strongest_2hu

If you have the fuel and engines for a stop-and-drop, couldn't you just aerobrake to a powered landing? I don't see the point of landing with parachutes if you're still going to waste all that fuel by stopping your motion about the planet first.

Which doesn't matter at all in terms of being deleted when the game unloads it in atmosphere.

Duna is the easiest atmospheric planet to return from. The gravity is weak and the atmosphere is thin.

The spambots are learning.

This is because you attached the docking ports to each other in the VAB, then attached the quadcoupler to the ports. This resulted in only one port being attached to both the quadcoupler and its opposing port while the rest were only connected to their opposing ports. If you want to use a tri- or quad-coupler setup (no reason for that now that we have big docking ports) you have to connect the docking ports to the quadcoupler first then attach the whole thing to the other set of docking ports.

It's been mentioned with rocket engines, but I'd like to confirm that it happens with jet engines as well: my flamed-out jet engines won't restart and the intakeair value showing in the resource tab goes nuts, blinking from almost empty to full to with flow values ranging from 0.00 to -30. Engines which were not activated at the time of the loss of intake air (such as action-grouping the intakes off before staging an engine) are not affected, but apparently the flame-out sparks are welding the turbine blades to the engine wall because once that happens the engine is dead. To reproduce: launch a craft with jet engines. Run the engines. Close the intakes. Re-open the intakes. Jet engine will not function. A trip to the space center then back to the craft will not reset it, unfortunately. I should note that I'm using a gob of mods but it looks like it's happening stock as well. Here's to hoping you can get this figured out, otherwise Mav and Goose are done for next time they fly through somebody's jetwash.

I've only ever noticed it when I load the craft or enter time warp with the legs extended, they seem safe if they're in the retracted position.

If you actually want perfect orbits for your GPS constellation orbit or whatever, orbits that won't ever get out of synch and cause you to lose coverage in places, your best bet is to edit your save file and then never load those craft from the space center or get within 2.25 km of them ever again, as they'll get thrown out of their perfect orbits when the physics loads.

When the connector locks into the winch (full retraction), the ships dock. So it doesn't really matter if you connect docked or undocked, if the goal is to hold the cargo in place it's going to get docked one way or another, and then gravity pulls it down through the floor. I had some luck with large payloads that were docked to the craft on one end by putting KAS radial attachment ports on the other end which I connected to winches installed in the cargo bay. Then I used the winches to haul the cargo up out of the floor and kept it (mostly) in place by leaving some tension on the cables. I was using it to airdrop large empty kethane tanks on Kerbin, and while the wobbling was significant it didn't cause any structural failures.

I don't understand the issues people have with taking the launchpad to other places. Can you get the cupola module to another planet? Then you can get a launchpad to another planet, it's only .5 tons more.

Did you even read the OP?

Having two landing gear in front (and two in back) is flirting with disaster in all but a few cases. In general, if you have more than three, you're gonna have a bad time.

Just hit ] as soon as you decouple, the skycrane can't go far in the time that takes and it even tends to go in a useful direction, up.

Because sometimes (most of the time?) your storage/conversion base is in orbit, and the drills just aren't quite long enough for that.

Nope. You can try riding Kerbin's orbit around the sun just in front or behind but it's somewhat difficult to get the speeds and altitudes exactly right, and lots of timewarp across a long savegame will result in the satellite falling out of position without occasional stationkeeping. You can orbit the sun slightly faster or slower than Kerbin (without ever getting grabbed by it) by being in an orbit which is fully inside or fully outside of Kerbin's orbit +/- its SOI, which is both obvious and not useful. The best way to use the two-body system we've got for fun and profit is probably to time-warp across the SOI change which might alter an encounter to your advantage.

That's the debug line in the "exlaunchpad" module for the launchpad part.cfg, right? It's set to false, which I can only imagine is default, and has never been touched by me. When the ship spawned there were violent explosions and everything that wasn't the ship either shot off into the distance or disintegrated, including the launchpad, leaving a perfectly intact vessel sitting on its docking clamps. Is it possible that when the launchpad is double-spawning one spawns properly and the other spawns completely full, and the one that wound up winning the clipping battle happened to be the full one?

To everybody who is building ion gliders, remember that you're probably getting as much (if not more) infiniglide thrust as ion thrust. If you take all the engine/electrical equipment off you can fly pretty well, forever. I know they're fun and we've all tried it, but it's pretty suspect to call it an effective use of ion engines when the control surfaces alone could send the craft to the upper atmosphere.

Today when I finally got a ship to spawn without exploding, it spawned with full fuel tanks even though I had no fuel connected in any way to the pad (I was testing the explody-ness of the ships and just had a pad with a rocketparts container that I filled with hyperedit). The rocketparts cost was around 8 tons as expected for the fuel-empty vessel, although the fully-fueled vessel weighed closer to 25 tons. Additionally, the staging didn't work and I had to decouple the clamps and light the engine by hand before buzzing around KSC. It sounds like you've got the exploding thing under control, I mainly wanted to let you know about the fuel thing (unless it's just me).

You have to be careful as it's pretty heavy, there's some limit to how light your craft can get before it becomes more efficient to use a lighter engine (there's a chart floating around somewhere). For big craft with lots of fuel it simply can't be beat.

You can see from the drag equation that the force of drag is dependent solely on speed, atmospheric density, ship mass, and ship drag coefficient. http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Atmosphere Because of the way that acceleration and force are related, in KSP mass winds up cancelling out of the acceleration due to drag equation, which means that atmospheric deceleration depends only on speed, atmospheric density (which is dependent solely on altitude for a given planet), and mass-weighted coefficient of drag. Drag coefficient is the "drag" value given in the VAB/SPH, most parts are at .2. Thus, two ships made of the same parts in different configurations will decelerate at the same rate; moreover, two ships made of completely different parts that share the same average drag value (a big orange fuel tank and a probe core, for example, both have drag=.2) will fall at the same rate. If anybody wants to come in here and tell me what "minimum drag" in the .cfg means, as well as "angular drag," and how they play into the drag equation (if at all), please do.

Remember that the game doesn't understand gimbals when it comes to engines in the "tractor" (pulling) configuration, it tries to gimbal them the way they should go if they're pushing, so it winds up going the wrong direction. You will need to disable engine gimbals in a tractor configuration (if the engines have them).

Debris has to get below ~23 km before it gets removed in Kerbin's atmosphere, anything higher is not affected by the atmosphere and will therefore orbit forever. Check your map some time, you'll probably see lots of debris with periapses around 65 km if you've been using your technique.

Frizzank: do you plan on producing a .21 release or should I just edit my .cfgs to align with the new command pod/SAS system? I imagine they work as is given that they are just dreadfully simple command pods with some fuel capacity. Love the roids, all in all. Space stations just aren't the same without them. Keep up the nice work.

The B9 release for .20 is still the most recent, it hasn't been updated yet so I don't know what your problem is. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/25241-0-20-2-B9-Aerospace-Pack-R3-2-New-pods-IVAs-engines-fuselages-structures

That design is probably never going to work. Even if you did get it up to 20 or 30 m/s you'd find that all the little pieces like the wheels and lights (and engines, they seem to be especially vulnerable) would come off. The most successful stock boats (as opposed to boat pack boats) I've seen or made use wing pieces to hold the body of the craft up out of the water, like a hydroplane. You can put landing gear on the bottom of the wings if you are dead set on having it negotiate land as those parts don't count in the physics simulation and therefore won't drag you down in the water. It also looks like you've got about 200% more engine on that thing than you need, and 100% more intake.