ShadowDragon8685

My advice would be not to swear the exact amounts, and don't try to cut your fuel reserves down to the wire. It's better to have extra and not need it than to need it and not have it. So if you're trying to to go from a Low Orbit of roughly 70Km to a 4,000Km orbit, sum up the dV you'd need to go from 70 to Kerbin Escape, which is 950 if I'm reading the DV map correctly. Add a fudge factor to that in case you need to do some corrections mid-flight or suddenly develop a need to head home. I'd say round it up to the nearest multiple of 100 and then add 20% just to be safe, so pack whatever stage you're using to get there with about 1,200 dV, and Bob's your uncle. No, not that Bob. The other Bob. There's a lot of Bobs.

Perhaps you could try spreading them out further, decentralizing the power supply situation?

I'm glad you like it. The original quote comes from Freefall, and is "If you think you've pushed off, you pushed the right amount. If you know you've pushed off, you pushed too hard." The context is that of a space-trained, uplifted anthropomorphic red wolf prototype, Florence Ambrose, teaching the completely not-at-all space-trained captain of her ship, Sam Starfall, an alien squid in an anthropomorphic pressure suit, how to maneuver in microgravity in the safe confines of his vessel. It's a real long-runner, having launched on 3/30/1998, and switched to color sometime. In real time, it's been going damn-near 16 years. Thanks to Comic Strip time, it's been less than a month in-universe, but what a month.

I've adapted some advice I read in the comic strip Freefall for EVA. If you think you're moving, you're moving. If you know you're moving, you're going way the hell too fast, slow down. Don't frantically bang your keyboard. That's what makes a mistake turn into a Kerbonaut permanently becoming a satellite of some far-off world or wherever you've lost them. Tap the WASD keys to move, don't hammer, don't bang, don't hold. Face the camera towards what you want to go to, tap W to point your Kerbonaut towards it. Is it moving relative to your Kerb? Tap in that direction until it isn't. Get your Kerb facing it and with it not moving, tap W to move towards it. If it's far away, tap it a few more times, but remember to tap S almost as many times to back off the rate you're approaching it as you get close. When you're close, find the bit you want - if it's at an awkward angle (it can be a pain to grab a ladder on "top" or "bottom" of the ship, IME,) don't feel bad about switching to the ship and rotating it, then switching back to your Kerb. Once you're back to your Kerb, tap W again to close with the ship, slowly, press F to grab a ladder. Congratulations, you're now on a ladder! You can scamper all over the ladder-equipped bits of the hull like an overcaffeinated tree rodent. Note that where ladders intersect at angles, you can tap A and D to reorient your Kerb, but not otherwise. Anyway, you're on a ladder on the hull, and presumably you're going to scamper up to the part of the hull that has the hatch and climb on back in, settling into the cozy, warm seat of a space capsule and vowing never to jump out of a perfectly good space ship ever again.

I feel required to point out that the captain of a ship does not nessessarily know how to do everything required to make that ship operate. He may not be able to pilot the ship, or repair the engines/trim the sails by himself. The captain's job is to oversee everyone whose job it is to do all of that. He's required to know enough to get his job done, but you can't just take the captain of the ship and put him on any given task and expect it will work out. Furthermore, there are distinctions between the commander of a vessel (traditionally a captain, but also possibly called a skipper or, in unusual circumstances, a coxswain might hold the position,) and the master. (Also the owner as well, but in this case the owner is irrelevant.) The master of a ship makes the big decisions - the master is the one who says "We're sailing this boat to Shanghai," or "we're sailing for Portland." The captain is the one who organizes it all, and the navigator and pilot are the ones who set the course and apply the throttle. I'm really, really kind of ****e at setting a course on my own, and even worse at applying the throttle except under the most forgiving of conditions, and by that I mean Minmus. That doesn't mean I shouldn't be allowed to play KSP until I "get over it." That's what MechJeb does - it's a handy dandy pilot and navigator I can give orders to and take over from when and if I have the skills to do it... Or when and if I realize I'm trying to dock a lander to a mothership and I haven't unlocked the auto-dock feature yet. (That was hairy, and sketchy as all hell 'cause the lander wasn't anything resembling RCS-balanced, but kinda fun, too. I never would have been able to do it without MJ to make a hohman transfer to put me within 200m of the mothership, though.) I know what MJ is doing, but with that stupid navball interface - and the fact that sometimes you're coming up on a parabolic apoapsis far, far too fast for me to get a maneuver planned using the damn thing and orient the craft appropriately - I'd be lucky to get anything done. Not to mention the fact that the navball isn't very helpful, I certainly can't find a heading on it. I'm lucky if I can orientate to the horizon using it, forget about "finding east" on it, and most of what I know about which icons on the damn thing mean what is because MJ actually spells out in english what it's tracking when it orients to an icon. You only need a ladder when you're going somewhere with gravy heavy enough you can't just RCS up to the hatch. Also, some experience from me: Kerbs tend to explode when they touch land and are exceeding a velocity threshold. It doesn't actually matter what rate they were approaching the ground, just that they're going too fast in any direction. So you can be skimming the ground very quickly and only clip it with a Kerb's toe, and he'll explode as if he'd rode a solid rocket booster straight into the dirt.

