merendel

Sadly stock has neither balloons or engiens that use any atmosphere as reaction mass although my EVE returns are much easier with mods that have either option. BTW squad if your watching I'd love a stock electric turboprop that could use EVE Duna or Jool's atmo for propulsion, not just kerbin/laythe. I'd still argue that EVE isnt pure building challange unless your designing something that sets down and takes off from the water. You still need to manage to land in a viable location otherwise and do it without significant thrusting past the deorbit burn to save fuel for accent. Land a perfect ship on too much of a slope and your rocket topples or breaks appart. Land at too low elevation and you dont have enough gas to get out.

For strait up landing tylo. Its a very fine line you have to ballance between keeping your speed under control so you dont lithobreak and burning up too much fuel in landing that you cant return to orbit. You can pick up enough velocity to wreck the lander in only a second or two of freefall. For a return I have to vote eve. Eve is easy to land on but a cast iron ..... to take back off from. To return to orbit you really want a high landing place but you need a large ship even there to have a chance of makeing orbit and a cragy mountain top is not the most level landing field. Its much easier to land near sea level but it takes a craft an order of magnetude larger to take off from that deep in the soup. It takes a special kind of crazy to split the differance, land at sea level and then rover the whole craft up a mountainside for launch (its been done though)

Depends on your definition of working example. Nasa is runing tests on a prototype but they are geting inconclusive results. The prototype did generate some small amount of force but strangely so did the supposedly inert control test. Needless to say things are confused at best. Theroreticly it works and experimentaly something is happening but it could also be a testing error and some other force is acting on it. Only time will tell.

All of the above. I've used Mechjeb in the past but more and more its autopilot just proved to be a lazy button. I kept it around for a while for the info windows but then i found KER to cover that need. I often have remote tech so I'll use its autopilot to do burns for probes that will be out of controll range and the ocasional long burn so I can walk away and do something else but I'm seting those nodes up by hand. RT generaly wont work for anything but following a node reliably so other catagories dont really apply to it. The only skill I ever have any trouble with is a precision landing with no targetable landmark. If there is something there, Flag, Ship, Kerbal, I can land directly on top of it if I want to by just following the target indicator in but hiting an exact spot without that is a tad more dicy. I can get somewhat close but may have to microhop if I'm landing a trailblazer ship to get closer than 1km.

A solar sail theoreticly does not require the craft to expel mater for a velocity change. Not technically thrusting as its the star expelling mater/energy and pushing the craft along but it is an option for a quasi reactionless drive. There is also what is called the EM drive that uses electricity to push against the quantum vacuum. The real world experiment demonstrating this drive may or may not actualy work, its has been shown that something is happening but the jury is still out on if its something else acting on the test rig. It probably wont ever work as a lifting drive as even ion drives make the predicted thrust look anemic. Still KSPI has both solar sails and the option to upgrade to quantum vacuum thrusters as well as thermal turbojets to use atmosphere as reaction mass. With that mod you could potentialy get into orbit with no fuel, just a crap ton of reactor power. A craft could use a thermal turbojet to put it on a suborbital trajectory, basicly sucking in air and spiting it out the back faster. Once up above atmo kick in the quantum vacuum thrusters to reach orbit and you could then go wherever without need for fuel as long as your reactor held out. If an antimater reactor is what is used you can even attach a couple of collectors and gather more from the Van Allen belts around body with a magnetic field for indefinite range.

The problem with adding that to stock is it would leave very little room for other mods. Untill we either have a stable 64 bit windows version or a more streamlined asset loading system that does not require every texture to be loaded to memory all at once I dont think it would be a good idea to add all of the beautification mods to stock. Polish needs to happen on the back end before we can afford to spitshine the the appearance.

