michaelhester07

One of the things I tried to do lately was to setup a ship to orbit mun like the diagrams from the Apollo missions looked like. It seems though that the planets and moons have a finite sphere of influence outside of which their gravity doesn't effect my ship. I've gotten close to that style of orbit but never getting it like the old diagrams. This leads me to questions: Do planetary bodies have gravity influence outside of their sphere of influence? This would be crucial for finding Lagrange points (where I would like to drop space stations or probes). Do Lagrange Points (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point) actually exist in this game?

I'll throw my method into the mix too. 1. Circularize your orbit at about twice the altitude of your target. It doesn't matter if the target's orbit is circular. This altitude is if you're impatient (which I am). You can go lower if you want to save fuel. 2. Set the object you want to rendezvous as your target. Your map will gain new markers on the orbits. Two of them are "AN" and "DN". 3. Match your orbital planes: Set a maneuver at the AN or the DN node (whichever comes up next) and drag the purple spike on the maneuver up or down until you get the AN and DN to flip sides. That is if you put your maneuver at the AN it switches over to DN. Then slightly drag the spike the opposite direction until the nodes are at a 90 degree angle to where they were. 4. Do the maneuver you planned in part 3. 5. Look at the planet or moon you're orbiting from top down, when you put your craft at 6 oclock and your target is at 8 oclock add a new maneuver just behind your ship in its orbit direction. Drag the retrograde spike until your orbit crosses the target's orbit. You'll see new bugs on the map: The orange ones mark when you first intercept the orbit and where the target is at that point, the purple ones mark when you second intercept the orbit. If they're pink you'll have one intercept. Each marker comes in 2 parts: where you'll intercept, and where your target is. Mouse over them to see which is which. 6. Adjust the position of the maneuver until the bugs are lined up vertical for one of the intercepts. If you mouse over them you'll see the separation. Get this to be at most 10km. If you can't get the bugs to line up advance your orbit half way (time warp) then try again. 7. Perform the maneuver from above. 8. Watch now as you approach the intercept. When you're within 50km of your target the navball speed will switch over to "target" mode. Wait a little longer until you're within 20km of your target. 9. Turn your ship to thrust towards the retrograde marker on the navball (the green one with an X in it). Thrust until target speed is less than 10m/s. 10. Turn your ship towards the target (large circular purple marker) and thrust slightly. Aim on the opposite side of this marker to line up your prograde marker (green, no X) with the toward target marker when you thrust. Once the markers are lined up thrust directly towards the target until 20m/s. Timewarp till you're within 500 meters. If the markers drift apart stop your warp and thrust to re-align them. If you're over 20m/s turn towards the retrograde side and thrust on the side of the Rg marker away from the "away from target marker" to move your retrograde vector towards it. 11. Once you're within 500 meters thrust toward retrograde to zero out your target velocity. Docking: 12. Target the docking port, and press the V key until you get the chase camera. Align the camera to the front of your ship. Now you can aim it as you were moving the navball. 13. RCS: activate docking mode and RCS. If your ship doesn't have RCS this is a little trickier but doable. Put your ship about 40 meters out from the docking port vector. If you draw a line from the center of the port directly out from it, that's where. Once you're there thrust to kill any velocity you have. 14. Aim towards the docking port: Line up the center of the navball with the target prograde marker (the same one from step 10 above). Thrust toward it with RCS. Use the "strafe mode" thrust on RCS to line up your prograde vector to the target prograde marker. You can turn your camera to the side when you're within 10 meters to see if you're gonna capture right. 15. If you're not going to get the capture thrust backward and let the ship drift to where it would capture, then thrust forward. make sure your navball progrades are lined up and you'll get the capture.

The mod I'd recommend for you is kerbal engineer. It will show you what you're getting out of that rocket for numbers. Aside from that with the first picture I imagine that your fail point is the Rocomax couplers between the first and second stage. Also if there are any SAS modules in the stack they'll also be fail points and they crush even easier than the couplers do. ( I know cause I built rockets where these were the fail point)

Probes are actually really good for finding and marking the biomes. Just make small probes with the temperature or gravity sensor and send them to every feature on the target that looks important. If the experiment describes it as from a different name from what you've seen before then you can mark the biome (by renaming the probe). Then you know where to send your kerbal to get the soil sample.

So asparagus staging is actually a decent way to add engines to a rocket and it did what I thought it would. I got 7k delta v off 5 LV 30s, 2 FL800s and 4 FL 400s. Orbit with 3k m/s to spare.

