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Good stuff, glad you're sorted buddy, enjoy the space race

The way you describe it sounds like a massive over-thrust, perhaps constantly burning your engines all the way to the top of the atmosphere? This will easily shoot you way, way too far. A couple of thousand delta-v once you're above the thick atmosphere (30-35km) could well lead to an escape trajectory - i.e. a line out of Kerbin's SOI. I'll ask the obvious and query whether you're... a) watching your apoapsis on the way up to see where you'll be peaking out? shutting off your engines when it's high enough? (If the apoapsis is reading 75km or up, and you're at 35km+ and 1200m/s or over, you can generally cut thrust and just coast the rest of the way.*) c) setting a navball manoeuvre node at apoapsis to give you a marker for which direction to burn when you reach it? (Just drag the prograde marker until you see a projected stable orbit.) d) timing that burn correctly, e.g. if it says "est 30 seconds" do you start at 15s before the node, so's to balance it out? (Burning at T-30s for a 30s burn will raise your apoapsis.) Sorry if these questions are overly basic, but seems worth checking * Numbers pulled from personal experience, using Ferram Aerodynamics Research. Speeds and altitudes may vary for stock!

Quick question if I may; do the build-a-base missions respect Kerbal Attachment System's methods of hooking things together? I'm eyeing up a munbase mission to justify the cost of landing a 25 ton Station Science module, but trying to line up docking ports by conventional means on the surface is a bit intimidating. Would be much easier if I can just land within a few metres and run some pipes between the two

Oooh, this sounds like exactly the problem I was having... There's a mission to bring in a class A, and I was struggling to grapple a B and a C. Any info on when that fix will show up? (Nice to know what's up with it though!)

Hi there, So this morning I finally succeeded in an asteroid diversion mission! Great! Having left it in a loose Kerbin orbit, I figured I'd go back, get some more science, and make the orbit a bit neater and maybe use it for a space station, only... it no longer seems to be grabbable. I have tried a manned ship, and an unmanned probe, to rule out weird construction problems. I have nudged gently at the asteroid at 0.3m/s or less, and I have rammed it at 5m/s. I've tried disarming and re-arming the claw repeatedly. Consistently, using both vehicles, the claws just slide over the surface but will not bite. Sometimes they dig in and almost seem to connect, but then they spring back out again. I've spent the best part of two hours trying to find a "perpendicular" angle of attack, and the short version is that the first attachment was just not this hard. Since I had a second asteroid inbound, I tried the same again with the same results - the initial attachment is easy and the asteroid can be diverted, but an asteroid cannot seem to be grabbed once it has been moved already. I renamed both asteroids when they were initially grabbed, and I've noticed the tracking centre now thinks both are a ships that can be terminated, which feels rather suspicious. In the first screenshot, you can see a ground pylon from Kerbal Attachment System. This is able to connect its winch in 'undocked' mode, which vaguely tethers the ship in place, but it can't work in docked mode and can't be used to move the asteroid. Even using the winch to physically pull the ship against the asteroid, the claw cannot be tempted to grab hold. In addition, by the time the unmanned probe arrived, the ship that was tethered in the screenshot had vanished into nothingness, although the ground pylon was still there (just visible in upper right of lower right image). I suspect this is the same bug as reported a couple of months back: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/93796-Advanced-Grabbing-Unit-cannot-re-grapple-an-asteroid?highlight=grabbing although there's too much appearing in my alt-F2 to work out if it's logging the same message. Using KSP 0.25 via Steam, with a number of mods (obviously - sorry about the state of the UI, I was getting grouchy by this point and wasn't in a mood to be neat). For now, I'm giving up on doing anything with my new Minimuns, since I can only assume there's an invisible kraken draped over the asteroids, swatting me away at the last moment Cheers, EddieW *edited 2 days later to avoid bumping* Probably the same as http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/100171-My-Claw-won-t-attach-to-the-asteroid since the asteroids I couldn't grab are B and C, while I have a mission to fetch an A class. This thread is probably not useful as the problem is known

