Excalibur

Cool beans

It\'s the most precise way I can think of doing it manually. Never claimed it wasn\'t long-winded or inefficient!

I thought I\'d included that in the video, apologies if it\'s not that clear. Final velocity = 1504.9m/s. Impact mass = 160 tons. Momentum = 240,784 ton/ms-1.

Oh it would. Just an exercise in manual rendezvous. I\'m sure there\'s a much better way to do it!

I\'ve thought so too in the past but if you have say just a MechJeb and a pod in orbit, functions like KILLROT seem rather weak giving me some doubts. I guess it\'s just a balance issue then.

That is such an elegantly ingenious design - hats off to you! Quite jealous I never thought of that. Mind posting the .craft file please?

Posting after bed-time isn\'t a good idea for me, I seem to get a bit muddled. ;D You\'re right about the main challenge of elliptical rendezvous being lining up the major axes. I think that\'s what I was trying to get at. I must admit I haven\'t put anywhere near as much effort into rendezvous as the other aspects of KSP, I guess I don\'t see much point until docking is released (but lets not get into that discussion). Just had a thought. What if you placed your chase ship into a polar orbit such that its Pe matched the target\'s Pe altitude figure. Perform a burn whilst over one of the poles that is normal to your orbit, if in the right direction that should move your Pe\'s together. Burn at Pe until your Ap matches the target\'s. Then next time you\'re back at Pe perform another normal burn to bring inclinations together. Won\'t be easy and you\'ll need MechJeb for the precise burns. I\'ll give it a try.

\'tis int it From what I understand there\'s a couple of ways of landing on Mun. One is a direct descent; as soon as you enter Munar SOI you head for the surface. The other option is to slide into orbit after entering Munar SOI and then perform a de-orbit burn. Apparently the direct descent is the most fuel efficient (though not by much) but it\'s much harder. I usually use MechJeb these days for my landings (getting a bit lazy I know). What I used to do though is get in a low orbit around Mun, say 15-20km. I\'d then make a nice burn de-orbit burn so that my downrange distance to landing (or impact) would be about the same as my altitude (10-20km). Kind of like a right angled triangle. Then once I\'d descended below about 5-8km (or if my velocity exceeded 300m/s for a measure of control) I\'d make a steady burn with the intention of reducing my velocity to near zero at zero altitude (obviously it\'s not that easy manually so make adjustments as you go). Remember to keep your ship pointed towards retrograde so as to help cancel both horizontal and vertical velocity. Main thing I\'d say is to keep your ship stable and orientated with your horizontal velocity vector so your controls actually match up with what happens on screen and don\'t let your velocity get out of control. You obviously need to be able to decelerate enough for a soft landing.

No worries, let us know how you get on.

Even with MechJeb or strong SAS I find a good portion of my rovers are pretty unstable so I never even considered SURF. Always assumed it would only be good for atmospheric flight. Guess I need to think outside the box a little more... That\'s why I like the forums so much though - such a good collection of brilliant ideas. Oh and a quick question... do you know if MechJeb can make use of SAS modules? Or does it only use active control systems (i.e. RCS)?

I LOVE the sound of this challenge. EDIT: My entry: http://youtu.be/ttD5E-nw9mA

I\'m anxious to hear your results... and I may just try something similar myself...

Glad to hear it How you liking KSP? Any questions?

I\'m happy to send you my setup if you like as well. I don\'t use the triggers at all, as I found them too weird. This is what I use if I\'m doing a lot of flying in spaceplanes: LB/RB mapped to throttle increment LStick L/R: Yaw LStick U/D: Translate forward/back RStick L/R: Roll RStick U/D: Pitch Dpad U/D/L/R: Translate U/D/L/R X: Cut throttle Y: Gear A: Stage B: RCS If I\'m flying in space I\'ll swap LStick L/R with RStick L/R as it seems to make more sense to me that way. I\'d also advise watching your dead zones - I\'ve made most of them between 10-30% and can really make control easier if tweaked right. Personally I think the \'ol 360 pad suits KSP pretty well... once you get used to it!

I should probably make myself a bit more clear on that point. I made an assumption that your target would have as perfect a circular orbit as possible (it\'s not difficult with fine RCS control). Then basically you make your chase ship\'s Ap or Pe coincide exactly with your target ship\'s altitude. Then within a few periods (depending on how elliptical the chase ship\'s orbit is) both chase and target ship should meet at the same point and you can circularise. I\'ve never had any trouble seeing Ap/Pe for both ships in these circumstances. You mentioned in an earlier post you\'d not yet accomplished a rendezvous - did you mean target in elliptical orbit or circular? I assumed the latter so directed my advice that way. Apologies if I got the wrong end of the stick (and a little off topic!). =P My edit referred to the fact that you should be able to invert this for chasing a target in an elliptical orbit. Instead of your chase ship using an elliptical \'chase\' orbit, use a circular one with an altitude the same as the target\'s Pe. Then once both ships inevitably meet at the target\'s Pe instead of circularising you burn until your orbit\'s eccentricity matches the target ship\'s orbital eccentricity. The increased difficulty of rendezvous with a target in an elliptical orbit would probably be using the Orbital Map view to synchronise inclinations, especially if the target\'s Ap is miiiillles away. Which I\'ve realised is what you\'re getting at now.

