merendel

I would recomend puting the first array of 4 sats with omnies somewhere in the 300-400km mark for orbital hight. that should be high enough for each to have LOS to 2 others at all times (so all 4 connect if evenly spaced) and there will always be 1 in range of KSC. As they are omni's as long as they are on you dont have to point them. This array is for dealing with your low kerbin orbitals, they cover anything being launched and in LKO waiting for a transfer window so you have uninterupted connection anywhere on the planet. you could add long range dishes to these but personaly I prefer just adding additional sats for long distance coms. The reason to keep this first array low is so you can get anything into orbit with just the reflectron active as the other antina's need to be deployed to work and can be riped off in atmo depending on settings and additional mods if you have them out during launch. those sats need to be in range for the reflectron to reach them once the launched craft gets over the horizon from KSC so a sat needs to be withen 500km at all times I'd later put up additional sats, possibly up as high as Kerbin stationary that have long range dishes. one medium range dish pointed at kerbin if your orbit hight is beyond the omni's range for conection to KSC, and another pointed at whatever celestial body you want it to cover. You can also point a third antina at the active vessel although you'll probably want a longer range dish for that. Long range sats can be deployed singaly as any signal interfearance from kerbin should be brief and infrequent if deployed high up and or slightly inclined but you can also deploy in pairs for uninterupted signals.

well the manuver node marker will tend to drift as you get closer to completing it. The nodes represent instantaneous velocity changes, as an instantaneous change in velocity is impossible and we most do them over time they have some measure of inaccuracy. The game tries to add up your vector changes over the burn and subtracts that from the remaining change on the node. Slight inaccuracies throughout the burn will have no immediate visible effect but they show up towards the end. Say for example you want a 100m/s prograde burn. You point prograde but your .1 degrees off in the normal direction. It looks like your right on the node all through the burn but your actually adding a small amount of normal vector. the game accounts for that and adds a comparable amount of anti normal to the node to correct the error. This isn't visible at first because it may only be .5m/s vs 50 m/s of prograde left in a node at the halfway point. However when you get down to .5m/s of prograde left that antinormal correction component is half of the remaining node and so the manuver node will drop down to halfway between prograde and antinormal. Mechjeb is normaly prety good at following nodes although its possible a mode is screwing things up. However mech jeb tries to follow the node as precisely as it can including the correction the node will produce for overburn and steering errors. If for whatever reason mechjeb cant hit the node to withen its error margian (.1m/s default as I recall) it will keep trying untill it does sometimes resulting in it spining around and thrusting back and forth trying to follow a node, getting less and less effective as you move further from the time of the node. Honestly I'd recommend you fly the nodes manually to learn how to do it. By all means use mechjeb to plan out the manuver if your not confident in doing that yourself (although you should learn that too) but try to fly the node yourself. a human mind is better at deciding when your close enough for the job than a script that just keeps trying even if its makeing things worse. Try watching 5thHorsman's fundamentals serries, particularly the 3 episodes on rendezvous and docking. you can find the first episode here

some pictures of the craft might help but spitballing a few possible issues. Its always possible your geting phantom forces from something on your craft but that would likely be noticable in your orbit shifting significantly over time for no reason. 1 I'm asumeing your well clear of atmosphere but best to confirm 2 Is your nav ball in target mode? Your orbital prograde lining up with your target will not nessicarly get you to the target. you want your target relative prograde to stay lined up as you approach 3 are you sure you were looking at the target indicator and not the anti target indicator (cant remember if the extra marker is stock or part of enhanced navball off the top of my head) I've had a few incidents where I thought I was burning to a target but was actualy burning away due to following the wrong marker. This is sounding to me like your reading the navball wrong or have it in orbit mode instead of target mode (click on the display above the navball with your velocity till it says target) Nothing in orbit is static, if you point your nose at an object and then stop all rotation it will drift out of alignment as it cruises along its orbit around the planet. Basicly if its just ahead of you in orbit and you point strait forward with the planet being "Down" and turn on stability its going to slowly fall away as it moves down around the planet. Its not that something is messing with the angles its just that your craft isnt being rotated to follow your orbital path, if you waited half an orbit you'd be faceing directly away.