Check the tracking station. Flags should be present as "vehicles." You can just "recover" them if they're on Kerbin, or "Terminate" them if they're elsewhere. Check the Spaceport for a mod called TAC Fuel Balancer. It's pretty darn handy. No idea. You'd have to ask Squad.

Once again, someone else telling people not to play the way they want to play. I'm starting to get annoyed with it. No, I'm starting to get angry with it. MechJeb is hardly a "Win" button. If you don't build your rocket right, MechJeb won't warp you to your destination instantly and grant you 10,000,000 Science. MechJeb can't really help you make a fuel-efficient short hop on Minmus or the Mun, because those aren't things it's good at. MechJeb can't instantly fix your broken design. What MechJeb can do is make sure you don't get frustrated at a design that can work if only you could keep it on track but you can't because you're not a computer. It can get you down onto the surface of an airless rock that you couldn't land on yourself because the shift and control keys are too sloooooow to actually do what you need done when fast throttle changes are called for. It can keep the nose of your craft pointing the way it's supposed to be pointing while you work out how in all the holy frozen hells to get a ship back to Kerbin with less than half the fuel you expected to have on your return trip. MechJeb is an autopilot. It is not "Autoplay." MechJeb will not scan my parts list, assemble a perfectly efficient, aesthetically pleasing craft with all the capabilities I require, wheel it out to the launch pad automatically, send it up, set its course, fly to wherever, run the missions I want to do, land the lander, hop Jeb out to have him scoop up some surface samples, plant a flag, write a pithy and long flag plaque for me, hop Jeb back in the lander, fly it back up, rendevous with the return stage, dock, jettison the no-longer-nessessary bits of the lander, set a return course, bring Jeb and the boys down in a biome they haven't gotten soil samples or EVA reports from yet, and pull everyone back to KSC to collect the sweet, sweet Science. That is what playing KSP is all about. MechJeb automates some of the bits of it that people find more tedious or unpleasantly difficult. MechJeb can make a Hohman Transfer for you, it can't build the craft to get there, nor can it decide where to go. It's an autopilot, nothing more. It's not an "Autoplay" button. It is most definitely not a "Win" button, as several debris fields littering the surface of Kerbin and its satellites, incorporating that lovely, nifty radial MechJeb box will attest.

I'm really starting to get annoyed hearing people poo-poo MechJeb. If I wanted to learn to fly a rocket for real, I'd be sending my CV to NASA. Or playing Orbiter. Doing things the manual way sucks, especially given the time invested in a single mission and that it can all come to an explosive halt at the very end because I bollocksed up a tricky maneuver with the keyboards. More importantly, there's a crap-top of complex maths behind the scenes that not only do I not know how to do myself (watching Scott Manley illustrate some basic orbital mechanics on paper made my head go aaaaagh!,) even if I did, KSP does not give me the tools I would need to make use of that math - things like a precise Hohmann transfer, for instance. Without MechJeb, I'd be lucky to manage to make an orbit, let alone an orbit with an apoapsis and periapsis within 10K of each other, and I could definitely forget about an orbit at the actual inclination I want. Maneuver nodes are practically no help whatsoever, because they require fiddling with the bloody awful maneuver node interface rather than, say, letting me input a maneuver to circularize my orbit at apoapsis, let alone getting any kind of an inclination change done without it making my orbit go all wonky to hell. So please, please please stop trying to give "don't use the one mod that you literally couldn't play Kerbal Space Program without" and "learn to do it without the numbers, you big baby," as advice, because they're not advice. They're as helpful as "Just cheer the hell up already!" is to someone struggling with grief and/or chronic depression, or "just find a job, you lazy bum!" to someone grappling with chronic unemployment. So there, I'll make that some serious advice for newbies: Don't pass down judgmental "advice" based on telling them not to do things they find work for them.

