AlamoVampire

Sirine PM the challenge to me and I will try to give it a go when time permits, right now, I am designing and testing an Eeloo mission and its taking its toll on me lol.

Had a similar experience today with a crew ship for my station as it reentered unmanned. 2 of the 4 panels tore off because they were not aligned with the flight path, but 2 were and survived. I think it has to do with the angle you are to the sun, I would say based on the picture, the sun was just beyond the horizon there.

27 years?!? wow!

I have a question to all of you who either refuse flat out to use mechjeb or have used it, but now do NOT use it. This is a simple question. Can you tell me, based on this picture, some vital stats? Delta V, TWR, for each stage? All mainsail engines on the lifting stages <central core lift stage + the 6 asparagus motors on the outside> and a poodle engine on the orbital ops stage. For Ease, I am showing 3 pictures. First is the entire rocket on the pad, no UI showing, 2nd is the Orbital Ops stage in the VAB as I did not wish to dig through my imageshack to find it in orbit operations, 3rd well below the other 2 is the full rocket again on the pad THIS time with its vital stats showing. also, this is not even the largest thing or the most awkward thing to be launched in my version of the game. Below all of this is THE MOST painful thing I have launched and I barely even manged it with MechJeb fighting it all the way into orbit. For me to get THIS nasty into orbit, I had to have MechJeb, there was no other way short of an edit into orbit, which was tempting. BUT, with mechjeb fighting this out of balance <and I tried for 2 solid days to make this thing balanced> beast it made it after some 200 tries.

I am a licensed RC pilot and have a few thousand hours of simulator time flying a number of single and multi engine prop/jet aircraft and have real world flight time. I love to fly is my point. But there are things one SHOULD know that you simply cannot know WITHOUT mechjeb. you are foolishly limiting your knowledge of your vital information with out mechjeb. if you want to do drone work thats YOUR problem and fault, but mechjeb is absolutely vital if you want a full picture of your vitals. i mean a 20 minute burn W/OUT physics warp. It's still brutally long WITH it. My last trip to eeloo saw some numbingly long burns even with physics warp and it would have taken me 5-6 hours to find the right angles given my eeloo is not at intersection with kerbins plane. Your game your choice. But mechjeb is beyond useful.

There is also the matter of that magical moment when your target comes into view in the current setup

Lol could be lol

true enough, but still, they had to have boats before they learned to fly even airplanes right? lol

Okay, here is the question: In Kerbal Space Program what is your current in game clock at in your primary save file? Does not matter if it is Career mode or Sand Box, which ever one is your primary variant you hang out in most. Mine? Sand Box Mode and it is at a nice: 11 years 132 days 11 hours and 50 seconds.

I was just finishing up a mission and watching it reenter from the comfort of my tracking station when something caught my eye. I looked at the globe I was presented in the TS and it hit me. There is only 1 transoceanic path on Kerbin that links both the western and eastern hemispheres and its down by the southern polar ice cap. Take a look, this is the ONLY path to cross the planet via water ways...

um.... I enjoy KSP MORE with MechJeb. I find it is invaluable for me. It gives me vital stats on my space craft and can let me find my intercepts easier than spending 2-3 hours mucking with maneuver nodes. A sense of achievement in KSP is NOT linked to MechJeb and its use or disuse. I spent nearly 1 MONTH in this game w/out mechjeb and could not master rendezvous and docking no matter HOW hard I tried or how many videos I watched. I never could figure out what I was doing wrong. oh sure I could eventually tag my target ship and link up, but by then I was sweating, swearing and nearly out of fuel both rocket AND RCS. MechJeb is a wonderful teacher. After watching it do 2 rendezvous and dockings I saw where I was making my mistakes and LEARNED from the mod. Flatly discounting and discriminating against a mod that is infact MADE by a Developer and it looks like this mod WILL be our main source of Autopilot <I for one do NOT like making 20+ minute nerva burns by hand, mechjeb handles that work for me> because of this fact. Disregard if it you wish, but, you are cutting away a tremendous amount of data and quite frankly your left hand because of its usefulness.

well, the hard way is practice practice practice until you get used to how your designs slow down and interact with atmosphere OR you could take the easier path and get the current MechJeb by r4m0n and use it to make relatively pinpoint landings with ease

Spacedcowboy: while i respect your choice to not use mods i must also question that choice. You claim you would like new parts but you willingly ignore a wonderful path to awesome and plentiful parts and tools?

