Nich

I am guessing you know how to dock and rendezvous in stock? What is the issue? The only difference in RSS is reaction wheels can not hold your orientation and the distances are much larger and thus more sensitive. RCS placement is pretty important. You dont want your translations causing rotation and rotations causing translations. Caps lock will help with this but you still need a decent RCS layout. For rendezvous: 1. Set your orbit circular above or below your target depending if you need to catch up (below) or it needs to catch up (above) 2. Put a node anywhere on the orbit and pull retrograde until you see a closest approach 3. Hit next orbit until your intercept is a close as you can get it (~ 2500 km) 4. Drag the node around the orbit until closest approach is < 25km (you may have to adjust retrograde/prograde depending how circular the orbit is) this is an engine burn and should be 20-200 dv depending on orbit differences 5. Using MJ manorvor node editor add or subtract .1 or .01 dv from prograde until closest approach is as small as possiable < 5km (these adjustments should be less then 2 dv) 6 After you have made the burn you should have 180 degrees around the orbit to intercept. Half way there create another node and pull/push AN/DN to the intercept. Then adjust prograde/retrograde until closest approach is < 1km 7. At 45 degrees to intercept you can do one final adjustment to get closet approach < 200m (keep in mind how fast you are coming in and how big you station is as you do not want to run into it if you dont slow down quick enough.) If that doesn't help I could put together a quick video in about a week

or even SR launched from airplanes

@nepphhhInteresting I can recover to the SPH from anywhere. From there I can launch to the runway and recover to the VAB. Although this rocket it is small enough that I can launch it from the Runway anyways.

I Have launched about 150 sounding rockets so far in my current 1.7.3 play through. So I had to re-read what you said 4 times before it really stuck and I realized we are saying the same thing. Below is what I had but I am not sure how to fix it while making it still enjoyable/playable "I hate to say it but rocket scientist love to optimize. I think there are several factors at play here. First build rate needs to decay. You can only throw so much money at the problem before you get diminishing returns. To cancel this out rockets are an exponential problem thus contracts need to pay out exponentially. As is the beginning contracts pay way too much and the more difficult contracts don't pay enough. If you adjust this you create a wall right at beginning that some people will never be able to overcome. i.e imagine if starting contracts only paid 200 funds. Secondly cheap rockets are penalized. Why does my 1 kerdit sounding rockets core take 50 days to build but my 80 kerdit rocket only takes 64 days to build? This overhead really takes away any advantage you get from making cheap rockets. Finally resuablilty needs to be nerfed. I would suggest reducing the percentage complete based off the distance recovered % and making fuel require % complete to refill." I have also made things even worse on my self. I designed a reusable 1 stage aerobe that can complete the 45-80 km sounding rocket low contract. It only nets me 3-5k depending on the altitude however it only takes me about 8 hours between launches. That is 4.2 million per year. I have spent the first 4 months of my game launching this and I have 20 points in the VAB so far. 150 launches and I have had only 1 failure that resulted in a total loss of the vehicle. I am able to grow my fleet of these by about .2 per month meaning that my income stream would grow infintly. However I cant imagine doing this for an entire year so I think I am going to do what you suggested and just give myself 100k a month and start working on a recoverable sounding rocket down range and see how profitable that is. I would love to see funding type contracts. Requires a new rocket design and pays very little funds however the payout is calculated based on the build rate, cost of the rocket, and the profit and pays out funds/second when the VAB is idol.

Thanks that worked great. I also update RO and RP-1 while I was doing that in case anyone runs into the same issue

So I recently installed 1.7.3. I think I may have mucked up my Kerbalism install. I took out a plane and temp and pressure flying low at earth require 180 days/357 days to complete per biome. Is this right? It feels like these are the on orbit values. Even at 4x physical time warp and a bomber with enough fuel to fly 32 hours (1, 8 hour work day at 4x) I am looking at 1-2 years to get all the biome data for earth. I also have 2 buttons for most experiments which further leads me to believe I messed something up. I installed Kerbalism (core), from master branch, and then copied everything from ROKerbalism (configs), from master branch replacing everything that had a conflict. In KerbalismConfig/Profiles, I deleted "Default"

Ya I am not sure I like how the early career is structured. I have played a couple of play through and I think the best start has 100-150 points in the VAB with a level 4-5 pad before investing anything in science. With 20 points in the VAB I was making 7k every 15 days on sounding rockets or about 170k a year. I ran into pad weight limits so I started investing in science which was a mistake. I should have kept investing in the VAB and pad until I am making 340t rocket in a day. This should be enough to fling stuff at the moon with basic tech. And it is a sufficient build rate that I can do pretty much anything I want (Man base for the Moon or Mars) with about a month of build time.

Ug I spent 4 hours building an optimized 19.997t rocket. 3 stages, 325kn LR79 class for 1m49s gave it a nice 1.4 twr off the pad to minimize gravity losses 68.6 kn LR105 class for 4m30s made a decent sustainer but I wish it could have gotten down to 50-55 kn as the current stage has too high twr and doesn't burn for the full 5m30s 20 kn W-class vacuum has way too high twr but it has the best ISP and can use balloon tanks which gives it a hands down advantage until the RD105 I was in the final phase of testing before checking how much lead I was putting into orbit. After about 10 failed ignitions of the LR105 class I finally find they cant be air lit until tier 5 or 7, cant remember. <throws computer out the window> <goes and picks it up> <Purchases 60t pad and starts building my standard R107 60t Lifter> any suggestions on how to make Simple Procedural Engines configs for R107 and R108? These engines really don't work great until you can put 300-400t on a pad. and need to put 15-25t in orbit.

