Eric S

Except for the moon landings, the US was behind the Soviet Union for the entire space race, but the US still celebrated it's successes. The Mercury astronauts were treated like celebrities, doing appearances all over the country. China is what, the third country to put up a manned space station by themselves? Given where their technology was when the space race was going on, that's an achievement.

I'm not aware of any mod that worked in 0.20 that doesn't work in 0.20.2, and very few that work in 0.20.2 that don't work in 0.20, and those that I'm aware of are clearly labeled. I'm assuming 0.2.0 is a typo, either on your part or theirs, since 0.2 had no addon support and was never released to buyers.

I was too young to remember it, but I was evidently quite aware of it, since one of my mother's favorite stories to tell of my childhood was me telling her to write NASA a nasty letter for not inviting me along.

That could certainly affect the cost effectiveness of both engine clusters and asparagus launchers, but I really don't think those prices are final.

A fairly safe assumption, as the devs really haven't shown much interest in restricting mod usage.

Heh, the first thing I thought of was "Hmmmm.... intentional or accidental?" Kegal exercises, for those that don't have that bit of trivia stored in their mind somewhere. Then again, I think that is being pronounced incorrectly when pronounced like keagle would be, but oddly enough, that's how I've heard it pronounced more often. So it could be just me thinking that. Ah, the dangers of "k" syndrome.

You don't. You can put both a probe pod and a manned pod on a craft and EVA the kerbals before you launch the craft. You can also use Kerbal Crew Manifest to add/remove kerbals before launch. It's a bit faster than EVA'ing then end mission'ing three kerbals.

Flipping on the ground was the first thing I thought of, but I have to say, your method was far more elegant than mine.

As much as I like the ion drive, it really isn't useful as a main drive for manned ships in KSP. It produces 0.5 thrust, which means that if you stick it on the lightest manned command pod and ignore fuel and electricity requirements, you'll get less than 1 m/s worth of acceleration. Even unmanned probes can be too heavy to use an ion engine unless you've got a lot of patience. It does make a nice engine for correcting satellite orbits, and an OK engine for lit probes, but for anything larger, you're either talking multi-hour burn times, using OP engines from mods, or strapping more of them onto a craft than you can realistically power. And yes, the atomic engine is mostly for use in space. As long as you're patient enough, it doesn't matter if it takes 15 minutes for a transfer burn, since the actual transfer orbit is going to take months anyway. Technically this is also true of the ion engine, but at 1/120th of the thrust of the atomic engine, ion engines take saintly levels of patience if the ship you're moving has any real mass.

Can't speak for the Philippines, But there's already been some discussion in some states about licensing Google's self-driving car to let it drive without a human ready to take over at any second. I'm sure that will bring to light all sorts of issues like this.

I'd like to apologize for not being very clear on this. I do tend to get distracted arguing the fine points rather than the important points. My argument on this wasn't meant to demean those that do these wonderful things, or to try to argue over at what point fly by wire gets complex enough to start feeling more like an autopilot than a moderated control or to even address the general situation of the skill required to pilot things. I was looking at the specific case of arguing that KSP's lack of automation is the right thing to have based on how the first moon landing required pilots to have some piloting skill not being accurate, as the level of automation even in that case was distinctly higher than KSP's total lack thereof. Which, to be honest, is a side argument in itself, since how realistic something is doesn't have a direct correlation to how fun that something is.

And where did I say they couldn't? What I said was that when people hold up the Apollo 11 moon landing as a triumph of man over automation, there was more automation going on there than they realize.

Agreed, you're misunderstanding me if you think I'm saying they had a "land over there" function on their autopilot. They used the functionality they had to alter the trajectory of the landing. They changed the attitude to vertical so that their thrust wouldn't slow down their horizontal velocity, then let their equivalent of ASAS handle that, and they keyed in a specific rate of descent (KSP's closest analog would be MechJeb's translatron, I think). At that point, they weren't following the planned trajectory, but they weren't flying the craft in the way a stock KSP player would be, either. As someone who first started programming with 256 bytes of RAM, less than even the Block I AGC had, I understand (admittedly, that one was a lot fewer chips, since they were LSI or even VLSI). What they had was nothing like MechJeb as a whole, just functionality that matched a few parts of it.

