merendel

I had one incident recently early in a career where bob was in a ship orbiting mun colecting EVA reports. several reports had been taken just fine but then right after he got out of the pod to take another his orbital velocity droped to 0 for no apparent reason. So here he is at 35km above the surface falling strait down as his ship takes off without him. no quicksave to undo the bug so I boost him to orbit on his jetpack. He has just enough to make it to orbit and get close to the same orbit as his craft but ran out just as he was geting close with about 2 m/s difference and not lined up enough to hit the door. Couldn't control his original pod (had probe for SAS but RT2 and I forgot to extend the antina) Sent up a rescue craft but after several faild passes trying to manuver a craft so a free floating kerbal could grab a ladder I gave up and edited the persist to give him a touch of EVA fuel. Dont feel too bad about haveing to cheat a bit since it was a glitch that caused the problem in the first place.

I could see this working although as categories instead of general research. You could spend points on "Engine research" and get a boost to ISP or thrust to mimic improved tech. Can be purchased multiple times but with diminishing returns, each is more expensive for smaller gains. You could research "Material Science" for dry mass reductions of parts. Possibly a category that increases impact tolerance. Can split categories down further, each one able to be bought as much as you like but all having a diminishing returns curve. Its less nonsensical than kerbal skills changing part performance that was talked about before it was droped.

I usualy aim for 80. Good hight for transfer burns that are not more than 3-4min long without hiting atmo as well as being high enough that if I launch another ship to meet up with a craft I still have a bit of room below it to catch up. I consider it a good compromize between effiency and convenience. I usualy have a fuel depot and assembly area a few KM higher for assembling the big interplanetary craft and geting a top off

Thats cause your haveing 4 engiens dumping their heat into 4 different parts instead of all 4 into a single part. between the tank and the 4 attachment points they dissipate heat faster. Asuming the OP is set on the quad coupler he can also try just sticking one of the T100 fuel tanks between the coupler and the LV-n's. Shouldnt overheat for the same reason as the 4x attachment points.

Considering I already use karbonite and so have this functionality already it probably wont change much beyond the parts I'm using and some balance changes. I'm sure there will be some differences between whatever they cook up for stock vs karbonite/kethane but I doubt it will be much of a paradigm shift for me.

Only to test new designs is closest to the rare times I use it. Most of the time I only use it for screwing around, Wack'A'Kerbal, hack gravity, and infinite fuel FTW. However I've used it in test saves to unlock just the science nodes to match my main save so I dont end up with parts I cant use on the craft when I port it back over. I've never really felt the need to mess around with the other parts of the debug menu.

Sadly that describes almost every topic we face in today's political climate. too much polarization these days and nobody listens to eachother. Myself I dont consider it a high priority for government spending. I feel there is plenty of demand in the private sector who will get it done better, faster and cheeper. Just about any time the government gets involved in a project it just becomes a money pit, ya it may get done at 10 times the budget that was proposed. That said however there's lots of other useless crap that were spending money on that should be cut long before space exploration budget if were haveing to tighten our belts.

While I sort of agree with the point about mechjeb I have to disagree with adding KER into that mix. It is better to learn the skills behind orbital manuvers vs just haveing mechjeb do them all for you. However KER offers no auto pilot functionality nor will it figure out manuvers for you, just information windows about your craft and situation. Yes you can either math out the dV by hand or with experience eyeball it but I dont really see a good argument for doing that the hard way. Other bits of information KER provides are also avalible in game but not in a convenient format that alows you to see all the data points at the same time.

Well my moded installes crash rather frequently but I dont really keep count. I on the other hand never crash a ship. I just sometimes perform lithobreaking maneuvers that were not on the pre approved mission profile. The rumors of faux trials leading to convictions of capital offenses happening after the public executions are the product of the tinfoil hats.4

Havent tried it. I could probably pull it off if I really wanted to but cant think of a single logical use for such a craft that wouldn't be better served with a much more practical rocket design. Going for replica designs has never really been my thing and the shuttle wasnt really all that practical in real life and KSP lacks several tools to do it even as well as IRL. Its possible to kludge a workable design together within the additional design constraints but there's simply easier ways to do any conceivable mission you'd use a shuttle replica for. I just cant be bothered to make a replica I'd never find useful for anything. At least a more traditional rocket replica (saturn 5 or the like) could serve as a heavy launch platform.

Since they said they will keep updateing the game chances are there will still be mod breaking patches. Unless they release a patch that ammounts to little more than adding/editing parts or makeing tweeks that mods already do there will be some breakage. They'd have to lock the base code of the game and never touch it agian to keep mods stable.

When I'm runing EPL the tankers hauling metal up to the orbital shipyard tend to be prety heavy, 200-300 ton range. Usualy only make em that heavy for really low gravity bases such as on minmus though. the fuel tankers tend to be lighter just cause fuel is alot lighter unless I really pad the part count.

I usualy build a core module with all the critical components first. Orange tank, science lab, a probe core and reaction wheels and a fair few batteries and solar pannles and docking ports. Frequently a pair of mark 55 radials will be on this module to finish the circularization and/or if the station needs to be somewhat mobile. Beyond that I just send up additional modules as needed for whatever I wanted the station for. Extra fuel tanks if I want a fuel depot. Dependong on the modset for that install there may be habitation, shipyard, refinery, manufacturing, or research modules sent up and attached. First additional module will go up with a docking drone added on that will handle docking manuvers for it an any future modules so I dont need redundant parts.

