lewisd

Given the primitiveness of the aerodynamic stuff in KSP, I always assumed that was just a function of center of mass and center of drag being different. I wouldn't think with something as light as a nosecone that would have much effect at all, but I could be wrong. I wish I was going to be home after work tonight to play with 0.22, but alas, I have plans.

Has anyone had a chance to test this or try it out at all? Any idea how exactly that works? The release notes are the first I heard of this change.

I'm glad someone did

You're absolutely right. Apoapsis is where I burned. I always get those terms backwords.

Cool, I'll check those both out. Thanks

Are there any mods out there that contain a variety of stock-alike engines and tanks that are "tiny" diameter, like the Oscar-B tank? I'm thinking of things like an engine with a thrust that sits between the LV-1/LV-1R (ant) at 1.5 kN, and the 24-77/48-7S. And fuel tanks with the same diameter but longer length than the Oscar-B.

I know I've said it before, but after my playing KSP last night, it bears repeating: Temstar, I love your rockets! I've been using them for more than just lifting to LKO. I'm building a station in keosynchronous orbit, and I've been using the larger ones to get station parts out there, with the last stage of the Zenith lifter getting me part way from LKO to KSO. Yesterday, after lifting something to orbit, I realized that the space between LKO and KSO was getting a bit littered with discarded boosters. Of course, because of the way I've been using them, they were all out of fuel. Bipropellant fuel, at least... As it turns out, every single booster left in space had enough monopropellant to use a long (couple minutes) RCS burn at periapsis to put them in a lithobraking orbit. So, as I said: I love your rockets!

Oh my god! Kerbals can repack chutes?! I only found out about fixing flats recently, but now this adds a whole new dimension to exploring Duna and Eve and and and OMG!

Yeah, but according to the chart I'm looking at, you need 800m/s delta v to go from KSO to LKO, plus a bit more then to get into the atmosphere, and then another 800m/s to get the tug back into KSO. The bit to get the tug back is going to be less significant, since it only needs to move the mass of the tug, not the mass of the other vessel as well. I don't have KSP in front of me here to see what kind of vehicle that would take, or even check the mass of the vessel that needs to be deorbited. It's got 14 FL-T800s, 4 of which are empty, and 7 LV-N engines. Those would be the bulk of the weight, so some quick math works it out to about 63 tons. But, I can use the fuel in it's tanks for the deorbit maneuver, so it wouldn't actually take any fuel from my tug, in this scenario.

I thought about sending up a dedicated power module like that to rescue the ship that's in the eccentric orbit, but I need a tug at the station anyway, so I'm going to try to kill two birds with one stone. That said... I'm not sure that any reasonable tug will be able to deorbit something from KSO, and return to the station, so on second thought... maybe the tug needs to take a dedicated power module to the stranded ship, and let it deal with deorbiting itself. I thought engines provided electrical power when they were running, but I guess that's not the case? (The stranded ship's power was going down rapidly even while the engines were running.)

I've been making it a habit for a while to make sure I always have at least one of those on my vessel, but sometimes I forget what's a "vessel". For example, the station core I launched has two of them, but the "ship" I was returning to Kerbin didn't have one. The rover (that Jeb rolled, driving like an idiot) had one. Actually, if the crash hadn't destroyed it, I might have had enough SAS power to roll it back onto it's wheels, and saved Jeb the walk. I need to remember to apply my checklist to all the stages that are standalone vessels.

I've had two missions recently that went a little bit off the rails because I've forgotten all about supplying electrical power to certain parts of the spacecraft. The first one was my first Kerbed mission to Duna. I got Jeb into orbit around Duna, the decoupled his rover+lander from the return craft, and descended to the surface, enabling the SAS on the return craft before I left. The mission on the surface went almost to spec, except that Jeb rolled the rover, and had to walk back to the rocket. The liftoff went well, got into a stable orbit, and was a couple km from rendezvousing with the return craft. I switched to the return craft to point it's docking port towards Jeb... and couldn't. I hadn't given it any RTG or solar panels, and the SAS had drained the battery. Despite this, Jeb managed to dock, with fuel remaining, and got home in one piece. You'd think that after that, I'd learn my lesson, but no, that's not the Kerbal way. Last night, I started assembling a space station (using FusTek and Infernal Robotics parts) in keosynchronous orbit. I got my core module up there, *with* plenty of solar power, and some RTG for backup. Once it was in a nice stable orbit, I detached the rocket, turned back towards Kerbin to put a bit of distance between me and the station before my retrograde burn... and promptly ran out of power. So now it's in a very slightly eccentric orbit, that intersects with KSO, so it's only a matter of time before it blows back into the station, blowing Jeb and Bob to kingdom come. This means I'll have to accelerate my plans to get a tug up there. Maybe it's time I printed out the checklist I've already made, and kept it beside my computer. With "electricity" highlighted.

