Rosco P. Coltrane

Not sure about the tech tree, I'm not at the computer right now, but once unlocked they are in the aero tab. Btw, they look like more or less regular cones, not fairings walls.

The mission had the following important points: 1) Me forgetting decouplers for the sats. 2) Me forgetting the probe core on the return stage. 3) The game not letting my separator go. 4) The game activating fairings 3 stages ahead of the current. 5) The game having a separator that won't do it's job at keeping the above stage solid in its place (which motivated a lot of redesign, which in turn increases the change of mistakes in other areas of your design). 6) The game having a SAS that doesn't really stabilize, making 5) even worse. 7) Not the right pilot. I'm willing to take the flame on this... but not sure if the game didn't assign another pilot again. All in all, Rosco 3 - KSP 4. I win. Also, when I arrived to Duna my rocket was red hot after weeks in space as if I just shut down the engines. But I'll let that pass because I'm not sure how it would work in real life and because it didn't cause any troubles. (I'll also ignore the multitude of things I had to guesstimate or look elsewhere because the game wouldn't give me that info, but there are so many it should be included in a 3-5 really).

I can't. It breaks immersion for me. I can play test some things, but not too much or I feel like I'm not really launching stuff into space but playing a game about launching stuff into space, I you know what I mean. That's why I always said I would pay for a mod that gave us a sort of "simulation computer" the Kerbals would have. Where you upload a model of your craft and put it into different situations in what looks like a gray sphere with whatever parameters you like but it doesn't *look* like the body you are going to visit. We could integrate this into career with different levels of accuracy or things you can do. And it cost a little money to run it too... One can dream. Also, many of the things here could have been prevented just paying more attention. Who's the Kerbal in the seat? Do the satellites have a decoupler? Legs? Ladders? That sort of thing. After a number of failed launches and game restarts you loose some of that to the "let's just launch the thing" feeling. - - - Updated - - - Galactic Ghoul! Even in real life they have a Kraken!

Well, my previous mission to Duna required a rescue because of the wrong size docking port problem... Maybe I would be better off avoiding Duna altogether. That place is haunted for me.

The worst part of KSP is when you combine your own stupidity with game breaking bugs... and that's exactly what happened here. You know how it goes in career, you plan your mission, piling contracts while you wait for the transfer window, Oh man this is gonna be great, all these contracts I'm gonna do in one mission to Duna... I need to get down there with a guy, then go put 2 satellites in orbit around Ike, and do 6 temperature scans and one gravity scan contracts... Everything's in place, I'll do this and then that and then... Feel like a boss. Well, the day comes and I leave Kerbin... Only to arrive at Duna SOI and discover my separator won't separate. It just stays there attached to my engine... Also, staging the separator for some reason activates my fairings, TWO STAGES ABOVE. I need the fairings to protect stuff when aerobraking... Dunno why, I moved the fairings to stage 0 and somehow the space bar finds a way to magically get to activate the fairings but nothing else in the middle. Sorcery I tell you! I finally get the separator to work after many reloads and retries (with right mouse menu of course, not space bar). Once in Duna atmosphere, I'm aerobraking like a champ thanks to Kobymaru's Trajectories mod... only to discover that my vessel wants to go retrograde, exposing the engine instead of the bullet like tip made by the fairings... It tumbles out of control but fortunately Duna's atmosphere is not that thick and the engine and pretty much anything survives. Get to the Ap and drop the lander, rise my Pe above atmosphere so it will stay in orbit and go land with the lander. Wait, who's piloting the freaking thing? Jeb! Noooooo! Again... Rosco my man, I thought you would have learned by now... Jeb can't repack parachutes, I need them to land on Kerbin... Well, I'll have to leave the capsule in LKO and send an engineer to repack them before landing. Again. Landing goes well, I underestimated the amount of chutes I needed, but the engine made up for it. Even the Kraken inducing bays work and all! Also, amaizingly Jeb hitting the landing legs seems to be enough to tip the lander... Watch out there my fried. You hit F5, right? Ok, I'll leave Jeb for now and will go deploy some satellites! I get to Ike only to discover that my two satellites are NOT connected with separators... I just forgot about them when I imported them as sub assemblies and mounted them directly with their engines. I can't deploy them, I'm screwed. Fine! Go * yourself! I'll just go back to Duna orbit and take off with Jeb, rendezvous and go back to Kerbin. Lost a couple 100k here but what you're gonna do. Stage the freaking satellite assembly altogether and let's go. No no, wait, wait... No... I forgot to add a probe core to the rest of the ship! Now my return stage has become an orange high tech asteroid. Daaaarrrrnnnnnn... Well, good thing I have like a gazillion backups so I'll just revert to a time before I have even put the ship in Kerbin orbit and I'll start over. BTW, this is what I love about KSP, if I managed to do everything I did wrog, right, I'd have felt like the king of space and everything in it... Next time... Next time.

"Kerman" I can stand if the person is using it as Kerman the lastname and not the species. You know, they are the Simpsons, the Smiths, the Kermans. Funny how one takes issue over something one knows irrelevant, but with repetitions it makes your blood boil.

Yeah, that's how it works. You unzip and copy into your GameData folder. You should end up having one folder called PreciseNode and inside that, one called plugins and 2 files CHANGES.txt and LICENSE.txt. Also, note that PN window shows up in map view only and only when you have a node created.

*#@ me! I don't know how I lived without this! But... A request if I may yeah, another one of those. Would it be possible to sort missions by expiration date (say, date of the earliest contract they have inside)? I usually group contracts by body / proximity so I can do a bunch of them with one big vessel. Having a list of missions that could be sorted by date, just like the contracts themselves, would be great IMO because then you know your mission to Duna is in 230 days. I know you can sort contracts so more or less you have the info available there.. but still.

