Newman

Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately I canned the flight and canceled the contract after a near pass of the Mun completely destroyed all the work put into it, so I can't check anymore. I suppose it's possible the contract was for a retrograde orbit, though I thought it wasn't.

Hey all, long time KSP player here (started out before we had the Mun, since then played several playthroughs, exploring everything that can be explored while successfully bringing my guys back alive each time (thanks in large part to the quicksave option).. Anyway, I consider myself to be pretty experienced when it comes to handling KSP; if it's possible to do with stock, chances are I did it. So I just tried to fulfill a contract that requires me to launch an unmanned probe that has power and an antenna, into specific orbital parameters withing "reasonable deviation". Not sure what reasonable is, but with my fledgling new space program (don't have RCS yet) it took quite a lot of fiddling to match the orbit to the one drawn in map view visually exactly (numbers wise it's all within a few hundred m, considering apoapsis is over 14,000,000 m that's pretty exact). And yes, I did match the apoapsis and periapsis point positions to the ones drawn on map, though I don't really think that should be a requirement, if I'm honest. Game's still not recognizing I did this. I literally dare not touch the orbit at all anymore since even using the reaction wheels seems to whack out the numbers in map view, and any modification I do now just gets it further away from specified parameters. Is this a bug or is "reasonable deviation" considered to be precision within a meter? If the latter, I'd like to point out several things: - you get satellite contracts fairly early in the game, as it should be. However, that early we don't really have all the bells and whistles, RCS included. - numbers in map view still go crazy when you steer the craft, even without engines and RCS, just using reaction wheels. I just had a situation where my orbit was about 2km too high, so at periapsis I turned the craft retrograde to drop the apoapsis for 2km. However turned retrogade the map view decided my apoapsis was now 2km too low! Turning the craft back, it was again 2km too high. You get the problem - with this kind of supersensitivity insisting on crazy precision is a bad idea. - there's literally no reason to insist on crazy precision as long as the satellite is roughly in a specified orbit. In fact I'd just draw a whole zone it needs to be in in map view. If you want it's apoapsis to be 14,124.000 m or some such number than anything between 14,000.000 and say, 14,200.000 should be considered reasonable deviation. - when specifying target orbits, do try to avoid ones that take your probe into the gravitational sphere of influence of another body, such as the Mun. Fiddling your orbit to perfection for hours only to have the Mun get a bit too close and pull the probe in is just plain annoying. Why? Because fiddling with orbital parameters for hours while the game still considers it "not good enough" simply isn't fun. I was looking forward to satellite contracts, but now that they're in there I find they're laborious, boring, and don't make much sense (lots of these orbital parameters would make no sense for a commercial satellite). Instead of fiddling for hours on end for no good reason, we could be exploring moons and planets. I realize this is still beta, and I'm hoping this feedback will be helpful for future updates. Oh, quick thought while I'm at it, I think a camera part should be added, allowing us to take shots of other planet surfaces from probes. That could be good contract requirements as well - take and transmit shots of duna polar region, etc.

Does doing it with two ships, and not Jeb but Edley count? If so, here's how I did it: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/showthread.php/21390-How-Edley-Kerman-walked-the-sands-of-Duna-and-returned-home-to-tell-the-tale

Getting to Eve is merely getting from a point in a higher orbit to a point in a lower one - so you can apply the same principle I used to return from Duna (there are screencaps that show the return trajectory above). Since Eve is in a lower orbit than Kerbin, it orbits the Sun at a much higher velocity, therefore you will need to apply a retrogade burn while you're still ahead of it along the orbital path. There is one small complication with Eve, though - it's orbit is inclined a few degrees relative to Kerbin's - not much, but just enough to miss it, so you will need to correct for that first. The way I do it: after achieving orbit I do a Kerbin escape burn. This puts me on a similar orbital path around the Sun as Kerbin. Now I wait until, from the side view on the map, my orbital path seems to intersect that of Eve's - at this point you do an inclination correction maneuver so your orbital plane is more or less parallel to that of Eve's. Now you need to wait until you're, say, 30 or 40 degrees ahead of Eve on your orbital path, and apply a retrogade burn until the map view shows up Eve encounter. Now you adjust your periapsis with tiny prograde/retrogade burns to get to Eve as close as you can get it, then wait until you're half way there, then slightly adjust your inclination (tiny burns, again) until your periapsis is a few hundred km away from Eve. Considering Eve's thick atmosphere, you could consider aerobreaking to save fuel on slowing you down - when you get closer you could adjust your periapsis to, say, 70km altitude to assist you in your breaking maneuver.

Here are the .craft files for both ships used.

