bewing

Ah. Exactly which version of the game? Current 1.5.1? And are you using the english localization when playing (or are you translating from some other language)?

I'm not so sure about that. I think XLjedi meant that he had CommNet turned *off*. With CommNet off, any antenna will do exactly the same job. Once you turn CommNet on, then a relay antenna will do everything that a direct antenna can do, plus it will also relay. But the whole point of CommNet is that once you turn it on, you have to start worrying about how much range each antenna has, and the HG5's are pitifully short range.

I think the problem is more likely to be that the pitch control surfaces are pretty much inline with the CoM, so the plane has no pitch control authority. So it's going to be unstable in pitch no matter what you do.

Yes, those sound like typos. It is true that a very large number of players are not completely fluent in English. Capturing asteroids is a pretty extreme form of rendezvous maneuver, so you have to be pretty good at rendezvous maneuvers in the first place before you make a serious attempt at it. Those two typos sound like things that a rendezvous expert would consider pretty obvious, and would probably ignore. From your thread title I can't tell exactly which tutorials you mean -- but you might want to "ping" the author of the tutorials here, by typing an @ symbol, then partially typing their name, then selecting them from the dropdown list. The author can fix the typos. In any case, you want the anti-target and retrograde markers almost exactly on top of each other in target mode, until your last kilometer -- when you really want them to diverge just a bit . After that, yes, you want retrograde, not anti-target.

You have your craft you are building, and a craft that is saved. The attachment point on the saved craft has to be set as the root part. You click the Merge button, click "continue without saving", select the saved craft from the list, and then stick the saved craft onto your current craft at the proper attachment point. If the attachment point of the saved craft is not set as the root part in the saved file, you can still reroot it while it is "ghosted", after you click the Merge button.

On the other hand, these guys are all addicted to maneuver nodes. At your midcourse correction point, you can just look with your eyeballs at the trajectory past Duna (or wherever) and do the burns by hand. The required burns are tiny -- so throttle your engines all the way down to give yourself the required precision. Normal/antinormal first, to get your trajectory to pass over the equator (e.g. if your trajectory is too far north, then burn antinormal). Then prograde/retrograde to change the timing of your encounter, which is the easiest way to adjust the flyby Pe. (You have to be able to judge whether your craft arrived "too late" after your target CB already passed by.)

You can always land anything (even with no heatshield) if you just burn enough fuel to get the reentry speed below 1500 m/s surface speed. So no, if you want to redo this mission it is not absolutely necessary to have a relay in orbit -- what you save on the heatshield, you just have to spend on some extra fuel.

There is no such thing as partial thrust blockage. Each engine is checked individually and if there is anything directly behind the engine, then that engine's thrust gets exactly counterbalanced by an opposing force placed on the part behind the engine. You will not see the thrust blockage in the context menu. All the aero readouts show full thrust, but the thrust does not produce any motion. I have not loaded your plane, but I guarantee that many of your engines are just wasting your fuel and producing no net force on your plane.

Well, I don't like looking at "plane-style" aero forces in the VAB. They often just don't look right. So my suggestion would be: rename a second copy of the craft, reroot if needed, rip off the whole booster and throw it away, save the craft, transfer it into the SPH, make it horizontal, and then look at the CoM/CoL.

I think this might easily end up being your best choice overall. The nice thing about aerobraking with a spaceplane is the immense difference in drag between prograde-lock and "trying to bleed off velocity" attitude. What that ends up meaning is that you can often fine-tune the aerobraking maneuver to bring your Ap very very close to your final number. Then at your Ap, burn just enough so that you meet your space station coming around on the next orbit.

I've never played modded myself, or ever created any mods -- so I know nothing whatsoever about the subject. Some of the others may have useful input though.

Several points: I prefer to always design for a single kerbal scientist + experiments as payload. Increasing the kerbal count has no benefits except for artificially increasing the difficulty level. Laythe is almost entirely water, so I find a pure LF seaplane SSTO is the most useful there. If you're willing to clip, I'd go for a single nuke/single panther design (with my single kerbal/MK1 format). A Laythe spaceplane is too different from a Kerbin spaceplane to expect the thing to SSTO from Kerbin's surface. I find it much better to put the Laythe plane on top of a kickback or two, in order to get it to orbit. Then refuel, then send it to Laythe. Refuel it again, land it. Fly around a bit. Fly it back to orbit, refuel it again, and send it back to Kerbin. The jet engines and wings are not enough deadweight to make a significant difference to your flight plan. The wings mean you need almost zero fuel and no parachutes to go from your Laythe parking orbit to "landed". So the wings completely pay for themselves. Anything that can launch from the surface of Kerbin to orbit can go anywhere in the system except Moho, if you refuel it in orbit.

On the runway, just activate the engines in question (by clicking the button in their context menu) and then go to full thrust. If nothing happens, then they are occluded.

Too close to the bulkhead is my guess.

It works a lot better in the VAB if you build everything facing the default direction, make the nosecone at the very top be the root part, detach everything below the root part and put it aside, delete the nosecone (root part), place a new nosecone and move it straight upwards with the mousewheel, give the entire bottom of your rocket ONE 90 degree twist, and reattach it all. That way, it's in the exact center of the pad and you did not have to do a lot of twisting and retwisting games.

Sure we can, but you're going to have to be more specific than that. So, what happens when you try? Is this a problem with finding the window, doing the transfer burn, doing the midcourse correction, gravity assists, aerobraking, or a problem with your craft?

300 dV is still way too expensive. A midcourse correction should be more like 2 dV, or something. So there's still some little issue somewhere.

Ejection angle is the angle between the point of the orbit you occupy at burn start, and the full prograde (or retrograde) vector of the planet on its orbit around the Sun. So in the following picture, it's the angle from the center of Kerbin (the red line) to the maneuver node. If you don't get this angle right, then your burn will not be nearly as efficient -- which means that you will either be early or late getting to your destination. So yes, that might be your problem -- but any interplanetary burn is always slightly inaccurate. And 5 million kms is not that bad. Halfway to your destination you always have to make a small burn to correct any inaccuracies from your first burn. Phase angle is the angle between Kerbin's current velocity vector, and your destination planet's current position.

They have short range antennas built into the launch sites so that you can launch a probe into orbit. The antennas do not have Tracking Station level power.

F4.

Works fine for me in both 1.5.1 and 1.4.5. My copy of 1.4.3 is on a backup disk somewhere. Maybe post a screenshot showing your debug console and the thing you are trying to shoot at?

OK, so I guess my experiment was out of date.

See, I've never noticed the angle making any real difference. Have you ever tried this experiment? Have a long thin single-stack rocket reenter, with an almost exact 90 degree AoA (held with a good strong reaction wheel or ten and infinite EC). Which parts get hot? Answer: the part on the nose, or the part on the tail. One or the other, not both. And nothing in between. Why? Because it seems to think that one of those parts is the "front" and all the rest is occluded. And I guess I meant a 2.5m heatshield.

I agree that reentry heating is a funny beast -- odd things happen with it, and I've never figured it out myself. My personal guess for an experiment would be to place 1.25m heatshields with no ablative just in front of those tanks. We could try summoning a dev to try to explain the algorithm, but honestly, I'm not even sure that they quite know how it works.

Well, Laythe is gentler unless you are an idiot like me. On Laythe, when I reenter, my temptation is always to fly along and along until I get to a nice island. It's really easy to just go into a nice hypersonic glide for hours and hours while you wait for the perfect island to show up. And then BOOM! your nose blows up from overheating.