Thanks I will keep trying. Ideally if you can get 20t to work then scaling for 40t and 60t is pretty simple with mass to be used for satellite contract's comsat payload.

Has any one managed to put a low tech object into orbit with a 20t launch mass? Even with early AJ-10s and LR89/79s, balloon tanks and Tank III I cant seem to get it done. That is not even considering the fact that I have no idea how I am going to get the 450k I will need to do tooling and engine unlocks. My sounding rocket contracts are only netting 12-13k and take about 21 days to build. FYI that is about 2 years doing 35 missions assuming they are unlimited. My aerobee core weights .063t which is lighter then the spudniks at .083t although both of these seem heavier then I remember.

Best tip I have heard with Gilly is you don't land on it you dock with it. Really changes your mind set

In my experience you want just enough engine to get 100-120 m/s by the end of the runway and just enough wing that you don't crash into the sea with 3 degrees pitch and you will probably make it to space. Although I should try a 150 m/s version with less wing some day.

@Geschosskopf 1 TWR seems really high for a plane based SSTO. Most people recommend 1 rapier per 15 tons but I think >50% requires more like 40-50 tons per rapier.

To be fair they are one of the most expensive nodes in the tech tree to unlock. So I cant argue against making them a disgustingly OP engine. Could always counter balance by adding a ton or 2

@Fearless Son True but do you even get over mach 2.5 at 45 degrees. Feel like that would give you a really high AP.

For this type of assent wouldn't panthers be better

@KerikBalm I didn't do many pure rapier designs to be honest. Most of my stuff was meant for Minimus refueling so it had a nuke stage. Lite nuke (or nuke cluster) at 20km around 1600 m/s. Flame out at 24 km around 1800 m/s and switch to LFO mode to raise orbit to a 70x30km orbit and burn the nuke to finish with a 75x75 orbit. I always had melting problems with the rapiers if I was too low and thrust problems if I got too high. I used a shock spike in front (antenna) and reversed shock cones clipped into the rapier. With the low enough drag I never had an issue breaking the sound barrier at sea level but getting off the runway was difficult. I felt like 1650 is just the point stuff started melting at 22km. But like I said it has been multiple versions since I have made SSTO's 1.3 or 1.4 I am guessing

I have noticed everyone tends to land 2x as fast as they should be. You should be pitched up to 5-10 degrees when your wheels make contact. Learning to land on an uphill is quite challenging but it can greatly reduce your stopping distance. But yes if I am making a SSTO plane I generally plan for at least 4 hours to put it together. My hardest part tends to be reentry getting a case of the flippies, then lawn dart, then flippies as I make adjustments.

Panthers and whiplashes are not even close to being in the same ball park. It has been a while since I have made a space plane but I remember them having a top speed in the 1200 range at 17ish km. I typically hit 1800 at 22ish km with air breathing with the rapiers. This means you have basically doubled your dv needed to reach orbit. I do kind of feel Rapiers with reverse nose cone clipped in are OP. They really should just remove the tail node. I would agree that this engine is clearly based off the saber engine and should have really good vacuum isp but how would you balance it? In RO you have to use hydrogen which would double or triple your tank mass and you need 6000 dv out of the LOX stage. Do you nerf all air breathing by making the speed of sound 70 m/s thus giving the rapier a top air breathing speed of 420 m/s and a ceiling of 8km?

Hold ALT while doing wasd will make a permanent adjustment. So just hold ALT-S until canards look level. If you have rear pitching surfaces you may not want to do all the way to level. Forgot how to clear it.

I see repeats now and then but for the most part I am still entertained after 5 years.

In past versions of KSP ore tanks had a better mass ratio then the LFO tanks. Not sure if it is still true these days.

Personally I like mag lev launchers. One mag lev launches straight up. A second mag lev in orbit accelerates/decelerates depending on perspective into orbit. The second mag lev then reboosts its orbit using ion or other exotic high efficiency thrusters preferably nuclear powered or ground based laser powered. As part of a collage project I did the calculations for a carbon nanotube static space elevator with no margin would require 2 ropes weighting a total of 638 kt and would only be able to lift 50 kg into geostationary orbit. It had a max width of 62 cm

Forgot to mention leaving the SOI. I once managed a 167 degree inclination change around the Mun with 12 Dv but that was a very special case. If you are boosting your AP to change inclination you generally want to do some of the change while boosting and unboosting (if airless body) as well but the savings are small (5% at most). The only way I have found for a minimum Dv is numerically solving.

Mun is a waste of time. I just complete the contract to open Minimus contracts. Been a while since I have played hard stock but my contracts are generally Launch a craft Suborbital Orbit (polar orbit for science) Unlock terrier Mun flyby and polar orbit (you have to go back to KSC while on flyby to pick up orbit contract) Upgrade tracking and mission planning Rondavou Docking Rescue contracts x5 Mun landing (1 way probe) Minims Flyby and orbit (same as before) Unlock Spark and upgrade vab for parts Scientist minimus hopper with, SAS probe core science jr and bio and all other science normally get 7000-9000 science but those might be on normal numbers. Unlock station parts and upgrade pad