James_Eh

12 pages of good advice. Here's some bad advice. Start big. Keep adding things until it flies well.

Welcome aboard! Amazing how many different ways there are to fling Kerbals off into deep space during routine EVA activities. My favourite is when you try to get two of them to co-exist on the same ladder for a moment while you adjust something else, then flip back to the poor victim only to watch him expelled at a high velocity on a random vector. Luckliy, those are really good jetpacks they've got with them...

... had not alienated my family, and still drove to work. Now I take the bus so I can work on new designs on my laptop.

Rats. I was really hoping they were my signposts to the perfect ascent. Well, they are fun to slalom through.

Like seemingly the majority of the posters lately, I have recently been devoting my time to space planes. I notice during ascent that there always seem to be lines of little round clouds that whip past: sometimes above, sometimes below, sometimes pretty much nose-on. Is there any significance to these little clouds? At first I thought they were related to sonic speed, but now am pretty sure they aren't. I'm tempted to try to hit them bang on, kind of like they are showing me my ideal ascent profile... (No mods.)

Count me in here. I like to picture myself as a Kerbal land developer, wondering how in the name of all that is sane that jerk of a real estate dude talked me into buying land within a couple of degrees of the equator on Kerbin. "NO! NO! My ski resort in the mountains!!! Obliterated by 20 large 1st stage lifter tanks and engines!!! Curse you KSP! (But go Jeb!)"

I just kind of stick them all together and get excited when I find two that seem to be about the same diameter.

Not a single commenter here has mentioned that they suck at landing at Duna because Ike always gets in the way. So I will. I am GREAT at landing on Ike. Duna? Never heard of it. (I hate that Roche-limit-ignoring jerk Ike.)

I had, I dunno, 9 or 10 landings in a row where I touched down oh-so-gently, then sslloowwwllllyyyy tipped over. Finally discovered the magic of the "T" button and haven't looked back since. (Well, technically, my very first Mun "landing" was at some hugely improbable speed (like a good fraction of lightspeed) after a rather untimely kraken attack. But I've gotten over it.)

Addictive how? It's normal to plan your whole week around KSP time and start taking the bus to work instead of driving because that gives you an extra hour to think about designs and plug stuff into your spreadsheets on the laptop. Right? Right?

Yep, gotta agree. I haven't customized any flags yet, but feel a sudden urge. Oh, and to the OP - welcome! And you will find that many agree, Dres is kind of a body that you just tend to skip over between Duna and Jool. Ceres without the rest of the asteroid belt.

SSTL - no refuelling, all stock. Which is turning out to be tough because I suck at planes...

Thanks a lot Moar B... I ask for pictures of shame and you post those massive things of beauty. I have to ask about #3 in particular - how in the world did it not hit the little obstacles of doom at the sides of the end of the runway? Or did it lift off vertically?

Thanks... This one "lifted off" by virtue of the fact that there is a wee slope off the end of the runway - I couldn't pitch up more than about 1 degree or I would scrape off the nukes, so I had to wait until I was over ocean, uncomfortably low, and THEN pitch up. Since this submission I have added an extra fuel can to each of the nukes. The original hope was that this would be a SSTL. Now I am hoping for an orbit of Mun if I'm lucky. Is there a spot to post "Worst SSTO's ever"?

So I've been fiddling with largish space planes, and over the last couple of evenings have decided that minimalism is maybe not my schtick and so I just started throwing parts on that seemed to help. Center of mass was way too far backwards once fuel levels were low? No prob, I made the capsule heavier. Trouble with initial lift? No prob, added front wings. Need more power for the orbital injection? Kept sticking on engines. And so on. I recall this problem when I started building rockets way back also. Of course I am far better with them now. But planes, now, they seem to scream for extra bits. Here is my submission of shame for this syndrome. Am I alone? Or have others tried to do something relatively simple and created monsters? Front view: Note the teeny engine on the cone used for braking once grounded. Also the extra fuel tank stuck atop the orange tank, 'cause I was hurting for nose weight once fuel was depleted (ie upon re-entry). Back view: Yah this is unattractive. I wish at least that I had gotten all of those damn fool air intakes to line up properly. But it flew! It flew! Made orbit and re-entered, missed the KSP by 1/4 of the planet, and I flew to it for a landing. (On the flat bit beside the KSC. I was scared of the runway.)

Returning from Duna in a large vehicle not meant to land on Kerbin. I had inadvertently put the MJ controller onto a part that I ditched early in the mission so I was guessing at the proper aerobrake peri as I only had the one chance given the low fuel levels. Emerged from aerobrake with 120 km apo and proceeded to try to circularize to avoid the second, ultimately orbit-killing drag in the atmosphere. Got the peri up about 500m above the top of the atmosphere before running dry. I suppose I could have gotten out and pushed, but it was a big big vehicle.

Absolutely true, unless your upper stage (and the timing of your lower stages) has major TWR issues and you simply can't circularize a 100 km orbit once you clear the atmosphere. (I have one mess of a ship that can't do 100 km but easily does 140.)

Or when you put a docking port behind an engine, and wonder what's happened to all of your thrust. (My first attempt at using docking ports. Turns out they dontt act quite like decouplers...)

Well, it would be, if we were talking about crashing into a celestial body. Unless ships have lithospheres, my new-fangled term still stands - I was just trying to make a joke about careening my poor EVA'ing slob into his ship. "When caught in a mistake, don't be a flake: SHIPOBRAKE" !!!

Congrats. I probably put in nearly as many hours on the same quest. Back in ?0.18? 0.17? when I started, I sent more landers to Mun and Minmus then I would care to count, and they all touched down safely, with plenty of dV left... and fell over. I wish I had twigged to the fact that you can use SAS to right a vehicle on a low-grav body...

So usually I am fine with EVA controls. As long as my victim is pointing on screen with head up, feet down, tummy towards target, I can pilot him through a dime-sized hole. But sometimes, and I don't quite understand why, I wind up with him pointing headfirst at the target. Then I have to a) totally revise which keys I am using to control the poor slob, and typically slam him head-first into the target at a non-negligible velocity. What is the word for that? "Shipobrake?" (edit: Heh, "Shipobrake". I might make that my new user name.)

Depends on who is planting it. The original 3 have kind of boring flags, like "One great step for Kerbalkind" and such. But when the rookies get involved things get strange. Billy-Bobrod always puts "PARTY!!!" on his flags. (I have to keep flags turned off in map view or all I can see is "PARTY!!!" everywhere...) The others hate him. Kenlie has taken to putting limericks onto his flags. And Dale often drifts into deep, philosophical thoughts along the lines of "Why am I here? What does this signify?"

I don't know as much about the nuts and bolts of this game as many of y'all, but... Could this be a case of processor cycles with big, lagy ships? If the seperatrons are at the bottom of the list of things to detach, and the game works through them one by one, and the first thing it does is blow the stack decouplers, could it then decide (in the next calculation iteration) that the seperatrons are no longer linked to any control-enabled thingies and thus just ignore the "fire" command?

Did your Kerbals do something karmically bad en route to Jool? I'm starting to get a bad feeling about the mission!

Make sure you disable crossfeed on any docking ports in the upper stage to prevent unintended fuel flow.