Chik Sneadlov

Lets say your planet has an atmosphere 100,000 feet thick and you're stuck in orbit at 100,009. The atmosphere and your orbit are precise and they never vary. You're out of fuel and doomed to circle the planet for eternity so in desperation you tie pieces of your clothes together along with some rope you find on board and you hang it out of the capsule which is as light as they get. The dirty laundry rope you made is long enough that twenty feet of it dips into the highest part of the thin atmosphere. I think you could slow yourself enough that eventually your ship would sink into the thicker atmosphere. After awhile you'd be low enough to pop a chute and land. Its just a matter of how long this would take or if the rope would burn up, but I'm assuming the atmosphere would be very thin at that point so your rope would not heat up much.

Which way do you mount the centerline of the stabilizer on a rover? I've put it in the center with the centerline of the stabilizer vertical and in line with the rocket, but that seems wrong. It probably should be near the COM of the rover and in line with the direction you want to go. On the moon it would help you keep the wheels on the same plane as the surface, right?

New prob. New ship and modified lander. I've run out of conventional fuel and all I have left is those nuclear decay things to produce electricity for my Xenon powered ion engines. I have lots of them. Anyhow, I mounted the lander on top of the rocket with the rocket blasts facing down, but for some reason when I set up a maneuver node, I'm burning in exactly the opposite direction that I wanted to hit with my target. There is no thing to aim for with the autopilot that is the anti maneuver. Its probably something to do with rotating the lander too many times in one of the directions. Its confused the computer. Or wait no, its because the engines are aimed opposite thrust. I wanted them to hold the rover down on the ground, but now I'm using them in space to go somewhere and there is no anti maneuver node to aim at with the auto pilot. Nuts I am going.

How do I navigate when on the ground, like when I'm driving a rover? Does it help to put the nav ball on surface? How do I know which way I'm going? I tried putting a node on a previous landing site and then setting that as a target, but when I use the autopilot to set it to target, it tends to pull the rover off it's wheels. It seemed happiest when I was driving away from the target even though I'd selected target. Mind you it wasn't 180 degree to the target that I was traveling. It was some other odd angle. I probably should mention I'm at the bottom of Minimus as best I can tell. The south pole. Not the center, but near it. I left my pilot in the rover after breaking off all the solar and running out of electricity and that thing kept picking up speed. It was going about 24 M/sec just before it had some kind of catastrophic problem. This is just on wheel idling power. How do they explain this in a simulator. You've got some kind magic force that propels you across an entire planet with no fuel being used. I dont think it was going downhill. I don't believe that any vehicle would handle as bad as a KSP vehicle on one of these planets. The main question - I landed near a previous landing site. I thought I'd visit the pilot and maybe switch with her and see her rover. I couldn't figure out how to get there. It was only about 5 km. I thought of some complicated, inaccurate ways involving the sun or my current trajectory, but it seems like there should be some simpler way of finding old space wrecks. The rovers behave oddly on the moons. What is the best way to tame this beast? Did I mention that the other day I landed a 100 meter tall rocket on Minimus and it slowly fell over but stayed intact? I then detached the rover and moved it out of the way and eventually got back in the huge rocket and took off from a horizontal position on the surface and made it back to Kerbin. I was close enough to walk to the space center in daylight. The big rocket scraped along and I ran out of gas and had to start up the next stage which gave me a little bit of angle to the ground. Of course on Minimus with a little speed you're going to be airborne for a long time so I got a little more perpendicular and gave it more thrust and pretty soon I was on my way home. I'm going to build a ball shaped cage rover with me and all the vitals on the inside. I'll put wheels all over the outside so that when it hits it'll be partly absorbed by the shocks and I won't have to concern myself with pitch and yaw anymore. If I put more wheels on a rover does it have more horsepower and go faster? Does it have better traction. So far I've been using 4 wheels.

If you have too much thrust another thing that works is to add a fairly large middle stage and then put full size airplane wings on the thrusters in place of fins. If your rocket gets tippy towards the end of the thrusters, put huge fins like airplane tail fins or airplane wings near the top of the rocket. You can mount them on decouplers so you can jettison the extra weight once you're in vacuum. A computer could model the change in center of mass and thrust as it happens. It could also tell you, with some calculations how the changes in COM and COL and ascent angle are affecting the flight. I'm surprised Kerbal doesn't offer this kind of gizmo to let you know when to jettison stages and fins to optimize control of your rocket. Its probably on engineer redux and I just don't know what I'm talking about.

