cybersol

Oh dear kerbal, did I have a rough start with the new rocket flight mechanics. It really doesn't help that early career mode basically forces you to build long thin rockets without access to wings or fins. No matter if I went into the gravity turn steep or shallow I would always flip out at basically the same elapsed time. Then it clicked that I was going transonic at that time, and it all totally made sense. It still wasn't easy to re-learn everything, but from then on it was so cool to know that it really is more realistic. Since then I have flown some basic career path planes, which are now such a dream to fly. Previously I always hated planes, but I think I might be a convert with the new atmosphere. Overall, after some rough times, I think this is going to be great and really wish I had tried FAR earlier.

A month ago I came back to KSP after a long hiatus -- the last time I played was before science was introduced. I must say Squad has done amazing things since then. In 0.90, one thing I enjoyed was how career mode made you make all kinds of interesting rockets with new constraints. I quickly grew to admire SRBs in a way that was never true before. They had a good chunk of dV on the cheap, and were just tweakable enough in thrust and solid fuel to let you make the rest of the rocket as recoverable as possible. This kept launch costs down, which seemed like a really good thing since that is also SRBs role in real life. However, in 1.0 the trusty BACC seems severely nerfed to me, such that there is little reason to use it over LFO. Checking the BACCs new stats, its mass actually dropped 1.9kg (24%) while its solid fuel load dropped 30% and its atmo ISP is way down 28%. While all engines went down in ISP, the LV-T30 for example only droped 12.5% atmo ISP. Despite all those size and efficiency nerfs, its costs in 1.0 increased 50%. Further comparing it to an similar weight LFO stack the BACC is longer with a higher drag value, generates no electric charge, and is not throttable. All in all, I don't think it fill its cheap booster role anymore compared to 0.90. In some ways this will be good, as the one true way to build a rocket will again be thin LFO vegetable style. Cheers, CyberSoul

I don't think its a new bug entirely. However, the SAS is extremely twitchy even in orbit now. Even with throttle off, I can see your engines animations twitching while viewing the ship in space. Meanwhile my orbital manuevers paths and maneuver targets jump around wildly. This has nothing to do with new aerodynamics, and instead hearkens back to the worst of old ASAS shaking days (0.18 ish). I definitely did not have that sort of orbital twitching in 0.90, so I think its a new reversion in 1.0. .

Yeah, that rocket I posted is just under those tier 1 limits, but proceeds from those first orbits immediately go towards mission control, launchpad, and VAB in short order. I still feel like giving me access to radial decouplers but not to fuel lines is the devs way of punking me. Career mode is great for making me appreciate what once seemed like little things. I swear I get more dV increases from fuel lines opening up that even from getting 2.5m parts.

Yeah there is tundra between shores and grassland everywhere, including a very short distance behind the start of the KSC runway.

Here is what I had using just the 3 tip tech nodes. I rebuilt it from memory, but took pictures of it in a test flight here: Edit: In normal, you can get enough science for this on the launchpad using just a command pod for crew & EVA reports and two goo containers. Also for your comment about fuel tanks mounted radially without fuel lines, one thing you can do is make symmetric stacks (same engine & tanks in 3 stacks for example). To me SRBs seem heavily nerfed compared to 0.90, so I have found that useful for getting early flybys. Cheers, CyberSoul

I'm just coming back to KSP after a long hiatus, so I can't speak to whether thrust plates are obsolete or not. However, I have used thrust plates on big lifters in the long past, and even then you needed a pair of struts between the top of each tank and plate because the decouplers would sway and break otherwise. Overall, I imagine they will be less needed due to the larger S3 type parts and engines that were not stock then. Cheers, CyberSoul

After some failed attempts to reach Moho with a reasonable dV budget, I've have been having a lot of success using the launch window planner (http://alexmoon.github.io/ksp), specifically the mid-course plane setting. To use it, I need to set the initial parameters of the ejection burn manually (usually in 2 kicks due to typically low interplanetary TWR). After launching into Kerbol SOI, MechJeb2 can take over and perform the expected mid-course plane change maneuver using the fine tune closest approach planner. However, setting up that initial ejection angle is more of a pain than it needs to be. I typically would orbit at least once and use the orbit info window to find where to create the maneuver node for the right angle to prograde, then do the initial kick burn, then set it all up again for the interplanetary burn. Or I could get impatient and eye the ejection angle, only that angle is actually quite important for big burns like Eeloo or Moho (http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/27236-Tutorial-Step-by-step-Interplanetary-Hohmann-transfer-guide-and-tips). So what I really wanted, was that MechJeb should be able to snap the maneuver node to a particular prograde angle. After all, it calculates the prograde angle in the orbit info window. So I added the ability to show and set it in the maneuver node editor window, like shown here (I'm the probe body setting up a 800 m/s kick burn): This ends up working really well with the shift time feature, as you can shift by say twice your orbit period and then snap it back to the desired prograde angle to get the optimal ejection angle at the perfect time. For convience with the launch window calculator, you can set the retrograde angle instead (which is just prograde-180). I thought it would be trivial to make, as I could just assume a circular like orbit and have it mostly work. But the results for kick burn orbits were horrendous, so I ended up learning a ton about Kepler orbits and the internal programming interfaces of MechJeb and KSP. And, wow, it actually works! I made it for me, but if anyone else is interested I can set up a pull request of github (as a giving back sort of thing). Cheers, CyberSoul P.S. First Post