dagothar

Age of Wonders 1 I loved the feeling and the soundtrack was superb too.

Ha, these are the guys from my university They did a really good job. I wouldn't say the rover is (yet) spaceworthy, but for sure it's a great start.

Soviets did have something like this - it was called Fractional Orbit Bombardment System: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_Orbital_Bombardment_System Basically, missile would achieve LEO, coast along, then deorbit over the target.

CoM is not the same as the CoG if the gravity field is not uniform. I believe it's CoM you really want.

If the mission were doomed, they planned to shut down communication. The president already had a speech prepared for that case: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2193732/President-Nixon-The-moving-speech-delivered-Apollo-11-astronauts-return.html In one review, when asked how he would spend his last minutes knowing that he would be stranded on the Moon, Aldrin said that he'd try to fix the engine to the end.

Have you seen the genre? 'Futuristic combat sims'.

Pretty much at first try (a couple of figuring-game-out trials before). I had already a good grasp on rocketry and orbital mechanics from playing Orbiter and reading a lot on subject before

This is pretty interesting, I haven't yet got to editing part configurations and didn't realize you can adjust PID gains. I'd really need to read in on how it was implemented in KSP. http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/SAS seems to say the input is angular velocity and not momentum.

I usually start maneuvers at half time of calculated burn before the node (ie. if burn is supposed to take 1 minute, I start at 30s before the node), unless dv is small - then I don't use full thrust and start at ~-5s, or use RCS. It all also depends on what situation are you in, as sometimes there is a plenty of time for corrections, and sometimes there isn't.

I get why we won't probably see n-body physics in KSP and I'm not going to press it it any way, but I don't agree that involved math is really that complex. Feynman shows in his books (although in really simple and probably not accurate enough way) how to do orbit calculations on a piece of paper. Hell, I did that at times when I was really bored. And I guess it could be optimised to a point of feasibility (for Lagrange points it would be probably enough to just solve 3 bodies problem - no biggie). Anyway, if it's closed, it's closed. I just wonder if there is a possibility of modding this in?

Wait, didn't Orbiter have n-body physics and still manage time warp and trajectory calculation?