Empiro

You'd need to put a bunch of ports, but it would work. However, if you limit your RCS usage for docking, the command pod probably has enough monoprop without having to carry extra. It comes down to whether you want to follow the real life space shuttle closely, or do the most efficient thing in KSP. In KSP, you don't need to worry about boil-off or having to re-ignite liquid fuel engines, so LFO engines are just strictly more efficient than the monoprop engines.

My recommendation is simply to do something completely different. Don't bother grinding science (if it's boring, don't do it!). Leave science gains at 50%+ to avoid boredom. Instead, just do 1-2 landings on each of the Mun and Minmus before setting your sights even further. Play with mods like Station Science and try to get most of your science from that.

One thing (I'll probably update the guide later) is that you should just be pointing your ship at your target, and move the velocity marker side to side using the IJLK keys (with fine control turned on). If you're doing burns, then it's probably going to be difficult to get the precision you need. Unless the two are perfectly aligned, then as you get close, it'll get further apart (imaging shooting at a target 1 mile away, but missing it just by a few feet, only when you get closer will you notice that you're not heading directly at your target) It's also the case that since you're not exactly the same orbit, you'll slowly drift apart, but assuming that your relative speeds are small (<1 m/s) you'll drift apart very slowly, over the course of many minutes.

It sounds like you're already doing it fairly efficiently. The bigger the differences in your two orbits (for example, if you're in 100km orbit, and your target is at 2000km), the more fuel it will take to initiate the transfer and to slow down, because you're basically matching your target's orbit when you slow down relative to it. However, one thing you might not be doing correctly is that when initiating your transfer, you want your orbit to tangent to your target's (i.e. touching it at only one point, either at your AP if you're going up to meet your target, or at your PE if you're going down). You don't want to cross your target's orbit and shoot past it. If you do, your relative speed will be much higher when you meet, and you'll need to spend much more fuel slowing down. A direct launch to intercept as some have suggested is indeed more efficient, but only if you follow an efficient ascent profile. Even if done perfectly, you're not saving too much compared to getting into a slightly lower orbit first. It's only a few tens of m/s to adjust your orbit by 10km. If during your ascent, you have to adjust your orbit quite a bit to get an intercept (or if your orbit shoots past your target to get a close intercept), then you can very easily spend more fuel compared with simply going into a slightly lower orbit and waiting until the right window approaches.

When launching, once your AP is at where you want it to be, cut your engines. Then, once you're close to AP, perform your circularization burn. Burn slightly above the horizon to push your AP away from you, burn slightly below to pull it toward you. Alternatively, you can lock your SAS to prograde, and when about a minute away from AP, start burning at max thrust. If your time to AP starts increasing, cut thrust, and wait until the time to AP is lower (for example, when 30 seconds away, and then 15 seconds etc.). Repeat this process with a lower and lower throttle and eventually you'll get into a nearly circular orbit. There are multiple guides available, and different techniques. I have one myself here: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=289580294 That's the basic idea of it. For some bodies, you need to adjust your inclination too. You might need to burn earlier or later to arrive at the same time as your target. For interplanetary transfers, the phase angle is very important.

I think it's still likely to be an odd bug of sorts. The fact that it only happens when you physical time warp probably indicates that some heating constant isn't handled properly. Does anyone know if closing the cargo bay also hides the part from the temperature gauges? For me, it's definitely the case that I don't see the gauge before it explodes, and none of the parts around it show the gauge.

Well sorry to see you go, but I hope you come back to it after some time. This is a game that takes patience and a willingness to learn. It's not a game that I'd call difficult in the way games like Dark Souls are, but rather it's a game that requires understanding, which I think anyone can gain.

I've also encountered a similar issue during my ascent. I'm using FAR, so that may or may not have anything to do with it, but I definitely can get this if I use physical time warp, including once when I was outside the atmosphere (firing small engines that were nowhere near the port).

Yes, but possibly merely because of the fact that you can build an SSTO with no jet engines at all. The problem is that with the basic engine, you don't get more than 300 m/s speed, and can't climb more than 10km or so. That barely lowers your delta-V requirements (and probably won't even offset the mass of the jet engine).

Yes, but it's hard to take the continuous derivative of a curve (almost as hard as trying to integrate a curve). I was playing around with this last night, and I was thinking that it would be neat (though probably unfeasible) to show a part's (or parts if they have a degree of symmetry) contribution to the area ruling, when you have the part highlighted.

For the trans-sonic cross sectional displays, would it be possible to add the option to show the first derivative of the area too? I know the general idea I'm trying to achieve, but I'm finding that often times, it's difficult to tell exactly why the yellow curve is behaving the way it is, and I end up just dragging parts back and forth to try an minimize the area.

Does anyone know what the exact changes are? I'm glad if they were buffed though. Back in .90 they were my go-to engines. In 1.02, I barely used them at all because there was just so few instances where they came in handy.

It's quite easy to grind science and get everything unlocked very quickly in the game. My recommendation is to start a new game, but play differently. Add some mods, like Construction Time, station science, or one of the contract mods, and make it a goal to NOT grind science. You'll find that the game plays very differently, and you'll probably enjoy it a whole lot more.

I thought that in the patch notes, the default open altitude was also changed to 1000m.

