Superfluous J

If by "cheating" you mean "assuming a race that can build space ships has developed the technology to TRANSFER STUFF THROUGH THOSE SHIPS WITHOUT HAVING TO GO OUTSIDE" then no, you can't do it without cheating.

The level 1 runway (i.e., the one part of Kerbin's surface that is least like a runway) is so bumpy that you roll backward. Every other runway, you still roll forward.

You asked what the community thought. What the community thinks (about most things) is "to argue."

Right click them. Takes some relearning but in the end it really is better. I called that it would be today, by the way. Over a month ago. When I bought plane tickets for a vacation. I fly in 10 hours... :/

With Distant Object Enhancement you could look at Jool, note the positions of its moons, and then jump to a ship at Jool and see if they were the same. Nothing beats observational evidence.

I may just be explaining it poorly. It's just percent of the orbit. In 15.45 minutes (the time it takes to transfer) the station would travel 51.5% of its orbit. So you need to do you burn so you will hit the station's orbit at a point 51.5% of an orbit away. As your orbits are both circles to start, that means your higher orbiting ship needs to be 1.5% of a full circle ahead of the station when you burn. And as every 1% of an orbit is 3.6%, 1.5% is 5.4°

I'm on vacation this week and won't have much computer time for a while. But for that last one... I don't know. I can visualize it but not explain it. And I can't even begin to think of how to program it.

While simple, that isn't convenient if you want to, for example, see how it changes in various places. It'd be nice to have the info available as you hover your mouse over a point. Like the Pe/Ap info, just everywhere. And while we're at it I'd like a ghost of your target (ship or planet) location at that time.

"Kerbal Space Program Version 1.1"

If you're going for a challenge and totally minimizing dV expenditure, then you shouldn't be going from Minmus to Kerbin. You should be going from Minmus to Mun for a gravity assist to slow you down to encounter Kerbin. Likewise, you shouldn't burn up to Minmus from Kerbin but use a Mun assist to get there. It'll only save a few dozen m/s of dV but if you care about 100...

I too don't bother reading them, which is bad because many custom contracts for Contract Configurator put real info in the summaries and I skip those too out of habit. I work in a large company and see actual text in actual emails all the time that this text is attempting to ape, and I appreciate the joke. They get the feel correct for sure. For the record and if my boss is reading this, I never ever skip over all that text in company correspondence.

This is very very true. Actually one of the main considerations for me to decide between staging in serial or parallel is the type of engines I'm going to be using in space. Frequently for large craft, I just use a few Rhinos in space and their atmo Isp is good enough to use right off the pad. At least, I think that's true. I've not done the math. As is typical of me

EDIT: Oops I used 75km. I'm not going to re-do the math now though "Time Unit" and "Distance Unit" was just to put your station in a similar situation to Earth in the Solar System. 1 AU is 1 AU because it's so darn convenient and for no other reason. 1 year is also super convenient for the SAME reason. We define our units in this way to make the math (which is the hard part) far easier. If you don't, you deal with the below. Your station is in a 675km orbit, and orbits in (I'm guessing here) about 30 minutes. So we know that the square of the period (30 minutes) is the cube of the SMA (675km) with some constant based on our units (Above, I set the units so the constant would be 1 but here, we need to find it). So, 30 squared is 900 and 675 cubed is 307546875, so 900*x = 307546875, so our constant here is 341718.75 or let's say 341000. Or 0.0000029 if you're going the other way. So your ship orbiting at 100km is actually at 700km from Kerbin's radius. So we plug that into the square/cubed equation: (SMA cubed = period squared * 341000) (7003 = p2 * 341000) (343000000 / 341000 = p2) (31.7 minutes = p) So your station orbits in 30 minutes, your 100km ship orbits in 31.7. To burn it down to the station, your transfer orbit's SMA will be exactly midway between 75 and 100km so at 87.5km which is 687.5km from Kerbin's center, so we do the same math: (SMA cubed = period squared * 341000) (687.53 = p2 * 341000) (30.9 minutes = p) So it would take your transferring craft 30.9/2 minutes to get from its 100km orbit down to the 75km orbit of the station (because it's a half orbit). The station in 15.45 minutes will travel 15.45/30 or 51.5 percent of its orbit, so you'd want to be 1.5 orbit percents ahead of the station when you burn down. 1.5 percent of 360 is 5.4 degrees. I think I may have said that last part wrong in the original example. Note this assumes that a 75km orbit is - indeed - 30 minutes exactly. But if it's not you can do the math yourself to figure it out. Note also you can end run around the math by noting, for all 3 orbits (ship, station, and transfer) the time it takes to get from Pe to Ap. Double that is your orbital period in all 3 cases, and for every orbit in the game.

I've played with it (as I have every part in the game) but never used it seriously, after the first few launches when it was new. It's a bit of "realism" I am happy to do without.