Now that's a comment I can get behind completely :-) I tend to use autopilots as tools, and tweak them as necessary, sometimes even far more than necessary. I still haven't found a docking autopilot that I trust to do more than individual pieces of the docking maneuver. An autopilot can kill relative velocity FAR more accurately than I can, and when you're docking hundred ton mothership parts, that can be rather important. As for the rest, it really comes down to "at what point does fly-by-wire get so advanced it's closer to autopilot than direct control?" Stock KSP is a lot closer to direct control than the kinds of fly-by-wire and computer assisted stuff the astronauts use, even back in the Apollo era. That's what I mean by overly romanticized. Flying a rocket based spacecraft has never been anything like flying a plane. In fact, that's one of the reasons Chuck Yeager passed when the Mercury program started up. He knew that the astronauts would be more passenger than pilot, and he wasn't interested in that experience. On the actual topic of the thread, the closest I come to cheating is hyperediting ships places to test them before I go through the effort of launching them and hauling them half way across the star system, and letting mechjeb keep the little maneuver marker where it's supposed to be. Oh, and as I said above, killing relative velocity while docking. Landing in kethane fields that aren't near the equator (I'll admit that my piloting skills aren't up to precise landings, especially if the planet's rotating fast enough that I have to take that into account).

If the throttle were the only control, you might have a point (and even that would depend on just what the autothrottle does), but the astronauts weren't maintaining the craft's heading, they returned control of that to the autopilot after they pitched. If modern airliners are landed by pilots lining up with the runway then letting the autopilot keep the heading and then just adjusting their rate of descent, then you'd have a reasonable comparison, but that really wouldn't sound like a manual landing to me. As for AP12, it sounds like something that could be handled the same way as adjusting AP11's landing location, but since I've never seen a writeup on the AP12 landing, I can't really say either way.

I have the utmost respect for astronauts, but that's really an overly romanticized interpretation of what actually happened. In reality, the autopilot was never turned off. They pitched the lander a bit and then told the autopilot to slow its rate of descent towards the surface of the moon so it wouldn't land in the middle of a boulder field. Once they made it to a clear landing area, they told the autopilot to resume it's normal descent rate. Manual intervention? Yes. Manual landing? Not really. The pitching was the only part done manually, the rest was changing the autopilot's parameters.

The file structure has changed, mods are done a little differently now, but not horribly. As far as the game performance goes, it's faster than 0.18 for some, slower for others, so definitely worth a try since you've already paid for it.

MechJeb is a lot better, but it's far from perfect. Turn on RCS and watch it practically vibrate trying to hold it's heading. Though to be honest, I think that's more a limitation of the controls available to MechJeb. I'm not saying that ASAS couldn't be better. Yes, dynamic tuning is possible and would virtually eliminate this kind of problem. On the other hand, with the number of other things they're working on, I'd rather have a simple partial solution to tide me over until they have the time to do a proper solution.

If it can be done, that sounds like a very good way to "fix" this problem. I certainly wouldn't mind adjusting a single value in flight.

No, they just use the acceleration of the last burn you did rather than compute what you can do now. It's simpler to do, and in the case of a ship that would break apart under full throttle, possibly more accurate. Yes, it's almost never really precise and is often horribly inaccurate after staging.

The problem is that there is no one right set of parameters for the PID, in order to minimize the overcorrecting without causing undercorrecting, the PID values have to change per craft, and probably have to change per stage of each craft.

I tend to do the same. My first mothership had a crew of 12, but I could have actually fit about twice that many kerbals on the ship because I had added living space and such.

The easiest way would probably be to define it as a regular engine that uses monopropellant as it's fuel.

Define a reasonable sized rocket. I had one kethane miner that mined 200t of kethane at a time. The larger deposits on Minmus did just fine, though I'd just about wipe them out, so that's probably the case anywhere. Works quite well on Eve. I haven't tried the newest part, it might be feasible on Kerbin or Laythe, but the previous ones didn't save enough delta-v to make Kerbin worth it, and didn't really save anything on Laythe.

I'll second the VAB being your throttle. My rockets tend to be at or near full throttle as much as possible. Asparagus staging actually makes that a bit easier if you're not using identical engines, since you're hitting staging events faster, so you're not burning as much fuel before you stage.