qoonpooka

Is there something about being in a polar orbit that's just easier to change? Or should I aim for least difference? These aren't polar coords, they're below the 45-degree mark, in fact (though only just).

So I picked up a contract to do some flyovers with crew reports on the Mun, figuring: "Hey, I'm sending a lander and have to do a rescue over there anyway, surely one of these boats can pack some extra fuel and make the flyovers!" So I drop into an equatorial orbit and, lo and behold, the points aren't anywhere near my orbit. No biggie, I figure, I should just do some normal burns to change my orbital angle, it's the Mun, how much could I.... HOLY WHOAZERS - 500+ dV needed?! So I've built a flying gas can that can handle the needed maneuvers but yikes. There's got to be a more efficient way to do this. I'm still using 1.25m diameter gear because I haven't upgraded my R&D yet, but this looks like you basically need orange tanks to do it. Is there a guide for optimizing completion of these contracts or some pointers folks can give me?

No joy. Example object: a lone stack decoupler. It's damaged, I think, and when I started to fly it, it had overheat status. I followed it through two passes, it's apo never lowers, despite the visible shock heating effects from it's 40km dip into the atmosphere. It cleared up its overheat status while I watched too. - - - Updated - - - Ah, yes. Yes I can!

23km eh? HAH! Debris cuts in at 23.8. Welp. How close do I have to be to give it focus? Do I fly an airplane around under it, or try to orbit over it with it set as my target or something?

So, I have some Kessler Syndrome building up now. I'd been doing a good job at ejecting launch stages in either sub-orbital, or aero-capture orbits but it seems that the latter is not good enough: I have four pieces of debris whose Kerbin periapses are below 70km, two of them go below 40km, and yet after three days they haven't been captured or burned up. Is this a known bug? How are these items persisting with the atmosphere? They should've burned up or lithobraked by now, and how on earth do you clean something like that up? You can't follow it into orbit... you'll burn up instead...

Awesome! That's the formula I needed. Thank you guys!

Search came up with nothing so... I have a satellite mission with a specific equatorial orbit around Kerbin. No big deal, really, but I'd like to be efficient about it. How can I calculate the delta-v needed to move from my 80km parking LKO to the target orbit without launching and reverting? I know how to do it with a maneuver node, but I'd like to build once, launch once, and get it right. EDIT: The Vis-Viva equation was exactly what I'm looking for, and KSP gives us the GM part of it in the show-info on a given body. Yay!

You guys make stuff way prettier, but after starting a 1.0.4 career mode game and finding myself short on science and having run the launch pad and runway dry of science - and also not having access to any of the good parts for a rover, I had to get creative and work with what I had. This works on Kerbin only, mind, but it's actually kinda fun to drive. You need to have unlocked: Basic Rocketry, Engineering 101, Stability, Aviation, and that's it. Parts List: 2 LY-01 Fixed landing gear 1 LY05 Steerable Landing Gear (under the nose) 1 Mk1 Cockpit 1 SC-9001 Science Jr. 2 FL-T200 Fuel Tanks (Oxidizer removed) 1 XM-G50 Radial Air Intake 1 J33 "Wheesley" Basic Jet Engine Comms gear, batteries, and additional experiments like goo are optional. If you attach experiments, place them symmetrically on the lower half of the fuselage unless you're good at tightrope walking. Use is as follows: crank the engine's max output down to like, 20% and keep the throttle low. Load a scientist and then using short bursts of engine power, coast along at 20-30m/sec until you arrive at the biome you prefer. There's several around KSC but those feel like cheating to me, so I use this to go to the highlands, grasslands, and shores and back. (Careful near the shores....) EVA whenever you need to reset experiments and store data in the cockpit. I haven't unlocked solar panels yet but they're planned for version 2.

Wasn't google. The one I linked, as you can see from the URL, is from the KSP wiki. That, apparently, needs to be updated. Thank you all for the alternatives.

Is there a new delta-v map then? http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/File:KerbinDeltaVMap.png says 4,550m/sec delta-V....

