zolotiyeruki

As an alternative, maybe wheels should have some (small) amount of minimum friction all the time. Not enough to stop you when you land, but enough to keep an already-parked craft from rolling away.

I actually don't like the Mk2 sections for this particular challenge because of the stock aero (drag cube), but they may work better with FAR. I found that pitching the wings up with respect to the fuselage by 5 degrees helped my efficiency tremendously. I'd get up to altitude and point the craft straight at the horizon (0 pitch). That minimized the drag from the fuselage (only the frontal area had drag--the rest was occluded) while still allowing the wings to produce lift. It also made flying for 8 hours a lot easier (thanks, Pilot Assistant!).

This has kinda already been done, in a few different formats:

While we're on the topic of landing sites, you know what else would be really handy? A slope map, so you know where you can find a flat spot to land. Heck, it could be a new type of science similar to the science you get from the M700 survey scanner--get into a polar orbit, deploy the terrain scanner, and you get an overlay on the planet showing where the terrain is conducive to a landing or mining site.

The OKTO-2 plus a small reaction wheel exhibits this behavior, and that's the smallest one you can get. As nli2work pointed out, the Mk1 command pod also has the same problem. Plus, the problem isn't consistent--it doesn't appear on the 'hold atitude' setting, but shows up for everything else.

When constructing bases in the past, I've built a dedicated "tractor" vessel that acts kind of like a helicopter. Between that and big docking ports, I had no problem (other than my lack of piloting skills) assembling the station.

I'm about to land my first mining vessel on Minmus. I've figured out a good location using my satellite with the Survey Scanner and the overlay, but when I switch back to my mining vessel, the overlay is no longer available. It would really be nice if I could mark a location on the surface while I'm looking at the survey scanner satellite, so that another vessel can then land there. Another alternative, I guess, is to make the overlay available from any vessel once you've scanned the planet. Or is this already in the game, and I'm missing ig?

I thought about it, too, but (apparently falsely) assumed that only air-breathing engines were allowed. And the throttle response for a Juno would be *way* too slow to use reliably for pitch control.

This sounds like a lot of fun....I'll have to try it out tonight EDIT: Well, getting off the ground and maintaining stable flight is hard enough. But landing in the traditional sense (safely, without chutes) with no control surfaces is HARD! EDIT 2: I did it! Zero control surfaces one engine, landed safely at the airfield. Timestamp on the screenshot is 17 minutes and change. It cruises stably about 42m/s. Roll/yaw control is done by balancing ore tanks (thanks for the idea, OP!), and altitude is controlled with the throttle. No screencaps during the flight, as it's a full-time job to keep the dang thing flying straight. I might have had the brake torque set a bit high on landing, but given how hard it was to get *to* the airfield in the first place, I didn't want to take the chance that I'd run off the end.

If you click the brake indicator, it will lock the brakes on. (I didn't know that trick myself until a few months ago)

Here's a bug I'd love to see fixed: on craft with low mass, SAS is very jittery on every setting (prograde, retrograde, radial, normal, etc) except for the default (hold attitude). The craft wiggles around all over the place. It sure would be nice to not deal with that.

Absolutely agree! I'm running some Tourist contracts, where some of the tourists need to land on the Mun. I have the rest of the touring crew sit in orbit while the surface-bound tourist does his/her thing, and it's a pain trying to figure out where I put each tourist.

I wish kerbonauts got their experience when they actually perform the action, rather than having to trek all the way back home in order to be promoted.

My wife is mad at me--that landing on Kerbin made me bust up laughing, and it woke up the kids.

Yes, the Juno includes an alternator.

Tannerite

I like these ideas. One variation on the stackable sepatron--how about one that works similar to the 1-way RCS port or vernor engine? Surface attach, simply points outward, etc. That would make booster separation a lot easier.

All the SRBs are 1.25m. Do you mean SRBs in other sizes? Then I agree. A 0.625m and 2.5m SRB option would be nice.

I did it without MechJeb, although I used Pilot Assistant. I coulda done it with only SAS, though.

Which demo is it? If it's the 0.18 demo, then it's not all that difficult. Sure, when I was first starting out, it was *really* hard, but with the experience I have now (I didn't know that the Mk1 capsule had reaction wheels, and didn't know how to soft-land), it'd be a piece of cake.

Ooh, this sounds like fun. Although you've got to be careful trusting the F3 screen for distance, since it adds the rotation of the planet (a few hundred m/s). Better to leave something back at KSC, so you can select it as a target and see the distance.

I wasn't sure it would be possible, but I got a Kerballed craft to the Island runway with altitude to spare.

Heh, I was about to post a "how far on a pair of sepatrons?" challenge, but this'll do. Here's my entry: Similar to Rhomphaia, I guess. 40.6km from the launch pad, no damage

Truth be told, this is just a really short version of the aviator challenge (where I went around 12 times on an air-breathing engine with no refuelling), and I learned a *lot* of optimization there. There are lots of little tricks that incrementally add up to HUGE fuel savings: fly high = low drag fly fast = orbital mechanics start to kick in, and you need less lift = low drag low weight = lower induced drag Big-S strakes have fuel capacity with no weight or lift penalty compared to a traditional wing. IOW, add fuel without the dry mass of a fuel tank. Shock cone intakes on *both* ends--they have the lowest Cd in the game small landing gear bay is physicsless, so no extra parasitic drag lower starting mass = less fuel used. I could reduce the starting fuel in my run by 55, and I would still end up with leftover fuel, since I wouldn't be lugging that extra 275kg of fuel all the way around. Mod on the left = Kerbal Engineer. Informational only--I was using it to track my position so I would know when to cut off the engine. Mod on the right: Pilot Assistant. It's an autopilot that I used to hold the wings level, my nose on the horizon, and my speed down (to avoid overheating), so I didn't have to babysit the craft through the whole run. In 1.0.4, I could have made the run with even less fuel burned, since the thermal model was more forgiving, and I could have flown faster and higher.

I'd like to be able to delete craft while looking at them, rather than having to remember their names, go to the tracking station, and delete them from there. I'd also like a taller 1.25m service bay/cargo bay. There are times when I'd like to bring along just a bit more equipment, or taller equipment. Another thing that would be nice: air intakes (and engines) that vary their drag based on how much air is being ingested/expelled. Throttle the engines up, and the drag from the intakes decreases. Part welding wherever two tanks meet with the same size nodes. 2.5m tanks weld together, 2.5m tanks weld with 2.5m-to-1.25m adapters, etc. Fuel venting. So if you end up in orbit with some leftover oxidizer and a LV-N, you don't have to lug around useless oxidizer for the rest of your mission. Ground effect, so landings are a bit easier