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qoonpooka

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Everything posted by qoonpooka

  1. qoonpooka
    Thanks HvP! That was exactly what I needed!
  2. qoonpooka
    So I've finally parked my first station around Minmus. It's got everything I'll want from it later: two orange tanks, lots of docking ports, plenty of monoprop and EC. Even got a nice contract to put it there (I would've done so anyway, it's my interplanetary refueling station now.) Thing is, I can't seem to get it's orbit fully equatorial. 5.3 degrees is the closest I can get, and I can't seem to find any combination of burns that get it closer. The maneuver nodes are useless because they don't show me the AoI. KER doesn't help much, it only tells me where I'm at, not how to get where I want to go; nor does it show the stats of the node's orbit... Any advice on finding equatorial orbits on my own?
  3. qoonpooka
    I'll give this a try. I tried doing it the other way around and noticed it won't let me drag a maneuver past an escape marker.
  4. qoonpooka
    So I have a ship on escape out of Kerbin with a Duna encounter in 295d. Great. The encounter track is such that I could easily capture into a polar orbit of Duna. Not great; this probe is bound for an Ike touchdown. No problem. 295d away means the dV to fix this should be hilariously cheap. I plop a node down a little ways out from my probe. (It spawns with 35dV for some reason, I'm not sure why but whatever. That's within my budget.) I start mouse-wheeling on various parts of it to see what effect it will have on the encounter periapsis... none. After about ten minutes of this, I yank REAL hard on various bits trying to provoke ANY reaction out of the encounter periapsis. The orbit goes crazy... but the encounter track remains entirely unmoved.... o.O I decide the encounter might be an error in the tracking and advance time to see if the encounter is real... and that's when I realize that I can slap nodes on the purple orbit, but not the blue one. (The purple orbit is my Kerbol orbit AFTER the encounter.) Nothing I do seems to let me add a node to the track I'm CURRENTLY on. Is there a hotkey for this? Am I just missing with the mouse? I don't even get a mouse-over indication that my current trajectory is interactable...
  5. qoonpooka
    Your Dres example is basically what I'm aiming for here. I'm using equipment that is probably not suited to capture to Duna, but my window closes in 2 game-days so if I'm doing Duna anytime this game-year, I need to launch it NOW. But the stuff I have means it's going to be a 0.5 TWR probe (because of all the fuel it needs to haul for the dV). Most of our conversation has gone completely over my head, so I guess the answer to my OP is: No. Such a guide does not exist.
  6. qoonpooka
    What do I do with all this stuff about phase angles then? Just bin it?
  7. qoonpooka
    How do you put maneuver nodes on top of each other?
  8. qoonpooka
    This seems like a good hack to get the job done for Minmus, but when I'm looking at being efficient with dV near Jool, for example, or looking to transfer these skills to interplanetary transfers, I'm in not-so-good shape again. I'd like to know how to compute the timing to get it just-in-time so that I can build those skills for my upcoming Eve and Duna runs.
  9. qoonpooka
    Indeed.I don't understand that spreadsheet at all, nor why I have to give the progression in terms of apoapsis height rather than acceptable burn time, etc. I was hoping there was a guide somewhere that explains how to use that tool, especially since I am now realizing I'm about to lose a Duna launch window and want to get a probe out there ASAP.
  10. qoonpooka
    So I've launched my first-for-this-career (second-ever) space station. I have a contract to park it over Minmus and I would like it to live there anyway because I want to use it as a refueling stop for interplanetary journeys. (I figure I'll rectify the orbit's angle prior to departure.) The station has very low TWR because it's not intended to move around much. Even with an inter-orbital tug attached it'll still need perikicking to make it to minmus. My usual method won't work here. Usually I click on the orbit, add some prograde burn, wait for the conics to go all screwy, make minor tweaks until I like my arrival characteristics, time warp to maneuver node, make the burn. The problem is, by the time I'm done orbiting a couple of times, Minmus will have gone along on its merry way. Is there a guide to knowing where in a circular parking orbit you need to begin kicking for a Kerbin->Minmus transfer? I can time it for an AN/DN intercept if that helps, or I can match alignments in my parking orbit first.
  11. qoonpooka
    I also use a 30km PE.
  12. qoonpooka
    Unless there's a mountain.
  13. qoonpooka
    If you trigger your parachutes in space, they will burn up on re-entry heating as you hit the atmospheric interface, which is what was happening to my chutes. I wasn't deploying them at too high a speed, because I wasn't deploying them at all. They were deployed automatically (and in error) because they were part of an earlier staging FNAR. But yes, the scenario you describe is definitely possible.