My ship had no shaking problems last night but when I load today on any of my 3 or 4 saves with this ship it shakes itself to pieces. Very repeatable. Nobody appears to have a solution on the forums so I guess I have to relaunch. I needed to modify the ship anyway. I used autostrut on almost everything and set it to various modes. I also used rigid assembly on a lot of the ship. The following was written before I encountered the shaking. Ion engines can be useful. I meant to build a rocket with some ion engines to fine tune navigation, but I ended up with nothing but ion engines for three quarters of the trip to Laythe. Set a course near Kerbin with the last of my big fuel engines and then found I was 800,000,000 meters off. The sun was pretty dim. I had 20 ion engines and about 12 gigantor solar that were actually getting sunlight. I could leave all the engines on for about 20 seconds and then the batteries would be totally drained. It seemed to take about ten minutes to recharge after turning the whole ship 90 degrees to get a little more light on the panels. Then I'd have to turn the ship back before the 20 second burn. That got very tiresome so I noticed that I was constantly moving closer to my target even with a little thrust in the right direction. Seemed like if I could just keep thrusting a tiny bit for a little more than an hour I'd be able to skim the atmosphere. I ran the engines at about ten percent power and got the ship on course. Dealing with this kind of problem and rationing my thrust seemed very real, very immersive. Very satisfying when my fiddling about actually got me the precision insertion that I wanted. Too bad I didn't know enough about Laythe's atmosphere. As my course got closer I shut down all but one engine in each pod of five engines, but that was still too much power. I wanted to hit at 15,000 feet because I didn't want to come back out of the atmosphere and smash into Jool which was huge and right in my path. I shutdown all but one of the ions. Oddly, as I thrusted towards my target I was moving away. The engine wasn't on the centerline of the ship so I guess it was rotating it and pushing me in the wrong direction. I activated the other engine across from it and started moving closer to 15,000. Got it to 14,986. That's what the ions are good for, setting up your encounter with the atmosphere and controlling your entry within fifty feet instead of 50,000 feet. I close the solar and communications dish and inflated the heat shield, pointed it prograde. Not very exciting in real time, even when you're between the two huge bodies. I got closer and things went very fast. The heat shield turned red and then the whole rocket turned sideways. Everything started blowing up and blowing away, but then I slowed down and popped one chute. I was heading for the ocean. The chute slowed me down enough for a water landing where I could watch the sky for a few days. Jool took up a huge part of the sky, but I only saw one, tiny moon. It appeared to be circling, but I don't think that's true. Not sure which moon it was. It popped up behind Jool, a small bead, and moved almost vertically. If I was going to do it again, I'd go for a higher orbit, maybe 25,000 meters or more, maybe even 40,000. try to slow down and get caught in orbit, but not land. Experimenting with this might have been nice but the ship shakes itself to pieces every time I reload now. I don't think it did that last night. Pretty sure I reloaded last night. Originally, what I intended to do with this rocket was control my final stage with a mixture of fuel and ion engines. I'd set the engines to different action groups and when I needed a precise atomospheric insertion, I'd turn off the liquid fueled engines and just use the ion engines. Maybe another action group to turn off all but one ion engine. I started work on that but got all confused by fuel flows and the game changing numbers that I'd tediously entered and doing things that weren't intended or making any sense.

I never noticed that you can adjust the thrust of SRBs. That's a great little tidbit.

