reapersms

Could you provide a screenshot of the map screen, with the navball, right as you're about to start your prograde burn at Ap? That orbit looks like you started burning prograde around 100km, went circular, and then just kept burning prograde after Ap and Pe switched places until you ran out of gas. or what he said.

Not quite. You want a suborbital Ap close to what you want your final orbit to be, but certainly above the atmosphere. Pushing it higher means either spending dv later to lower the Ap back down to your intended orbit, or burning with a radial component to twist the orbit. Prograde exactly at Ap is parallel to the ground, the nose points at the horizon, and all of your thrust is (essentially) horizontal. Prograde along the way up will smoothly transition from nearly vertical, to horizontal, as you ascend. Depending on how much thrust you're providing at a particular point, one of three things will be happening: (assuming you are thrusting prograde) Ap increases slowly, while time to Ap decreases -- low thrust, or you are very close to Ap already. Pe should be increasing, and the eccentricity of the orbit is decreasing (becoming more circular) Ap increases slowly, time to Ap holds constant, Pe climbing moderately -- thrust is well balanced with your position on the ascent. This lets you spend more time to get to orbital velocity, and spend more of that time in the thin portions of the atmosphere, and as you continue, you spend more of the thrust towards the horizon rather than fighting gravity. Ap increases quickly, time to Ap increases quickly -- thrust vastly exceeds what you need for your target orbit. chances are you have a highly eccentric orbit, with a Pe way below ground level (so, still sub-orbital) and if you cut the engines to coast to Ap here, you will lose a lot of velocity to gravity on the way up. this will result in a long, hard burn at or near Ap to circularize. If you hit this point early, you also lose velocity to the atmosphere, especially for 0.18's atmosphere. I don't quite recall the details of the 0.18 atmo, other than a lack of heating and it being exceedingly soupy at lower altitudes. The suggestion to pitch the nose above or below the prograde marker is fine, though I think it's more efficient in KSP to adjust with throttle -- dv spent away from prograde is being spent to steer your orbit, not get into orbit, if that makes any sense. The only case I can think of for Ap reducing while burning prograde would be right around the time of the turn, after a steep, fast ascent. At the point you turn, your surface trajectory will be a long, thin ellipse. Burning towards orbital prograde will widen the ellipse, at the expense of lowering the Ap for a bit. If you keep pointing at orbital prograde it will start increasing again.

Did you not have it set to trigger in the same stage as the decoupler? What I see there is a decouple event, a few seconds of delay, then the heating messages. That looks a lot like the lower stage burning out, hitting stage to decouple, waiting a bit, and then throttling up or staging the middle stage engine. The middle stage would coast ahead a little bit, due to having less drag than the lower stage, but gravity would pull it back some, probably leaving it right at the edge of the heat effects for a second or so, which shows up in the log. IIRC there isn't any meaningful throttle response lag for the stock engines, so you should usually just stage the launch clamps in the same group as the engines or SRBs for the first stage anyways. There are some mod engines that have a spool up delay where it is important to delay it a bit, but with stock you're just burning off SRB fuel (probably a good chunk of it for the fleas, they don't burn for very long) or cooking the launchpad. It looks like you still have the fins set up like the tail end of a fighter jet. Is it still pulling in odd directions on the way up?

