Edax

Essentially what happened on my trip to Duna.

It's rather crude, but you can just have a Kerbal plant a flag on all the richest deposits of ore you find. Still, it's kinda disappointing that the flag you use as a monument of your greatest achievements, are also used as mundane ore markers. Maybe just a simple flashing beacon that engineers can place would be more appropriate? Should be simple enough to implement.

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Now I have three options of accomplishing it. 1) Use gravity assist of Ike of 300 m/s orbital velocity to accelerate for free, with current craft setup (both vehicles) 2) Undock and park the heavy lander in orbit to gain the total 818 m/s delta v to send the nuke+hitchhiker rocket home directly. But I am using Remote Tech mod (no remote-control in middle of home path), and would have no correction-control between Duna and Kerbin. 3) Send a refuel vehicle to Duna on next window. The wait will be like 1.0-1.5 years. http://i.imgur.com/s5VHcaJ.jpg http://i.imgur.com/zhaXO8P.png The question is I am trying to figure out how to use the Ike gravity assist correctly. See the second photo in the second spoiler. Is A path the correct way? On a happy note, I applied my lesson on designing a EvE craft (just visiting not landing) with a single nuke and mod liquid-only tank. http://i.imgur.com/JkOnIQM.jpg The safest and most simplest method would just to send a refueling probe. Docking ports, plenty of airbrakes, large heatshield (doesn't need that much ablator) and make it sturdy, and just hurl it at Duna at high speed without waiting for the transfer window, and aerobrake hard. And double check to see if the resupply module will enter in a retrograde orbit so it can link up.

From a high-speed non-window planetary transfer, the atmosphere of Duna can rip you apart at 15000m.

Admittedly I'm new to mining, but on Minmus, I have a Mk3 ship medium sized fuel tanks (about 4000 units) and a medium amount of ore tanks (2400 units) and the converter. I just land, mine, fill up the fuel tanks, fill up the ore tanks, and dock with my orbital refilling station transferring fuel, and refining the ore into more fuel. This method seems the simplest. 2 lv-ns have no problems moving a now 100ton ship into orbit.

So the orbital map implies your still moving after you've stopped? If the markers are twitchy, it could indicate a physics clipping issue. (You ARE in orbit right? Not on a sub-orbital trajectory out of the Mun?)

Unless your orbit is perfectly matched, your going to drift away from your target at the "closest seperation". What you want to do right before closest approach is burn retrograde in "target" mode till you and the station are no longer moving in relation to each other. Then find the target the nav ball, and burn towards it slowly. You'll want to monitor orbital drift and burn towards where the station will be. On the orbital map, you should maintain the slow burn until the orbital map slowly shows your closest separation to be 0.0km.

Landing vertically is a lot safer if you have the fuel for it. Just point the main engine prograde until you've killed velocity and are pointed upright. (though technically the spaceplane in this video isn't a SSTO, but that isn't that important)

I laughed at the thought that Mortimer could take out a life insurance policy on the astronauts. The monthly premiums for Jeb alone probably be what the real-world Apollo program cost in it's entirety. The most you could say for Jeb is that he's a non-smoker.

My quirk is that every "manned" mission to another planet/moon must be done via spaceplanes. It's fun to have more control in take off and landings, plus spaceplanes just have the coolness factor, that I'm more then willing to put up with the extra challenges of fuel and logistics that spaceplanes require. Plus it makes the return more triumphant when you land at KSC in the very spaceship that traveled to another world, with a cargo bay filled with new scientific data, just to have it refilled with fuel and sent off on another adventure.

It can be handy to stick docking ports on struts pointing outward of the main body, that way other ships can dock with the station without colliding with the station's equipment.

Sometimes the structure of the spaceplane generates too much lift at a certain angle. The best solution is to fly as prograde as possible, same with reentering.

I'd rather replace the g-gauge with an engine overdrive gauge. Who wouldn't want to be able to get 120% thrust on their engines while screaming "I'M GIVING HER ALL SHE'S GOT!"

