Srpadget

Because I'm reveling in a universe with basically-correct physics in which realistic space travel is merely 'tricky' rather than 'd*mn near impossible' and hence CAN be done manually, of course. KSP has made my old job into something FUN again! YAY! :-) At some point, when the newbie-shininess of it all has worn off, I will likely get MechJeb and/or other labor-saving tools. But for now, I'm rather enjoying doing it all by hand.

OMG...the Launch Window Planner is a THING OF BEAUTY. I had just gotten out my old astrodynamics text from college, and was going to build a utility much like that. (Or rather, a utility like a much less-capable, less-user-friendly, less-versatile, lobotomized version of that....) I begin to suspect that NASA is working with the devs on KSP at least partly because this community has developed better preliminary-mission-design tools than NASA has. (And I get to say that, because I've worked with some of those tools.) Okay, so now for the 'forum newbie question': How do I tag this thread as "Answered"?

Looking generally for tips and tricks for more-efficient planning of burns, here. I'm just starting to foray out beyond Kerbin's SOI, with a mission partway to Duna and in the planning stages for an upcoming launch window to Dres. The latter of which has me wondering about how to plan the burns given the significant plane change involved. Duna was pretty straightforward, partly because of Duna's very small orbital inclination and partly because I happened to luck out timing-wise and launched just a few days prior to passing a node line -- so it happened that an in-ecliptic transfer orbit was 'good enough' to get me into Duna's SOI (which of course will be sitting right near the opposite node line when I arrive in a couple hundred more days). But that's not going to cut it for Dres. It seems I'm going to have to set up the Hohman transfer "blind", with the apoapsis far above or below Dres SOI (due to the difference in orbital planes) and thus no feedback regarding Dres' position when I reach apoapsis...until after I've done a plane change well into the voyage. And at that point, fixing a badly-planned (or -executed) burn will be terribly terribly dV-costly. So there seems to be substantial risk to my default plan of "burn out of Kerbin orbit into Hohmann transfer, then plane change at node line, then fine-tune as necessary". Even though I plan to practice with a couple Mun-to-Minmus runs in the run-up to my Dres launch window, Dres will be much much trickier (tiny SOI, ever so far away, by comparison). And hence, I'm wondering: how do other people plan the burn sequence for trips to planets with highly-inclined orbits? (Manual only, please; eventually I may make life easier with Mechjeb and/or other automation mods, but for now I'm doing everything manually just to prove that I *can*. Clever ways to extract more usable info from the guts of KSP, that's fine; anything that does the work FOR me is right out.)

Will check persistence file. And after my current obsession with Mun landings has subsided, I'll go back and try docking a couple more times. So, um, now that I've gotten all this useful info, how do I flag this thread as "answered"?

Woot! I finally got it to work! I trust the science module in between pod and port doesn't screw anything up? I built this by the simple expedient of taking an existing science orbiter, slapping on some RCS, replacing the chute with radials, and sticking a docking port up front where the chute used to be. Worked great for everything--except, apparently, docking.

Okay, then. Next "newbie problem" is figuring out how to post a screen shot. Even cropped down, it's too big to post by more than an order of magnitude. ::grumble::

Hi! I've already introduced myself once here, but I've got a screaming-newbie question and figured this might be a good place for it. Got KSP via Steam, running on a Windows box. My question: where did the installer put the KSP files? I can't seem to find anything that looks like it in any of the obvious places....

No mods. Absolutely bog-standard stock game. Playing career mode, not that I expect that makes a difference. Will grab a screen shot and post it when I get the chance.

I am beating my head against a brick wall known as -- docking. There's obviously something I do not understand here. Thing is, my problem is NOT achieving rendezvous. That's both boring (playing catchup across several orbits) and fraught (final approach with RCS jets), but I can do that. What I CANNOT do, for the life of me, is get the flippin' docking ports to DOCK. Story time: I have flown two "docked" ships with the docking ports bumped up against each other, (apparently) totally motionless--after I saw a sudden shift in position that sure looked to me like the magnetic catches had grabbed each other. However, the two vehicles continued to act like, well, like two vehicles--I could not command the parts of Ship A while acting as Ship B, I could not transfer fuel from one to the other (or possibly, "I could not figure out HOW TO"), and over time the two ships slowly drifted *sideways* in the plane of the docking ports, until they detached. So I decided to try the quicker and simpler method of doing it on the ground. Build rover with docking port, target to dock it to. Launch rover, drive off launchpad, launch target. Do some rather touchy driving around on the pad to get things aligned without driving over the edge. Eventually get it all lined up, sllooooowwwwly roll the rover's docking port up to the target's, and ... *bounce off*. (This was doubly disappointing, as this 'rover with docking port' project had given me all kinds of cool ideas for a refueling station on Minmus, with tanker-truck rovers transferring fuel between storage tanks and visiting vehicles getting topped off before heading out into interplanetary space...and that's not gonna work if I can't use docking ports as fuel-transfer pumps....) I am at my wit's end, here. It seems to me as though there is some simple-and-obvious user-interface thing I am missing. Is there some command I need to issue to the docking port itself to tell it "power up, I need you now", or "clamp down NOW"? Can someone walk me through all the steps (i.e., keystrokes) involved in just getting the dang ports to ATTACH to each other...??