Good point I was thinking about that wrong. Stuff still leaking out the back =/= still producing meaningful thrust. I was thinking leszek ment leting them go while they were still producing considerable thrust which would be bad as you can no longer controll where they'd go. particularly bad if they do the KSP trick of moveing out just slightly then convergeing just ahead of where they were released, right above or in the upper portions of the main craft. However you make a good point there would still be residual burnoff spiting burning material out the back even if it was no longer able to produce any significant TWR, thats probably what laszek ment. although I agree still laughable for a liquid engine.

Not sure you'd want to release even a radial SRB with it still runing unless you expect the pair to not run out at the same time and it would still be dangerous. I was more refering to the fact that the pod was able to get away from the thrusting stage. Even if you separated with explosive bolts or something that throws it forward unless the pod is producing thrust with the same or greater TWR that spent stage would accelerate right back up its tailpipe a moment later. Just pokeing fun at the fact that the animator clearly didn't get a reality check done before sending that off to the media distribution department and nobody else along the chain noticed while there was time to fix it.

did anybody else LOL at 1:41? the point where the dragon capsule separates and gently drifts ahead of the clearly still thrusting upper stage with no visible thrust of its own? aside from how horribly dangerous separating would be with a still thrusting rocket behind you I don't think it works that way

Ironically there seems to be a few other scientific fields that like to operate in that particularly unscientific manner.

I disagree with the bolded part. outbound flights from jool are cheaper to most destinations than leaving from anywhere else (baring trips between a primary and a moon like duna/ike trips). the return may be more expensive as your going to need at least a couple K dV to climb back up the gravity well without geting a couple slingshots off eve or something but going down the well is easy. With a gravity assist off tylo you can sling your PE down to duna, kerbin, or eve's orbit for only a couple hundred dV. From there you use either gravity or an atmosphere to bleed off orbital velocity and if your final destination is not one of those planets sling yourself into a more ideal orbit. You can go direct to one of the other planetary orbits but it will cost more to slow down without an atmo or gravity assist. The only expensive part of leaving jool is your looking at a couple year trip each way so plan accordingly if you play with a life support mod.

Simplicity and weight most likely. Electric actuators require power and they have a finite energy budget to run everything. To add more power they'd need more batteries which are heavy. Closed loop hydrolics are reliable but also heavy as you need pumps (more energy budget as well) to move the stuff and are often sensitive to extreme temperature shifts. A once through hydraulic system, most likely a pressurized gas is comparatively lightweight and scaling it up for more capacity probably requires less than the other options. So in the end they had the choice of a finite electrical control, a liquid hydraulic control also finite due to electrical needs, or a finite once through hydraulic control. they probably chose the one that was the lightest and least likely to break down for the application.

I can see why they wouldnt post video of the crash on the deck of the barge. While the folks at this community would see even that crash as a very successful attempt we are also much more knowledgeable on this subject than the general population. While we are thinking "OMG they just flew that rocket through the eye of a needle from hundreds of KM away and just bairly missed sticking the landing. so close, they'll nail it next time" the rest of the uneducated masses will see "OMG that rocket just crashed into that boat and they want to try that on land? Not anywhere near me they dont." Sadly the panicked masses calling their representitives could cause much more problems for the company than the additional publicity would be worth unless the crash was particularly tame (aka landing almost stuck but the rocket toppled over after touchdown but no boom) Personally after proving they can hit such a tiny mark as that I have no reservations about them attempting that over land. Keep it to unpopulated areas just for safety of course but that was an extremely precise landing and I have no doubt they can repeat it.

Not immediately. Its generally safe enough to claw any number of ships on to the same asteroid as long as the whole combined structure remains physics loaded. On the other hand every time you swap to a distant ship or go back to the space center and return theres a chance the whole thing will suffer rapid dissassembly once physics loads up agian. Basically roll a 1d6 for each claw latched onto something. if any of them come up a 1 you've got a kaboom. Whats really unsafe however is haveing a claw on an unfocused craft grab something. dont ever fly a ship into an active claw on a different ship, bad things happen when you do (this is what danny is doing with the planet destroyer)

As someone who has used Mech Jeb's smartASS in the past I can say useing it to hold retrograde is a horrible idea for landing. Overthrust just a bit during final decent and start traveling up can cause your craft to flip out and you may not recover and get pointed in the right direction before gravity makes you its ..... The new controls do basically the same thing and I wouldn't trust them for landing anyway. I do think toggling SAS on and off should default to stability only however.

