Eric S

It only matters if it's an ion engine, and I doubt you'd try that. Do you have a fuel bar in the staging area for the engine, and does the throttle indicator next to the navball respond to left-shift and left-ctrl? It really sounds more like you've hit a bug that people have seen from time to time where for no apparent reason, a ship just becomes uncontrollable. You should be able to throttle up an engine no problem, and you shouldn't even have to EVA to extend the solar panels if it's a manned craft, regardless of the power situation. I think a save and reload might fix it if that's the case, it might actually take quitting the game and starting new. I hadn't heard about that bug much lately, and this is the first time I've heard of it hitting someone running 0.22.

I've heard 500 delta-v mentioned, but I've never tried to confirm that. I've done EVA land and return missions a few times, and I've heard that you can do it on Minmus including the transfer back to LKO, but I've never tried that. Heck, if nothing else, that should be enough to put the eva'ed kerbals into a free return trajectory and then, after a light bit of aerobraking, circularize back in LKO.

Actually, in the dev streams, they've mentioned that they're considering doing this already.

There's something someone is missing. That someone may be me. Is this a manned ship? If so, even with no power, you can power up the engines (which may provide power) or you could just extend the solar panels (not even requiring an EVA). Both of these work in a manned ship with no power (just tested both to make sure it's still the case in 0.22). Neither work with an unmanned ship with no power. You may have a mod enforcing power requirements for those activities (I'm pretty sure that there's at least one of them). Other than that, it would be possible to catch up with the craft, but you'd need a good bit more delta-v than the original craft had, and every rendezvous method I know of involves orbits instead of doing it in a single pass, so you'd be winging the intercept. Possible, but not trivial, especially without practice doing so.

That's not stranded (yet), though it'll take a ton of patience. With a periapsis at 50km, you're hitting atmosphere, which is going to slowly eat away at that 12000 km apoapsis (but only if you're actively in control of the ship while it is passing near Kerbin), provided you can avoid an encounter with the Mun. How inclined is your apoapsis? Two possibilities that don't involve trying to rendezvous with the ship. First, you can just wait it out. Assuming your apoapsis is inclined enough to miss the moon, you could just leave the game running overnight with the parachute deployed. Sooner or later, you'll aerobrake enough to reenter. Second, you can get out and push. At an apoapsis of 12000 km, it won't take much to lower your periapsis deeper into the atmosphere. EVA a kerbal, turn on his jet pack, move him prograde, and then push the ship in the retrograde direction. It should only take one push, as anything below a 40 km periapsis will degrade much faster, and anything much below 30 km will cause an immediate reentry at the speed you'll be going.

That has been my experience, you get a dot with a number on it in the tech tree view telling you that there are parts to unlock even though you've unlocked the node. Clicking on the node shows you the parts, and you can click each individual part to unlock that part.

Not in any significant way. A small amount of vectored thrust gradually rotates the craft a degree or two, gravity does the rest, unlike a jet where the entire turn is caused by the force of lift from the wings and engine thrusting farther off from the direction of travel. As for the comment about the ISS, the point that I was trying to get across is that the various forces involved in an orbit cancel each other out from the point of view of someone floating in a tin can, since the tin can is following the same trajectory. A rocket launch is the same thing, just with one force not entirely cancelled out. If KSP has taught you anything, it should be that you're either on the surface or in an orbit at all times, just not necessarily a stable orbit (due to escape from an SoI, aerodynamic drag, or collision with the ground). Go fly a plane in KSP and pull up map mode, you'll see an orbital projection. Mind you, that projection is only accurate if you killed the engine and stopped getting lift from the wings and didn't suffer from aerodynamic drag. If you're thinking that real life gravity turns are done like in KSP, I can see where the misunderstanding comes from though. Real life gravity turns are very delicate and gradual, not the "Now go this way!" that they often are in KSP. As I said above, the rockets only turn under their own power a degree or two, gravity handles the rest of the turn by bending the trajectory, hence the term "gravity turn." This is done early in the launch, before the velocity is high enough for facing the rocket in a direction other than pure prograde to become an issue. I try to do gravity turns a little more realistic than typical KSP launches, but it's not easy to do in KSP since the amount of the initial turn needs to be fairly precise. Turn too far, and you're soon find your prograde vector pointing horizontally or even downward before reaching a sufficient apoapsis, not far enough, and you reach your target apoapsis height long before you come close to orbital velocity and you wind up needing a long circularization burn.

