Fearless Son

My suggestion to many players new to the Mun is to aim for the large, dark craters visible on its distant surface. Even though they are relatively flat, they have plenty of smaller craters inside them. Ideally you want to aim to land not in one of those nearer craters, but next to one. The slope of a crater can play hell with the landing, especially if your angle is bad, and the low gravity can make a craft tip easily if its center of mass is even moderately high unless the landing surface is extremely level.

Ultimately, that is what I had to do. Sending the original craft back proved unworkable after many save-scummed attempts. So I had to break down and build another rescue craft, this time completely uncrewed but with the same crew capacity. Since I was operating under the same maximum number of part limits, I was forced to cut down on some of the redundancy I had built into the design of the original, with a lower fuel capacity once in orbit which narrowed my margin for error considerably. But I did it, got to within half a kilometer of the other rescue vehicle. With no more fuel in the other rescue vehicle (I used its fuel to make the final push of the rendezvous so the second vehicle had enough fuel to control where I deorbited) I spacewalked all three Kerbals across from one to the other while technically in Kerbin's upper atmosphere, which was a little hairy, especially as there was only one hatch in the single-seat cockpit so I had to do a bit of a "dance" to get all three of them in with Val in the pilot's seat. Anyway, I managed to de-orbit with it. Note the fewer solar panels, fewer parachutes, nose-fins to help keep it retrograde, and heatshield:

Oh, that is awesome. I may have to watch through that entire series some time. That is actually what I use those storage bays for the most. I just neglected to put them on this design because I am still in the early game, still have a tier one VAB, and thus still have a limit of thirty parts per rocket. Part of the reason I was doing these rescue missions is to raise enough capital to upgrade it. I also like to make sure that the craft I use that only go to Low Kerbin Orbit have plenty of batteries, if only to give them plenty of electricity for reentry orientation, where my solar panels might not be positioned to give me much input (either being retracted an inactive or being fixed but facing away from prograde which means that they only work if the sun is behind me.)

Always makes me happy when someone recognizes that. One day I will put a very large asteroid into orbit of Dres and turn it into a colony ship to send out of the system. I tend to use SAS sparingly, turning it off when I can keep it level by myself, then turning it back on when I really need it. Since I have solar panels on it, as long as I bring it down on the day side I should be able to keep the power balance positive (at least if and until the solar panels burn off.) Eh, I try to avoid mods when I can. Too temping to fall down that rabit hole.

I like having a wide safety margin (and it lets me recover more pieces of the craft on landing which is important early game when funds are tight.)

Thanks, @katateochi, I think your prograde maneuver will work for me. I might have to sacrifice the nose cone parachute, but I should be able to land it safely with just the drogues and radials. The maneuver about sacrificing the command pod to use the passenger cabin would not work though as I have all three seats occupied (Val in the command pod and two rescues in the passenger cabin.)

I might have to, but it would need to be with a different craft, one that has retrograde assistance even without a pilot. Maybe Jeb can take over for Val and Val can take Jeb's place on the auto-piloted assisted craft. Thinking about this design, I may need to start placing fins on the nose of the rocket, so that when it comes in rear-first the extra drag from the fins helps keep it right. That might have a negative impact on ascent, but so long as the stability fins on the bottom of the assent vehicle are bigger and generate more drag than the ones on the nose, it should be okay. Typically I like to use A.I.R.B.R.A.K.E.S. for this purpose, but I do not have those unlocked yet. Very shallow. I lack the fuel for a steep descent. My last attempt before reverting to quick save actually tried to keep it as shallow as possible, aerobreaking with several passes at 68K altitude until the orbit was terminal. Same reaction as to the steeper descent: the transition between the upper and lower atmosphere is where I run into trouble. Unfortunately I lack anything but the most basic heat-shield at the moment. I am not sure exactly what heats up the fastest, but I know that if I turn even just a little bit the heat gauges on the radial elements (chutes and solar panels) fill up quickly, necessitating a quick correction. If the entire craft flips, the whole thing blows up almost instantly and I can never be sure exactly what went up first. I am not too worried about stability assist though, between the large battery reserve and the solar panels, and with only a small command pod to generate rotational torque from, I am confident I have sufficient electricity to get down to a safe level to deploy chutes. I stress, the really difficult part of this is getting the craft down to a speed safe enough to deploy the parachutes. If I can do that, everything will be fine, but I seem to have trouble surviving the band of atmosphere in the 40K to 30K range where my speed is too fast and not slowing quickly enough.

Okay, so as I mentioned in the "What Did You Do In KSP Today" thread, I started a new career recently after the 1.1 patch dropped. However, I find myself in a bit of a conundrum, and I hope I can get some advice from other experienced players. So, like you do in a new career, I took some contracts to rescue stranded Kerbals in Low Kerbin Orbit, both for the funds and to build my roster. I designed a small craft big enough for a pilot and two passengers, sent up Jeb to rescue one, and he brought the stranded Kerbal back with no trouble. Craft worked great. So I got two more contracts for rescuing Kerbals, both also in LKO. I sent up the same craft with Valentina at the helm this time, because Jeb already had one star in his piloting skill and I felt that Val could use the experience, and since I knew the craft was solid, I figured this was an easy run. So Val went up and performed two separate rendezvous in the same flight, successfully getting Nana and Katly onboard. Yay! Okay, time to return to the surface. ... and that is where things got complicated. You see, the craft is built with low-tech parts and no heat shielding. Now, if it can keep its engine pointed retrograde during the descent, it will be fine. The engine can take the heat, and if it starts overheating I can burn fuel to transfer heat outside and slow down further at the same time. But my last flight had two advantages over this one: Jeb had one star and could keep the craft pointed retrograde through SAS, and since it only made one rendezvous it had more fuel left to burn during descent. While Val can keep a craft relatively steady, she cannot keep it pointed retrograde, introducing the possibility that incidental forces might push it into an unrecoverable turn (which leads to rapid and fatal overheating at the airspeeds involved) given the relatively weak electric torque forces provided by the command capsule. While I had to burn some fuel on the descent previously to help give the pilot more ability to fight those incidental forces and slow the craft at the same time, I have much less of it now, not enough to burn willy-nilly and finding just the right moment to light the engines and with just what amount of throttle has been troubling to me. Here is a picture of my craft. It has two radial drogue chutes, two radial regular chutes, and one nosecone chute, set in stages to activate the drogues then the other chutes. Can anyone advise me about how best to deal with this?

