Kerbart

I'm glad you got inspired again. Overcoming challenges is part of the fun! Imagine Gene Kranz, at the Apollo 13 mission, once he found out about the incompatible air scrubbers between the LEM and the command module, had thrown his hands in the air and cried “that's it! I'm tired of this ####. First the explosion, now this... Guys, I propose we just scrap this mission and start over again. Boys, turn off those monitors and go home early today for a long weekend. You deserved it. Bob, when does Apollo 14 launch?â€Â

LD50 Radiation tests on fluffy bunnies.

The fun of KSP is for a large part overcoming obstacles and meeting (self chosen) mission goals. Some set those goals tougher than others and will probably think that their achievement of, say, landing on the Mün is not considered that big of a deal because everyone else uses decouplers, or something along those lines. This is not limited to KSP. In photography you'll see people lament that "back in their day, they had to learn to focus and expose manually" (as long as you're not brewing your own chemicals and grinding your own glass I will not be impressed). And "building a computer from scratch" is also open for discussion ("if you're not etching your own PCB's it's not really home-made"). It shouldn't really be a big deal. As Regex pointed out who cares, and besides that the only things Mech Jeb does better than players with even moderate skills are those things nobody thinks are that hard in the first place. And if you can't Rendez-vous, Dock or Land even if your life were at stake, isn't it nice that MJ can do that for you so you can keep enjoying the game instead of getting frustrated? For contests it's a different story, lest somebody uses a homemade rocket engine with an ISP of 1,000,000 (both in and outside the atmosphere), 25 MN of trust and weighs less than a ton.

Given how ethical we treat the Kerbals... it shouldn't be too much of an issue. And I'm sure we'll see some awesome mods for the Radiation Exposure test: Fluffy bunnies Kittens Puppies Bring it on!

First of all it's amazing how rapidly KSP development takes place. Compared to some other games (yes, I'm looking at you, Duke Nuke'm, but also you, Half-Life) where you get lots of teasers and then... nothing, this is amazing. Because what the devs are showing is not so much empty demo shells of “what we might include in the game†but much more “what's in the new release once it's ready for publication which is going to be really, really soon†The science experiments look gorgeous, and I hope the R&D section doesn't kill the frame rate on the space center too much, but it surely looks impressive.

In addition to what's been said... "A better vacuum than the average high school lab can produce"

Ignore all that baloney advice of "sent if up in pieces" (unless they mean the giant fireball at launch). MOAR BOASTERS! MOAR STRUTS! Put that sucker into orbit in one piece AND TOTALLY PWN SCOTT MANLEY!!! Oh yeah, and don't take me too seriously

Hahaha! Mission control should have thought that one up before sending the rescue mission to space and only put 2 Kerbals in the MkII pod instead of three. (I'm going off on the wild assumption that you sent a Mk1-2 command pod). I hope you put the “volunteer†in Jebediah's capsule so you can track him down easier. BOB: “There's Jebedia's capsule! Radio him to tell him to EVA aboard!†JOLFRUED: “Ehm dude, there's no room for that with the three of us in here†[Everyone looks as Jolfrued] BILL: “That was so kind of you. I'm very impressed with your team-playing ability†JOLFRUED: “Huh? What?†I liked your plan of using the landing gear as claw. You still need to de-orbit that capsule (Kessler syndrome) so why not execute that plan anyway? It's a good exercise for your docking skills. I've deorbited 10t spacecraft in a similar way.

Well yes, keyword being exactly. The nice things about Lagrange points is that they're stable, so if you're off a little bit (within limits) the orbit will correct itself, instead of your craft drifting off further and further over time. And unless you match Kerbin orbit exactly, you will drift off.

Well by NASA standards you've reached the end of the Kerbol system about 15 times then by now

Ehm... "I wonder why it's so cheap"?

