Specialist290

Well, speak of the devil. That glorious, glorious tech tree.

I'm still getting the "Not Acceptable" error whenever I try to log in. Have been for the past few days.

Personally, I've found the best solution to be to play a different (set of) game(s) for a while, then come back to this one when I'm "recharged," so to speak. Just load up some mindless little action game / shooter / platformer / racing game where you can mindlessly shoot / stomp / race without having to worry about complex things. A few suggestions of my own, though: - Try to land on the Mun using only solid rockets (and maybe RCS). - Try to get to another planet using only solid rockets (and maybe RCS). - Design a completely asymmetrical rocket, then see if you can get it into orbit without changing the asymmetrical aspect of the design. - Build a spaceplane that can circumnavigate Kerbin without leaving the lower atmosphere. - Build and pilot a boat. - Mount your boat on a rocket, then put it on Laythe and pilot it there. - Intentionally strand some of your kerbonauts in solar orbit with no way to get home (you monster), then launch a rescue mission to get them back. - Build a single ship that can visit every planet without refueling. - Look for more anomalies everywhere. Maybe the devs actually added a few we haven't noticed, or that the rest of us are just keeping quiet about. - Take a rover with an internal cabin, put it on the Mun, then look for a pair of craters and plant an arc of flags to one side so that it looks like a smiley face from the map view. - Launch an array of satellites in orbit around Kerbin, then arrange their orbits so that they form pleasingly symmetrical rosettes. - Send something to find out what's at the center of that huge impact crater on Kerbin. - Get a kerbonaut, and have him walk all the way to the North Pole from KSC to plant a flag. - Build a lander that can take 21 kerbonauts, then land it on the Mun and build a kerbal pyramid out of the kerbonauts. - Build a scale replica of an Easter Island moai entirely out of structural panels, then land it on Laythe and pretend it's a new anomaly. - Build a giant rocket, then build a mobile launchpad to carry it over the mountains to the other side of the continent, and launch it from the opposite shore. Call it "Fitzkerbaldo." Above all, find something you do genuinely enjoy doing, and do that until it stops being enjoyable. If you feel like "polishing off the salad bar"* is getting tedious, take a break and do something utterly ridiculous instead. * Getting new ribbons and devices for your mission ribbons.

Nicely done! Also nice to have such a chill... girlfriend? Fiancee? Wife? Ah well, nice to know she's OK with it

No problem. Also, don't be afraid to ask questions in the Gameplay Questions and Tutorials subforum as well if you encounter any other snags.

A small correction on that: The first delta-v number is the stage's delta-v. The second number is the combined delta-v of that stage and all stages that fire before it.

Completed my first mission to Eve: Not as intricate or involved as some missions I've seen others do, and I'm leagues away from sending kerbonauts there and returning them, but I'm rather proud of it all the same.

Why do they have four different categories for rubbish, instead of a single trash bin?

Hmm... I think I know what might be going on here. Taking another look at that second design, what you might want to do is to have a probe body on both craft. You can tuck an OKTO2 between the main capsules and the docking ports, which should allow you to remotely control both craft (as long as you still have power, of course). Alternatively, you could put a remote guidance unit on the service module of the orbiter and just above the RCS tank on the lander. Just make sure you have them oriented correctly relative to the craft; if you mount it upside-down, your navball will tell you your ship is upside down Also, as long as both craft are within 2.3km of one another, you can switch between different spacecraft using the [ and ] keys, if actually selecting the craft is your problem. You can also pick "Switch To" on the map mode; the craft will stay visible on the map if there's some sort of control pod, so the game won't treat it as debris. Hope this helps

First off, welcome to the forums! Wish I had gone to a school that did something like that when I was younger. Then again, KSP wasn't around back then... But still, sounds like a really cool experience. As for mission structure: I'm seconding the idea of basing the order of the missions off of a simplified version of NASA's flight plans. You could separate each set of missions into sets of broad programs like this: 1. Mercury Program: Getting rockets into space and into orbit, getting a manned craft into orbit and returning it safely. 2. Gemini Program: Learning maneuvers to change orbits, rendezvousing and docking two spacecraft in orbit. 3. Apollo Program: "We choose to go to the Mun before the end of the week and do the other things..." Last year, another teacher got some attention for using Kerbal Space Program in his AP Physics course. He chose to structure it by dividing his class into "companies" and giving them "contracts" and a budget to manage, as well as rewards for achieving certain milestones. You can find his course description for that segment here, as well as a discussion thread on these forums he held with the community. You could take some of his ideas and integrate them into your own plans, depending on how you decide to run it. Additionally, feel free to refer to the Drawing Board (linked in my signature) for links to a wealth of information about the game itself, including tutorials, informative charts, and other player aids. I've also got a few ideas for practical exercises (like math problems) the students can try outside of the game, but I'd need to know what level of schooling they're at in order to proceed. Don't want to try to introduce the delta-v equation to a bunch of elementary school students who have never even seen an algebra equation yet, after all

