Wemb

While you can get to the Mun and Minmus without manoeuvre nodes, you probably don't want to try.. As well as nodes the upgrade also gives you 'patched conics' - that is, the map will be able to show you where you will be once you've entered the moon's gravity field - this is probably more important than nodes if you're flying to either of the moons with a limited dV budget. Good luck and welcome to the KSP! Wemb

Regardless of the in-game economics, it can be fun trying this - but I found it very difficult to even make it pay off in terms of refining enough fuel to get the fuel back into orbit on the Mun - sure my design was rubbish and inefficient, but still, the gravity on the Mun makes it challenging - so if you are going to try this, I'd suggest doing it on Minmus. Snark's Option 1 - an orbital lander is going to be easier, but I doubt you'll be able to make it work on the Mun. Option 2 is a lot of fun, though I've still not managed to build a refueling base with pipework that didn't occasionally just detonate without warning. Oh, and as for science, there's nothing really in the stock game to be gained from it - you _can_ land a science lab on the moons and get extra science, but since you can max out the tech tree without a science lab at all, and since they take so long to generate returns (compared to bringing the raw data back home), it's rather all just cosmetic. At least the fuel base can help you reduce the need for sending fuel into orbit as well as your rockets. Might want to look into things like USI's Kolonisation mod if you want a real base/challenge. Wemb

If the contracts aren't there, sure. You will need to generate cash to do this, but that's what tourists and satellites are for. If you can build a craft capable of sending a crew to Minmus and back again (or the Mun, but Minmus is easier), you'll find all the science you need. If you can send a scientist and bit more fuel than you need, you can produce collosal amounts of science for very little outcome - enough to fill out most of the tech-tree with only a few repeat visits. Like Streetwind has suggested, once you've got the terrier (and maybe the spark), then you should be able to get to Kerbin's two moons - and that that point, concentrate of getting the science experiments out there to collect data. One thing that I didn't see mentioned are Scientists - their special skill is that they can turn the one-shot goo and SciJnr pods into reusable experiments. If you can fly them safely, take them instead of pilots or engineers, and that'll allow you to collect even more valuable science from multiple places while in space. Wemb

There's also a mod which can automatically number your launches, I believe - though I've not used it myself yet, but I keep seeing it in the list of 1.1 compatible mods in CKAN. Don't have KSP here, but this might be it. Wemb

Well, I've found remotech isn't playing nicely with 1.1 yet (at least, not for me). SOme of the others mods suggested are pretty hardcore. Personally, since the only real challenge in career mode are the contracts and unlocking the tech tree, I'd suggest some contract mods and something with re-does the tech-tree, maybe starting with unmanned rocketry. And gives you 'ladders' before Munar capable spaceflight :-) Wemb

Hmm - I'll try and untangle my mouse cable and see if that helps :-) I thought it must be a bug, but hadn't seen any other reports here. Thanks - I'll leave it alone, I think, till game matures a bit before diving back in. Thanks all. Wemb

I think we've -all- done that at some point. At least, in this case, it was a satelite. You don't want to be in the position I got myself in when I returned an Asteroid - into the correct, apart from being backward, orbit the contract requested. That was not a profitable year for the KSP. But, yeah, you can thrust limit the engines as others have said for fine control - though in most cases, once you've achieved orbit, a Terrier is probably huge overkill for a satellite. A spark would be better than a twitch though - you'd need two twiches for a start, they're not much lighter and their are a lot less efficient. Wemb

So, obviously, coming fresh to RemoteTech by installing the beta into a beta copy of KSP while never using it before is an insane move, and I'm quite happy to be told to go and RTFM - assuming this issue is expected behaviour and not a bug - but it's so odd, it feels like a bug. In short, got a couple of very simple satellites in fairly terrible LKO orbits and I need to boost them higher to increase my coverage around Kerbin, so I'm in the Tracking station, looking at them... And I can't leave. I can't 'fly' the satellites (whether they're in range or not), I can't right click and get a menu and - most bug-ish to me - I can't click the 'exit' button to return on the KSC view. This is a bug right? Not a feature? Wemb

Even if you don't want to use MJ to actually plot the transfer for you, you can still, if you want, use it's other tools to assist in you doing it - I'm specifically thinking of the Manoeuvre Node Editor, which has tools for tweaking the Nodes, snapping it to various events (such as Pe or AN), and adding/removing orbits - exactly what the game GUI can do, but is a lot less fiddly and easier to use. That and the Kerbal Alarm Clock and both pretty useful. Wemb

