I had a similar incident when I ran out of fuel returning from my first Minmus landing. My periapsis was stuck at 1000km, so I sent a Kerbal out on EVA and got him to push the capsule with his jetpack until I got it down to 30km, then let atmospheric drag bring the capsule home. Silly, but it worked. I'm still hoping that it was a mistake and re-entry heat will be returned to its former state. It seems like the nerf may have been an unintended consequence of increasing atmospheric drag in the latest patch, then the devs went on holiday for over a week. They've returned this week and said they are working on a another patch, so hopefully re-entry heat will be addressed by that.
^ I love the fact that this game's existence makes it possible that "atmospheric drag" and "nerf" can be mentioned in the same sentence and still result in a meaningful statement.
Just reinstalled the demo onto my comp, definitely more simulator than game (cute little green guys notwithstanding) but the hardest part is definitely transferring from orbit to orbit. The visual representation doesn't lend itself well to precision.
Finally installed and played a bit of KSP today after owning it for years, and was very amused by the landing site of my very first rocket.
I just started playing this last night, it's pretty tough. I managed to send my first crew into deep space, and burned up the second crew on re-entry. I think I need more practice. -Ricky
I use mechjeb. I'd rather spend my time running missions and building stuff than I would manually trying to pilot the ships. Not even NASA bothers to do that.
Yeah, I tried that last night. I got to orbit fine, but had trouble landing. I couldn't figure out how to change my orbit. Maybe tonight.
Change orbital height? easy. increase apopsis, then do a circulation burn when you're at the new apopsis. also make sure to get the latest dev build of the mechjeb.dll. There's a link in the first post of the thread for the addon.
I think it's useful to have to pilot manually, at least at first. It's a good way to teach the rough basic of orbital mechanics, especially for dunces like me that learn best through doing and not by staring at numbers. But yeah, once you're doing more precise stuff, there should be an autopilot function to take some of the guess work out of it.
It was the opposite for me. Mechjeb was able to show me what each maneuver accomplished and gave me a better idea of how orbital mechanics worked.