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Part One Or, why you should always bring more fuel than you need The Armstrong 12 was to be a simple mission. Land on the Mun, say something cool, plant a flag, do some science, go home. Jebediah Kerman took the job, stating that the Mun is his favorite celestial body, because it's 'so classic'. He said he would live there if he could. It seems the universe has a sense of humor. The fuel margin was tight, you see. The lander was extremely small, and was direct ascent based. It looked like something a 'noob' would build, in Jebs own words. Bob was perfectly fine with that, but preferred to stay home, and watch TV. Bill said that he was already slated for the Aldrin 4 mission headed for Minmus. Jeb, as mentioned, was enthusiastic. "Three... two... one... liftoff!" Bob and Bill looked up into the sky. As the ship flew upwards, they watched, half awed, half bored. Bob turned to Bill. "You think he'll be okay?" "Bob, that's pretty much guaranteed. Jeb is a good man, he can figure his way out of anything." "Well, that thing looks like it doesn't have much fuel." "He'll figure it out. I'm gonna talk with Wherner about Aldrin 4, what are you gonna do?" "Play some poker with Tomlo. Tell me when we send a mission to a nice, safe place. Like Laythe." "Yeah, whatever, Bob." As Bob ran off, Bill took one more look at the rocket--by now well into it's gravity turn and nothing but a blue speck in the sky--and then headed to the VAB... Soon... Gene looked at the screen. He didn't like what he saw. "Uh, Jeb, you're still doing the circularization burn. You're gonna need to be more careful with the fuel, especially now." "Hey, don't worry! I'm almost done with the burn. Everything will be fine." "I hope so..." "Burn complete, by the way." "All right, wait for Munrise and burn. Please, be careful." Later... Jebediah felt the rush of adrenaline as the Armstrong 12 came slowly down. "Coming down... nice and slow... just like always. 100 meters... 50 meters... 10 meters... there! The Armstrong 12 has landed!" "Uh Jeb, it seems you're on a slope, what's your..." "Working on it." "...Fuel situation..." Jeb maneuvered the ship off the slope and onto the plateau near the crater. Expert, just as always. "Jeb, please tell us your fuel situation." "Uh let me check... oh, no." "What?" "32.5 units. Not nearly enough to get home from Minmus, let alone off the Mun." Gene sighed. This is what he feared. "Jeb, we'll get a rescue ship to you as soon as possible." "All right. Not that I mind it here, just a bit lonely..."

Looking pretty well so far just a bit more people and we can arrange ourselves some TeamSpeak room to talk in... the first "KSP guild" ever!!!

The Kerbal Space Program has come a long way, and so has one of its very first suppliers, Jebediah Kerman's Junkyard and Spaceship Parts Co. With more and more missions being launched each day (everyone's still working on the "and coming back home" part) Jeb's little ragtag enterprise has blossomed into a huge, slightly less ragtag enterprise. They're so huge, in fact, they're opening up a brand new office! In order to...uh...reasons, they're planning to open one up on the Mun! They've pledged to make it the biggest, most magnificent office complex ever built, probably because by now there's so much scrap on the Mun they might as well move right in! Unfortunately their lead architect was also a kerbonaut and got stuck on Minmus during a mission, so they've resorted to calling you in. This is a stock part challenge, as the title suggests, concerned with building a very particular type of Mun base: an office complex. Using whatever stock parts you can, build a Munar habitat that can house as many Kerbals as it possibly can, looks as good as possible, and because this is an office skyscraper, is as tall as possible. It can have no engines of its own, and must be a module made for permanent usage on the Mun. For extra challenges, try some of the following: Construct a special office somewhere for Jeb, Bob and Bill (or just Jeb) and put them in it. Put other things that an office complex would have, like a company parking lot for ships and/or rovers, a shuttle service, a private communications line with Kerbin, etc. Once you've got your employees on the Mun, think of the most creative thing to do with them. I dunno, one of those team exercises HR guys talk about or something. Take at least one screenshot of the finished product, and feel free to take any other photos of the complex you made at any other times-during its construction, if you took on any of the other challenges here, whatever. That's about it. From there, everything's up to you. Happy building!

