FREEFALL1984

How close do we need to be to the ksc, i landed within 10km but ran out of fuel so overshot

yeah the ion engine buff has made it a little less accurate but you'll still only have 0.02kn of thrust so it should be within a few milliseconds of perfect, also if you set up all satellites in the same way they you'll generally have them land within 1 millisecond of each other since you'll likely be more or less the same difference from the 6 hour mark on each satellite you'll find that if you have only one satellite in contact with ground control, as soon that satellite passes onto the night side of kerbin and its batteries die your full communication setup will die, I remedy this by having 2 sats in contact with ground control at all times, and make sure all sats are talking to the satellites nearest them this means you need at least 4 active dishes on each satellite, one each to communicate with the satellite next to it and one to communicate with the target space craft, and one to communicate with the KSC (although the sat on the opposite side of kerbin only needs 3) alternatively you could add a whole crapload of batteries on the one above KSC instead

There will be some inevitable drift without regular maintenance but you can minimize it if you're prepared to put a single Ion engine on each satellite, then you limit the thrust to 1% and thrust retrograde until the orbital period is 5:59:59 then you turn prograde and apply minimal thrust until the orbital period "just" ticks over to 6:00:00, the instant you see the timer tick, kill your engine, depending on the weight of the satellite (and your reaction times) you should be within one twentieth of a second of a perfect 6 hour period. You can also do this with RCS but they tend be a little too powerful for smaller satellites

Base it on orbital periods, I like to release my geosync satellites from the same vessel, make sure your first lifter has an orbital period of 4 hours and an apoapsis of 2868.75km, then release your first sat at apoapsis, then circularize its orbit and make sure its orbital period is 6 hours, then when your main vessel release the next sat and circularize that one making sure it also has a 6 hour period, then do the same for the final satellite, you now have 3 satellites in a geosync orbit all with orbital periods or exactly 6 hours, they might not be perfectly circular orbits but they should never drift out of sync. if you want 4 satellites make sure your main vessel has an orbital period of 4.5 hours (6-(6/4)), for a 5 sat setup have a period of 4.8 (6-(6/5)) hours and so on

Just dig a deep enough hole and bury it, failing that bury it in an existing empty oil well, that should be more than sufficiently deep and isolated.

if its just something like a satellite which I never intend to refuel or recover I just use radial decouplers but then you need to account for the weight of the decoupler itself in your design to make sure the centre of mass stays central. but as osprey said, radial attachement points with a docking port on work just fine, you just need to make sure you have the design of the satellite nicely balanced. Most of the time though if im setting up comms networks, its simply easier to have everything stacked vertically,

when Im going on manned interplanetary missions I tend to send a resupply probe, basically a small probe body with a single docking port, an FL-t800 then I attach a bunch of FL-T800s to the sides and a single LV-N on the bottom, then I stick a bunch of RCS tanks and some RCS blocks. depending on the final DV i might run a couple of fuel lines from 2 or 3 of the outside tanks to the middle tank and of course a few static solar panels. Then this gets sent to the planet ahead of my main ship but in the same launch window, it also allows me to practice my entry and aerobraking before the main ship. once my lander leaves the tug, I then send the resupply ship to dock with the tug and fully refuel, before allowing the resupply vessel to burn up or lithobrake onto the planets surface.then once I've redocked my lander, I ditch its surplus fuel tanks and any useless parts such as legs and RCS tanks which I always attach to the radial tanks for this very reason., now I have a fully fueled tug with a command pod and a bunch of science and parachutes ready for the return flight, doing this I usually end up with about 8000m/s Dv for the return, which is more than enough to get back from anywhere with ease,

I imagine you time your launches though otherwise you'll spend a long long time following the mun around kerbin

Yeah, for low level craft use standard jets, the ISP is much better in atmosphere, but the engine requires more intake air, so once you get above about 12km expect a flame out. The turbojets are much better at high altitude and taking this into account you would normally get much better fuel economy overall per km traveled since you'll be travelling about 3 or 4 times faster at 25km than you would at 5km so best to use turbojets even for little jaunts around kerbin if you wanted to be really really economical during in atmosphere flights, have a couple of turbojets and a couple of standard jets running off the same fuel tanks, and run the standards during takeoff and climbing/landing, and then once you hit 12km switch out to the turbos, you might be carrying an extra 2 ton around with you but overall i find it still more efficient and since they're all breathe the same air you only need the same amount of intakes..

