BlackBicycle

A (very) short essay on atmospheric landings. My most tricky one was landing on Dune. I quickloaded 3 times before finding a proper periapsis for atmospheric braking. Just in case anyone is wondering, that was 12500m at the first try. It was not quite enough, but on my second try (11000) I got stuck in the (already very low/thin) atmosphere and crashed... In fact, my chutes riped off : ( BUT! there is a "butter zone" there, and it of course depends on the speed with which you are entering that thin atmosphere. The rest of the story: I did use engine braking the time I landed successfully, not a lot of it, just enough to make sure the chutes don't rip off when they open. I also had a bad luck of landing in a high-elevation area, several km ASL (as if there was any S there, hmm). The chutes worked well, and I didn't have to use the engines after the chutes were fully deployed. Those were 8 side-mounted stock ones. Cannot figure out the weight, but it was I'd guess about 4 tons, give or take a ton. Landed OK : )

@ Technion - see post #4 Zeni, Unfortunately I am allergic to Facebook (due to a simple fact that they won't let one unsubscribe, that is Big Brother all the way (hope you understand, the explanation is not something we'd want to start a discussion on, not on this forum that is, right?) Thanks for that remark on my vessel. She is a beauty, isn't she : ? As of mods, I've always "preached" this, both in game mods and IRL: go stock until you feel like you need more. Then get the thing that is what you want, no more (no less, if possible.) Enjoy the overall setup with the new addition. Then, if and when you feel like you need another piece, add that. Only when you really feel like you want it. This way you will know all your mods, know exactly what they do and know how you can handle the situation should your calculations fail. Okay, this comes as an experience from the cases when the systems fail. And they do, trust me. And as a New Year present: if I may turn your attention to a good old trusty MechJeb. You'll never be without it after you've done it with it once. Oh, my, did I just say that?? : ) http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/mechjeb/ P.S. wow, a new .23 version. Been using the emergency .23 capable dev version. Wonder what's new, the dev 22 to 23 did give me a few glitches...

Personally, I always considered KSP space to be too full of ambient light. It really breaks immersion, imho. I would love the team to have a look at this, but I am afraid it is intentional : (

Add enough chutes and you can land a fishbowl at Kerbin without so much as a splash. Provided that it is a flat surface, of course. Or if it is not a fishbowl, but a rover (which is just that much more sturdy and is much more slope-tolerant : )

Landing on Kerbin: if 1-man capsule: 1 parachute on top is enough. if 3-men capsule: 1 top (can be a drag one if you are feeling fancy, or the regular one. 2 chutes on the sides of the capsule. Open them when you are past the entry stage (when the flames subside). Don't forget to disengage the stabilization (T key) - the chutes will do all the stabilizing for you (unless you've arranged them in a weird way while constructing the capsule) that's it : )

Dear OP (Original Poster), Have you tried to work your way through Career Mode without the mods? I guarantee it will be way more thrilling and will present this game to you in a way it is supposed to be played. Granted, you can mod it to have uber-efficient engines, autopilots that will get you where you want to be (supposing those uber-powered rockets can get you there)... but that would be kinda like this: Give it a thought.

Why should I care about.... (quote from Civ 3... I think..) Ahem. Anyways. As it stands in .23, my new career, the probes helped me enormously. I was stuck at some point. (now here comes the important part) I could have milked more science from Mun, but the whole routine got old. (Okay, now I have a new strategy that I am going to have fun with, in a new career, but that came after this story). Then I realized I don't have to roll on polar orbits of Mun and Minmus till the seats get worn out to earn my fair share of science. So I concentrated on probes. It took me several hours and a few test launches (stretched over two evenings of intense fun) to construct the thing that was able to go far. My science level was just at those Xenon thingies. In case you don't know, it gets pretty dark out there by Eeloo. I underestimated the power of my solars, so it turned into a battle for speed for a while (was trying to brake at its orbit). It ended up in me leaving the simulation run and checking it every hour or two to correct the heading and make short pauses to orient the craft so that it could recharge well. I did succeed in the end, and now I have a probe around Eeloo. It had already sent back all it could by now and is now an honorary guard of said planet. This was at a very low tech level. With the transmissions I got from there, it was enough to advance my program in such a way that the next mission I did was a manned landing on M.. erm.. Dune : ) I couldn't imagine landing there, let alone coming back before I had the tech that I bought with that Eeloo probe science that it delivered. The moral of the story, of course, is that the probes are absolutely viable, as long as you want/need to push the envelope. Which is the situation that I expect when the credits come into the equation. And even before we have economical considerations, the "early-on" unmanned probe to the far reaches of the system can not only be viable, but in fact very useful. Transmissions and all.

Mods=Sqr(AllEvil) : )

You are most welcome : ) You can now edit your original post, there will be a flag there to change the TAG to "Answered"

... and incidentally, the RMB, when you rightclick on the part, is what lets you see the stats.