By the same logic, astronauts on the ISS would be pushed towards the "ceiling" instead of being in free fall. Instead, since every force that acts on the astronauts also acts on the ISS, the astronauts fall along the same path the ISS is taking. Since there's no difference in the path taken by the ISS and the astronaut, the ISS exerts no force on the astronaut to keep the astronaut confined within the ISS. The reason the force of the wheels of a car was brought up for why you felt the turn is because that force is applied to the car, not to the passenger, causing the paths to diverge, which means that some force has to pull the passenger back into a path matching that of the car. This force is what you're feeling. In the case of a rocket launch, there are only two forces that will act on the rocket but not the astronaut. The rocket's thrust, and atmospheric resistance. Since both of these forces are parallel to the movement of the craft, the net force is parallel to the movement as well. Hence the only force the astronauts feel is being pushed towards the direction of acceleration, which is to say, forward. Gravity and intertia both affect both the rocket and the astronaut, any affect they have would have the same result on the rocket and the astronaut, meaning that their paths don't diverge, meaning that the astronaut won't feel anything from those forces. Now, if the rocket were turning because the rocket was thrusting in a direction other than the one that it were moving in, then yes, the astronauts would feel some side to side force because atmospheric drag and thrust aren't parallel, resulting in some force not directly in line with the rocket. However, the point of a real gravity turn is that gravity itself is causing your trajectory to not follow a straight line.

The Launcher is new to KSP 0.22. Odd. It might be a difference between a KSP-store copy and Steam copy of KSP. My copy is a KSP-store copy, so if all else fails, I can just open up the zip file and copy the file I need back out of it. I'd be surprised if the Steam app didn't have a way to reinstall "corrupt" files.

Correct, the purpose of the extra data was to make it harder to transmit the results. It's the first pass of the tech tree and science, I don't know if the devs hit the mark they were aiming at for how easily the tree is unlocked. Personally, depending on how hard I push, I usually unlock the whole tree in 4-6 missions, so even at the current values for those high end experiments, it's quite doable. First mission, Polar orbit (you get more EVA reports that way) and at least one orbit with a "high orbit" apoapsis, maybe a swing by the Mun/Minmus or even the solar SoI if I'm feeling aggressive. Second mission, a Minmus landing. Third mission, a Munar landing with EVA reports over at least 8 biomes and surface samples/EVA reports from at least two biomes (three is pretty easy). Fourth mission is Duna or Eve plus the corresponding moon. Then maybe the other one, maybe a trip to Jool and one or more moons there. If I push the first mission hard enough, I might combine the 2nd/3rd missions, but I usually don't do that because a first-node-only ship that can go that far tends to be a pain to launch.

Interesting, I'm glad I checked before answering. There is no patcher in the 0.22 zip file. The first time you run the Launcher, it will download and install the patcher.

Other than being 2d and having a complete lack of struts, fuel lines, EVA/IVA, flywheel torque and as near as I can tell, anything bearing any resemblance to Kerbal Engineer Redux, a KSP player will feel right at home with SimpleRockets. Space Agency isn't bad but your understanding of orbital mechanics will go completely wasted there, its orbital mechanics sound like something someone would come up with if they didn't know orbital mechanics and tried to approximate them with "common sense" (prograde burns speed up your orbit but don't change the path, radial burns change your orbit altitude). Oh, and no maneuver nodes. On the other hand, being 2d makes landing much easier. The game has built in challenges and leaderboards for things like getting into orbit using the least amount of fuel and such. Not sure if they've reset the leaderboards yet, there were some leaderboards that were affected by bugs that made the challenge a bit of a joke.

I mentioned this in your other thread, but the amount of science you get is the correct amount, the bug is in the display, so setting the mentioned value to 1 is fixing the problem and making it easier to transmit the experiment results rather than getting you less science than intended.

The value you're getting is the intended value, the bug is in the display popup, as confirmed by Harvester (I'd link to it, but I don't have the link handy, and it explains the values a bit better as well). Basically, one of the attributes (dataScale, I think), increases the amount of data that the experiment will generate, but it's not supposed to increase the science reward. The popup that shows the results and lets you keep/transmit/discard the results isn't taking this into consideration, so is thinking that all that data would return more science than it should.

I like your non-asparagus design. It achieves much of the advantages of asparagus staging by thinking outside the box. It doesn't surprise me that your "lazy" asparagus version of it doesn't show much improvement, but that's because the design wasn't made with asparagus in mind. By having three mainsails and three skippers, you're locked into a three branch, two stage design, and that's not particularly efficient.

Making a useful spaceplane. I've done several that can get into orbit and come back, but not one so far has had enough oomph left over to carry a useful amount of cargo.

Also, there are performance updates coming. One of the devs managed to get a 30% speed improvement and some more memory optimizations working, but the update didn't pass QA in time for 0.22 from what I understand (in fact, I haven't heard that they've definitely passed QA at all at this time).

The boundary between upper atmosphere and near space moves. I noticed that on Jool, but most of my experimentation has been with Kerbin, where I've had upper atmosphere readings as high as 68K, but near space readings as low as 30K. It should be noted that I've never received an upper atmosphere reading during an aerobrake maneuver where my apoapsis wasn't in the atmosphere, so I suspect that SMA, apoapsis, periapsis or velocity may play a role in what counts as upper atmosphere instead of just altitude.

