Wemb

OTOH, regarding when the best time to start a suicide burn it's also important to remember that the consequence of starting your burn too early is comming to a halt some distance above the surface and some wasted fuel, while the consequence of starting your burn too late is becoming a new crater. People new to this might want to err on the side of caution. :-) Wemb

I did a few minmus missions when I first started without landing gear and a ton of sciJrs like this once - I wasn't convinced the thing would stay upright if I EVA'd onto Minmus's surface, so I landed on the engine bell, then pitched over to one side where I had a single vernor thrusters at the top of the rocket to break the fall as it topped over. Getting back up was simple too - fire the thruster till you're at ~20 deg, then light the blue touch paper and you're away. It's soooo wrong, but it worked. Wemb

Unlock the claw's pivot and adjust it's angle so your engine fires coaxially with the asteroid's COM. Oh, and don't put in a widdershins orbit like i did the first time I did an asteroid capture mission... Wemb

.. And put them in sensible places round your end-stage's CoM. I've never used RCS balancer, and it's certainly not needed for small lightweight craft that can use reaction wheels to turn. Snark's advice on using Caps-lock is much more useful till you're trying to dock fuel tankers. Wemb

I think so yes - thought I haven't run the numbers - but think, you're ditching them - so the quicker you empty them and dump the weight, the better. If your TWR is too high, this probably means that you're got too many SRBs - reduce the number or size of them, rather than lowering their thrust. The problem with using too many SRBs is that they're utterly uncontrollable, and that's the last thing you want when you're trying to do a gravity turn or flying through an atmosphere. Wemb

I'm not sure that's going to be easy to answer - I suspect it will depend (definitely) on the heat tollerance of the part that's blowing up and on the heat output of the engine. Best bet is probably experimentation. If you can, rotate your stages to avoid having engines firing directly on-top of items below them. If you want more specific advise, a screenshot of your rocket might help. Wemb

Even better than the +TGT mode is the PAR mode - at least, I find this - it keeps your craft co-axial with the docking port, meaning you only have to worry about translation - this makes life a lot, lot easier. Wemb

Finally, if this rocket is designed to hit an altitude, you could try and deploy the chutes at a lower air-pressure. This is risky, because even if you can deploy it at a high altitude when you're velocity is low, by the time the air density is high enough for it to start working, you may have accelerated to too high a speed again. If that doesn't work, one last thing you could try doing what the Soyuz does - fire a small retro rocket to slow you down before you deploy your chutes.[1] You could put a flea on the top, with reduced fuel to do this. Wemb [1] The Soyuz fires these before hitting the ground, after the chutes open, but you get the idea. Frankly, I don't think there's much in the Real World that's more Kerbal than this.

And, if you want to go entirely stock, one of the most useful things you can do is to slap a couple of downward facing spot lights on your ship - if you've every seen the movie The Dambusters you'll know why.this is useful. Also, if you want practise - do it on it on Minmus, It's much easier and forgiving to land on and required a lot less dV meaning you can practise more. Wemb

And if you want something a but less automated, take a look at KER - it has what is effectively, a landing computer which won't do the landing for you, but will calculate times to impact, suicide burn times, etc. as well as displaying really, -really- essential data, such as the radar altimeter rather than ASL. Wemb

This will happen if you go straight up and then straight down again - or anything remotely close to it. When you re-enter from orbit, remember, your mostly going sideways - so you get to spend a long time in the atmosphere to loose speed. Sub-orbitally, the horizontal component to your velocity will be much less - which means you'll have less time in to the atmostphere to slow down. There are a few approaches to this - you can try and give your re-entry body improved lift characteristics so that you glide back rather than falling like a rock - which will prolong the time in the atmosphere. Alternatively you can researcha and use drogue chutes which aren't enough to land with but can slow you down enough to deploy the main chute. But, early on, your best bet is to simply do less steep sub-orbital missions. Burn sideways more - you'll limit your potential Ap, but at this stage all you're trying to do is hit >70km before coming back - so use any excess thrust to get sideways velocity which will protect you on the way back down. Good luck Wemb

It doesn't have to - and you're right, once you're in space you're not fighting an atmosphere. But! If you're suborbital, you are running against the clock, and a too low thrust engine might not get you into orbit before you re-enter the atmosphere. As for the apogee. Ideally, you would circularise your orbit (or, at least, get both Pe and Ap out of the atmosphere and above 70km) at the moment you hit the Ap. This is, of course, not actually possible - but the best you can do is make the mid-point of your orbital insertion burn happen at the Ap. It's entirely possible to get a stable orbit doing this burn before or after the Ap, but doing so will be slightly less efficient, since you'll be adding a 'vertical' (well, radial) component to the burn, instead of a purely horizontal (well, pro-grade) burn. The main problems with not doing the orbit burn exactly at the Ap is that (most likely) you'll not get the intended Ap and Pe you expected and, at worst, have to do another burn to circularise your orbit at another point. Doing it at the Ap simplifies the whole process - your required vector will be exactly on the pro-grade marker, your final Ap/Pe will be what your current altitude is before you started the burn, it'll be easier to get the exactly Pe/Ap needed/to circularise and you minimise the amount of fuel needed to do it. Wemb

