I got lost on the Mün

[Kerburettor]

Hi everyone,

Glad to be part of the community! Hey, don't leave just yet!!

I discovered KSP a month ago, and have been binge playing it. For the (unhealthy) amount of time and effort put into this game, I haven't done extraordinary things. Just managed to visit the Mun or Minmus a couple of times each, using a few dozen savefiles in the process. I still don't have a firm grasp of what makes a decent rocket. To be honest, I'm more of a planes guy... so I decided to install what looked like the nec plus ultra of aviation for KSP, FAR that is (and a few other mods because I really fancied that su-30 or f-35 replica). But I'm trying to keep the gaming experience light enough for my set-up, so I had to - sadly - resign myself to accept that I would not be able to run KSP with stunning visual enhancers. I actually use my business laptop and it's not too shabby, but obviously it wasn't destined to run video games so despite its theoretically encouraging specs, it still doesn't make the cut.

Anyway. I'm playing career mode, and I'm struggling to make it to the next level, which means making enough science to leave Kerbin's satellite system, and in the meantime understanding how to actually play the game to create rovers, probes and whatnot, then launch them into space. I can't say I've made enough attempts at orbiting a probe around Kerbin to call it quits, but it is also quite certain that I know very little about rocket science, which is why I'm here today among you kerbalnauts to learn from your wisdom.

How hard can rocket science be anyway?

Kerbally yours

[Geonovast]

Welcome aboad!

3 hours ago, Kerburettor said:

How hard can rocket science be anyway?

Quite!  While it's certainly not real life, this is rocket science.  I was right in your position when I started.  My first couple weeks were essentially sending useless impactors to the Mun just to see if I could hit it.  I didn't know anything about orbits that Star Trek didn't teach me. (And Star Trek couldn't have gotten it much more wrong)

Lots of good tutorials and people here.  If you have any specific questions, head over to the Gameplay Questions section.  If you can't find what you're after, just ask!  Since you seem to have at least gotten past the "pointy end goes up" stage, you're doing well.

If you're having issues collecting enough science, you'll need to read up on biomes.

[Starman4308]

So, two comments:

First, FAR is good for realistic aerodynamics. Sadly, in KSP, this means coupling realistic aerodynamics to very unrealistic part masses. Your typical 1-seat cockpit masses more than an entire Cessna. That means high landing speeds and hilarious amounts of wing and thrust.

Second, for rocketry, the three most important concepts are most likely going to be:

The Tsiolkovsky Rocket Equation. Quickly stated, the better your specific impulse and full/empty mass ratio is, you more delta-V you get out of a stage.

The Oberth Effect. Loosely stated: burns at high velocity gain or lose you more orbital energy, so many maneuvers are best performed quickly at periapsis... though engine mass hurts your total available delta-V (see above).

Gravity turns. Basically, gradually turn into your orbital course soon after launch.

[Kerburettor]

Thank you for this warm welcome and your advices!

7 hours ago, Geonovast said:

Quite!  While it's certainly not real life, this is rocket science.  I was right in your position when I started.  My first couple weeks were essentially sending useless impactors to the Mun just to see if I could hit it.  I didn't know anything about orbits that Star Trek didn't teach me. (And Star Trek couldn't have gotten it much more wrong)

Lots of good tutorials and people here.  If you have any specific questions, head over to the Gameplay Questions section.  If you can't find what you're after, just ask!  Since you seem to have at least gotten past the "pointy end goes up" stage, you're doing well.

 If you're having issues collecting enough science, you'll need to read up on biomes.

My first contact with ksp was through watching Scott Manley's videos (I've got to thank Youtube's algorithm for this)! He's got a knack for explaining astrophysics in a somewhat precise yet casual manner. I'm an avid viewer and got to learn the basics before I decided to purchase the game. Orbital mechanics isn't completely foreign stuff to me but I really appreciated to get a taste of what it meant to manipulate conics in a fun-oriented game.

