Lheim

Seriously, those 'test so and so in orbit' contracts usually do have an altitude specified. This could be a display bug.

Kerbin does have an orbital velocity relative to the sun of about 9 kilometers per second - no slingshot around the moon is going to negate that all. You might consider the maneuver Nasa used - a gravity assist off a gas giant. So much higher in orbit of the sun, your velocity will be significantly lower - and the gas giant can essentially stop you in relation to the sun, leading to that very tight encounter you want. In regard to EVA - small taps work best. Do NOT hold down the directional keys.

Small quality of life change? Can this mod be made to change the map view icon for flags and ships and such - perhaps to a flourescent green? It's turning out that it's super difficult to find KSC through the clouds, even with a flag marker there. It's pale semi-translucent white!

1. Most folks I know round this forum just use imgur.com 2. Not really in game stats, yet, so with the base game it's just a matter of getting a feel by experience. If you right click on a engine in the VAB it'll give you more stats, like max engine power - there's also a mod like kerbal engineer, which shows you explicitly calculated thrust-to-weight ratios (TWR) - hint: if it's less then 1, you're not leaving the ground. 3. Nope. Though if you see white cloudy things zipping past in your rocket's wake you're just going WAY too fast. 4. Not entirely sure whatcha mean! 5. The three-man pod is quite heavy. but seriously, it + orange tank + skipper + two side mounted boosters *ought* to get to orbit.

I'd say that contracts are a very neat addition to the game. Having a randomly generated goal is a nice way to spice up play and force us to do different things than usual - especially combining multiple contracts in single missions makes some creative building necessary. I look forward to seeing the system expanded. However, a few bullet points just for pure feedback's sake. - I think there are too many kerbals stuck up in that 100 klick orbit. - While I'm not looking at this from a newbie's failure-prone perspective, I think it's a little too easy to get much too positive a cash flow going - There are obviously some impossible contracts sneaking through the random generator - wanting stability enhancers tested orbiting the mun, say. - 'Science from orbit of X' contracts finally gives us a reason to leave probes or ships around bodies, and that's awesome - but being encouraged to leave kerbals stranded on flag planting duty doesn't feel right from a roleplay perspective. - more contract types would be greatly appreciated, and in particular more 'long term' style contracts - building stations and satellite networks, crew rotations, ship maintenance, doing surveys etc; See the Extra Contracts or Fine Print mods that have come out for ideas. - More rewards types than sheer funds or rep would be neat, too: like maintain a satellite network, get fuel delivered to your station by some subcontractor. I'm also not sure what prestige does right now, but I hope it does cool things in future.

I'd suggest using Hyperedit to actually put your vehicle on Eve. Changing Kerbin's gravity, you still wouldn't face the ferocious atmosphere that Eve has.

So, the basic useful fact is that higher orbits move slower, and lower orbits move faster. If you bring a portion of your orbit down lower than the target's orbit, you will .. orbit by orbit, creep up closer behind it. How much depends on how much lower you go - or you could go higher, and going slower gradually let the target 'lap' you. It's a matter of going around a few orbits and keep trying the maneuver nodes at the point where your orbits overlap to see if you can adjust the timing with prograde or retrograde thrusts so that the next orbit around you come close to each other.

It's a small complaint. Personally I'd be fine with nonsense or with reasonable-if-humorous sentences, but as it is it hits a kind of mind-twisting uncanny valley of english.

I'll pop in to say I've had the same issue with the inline clampotron part. I'll line things up perfectly by the navball, but be a meter or so offset in reality - almost as if it's using the end of the piece, instead of the docking port.

Driving rovers is weird.. . It's bound to come up for a pass by the devs eventually. All I can suggest is three things: 1. Put yourself in docking mode. This changes you to translational motion controls; it gets rid of the torque every time you try to turn. 2. Use SAS. It'll try to keep you upright - better if your rover has a sas unit. You can use F to toggle it briefly off if you want to come out of a wobble. 3. Hit caps lock to engage fine controls. Stifles the effect of somewhat jerky keyboard turning. Rovers do take a long time to drive anywhere. Wish they were more fun, really. Seriously, though. Put sas units on future rovers, and some of that 1x1 square platting as armor - you can survive rolls and tumbles and roll yourself upright again.

That'll do it then. The OP's rover has no electrical storage capacity.

Does it have a probe core? I don't think the command chair counts as something that gives control.

I did the same thing with the google translate on that article . Interesting tidbit: This is a guy from the teacher gaming company, so it's hardly official from the devs. But does he know something we don't?

Yep, make a maneuver to come down a little past your intended target. Keep adjusting that - the planet will rotate, and you want to do it relatively shortly before the landing so you're not knocked too far off whack by that rotation. Then target the ship/flag at your landing site. If you go into target mode - you'll see the pink icons that represent the target's position and velocity vectors relative to you. You can use that to trim your direction of motion on top of your target. It's a total art, though, seriously.

Yeah, I thought fine mode was suppose to try to balance the directional thrusts. However, there's always just getting within ten meters of your target, killing velocity, pointing the docking points very carefully at each other, then firing your engines..

