Zylark

...snip...No prizes for guessing what else is also right in front of me as I'm sitting in front of the computer...

Ah yes, the joys of learning the game My first intercepts - or tries at it - was a little dance where my craft zipped by the target again and again. And again. At some point something will 'click' and you get it. At around the same point you get hopelessly addicted to KSP

KERBIN IS SAFE!!! No tinpot little country under threat even! Kerbal Space Center have the great pleasure to announce that the hero of today, Bill Kerman, have both intercepted and pushed a very dangerous Asteroid onto a new course that do not threaten to impact Kerbin. It is however reported that Bill Kerman have some very serious problems controlling that big rock. Too much too handle even. Whilst plenty of patented Space Tape have been applied, keeping a steady course is in Bill Kermans' words "Like eating snacks in a centrifuge!". Our engineers at KSC have a sneaking suspicion someone should have added a large SAS module to the Asteroid Grabber module. Though when asked directly they all go "Who'd a' thunk it?!" As if saving a little insignificant country was not enough, another great win for the KSC - Yes, we've made a good landing on Eve! Two aerobrakes and a little bit of thrust, and all was good to go on sending the puny Eve Lander to do its' business, landing on Eve. It all went very well, and for some reason Mortimer over at the Finance Department got a smile that even bad coffee won't wipe. Still to do for that particular mission is using the little dV still left to get the orbiting probe into a more polar inclination. More science to be done, and get the rock properly mapped should some Kerbal be stu... - uhm - brave enough to attempt a landing! --- Next up, will Bill manage to get his big Asteroid to a sensible orbit? What is on with the Duna missions that nobody told anyone about yet? This and more in the next episode of... Interplanetary Quest!

Great job - doing the entire movie next?

Teeny tiny introduction: Had to go with a new career as 0.25 was released, but unlike my previous two write-ups this time I won't cover all the early stuff happening around Kerbin SOI, but rather the more interesting voyages to the other planets and other missions that are new to me at least. I'll try to keep things 'real' in the sense that before any Kerbal venture out into the unknown void, probes will scout ahead and do their business to prepare for manned missions. The Career is played on unchanged Moderate difficulty settings, with a ton of mods slapped onto the game. Only 'whoopsies' I allow myself are launch reverts should I forget something. Else, if in space, there is no going back. Progress so far: Probes sent off to Eve and Duna. Several to Duna as it happens. Stations are zipping around Kerbin, Mun and Minmus, though the latter is temporary and will be moved to Duna by the next launch window. Mun got a big Karbonite mining operation going on that will be expanded for other resources as well in due time. There's even a small Karbonite rig down on Minmus. And one on its' way to Ike. In anticipation of my manned mission there which just got underway at a near optimal launch window. Nearing the end of the Tech-Tree and got roughly 1.2 million in funds. And have probably 6 million in available technology I can't afford to buy... Enough catching up - onwards Kermans - for the Science! After a long silent trek in darkness, something only seen through mildly powerful telescopes back on Kerbin caught the lenses onboard the Eve Probe Lander, EPL for short. It's round, spherical some would insist, and very purple. Since not launching even remotely near an optimal window, my little Argon-Electric powered probe is coming in screaming at over 4700 m/s, and that number will just grow as the probe falls further into Eves' gravity well. With just about 1000dV available, that means dipping down deep into the atmosphere of Eve to bleed off some speed in order to achieve orbit. I think something around 55km for the Pe should do fine. Some preliminary Science already sent off to KSC. More to come. NEWSFLASH - STOP THE PRESSES!!!! ASTEROID ON IMPACT COURSE WITH KERBIN! 'No need to panic!' say KSC spokeperson Walt Kerman. 'It's just a medium size asteroid, not a really friggin' huge one. Should it hit Kerbin it'll just wipe out a small country, probably not an important one at that. The chances of it hitting in the vicinity of KSC is pretty slim, so we're cool!' Head of flight operations, Gus Kerman, added that Wernher von Kermans' blueprints for a massive Asteroid Redirect mission got nixed by head of finances, beancounter extraordinaire Mortimer Kerman. 'Hey, we only have so much to go around you know!' Mortimer chimed in at the press conference. 'Give us enough funding and we'll send that asteroid to a dark corner of Jool if you so desire!' 'Nownow gentlemen, no need to get agitated. We have a contingency plan, Gus, if you could be so kind...' Walt interrupted. 'Why thank you. Yes - within our rather restrictive budget we found room to send up a miniscule manned Asteroid grabber. This got sent to orbit around Mun where it met up with our massive Fuel Lander which as it happened recently topped off its' huge tank of fuel down at the Karbonite Base there.' 'Combined this ad-hoc contraption should have plenty of power and fuel to at the very least nudge the Asteroid away from a Kerbin impact. Ideally we hope to capture the thing into a Kerbin orbit for further study. Mortimer of the finance department and Linus of the science department both assure us that it would be the profitable and enlightened thing to do.' 'An intercept course have been plotted, and even-though actual capture of the rock will only happen hours before estimated impact, we're pretty confident we'll have plenty of time.' 'To increase our chances, we put one of our most experienced Kerbonauts on the job, Bill "the Bold" Kerman. He have reported in that all is nominal and is awaiting the proper time to start intercept in just over 11 days. Snacks and Fuel both are plentiful.' --- Will Bill save millions of lives? Will the very expensive Eve probe achieve orbit around the purple emerald? This and more on the next installment of... Interplanetary Quest!

