Tristavius

If this was a response to my mod request - you rock! If it wasn't, well, you rock anyway!

I'm amazed no one has made a mod to turn mod parts on and off at the touch of a button...

I tried this concept on minmus once (even less gravity to contend with). I came to the conclusion that a manned one simply wasn't possible - I could get the TWR but not with anywhere near enough solar panels to stay afloat for more than a small period of time. Perhaps now with the external seats it would be possible to revisit the idea. Of course heading to Pol or Gilly may help further aswell.

Nah, you don't need nodes for the moon! Getting an intercept is sooooo easy.

I used to launch 5 orange tanks at a time as the payload (all arriving full) but man it was such a pain to dock them all and my lifter had a high kracken-attack rate. Now for my Kerbin station I just launch 3 at a time which is nice and easy to dock and the lifting is a lot more reliable. My 3-tank design is a central core of Structural Fuselages with 3-way ports on each end and the 3 orange tanks mounted radially. Each tank can be detached using the radial decoupler and has docking ports on either end, so a ship can come along and carry one away to use as extra fuel. When bringing new fuel to my station I have the option of adding the new 3 onto the previous 3 or deorbiting the old 3 and replacing them. My minmus station in theory receives kethane from the surface, but so far I installed Kethane when i found resources weren't coming next patch, landed a big kethane refinery and orbital lifter then have never used them. My Laythe station I've recently began receives one orange tank at a time from the same design I use to rescue stranded crafts. I launch the tank with 4x FL-T800's radially mounted with a nuclear engine each. The side tanks allow it to get to most places without tapping the main tank, and with 4 engines I still get a decent burn time.

Now that I've landed on all Jool's moons, I now want to crew change the staff so I can claim my return emblem on my ribbon (yeah, yeah, I'm an achievement fiend). Trying to build an adaptable lander, and it's proving rather tricky! I've been trying to built it in stages - I could just build a Tylo lander and use it everywhere else, but I don't want it to be so inefficient for the small worlds. Currently it looks like it'll be in 3 parts... Part 1: A capsule, some fuel and an aerospike giving enough delta v for return landings on Pol and Bop. Part 2: Adds on to part 1, Additional fuel and parachutes to allow Vall and Laythe return landings Part 3: Stuck here. Not sure if this will be used as well as or instead of part 2. Either way it needs to give some serious fuel and additional engines to allow a Tylo return landing My mothership when then take it to Jool with plenty of Kerbals who will relieve the crew on each of the moons.

Infact Moho: lets see some molten rock that you really don't want to be driving over!

It took me a long time to realize how clever they've been with the current planets, in giving you a sequentially harder set of challenges with different solutions required and different pros/cons. If you really stop and think about the setup of the Kerbin system, every planet and it's moon combinations is designed to learn (and test) a different skill. I'm really not sure what should come next... most of the bases have been covered so far, so yeah, I think I'd like to see improvements on the current worlds first. For example, weather conditions, more scenery (OK it'll just be interesting rocks on most worlds) and maybe some different terrain type modeling that effects rover handling (and landing!), for example.. Frozen lakes on minmus - very little grip and control and a very hard surface to thump down on Coarse Sand on Duna - softens landing a makes rover handling a little harder Fine sand on Laythe - stronger effects of the above You get the idea. Weather effects and atmospheric effects would be good too. Moho is supposed to be a baking hot radiation soaked hellhole, but actually it just feels kind of dull. An ice world with an atmosphere would be quite nice too... maybe a terran world leaving or entering an ice age, with nice tropical green around the equator and heavily frozen ice caps descending.

That makes sense I guess the problem with all these charts is they show kerbin differently to other planets. Shouldn't it actually show 950 as the 'Orbit' value for Kerbin (and the Land value as 4500 - 950)? Not sure how you'd show the intercept values then mind you... I guess they'd have to go planet to planet rather than via the Sun