Please make 2 leaderboards, 1 for modded games and one for vanilla game since my computer is a little limited I'll have difficulties adding all the same parts as others

How about a low solar orbit, that way you're radio signals will be camouflaged, you would also be visually camouflaged since the station would be too small to effectively detect optically unless you knew exactly where it was although you would have the obvious issue of super high radiation levels, but I guess if you could get a full extraplanetary community into a low solar orbit, then designing and building a radiation shield to protect you would be a walk in the park, would probably end up looking like the ship from the film sunshine.

I like to go for a centrally located turbojet as well as the others and have the rockets on the outside of it, once I hit 1400m/s at 22km I disable all but the central turbojet so you dont get screwed when one of them flames out, then I activate my rockets, the boost in speed and lower intake demand lets the central turbojet run until about 30km which helps the rockets get you through the thick part of the atmosphere, also be ready to disable the intakes as soon as you flame out, Also once I hit this alt and speed I tend to lift my nose up to 45 degrees with my rockets firing, this usually lets you get apoapsis to about 60km before the final turbo jet cuts out. meaning you'll have about half a tank for each rocket to pop the apo above 75km and circularize

Install kerbal engineer redux or mechjeb both will give you a weight in hangar and a relative weight during flight

Ah ok, I thought the engines under the huge side tanks where perhaps mainsail, which would lower the thrust to weight since a mainsail on its would only just be able to lift the side stack, replacing them with KR-L2 engines would reduce the gravity drag and help get into orbit faster

That smaller payload has a total of 10km/s Dv, you should be able to land on the mun, then take off fly to minmus, then land and take off again and return to kerbin in a single mission. the only possible issue is that you're using mainsails (unless im mistaken), your heavy lifter should be able to insert to munar orbit without issue, but your 10ton station might struggle since the second stage T/W is only 1.2, and the whole thing only has 6.5km vac to begin with. you'll likely struggle getting that into orbit due to gravity drag

Generally a munar mission can be performed with 8000m/s which is achieved with a fairly basic rocket with pretty standard low tech parts. I normally account for 5km/s into LKO 850m/s to mun 500m/s to circularize into munar orbit and change inclination for targeted landing 1000m/s for safe targeted landing 1000m/s to return to kerbin. This is generally grossly overestimated, leaving me with plenty of DV after landing. also this can easily be achievable with a standard easy to build rocket and I often end up landing on my transfer stage, the only thing I can think is that your phasing is incorrect or your fuel lines are back to front, because the rocket you've described should be able to achieve a low circular munar orbit before you even detach your lander. I also noticed you refer to the tanks on the sides as tanks and not liquid boosters, they do have engines on them dont they?

If your orbit is in phase with that of the moon, it could take a lot longer than a long time. it might never happen. in fact if its exactly in phase it could take thousands of years to get an incounter lol

It takes longer than 5 minutes just to load on my machine

Perhaps as the game inherits inevitable difficulty settings they could have both DV and TW for easy mode, DV only for medium and nothing for hard, this would let the more hardcore KSP players calculate their own DV

My landers look nothing like this, these look sleek and efficient with just enough fuel to do as designed, mine tend to have huge amounts of excess DV and require no docking. once I made a minmus lander with 5 of each experiment and 2500m/s Dv after touching down, and a fully fueled T/W of 80 in minmus SOI, needless to say I spent about an hour jumping around the surface of minmus and then went to perform a parachuteless landing on the KSC roof and ended up with 1650 science points. But it was as ugly as sin

Why the hate, maneuver nodes are brilliant, they make life so much easier, I dread to imagine how you're going to perform fine tuning on interplanetary transfers without them, I can see a lot of F9 spam in your future

