Aegolius13

How sharp is your turn? Are you doing a degree or two pitchover at the start, or shifting 90 degrees in one go? What size decoupler are you using? If it's a tiny one, it might be getting overwhelmed. How is the clearance between the payload and the fairing? If something collides into the fairing, bad stuff can happen, though I wouldn't expect the fairing base to fall off. You might want to try autostruts. E.g., autostrut the fairing base to the heaviest part (which will probably be something in the booster), and autostrut something in the booster to the root part (which should be in the plane). A screenshot would also help diagnose the issue.

Further further to the comms issue, I think on the hardest settings, there's a gap between groundstations during the standard ascent. This can be dealt with by building a set of relays around Kerbin. But if you never get signal at all, it's probably not this. Alternate idea - you could make sure you're not running out of electricity for some strange reason. I believe dead probe cores show lack of signal. This seems quite unlikely with batteries and an engine alternator going, but could be a bug or something. The pods/cores come with a built-in lousy 5k antenna. It's not good for much, but it should have no problem picking up a signal right at KSC.

Hi, and welcome aboard! Do you mean the Hitchhiker module? It should have usable hatches. If you aren't close enough to the target (2km I think), you're not even able to focus on the craft, but it sounds like you're past that point. You could try both clicking on the portrait, and left-clicking on a hatch, and see if one works for an EVA. I can't think of any part on a Kerbal rescue contract that isn't supposed to let you EVA the Kerbal. Sometimes on missions where you have to recover the craft as well, you need to use the Klaw to grab the other ship. You shouldn't need that here, but I suppose you could try it as a workaround.

You only get refunds for stuff you manually recover. And as noted, parts generally disappear when left unsupervised in atmosphere. So in stock / typical gameplay,* there's no reason other than roleplaying for putting parachutes on boosters. However, you might be interested in the "Stage Recovery" mod. I haven't used it myself, but I believe it does exactly what you're referring to -- provides funds for decoupled but "survivable" stages. *In some cases, you can do some fairly convoluted switching between craft to get stuff to survive, but it doesn't happen during a typical launch with focus on the main craft.

If your station has enough fuel, another way to do this would be: 1) Before separating, do a retrograde burn, just enough so that the entire craft is on a deorbit trajectory. Might as well use the thruster module's engine/fuel for this. 2) Rotate so that the station module is facing the prograde/forward direction. 3) Decouple the thruster module. 4) Use the station's propulsion to burn prograde and put it back into the desired orbit. I can't see if you have a full engine on the station, but even the RCS blocks shoud be able to do this in plenty of time.

Getting to the Eve system is quite easy, with only about 1,000 m/s burn required. Once you get there, though, you have to either aerobrake (which gets very hot) or put up with a fairly hefty burn to get into low orbit (the map says 1,300 m/s). I usually just go for the latter, since it takes a bit of complexity over what is already a complicated mission. The orbiter shouldn't take anything special, particularly if you elect not to aerobrake. The lander, however, has a number of challenges just getting to the surface: The first is the massive reentry heat. Anything not protected by a heat shield is as good as dead. The second issue is aerodynamic stability once you hit the thicker atmosphere. Since heat shields tend to be very draggy, flipping is very common, and normal countermeasures like RCS can easily be overwhelmed. Many people solve this by putting some inflatable heat shields at the back of the craft, just to add drag. The new robotics parts may have opened some options for homemade airbrakes here. It also helps to transfer any available fuel to the forward-facing end of the ship. The third issue is getting your ship ready to land, which means getting oriented right, ditching the heat shield, and getting chutes to deploy. You may find that when you detach a heat shield, it flies up an into your ship (since the shield is much lighter/draggier than the rest of the ship). There are various ways of dealing with this, like using separatrons or similar to dislodge it, or dropping the heat shield while it's facing sideways or up. Oh, and chutes tend to get glitchy on Eve. In particular I'd be leery of saving while your chutes are out. Trying to load that save may cause... problems. The fourth issue is landing your ship in one piece. You pretty much have to hope for a landing site that's flat-ish, though the more stable your lander is built, the less of a big deal this is. The high gravity and heavy masses involved have a habit of breaking landing legs. Options here are to include extra legs in case some break, design very sturdy legs (looks like you're on this), and/or use engines to soften the landing as much as possible. And then once you're landed, if you want to plant a flag and all that, you'll need a way to get your Kerbal to ground and back. Many people like to put a small crew module at the bottom of the lander so the kerbal can be transferred close to ground. . It's common to put everything not needed for the ascent (chutes, landing legs, Kerbal egress, etc) on decouplers and drop it before taking off. Ladders are not recommended unless you ditch them before takeoff, since they're very draggy ----------- With all that, you'll likely be starting out with a large, convoluted package on the launchpad, but it's still essentially a regular launch. Strategic use of fairings may help with aerodynamic and heat issues. One thing I like to do -- a typical Eve lander (including yours) tends to have some very powerful, efficient engines packed on it. I like to put those engines to work on the Kerbin launch and/or transfer to Eve, with detachable fuel tanks, instead of separate engines from those stages. This can avoid even more size and complexity, but it can require some unusual designs.

