Superfluous J

Are you sure none of your mods add that functionality? I suspect it'd be a pretty simple Module Manager config.

First, I'd move somewhere where you can grow crops year-round. I'd then raid the local library for books on farming and the local stores for canned goods to keep me going until the crops became sustainable. Once I knew I'd be able to survive indefinitely, I'd learn how to fly (from books), go to the local airport, and repeatedly take planes into the sky just to jump out and skydive back to the ground. hen I'd base jump off of all the nearby tall buildings and bridges. Eventually, I'd take a road trip to the grand canyon in a convertable, and drive off the side to see if I can "base jump" that. I don't know what I'd do for the 2nd half of the year, or for the rest of my life, but "whatever I want" would be high on the list.

Agreed on TWR being too high. I'd replace that Mainsail with a Skipper with some solids to get back to 1.5 off the pad. Also, if your fins are control surfaces swap them for regular fins. I disagree about building out "as fast as you build up." Your rocket should look like a pencil, not a lampshade.

Yeah a lot of us just had 2 major holidays in a row. Those major holidays are of course Halloween and Standard Time Day. I had no idea what planet I was on when I woke up this morning.

I assume you mean the docking port scene. I defend it easily: Rule of Cool. It was a really really cool scene presented beautifully and it made our hero look awesome. If the rest of the movie was more like that scene and less like the boring pile of ... uh ... not-cool that it was, then it would have been a much better movie. More "realistic"? No. A better movie, though. There is a fundamental difference between "You couldn't dock those two ships together in that situation" and "You can't get to the ISS from Hubble with 2 people, with the RCS fuel from a single suit." One is a shrug and a "well it's cool anyway let's do it, and plus it makes our hero look BadS" while the other is "Herp I don't know but they said space was like being on a skating rink back in 8th grade so what if they just skated there?"

Are the probe cores really far apart, or are they possibly right on top of the rocket with your mainsail at the bottom? What's your TWR at launch (You can tell by reading the G meter after you hit spacebar. Each tick is 1G and right at the surface, 1G=1TWR)? Do you have RCS or reaction wheels up at the top there as well? What I think is happening is you're getting some resonance in your ship on liftoff. The probe cores sway to the right, and both any reaction wheels up at the top AND The mainsail try to compensate, causing it to sway to the left. Then they compensate again, causing it to sway again right. Repeat until your ship breaks up. It's not super common but it does happen. When it does, you have a few options: 1) Fly without SAS. It's a pain IMO and not worth it usually. 2) Disable gimbaling on the Mainsail. That's the main problem. It's far from your probe cores but assumes if they're turning, it's turning. So it tries to correct a problem that's not there. 3) Put a probe core on your main stack, and "control from here." on it. The closer to your Mainsail the better, though anywhere on the lifter is fine probably. This will cause the mainsail to consider "forward" where THAT probe core is, regardless of whether or not the upper stack is wobbling. You can also look into the Kerbal Joint Reinforcement mod but I've been playing for 2.5 years and have never felt the need, myself, so I know it's not necessary to fix a problem like this.

Yeah I aerocapture at Duna all the time. 13-15 km is perfect. Never needed any heat protection either.

I suspect the list of aggregate planet data would look like this: Kerbin: 98% Mun: 1% Minmus: 0.5% All other planets: 0.5% Similarly for parts. Swivel and Reliant share over 50% of the pool while all other engines barely make a dent.

I had this problem too, but someone else pointed out that the RTG was not used by the astronauts, but by the unmanned portion of the mission, as the power source to generate the fuel for the return journey. And the burying it was basically red-tape protocol rules made by pencil pushers. That may actually be the most realistic part of the book

I never use rovers anymore. The fuel you "save" by driving it around is far more than wasted getting it to the location. Just make your ship able to make those small hops. It won't take that much more fuel. If it's close enough to use a rover, it's close enough to hop without spending much fuel.

And the magnitude. One suit just does not - and never will - have the thrust required to do what Clooney's did. They barely have the thrust to do the little tour he took at the start of the film. - - - Updated - - - That sounds correct to my memory.

