RuBisCO

Wait a minute if your kerbal is going 10 m/s per second from one or the other ship does that only give you 5 seconds tops to attach one ship to another before your KAS reaches the end of its rope?

Biorobotics

Has anyone tried violent dock-o-crashing using KAS and no RCS? In my testing I've successfully docked ships traveling at up to 25 m/s from each other. 1. Have ships pass within a few meters of each other. 2. Aim KAS system so that other ship will cross its line of fire 3. Wait for it, wait for it, wait... OOps you missed it, reload! 4. Fire Electromagnets and grab on to other ship. 5. Violent tumbling begins. 6. Retract KAS and switch on and off ASAS on both sips until their magic infinite spin gyros suck up all the kinetic energy 7. Line up docking ports (or if you done this well enough they will already be close enough to pull each other in automatically.) 8. Fire KAS again and pull each other in. Advantages: No need for RCS, no need to match velocities as long as they are below 25 m/s (maybe higher, just haven't tested higher), violent hair-raising fun.

The challenge is simple enough: Have an orbiter in a circular orbit and another coming up to it in an eccentric Hoffman transfer orbit, now without matching velocities try to have the two orbiters dock. Now yes you might say this is impossible (actually that all you have said so far), but I tell you its not only possible its rather fun (Like running face first into a tree and not being injured fun). Here we see the kind of orbits I've been able to do it with: Now again very simple: when the two crafts approach each other, (1) your NOT going to dock with RCS (NO RCS!), and (2) your NOT going to use thrusters of any kind. You need to find a way to dock them together and negate all that extra kinetic energy. Requirements: # Approach velocity above 5 m/s # Need to dock in the end with STOCK docking ports # All mods are fair game, within reason (no hacks around the physics or unpublished modifications) Scoring: +1 points for every 1 m/s in your approach velocity. +3 points for every 1 m/s in approach speed beyond 25 m/s (simply because I have not tried beyond that speed yet) +10 points if you find away to do it without KAS! -10 points if parts break off or explode. +1 point for every ton of total mass slamming together beyond 20 tons

When starting a game the first thing I launch is a tiny satellite into an orbit that is always above the maximum warp limit around Kerbin (Above 610 km but below ~3000 km so I don't need to zoom out to far to find it) so that from there using Mechjeb I can see when Hoffman transfer orbits are best from one planet to another and time warp to it, then switch to the launch pad and launch my rocket or switch to it already in a low orbit. My question is: is there another way to calculate when the best Hoffman transfer orbits can be made and to time warp to them?

OK lets just call this answered. A very large first stage that gets the second stage to 100 km and to <1500 m/s of circular orbit followed by a seconds stage (1/10 the fuel and 1/8 the mass of the first stage) works very well, splash down parashute recovery, no deadly re-entry.

Well ok here is an idea: when sending kerbals to other planets, if we had some female ones then leave them on the planet with the standard male ones for a few years and come back to find more of them? So if you send pods un-full eventually they will fill up? Also yes to Jebadiette

The further the orbit is from a plane of zero the more the satellite will appear to precess in the sky all the way to the extreme cases of polar orbiting satellites that fly over the same path on the ground once a day. Why not put a satellite in 6 hour geosynch orbit and change its inclination as well as make it non-circular and look down at kerbin at high time warp, record the pattern or trace the path the satellite appears to cover along the ground. I'm going to guess that adding inclination will cause precession along the longitude, while adding inclination will cause precession along the latitude and the two combined could make kerbin's surface appear to move in circles or even figure eights.

