Plusck

That seems a bit odd and pointless. Doesn't mean you're wrong, but still... The CoL marker in the VAB is pretty useless, I think, unless you tilt your rocket to see what happens when it goes off prograde. What is certain is that the VAB does not behave like the SPH when all aero surfaces are neutral. If I had to take a guess, it's that the SPH "cheats" and adds a fractional angle above prograde when calculating CoL. It can't do that in the VAB since there is no particular direction that a rocket can rotate towards for the aero direction to be meaningful, so you have to do it yourself (click and grab your root part then do shift-WASD once). So yes, the Mk1 pod definitely has "lift" in stock. No matter how many tanks you put under it, "lift" will stick resolutely to its underside: And while facing prograde, the CoL marker is pretty meaningless. You have to tilt it in the VAB: And once you do tilt it, the CoL marker should show up in the same place as it would facing directly prograde in the SPH:

As @Starman4308 says, staging should work for any part that doesn't have a "test" button. However, do be careful to actually stage (using space bar). I'm pretty certain that using the right-click window to manually fire a decoupler/separator will not work... or at least I definitely had to restart a mission recently because I did that and the contract didn't complete.

My biggest problems with Eve have been getting down without burning up, and getting crew back on board after going out for science. That's because you need thin and pointy and hardly anything other than fuel and engines on the way up, but you need plenty of drag and control on the way down, a wide and sturdy base to land on, ladders to get science back onboard (and joined ladders that are navigable on Kerbin are not necessarily possible to climb on Eve), and so on... So the best way is probably to spam decouplers which will all fire the instant you try lifting off, shedding all that "re-entry+landing" gear. My last time down I had a large fuel tank as a heavy base with legs on, holding most of the fuel that I needed to put into the upper stages. The idea was to land, pump fuel up, then separate and take off. Mostly worked from sea level apart from the "getting surface science back" bit.

Slashy, I felt those numbers were a little high since I tried very hard recently to return from the Mun with science in early career without ugrading VAB or launchpad... and failed... so the numbers were quite fresh in my mind. For a 3-stage rocket, I was getting: - 3200 to orbit (72x73km) - 860 to Mun 9km flyby - 275 to circularise - 12 to deorbit - 565 to land. 4900 m/s total from launchpad to landing. My main problem was I just couldn't get more than about 5400m/s out of 18 tons, so I could never make it back again. Of course with an SSTO the TWR is going to be lower and you'll never quite pare it down to those numbers, but I couldn't say how much more it needs. I'm not a huge SSTO expert.

If you look at the screenshot, you'll see it is that simple. The AN marker is highlighted and clearly says "180°"

I don't think you can ever get "kerbal plus part" recovery contracts for any part that isn't crewed, so that should narrow down the options. The dimensions given in the contract should be quite precise, so (assuming the OP was approximative) that probably means Mk1-2 pod or science module or hitchhiker can. I've done a couple of part-recovery-from-surface contracts and swore I'd never do one again. I tend to end up with hugely complicated designs. The worst thing is getting something that can reliably grab, but can also then lift off from the surface. That means either huge (so that the added recovered part... potentially over 3 tons... doesn't make the craft impossible to control) or balanced (so that the part goes in the middle. Just for kicks, I built this to show you what I would do. I know it's awful...

The other reason to put reaction wheels close to the controller is that they increase the amount of wobble in the craft, since they increase the number of joints. Unless you autostrut, putting a 2.5m module in the middle of the stack between 2.5m tanks can be very bad for wobble: the joints simply aren't strong enough.

Hah, congratulations. I've often wanted to do an updated docking tutorial but I've never managed to get good video capture. Personally, I always use "locked" view on the camera for the last few metres, and "SAS hold" on. I don't like target hold because any deviation from lateral alignment will automatically cause you to move out of rotational alignment. And in "locked" view only up and down are reversed, just like on a standard flight sim, so it's easy to eyeball. But above all, it's the NavBall you need to watch. Once the two ships are aligned (even if it's 200 metres away), give warp a short blip to stop them moving, then just concentrate on keeping the prograde marker over target with IJKL-HN. if you don't rotate, you'll still be perfectly rotationally aligned with the target... you might have to move sideways to compensate but that's just the other part of "pushing the marble": moving the prograde icon around to push the target marker towards you. It's not very easy to get your head around the NavBall, but its information is priceless. For some people it helps if they imagine standing in a room, with the navball marking painted onto the walls. So if the target is above and ahead of where you're pointing, then you need to head upwards at a slightly sharper angle. As you do so, the target icon will drop until you're pointing straight at it: therefore you use RCS to push prograde up, and that makes the target icon drop. If, on the other hand, you thrust forwards, the prograde icon will drop down below the target, and as you approach the target will sail over your head: prograde is "pushing" the target icon away.

