thorfinn

You know, I'm holding out for Kerbal modding support in the (far) future... to make Gundams, and Tracers, and Valkyries out of them With IVA views, of course. Though from your commentary, it seems like I wouldn't be able to fly that (beautiful) bastard very far until I spring for that neural interface connector...

In their shoes, if I was really confident about the one-engine-out capabilities, I'd be tempted to do that on purpose just to show off

Landing on the night side is always unadvised, for reasons you've just discovered.... Anyway, to help with the bouncing, try sticking three or four mini solid rockets upside down on your lander. Fire them on contact, and they should hold you down while the lander settles. If the lander is light and you have a strong RCS, you can use that instead.

Yeah, I'm quite amazed by ASAS really. It managed to fly a (nerve-wracking!) orbital insertion for a fairly aero-unstable rocket boosted spaceplane: This thing will fly IF you always keep the angle of attack below about 3 degrees, at all times. You let it grow larger, and it suddenly departs. With lots of small corrections and a very careful gravity turn, you can loft it into orbit.

Not only a cool artwork, Makettaja, but a nice merchandise idea! Squad should make these "dice" and sell them - well, in this case the moons should be reproduced too, not just the planets.

Well, B5 certainly had the best Russians: With apologies to the real Russians on this forum, who probably feel a bit misrepresented (It was still the nineties, y'know... )

Oh god my root beer is coming out my nose. It hurts like heck. Thanks a lot. [ATTACH=CONFIG]33821[/ATTACH] OK, OK, I'm done....

I'm amazed there were no Top Gun jokes yet. (Your Kerbal was obviously sensing MiGs nearby

Who said KSP can't simulate ropes?

Nice craft you have there! I'm trying to do the same with a bigger ship: the Halfway to Anywhere N is bound to survey the whole Jool system, and come back... I'm sure it has quite enough delta-V for that. I tried not to look at pics of the Joolian bodies, I'd like to experience them first-hand. First launch was aborted due to a stupid problem: the small hardpoints that are advertised as "fuel crossfeed capable", actually aren't.... No fuel lines on the first stage, though.... I kinda like it this big. (Well, there are fuel lines technically: the center column feeds the four engine/tank stacks. I think that this "simulates" a bigger 1st stage with the parts we have. Asparagus is so efficient, I don't want to rely on it if possible) Well, why didn't you just set a 15km periapsis and went to a straight-in reentry?

Unless you think that any equatorial orbit will have you going pro-grade wrt. Kerbin at one point and retrograde at the opposite side. You just flip the angles.

Use the keyboard to control time accel, never jump immediately from 100000x to real time. The engine was not built for that, really... "decelerate" quickly but smoothly and you won't have problems.

The story so far, for children of the 80s:

I've seen a reentry module up close (it was from Soyuz TM-34, if I'm not mistaken) and I was also quite impressed by how small it was. I also think I probably wouldn't pass the tests because of that, long before they put me in the centrifuge.... but, we must remember that right after launch and up to reentry they had the ball module on top too! (The total habitable volume is larger than Apollo, right?) A couple of pictures I snapped with the extremely crappy camera of my then-current cell phone that day:

I liked TOS as a kid (reruns of reruns) and loved almost all the old movies ("It's not just the whales…it's the water!" ) I had a bit of a trekker phase, tried to get into TNG but it lasted very little actually. Oh, and I loved Enterprise. I loved the first two seasons, actually.... Shocking, I know. Liked them because it was Trek not taking itself seriously, a thing that was extremely needed after Voyager.... laughed and cheered a lot because there finally was a crew of rookies, in the first true voyage of exploration for Earth, looking awestruck at almost everything they met, making mistakes and getting humiliated by half the galaxy's ships in terms of speed The self-aware humour, the haughty Vulcans ("When logic fails you, you raise your voice? You've been on Earth too long" :D ) and poor T'Pol trying to rein in this bunch of troublemakers and her government at the same time were much more interesting than the usual technobabble-infused scripts for me. Oh, and I'd rather serve under captain Archer than that insufferable, infallible know-it-all Picard (I also have this sensation that the first two seasons were also subtly political... everybody disagrees, but they haven't managed to convince me yet.)