Hi Skee, Without wanting to put too much emphasis on this part of the discussion... the reading experience is your concern. It determines if people will read your question or not. The more people reading your question, the higher the chances that there is somebody in the population of readers who will [a] know the answer and cares to answer it in a comprehensive way. Converserly, if nobody cares to read your question, you can be certain that there will be no answer. Or you get the wrong answer, because people do not understand your question in the first place, or assume you didn't try certain things. If you care about getting an answer, you should care about the way you post your questionâ€â€concise, leaving out unneccesary details and clarifying what already has been tried (to prevent getting the wrong answer). The docking ports on my space station are frozen in "locked" position and cannot undock. This applies to both inline docking ports as well as the shielded ports on docked ships. [problem description] Right-clicking on the ports shows that they are in a "locked" state, and clicking "undock" when it's available doesn't do anything. The station is powered and crew is available, so I should be able to undock I think [describing what you already tried and looked into] If it helps, here's a picture of it. I tried editing quicksafe.fsf and persistent.fsf files but I was unable to locate the space station. I don't want to rebuild my station from scratch, and besides, it could happen again! Help! [Further information that might help and call for action] Which of the two will give you more, and better, answers, do you think? The original post, or the modified version above? Putting some thought in how you post your message when you rely on others to read it is really worth the effort!

Capi3101 comes out with the right number, although based on the wrong assumption (1 gram equals 1 cubic centimeter). When you look at the wiki entry for the X200-16 tank it lists "800 units of fuel" and in the sidebar "360 L fuel, 440 L Oxidizer" With a dry mass of 500 kg and a liquid mass of 4000 kg (the SI unit for mass is kg, not g) those 800 units have a mass of 4000 kg, or 5 kg/unit ("L" which is obviously not liters), as Respawn pointed out. The external volume of this tank is À×¼D²×h = 3.1415 × .25 × 6.25 × .9375 = 4.6m³ Kerosene (which is basically what the Saturn 5 rockets used) has a mass of around 800 kg/m³ (depending on temperature) so you'd need 2.25m³ to store those 360 "L" LOx (which I assume is used as oxidizer) has a mass of around 1140 kg/m³ so you'd need 1.93m³ to store those 440 "L" That gets you a total volume of 4.18m³ used to store propellant which is remarkably accurate, as the fuel volume obviously will be less than the outside volume (just take a look at the inside of a Saturn 5 rocket, although those are of course a bit more advanced than the above ground pools that Rockomax uses for their X200 tanks)

Reminds me of a coworker; his daughter had been living at home for most of her college carreer and when she did live on-campus her father paid all her expenses. So now she gets a job and moves out to live on her own. Next time she visits she complains on how expensive living is. “Do you have any idea how expensive car insurance is?!†she complains to him. He couldn't stop laughing. Yes, he had a pretty pretty good idea how expensive her car insurance was

Things don't explode enough?

It's like saying that creating and preserving peace in the middle-east is simple; you just have to make sure that everybody gets along. The whole syncing thing is the problem. How do you decide to go into warp in the first place? And when to get out? Based on "whoever needs the lowest warping speed?" That makes multiplayer beyond 2-3 players nearly impossible; there will always be somebody who needs to do something where timing is critical.

Summary Opinions on "docking mode" vs "alphabet soup" seem divided so I don't think there's a general accepted best practice there; the best advice is experiment and see what works best for you Use camera chase view (it automatically translates the directions on your keyboard to the direction you're facing) Set the docking port you want to dock to as target Set the docking port on your vessel as "control from here" Learn to use the nav ball! It gets ridiculously easy once you're able to understand what the navball is showing. Start with ships where RCS is aligned with the center of mass, once you've mastered docking those you can move on to unaligned ships Follow up on these points and docking becomes an exercise, not a challenge.

Oh god the horror. School... Last night I worked until 20:30 because we needed to get some numbers out by this morning This morning I was told we're sorry, we gave you the wrong numbers. Can you do the work again with these? School isn't that bad. Really. And be prepared that you'll have to continue learning things once you're finished with school/college. The difference is that now you have a day job next to it.

An important step in design is deciding what you want to achieve. Do you want to reach a certain height? Is keeping it straight the main challenge? Or does it just have to look good? As for names, what you can do is google some kind of mythology. Be it Greek, Roman, Nordic, Celtic, Aztec, Papua... and then name your rockets after the appropriate gods of the sky. It will impress everyone when you can say "this one is called Pluvius, for the Roman god of the rain" or something along those lines.

