stibbons

You don't have to land on the Mun, but you also get a lot of science for successful flybys and orbiting at a couple of different heights. In LKO and (I think) low munar orbit, the biomes also count when you EVA, so EVA over the oceans and over the polar regions, etc.

Of course, if you're not intending to go to space today, you can get very simple indeed.

All they need are a few mojitos. Did the crew provisions on the Apollo missions include any rum?

Check out RemoteTech/. Lets you build communications networks for sending commands to unmanned probes, with realistic speed-of-light delay. Landing an unmanned probe on Duna with several minutes delay is a solid challenge and a lot of fun.

Rather than launching your own satellite, you can buy processor time on other satellites. A week of uptime on an ArduSat only costs $250US. If you have something specific in mind, it seems like a pretty cheap way to get some time on some hardware in orbit. Also check out the Pocket Spacecraft kickstarter. £450 to load your own software on to a spacecraft that will land on the moon.

Rather than calculating the best place to start a burn from LKO I get myself in to a circular orbit just above or below the synchronous altitude, wait until my satellite is in about the right place, and then move to a synchronous orbit. Probably slower, but 100% of the time it works every time.

There's no guide to installing plugins on Linux because there simply isn't anything that you need to do differently. Plugin installation is identical to making them work on other platforms. Under the hood, those DLLs are C# assemblies. On Linux, the Mono runtime environment can be used to run / link to these assemblies. KSP ships with Mono bundled, and uses it internally to access plugin DLLs. A lot of core functionality is in DLLs too, check in KSP_Data/Managed. Which leaves the problem of why plugins aren't working for you. it's not clear, but sounds like you're copying the DLL files in to .local/share/Steam/SteamApps/common/Kerbal Space Program/Plugins/ ? That was how plugins were installed in previous versions, but 0.20 moved a lot of things around. Now, all of a plugin's files live in a plugin-specific directory under .local/share/Steam/SteamApps/common/Kerbal Space Program/GameData . Everybody seems to package their plugins slightly differently, but to take your Crew Manifest example, extracting the creates a CrewManifest_v0_5_4_0/GameData directory. Just move the contents of that GameData directory to KSP's GameData directory, and you should be in business. EDIT: Oh, and fun aside concerning Mono. When the ISA MapSat plugin was working, it included a .exe file for generating PNG maps. On my Debian box, I installed the mono-runtime and binfmt-support packages, then was able to just run that exe from the command line.

Yep. Fell over Western Australia. The Shire of Esperence, which copped the majority of the debris, famously issued NASA a $400 fine for littering. As Kerbface said, it isn't in complete vacuum, there's still a small amount of atmosphere. It is happening to the ISS - it regularly has to make adjustment burns. But an active station has a lot more to worry about than just air friction. Vibrations from machinery and momentum of people moving around, as well as docking maneuvers, can affect orbits as well. EDIT: I don't actually have a citation for saying that vibration affects the orbit. It came from some Cmdr Hadfield tweets talking about the vibration isolation treadmill, but he might have only been talking about disturbing experiments on board. So, uh, sorry if I was wrong.

Environment variables should be inherited by child processes, yeah. But I haven't actually tested it. Another way is to modify Steam's launch properties as described in the first post: Just replace the LC_ALL=C with the LD_PRELOAD and __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS variables.

I recently started a fresh game: Started by launching a manned Mun landing. While that was en route, four staggered unmanned launches to put Relaytech comms satellites in Keostationary orbits. As soon as they were in stable orbits, two more launches sending comms satellites to Mun and Minmus respectively. And then launched a Kerbin mapping satellite. Followed shortly after by two more launches to get map sats to the moons. And then a great dance of trying to move satellites in to their final orbits while other craft were getting to their destinations. This sort of multitasking feels much more realistic to me than time-warping until the first craft reaches its destination before launching the second. But things are going to get fairly hectic as I get closer to a Duna transfer window. Kerbal Alarm Clock is the only way to sensibly manage it all. But things can still get pretty hectic, de-orbiting a craft for a Mun landing knowing that there's only a few hours until another craft changes SOI.

I'm assuming here that the satellite that you're sending to Mun also has the 5Mm omni dipole and the 50Mm satellite dish, right? Just setting the satellite dish to point to Kerbin won't work while you're in Kerbin's SOI. What I'm guessing is happening is that the dipole antennas on your Mun mission and in orbit around Kerbin are maintaining contact until their range is extended, and then you're losing connection. Couple of options. Instead of pointing your Mun sat's dish at Kerbin, aim it explicitly at one of your Kerbin relay satellites. I'd pick the one that's most recently come in to line of sight, to give you the longest operating time. Or, if you can get your intercept with Mun lined up and squared away before you head out of range, just stay aimed at Kerbin and let it go dark for a while. Once the Mun sat moves from Kerbin's SOI to Mun's, it should lock on to Kerbin automatically.