Earth is above that arrow.

I just thought I would post some quotes on space and space exploration. I think we could all use a dose of this stuff every now and then “Since, in the long run, every planetary civilization will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring--not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive... If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds.†― Carl Sagan “A blade of grass is a commonplace on Earth; it would be a miracle on Mars. Our descendants on Mars will know the value of a patch of green. And if a blade of grass is priceless, what is the value of a human being?†― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space “Decreasing the budget on the space exploration is nothing but a great treason to humanity! Space exploration is closely related to our very existence! Cut the budget on other things and increase the budget on the space exploration! Think great; if you do not think great, universe annihilates you!†― Mehmet Murat ildan "It is not in our nature as human beings to sit back and say we have enough, that what we KNOW is enough. It is in our nature, down to our very DNA to explore, to seek that which is yet unknown. It is not for our personal glory that we seek the stars and their secrets, but for the glory that is Humanity. We go forth from our world in small steps to seek knowledge. We will yet take larger, longer strides into that cosmos. That is our duty. That is our destiny. That is our responsibility." -- Alamovampire

i think a long term probe mission like a KSP version of NASA's mars landers like Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity would be wondrous to have! I think it would need more biomes to be closer for that to work, but, then again we are at the start of career mode in KSP who knows what will come. I think some tweaks and a few changes are what we need honestly, and I think they ARE coming anyway lol

Hey boxman, here is some free advice: take a break from the game. go play a different game for a while. I had to shortly after .22 came out because I slammed science points like they were going out of style. Had the tree maxed out in 5-6 FLIGHTS. No joke on that either. It burned me right out. I took a break for some time and only just came back in the last week or two, and it feels fresh as fresh gets. Also boxman, i want you to consider something. They can spend countless hours making new parts and trying to push the boulder up the mountain to more complex systems, but that would not be healthy for them as programmers or us as players or even more to the point, to the game itself. Do we have a ton of stuff right now? yes. Do we need more? no, well, not right now. Right now, they have and should continue to smooth the game out and optimize what we have. They have pushed some things in this game as far as they can with what we have right now. I wish I could find the post Harvester did, he had this neat graph showing this, but, they can put in a HUGE effort for a TINY reward in say flight/parts OR, they can let that go for now, and put in a moderate effort for yet a still large payoff in career mode, or better yet, a moderate effort to optimize the game and perhaps see it get pushed into 64 bit land and smooth it out a HUGE way. It is better for them to give us tiny improvements in terms of optimizations and a single part here or a pair of parts there while boosting the back end code. Patience my fellow kerbonaut, patience! We are all headed for Eeloo and have ONLY just made it into orbit around kerbin, we have a LONG ride ahead of us

Warning, kinda gonna be picture heavy and wordy, hope you guys enjoy this mission that was 11 years 100 days 22 hours and 45 minutes in the making since the crew this story centers on got involved. Back about a 11 years ago <game time > the fine folks at Kerbal Space Center decided they wanted to build a space station and so they did. With the help of Jebedia, Bill and Bob Kerman, they built the Kerbin International Space Station. Jeb, Bill and Bob along with 4 other brave Kerbals crewed the station for a mere 20 days while the stations first long term crew made ready. Enter Mission Commander Gregfen Kerman, Mission Specialist 1 Neldas Kerman, Mission Specialist 2 Algel Kerman, Mission Specialist 3 Kelsen Kerman, Mission Specialist 4 Luddan Kerman, Payload Specialist 1 Randall Kerman and Payload Specialist 2 Aldfry Kerman. These 7 brave souls signed up for a long duration mission of an unknown length. Little did they know that once their rocket started up off the launch pad it would be 11 years 100 days 22 hours and 45 minutes before they would step foot back on Kerbins lush surface again. During their 11 years on the KISS they advanced science for Kerman kind doing medical experiments and other assorted experiments both on board the external bays and inside the station itself. The main objective of their mission was to discover the long term effects of a microgravity environment on a Kerbals body and mind. Many missions came and went through that station bringing with them words and supplies from home. Some of their favorite missions included the return of Jebediah, Bill and Bob as they went to and returned from Duna bringing a fun picture for the Stations crew: Another favorite mission for the Stations crew to visit them was a pair of missions to Kerbins Mun and Minmus as well as a team that went to Moho: But finally in their tenth year on the station, they watched as the first of 2 new missions to Eeloo was sent on its way. A simple refueling barge to arrive ahead of the Eeloo manned mission. As not only KSC received telemetry from that refueling barge that it was in orbit and entering hibernation to await the arrival in the next 1.5-2 years of a manned mission, KSC informed the KISS crew that they were finally coming home. They were given a special bonus during re-entry of being on target to land right at the KSC.

