Tiron

Er, no, lining them up perfectly is a VERY bad idea. It causes extreme instability and makes attempts to control the craft all but futile. I suppose it MIGHT work if you had really weak controls forces versus the weight of your craft, but it's still sub-optimal even if it does. Note that IRL, Jet Fighters do this sort of thing ON PURPOSE because it makes them more maneuverable...but then they have Flight Computers that are constantly making adjustments to keep them in controlled flight. The new SAS *might* have half a shot at handling it on some craft, but I suspect it's too slow and tries to correct small movements too lightly to manage it. Center of Lift behind the Center of Mass is good for spin recovery ability but bad for maneuverability and also gives that nose down tendency. Moving the CoL closer to the CoM increases maneuverability and reduces the nose down tendency, but also reduces spin recovery capability. Adding canards moves the CoL forward, which is why you're seeing it help.

Flags or parked vehicles are the typical stock method. Non-Stock, well, Mechjeb's otherwise Terrible 'Spaceplane Guidance' module has an Instrument Landing System built into it, which gives both the direction and distance to the runway (the one on the island is selectable but it defaults to the space center). You can also have it display ILS guidance for the specified glideslope to the specificed runway on the Navball. I cannot emphasize enough however how much I do not recommend using either the Altitude hold or Autolanding functions of this module, however. Neither is able to control throttle at all, and the 'altitude hold' fails utterly at actually holding an altitude, instead porpoising above and below it continuously (which WILL flame you out if you try to use it at high altitudes). With the New SAS being so much better for spaceplane use, there's no real reason to bother with the 'Altitude Hold' anymore. The Autolanding mode can also only control the attitude, so it's up to you to control the throttle in a way it can deal with. Last time I tried to use it (awhile ago, but I've seen nothing in MJ's patch notes indicating it's been changed since then) it also aimed for a very strictly defined point on the runway. When you pass that point, it then tries to turn around and fly back to it. The last time I used the 'Autoland', I botched the throttle control, the aircraft bounced off the runway, and Autoland turned it completely around backwards. I Hastily shut it off and tried to put it down backwards. It almost worked: I had a slight yaw angle though and the resulting forces tore the plane apart and sent the pieces tumbling down the runway.

Oh so the struts manage to exert some force before they break huh...well that explains a lot...

The thing here is inclination: Kerbin has a perfectly circular 0 inclination orbit. Duna has 0.06° Inclination, which is not quite the same but close enough it doesn't really matter. Jool has 1.34° inclination, which again, isn't all that much, though it's enough it might require some small adjustment. Eve has 2.01° inclination, which is right about where it starts to get significant. Moho, Dres, and Eeloo all have inclinations in excess of 5°, so they're much much harder again. And Eeloo's got major Eccentricity too, which makes it very much harder. Also, something I forgot to mention earlier...Didn't they fix the Moho overheating bug a few patches back?

Easiest way to answer this sort of question: Build it, attach a launch clamp to it. Put the Launch clamp above the engine in the staging order. Try it on the pad, still attached to the clamp(s).

Every time you hit the atmosphere, your Periapsis will drop very slightly and your Apoapsis more. Unfortunately, 56km is very high with a very tenuous atmosphere, so it'll take awhile. In order to make best use of their EVA trick you want to do it at apoapsis. Any little bit of lowering would help speed it up rather dramatically (the atmospheric thickness and thus drag increases exponentially as you drop). Just don't run out of fuel and leave your kerbal stranded outside the capsule! (right click on his jetpack to see fuel remaining). The Parachute won't 'partially open' until you get to about 22.5 KM, but if you get that low you'll already be falling in, so it's really no help here.

Honestly, it's sometimes more Exciting WITH Mechjeb. Designs that really push the boundaries of controlability it doesn't do well with. Especially spaceplanes. It has a distinct tendency towards '(Auto)pilot Induced Oscillations', right up to the point of actually losing control of the craft as a result. So you either end up flying those manually until you get to the point where it can control it itself, or you redesign it so that Mechjeb can fly it without losing control. Honestly, Mechjeb's spaceplane functions really are Terrible. The only one that's any good is the ILS, withOUT the landing autopilot...

Because he's stop having fun guy.

The general gist of it is: Don't go straight in, and use more parachutes than you would on Kerbin. Some rocket assistance for the parachutes is not a bad idea on heavier craft.