One of the better ways to maximise income with the contracts in the early game is to work out how to complete multiple missions with a single launch - for instance, it's very easy to make a satellite with huge amounts of delta-v - far more than you'd ever need, once you unlock the Spark engine - in which case you can stack up a bunch of similar satellite launch missions and complete them with the same bird, rather than doing multiple launches. Similarly, you can quite easily build an unmanned two-person rescue ship with a couple of Mk-1 pods and a stayputnik strapped together. It doesn't look pretty, but it'll fly, and re-enter safely enough and you get twice the income and two new astronauts for every launch. Oh, as for a Biome map, not entirely sure about the stock survey scanner, but the SCANsat mod adds similar scanners which can display a biome as well as a resource map (and others) http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/72679-105-scansat-v149-real-scanning-real-science-at-warp-speed-march-6/&page=1 Wemb

I don't think anyone else said (apologies if they did), you can, at a pinch, always get out and push. (really, you have a jetpack that magically refills itself whenever you reboard the ship). Wemb

Also 7) Pull your spacecraft, rather than push it. Wemb

Might be possible to counter it by changing your roll during ascent - if the drag is going to produce torque that coupled with gravity flips you, it may be worth rolling to ensure the instrument is on the other side of the rocket, producing torque that counters gravity. But having said that, I've launchd these scanners before now without problems - also take a look at your TWR and CoM. A picture of your rocket would really help. Wemb

What Snark said. - I would suggest that you might use MJ for the rendezvous - I do this because it saves all that fiddly mucking about with the nodes that I find neither challenging or fun - but only once you know how to do it. Docking is fun though, and one of the more satisfying achievements in the game - you don't really need a mod for docking - all the information needed will be on the Navball, but the Docking Port Alignment Indicator mod is very useful tool making the information clearer and easier to use. If you want a challenge with docking, install RasterPropMonitor, go IVA, turn of the games UI with F2 and dock entirely from the capsule using just the MFD displays - that's really fun. Wemb

Yup - what the others have said - try flying it without the fairing - I bet it's a lot more stable. That and your launcher is colossally overpowered, so if you are going to fly, it don't fly it at anything like 100% thrust. Wemb

Not at all - with RasterPropMonitor installed, I have done orbital rendezvous and docking missions (post launch/orbital insertion) entirely from within the IVA as a challenge. And much fun and satisfaction was had. Plus, where else do you see your radar altimeter? Wemb Oh pish - talk about style over substance! Did the crew of Apollo XI have 'wireframe graphics'? No they did not - they had the AGC and were happy with it. 15 push buttons, 22 7-segment LEDs and a few status lights was good enough for them - what more do you need to fly to the Mun? Wemb

Yeah, what Boris said - that thing is just not suited for anything, possibly except going straight up - but even then you'll go so high you'll probably have problems with re-entry. Try and turn at all and It'll be flexing, with almost no way to correct itself, it's CoM will be moving dramatically during it's flight and you have barely any control authority on it so you can't steer it and even if you could it'll probably snap, and even if it didn't and you could steer it at some point, by the time the fuel has drained, you'll probably no longer be able to steer it... You have stack decouplers and SRBs - use them. Get the science, and get some AV-R8's and bigger fuel tanks - the AVR8s will provide you will a huge improvement in control, and with bigger tanks you'll be able to build stronger less bendy rockets. But, basically. if you want to get high in the early game, use stages, and make your first stage an SRB. Till you get thrusters, reaction wheels, and steerable winglets, you're reliant on the reaction wheels in your pod for steering - they're only going to be useful on modestly sized ships.. Wemb Ah - have just seen you have 1392 posts - I suspect you know all this already...:-)

Woah - I can't begin to express how fabulous this is. Okay, so functionally, it's probably useless - but damn, for anyone who recognises my avatar, can probably guess at my reaction to this. This is totally Dan Kerbal, Pilot of the Future. Wemb

Not just me then.... It does slightly bug me that the ease of which you can farm science of Minmus makes it almost completely pointless building orbital labs - especially when they process the data so slowly, you'd have to timewarp for months if not years to get a reasonable return. I hate doing that.. Really hate it. And by the time you've got the infrastructure needed to farm science in orbit to generate big returns, there's nothing much left on the tech tree to research anyway. I'm now got to the stage in my latest career mode where I've unlocked most of the tech tree, but haven't even got a space station in orbit yet, and am still 100 days + to my the next planitary transfer window. Wemb

You may also want to look into some of the Node editor mods which can help with editing and fine tuning them - they offer push button interfaces which be used to adjust both the nodes and the time it's set to. MechJeb has one built in, but I believe there are stand-alone ones available. Wemb

That would be operating system specific, I'm guessing - in Windows you should have an acceleration option that helps do large and small movements without being stuck on a speed that's either too fast or too slow. Also - do you know you can use the mouse wheel to make small adjustments to manoeuvre nodes? That helps a lot. Wemb

I mean, have several SciJr clustered around a central fuel tank/engine core - makes it big and flat - something like this from Azoth