Pecan

The Big Talking Head told me that Minmus really was made of green cheese and would be an edible life-support resource in 0.24. You have to mine it with Welsh Kerbals, that's what KSC West is for. Or possibly not. Pointless speculation anyone?

KSP may have better tools than it used to and using better tools can make any task easier - once you know how, why and when to use them. Yes, it's easier to test-and-adjust a manoeuvre node than to sit down with pencil, paper, calendar, planetary almanac, and yards of equations to work through. It's easier with a slide-rule too. Or a computer. The results are quicker and more reliable with these tools as well, which is why any professional person uses them. Maybe it's because I don't have real-time months or years and a team of astrophysicists and mathematicians to hand but I think easier tools does not necessarily mean 'too easy'.

And? You tease! Where are the pics, we want to see?! You can't leave it like that, surely :-(

Next-up bi-elliptic transfers for fun and profit (<- It's wikipedia). Quite why a big burn to go further, taking longer, beats a Hohmann transfer is beyond me, despite the comment at the bottom that "Evidently, the bi-elliptic orbit spends more of its delta-v early on (in the first burn) thus yielding a higher contribution to the specific orbital energy and, due to the Oberth effect, reduces required delta-v." Yeah, if you say so.

FAR changes atmospheric flight so, apart from Kerbin and Laythe as Sirrobert mentioned, that's Eve and Duna. Eve has soup for air and crushing gravity which, together with no oxygen, means spaceplanes have no practical value there. Duna, on the other hand, has hardly any air at all making 'flight' useless for the opposite reason. Put all that together to answer your payload question: spaceplanes are ok for crew-transfers.

Design backwards: Your lander/return stage needs to launch from Minmus, orbit and escape its SOI: 180 + 70 + 90 = 340m/s. From there it can aerobrake to landing. Your transfer stage needs to get the above to Minmus and into orbit: 680 + 180 + 70 + 90 + 70 = 1,090m/s + above = 1,430m/s - give yourself 10% for comfort = 1,573m/s Plus launch: 4,500m/s + above = 6,073m/s. Even if you don't want to aerobrake completely and want a good margin you 'only' need to double 1,430 and give yourself 10% = 3,146m/s. That should still be a small, light payload you can easily launch (for a grand total of 7,646m/s) and which has plenty of spare deltaV. That is, I think, the plan I used for Long Tom: That and Fat Sally are also good for Mun.

There are a few life-support mods, some harder and some easier to use. Probably the most widely-used is TAC LS, although I have seen comments that apart from adding scrubbers and recyclers you can then just leave it to look after itself. I haven't tried it, or any other LS mod, yet but do intend to in my next campaign. RT2 is ... interesting ... I like it but, yes, it does give you a whole new set of design considerations to include and not really any reason to go anywhere. It's only really a bit tricky getting your initial comms satellites in orbit (and even that isn't actually HARD). Once you have the initial infrastructure the coverage and auto-aiming of satellites makes it easy to administer and expand. Oh - but read the start and end of the mod thread - RT2 does work in 0.23.5 but the 'official' release has issues, check carefully what you need to install.

It is :-) A nice little mod that won't make you change your gameplay but gives you another reason for going places - and for using unmanned probes, although you could sit crewed ships around each body to map it. Career mode is going to be a lot more interesting (we and Squad all hope!) in 0.24 but at the moment, once you've learnt the basics - as you're landing on other bodies and docking then you have - there really isn't any point in grinding science just to unlock the tech-tree. Mods like SCANSat, RT2, Kethane and some others give you a whole new set of reasons to go places and do things. Kethane gives you a good reason for bases and, to a lesser extent, space stations. RT2 introduces communications satellites but makes things harder because everything has to maintain a link back to base. Both Kethane and, especially, RT2 will mean you change the way you play though (which for most people is the point of using them, of course). If you are interested in using SCANSat to structure a campaign, let me plug Exploring The System - A design tutorial campaign which I'm writing. It's long, only half finished and will get longer later ^^. My intention is to, eventually, make it 'the missing campaign manual'.

In that case you may enjoy a campaign with more structure and purpose than career currently provides: install the SCANSat mod, launch satellites to map all the planets and moons (starting with Kerbin, obviously), then go and find out what the 'anomalies' the satellites find actually are. (or just look at Kerbal maps for their locations).

There are a lot of magazines with similar titles around the world. It would be useful if we all remembered we're addressing a worldwide community here and specified which country/area we were talking about (see also the 'year 6' pupils thread which wasn't clarified at all by me when someone said 'same as grade 6').

Keep both. Make a new install with 0.23.5 then add the (updated) mods you want. If you want to continue a saved game from the old version in the new game (and have all the required mods for it) just copy its folder in saves\<save name>. Until recently I had demo 0.18, 0.22, 0.23 and 0.23.5 with and without mods installed. Tidied-up a bit now because I just wasn't using 0.22 and 0.23 any more.