... and a TWR of 5.64? Is that for calibrated for Kerbin, cause if so, that really is overbuilt! Wemb

Furthermore to what everyone has said, your Mun lander will be entirely capable of getting to Minmus, _and_ given Minmus's lower gravity it's entirely possible you can land, take off, and land again at least once, if not twice more and collect multiple science (assuming you bring a scientist). Furthermore, you may well find you can swap out whatever lander descent stage you currently have with an even lighter engine, and have even more dV to play with on the frozen green lump. If you've done some Munar landings, you'll find landing on Minmus trivial. But getting into the right orbit to get to it is useful practise. And if you need to rake in cash, do the rescue missions, free Kerbals and money. Wemb

The problem with small engines, even on small probes, is that while you can get huge amounts of dV, you may also have excessive burn times to get out of the Kerbal system due to a low TWR which can complicagte getting a good transfer to another body. Typically a Spark engine is probably a decent compromise for a very small satellite. But as dV needs go up, you'll need to take more fuel, which means more mass and there super-efficient engines really come into their own. You could also consider other options such as saddle tanks, and asparagus staging - their benefits aren't restricted to the launch. Kudos to Empire for linking to that tool, I'd not seen it before - very nice. Wemb

You can add them into the staging sequence as normal, or right click and 'deploy' whenever you like. They can be 'deployed' or ditched at any time, but above 40km or so, when the aerodynamics effects they're designed to protect are no longer any great issue, is the best time to deploy them. I'm not really convinced for a small rocket, that a fairing is worth it - as an alternative, you could put a nose cone and seperator on the top of the satelite and it may well do the same job for less weight[1] Wemb [1] Not that I've checked the weight, I haven't, but I use that before I get the fairings in career mode

As the others, but with a single further observation - echoing Plusck's comment - either use retractable solar panels, or put them far away from your docking ports or, if you can't, at least illuminate them with floodlamps. Until you're proficient, you will probably at some point drive through them sideways by accident if they're anywhere nearby. Wemb

Yup, what he said - the Spark engine is perfect for satellites, and with even a FL-T200 tank you'll have thousands (nearly 4,000) of m/s of dV on a probe core with a couple of solar panels and an antenna on - note you probably don't need batteries, unless you're running remote Tech or similar. If you really want to save weight, and have the parts, the oscar tanks are even better - an OKTO probe with a single solar panel, antenna and thermometer with an oscar B tank and a spark engine will have, on it's own, a dV of about 1,700 m/s. You should be able to get that into orbit with a pretty small rocket. Wemb

There's a few things you can do, as others have mentioned - come in with a higher Pe and, perhaps, do multiple passes - it's tedious and a problem if you're running with life support mods, but it will do the trick - eventually... Otherwise, other things you can do to lessen the danger is to reduce the weight of your ship as much as possible with it re-enters - the heating isn't just about speed, it's about reduction in speed, and that's also dependant on your kinetic energy - generally, the lighter the ship, the easier it will be to slow down. OTOH, rocket engines are surprisingly good at absorbing heat on re-entry. For very early missions, I generally don't bother with a heatshield, but instead leave my final stage in place on re-entry, and decouple it only when coming to land if I think the parachute won't slow down the whole stack sufficiently. Wemb

Extra drama?

You should still be able to eva (assuming you have unlocked that skill), to get to the experiement and 'take data' on it, and then store it in the capsule. If will then be turned into science when you recover the vessel back on Kerbin, if you forgot an antenna. Wemb

And to clarify a little more, the reason we talk about delta-V rather than needing some amount of fuel, is that every movement you make Kerbin's solar system involves changing your velocity (which is a measure of speed and direction) - usually this happens for free when gravity is pulling your arround an orbit - but, regardless, any change in where you're going or what you're doing is, in esscense, a change in your velocity. As such, it makes more sense to describe the capability of your vessel not in terms of the amount of fuel it carries or how big it is, but the amount of change of velocity it is capable of. This is also the figure that's displayed on the Navball when you plan and execute a burn. This becomes really important when you want to do more advanced missions which you will need to budget your delta-V for. A consequence of your ship's being (in relative terms) a so much smaller than the planets they orbit, is that the size/shape and of it's engines of the rocket is largely immaterial in calculating the amount of delta-v needed to get it from one particular situation to the other - and as such we can produce maps that describe the dV needed to get somewhere. See here The final step in planning your missions is having the tools needed to work out how much dV any rocket (or stages of a rocket) you build has - you can do this with a spreadsheet and the appropriate formulae, but there are some handy mods - such as Kerbal Engineering Redux - which will tell you in the VAB, and when you fly, how much dV your currently have. Getting to grips with this will enable you to plan and make much more complex and wide-ranging missions, but also to trim your existing rockets down to the much smaller sizes as you're (probably) building rockets that have way more dV than you need for whatever it is you're doing with them. (Unless you're already runnign out of fuel right at the last moment). [Edit] - here's a link to an excellent thread describing this from a year or two back. Wemb