Really haven't had ANY problems with most of the above... I'm one of life's over-designers, as is necessary in my career. My friend showed me KSP for the first time and was amazed when my first 3 minute attempt at building a rocket launched, made orbit, landed on Mun and returned my Kerbal safely to Kerbin. Getting my head round some of the concepts, docking, interplanetary transfers, oberth effect etc has been a challenge, but actual rocket design is so, so simple when there's no budget (I'd be terrible at it in career mode). Have never had a crash landing or had a mission objective fail, again always through over design. Hell, my 'Small Load' lifter is rated for nearly 40 tons, and it's very rare I'd ever launch anything less than 25 tons into orbit... don't think I've ever made anything smaller other than satellites, and I launch those in clusters of 6+ with a transfer carrier SSTO however. Wow. I SUCK at SSTO. Been trying to build a crew transfer shuttle for WEEKS with absolute zero success. I also suck at flying in atmosphere. So yeah, the real challenge in KSP for me will be SSTO, until such times as I have a budget constraint, which I suspect I'll also be terrible at.

Didn't have much time last night, but I landed on Pol and had a nice drive around... fell down a mountain for about 6 km without touching land which was fun. Then landed on Bop, but as I keep all but my mapping satellites stock I have to try and figure out anomalies by the terrain. Think I got it totally wrong and have landed some 60km away on a similar terrain feature so started the drive. Tylo craft is now a day or two from arrival so tonight I'll see if it can land. Still not convinced it'll be able to on its current fuel, so a refuel from my Laythe station may be necessary. Only 80% sure it'll be able to land even on full tanks mind you :/

I don't deal with it, I disable persistant space debris. But only due to being abroad on my laptop which really doesn't need the extra strain of all the debris. Prior to that (and still now technically) I stick a probe core on just about everything other than the very earliest stages that will be dropped in-atmosphere. I then jettison very nearly empty tanks and later control and deorbit using the core.

I may be totally wrong here, so apologies I am, but I really don't think that's the case? For example, it costs approx 1060m/s to get from LKO to a Duna intercept. Out of that, 950 m/s is the burn to leave Kerbin SOI, and a relatively small amount (110m/s) to push the apoapsis out to Duna. On the way back I can envisage the same 110 m/s being required to get from a Duna exit to a Kerbin intercept, but the burn to leave Duna SOI has got to be a lot lower than the 950m/s on Kerbin as Duna has a much smaller mass. Possibly totally wrong every time I think I have my head around this game someone shows me otherwise!

Gratz Now you just need a rescue mission!

Hmmm, I'd be happy to do a series of them or make something web based if I could get the values from somewhere...

You may also want to consider the following.... Pol is very small and easy to land on and not that hard to get to. Bop is also very small and easy to land on, though it's a lot harder to get to due to it's inclination. Laythe is very easy to get an intercept with, and you can both aerobrake and land with parachutes so getting down is easy (though getting back up is more expensive). Avoid Tylo as its probably one of the hardest places to land (high gravity but no atmosphere). Very, very approximate delta-v values (so many factors that can effect this) for getting from a low Jool orbit to a moon and landing only are... Laythe: 1600m/s (Assuming aerobrake and parachutes) Pol: 3580m/s Bop: 3656m/s Vall: 3936 m/s Tylo: 6200 m/s So if you find yourself struggling with Vall which is actually a fairly delta-v intensive landing, consider one of the smaller moons, or better yet, Laythe

Congrats! All very exciting when you first make it. You cannot aerobrake or use parachutes at Vall as it has no atmosphere. It's also a bit larger than any of the moons you'll have been to yet - your looking at about 1200 m/s to land and around 2000 to take off and make orbit again, should you want to so that's quite a bit! For now you can always land and then send a rescue mission later

I've been using this chart for a while now, but I've found one small flaw - the delta-v for a return journey both in practice and from sources such as the wiki doesn't seem to correlate to any numbers on this chart. For example, people report 1500-2000m/s to launch from and make Duna orbit (I'm guessing this is the 1380m/s + the 370 orbit m/s) but then the return burn to kerbin seems more like 620m/s. Am i reading something wrong, or is it just the case that this is a 'from Kerbin' kind of deal only... and if so has someone made maps focused around delta-v from other bodies?

