radonek

A few observations to already good answers: Undocked crafts slowly drifting away is a Good Thing to see. You can't make them perfectly stationary, and I don't think you want them closing in and smashing into something. Well, in theory you can make them stay put on exactly same orbit, meaning directly prograde or retrograde. Dunno if it's actually possible to do. In my experience, good place to park stuff is on planar axis (under or above). If you zero velocity there, you should have very similar orbit in all but inclination - stuff will drift closer or farther out but not move around. (This is why prolonged docking maneuvers are sometimes done in this axis.) With circular orbit being, well, round, things drifting away tend to be coming back after half-orbit. If you fiddle around for long time, keep eye on stuff floating around and re-zero relative velocity where necessary. In theory, this means one can't really loose anything, but in practice anything that gets outside physics range can get on slightly different orbit. RCS build aid mod is a great help when creating big ships. Switching between rotation and translation should not be a problem in a first place. Get some mod that will show you target docking port axis. (I use "Navball Docking Alignment Indicator" as it only adds a marker on a navball.) If you align axes first, you don't need to touch rotation controls afterwards. Just get roughly into position, turn towards marker, turn on RCS, translate to dock. With a bit of practice, you can do it by navball alone, which is immensely useful when docking in darkness. If you have a fat fingers, disable engines in docked vessels. Yes, it does not play well with stagging, but neither does docking anyway. "Closing in" phase of docking is mostly unnecessary. Here is what you do: burn for rendezvous as usual. Right after MECO, align your ship along cardinal axes, switch to map view and right click on encounter marker to keep distance visible. Now switch on RCS and just tap any translation key and you will see encounter distance change in realtime. I won't go into details, just play around with translation keys and see what it does to distance. With responsive RCS, I can usualy get within 100m of target right on. In fact, one downside of this method is that there is a real chance of crashing into target, so don't over do it if your vessel lacks TWR for fast velocity matching burn.

That's what our vet said. Our dog had his own opinion in the matter :-) ED: gun? shotgun? I wonder what kind of postapocalyptic wilderness are you guys living in.

In my opinion, anything that features remote control is inherently unsecure. Professional hardware with dedicated control channels at least require some effort to break into, but the lowend "enter wifi password and download phone app" is worse off then key under the mat.

Joystick is strictly optional. Did you switch camera to "Locked"? Using freecam is a common mistake.

Usual way to handle this is to raise AP to something eccentric, change inclination at AP and then recilcularize down at PE. Idea behind this is that your orbital energy is very low at top of eccentric orbit, so it does not take much to alter it. Google bi-elliptic transfer. But at 63m/s it's probably not worth the fuss. Just burn retrograde until it turns prograde and you are good.

Well that is probably consequence of ebuild not being maintained by somebody who actually use the stuff. I am begining to think that layman and improvements in overlays keep people from working on main tree.

I think we already established what is emerging here

@kerbiloid and you know what happens to those who dare to disturb worshippers from they aeons old duty? You can cower behind those newfangled rodent driven interfaces with their holy images and rectangularly boring eclidean geometry. Until one day you learn that nice fractal screeensaver is in fact computing Dho-Nha curve and before you know it you are staring right into the Abyss.

Outrunning a missile? I don't think that would work. Missile does not need to match target speed, it just need an interception. If you burn while missile is far away, correction would be small. If you wait for it to close in, you are essentialy trying to out-TWR it, which is a lost proposition.

I'd say avoid that one. I got it years ago and so far it's been road to disapointment.

…with a high CoM and hard to fit inside aeroshell. I mean, yes, I've done this too but I would not call such hack a "rover" any more than a plane with landing gear out can be called a car.

@Cavscout74 Fair enough, it's possible… yeah, not a good idea, impractical, but quite possible. Although you may be up to something here with biome hops. Waaay back (long before robotic parts) I tried this with long legged skycrane and rover with docking port on top. But redocking was tricky and krakenprone. Having a nice, flat platform would be very helpfull there. Also, skycrane like mine can only transport vehicles designed for it, while that nice big platform of yours can in theory (with lots of EVA strutting and if CoM alignment can be managed somehow) transport anything. So maybe there is some use for it.