Landed on Duna. On my feet! Didn't use the heat shield. I slowed with the atmosphere and then with rockets. I added another stage in the middle with the huge tanks of liquid fuel and a big engine since my TWR was very high. It slowed my ascent through the atmosphere of Kerbal which was nice. Smoother, lower orbit. Then I had a lot of fuel to get to Duna. I still had fuel in the second stage when I landed. Its too bad they don't let you move the nav ball when you're trying to land. I crashed a few times. The chute opened fine even with the heat shield above it, which seems wrong, but you have to slow yourself with the rockets. The chute alone isn't enough on Duna. The worst thing is that the capsule is blocked by either a light or part of another parachute so I'm trapped in the capsule. I would buy detachable, ejectable lights, everything ejectable. The inflatable heat shield might be used to right a fallen rocket if it can be stuck to another inflatable heat shield. At least it could get the engines pointing at the ground at an angle so you can retry a landing. I landed one time and closed all but one landing leg. The module was up on a hill with this one leg sticking up and I thought if these were real astronauts they'd find a stick and attach it to that one leg and then hang on to the end and try to leverage that ship back up onto it's feet. The approach was interesting with Ike being right there. I thought I was going to hit it but the planets are all smaller than they look in the map. Still Ike looked to be about as big as Duna and its gravity affected me. Had to change course about three times coming in and ended up landing on the darker side which wasn't all that dark. Tomorrow I can try to take off and land on Ike or go back to Kerbin. "Morning light on Duna created long shadows on the cold, red, soil. I blasted off and easily got into orbit around Ike. Landed standing up on my remaining live engine. This would make an excellent place to practice orbiting and landing in atomospheres and without atmosphere. Still trapped in the capsule. I tried once to fall on the lamp by decoupling my last fuel tank, but I landed on the wrong side. I set an ambitious course for Laythe, one of the moons of Jool and three quarters of the way across the solar system. Was surprised to get an encounter with Jool. It'll be about three years before I actually see the green planet with my eyes. God I wish I could empty this latrine bucket. "Six years and three hundred eighteen days trapped in this capsule. In nineteen days I'll be at the Jool periapsis. I'll blow right past it and circle the sun endlessly. I have to do something. Maybe this tool box. Yes. A drill, a small cutting tool, some Gorilla Glue and small explosive charges that should have been attached to the lights and parachute. I might be able to cut my way out of here, detach the RCS system and arrange them to all blow in one direction. I've got a lot of monopropellant. If I hold down the button for 18 days maybe I can slow enough to be captured by Jool's SOI and then the atmosphere will slow me down enough so that I can descend and.... die.... on this horrible, giant green planet instead of space. I've got to take a chance. It'll be worth it just to toss out the bucket and take a dump on the outside. Just to be able to do something! At least if they find me they'll know I went down fighting. I did it! I'm out and slowing down. I think I'm going to make it! Man is going to Laythe. The green giant will give up it's secrets. Talk to you later." - Valentina, Space Explorer and the first person on Jool For 12 years Jebediah Kerman circled the sun, trapped in his capsule. He clawed and scraped furiously at the door trying to get out with the only "tools" he had which were a power saw and drills he'd drawn on some scrap paper, but he remained forever entombed in the capsule trapped by a misplaced light and bizarrely, thinking he was Valentina. He was finally "rescued" in 3249 when a space merchant stumbled on the wreck of the Beta 2 and found the mummified body of Jebediah, something red smeared on his lips, still inside with his notes, a testament to the hazards of space and the horrors isolation can wreak on the fragile human mind.

I tried Dres. I got a nice view of it as I hurtled past. Not enough fuel to slow down and be captured by it's gravity. I decided to try a planet with atmosphere to slow me down, so I went to Duna since I did have an inflatable heat shield. I've charted some nice close passes to Duna but matching the actual trajectory to the chart is harder. I came within sight of Duna I think, but I had problems with asparagus staging and normal staging and fuel flow. I gave the tanks number for fuel flow, but they weren't in fives or tens. I separated them by 1 and the computer ignored the numbers and burned them all. Then it wouldn't let them go or start the last engine so I had to do it all manually and by then I was not going to get my encounter. The nodes are giving me problems. Just when I need it most they don't tell my how long the burn is going to be. Whenever I'm a galaxy away it always tells me to the second how long to burn, but when it counts and I've spent two hours getting this close it refuses to calculate. I should have tried Dres with fewer SRBs. Too much speed and no way to slow except burn tons of fuel which I didn't have. I love the way Kerbal doesn't have some idiotic magic device that slows a ship like a car pulling up to a stop sign or even a huge tanker full of oil trying to dock, although that's pretty close to what its like. I'd like to put way too much delta V on a huge oil tanker and send it in to port. They'd at least have the satisfaction of hard steering that would change their course.

If I build a huge frame and put 200 of those electric engines on there with 200 solar panels and some xenon, will I be able to rise into orbit around Kerbin? It would almost be like a balloon launch to another planet.

