suicidejunkie

Switch view modes to ANYTHING other than auto. The last thing you need when flying EVA is for your camera to spin around wildly because you just technically went suborbital! You may need chase or orbital mode to get allow the kerbal to orient in a direction they can grab the ladder from, but you can press 'v' only when appropriate. Set the nav ball to target mode, and watch the prograde marker; stay on target Also keep the speed down. 10m/s is plenty fast for a long range cruise, up close you will want to keep it below 2m/s, and under 0.5 when hoping to grab a ladder. Whenever you're not looking at the navball alone, the key thing is to put your mind in the Kerbal's head. 'A' means accelerating to THEIR left, not yours, and shift is towards their helmet.

So far, what I'm hearing is: 1) Visit the Grand Canyon! 2) Roughly Mun sized, so pretty easy to land and return on. 3) Bit expensive transfer and capture costs due to lack of atmosphere, but lots of asteroids around for cheap and easy ISRU probably. 4) Fewer transfer windows due to being relatively close. Aside from the calorie-free whoohoos, what would you put on the postcards to really encourage people to visit?

With EPl and KAS, it would make a good tinkering project while between launch windows.

This might help show the tour. All the southern relay nodes were built in situ by Bill while driving by (They're composed of just a Hex, a battery, a 3x2 solar and an omni antenna. Plus a DTS dish for the south pole one) They're omni-linking through the ore scansat at the moment, and the surface mesh network lines are all underground. The overlapped rover and debris icon on the right side is where Bill left half the rover behind. PS Edit: Here is the rover operating as originally intended (hauling huge things across the flats). Jeb's bootlegger turns and miscellaneous antics not included.

Internet went down last night just after posting, it should be working now. It may help to know that I didn't realize it would be a full circumnavigation at the start, so it is a bit thin on the pictures. The numbered captions go with the pictures, and it looks like they're in proper sequence this morning. Should start with the intact rover with a 909 on top.

I happened to be sending a truck around Minmus to deliver a new LV-909 engine to Bill, and realized that it would be the same distance to Elcano the trip, so here's the story! All stock parts except for the TAC-LS tank, and for the second half of the trip, some KIS containers. The truck was built on Minmus, but it did do the most important job of circumnavigating. 1) Bill had been stranded on the far side of Minmus with a broken hopper after landing a bit to hard and lithobreaking the engine into dust, so the truck was loaded up with a spare 909 to deliver. The truck was initially intended to haul heavy loads short distances from the EP foundry to their final destinations, hence the mounting points and the extra seating for assembly workers. For this trip, I had an extra 3x2 solar panel bolted on to the back to keep the engine running all day. 2) Lannand Kerman took the first shift, and headed north over the great flats, picking up speed for the hill climbing to follow. There is a reasonably gentle slope at the north end, so he didn't have any trouble, and made a good distance before having to retire early to allow some other ships to maneuver. 3) After a late start the next day, some easy travel over the flat highlands brought Bill's damaged craft nearly in sight. (image is from the next morning) 4) As the sun was rising, Lannand came to a tough hill, but by using the gyro to put all the weight on one wheel for maximum traction, and doing some switchbacks he was able to make it up. 5,6) Halfway around the moon from the start, Bill installed the 909 on the broken hopper (seen right), and replaced it with two containers full of the probe cores and relay equipment he was originally here to install (taken from the carrier in the background left). Lannand then took the hopper back to base to be recycled, and Bill continued the tour. 7) On his way south Bill took the opportunity to deploy relay stations. This one is the south pole relay with a DTS antenna for the long range link to a matching relay on Kerbin's north pole. 8) After dropping the last probe core to form a solid remotetech radio ring from north to south and guaranteeing uninterrupted comms to KSC, Bill found himself without any cruise control. 9) He shortly found himself without half the rover as well. 10) Crawling over the Great Flats again, at a measly 7m/s. By pure coincidence, it was almost stable. 11) The great flats factory base is finally in sight. 12) A relieved Bill Kerman parks the rover as best he can. 50%+1 parts left intact after making the tour!

