Dust

In 0.23 I'd say absolutely, for something like Moho and most other planets you should do a multi-launch build in LKO. My usual interplanetary ship involved several 2.5m sections connected by 2.5m docking ports. I'd have a nuke tug module, crew habitation/command module, lander/probe module, and drop tanks at the rear (the last of which having a KW rocket to assist in the ejection burn). I have yet to do an interplanetary mission in my new 0.23.5 career, but I suspect you can now much more easily get to most planets with a single launch.

I'm using v0.13.1. I seem to have a problem with rockets flipping when I build them tall - they're fine at first but up a few km they flip tail over nose as soon as the nose diverts a few degrees from surface prograde. This, by the way, is following a gradual gravity-turn-like ascent profile including throttling down to maintain efficient airspeed. The only way to combat this is to load up the rear with fins, which I'd rather not have to do. The other day it dawned on me that it seems to be because fuel empties from top to bottom - which results in the top getting lighter, the CoM dropping, and creating a situation where the nose of my rocket would much rather be trailing. I confirmed it by transferring fuel up during ascent and stability was preserved. Is this truly a significant factor in this behavior, or are there other factors at play to be more concerned with? And if my observations are correct, is there any known way of changing fuel behavior to empty tanks from the bottom up instead?

K^2 - "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect." KASASpace - "Wait till I get going!"

I use PreciseNode, which brings up a node editor window. Not a view of the maneuver node - as you suggest - but with +/- buttons and such. Check it out, it comes in real handy for me and solves the problem of having to juggle node and target zooms.

There is a mod ("Laser" something-or-other) that allows for greater physics draw distance. Manley had it running in - I believe - his older reusable space program series and had it out to at least 90km. That would get around the 2.5km limit issue. However, the whole thing would need to continue rotating once per orbit, because if you're half done the CoM would be somewhere underneath the surface, and if rotation was stopped by time acceleration the trailing edge would collide with the planet body. So I do think it's impossible.

That's pretty cool. I gave it a whirl and I like how it just works all by itself automatically without any setup needed. I noticed, though, that it only shows the currently active ship, will it be possible to also show all the other crafts (especially for rendezvous)? Also, I play windowed, and since it was a copy of my main install it had the same window size - however my other monitor is smaller and the map view doesn't allow access to the menu to change the display options (although I can probably fix this in a config file). No performance hit, by the way. I'm running a 3.7 GHz i5 with 12GB ram and an nVidia GTX450.

There's a nice breakdown of the Apollo mission profile at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program#Lunar_mission_profile

That's <sniff> beautiful...

I think you're falling for the fallacy of "more fuel means more delta v, right???". In fact, adding more fuel onto the same amount of thrust reaps rapidly diminishing returns, which is dictated by the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation. Let's start with a Mk1 pod and use the rocket equation to see how we can get it to the Mun. If I add one FL-T400 fuel tank and 1 LV-T45 engine, you'll get a dV of 1818m/s (ASL). Add another FL-T400 and you get 2785m/s (a 53% increase). Add a 3rd - 3414m/s (+23%) - and a 4th - 3864m/s (+13%) - and you see where this is going. Meanwhile, your rocket has gone from weighing 4.55t on the launchpad to 11.3t, and your thrust to weight ratio (TWR) plummeted from 4.5 to 1.8. Now, 3864m/s dV is not enough for low Kerbin orbit, let alone munar orbit and back, so you're going to need to add at least another 2000 or so m/s dV. If you try to add just fuel atop the same engine, you'll very quickly not have enough TWR to get off the ground: at 9 tanks your theoretical dV is 5025, but your TWR of .9 means you won't get off the ground until you've burned up nearly one tank of fuel. A TWR of 1.8 is a good regime to be in, so let's go back to 4 tanks, with dV=3864 and TWR=1.8. Now, to effectively increase dV you're going to need to add thrust along with more fuel. To do that, let's add a couple of radial decouplers to the sides, stick FL-T400s to them, and stack another FL-T400 on top of each, with an LV-T45 underneath each one. You should now have 8 fuel tanks in a line (2-4-2) with 3 engines underneath. Now, order your staging so that only the two side engines fire in stage 1, then stage 2 cuts the decouplers and fires the middle engine. On the pad your rocket will weigh 23.35t. When the two side engines fire you will have a TWR of 1.75 - nice. That 1st stage is good for 1316m/s dV (ASL), and when that is done you fire stage 2 with its 4467m/s (vacuum), which totals 5784m/s. And I believe that will get you to munar orbit and back (with practice, anyway). If not, add another tank on each side and fire all three engines in the first stage to maintain good TWR. Finally, I very much recommend installing the Kerbal Engineer Redux mod, which does all this math for you.