Short version; quite right. Unfortunately I'm limited to RAM intakes at the mo, which makes my engines choke at ~20km altitude with one intake each. They'll make 25km with two each, but then the drag keeps my speed down and it's even harder to get anywhere. Rapidly turns into a race of engines vs intakes, but the best balance I can find for this size of craft is a pair of each. However... basing my design on one of Wanderfound's more compact models, running with 2x RAMs, 2x regular turbojets from Karbonite, and 1x nerva, I actually managed to get the little beast into orbit, rendezvous with the lost kerbal, and bring him home. Despite having cannily covered the crew hatch with a radial parachute. Misjudged the final approach and landed about 200m from the runway via those emergency parachutes, but the exploding nerva triggered a nearby seismometer and gave me science, and I was able to taxi onto the runway for nearly full recovery costs anyway. In kerbal terms, that's a 110% success! Handled pretty well throughout; as long as the AoA stayed under ~15 degrees, she was happy to bring herself back to prograde and just descend gently. Whether she'll make orbit with something in the cargo bay I'm less certain... maybe if I dump all the mono prop to free up the weight, but I doubt she'll carry more than a ton above her current mass. Landed with about 600 m/s left in the nerva, but it was a super tight thing getting out of the atmosphere. Tempted to sneak a couple of structural type B's behind the main wings - no new leading edges, so maybe FAR will let me have the lift without penalising me with drag? Either way, it's definitely better than this... ...which constantly, and predictably, fought the controls going both up and down and very nearly didn't make it to space. And yes, that's 18 intakes per engine, and some LV-909s on the back. (Though indeed, the Mad Spaceplane Dragonflight somehow made it up to 76km and deployed its satellite by ejecting it violently out of the back end since I didn't have cargo bays at the time. Couldn't make a full orbit though, so had to be quick about it!) So yeah, thanks Wanderfound and Jovus, you've definitely put me on the right track and hopefully I can avoid further catastrophes of design

Great thread here, lots of inspiration for spaceplane design. Spent two evenings on it so far, and with the help of FAR's stability checks, everything gets to about 28-30km altitude and 1200 m/s without major wobbles, but then runs out of lift and the prograde heads inexorably downward. Sometimes they make space, but generally don't then have the fuel to stabilise the orbit. I fluked a twelve ton midget without any intake coolers, that actually gets to a 75km orbit, but isn't big enough to carry cargo, and doesn't have the fuel to spare to do anything except come home. Two things I notice in your designs is that they're all longer and have smaller wings than anything I've tried... wondering if maybe I'm overcomplicating things and giving myself too much drag to contend with. Lol, yep, that's me! Feels like the good engines are hidden behind a massive wall of research that doesn't really have any benefit during the middle tiers Puttering around with ram-intakes and turbojets at the mo and getting a bit dispirited, so nice to see something simple that might be within reach

I don't mind the proximity, I just feel like the science reward for things on Kerbin's surface/in Kerbin's airspace is too generous. The stock game already rewards quite a lot for just picking up temperature, pressure, and soil samples from different biomes, but those are at least limited. Kerbin flyovers are infinitely available, and easy once you have a working jet, and thus (IMHO) need to have no science reward to make sure players don't simply grind the whole tech tree before breaching the atmosphere. Nice fundraisers, but they'd probably be best restricted to being only that. And there's no reason you can't test rovers without a specific mission to do so. I've spent hours bumbling mine around KSC until I figured out designs that worked well Tried exactly that yesterday with no luck... Though I do sometimes find that it's not counting satellites as being in the correct orbit, even when it's visually and numerically within it's specified margin of error. Happily, the debug screen solves this issue, even if it is a bit of a ham-fisted tactic

