BillWiskins

Alternatively, you could just use the [ and ] keys to cycle through all of the things you\'ve put in space - crewed craft or drifting debris - until you find the one you want deleted, and then hit ESC and \'End Flight\'. Edit : should state that you can only do this when you are focused on a craft that is already in orbit or landed.

I\'d guess that if your orbit intersected your landed craft, you wouldn\'t be able to complete five passes, thereby breaking the first rule Also, I believe particularly low Munar orbits have been known to deteriorate, or at least abruptly end, for whatever reason.

It\'s in the controls mentioned in the game setup, but it\'s often overlooked: hit CAPSLOCK to enable \'precision mode\' controls. Useful for landing.

Gah, beaten to it. Anyway, I am not the most qualified rocket engineer around here, but I toook the liberty of reconfiguring your Orbiter a little so that it can make orbit without SRBs... if you can\'t solve a problem, best to just avoid it, I say I don\'t know if it\'s helpful, but here\'s what I have:

I knew it would be right in front of me. Cheers, sir.

It won\'t help your thrust-weight ratio much, but if you cannot find any more efficient way around it you could try mounting the decouplers on decouplers. Never been an issue with me, but it could give you the extra clearance you\'re after.

Now that is a useful video. Makes the beefy, six thousand fuel tank monsters everyone else (I) use seem a little silly by comparison. I have a question, though it is not a particularly difficult one (and not specifically related, either). I would really like to know how to enable flight controls in the map screen. It\'s obviously so much easier, but whether it\'s through lack of observation, general stupidity, eddies in the space-time continuum, whatever - I just can\'t figure it out. Anyway, lovely video and some lovely music on there, as well.

I\'m going to make a video of my attempts to find and catalogue every Mun mission video tutorial that exists. There must be getting on for six or seven hundred thousand by now, and I reckon that if I keep track of certain statistics in each, find the average for all of those, I\'d have the perfect mission plan. And using that information, I\'ll be able to start work on my own video lesson!

..and it\'s alarming how much of a difference that extra 0.3kg parachute makes. Congratulations of the safe return, sir.

Yeah - they didn\'t make it. I underestimated the efficiency of the retrograde burn at Ap, and used all of my pixel bringing the Pe down. It went from 68,900m to 20,500 quicker than I could notice and hit X, otherwise I might have had a chance at scrubbing off a couple of m/s before the final splash put the horrified guys out of their misery. Adding a parachute makes the craft behave like a drunken librarian on a tightrope. No 0.1-mass ASAS for me. Might leave it behind next time.

Mine is yellow. My best theory is that the KSP developers have chosen a very particular shade of yellow that only superior, slightly more evolved members of the human race are able to identify correctly. In more relevant news, my first attempt yielded a 110,090m x 68,936m orbit with approximately one pixel of fuel remaining. Don\'t like the chances of a comfortable landing, chaps, but with any luck your names will all be engraved on a bench in a bus stop somewhere. You shall live on! ...and I shall try again, possibly with a parachute and a better ascent profile.

Ah, perhaps it is, perhaps it is. My point was that the thread containing the answer (which appears on the first post of said thread) is, and has been for some days, fairly clearly evident on the first page of this sub-forum. No matter! No harm is done.

There is a thread on this exact topic on this exact board right now. Four seconds of reading would reveal the answer to your question; almost certainly less time than it took to start a new topic. However! Perhaps some unique circumstances conspired to conceal this thing, and who am I to judge? So I present to you, in link form, the thread to which I refer. Happy editing! http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=8814.0

Depends on how fast you\'re moving My \'large\' lander (see my reply earlier, #9 I think) has more than enough power and fuel to brake from ~600m/s to under 100m/s starting at around 24,000 metres. It also has about a third left in each tank after touchdown. Your mileage may vary, but I\'d recommend trying to start braking no later than 20-30,000 metres with any lander, as an incredibly rough guide.

I just opened a .craft in Notepad. Love the warning: \'do not edit this file by hand. There are no cheating opportunities here. Go away.\' What did you achieve in particular by editing the .craft file?

I don\'t think it needs more fuel - like I said, I wasted a load of it and still managed to get there. I have Giller 1 sitting on the Mun right now - I\'m tempted to attempt a return trip, but all that remains is just less than one tank of RCS. I don\'t want to spoil an otherwise mostly successful mission, but I am curious... Also, I\'ve attached Meredith 18 if you want to have a shot with her. She\'s less stable than Giller when in atmosphere, but a lot easier to land. EDIT: Attached the wrong Meredith. 17 is the one you want.