I wouldn't even bother with landing legs. If the rocket isn't too tall, and you turn off gimbal and land on the flats, you can land and stabilise on your engines without too much trouble.

You can use either set, whichever is closest. However, the real answer is probably more like "neither"... because if you do the right job of "pushing the marble" as you approach the first orange set, you'll end up with the intercept point being somewhere between the two. I'll explain a bit further down the page... And this shouldn't make any difference to the difficulty of docking. The main "trick" is just to do about 95% of your burn at normal thrust, then delete the node and finish up the burn while watching the map view at minimum thrust. You should see the chevrons get closer and AN/DN drop to zero. The next trick is to fine-tune using RCS keys IJKL-HN. When finishing the burn, as soon as the chevrons and/or AN/DN start getting further from what you want, stop immediately. Turn on RCS and use "N" to reverse thrust. Then try each of the directions IJKL in turn to see which one(s) you need to bring the chevrons and AN/DN down to where you want them. This is where you really have to learn to "push the marble". And keep your eyes on map view all the time. RIght-click on your target and on the orange chevron so that they both show up and you can see (a) distance to target, (b) time to intercept, and (c) distance to target at intercept. Then don't do anything until you're a minute or so out (unless relative velocities are in the hundreds of m/s, then start earlier). At one minute from intercept or so, turn to target retrograde, look to see where the anti-target (pink upside-down Y) is, and thrust on the other side from prograde. On the NavBall, your markers should therefore be aligned as follows: (where you point) (target retrograde) (antitarget) -v- O Y As you thrust, the target retrograde icon will be pushed away from where you're pointing and over the anti-target marker. Looking at the map, this should increase your time to intercept and bring intercept distance down to zero. For the next bit, a quick bit of arithmetic is always useful. You should have a rough idea of acceleration from the last manouvre node you burned (unless you have KER or MechJeb to tell you exactly what it is). Let's say it's about 8 m/s2. Now look at your relative speed to target and divide. So if it's 100 m/s then that makes 12.5 s that you need to get down to zero. Therefore, if you have got the chevron down to 0.0 km, you need to wait until time to intercept is about 10-12 seconds and then burn hard retrograde. Or you take it a little easier, start at 30s out and burn retrograde until you're down to 20 m/s difference or so. You might need to "push the marble" again to get retrograde over anti-target. Wait a few seconds (since you've slowed, the orange chevrons will have moved along the orbit some more) then when you're about 10 seconds away (10 x 20 m/s = 200m), burn retrograde again until you're down to 5 m/s. Now switch to outside view. You should see that you're about 100m away and heading directly to target at 5 m/s. Burn retrograde gently until it's down to 1 m/s or less, turn the ship around to face the target and use RCS and keys IJKL-HN to do your final approach. If you do all that right, you will have matched orbits with the target as efficiently as possible, in the minimum amount of time and the minimum fuss. You can find some examples (for an older version of KSP) here: https://imgur.com/a/vGrJx There is also a bit of "pushing the marble" in this orbital rescue album, but without ever actually getting the retrograde marker over the anti-target: https://imgur.com/a/c1QJR Less monoprop wasted = more space for beer.

Ah well. Two ways of interpreting the lack of responses in this thread: 1) None of us wanted you to feel utterly stupid, so we didn't say anything. 2) None of us had a clue what the problem might be. Definitely number 2. Of course! Couldn't have been anything else.

I had to read @Rocket In My Pocket's post three times to check that he didn't say it, but... Scientists are (imho) by far the most important crew members because they can reset the goo cannister and materials bay ('science Jr.'); that means that your lander can land in several biomes (check the wiki for the biomes map, and land where three biomes meet so you can do short hops to get all of them) and the scientist can reset the experiments each time. You need a decent probe core if you're sending a scientist, but by the 90-point level you have the HECS which is good enough for everything for Kerbin and its moons. I personally hardly use anything but the HECS until I get the "space ship" 1.25m probe core, then I hardly use anything else... And then you really need to get everything at Minmus done. It's actually a lot easier, but it gives much better science rewards (though with fewer biomes). With just the Mun and Minmus, you should get most of the science tree done. If you put a 2-man science module crewed with 2-star scientists in orbit around both the Mun and Minmus, fill them with science and get them researching, you should complete (or nearly complete) the science tree at about the time your first transfer window for Duna comes up.

