Galane

That's the IRONY part (yet to be invented) that lets an arm do the inchworm thing.

They're adjustable in .23, I just haven't tried adjusting them yet.

Without the firespitter.dll, they simply work as hollow bits to put stuff in? Not going to do wonky things like not using the toolbar plugin with the latest Infernal Robotics? I'd like to have the doors on these openable without needing to EVA a Kerbal. Imagine mounting an Infernal Robotics hydraulic cylinder inside one to extend an antenna, or using them horizontally as landing gear bays, or even just using the doors as landing legs.

An inline stackable unit with three or four or even just two bags that blow out sideways, like the ones that unfurl out the top, would be most welcome, especially for things that need to be launched with a booster on the bottom *and* have a docking port on top. That would replace hacked together things like this. The VTOL rotatrons are mounted on the big hydraulic decoupler manifolds so they and the gas bags can be dumped upon reaching max lift altitude on Eve. 'Course that experimental craft doesn't have enough fuel to get to orbit from its max lift altitude. An inline radial expanding life envelope unit should be able to stack atop another without the bags interfering with each other.

Clampotron Jr's worked fine on my Duna ship, with four quantum struts, holding orange tanks side by side, with mainsails. At some points of the trip there was only thrust on one side of that connection. Probably wouldn't have worked without KJR, which was the answer to making the ship usable on my computer. It has a dual core (would unlock to quad if the chipset was one little revision newer) Phenom II X2 555 AM3 CPU (in an AM2+ socket) with 2 gigs of PC2-6400, running XP 32bit. Will soon be upgraded to 6 gigs RAM and Windows 7 64bit. I'm thinking the PCIe x16 Radeon HD2600 Pro with only 512meg is holding it back.

Infinite fuel without the infinite fuel debug cheat.

What I keep getting on everything with reaction wheels is they flip back and forth between operational and not enough electricity, even though there's plenty of power from batteries, solar panels, RTGs or any combination.

Amazing stuff you've made! A part I'd love to see is a right angle VTOL type rotator to which I can mount Hooligan Labs Cirrus gas bags. The ones in Infernal Robots are A. butt ugly B. have huge bases C. small engine mounts. The Cirrus bags have Rockomax size bases so they should be mounted out farther. Just looks clunky with the huge rotator bases stuck to the sides of an orange tank. Just think of the possibilities of a Rockomax size VTOL rotator... a vertical takeoff ship with pivoting Mainsails.

Right click on a part with control capability then click the control from here button. If you loaded a save from an earlier version into .23, crafts already in space may have their control selection un-set.

Just got done with some tests on build 153. The results were not so good. Rather than tempt fate with Eve for the umpteenth time I excavated an old AARP Stock Lander 1, built of all stock parts back in .21. Didn't want any non-stock parts to possibly cause any problems. Hyperedited to a 20KM Mun orbit, picked a smooth looking spot as a landing target, zeroed to put it right on the equator then poked the land at target button. It turned retrograde, did the initial deorbit burn, flipped prograde to do a little correction burn then it kept the engine at idle, burning prograde and headed for higher altitude. Reset the orbit with Hyperedit, reselected target. This time it did one little correction burn after the deorbit burn and then stopped doing anything. Sailed right past the target. So I tried it a third time, got a repeat of the first attempt. Next try was a jump to 71KM Kerbin orbit. I have a flag planted a bit south of KSC. The lander came down within 200 meters of the flag, but waitaminute?! Dude! Where's the ground! It was at night so I'm not sure but I think I could make out mountains in the distance but there was no KSC buildings or land there, the flag had dropped to sea level. MechJeb hovered the lander at the altitude where the surface should have been. When it was nearly out of fuel, the Kraken blew it up. I went back to the VAB for another lander, put it in a 71KM orbit to try the landing again. There was ground to land on this time and the flag was back where I'd planted it but there were some dark, wedge shaped cracks radiating from the touchdown point and I could see stars through them. One really large crack ran from the touchdown point beneath the VAB and could be seen from several thousand meters up. I got a couple of screenshots but they're at night so the cracks are hard to see - dead black against not so black, except where lit by the landing lights. Both landings on Kerbin, it started the landing burn at around 2,000KM. No parachutes on this lander. I decided to try Mun again. Got a repeat of the second attempt where it quit doing anything. I let it ride down to 5,000 meters then tried the land somewhere button. That worked perfectly. I launched it up to around 3,000 meters, unguided, then did land somewhere again. Worked just fine again. Time to finish it off (there were no Kerbals on this flight, it has an RGU under the three man pod). I used ascent guidance to go to a 20KM Mun orbit. Lifted fine, did the circularization burn fine too. Then it aimed the engine straight down, running at very low throttle and doing a bit of a wobbly dance while very very slowly gaining altitude. It was maintaining a circular orbit but with its center shifting off the Mun's center. So I shut it down, aimed it retrograde, burned what was left of the fuel and crashed it. Many revisions back with MechJeb, in either .21 or .22, I've had it quit like this during landing and I've had it burn the wrong way a few times too, but I'm pretty certain never with this lander. I tried switching control between the RGU and the pod but it didn't change anything. Build 153's record not so good here. Four failed targeted landings on Mun, two perfect land somewheres, one failed Mun ascent, one failed Kerbin landing (due to vanishing ground) one perfect Kerbin landing, with some funky cracks in the ground I've never seen before. It's 2:40 AM here now, probably won't try build 152 tonight.