Unless you successfully landed at KSC (In which case, you're a BOSS,) those are three very, very brave Kerbonauts, to get back in the saddle. Good job! For future use, I would suggest equipping all equipment you plan to put into Kerbin orbit that you intend to bring home again for a hardware-assisted aerobraking maneuver, IE, a parachute landing. And good job!

If for some reason you have a station that has some thrust on it and you can't pull your kerbs off for some other reasons.... I would try to do as much of a suicide burn as possible. Use as little DV as you possibly can to get down - just put your PE below 69K and wait for aerobraking to happen. This could take ages, but it'll pull you down, eventually. Then save the rest of your fuel until you're almost down to the ground, pushing down against terminal velocity, point the nozzles at Kerbin and slam the throttle on full to kill as much velocity as possible. If you pull it off and you have enough crumple zone under you, it should be entirely possible to perform a hardware-assisted lithobraking maneuver, the kind that ends up with an intact command pod rolling around on the ground and the Kerbs within in dire need of clean shorts and swearing that they won't so much as ride an elevator off the surface of their homeworld ever again.

At the very least, it could get him back into a Munar orbit so he could pull something else with extra crew capacity up by it and EVA them over to get the heck out of Dodge.

Welp! This looks like an opportunity to figure out how to land a rescue mission with a hitchhiker storage container! Or a lander with four outboard 1.25m engine stacks topped with Mk1 command pods.

It might help if the pics in question were (a) not the size of a postcard, and ( actually showed your craft. It looks like you've got five engines, though, presumably four radially arranged around a fifth. If they're anything but those junk "What is this, an engine for ANTS?!" engine, you should be able to slow down by following a very simple formula. Step 1: Point engines towards Mun. Step 2: Fire engines until no longer zooming zooming towards Mun. If you want more specificity, it would help if I could actually see what you're flying.

I just learned something new and very important. If you get all the way back to Kerbin with a tall vessel, land on, say, a slope, tip over, and the science bits fall off, disaster has not struck. The Science has not spilled out! If it was a Kerbbed flight (Kod help you if it was a probe, because then you're shafted,) you can hop out of the ship, walk over to the science bits, rightclick on them, and collect the science out of them, take it back to your capsule and hop back in to store the science within. (Alternatively, this raises the potential of disposable Science mcguffins, goo tanks and materials bay. Land, do a sample, remove it from the bay/cannister, store it in the capsule, jettison the science mcguffin to save weight.)

Of course there isn't actually any such connection, but if observing a canister of unknown goo in flight (rather than say, analyzing it in a lab,) and having a Kerbal hop out of his space-ship to write a quick travelogue from the ladder as he flies over each and ever biome of a planet is the kind of thing that can help Werner von Kerman invent new rocket parts, then surely a comprehensive Kethane-deposit map would also be of assistance.

Hence why I suggested that the Science could come based on a percentage of planet mapping completed rather than on finding a deposit. It would be just as important to know what sort of land formations do not develop Kethane deposits as which do.