If you make a small, light craft, and start in a good orbit wrt your target, RCS is all that you need. This was an old design (0.14X4, go figure ) but in 0.16 things haven't changed much. The active craft was the smaller one, the other just sat there waiting. I also went kinda eyeballing it; all these months of KSP have given us some instinctive feeling for orbital mechanics, but you'll probably end up a couple klicks apart or more at the end of you orbital maneuvers. The closer the distance, though, and the lesser apparent are the weird effects of "non-Euclidean" motion... in the final moments, you can just thrust towards your target and correct along the way.

You'd have to know if I was being ironic or not. And I won't tell

If you already know about rocketry, then yes, it's easy. Kerbin's gravity well is quite mild compared to Earth, and rocket Isp in 13.3 was quite forgiving, so making a simple two-stage orbiter is quite straightforward. You must keep present that the developers, presenting the demo of a severely incomplete game, wouldn't want it to be frustrating (it has to work as advertisement The balance has already changed in .16 (.17 incoming Real Soon Nowâ„¢) and will be trimmed again as we approach completion: docking will be a game changer, as will be "space race mode". You'll also notice that the balance of old KSP discourages many of the clever staging tricks you could be thinking about: it's two stages to orbit, three to the Moon and back. Personally, I managed a lunar landing on the first moon on my first try, back when it was made (0.12 if I'm not mistaken) and I'm not the best pilot around here... truth to be told, I had practised powered landing on Kerbin before, but I always failed, so I don't know how much good that actually did me. You won't get bored easily though, don't worry I believe that each coming versions will become more challenging than the previous, through new objectives, new dynamics, et cetera, for quite a long time still. And I was here during 0.9 when we didn't even have an orbital map, but I'm still playing (on and off) anyway The fuel bug is exclusive to 0.16, the demo doesn't have it. It just has rocket fuel with a specific impulse around 500 ^__^

One-way missions will not be significantly harder, if you can reach solar escape velocity (and many people have done that with stock parts) you can arrive almost anywhere. Going and returning, that's an entirely different proposition. But it has to be. Also because when docking finally comes, it will make everything easier again

Nova mentioned trying to go for 10x .... have you abandoned that in the end? (It would be useful to simulate kinda-more-realistic ion engines, as he said.)

I'm speechless. Either the NASA people made quite purposeful choices in their manipulation of the signal to make it sound like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N3V9UF7jEE or there really is something like artistic prophecy....

Frank Sinatra is great and all but I prefer Julie London's rendition better. Well, I can't compare her to the greats, but I think I'll always have a soft spot for Hikaru Utada singing that song. Nostalgic reasons, y'know. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nd0-9yoeK_I Anyway, I don't have a launch music, but I certainly have a LANDING music. And those who have seen Tom Hanks' From the Earth to the Moon already know what that is.

The calculator wants to compute the total delta-V needed, including what is needed to escape the gravity well. If you don't change the default settings, it computes that escape velocity from an impossible 100km orbit of Jool (Impossible because the "surface" of Jool will be defined as the 1-atmosphere isobar, or maybe even a higher pressure: 100 km higher will still be deep in the atmosphere). Orbiting tightly around a gas giant means being at the bottom of a very tall gravity well. Also, the calculator operates under the assumption that Jool will have 1841 times the mass of Kerbin, which is almost certainly an overestimate: Jupiter is ~317 Earth masses, as a comparison. Inputting a higher orbit gives more sensible results, even though there is a bug somewhere because the ejection angle goes NaN.

Not mine, but I think that Playstation players will like to see this. The launch itself is nothing spectacular, but...

I've been meaning to fly the interplanetary missions that way for a while, too. It's what the old Kraut would have wanted