I'm just back at Kerbal after not playing for a couple of years. I'm discovering all these new things like Xenon, I like the incredible efficiency. I want to see what those engines can do and I'm finding out. They aren't easy. I want them to do better. Maybe ISP isn't all that. The engines are kind of heavy compared to the power they produce even though the fuel seems to burn for a long time. Maybe I'm just mislead. Before this I was using those "nuclear" engines. They didn't need an oxidizer and they had a good ISP, but they're so weak I gave up on them. As far as solar, I thought I'd be able to make some kind of folding structure that I could mount lots of gigantors to, but I haven't seen how I can do that. Things that fold in Kerbal don't allow other things to be attached. With Duna I didn't like all the mystery objects in the way. I thought their gravity might affect my flight and I couldn't make an orbital loop with Duna any more than I can with Eve or Eeloo. I was setting a course when I got an encounter. Didn't realize it was with Jool, but it only took a tiny burn so now I'm heading for Jool and you're right. Solar power is poor out here. I thought it might be a quarter the strength it is near Kerbin but seems like its more like 1% of the power near Kerbin. Its taking forever to recharge the batteries so I think I'm going to escape Jool's gravity and get stuck around the sun again. I'm really starting to dislike Xenon and these engines. Just went back to the spacecenter and worked on the current rocket. Set my SRBs to 87.5. Put on some huge fins, the plane tail fins actually and the flight seemed smoother. There was still some wandering towards the end so maybe take off another 10% power. This time I'm heading for Dres. Still have the Xenon. Added 9 more tanks asparagus. Kind of pointless because I think that's enough to take me to another galaxy and I'm not going to be leaving Dres with these engines, but that's what I'm doing now. Every now and then my SAS doesn't seem to work at all. I don't know if it was that I hadn't brought up the navigation ball or what, but it happens when I need to do things fast.

I've been reading all your posts and also navigating and plotting. Thats good to know about the numbers in parenthese. I looked at Eeloo on the wiki. Its low gravity and no atomosphere. Escape velocity is 841 m/sec. I'm guessing thats at the edge of it's SOI. I'm going 5.9km/sec right now. I think I might be going faster when I'm nearest Eeloo so I'll have to slow down a lot. I'll probably run out of fuel doing that and won't get close enough to the SOI, but maybe I can smash into it. Let me check with Bob and see if he's okay with that. .... Sure. Bob would love to impact Eeloo. I bet its going to be cold out there. No seat heaters in KSP. They should have the Kerbals age and grow beards as time goes on. If they run out of food they should wither. I'd like disturbing stuff like that. Bob doesn't know this yet, but I left my porn collection behind his seat. Bob's been to rehab for sex addiction and got cleaned up. This might be a problem. I do attach things symetrically, radially but its very easy to forget what the radial settings are when you are attaching one antenna. If you touch the ship in the wrong spot it will change the number of radial attachments. With the radially mounted Xenon tanks, I had to rotate the tanks (a nightmare on it's own) to get them to stick to the decoupler. I also suffer occasional lag and bizarre mouse malfunctions. The game just picks things up sometimes. "Snap"! Oh no. You can undo, but there's a lag for that too. I wish there had been one auto strut grandparent button for the whole rocket. That's how I strutted the thing up. The struts just waste time and cause screw ups galore. I love it, but it gets annoying. Last night I tried putting on a downward facing payload fairing. The goal was to wrap the boosters except the fins and exhaust, but it wouldn't let me quit the fairing. I guess you have to wrap it up and put a nose cone on it but why? Why not wrap the upper part of your boosters and leave the bottoms exposed. The tops of the boosters are under the upper fairing, but I'm not sure they are out of the wind. In real life they'd mostly be out of the wind, but some on the edge would really get hammered, I think. No nose cones. It would have been nice to wrap the entire rocket in some kind of single fairing that smoothed this all out but I am getting very high speeds now so it is improved. I had a nice node set up. It said I needed to do a 30 minute burn. I accidentally fired up the engines a little when I was trying to get the camera focus off of Kerbin and onto the command module and the burn time changed to 30 seconds. I warped to within 15 seconds and the moment I fired up the engines it changed the burn time to 27 minutes from 30 seconds. Why do they even have that glitchy burn time thing on there. If I'd not trusted it and instead just looked at the orbit, I'd have seen that it needed a huge burn. Now I'm going to miss again.

