herbal space program

I will definitely do that, but it's going to take a couple of days. I've already taken screens of the proof-of-principle mission, but I still need to figure out at least one more DSM to get all the way to Jool's orbit. Once I've done that, I'll just need to take note of the Jool-Kerbin phase angle at the time of my initial ejection burn and at the time of my arrival at Jool's orbit, and then I should be able to determine the correct Jool-Kerbin phase angle to start with so that the second time through Jool will actually be there when I arrive at its orbit. Stay tuned....

Items 1-4 are exactly correct. Item 5 is not really as hard as it might seem at the outset. You just need to construct a table of resonant orbits for Kerbin (i.e. 2:1, 3:2, 5:7 etc., just multiplying Kerbin's period by these different ratios) and another table that lets you offset the return times to model encounters at spots other than where you ejected from. With those simple tools in Excel, it's fairly easy to tweak your orbital period up and down until you have your ship and Kerbin at the same spot at some future time. Remember you can always save your game state and run the clock forward until your ship and kerbin each in turn reach the desired encounter point, then use that information to go back and calculate all the return times to that spot for both Kerbin and your ship at the time when you saved. Again, I will illustrate all of this later when I have more time. And Item 6 I would say depends on your personal temperament, but you can definitely save a significant amount of dV if you're willing to do the calculations. While figuring out exactly what to do might be a time-consuming exercise, once you know how to set it up you can save (in my current estimation) at least half the required energy to go to a body like Jool. It's true that using Eve may be more efficient in terms of energy, but those windows only come around once in a blue moon while if you do everything using Kerbin and DSMs, you'll get a window every 1.2 Kerbin years or so. Anyway, I think I'll try to use this method to actually get to Jool, and we'll see what it ends up looking like....

As I have been thinking (and playing) this through, I have arrived at the formula that the maximum amount of orbital energy you can theoretically harvest from a given encounter is proportional to the relative velocity between the two bodies times the sine of the angle between their trajectories. I haven't actually looked this all up, but I'm pretty sure this is the right answer. IOW, if you are coming at the other body at zero angle, right along its orbital path, it can't accelerate you at all, regardless of how fast you are moving relative to it. But OTOH if you are falling straight at the other body towards the sun, exactly normal to its trajectory, it can add its whole orbital velocity to yours if its gravity is strong enough. If its gravity isn't strong enough, you can harvest the energy in successive encounters, like you do at the end of the K-E-K-K-J route. The end state is always an orbit that's perfectly tangent to that of the boosting body, from which you can't gain any more energy. What this boils down to in terms of bootstrapping yourself out of your local gravity well is that if you escape a given body, any maneuver that you can do to increase the orbital angle at which you encounter it the next time can have significant energy returns. For example, this evening I boosted my ship prograde out of a 100km Kerbin orbit for 1069 m/s, to reach a solar Ap of 21.01M Km. FWIW, if I had used the Mun, I could have done this for just 980 m/s. From this solar apoapsis, I boosted retrograde 165 m/s, dropping my Pe inside Kerbin's orbit and generating intersects with significant angles. I timed it (using a fairly simple Excel spreadsheet) so that I re-encountered Kerbin on the inbound intersect 4 orbits later, and was able to boost my Ap to >35M km from that encounter, almost all the way to Dres. What this adds up to is that by losing 165 m/s of velocity I was able to gain it all back plus another 235 m/s, because dropping my PE from up there maximally increased the angle of re-encounter. Better yet, the higher your Ap, the cheaper it becomes to do this. My guess right now is that in this way, I'll be able to climb up resonant energy levels to to Jool's orbit for something like 1500 m/s total, which is obviously significantly more than the PLAD route, but is still half what boosting straight there would cost and does have the advantage of not depending on other bodies and thus being doable once every Kerbin year. I need a bit more time to work on it, but when I finish I'll post the whole thing with pictures. I must thank everyone who participated in this discussion. I didn't quite understand all this before and now I think I do!

...Well I've now convinced myself that no matter how I eject from Kerbin, I can't re-encounter it in a way that gives me more orbital energy than I would have had if I had just ejected prograde with the same amount of dV. I set up two ejection burns of `980m/s, one of which swung low around Mun to eject prograde, and the other of which ejected about 60deg sunward of prograde. The prograde ejection got me to an Ap of ~21M Km, a bit higher than Duna's orbit, the anti-radial one to an Ap of only 18M km, with my Pe inside Kerbin's orbit such that there were about 80 days of Kerbin travel time from intersect to intersect. I timed the anti-radial ejection burn so that I would re-encounter Kerbin (non-tangentialy) after 4 orbits at the opposite intersect from where I initially ejected. When I tweaked that encounter to raise my Ap as far as possible post-ejection, lo and behold I could get to a tangential orbit with an Ap of ~21M km, just as if I had made the same burn ejecting prograde in the first place! There is a long and tedious lesson in conservation of energy for you. Next I will test what happens if I eject prograde with a smaller burn and then expend the difference boosting retrograde at my Ap to create a subsequent non-tangential encounter....

