herbal space program

D'ohh! So many things to think of when you're having a computer make up names for you

Last night I finished working out my 8 year, <1300m/s route from Kerbin LKO to Jool using gravity assists from only Mun and Kerbin. Details here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/139121-kerbin-kerbin-slingshot/&do=findComment&comment=2601515 I'm sure it can be done better and I hope somebody tries.

OK, so I finally finished my Kerbin/Mun assist-only route to Jool. Please see the linked album for images. The bottom line is it required 1297.6m/s total dV for me to get to a Jool encounter, which saves almost 700 m/s relative to the 1987 m/s ejection burn required for a direct transfer. Total transit time is 8 years, 200 days. http://imgur.com/a/XQSnn The whole principle of doing this is to climb a ladder of resonant orbits through successive gravity assists. The course I chose was based on a 3:4 followed by a 2:1 resonant orbit, using deep space maneuvers near my solar apoapsis to create an angle of incidence between my orbit and Kerbin's for gravity assist. I started with Kerbin a bit less than 30 degrees ahead of Jool. Next time, I would probably try a bit more than 30 degrees. I ejected Kerbin-prograde with a 950 m/s burn that went low around Mun, as pictured. This gave me an initial solar orbit with a 20.18 MKm apoapsis and a period of 596.7 days. this is 28 days longer than the 568d period of a 4:3 resonant orbit, which seems to be sort of a sweet spot to shoot for wrt any resonant orbit. From a bit after the Ap of that orbit, I burned retrograde for 169.5 m/s (DSM1), lowering my period to 564d and setting up a Kerbin encounter after 3 orbits, at the far intersection. Setting a periapsis of ~1000km at this encounter, I was boosted into a new orbit with Ap 30.1 Mkm and a period of 882d. This again is 30d longer than the 2:1 resonant period of 852d. From near the Ap of that orbit, I pulled back for another 173.1 m/s (DSM2), resulting in another Kerbin encounter on the very next go-round, from which I was able to get catapulted to a Jool encounter from an 88km periapsis. Another 70 m/s of plane correction and a tiny in-plane maneuver got me captured via a retrograde Tylo encounter. Anyway, this route is not quite as efficient as the PLAD route (1000m/s), but that route only has one window in 17 years while this one can be taken as often as the direct Hohman transfer window comes around. Anyway, I'd be interested to see how much this can be improved upon, but I think I'm done with it for my own part.

Although I certainly don't think it would wreck the game to have such a thing, I feel like the introduction of tweakable tanks and the mass readout in the engineer's report has made calculating it yourself in the VAB/SPH so easy that I really don't miss it that much. For the sorts of missions I'm doing, I like to keep logs of dV expended/remaining at various points, so even if it were available I'd probably just keep using my spreadsheet anyway. OTOH, way back before you couldn't get your full/empty masses in a matter of seconds, it really was a drag not having one!

Just putting stuff in orbit and landing on other planets is pretty easy. Maybe you should try something harder. Have you built any space planes yet? How about dropping an asteroid on Mun to see what happens? How about seeing how far you can go and return from using an SSTO? Ever built a helicopter? An ion glider? Jool5? Eve rocks? In only 200 hours, you'd have to be superhuman to have mastered all those challenges.

Thanks! I'll try that. This issue has basically caused the mission I was working on to grind to a halt, so it will be a big help.

Ermm, what? where would I set that flag? I'm not launching KSP from a command line.

I played through career mode one time with standard hard settings except for f5 in case of crashes. There were a couple of tight spots early on, but then it got really easy pretty quickly. I can't imagine why I'd want to do all of that again, unless there is a whole lot more content involved next time. I did engage in a couple of career-based challenges after that, like how much science/$$$ can you accumulate for how few missions in the early game, but that got old fairly quickly too. Now what interests me is using sandbox mode to push the envelope of what can be done in the game. I hope one day career gets some serious love from the devs and I have a reason to play it again, but until then I'll just play with my space planes and gravity assist tours.

I don't find the game unplayable exactly, but the fact that it CTDs almost every time I try to minimize it to look at my spreadsheet has sure made my current mission a pain in the end that should not point towards space. I hope they don't need several updates to get around to fixing that one..

Unless you're you're playing some sort of hair shirt version of career mode or involved in a lowest dV to Minmus challenge, I can't see why it matters so much one way or the other how you do this. For Mun or other bigger bodies, how you come at them matters a bit more.