I adjusted my Conic Patch Limit to 6 as suggested, but the little blue line is still short. I did notice the orbital lines around eve though so I set course and set another course and another and eventually I made it to an Eve encounter, but ran out of fuel as I tried to get into a big elliptical orbit. (I couldn't even see Eve when squinting, but the map said it was out there in the darkness about a million km away) There were several screw ups and unforseen things that happened like getting too far from the sun and having engines die on three sides and losing SAS. With a lopsided cluster of engines running the ship started wouldn't stay on target. I'm now trying to improve the rocket by setting up asparagus staging but I see its worse than ever. I'm trying to set fuel flow from the tanks but there's a number in parentheses that I don't know what it means and the game adds numbers to the number I picked and then later it gives all the tanks the same number and screws everything up. Why can't I just click on the thing I want to fall off and put it a number like 1 and then go to the other side and put in 2. They make you roll through all the numbers with no way to speed it up and no way to enter by typing and then the numbers reset for no reason. some time later... Okay, the game kind of gave tanks logical numbers and I trusted it, but found out in deep space that it was screwed up again. I have three clusters of Xenon tanks mounted on radial decouplers. Each cluster has three Xenon tanks. Two of the tanks in each cluster are the same fuel priority number but one is off by ten so it starts draining a tank from another side. I have to shut that tank down to get it to drain from the right tank and then decouple manually after packing up the many gigantor solar including the 7 or 8 gigantor that I forgot to add to the gear group. Lots of opportunity for screw ups, never-the-less I am proceeding to Eeloo. I've got an encounter mapped out after about a 1 hour 10 minute burn. My orbit will probably come short about 30 million km or so. 26 minutes left on the burn and so far I've ejected six of the xenon tanks with no problem. I must be a little lighter but I'm burning through fuel at an unsettling rate. I had a lot of trouble getting things to stick to other things as usual because Kerbal just doesn't like to let anything stick to anything else. Took me forever to build the thing that I attach my 25 engines to, but it ended up being very light and flat. My asparagus staging just isn't very efficient. There's room for a lot more tanks but its such a headache and it always comes out wrong. At least they let you change fuel priority numbers while piloting. That's pretty cool. I had hoped to attach gigantor solar to gigantor solar so that they'd reach out further, but they don't stick to anything that expands. I brought along an expanding heat shield this time and mounted it on the tip of the rocket. It game me quite a bit of trouble until I auto struted it and also added struts. Ten minutes left to burn and I just ejected the last cluster of tanks. I've got five big tanks left in the center and then that's it. 4.6 km/sec. All the staging went smoothly. Didn't lose any solar panels or anything. All engines firing but we're close to Kerbin and the sun right now. 5.9km/sec I'm stopped at 100,000,000km orbit. Never got the encounter indicators so this is all screwed up because of the long burn times and bad timing. Still have about 3000 xenon so I might be able to get closer.

I've been exploring a lot of new things like the payload devices and Xenon engines, struts and using group actions. Got those things running pretty nice. My rocket is moving much more smoothly, higher speeds, lower, faster orbits. I've circularized orbits within a couple hundred kilometers, got my RCS working pretty well. I even matched my orbit somewhat to Eve's orbit and at no point did Eve's orbit cross my orbit. I had to tip my orbit pretty radically to be able to touch Eve's. Then I tried to get it even closer but I'm working from such a tiny circle compared with the distance and I'm just lining things up by eye with the sun in my eyes. This is from Kerbin orbit. Is it possible to go from Kerbin orbit to Eve orbit? Or is it required to hit all the objects in between? The orbital lines don't reach. I always get stuck orbiting the sun if I can't get an orbit with a node, but it seems like it should be possible with enough fuel to go from sun orbit to orbit another planet or at least make a tighter sun orbit. I've got quite a bit of Xenon fuel and 26 gigantor solar units for my 26 xenon engines. They can run for a very long time without running out of electricity. I did manage to get a descending or ascending node with Eve. Is that the point where I put another node and... I don't know. Sometimes with this game my brain just freezes up. Am I nuts to be trying to orbit these outer planets just by eyeballing things? Can I go from Kerbin to Eve or even further? If not what should I do first? I'm proficient at going to Mun and Minimus and back. Is there a way to make those orbital lines stretch out further or is there some other trick to know if you've got a chance to rendevous? What do you think of my long range space traveler with 26 xenon engines and 26 gigantor solar? Got rid of struts and am using the strut system that comes with SRBs. Attaching to grandparent. Does this method cause less lag or am I imagining? Which mods should I use and where are the best tutorials for those mods? I'm using Xenon for the phenomenal ISP. I think I managed to lift off from Minimus and get back to Kerbin but Minimus is very low gravity. I might have problems lifting off from bigger bodies like Eve and so I might have to complicate my landing vehicle eventually with stages or docking devices. I might even have to take things apart and put them back together again in space but that sounds like quite a formidable but attractive task. On the other hand getting to Eve and fiddling with the nodes just turns me off sometimes. Too much to go wrong and when you fail you have to go way back to the beginning.