Consider the case of asteroid mining. You dig up some ore, process it into LFO, and 20% of that to power the whole process with fuel cells. At the end of the operation, you have gone from 100 tons of resources in the asteroid to 80 tons of fuel and 20 tons of "lost" mass which was converted to energy in the fuel plus waste heat. The only difference when on a planet is that the planet doesn't lose mass because it isn't worth tracking such small fractions.

I had an "8k GIC" design that I'd leave on the runway while launching rockets from the pad. Really wasn't worth the hassle of launching, setting a KAC timer and then recovering it 3 hours later, for some piddling amount of funds even on hard settings.

You can make it notably better by having just a single engine set on the top of the rocket (a pair of thuds for example, or LV-Ns on arms), and then dropping only fuel tanks and separators, never engines. If you throw in an engineer with a KAS tool, you don't even need the separators!

Or launch another ship with a large ISRU and a claw. Claw it on temporarily, take the money, then disconnect and ditch it.

Mount the Thumpers to the side of a stack decoupler? Burn off the boosters with the jet wash of the 2nd stage?

I find this interesting. It all seemed very familiar, except for the differing conclusion regarding career vs sandbox. I think it might be that lately I've just used career mode to generate rescuees, show a tech progression, and track a score in terms of kerbal XP and milestones. I haven't had a need to explicitly force accidents to make things 'interesting' for the kerbals, since I've just been flying wild frontier space cowboy designs and eschewing probe cores (AIs are not allowed to be wired to something with reaction drives (anti-skynet pilot's union rule), and other than the Fantastic Four all crew are rescued from space). Current lander tips over every time, except on minmus flats, but I haven't bothered to redesign it. All mun landings are instead simply flown by engineers who can KAS it around into its own unique rescue ship, and Minmus is small enough to stand the ship back up as needed. Space cowboy management + TAC + KAS keeps things lively enough for me (Only 5 dead kerbals despite at least 15 'incidents'), and even on hard, funding isn't an issue; rescues and milestones and stage recovery fund the whole program.

It wasn't fuel per se, but I had a moonbus carrying 5 Kerbals to Minmus. The main rockomax sized lifesupport tank had been swapped out for a food-only container to top up the non-renewable resources on the colony, and then at the last minute the seats were packed to bring more engineers to help with industry. However 35 days of supplies in the small LS tank divided by 5 Kerbals = NOT ENOUGH for a Minmus trip. I got the low water notice (4h and counting) while they were 3 days out from the minmus intercept, and the oxygen supply was only a few minutes behind it (thanks to Kerbin's breathable atmosphere during the start of the launch) There was lots of fuel on the bus, since it is designed to go to the surface and return to Kerbin on one stage, so I spent 800m/s to blitz for Minmus and reach an SOI intercept with 15 minutes to spare. Unfortunately, it would take a bit longer than that to reach PE, the speed at PE would be over 1100m/s, and I'd spent half my dV budget already; without assistance the bus would be going into a Kerbol orbit shortly after the crew died. With under 3 hours to go, Bill at the Minmus colony started assembling a rescue ship. Using a LFO hopper as the base, he bolted on two extra 400 tanks to the top of the 3-way symmetry 100 tanks, giving it a lopsided 9.5 tons of fuel storage, and pumped the colony dry to fill it. (I couldn't add the third tank without blocking the capsule's entrance door) Adding a supply canister for water and air, and making sure to pack the power screwdriver, he then had to wait nervously for the launch window. The final rescue involved eyeballing a suborbital hop that would leave him hovering in the path of the hurtling bus, and then struggling to maintain attitude control with just a gimballing 909 and the capsule gyro during the entire flight. The Bus used its remaining fuel to decelerate as best it could before contact (a good 900m/s all told), and then Bill had to rush towards it and match escape trajectories. Flying across on the jetpack, he slapped down the can of air with just 9 minutes left on the clock, giving them all a good 3 days more to live. The rest of the rescue mission went quite smoothly; docking the rescue ship to the bus' nose and then doing a joint landing on the flats next to the colony using the extra fuel delivered.

In other words; aerobrake it, land it, and then launch it back in to orbit, and you can call it whatever you like.

Put a giant laser on it, then you'll know for sure. "That's no moon!"

