strider3

@Spricigo I have found one advantage to having 2 engineers at a mining site. While one is EVA'ing around, hooking up hoses and such, the other remains "onboard" and maintains production levels.

@Tonka Crash Thanks, buddy! Will let you know how it works for me.

@Tonka Crash Can you explain a bit more on using the translatron function? The only YouTube video I found is 6 years old...and the ship crashed! Say I land safely, but my ship is too far away to reach the hoses so I can transfer fuel to it from my mining base. How do I use translatron to move me closer?

@HansAcker When you mention TWR...do you have a range in mind that is "not too high or low"?

My issue with this one ship isn't so much about accuracy as about a controlled descent (although the one leads to the other...chicken and egg? LOL). I've tried adjusting throttle and gimbals...even torque on the wheels. Nothing seems to help...MJ just wants to "over-control" this ship, for some reason. The problem must be the ship itself as the other 5 parts of my mining operation landed within a reasonable, workable distance and did so in a very smooth, controlled manner. If I could find the problem I could send a new Hauler along with the 2nd drill and 2nd ISDU I have in Kerbin orbit, waiting for the departure window. Barring that I'll just "Cowboy Up" . @Tonka Crash That's one nice looking base you have there! Building bases like that is beyond my knowledge, at this point... it's not the parts so much as placing them that I have to learn about. I'll get there, eventually.

Why do I bother? I'll just remove MechJeb and land manually....I've gotten good at it.

I am having an issue with one ship landing on Dres, using the MechJeb "landing Guidance" autopilot. First let me point out that the landing guidance worked very well for 5 of the 6 ships that comprise my Dres mining operation. The drill was not mobile so it had to land close to my chosen location...it did. The other parts of the mining "base" had rover wheels and were landed at a spot I picked out as a "landing area". They all landed relatively close to this area, using the MJ landing guidance function, and were "rovered" to my desired position for them. The problem I'm having is with my "fuel hauler". This ship carries processed fuel and LoX from the mining base to orbiting refueling stations around Dres. It refuses to land at the designated landing area with MechJeb Landing Guidance. In 14 attempts it has landed safely only once...4.2 kilometers away from the base. All other attempts have resulted in high speed crashes, at many angles, into Dres's surface. Once the "Land at Target" button is pushed, this ship goes into a slowly increasing "over-correction" until it is completely out of control. I have tried incrementally reducing gimbal limits, all the way to "0", reducing reaction wheel torques...nothing stops the ship from going completely out of control before crashing into Dres. Here is a screenshot of the ships in question, from left to right, all ships landed at my desired location...the drill exactly where it sits and the rest at the landing area you see on the far right. The far right ship, the "Dres fuel hauler" is the one in question. I have been manually piloting it to a landing close enough to transfer fuel / LoX....but the whole reason I tried MechJeb was to get this ship to land, consistently, near my mining operation...and it has not worked. I will gladly supply any logs, craft files, etc. that may help...but I don't know exactly what files are needed. Please just let me know and I will provide anything needed. I am NOT just asking for help without any input or "work" on my part....I just need to know what, exactly, is required. There are many "logs" in KSP, please let me know which would be helpful and how to correctly "get" them (after the ship has crashed, while it is experiencing it's wild oscillations, etc). Thank you for your time.

That's what I needed to know...thank you!

Having an engineer boarded in a mining operation does wonders for productivity. Would adding a 2nd engineer show another increase over only having 1?

Here's what I'm seeing: You will notice that I have selected "show landing predictions" and "show trajectory". Do you see the normal MJ target landing red crosshairs? Do you see the normal blue "landing prediction" crosshairs? No...you don't, because they are not showing up. Do you see the landing guidance check boxes for "Show landing predictions", "Show trajectory" checked? Yes, they are. When this has worked ( the only 2 times), I would have 2 "bullseyes" in this view...one for the target landing area, and one for the "predicted" landing are. As you can see...I have butkus, at this point. I'm not impressed with MJ, so far. MJ needs an English speaker to do youtube discussions on how it works. Is this an MJ problem with other mods? That should be documented and told to us. It seems to me that MechJeb has been touted as the "be all, end all" of all mods...I'm not seeing it that way. I'll go back to manually landing my fuel transporter, over and over, if MJ can't do the job.

MechJeb has an option for "Landing guidance" that is supposed to show "landing predictions" and "show trajectory". I have had those work exactly twice, in 13 attempts to use the MJ auto land function. Can someone explain why these visual "cues" don't work most of the time? The landing guidance still appears to work...but the visual cues are very handy and I don't understand why they only show up 10% of the time? To be completely honest, I am not that impressed with MechJeb's documentation and the lack of detailed "how to's". What I have found online has been a mish mash of non English speaking people attempting to explain how MJ works. No offense is intended or insinuated...but I just don't understand the people who are talking on the youtube videos. I digress...why is the MJ options for "landing predictions" and "show trajectory" only working 10% of the time? That is the real question.

Thank you, I will look into both of your suggestions.

