Colonel_Panic

If you only have a 550W I'd probably upgrade your PSU first and get one with proper 6 & 8 pin power while you're at it.

if your lander predates v.20 there's probably nothing you can do to add a flag to it without risking your save file. You could always send a new kerbal crew up for your lander, as I believe the flags are sent with each kerbal. if you want to try editing, try searching for the flag's filename and replacing it with the filename of a different flag. Again though if yourlander/kerbals predate v.20 they won't have a flag to replace.

MechJeb 2 is an unfinished beta, but still has a lot more powerful and reliable features than 1.7x. It just takes some getting used to the new interface. I don't know of a good way to remove MJ 1.7 modules from KSP .20 ships, which is why I switched over to MJ2. I'd recommend doing the same.

I don't get it.

lol This does not work. One way to do it is to send a retrieval ship up to collect and de-orbit it. If the module doesn't have a parachute, you may want to transfer your kerbals to another ship first by having them EVA to it at a rendezvous. Here's a ship you can use to catch and de-orbit if you want http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/29958-7R45H-CN-and-7R45H-7RK-The-solution-to-your-debris-problem!

Neat thread. I'll bite. This was my most recent build, though I don't know where I put the in progress shots... 6-Core i7-3930K @ 4.0GHz with HT off. 32 GB DDR3 in quad channel GTX 660Ti 2x 160GB SATA3 SSDs in RAID 1 for system 6 TB of spinning storage for programs, data and backup built as a universal gaming workstation... intended for a lot of video rendering, editing and encoding capacity as well as gaming and cracking. I kinda regret spending as much as I did on the CPU, but at times I'm really grateful for what it can do.

Step 1) make lots of balloons Step 2) fill balloons with helium and sell them as cheap party favors. Step 3) when extreme helium shortage bubble bursts, remind bureaucrats of scarcity on this planet and get them to actually do something about it now that it's too late. Step 4) secure funding for space program to search for and mine helium from other planets. Step 5) profit!

Simply put the act of changing inclination is removing velocity in one direction and adding it in another. Comparatively, landing is removing it, and taking off is adding it. If you accomplish both int he same maneuver, you don't have to do it twice. gilly's rotation isn't a huge factor as far as I'm aware.

that has nothing to do with gilly's orbital altitude but rather gilly's low gravity. It wouldn't be expensive per-se to change inclination at gilly's equatorial AN/DN, but because of the fact that you're injecting from perpendicular to gilly's pane, there's no possible way to save fuel by doing it earlier on capture. It's a simple case of "you can't get there from here." as any inclination change you make coming at gilly from above/below will still leave you inclined 90 degrees, just in a different direction relative to gilly's orbital path. The only way to shave inclination change cost off the basic change around gilly, is to do your landing at the equator and then take off at your desired inclination.

Are you trying to combine ships via subassembly loader? AFAIK this doesn't work because the root part of an assembly is never the docking port unless that's where you started building it as an addon to another existing ship. It is doable, but it takes planning in construction, and you sometimes have to 'build backwards'. Place a docking port on the piece you're working on where you want the next piece to join, then place another docking port facing the first (using the wasd/qe keys to rotate it to the way you want them joined) and then start building your next module. This works best if you start building from the 'core' module. Also you can alt+click to duplicate a singular assembly and make an identical copy to attach elsewhere on the ship. Unfortunately fuel management is broken for ships assembled via docking clamps, since docking clamps override fuel lines with "everything on this half of the ship can share fuel with everything on the other half." To get around this, seperate the docking clamp from the main ship via a decoupler on one side, and just don't use the decoupler. Then treat fuel management like you would with a regular ship, as if the docking ports were two-way fuel lines. Attach your directional fuel lines to the decouplers to feed fuel to the other side.

I see this has mostly been answered... If you're looking to do the math manually, see this page: http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Tutorial:Advanced_Rocket_Design MechJeb has already been suggested, but there's another (better) one I might recommend that doesn't come with all the unrelated stuff MJ does, and that's Kerbal Engineer Redux. All it does is offer staging analysis and delta-v calculations, and you can use it only in the VAB or in space depending on your preferences. So that's the easy way and the hard way. It's just rocket science.

yeah it is long, and I've been meaning to break it up somehow but there wasn't really a good way of doing it since I jump around a bit. If you want you can skip to the point where I start talking about the lifter stages. You'll know you're there when you see a big orange tank on the screen.