That's the bit I missed. I thought they were just cosmeticly different.

EDIT: figured it out. Was using the "fuselage shroud" instead of the "side fairing". I can't get these fairings to separate, no matter what I try. I'm just stumped. The imgur gallery says to make sure it's staged properly, but the fairing bases aren't adding any part to be staged. I've tried putting a decoupler above or below the fairing base, but that doesn't seem to help any. I really don't know what I'm missing.

I was just actually mulling over some ideas for something like this. It's probably possible to mount a small motor or two (a couple ants?) pointing sideways, off the front bumper of the rover, and use those to slow down the "tiping over". Of course, if it's a manned rover, you'll still need a return to orbit vehicle of some sort... Maybe have that on the very top, and after landing the rover+return vehicle, separate the return vehicle and land it close by?

I don't know what fixed it, whether it was unplugging the joystick, or, I think more likely, making sure my center of thrust is vertically aligned with my center of mass, but I'm having a bit more luck with planes. Thanks for all the advice.

I just started using this trick. Works great. Straight out of the Dam Busters WWII mission.

I'm really curious about something. Why do you use large stacks of the middle sized fuel tank, instead of the larger orange tank? What you're doing has a higher part count, so I assume there's some benefit that outweighs that?

Cool! What are you using to do that? I have an xbox 360 wireless steering wheel I want to use on my PC, but couldn't find something that would let me.

Damn, that's frustrating. I got a joystick for the sole purpose of making the planes in KSP easier to fly. Oh well. I'll see if unplugging it (and rebooting) helps any. Thanks.

Is it possible to get vessel mass using Telemachus? I've been developing an "ascent simulator" tool, that's able to generate graphs similar to those of Telemachus, but from outside KSP, by simulating an ascent. However, my results are still a tiny bit different than what KSP does. You see, I wrote a simple tool that makes HTTP requests to Telemachus, and dumps the data into a text file. Kind of a roll-your-own data logger, using Telemachus. I've been comparing the altitude from that with the altitude from my simulator, and found that mine is slightly off. It would be great if Telemachus could tell me the mass as well, so I can see if I'm simulating fuel burn rate properly, and if maybe that's the reason my results are slightly off.

Killed my entire 32 kerbal colony on the Mun by accident. I wanted screenshots for this thread, but I'm at work, and KSP is at home. I realized that if all I wanted was screenshots, not to actually play KSP, I could probably use the "LogMeIn" app on my phone to connect to my home machine, start up KSP, and get the screenshots I need using the phone's built-in screenshot functionality. Great plan, right? I went to the space center, switched to my colony and... WHY IS IT TAKING OFF? NOOOOOOooooooo.... this is going to end badly. I forgot that I have a joystick plugged in at home... and that I left the throttle on the joystick set to max, from when I was testing a jet last night. Since the colony has an engine, with fuel left still, and I hadn't deactivated the engine, it took off, without SAS, without arrow keys to control it, and with the graphics streaming sssslllloooowwwlllllyyyy over the internet to my phone. And the LogMeIn app has no escape key, so I couldn't even bring up the menu to pause, and deal with it later, attempting to land it.

That really puzzles me, because everything on the plane was either added as a single unit along the centerline, with "snap angles" on, or with symmetry. Hmm, that is interesting indeed. I *do* have a joystick hooked up, but I assumed the center dead zone would prevent this sort of thing from happening. Any idea why that wouldn't be the case? Does KSP not configure any deadzone by default? Is there a way to configure a dead zone?

Neat, I'll give that a try. I haven't looked closely at MechJeb's SASS, but it sounds like I should. Oh, I forgot to mention, I did try that. It sort of worked to control the roll. I say "sort of" because I was able to slow down the roll, but not stop it completely. As for pitch, no matter how much trim I tried to apply, the plane would still always slowly pitch up. I'm not sure why the trim didn't help.

Not in my case. It keeps increasing the pitch until the plane is going straight up. (Now that I think about it, I have a probe core [this plane is unmanned {unkerbed?}] as well, so that's another set of reaction wheels I forgot I had, bringing the total to 3. Way more than I should need.) Interesting, I didn't really think about that. I was so focused on making sure the center of mass and center of lift were appropriately aligned, that I didn't even think about the thrust. I bet the RTG, solar panels, and tail fin, that are all on top of the plane, are raising the center of mass just enough that the thrusters are below it, making the plane want to pitch up, as it's doing. That's interesting too. I'll see about giving that a try, but I think making sure the thrust is alligned vertically with the center of mass is probably the best place to start. Thanks a lot for the great tips!