Vanamonde

That's true of outward-bound flights as well, so it shouldn't make a difference. Have you noticed that the calculator gives ejection angles clockwise for outer planets and counter-clockwise for inner planets? Might that be part of the problem? Don't forget that perspective changes as you go from one SOI to another. Start a burn over the dawn side of Kerbin and you will be thrusting prograde relative to Kerbin, but retrograde relative to Kerbol. You're actually firing Kerbin-orbit-retrograde the whole time. I too am having great difficulty reaching Moho, but I suspect that a large part of the problem is that the equations have to assume that your burn is instantaneous, which of course it can't be.

Ugh. I spent most of the last 2 days missing Moho by varying numbers of millions of kilometers, and got so frustrated that I decided to land on Minmus for the first time in .17, because it's such a simple old thing that I was sure it would go just fine. Instead, this happened: The force of the decoupler rips the RCS tank from the ASAS module. Tried it 4 times, and it broke every time. So, no landing on Minmus, and my streak of getting absolutely nothing done stretches on into a third day. WTF? Never happened before in the 4 months I've been playing this game. Has anybody else seen this happen?

Right, which I think was part of the original poster's confusion; he was comparing single spaceship-to-world encounters he's coordinating in KSP with the results of real-universe situations in which many bodies are flying around, but only a few are captured as moons. My suggestion was somewhat whimsical, in the same spirit that allows Minmus to be frozen while Kerbin is not. Sorry I wasn't clear about my tone.

It seems no little green wheels will be following your major around.

What excellent questions! To rephrase Zarakon's point, out of all the possible velocities two objects might have relative to each other, what are the odds that the conditions are right to result in a closed orbital path? The odds that this would result by chance are indeed pretty low, which is why in the game, it only results from intentional manuevering. But as the other posters have already noted, random trajectory isn't the only factor at work. Bluejayek makes the interesting point that the Earth-Moon system may have been one object that became two, but is still one system. It's not coincidence that they ended up at appropriate velocities to orbit each other, because that same mass was ALL at the same velocity (except for rotation around its axis) before the impactor came along and made a mess out of things. As for Gilly, perhaps it's the rocky core of a captured comet, the rest of which evaporated, with the outgassing serving as reaction mass that was ejected in the process of arriving at its current orbit.

HarvesteR, the main designer of the game, has strongly advised against placing control surfaces at the tops of rockets. He says they're a de-stabilizing influence there, and he should know. That doesn't explain why it might work once, but it probably is at least part of why it doesn't work after that. Also, I don't think those vertically-mounted elevators on the sides of the outer boosters are doing anything but flapping in the breeze. That is one interesting, George Pal-looking ship, though. On further examination, I have no idea what attaching struts to control surfaces like that might do to the stability of your ship. As the flap moves, it would apply torques to your booster stages. I don't know how much or what kind of effect that would have, but it can't be good.

The "experience" Fraczus is talking about is that you have to get about that low before Duna's atmosphere starts to have much affect on your speed. And he's right, it is about 1/4th the altitude at which that happens on Kerbin. The game considers you to have entered Duna's atmo (boots you down to warp 1) at around 47,000m, though, so I think that's the official upper limit.

SOI stands for "sphere of influence," which is the mini-universe you are currently in. When you are travelling from one to another, the game takes your course and speed and converts it to the coordinate system of the new SOI. The gravity of the previous world's SOI stops affecting you completely and the new one takes over. However, the smaller world is itself moving within the SOI of the larger world, which means the larger world's gravity IS affecting you, indirectly, through the motion it imparts to the entirety of your new frame of reference. Say your ship and Mun are both orbiting Kerbin, in the same direction. Mun orbits at 542.5m/s, and your ships is coming up behind it at 543.5m/s, both of you following a curve around Kerbin. As soon as you enter Mun's SOI, your speed display will flip from 542.5m/s to 1m/s, and Mun will appear to be sitting still (relative to you) while you are moving in a straight line (relative to it). In both frames of reference, you were overtaking Mun at 1m/s in a linear way, and that hasn't changed. It's just being figured from Mun's perspective instead of Kerbin's. Am I making things clearer, or confusing things further?

Yes, every world exists in its own little simulated universe, and you transition from one to another. However, the game actually maintains your course and heading in absolute terms, and it only appears funky as you change perspectives and coordinate origin points.

I see you're dispatching colonists rather than explorers (no provision for return). That certainly simplifies things. I've used this approach on a couple of them, too.

I find the double-tap for the parking brake kind of finicky, so depending on your design, you might also be able to simply retract the landing gear and let the plane rest directly on the ground.

Gilly is REALLY dangerous, for all sorts of reasons. For example, my guy ran into the ship and fell down. When I had him stand up, he was under the ship and accidentally headbutted it. This resulted: Fortunately, I had a recent quicksave.

I now have landed explorers on all the new worlds, though not all of them will be coming home. Some suffered misfortunes, but others are serving as sort-of live probes into local conditions, to gather data so that I can build returnable ships. crashed but survived intentional stranding returnable landing returnable landing returnable landing (that's an eclipse, by the way) out of fuel, awaiting retrieval (of course, a low orbit rather than a landing) returnable landing returnable landing landed, but out of fuel intentional stranding. Feel free to not care. I'm just excited because this game is so incredibly much fun.

I learned from experience: if you don't wait for a good transfer window, you waste even more time at high warp, trying to bring your ship and the planet together. It can be done, and it was my prefered method, until I just got tired of all that wasted time and realized the methodical way is best even for impatient people like me.

No ladders?

This doesn't apply to the nuclear engine shedding. I always step down my warp factor and it's happening anyway, and besides, both times it happened to me it was while I was at normal speed and hadn't been warping for at least several seconds.

Other than live TV broadcasts at the time, photographs, moon rocks in our possession, the fact that if it was faked then the thousands of people personally involved in the program both 1) are all liars and 2) have all kept the secret for 40 years, and that later probes have photographed the parts of the landers left on the moon?

Kerbin as seen from the surface of Gilly.

Congratulations on your first Mun landing. Isn't it an amazing feeling of accomplishment? (Your Mun has hardwood floors? Classy!)

Twice for me now. Both times, at normal speed (no warp, I mean), while I was looking at the map view, in deep inter-planetary space. (I was lucky; in both instances I had recent quicksaves, and just went on with the missions.)

Have you looked at the how-to section? There are several video tutorials stickied at the top of the page.

I think I have a new world. (It's Vall, if you were wondering.)

Has anybody landed an intact ship on Moho? I tried one with no engine, relying on RCS propulsion to get around the overheating issue, and the LANDING LEGS blew up at around 1200m due to overheating! I did previously make a survivable crash landing with just a capsule, though, at around 4000m local ground altitude.

Fie I say! How does this pernicious and base rumor persist, maligning the entirely adequate atmosphere of poor, innocent Duna? I use engines down to the last few thousand meters/300m/s or so, then descend entirely on chutes. Five large chutes bring down a lander at a nice 9m/s or so. The lander comes down with full tanks in reserve for the ascent and orbit to meet a Kerbin-return ship. The truth will set you free!

To be honest, there's really not much to do on any of the worlds yet except see how high your little guy can hop and take screenshots. The only reason it's so frikking cool to BE there is because of the sense of accomplishment you have after struggling so hard to GET there. As frustrating as it may be right now, you'd lose all that if you used a cheat to get around the process.