JeanHavoc

Typically I use a numbering scheme to denote the various missions that I launch. Originally there were just three types of mission: 100-level for missions that orbit Kerbin, 200-level for missions that orbit or land on Mun/Minmus, and 300-level for Interplanetary craft. However, more recently I've been thinking of making a few changes, in particular I'd like to add a 400-level for interplanetary landings and a 500-level for manned IP missions. Might help for keeping things clear, particularly when there's a lot of stuff going on at once.

Hmm well, I don't know that I've ever felt actual "pride" when completing a mission in KSP but I can think of several instances in which I was very much pleased with the results of my efforts. The first thing that comes to mind would be my first landing on Mun, which was my first encounter with a body other than Kerbin. In retrospect my lander was too tall and spindly and so it was very difficult to land, particularly manually, but after crashing 10+ times I finally made it. Hard to top that particular event since it was the first success along those lines that I ever had. Then there was my manual landing on Laythe which was, well even harder than what I described above. My lander was low on fuel, and I had to hit a tiny island target from a polar orbit while accounting for rotation and my angle of descent. It took many attempts and failures to get it right but boy was it satisfying when it finally worked. I would also point to another mission, easy by comparison, wherein I landed a probe on Ike, took off again and then parachuted to the surface of Duna. One lander reaching two different sites on two different worlds - I always thought that was a cool thing to do; and it justified my inclusion of parachutes when I could have removed them before launch to save on weight. Anyway, interesting thread thus far.

I too prefer to park most things in a roughly circular 80 Km orbit above Kerbin. I end up with a lot of debris and defunct space craft there, but I will point out that I often move things from that position as well; only the most rudimentary missions go no further. Not sure how I came to choose that particular distance, but I think it had to do with it being a good 10 Km higher than Kerbin's upper atmosphere. I suppose I just like having a bit of a buffer, just in case.

Vulcan never made sense as a name for a tiny moon of Pluto anyway. Historically speaking, it was a name given to a planet that was inferred to exist between the orbit of Mercury and the Sun. Naturally no such world exists, but that fact combined with the provenance of the Roman God always left me with an impression of a place made inhospitable by heat and violent geological upheaval. Needless to say such things do not apply in anyway to the deep freeze that is the Kuiper Belt. All I can figure is people really love Star Trek and they must have thought this was their chance to undo what had been done in the 2009 feature film. Whatever the motivation, I can't bring myself to agree; incidentally my personal choices were Acheron and Lethe.

I'm particularly attached to Neilbald Kerman, a name that showed up at the top of the roster just recently for me. For one thing, he ended up being a "test pilot" of sorts for many of my early missions in 0.20 and had an excellent survival record. Moreover his name instantly reminded me of Neil Armstrong, so I thought it was appropriate that he be the top kerbalnaut in my program. Of course his name also reminded me of Nate "Tiny" Archibald, but I'm not so sure that has quite as much relevance here.

I paid seven dollars for my copy, way back in January of 2012. Come to think of it, I haven't really thought about what "version" it was that I originally downloaded. Frankly it never occurred to me to pay attention since I didn't really play the game in earnest until the other planets had been added. Interesting to think back on it though.

I buy as many games as I can physically, mostly because I don't want to spend hours at a time downloading every single asset from Steam. However, now that I actually think about it, the last game I bought physically for the PC was Skyrim, and that was way back in November of 2011. Granted, I've purchased a number of Xbox games in the interim, but one doesn't have much choice in that arena - at least for new, big budget releases. I probably would buy a KSP box if it existed, but I would hope such an item would have some goodies involved to make it worth my while. At this point there wouldn't be a point to just buying a disc and a plastic container.

Well, after a little more practice I managed to get some decent flags put together. Just thought I'd post a few examples here for you guys to see, now that I've got them set to the proper 8:5 aspect ratio. Curiously, I only realized after the fact that the flags are at 512x320 resolution - the game doesn't seem to care so I guess I'll leave them as they are. Anyway the first involved little real work other than mixing a few images together. I reduced the opacity a bit to give it a somewhat faded look - mainly for personal taste more than anything else. Bear in mind however I think this first one is a bit less opaque than the rest - an error on my part: In the next version, I decided to do something with a little more editing involved. I drew a couple of individual components and merged them together into something entirely new. It's pretty minimalistic, though still effective: This last one will be the one I am going to use, more than likely anyway. The faded look isn't quite as nice, but for the sake of consistency I made each flag the same this time around. I can always go back and edit the template later if I want to: So there you go. I'll likely do some more of these in the future, its' not hard to combine a few bits here and there to make something completely unique. Nice feature addition indeed.