Enjoy the challenge of this mod overall, but can I make a small suggestion? It would be nice if dishes could be activated without a connection, as long as there's at least one omni-directional antenna active. Reasons: - The punishment factor for forgetting to deploy an antenna is guaranteed mission failure. - You may not know it for quite a while, though, if you just push your probes off and turn to other things while they travel. This leads to nerd rage when you figure out what you forgot to do - NASA or the ESA would have a dozen people asking "did you check...?" while it was still in Earth orbit, but we have one player, and no reminders. - Early tech tree and on a tight budget, it's easy to be struggling for battery life, which gives players good reason to hold of deploying until the probe is outside of LKO (and thus out of Kerbin's shadow). It's surprisingly easy to forget that you meant to deploy Justifications: - There have been real space probes, for example Galileo's Jupiter mission, which possessed both a high gain and low gain antenna. The low gain was there as a receiver to say "hey, open your big antenna now", and meant the big dish could stay safely rolled up until it was needed. In fact, the low-gain antenna was the hero of the mission, since the main dish failed to open! - Ground transmitters rarely have a problem generating enough signal power to contact a probe, even if it only has a small antenna. If needs be, we can throw a megawatt signal out, where the probe might only answer with a nanowatt. Other than that, RemoteTech does genuinely give players a mental challenge; where do you need your comms satellites, how can you stop them bunching up in orbit, how do you avoid connection eclipses, how do you keep them powered when in planetary shadow, is it even possible to get a real geostationary orbit in KSP, etc. This much I definitely like - but lol, forgetting the antenna is... well, let's just say I tend to hack the config and up the range of the standard omni high enough to deploy the proper dish and get on with the mission and my life Of course an alternative is an alert that says "Hey, this probe will be out of communications range in 10 minutes, do you want to do something?" and stops time warp, but that feels like it would be harder to implement --- In a completely separate issue, I've had probes fail permanently because I overloaded them with dishes. Once the batteries were empty, none of the antennae worked and I couldn't issue an instruction to deactivate some. Not really a bug, per se, but quite annoying. Graceful failure would be nice, e.g. a priority order, such that dishes are powered in priority order, based on the current active link to mission control when the player is focussed on the probe. If we are allowing "active vessel" targeting then this doesn't seem out of bounds. If there isn't enough power for a secondary/tertiary/quaternary dish, then shut it down for 30 seconds to give the player a chance to figure out what to do. Cycling power round the antennae like this means the probe should never actually lock up permanently, even if its communication link path changes over time. --- Just some thoughts! Overall a good and interesting mod and hope it keeps being developed and improved

Brilliant mod, thank you Brought my modded KSP down from 3.4GB where it was crashing regularly, to a stable 2.8-2.9, with no obvious quality difference ^^

Fantastic mod, thank you - combines well with RemoteTech (satellite networks are profitable now) and gives reasons for rover missions and space stations Can I suggest however, that the science return for aerial surveys (and possibly rover missions) on Kerbin is removed, or at least cut to almost nothing? Even playing on a hardcore 40% science return, I can still very easily grind survey missions with low technology, for up to 88 science at a go. This feels more like the sort of thing an aerospace company might do for a bit of profit to help balance the books, but isn't likely to return any new knowledge. Also, I got one rover mission so close to KSC that I just rolled off the runway and tagged all the waypoints in about 10 minutes xD Amusing, but feels a bit abusive of the intended mechanic, since it didn't cost me anything to execute. I can see from the config that the base science for surveys can be changed, but I think that if it's on another planet, players should be rewarded fully for it. Eve aerials would be a monster, for example, and well worthy of science return! But again, thanks for this mod, really nice extension to the game and really should be adopted into stock

What you've done is hit terminal velocity. The force from atmospheric drag has become equal to the downward pull of gravity, so you're settling towards a constant falling speed. Because the atmosphere gets denser nearer the ground, any object falling at terminal speed will actually slow down as it gets lower, since drag becomes higher. You can however test the parachute on the way up! It'll jerk your pod around a bit, but if it's just a single pod, liquid tank and thruster, then you should be ok. 250 m/s should be very reachable by that altitude with a simple, small ship, and you can kill your engine straight afterwards and just drift down again. If it's not quite making it, just angle your ascent (remember to turn SAS on!) so's you get more time to build up speed

Think I'm far too lazy for this... although it does provide something else to build, if I ever run out of other stuff that needs doing xD Until then I shall continue to fly my jets half way around the globe for a Fine Print mission, then parachute them to ground and recover them quickly

Grows on you fast, doesn't it? Good news is that the obsessive phase begins to fizzle after a couple of weeks and you get to the comfortable 'it's great, but not 16 hours per day' stage

Oh tsk tsk, you dirty lurker you

These are all really good, actually. In addition, I'd like to suggest Infernal Robotics and KW Rocketry. They don't add realism per se, but they do add tools which will help you overcome the extra problems that FAR will introduce (e.g. with hinges you can make your un-aerodynamic probes and rovers fold up a bit so's they can be tucked behind fairings, which are then more launch-able). And it'll be controversial, but Mech Jeb will help with planning trips to other bodies. You don't have to let it fly if you prefer to take the helm (I mix and match; I tend to let it get me to orbit, but I'll land stuff manually) but it's got some nice built in tools that will help get your orbital transfers sorted out. If nothing else, it can calculate where your target will be at the time you get there, which I for one find a real pain in stock!

