Brotoro

As relevant as today's headlines! And we can't post in only moderately-old threads because they all vanished.

I would get into an orbit around Kerbol that would put me 180 degrees away from the asteroid's apoapsis at the right time to make a Hohmann transfer out to that apoapsis point that arrives at the same time as the asteroid reaches that point...then burn to slow up and match orbits. I'd need to know the size of the orbit and where the asteroid is along it's orbit (and where Kerbin is in its orbit)... and then some fiddling with Kepler's laws should give the answers needed for the size and timing of the initial phasing orbit.

I do not use FAR. A comment by somebody else about the non-aerodynamic nature of the rocket lead me to develop a folding version of the rover (see this thread)... which I then used in my Long-term Laythe mission. But, in the end, the sloppiness of the hinge connection, and a tendency for the hinges to shift over time (appearing to detach from the rover parts), made the Folding Fido much less safe to drive than the rigid Fido.

For a long time I was recovering them with parachutes on Kerbin whenever possible. Later on, I started to recover the whole Mark Twain vehicle. My most recent space tugs that use nuclear engines are designed to remain in space and be reused for multiple trips to the planets and back, but they have parachutes on their nuclear side pods so that they can potentially be returned to Kerbin later for refurbishment.

I decided to make a "proof of concept" test of a self-aligning docking port. The port uses "petals" to guide and align the ships as they come together. I don't have nice little parts to work with, so I made my petals out of 1x1 structural plates mounted with cubic struts to a standard size ASAS unit which has the docking port on the front of it. Below are the two ships. coming together somewhat out of alignment: Coming closer.... At least one of the ships must have SAS turned off at this point so it can rotate when the plates touch... Below, the petal plates are bumping along one edge... ...and the magnetism of the ports pulls the ships together. Aligned and docked! Below is an animated GIF of another test. Sorry for the sudden change of view angle after docking, but you know how KSP is. Now, these petals are big and ugly, but I assume some modder could make a nice looking port with smaller petals that do the trick.

No. The bottom stages use UDMH and Nitrogen tetroxide.

That video is scary. Something you do NOT want to see is a big out of control rocket backlit by its engine flames.

Me? I'd rather explode the rocket in the air and let the inert small parts fall down than have the rocket hit as a big bomb. And I especially wouldn't want a wild rocket zipping off horizontally to wreak havoc who knows where. A rocket could get quite a distance after thrusting for 42 seconds. But it may be that there isn't much of anything around the Russian launch area that they are worried about getting damaged more than they are worried about protecting the launch facilities (unlike the situation around Canaveral where there are towns and such to protect)

The thing that strikes me as odd about the Proton crash is that the Range Safety Officer did not blow the thing up. Or do the Russians not go in for that kind of thing?

RTG have the radioactive heat source encapsulated in such a way that they should withstand reentry and impact. The RTGs typically use plutonium dioxide, so it shouldn't burn even if it does get loose.

On my VTOL test plane? Yes, that's a decoupler. I needed a part in there that wouldn't crossfeed fuel so that I could hook up fuel lines to give me symmetric draining of fuel from the various tanks. It turns out to be better to use a 1x1 structural plate instead, but I did not do that at first beacuse I thought the structural plates were fuel crossfeed enabled (since I had found out earlier that I could get them to crossfeed fuel on my ocean probes). I had a thread here discussing this weird fuel crossfeed behavior.....but it got moved somewhere else and I can't find it now.

Congrats. Note that it is possible to drive your rover with time warp (actually physics warp) on the Mün by holding down the Alt key when you press the increase time warp key (period).

I think what we are seeing here is the weird physics of flotation in KSP.

Weather balloons can go about 40 kilometers. Typical model rockets go less than a mile (although you could probably double that with a rocket near the high end of the impulse range that defines "model rocket"). The rocket will do better starting from higher altitude, but not better enough to get it into space, I suspect.

The planet Jool is named after the King of the Kerbal gods. Jool is narcissistic, inconsiderate, petulant, and irresponsible...in other words, great classic god material. He is envious of all other gods, and therefore he is usually depicted as green in color. He wears a mighty golden belt that can kill mortals who spend too much time exposed to it. Laythe, Vall, and Tylo were three fair maids whom he tricked into having sex with him by disguising himself, respectively, as a bull, a shower of gold dust, and a battery-operated sex toy.

The big canyon on Dres is easily visible from orbit...it's the small gash in the white area on the middle-right in the picture below: Picture from my Disaster at Dres mission.

Today? Flew plane/rover. Drove plane/rover. Took many screenshots. Finished exploring one group of islands.

Making ASAS 'smarter' is the most important improvement I've wanted. I hope it finally knows how to handle gimbaled engines well (so they don't bang back and forth to maximum deflection, and so clustered engines can control roll). A part to add control torque to go along with this would be very nice. Disappointed about resources? No, I was disappointed about that back in 0.19...now I'm kind of resigned to it.

Nice pictures, guys. Thanks!

"I must touch it!"

If it's just during landing that the wheels explode, you could add enough landing gear to the ship to take the landing shock, then fold them away to put the wheels on the ground (or even jettison them to get rid of the weight). If the wheels are getting damaged during roving, you need to make a lighter vehicle for the number of wheels you have.

I've been limiting myself to using only reusable launch vehicles. My Reusable Rocket launch vehicle (because of its rather inefficient launch trajectory required to allow the boosters to land back at KSC, and the need to keep enough fuel to return the sustainer to KSC) can only lift about 38 tons into orbit, so all my ships get assembled out of pieces smaller than this limit. I also do not leave kerbals stranded on faraway planets with no intention of returning them home.

120 or so,last time I paid attention. That's from many game years of leaving probes and used landers at all the planets and moons, plus ongoing active missions. But I haven't gone back to many of them since I switched to version 0.20, so I expect many would appear underground and explode violently if I did.

Slow? Of course...You're used to just bopping all over the place with your VTOL. Rover exploration would have to seem tedious in contrast. But if you want to simulate a realistic exploration program, you have to get boots on the ground (or wheels on the regolith). But I never go into a long driving session without being armed with a trusty audiobook. My rovers can actually cover ground pretty quickly when I drive them like a maniac at high warps factors (which I do when I'm in an "I'm bored! Let's GET there already" mood...but I don't count any resulting smash-ups and re-dos against my poor kerbals' missions, since they obviously wouldn't be driving that way...and I'd already done it 'hard mode' driving around a planet, so I know I can do it). I quite enjoy the driving around at times. Much of the sights look the same, but occasionally there's something new. And I'm often impressed but the thought that some dev spent days and days lovingly handcrafting every square foot of terrain (OK...more likely a considerably shorter amount of time herding a terrain generating program getting something he liked the looks of), so it seems a shame if nobody ever goes and looks at the stuff.

Then my work here is done.