Stevenator1

For me, ejecting those solids is proving problematic BOTH ways of doing it...

You have no idea how much I have tried to do that. Try and try, space is huge. I still haven\'t had a plane or ship that can do that. Gets to at least 70km, all one piece, 2 stages, enough RCS fuel for orbital maneuvering, and enough jet fuel to do a controlled landing. All 0.15 vanilla parts. Tested your design out, I really like it Worked fantastically, got a stable 150km orbit, and brought it back down on the pad

Though sal\'s reply was great, I\'ll go through a quick and easy tutorial on MY personal way of getting to the mun and back, by stages and rough generalizations - I will let you build your own ship. My stages go from LAST to first - from top of the rocket, to bottom. It is always much easier to work in this backwards order. 1. Just the command pod and parachute, then a decoupler. These 3 things should ALWAYS be your top 3 things.. pretty much every time.. This is for entry back onto earth. 2. Munar landar. I usually just have an ASAS, RCS with a few RCS thrusters, and the smallest liquid fuel tank and really small liquid engine, and landing pegs. This is for your final Munar decent, as well as your lift off of the Mun and escaping into Kerbin\'s orbit. 3. Orbital corrections phase - put simply, the phase that finishes up establishing your original Kerbin orbit, and Mun orbital insertion. This is usually simply 3 liquid fuel tanks, and a vectored liquid thruster. 4. Main Kerbin Escape phase - Fairly simple phase - get you out of the atmosphere and into a partial orbit. I usually use 4 radial decouplers and then put 3 liquid fuel tanks on each decoupler with 4 non-vectored liquid thrusters. 5. Lastly, your get-the-hell-off-the-ground phase. I\'m fairly sure you can tell what this should be. Usually for me this was just a bunch of solid boosters on radial decouplers at the bottom(I mean a lot, like, at least 30). Recently I have been using these RAM jets, because (until they get fixed) they have LOTS and lots of power at low atmosphere to push the rocket off the ground. I\'ll link you a nice .craft file of mine when I get home, following this design. As for the general flight plan: Activate SAS, ignite first stage. Fly upwards until either your solids run out, or your jets can no longer INCREASE the velocity of your ship. Fire 2nd stage, at full throttle. At 20km altitude, drop spacecraft to 45 degrees pitch at 90 degrees angled. (Going east, 45 degrees above horizontal). Slowly decrease the angle. You should end up at 60-70km, moving horizontally east. Continue to pick up speed. Fire 3rd stage. At this point you should nearly, or already have, an orbit around Kerbin. Continue to increase speed horizontally until you achieve one. Turn off all thrust. You should still have lots of fuel left in your 3rd stage liquids. Go into map view. You are going to want to fire your rockets in the direction of your velocity when the moon comes over the horizon of Kerbin. If you fire them in that direction, your orbit should extend out to the Munar orbit distance, and you will be on an intercept course. Time warp, and wait until you are on an intercept course with the moon. When you are at 37,000 meters altitude on the moon, aim your rocket straight in your reverse-velocity direction, and fire what is left of the liquid fuel in your 3rd stage to get rid of ALL velocity. Continue to use the 3rd, and fire the 4th stage when the 3rd runs out, to keep you moving VERY slow on your decent to the moon. Extend your landing pegs, use rcs translational movement (kijl) to keep your decent vertical only. Land! To take off, go east, and stat moving fast enough that you get an orbit around the Mun. Extend this orbit outwards toward earth. Only a few million meters should be fine, you will be captured by Kerbin\'s orbit. Once you are captured, wait until you are at the pariapsis of your orbit (because you are moving the slowest then), and fire in your reverse-velocity direction until your orbit is planned to actually HIT kerbin. Then just time warp it out, and dont touch anything. You will hit the atmosphere, and the atmosphere will slow you a LOT. Then just jettison your pod out, deploy parachute, and just drift to a landing! I know there are a billion tutorials of this out there, but I was in class and really bored.. I needed something to do... SO I wrote this massive wall of text instead of working on, you know.... Physics.. (Irony huh?)

Indeed the RAM jet physics are nowhere near complete. For now, I\'ve completely gotten rid of my first stage solid boosters on the bottom, favoring usually about 8 jets. The minimal fuel use is easily outperforming a solid booster, and I can get a good horizontal velocity before running out of fuel and firing up the main liquids.

Thanks much Vincent. I have some time to explore the new updates this week before more stuff comes up, so I am very happy to do so. I\'m extremely interested in the new vanilla stuff that has came out. Unfortunately for my own learning curve, I absolutely hate using other people to learn the functions of these parts, so it is going to take me DAYS to figure out the functions, and the paterns of everything.

Well I\'m still quite familiar with my basic solid and liquid engines Remember, been here for almost a year (joined the forums about 2 months into gameplay) All these air-intake engines, however... Are going to take some getting used to!

Thank you much for the quick reply! Actually, there was much debate in the early releases (I\'m talking like, version 7 and 8) of what the names of the people, planets, sun, solar system, etc. were That is absolutely fantastic, I love it! Persistence was my one singular issue that I had with the early updates, I am soo happy that they added it! And the new mun... Now time to make ANOTHER vanilla rocket powerful enough to explore it... Does it have the same mechanics as the original Mun?

Hey bros, I\'ve been with you for a loooong time sporadically. College, life, you know. ANYWAYS, I haven\'t played since 13.1 I\'m going to go sift through all the update notes, but an actual user can probably tell me the more important updates since this time. Anything cool and new on Kerball? (Did we finally give the planet a name?)