KSP is a great, fun game, but it has a difficulty curve like, well, a rocket. I figure there's some critical "lessons" to get yourself over to achieve competence. Here are the ones I've learned, so far. 1: MechJeb. I find KSP to be just about unplayable without it. I know that there are surely some purists who will disagree, but without an autopilot and MechJeb's VAB calculations, I'd likely still be considering myself lucky to so much as make Kerbin orbit, let alone be gearing up for my second shot at a Munar landing. I'd also likely have no idea of what to do without having seen MechJeb do things, but I've watched MechJeb in action enough to have an idea what on Kerbin it's doing and how to do it myself. 2: When in doubt, radialize! I've experienced nothing but bitter, hilarious disaster trying to build vertically, barely able to get ridiculous expanding stacks into Kerbin orbit. Instead, I figured out that I have to build outward; the same fuel tank+engine design, in a serial decoupler arrangement, is vastly less useful and powerful than two/three/four/six of the same fuel tank + engine design arranged radially around another of that same engine design. 3: SRBs, and how to use them. Specifically, SRBs are good for an initial bump to get your rocket engines up to speed and to let them carry some or all of the lowest-altitude work alone, with MechJeb on the limit to terminal velocity setting to save fuel, but it's not really worth it to use them for more than that. Radial liquid fuel engines are so much more useful, I'm pretty sure I could get a radial SSTO going. 4: The KW RockoMaverick engine, for when you don't yet have the Mainsail. This could work with the LV-T30 stock engine and I think it would still be superior, but KW Rocketry is what really sells it. Get a big old 2.5m Rockomax fuel tank stage going, however much is appropriate to the payload you intend to use, and stick one of those KW LFTA 2-1 conical 1.25-2.5 adapter-fuel tanks on the bottom, inverted. Stick on a tricoupler (or a quadcoupler, if you have it - those will definitely make it better,) and attach three KW Maverick D-1 engines. Gives you massively more thrust than the Rockomax Skipper (350*3 = 1050 thrust > 600 Thrust,) with better ISP at sea level and no worse ISP in vacuum and far more alternator output, not that that will matter on your ascent stage. It is heavier by 2 tons, true, but the far greater TWR means you'll ultimately save a lot in getting into orbit, and the RockoMaverick has been consistently lifting payloads into orbit for me that the Skipper can't. Not to mention it looks boss as heck, especially if you have six or twelve of them radially arranged around a central.. 5: Less is more when it comes to payload, more is more when it comes to engines. If engines are your payload, you're going to have some tricky balancing work to do, and your ascent stage will probably wind up being approximately the radius of the Death Star. 6: Navigation lights. I'm pretty sure they came from B9 Aerospace since they were manufactured by "Tetragon Projects." Use the red lights on the left side of the craft and the green on the right, and I like to put the white lights strictly down the "top" - that is, with the craft as a whole (that is, the first command part) not rotated, the white lights go straight down the middle when facing out of the VAB. This helps so much when you're in space and looking at your ship trying to work out which side is which. (Not to mention it makes your ship look boss as heck. ) 7: Don't forget batteries and power generation! You don't want to SSTO a 45-ton payload and be about ready to embark on a Mun shot only to realize that your entire power supply is the tiny supply in the lander strapped to the top of your transfer stage! That's what I've figured out, anyway. Some of it may be wrong, but it's what I've got and it's what's worked for me. If it's stupid, but it works consistantly, was it really stupid? There is one thing I want to know, though... Is there any practical point to installing fairings without FAR? I haven't got it installed and don't intend to. Fairings look boss as all heck and watching them pop in orbit is great, but without FAR, are they just adding mass and (paradoxically,) drag? Or do they actually shield the drag of their payload and replace it all with their own drag in stock, because that would probably justify the weight several times over on the ascent stage.

I've yet to achieve a successful Mun landing, though I have once gotten a Landercan to the surface without it exploding hilariously on impact. (Everything under it served as the crumple zone.) The one and best piece of advice I can give you, though? If you're using an untested lander, attach a Probe core and send it unmanned first. Heck, the probe cores have reaction wheels even if nothing else has been unlocked in that size category except the capsules themselves that have reaction wheels, so you may as well go and attach a few for really good control. If it runs out of fuel half way down and scatters its parts over five kilometers of Munar surface, that lander is not sound and you most definitely should not have a Kerbal inside. If you bollocks up the landing but the design is sound, you should hopefully have a better idea of what to do next time.

