MajorThomas

Any chance you're using MechJeb and have your thrust limited to something smaller than 100%?

Here we go, I saw this kickstarter project, for USB buttons, sliders and dials connected modularly, and thought it might be useful to you: http://www.palettegear.com/

Thank you for this thread. Good to see people being honest about their feelings out there. And kudos to Squad for creating a game with the right level of realism and immersion to create the feelings in the first place. I suppose the more empathy you have for your kerbals, and perhaps the more unsure you are about your spacecraft building and piloting skills, the more you'd prefer to stay close to Kerbin. My kid, all he wants to do is run around the KSC, do rovers and low altitude testing (and lots of explosions...he'd prefer to blow up the KSC if he could, just like he likes to blow up his worlds in Minecraft). I can understand his fear of the unknown in KSP. There are Krakens out there!!! I guess I'm too dumb to be afraid. EDIT: My first interplanetary mission, to Dres, was scary. Wasn't sure I had enough gas to get home.

Soft landing achieved, with about 1% fuel remaining!

This is a D'Oh!! moment.

Very good point. With the decoupler removed and some legs added...if the weight isn't more, and the drag less...I might be able to do a true SSTO.

I had a feeling. Also the ISP is a respectable 360 s, I'm sure that helps. Inspiring...let me try that, will post results here if I succeed. Ah the joys of being laid off...got some time to do KSP.

(I haven't found any SSTO rocket threads, apologies if I missed it.) Last night while fooling around with using octagonal struts to add attachment points for rocket engines, I slapped together a simple rocket very quickly, and in the first test sent Jeb up to a ridiculous altitude of 890 km. I thought maybe something with this much capability could make it into orbit? The second test showed that indeed, this rocket can. So I have apparently stumbled into an SSTO rocket design that can get into a 72 x 80 km orbit, and even have a bit of fuel (~ 1 %) leftover to deorbit. Pic: Parts list: Mk 1 (small, one Kerbal) pod Small parachute Small decoupler Small (not smallest) Rockomax, full-width fuel tank Small Rockomax engines, 0.1 mass and 30 thrust each, x5 4 octagonal cubes (tiny), arranged with fourfold symmetry on the bottom of the fuel tank. Each takes one engine. The 5th engine goes in the center at the usual attachment point. No antennas, batteries, panels, fins, legs, anything else.

Moho for me. First probe completely failed to make rendez. with the planet, had to be terminated. Attempt to build a ship to send Kerbals there was scrubbed at the last minute when I realized there was no way they could come home. Second probe barely made it, but the ISA Mapsat failed to give good data, then the lander crashed into the surface going fully 200 m/s. Gravity quite a bit higher here than expected, yet no atmosphere. (My Duna missions so far have all been happy-happy-joy-joy, which from reading this thread seems atypical.)

Wow, what a story! I kept laughing out loud. Co-prosperity sphere!

I like this story a lot. I once stranded Jeb this way, but mounted a rescue mission. Perhaps in your story that would have been expected, if it were not for the war and historical purge intervening?

Thank you for this list, I can't wait to read'em all!

Thanks folks. Tada: I meant two major burns. Of course one must always do minor mid-course corrections Xaiier: Yes, I don't have a feeling for the Oberth effect yet...haven't internalized it, can't explain it. That bugs me. I agree, "one-burn" interplanetary hops are hard to do well. There are webpages that give launch window times and angles that help A TON...I doubt I could do it without that help. While it is fairly easy to setup a maneuver node in advance, knowing exactly when to start firing the engines and which way to point are both difficult. I find my burns take longer than the planning tools accommodate for, so I'm pointed more in an outward / away direction than I should. So frequently just after a major burn from Kerbin I must do a multiple 100 m/s delta V burn in an "inward" direction (toward the target planet). If I wait even longer, the corrective delta V gets much bigger. So I guess the answer is, getting away from Kerbin makes the second burn easier, while escaping from Kerbin in the approximately correct direction is also easy. It just (in my experience) may cost you 500-1000 m/s delta v that way. That must be the price users are willing to pay for an easier sequence of burns.

Can someone explain why one would want to first leave the SOI of the starting point (say, Kerbin) then perform a separate burn to get to the target (Duna, Moho, whatever)? I never thought anyone did this, but in at least one thread recently, and on a YouTube KSP video, I see that 1. Some people think it's common and/or recommended to do the two-step process. I don't yet see what is the advantage of doing this. 2. Some say it's better to do just one burn. My intuition also says to do just one burn. (I also learned about the "Oberth Effect" from this thread (thanks!) which may have been the source of this intuition. That said, I took a class in orbital mechanics 20 years ago. It's probably buried in here somewhere.) Apparently you can save a lot of fuel this way, so why would anyone do two major burns (one in the SOI and one out)? Thanks-

Can someone explain why one would want to first leave the SOI of the starting point (say, Kerbin) then perform a separate burn to get to the target (Duna, Moho, whatever)? I never thought anyone did this, but in this very thread I see that 1. Some people think it's common and/or recommended to do the two-step process. I don't yet see why. 2. Some say it's better to do just one burn. My intuition also says to do just one burn. (I also learned about the "Oberth Effect" from this thread (thanks!) which may have been the source of this intuition. That said, I took a class in orbital mechanics 20 years ago. It's probably buried in here somewhere.) Thanks-

(I haven't read through this entire thread so this may be a repeat) Whenever I view a screenshot from KSP in other threads here, I often right click the image hoping to pan the view around. Oops.

This is what I do, almost exactly. It also helps if you develop a decent idea of how much fuel is needed at different stages of the mission, so you don't do things like waste upper stages, or run out of fuel during the return trip, etc. You can get a sense of this by flying missions to other planets.

LOL to all of the above. But look on the bright side, at least you could easily re-texture your rockets and planets to look like cloth, bricks, wainscotting, whatever.

Congratulations, junior rocket scientist! ...and struts too, don't forget

Transferring Kerbals thru docking ports would be great, hope this feature is added someday. I like the idea of using ladders to crawl from one ship to another, I should try that. Reason for docking: You can transfer fuel, so expendable tankers are useful for fueling long duration missions. I have a "robotanker" I use for this. Reason #2: Can be useful for transferring Kerbals via EVA, at least the ships don't wander or separate. One less thing to worry about during the transfer EVA.

I agree with most of these ideas, it's really "playing to better one's self" and as such it's perhaps the best kind of competition. Having just reached a major milestone in the game...filling out the science tree in career mode, flying stock and without any navaids, I have begun looking for more things to do. As a reward I've added MechJeb to cut down on the tedium of setting up and executing burns. Also added Kethane Pack, to give me a reason to go setup bases. I also spend a lot of time fooling around with experimental designs, as this game really shines in the almost Darwinian approach to design. Just keep testing until it works, you get a refined design one way or the other.

I've sent fuel trucks along with Kerballed ships, to aid in coming home. At least once I've forgotten to deploy the solar panels on the fuel truck, resulting in a dead ship out there among the planets.

Looks like a good idea for a mod. I'd make a large "probe" module (allow remote control of the spacecraft and rocket) that contains a special Kerbin animal, and you see an image of it during flight similar to the Kerbonauts. However EVAs would not be possible. Thoughts?

What do you call it before it's alpha?

I too worry and feel uneasy when I see nuclear bomb footage too. The blast/fireball/mushroom clouds represent an unbelievably huge force of nature released to destroy...other people. Letting the genie out of its bottle, like. Not something to be taken lightly. Probably helps that I grew up during the time of maximum nukes and fairly high tension, in the 1980's.