Do you have a picture of the vessel? your figures sound high unless you have almost no dry mass right now. That said if you have anywhere near that much delta v you can very easily do it. You do NOT need to expend more than 250 delta v to get back to eve, and you are not circularizing at eve but rather just using it as a gravity assist to reach kerbin, thus dropping your *total required delta v* to reach kerbin from the surface of gilly to less than 400. It really is *that low*, so give or take a little on fudge factor you should be perfectly fine doing it that way. Furthermore reaching gilly shouldn't take that much delta v either unless you're intercepting at the absolute worst point in its orbit (and if that's an option, then intercepting at the absolute best point also is). Another poster mentioned just burning to escape from gilly prograde, and then doing a hohmann transfer from kerbol orbit. If you have as much fuel as you say you do, you can do that too. I mentioned using the slingshot maneuver because it dramatically reduces the fuel necessary to bring your kerbol apoapsis up to kerbin intercept, so the difference in required fuel between landing on gilly and not landing on gilly is minimized. Because you're in a polar orbit (and gilly is highly eccentric), the phase angle calculators do not apply, and it won't be a proper hohmann transfer. What you need to do is guesstimate when gilly and your ship will cross planes. Set it as a target, and you'll want to intercept at the ascending or descending node. Timing is critical because you're not in the same plane as your target. To time it, create a maneuver node opposite from the planned point of intercept to burn to prograde and bring your apoapsis up until it intersects with gilly's orbital line, and the intercept markers appear on the map. There will be a marker for your ship and a marker for gilly. If they're far apart (gilly's marker is still way back behind your intercept on its orbital path) you'll need to cancel the node and rotate around eve some more to let gilly get closer to your intercept point to try again. If the markers are close together, but you don't get capture, try adding some radial thrust from eve into the burn. This will push your orbital line out away from eve, thereby adding a tad more time before your intercept and allowing gilly to catch up. You just have to adjust your node's prograde/retrograde to keep your orbits intersecting so you can tinker with the burn until your intersect markers get close enough to get an encounter. Once you have an encounter, just do your burn at the node, and then set up a second node to fine-tune your approach and make sure you're still on target. EDIT: I take back what I said about inclination change in my previous post. Because you're entering gilly SOI perpendicular to its plane, it is not possible to improve your inclination on capture. Instead, to minimize delta v of the inclination change before your ejection burn, try to land near gilly's equator and then takeoff into a 0 inclination orbit to the east.

It sure does. The surface of a planet has a prograde vector around the planet's axis. Since prograde and retrograde are just velocity vectors, literally anything that is moving in relation to anything else has a prograde vector. This comes into play because the planets are rotating, so if you want to match your direction of orbit around the direction of a planet's rotation (to ease takeoff and landing) you want to know the surface's prograde relative to the planet's center. That said, some of the ways I've seen this concept described in this thread are incorrect. All of the bodies in the kerbol system, so far as I am aware, rotate easterly in the same direction as their orbits, so if you enter a 180 inclination orbit by capturing from the inside, you are orbiting in the surface retrograde. If you enter a 0 inclination orbit by capturing from the outside, you are moving to surface prograde.

Personally I just think that's unnecessary. I'd stick with just one large tanker, which you can send up to rendezvous with a very large ship or station in orbit to fill it up at once, and then use it as a fuel depot for smaller ships to come to it. You're adding extra steps and layers of complication to the process.

it also says unanswered, hence the confusion.

definitely watch my rocket building tutorial. It's not just about "more boosters", it's also about staging and fuel management. You need to use stages and fuel lines so that you're dropping the dead weight of empty tanks and extra engines as soon as you can. Gravity turn depends on the rocket, but in general you want to start them early as possible, and as gently as possible so you follow a nice smooth curve toward your prograde.

Fuel lines are bugged and do not behave as expected when a loop in flow is formed even in only one direction. You will find that because you have tanks draining into multiple other tanks, and multiple tanks draining into the same tanks, it will draw fuel unevenly and out of order. This is what is happening in your case. Your best bet is to go with Brenock's suggestion above, quoted below for convenience: every tank should have only one fuel line leading into it, and one fuel line leading out, and no more, except for the core stage (which can have multiples leading in but none leading out except to engines)

The crew module deliver vehicle comes equipped with 4 crew modules, here's a pic of it with 2 already deployed and in the process of deploying a third: http://postimg.org/image/lzgdpcwj3/full/ and the .craft link (includes launch system): http://herpnderp.info/KSP/OASIS%20Crew%20Module%20Lifter-S.craft all stock

