Zephram Kerman

SRBs are most useful for the first few moments of launch. Remember the optimum ascent is to keep your rocket at terminal velocity. At sea level on Kerbin, that's 104 m/s. But if your liquid fuel rocket can accelerate from 0 to 104 in 5 seconds, it's overpowered. You'll then have to throttle back too much for the remainder of that stage, which means carrying extra engines as dead weight. So jettison those engines, which means SRBs.

Since you mention having trouble getting it to orbit, it might help to rearrange the lander for symmetry. If the payload is asymmetrical, that would make the launcher hard to control during the gravity turn.

The side that looks like a smooth grey cylinder should be facing the connection and hidden within a part. The side that looks like a painted ring should be facing outwards. Since parts can be rotated around, it is possible to attach it the wrong way. If this happens, the two ports cannot get close enough to dock, and only bounce. But, you say this craft has docked successfully once before. So maybe this is not the problem. More likely, it is due to a protruding part from another part of the ship. Maybe two wings are bumping into each other, or the landing gear, etc. If so, it can dock successfully when rotated a certain way, but bounces if rotated another way. Move the camera around and this becomes obvious if it is happening.

Well, according to the wiki, geosynchronous (sic) orbit is at an altitude of 2,868.75 km. For practical purposes, my favorite orbit for stations is 230km. That altitude is above the 100x time-warp threshold, with a little bit of room below for visiting craft to time-warp as well.

I use those all the time, and never had a problem. In fact...Random Fact: you can use the tiny cubic strut to attach things in places they wouldn't normally belong! Temstar's "engine cluster" trick is a famous example.

That's very cool. In the back of my mind, I've been wondering how a spacecraft position is figured out in real life. (I was pretty sure NASA doesn't just press "m".) The precision of this instrument, able to get a useful position by measuring the angle between two stars, blows my mind.

When the the cupola was added, I immediately thought it would be my favorite. But I thought it would have more visibility than it does. So, I still prefer the landercan, even with its muddy windows, because I can see where I'm going. Next is the mk 1 cockpit with its hi-vis bubble canopy. Yes, this thread should be a poll. Poll please!

Plenty of naysayers and tangents in this thread. @musicpenguin, I think your aerospike idea could work. Give it a try! Keep the plane very light weight, fly slowly to avoid drag, and take off from a high plateau. It would help to look up the terminal velocities for various altitudes, and treat those as speed limits. I hope you do give it a try. If you do, please post the results. Good luck!

Very similar. But the reverse gravity turn can be done with a safety margin, so that it's not necessarily always full power. But that's why I say the hard part is knowing when to start.

You can have a lot more fuel for pinpoint landings (and to return home) by optimizing the approach to land. The most efficient way to approach a landing spot is an elliptical orbit that passes very low over the landing site. Then burn to land using a path that looks a bit like a reverse gravity turn. The hard part is estimating when to start, but it comes with a practice after just a few tries. After touchdown, use rover wheels to drive overland back to where you meant to go.

Now that I've tried it out, be aware Screencast-o-matic free version puts a watermark in the lower left corner, and has a 15-minute limit. However, MSI Afterburner is working quite nicely. It took me a while to find the video recorder. (Click on "settings", video, then assign a hotkey to start/stop recording.) Otherwise , it's been great so far.

Well that's purdy! It's going to be a lot of trips. But it's very prudent to have the whole thing simulated on the ground first. I like the little control tower thingy, and the light towers above each of the hab modules. How does it look at night?

A friend at work recommended Screencast-o-matic. I'll be trying this out in the next few days.

Well if it's only wobbling during launch, you could simply lock gimbal on some engines. That's especially handy if your launcher has mainsails.

I don't have any screenshots of this, but I've been experimenting with the idea of floating bases. The main advantage is the side-mount docking ports can adjust up or down by moving fuel between the outrigger fuel tanks.

