Anquietas314

The tools don't need to be all that complex, and telling you (roughly) when it's a good time to go visit planet X doesn't detract from eyeballing

You don't need a protractor, because KER tells you how far you are away from the time you need to burn ("Intercept angle"). How many numbers there are doesn't matter - this information can and should be displayed visually. Most people are not going to have any idea what a phase or intercept angle is.

Rusty6899: I'm also playing on hard difficulty settings, though with quicksave and revert - because to hell with losing my $50k spaceplane -- and more importantly jeb -- because of a tiny design flaw that only applies in stock physics or crashing because e.g. I got distracted / cat decided to sit on the keyboard, etc. Those contracts pay about 50k on Kerbin/Mun, ~80k on Minmus (because I haven't done any of those yet I think). The "deploy a base" ones however are more in line with what you say. Minmus is easy to fly around in orbit; Mun is a heart-attack waiting to happen. The one "while flying below" contract I did on Mun, I very nearly lost a kerbal because there was a huge hill right after the marker in my orbit. Spaceplane building takes a bit of practice but it's not that hard

See above post.

I actually encountered this bug in version 8.1 of scansat (the 0.90 version) while trying to help here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/104371-Engines-will-not-fire I have no idea as to the cause, however the mods installed at the time were the current versions of Kerbal Engineer Redux, StageRecovery, Romfarer's Lazor and scansat.

The transfer speeds listed in-game are actually wrong. the larger transmitters do transmit faster. It's a bug that's been in the game for quite a while (since antennae became useful I believe). The actual values are listed here: http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Antenna

>_> KSP is a game where waiting is a necessary game mechanic.

ddenis's argument is neither a straw-man nor a red-herring; these are examples of a red herring. It is possibly poorly explained perhaps though; OP's basis for removing the stayputnik is essentially that they don't like it without SAS, but phrased under the assumption that everyone agrees (or should). Lots of people however do like the probe as-is. Of course, as I said here another simple solution would just be to bump the probes' SAS abilities up a level each, so that stayputnik has basic SAS and the second octo probe has full SAS; as was said earlier those who like it without SAS could (but admittedly probably wouldn't) turn it off. There are also plenty of other solutions to the memory issues KSP suffers; e.g. not loading every single part in full at game start; compressing meshes/animations (in memory) that are not currently on screen but may be loaded in the near future and compressing textures unilaterally (see the Active Texture Management mod; it does make some textures a little ugly but you could always use a different, less lossy compression algorithm - there are dozens to choose from). The performance impact of loading (suitably stored/cached) models, animations or textures from disk that aren't in memory should be a few tens of milliseconds at most in a typical case, assuming they're not absurdly huge, and most of that is due to seek time. That makes it practical to only load the models etc used in the active ship and any close enough to see without significantly affecting performance. How easy any of this is to do in Unity though, I don't know; it's not an engine I've worked with.

The numbers provided by KER aren't particularly easy for someone who isn't an expert in orbital mechanics to grasp intuitively. It is better than nothing at all though.

OhioBob: I am going to blame Google for it not bothering to mention it was referencing the sidereal period, but 29.5 days is still neither 30 or 31, the two main month lengths (cue comment regarding our arbitrary calendars )

Claw: it's worth mentioning that there are cases where the decoupler's ejection force (if it's quite small like with the 0.625m ones) is desirable; it helps give you some clearance for moving away without needing to use RCS fuel to do it. Plus having the cargo release as part of the staging can be convenient If you have probes in particular, then those will probably already need to be rearranged in the staging sequence, assuming you don't want to have their engines firing inside the cargo bay

I'm not sure if this really counts as a tutorial, but those are meant to go in the subforum. I'll just add that the huge Kerbodyne engine and the toroidal aerospike are both easy, well-paid ones for suborbital trajectories, as is the rapier engine to a lesser degree.

You also need to upgrade the Astronaut Complex.

Yeah, at the very least the tier 2 should not have what I think are supposed to be potholes - certainly not immediately after you just built the damn thing. Length aside, I think the tier 1 runway's mostly okay. Odd that it's the tier 1 runway, rather than tier 0, but otherwise mostly okay.

SkyRender: I actually enjoy those survey contracts (on Kerbin!). The ones on Mun/Minmus/etc I ignore unless I'm going there anyway, in which case it's just a source of bonus science/funds for what I find a moderately interesting challenge (imho).

Musil: you're quite welcome

seaces: could you upload the .craft file for that ship? It might help to diagnose the problem - whether it's something you're doing wrong or it's actually a bug in the game. You'll need to use dropbox or some other file host of your choice, but be aware that adf.ly and similar sites are specifically prohibited in the forum rules.

Nice job finding a workaround That can be quite tricky to get right and it's a bit dodgy on Hard difficulty if you leave quicksave/revert disabled (which makes designing spaceplanes in stock physics a bit of a nightmare but never mind); you could accidentally place the rocket on the sloped part of the (tier 2) launchpad... which for some rockets is not a good idea

Hmm. That suggests it does depend on the ship the game considers the primary one when you're docking. That's also quite interesting because the contracts don't check the "new satellite" you launched is actually the one that was put in the target orbit for satellite contracts. There's been a few cases of that mentioned here and a few other threads: Abusable Contract Mechanics. I would expect the same code is used to handle both kinds of contracts, with the main difference being the conditions for what the object is made up of.

LethalDose: that's fine, but the second paragraph (the edit - it's in the bit you just quoted) does address that. Really you could of course just wait 6 in-game hours for Mun to move through 60 degrees of its orbit if your phase angle is much more than 90 degrees off, which makes it a non-issue.

You need to upgrade both.

I used decouplers on the plane in the screenshot because it was just launching probes that were being sent to duna/eve. Those weren't coming back . The plane was designed so that you just swap out the cargo (possibly the decouplers/docking ports) to change the contents

Were you by any chance trying to transmit something, or have anything (including controls!) that might be draining the batteries?

Yup, you need docking ports or a decoupler. EDIT: here's a spaceplane I made in 0.25 that has the cargo bay wide open:

Have you tried right clicking the panels to see what they say? It's quite possible you managed to damage them, or they've been blocked by some object such as Kerbin or Minmus itself. It might be possible (but very unlikely) for one of the inner planets to block it briefly as well, although I haven't seen that happen myself. The panels should charge your batteries as long as they have a clear line of sight to the Sun, and are pointing in the right direction.