bewing

Yes, it's a converter. Yes, it adds more weight -- but the point is that you have a huge amount of fuel available at that point, so you can have a really big engine and you don't have to worry about weight anymore. The easy way to dock on the ground is with a klaw on the nose of a rover. You just drive up and bump the klaw into any flat surface. That gets you docked. And then if you have the settings set nicely, you can do trasfers. The hard way is with carefully matched docking ports. Once again, you have one on the nose of a rover, but the rover needs to have some method to raise and lower the nose. You drive up and get the nose aligned horizontally, then either raise or lower the nose -- maybe while inching forward at the same time. Hopefully your docking ports will dock when they get really close.

That would work. Yes, that would get you a small boost in engine efficiency, and a huge boost in thrust. You need to go to the wiki and see what the surface gravity is for your liftoff. Your TWR is the number of newtons of thrust in your engine, divided by your ship's mass in kg times the surface gravity acceleration. So if your craft is 20 tonnes, that's 20000 kg. The Mun's gravity is 1.63 m/s^2. So you need 32.6 kilonewtons from your engine to achieve a TWR of 1.0. Which isn't enough to get you off the ground. You want to be in the lowest convenient orbit around the Mun when you leave -- to take the most advantage of Oberth. The Mun has enough orbital velocity to have a Pe of 11,400km -- to return to Kerbin, you want your final Pe to be a lot lower than that. So you need to kill most of your orbital velocity from the Mun. So you need to exit the Mun's SOI going backwards along the Mun's orbit. In this example, I'm in a 15km orbit over the Mun. The maneuver node is pretty good, but not quite the most efficient possible -- because the lines are not quite parallel. OK, good. It's not a station contract, so you can refuel all you like. Depending on how you play the game, though -- sometimes it's fun to maximize your profits by following the contracts to the letter, but violating their spirit. So you may want to note that the vessel that mines the ore doesn't have to be the same vessel that ends up in orbit around Kerbin. It also doesn't have to be the same ore. And you don't have to get it all the way to LKO to complete the contract. All you need to do is get the ore just barely out of the Mun's SOI. Or mine the ore on the Mun, don't launch it, and launch a craft with 2200 ore from KSC into LKO.

Try selecting your forward docking port, open the context menu for it, and click "Control From Here". Then please try your steering again. I don't know exactly why the wheels do that, but wheels on rovers do seem to work better when the rover is built in the SPH.

You may want to swap out the little drills for big ones, and you may want to add at least a command seat for an engineer. The speed increase for the mining will be huge. It takes maybe 700 m/s to get to Mun orbit, and another 300 to get to a decent Pe on Kerbin for aerobraking. But I'm worried that you won't have enough thrust to get off the ground. You're on the hairy edge for minimum liftoff thrust. In the editor you can also fill ore tanks, temporarily. Then you will be able to get the dV for the craft with full ore tanks. Then empty the tanks again. As you said, the surface scanner is only barely useful if you can move around. It serves no purpose at all for a stationary mining base. You're going to need another thousand to land. So yes, I suspect you'll need to refuel. However, pay close attention to your contract. If the contract is asking for a NEW station in LKO with ore onboard, then you can't dock to anything except brand new ships during your entire mission, or the contract will fail.

He did. Look up two posts.

Hmmmm. The xbox game downloader has an automatic verification process built in. So that should make it a lot harder for a corruption to happen. Once you've purchased a game on xbox, you can theoretically delete it and redownload it -- but it takes a long time and it's annoying. So I think I'd take Gargamel's advice. Force the contract to complete with the cheat menu, and see if any problem like that ever happens again. If it does, try to spot the pattern -- and maybe try doing the delete/redownload thing then.

The contract works from the runway too. I do that all the time, myself.

Did you buy this game from steam? It sounds like you might have received a slightly corrupted download -- if so, it's easy to fix with a "file validation". In general, it sounds like you are doing everything right -- so the contract should complete. If it doesn't, then that almost always means some kind of corruption. Do you know how to do a file validation from steam?