That log isn't showing anything about the SRBs, the exhaust heat damage it's talking about is the 909 in the middle heating the stack decoupler above the tri-coupler. Unless the radial decouplers holding the SRBs on are attached to the engine instead of the fuel tank, I don't think that could be cooking them. The SRBs themselves might be mounted high enough to cook the decouplers with their own exhaust though... The caveat about the fins still applies. They don't look remotely lined up properly for anything. The yaw pull is probably the asymmetric drag (from only having them on one side of the rocket), and the attempts of manual control or SAS to correct for that is rolling it (also due to them only being on one side of the rocket, and not particularly well angled) It sounds like you ascent path is probably not close to optimal either. If you're heading straight up, and then attempting to go prograde around apoapsis to boost into a circular orbit, that will be *exceedingly* wasteful, especially if you are trying t odump the second stage when your Ap hits your target, to circularize on the upper stage. New suggestions: Maybe adjust the vertical placement of the SRBs slightly to make sure they aren't cooking the decouplers, or getting cooked by the 30's -- I can't recall ever running into this sort of issue, but I haven't used SRBs much in a while. Redo the fins on the middle and upper stages. Try one set on the middle stage, with 4-way symmetry on, and make sure they're lined up with the arrows on the decoupler. You probably don't need them for the upper stage. -- Fins on a rocket are good for two things, overall stability, which wants them as far back as possible, and general pitch/yaw control. The best way to get the control is 4 fins at 90 degree angles. Any other configuration is going to start trying to twist them in odd directions, resulting in strange pulls. You certainly want them symmetric around the center of the rocket, or it will throw the center of lift and center of mass off of the center of thrust, which will flip the rocket eventually. What happens the CoM moves further and further towards the fins as you burn off fuel, and at some point the force from the engine overpowers the torque from the fins or ASAS. Switch the 909 and the middle 30. If control is still an issue, turn the 30 into a 45 (for engine gimballing, to give better control above 40km) -- the 909 is not a high thrust engine, but has very good efficiency in vac. The 30 & 45 have a lot of thrust, but aren't as good in a vacuum, and the 30 can't angle the thrust for extra attitude control. Assuming you have good enough TWR, which I think you should, apply a *slight* bit of pitch eastwards (try 5-10 degrees at most) when you hit 70 m/s or so, and follow the surface prograde vector to 25 km or so. After 25km, switch the navball to orbital mode and point at that prograde. -- atmospheric drag ceases to be particularly significant after 10 km, the main issue is heating. Ideally you want to be angled such that the part of your thrust towards the ground just barely outdoes gravity (to keep the rocket going up), with the bulk of it pointing sideways (to spend as much of your lower stage fuel building orbital velocity as possible) Around then, switch to map view, pull up the navball, and do your steering from there. If you want to be really efficient with it, try to fiddle with the throttle to keep your time to apoapsis around 40-50s, though keep it above 20% or so throttle. When it hits your target altitude, cut throttle, and blip it occasionally to deal with air drag. When done properly, this will result in a circularization burn of less than 100 m/s or so of delta-v. -- If you just go straight up, your orbit has an apoapsis of 200km, periapsis of -600 km. If you do a lot of sideways burning, you have an apoapsis of 80-100 km, and a periapsis of 20-40km. The first case you'll need to put 1500-2000 dV into it to round it out to something orbital, the latter will need 30-80. You will probably have far more fuel left than you know what to do with, and the ride up will be a bit warm. One last thing -- that ASAS probably quits working completely about 3 second after you shut off your engines. The reaction wheels in the asas and the pod both need electric charge to run, and I see no batteries or solar panels to provide it. The engines should generate enough to keep them running, but only when the engine itself is running.

Most of this is some random guessing. It looks like your fins on the upper stage are asymmetric, this will certainly make it pull toward the fins on the way up. They should probably be attached with 3x or 4x radial symmetry, and preferably as low on the stage as possible. You can probably ignore them for the topmost stage, you should be so far up that the fins will do almost nothing for you by then, and the pod should have enough torque to handle orientation. You should probably stick a strut or two between the three columns of tanks below, to keep them from bending into each other. I could see them getting a little noodly at full thrust near the end, which is good for glorious fireworks, not so good for going to space. What engines are you using? It looks like you've got 30's or 45's on the bottom stage, a 909 in the middle, and another 30 or 45 on the upper. My gut instinct would be to swap the 909 with the middle stage. A 909 with that much above it is not going to be particularly efficient for getting to orbit unless you're going almost completely sideways by the time you turn it on. When are these stages dropping? 909's aren't going to be very worthwhile below ~10 km or so.

