Gargamel

That would solve most of my issues right there, but I'm playing with Final Frontier, and all the kerbs I leave on board wouldn't get their Surface Eva Merit Badges. :S

Yup, Stage recovery is pretty much fire and forget, you drop the boosters, and when they get a certain distance away, they are recovered. Some boosters will require a probe core to be recovered, depending on the flight parameters (Too fast, too high, requires powered descent, etc). One nice side effect of SR, you can deorbit probes back onto Kerbin without having to actually fly the reentry and landing. Just drop your Pe to below 0km, and switch back to whatever craft you want, and SR will handle the rest. There is no controlling the booster to the ground, so it may not be what you are looking for.

That's about or better than my system, and I play KSP just "fine". Of course I have to play at low settings, and it takes 15 minutes to load, but I can do all the things! Mine is currently jammed up with sawdust. Gonna get to that this weekend.

My technique, and it's probably wrong and ineffecient, is to have a decent main engine, but heavy SRB's. I'll then limit the thrust of the SRB's so at launch I'm in the 1.6-1.8 range. I then use MJ to keep my acceleration at 20 m/ss, and it will throttle back the main engine as the SRB's get more relative TWR. Then when they separate, I have more Dv left for the main engine to complete the orbital insertion burn. This allows me to build lifters that cover a larger range of payload masses, but keep the same ascent profile, so I can launch directly to rendezvous without trial and error. Of course, this is MJ dependent, flying this by hand is doable, but a little more complicated.

But for most payload that are already pointy, the difference in drag losses is easily out weighed by the extra mass a fairing brings. Some payloads scream Fairing! Some payloads do better without. You really have to take it on a case by case basis.

I think I saw his out takes from that video. I think he spent a LONG time running at the wall, jumping and trying to trip over the edge.

Do the math. What is the mass of your ship, what's your ships TWR? So if you figure that out, you can easily see why it takes 15 minutes to execute this burn. But simply, your ship is WAY underpowered. Correct? Yes, the game is functioning correctly. Normal? No, but that's on your end. The mass of a ship does matter, weight has no bearing on a ship until it is resting on the ground. His TWR would have taken ~4.2 hours to complete your burn....... I don't call that normal, that's underpowered.

Aside from the fact that kerbals have 0 skills inherently, and are allowed to do things based only on their level, I like the idea. Especially since I play with Final Frontier, this would really allow me to customize my kerbals.

Heh... I remember reading this thread the first time around.... Good find necro'er!

I believe you are right. I think that offered expired a few years ago. I actually see not having KSP on steam being a good thing. I really don't want to know how many hours I've put into it over the last 6 years.

Ha! Made it! Now I can go back to being an evil grumpy curmudgeon. Cause dang it, I just made it here... that would literally be another 20 years at the pace I gain rep. Took this account 5 years (almost to the day!) to gain 1k. I don't think I'll live to see 5k. Unless I start modding. Holy crap.... I've been playing KSP for 6 years now.... Sigh....

Careful, there's another addiction that can get out of hand :). I built a motion activated, programmable thermostat for my workshop/garage, finally got it working how I wanted it to, then sold the house a month later.

I'm looking for a mod that will EVA everybody on a ship, and then bring them back in. I'm running a series of 'training flights', landing on the Mun, and then Minmus. I usually take 6-10 kerbals at a time, and it's a real pain to get them all out onto the surface, and then back into the ship. Ideally, they'd all be EVA'd to the surface of landed vessel, in a nice little group. I can then plant a flag, so they all get the XP, and then back on board and off we go. So, it would EVA everybody from a landed vehicle, to say 10m from the craft. And then clicking the button again would bring everybody within say 25m, back onto the craft. I'm not even sure if it's possible given the way KSP works, but I'll throw that it there and see what I can get. I'm tempted to try using the Ejection seat mod, but I'm not sure if the ejection force on Minmus would cause more problems than it's worth, with a half dozen kerbals scattered 2km around the ship.

WHOOPS! LOL! Appreciate the rapid response LGG, so get to this when you can, no rush.

