EdFred

Based on this, the problem is not fuel - unless you are building ridiculously small rockets. About the minimum you need (with no gravity assists) to launch to orbit, travel to Jool, and return is around 10,000dV. If you just want to go there, around 6500dV.

I think that if you have 1200 hours in the game and none of your missions ave worked you aren't doing them like you are supposed to. You never point straight at another planet to go there. Just like throwing a ball, you never throw it straight at the target. Everything has an arc (orbit) to it. Every planetary transfer should be eccentric - especially if you are running out of fuel. Post some screen shots of your trajectories and burn nodes to reach other planets.

To go where? To just barely leave the SOI? If you barely leave the SOI you will be near 0 on eccentricity. However, anytime you are going to any other planet you have to have an eccentric orbit - there is no other way around it. Unless you want to change the PE/AP by 1%, then orbit 1/2, then circularize, then change by 1%, then circularize, then orbit 1/2... but even then you won't be at e=0

How do you win the challenge? Points awarded? Special categories? Leaderboard? Or is this a participation ribbon "challenge" ?

Someone declaring Scott Manley a beginner. Best laugh I've had today.

It was a "free" upgrade for me. I was happy with 10MB - and had that for a long time, but when I went to change my cable subscription, they had bumped the internet speed for me - and I was paying $30 less/month for MOAR channels, and more speed. What I've found at 60MB/s is that the bottleneck is on the server I'm downloading from - which is a long ways from when I was using Napster on 28.8k and ecstatic to be able to download a song at over 3!

I like my Charter Cable at 60MB/s and unlimited usage. Of course, I don't do much in the way of netflix or streaming so I'd never even come close to hitting any data caps if they did have them.

Landed on Dres, (first time) did science, and did an immediate launch back to Kerbin. Had enough dV that I didn't even bother to wait for the transfer window to come back.

I would make a square (or rectangle if need be) with the weight distributed in the center. And like |Velocity| said, make pontoons with empty tanks. If needed, use girders to widen the pontoons to create more stability. Just like a lander needs to be wide to keep from tipping over, same thing with this. I would put some of the long girders on the corners horizontally, and put some empty 32s at the ends. Then lots o' chutes to make sure it touches down softly.

I no longer use SRBs other than sepratrons when my tanks empty in the middle of a gravity turn.

Decouplers (if you don't want the following sticking around after landing), struts, girders, and chutes. Why isn't it surviving the landing?

The great thing about landing on Eve - just slap parachutes on it. Every craft I've landed on Eve has had a lower touchdown speed than when I tested it on Kerbin.

Never had this issue, and I've docked a 1 man lander can with a 200 tank, and a 48-7S with a "massless" battery pack and solar panels, and nothing else on it, to a clone. No issue like what you are talking about. SAS turned off on both when within 10m - and I don't even use RCS anymore with small craft.

Yes, you can chute to the surface. I think I landed at 7m/s with no engine deceleration.

Landing legs? Who needs landing legs. This was my lander for the Eve Challenge. Other than the large boosters, the rest of the lander was Aerospikes and the 48-7S engines. Trip documentation: www.sidnaw.org/kerbal/EveChallenge.htm

Everything in the game I have done manually - even a < 100m MSL Eve ascent - I landed 20 modules on the Mun all within 2km for each other manually. I've manually flown to every other planet (except Eeloo - haven't been there in any form yet). And I even landed within 2km of KSC manually. Once I've done it manually, I might turn it over to MJ. There was a time where I let MJ do everything. But it doesn't do everything well. So now I use KAC to determine all my launch windows, I manually create all my nodes, and let MJ keep the nose pointed at the blue target on the navball. All my rendezvous are done manually, as MJ always seems to mess that up, but I do sometimes incorporate the use of Smart A.S.S. for docking, but still manually do it. I do let MJ handle my ascents, descents, and circularization burns, because I've done those hundreds of times. The utility I most like on MJ is the ability to limit throttle, especially when fine tuning planetary intercepts, and docking - since I don't use RCS most of the time. Limit the throttle to 1%, and now I can fine tune things from millions of km away. I look at MJ like the database I built for work. Sure I could use a type writer and calculator to generate all my reports, but why? Though the aerobraking/landing site planner probably gets used most - it's nice to do one aerobraking maneuver and have my apoapsis right where I want it to be rather than come in too deep, or have to make 6 maneuvers.

SHIFT+Q or SHIFT+E to rotate the CM to line up with everything else?

Kerbalkind lived for millions of years without bases.

It might be cheaper to just send 1 male and 1 female Kerbal to a planet when the costs come out in 24. Unless of course they reproduce like amoebas or mogwai. Then just let em do what they do.

You can change the key combination in steam.

If I go through my logbook, I've probably got about 20 different types of airplanes I've flown - though I'm sure I've forgotten some. The largest I've flown is a King Air. Anything larger than that, and you get into needing a type rating for each specific aircraft. The most fun was flying aerobatics in an Extra 300. I currently own a Piper Comanche.

Yep as you make the initial turn the relative wind impacts the vertical stabilizer pushing the tail inside of the turn, and the nose to the outside of the turn. A slip. The nice thing about a slip, is even if you stall it is pretty much impossible to enter a spin. I will sometimes have students do a stall while in a slip. Too much inside rudder though, and you've got the classic overcompensating base to final spin. I've found planes with more dihedral have less tendency to yaw. Which is why we joke that the rudder pedals in the PA28 series are just for foot rests. Cessnas seem to need more rudder input on turns.

This is actually an argument in real life (although the argument comes down to semantics really). In real life you use all three axes to turn. You initiate a roll with the ailerons which causes the vector of lift to rotate to the left or right - creating a smaller vertical component of lift, and adding a horizontal component of lift. At the same time the plane will start to slip, so rudder in the direction of the turn is needed to keep this from happening. Some planes have more tendency to do this than others. And since the vertical component of lift is now decreased, you also need elevator (stabilator in some planes) to raise the nose to keep from losing altitude. Although when I only need a few degrees of left/right correction, I will make turns with only rudder - like when I am on final approach segment of an instrument approach. I fly the same say in KSP as I do real life.

You said you placed the rudder in the front of your plane, and asked about real life. In real life, you generally look forward, and sit somewhere near the center of mass. So in the real world it would be in your way vision wise.

Since there's no atmospheric drag on Mun, your most efficient way is going to be determine launch angle (someone just posted a formula for this a couple days ago) and basically point, fire engines, kill engines, coast, burn to stop.