Mat2ch

As far as I know you are able to do gravity assist. But I found it hard to do scheduled burns. Even though I brought much RCS and had many thrusters at the back it was hard to get it accelerating in one direction. I had to stop often to realign with the node. So doing a precise burn takes time. Oh, and Class E means very very big. Have a look: http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Asteroid It says 854 ~ 3,828 tons. Moving this will take even a bigger rocket (or more fuel, speed is not the problem, but time is, at least for me).

Hi, I'm pretty sure this is one of the hardest things to do in Career Mode. I clicked it by accident, the numbers looked great and I didn't realize what I was up to. So I sent in my first little ship, just to realize this asteroid was huge and I didn't bring enough power or fuel or anything to handle it. I didn't have any problems capturing it. It's fiddling with the manouver nodes, which is tricky, because there are a few bugs (I can't click more than 5 times on the "do on the next orbit" button until it resets. So time warping and trying). What did I learn? When handling big stuff, bring heavy tools. The mission got me around 3 million credits and I spent 2 million for the ship. It uses 28 LV-Ns, weighs 718 tons and has over 12000 dV, which was a bit too much 10000 would've done. With it's launcher the start weight was 5000t. I bet there are more efficent ways to get this beast up, but I haven't found them yet. Most important things: Pull, don't push. I made several tries with pushing, until I saw a post here where somebody pulled. Works much better. Bring enough RCS with you, put many RCS thrusters at the end (or at the top, depends on where you're pointing ) to stabilize, because if you don't hit the center of gravity very very precise it will wobble. And I never made a very precise grab. In fact I tried several times and I always slipped away. Unlocking the grabber so it can tilt didn't do the trick. Luckily I had plenty of RCS with me and let SAS do the rest. It took me around an hour after grabbing the asteroid to get it out of the system. Bring time! Just for the fun of it I made a safe game and then "landed" the asteroid on Kerbin. Very satisfying after weeks of fiddeling around to get the ship right and then get it up into orbit... (Did you know? These things leave no crater and roll around like boulders... ) So, whatever you do, if you see this contract, try to complete it. I've learned a lot. Also thanks to the rest of the forum, without some hints from different threads I wouldn't be able to write this.

Thank you, Deddly, for your suggestions. I would've never though of just tilting the plane in the hangar to see how it will behave at different flight angles. I've redesigned it a bit and now it flies really great.

I tried to design it the way that the fuel gets consumed evenly. I guess Empiro and Starhawk are right with the air intakes. Will resdesign and just try it.

Hello JebKerboom, yes the tail fin is a good idea. I've added it now. I've designed the plane around the empty cargo bay. I'm trying to create a design that will get me into orbit with an empty cargo bay. I will have to redesign it if I want to transport fuel tanks with it, because the engines have not enough power.

Hello Deddly and thank you for the warm welcome! CoM and CoL on the full plane: And here on the empty plane: Ange of attack screenshots: This looks pretty stable to me. But I've got to change the position of the air intakes.

Hello Empiro, you are absolutely right I'm playing without FAR and I'm using only stock parts. The only mod I've got installed is MechJeb, because I got lazy to always watch my speed and creating an fine tuning nodes. Also there are a few bugs in the Linux version which make it really hard to turn the camera and/or use the manouver nodes. The tail fin is missing due to my lazyness. Since I don't need it most of the time I just don't place it. But I've changed this now. I think you and Starhawk are right. My air intakes are in the front as counter balance to the heavy engines. Looks like I need something different. Most of the time I fear to overshoot and make it too short. But with time comes practice.

Hello, thank you for all your answers. You are a very helpful and nice community, I think I'll like it here. I'll try to answer as many questions in the following posts and hope I don't "spam" to much.

Hi, I'm trying to build a huge spaceplane that is capable of delivering a Rockomax Jumbo-64 fuel tank into LKO. I've made several attempts just to build plane huge enough to carry one someday. My latest attempt is this: It is capable of going into LKO and returning with enough fuel to at least try a landing. (Actually you see it here returning from Orbit, heading home. Didn't make it though, not enough liquid fuel left) But on reentry it flips to it's back (actually to its tail). I observed this behavior now several times with different spaceplanes, but on the first ones I didn't take too much care about CoM or CoL, they should fly. But on this one I had the CoM right in the middle of the cargo bay and CoL was almost next to it. As you can see there's a fuel tank in front of the cargo bay and one in the back and they're getting emptied evenly. The liquid fuel tanks are also balanced out around the CoM. It only happens on reentry when hitting the thicker atmosphere. But it is stable again, if I manage to point it prograde (which is hard, because it's wildly spinning) and apply some thrust. (There's even a half full liquid fuel tank in the front just for balance, I do not feed from it and I checked that the fuel is still there) So what happens here? I'm out of ideas.