Here's my suggestion: starting doing periapsis kicks when the phase angle is a little more than a day ahead of time. During the final kicker burn, watch the orbit period to make it match up (about one day) so that you return to periapsis on time for your transfer burn.

One thing that helped me was to make an action group to close all the intakes when the engines shut down. Those few critical seconds when the rockets first fire and you're climbing up out of the soup is when every bit of drag makes a huge difference. But really, your technique during those few seconds is what matters.

Try putting the engines high up above the Center-of-Mass. That should make it inherently stable. This probably won't help with your crane problem. But maybe some of the design ideas will help. I was just working on a VTOL craft yesterday. Yours probably hovers better than this one, because KSP freaks out if a wing ever goes backwards at all. But with a little forward velocity, aerodynamics makes it barely controllable without RCS. Just for inspiration, here's what it looks like: What I did was attach the small cubic strut to that structural wing in the center. Using the Center-of-Mass marker in VAB, I could get it pretty close to where it should be. The strut is tilted forward one or two notches, to encourage the plane to drift forward instead of back. Then I attached a jet to that. It took a few test flights to fine-tune the location. In the image above, the strut is on top, and the engine is attached to it backwards through the wing. (Thanks part-clipping!) This was the only way to make it trim correctly for high speeds.

Engine clusters are cool. But let's wait until the troubleshooting is done before making the thing even more complicated! By the way, the inner stage TWR may be less than 1. So a cluster of 5 or 6 LV-T30, perhaps with one LV-T45 in the center would be plenty. Or, for simplicity, just the one mainsail by itself, without the mk 55s.

Technically, what your describing as "ringed" asparagus is actually "onion" staging. I'm not kidding. Someone called it "onion" because the layers peel off. Onion staging is not quite as efficient as asparagus, but it's a lot simpler. Anyway, Shand's suggestion is probably your best bet. If that doesn't work, try deleting the outer stage and fly it starting with stage 2. Then you can get a better look at what's going on. (Just don't save, so that you can avoid rebuilding it.)

The plane in SM's tutorial is the Aeris4A. Even with his improvements, it's pretty hard to fly. Using that one as a reference point, here are some things to consider: • if you don't have a joystick, Caps Lock makes keyboard controls more gentle; • CoM (Center of Mass) always ahead of CoL (Center of Lift), even a meter or two is ok; • put fuel tanks at CoM, so that this point doesn't change as fuel empties out; • CoL seems to change while maneuvering; try tilting your plane in SPH to see what I mean; • canards are very powerful (and inherently unstable), so they make a plane more difficult to control; • it is preferable to make your plane controllable with only tail elevators, since these are inherently stable; • there are several different control schemes: ~ ASAS tries to hold the same direction as when it was turned on; ~ Avionics Package tries to match the plane to its current velocity vector (the prograde marker); ~ I usually prefer MechJeb surface mode, which is more like real-life Pitch Hold / HDG Hold, even though it uses yaw and I have to bank manually. Also consider that flight controls actually work differently than they should, because they are mapped the same way as RCS thrusters. Take a look at what your elevators do when you try to roll. One elevator splits and goes the other way, to help with the roll command. This split elevator messes up the pitch trim.

He told me the other day that the final version of the manuscript is done with proofreading, and off to the publisher. So it won't be long now!

This is one of my favorite things. Those jets are very helpful. Possibly, you could reduce the wobble by locking the jets' gimbals. Since they are in the middle of the ship, they can't help you steer anyway. Use another control group to disable them all at once, easily.

Och! Bummer. Congratulations on building a capable design. There is still hope. It might be possible to right the ship. Drain all the RCS fuel from the top tanks to the big one below. Retract and extend landing gear while rolling around. Either you'll be back on your feet, or more things will explode. If you do manage to get upright, right-click on the opposite engine and shut it down, leaving the other two activated. Or, just press F9. You did quicksave before the descent, right?

Autoland worked fine for me, and the anti-flameout thing is just golden.