Well, I took Giller 1 for a test drive to the Mun. It was an interesting trip! The first thing I noticed, and it may very well just be due to having a different approach to attaining orbit, is that after the first four stacks burn out, the final middle stack loses speed very quickly at full throttle. I think when the first stage is discarded it\'s at around 7-800m/s, and the remaining spacecraft loses easily 150-200m/s before enough fuel is burnt off/the atmosphere becomes thin enough for it to start accelerating again. I was pitching over to 90 degrees at ~30,000m, and that\'s roughly when the first stage burned out. Orbit achieved, though, and off to the Mun I went. Now, due to some navigational idiocy, I had caused my trajectory to bring me in ahead of the Mun, which as usual resulted in a collision course once Gillen 1 was captured. So I did waste at least some fuel fiddling around with that to get an orbit, since I am a foolish creature of habit and I wanted to land in my favourite crater again. I\'m also aware now that I left the radially coupled tanks attached for some time after they had emptied, so I was carrying a lot more weight than strictly necessary. Anyway, the fuel was all gone with a few thousand metres to fly, and so I got rid of the empties and took to the RCS for the rest of the descent. This was not easy - flashbacks of my own first few landings, particularly before I was confident that I had enough fuel and therefore opted to leave out the SAS unit. Jesus Christ in a jam-jar (if you\'ll excuse my profanity) - these little landers are tough to keep pointed in the right direction without it. To make matters worse, having RCS on does seem to amplify the adjustments made using WASD - not an option when it\'s touch and go as to whether the thrusters will slow you down in time. BUT. I\'m pleased to announce that you can now consider Giller 1 officially a \'successful mun lander\'. I\'d advise you to stick an SAS in there for an easier ride, and considering the fuel I wasted at various points, you can certainly afford it. Screenshots added for your viewing pleasure. Edit: I should add that that was actually the second attempt - the first ended in embarrassment when I accidentally ejected the lander legs (didn\'t realise they were on decouplers...). I was in a position to attempt a landing, which I did, but the stability issues and lack of legs meant that all but the command module was destroyed. No injuries, but certainly not a \'successful\' mission. For the above attempt I moved the legs and their decouplers up the staging so that I wouldn\'t make a space-tit of myself again.

Carefully Just make sure you have the correct equipment (tanks and thrusters, both of which I have forgotten to add at various times (though never forgotten both at once)), and then make sure RCS is activated (keyboard \'T\') and then SAS your way to a stable vertical position, and fire the thrusters in a downwardly manner (keyboard \'H\').

I do not have any idea how to help you. However, there is a user on these here boards who might - I think his name is Cezary, and I\'ve seen some very impressive satellitery from him.

I can, and I will, but I don\'t know if it will come as any help to you. There\'s nothing shockingly original or exceptional about it. By the time I\'m in orbit, for \'not being very efficient\' reasons, I\'m down to a couple of tanks of fuel feeding one engine, which is enough to boost me out to just under 11,400,000m as per a normal Mun mission. Whether I go into orbit first depends on whether I have arsed anything up dramatically and used up significantly more fuel than a competent pilot would have, and also where my favourite crater is in relation to my approach. So however that pans out, my preferred descent method involves falling to about 50,000 metres and then managing the remaining fuel in my stack to slow down. It\'s usually good for getting under 50m/s by 48 or 49,000 of those remaining metres, and since my lander has quite a lot of thrusters attached to it it isn\'t that important anyway. It can slow itself pretty well just using RCS (within reason). The nearest of landers pictured actually had a third tank of RCS under a decoupler, as well, for \'hovering about\' purposes. Meant I didn\'t have to be super-precise with my descent into the crater - I wanted to park next to the previous mission, and this way I could come down a few km away and just mosey on over at my leisure. So, that\'s more or less it. I take my transition stage with me as far as possible for braking - after all, I made the effort to get it off the ground, it\'s just wasteful to not use all the fuel. Mind if I ask what went wrong for you? Hope that had some use, anyway, and better luck to you for your next mission.

I mainly go for reasonably small landers, largely because the VAB runs so slow already that I can sometimes rollerskate to Las Vegas and back before the screen updates with my last addition. And while the previous sentence is a massive lie, I do prefer to keep the number of parts down for performance and control reasons. First image is my usual lander, plus a version of it without the SAS unit. No engines usually - most of my landings have been RCS powered only. The second image is the biggest thing I\'ve yet landed, and only the second or third to use actual engines. It also has far more fuel than is used for landing alone, so I can use it to explore a bit, then provide a launcher for the middle section to return to Kerbin much more reliably than the previous example.

You should also be sure to press \'r\' to enable them.

People have constructed designs that use lander legs to \'capture\' another craft in orbit, but picking one up off of the ground would be unbelievably hard, especially with stock parts. I don\'t know if there is a mod or plugin part around that will make it easier, but if not, you\'ll need a very clever design that currently I can\'t even begin to figure out. Also, presumably you\'d need to find a reliable way of hovering over the landed command module. Also, I\'m not sure you would be able to get a good grip on a CM if it was the right way up, using lander legs. I\'m beginning to doubt this scheme somewhat If you can do it, I\'ll take off my hat in your direction. Good luck!

Ah, no, it sounds like it\'s working splendidly so I\'d leave it well enough alone

Yeah, bloody RCS. Throws me off all the time too, and it\'s a pain for \'docking\'. I just do a \'test\' when I\'m a safe distance above ground to see which way \'L\' sends me, for example, then rotate the camera to match the controls. Never quite stays where you need it, but it\'s usually good enough. All but one of my landers so far have been RCS-only, so it was sort of necessary... Does that extra RCS thruster cause any stability issues? Just curious.