Indeed while good for some nearby Bodies, the lack if accuracy causes it to be a nono for moho and eeloo, also don't forget the days on the mission counter are only 6 hours long now

I attempted a big light craft last night, using a rockomax adapter at 0.08t and piling dozens of solar panels on it, I then had 7 ion engines clipped into each other thanks to laterally placed girders and 8 sets of winglets for lift, I made it up to 30km and reached 900m/s, but I think I cheated because I had a landing gear attached using radial decouplers which gave me a bit of an illegitimate boost when I decoupled. Heres a question, during the early morning I was loosing power, would it be better for me to just max throttle and deal with it or drop my throttle, allow my batteries (none spammed) to fully charge then get a brief full throttle boost before dropping back to an underpowered state again

I generally don't bother using gravity assists within kerbin SOI unless its climbing from the mun to minmus in the early game, I sometimes use them for interplanetary insertions but the precision required is rarely achievable so it means a fair bit of course correction. But here's a simple method for single munar gravity assist to duna. Firstly, timing is everything, Firstly you need to make sure the moon will be in the right place at the right time, and many times duna and the mun will be up to half a month out of phase so you will have to make do and best guess it but this will cost a lot moreDV than if they're properly in phase. This is quite tough to explain so bare with me. 1 - For a single body assist (which is much easier) your burn to the mun needs to be performed just before (about 15 degrees before) you hit midday on the sunny side of kerbin. Obviously this means the mun needs to be in the correct location so you hit its SOI at apoapsis, for me this is generally done be eye and as educated guesses although I'm sure someone around here could do the maths. This all needs to be timed so you reach munar periapsis in the Duna transfer window (roughly) and that the mun is located 15 degrees after kerbin midnight. 2 - Burn towards the mun but make sure your trajectory will take you prograde around its far side and before you do this though make sure your inclination matches exactly since any inclination differences prior to mun encounter will be greatly amplified due to the muns relatively small radius, and then try and get your peri as low as safely possible 9km should suffice. 3 - you can burn at peri and perform your powered gravity assist, use this to straighten out your kerbin SOI Vector, 4 - after you leave the muns SOI, make sure you'll be traveling towards kerbins prograde vector just as you exit kerbins SOI, burn normal or antinormal to compensate (if done properly this should only take less than 20m/s, or if possible burn prograde, dont burn retrograde you'll be killing speed which should only be done if your gravity assist caused you to overshoot duna. if the big yellow line (kerbols SOI trajectory) appears to pass through kerbins SOI then you're on the right track 5 - while still in kerbins SOI check your intercept with duna, tweek the course if needed by burning normal or antinormal or prograde or wait until you leave kerbin SOI if you need to burn retrograde, since burning retrograde now can mess up your kerbin exit trajectory and only burn prograde just before you exit SOI, the important thing is that your kerbol apoapsis is on the other side of kerbol from your current location. 6 - As soon as you leave Kerbins SOI perform a corrective burn, this will be a lot bigger than if you came straight from an LKO since your timing has been a lot less precise. possibly up to 100-200 m/s or more depending on the quality of the gravity assist you may then need to tweek the inclination of your orbit at AN/DN to get a dunan encounter. Performing a double gravity assist follows the same principles but requires a lot more precision. This is generally easier in systems like jool since there are a lot of large SOIs to hop through, You first need to encounter the mun about 90 degrees earlier than with a single gravity assist, the mun need to then fling you into a minmus encounter at about 15 degrees before kerbin midnight and you need to then burn at minmus peri as before, the chances of both moons aligning exactly when duna is in its launch window is slim to none and you'll likely end up closer to jool than duna since this can save you a hella lot of DV, also your inclination changes need to be precise and early to account for minmus inclined orbit, in fact it makes a lot of sense to only try this when minmus is at an AN or DN although this only happens twice per year.

I tend to use my transfer craft a lot to land on none atmospheric and atmospheric bodies, in fact I've become quite proficient at landing with an FL-T800 and a LV909 or LV-T45 attached to the bottom of my lander, then decoupling and flying a few yards clear before touching down without using more than perhaps 5m/s DV from my actual lander.