All this real life talk is more or less irrelevant to KSP. Sending kerbonauts to the surface of, say, mars is going to earn you the most science points, data, progression whatchamadoogits(whatever they call 'em). Especially if you can send those kerbonauts back home safely. I wouldn't mind it, but I doubt we'll see anything like programming actions or response delays when it comes to controlling distant probes like you see in real life. RemoteTech, however, will probably always be around to fill that niche. What would be interesting, though, would be a kind of packet loss due to excessive distance between KSC and a probe doing science trying to beam that data back via satellite. Even more reason to send manned missions that return relatively safely...which would, of course, wind up requiring more resources to build because manned missions should just be more difficult. Sure, you could always trickle in science data via probes and satellites, but if you land a few really successful manned science missions on various planets and moons it should really count for something. This is another reason why I'd love to see life support factor into career mode. Sending probes should be the slow but safe and inexpensive way to do science whereas sending kerbonauts should be risky and expensive but give you notable boosts to your tech level.

I guess they should have 13 PM now... that wouldn't mind that much however, should anyone want to talk a bit, my skype is fyzzicek

I think that was the point, wasn't that show set close to our time? So I can imagine they were trying to mimic some elements of present-day space programs. Either way, I like when threads start talking about customizing stuff and all the different ways you could customize your kerbals. Not that it's not been suggested before...probably a LOT, but the more people talk about it, the more likely it is to be implemented, I feel >.> Imagine if we could paint our rockets and/or kerbals the way you can customize cars and players in APB. That would be amazing. I'd even be happy if it were as simple as the Dawn of War army painter...though I already kinda mentioned that earlier with the color wheel thing. But if they ever add the kerbalizer into the game, a lot of the props and things would have to be unavailable...otherwise there'd be no point in using Kerbalizer for avatars or what-not. Besides, who's going to lug around a piano or guitar in space? Or wear those huge 2013 glasses that probably wouldn't even fit into a helmet XD

KSP was designed to be a space program simulator...to play like a tycoon game. The only reason we got sandbox first is because they had to make sure building rockets and flying rockets - the very core of the gameplay - was functional. Finally, they're focusing on career mode and yes, many of us are very excited. Some of us haven't even really been playing KSP because we've been waiting on career mode. Granted, I still break down and load it up now and again regardless...the less I know about flying and accomplishing things, the more fun career mode will be. Also, really late reply to an old thread. Kinda funny >.> But in regards to the memory limit, they'll undoubtedly fix that as well as many of the other lag problems we see right now in KSP. They talk to the Unity creators sometimes and KSP is one of the most successful Unity games out there so that alone should encourage the Unity guys to increase performance and at the very least, let physics calculations be handled by multiple cores. That said, half the game's final features will probably be career mode stuff. Sandbox is fun, but I'll want to be discovering planets and actually gaining something in-game based on my successful missions, besides a screenshot or short story to tell my buddies. I want my missions to help my future missions. I want the game forcing me to squeeze what creativity I can muster out of my dense skull. It's just exciting to some of us. It'd be even better if they had various features you could toggle on and off or adjust via sliders...like income rate, advanced life support and so on. Then people could REALLY customize their game experience and play career mode exactly as they want to without having to hassle with or hope for mods to cover their needs.

Ugh, AI talk made me rememeber the sniper tailgunners... I loved the jets, and the absurd care you had to take with them. Doing pretty much anything resulted in a jet going catastrophically wrong

Hello! I've recently made a move from the UK to Christchurch on a working holiday visa, possibly looking to stay long term. I used to frequent the forums quite a bit and even help out Squad with a bit of testing before I moved (unfortunately now I don't have frequent access to a machine that can run KSP). As these forums are full of helpful and generally pleasant people I'd like to make myself known to anyone who lives in the Christchurch area and may be willing show me around, go for a beer and of course talk KSP (I only really know one British ex-pat out here so the chance to make new friends would be most welcome!). So if you think you can help me out please don't hesitate to post here or drop me a PM to get in touch! Cheers and happy launching!

As a software developer in IT for over 40 years (we used to be called computer programmers in ADP), I hear that!!! Until Y2K remediation, I was doing very well pushing code. Then, Y2K got pushed overseas to India and Pakistan, and the jobs never returned. For about 10 years now, when some kid asks me about being a professional developer, I STRONGLY discourage him/her. I need to talk to you about that Wordpress thing.

