Blaarkies

I am doing that for Gilly...because seriously, to have a base and then a station around Gilly is just as silly Gilly's gravity. I want to do it with Minmus aswell, but you need a lot of fuel to make the ISRU extra mass seem irrelevant. I have a Minmus base which can hold a lot of fuel, and then a 4nuke lander that carries a Rocketdyne large tank back to LKO. EVA fuel pipes make it so much easier, just land close by and thats enough. I see flexible docking ports aswell. But I would rather replace all this Minmus operations with a single B9 HX-sized mothership

NASA has 500 people triple-checking all these details, but you are 1 person doing such a complex mission...it is hard to find all that is wrong alone, and it is bad for gameplay(the first few times is cool, we learn from it). Would it be cheating to Hyperedit a kerbal there, with some KAS equipment, add the chutes to the craft, and Hyperedit the kerbal and equipment back home? (I would just HE land and recover the ship, relaunch it with the same amount of used resources and HE it to the last destination it reached)

You do realize why there are so many PCMR baiters, right? Your first post was a bait, everyone just followed suit. See, in the eyes of the Piece-Sea-Mustard-Rice, non of those pro's you mentioned are an advantage of consoles. PC's just have a social stigma describing how they should be used...no one has to use them any different than console if they don't want to. * you probably didn't intend for the thread to become PCMR, but it goes both ways. I am still happy for all the new players coming to KSP (it's damn hard convincing people to try out the game!)

If the RAPIER is based of on Skylon's SABRE engines, then it would burn Hydrogen in airbreathing mode(by adding atmosphere intake air as oxidiser)...and in rocket mode it just adds the Oxidizer from onboard. A bit oversimplified, but yes, it uses Hydrogen like other aircraft uses Kerosene, that's awesome! The Lunar Decent Stage, did it use a Hypergolic mixture, or was that only for the Ascent stage? I know they stressed about the reliability of an engine on/around the Moon. It is the only ticket back home. LV-N engines use LH2 (liquid hydrogen) if the NERVA engine is anything to go by. I don't think the reactor core loses radioactive material, but if the core has a short half life, it might need to be replaced after some time

Put the base on top, on the edge of the cliff. Whenever you decouple anything that become rubbish debris, then just use a Klaw mobile to throw it down the canyon...it is someone else's problems then * there is more than 200m of space down there(forgot to add a ruler on my rover, but Mk1 eyeball and all that). It is about as flat as surfaces on the Mun.

Why not just add half an extra nuke engine every time? All jokes aside, it is important to be able to do orbital burns at less than 0.5 TWR. The more TWR you have, the more engine mass is coming with, which in turn needs more fuel. Nukes fit a fine niche, where you just have to keep adding more of them until you have 0.5TWR ...Ions on the other hand have an engine TWR of 0.8. That means, no matter what you do, you will never have a Ion craft with more than 0.8 TWR(no matter how many engines you add). Realistically, do not expect more than 0.2 TWR from Ion craft(more than that is a lot of engine mass you have to carry around) Remember, "Their fuel type is so light" is irrelevant, it is all about how it is packaged(wet to dry mass ratio of fuel tanks). LF(nuke fuel) is packaged the same as for the rest of the rocket engines(nukes have less sizes and shapes though)...but Xenon(Ion fuel) is horribly packaged, many times worse than the LF-OX

Alt+F12, Whack-a-Kerbal, Choose object mass as ∞ - 5.5(otherwise you get blackholes), Choose velocity as 3.4 x ∞ (because Einstein cursed the universe with stupid relativity and stuff ), Fire away at it, piece by piece, see what remains when the power consumption stop, ???, Profit! Just kidding, but serious...try KML, it is a savegame file editor. Feed it a quicksave from your game, wisk through the vessels tab, find your craft and check through the types of modules...the answer is effeminately there, i just wish there was an easier way

That's way better than I expected! Yes, i get 3170m/s(+- a few due to this explanation ↓) for a LKO Inc. change towards polar. Basically the same value that is displayed on the Maneuver node. @StrandedonEarth, that mod really makes these kind of stuff easy, thanks! There is a major disadvantage on this straight burn method: Midway through the burn, my orbital velocity was only about 1580m/s. If you can maintain a TWR of 2, then it will still take 161 seconds to do such a burn(+-50 of those seconds will be at below 1800m/s orb velocity...that will definitely add some gravity drag). It just gets far, far worse with realistic orbital craft(TWR < 0.5) So the stats result as: - 0% savings -> 4480m/s two separate burns - 18.5% savings -> 3650m/s continual aim at vector - 29.2% savings ->3170m/s straight burn But the 10.7% extra savings is only possible where TWR doesn't matter, like Ap of high elliptical orbits

