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What are some of the most useful techniques in this game that you know of?


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Tuning your landing point when re-entering with a spaceplane. Hold very steep pitch (60-90 degrees) to begin and once you're at safe surface speed (say, 1500 m/s or below), continue the steep pitch if you think you're overshooting, or go straight-and-level and transition to supercruise if you're falling short. Recover at KSC every time!

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The high velocity launchpad:

Build a rocket with ~1.0 TWR.  Then put a pack of hammers underneath it.

Your rocket thus keeps a consistent 250m/s ascent going through the lower atmosphere to avoid both horrendous gravity losses and aero problems from wacky contraptions on top.

 

 

Tuned SRBs:

A set of unbalanced fleas gets the ship off the launchpad and angled right for the gravity turn.  The main boosters then light up and take you to space.

Years ago, I also saw a video in which tuned sepratrons would separate, rotate and redock an Apollo style vessel with one button.

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Test each stage of your craft in flight before you add the next stage. Prevents NO END of trouble. 

When building planes, assemble the entire wing from only one root part which attaches to the fuselage. That way you can fine-tune the balance of the entire wing by moving one part. 

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Checklists.  

When building a craft, use the Engineer's Report button to show you what you may have missed.  Then step through Electrical, chutes, staging, docking, etc, to make sure you haven't missed anything. 

Same with Launching, step through all the settings you'll need so you don't miss anything.  This is especially true if you use multiple mods and a bunch of them all need something tweaked.

Any "next Step" type activity should have a checklist, mental or written down, that you step through for each new activity. 

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Puting a retrograde rocket engine on SSTO space planes, very small engines gives a TWR of 0.5 when it's almost empty. Helps a lot when landing, and can be used to correct the landing site from the upper atmosphere without turning around and risking lose control. I use that one from the SpaceX's Dragon, kerbal reusability expansion adds them. 

Also mods, a lot of mods. I think I pruned 80% of the stock parts, and use better parts from mods instead.

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If you can't get the orbital tilt you want at your destination world, just get the periapsis near the target orbit (or the equator if you just want an equatorial orbit). Then - once you arrive - burn down at that periapsis to get an elliptical orbit.

Then fixing your tilt will happen at apoapsis far from the world, and so will be as cheap as possible.

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Understanding mass fractions, and the implications of that understanding on rocket design. Originally written not as a guide but merely as an answer to someone's question, I now constantly find myself linking this post to others because it just keeps being relevant.

Also, realizing that I can steer and use the engines during physics timewarp took me way longer than I care to admit :blush:

Finally, making maneuver nodes is a skill not to be underestimated. You'd be surprised how many people with four digit gameplay hours still struggle with this.

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2 hours ago, Streetwind said:

Understanding mass fractions, and the implications of that understanding on rocket design. Originally written not as a guide but merely as an answer to someone's question, I now constantly find myself linking this post to others because it just keeps being relevant.

Aha!  There it is!  I read that the other week when you linked it in another thread, and was then looking for it a few days later when I was building something and couldn't find it :D  Is there a way to mark threads as favourites so I can find them again easily rather than having loads of bookmarks in my browser?

Edited by RizzoTheRat
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Clipping and rotating tools make your rockets look better.  :cool:   I can't tell you how many times I've taken a "Thud" and turned it around to make it an "inline" engine, especially in clusters.

 

Oh, another one... adding a probe core, especially an OKTO2, into a capsule--- makes nonpilots into pilots and low-level pilots into better pilots.  :wink:

Edited by MaxwellsDemon
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Having your RCS thrusters equidistant from the CoM really helps when docking.  If you don't have a mod to help, use an extended ladder, placed on the docking stages CoM, as a measuring tool.  Place one set of thrusters, rotate the ladder 90° and place the second set the same distance away from CoM. Remember 1) reduce the fuel in the docking stage to match the actual conditions when docking 2) remove the ladder when you've done!

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Speaking of docking, locking target tracking has the pilot/probe core manage rotation, leaving translation to you. With this and docking mode, find yourself in a WASD situation.

I've gone as far as to manually map the mouse's side-buttons to docking/normal mode.

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My personal favorite function in editors is the absolute/local offset toggle mode. Helps sometimes with just minor adjustments and keeping things in line.

 

Edited by qzgy
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If you have a plane which needs a particularly high speed to lift off (or to stay in the air when right above landing), the KSC runway isn't always long enough for the acceleration provided by the main engines or the deceleration provided by brakes. The solution: sepratrons.

I've been experimenting with putting forward-facing sepratrons in places like wing tips to assist with liftoff acceleration (they can also look interesting if placed well), and backward-facing sepratrons beneath the nose of the plane to provide rapid deceleration right as the wheels touch the runway. I still need to perfect the technique and figure out when it works well, and I'm sure it won't work for larger planes (unless I use the bigger seperation motors that SpaceY adds), but it's certainly a promising idea.

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2 minutes ago, septemberWaves said:

The solution: sepratrons.

Some of my most fun creations have been RATO SSTOs where I would put two thumpers on the wings of the plane, then fire them up to get high into the atmosphere so that the whiplashes work enough to get half of the way to orbital velocity. If you haven't built a RATO SSTO, do so. Its an unforgettable experience. :wink:

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