herbal space program

Don't make me into Lord Kelvin here. I never claimed it was impossible to get to Jool for less than ~1050 m/s, I just said it had been a long-standing record in actual play, which it was. When I was reminded in that thread that people did eventually take on the challenge of using multiple Munar assists rather than just one to get enough ejection velocity for the first Eve transfer, I immediately admitted it could in fact be done for less.

CoL, CoP, whatever. It was quite obvious from looking at OP's craft that with those big SRB's positioned where they are, that the center of aerodynamic forces was both forward of the center of mass and far forward of the center of thrust, at least at liftoff. Maybe not so much after the SRB's are empty. At any rate, the profile that AP posted was only a tad more aggressive than the standard one, and OP did also put significantly more control surface all the way at the bottom than there was before, considerably mitigating the instability as compared to the original vessel, so I think there is room for us both to be right!

Although what you say is true from a technical standpoint, that philosophy has its limits, as in if you get going too much sideways and not enough upwards at 10km you will actually take a significant hit from the drag, not to mention that you will probably explode! Having said that, 45 degrees at 5km and maybe 25 at 10km is probably OK from a not-exploding standpoint, but I wouldn't push it much beyond that. Even though drag per se is not such an issue above 10-15km, excessive heating definitely is. Also, I think OP would have to do a very significant redesign of that vehicle before it ever could do such a thing without flipping. It's pretty clear the CoL is in front of the CoM as currently designed, and that is just not going to work in that kind of scenario.

That thing looks like it has plenty of dV to make orbit, but those giant SRB's don't have any gimbals so they will be really tough to steer. You also have lots of draggy parts in front of your CoM, which will make your rocket inherently flippy under high aerodynamic pressure. So in addition to lowering the TWR at takeoff like @AHHans said, you need to add MOAR TAIL FINS to the bottoms of your SRB's, like at least 3 of those per booster instead of just one. You could also make it more steerable by mounting the SRBs on radial decouplers to the side of your fuel tanks rather than underneath them, although this will increase drag a bit. As to your ascent profile, it looks like you're using an aero mod, but in regular KSP a good rule of thumb is to start your gravity turn at around 150 m/s, be boosting at about 45% by the time you hit 10km, and more or less horizontally by the time you reach 25-30km. The closer you can stay to prograde during all this the better, especially since you have wings. You should also cut thrust right as your AP reaches >70km, and boost prograde in small increments to keep it there as you climb out of the atmo. In my most efficient ascents, I only have to add a few tens of meters of dV at AP to circularize.

Although 12.5 km is not so bad and you could definitely manage with several cycles of what @linuxgurugamer outlined, it seems that the orbits of your two vessels are both very close to and crossing each other, which can make setting up a close encounter with the maneuver node quite a pain. To make it easier, unless your orbital altitude and or fuel consumption are mission-critical, I would switch to whichever component is currently further ahead in its orbit and boost it to a ~10km higher one, circularizing at your new AP, so that the orbit of the lagging craft is completely inside the orbit of the leading one. I would also make sure the two craft are in the same exact plane if they are not already (i.e. AN/DN are zero) by boosting normal or anti-normal as appropriate at one of the orbital nodes, whichever is reached first by either craft. Then I would place a maneuver node a few minutes in front of the trailing craft and pull on the prograde handle until the new orbit is tangent to the (now higher) orbit of the leading one. Once you get an intersect indicator, it should show you hitting your target orbit somewhere behind your target craft. Assuming it does, grab the center circle of your maneuver node and slide it forward along your orbit until the trailing craft's intersect happens right at the target position by eye. You can then fine-tune that node by looking at the separation value and making small adjustments the pro/retrograde, radial in/out, and normal/antinormal handles, adjusting each in tiny increments successively to zero in on the closest possible encounter. With that you should be able to set up an encounter within 1km. Once you've gotten to that, you can go back to doing what @linuxgurugamer said you should do near the closest point, i.e. boosting target-retrograde, except I'll add one thing: If you are closing and your yellow target retrograde marker is not on top of your pink anti-target marker, you can move it there by pointing your craft some distance to the opposite side of the target retrograde marker from the anti-target marker and boosting gently. That should push your retrograde marker towards your anti-target marker, in turn making your closest approach closer. Once you get within a couple hundred meters of each other this way, you should reduce your closing speed to 1m/s or so by boosting target-retrograde, then flip around to lock on the pink target marker. From there, use RCS translation to keep the pink target and yellow target-prograde markers right on top of each other, slowing down to ~0.2m/s closing speed right before docking. At some point in this process you also need to switch to the target craft and lock it on to the chasing one so that they will remain pointed directly at one another. Anyway, that was a bit of a mouthful to say, but if you follow all those steps you should be able to rendezvous and dock successfully every time.

