Prepper-Jack

Engineering an appropriate TWR is important for the whiplash. As Sharpy said ... with too little, you're not going to go hypersonic. However, the other direction is even more disastrous- as too much engine can easily lead to detonations below 10km if you don't hold back on the throttle. That said, you still want enough to climb at 45 degrees and hit peak speed before 25km or so - which can be close to 1500 m/s with enough turbos.

Yes, you can pull it out with a Kerbal on EVA. Just right click the capsule and click 'take data' or whatever it is. From there you can either deposit that data manually into another pod, or it will be deposited automatically when the Kerbal enters the pod.

If you have the extra fuel to spare, you can burn somewhere between retrograde and radial to lower velocity while keeping periapsis at a reasonable level.

Well, I can share a bit of what I did.. maybe lend some ideas. 1. The base modules were mounted to the top of the lander, and not the bottom. I found that the fuel on top, which usually weighs more than the object being move, will make the entire assembly a bit top-heavy, and prone to tipping. So this was a good way to avoid that result. 2. Each module (MPL, crew bays, etc) was of the 2.5m variety, and went up sideways. This made the final "rover" much more stable, with a much longer wheel base and less mass on top. They had a radial mounting point at both top and bottom, with a docking port on the bottom. On top was all the odds and ends that would otherwise shift the center of mass. 3. Each module came stock with two large radial RCS tanks mounted near the bottom (but enough to give wheel clearance). This helped in giving it a low center of mass, and a plethora of thrusters allowed it to fly off the lander with ease. 4. For wheels, I added a pair on each side of the assembly via the mid-length I-beams connected at the bottom of the module. This gave it a decently wide stance. 5. On each end were structural fuselages connected to docking ports. Assembly was a remarkably simple process of driving one docking port into the other. The end result was more like a train than a "base", but it had something like 18 cars all told, and could go at pretty good speeds. It was kind of fun to IVA-drive on the Minmus flats with the cupola module up front. Probably could have flown into Minmus orbit using RCS alone.

Well, if you keep adding asparagus stages, you do run into the problem of having the outside stages being nearly instantly drained of fuel. In that respect, traditional asparagus staging does hit a maximum dV. The only way to offset this is to increase the number of boosters per each stage (ie. 4 inner rockets are fed by 8 rockets, which are fed by 16 rockets), but this obviously gets out of hand very quickly.. Vertical inline staging, or non-asparagus radial staging, does not have that problem of course - and is theoretically unlimited (as you say).

Well, the service bay hitting the caps does sound like a possibility. It may also be that a part somehow got duplicated during the build, and when the ship gets stressed in some manner, it causes a collision. If you don't have a prior save, I might try going to that location with a rescue ship, then trying to "switch to" the doomed ship from a close proximity, without going to the tracking station. That worked for me the last time I got in this kind of pickle.

Hmm - any idea on the cause of the explosion? A wonky service bay or something?

It's normally optimal to circularize and come in as low as possible to land, as you're working with gravity, not fighting against it. If you come into the Muns sphere of influence in a collision course, approximately 2Mm away, traveling at 300 m/s - you will have gravity pulling on you the entire 2 million meters, leading to a massive sustained suicide burn in the end. I think I saw in some thread recently that someone calculated this to around 2,700 m/s of dV - and that doesn't sound too far off the mark (though I haven't done the calculations myself). Alternatively, you could come into a high orbit at low speed, circularize for 50-100 dV, transfer to a very low orbit for 100 dV, then suicide from that orbit with around 550-600 dV. Quite a bit of savings.

*shrug* Unless I'm just testing things out, I'm usually playing career mode at moderate or higher difficulty. I'm avoiding hard mode explicitly, as reverting is often legitimate in a game as buggy as this, but went "custom" difficulty with hard settings otherwise for my new save. The juggling of finances in addition to everything else does make the game more involved, and you have to come up with more creative solutions than you otherwise would have with an unlimited stack of cash. To me, that's fun - though there is a point where it gets a bit too tedious, and that point will be different for every player. Also, adding on things which make the game more involved, like RemoteTech and life support, are kind of mandatory for me now. The combination of it all makes the game challenging and enjoyable enough for me at the moment, and keeps me engaged. To each their own, though. I'm not particularly a casual gamer, and I like a good "hassle".

