Tiron

It depends on your rocket, unfortunately. Because different rockets take different amounts of time to climb. (this is why Mechjeb's 'launch to rendezvous' function requires a 'practice' launch to the target altitude before you can use it: You need to determine how long the rocket takes to launch to that height, measured by the 'phase angle' the target object should be at when you launch.) Regardless, going straight up is horribly inefficient, because you'll be losing speed to gravity the entire time. Much more efficient would be to launch normally directly to the Mun's altitude. This would entail getting both the timing and the apoapsis right so that you encounter the Mun without having done a Circularization burn yet. I've tried to use the aforementioned Launch to Rendezvous function to do this, without success because the rocket I was using had Turbofans for boosters and Mechjeb wouldn't let me have enough time to spool them up before launch. I haven't yet tried it with another design, though I swear I've heard it said it's less efficient than launching to orbit and then doing a transfer burn.

I never managed to get my refueling tankers to work, got Kethane instead so I could get the fuel from the Mun, but never actually followed through on it because my stations were too laggy. I had a vague sort of idea for a simpler (and smaller) design that hopefully wouldn't lag so much, but haven't actually done anything with it. Actually, I haven't done much at all since then because I'd been playing with Spaceplanes and rovers instead. Except the rovers don't work very well because of the terrain bugs. I suspect the general principle works better with Kethane (or its eventual stock replacement), because you can get fuel from low gravity worlds instead. Especially if you're hauling the raw kethane to a refinery station. Which in the past has traditionally been somewhat less efficient than refining it on the surface and hauling the fuel, though the recent changes have...modified that dynamic more than a little. The kethane-> fuel conversion factor is the difference in weight between the two, modified by the efficiency. If the efficiency is lower than 100%, the fuel weighs less than the kethane. If it's more than 100%, the kethane weighs less than the fuel. The maximum conversion efficiency used to be 99%. It's now 103% for Liquidfuel, so it's a bit more complicated. Regardless, the key point is the tyranny of the rocket equation. To move more mass you need more fuel, which adds more mass, so you need more fuel, which adds more mass... Apparently the only reason it's not an infinite loop is that you burn the fuel as you go, continuously losing weight. So to maximize efficiency you need to move the lighter craft to the heavier one. This is probably going to be the craft that needs to be refueled. And if you're doing that, your tanker is effectively a temporary refueling station. This also means, for example, that the most efficient way to launch a tank into orbit is to use the fuel in the tank to launch it, then refill it in orbit (Ideally with fuel from a nearby body with low gravity, as that drastically reduces the cost in fuel to move the fuel you're filling the tank with).

I have heard from a friend who is fond of submarines on Kerbin that the density needed to sink is lower in 0.21 than previously... And it makes things less weird, I think he said.

I like how this turned into a thread about how mods can actually make the game HARDER than stock. If you want to play all stock that's great, but you're missing a world of possibilities, my friend. Also setting yourself up for a lot of tedium. As for what the OP was TRYING to shoot for, there's this thing called 'Fake Difficulty'. The difference between Fake Difficulty and Real Difficulty is that in the former case, some kind of design problem with the game is what makes it hard. In our case it's mostly things that aren't finished yet. For example, transferring to another planet without mods. The Game UI at present includes very little to help you determine the right point or direction to burn to get there. It can tell you the 'point of closest approach', by which means you could theoretically brute force it with a ton of excess Delta-V. Trick being while this would be hard, it wouldn't really involve any particular skill. Doing the transfer properly without mods involves either calculating or looking up the appropriate phase angles and then measuring the angles by holding a protractor up to the screen. Technically speaking, there isn't any practical difference between using a physical protractor, and adding the same functionality into the game with a mod. Point is, the tools aren't really there as it is (though I'm sure they will be at some point later in development). And in my experience, that's the kind of thing most mods seem to do: Add things that aren't implemented in stock yet, or expand upon the things that are incomplete. Some of them make things easier. Some make it harder. Some don't affect the difficulty at all. It's up to each individual person what they want to use or don't want to use. There's no right or wrong answer. I mean, it's a game. The point is for it to be enjoyable for the person playing it. If mods help accomplish that, it's not a bad thing. And if you think it is, well... what concern is it of yours, frankly? Different people enjoy different things. That doesn't make it wrong when someone else has different preferences than you do, that just makes them...different.

That's because landing legs aren't actually on the gear group, they just have the same hotkey. Last I Checked, anyway. One of the side effects of this is that clicking on the 'gear' button will toggle gear but not landing legs. You can also manually deploy/undeploy gear/legs by right clicking on them, but if they're part of a symmetry group it'll still activate that entire group.