Hi, I actually did something very similar to this just this morning in sending a map satellite from eve to gilly. I can't tell you much about your capacity given your supplied fuel stats, but I can tell you that you need less than 1000 or so delta v of fuel to reach gilly, and almost no thrust to weight ratio to land. Furthermore from gilly, it takes less than 500 delta v to return to kerbin using an eve gravity assist, so in theory, it will take only a tiny bit more fuel (between 400 and 700dv worth) to land on and return from gilly en-route to kerbin than it will take to go to kerbin directly. Here's the method: 1) wait until gilly is in the right position around eve for a hohmann intercept from your current orbit. This will require a lot of guesswork and maneuver node experimentation. Set gilly as a target and pop maneuver nodes to prograde to get an orbital intercept and look to see where gilly will be when you get there... and if it's too far behind in orbit, wait another revolution around eve and try again. If you're close, fine-tune it by tinkering with your prograde and radial burns to bring your arc out and get an intercept with the right timing. expect around 800dv if you do it close to the middle of gilly's orbit. 2) fine tune your approach because gilly has a very small SOI, so you want to come in real close, but avoid hitting any mountains. Don't worry too much about inclination until this point. Inclination burns cost fuel, though you can adjust it almost for free on capture if you do it right as soon as you enter gilly's SOI. It doesn't need to be perfect, but the closer you can get it to 0 inclination around gilly, the better. 3) circularizing burn. Here's where you need some TWR since you have a very small burn window and will shoot past fast. I couldn't do it with my ion powered mapsat, but you can with your LVN most likely. it takes less than 200 dv IIRC. 4) landing and takeoff is straightforward. gilly has almost no gravity. Make sure your landing craft has a wide enough base to not float off the surface and tip over. 5) return is the hard part... because of gilly's eccentric orbit, you'll need to find a kerbin return window that is compatible with your position in gilly's orbit. You want to do it when gilly is near it's apoapsis and eve is near opposite from kerbol while kerbin is at the right phase angle all at the same time. You might need to skip a window or two waiting for this to happen. When it does, burn to gilly's retrograde to drop down to an eve orbit with a periapsis just above eve's atmosphere (~250dv). Hopefully you get lucky with inclination (might want to quicksave first). Then wait until you reach the periapsis before doing your ejection burn from eve to maximize the oberth effect and put you on an intercept with kerbin (~150dv) and the rest is just nailing your kerbin approach.

It looks like he wants to send parts of this station off to dock with smaller vessels. I'm not sure what the question is, but it does seem a rather inefficient way of accomplishing the refueling task, unless the tanks are meant to remain attached to the vessels they're fueling. Multiple smaller redezvous will take more time than just one bigger one.

You can stack tanks. You can also add struts in 3 symmetry around the joint to reinforce it, even if you can't see the struts externally. You should however refrain from using stack decouplers below heavy rocket parts, as they are notoriously hard to reinforce. This is a feature. For best practice, use the 'long' decouplers positioned near the top 1/3 of the stack, and use a strut to reinforce near the bottom. Note: you may experience extreme wobble and stability problems. This often is not the fault of poor reinforcement but rather the gimballing on the outer engines causing a positive feedback loop and oversteer. Fix this by setting them to a control group to toggle gimballing, and turning the gimballing off before flight. Yes, the struts are as of the current version connected via explosive bolts that will automatically disconnect if the core node connecting two parts is severed. It will not damage either side in the process.

If I understand you correctly, you're asking about kerbals on EVA operating ladders. This is possible if your kerbal is close enough to the ladder, and is done by right-clicking on the ladder itself while contorlling the EVA'd kerbal.

wow lot of misinformation in here. quite simply, prograde and retrograde are velocity vectors toward and away from the orbiting body's direction of travel relative to the body of reference. In layman's terms, they are the directions in which acceleration will speed you up or slow you down without changing your relative direction of travel. This means that every object (except Kerbol itself) has a prograde and retrograde vector relative to either Kerbol, or one of the planets, moons or other objects in the kerbol system. The prograde is the direction the orbiting body is moving toward, and the retrograde is the direction it is moving away from. If the orbiting body is a ship with a navball, then the prograde vector is marked by a yellow circle, retrograde is marked by a green Y, and the body of reference is listed at the top of the navball (and can be changed by clicking on it) Other examples: Kerbin's prograde around Kerbol points along the orbital line in the direction that kerbin orbits (counter clockwise) so if you want to "burn toward kerbin prograde" you need to begin your burn in the middle of the dark side of kerbin (assuming a 0 inclination or 90 degree orbit to the East) which will serve to bring up your kerbol apoapsis upon kerbin escape, while burning toward the retrograde of kerbin, on the day side of kerbin, will lower your kerbol periapsis on escape. For more information, read the wiki on the navball http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Navball

Hi, I might be able to help, but first I'd need to know a bit more about what you're trying to do. Are you looking for help designing the modules to interconnect? or are you just trying to join them in space? My RCS tutorial (in my signature) might help you with both, though one thing to note about the former is only like docking ports can connect with each other. Make sure both parts have the same type docking port, and are clear enough around the docking port that the ships won't collide while docking or docked, or you'll run into spontaneous explosion issues. EDIT: Sorry I misread your intial post and thought you said "I can build a rocket to get to orbit." For help with actual rocket design, take a look at my other tutorial on rocket design (also in signature). It's a bit long winded but should answer any questions you have about that. Once you've gone over it feel free to ask me questions on anything you need additional clarification on.