Maybe there is a reason space agencies are not using this already? Anyway, I think you are looking for this.

If it's really really tiny ordinary lander with a ramp may work, but for anything else I'd go with skycrane too. Just slap decouplers on sides, add engines and fuel to taste – what could be easier?

My bet is also on water. Maybe hunk of ice in some interresting and/or unexpected place.

@Okhin Digital fakes are a different thing, they manipulate information. That works on conscious level, I can decide this information is false and choose not to believe it. What OP is describing is stimulation of certain neurological pathways that could not be ignored (else is ineffective), essentially a form of medusa weapon.

Will try. So far, I test it unladden on Kerbin, under assumption that lower gravity on Mun or Ike should be roughly balanced by fuel load. Hinges are unpowered and unlocked so that each wheel pair can follow terrain slope. Ruggerized wheels don't have enough suspension travel length to handle this and inner wheels would come out of grip. (You can also see terriers on each end for propulsion.)

So I wanted something on wheels to haul fuel from ISRU rig, with a decent sized tank. My problem is that big Rovemax XL wheels are awfuly heavy and TR-2L too small. After some deliberation and with a bit of help from robotic parts from Breaking Ground I came up with this: My problem is that wheel suspension goes kraken-crazy in this configuration. I was able to tackle it somewhat by attaching wheel beam a bit off-center and fiddling with a spring/damper override until it became driveable (and as far as offroad capabilities go, it works great) but… it depends on vehicle weight, wheel units tend to rock like crazy and when docked to mining rig it went krakening again. When I set hinges to powered and rotate until only one wheel in pair touches ground, all problems go away, which makes me think that hinge is not the main culprit here. I would be grateful for either advice how to make this work, or suggestions of better chassis configuration.

Also be aware that putting struts directly onto klaw is a krakenbait.

Best Alien movie is the third one. Seriously.

I would like to remind all the wiseasses around there is something of a difference between these sets of walls

In short, they are not using full capabilities of their craft. No wonder those silly rebels got their backsides kicked. In short time empire will be ruled by anyone who can train half competent space combatants.

Yes, antimatter is incredibly dangerous. So was gunpowder at times. Or steam engine. Or nuclear power… So, it depends. Civilization that laboriously manage to squeze out a limited stock of antimattert as a last resort doomsday device may be in for some fireworks. Civilization that can produce and use antimatter at scale is likely to know a thing or two about safe containment.

Theory: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunexotic.php#id--Strangelet_Bomb "Practice": https://eldraeverse.com/tag/burning-of-litash/ (read from bottom up). That would still be stellar-size black holes. Think smaller. Think tiny, rapidly evaporating singularity. You have projectile going right through anything made of matter, making nice holes in the process via tidal forces. You have mass turning into energy, lots of energy, just as AM bomb, and if you time things right, detonating just where you want. And all of this without any containment or other delicate machinery. Yes, this would not be any easier to handle then AM, but it would be WAY harder to counter (not saying impossible) than antimatter charge (where you just damage containment and it fizzles). In short, if you want overpowered combat with "magic" level technology (and I claim that mass production of antimatter is firmly there), you should aim for properly "magic" weaponry and not just slap bigger boom on medieval technology. Those are not overpowered nearly enough.

I would say it's quite opposite. Long range beam weapons have problem with collimation. Missiles work at any range. Beam weapons have light lag. Missiles can have terminal guidance. Beam weapons power/time is limited by cooling capacity. Missiles can be deployed in swarms of any size. No, unless you conjure up some magic laser that can be perfectly focused at any range and travels faster then light, beam weapons will do much better as point defense or cqb. As for antimatter weaponry, you are, as usual, wildly mixing tech levels. If you can't mass-produce antimatter easily, it's not worth it for reasons already stated - you'd be wasting resources to package energy in form that is particulary hard to handle. On the other hand if your civilization CAN produce and handle antimatter at scale (and we are talking significant Kardashev factor here), then game is singularity projectiles, strangelet bombs, stellar engineering and similar funnies. At this playground, pure antimatter warhead is crude and ineffective toy. (I say cut the violence and go for information/memetic warfare).