Plusck

I'm not sure how easily you can do this for under 362000 funds, but I think you need ideas more than a solution, so here goes: - take your time. - use Ike. Really, really use Ike. It is not that hard to get down and up from Ike, since it is very Mun-like, so whatever you big ship you use to get from Kerbin to Duna, I would recommend sending a miner down to Ike to drill, mine, convert to fuel and resupply your main expedition before you land on Duna. - if that same miner / drill ship has parachutes, you can land on Duna without too much of a problem. All you need is enough TWR to get back to orbit, so you ideally want to disconnect the drill / ISRU and have 909s or whatever to get you back up off the surface with your ore. Once off the surface TWR is irrelevant so you could redock with an LV-N to get you back to Kerbin. Since in this scenario you would have used the LV-N to get to Duna in the first place, your initial Ike mining tour should have been enough to fill up its LF tanks, so you don't need to use any of Duna's ore to send you back home.

As Snark said: don't try to bring everything back. Or rather: split your ships so that you fulfil the contract with the minimum of what you can get away with. I don't tend to do too many exact calculations for my vessels. I don't use KER or MechJeb either (though I am sorely tempted). However, I have a contract to take 1150 ore from Ike to Duna. I already have a mining ship on Ike (easy enough - it is much like the Mun only further away) but it will certainly not be able to land on Duna, so I am currently sending this thing to do the contract bit of the job: So once I connect it to my mining ship, I will (a) gather 1150 ore from Ike, (b) have 1150 ore on my vessel, and (c) land 1150 ore on Duna. Hopefully...

Facepalm! Yes, quite. Stupidly didn't even occur to me when replying.

Well, give me a couple of years and I'm sure I'd happily pass you my "bring 2400 ore from Eve to Gilly" contract if I could. But please, don't twist the very clear points I was making. You do your stuff, you work on completing the contracts you have already accepted, and hey presto! a whole new slew of contracts have appeared while you were away. Nobody is suggesting you should obsessively consult mission control every 4 days just so that you don't miss the golden-egg-laying contract of your dreams. Career is a great way for beginning-to-middling players to feel rewarded for their efforts, stimulated into new enterprises and pushed beyond the basic fill-the-science-tree goal. And of course, some of those players won't appreciate it but prefer science/sandbox modes, and some will wish it was something completely different. However, I'm pretty sure that the ones who are most vocal critics of it are those who have already done all that and more, have pushed their value-for-money from buying the game down to about $0.05 an hour or less (maybe far less), and really shouldn't need the contract system to be providing the main focus for whatever they are doing. And in the meantime, the beginner-to-middling player should really have more than enough going on not to be constantly scouring the contract system for that rare lvl 30+ enchantment or whatever. So yes, of course the contract system could be improved, but I get the distinct feeling that some of the gripes expressed here are less about the contract system being bad, and more about wanting more content, period.

Surely the core can just use RCS without needing a gyroscope, no? However, I see the RCS thrusters are clipped into the solar panels. Could that be the source of the problem?

Testing decoupler at the launchpad is dead simple. But you might want to avoid doing it if you haven't unlocked the part yet - because you get to use it as often as you like UNTIL you complete the contract. But to do it? Attach a decoupler to a command pod. Launch. Right-click on the decoupler to "test" unless you are told to activate it in the staging sequence, in which case you put it in a stage by itself and activate. Done. Recover craft for 100% value. For the booster - if you're going too fast, just build a smaller rocket! Again it depends on whether it says to "test" or "activate", but basically put a pod and parachute then decoupler then your SRB (right-click in the VAB to set throttle at 30% or something) then decoupler then either a seriously under-throttled SRB or a couple of fuel tanks and Reliant + fins. If you've got to 600m/s at 30,000m then you're 99% there, just throttle down. For the SRB that just means right-click in the VAB. For your LF design there is really no excuse !

(1) Speak for yourself (2) Try to avoid doing (1) if thread contains multiple examples of (1) in exactly the same terms as (1).

