cephalo

Hey, is this true? I did not know that. It's not documented on the wiki in any case.

Wheels are broken right now, so you want to use Claw's bugfix mod. Otherwise you will have no brakes.

Like others have said, it looks like a pretty good launch. The reason why you had to fight the whole way is because the air resistance becomes a brick wall near the speed of sound. That means that even a small angle off prograde is going to slap the tip of your rocket sideways. The rocket is never aerodynamic travelling sideways, so you want to point prograde during that critical time when air resistance is great. Also you don't want to hit the speed of sound too low, as a thick atmosphere compounds the problem.

I've tried to land on Mun from a very high altitude, thinking that since my orbital speed is so low I might save some dv, but what happens is that you pick up a ton of speed on the way down. I found that the dv requirement was around the same. You either have to kill that 600ms horizontally or vertically. The lower your orbit, the less time there is to build up vertical velocity. I guess that means the more expensive path is the middle ground between those two.

I'm guessing you won't find a lot of people who have successfully done that. I imagine the plane would look like a glider with tons of wing area.

Does this imply that the game grows more unstable as things are docked/undocked? Right now, the solution seems to be to save often and if something happens it can be cleared up by restarting the game. Does it eventually just become unmanageable if you dock too much? EDIT: KAS seems pretty fun. After I'm satisfied with my progress in stock, I'm going to play acareer with KAS and the life support mod and other part mods.

Yeah, same for me. All the connections vanished. I'm pretty sure the explosions were just colliding loose parts.

So, I was trying to build a Minmus mining operation, and after two attempts at making a fuel lifter I came to the conclusion that even on Minmus flats, surface docking is just too fiddly and time consuming. Landing struts sink into the ground, and other crazy things happen that prevent the kind of perfection required for surface docking. I can't spend 45 minutes docking for every fuel run. So my next solution was just go with the claw for this purpose. Ah, so much easier! So while my fuel lifter is filling up with fuel, I went back to put my over-extravagant, high part count mother ship into Minmus orbit from Kerbin. This thing is like a self sufficient ark, with about 9kdv, room for 20 Kerbals, great science lander w/ attached rover that probably can land and return from Duna, lab, a mining probe and ore converter, all powered by 24 nuclear engines. As soon as I hit the time warp to the next maneuver, the ship comes apart and everything but the cockpit plummets toward Kerbin, triggering a spectacular chain of explosions and flying debris. Reloading doesn't help, but fortunately restarting the game did cure the problem until I could get to Minmus. I haven't seen this before. My big mother ship has been fooling around in Kerbin orbit for a while with no issue other than the expected bad framerate. My question is, was this attack because of the claw? Is this something that will get worse while a working claw is in the game?

Is there a way to put them back into the 'stowed' position? That's where I want them. Also, after playing with it, I'm not sure about the rotation problem, It might just be that Minmus has no traction. In any case, I can slide around with RCS. It's the wheel height that kills the mission.

Ok, lets examine why my latest, really expensive project failed. I tested this design on Kerbin, and it worked fine. The idea was to use the lander legs to push the docking port up to a uniform height for surface docking in the standard way. So, I designed the legs to reach down lower than the wheels as in this picture in the VAB. You can see that the feet are a good distance lower than the wheels: On Kerbin this design tested fine, presumably because the weight of the craft pushed the wheels higher in relation to the legs, but on Minmus, this happened: As you can see, my extended legs are now floating very far above the wheels, completely ruining the design. This won't dock with anything on the surface. This is actually not the only problem. I'm not sure why, perhaps because I designed this in the VAB instead of the SPH, the wheels on opposite sides from each other rotate opposite from each other, making it uncontrollable. (<-- Not sure about this actually, might just be uneven traction on Minmus.)This confuses me because everything was fine on Kerbin. I think the problem has something to do with the fact that before landing on Minmus, I had docked to another ship to transfer some excess fuel. I think the docking somehow messed up the orientation of the wheels. Is there any way I can salvage this craft without spending my last dime on a do-over?

I find that I have to put radials on a reverse slope to be sure they won't explode. if I can't do that I use the next size ablator.

Hmm, What I mean is, my Duna lander design with small modifications could fulfill the contract. Could I build the lander, dock it with my interplanetary stage, then undock it in Duna orbit to fulfill the contract? All the actual parts will be new, it's just that they will be transported by the existing craft. That's ok right?

I have a contract for a new space station around Duna. I can fulfill this easily if I can dock the new craft to my pre-built interplanetary stage. Will docking my new craft with the old one nullify the contract? Googling tells me that you could previously fulfill 'new craft' contracts endlessly through docking, but that it was fixed. What does that mean? How does the 'new craft' requirement interplay with the docking mechanism?

I don't see how burning at the ascending/descending nodes saves dv. You still have to burn normal/antinormal in order to not miss correct? Otherwise your ap will be very far from Minmus orbit path right? NM I get it now. You meet Minmus at the other node.

I actually did that on the Mun, and made a very nice science lab bus that could land, drive around indefinitely and then launch itself back into orbit. What I didn't like about it was that while it was a great rover, it didn't have enough dv to be a versatile flyer. The result was that I spent 3 whole evenings driving around on Mun to reach different biomes until I wanted to throw up. I did see some cool things, but not 3 evenings worth. I'm ready for a minimum of driving on Duna.

There's always a passionate thread on every forum that serves no purpose other than pitting the fanboys against the critics regarding a topic where no agreement is possible between them. These go on for hundreds of pages.

Maybe overhead docking would be easier with the docking alignment mod. Surface docking requires extreme precision and closeness. Maybe there's a way to horizontally dock a rover, which might be a bit easier than overhead since you can more precisely align things with landing struts. EDIT: of course then you would likely have problems with rigidity when taking off... nm.

I tried docking ports on Mun, and I found it very difficult to dock that way. I got it to dock, but only after fiddling with various landing gear positions for 40 minutes. I was hoping the claw would be less fussy.

Here's the idea, I have a large duna lander, I want to deploy a small science rover to finish up the tech tree. I was thinking that underneath the lander I could have an appendage with a claw attached, that I could back into with the rover when were ready to take off and land somewhere else. Has anyone tried something similar? I've heard the claw can cause bugs and I've only used it once for a part retrieval contract.

So, I'm pretty stubborn about getting unfeasible rockets into orbit. I never know when to give up. I'll put rockets on sideways, whatever it takes. What I have discovered is, no matter what kind of stupid unbalanced rocket you have, if you stage your engines with SAS on and not touch any controls after that, your rocket will stay straight! I don't think the physics kick in until you touch something. So what you can do is fly straight up until about 30km, and then flatten out in the direction of your gravity turn. It's not the most efficient way to get to orbit, but you can get some ugly payloads up there this way.

Now that I'm on to bigger rockets, I no longer use them either. With the rockets I use now, I would need 24 SRB's to get a couple hundred dv. Not worth the hassle.

Someone posted an 'optimal rockets' series of graphs on the main forum that may have you covered.

Somebody around here said those large nose cones are broken, and your better off using other combinations of adapters and parts.

This is one of the headaches of the MPL system. One workaround is to take two copies of each experiment one to store the command pod, and the other to store in the MPL. Since the MPL has such small data storage, it's likely to tie up those experiments for a VERY long while. If you have two copies, you can take one home while you're waiting the years it takes for your local lab to process the other copy.

No middle stage eh? If that center tank is supposed to take you to Duna, maybe you should put a Poodle on there.