Specialist290

Seconding the above, for fun and profit. Better still, wait for a third one to appear, then design a lander based around the three-man capsule and send all of them in one mission.

Nicely done as always Which add-on is it that has the seismic sensors and impactor experiments? I'd like to try those out and see how they managed to make it work.

I graduated a little less than a year ago with a BA in History (no specialization; the college I went to wasn't large enough to offer very many targeted programs). I'm hoping to go on and get a Master's or Doctorate to build on that (in something like archaeology or classical studies), but right now I'm sort of just cooling my heels and hoping to build up a little emergency cash reserve.

Glad to here you're in business once again, Akinesis. I was wondering where I was going to find my "fix" from once you dropped off the radar Also, would it be appropriate to say at KSC that "This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius"? But seriously, I do like seeing little in-jokes and things like that.

You're correct in that you're more or less never going to get it "perfect" until you've actually docked the two craft together. However, the point to "zeroing out" once you're at the point of closest approach is basically to reduce your relative speed to the point that the differences between the two orbits are mostly negligible. Once the two craft are close enough in position and velocity, it becomes less a matter of matching orbits and more one of steering your craft within a frictionless 3D volume so that it can link up with another stationary point within that volume. In theory you could probably do this from the point at which the navball cycles over from "Orbit" mode to "Target" mode (since most orbits are so big that even a 60km difference is a fairly small slice of the total pie relative to the orbit's circumference), but I generally try to aim for the closest approach I can get. Somewhere in the range of 5-10km might make for a good upper limit on your plotted closest approach simply for the sake of time and sanity for someone new to docking, but with a bit of practice I've been able to finish my "parking" burn within 200 meters or so of my target before. You're more or less correct here in general, but again, unless you're a pretty significant distance away from your target, it might be simpler to make a "straight shot" at the target as explained above. It really depends on the situation. Can you consistently get a fairly good close encounter on your rendezvous approach? In stock, the navball is your friend here. If the yellow prograde vector marker (open circle with wings) is right on top of the pink target heading marker (dot surrounded by broken circle), then that means you're heading straight at your target. With a little practice, you can learn to "steer" the prograde marker around on the navball using your RCS translation controls. If you don't have any objections to using plugins, you may also find NavyFish's Docking Port Alignment Indicator to be helpful. If you're within loading-distance range (~2.3km or so), you can pop back and forth between craft using the ] and [ keys. Extremely handy for these sorts of situations. Hope this helps. Don't be afraid to come to us if you still have questions EDIT: Well, those replies certainly weren't there before Maybe I just take too long to type these things up...

And now for the bad news: You will never be able to watch space travel / combat / whatever in a science fiction movie without that feeling that something is very, very off about how things are moving ever again Still, it's ultimately a small price to pay for the much greater reward of expanding the horizons of your knowledge.

The short answer is: You don't. Delta-v is dependent on the efficiency of the engine(s) and the ratio of the vehicle's total mass to its dry mass (i.e. final mass after all the fuel is burned up). Delta-v is essentially a measure of the total amount a rocket can accelerate; in a perfect, featureless vacuum, a rocket with 1000 m/s of delta-v can accelerate from a standstill to a velocity of 1000 m/s, or it can accelerate to 500 m/s, then turn around and decelerate back to a standstill (or any combination of maneuvers that adds up to 1000 m/s of velocity). The way you can calculate delta-v directly is actually pretty simple: delta_v = Isp * 9.8 m/s2 * LN(initial_mass / dry_mass) This is also known as Tsiolkovsky's rocket equation (or just "the rocket equation"), and can easily be done on the calculator that ships with your computer or with a pocket calculator that has an "LN" key (i.e. that can calculate the natural logarithm of a given number). Whenever the subject comes up, I tend to recommend MyKSPCareer.com and these three pages on Atomic Rockets if you want a more detailed explanation. The Atomic Rockets pages in particular helped me out considerably when I was trying to wrap my head around the concept when I started playing. Hope this helps

Welcome to the forums! If you're here to share your enthusiasm for the game, you're in good company.

Sort of along the lines of what Supernovy is discussing, I could see a place for a per-time payment that gradually tapers off over time (until it stops entirely) unless / until you send another mission to "refresh" the cash flow stream. While it wouldn't provide as much total cash as the initial one-time bonus (at least for the first mission by itself), it might be useful for such a mechanic to act as a "safety net" to keep your space program afloat until you can scrape together enough cash to reach the next milestone. EDIT: I could also get behind the system Tw1 has elaborated below.

Thanks for the link. I'll certainly take a look I've been meaning to make a general evaluation of the new tutorials that have been posted here for a while now.

