AlpacaMall

What is deploying the elevons used for?

I'm making a reusable mothership for those long, interplanetary trips. Playing with (among other mods) OPM and USI-LS. For a NERV-powered mothership, how much dV can I expect to be able to pack in the mothership's single stage?

KSP does not have a built-in “map” of relay stations. The closest thing the game offers is KerbNet. A feature of KerbNet is that some probe cores will offer “anomaly detection”; Kerbin’s relay stations will appear as some of the anomalies detected by KerbNet.

The easiest-to-learn way of getting to Minmus would be an inclination change while in Kerbin’s orbit. Once you’ve launched your rocket into orbit of Kerbin, select Minmus as your target. This will create two new indicators on the map (“M”) view; the ascending node (“AN” on the map) and descending node (“DN”), both in green. These two nodes indicate the angle between your orbit’s inclination and the inclination of Minmus; mouse over the node to get the angle. Now, you want to change this angle to zero. Make a maneuver mode at the nearest of the two nodes, and use a radial (or anti-radial) burn to drop the angle to zero. From here, you should be able to get to Minmus in the same way as you got to the Mun.

OP does grand tours. “Just make the game less hard” isn’t really a good guiding philosophy for that. Regarding part welding, it should still help in some cases. On landers with multiple engines, wouldn’t the loss of an engine mean you have to shut down the opposite engine to prevent asymmetric thrust? That’s two parts which can be welded together, since the failure of one means that both become unusable.

Once you’ve done that, another easy way of getting science is launching a manned pod into a low polar orbit, and taking EVA reports above each biome. You’ll need to be able to get into orbit first, though.

Any chance for an update on this?

At the scale you’re building at, the guidelines for space station design are probably the best things to search for. The two big rules I remember are: 1) Minimize the number of lights 2) Minimize the number of open docking ports

What mods do you have installed? Asking in the relevant mod's thread is probably more helpful than asking in the general questions forum.

If the other methods don't work, the worst case scenario is that you use engines to brake in the atmosphere once you're down at parachute altitude. At 1000m/s, that's about 250m/s you need to shave off for the drogue chutes to open.

Dammit, I knew there was something simple I was forgetting... Thanks! Open docking ports are supposed to be murder on the frame rate, so I use the shielded ones to prevent that. That would work if I didn't use the shielded docking ports, which don't have a node in the VAB. That's what I was originally considering with the engineer; send the arms up with two normal docking ports, easily attach them, then have the engineer swap out the docking ports.

That was my first thought, but the bug I linked prevents me from doing that; the decoupler always stays attached to the arms, not the ship carrying them, no matter which way the decoupler is rotated. And since the decoupler is technically the parent of the arm, I can't use an engineer to detach it.

I'm building a space station, which will have six arms that ships can dock to: At first, I tried launching the middle section all as one piece, but it was too draggy and wouldn't fit in the 3.75m fairing. So I launched just the core and put the arms on docking ports, to be sent up later. However, now that the core's in its proper orbit, I'm having trouble figuring out how to launch the arms. The regular docking port is the only node on the entire arm, and so I can't find a way to decouple the arms from whatever ship I send them up in, due to this bug. Decouplers stay attached to the arms, and docking ports can't release the arms when placed radially. The only solutions I can think of is to send the arms up with unshielded docking ports, and bring an engineer along to swap them out with the shielded ones, but adding six extra docking ports and a crew reentry pod seems like a hassle. Are there easier ways to put the arms on the station?

Oops, I meant using non-tweaked stock parts in RSS. It's definitely not impractical with balanced parts.

If you're still interested in RSS, I've heard good things about the SMURFF mod, which tweaks the stats on the stock parts to make them fit for RSS. (however, like everyone else here, I don't actually use it; I mess around in stock/RSS, but actually getting stuff done feels impractical.)