Agreed. Your pod (not to mention your vectored landing thruster) easily have enough rotational force to move that much mass. those RCS tanks just become deadweight. Unless you wanted to remove the vector thrusters entirely and just get off the moon and back to kerbin using only RCS (which is possible, I\'ve done it). But I prefer not to.

Really? Were you going straight up?

Yeh I have been COMPLETELY disappearing from KSP and Eve to play Skyrim! Its really a good game, I just wish Bethesda would have deviated more from their pevious engines... It\'s just too simliar. Beyond that small negative, its great!

Very true indeed. If you have seen my other posts, my game is currently still running, onmy way to proxima centauri(I\'m on my iPad out right now)

His ability to do that is very limited as wheels do not work how you think they should right now. HarvesteR needs to make functionality for them before it is really possible

I\'m working on making a set of deep space parts. Basically giant engines (but balanced)

O.o *sits here twiddling his thumbs waiting for new guide* But I don\'t need no stinkin guide, I already got this game down (until more stuff is released, then I get to learn more)!

LOLOLOL thats fuuuny

No it is certainly not required to have a massive rocket They are just fun to make.

Well there\'s a lot of complicated math behind this that I really do not feel like explaining. Basically you need to put your slingshot into munar orbit 45 degrees in front of the moons rotation and you will intersect perfectly. But let\'s back up for a second First of all, when you are originally making your orbit, thrust towards the EAST. I say this because the earth is already rotating east, making it MUCH easier to set up an orbit in that direction. once you have gotten a stable orbit, just go around and wait for the mun to go over the horizon. Then thrust due east and watch your Apo rise 45 degrees from the moon. It\'s all the complicated math that really does this, but all you really need to know is wait for the moon to come around the horizon, and right THEN do your burn, and you should intersect the moon perfectly. One burst to get into the orbit with the Apo at 12 million meters and the Peri at 100-150 thousand meters should work just fine to get you there!

No problem mate! Also, a good thing to know is that you use Nova\'s mod IN PLACE of the stock parts, not with them. He uses completely different fuel ratios that make his parts basically incompatible with the stock parts. RCS can be a supplement to SAS, or can be used on lunar landers to control lateral movement. I have found that I prefer to just add fins to my rocket to get it to turn to my bidding while escaping the atmosphere, and only use RCS for my landers.

My lander module (I would post a picture but I can\'t because I\'m not at home, will do later) is fully capable of landing on the moon as well as escaping munar orbit and coming back home. I usually actually use my large main liquid rocket to slow down my decent when I am close to the surface, and just use the lander module for the little that there is left. I ALWAYS prefer to cancel all of my horizontal velocity the second I get caught in munar orbit so that I can have a nearly perfectly straight fall for landing. The reason for that is that it is very hard to cancel all of your horizontal velocity when close to the planet, and you are likely to panic and screw up. TL;DR?: Straight Down, use stage before lander to do most of the decelleration.

Grammar* If you are going to correct it, do it correctly! Anyways, now that I am done being a Grammar Nazi, I figured I would share my thoughts. First of all, that probably happened to you for 2 reasons. [list type=decimal] [li]A lack of RCS[/li] [li]No lander legs[/li] If you didn\'t know this, you can actually use RCS for planar (opposed to rotational) movement. You can use IKJL for forward back left right, and HN for up and down. You can use those to cancel out all of your horizontal velocity when trying to land, and slow down your vertical speed with your actual boosters. You shouldn\'t need to waist RCS fuel on boosting up and down with RCS. Also, Lander legs. Now with vanilla mod, there are no 'lander legs' That is why I suggest using Nova\'s mod (which also replaces all of the base parts). Now if you wish to stay with vanilla, which is understandable, you can make makeshift lander using 8 radial decouplers towards the bottom of your lander (using symmetry), and attaching large fins onto that. That makes for some decent makeshift lander legs, and are semi helpful to prevent your rocket from falling off, leaving you stranded.

This isn\'t that bad.. It\'s only 40 SRBs (in one stage) and 1 liquid (with only 2 fuel tanks). Followed by a lander of 1 engine too. Awh who am I kidding it is quite excessive. But all of the rockets fire in 1 stage, making for a fairly easy flight plan.

Oh spacebuild, those were the days. I used to play spacebuild, but I can not STAND the new SB3, or LS3. I am a sucker for vanilla SB2, LS2, with lots of custom weapons. That makes originality a factor, and not a bunch of useless entities... I have cycled through a lot of different space games myself: Spacebuild, EVE, KSP, Orbiter. I am currently only playing EVE and KSP out of those 4, the other 2 got kind of old IMO.

There is a giant misconception that huge is better. It is NOT. I have gotten to the mun with this rocket: And this one: though these are not stock parts (they are Nova\'s mod) they are just about as balanced as stock parts. The first one Is a standard rocket design, and could make it to the Mun easily (even if you replaced all of those parts with stock parts) The second rocket is my response to the common phrase 'needs more boosters' That rocket CAN make it to the mun, but it is mildly unstable. It is a rather small base rocket with a ton of boosters attatched to make it out of the atmosphere. You use the boosters to escape Kerbin\'s atmosphere, and then the liquid to establish an orbit, and do an orbital transfer to the Mun. The lander hidden in the nose cone is what you use to actually land on the Mun, as well as escape the Muns orbit and land back at Kerbin.

You have duct tape? That, my friend, is WIN, and the true Kerbal way. It is also the Minmatarian way, but I\'m starting to think that they are so similar that the Minmatar are just the decendents of Kerbals.. Of course only like 5 of you are going to get that joke, or this one: The Amarrians pray to their gods. The Gallente pray for peace. The Caldari pray for profit. The Minmatarians pray that the duct tape holds and their ships dont fall apart.