Parkaboy

I love career mode, but rejecting tons of contracts in order to get the one you want gets really old after some time. I wish the mechanic for picking contracts were a bit different, something like this: - You can open new "programs", such as a Mun program, a Minmus Program or a Duna Program. When you open a new program, you get first the "explore body" contract, then start getting other types of contracts. If you close a program for a certain body, you no longer get contracts for that planet. - Maybe we could even have sub-programs, such as, for example, "Mun Orbit Operations" (satellites, space stations, rescue missions); "Mun Surface Exploration" (plant flag, surveys, etc); and "Mun Tourism" (tourism contracts). And certain types of programs could become available as you upgrade your Mission Control and Tracking Station buildings. Just an idea, but I doubt they'd change the mechanic after 1.0.

Thanks everyone for the responses. I think I managed to find a solution. Turns out all I needed was to get my CoL a bit closer to the empty CoM. It made the shuttle a bit less stable with the full tanks, but since I plan to reenter with the tanks mostly empty, I should worry more about stability when dry. With this really tiny shift I managed to lift my nose enough to control the angle of descent while landin. It's still a hard bump, but the shuttle lands in one piece.

Hi, I'm just having trouble landing an unpowered (that means, without fuel, not without electricity) MK3 Shuttle. The design is a pretty standard shuttle: looks very much like the one in the countdown video, but with a Skipper engine at the end. It flies beautifully in testing, but when I try to glide and approach the landing strip to land, drag turns it into a brick. Its horizontal speed drops too much, and then the ship itself drops and crashes. If I save some fuel, I can speed up a bit and manage to land, but I was aiming for a design that could land without engines. Does anyone have an idea how I can fix this? Adding more wings to increase lift will probably only add more drag, right?

You need data from experiments to proccess in the lab. Bring data from experiments performed on another vessel, or remember to include experiments with your lab. Review the data and choose the option "proccess in lab" to send the data as a numeric value to the lab. The lab can hold up to 500 data, and the more it holds, the more science it generates. I have a lab generating around nearly 0.5 science/day with almost max data (in Kerbin orbit). Not sure if I can get better values with scientists of a higher level.

Basic planes are mostly useful to do contracts close to the space center. It's easier to build a shuttle-type vehicle that can go orbital or suborbital to tackle those contracts further away, especially since the basic jet engine can't take you much higher than 13 km. Of course, planes don't have to be just planes. They can be spaceplanes or, as mentioned, spaceshuttles.

I think I finally got the hang of reentering with a shuttle. I was just playing career, and decided to build a small two-kerbal shuttle to ferry tourists around kerbin, and maybe even take them on Mun flybys. Mind you, I was still low on the tech tree, and had no access to stuff like airbrakes and drogue chutes. First I designed the shuttle itself. The thing I used to have trouble with - making a small vessel that could glide well - turned out to be fantastically easy with the new aeridynamics. Then I designed the booster stages. Getting the balance right has always been a pain, and in fact I think the new aero helps me on this area, since the shuttle wings help keep it stable. Then I had to find out how to reenter without burning up. I got it right on my third try. Here's how I did it: From LKO (around 80km), I burned retrograde until I got a periapsis of about 50km. I tried to set this periapsis a little west of KSC (near those mountains). Now here's what I think it's the important bit: in the highest part of the atmosphere, where it isn't too thick, you shoul pull your nose up and offer a lot of area to cause drag. I pulled up about 30º-45º, and lost most of my orbital velocity between 50km and 30km. If you don't do that, and you reach an altitude of around 30km with too much velocity, you may burn up.

