Superfluous J

What LameLefty said. You can also build one of your pairs, get it all set, and then copy that radial decoupler and put it onto the central stack. I've not tried it in the VAB, but in flight if you fiddle around with clicking, right clicking, and holding alt you can separate things in the staging system. It's clunky enough that I've not bothered but I did notice it. If that works in the VAB it'd work here for you, but setting the whole thing up from the get-go with separated staging is far easier.

Actually if there was a part that was a pair of pliers that you could attach 2 command pods to, you could transfer crew between those pods. The claw never gained this ability, too. People don't transfer through things. They just can transfer between command pods in the same ship. No checks are made (other than that the destination has an empty seat) and no time is taken. It just happens. I both agree and disagree with RoverDude on this one. Squad could add a check for hatches and disable contracts for them, but RoverDude could also add a hatch to that module. Also, you are not considering that perhaps someone would WANT you to have to rescue the Kerbal without a hatch, to exercise your problem solving skills. I'm not saying Squad or RoverDude had that idea, but that hard-coding it away by Squad would eliminate that possibility.

TAC (or any) life support mod should disable rescue contracts entirely. By the time you got to them, they'd be dead anyway.

The hardest single thing was landing on and returning from Eve with a Kerbal. Specifically, getting him back into orbit from the surface. The hardest mission was the Jool-5 one, but I made it much harder by putting (literal) tons of restrictions on myself. Though I think I'll blow both of those out of the water with my latest endeavor, a grand tour for the Ultimate Challenge.

It always is Some context: I was using this last night and I use NavHud, which shows me the alignment and direction to target, and of course the game shows distance. Mostly all I wanted was "distance at intercept" and "time to intercept". They're not always just a simple equation of distance/speed, especially if you're a good distance apart. I don't think it'd be distracting to just leave up what's already there for rendezvous, but change the text to read in meters if you're under 0.1km. I don't know the exact considerations you look for to display rendezvous information but I imagine you have upper and lower bounds for things, and simply removing one of those bounds could be all that's necessary. Whichever way you go, thanks for considering my idea.

I deal with the bugs by playing all the other games that do what KSP does only without the shortcomings. Oh wait there are none.

Yes.

I just experienced for the first time how awesome the rendezvous timer was. Well done. I don't know if this is doable, but in my mind this could also be used as a docking timer, if you allowed it to go down to the meter (and likely decimeter) and kept it up when it would normally go away. I don't know if it would cause any problems or be too inaccurate and jumpy (as math fights physics when you turn ships and fire RCS) but it'd be pretty convenient.

As someone who's done both as well, I find Tylo to be marginally more difficult than Mun, but consider Eve the single hardest thing you can do in the game. Regarding the MPL, I don't use it. It seems an odd combination of grindy annoyance and super science fountain.

Kerbals are referred to by name several places in the file. You must change ALL references to that Kerbal to the new name. Some cause weirdness, some cause what you describe, but in all cases it's bad. But I don't see how changing the persistent.sfs could make it so you couldn't load an otherwise perfectly okay quicksave.sfs from earlier. There must be something else going on there but I don't know what it could be.

I don't. I suck it up and bring the fuel to slow down manually. And nice plane!

I've built standardized lifters, but never used them. I almost always custom build the lifter for the rocket. I would if there was an in-game benefit for it, but I tend to enjoy tailoring the lifter for exactly what I need to lift. I'd like to - say - design a single lifter and then get a 10-50% discount for using it, but that would be pretty hard to program, I think. Other than potentially saving time, no. And that's arguable I think.

I used to do KSP, but then Fallout 4 and Darkest Dungeon (and to a lesser extent Just Cause 3) happened. Those are (mostly) over now though and I'll be starting up a Grand Tour soon. Maybe even this weekend. http://youtube.com/HMVPlays

No it's the same as what happened in the book.

You can also, with a deft hand or a fuel pumping mod, launch it full but transfer its fuel out into the lifter on the way up. This can significantly lower the size of your lifter stage. I've had ships where the "lifter" was just some engines attached to small fuel tanks that the "payload" constantly filled during ascent.

