radonek

Same is mostly true for doom. You can't have intersecting sectors (no multistory buildings), entities can't pass over each other… third dimension is just for visuals with little physical significance. Build engine (duke3d) is slightly better (entities live in 3D, but sectors are 2D with some magic teleporting to make it look a little bit 3D. Everything before Quake was more or less 2D with some faking on top…

Munar parking orbits under 30km are annoying since you can't timewarp much. I usualy have flying lab at 32km equatorial, landers go to 10km parking for phasing and rendezvous. Flat palce high-up could probably be best found with scansat map.

If WoW is any model, I'd rather avoid such "updates".

For me, biggest cash cows early on were testing those big-ass NASA engines on escape trajectory and space stations on sun orbit (but be careful not to pick ones involving asteroid until you have fully upgraded tracking station). Combining a few satellite misions into one can also net nice bonus. Hauling staions to Mun or Minmus is better paid, but also take more time so i generaly avoid it. There is also a trick around "must be new" prerequisite: if you dock your brand new ship to older station, you get "old" station. But if you that dock station to your ship (that is, "new" hardware is passive during docking) resulting ship is considered brand new. I'm not sure this is precise though, triggered it only few times unintentionally.

Whats a mess today may be handy source of material tomorrow. Yes, it would need significant industrial capabilities but not having to haul every nut and bolt down from The Well could save incredible amount of money.

47km is a long shot, but if you have a lot of fuel it can be done. Click on orbital velocity to get to "Target" mode. Now big violet marker shows vector to poor Ickle and prograde/retrograde markers show relative speed vectors. You point to violet one a give it a kick, see target coming closer. Then aim at retrograde mark and wait as long as distance to target goes down. When it starts going up again, you passed closest approach point - burn retrograde to kill relative velocity. You are stationary somewhat closer then before, but difference in orbit will imediately begin to pull you apart (relative velocity will slowly increase). Rinse, repeat – big violet marker gets you closer, but at speed. Retro burn kills speed. Once you get it into hand, you can combine both into single maneuver. Also, look at some docking tutorial since meeting at almost 50km is pretty bad. With a bit of practice you can get to <500m and avoid catching-up maneuvers entirely. Once you are close enough and have no big relative velocity, its just same as ordinary EVA.

I heard it a different way (a long time ago and cant remember the source, so YMMV). At fault was some sensor in fuel line that was, as is widely reported, marked with arrow (after some previous accidents anyway :-) ). All good, except what was to mean "this way to space" this technician took for "this way fuel flows". Which is convention when plumbing is concerned around here. I know its not as funny as "teh stupid ruskies" version, but sounds as completely understandable mistake in my book.

ummm, Voskhod is a bad role model. Those three people were not as much "managed" as "crammed" inside.

Yeah, that would be handy. Actually, it would be too easy if you ask me. And probably not efficient anyway – getting intersection is not easy unless you make plane change first. I found it more efficient to do radial or planar maneuvers high-up. I did a lot of orbit jobs recently and found them rather trivial once you get hang of it. 1. Get to circular LKO 2. Open map view, center on Kerbin and move view until An/Dn nodes on target orbit overlap. Click on your orbit at point where they overlap and set up maneuver node. This is to project An/Dn on your orbit. 3. Burn at that node to raise Ap close to target orbit An or Dn, only a bit lower. 4. When close to Ap, do a plane change to match target orbit. (you may again do an/dn-overlap trick to better see point of intersection) 5. When you tackle inclination, immediately do a circularization burn until you get an intersection with target orbit. 6. Small radial burn slightly before intersection point will align both orbits. 7. Intersection point should now be Pe, small burn there will match eccentricity. 8. … 9. Profit. Note its all done in map view. You don't even need to set up nodes, just burn at proper naball marks and see orbit move where you want it. Only initial Ap-rising need to be done with some accuracy, maneuvring high-up is cheap and its easy to pack up small sat with lots of spare delta-v, so don't be afraid to just try things. Its even possible to do several contracts with single craft once you get used to it.

If you want to do a plane change at lowest speed, do it on top of hohmann BEFORE circularization burn. You only need to make soure your AP matches An/Dn with target orbit, which is conviniently shown in map view.

If nuke cant save you more then about 2t of fuel, you are better off with LV-909, because it is that much lighter. Otherwise (read: anything interplanetary too big for xenon) LV-N is better choice.

Massive ships are bad choice to practice docking. You are better off with something small and nimble for starters. Weight is not problem itself, but proper placement of rcs port on complicated design is. With small ship, you do not need much thrust to translate and reaction wheel can nullify small torque. On large ships you need to be very careful with rcs port placement, lest any translation swings your axis around. I'd say its wise to start small, like apollo-style mun landing and work up from that. If you are playing career, retrieving all biomes is good practice for both (somewhat) precise landing and docking: Go down, grab science, get up, catch up with orbiting tanker/lab, clean up experiments, top up tanks, rinse, repeat. When i did this first time, docking was half-hour chore. At the end, I could do it in a minute with eyes closed, not to mention nice load of science at return module :-) And when you start to fiddle with big stuff, get the RCS Build Aid mod.

Real question is, why would anyone use plane? They are only usable on Kerbin and Laythe… and even there, you are better off with some VTOL design for rover transportation.