Landing something wide on a hill is always going to provide a challange. Consider also the distribution of parachutes - you could even try overloading it with chutes - that at least might allow you to cut some at the last moment to also adjust your angle of collision with the terrain. Also, legs and RCS/vernor thrusters depending on local gravity could help with this too. Wemb

Doesn't get much better than that - well done! Wemb

That's a _lot_ of fuel and engines you're taking up - what sort of solar array are you building? I put a pretty bigone up (A docking port with attached pylon holding, I think, 6 or 8 gigantor arrays + batteries) last year, and did it by sandwiching it in-between two heavy lift stages, rather than having the payload at the top - it was fiddly to build (the symmetry) but flew fine and worked well to limit the scale of CoM changes that took place during the launch phase. It looked gorgeous with two of them attached to my station, but was complete overkill - really didn't need that much power at all. Wemb

Yeah, that sounds like excessive amounts of 'fun' to me :-) I'm still planning on doing a kOS powered launch and then an entirely IVA and non-GUI rendezvous and docking at some point when I've found a readable manual for kOS (and, I hope, a RasterPropMonitor interface to it. That'll be fun enough for me. Wemb

Nice - that's not too bad - if you have time, fiddle with a maneouver and see if you can get it closer than 3.3km before you get there - but 3km is okay too. What you should do is when to get to 3.3 km away, and just before your distance then starts to go back up, that is the point when you should reduce your relative velocity to zero. Once that relative velocity is zero you will be more or less at the same place as the target. (well, 3.3km away) , at the same point in time and, importantly, going in the same direction at the same speed - that means you're in the same orbit and you can relax a bit. At that point, you need to get closer - either you point one ship at the other, and fly (relatively slowly) toward it - when you do this, your prograde marker will be in the same direction as the target marker - they will probably diverge a bit as you fly, as your orbit will be changing compared to his because you're accelerating again - but just remember to stop use the retrograde marker don't eyeball it - or you could eva your kerbal and fly him 3km using his jetpack. It's not a lot different, in principal - you're just more limited by fuel in the spacesuit - but it might be easier depending on how manoeuvrable your ships are. On the other hand, the spaceships will be easier to see if you get them closer. You don't need RCS unless you're trying to dock.- the Kerbals' jetpack is a mini-RCS system, so you can fly him in circles round your spaceship to find the door. Good luck! Wemb

Yup, more or less. The lower your orbit, the fast you move - so to catch up you have to lower your orbit. If your orbit isn't entirely circular you'll be at different speeds at different points so may not always be catching up, but if your Ap's are the same but you lower your Pe below the target's your orbital period will be lower and you'll catch up. The reverse is true if you need to slow down and let the target catch up with you. The counter-intuitive bit is that to 'catch up' you have to burn away from the target (which lowers your orbit, which speeds you up) - Even the Gemini IV astronauts got that wrong, so it really is rocket science. Your right about the plane adjustment - do it at the AN or DN - the points at which you cross your target's orbit. Also, be aware that the further you are away from the body you're orbiting the cheaper this will be (because the further away you are, the slower you are, and therefore the less fuel you will burn to change velocity). This won't matter ina near circular orbit, but can be important in an elliptical orbit. Finally, when you're on final approach in Target Mode burning prograde will increase your relative velocity tot he target, retro grade will slow it - so to rendevous, you ideally want to burn retrograde when you're at the closest approach until your velocity in Target Mode is zero - you will then be parked relative to the target. Not sure what you mean by 'putting Ap back'. I would suggest that you concenrate on getting your orbit's co-planar first - that is, get the AN and DN to zero first, and then once you're in the same plane, you only have to worry about 2 dimensions instead of 3. Wemb