They're equivilent but not the same. The coords you found are in Decimal format, the ones Mechjeb wants are in Degrees, Minutes, Seconds format. The Minutes and Seconds are out of 60. The N/S or E/W part is indicated in decimal notation(if it's not explicitly listed) by if the numbers are negative or positive: North and East are Positive, South and West are Negative. To Manually convert from one to the other is really not too difficult: The part above the decimal point is the Degrees. Multiply the part below the Decimal by 60, the part above the decimal point in the result is the Minutes. Multiply the part below the decimal in that result by 60 again. That gives the Seconds. In the Case of your Example, 40 Degrees, 0.2671*60 = 16.026 = 16 Minutes, 0.026*60=1.56 seconds, North, because it's positive. Then 174 Degrees, 0.0467*60=2.802=2 minutes, 0.802*60=48.12 Seconds, East because it's positive. So 40°, 16', 1.56"N, 174°, 2', 48.12"E The FCC Converter spits out 40° 16' 1.5594" 174° 2' 48.1194"

Whatever Mechjeb's landing module says will put me at my desired orbit's apoapsis. Or won't have an apoapsis out of the atmosphere, if I'm going for a direct landing. It's one of the loveliest, and so far as I know absolutely unique, abilities of Mechjeb: Aerobraking simulation. There IS an external calculator now, but Mechjeb's is part of the landing module. Somewhat obviously, it can also predict landing sites. And it updates both types of predictions in realtime, so it's a lot handier. I do sometimes wish there was another mod that could do that which I could suggest to the Mechjeb haters, but so far as I know there isn't one. So for them I say 'you can disable functions and modules in the cfg file if you don't like them'.

I once forgot to move the launch clamp stage on a craft...it ended up not only with it after the initial engine firing, but after the SRB decouplers. So imagine my surprise as I hit the engines and go nowhere. So I decouple the SRBs (leaving them still attached to the clamps, burning at full), and proceed to land on the Mun anyway. That ship had so much Delta-V it wasn't funny.

Well Duna's problem is thus: It has about 1/3rd the gravity, but only 1/5th of the atmosphere. At Datum. It's also covered in multi-KM highland plateaus, so landing at 3KM is not uncommon. At 3KM, the atmospheric pressure is well under half what it is at Datum. So Not only does the gravity not entirely compensate for the thinner atmosphere, there's large areas of the surface where it doesn't even CLOSE to compensate. Parachutes work better if you can hit one of the lowlands, but they still work less well than on Kerbin.

But did you know it was named 'USS Kearsarge' originally, but was renamed 'USS Hornet' after the previous one before Launch?

Going to war for territory under a flimsy excuse (or none) isn't soley an American thing. The whole idea that it wasn't an acceptable thing to do didn't pop up until the 20th Century, and didn't really get to where it was widely considered unacceptable until the LATE 20th Century. It was the norm in most parts of the world for thousands of years.

As opposed to our massive industrial power and absurd amounts of money. And the Russians doing most of the 'Dying' part. I tend to think of our role in Europe during WWII basically having been making sure Stalin only got HALF of Europe afterwards. Simple fact is though, WWII is the only time in history that someone has fought a war on two different fronts and won.

Asparagus staging COULD work IRL, it isn't used because of the sheer complexity involved in doing it. Basic Crossfeeding on the other hand HAS been used...but it's not nearly as difficult. The complexity of all those fuel pumps and the size of the pipes that would needed is the chief issue: the whole 'it would make the whole rocket rotate' argument doesn't hold water, however. The rotary movement of the fuel is stopped at some point while still in the rocket in order to move it in another direction, either inward or down. Changing the direction of the movement is considered an acceleration, even if the velocity doesn't change afterward, and this kind of situation is part of why it's still an acceleration. The force exerted by the moving fuel on the rocket as it changes direction would cancel out the rotary motion imparted by the pumps starting the fuel moving in the first place. Scott Manley did a vid near Gilly where he talks about this effect, while demonstrating an exploit that can be used to accelerate a craft without using fuel. It works because you can move the Center of Gravity of the craft to a different point in space by transferring fuel. In reality, the recoil from moving the fuel would start a motion in the opposite direction, which would be stopped when the fuel came to rest in the other tank. The result would be the craft sliding slightly in the opposite direction, in such a way that the center of gravity ends up at the same point it was at before you moved the fuel.