Sadly that's true. KSP forum is quite civilized however - maybe because rocket science even in a game demands some basic level of intelligence which often goes in pair with personal culture? However there is also quite a lot of pressure on some of the most popular modders and some people think that spending 20 bucks means they purchased slaves making stuff for them as they demand it. I hope that with growing popularity KSP forum will stay more or less the same - place when you can show your work, ask questions and get answers to them, talk about physics and space, download incredible mods and just have fun.

Debian Linux? wow you are a geek! Welcome, I dont really consider myself a gamer, more of a simmer/math science guy, and you will find more of the same in this community. And "it" is greater than it seems and there is no shortage of help from fellow members here. Whatever you do, dont talk about politics, religion, or Mechjeb (you will figure this out after your first few orbits) Enjoy!

Edited away talk of Lagrange polynomials and LGL points? Was getting interesting. I just remembered I think I still have a copy of GPOPS-II (http://vdol.mae.ufl.edu/SubmittedJournalPublications/TOMS-GPOPS-II-February-2013.pdf) somewhere, since one of the authors was asking me for help a few months ago with the Matlab interface to Ipopt. That might be easier to use than PSOPT since it's in Matlab, though it's much more restrictively licensed (only free if you work for the federal government or the University of Florida...).

we have such a humble community, lets sit around and talk about how humble we are! we are so humble!

Hi everyone. Just a thread to talk about all parts that have "stats" that maybe seems strange to you (like really. not guess or little tweaks) For instance, I am quite confused about the weight of some aerodynamical parts (cone noses.. seems veryyy heavy for what it is.) And really obvious, the classical little bay landing gear for planes /shuttle. it is so small and it tells us 0.5 tons !! as all other rover gears are way lighter but much bigger in size. (except the huge one really heavy but seems legit) is that wanted or someone ever found out these statistics looks strange ?

Woudl be nice i was thinking about using the skybox you talk about aswell but the download is rather big and i wasnt sure how great it will look. Which resolution of the skybox did you use?

Hmmm well..still... you outed yourself as a dev. Now we must hunt you and squeeze you for code..... <whip crack> <evil laugh>.. oops sorry, the managerial type emerged there. Seriously though have some faith. While your concerns might have not matriculated to the top of the to do list I'm sure they will get things sorted out. I so wish we could crack a beer right now and talk shop lol

.. cough .. I didn't know you could drag maneuver nodes until very recently... I've just be redoing them over and over till I got them right. Talk about a Ah-Ha moment combined with a face palm that left a mark.

You're mostly right here. I almost have quit using the game. I barely play it anymore because I know exactly what's going to happen. I'll get frustrated by incomplete features that have been incomplete for a very long time, with multiple requests over that time period to actually sort them out that haven't been heeded. - Rocket wobble is a great example, and Unity engine and Development Asymptotes a poor excuse. 2.5m parts have been around for a long time and still are very poor. Extra rigidbody connections, which are placed at a spacing determined by the difference in mass of the two parts could solve this. See? A possible solution! Or how about a lot of talk about how we could stick a Kerbal on SRB, even an endorsed comic showing it so - when in actuality we can't without having some way of spawning the Kerbal first, as apparently seats aren't crewable! Look at it this way - Assign Kerbal to seat, seat starts with the Kerbal's data (this can be done with ANY part at all, I have made seats able to do this part) and then the seat during physics loading spawns a new part, which is the Kerbal. They should have all the code they need available to do that in their hands, very quickly - same with the previous suggestion. Both have had quite a few requests floating around to be done and I know Devs have had contact with both. Why has there not even been acknowledgement of these and other problems? Its always about the next big feature. I've only heard of "fixing ASAS" for updates on previous updates, but that isn't the best solution. people are asking for options to have BOTH the old ASAS and new SAS. Listening to that would save time they can put into solving more issues.

It is right, if you talk about density of energy production. Sun produces energy mainly through proton-proton nuclear reaction cycle. It has part reaction H + H -> D + positron + neutrino which is extremely improbable even in sun's core. Therefore energy production per kg or m^3 is less than in human body. Surface area is proportional to size's square but volume is proportional in size's cube. Therefore the huge sun has very small surface area per volume ratio compared to human and it must be extremely hot to first transport all energy from huge volume to "small" surface and then radiate it to space.

