Awaras

But you only gain speed \'on the way to Periapsis\' if your orbit is elliptical and your Apoapsis is considerably higher than the Periapsis, and the speed you \'gain\' that way is the same speed you lost while climbing to Apoapsis (that is, speed you didn\'t need in the first place).

I guess the ideal position of the Mun would be one in which the Mun begins to rise over the horizon at the moment you circularize your orbit after launch, so that you never turn off your engines and just keep thrusting for a TMI burn...

So, if you put a Cart (http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=8431.0;topicseen) vertically onto your rocket in the VAB, you can then put certain parts on the cart horizontally (discovered here: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=9098.0), which allows you to make things not possible otherwise: I am pretty sure that the devs never intended for this to work, but you can get some pretty interesting results: I am interested to see what the community can make with this.

No, the addons are just to make things more interesting. You can go to the mun with parts that come in the demo version, without any addons. Check this out:

You can definitely get into orbit and even land on the moon with the demo. The full version lets you launch multiple ships, adds a few new parts and allows you to use modules made by other people. Take a look at the wiki, there are some nice tutorials there for orbiting, landing on the mun and other stuff...

Same as the OP - you put a cart on vertically, and you can place any part sideways, put decouplers, landing legs or whatever else on it and then move it to another place...

I used this trick I saw here: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=9098.0 (see spoiler)

You kinda missed the mun there... The goal is to get an orbit so that the mun is close to you when you approach apoapsis. You have two options: You can completely circularize the orbit when you reach apoapsis, and since your orbit is slightly wider than the mun\'s you will be moving slightly slower than the mun. You just increase time warp to max and wait. The other option is to restart your launch. This is the best way to get to the mun: You launch from kerbin and get your ship into a circular orbit around it at around 150-170 km altitude. You point your ship towards your heading (the yellow circle with nothing inside it and three lines outside) and timewarp/wait until the mun starts to rise over the horizon. As soon as you see the mun, you burn prograde at full thrust untill the apoapsis of your orbit is at the same altitude or a little lower then the orbit of the mun. Turn off your engine, timewarp and watch the map untill you see that your orbit has changed - That means that you have switched to the Mun\'s sphere of influence. When you reach your Periapsis, burn retrograde (green circle with lines inside it) until you circularize your orbit around the mun. When you are ready, burn retrograde untill your orbit intersects the surface of the mun. Try to land...

Wow, I hope you realize that you have discovered a way to build very different kinds of rockets/landers?

Sign me up for the stock base please.

I use this kind of staging all the time. BTW, you do not need to connect the bottom of one stage to the top of another stage, bottom to bottom works the same (fuel tanks prioritize drawing fuel from fuel lines before drawing from fuel tanks above) and looks cleaner with shorter fuel lines... Check out this thread for tips for using fuel lines: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=8368.0

I have found that once you are closer than 3-4 km to your target and you have matched orbital planes and orbits as best you can, simply slowly thrusting towards the target with RCS and watching and correcting for drift it is enough for a successful rendezvous.

It\'s not fully stock, says it needs ascent autopilot. Here\'s mine, it looks small but gets you to the mun and back with plenty of fuel left over...

Three way meetup in Kerbin orbit: Landing all three command pods within reach of the space center

Dude, mass is mass. You must exert a force to accelerate mass, on earth, in space, anywhere. The more mass there is, the more energy you need to accelerate it to a certain speed. Do the test yourself: Make a ship with a bunch of fuel tanks on decouplers. Get it in orbit. Spend all the fuel in those tanks, leaving just one or two tanks in your core ship. Turn off engines. Press F5 to quicksave. Boost at full thrust until you run out of fuel. Write down your final speed. Now load the quicksave (F9), jettison the empty tanks and again boost at full thrust until you run out of fuel. Notice the difference in the speed? *Edit* Just did the test myself: got this ship into orbit Boosted until the outer fuel stacks ran out of fuel. My speed was 3920 m/s. Quicksaved. Boosted at full thrust with the empty fuel tanks on until I ran out of gas. Final velocity: 5019 m/s Quickloaded. Decoupled the empty fuel tanks. Boosted at full thrust until I ran out of gas. Final velocity: 5923 m/s Dragging the mass of those 8 empty fuel tanks and 2 engines cost me over 900 m/s of delta V....

The more mass, the more energy needed to accelerate it. Yes, jettisoning the empty fuel tanks will allow you to accelerate faster and use less fuel.

Correct me if I\'m wrong but currently there is absolutely no point to putting parachutes on anything except the command pod. I am sure that will be changed once the part recovery mechanic is implemented in the game, but right now any part that is dropped from your rocket is considered debris, and if you place the parachutes in the same stage as the decoupler that releases the part, when you drop it the parachutes will open nicely (if you follow it down it you can see that it will probably even survive the landing), but as soon as you move farther away from it than 2.5 kilometers it will simply be deleted if its altitude is lower then 20km or so... This is because of the current debris atmosphere reentry mechanics - unless it\'s landed, any debris is deleted as soon as it drops below 20-25km if it is on rails (which it is as soon as it is farther than 2.5km from your ship).

Yes they are (at least the shuttle boosters are...) 'Following each space shuttle launch, crew members of Liberty Star and Freedom Star pull the spent boosters out of the ocean and return them to Hangar AF at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Once they are processed, the boosters are transported to Utah, where they are refurbished and stored, if needed.'

First couple minutes of the movie:

This is AWESOME!!!1!one!

Once in orbit, burn retrograde until the periapsis (the lowest point of your orbit) is inside the mun. Try to do this when you are above the dark side of the mun so that the spot where your orbit touches the surface is on the day side. Increase time compression and wait until you reach an altitude of about 50 km. Burn retrograde until your lateral velocity is close to zero (the retrograde icon on the navball should be close to the dot in the middle of the blue hemisphere of the navball. Center the navball on that dot and turn on ASAS to keep your lander perfectly vertical. Keep falling down until you reach around 15 km. Again try to \'kill\' any residual lateral velocity and start burning retrograde to slow down until you speed is about 100 m/s. Keep slowing down as you descend. Approach the surface slowly. The altitude meter shows an altitude above zero level, the surface might be higher, at 2-400 meters depending on the terrain. If you are landing on the day side of the mun, you can look for the shadow of your lander to see how far above the surface you are. If you see that you are heading to a landing at a steep slope, boost up and try to find a nice flat spot. Ideally, you should land with very little lateral velocity (you can use rcs to kill any lateral velocity). You should touchdown at less then 2 m/s or bits will fall off your lander.

Yup, exactly as it happened to me... This inconsistency is something that should be pointed out to Harv so he can take a look.

Did it: There is something seriously weird with that piece of land... I tried to get there with a rover 2 times, and every time the location was different: The first time, there were huge gaps between the tiles, and my ship fell apart and fell through: The second time, there was still a gap, but it was different, so i approached the south pole carefully: You can see the stars underneath! After I went back to space center to verify my coordinates, and then returned to my rover, the terrain became completely different, without gaps: Wider area of the site: Now to try to get the kerbonauts home with just one rcs tank... *edit* Yay!