technion

The final steps, getting our ion lander out to the mothership. Oh hi. This was totally unplanned. I didn't look at a planner or really do anything, I just decided to see what would happen if I burnt prograde for a bit, and look, a trip home. Deadly re-entry is not so deadly when you're just capsule with a heavy heat shield. This is probably the fastest I've ever returned to Kerbin and it did require a pretty exact Pe to do safely. See what I mean. There's enough science there to unlock half the tree (even though it was nearly complete when this mission started).

Transfer to Vall. The entire mothership landed on Vall. I know it violates minimal principles, but the ion lander couldn't get the TWR here, Laythe and Tylo landers had a tiny final stage, and packing another entire lander was uninteresting. I've never tried to land something this heavy though. This took a lot of tries. So here's the tip. LOCK SUSPENSION. I never actually used this before. But after about five tries where, even at 4m/s, you would land and then quickly bounce on one side and flip over, I found this gem of an option. With landing flag. Getting out of here.

Mothership gets moving. Destination Laythe. The budget was for the skipper stage to last until the start of this burn, so there was room to spare. This has to be the easiest capture ever. I didn't think this was possible. Transferring to the lander. This silly tank was a spacer. Without it, you couldn't EVA from the main capsule because the lander obstructed the exit. Transferred fuel out of it before losing it. I wish I had a better photo of this. DRE made this landing terrible. The first round hit the atmosphere at over 3km/s, and quickly blew to pieces. I ended up setting the Pe to 35km, and slowing braking into the atmosphere over four different orbits. When it finally came in, it did so almost horizontally and took a long time to slow down. Problem #2: This ship's drag was low enough that it didn't slow enough safely deploy chutes (DRE remember), until under around 1,500m, which is below the threshold for the drogues to deploy immediately. It took a few tries to make that happen without ripping it to pieces. Of course I could have used the throttle, but there was no dv budgeted for landing. Landing. I've stopped caring if I land in water. The only way around that on Laythe is to bring a jet and fly where you want. Bringing it back up. Coming in for rendezvous. Done.

Detaching the next component. This is what I meant by lightweight - it's an ion driven unit. In full action. I found this still isn't enough solar panels to fully power the ion engine when out at Jool. Capture at Bop. These transfers were done much better than I have in previous missions. The thing about Bop's craters is sometimes it's hard to land in the sun, even when you land in the sun. Landing flag. Tiny transfer to Pol. Despite the low gravity, I came in very hard and bounced. This was mainly pilot error. But things seemed OK so I kept on. Nope, several legs wouldn't retract after launch and required repair.

I really don't see this game as playable without precisenode. Manouvers like this take a lot of playing around at increments of 1dv. Here we do a direct injection to Tylo. It's an incredibly lucky intercept. To be honest, I had several goes at this. Just a -+2 prograde soon after leaving Kerbin can make the difference between the 791 capture you see here, and the 3800 capture I planned the first time around. Capturing. Note the skippers. I really shun the nukes when the rocket is this size. The inaccuracy caused by your ejection burn taking 25 minutes usually ends up costing you more than it saves by the time you correct. For some reason I don't have a shot of the first stage of the Tylo lander - probably due to the frustration of the many attempts to land here sanely. You can see it on the top of the rocket in previous pictures. Here's the lander. The idea was to use this stage only right before landing. Unfortunately when that shot was taken, it didn't land with enough fuel. This time it did. Obligatory. Back off this rock.

Hey guys, This is my third round at Jool 5. I wanted to make things a bit different this time, so I've gone for a much more minimal approach. It's not "minimum mass challenge" minimal, but my previous attempts carried tonnes worth of oversized landers taking materials bays to every part of the system. As always, I play with DRE and FAR, which makes for a much more difficult challenge than is common. Alexmoon will often point out a 3000dv injection at Jool, which most people just aerobrake away. And of course, I'm still running an experimental SSL server to store these. Here's the launch rocket. Those new lifter modules really do have a huge thrust, with two and a half orange tanks on top of each one, the middle stage of this rocket still doesn't fire on launch. Through the launch process: Circularising, just dropped the lifter stage. Setting up in orbit. Transfer to Jool.

Frankly I'm surprised the "For Web" edition of VS is capable of this, it's certainly not a web site it's compiling. Just remember mods are different. There's no reason I couldn't call a Winx64 check "bool rocketIsLanded()", or check IntPtr.size != 4. I'd guess a lot of people never test under Linux and hence don't include that test either.

