Buzzed Aldrin

The other day I was at a friend of a friend's house, and it somehow came up that he had just downloaded KSP but didn't really know what the hell he was doing. I of course got excited and started talking about it and next thing I know I'm sitting at his computer designing a mun rocket with about 4 guys watching intently. I guess I had talked a little too loudly about being a Sierra Hotel Rocketship Pilot. Anyhow, I somehow manage to design (no math - totally seat of pants) a simple munship, launch and achieve orbit on the first try, transfer successfully, land using only the keyboard (first try), plant the flag, and achieve munar orbit. Of course by now I'm desperately low on fuel, but the hard parts are done, right? I'm still playing it Scott Manly cool though, set up my transfer burn and used up the very last bit of fuel getting a Kerbo reentry trajectory. I did not equip RCS on my ship (or panels -- whoops!) Splashed down with authoritah in the sea off of KSC. Stood up and finished my beer like I did that sort of thing all the time. Hopefully I got another one hooked on this game -Buzzed

Getting to and landing on the moon with no maneuver nodes and no landing legs was a real challenge Back In The Day .

1. Establish mission parameters / goal. 2. Calculate necessary dV for goal +~20% 3. Design craft in head and on excel spreadsheet. 4. Build in Vab. Tweak. Test. Tweak. 6. Launch mission.

About 80km on the Mun testing my interplanetary rover design. A small SAS unit attached low is useful for righting the vehicle in case of unplanned airborne events, and is a much more efficient solution than extra wheels or rcs systems. Buzzed

Mechjeb landing worked great for me on most ships, landing within 1 meter of the desired coordinates, except for some reason it didn't calculate the thrust / weight ratio correctly on my skyscrane rover delivery vehicle and attempted the suicide burn about 4,000meters below where it should have. Buzzed Aldrin

I'm sorry, we're going to have to ask you to turn in your nerd card.

I try to design my boosters to reenter and not leave tons of debris around. I recently landed in a Mun canyon and drove to the first flag I planted on the Mun in career. Having that goal of driving to a destination made the otherwise tedious job of surface roving much more interesting. Next landing is a Duna Lander / Rover near my first lander probe. Then onto Ike! Buzzed

2. (Elaborated) Make the video record / stop one button on the keyboard so it functions like a screenshot, except it records video instead of a JPEG. Record quality settings could be adjusted in the settings tab.

1. I'm sure this has been suggested before, and may be in development: the ability to transfer Kerbonauts between docked vehicles without EVA. 2. Some kind of in-game video recording widget. 3. Make fire and rocket exhaust much more visible over distance, as real life brightlight sources are. This may be outside of the capabilities of Unity, but it never hurts to ask. -Buzzed

Gilly = Member of Ziggy Stardust's band "The Spiders From Mars".

I guess the forums took a dive a while back, but I don't visit that often. Have to say I'm loving career mode. This is the best update in a while. Nice work squad! Buzzed Aldrin

You had to land veeerrry gently on those wings. http://imgur.com/a/pHE8y

I have simulated with an excel spreadsheet, and it seems that the game treats thrust as a constant and ISP changes as a function of atmospheric pressure.

Generally delta V isn't usually the limiting factor for payload mass. That's usually determined by your ship's initial T/W ratio: Sum of thrust of engines / total given mass x acceleration due to gravity. (Eg. 9.81ms^2 for Kerbin at sea level) If it's less than 1 you are definitely not going to space today. If it's damned near 1 you might get to space but it's going to take a lot more delta V. Fix

If the two ships are within a couple of kilometers or so, you can use the { and } keys to cycle between craft. As far as rescuing the Kerbals - probably best to send up another ship that they can space walk to, unless you have a docking port to refuel the existing ship. Buzzed

Wouldn't it be cool to see your masterpiece heavy lifter crouched on the pad, white steam and gases boiling off through the bleed off valves while the timer counts to zero? Well, wouldn't it?

ISP for a given pressure is given as: (1-Pressure) / (1/ISPdif) + ISPsl where ISPdif is the difference between the given values for the motor's sea level and vacuum ISP, and ISPsl is sea level ISP. For the LV-N - ISPdif=800-220=580 and ISPsl=220 So: (1-.5)/((1/580)+220= 510seconds