MrOsterman

So in my career game I've got 3 Kerbals stuck on the mun. I landed a mun base for them to at least work in (and can now probably send a rocket to bring them back now that I've updated my launch pad). But the base was 30km away from their pod so they had to EVA across the mun to it. What I found was they were good for a single bounce at any speed. After that, it seemed their impact tolerance dropped seriously. My first kerbonaut sailed into the ground at my base at upwards of 200m/s and slide a few KM along the surface without a scratch. She got up, turned around and did another jump back only to turn into a dust on impact the second time. Ditto for another later that bounced but stayed up right enough for me to fire some more RCS boosts. Dust when he hit the second time.

In good news to come: Once you start bringing samples back from Mun you're not going to worry about 3 science... :)

Pop open the bubbly! I know the feeling. My first effort on the Mun resulted in the lander toppling over, crashing, and having only the command pod survive. Took me 4 tries to land a life boat to bring my Kerbal home....

. . . Yah know... it's time to launch KS-2 anyway....

[quote name='A_name']I think the reason it's being called a bug or an issue is because the un-shielded capsule has more drag than the shielded one. Of course it makes sense that the weight of the heat shield will make you drop a bit faster, but the problem is drag.[/QUOTE] Weight yes but it's also, potentially, more aerodynamic. You do want it cutting through the air a little better in order to help minimize the compression heat of the high speed re-entry. It's possible that the model they're using for drag gives the heat shield a break compared to the bottom of the stock capsule. Drag force is based on mass, but also area and current velocity, iirc, so maybe the issue is our current understanding of the actual physics?

At the Moment KS-1 is happily orbiting Kerbol with it's little crew of 3 and it's been there doing research for going on 7 years. The problem is that I built it before I unlocked docking ports so the only way I can change out the crew on it is to use the AGU and claw onto it (which was hard enough for me as it was). I took on that trip with me two new scientists and I also attached a docking bay to my "shuttle". I got up there, locked on, did a little crew dance to get everyone into their new homes (ie take out my scientists and rotate in two new ones, plus a new pilot to man the escape pod if needed). Thankfully I also had some fuel on the station I could transfer to my shuttle since I burned more than I expected to setting up the docking. But what I couldn't figure out was how to get my Kerbal to transfer the Docking bay and install it on the station. I fiddled around flying around it right clicking, left clicking and (I think) alt-clicking on it and never got the option to move it. Eventually I just gave up and sent my crew back to the planet for some well earned RnR. Did I miss something? I know in a tutorial video on docking I watched a guy move parachutes onto a satellite he was trying to recover.

I'm remembering a quote about basketballs, and baseballs and hitting a piece of paper......

[quote name='Kerbart'] My advice would be to start in Sandbox mode instead, and practice the [ ] out of KSP with building ships, orbiting them, docking, making transfers to Mun, Minmus, dock there, land there, maybe go even to Duna. Career, in my eyes, is a challenge, not a way getting eased into the game. It's hard enough to master many of the required game basics in the first place; being hampered by a very limited choice of parts is not going to make it easier.[/QUOTE] Career does add the challenge of having to watch your funds and upgrade your buildings but it also doles out the parts to you slower than you do in pure sandbox. I personally think that starting off with limited parts and limited potential is good because it gets you working with various mechanisms in small scale before you start trying to do the big scale stuff.

[quote name='ModZero']That's not the game you're playing, that's the demo version ;-P[/QUOTE] Which does beg the question: Is the "Game" the "Game" or is it the "Game + Mods"? MrsO insists that it's the "Game + Mods" and that makes things sticky. Of course WoW does something a little different: it pushes the new code to a test server weeks ahead of release and allows modders full access to the updated API so that the day a patch drops (and usually with fanfare) the mod sites can all push their updated mods up as well. Usually for the wife, she just turns on the WOW updater for the game, and then turns on the Curse updater for the mod and comes back in a while to everything working (more or less) like it was pre-patch. Maybe there is a fair feedback in all of this to provide more time between "we think we've got the next patch stable" and "we're pushing the next patch out." A week is a long time, sure but that development time for Modders can be a big difference and a HUGE benefit to the community if it's come to rely on Mods, especially mods that have the potential to break with the new release.

[quote name='Hary R'] For mods, even a simple bug fix can break them as you never know if a part of a program, a line in a code that get changed in a bug fix were actual used by a plugin.[/QUOTE] This is where MrsO and I have big disagreements about games like Warcraft. She runs really really mod heavy and I run nearly a stock vanilla experience. The difference is that every patch that rolls out, she spends 4 hours tweeking mods, looking for updates and trying to relearn how to play with out them. I spend 4 hours playing the game....