The fuel lines let you decide which tank drains first. It ultimately is supposed to let you transfer fuel between containers which are attached with components that don't allow a fuel transfer (like the metal struts). The pipes will make fuel flow in the direction of the arrows on them. The fuel will flow out of the tank in the retrograde direction of the pipe first. That is if you have 2 tanks with a pipe between them they'll drain from the first to the second. The second one doesn't drain yet. The point of asparagus staging (from what I can tell) is to maintain a flat TWR as the rocket launches. You'll drain 6 rockets with a TWR of 2 but by the time you drain the tanks on the first 2 you'll be up to TWR of 2.6 or so. You break those rockets off and continue on the 4, back down to a TWR of 2. This burns until you're down to one rocket with a TWR of 2 for the remaining weight of the rocket. You'll get the same acceleration with less fuel and hopefully cost than if you just stuck 7 tanks together each with a rocket and let em burn. That by the way is how I've been doing it and I'll describe it below. I personally don't do asparagus staging as it is hard for the automatic stack control to understand and I don't like taking 10 minutes to figure out the stack only to find out I have to add a part and it completely resets my stack after I do that. My 1.5 rule. If you consider the largest tank you have available that matches your rocket's engine size as 1, the second largest as .5 you end up with the 1.5 I refer to. Always put the bigger tank on the bottom to increase the rocket's stability. Struts may be used to increase the stack stability for long rockets. Here we go: LV-T30/45: FL 800 and FL 400. : Provides about 2500m/s deltav at about 2.1 TWR. The T30 has a higher TWR with a lower delta v. Once I have the 45s I don't use the 30s though. LV 909: FL 400, FL 200. If I followed the rule. I personally hate making tall lander rockets and wouldn't use the 909 for anything else. 1 FL 400 gives 2200 delta V for 1 ton of materal on the craft, enough for a return trip after a Mun landing. Rocomax poodle: The rocomax 1600 matches this like the FL 400 matches the 909. Same purpose, bigger rocket. Also doesn't follow the rule. If it did it would take the rocomax 800 size as well (that thin one with the same fuel content as the FL 800) Rocomax skipper: Rocomax 3200, Rocomax 1600: I primarily use this as an orbit insertion rocket. 2400 delta v for a 15 ton rocket. TWR is fairly low though, only 1.8. Rocomax Mainsail: Rocomax 6400 (orange tank), rocomax 3200: I call it the Flying cigarette. Used for bottom stacks in a pack of 5 (center with 4 surrounding). Struts must be used to attach the upper stages, otherwise the rocomax decoupler gets crushed under the thrust and the rocket falls apart. Launches up to 50 tons of craft above it (including the weight of the skipper stage). If you need to get more weight than this consider a castle shaped launch vehicle. With what you're doing adding extra radial rockets watch your G force doesn't go too high and keep the large tanks to the bottom. If you put your orange tanks on top of the silver ones your rocket will be unstable. Make sure you have enough struts to keep it from flying apart. If something falls off, add struts to it.

You can put out-riggers on it: Long struts on the sides with one wheel at the end of them. I did this with a rover and I could corner on minimus at 15m/s.

I'm not sure if this was suggested before but what if a moon had a moon of it's own? Give a large moon like Laythe a small moon that orbits it. That would make an interesting landing challenge.

I wish i could have my kerbal repair solar panels. I went on an EVA and he went crashing through 10 panels on my ship completely destroying them all. Like a bull in a china shop! I left all the panels on Ike cause he couldn't pick em up to put them back together.

I got to thinking something about space stations and game performance. It seems that when I connect more than 4 ships together to form a station the framerate starts dropping like a rock. I even set the physics delta to .03 to maintain it. I wanted to think about why this happens and I think I know (though I don't know what the inner workings of KSP is like). If each ship is structured as a tree then the docking ports allow multiple trees to be connected together. The collision component is calculating whether a collision happens for each tree. The thing I want to suggest is this: If multiple trees are connected the game only needs to calculate collisions and structural physics once for the whole interconnected tree choosing only one "root" of one of the space ships as the calculation root. I believe now it calculates the collisions for each tree root in the connected system. This results in redundant collision measurements and cuts into the framerate, dividing it by each connected ship in the system, of course depending on the size of the ship part wise. I need to test if this is true by connecting together several ships with the same design to see if the framerate divides by the number of ships connected. It's something worth taking a look at for optimizing large space stations.