Not a bad suggestion there. I suppose the only issue I'd have with trying to work in such a small area relates mainly to my flag designs, which are constructed from various pieces taken from other images (public domain/free to use stuff). It might be worth working with a larger canvas that is the same ratio of 256x160, so it will scale at the right rate when the time comes. I hadn't thought about the dpi concern - usually because such things are not all that relevant in my case. I'll take that into consideration in the future however.

Well, I've been trying my hand at this for a bit, but found out only too late that the flag I created doesn't scale well to 256x160. Here's the flag I was working from: Looks nice, but I'm probably going to need to rework it or do something a little different. I also found out that if you simply scale the image properly, it goes down to 256x128; adding in transparent pixels - my first thought, didn't play well as the game adds black bars wherever the image lacks data. Well, at least I'm making progress, and the flag I created did load in-game so there's that too. Perhaps I'll try a simpler design next time.

So, I think I could use some clarity here. Are you guys telling me that in 0.20, if I begin constructing a rocket with a probe as the focus, any additional capsules I add will be crewed anyway? That doesn't sound like much of a feature, since I had made a habit of flying missions with empty capsules in 0.19; you know, test flights and what not. I wonder what the purpose of this change might be?

Funny you mention this. Yesterday, I was gearing up to send a probe to Jool and it just so happened that as I made my ejection burn I ended up with a Munar encounter along the way. I didn't think much of it and I wasn't very worried about the effect it would have on my mission, but things got even more interesting shortly thereafter as I -also- had a Minmus encounter to top things off. I comment here because now I'm curious as to what impact, if any, both of those flybys had on my DeltaV and subsequent fuel consumption. Can such things be calculated accurately, at least within the world of KSP?

Yesterday, I used the protrator mod to help me deliver a moderately sized lander to Duna's surface. In the end the mission was a success and my lander reached its target with enough fuel to return to orbit. However, I found that even though I departed Kerbin at the right time according to the information I was provided, I missed Duna by quite a wide margin on my first orbit of Kerbol. This got me to thinking that it might also be important not just to depart at the right moment but to be able to accelerate fast enough that you hit that window at the proper time as well. My interplanetary stage obviously lacked enough thrust, but I'm wondering if it would be possible to calculate or adjust your departure position to account for very slow acceleration and if that's something that a layman could do without too much trouble. Anyway thought I'd through that out there, my experience did make me curious.

Interesting point here, I'd just heard it was Mercury ran ran with it. There are elements like Gallium that are solid at room temperature, but melt at slightly higher temperatures. It's also a fact that at the surface of Venus itself temperatures are hot enough to melt Lead and (as you point out) if Eve is a true analog than those "seas" could be simply large reservoirs of a variety of metals. Still it raises questions as to why we'd observe such bodies of liquid on Eve and not Venus, what was the difference that produced such an intriguing difference. Moreover, why does Eve have a clear atmosphere, devoid of cloud banks. One possibility is that it's so hot that there are no volatiles condensing at those temperatures. This would be the reason why hot Jovians (within a certain temperature range) would appear deep blue; rayleigh scattering would do its work while cloud banks would fail to form. Not sure how likely that would be, but this is a game we're talking about, so one can't rule it out. Still, it makes one wonder how the Kerbals land there and survive too!

Well, thought I might get in on this myself. I recently set about designing a lander that could reach the Mun but would operate in two parts; a descent stage and ascent stage - similar to what the Apollo Lunar Module did way back when. This photo shows my ship in orbit of Kerbin along with its departure stage: Don't know how awesome it is, but I do think it looks cool at least! Now, here's another image after landing on the Mun: Sadly the craft is not quite as efficient as I'd like - there's still lots of fuel left in the descent stage, but I'm pleased with the results thus far. Next challenge for me is to make sure I can actually get back on 200L of fuel - I think it'll be fine given the low weight of the command/service module but we'll see. I'm just glad as always that I didn't explode on impact.

Good advice there on switching over to p/semicolon or some equivalent: I'll need to try that myself. I'll also agree that the nav-ball is far more useful going down than looking at the ship or the terrain (well at least until the last few meters) - I actually find looking at what's happening in real time to be a bit confusing, it's just far easier to maneuver by aligning myself with the ball than trying to figure out 3D spatial orientation on sight. As for Capslock, yeah I use that all the time. I probably wouldn't be able to land at all without it. I think I see your point about descent from a high orbit, well at least high in KSP terms. I'll have to see about giving that a shot as well, can't hurt to try something new. Oh, as for craft weight: I've landed three-man capsules on Mun with a lander mass of nearly 15 tonnes - I've also done the same with much smaller spacecraft, one of which came in below 4 tonnes. I can say that the heavier versions are much more tolerant of impacting the ground at slightly higher speeds and seem less prone to translating minor mistakes into full-on catastrophic failure.

