Hypocee

The ASAS locks in a vector in privileged inertial gamespace and attempts to keep your nose on it. If you lock in vertical, Kerbin\'s going to rotate under you as you boost and make that inertial reference a retrograde gravity turn, so it doesn\'t surprise me that you\'d wind up heading west. The 290 surprises me a bit, since your theoretical turn should be slightly south of west. Maybe early \'hunting\' behavior by the ASAS feedback loop?

Exactly. The question is nonsensical because there\'s no room for events at c. It only makes sense if you drop it to 'very close to c', in which case it becomes trivial. I\'ve said it here before, but this carries the rather delightful implication that from their own point of view, photons and similar massless particles don\'t exist, having no time to exist in; the emitter and receiver simply 'touch' somehow in the overall quantum event. Even if that event happens to span 13 billion years of slow stretching down to CMB. I\'m just now reading Lawrence Krauss\' Quintessence about the history of dark matter, and among its general excellence it points out that special relativity has a second line of reasoning, implicit in Maxwell\'s equations 20 years(?) earlier - the speed of an electromagnetic wave is dependent on two quantities that are quite measurable in the laboratory and affect all sorts of stuff. If c were not fixed for all inertial observers it wouldn\'t be a matter of a subtle wiggle in a cunning experiment; serious laws of physics - chemical reactions, atomic cohesion etc. - would break down. Anyone who likes to play with relativity, you may enjoy Poul Anderson\'s hard sci-fi novel Tau Zero. It\'s about a Bussard ramjet that gets trapped into going faster and faster 'forever', and gives gentle but detailed explanations about the mathematics of the relativistic velocity factor tau, and how the ship\'s ever-increasing speed affects the universe around it - fighter-style realtime dodging between star systems on the fringes of a whirling galaxy sparkling with rainbow supernovae is a rather memorable image.

If I\'m any guide you\'re going to get some bogus answers regarding free-return trajectories assuming an eastward Kerbin launch, which are the lowest-energy overall. Disregarding how you got to the mün and orbital legacies of the Apollo Lunar Orbit Rendezvous architecture, I believe an eastward orbit is theoretically more efficient since its angular momentum both opposes the mün\'s orbital momentum for minimum energy to Kerbin and coincides with its (utterly, utterly negligible) rotational momentum for minimum energy to münar orbit. I can tell you with much more confidence that the ideal burn takes place at the point in münar orbit exactly opposite Kerbin, and that it doesn\'t actually have to be displayed as an escape trajectory - it only needs to be an ellipse that\'ll take you farther than the münar sphere of influence. The latter part will be much more apparent when conics get patching.

Nothing unexpected. Limitations on instrumentation and human reflexes mean you\'re almost always going to be somewhat off a perfectly in-plane burn. Thus, we introduce the world of...mid-course corrections! Very small burns along the way can tune in your orbit - the earlier they are the more efficient but more demanding on precision. An easy technique with our Magic Videogame Eyes is to fly in map view, position the camera so the mün\'s orbit is edge-on, then adjust your elliptical orbit up or down (probably with RCS) to match it. Is the best I can do, sorry. I guess I can add that 'prograde' and 'retrograde are the two green markers on the NavBall. The more general case is that, as in all astronavigation techniques, you burn at the point where your current orbit intersects your desired orbit.

Well, both of those things are true... but Kryten apparently forgot that inclined/polar orbits exist. So yeah.

Crazy fluke, though obviously the SAS helped. Gratz. I don\'t pay much attention to the Challenges culture, but I\'d be surprised if there weren\'t Spacebar-only and one-press orbit challenges.

Even more precisely, burn horizontally and at 90 degrees between prograde and retrograde at the 'instant' you cross the equator. Ideally you\'ll be adjusting that burn vector over the course of the burn until cutting off when it points exactly north or south, meaning that your orbit is now purely east-west, i.e. equatorial. Be advised that plane-change maneuvers are enormously fuel-hungry, especially in low/fast orbits. There are real-world examples where it\'s been less costly overall to burn up to a high orbit, do the plane change there, then burn back down to the low orbit again.

The first - Iskierka\'s researched and proven there\'s an erroneous mass term. You can verify it by dropping, say, a full and a burned SRB side-by-side. They behave the same.