Just noticed this statement. If you need to put a lot of wing area in the front to take off, that means you are too nose-heavy when fully fueled. I usually have nearly all the main wing area towards the back, with maybe a couple of canards mounted near the front. Where you put your wheels matters a lot too. You want your rear wheels to be behind the CoM but relatively close to it, so that they bear the bulk of the weight but will still represent a good pivot for your craft to pitch up without applying too much force. Your nose wheel OTOH should be as far forward from the CoM as you can get it, so that it bears as little of the plane's weight as possible.

It contributes massively to flipping, just like @AHHans said above. If your CoL ever gets significantly in front of your CoM, then you are toast! What you want to do to fix it is while you are getting far enough down into the atmo that your plane is starting to feel aerodynamic forces, set your SAS to hold your desired attitude and then select your fore-most and aft-most tanks using alt-RMB. Then take a look at your pitch indicator on the lower left of the screen. If it shows that your SAS is constantly applying downward pitch, then start transferring fuel from the aft tank to the fore one, stopping right as the needle reaches the neutral position. You may need to make further adjustments of this nature as the air gets thicker, but if you use that pitch needle during SAS hold as your guide, you should be able to avoid serious problems. For my part, I always take pains when designing my craft to try to have the CoL just behind the CoM both with all the tanks full and all the tanks empty. Using wet wings mounted towards the rear can help you a lot in doing this. Trying to mount at least some of your engines more forward on the wings rather than at the back helps too.

One of those things that gets so routine you don't even think about it, except that the last Kerbal I got a contract to rescue in the latest KSP version (orbiting Duna) didn't actually have an EVA pack on board. That made it just a wee bit harder, especially since as it turns out nobody on the rescuing vessel had one either! The rescuing vessel was also at least 50m long, being composed of three separate modules connected by wobbly docking ports. Took me a good hour and countless reloads to get a hatch close enough to poor, helplessly floating Dandard that he could grab it.

If you've only been playing for 11 hours, it occurs to me that you might not be allowed to do EVAs yet, as you'll need to upgrade your astronaut complex to level 2 first. That will make the "get out and push" solution possible, provided you have enough propellant in your EVA tank to de-orbit, but you'll definitely want to hit F5 before trying it, unless you have made the extremely ambitious decision to play "hard" for your first career game, in which case I would strongly advise against it. If you want to do a rendezvous OTOH, you'll most likely want to upgrade Mission Control and the tracking station as well, so that you can see the orbit intersects and place maneuver nodes, or else setting up that rendezvous will be quite challenging. Technically, I guess you could still de-orbit your stuck vessel without any upgrades by using another vessel rather than a Kerbal to do the retrograde pushing, but without RCS, patched conics, or maneuver nodes that is going to be wickedly difficult. Give all that, I would have to agree with @OHara above that your best option is probably to work on other missions until you have all the upgrades required to make your rescue easier.

No matter what you do, you're going to have to rendezvous another craft with his, so for now I would just send Jeb up with a 2-seat ship and have Bill fly over using his EVA pack. You can put some extra ladder segments next to the hatch to give him more area to grab on to. And if you don't have a 2-seat capsule yet, you can just stack two Mk1 capsules on top of each other. Just be sure to have two parachutes instead of one to land your heavier command pod safely. You can salvage the abandoned pod later if you are a penny-pincher. Either way, you'll soon be getting a contract to do the same thing over and over, which is the only economical way to staff up your program, so you might as well learn how now!

