impyre

If your base isn't exactly equatorial, you'll always be coming in at a slight angle no matter what you do... so inclination doesn't really matter all that much. Just eyeball it until the path crosses over the destination, and fine tune as you get closer. As long as you are pretty close, course corrections of that nature require very little fuel usually (at least with no atmosphere to interfere). In order to minimize the angle at which you are coming in, you could take one of two approaches. A) come in from a polar orbit laid ahead of your destination such that it will be there when you get there, or at 90 degrees phase (dawn or dusk), execute an inclination change whose degrees match the latitude of your destination, and ensure that your periapsis is over the target area, then burn for landing when the target site is at the noon position on the surface. Honestly, with either method your angle of attack due to descent will be greater than the angle of attack due to inclination difference. If, however, you want to know more about method B, the trick is to get equatorial and point at your normal/antinormal node depending on situation. The number of degrees that node traverses will be equal to your change in inclination. (of course this requires a navball that shows normal/antinormal) So in your case, you'd burn normal or antinormal until the indicator moves about 1.5 degrees (which will be pretty difficult to nail unless using rcs.) Now for my 2 cents: I always go for insertion to polar orbit. You can land anywhere on the planet with minimal changes to your orbital inclination if you wait long enough. Also, if you do a mid-course correction, getting polar orbit is really cheap (anywhere between 5-40m/s depending on the situation). This, combined with not having to worry about post-arrival inclination changes and a variety of good alternate landing possibilities makes it an ideal situation.

That seems a bit unhelpful. A good challenge needs some way for players to compete. How would they compete in this challenge? Voting perhaps?

I love challenges, so I thought I'd put up one of my own. The object is to put two asteroids on a collision course with each other. (Or as close as possible) The rules: general (applies to stock and modded categories): no using mods to fly your ship for you. orbits must be around kerbin no engines that generate insane thrust (warp drives or other nonsensical stuff). Infinite fuel/rcs is fine, cheating to get a ship into orbit is fine, this contest isn't to see who can get into orbit the best. No KAS or other attachment mods, the only way you can attach your asteroid is with the stock claw, or some ingenious mechanical monstrosity. No steering asteroids into each other, they must be released before the distance between the two asteroids gets below 50km. So be sure screenshots showing trajectories are at/before that point. Stock category - Use stock parts and physics only (mods like kerbal engineer, gui mods, etc are allowed) Modded category - Use modded parts. freeforall category - use whatever parts and mods you like. on the honor system, don't alter save files or otherwise completely defeat the point of the challenge The scores: Scores will be tabulated as follows: For a collision (show picture of the collision) - score = 1/(semimajoraxis1*semimajoraxis2). This essentially means that the smaller the orbits are (for the most part), the more points you get. For a near-miss (show picture of intercept distance) - score = .1/interceptdistance. Obviously points can be had this way, but they won't amount to very much comparatively speaking. Obviously screenshots that show all pertinent info will be needed, also make sure to get a good shot of the vehicle itself. The top three scores will be kept in each category.

Well, I'm using NEAR aerodynamics. I wasn't sure if that would disqualify me or not... and since the contest already had a winner I won't bother with the stats screen and runway shots, etc. I just thought this might be more challenging with aerodynamics installed, and i think i was right. In any case, I managed to (very carefully) get this beast into 120km circular orbit with a few hundred dV remaining. Completely horizontal rolling takeoff, no seesaw gimmicks, just through manipulation of center of thrust. I tied the bottom row of thrusters and top row of thrusters to action group toggles. Once I got apoapsis more than 1 minute or so away, I pumped all remaining fuel into the central tank to balance it out and then established orbit.

Just my opinion here, but deadly reentry works very well with NEAR. I use it myself. I've had things be destroyed by reentry... but it's usually because of a lack of shielding or reentering too steep/fast. If you aren't having problems with heat, it may be a testament to solid reentry trajectories. Don't fix it if it ain't broke, knowatimsayin? I personally usually forgo shielding in favor of lighter weight. I control reentry temperature by using the engine bell as a shield (as it's designed to withstand high temperatures) and just throttle up a bit if it starts getting hot. For larger rockets, it can be difficult to maintain the appropriate direction (engine-first)... but generally it isn't a problem. Of course, if you really want it to be more difficult, I can play around with some settings if you still want help.

