Jaeleth

You can design your plane so that the engines are on both sides and the central rear of the plane (tail) is, say, a liquid fuel fuselage. Then attach the separator and the cargo there, much easier to drop than with the cargo bays. Beware of CoM change when you release the payload, though... or you can carry it above the plane, with a radial separator or hard point, pitch up, go vertical, separate, and return to horizaontal flight. (Actually, just pitch up a little, the parachute will do the rest) you can carry it below, like a bomb, but check if the landing gear has enough height for take off or you can even, carry it inside the cargo bay with a docking port and land at the place, and unload it slowly And take off again

Advanced building 101 I recently found a problem, and I would like to know if there's someone else out there with the same problem. I am building colonies at every world. Some are older and are, therefore, bigger. They have been built in career mode, so they are made up of a mix of attached blocks through docking ports, on the surface. One of them, my minmus fuel factory, has grown in size quite a bit, the latest addition was a nice landing pad, placed quite far from the main building, via a long pipe which was assembled, in place, in 3 sections. What happens is that, since terrain is not level and there is yet to be done a mod that allows for buldozzers or terrain levelling, the landing pad, when I warp time, clips the terrain mesh a little. this is enough, however, to make parts of the landing pad exploding and jumping into the air. the reason why I adopted the "no legs" building process is that it is easier to standardize equipment, since, independently of local gravity the port height for each block remains the same, unlike when we use legs. Besides... It looks better... Knowing if port height matches is, as you can see, of paramount importance before sending base components to be assembled millions of miles away, and if I have to design this for each scenario, instead of using default design for all, it's a pain in the ass... but.... The no legs approach is giving me this problem... What do you suggest? Using legs will prevent this on larger ground bases? Is it worth the pain? Anyone knows when bulldozer mod will be available? Maybe making smaller bases (in terms of area)? How have you overcome this problem, if you ever encountered it? I can think on a number of alternatives, Imwould be interested in knowing thenless painfull ones eheh

You now have a 25km range. In the old days you'd have to fly real low and perform some aerobatics to keep within 2.5km rangs, but not anymore. You're safe. Still, you should go near the ground, say, 100m above ground, if not for anything than making sure your cargo lands where you intend it too land. Deploying chutes is very easy. Just attach your cargo to the plane with a separator, linear, radial, doesn't matters there are are lots of ways to do this. Insert chute deploy on the same stage than the separator... Bingo. Done! worked many times on my missions on kerbin surface

The mission text is poorly written. 60km burn is what you use to intercept asteroids when either the intercepting ship has low acceleration or the dV between ship and asteroid is huge, usually is, and I mean HUGE, like around 1000m/s. start your burn, much, much closer, test the distance, plus, when you have a dV of, say, 10m/s to target, stop burning, make sure your ship keeps retrograde to target and wait until target passes ABEAM your ship. When it does, burn the last 10m/s never bothered with these training missions, anyway. but they are useful when starting to play, or they should, if the mission profile was properly done, that is... Docking the easy way? select docker, select a docking port, control from here, select target, preferably select a DOCKING PORT on target, if you can at the given distance, if not select one when close enough. point the ship towards the target (pinky circle with pink dot in center on the navball). Thrust rcs forward. No more than 5m/s if it is your first docking When close enough (50m) make sure ship keeps moving exactly prograde (pointing to the yellow circle on navball) and reduce dV between you and target to 0m/s. point ship to target again. go to target, select the docking port you selected as target, from the docker, and control from here. Point target to docker. now both ports should be aligned. get back to docker, move forward with rcs at no more than 1m/s. Keep ship nose on pink ring and keep yellow circle prograde on pink ring too (all aligned). When yellow circle tries to move away from center use side rcs's to bring it back gently to center. 10m or so from touch, reduce speed to 0.5 and then 0.2 m/s touch and dock. good luck. this method is the easiest for almost ANY 2 vessels but for the most huge space stations and capital ships, so it should be enough for a long time and by then you shall have figured out how to dock the big ones yourself

Never use wireless-anything for any critical timed input apps, that is, gaming or flying the real thing...

you will get an optimal hohmann transfer window from tine ro time only, so get all your ships ready to fulfill the contracts for that destination to launch at the same time, cram as much as you can on each vessel. Take surpluses, specially multiple sensor probes, you will get other contracts later and if the probes are already there, waiting on a dropship, you'll get heaps of money . Take at least 3 kerbals, they will gain experience and sooner or later you'll have a "plant the flag" mission. Take one lander. Make your ship as modular as possible so that you can change components, fuel tanks, engines for multiple mission profiles ( sort of as NASA is trying to do now ). Take a mining base with docking capabilities, so that you will have full autonomy. in other words. Take an entire colony fulfill as much contracts you can and wait there for the next contracts fir that world. Remember, plant mining bases always on low grav satellites.