All my launchers are designed to either leave stages on a suborbital trajectory for lower stages or are designed to be recovered eventually for the upper ones. I'll sometimes crash spare fuel pods into other planets after a transfer or leave them in orbit with docking ports as a mini refueling depot if they still have fuel in them. Prety much all my debris are the remains of ships I crashed somewhere. Sometimes I sweep them up for refurbishment with interplanetary launchpads but mostly I leave them for historical reasons.

I picked it up for 23 bucks a bit over a year ago on steam. counting only steam hours I get $0.04 per hour after 512 hours. However I've probably spent 2-3 times as many hours on moded installs that I moved out of the steam directory after I lost a save due to an update. I'd be willing to bet my actual cost per hour is down at the 2 cent mark or lower. I suspect the cost of the electricity to run my computer while playing KSP is higher than the price I paid for the game at this point. Just copy the game folder out of the steam directory and launch it from there. there's no DRM on the game that requires you to run steam. You only need to run steam to download updates.

Personally I do have one regret about purchasing KSP. And that regret is the number of hours it has consumed. Well worth the money for the entertainment I've gotten from it but alot of those hours really should have been spent on other things

Mostly I just build and launch for simple missions. I'm confident enough in my building technique to at least get to orbit and most major issues will show themselves by then and I can find a way to remedy if needed. There are 3 situations I test in a sandbox save however. New heavy launchers, Multi launch assembled in orbit missions/craft, and anything that is soposed to fly with wings. The heavy launchers normally take a few iterations to make sure fuel is flowing properly and staging works, after that I can subassembly it under any payload without difficulty. Large orbital assemblies I normally hyper edit into orbit and put them together just to make sure everything fits properly and is able to fly. Once I've got all those kinks worked out I load the designs up in my non simulation save and attach them to launch platforms to send up and assemble legit. I normally don't do this for stations, just anything that will be moveing after assembly. Stations I normaly have enough docking ports on that I can slap a module in wherever and it will work so no simulation needed. As to the airplanes, I play with FAR. While that should be enough said for the initiated for everybody else just know it takes many tries to get a plane that wont flip out badly and I'd rather do test runs in a simulation mode.

It would be at best neutral on the fuel mass to orbit and probably detrimental for a variety of reasons. Not the least of which is the human body is not the most efficient converter of mass to energy. The physical exertion of doing the jumping would require bringing along more food so you'd need even more fuel to push the extra food mass into orbit. the jumping itself would produce no measurable gains.

The apoapsis (highpoint) of the orbit will stay in roughly the same alignment relitive to a fixed referance point from orbit to orbit. If its over the "Dawn" line one orbit it will still be over the dawn line when it gets back to apoapsis the next time. The earth will be rotating under that orbit so the apoapsis may be over Russia the first time, Europe the second and the USA on the third orbit but it will still be at dawn in the short term. Over the year it will appear to shift as the earth moves around the sun, the orbit itself wont have changed just the frame of referance. from a top down view of the solar system if the apoapsis is south of earth it will stay south of earth even 6 months later when its now over sunset instead of dawn. This is of course ignoring N body physics where the gravity of other moons/planets can alter the orbits but thats probably beyond the scope of what your looking at. Asumeing your not viewing the solar system as a whole in the scope of your game and your looking for a simi realistic eliptical orbit I'd recomend useing the day/night terminator as your referance point. If your only looking at a few days timeframe dont bother moveing it around from orbit to orbit as the shift will be negligible. if going for realism and many months of time are passing it will shift relative to the terminator about 2 hours per month so its going to be quite a few orbits before the effect is noticeable to the naked eye

A strong argument could be made however that flip top cell phones were inspired by the startrek design instead. ST communicators to me at least appeared to be a compact, hand held, futuristic looking version of a 2 way radio, a fairly logical progression of wireless communication tech at the time. The design asthetic, particularly that flip top design later inspired the designers of cell phones years later when they came up with the look of the newest hand held communication tech. Less a case of predicting future tech accurately other than in the broad sense of having handheld communication and more a case of it guiding design when tech resembling what was on the show became avalible.

they could just go with "Launch" as its both officaly launching the release version of the game and is a obvious tie in to what most players do alot of (launching craft)

I suspect it would fall under the category of fair use, just like youtube lets plays are not considered copyright infringement. Even so copyright infringment is only a legal issue for someone if the copyright holder wants to press the issue. I doubt squad would have an issue reguardless considering the past colaberation. I suspect the'd be tickled pink to see nasa use their program for brief blurbs on informational space/science clips.

Then agian RCS could do the whole geting to orbit bit on gilly Decoupler drives do have amazing dV potential but they are extremely inefficient in part count and funds if you want to go any distance. They only work moderatly well on a near massless craft or with edited parts (enormous decouple force ftw). A fun gimic but they are Awesome But Impractical

Theres nothing stoping you although my experience has been unless the difficulty slider has been set to "Ultra Grindy" theres not much point bringing them down for recovery. Idealy a sat for these missions is going to be prety cheep and probably not worth the time spent to deorbit it for a fairly small amount of funds compaired to the payout of the mission.

My approach was 4 equatorial at 350km equiped just with the baseline omnis to cover LKO. Later a pair were launched into a polar orbit equiped with an omni(to connect to the LKO sats), a DTS-m1 (first foldout stock com) pointed at active craft, wide angle with enough range to cover kerbin SOI and connect to relays around mun/minmus if active vessle is there without the cone missing a sat. Finally the pair will have the longest range antina I have avalible pointed at active vessle to cover interplanetary missions. Normaly the polar sats get placed as soon as I'm starting interplanetary with the best tech I have and get replaced once I unlock the longest range coms. still 6 sats all thats required and can do it in 2 launches as it takes little more than get up to desired orbit and enter a simple phasing orbit circularizing 1 sat per orbit. only takes a few minutes to deploy.