"Soon you will hear great news about KSP that will make the team proud of their effort" Well that's sure made me curious! Although it does sound just a little bit like the sort of thing you'd say while you're packing your bags and searching for countries with the most favorable extradition policies

I definitely understand how you can get a big plane change from a small mid-coursecorrection, but what I'd like to know is if you eject from Kerbin (perhaps using a Munar assist) in such a way that your Pe goes inside Kerbin's and your Ap outside, can you then set up a subsequent (non-tangential) Kerbin encounter at one of the resulting orbital intersection points, from which you can ultimately harvest more energy back than you had to put in to get to that orbit in the first place? It seems to me like the plane change maneuver doesn't really increase your total orbital potential energy as much as change your direction of motion, so it's not clear to me if you can get these sorts of effects keeping everything in the same plane...

So having tested it now, it does seem that I can only lose energy if I re-approach Kerbin from a perfectly tangent orbit. I guess losing energy was what I was trying to do with my Moho multi-assist mission, so I never looked so much into trying to gain it! The KEKKJ route of course involved non-tangent Kerbin encounters, so I never had occasion to test it there. What does seem possible however would be to boost retrograde at a solar Ap a bit less than 2:1 resonant and drop your Pe so you re-encounter Kerbin earlier on its orbit and non-tangentially, you could actually get a net gain of energy from the second encounter. I suppose that's the Vinf leveraging PLAD was talking about. I'm gpoing to go mess about with this some more, maybe employing Mun as well, to address the more practical question of how possible is it to bootstrap yourself out of Kerbin with only the Kerbin system and DSMs.

OK, so I realize now that maybe I remembered it wrong and that what Plusck/Machinist said is true. Perfectly tangential encounters produce minimal changes to AP/PE but result in radial corrections instead. Off-tangent encounters produce higher or lower AP/Pe depending on which side you approach the SOI from and which way you go around the body. I will just go put that to the test now. I'm kind of embarrassed I spent so much time doing this stuff less than a year ago and I still don't remember exactly how it works...

I guess I figured this one would be a loser like all the others but it actually flies fairly well! Since it managed the Laythe-and-back challenge much better than SSTO12 did, I suppose it does deserve a name. What do you think? It flies pretty well, but I never claimed it was pretty... ...OK, so is there some new trick to loading images now? the old [imgur]26BdW[/imgur] way doesn't seem to work, and when I paste that full link into the Insert other media dialog, I get a broken image, even though pasting it into a new browser tab gets me right to the album. Any advice fellow Kerbonauts? ...erm so the old way now seems to yield a link and not an embedded image. Any way to change that?

I dunno, I just spent a couple of hours flying my SSTO14b to orbit with and without 2 pairs of struts holding the fuselage sections together. I ended up with 5.7 km/s dV on orbit with struts and 5.9 km/s without. There was definitely a bit of a hit, but I can't believe it was 50%.

I think there are two things getting confused here and also a problem with what "behind" and "in front of" mean. What I'm talking about is if you are passing Kerbin on the side closer to the sun (inside) or farther from the sun (outside). If you are approaching the planet from retrograde, as you would be in a 2:1 resonant orbit you established from Kerbin in the first place, you want to pass it on the side closer to the sun, deviating your orbital path outwards. In the case of the PLAD K-E-K-K-J route, you are encountering Kerbin on an orbit that goes inside of Kerbin's, before your PE. In that case, the equivalent maneuver has you coming from the outside and again passing on the inside of Kerbin's orbit so that you get ejected essentially prograde on Kerbin's orbit. In both cases the result is to raise your Apoapsis, but in different places relative to where you eject from Kerbin.

Well that is certainly just wrong. I'm tempted to see how removing the two struts on my SSTO14 would affect drag, but it flies so poorly without them...

Yes, this is totally doable OP. If you set it up so that you encounter Kerbin at your own PE, you will raise or lower your AP in the same spot, depending if you fly outside (lower) or inside (higher) of Kerbin. on your orbit. If you encounter it before or after your PE, you can also change the argument of periapsis of your orbit and raise/lower your own PE inside/outside of Kerbin's orbit. As RIC mentioned, PLAD's famous cheap route to Jool culminates in two sequential Kerbin encounters set up exactly as you said.

I concur with AeroGav that your COL is too close behind your COM. If you slide those wet wings backwards just a little, you'll both stabilize your plane and help it to maintain good aerodynamic trim as the fuel get used up.

So is this excessive drag a fixed quantity for each strut or does it depend on how much strut area is exposed to the air?

This made a huge difference for me. I also do agree with OP though that in the current air, lift seems to drop off a fair bit more precipitously when going high and fast compared to previous versions. This is fortunately offset by less drag at lower levels, so it works to just pack on moar wings to get better performance up there.

