Pecan

I'm sorry this is all taking so long - all I can say is work, holiday, illness, New Year, distractions and procrastination. Chapter 8 planning is now complete - it will consist of a science module, drone lander and manned-landers for low-g, med-g, Tylo (sort of) and Laythe (another spaceplane) plus supporting cast of assorted launch-vehicles. THIS weekend, promise ^^. I think.

Do you have 'Force Roll' enabled? That's what it does.

*Grin* Or MJ, which has the same thing.

It certainly can. We all know a lot of designs that are fine until they get high and fast and then flip-out. On the other hand, before I learnt this, I had a few planes that were fine on the way up but impossible during re-entry. I'm assuming this was simply because the main speed-run during ascent comes above the thick atmosphere, whereas the aerobraking spike on re-entry is once you hit it. (usually I'm air-hogging 8 intakes per engine, in Stock + DRE) - - - Updated - - - We're talking about when it isn't Com moving behind CoL.

MJ has a lot of different modules that you can choose to use or not as and when appropriate. I use ascent guidance because I sometimes do 40-odd launches a day, testing vehicles, and I want repeatability in the flying. When I do want to fly a launch myself I just don't turn that function on. THE best module for me though is Custom Window Editor - which lets you display exactly the information you want in whatever windows as you want.

Lots of people say CoM but I've found Centre of Drag has a much greater effect, especially during re-entry when drag is slowing the vehicle so sharply. Intakes are high-drag. They want to be behind the CoM and if you put them in front of it ... they don't want to stay there.

Well you're absolutely right about the targetting; it's always the root (or highest part in the tree after decoupling) that gets targetted. Never noticed that before, since I'm targetting to dock and using the Navball Docking Alignment mod. Attaching sideways at one end still lets the load align under thrust though. Make sure you 'free pivot' after attaching, then apply thrust to pull the load. I would suggest you try a 'pull' design with radial engines rather than relying on RCS for that. A push engine like yours will have the opposite effect (pull string, it straightens out, push it and ... it doesn't). ETA: Excellently prepared and presented save-game, by the way. It really helps us help you if you can do something like that.

No, no, I mustn't get into another off-topic debate about MJ. Some people think guessing or using a sliderule is cheating, there's no right way to play.

Hmmmm, compare to Space Engineer

Nosecones in stock are not (quite) useless - their low drag helps a vehicle in atmosphere stay pointing in the right direction.

Upload your save game (persistent.sfs) to dropbox or similar if it's stock and I'll take a look at it.

For 'lateral' I should have said 'linear', non-rotational. If you pull a thing the CoM will align behind the point at which you pull. I had assumed you were selecting the target from the map view, but I'm surprised it makes any difference in flight mode - it never has for any other sort of target selection (ie; docking).

The Drawing Board in the tutorials section of this forum is the best place to look for which guide would suit you. Mine has vehicles for all uses (er, except Tylo, Laythe and Eve) :-)

I actually started a similar thread in the middle of last year. Rowsdower commented that they had long-term plans to keep updating KSP even after release; as we are also hearing now. As to what else they should produce - given the number of people here who like (space)planes and messing around in the atmosphere I think a build-your-own aircraft simulator would find a market. Yes, there are already a lot of flight simulators but, no, they don't let you design your own vehicles.

No changes that I know of. When you target anything, it's the CoM that is targetted, isn't it? What/where are you getting as target? Secondly, if you pull with any lateral thrust the CoM will aline on that axis, then you can lock the claw.

Welcome :-) Start small and see how far you get, then get a little bit bigger. Being able to get into orbit reliably in the first place is a major achievement and from there it takes comparatively little more to get to the moons. After that the other planets are the same on a bigger scale, but you need to know about transfer windows (when to go). The other major learning steps are landing - as you've discovered - and docking. If you have fun just building I suggest staying in sandbox mode but for a more controlled start try science mode - you start with very few parts and need to run experiments in order to unlock more. Career mode has a lot of extra complications - like money - which make things much more complex when you are still trying to work out how to build rockets.