All the orbital mechanics stuff in The Martian (book. Still haven't seen the movie) was solid, including everything the mothership did to get back to Mars from its Earthbound trajectory. I don't remember the particulars of the supply pod but IIRC thought it was capable of getting up to the speed of the mothership, and the mothership then burned to get to Mars. And the mothership was not doing Oberth maneuvers, but burning for extended periods with efficient but very low thrust. Gravity had a lot more wrong with it than the recurring debris field. It treated all the things in space like they were stationary on a map, and you could just thrust toward them to get there. Anybody who's tried a rendezvous in KSP knows that ain't the case when you're more than just a few scant kilometers apart.

Very nice suggestions!

It was sarcasm, and I did not take other worlds or heavy transfer ships (as with life support) into account. I doubt I'll do it in any of my missions, but I accept there are some cases where it would show some sort of benefit.

I just noticed on that picture (which is a screengrab from the video in case you're curious) the top of the screen is blacked out, as if there's something there they don't want us to see. Some new GUI feature perhaps?

Every 15 minutes I drop a time stamp, so if you can find a spot in the video more easily. Something in "quotes" means it was directly said, though I frequently don't bother with that. [brackets] are those rare times where the accent barrier keeps me from understanding something, or I want to say an aside about something Max said about KSP development. Green text is descriptions of what Max is doing in the game, with asides and commentary by me where I feel the desire. If you want to watch the episode yourself, you can find it at http://www.twitch.tv/ksptv/profile/past_broadcasts Squadcast was just over an hour. 0:00 Max appears to have just gotten done with his 2nd job spinning a web any size, and catching crooks just like flies. It's his old Halloween costume. Hurricane "actually happened." Mostly hit unpopulated areas. He's going to rescue some Kerbals 1.0.5 may be entering Experimentals. They might not be as long as before. "You might not have to wait that much." The rescuer actually landed last time. So "all" he has to do is go home. He lifts straight up at 1/5th throttle. I know it's Minmus but come on By the time he goes to map mode he's got a straight up trajectory into Kerbal orbit. The ship has plenty of fuel so no biggie. I can't even explain what he's doing because I have no frickin' clue. Lets just say his "return" trajectory almost left Kerbin's SOI. He sets his periapsis to 60, which is way too high but won't kill him at least. Q: Why don't you play 1.0.5 on Squadcast? A: It would take away from the media team, content creators, etc. He throttles up at Pe to bring his Ap down very low. Q: Release Date A: You all know the answer so I won't even say it. That said, they're expecting Experimentals to be short. Q: Screenshots? A: Yes, but later. They are pushing for the time between 1.0.5 and 1.1 to be "as short as humanly possible." (Max is talking about the awards Squad has gotten. It's not related to the gameplay or development, so I'm not commenting on it. I'm happy about the awards it's just not relevant) Q: Fixing lag for Saitek joysticks? A: A lot of the code for joysticks has been overhauled, for steam controller, ps4 and xbox 1 controllers. Overall making it easier to control. 15:00 Re-entry is uneventful, mostly because Max had tons of fuel and did most of his slowing down with that fuel, way up in the upper atmosphere. When the contracts end (I think with the console ports?) with the other developers, Squad will take over support for the console games. It's not a big deal as most of the stuff is just Unity. And if need be they could re-hire the same people to fix any problems. His rep is "up" to -517. Q: Multi-screen support? A: It's something they're looking into with with Unity. It looks very possible, just not quite yet. He's got another Kerbal, in orbit with no fuel, to rescue. He uses the same ship he just used. Q: Does Squad have a wish list for 1.2? Or Beyond? A: "We are currently not happy with the way the game in general looks. Every now and then - and by that I literally mean all the time - we go on reddit... on our forums... we go on social media and what do we see, guys? What do we see? We see absolute and complete beautiful [something] in the game. We see mods tht have brought such gorgousness to the game that is downright mind-boggling. ... And you know what? We want to do our official version of that. We want the game to look just as good." Why aren't they doing that already? They ran out of RAM. One solution: asset loader. They are "very interested" in doing that. "What else could we possibly do after that. Oh that's right. We could move to Unity 5 and make the game 64 bit so the RAM limit becomes a thing of the past." That is their plan. Once they have all that room, they will make the game as pretty as they can. What 1.1 does for KSP is it unlocks the potential for them to go "kinda bananas". They can get some of the effect by bumping up shaders or changing the lighting, but "we kinda wanna do more." All he asks for from us is patience. They thought U5 would be less work, but once they dove into it, it was more work. By now he's in orbit. He ejects to Mun, gets there, orbits, and brings his orbit down to the target ship. 30:00 He fixes his inclination and then gets an encounter marker of 600 meters. He of course sets it up perfectly to start the encounter at orbital sunset. Q: (question about bringing other modders on board) A: They've learned over time that they have an amazing pool of people willing to work with them (for money). It's been amazing. He happily says "Yes" to the idea of approaching people. If they are willing and everything works. Q: [something about more parts] A: When they have more RAM, "who knows what will happen." He EVAs his stranded Kerbal into the rescue ship. He sets up a pretty efficient return trajectory. It could be worse, but I think if he'd just burned where he was it'd have been better Q: (not really a question) someone wanted to see everything sleek and modern-looking. A: Maybe a toggle (I suspect in jest). For some reason he set his Kerbin Pe to 80km and then burned his Ap down. Q: Female Kerbal bounciness. A: He was joking. He likes it, and thinks it is funny, but it should and will be fixed. "I believe in an equality of elasticity among the genders" Re-entry is a bit more typical this time around, more fire and less fuel use. He does hit the gas though to slow down. 45:00 He lands safe and sound. He looks at contracts for the next mission. He considers a flyby of Duna and a re-enter of Kerbin. He decides instead to get some science, so he can unlock the next fairings. He is going to send a probe to land on Duna and transmit science back. He opts for 2 nukes in the transfer stage, and a Mainsail with a single orange tank to lift off. I predict it will not get to space, but if it does, it'll have way more fuel than it ever needs. He adds some of the biggest solid boosters too, which will help. He adds 2 more orange tanks and ... SMALL DRILLS. And small tanks. But SMALL DRILLS. Currently only works in high density areas. ... he adds 2 more mainsails to the orange tanks. Next time this thing will launch, and may even get to space.