I admire your diligence, but looking at what you had to go through to do the workaround, I think I'm going to give myself a break and use the cheats menu! I've already had another contract that appeared unfulfillable, which was to map eight asteroids with a SENTINEL scope from a designated orbit. I built the required craft, sent it up there so the target orbit disappeared from the map view, and then the contract box said all I had to do was wait and I'd be notified as the asteroids were spotted. Six years later, the blasted thing had practically collided with at least 8 asteroids and still not one of them was logged. It was out of comms range half the time for the first couple of years, but I fixed that, and still no progress. I ultimately just threw up my hands and ate that one, because I'm in a situation now where I have a whole Jool 5 mission parked in-system, but I have so many contracts active that I can't get any new ones I could use it for. The rover repair mission I posted about is one of those for me as well, and it's also holding up other Duna system missions I need to get done to clear my slate, so Alt-F12 it is! ...Actually, after following one of the links at the top of the post you replied with, I went ahead and edited my save file. Problem solved, thanks! Alas that link takes me to a login screen for which my forum credentials don't work, but thanks anyway!

Hello all, I'm currently playing through a career game with the BG DLC and the in-situ building update, and I got a contract that said I needed to add enough parts to a rover on Ike so that I could drive it to a waypoint to fulfill its original mission. In the contracts sidebar, all it said was "move the rover". So I landed nearby, drove my own rover out to meet it, slapped on some solar panels and a big battery, and then drove the rover to the waypoint AFAICT, i.e. the square nav indicator was as nearly directly above me as I could get it. No contract fulfillment notification. Am I missing something? I even tried running the science experiment onboard and transmitting the data, but still no cigar. Are the waypoints super-fussy or something? I have no idea what to try next. Thanks for any help!

Are you perhaps suggesting there might have been some use of the F9 key involved here? How dare you??

I.....improvised! I forgot to put radiator panels on my Ike ore extraction contract vessel, so I had to get creative with the MK3 spaceplane I had in the Duna system for a totally different set of missions. Don't try this on Kerbin!

I felt the same pain re Eve until BG came out. The key is to use the robotic parts to make a propeller-driven space plane, like this one: The wings make heat shielding unnecessary because their lift keeps you from going in too fast and they dissipate a lot of heat with all their surface area. As to going back up, the plane pictured can reach about 22 km on the propellers, at which point it pitches up, drops the wings, and easily gets back to orbit as a rocket. Being able to get your craft that high for free just solves so many problems! The props do have a bit of a learning curve to them however. I'm playing through a career game now, but once that's done I'm going to try to make an Eve sea level SSTO starting from this design. If it's possible somebody here has probably done it already, but I'm not gonna look until I've given it my best shot...

It definitely makes a noticeable difference on engines with a big, flat back end like the Rapier. Clipping backwards-facing nosecones into them reduces their drag quite a bit. I used to do that all the time, but I've since found that enveloping such parts with a backwards-facing fairing seems to reduce drag even more, and also seems less cheaty to me since it doesn't involve part-clipping.

It was the only time I ever beat Man Eating Ape at any challenge AFAIK, which was the cost required, because I did it in a single stage. I also won the dV contest back then, but I'm pretty sure you could smash that record with enough patience.

I'm kind of tempted to give it a try now, although I would still probably go with 2 km/s once on LKO for insurance against my own ineptitude. OTOH, I kind of exhausted my patience for this sort of stuff doing the Retrosolar Rescue mission a few years back in a single stage, which took me 200+ years and like 60 separate flybys. https://imgur.com/a/5URWb

That's right, I had forgotten that people set up multiple Munar flybys these days to get more ejection velocity. What are your resonant orbits? Like 6:8 followed by 4:3? Anyway, that would probably be very difficult to time set up so that you get your Moho encounter out of the way early, since I think that needs more energy even than K-E-K-K-J, but I guess you could drop yourself down to Moho from Jool at some point.