From experience in 1.0.5, I'm pretty sure it means current vessel weight, the moment you hit orbital (Ap+Pe > 70)

I've certainly made that mistake a few times, usually summed up with some colorful language when I get there. 0* of inclination would indeed be east, in a bog-standard equatorial orbit. If you don't need to really get it moving, a twitch should work. Alternatively, you can adjust the thrust limiter once in flight for a lot finer control. For exceedingly fine-tuned stuff, I'll knock it down to 10-25%. Set right, you can use mammoths to adjust orbits.

Argument of Pe describes the orientation of the ellipse around the central body. If your Inclination numbers are what it shows for the AN/DN indicators, it sounds like you have a perfect orbit... going the wrong direction. 180 degrees of inclination means head west from the launchpad, not east. You'll need a bit more dV, as you have to counteract the eastward boost Kerbin gives you. I think on the order of ~10% or so.

Something inside here is doing Bad Things. In an RP-0 game, I was trying to build a basic supersonic jet, and anything I built with the avon or the other afterburning engine from the early supersonic tech node would destroy the universe the moment it touched the ground. I see the plane spawn in, drop gently to the ground, and the moment the wheels hit, the screen freezes (thanks to the debug log getting spammed). On the off chance that the UI responds enough to go back to the space center, everything is gone or space, and the only remedy is killing KSP and restarting. I don't have any of the bits avaliable at the moment, working from memory it was an X1 cockpit, a couple of procedural tanks, B9 proc wings, and some adjustable landing gear bits, plus the engine. I want to say the small engine worked, but I'm not 100% certain about that. The logs show some NREs from ModuleDynamicGimbal.Update, followed by a ground offset error, and then the view direction being NaN. That NaN rips through all the transforms that touch it, and kerbin collapses into a black hole. Removing DynamicDeflection fixes that problem, but it's somewhat less than ideal, the flight after got ripped apart by some fatfingering on PilotAssistant. Other things I tried while diagnosing it: Removed landing gear -- still happens when the fuselage hits the ground Switching engines -- both of the afterburning engines explode it, don't recall on the small one. X1 engine works, but it's a rocket so it probably doesn't count. Yanked wings -- still dies Removing engine -- works

Anything I drop before I hit vac survives fine with just chutes without any further intervention. What doesn't always work is getting to an 80x80, decoupling the booster, and sending it back with a ~20km periapsis to trigger StageRecovery. It leaves physics range, so there's no aero drag, and it hits the 23km kill point at 2200+ m/s, and falls victim to the dice roll for burning up. They usually have 300-500 dV left in them at the time (thanks to losing the mass from the upper stage) but I believe SR doesn't try bleeding speed off until after the burn check. I've been meaning to hide a heat shield on them for a while, but the last couple of nights of KSP have been in fiddling with TOT mission plans and/or circularizing with the upper stage instead of a fully orbit capable lower booster. Until now, for those I've just been flying them back manually, but that starts getting a bit repetitive.

If you're flying the thing back manually, SR won't kick in anyways. For fire and forget ones, it would be nice if the powered recovery could take into account the excess fuel to get the max velocity under the burn up percentage. What I'm going to try on the next big launch is sticking a heatshield on the front of the booster, under the decoupler, and see if that improves the chances of it surviving a trip back from the end of the circularization burn.

If your parachutes are set to activate at the time you stage the booster off, they're probably going to be destroyed instantly. Tweak their min pressure to something around 0.46 or so, and they ought to survive, and still be there when StageRecovery looks at it. The 0.46 or so keeps them from opening at all until ~3000m or so, giving the atmosphere a while to slow it down, and still activate in case they get to the surface before they leave physics range. If it's burning up due to a speed over 2k m/s, I think you can stuff a heat shield on and SR will give you better odds.

It's there, but the link is missing a : https://www.dropbox.com/s/62rk8dvz7awbxtj/KSPI_CRP_20140927.zip?dl=0