Kerbal Space Program!

[Quinton]

Do the Kerbal attributes (Courage and Stupidity) actually *do* anything yet?

[5150]

Has anyone worked out how to save subassemblies yet? (or is it because I have an existing/sandbox game)?

[Mrbloodworth]

Has anyone worked out how to save subassemblies yet? (or is it because I have an existing/sandbox game)?

Yeah, build the thing you want, and drag the entire assembly to the lower left of the sub-assembly screen. Its a small area with a dashed line around it.

[Engels]

Have they fixed the radial separator attachment mechanic yet? I got very frustrated placing on separators that wouldn't really hold onto the boosters in a radial configuration. It wasn't technically 'broken', but there was no good visual queue to let you know your connections were sold.

Also docking. Hate docking. Like, wtf level of fiddly shit right there, combined with a level of twitch that makes The Witcher seem easy.

[Mrbloodworth]

Never really had an issue with that item in my builds. Not having it now, post patch.

I have a suspicion your build is the issue? Maybe how much weight you had on it?

[Pennilenko]

No matter how much I read or calculate, I can not seem to make Mun orbit. I think I keep jacking up my gravity assist, rocket science is hard yo. Five Kerbals doomed to wander the solar system.

[proudft]

I've landed twice so far but without enough fuel to get back.  They transmit their SCIENCE back, those faithful Kerbals, telling us all about the nice gray rocks they've found, but they orbit endlessly...

[5150]

No matter how much I read or calculate, I can not seem to make Mun orbit. I think I keep jacking up my gravity assist, rocket science is hard yo. Five Kerbals doomed to wander the solar system.

If this is your first attempt to land on another planetary object I'd suggest Minmus rather than Mun (there are a few reasons for this)

There's a YouTube video by Scott Manley that makes it look super easy (I've had one go so far but my peri wasn't quite high enough to get me into Minmus' sphere)

[Quinton]

Scott Manley's "Mission to Minmus" tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmAMGJm-bwU

I'm embarrassed to admit that until he demonstrated it, I didn't realize you could grab the circle of a maneuver node and drag it around the orbit -- I was deleting and recreating nodes trying to line stuff up and wondering why it was such a pain in the butt.

[proudft]

Whoa, I didn't know that either.  My skill at guessing what angle to put the node for getting to the Mun is all wasted!  Will certainly make hitting Duna easier, though.

[Yoru]

No matter how much I read or calculate, I can not seem to make Mun orbit. I think I keep jacking up my gravity assist, rocket science is hard yo. Five Kerbals doomed to wander the solar system.

Should be pretty easy. Get into low orbit (80-150km) around Kerbin, wait until you see the moon just start to rise over the horizon. Burn balls-out pointing at the moon, switch to the map view. Once you get an encounter predicted. Should happen around 3000m/s speed, give or take some. Hit X to cut engines and drift until you're in the moon's sphere of influence and do whatever normal maneuvers you want.

That's how we used to do things before we had fancy shit like maneuver nodes or even intercept prediction.



I've pretty much conquered the career mode thing. Slap a gravity detector, 3 XL solar panels, 3 antennae on a probe core, put it in 89-degree sun-synchronous polar orbit over the moon, spam gravity surveys from 65km ("high above") and 55km ("just above") above each biome. When you hit a new biome, spam 3x transmit, wait for complete, then spam 3x transmit again. Nets you about 100-150 science per biome and moon has about a dozen.

You can do the same for Kerbin, but it doesn't do much more.

For landings, I bring 4x material bays, 4x goo pods, 4x of each instrument (seismometer, thermometer, gravity detector) and 4x 1-man command pods, so I can bring back 4 identical EVAs and soil samples, which utterly depletes the science from one surface biome. Between 4 trips of that and the orbital Gravity Sciencer Slurper, I've completed everything but the aerodynamics tech tree, because fuck planes.

Went to minmus once, but other than that, you can get all the science you need from kerbin + moon to unlock everything.