  14. qoonpooka
    The problem was that my staging had re-ordered itself and the parachute was being erroneously deployed in orbit. A collision with a mountain I would've been able to identify on my own... I have plenty of prior experience to draw from, on that. ;P
  15. qoonpooka
    For the 'check which direction you need to launch' part... how do I know north vs. south? North is for ascending node, south for DN?
  16. qoonpooka
    I would like to put a ship into orbit around minmus with a minimum of fussing around. I've heard that a 'direct launch' is the lowest dV way to get where you're going. Basically, skip the parking orbit and just go for what you want. Okay. Fair enough. What I want is a rendezvous orbit around Minmus with this here tanker, so that it can refuel an on-station lander. This means that in addition to burning directly into my minmus rendezvous, I also want to have inclination. I'm assuming, since I have zero control over where the KSC is that flying directly into the minmus encounter's no good. But how do I know which way to point my navball to get the properly 6-degrees-inclined orbit after I circularize into LKO? (I'm aiming for an 80km parking orbit to go for my rendezvous burn from.)
  17. qoonpooka
    Yes. This was it. The rocket has also mysteriously re-ordered its own staging on me. Good grab!
  18. qoonpooka
    I have a lander on return from Mun. The game is saved on the final approach. There is not enough dV left to abort the landing. It's an aerobreaking maneuver directly from Munar ejection. Peri is 27km, I can bring that up to 32 or so. Apo before atmo is 8M or something like that. This is by far not the most aggressive aerobreaking I've ever done. I've flown this mission before, and came in on basically this return trajectory from Mun once before. I've taken this lander to minmus and come back home in a similar, more aggressive fashion. Two things are different this time: 1) I'm using a nose-mounted basic chute instead of a pair of radial mounted chutes. 2) This rocket inexplicably decided to become unstable during liftoff and lean towards 270 (it did not do this on prior launches). There are no additional asymmetries introduced, so I have no idea why that was other than, FNAR, the command capsule's reaction wheels toggled themselves off. (I discovered this after successfully wrestling the thing into orbit.) On re-entry, however, around 20km altitude, well before I ever let my hand NEAR the spacebar, the parachute is mysteriously 'destroyed by aero forces and/or heat.' At NO POINT does the part give me a heat bar. The housing for the parachute is still there, there is no explosion or anything, but the chute chamber vanishes. This has never happened to me before EXCEPT if I were to deploy the chute while the indicator was red (which it is). Why is my chute suddenly destroyed? The vehicle is just the pod, chute, and heat shield. SAS is off, the vehicle is stable and the heat shield is pointed in the right direction. I see no visual heat effect on the chute, nor is there any discoloration of the chute housing suggesting overheating is taking place. Valentina needs y'all's brains.
  19. qoonpooka
    Aaaand it works suddenly! Yay! Either closing KSP and restarting it, or rebooting the machine may have contributed here. I was able to reproduce your results and can now go forth building my modular network!
  20. qoonpooka
    That is exactly what I'm saying. I'll give it another go the next time I'm at my machine, but my experience has been that when I hit the alt key, it DOES snap, but it does so in the reverse orientation to what you show. I haven't tried, as someone suggested, holding alt while I rotate it, though.
  21. qoonpooka
    The top of an OKTO and the bottom of a 2.5m RCS tank, for the tug. The fore and aft ends of an orange tank.
  22. qoonpooka
    You got it. The alt-key thing will make it snap, but to do so, it flips over so that the 'business-end' is what's snapping to the bottom of the tank.
  23. qoonpooka
    You have it correctly, except that I am also trying to place a normally sized one on the bottom of the same tank. Basically, I have an orange tank with some RCS thrusters on it. It is intended to be moved from place to place, so the tug docks at one end, and the tank lets go of it's mooring on the other, then the tug moves it into place, and it re-clamps onto something, then the tug lets go. The tank has no on-board control, so it needs to be able to dock to two things at once, and I want it to do so along it's axis.
  24. qoonpooka
    The science Jr. isn't the only source of science, either. You have enough power to send things that aren't materials observations. (Crew reports and EVA reports come to mind). it'll eat up most of what you do have, though, so having some other way to generate science for transmission is key. The lift-stage liquid engines have alternators in them, as does the basic jet engine, so they'll generate EC while you're thrusting.
  25. qoonpooka
    When I tried that, while flailing about, it also flipped it over to make that snap. In that orientation the thing won't be usable to dock. I'll poke at it some more though. The problem with the 'overlaps perfectly' is that I can't get a good visual angle on the bottom of a fuel tank to instal an aft docking port.
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