Dunbaratu

But a related question I have is this: If you Do remove parts from the parts folder for a ship that currently exists in flight, what happens? Does it keep the ship around but remove those parts from that ship? Does it keep the ship and NOT remove the parts, therefore causing a bug where it potentially crashes the program because the vehicle is making a reference to nonexistent data? Does it remove the ship entirely if it references nonexistent parts? And similarly, what does it do to ship designs you've already saved in the VAB using the deleted parts? Will it crash the game if you try to load those ships?

The only reason for wanting a high thrust once you're in orbit is to cause your burns to be closer to pinpoint accurate. The maneuver nodes are calculated based on the assumption that you can provide all the delta-V you want in a single instant at a single location on your flight path, which isn't entirely true but is often close enough to true when doing very large orbital movements where you're still close to the same point in your elliptical geometry after several minutes of thrusting. But the downside to having high thrust is that it makes it hard to "STOP" your burn at exactly the point you wanted to. It starts to become hard to control when even at the lowest throttle setting the difference between burning 1 second versus burning 1.5 seconds makes the difference between hitting or missing your target. So it's a tradeoff how high you want your thrust to be. I find that I prefer low thrust, with the caveat that I have to remember to "straddle" the maneuver point time mark because of how slow it is. i.e. if it predicts that I will be burning for 2 minutes, then I want to start my burn at T minus 1 minute, rather than start it at T zero, so that the *middle* of the burn time is at T zero, rather than the start of the burn time. Also, when doing a slow burn at Apopsis or Periopsis where I know my maneuver node is entirely prograde or retrograde without the other two axis "knobs" having been twiddled, I find that I tend to ignore the blue maneuver marker and instead just burn using the retrograde and prograde marks themselves because I know the blue mark is only correct at one pinpoint time during the burn. I start my 4 minute burn and then keep a careful watch on the prograde mark and slightly rotate to follow it as it moves while I burn, so I'm never burning "up" or "down" during the slow burn.

The success rate of rocket launches is nowhere NEAR good enough to risk carrying radioactive waste by rocket. Once it's in orbit, then yes it's a great way to keep it from contaminating anything and in space you won't even notice the radiation compared to what the sun already puts out. In fact there's not much reason to bother sending it to the sun. Just get it away from earth and that's good enough. The problem is what happens during those first few minutes of flight trying to get it up out of Earth's gravity well. A success rate as high as 99% would still be too risky, and in reality it's not anywhere near even that good. Here's a report just from a portion of 2012. Note: 78 successes and 6 failures. You don't want one of those 6 failures to be one that showers fallout from radioactive waste down onto the planet. ========================================================= Vehicle Overall By Orbit Type Launches Earth-Orbit Earth-Escape (Failures) LEO >LEO Deep Space ========================================================= CZ 19(0) 10(0) 9(0) - R-7 14(0) 12(0) 2(0) - Proton 11(2) - 11(2) - Ariane 5 7(0) 1(0) 6(0) - Atlas 5 6(0) 2(0) 4(0) - Delta 4 4(0) 1(0) 3(0) - Zenit 3(0) - 3(0) - PSLV 2(0) 2(0) - - Falcon 9 2(1) 2(1) - - Unha 2(1) 2(1) - - H-2B 1(0) 1(0) - - H-2A 1(0) 1(0) - - Rokot/Briz KM 1(0) 1(0) - - Vega 1(0) 1(0) - - Safir 3(2) 3(2) - - Pegasus XL 1(0) 1(0) - - --------------------------------------------------------- Total 78(6) 40(4) 38(2) - [a] Assumes that two unsuccessful, unreported Safir launch attempts occurred. (Source: http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/log2012.html )

How are people making rovers that the Kerbonauts are sitting in and driving around? I can't figure out how to make a Kerbal stay on board like that.

I was trying to avoid the problem of carrying around the takeoff fuel on the rover itself.

Build your rovers with a self righting mechanism (haven't any of you watched Robot Wars in the 90's?) like in these pictures: Mine are built from stock landing legs parts - mounted on the roof of the vehicle. To get mine to work I had to rightclick them and operate them selectively one at a time instead of using the "G" key to do all at once, because I had to alternate using the left and right pair rather than toggling them together all at once, but the design did work.