Some of those Fine Print missions do want you to put probes at some odd orbits. I've had ones outside of Mun orbit even, at a very eccentric orbit. To get an idea of where you need put your probe, jump to any asset you already got in Kerbin orbit, enter map-mode (m) and zoom out until you see a colored orbit guide with arrows going around it. This is where you need to place your probe, and traveling in the direction of the arrows.

1: If it got engines, it is not a station but a ship 2: Plan ahead - make stuff modular. So if you need to re-arrange or move the entire thing, all you have to do is break it up and ship it off to its new location and then re-assemble there. A bit more work, but no wobble. Also makes it easy to ship it to far away places. For instance those big Cyclotrons from the Station Science mod. They need not be permanent at any one place. Once you've done the kuarq experiments in one location, just detach and ship to another location. 3: Make sure your load is balanced _and_ when transporting big things that are stuck together via docking ports and struts, you need to pull it, not push it. So engines up front, not at the back. And since KSP gets confused when Center of Thrust is in front of Center of Mass, turn off engine gimbal and let _ONE_ central SAS module keep the entire assembly pointing in the right direction. 4: Use Docking Port Sr for big heavy things rather than connecting with standard Docking Port. Even better, mods like Near Future got trussed docking ports that lock together really well. Strutting should only be the last resort. Besides looking ugly, struts doesn't add that much stiffness to big heavy things compared to the other alternatives I mentioned.

1: Design your Spaceplane with some kind of radial attachment point (docking port, radial decoupler, octagonal strut or similar) as the root of your vessel and placed at the bottom of your vessel where you want it to line up with the rocket stack. Then save your Spaceplane as a sub-assembly, go over to the VAB, design your rocket stack, load up your spaceplane from the sub-assembly and attach it to your rocket stack. Also how you get a Rover onto a launch vehicle, though Rovers tend to be stacked on top of the launch vehicle, not ride on the side of it. 1b: Look into the Select Root mod to help modify existing designs so that you can get a radial attachment point as your root part the easy way rather than design from scratch. 2: Select root part, and then re-orient your vessel so that it points up. Then attach launch clamps (or landing legs, remember to deploy them in the SPH) so that your vessel don't tip over when you try to launch it.

@Higgs: Whilst MJ certainly is useful, very much on my 'must have' mod list, it is also a bit of a crutch. And quite often, not as good, efficient or precise as doing it yourself. I view MJ as a tool for doing the routine. Much as pilots use their autopilot. Whilst it can do certain jobs very well, it requires constant monitoring and is no replacement for a proficient pilot doing it manually. What makes MJ essential however, is all the nice data panels and the Maneuver Node Editor. From designing the ship to flying it manually, all that information and fine control of the MNE is vital to doing a good job of it. What the autopilot is good for is executing nodes you've set up, getting stuff to a desired orbit and landing stuff (*NOT* Spaceplanes) at a desired spot. Everything else is a matter of convenience, as MJ tends to do them very inefficiently. But if you got fuel or monoprop to spare, then by all means go ahead.