A colony on Mun or Minmus or Kerbin (huh?) is not too bad. It is definitely not the most efficient way to progress in the game, but it does provide many hours of entertainment (punctuated by moments of pure horror and sheer boredom.) In fact, I am now planning on restarting the career mode and doing a Munbase. There are enough biomes, but they can hardly be researched via rovers. So I set me a goal. Let's break it down from the top stage down: 1. A manned flying vehicle ("Probe") equipped with all science instruments I can afford at that point lands at some biome. Crew reports, EVA, samples, all the science instruments. The vehicle then heads to the Munbase and lands there. 2. Either the vehicle itself heads towards the stationary Lab, or some kind of tug carries it there. It docks to the lab. Astronauts carry all the data to the lab. The lab resets the MatLab and the Goo. 3. The Probe undocks from the Lab and is carried (or drives itself) away. 4. A refueler rover docks with it and refuels it. The fuel is taken from a separate tanker that is launched from Kerbin and is landed nearby. 5. The Probe goes to some other location to repeat the process. P.S. And of course, every once in a while, a capsule from Kerbin comes (maybe with a replacement crew), all data is loaded back into it and sent back to Kerbin to be recovered. : )

The only other thing here to take into consideration, of course, is that if you are burning at full power and your vehicle is comparatively small, your TWR will change noticeably throughout the maneuver, so the second half will take shorter than the first one, at the same throttle setting. This is not very often the case though, for a number of reasons that I cannot be bothered to explain, unless specifically asked to (soon, as it's late at night here : ).

Welcome! Your questions seem to indicate you are really into this thing, as most of us are. So here we go, I'll try to answer the first question. First of all I have to say we have a very decent wiki where you can learn it all. Other than that, here's a short primer (without mods. Get MechJeb and it all becomes a breeze (once you've learned how to handle it). Stable orbit: 1. Press T - that will keep you stable. Launch. Go vertical until 10 km. Make sure your speed does not exceed 200 m/s under 5km, 300 m/s under 10km. Throttle down a bit if needed (down to half-power or more, depending on the vehicle). The Wiki has more exact figures. 2. At 10 km, slant your vehicle 45 degrees to the right. The navball should indicate 45 incline towards 90 degrees (that is, you are halfway on blue towards brown, and the mark on it reads 90 degrees. You should be traveling east (to the right) along the equator. 3. Press M to switch to map, bring up your navball (map screen, low edge, middle) to make sure you are on course and to be able to cut off engines from the map view. Zoom in with the mousewheel (sometimes you need to rotate around the planet, rightclick-hold and drag, move mouse sideways), take a look at your trajectory. There will be an apoapsis icon. Mouseover that and you will see your apoapsis increasing. When it reaches space (over 70km for Kerbin (edge of atmosphere), you can turn off the engines and fly up there. Make sure your apoapsis does not fall below like 75 (you will need those 5 extra km for corrections, if you aren't using an autopilot, like MechJeb). You are still in the atmosphere, so if your apo gets low, just do a short burst, same direction, 45 deg up above horizon (into the blue). When you are good, just wait till you are near the apoapsis (if we are talking 75, 70+ will be close enough.) 4. Orient your vessel towards the horizon in the direction you are traveling, (there should be that greenish-yellow circle with 3 short sticks protruding from it - that's where you are actualy going). Don't match the circle, just lay exactly on the horizon. 5. When you are about 72-73km, start burning (forward). Let your direction stay on the horizon, switch to map (M key) and watch your trajectory pull out and out until it becomes an orbit. Watch the opposite apsis of the orbit (mouseover the small icon there) and see when that also clears the 70 km of the atmosphere. You can press X then (make sure the navball is UP in map view, or it won't work) to shut down the engines. You are in orbit. 6. Every orbit has a highest (apoapsis) and the lowest (periapsis) point. The most energy-efficient way to change those are to raise apoapsis at the moment you are passing periapsis and wise-versa. You just burn towards that yellow-green circle (your direction vector it's called) to increase the opposite point (be it apo or peri), and burn retrograde (backwards) do decrease the opposite point. There we go, Google is our friend. Just google for "ksp youtube orbit" Enjoy : )

It IS hard to figure out where you go wrong without pictures, but I'll just lay it out for you: 1. All the engines of the stage that can start, should start right away, that means BOTH boosters AND the stage they are boosting (the engine(s) in the middle). 2. Make sure that after you separate the boosters (and the core keeps working), the core had exhausted its fuel enough (ie is already light enough) to keep accelerating your craft well when you jettison the boosters. The starting stage core must not work much longer than its boosters, ie you drop the boosters, another 30 sec to 1 min, you ditch that stage too. 3. Forget the solid boosters. The best booster is a tank and an engine. When you are at the end of the tech tree, the best "booster" is an orange tank with a Mainsail feeding off it. Earlier on, it is a stack of a couple of medium tanks, with the most powerful engine you can stick at the bottom of that. Keep on asking, that's how you get to boldly go where you have never gone before : )

I see. Well, personally, I use my Mainsails for everything but the transfers planet-to planet, in which case I use nuclear for their efficiency. And the small fry, of course I use the small fry engines : )

Exit the vehicle, make sure you are on the surface, rightclick your astronaut and choose "Take surface sample", choose to keep data. Return your astronaut to the capsule, you will have the sample stored in the capsule. Return the capsule to Kerbin, "recover vehicle". Voila.