So, after having some problems with my install I reinstalled from the ground up as a Hail Mary (that worked) and began adding mods back one at a time, just in case one of them was the cause. KER was the first to get re-added, and I discovered something odd.... the first ship that let me park a capsule in orbit had a piddly 3.1k Delta-V... But... wait... I thought it took 4.5k delta-v to get into LKO? And, okay, I only BARELY made it and had all of two seconds of fuel with which to deorbit but the apo was like... 74km or something obscenely low. Have Delta-V requirements changed dramatically in 1.0+? Is the delta-v in KER misreported or calculated somehow? Did I accidentally fly the world's most perfect ascent? Did wormholes get introduced? What's going on here...

This was a manned mission, so I try to keep those durations plausible, and it included a plant-flag objective. But yeah, I'm gonna park a satelite in a polar orbit for this reason.

Awesome, thanks for the tip! Landed too far west, trying to walk my way there, but the delta-V budget is getting /tight/. Changing to Answered.

:mad: Here is the orbit I'm on, with the last target for a temperature survey contract showing. This is a Munar orbit: I'm not getting messages, so I figure I need to burn my angle of inclination down to it. So I set up a maneuver node like so: I burn that correction, note the dotted line DIRECTLY UNDER THE TARGET. Except that, when I get there, the damned thing is the same distance away. Mun is tidal locked, yeah? So it shouldn't be rotating away from me... I'm gonna run out of delta-v if I keep missing like this... While I'm on the subject: Anyone got any good links to how to do a precision landing on a target like that, that /isn't/ mechjeb-assist or burn-to-zero right above it? The former because, if I wanted cheat codes I'd be playing a different game () and the latter because I've only got 1.6km/sec dV left, and I worry I won't be able to get home with those shenanigans - plus I have more flyover scanning to do, if I can afford it. EDIT: Tidally locked doesn't mean it doesn't rotate out from under you... #TIL.

CoT is inline, yeah. But you're right that it behaves like it's not. Yeah, I was expecting there to be issues. It's just this specific failure mode, almost like the physics model can't figure out what to do, so it has a seisure until atmo density overwhelms whatever glitch it gets into. I guess it's possible that it's simply a combination of factors. I'm going to try tightening the design today and see how it handles, then.

omg /that's/ what that is!!

Yay I helped!

Oh I definitely stall. I'm holding the thing up by engine thrust alone at this point and then suddenly it'll run away from me - almost all the time it'll pitch /up/ no matter the input, and then once it flips over the pitch once it's just total pandemonium for a 20,000 meter fall. Any one of these symptoms would make sense, but it's the combination of no control input, and the aircraft acting like it's suddenly got ZOMG ALL THE INPUT ON ALL THE AXES HOLY CRAP EHRMAGERD DOGEWOW. As the atmo density increases around 4-5k It'll stabilize from the tumble and I can pull out of the stall just fine.

I have had flameouts, but I'm pretty sure I'm not flaming out when I experience this particular scenario. Both engines are clearly still thrusting as I tumble, if I raise the throttle. (It becomes much more rapid in the tumble, too, but I clearly get two contrails throughout.) I believe that I can hear as the engines are nearing flameout, and I tend to throttle them nearly to zero when I hear that. Most of the time I can prevent it. When I do get a flameout, I tend to see it as a flat spin, rather than the tumbling on all three axes I've been seeing. But I'll certainly re-wire the intakes and see if that helps.

This may be the culprit. I'll check it out. I suspect not, the mass is probably just slightly behind the lift if I pull the elevons and tail, and very ahead if I pull the canards. Starhawk also doesn't like the canards it seems, I feel like I had to put them on for mass or lift reasons... Hmm. I assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that the intake fuselage wasn't anywhere near as draggy as the big chrome ramscoop deal (Which is between the tail verticals). I'm still having trouble keeping enough intake air in this plane, however, even at lower altitudes. But flying backwards at high speed is one of the modes of dead-fall so you're probably right. I don't know what you mean, exactly, so I highly doubt it. I built the body, using intake fuselage because, at the time, I didn't have structural, and knew I needed intake air. Then I stuck the engines aft of their fuel tanks. I'm guessing this is incorrect? Two votes against the canards and to move intakes to the rear. Copy that. I'll do a rebuild with those principles in mind. I'm confused about the advice in re: quantity of control surface though: If I want less control surface for more stability, how do I steer at 22km? EDIT: Oh, and how do I do invisible struts? I can't seem to figure that one out.