I'm not intending to be offensive, I'm letting you know I don't understand from your description what this application is meant to be telling me, or why. For a start I don't know how you get from: "Mass = 15" To: "Weight = (15*9.81) = 147.15" Definitions of 'weight' that I am used to would say that under 1g acceleration (on the surface of Earth or Kerbin, for instance) the weight would be 15t. Why is your value so much higher? Then: "The ideal take off speed is 90-100" Why? What do I lose if I use more runway and take-off faster? How about if I point up at 40m/s? "This is also the speed which your cruising will occur" What cruising? Why am I cruising? "52% Thrust Limiter" Why not just throttle-back? Why not just go faster? "I personally use 10% elevon (0.66 lift) per wing ... 50% the elevon for rudder" Which is about control, not lift unless you're doing some very strange things. How does this relate to the rest of the package? (Apart from all that I'm probably missing something because I don't even know what a Mk4 spaceplane is.)

Moving clocks run slow. Jeb always jumps onto every flight because he doesn't want to look like that. It's what happens to Kerbals that stay at home.

Ahhh. I watched 'Unstoppable' again yesterday. This is the hype-train everyone wants to get off of then :-) I think someone recently said KSP is "awesome" ^^. If Squad're happy with that so am I, it's their call, even if it seems odd to us - otherwise they could go on for another four - or forty - years and still not reach 'perfect' for everyone.

I repeat "if anyone wants to show me a design with winglets I'll show them a more mass-efficient one without". Bet* I can do cheaper for a given payload though. [*Not really, but you remind me to mention - I went in a betting-office for the third time in my (long) life yesterday, just to see if they had odds on the next SpaceX landing attempt. They didn't, but are getting in touch with central office].

Yes (+ 7 chars) Slightly more helpfully - it isn't easy but it's just a bigger orbital-rendezvous. Landing an asteroid is more of a pain that just getting one into a stable orbit but still very doable. Whether it's worth doing for you at the moment is a matter of confidence and how much time you want to put into it. Look at the deadline for the contract - it may well be years in the future and, without actually going to expense/inconvenience of cancelling it, you may well be able to ignore it for a long time to come and until you've done a lot more other missions ;-)

Summary anyone? I've been away on post-christmas tour and really can't be ***rsed to read 51 pages of speculation. Does anyone know anything? It seems very strange that without feedback on their only beta version Squad should declare 'done' and even perverse to announce new features at the same time (which will therefore get NO beta-testing), but you can't with management. On the other hand there's a lot of software, especially games, where much is promised 'later' and we're just lucky Squad aren't pulling the plug on free updates yet. I rest in the knowledge that I've already had more than my money's worth from KSP and it's all gravy (non-British = extra luxury) since about 6-months ago :-)

rynak has given you an excellent answer above but it's worth stressing that this is an excellent question for those that aren't computer graphics or memory experts. KSP, and its Unity engine, work a particular way. ATM, OpenGL and directX11 (the usual attempts to save memory) try to change the way KSP/Unity work by getting 'underneath' the program and controlling the computer itself (sort of). There are so many different computer types, their Operating Systems (Windows, Linux, various mac, etc.), CPUs (Central Processing Units, Intel, AMD, etc.) and GPUs (Graphics Processing Units, or just 'graphics cards') that no one solution can be guaranteed to work on any particular setup. That means the best you can do is 'suck it and see'. Make sure you have a backup, then just try every option available in order to find out which gives you the best results. (For me ATM does well and directX11 works a treat, apart from the common graphics glitches. OpenGL actually takes more memory and gives more problems, so I avoid that. Other people and their machines have completely different results. It's hard, trying to beat the system, otherwise we'd all know exactly what to do.)

I'd like to see a transcript so I can learn something, since I'm not going to waste the money on bandwidth unless I really need pictures.

Suggestion = F9. Mass and fuel-units not imporant on their own (included in dV and TWR calcs). Can't do TWR calcs without knowing thrust. Can't do dV calcs without knowing engine Isp. ETA for post #3 above: burn to circularise instead of landing. Rescue later