My stations are quite small, so I reorient them to line up the docking ports with the incoming ship to save fuel. For larger stations here's an idea; Make a docking arm with IR articulated joints and a klaw. Then you can reach over and grab the ship, then pull it around to the dock. Or for short visits, just put the docking port on the arm, and bring the dock to the ship.

Is there any way to abandon a construction that's partly done, rather than going through a lengthy teardown? I've gotten two hours into a project and I want to just pitch it to start something different; loss of all the invested resources is very acceptable at this point.

Mün being tidally locked means you can't wait for Kerbin to be overhead, because if it isn't overhead now, it never will be. Additionally, you don't want Kerbin to be overhead, but on the western Horizon. If you've landed on the eastern side of Mün, then Kerbin will be to the west, and straight up will be directly against the Mün's orbital velocity. In this case, burning straight up in one blast is best, and you can do the entire return burn very close to the surface, for a discount of 10-20% over going to orbit first. Anywhere else, you need to go to orbit first so that you can boost in the right direction without impacting the surface.

I can always spare the ~50m/s needed for a normal burn to course correct to Minmus a day or two out from Kerbin. Unless Mün is in the way, it works great, and I just do the transfer burn on the first orbit of Kerbin.

They were still in flight towards Minmus. Just over 5 days after launch, started with 6 days of supplies for an 8 day trip. Bill had some fun with the lopsided rescue vehicle. It originally had 3-way symmetry with T100 tanks, and two of those three had T400 tanks bolted to the top. (Third one was left bare so the capsule was not blocked) Limited to half throttle to avoid a spinout, but being Minmus that was still about 8.0 TWR. Bill popped up to an AP along the bus' flight path, the bus did its braking down from 1200m/s, but had to cut thrust early to keep enough speed to reach Bill in time. Bill then burned for rendezvous, almost overshot, but came to a halt 250m away, and bolted the lifesupport can on with 9 minutes left on the clock. With 15 minutes until PE, Bill then bolted on a docking port, and made a hard dock using just the 909 on a lopsided ship. Fuel transferred, the bus was then able to make an easy descent to the Great Flats. Bill then detatched the rescue ship from the top of the bus and tipped off towards the surface; first wondering why the throttle wasn't working, then trying to enable the engine, and then realizing the fuel was still locked out before a jarring bounce on the landing gear marked a successful landing. The engineers were delivered, base expansion contracts fulfilled, and the Minmus economy continues to expand. Within a few days, water production will begin, although it will be a far cry from the demands of the growing population.

Today I got a notice that Min-bus was low on water. 4h30m on the clock. Turns out 31 days of supplies +2years of snacks vs 5 kerbals on a minmus trip does not add up. At the moment I've burned 800m/s to hit minmus PE in just over 4 hours, with 750 out of the 1100dV required to make orbit. Bill, meanwhile is scavenging parts, fuel and supplies from the Minmus base to make a rescue ship. So far it looks like he's got 3000dV to catch, resupply and return, but the timing will be tight and the navigation will be tricky.

One thing to note is that you've just landed close to a mining rig, and therefore fuel is unlimited and free. Adjust your throttle to get 1TWR, hover, and tip slightly towards the mining rig before going back to vertical. Let your ship hover slowly over and then set it back down. Take your time. If you burn 1000 units of fuel, no biggie, the mining station has lots more where that came from Just have a rover with a fuel tank on the back to provide enough fuel to hover over in case of dry landings.

It sounds like you want something to keep the airlock part half full, by doing crew transfers in or out of the main seating part, which would then allow you to EVA a whole stream of Kerbals and reboard them? If you don't care about which Kerbals get off in what order, and the airlock has a capacity of at least two then that doesn't sound too complicated to automate, but you'd still run into fun when the pilot is the last one on board and keeps moving to stand in the airlock instead of flying the plane.

Try setting timewarp on at 5x to lock it into rails. Alternatively, what about a single-part craft? Plot the course out from a piece of debris, so it has no structural/collision physics to jitter the orbit.

Once you've put your first satellite in orbit, you can make a chain of maneuver nodes off of it to trace a path wherever you like and see the individual costs of each burn by hovering your mouse over them. As long as you have at least one node for every two or three SoI changes, the path will keep going. What is the extra feature you're looking for beyond that?