Kerba Fett

Well, by the time 1.0 comes out holographic displays should be common and the average computer will have a few terabytes of ram so we'll look back at the limited part counts and laugh. Graphics on 1.0 will probably be on par with what you see in high budget movies today. I'm really looking forward to it.

When you removed the parts and loaded the game, you would have gotten a message about not being abled to load ships due to missing parts. Then the game deleted those ships and rewrote the save. By the time you re added the parts again, the ships they were on were deleted. IF you haven't done another quicksave, (F5) you might be able to reload your last quicksave (F9) and get your ships back.

If you want to see dV for your ships RCS system MechJeb will show it, but you need to add the function to a window using the custom window editor. That said, if you take a mk1 pod, add a parachute, 1.25m RCS tank, 4 quad thrusters, 4 probe landing legs, and a shielded docking port it will have an RCS dV of 688m/s. I use a ship just like that as a data courier for my Minmus operation. Once it's transfer stage has it on the way to Minmus the RCS is enough to enter orbit, dock with the station there, then get back to Kerbin. I never tried getting to the surface with it, but it should be able to manage it without any trouble. If you want to play with RCS powered hovercraft, Minmus is probably a better place than the Mun. I tried to do the same thing as you've got in mind and it didn't work well on the Mun. 4 RCS quad blocks will lift a small rover or ship, but the fuel doesn't last that long on the Mun and it was a bit unstable to fly.

Put a probe core on an RCS tank and some thrusters, a few batteries, and some solar panels. Then deliver it into Munar orbit. Your mini tug docks with the lander and tows it back to its transfer stage to refuel. Once refueled the lander undocks and leaves the mini tug still attached to the transfer stage for next time.

For my fastest in atmosphere aircraft I left off all the unneeded drag. Like wings, landing gear, control surfaces..... A reaction wheel and engine vectoring are it's only control. And it handles pretty good at over 500 m/s.

If your dad's a non gamer are you sure he's even interested in playing it? A lot of people think of gaming as a pointless waste of time. He might play while you're around to be doing something with you but that doesn't mean he'd be interested in playing solo. If he does want to learn the game you might be better starting him stock in career mode. All the parts in the sandbox mode can be a bit overwhelming.

I use sheilded docking ports on a few of my ships and don't find them to be any buggier than any other port. I've had a couple of times when ports wouldn't stick despite being in contact with no motion. I'd just back away 20 to 30 meters, switch control back to the pod and untarget the station docking port. Then I'd reswitch control back to my docking port, retarget the one on the station, and reapproach. I could then dock normally. That seemed to fix it without tweaking the persistance file.

That biome overlay looks wonderful. I can't wait to give it a try. One question though, do you just give us the overlay, or does it need to be scanned from orbit with something like scansat? (which I think would be more realistic)

You could revert the flight. That would save him. Why would you even keep the engine running after your AP was above a couple of hundred km? Is it just a test of rescue systems? Aside from reverting you could also bail out of the capsule and see if all the fuel in your EVA pack would be enough to get your PE out of the atmosphere. He'd still be stranded, but that's easier to fix than dead.

If it worked for Duke Nukem Forever it would work for KSP. Sure it took them 12 years to finish the game, but look how good it looked compared to other games that were started 12 years earlier.

If you have the steam version and want to keep the old version to play after a patch then just copy the KSP folder from your steam library folder to a different location and start it with the KSP.exe rather than through steam. Same applies if you want a stock install and a modded install. Of course you need to do this BEFORE steam auto patches it.

It couldn't be made of ice. I've landed at the same spot next to my methane drill quite a few times. If it were ice my rocket engines would have caused some melting. The huge flats are obviously from an advanced alien species strip mining there long before kerbals ever went to Minmus.

First thing is that if you go EVA and collect the data from the goo containers and science jr it won't matter if you lose them. The data would be in the pod at that point so you'd get the return amount of science. Second thing is that sometimes the stuff just falls off but isn't destroyed. (I think they use water based glue to attach parts) Any parts that are not destroyed can be recovered separately from the tracking station. Just select the debris tab and take everything with the correct ship name. Sometimes you get lucky and recover one of the experiment containers.

One thing not mentioned is that if you want to maximize your science gain and have access to the mobile lab, it's worth transmitting the results of surface samples and experiments. If you transmit a surface sample you get a lot less science points than returning the sample. If you transmit then go back out and get another sample the second will be worth less to return than the first sample was. However, the combined value of the transmitted sample and the returned sample are worth more than the first sample would have been if returned. The same applies to material and goo samples except that transmitting disables the experiment pod so you need the mobile lab to reset it.

Actually, it's a lot less of a challenge to do this on Minmus than it is on the Mun. They forgot to add gravity there. And you don't need to return the experiments to Kerbin. Just pull the data from each one and bring all the data back in 1 ship.

Or you could use the Crew Manifest Mod to move kerbals around in a ship or station.

Try adding a couple more reaction wheels to overpower the weak yaw control.