I used up the few drops of fuel left in the descent stage to gain some altitude, ditched it, and then used the ascent stage to get back into orbit: This is where the orbital matching skills come into play. I didn't have the fuel to do the fancy linkup with one ship a few meters away from the other, but getting close enough for a suit transfer was all I needed, and this orbit provided that shot: Time to abandon our faithful Duna VIII - by this time it was all out of fuel (RCS as well), but it served me well. It will now stay in orbit of Duna as a permanent monument to Kerbal's first steps on another world. Well, first Kerbal that went back home and lived, anyway. Using the suit's RCS jets, I made my way towards the Orbiter Mk I that's been waiting for me for the entire time. Really need to get to Duna's moon some time as well... ..and here we go. That's it for the hard part. You may have noticed that about 3/4 of Orbiter's interplanetary stage fuel is gone. But the rest is more than enough to return to Kerbin. Again, we need an efficient return trajectory. ..and soon enough we find ourselves back on the planet we started from. With all fuel spent, it's time to ditch the interplanetary stage and use RCS to plan my descent. I like to land on water, so as to not break my Kerbonaut's spines... but I also like to put them in somewhere close to land, in a bay if possible. Much better than dropping them in the middle of an ocean! Location selected, going in. ..and the rest is self explanatory. I love the view of the chutes from the cockpit window Rule #1 of water splashdowns: if you can't see land from your window, you've failed. Back home! Edley Kerman became the first Kerbal to walk on another planet and return home (in my game, anyway )

Behold the Duna VIII! I really designed this one to *just* have enough fuel to pull it off. If you plan your route efficiently, it'll be plenty enough though. Again, flies surprisingly well considering the size of the thing. Time to get it to orbit, and say hi to an old friend: I remember when getting to the Mun and back was the ultimate challenge Again, planning a low consumption route and not wasting a bunch of fuel on chasing Duna all around the system is the name of the game. Getting close... Setting up for atmo entry... And planning our descent trajectory. I equipped the lander with 5 chutes, but they're not near enough to do the job. First of all, Duna's atmosphere is really thin and only begins at some 42km above surface. Relying on just the chutes just means making another crater. Secondly, our lander is way too massive for the chutes to handle on their own - and you really don't want to use the chutes to kill your horizontal velocity; you need to use your engines to control your descent. Make sure you don't come in too fast when the chutes deploy, either, and be prepared to assist the chutes with engines sporadically all the way until touchdown. Here goes nothing... Final burn to slow us down... ... and that definitely earned us the rights for some Duna-themed tacky postcards Duna. Land of sand.. and of the spice mel.. or was that something else? Just in case it wasn't, better go back in - the Sand Worms come out at night and I don't have an ornicopter to warn me. Up next, the triumphant return

(Stock only) I doubt I'm the first who's thought of this, but I haven't played KSP for some time now and checking again on the forum yielded a pleasant surprise - new planets, exactly what I've been waiting for! After a few spectacular failures I managed to finally do one-way trips to Duna and Eve. Problem is, one-way trips rub me the wrong way, and even a one-way trip to Duna I found to be harder than a return trip to the Mun. The target planet is much further away, requiring lots of fuel, it has a much higher gravity than the Mun, meaning that landing a ship that has enough fuel for a return trip isn't practical (frankly, such monster rockets usually disintegrate on the launch pad for me). So, I came up with another way - I'll launch two craft to Duna; one will be an orbiter with the bigger, three-seater pod. Since this ship doesn't need to land, I can just give it a massive interplanetary stage with nuclear engines instead. The other ship will be a one-seater craft that will be able to land on Duna, than take off again, perform and orbital rendezvous with the orbiter, transfer the crewman to the orbiter via EVA, and then return the orbiter home. Part 1: Securing our return ticket This is how it all went.. perhaps it can help someone do the same. Before I begin though, I don't claim that this is the best or only way to do this - but it worked for me. I'll also include the .craft files below in case someone wants to try it with the same ships I did it with. Note that I haven't used any mods at all - the game was as vanilla as it gets. First I needed to design the craft to do it. Even the two-craft approach meant building rather massive rockets, as you're about to see: The Duna Orbiter Mk I on the launch pad. You'll notice only two crewmen on the screenshots - I had one EVA on the launch pad, and then I did an "end flight" for that crewman only. This provided me with an empty seat needed to recover the kerbonaut that would be landing on Duna. It actually flew surprisingly stable! I learned my lessons with the Duna series of rockets, where Duna VI was the first to reach Duna and Duna VIII finally became capable of re-establishing orbit after landing. ..establishing orbit. I spent the almost the entire first series of tanks of the interplanetary stage to do this. But, I expected this. The thing that will make or break your trips is efficient trajectory planning. It took me a few trial and error runs to figure out how to do it without spending too much fuel. Before you even attempt this, however, you should be familiar with KSP basics; you should know how to modify your orbits, change orbital inclination, and having performed several orbital hook-ups before helps too. Once your map view shows that you're on the way to Duna encounter, check the projected periapsis to Duna. Due to extreme distance, it's probably a rather large number, say 25 million km away from it or so. The problem with that is, if we stick to this course it will take us way too much fuel to slow us down once we get to that point. Now it's time to put to use all that knowledge about modifying orbits - burn a tiny bit prograde/retrogade to get the periapsis as close as it will go, then wait until you get about halfway of the projected path to Duna. Once you're half way there, modify your orbital inclination a bit if needed - I was usually able to bring my periapsis down to say, 250-450km away from target planet. These correction burns are tiny and don't cost much fuel at all, if done at these large distances. Once you get to Duna, correcting large mistakes will cost you so much fuel it'll usually be enough to ruin the whole mission. So, do tiny correction burns at a distance until you have a proper approach set up, and you'll end up here soon enough: Duna Orbiter Mk I, orbiting Duna. What it was made for. Now it's time for stage two of our mission. Switching back to the space center, I prepared to launch the Duna VIII, the ship that will actually deliver a crewman onto the surface of Duna. That's up next..