What he means is that with KAS you can dock via a cable attached to a connector port on the target craft by a Kerbal on EVA, so if you can rendezvous and get within 50m you can make a connection. A big bonus there is that KAS includes a radial connector port that can be detached and reattached to any craft. Bring one of those along, and you can use the cable to dock with literally any craft at all. It's a godsend for rescue missions or for surface docking in general.

getting the second set of ports perfectly aligned is all but impossible. The instant the first set of ports docks, the second pair will lose their magnetic attraction capability. If they happen to hit each other, they'll lock on in that position, in the same manner as if a strut had been added connecting them. It actually is multi-docked, but the alignment might not be absolutely perfect.

If the craft is recovered, the kerbals go right back on the active flight menu, but this is only possible when landed on Kerbin. When terminating the flight (the option for which is NOT enabled unless recovery is not possible) The Kerbals are NOT deleted. They're flagged as 'missing' (state=3). By default, after a period of time they will respawn into the available roster, with the exact same name, stats, etc, without having to re-hire them. You can set it not to respawn them by manually editing persistent.sfs

Less complicated Version: The 'Isp' statistic indicates the fuel efficiency, which is independent of thrust. The efficiency varies with altitude, and smoothly slides between the 'Atmosphere' and 'Vacuum' numbers as the pressure decreases. Interestingly, the lack of a third point at a higher-than-Kerbin's-Sealevel pressure means that if you go someplace with a thicker atmosphere, like Jool or Eve, the efficiency flatlines at its 'Atmosphere' level even if you're at several atm of pressure. The key thing is that burn rate is determined by a combination of the thrust and the Isp. Two engines with the same Isp but different thrust will burn fuel at different rates. The LV-T30 and LV-T45 for example. The LV-T45 burns fuel at a slower rate because it produces less thrust. Crucially, however, because their Isp stats are the same, you'll get the same effect out of both of them: The T30 just does it a bit faster. The exception is during ascent, because if you don't have enough thrust to efficiently overcome atmospheric drag and gravity, the extra efficiency gets wasted while you're 'stuck in the mud', so to speak. Using larger numbers of the more fuel efficient engines doesn't always help either, because the extra weight reduces the overall efficiency of the rocket, which can easily end up more than compensating for the more efficient fuel burn of the engines (LV-Ns are especially guilty of this, being so absurdly heavy). In space, the thrust level almost doesn't matter: if your thrust is low you just do a longer burn. In this case higher Isp is almost always better. The sole exception is if your overall thrust to weight ratio ends up being so low that you can't complete the maneuver during the window you have to do so. This doesn't happen as often as you'd think, except with Ion powered probes that are way too heavy.

Gear, Brakes, SAS, RCS, and Lights are mostly there so you can take stuff OUT of them. Unfortunately, landing legs don't actually USE the 'gear' landing group, even though they're on the same keyboard shortcut. Stage, well, I use it on some of my spaceplanes to deploy the antenna I sometimes put on the nose. Gotta watch that, though, because unless they've fixed it, antennae are able to retract the first time their action group is used after reloading the scene. Except they won't deploy again until you've done another scene reload. There aren't a whole lot of things 'stage' would be useful for, because whatever it is would happen every time you stage, which restricts it to things that only go off once, and you want to happen right at launch.

Well that's the weird part. It's not affecting the thrust or the speed any at all: I can go just as fast in reverse as I can going forward, it's only the resource consumption that's different. And it's not just my girder-based rover either. The motorized landing gear do it on my spaceplanes as well. On one of the Spaceplanes, for example, it's using a single motorized and steering dual wheel pod and two inert dual wheel pods. Going forwards, it consumes 2 electricity/second. In reverse, it consumes 0.06 electricity per second. The rover, with three electric motors, two Littlecar Wheel MSes, and two Littlecar Wheel Ms, consumes 3 electricity per second going forward, but only 0.19 per second in reverse. During my preliminary testing phase, when the controls were reversed due to the primary girder apparently being backwards, I had a rover with SIX electric motors doing over 50 m/s in reverse, running off a single RTG. If you could invert the steering like you can on the stock wheels... Edit: Are you using the stock suspension system, by the way? Because it's got the same 'terrain imprecision' stability problems as the stock wheels, which was really what I was trying to get away from... (The spaceplane wheels are so glorious however that I'm sold regardless, but the rover suspension thing has basically stopped me playing the game, because the new terrain has made the problem dramatically worse)

There's a solution for that. It's called a 'Drogue Chute'. Produces less drag and opens at a higher altitude, specifically designed to prevent this sort of thing.