I reckon I'll need to become more organized in the way I play this game. It's easy to get carried away by all the different missions and forget to tidy up your gameplay, which means (in my case) forgetting to erase supernumerary savefiles, useless contraptions, and not scheduling properly. Your remark on biomes reminded me that a mission needs to be well thought through in order to optimize science collection. This is work in progress for me; Not only in the game but also in real life. I kinda rush into things and forget a lot of necessary details that would have prevented me from headbanging the nearest wall. 

3 hours ago, Starman4308 said:

First, FAR is good for realistic aerodynamics. Sadly, in KSP, this means coupling realistic aerodynamics to very unrealistic part masses. Your typical 1-seat cockpit masses more than an entire Cessna. That means high landing speeds and hilarious amounts of wing and thrust.

I was amazed at how poorly mechanical contact is simulated when it comes to wheels. Surely real life aircraft landing gears don't have to go through elastic collisions. Sometimes, springs seem to have negative damping, but that may come from conflicting mods and Kraken-like behaviours when you run out of memory (which is odd because I'm supposed to have plenty of it, I'll blame the GPU for bottlenecking my laptop)...

3 hours ago, Starman4308 said:

The Tsiolkovsky Rocket Equation. Quickly stated, the better your specific impulse and full/empty mass ratio is, you more delta-V you get out of a stage.

I know the first equation for having derived it in highschool quite a while ago during our physics classes (we simply called it the rocket equation), but didn't immediately make a link with the notion of Delta-v. Sometimes I wonder if I have to go through back-of-the-envelope computations before launching a mission. These seem like a waste of time but such is the bread and butter of an engineer I guess! Planning appears to be the step between failure and success...

3 hours ago, Starman4308 said:

 The Oberth Effect. Loosely stated: burns at high velocity gain or lose you more orbital energy, so many maneuvers are best performed quickly at periapsis... though engine mass hurts your total available delta-V (see above).

I had an intuition of this principle, but never went through the actual explanation and certainly didn't know that it was called the Oberth effect! I did notice that when I don't have enough Dv for a maneuver, I should often start my burn even before the scheduled time (scheduled_time = maneuver_node_time - burn_time/2) because if my second engine has a greater specific impulse, the remaining amount of burn will take more time than what was originally planned by the computer. Does that make any sense?

3 hours ago, Starman4308 said:

 Gravity turns. Basically, gradually turn into your orbital course soon after launch.

Now things are getting interesting. I don't quite understand how my gravity turns are supposed to look like depending on the rocket I'm launching. How do I time it? More often than not, I have the unsettling feeling that I could have saved a few hundred m/s of Dv by managing my trajectory a bit better.

Edited January 27, 2019 by Kerburettor

[Starman4308]

1 hour ago, Kerburettor said:

Thank you for this warm welcome and your advices!

My first contact with ksp was through watching Scott Manley's videos (I've got to thank Youtube's algorithm for this)! He's got a knack for explaining astrophysics in a somewhat precise yet casual manner. I'm an avid viewer and got to learn the basics before I decided to purchase the game. Orbital mechanics isn't completely foreign stuff to me but I really appreciated to get a taste of what it meant to manipulate conics in a fun-oriented game.

I reckon I'll need to become more organized in the way I play this game. It's easy to get carried away by all the different missions and forget to tidy up your gameplay, which means (in my case) forgetting to erase supernumerary savefiles, useless contraptions, and not scheduling properly. Your remark on biomes reminded me that a mission needs to be well thought through in order to optimize science collection. This is work in progress for me; Not only in the game but also in real life. I kinda rush into things and forget a lot of necessary details that would have prevented me from headbanging the nearest wall. 

I was amazed at how poorly mechanical contact is simulated when it comes to wheels. Surely real life aircraft landing gears don't have to go through elastic collisions. Sometimes, springs seem to have negative damping, but that may come from conflicting mods and Kraken-like behaviours when you run out of memory (which is odd because I'm supposed to have plenty of it, I'll blame the GPU for bottlenecking my laptop)...

