42_aerobrake_passes

Go to http://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/ and plug in the destination and current time, this will tell you when you're leaving and when you're arriving. Now swap the origin and destination, and plug in the arrival time as the earliest departure time. Subtract your launch time (which you'll want to assume is a few days before actual departure) from the arrival at Kerbin time. Add life support containers until the TLS window shows that you have support for at least that long. To be extra cautious, you could launch an unmanned supply vessel with life support containers and fuel. If you messed something up, you can then rendezvous with that supply vessel, dock, and transfer over what you need. With Duna or Eve the window frequency is short compared to the travel time, so the supply vessel needs to be launched at the same time or earlier. With further destinations though, windows are more frequent relative to travel time, and you could feasibly send your supply vessel after launching your manned vessel and have it arrive in time to be useful.

When using a reentry vehicle that's dissimilar to what I've done before, I usually take just that part of it and put it on top of a SRB that's been tweaked to have just 2-3 seconds worth of fuel at a high TWR. Basically enough to get it up a few thousand meters. Launch it and stage the chutes and decoupler when it starts going down again. This also will verify if it's going to fly with the heat shield forward or not. Sure, you can math it out - but sometimes it's easier to make the situation easily testable.

To answer the question that I suspect the OP may actually be interested in: If you put the slider for the pressure to open at all the way to the right, it will still trigger high enough to slow you down in time as long as you have sufficient chutes for your mass. Somewhere between 3k-4k on Kerbin IIRC. Duna would need more attention to detail.

Anyone else tempted to rename a kerbal to Ahab Kerman and go hunting for the white kraken with this part?

The reason geosynchronous orbits are used in real life is because a fixed location on the ground will always be able to point in the same direction to be pointing at a satellite. In KSP+RT, you're never going to be having something like that on Kerbin, making synchronous orbits pointless (outside of RP or "it's cool" reasons - if you're Doing It Wrong because you want to do it wrong, you're Doing It Right). In theory it might be useful if you wanted to use a dish on a ground base on another body and not have to retarget it, though even there I'd prefer an omni with satellites in a low enough orbit to reach it.

I'm having problems with the flight computer forgetting commands. I click on node then exec to tell it to do the next maneuver node burn, and verify that both commands show up as being planned. I then go back to the space center, switch to the tracking station, and reselect the probe where I gave the commands. When I open the flight computer back up, only the "Hold Maneuver Prograde" part is there; it's lost the "Execute planned maneuver". This seems to happen every time; rather annoying if you don't want to keep something constantly focused because you're trying to set up your initial constellation. Anyone else seeing this? This is with RT version 1.6.4.

I've had that before, go to your save directory and look around until you find where it keeps the blueprints. Either delete them all or poke around until you find the right one to remove. I think it might have been related to a character in the name of the saved rocket.

- Unkerbaled probes must lead the way. Otherwise how do I know that Jeb's not going to just sink into the soft, delicious surface of Minmus, or that Pol is not actually made of antimatter? Same for orbiting anything but Kerbin itself; we need to make sure that big pink creatures from planet Dirt aren't going to try to shoot us down. This rule gets particularly interesting when playing with Remotetech. - For kerbaled flights that are longer than a there-and-back to Minmus, multiple kerbals have to be sent, as solo kerbals tend to start going a little strange when they're alone too long. Two isn't enough, it has to be three; someone has to break up Bill and Bob when they start having slap fights over who gets to date Valentina when she joins the KSP. (I think they're both going to be rather disappointed...) - More of a rule that a lot of people do but I don't follow: It's okay when using Remotetech to have insufficient batteries to be able to handle the full duration of passing through Kerbin's shadow, especially for the first constellation. The flight computer for those probes can do far more than Jeb can do before he leaves Kerbin's SOI; it should be able to switch to a low power mode for 95% of the time and just power up occasionally to see if it needs to do more. Someone can pay me if they want something to relay their TV signals, otherwise what I'm putting up is for KSP use only and doesn't need to be running full speed all the time!

Depending on how over-engineered your launch was, it's often possible to raise your apoapsis to be just short of leaving the SOI, then burn retrograde at the new apoapsis to turn around. It's the situation as large inclination changes (after all, going retrograde is basically just a 180 degree change in inclination); with the much slower velocity at the top of a highly elliptical orbit, making major changes to your direction is much cheaper, to the point of the saving exceeding the cost of getting your apoapsis up that high then getting it down again. With a sufficiently large amount of dv on reaching low orbit, it's possible to satisfy several orbit contracts with the same launch, even if some of them are retrograde to the others.

kerbalproof.com for quick referencing and links.

It's not so much NASA saying "We have this cool new thing" as "Hmm, this is weird. Can anyone help us figure out what we're missing here?". A friend of mine pointed out that the thrust claimed is along the lines of what you get from one end being slightly warmer than the other.

Make sure that you redo every repeatable experiment 5-6 times, because there's just barely enough science reachable at each point in the tech tree to get to the next choices. This is partially because each new size of part is much better than the smaller one, completely obsoleting it, and is vitally necessary to go further. You'll need to have 2.5 M parts to get to Mun and Minmus; don't even think of trying to get to other planets before 3.75 M parts and Gigator solar panels!