Pecan

Ok, I give up. What is 'Tosc style'? Where is this tutorial? Why is it only today?

On the PC caps-lock switches between coarse and fine controls. Presumably you have the same option on xbone but I've no idea what the control for it would be.

Yep, regex - Pandaman said it first here and it's another mistake to add to my list. I forgot to say: And that includes "just trying it" because it seems like a blast (one way or another, it probably will be, hehe).

Don't send good Kerbals after bad - use an unmanned vehicle with a probe core to fly up there, then the Kerbal already there can get in the one command-pod seat. Smaller, lighter and safer. This isn't really the right place, as it's a question not a tutorial. A moderator will probably have performed his magic before you know it ... (I will report the thread for a move)

Way to go :-) You've made it to orbit and to Mun - wasn't the Mun-trip much simpler than getting into orbit in the first place? Stick the dV calculation in a spreadsheet or similar: dV = (Isp * 9.81) * LN(Wet/Dry) which means ... dV = (engine efficiency * g) * natural logaritm of (mass with fuel / mass without fuel) which means... You can do more stuff if you have more fuel and more-efficient engines. Not a difficult concept *grin* and ... engine efficiency (Isp) is shown in pop-up window when you mouse-over an engine in the VAB/SPH parts-list - most of us use the vacuum efficiency for everything except launch. 'g'(ravity) is a constant just used to convert the units into m/s Using the natural log shows 'diminishing returns' as you add more and more fuel to a vehicle - this is 'the tyranny of the rocket equation' and is why we can't just build anything as big/powerful as we want. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition30/tryanny.html gives the NASA/ISS view of the matter. mass with fuel is shown in the VAB/SPH as you build a vehicle. mass without fuel can be shown in the VAB/SPH by right-clicking each fuel tank (tweaking) and removing the fuel. Failure is fun!

7km/s dV isn't too bad for Moho. There's a very good tutorial on it in the, er, tutorials section of this forum and it can be done for as little as about 2.5km/s IIRC but off-the-bat figures from the dV map would put transfer to and orbit at around 6.6km/s unless you know 'the trick'. Point is, Moho's generally considered the hardest place to reach in the solar system so you haven't done at all badly.

I have learnt a valuable lesson this week about the importance of humility when teaching, KSP specifically. We have a lot of new people playing KSP just now and (fingers crossed) a lot of people helping them. With luck this will benefit, or at least amuse. all of you. There are people from several countries staying here, some of whom are interested in astronomy and/or other aspects of space science. We had a session recently watching 'The Sky At Night' about the Juno probe going into orbit around Jupiter. At the end, one of the questions was "Can you do anything like that in KSP?", to which the answer is "Yes, of course. We just need to design our required final satellite payload and the necessary launch/transfer vehicle(s)". Two hours later, thanks to time-warp but no thanks to time spent explaining dV, Isp, etc. our SCANSat satellite neatly closed its orbit around Laythe (they chose it) with a comfortable 350-ish m/s dV remaining. Everyone happy, Until this week, when they started playing KSP themselves. See, I'd told them to start small by putting a satellite into orbit around Kerbin. As we all know, that's something that anyone can do in their own-designed vehicles, first time, every time. NOT! ^^. I had made several huge mistakes, including (feel free to point out more, I deserve the ignominy): Mainly, I'd made multi-stage, multi-manoeuvre-plus-gravity-assist, interplanetary look too easy, raising false expectations in themselves of what they 'should' be able to do. "Just" getting to orbit then seemed really trivial to them. And most of them didn't put in a lot of thought or extra reading ('cause it's easy, right?) So failures felt to them like big, personal, ****-ups or game-issues. Failure, frustration, annoyance abounded. We've been chatting again tonight and I apologised for not having told them (enough): This is easy ... after 3,500+ hours of practice! Anyone than can do it on request, in front of an audience and after a couple of bottles of wine, probably has several-hundred to 1,000 hours in. Getting to orbit is the hardest part. Knowing where to look-up the required information (transfer window, dV requirements) is most of the rest. Keeping it low-mass is the critical trick. To all you just getting to grips with KSP (on whatever platform): Getting to orbit in your own ship is hard. You will fail many times. If we give you a ship perfectly designed for the job ... ... you will still fail (at least) several times ... and when you do make it you will neither feel so good about it, nor understand half the reasons why you failed before. Once you can get to orbit you are "halfway to anywhere" (Robert Heinlein), 'cause it's that hard compared to the 'space-travel' bit. You don't have to do it all yourself; read/watch tutorials about how to do it. EVERYONE who can reliably go interplanetary, from scratch, in a couple of hours, has failed many, many times - and probably still fails sometimes - 'just' getting to orbit. Because, just in case you haven't got the message yet, it's hard and you're going to fail. The only real failure is failing to learn. After your milestone achievement in orbiting, you will fail at re-entry, landing, lunar- or interplanetary-transfers and, especially, rendezvous and docking. So did everyone else. It's what KSP is about. Which means you can do it too. "Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm" (Churchill). Take-home message is JFK's, "We choose to do these things ... not because they are easy but because they are hard", that's where the sense of achievement comes from.

