FuzzyLlama

Once you fiddle with the saves enough, you can start to see just what variables (like rotation) you need to tweak and where. For instance, if your docking port is accidentally placed backwards, swap its top and bottom attachments and change its rotation from, for instance, 0,0,0,1 to 1,0,0,0. CTRL+F and Notepad are your best friends.

On starting an interplanetary voyage from Minmus: Yeah, works great! You could refuel from an orbital space station and drop in toward Kerbin when Minmus is positioned either pro- or retrograde along Kerbin's Kerbolar orbit. If Minmus is retrograde, burn at your Kerbin periapsis and be slingshot toward the outer Kerbolar system. You are stealing some of Kerbin's orbital energy, but that's ok, it can always find more! Also, if you enter a very low Kerbol orbit and slingshot around it retrograde, you can time warp backwards to save the humpbacks.

Full interview with MinecraftEdu folks about KerbalEdu is here. Of course, MinecraftEdu is here. You can find their contact information here.

Maybe tweakables will change that in 0.23... adding generators to smaller engines?

I like SRV Ron's design - asparagus stage the payload section for interplanetary voyages. I have played with this a lot. But the best is to use vertical staging as well. If you take two fuel lines from your central lifter up to the first payload stages, you can burn your payload rockets all the way up. Then you have the option of using more efficient rockets with less thrust on your lifter, using less fuel, or whatever. Sometimes your payload tickets won't

In addition to contacting Squad and expressing our interest in using Kerbal for education, we should keep in touch as a sub-community to share our ideas. I would love to get involved in creating educational mods that include curriculum-based "tutorials", etc.

The best way to do what merlinux suggests is to find the craft file for your intact craft and locate the fuel line part. Copy that and paste it into your persistent save at the appropriate place. What matters more than anything else is that the parent part number is correct (and that you don't break syntax). Make a backup of your persistent. For roleplaying, Jeb got out with his spanner and duct tape roll. Lick o' paint, lick o' paint, good as new.

On a similar note... In my career game, I accidentally iced Bill Kerman. His spaceplane, as it turns out, was terrible at landing. A few missions later, he was in the command pod, sneaking off to Minmus! Anyone else seen this?

Just like the space shuttle?

From my experience being obsessed with SSTO space planes, I have found this: Keep your CoM as far back as possible. This way you can put rear landing gear farther back and still pitch up on the runway, giving you a reduced chance of tail strike. Keep your center of lift behind the center of mass. On larger craft, get the lift vector to point through the very rear portion of the center of mass ball indicator. Lighter craft should have centers of lift farther behind than this. This way as your fuel burns your craft will stay fairly well balanced. Corollary to this: part of your lift balancing plan should include some lift near the very front of the craft (but don't overdo it by shaping on too many control surfaces!). A winglet tail fin is a good idea. Stick it right on your plane's butt. For small craft, put one jet engine in line with the fuselage so burnouts don't affect your yaw. For smallish craft, use a bi-coupler or a tri-, to keep your engines as close as possible to the long axis of your craft. This helps control the problems associated with flameouts, if they happen. Slap some RCS thrusters on. A couple fore and aft, and a pair at the tips of your wings. Save your monopropellant by keeping RCS off until some arbitrarily high altitude where your plane stops feeling like a plane and starts feeling like a Subaru drifting through the snow. On a similar note, control surfaces are important. Too many and you can't control your craft. Too few and same problem. Put some on your wings, behind your centers of lift and mass. If your craft pitches too quickly, remove a set of control surfaces. If your craft always tries to pitch up or down, it is imbalanced. Fix the design, or alternatively, angle your control surfaces down or up by 5°, respectively. Use more wings than you think you need. Two symmetric sets of delta wings with control surfaces is about right for a cockpit, one mk2 fuselage segment, two mk2 adapters (which contain fuel), couple small bipropellant tanks and four engines. If your prograde vector is at 15° to the horizon when your heading is at 45°, add more wings. There is a spot at mid-altitude, maybe 15-20 km, where you haven't accelerated enough but havereached thinner atmosphere, and your heading and prograde directions will drift apart from each other. You can be at a 30° pitch and your prograde vector is 2°, so you are predominantly accelerating horizontally. That is ok, and once you get to high (> 1 km/s) velocity your vector and heading will align better. In fact, I have had flyavle but less than stellar designs that reach a ceiling around 17 km, but with a little rocket boost can keep going on just jets until 25 km. On that note, you also need enough air to get the velocity you need with jets. Otherwise your SSTO is not doing its job. You need tons of intakes, at least 5 per jet engine. At extreme altitude, intakes = thrust. Want to get up over 2 km/s on jets? Try >10 intakes per engine. After 15 km, keep your vertical speed around 20 m/s and crank it horizontally. The perfect mix is tricky to find. I know this is more than what you asked about, but I hope these tips give you some inspiration. Nothing more rewarding than hooting orbital velocity at 35 km and drifting up peacefully. Cheers, Llama

I like to set them to open with an action group. In the VAB at the top of the interface there are three blue tabs. The center one switches you to action group mode. Select action group 1, click on your solar panel, and click 'toggle solar panel' (or some such) to add this command to the AG. Then in flight, you can tap 1 to open and close your panels. Make sure to put all your panels in the action group. This is easy if you only have one set of symmetrically placed panels! Deploy your panels just as soon as you hit 70 km altitude! When I first started to play KSP, this was the number one post-launch mission-ending catastrophe. Maybe in the future, a Kerbal with a toolkit could manually deploy panels...

When you have successfully convinced the tech teacher at the school you admin to use Kerbal as an educational tool!

I believe they control your kerbonaut's facial expressions. Stupidity causes more grinning, courage causes less frequent scared faces. I believe. Other opinions?

On Earth, the jet streams typically travel in the same direction as the spin of the planet. This is because the primary control on jet stream motion is the rotation of the planet (factors such as differential heating of air over land and air over sea also affect the jet streams, and can even create easterly jet streams). So, if you were keen, you could coast on up to 15 km altitude on Kerbin, find a jet stream and ride against it. Your maximum surface velocity might be a little higher, as your engines would be having air rammed into them au naturale. Go above the jet streams and you lose some of this advantage, but you might be able to travel much faster (esp. if your operational ceiling is 30 km or greater). Traveling opposite to Kerbin's rotation will lower the around-Kerbin fly time because the ground moves under you while you fly. At such low pressure, drag hardly matters anymore anyhow, and the difference between 1500 m/s and 1600 m/s is much less than the difference between 100 and 200 m/s. That all being said, I kind of imagine that until your navball reads 'Orbit' instead of 'Surface,' the effects of planet rotation beneath you are ignored. Maybe someone more familiar with Kerbics could enlighten us on this rule.

Kerbinar eclipse?