Kulebron

Heard a version of it: in Antarctic, pour a mountain for some of it's distance, evacuate air and close it's top with some soft cover (at 10 or 20 km of height, the pressure will be low to not break it). When the gun will fire, it will accumulate the residual air ahead of the projectile and this will throw away the cover (or it should be just soft and easily breakable).

Even for Moon, such a railgun would be quite big: 100 kms to get into orbit (2600 m/s) with "only" 5g acceleration.

A lot of the information is in KSP wiki. Delta-V of a rocket can be calculated with either Flight Engineer Redux plugin or MechJeb. MechJeb is very useful for precise journey planning, because in it you can edit every maneuver exactly, by whatever precision you need, which is very hard in 3D map. Also it has all kinds of flight helpers (maintain prograde/nominal/radial, autoland, etc. if you are ok wih machine aid) Nevertheless, precise trip planning is technically impossible right now: you still have to correct your course. KSP developers explained this at a conference: the issue is that they use 2-level coordinate systems with values stored as floating point values, which have low precision, and errors increase with distance. That's why your maneuver for 100 days later will not be precise, and you'll have to readjust it. (Rewind to 4:20) http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=w9KZ3JG0TnY#t=260 There, they also explain that there does exist universal time, and all planets positions can be calculated beforehand. (But with some adjustments you can shoot from Kerbin to Laythe and enter exactly the orbit you need, with an inclination aligned with the islands, to land on the ground, not in water.)

So sad F1 button does not work, and no navball to watch.

Two minutes!

Anybody hears sound in the broadcast? Opera flash plugin has bugs

t = -40 minutes

Service towers retracted.

They say it's the same launchpad that was used in 1961 for Gagarin's flight. Built in 1957 for ICBM R7.

Novosibirsk city. We have a lake nearby in 10 minutes of walk from my home, I'd go to the high coast to watch. Even at water lever, the view to southwest is unobstructed, and you can see even the second stage falling down and burning brightly (if I remember the details correctly). We saw a couple of launches from there in last 10 years, just by coincidence. (Of course everyone around said it's UFO )

I'll go watch it outside, it's 1-2Mm from home and I can see the third stage in the sky usually. [edit] It's raining.

Maybe put an airbag under the seat? Great work, guys, by the way. Good luck!

I'd second the recommendations to use WASD and IJKLHN (although I use UIOJKL with U and O for forward and backward). RCS ports have to be around the center of mass, to not turn the ship when you translate it. And a good idea is to switch between ships and align them at each other's docking port (right-click at own port to control from there, right-click other's port to make it a target). Another trick is to point one ship's port in some direction you can remember (say, horizon north), and aim the opposite in the other ship. (Horizon south, 180 degrees) then translate without turning to match the target marker at your pointer and forward.

Had a similar problem with a simpler rocket. Looking at it again, found that a pipe was disconnected, and fuel flew asymmetrically, quickly disbalancing the rocket.

Exactly, thanks! I hope this becomes "vanilla KSP".

Right now, if you land on Kerbin, you have to go to space center, then to tracking station, then find the ship and then click "Recover Vessel" button, and confirm you need it. This is pretty annoying. Meanwhile, after a crash you see statistics instantly. Would be much easier if you could go to statistics window and have "recover" button there. This also would work perfectly for debris that have survived landing on Kerbin.

Would be great to see these markers in navball too. Right now navball is more suitable for aircrafts, most of which never fly sideways, nor bank more than 30 degrees. But spaceships need normal and radial vectors very often, and right now navball lacks these important indicators. For instance, if you are on an inclined circular orbit, prograde and retrograde markers are some degrees off 90 and 270, and constantly moving, so finding radial direction is hard. If you are on an elliptic orbit, both normal and radial are hard to deduct and catch. I have to add expendable maneuver nodes to find where to aim at. Would be great improvement in orientation.

I don't know what to expect from 0.22, but here's a real-life tool for docking used on Apollo. Several metal plates that show you whether you are on the same axis and in the same banking angle. It can be used on a docking port itself, to ease the assembly. This way the game could have a real hardcore mode. Right now, as I tried to dock from one of Mk2 seats, it's impossible: as you double click on the proper window, the target is... ehm, untargeted. If you need details, as I understand, command module (from which the photo is taken) had an aim to look with an eye through, exactly like in lunar module (in the photo). So it's just a bit of 3D drawing inside CMs and outside docking ports. I'd add some more of them, to be able to align at different orientation. http://one-giant-leap.info/#AS11-36-5365HR

I heard this argument from Schmitt in his 2009 speech. This is true, but the problem is costs. Apollo program cost 109G$ in 2010 money, and MER (Spirit & Opportunity) roughly 1G$, which is 109 times less. Even if you discount the amount spent on pioneering research and development that had to be done for Apollo, the cost is still incomparably high.

So spend time. Most Venus landers were Soviet.

How much asymmetric? If I balance the center of mass to be above the engine, will it be symmetric or not?

The calculations seem very wrong. You don't need that much delta-v to get from Laythe to Eloo. The delta-v map lacks shortcuts, and jool system there assumes the most stupid ways: descend to Jool and then climb again to another object. If you orbit Laythe, you already have a very good speed. You'll need only 500-700 m/s to escape both Laythe and Jool, and then it depends on the shot direction: you can either shoot it back to Jool's movement and descend to Kerbin (1000 m/s) or shoot higher and get to Eloo. To lower orbit from Pol to Bop you also need very low delta v.

If you deach several parts of a rocket, the combo will have only one joint, the one you disconnected from.

The engine always points straight up, but your fingers don't, so this example works only in atmosphere, where if you incline a "pencil", aerodynamic force starts pushing it sideways more and more because of velocity. The engine is "neutral", it still pushes it straightly. In space, there's no such force as drag, and as soon as your ship is symmetric, you can put an engine in the back safely. To some degree an off-centered rocket is flyable, as SAS and pivoted engines cope with it.

To handle a station better, make it as compact as possible and put RCS thrusters on struts, a bit outside the station. This way the station will have low inertia and RCS will make more moment. Docking ports have low sideways strength, so an assembly like Mir station is hard to push and pull, because the modules that stick out will oscillate. But you can't make a long pencil (it has much rotation inertia), so in theory it's better to join two or more big orange tanks parallel to each other with two pairs of docking ports.