BLFonsworth

Building a rover and then attaching it can be tricky, the base structure you get for the orver only connects to other structural parts on the large flat surfaces and cannot connect to the ends/sides, which limits your potential unless you add extra structural parts.. Check out the rovers in this album. I just made these recently.. http://imgur.com/a/BIIuS#0

My first few attempts at the Mun were only flu-by's with probes, to figure out the approach. Once I had the approach down, I sent a lander.. The Mun's gravity makes it a lot easier to land on that you would think. It took a couple of quicksave/loads to get my first landing (which i don't have here, it's not part of the base). Once I i figured out how to land I decided to just make the jump to a Mun Base. I'll be honest, I haven't figured out a fuel efficient way of getting them home yet.. xD I'm also about to make an update to the OP with more pics and mission updates.

[MISSION UPDATES BELOW] Hey all, New here and still newish to KSP, 67 hours according to steam. Playing all-vanilla atm. I'm building my first Mun Base and looking for feedback on designs and also just to show off a bit too. I'm playing in career mode and have not unlocked the entire tree yet. So far I've landed Jeb on the surface and he is holding down the fort. So far I've sent him a rover and a science lab. The lab is unmanned, waiting for the next kerbal to join him (I also missed the landing by ~2km lol) as well as a rover with a better seat design that I have ready to be sent up next. My next steps past what I have already built will be developing some sort of science rover that can dock to the lab to be able to reuse experiments. (Ideas on designs would be greatly appreciated) I will be posting pics with some updates on progress as I expand the base! For now, enjoy the couple screens of the base so far, the designs used so far, and Jeb saying hello! http://imgur.com/a/BIIuS MISSION UPDATES BELOW!!! ____________________________________________________________________________ UPDATE ROVER DELIVERY #1: Jeb has a friend! And a couple rovers.. I've successfully landed Steve K. on the Mun to keep Jeb company and help him in his research efforts.. After 3 attempts at sending up a rover, I realized 2 things. First: Always test the height of your docking equipment on the launchpad or somewhere at the space center before you send them to the Mun.. Second: Driving in low-G is not easy (i blew up the Rover once and had to quickload). THIS IS THE UN-MANNED VERSION. I DID NOT ACTUALLY SEND THIS VERSION. MID-ORBIT I REALIZED MY MISTAKE AND REVERTED TO ASSEMBLY AND ATTACHED THE MANNED COMMAND POD The rover pictured is the 2nd rover I had attempted to send. The first was a single man rover that was not very well built and was extremely unstable, eventually turning over and breaking while trying to make a turn on the Mun's surface. Steve made it, just after sunset! You can see the manned rover delivery lander in the background. The new rover seems to be just as stable as the last, despite being slightly larger and much more symmetrical. Here it is turned over next to the original Mun Base Alpha lander can... The Next Mun Day I decided I had enough fuel left to move the rover delivery lander over to the Mun base. It was a quick lift off, turn and then landing. I only had to move it about a half a km. ROVER DELIVERY #2: These rovers just wont work.. too small, too slow, too unstable. I need a whole new design.. Unfortunately I didn't think to grab some screens building and launching. I will try remember to get some screens of the whole delivery system in the Hangar and post them, it is a very odd design but it worked. I do have some action shots though! It was a 2 rocket design and was actually kind of difficult to keep flying straight under thrust of more than about .75G The new "Mun Car" in low-Kerbin orbit. The Mun Car was a terrible design for fuel efficiency, but I have trouble with the builder still (I hope it's not just me, the builder is so awkward sometimes) so I really didn't want to re-design it. It took several f5/f9 presses before I got it to the Mun's surface. I ran out of fuel during descent several times. I got it to the surface, but about 20km away from base.. so.. I took the rover delivery lander, which still had a small amount of fuel left) It got me to about 5km away and the rest was up to Steve.. I first attempted the journey at night.. and after realizing you should never travel at night on the lunar surface w/o lights, I time warped to the day side of our orbit and went to retrieve my new Mun Car. The trip there took maybe 5 minutes, using the RCS thrusters to glide over the surface from the lander to the rover. The trip back took about an hour. The Mun car is much more stable than the other rovers and built waaay better. The problem now is going too fast and launching off bumps and small hills. I blew the rover up once and had to f9. I did manage to eventually get it back to the lab, AND DOCK IT!! Going to get the Mun Car, at night. Bad Idea.. Much easier during the day The New Mun Car! Still has that new-car smell!! Steve really seems to like his new car! I hope Jeb likes it too, we'll find out next mission! The Car next to my original Mun Base Alpha lander can The Mun Car, docked to the Mun Base Lab, with the old rover still chilling out next to it. Lesson learned, practice docking your stuff before using it! I thought about this ahead, after landing the lab and first rover and the rover wouldn't line up perfect to dock. I decided to put small engines on all 4 corners of the new car and use them to lift it up to the highest docking port (the other 2 were too low).. It worked like... well let's just say it worked.

I used the default Kerbal Flag lol so here is my current missionfFlag: Mun Base Alpha

That's a cool idea, I have been playing with orbital refueling in low-kerbin orbit to refuel before burning to my destination. But that is the only object I have in orbit anywhere

The video I saw where he did several fly-by's at once he was re-using every experiment, which can't be done anymore. That was kinda the basis of my question, If I can't obit and use the same equipment over and over, why not just fly-by, come home, rinse, repeat.. Thanks for all the quick replies!

