Warzouz

BTW, you should favor JPG over PNG, it's more lightweight for images. PNG are better for graphics.

Agree for tanks (height only, not diameter), adapters (with fuel and without), and wings (no clue, though).

I never drove for a long period on Eeloo (just tested a Hyperedited rover there for hundreds of metres) there. But I landed several times on Eeloo. The surface is smooth and nearly crater free ; not like the Mun... So it's quite safe and easy. I've a rover design built for 1.0.5. It may need some upgrade for a long rovering as wheels uses more power than before. Maybe you can adapt from there. The landing skycrane is quite easy to use. Most of the price of this stuff comes from the RTG you can't really do otherwise on Eeloo. have fun.

Basic SAS uses less electricity than hold retrograde. To economically hold retrograde you have to use SAS and orient yourself to retrograde. But when you're around 45km, SAS is not needed anymore, the pod will keep itself to (surface) retrograde.

Just paste the URL of your screenshot.

Don't use rubber in your rocket design, you fool Mine : You do the perfect burn, but realize you aren't on the projected orbit at all : You forgot to change the "control from here" to a prograde part... You decouple your interplanetary stage and see your docking port leaving with the debris : you plugged it backward. You plan a "school bus" mission to jool and notice in LKO the 16x passenger cabin is empty of Kerbals... You prepare a Eve probe lander mission to get some juicy science. You select a polar landing site. Reentry OK, chutes OK. Until you realize, the landing area is always in the shade due to surrounding mountains... You proudly set a perfectly circular orbital probe into Duna SOI. Then returning later to it, you realize it has be swung into Kerbol orbit (non circular, of course...) by Ike. and the ultra classic : you are preparing for a nicely tuned interplanetary manoeuvre node in LKO and press the space bar instead of the map/navigation key, thus trashing your entire unused interplanetary stage.

Eve ascent vehicles are quite harder to deal with flipping than other rockets. dV is much higher than on Kerbin, so you need more staging. That mean your rocket frame will change quite rapidly. On Kerbin, you usually dump you lower stage when the atmosphere don't affect your ship much so lack of fins on your second stage aren't an issue. But on Eve, you dump your first stage while still in heavy soup. If your second stage doesn't have fins, it'll probably flip. but if it has fin, your first stage may flip because you moved your COL forward (so your rocket become more unstable). Then you can still add bigger fins on first stage which will solve the whole issue... until you remember you have to land this thing on Eve. Big fins can make the whole ship flip head first on reentry (which is baaad) Eve landers/ascent vehicles are kind of a puzzle.

There are 2 reasons you can fail Your flight technique is flawed (or need optimisation) You rocket design is flawed (TWR, dV...) I would recommend you to practice with Stock Kerbal-X in sandbox game. It's an easy rocket than can go to the Mun, land and come back with more than 500m/s of spare fuel. Then you can go to Minmus (with even more spare fuel left). If you have a hard time flying/landing, there are some mods that can help you (MechJeb). Look at what autopilots do, then you can try it yourself. If you have a hard time designing rockets KER mod can help you (MechJeb too). Or use stock rockets and try to understand how and why they are built that way.

I should say I'm not really sure about MK1 parts, but I'm quite sre about MK1-2 command pod (the silly heavy one) I usually add a partially filled heat shield on "custom" vehicles such as those stacked MK1 pods (sometimes 6 of them...) designs we nearly all do to avoid using the heavy MK1-2 pod. Well, that's strange. Again, I don't have KSP here and I don't have used MK1 for quite a while, but I don't think my heat level goes up to 50% critical at 60km. I know that critical heat level is above 90% for MK1-2 when reentering from the Mun (3000m/s)

I agree that you should try to send the biggest part you can on target. The less docking you do the better. But precise landing is not that hard when you can manage landing well. Even, I though it was hard so I didn't tried until quite recently, I succeeded immediately. It was much easier than I though. I remember targeting a Mun arch and had to do a emergency burn not to hit it ! The hardest thing to do is to really slightly aim above your target. The left/right errors are the easiest to get (the display is not precise enough to get <3km precision without one or several course corrections). So it's the hardest to fix. The vertical distance is easier to handle because you can easily burn radial (in or out) and hover very far (by wasting fuel though). I suggest avoiding the "kill speed and drop on target". It's very expensive and not precise. The cost of a correction burn is usually high because you fall toward the ground and you don't have much time to do it. With a shallow approach, a very small burn can increase or decrease your range by few kilometres. As a final tweak, you can always do a little hop toward your target. It's easy if your ship isn't too bulky and responds well to reaction wheel control..