It's a 7 engine monoprop cluster from the Near Future Mod pack. I've kinda fallen in love with the monoprop engines from NF for most everything within kerbin's SOI (except launches), it tends to help simplify ship building. I plop one large tank on the craft and it fuels everything. Yes, I know I'm giving up a touch of efficiency in some cases, but the trade off for simplicity and reduced part count is worth it. So yeah, that's a 3.75m mono tank with a tweakscaled 2.5m monoprop engine. There is a really nice 3.75m mono engine in the pack, but it's too tall for this application. I needed the base of the engine to stay clear of the ground as the station started to fall, else it might act as a pivot and the station might not come down square.

Well, when all else fails, hit it with a Hammer. They tried that on Apollo 12 to get their camera to work, but with less success.

Yes, sort of. The initial concepts for KSP were drag and drop construction of rockets, and to see how high you could get them. The 'rigid body' design is just a side effect of how the game was initially designed. Which was by a couple of brothers who didn't have a lot of programming experience, and they really didn't have a long term plan set out when they started us down this road of insanity.

If you haven't upgraded the tracking station yet, this should be your first step. Check the tutorials section for some really good info on CommNet. That will explain a lot of the jargon and math.

Ya know, I appreciate the humor, but sometimes rocket scientists just need to be locked in a room and let them work without any out side access to pop-culture. Very interesting stuff. Those are words I never want to see associated with a nuclear reactor. We've been there, done that, so sorry Northern Ukraine. But I understand they were (HOPEFULLY) staying within safety limits. Oh god... the more I read, the scarier it gets...

Daaahhh.... I was hoping, since this was in the S&SF sub forum, that somebody was actually building a Firefly freighter.....

@Skyrocket, this may be the cause. Go through your vessel and turn off all the autostruts, then try undocking.

Apparently not. 1.1.6 for KSP 1.3.1. Yeah, but I like having the crew selected for me based on some criteria. Otherwise I've found myself playing favorites for no apparent reason. Guess I'm just bitter like that.

Not sure what you mean there. If you imagine the first section I undocked in the post as the "target Station", the Tug and payload dock with the station, and then the tug undocks and deorbits (either burning up or being recovered. As mentioned With Stage recovery, I deorbit probes likes this whene ever I feel like, and SR will handle all the recovery for me, in the background). Or do you mean the Ground base I was building? glad you asked! I do the land, tip, pucker, and pray method. I have screen shots for the What did you do today thread, but I never posted them. So here ya go: Base in flight (or pre landing, or perhaps at landing, hard to tell): Base after tipping over: Ok, so let me break it down for you. You can see the two Hab modules pointing towards and away from you in both pics. Those were launched and docked using the exact same launcher from the previous post (I literally just brought up that save to do that post). The core of the base, (the Science Lab, the 4 way Hub, and un-opened greenhouse), were launched as one piece (since it's long and pointy), and the Engine module was launched with it attached. I built the base in total, with the engine module so I could get good Dv info for planning. That module is the minmus transfer stage and landing stage in one. Notice it has solar panels for use in flight since the base panels only point "up". It's also heavy on the RCS for control, but there is no probe core on it, that's part of the base itself. Landing is done vertically, as shown in the first pic. But if you notice, the engine module only has legs on one side of it. The 'dorsal' set of legs is set lower then the 'lateral' set of legs, so upon landing, the whole contraption will immediately start to tip over, with the base legs pointing down. I have (unseen) RCS blocks way out on the 'nose' of the base, so I can thrust those if needed to ease the base down. Because I play with "No persistent Debris" setting on, after decoupling the engine module, and switch vessels, the engine module will have disappeared. But you can easily use the KOnstruction rovers to build something to haul it away. Minimum frame rate? As low as you can handle. I giggle with glee when my clock turns green, but it's usually yellow, sometimes red. And that's just for normal launches. I use mechjeb to do a lot of the routine work like rendezvous and docking just because the low frame rate makes it very slow. But I'm not the one to ask about this, I play on minimum settings and I'm happy when my load time is under 15 minutes. I've had times with Huge ships docking with each other where my frame rate was measured in seconds per frame.

Oh... never thought of that. I'll keep that in my back pocket. But me and KIS aren't the best of friends at times. I've accidentally detached huge single parts from my stations while trying to add small parts.

My suggestion would be to have an option to ignore changes at all, and if the vessel's save name doesn't change, the numbering won't reset. This would be a toggle with the Block numbering system, as they would have to be mutually exclusive. This made me laugh. Thank you sir(?), you are the best. Have some snacks to go along with the likes.