- Build rovers in the spaceplane hangar, not the VAB, otherwise your navball will be 90 degrees out of whack, and possibly backwards. Not to mention the symmetry is more appropriate in the SPH. - If you make rovers with a docking port for skycraning, make sure the docking port is the root element - this way you can save them as a subassembly and attach them to a rocket in the VAB later. (Look for the SelectRoot mod if you found this out too late!) - If your rover is attached as a subassembly onto your rocket, double check you're controlling the rocket from the right place at launch... if the rover is upside down in the rocket, you don't want it controlling everything! - If your rover is unmanned, consider making it as a hollow shell of panels (not necessarily a solid 6-sided box, 2 panels with a separator at each end is fine). This gives you room inside for batteries and mono propellant tanks, and protects them against impact, while leaving the external space for wheels, science widgets, and solar panels. - If you use mods, Infernal Robotics adds awesome hinges that you can use to turn your rover's wheels underneath it, giving you a more compact object to launch (great if you use FAR!) which then spreads into a wide wheelbase when it gets where it's going. (Can't tell that I spent 5 hours working with rovers last night, can you? )

Ohhhh... right, I see. In my head, the speed of sound was ~700 m/s, but it turns out I was thinking of miles per hour Ok, now I see why it fell apart - and why it glows so beautifully during night flights! And yeah, one of the reasons I wanted FAR/NEAR from the outset was that I'd seen planes in it have a habit of looking realistic, which makes me feel better about the physics modelling overall My current jet resembles a Eurofighter Typhoon and (apart from the turning at mach 5 issue) handles really well for roll and pitch. For the moment I'm getting away with KW Rocketry's fairings. Though it did look silly when I launched a fat but light satellite in a 2.5m extended case, on top of a 1.25 rocket! Made it to orbit though, amusingly. Biggest challenge is rovers, though using Infernal Robotics hinges, I've now got a pretty solid 6 wheeler that folds its legs underneath it so it can be turned on end and just fits in an 2.5 ext fairing, along with a skycrane on top of it holding 1200 delta-v. Comes with the handy bonus of being able to tweak the ride height if it's grounded out The interstage idea is a nice one though, I'll look into that - might make my designs a bit less bulbous up top! If nothing else it sounds like a good place for mono propellant tanks. Annoyingly I didn't get round to it; turns out I have 85 game-days until the best Jool window for the next ten years, so I'm scrambling to dredge up local science from Kerbin and Mun and Minmas so's to be able to get the best possible ship ready. New rover will definitely be in the fleet that goes out, the question is whether I can manage an orbiter with a return stage to get the best possible science back... Plenty of money, but I don't think I've unlocked the nuclear engine yet cos I went towards probes and spaceplanes instead of rocketry I'll definitely use your MJ tip when I launch that lot though, thank you

My probe got to Moho before I realised the RemoteTech antenna on it was targeted at Mission Control instead of a satellite with long enough range to talk to it Also I build rovers with faces, then feel guilty when I don't bring them home x(

Tbh, it's exactly that which was scaring me off FAR. Being quite new to KSP, I'm not really sure what will get me to what speed - it was a total surprise that my ram/turbojet fighter goes as fast as it does Might give it a shot, though, since I think I now understand how to design planes that don't fall apart. Although I did try a 15G turn at 1500 m/s yesterday. Even with just NEAR, it didn't go well, but hey, that's why I always put a radial parachute on the pod I haven't actually had anything rip off, because I've been wrapping every single probe in a fairing Although a couple of times I've screwed my staging up, the fairing has popped at the same time as my boosters detached, and then taken off a solar panel or dish because it's gotten caught in the airflow and dragged down the side of the rocket. Aside from that, my worry is things like the big reflector dishes, KR-14 and up, which I think don't survive a launch? And then yeah, there's issues about how big a rover I can put on the end of a rocket, because they're not the most aerodynamic objects to put on the front of a rocket. That said, maybe I should actually try to launch something ridiculous - maybe it's not as much of a problem as I'm expecting it to be Been investigating the robotics mod too, the hinges in that look quite promising for giving some fold up options, if I design stuff cleverly. Ah, that sounds like the 2nd step that I've been missing, cheers The initial Hohmann transfer is pretty good at getting in roughly the right location at the right time (or at least it's better than guessing!), but fine tuning as early as possible is decidedly what it needs. I'll give it a go later tonight, thanks!