For your first rendezvous I\'d suggest launching your target into a circular orbit of 350km with as close to zero inclination as possible (reason for the relatively high altitude is so you can use a higher time compression factor). Make sure your ships are easy to control in orbit with lots of RCS fuel. You\'ll need it. Obviously you\'ll now need to launch your chase vessel into as close an orbit as your target. Once this is done do as follows: [li]Go into Orbital Map view. Focus the camera on Kerbin[/li] [li]Zoom the camera in as much as possible so that you can still see the relevant orbital tracks just \'in front\' of the camera[/li] [li]Now find one of the points where the two orbital tracks cross over each other (there will be two points 180 degrees apart)[/li] [li]Orientate your ship so that it\'s locked Northwards (best done with the \'+ NML\' button on MechJeb)[/li] [li]When your ship reaches one of the \'crossover points\' along its orbit make a small forwards RCS burn with fine controls on (\'Ctrl\' key then \'h\' key)[/li] If you do the above while in the Orbital Map view you should notice that the orbital tracks begin to converge at the two points at ninety degrees of your orbital position. Simply keep firing forward with the RCS and you should be able to match up your orbital inclination with that of the target almost exactly. If you find burning Northward increases your separation, just burn your RCS in the opposite direction with the \'n\' key to give you a Southward burn. Once you\'ve got the inclinations synced nicely match up either Ap or Pe with your target. Leave the other at least 10km higher or lower. This will enable you to catch up the other ship (or the other ship to catch up to you). When you both eventually meet at your Ap/Pe then all you have to do is circularise and you\'ve got a nice easy rendezvous - no Rincomp required. See this thread for some extremely close intercepts I\'ve achieved with this method: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=10570.0 P.S. I plan on doing a more in-depth guide on this subject in the near future... EDIT: Not tried it but I think the above method should also work for rendezvousing with other ships that themselves have an eccentric orbit. Probably a good deal more difficult I should imagine though!

Thanks dude, it\'s the first in what I hope is a series of many guides for KSP. I want to contribute to the community and without any modelling/texturing/coding skills this is the best way I can think of

Recently I\'ve been working on a little guide for some of the people new to KSP and the forums. Covers the fundamentals of reaching orbit reasonably efficiently - a must for the newbie! Check it out here on this great site... http://xenolith.ws/?page=post&id=17 P.S. Any corrections/suggestions please don\'t hesitate to let me know!

You know I doubt we would have. Orbital space around Kerbin is huge so consider these factors; [li]\'liths are only ~2 metres x 1 metre,[/li] [li]pitch black in colour, just like space,[/li] [li]unmarked on the orbital map.[/li] Only chance would have been the Muon Detector, but even if your satellite managed to detect it, you\'d very likely be in a very different orbit. This would probably make it appear as if you\'re passing over a ground target.

You know I didn\'t even think of trying that. It wouldn\'t be too difficult I don\'t think. I bet you could approximate the trajectory as a straight line in this instance (just as the Earth appears flat from the surface). Then it\'d just be a case of setting up the camera so you can find the angle between ship and target. A little bit of trigonometry and you\'ll have your distance figure. Should be pretty accurate too if you measure the angle carefully!

I\'m already working on a couple of \'How-to\' guides, namely how to get into orbit and locating those pesky Munoliths. Should be up in a day or two. Would have been sooner but it\'s DIY central at my house at the moment!

I did originally set out to use carts however I\'m pretty impatient; I kept taking off at 50m/s and spiralling back into the ground with a very Kerbal firework show. So I switched to a hovering lander. No terrain worries as with the cart and you can traverse the surface much faster than on wheels; great if you lack the patience to trundle along the surface. Your method of location is essentially the same as mine... establish a baseline then head off on a normal course from it til you hit paydirt. \'Great minds...\'

Nice, tidy looking lander. You\'ve inspired me to try something with stock parts. Only thing is my PC doesn\'t really seem to like large stock ships due to the high part count. Wouldn\'t mind but it\'s not a bad spec PC either!

Cheers. Yeah I prefer the Failcan struts over anything else - small, strong and light. It probably is possible to land it with zero horizontal velocity, but it\'s damned difficult. I\'ve landed it with around 2-3m/s hv which I class as a vertical landing just about.

Here\'s one I made a few weeks back... Stable VTOL Capable of conventional/unpowered landings Craft file attached. Requires: [li]Mechjeb[/li] [li]C7[/li] [li]CBBP (for struts)[/li] [li]Tiberdyne[/li] [li]Damned Robotics[/li] After extensive testing of the VTOL concept it became starkly obvious that vectored thrust in contact with any part of the aircraft is very bad news. Hence the vulture-like high wing. http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=11022.0