Hotel26

It's been known to happen. This is my Triop C1 cargo plane. It's a little beauty! Heck, I've even been known to kidnap a talented designer! This one pictured is due for a promotion to Red Tunic in my world, pretty soon. Pretty weird to think you have a double somewhere, isn't it?

My first asteroid and a successful flight test of Mosquito. Not a big one, RXR-929, but being on a collision course with Kerbin meant half the time within which to work and necessitated a rather large apogee.. Altogether, pretty satisfying! [And, yeah, tip of the hat to @Atkara for the push to get this bucket-list item done!]

How similar would you say your glitch is to this one: This one occurs in KSP 1.3.1 after "teleporting" with a mod I was working on. (I never solved this problem.) I'd like to know how similar the artefact is, though... Things shake and others within focus. But switch away and back and it's OK.

I always punch the BBCODE Copy button. It's the link to the png with the brackets added. That always seems to work for this forum. You're right: there are multiple ways and it's a bit confusing, too. Good luck and have fun with CommNet!! (I ignored it for a year and then discovered its intricacies are a blast!)

Try putting [ img ] and [ /img ] brackets (without the spaces) around the URL, like this: to embed the screenshot, if that's what you wanted. Or go to your screenshot in imgur and click "Copy" on the BBCODE and then paste it from your clipboard.

Making refinements to my Krux OFD (Orbital Fuel Dump). The basic 'jacks' design is courtesy of swjr-swis and has proved very strong and durable. I've decided to incorporate the Krew compartment directly rather than dock it later. [Click the first shot and then use right arrow for a full-sized slide show.] Using a Brikoleur "Wangari Maathai" as a lifter in this shot, but I've shifted to my new Methuselah ultra-heavy lifter now. The VAB looks like a cathedral in these shots... And now I'm building a Kraken-trap to see how stable this could be with, say, 5 ganged up... Five is definitely overkill with a half million kallons fuel capacity, but I'd surely like to have the docking capability! We'll see.

Ever see the movie Pushing Tin[*]...? Long story of a 48-hour shift this weekend, "pushing tin", dragging down one "shrimp boat" after another from KAC until the "big picture" turned into a continuous blur; anyway: meet DSRN-Omega-Methuselah: Methuselah is the ancient god of Overkill. To salvage something out of the weekend, I took a contract to put 12x deep space relays into the 25Gm band around the sun, one every 59.3 days... don't ask me why but it's lucrative and money talks. DSRN is a fairly light-weight Deep Space Relay Network. The Omega drive behind it is a fairly massive 69 tons. (Also overkill.) I wanted the whole thing up fast and didn't want all the maneuvering to orbit, jockey and refuel the deal. Enter, Methuselah. It felt oh so good to be lazy... * John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton; surprisingly great, great movie

Well, what expert (and prophetic) advice you've all given. Thanks also for the baseline. I've had some fun trying to implement it. Including on the last run, with just a Spark and a T100, I was a bit wasteful on fuel picking the landing site (avoiding a crater), so it didn't quite make it back into orbit. Cathat Kerman had to bale out and use her jet pack to finish the job. I didn't bother to try to finish the r/v with the jetpack, but never underestimate the dV of a very determined Kerbonaut! I think I like the idea of a Mk1 lander can with a Mk2 can remaining in lunar orbit and returning for reentry. That checks all the boxes and matches a suggestion above about Apollo? I'll report back here when I'm done and also how well my 12 year-old enjoys it.

My son has started to show interest in KSP... So I thought I'd put together a mission to the Mun and return that embodies rendez-vous and docking. It's been a challenge to dust off some cobwebs! My goals are: 1 Kerbal. Plant a flag. Anywhere on the Mun. Return. Splash down within 100km of KSC. Or land on the Green... Necessitate a rendez-vous and docking. This is really important because this is a pedagogical mission! It can't be too close on the budget because this is for kids. So I have a working prototype and of course I'm wondering how much the scalpel could take off this mission now. It feels like it's pretty fat... Here's a shot of my first cut at this: which is: junior dock z200 battery flr10 mp mk1 pod communotron 16S t400 with 3 mk2r chutes and 3 rv105 rcs and 3 lt1landing struts lv090 terrier junior dock fla10 adapter 2 T800 tanks dart engine tr18A stack decoupler t800 rocko adapter jumbo64 with 3 gantries and 3 r8 winglets mainsail engine

You don't recall the approx lon/lat for that landing site, do you? Thanks! (Have 2 for that...)

