FREEFALL1984

just time a multiple gravity assist around jool, with all the orbiting bodies you can gain so much speed and drop your kerbol peri to as low as possible then burn almost all your remaining fuel at peri then hopefully hit a nice moho encounter on the way out. The jool system is handy because there are so many GA opportunities, tylo being the obvious culprit. I've lost a few probes to interstellar space simply by forgetting to stabilize their jool orbits

if the idea is to translate long distances along the surface, you're best off just using big sub orbital hops, since maintaining a constant altitude is painstaking and can cause huge amounts of grief as well as burning more fuel than a well timed suicide burn.

I like to build land and return skycranes, instead of using a decoupler to drop your rover onto the surface, just use a docking port and position it so that there is a small drop when you have the cranes landing legs suspension locked up the rover is lifted a little off the ground, you then decouple with the suspension locked, drive the rover away, then for return you simply park the rover under it then unlock the suspension, the two will redock ready for liftoff. Remember if you're building it for the mun you're going to need less legs so the craft can still drop enough in the low gravity. Also it might be worth adding a second command pod to the skycrane itself so you can use it as an emergency return vehicle in case your manned rover flips and burns.

This whole comment makes very little sense

Best to do this by eye, finding a constant throttle location is hard and it'll never stay constant for long since as others have mentioned as your fuel decreases you need to throttle back to stay stationary.

I apologize, its a colloquial term used in parts of the north east England, proper English would of course be "it's that that causes" or "it's that which causes" but occasionally regional accents seem to seep into people's writings

I cant say I have a lot of experience with the external seats, I can imagine its something to do with the fact that there's nothing to "grab" and since the "board" option with the space bar only appears when you're on a ladder, since it doesnt have a ladder attached you have to click the command seat when in EVA, the menu will allow you to board

of course your right, the astronauts will know more or less when the staging phases are going to take place to within a few seconds, but a very delicate and lightweight piece of engineering such as a satellite which has been designed to be manufactured on earth and operate in microgravity may not be able to counteract such forces, besides for the quantity of fuel it would take to control the G forces to make the crew and cargo have a more comfortable journey would be negligible compared to the total fuel required to reach orbit in the first place. Also preburning during staging would help to force the earlier stages into a descent, and this could either force the hardware on a predictable course which will guarantee that it breaks up on reentry, or it can target a safe (ocean) area for hardware which might not break up.

The difference is that the fighter pilots and F1 drivers have full control of what they're doing, and they can brace for maneuvers now imagine being a passenger in a rocket and having absolutely no awareness of when the staging will take place or how much time would pass between staging phases. Imagine being in a car which gets hit from behind, the impact itself might not be that hard, but the fact that the victim isn't aware of the impact until it has happened, means that they try to compensate for the change in acceleration. its that what causes the injuries, not the actually g forces endured.

As I mentioned I think the main issue the the munar approach shown at about 5:30. you gain way too altitude and end up hitting the moon at far higher speeds than necessary.

maybe its also to reduce risk of injury to the astronauts, having someone travelling at 3 or 4 Gs of acceleration then that dropping to 0Gs in less than half a second then increasing to 2-3Gs in another half a second could really have some adverse effects on the crews necks as well as the hardware. At least with a hot stage like this you'll only be going from 3-4Gs back down to 2-3Gs which is much more manageable.

There is no good reason to be building spaceplanes, same as there is no reason to build rovers, or airplanes, or even rockets, in fact there is no good reason to be playing KSP at all, unless you consider playing KSP to be fun and enjoyable like me, in which case that's the reason we build rockets, airplanes, rovers and spaceplanes... because we enjoy it and relish the challenge.

