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OK interesting subject and I made a related post about this in another thread FYI. Personally I dont use Mechjeb which is less empirical so I will be interested to see what you find. From what you said about your direct descent though... ...it sounds like you throttled down at 10km to keep the speed up? If this is the case then the burn began too early which if true would mean it could be done more efficiently by delaying the burn to the last possible moment so you are doing 100% burn from start of deceleration until <1000m (depending on terrain altitude). FYI

Be kind to Kerbals! They may not be alive but they represent life. Its bad Karma to be careless with living things. Ommm....

Yes it does, the tin can still has live Kerbals in it, that\'s a successful landing! The return journey might prove a little tricky... btw it looks like your lander legs might be too high up, so the craft would probably end up landing on its engine.

Actually, my sincere apologies to Don Lorenzo and everyone else.... I do believe I was wrong. Mea culpa. Here is my explanation. There is a more efficient way to land which involves angled descent, but it is quite tricky to fly unless your craft has good manoevurability. For large craft with low turning speed it is not going to be easy to do and for these the long drop is easier to fly and is only slightly less efficient. As khyron42 said, when I said a long drop was most efficient I was thinking about efficiency of a long drop over a two stage drop (which is what most of my angled descents turn into). As a basic piloting principle helpful for the hard of landing this remains true, see top spoiler. But the expert angled descent does seem to be more efficient than the long drop.... see below and bottom spoiler. METHOD : I delivered a lander vehicle with full tanks into various orbits using a previous stage which was discarded at the beginning of each experiment, then a quicksave using F5 was made and both landings were run from the same start orbit shown in the screeny by using F9 to reload it. Then I compared remaining fuel on landing graphically. It is not entirely empirical because it depends on my landing skills but if I am biased I still managed to prove myself wrong so its a pretty ineffectual kind of bias! In both cases I had 5 pixels more fuel left after dropping from AP than from PE. Screen resolution 1920x1080. I tried two lunar orbit scenarios. One was AP 2,081,860m PE 841,443m Second was AP 2,081,860m PE 14,240m You can see from the images the kind of split I was going for, I landed from AP and from PE in both cases, this is not quite the same as an angled descent. The comparison box compares the top fuel bar from a landed screenshot. experiment one AP 2,097,983m PE 841,443m experiment two AP 2,081,860m PE 14,240m My last experiment showed me that Don Lorenzo is right that the long drop is not the very most efficient method because you can save a small amount of fuel by not removing the lateral velocity at all (and not dropping vertically) as long as you start from an orbit which will meet the planet at about <45° angle at a location 90° prograde from the comparison point (where the vertical drop would start and end) and you leave the deceleration burn to the last possible moment and successfully cancel lateral and vertical velocity more or less simultaneously. IMHO You get two advantages from this, one you dont waste fuel removing orbital velocity at the start and the velocity you dont remove is also subtracted from the downward velocity at the point you \'touch\' down so you double its value. Second advantage is that you can begin your burn at a lower altitude for a given speed because the angle means you have smaller vertical component, this requires exacting piloting but it is possible to realise the benefits of these advantages with real fuel savings see bottom spoiler. You have one disadvantage which is you are dropping for longer but the advantages seem to win. I don\'t know the math but I ran some experiments today. In this experiment I compared a straight drop from approximately AP to an angled drop as shown. I started both approaches from the same game save ran each a few times and picked the best result for each. The best angled approach landed with 2 pixels more fuel than my best straight drop and it was not a fluke as other pairs of results showed similar but smaller gains. experiment three AP 2,112,864m PE <0m Would be good if someone with more math skill could analyse this. If I did my second two stage drop (top spoiler) properly it shows dropping from a PE of 14km was not as efficient as dropping from AP. So the angled drop has a very narrow window of optimum efficiency. Would be good to be able to predict what this window is from theory

Thanks GroundHOG-2010, yes, look, the sea surface is clearly dimpled with some kind of shiney bump map. It was much easier to gauge the distance between craft and surface then. Its not quite as blue as I remember (I must have been wearing azure tinted spectacles jk) but it is less chequered, though that is not entirely absent.

From the mouths of babes and TV presenters...

