Acet

What I've seen happening in the past is that the drills stop when I restore focus to the the ship, and if I right click they say that it's because they moved. This can happen with standard drills, MKS dust sifters and I used to see it with Karbonite drills when I used it. This is especially bad with bases where a hard component (such as an orange tank) is directly sitting on the ground. In fact, large bases with large hard surfaces sitting on the ground visibly jump when I switch to them, sometimes extremely so. I think this is a problem in KSP's activation of physics calculations on a craft when its landed and focus is switched to it. The best solution I found so far is using landing legs and not locking them. Could it be something like that?

I just did an aerobrake with a C class down to about 48 km and that was fine. The two small active coolers I had open and pointing behind the craft (the asteroid was in front of it all) might have helped. That said, after 3 turns of this I lost patience and used the engines to break the remaining 500 m/s of dV. As somebody else suggested, aerobrakes might be a good idea.

Less launch TWR - 3.86 is way too much. For a liquid fuel launch stage around 1.4 - 1.5 is right. You are probably getting to higher supersonic levels (mach 3+) in the lower atmosphere - you can tell it by the flames around the ship - which is pretty bad for controlling it, especially given that without any fairings the aerodynamic profile at the front of your rocket could best be described as something which wants to get out of the way of the airstream ASAP. Furthermore, an excessive ascent speed means you're wasting too much fuel purely on compensating for aerodynamic drag. You should probably get rid of at least half the engines (drop two side stages, possibly move some of their fuel to the remaining ones) and add an AE-FF1 aerostream proctective shell just below the middle decoupler to make a fairing around the satellite stage.

I do manual landings all the time. Rough guide: - Select a landed ship, flag or kerbal as target. - Quicksave! - Reduce your PE and aim it to the West of where you want to land. The least steep you descent is, the further to the West you should aim. This is because the planet will rotate as you descend so you need to account for descent time and flatter descents take longer. - Put a manouver node at the point where your descent will intercept the planet. Adjust it so that it reduces all speed to zero. This will tell you time and direction that you should fire your engines to stop. - Fire at full power about 10% - 20% AFTER the point when the manoeuvre node tells you to start. If you do it right on the dot you will be too short. At this point your aim is to have your horizontal speed down to zero at the point when the target retrograde markers is exactly centred in the blue side of navigation ball. When this happens it means you're right on top of your target and can simply drop down. - As you're doing final approach (some kilometers from target) you will notice the target retrograde marker moving roughly towards the centre of the navbal. What you want is to make sure it goes to its centre. The way to do this to make small adjustments by firing your engine to make sure that in the navball you always have 3 indicators in a line: your ship's retrograde indicator -> your target's retrograde indicator -> the centre of the blue side of the navball. The closest the target's retrograde indicator gets to the centre of the navball the closest your own retrograde indicator should be of it, ending with all of them at that centre point. You need to think of it as a game where your ship's retrograde indicator pushes the target's retrograde indicator away from it. The furthest your ship's indicator is from the centre the strongest it is pushing the other one way, and if it's at the centre then the push is zero. By firing your ships engines when it's pointing away from its own retrograde indicator you push that retrograde indicator away, with the aim being to keep that 3 indicator alignment i pointed up. - When you're about 500 m away from target you eyeball it for final landing - this is the part where you mostly start ignoring the navbal since as you get very close to it the target's retrograde indicator will quickly drift away from centre. At this point I usually do small burns to send my ship towards the desired landing area and maintain a hoover as it slowly drifts sideways. Once you're on top of where you want to land, aim the ship to its own retrograde indicators and do a controlled burn following that indicator - by aiming at the retrograde indicator rather than straight down you will both kill horizontal and vertical speed. If everything went well, thumbs up, otherwise it's time to load that quick save. I strongly suggest you train in Minmus first, before try the Mun - Minmus has less gravity so everything happens slower and you're less likely to quickly gain tens of m/s of descending speed as result of a few seconds of distraction, which is what happens when doing it in the Mun.

