arq

Interesting. I might have to hunt down some RB glasses...

I've been messing with SSTO's for awhile now, but I only recently managed to get one all the way out to land on Minmus and back. Still working on increasing the range. One guy made one that could land on Duna and return, but I've got a ways to go before I can manage that sort of thing.

I think the 'wormhole' idea (or some form of 'jumpgate') would be the easiest. Doing interstellar burns would be exceedingly long and require exorbitant dV, not to mention waiting decades to arrive and needing to add a galactic SOI. I don't know how the Kerbol system is defined and if it's easy for modders to modify, but if it is people could easily add other systems (procedural or not) without massive difficulty, I expect. It'd be fun to see the Earth system (hardmode since the dV's are so much higher?) or fictitous ones, though honestly I'd most enjoy exploring procedural ones, especially if a concept of discovery/exploration gets implemented.

I try not to spend too long at KSC, but it certainly is pretty now! Maybe after that will come some pretty terrain and atmospherics. Heck, maybe the Kerbals will see just how pretty the whole place is and decide to come up from their subterranean colonies to build actual settlements...

Yeah the main issue right now for me is the pathetic lift provided by aerodynamic surfaces. To make any non-micro craft (even a small SSTO) requires an inordinate number of wings, to the point where I often have a hard time finding places to put them (without clipping). The craft comes out looking like a weird hairstyle than a plane. You can judge the lift of a plane by your angle of attack (angle between heading and prograde) in steady flight. As it stands now, the high-TWR is necessary for jets because (without massive numbers of wings) they fly as much like rockets as planes, the larger planes that I make regularly have 20+deg AoA at low altitudes (where the TWR is low because of altitude effects on the engines). EDIT: To be clear, when I say 'massive' numbers of wings, I mean more than the 14 already there... I've started using the procedural wings mod and that helps a little with the aesthetic/partcount issues (though really partcount is rarely an issue for planes because they're typically pretty small), just make a few really big ones and you're in better shape. Though with stock aerodynamics it's still pretty underwhelming.

Haha I have that happen to me all the time (or leave a probe in orbit for awhile and forget to deploy the panels). I always put 2 of the small fixed solar panels on my probes now, so that they will eventually hit kerbollight and be recoverable.

Does it kill rotation like the Avionics Package? Or just along the roll axis? Or what? I never quite understood. Does it only work when ASAS is engaged? I had read that the only part that can actually rotate your vessel (apart from RCS and engine gimbals) are Command Modules and that SAS only worked against that. I guess the new reaction wheel parts will supplant SAS when they are released. Really, I wish I could toggle between the Avionics Package and ASAS for spaceplanes. Avionics is much more useful in atmo (for keeping the plane from flipping out when maneuvering) while the ASAS is nice for rocket burns.

People have such a negative view of asparagus staging, and not for much of a reason. It's a much simpler way to design a rocket and can save you a little on part-count. Besides, anything with boosters might as well be asparagus-staged, and most people use boosters on the bottom level anyway. You're just throwing away dv by not adding the fuel lines. When you start looking at 400t+ payloads, a vertical lifter starts becoming less and less feasible because of the height limit of the VAB. Still, if you insist on not, your bottom stage looks a little long (by my reckoning). You could try splitting it into two stages and maybe making it a touch longer?

But I want to know!

If you save it, then click 'Load' in the VAB/SPH it will tell you the part count of every saved vessel. Or, in flight, go to the map view, focus your vessel, and look at the info tabs on the right side of the screen.

Kerbal Alarm Clock and Protractor both can give these times (or at least relative to the current time), though they disagree so there are probably various ways of calculating this. If you click the phase angle (theta) column in Protractor it converts it to times instead of angles. As for transit times, they vary a little bit by your precise departure profile (in addition to eccentricities and inclinations of orbits), so it's tough to find exact numbers. I do remember somewhere that someone came up with the frequencies for each window, at least (ie Kerbin->Duna window every XX days YY hours starting at ZZ:ZZ:ZZ). It was probably from a thread linked from The Drawing Board http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/28352-The-Drawing-Board-A-library-of-tutorials-and-other-useful-information

I love this mod and use it more than any other. A few features I'd be interested to see: - Correct isp/thrust based on engine on/off state (turning an engine off does not register properly in Engineer). Also, jets do not report the correct thrust values (they vary by spin-up/down time and altitude). Is it possible to read these directly from the parts? - Thrust/mass ratios for estimating burntimes or landing in vacuums (often much more useful than TWR). It sounds like it might be very difficult, but if you could implement a 'Custom Equation' field, where you could implement an expression in terms of other variables, that would be awesome (ie for calculating how much vertical distance it will take to arrest a fall) and could fix this too. - Acceleration values to supplement velocity values (again useful for spaceplanes - could help for maintaining altitude, since you usually want to cruise at your max altitude to build up speed before going orbital). This might require taking a difference (maybe with some smoothing) over the velocity values, if it can't be computed directly. Those were the big ones that came to mind - thanks for all your great work!

Also, you can select a docking port on your ship and 'Control From Here' to set your navball relative to that port. And I agree, NERVAs are really the only good option for interplanetary travel, even if it means having a lot of them (I used 12 to move a 300t ship to Duna, though it did require a small bit of patience on the burns). It's easy to attach FL800 fuel tanks to the sides of your ship and put NERVAs on the bottom, if having trouble finding places for them.

I decided to get some practice launching and docking asymmetric payloads. Also, LKO needed moar lettarz.