I can't really agree with that, because I still found that the training missions taught me new things about the game, gave some pointers to ship design, and put me in a situation which I would have been incredibly frustrated with if I'd had to go through all the trouble of putting a ship up there to start with to try these skills out. So of course they will be offputting for some people, but not for me. They are flawed but with the exception of the parachute (which really should have been on a checklist of parts to scan for and update with the atmosphere changes) the flaws are things that you can work around without having to head for the wiki. For my part, I'm glad they are there and weren't just scrubbed while awaiting a fix.

Well, if you've got to the stage where you don't have other missions needing attention, more moons to explore, or new Eve return craft to test, all of which will involve quite a bit of warping before you even think about checking the contracts out, then to be fair I would say we're out of the realms of "I don't like the contracts" and more into the land of "I want an expansion pack".

Under MacOS, you need to press "Fn" to use the F1-F12 keys. Or you do as I do, go into System Preferences > Keyboard and check the box which says "Use all F1, F2 keys as standard function keys". Then press Fn when you want to change volume, brightness or whatever. IMO, that should be the default setting on a Mac. Be aware, though, that Alt-F1 might still never do what you actually want it to. Luckily KSP doesn't use that combination.

Well to be fair, the time you have to accept most contracts expires in about 4 days. So "eventually" isn't long at all.

Oh man, I didn't even know that this was a possibility. I've been killing myself trying to get bits of saved subassemblies to fit right, saving and resaving and reloading and switching. And shift-click on the bit you actually want of the unattached subtree works fantastically well. So there you go: it exists in my version since approximately 5 minutes ago

Neat! This is why I like this forum. I would never have dreamed of putting the service bay between the rocket and the fuel, for example. Just wouldn't have crossed my mind to do it that way. And I'm glad the bigger rover is fine after falling off the roof like that. Again, I would probably never have put myself in a position to risk it.

For the other tutorials: - To the Mun Part 1: Fine - I deliberately played this approximately while following the instructions. That gets you to the Mun fine enough, though without enough fuel to land since I wasn't being particularly efficient. - To the Mun Part 2: The instructions for leaving the Mun are a bit off - a 270° burn back to Kerbin SOI is really not the way to go, and the instructions afterwards to "ignore a Mun intercept" is poor: it should add "IF the intercept is after you pass Kerbin" because that 270° burn could easily put you ahead of the Mun rather than behind it, where you want to be. What you really should do is burn 90° (east) from the surface, get into a very low (9-10km) Mun orbit, then burn prograde as you start to approach that point of the orbit where you pass directly between the Mun and Kerbin. And the parachute is badly configured for 1.0.5 so you will die on splashdown: you need to raise the altitude to 1000 or 1500m - Asteroid Redirect 1: The instructions are not great. At that kind of distance you simply cannot configure a manouevre that will accurately intercept right at the edge of Kerbin SOI. Or if you do, your burn will never, ever stay exactly true to it. Since there is a Mun intercept on the next orbit, it is extremely difficult to set manouvre nodes properly since the slightest change makes enormous changes to the subsequent orbit, and the game keeps oscillating between orbits as it calculates the intercepts. The best way of doing Asteroid Redirect 1 therefore seems to be: get a very approximate intercept, warp about halfway and try to place a new manouvre node to improve the intercept. While setting the node, if the intercept starts getting close before disappearing, then go back to the point before it disappears, burn that node then delete the node and continue burning a touch more to get your path approximately to where it should have been if the intercept hadn't disappeared. Warp halfway again, rinse and repeat. The tutorial tells you much later to deploy your solar panels. You absolutely have to do this before leaving LKO because the ship steers like a cow with electricity, and like a dead cow without. If you use RCS to turn your ship anywhere near LKO, you'll completely change your trajectory, making all of your fine planning pointless. - Asteroid redirect 2: haven't tried it yet. The tutorial instructions in Asteroid Redirect 1 crashed as soon as I latched on to the asteroid, so I gave up.

