RabidMonkey

Another tweet from Maxmaps - Valentina riding a rocket with 11 boosters... 11 days to go?

And here I was thinking that prank never worked. I post in the presence of greatness.

MOAR WHACKJOB! I'm also glad I'm not the only old ....... playing KSP who remembers the Hell of Banyan Vines and Token Ring. Subscribed.

That is a thing of awesome beauty, whose like we shall never see again.

Take a look at the Timberwind 250. TWR over 30, 2451.6 kN of thrust.Compared to modern nuclear engine designs, the LV-N is severely underpowered. Even at its current size.

I think Jeb fighting could be done in a very Kerbal way: Firing rockets at his opponent, special moves that end with them strapped to boosters and launched, firing himself at his opponent on a booster, the KLAW descends from the sky to grab them, Kraken summoning...

Don't forget his finishing move, where he summons the Kraken, subjecting his opponent to rapid, unplanned disassembly.

The basic idea is that instead of a purely ballistic trajectory that optimizes fuel consumption, the rocket follows a shorter, more direct trajectory that optimizes speed. I've seen that term in the context of nuclear war scenarios - One of the big worries during the Cold War was a Soviet SSBN sitting a couple hundred miles off the eastern seaboard and peppering the coast with depressed-trajectory SLBM shots. From the mainland of the Soviet Union, we would have had about 30 minutes between launch and impact. A depressed-trajectory shot from close range would probably have dropped that to less than 5 minutes between launch detection and detonation.

My rakish good looks and a devil-may-care attitude.

That got it! Reading your post, I realized - if the LAN was offset by the same arc that would be traversed in the EPH, of course I'l get a pile-up. Set the LAN of them all to 0, left EPH alone, and they're in perfect alignment. Thanks!

I'm running into a bit of trouble doing some fine-tuning on my RemoteTech constellation. I'm trying to get 6 satellites into a hexagonal arrangement in a 6000km orbit, and launched them into as close a position as I can get given our standard floating-point, velocity changes depending on orientation nonsense. To get them locked into a constellation that won't drift into uselessness within a couple years, I'm trying to lock down the orbital parameters in the persistent.sfs file. Did a bit of figuring, and worked out that the target orbital period is 56690s, and (obviously) there should be a 60 degree angle between the sats. Here's an example of one of their entries: ORBIT { SMA = 6600000 ECC = 0 INC = 0 LPE = 0 LAN = 60 MNA = 0 EPH = 9448.333333 REF = 1 } I entered the appropriate LAN values as multiples of 60, the EPH values as multiples of 9448.333333 (56690/6), and the "lon" values in the VESSEL section equal to the LAN. This resulted in all 6 satellites being in exactly the same place in the orbit in a giant pile-up. I've found lots of guides for 3 satellites in a kerbosynchronous orbit, but I'm having some trouble working out the equations that will help me calculate the relevant values to get an arbitrary number of satellites at an arbitrary altitude. Yes, I know I can use HyperEdit to get them there more easily, but I like doing the math. Yes, I know that some people will consider this "cheating", but I rationalize it as automated, preprogrammed station-keeping.

We've already seen the aero upgrade, though:

Now boarding on platform K...

The LV-N is overpowered compared to the first-gen NERVA designs. But if it's compared to the Timberwind designs proposed as part of the "Star Wars" program, then it's insanely weak. I built a quick-and-dirty config using the specs for the Timberwind engines, and they were ludicrous. Single-Stage-To-Eeloo using a Rockomax pancake tank ludicrous. There should be a rebalancing of the LV-N, but I don't think nerfing it further is the answer. It should generate ElectricCharge at all times - after all, there's a nuclear reactor running in there, and adding a generator to it would be trivial - and definitely a reputation hit if used inside Kerbin's atmosphere. Definitely increase the cost and require ONLY LiquidFuel as well. Bad Things happen when oxygen meets Uranium at high temperatures. Uranium is already pyrophoric, so adding LOx would turn it into something last seen in the Soviet Union in 1986.

I've been having some issues with the Mun arch contract. Once accepted, I can't complete it - I go all over any arch both at ground level and climbing the arch itself, but it never shows as having met the requirement. In addition, once I've attempted the contract, trying to open the contract panel from the stock toolbar causes the entire game to freeze to the point where it doesn't even generate a debug log.

I'm seeing the same issue. Any update on a fix? I know the workaround is to disable symmetry and attach the parts individually, but it would be nice to be able to use something more precise than my eyeball when trying to surface mount multiple intakes.

Fragile enough that you don't want to exceed 8m/s without a level 3 engineer on board.

I'm seeing the same on 0.90. Running 32-bit, and no logs are generated.

I'll just leave this here.

Done that. A couple versions ago, I had Jeb pushing the capsule back home from the Mun. Takes a lot of time and patience, but it does work.

Out of curiosity, I made an engine that matched the stated capabilities of second-generation NERVA-type engines (Look up the Timberwind series - stupidly efficient and powerful). Past 5% thrust, it made a surprisingly effective bid for freedom, tearing through the rest of the rocket.

MOAR power!