The OP asked about how 64 bits allow for far more RAM than 32 bits, I will now demonstrate this in a really long round about way: Back in the early days of the unix operating system (early 1970's) some engineer came up with the idea of "Unix Time" for computers, that being counting the seconds from a specific date, for example right now in my linux operating system I typed "date +%s" into a terminal and out it spits the number "1380065956" this is the Unix Time Stamp or how many seconds since midnight, January 1st, 1970, in London (roughly)! Now that a BIG number, in binary that number is "1010010010000100010001010100100" or 31 bits long! Now there is a minor problem with Unix time: its limited to 32 bit numbers, once the Unix Time reaches "2147483648", in binary as "10000000000000000000000000000000", or 03:14:08 on 19th of January, 2038 it won't be able to count to the next second because that would require a 33 bit long number (or more exactly switching that final 0 to 1 and counting negative numbered time!), this will lead to an "overflow" error and Y2K like shenanigans will follow (like negative dates or time restarting in 1901 or 1970 and going backwards!). Thankfully there is a fix: Just use 64-bit long Unix Time, now you might ask "but wait is that not just pushing the overflow problem out to a further date?" Yes in fact on Sunday at 3:30:08 pm, 4 December in the year 292 billion, 277 million, 26 thousand and 596: Unix time in 64-bit will reach its end! If the universe still exists then someone is going to have to make sure everything is switch to 128 bit time stamps or there is going to be blood I tell you (or what ever pumps though veins in that time)! What does this have to do with RAM size? Same problem! When a computer pulls a value from memory, from Random Access Memory, it needs to know the exact location of that value: 32-bit memory addressing can count out to the number 4294967296 or access every byte of memory that is 4 billion, 294 million, 967 thousand and 296 bytes large and no larger. Since the computer stores values as 8 bit long numbers called "bytes" that is where the 4 gigabyte or "4GB" memory limit comes from. Switching over to 64 bits solves this problem for in theory the computer could recall any byte out of 18 quintillion bytes (QB)! Sadly x86-64 CPUs only use 48 bits out of the 64 for memory addressing limiting us to *only* 256 Trillion Byte (TB) large RAM (crying shame I tell you!). They do this because using the full address bus when no present day computer, server or gigantic supercomputer mainframe could even come close to using 18 quintillion byte large memory is silly. Thankfully they could change this someday when needed with ease and still be backwards compatible. Someday when harddrives and RAM become one, using MRAM or spintronic memory or god only knows what, we might have terrabytes of RAM and people might complain about how the 18QB limitation is stopping their household robot from figuring out how to wash the grime off of cast iron pots: "I keep telling you, you stupid droid, DON'T USE SOAP!" "MEMORY ERROR! MEMORY ERROR!" "Fine, fine, just walk the ****ing dogs, jeez, I'll handle this, just go, yes, yes, I still love you." For now though we complain about 4GB limitation when using 32-bit computer programs because all the extra RAM space we could use on our 64-bit CPU's would come in really handy say when playing KSP and using a huge number of mods and parts and crafts all over the kolar system... you get the idea by now right? If you want this, get linux, buy 8, no 16 GB of RAM, play KSP, problem solved.

Just go to an orbit where your surface speed is zero. Its not as tricky as it sounds the kerbal wiki (and people above) tells you already where it is, but remember you need to have a perfect 0 degree plane alignment as well, use a tiny engine for these very small adjustments, or RCS (someone suggest that already). Mechjeb can get you almost all the way there but no matter what your still going to need to do some manual orbital tuning to get as close to perfection as possible. This is going to require looking at your surface speed and providing thrust prograde, retrograde, north and south pole until it is zero, time warping a bit until the speed is not zero and repeat, be smart about it if you need to do more then a few d/v your doing it wrong. One thing I like about Kerstationary Orbit is that its a great place to do max speed time warps, the skymap is wizing around and yet the planet below is perfectly still!

I would make a gigantic flower out of sheets of metal add three kerbals plus a stayputnik pod and... oh wait you got it fixed, well I guess I don't need to tell you my plan then.

Here a challenge: Make ascii arts using only '1' and '0' that also converts into readable text.

