Red Iron Crown

Instant orbits are a workaround for not being able to assemble big things in orbit. Edited to be less offensive. Sorry everybody.

Nice, I\'ve been looking for a rule of thumb for deorbiting but haven\'t had the time to do the experimentation you have. Great job and thanks!

All of those things would have been true with appropriately sized legs as well, while allowing other designs to work too.

What does this do?

Too bad they didn\'t fix them. Adding a smaller engine was a weak solution, as now you can only use the legs with one of the three available engines. If you want to use them with another engine you\'re back to using radial decouplers or extra fuel tanks to get them low enough, not much better than using winglets imho. It\'s really a shame, because the legs are attractive and nicely animated. I can\'t fathom the reasoning behind requiring a special engine to use them, it limits the flexibility in designing landers with no upside that I can tell.

I\'m guessing there is a hard limit to how high an orbit can be while remaining in Kerbin\'s sphere of influence.

Very, very difficult without being able to read the speed. Not knowing Vi will make the calculations problematic. I think the only way I could do this is record the details of an instrumented flight and then try to do the exact same things at the same times during an uninstrumented flight. Even that would be challenging.

Nicely done!

Suddenly I feel very, very old.

You mean the same freedom that the Cepheus is exercising to criticize your posts? You certainly can say what you want, but the consequence of that freedom is that others can say what they want about you. So, if you post like an idiot, people will call you an idiot, and there\'s nothing you can do about it other than not being such an idiot.

Beautiful ship, great job!

Not keostationary, if you look closely in the vid you can see Kerbin\'s terrain features are oscillating north and south a small amount, indicating the orbit has a small bit of inclination.

Pretty sure Jeb would have survived sitting in the pilot\'s seat on the shuttle. Dizzy, though.

I zero out as much horizontal velocity as I can while still 5km or more above the Mun, using the map view to get the orbit to look like a vertical line. Then I set the lander\'s nose straight upward, turn on RCS and SAS and adjust the main engine to give an acceptable sink rate. As I get closer to the surface and can more accurately see my lateral speed, I use the translate keys (I,J,K,L) to use RCS thrust to get me dropping straight down, then a couple of quick hits of H just before touchdown to almost zero the vertical speed. Then hit X as you touchdown to kill the main engine and settle the lander. It can be stressful, as you juggle throttle position, attitude and translation with the surface coming up at you. Definitely gets the heart pumping!

Awesome part. Can\'t help but think a 60 degree version of this would be a great connector for making a gravity-wheel style space station.

Can anyone confirm this pack as working with 13.1? My copy hangs at loading part 'Saturn V Stage 1 Engine'.

Er...won\'t being able to use home-modded parts make this trivial? Anyone can edit a few .cfg files to make a craft capable of almost anything.