Specialist290

Sidenote: I think this belongs a little better in Mission Reports. At any rate, welcome to the forums, and nicely done! Hope you'll continue to share your progress as things develop.

To be completely honest, the big one for me is constructing and flying a decent spaceplane. I can fly some of the stock ones just fine, but my own attempts at building or customizing them tend to end in tears and fiery crashes.

Another trick you can use in conjunction with those already listed: You can multiply the total mass of your ship by 10 (actually 9.8, but 10 is a nice, round number that's easy to remember) to get an estimate of the amount of weight (remember, "mass" and "weight" are different things) you'll need to overcome when placing your engines. The "Max Power" value for each engine that's listed in the VAB will tell you how much force each one generates in thrust, and you can then add your thrust up and compare it against the weight to see if your engines will actually lift the rocket off the launchpad. Specifically, if you divide your engine's total thrust by your craft's weight on Kerbin (that's where the 9.8 comes into play -- 9.8 m/s^2 is acceleration due to gravity at Kerbin's surface), you'll get what is called a Thrust-to-Weight Ratio, which is a simple way to tell whether your rocket will lift off, and how quickly it will do so. If it's under 1, you won't lift off at all, at least until you've burned off some of your fuel.

Welcome to the forums! Glad to here you've enjoyed the game. Feel free to stick around and chat, or ask questions, or brag about your achievements. That's what we're here for.

Sorry to rain on everyone's parade, but I think this goes against the Forum rules: Have a nice day, everyone

An encounter with Moho? Quite certainly, yes. Circularizing and landing? Probably not likely. Moho is hard. Not as hard as Tylo landing or Eve return, but hard enough.

In either of my two Career Mode saves: Yep, kerbality is extinct. Haven't really done much with permanent crewed outposts in either of these. In my Sandbox ported over from 0.21: Jebediah and two others survive on Overwatch Station in LKO, assuming the disaster doesn't totally destroy the planet itself. Bill and two others survive in my Munbase as well. Long-term survival of the species looks grim, but all six can return to Kerbin's surface once the dust settles if they're well-stocked, so they'd better hope that at least one of them is actually female under that spacesuit.

For my "milk runs" to the Mun and Minmus, I've pretty much done them so often that I can almost wing it simply from past experience. As silent_prtoagonist mentions, reading the delta-v numbers for landing and establishing orbit backwards works well enough; you don't have to worry about Kerbin --> Mun / Minmus transfer delta-v, since you can dispose of that cheaply enough while passing through Kerbin's atmosphere if you get a low enough periapsis in your Kerbin orbit. For interplanetary trips out and back to Kerbin, I typically have alexmoon's Launch Window Planner open to see when my next transfer window is, and how much delta-v it will take.

Likewise. The fact that solid objects pass through them seems to hint at some sort of strange dimensional overlap going on... Perhaps harbingers of the krakens' efforts to break out of their interdimensional prison and wreak havoc once more?

The intro music (and I think a few others) are all original, proprietary compositions. A lot of the "atmospheric" music comes from Kevin MacLeod, who makes a lot of tracks available for free public use.

Also, make sure that the docking ports on both craft are properly facing "out." You can rotate parts in the VAB using the QWEASD keys while placing them.

Whoops! I'll get to fixing that, once I remember where the original Excel spreadsheet was.

It's still possible to navigate using the lander cans and the navball; you just have to consider that your direction indicator is at the "top" of the ship, and that the hatch and windows are on the horizon. Thus, your heading is going to be determined by whatever heading line is closest to the top of your screen. For instance, even given the fairly low resolution, I can tell that in Dave Kerbin's first screenshot, his rover is heading west.

Nicely done! Let us know how your Munshot goes as well.

A few I've enjoyed in the past: The Ur-Quan Masters: A free version of the old classic Star Control II. Oolite: Another remake of a classic video games, this time of Elite, the granddaddy of all space sims. Also highly moddable.

I feel the urge to point out that Squad isn't under any obligation to make the Kerbol system a carbon copy of our solar system (which seems to be a point that frequently gets missed in discussions like these). That said, a ringed gas giant would be pretty cool

Not entirely sure how to address this one; an orbit is an orbit, more or less, and the energy it takes to reach one orbit from another with the same craft is more or less always going to be the same if you always do it the same way. The trick to this bit is that while your station is transferring from its parking orbit to a geostationary orbit, Kerbin itself is rotating at a rate of 360 degrees every six hours. Meanwhile, your transfer orbit is going to take you from periapsis (approximately the location of your burn if you do a Hohmann transfer) to apoapsis (geostationary altitude, again assuming an ideal Hohmann transfer) -- that is, 180 degrees -- in half your orbit's period. This thread should give you some advice on how to work out the specifics of that.

For the record, this thread explains what each of the different conic draw modes displays, if you do decide to adjust them.

The rational part of my brain fully agrees. Still... Warning: TVTropes may ruin your life.

Number ten is also wrong -- the interrobang is specifically a single punctuation mark that combines the "!" and "?" into one symbol, not just any appearance of "!?". That said, an interesting article.

I came into this thread expecting a cannon that fired things into space. I'm slightly miffed that that's not what this is, but it sounds pretty cool nonetheless.

I just want you to know that I'm probably going to steal this idea from you for my own future interplanetary rover missions. Extremely clever!

The general rule of thumb is that anything that passes below the 0.01atm threshold while "on rails" (i.e. not actively loaded into the physics engine) is deleted. The exact altitude varies from planet to planet; like Kasuha mentioned, it's around 23km for Kerbin.

In the big picture, the ideal transit window is more dependent on the relative positions of the planets themselves than it is on your precise orbit around the body of origin. Unless your orbit is significantly inclined or highly elliptical, the differences between the two aren't likely to be very great as long as they're both drawing from the same model of planetary motion.

As always, nicely done! I've also noticed that your English has been improving considerably since your first chapter.