I use the keys because I've been useing them so long. mostly I just forget the gizomos are there untill I hit a tricky alignment that just does not want to line up properly. Gear bays in particular were always a problem before as they were mounted on odd angles more often than not and the rotations to get them lined up were not always intuitive. They are nice tools to have but alot of the stuff I need to rotate are the 90degree angles anyway and thats faster with keys if your used to them.

I wouldn't recommend this approach. Minmus is still traveling at around 270m/s around kerbin. If your doing a really high energy transfer your going almost strait up so thats 1km every 4 seconds tangental to your vector. If you spend enough dV to make the trip in 2 hours and align your vector dead center on where minus is now you'll most likely still miss the SOI by the time you get there. From my own experience I generaly find the departure time for a high energy burn to minmus is prety close to the time you'd leave for a hohman if you've got a good TWR. The more energy you put into the transfer the more your vector deflects closer to minmus's current position. Its not quite 1:1 so you'll slide off target the faster you go but it will still get you prety close. delay the burn by a minute or so and give it a normal componant so your vector still crosses minus's orbit. The other trick is to look at your SOI departure from kerbin time. Minmus has about a 300 hour orbit give or take. Its orbit is also about 2/3 of the way to the SOI limit so you'll only be crossing its orbit a few hours before hiting the boundry if your going fast enough. for every hour to the SOI limit you need to aim for your vector crossing minmus about a degree or two ahead of it. Drop a node, give it as much dV as you wana devote to the outbound leg, aim your guestimate number of degrees ahead of minmus and give the node enough of a normal componant that your projected vector crosses minmus's orbital track and you should get an encounter. Play a bit with draging the node if need be and it should pop up eventualy. as a test case 3km/s burn from LKO well away from the AN/DN (so part of that is a normal componat) gets me about 6hours to kerbins SOI crossing minmus's orbit a about the 3 hour mark. Aiming 5-10 degrees ahead of minmus and I start geting encounters with minus. Departure time is a couple minutes after when a homan to minmus would burn.

I'd also put in that it depends entirely on your situation as well as opinion and playstyle. Outsorced RnD (funds to science) is considered OP by many but would be quite worthless if you were straped for cash and cant even make use of extra science because your research center isnt upgraded enough yet. Personally I somewhat favor rep to funds once I've built up enough of a rep reserve to activate it while still keeping access to decent payout contracts (if your rep is crap you get comparably crappy contracts) and will sometimes do science to funds as well if I'm flush with science points I cant spend because I need cash for upgrades. I usualy find cash is a biger constraint early on when needing to fund big ticket KSC upgrades and unlocking parts (I have it set to require funds to unlock the parts as well as science) on the other hand once you can spam sat contracts funds becomes less of an issue if you design a cheep one.

Kinda why I suggested a prograde following plane with the probecore slightly tilted so it would pitch up. Yes its slightly more efficent to just give the wings an AOA but you can split the difference a bit. if you need a 10 degree AOA can do 5 on the wings and 5 on the core. You'll still have the issue of the plane wanting to climb higher as fuel load drops but when you get too high you'll start to stall and drop. the probe will follow the prograde down but because its angled slightly off it will actualy be pulling out of the dive naturaly. I'm just concerned that pure AOA on the wings wont always be enough to pull out of the dive while the tilted probe will force a bit of steering correction as well as your tricking it into aiming your direction of travle a bit above prograde. It will experience more extreme oscillation as the aircraft lightens but it should keep going till out of fuel.

I've tried both types of controll imputs. I do agree a joystick or a gamepad is better for planes but I prefer keyboard for docking. What I found helped the most with docking was ignore docking mode altogeather and just remap the RCS controlls to something thats intuitive for you. Personaly I moved them over to the num pad. I control all my rotation with the left hand like normal but at the same time I can control translation with my right. I like 8/2 for up/down 4/6 for left/right and 7/1 for forward/back. You dont really need steady light input most of the time while docking (although its pure gold for plane flight) and RCS you want to do in little bursts anyway not long burns. Besides if you layed out your RCS ports with a bit of forthought you should be able to translate with minimul rotation so you only need to line up once and turn on SAS.

1 "Always put at least 2 flat solar panels on any craft at different directions." 2 "Rule 1 is to be followed immediately after the first part is placed, the panels can be moved later if needed" so many probes have been saved by these rules. nearly as many have been lost from the failure to comply.

