MaverickSawyer

Kerbin orbit rendezvous, or around one of the moons? If it's around Kerbin, as long as it's not terribly inclined, you can simply run the station a little higher orbit than your typical orbital insertion altitude (I like to park my stations and other targets at 125km and launch to 100km), wait until the station is at about a 60* angle above the west horizon, and launch. You'll wind up behind and below the target station, then you have at most an hour's wait until you can start a Hohmann transfer with a mid-transfer alignment burn. With practice and some experience in timing the launch, you can be docked to your station in under 30 minutes. Moons are a whole 'nother balllgame, though. Again, having different altitudes for orbits helps you make the catch-up faster. I don't usually put stations around the Mun (too much dV to the surface and back to be worth the effort, imo), but at Minmus, I typically will park stations at 40km or higher, and insert into orbit at 10-15 km. VERY fast catch up, for Minmus anyhow. As for the trip out to Minmus... if you're willing to eat a little bit more dV at departure and a moderate amount more at the arrival end, the transfer from LKO to Minmus can be as short as 1-3 Kerbin days, depending on the dV hit you're willing to take at the Minmus end.

Comet is easy: just clip the engines into the wings and reduce your fuel load by 10% or so.

Man, I have so many memories of using this pack back in the prerelease era... heck yes I want to see it revamped!

Whoa. That didn't mess around with tumbling after the strike!

Ok, further experiments have not turned up this issue with other docking ports, so it's something about that one in particular...

Habs were previously mentioned as a "Not at present" thing. SXT was the recommended hab for use on that front atm. Rovers... well, there's plenty of packs out there. I'm kinda partial to the PackRat rover for a mission like this myself, but I haven't used it in a long time.

I'll give it a whirl. Reporting back shortly... EDIT: Yep, still happens. Same amount of tilt and in the same direction: Hmm... One thing in common to each of these scenarios is the fact that I had the docking port first stacked with a matching docking port in the VAB, then decoupled on orbit, then redocked... but that's never given me this kind of behavior before when used with other docking ports.

Okay, ran the mission again with new RCS placement, no autostruts... and the issue remains. Might have to do this as a monolithic launch, which sucks because the craft is so damned long.

You know what... I did have an autostrut enabled to keep the truss section from wobbling atop the rocket. And I didn't know about the colliders... Looks like I need to launch a new version of that truss section. Good thing it's in sandbox!

Heh. Just found this little easter egg in the New Shepard gear...

May have found a bug with the 5m docking ports from the launch vehicle pack... I tried redocking again at a different speed and with a more on-axis approach... same thing happened. As soon as it docked, it bent like that. Kinda puts the kibosh on my plans to use this as a cargo transport ship if it leaves the cargo off the centerline.

How have I not seen this before?!? Instant must-have.

I think that he's asking for the resource transfer spool in a Universal Storage II-compatible unit, aka a "wedge". It's certainly an interesting idea, and one that would likely be most welcomed.

I don't think that's ice... I think it's insulation panels around the fairing to reduce the environmental system demands while on the pad. IIRC, a lot of earlier American and European satellite launchers used the same approach.

I didn't know i needed this until I saw this. Well done, sir.

No. If you just press "B", they'll retract as soon as you let go.

Last time I checked, if you toggled your brakes, the grid fins extend into the airstream and begin to function as, well, fins.

They may have done the test when they did precisely so that such photos could be released. Just like they "allowed" a J-20 to be photographed at fairly high resolution without its camouflage paint, highlighting the sensors and antennas of the aircraft. And the Chinese have a VERY good firewall for catching those pics if they don't want them released. TL;DR: Assume that any such "leaked" photo has been allowed to leak on purpose to send a message to interested parties, i.e intelligence agencies.

Well... if treated properly, steel can survive that, yes. Look at the pusher plate for an Orion drive. If untreated, though, it'd be just as toast as a human.

Reports I've seen are that it was an ABM test, or something similar. Hence the secrecy.

Yeah, well, those panels are just completely wonky when retracted.

Same... then I noted the "em", and realized that he was referring to the Earth-Moon L5 point.

Weeellll... in the old "soup" atmosphere, that was a legitimately useful approach.

Depends on how much of a deep throttle capacity the BE-4 has...

True, but I've had difficulty pruning that pack properly, as most of the parts in it are better reproduced elsewhere by other packs I use. I've tried multiple times to trim away all but that part and a few others, but the way the textures are referenced is... wonky, and I wind up with blank meshes with no textures.