DonLorenzo, dear fellow, there is only one angle of approach, straight down. Its most efficient to take all lateral movement off at a high altitude by lateral thrust parallel to the horizon, this give you lots of time to get it right (see map view) and wastes no fuel as lateral velocity will not increase due to gravity. If you get lateral drift to near zero and allow the ship to fall as fast as possible to the surface and burn at the last moment you spend as little time as possible hovering and wasting fuel fighting gravity and you get straight into the fine adjustments for landing ASAP. It may seem counterintuitive but the faster you approach the less time you are accelerating so the less fuel you use. The later you leave the vertical component of deceleration the more fuel efficient the landing.

Any chance GroundHOG-2010 you could put up screenies of the v9 ocean, near and far views ? I seem to remember it was bluer. IMHO the current sea is not as pretty as 9 was. I made a suggestion about it.

There is an easy way to guesstimate the altitude to start your deceleration burn which I use. You simply do a test burn at max speed eg take 50m/s off the descent speed at 650m/s and see how much altitude you lose while doing it. Multiply this up for the total remaining speed add one for luck (ie 1x 50) and then halve it. eg if it takes 4000m to reduce speed by 50m/s then you will need to start your burn if you are travelling at 600m/s at ... 600m/s ÷ 50m/s = 12 12 + 1 = 13 13 ÷ 2 = 6.5 6.5 x 4000m = 26,000m approx

Do you know about using RCS with the translate keys? They push it sideways instead of turning the ship, they should be able to adjust for sideways motion, if you have the ship vertical in the first place.

OK I get it now, drum n base is a thing.... lol sorry. So its drum n base with synth some reverb (?) and the spoken bits, could you call that dub?

Hows it lookin\' down there amigos? ;D

togfox, glad you found it interesting, the staging is more usable in 14.4 btw. That design took a bit of R&D. First was the minimum second shot craft, tried a few but settled for a 3 stack, having been convinced by the winning 3 stack design from dashcunning in the 'Smallest craft for munar landing and back'. Then I had to make that thing float upright when landed in water and developed the upper part of the first Kerbin lander stage with floats and chutes based on experiences in the 'To the other hemisphere and back' challenge. From there it was improvisation and ended up looking a bit like a flying patio. The vid shows how decoupled parts hang on to the model in strange places after a reload. If I was a perfectionist I would have played it through without reload and only used shots with pristine craft but then you would expect parts hanging off a ship which just exploded... a bit..! Thanks RedDwarfIV, OtherDalfite, madmat & Zephram Kerman, glad you liked it. The other thing about the music is the lyric/quote/hook which says 'we would like to show our appreciation, for your support' which I thought was an appropriate way to say thanks to Squad . Only thing is I cannot work out where that quote comes from, usually that kind of thing is from a movie, can anyone identify it ?

Thanks Iapedus. The music is pacey, definitely grew on me. I am thinking the beat is a fast reggae/ska, so not garage nor techno, am wondering if it has a name. Its pretty cool anyway 8) though relentless, morning music not evening music. Reminds me of fatboy slim a little in that it has rhythm and a sense of humour about it. I like the underlying creepy Hollywood alien vibe, which kind of fits given that our ships are piloted by little green men. IMHO the reggae beat gives it a 60\'s 2-tone association which keys into the era of UFO paranoias and public fantasies of official coverups re: aliens visiting Earth. So it felt like an amusing thing to put alongside KSP anyway since music does make vids more enjoyable. I hope you folks don\'t mind the ads btw, it wasnt monetised by me, this is how google make their revenue stream from facillitating the mixing of third party music & video! I don\'t get a choice in the matter nor do I see any profit, its just for fun as far as I am concerned... Here\'s the craft file in case anyone is curious.

Here is a KSP mission report remixed with an amusing music track in 'YouTube video editor', for your enjoyment. Your challenge dear listener is to tell me which genre this beat belongs to ? http://youtu.be/lHLRea0RAmQ The original vid (CCL) is available without music here... http://youtu.be/sPJYljAaomQ

Here is a stock ship doing the mission. I took some liberties with making the video, mixing footage from a couple of attempts only one of which was actually completed. So the video does not show the initial Kerbin orbit which lead to the successful completion by conserving enough fuel to make it possible. The straight climb shown used too much fuel because this craft initially has a thrust to weight ratio on the low side. But it does show how the craft stages to good effect and keep the vid short (6 mins) as there is a lot to pack in. I used making this vid as an opportunity to try a trial version of Cyberlink PowerDirector and so please forgive the 5 seconds of intrusive water mark at the beginning and my tinkering with gratuitous transitions and some crude animation. I made and uploaded it as an 1080p HD MPEG4 to see how that worked as well, so at least HD is available. Enjoy! http://youtu.be/sPJYljAaomQ

Exactly and why wouldnt they be? If the devs do develope new navigation and control modes surely they can add to existing modes and not replace them, so noone loses, everyone is happy, what could possibly go wrong with that ?

