wibou

What I was planning to do was to pack about one hundred parachutes on a special claw and hope it is strong enough to hold the entire asteroid mass while the 'chutes do their trick. I already made the claw + 126 chutes design actually... What you are telling me is that it won't work and I should try to rocket-land that monster?

I've got a contract where I must (gently) land a class C asteroid on Kerbin. By some incredible luck, I've got a C asteroid on a collision course (it's gonna crash on kerbin!) 5 days away from Kerbin SOI... At first I thought this was good since I don't even have to waste fuel on orbit, I just have to strap a couple of dozen of parachute on a rocket, make contact and (assuming it does not splash down in the sea) that's it! But now that I think about it... the orbital speed of the asteroid is going to be TREMENDOUS and I will have to MATCH that speed if I ever want to make contact. I would basically need to get into a collision course with kerbin too BUT at just the right time (and speed and altitude) so I would be able to reach my target. That sound almost impossible... Is that even possible? Did anyone try (and succeed) on that?

You probably want to read this thread: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/96823-Random-destruction-of-wings

I had the same problem before. I found that the _SPEED_ at which you stage makes enormous difference on the success or failure (in the sense of if it hits the rocket or not) of decoupler / separatrons. I think there is even a bug open about it ("decoupler behave different depending the speed"). What I would recommend you would be to CUT the engine prior to activating your stage. I have very good and reliable rocket that just can't decouple unless I manually stage it using the "hit X / hit space / (wait 1 second) / hit Z" trick. Sure, you lose some delta-V but your kerbals live to see space that day

Hmm a modular and super-heavy mothership that can dock several smaller rockets/landers sound like a neat idea. Make sure to post your results back here, it sure would be interesting

Riiiight, that part is VERY important. If your RCS are NOT around your center of mass, you WILL have hard time docking. Also make sure you have (at least) 4 RCS thrusters. Less is a pain since you need to ROTATE your ship to strafe a different direction. If you are super heavy, you might want to add more than 4 thrusters, but unless you have more than ~75 tons in the part you are trying to dock, 4 should be fine.

Intercept nodes usually stop working when you get close to the asteroid... it's kind of dumb really. A step by step guide would look like: While orbiting kerbin, use the intercept node to get relatively close (<100km, ideally <20km) from your target. As long you are still orbiting kerbin, you SHOULD be able to use the intercept nodes. Once you are almost at intercept point, switch the navball into "target" mode and burn retrograde to cancel your velocity relative to the target... it's usually the point where you will lose the intercept nodes. At that point (assuming your velocity relative to the target is ~0m/s), find the "target prograde" node on your navball and burn that way. If you are far away (>50km) you probably want to give yourself a hell of a push, up to 100m/s. Below 50km, anything between 25m/s and 50m/s is probably fine. Less if you are even closer (lucky guy!). If you use your map at that point, it should give you the distance between you and the target but (oddly enough??), you won't see intercept node. Spot that distance... if it start INCREASING instead of DECREASING, then burn "retrograde" to cancel your velocity and do a burn "target prograde" again (step 3). Eventually, you WILL get an intercept with your target... You probably want to do the last 3km very slowly (<2m/s) to make sure you don't overshoot. The last 75m should be done using RCS for maximum precision; click on the target and select "target center of mass" to make sure you don't end up with a disbalanced charge. If you grab too far from this point, the ship composed of your rocket and the asteroid will be very hard to control (although a "A" type asteroid is light enough it wouldn't matter). Once you have it, it's all orbital mecanic baby: switch back the navball to "orbit" and burn retrograde to get back into kerbin orbit. There, your very own asteroid! Some people might point out this is ZERO fuel efficient and that be true. But around Kerbin, fuel is rarely an issue and it is way easier to execute (and to explain) that way

Rendez-vous can be hard but you get used to it very quickly... There is some good turorial about it on youtube; something like https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=scott+manley+rendezvous might be what you are looking for (aim for tutorials). Kerbodyne tank (which one, the big big one, really?) and two LVN seems A LOT, if you can put that monster into orbit you can probably go anywhere (burn with LVN will take a while but it shouldn't matter)... But it would really help to see the actual setup, you could post an image of it. You could also install some mod (MechJeb?) as it would give you the delta-V of each stage, you could then check on the wiki if that's enough. The lander... well a picture would help, again. Duna has about 1/3 of the gravity of Kerbin plus much much less atmosphere. If you can raise your lander from 0km to 42km on kerbin, then you will definitely have enough on Duna to reach space... if you plan a bit more to circularize then you should be fine (it's probably too much, even?). Parachute ARE useful, since there is some atmosphere. But don't expect them alone to land you safely, you will probably have to do a short burn just prior touching ground.

