FyunchClick

OTOH, this is Eve, and supposedly losing speed before you break up in the thick atmosphere is a problem. The heavier it is, harder it is to slow before you hit the dangerous bit. Perhaps going in with just enough dV to kill your terminal velocity and land with a little bit of margin is the way to go?

True, I'm actually using both, KER reports it for COM, I switch RCS build aid to dCoM, then I fiddle until both are about equal and as low as I can get them. Those vibrations, were they for rover wheels or landing gear?

Wat kind of acceleration were you experiencing? For the first 10 km or so something in the area of 2 g should help with a smooth ride.

Wow, that was pretty grim. Great cliffhanger at the end.

Use the RCS Build Aid mod and the offset tool to balance it nicely on top of a big rocket (minimize engine torque). Make sure to put it in a fairing for a smooth launch, and strut it to the rocket if it swings around too much during take-off. When landing on the Mun, putting belly mounted Vernor engines on (again, balance using RCS build aid) for an easy landing. I've landed some pretty big ISRU equipped rovers on both the Mun and Minmus that way.

Fair enough, although these solutions seem mostly useful in career mode before you upgrade the tracking station to unlock nodes. After that setting up a node that combines normal and retrograde seems like the simplest solution of all.

SRBs also don't come with gimbals, so that smoothness you get from LF rockets could just be more control authority. For that reason alone I usually take off on LF and boosters. You can drag your LF engine ignition into the SRB decoupling stage so you don't have that pause between the two.

It's beautiful, but for some reason I suspect the embedded link to sketchfab is killing this page in IE (works on Chrome though). Of course, why are you using IE in the first place is a perfectly valid response to that... - - - Updated - - - (Edit: this was my entry for SSTOs but it got tacked to the last message) My Transport SSTO MKIV, gets to orbit easily with over 2.7 km/s left in the tanks. The three rapiers seem arranged asymetrically, but they're nearly perfectly balanced using RCS Build Aid mod, so there's virtually no engine torque. The two rcs blocks/ports on the wings are in line with the COM, giving it balanced translate and attitude control for every direction but pitch. There's some fuel connectors which are required for fueling the rapiers in closed cycle, but on the upside there's little or no need to pump fuel around manually to keep it balanced. Craft file here if anyone's interested.

Not sure if it qualifies as a station or a base. Basically, I captured this class E asteroid and put a station on it. It's in a 250 km orbit around Kerbin, and I'm planning on using it as a fuel depot, crew hotel and research station (for what that's worth at this point in the career) all in one (click past the first image, that's just the tug that brought it in orbit). The fuel depot is conveniently located right next to the housing facilities to prevent unnecessary suffering in case of a catastrophy.

You can combine your (anti-)normal vector on the manouver node with a retrograde to keep your apoapsis in place. You'll have to fiddle a bit as adding retrograde to (anti-)normal also changes your inclination, but I noticed you're saving dV for bigger inclination changes. By rotating your ship to keep up with normal/antinormal, you're actually wasting fuel because you're canceling out half of the cosine part of the angle you turn through of dV of the burn, because you added it in the first half of the burn but removing it again in the second. By adding retro as you set up the node to keep your eccentricity, you can go in the direction you're supposed to be going without wasting that dV. Also, you don't have to do that later (which is also a waste).

Exactly. RTGs are nice to power a probe core or as an emergency backup, but they lack the output needed for mining and ISRU where you can't use solar pannels (Dres and beyond basically).

I'd like to claim 12.5 km

Well I know a bit of Hindi (how to say thank you amongst it) and that didn't ring any bells so I wonder if google didn't serve up a plate of random word salad. I can do you some Dutch, do you prefer random tourist guide level stuff or actual non-sequiturs?

Could you do a little video on that? I'd love to see what you're talking about in action.

Basically they can reinvent the game over and over again with these incremental updates as they have before. Even the base platform get's a pretty hefty update now with supporting the new Unity engine. There's no storyline that would require a new version. And Kerbal is probably a slow burner, so the money would have been tricking in all this time funding for these incremental changes. I do wonder about the business side of things though, as at some point everyone that is going to buy Kerbal will have (or even more worrying, may have already), and at that point there's no business sense in in investing much time adding new features. The shift to other platforms than PC/Mac is part of finding a new source of revenue of course, and if it's sharing a common base, PC and Mac can lift along on the improvents coming out of those platforms, but at some point that market will saturate too. Then they'd either need to really reinvent the game in a Kerbal II of sorts, which should be offering enough to be worth buying too, have subscriptions or paid expansions to keep this deal going, or move on to something else. I know for me Kerbal's been the best deal ever, buying it at a sale and logging substantially more hours on it even than on my Fallout New Vegas playthrough (and I played that for months and months on end). I'd donate or buy expansions to keep this deal going (but not subscriptions, I hate the idea of having my game ransomed to a monthly pay-off).

One is a searchlight, the other is a floodlight. The searchlight is good when you use them for landing lights or headlights on rovers, because you can light up terrain a long way away. The floodlight is good for illuminating cargo bays, lighting up your ship exterior, or providing light around your ship while landed, generally lighting up a work area. Btw, in the VAB you can right click them and change the RGB levels, so you can change colors or even intensity if you feel they are too bright.

For my workhorse MKII transporter (hovering up rescuees all over the kerbin system and rotating crew on space stations) I have three rapiers and a single LV-N. I've also flung a huge MKIII based one at Laythe, it's got six rapiers, four whiplashes and two LV-N, based on a mix recommended by goslash27 at another thread. Both are designed to make orbit with kms/s of dV left over for onward journeys.

Interesting. Until now I've saved my plane changes for a point high in my orbital swing on the assumption that would always be cheapest there. I'll go and try how it works out with my next few captures.

Yes it's great. It lets you look at torque from engines, from RCS (translate and attitude), it has options to look at CoM and dCoM (dry Centre of Mass), and you can even include which resources you want to be included with the dCoM calculations. No ships of mine leave the hanger or VAB without tweaking torques to a minimum first.

No new pages yet? The suspense is killing me.

Wow, loved the build up to the reveal of the contents of that container.

Edit: ninja'd. With periapsis being at the same place as ascending/descending node, wouldn't the cheaper option be to burn just enough retrograde at periapsis for a highly eccentric capture , and then burn for a plane change at apoapsis? Since your speed is so much lower at apoapsis when very eccentric, any change to the speed vector(lit. dV) should be that much lower too. Of course, you need to combine normal/anti-normal with retrograde to prevent lifting periapsis). You can then finalize your burn for a circular orbit once you swing back to periapsis. Or in other words, since periapsis is where you're V vector is biggest, it also requires a lot of dV to modify the direction that vector; thus it would be the worst place to do a plane change. Or am I missing some arcane aspect of orbital maths here?

If you take for instance Kuzzters Hummlebee (http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/134375-Hummlebee-Mk2), it uses a very user friendly approach with Vernors. * Burn off most of the dV using the main engines. * switch "control form here" to the belly docking port, turn on RCS. * set your SAS to turn to prograde in "surface" mode (you may want to turn in the right direction manually first to prevent the SAS overshooting). * Use the translate-back key ("N") to touch down smoothly. Since you're tracking prograde on SAS in surface mode, when the speed counter on the NAV ball reads 0 you'll have come to a complete stop relative to the surface. Works perfectly on the Mun or Minmus.

I have seen the case being made that gravity losses outweigh drag losses most of the time (e.g every second you burn straight up you waste 9.8 m/s of dV) so I wonder if a gravity turn isn't preferred regardless.

LOLed at strawberry cheesecake.