Clipperride

Looking at the debris field, I bet you're glad that you practiced the landing with cheat mode high fidelity simulations first? As for bouncing landers, the things I would try are (and thes are just suggestions with no guarantee that they will make things better rather than worse!). Experiment with the spring and dampener settings in the landing legs tweakables. Although if, as you mention, it's a result of minor differences in leg positions this may be of limited use. One other suggestion is to use something that helps keep your lander in place. An upwards facing vernier or sepratron (with the thrust turned down) may help "plant" the lander more firmly. You could even try a single lowered thrust sepratron pointing outwards. If you them rotate your lander so it is facing down slope, as you near touchdown, it may prevent slippage. I hope you find a solution and let us know how you did it.

My bet is Jeb has assumed a new identity, disappeared with a decent amount of your current funds and is now eating his own weight in daily snacks on some tropical island!

To give an example, if you are in an equatorial orbit around Kerbin and you select Minmus as your target then the ascending and descending nodes will be at the points where Minmus orbit crosses Kerbins equator. For half of its orbit, Minmus is below the plane of Kerbins equator and above it for the other half of its orbit.

First question - which version of KSP are you playing? Since 1.2 I've noticed landing legs are a lot more effective at stopping your craft sliding on touch down. I've landed on the Mun, on an approximately 30° slope with 4 large landing legs (the lander was medium sized - based on the 4 Kerbal Hitch Hiker Storage Container). Prior to 1.2 I had stopped using landing legs completely as the slightest slope seemed to cause the lander to slide (plus they had an annoying tendency to accelerate Kerbals that bumped into them to lethal velocities!)

The nodes should be visible when you "set target" as they are a comparison between two orbits. Have you tried setting the Mun as your target?

That's the point I was making - you couldn't use the easiest real world solution for tracking distance traveled. Would it need to take account of the orbital speed of the body you're traveling on? I'm sure there would be people interested in using such a Mod if it were created Looks interesting, but my system sometimes struggles keeping track of the current vechile! I've been enjoying actively driving on the Mun a lot more compared to previous attempts.

I guess the easy solution requires knowing how many times the wheels have turned and I'm guessing the game doesn't keep track of that for modders to make use off. The crews reckless speed across some bumpy terrain resulted in the "time to impact" indicator from your accurate burn time mod flashing on from time to time! But driving on the Mun seems much easier than it used to be prior to 1.2

@Plusck Thank you, I didn't realise that the figure given wasn't relative to the surface you are traveling on. There should be an odometer that you could strap onto your rovers! @DrLicor I could have sworn I'd tried that before, but it works now, so thank you (maybe I didn't hit the Function key when I tried looking for that info window before) Onwards to the South Munar Pole.....

Three of my trusty Kerbalnauts are taking an extended driving trip on the Mun. Is there a way to find out how far they travel in each session? I know you get details about speed and distance travelled on the info box that appears after a vehicle is destroyed, but I can't find it in game. My current method of keeping track is to simply place a flag every 40km, but that's the distance as the crow flies (assuming some kind of Mun crow that can fly in a vacuum!). Obviously the actual distance is further as you alter course to avoid craters etc. Are there any other methods for keeping track of distance traveled across land?

I may be misinterpreting your question, but have you tried cycling through the camera views (V) until you're in free mode?

Sadly the Rover Mate is still not that well suited to its role in 1.2 (imo). Unless I'm missing something too? If you use the offset tool to place the docking port in line with the finished rovers CoM, you can at least use it to attach it to a lander. (My Mission Report shows how I deploy a rover on the Mun)

I tend to build larger rovers and solve the problem with a Cupola pod on the front. One other method, for little rovers, is to attach a small docking port to the front and then use "control from here". Remember, when you first select the RoveMate core, you can flip it over if the driving direction is wrong.

When docking, I cycle the camera view (V) until it's on "Locked". If you then position the camera behind your vessel and try the H/M, J/L and I/K keys you'll see the ship move as expected. One other option is to place a small rectangular girder section to indicate "up" relative to the pilot. That's also handy if you are docking fore or aft (ie inline) with another ship and alignment is important. Again, a small girder, or similar, next to each docking port, gives you a reference point. If I want to be precise about docking; I get to within about 30m, choose the "Locked" camera view, then come to a stop relative to the target. Turn off the RCS thrusters (so you remain stationary) and use the WASD keys to rotate the active ship to the correct angle for docking (ie the orientation you would want you active ship to be in a moment before docking). Then, turning the RCS back on, I use the IKJL keys to move "up", "down", "left", "right" until I get the targeted docking port symbol on the NAV ball in the centre of the -v- mark. Finally a touch of H/M to move slowly forward and dock. If, when you start to move forward, the prograde symbol isn't also in the centre of the -v- on the NAV ball, use IKJL to move it until the prograde symbol, targeted docking port symbol and the -v- are neatly lined up. As you move in, you can (with RCS thrusters turned off again) use Q/E to rotate into alignment. (You'd never guess I got paid by the word would you?? Old habits die hard)

@crackerbal Nice looking base you have there. The reason I used a claw on my miner was - I was less organised and I already had some craft with no docking ports for surface refueling. It was one of those sudden moments when I thought "but the Grabber Unit should work!"