Tutorials should show you how to control your rocket. The biggest thing to remember is where the toggle for SAS is (T). Turn it on during launch to stabilize your flight. You can still make adjustments with it turned on with the key controls. Now letting go of the key will let the ship stay where you put it. To avoid losing orientation pay more attention to the nav-ball on the bottom rather than your camera view. The key commands are mapped to that ball (as they would on a real spaceship I imagine. Some cases where the keys actually have to map to your camera movement exist (such as docking) in which case tap the V key till you get the "chase" camera. That camera maps your view UP to the navball UP. Flight controls are like an airplane at that point.

Open your map and click on your ship once you detach a probe. You should see "<your ship's name> probe" and a context menu with "set target" and "switch to". Pick "switch to" to control your probe.

I wish I could add a camera/radar assembly module to a probe. Make it so that would be able to produce the same data as a crew report would. So far the only probe I have that actually feels like a real probe is the kethane scanner probe I have in orbit of Mun and I had to get a mod to make it. Wishlist of probe capable parts: Camera -crew reports : what idiot builds a probe that can't get a decent look at what they shot it at. Even Voyager had a camera. Thermal Camera -temperature reports from orbit... lets me get the 40% transmission value without landing: It would be like the thermal satellites we have now. Radar mapper - Scan the surface to generate a topographical map which lets me identify the biomes and identify safe landing spots (flat spots). : Rather than fly blind and hope for the best which usually results in me splattering a kerbal across the landscape I want to be able to identify a safe place to touch down. Resource detectors: Generate 1 science point per scan node (like the kethane scanner) on a planet when it successfully finds a resource. Could be labeled as a spectrometer. - water : gotta find this for a sustainable base - oxygen : if the planet or moon has this I can generate breathing air for the Kerbals - metals : If I want to do any construction on the object without having to ship all the materials from Kerbal. - Helium 3 or Kethane: generating fuel on the surface - Atmospheric composition sensor: What if Duna had an oxygen envrionment? I don't know since I can't tell what the atmosphere is composed of. This one would require entering the atmosphere to find out. Some small amount of science from this. - Surface sample analysis kit: Similar to what the Curiosity rover has on it this would allow a probe or unmanned rover to take surface samples. It would use the same science pool as a kerbal taking a surface sample. This equipment is on real life probes to gather information. The information they gather lets us determine if and where we could put a moon base. Such a base would allow easier construction of vessels to other planets. I would even assume in 2001: A Space Odyssey that they would have had a moon base where they built the Discovery as launching all of that into orbit would be really expensive. It's interesting that KSP could become research into ways to get into the deeper corners of the solar system

Yesterday I did a rescue from munar orbit of Jeb. He had been there since the start of my current campaign. I landed a kethane mining probe on duna and realized that I can't shut down the drills when the probe has no power (wait what?) so I have to build another mining probe to go there instead. The orbital refinery space station is coming along well and has all the old transfer stages parked there. I'm going to send one back to Kerbin to pick up the new probe and bring it back to Duna. No sense launching what I can reuse.

You can use the stack decouplers to stack the small Solid boosters. My only problem is controlling the rocket with that setup but you can keep it fairly straight. Do a capsule with a parachute, the 400 size liquid fuel tank and the LV-30 for your first launch. EVA, soil, get back in, crew report, launch it and then recover it. That unlocks the stack separator. Use the stack separator to add another copy of the 400+lv30. mount 3 of the SRBs on the side of that. Use stack separators below those and add 3 more srbs below. That should make for 6 stages: stage 6 fires 3 SRBs, stage 5 separates them. Stage 4 does the center LV30 and the 3 srbs. Stage 3 separates that (make sure you burn all the gas on that LV30). Stage 2 separates that and stage 1 inserts you into orbit after you burn about half of it. If you turn 45 degrees east (but your center marker of the navball on the 90) you'll do a good enough gravity turn to get to orbit. Once the speed indicator switches over to "orbit" burn to half of your stage 1 if it's still there. Switch to your map and plan a burn prograde until the Ap mark swaps with the Pe mark. After that burn you're in orbit. Once you unlock the LV45 things get easier to control. *edit: the gravity turn should be at 10km altitude... that's when you break above the thickest part of the soup that's kerban's atmosphere.

I wanna say I love this game. It is one of the better sims I've seen and so fascinating a subject. I'll be around here!