I don't know about in theory, but in actual play I believe the long-standing dV record for just reaching the Jool system was something like 1050 m/s, using a Mun-Eve-Kerbin-Kerbin-Jool route, and setting up that first Munar assist so the transfers line up is a nightmare. There's also the matter of the plane change going to Eve, because finding a transfer window exactly at the nodal point may not even be possible. Having said that, I think the best approach would be to go Mun-Eve-Moho-Eve (brushing past Gilly)-Duna (brushing past Ike)-Kerbin (brushing past Minmus)-Kerbin (alternate Minmus encounter)-Jool-Tylo-Laythe-Vall-Pol/Bop-Tylo-Pol/Bop-Tylo-Dres-Jool (and tylo/Laythe)-Eeloo. The timing is such that the Duna encounter after the first Eve flyby is actually really easy to get if you take the classic E-K-K-J route on its first window, you just need to figure it out so that your trajectory is not much changed when you come out of it. Once you are at Jool, you can use all the gravity assists available there to sling you past everything in the Jool system really easily. Aerobraking at Laythe is also a possibility, but bring some serious heat shielding, because unless you swing by Tylo first you'll be coming in hot! From Jool I think Dres is the next place you'll want to go, ejecting to a 2:1 resonant transfer orbit that encounters Dres at the nodal point and comes back to Jool 10 years later. From that last Jool encounter, you can eject to an interstellar space-bound Eloo flyby. Alternately, you could try to tag Dres on your way up to Jool, but with the plane change you'll probably have to wait a very long time for that. All told, if I were actually going to try to fly that mission instead of having some computer code feed numbers into MechJeb, I would not want to leave LKO with less than 1,500 m/s in the tank, probably 2,000 TBH, especially if I want it to take less than a thousand years. With what I outlined, it could likely be done in under 100.

One thing I think would be great is if pilots of a certain level could execute maneuver nodes automatically. Perhaps they could do it semi-manually at level 4, so that you push a button and the whole burn gets executed, and at level 5 they could do it fully automatically, so that a maneuver node you set in advance gets done even if you time-warp past it.

I'm actually having the same problem now. The mission was to add needed parts to a rover on Ike so you could then drive it to a waypoint, and I did exactly that but the game is not recognizing the contract as completed . OTOH, giving engineers the ability to do stuff like re-position misplaced ladders is priceless!

Propellers have definitely been a game-changer for me on Eve: The solar-powered prop plane on the left, docked to its orbital tug in the image, accommodates three Kerbals and a bunch of science experiments, makes Kerbin orbit as a single stage, can re-enter the atmosphere on Eve without any heat shielding, can land and take off any number of times on Eve to gather/transmit science, and can then reach ~22km altitude on Eve on the props before jettisoning the wings and flying back to orbit on the Vectors. I suspect that a stripped-down version might even be able to SSTO on Eve, but I have not pursued that yet.

I think they have a fine line to walk between the above-quoted statements. On the one hand, it's totally true that what's kept me playing the game for far longer than any other computer game I've ever owned was without a doubt it's sheer difficulty combined with the totally open-ended nature of its challenges and the associated problem-solving strategies. The lack of readily accessible tutorials in-game did add to the air of mystery and made the each achievement seem like something truly special. Being part of the community of early players who braved all that difficulty to do these really cool things felt like it actually meant something. I would hate to see them pitch all of that over the side by nerfing all the physics/flight aspects in the interest of making it more accessible to people for whom it's maybe just not the right game. On the other hand, when I first started playing the game, docking larger ships was not only a tough challenge in mastering the basics of orbital mechanics (cool!), it was in fact nearly impossible because the SAS code was too buggy for the ships ever to stop wiggling (not so cool!). Large rockets would also spontaneously disassemble themselves on the pad unless they were festooned with so many unsightly struts that they looked like they'd been put together by a drunk with with a jumbo staple gun. And of course countless physics bugs made the notion of playing a hard career game with no quicksave a non-starter. It still is actually in my book, because even now things sometimes shake themselves to pieces/explode for no good reason. I definitely don't/won't miss any of that, nor will I miss the sometimes-impossible VAB placement interface or the clunky, slapped-together look of the current tiled wing implementation. I also think that not holding the player's hand shouldn't extend to not actually explaining at all how to use a bunch of parts, or how to work with critical concepts such as ISP, dV, orbital mechanics, drag, CoM/CoL placement, etc. I think it's definitely possible to do those things better without giving away so much that the challenges become trivial, and of course if the tutorials are all optional you can still choose to figure everything out on your own if you want. Time will tell!

Thank you everybody for the helpful replies. I actually spotted what I assume is a mini-crater last night, but then I messed up deploying my rover so that it landed in one piece but uncrewed, hatch-down, and without any signal to its probe core . I was too tired to try again at that point, but at least now I know one of the things I'm looking for. It's also good to know that I can turn off the terrain scatter if it's too much like looking for a needle in a haystack.