Stickyhammy

Okay after sleeping off my disappointment in my last generation of rocket that had bad thrust I made a new varient. This has more than 5 times the TWR with only a 1000 m/s delta V loss. Still enough to get to Eeloo and back. Going to work on a lander for a bit before I launch this one. Will make sure to check this post before I go just in case someone else has any upgrade ideas.

I did get the ship into orbit and refueled at the station. Now your saying I needed more engines? But its already in orbit... Oh well. Back to the drawing board. At least these launches don't yet cost me any cash.

If I can figure out how to get it to space I think this ship should do the trick to get orbit data from all the planets. Thanks for all the help Kerbal Space Engineers! Yes It should be "interplanetary". Thanks for noticing.

Yes I realized that thanks Just de-orbited my clunker after putting the fuel back in the station. Going to redesign a ship with those nuclear engines and see if I can get over 10k at station. It must have been the ships mass that cut so much off my available delta V.

I have all but the very last 550 science things unlocked in the science tree but I couldn't find mechjeb pod in anything I already bought. Oh well. On the plus side I did manage to cobble together the ship with a mechjeb pod, 4 skipper engines and the big main engine. Mechjeb is telling me I have 8215 delta V. If thats accurate on the ship in space then I should have enough to get anywhere, except the sun I hear that place isnt very nice to close visitors. Something about flaming Kerbals. Edit: I do have the box and it tells me delta V in the current game I am using. 8215 is accurate enough. I guess my question is answered I do find it funny that with all my ascent stuff on the delta v is only 11k. Seems like I should have more but meh.

Well, I dont like math so I went ahead and got mechjeb. Its file is called mechjeb2 but i suppose its the right one. Put the entire mechjeb2 folder into kerbal space program gamedata folder and started it. Its career mode so I need to figure out what else i need to do to get it load the parts for mechjeb to add to my ship in the hanger. I vote that kerbal space program should give you this information without mods. Edit: Started a sandbox mode to make sure its installed and yes it works. Have the mechjeb pod. Good to know. Edit: This seems annoying. I guess I need to start a new career game to get the science tree to include the mechjeb pod. No thanks. I will just copy over the ship design to sandbox and check it there.

Well, I used the big engine on the main rocket because I figured I would need to use its boost to reach orbit. Turns out I had enough fuel in my vegetable tanks to get to orbit and reach the fueling station. I have enough landings to use the nuclear engine but its thrust seems so small. As for mods and such, I could get something that would tell me the mass of my ship and all that but it just feels like cheating. I learn better if I need to figure things out by myself, or at least learn with whatever stock information the game gives me. I have been looking at the solar system map for about 30 minuets trying to figure out how to reach Eeloo. Might as well go for the hardest one to orbit so everything else is a piece of cake. I think its the wrong time of year to get to Eeloo as the planet is almost on the other side of the sun. All my manuver nodes try to crash me into the sun or simply vanish when i alter the thurst icons too much. Green, purple or blue, its all Greek to me and I never only understand English. Since I learn by failing I think i will just point my ship towards Eeloo and hit the gas. Whatever happens happens

The picture shows how much fuel and oxidizer I have. I don't use add-ons or mods so I don't have a fancy readout of delta V. In case your too busy admiring my primitive ship and or station, the basic stats are 4 full orange jumbo cans and 2 full huge fuel cans. It adds up to 24480 fuel and 29920 oxidizer. This fuel powers 4 skipper engines and one KR-2L. I want to shoot for a planet, any planet, thats not Kerbin, achieve a stable low orbit, and return to Kerbin with my veteran crew. I would hate to lose Jeb as he has landed 17 times on the Mun and Minmus. Can I reach any planets with this fuel load or is the ship too small?

I forgot something very important! All Kerbal Space Stations come standard with a claw module. I had it on the station in the first place just to make it 20% cooler. Turns out it is useful after all! I took up the new station design with 4 empty cans with struts to keep them from falling apart. It made for a very stable package without that wobble from the port. I took the cans off station A because I thought it wouldn't make orbit. Tried and failed three times. This time it made it with no issues. Just need to transfer the fuel over and DE-orbit the old station.

I took my original station design into the launch bay to inspect it for errors. I don't know how this happened but I found the problem I think. On the right side spoke there is a docking clamp between the hub and the structural component. That is the side that makes it wobble. I will remove it and see if that fixes the station. I just dread trying to move that 10k fuel from one station to the other No way I can dock a new fixed station to the old station... Or can I.... If nothing else it would be interesting to try.

I just moved one orange can to the other end of a different orange can. Good thing the cans have docking clamps on both ends. Doesn't look as nice but it doesn't wobble either. Now I need to build an inter-planetary cruiser to collect that 10,000 fuel. Still wondering if its just a bug that a station cant have 4 spokes.

Update. I took the top ship with the fins back to Kerbin just fine. No wobble. Tried to take the fuel can delivery ship off next and the station ripped apart and exploded. Going to try to undock the extra fuel can as well as the ship. Also should note I had turned off SAS, stopped the Cupola modules torque and made sure the reaction wheel was offline. The station still went crazy.