Well, for the docking one, you were told in "orbital 101" that changing plane closer to the planet is expensive... but the tutorial tells you to change plane at the worst possible time. Also, if you do change plane at the Descending Node, you will have put yourself too far ahead of the target craft to be able to reach it within the next orbit. So basically, you either do as you're told and burn 400m/s to change plane, then wait an orbit or five and change orbit for about 300m/s. Or, you change plane at the Ascending Note for 350m/s, then about a third of an orbit later do your orbital transfer for 300m/s. This is the simple solution that the tutorial should be telling you to do. OR - smarter but NOT in the tutorial (and maybe a bit complicated for a beginner), you change orbit first at the Descending Node, then change plane when higher up. To do this you absolutely need to place two manouvre nodes at the same time. One at "DN" with a prograde burn, then at the higher "AN" to change plane to match the target. However, to get an intercept you actually need to burn a bit higher than the target orbit, because your first intercept (the only one marked for your transfer burn) will put you far ahead of the target. Since you are going higher, you will go slower than the target after that, and it'll catch up with you as you are on the way down AFTER the plane change. Once you've placed a manouvre node at the "AN" (now on the other side of the target orbit) and changed plane, you'll get a new intercept that should be a lot closer. I guessed roughly and plotted a 295m/s transfer (prograde) burn, and after the plane change that gave a 72km intercept with the target ahead of me. You need to bring that distance down. Since the target is ahead, I need to go faster, meaning I need to keep my orbit smaller, so my first transfer burn has to be less. Dragging my retrograde marker at the first node down to 291.2m/s gives me an intercept at 4.8km. Yay! However, doing that has necessarily changed the location of the plane change node, so I should really go back and fix it (even though it looks almost unchanged). And after deleting the second node, placing it exactly on "AN" and bringing the orbital inclination down to 0.0° again - my intercept is 2.7km! Double yay!! Total cost? 291m/s plus 199.8m/s . That means under 500m/s total instead of the 700m/s (and the long wait) that the tutorial proposed. There is a problem with this method though, which is that the second node will not update automatically while you are making a burn. So say at the end of the burn, you have 1.0 m/s still to do but if you burn, it starts heading back up again: stop! Delete the first node and click on the second one so that it updates. See where the intercept is. Burn a very small amount and click again, and again (or turn on RCS and use "H" for prograde or "N" for retrograde for finer control, but turn RCS off again afterwards) until the intercept is good. Then warp to the second node and change plane. Then you can delete the second node and click the next two "next" buttons in the tutorial. The tutorial asks you to burn precisely down to 0.0m/s. Forget that: just create a node anywhere, giving 0.0m/s, and click next. Now, you need to plan your intercept. Create a new manouvre node on the intercept point. Then pull on the radial out vector until your orbit is fully inside the target orbit, and the prograde to increase it until your orbits are virtually identical. It doesn't have to be deadly accurate, what you want is a ballpark figure for your change in velocity, and your burn time. This should end up giving you about 360m/s to match the orbit of the target, and a burn time of about 30s. Now - switch to your outside view and warp until you're about 2 minutes out. Go to target view like the tutorial says, and line up with the retrograde marker. If you properly set your manouvre node to match orbits, the blue marker should also be at almost exactly the same place. You'll also see the "anti-target" pink marker very close by - and hopefully getting closer. Since you know that you need 30s to match speeds, you can wait until the target is much closer - at 40s it'll be