There, I fixed it. In addition, once you've marked the target you will notice that the velocity marker shows the relative speed on the nav ball. If your velocity is horizontally aligned with the target marker your height is good If your velocity is vertically aligned with the target marker your sideways position is good. But forget about the above two and think two steps further. 1) If your velocity marker matches the direction of the target marker it means that you're closing in on the port in a straight line. Once you've lined up your speed marker and your target marker on the same diagonal (and that's just a matter of adjusting either horizontal or vertical speed) move to step 2: 2) If your (positive) velocity marker is on top of the target marker it means that your moving towards the docking port at the same rate as you're converging to the center. In other words, when you reach the docking port you'll be right on top of it. Assuming you got the first part right (matching horizontal and vertical speed), increase/decrease forward speed until your velocity marker is on top of the target marker. Now it's just a matter of waiting until you hit the docking port. This works so well that I've docked multiple times without even noticing it. I was just keeping my eyes on the navball and all of a sudden... Music, kerbals pop up on the videocam, etc... docked! The docking port can adjust for quite a bit of directional misalignment (don't overdo it, but 5 degrees is not an issue and probably even more). However, that works better with the stabilizer turned off (as it's not counteracting the attempts of the docking port to line you up) so turn off the stabilizer once you get really close (and not intend to do any direction changes anyway). As mentioned before: MAKE SURE YOUR RCS LINES UP WITH THE MASS CENTER OF YOUR CRAFT!! If I want multiple RCS trusters (better for large vessels) I put one set on the mass center, and then two pairs on equal distance at the far ends of my craft. Docking with asymmetric RCS is incredibly painful.

I can see the mod frustration. Multiplayer discussion will automatically return to timewarping as it's such a big deal. I'd say no time warping withing the SOI of each planet. Outside planetary SOI (thus inside Kerbol's) you'd be in single player mode and can warp as you like. Then you "drop out of warp" and into a planetary SOI. Now we know where "going in and out of warp" came from!! The demo is cool and an amazing proof of concept and the OP has my blessing to research it further; it's an impressive feat that I'm not capable of. However I think most of the multi player issues are not technical (warp being the most interesting of them) but result more from multiplayer social issues: property destroyed by other players, cheating, harassment, bullying, etc. Even if the technical issues are solved that'll still be a tough nut to crack.

Why go to the moon? Because we can. Since we've already proven it, what's the point of going again? At one point it might be valuable for Americans to show that they *still* can go to the mün. But the limitations are more budget and economics related than technology, so it's more a question of "are we willing to pay for it" than "are we able to do so," and then it simply becomes a matter of "can we do it within the budget we're willing to spend on it?" From a PR perspective there's great value in it to show off your technical prowess though, and that's a good motivation. What is the value of going to the moon? As Moon Goddess pointed out, there was plenty of scientific value is sending men (especially a geologist) to the moon. Were those rocks worth the $25 billion we spent on it? That is open for discussion. On the other hand, scientific research is... research. "If we knew what it was what we are looking for, we wouldn't be calling it research" (A. Einstein). But there's also value in the journey of going to the moon. Not the actual space travel, but all the research and development included. A large part of the $25B spent on Apollo went back into society: people were paid for jobs, contractors were paid for delivering products, etc. The amount of money "extracted" from society to go to the moon was a lot less than that $25B. And then there's spinoff products. NASA lists an interesting list with innovations resulting from the Apollo project, and that list is far from complete. When I was studying mechanical engineering at college I was told about this example. The moon rover obviously needs motors. With electrical motors, size and weight go down (assuming constant power output) if you increase the speed of the motor (thus lowering torque). Of course by the time the power is transferred to the wheel you need lots of torque and far less RPM, and a gear box would defeat the purpose of using that little high speed electric motor in the first place. The Harmonic Drive does just that; it offers a super light-weight, reliable (little moving parts) transmission with super high transmission ratios (the rover used a 80:1 ratio on the wheels), and from what my teacher told me modern harmonic drives wouldn't be where they are today if not for the research required for the rover drives. The innovation required (to do it at manageable cost) alone will be worth it going back, even if a robot could do it a lot easier.

For one thing I'd drop real numbers and switch to complex numbers instead; it allows you to drop most of the trignometry involved (this is why complex numbers are used extensively in electromechanics, and to my knowledge in orbital mechanics as well) As for the kraken, I'm sure there's lots of ways around the numerical problems but I think the integration with Unity is part of the “problem,†and I'm putting that word in double quotes as we should not forget that despite all the flaws and shortcomings the unity route does seem to succesfully have spawned KSP in the first place, and on multiple platforms as well.