I laughed when I once got "Locating Jebediah Kerman" followed by "Untangling Space Tape". I just had this mental immage of bill and bob wondering where jeb was and then locating him in a tangled ball of space tape

Combo of 1 and 2 for me. Each part is sent up with a quad pack of RCS thrusters pre ballanced but no tanks or additional parts for control. Once it reaches the station the docking drone is sent out to grab it and the orbital insertion stage is jetisoned with its probe core to return to the surface. The docking drone handles control, power and reaction wheels and the RCS thrusters on the componant piece were aligned to give centered thrust with the drone attached. Once in place a kerbal is sent out to remove the excess RCS thrusters with KAS. The drone isnt anything special just a probe core mono tank/thrusters, reaction wheels and power system. Has a docking port on one end and a claw on the other for the odd times when I cant have it attached to a docking port directly on the part its moving

I dont bother with CCT or any imposed limits on launch times. I figure I'm just going to time warp past them anyway so its just one extra pointless step in my view. Yes its more realistic to require time to build and prep craft between launches but so is waiting for years between launch and mission actualy reaching its destination. As that bit of tedious realism has been sacrificed on the altar of gameplay I see no reason to add another bit just to apply the exact same solution. I figure between FAR DRE and Remote Tech and a revamped tech tree I've made enough concessions to realism. I'm going to have offworld ship building soon anyway and thats already going to have build times (extraplanetary launchpads) I'll just handwave kerbin launches as just abstracting having multiple launch sites and building being done ahead of time at multiple complexes.

already was. I play with FAR so I already need to keep things reasonable. Then agian the only thing that changed when I went to FAR over stock aero was some of my designs needed nosecones. As long as your not makeing pancake rockets its not that bad. I still do asparagus staging on occasion in FAR and it works fine. Just have to keep it down to 1 layer around the central core and put nosecones on everything.

Never had anything just crash into eachother while I was siting there to watch it where neither object was in the proccess of a manuver. I've had bits of flotsam float back and bump into the station but those were mostly just let go at some point and drifted back at 1 or 2 m/s. I have had multipule accidents involving intercepting a target I intended to dock with however. Flying to meet a station/fuel depot only to find out my closest approach actually intersects and I didnt start a deceleration burn in time to stop. Outside of intentional rendezvous that went bad I've only had one major crash and one of the objects was in the middle of a burn at the time. I'd launched a mission to somewhere, cant remember where now. Got it into orbit and ditched the nearly spent booster that got it up there and setup my manuver to leave. One orbit later I started my burn, 30 seconds into that burn I crashed directly into the back side of the booster stage I'd jettisoned an orbit before. I got more dedicated to not leaving spent crap in orbit after that one.

chuckle, I know how that goes. My most recent game I accidentally accepted a duna satellite contract and was way off window for it and didnt want to wait. I launched it now with a 5km/s departure burn that cuts down below moho's orbit to hit duna with another 5k in the tank to slow down since I know aerobreaking from that speed in duna's thin atmo isnt happening. Still its going to get there months before the actual launch window opens.

Sadly that does not prove time travel, just proves that human stupidity is the greatest force in the known universe. I doubt we will ever develop the ability to travle backwards in time. No mater how careful or how well regulated there would eventualy people that break the rules or just screw up and leave evidence behind that they were from the future. Its the clasic issue of security needing to succeed 100% of the time while the person breaking the security only needs to succeed once but the security needs to succeed for 100% of the attempts from all of humanity's remaining existence. eventualy the evidence would start showing up and we'd see time travlers. Lacking any evidence of time travlers to date implies that its probably impossible

20k is impressive as you prety much had the equivalent of getting into a retrograde version of kerbin's orbit and slammed into it directly. Kerbin's orbital velocity is around 9.2km/s so 18.5km/s hiting the SOI and probably picking up a bit more on the way down the gravity well. I play with FAR and DRE so my returns are significantly more sedate than that. Hiting atmo at that speed is just as final as hiting the ground at that speed. Going deep enough to capture will vaporize the ship if it does not have an aerodynamic breakup first. I think 4-5km/s is the fastest I've done with the mods. I've done faster with cheats and stock rules but that does not really count does it

Mentally I think of em as tier 1 tier 2 and tier 3 along with a bonus mini tier named probe. I frankly don't use much from the probe tier other than the cores themselves the reaction wheel (to supplement probes) and the 48-7S so it barely counts but whatever. This also nicely lines up with the order you recieve them (agian I dont count the worthless oscar B and such). However if I'm communicating with someone else and I need to specify a part size I actually list the proper diameters. I dont find the conversion all that difficult so it does not bother me for clarity's sake. I might have an issue if they add another offical tier considering the next in pattern would be 5m parts but I'll jump off that bridge if it ever comes up. I know mods add them but I dont expect any mods to fit into stock rules anyway.