Actually, "top heavy" is exactly what you want on a rocket. Aero forces on the back of the rocket tend to push it back towards prograde, while forces at the front tend to push it away. With the mass centred at the top, there's a long lever arm for those "good" forces and a short lever arm for the "bad" ones. However, if there is any sort of "whipping" effect as you say, it surely means that your thrust isn't perfectly centred. If your thrust is off-centre and you don't have gimbal, then yes that long lever arm starts becoming a problem.

Since you can't revert, I'm assumig you try to avoid quicksave too. A word of warning then: do NOT jettison the heatshield until your chutes are fully open (or you have the control authority to turn around and have the heatshield behind you). Heatshields on Eve fall very very slowly too, and they oscillate.

From memory, I don't think there is any feasible way of getting anywhere near a TWR of 1 with ion engines. From all you've said in here, I really think you should go back to chemical rockets and get Duna and Eve captures sorted. Shorter burns, taking care to make a good correction burn halfway there (while focusing on the target system) to get Pe very close to the target. With the burns done in the right places you don't need all that extra dv. Once you have that sussed, you can start doing difficult places like Eeloo and Dres (which is very hard to hit, I find). Maybe start just sending a couple of largish relay antennae (15g) with capable probe cores on chemical rockets to both Eve and Duna. That way there is no risk of having SAS fail on you (due to no connection to KSC) except perhaps as you approach the target planet, and you can always use retrograde hold and full thrust to capture even without a KSC connection. Don't worry about the unknown objects, they have no gravity influence and the chances of hitting one are infinitessimal (and zero during warp since you can only collide with planets and moons when warping).

"Escape velocity" is the speed you need to go at a certain altiude to get to very nearly zero m/s at the edge of the SOI. I'm pretty sure that for all planets without an atmpsphere, that means at the surface of the planet. So if you take off from the surface of Eeloo at 841m/s, you will end up only just escaping Eeloo's SOI. Escape velocity doesn't really tell you anything about how much you need to change speed to capture. Eeloo's orbital velocity, however, will matter for that. And your current speed will drop quite a bit before you get there. Expect at least 1500 m/s to capture, probably quite a bit more. Eeloo is very hard to hit. I'm not sure why you're trying this before getting guaranteed captures at Duna and Eve... it's way way up the learning curve. And your power generation from solar panels will be terrible out there. Not a great place for ion drives. Oh and you can wrap fairings onto cylindrical parts of the rocket, and it will stop building if you get it right. I don't do it myself but it's a thing.

First principle when building in the VAB: only ever build in multiples with radial symmetry (two, three or more) unless you really really know what you're doing. The only things you should ever put singly are the node-attached things on the central core, the "light" science instruments, batteries and antennae. The number in brackets is how far off the default fuel priority number it is. If you change staging order (in the VAB or in space) the fuel priority will change too. However, as long as you placed the tanks with symmetry, they should always be identical for each booster (and if one of the tanks has a different priority, all symmetrical tanks should have the same difference, so it isn't a problem). Rather than lock off the tank, just click on the +/- buttons to get them where you want them. Again, if placed symmetrically then that change should affect all tanks equally. The exception to all this is if you deliberately separate decouplers into separate stage numbers. If you do that, you will have problems unless you are very sure you're doing it symmetrically. Zoom out! There is no need to keep squinting. Once zoomed out, a click on Kerbin will bring your maneouvre node back up again. You only need to zoom in to drag your node around the orbit to get a hit. Once you have a hit, zoom out and adjust the node vectors to get the closest approach. And adjust your approach on the way. Nobody ever gets a perfect hit direct from Kerbin orbit. You really must do your capture burn low over your destination planet (except Jool, which is another story), and you can only get that by making a course correction somewhere along the way.