I mean... I wouldn't... It wouldn't be... ethical. Once, maybe, for the scientific curiosity. Or the thrill of living dangerously. Like if the AA batteries in the warp drive failed at that moment... Naah.... -> <- I mean, *I* don't even use warp to stop a spinning craft, no sir. "Teleport" is probably the wrong word; I think I prefer "shimmer"...

The Universe Is Deeply Mysterious! Quantum Mechanics surmises that this is possible, but I, just moments ago, watched two craft become mutually and co-relatively invisible and pass through each other. A very weird observation and I am still shuddering. The vehicles had just separated for one to turn on course for a maneuver node for the Mun. MechJeb engaged warp just as the craft had started an imperceptible drift back together again and I watched one simply merge and pass through the other! Or vice versa! I knew this was possible. The same way that a de-orbited craft will not actually crash unless a) under observation! or 2) the perikee is set lower than some magic number(*) * now scientifically determined (i.e. overheard in a bar...) to be 22km (in the case of Kerbin) Weird all the same to see Science being borne out!? Of course... ...the implications -- e.g. for docking on the far side of a large craft -- are huge. Simply, uhm, teleport, as it were, over there. Yeah?

This is Crab. Crab scuttles around the orbit lanes, seizing clutter (old space stations, fuel dumps, dead boosters etc), bleeding out fuel and then pushing the refuse into de-orbit trajectories. It brings the fuel back to one master fuel dump for consolidation. It carries enough fuel to also rescue craft stranded by fuel-starvation. Capacity for 4 hitch-hiking Kerbals + one jump seat for thrill-seekers. It's also an efficient tug for relocating heavy equipment. Fully fueled, it's easily able to ascend from the surface of the Mun into orbit, perhaps to act as a fuel tender. With a Klaw attachment, it could usefully serve in the reassignment of an asteroid's orbit, after capture. I have a second Crab on the way to the Mun. (Don't foresee ever using more than 2 in the fleet.) Trials will take a couple of weeks as I clear out the junk from LKO...

Hubba hubba. Get a load of the cargo bays on that transport plane... I've been doing housework, cleaning out my LKO lanes of cruft that has been building up during this illustrious career. (In preparation for a new launch progression strategy based on HKO (high Kerbin orbit). The "Munar Park" experiment, on the edge of the Mun's SOI, is not working out so well, although it is no yet dead...) Thank the Kraken for KAC!! I've been so busy with it all that I use it: not only to schedule subsequent maneuvers; but also to: put 1-minute timers on everything I touch that needs (non-urgent) cleaning up later consulting future alarms to find >= 1-hour gaps to schedule new tasks for launch The timers in 2 are intended to never leave any task without a timer tracking it. These timers expire in 60 seconds and I close/ignore them, knowing they go onto the greyed-out list of expired timers, which can still be consulted and acted upon. Standard procedure, I'm sure...

Don't feel like you are alone. I'll be on 1.3.1 a while longer yet. I did buy MH (to support Squad in gratitude for thousands of mind-saving hours of stimulation) but not to run it and have not run it.

Good to see you in the forum! Would like to see your pics, too! But Imgur albums don't work, AFAIK. I think every shot has to be individually linked. (pain) I use the link in the sidebar on the shot that Imgur labels [BBCODE] and that works. (Someone more expert than me may embellish on this...)

Beautiful looking rocket! Looking forward to seeing your further exploits as you post... ---- Lately. I did a docking experiment with an SSTO mock-up in space. The mock vehicle consisted of an Mk-3 cabin with 700k RCS tanks and senior docking rings at each end and I placed two of these 150m apart. One had a belly ribbon of 4 RCS thrusters girdling the CoM (my standard approach to SSTO maneuvering) and the other had 3: one top dead-center and the other two under angled 120 degrees away down on the lower-side, symmetric to each other. Docked one with the other; returned to save file; docked the other with the first. Measured time do dock and MP consumed (limiting max speed to 1 m/s) and concluded (unscientifically, non-rigorously) that only 3 RCS thrusters confers no significant disadvantage in maneuvering. But just 3 belly RCS thrusters can look a lot better rather than having lateral RCS thruster blocks placed between two cabin windows...