Minmus was a nice surprise, but 0.15 would be full of win even without it. Still, I absolutely loved landing on it. Gives the game a whole new dimension. Landing on the Mun started to feel like popping down to the grocery store after so many flights

I did a return trip, stock only. First attempt successful, too. I win The new flight director system makes it so much easier to adjust trajectories, this is a great building block for the future when we\'ll have a full solar system - I anticipate some really cool complex maneuvers. In the mean time, I love Minmus! It really feels like you\'re landing somewhere really remote compared to the Mun - it\'s tiny, it\'s different, it\'s much further, and has really, really low gravity. On approach: Landing: I wasn\'t sure whether or not those lake looking things were solid or not, but in reality they would be - can\'t exactly have liquid in those conditions - I suppose they could be frozen lakes of methane? Either way, I wasn\'t sure what would happen if I landed on those, so I decided to not send an unamanned probe first an just went ahead and landed there anyway. Then I decided to take off again and park on the 'shore' instead. Sunrise on Minmus. Just had to wait about two weeks for it Now that the crew enjoyed that sunrise, we realized we\'re running out of booze. Attempts to come up with some alcoholic beverage distilled from frozen methane were less than successful, so it\'s time to go back home and restock:

A good way to get a feel for it is to experiment. Quicksave, set your throttle to a low setting, go to map mode, turn your craft around and see what it does to the orbital path. But to answer your question, once you find yourself on a collision course with the Mun, imagine drawing a line from your position towards the flight direction vector. Now imagine a line that is at 90 degrees angle on that one - direction really depends on which side you\'re approaching the Mun from. Experiment in map mode. Or you could avoid having collision courses at all. When doing your TMI burn, make sure that your apoapsis is a bit further than Mun orbit. If it\'s far enough you\'ll end up on a Mun flyby with a periapsis above it\'s surface. Again, experiment in map mode, now that they\'ve added the possibility to control your craft in it it\'s never been easier to figure stuff out.

Maybe he wants to only use RCS when 'strafing' and not when turning. So just for translation and not for rotation?

An experiment in precision landing. The small one is my MunLander 1, which got stranded on the Mun due to funky 0.14 experimental bugs. It gets loaded with legs retracted, and the RCS won\'t function anymore so it\'s not going anywhere. The legs, when deployed, send the craft into an uncontrollable spin. But that\'s what you get for messing with experimentals Still, it was fun getting a more classical design to land next to the thing. Then I went back to the tracking station and back to the ship again, and the rocket spawned beneath the Mun surface. When I throttled up it went up a few meters and impacted the Mun surface from the wrong side, exploding in the process. There\'s definitely kinks to work out, but when they get fixed 0.14 is going to be the bomb - just being able to land two ships one next to another bring a huge amount to the table.

In short, these guidelines should be of help: - make your lander as light as possible. The larger/heavier the ship, the harder it will be to land. The trick is to balance the lander so you have enough fuel to land and return home again without bringing too much mass to the moon. But you\'ll find it easier to land with a lighter lander, when you get the hang of it, you can try the more convoluted designs. - if you\'re not a 100% devoted purist, use lander legs. They make it much easier. - you pick your landing site from Mun orbit. If you don\'t establish a proper orbit prior to landing, you\'re doing it wrong. Look up Ivan Ivanovich\'s excellent guides on this to gain an understanding of basic orbital mechanics, and how to modify your periapsis, apoapsis, and inclination. Setting up your orbit so it goes over a crater is easy. After that you just need to break at the right time. Use the map, and you should be fine - when you\'re ready to begin your deorbit burn, try and get as close to zero speed as you can by following the reverse vector icon on the navball. Have plenty of altitude when doing this - around 60, 70km altitude works great. This should more or less result in an almost straight line down to the surface. It\'s easier in a crater, but I\'ve managed landings pretty much on every type of terrain. - control your descent so you don\'t get so much speed so you can\'t break in time. Look at the vector icon on the navball, and try and keep it dead center. - when at a lower altitude, you should have cut your velocity to a manageable one. Use SAS to lock your orientation dead center, use your main engine to control vertical velocity, and use the RCS translation controls to control horizontal velocity. Though I\'ve done landings without RCS at all, it\'s easier like this, especially on a smaller lighter lander the RCS will have more of an effect on. - keep your vertical velocity as low as possible and prepare to kill engines completely the moment you touch the ground. Anything below 5 m/s should work. My best landings managed to get speed almost killed completely before landing, without any horizontal velocity - you just gently touch the surface.

There should be bonus points if there\'s fuel left in the craft after achieving solar escape velocity. There\'s little point in this exercise if the 'ark' ship is unable to do a breaking burn once it reaches it\'s destination, after all