I've only "joined" KSP with .21 (and the .18 demo of course) so I cannot really contribute to how the game has changed. Based on the comments, I don't think that it's bad that "clunky but cute" has been replaced by something a bit more polished looking. As for "more human, less Kerbal," I think that is mainly a result of the player adjusting to the game and have an altered vision on what "reality" is; because the Kerbal universe definitely is not! The Kerbal world, with it's flexible parts and simplified drag model, tends to reward different design strategies that clearly have a Kerbal feeling to it. Yes, if there ever was a "LOLZ Lets see it explode" attitude it's far less in the game but failure still is an option, and with the limited stock parts you'll still end up with things blowing up spectacular in your face. It's more likely though that after many weeks of KSP you're starting to get used to rockets that are wider than high, parts falling off at launch and ejecting 5 stages (each of three or four rockets) on your way to the edge of the atmosphere. I'm getting used to it. But I'm still enjoying it.

“Jeb? I like Jeb. Always smiling, never complaining. You can put him in a trash can with some fourth of July fireworks strapped on and he'll put it in orbit. Come to think of it... That's how we *got* him into orbit at first!” “Bob's a different story. OSHA this, Safety that... so when when we had to retrieve Jeb after that little, ehm, docking point shear-off at launch snafu with the new space tug we decided to use prototype #2 and send Bob to get him. Now, you have to understand... the Space Tug is a new era in Kerbal spaceflight. It's basically a big ass fuel tank, three atomic engines strapped on it in a radial fashion and a 2.5m docking port at the rear, as we want our pilots to have a good view at the front, so we used the cupola as a cockpit. And since we're intending long missions we added some crew quarters as well. There's room for four in the crew cabin, but the idea is to fly with a two man crew, and have only a single pilot launch. You know, in case she goes boom during launch. Not that it'll ever happen of course. “So we came up with this contraption where we have a stack of 2.5m tanks strapped underneath the docking port (we changed the design later as the docking ports kept getting ripped off during launch) and a huge tower of 1.25m tanks as asparagus boosters underneath the atomic motors. It looks kind of neat, really. Makes you wonder if it goes into space, so that's a plus for the design!” “And here's Bob. “That's only a cupola. What if she blows up at launch? How do I escape?” We told him to quit whining. “Jeb put the friggin’ thing in orbit so why won’t you,” we said. We told him to be reasonable. Do you know how much weight and complexity an escape tower for the cupola would involve? Not to mention that we now would have a decoupler underneath the cupola and we all know what happens when one of those idiots triggers it because they're still in staging mode when they think’ve switched to target mode. So no, that wasn’t an option. “Then we got an idea... Why not use a Mk-I capsule, and strap that on top of the copula? Bob will launch from there, it can easily be detached and once’s he’s in orbit he can detach it. After he EVA’s back into the main control cabin, but that’s his problem[chuckles] “So we propose the setup to Bob, and he’s all smiling. Now, we learned a few things at launch. This structure is pretty wide and stable, so we figured “a launching tower is for sissies. We don’t need no stinkin’ launching tower. Turns out we do. All the weight initially rested on the Mainsail engine which sheared off the fuel lines. So come launch time, the whole thang’s just sitting there spitting fire and stuff and not taking off, as the Mainsail ain’t workin’ “Now, we just thought we had them staging order wrong. So I tell the boys “I guess the Mainsail somehow went to second stage. Why don’t you fire her up?” and without a moment’s hesitation we did. You see, she’s burning up precious fuel, and if the choice is Bob or 25 tonnes of Kethane, well it’s easy to decide where the priorities are, right? “So we wack the stager, and next thing I know I see them fairings of the atomic engines come off. Now why would that happen? On closer examination, the atomic engines kicked off and started running! That means that we just booted of the real second stage, and with the decouplers activated there's no way we can shut the boosters down. And of course the atomic engines are now firing straight on top of the fuel tanks. Too bad they drain from the top or we would have had some great fireworks! “We quickly held a team meeting to decide what to do: inform Bob to test his emergency contraption, or wait and see what happens. The vote tied, so we flipped a coin, and the weighted decision was made to inform “Just as things got interesting, Bob hit's the Big Red button. The good news is that there wasn’t a lot of work for the cleaning crew, as it was a pretty clean blow up. They found two decoupler rings and a strut, and that was about it, I think “So we changed the design a bit. The good news is we’re now using three mainsails (guess where they’re attached to!) with an ungodly amount of boosters strapped on. Leaves the rear end of the tug free to drag all kinds of stuff into space. But that’s a story for another time...”