hugseverycat

It was a frustrating day for Kerbalkind today. I failed repeatedly at getting a rover to fit inside a service bay, and I also smashed my rocketship into Ike while timewarping at Duna. I guess the rocket's orbit was too high. RIP Jenette Kerman.

Hi JackBush, I'm a pretty new player too. "Ideal" would be zero I guess?? I saw a video where someone's burn time was 4 seconds. But you don't need to aim for that now. You're just trying to get into orbit and you can do it inefficiently. My burn times are usually between 30 seconds and 2 minutes depending on what sort of monstrously heavy ridiculous thing I've built. Your rocket looks like a it is carrying a lot of dead weight. Although creating massive rockets is the Kerbal Way, one lesson I learned recently is that sometimes less is more. Sometimes if a rocket doesn't seem to get to orbit, it's because it has too much fuel, not too little. The rocket I usually take up to orbit (with plenty of fuel to spare these days) looks like your long center one, with only two solid boosters (the mid-size ones). Here's a picture: Yeah it's not the world's fanciest or best designed. I can see a lot of things I'd do differently. But it gets me there. My fuel tanks are 4 FL-T400s, 3 on the initial stage and the 4th up above. The solid boosters and the "swivel" engine fire on the same stage. My upper stage engine is a "terrier". Basically what I do is enable SAS, throttle to max with Z, then fly up, tilting over gradually with an aim to be at 45 degrees when I'm at about 10km. After that I do keep turning over gently, but not too much. Dump those solid rocket boosters as soon as they are empty (it will happen fast). When I'm around 30km I switch up to map view and look for my apoapsis. Mouse over it, and just keep staring at it until it is above 70km (I usually go for about 80km) and then cut the engines with X. Once I've cut the engines, then I set up the maneuver mode at apoapsis. You need to do this kind of quickly! Just click at apoapsis and pull your prograde marker (the green one without the X through it) until the apoapsis and the periapsis switch. You should then have a time to apoapsis and an estimated burn time. You'll also have that blue marker on the nav ball telling you which way to burn. Once you are above 70km, turn towards that blue marker, even if you have some time before your burn. Basically you want to do half your burn before apoapsis and half afterwards. If you have some time before then, zoom out and you'll notice that your orbit probably isn't perfectly circular. I always overshoot a bit! You can pull the retrograde marker a bit to bring yourself closer to a circle. Then burn when your time to apoapsis is half of your total burn time. I almost always run out of fuel on my launch stage during this burn, so if that stage is almost out of fuel, give yourself some more time because the terrier engine is less powerful but more efficient. I know this is not the best way to get into orbit but even noobs can do it! You don't have to be perfect. Good luck!!

Oh cool, thank you! That is getting my sun mission to show up, yay. I guess the Kerbin mission magically expired in between asking this question and going back into the game to test your answer cause it's just totally gone now. Oh well! Thanks again.

I'm doing career mode as a relative noob, and my only mod is Kerbal Engineer Redux. And my problem is that the contracts to put things in specific orbits... well.. I can't see the "specific orbit" guidelines in my map anymore! They used to show up all the time, and now they only show up sometimes. Right now I have two active "specific orbit" contracts, one to put something in orbit around Kerbin and another to put something in orbit around the Sun. If I go in my (fully upgraded) tracking center I can usually see the target orbit around Kerbin. I think I saw the solar orbit once. But when I'm on a flight, I can't see either orbit. I tried removing KER but the issue persists. Did I do something to turn these orbit indicators off? How can I get them back?

Yesterday I spent hours trying to land in the general vicinity of stranded Bill Kerman on the Mun. If I managed to land safely (about 50% success rate) I would then destroy my ship upon taking off again (SAS disabled and I did a nice flip, turned the wrong way, everything went wrong). I finally saved him! Then I sent a ship on my first interplanetary mission (aside from sending probes to orbit the sun because why not?). I safely arrived in orbit around Duna!! Jenette is almost as excited as I was. (As you can see it was a very long boring flight for her.)

On one of my first "successful" returns from Kerbin orbit, and due to staging or blind panic I deployed my parachutes early. So I EVA'ed my Kerbal and she flew out of the capsule, landed head first, and survived. I only recruit and use lady Kerbals if I can help it. I'm sexist. I once strapped a chair to the outside of a capsule and had a Kerbal get into it to see if she would survive re-entry. She did. I left Bill stranded on the Mun for 2 years. I finally rescued him yesterday, after crashing landers alllll dayyyyyy longgggggg.