What I do (when not lazy and let MJ do it all), is to get the intercept as close as comfortable, between 100 and 500 meters is fine. Before estimated closest approach, I turn the vessel to target retrograde. Then at estimated closest approach, burn until relative velocity to target is +/-0.1 m/s. Then I turn vessel to target, setting up so that I get to a good position for final approach and docking. Speed for approach depends on distance to target. Rule of thumb being distance (in meters) divided by 100 is the closing speed I aim for. So if 500 meters out, initial approach speed is 5m/s. During the approach - and if available on my vessel - I reduce speed as I close using RCS. Again following the 1m/s per 100 meter distance to target guideline. If RCS is not available, I turn the vessel to target retrograde again, and use main engines to reduce speed as I get closer. Keeping such low speed during approach assures no unfortunate collisions, and makes it easy to make minor course corrections to line up properly to the docking port I'm aiming for. Actual docking is done by using MJ SmartASS target Par- autopilot to keep my vessel aligned to the docking port, and do the approach using Docking Port Alignment mod. Unless it is some small nimble vessel, where MJ does a good job of docking for me. Larger vessels have to be done manually, as MJ gets very wasteful with monoprop - and I don't usually have much of that on my ships.

Sure is. The following example is using Karbonite mod, but Kethane works much the same way. Karbonite however integrates very well with the Modular Kolonization System mod that I also use. Same author and all...Anyhow. Assuming you got your Mun (or Minmus by all means) mining operation up and going - some assembly required - all you need is one really big fuel lander. That'll do. Launched upside down and that big tank on the lander emptied of fuel to get the weight down to something managable. Plot a course for Mun. Don't trust MechJeb doing this properly. With a bit of experience, you'll do this much better yourself, and always getting a good prograde orbit at your desired altitude. Landing is something MechJeb does a whole lot better than me however. But here MJ missed the target by nearly 30-40 meters, so had to do some plumbing to hook up the lander and the base. All done, fuel transfer is a breeze. Next up is just deciding where you want that fuel. The short of it being getting well over 6000 units of fuel more or less for free. Setting up the base do cost a bit, and that lander isn't free either. That is a one-time investment, and well worth it as you'll be able to fuel up for free for the rest of your career. Oh, and there is also an easier way - no lander required: With MKS you get the Kolony Logistics module. With it you can transport whatever to wherever within the same Sphere of Influence. It cost a chunk of fuel depending on from where to where you need transport what and how much. The upside is, it is entirely automatic and runs in the background. A typical transfer of fuel from the Mun to Mun orbit will cost amount of fuel to transport divided by roughly 4 and will take a day to complete. All you need then is a ship with a large fuel tank to ferry the stuff from Mun orbit to your station in Kerbin orbit.

Getting fuel to orbit from Kerbin is both expensive and not entirely efficient. What I do, is to not do any refueling launches at all. Once a Station or Depot is in orbit, it'll get more fuel by siphoning off what is left over from some other launch. Then I get some useful payload to orbit, and add to the fuel reserves even if it is just a few hundred units of LFO at a time. The other strategy I use is to set up fuel production on Mun by means of Karbonite or Kethane mods. Transporting fuel from Mun to a Kerbin Station or Depot is a pretty simple affair - and more important cost nothing. If you must transport fuel to orbit, then anything over a Jumbo64 tank will weigh so much that the entire operation becomes very inefficient and very costly. If you play sandbox, then that is fine - if in career there are better things to use those funds on.

Short term: Get all my probes and unmanned landers around Eve/Gilly and Duna/Ike - the last is a sample return mission. Medium term: Set up some practical resource resupply infrastructure in the Duna/Ike system. Perhaps even a full on OKS station with all the bells and whistles. Long term: Finally go visit Jool and its' moons. Never done that despite having the game for nearly a year by now.

Only thing I'd like to throw in, is to replace the stock ScienceJr and Goo thingies with Universal Storage mod equivalents. Will save you a ton of space, a bit of weight and will look much smarter.