I use the deployable radiators to cool down my reuseable rocket tanker. They can be deployed safely at 30,000 m, as they are necessary given my tanker has the "boars" for engines, which produce a LOT of heat just getting into orbit. Without the radiators deployed, the thrusters at the bottom of the rocket on the "boars" will explode from the heat, which would make aligning docking ports extremely difficult.

Some kerbals have watched Sunshine one too many times.

Contracts need better progression. Their pretty fun in the beginning. Like trying to flyby the mun with no maneuver nodes, no solar panels and no sas. It was a fun interesting challenge that felt like something would have reflected reality early on during the real life spacerace. But other times it's frustrating, like getting the "Get a space station orbit in Duna contract" after I've already built my Duna spacecraft in orbit around Kerbin (thus making it ineligible). It's weird seeing 2 star contracts to land tourists on the mun when you yourself haven't even landed an astronaut there. I like the tech tree as it is. It eased me into the game mechanics and taught me how to do more with less. I just wish there were more I think the MPL needs work. It makes sense that you can gain additional science by gathering soil/rock samples from Kerbin or the Mun and testing them in a lab in space. But temperature data? Eva reports? "Bill triped over on his space walk? QUICK GET MY ELYMER FLASK!" How is a spacelab turning this into science? I feel like MPL should run science equipment continuously in order to gain science, like a lab on the surface of the mun constantly scanning seismic data can perpetually produce science data. I feel as though labs should act like science harvesters, with their output dictated by their location (orbit, landed on other planets/moons), rather then function as Science recycle bins. That way your encouraged to put labs in difficult places, and be rewarded for the challenge.

LF spaceplanes are easy, just bolt them onto a non-LF only SSTO. Then the LV-N only has to operate once in orbit.

I've landed on the mun and minmus with spaceplanes. The most effective way is to kill ALL velocity, so you touch down vertically on the wheels very gently. In low gravity environments, if you try to land horizontally, the wheels will just bump off the ground; you'll get no braking action, and you'll be tossed from the ground at an odd angle that can be difficult to correct. You can compensate by having the thrusters try and keep you on the ground, but it's just safer to burn the extra 70 Delta V for a gentle vertical landing. The advantage of wheels (even just landing gear) is that the spacecraft if moblie on the ground with just a few thruster inputs, and you can easily visit several biomes with all of your science gear with you.

Spaceships can get away with very light designs and can ditch mass with staging, while spaceplanes have to drag around it's wings, plus, SSTO spaceplanes have trouble removing dry mass from itself, so it's less fuel efficient traveling in space, that's one of the drawbacks to spaceplanes. To compensate for the extra dry mass, you add fuel sometime during the journey.

Yes, they cannot "effectively" travel. I didn't say they couldn't do it. You want to leave Kerbin orbit with a full tank so you can go anywhere and come back. A lot of the spaceplane is dead weight in space, so you need to top off the tanks to compensate.

[i can't see your image] You need to build a LF refueling station in orbit of Kerbin using either MK1 or MK3 LF parts. Dock with it, and gas up. SSTO's cannot effectively travel after they burn their fuel escaping Kerbin unless they get some gas whilst in orbit.

So, now that the ship is fueled up, loaded with probes and 2 disposable fuel tanks for the spaceplanes, I think I'm ready to head to Duna. I think i'll just skip the launch window for now, it's only 250 extra Delta V at the moment.

Hmm, maybe I should have stuck the engine on the front of the plane like it did with the Valkyria III, that way the wings would have been pointed in the right direction for gliding, and I'd have thrust slowing me down... Guess I'll just have to see for myself.

Eh, giving that the launch window for Duna effectively makes the delta V requirements as low getting to Minmus, getting to Duna orbit isn't my concern, it's the landing part that's got me nervous. I mean, can a plane glide effectively in Duna and slow down using wing imputs alone? Or do I need to fire the engine to slow down to a safe landing speed? Reason I don't want to send a probe first is that by the time it get's there, I'll have missed the launch window. - - - Updated - - - According to the wiki, it says I only need one.