The devs hinted that they have plans to stop some forms of science abuse without stating what forms. I'm expecting "strip mining" research with repeated transmissions to be on that list. As long as that's resolved, I'm happy. While realistically the non-sensor experiments should have a single use, or at least limited uses, I'm concerned for the effect that would have on research balance, as you'd be nerfing the two heaviest experiments, but not the lighter ones. We'd probably need to increase the science returns for those experiments (not by a huge amount). I've got one save where my transmission rule is "no transmissions where I've already done a transmission or a recovery." I find that even on fairly simple missions, that cut my science at least in half, which feels like a reasonable progression for something that isn't the only purpose of career mode.

For example, one unity windows-64-bit specific bug that got fixed more recently than the last time KSP updated their version of Unity involved the raycasting mechanic. It was a random crash to desktop type bug involving a feature that KSP does a LOT of. There's no chance KSP could have had a stable windows 64-bit client with that bug present. I don't know if it's the only bug of that category, in which case the next time KSP updates their Unity library we can get a working 64 bit client, or if there are other bugs. Since at least some of the windows-64 bit issue is out of their hands, the devs have been looking more at memory optimizations than pushing for 64 bit, as that way any improvement can help everyone, not just those with 64 bit OS and more than 4GB of ram. That config is popular with people that consider their computer a gaming machine, but not so much among people that game more casually.

It is faster, the throughput stat is either wrong or severely misunderstood. The DTS-M1 transmits the same data in 80% of the time the 16 does, and the 88-88 in 60% of the time. Those numbers are results from testing I've done trying to make sure I understood the stats.

I've noticed that upper atmosphere is fidgity on all planets. On kerbin, for example, I've found upper atmosphere as high as 68 km, but near space as low as 32 km. I've never missed upper atmosphere on Jool, but you need to come in almost circularly, otherwise you're "flying" before you know it. I've hit upper atmosphere on Jool as high as 135 km, but only when I came in very slowly and gently and aerobraked into an almost circular orbit at that height.

At any rate, judging from what they said during the developer live stream, they're definitely doing something to discourage the infinite transmitted experiment spam. It'll be interesting to see what they decided on.

At this time (and I don't know if the devs will change it), you only get science from ship recovery for one of the places you went. You still get all the science you did in each of those places, so it's still worth doing, but you do need to keep in mind that if you're doing multiple flybys, orbits, or landings, you're doing it for the experiments, not the ship recovery science.

It's quite true, I've verified it. And frankly, if you tie your science gear to a hotkey and have enough solar panels, the amount of patience it takes to "strip mine" a region (biome/altitude/whatever) of science isn't as much patience as it takes to send up multiple craft for returns, especially if you're doing multiple regions in a single trip. Not as a direct response, but just as a bit of the math behind science and diminishing returns, let's put the readers to sleep! The reward for any given experiment is a percentage of the total available science for that experiment in that region. So if you've already turned in enough experiments to get half of the possible science for that experiment in that region done, the amount of initial science for your next experiment of that type in that region will be half as much as your first one. In theory, this means that you can never get the amount of science remaining down to zero. Once you start rounding numbers, either intentionally or just as floating point errors, it does become possible. For example, using actual data from in game, doing materials science on the launch pad and radioing it in: You start with a maximum possible science return from that experiment at that location of 10.5 units of science. The percentage of that that you could get from a recovery is just a tad over 71%, so your first experiment will return 7.5 science if recovered, 20% of that, or 1.5 if radioed in. Assuming you radio it in, now there's only 9 points of science available, and 71% of that is 6.4, so that's the value of the experiment the second time, or 1.3 if radioed in. Radio that in, and now we're down to 7.7 science remaining. 71% of that is 5.5, so that's the value of the experiment the third time. This continues until you stop, probably somewhere around 57 total transmissions, depending on how the rounding goes. Now, some of you mathematically inclined people are might already be seeing a different way to view this. A materials science experiment leaves 29% of the unknown science if recovered, or 85.8% of the unknown science if radioed in. This basically means that you can look at it this way. total science earned by materials science experiment on the launchpad = 10.5 - (10.5 * 0.29^(number of times recovered) * 0.858^(number of times radioed in)) You'll notice that since we're just multiplying each of the factors, it's commutative. So if you've done X recoveries and Y radioing it in, it doesn't matter what order you've done them in, you'll be at the same place (barring the ever present rounding errors). You might also notice that at a 20% return plus diminishing returns, it takes just about 8 transmitted experiments to return the same science as one recovered materials science experiment, regardless of how much science that one recovery got. This isn't to say that these same numbers can be plugged into any experiment in any location. For example, one recovered mystery goo experiment only returns about 55% of the available science, so the diminishing returns don't kick in as fast. If transmitted however, the experiment loses less value, and diminishing returns winds up kicking in faster. At the other extreme, a gravity scan reading returns over 90% of the available science if recovered, so the diminishing returns kick in even faster in the case of recovery on that one. In fact, atmospheric analysis, between high total yields and limited losses due to transmission, can be ground out in eight transmissions to the point that the available science rounds down to zero. All the other experiments fall between these two ranges, except for Crew Reports, which take about 5 transmissions to hit zero available, due to the 0% loss because of transmissions.