Get out and push (Really - EVA 'jet pack' can be refuelled an infinite number of times, just by re-boarding the command pod. Get out, push pod retrograde, re-board = refuel, repeat until desired periapsis or you're coming back into the atmosphere anyway and it isn't safe to EVA).

Huh, whut? Apart from being lost as to how all this rep works anyway, wasn't I already here (LGG #79, OP #109)? Do I have to do any work now?

No, no, no, no, no. Not only do we not want yet another pointless flame-war but we're booked-up for the Summer season.

You mean you haven't ragequit anyway? I certainly have. Can't stay away though. Welcome.

Oh yes, your main point is perfectly understandable ... but unlikely to happen :-( For one thing there's just so much about rocket flight that needs to be explained. Squad's view has always been that we will have more fun finding out for ourselves and that giving us the numbers (deltaV, for example) would make it too clinical. As a bit of practical advice; try messing-around practicing in sandbox instead of career mode. The latter adds so many other constraints (budget, tech-tree, parts- and mass-limits) that you can't really experiment, build, test and understand without a lot of extra hassle. You can't, for instance, get to orbit with starter parts so need to do science to unlock later ones, which means spending money, which means doing contracts to pay for it ... etc. etc. etc. Be assured - getting to orbit for the first few times is hard! Then it stays hard right up until it suddenly isn't and you can put any half-decent ship into space without thinking about it much. Most of the rest of what you do in space, except landing, is way easier than getting to orbit ^^. Docking is in a class of its own though. NO ONE gets rendezvous and docking down without many fails. I used to hate it and let MechJeb (mod, so not available on console) do it for me. Now I enjoy the 2001-space-ballet, tranquility of doing it manually (and quicker and more efficiently than MJ),

Practice is what it takes. Follow a tutorial. Practice. If the next tutorial seems difficult or doesn't make sense. Practice. If it's still hard. Read about that type of mission/manoeuvre (or watch Youtube - almost everyone except Scott Manley and NecroBones is just a know-nothing screamer though*) Practice. Repeat. For instance - if 'To The Mun' seems impossible - how much time have you spent in orbit, just practicing with what manoeuvre nodes do? Can you even make it to orbit reliably with a ship you designed and built yourself? Just that first step is no mean feat but unless you've mastered that (for a given value of 'mastered') there's really not much point in even thinking about how you get to Mun. As Streetwind said, trust yourself but don't expect it to be easy. Especially docking - it took NASA years to work it out too! [*Apologies to any others who make well-scripted and -edited videos that actually show how to do things instead of how to fail. I know you must be out there, but the "*scream* look at me explode!" crowd make it very hard to find you.] PS: You more or less explained why StarStryder was right when he said, "That's a lot harder on a console and so console gamers expect a lot more hand holding." It's not derogatory in any way; he explicitly says you expect the [in-game] hand holding because you don't have the same instant-access to the internet that we do on a PC.

You have GOT to show us a video of takeoff, even if not landing :-)

The term for a bug you don't intend to fix is "undocumented feature".

1. Kennedy Space Centre is isn't at 0, 0 because that's in the middle of the Atlantic off the African coast. 2. The Atlantic. More seriously, similar considerations might have applied in KSP too. Maybe where it is was simply the most convenient place. You also have to wonder why they moved from the old KSC.

Yours and RIC's are good points and, in particular, the fact that there is no canonical definition. In practice *grin* whatever works, works.

Nothing in the definition of asparagus says you have to have the same - or any - engine(s) on every stage. If it's core plus lots of drop tanks linked by fuel lines in an asparagus arrangement, it's still asparagus.

Yes - asparagus staging is just a special-case of onion staging using symmetry-2. The reason it's more mass-efficient is that it's quicker to use and jettison 2 tanks of a given size than 3 or more. Dropping one tank at a time is even better but you can't drop a tank from just one side and expect a rocket to fly straight ^^. @Gaarst - on that subject. I disagree with your perscription for mass efficiency. That's exactly where asparagus wins. Take the typical example of a core plus 2 "liquid fueled strap-on boosters", for examples. Add two fuel-lines -> asparagus. You already have the decouplers and with the fuel lines you can reduce mass by taking less fuel. Whether the saving is worth it in current KSP I won't argue.

Thank you - all suggestions for improvements are always welcome and, yes, I will be updating it when I think KSP is in a stable release. In this case I used "\Program Files" because that's where the automatic installer puts KSP IIRC.

Agreed - I see asparagus more about the fuel-flow allowing opposite pairs of stacks to be jettisoned at the same time than about equal stages. As you point out it's not really a very necessary or useful art any more but when I do/did use it I am happy to tune each stage for its section of flight, especially through atmosphere.

It's almost magic

Most of this PDF on dropbox that I wrote for version 0.90 is still relevant. Lots of explanation of how to install mods there :-)

How many fingers am I holding up?

Originally by NASA and in this thread. The OP there is the rocket scientist in person.