Is not that difficult a concept. All mods go into the GameData folder of your ksp install. But different mods organize things a bit different. To use a popular example:Toolbar: By unpacking the .zip file, you get a folder structure like this: Toolbar-x.x.x/GameData/000_Toolbar. To install this mod, copy just the 000_Toolbar folder into your Kerbal Space Program/Gamedata folder. Wherever that may be. You selected that yourself during installation - unless if bought from Steam where KSP is then installed under steam/steamapps/common/kerbal space program. Where you have installed Steam you decided yourself a long time ago and probably whilst high on sugar and/or coffee. Other mods may or may not include a folder named GameData. If they do, you copy the folder(s) and/or file(s) inside the mods GameData folder to your Kerbal Space Program/GameData folder. If they don't you copy the folder(s) and/or file(s) of the mod directly into your Kerbal Space Program/GameData folder. After first unpacking the .zip file naturally. Any simpler I can't explain it.

I must admit that for most my landings, I just use MechJeb that do a pretty good job of precise and safe landings. There are however a few cases where this is not the case. Early in career means doing it manually, and from time to time if landing on some new location, the spot you've picked is on a heavy slope and one need to take over the controls to do a manual landing somewhere nearby that is a bit more level. So my landers are usually pretty squat designs, where a low CoM and wide separation of landing legs negates any minor horizontal drift as I touch down. I also tend to go with triangular design for landers, so that no matter how uneven the ground is, all landing legs will touch the ground. Quad designs may leave one leg hanging. The short of it being - make stable designs and don't land on a heavy slope

Mods generally come packed in one of two ways. Either all relevant files are sorted under a folder with the mods name, and all you need is to drag it to your ksp/gamdata folder. Or a mod contains several folders, where the files is packed under the mods name then followed by gamedata and then several folders under that. Then you need to unpack the mod, manually navigate to the gamedata folder of the mod and then select all folders inside that - and copy those folders to your ksp/gamedata folder.

Hehe, ModuleManager reports 919 patches on my load. I just use the time to put on another batch of coffee... As the game goes into Beta we'll probably see some improvements in performance - and load times.

dV as others have said is the amount of force you need to change direction and velocity. The precise measurement of which is not for the faint-hearted, which is why we plebs got MechJeb and Kerbal Engineer to do it for us. If ISP is how many kilometers per liter of fuel your cars' engine can do, then dV is how far your car can go with your current engine and amount of fuel.(*) aV as you say, is not a thing, it's just reading the triangle in MechJeb wrong - it is a delta... you know, from the greek alphabet. Hence Delta Velocity - dV. (*) Yes I know it is not that simple, but it is a nice analogy nonetheless.

Some more rocket designs for the OP to have a look at. Again, designed to get a lander to Duna - in style. This from my current career, which is now just about to get ready for branching out to the other planets. First order of business - a lander. Need be lightweight, packing a ton of science gear quite literally, and have ample life support should something, let us say, unfortunate happen. Slightly bigger than the little one from my previous career, but also comes with a smidge more dV and more beefy parachutes. One drogue, three XL and two radial. That should save me plenty of dV in braking for touchdown. Staged in three phases. Drogue deploy at 2500 meters, Radials at 2000 and XLs at 1500. This to save stress on the vessel. If all chutes deploy at once it might just rip the entire thing apart as it comes screaming down the Duna atmosphere - thin as it is. Ready for launch atop my 15 Ton lifter. Since I'm running with Stage Recovery, my lifters got more chutes than you can shake a reasonably sized stick at. The Radial engines of the main-stage don't kick in until the SRBs are spent. A good 150km orbit reached. The final stage of my lifter have plenty of fuel left to de-orbit itself. More cash in the bank for me. Next order of business, the mothership that'll haul the lander from LKO to Duna. As it happens, I already have one of these in use around Kerbin and its' moons. More of a multi-purpose Crew Shuttle that doubles as a heavy tug and lander. Perfect for landing on Ike for instance. To which I might add a Karbonite driller and refinery is already underway. So sent up a sistership to the CS Anton, the CS Bernard... The CS Bernard hitched a ride to orbit on top of my 45 Ton lifter. Mind you, the Crew Shuttle do weigh in at 51 Tons fully fueled, but since it got its' own engines to do the circularization, that's not a problem. To not fight against the Kerbin souposphere, the central main-stage don't ignite until the SRBs are spent. A little Hohman transfer after, and time to dock the two vessels together. Apply liberal amounts of Space-Tape... ...and good to go. 4500dV is enough to get to Duna and back. To make things better, I don't need to haul the lander back, so that should buy me another 1000dV for the return trip. And even should I waste a ton of fuel getting to Duna, as said, I already got some fuel generating gear en-route to Ike. --- Using a bigger lifter, I could have launched both vessels in one go. But I've yet not had any need to go bigger than the 45 Ton Payload lifter I already got as a sub-assembly - and designing a new and bigger one would require the usual rounds of trial and error. All I really had to make from scratch for this mission was the lander. Oh, and the nukes on my Crew Shuttle, are the bi-modal ones from the Constellation mod. They give a bit better ISP than the stock nukes at 950 and give a lot more thrust at 110 - and generate 18U/min electricity when not in use. Hope it gives the OP some inspiration

