tsotha

Ideally you would sling yourself out at the optimal ejection angle, which the launch window calculator will give you.

On Minmus, yes. The gravity is low and you know where the flat spots are. When I send a lander to Minmus and end up with extra fuel in the transfer stage there's no need to waste the extra fuel - I just set it down on the on the transfer stage rocket cone.

Can you even get to orbit on the basic jets? I pretty much ignored spaceplanes for a long time, so my first was with all the technology. On my next play through I went to build one with a basic jet I just couldn't come up with anything reasonable. Good enough to fly to another biome and take some measurements, sure, but the only "spaceplane" I could come up with was pretty much a rocket plane that took off horizontally on a jet engine.

Bob is resting up from the successful completion of a Duna landing mission. Bill just returned from launching three microsats via the space plane. And Jeb? Well, after sneaking aboard rescue ships over and over he was assigned flag planting duties on the Mun. No return trip planned anyway, but in a spasm of incompetence he botched the landing and is left with just the capsule. Periodically he gets a tone in his helmet and he takes out the flag, plants it, waits for confirmation, and then takes it down. We may send a ship for him if a really dangerous mission comes up.

Did you put the Vernor engines on the very top? Putting them at CoM won't do anything for you. I wouldn't expect aerodynamic control surfaces to do much - above 10k there isn't much air. Have you considered mounting, like, a T-30 horizontally? I think there was a "hands off gravity turn" challenge a few weeks back where people employed that tactic pretty successfully.

If you can't find a solution you can always call it "Merde" instead.

The device tests all come in one of two possible varieties, and if you click on the blue plus sign above the test conditions it will tell you which one it is. Either you "activate through the normal staging sequence" or "select 'run test' from the right-click menu". Your contract is probably the first variety, so you have to activate the booster from the staging sequence like you would any other engine. As others have pointed out, the key is you don't need to set it up so it actually works - take out all the fuel and don't bother putting a decoupler between the test device and the previous stage.

Easier, in fact. Much easier, particularly if you don't have a lot of experience docking. It takes fuel to match orbits with another ship and dock. Plus, giving your lander the ability to dock places design constraints - you need to add the docking adapter. You need to make sure fuel use doesn't change your CoM very much, since otherwise your RCS thrusters will be in the wrong place. It's easier just to keep decoupling the stuff you're done with until you finally arrive back at Kerbin with a pod and a parachute.

A polar orbit would probably be cheaper than a gravity launch and a inclination correction. And, as 5thHorseman pointed out, you can use Ike to fix your Kerbin inclination on the way back.

Yeah, that should be orbit, unless the wiki is wrong.

I had the same problem in the beginning. The key for me was proper ship design - make your ship so the RCS thrusters are exactly at the ship's center of mass, and make it tight with plenty of struts. When you do translation (with I, J, K, and L), your ship shouldn't change heading at all, nor should the nav ball sway back and forth (indicating wobbling). If you don't know how much fuel you're going to have when you dock, make sure you design your ship such that the center of mass doesn't move as your fuel depletes. If you control both ships get the docker within about 20 meters of the dockee, zero out your closing velocity, and then rotate each ship's docking port so that it faces the other exactly: Set the other ship's docking port as the target, click "control from here" on your port, then line up your reticle with the pink tennis ball. Switch to the other ship and do the same thing. Then just give a little puff forward on the docker and you're in like Flynn.

By "truss" I take it you mean the "modular girder segment"? I would have thought something with 12 fuel tanks wouldn't respond to SAS very well, but I tried it and it's surprisingly maneuverable. The landing seems kind of hard to time correctly.

I pretty much ignore the launchpad and runway. If you do the SRB overheat method to stage before you get decouplers, you can send your very first rocket into orbit. I just started a career and so far I've done three flights: 1. Orbital rocket. I stacked five of the starting fuel tanks (T-200? Something like that. The wiki is down right now.) over the starting liquid engine and put three SRBs under that. As an SRB is almost done fire the next one and the first will overhead and explode without damaging your rocket. Yeah, it's kind of cheesy. If your launch profile is efficient enough you'll have just enough fuel to get to orbit and back. Do a crew report and EVA when you're suborbital and in orbit. 2. Mun Lander. I got enough science on the first rocket to unlock the LV-T45 engine and the LV-909 engine plus decouplers, which is enough to build a Mun lander - nothing fancy, just goes there and back. I had a lot of trouble with this one without solar cells (because the 909 doesn't generate power) until I found out batteries are "physicsless", so put on a dozen batteries and you won't have any power problems. Put 50 on. They don't have any drawback but cost. 3. Science harvester to Minmus. I sent a lander to Minmus with eleven Science Jrs, eleven goo containers, and a thermometer. The gravity is low enough there that I can hit every biome plus low and high orbit (crew report, EVA, Science Jr, goo container, plus the thermometer if you're landed), which is enough to finish out all the science except part of the last row. A mission to Duna should finish out the rest of the tree. If you don't do the SRB overheat thing on the first flight you probably need to go to space with your first shot, which is enough to get decouplers for orbit on your second. Or you can scrounge around the launchpad.

I'm new to this internet thing. And now for a public image: http://i.imgur.com/rDA3Yb2.png

http://tsotha909.imgur.com/all/#

So I have this lander that's finally arrived at Minmus along with its mothership. It has four LV-1 engines, each at the bottom of a FL-T200 fuel tank arranged around a MK-1 can. As usual, before I did my transfer burn I deactivated each engine individually from the right-click menu. During the journey to Minmus the engines seem to have mostly sunk into the fuel tank. They're still listed in the staging stack, and I can see about half the nozzle. But the rest isn't visible. I can't right-click them to bring up the menu, so I can't activate them. No matter where I click I get the menu for the fuel tank. Is there a way to bring up the right-click menu on parts you can't get at? 32 bit Windows. Mods: Docking Port Alignment 4.0, Editor Extensions 1.3, Engineer Redux 0.6.2.10, and Kerbal Alarm Clock 2.7.8.2

I haven't tried it yet, but the docking tutorials say you can get more strength in a junction by docking more than one port at a time, i.e. if you want two orange tanks end-to-end you can use a triangle of C-Srs for maximum strength. They also say it makes the actual docking operation quite a bit harder.

I'm not having any trouble getting them there. The problem I have is making them go away.

I don't think I've hired one yet. Seems like about one in ten contracts are rescue missions, and those guys go onto your roster.

I found the easiest way to land is to go into a Mun orbit from your translation, then lower your orbit until it's completely circular at about 12km. This way you have just about the smallest amount of energy you can have before you actually start landing. Then do a retrograde burn until your surface speed is zero and start going straight down. I forget where I read it, but supposedly the rule of thumb is to try to keep your speed in m/sec at about 1/33 your altitude. Your true altitude, that is - use the altimeter in the cabin. Of course the most fuel-efficient thing to do is drop like a stone and then at the last minute flare out with maximum thrust such that your speed drops below 10 m/sec when the legs touch the ground. Of course, if you do that you're going to die about 99% of the time. The other tip is when you actually set down make sure you kill the engine - if you land on a slope and leave the engine running it'll tip you over.