Specialist290

Welcome to the forums! The mods I tend to get the most use out of are Kerbal Engineer Redux, Crew Manifest, and Kethane. I wouldn't consider any of them essential, but they are quite handy to have. If you need any help learning how to achieve some of the more complex goals in the game, I'd recommend taking a look at the Drawing Board (link in my sig), which has tutorials and player aids for players of all skill levels. Feel free to also ask questions in the How To section of the forums. Happy landings!

Welcome (back) to the forums! Yeah, the server crash back in April certainly caused quite a few headaches. I had to recreate my account myself! Happy landings!

Welcome to the forums! Hope your first mission to the Mun goes successfully, but if you need any help, feel free to check out the tutorials listed on the Drawing Board (link in my sig) or to ask questions of the fine folks who frequent the How To forums. Happy landings!

Welcome to the forums! As Scintillator has pointed out, there are quite a few tutorials available. Many of them are listed in the Drawing Board (link in my sig), including a few that aren't on the forums here. If you still have questions, the people in the How To section will be more than happy to provide answers where they can. Happy landings!

SQUAD does work with educators to provide special licenses for schools, although they prefer to let the teacher contact them first. Some teachers have come up with quite clever ways to encourage class participation.

Welcome to the forums! Glad to hear you're enjoying the game. I definitely agree that KSP has filled a niche I've been wanting to see filled myself for a long time. I've always wondered what it would be like to build and launch my own rocket into space, and I've been a science fiction fan as well since I was very young. I also cut my teeth on some of those older flight sims, although my particular poison was Red Baron from Dynamix back in the day. The idea of a more interactive IVA experience has certainly been bounced around the forums a bit, and I think the developers have mentioned they do want to eventually give your Kerbalnauts the ability to move around and interact with elements inside the spacecraft. I wouldn't worry too much on that front. Long-distance missions are fairly simple once you understand that the timing of the mission matters just as much as the rocket you've built does. There's tons of resources on conducting interplanetary transfers listed on the Drawing Board (link in my sig), as well as many other tutorials, guides, and references as well, intended for players of all skill levels. You can also enlist the people over on the How To forums to help troubleshoot specific aspects of design or piloting. Finally, I'd like to suggest breaking any future long messages into paragraphs. Large walls-o-text can be rather hard on the eyes when you're reading from a computer screen, and breaking your message into small chunks by topic helps give it a little structure and makes it a little easier to follow. Happy landings!

I'm not surprised by the lack of mention of resources, since I've imagined that's going to take quite a bit of work to implement in the first place. Like rodion, though, I do wish they'd implement some kind of subassembly support for rocket construction (especially if they could do it in a manner that lets you use all the attachment nodes available). That said, crew management is definitely something I'm looking forward to.

Nicely done! Getting good at landings is mostly a matter of practice, really. Usually what I do is get into a low stable orbit first, then plot a maneuver node about 90 degrees in the orbit before my targeted landing site that overshoots it just a little. From there, I adjust on the fly until I'm roughly where I want to be. One of my most recent attempts to land at a given point dropped me about 0.5 km from my target (a flag from a previous landing site) with plenty of fuel to spare. EDIT: It's a good thing there are no traffic cops on the Mun, because you were going at about the same speed as this guy

Most impressive. Those young ones will surprise you sometimes.

You might want to take those suggestions over to the actual thread for the plugin itself. This is just a guide that isn't maintained by the plugin's creator.

Well, drat. A perfectly good theory dashed, just like that.

A lot of Robert A. Heinlein's stuff is diamond-hard, aside from the occasional handwaving he does to have FTL travel in some of his books (and the fact that he portrays Mars and Venus as inhabited by intelligent beings -- which, granted, hadn't yet been ruled out when he started writing). Some particular recommendations: Space Cadet Farmer in the Sky Starship Troopers (Don't watch the movie. I'm not kidding, it's awful even considered independently of the book.) The Moon is a Harsh Mistress The Rolling Stones (Written years before the band formed, so no relation.) Citizen of the Galaxy

Indeed it is. Thanks!

It's normal behavior, and yes, the fact that your orbit around the Mun is much tighter is definitely contributing to it; the drift also happens in Kerbin orbit, but it's much less noticeable precisely because you're moving around the edge of a much larger orbit. That said, one thing that helps keep your ship stable is to point your target craft in either the "normal" or "antinormal" direction -- perpendicular to the direction of your orbit, but parallel to the Mun's surface. In an equatorial orbit, that would be either north (0 degrees on the Navball, lined up right in the horizon) or south (180 degrees, same), but for a significant inclination off that it gets tricky (though you can cheat a little bit by plotting a maneuver node along one of the purple vectors, then pointing in that direction).