And again; two designs for Minmus & Mun (ignore the docking drone in the first 3 pics):

Two Minmus and Mun designs (Long Tom and Fat Sally), and an interplanetary satellite-delivery transfer vehicle:

Due to the differences in the Kerbal universe and the power/mass of engines and fuel available an 'Apollo' style mission is much harder than a direct return. A one-man (Kerbal) capsule only needs a bit more than 45-units of fuel (a small tank) and one tiny 48-7S to launch from Mun and return to Kerbin. Just remember to put a parachute on top of it!

The Guardian is very much a a newspaper of record along with, in the UK, The Times and The Telegraph. Historically "The Times of London" was IT in the days of Empire but now, sadly, it's a Murdoch publication and will print more or less anything that suits the stable (but still tries a bit to live up to its ancestory, just for the advertisers' sake). The Telegraph is a generally right-leaning and The Guardian left-leaning, although by the standards of most of the world they are both moderate - England's nice that way; we had a civil war 400 years ago and didn't enjoy it. A write-up in the Guardian is significant; although with the decrease in print circulation it means less than it used to (as Squad is well placed to appreciate!) A write-up in the Sun would reach more people but make less impression. People who read, or write for, the Sun are unlikely to be interested in learning orbital mechanics - as a generalisation. PS: @ technicalfool - the Sun also got itself 'not quite banned but' from most Army barracks during the Falklands conflict. The headline that was one step (of many) too far was "*******s!" when the Argentina air force managed to bomb one of our troop ships. As we (I was a soldier) were told at the time, "Our enemies are not that or any other insult, they are people just like us. Making them less just makes you less for beating them". [Army rule - respect your enemy. More noted for its lapses than adherance (Abu Ghraib anyone?) but generally much more applied than not - by everyone.]

Ah, I see, thanks chaps. Long way to go before I have the 'perfect' efficient, low part-count, high payload-ratio launch vehicle, etc. I think. Until then, the challenge continues.

For those not in the UK or otherwise familiar with the Guardian (where this article appeared): It's one of the 2 or 3 'high end' newspapers here but satirically called the 'Grauniad' as it's infamous for its typos. Sadly the embarrassing quality of the journalism itself (fact-checking is for wimps, pass me a cliche!) is typical of English newspapers too. Excellent publicity though :-)

T30s are my preferred 'thrust' engines when nukes are just too underpowered. Aerospikes for launch unless the ARM parts are required. Mass-optimal engine type vs delta-V, payload, and min TWR - cross-reference how much mass you want to push vs the deltaV you need and read-off the best engine.

What's an "OW game"? (all google gives me is spelling games ^^)

As far as I know there is no way to change the resource-type shown against the engines. In any case, air is not a limited consumable in the same way as fuel so KSP would have no way of deciding when it's '50%' used, or whatever. Although, thinking of that, the resources panel shows it as % of max available so perhaps it wouldn't have to work too hard!

Have you read the several threads about how powerful the ARM parts are compared to the rest of stock KSP? Part of the problem you might be seeing is that some people think mainsail engines must be good because they are late in the career tech-tree. Other people do believe in, or prefer, 'moar boosters'. "Cool", "realistic" and "efficient" are all possible - but what you might think is 'realistic' almost certainly isn't what someone else thinks is 'cool' (and vice versa), while 'efficient' is about KSP physics, not some myth from "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away" (My own foible is I prefer plausible SF to ancient history and can't understand why, for instance (not you), so many people think the best way to go to KSP's Mun is with 60-year-old Earth technology)

:-( And just bit by the same Kraken (species). 3 long orbits of almost-Munar Ap and aerobraking Pe to finally getting an unpowered, parachute, landing ... 2,000m is good, 1,000m is good except the ground has disappeared, 500m parachutes fully-deployed, 200m ship explodes. ('Blue dot' memory-leak bug). DID quicksave after parachutes deployed ... deployed parachutes are deleted on a quickload. Ah well, it is what it is ^^.

Subject to the number of tankers you station outside the VAB/SPH for refuelling the only question is, what constitutes a 'trip'? If you have a parachute you can go up and back down. If you have docking ports or KAS you can refuel. In real-life the refuelling would be easier, of course, and everything else harder.

I didn't have any interest in a KSP film until seeing the 'Video Wednesday" thread today (which is Thursday, by the way). Now I've decided I'd like to see a film that showed KSP players how to survive without films.

Then I would appreciate something from you that I can replicate - I mean this; I'm not denying the possibility of what you say but you've not given me anything I can test. Every way I fly to orbit, manually or with MJ, beats what I think you mean, which may be very different to what you actually mean. If you're right I would like to know but I think we've hijacked this thread more than we should already. PM me if you wish (or however best you think to continue).