The below math is slightly wrong in that the calculator I was using (me) was doing cubes wrong. Ignore the wrong numbers though and the idea is sound Also, in my following reply, I used the correct cubes. Well the math isn't that hard, it's just fiddly and I don't like it Your orbit period cubed is equal to your semi-major axis squared, with a convenient constant thrown in. So for example Earth's SMA is 1 AU, and its orbit is 1 year, so the constant is 1 (due to how we chose our units). Mars' SMA is about 1.5, and its year should therefore be about sqrt(1.5 cubed) and sure enough, it is. For your ships, then, you have one at say a 100km orbit and one at a 200km orbit (Orbiting at 70km is asking for trouble and I would say any permanent station be at LEAST 80km up and you may as well do it 100 for easier math). Of course, Kerbin's 600km in radius so your orbits are actually 700km and 800km. Let's say you're orbiting 100km and your station is 200km. Let's also say your 200km station's orbit is "1 time unit" and its orbit's radius is "1 distance unit". We can say 1 time unit cubed equals 1 distance unit squared, just like with Earth and years. Further, your lower ship's orbit is 7/8ths of a distance unit, so its period will be the square root of 7/8 cubed, or about 0.93 of the station's orbit. Note I'm not using km or seconds or anything, just comparing the two orbits using made up units that are more convenient. This is easier because you can then remove all units and just use ratios. You will eventually be making a burn to turn your 100x100 (Periapsis x Apoapsis, not width x height) orbit into a 100x200 orbit, to go from where you are to where you're going. Remember that's actually a 700x800 orbit. The long width of that ellipse is 1500km, so the SMA is 750km. so it's 750/800ths the space station's orbit, so sqrt(750/800 cubed) is about 0.968. You'll eventually be traveling halfway around from your ship to your station, and in that half time you'll travel 0.484 while it travels 0.5. 0.5-0.484 is 0.016 orbit units, and an orbit is 360 degrees, so you want to be 360*0.016 = about 5.75 degrees behind the station when you do your burn to Hohmann transfer to it. Now you see why I just make maneuver nodes and drag them around. (I hope I didn't make any mistakes, either in the math or the idea. I'm pretty sure I didn't but I'm running on low sleep right now. Hopefully even where I do have any mistakes, I at least get the IDEA across so you can do it yourself with your own orbits)

2 ships in LKO don't really need a Hohmann transfer. Using one in my opinion is like removing a screw with a pocket knife. Sure you can do it but there's a screwdriver RIGHT THERE. If you have 2 ships in orbit around Kerbin, control the one you want to rendezvous with the other. Place a maneuver node anywhere on your orbit and draw it up to touch the other ship's orbit on the other side (that's actually a Hohmann transfer but we're not calculating anything here). It should get you some encounter markers. Unless you're extraordinarily lucky they'll not match up. Drag the maneuver node around the orbit and see if you can get them to. If so, great. Do that burn and then rendezvous. If they're not (and it's likely they won't be) use the "+/-" buttons on the maneuver node (right click it to toggle between the "normal" maneuver node and this one) and increase the orbit once or more, until the two markers are close to each other. THEN drag it around (in that same +/- mode. Don't drag it in the other mode or KSP will "helpfully" snap it back to the current orbit, not the future orbit) until the two encounter markers match up. Two mods that make this MUCH easier are precise node (so you can be 100% sure you're not going to screw up the future node by dragging it) and Kerbal Alarm Clock (so you can go do something else while waiting multiple orbits before your burn). I apologize if this fits your definition of "making random nodes." It's really not, though. It's a specific process that you can follow and get exactly what you want every time.

This isn't the right thread for this post but I'm not sure what would be and it's small enough that I don't want a new thread for it Whoever is responsible for the new "Recent Activity" page's extra buttons, filters, and options being right on the page and easily changeable, thanks! I didn't even know I wanted that.

I don't usually bother with rovers. I build a plane that can get to the location, quicksave when I'm nearby, then crash into the ground 4-5 times until I finally land the thing. Do whatever the contract requires, take off again (after quicksaving), and repeat for the next location. Doubles as flight training too.

I second this. All your questions are just a walk down memory lane for me, when I had all the same problems. The same is true for a lot of us, I suspect. For me personally, it's the first weekend of my vacation so I'm understandably not on as much

Backups, man. Backups. But I feels your feels. That's harsh. But backups.

Isn't that the level 1 admin building? Or do you mean all the worthwhile facilities?

asdf One more: When you're landing and trying to nail it within a few meters (or less, when landing on say a docking port), you'll need to be able to control roll and translation at the same time. Perfecting that skill in the far more safe and forgiving environment of orbital docking means your learning curve will be shallower.

I somehow totally missed this entire thread. I blame Fallout coming out at about the time it was active One question, other than being "Ktolemaic" is it otherwise "correct"? Like, all of the below: - Is the Sun roughly the same size in the sky (i.e, did you shrink it or make it as far from Kerbin as Kerbin is from the Sun in the stock game? - Are the other planets visible as well in the sky, or are they small enough to only show as points? - Does everything still follow Kepler's laws of motion, so when you're transferring to the planets will it be like transferring to Mun? If the answer to at least the last one is "yes" then I'm at least going to play around in the universe a bit. It's a really cool idea. It reminds me of a sci-fi series I once read but now have no idea the name of, where the Solar System was actually Ptolemaic but followed workable physical laws.

Agreed. It also matches with my own personal rule that - if I'm doing 2 separate lifter stages to orbit - each of them gets about half the dV. But really in the stock game I far more frequently do my stages in parallel instead of serial, with fuel lines feeding into the inward tanks. Most small rockets only need one such transition, and it's more efficient and you can use all the (lifter) engines at launch.

I don't use docking mode because I instinctively know how to use wasdqe for orientation and ijklhn for translation. Retraining my brain to use different keys for one specific thing, when I've already mastered all the controls, seems like a waste of time at best. Also, one of those controls you need to retrain is the spacebar, and considering what that does outside of docking mode, it's just asking for trouble. Completely unrelated to KSP and too long to just watch on a whim video hidden below