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bewing

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Everything posted by bewing

  1. Yes, interplanetary transfers are always extremely finicky for the intercept. Really, all you can do during your initial transfer burn is to get any intercept at all. You always need a mid-course correction. That is always still fiddly, but it's doable to get a nice low Pe that minimizes your capture burn. For duna, it's fine to even lower your Pe all the way down into the atmosphere -- it's thin enough that there are no heat issues.
  2. LAN and Arg PE are Keplerian Orbital Elements: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_elements You don't actually need those numbers for anything in KSP. They are only there for completeness. Phase angles and Ejection angles are described very well here: https://ksp.olex.biz/ You do need the ejection angle when setting up an interplanetary transfer burn.
  3. Nodes have arrows going in, and arrows going out. You draw a connection between the arrows just by clicking and dragging your cursor from one arrow to another. That creates a white line. Once you have a line drawn, you can click on it again and you will get a color palette. You can change the colors of each line to be anything you want. The colors are meaningless (except maybe to the person who created the mission).
  4. Basically, you can't. At least not directly. Partly it depends on your atmospheric maneuverability. Let's say you can adjust your reentry by 10km to each side -- by either thrusting, using aerodynamic control surfaces, or adjusting the timing of your reentry. Let's say you can manage to complete one full Kerbin orbit during your reentry. So that gives you a 20km-wide strip around the planet. If there's a runway in there, you can land on it, but your odds are basically zero. Or maybe you can aerobrake into a permanent inclined Kerbin orbit. You're still orbiting once every 30 minutes, which gives you 12 orbits a day, and still your odds of flying directly over a runway are bad. So pretty much the only thing you can do is to increase your horizontal range on your RV. To be guaranteed to be able to land on a point, you need to have a lateral traverse range of a minimum of about 75km. And then you need to aerobrake into orbit, and wait for that point to be on your orbital path.
  5. Well, there are a dozen or so possible testable conditions, each with their own special type of logic node. If the condition that you want to test doesn't fall neatly into a pre-assigned category, then you have to use a lot of cleverness to make one (or a combination of more than one) do the same job. In a perfect world where you could test any condition you wanted, what would your condition be?
  6. By "logic connections", do you mean testing a condition? Or do you just mean "this node leads to that node"?
  7. The direct antennas don't help at all. They don't mix with relay antennas, and cannot bounce signals. They only provide control for the current craft. So all you have is 9 100G relays. That gets you a relay antenna signal power for the satellite of 100G * 9 ^ .75 = 520 G. There is a "range modifier" in your settings that gets multiplied into the range calculation, which is the square root thing, which depends on the antenna of the probe craft.
  8. As I recall, the last time I did the full comparison the Tailfin is superior to everything else. You don't need a lifting surface at the back end. You need control surface area.
  9. If you want to be really super clever about it, there is one special point in your orbit (one of the two crossing points between the orbits), where you can complete your contract instantly with just one minimum cost burn.
  10. All the above answers are right about the Mun. But to answer your exact question: when you are looking at contracts to accept, each contract has one to three stars on it. The number of stars represents a relative "difficulty level", compared to other contracts of the same type. So a "one star" contract is very forgiving, while a "3 star" contract is very strict.
  11. The easiest place to get the "Landed at KSC" minibiome is parallel and next to the Runway. Basically, go off the Runway down to the lower grass, and you'll probably be in the KSC minibiome. If not, then get a little further from the Runway. You can easily do this by creating a craft that rolls on its side. Even a command module plus an empty flea booster can roll far enough to get off the Runway, if you launch it to the Runway.
  12. KSP has reflectivity turned off in flight mode for performance reasons.
  13. Yeah, autostrut just the main engine at the center, at the bottom, to the "root part". That'll wipe out pretty much all the wobbling.
  14. Separators and decouplers give off a puff of smoke when they activate. It's just a visual effect.
  15. The truss structure isn't supposed to disappear until everything detaches from it. You still have a decoupler attached to it, therefore it will not disappear. Either use a stack separator, or turn your decoupler around. Additionally, the truss structure is just decorative. Your satellites can fly right through it.