You have to match all criteria at the same time for the contract to complete, so if it says "support 7 kerbals" and "landed in minmus" then it has to support 7 kerbals when landed in minmus (and all the other criteria, including the usual "be stable for 10 seconds") and the contract will complete. What you do after the contract is completed does not matter.

Aim at the base, do the final adjustment yourself. I personally do all landings by hand, tough I use KER to be able to see things like actual distance to the ground and distance to suicide burn point, so as to avoid wasting too much fuel. The secret with final adjustment is to make your base (or a flag, landed ship or kerbal) a target and then try and get the target's prograde indicator to be right on the centre of the blue part of the navbar - which means you're right on top of it - and at that point kill horizontal speed and drop. Once closer to the ground it will start drifting so adjust with horizontal speed to keep it centred. The last bit of adjustment can be done visually when you're close enough. Works fine in Minmus (where you can train this with little risk) and is a little harder on the Mun but not that hard to do (I have bases on both and always land manually). Outright crashing is very rare unless I'm trying some kind of daredevil manoeuvre (like trying to time my burn down to the last second), but it's possible to end up a bit too far from the base if low on fuel (which is a frustrating waste of time due to me having to send a ship or rover to refuel) or do a silly mistake like clipping a solar panel on the base, so I usually quick save before doing a landing from orbit, though less often when just doing suborbital transfers.

If you're using KIS/KAS and are up to trying something slightly insane you can bring some solar panels, small probe core, small SAS, battery, mono prop tanks and mono prop engines and turn it into a ship capable of getting into orbit. Just place the parts around it and link to your own ship for refuelling. Not necessarily the simplest way, but likely to be fun trying.

Whilst piloting that ship, right click on each chute in turn and deactivate it. Now make 2 new empty stages. Add the chutes to the topmost stage, leave the lower one empty. Trigger the lower (empty) stage, NOT the one after that with the chute. There you go: all ready to stage your chutes. (keep in mind that this only works if the chutes have been activated but not deployed or destroyed - i.e. they're blue on the staging bar). I'm not 100% sure if the activate/deactivate button on the chute dialog whilst on flight is 100% core, if not then it's probably from KIS or KAS.

I'm currently in the same situation and the way I ended up doing it was sending a mission upfront with just the scanner probes for Duna and Ike, outside the optimal window and with a shorter transfer time (thus spending more dV, but since probes are light the extra cost is small) and am now preparing to send a crewed mothership with docked landers. In the past I did the whole loose flotilla at the same time thing, and it was messy because of trying to make sure only one ship is aerobraking at any one time. I've also did the sending of EVERYTHING on one ship thing, which is a pain because you have to design it for, amongst other things, aerobraking without loosing (too many) parts. It's seems to be a good compromise to send the lighter stuff upfront before the transfer window and with a shorter travel time so that it gets there and is in place and working before the main mission arrives.

Maybe the order in which you are firing the engines has changed or the order in which you are dropping spent components is different. Remember that the efficiency of the engines (i.e. Isp) affects dV - all other things being equal, the more the Isp of an engine the more dV you get for the same amount of fuel - and solid boosters are notoriously inefficient (they're only useful because of being dirt cheap), which is why they are usually only used on the 1st stage to be fired. Also liquid engines in KSP have lower Isp values the higher the atmospheric pressure (the thicker the atmosphere around them, the less efficient the process by which they work is) - so that's why you see them listed with two Isp values, one for vacuum and one for Kerbin atmosphere at sea level - and their Isp at any point during launch depends on atmospheric pressure at that height (the higher altitude the lower the pressure and closer their Isp is to the vacuum one). What this means is that the later you fire a liquid engine (when going up in atmosphere), the more its Isp, so if for example you order your stages so that you LFO engines only get fired after the SRBs are spent, then you get more dV (since when they do start using their fuel, they are higher and thus under less atmospheric pressure, so are more efficient). Last but not least, you should strive to drop useless mass as soon as possible. For example, dragging SRBs along once they are spent is a waste of fuel (since the fuel left in the stages still in use is now having to drag up not only the mass of the bits of the ship still useful but also the mass of the empty and entirely useless solid fuel boosters). So purely by changing the order by which things fire (even simply from using LFO engines at the same time as the SRBs versus using them separately) or the time when spent sections get dropped, your dV will change.