The short version is that I've always been rather fond of the idea of traveling to distant worlds. I grew up reading a lot of my dad's old science fiction (by the likes of Clarke, Heinlein, Asimov, and others of that generation) and watched things like the Star Wars movies and a little bit Star Trek, which naturally fired my imagination quite a bit when I was younger. I've also enjoyed a few older space flight sims in the past as well (including a fan-maintained version of the old Elite game), plus a few general flight sims and other space-related games like the Master of Orion and Galactic Civilizations. I've also always been a fan of real-world space exploration as well, especially of NASA's early programs like Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. In many ways, this game seemed like a perfect fit to me.

Welcome to the forums! While it's an interesting suggestion, the "interplanetary transport network" is not so much a thing in and of itself as a byproduct of the way gravitational effects work in our solar system, and Kerbal Space Program currently uses a two-body physics simulation that relies on defined spheres of influence. The matter of changing over to an n-body simulation has come up so often and been discussed so exhaustively (mostly in reference to a related matter, Lagrange points) that we on the forum staff have it listed as a topic on our What Not To Suggest list. Therefore, I'll have to close this thread. Note that this doesn't mean it's a bad suggestion in and of itself, just that it's related to a topic that's been discussed quite extensively before. If you have any other interesting ideas that aren't on the list and that you feel like sharing, feel free to do so.

Moving this over to the Science Labs, since it seems to be more about how real-world spacecraft operate

Minor point of order: The decibel scale is logarithmic. Every increase of 10 decibels represents a tenfold increase in intensity. That being said, to address the topic itself, I think it would be a good idea to have some sort of upper limit to how loud any given sound could be, and scale the relative intensity of an individual sound compared to the total amount of sound output by the scene as a whole.

Thirding Morrowind as well. I spend so much time just messing around that I never actually got around to finishing the plot...

I'm not the person who first posted that, but since I've played the series a fair bit myself, I believe he's referring to the ability to select different difficulty levels depending on how much of a challenge you want. I'm not going to offer my own opinion on the subject or make any predictions about the direction SQUAD themselves are going to take in regards to this matter, but having played a few other flight simulators myself in the past, I've noted that many of them do in fact allow the player to toggle between "more realistic" and "more arcade-like" modes of gameplay, down to being able to toggle certain features on and off individually.

Since it's discussing a peripheral rather than KSP itself, I think this can go in the Space Lounge That out of the way, it's certainly an interesting little device.

Welcome to the forums! I've seen your help request in the other thread and posted something that I hope will be helpful there. Let us know how it works out.

Welcome to the forums! It might be entirely possible that the issue you're running into is the same one dealt with in this thread. Try out the instructions from that post and see if that helps fix it. (I don't know if that bug's been addressed since the tutorial was first posted, but I suppose it's worth a shot.) Hope this helps!

One I was rather fond of back in the day was Red Baron, from 1990: Of course, the one I probably wasted most of my young life on was Civilization II:

As with many complex calculations, it's easiest to get a handle on if you break it down into its component tasks. We'll assume for the sake of convenience that the origin and destination orbits are circular, or close enough to circular for required adjustments to be negligible. For the specific equations, you may want to refer to Robert Braenuig's page on orbital mechanics. I'll throw in an additional disclaimer that math was never exactly my strong suit in school, so don't expect me to be able to explain these equations inside-out myself. First, you'll want to calculate the parameters of your transfer orbit, with one apsis at the origin altitude and the other at the destination altitude. Once you've done that, take half of that orbit's period, since that will be the amount of time it will take for your craft to travel from one apsis to the other. With that, you'll want to figure out the length of the arc the target craft travels in its orbit in the same amount of time. You can do this by dividing the half-period of the transfer orbit by the period of the destination orbit; the ratio between the two will be the fraction of the orbit's radius that the target craft travels in that time. Convert that ratio to degrees, and you'll have the phase angle you want. Hope this helps EDIT: One of my peers has also let me know that he's posted this handy equation that boils all of what I've said down into a single formula.

Believe it or not, someone did an investigation into how KSP's rigid-body physics works just yesterday. Harvester himself added a few remarks to that thread that may prove enlightening as well.

I can see it now. The game comes packaged with several floppy disks, and every time you go through a Sphere of Influence transition, it pauses the game and gives you a prompt to "INSERT DISK 5 (or whatever) TO CONTINUE." I remember the days of floppies...

Welcome to the forums! Glad to hear that you're getting your computer troubles sorted out. I've lost a couple computers to accidents and the occasional lightning strike myself, and it's never fun having to wait on a new replacement. Did you need to pull any data off the old hard drive, and if so, were the computer techs able to do that? If you ever need any help in your quest to visit all of the planets, feel free to ask questions here on the forums. Also, I try to maintain a list of tutorials and other resources over at the Drawing Board, which can be found through a convenient link in my signature; many of those tutorials specifically address interplanetary travel, and others can certainly be applied to specific aspects of a given mission. Also, nice to see another player who was introduced to the game through kurtjmac's series out there!

Well, looks like this app has some nifty new features since I last took a look at this thread The new KSPTOTConnect and Mission Architect look like they should be most handy -- no more bouncing between three or four different programs or screens to get everything set for my mission plan.