That's because you don't rendezvous with a moon, you use the Hohmann Transfer. Then when that finishes use Fine Tune Closest Approach. For Mun set it to 20KM for your first attempt. That should (in map view) get your course line arcing past the Mun with a Pe marker. Once you have that, use Circularize and change it to Periapsis. Enable Auto Warp and if your ship has enough thrust and power you can sit back and watch it go to Mun orbit on its own. To land on an airless body your ship must have a TWR>1 That is a Thrust to Weight Ratio greater than 1. Like how an F-15 Eagle jet fighter's engines together have 47,540 pounds of thrust while the plane weighs 44,500 pounds so it can accelerate straight up, until it runs out of dense enough air for the engines. If your ship's thrust does not at least exactly equal the weight of the ship by the time it reaches the surface, CRASH. It's better to have more thrust than weight right from the start of the landing procedure. With an atmosphere and parachutes you can land a ship with a TWR<1 but (if it doesn't crash) it won't be able to take off again.

Dev builds of MechJeb 2.1.1 are up to #153 today but one person reports exploding* issues on Mun landings with #153, but not with #152. I'm going to try both with landings on Eve, first with my rovers that I know can land there with success. *The Stayputnik exploded around 100~150 meters then the rest crashed. A second try had the lander fall through the Mun surface then explode.

I don't use FAR or anything that modifies drag or parameters of stock parts. ReStock and KSPX make copies and mash-ups of stock parts as different parts, but don't alter the regular stock parts. Mods I have with dll files are Hooligan Labs, Infernal Robotics, Haystack, Editor Extensions, Quantum Struts, Texture Compressor 1_1, KAS, Procedural Fairings, Kerbal Joint Reinforcement, HyperEdit, Kethane, SelectRoot, Stretchy Tanks/SRBs, TAC Fuel Balancer, Kerbal Alarm Clock, Module Manager 1.5.6 used only to add MechJeb to command parts. All except the texture compressor are the latest releases. None of them should be having any effect on parts drag in atmosphere. Everything I've tried to land on Eve (with enough engine power to actually land) has tested fine on Kerbin with the suicide burn starting plenty high enough. I figured I'd be using the new tweakables feature quite a lot but haven't used it at all yet, mostly due to the joint reinforcement mod and improvements to MechJeb removing the need to lock gimbals on some first stage engines before launch.

The (formerly) Hooligan Labs airships to other planets mod. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/53961-0-22-Hooligan-Labs-(now-under-new-managment)-Featuring-Airships-Subs-and-more

How about a similar challenge using the firespitter mod, an electric engine and one small battery?

Better is better. With so many different kinds of conditions to land in, it's a difficult thing to program. Then why is it waiting until it's almost hit the ground on Eve to do the burn? Here's the latest fail to land on Eve. There were three Cirrus bags on that, and three LV909 engines. Modified from the ship in the second picture. I put the gear down manually. MechJeb waited until an even lower far too late altitude to start the final burn and smacked down at 9 meters per second instead of the 0.5 it was set to. Broke 4 of the 10 legs, fell over and blew up. Previous version with only two Cirrus bags and without the side tanks and LV909 engines. Perhaps if I adjusted the four radial chutes to open higher? Or more chutes? I can't put anything on top of the lander because that's where other things will be docked (with the bags turned straight down) for the trip from Kerbin. I think I'll try some Landertrons the next time to see if they can do what MechJeb isn't.

One of my attempts. Imagine four Cirrus gas bags on top. I was able to (just barely) get this back to orbit after lifting it to around 26KM with the bags. Not a design practical to stack other things on top of, with the lift bags on top. Sixteen landing legs still not enough to keep the engines off the ground. If the suspension is locked they just poke into the ground. Later I'll post a pic of another design I've tried. Three Cirrus bags and three LV909 engines. Gear lowered manually but MechJeb waited almost to impact to do the burn. Hit at 9 meters per second, broke four of the legs, fell over and blew up. Previous version with only two Cirrus bags and without the side tanks and LV909 engines.

