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Polar is 90^o ; 180^o would be launching due west. I looked them up-- Baikonur in Kazakhstan is about 46.0^o while Kennedy Space Center is 28.5^o of north latitude.

51.6^o , the ISS's inclination, is indeed kinda high, but you get to see more Earth that way, including all of the continental US and Hawaii (which goes up to 49^o except for one weird spot in Minnesota). The reason is the Russian preferred launch inclination. That's partly due to Baikonur's latitude, but also due to the fact that they have to launch in a certain direction slightly north of east for safety. Between the sometimes use of massively toxic-to-life hypergolic fuels and the general risk of falling rocket parts, they launch over an uninhabited area.

(some substantial edits)

• "Chad (C7): I’ve spent this week working on a special project, along with finishing testing of the Unity 4.3.3 update."

• Unity 4.3.3 release notes

I don't see anything about multi-core or GPU physics.

This game is definitely quite tricky to learn, but definitely worth it. The reason is that it's not just some game mechanics you are learning, it's actual rocket science.

Scott Manley is an amazing kerbal player, but probably not the best to learn from at times. He tends to favor advanced techniques. I definitely think Das Valdez is a better kerbal teacher. He does Kerbal Boot Camp streams, and has a ton of videos on youtube.

One of the key points to learning KSP is to start simple and not overwhelm yourself. This is one reason many people recommend starting in science mode. It limits the parts you have so you can learn how simple rockets work before moving to larger ones.

Does it make sense on it's own? Can you see why, for example, position under constant acceleration is 0.5at^2 ? As another example, I'm not sure if you've covered work yet in calculus (every calc class has a little bit of physics), but if you look at a graph of the length of a rubber band vs the force applied, let's approximate it as -3x^2 +3x+2, from 0.25<=x<=1. it looks like this. The work done to that rubber band, the energy you have stored in the rubber band, is the area under that region. In calc BC you'll learn about arc length, and you'll be glad that Kepler already worked out most of the equations for you.

It generally works for Hohmann transfers where you have big differences between your low energy orbit (LEO) and your destination orbit when the two orbits are close to circular and you have a big spherical body you're only a fraction of a radius above. Lose the horizon and look for the prograde marker on your LEO being close to the target marker and the horizon of the NavBall for the most general case. It also works in Orbiter and real life. The Apollo program never actually used this as a navigational strategy, but noticed it as it was happening in the simulator (due to limitations in GPU technology at the time, the Earth and Moon were rendered by aiming cameras at models.) In Apollo 13 (i.e. the Ron Howard movie), TLI is depicted as ending with the S-IVB stack aimed directly at the Moon. Did the movie people know? I wouldn't be surprised either way.

What actually happens is that your craft goes around about half a rev on the transfer orbit while the target goes around about a quarter of a rev in the same period. Kepler's math is good enough to predict this, Hohmann could have predicted this (either he didn't or no one noticed - it's also possible that he didn't think of the case where the departure orbit is far smaller than the destination orbit.) Finally, the astronauts and flight controllers of the Apollo program noticed it in the mid-1960s. It is probable that Scott Manley introduced the technique to the KSP community, but I haven't confirmed it yet (many of his older vids are delisted, unfortunately.)

great, so a reproducable bug!

if you now rename the working settings.cfg (forcing the game to create a fresh, default one), does the performance become abysmal again?

if so, put the old one up at http://gist.github.com then edit it and put the working one. github will then allow you to see the specific differences between them. May want to point Squad devs at it too via http://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com too

https://www.amazon.com/Orbital-Mechanics-John-Prussing/dp/0199837708

I don't think my wiseguy response is what you want though.

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I would recommend waiting until after you leave the Eve SoI, and then trying to figure out how to do a rendevous with Kerbin from your post-Eve solar orbit. mechJeb lets you do a generic elliptic transfer (homman is a special case of that). Trying to do something before is going to be hard, and will probably require a bi-elliptic transfer.

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Maybe (if you really want to muck around) do a gravity assist plus burn that puts your apoapsis above Kerbins orbit, then when you get to your apoapsis burn to raise your periapsis to intercept Kerbin. You have to have your timing just right though. Hard to do without number crunching.

https://imgur.com/a/Soikg :)

it sounds like you already have a close encounter. may want to skip to https://imgur.com/a/Soikg#47 where I discuss how to make a maneuver node to help you zero rel.velocity at closest approach.

TL;DR: at closest approach point, drop a maneuver node that makes your orbit the same as target orbit. Use it as a SUGGESTION for burn times etc, chase that target retrograde marker down instead of the node itself!

If nothing else works, try Universal Joystick Remapper. Or apparently, the new and currently maintained Universal Controller Remapper that I should probably install myself.

Breaking ground first!

But go to gg.deals and find yourself a good deal.

But if you want to spend it from your steam wallet wait for a promotion that comes ca. every 1-2 months and you may buy both!

> You could resort to file editing. Scott Manley has a nice video about it, bury the sort version is go to [Kerbal directory]/saves/[your save] and open the quicksave, ctrl+f the satellite names and from their you can change orbital values.

Yeah, I consider that equivalent to the HyperEdit option I considered.

But the problem there is that it doesn't prevent what happened to me from happening again, since apparently some ship got close enough to the satellite to take it's physics “off rails”. My initial orbits were great. Getting it accurate the first time wasn't my problem.

> In the spirit of fair play (while also balancing realism), obviously in reality engineers do pages of math per launch and can be kuch more exact, so once I launch a satellite into a reasonably close orbit of where I want it to be, I edit the quicksave to make its orbit exact (since I literally do not have the capability to do so with the keyboard controls)

My calculations fit into an R-script that was maybe half a page of code.

On top of that I have a kOS script I made that will execute any maneuver node automatically (works on all my other ships). Unfortunately, it turns out kOS has a bug where if you decouple a satellite from a parent-ship, the decoupled satellite will not execute kOS commands. So my satellites had to be done manually.

But again, even if kOS hadn't bugged out, and let me set up the orbit perfectly, it still wouldn't have prevented the problem. At best it would have postponed it. All it takes is flying too close to your satellites.

Official website already checked out?
https://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com/product/kerbal-space-program/ (I don't see a version number)

>Is there any way to retrieve those probes back?

Yes, restore an older copy of your persistent.sfs file from backup. It's located in your "saves" directory. If you're not currently backing up your computer, start.

Windows 7 has a built-in "previous versions" feature, which isn't real backup, but might help: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/previous-versions-files-faq#1TC=windows-7

OS X has Time Machine

I cannot use CKAN now because the mod is not ready for 1.9... But apparently there will be a BetterCrewAssignment folder in KSP's GameData folder, and inside a file called BetterCrewAssignment.cfg.

Use Notepad++ for a safe file editing in general.

For the part about probes, I found a handy forum thread about general Module Manager queries but I don't remember where it was... All in all you should make your own mod for this.

Just get one these: Jumbo Rectangular Magnifier
That's a good kerbal solution... right?

Allmhuran's video on gravity assists is awesome.

Fundamentals of Astrodynamics is a book that was recommended for people who really want do dig into the subject. The book is pretty hardcore, so you really want to have taken differential equations or higher level math classes.

You could try this... not only does it free up your hands for launch and flight operations (or snacks) it drains the 'fuel' from both tanks at the same time eliminating the need for pesky fuel balancer mods

http://www.amazon.com/Beer-Soda-Guzzler-Helmet-Yellow/dp/B006CWV17Q