Well, ok, nukes may be an option on Duna as it got a pretty thin atmosphere and low gravity. But still, those things weigh a ton, 2.25 tons to be precise. With poor thrust to weight. They might be frugal with fuel, but are also more suited for long low TWR burns. Something like a LV909 isn't all that thirsty, comes in at 0.5 tons and have comparable thrust to the nuke. Which makes them perfect for a small lander where every little kilogram matters. The tiny little Rockomax 48-7S are also pretty impressive. 100kg each. Four of those give better thrust than two LV909 _and_ shaves 600kg off the mass of the vehicle. Compared to two nukes, they give the same thrust and saves a whopping 4.1 tons. With its third gravity of Kerbin, Duna is just there on the edge on where nukes are able to lift any meaningful payload to orbit. You get very little bang for your buck using nukes under those gravity conditions. Oh, and Unknow: That little lander of mine have very slim margins of error. Both descent and ascent got to be done perfectly to save fuel. If first trip to Duna, try and aim for at least 2500dV (in atmosphere).

Either way, stacking vertically, radially, or a 2x2 combination - just remember to provide plenty of support trussing. If it wobbles on the launchpad, it won't reach orbit

If going to Duna with that lander, then three things: 1: You'll want parachutes. 2: Nukes won't do in atmosphere. They are great in a vacuum, but not where there is some air. No matter how toxic and deprived of oxygen. 3: Still too big - or underpowered. Either or. Landing on Duna - and getting back to orbit - you'll need about 2100dV. 600 going down, 1500 getting back up. It's the getting back up bit that is tricky. And why size matters. Not only do you need a ship capable of hauling the lander to Duna from Low Kerbin Orbit (about 1800dV for mothershipship with Lander attached - one way), but you also need some good Oomph, a technical term for high Thrust to Weight Ratio, on the Lander so as to make the trip back to orbit from Duna as efficient as possible. Saving weight on the lander achieves both. First, your transfer vessel won't need as much fuel or as many heavy engines. Secondly, getting something neat and light-weight to gain speed is a lot easier than something big and ungainly. When doing interplanetary, a 'moar boosters' design is more work and effort than a 'small is beautiful' design. This for instance is a tiny Duna lander, with Life Support and plenty of Science instruments that add a couple of tons to it. If not caring about Science gear and don't play with Life Support, you'll get even more dV out of a similar design: High Duna TWR, and in atmosphere dV of 2100 and change. Mass is under 10 Tons fully fueled and with some RCS for docking back with the mothership. Hauling that thing to Duna orbit from LKO and back won't take more than a Orange Jumbo and a couple of nukes. As for the lifter you got designed, it looks a bit like it'll only stay together by plenty of struts and some good luck. Way too many parts. And what is the deal with all that RCS fuel? That stuff is heavy, and more important not necessary. Only your lander need RCS to dock, and it'll not need more than 40 units tops. Your mothership certainly do not need 1500 units of RCS. Only thing that ever need even half that, is Fuel Depots and Re-Supply ships that service a whole gaggle of other ships.

Do carrying a tiny ion or argon gas fueled lander to orbit in a Spaceplane cargo-hold, then using the lander to go to Mun, land and get back again to Kerbin orbit, dock with Spaceplane cargo hold and then deorbit count? Technically just a single stage to the Mun and back *cough*...

My bare minimum is 75km, anything below I wouldn't consider safe. Any little nudge if coasting at 70km might just very well throw the vessel under the magic border. Though the actual altitude I aim for depends greatly on the mission at hand. Usually above 140km for two reasons. It allows greater time acceleration, and I got a Station zipping around Kerbin at 200km that I often visit for refueling or crew transfer purposes.