Psycho0124

I use a Thrustmaster T-Flight Stick. Cheap, works better than my old Sidewinder. This one looks good too: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA0AT0MB9960

Yep! Imagine what a mess it would be with a sensor installed incorrectly though. Call me old-fashioned but I'd really prefer a flesh and blood pilot at the controls if I were to be a passenger on one of those. Haha! Yeah, those legs are going to need a new paintjob. I went to an interesting bonfire out on Padre Island a few years back. Our genius hosts lit ~40 wooden pallets all at once. The radiant heat was too much to handle at anything less than 40 feet and bubbled the paint on car bumpers ~20 feet away. Imagine what the radiant heat coming off that exhaust plume must be like for those poor lander legs.

Other: Orion. Nothing else could have been relied on to bring thousand-ton payloads to orbit. Need a skyscraper on the moon? No problem. Naval destroyer around Mars? Sure thing. Shame it was never built.. The book written about the project by Dysons son is pretty hilarious though. Lots of great rocket scientist humor.

Depends on the overall mass of your ship. Save it, try for orbit, check fuel gauge and you'll have your answer. Did you edit away your original question or something?

Yep, pretty much what Hoy said. 1. A drill that can extend into the surface (test it out on the launch pad to see how it works). 2. Any size kethane tank anywhere on the craft. No special placement or connection needed. 3. A converter. Can be in the same stack as your fuel tanks and it will work fine. You can also have it in a seperate stack, just run your fuel lines to it. It consumes "empty fuel tank space" so it should be downstream of your outboard tanks. 4. Power to run it all. A gigantor array or pair of them works great for most kethane setups. Less power just means more time to convert. You can convert at up to 100x time compression.

Nervas are your only real choice for interplanetary travel. No other engine offers reasonably efficient use of your fuel. I routinely do massive station deployments using a single NERVA pushing more than 4 jumbo-64 tanks (TWR of 0.04) and have never had a problem with burn time. Do incremental burns, start burning early, be patient. Use alt+> to do physical time acceleration and you'll be set. Patience with low thrust-to-weight ratios pays massive dividends in delta-v. As for the docking maneuver; just eye-ball it. Set your camera to 'chase' with the v key. Keep your view moving; checking different planes and relative velocities. It looks like you should have more than enough mono-propellant to go slow and take your time with the docking.

Minimus. With the kethane mod, it becomes a giant orbiting gas station. The low gravity makes it really fun to fool around on too; like a giant bouncy castle.

Just completed a trip to the northern ice cap. Visited something interesting crashed on the land next to the ice pack.

In-flight tunable ASAS is what we need. A right-click menu and a few sliders. Maybe buttons for Forbid RCS/Engine gimbal/control surfaces. It would be glorious.

I get this a lot with my docking kethane rover/miners too. Try returning to the tracking station and then returning to the stuck rover. Reloading the world seems to fix whatever issue causes that.

Jeb is the reason I started making missions recoverable and making a point to land them near KSC. I've had him (in his first iteration with no 'end mission' usage) personally pilot station placement in the orbits of Kerbin, Mun, Minimus, Duna, Laythe, and Pol. He landed colonies on the Mun, Duna, and currently on his way back to Kerbin after placing a colony on Laythe. Bill has been piloting a Kethane mining tug at Minimus station for years now. Bob did some weapons testing in LKO (SRB torpedos! Fun!) but has been chilling at Kerbin station for a few years now. I'm currently shipping all three back to KSC to 'get the old gang back together'. I designed a modular NERVA tug/space-plane/vertical lander ship for them to attempt a Grand Tour of the Kerbol system together. I'm a little nervous about the Tylo and Eve landings but I'm sure Jeb will pull it off with the right equipment.

I love NERVAs! My standard interplanetary stage consists of one Jumbo-64 with a single NERVA on the back. Set up a burn, light the engine and go grab a coffee. My general rule of thumb is to use NERVAs any time my ship isn't within an atmosphere or fighting a strong gravity well. That 800 isp is just too sweet a deal to pass up for me, especially since I fly seat-of-the-pains and need to make corrections here and there. Once you're in orbit, you have all the time in the world to make your burns.

Sometimes you're going to be forced to rearrange your stages when you dock two ships. It's a pain but I don't know of any other way to sort things out. As for both engines firing, right-click the opposing engine and click 'deactive engine'.

Great! Thanks for working on it! Couple quick bugs: I ran into a little issue(?) with the RTG functionality. The mass on the vanilla RTG is only 0.08 tons but the 1.25m stackable RTG I created weighed in at over 1.7 tons. It produces a little more power (1/sec) than the vanilla unit (0.75/sec), and I guess the structure should have some weight but custom RTGs seem overly massive at present. Maybe .12 tons for the custom RTG and some extra weight for the structure? Also ran into a little UI glitch. Changing the oxidizer amount while 'auto' in checked results in a crash. Maybe add a little function to force-uncheck the auto checkbox if the oxidizer value is selected? Might be easier to just 'grey out' the oxidizer field while 'auto' is checked instead. Thanks for releasing/developing this tool by the way. It adds so much flexibility to rocket design. I will honestly be surprised if there isn't eventually a "Landos Tank Fab" building out between the VAB and space plane hanger. Thanks again!

Thanks! That's going to make landing on kethane deposits so much easier! Waiting until low altitude for it to automatically switch to surface setting is such a pain (if it even switches at all; I've had to eye-ball high altitude landings on Minimus with my gimbal set to orbital velocity so many times.)