Just to try what NOT to do : Kill you horizontal surface velocity above 70km then let you fall down to the surface. You will probably not survive. The fall is too short to slow you down and you may not be able to safely open your chute, even above water. It's doable with drogues though. The high atmosphere is too thin to let you open you chutes when you speed is low (even though that may no save you either ***) As for my usual design for reentry vehicle : as many, it's the simplest I can. Usually a pod and one chute. I add a heat shield only for interplanetary reentry. It's not useful for Mun and Minmus. Stock Kerbal-X don't have any heat shield and can safely reenter from Mun, Minmus and even Duna (I've not tested Eve, But I think it's good to go too) As for trajectory, I aim for PE at 30 to 34km. I keep SAS in high atmosphere then remove it around 45km. *** Well, I remembered landing on Duna with Chutes (no drogues). My ship wasn't slowing fast enough, and I slowed down with engines to let my speed be under the chute safe deploy. Then I deployed the chutes. But even with the chutes, the ship was still gaining speed and as soon as the speed went over the safe speed, the chutes were destroyed, even they were safely deployed... Hope fully I could do an emergency landing on engines, but that cost me the return home EDIT : And I agree with @Snark, Drogues are note really useful for Kerbin for a regular reentry. I used them to land very heavy vehicles though back in 1.0.5 (like a 500T first stage recovery...). But they are great for Duna to allow you to open your regular chutes without burning fuel.

Here is a probe rover I did back in 1.0.5. The atmospheric skycrane is now dangerous but Duna don't need one. The rover should be modified to handle the increased power need of the new wheels.

With a rocket ! Your question could be more specific : what part you don't grasp ? There are plenty of tutorial video on youtube about going to the Mun.

It's even worse, the lander is jumping and don't do contact with the ground. I recently did a Gilly Ion lander . I used 4 lightest landing gears to create a proper lander. I couldn't get into contact with the ground. I toggle the gears and the lander landed immediatly on the engine... "KSP Gear : we'll make you love no using them"

Ah, I didn't know that. But RCS packs are very weak.

Yes, but this engine is very useful when you want to build RCS only ships like medium rang tugs. You gain efficiency by not using several engine types and fuel. I find the Reliant not useful, it's ISP is too low.

SSTO rockets are easy in KSP because you only need 3200m/s to LKO. I'm not sure that's really possible using that to real life LEO except for marginal payloads. For example, for fun, I tried to transform Saturn V into a SSTO rocket. Totally ignoring that TWR would drastically going down, the rocket would have to be 5 time bigger (14000T instead of 3000T) without taking into account the new engines you should add to lift it (so you would need more fuel and more engines and more fuel and more engines and more fuel)... Sure Saturn V wasn't only LEO, but you get the point. SSTO rocket (and even space planes) works nicely when low orbit dV is reasonable. The difference between a Kerbal SSTO rocket and a regular rocket is not that much (20 to 25% more massive ?) so it's manageable by current engines, just adding one more. IRL (for Sarturn V, it's 5 times heavier and it wouldn't even lift off until nearly all fuel would be depleted....) That also explains why SSTO rocket are mainly a post release designs. Before, LKO was 4500m/s, SSTO rockets would have been much heavier and expensive compared to regular rocket (or even asparagus) As for payload fraction in KSP, SSTO do worse than staged rockets. I think that best payload fraction is around 25%. My SSTo rockets are around 16 to 19% (which is not that bad is you consider that I keep fuel and parts for the recovery) Finally, I totally agree with your final statement about docking into orbit. To do that, you need more parts which will moslty stay on you final ship. Only do that if you like doing rendez-vous and docking. EDIT : this topic should be moved in "Gameplay questions" forum

You'll find you happiness there, even it was designed for 1.0.4 (reentry my be rough in 1.1.x) There is a lifter for 600T. More seriously, you can adjust the 200T lifter to carry your 225T to LKO. EDIT : as I was looking at my table, you should need 5 mammoth engines to lift off very easily (should be rated for 250T). Then add the needed amount of fuel. Ultra easy. Using 12 to 14 mainsails should be good too (might be more expensive though).

