celem

People given you loads of good suggestions here, theres not much more to suggest since things start to cost considerably more dV and involve trickier intercepts beyond those listed above. Beware Moho, it looks tempting for something to do after you hit those above but it's not for the faint of heart. Dres isn't so bad, just like a distant Ike but a weird orbit. Personally I did Ike in your situation. Gilly is the cheaper dV, but Ike is one of the easiest things to hit in the system.

Mystery Goo is.........people! No seriously... I dont much care about the physical anomolies displayed by KSP's universe. As said a number of times in this thread, its only very loosely based on our own universe. Like the OP however I do find myself wondering about the exact make up of the various planets. I would point out here that the other day I noticed KSP Interstellar mod has added gas and liquid chromatagraphs for determining makeup of the worlds we visit, presumably the creator has also defined these makeups since I dont think stock-KSP cares much beyond O2 needed jet propulsion, but it was a nice immersion touch. Never tried the mod, Im not too fond of the other elements of it, but I might try and fish those 2 parts out for the above reason alone. I've always been tempted to make a custom sciencedefs file to make science 'serious'. While the flavor text is sometimes funny, I often find myself wishing that there was some actual data in the reports. An atmospheric analysis report that actually has the Kerbal/probe listing the components and ratios would be (imo) interesting to read. I got a touch of this already in vanilla with gravity scans, I found myself curious as to which biomes might report escalated activity and what that might tell me about the formation, age and condition of the body im orbiting. Goo and Materials reports are a good example of 'funny' sci reports, but since they are unlocked before atmospheric analysis I always wanted them to give atmospheric or radiation clues in a more logical, consistent fashion. Im also working on tweaking the new Scoop-O-Matic mod (forgotten author, sorry!) to give me mineral readouts, since I love that automated shovel idea for sampling and this would be a somewhat logical way to get a first idea of the makeup of a world. I also very recently spotted FlowerChild's BTSM modpack has some kind of drop-probe that I wouldnt mind adapting into a simple impactor experiment. tl;dr I want to be able to discover what they are made of, but dont much care exactly what it is

It is of course possible to land with no parachutes whatsoever. It works the same way as any other planet, you have to kill your horizontal velocity and then get your landing speed low enough for your legs. It takes quite a bit of fuel and of course a Thrust-to-weight ratio of considerably better than 1. If doing this then wait for re-entry effects to finish and watch for the secondary 'whitish' effects. At this point your speed is going to be plummeting past 600ms towards 300 and you are likely around 6km up. This is where I usually start killing the horizontal and slowing the drop. Kerbin takes a bit of practice to powered land, but with enough of that practice you can drop landers from orbit onto the pad. edit: also 'thrust down'? If by that you mean whilst pointing at the planet, then no. You de-orbit by thrusting backwards, towards the horizon you are flying away from until you fall in.

Using a Kerbal to push something on the ground rarely ends well. I have several times returned from a successful mission, EVA'd for extra science in my Kerbin return biome only to have the capsule roll and block the hatch. Trying to push it back caused the Kerbal to explode. (i can only guess it rolled over him) Also, Kerbals dont do 90 degree transfers from ladders well, i.e. they wont climb vertically and step off the top onto a horizontal platform, they will mis-step and fall (and sometimes, just for fun, explode). You can however make a ladder-to-ladder transfer upto about 60 degrees

That itself isnt too tricky since the game already separates splashed and landed and every ocean currently in the game is a biome (or a fake surface-only approximation of one). Great mod, love the idea, it's going into my default catalogue, cheers!

Yeah full props for that one. I generally cant make top-down staging work even after a weekend in the VAB, balancing it and not ending up with an unflyable inverted pyramid is half the battle, think all my tries went to bits before 10km. My very first rocket went to minmus surface and back with a Kerbal. I immediately fell in love with the game and decided I was pro. Of course the following 50-odd designs failed hard until I learned some humility and started reading tooltips/doing sums. In my arrogance mk ii saved directly over the successful file and it was almost a realworld week before i hit 70km again Since then plenty goes off without major hitch on the first launch. But I have a fairly consistent lifter design and 90% of failures that do occur are payload attachment fail. (not enuf struts)

Sigh. I always forget that pit of unwashed evil.

Im not much interested in mini-games that drag time off the spaceflight part of this wonderful game. That said, once career is fleshed out with the possibilities of contracts and missions, I wouldnt mind there being some level of interaction and involvement with companies and groups representing these. I do like the mods you mention, adding a bit of life to the homeworld was a big deal for my immersion, otherwise it feels like the kerbal race is infact limited to an unending supply of nutjobs dumb enough to let me strap boosters to them who idle away their time playing foosball in KSC till I sacrifice select them.

Given that we both live in the same country, getting slimmer by the second. Little creepy even Yeah I figured KSP would have a max request somewhere, at least it should always have max RAM available now. It most certainly will be linux64, as soon as i get win8 to let go. I was partway through a dualboot setup before I realised I've never done that with win8 before and it kept disabling the grubloader. KSP was lucky to pull 1Gig off my old 2g desktop with all the junk in the background. My machines are usually set up as development rigs and have all sort of services running. My old machine is also my primary tomcat server, glad to have a dedicated gaming rig for the first time ever! (and i cut my teeth on Elite)

Me 10char.