- - - Updated - - - Yeah, the extra control/lifting surfaces are for having SOME control in thin atmo. I fly it with capslock on in low atmo. You are correct that it can spin on a dime if you ask it, though. (Don't ask it.) I don't grok why at high-altitude, though, where the control surfaces should have /less/ purchase, it flips out like a rabbit on crack. My goal is a stable, responsive craft @ 30km. I've looked at all the tutorials, and this is as close to their advice that I can model...

Stock. I'll get those screenshots presently. Middle engine was the last part for testing. Was a 'basic jet engine' test @ 19,000m - 22,0000m with a speed of 340-440m/sec.

Goal was to pick up materials science from upper atmo on ascent, grab a full-value temp reading before I park a probe in Kerbin orbit to do it for me, later, and do EVA flyovers in orbit - then de-orbit and recover everything. Settled for a partial success.

So, at the suggestion of several posters here, I've taken to flying aircraft for my parts testing missions since I can more reliably produce altitude/speed combinations with an aircraft than I can with a rocket. I've attached a .craft for my two-engine test-bed. (Two-engine, so I can mount a single part to be tested, and for better climbing/speed performance for envelope pushing parts tests.) https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7Rn2EgE0DrDVzhFYjFwcVdnMmc/view?usp=sharing Below 8,000m, this thing flies like a dream. It's fast. It can fly nigh straight up. It rolls sharply and stops on a dime. It turns pretty well. (It'll turn too well if you're not careful and you can spin it out.) The rudder is useless, but good for trimming landings. I wish I had flaps for the final approach, but I've emergency landed it just fine every time I've taken it up. But it's not without some sweat-inducing attributes. It flames out around 22,000m - which I guess is normal for a basic jet engine - which can make thin-atmo testing a bit hair raising. I often dive on 0% throttle to hit my speed targets. What's worse, however, is the way that, at that altitude, the plane wants to tumble. It seems to have no rhyme, nor reason, on all three axes. It tumbles all the way down to 8km, and then suddenly aerodynamics start to take over. Normally, I'd assume this was the atmo being too thin to interact with the wings and elevons... but it enters the tumble so quickly and easily - and becomes impossible to control so fast - that it's clearly being acted on by /some/ force. This is at zero throttle, too. More expert analysis than I possess is required to diagnose this problem. As you probably figured out, this is where you come in. I'm looking for a craft that has ample thrust and lift for high-altitude, high-speed tests. Long endurance for visual surveys (though this will eventually be replaced by a VTOL craft to get the EVA requirements), and a stable flight profile so I can focus on getting into position, instead of wrestling out of a tumble.

Guys, you're all awesome. I managed to wrestle this thing into orbit with ~100m/sec of dV left for the de-orbit. (I was tempted to try having the pilot get out and push but I'm crap with RCS controls.) Given the losses described above, I'm happy with only losing ~200m/sec of dV on the ascent. This thing can park capsules in orbit, with science on board, and it involves - as described by a couple of people - tacking on a flight computer and watching the apo and time to apo. The analysis of what that RT-10 was doing is super useful for diagnosing future problems too. It is comforting and frustrating that it's not my piloting. My piloting I can fix. Swapping out to an LV-30 stage is expensive, but now I can at least make more informed decisions about it. Changing to 'Answered.' Two things struck me about this craft, though: 1) I need to make sure the PV panel is facing the sun before I get broadcast happy. Ran it out of power so my de-orbit was a hail-mary because my retrograde marker was at all visible on the navball. 2) The legs are too high. I wind up landing on the engine and the whole craft comes apart, losing all the scientific equipment... oops.