Foxster

That would be a choc chip in the frozen minty goodness that is Minmus.

Wouldn't coming in from Dres get up a fair head of steam?

Yes, use hardpoints instead. I've no idea why these are in the Structural group instead of Coupling. They come in two handy sizes, have lower drag than radial decouplers and leave no stub. Fit them (or radial decouplers for that matter) about 1/3 of the way from the top of the stack being decoupled and the the stack will be thrown clear of the remaining craft.

One obvious thing is to minimise your payload i.e. just put man in a can on the surface and bring him back. Adding anything else, such as a rover, is going to greatly increase the dV requirement. Also dumping anything not needed for the return journey (landing struts, science stuff, etc) will help. You could also consider mining at Dres to reduce the need for fuel hauled to Dres and back. Another thing is to just have more dV. It is a mission that seems to suck up more dV than the dV maps say. Live with longer burn times and overload on the stageable tanks. I sometimes use just a few nukes and a repeatable stack of stageable big LF tanks like this...

I had this yesterday too. Tried tweaking various things and raising the landing gear on my aircraft. Nothing worked but when I moved the craft a couple of meters and back again it went OK first time.

Why bring the science jr back at all?

Just got a little update to KSP at 16.38 GMT+1. Anything of note?

How about recruiting some more?

Interested in the ground slippage thing cos my attempts at a walker aren't going well due in part to this. Next thing I'm going to try is landing struts for feet because they are much more surface sticky than other parts.

I believe they are supposed to be robotic parts rather than electric motors i.e. things to move other parts of a craft about, not to propel the whole craft forward.

Hang on. Are you were talking about stock capsules with heatshields attached? Stock capsules have no ablator themselves.

Is it that they are just fatter and less aerodynamic so slow down quicker?

You could use the HyperEdit mod and the ship lander feature setting a height that you like. Or if the rocket you want to launch isn't too big then you could just have a big first stage that you launch vertically. When it reaches the height/Ap you want then seperate, wait until you stop rising and then launch your test craft.

Unless you have Kerbnet turned off in settings.

Good question. My understanding is that the features are biome-specific and some biomes may have none.

It would also be a good medical term for the problem I have with my right knee at the moment.

As said, generally no if you mean using the offset tool to move the part inside or behind other parts. To get a part shielded in the enclosures mentioned you generally need their centre of mass inside.

Yes, it does. Though the mechanics are not clear or may be bugged. I deployed some experiments on the Mun at three biomes and they continued to drip feed science over several in-game years. I then deployed some on Duna at a single biome and got a couple of notifications of science generated and then never heard from them again. So it might be that deploying to multiple biomes extends the science generated? Or its bugged. Or there is something else going on.

Umm. I have them.

As far as I can tell it does a similar job to the weather station but on airless planets & moons. It generates science over time. Do you need to know what extra stuff you have to deploy to get it to work?

If you want to find the collectable rocks and/or scan the new Breaking Ground surface features then they can be very difficult to spot. Help is at hand through the cheat menu. On a PC hit alt-F12 and look at the bottom for Breaking Ground and then Surface Features. Tick ROC Finder and ROC ScanPoints... Then when you are wandering the celestial body of your choice you will see pointers to objects...

I used a rover with three sets of deployable experiments and created three bases in different close biomes on Eve. All seemed to work OK. I think that each biome produced science but it's not easy to tell. The console messages only say " X science was returned from the surface of Eve" rather than what biome on Eve. Also when looking at the results history in the research centre it only lists the science returned per experiment per planet/moon. If you have the large arm available then take only that as you get significantly less science with the smaller ones. You get quite a lot of science but it can take a long time to find a feature to scan. It's also not yet known in what biomes you will find what features and I believe some biomes have none. So you could spend hours looking in a biome when there's nothing there. For Kerbin I used an aircraft and it still took 30 minutes of low level/speed flying over a mountain region to spot a feature.

Stuff like this with the new experiments is a mystery to me. One set of experiments I placed on the Mun has continued generating occasional science over a period of several in-game years. Others on Duna have produced nothing despite being powered and connected. I also have Science Transmitted as "Infinity%" on some experiments. Quite a few bugs still to be worked out methinks. Just checking - your experiment does have a solar panel nearby with sufficient capacity and it's daytime?

Yup, I've had several funnies with surface mount parts attached to robotic parts. For instance, if you attached wheels to a piston directly then they don't move with the piston. Attached something like a small panel between them then they will be OK.

Here are some science returns I've had so far from the new surface deployed experiments... Duna Minmus Mystery Goo 178 (about 50%) 114 (about 50%) Weather 237 (about 50%) No atmos Seismic 0 (0%) 400 (100%) Ion collector Atmos 335 (about 65%) These were deployed by a 5* scientist to maximise science returns. It looks like the ion collector only works in a vacuum and the weather station only works if there is an atmosphere. The seismic sensor looks like it gives good returns but it's hard to get data. It seems you need to slam something massive and fast into the ground as close to the sensor as possible. I took along an extra little craft just for this purpose to Minmus and got lots of science. On Duna I relied on dropping some spare stuff just after lift-off and this gave zero science. Each experiment, the antenna and the control box all use one unit of power. Meaning you need 5 units of power for a full suite. The deployable solar panel and the RTG each produce 4 units of power when deployed by a 5* engineer, so you need two (assuming you have Comm Network turned on and so need the antenna and you deploy 3 experiments). I don't know how often the science gets generated and sent back. During the transfer from Duna (2 years?) I got several science return messages and these dried up by the time I got back. I don't know if I'll get the extra missing science from the experiments over time e.g. I only have about 50% return on the weather experiment on Duna. I also deployed the experiments in all the biomes on Kerbin. As you'd expect the returns were much less, typically around 12-25 science per experiment in total. Worth the effort? Overall I'd say they have made an interesting alternative way to generate science. They don't seem OP considering the expense and time needed, not forgetting you'll also need a scientist and a engineer along, whereas you can manage with just a scientist for the older experiments. I could previously do a science game play-through in a couple of hours and this took me several hours longer but some of that was learning the new stuff and messing about deploying on Kerbin, which probably isn't worth it if you are going for speed.