The fact I'm just one guy, who's holding a letter with this wording: means that would probably be a bad, bad idea. It's one of those situations where, even if the law was on your side, you could fight the case only to wind up victorious, but bankrupt and destitute. Enterprise security has very little to do with well written security protocols and everything to do with legal teams. Hell, just look at the amateur hour security on Australian Government websites.

I'm not convinced that's the way to start. The hardest thing I had with this game when I started was the bewildering array of choices. I kept putting mainsails on the top stage and those terrible white radials around the bottom. The early career mode actually makes it really obvious what your first rocket should be made of. You do have a parachute available right away though.

73 degrees is an awful lot to shave off. Even done at the edge of the orbit, I'm interested in how expensive that would turn out to be.

Do you mean that a radially mounted parachute, on a command module, is protected by the heat shield under the module? I just assumed that, so long as the module itself doesn't explode, you can assume the heat shields are doing their job, and exploding chutes needed to be dealt with some other way such as better placement?

What am I missing about how that's meant to reorbit? The lander can appears to have no fuel tanks at all? If the idea is to reattach to those docking ports, that would mean driving those rovers sideways?

An open source security library I wrote ended up used in a firewall product that sells for six, or in some cases, seven figures. I attempted to contact the vendor to discuss my concerns that their method of using it introduced bugs, and they responded with a letter from their legal team brutally telling me to shut my mouth and deal with it. Legality is definitely an issue in the grown up world.

The problem with messing with any of the variables that effect difficulty is that what happens when you're not on Kerbin. I regularly perform direct captures on the trip home to Kerbin without any heat shields - the default values for everything simply don't need you to do anything. But, even in this configuration, landing on Eve is exceedingly difficult, and landing something capable of a return is a huge challenge. If I increased the Kerbin difficulty, I'd literally expect Eve to become impossible.

Given the amount of try/retry involved, I suggest the following: Run in sandbox Build rocket Hyperedit it to Eve Land try to reorbit Don't try it "for real" until you know it works. By the time you hit iteration ten of your rocket, you'll be glad.

I completed exactly this mission. There's a guide below. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/82321-Eve-in-a-single-mission No matter how much you stack your rocket with heat shields, you'll need to bleed off some of it. From a 100x100 orbit, I was able to burn about 900dv off before dropping the transfer rocket, and things were still quite dicey.

Yep, "the forums are safe" is the answer, but "safe" is always a relative term. There's nothing at all that stops me making a post that says: There's a link in your own signature and I need to trust you that it's not going to be problematic if I decide to click on it. None of this means the forums have ever been "hacked" or are unsafe, it just means its equally unsafe as every other website.

And now there's quite a blow up over Google listing the whole bit.ly domain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8507624

You say the "forum" is insecure, but the message appears to suggest you clicked a link on a forum, taking you somewhere else via bit.ly. If that's correct, you'd need to worry about that site (not the forum). Edit: Why yes, the post on 21st April 2014, 09:43 has a Bit.ly link. May I suggest "don't click it".

My recent completion of this won't quite qualify because I used FAR.. but man.. if anyone here is playing with DRE, I sincerely wish you the best of luck. Landing anything big enough to reorbit, without having it explode, is a very serious challenge.

One of the difficulties is that every guide ever tells you "USE THE LV-N FOR INTERPLANETARY". But rules are meant to be broken. Given that Moho requires an exorbitant amount of dv, my winning combination is: - A return module, with one grey tank and 2 x radial lv-n - The insertion stage. Under that, one large orange with 2 x LV-N. You can run all four at once to manage the insertion. It doesn't matter if this burn takes eight minutes or whatever, it's the ejection that needs to be precise. - The transfer stage. 2-4 (depending on payload) radially mounted orange tanks. Asparagus staged with the insertion stage, powered by skippers. I can usually push the whole thing onto a moho intercept with 2-3 minute burn. The problem with following the "LV-N only" rule is that, while you may shrink your transfer stage two large greys or something, you create a 30 minute ejection burn and you'll actually spent more dv trying to deal with the inaccuracies it causes, not to mention falling asleep doing that ejection.

Hey, I've come across some spare time and I'd love to do something useful related to this game. Alexmoon's website is linked in just about every thread after all I'm not in a position to make a mod (because I've learnt too many damned languages already) so this is where I ask if anyone knows what maths may not be sitting on an automated website yet?

I people will need to mention versions since others have said it's broken in Chrome.

It depends on your specific craft, but for a long time I've sporadically built rockets that required docking by pointing way, way away from the pink target marker, and using the Lazor Docking mod instead.

Can I highly recommend.. send a rover first. I went through this mission a while back and there's nothing more annoying than trying to walk a Kerbal very far. And on Eve, just picking up and lander and flying 10KM and relanding isn't quite what it was on the Mun