You are not doing Squad nor the devs any favors OP by trying to stamp out criticism on this forum. Frankly, I find this broadside at everyone who dares complain offensive. If you are referring specifically to unfair criticisms of the devs themselves for the (clearly defective) product Squad released, there have not actually been so many of those. Mostly, there have been allegations that the hands-on developers are getting egregiously overworked and underpaid, which is a narrative that (while I have no idea if it is actually true) is quite consistent with the product Squad just released. Squad and the developers are not the same thing, and posturing as if criticism of Squad's business model is the same as disparaging these poor overworked programmers is disingenuous. And blaming the victim, i.e. telling the players that their impatience is the cause of this unprecedentedly buggy release, is just preposterous. If you want to single out some individual who makes some particularly nasty remark, have at it. But this approach to all the malcontents smacks of former Soviet republics.

I think they would be nuts to do this whole engine upgrade now if they weren't going to add a bunch of new content to this "version" of the game, i.e. this code base. If I were in their shoes, I would hire some creative consultants and more content developers, then use them to help create one more significant content upgrade that is still covered by the original price of admission -- not a huge upgrade, but one that will keep everyone interested while the development process goes on. Once this version is bug-free, any future content additions should be handled as expansion modules to the existing game for at least a couple of cycles. These should be relatively cheap (say 10 bucks), but still cost enough that they will maintain a working revenue stream for Squad. While all this is happening, they need to come to grips with the crossroads they're at creatively and figure out just where this game is going. If they want to keep their broad player base alive, they need to come up with something major to keep it interesting for them. That could be a bunch of different things, but only when it is clear what that is should they start developing KSP2 in earnest.

When I was playing career, I most certainly kept using the same booster stacks again and again for missions that were in similar ranges of tonnage and dV from LKO. It was already enough of a grind without having to assemble essentially the same rocket over and over. Since then, it's been a mixed bag. Sometimes it seems like it's less work to just slap something together for the job than it is to go find something in all my save files and sometimes it doesn't.

Before career mode existed, I also used to play guided by the notion that everything should be done in as little Kerbal time as possible. It was a way of making the game more goal-oriented for me, and it introduced the interesting (to me, anyway) challenge of juggling as many parallel missions as possible. I still did interplanetary missions, but I had to keep track of time so I wouldn't miss the transfer windows between maintaining all my other missions. When actual career mode came along, I was kind of disappointed that there was no element of minimizing Kerbal time included. I must admit though that when I brought up the idea here a while back of having some sort of time-dependent money burn in the game, like annual rent for the KSC, it was roundly rejected, and I think somebody even went so far as to troll-rate the thread . So I guess the devs made the right decision to leave that out, but I still kind of wish it was there.

Hmm. I must say that I've found that if I focus on the body that I mean to encounter and zoom into it, I can almost always manage to rotate the view so that my node is somewhere behind the planned encounter along the same line of sight, allowing me to see both at the same time. What drives me nuts is trying to dial in the dV with the scroll wheel, which moves either in tiny, useful increments or maddeningly large jumps based on no particular logic AFAICT.

There's a mod for that (Precise Node, IIRC), and the cognoscenti around here were kind of amused when they learned that I had undertaken all these really fussy multi-planet trajectories without it. All I can say is you get used to its stupid behavior eventually, And to be honest I also get a certain level of satisfaction from feeling like I can fly all these maneuvers using my own hands and some gauges. Using a machine to type in the exact answer somehow feels like cheating to me.

Reading through this thread, I think the devs are in a tough position with this whole question. It's really a matter of what their target market actually is. Most games, even highbrow ones like Civ, will hold your hand so that even if you are essentially incapable of sustained, systematic reasoning you can muddle your way through. KSP just plain didn't do that, while at the same time offering a type and level of simulation experience that was beyond anything else available for this sort of scenario. What made it my favorite game ever, a virtue that it shared with Nethack, still perhaps my second favorite game ever in spite of its most venerable age, is precisely its sheer difficulty. I had to think hard to make things work. I had to be creative! I had to genuinely push my own envelope of reasoning and calculation, and consequently the feeling of reward I got when I finally achieved success was unique. When I first landed on Mun successfully, I was ecstatic, jumping up and down in front of my computer. I honestly don't think I ever experienced that level of gratification playing any other computer game, even including the first time I escaped with the Amulet of Yendor without cheating. I really don't want KSP to lose that magical, singular virtue, but I have to acknowledge that this level of obscurity and difficulty may just not play to the sort of audience you need to target in a really big-time, big-dollar release. They have a very fine line to walk.

Today I worked on my "Straight Outta Kerbin" Kerbin-only multi-assist route to Jool. In the last iteration, I reached Jool's orbit for a total of 1345dV, using only Mun/Kerbin encounters and deep space maneuvers, but I just missed my Jool encounter, needing to have an impossible 20km Kerbin periapsis on my second encounter to get there in time. I've restarted with a slightly later ejection date, and I've managed to optimize a thing or two this time, so I think I'll eventually be able to pull it off for right around 1300 m/s from LKO in only around 7 Kerbin years, by hopping up first to a 4:3 resonant orbit and then to a 2:1.

