Saw your Steam icon pop up for it yesterday. Figured that would be the way of things.

Had a similar experience with my friend Tod (EmpegBBS handle: CommOri) who I've been mostly out of touch with for years. As I was playing Kerbal last weekend, I kept seeing his Steam popup: CommOri is playing Planetside, CommOri is playing Planetside, CommOri is playing Planetside, and I have to assume he was seeing my popups on his system too. Then a couple days later, I see the popup: CommOri is playing Kerbal Space Program Demo... I had a big laugh just then. I later confirmed that yes, after his coworkers had been nagging him to try it, my popups pushed him over the edge.



Yeah, the whole orbital mechanics thing is interesting. So much of it is very unintuitive. You'd think, for example, that burning your engines while pointing at the ground would be the efficiant way to deorbit, but it's not.

More playing around with Hohmann transfers has led me to figure out some good rules of thumb about orbital burns:

- Burning prograde or retrograde (i.e., exactly with or exactly against your travel direction, i.e., the yellow pips on your navball) always gets you the best fuel efficiency in terms of the change in your orbit shape.

- Burning pro/retrograde at any point in your orbit will change the altitude of every part of the orbit except the point you're at. In other words: if you think of your orbit as having four "quadrants", and you've managed to line yourself up with another object (such as a ship/planet/station you want to intercept) but you're only touching their orbit in one quadrant and the other three quadrants don't line up, then wait until you're sitting in the touching quadrant (at the touching point) to do your burn. Then to get the other three quadrants to line up, burn retrograde to ensmallen the rest of your orbit, or prograde to embiggen the rest of your orbit. Using this technique you can, by repeating it at various points along the orbit, get your orbit to exactly match the target's orbit without expending very much fuel at all.

- Burning prograde at perigee is the most fuel-efficient way to gain orbit altitude at the expense of making your orbit very elliptical. Burning prograde at perigee gets you the most elliptical orbit.



Been there done that. Ran out of fuel before I'd quite gotten the reentry angle I wanted, so I had to sit through a few orbits as the ship aerobraked. Fun stuff. Note: I think there's a bug in the game where, if your perigee is inside the atmosphere, but you are at your orbit map and you crank up the timewarp, it'll zip right through the atmosphere as if it hadn't aerobraked at all. If you want to make sure to get the aerobrake to work, you have to use a slower timewarp (1x to be sure) and view from the piloting/staging screen.