Nibb31

There is a hatch in the fairing, and another hatch in the side of the orbital module. They ingress through the OM and go down into the DM where they sit for launch. There is no side hatch on the DM. After landing they egress through the top hatch of the DM that was connected to the OM (which is why you usually see the DM sitting on its side after landing). Apollo and Orion also have an external hatch through the protective cover that covers the command module during launch and is jettisoned with the launch tower.

The problem definitely won't be the fuel to get there, but the fuel to get back will be problematic. It really is a shame that we won't have docking. It doesn't make much sense to plan interplanetary expeditions without a way to dock a separate lander module or to refuel ships. Imagine a rocket big enough to take you from Kerbin to that planet. Then imagine the rocket capable of putting that fully fueled interplanetary rocket in one piece on another planet (including the semi-powered descent because parachutes will probably not be very efficient). My plan for 0.17 is to ignore return trips for the moment (because without docking, it is just silly) and only send one-way unmanned probes and rovers, probably with Munolith detectors and cameras. This will allow me to perfect my navigational skills and figure out the best entry and landing techniques so that I can send a lander and a return ship when docking is released.

No, 'minmostationary orbit' would be at a much higher altitude.

Please read the forums before posting. Mun arches are well-know artefacts that have been reported hundreds of times already.

A rover shouldn\'t need to take off. It is better (and more fun) to design each craft for a specific task: a spacecraft (a lander or a transit vehicle) has very different requirements than a rover or an atmospheric vehicle. Building a rover that has to carry along engine and fuel to return to Kerbin would be silly. It would also be silly to design a Munar lander with wings or a return vehicle that has to carry wheels and suspension. With crew transfer made possible with EVAs, you would land your rover unmanned, then transfer your crew over to it, like Apollo. Ideally, a rover would be part of the Mun base and reusable. I have a design that lands an unmanned lunar base, with a rover attached to the bottom. Before landing, it hovers 10m above the ground and drops the rover, then drifts a couple of meters away, lands on its legs (MechJeb required for this sort of manoeuver), and extends its solar panels. A later mission delivers the crew on a small lander capable of returning.

Where do you see ice ? I see flat areas and bumpy areas. The 'lakes' could just as well be cold lava or just soil deposited there bu some weird geological process.

There are no straight lines in spaceflight. You are always orbiting something.

If you\'re in a circular orbit, then antiradial (Rad-) should keep you pointing towards the planet you are orbiting.

Use the Munolith detector plugin to hunt them down. It\'s a lot more fun that way. Arches are much easier to find than munoliths, because they can be seen from at least a 10000m orbit (and maybe higher). There is one around the equator, one in the Northern hemisphere near a crater, and a third one that is apparently misplaced underground.

Just because it is painted brown and green doesn\'t mean that it\'s only useful when you are near a planet. A nav ball is always usefull in space, because unless you are on an escape trajectory far from the sun (like Voyager or Pioneer) you are always orbiting something, therefore you always need to be able to position yourself relative to that object. On a translunar trajectory, for example, the navball clearly indicates whether you are pointing prograde or retrograde. It indicates the orbital plane, and allows you to position the spacecraft in a normal or antinormal (North or South) position for inclination changes. It also allows you to eyeball all the in-between positions that allow you to correct your trajectory. It\'s much easier to visualize all this information with a navball than with some kind of 3D plantarium based on a starmap of dozens of reference points. It\'s not the only instrument, but it gives a clear summary of the spacecraft attitude. The fact that it was used on Apollo and on Soyuz (and probably Orion too) means that it\'s still relevant.

There is no temperature outside if you\'re in a vacuum. If you stick a thermometer outside a spaceship, you are not measuring the temperature of space. You are measuring the temperature of the thermometer. Space isn\'t hot or cold, because it isn\'t anything. It\'s void. If there is no matter, you can\'t measure the properties of that matter. What you can measure is the temperature of the soil or the temperature of the space ship parts. In practice, stuff facing the sun is hot. Stuff in shadows is cold. In space, these temperatures can get extreme, because there is no convection to moderate the temperature. Because of this, the possibility of liquid water on the surface of a moon with no atmosphere is zero. As soon as the sun hits, it would vaporize. Water can only be liquid within a very narrow temperature range. Similarly, there can be no frozen lakes, even on the dark side, because a flat surface implies that it was once liquid, which is not possible.

Who says it\'s frozen ? Do you have temperature readings? Who says it\'s ice/water? The flat features could very well be solidified lava lakes. There are quite a few substances that have high temperature melting points. There could be a gazillion geological processes that could have caused those 'lakes'.

Could you maybe trim down your sig a little ?