  16. You can calculate it by hand fairly quickly using the vis viva equation.
  17. "Supposed" is too strong a word. Sometimes it helps a bit. But sometimes it's fun to have a plane with a tighter turning radius when taxiing.
  18. Well, you can either roleplay this game, and make up your own backstory, and then send your brave kerbals out to manifest their destiny -- or, if that sounds like too much work, you can start a career mode game to give yourself some random targets to shoot at. But it mostly sounds like you've got the basic orbital mechanics of the game down pretty well. Rovers will be a small challenge for you. Airplanes will be a medium-sized challenge. Spaceplanes are a huge painful challenge. Flying kerbals around in orbit in their EVA suits is a medium-sized challenge -- especially flying distances of 10km+ between ships. Rendezvous between craft in fast eccentric orbits is a big mental challenge.
  19. The issue will be that reaction wheels use up an immense amount of electricity, and your rover will be drained after going a few hundred meters. On rovers, you really only want to use the reaction wheels in an emergency (your rover is flipping through the vacuum, and you need it to land back on its wheels).
  20. Are you sure it's to the right? They almost always pull to the left. In any case, the problem of 'veering' is so common with planes that it's on the FAQ in this forum. There are many possible causes that all have the same symptom, but as far as I'm concerned, the most common issue and fix is something I call "ground drag". To achieve passive directional stability, you want low drag at the front of your vehicle, and high drag at the back -- no matter whether we are talking about rockets in the atmosphere, or cars on the ground. The most likely problem is that your front landing gear has too much friction with the ground. The fix is to change the friction on your front gear to "manual" and then reduce the value to .5 or less.
  21. No, it's probably not the symmetry, it's almost certainly a reaction wheel somewhere on the craft generating torque. In the default setting, the reaction wheels and the rover wheels use the same keys. For the rover wheels, the keys mean "forward, reverse, turn left, turn right". And for the reaction wheels, the keys mean "tilt forward, tilt back, tilt left, and tilt right." So whenever you push a key to try to make your rover go in some direction, it also tilts at the same time. The easiest thing to do is to go into your settings, and remap the rover controls. You can use the keypad, or the arrow keys, or anything -- just as long as they are not mapped to the same keys as your reaction wheels.
  22. To merge a ship, the craft that is being merged *must* have an open node, and the part with the open node must be set as the root of the craft.
  23. "Merge" mode has a lot of limitations. I think the answer is basically that you want to turn the satellite into a subassembly, from being a merged craft. I'm sure there are multiple ways of doing that, but my suggestion would be just to look for an open node on your generation ship's centerline. Merge the satellite, and attach it to the node. That will turn off "merge"mode. Then detach the satellite, and now it's a subassembly, and you should be able to attach it radially, onto any radial attachment point.
  24. Another thing that can cause rovers not to move is if the probe core is in the wrong orientation. Please look at your navball when you put the rover on the runway. Is the heading 90 degrees, with the blue part of the navball up?
  25. For stock KSP, aerodynamic lift has a very simple model. There is no way to reduce drag. For the first few degrees of attack angle, drag increases very slowly, up to about 5 degrees, where you get maximum lift. You get rapidly increasing drag, but slowly increasing lift up to 10 degrees. From 10 to 30 degrees, you still get increasing lift, but drag increases extremely fast. At 30 degrees, your wing stalls and lift falls to zero rapidly over the next 10 degrees of AoA. The amount of wing that you need depends completely on your ascent profile, which varies tremendously between players. All wings are identical for lift/drag. The basic swept wing, however, weighs twice as much as any other wing per unit area. The BigS and FatS wings can additionally store fuel. The FatS wings have very low heat tolerance, however, and tend to explode when used in a spaceplane unless you are extremely careful. Sorry I can't help with supersized planes. My biggest spaceplanes tend to be around 40 tonnes.
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