Heh. Realized I had already solved the "radar altimeter" problem without realizing it. I deorbit using some of the remaining fuel from the TLI/orbit-entry stage (yay, overcapable spacecraft!) then a few km above the (expected) ground I stage and start using the lander fuel. And as long as the dropped fuel tank has not yet exploded beneath me, I'm golden. After that, I'd best be trimming for touchdown. :-D A bit imprecise, but it gets the job done.

Hello everyone! New to KSP as well as the forums. Been playing a couple weeks now, in "Career" mode. My most ambitious (successful) missions to date have been a Minmus landing and sample return and a first foray into "deep space" with a crewed mission leaving Kerbin's SOI and returning. (I also have left a trail of flaming wreckage across the Mun in a failed effort at landing a probe. But it was the result of a not-quite-perfect LANDING, not a failed de-orbit: the probe skittered sideways, tipped over, and made several low-velocity bounces before blowing up in a series of explosions, and I think I know how to correct the issue... so as the PR departments of NASA and SpaceX say, "We failed to achieve all of our objectives, but the overall mission was highly successful and we learned a great deal from it".) Anyway. Background. I'm an aerospace engineer by profession, and my resume includes stints working on both the Space Shuttle and ISS programs. So I'm pretty well 'up' on the theory and practice of orbit mechanics (even if some of it is stuff I haven't used professionally since I learned it in college, I do remember it). As a result, I'm pretty good at vehicle design for a given mission. And I was totally unfazed at launching "Deep Space One" with no advance mission planning because I knew full well that I could manage 'on the fly' a Mun gravity-assist that just *barely* managed a Kerbin-escape, small burn back into Kerbin's SOI, midcourse correction to another Mun-flyby to kill some of the excess velocity while targeting directly into an aerocapture back at Kerbin. I am driven STARKERS, however, by the gawdawful challenges of attaching radial-mount boosters to decouplers: using a 2D interface to solve a 3D placement problem, AARGH. So I have precious few questions and difficulties with the orbit mechanics (though I eagerly await the addition of advance mission planning when Mission Control comes online), but I have a host of them revolving around the game itself: its user interface quirks and the peculiarities of ship construction mostly. For instance, I'd like to land on Minmus someplace other than the various Flats. But the higher-elevation areas are, well, *higher elevation*. And the altimeter in the base interface is altitude relative to the datum, not relative to the local terrain. So how do I figure out where the surface REALLY is, in time to kill my remaining descent velocity and "land" rather than "crash"? I WANT an instrument that gives me altitude AGL, and the parachutes use that data when deploying on Kerbin...but I don't know how to get access to the data. (That's going to be a bigger deal when I start concentrating on Mun; a long, slow, low-speed powered descent that kills velocity at a high altitude and then cautiously creeps down to an uncertain surface? Doesn't really cost that much fuel on Minmus; it's a less attractive option for Mun and its higher gravity, however.) Another quandary: I have just researched my way to the base rover parts, and am all eager to master Mun landings so I can send a rover there. Which leads me to wonder... the game does not appear to have anything in the line of cargo bays or vehicle ramps... so how do I GET a rover to the Mun, off the spacecraft that transported it, and onto the surface (reliably right-side-up!) where it's useful?? If I put it at the top of the stack, above a lander, I don't see how to get it down to the surface; I suppose I could put it UNDER the lander, with a decoupler ABOVE it and landing rockets mounted radially...but that seems needlessly contrived. This is doubtless a case of "thinking inside the box"; I know how it was done for Apollo, and the various Mars missions, but those don't seem to be options here. Is there some obvious, straightforward way (which I am just not seeing) of mounting a rover on a lander, transporting it to a destination, and deploying it? And that's WAY too many words for a "Hello" post, so I'll shut up now.