I've had a quick glance through and couple of major piloting errors have cost you your surplus DV, firstly while your launch profile from kerbin is reasonably good your approach to the mun is terrible. firstly you didnt wait for the optimal window and you overshot it by a long long way by not using maneuver nodes and ended up having to kill ridiculous amounts of speed on landing, a good approach would of brought your kerbin apoapsis just above the moons orbit and intercepted with it at your highest point, this is pretty easy to pull off with correct node placement this mistake likely cost you 800m/s Dv which is a whole bunch. the second error is your terrible return trajectory, you need to remember that in order to return from a moon you need to reduce speed, while in orbit around the mun your travelling the same speed as it relative to kerbin, in order to drop your periapsis the most effective method is to leave the muns SOI on its prograde and heading a little vertical in relation to kerbin helps make your kerbin orbit nice and elliptical meaning you will end up on a closer approach, if you would of left the muns surface and headed west about 45 degrees from vertical your change in relative velocity would of dropped your kerbins periapsis, to a much lower altitude. meaning you would of saved yourself about another 300m/s, in total I think you wasted about 1100m/s if not more, I haven't watched the full video so there may be other issues, but these are the more easily visible ones. So the lesson is to use maneuver nodes, they'll save our kerbals lives

In order to get close to the target, you can perform a hohmann transfer into its orbit, here's how I dock and its fairly simple after a couple of attempts. 1 - Launch the first vessel, get this vessel on a predictable orbit, I like to go for 150km, since this allows slightly faster timewarp, make sure the vessels orbit is perfectly (or as near as possible) circular. with 0 degrees inclination. 2 - you can time the launches, but for now I suggest you wait until the target vessel has just passed your launchpad (perhaps about 15 or more degrees around its orbit) 3 - Launch the second vessel, Achieve an orbit of about 130km, make this orbit as close to circular as you can, 4 - Match the inclination of the target vessel using maneuver nodes. 5 - now you need to wait until you near the transfer window. this is the point where your vessel is just behind the target vessel on its orbit. a good rule of thumb is to be about the same distance behind the target as the distance you are below the target. meaning the target itself is about 45 degrees off your prograde marker. if you miss the window then you need to come around for another approach, this can take several days. so timewarp until your slightly farther behind the target than last time and try again. 6 - Create a maneuver node just in front of your ship which brings your apoapsis up to the targets altitude, 7 - Now shift this maneuver node around your orbit a little, you should see closest approach markets, one of these markers will show the target location at closest approach. this needs to be as close as possible to the other marker. 8 - Make sure the closest approach markers have as low a distance as possible, getting within 300m (or 0.3km) should be fairly simple. 9 - Now as soon as you get close to this closest approach marker, you need to burn to match the targets velocity, the easiest method to do this is to match orbits, so create a maneuver node at apoapsis and bring your periapsis up to the same 150km to circularize, 10 - Now your speeds should be within 1 or 2m/s of the targets, in order to reduce the speed to zero, you need to first make sure the navball is set to "target" and then burn retrograde slightly, this will be a tiny burn so RCS would be best once your there you're prograde/retrograde markers will perform a celebratory dance. 11 - Now switch vessel to the target and rotate it so the docking port is pointed at your ship, best to do this by selecting the docking port you wish to use and selecting "control from here", then setting your other ship as target and aiming at the purple marker. 12 - Now switch back to your other ship and select the docking port you wish to use and select control from here. 13 - Now perform an RCS burn with the H key (N key is the opposite) (or a weak engine burn !not recommended!) and drift towards the target. dont overdo it, I recommend about 1m/s per 100m to travel, so if you're 500m away move at 5m/s, then as you get to 400m drop to 4m/s and so on until your at about 50m away, if you now would be a good time to quicksave (F5) and if you want you can kill your relative velocity but if your happy and moving nice and slowly you can continue. 14 - Once you're pretty close you need to double check the vessels orientation as you may of move out of line, as before, switch to the target, point it at your other vessel and then switch back and do the same. 15 - Now select the docking port on the target ship (you should be close enough to see it) and select set as target. the distance meter now changes from the targets COM to this docking port. 16 - continue to drift towards the target at low speed. 17 - Now looking on the navball, you should have a purple marker in alignment with your prograde marker, if its not then use the jkli keys to move it onto the target, this will be reversed so take care and since your relative speeds are so low this will massively effect your direction of travel so only use tiny burns. 18 - Keep your prograde marker lined up with your target marker as you close the distance. 19 - if you need to then bring your vessel to a halt and tweek the translation and orientation, although this will need to be done by eye as your prograde marker will dance around or turn into a retrograde marker, it might be helpful to switch to the other vessel and tweek the orientation again. 20 - As soon as the distance closes to less than 0.2m turn off your RCS and SAS and allow yourself to dock automatically using the magnetic force, this may take time to dock for really large vessels. This is the most efficient way to dock short of launching directly into a rendezvous.