I know the first equation for having derived it in highschool quite a while ago during our physics classes (we simply called it the rocket equation), but didn't immediately make a link with the notion of Delta-v. Sometimes I wonder if I have to go through back-of-the-envelope computations before launching a mission. These seem like a waste of time but such is the bread and butter of an engineer I guess! Planning appears to be the step between failure and success...

I had an intuition of this principle, but never went through the actual explanation and certainly didn't know that it was called the Oberth effect! I did notice that when I don't have enough Dv for a maneuver, I should often start my burn even before the scheduled time (scheduled_time = maneuver_node_time - burn_time/2) because if my second engine has a greater specific impulse, the remaining amount of burn will take more time than what was originally planned by the computer. Does that make any sense?

Now things are getting interesting. I don't quite understand how my gravity turns are supposed to look like depending on the rocket I'm launching. How do I time it? More often than not, I have the unsettling feeling that I could have saved a few hundred m/s of Dv by managing my trajectory a bit better.

As I understand, wheels are currently one of the bigger bugs in KSP, something about a Unity upgrade.

I'm not sure if MechJeb or Kerbal Engineer Redux have been updated to the latest version of KSP, but they provide some additional useful information.

Specific impulse has nothing to do with the Oberth Effect. Thrust-to-weight/thrust-to-mass ratio, on the other hand, does. If you're staging mid-burn, your TWR often drops, but that's because the next stage (usually) has less engine power, not because of specific impulse. In general, try to split delta-V evenly: get half the maneuver dV done before the node, and the other half after the node.

For gravity turns, there's the Gravity Turn mod, or outright trial-and-error. Unfortunately, not many tips for you, unless you turn to the Dark Side and install Realism Overhaul.

Unfortunately for me, it appears the GravityTurn mod copes poorly with Realism Overhaul, as GT uses engine throttling and a lot of real-world engines do not throttle.

It also probably doesn't cope well with this:

[RubyPetersen]

I simply want to know which platform do you use to play this game?

All the glitches and stuff depends upon the system I supposed.

[James Kerman]

1 hour ago, RubyPetersen said:

I simply want to know which platform do you use to play this game?

I think the majority of players are using windows/Linux because of the ability to add mods and the speed of updates.

[Kerburettor]

5 hours ago, RubyPetersen said:

I simply want to know which platform do you use to play this game?

All the glitches and stuff depends upon the system I supposed. 

I play ksp v.1.6.1.2401 on Windows 64bits.

The game visually glitches a little bit, especially when I'm on or around KSC's runway. But gameplay is relatively sound and the game runs smoothly enough (30-something fps by my standards is smooth) considering the quality of my setup. I had to sacrifice a few graphical elements to get it to run without lagging during atmospheric flight: reduce aerodynamic sfx and screen resolution among other things.

Edit: And I also deleted some mods that appeared to induce lags

Edited February 1, 2019 by Kerburettor

[RubyPetersen]

15 hours ago, James Kerman said:

I think the majority of players are using windows/

Actually I also used the same.

[MrSystems]

Welcome! I second the suggestion to get Kerbal Engineer. If you're trying to do any sort of calculations you'll need to know more than just your orbital velocity. It also solves the specific problem you mentioned of knowing when to start your burn.

In addition to the rocket equation, the other useful formulae are vis-viva and the orbital period formula. With those three equations you can plan an entire mission before you even start to design your rocket, if you want.

Last, as regards collecting science in a career game, it took me a long time to realize a) experiments work on Kerbin, b) each part of the KSC is a unique biome, and c) you can build a goofy-looking science-collecting rover in the space plane hangar using early-game parts. Whenever I start a new career game I always make unlocking the Gravioli detector as soon as possible my highest priority, as it collects biome-specific science in orbit.  And if you're not collecting enough science to enjoy yourself (this is a game and enjoyment is the point), consider adding the SCANSat or DMagicOrbitalScience mods.

[GRS]

Welcome Aboard !

I say that you need a Scientist to fly the rocket and pull as many Science as possible, Scientists like Bob could restore Science Hardwares, and my first times were just...burning linear upside so i can get orbit...