The lander should be able to make it back to Eve orbit then be capable of docking to a transfer vehicle to return to Kerbin. The combo decoupler/clampotron, not required but AARP plans to use it for mounting the lander for launch then flipping the lander around to dock to it for the return. See AARP's Duna mission. The Eve mission will be similar but with the Eve refueling rovers launched separately then docked on top of the manned lander. For mining Kethane on Gilly there will most likely be landers on top of the side boosters.

If it can be more self adjustable to the gravity of the body being landed on, that would be very nice. For high gravity like Eve, start the final burn about 2x higher. For really low gravity it could wait until the last little bit of distance. One thing it shouldn't ever do is wait until it's too late to lower landing gear. Is that event directly connected to starting the final landing burn? I'd rather that be set to a certain minimum altitude, no matter when it's going to start the burn. Yet another thing, how about an option to not cut the chutes until it's actually landed? That'd be a help for those times when it runs out of fuel right at the last second. Wayyyyy back up thread, or possibly in another thread, someone had some really massive vehicles they were trying to land but they'd smash to pieces because all the chutes would cut the instant any part of the vehicle touched ground instead of waiting for all vertical velocity to stop. If that's built into KSP, could it be patched over by MechJeb?

In WW2, guns on some ground attack planes were mounted with rubber bushings so they'd wobble around a bit, spreading out the bullets. Those movie scenes where a plane is strafing and making two perfect lines of hits are BS. Watch old gun camera films and you'll see the hits scattered across a wide area. In any case, trying to run straight away instead of perpendicular to the flight path would just get you shot, most likely dead. The idea was to get hits on vehicle size and up targets without the pilots having to do precision flying, kind of essential when the guys the targets belonged to got upset about all those bullets and sent some of their own bullets the other way.

Now fly it under the bridge, the hole in the building and under the driveway cover in front of the curved building. For extra points, fly it through the gap between the end of the wind tunnel and whatever the building is next to it.

What I'd prefer is a separate program that does automatically what PolecatEZ did manually with the texture packs. Throw the GameData folder at this program and it would find all the textures of a certain minimum dimension, of the file format that eats up so much memory, then do a bicubic sharper resample when shrinking the dimensions. One and done, no need for an active plugin that can have conflicts with other plugins or parts.

That's what it's for. Use Hohmann transfer with Mun as your target. Once on your way, use fine tune closest approach. That will make you miss the Mun instead of hitting it and get on a trajectory to be able to get into a prograde orbit. Once you have the missing trajectory, use circularize in maneuver planner and change it to periapsis. When you have that activated you should be able to sit back and watch your ship go into Mun orbit on its own.

Five minutes and fifty-five seconds without mentioning that Buckminster Fuller coined the word tensegrity and built some pretty neat things from rigid rods and tensioned cables.

I'd like to see someone do a Kerbal version of the YMC-130H "Credible Sport". That was a C-130 with several rockets added in different locations. Some pointed aft, some down, and some were aimed forward in hinged, pop out blisters. The goal was to have the plane able to land in and take off from the inside of a soccer stadium in Iran to rescue the hostages. All went well until the last test flight before the rescue mission. The crew accidentally fired the forward retro rockets before firing the down pointing rockets. The plane came to a near stop in mid-air and slammed to the ground, destroying it. How it was supposed to work was the plane would drop in fast and steep, the down rockets would fire to counter the fast descent. Right after wheels down the retro rockets would fire and stop the plane. To take off, several rockets on the rear/sides and tail of the fuselage, aimed to the rear and slightly down, would fire to give extreme acceleration, along with the engines and prop pitch set for maximum thrust. It was tested, it worked, then the goof happened. On the last test landing before the mission was to proceed, the crew lit the retro rockets before the landing rockets. The plane slowed down so much the wings lost lift and it slammed into the ground, severely damaging it including breaking the wing and catching fire. The project was done in such a rush that either nobody thought about a sequence interlock for safety or there wasn't time to build it, the crew was just not supposed to screw up and fire the rockets in the wrong order. The latest release of the landertrons seem like they'd be ideal for a KSP version of this. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/61294-WIP-XT-Landertron-Smart-Retrorockets-for-Landers-and-Spaceplanes-v0-06a-12-28 One thing would be figuring out how far the equivalent soccer stadium distance is on Kerbin so markers can be laid out for the landing. Same thing for setting up a barrier or two to stand in for the outer walls of the stadium. How many Kerbals to rescue and bring back to KSP? There were 52 hostages that "Credible Sport" (and the other failed operation) were intended to rescue. That number might be a bit much to handle in KSP. I see Scott Manley has already tried RATO in May 2013.