Personaly I tend not too use alot of part packs that have alot of overlap and I frequently will trim out redundant parts if that happens. I also if needed cut out most of the fuel tanks and just use procedural parts to make the tanks instead. What do I need 30 or more different sized cylindrical fuel tanks for when I can just use 1 that I stretch to fit? I'll do the same with fairings and wings if I need to cut more parts out to reduce ram usage. Typicly I install required lightweight mods first (KAC, Engineer ect) then whatever critical part mods I want for this game playthrough, then visuals, then whatever bonus part mods I like to have but can live without. For fixing ram overruns I start with OpenGL (might try dx11 to see if it works better on my system soon) then ATM then pruneing unused parts.

You have that backwards. fuel costs are very cheep compared to throwing away multi million dollar rocket engines every launch. If the fuel was the bulk of the cost in a space launch there would be little reason for SpaceX's push for reuseable rocket stages. They are hopeing to reduce the cost dramaticly if they can make a launch stage that is easy to recover and refurbish. You may be thinking the fuel cost is high due to how much more expensive shuttle launches were compaired to normal rockets but most of the shuttle expense was all the refurbishment it took after every flight to actualy reuse that deathtrap somewhat safely.

Personaly I didnt find it all that hard. I've done it a couple of times with parts that were prety much what you'd expect from an early mun landing, just more of them. I just designed a squat lander that could self launch from kerbin and put itself in orbit around mun. I then took that design and mounted it on top of a launcher and transfer stage and sent it off to jool. The greatly reduced lander (after looseing all its radial stages during landing and asscent) hooked back onto the transfer stage with a docking port and returned to kerbin. Really the only hard part was controlling the touchdown. Gravity is high enough that its tricky finding just the right amount of throttle to come down slowly but not too slow. Even a second or two of underthrottle can pick up enough speed to break something. Fuel margins are also tight enough that you cant hover for long looking for an ideal landing site if you come down on a slope. otherwise all you need is a craft with 5.5k dv or so with a TWR in the 1.5 range or better. I dont go back there often though. the planet is just to much a pain to land on to make a ground base viable when there are much better targets for that kinda thing nearby. Just 1 mission to get surface sience (most likely a mobile lab rover with an asscent pod now) and then ignore the place till the next career restart aside from a sweet gravity assist target.

You must build small if they are only wafting gently. More often if I forget struts the outer stages are drooping like a pair of saggy old tits hanging off the spacecraft (although ones with a surprising amount of bounce till physics settles) Most of my aborts are stageing errors, particularly if the design is going to be a standardized design after the first run. Better to go back to the VAB now and fix it on the saved craft than to do an inflight fix and then forget and have to do it agian next launch I also get the occasional jeb sneaking into the pod issue although thats not as bad since .90 Saggy rockets and bad controll athority tie for third place although the later tends to not get a revert as its only discovered in flight. I dont get spontanious dissassembly all that often anymore but I do get separation errors that take out an engine from time to time to round out my launch failures. This list does not include stupid things forgoten from the mission profile like geting up to AP with an unmaned probe and discover I forgot a power system or didnt deploy the pannles.

It might be easier to just tell the probe to point prograde and ever so slighty angle the probe core so when its pointed at prograde the rest of the craft is actualy pointed a few degrees upwards. If you get the alignment right for a specific speed/altitude you'll fly strait indefinitely. If you get going too fast or have the angle too high you'll eventualy climb till you start to stall, prograde will drop below horizon and you'll fall go down for a bit. However because the probe core naturaly angles the craft up it will pull out of the dive as it gets lower and the wings generate more lift and engine more thrust. The hard part will be keeping it from rolling.

When my father had cateract removal surgury I know they marked on his forhead which eye they were soposed to be working on. Even the best surgeon in the world can make mistakes. A little wounded pride over having a blatant reminder of what your working on is a small price vs doing the wrong procedure on a patient. Much better to double and triple check before that first cut is made. That rocket breakup video was cool though. I've seen that kind of aerodynamic failure when playing with FAR more often than I'd like to admit.

Not even a Jetpack? I'll have you know that jetpacks make everything better. I'm not sure where or how we could get our hands on a planet sized jetpack but when we do I'm sure it will make dres better. Failing that theres always the Michal Bay approach. Liberal application of explosives.