I've heard the claw is the go-to tool for summoning the Kraken, though I've never personally witnessed it. I've been careful, however, and only been using claws in low-part count cases like rescuing a single capsule or rocket part, and in short durations for refueling landers. General advice seems to be to keep claws away from terrain as a whole, and not use them for permanent connections. I have had a large ship spontaneously disassemble, however. No explosions, but every connection just vanished. No existing claws at that time. I've also seen videos where this has happened, and caused explosions, but these ships usually had a lot of clipping - which may have been the catalyst. I'd guess the two issues are unrelated, other than being physics bugs. But, I'm not a Squad developer, and not privy to the code - so who knows?

I won't install Mechjeb because I personally enjoy doing manually what it automates. With KER I have no such compunctions, as manually engineering a rocket is a little tedious to me. As for the extra components of KER, I tend only to use the radar altimeter piece - which, as far as I'm concerned, should be stock in the HUD anyway.

Nice rig. Hmm, I don't have any pictures unfortunately, as I deleted the save, but I suppose my largest "rover" was a mobile base on Minmus set up kind of like a train. Each "car" consisted of a particular base component, with two radially mounted structural fuselages and associated docking ports that connected each car. Rugged wheels were attached to underside of the cars via I-beams, and even on Minmus proved to be quite stable and very fast. Driver cab had a cupola module for a nice IVA experience. Each car also had some of the large radial RCS tanks on the bottom sides, which (in conjunction with thruster blocks) helped both with delivery and allowed the train to fly (though this last part was only briefly tested). In total, I think I had about 19 or 20 cars on the train, with room for as many people. Could mine, do science, make fuel.. basically everything. Hoping to do something similar with MKS/OKS components within the next few days, though not quite sure on what to do with the inflatables..

Easy intercept in low orbit: 1) Target said vessel and get into a similar orbit with roughly matching peri/apoapsis. 2) Burn Normal/Anti-Normal near ascending/descending nodes to get into roughly the same inclination as your target. 3) Directly after passing the first intercept point, burn prograde until the target position and intercept point are on top of each other. 4) Time warp to a little before that point, make sure your target is "target" (click where it usually says orbit or surface), and burn retrograde until this speed says 0 m/s. This is your relative velocity. 5) Burn towards the target (pink bullseye) a bit, time warp to the next intercept, burn retrograde to reset relative velocity to 0. 6) Repeat step 5 until you're on top of them. If you're already close, might want to go easy on the throttle. If fuel use is a concern, you can limit the prograde burn in step 3, though it will take more orbits to get close. This reduces the initial dV and the amount of relative velocity you need to kill. Likewise, you can skimp on step 5 a bit - will take less fuel, but more orbits to get there. If your target is in a very high orbit, and you are in a low orbit, simply use a maneuver node to directly intercept them where target position and intersect point match. At that point, burn retrograde at the target like the dickens to match the orbit. Docking itself is a bit of a pain without RCS or Vernor thrusters. If those are unavailable or unappealing, consider using spider engines at low throttles with the main engine turned off. Hitting your target with heavy rocket blasts is counter-productive.

The impact tolerance of the large aircraft landing gear is 70 m/s. Top of the line rocket landing struts is around 12 m/s, IIRC.

Isn't it a little early to be talking about sequels? Plenty of room for DLC/Expansions, especially if they get the 64-bit stuff out of the way.