Entirety means everything that's there. That's just.. what I think is the stronger interpretation of the phrasing . He didn't say 'career mode was put in', or 'completed'. If I hired a contractor to start my house last month, and so far there's a wooden frame standing on a concrete foundation, I could say that the entirety of the work that's been done has been done in the last month. Ya? In other words, as he said, 'the entirety of the science implementation', not 'the entirety of science'. But this is being SO lawyer-y. Ugh

I agree. You lose all credibility by claiming that nothing has been updated. Performance tweaks, career mode, science, new moon, new ksc models, new parts, new asteroids, c'mon. It's at this point I have to say - close this thread, devs. There's nothing here but the kind of shiftless, irresponsibly slanted rhetoric that comes out of politician's mouths.

If you've got a problem, outline a specific actionable complaint. Don't get all fussy and philosophically argumentative about the definitions of alpha, beta, complete. Games these days are ongoingly incomplete - even released ones, so fretting definitions is increasingly pointless. What you ought to be concerned with is: 1) is the game fun? 2) is the game development ongoing at a reasonable pace? 3) Are they adding things I find fun? Now, I'm going to assume 1) is true. So your problem lies somewhere with questions 2 or 3. Narrow your complaint down, get back to us. Fruitlessly arguing definitions is the definition of philosophy. As far as I'm concerned philosophy is a dirty word. Edit: I'm going to suggest you re-examine your perception that every complaint is greeted by allegations of 'whining' on this forum. Some are; then again, some complaints are extremely unconstructively phrased - aggressively, arrogantly put out there. Some complaints are greeted with relative public consensus - nearly everybody agrees rovers suck, and that the aerodynamics need changing. What's more important than how this public mass reacts is how the developers act, however - and they continue to add cool things to the game. They have also stated that -after- scope completion is the time to do tweaking to things like aerodynamics and such.

Collecting surface samples can actually poison your Kerbals. Never let one just sit in the capsule for a return trip.

They do write english on their sticky notes and rocket parts. They just pronounce it like backwards spanish.

They recently did just say that in a few more updates they'll have 'scope completion', which probably means beta is not so far off. Yeah, the versioning numbers aren't going to go all the way from .23.5 to 100. They work like a.b.c - a = major release number, b = patch, c = subpatch Right now we're on 0.23.5, and that goes as many or as few patches as needed until the dev decide it's done and ship a 'Kerbal Space Program 1.0'

Rendezvous I picked up relatively easily.. for me, docking was the sticker. Finally did it after several sessions of jiggling around uselessly, with a few hints from the forum. The second time I successfully docked was actually above Duna, with a separated lander coming back to my interplanetary transfer stage. I was sweating because I didn't want to run out of monoprop a billion kilometers from a resupply Nowadays.. I can manage docking in a minute or two with only a sprinkling of monoprop. Anyway, yeah. Rendezvous and docking are really hard to learn but get easier with practice, and they open up SO much possibility in the game. Space stations and orbital fuel depots, reusable craft, etc, etc.

Yeah, mechjeb can do this stuff - you might actually want to install it just to see how it does things. It has helped some people learn. That said - there's something satisfying about working through it and succeeding on your own. Your choice entirely. The markers on the nav ball and the map are your best tools as a pilot to plan things out and execute them. I wish there was a guide to all of these things somewhere. Basically, when you select a target and your orbits overlap you're going to get 2 purple and perhaps 2 orange tabs put on the orbits. One will represent your position at your closest approach to the target, and the other will represent the target's position. Purple is the first closest approach and orange the next. You can mouse over them for that info. You adjust those in several ways. Higher orbits will let an object catch up underneath you, lower orbits you get closer behind them, by going faster. Try this: If you're in equal orbits but just at different positions.. select your target, and draw out a prograde maneuver for yourself. Go as far as you need to - *eventually* you'll see that with that maneuver the two purple tabs line up within a couple kilometers of each other. Of course you may need to go halfway to Minmus for the timing to work out in just one orbit.. horribly inefficient, as you'd be moving like a bullet and would have to slow down again as you approached your target as well. But you can do the same thing if you go less high and take a few orbits around. So keep one side of your orbit at the target's 'height', the other higher or lower, and as you go round a few times you'll get closer and closer. Each orbit, just keep trying to find a maneuver that will make you intercept. Start with one at the point where your orbits overlap, but you can slide that sucker around and experiment. When you get an intercept, that's when the flying by the seat of your pants really begins. At that point it's really vital to understand the markers on your nav ball - I really recommend the video playlist I linked earlier in the thread; you don't need the whole thing; what you need are the videos on rendezvous and orbital rendezvous . You want to be in target-relative mode - you see the speed readout on your nav ball that says orbit, you can click that to cycle through ways to display your velocity - relative to the surface, the center of the planet (orbit), and target. Relative velocity is a really difficult concept to wrap a head around, but think of it this way - say for some reason you want to come in alongside some car that's driving on the freeway to toss - I dunno, a bag of snacks to the other driver. If you're doing that the speedometer is almost irrelevant. You don't watch the speedometer; it tells you the speed you're going on the ground. You watch out the window to see how fast or slow or angled the vehicle you're trying to match up to is moving subjectively to you. Trick to manage is to slow down gradually - relative to your target, as you get closer. You can trim the direction of your motion to be the same as the target's as well with off-angled thrusts - the video is helpful. Read the text but watch the nav ball!

well, just slapping K on something would be a bit of a lame in-joke. I would vote for 'macaroons' or 'smackers'

Two questions, OP: Are you selecting the target ship as your target? The map will provide 'closest approach' markers when you do. Do you understand how to make maneuver nodes?