Sounds like a question for http://what-if.xkcd.com/

Here are the ones I'm currently playing: - Grand Theft Auto V - FTL: Faster Than Light - Banished Also play these occasionally: - Civ 5 (great on Win8 touch) - Forzas - Dirt 2/3 - All the Lego games - Portals (need to finish Portal 2...) - Eufloria - TrackMania United - Euro Truck Simulator 2 - Team Fortress 2 - Company of Heroes (I haven't tried #2 yet) - GTA4 (if only to do the )

Wow, this has degenerated, hasn't it... The real universe is quite a complicated, messy thing. Boundaries - as we define them - only exist to simplify complex natural things so as to better understand it, and usually only make sense in the diagrams of such natural things. As said before, atmospheric pressure versus altitude is a curve, and drawing a line somewhere on that curve and calling that space takes more into account than just "is there Earth atmosphere here?". Simply because the ISS is encountering some gas molecules of primarily terrestrial origin does not mean it isn't "in space."

This. I've always built my crafts as a whole, with intended payload included, using KER to tell me how confident I should be that it'll work.

I have the 10" dobsonian-mount reflector my dad built when I was little (30 years ago). Everything but the mirror was hand-built by him. The rubber parts in the eyepiece holder/focuser fell apart, so I need to replace it before I can use it again. But even if it were operational I would need to drive at least an hour to get any dark skies.

There is finite and there is infinite. In your sequence, if you look at any individual step n - no matter how large - n will be finite, so the result will be finite. There is no step where n=infinity. Infinity only comes into play when you imagine if this were to go on for an infinite amount of time - but as far as I'm concerned infinity never happens. So no matter how far you go in this sequence each step always results in a finite number - and the reciprocal of that number is also finite.

No , then?

*COUGH*exploit*COUGH* ...Try putting at least 2 static little panels on every unmanned prob you ever build.

Is it possible to hide all threads in a forum section or subsection? I primarily use the "New Posts" link to see most recent posts, and I'm not at all interested in seeing posts from, for instance, the Forum Games or international languages sub-forums. It would be nice to be able to exclude those posts.

The actual strut part is just the first node that you placed. The bar and 2nd node are just visual effects. You need to go back to the first end to grab it, and even then it can be small and difficult to grab. Half the time I just keep grabbing another new one.

Someone once posed a similar question and one of the responses was along the lines of "No way, if I have to do math then it's not fun anymore." and I totally disagree! To each his own. Spreadsheets, formulas and calculations can be fun, too! When I suspected KER wasn't correctly calculating the dV of my interplanetary ships I learned how to do the rocket equation to confirm it. When I started using RemoteTech2 I taught myself how to solve orbits for altitude, period, velocity, etc. for configuring relay satellite networks (and from there also played with calculating orbital transfer burns). For rendezvous burns and suicide burns I learned how to calculate the distance from target I should start burning. It especially gives me something to do at work when I want my KSP fix.

I strongly recommend installing a mod that tells you the delta v in your build. Kerbal Engineer Redux is excellent, since it tells you about each stage. Your delta v budget should look something like this (off the top of my head): - 4,500 for Kerbal orbit - 800 for Munar transfer and capture - 600 for deorbit and landing - 600 for ascent to Munar orbit - 300 for transfer home Less than 7,000 total, and that's overbuilding. So if you put ~4,500 dV total into your ascent stages, 800-1000 dV into your Munar transfer stage, and 1,200 dV in the lander you should be good. Make sure TWR is about 2 in the lower Kerbin atmosphere, and at least 1.2 for your upper atmosphere "gravity turn" part of your ascent. If you're still running out of fuel come back here with details about your flight plan and we'll help you out with tips to improve your efficiency.

The cosmological horizon is not the edge of the expanding bubble of things, it's the distance at which the things we are looking at are so far away that we are looking into the birth of the universe. If you looked out to the "edge" and were to magically place yourself there, you would - as I understand - see the same thing we see here (not half the sky full of stars and the other half void of matter and energy, as you suggest). It begs the question, though: If you had the ultimate FTL ship and continued traveling in a straight line away from the Milky Way, would you - at some point - find the Milky Way in front of you?

@Momentus, you seem to be assuming that the center of mass is at the tower, which it is not. The device you see is purposely built with the center of mass of the arm holding the gyro to be out away from the tower, so that the gyro is pulled down by gravity. The whole purpose of the device is to demonstrate gyroscopic precession. When gravity pulls down on the gyro, the torque at the arm/tower pivot acting on the gyro gets deflected 90 degrees, applying a torque at the gyro along a vertical axis. But given that the CoM of the arm is out towards the gyro, and the base+tower appears to be symmetrical, the axis of rotation of the whole thing is off the center of the base - at the center of mass. There is nothing anomalous going on here, and there are plenty of videos and information linked on that site that demonstrates the behavior of gyroscopes - all of which precisely follow established laws of motion. So please, for the sake of civility, try confirming your own assertions before denouncing others' opposing assertions.

Can't be. I've done it many times. It's on the order of size with the 1.25m docking port. So maybe out to 2 meters, but certainly not much more than that. Probably no more than double the magnet grab distance.

There is a minimum distance you need to go out to, and it's not that far - 1 meter-ish - just a puff of RCS out, rotate, and puff back in. I also recommend Navyfish's docking alignment mod. Or if you're a minimalist there's instead Navball docking alignment, which places a single new node on your navball that indicates alignment and rotation of the targeted port.