Scarecrow88

For anyone in the UK who is too young to remember the old money, and is struggling to put a value on that ice lolly, 6d in old money is the equivalent of 2 1/2p in decimal currency terms.

It's never been of much use to be honest, as it doesn't have enough fuel to do anything more than buzz around the space centre for a couple of minutes.

I have done one with just the command seat, but decided to do one that looks more like a plane. Dimensions: 13 parts 3.4t H: 2.0m/1.7m wheels down/wheels up W: 3.8m L: 3.4m

On my relatively modest Duna lander I have a drogue chute set to pop at 2500m and a Mk16 set to open at 2000m. It's probably a bit on the conservative side but it gives me enough time to juggle the engine for the last few metres to ensure a safe touch down.

Just be aware that if you are going to use a chute at Duna to help slow your descent, the default deployment height of 500m isn't high enough due to Duna having a much thinner atmosphere than Kerbin.

For shorter burns, don't use nukes. It's quite easy to get to Duna (and back) without having to rely on nuke engines.

How can it be considered cheating if there is no competition involved? Each player is playing for himself, and I would suggest that you can't cheat yourself. Sure, if you are not comfortable with certain aspects of the game, there is nothing to say that you have to use or incorporate that aspect. To that end, some players may do things in their gameplay that you wouldn't be comfortable doing in yours but to call it cheating is a bit disingenuous.

Yep. Just look at RL missions from Earth, they take years as well. Space is HUGE and it takes a while to cross the distances involved, especially at the speeds we can currently attain with existing technology.

How do you control the engines? Are the rapiers set to change mode automatically, or do you change them manually? Also, do you have the jet engines on a key so that you can disengage them when required?

I still plan my landings on Mun along the basis of that video, but it's not quite possible to do it exactly like that anymore, ever since the Mun surface was re-modelled and it's nowhere near as flat as that now. If you try to follow that method exactly these days, you're more than likely going to run into the side of a hill before you slow down enough to actually land.

Not a true replica, more a 'in the style of', but it's easy to fly and I think it looks the part. All stock, apart from the lander can, which is a massive improvement in the looks department over the stock 2-man lander can. On the pad 1st stage jettison 2nd stage burn for LKO MEM fairing discarded MEM extracted and 2nd stage jettisoned MEM on Mun surface MEM ascent stage returning to Munar orbit MEM about to dock with CM Re-entry at Kerbin Nearly home

Interesting. I wonder how I turned it on in the first place?

I started in 0.19 apparently and still have all the download zip files between then and now, so can happily take a trip back down memory lane should I choose to do so. It is indeed interesting to see how things have changed over time.

Experiencing a strange graphics glitch when launching my Apollo style rocket, based around the main engines. As you can see in the attached image, there are some odd Kerbal colour rectangles, and the engines themselves together with the fairings they are attached to, are outlined with a kind of glow effect. Both effects disappear when I stage and discard this particular part of the rocket.

I agree that the optimal burn to align the orbits is at the ascending node, but by following the tutorial and doing it at the descending node just means that when you do your intersect burn, the rescue ship orbit needs to go higher than the stranded ship. Your closest intersection then becomes the point where the rescue ship crosses from being higher than the stranded ship, to being lower. Having said all that, I ran in to the same problem subsequently, in that the tutorial wouldn't progress beyond telling me to perform the intersect burn. I'm not sure if it thought I had missed a step, or if I didn't perform the burn quite to it's liking, but as a novice if I had got this far with the tutorial I would have been stuck. I didn't proceed with the tutorial beyond the actual docking, so can't comment on the staging and how you get everything back to the surface.

Sandbox only for me.

I've found that you need to seriously modify your ascent profile to get SSTOs to work in 1.0

Glad I found other people are having the multiple copies on toolbar issues with this mod, as I thought I was going nuts when it kept doing it to me. Be glad to see a fix, as this is one of the most useful mods out there.

Not really a regret, just something I've not got round to due to it probably being the most difficult mission in KSP, and that's a manned return mission to Eve.

My Saturn V style rocket works fine, but I use a non-stock lander can purely because it looks way better than the stock 2-man lander can, so I won't post it here.

Just logged in to download the 1.0.1 patch, and it's offering me 1.0.2, or is that just a difference between Steam and the Kerbal store?

Same problem on my SSTO. I did manage to get it to orbit without overheating the tail piece eventually, but it needed quite a change to the flight profile to do so.

Just a small bump as the craft file has been updated so that it downloads the 1.0 compatible version.

My small test craft used to work out what changes are required to design and flight profile to get to orbit.

Seems to me that getting a spaceplane SSTO to orbit now just needs a different flight profile from what we have been previously used to. I've found that staying in the lower atmosphere (10k - 15k) whilst trying to build up speed results in overheating and big explosions. Trying to build up speed much above 18k or so means the engines are running out of oomph and you can actually start slowing down. My successful flights to orbit so far have built up most of the speed on jets between 15k and 18k. I've also found that the Rapier engine, if left in auto switching mode, tends to switch to closed cycle a little early.