The bigger the payload in one go, the cheaper it gets overall... It's the same in KSP as in real life. SSTO's aren't, usually, practicable to take large components upwards, although 3m can't be considered "large" anyway. SSTO's tend to consume much fuel for all that extra drymass they have to take up so do your (economical) maths if the fuel you are wasting with multiple SSTO launches is more expensive than dumping one or two engines and fuel tanks...

They both have a function a cooling the air entering the engine, cooler air, denser air, denser air, more kick out of your engine at higher altitudes. Never used nacelles, use pre-coolers quite often.

Using stock parts, simple solution: Low gravity worlds, not a factor, you can dock anything with anything, on ground. High gravity world. Very difficult to align docking ports with precision, so build a "hose" consisting of a series of small docking ports attached together, back to back, front to front, something like 6 to 10 jr. Ports will do. This will create a somewhat flexible duct that will adjust for small mis-alignments of ports. Attach this host to your refueling truck. It will look like an ardvark but it will work!

1. best tip of all... Even playing at hard mode, allow for quicksave. The game can and WILL turn against you even if you do everything right and you might end up loosing countless hours of gameplay. You can always decide if you accept the loss or reload at anytime and, this way, you'll be safe from bugs... 2. Periodically check if you contracts are still all there. Particularly when a recent contract is completed and always BEFORE saving game. When you notice some bug has ocurred in game, whatever type of bug, go to contracts and see if they are still all there before saving. There's a bug, in career mode, where all contracts are wiped out and a row of new ones appear. If you already spent your resources building ships for contracts that evaporate... You're done for This is a very serious and disrupting bug! If you do not allow for quicksave in mid game this bug WILL get you and WILL kill you, sooner or later. 3. In the beginning, balancing the budget is top priority. Limit you designs to "crude and workable" forget "fancyfulness" factor. 4. You will be following certain tech tree choices. Before accepting any contract make sure that you have or are in the verge of having the required techs, otherwise you might get into a dead end... Ignore risky contracts, later on you'll have the chance to take them all if you wish. 5. Try to complete several contracts with a single launch, but you already said that, this apllies to all stages in career mode, even when you got endless tech and huge resources. 6. If you are unsure with your designs you can always try them in sandbox, consider that simulating, NASA trained astronauts in simulators time and time again before declaring them "mission-ready" and, nowdays, all spacecraft and aircraft are simulated before manufacture. But if you want to do it the really hard way avoid using kerbals in testing the vehicles, use parachutes to recover as most as you can from the vehicles and use a tested kerbal recovery system before you send a kerbal in it. Make sure you trigger the rescue sequence with the abort button and not through the staging sequence. Take time to see if there's something wrong with the design before launch, use the CoM, CoL and CoT tools frequently. 7. For aircraft use this method (used in real life): First check stability, apply throttle, let it gain some speed, then thr off, brakes apply, see if it runs smoothly on runway. Next see if it has a good CoL, TWR and landing gear placement. Full throttle, see if it accelerates fast. It should be reach rotate speed before 1/2 runway, so pull up gently on stick until nose comes up, if it does so before 1/2 runway is ok, thr off, brakes aplly. Next take it off ground... From now on there is no option but a smooth landing or loosing the vehicle. Do a circuit around the runway only. Test for optimal TWR, if nose is not too far up (high AoA) in order to achieve level flight. From there on, just do longer flights, aerobatics and or SSTO if it is the case. Remember to have an ejectable control module, with parachutes if you take a kerbal. if landing gear is ok, emergency landing almost anywhere on kerbin is feasible, if landing gear is lost (usually meaning plane suffered strutural failure) but, somehow, it is still controllable, ditching is better than crash landing in ground, unlike real world.

