Ripper2900

You might need the boom to have some wiggle-room. You could mount some flexible parts at the base of the boom and perhaps at the end before the docking port. Imho the most flexible parts are docking ports, the junior variety in particular. Try to put one on your truck, mount another facing that, and put your boom on that last one. It would enable you to decouple the boom, so be careful, but will allow it to flex. If it's not enough, try add another set.

The orbital scan gives results per BIOME. The surface scan gives you the actual values of ore concentration WITHIN the biome you've landed in. Narrow-band scanning doesn't affect the overlay. It's only for real time viewing. So an orbital scan of minmus may show that all "minor flats" biomes has more than 70% on the overlay. Landing in one "minor flats" and doing a surface scan, might tell you that one of the minor flats has >80% and another only >60%. These percentages are still only relative. They're the percentage of the maximal concentration of that planet/moon. Then moving in with the narrow-band scanner, you can see the results in detail. If you've only done an orbital scan, all biomes shows uniform distribution, but with the surface scan, it'll show the actual distributions. One part of the best "minor flat," you've found above mine have 5% but in the other end it might have 8%. --> you've found your spot! Edit: the above places and percentages are purely an example. Each new game you start generates new ore concentrations, although I think that the max concentration per celestial body remains the same.

The UI's WILL change after doing surface scans. Both the survey overlay and the shades of the NBS view. But usually not by much. I've just scanned and mined Moho, and in my case, the hottest biome was the "Minor craters" - a number of craters scattered around the surface. After landing in one and doing the surface scan, the orbital overlay changed to highlight some of the craters over others. The best was at high lattitude : bad for mining. So I focused on the equatorial ones, and found that the western part of one gave me 6.9%, while others had less than 4%. I like to use one of the non-monochrome highlight colors for the overlays. They provide a much clearer image of what's going on, than the default pink color.

The analogy with 45 degrees sounds fine to me, but note also that Duna's atmosphere runs out quicker than Kerbin's. So an even lower angle is better, provided you have the twr, which in your case, you do.

You could add a few fixed solar panels at various angles to ensure ones is pointed at the sun at all times. Then when you've done your transfer burn, shut the fuel cell off. Then you arrive at jool, turn it on again. You can't turn it on without a little power, so you'll need those extra solar panels. There's no reason to run the fuel cells for the whole trip.

Another tip: put a small fin towards the bottom of long radial boosters. That helps stability and when separated, will drag the booster slightly away from the center stage due to the offset drag. I have good xp with that when doing hex- and octo-staged asparagus rockets where spinning won't help.

You should pitch to 90 degrees. That will give you a bonus of Kerbin's rotation, instead of the penalty.

Yes it is. Since 1.0 Isp is directly affecting thrust. Fuel flow remains constant, but lower Isp means lower thrust. Pre-1.0 this was opposite.

Don't worry too much about having to do a few tries to get a good launch. No rocket builder get it right the first time (except for North Korea - at least they say so) use a mod like mechjeb or KER which can help you calculate twr and dv while you build your rockets. Test test test and practice practice practice to know ow what sort of values you'll need to do a nice smooth gravity turn on launch. Moderate twr, enough dv and quick but small true to the east is my recipe. Then just fly the prograde and level off at 50 60 km up, and accelerate to orbit fully.

Mechjeb has SMARTASS. That's it's version of stability. As some of the others mentioned, it can also be tweaked, but I've never had the need to do that. The non-modded sas attitude hold is also much better at holding the direction stable then the specific modes like prograde, normal or target. Not sure why. Maybe it's got something to do with not adjusting to a continually changing setpoint?

Been to mun, minmus, duna and ike with single-mission manned landers - and returned. Unmanned lander to eve. I'm current on a grand tour mission to land on all bodies, except eve and jool. This is with a mothership, some scanner probes and manned science- and mining-landers. This has taken me to jool's moons, eeloo and Dres so far, as I spiral inwards...

That's my experience too. Warp at 1000x, and you can mine, convert, the whole shebang without loosing power. I also think that it won't run out of power if you switch to space center or another craft.

