DerekL1963

You've noted the divide, but not noted the results that divide virtually always produce? I find that hard to believe.

You don't need to remap - just drive your rover from the docking screen rather than the staging screen. Swap back to the staging screen if you need gyro torque to right your vehicle. Klajan, do you have a .craft file for that rover?

Yes, and no. The Shuttle rolled not only to control aerodynamic loading (and to point the antennas on the Orbiter's upper surface at the downrange ground stations*), but also to align the stack with the intended flight azimuth. The Saturn V rolled for the latter reason as well. (If you read the Apollo Flight Journals (http://history.nasa.gov/afj/) you'll see the calls for the roll program somewhere around T+00:00:15 to T+00:00:30.) The reasons why they needed to align the vehicle with the launch azimuth are complicated and buried deep in the arcana of guidance system design and are related to the low performance of guidance electronics back in the early days. (Watch the Polaris and Poseidon launches starting at about 00:10 in this video (http://youtu.be/uljVI4m5e3c), and you'll see them perform a roll program almost immediately upon ignition.) Nowadays it's an anachronism kept out of habit, if they do it at all. *Later in the program, some of those downrange ground stations were decommissioned for budgetary reasons. If you compare the time of the roll back to 'heads up', you'll see where the later launches had to roll back earlier to point those antenna at the TDRSS birds. This. There is no One True Way to do a gravity turn.

The moment when your booster shuts down at 8km, for the second time in a row, because you've left your autopilot set for blasting your lander off the Mun....

How do I get him to *turn around*?

What it says in the title - where is a good place to host craft files?

Nope. Apollo used components originally designed for the DoD missile programs. (Though, because the timing was wrong, the DoD wouldn't actually start fielding those units until the late 60's.) Most people don't appreciate that NASA went out of it's way to minimize the number of new technologies developed for Apollo - there wasn't a great deal of time and there was a great deal of risk. They didn't even design new flight computers for the CSM and LM - they modified the computers used on the Polaris A2. Not to mention the F-1 (on which the entire program arguably depended) came from the USAF, and the Saturn series of boosters relied on work started when the Redstone Arsenal still belonged to the Army. One of the great dirty secrets of Apollo is how much it relied on work done before Kennedy's decision that could be grabbed and modified quickly - and much of that originated with the DoD. (That's why Kennedy selected the moon landing in the first place.)

Actually, it's more correct to say that "Almost everyone has multiple items in their house that are widely believed to have spawned from the Apollo program, but actually didn't". NASA's propaganda machine has long been an expert at spinning NASA's use of a technology into NASA being responsible for that technology, and decades of repetition by NASA and space enthusiasts have converted that spin into accepted truth. To take just one example - freeze dried food. NASA didn't invent it, freeze drying was invented in 1938 by Nestle. They didn't develop it into a viable process, that was done in WWII in order to ship blood products overseas. The first commercial products came along in the 50's.... NASA was a latecomer to the party. Etc... etc... On investigation, very few of NASA's spin-off claims withstand scrutiny. Actually, we are, because the Soviets were notoriously bad at documenting the results of their life sciences experiments. Not to mention it's good practice to replicate experiments and experience across as wide a variety of individuals as possible - there's a lot of variation in the human race, starting with the male/female divide.

That depends on where/when you grew up. We were still using "gosh" in high school in the late 70's... (Winston-Salem NC, NFSH Class of '81.) The Apollo astronauts largely grew up in the 30's and 40's. According to Micheal Collins (in Carrying the Fire), at least one Apollo astronaut had to be trained to hum rather than swear... Rumor has it this was John Young.

MechJeb will use the RCS if you've turned it on. Otherwise it uses gimbaled engines and command pod/probe body torque.

I missed the [cool], no biggie.

You're doing better than me... I flew a ton of unmanned practice missions first.

For an interplanetary vessel, surprisingly enough, it does - there's only so many launch windows. The windows are wider than with chemical, granted, but they're still there. Absent free fuel and massless life support, there's still going to be push to use the most optimum trajectory available.

The smiley doesn't diminish the implied insult.

Real rockets do that because you need different engine bell designs at different altitudes for maximum efficiency. (There's some other factors too, but that's the big one and one of the reasons for the ongoing interest in aerospike engines.) This is not (AFAIK) well simulated in KSP.

Not quite. Korolev designed the R7 with droppable strapons for the same reason we put droppable engines on the Atlas, not because it was particularly efficient but because nobody was quite sure how to ignite the engines in flight, or quite how [tandem] staging would work. (Plus it kept the size of the individual units down for easy transport.)

Umm... how can something made available for public download be "stolen"? Especially since he linked to your craft.

This has to be added to the Zenith family...

Yep, it's my standard way of driving rovers - a tip I picked up here on the fora.

... when you realize you've been watching the MapSat screen for waaaay too long, and it's now a half an hour until your spouse gets home and you haven't even started dinner.

Disabling the rotation mode *is the entire point*.

Use the forum search function to find Temstar's Zenith series boosters.

Try using the docking mode controls like you would for a regular rover...

I was like that too... so I re-created it, tossed on a MechJeb, and got it to a stable 67x62 orbit with something like 4 units (total) of fuel and oxidizer left. WTG Francesco!

Or set your debris slider to "0". It all depends on how you want to play the game.