Personally I am not a fan of warp drive because I dont think physics will ever allow it in reality. I would prefer the skip ahead in the flght path method which HarvesteR mentioned was planned. However I can think of nothing finer than arriving in an unexplored star system with a colony ship, defrosting a few Kerbals and prospecting for locations and materials necessary to fuel, service and build a spaceship factory.

The final piece of the jigsaw for me was understanding that the navball attitude gradations are the frame of reference. So 90° is always east for example and prograde on the ecliptic, that is how I navigate to Mün orbit today, just steer east and check the map for Mün location and burn for apoapsis 60° ahead of the Mün. Locking camera to craft would IMHO work for space/air planes and carts in atmospheres or on or close to terrain but not rockets navigating the ecliptic so much where,like you say, I want the freedom of movement to look from any point of view, especially directly from behind to see where the ship is pointed / going. Stopping the camera at that point and also the view from directly ahead just doesnt work for me.

I am wondering if unity can scale that much, or whether it is going to run into limits and will have to make sneaky transitions between star SOIs?

I get where you are coming from Ydoow and agree. I had a couple of ideas. We were trying to figure out how to make it easier to steer a KSP rocket. I was thinking red+green navigation lights would be good. Then I thought perhaps you could exaggerate that kind of visual cue using an HUD overlay showing translucent circles drawn around the ship, outer circle indicating frame of reference ie compass points and horizon/ecliptic, inner circles showing ship orientation, in effect turning the ship into a navball. If you took that a step further you could try locking the WASD controls relative to the outer circle representing the frame of reference so no matter how much your rocket spins, when you press D in the atmosphere it steers east. Then you would be free to move your camera, but you would need two more keys for up and down, at which point imho use number pad instead of WASD. If you fix WASD to the camera on the other hand it might work but you would have to move the camera to operate the ship, when it was aligned parallel to the screen you would need to shift your POV 90° unless you had those two extra keys again, in this context for in and out of screen, just thinking out loud there.

I think the OP makes a good point, it is hard to relate the keyboard commands to the 3rd person model. Personally I do notice this difficulty too and I don\'t think we are alone so I think it is going to help KSP if we think about it instead of just deny it. I note there are some individuals who have the hang of the navball who are all too ready to put the slap down on people remarking about this issue but I think that is childish and I dont think they are doing anyone any favours. However it is also true that once you get the hang of it you can fly with the navball, it is a tricky learning curve/crevass crossing. FYI I made the adjustment by switching the W-S keys so that when I fly by nav ball the keys do to the navball display what their layout suggests. The W key is always up and the S key is always down, A is left and D is right on my PC, moving the inclination marker relative to the nav ball. It seems insane to me to attempt to fly the ship as though an aircraft in third person (by retaining default W-S setting) when you can only truely coordinate the craft using the navball. Currently the capsule windows are the only visual cue we have regarding the orientation of the craft. Space planes would be different because the assymetry of the wings would indicate the craft axese but these are all but invisible for a stock rocket. One thought I had was that it might help if the craft could be given red-green convention navigation lights.

I do agree the orbit lines fading out doesnt help navigation, would be better if they didn\'t fade at all, ever, at any zoom, in map view.

Randox, fyi no disrespect to CS but today that mixer is effective and cheap but is entry level technology, I believe the Russians, with state funding, moved that design on to a more efficient pressurised premixer, with great success, though the principle is very dangerous unless engineered well because if you dont keep the flow rate up and flush it on shut down the fuel can ignite in the premixer and blow it up. More recent 2006 ('Integrated Powerhead') mixing solution mentioned here, from Pratt and Whitney Rocketdyne, Inc. and Aerojet under NASA.

hoopla! The terrain in this shot is a bit of a clue, consider the floor. I first found it by guesstimating from the shadow assuming a standard start (having already eliminated all other possibilities on the equator in fact) and then the shape of the crater wall helped confirm when I arrived that it was worth looking harder and helped locate the likely position. Not a dead cert to find even if you are in the right crater but fairly obvious if you think about it from a prehistoric perspective, since we dont have magnetic signatures in KSP...