Reminds me of my attempts at making a fuel hauler. I did some crazy stuff with it, with absurd amounts of tanks. They all lagged so badly I *couldn't* have launched them manually. Mechjeb doesn't mind a slideshow, and we didn't have physics delta time yet. It's actually one of the principle advantages of the ascent AP: It can launch insane contraptions you'd never be able to control because of the lag they induce. I once tried to cut down on the number of struts I needed by using a box made out of trusses as the primary structural element, with the tanks hanging off it. It kinda worked. The core of it made it to orbit just fine, with no fuel. When I started hanging tanks off the outer layer, and added more engines, it turned out the joints between the trusses were fairly wobbly. So I started adding struts. And ended up right back in lagville with it still not working, even though it had less fuel. The basic principle did have SOME merit though: Using one set of engines (five mainsails in a Quincunx formation, which looks really, really good for some reason...*coughS1Ccough*) for the entire ascent, and ejecting just the fuel tanks as they emptied two by two...was REALLY efficient. I haven't yet tried to re-use a slightly more sane version of it yet, however. Maybe I should...

Wiki says Hornet did 11 and 12, nothing about Skylab.

Or you just use the lovely mechjeb ascent autopilot to do it for you while you go get a cuppa, and then do the interesting bits when you get back.

In the words of Randall Munroe: If NASA were willing to fake great accomplishments, shouldn't they have another one by now?

That was my point. Doing a launch that requires 'minimal interaction' is tedious. It leaves you with two things you can do: Check your gauges, or do something else. If you do something else, you'll miss your gravity turn start or MECO or something, sooner or later. The slight differences from launch to launch really don't amount to much unless you botch something up. So instead of a 10 minute-ish 'youtube video', you get a 10-minute-ish cutscene with occasional 'press a to not die' events. Get mechjeb to do it, and you actually CAN go watch videos on youtube, read wikipedia, get a cup of coffee...whatever, and come back and it's done. You don't HAVE to watch it anymore, because instead of minimal input it now requires no input. Instead of doing the same thing over and over and over, you're catching up on the news while your 107th uneventful launch in a row ascends to orbit. Edit: Let me just add that it doesn't ease or invalidate test launches particularly either: Mechjeb's not any better at flying the rocket than a competant player is. In fact it's worse in some ways, with a tendency towards Pilot Induced Oscillation on marginally controllable craft. It also doesn't have any magical ability to manipulate the controls better than a human, so any problem that prevents you from being able to control it, Mechjeb isn't going to do any better with (and may do worse). In short, it's only really helpful on easy, uneventful launches anyway. That said, you can use the 'ascent path target on navball' option to help you fly a more precise ascent path without the autopilot, which is very handy.

Actually, if you're building rockets correctly, that's when it turns tedious. If the navball minigame is action-packed and exciting, you did something wrong. On a well built rocket, you end up in a loop. Check attitude, is it correct? Check Speed, is it too high? Check Altitude, do you need to start/adjust your gravity turn? Check climb rate, are you climbing fast enough to make orbit? Check fuel, are you close to staging? Check Apoapsis, is it high enough you need to cut throttle? You end up spending most your time just checking different readouts and making small adjustments (except for the start of the gravity turn). If you can't do this because you're having to constantly make adjustments to keep it on course, you've got some kind of design problem. At the opposite end, when you start getting things so large that they're hard to fly properly, you get into physics delta time from sheer partcount, which is far, far worse to deal with than your 50th normal launch. In short, if it's NOT tedious, you're doing it wrong.

This is because going into timewarp puts all ships in the active scene 'on rails', which halts all movement. Just blip it up to 5x for a second, it'll stop rotating. Part of what's going on is that the SAS has a tendency to overcorrect, especially the Old SAS, which by default Mechjeb's autosteering is pretty similar to. So what happens is, you get it stable, but really it's wobbling back and forth slightly. When you switch craft, it stops being controlled, and whatever the last overcorrection was, that's how it moves. You might try using the default SAS to stop it instead of Mechjeb as well, as it's a lot less overcorrect-y, even if it does have some issues.

It's a weird thing that bike does sometimes. If you change scene and then change back, it usually fixes it. Generally happens when getting into it from EVA. And I still think that rule is a terrible idea that will massively reduce the number of bug reports but yeah, it's a thing.