I call this baby Anomaly Hunter, guess why. Note the LT-1 struts on underside of rover, they lift it to lock on docking port. Sometimes docking ports fail to engage no matter what, so rover have a small tank and engine to jump up, also serving as weight to lover CoM. Lifter is a bit on a heavy side since its intended as mobile base for extended periods of time, for a single purpose mission it could probably be made much simpler and lighter.

Baaad idea that one. Plane changes are prohibitively expensive on low orbits and you are better off on equatorial orbit anyway. Polar orbits are great for sightseeing (albeit kinda boring since you spend a lot of time waiting ) but equatorial is more efficient (if you are orbiting in direction of planet's rotation). If you really want polar orbit, do it on arrival, imediately after SOI change. Plane changes are cheap when you are slow. Once you fall down the well you gather a lot of speed and any planar/radial maneuvers becomes a huge pain. That is a good plan, but you will be doing it all over again once you aquire seismo and gravioli detectors. Its hard to get them soon, so I usualy make one or two "direct" visits (and flyby to collect hi-over and low-over science) to get a tech boost. Polar biomes are good candidates - they are too far from equatorial orbit anyway.

You are stronger then me then. Long time ago I decided that only way to stay firm is to not install mechjeb at all. Which means that my first attempt at docking was two hours of nerve-stretching odyssey :-) but definitely worth every second. That is more then enough. RCS is very inefficient – you will be better off if you take same weight in ordinary fuel. You don't really need rcs outside terminal phase of docking. And if you do things right, you can dock decent lander with about 2 units of monoprop. (by hand, I hear mechjeb does not exactly shine in this) Anyway, for first attempt its better to skip docking and go for direct ascent. Its inefficient since you carry your departure fuel and chutes down and back up The Well, but Mun's well is not that deep and its a WAY simpler mission profile.

Sure would. But rasing orbit from 15 to 75km is not that much compared to what getting at orbit takes (about 600m/s) and well within safety margin you should have. Get Flight Engineer mod and ask him what he thinks about your lander. You just need to undock and look at total delta-v in "vessel" tab. If you are under about 1200, you wont make it back no matter what. 1500 should be enough to have a few seconds of "hover" time and a spare bit for small plane change. More then that is a waste since you will be hauling dead weight down and back up. Also look at TWR of your lander. If you have big engines, you can go close to suicide burn to spare fuel (read: do breaking burn very low) but you need some experience to pull that off. (or lots of loading :-). Generaly speaking, with TWR under 3.0 you stick to shallow descent paths, with 5.0 or more you can fall from higher up. Also, know that ascent from mun work different then from kerbin. You dont need to waste fuel getting off atmosphere, turn to 90 immediately and once you are clear of terrain (should be a second unless you are in really deep crater), you can begin chase the horizon. With apopasis over 5000m you sholud be already leveled and building orbital speed. You can cut off once apoapsis is over 10000m and do circularization burn there. Any orbit over 8000m is good and from there you can either go for your station or bring it down to meet you. I would advise to bring it to about 32km anyway – its close to surface but high enough for decent timewarp.

You people are making too much fuss for nothing. Squad have basic framework for this XP thing, need something to make it work on, and adding a bit to existing mechanism is easy first pick. Yes, altering physics is a bad idea. So what? As long as its moddable, anyone can prove to do better. And squad guys can then take best ideas back to vanilla, as they already did several times. I'd say its actually smart to get this thing out of the door and to the modders hands ASAP and not waste time with "deep" changes.

Soviet technology was not at all that wonky. You just have to look at china, india, japan and whoever striving to get where Korolevs gang was like fifty years ago. As any technology, theirs had pros and cons. Worst pieces usualy came from being pressed into deadlines by The Party (first sputniks and voskhod comes to mind). Others were very smart (like, say, R-7 liftoff load-bearing, or soyuz sectioning scheme). The fact that american commercial space flight today uses engines made by Kuznetsov for N-1 should also tell you something…

The article does not sound at all bad to me. The actual reference to to minecraft is this: …and its right and true in my book. As an avid player of both, I can tell they touch some similar feeleings. Freedom to build, complex world and lack of mindless violence work for me in both. Where most games have you blindly following storyline, with bodycount as measure of success, KSP and minecraft are both different in similar way. Add in that both are indies with strong and nice community, both aimed at something unusual in industry, and both surprisingly succeeded… hell I hope Squad don't get bought by Microsoft too :-)

Coding Hint #1: do not ask coder for pointers

Umm, no, Intel drivers work great. There were issues during move to GEM and KMS, but that was years ago. Intel chips definitely lack lifting power though.

I dont understand why you aborted. You could send automatic tanker, top up tanks and head home. You dont even need a tug, you can wait where you are and head back with tanker. If you really want it and can't get to it, well, why dont you move tug? BTW If you want to test your TWR without mods, look up numbers on wiki and use Mun or Minmus as benchmark. Dune has 0.3g, ergo, if you can get off Mun's 0.15g on half throttle, you are set. You could make it dress rehearsal of whole mission.

Definitely Mk 1 lander can, since its a good piece to build around. Mk-2 lander can and hitchhiker come second. Mk 1-2 Command pod would be great if its slanted sides were not pain to work with. (Is this why there are no stock vostok- or soyuz-like pods?)

Same thing. Just dont need to carry "fuel" around since air tends to be around aircraft, but it need some form of reaction mass. NERVA have to carry reaction mass outside atmosphere, but create thrust via same principle.