I do lots of docking. After the first couple of times it's always seemed pretty easy. First I put my station in a circular orbit at 200km. Next a launch the ship that I want to dock and make its AP 200km. I move the PE just out of the atmosphere and let both vessels orbit till the ship is almost caught up with the station. Then I raise the PE till my intersect at AP is as close as I can get for the next orbit. (usually about 1.5 to 2km) Whole on my final orbit I place a node at the intersect to raise my PE to 200km and match orbits. This also acts as a countdown for the rendezvous. Once the burn is done to match orbits I line up with the relative velocity - indicator. This looks like the retrograde marker on the navball. In target mode the nav ball doesnt show prograde/retrograde, the yellow markers are Rvel + and Rvel-. I burn Rvel- till the speed shown on the navball shows 0. Now I turn towards the station and use RCS to start approaching. The Rvel+ marker should show up once you start moving toward it. Strafe up/down and side to side with RCS to keep it over the pink target marker. It will tend to drift a little as you approach since your orbits are a close match, but not a perfect match. Once you get to about 20m stop all relative motion and you can start lining up your final approach. I think the suggestion about rotating the station to make docking easier is a bad one. Once you start your station rotating you'll need to use SAS to stop it. If any ships are docked with the station there's a good chance that their SAS will be fighting with the station SAS. Normally this starts as a small oscillation that increases till the station tears itself apart. It may not happen the first time you try it, but sooner or later it's likely to happen. If your docking port is on the wrong side, drift past a bit then kill your relative velocity and approach from the other side. If you're ok with using mods the NavyFish Docking Port Alignment plugin is handy as mentioned previously, but MechJeb is even better. I've never tried the docking autopilot so I can't comment on that, but the smartASS is very handy for holding a particular attitude and custom windows can add a lot of info you wouldn't normally see. My docking info window contains: Distance to Target, Closest Approach to Target, Relative velocity at closest approach, and RCS dV. The relative velocity displayed by Mechjeb and the NavyFish plugin are also much more accurate than what the navball shows.

To be accurate it's actually a UCO. Unidentified Crashed Object. If it were still a flying object it would have an orbital track and would be easy to find.

I was just about to suggest more reaction wheels. My thinking was that one of your wingtips catches drag first and the pod doesn't have enough torque to prevent it from tumbling. I built this thing for suborbital testing and it's only controls are engine vectoring and reaction wheels. It handles pretty good once you get up to 300 m/s or faster. Once one engine flames out you have a few seconds to lower the throttle before it spins. I also find stock SAS holds better than mechjebs. Takeoff is vertical using launch clamps.

If you were to try it on a low gravity world like Minmus where your hover time is pretty long it should be possible and perhaps even easy with MechJeb. Consider this, The translatron can control your vertical speed pretty accuratly. You can use Mechjeb to hold your ship parallel to a docking port axis. You can translate with RCS while in staging mode using IJKLHN. It should be possible to mount a docking port on the bottom of your lander and use radial mounted engines. Then have the translatron hold a hover just above the height needed to dock, use Smartass to hold you Par - to the docking port on top of the base. (in the target menu) Then use the JJLHN keys with RCS on to move over the port on the station. Once you're above the port you set the translatron to descend at about -.2 (in case you didn't know, you can input a new number into the translatron and it won't take effect till you click execute. This makes for a quick way to change hover/descent rates.) You might even be able to just use the RCS to push down onto the docking port against the translatron.

Large parts normally have larger attach nodes. doesn't that affect the strength of the attachment? When you rescaled the 6 way hub did you do anything with the attach nodes? The game may still be seeing it as a small part with weak connections and that may be where the wobble is coming from.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned here is that when you rendezvous your ship is normally in a lower orbit than your station. I use an elliptical orbit with my AP at 200km. (same as the station orbit) the PE is usually about 70 to 80km to keep me out of the atmosphere. Because my orbital period is shorter than the station, I eventually catch up with it without using any dV till the last orbit when I raise my PE just enough for a close rendezvous. If your station orbit is too low you don't get enough difference in orbital period and it takes a lot more orbits. If you use a higher orbit for your ship so the station catches up with you then you need to burn fuel to raise your orbit then later burn more fuel to lower it. If you want to get the maximum fuel load to the station you're pretty much forced to put the tanker into the lower orbit.

If SAS was on, the station may have torn itself apart as the ship SAS fights with the station SAS. It starts as an oscillation that gets wors and worse till something breaks. It's a good idea to turn off SAS just before the docking ports touch. (at that point you shouldn't need it)

The escape key will pause the game, but it's not much good for screenshots while it's paused. If you're playing the steam version you can use F12 to save a screenshot for uploading to your steam library. If you're playing the non steam version, then F1 will take a screenshot and save it to the screenshots directory of your KSP folder. You can turn off the interface using F2 and I'm sure you've figured out that F4 toggles the onscreen labels. I find the labels really intrusive when docking.