I stabilized it some more by wrapping the lowest stage of the fuel tanks with six more huge fuel tanks and putting huge engines on each. They go off with the SRBs and I put in a lot of struts between the inner fuel tanks and the SRBs. Things went smoothly until seconds before the end of the SRBs, but it was no big problem. I have to try again with more aggressive turning because I ended up about 650Km out in space which is more than I need and took a lot of fuel to circularize. I notice I'm not using the oxidizer in the tanks on any engines. I've got those nuclear engines that aren't really nuclear and I've got the huge orange engines. Why am I schlepping oxidizer all over the place if I'm not using it? Would those ramjet engines with the great ISP use oxidizer or do they have to have air forced in from the atmosphere?

I did it. Enabled advanced tweaks. Was impressed that Squad would create such a thing that shows a fuel diagram and lets you choose how the tanks get drained. It worked but needs work. I did find that my rather huge ship was quite uncontrollable with SAS and RCS. I even added a second RCS but still at the end of the solid boosters it went out of control. I didn't lose the ship, but it was spinning wildly and very difficult and fuel costly to bring under control. Annoying because the last eighth of the SRB's is where you go from 750 m/sec to 1500 m/sec even with instability. I had added a lot of fins on the whole thing, both as low down on the SRBs and high too. This smoothed out the ascent tremendously but still at the end it went nuts. Maybe a longer rocket? Maybe more weight at the top. I'm surprised they don't have a way for you to see how the rocket changes as fuel burns. I'm guessing the SRBs burn from the bottom to the top and so the rocket becomes too light on bottom whereas when burning liquid fuel the rocket gets to light at the top. Also, at the end of the SRBs I'm leaning more. The COM moves up and away from the force pushing up and leverage takes over. Gravity pulls down but now with the rocket leaning, gravity pulls down on the fulcrum of The COM of the whole thing shifts up a lot whereas the force pushing up stays low. When you go straight up, it doesn't matter that you're COM and COL are close together or far apart. Gravity pulls straight down to earth and straight through the center line of the rocket so it doesn't affect stability. when you lean the rocket the COM is the fulcrum and the Col is feet away and lower. The COG pulls down above the COM and this produces a lot of torque which is not very strong compared to the engines but the engines are not doing anything to correct this. I could put the engine on the side of the SRB half way to the top. The COM would stay more constant that way. My original idea was to put the engines near the top of the rocket so that they'd be pulling it into space instead of pushing it but I lost focus on that by getting caught up in other matters. Oh wait. No. I can't move the engines on an SRB. Even with engines mounted high, the COM will still shift up and as the rocket is angled the COG will still pull down if it is not centered on the COM. What you need is an engine that shifts up and down as the COM shifts. That would make the rocket much more stable. Also, I should pay attention to where the COG is at least when I build. I never even looked. The other thing is that I don't really need a rocket this huge. I just want to build it, but I don't know how to make it maneuverable. I don't know if there is a way with Kerbal to make an engine that slides up and down as needed or if there is a way to control that. It'd be cool to invent a program that does that and sensors to monitor changes in the rocket.

I haven't played for a couple of years and have just been getting back into it. I thought I'd build a frame in the shape of a huge plus sign and put long legs on it. Then I'd put some engines on the bottom of each leg. Fuel tanks would hang from the center of the plus sign. The lowest fuel tank would drop when its empty and then the next tank and the next. Asparagus staging. I'd run fuel lines from the tanks to the engines but the lines wouldn't stretch for the twenty feet. I was then surprised to see that somehow fuel was getting to the engines without any lines. I haven't found a way to feed the fuel to the engines one fuel tank at a time. Its always draining all the tanks which foils my asparagus staging plans. This is the main question. Is there a way to prevent the fuel from getting to the engines? Is there a way for me to run fuel lines so that the engines do get fuel and they drain one tank at a time in the order that I want? Is there a way to make a wire frame base on which I can attach parts like fuel tanks, engines, command modules? The work I did with the wire frame was very tedious and there are lots of limits on attachment points. I don't know why Kerbal puts so many limitations on their parts like fuel lines. Why are they limited to short distances? Why do a lot of wire frames set up with attachments points on the ends but not the other sides?