Huh? Are you looking for ideas on how to get these things into Kerbin orbit? Or how to get from there to Eve orbit, or both?

You wouldn't have to put engines on the round adapter itself; if you have any surface on the the ship with parallel sides, that would work. But if all you have to work with is curved sides, then yeah, this would not keep you stationary.

You could include two engines or thrusters pointing in opposite directions. Firing them both would use fuel but not move you.

Nope, unless I'm looking to specifically do one for a challenge. I find that generally they're not worth the time spent (both my time and in-game time), or the legwork to get just right. For example, in a good window you can do an LKO to Jool transfer burn at about 2,000 m/s. Going from Kerbin to Eve, just to start the gravity assist process, is at least 1,000 m/s. So the savings (is going to be under 1,000 m/s, and could be substantially less than that depending on how many correction burns are needed. The one exception is to capture around the Jool system - I almost always do a "reverse" assist around Tylo or Laythe. These are not nearly as picky, don't take much in-game time, and can save at least a few hundred m/s. Honestly, I'd suggest mastering regular maneuvers before look at gravity assists as a way to save (other than the Jool moons as mentioned above). To get assists to work efficiently, you need to be very precise with maneuvers and timing, and can easily end up spending net delta-v if things go amiss. And I've found both the theory and practice of gravity assists to make more and more sense as I learned more about orbital mechanics through gameplay. This is not my forte, but I understand there's a mod/tool called Flyby finder to help with this. The only time I did a gravity assist on the way to Jool, I used Kerbin (rather than Eve) to get the assist, similar to the real-life Juno probe. This is quite a bit easier to plan, as you can launch one year prior to the Kerbin-Jool launch window, get into a different (but same period) orbit around the Sun, and then get the assist right at the launch window.

Not gonna say it's impossible, but I have never gotten a wing with anywhere near that many segments to stay intact. You could try to use fewer, bigger wing pieces, like BigS wings in alternating directions. For the biggest planes I typically do a biplane or something similarly non-realistic. I figure that's a fair tradeoff for the limited wing options the game gives you.

Definitely. Just take the file you want and copy it into the following folder: Kerbal Space Program\saves\[save name]\Ships\VAB for rockets, or Kerbal Space Program\saves\[save name]\Ships\SPH for planes However, if you haven't unlocked all the parts, you'll get a message as such and won't be able to fly it. I don't think there's a way to get around that without editing game-wide files. You could cheat yourself up some science points and unlock nodes, but that doesn't sound like what you want either.

Yes, essentially, though hatches aren't always reliable markers. Some pods have multiple hatches, some have hatches on the sides (e.g., the cockpits), and the probe cores of course are pretty symmetrical. By default the game always lines up pods/cores the same way, so if you plunk down your primary pod/core as your first part, it should be pretty reliable. Things can get trickier when you're adding on detachable craft, of course.

Do you mean to ultimately get into Pol orbit? I've noticed similar things, at least on Laythe and Tylo. If you encounter the moon with the trajectories tangent (i.e., while it's travelling in the same direction you are), you're taking full advantage of the moon's rotational velocity around the planet. Kinda like how it's easier to catch a ball if you move your hand back as you catch it -- the difference in relative velocity is smaller. A less-than-ideal gravity assist may give up as much of this benefit as it gains in apo/peri adjustment, especially once you factor in maneuvering burns. And your approach certainly saves a lot of work over plotting an ideal assist. I would think the outer moons would provide less of a benefit here than, say, Tylo or Laythe, since their orbital speed is lower (though of course YOUR orbital speed around Jool would be somewhat lower as well. And since their gravity is lower, the Oberth effect won't soak up as much of the delta-v needed to get into capture around Jool and ultimately the target moon. I don't really follow with Gilly, though, as there's nothing else in Eve's SOI to get a gravity assist from, so no alternative to compare too.

My limited experience with IVA piloting has been, to quote Mr. Indiana Jones: Fly, yes. Land, no.