Wait what?! ... Thank God. I though it was missing in the latest version. But no, I have the latest version and Ap/Pe enabled in the options. All that is needed is hitting the "O" button and enable it.

Well. All I have to say is this: when it comes to hobbies, if you don't feel motivated to cram more stuff into your already busy life, just don't do it. You do what you do for fun or the feeling of accomplishment. The end result in mind is "I feel good I did this", *BUT* the middle result must be "I feel good doing this despite the trouble" as well... unless it's a job, then don't do what you don't really want to. On the subject of speed, a big part of code crafting speed is motivation. If you have problem A to solve and you don't feel motivated to solve it, then you go to work on problem B. If after solving problem B you still don't feel like working on A, you go to C... and A never gets completed or is half-assed so you can move on. Good luck feeling accomplished with the quality of A's code. I think somewhere, in a dark corner of our hard drives, Internet servers and Arduinos, we all have our good share of shameful problem A code. The idea is to keep it at a minimum!

Best: Red Baron II/3D, with Age Of Empires II in a close 2nd. Worst: Well, out of the ones I actually bought (as opposed to followed closely but didn't buy out of worry or just pure luck), Planetary Annihilation. What a let down that was. Hyped as THE greatest RTS in the history of human kind with the best devs you can hope for, ended up to be mediocre at best with devs that give a rat's behind about anything.

KSP? Headache? You either get used to it, or you go mad and quit. Go play something else for a while, that's what I do when the bugs get to me. SQUAD missed the ball. It saddens me. There's nothing I can do. I go play Age Of Empires and come back next week.

What I'd suggest you do it is using Precise Node because it's simple better, and Protractor for the phase angle, the time you have to wait, and the time in your orbit you have to create your node. So you wait for the angle watching Protactor, then 30 minutes before Protractor says you should leave (in Protractor, you click the angles to switch to time display), you create a node ahead when protractor says you should leave, say 20 minutes. Add the dV needed in Precise Node's prograde field, and you're pretty much set. Ejection angle at this point is pretty much irrelevant.

In my picture, Jool is 1500 pixels in radius for its 6,000 km (what's seen there is less than half Jool because it was just too big, the equator is outside the picture). Kerbin is 150 pixels for its 600 km radius.

Tons of things as I started when I went to college and began living by myself some 14 years ago... I rather learned or starved! Not that I do it regularly because... well, life: boiling some noodles and be done with it leaves time to do other things. Dinner time around this part of the globe is around 9-10 pm, so if you want to kill some time before going to bed, you better cook fast, effectively contradicting the concept of killing time because you artificially fabricated said time to then be able to kill it with video games and unnecessary stuff.

Well, I thought Kerbol looked like a flea compared to the real sun... but not so much: Still small though, but then again our sun is not precisely big... https://cdn.pmylund.com/blog/content/2010/07/sun_is_a_pixel.jpg PS. Thanks for the rep!

Like "Red" said in The Shawshank Redemption, in prison a man will do most anything to keep his mind occupied... I'd add a free but very bored man, too. So here it is, probably the most obnoxious wallpaper you can have, I'm already hating it with all those labels and sphere that look like icons! (click for full size version)

Actually, after posting this I recalled that there's a rule against politics here on the forums... So please...

Well, considering that NASA's money comes from the US... I mean, if I it were to spend a ton of money to put the craft on another planet I'd like to have my face on the rover too. If the mission is international... I guess having an Earth flag makes sense... Not sure.

I voted "I use maneuver nodes often, multiple nodes at once" mainly because a big charm of the nodes, to me, is to be used for future planning. I never go past 2, thou. Than being said, I use them a lot, only times when I don't is to circularize or do small corrections to an orbit in any of it's directions (except for normal/anti-normal because I usually can't remember which symbol is which) . If it's more complicated than that, I at least create a node to see how the maneuver will pan out, but more often than not I also follow said node. I also play with MechJeb so sometimes if my max time warp is limited by my altitude, I create the node and let MJ perform it while I go do something else.

Well, it could be considered helping my mother in her shop at age 16, had to work the stipulated hours for a fixed pay and everything. But my first for real real, no family job, was as a freelance programmer. Had to create an administration system for a real state agency at say 21, 22? years old. Never got paid for it. So, my first paid job that put food on my plate was for a software company, working on a system for a telecommunications company. Age 26 I believe. Dropped college that year too 'cos didn't have the time for both (and no money for just college).

Or you play Outer Planets Mod. Fancy a 25 years transit?

Another sandboxer here. Career is great, at least in part, to force me to do stuff I wouldn't have bothered otherwise... because, you know, in sandbox I have all the parts I like and all the money I want, so who cares if my ship is 200 tons and costs millions? That being said, after the first couple of tech tree levels, it looses all of its charm to me. I always end up giving up and going back to sandbox after hitting Duna. Career to me has always felt like a collection of unrelated ideas thrown together hoping they would produce a "career" somehow.

On the subject, can anybody recommend a way to "land" a ship on another planet? I want to try several designs so I can get an estimate of dV needed but I don't want to go land a 200 ton craft on Duna, and then a small one, and a fat one, and a slim one... and... I tired HyperEdit "magic-landing" feature but didn't seem to work for me. I also looked at Extra Planetary Launchpads but it didn't look like it would do what I wanted to do (ie, build ships fast and "cheaty").

I meant online type stuff. Old games had keys maybe, and a demo that was stripped down. I remember the Mysteries Of The Sith demo... My lord I played those 2 levels to death before buying Dark forces II and MoTS... Buying tons of Magazines with CDs to try demos... Man... I'm old.