..... That you can use your RCS thrusters on the moon to fly between two points quickly? I landed a life boat for one of my stranded Kerbals but it was 10 km away and I figured that she'd NEVER be able to run that far so I scrapped that mission and started over (again) to get her a new ride home. Granted, I probably didn't leave enough fuel in the tank to safely get her home anyway but that's not the point. ..... That you should prioritize upgrading your tracking center? Seriously, this game got WICKEDLY easier once I could start to plot maneuver nodes. Yes I did manage to get a flyby of the Mun to work by just eyeballing it, but I probably never was going to get Munar orbit without seeing flight plans. ..... That the save game features are broken and you need to click "Save" rather than hitting Enter? I'm still a little cheesed over how often I've lost my "backups" to that bug. Upside is that it did, briefly, force me into a "Well you done screwed that one up" moments that forced me to go back and fix things which ultimately were kind of fun, but I really would have preferred to know that was the case. So what else do you wish someone had said a little earlier in your KBS Career?

You're better than I! I still can't seem to get a probe to even get into ~Orbit~ of Duna let alone landing on it. I'm pretty able to consistently land and return from the Mun though, which I consider an advance given that I stranded my first Kerbal there with a botched landing and then subsequent 100 or so failed efforts to get her a life boat to bring her home.

[quote name='Terwin']When flying 1.25m craft, I would have them tumble so as to keep as much surface as possible in the air-flow. This was usually able to save craft for which I did not save enough fuel for a retro-burn( or at the very least slow me down enough that my remaining fuel would get me slow enough for chutes). Now that I have drogue chutes unlocked, atmospheric braking burns are much more optional. I thought the current placement of Drogue chutes high enough that you need to solve the deceleration problem first was deliberate, that way you appreciate their value once you get them.[/QUOTE] So... at what point do you ask if someone appreciates their air bag, before or after their accident? :/

Well there's a legit complaint in "lost work" especially if you're deeply invested in Career Mode. For me, and I'm new as of 1.0.4, I feel like I've put a LOT of time in on building up my tech tree. A lot of it was, sure, spent learning the game, the mechanisms, figuring out how to get science quickly, how to get into orbit, etc. I just spent a week trying to land a life boat on the Mun so I could get back a stranded kerbal and even that I'm not sure I did as well as I could. But on that game I'm at a pile of funds, I've managed to upgrade my facilities enough that I'm not eyeballing everything in flight control, I have the parts to spare to build the rockets I want, etc etc. I'm not at all looking forward to the prospect of starting clean from scratch. (which I'm getting a new PC and I may have to if I can't get my head around the oddly buggy save game features.) I think it's a little shallow to dismiss complaints of "I've been playing for X months and with this update nothing works!" with a counter of "well start a new career" or "meh, that happens". It's a legit complaint, especially with a game based on a physics model that is being constantly refined to include more realistic factors. I don't have a real "fix" except, perhaps, for Squad to include more ~toggles~ as they add more "realism". Don't want to have your rockets broken by heat factors? Toggle it off in settings. Short of that.... dunno.

I am happy to report that Sila Kerman is back on Kerbal all safe and sound and with a pile of science to show for it. I ended up building a lander using the "core engine and 3 outrigger engines." Taking off was an adventure and got lucky with a fluke launch at 45 degrees that put me on a direct shot back to Kerbal. Thanks all!!

[quote name='parameciumkid']Mk1 lander can + FL-T200 + 24-77 "Spark" = simple foundation for Mun lander. I've been using this basic recipe for over a year now and in all the versions that have been coming out, even with the engine adjustments, and it continues to work like a charm. You'll of course want to add landing gear, solar panels, etc. as necessary. ;) P.S. For rescues you'll of course want to wedge a probe core in there somewhere.[/QUOTE] Wait, how's the Lander Can do with re-entry into Kerbal atmosphere? I got the impression from it that it was a sure fire shred on re-entry. My build for a lander has been: Parachute Probe-core MK1 Capsule Materials Bay Heatshield Fuel Tank FL T200 Terrier Engine (the smallest I have currently unlocked for the 1.25m body type. My problem seems be that I start burning fuel for the Terrier in while still coming around the mun pretty fast. By the time I set down I'm only at 20 fuel units left for it and I have bad feeling that won't get me home unless I'm danged lucky. I've been trying to keep the materials bay because, oddly, I found that I can use the doors to toss my capsule back up right if I land and fall over. Maybe I should experiment more with the RCS thrusters to do things like slow/ manuever/ land rather than the main engine....

