Kerbal Space Program

That sounds about right.

I think it's also a good idea to adjust the throttle to maintain 150m/s when below 10km, since trying to exceed that will result in wasting fuel due to air resistance.

Eh, not quite that slow, terminal velocity at 7km is already 200m/s.

First few degrees of pitchover at just over 8km, and don't go much further before the time to apoapsis is at least 1 minute.

I have a habit of going straight up until there's almost no atmosphere, then flipping to the side and doing the gravity turn.

Flying into space (rather than launching into space) is definitely a wholly different kettle of bowl of fish of kerbs.

The RAPIER engines make it somewhat easier, since before that you had to manually shut down the jet engines.

And God forbid you have 2 engines and forget to turn them off. Only one would cut and that death spiral...

It's rarely deadly, since you have plenty of time to stabilize, but it does usually prevent that flight from getting into orbit.

For me 20 plus minutes of wasted time counts as a failure.

In my quest to make a space gas station, I've realized that I have no docking ports. So now, my efforts are focused on getting SCIENCE to get some docking ports.

To get said SCIENCE, I've decided to try and get a spaceship to do a fly-by of Mun, do some sciency thing with goo and whatnot while up there, and get back to Kerbin.

That ended up getting another Kerbal stuck in orbit around the Sun. I'm seeing a pattern emerging.

edited 2nd Jun '14 7:18:08 PM by MisterC

If Kerbals survive and land back on Kerbin, then I generally consider it a partial success.

For example, I was putting up the huge command center of a multi-part ship into orbit, and only when I was done did it turn out that my Mechjeb module was actually obstructing the hatch of the fancy B9 cockpit, meaning that my pilots were pretty much stuck there instead of being able to move into the habitation and science modules. I decided to de-orbit it in the hope that the launcher rocket parts, fuel tanks and habitation modules would cushion the impact enough for the cockpit to survive.

It was the only part to survive, while the MJ module somehow managed to explode during the lithobraking, meaning that my two dudes could get out and take a plane back to KSC.

.... I thought they mostly fixed the kraken....

I was loading the final peice of payload into my masive Jool V transfer vehicle, which was suposed to transfer a probe for every moon to jool....

With just 16 hours before launch window, 100 meters out, the Jool V just randomly dicinigrated, all its peices flying as chunks every where....

It.... it was very disheatetning, I have been working on that mission for days...

It's still a problem for some huge ships. It may be caused by certain parts that have weird physics coding.

And that's why I don't spaceplane.

I can't get to space my plane even after 30 mins, so I just closed the game. LOL

I've built some good spaceplanes, though I do use B9.

Also, I've been having a problem where I can't quit to the space centre or recover certain vessels. Any idea what's happening?

It has been done! I've made an orbital refill station: a satellite composed of 3 big fuel tanks, a some docking ports and some solar panel to keep the probe active if I one day need to do something with it.

I'm now practicing docking onto it, and DAMN it's hard. Closest I've been to it is 900ish meters.

Edit: Uh, you can set your Nav Ball to be relative to the target? That's mighty useful. It simplify things a ton, actually. All this time I was trying to match orbits only at intercept points and guesstimating everything. Now I can just match orbits and use the Nav Ball to match the target's speeds and direction and then catch up/slow down to it.

edited 5th Jun '14 4:38:15 PM by MisterC

make sure you have RCS fuel refill options too, otherwise you're gonna have a bad time.

I've heard people can have fun without leaving the ground. I assume they do that in sandbox, because you can't really move on the ground with the starter parts.

Pretty much. Career Mode is a recent addition, and still a work in progress, really.

I've been doing nothing but career mode, but it might be time to go sandbox instead.

ETA: In fact, that's usually how I get into games. I cheat my way up and see what I can do first, then I go for earning victory and accomplishment.

edited 5th Jun '14 6:05:22 PM by Journeyman

If you click on the speed thing, it'll cycle between ground speed, orbital speed, and speed relative to target. If you select a target, a new set of pink markers will appear on your navball for your prograde and retrograde vectors.

What I like to so is try and get a rendezvous within 2km then zero out my velocity relative to target. Point my ship prograde toward my target then crep in pretty slowly, course correcting as necessary. Once I feel like I'm close enough, I right click my ship's docking port and select 'pilot from here' and right click my target docking port and select 'set as target' which will do what I think you're asking for and make the navball markers relative to the target.

From there, it's just a matter of lining up all three prograde markers on your navball. Don't forget that IJKL allows you translate as opposed to rotate. Also a helpful tip to avoid getting disoriented is to hit [v] to use the chase cam

Additionally, H allows you to use RCS to move forward and N does it backward.

@Journeyman: I disagree. My method of building up the first few science unlocks is to create a ship made from two command pods stuck end to end, with a Kerbal in each one. I then press one of the WASD keys to put it on its side and launch it, using the roll control to get to the beach and other nearby biomes.

I call it a Bizkit, because it keeps rollin' rollin' rollin' rollin'. XD

For the record, if anyone reading this thread still hasn't gotten it but would like to, the game's apparently on sale over at GameFly Digital right now.

Holy carp. What roll controls?

So what's everyone else's rover designs? Because I just can't seem to make a stable one. Though I also happen to be using plane parts, and I suck at building those as well.

edited 6th Jun '14 9:41:01 PM by Journeyman