Reactordrone

Manual control in stock aero. Set all thrust limiters to 100% and separated the LV-T45 engine from the first stage. launched and kicked over to about the 60° mark. Approaching Mach 1 I activated follow prograde. Held the nose up a little at about 15km then went back to prograde hold. killed core engine when apoapsis was at 80kn and coasted to just before apoapsis, Used up remaining fuel in core and activated final stage bringing apo to just over 180km then circularized. 157 fuel left for a 180x183km orbit.

New people come here with issues that they have while playing the demo and it helps to troubleshoot their problems if you're playing the same version, especially since the demo has such a different drag/aero model and limited part menu.

I mostly play the full game but I will occasionally fire up the demo. No idea whether that would count as a yay or a nay.

That would be radial/ anti-radial. Normal and anti-normal are aligned north/south when in an equatorial orbit ( the purple ones ).

You'll need to turn it on with the R key and to fly sideways you'll need to use the translation keys IJKL with H&N for forwards/backwards. Align your ship to a normal/anti-normal direction, rotate your ship until you get an RCS port facing backwards and one of the IJKL keys will provide forward thrust (it will take a while to burn through three tonnes of monopropellant). That training scenario isn't designed to let you land but it's an interesting challenge to work around the limitations. Pity you can't EVA in that scenario or you could try to return to Kerbin using the EVA packs.

If you use the main engines to do the manoeuvres you won't have enough fuel to land, you'll only have enough to get into Munar orbit and return to Kerbin. It is possible to land and get back into Mun orbit in that training scenario but only if you use the massive amount of monopropellant to do a lot of the orbital manoeuvres. ETA- If you are going to fly with the RCS you'll need to fly sideways since there are only linear RCS ports and none are facing backwards. And just to add some figures, if you use all of the mono up first you'll get about 384m/s out of it and then have 2055m/s delta v available from the liquid fuel/oxidizer, just enough to fly to the Mun achieve an orbit, land and return to orbit.

It also helps to move the view so that you're looking down on the solar system rather than across it. Looking at that picture I have no idea what's going on.

Mostly landing accidents with the occasional controlled flight into terrain.

Yes, you need to have at least a small ore tank to collect ore before it can be converted.

The projected orbital paths appear to change when you change to another body's sphere of influence (SOI). When you're in Kerbin's SOI your Mun encounter will appear in brown and as you cross into the Mun's SOI that part of the orbit will change to the blue orbital path around the Mun. If you're in Kerbin's SOI and you want to see the orbit as it will look in the Mun's SOI you can click on the Mun and select focus view. This view can be very handy for fine tuning your approach since you can set up a manoeuvre node near Kerbin and see how small changes can effect your approach to the Mun.

The other thing to check is the game version. There have been issues with contracts with 1.0.5.1024 that were fixed with 1028 (and the asteroid day update).

The demo version is very lacking in control compared to the full version. With no steerable fins and no gimballing engines you'll have to balance the ship well to have effective control with the reaction wheels. Too many fins at the back and you'll have no ability to change direction, not enough and it will want to flip at mach 1. Something like this should just about fly itself to orbit.

Usually if the root part is unmanned, e.g a probe, then any manned parts that are attached should be empty by default.

No. Space around Kerbin can be low orbit, high orbit, sub orbital and just passing through.

The large holding tank is about the same size as a rockomax X200-16 tank so about 2.5m diameter by about 2.4m high giving a volume of just under 12m³ and a 15 tonne capacity. The smaller tank's volume is about 3m³ holding 3 tonnes so you're looking at somewhere between 1-1.25t/m³.

It looks like you're trying to leave too early. It's hard to tell exactly from that image but it appears that you have Kerbin almost 90° away from Duna and they need to be much closer. I've always found that if Kerbin is at the 6 o'clock position (the Sun being the centre of the dial) that you'll need Duna to be around the 4.30 - 5 o'clock position. That should give you a reasonably close approach at the apoapsis of your transfer orbit and with Duna, it's better to go late rather than early since you'll arive ahead of Duna and you can easily slow your arrival time to get an intercept by pushing your apoapsis a little higher than Duna's orbit.

You can also place the docking port on the underside of the pod and have an RCS tank and thrusters at the top for de orbit burns with a MK16XL on top of that.

[quote name='Aethon'] Oh, and I also think it would be a good idea if some rescues were on the surface.[/QUOTE] Some of them are, but it's more rare than orbital rescues.

I estimate that the ship has just under 340m/s delta v left which should be just enough to get home but there's no margin. You'll want to get into a very low prograde orbit as efficiently as you can and them set up a manoeuvre node so that your ejection burn takes you in the opposite direction to the direction that Minmus is travelling in. It will take about 170m/s to get your periapsis into Kerbin's atmosphere. If you're short on fuel you can decouple the pod and get out and push for the last few m/s. Should be similar to this, [IMG]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v499/swampmonster/Kerbal%20space%20program/MUN%20RETURN_zpsugtqm906.jpg[/IMG] But with Minmus rather than the Mun.

Problems getting to Duna or problems landing on the surface? Landing has become somewhat harder since 1.0.5 hit and you're going to need airbrakes and/or drogue chutes to allow a parachute descent.

To start, highest speed 74,097.7m/s - 32.2t - (37,820/50) x 2 should get me 146,618.2 [IMG]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v499/swampmonster/Kerbal%20space%20program/speed%20challenge_zpscevwmp93.jpg[/IMG] Could have gone a little faster if probe survival isn't a requirement (as it is I lost the engine).

The small one won't work at ore concentrations below 2.5%

[quote name='spikeyhat09'] They are actually more different than that. The LV-T45 has more mass. If you reduce the LV-T45 mass to that of the LV-T30, you end up with a thrust of 220.313 KN. Conversely, an LV-T30 scaled up to the mass of the LV-T45 would have a thrust of 300 KN.[/QUOTE] But the LV-T45 has more mass because of the gimbal system, not because the engine is bigger. The LV-T30 is a bigger engine on a lightweight, fixed, thrust plate and the LV-T45 is a slightly smaller engine in a heavier gimbal mounting.

Just landed a 1t probe on the southern ice cap. Didn't have any problems slowing down, with it reaching safe deployment speed before min deployment pressure had been reached and safely landing on 3 radial chutes. Just about to send off more ships so I'll see how a higher density craft reacts.

Heat shields appear to work much better than they used to. I haven't destroyed one through overheating (not that I've really tried to). Front/top sides of capsules are now dangerously unprotected. Drag on a Mk1 capsule seems the same or very slightly lower at all altitudes than in 1.0.4. I'm not seeing higher drag in the upper atmosphere.