Yes exactly. Like being in orbit heading east...and deciding to change direction to north, ending in the same Ap/Pe. I actually want to try it myself, I am curios how much the difference would be, since the math doesn't seem quite that obvious(integrate a sinus function and find the seconds of thrust for 90 degrees turn? I am unsure though)

adding to this, have you noticed that Nukes no longer need lots of radiators? I am running a 4 nuke tug on two large-panels(the static type), without them even being "activated" and nothing gets glaring red

You might want to explain more on this...It sounds like the "For Science!" mod, but it is only active when a scientist is on-board the vessel. And that should be stock, it will makes scientists useful than random probe missions

You should do those in reverse. I mean, do the Pe drop first, so that you are moving slower when doing the Inc. change(makes for a cheaper Inc. burn). Doing Inc. change at 270' vs 90' before landing is essentially the same(just burn opposite direction to move the landing marker). If you could combine those two burns into one Maneuver, it could become even cheaper(but that affects the landing angle and many other factors that are of a higher priority here)

No don't do that, now you have essentially two halves of a burn pointing in different directions ! The naive way to do Inc. change by 90' is to firstly cancel out your orbital velocity(burn 2240m/s retrograde at LKO)...now you are standing still in space while gravity is rapidly getting you closer to the atmos. To stop that, you have to burn North for 2240m/s. Now you are in a polar orbit for a total of 4480m/s. What I propose is to burn only 3167.8m/s at heading 315'(North-west). Pythagoras FTW! I understand your Maneuver is different, by continual aiming at the Normal-vector, as it drifts to the final position. Doing this gives you a lot of burn time towards 0' and some more at 270'...those burns don't line up, using only slightly less fuel than the 2 burns method. It is like walking across a rectangular field: 2 burns method -> walking along the fence until you get to the other corner Aim at normal -> walk along a smooth curved path over the field Static aim maneuver node -> Walk a dead straight line to the other corner of the field *If a craft has poor TWR, then your aim at vector method is much much safer(you always have orbital velocity at any point in the burn...no falling out of the sky/space). The static aim burn has a moment halfway into the burn, where orbital velocity isn't achieved yet. P.S. These LKO values are just for argument's sake, never do Inc. change at LKO

What is a "Dres"? Besides that, there is one thing to consider: Many player feel the planets are boring, flat, bland, etc. But that is kind of reality, if most of us see Mars through a pressurized Hitchhiker container, or saw the...what is that desert they filmed the Martian at? Anyway, if it wasn't for the atmosphere and gravity, it becomes hard to tell the difference. So there is a place on Earth that cosplays being Mars, yet none of us are really looking forward to having a month long vacation there. I feel KSP is actually being realistic in how "boring" the planets are(certainly not because of any other reasons ) My point is, adding new planets is like copying a poster, changing it's color and sticking it in your room...they are all technically different, but somehow all look the same(not criticizing anybody, just revealing my experience of KSP) Now criticizing!: no, but new ideas(stuff that isn't already in the game). Imagine Gilly on a solar orbit, Ap just below Jool, Pe near Eve...call it a Commet(it needs much more than that to be interesting). Or a high gravity world like Eve, but in a highly elliptical orbit could make players wait year just for the super cheap transfer to Jool/Eeloo

There is a huge open gap between Duna and Jool, why isn't there anything but empty space there? Maybe a moon/planet should be added between Duna and Jool, at an altitude in the range of 34 917 642 714m to 46 761 053 692m. Just put it in a somewhat eccentric and inclined orbit and make it analogues to Ceres.

How about making an independent copy of your kerbal directory, and keep playing that indefinitely? It is not like we need new updates to be able to play the game(like most online games), we can keep playing v0.90 until the day that the normal mainstream operating system doesn't support it anymore(windows 11?)

So where is the post that this parody is based off? C'mon, we know you do these things... * he will now claim that this post is totally serious, don't listen to that

The stakes are set really high to keep that meat "Hydr-ated" ... ....i'll show myself out now

But what if you shutdown the probe with a timer function that will boot up again after 20days ? Since KSP is a singleplayer game, but space missions are orchestrated by 100's of professionals...that exploit was kind of like "someone did all the research and calculated that we need the probe active when it reaches Mun SOI, or x amount of time from now...in the meanwhile it can run in low power mode" *something like this is possible with RemoteTech(sending future commands), but it is hard to overthink every little aspect of missions without a team of 100's