My tips: Don\'t watch the rocket. Watch the nav ball. The ball itself represents the world around you. Blue is above the horizon. Brown is below the horizon. The central '-v-' marker represents the direction that your rocket is pointing. The yellow prograde (and retrograde) markets represent the direction (or vector) that your rocket is moving. The angles written on the horizon are headings: 0° = North, 90° = East, 180° = South, 270° = West. The angles written from the center towards the horizon are your pitch: 90° = Vertical, 0° = Horizontal. Positive pitch is on the blue side of the ball. Negative pitch is on the brown side. For example: - when your prograde marker is on the brown side, you are going down!. - when your '-v-' marker is in the middle of the blue side (at launch), your rocket is pointing straight up. If you want to change your vector of travel, point the rocket in the right direction and burn your engines. This is how to fly a launch manually (again, don\'t watch the screen, just watch the nav ball and altitude): - To go up, as the rocket moves around, just press the WASD keys in order to keep it well centered. You should see the prograde marker in the center as you are going straight up (90° vertical). - When you get to around 15000m, start pitching the rocket by tilting to a 70° pitch in direction of the East (marked as 90°). Watch the prograde marker slowly catch up with your direction. - As you go up, progressively tilt the rocket to 60, 50, 40, 30, 20, 10° pitch, in order to be pointing towards the horizon (0°) when you leave the atmosphere at 70000m.

The only 'embedded' Microsoft OS are Windows CE and Windows Mobile, and these are hardly ever used on critical embedded systems in the aerospace, defense or automotive industries for critical applications. Serious embedded systems usually run a specialized real-time operating system (RTOS) such as VxWorks or QNX. One of the reasons that aerospace computer hardware and software use old technology is often because it costs a lot of effort to develop, test, and certify new systems. When a system is robust and flight-proven, redesigning it involves more risk than it\'s worth.

He wasn\'t on the dev team when he wrote that and he first wrote that when 0.14 was the current version. Things change a lot in software projects you know.

As someone on the Interwebs once said:

Not automatically, but you can do it quite precisely with the manual controls: - Show the Orbital Information window - Set the Smart ASS to Normal + or Normal -. - Burn until the Inclination is at the desired value.

SAS and ASAS do not serve the same purpose. ASAS is an attitude control computer. It maintains attitude, by sending commands to the inputs that control the spacecraft, but without some kind of control authority (RCS, winglets, gimballed engines, or SAS), it\'s powerless. SAS is just an attitude control gyroscope. It is one of the control authority systems, just like RCS, winglets, or gimballed engines, but it needs someone to control it, either you or an ASAS computer (or a MechJeb).

I don\'t know what that was, but it wasn\'t French.

Which version of KSP are you using? The plugins only work on the paid version (0.15.x), not the free demo (0.13.x).

Someone seems to be having anger issues here. May I suggest that if you want help, you might want to tone down the entitlement attitude. KSP is pretty a work in progress, and so are plugins. Things aren\'t polished, don\'t always work as intended and hard hats should be required at all times. Don\'t forget that plugin developers are not getting paid. They don\'t owe anything to you. They are doing this on their free time because they enjoy it. And that motivation tends to fade away when you have to deal with folks throwing temper tantrums because they don\'t get served what they want. What you want to do will require fiddling with .cfg files so that several parts by several folks work with several plugins by several developers. Of course it will require some work on your part, some editing cfg files, some reading wikis and forum posts, and maybe some help from the developers. However, whining won\'t help.

Not necessarily. The cost of space flight is more a matter of volume than a matter of technology. SSTO and reusable launchers are expensive to develop and maintain, moreso than mass produced disposable launchers. An engine like Skylon\'s will cost much more than the dumb disposable turbopump rocket engines or SRBs that are used on Atlas, Falcon, Proton or Ariane. Competition in the market and mass production bring the costs down. The extra cost is only worthwhile when launch volumes are high enough, and much they will have to be higher than today. And launch volumes will only increase when some applications are made worthwhile by a lower cost. It\'s a chicken and egg scenario. At any rate, we are reaching a plateau in terms of comsats. Households tend to use more and more land lines, DSL or digital for TV, and GEO orbits have too much latency for bidirectional communication. If anything, the satellite market is going to shrink in the upcoming years and costs are still too high for space tourism. So really, it\'s hard to imagine the costs to orbit coming down soon.

Some sources use the latin names of the the Sun (Sol) and the Moon (Luna) as a disambiguation. But actually, in English, the capital letter should be enough to differentiate the Sun and the Moon from a sun and a moon.

I strongly suggest that folks use the Muon Detector plugin rather that just look them up on a map. It is much more fun and rewarding to find those-mysterious-features-that-may-or-may-not-exist by yourself. There is no fun in just going to coordinates that somebody else pinpointed for you.