@DerekL1963 I may not have increased the lander's throttle limit to 100% after doing an orbital correction. Let me try again... Yep, forgot to undo the throttle limit. I now have a TWR of 12.35. So, if I understand you, no mid-course correction is necessary? Because with the one new node MJ created (with throttle at 100%), I'm not seeing anything near a Kerbin encounter in map view. To the contrary, my nearest approach is over 28,000,000 km. As you can see in the screenshot, MJ says that my total Dv to insertion of Kerbin orbit is 3,659 km/s, but the only node I have is a 1,603 burn? There must be a second, mid-course node? I think it important to point out that I'm not doubting MechJeb's abilities...only my understanding of how to use MechJeb correctly? This has been an ongoing issue, YouTube is great...when the poster's primary language is English. However (and no offense to YouTube posters of other nationalities and their attempts to help), the English language posts I have found are very hard to understand due to the language barrier.

@DerekL1963...I tried MechJeb to create nodes for a return to Kerbin from Dres. It tells me, in yellow text, that my initial orbit must not be hyperbolic...my eccentricity for my Dres initial orbit is 0.0000...can't get any less "hyperbolic" than that! Thinking it's just a warning, I continued on and MechJeb created a node to depart Dres...but just the one node (that I can see in PreciseManeuver). I'm including a screenshot of what I am seeing.

Thanks...I must be getting senile . So far the issue has not returned since clearing the lock.

Is there a mod, or a way to alter a landing struts part config, that prevents the landed ship from "tobogganing" down the slightest slope? I'm not asking to land on the side of a cliff, mind you ...just a bit of improvement in the friction or grip of the pads?

I will give MJ a "solo" shot at it next time I leave Kerbin. You'll notice in the screenshot...this is my mid-course as given to me by Astrogator. It has a huge amount of anti-normal which makes it very hard to arrive at Dres without a large inclination that must be corrected. Even allowing MJ to "do" the burn, I end up with a Dres encounter (so that's good ), but I spend DV getting to an equatorial (0 inclination) orbit...even the slightest error by MJ's burn results in being way off of the "planned" trajectory. I usually do well enough with a manual burn to celestials with a low inclination orbit...Dres is just...Dres . Maybe I'm demanding too much and should live with Dres being a bit difficult? Just getting an encounter with Dres is a "win", in my book. I will try your suggestion of using MechJeb alone, next time, and see how that goes. Thanks!!

OK..."if it ain't broke...don't fix it" . Without messing with any of these, MechJeb gets me..."close"...a very subjective term when dealing with Dres's inclined orbit. I end up having to create a third node to correct the MechJeb miss on the correction burn from Astrogator. But, it's still better than trying to hit the "thrust off" at the exact time needed on such a high anti-normal burn. What would be ideal is a mod which does not "overthink" an auto-burn...start on the created nodes timer, stop when burn Dv is 0. Even that could be a problem, though...PreciseManeuver and KER sometimes disagree on burn times. For now it works well enough. Thanks!

I am trying to find information on using MechJeb's maneuver node editor to automatically start and stop my required burn using an existing Astrogator node. I've searched youtube but haven't found anything dealing with this specific MechJeb tool. When I open the editor, it has the information for the next node for the craft I'm flying...that's all good. What I don't know is what all the other buttons and entries do. I can get Mechjeb to do the burn but it seems to start a little late and stop a little early. I'm wondering if some of the settings might help with that. Specifically...what is "Set delta to:", "Conics mode" and "Tolerance" used for? In truth, when it comes to conics, all I know is how to spell it , to this day I have no idea what they are. If anyone knows of a tutorial for this specific MechJeb tool, that would be awesome, rather than going over the whole thing here. Thanks for any help.

I cleared the input locks (there was 1). Not sure what it was...it's a bitmask and then binary code. So far things are working normally but I'll let you know if the issue returns as I go along. Thanks!!

I'm not sure what you mean by "input locks"?

In the last month or so I have run into a problem when in map view. When starting the game everything works fine...I can double click Kerbin to focus on it, I can click the orbit of a craft to place a node, if a target is selected I can click on the closest approach markers and see my distance, etc. to the target and I can select other crafts by clicking on them. At some point, this all stops working...I can't do anything with the mouse clicks in map view, mousing over the "closest approach" markers for my target no longer gives me information...I have to restart the saved game from scratch to correct this...and it eventually repeats. The only mods I've added since this started occurring are shown below: Ignore KES date, that's just it's LOG file...KES has been installed for years. I had both Astrogator and Transfer Window Planner installed, so I deleted TWP as a possible conflicting mod...did not help. Anybody else seeing this map view issue?

FTT: 1.2.0.0 KSP: 1.7.3 Here's all the possibilities: Found it...it's in the black containers, the Cluster tanks and saddle tanks.

Anybody? I still do not see "Liquid Hydrogen" as a selection for the tanks??

I see the switchable fuels...but nowhere do I see "Liquid Hydrogen"?