That's an enormous amount of Delta V you have now... You'll be able to do really inefficient transfers and make plenty of mistakes and still be able to make it. Consider the following approx numbers (taken from one of the delta v maps) Take off to Low Kerbin Orbit: 4500 m/s LKO to Duna Intercept Burn: 1060 m/s Plane Shift: Negligible Making Duna Obit: In theory about 370m/s, but in practice nearly free if you aerobrake (maybe 50m/s for corrections). Duna Landing: Close to being free if you parachute correctly (maybe 100m/s to drop periapsis into atmosphere and get the speed perfect for landing) TOTAL OUTBOUND: 5710m/s Take off to Low Duna Orbit: Wiki says 1500-2000 so lets go with 1750 m/s LDO to Kerbin Intercept Burn: Wiki says 620 m/s Plane Shift: Negligible Making Kerbin Orbit: Free (Aerobrake) Kerbin Landing: Free (Parachutes - more expensive if aiming to land at a particular spot) TOTAL INBOUND: 2370m/s TOTAL: 8080m/s for a complete launch -> transfer -> land -> launch -> transfer -> land Journey Note: numbers very approx and i may have missed something - ballpark figures only.

Nah, got such a huge set of achievements and infrastructure in place I doubt I'll ever start over unless I'm forced to (and if I am, that may be quitting point for me). I may consider it when resources come along, but being as the only real 'game elements' in this patch are flags and seats I don't see the need to change my current game.

I've landed my manned rovers on most worlds in the system now (some my older 'Piranha' class and the last two my newer 'Swordfish' class). I was trying to decide whether to do Bop, Tylo or Pol yesterday and suddenly thought, why not all three! So I've launched three craft one after the other into orbit then done the transfer burns one at a time. It was actually a fascinating experiment - they all left LKO within about 6 hours of each other. They all tried to get their burn point at the same position, yet small variations in when I started my burn have led to dramatically different transfers. One managed to get a near perfect transfer with an encounter at the apoapsis immediately, and when I corrected the normal/anti normal later it dropped into an awesome 300,000m approach with no extra work - my best transfer ever I think. The other two I somehow messed up a bit and had to spend 400 and 550 delta v fixing the approach - amazing considering they craft all had basically the same start. The arrival times also differ dramatically, with the 'worst' transfer arriving first, the other bad one about 8 days later and the best one nearly 2 weeks after that. Anyway when I left it last night, the first one had arrived (least fuel left), aerobraked at Jool and encountered Pol and is now sitting in orbit waiting to land. The second arrived in the middle of all this so I had to juggle the two (middle fuel). The second has just reached Bop orbit and is ready to land. Tonight the third will arrive (most fuel) and head for Tylo then I'll land all three. I'm 100% confident in the Bop/Pol landings (infact I should be able to land some 20 times over) but the Tylo one worries me. Not 100% convinced it will land at all. If it can but doesn't have the fuel I have some tanks around Laythe, so will be able to top it up first, we'll see. It's TWR is a bit low for Tylo though so I'll just have to see.

One thing jumps to mind immediately; you have an awful lot of nuclear engines for such a small load (and such a small fuel package). You would be much better off with a single nuclear engine for your interplanetary - with a load that small your burn time will still be quite short. Always try and do interplanetary on as few engines as possible (more just means less efficiency due to the added weight, and nuclear engines are rather heavy on a craft that size) unless your burn time becomes far too large (I try and aim to keep mine under 5 minutes to escape Kerbin SOI). After that it just becomes all about getting the angle between the two planets right, and your departure angle from Kerbin right. I highly recommend protractor to help until you get used to 'eyeballing' it.

As with most, nearer 10k for lighter craft, nearer 18 for heavier seems to be the sweet spot... it also depends a bit on the staging, for example my two everyday lifters (rated for about 40 and 70 tons) both shed several tanks/engines at around the 15k mark, if I turn before this they have a habit of clipping something as they come off (there's invariably a degree or two of wobble after the turn) so I wait until that part of the staging is over before turning. I've also changed my methodology recently; I was taught (for better or worse) to do a small gravity turn, push my apoapsis to 80k then stop; as I approach the apoapsis turn the rest of the way and begin to circularize my orbit. Recently I've discovered following my prograde marker after the gravity turn and never really cutting the engines unless I really over push my apoapsis seems to be a lot more reliable when getting designs with borderline delta v into orbit.

I think the point is they SHOULD in theory disable themselves for a few meters to let you get away and then kick back in so you can just nudge a few meters backwards then redock... but sometimes they just refuse to re-engage, in which case reloading physics (switching to space center and back) should do the job.

I just did exactly the same as you two when I found out .20 was delayed.