tsotha

Or you could just use something like Kerbal Engineer.

As pecan said, the tri-coupler isn't going to buy you anything. If you want three stacks just radially attach two more to the main stack. I use tri-couplers to run three engines off of one tank when I get one of those annoying contracts for a fast (meaning significantly faster than terminal velocity), low altitude test. Other than that I can't see any use for them beyond aesthetics. And yes, Minmus is the easiest place to go. But contracts send you to the Mun first, and anyway if you're having trouble with the Mun it's likely you're going to have trouble plotting a Minmus intercept.

I suspect if the lab module isn't actually destroyed you'll be able to recover it and get all the science. I had a rough landing where the only thing that survived was my capsule and two goo containers which had been attached to a fuel tank. When I recovered the capsule I didn't get the science, but when I recovered the goo containers (now labeled debris) I got the results of my experiments.

Kerbals can fly away from your ship for no apparent reason, but much of the time the reason this is happening is the hatch is partially blocked.

Not every number has units. Units cancel on ratios of the same thing, for example. Anyway you'll have to be more specific.

Yes, drag. You can save fuel by closing the ones you don't need.

That is a good trick. I did not know that.

If you feel like you need mainsails and orange tanks to get anywhere it's likely either you're not staging your rockets or your payload is too heavy. Normally you would use at least three stages for a moon shot. More common is seven or eight, if you're just counting the stages as the UI presents them. If your goal is just to land on the Mun and go home the lander should be no more than about seven tons, depending on how much you're expecting it to do. The best thing for you to do is get Kerbal Engineer and try to maximize your dv. Often adding more fuel in the wrong place makes your rocket less capable instead of more.

As others have noted, at least in the beginning start with a single engine. If you have two they won't cut out at the same time, so you'll need to manually switch over to rockets before they run out of air. Start simple. Make a spaceplane with one turbojet, two 48-7S rockets, and three ram intakes. If you baby it you can get a 150/35 orbit before you have to switch to rockets. Personally, I think this is an easier plane to design and fly than one using Rapiers. And yes. Planes are much harder than rockets. CoM is important, and it moves as you burn fuel. When I started it wasn't uncommon for my prototype to achieve orbit without a hitch and then tumble uncontrollably during reentry.

I have this problem when I use stacked small tanks, engines without gimbals, and don't add SAS modules. You pretty much have to do one or the other (or both) unless your rocket is so small the capsule has enough juice to keep it straight.

How are you activating it? It has to be activated with the staging key (normally the space bar). If you activate it from the right-click menu you're not satisfying the conditions of the test.

Normally I take a ship to Minmus with 11 goo/Jr pairs and land in every biome. You've got me wondering what it would take to get a mobile lab there with enough fuel to clean everything out. I tried a science mission to the Mun with a light lander and an orbital lab. It worked - I had enough fuel to land and return from every biome. It took for-freakin'-ever, though. All that docking was just tedious.

Oh, and while we're at it... The physics exclusions should be in the interface. If it's excluded the interface should list the mass and drag as 0.0, or maybe "negligible". Let's say I have two contracts that each specify a part with a mass of 0.1 and a drag of 0.2. In theory I can just put them on opposite sides of my rocket an have everything remain balanced. But I have to go look at the wiki first, because one of them might be ignored by the physics engine and the other not, which would unbalance my design. I understand the game functions better if it doesn't have to worry about struts and batteries and such, but the description should be accurate.

That's what I do. The way the game keeps refilling capsules I emptied is annoying and I'll revert if I'm on a rescue mission and realize the capsule is occupied when I thought it wasn't.

I would like to see SOI transitions either work seamlessly at high time compression (and I realize this is probably not doable) or automatically change the compression rate when crossing SOI boundaries (and then restoring it). Crossing SOI boundaries is a big hassle that could be made much less annoying.

Minmus actually works out better without the science lab.

It's software. How long you know about a bug isn't as important as how long it's going to take to fix and what you could have fixed or added instead with that time.

Yeah, sucks for this use case but makes sense in others. Would be nice to have a text box to type in an exact value for this and (especially) fuel transfers, but it's not the end of the world.

Taking eight materials bay/goo container pairs is less mass, particularly since you can get rid of them as they're used, e.g. ditch the "high orbit over the sun", "high orbit over Duna", and "low orbit over Duna" experiments before you do your Ike transfer burn. That's going to have a large effect on your dv. Assuming you want to return to Kerbin, I can't see any reason for the mobile lab unless you're going to do more than eleven materials bay/goo container experiments or you intend to return multiple samples from the same biomes. Even in the second case it might make more sense to take extra capsules/lander cans instead. IMO what they should do is remove the Kerbals from the lab and make it automated. Then it might useful for unmanned missions.

That's what I thought he meant too. I've always wondered why the plane started off down the runway before I fired up any of the engines.

I'm not sure landing is a "pro" for planes. You can't land just anywhere in a plane, and something big enough to carry ten tons is going to be hard to land.

Bah. It's episode 9:

Look at the third part Scott Manley's "Kerbal for beginners" series. He goes through exactly what you're trying to do.

I was just gonna say joystick. That seems to be the answer to 99% of these.