To reach the L1 point? a ship can leave for it at prety much any time of the year as long as the moon isnt in the way. The only window they have is they need to launch at a very specific time of day to align the orbits properly. Other than that they are just at the mercy of the weather and if they keep haveing to scrub conflicting schedules.

and they just scrubed due to upper level winds :/

I try to avoid killing kerbals and I'll send out a rescue craft on the rare times I manage to wreck a craft where the kerbal survives or runing out of fuel stranded them. But if they do happen to die, well .... happens. The most comon case of a kerbal becomeing strand... er promoted to flag planter, is when the landing craft tips over and cant right itself. I've got a little rescue hopper design that can land and return anywhere but eve (comand chair on top of a probe core, fuel tank and engien). I can push it almost anywhere in the system with a LVN driveing a fuel tank and command pod for the kerbal to ride home in after the hopper gets him to orbit.

Well my first thought would be some phantom forces going on. That ship is rather large and complicated. you can sometimes get a ship assembled in such a way that the physics starts tweeking out and you get minor, or sometimes major acceleration for no reason (kraken drives try to harness this) It could also be just the patched conics going weird too. Looked like a marginal encounter with tylo catching up to your ship. Good for a nice efficent insertion burn but it can mess with the conics as its not sure if your hiting or missing the SOI. A slight nudge either way and you either miss the SOI or end up comeing in from a different spot mucking up the final orbit and large ships wobbleing tend to make the orbits wobble a bit although normaly that straitens out in timewarp. That said I've never seen exactly what I saw in that video so cant be sure what caused it. The fact that it kept jumping the predicted orbit to the same general area, well away from where it should have been indicates something screwy going on and I'm not sure what.

na "Not for Long" would be more accurate. if it leaves the ground at all its technicly flying and any brick can do that with a big enough kick. Far will probably rip it apart given a big enough kick to go any distince but who cares it would be fun to watch.

Its doable if you know what your doing but its also really easy to screw up your save if you dont. Since your already willing to cheat the replacement out there I'd personally recommend you just go get hyperedit. its prety easy to take something from the launchpad directly into orbit of whatever planet you want and you can land it from there either manualy or through another use of hyperedit.

No it hasnt changed other than added bioms. Its always been a bit less gravity than kerbin, its just that you have no atmo so the landing is harder but the takeoff easier. My rule of thumb for building tylo landers has been to just take off from kerbin to test it. If it can make it to orbit on its own with a bit of fuel left over it can probably handle tylo. Needs a bit more of a fuel reserve on games I'm runing FAR vs stock aero as it costs less to get to orbit on FAR.

As I recall the KSP dev's were originally going to quit the company so they could peruse this idea for a game that they called Kerbal Space program. That company wanted to keep their talent around enough that they bankrolled the program themselves, a decision that seems to have paid off quite well. To me that shows that the owners greatly value the KSP devs and I dont see that changeing in the near future. If the devs wana stick with it keeps makeing money I dont see the owners messing up a good thing. As minecraft has shown money can keep rolling in for a long time on a good game. I wouldnt be surprised if the team shrinks a bit and some devs are pulled off onto another project eventualy but I doubt there are any plans to compleatly pull the plug in the near future.

I still find it amusing that flag on eve is only 13 while the jool moons are 20. Sure its really easy to get there and plant the flag but its a hundred times harder to get them back agian so it counts than flying out to Bop and back.

I go through periods where I rarely fire up KSP due to boredom. I just go play other games for a month or two. Eventually the itch comes back and I log another hundred or so hours of KSP before taking another break.