This thread is of some interest to me as I've selected Eve as a primary target of interest once I get through with Kerbin space. I see a lot of stuff dealing with landing there and the various issues with coming back home but I'm of a slightly different mind and I'm wondering if there's any good information regarding potentially flying by Eve and then returning to Kerbin rather than simply going into orbit. Moreover, I'm wondering if it might be possible to replicate what Mariner 10 did in the real world by flying past Eve on the way to Moho. I might, of course, be asking far too much of KSP - but I am curious as to what's possible here.

Well Nibb31 I've been trying to do what you're suggesting however I find KSP's controls when it comes to landing abysmal at best - or, maybe I'm doing it wrong, or some combination of the two. I've mentioned this I think before, but I don't see how one can effectively use the WASD keys, and hit left control/shift and use the mouse to change and reorient your view all at the same time. I also find my ship is constantly tipping over, rotating, listing in various directions even if I apply no thrust at all, and this is (as I said) very much magnified when you're 10 meters off the ground. By far my typical failure mode is to reach the ground, hit between 3-6 m/s upon one of my struts, which is enough to push the whole craft on its side. As the craft falls over, I have no means to arrest that, usually anyway - though I do sometimes manage to escape and abort to safety. The new rocket designs I've been using have allowed me to reach Mun with a Sizeable reserve of fuel, often 1500L+ and a Poodle engine to slow me down. This has been quite effective at putting payloads of 10-15 mass units (tonnes, I guess?) on the surface and often I can cancel out all my velocity above 10 Km height, I've found that if I do that and "fall" towards the ground that the craft tends to right itself due to the gravitational attraction and when it works it's worked quite well. Like Vanamonde said however it's not ideal, in the sense that you can't really tell the general relief of the ground your falling towards. I just think I might not be very good at the quick reflexes and proper button mashing component of the landing process, but learning more about the game has helped. It is still quite satisfying to reach the ground and not end up meeting a fiery death. Actually have four Kerbals on Mun at the moment myself, that's a first for me. I do wish they'd get some new, modern tutorials up on YouTube as well - most of the stuff I'm seeing is from like pre-0.13 era.

I just managed to land a 3-person lander on Mun myself and as usual I find the biggest challenge is cancelling out my horizontal velocity before I'm actually encountering the surface terrain. I can't tell you how many times I've pulled an Apollo 11 and ended up going straight left to right across Mun's surface and when that happens I typically have no clue what to do about it. Small changes in acceleration and orientation in that circumstance tend to be quite magnified and usually I end up with an exploded lander. Thus far my best landings have been the ones where I really do come more or less straight down and encounter the ground at 3 m/s or less - under those circumstances my success rate has been 100%. There are a couple of things I wanted to bring up though. I've actually encountered a problem where my legs have clipped into the Munar terrain and knocked the engines off my fuel tanks. This is obviously a very bad thing and I'm curious as to whether or its a bug or some sort of feature. I'd also like to know if anyone can point me in the direction of just what the impact tolerance ratings mean for individual ship parts. The capsules seem to have a much higher figure than most of the other stuff, and I guess that makes sense, but I could use a better understanding of just how much force, say, landing gear can take before exploding or breaking off. Still having fun though despite my poor landing-record.

jfx: One thing I can point out is that there are - in our universe anyway -a class of peculiar stars that have atmospheres overly enriched in Mercury, Manganese and other elements. One example I can think off of the top of my head is Alpheratz (or Alpha Andromedae if you prefer). Naturally at least in real life these stars are all very large and brilliant, but we're not seeing a one to one equivalence with KSP anyway. As to whether Kerbol could be a Population I Star or better (with a very high metallicity) I could see that being a possibility as well. Accelerando: If somehow the planets of the Kerbol system were overly enriched in Osmium, they could be quite small and yet pack as much mass into that area as we'd find on Earth. I don't know how likely it would be for such a thing to happen in reality, but in a game with a different set of rules it would be hard to rule out. I wonder if it would be possible to determine the amount of Osmium that would be required to produce the kind of results we're seeing in game.