There is a complex system built by engeneers which pour oil onto the wheel and landing struts when the slope is over 1°. That's explaining the price and the weight of wheels and struts. What we didn't know is Kerbals live in snowy mountains. When something is not sliding, it's wrong. They are skiing (skidding ?) fanatics

Personally It's the classics Ascent : Eve takeoff Round trip : Tylo Navigation : Moho encounter Manoeuvre : Rendez-vous But what I fear the most : Fighting the manoeuvre node handle for interplanetary navigation... This thing is simply user-unfriendly and seems designed to poison the gameplay.

I agree that the contract system is off and don't serve the game well. The problem is that IRL space programe aren't that way. If you look at some probe wiki page, you nearly always find the grouped by "programs" which as primary objectives (is they aren't fulfilled, the mission is a failure), secondary objectives and opportunism objectives. Those program objectives are split onto several "missions". KSP doesn't reflect that at all. The contract system is totally the other way around. There should be some kind of "contract building" feature which would be as important as building the rocket or flying it. Further more, on a different level, the game has no "story mode". I understand @NovaSilisko was trying to implement some of it into an eastern eggs chase. There could have been a much more driven game mode for new players (maybe plugging together those tutorials and scenarios and stitch them with some background story) . I would have much appreciate that when I started the game... EDIT : As I said several times. the current contract system feels ths game should be calle "Kerbal Space Flight" not "Kerbal Space Program". Also with the lack of KAC-like feature.

@Alshain is true. You can send a 100T "pencil like rocket" to space, even worstly shaped payloads than his screenshot. Wobble can be contained with struts and mostly engin gimbal reduction. Even fins control has to be reduced by default. A well designed rocket should mostly fly by itself. If you have to force it eastward, that mean you thrust is too high. Don't turn east, reduce or stop thrust for a moment, then burn again. By doing that, you rocket will always keep straight and won't wobble. Well, that not OP subject related though...

In my table, I compare the different recovery of my rocket, of course. I don't compare it to a fictive rocket. I'm not telling that by landing a SSTO rocket you gain (no recovery value - 97% average recovery value), I just stating the average cost of a launch. In my 1.1 campaign, I don't use SSTO rockets, my launches are more expensive, not doubt about that (around 1000 per T, maybe more). As for crashing the recover rocket, that happens but quite rarely. Even if the rocket fall, you still get most of it. I quite don't get your argument : every mission failure (partial or total) cost if you don't use reload. When you forget something, you need another mission to bring it. That costs a lot too. Sure recovering a rocket is an additional part of the mission but that's not harder than landing a SSTO space place on the runway.

I tend to let my second stage over 1000m/s or they become too small. My first stage is helped by boosters for taking-off.

SSTO space planes are still cheaper than SSTO rockets (recoverable of course). The issue is that they aren't scalable. Once you have a flying plane, you can't just double every thing to get a double payload. You can for SSTO rockets. It took me a lot of time to tweak my recoverable SSTO rocket. But when I did that, I got the whole family of launcher (11 of them) very quickly. As on the subject : Since dV LKO requirement went from 4500 to 3200m/s the gain from using asparagus is much less important than it was back in beta. Asparagus are more mass efficient but less cost efficient. What is the real gain in launcher mass % (should be easy to get) and in funds (harder, depends on design) ? for a 3200m/s rocket. As for SSTO, it's also easy to compare in mass, but not in funds as a SSTO don't care about using the most expensive parts (they get them back, or 97%) PS : OK, sadly, time to work now...