about 16km away - before burning hard to bring relative speed down to under 50m/s. while burning, delete the manouvre node by clicking on the "x" next to the countdown bar, and concentrate instead on the target velocity. When you're under 50m/s, the tutorial will let you click the "next" button. Your target ship will be anything from 5 to 12 km away (depending on how much nerve you had to wait before burning), The tutorial's next suggestion is absolutely insane. You do not want to use RCS to bring your speed down from 50m/s to zero. That is just madness. Also, you do not want to burn retrograde precisely because it'll just take years to manouvre close to your target. Instead, look at where the "anti-target" pink marker is compared to retrograde. Then point to about the same distance away on the other side of retrograde, like this: Now just use your engines, but gently. When you burn, the retrograde marker will shift away from where you're pointing, and move over the target marker. If you pointed the right way, the two markers will be more-or-less in the same place once you've lost half your speed relative to the target. Now warp forward for a while. You'll notice that the two markers (retrograde and anti-target) start to separate. Point to the other side of retrograde and burn again to align them. By now you should be going at around 10m/s towards the target, and it should be about 3 or 4 km way. NOW you do as the tutorial says. Point to retrograde, turn on RCS, use "H" to thrust, and get your speed down to 0.0 or 0.1m/s Then turn off RCS, turn around, turn on RCS again and thrust "H" towards the target until you're up to a few m/s. Of course, if you correctly followed all the instructions about pushing the retrograde marker directly onto the anti-target marker, then coming to a stop was a complete waste of time since you were heading directly to the target at about 10m/s anyway. But Gene Kerman insists and he's boss... Warp forward a bit. You will notice that again, the markers start to diverge. Now is the time to learn to use RCS properly. While pointing directly at the target, use the IJKL keys to move the prograde (yes, we've turned around so it's prograde now) marker around. The slower you are going, the greater the effect. Bring the prograde marker back over the target. Warp some more, correct again. You'll also notice that these corrections have slowed you down compared to the target. Yes - all of this is manouvering is hugely wasteful, but it can't be helped now. What we should have done at the outset was perfect our intercept, perfect our orbit-matching node, and burn when the target was much, much closer. Or not bother with an orbit-matching node and trust in our feeling about how much time we need, and match speeds in gentle stages by pushing retrograde over the anti-target marker and keeping it there until the target is right on us. Finally, for docking the tutorial gives very little help. Don't bother with docking mode: use IJKL and HN instead. Moving around a dead ship to get the docking ports aligned is a nightmare. Instead, switch to the other ship, right-click the docking port on it and choose "control from here". Then go to map view and click on the other ship and select it as target. Then move the ship until it is pointing the right way. Give a millisecond of warp to stop things from moving. Then switch back to your first ship and again, give a millisecond of warp. You should now have both docking ports pointing perfectly at each other and can use HN IJKL to move slowly up. Keep the prograde centred on the target marker. As you approach, the target may drift away from your "pointing" chevron. Don't try to realign with WASD - instead push the prograde slightly to the other side of the target marker. The effect of this will be to push the target marker back over your crosshairs - without adding an angle betwee your two ships' docking ports. So, yes, the docking tutorial doesn't really give the best instructions. If you follow them to the letter, you'll probably run out of fuel. On the other hand, though, it has to be said that finding out what the tutorial is doing wrong is also a great way of learning

