tomf

That is a pretty nasty orbit to have to aim for. You could save a fair amount of dV by making sure you launch while Kerbin is alligned with either the ascending or descending nodes of the orbit. That way you can compine your burn to leave Kerbin with largish component to change plane at teh same time. Then you can combine the burn to raise your PE with more plane changing. A gravity assist could save a fair bit more, but only if you are able to ensure you arrive at Jool as it passes the nodes of the target orbit.

There is a stand alone tool called the flyby finder that will help you to plan what is possible with gravity assists. Finding it is going to be a pain on the new forums though. Otherwise it is a pretty much a matter of trial and error. If you remeber that passing in front of a planet will loose you energy and passing behind it will gain energy. In general though I would question why you want to do gravity assists. If you are trying to create efficient missions than I don't believe it is worth it. The size and layout of the kerbal system means that the benefits are consideraly less than in the real solar system and the burns you have to do to adjust between encounters normally eat up any gains you might make.

Co-incidentaly The energy you could get from fusing all the hydrogen in the earths oceans is remarkably close to the energy required to completely disassemble the planet.

It is from a whila ago but I went through an example of calculating delta-vs required for interplanetary transfer here and I think it is pretty well explained. [url]http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/27171-Calculating-interplanetary-delta-v[/url] Everything in that thread is still valid. However, now I have proved to myself that I can do it I almost always just use Alex Moons transfer planner.

The mod Kerbal Alarm [url]http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/24786-1-0-x-Kerbal-Alarm-Clock-v3-4-0-0-(June-27)[/url] clock does exactly that. Many people would like to see it become stock

Bacteria do vary widely in their resistance to vacuum. You could have a bateria that is killed just by cold and vaccum but equally it could take something more extreme. XKCD recons that thousands of spores will still be viable on the voyager probes after 25 years in space exposed to plenty of radiation. [url]https://what-if.xkcd.com/117/[/url]

To answer some earlier questions the thickness of the cable varies with the hight. Each section needs to be strong enough to support the weight of itself and all the cable below leading the a function that is close to exponential for most of the height. How fast it grows is related to the tensile strength of the material. For the strongest steel the cable at the top needs to be 10^16 times thicker than the bottom, so if you have a 1mm^2 cable at the bottom it will be approximately the diameter of the earth at the top. Stronger materials can reduce that factor to much more plausible values, theoretically as low as 1.2. Numbers taken from [url]http://www.zadar.net/space-elevator/[/url]

Interesting. In my testing your craft was fine as the game had failed to notice the interaction altogether, that was at speeds of above a couple of hundred m/s.

If you find you are in a retrograde orbit after a transfer it is because you got your encounter slightly wrong. It is important to set up your encounter so that your periapsis is on the correct side. There are a couple of ways to check. When fine tuning my encounter I click on the target and zoom in. If you have a low PE you should be able to see some deflection of the orbit. This should always be in the anti clockwise direction (to the left) when viewing from above the north pole. If you are coming in so fast that there is no deflection you can still see which direction you are traveling from the escape node at the end of the orbit segment and ensure that the planet is on the left.

I'm not really sure, it is all down to the collision detection code in the game. It is going to be a probabalistic thing based on the physics frame rate, your speed and the size of the asteroid. I assume that the collision code is triggereed when a part is inside the clipping mesh of another. If you are going fast enough that in one frame you are approaching the ateroid and in the very next frame you are on the other side of it moving away then it isn't going to register.

In career mode an engineer can repack a parachute, just eva over to the parachute and right click on it. The engineer might have a minimum number of stars required though.

The best orbit to launch into is going to be the one with minimum inclination as plane changes are always expensive. I would start of from the surface by burning due east and then follow slightly to the east of the prograde marker. If I were significantly inclined ~>40degrees of latitude on my landing site I would try to get a large AP and Keep the AP near the ascending or descending node. The plane change will be much more efficient done far from the centre and combined with a burn to raise the PE to the orbit of the target station. Then a burn at PE to create a rendevous of less than 500m on the next orbit whill hopefully will require an AP similar to the target. Then rendevous as normal.

If you aren't adverse to mods you could try installing waypoint manager that will render the waypoint in space so you can visulally see where it is. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/104758-1-0-4-Waypoint-Manager-v2-4-2-2015-07-31

But is the size of the mushroom proportional to the size of the blast? Could you draw up a rule of thumb like if the cloud is bigger than your thumb you are in a lot of trouble, if it is smaller you are probably ok for (for some level of ok) that would hold for large nukes and smaller ones?

Divers don't normally use pure oxygen either. Below abput 6m depth in water 100% O2 becomes increasingly likely to kill you suddenly. Divers normally either breath air or mixes with slightly elevaetd levels of O2 like 32%.

The game does despawn untracked asteroids after a while and replace them with new ones which I think will get rid of some kerbin colliding ones. Any asteroid that has a trajectory that collides with kerbin, tracked or untracked will be deleted as it crosses the 23km boundry in Kerbin's atmosphere just like any other vessel that isn't in physics range of the current focussed vessel.

Editing the save file works fine. Take a backup first in case you mess it up and then you can find the contract in the asve file and change it's status. I don't have a save file in front of me but I have done it before.

Have you looked at the firespitter propellers?

My plan was tyo land my rocket almost completlely empty and the land a rover nearby. The rover carries ISRU equipment and a claw so it drove up to the return vehicle, grabbed it with the claw and filled it up before retiring to a safe distance.

Interesting, it looks like that is a bug and impacts within physics range don't register in a bangometer. For the moment I am going to claim it as a feature, if the impact is too close then the surface waves overwhelm the detector and stop it from being able to gather any useful data from the core. Really it is a bug and I will try to fix it, hopefully next week.

That will find you all the asteroids. To get only the ones that are being tracked I think you will have to do something like asteroid.DiscoveryInfo.HaveKnowledgeAbout(DiscoveryLevels.Name) experiment with a few different levels unto you get the one you want though

I want to find out the Kerbin periapse for kerbin intercepting asteroids as they sapwn. I found this thread http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/127018-Questions-About-Asteroids-%28and-the-Orbit-Class%29 which posed the same question I am currently running into similar problems in that Vessel.AttachPatchedConicsSolver is throwing an exception NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object at Vessel.AttachPatchedConicsSolver () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 Does anyone know what is causing it?

Before you do that you are going to need to get all the asteroids that are currently spawned. I am doing this with IEnumerable<Vessel> asteroids= FlightGlobals.Vessels.Where(v => v.vesselType == VesselType.SpaceObject); then you can loop through the asteroids and check the prefabbaseurl foreach (Vessel asteroid in asteroids) {

New Version! Now you can see what asteroid you are being asked to analyse before you accept the contract, and when you accept the asteroid is automatically tracked so it won't despawn leaving you with an impossible to complete contract. Plus I have added the MiniAVC plugin so you can find out about the next exciting installment of Impact!

It seems that there is some debate but it looks like the upper limit of the individually visible stars in the sky is around 10,000, only half of which will be visible at once. http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-resources/how-many-stars-night-sky-09172014/