I had promised a surprise location, so here is one. Mun Tower 1 is located roughly at 0N 98E on the Mun. Here's a refueling operation in progress on the surface of the Mun: Unfortunately for the Escort, its pilot landed it 90m from the target, MT1 (Mun Tower One). The tower is a Telemagic tower (marked out with 4 flags indicating 2 "runways" on a relatively flat site) with a refueling apron 30m in radius. Refueling the Escort would have taken a total of 10 seconds if it had landed within 30m of the tower. A pair of Vodka Daiquiri fuel trucks, doppelganged, had therefore to be employed to shuttle fuel to the Escort, requiring a total of 7 trips.

My final revision of Escort sporting the landing "legs" that enable it to land in lo-grav and take on full fuel has arrived at the Mun and has made 2 and a half fuel trips to the surface. And I've assembled a small collection of Escorts now at lunar station MX1. I have another two out at Munar Park which is in munar orbit at an altitude of 2,000 kms. Duna Beach Head Charlie is enroute for Munar Park now and will be my first Escort-assisted launch from the Mun (via an Oberth dive on Kerbin). At this stage, I am starting to worry that the rendez-vous penalty (days waiting) for such a high-altitude, long orbital period base is going to be problematic for some operations. [Well. Just an excuse for some pics.]

I understand your sentiments most precisely. My ten year-old questioned me about this a few years ago when I first installed MechJeb because my household had a strict no-modding policy (mainly about Minecraft)... When/if one outgrows MechJeb (which has been a great teacher!), KER is the natural replacement umbilical for information. I had to make an exception for KSP mods because the KSP biological culture is mod-rich but I try to limit the number. I have a shortlist of essential exceptions: KER and KAC are the prime examples. Both are informational. KER also has a straight-line distance stat that can be used with Law of Cosines [2nd citation in OP] to establish exact spacing in an orbit (if one wanted to be that precise) [although the same number appears in the Map View in stock]. The rationale with orbital period is that all participants return to the same position/speed at the same moment and this is what "freezes" drift. And it's directly and easily adjustable.

With KER installed, there is a read-out on orbital period down to the millseconds. The orbits don't have to match perfectly (geometrically), but if you use RCS or ions (especially thrust-limited for the final tweak) and you note the orbital period of your lead satellite and then you tune the followers to have the same orbital period right down to the millisecond or as near as you can get... you will have done the job as well as it can be done.

The new guys in Marketing have overruled me... fins are back... "Better gas consumption..."

I added fins to my Escort rocket sled. Well, fins (with outboard T-800s) looked too retro, not to mention the unnecessary weight. So I went with the tail cones instead. This means I can land it on the Mun. Refuel it. Re-orbit to tag a twin. Refuel that too. Then push both out to the Munar 2Mm outer orbit where I intend now to assemble interplanetary expeditions. (Will probably have a station/fuel dump at 25km to buffer fuel and one out at 2,000km.) Then use a fully-fueled Escort to do the interplanetary transfer insertion... THUMP!! Using what I learned with the Escort project (particularly the first usage of Rhino engines), I did a make-over on my old Minotaur fuel tanker tech. Result is Titan... (click the first below for a slide show) It looks so far like it can loft at least 75K kallons of LF + a few of OX into LKO. (I'm wondering also if, with elementary wings and chutes, I could lob the second stage back over the KSC and control it well enough simply to land it on the green for recovery... separate project)

OK, I see your total fuel is 4000 units, which indicates the front Mk-2 fuselage is the short fuel fuselage and NOT an inline dock. And why I was having fuel starvation problems. I also missed that the tail cone was a chute. (Must change my monocle!)

I wonder to what you attached the main gear? If you're attaching them (logically!) to the wings, you may get a machine that is a fussy lander. I always (cough) attach stuff such as gear and engines to the fuselage and then (cough) gizmo it out to where it is supposed to appear. Result is a robust lander. Love the appearance of this one!! (It's awfully tempting. Hmm, do I need another 2-Kerbal SSTO. Well I learn something every time, so...) Update: @Triop: that's a real kick to fly, sir! With just two RAPIERS and a total of 3600 units of LFOX, I struggled to get it supersonic until I realized I could light the rockets to get it over the top and begin a nice healthy climb. The kind of plane pilots love to commune with due to the care & attention required!