No problem with eyeballing. As long as you mean "eyeballing with nodes" because I'd hate to try doing it without... The thing that you need to get your head around, is that when you touch Eve's orbit, you need Eve to be at that exact spot. Just like the Mun or Minmus. Since Eve orbits faster than Kerbin, that means you need to leave Kerbin before Eve has caught up (roughly a sixth or an eighth of an orbit behind Kerbin), so you do exactly half an orbit during the transfer and Eve does a bit more. The trouble with Eve is that its orbit is inclined enough to make getting a hit a pain. You need to do it in a few steps, then rinse and repeat until done: Select Eve as target. Drop a node so that you'll eject Kerbin's SOI retrograde, and add enough prograde to that burn so that your final Pe is touching (sort of) Eve's orbit. Probably about 1200 m/s. At the very least, you should get an AN/DN somewhere in sun orbit. At first, drag the node around so that it is "most efficient"... meaning Ap on the resulting orbit around the sun should have Ap more or less where you are now. This might have to change to get a hit, later, but at least start by trying on the most efficient path. Drop a second node just before AN/DN, and add anti-normal (if AN) or normal (if DN) until the AN/DN marker touches Eve's orbit at Pe. That should give you the encounter/intercept markers. Go back to your first node, and very carefully drag it along your Kerbin orbit to close the gap between the encounter/intercept markers. If this is a problem, use the radial in/out vectors instead since this has the same effect. Add or subtract prograde to keep Pe down on Eve's orbit. Go back to 2. and either adjust it or delete it and replace with a new node. If this still doesn't work, you'll need a more aggressive approach. The principle is the same but you stop trying to hit Eve at Pe (since the timing won't work) and instead you either dive down to hit it much sooner (because Eve is too close to Kerbin and is too far ahead at Pe) or you start by heading out from the Sun before re-crossing Kerbin's orbit and reaching Eve much later (because Eve is too far behind Kerbin... but you'd be better just waiting a few days in this case). This can get very very expensive. Either way, you do the same steps as above but you start with a much larger burn (say 1500-1800 m/s or so). If you're doing the "diving down" thing, any midcourse AN/DN changes will be huge, so you're best adding normal/antinormal to your ejection burn to minimise that - in fact you should be able to get a good encounter without any course-change later in this case. Remember that any change in inclination when leaving Kerbin will have zero effect on your position exactly half an orbit later, only on your inclination. Therefore any normal/antinormal burns at Kerbin will only be useful to (a) increase or reduce the midcourse plane change* you need to get an encounter at Pe, or (b) get a hit if you meet Eve earlier or later than Pe. (* bearing in mind that plane changes are always best when going slowly, therefore always as far away from the body you're orbiting as possible) Also remember to make full use of the "right click to stay visible" feature for intercept markers, AN/DN markers and suchlike. There is no need to stay blinded by the Sun when doing all this, you can zoom out and do everything except for the "dragging around orbit" bits from a distance. And to see where your orbit will go next, you can always add a node: this will automatically make the path in the next SOI show up. And if you added radial in/out to your transfer burn, remember that this has much the same effect as dragging your node along the orbit line. To reduce the cost of the burn, simply start burning earlier (if radial out) or later (if radial in) than the node says to burn, and it will cancel out some of that added cost. However, in this case you'll certainly have to eyeball it on map view and stop when the orbit lines align, slightly before the end of the proposed burn. Finally, once you have done your ejection burn, you want to change focus to Eve and alter your mid-course correction so that you end up just grazing Eve's atmosphere (90km altitude) for capture. Don't even think about aerobraking at Eve if you don't have heatshields. And in any event, @5thHorseman is right... start with Duna, it's way easier. And the atmosphere won't burn you to a crisp in seconds.

If your target has no means of control: Hit "V" until you get the "locked" camera view. Align the camera so that it's facing the same way as your ship is. Then use the translate keys (IJKL-HN) to change your approach vector so that you will move into the space just in front of the target's docking port. If your target does have some sort of control: Right click your own docking port to bring up the GUI window Switch to target (default keys [ ] ). The GUI window should still be visible, click on "set target". Turn on SAS and turn to face the target (using target hold if available) Switch back to the other ship and dock.

