Grumman

That's an idea worth trying. I have used jet engines to escape the atmosphere before, and I have had time to recover boosters after circularising orbits with my current heavy lifters, so it sounds like it would work.

"Composite aircraft." There have been some interesting attempts over the years, some more successful than others. One involved turning an entire bomber into one massive cruise missile, steered from a fighter-bomber strapped to the top.

Thanks to a moment of inspiration, I finally created a flag for my Kerbal Space Program:

Without testing it yet, I'm going to make a guesstimate... Find the surface gravity of the moon you want to visit: g(Minmus) = 0.491 Find the radius of the moon you want to visit: r(Minmus) = 60,000 Calculate g^2*r / 2: k(Minmus) = 7,232 Find the maximum acceleration of your ship, and divide k by the square of that number. That should be approximately how high you need to be when you start your burn. That's assuming you are almost in a circular orbit.

It would not require "a few hundred lines of code". You would need four things: 1. A check whether the only active engines are ion engines. 2. A check whether the summed axis of thrust of those active ion engines passes approximately through the center of mass, that does not let you turn on time acceleration if not passed. 3. A velocity function that uses the sum of two acceleration vectors (gravity and summed ion engine thrust) to modify the displacement of the ship. 4. A check whether the ship has both electricity and xenon, that turns off time acceleration if triggered.

I think it's appalling that the very first thing they did after the official release was to add an unnecessary feature that crashes the game, and leave it to fester for over a month. That is my biggest complaint at this point. My second complaint is that Mk3 parts are still unusable - if you try to land a Mk 3 plane, it will fall apart.

I'm getting close to the end of the tech tree, and once I get there (or at least, I've got the parts of it that I really need), I'm finally going to build my Kerbal-to-Laythe mothership - an all-in-one mission with spacefighters, a miner to send to the surface, half a dozen probes to send to every part of the Jool system, rovers, the works.

I suggested something once that would fit in well with this - an Unkillable Kerbals feature. When a Kerbal hits the ground, they just bounce, then stand up, brush themselves off and get back to work. When a manned capsule hits the ground, the Kerbals are ejected, then bounce and stand back up.

You have 7 pilots, 10 engineers and 5 scientists. If nothing else, I'd suggest putting a couple of those scientists in Kerbal orbit with an on-board laboratory and some science for processing until you need them.

Something I suggested in another thread is that tourists and VIPs could have optional objectives added to their contracts, giving extra rewards if you deliver them to a particular Kerbal city and not just recovering them in any old place. This would give the player an incentive to make precision landings on tourist flights, even if the cost of the capsule isn't big enough to warrant the effort.

The Junior can transfer Kerbals, despite what it says.

Yeah, it should be possible to make Xenon, but not with the ISRU. It should require a different sort of "miner" - one that skims the atmosphere of Jool, perhaps, before returning to a stable orbit for processing.

Before the MPL contracts gave out more science, as did the funds-to-science policy. Science is the most important resource in the game. If you don't have it, you might as well be playing the old 0.18 demo. Being stingy about it - hitting things with the nerfhammer every time somebody finds a way to generate science that doesn't suck - just makes the game tedious.

Well something needs to be an overpowered source of Science, or we wouldn't get anything done!

The claw should also allow you to transfer the tourists to the rescue craft, if you don't want to waste your fuel dragging the whole thing back. Just click on the hatch of whichever part they're in and choose "Transfer".

I feel that making it wider and not taller would make more sense than both tall and wide. Something has to be the largest diameter part, after all. If you add a new diameter to hold the 3.75m parts, is there any particular argument for why that is the perfect stopping point and not a new Mk4 size that can hold your 'guppy' parts, or a diameter one larger than that? On the other hand, wider parts do serve a specific role in allowing unaerodynamic rovers to fly by encasing them in a more aerodynamic fuselage.

The loading ramp is definitely the big one, apart from strengthening the joints so that they don't fall to pieces every time you land. Beyond that... Mk3.5 "Widebody" Cargo Bay Mk3.5-Mk3 Cargo Bay Adapter Mk3.5-Mk2 Cargo Bay Adapter w/loading ramp The Mk3 parts are nice, but they don't play very well with rovers - they're good for transporting 2.5m parts but even a girder with wheels is too wide to fit in without riding up the sides. Making a few cargo bay parts that are designed to give a bit of extra width so we can transport more than the bare minimum size of rover would be good.

This is a thread I created about fixing the problem by allowing a simplified form of thrust-under-timewarp in the specific case of balanced ion engines. Since they are neither powerful enough to produce significant strain on the structure of a spacecraft nor fuel-hungry enough for changes in mass during a burn to be substantial, you can cut quite a few corners on the simulation while still getting good results.

You should do a trip to Minmus before you try a Mun landing - it's further away, but the gravity's a lot lower, so it's actually easier to land on Minmus than on the Mun.

They would not. Even if they did, it would simply be a matter of running one faster than the other to compensate.

This is looking good. I don't know whether you've considered the idea, but would the airship envelope consume a certain quantity of liquid fuel to inflate? Or would it be a self-contained unit that deflates by pumping the lifting gas back into whatever pressurised container it started in?

No, I wouldn't. If I had hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on a vanity project like that, I'd do something worthwhile in its own right, like exterminate whooping cough.

It would be better if we didn't have to worry about that - especially when it's a spacecraft intended to dock with other spacecraft.

He says he's at one of the poles, in which case there will never be a high noon.

It's possible to set triggered parachutes to only start deploying at a sufficiently high pressure (i.e. low altitude) that they only start opening once your rocket has slowed down enough to not destroy them. IIRC, I set mine to around 0.3 atmospheres. You still need to watch it fall, but you don't need a probe core to delay the opening.