Most of my money making in mid-late game come from "Science from around ..." contract. I have satellites around all celestial bodies already so any of those contract is basically free money, from 30K (Kerbin) to 200K (Jool). You _should_ be getting a lot of those already, especially if you explored some of the bodies already. My other cash cow is the (not quite sure of the name) "Gravitational data from around". Those cost me some fuel but most of my satellites got PLENTY of fuel (~2000 Xenon?) and the net gain is ridicolously high... As example, these mission around Moho earn me about 600-700K. Now, if you are NOT getting any of those... well the "Explore X" take up contract slots but never expire, so you might need to complete those just to free some space for other contracts. You can (and should in mid-game) also decline all the "Test parts" contracts since the net gain is usually quite low (although not all the time). In any case, time warping a few days will expire/refresh the contracts and you might be getting something interesting... just time warp until your lander reach Duna NB: attaching parachutes to booster usually won't work since the engine will automatically delete any objects you don't control that are inside the atmosphere... orbit is fine though. Or there is some mods that make it possible, if you are interested.

Hmm this thread might interest you: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/57197-The-Ultimate-Jool-5-Challenge-land-Kerbals-on-all-moons-and-return-in-one-big-mission?p=1313730&viewfull=1#post1313730

Going to Eve is easier than going to Duna ATMO. The orbit inclinaison is bigger but the delta-V is similar... but what's REALLY awesome is that you can insert yourself into orbit around Eve just by using atmospheric drag to break. Aim around ~60km into the atmosphere during the encounter and it should put you right into orbit. Then keep the PE around 70km for a couple of pass to bring down your AP to the height you want. Be careful not to go TOO low though

I add the same reaction at first... "Hey that damn target is moving!". Then I realized... the moon is rotating so a stable orbit does not keep passing over the same point on the ground. As the moon rotate, the target rotate with it, but your orbit keep passing over the same point. So this mean: 1- You need to adjust your trajectory as late as possible or to compensate for the rotation 2- You can just hit time-warp and wait, you WILL more or lss line up eventually (unless your are perpendicular), although it can take quite a long time.

What's your hardware? More specifically, what's the Video card and drivers? NVIDIA/AMD/Intel? Using open source or proprietary drivers?

Hmm that's weird... Everything seem to be there. If you made this AFTER accepting the contract, there is no reson it shouldn't complete, really. Maybe some expert admin here would have a way to look into the save file to determine what the game consider to be "missing"... it might be a that you found a new bug sadly That said, you could cheat and complete contract using the debug window (<MOD> + F12 ), although it won't give you the end of contract money/science/reputation. But you won't pay the fine on failure either (and you keep the advance money).

Aaah you are right... Sorry about that, I really should've spotted those orange thingy. I blame my overly large screen resolution We don't quite see the lander on the picture though. It looks like there is two (Duna/Ike?)... or maybe it is just two landing can radially placed? It would probably help to see the VAB assembly of that, instead of widely guessing

Do you have antenna, power and docking port? A picture of the station once in orbit and the expanded contract tab (the contract thing on the top right) with the various green check/uncheck would really help us pinpoint what's the problem and/or if you have found a bug.

Indeed. Way WAY too much battery. 1000 electric charge would be PLENTY if you keep the SIX gigantic solar array. In fact, it would be quite enough to have only 2 (but it would be less pretty that way, agreed). I don't think the lander could land on Duna and back though... I don't see the engine on it so I assume there isn't much trust there.

HOLY COW, that thing is _massive_. You use SRB to throw used stages backward? THIS THING IS AWESOME! I LOVE IT!! After watching the video, it is clear the wobbling start appearing when you end up with the large and heavy bottom and the narrower-but-heavy top linked by a weak narrow central coupling... the physic engine dislike this, obviously. You should be able to (somehow) fix this by adding struts between the central "tail" bottom part and the heavy top part (10:43 in your video). Adding 4 struts at ~60 degree between the top 4 orange tank linked to the start of the kerbodine gray tank should really help I believe... You might have trouble to add those in VAB when your 6 other bottom orange tanks are present, but it would definitely help (although I suspect it won't be perfect). Another way would be to make sure you use the same type of tank (i.e. don't mix rockomax and kerbodyne) along all the length of the rocket... The wobbling is basically caused because the bottom "mass" is larger than the coupling so using a tank as large as the decoupler should help a lot. However, since you have a very large payload atop, it might still wobble anyhow... you would need to test.

I confirm I have the exact same issue more or less often. I don't think it is related to alt-tab although alt-tabbing out/in sometime fixes it. Otherwise I just switch to KSP and then back to the ship. I really thought it was a Linux related bug (I use Kerbal under Linux), I'm kind of glad it's not.

But much MUCH less fun Jeb once said "any landing that doesn't cave in your skull didn't had enough horizontal delta-V"!

