Ben314

I was doing an apollo-style moon landing with the separate CSM/LM. My LM had come up, and successfully rendezvoused with the CSM. Everyone transferred over fine, and since my LM was just a lander-can, 4 solar panels, and a bunch of RCS, I undocked from it. I then time warped halfway around my munar orbit to eject into a kerbin intercept orbit with the least fuel, and by that point the tiny forces from docking had driven the LM far out of sight. So I started up my SM engine for TKI, and about 20 seconds later, BAM out of the blue my totally-forgotten-about LM comes crashing into my rocket. Luckily it directly impacted the SM not the command pod, so Ed, Ademy, and Shepdorf were alive, but left in a wildly spinning command capsule with just a docking port and a decoupler attached, surrounded by a cloud of debris. Bill, Bob, and Jebediah went up and saved them though. Probably my finest hour in KSP too

Okay that's what I thought, but is there a way to access part's methods from partModule or vice versa?

Okay I realize (after finding out what the icons in microsoft visual studio actually mean (I'm used to code::blocks)) that I used the wrong terminology. I have no idea how to use C# events. What I want to do (and maybe this is just a bull-headed C++ way of doing it) is override onUpdate() to run part.isSplashed(), because I can't find a way to override part.onSplashdown() which seems like it would be simpler. Since the class for the plugin is in partModule, how can you refer to that partModule's instance of the part class to access isSplashed?

Thanks for your reply. I just need a bit of clarification (I have used 0 C#, so could be a total newb question): How can I access the events in Part? I want to make something that when it splashes down activates airbags, and I know I can do it using onSplashdown() or checkSplashed(), but I can't find how to actually use those.

So me being totally new to modding KSP (or games for that matter, although I'm a semi-experienced C++ programmer), I just want to know what the difference is between these two classes are. The tutorial on the wiki says that to modify a part's behaviour you override methods in PartModule, but I'm at a loss as to how to use onUpdate() to do anything really when in Part there's a whole bunch of seemingly far more useful methods. Basically, what is the technique to use the methods in Part vs the methods in PartModule?

This... this is absolutely incredible. I don't understand your names for vessels though

You can either treat each separate engine as a separate stage (if you're using them at different times), or take an average of Isp, weighted by thrust. Orrrrr a far easier option: http://www.kerbalspacecalculator.net16.net/stageDVCalc.html

I used to use SRBs back when I had just the demo, as my first three stages (tri coupler connected to three tri couplers connected to 9 tri couplers, then three stages of SRBs), because they were the only way to get power and throttling wasn't necessary (or so I thought). Now I just find they lower your overall dV or only marginally increase it, their only use is getting rockets that are wayyyy too big off the ground. Like everyone says on this thread, asparagus staging is better -as long as cost is not an issue-.