You'll note that when you open your shielded clamp-o-tron it looks exactly like the 'top' part of the port in that little picture. The docking system in KSP is 'genderless', the connection is held together with magical magnets of awesomeness, so both sides of a docking setup are the same (not the case IRL, as a general rule). The stuff sticking out the bottom clips into the part they're attached to, deliberately.

Hit F3 and check for an actual 'connection broke' message. The struts SHOULD have disconnected if it actually broke off. If it just moved a bit when he touched it, well, that happens. The joints flex, parts can shift around, particularly when kerbals start crashing into them. As long as the actual connection doesn't break it isn't a problem. Edit: Oh wait, I read that wrong. That is weird, the connection shouldn't be THAT weak...that's the second post I've seen today talking about weak connections...

In most cases, 'enough' batteries isn't going to be very many. If you're orbiting a body, you're very likely not going to be in eclipse all that long, unless in a high inclination orbit. That means unless you're trying to do EXTREMELY high power draw things like use ion engines or rotate 12 reaction wheels on all three axes at once the entire time, you're not going to need more than a few batteries, particularly now that the inline 1m batteries hold 1k for the same weight as before. There's now even a large size battery with a capacity of 4000 units of charge,(at the same mass per capacity as the other batteries, even) so battery partcount isn't nearly the problem it once was. As for rovers, I'm all for nuclear rovers as I've mentioned several times. On the surface, on many worlds you spend a very long time in eclipse, so long that the needed weight of batteries to keep you running during the night is far, FAR higher than the weight of RTGs just to run it all the time. Not to mention that on worlds with any kind of atmosphere, the drag you experience as you roll across the surface is frequently enough to break solar panel arrays off, meaning you're stuck using OX-STATs. OX-STATs have the heightest power to weight ratio of any generation source, but they don't track the sun (meaning they're almost always at a suboptimal angle), and their base output is the same as an RTG's, so you end up needing a LOT of them. Thus why my rover is nuclear, even though my ships are not(I may investigate the weight requirements of taking my mapping probe nuclear though, the kethane mapper uses a lot of juice, and high inclination orbits give it longer eclipse periods than normal). Yeah, they pretty much did. Solar Panels and batteries save weight, RTGs are more convenient and sometimes have lower partcounts. It's going to get even better at some point, when we get planets beyond Jool. (Eeloo is allegedly going to be a moon of one of them when it happens.) Get far enough out, and the power reduction on solar panels will swing things sharply in favor of RTGs. Trick being is that there really isn't anything out that far just yet.

People have done, and it does NOT follow that path. The instant you enter the second body's SOI it changes to a proper orbit. Yeah, but that's not the path it'll actually take...

Actually, checking an ENGINE is trivial. For starters, the fairings have writing on them(as do probe cores). For seconds, well, the fairing would appear the second you mounted it if you somehow did it upside down. The older two types of docking port are both very difficult to put on backwards (due to obvious indications of which end is which), and easy to tell if they are or not (due to extremely obvious shaping differences). The only other part where it both matters and is hard to tell is...well there aren't any others, because the decouplers all got arrows on the sides.

None of the docking ports do, actually. It's just a lot easier to tell when it hasn't with the others.

Honestly, next time I build a station (if I ever do), I'll probably use KAS instead of docking ports(for the refueling points anyway). The total weight of a KAS docking system is higher than using docking ports, but it's all concentrated on the winch side: the connector port on your actual craft weighs very little. The downsides are that it's dramatically more wobbly than docking ports, and it REQUIRES a kerbal on EVA to make the connection, but the weight savings on the craft are probably worth it at least some of the time. Not to mention you can 'dock' at distances up to 50m that way.

Actually, if you placed the parts with symmetry, the action group will select all parts in that symmetry group. Just beware if you detach it, leave it floating for a moment, and then put it back (presumably after changing something ahead of where it was mounted). It knocks down to a single unit while it's floating and if it was assigned to an action group, when you put it back only the single part that was floating will still be in the action group: all the additional ones placed via the symmetry mode won't be. It's really annoying, but easy to fix: You just have to reassign the parts to the action group.

