Nibb31

3 on the Mun, 3 on Kerbin. Lots of craters.

It does, but you have to set your roll attitude first. If you roll to have a horizontal horizon, the craft will behave exactly as you describe above. Roll is just as important as pitch and yaw when it comes to docking. What we really need is a docking camera with distance, alignment and speed information on the HUD, like this.

There are hardly any windows on real space capsules. They are mainly for enjoying the view, not for orientation. Real astronauts use the instruments, and notably a navball. Look, no windows: Soyuz: Apollo; In KSP, it is possible to fly a mission blind with only the navball and the map view (and even the map view can be superfluous if you have the MechJeb orbital information view).

Yeah, but it\'s more fun to launch it on a satellite and more of a challenge. KSP should be about rockets and putting stuff in space, not flying around in airplanes! =P (Only joking. It\'s a sandbox game so you can pretend whatever you want... ) The detection light is only on the long range device. It blinks green when you are approaching the source of Muon emissions and turns red when you are moving away from it.

I think it\'s nice that it\'s big and ugly. It makes its use sort of dissuasive as compared to the short range device. Try putting it on a sat: It worked fine at an 8000m orbit on the Mun. It should work on Kerbin at 70000m, but will cover a narrower area. This is my method for locating precisely the Munoliths from orbit. 1- Build a MuonSat based on the long range device as above, and put it into a low altitude/high inclination orbit (70° or 80° for example). 2- Leave it to orbit on 10x acceleration. On your first pass, when it beeps, zoom out as far as possible and take a snapshot of the area. Print out the picture and use it as a map. 3- On each pass over the area, draw a green line on your map to mark your orbital trajectory above the area. 4- Watch the green light. As soon as it turns red, mark that spot with a cross on your green line. 5- Trace a red line perpendicular to the green line, passing through the cross. 6- After several passes, the intersection of the red lines marks the candidate location. 7- Send a landing expedition equipped with the short range device to explore the location. 8- ? ? ? 9- Profit!

Nope. You\'re freezing.

And we have all 3 Munoliths. Sorry for the dark pic (which may or may not be a hint). The last one is tricky to get to, my lander lost a leg on the way.

My second Munolith: I think I\'ve pretty much located the whereabouts of the third one with my MuonSat... Expedition en route...

I don\'t get it Nova. Why are you working on planets? They look nice, but are you planning to add extra planets with a plugin? I thought that planets could only reasonable be added by the developers... What about all those awesome parts that you were working on? the hinges, the cameras, and the rest? did you just lose interest or do you want to release them later?

Finally found the first Munolith in a crater that I had already visited 3 or 4 times. You have to get really close to it for it to become visible, less than a kilometer, so it really is like finding a needle in a haystack. I got fed up with random landings in every crater to find the Munolith. Thanks to R4m0n\'s plugin, at least we can use some kind of methodology. And it works ! First of all, put a MuonSat around the equator, with long range detection. By following the red and green light, you can get a rather precise idea of the longitude and therefore a strong candidate site. Then send a rover with the short range tracker to locate the Munolith. And finally once you have the correct coordinates, land a hab module for long duration study of the artifact. Now I\'m putting the MuonSat into a 60° orbit to get full coverage of the Mun. Be right back... I think we\'ve picked up a second signal...

Or 42.

The thing is, there will be no flags and footprints on Mars for at least the next 50 years, and probably the next century. So in the meantime, rovers and probes are cool. MSL will probably be the last rover. The next step for Mars missions are ISRU and sample return, which are both steps that have to be accomplished if we want flags and footprints one day. As for KSP (back on topic), there is a big problem with getting to other planets: launch windows. For Mars, in RL, we get a launch window every 2 years. This would make KSP a pretty boring game if you had to warp 100000000x for 20 minutes to reach the next launch window. As you add more planets, the problem of planet alignment gets more difficult. It\'s going to be hard to keep a good balance between fun, game mechanics and orbital constraints, which is why Squad needs to have solid game mechanics first.

These are great, but they really need a version on deployable legs so that they can fit in a shroud and provide some stability when deployed. If you mount them on a 1m stage, it is too top heavy and topples over.

The whole Spektr module had to be sealed off after the accident, which involved cutting the cables by hand to close the hatch while the station was decompressing. Must\'ve been quite a hairy moment for the crew... Apollo 13 was a near miss, but the entire history of Mir also has a lot of very very close calls that could have killed the crew.

Heading straight for something in space is usually a sure way of never reaching it.

I don\'t think this is possible. Docking with landing struts is unstable and puts you into un uncontrollable spin, so after step 4, you can\'t do much more.

This isn\'t really a support question. It\'s hard to see what your orbits are from that angle, but your craft seems to be too close to the Apoapsis to lower it significantly. To lower the Apoapsis, you need to burn retrograde at the Periapsis. To raise your Periapsis, you need to burn prograde at the Apoapsis.

The trick to get to orbit is to tip over and not go straight up. Ideally, you want your rocket to be parallel to the ground when you exit the atmosphere (around 70000m). However, you want to get out of the thickest part of the atmosphere as fast as possible, so you should go straight up at the beginning of the flight. These are some rule of thumb instructions: - Straight up full throttle to 13-15000m. - Start tipping over approx 20° East (to the right), because this offers you an extra boost due to the rotation of Kerbin. - At around 25-30000m, tip over 45° until 50000m. - At 68000m, aim for 90°. - Look at the map. Keep on burning until your Ap reaches your target altitude. - Coast to the Ap point on the map, point your rocket prograde (the yellow marker on the nav ball) and start your circularization burn. - Stop burning when your Pe reaches the target altitude. - ??? - Profit!

Wow ! Fantastic model! Could you make the pod windows opaque (maybe tinted gold or black) instead of the stick-on kerbal decals ? They make it look like a 1950\'s tin toy car.

Really? Do you have a source for that? Hummm... I don\'t get it... What do radial decouplers have to do with docking? Radial decouplers are typically used in first and second stages, in the atmosphere, well before getting involved in any rendez-vous or docking. It would be stupid to plan staging during a precise rendez-vous manoeuver. Also, if you want a 0 force decoupler, just use a 0 force decoupler. Sometimes a 50 force decoupler is what you need, especially on radial rockets. That\'s why where there is a FORCE parameter in the first place.

I\'ve noticed an issue since 0.14 where radial decouplers all seem to have 0 ejection force, which causes spent radial stages to collide with the central stage when jettisonned. Has anyone else noticed this ?

Wow! A front facing camera pod would be awesome for docking manoeuvers!

First, you have to learn how to adjust your orbit. You can practice that in Kerbin orbit first. To raise your apogee or perigee, burn prograde at perigee or apogee (on the opposite side of the orbit). To lower your apogee or perigee, burn retrograde at perigee or apogee. To obtain a nice circular orbit, you need to burn at least twice to adjust both the apogee and perigee to the same altitude. Easy once you get the hang of it. To get a nice landing trajectory, you simply have to burn retrograde to make your perigee intersect with the ground. Then it\'s a matter of maintaining a slow enough vertical velocity, horizontal velocity and attitude. Use the nav ball.

5- Fire retrograde (slow down) to insert into munar orbit. 6- Lower your orbit and commence descent. 7- Under 20000m, slow down enough to cut your horizontal velocity. The yellow retrograde marker should be in the middle of the nav ball. 8- Land with a careful combination of main engine to maintain the descent rate and RCS for horizontal direction.

You would have to switch off the SAS and manually input the correct rotation with the RCS and correct it manually. Very hard to do.