Looks like every Eve ascent I ever built. Parallel evolution eh? External command chairs are not cheesy and unrealistic, they are boot-strap tech XD

Yeah the temperature probe is weird. I cant even guess how it decides what to show. It does drop if you put it in shadow, but not by as much as it should, and doesnt appear to move at all in direct light. the gravity scanner is much more realistic generally

Thats a pretty smart idea actually. I would hope the game never reaches the 'requires connection' stage (cos that was such a popular XBone feature). But some kind of heuristics like this would be awesome

Yeah, thats pretty disturbing, but in a good way. I crunch everything through KER (or pen 'n' paper if im feeling old school) so they work in theory. I have a number of designs that inexplicably detonate/implode on the pad with alarming regularity, others that struggle to break 500m without serious harmonics building up in the launcher. There are a couple that crash the game everytime I hit 'Launch', and some that should work just fine, and seem to, until pieces randomly decide to tear off. And on the off-chance the whole thing DOES hold together, well it will be the 1 launch in 10 that I let mechjeb handle and he will fumble the grav turn or be lead-footed with terminal-velocity matching and/or apoapsis finetuning and tear the ruddy thing to bits anyway. We aint a rocket company... Did nobody tell you we are actually fireworks merchants? Oooohhh! Aaaahhh! ......ouch

I would assume some kind of loss during conversion. This prompts the player to think carefully about it before commiting. Otherwise you could just juggle these 'currencies' back and forth at will. I also, fear for the day where I'm paying for every part I put on the pad. Certainly not at Whackjob levels yet, but I've been running KSP off 2g of RAM. My christmas present is booting up as I write and carries a whopping 12g, so im looking forward to ever inflating part-counts on my end.

I only got to open the box today cos its my birthday on the 31st and i usually get combined gifts and OMG I DUNNO WHAT IT IS BUT THE CORNER TORE OFF THE PACKET AND WHATEVER THE THING IS IT COMES WITH 12G RAM THNX BYEEEEEEEE!!1! *celem enters hardcore gaming coma* Incase anyone still wasnt clear the caps are tongue-in-cheek, but im well thrilled with this new hardware and the fact that KSP now has fully 6x the RAM to work with that it had yesterday. /me starts dragging every slider he can find all the way right.

Yep mate, i'll start working on some filters and overviews in my next few versions. v0.3 is actually done but I cant get it up to my host yet. I also noticed suddenly this morning that I dont have 'acceleration data'. I've also come up with an idea for a mission planner calculator whereby you can select a bunch of experiments to add to a 'mission' and it will then tell you how much science that mission is worth. Should also help plan how many of each experiment to take and is already designed, gonna hold it a version or two till the layout is settled and I iron out remaining issues.. edit: v0.3 is up.

v0.2 is up, now with correct data for the experiments in atmosphere and some visual changes. Next up will be a better method of presenting the generic experiment situations to make it more intuitive. I'll probably run a second table. edit: discovered laythe/eve land/ocean are not true biomes, but surface only biomes like Launchpad/runway/ksc. v0.25 incomingdone.

That never even occured to me, but is a good point. Will have a think about some alternatives

Changelog: v0.1 - initial v0.2 - fixed some incorrect data for in-atmosphere experiments, changed colors to make it colorblind friendly, minor layout change and code clean v0.25 - fix for Eve and Laythe whose Ocean/Land biomes are surface-only. Atmosphere and upward homogenised. v0.3 - Surface Sample included (oversight), layout tweak, legend added to table

rofl, strap him to an untested launch vehicle and kill him in upper atmosphere due to payload disintegration. No other end is fitting for such a Kerbal.

Seriously... we are all fans of KSP. But you, sir, have a problem... Thankfully the cure is simple, take 5hrs of KSP per day and call me in a month

'wobble during launch is to be expected' me teaching a mate how to play KSP, shortly before catastrophic launch vehicle failure

Hehe, I've done that one too. Was discussing MarsOne with a mate in a heated debate, when he suddenly interrupts with 'Whats Duna?'. Derp. On the upside, the explanation for this slip led to him becoming a KSP player, so win-win. Everytime Im driving around a roundabout I mutter 'slingshot' under my breath. My missus is getting worried.

I have a stable of launch vehicles for those moments where i'm too lazy to design a customised one specific to the payload. Worst overkill was probably my keosynch satellite launch (for RT2). I was really quite drunk and put a 140t rated launcher behind a 1t sat. Thrust was below 30% all the way to about 20km and I ended up trying to insert into keosynch with 6 mainsails. That kind of thrust is not your friend when going for such highly accurate burns. To make it all worse I didnt add any kind of propulsion to the sat itself (my keostationary sats should never move), yet the decoupler that released it from the launcher was mounted the wrong way around, so when I triggered it the satellite gained several m/s and was no long synchronous, and therefore useless. Memo to self, push the launcher away from the sat, not visa-versa.