Chaos_Klaus

Coming from interplanetary space, you can tweak your encounter so that you pass over the a pole of your target planet. This way you can capture directly into a polar orbit. You can do this just when you enter the target's SOI. Play with the normal/antimnormal and radial-in/out burns to see how your flyby is changing.

You can (and should) do an apollo style fairing entirely without the extra nodes. Build your CSM. Then attach the docking port of the lander directly to the engine of the CSM. The docking port can be staged to seperate the CSM from the lander later. You may have to enable staging for the port as a tweakable. Disable the shroud on the CSM engine to make it look better. Below the Lander, add a decouper and a fairing base. Build the fairing and close it around the CSM. Done. The fairing base itself can not decouple any parts, except the actual fairings. Anything you want to detach from it has to have a decoupler. Using a stack seperator between lander and CSM is not advisable, because it will be in the way when you decouple and turn around to dock again.

But his KER is set to atmospheric and even then he should have enough delta v. The delta v map actually shows vacuum delta v even for atmospheric ascents, so you also need to look at vacuum values in KER. Drag losses for reasonably aerodynamic rockets are included. So this lander should have way more then enough delta v. So apart from judging TWR for liftoff, you actually never have to look at atmospheric stats in KER.

It super unaerodynamic. All the parts sticking out will create drag. Especially the outer tanks that are mounted sideways. Between 270m/s and 340m/s is the so called transonic region. At these speeds you suffer lots of drag, before punching through the sound barrier at roughly 340m/s when drag will be a little lower again. So I guess your craft struggles to overcome the sound barrier.

But warp 10 is the warp barrier!

Well ... that's how calculating delta v works.

You are going about this the wrong way. Reentry effects don't matter. They are purely cosmetic. All in all, losses to atmospheric drag are small. You are more likely to overheat you nose cone then to loose too much delta v to drag. Don't worry about speed. The important thing is to point prograde while you go between 250m/s and 350m/s because that's where you'll encounter lots of transonic drag. As long as you go pointy end prograde, you're fine. With the pre-1.0 aero model, you wanted to stay below terminal velocity. Now, terminal velocity is super high during ascent, because drag is waaaaay lower.

Everything looks quite normal. You see two "close" approaches that are both not at all close. The timing of these particular orbits is probably not ideal so that the objects miss each other and never get closer although the orbits are touching.

Each key represents a point along a curve. The first two values represent x and y values. The following two values are optional and represent the slope of the curve before and after that point. Together, all keys represent a so called float curve.

KER makes assumptions on when you do your staging. In this case it assumes you'd activate the boosters immediately after activating the mainsail ... because that would be the sane thing to do. So in effect, it's showing you stage S2 with 0m/s, and probably 0s burntime. Then S1 is the Mainsail burning together with the boosters. KER doesn't give you the numbers you want, because it can not know when you actually activate the boosters.

One solution is to have the engines pulling the craft rather then pushing it. Another way is to use the stock autostruts. Enable advanced tweakables in the settings. Then rightclick a few parts and auto strut them to the root part.

Oh and by the way ... you need a horizontal tail plane. At the moment you have no way of controlling pitch or roll other then the reaction wheels in the cockpit.

Hm. It's a really tiny patch.

@Kobymaru I have this feeling that you are not using the transfer planner to its full extent. When you click "Plot it!" it shows you this porkchop plot with the black crosshairs. You can actually click around in this plot and it will give you the transfer parameters. Every point in this plot represents a different transfer. You can even click and drag too scroll around. That planner can give you the exact parameters of any transfer you want. It just gives you the most efficient one by default.

Oh dear ... I have to cry ... performance improvements!!!! I can now turn on anti-aliasing and max out all the settings without seeing a slow motion slide show ... on a notebook! This feels like the best update ever.