[calapine]

 

 

 

*salutes*

[Pennilenko]

Something about that just got to me.   

[Mrbloodworth]

I did something like that the first I time I found the EVA button.

[Threash]

Something about that just got to me.   

It's because he is so happy in the first shot.

[Mrbloodworth]

Kerbals are very happy creatures. At very odd times.

[Brolan]

Picked this up during the Steam holiday sale.  Having a lot of fun with it.

Figuring out the orbital mechanics but having trouble getting enough fuel into orbit to do the lunar insertion and return.  Anyone got any tips?  Do you just have to build an obscenely large rocket?

[bhodi]

I've played entirely too much of this game. Steam says 79 hours, so I can probably field most questions you have.

Firstly, the base game makes rocket building very trial-and-error; It's fun for the first bit but I then like to have a bit of data when I'm designing my rocket. Mods really make this game shine.

I highly suggest Kerbal Engineer; stick the entire directory inside your gamedata folder, research the new part in the tech tree, and stick it on your rocket to get statistics. You need about 5000dv to get into orbit, or 4500 for a perfect ascent, and your orbit/transfer stage needs say 1.5k, and your lander should have another 2k to land and get back to kerbin.

So, to your question. The biggest thing you are probably missing is asparagus staging and crossfeeding, along with ditching empty tanks as often as possible:


But honestly, less is more. A super basic lander - parachute, pod, t400 fuel tank, lv909 engine, landing struts - can be sent to the mun and back with 2x T800 tanks + engine on the central stalk for your mun transfer, with 4-6 radial decouplers for the ascent stage (which can be 2 t800s and an engine, asparagus staged)

I'm avoiding posting pics, since I think experimentation is half the fun, but there are endless, endless youtubes and how-tos if you're stuck, which I can recommend. Having a little cheat sheet of the DV requirements to takeoff/land on the solar bodies really help. Looking at mine, for example, says 4500 to get into kerbin orbit, 860 to get to mun, 210 to orbit, then 640 to land. Overengineering significantly past those numbers means wasted fuel and a much, much larger rocket.

Oh, also, going faster than terminal velocity wastes fuel going up, but you can't really see those numbers without mechjeb or other mods. As a general rule, if you use kerbal engineer, don't go much above 2.5 TWR on your first stage or you'll hit the limit. Shock waves or heating on going up is a bad sign. Also, you can right click your boosters and tweak the amount of thrust they give. This is really, really handy.

[5150]

Picked this up during the Steam holiday sale.  Having a lot of fun with it.

Figuring out the orbital mechanics but having trouble getting enough fuel into orbit to do the lunar insertion and return.  Anyone got any tips?  Do you just have to build an obscenely large rocket?

Not at all - Scott Manley has a YouTube video on getting to Minmus and back (which is apparently easier to get to than Mun for a few reasons) with a very simple rocket (way simpler than some of the stuff I came up with originally just trying to get into orbit!)

[Brolan]

Thanks for the tips!  I managed to get a rocket to orbit the Mun and return.  Now puzzling out how to build a lander.

[climbjtree]

Ok, I might start playing this game.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhRNO6EZmRA

[proudft]

Latest patch is another giant step from sandbox to game.  Now there's missions and money and whatnot.  Seems pretty cool.   The missions to test various rocket parts are randomly generated, so some of those are weird with the various altitude/speed parameters.

I then got a mission to rescue a Kerbal stranded in space.... and poof, there he is on the radar... how did he get there?  Who knows...

I'm glad I have rendezvous/docking basically figured out now after practicing it a lot a week or so ago, got that poor dude on the first try and doubled my finances.

Some details: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/content/294-Kerbal-Space-Program-First-Contract-The-FAQ

[Lanei]

For docking, this mod is the absolute best.