Actually, docking ports make perfectly decent connectors, which you can release by right-clicking and then pushing the "decouple" button. I use and abuse them all the time, especially when I want to keep a docking port for later on top of my main ship and have some sort of single-use probe (which doesn't need one) on top. The arrangement below worked perfectly well for my Eve lander. The only problem is (a) it looks silly because the docking port isn't visibly connected to the heatshield, even though it is, and (b) the shroud on the heatshield stays magically connected to the main ship when the lander is released, but only for as long as the ship remains loaded (so after landing, I went back to the main ship and the shroud had disappeared).

From what I've understood from all the vids and comments, FAR was a "must-have" for serious players prior to 1.0.1. Since 1.0.1, and especially since 1.0.5 and the further tweaks to atmospheric behaviour, I feel that there is absolutely no expectation that a new-ish player will go straight to FAR. As a long-time demo player and new-ish buyer of the new game, I certainly didn't feel the need to change the atmosphere from stock. I may do in future, but I'm sure that the first mods I install will be to help timing missions and making rocket calculations, not make fundamental changes to gameplay.

Agreed with what Pecan said. There is no separator visible here. Assuming you don't have something clipping into the parts there, you would have to right-click the docking port and chose "decouple node" (or words to that effect). However there will be no significant decoupling force. Your rover will wobble on top of your command pod until gravity wins, at which point it will fall and maybe break. Rovers are not an easy option, because getting them on the gound the right way up and in one piece is hard. It's tempting to think of a rover as something that trundles off your lander, but that is probably the hardest thing to do. I did that early in career game but it was massively non-optimal. I'll try and dig up a pic of it so you can point and laugh... What is easier is to consider the rover to be the only thing that matters, and all the rest is sacrifical to it. So your final stage lander is basically just big enough to get the rover to 1m above the ground (at whatever angle) and then you cut the engine, tip the rover onto its wheels and abandon the rocket stage. With your current setup this isn't going to be very possible - you can't just tip the lander over and even if you did the rover would probably end up upside down. However, add a couple of puffs + monoprop or a droppable pair of oscar tanks and twitches to the sides of the rover (maybe with small reaction wheels too, so that CoM issues are less of a worry) and you'd be able to lift off the lander and drop the rover next to it.

The contextual menu is the menu you get when you right-click the part. There should be a "run test" button near the bottom of that contextual menu when you use the heat shield. If you don't see that button with the 1.25m heat shield, then that is another problem. Could you post a screenshot of the contextual menu for the heat shield in water?

I used to think that until someone told me it was flat-out wrong. Top-heavy is good and doesn't flip: it makes the nose droop towards the horizon maybe but it makes it fly like a dart. Bottom-heavy makes it flip because the momentum of the rear (engine + full fuel tanks) joins forces with the drag of the front, so it flips. Fuel usage in flight is from the top down, so the worst flipping time starts about half-way through a stage, especially if you have a draggy top.

I think you are underestimating the kudos gained by the chief scientist at R&D when he receives the report book containing the original temperature logs and struts around the lab with it. And the loathing and back-stabbing competitive drive that it instills in everybody else who just get the computer printouts

I think you're reading it wrong. You do not need anything to be manned. You *need* your vessel to be manned to qualify for certain base and station contracts (but very few, actually, most just ask you to get the facility there and don't care if it's staffed). Plant flag obviously needs a Kerbal. Rescues most definitely don't need you to send a kerbal to pick up another - you just need to get a controlled vessel close enough to switch to the rescued Kerbal. Crew reports need a kerbal on board, so if you get a contract for a survey you need to do it in person. Tourists are Kerbals. And some world firsts are things like stepping foot on another moon or planet - and that foot is generally attached to the Kerbal. So the common theme is that to get credit for all of these things, or to get them to work, a Kerbal is necessarily involved. Any other unmanned flights are just that: unmanned flights that may or may not qualify for progress. I'm prettry sure that the "fly by a new planet" world first can just as well be done by a machine.

Oh - so I forgot you can't load craft into the demo... OK, well it's parachute, pod with batteries, stack separator, fuel tank with solar panels, two decouplers with the fuel tank and another beneath that with landing legs + fuel line Then in the middle it's four tanks, set of 4 fins, reliant, decouplers in 2x symmetry both ways, 4 fuel tanks + reliant on each side, asparagus lines, and SRB set at 54% (I think) boost with one and a half tanks above, asparagus lines to the side tanks. I say one and a half because I think that I changed that just before setting off. So yes, it was supposed to be droppable tanks on takeoff. Ascent profile: aggressive. Full power start, turn a few degrees right off the launchpad. Enable prograde SAS. Thrust down to 2/3 at about 140m/s until the SRBs are dropped. The speed will still pick up to well over 200m/s by then. Then correct angle to about 50-60° while throttling up to 100%. Keep prograde assist on but keep pushing it down towards the horizon if it doesnt go on its own. You should be able to get up to 70km with some of the main stage left, with 800m/s or so circularisation still to go on the final stage. I'm sure it could be done better still, maybe even enough to get off the Mun...

In fact, from the pic there of me sitting on the ground at Minmus, I actually should have (maybe) got all the way back but I forgot that I designed the landing-leg tanks to be droppable. So I took them back to eternal Kerbin orbit too... Facepalm etc. This was the April / May 2015 demo. And this should be the correct craft file for the ship.

Aha! That is a rather more specific description than I have managed to give, for what sounds very like what I experienced. I don't really recall that there was no visible patched conic when I switched (via double or triple click) in map view and lost my contracts, but it's a distinct possibility since map view was playing up (I do remember finding it impossible to place manouvre nodes at the time).