KER gives the information per stage based on what you have after staging that stage and until you need to stage the next stage. So your stage 7, which starts you off, only lasts until you get rid of the first set of boosters. It therefore won't last all that long and won't give a large dv change. By far the greatest dv change will come once you get rid of all your boosters and have the core stage with full tanks. That happens when you stage number 4, so therefore that's where all the dv is. KER currently cannot suss out how you plan to time your staging if there is no absolute end to a given stage. If you enable crossfeed, then even if the boosters' tanks are empty, the engines will still have fuel available to them via crossfeed. Therefore KER fails to recognise that you intend to drop the booster (by watching the fuel tanks and dropping the stage when empty), so it vastly understates your dv. The same thing often happens if you have drop-tanks. The only workaround, I think, is to make the build with fuel lines and fuel crossfeed off, until the numbers are where you want them. You then just have to accept that in-flight numbers won't be right, remove the fuel lines and enable crossfeed for the finished ship. Likewise with drop-tanks: to get the numbers, add fuel lines and stick a tiny engine on that stage to get an approximate number for dv. As for all the numbers, they should be fairly self-explanatory. "Torque" in the VAB info is vital if you have assymetric builds and need to know whether your thrust is offset. "Burn" is vital when putting fuel tanks on SRBs: you need to set the SRB thrust limiting so that the SRB stage lasts exactly as long as fuel in the tanks will, and thr "burn" time lets you know about that. For the other numbers, you'll have to ask specifically which ones you want to know about

This still works, but only if you can get warp up to the fourth or fifth level. That means you need enough batteries to cope with the transmission as you ramp up the warp, and you need to be in an orbit (or landed) which lets you set warp that high. Roughly, I've found that this lets you send a full lab of science if you have about 2000 units of electricity in your batteries (out of the 4000 or more that you need in total).

Yep, just verified the immense idiocy of the "docking" tutorial and it is as bad as I remembered. First it tells you to align planes while you are in a lower orbit. Therefore it is the worst possible time to change planes. Don't ever do that in real missions. Next it tells you to get within 5km of a rendezvous. 5 km is awful. You should aim for 0.1km Then it tells you to kill relative velocity at 5 km, using RCS... and then aim for your target using RCS with a maximum relative velocity of . I followed the tutorial literally and got myself in an orbit where I was 5km away but even with 10 m/s relative velocity I could never get within 100m of my target. Following the instructions would therefore never work. Assuming some intelligence, I used up a huge amount of monoprop killing relative velocity and then aiming for the target again. Again, the tutorial doesn't explain anything and if I didn't know what was happening, I'd be totally lost circling about the target at around 100-200m with rapidly dwindling monoprop supplies...

Couple of things: - the "Mac" question shouldn't change anything. Unless you're using an antique (which is possible, given Mac build quality ;)) there should be no actual difference between versions of KSP. - the "docking" tutorial is awful. Terrible. A crime. Shocking. I may be exaggerating slightly but seriously, it is one of the most destructive tutorials out there because it forces you to do really idiotic things. It wasn't meant to be so idiotic, so if you start by trying to understand what it was actually trying to make you do (but ended up doing badly if you take it literally) I'm sure you'll have a Eureka moment and it'll all fall into place...

The first ship you send to any other planet should include a relay capable of talking to Kerbin at all times, that you leave in orbit there. For Moho to Duna, that means it has to be the RA-15. For Dres to Eeloo, the RA-100. And you need the level 3 Deep Space Network at home, of course. After that, the issue arises as to how to control subsequent craft during the transfer. And how to control craft if you lose the connection temporarily. Or in other words, how to optimise resources and ensure you have at least approximate control. My simple solution: put a pair of DTS-M1 antennae on any craft that is going to go anywhere interplanetary on its own, and make sure the probe core can at least do all of the cardinal direction holds and ideally also hold the burn node direction. The dual DTS-M1s allow you get a reasonable distance from Kerbin (from Moho to Duna as long as they are on the same side of the sun) and still have direct control. And if you plot your manouvre nodes and reduce your engine max throttle before getting too far from Kerbin, they can do course correction burns using the minimal control you still have (turn to X direction, max throttle, zero throttle). So with that as a minimum, you can get to your destination, capture, get back, even land probably. But you still need that relay at your destination if you want to do anything. Without the relay, you just have to wait half a year or more until planetary conjunctions bring you close enough (and again, only for Moho through to Duna).

Yes, I can confirm that this is sometimes an issue for me. I certainly don't have any idea why it happens. I don't recall anything unusual happening or being done by me before it happens. It is possible that I mashed a few keys at the same time, but then that is something that can happen anyway and KSP doesn't seem to have a problem with multiple concurrent key presses all the rest of the time. So it's a mystery. And rare, maybe happening three times in my current career save (10 years, all stock planets and moons visited and landed at least once). If you can get back to the space centre then it is "sorted" when you load the craft again... assuming you have a craft to come back to...