I must say that I never found not knowing the exact dV of a ship or the dV requirements of a mission to be much of an impediment in visiting other bodies. If you set a big bundle of nuclear asparagus spears on top of a gigantic booster stack, you can easily make a ship with 10 or more km/s left when it gets to LKO. With that, you can bumble your way almost anywhere and back (except maybe Moho ). I always did orbital rendezvous landing missions as well, which meant that for the price of learning how to dock in orbit getting everybody home was never that near of a thing. By the time we got to 0.95, I also had several big stations in Kerbin and Munar orbit, at which there were massive depots of fuel and a fleet of tankers, tugs, etc. docked, so I could always leave Kerbin's SOI with a full tank. In 0.95, I did the whole Jool5 mission, succeeding with the first ship I launched, without exactly calculating the dV of anything involved, including the Tylo lander. I only actually got interested in exactly how much dV my craft had left when that itself became a matter of interest, like when I got involved in challenges about long-range SSTOs and low dV routes to different places. Since we now have tweakable tanks and the Engineer's Report, getting that info did not require KER, but simply that I learn how to enter the formula "=LN(A1/B1)*C1*9.8" into an Excel spreadsheet, then put the wet weight, dry weight, and engine ISP values into cells A1, B1, and C1. I'm sure KER makes that easier, but compared to the endless hours I've spent actually building and flying my ships, that effort is peanuts IMO.

Actually, if you know your launch window you can get to Duna for around 1050 m/s. Just time warp until Duna is a little under 60 degrees (57 exactly I think) around 44 degrees (sorry, 57 deg behind is for Eve) ahead of Kerbin in its orbit, then boost prograde from the trailing side of your 70km orbit so that you eject parallel to Kerbin's orbit. Just set your node to 1050 m/s pure prograde in roughly the right place, then drag it around the orbit until your escape trajectory and Kerbin's orbit line up. If you decide to get fancy and use a gravity assist from Mun (i.e. wait until Mun is at about 7 o' clock wrt Kerbin with the sun at Noon, then set up an encounter that swings low around it and ejects prograde), you can do it for a little under 950 m/s. Once you've done it, you'll be amazed how easy it was!vAnyway, the calculator I've always used is here: http://ksp.olex.biz/

zomg you figured out how to get that monster into orbit before you ever even went to Duna? . For me, making my first space plane was WAAY harder than just landing on Duna. Different strokes I guess!

Really? I think that for just getting from one body to another it's perfectly fine. IMO It's when you're trying to set up multiple gravity assists at precise places and times, using as little dV as possible, that it really comes up short.

I started playing in (I think) 0.19, and as soon as I had successfully explored Minmus, which took me a few months of heavy playing, the next thing I did was go to Duna. There was no question of that not being the next thing. Not knowing about all the transfer window planning tools, I just built a ship with lots and lots of dV, launched it onto a minimal escape trajectory, and then just kept placing and deleting maneuver nodes on the resulting solar orbit until I found one that got me to a Duna encounter. It took maybe 10 minutes to find one, after which I knew more or less the right phase angle for the transfer window next time. It required no calculation whatsoever, and this approach worked fine for me to visit Eve as well. Moho was of course another matter, and by the time I got around to Jool I had found out about all the planners you can access from the Wiki. Anyway, I guess my point is that if one is motivated enough to figure out how to get as far as Mun/Minmus, it seems odd to me that one would then balk at the minimal additional challenge of getting to Duna. RIC stated quite correctly that it's tough and very tedious to trial-and-error transfer windows from LKO, but that only matters if you already know that you're supposed to set up your transfer orbits from there because of the Oberth effect. I was totally innocent of Oberth at the time, so I just massively overbuilt my ship and did it by brute force as I described. I can't be the only player who got to Duna for the first time in this fashion.

In my practice I'd have to say that's pretty much true, but with some experience you do learn what will never work and also what the starting points are to try for different scenarios.

What Pe you should shoot for depends entirely on the body you're trying to get captured by and how fast you're coming at it. Moreover the aerodynamic model just got changed again in a manner that significantly affects upper-air drag, so I'm not sure even the hardcore folks have got that all worked out yet for every situation. In the last model, there were plenty of aerobraking scenarios that used to work pre-1.00 that became instantly deadly. Perhaps if you could describe your specific scenario a little more, somebody could give you a more helpful answer.