I have encountered 1) and I assume they'll fix that sooner or later. The rest of it doesn't really bug me so much. I think the air is actually a bit better in 1.1.2 than it was in 1.0.5. I seem to be able to get significantly more dV on LKO now with my latest Mk1 SSTO than I could in that version, although to my preference they went a bit too far making the lower atmosphere less draggy and the upper atmosphere less lifty. I'll gladly keep that over the excessive UA drag from 1.0.5 though.

That's a very nice ship! That super-wide design is sort of overkill for the Mun, but on ultra low gravity bodies like Minmus I'll bet it makes landing ever so much quicker. Thinking about it, the design reminds me of Pilae, which had the same problem to contend with.

A fair point, but in my defense I learned how to fly landers long before this option existed. My whole point was just that RCS is basically there to facilitate these sorts of small maneuvers, and it most certainly does make things easier for inexperienced pilots, so I don't understand why one would want to tell OP, who is already having problems staying upright on landing, to get rid of it and presumably just learn how to fly better. I certainly never meant to imply it was essential. Also, having an exactly retrograde approach will not change what happens if you land on a slope, so there would still be some benefit to having more SAS power. Anyway, this seems to be turning into some sort of liquid fuel jettisoning contest now, so I will bow out. Maybe OP can let us know later what ultimately solved their problem, ala Stump the Chumps..

Boy do you and I have different pedagogical styles. In case you have forgotten, for a brand new player landing on the Mun without the benefit of RCS translation is really, really hard. I sure haven't forgotten. I could never have done it in the first few months of playing, but of course like you I can do it pretty easily now. It is absolutely false that having RCS as a "crutch" early on made me unable to learn how to do it "right". What it did was make it fun instead of a mind-numbingly frustrating and tedious challenge. As to getting in hot water with RCS, I wasn't suggesting trying to correct manually. Of course that will do more harm than good. But it will of course also add significant power to the SAS system, which could easily make the difference between ending up upright vs. sideways. Anyway, I seldom find that I make somebody feel like they've actually been helped by telling them they're doing it all wrong from the get-go. YMMV.

I don't know how you can say that having RCS helps with neither approach nor tipping over. Maybe it doesn't help you with your awesome flying skilz , but you know us regular folks do like to be able to line up all the indicators with RCS translation rather than by pitching this way and that while plummeting towards the surface. And if one doesn't stick the landing as I'm sure you always do, every bit of rotational damping you can get from having RCS/SAS engaged also helps. As you might have noticed looking upthread, I already suggested to OP that the capsule should be lower down, below the two bays, and the legs higher. Those changes will decrease the MOI far, far more than getting rid of a measly .05t of monoprop.

But OP's problem was tipping over when landing, not fuel consumption. Eliminating RCS will make that worse and not better, both by requiring better flying skills to manage the approach and by providing less rotational stabilization after contact.

Those both look like they could do the job, but there's lots of stuff you could do to make them less flippy. It's important to position your legs as high as possible relative to your center of mass, and your center of mass is currently way above them. It's also good to minimize your overall moment of inertia by concentrating the heavy parts in the center. You can accomplish the first thing by mounting your landing legs higher on your bottom tanks. Your exhaust nozzle should clear the ground after you've landed by just enough that you don't bottom out. Your legs are way lower than they need to be for that. Actually, you should be using the bigger struts on the bigger lander too. The other thing you can do, although it looks kind of silly, would be to mount your light materials bay on top of your command pod using a couple of struts and radial parachutes. That would concentrate mass in the middle and make you less tippy in general. I'll bet if you do just those two things you'll find you have a lot less difficulty landing upright....And I agree with other that that Poodle is waay OP for a basic Mun lander. You could lift a 22-ton lander off of Tylo with that! Nonono, they need to be as *high* as possible. The further above the point of attachment the COM of the lander is, the more it will want to flip if it hits the ground slanted. Also, four legs requires significantly more rotational energy to flip on its side than three, so that will also make the lander perform worse and not better.

I agree that demanding for Squad to answer to these accusations publicly is unrealistic and pointlessly antagonistic. But it does seem pretty clear at this point that they are still using a garage band development model even after their game has hit the big time. The devoted fans are screaming for more, and it is really very slow in coming. Modders are cranking out content way faster than the core development team is. I understand that there was a physics port and that's a whole lot of work for no content advantage, but still it is not unreasonable to expect them to have taken this ball and run further with it by now. If that's because they have in fact taken the bulk of the revenue from KSP and put it towards other ventures, leaving us out in the cold, then I do think it is pitchforks-and-torches time. Mind you, I could never begin to begrudge them the $20 that my early access purchase cost for the 1500+ hours of play that I've (mostly) enjoyed, but I want so much more, and I'm willing to pay what a big league game would cost right now just for a promise I can believe that a lot more is forthcoming in the next year or two. But if Squad is going to take that money and not deliver, then I'd rather see somebody with a real commitment to game development buy them out and finish the job properly.

If Squad is really more interested in things other than game development, maybe the best thing would actually be if somebody bought KSP from them and then got serious about taking it to the next step. I know for my part that I'm more than ready to pay more money if it will get me a program that begins to do all the things that are possible in this environment.