Landers are quite efficient if you bring a large transfer stage into a low polar orbit, and use it as a temporary fuel depot for multiple landings. Let's say you can land, take off, orbit, and rendezvous from Minmus with less than 180 fuel on your light lander. The big red tank you left in orbit is somewhat spent from getting you there, but still has around 1800 fuel left. That's 9 landings and a return. There's some extra cost associated with getting the extra mass up there - but it's certainly not 9 times as much. If you're good at docking, or at least rendezvous and a claw, it's worth it.

The 500km omni antennas are fairly resilient (the always-on antenna). If you drop a 5Mm omni, coupled with a long range dish in low orbit, it should be enough to get to the surface and unpack a real dish/omni.

Can't say I agree with this. What you say about collecting more science with Kerbals is true, though there's other things to do without the use of Kerbals. A rescue platform, for instance, is much more efficient in the long run with one crew pod being shoved into orbit than two (or better yet, simply a drone with a klaw and some parachutes attached). Collect temperature/seismic/gravity data at so-and-so 3-6 locations is much more cost effective with tiny probes, as they can easily reach 10k dV and above for minimal investment. A network at 90 science should have the ability to reach Duna and Eve, if I remember correctly. Even if you're not using life support mods, sending probes to these systems will be significantly cheaper than sending Kerbals. 1-way vs. 2-way, plus extra mass to support Kerbals means you're usually going to spend 4-5 times as much for the Kerbal, if not more. Additionally, sticking to Kerbin/Mun/Minmus for the full tech tree is quite doable, but not as profitable (and I would contend not as interesting). Science data from space around/surface of Duna/Ike/Gilly/Eve missions are frequent, lucrative, and completely repeatable by the same probes. I would, however, recommend that a jr. docking port (unlocked pretty early) be added to each satellite at the very least. That way the infrastructure doesn't need to be replaced, just enhanced.

It would most likely help matters quite a bit if you moved the center of lift a bit behind the center of mass, yes.

6350 m/s? That's quite high, unless you're flying a parking lot into space for some reason. Or is that 75 million meters? Absolute minimum would, in a vacuum, be slightly higher than orbital velocity at the desired orbit. Radius of Kerbin is 600km

To an extent. But, each has a fairly significant mass. Slapping 10 chutes on where 2 will do can really gut fuel economy.

Minmus, as you say, spins fast. Usually this can be resolved by a quick time acceleration, though if your circular orbit is near-synchronous it can take a while. Synchronous orbit for Minmus is 357.94 km. How long it takes you to get in sight of your target depends on how far you are from that spot. If you're very close to that specific orbit, you'll want to burn either prograde or retrograde (depending upon where the ground spot is), then loop back around and fix the orbit. At Minmus, this shouldn't take more than 100 dV.

It's this. Only available after the rendezvous contract, as far as I know. However, the "not having docked" before prerequisite may not be entirely right. I've been doing claw captures on rescue missions, and am still getting it in the list. It is, however, a three star contract. Declining some other 3 star contracts or increasing prestige should cause it to pop up. The rewards are kind of lackluster - 60k in funds and around 20 prestige IIRC.

Yes, what can be determined as a grind is subjective. I still go out and gather the KSC biomes upon a new game start - but instead of just making a jet rover I've been making wierd contraptions to cut back on the boredom. Last night, before even accepting the "launch your first vessel", I obtained all the L45 science nodes by making odd rovers that used only flywheel torque. The first vessel to complete "collect science data from Kerbin" was basically 4 capsules and a couple goos, which was rolled all over KSC with the whole gang of dizzy Kerbals inside. Doing the same thing every time does get boring. Try something different with your new saves.

The ascending and descending nodes are where Minmus orbit intersects with your current (presumably equatorial if you follow a typical Kerbin launch) orbit. Burning at those nodes is pretty much the only place you'll be able to intercept Minmus, unless you either align your Kerbin orbit to Minmus or adjust your maneuver to take such inclinations into account. Both of these cost in terms of dV. So yes, unless you match the angle on launch, it's most efficient to burn towards Minmus at the ascending and descending nodes.