No, I did a fresh career with that one too.

Fair enough, but if those shockwaves start getting red, that is usually a good indication to dial back on the throttle a bit. Unless you have only heat-resistant components on the leading end of your rocket, you could end up losing something you need later like a parachute that is part of an aerodynamic cap. From what I have seen of 1.1, that aero-heating can be really brutal on parts not meant to withstand it (though I understand that is a known bug.)

Aerodynamic shape also has an effect, which can fudge the optimal numbers a little (but not a lot.) That said, I find that the visual effects are a good indicator: if you are starting to see trails of compressed air pressure-wave off the forward surfaces of your craft, you are probably moving too fast. Try to keep your velocity just below the threshold for triggering that at whatever altitude you are currently at, and you should be good.

Since I started a new career with the 1.1 launch, I am still doing early-game stuff. Last night I did a couple of tourist contracts on a sub-orbital flight to build some capital. Incidentally, is it just me, or has suborbital flight gotten more dangerous since the update? Coming back from LKO, I have a reasonable expectation that I can parachute a returning craft back to the ground at a survivable speed. But going suborbital, I find that the atmospheric breaking alone is insufficient to bring my craft's velocity under the threshold for safe parachute deployment, and relying on those alone will result in the craft impacting the surface at speeds that will rip the chutes right off their moorings before they can even unfold. I find myself having to save some fuel for a breaking burn in the 30-20K altitude range to bring the velocity down to something my parachutes can take. Even then I need to add a couple of drogues on a separate stage just to have anything like a safety margin.

The answer to the later question is "Very carefully and with lots of heat shielding."

I usually put something like "On this spot did [name] Kerman become the first Kerbal to set foot on [planetary body]." I mostly use them to track which biomes I have already gathered science from.

Also true, but then you only get to perform those experiments (with a Science Jr.) once in orbit or above the Mun, while each biome represents a different return. In the early game, you have to take what you can get to.

Anyone who works in the software industry for any length of time comes to know this intimately. Development is a balancing act of time, functionality, personal ability, and expending the scope of things that were never expected to scale that way. Put as a metaphor, for every clean and polished-looking rocket design you see, there are dozens of struts clipped inside holding it together.

There are different ways of building a spaceplane, and many different techs can go into any of them, so it is hard to say specifically which nodes a spaceplane actually requires, but practically speaking if you can unlock the Hypersonic Flight and/or Aerospace Tech nodes, you probably have what you need. The former will get you Whiplash engines, the later will get you R.A.I.P.I.E.R.s, either will be able to accelerate you out of the atmosphere. You will also need a space engine for outside of atmosphere flight, which the R.A.I.P.I.E.R.s can double as, and enough fuel to actually make it up there and complete a circularization maneuver. But from the wording of your question, I am guessing you already can actually get going to a trans-atmospheric ballistic flight but run out of juice before getting into a stable orbit, yes? This is the tyranny of rockets, and it goes double for spaceplanes, sadly. If you can get that far, you can go all the way, it will just take a lot of design tweaking and experimentation with fuel loadouts and ascent profiles to find an optimal one, and there is no making that easy since each spaceplane design will be different. Good luck though, making an effective spaceplane is a challenge.

Great update! Started a new career last night, having fun so far, except... The wheel stress system needs a bit of tweaking. An excellent system and I approve of its structure, but the implementation of the low-tier wheels leaves something to be desired. Being a fresh career game with just-unlocked part groups for airplanes, I tried to build and launch a small science-carrying plane from the runway to do a few experiments. But on the tier-1 one runway with low-tech parts in a small plane, I can hardly even take off! The wheels keep breaking on the bumpy runway before I even get to sufficient take off speed, and trying to even roll off the runway at low speed results in a broken tire the moment it touches the grass. I shudder to think of what landing such a plane would be like. I mean, I approve of the idea of enforcing certain tolerances for bumpy landings, but this is absurd. The lowest-tier, unretractable gear is useless from a practical standpoint unless you have an upgraded runway, but by that time you probably have other options available anyway.

Looking forward to getting home and firing this up! Also, I appreciate the tutorial update. While I am confident enough in my grasp of the game, I know people who are really interested but still struggle to make orbit. This will help get them into the game.

Sounds like it might be a prime candidate for an assisted launch system. Maybe a couple of underslung solid rocket boosters on decoupling pylons with their tweakables set to output at reduced thrust. Use them to drive the craft to lifting speed and let it rise as aggressively as you can manage for as long as the rockets will hold out, then drop the dead weight and engage the ions.

My guess? It becomes part of Apple's development strategy for a new generation of operating systems. (Am I really that old? Yes I am.)

Delicious. The answer is always delicious.

Easiest way to do that is to paint it red:

Okay, now I am imagining nabbing a bunch of these and joining them into a network of asteroids for a big floating spacedock. It would be tempting the kracken, but it would be so cool...

That is something I had considered as well. It would be great for a kerosene-powered electric motor car to roll around Kerbin in where it would also double as a down-force generator to give it better traction and handling.