Morokth

Some of the structural truss pieces can be selected as the first piece in a ship just like a probe or cockpit. Most likely the truss ended up controlling the minmus pod instead of the other way around

He means RETROGRADE. Burning prograde will increase your orbital period. Retrograde slows you down because you're burning against your current velocity.

The large rockomaxx adapter works just fine too. As well as throttling up to something just shy of 100%. I'm not glorying to burst anyone's bubble - not everyone knows this - but maybe my random mentioning of this will help that one person who didn't know mainsails and jumbo-64's don't seem to get along

I've also had that weird bug where the nav-ball was oriented on a clearly wrong angle while sitting on the launchpad. In one particular case I had the mechjeb control part mounted above the remote guidance piece controlling the rocket, wondered if that was causing the problem and moved the MJ part to beneath the pod piece. Since then I have had no problems, but I'm really not sure if that was truly what was causing the problem in the first place.

Simple steps to arriving at the Mun based on my experiences thus far - 1.) circularize your ship at whatever altitude parking orbit. I suppose this isn't entirely necessary but I find boosting to a parking orbit makes whatever else I'm going to do much easier. For me and what I do in game, 100km parking orbit is the standard around Kerbin. 2.) Select Mun as target. At the descending or ascending node burn normal or anti-normal to get the inclination difference to 0.0 degrees. In some cases having the inclination difference "close enough" may not cause much worries but I find this just makes everything else easier. 3.) In map view, zoom out far enough to see Mun's or ital path. Swing the view so that you're looking at Kerbins polar cap, and so that Mun is in about the 2 o'clock position. Now zoom back in and place a maneuver node at about the six o'clock position and set your burn for an intercep with Mun. Some fine tuning may be needed with the exact placemen of the node, but you should end up with a delta-v of between 820 and 850 generating you an encounter with the Mun, with a Mun periapsis of anywhere between 300km and a couple thousand kilometers. 4.). Once you are in the Mun's SOI, place a node at your munar periapsis and use the retrograde arm to place yourself into orbit around the Mun. 5.) lastly, if desired, circularize your burn at your desired altitude. This is the process I go through in getting to the Mun or Minmus. I hope I wrote this out succinctly and clearly enough for any who wander by looking for answers.

TWR is thrust to weight ratio. In total vacuum this is (from my own observations at least) not so important, but as a rule you pretty much won't move / lift if you have less than 1.0 TWR. That is, a rocket on the launchpad with more weight than what the thrust can move isn't going to get lifted. So you need at least 1.0 TWR from launch. I'm sure someone can give a far better explanation of this than I can. As for thrust and kN (which I understand to be kilo-newtons, and newton being a measurement of thrust), there is an equation that can be done to "manually" determine your TWR. Of course you would also need to know your rockets weight as well but I don't know tha formula. Again there are more well informed / well spoken people that can give you a better grasp than my simplistic layman's terms I just used.

Akinesis, I hope all goes well with your daughter. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading your mission reports, to the point where I've been thinking of doing something similar in a campaign series I've been tinkering with ever since finding the wiki campaign. Thanks for the inspiration / boot in the behind to stay task oriented!!

I was curious about it would work in a polar or it vs. equatorial because if the rotation of the planet. During a moments pondering, I had a vision of the satellite more or less just sitting there but I didn't think that would happen. Guess ill just have to launch one and see what happens! As for the mapsat ill have to get my laptop online and see what I can dig up insofar as a hotfix file or what have you. Thought I saw one but was just browsing and not really paying that much attention at the time (probably cuz I was wondering about the polar orbit question).

Well two really, I suppose... 1.) If I launched a satellite into geosynchronous altitude (assume 2868km for Kerbin), but along a polar orbit, what would the difference be compared to an equatorial orbit? 2.) I can't seem to get ISA MapSat to work right with .21. Anyone got a fix for this? I'm using 3.3.4 if memory serves. And my apologies if this question is out of place.

Hmm. Hadn't thought about that lol.

As an alternative, you can grab your debris and move it into a decaying orbit, release it to burn up in the atmosphere/splashdown/touchdown and then return the collector back to a stable orbit. From there, go find more trash to pick up, or jus decouple Jeb and land him and send another pilot up to track a crack at it (would require a docking port to hold the cmd module instead a decoupler, but I think you get the idea). Course, there's always that persistence debris slider too, which is my personal favorite (although I've been working on keeping detached tanks and the like out of stable orbits)

Might have to go get it. I've already thought about it just to have a variety of different names than the same dozen or so that I end up with. Just haven't thought enough about it to do it - maybe when I get around to building and populating stations and large ships I will though.

Yeah, thats what I came up with too. Bit of a pain in the ass but I made it work. Even got to take my nifty rover for a bit of a drive - nice rugged bastard of a vehicle but I can't possibly think of trying to get it into space. I think it'll work for anything based on Kerbin - at least if I don't have to dry too far with it, that is.

Ok, So I have a rover with a crew of one to operate, and a hab module looking thing to hold three kerbals. Question is, though, how do I get those three into it before I take the rover off on an easter egg hunt?? Mind you, the rover isn't leaving the planet. Its going ot go from the KSC to the nearest egg that I have a location for...

This is more or less me. I use mechjeb almost entirely for the information I can get (like the weigh of the launcher and pods I use instead of adding it up by hand) although I have once or twice used the auto ascent and orbital alignment modes a few times. My command pods have names/classes (a prince and prince II class, lately duke and baron classes as I continue to find a way to get the best one-man command pod for my projects before I move on to the three man crew variants). My missions have been Explorer 1 and 2 to validate the command modules serviceability and make orbits and the like. Then there was Salutation 1 and 2 which were my attempts to make orbital rendezvous and dock (still haven't been successful with that yet - ugh!) and just last night, working on a new launch rocket I had Sparrowhawk 1 with a second Sparrowhawk mission lined up for tonight's festivities as I continue to refine the rocket. I also use the mapsat mod cuz the idea of sending a probe to a moon or plane an let it scan for a map appeals to me. And I'm thinking of getting the kethane mod because tha might be use to me as well. I tend to role play my stuff too so that just adds to it. Beyond all that I try to stay pure and I only want to use stock parts and what not.