Zeni, in fact I myself am starting the new career, to do it my way : ) I only figured this whole way out a couple of days ago, while I was already half-way to Jool with 5 ships docked together and one tug pushing them (talk about tech advances). My tech tree is almost done, so I am through with the "campaign", as they used to call it in the days of the Hubble : ) So I am starting over, with exactly this strategy. Hope we'll share experiences (we might open a thread for that, send me a PM with a thread if you start one). This time my challenge (apart from actually making the flights), will be to figure out whether it is easier to work with Minmus rather than Mun. I'll try to take shots and all that. In the meantime, here's a shot of my ongoing Jool mission (this run did't go very well, I realized I had to switch off most of the gyros, except for ones in the middle of the structure, in order to keep the thing from flexing itself apart):

I really want to see you do a manned Jool mission while "throwing those mainsails out of the window". IMHO, you really need to practice a few more dozens of missions before publishing "opinions" like that.

Easy. 1. Get the astronaut out. 2. Unlatch him from the ladder (press space). Press R to engage the rocketpack. 3. Press "back" (S button) for less than a second. The astronaut will orient himself along certain axis (we don't care which particular one that is). 4. Accept his axis as the ones you will have to work with. Rightclick-orient your view so that you see the astronaut from behind. 5. Now you can control him with the ijkl (kinda like wasd) for translation (moving sideways). EDIT: Shift/Ctrl for up/down. 6. EDIT: your up/down direction (reference plane as it is known) will stay the same, but if you rotate the camera so that you are not seeing the astronaut exactly from his back, a momentary press of "forward" or "back" (I or K) will orient him towards the spot your camera is looking at (mind the general (up/down) plane, which will NOT change). There it is. Once you tried it, it is fairly intuitive : ) P.S. Sorry for edits, my wife/kid came home just as I was writing this. Chaos ensued, and my descriptions lost their preciseness. Corrected those now as I could : )

"Target parallel" works with the core bodies too, no need to select docking ports. It is enough to select the main body from the Map View and do "Set Target". That's how I do it all the time.

Good luck Soda, I bet all that equipment weighs a lot : ) I am doing something similar in the coming days, I'll be watching your progress with great interest. Maybe you should start a thread somewhere.. (where do we keep our current reports at?). I'll probably make a parallel one. See each others designs, brag a bit, find some solutions to impossible situations : ? In other words, talk to ya soon : )

I find your lack of faith disturbing. You do not need any mods. Personally, I see the current situation with science fun enough, if not too challenging. This is how you do it: 1. Research scientific instruments first and foremost. Plaster your vehicles with those. 2. Launch probes (manned preferable, so that you can get ground samples) all over Kerbin. Check the biome map on the wiki. 3. Research until the gravioli detector. Since then, the whole system is your oyster, because: You take separate readings (which can be retrieved by your astronaut and stored in the return capsule) from: "In space above X biome", "High in space above X biome"., Set a polar orbit, spend a couple of RL hours, and you will have a scan of most, in not all biomes on Kerbin from low orbit. Boost the orbit, do the same thing from up high. You can then do the same thing with Mun, then Minmus. Your first gain from the near-Kerbin missions should be way more than enough to get some tech to do the same thing with the moons. How you do it, which techs you choose, is up to you, but that's the beauty of the game : ) Best of luck, see you on Laythe!

I'd like a shot from the rear, but I am really leaning towards an "obstructed engine" theory. GuildNav, have you tried the saved planes that come with the game? Those, while basic, can give you a decent idea of how things fly in this game.

Of course it is better to keep below certain speed when the atmosphere is "too thick for current speed". MechJeb does it for you in its "Ascent Guidance" module, and there is also a table of "terminal velocity speeds" at different altitudes. Which basically marks the top speed above which you will have to exponentially increase your fuel flow to reach relatively negligible increase in speed. P.S. Ninjaed - see message above : )

Sorry, can't resist. Seing those pictures of the surface of the poles reminded me of a dialogue I had a while ago, with an Australian. Me: I live in Jerusalem. They say we have a Navel Of the Earth right here, like 5 clicks from my place. Him: Ah well, it is better to live in Earths navel that in it's ....... : ) P.S. Hope I didn't violate any rules now, I got reprimanded recently by the mod...