rodentgun

You are all horrible geeks Been on MK2 "Spectacled" Eyeball for 35 years now. I went with the FarSeeing option, found the Myopia Edition too unfocussed due to astigmatism. I find that landing is doable from the orbital map but somewhat difficult. If my lander is about to tilt I escape Again and go out of orbit rather than try to fix it near the surface of the moon I am trying to land on.

How is the best burn? I try to split my burn across the navigation timer 0 point. But near the end of the burn the blue target drifts and I somehow still end up overdhooting a wee bit. Is it how it is?

Sooooooooooooooooo. What is the conclusion then, if any? Did I do wrong with the approach I used on Mun to land in Eastern Crater? I find the optimal suicide burn thingy impossible to achieve when playing as a gamer, not a physicist. Should I do the horizontal burn but at a small -15 degree tit from horizontal?

I made my very first recoverable rocket stage and sent my first refueling space station bits into space above Kerbin with it. Got it back down safely, too, as it landed on proper kerbin soil and was brought back to KSC for recycling.

Well, Temstar, the beauty of it is that it sort of tests it self as I launch more rockets That is my 3rd "test" after having seen the two first iterations break up on landing. Btw that was Uneven land btw. It didnt topple as I had a little bit of booster fuel left to lower impact velocity at a fraction of time before impact. I am also trying to keep down the mass of the launcher stage to as low as I can to leave room for payload. My hope is that I can use it to launch tanks of liquid fuel and oxidizer to my space station once it is constructed. There is no reason to "test" for the purpose of seeing what works now I just modify as I go along. Some times it doesn't pan out, but this doesn't mean I have to say it is a complete failure, which it would be when I lost kerbals. Now I just tally up the recovered parts, and the more kerbdollars left over for me, the better, assess what could improve or if I just had bad luck. I modify the design as I learn from my mistakes, the kerbal way! Water landing has already been tested. IT topples and splashes sideways but did not break. Anyways, I think we are breaking away from the topic now!

I just started imposing a staging recovery rule on myself. I am on my first career on normal mode so I have used the Back to the Drawing board button A LOT of times as my rockets did wrong due to my inept design. However, Im getting better at it now. Just a mere 200 hours sunk into KSP So now, inspired by Space X, I have worked hard to recover my booster stages. I quickly gave up slapping chutes on boosters and other jetissoned stuff. Doesnt work it seems. So I allow myself some disposable Solids to increase thrust at launch if needed, but apart from that my launcher stages should carry themselves up and down. It isnt going as well as I planned. But the good thing is that when I screw up, and my stages crash instead of land for recovery, I don't "reload" as I do when Kerbs die. So gradually increasing the difficulty Building up the experience of what works and what doesn't the kerbal way: Building and testing first, then calculating what the hell went wrong AFTER Last night I finally managed it: 22.000 kerbdollars recovered as my booster staged returned from orbit and landed. A Rhino engine with a large 2.5 m tank, four fins for stability, four legs for landing. 2 drogues in the engine end and 8 chutes in the top to lower speed enough and flip the rocket just before landing. I put a 2.5 m service bay on top with a 300/800 2.5 ablator for heat protection. Stuck an OKTO2 probe inside the service bay with a couple of batteries attached and a small stabilizer. Also a few voltaics. So I have to fly this thing down myself. My ambition is that any launch from now on that isnt a space plane should have launch stage recovery as mandatory (with the exception of boosters)

That is a lot of if's. I tried it on my last landing on the Mun and compared left over dV after landing. I did shave off around 100 m/s or so by doing as described above instead of a continous retrograde burn. My terrain altitude was around 1000 m from the surface of the East Crater after I cleared the mountain range encircling it (That was a paint scraping moment btw). I did find it easier to land with the full stop method however. Perhaps this is a reason for efficiency being a human player. I had only to navigate 1000 m down and that made my final approach with vertical retrograde trusts much more precies and short. hence the efficiency gain.

Sorry for the thread necromancy, but this advice is still sound in KSP 1.05. I tested it on my Mun lander. Shaved around 150 dV off in the budget, or around 10%. So putting it simple: The most efficient descent profile is to burn retrograde while keeping descent to 0 m/s so you effectively are flying horizontal until you are at "full stop" on the Surface speedometer. Do it from as low an altitude as you dare to. Then descent. Thanks

So, if I perform this calculation for Eeloo, I get the Ejection burn dV at 2071. Add 2200 from Kerbin low orbit velocity and I should expect to return to Kerbin with a speed of around 4270 m/s?

Ah, thank you pvtsteyr. I have only played KSP since december so the science and fine art of ballistics is new to me. Learned what I have from this I changed the way how I launch Spaceplanes too. Instead of sharp pitching up I gently raise the nose up above Kerbin's horizon when my jet hits max thrust at 11 km. By slowly nudging the prograde vector upwards until I hit 35 degrees I have now A good 20% efficiency boost at least. More deltaVs! anyways, what IS the necessary velocity to reach orbit around Kerbin? something above 2200 m/s?

Thanks for the extra help, A_name. One thing that puzzles me is that the further I go up, the longer away my time to apoapsis seem to go. Last ascent it went to past 3 minutes as I hit my apoapsis of 82 km. I still made the ascent into LKO with around 3200 m/s, had 22 left in the main booster tank when my orbit was complete so I think my ascent was very efficient. But the numbers you cite and the ones I see don't match for some reason. Perhaps because my rockets are smaller? i am using just one stage from launch to orbit for launches in Kerbin SOI so far, btw. This might also affect upper atmosphere behaviour compared to your guide.

Just a follow up on my experience with this launch technique. Some of my designs dont Work at all with this. I seem to experience a lot of topsy-turvying and rocket flipping around 8 to 10 km altitude. I guess I used to SAS bruteforce me through this, but now I redesigned some of my rockets. I went from a 109 ton rocket to propel a 13 ton lander into LKO and down to a 65 ton Vessel to launch the same lander into LKO. Done with 3200 m/s only can you believe it? Further experience: With my medium sized rocket of sub 100 ton the 45 seconds to apoapsis and 1.50 TWR seems too Little. My rocket appears to be aerodynamically very stable, but at this speed it drops into the horizon too quick. If I keep the time to Apoapsis at 45 I will never make it. But if I keep it at around 1 minute it seems to work better.

Oh goodness. This post really helped me make the best ascent I ever did. No amount of watching videos and mucking about with gravity turns worked as well as this post. It seems that letting Gravity do the work for you is the most efficient way. So many extra DeltaVs now in LKO, what to spend them all on!!! Thank you A_name, registered just to thank you for your guide.