That's perfectly alright If you're honestly trying to learn, there's no such thing as a stupid question. Again, I find that Atomic Rockets explains things much better than I can, but to summarize as best as I can: Every planet has a minimum cost based on that planet's size and mass. On top of that, as you're lifting off, you're fighting against both gravitational drag (i.e. drag exerted as a force on your rocket as it tries to pull you back down) and atmospheric drag (drag exerted by the atmosphere pressing against your rocket and trying to slow it down as it tries to fly upwards). (Since Atomic Rockets doesn't provide any information on atmospheric drag, you'll probably have to use the data from the KSP wiki page here to figure that out.) I'm going to admit that I'm still wrapping my head around the atmospheric math myself, so if you want more details on that, you might want to wait for someone more knowledgeable to chip in. (Maybe alterbaron is still around; that sort of question would be right up his alley...)

I'm getting a weird error with the new planner. The "porkchop plot" isn't showing up -- just a red background and a greyed-out cross. Also, it doesn't let me select any other routes than the first one that displays. I'm running the latest version of Firefox, if that matters.

I call it "Bob." Sometimes I like to imagine that the Kerbals on the surface wake up in the morning and wave at it and say "Hi, Bob!", and then I pretend that they pretend it says, "Hi, [insert Kerbal Name Here]!" back, but then they get depressed because they realize it can't actually answer back because it can't talk. And now I've made myself sad thinking about depressed Kerbals. Aww...

Putting the link up for the next guy: https://www.dropbox.com/s/b20vs42nrmk68t6/persistent.sfs I didn't do anything major to anything that was already there; instead, I put a rover and a small base core on Minmus. For the rover, I'd highly advise disabling the motors on the rear wheels, as otherwise it likes to do backflips. Driving is kinda hilarious on Minmus due to the low gravity, and I'd advise remapping the rover controls to the translation ones but having your fingers ready to control pod torque anyway. That said, if you know what you're doing, you can make the rover breakdance Also, a screenshot showing the rover and base together, along with pilot Tombree Kerman:

Nicely done!

Are you sure all of your fuel tanks are connected to your engines? Some of the structural pieces aren't automatically fuel crossfeed capable, so you might have to use fuel lines to make sure the fuel is actually being used.

I might take a look on the weekends. Username should be the same as it is on the forums.

Most impressive Wish I could assemble things that were half that impressive in orbit, but my computer huddles in a corner and whimpers softly whenever I even suggest the idea of something with that many parts.

You and me both, brother On-topic, though, I think having too many high-quality mods to choose just one is definitely a good thing. Gives people a lot of flexibility in how they want to customize their play style. But yes, OP, do exercise a little bit of self-control

I'll have to take a look at this later, when my internet service isn't being bottlenecked by my usual download limits.

Regarding point 3 in particular, it's best to keep in mind that the one factor that delta-v and TWR have in common is mass. Because of Newton's second law of motion (F = ma), we know that a rocket's rate of acceleration is proportional to both the thrust of its engines and the total mass of the rocket. If we reduce the overall mass while keeping the same engines, our rocket will accelerate faster because it's pushing a smaller mass with the same amount of force. Likewise, the delta-v potential of a rocket is proportional to the propellant fraction and the efficiency of the engines used. If we reduce the size of the payload while keeping the same engines and propellant load, we increase the delta-v, because a smaller overall mass means our rocket has less momentum to overcome in order to reach a given velocity. In light of both of those facts, we can come to the conclusion that ultimately, the best rocket for a given mission is the lightest rocket that can accomplish that mission. In fact, it might help to think of the delta-v equation in terms of mass management. A rocket needs propellant in order to move its payload, but until that propellant is burned, it's just "dead weight" that needs to be carried along, and thus you need more propellant to boost both the payload and the propellant you already have... and those costs add up quickly. This is why SSTO craft capable of carrying any signficant payload are so difficult to build, and why staging is so popular for many launches -- dropping unneeded mass at strategic points allows you to change how the equation is calculated in midflight. EDIT: Yes, the delta-v requirement for reaching a stable orbit around Kerbin is the same, assuming an ideal flight path. If you have a rocket that's capable of lifting you off Kerbin's surface and getting up to that delta-v target, it'll get you there regardless of how big the rocket itself is or how many engines it has. Think of it in the same way you think of money. Let's say you want to buy a train ticket that costs $100. It doesn't matter if you pay with a single $100 bill, 5 $20 bills, 10 $10 bills, or 10,000 pennies although I really wouldn't recommend actually trying that last one in real life... As long as you can afford to pay the fare, you can get on the ride. If you're even a penny short, though, then you're out of luck, Chuck.* * Disclaimer: This applies equally to all individuals, regardless of whether or not your name is actually Chuck.