Well we all remember Duke Nukem Forever... not really a joke anymore sense it happened. It was only an 'OK' game not worth 14 ****ing years of waiting though. A development period that long would lead you to expect that such a game would instantly bring you to nirvana after having died from gamer orgasm! Likewise if Half Life 3 ever comes out it better be so mind blowing incredibly awesome for taking this long to develop.

*cough*usethisandremoveallspaces*cough*

Jebalina... Jeb-sue... Jebell... ?

I'm ok with the Kerbals being asexual or what ever, but they do seem to all have male sounding names and a masculine haircut. I think girl kerbals would at least make for more 'variety' in the kerbal designs, also why not different hues of green or even blue and purple 'races' of kerbals?

The problem is that the game is unfinished, mods like Kethane, RelayTech, MechJeb, Lifesupport, Deadly Reentry, Mission Control, etc, etc, "Finish" the game. Ideally SQUAD will have working space mining, communications, autopilot, life support, re-entry and career mode when they finish the game (someday) making most if not all of the most popular mods obsolete. I personally could not keep playing this game without MechJeb, I love to build but can't fly worth crap.

Ok so I made hyper long KAS winch set and went down to 2 km of Jool surface with deadly reentry off. I then dropped the "anchor" (which was a pod all its own, UNDOCKED) with parachutes and when it reached 0 altitude I began raising my Jool station via balloon from 2 km up to 50 km (this was a slow process) locked position and saved, then I dropped the hyper long cables and the game still thought I was attached to the surface so it let me save with the station actually floating 50 km above thee surface! I can return to the station but sometimes the game relies it is afloat and won't let me save again, the kraken is clearly circling but it does not try to go in for the kill. I've done this on Kerbin and EVE and been able to even dock other aeroships with it and get them to think they are docking with something attached to the ground (thus can save). The anchors though have to be disconnect from the anchor pod, they seem to automatically disconnect passed ~2.6 km, best not to have them docked and it best to either retract the cables once reaching the desired altitude or just drop the hyper long KAS winch altogether

I've did it, 5 solid stages, using several mods's solid rockets. The final stage though did not have enough delta V to get all the way to the mun even with some extra solids strapped on: had to use liquid thrusters on the probe to finish the job. I used stock tiny solids attached to the 4th stage sideways to blast the stage off when I reached the correct speed/orbit (according to mechjeb) sort of as a crude cut-off for solid fuel stages. Had a real problem with stages reaching 6+ G of force by the end of their run and the whole thing coming dangerously close to I'm most interested in the laser comms experiment, hope that works really well (also will have hyper accurate ranging such that they will know the LADEE position per instant of time down to the centimetre!)

No no, ALL solid fuel, no liquids what so ever, call it the "Minotaur-LADEE Challange": get a probe from Kerbin to mun transfer using ONLY solid rockets.

From the wiki and the Orbital Science Fact Sheet it looks like it 5 stages ALL solid fuel. Awhile back (1970's) they developed solid rockets they could shut down (by causing flame-out via different mechanisms like blowing off the nozzel) to do this in KSP would require solids that could be shut down like Minotaur V IRL ones. Either that or playing around with existing solids from different mods that can launch a specific mass into a specific orbit with 100% of it fuel, no more or less. OR try somekind of crazy scheme to jettison the unfinished solid manually and not have it crash into your cargo pod... that sounds like a lot of fun!

Oh I've done that, works fine on Eve or Duna or Kerbin, etc, but not Jool! First of all things get really really hot as they approach the surface (not good if deadly reentry is on) Second once anything make contact with the bottom no matter the speed it [implodes]. Would be nice if I could save up higher and cooler.

Question: is there any way to save a game while a ballon is midair?

Yeah I 3rd this motion, please PLEASE reduce the ratio to one that is competitive with existing tanks, this mod is so close to making NP2 and KWR tanks useless.

First of all i'm using most stock parts, second of all that one innocent was so one of a kind I not sure what did it. Let me rephase the question "Is is possible to do two stage to orbit reusable with stock KSP, if not what is mods are needed?"