Why aren't you playing Kerbal Space Program yet? It's free

I am going to immediately share this with my Civil Air Patrol cadets, they'll get a kick out of it. Thanks.

 

Version 9.0 is out. Stability is improved, struts are available, and the vertical speed indicator is not on a logarithmic scale, making it useful.

There is a donation link up and any donation of $7 or more will count as a preorder for the finished game. I love the game and the way the developers have gone about introducing and releasing it, and I will be donating significantly more than I usually pay for games (I haven't bought a game that wasn't on sale on Steam in probably 5 years) next paycheck.

 

I checked out their list of planned features, and am blown away by some of them. Travel to other planets!?!?!?!? Yes please.

http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/~kerbalsp/wiki/index.php?title=Planned_features

 

Might give it a look

 

Loaded this up last night. Eventually hit 157k in altitude, but dropped straight back down (with a chute, of course). Guess I should do a bit more research next time

 

The trick to orbit is that you go sideways in addition to up. Try 4 liquid tanks and an engine, put a few boosters around the stack on radial decouplers, get up to about 20k then tip 90 degrees in any direction and burn until you're around 40k and going 2350km/h. Baby's first orbit.

 

Version 0.10.0 is out! Joystick support, a completely new terrain engine, and movable winglets that help you steer among other things. The next release will have better flight instrumentation and orbital calculations to prep us for extraplanetary objects in the subsequent release.Unfortunately, the sticky launch pad bug is worse if anything, and won't be fixed until the next release.

HarvesteR mentioned on the official forums that he's a little ahead of schedule and will probably have a 0.11 experimental release out soon that makes the atmosphere much more realistic as opposed to the 34500m wall that's there now. Decay-free orbits will start around 70000m.

 

I forgot about this one. Just updated it last night. Im about 15hr into a flight. Wish there was time compression. Highly elliptical orbit, ranging from about 40-600k distance. Sadly I jettisoned my second stage when I thought my orbit was good and dont have any power on my module, so no way to re-enter.... guess I just launched another manned satellite. Ah well, try again and remember to leave some fuel to bring them home.

 

I've gotten into orbit a few times, I just can't seem to de-orbit. I need to learn how to kill my velocity arount 80k altitude.

 

Version 0.10.1 is out. Control surfaces are redesigned and the atmosphere now extends to about 68000m with a realistic falloff rather than the ball of soup it was before.

Shagg: to deorbit, the simplest way to do it is burn retrograde until your velocity drops below stable orbital velocity, then wait for reentry.

 

Been trying to smooth out my elliptical orbits to be more circular. Tough job, too much burn and I endup doing a re-entry on the next pass.

 

New version of maltesh's orbit calculator out for 0.10.1 is out, should help you.
http://www.mediafire.com/?ceuxzy3l56a1u

 

Now that 0.13.1 is out, I'm going to make a new thread. It's practically a new game at this point.

To answer your questions:

-ASAS uses AV-R8 winglets (and RCS if turned on) to maintain attitude. When your rocket starts wobbling, remember this: It's not unstable, it's doing the rocket dance (warning: your rocket may literally dance its ass or other pieces off.)
-You can fly into the sun (Kerbol) with stock parts but it's not easy. With stock parts, your best bet is to fly out past Mun's orbit and slingshot past both it and Kerbin at or near syzygy.
-If using stock parts, use winglets on radial decouplers as landing legs and blow them on takeoff to reduce weight . A full RCS tank with 8 nozzles can get itself and the capsule back from the Mun.

I suggest that until a version with more stock parts is released, that everyone try KSP Silisko edition. NovaSilisko is one of, if not the most dedicated developers for addon parts and mods, and he did a great job of balancing the stock parts and adding a few more to give you a wider selection, retain the feel of the game, and make it a little more "realistic." One of the biggest improvements over stock is, as he says, that the super heavy stock decouplers make no sense and discourage staging, which is the exact opposite of how real-life rocket building works. There are a bunch of "reserved for future use" parts that you can safely ignore for now unless you want to build things that look cool but don't do anything.

 

downloading......

 

300,000 meters... managed to line up a pile of fuel ontop of a single rocket and it's my best yet. I tried a handful

 

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