To the best of my knowledge no; those missions are what I mean when I reference 'one or two missions ever in history' not using conics.

And no, it also displays your TVV/direction of travel, in both forward and reverse (X inside) directions - the yellow carats.

I\'d trust the KSP Orbit Mechanic

Every functioning human feels the same and the event\'s over, but reading this made me smile so I felt it was witty enough to spread a bit further. A while back I bought Digitanks, on its own merits but also because it was the first thing in years to resemble Moonbase Commander, which is the best thing though 'Atari' desperately don\'t want you to buy it. This is from the creator of Digitanks.

Specifically Firefox 8 had a little spat with spec compliance nerds. 7 and 9 are both fine. You can rename any .php files you\'ve downloaded to the proper extension and they\'ll be OK, it\'s just the filename that gets screwed up.

http://xkcd.com/932/

Struts (and fuel lines) in symmetrical arrangements are pretty broken in .13.*thanks to a bug introduced to their raycasting. It\'s reported fixed for future releases.

Mmm. Of course, what a shame that broadcast media producers just happen to own the cables and towers. Shame if anything happened to them - like maybe if, say, Google, who So Bravely Took A Stand against SOPA, were consistently working with Verizon to overturn net neutrality so they can just squeeze unpleasant traffic out rather than cutting it off.

Nope! Still vaguely wondering.

My guess is you\'re referring to a few of Alchemist\'s posts, most clearly stated in this one. Strictly speaking it\'s about adjusting your instantaneous speed which has implications for your design TWR.

Possibly, in a given craft, in KSP, currently But exploring and working out the calculus of less gravity drag vs. more kinetic energy imparted to thick air is among the things real aerospace engineers are for. KSP\'s drag model is also currently incomplete in one way and broken in another - though if I understand correctly both fixes will push it in the 'power hard' direction.

Orbital transfers are quite difficult There is not currently a marker for an ideal Hohmann transfer, in part because it relies on either a big fat UI or the assumption of a mun landing, and in part because there\'s debate over whether it would hurt the fun to have the machine tell you GO HERE FOR SUCCESS HUMAN PILOT without having 'bought' the machine in the metagame. Many people use the rule of thumb 'burn when it rises above Kerbin horizon in front of you'. You\'ve succeeded multiple times already, but you might also find the RCS translation controls useful/fun. Tune the main engine thrust for near-cancellation of gravity, then adjust your velocities directly rather than relying on tilt.

Right on. F2P can always be screwed up, and usually is - Sturgeon\'s Law. But if applied to a game where the other players are the content (multiplayer), it can be awesome and lucrative. A flight sim? Not so much.

The only thing I have to add is that slow versus fast doesn\'t affect the total delta-V per unit of fuel, but it does affect the total fuel efficiency of your trajectory. The ideally efficient pilot is as close to a gun as possible, and always burns at the maximum available power; the concept is called 'gravity drag', and can be demonstrated by extending it to an extreme: Imagine throttling down until you had .0001 m/s acceleration upwards. You\'d burn all your fuel hovering a foot above the pad, for effectively zero result. Similarly, slow-hover down from a klick up and you\'ll burn all your fuel then fall. Real landings have to make allowance for things like human reflexes, telemetry and control authority.

It\'s really pretty easy with practice. If 7 things a week aren\'t revolutionary challenges to the whole of SCIENCE! they don\'t get to eat. 'Evil is a little man afraid for his job'.

I\'m not saying that\'s not so, but it shouldn\'t be so - either in real life, where solids lose mass and therefore gain acceleration just like liquids, or in the game - I remember in the first couple public releases there was a hilarious bug where SRBs got the wrong polarity and added mass as they burned, which implies that now it\'s fixed they lose mass and are intended to do so.

You understand the situation perfectly. Liquids are supposed to be better. If you haven\'t already you might want to learn about 'specific impulse', which is what they have a lot more of. A. Cost will eventually matter. B. The advantages SRBs have are higher max thrust and insane thrust-to-weight ratio. An SRB can lift more weight second-to-second than a liquid engine. This makes them great for adding that extra initial lift to a liquid rocket that couldn\'t otherwise lift off. By the time they burn out, the liquid engines have also burned off some fuel, lightening the ship enough to continue on its own.