Superfluous J

If you're not sure if what you've built will work, test it on the launchpad or runway. It probably won't be very efficient but if your drilling/converting rig is all set up correctly, you should be able to get ore and convert it into LF/O.

I see it as they stopped being the only useful engine.

Back in 0.90 you could get landed in water science just off of the island runway's runway. Haven't tried it in 1.0 because science is oozing out of every other pore of the game so I don't feel the need to hunt any of it down.

Nice design for 25 hours worth of gameplay. Solid 3-man mun mission there. You've taken the first step into a larger world. You've got a few more dozen "first"s to nail before you've even scratched this game's surface!

In official testing and sandbox, dozens. Who knows. In actual serious career, zero. Goose Egg. Nada. Well, there were those two that died in a plane crash, but then the game crashed and when I reloaded they were back on the runway. So that doesn't count Edit Over 3.5 years later: this post has the distinction of housing my 10,000th like.

Yes. I took one of the images from the ProceduralFairings mod and put it in place of the stock fairings image, and think the result looks much better. I sadly don't remember which file I replaced or which I used, but you can see the fairings in most of my videos in my current series.

First off, congrats on the 30-part mun lander. That's no small feat Second, I refuse to disable save/revert options specifically because of bugs. I just do my best to not succumb to using it for other reasons.

I made a ship that can go from the launch pad to about 200m/s from LKO without ever touching any controls except the spacebar Including the SAS button (i.e., I didn't even turn SAS on)

I don't think it's possible for a device that gives you science to be OP. Science in this game is like water. Your ships explode when they touch it. No, wait. That's not what I meant. Science in this game is like water. It just flows in from all directions filling up your R&D building.

Haha! No, "save scum" is a pretty common term, enough that I don't think RD would think he was being called scum

Sweet! Been waiting for someone with more aptitude than I do make this mod

Yup. And it's essentially Steam's entire pricing scheme.

KSP doesn't cost $40. The $40 cost is so when it's on sale for $30 or $20 people buy it. If it cost $20, nobody would buy it unless it was on sale for $15.

If you don't mind mods, I find this pair quite effective: Disable Temp Gauges stops the stock memory leak by disabling the gauges. Critical Temperature Gauge puts up a nice (and configurable) heat warning that doesn't leak memory.

Let's break this down a bit: 3300 + 930 + 160 + 180 (Minmus landing) Correct. 180 + 160 + ~70 (probably more, transfer to Mun SOI) Actually 70 feels about right for a Minmus-Mun transfer. Maybe even less. This chart doesn't well represent transfers that don't include Kerbin as an endpoint, though. 310 + 580 (Mun landing) Yup. 580 + 310 + 860 You do not need that 860 to return. The aerobraking will do it for you. If I pack a buffer of an additional ~30% I'd be at around 10k. 30% is a big buffer. I usually do 10%. Feel free to start at 30% but note how much fuel you have and next time adjust your margins. So I've saved you 860 already so your 10k is probably closer to 9k. If you cut your buffer to maybe 20% (or 10% like I do) we're getting close to 8k. And ship design can cut this even further. You will always need that much dV, but you can do more with less fuel with efficient design. Leaving things in orbit (which of course means knowing how to rendezvous and dock) and designing a lander that can efficiently land on both Mun and Minmus (hint: Go to Mun first and leave an empty fuel tank on the surface, so your lander is smaller for the rest of the trip including the Minmus landing) can cut your payload in half, which means your lifter will be half as big. Which means it'll be cheaper. And easier to fly. And you'll feel like a baws.

If you want to do it all stock, I have a quick vid on how to, once you're in LKO, figure out how to time and aim your eventual burn using placeholder maneuver nodes that you eventually delete. But as neat as it is to be able to do it all stock, I much prefer the transfer window calculator mod. It's amazing.

True, but interplanetary windows are large enough to just jump forward or backward an orbit (of your ship around Kerbin) or two so Mun is out of the way. Or burn 3 seconds earlier or later so Minmus is out of the way

Yeah I know about the "warp to" options in the stock game, but they are not easily oopsable. You have to click the thing, then select a "warp to" button. The KAC ones are almost infuriatingly easy to accidentally click on. Assuming those are what you're talking about, you can disable them. I'm not running the game right now but according to a post on the KAC thread by TriggerAU, the option is in Settings->Specific Alarms->WarpTo Alarms

Yes. The chart assumes you are minimizing dV expenditure by launching at ideal times and doing ideal burns. And note: In this case, "all" is Kerbin and Duna.

And in all fairness, it's not been 2 years. The game's been out of beta for what? A month? Before that they were not even considering balance. Fair to call them on "we balanced everything" when they clearly did not.

Is this seriously a thing in the stock game? This is the second thread about this and I saw nothing about it in the forum before 1.0 and I have yet to experience it in the game. Is this *not* the KAC warp-to buttons? Or perhaps did KAC do something awesome and disable some stock feature that I didn't even know existed because it figured if I didn't want to see its buttons, I didn't want to see the stock ones as well? I'm serious. I don't know what you're talking about because I've never seen stock buttons. I must be doing something right. Does someone have a picture of the buttons?

Short answer: Do it in one burn. Long answer: If you're in LKO and burn to escape Kerbin's SOI, it takes (about) 950m/s. If you CONTINUE to burn, it takes an ADDITIONAL 130m/s for a total of 1080m/s to burn to Duna. Of course, you have to do the burn at the right time and in the right direction, and without some tricks or mods or charts finding that right time can be difficult (but not impossible) in the stock game. The 720m/s you saved is due to the Oberth Effect, one of my favorite things in all of space flight.

Merge is crap. Don't use it. I'm sure it'll get better but right now it appears to be more broken than maneuver node placement on a hyperbolic trajectory. Subassemblies exist, and have for quite some time. Click the >>> button in the far upper left corner and that'll open up 'advanced' mode. There is a green button in there with a rocket ship icon. Click it and you're in the good old subassemblies screen. When you click and remove a part from your ship, the part you clicked is that subassembly's root node. It's the node that all other pieces are connected to. The first thing you placed is your ship's root. If you don't want that thing to be the root, then hit the number 4 on your keyboard, click your ship anywhere, and then click the part you want to be the new root. A subassembly can only connect to other parts by its root, but it can connect to any other part.

I think what SanderB tried to say was: In the VAB or SPH: Press 4 to change root parts. Press 3 to rotate parts, which will give you that gloriously useful set of rings. Press 2 to translate parts, which gives a just-as-useful set of arrows. Press 1 to go back to parts mode.

Totally agree with you. My "creativity" in design is more about how I can creatively use lander cans than most anything else.