I'm trying to figure out how the small hardpoint works. I set up the following seven-part test: (textures from Restock) Both hardpoints are oriented in different directions. The left hardpoint was placed normally; I put it on the central fuselage, then placed the left fuselage on the other end. The right hardpoint was placed in the opposite orientation; I first placed the hardpoint on the right fuselage, then connected it to the central fuselage. What I expected to happen was that the hardpoint on one side will decouple the side fuselage, and the hardpoint on the other side would decouple itself. Instead: Its larger sibling, the Structural Pylon, also exhibits this behavior. Can someone explain what's happening here? I'd like to keep the hardpoint attached to the central fuselage, but the game doesn't want to let me do so.

Another tip I've seen is that open docking ports will drop your frame rate significantly. Try only adding the docking ports you're sure you'll need, or using the shielded docking ports. But then again, if that were the case then I'd have thought the first station would melt your computer...

It looks like people have done both in the past; I've posted mine as a reply, some have made threads, some linked imgur albums, and some created entire videos and put them here.

In the future, don't forget that you can quicksave and revert to an earlier save! (In this case, it would let you start over and use the Oberth effect too )

Alright, here's my submission to the Jool 5 challenge. (3rd level, no ISRU) Ship used: The KSS-J "Orca", with a mass of 198.951t and a cost of 320,294, assembled in 7 launches for a total cost of 664,705 Crew: Jeb, Val, Bill, and Bob, plus the new hire Lanuki, known for being the only kerbal to return from Eve. (don't tell him he was meant to be disposable) Part 0: ships used https://imgur.com/a/MDsgwC1 Part 1: assembly and departure https://imgur.com/a/ifb8b4Z Part 2: Laythe and Tylo https://imgur.com/a/1ivb7YX Part 3: Vall, Pol, and Bop https://imgur.com/a/B3J2w4l Part 4: return https://imgur.com/a/cKTdzLg Mods: (no DLCs) This was my third time ever visiting Jool, and I'd never actually orbited or landed on any of the moons before, so I'm surprised and pretty happy that I managed to make everything work my first time designing the craft. Of course, it did take far too many quicksaves to land sometimes, especially at Laythe. (note: After taking admin strategies into account (40% science), my mission would've netted a total of 23458 science. If only I hadn't clipped a few of my science parts...)

Gravity braking around Tylo/Laythe is probably your best bet; it's a lot less trial and error than aerobraking, and costs about the same amount. If done correctly, you can get a free Laythe intercept right after the gravity capture too. Since they're too large for engineers to build, you can try assembling it space-station style; put your NERV cluster on a docking port (or multiple ports, if the angle's important) and dock the whole assembly at once.

Can you explain "form factor" a bit more? If I'm interpreting it correctly, then it means that the part isn't bulky and doesn't make placing other parts around it hard, which clearly isn't the case with the equally sized crew cabin: Seating makes sense, but that's another preference thing; my kerbals don't seem to suffer from any negative effects even from sitting upside down, if my outposts ever came to that. Again, makes sense logically, but these don't exist and protecting against them is down to preference.

Something I've done to fix that is go through all the zeroes in the descent profile and just click each one and hit enter. Maybe it's showing zero when it's not actually set to zero?

Is there any advantage to using the 4-kerbal Hitchhiker cabin over the crew cabins? I'd always assumed that it's designed as a space station module, and would be lighter than the airplane cabins. However, this doesn't appear to be the case: The Hitchhiker has a mass of 2.07t, or 0.518t per seat The Mk1, Mk2, and Mk3 crew cabins have masses of 0.91, 1.85, and 7.18 tons, or 0.455, 0.463, and 0.449 tons, respectively The only use I see for the Hitchhiker is the 2.5m shape; however, given that the airplane cabins have higher heat tolerances and impact resistances, it doesn't seem like the Hitchhiker is meant for atmospheric flight, where shape and aerodynamics actually matters. That leaves appearance as the only possible use I can see for this part. Is there something I'm missing? It doesn't seem right that the part is unbalanced in this way.

I recall reading that the KAC transfer window formulas don't take some factors like inclination into account, leading to them being slightly off. If you're playing in the stock system, you can switch to the "By model" setting, which uses actual in-game data instead of calculated windows.