I for one love space and pretty much anything to do with space. I have always wanted to go to space and visit the ISS, but since I lack the huge amount of money to get my carcass up there, I use KSP as a surrogate for being in space. But, more than that, I love space games, and I was wanting something much like KSP and when I saw it on steam, I first passed on it, because, little green men, really? I picked up the demo in early july and from there, my life kinda went down this little green rabbit hole and I found jebediah standing at the bottom with a wrench saying: build my friend and see where your imagination takes you!

THIS was for a MOHO mission, very over built: THIS was first, a pure NIGHTMARE to launch, it was out of balance. Secondly, this is my furthest Kerbol SOI orbiting object, orbiting out as far as Eeloo. Also, this thing is in SANDBOX mode too.

the days of major new features for NOW are over. right now, they have a fairly stable product and need to polish the back end of things to make sure things run smooth, then they will add a new wave of goodies for us. remember we are in ALPHA @boxman you said: 2 things: 1. you can get mods to make things harder on yourself, they exist, things like Deadly Re-entry IF its updated for .23, I personally do not use that mod so I do not keep track. There are others that rescale the planets and what not. 2. hate to break it to you, but the way the gaming industry right now as a whole is headed, its more towards casual gamers, as they are the larger portion of the consuming populace, so, it makes fiscal sense to tailor to them, but as others have said, Squad has essentially said: heres a universe, parts, go at it as you see fit, OH, you wanna have a 'goal'? heres career mode <including incarnations YET to be seen of career mode> have fun! look boxman, they are also going to leave physics as they are, so, again, feel free to tailor how YOU play to YOUR chosen difficulty. If that means no time or physics warp to get to eeloo then no time or physics warp. what ever it means to you, do it, its your copy of the game

I seem to over build in my head then in the vab only to struggle a few hours. Then i go and simplify it and get success lol

@Ravenchant I think it's like when you see black clouds from a nasty thunderstorm rolling in and it makes trees more vivid in the foreground against that backdrop

congratulations! there is nothing like that first Mun landing! You can only go up from here!

Upon a stable circular orbit I jettisoned all external engines and solar arrays leaving only the central tank, 16 of the 400 charge batteries a probe core 8 heavy novapunch rcs thrusters a mechjeb and shielded port And 2.5m asas. I then did as stated above and saw the .06 draw on the batteries, i severed the flow to the core and accelerated time and it sucked it all dry. I will post a capture of the vessel with full parts listing later this eve. EDIT: as stated above in this post a few hours ago, I now give a full parts list PLUS a picture of how it is in orbit at Eeloo at this very moment. 1 Clamp-o-tron Shielded Docking Port 1 RC-L01 Remote Guidance Unit 1 MechJeb (AR202 case) 1 Large ASAS 1 Rockomax Jumbo-64 Fuel Tank 2 RCST-250 RCS Tanks 8 Yawmaster RCS2250 Heavy RCS thrusters 16 z-400 Rechargable Batteries this is how it sits in its final configuration in orbit. I had to dump its cruise stage upon locking into a stable orbit as to not crash frame rates when my manned mission comes. I figured 16 batteries would be sufficient to sustain the refueling mission in the interim as I would NOT be giving any commands to the probe core, but, it continues to draw power when I restore its ability to pull from its on board battery in the core. As stated before, all electronics are turned off, all 16 batteries <not counting the tiny 30 charge battery in the probe itself> have been drained dry in my attempt to figure out why this thing was drawing current. The picture: those things at the bottom or left edge of the tank <depending on which way you want to look at this> are nothing more than a few heavy struts and cubic octagonal braces that I used to steady the joint between the tank and the lifting stages. EDIT 2: I was forced into an F9 reload by a mistake I made at my space station which sadly resulted in my refueler being in orbit of Kerbin and making me resend that bloody mess to Eeloo. It DID teach me something, and I found a way to take my electrical drain down to 0.00. All it took was shutting down EVERYTHING. Probe Core, batteries, RCS everything. I have full batteries and the thing is essentially hibernating in full powered down mode. Thanks to all who replied!