tomf

The landing gear are being re-done as part of Hervester's Unity 5 work and I think he mentioned that they would be steerable.

I believe the purose of the physicsless flag if to effectively weld the parts to their parent and remove the need to run physics on them.

Do you know that you can hold the alt key down to force a part to only attach to nodes - as opposed to radially? It won't help you pick the right node amonst many tightly spaced ones but it certainly helps narrow the placement options down.

I have that mod, it is by DMagic. I'm asking because A. I'm curious. B. I want to be able to know what speciality a Kerbal has before I agree to rescue him.

I'll just point out that normally rather that using G and M as seperate constants people normally use the standard graviational parameter for a body, μ. This =GM and is listed on the wiki for each body.

Ive seen staying below 300m/s as a solution to rocket flipping. Staying in the subsonic region until you are out of most of the atmosphere.

Perhaps it isn't a bug but a feature request, the ablator shouldn't evaporate when it is staged and perhaps the temperature at which it ablates should be considerably higher. I realise it won't be trivial to distinguish between ship that is hot but whose temperature is being controlled by the radiators and a ship that is undergoing re-entry and heating up rapidly.

I think this is a bug in the heatshield configuration To reproduce build a ship with radiators and a staged heatshield, put it in orbit of the sun somewhere around the orbit of Moho. The ship will heat up to around 600K. The radiators are able to stabilize the ship at that temperature. However this temperature is hot enough to make the ablator slowly evaporate despite the fact that it is currently staged and the ablator is going to be required later to re-eter on Kerbin.

I assumed that is was going to be something fairly simple like adding the ascii values of every letter and then taking the result mod 3 as the profession, but it seems more complicated than that. I think it was stated that they wanted Kerbals witht the same name to have the same profession across every save game, which is certainly easier this way.

Has anyone ever worked out the function that ransforms a kerbal's name into their speciality? I tried save file editing to create A, B and C Kerman but they weren't all different specialities as I was expecting.

What do I need to do to get the non-random tourist contracts? I have unlocked the whole tech tree and visited a few different planets ut so far I haven't reveived any contracts other than "take these 5 kerbals to robit for an hour" I have done a couple of them but I am looking forward to doing something more advanced.

I think that this falls under Poe's law, that a sufficiently advanced parody is indistinguishable from genuine nutjobbery.

Have you used a probe that has no reaction wheels and not put a seperate reaction wheels on the cargo? If that is the case you could be able to "control" the part but not actually make it move in any direction.

No, It is certainly possible to do an aerocapture and then a landing on Duna without requiring heatshields, it just doesn't have enough atmosphere to do real harm. Assuming that your guys are coming back I would simply use you ascent engine to take the worst of the re-entry heat and then provide last minute thrust to give you a soft landing. It will only require a small amount of fuel and will save you from carrying large numbers of parachutes.

As promised months ago it is now possible to run experiments firing impactors into asteroids. Check the first post for details.

The impacts are per body - if you do a 10Mj impact on the mun a 9MJ impact will never give you new science. If you want more science you will have to go further afield

Every impact should always place a new result into the seismometer. If the energy of the impact is less than one you made before it won't give you any new science. Did the message saying that the impact was recorded appear on the right hand side of the screen?

Do asteroids not get generated in a career game before the tracking station is upgraded to be able to see them?

Thank you. My next question: Is there a good way to tell if the player can see asteroids? Also how can I tell what size class an asteroid belongs to?

How can I find out what ExperimentSituation a vessel is in?

Were you thinking of the drop of of performance of KSP jets as they get hotter/faster? I believe thatJet engines are normally limited by the temperatures of the turbine blades in the exhaust. This means that as the intake air heats up (due to the compression effects of increased speed) the amount of thrust you can get from heating it further by burning fuel becomes limited.

I tried to get a high speed collision with an asteroid a littel while ago. I used hyperedit to put it into a perfectly circular retrograde orbit and my craft into a prograde orbit. The probe passed straight through the asteroid.

Standard response - if the OP wants the functionality now they can install the PreciseNode that contains the hotkeys they want

What colour are the parachutes in the staging display (bottom left) immediately before they explode? And do they have full overheat bars in the thermal overlay?

That is really weird. The game provides a list of the bodies it thinks you have visited and I just pick one of them. Do you have any other mods installed? I'm away at the moment but I will take a look when I get back next week.