Ah. Yes. All those people coming from places other than the surface of a planet, specifically into an ideal orbit of that planet to make ejections to other planets most efficient. I forgot about them.

Actually I recall this being discussed some time in the past 30 years and I googled someone else's reasoning because I couldn't bother to write up my own: "Gas will go stale within months. And that's modern day Gas, who knows what 1955 gas shelf life is like. The more space in a tank, the more space it has to evaporate. Condensation will add water to the fuel ruining it. Temperature swings will as well. As we know, 1885 had no temperature control to speak of. The older the gas, the less likely it will ignite. Diesel would last longer as it does not need a spark to ignite, just compression. In short, even if Doc had saved the gas, eight months and imperfect storage would have made it useless by the time Marty showed up."

Actually that wouldn't work IRL, though I bet it would in KSP. IRL, inside a planet gravity is less. I define "as low as you can" by the highest mountain on an airless world, and the atmosphere on an aired one. With a margin to account for the fact that your ejection burn will take you a bit lower.

Which means, of course, that the best place to put your ships before burning out to other planets is "as low as you can."

Check "Body Fixed Mode" in the options. Your trajectory will no longer be relative to actual space, but instead relative to the world you're orbiting. In other words, your trajectory will compensate for the planet's rotation.

100% this. 1000%. 1,523,395%. I've missed so many harrowing, low-altitude, near-planet-grazing flybys because I was busy right clicking stuff.

I frequently put a 48-7s on a 1.25m stack and never have problems. Of course, the payloads are usually small too. I have used 3 or 4 vertical struts with good results. I've used a terrier (or even a nuke or a swivel/reliant, though I haven't used those in space outside of early career in a while) on the larger tanks, too, and in those cases if the vertical struts don't work, 6 or 8 struts in sets of 2 in an X pattern does the trick. It also helps sometimes to disable all control devices on your payload during launch, and put a probe core somewhere on the lifter and control from there on liftoff. Then if your payload wobbles, the lifting engines don't gimble all crazily trying to "correct" a problem that's not there.

I expect I will play it to the exclusion of all else (except hopefully eating, sleeping, and working) for a solid week. Then I have a long weekend out of town. Then I'll play it to the exclusion of all else (except hopefully eating, sleeping, and working) until I'm done with it.

A) It's in 1.1 It was probably not worth no matter what, it as if your probe on Duna can contact a satellite in Kerbin's SOI, it would be able to talk to KSC even without that satellite present.