If you only tangentially touch the orbit, then you will have that problem. What i mean by this is, imagine you try to intercept Eve from LKO, with very little dv so that your Kerbol Pe is barely touching Eve's orbit. When you arrive at Eve, you will be moving faster than Eve(since you have a greater Kerbol Ap than Eve). Now since you are moving forward, there is now way to bend you inner Eve SOI trajectory to point more "forward"...(there is an inclination trick to still achive this with Eve, ignore that for now) However, think of it this way: Since you are moving faster, it is easier to get "in-front" of Eve in Eve SOI, since you will be hitting Eve from behind...but if you are going slower, then Eve's SOI will catch up to you and you will swing "behind" Eve. The trick to skip all this, is by dropping your Kerbol Pe to slightly below Eve's orbit(about 5% of the way to Moho), it seems wasteful but bear with me: When you intersect Eve's orbit now, you will have a greater difference in speed(Eve is racing past you, since you aren't really even movin in the same direction as Eve). This extra speed is relative to Eve, so if you can bend this trajectory as to exit Eve SOI in the same direction as Eve's orbit, then you suddenly got that extra speed when you exit into the Kerbol SOI. *you can easily play/test this out on Kerbin alone. Escape Kerbin, deep space burn retro grade to drop Pe slightly below Kerbin, ???, profit!

Did you seriously send a ship to Duna from LKO via Mun for only 880m/s dv? For comparison, you can "touch" the Mun SOI for about 840m/s from LKO. Most gravity assist Gurus say the Mun gives a maximum of about 150m/s dv, and less than that the faster you go through the SOI(the change in exit angle decreases)

I find low gravity worlds useless for anything other than easy landings. Take Dres/Moho for example, it uses over 1000m/s get capture yourself in orbit, while it only takes like 200m/s to capture at Eve(i know the relative speed difference between Kerbein/Eve is worse that Kerbin/Dres/Moho...but because of Oberth, it would still be far more expensive at Dres/Moho) The Mun is great for a slingshot...to Minmus. Really, don't try anything more than that(maybe using a Mun assist to get into a higher orbit, resulting in cheaper injection burns into Mun orbit). It save a little more than a 100m/s dv getting to Minmus(since you get a Minmus transfer trajectory, but with Kerbin Pe way above 70km...it is like 5 000km at least). A Scott Manley video about the JUNO mission has a piece of very educational visual gravity assist explanation. Basically, escape Kerbin going prograde(very slowly, less than 10% of the way to Duna). Then at Kerbol Ap, you should be behind Kerbin in the race...burn retrograde for about 200m/s, you will get an intercept with Kerbin somewhere past the "Starting line"(where you escaped at first). This sling should get you up to Duna orbit or even more...anyway, the trick is to start one year + a few(20?) days AHEAD of the departure date(so that you will swing by the same day that the transfer window opens up) I am still no master at this, but I know it is useless for a trip to Duna/Eve...but for Jool this is perfect! (but you really need to have your life in order to be able to achieve it...successfully)

Well, it is not wrong. In orbit your are continually accelerating towards Kerbin I have seen this in previous versions, but mainly when rotating massive ships at 60rpm or faster...but now in 1.1.3 it happens very often(but mostly at low altitudes). I am gonna try out some of these "not-so-placebo" fixes though(i only know about disabling SAS and EVA kerbal fix)

Try warp-unlocker. It removes all those altitude restrictions(be careful on Gilly). It should be stock, it is stupid to go back and forth between tracking station(or some probe lying on the surface of a planet) just to time warp faster. It is supposed to be a safety feature so that players cannot skip through the atmosphere...well just go to tracking station then

@KerikBalm I meant to say Laythe, got ahead of myself there Those are absolutely amazing, kudos, bravo, well done! How does the cargo ramp work out for you, does it give any headaches? Also, do you have some bases solely for getting cheap fuel(like Minmus)...what system do you use for lifting the fuel to orbit? My plan was using the cargo doors type(facing downwards). Land the VTOL and open the door, but before unhooking I would extend the base's landing legs then undock. Then retract the VTOL gear as I slowly throttle to lift off, leaving the cargo on its own landing legs. This all fine and well in fantasy land, but in real life(where kerbals work for a living) there is that annoying "cannot deploy while stowed" feature that bugs out whenever you least want it to. Also, if the landing spot is not flat and water level, the VTOL engines will drift...and then there is the panther in afterburner mode that might not give enough lift(this thing needs to be able to make Laythe orbit afterwards to collect more payload). At least the davon-throttle-control-systems got the VTOL engine covered, it is really fun controlling craft with zero reaction wheel or rcs, but only from differential engine thrust If I can just get it on the surface, then a base crawler rover can assemble these parts(I had great success with crawlers on Minmus...way better than the forklift on the Mun)