Something just happened that proved a couple of things: one, that there are still a few bugs that need squashing; two, that Valentina Kerman is truly a badass of the highest order. Valentina was flying a visual recon mission in kerbin, on board a prototype plane. It was a trusty but primitive plane, since I'm still low in the tech tree, but I had flown a couple of missions on that bird with Jeb. When I tried to reach the last objective on a contract, which was doing a crew report above 19500 m altitude, I learned that my little plane could only reach around 13000 m. So I decided to reload a quicksave (so I wouldn't have to fly half the continent back to the KSC), and suddenly... flameout! My engines were air deprived. My air intake wasn't getting anything, even though I was at that point only at 1000m high. I tried closing and opening the intake, shutting down and turning on the engines, and nothing. And so I decided to do an emergency landing. But the plane had too little electric charge - since the engines were off and I couldn't recharge the batteries, and I still had no access to solar panels. My power went out while I was still 100m above the surface, and the plane nosedived into the ground. A couple of meters before crashing, though, Valentina bailed out of the cockpit, and bounced maniacally across the grasslands. With a smile in her face.

Update at 50%!

10% and updating!

A Don't Panic Button

Space telescopes? Since it's the Hubble anniversary, I should point out that one of the things I missed when I first started playing was having a telescope to put in orbit. Sure, there are mods for that, but we could hope for a stock one, right?

KSP isn't about crashing spaceships. It's about landing them spectacularly.

Its a countdown! Can't launch a rocket without some sort of countdown!

After the hype starts building up with all the details, videos and screenshots showing up online, I get a new urge to start playing again. By this time I've been bored with my career game for some time, and probably haven't touched it for a few weeks. I fight this urge, because I don't remember what I was doing in my old save and I don't want to start a new one with an update coming up soon. I end up firing up a new career save anyway, and two days later the update is released and I scrap it and start over.

Sure, but I don't see the logic on dividing it by 6. You would either have to multiply the number by six to get the number of hours, or divide it by four to get the number of Earth days, right?

I'm pretty sure it was mentioned somewhere that fairings act as heatshields. Being that fairings are procedural, you can just create your own heatshield from the fairing parts, can't you? You can at least protect capsules and probes that way.

I guess there are instruments hidden on those panels? Trying to make the lab like the science stations on the ISS, with lots of wires and tools, would probably add too many polygons to the model, causing undesirable lag. The IVA models must have tight constraints, since they're part of the scene during flight.

These days with subassemblies and picking the root part it's not hard to reproduce inside the VAB a design you assembled in orbit. That way you can have the craft. file of a finished space station, for instance, making it easy to send it to Eucl3d.

You can connect multiple docking ports at once, as long as the ports are perfectly aligned. You may have to try it a few times before managing to connect all of them at the same time.

It would be nice if it was Kronal Vessel Viewer becoming stock. Edit: Also remember that MaxMaps is prone to lame puns. A "new dimension" could be just a reference to the name of the new partner, or something the partner has worked on.

It adds enough to the game to make my wife want to play it, and she never shown any interest in KSP other than finding kerbals cute.

I've used this mod when it was still mantained by dtobi, and loved it. After a few months playing stock only, I decided to give it another go, and just downloaded it and the KM gimbal plugin. But now the game crashes as soon as the loading screen ends. I do have several other mods, including the latest Mechjeb, RemoteTech, KWRocketry, Cacteye Telescope, EVE, DRE, Kerbal Construction Time, TAC life support, and Distant Object Enhancement. Is there a conflict between one of those and KM's shuttle engines?

Hi, I've just tried this mod for the first time, and I can't launch anything. The "simulate" option works just fine, but in the "Build List" window, I only have 3 buttons: "VAB", SPH" and "Tech". There's no "VAB Storage" from where I could launch, as indicated in the Getting Starting Guide. Is there a problem with my install? I do have a few other mods working: Mechjeb, DRE, EVE, KWRocketry, TAC Life Support and a bunch of Nert's parts packs. Edit: Nevermind, I figured it out. The option to launch is only available at the KSC scene, not inside the VAB; it's a bit unintuitive... :-P

Nope. My bad. Do I need them both? And do I need TweakScale to make KSPI work?