Visiting the Mun and Minmus both in one trip is going to be a trick and a half. I'd visit the Mun first - changing inclination to match Minmus will require a lot of thrust, but changing inclination to meet the Mun from a Minmus launch will be harder still. Best you get rid of the weight of your Mun ascent stage/fuel first. (Unless of course, you're going to be fueling up when you get to the Mun by Kethane mining or something, but I'd still go with Mun first.) I'd be worried about that TWR when it came to landing on the Mun, though. The Mun is surprisingly unforgiving of a low TWR. More than one of my (thankfully un-Kerbbed,) Mun landings have ended in hilarity when I found my craft had enough dV and TWR to kill horizontal speed, but not enough (of one, either, or both,) to kill vertical speed. If you watch Scott Manley, he tends to use a rig with about five Rockomax 48-7S engines, four radially mounted around the fifth. That set-up will give you a thrust of 150 for the weight of half a ton, which is much better than even a KW Rocketry Vesta. (If you're going with a radial engine setup like that, just remember to make sure the fuel stacks all have equal amounts of fuel, otherwise you're liable to find your outboards or your inline motor flaming out suddenly. It's not a disaster if that's how you planned it, but if you didn't, it will be. Don't count on fuel lines, they'll vamp the inline engine's fuel to keep the outboards going.) In general, though... I'm not sure why you're doing that, other than to say you did. I'd just send two missions, one to each of the Mun and Minmus simultaneously. Easier requirements, you can bring back Science! from both without lugging dead weight down to a surface and back both ways coming and going, etcetera. If you're just looking to plant a different flags on two bodies in one mission for bragging rights, though, you'll want to at least have a two-kerb lander, since I think Kerbs get one flag per mission. (Or you can transfer between lander and mothership I suppose.) In the end, though, I'm not sure which will cost less dV, and it probably depends largely on the alignment of both the Mun and Minmus. You could always launch two identical missions as near as simultaneously as you can get and record the DV they both have remaining when they're making their final run for home.

I wouldn't mind having to map them first, I'd just like integration on a biome map and the orbital positioning, you know? It would take the guesswork out of "am I at the right inclination? Am I over what I think I am, or am I misreading this thing entirely and I'm the other side of the freaking world from where I think I am." factor. Could even be made in the form of an environmental biomes mapping sensor, getting you a bit of science for each biome you map/percent of the world you biome-map.

Hi. I've just got around to fooling around with the Kethane sensor, a small one on a satellite around Kerbin. It's going well, though it kind of takes forever... But it is kind of a relaxing alt-tab event, letting the Kethane sensor run in the background while I'm alt-tabbed out. It did make me wonder, though... Would it be possible/desirable to make Kethane sensors generate Science? (I think it would be desirable, obviously.) We are, after all, mapping an entire planet, using a sensor of some sort (and a very shiny, high-tech one. Just look at it's truncated triangle futuristic shape. That's gotta be some good stuff there!) to essentially make a specialized map of a planetary body. That's gotta be something that Werner von Kerman would find useful in some way or another. I'm not entirely sure what algorithm would be perfect - maybe a Science bump for every Kethane hex discovered, or maybe a Science bump influenced by the planetary modifier for every 10% of the whole map which has been pinged or ponged? If nothing else, a complete (or near-complete) Kethane map would probably give insights (well, to the Science Lab boffins, us mission controllers would still need to map,) into the formation of planetary bodies and their Kethane deposits and such. And it would add a point to running Kethane survey missions long, long before you're ready in any way, shape, or form to launch missions that actually exploit those resources.

I have a question: is there any possible way to translate the Custom Biomes map to an overlay in the KSP map view, Kethane-style? Or failing that, display the active object's orbit and position on the CB map? Eyeballing the biomes is a pain in the aft, especially when you're over something that has very little to differentiate one section from another, like the Mun.

Hi. I've been using your RealChute mod since I got around to reinstalling KSP recently. I love it, I love it a lot. I just have a suggestion, though. It doesn't even have anything to do with the physics or anything. Since getting the first RealChute part in career mode, I've come to associate the orange stripes with Drogue chutes and blue stripes with Mains. But the combo parts have gray stripes. It makes them hard to differentiate in the editor from stock parts at times. Simple suggestion, really, if potentially a bit eye-searing: for the combo chutes, use a combination of orange and blue stripes? I'm not a graphics artist or I'd see about tweaking that myself. But it simply occured to me as I was looking through the editor, given that I realized I'd been trained to look for green, orange and blue for RealChutes, and to know which was which.

Are there any Internals for the DEMV Mk 1? If so, they're missing from the download on Kerbal Spaceport. I installed it, and it runs like a dream, but in the current version there's no portraits of my Kerbs, I can't send them EVA or do an IVA to look around the interior. This is a shame, because it runs around Kerbin better than anything I made - well, it's slower than what I made, but it can sustain a higher speed over terrain that would shake my best efforts apart and land Bill, Bob and Jebediah upside down on their heads.