Aerobrakes! As I recently found out when figuring how to bring back to Kerbin small but heavy containers from Minmus (mined commodities from MKS-Lite), aerobrakes not only make the impossible possible (in this specific case those things were like bullets and never got below safe chute speed before crashing, even at very shallow entry angles, if I didn't put aerobrakes in them) but because you can turn them on or off at will can also be used during re-entry to fine tune landing. Before this discovery I was also having trouble with that, mostly because different ships now have different ballistic descent profiles, depending on their drag, weight and even which direction they are facing at different points when coming down (on start of descent sometimes it helps to present a high-drag aspect), so one had to figure out for each new ship design when and how steep to start one's atmospheric entry to end up close to the KSC. With the addition of aerobrakes I now have something which gives me quite a lot of control during descent (the difference in drag between ON and OFF can be huge) without the need for extra fuel or near impossible manoeuvres to change the side pointing at the wind. (Edited for grammar fixing and clarification)

From what I've been seeing, for TWRs around 1.3 or less you start to spend more dV to get to orbit, quite independently of one's piloting skills. In my experience in situations where the TWR would otherwise be low yet enough for liftoff, it's often better to replace a Skipper engine with a Mainsail, even thought the latter adds 3t (and thus reduces dV), because you end up using less dV to get to orbit. I suspect this is the result of a similar mechanism to why in 0.9 one tried to get a TWR that resulted in the ship ascending at close to Terminal Velocity: to get out of the gravity well (and from paying the fuel price of simply fighting gravity) as fast as possible but not so fast that the losses due to aerodynamic drag were larger than the gains from it. In 1.0 and the new drag model, means that Terminal Velocity is near impossible to reach, but in the lower atmosphere there is a vast increase in aerodynamic drag losses at hypersonic speeds (when there are flames around the ship) so one tries to ascend through the first 30km or so just below the level at which flames start to appear but otherwise as fast as possible, and that sits at around the 1.3 - 1.5 range for TWR in the launchpad.

In career my mid-size payload (10t - 30t) launch stages tend to be based on a Skipper or a Mainsail with an orange tank on top, surrounded by either solid boosters or a ring of liquid boosters in asparagus configuration. What I've found is that for lower payloads the Skipper, being cheaper and half the weight of the Mainsail, will give me more dV at a lower cost, all else being the same. However if the resulting TWR is too low, the ascension takes longer and the dV spent to get to orbit goes up thus eliminating the dV gain. So as a rule of thumb in this setup I'll use Skippers for payloads were the TWR with it of the last launch stage (after all boosters dropped) is 1.3 or more, and for larger payloads I'll use the Mainsail. Also another thing to keep in mind is that the ISP of an engine gets pretty close to its vacuum ISP at about 10k high, so in some case it's actually cheaper and more effective to use a Poodle (really!) as long as you can use boosters only to get you up to that height (for example for 10t loads).

Shallow dip and a ridiculous number of aerobrakes??? Just wondering, I haven't gone to Jool in 1.0.x yet.

One of these, an Oscar-B tank, a probe core, batteries, antenna, thermometer and a few solar panels = very, very light probe/science-sattelite with 2000 dV You can put one such probe on top of a ridiculous small launcher and, for a total of 5k credits you have something with 6000dv which can put satellites in LKO and all of Kerbin's moons (and also land in the latter), as well as do multiple "put satellite in orbit of..." contracts with one launch. That's all of the exploration, land-in XXX, science from orbit, and most put satellite in orbit of XXX contracts take care of for the early/mid game in career. Beyond that, it's maybe only useful to make a mini-hopper with a chair to move kerbals around in Minmus.