Thanks for the tips guys, I think I'll be getting closer attention to strategies since I have one active, it is to transform science in money so it shouldn't matter but i'll take a closer look or cancel it since I don't need any more science and money is not in short supply at this stage. I didn't loose kerbals but I did lost one or 2 ships, maybe I shouldn't have scrapped that big ship heading towards eve just because of a slight error in insertion angle, which turned out into not being able to aerobrake it enough for insertion... . I'll take the advice of warzouz and convert all points to reputation. With science maxed out and 14000 surplus and over 20 million credits the only marker I find it funny to grow now is reputation ), as long as I don't loose a whole fleet of ships money should suffice .

I noticed that, during my career, reputation was always climbing. But when I started to have Eve, Jool, and so on, contracts, they were mixed with easy contracts as well, as a rule of thumb I accept ALL contracts and fulfill them all, but reputation started to decline, first 1 percentage point, now the second. Is it caused by the fact that I am accepting too easy contracts at a point in the game that I should only accept difficult (3*) ones? Should I decline, then, (1*) or even (2*) contracts? A pitty, because some of them are still fun and relaxing to do How does this reputation marker works then?

well.. We're at the end of 2015 and the bug is still here... Very annoying. Squad, do correct these annoying bugs before moving forward, please. Only workable solution, use mechjeb as suggested. All others may or may not work, mechjeb always works.

Thanks. It worked but with some limitations: only works when pressing Alt at the same time I press center mouse wheel

Do you know if there is a way to change focus to any part of a ship inflight (translation of the viewpoint) ? Like the shift key on the VAB. for big ships it is hard to manage inflight parts that are far away from the CoM.

Yes, I know perfectly well the difference between mass and weight, my post was already too long to be concearned with semantic details since the difference here was unimportant because I was not calculating anything, just explaining a strategy.

I could send you my ship, but that would be a spoiler since part of the joy of this game is to design the ships and tackle the engineering problems that come with big ships Use hyperedit and sandbox mode to test your designs on Eve before sending a real mission. took me a month (real time) to get the right ship design and landing procedures to do this. 2 hints: when using a big rocket there's a real problem in getting the kerbals on ground, sometimes it is not possible or practical to build large ladders. Deploy a small, disposable, crew cabin at bottom of rocket and simply transfer kerbonauts between that and the manned module which should sit at the top. landing a ship in eve means thermal shields. The 3.75m shield may nit be enough for large rockets with boosters (of course it won't ). Cluster smaller shields around a 3.75m one, like a daisy and attach them to the bottom of the rocket. Mammoth engines recommended for first and second stages, first stage multiple mammoths, i use 4. You canplace thing on bottom of a mammoth by attaching a radilal attachement point to the mammoth, sideways, and rotate and slide it beneath the mammoth. The rest is up to you to figure out, go have some fun

Taking off eve is talking about 500 tonnes of ship (around 1000 tonnes in eve). it is possible, it is almost easy, but it requires a LOT of work. i am talking landing at less than 1000m MSL on eve, not on highlands and peaks. Curiously the HARD thing is not to get out of Eve. But to LAND on Eve... now, before everyone else sets me on fire let me explain... landing a small or medium crewed craft on eve is extremely easy. Just a parachute and it will practically stop the damn thing in mid air as it falls in that thick soup of an atmosphere. But landing a 500t beast... Not so. lots of parachutes and engine power in the last tens of meters is required for hyper-soft landing no landing gear will hold it, 9 out of 10 times the entire ship brakes in small pieces when landing on legs, wheels, you name it. The trick is landing on the engines, which will have to be mammoth for the first stage, and those engines will have to be attached to the fuel tanks with lots of struts for extra rigidity. getting out means refuelling, if you used the engines for softening the descent. you-ll have to land a drill, or tanks on wheels, if you want to make it harder, or an even bigger ship... Anyway, using the drill or tanks: dock it with the main ship (this is a very hard design problem, recommend using a hose made of mutiple attached small docking ports) and fill up the tanks. the ascent is somewhat tricky, climb "very vertically" and from the 10000m the atmosphere behaves like sea level on kerbin (sort of). Have a very light final stage, monopropellant and some puffs will do nicely, for the final m/s you'll need to get out of the gripping hand of eve. another problem is to get that big ship on eve. A ship big enough to get off eve should SSTO on kerbin, at least mine did, transferijg the fuel to the final stage to keep those mammoths burning without staging. Another boring and expensive and time consuming problem was to refuel the entire thing on orbit before ejecting to eve though... By the way, a career mission to plant a flag on eve costed me around 2.500.000 credits.... Because i didn't want to leave the poor kerbals stranded there. I am taking 3 of them to the surface and back, though. oh, almost forgot. The return ship. Getting them back to kerbin will cost me another 100-200k but it's a nuclear ship and is reusable so... this is data from a real mission. the point of landing so low on eve? I had to land near a rich mining vein so i could setup a mining operation for future manned lfights to eve. The only large rich mineral area i found near the equator (less deltaV) and with fairly level terrain was at low MSL so... Unfortunately EVE rich areas are all at low MSL, mountains and plateaus are poor in minerals, strange as it might seem and carrying large amounts of fuel or ore through big distances on the ground is NOT a practical option... Not even with mechjeb handling rover autopilot. That would mean a lot of movie watching or nap taking while playing KSP )) the aforementioned ship refueling on minmus orbit. shields assembled. Detachable engine assembled. To be detached prior to reentry eve. Refuel shuttle can be seen right of main ship Same ship, different angle. Waiting ejection to eve in T-31 days

