DD_bwest

one science source alot of people forget is that every biome has a corresponding biome in low orbit that you can grab EVA reports from. also every biome can have a thermo do it in low atmospheric flight, so if you have a thermo on the way down, getting results just before you touch down hill give an opportunity to grab more results. if you can get to the muns sphere of influence, and can atleast get into orbit, then there at 17 eva biomes in low orbit worth 12 a piece. get a surface sample from every spot you ever land, you can also go around the space center doing the same. if you can build a "car" of some sort, you can even go around and get science reports from the tests you can do. if you can get to the mun, getting into orbit around minmus isnt that much harder, and has 9 biomes for low orbit eva's plus all the other science you can get from doing both low and high orbit you can also leave kerbin and come back. time a burn that sends you out of kerbin either retro or prograde, grab the science the second you change SOI's, then burn the opposite way and head back into kerbin edit: i bolded what i think are the better sources, as they will increase skill while grabbing them

adding fuel to that second stage will help you a ton. its underutilized with that much fuel

you just dont have enough delta V. im still getting a higher TWR than what you say though. your 2nd stage could easily get more, i would double the fuel for it. and add 50% more fuel to the lower main stage, and add 50% more fuel to your boosters. then maybe add an extra set of boosters to the lowest stage if your TWR falls to low, but im pretty sure you wont have that problem. Adding fuel lines to crossfeed the fuel from your boosters to the main tank will also get you a bit more out of it.

whats your payload? ive been putting it together in my vab and with just a command pod and mine is considerably lighter than 70 tons. it has a pretty high twr, but just barely enough delta v.

How familiar are you to the terms TWR and DeltaV? (basically how fast you can accelerate, and how much velocity change you can get out of your fuel) the 2.5m parts work the exact some way the smaller parts do, they just have different weight and thrust values. do you have a picture of the rocket your trying to get in orbit?

if you do things right(this means targeting things properly and lining things up), you dont really need visuals of what is actually happening unless you have built your space station in a way that it needs to "dodge" part of the station on its way to the port, or if it doesnt have attitude control. He asked " How does Kerbal know the orientation of my craft to differentiate left/right/up/down? Wouldnt it need to know a specific point on the craft in order to base directions off of that? " with the answer being the Navball. Learning how to fly using the navball is perhaps one of the more important things to learn.

land back on kerbin as for if splashing down counts, i cant think of a time where ive ran into it not counting, so maybe ive been lucky or they fixed that.

if you fly by your navball, you wont have issues. no fiddling with cameras, you can even dock while in map view. next time you get to that point for docking. look at your navball and ignore looking at your actual craft. you will see how the translation controls will move your prograde around. each button will always correspond to the same direction on the navball. with your target being the docking port, once you aim at it in the navball (pink target marker) all you gotta do is put your prograde directly ontop of it.

what kryxal said is the way to go. try your best to get your PE to be roughly the same spot as your AN/DN, so that when you capture and leave a highly eccentric orbit you'll have a node close to your AP for a cheap inclination change

how long do you have to complete it? just wondering how much time you have for using gravity boosts or even heading to the far reaches of the suns SOI either way this contract will take a large amount of deltav and a good amount of time edit: also i would probably go nuclear, cause at that distance from the sun power isnt as easy to come by

when everything connected to it is detached. So if you take a separator and place it on one of the upper nodes, it will create those truss segments to support it. and you can place stuff still under it to the lowest node. Those truss segments will stay there until that separator is detached(even after you jettison the actual fairings), at which point they vanish into subspace lol this means that if you use a regular decoupler, when you detach the upper part leaving the decoupler behind, the truss segments will still be there, possibly blocker anything under it you might want to get at. one thing you can do is hop into a sandbox, and just attach things randomly to see how it plays out, then when you launch use alt-f12 to cheat yourself into orbit and see how they work

If you want, u can use them the old way for a simple payload, you dont HAVE to turn off the extra nodes(done in part tweaking) but it does make it easier to place. But what the extra nodes allow you do do is use them as an interstage fairing/adapter for either upper stage engine layouts that might need it, or stacking probes/relays ontop of eachother. or even stuffing a lander below a command stage so that you can turn around and dock with it apollo style. something of note though, the truss segments only go away when everything attached to them is disconnected, so you gotta use seperators or upside down decouplers

okays, if not you could try essentially the same by saving the unattached part as a subassembly. then click new vessel to start fresh, choose the probe core and reattach the subassembly

hmm not sure if this works but try rerooting to the probe core, then select everything but the core to seperate the entire vehicle from that core. then delete the probe core, select a new one and reattach the rest of the vehicle. it may change the base part.

thanx thats more to chew on. is the reason the RS-25 gets such high ISP in vac, because it use hydrogen instead of kerosine?

i havent gone thru real life stats, i was just basing it on all the high isp engines in the real world booster pack. i guess ksp is around the low end of things and the main difference is part mass. i learned more today lol

in real life earth is ten times the size of kerbin. i believe the units of measurement in game are off and im pretty sure RL rocket engines get better ISP than kerbal rockets because kerbal rockets were adjusted for kerbin and gameplay. alot of the engines in the real life boosters mod get pretty decent ISP, and tend to be OP if your using them for stock kerbin. i could be wrong tho as for realism overhaul, its been way to long since ive used it to remeber specifics as to what it does

i use 1.3 for lift off. .8ish for the orbital insertion and the transfer burn stage. i like a higher twr for landing, which isnt to hard. i think the sparks are the best engine for mun shots. i like a twr around 4ish also you can always make a sandbox save and test the rocket there before bringing it to the real thing lol think of it as a computer simulation test

lotsa good info in here. stage that beast is probably the best. your hauling way to much useless weight to orbit otherwise. getting to orbit can be done on the second launch of career. you just need the swivel and decouplers. also the twr is way higher than what is needed

what i do to launch to the right inclination is to launch with the orbit marker directly above and the command vessel ahead of your position, boost up briefly then aim directly at the target with sas for a sec, this will put your prograde practically in the same inclination, then just follow that intol orbit. put yourself in a 30km or a 40km orbit and match inclinations at the nearest an/dn to put it spot on. now follow normal rendezvous steps to wait until its coming up behind, create a node to lower your pe to intercept, and slide its timing until you get a good one. unless your playing to max realism and dont want your kerbals waiting around orbit for a while, exact positioning isnt all that important, just matching inclination.

yup, mission control enables manuever nodes, the tracking statiom turns your orbit line blue and shows encounters etc they both need to be upgraded just once for them

by shaking, do you mean a wobble where your ship is partly like a wet noodle? this is often caused by sas over correcting itself, and limiting engine vectoring can help reduce it. getting a gravity turn right can be a real challenge, and takes some experience to be able to tell how much your initial tip should be given your TWR, and to tell how good your trajectory is early enough that you can take some decent corrective action. if your really having trouble getting into orbit, sometimes its just easier to over build and fly up well over the thick atmosphere before you start to turn. and as for COM problems, should it be the case, If you turn on advanced tweakables, you are able to pick the order the tanks drain in, so you can make them drain bottom up. this will move your COM forward during flight, thus increase your stability

so are you in need of cash to finish the contracts? or are you worried about the rep hit for not finishing them?

the contract orbit on the map view should be "spinning" in a way, depicting the direction of travel. a certain part is thicker and more bold than the rest and it moves around the orbit marker and i think the term your looking for is a retrograde orbit, as its counter to the bodies rotational direction

the highest feature is 7km if i remember right. 15km is certainly safe and provides you more time to cut your horizontal velocity if your lander is low TWR. unless they added a new mountain that im forgetting lol