peadar1987

If you're using FAR, tilt your forward lifting surfaces upwards so they stall before the main ones, dropping the nose if you begin to flip, and (hopefully) saving the situation.

As I understand it, you'd have to liberate a lot more chemical energy from the fuel to do this though. The most efficient way to use the chemical energy locked up in the fuel is to stop the exhaust "dead" in space, but if efficiency isn't really your concern, you can get more thrust by using a far higher exhaust velocity.

Presumably several plates will act as an ablative heat shield. The first few will burn up, exposing the ones beneath, and if you have enough, you won't burn through to the capsule.

Does it not have something to do with exhaust speed as well? Because the kinetic energy gained from forcing burning fuel through a nozzle is split between the rocket and the exhaust, so in an ideal world, you'd have the fuel stopped dead in space (zero kinetic energy), and all that energy going to the rocket, as opposed to wasting kinetic energy by giving "backwards velocity" to the fuel? Or am I overthinking things?

You can put a cubic octagonal strut on the side of a capsule and attach a conical parachute to that (I needed to make a radial-mounted drogue once, and discovered this trick)

I don't think Mechjeb will ever become stock. Maybe I'm a bit of a snob, but I see it as more of a tool for experienced players who are bored of launching and docking than something that adds to the game. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but if people really want it, they can install it as a mod. Plus the devs have said autopilots will never be included in the game. I think a tweakable realism menu is the way to go. Turn on and off remotetech features, deadly reentry, basically a package of mods-made-stock you can enable and disable to make the game easier or harder.

There's a reason F1 cars are so finicky to set up, too much front downforce, you get oversteer, and the thing is crazily twitchy (although if you handle it right it will brake and corner faster), too much rear downforce, and you get understeer, basically the front wheels aren't stuck to the road well enough to turn the thing. Still, 60 m/s isnae bad for a KSP rover!

We can only wish that Old Adolf was stuck on top of a questionably engineered contraption of SRBs and girders and fired in a general upwards direction!

That's a suggestion I was going to make as well, fully-fuelled tanks should make HUUUUUUUGE explosions when they go up (I want my launch escape system and reflexes to be tested to the limit if something goes wrong!)

Some parts already have this, landing gears, legs and wheels I think (although I've never had to use them. My craft are always fine, or utterly obliterated, no nice "slightly damaged" middle ground for me!)

German Kerman seems surprisingly common, he was last seen in my game battling a Kraken with nothing but a roundified monopropellant tank and a pointed stick

I'd love to see life support actually, provided it was relatively simple, and implemented in a non-annoying manner (So you wouldn't need extra life support for a Munar landing and return, or even one to Minmus, but if you were going to be in orbit more than 7 days, you'd have to put in life support modules. It would have to be combined with an intuitive UI, so you could see how long your Kerbals were going to survive in space, and how long they had left, because having your Kerbals die because of the life support Kraken would be incredibly annoying!)

I'm still having the issue with spacecraft undergoing RUDs when you switch to them. It seems to be that the command module just stops completely, and all associated parts keep moving with their initial velocities, tearing the ship to pieces. The problem seems to clear itself up when I remove the deadly reentry plugin. Any advice on how to fix this?

There's a key bindings page on the wiki? I've just been finding them by looking in the in-game settings! Doesn't help much though, as the toggle navball button doesn't appear to be in the settings menu to change the binding, and I don't have a numpad on my laptop. Grr! Thanks anyway!

I think it's a fairly common glitch that you aren't able to click on the wee arrow to bring up the Navball in map mode, which is quite annoying. Can I request a hotkey to do it for us, so we don't have to deal with the bug?

The Irish Aeronautical and Extrakerbestrial Society wishes you the best of luck in your endeavours, and politely requests that all launches from the Dover Spaceport be carried out in a prograde direction (not that we don't have the utmost trust in British engineering, but...)

Deleting the GPS part seemed to have solved things, until one of my craft was swallowed by the Kraken, and I quickloaded. I don't think the plugin liked that, and wouldn't show me my ISA and Polar maps any more. Oh dear!

You can simulate L3, L4, and L5 by placing probes directly on the Mun's orbit, but it has to be super-exact, otherwise the orbital period will be slightly different to the Mun's, and you will end up in its SOI. Best place to put it to avoid is probably around L3, opposite side of Kerbin to the Mun.

Can't mechjeb calculate the landing position of a body taking into account atmospheric drag? Perhaps it could be made so you could designate parts as probes, and if they have enough parachutes (1 chute/ x units of mass), they get placed on the ground at the calculated position.

I am officially an idiot! Cheers for creating an account to point that out to me, working properly now (except occasionally getting the "ISA and Polar" issue)

Mine's probably a Dres landing and return. The rocket I used was 1000 tonnes on the pad (originally a Duna rocket, but has plenty of excess delta-V), and did the job fine. I don't like using NERVAs either, so it was all chemical rockets. I was in the process of sending fuel tanks to Jool so I could send some Kerbals on a tour of the system, but then 0.22 came out and I got caught up in career mode. By the way, always good to see a fellow Irish Kerbonaut Biker Joe!

Yep, but it does take real in-game time, and I can't think of a better way of doing it (giving an instant science bonus for placing a mapsat in polar orbit doesn't seem good enough). And you do have to avoid having an orbit whose period is a whole number integer multiple of the rotational period of the planet.

No Kerbal left behind! I test new designs by launching them, and if they explode, they explode, and I revert flight. I reckon this is an acceptable break from reality, and is a substitute for unmanned tests, complex maths, and years of design verification. However, after the first "proper launch", there's no reverting, and the Kerbals must rely on the Launch Escape system. So far, I've only lost one Kerbal. Jebediah burned up on reentry from a Munar flyby when his capsule ran out of charge, and wasn't able to orient the heatshield on reentry. The capsule survived, just, but the parachutes were burned to a crisp. He smiled all the way down, and I died a little inside!

It would be more along the lines of "cool features" rather than something near the top of my list for KSP, but imagine if after you'd built your rocket, and clicked "launch", you could see it being built in the style of a time lapse in the VAB. (Never going to happen, much more important things for the Devs to be doing, but a boy can dream!)

I usually jettison the escape tower when I leave Kerbin's atmosphere. By a strange quirk, it has just about enough delta-V on its own to reach Duna's orbit, and occasionally get a rendezvous. For a few glorious moments, I once thought my escape tower was going to get a gravity assist from Ike which would drop it into an elliptical orbit around the Red Planet (Instead, it missed Ike's SOI, got a gravity assist from Duna and ended out going on an adventure towards Dres. Meanwhile, I was so caught up in the Adventures of the Escape Tower that I forgot to pay attention to the actual mission in progress, and it looped once around Kerbin and smashed into a mountain.