Thanks all for the answer. My reply to all that below: Maneuver Node I gave PreciseNode a shot and it seems promising. The UI seems simple enough, although the keyboard hotkeys will take me sometime to remember. But so far, it's great, FAR FAR more precise node maneuver (it's in the name, after all). I hope Squad do something about this node mess in Stock... Navball VS Ship (aka Stage) View I still feel like I'm the only one with this problem... I am already doing most of what was suggested, even more (putting green/light navigation light on ship, etc..), I suppose my pilot skill are terribly bad Sometime I don't have the time to rotate the ship and must react quickly... or sometime the asymmetrical markers are out of sight... or I forget I moved the camera... so markers are really not that great. Some people also suggested chase (follow?) view, which is great in some case (docking) but really suck in some other cases (landing). So no win-win solution it seems I just hope Squad fix this eventually, either by adding something on the NavBall (some arrow pointing "the standard plane is THIS -> way"?) or somekind of HUD on the ship view (that would tell you that "W" is this -> way in the current camera angle). Precise encounter PreciseNode really did help on that, I can now focus on a planet AND adjust the maneuver efficiently! That said, somebody mentionned I could had the "conic patches" problem... what's that bug? Sometime, even with PreciseNode what I planned during an early maneuver turn out not the be the actual trajectory when I finally enter the SOI of the body, could it has something to do? I guess the mod fix most of the issues (2 out of 3 anyways) so I guess this can be considered "Answered"

Congratulation, you've got yourself a nice Kraken-drive! But seriously, does this happen if you reload a previous save or (even better) if you start a new career or sandbox?

I have been playing KSP for two months now and I consider myself an intermediate player. I have satellite around every celestial bodies and habited space station around Eve and Duna... so I guess I kind of know what I am doing, although I do it very inefficiently (i.e. I suck at plotting transferts, I just compensate by packing extra delta-V). That said, I still have a lot of issues I can't seem to fix. Being uncomplete, a lot of stuff in KSP is not quite explained so I often have the feeling I am missing stuff that would make my life way easier. So here is a list of what's bugging me... if you have useful tips, please share them with me Maneuver Node I have a love-hate relationship with the maneuver node: they are VERY useful but somehow VERY frustrating. First, it's very hard to pull the correct "arm" (e.g. prograde or normal) without accidently pulling another one, screwing up the orbit. Second, there is no safe way to "slide" the maneuver node around the current orbit when unzoomed... Let's say I am trying to fine tune a transfert orbit from Kerbin to Duna, the only way to test the effect of "sliding" the node is to zoom to kerbin, slide, zoom back to duna, observe the result, zoom back to kerbin again, slide, back to duna, yada yada... It gets frustrating VERY quickly. Finally... while it is possible to click on AP and PE so the information stick, those are exceptions. The only way to observe the result of a modification to a maneuver node is to move the mouse from the node to the "target". As example, if I am trying to fine tune a rendezvous, I have to slightly adjust the node, then pass the mouse hover my target, then adjust again, then check with the mouse... How do you guys work with the maneuver nodes? Is there something I am missing? Hotkeys, special focus, anything? Navball VS Ship (aka Stage) View Of course, I can navigate only using the Navball... but sometime I'd simply like to point my ship in a certain direction (in the stage view) but I find there is no easy way to "map" what you see from the stage view and what you see on the Navball. Example case: I am in the final approach to landing a rocket near my land station and realize I am a bit off... what I would like to do would be to point the node of my ship in "that way". Unfortunately, because the camera, the roll-orientation of the ship and all that, there is never a way to know which way is "that way", I can never know beforehand if I need to press W, A, S or D. I took the habit of putting red and green light of left and right side of my ship, it slightly help but it's not heaven yet... Any hints? Precise encounter Usually, encountering a body "from behind" would accelerate you (I believe?) and would give you a counter-clockwise orbit. Encountering "from the front" slow you down and give you a clockwise (i.e. 180degrees) orbit. Problem is, while planning an encounter, I find it very difficult to tell which way I am going to "get grabbed" by the gravity. No matter how I zoom or change the focus, I end up guessing wrong 50% of the time. And it is way worse for bodies that far away from the maneuver node since it's really tiresome to test various variation on the maneuver node (because of the #1). To make matter worse, high gravity (and no-so-high) bodies will "curve" (i.e. incline) your trajectory when you get too close... but it's really hard to tell how much before the actual encounter, so I sometime end up in very difficult situation (e.g. unwanted polar orbit). Because all that, my encouters are always very imprecise and I end up spending way more delta-V than I would need. How do you guys do it? Is there something I am missing here. So that's about it for now... I have more but I think I will just start with those

LOOL I was really wondering what you were talking about

For the few of us that don't actually know all that, could you details? I'm very interested by that.