Along the lines of what Whackjob is suggesting, I'm also thinking of having separate decks (except three this time). The first one would be a "Target" deck, with one or more cards (hopefully all equal in number for each) that tell you where you're going (the Mun, Minmus, Duna, etc.). The second deck would be your "Vehicle" deck, which tells you what sort of craft to build (keeping it simple, to generic things like "Satellite / Probe," "Station," "Ground Base," etc.) The third deck would be a "Restrictions" deck, to make things interesting with rules like "Must not use nuclear engines," "Must return to Kerbin (or LKO) to complete mission," or even telling players to set up certain "complications" in flight (like disabling an engine to simulate it "failing," etc.).

Yep, it's been a known issue for some time. As mentioned, you can usually counter it by attaching a Sepratron or two to the stages in question and setting them up to fire at the same time you decouple.

I've known about it a while myself, but it does deserve to have a bit more attention. Maybe one of these days someone will post a "little-known in-game features" post that handily collects things like this into one place.

I'd say it sounds about right, myself.

Seconded. I want to see if it actually clips the view as well, or if some other form of silliness happens. That said, it's an incredibly clever design.

For most burns, splitting the duration in half on either side of the burn works well enough, with a few minor corrections. Of course, if you want to get the most efficiency out of your longer burns, what you really want to do is split the delta-v expended in half, not the time. This gets a little complicated to calculate exactly, but this tutorial has the equations you'll need, as well as a decent "back-of-envelope" method for estimating the ideal time to begin your burn.

Making my first mission to Moho manned, without sending any kind of probe there first to make sure I knew what I was getting into. Hoo boy, was that "fun"... In a previous save, I also had a kethane miner / transporter that burned far more fuel on a round trip to and from the surface than it carried to the station, which sort of defeated the purpose of having it. I ended up just junking the design entirely.

Welcome to the forums! Nicely done with the landing, even despite the technical difficulties. For the rescue craft, have you checked to make sure you still have power in the batteries? Do you have anything on board that can generate power, like solar panels or RTGs?

Hmm... Luner in the lander. Luner, lander... Naaaaah. Clearly I'm just imagining things

I had the same idea myself a while back. Never got any word one way or another for certain, though it's definitely a possibility.

Nicely done! Keep at it -- you'll get there eventually, I'm sure.

If you want to be technical about it, it's both. Traditionally, the terms "minor planet," "planetoid," and "asteroid" were more or less interchangeable, but the former was the only official term and has since been deprecated. It's still quite right to call Ceres an asteroid by the traditional understanding of the term, though (" small bodies of the inner Solar System out to the orbit of Jupiter").

The Oberth Effect is your friend here. (Don't worry too much about the math on that page; you won't really need it for a simple Kerbin - Minmus transfer.) Get your craft into a low orbit -- like 70 - 80 km low. Then plot your maneuver node for your trans-Minmus injection burn from that orbit. Target Minmus so that you can see closest-approach markers, and adjust your course using those as a reference until you get an intercept. You can drag the node around the orbit and tweak the values a little until you get it as close to ideal as your patience will allow. (Don't forget that Minmus itself is slightly inclined.) Once you're in Minmus's Sphere of Influence, wait for periapsis again, then plot a capture burn that'll put you in an orbit with a new periapsis close to the surface. Circularize there, and you can effectively pick your landing site from orbit. I'd also advise you to familiarize yourself with a concept called "delta-v," if you haven't already. These pages at Atomic Rockets do a good job of explaining it, and these three articles are written to help players apply those concepts specifically to KSP. Knowing your craft's delta-v capacity is helpful, because it allows you to use charts like this one to show you how much "oomph" you need at a minimum to get your craft to a certain destination. You can run the delta-v calculations for your rocket by hand, of course, but doing that over and over again gets tedious. There are mods like Kerbal Engineer Redux (my personal choice) and MechJeb, which will both display delta-v information for you to use while you're building your rockets and while in flight. Hope this helps

But how do you know he bought the smart car? What if he built it himself? ...In a cave, with a box of scraps?

I tend to lean towards the cautious end of things myself. I've recently taken to adding either an LES or (if that isn't necessary) some other kind of abort system, so that they can land safely if there's a launch failure. I'm also in the process of sending probes to interplanetary destinations so that I can test out concepts I'm going to be using for later manned missions. I also play with Deadly Reentry, so there's a very real danger of actually destroying my craft through heat or acceleration effects, so I try to keep things within safety margins for those as well and include heat shields on my capsules. I'll send a rescue mission if they're genuinely stranded. On the other hand, I consider a Hitchhiker put in orbit or landed somewhere deliberately to be a permanent base and just assume that it's being supplied "off-screen" by routine launches while I'm busy advancing the next part of my space program, so I don't really feel the need to rotate crews out as long as they're doing their jobs.