The command pod or a docking port must be perpendicular to terrain, not pointing upwards. The easy way is to place a small docking port facing forward and when the rover is on ground right click the docking port and select "control from here". At this point the rotation of the port is also important, otherwise you-ll have the navball pointing forward but in an odd bank angle. For this matter the best is to test the rover in kerbin and see if the navball is rotated correctly.

Thanks for your insight and advice, Padishar.

Hi. I haven't stumbled into serious lack of speed problems until I decided to put together a huge space station, together with tow ships, manned ships, a fleet of probes and so orbiting EVE and all within a few tens of meters to hundreds of meters of each other totalling around 1200 part count... I noticed the graphics card is not that significant, I quadrupled the graphics card memory and switched from a reasonable older one to a more recent model with not a significant change in frame rate. I have only 2 mods, mechjeb, and alarm. I kept the same processor and memory. I think that processor speed is more important than graphics capabilities when dealing with large a large part count. As for memory, I have 6 GB. I'd like to know from you which item you consider most important in improving frame rate with high part count: graphics, memory, processor And also to know if, above a certain part count, there is simply no economically viable machine that can cope with.

I have used rovers extensively and yes, they are boring, as in real life, since they are slow... But they do cover a lot of ground with no fuel waste and accomplish multiple site sampling missions perfectly. I try to use as tiny rovers as I can and spread a lot of them on the planet's surface so that there's a chance to re-use one of them on the next contract. Anyway, the trick for rovers is mechjeb. I never needed mechjeb to fly my ships but after having a couple of accidents while falling asleep driving my rovers I decided to install it. Do it, it will make rovers much more usable. As for the topic. CoM and CoL relationship should remain the same anywhere in the universe, in thinner atmospheres go for bigger wings, testing in higher kerbin atmosphere, as mentioned is a very good idea. Pay attention to the slowest speed you can fly at high altitude, this will be your landing speed at Duna, if above 60m/s advice bigger wings or VTOL capabilities or chute, if your engineer on duna can refit them. Bigger wings difficult to lift off kerbin so you may want to make longer wings instead of increasing the wingspan. As for eve, aerospikes, a big plane, lsmall wings, lots of fuel and a network of mining stations, strategically placed, should do the job in duna you could consider ion engines, but since xenon cannot be mined, xenon switched from prime fuel for small long endurance craft in 0.9 to expensive junk in 1.0 onwards. Why should I build a craft that needs fuel to be ferried from a million miles away every time it runs out when i can mine other type of fuel right on the spot?...

Always allow for quicksaves in your settings, and save a lot. That's not cheating, in the real world there are no saves, but then again, in the real world the whole universe doesn't crash because of a computer bug... If you are in career mode remember that ANY flight can be translated into cash (unless it has kerbals on board and you care for the, like me) so, if you want to correct some issue and cannot revert a flight you can always edit the game file (make a copy first) and add the money you lost for that flight. And then, terminate the flight. Since time is, usually, not an issue in the game, returning the cash back returns you to the conditions prior to the flight.

Can you point me to a description of standard insertion from LO around original body? Escaping kerbin SOI first and then decelerating to Eve was the only way I thought possible to transfer. - - - Updated - - - never mind, yasmy, you already answered above, thanks

The best escape from kerbin burn should than be in a way that I am accelerating to escape kerbin while pointing BACKWARDS towards kerbin movement aroun the sun, right? If we consider kerbin heading while orbiting the sun to be 360, then, I should perform the escape burn at around radial 270, while on a normal, anti-clockwise orbit (W to E)?