Interestingly, a red dwarf star would be denser overall than the sun. This is because of the fact that along with lower mass goes less energetic fusion reactions in the core; so the star's gaseous envelope is, by necessity, more compact. Of course as mentioned before a star's density will vary with depth - but for very large stars in old age (like Betelgeuse) they can become so distended that their outer layers become comparable to boiling hot vacuum. It's fascinating stuff - sadly however I'm not skilled in the maths and everything behind it. Another thing to keep in mind for a world like Laythe is that with a substantial atmosphere and temperatures approaching, say, 200 Kelvin, it would be possible for water to remain a liquid if it had a suitable antifreeze (like ammonia) mixed in. I'm actually more interested in where Eve got it's massive supply of Mercury. That element is not particularly common in our own Solar System - well at least not enough to fill up entire seas. Perhaps the solar nebula that world condensed out of had quite a different materials allotment than ours did. I wonder if all the planets, Kerbin included, are overly enriched with heavy metals?

Your lander configuration is very similar to what I used when I first tried to reach Mun. The primary difference is that I made use of the full sized FL-T400 tank and I omitted the S.A.S. Module. I actually found landing upon Mun with such a slender footprint to be quite difficult and I've since changed my lander design to something a bit easier to handle. Still, I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who had the idea to go with that kind of design: I used quite a bit different rocket design however. What I put together allowed me to get into Kerbin orbit with 1,400 Liters of fuel in my second stage, which proved to be more than adequate to get my command module up to Mun and to put me into a descent trajectory. I'll post a pic here as well as it will be a bit easier than trying to explain the whole thing in words: I can't speak to how efficient that design is, but I've found it to be reliable and quite suitable for the purposes of getting me to the Mun. Basically I use Rockomax tanks on the first stage and cluster eight 4.5 segment liquid boosters around that - the boosters don't just provide thrust, they also feed fuel into the central engine such that the primary tanks don't get drained until well into flight. I calculated that my first stage utilizes about 22,400 Liters of fuel and provides enough velocity to almost reach orbit by itself. Frankly, my main issue with landing on the Mun was that such a slim lander design leaves a very narrow footprint and its all too easy to crash, fall over or just fail miserably when it comes to affecting a landing. To be honest the keyboard layout and controls are not optimal for doing a manual landing, from what I can see, as it's no easy feat to use the mouse, the left control/shift keys and hit WASD all at the same time. Of course I might just be very uncoordinated - anything is possible. At any rate, I'm pretty new to all this landing and orbit stuff myself so it's nice to see what other people are experiencing. Getting that first landing down without dying was quite the simulated experience to be sure.

Your lander looks pretty similar to mine and the results of trying to land on Mun ring true for me as well. It took me eleven individual attempts to land, in about 40% of the cases, Jeb actually survived - usually the lander would fall over or it would be destroyed while leaving the capsule intact. I came to learn later that the long/thin lander configuration is hardly the best, but I must say I still felt satisfaction at getting it right anyway. Actually your story makes me wonder once more if its possible to fly the three-man capsule with only two occupants - if not possible now that might be something they could implement in the future. You know back in the days of the Apollo Applications Program they actually had a never-used Skylab-Rescue concept that involved something similar; An Apollo CSM with a two-man crew and extra seats bolted in to ferry the stranded astronauts back, it's a fascinating read if you're interested: Skylab Rescue.

There are a wide variety of possibilities, however I would rather like to see a Chthonian world myself, something akin to Corot-7b perhaps. These close in and extremely hot worlds appear to be common enough and it would be fascinating to deal with one, though landing would be, shall we say, cost prohibitive. I would also like to see Jovian worlds implemented that follow the Sudarsky Classification System - I guess that would be more aesthetic than functional but again having a Bespin-esque water-cloud gas giant would be a nice touch. Finally, I'd like to see an ice world like Hoth implemented, something with a density of say 2.5 gm/cm^3 with a substantial atmosphere and cold-weather complications. Remember, landing on an airless body with a surface temperature of 30 K would be one thing, landing on such a world with an atmosphere twice as dense as Earths' would be quite another. I'll be very curious to see how things proceed on this front.

Just thought I'd say hello, I purchased KSP sometime earlier this year and really thought the concept was intriguing. I was up until recently however hilariously bad in all aspects of fictional rocketry, managing to blow up myself up on the launch pad more often than I'd put a capsule into orbit. I guess practice has helped me however, as I've become much better these days - so much so that I've managed to build a craft that could orbit Kerbin, Mun and Minmus and complete the circuit without losing anyone to catastrophic existence failure along the way. Now, if I could just figure out how to keep Jeb from dying every time he gets near the Munar surface; that remains one hell of a challenge. At any rate, good day to you all.