If you don't use any alignment mods, it's a hard task. If your core or pilot is skilled enough to have target-hold, start by going to both ships, target the other, then have sas lign up the ships to point towards each other. Else you'll have to do it manually (not that hard though). Turn your target ship back to attitude hold. (important else it will start to 'hunt' for your ship when you get very close). From the other ship, keep it on target-hold, use 'v' button to change view mode to chase or lock. Then you can start using rcs to close in and dock. Good luck

Once you've done the broadband scan, you have some rough ideas as to where to look. Then bring a narrow-band scanner to these places and while watching, look for biomes with high average concentration. Now land there and do a surface scan. You can then go to the narrow-band ui and see the actual concentrations for that biome. I restrict my searches to very near the equator if possible, because i'm on refuel missions or my mothership which is on a grand tour of the kerbolar-system. Changing planes with that behemoth or with the miner full of ore is too expensive. If I can find spots of more than 5-6% I'm happy. I still don't know what the cutoff percentage in the map overlay actually represents, but I think that it might be the: "biome-average concentration relative to the max concentration of any spot on that planet"

A little trick I've used in a couple of landers, is to use the heavy landing legs, and rotate them a click or two outwards. Granted, it doesn't look really super, and when retracted, they'll be partly inside. But - they'll have a much better reach and provide you with a much larger footprint for increased stability.

Once you're in low kerbin orbit and pretty circularised, withe right inclination, put a maneuver node and drag to get it to the height of the target apoapsis. Then drag it along your orbit until the position of the node apoapsis is at the correct target apoapsis. Do the burn, and repeat the procedure for the periapsis. Then you should have the correct orbit

Use the nav ball. It has bearings written on it's "equator". 0 is north, 90 East, 180 south, 270 West. In your case, you would want to launch westwards, towards 280. (east minus 170)

You're not in orbit untill you trajectory does not intersect the ground. Neither of the last two posts are right. Those are SUB-orbits. You can be in orbit right off the pad IF you accelerate horizontally to orbit velocity. Your orbit will decay immediately, but for an instant, you'll be in orbit.

Default key mappings have the drive controls for wheels and rotation (rcs) control mapped the wasd keys, so when you press 'w' you drive forwards but also pitch down. I've found it very useful to map the drive controls to the arrow keys instead. Then I can pitch, roll accelerate and more...

You could try to split it into 2 or more burns on sequential orbits. It's known as periapsis-kicks. Do half the dv at the node, then orbit around, and do the rest of the dv. Then you should be on your way. Keep the same maneuver node for the two burns, but click the little button on the node that moves it one orbit ahead, after the first burn. You can also make tweaks to it at that time to account for inaccuracies in the first burn.

I usually launch with a gravity turn, trying to get horizontal at 50-60 km. Then burn horizontal untill apoapsis is 80km. When I reach those 80 km, I burn prograde, raising periapsis to 80 as well. Circular orbit achieved. It sounds like you're either burning too much during ascent, trying to get you periapsis to 80; this would cause your apoapsis to grow too high. Or you're not burning horizontally AT the apoapsis of 80?

Gigantor panes will only give you about 1 electricity each at the area around Jool, so you shouldn't rely solely on solar imho. I use a fuel cell array in addition to 4 Gigantors, but with a lvl-2 engineer, I'm not sure that you can mine enough ore to break-even, with the fuel cell.

Only on asteroids does the ore run out. Nowhere else, and even there you van just sit and drill.

The diminishing returns. The first is the most valuable, second is less and so on. I've set up a routine to do two of each when I explore. After that, it's pretty much useless, as your numbers confirm. But you can only store one instance of each in a pod. Therefore, I transmit the first experiment back, then use a scientist to reset the goo and matlab, and do run the experiments once more, this time taking the data, store it in the pod and bring them home to ksc. A trick is to assign a action group key to do all data and also the crew report of your pod. Also try to build it so your scientist can reach all the equipment when eva'ing, without having to leave the stairs of the pod - much less hazzle! Then your scientist can also do eva reports, reset the experiments and take the data in one go. You only ever need to let go of the capsule to plant flags and take surface samples and eva reports from the surface.

Dependant on the design of your ship, I suggest you add a first-stage. A SRB or a small liquid booster. You just want to bring your craft up a handful km. Then that terrier will start biting. It's wonderful in vacuum but it socks at sea level, so find some way of reducing the pressure (bring it higher up before you start using it)