Starstrider42

You misunderstood my question. We know you're early in career mode; we can tell that just from looking at the parts list on the left side of your screenshot. What I meant was "How did you decide which of the available parts to connect to which, and in what order?" As for a design to try, my only suggestion without knowing more details is to have only a single LV-909 engine on your lander. You'll still have enough thrust for the job, and you'll save a lot of weight.

Edit your first post, then click "Go Advanced".

You can *ONLY* take a sample from the asteroid, it does not affect science in any other way. Specifically, asteroids don't create a new biome around them. Right click on the asteroid to get what you want.

Vane, could you explain to us your reasoning behind this particular design? That might help us give you more general advice.

"I couldn't find anything" means "I only found non-answers". I can't judge the optimal value of a mysterious, arbitrary parameter.

Let's see if I've got this right... 1st stage: 4 LV T-30 engines and 1 LV-909 engine, backed by 25 FL-T400 fuel tanks. 2nd stage: 5 LV-909 engines, backed by 5 FL-T400 tanks and one FL-T200 tank. Payload: 1 Mark I capsule So for the 2nd stage, you have an I_sp of 390 s, a dry mass of 5*0.5 + 5*0.25 + 0.125 + 0.8 tons (plus a few extra bits), and a fuel mass of 5*2 + 1 tons. So that gives you a wet (i.e., fully fueled) mass of 15.675 tons and a delta-V of 4620 m/s. The total thrust from the five engines is 250 kN, for a thrust-to-weight ratio of 1.9-11.7. Definitely overkill. For the first stage, you have an I_sp of a little over 320 (not sure how to average different engines together), a dry mass of 4*1.25 + 0.5 + 25*0.25 + 15.675 tons, and a fuel mass of 25*2 tons. That gives you a wet mass of 77.425 tons, and a delta-V of 3250 m/s. The total thrust is 4*215 + 50 = 910 kN, for a thrust-to-weight ratio of 1.2-3.4. Pretty reasonable for a first stage. Delta-V for a round trip to Mun orbit is about 6000 m/s (http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/41652-A-more-accurate-delta-v-map), and you have a total of 7800 m/s. So you should be able to do a Mun trip with fuel to spare, but I suspect you could also doing by dropping some of the upper-stage engines and consolidating the fuel tanks. EDIT: Oops, I didn't even notice the landing legs. So you want an extra 1700 m/s for a landing mission (the map I linked gives pretty optimistic numbers for landings), which means your rocket is barely able to do it. As Vanamonde said, you could probably save a lot of upper-stage weight by shifting some of the fuel to a lower stage.

You'll want to make two changes: install the FAR compatibility extension, and don't use the default launch profile. Honestly, I'm surprised your rocket didn't flip over and/or blow up if you made a sudden turn at 7 km. I've found that a turn start of 0.2-0.5 km seems to work well with FAR, as well as a turn shape of 35-60%, depending on the TWR of my engines (surprisingly, for lower TWR, you want a steep ascent, or MechJeb will get confused and basically give you an almost-hovering flight path). EDIT: can somebody explain what the percentage in the turn shape actually means? I couldn't find anything on it in the MechJeb Wiki.

I think you're going to have to do that anyway. ANY change to the antennas (like a new mod version) causes them to reset.

One experiment per experiment type per planet per biome, yes. So, for example, two "Kerbin Grasslands" EVA reports will give you a warning that you have to throw away one.

That one's going to be a lot harder. You need exactly the same delta-V you'd need to put any other ship into an orbit at that height (or, conversely, to get into a solar orbit from an orbit at that height). You might be able to do it with 1000 m/s, but you'd be cutting it close.

More like they're using KSP as a billboard to raise public awareness of near-Earth asteroids. I'm pretty sure government organizations aren't ALLOWED to endorse private companies, even if they want to. Their actual involvement in ARM was probably more of a consulting role -- "here's how things work in the real world", etc.

How far are you from Kerbin, and how quickly is the asteroid approaching (you can probably get both from selecting Kerbin as a target)? As a rule of thumb, to prevent a collision, you need to only change the asteroid's velocity by v_inc * r_K/d if you burn perpendicular to its orbit, where v_inc is the incoming velocity, r_K is Kerbin's radius (600 km), and d is the current distance. You want to add some margin to that, since it doesn't account for the effect of either the Sun's or Kerbin's gravity. And don't forget, KSP asteroids are tiny. A 20-meter asteroid like the one you have could cause some local damage (the Chelyabinsk meteor was about that size), but it's certainly not going to end the world. And due to KSP's limited physics, this one won't even do that, it'll just hit the ground and roll to a stop.

Do you have Deadly Re-Entry installed? There've been reports that the old DRE doesn't work properly with the new engines.

I thought you were using the interstage adapter. That one has a tunable size, IIRC.

If you don't have a way of returning the science lab itself to Kerbin, you get the most science from transmitting each experiment until you hit the transmission limit (and there is one: depending on the experiment, the lab-boosted limit ranges from 30-75% of the maximum allowed science for that biome), then doing the experiment one more time and storing it in your crew pod. DO NOT "transmit all data", instead ask to review the stored data, then pick and choose which ones you want to transmit (it's the same window as when you first take the data, except scrollable; hit "store" to do nothing and hang on to the already-stored data). If you can return the science lab to Kerbin, then don't transmit at all. Store multiple copies of each experiment in the science lab (unlike the crew pod, there is no conflict between "identical" experiments) and return them all. 3-4 copies should be enough to max out your science, and 2 will get you close enough for all practical purposes.

That's because the mission times are now given in Kerbin days, which are 4 times shorter than Earth days.

I was wondering: since the new Klaw is TL5, and the electromagnet is TL9 (and uses a ton of power, to boot), does the ARM patch basically make the electromagnet obsolete?

A better question is, will the ship have enough thrust to lift the asteroid off the ground?

It would be nice if you posted an announcement on the site, as well. I was convinced I'd found a bug until I came here to post about it. On a more positive note, are you planning to add asteroid ribbons/devices? I can imagine asteroid flyby, asteroid docking, asteroid redirect, asteroid moved to an orbit in a particular SoI...

Does this work with 0.23.5?

Any word on compatibility with 0.23.5?

I think I heard that the improvements only apply to stock joint sizes. Mods that use custom sizes, like KW Rocketry, are in trouble. I'm guessing the same goes for procedural nodes?

So the asteroid is basically a very large experiment module? Weird, not what I expected at all.

Yes. Just delete the RemoteTech DLL, and you'll still have the parts. They might not work with the stock science system, though.

Version 0 of any program is *supposed* to mean "consistency not guaranteed". Now, if version 1.0->1.1 broke compatibility, that would be shameful.