This is exactly the problem that autostruts were introduced to fix. To turn them on: go into your Settings, and enable Advanced Tweakables. Then you will need to take the rocket back into the editor, and turn on autostruts for several of your rocket's parts. Autostruts make your rocket much more rigid, by putting an invisible solid connection between two parts. In this case, I would recommend one autostrut to the Root part in each of the sections between the bendy joints, and one more at the very bottom of the rocket.

After trying all the above methods a number of times, I have decided that I like to use method 3. The deltaV needed to get a tanker ship from the surface of Minmus to a 45km Pe at Kerbin is pretty tiny. So trying to conserve there is not too useful. And a large interplanetary ship may not have enough fuel remaining to get from LKO to Minmus for refueling. But circularizing a tanker at LKO takes a relatively large amount of dV. So I created a tanker with a very high heat tolerance that could aerobrake (in 3 passes) from Minmus with a huge load a fuel. And I find that to be fun.

Not really. Besides joints, you also need to turn on "No Crash Damage" and "ignore max temp". But you can still blow up by hitting the water too hard. And you can still spaghettify your craft by hitting the ground too hard.

I'm not sure. I've never tried anything like a 10x GPP game. You have science at 500%, and you might easily be able to get away with only 100% for that -- if you are careful about stripping KSC of science points. Funds at 200% will reduce the contract grinding somewhat.

Contracts are how you make money in the game. Obviously if you make the game cost more, you're gonna have to grind contracts more. At the beginning of the game, you have a very low (zero) Rep. Until you build your rep over 300, you will only be getting survey or tourist contracts to grind. So if you are going to be prejudiced against survey contracts, then I'd suggest a starting rep of 200 minimum.

In general, aerodynamic drag makes up a very small portion of a rocket's total deltaV budget. If you can perform a reasonable gravity turn, then aerodynamics really isn't worth a lot of worry.

Yes, parts occlude airflow according to the frontal area of their "visible mesh". So if they look like they are different sizes, then there will be additional drag.

Sounds like you haven't heard about autostruts? You need to turn on Advanced Tweakables in the settings.

Welcome to the forums gridfinned. I do not know if there is any mod that can change the behavior for you, but I just wanted to clarify what you said. What you saw is not exclusive the to grabbers. Any time you successfully dock to something, all your engines will shut off. Having a grabber activate is a form of docking. The game does this by default so that all the engines on the two now-docked ships don't suddenly all activate and do bad things to your orbit, or waste your fuel, or cause explosions.

I just checked in version 1.7.0 -- in Main Settings/Input/Kerbals, at the bottom of "Character Controls", P is available for reassignment. I haven't checked back to previous versions but I'd be pretty sure it's in 1.6 also.

A compass heading is not a vector. Just an angle.

You can only do that if the orbits intersect at a point. If so, then the first approximation is to just subtract the velocity vectors at that point. That gets you the deltaV. If the orbits do not intersect, then you cannot get from one to the next with only one burn.

I can't reproduce that. Kerbals are always naturally buoyant. Have you tried hitting WASD?

Having a plane veer to the left on takeoff is a very common problem. In fact, it's so common that there are actually some suggestions on the FAQ in this forum. There are many possible causes, and many possible fixes. My typical suggestion is to understand that passive stability in general comes from having very little drag at the front of your craft, and high drag at the back end. This is true both while you are in the air, and on the ground. When you are on the ground, your wheels have a lot of friction. Wheels with high loads have even more friction. What this ends up meaning is that your nose wheel may end up having a lot more friction/drag than your rear wheels. To fix it, in the SPH open the menu for the front wheels. On the friction control, set it to manual and adjust the friction on the front wheel down to 40% or less. Even 0% works.

Welcome to the forums. To have a 95% commitment, you must have a level 3 admin building, I take it? There is a rather longstanding bug with the level 3 admin building, that hopefully will get fixed someday. To the best I can tell, any strategy that you select gets applied TWICE. So your strategy commitment is actually 190%. So try reducing the commitment on your strategy to 48% and see if it works better.

Hi Claw! Yep, I was definitely planning on including the launched launch clamps. Spaghetti is baked into the game engine, I am nearly certain? The parachute is a very good idea. I'll think about how the other three might fit in. Hmmmm.