Anquietas314

To be honest, I hope the current implementation of IVA in general is far from finished - I'd like to be able to move around inside the capsule/station/..., press buttons and so on

Hmm... would FAR be smart enough to notice you're stacking wings like that? It seems like that would be quite a tricky case to handle.

The orbit didn't immediately cross the Mun's SoI, but given the nature of the game even if the contract specified a perfectly mun-synchronous orbit that would never intersect, it's very, very unlikely you would be able to match the semi-major axis of that orbit perfectly; eventually it would intersect. Also: I specified that time was a factor in that probability. It's difficult to know for certain whether an orbit will have an encounter with Mun after 20-100 orbits, both because it's a pain to use a maneuver node to look that far ahead, and because floating point errors will slightly change the orbit over time - even on rails. And the difficulty is not as simple as that - there are orbits with an apoapsis/periapsis as far out as Mun which never the less will never intersect Mun's SoI. Highly elliptical inclined orbits are a good example of this.

I don't think you need that many engines dude... a lot certainly, but... 26? 28? Good lord. You should probably have a higher intake/engine ratio too. intakes matter much more higher in the atmosphere. My spaceplane had a total of 112 intakes for those 16 turbojets - 1 shock nose cone intake and 6 of the structural ones each. That wasn't enough for maximum efficiency.

Nope, it's a stock issue, although it's quite possible mods make it more likely. Only a couple dozen tonnes? I found it took hundreds of tonnes to make that happen

Tex_NL: in terms of time investment the satellite contracts aren't really that far off balanced. The problem really is that they pay well over 10 times the launch costs in many cases, but then again as you do more of them the profit margin for doing them drops quite substantially. Plus, contracts as a whole are quite unbalanced at the moment; if that were fixed I imagine the satellite balance would be too.

But then it wouldn't be a crew report would it? There's no crew! A camera might be nice for a new kind of experiment though, which could of course be used for visual surveys (perhaps make it so that it's either crew reports/EVA or cameras though, so we don't have to go slapping a camera on the side of a Mun lander or something )

While in theory this is a good idea, I've had several contracts that required me to put a satellite in an orbit which was very unlikely to stay there for any significant length of time (high chance of encountering Mun for example). It would be quite difficult to prevent those from happening in general, plus... how do I know this is not what the company requesting the satellite wanted anyway?

That's actually a bug. I've had it happen a few times; rockets with enough thrust or multiple engines seem to be able to overcome the sticking though. Another workaround is to raise it off the pad a bit with launch clamps.

Kerbal can also mean "like a Kerbal might do" ("That's a very Kerbal design right there", etc) I'm not sure I agree that Eeloo is supposed to be Pluto though; its orbit would suggest Jool is actually Neptune if that were the case...

You know "great" and "tedious" are contradictory terms right? I think "more work" would be a better term I do love the new stuff though, minor annoyances aside

As far as I know the fuel rules haven't changed in 0.90, at least not for this situation. That is some pretty wacky behaviour though I must say o.O. You would probably be better designing that thing as a tall single-stack rocket though with a more powerful engine though. The Isp savings on those engines will be more than offset by the added mass of having 5 of them.

That also leaves you with one less contract slot to use (Important early game) Be warned though that you won't be able to launch a ship that has the part after you complete the contract and before you unlock the part properly.

I found the smallest 1.25m tank to be the most cost-effective one to launch. The 7S is either about as efficient or more efficient than the LV-1 for that tank, and iirc marginally cheaper (I don't currently have the game open). The tank's small enough that the same launcher works just fine (as does the next one up, but that makes the launcher less efficient) The probe-size tanks have a lower fuel/mass ratio and are much more expensive for the same delta-v

Also a valid reason why that doesn't work

My point was that the mass and cost was unnecessary. Also, suppose the booster is very low on fuel? Then you can't deorbit it and it's quite likely that adding more fuel would significantly increase the cost of the rocket (rocket equation). Having a button you click to indicate you think you're done requires no additional mass or cost to be applied to the rocket, and also solves the problem quite neatly.

It should be noted that the LV-1 has a lower Isp than the Rockomax 48-7S; depending on the mass of the probe the LV-1 may be more or less efficient.

Decouplers add mass and cost to the satellite, plus then you've got uncontrollable debris in the orbit of the satellite.

How do you propose we get the satellite there in the first place then? My satellites use the tiny Rockomax engine and the smallest 1.25 meter fuel tank (seems to be the most cost-effective solution) ... and generally don't have RCS on them at all. Plus RCS can be used to provide a lot of deltaV...

Heh, yeah don't place engines too close together - the attachment nodes on parts that connect one part to several others (e.g. 1->4 adaptors) are usually spaced far enough apart to prevent engines overheating (this may not apply to mod parts mind!)

Hmm. Given the surface of Gilly extends higher than that, that table seems suspect. If it's correct, that's probably a bug. I'll have to send something out there to confirm it *flies off to do just that*. EDIT: Confirmed the wiki is correct... but 6 km is actually lower than the non-physical timewarp limit (8 km)!

Yeah I guess. Realistically speaking it doesn't make any sense - for the most part the astronauts don't really know all that much about how the rocket works, they just follow instructions from mission control - but if the buffs were small enough you could probably argue e.g. a higher level kerbal will not screw up the throttle gimballing as much, etc, thus saving on fuel

There isn't really any such need; even on hard difficulty an experienced player can manage just fine without cheating the system, without really needing to grind too much either. Obviously if you never leave kerbin's SOI it takes a fair bit more effort to get the science needed to complete the tech tree, and pretty quickly kerbin/mun/minmus contracts pay peanuts, but it's certainly possible to make enough money and science and still have fun If you're talking about the buildings being too expensive, they are to some extent but that imho actually contributes to the game; if you can't build your usual rocket for going to the Mun because your launchpad/VAB isn't big enough, you have an opportunity to figure out a better way to do it

Ah okay, that makes more sense. It wasn't clear from the OP though; considering many people will only read that you should probably edit it to clarify (leave the original text there, just add the clarification in-between 2 and 3 - saves confusion with the first couple posts )

That's not an exploit at all. It's a little bit buggy in that it doesn't check if the satellite has been used to complete other contracts, but being able to accept multiple contracts of the same kind is desirable behaviour. While it's not a terrible idea, it has the same problem as just doing it automatically without the naming thing: I typically name my satellites to indicate what contract they're for (mostly so I know who I launched what for) while sitting on the launchpad - that lets me switch vessels, do whatever, then switch back and know which contract that satellite is for. If the naming is automatic and you lose control automatically, then the naming serves no real purpose. I would however like to see a way to auto-rename the contract by clicking a button - doing it fully automatically however wouldn't be a good idea for somewhat obvious reasons