Well an update: She's still on Mun. She's delightfully chipper about it, but she's started looking for some potatoes to, as she said, "Science the F out of". It may be time to start to use some mods to help me get this laid out right as my current plans seem to have me orbiting the mun at too fast with only a single tank of fuel for the descent and corresponding ascent stage. Fortunately she's on a fairly flat area, and along the equator line. I've been hesitant to pack too much fuel for the lander (I've seen some designs using three fuel pods off the main pod as a kind of tripod build). But I think I do have to rethink this all because I'm pushing too much mass into orbit and then into the munar orbit and that's gotta be part of the problem. I'll work more tonight....

Thanks! I'll be working on it tonight and seeing if i can finally make use of my RCS thrusters for more than must changing pitch (I just discovered "Translations"). I'll see if that can get me through...

Well I'm off for the weekend of packing my earthly mother in law and won't be on Kerbal so I won't be able to report success. I will report continued lack of it though. Seems I always am short of fuel for the burn to the moon and then getting into a Munar orbit. Do you guys overshoot and then coast in (which feels like a very very small window to hit) or undershoot and then get pulled in close to it as you slow more? So far I'm trying an extra fuel tank or so but it seems that the weight of the tank outweighs the added time burning leaving me still with the same result: I'm burning half of my lift stage's fuel trying to park (which I seem to be coming in WAY too hot WAY too often). Maybe I'm taking the "burn horizontal to kill your lateral motion then manage your drop" too literally. Seems that I burn a lot of fuel slowing down on one vector and then shifting to another vector rather than just burning purely retrograde. Grumble Grumble. I oughta just leave her there....

While accurate it also conflicts with some other real world twists. I lose a kerbalnaut on the mun. I can't quite afford a full rescue mission so instead I... take contracts to test fire rockets while I save up the cash to launch a rescue? More realistically would be some kind of AI that says "hey, you've got a stranded kerbalnaut, you should rescue them. here's unlimited money until you do but you can't get more research until you have" or something similar. Plus, honestly, I think the unlimited air/ food/ water is, while unrealistic, a fun twist of having little kerbals rather than people.

But that could mess with other things. While realistic, it can take years to line up the right orbit to put a probe on Duna, and that can create some odd situations with other projects you may have waiting (such as rescuing a lost kerbalnaut)

Yeah, the more I read about this (I just saw the rep hits with this thread; I'm too busy sciencing up right now to worry about contracts too much) the more I think I'll find that toggle to flip (if I can in my current save game; I don't want to start over). Some of these contracts are for things I'm just not up for trying yet. I could feel pressured to finally learn how to space walk but I'd rather focus on learning to land on the Mun at the moment thank you. Even just letting me set a focus "exploration" vs "rescue" vs "research" would be nice.

"Here Sila Kerman became the first of her kind to set foot upon the Mun. Here, too, Sila Kerman became the first of her kind to become stranded on the Mun."

How is that still a bug at this point?!? Okay well now I know where those saved games went. I don't mind losing my revert option. I felt really good about my chances on that landing until I, ya know, lost control of the landing itself. Or I would have liked a chance to replay the assisted flip launch to see if I could get a better take off once the rocket was upright (I think I still had it stuck "retrograde" or something stupid like that at first so I wasted a lot of my precious fuel on take off). Maybe I should have tried to use Sila's RCS thrusters to push the module back to an upright state for take off... Meh. Mostly I just don't want to have to replay launch into orbit if I don't have to... that and I'd like to actually hit Munar orbit without having to stop on the way there. I always seem to struggle getting the manuver point right and end up passing in front of the mun, then being pulled back towards it's orbit as opposed to coming up behind it and into orbit that way.....

I have successfully put Sila Kerman as the first kerbal on the Mun. Unfortunately we came in hot and and at an angle and her pod crashed destroying the fuel and engines and leaving only her capsule and science arts undamaged. So she's stuck there. I'll also admit my track record for Munar landings is spotty but I'm struggling with the save game features to save my game while enroute to the mun and then restoring a save. I did one where I purposefully called the game "Moon Shot" and when I went to reload it later it was gone with just a list of "Quick Save ##" there. So I know I have a hard time nailing a good landing still (though I did put a probe down on Minus very neatly.) I know part of it has been ineffiecent rocket design. I just got Heavier rocketry, and I don't have the 3 kerbal command capsule yet. I was trying to do something with the Rockamax fuel tanks as my Lift stage, a combination of 4 Swivel engines as my orbit and moon shot stage, and then a Terrier as my Munar orbit, descent and return stage. I had one game where I landed at an angle, and was able to use the doors of the Materials bay to push the pod mostly upright and then blast off the surface but I wasn't able to save enough fuel to get a return flight set up; she'd be lost in a permenant orbit with that plan. My current thinking is to try copying one of the other builds I've seen but top it with an advanced probe unit and send it unmanned. Basically have the probe send her a life boat to get on and then come home. Should that be workable?