1. Get close, match velocities.
2. 'Control from here' on your active vessel's docking port, target the docking port you want to dock with, the window appears.
3. Rotate to align the circle with the crosshairs
4. Spin to align the T-like thing with the top center (optional)
5. Thrust laterally so the small yellow vector indicator moves toward the green lines.  Towards where they intersect to do both at once, or do one then the other.   Correct rotation of the vessel if it rotates when you thrust laterally with RCS.
5a. The green lines will move toward the crosshairs, faster the farther from the center of crosshairs that the vector indicator is.
5b.  Kill lateral velocity by bringing the yellow thing centered as the green lines are centered.  When green lines, yellow thing, and circle are centered, you are lined up perfectly with the target port.

[apocrypha]

This game has me hooked like nothing else I can remember for a long time. I'm coming up on 400 hours played now.

0.25 hitting soon, nothing majorly exciting in it - Administration Building, which will add some long term strategy options to the career mode and the integration of SpacePlane+ if you're into making planes (not something I've dabbled much with so far).

My current Career Mode save has got a bit over-complicated so I'll be restarting as soon as 0.25 hits :)

[Quinton]

I am going to lose so much time to 0.90.

VAB and vehicle editor overhaul.  New career mode goodies.  Bunch of new parts.  Biomes.  All kinds of insanity.

http://kerbaldevteam.tumblr.com/post/105298544359/kerbal-space-program-beta-than-ever-is-now

One of my favorite bits; new buttons next to the 8ball that tell the SAS to hold a specific vector:

[apocrypha]

Awesome, love the look of those SAS buttons.

I'll be waiting a little while for mods to update before jumping in, but I suspect this'll eat up a considerable amount of my time too

[apocrypha]

 

[apocrypha]

Arise!

This has come out of beta and officially launches as 1.0 today! Big update with aerodynamics, heat, fairings and resource mining now part of the base game.

I haven't played for a while, still minecrafting, but this is definitely one I'll be going back to one day

[Shannow]

Bought this as a birthday present for myself.
Wow did I kill a lot of Kerbals last night.

[apocrypha]

Haha excellent 

I highly recommend Scott Manley's videos if you need any help.

[Quinton]

He just did a new series of tutorials for 1.0 Career Mode too:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYu7z3I8tdEkUeJRCh083UT-Lq5ZIKI75

[5150]

Is there an easy way to fix craft that [now] have invalid parts?

[Pennilenko]

Is there an easy way to fix craft that [now] have invalid parts?

Starting from scratch on the new release build is the best option.

[MisterNoisy]

I love building spaceplanes.  That is all.

[Jeff Kelly]

I've already sunk 15 hours into this (bought it Saturday on a whim) largely failing to even get into orbit and it's insane fun. They've nailed the trial and error aspect by letting you revert to launch or vehicle assembly. It's totally engrossing to come up with a new concoction that will most likely totally fail to achive the things it should. Also the Kerbals are cute and endearing in a way that makes you want to get them safely back to Kerbal. The interface is still cluncky in spots though.

I'm currently trying and failing to get into an orbit around Mun, even though I've watched and read a few tutorials on how to do so. Which brings me to my biggest gripe with the game.

It's very bad at telling you anything about how to actually play the game. Apart from a few very basic tutorials the game offers nothing to help you. No manual, no in-game help system, no tutorial about any of the physics or the orbital mechanics aspects. They don't even tell you really basic stuff that would help you right at the start like that delta v is more important than actual speed, the delta v necessary to get into orbit, the delta v necessary to achieve escape velocity, where orbit actually begins (above 70 km). They don't really tell you what the different speed and directional vectors mean (apoapsis, periapsis, prograde retrograde etc.). They don't even mention basic stuff like that it helps to launch due east to get additional speed from Kerbal's rotation. If you don't have at least a decent background or an interest in physics you'll be totally lost.

In short it's the sort of game where the manual and help aspects have been outsourced to enthusiastic fans on the internet and that's bad because the game itself should tell you what the basic elements mean.