SlothPaladin

Yesterday I had a rescue mission of a Kerbal orbiting Minmus so I built a lander that 5 Kerbins could fit in, and messed up and sent 5 Kerbins out to Minmus, after I got within 500m of her dielectric craft I EVA'ed her to bring her over to the rescue ship, and discovered I was full, but I didn't want to ditch the mission so I sent one of my other Kerbals out to her craft and left them while 'completing' the rescue mission.

The side engines are on Advanced Rocketry, which is a 45 science node, honestly this low tech level plane is about the only thing I use those engines for.

I am willing to do contracts that have one goal that is "above xxxx altitude" I have a simple plane I built just for that: Alt Hopper MK I It's easy to land, and really low tech and just 12.7K. When I get to the zone I tend to be around 11K meters and then I point my nose strait up and hit the jets, it will go high enough for every contract I have encountered, I try to only get contracts that that are on my continent as it can get back to the runway from there but on over seas missions it does not have enough fuel. I have set the oxidizer levels so the rocket engines should burn out with enough fuel that you can make it home on your jet engine once you drop down to a more practical height.

Sorry for the double post but I'm home now and can actually test some of these theories out. After locking the gimbals the amount of movement that the ship went through was greatly reduced, if I throttled up to 100% the movement was about the same as being throttled up to 25% before. So I think the gimbal issue was the main cause. Ship still has issues but this whole thing has given me a lot of good redesign ideas. As far as I can tell the masses on the side are pretty close to perfect, I may still try to use this setup on a new ship: I also figured out a way to quadrupal the thrust while using the LV-Ns while only adding 32 parts by doing some of this silliness:

Wow, thanks guys, there is a lot of useful info here. Kasuha: I'll have to try disabling the gimbaling and see if that works better. Vanamonde: The two vehicles on the 5th segments have the same mass, but the masses center might be off, if that's the root of the problem I'll probably have to build a new ship for the mission. I had initially planned to use the 8 Atomic Rockets on segment 5 to do the exit burn but the burn was going to be something like 30 minuets or something and I got impatient and sent up that stupidly over powered engine segment. Maybe I just need to build an engine segment with 32 of them or something, but that would be a part count nightmare.

I'm not sure if this is a bug or some massive design flaw but I built a large spaceship which I put in orbit in 5 parts for a mission to Jool, now I'm trying to get a 2000m/s burn to start it on it's way there but when piece 1 is ignited (at about 1/4 power) the ship pulls down and to the right hard. Initially the ship was only section 4 and 5 but the thrust to weight ratio was pathetic and I only had enough delta v to get to Jool, with none for the return. So in a not very science-y or mathematical approach I figured I'd just send up a ton of fuel and some super powered engines. So I sent up two payloads of fuel (section 2 & 3 each with one S3-14400 tank), and new engine section (with two KR-2Ls and 2 S3-3600 Tanks) On my initial attempt to get out of the Kerbin system I had the engine section between section 3 & 4 pushing section 4 & 5 while pulling section 2 & 3, that way I could drop fuel loads as I finished them, but the thrust from the engines made the craft fold in half (to be fair I'm not really surprised as those two engines create an insane amount of thrust). I figured if I couldn't push my ship I should be able to pull it. so I took block 1 out from between blocks 3 & 4 docked the fuel section to block 4 and flipped block 1 around and put it in the configuration you see in the screen shot. Block 5 was meant to be the forward facing section and every other section was designed to be pulled behind it. My first thought was maybe I messed up on some fuel flow but I checked and fuel was flowing from 3 to 2 to the center tank in 1 and then out to the radial tanks for 1's engines exactly as planned. I looked through all the tanks but everything seems to be normal, no engines are enabled that shouldn't be. Then I figured maybe reaction wheels don't like moving in the wrong direction, so I disabled all reaction wheels that were not in block 1 but still the same thing. I thought that pulling the ship would minimize any off center issues I had, not that there should be anything, all ships hanging off of section 4 are identical with 3 way symmetry and the rover and mini-ship for section 5 were weight matched and I launched them into orbit without a problem. If you have any suggestions, or if there are any ingame issues that might complicate a ship like this I'd like to know. Any other troubleshooting paths I should look into? The ship is 948 parts and 453 tons.