kurja

What Steven said. What did you think that deceleration due to aerodynamic drag is doing to your speed? Not changing it? Also, you didn't mean to seriously suggest that your speed actually changes when the navball changes modes?!?

your horizontal surface speed is not zero. Try landing that way...

Now you're just changing the facts... if you're going 2m/s and the conveyor is going 0.5 in the same direction you are moving faster than the conveyor, not the other way round. Your relative velocity is 1.5 m/s, and that is how much you need to change your speed. When the conveyor moves to the opposite direction, it's 2 + 0.5 = 2.5 m/s, which is again how much you need to change your speed. 1.5 does not equal 2.5. As for your second version here, if conveyor moves at 2.5 and you're moving at 2, then your relative speed is .5 (and that's how much you need to change it). BUT if it's moving at the same speed in the other direction your relative speed is 4.5 which obviously is not the same.

No. I have to use 1050 m/s dv for one and 950 m/s dv for the other.

No. 2 = (2 + 0.5) - 0.5, like it says there, equals two which is not zero

Atmosphere would rotate at the same speed as the surface, so if you already had 0 surface speed upon re-entry, nothing would happen, right? I suppose if you made the orbital speed zero, then entered atmosphere, we should see horizontal acceleration from drag..? Maybe.

Questions? Yes. Why won't your example actually work? In your example, you have cherry picked unrealistic values to give the result you want - when does anyone approach a planet at orbital speed lower than the planet's rotation? Try flying at 1000 m/s with conveyors moving at 50 m/s: your relative velocity to one is 1050 and 950 to the other. Different delta vees needed to come to a halt, you see. (edit: also, in your example, if your relative velocities are 2.5 and 1.5 like you said, those are the amounts by which you need to change your speed to come to zero, not 0.5 or -0.5..)

Which is funny because I just contradicted your claim. Surface speeds are different for clockwise and counterclockwise orbits. Just accept it. Or better yet, try it yourself and see how it is. Just get two crafts on opposite orbits with same altitude and thus orbital speed, then check their surface speeds. Are they the same? No, they're not. Unless you're saying that horizontal surface speed does not matter when landing? Forget newton, forget friction, just look at the surface speeds.

As a simplified analogy, let's say you're a bird flying in calm weather at air speed of 2m/s. Below you, there are two conveyors both moving 0.5m/s (relative to the ground), one in same direction as you and the other in the opposite direction. So your relative speed to one of the conveyors is 1.5m/s and 2.5m/s to the other. Do you need to slow your horizontal speed more or less to land on one of the conveyors? Or if you make your air speed (analogous to orbital speed, here) zero, what is your speed relative to the conveyors, can you land softly on either? I hear linking to wiki articles makes me more right so here's one

See bolded part of quote. That velocity to the ground is different depending on your direction. In your example the orbital speed of 1km/s at a given altitude is the same regardless of direction, but if you nullify it, that does not make your horizontal surface speed zero which has everything to do with landing. No point in arguing I guess, I'll do a test this evening when I get home...

erm, I disagree. You are correct in that the orbital speed is the same at a given altitude regardless of which way you're going, but the surface speed is not, and that's what you need to negate when landing. Like you said yourself, "orbital speed in relation to a point on the surface would be greater if you were going opposite of the planet's rotation" - it is exactly that relative speed that needs to go to zero when landing, and to make that larger change in speed more fuel needs to be used than if you orbited along the planet's rotation.

might work a little different depending on your keyboard and operating system, but there's no need to memorize ascii or unicode numbers. that being said, people who don't use accents, umlauts or "special symbols" in their own language can't be expected to use them correctly, everyone should relax about it...

you do need to spend more fuel on powered landing if your orbit is opposite to the planet's rotation

I like that idea but for some reason the mod doesn't seem to work for me :^/

Tried that, couldn't make it happen... it's an eve lander, lifting it from Kerbin without using any of it's fuel isn't easy and requires a lifter so large that laaaag.

Hi, I'm having a problem with this mod; initially, clicking on the icon to bring up the window, it had that teeny icon on the bottom right corner, presumably to make the window larger and I clicked it - now the window appears to have become infinitely large, I can drag it left all day but I never get to the right edge. And it seems to me I can't actually make any fuel transfers. Or close that huge window. Here's a screenshot: edit - apparently this is known bug when playing in linux

Yes, that's exactly how it's taking half of forever when there are dozens of tanks to transfer fuel to. Do you know of a more convenient method? thanks, I'll take a look at that

I've put together a large craft in orbit and now I need to refuel the thing so I can go anywhere with it, and it's taking ages to do because I have dozens of fuel tanks in there... Is there a convenient method, by a mod or otherwise, for transferring fuel between docked crafts? Like, transfer all resources from a craft through a docking port to any and all tanks on the other side of the port...?

Jool lower atmosphere and surface missions. Eve surface missions, unless you're able to ascent from there without it being a massive chore. Low solar orbit missions. And the amount of science available in the game is much more than you need for the entire tech tree, so you might want to play a couple missions a bit easier - with probes, much lighter and easier to fly.

I'm pretty sure there are no flags in the demo version

hm what if you have a full hitchhiker module and go IVA?

reported science points are wrong for some science parts, like the accelerometer.

set up a maneuver node for normal/antinormal dv, align to the blue marker and you're all set regardless of your inclination?

I trying my first Eve return, could you share that ascent craft for a closer look?

you can also click on the pod to view all stored experiments, and transmit form there