Hey guys and girls, Ten days with KSP now, all of them deeply engaging, and seven of them running NEAR, Fine Print, RemoteTech, KW Rocketry, TweakScale, and a few others because they're clearly too good to ignore. Mostly going well; probes to the inner solar system, 'fast enough' jet planes for Kerbin flyover missions, and an unmanned Munar rover that can run just as well either side up, as inspired by those little radio controlled cars. Gone career mode because I'm that kind of guy who doesn't like everything handed to him up front and loves the long discovery process with lots of use of intermediate tech levels. Indeed, I restarted after two days because I'd taken the Outsourced R&D policy, and discovered it is hideously overpowered and ruining the whole point of having a tech tree. Technically 'legit' but obviously a sploit... Much happier now that I'm grubbing around for science while battling a budget. I wanted to make it an iron man play, but truth is I feel like the game engine is a bit too likely to 'splode my stuff for absolutely no reason. One accidental tap of time warp and my planes fall apart in flight, so I guess it'll be an honor-system iron man, where I'll take losses if they feel fair, rather than like the result of dodgy coding or lack of information at the point of commitment. I know it is rocket science, but I don't have the head for the mathematics and I have to go on what the orbital predictions say will happen - even when that's really vague and stops at 'Kerbin escape' If y'all could spare a little wisdom, I do have a couple of questions however 1) Is using NEAR (and later FAR when I know the game better) going to make me struggle with later missions? I like the aerodynamics a lot better than stock, but it does make getting big things into orbit really hard. So far I've been focussing on unmanned flights, and have been shrinking my components to 50-70% normal size in order to wedge them into a 2.5m fairing, but I have absolutely no idea how I'm going to get kerbonauts past Minmus. They'll need better comms, which will need to be shielded in a fairing, which will not fit around a big capsule; rovers for a crew will need to be bigger than my scaled down mini-rover, and yet I had to think really hard about how to fit a skycrane and lander into a fairing, just to land on Mun; etc. In short, does FAR or any other mod, provide any solutions to the (realistic) problems that FAR brings to the table, or is it something nice to play with for a while, but an obstruction later on? 2) I've been looking at Transfer Window Planner and MechJeb to help me find the right times to get to places. The first just gives me angles and delta-v's that I have no real idea how to implement, and while MechJeb will create a manoeuvre node, it has a habit of not arriving in a very good place for getting into orbit around my destination. Example, my recent Moho probe just barely achieved a wonky orbit with 12 m/s left in it's fuel tank. According to TWP I should have arrived with a thousand times that to spare, transferring orbit-to-orbit, which was to my mind 'plenty'. The question then is whether TWP is providing a fair calculation of delta-v, and if it is, how can I go from what it's showing me on screen to a set of manoeuvre nodes that I can execute? Otherwise, how can I get MechJeb to tell me what the other half of the transfer will be, before I launch, so that I don't try this with a crewed vessel and have to abandon it and return home? Thanks for your advice!

Been struggling with the same challenge as the OP. I use NEAR (because I've only been playing KSP for 10 days and FAR looks really hard ) and have never flown in stock conditions, but landing can still be a pain. So far only achieved on the polar ice cap, where I just cut the engines and let it glide down super slow. So I added radial mount parachutes to key points of the fuselage, and a few struts. Now I just have to get her below about 200 m/s and she'll hang together when the chutes deploy. Doesn't seem to hurt much either; twin turbojets and ram air scoops, ~1500 m/s top speed, maybe 20km ceiling, and gets 2/3 around the world on a full tank. Not gonna win any awards, but nicely for those flyover missions that Fine Print keeps giving me. And glows nicely in the dark Would FAR be more brutal on the drag effect those chutes would have? (Alternatively, am I underestimating how much drag I'm getting from them?)