The limit only applies to the vehicle currently being controlled. All other vehicles other than the current one are operating on a more limited physics model that doesn't try to calculate all those things that tend to go wrong in the calculations when time is sped up. So to speed up the time on your low-altitude craft, go switch to another vehicle that isn't low altitude, and time warp from there, then switch back to your low-altitude craft. The things that do not get calculated on secondary vehicles other than the current vehicle include: - Rotational velocity (the vehicles stay frozen in their current orientation and all rotational velocity is forgotten and zeroed out, which also has the side effect of stopping wobbling, if you're looking for a cheaty way to do that). - Atmospheric drag (This is why debris can orbit Kerbin on low orbits like 30Km without degrading and falling in. That's a bit annoying because it means to de-orbit debris you have to get it to hit the surface, not just hit atmosphere.) - Component stresses and impacts (i.e. the ships won't break apart from wobble, or collide with other craft - they just pass through each other). Because all these things are turned off when calculating the vehicle as a "secondary" object and not the primary one, the reasons for disallowing fast time warp at low altitude are gone when the ship isn't the primary one you're looking at right now.

No screenshot, but: I attached a ring of solid fuel boosters, and radial decouplers for them. I didn't carefully watch the staging list it automatically generated for it. On the launch pad I hit the spacebar for "go" and the solid fuel boosters turned on... and decoupled the moment they did so. I sat there on the launch pad not moving and watching the boosters fly up up and way.

I voted "something else" because you didn't include "more science parts" in the list. I want the probes I launch to actually *do* something. I'm looking forward to the idea of a fog of war, where you have to launch probes to find out data about the far planets.

Mun Roller and Come Backer One Mun lander with a Shrimec(*) and a platform to take off again. All parts stock, no mods: (*) A term from Robot Wars TV Show meaning self-righting mechanism used when you're knocked upside down. No, I have no idea why there's a letter "H" in the abbreviation. I didn't invent the term. In Transit to Mun: Making de-orbit burn for landing: Landed: Disconnected from lander platform and starting to drive: Self Righting mechanism (made of landing legs upside down on the roof) pushing lander back onto its wheels again after a driving mishap: Driving rover back onto lander platform after an excursion. There is a docking clamp at the front of the rover that will connect to the clamp on the lander when it drives up against it: Clamped to lander for re-flying: And take off again, ready to be taken elsewhere on the Mun (or if I had better skill at landing and hadn't wasted almost all my fuel trying trying to abort crashing trajectories over and over, to be taken back to orbit around Kerbin again and dock with a space station.) :

So am I supposed to connect it like this, essentially? Do I understand it right? So, by the way, what on earth is the difference between the meaning of "undock" and "decouple", then? They sound like they mean the same exact thing to me.

Here is a screenshot of it about 15 seconds after it happened so you can see: I was attempting to use the construction technique I'd heard of where you can force docking couplers to couple rotated the way you like by using two of them next to each other, so your RCS thrusters on your components are aligned and not off-angle from each other. But the problem is that I can't decouple them without one of the bits breaking off as shown in the picture. I rightclick on one port in the pair and say "disconnect", then quickly click the other one and do the same, and the two ship modules drift apart as expected, but one of the couplers breaks off its module when I do so. This keeps happening each time. I scrap the mission and try again, and after three tries I'm getting frustrated. What am I doing wrong? I thought that disconnecting both at the exact same time might help so I put them into a common control group to be activated with one keypress, but when I press that key.... nothing happens. The only decoupling I can do is manually with the rightclicks.

Well it pretty much would have to be taking into account the rotation, otherwise the advice to always launch toward the east wouldn't matter.

Then it wouldn't *be* a planet. Especially not one with a molten mantle. Magma doesn't have a lot of tensile strength. (Also, it wouldn't form a planet in the first place if the matter was spinning rapidly enough to null out the effect of gravity. It's the matter pulling toward other matter that causes the planet to form in the first place.)