Brotoro

Why do we need such a large container to return samples? The Apollo astronauts just brought back samples inside their capsules.

Hahahahaha! I love it. Grrr. Why will this damn "Add to Reputation" button not work??

I want to know the size and mass for the SCIENCE part now so that I can start adding a placeholder to ships I'm making now (and then swap in the SCIENCE part later).

Evrion is correct, Geschosskoph. The L4 and L5 points in KSP do not work like the real ones (they do not have the same effect). Sure, you would stay in the same place relative to the secondary body in KSP if your ship was EXACTLY at the L5 point (or any point EXACTLY on the secondary body's orbit...which is unrealistic), but with a real L4 or L5 point, there is a large volume of space around that point where a ship will end up moving around the Lagrange point and not drift away. This does NOT happen in KSP. If you are even the tiniest bit off from the L4 or L5 points, your ship will drift away over time. So those points DO NOT act like real Lagrange points, hence "they do not work."

My Folding Fido rover used Damned Robotics door hinges. Here is an earlier version showing the two stages of its deployment sequence: Because of the arrangement of the sky crane (which was similar to the sky crane I used for a non-folding version), the rover had to be set down partially deployed... ...and then it would finish deployment... ...so the landing drop-off looked like this: A later version made the sky crane more compact and arranged so that the rover could be fully deployed before being set down: A problem I had with this rover design in actual use was that the Damned Robotics hinges would "drift" in position over time... so that when I later came back to the rover, the hinges would appear at angles that were off from where I left then... and the plates of the hinges would also no longer appear to be attached properly (they could be 90 degrees off...but the hinges still worked). But the main problem I had with this design was that the hinges allowed some wiggle in the framework that made this rover much more dangerous to drive than its solid-framework cousin. So for the safety of my kerbels, I went back to a rigid frame design.

The two manned missions reached apogees of 116.5 and 118.3 miles. Both went down range about 300 miles.

No, you can't make Jupiter explode like that. A thermonuclear bomb uses a fission primary, with enough energy output to knock down a fair-sized city, and uses that energy to cause an implosion that compresses and heats a relatively small quantity of deuterium and tritium (or tritium formed from Lithium in the bomb) to get a fusion reaction for a very brief period. Sufficient density and heating is difficult to achieve with even the deuterium and tritium, and those isotopes undergo fusion more readily than the regular hydrogen that makes up the bulk of Jupiter's atmosphere. You won't get sufficient compression and heating from an outward-moving shock wave in regular hydrogen to cause fusion.

I find the capsule torque (in conjunction with ASAS) to be very useful in keeping a rover from flipping out of control, or keeping it in control if it gets gets airborne, so I wouldn't want to disable the torque. So I remap the four keys for right-left-forward-backward.

Ahhh... I watched it again, and the ending makes me so sad, where they say they've only been to the Mün nine times. It breaks my heart to think KERBALS could fall victim to the same foolishness WE did.

Are there fuel lines running from the tanks with lots of fuel to the LV-T45 engine? Running in the correct direction?

Hmmm... The "Add to this user's reputation" button does not seem to be working today... I've tried in two different browsers. Is anyone else having this problem?

Nice ascent. Have a kerbal snack.

Beautiful! A great little film.

I just wish AmpsterMan gets his wish. It's a simple question a dev could answer in minimal time.

I simply made a two-kerbal rover small and light enough to stick on the side of my Apollo lunar module. Because the lower two wheels are under compression against the descent stage of the LM, when the rover is ejected it rotates out and lands on its wheels. (This one was a ladder-rider version, back before we had control seats.)

HyperEdit is your friend.

I'm getting that same timeout error, and I don't use adblock.

A huge debris field just makes your liftoffs laggy. So I avoid launch site debris.

Mission report with pictures (including orbital transfer plots) is here: http://www.mindspring.com/~sportrocketry/ksp/eeloo.html Landed one kerbal on the dark bits... And another kerbal on the white bits... ...and returned everybody home to the KSC:

I once had a ship collide with the Statue (in the pyramid complex in the great desert) while the ship was in orbit... so I believe collision meshes can wander far afield in strange situations.

Whether or not the developers choose to make Laythe a friendly place is up to them... but they don't HAVE to make it unfriendly. Jool looks superficially like a gas giant planet (and it certainly does have a thick atmosphere and no solid surface accessible to us), but it is only the size and mass of Venus, approximately. So even if the devs want it to very gas-giant-like and give it a core of super-dense matter in the center so they can surround it with a thick hydrogen/helium atmosphere and mantle, it STILL shouldn't have the massively powerful magnetic field that Jupiter does (or even the much weaker magnetic fields that Saturn, Uranus, or Neptune have). It could have a much weaker magnetic field. The devs have that option. Even if Jool does have a radiation belt, Laythe's substantial atmosphere will block the high energy particles in the radiation belt from reaching the surface of Laythe. So there is no need to cower under the seas in any case. If the devs want to be nice to kerbals in Laythe orbit, they can choose to give Laythe a magnetic field to protect them. The distances in the Joolian system are so small that the tidal forces will be much greater than in the Jovian system (even with Jool's smaller mass), so Laythe could easily have a liquid core for generating a global magnetic field...assuming the devs want to be friendly. Because of all that tidal heating, Laythe would be considerably warmer than the Jovian moons. If the devs choose to be friendly, they could give it a big greenhouse effect (if its atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide, along with the substantial amount of oxygen we know is in there), and then a very salty ocean would be sufficient to have liquid water without the need for the difficulties of ammonia. Plus, all those volcanoes would look awesome.

Kerbals have DNA with extensive checksums.

This thread inspired me to play with some rovers... trying to make something suitable for Vall. For the first time ever, I tried out those ruggedized medium rover wheels... YEOW! Those things have a deadly grip! How do you guys use them? I tried driving around and the rover tries to flip violently on braking... and even at 2x time warp the thing wiggled out of control and flipped. Crazy wheels.

I've never built really large rovers, so my largest ones are probably in the "medium" class. But I've done a LOT of roving with them. The rover below (or close variations of it) have been used on Eve, Duna, Laythe, Mün, and Minmus. I used one of these to drive completely around Duna. Low CoM, wide wheel base, and ASAS for stability when it "catches air," plus lots of wheels to distribute the stress so blowing wheels is minimized, are the features that make it successful. It works best in higher gravity, and used RCS on Minmus for those exciting "airborne" moments. (That version in back was a folding model that used Damned Robotics hinges, but it was less successful because the hinges made the frame weak.) The BirdDog rover below is a combination airplane/rover that has driven extensively on Laythe (and Laythe has some very difficult terrain). It's a small plane so it can get from island to island on Laythe, and can land/take off in surprisingly small areas. When its nose gear is raised, the two front rover wheels are lowered to the ground to put the ship in rover mode. It can handle steep slopes approached at an angle (you have to learn to drive the contours of the landscape), and even handles well at 2x or 3x time warp on moderate terrain. The things that are most dangerous to it (and many rovers) are hitting v-bottom valley at speed, or trying to run along the top of a sharp ridge (where it can bottom out and rip off the jet engine). There have been a couple times where I've accidentally (or purposefully) taken it over a sharp drop off, and it was able to survive because it could glide down to a safe landing. The aircraft landing gear are very resistant to damage, and possibly the ship's mostly-triangular wheel layout makes it handle rough terrain well...but I haven't tried that configuration on airless bodies yet...mainly because the landing gear weigh a LOT compared to rover wheels (although it's not clear if KSP actually counts the mass of the landing gear in flight).