I'm still fairly new to KSP (just under 70 hours as of this posting) and I have a question to ask the greater community here: Why should I put a probe and/or satellite into orbit instead of just doing a fly-by? Since science experiments can only be performed once why bother trying to obtain an orbit with a probe or satellite that you don't plan on landing? If I have no intentions of landing on the surface, I tend to adjust my approach to fly over which ever area I need, be it poles, midlands, etc.. I have done this on manned missions as well to get the EVA and Crew Reports. Is there any plus side to have a permanent satellite in orbit around any of the orbital bodies in Kerbol? Other than personal accomplishment.. edit: this post was moved, im not sure how it got in the wrong place but was supposed to be in the questions/tuts section, sorry mods.

It took some working at it, watched some videos on youtube to see how others were doing it and just kinda followed along. The biggest hurdles for me were finding out that you can change your speed indicator to show your speed relative to your target and how to translate my orientation into the RCS controls to go in the right direction. I still struggle with that part, I always hit the wrong button and have to immediately counter it. I practiced it in sandbox mode, I even started to play around with design ideas and space station building before I took it to career mode. However, after my first dock, I celebrated by throwing my hands in the air, scaring my roommates cat, taking a bong rip and then smoking a cig afterwards.. Yea, I was that happy about it.. It was only a couple days ago too.. Once I knew how to dock, I went to career mode and began to design an orbiter to refuel from. I sent up an orbiter and then sent a fuel tank to dock with it. Since then (like 2 or 3 days ago) I ahve successfully docked and refueled 2 probes, 1 manned lander and 1 rover delivery lander. I would vote, but I'm new to the forums and not allowed to vote yet.

Hello World! Or something like that.. New here to the forums and still fairly new (compared to most of you) to KSP, I'm approaching 70 hours in game (and probably just as many watching youtube "how to" videos). I thought I would make a post about my efforts so far and ask for some helpful advice. I'm playing all-vanilla so far, with only the mechjeb add on which I have actually never used b/c I haven;t taken the time to figure out how to pre-prgram the thing since you can't pre-plan your flights (at least I don't know how) and most of my flight plans are done on the fly with only a vague end-goal in mind, like "land on the mun, however possible". I'm still pretty bad at making the most fuel efficient ships and flight patterns. I'm also not very good at guessing mission windows and I am not aware of anyway to plan flights from the space center (I feel like I just haven't figure out how, why would you NOT be able to plan a flight before launch?) I've done a lot of missions on/around Kerbin and have sent some orbital probes and manned missions on fly-by's of the Mun and Minmus. I've landed on the Mun a few times (once getting ol' jeb stuck w/o enough fuel and had to do a few more missions to unlock the multi-Kerbal command pod and then go get him.. only to have that pod run out of fuel half-way back to Kerbin). I've also landed 2 probes on the surface of Eve (this was a major undertaking and took countless attempts and "revert to.." before I even got my first one on an encounter course). I've managed to unlock the docking ports and have since put an orbiter into space around Kerbin with extra rockomax fuel tanks for refuel stops before burning out of Kerbin's gravitational pull. My first docking attempts, as you can imagine, didn't go so hot and it took several youtube videos before I was able to figure out exactly what I was doing. I was thinking of expanding this into a full-on space station but have yet to see the need for it since I have already exhausted most of the science I have perform on/around Kerbin. I have had 4 successful dock-and-refuel attempts now, 2 of those were my Eve probes and the other 2 were missions destined for my first Mun base. That brings me to my current mission: Establish a useful and sustained Mun base. I started this by creating a new lander, not intended to have enough fuel to come home (but ironically probably does sine I refueled in Kerbin orbit), using the recently unlocked lander can. I then designed (not very well) a rover and a delivery system and sent it up to meet him. The Rover mission was probably one of my most interesting so far. I only recently unlocked the basic rover parts and was anxious to try them out. Now that I had unlocked the rover I could start to build a Mun base and actually be useful. After some late-night-post-bong-rip building I had a very basic rover design and an all new rocket design to deliver it. Based roughly off the lander can I had already sent, I designed the Rover to decouple from the bottom of the lander portion of the craft. The Idea was, land on the Mun and once on the surface, decouple the rover (ideally only a few meters above the surface attached to the bottom of the lander). the mission seemed to be running smooth until I began my decent to the Mun's surface. I realized at some point during ascent and/or flight my lander legs had been blown off and only 2 (of 8) were left and they were both on the same side. It was too late to revert the mission back to launch as I had quicksaved when I began my Mun encounter. So, what to do.. think quick because the surface is coming up fast, and we can't get back into orbit and then back down again w/o running out of fuel and crashing into the Mun. So.. here we go.. down down down.. what am I going to do... then at about 10km up it hit me.. The Mun has lower gravity and I can hover there pretty easily. So, I gently slip down to the surface and somewhere between 500m and 100m I start to give quick, short bursts of thrust to bring my speed to as close to 5m/s as I can and keep it there.. once I get about 5 or 10m above the surface (about where the lander would have stopped with the legs extended) I give one more quick burst to get to 0m/s (I actually ended up and like 0.2m/s upward velocity) and I decouple the lander... Only to realize I'm not over flat ground (even though I managed to get to within 500m of my Mun base which is relatively flat) and the lander is also not very symmetrical and it 's off-balanced weight coupled with the slight grade cause it to begin rolling.... away from the Mun base.. I quickly drop the lander to the surface (no legs mind you) and switch to my Kerbal at the Mun base, EVA, press R, SPACE bar and mash W... I made it before It rolled too far and for the first time, boarded the rover and was driving around the surface of the Mun. I also realized I had put the control seat in an odd spot (to make the lander capable of attaching to the delivery system the way it did) and my kerbal now is flat on his back, looking at the stars, driving across the Mun, in a rover that is already unbalanced. In fact, I have to prop it upright to keep it from rolling around at once my Kerbal gets out. Anyway, enough typing, I'm sure you're tired of reading. I'll have screens of my stuff later and I will be making a mission thread and/or video for my Mun base and any antics those krazy kerbals get into. Sorry for spelling or grammar errors.