So I docked 4 full jumbo fuel cans to my station just fine. Unfortunately when I decouple my last fuel can deliver ship from the station the entire thing starts to wobble and eventually shakes itself apart. Sometimes a fuel can explodes. I took a video of it happening but until it uploads here is a screenshot of the station. Maybe someone can explain why its going crazy without seeing the video. Here is the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJ1iv7acO38&feature=youtu.be

You seem to be right. I looked at the wiki wrong. It says "Most modules have only a limited capacity; typically, command pods can only take "one of each": one surface sample from here and one from there is possible," I missed that part. Thats too bad. I was going to name my command pod chain the Pod Train. Might make one just to see if it works even though I dont need it.

I took the time and effort to get a space station to mun orbit. It has a science lab for boosting transmit research. As it turns out that's useless as the total amount of science you can send is still way short of returning it via a pod. So I am wondering if it would be possible to bring a 4 command pod craft to my mun station in order to store four sets of surface samples for return all at once. Keep in mind the pods have to return in one piece and I have found multiple pods dropping at once causes pod deaths if your not controlling each one. I would guess that that you could keep all four command pods docked in a line and give plenty of radial chutes to slow down the chain enough to survive impact in the ocean. Has anyone tried this and made it work?

Style is secondary to functionality at the moment. Once I have all the fancy research done I can make it look pretty. All I care about now is getting down to the mun and back. I am prepping a station for mun orbit at the moment. It has fore and aft docking ports. If I get a new fat lander design finished before it leaves I can bring it along. It would be nice if I could reuse it to bring back samples to the mobile lab. That way I dont need to keep relaunching rockets to land at biomes on mun. Only done 4 so far. Thankfully canyon biome was an unplanned second landing. Such a small target.

I am preparing a station to send to the mun to orbit for refueling. It has the science module for remote analysis, a habitation module for the crew that will man it and the 3 man pod which should have a de-coupler on it before the fuel tank. In this state it wont ever re-enter Kerbin without exploding on impact. Its engines will detach and blow up when I manage to get it to the mun. Station has pink lights. The fueling ship is a new design. I was using one that only managed to dock at 1400 fuel in its tank. This design met the same station and has about 5,000 fuel in it to transfer over. Fuel ship has one blue spotlight for docking in the dark. Edit: Version 2.01 of this has fuel lines from each of the small tanks to the large tank. Less clicking to transfer fuel.

Your probably right about the mono. Its almost useless for landing on the mun imo. I just have it for the heck of it. Will try dropping it down and see if it helps. Its mostly there to lower the center of mass.

This lander is notorious for tipping over if I even so much as sneeze on landing at the mun. Its center of gravity is too high I guess. That size fuel can is the minimum it needs to get down to the mun and back up to the transfer rocket. I think I can fix that if I add many smaller cans rigger lower to the landing struts and just connect them with fuel lines to the engine. For now though Jebediah has landed four times on the Mun and returned safely to Kerbin. So I suppose that's a success.

I only have limited parts since its not creative so i did my best. Happy to say that I managed to get this into orbit, rendezvous with a moon lander that i ran out of fuel before i could De-orbit it, grab the pod in the basket and return both craft home safely. What a pain it was to land both pods at the same time without one of them exploding.

Those are standard clamp o tron docking clamps not juniors. I dont have high enough research to get the smaller ones. Those cans are just so big that its deceptive. In the end I managed to dock and transfer fuel into the station before undocking and de orbiting. Thats all I wanted to do. It turns out I didnt need the fuel with my pod catcher. Managed a catch and return for the 226 mun canyon science without fueling in orbit. Thanks for the help. I feel much better now that I know it works after all. Just need to change the post to answered. Dont know how to do that.

It took another 2 hours of bumping and grinding and load and save and load. I even De-orbited the fuel carrying ship and relaunched it after confirming the clamps were the right way. In the end I got it to dock. I got the picture to work on the forum with tiny pic instead of imgur.

Pictures didnt link so editing out post.

Had to go to sleep because it took so long and now I need to go to work. The one thing I thought of in my nightmares was perhaps I need to roll the entire ship with q to line up the docks perfectly. That's the only thing I can think of. Not sure if that's required. Also they are both standard size ports. Thank you you for the screenshots. That's what i needed. Will test when I get home. I only need to dock to get fuel into the orbiting can to get fuel into my grabber ship to collect the lander thats orbiting funky because I ran out of fuel leaving the mun canyons. Rescued my kerbal with an Eva a few days ago.

I have read dozens of threads about how to do it, watched videos of docking for hours, and yet when i get my docking ports together on my two ships they wont engage. I have never successfully docked. I need help to solve this problem. Google has no pictures that show me how to align the docking ports on both craft. I need a picture of both ships in the same picture showing both docking ports installed correctly. From the mounds of mostly useless information online I have read its supposed to be both docking clamps with the dotted line on the side facing away from the craft. I have both my ports that way but it does not work. If I see it in a picture the correct way and it matches what I have exactly I am going to be even more annoyed then I am now. Getting the two craft lined up is not a problem they just wont connect no matter how slow I move the ports together. Yes I turned off the sas on both ships. Yes I targeted the docking port itself and not the ship. Yes I clicked the crafts docking port I am piloting and selected the from here option. Everything should be setup correctly and yet it still wont work. I also checked both ships name = ModuleDockingNode in notepad and they both say enabled true status ready The only good thing from my wasted hours is I have perfected the art of matching orbits. Doesn't do me any good if once I get there I cant do a thing.