One last point, once you have the Kerbnet™ panel open, the button at the top right cycles between the two readouts, one of which shows the biomes. Also, keep an eye on the Field of View slider towards the bottom if you want the scan to cover the largest area.

I did wonder how it was flying! (Cleans glasses)

Would the fact that you're using a Dawn engine and Xenon gas make the difference in your example?

The tweakables allow you to order the way tanks drain, going from the highest to lowest numbers. What has thrown me several times is, you need to enable propellant flow across all the decouplers, separators and docking ports. Otherwise each stage acts as a separate system (which can also be useful)

It's good to see that the options include different settings for bodies with or without atmospheres. Sorry to hijack the OP, but does anyone know the occlusion setting needed to give Kerbin a similar level of radio refraction to Earth? (I assume bodies in a vacuum "should" be set to 0%?)

You're right @crackerbal - like other docking ports, transfer is allowed once the Claw (Advanced Grabbing Unit) has been used to dock with another vechile. I checked the KSP Wiki and found; "The AGU is the primary means of capturing and redirecting asteroids. It's also useful for craft-to-craft docking or for exchanging resources with craft or debris without a docking port. As with docking ports, resources (liquid fuel, electricity, etc.) can be exchanged with the target."

Ive always liked anything to do with space travel and rockets, especially anything to do with Apollo. whilst I was playing "simple rockets" on the tablet and it mentioned it had been inspired by the much more indepth KSP. I drooled over the pictures and videos I found, but I only had a cheap generic laptop at the time - not a hope of actually playing it. I then inherited an old but decent laptop and immediately downloaded the demo. I was initially disappointed as it played at a truly shocking low frame rate but, after turning down all the graphics settings, I found it ran just fine. It's nice to see other people's screenshots, with everything turned up (and added extras), but when playing the game, I'm so lost in experience, the quality of the visuals makes very little difference. I'm hooked on playing science mode, setting my own goals and adventure's. With the possible exception of "Dark Age of Camelot", it's the best game/biggest time sink that I've ever played.

Ive been using autostrut fairly sparingly, but it has made a massive difference to launching heavy, awkward loads.

I started a new Science Mode game when 1.2 was released and, when I realised it's been a long time since I did any driving on the Mun, I decided it was time to give it another go. Mission Report - Mun Rover Lab. With a design based on the mobile processing lab, construction and testing was completed in record time. As you can see, the CoM was shifted downwards as far as practical, although still much higher than the design team would have wanted The offset CoM also gave the launch vechile design team some pause for thought. Mounted centrally, the rover would make the rocket hard to handle. So, a docking port was carefully offset, to serve as an attachment point. With time limited for this program, only one test was scheduled and was used to check the Rover alignment. Thanks to the wonders of "auto strut", placing the Rover into the fairing was easy. Previous versions often needed a complex arrangement of separators, girders and struts to keep things in place. This kept the launch vechile to a fairly reasonable size. During a previous mission to the Mun Lowlands, a large flat plane had been discovered and flagged (literally!) for a future base of some sort. After refuelling the second stage in LKO, it was off to the Mun. By sheer blind luck Due to the brilliant mathematical minds at mission control, on entering the Mun SOI, the initial ground track took us almost directly over the landing site. Rather than go into orbit first, the decision was made to come straight in to land. The new landing platform worked reasonably well, although the control was somewhat "slushy" and "mushy" which contributed to a short landing, some 5½km from the the flag. The tension was high in KSC as the deployment system could not be tested on Kerbin due to the higher gravity. It was also suggested (somewhat late) that an engineer would have made a good crew member in case the wheels failed when it fell over transition to a horizontal axis Three landing legs, on one side of the landing platform retracted... Two sepratrons (available from our Sponsor "Jebs Scrapyard") fired, tipping the whole thing over The wheels held, so it was time to undock and drive the 5.4km to the prime landing site. The spent stage will, no doubt, turn into a future tourist attraction, with souvenir shops and a Jebs Outlet Mall. Finally the crew landed in a desperate craft with snacks and medals all round as they touched down a mere 123m from the Rover and flag. Now it's time for a drive.............

@crackerbal It's an old picture from KSP version 1.0.4. But I'm almost certain the Claw still allows fuel transfer as it forms the front end of my refuelling tug. I'm 99% sure I've used that method since 1.2 was released. The mining vechile had aeroplane understand carriage and forward and aft verniers for propulsion. There was also an additional, large landing gear under the nose making docking with the tank seen in the image easy.

Good idea - I did end up with quite a lot of vernier's on my Mining "Crawler" (old image of her in the spoiler below..... Notice the lopsided solar panels, the result of a less than perfect deployment following a vertical landing