Superfluous J

SC2K FTW. This used to be my ringtone, but it actually got annoying so I changed it.

Install it like any other mod (see how-to below) and to use it look around in the in-game KSPedia.

I always thought the QBE would fit in a really nice niche of radial mounted probe core. Not as needed now that you can change which way is "up" on the fly, but still would be nice.

I never felt bad about it. Still some of the best money I ever spent in my life. I also bought it a week before a big sale. I minded that at the time but in the whole scheme of things I paid $20 or whatever instead of $7 for one of my all time favorite things. What's the big deal?

Tech support for a specific business software suite that I will not name in a company I will also not name

2013. June or July. About a month after they ended "free updates forever"

I just checked again to be sure and was shocked to find out that I ignored 6 people. Then I realized it was telling me I was ignoring their SIGNATUREs. Then I was shocked to find it was only 6.

The same way they fit them through the capsule doors. They don't The helmets are inflatable.

I feel like the government has better things to do than post proof that every crackpot theory out there is wrong.

Of course. Many things in KSP are much more (or less) powerful than in real life for game balance. But that doesn't change the fact that if they want to point Kepler at the right quadrant of the sky, they use reaction wheels to do it.

I don't consider them the main engine, no. Well sometimes I make a little vessel that acutally uses a single rcs thruster as a main engine but not usually. Sorry that I said "engine" and not "main engine" in that first sentence. But as the conversation up until this point was about the main engine I didn't think to.

Space probes like Voyager and Hubble do not reorient themselves using engines. They do in fact orient themselves with reaction wheels and rcs thrusters. I am by no means an expert but I don't think any space vessel that had to aim a lot of different ways relied entirely on the gimbal of the main engine to orient itself when it didn't also need to thrust forward. That said, I've successfully rotated my probes with gimballing engines in KSP and if you don't care so much about your resultant trajectory it works just fine.

Mechjeb is a very good and well-made mod that I also do not use. Though "I want to play the game myself" isn't a very silly reason in my book Yeah, really. I'm not one of those players who make a standard rocket with a standard payload, though. Pretty much everything I launch, it's the first time I've ever launched that exact thing and I built it in the VAB minutes before. Sometimes I'll use GravityTurn, but even when I have it installed, I frequently don't bother. It's generally quicker to launch it myself than let GT take a couple tries to get it right, and it's not like I'm going to ever launch the ship again. If I *was* going to do a "standard launcher standard payload" type career I'd just save myself the CPU cycles and go the route of Kerbal Space Transport System.

Yeah I've been using this one in my 1.10 game and it's fine. The only problem I've had so far is that the last Mun monolith (#7 total I think?) the marker was a couple hundred meters too high. I know about the Jool monolith problems so I'm just not going to accept that contract until it's fixed. But as an anomaly checklist/guide this pack is fantastic.

That is not a silly reason at all. At least,I hope it's not because I agree with you I do use Restock myself but I avoided Better Than Starting Manned entirely because I didn't agree that its name was the truth.

I was going through the list of popular mods, and came across one of my all-time favorites, Chatterer. I realized, I never use it. Why? Because when recording videos I need to be in control of the sounds sometimes, and some chatter at the exact wrong time could hamper my editing. I hate editing, and want to hamper it as little as possible. And so, I don't use Chatterer. Then I wondered if others had similarly silly reasons to avoid similarly awesome mods.

You can hit caps lock which reduces control parts. I have no idea if it also reduces steering speed but it's reasonable to expect it. Reasonable enough to suggest and try You can use a controller. If you can get it to work, I've never bothered but I hear horror stories. Presumably the analog controls would work on steering. Other than those two guesswork things that might not even work, I can't think of one. Even considering mods, which you don't want to consider.

And even if you do go out there and create them "for real" the only thing they'll destroy upon hitting Kerbin is themselves, no matter how big they are.

All very true. It just depends though on what you consider essential in a design. Personally, the ability to turn the craft without running the engine is essential in most of my probes, and the cheapest way to do that is with an Okto-2 and the smallest reaction wheels. If I'm doing that anyway then an engine with gimbal isn't necessary, and the Ant is therefore the best choice. For you it's not, and therefore the Ant is useless. I believe the philosopher Arnold Jackson* put it best, "Different strokes for different folks." I wish you could turn down the reaction wheels' torque in the VAB and the mass would similarly decrease. But barring that, those are the best I'll get. *You may know him for his more well known phrase, "What you talkin' 'bout, Willis?"

Very much this. The tutorials are good but they can be a bit annoying at times, diverting your attention away from what you need to do by telling you what you need to do, and by the time you understand what they're telling you, you're well past where you needed to do it. Better in my mind is to try to get WHAT they're telling you to do, and then trying it in a real game. I would suggest starting a new Science Mode save. Like Sandbox, you can play forever and never lose... just litter the ground with failures you can clean up or ignore. Like career mode, though, it limits the parts you have available so you don't get overwhelmed with hundreds of potential things to add to your craft. The limits really force you to learn how to do the simple things. And of course as you get specific problems, we're always here

Unless your probe core has reaction wheels, or you're using a Octo-2 for which the smallest reaction wheel and it combined are lower mass than all probe cores with reaction wheels.

Exactly. Also, at the right time and in the right place.

Especially with the ability to slapdash build ships in orbit coming in 1.11, this would be a really nice way to repurpose tanks on - for lack of a better term - the fly.

So, like, 12 hours from now. 10:10am Eastern time US.

@jaunco325 You don't do each burn on the table one by one. you add up the necessary numbers and then do ONE burn with the sum of the numbers. ...sometimes... Yeah the table can be confusing at first. But keep at it and it'll become a handy reference. It's just not so good a teacher. To go to - say - Duna, you do ONE burn from Low Kerbin Orbit. That burn will be (roughly) 950m/s to get out of Kerbin's sphere of influence plus 130 m/s to keep extending your Sun orbit to Duna. But you don't burn 950, coast, then burn 130. You actually burn 950+130 = 1180m/s. But you can't "just" do that. you have to burn at the right time, and in the right direction. The right time is found pretty easily for Duna by eye. In the Tracking station, zoom way out so you can see the Sun, Kerbin, and Duna. If you rotate the view so Sun is on the Left and Kerbin is on the right (3:00 on an analog clock), the correct time to leave is when Duna is directly above Kerbin (at about 1:30-2:00 on the analog clock, give or take). This is when looking DOWN on the system from above the North Pole of each world. In this diagram I've described, Kerbin should be moving upward in its orbit and Duna moving up and left. They're orbiting counter-clockwise. The right Direction is "forward" in relation to Kerbin. You want to create a maneuver node on your ship's Low Kerbin Orbit with 1180m/s prograde, and then drag that maneuver node around until it makes your ship leave Kerbin FORWARD in Kerbin's orbit around the Sun. This means that you'll be burning on the night side of Kerbin, a bit past sunset from your ship's perspective. Make that maneuver, then zoom out and hopefully you'll see that your resultant Sun orbit gets close to Duna. With a little tweaking, you may even get an encounter. Target Duna, and you'll hopefully at least get some close approaches. Just remember, this is not just about getting to Duna. You're learning a SKILL here and it's going to take some time. But once you get all the little parts of it, you can apply them EVERYWHERE.