That I'm glad to see. I've always liked space planes, but other than the design challenge, they were just so impractical. They take longer to design, longer to get into orbit (because of the slow climb followed by horizontal acceleration), and much, much longer to bring back. If I'm playing career mode, I'm limited mostly by my play time, and I can design and launch 5 rockets in the time it takes to get one space plane up and back down.

There is no maximum delta-V you can achieve theoretically (though from a practical standpoint, your rocket will eventually get so big that the game wouldn't be able to handle it). Here's another example to see the math. For simplicity, let's assume that except for the payload and fuel, everything else has 0 mass (e.g. engines have infinite TWR and 0 mass). Let's say that you have a 10-ton payload, and with 10 tons of fuel, you get X m/s of delta-V. Warm-up questions: if you have a 5 ton payload, how much fuel do you need to get X m/s of delta-V? (5 tons -- half the payload, half the fuel) What if you have a 20 ton payload? (20 tons -- twice the payload, twice the fuel) So now, we have a 20 ton rocket that can get X m/s of delta-V. What if we want to get another X m/s of delta-V? We'd need 20 tons of fuel. As above, 20 tons of fuel + 20 ton payload gives us X m/s. We then get another X m/s from the 10 ton fuel + 10-ton payload. He's a chart: 10-ton payload + 10 tons of fuel = X m/s (20 tons total) 20-ton payload + 20 tons of fuel = X m/s (40 tons total) 40-ton payload + 40 tons of fuel = X m/s (80 tons total) 80-ton payload + 80 tons of fuel = X m/s (160 tons total) 160-ton payload + 160 tons of fuel = X m/s (320 tons total) 320-ton payload + 320 tons of fuel = X m/s (640 tons total) 640-ton payload + 640 tons of fuel = X m/s (1280 tons total) 1280-ton payload + 1280 tons of fuel = X m/s (2560 tons total) The mass of the rocket doubles every row, but we're only adding X m/s of delta-V each time. The above rocket masses a whopping 2560 tons to give a 10-ton payload 8 * X m/s of delta-V. You can keep going to get more delta-V, but your rocket must get ridiculously huge to squeeze out more delta-V. And note that we assumed that engines, fuel tanks, decouplers, struts, etc. all had zero-mass! This is that logarithm in (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation) in action.

For most mission planning, people only talk about vacuum delta-V, since you spend most of your time in space. In addition, the engines that have good TWR and are ones you want to lift your rocket off Kerbin all have similar ISP in both atmosphere and vacuum, so it's just more convenient to stick to vacuum delta-V

To answer the original question, no, SRBs do not help except when used as a first stage. Think about it this way: SRBs are heavy (particularly their fuel), and they burn out quickly. So lets say that after you strap on those SRBs, you still don't have enough delta-V to get to where you want to go. You solve this by strapping on even more SRBs. You'll find that you'll need a ton more of them, because the SRBs from before are really heavy. This is why SRBs are great for a first stage -- they provide good TWR, and the fact that they're heavy doesn't matter as much because nothing else has to come along and lift them (they only have to lift themselves). Plus, the diminishing returns (aka tyranny of the rocket equation) doesn't take into account TWR at all. It applies even if your engines weigh nothing, because just by adding more fuel to a rocket, it becomes harder to accelerate the rocket (meaning you need to add more fuel, and so on).

There's no way to make it to the Mun, land, and and come back with 4000 m/s delta-v. That's just enough to make it into orbit and maybe perform a few orbital maneuvers in LKO. Maybe when you were new at the game and just testing things out, you enabled infinite fuel? For the first few landings on the Mun, it would make sense to not worry about fuel and just figure out how to get the controls right.

It sounds like you'll need to change the root part on the satellites. The root part is basically the part that you attach from. e.g. the probe core, or the decoupler.

Patience and a soft touch is the key. Don't turn too fast or make any aggressive maneuvers. I usually like to disable SAS and rely on precision controls and the trim settings to control my glide slope. 100 m/s is completely landable, but you can definitely go slower, assuming that your craft doesn't have tiny wings for its size. Just pull up more (or use trim settings) to increase your angle of attack and slow your descent. You want to be descending less than 5 m/s to avoid bouncing. Just before you touch down, you may also want to pull up slightly to flare. This slows your descent further, and also quickly slows you down. Above all -- practice. Save the game when you're a few KM from the runway. If you crash, reload and try again. You'll get the hang of it soon enough.

Assuming an asparagus staging is properly set up, and all the engines have the same ISP, then not firing an engine only lowers your TWR. That's actually another thing that might be wrong -- are you sure the asparagus staging is properly set up? If not, then that could also be the cause of lower delta-V. Otherwise, I concur with the others -- the likely explanation is that the TWR is too high. You don't need more than 1.6 for the first stage, and any more than 2.5 is likely to cause you to lose delta-V due to air drag.

It looks like you're pretty early in the career mode, which is indeed fairly challenging to get into orbit. The issue here is that those SRBs don't have thrust vectoring, and your winglets don't have control surfaces. The net result is that you have very little control over the direction of travel. My suggestion is to use more liquid fuel and not so much in the way of SRBs. The Swivel engine is a good engine to use in the early game, and combined with a pair of the SRBs, can give you good control and TWR.

I can't see any of your pictures, but the general advice is to put fins at the bottom of your rocket to help stabilize things. Also, make sure that you're using symmetry.

F3 brings up that screen at any point.