Minimalist

Rendezvous As (I hope) you can see from the image I can get a rendezvous with a target in a highly elliptical orbit. In this case I'm sending fuel to a captured asteroid that ran out. My intercept is at, or very close to, periapsis. My question is this: Is it easier to make the rendezvous closer to Ap or Pe? Both craft would be moving more slowly near Ap, but I can't convince myself this represents an advantage. As an aside, is there somewhere I can see the class of an asteroid after I've grabbed it? --Min

Hi all, Not sure if this is phantom physics of the craft or the magic of Eves atmosphere. http://imgur.com/a/7f70e Far from aero-braking, Eve is increasing my Ap. Sure, my Pe is coming down, but I don't think that's going to help much... I know, I should have packed more... --Minimalist

Thanks for the quick replies. I removed the symmetry for the centre-feed lines and it now behaves sensibly. Not as I expected, but that's my understanding, not the craft . Corrected craft.

Hi Kerbonauts, I need some help with funky fuel flow. I designed a craft with ridiculously long small diameter boosters. So I thought, "Why not asparagus them and save the length?". So I split each booster into eighths (they were very long ) and set up the fuel pipes and staging. After several failed launch attempts (<plug>using TriggerAu's excellent Alternate Resource Panel for debugging</plug>). The two fuel lines connecting the two engine stages are the only pipes installed without symmetry. My debugging could be wrong. I could have a mis-placed fuel-line. I can't see why one works and one doesn't. Links to craft below. This one behaves as expected. This one doesn't. I had to re-arrange the staging a bit between the two. One is four stage, the other eight. I did this purely by re-staging the decouplers, didn't touch the existing fuel-lines. The original had a payload, which I removed. I use a few mods (KER, RT2 - I removed the antenna, the above mentioned ARP, no others that I think will interfere). Could any rocket boffins help stop me going crazy, please? I could just replace the whole shebang with 2 large-diameter boosters, but where's the Kerbal in that?

Is it possible to modify the parachute icon in the staging display to indicate whether it's safe to deploy? I guess there would have to be 3 states: Unsafe, Risky and Safe. Maybe a red, amber or green (or no) background on the icon? At the moment I'm right-clicking over a 'sacrificial' chute to determine when to deploy