Because it's NOT the same. The other docking ports have major, readily visible differences between the two sides. The CoT in particular sticks out quite a ways and has a substantially different diameter on the docking side. The Jr also sticks out a fair ways, and also has a smaller diameter on the docking side. They're also both shaped so that the 'base' side is flat, and it tapers down to the reduced diameter via a fillet. The Sr. is nearly symmetrical, filleting both ways: The shape is basically the same as the large stack separator. As a result, it fits nearly flush with the part it's mounted on. The docking ring has a diameter only slightly smaller than the base. It also has no stand off at all, unlike both of the other ports; it's literally just stuck on the end. And no offense. But one guy spending 10 seconds to edit the texture slightly is definitely not more effort than hundreds or thousands of people repeatedly spending several seconds zooming in and rotating the camera. Edit: Actually I was wrong. Ironically, the large stack separator has more readily visible differences between the two sides than the large docking port does. Edit2: What the hell was I thinking, actually? The bases of the other two ports aren't flat, but they don't need to be: They have visible extensions that clip inside the part they're placed on. Which really just makes it worse: The Sr. Doesn't follow the conventions established by the other two parts at ALL. It has more in common with a decoupler than with a docking port, in terms of how it's shaped.

You know...that almost looks like...it's applying three body physics... as if it's accounting for the gravity of both the new body and the one you're currently in the SOI of.

2 RTGs only provide 1.5 electricty per second, or 90 per minute. Reaction Wheels require 18/minute PER AXIS being rotated on. Command pods vary with the amount of torque they provide. The worst case is the mk1-2 command pod, which uses 1.2 per second PER AXIS. A mk2 lander can uses 45/minute (the full output of an RTG) per axis, the mk1 command pod is only 14.4 per second per axis. Cupola is 54/min/axis. Mk 1 lander can is 18/min/axis. You can see it varies a lot, but a small number of RTGs is only going to be sufficient in all cases if you're either only rotating on one axis at a time, or sticking to small command pods and probes. A single, deployable solar panel array provides 2/sec if locked onto the sun properly. Two of them (the minimum realistic amount) would provide 4/sec, and weigh only 0.035 T. A single RTG weighs 0.08 T, and produces less than a fifth of the power of two arrays. Batteries weigh 0.005 per 100 charge stored. This means, potentially, for the weight of a single RTG you can get two solar panel arrays and enough batteries to store up to an additional 900 charge. More likely is storing 800 via a pair of Z-400s. So for less than the weight of 1 RTG (0.75 power per second) you can get 2 solar arrays (4 power per second), and two large radial batteries (800 power storage). If you go by power production, to match two solar arrays you'd need 5 1/3 RTGs, but let's just go with 5. That would provide 3.75 power per second. It would also weigh 0.4 tons, which would mean that with two solar arrays you can now fit up to 7300 power worth of batteries while still matching the weight. You're probably not going to fit anywhere near that much, so it's most likely a net weight savings almost regardless of what you DO fit. Now if we consider your example of 2 RTGs, providing 1.5 power per second. That would weigh 0.16 tons. For that weight, you could fit two solar panels and 2500 worth of battery storage. So 2 Z-1000s and 5 Z-100s, for 2500 charge and 4 power per second (versus 1.5), at the same weight. Or at a lower partcount, 1 Z-1000 and 3 Z-400s, storing 2200 charge at 0.015 tons less weight. "Ahh but solar panels produce less power as you get further away" you say. Well, the scale factor isn't set up particularly realistically, so Solar Panels produce half power at a distance roughly equal to Jool's semi-major axis. So at Jool, those two solar panels would produce 2 power per second. STILL more than two RTGs. The '0x' point is set to 'almost 3 times Jool's Orbit'. In my game, right now, Eeloo is just a bit past its apoapsis and at a distance of 1.65 times the 0.5x distance. I'd guess based on the appearance that its apopasis is probably at or below 1.75 times the 0.5x point based on that number (it's really not that far past apopasis). I'm not sure exactly how the math works (the wiki says the falloff "follow a spline curve of 3 piecewise cubics defined from 4 points".) Based on that, I'd guess that a small solar panel array probably produces less power than an RTG on Eeloo only while it's on the furthest parts of its orbit. But then, I wouldn't generally advocate a solar rover anyway, because they spend so much time in the dark, so that mostly only applies to things orbiting Eeloo. The point is, for most purposes, almost no matter where you go, RTGs weigh so much more than solar panels that you can AFFORD to fit enough batteries for normal operations, and still end up lighter.

Because you don't have enough lift and are having to use part of your engine thrust to keep you from going upward. That said, with the current aerodynamic model getting 'enough lift' to fly straight is basically impossible. Because it doesn't take account of things like angle of attack. That's why they're mentioning FAR, but keep in mind that FAR messes up all kinds of other things as well. In particular I've heard that it screws up mechjeb's ascent module something horrible.

Can't see the handle if that side's attached to something. The docking ring is so tiny and subtle that it's hard to see without looking very closely. The problem is not that you *can't* tell which side is which, the problem is that it's too *difficult* to do so, due to the extreme subtlety of the differences, particularly as viewed from the side. The whole point is that it could trivially be made easier.