I use MJ for this, I set up a landing target (although I do land manually) and when setting up the target it gives me realtime information on the target site, including the biome and terrain details.

the standard jet engines are only really efficient for low altitude flight (ie less than 10k) BUT! if your craft can happily fly at 20km without flameout, then it might be worth it since your actual speed is potentially much much higher than at 5km, So for example "if" you are consuming just twice as much fuel per second at 20km than at 5km but are moving 4x faster, then distance wise its more efficient to travel at 20km although you will still consume fuel twice as quickly, however if you have the option of using turbojets, then I would recommend them every time since they allow you to reach absurd speeds, (my record is 2300m/s at 24km on TJ alone and I could of just about circumnavigated kerbin, twice)

For a full 90 degree orbit change assuming a landing on an atmospheric body, I personally would be tempted to raise my apoapsis to a much higher altitude and then change my inclination at apoapsis, then burn retrograde and kill my periapsis and target a landing area on the pole in question. This is assuming you're not using DRE or want to keep it realistic since you'll be hitting the atmosphere at a terribly dangerous angle which IRL would be out of the question. But as Edfred said, burning before entering SOI is always the best option (assuming the planet isn't kerbin) and if it is kerbin then why not just take off to the north anyway

I just tend to do it by eye, depending on the body your lifting from. If I have to overcome a thick atmosphere I always launch early, if not I like to launch late and keep travelling towards the target marker. it generally takes an orbit or two to get docked, but remember the fastest launchpad to ISS was 6 hours, which is 4 orbits of the earth (wherever that is) and docking in 4 orbits on KSP is fairly easy with some nice timing and a little luck.

And as I discovered yesterday, getting there is only half the issue, killing off the orbital speed takes a whole bunch of Dv, in fact I had to send a fuel supply ship to rendezvous for the return trip since I was left with hardly enough DV to leave moho SOI. Jool is a good bet, lots to see and do, plenty of easy targets and it houses everybody's favorite planet, laythe plus it takes less DV to get to jool than Eeloo due to the obvious aerobraking options and gravity assisted departure (if you're into that kinda thing)

Perusing that challenge most people are using mods, nobody has dared to try it on a stock game, will I be the first? lol

So I made it to Moho, without any real issues, and I thought I would revisit Eve, I got Jeb on the surface without any problems. but it appears I bogged up my staging on my new lifter and set some fuel lines the wrong way (schoolboy error I know) meaning I only have 6km/s DV to get back into orbit so a rescue mission is required, Now I could fix my lifter and send that back, but I thought I would try something a little more interesting, I thought, if eves atmosphere is so thick then I can surely use it to my advantage, sure it contains no oxygen so there isn't any possibility of jets, but I imagined a staged rocket plane with an initially low T/W but a high degree of lift could help me get into orbit. The use of the highest efficiency engines with the highest T/W (mini cubic strut engine clusters) and keeping the throttle low enough to both keep the plane moving through the soupy atmosphere and to allow the thing to climb in the high gravity. I'm thinking a LV-N engine once high altitudes have been reached and an couple of mini clusters on detachable fuel tanks for the initial climb. and disposable wings which can be dumped once I'm out of the worst of the atmosphere. Has anybody tried this before and is it an effective method,

also worth mentioning that depending on your booster layout you can sometimes get away with a single sepratron at the top of each booster.

yeah, think how much tighter scar tissue feels compared to normal skin. I burned my knuckle quite badly a few years ago and for about 6 months it hurt to clench a fist, I imagine this is partly because scar tissue lacks these little ridges (as well as the scar tissue being slightly thicker than surrounding skin)

That does sound like an awful lot of fun, tonight I think I shall build one

indeed they are tiny but they pack just enough punch to push things clear when decoupling