Maybe I'm naive. I assumed that I could build a ship, launch it into orbit around Kerbin, leaving a huge tank of fuel circling the globe and then build another ship and launch that so that it rendevoused with the fuel tank in orbit and transfer the fuel from the one tank to the other or dock with the full fuel tank. When I built the second ship and launched I found that my orbiting fuel tank was gone or at least not showing on the map. What is the correct way to do this? I want to build a refueling station in orbit and maybe another one in orbit around the Mun and then visit those stations with other rockets in the future. And if I can do this do I have to dock the empty tank with the fuel tank in order to transfer fuel or is it enough to pull along side? Are fuel stations even necessary for long range journeys? Another question involves tall rockets tilting way off vertical and falling apart. Do I need something besides ASAS to keep my tall rockets vertical?

Training mission To The Mun part 1 24.2.559 Windows Vista No mods I tried it again and this time I could uncouple but I didn't know how to take control of the lander. Spent some time trying to dock but that will take some work. The last time I played you had to go to tracking to take over other ships. Seems there should be a way to do it within the scenario.

I'm in the tutorial orbiting the moon with three astronauts. I wanted to leave two astronauts orbiting and take the last guy down to the moon with the lander but even though I space walked him into the lander I can't decouple. I've gone to the joint and right clicked but the buttons for decouple do not depress. I tried moving an astronaut next to the joint but that doesn't work either. The tutorial invited me to land so I'm surprised nothing works. Is there something I'm doing wrong?

Thief 2 and it's hundreds of fan made missions that were excellent GTA series Elder Scrolls series Tropico4 Lunar Flight. This is a great space simulator, maybe the greatest but its limited. As far as I know its the most realistic Lander simulator but there's just one ship, the lander. It takes a lot of time to learn but once you learn just parking it is fun. You've got the moon and you've got Mars with incredible, disorienting dust storms. And Lunar Flight is cheap and modern with modern graphics. KSP created a new genre as far as I know. Its great but it feels like a lot of things are not polished. It takes a lot of effort but you can do things that you can't do in any other game. Lots of room for improvement and I hope there is. Mount and Blade broke new ground with horseback fighting that felt right. Il Sturmovik was a fantastic simulator. You can almost get into space with this rocket shaped ship powered by two propellers. I think you would say they are mounted radially. The damage model is so cool, but its complicated and you almost have to have a stick. I thought Operation Flashpoint had good sim features and with the fan made stuff it had a lot of gameplay. FarCry 3 Sins of a Solar Empire and Gal Civ 2 are great games. I'd put KSP in the top 20 or so.

I don't know whats going on. I had a rocket that worked and now the engines don't ignite. Other rockets had struts disappear and the stages don't seem to be connected anymore. They're stacked right, but they're not bound together so the rocket falls apart, sometimes on the ground. The engines are on the bottom of the launch order and I have them throttled up. None of them start. Some of them are solid boosters and they don't start either. Is there a cure for this kind of glitch?

I get very confused looking at rockets and the staging diagram. So many of the engines look alike. It would be nice if you could choose a colored stripe for a stage and see it on the engine and the staging diagram. Same stripes could be used on decouplers. Items that are used repeatedly like struts should just stay in your hand after both ends are attached so you can quickly put in fifty struts if you have to without constantly going back to the structural tab. I'd like some bearings of various sizes for pinwheels and other physics experiments.

I put about 150 struts on this contraption. Its really tedious to keep going back to that structural tab. They should have just left it in your hand to repeat as often as you wanted. If you wanted to use some other part you could click on that. That's a lot of unnecessary mousing around. Also, building frames with many the same parts, they again should have just left it in your hand so you could put together big assemblies quickly. Or click and drag.

I use a lot of struts so rather than going back and picking up another strut everytime I need one I thought I'd use alt + left click, but nothing happens. Here's what I'm doing precisely. I pick up a strut. I put it on a rocket and then I put the other end on another engine. At that point I hold down left click while holding alt and I expect another strut to appear but nothing happens. Does anyone know precisely what I'm doing wrong and how to do it right?