It was between 2 and 3 km. I'm hoping to land over 4km up but it's nice to have the margin The brakes are almost never actually in the air stream. They're just there to peek out when the craft wobbles, catch some air, and push the craft back to having the shield in front. I am. My first design had 7 large heat shields splayed out to fill roughly the area the inflatable one fills now. I'm glad I don't have to use that now. I'm also glad I don't have to launch it off Kerbin now My mission has been designed around that Lander Can. I *could* swap it out for a Mk1 capsule but then I'd have to re-test everything else. And it performed just fine. I suspect I'm taking advantage of some simplification in the model that's there to run the game faster, but at this point I don't care. It works. Period I've got 5 "ships" in my ship (not counting little robotic tugs to do the dockings) The Eve ship An ISRU ship that can land on Moho, fill up, and get back into orbit. It can also land on all other airless worlds but Tylo. It can also land on Duna and get back to orbit without drilling. The "Tylo Lander" that will also land on Vall, and will also be an all-around long-distance tug. For instance, its got the job of fetching that lander can in low Eve orbit and bringing it back to the mothership. A Laythe plane. Because going to Laythe and not bringing a plane seems... just wrong. The mothership, that has enough dV fully loaded to get the whole she bang from one place to the next. I'm looking forward to doing it!

What solved it was making sure I was aiming upward. To achieve this, I employed a combination of: quicksave/load until I land somewhere fairly flat , and also through a few launches. reaction wheels place all 6 landing gear on separately so I can raise just one or two of them to allow me to tilt the ship before liftoff. Raising the fins up a little bit - but not too much. They're still behind the COM but only just. And the COM goes up as I drop stages so it just gets more stable as it rises. Ditch the fairing for a single intake, just like the onioned bosters have. I'm not sure if that last one helped, but it did lower my mass enough to justify keeping the reaction wheels into the early launch to help maintain stability. And a big part of landing turned out to be A.I.R.B.R.A.K.E.S. Those things act like fins once you get down to about 70km altitude. I don't know if I'll have the time this weekend, but hopefully I'll start my actual Ultimate Challenge soon! I still need to figure out how to hook all this junk together in some sort of transfer stage.

A lot of this went into my first (and likely only) Eve lifter. It doesn't quite make Sea Level but from 2km or higher it can reach orbit. Landing and launching yours (and following your instructions both for your own and mine) really helped a lot. Thanks!

Is that 4 aerospikes in the middle there, under a 2.5m tank?

Another thing you can do - if you want no mods - is to launch straight up. When the engines cut out, note the time and your velocity. Then 10 seconds later note the velocity again. Your acceleration down due to gravity at the surface is 10m/s (about). Your acceleration at the end is 1/10th the difference in your two ending velocities. The average of those two numbers times how many seconds you burned is *about* how much you lost to gravity. That number, plus your velocity when the engines cut out, is *about* your ship's total dV. This ignores several things about atmosphere (and the fact that acceleration due to gravity doesn't fall off in a linear fashion) but it's a good approximation. You want that number to be at least 8000m/s.

IIRC you need to be able to launch your ship into LKO, then Hyperedit it back down to the surface, and then launch THAT back into LKO. And if you have enough left over to escape Kerbin's SOI, you might - just might - be able to scrape your way into orbit of Eve.

No. In real life, Earth's tilt is 23 degrees. Mars' is 25. Uranus' is 82. In RSS, Earth's tilt is 23 degrees. Mars' is 23. Uranus' is 23. And they all point the same direction as well. What RSS does is a hack to get the tilt on Earth right, sacrificing correctly tilting everything else.

I'd guess some sort of fuel pump mod, or a lot of right-clicking in flight. And that air conditioner is - I believe - the parachutes, deployed.

Here's the output_log.txt (zipped) of me loading the game, jumping to an already-orbiting ship from the tracking station, and hitting time warp up to 50x where KSP told me that was fast enough. [defunct site link removed by moderator] And here's the latest source code with the outputs just to be sure. And finally, I don't know exactly what " One possible cause, given you say the real mod works, is that you're targetting the wrong version of .net it needs to be version 3.5. " means. I mean, I know it means that I need to target .net version 3.5 but I have no idea how to do that in Monodevelop. I found the string " <package id="Xamarin.Forms" version="2.2..31" targetFramework="portable-net45+win+wp80" /> " in a file named packages.config and changed it to " <package id="Xamarin.Forms" version="2.2..31" targetFramework="portable-net35+win+wp80" /> " and that didn't cause any compile errors, but it also didn't make the mod work.

Oh really? I always thought it was rep due to the green dots in the last forum. The more you know...