Does the rolling only happen when you're under thrust? If ASAS is still having a hard time stopping roll after you kill engines, then it's most likely because of parts clipping other parts.

Yeah, no problems at all with strutting one stage to another. When you decouple the stage, the struts disappear.

For what it's worth, this is addressed in the FAQ - https://kerbalspaceprogram.com/faq.php#AI8

...and it's also where Ford Prefect hails from.

It's in the wiki! http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Atmosphere#Drag Although turning that in to a spreadsheet or incorporating it in to something like Kerbal Engineer would be pretty fantastic.

I've built half a dozen different launchers, saved them all in the subassembly loader mod, and then stopped building launchers. Now it's all about building a payload and then slapping an appropriately-sized launcher on the bottom.

Two - Alpha and Beta Centauri. Interesting star systems in their own rights, but I've always known this pair as the Pointers. They're very easy to spot, and can be used to find the fainter southern cross. Projecting a perpindicular line through the midpoint of the pointers is also one way to help find south.

What astronaut goes anywhere without their trusty pocketknife and a knack for improvisation?

You're right that NTFS and VFAT don't preserve permissions on files - if you copy everything to a USB stick and back then all of the permissions will be reset. But whether you can execute files on an NTFS drive depends on a few mount options. First of all, there's the exec and noexec options. They do pretty much what they sound like. Then there's the umask and fmask options. These set the default permissions for all files on the filesystem. umask applies to everything, fmask applies to regular files (there's also a dmask for directories). And then there's the showexec option, which only allows files with common Windows executable extensions (like .EXE) to have the execute bit. Looking at the Debian system I'm on now, with an NTFS USB drive and VFAT USB stick plugged in, they both have default mount options that won't let me run anything useful.

I'm not sure if there's a way to change the flag for an existing vessel without editing the save file. But editing it is pretty simple. Naturally, back it up first. The flag for a vessel is stored in its command pod part. So search for your VESSEL, then within it look for the PART that matches the command pod that you used for it. Inside that you'll see a "flag =" line. This is a path to your flag, relative to your GameData directory, minus the file extension. The default value is "Squad/Flags/default". If your flag is stored in GameData/myflags/Flags/leetflag.png then set flags to "myflags/Flags/leetflag". It's worth pointing out that Kerbals on EVA are considered vessels in their own right, with a single part (and that part has its own flag variable). You might want to get all your kerbals inside before editing the savefile so they all have the new flag. Also, this won't change any flags that are you've planted already. Either take them down or update them too.

The entry for Mun in the KSP wiki gives its orbital characteristics. It's in a completely circular orbit at 12000 km with 0 degrees inclination. As others have said, you only have one gravity well acting on you at a time, so you just have to put yourself in the same orbit. Get yourself in LKO, then set up a maneuver node to push your Ap to 12000km. If that puts on you on a Mun intercept, then move your maneuver node until it doesn't. Then just circularise out there and you're done.

I cheat a little. For my RelayTech communications satellites, I launch them and put them in orbit myself. I'll get the peri and apo within a couple of hundred metres and the inclination as close as I can without using MechJeb. But after that I edit the orbit parameters to get a more stable orbit. That means I can have three or four satellites in almost identical orbits, without having to go and tweak their orbits every couple of days to make sure they keep a good spread. Seems to me to be a good compromise between the challenging part of setting up a network, and the tedious part of maintaining it. But I might look in to MechJeb soon to help nail sats to nice orbits.

I like to use geosynchronous orbit for my comms satellites because it's a nice way to make sure surface transmitters don't get periodic blackspots. Putting a station in synchronous orbit, or at least an equatorial orbit, would be a nice way to make transit to and from the surface more predictable. But that's probably heavily negated by how far out it is. I'd rather wait for a transfer window for a low kerbin orbit station than have to get out to the much higher synchronous orbit.

There's a handful of things that can go wrong. First of all, there's two different antennae - the omnidirectional antennas, and the more powerful dish antennas. There isn't an omni that can reach from Kerbin to Duna, so if that is all you have when you're putting craft up there you're boned. The satellite dishes need to be opened, and you need to target them. So if you're going to hyperedit craft, it's best to put them on the launch pad, right click on the antenna and target them at Kerbin, and then shift them. Finally, remember that KSC has fairly short range capability on its own. I don't recall if it can reach to Minmus, it definitely can't talk to Duna on its own. If you're avoiding effort, the simplest way to solve this is with a small relay craft with both an omni and a large dish that's parked near KSC. The omni talks to KSC, the satellite dish should be aimed at your craft, or the body it's orbiting around. The thing to remember with relaytech is that it works on line of sight. If you only have one craft on Duna then it will only work if it can see the craft on Kerbin. If you've only got one satellite dish near KSC, then the window where they can both see each other is pretty small indeed.