I am a web developer. The public at large, even gamers, have no idea how time consuming and nerve-racking software development can be. You really put your heart and soul into not only the software, but the vision that drives its development. A developer works all day (and often night) to create something that appears magical. Every iteration of the software will reduce bugs, but seems to create others as it grows. This is true even for the best and the brightest out there. There are just too many variables (literally) that can interfere with the software you are creating. Even though I sit here and run (execute) the software I have created up, down, sideways, etc., and think I have seen every scenario to possibly generate a bug. Usually no less than a day after launch, an end user will discover a bug that never presented itself during development. Often a result of a different platform environment than the developer. Therefore the developer should not be the the person testing the software. Since they built it, they know every button to be pushed to make it work. We need to leave testing to those that have never seen the software and have no idea how to use it in the present. My point overall is that WE are the alpha/beta testers and need to do the developers a service. Sure we "paid" (EXTREMELY cheap entertainment) for the game but with the understanding that the software is not finished. Being on the other side of the fence at work, it is actually somewhat painful when you have put a LOT of effort into a project that does amazing things, and when one relatively small bug is discovered the users will claim your software sucks, you suck, etc. It ruins my day and dissuades me from providing services to the people that complain about a petty issue that can be easily and quickly resolved. Even if I figure out the problem and fix it the same day, some users are already skeptical and now want it to break so they have an avenue to complain. And in my case, people WANT the software to break. I work in an office. If the software breaks, or network goes down, they are off the hook to work and get to sit around and drink coffee, and talk about how crappy things are. It makes them feel better IMO. Dont get me wrong though, the majority of people are appreciative of the work we do. It is the few rotten apples that spoil the bunch, and it really brings us down mentally and even physically. So to wrap up my rant: hug your local software developer, they want to do good. We DO want to know about the bugs (but hope for none). If you are not satisfied with the software, remember to appreciate the great things it does and present the bad parts in a productive light so it can get fixed. Otherwise your programmer may not show up for work the next day. THANK YOU SQUAD for years of a few little bugs

I am a furry who has been playing KSP since Version 13, aprox., but has just now registered for the forum. Well, maybe not exactly. I remember posting things under a different name but the forums aren't recognizing my of my emails so I just registered a new account. I most definitely am not good at the game, and often need MechJeb's help just to get to the Mun. I can get into debates that aren't my field of expertise as I have no fields of expertise, but I am attempting to improve this bane of mine and hopefully it won't get me into trouble here. Well, I am not one to talk about myself so let me just say again... hello, fellow rocketeers!

Several posts were split and moved to a new thread: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/47150-ISA-MapSat-Legacy-discussion Feel free to talk about the future of MapSat, or any new similar mod development, over there.

Same as the talk of Fusion reactors and engines being 'non-radioactive'. Say that to the people who have to clean the fusion toroid out after it's lifetime of use! OK, fusion doesn't produce much radiation compared to fission, but it does produce some, again mostly secondary radiation in the casing. Still hoping they get a workable fusion reactor up and running sometimes (Curses Fleishman and Ponds that they couldn't get something out of that debacle! )

Fantastic, they have one contract with one space industry company. Let's have a look at the block quote in the press release you linked to, shall we? "The contract will enable the initial conceptual design of the Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS) and Mars Surface Exploration Spacesuit System. During this study, Paragon will identify major suppliers, concepts, and technologies that exist today and can be used as the baseline architecture for further development." It's not a hardware contract. It is a study to pave the way for more studies. Mars One is claiming there will be humans on Mars in 2023. It is now almost 2014 and there is no metal being bent anywhere. It takes years and years to design, build and launch a 1 tonne rover to go to Mars. There is a significant difference between that and what Mars One has to pull off in order to succeed. Nobody knows how to get a <1 tonne payload to the surface of Mars safely yet. That's just one example, there are hundreds of other problems that have yet to be demonstrated, tested or worked on by Mars One or even national space agencies, and that's just the hardware. It is going to cost many tens of billions of dollars to get to humans to Mars, money that Mars One does not have, or they'd have hardware being built right now. Get real. Mars One is not going to happen. They can have all the talks they want. They could talk to his holiness the dalai lama; it would change nothing. There is no progress being made towards actually getting people to Mars. They are just talking. There is an almost infinite gap between what they say they will do and what they are doing. In that sense it's a scam.