The best way to prevent/help recovery from flat spins is to ensure that the aircraft is designed such that the drag at the rear is always greater than the drag at the front. This type of aircraft will always be stable in just about any situation... but it usually ends up looking like a dart. Thus you have a rocket with fins. Rockets with fins are super stable, even at high speeds, so long as center of mass and center of thrust are properly aligned and the drag profile has greater drag at the bottom.... kinda like a dart. However, rockets generally don't turn very quickly, especially not while in the atmosphere. Planes are meant to be more maneuverable, but the tradeoff is stability. You just have to find a balance that feels right for you. Also, the another point about center of lift, the further from center of mass it is, the more stable your craft will be in general (again, note that stability makes maneuvering harder).

"Is there a way out of a flat spin?" That depends entirely on your aircraft. I've had some of my builds go into a flat spin and be completely unrecoverable, while others could recover. Namely, a flat spin is the craft's attempt to find a point of balance while in a drag-heavy state. The easiest method is to pitch down until you can recover... but how much you can pitch down will depend on how much changing the control surface orientation changes your craft's shape. For a large craft with small control surfaces, it likely won't help... but with a small craft and large control surfaces, you might recover easily. "How do I plan reentry... KSC?" Basically, you drop into the atmosphere planning to overshoot then essentially use a slalom-like path to slow down. Here, Scott Manley shows a pretty good plane-type reentry starting around 15:25 "Is it normal to burn... " Not really. Part of the point to using a space plane is that it can use its wings to burn off velocity during reentry and keep temperatures manageable. Of course, there are limitations. If you drop straight back from the mun you will come in pretty hot no matter what you do... generally to bring back a whole vessel (space shuttle) you'd want to establish stable low orbit over kerbin, and then reenter with apoapsis lower than 80-100km. If you have an apoapsis in that range, you should be able to reenter without a problem and without any retrograde burns in atmosphere. That said, if you pitch down too much you will start to speed up and see reentry effects happen. I believe the video above also shows an example of that as well. The main thing to consider is whether you have enough lift or not for the weight you are trying to bring down. I think the best way to figure that out is through experimentation. "...balance CoM..." Balancing CoM can be tricky, especially with shorter crafts. Try to put fuel near the front to offset the weight of the engine, use structural fuselage to set the engine further back. The center of lift should be between the CoM and center of thrust. This being said, if the center of mass shifts, the center of lift can end up in front. The easiest way is to make your craft longer, and put more weight toward the front to offset the weight of the engine(s) at the rear... this should give you plenty of room to put the wings somewhere in between. EDIT: Be aware though that to make taking off easy (if you use a traditional horizontal runway launch) the rear wheels should be somewhat closer to the CoM than the front wheels... this means that if your CoM is too far forward, you may end up accidentally knocking engines and/or tail pieces off when you go to pitch up off the runway (longer lever).

I'm not sure if anyone's said this before, but if they have it bears worth repeating. This mod is nearly impossible to find if it isn't near the top of the list of threads. You have to google a specific combination of words, namely ksp ferram neophyte. I'm thinking if you put ferram in the post title somewhere it'd make this much easier to find using the forum's search (which is generally the first stop when looking for mods in here). At least that way a simple forum search of Ferram would return both FAR and NEAR. Thanks for an awesome mod btw, the level of complexity here is just enough to be interesting but not too much so as to be frustrating.

Yeah, the catch is to reduce the moment of inertia to as small a value as possible by keeping the whole thing as compact as possible. With small moment of inertia it takes less torque to maintain the proper heading. That said, it's perfectly stable at high speeds as long as you don't touch the controls and head straight up.

This seems like a cool challenge. I'll submit an entry when I have more time.

pre-flight: Near apoapsis: Map view:

I managed to get a little over 150km. I actually got closer to 151km, but I didn't remove the 4x timewarp until well after i left the atmosphere when i noticed my apoapsis continuing to drop even though I'd already passed 70km. I can't figure out how to upload screenshots here, it beaks every time I try to paste it. They do exist though, and can be seen on my steam profile.

wow... all the trouble you guys go to in order to provide a wonderful service to us gamers at no cost to us, and you *still* gotta put up with this. Just remember, there are lots of us who really appreciate what you guys do and what you put up with. Thanks for an awesome mod and regular updates.