Provisional Name 12

The purpose of that one was to launch those satellites (comsat for LKO on remotetech mod) to a 2kkm orbit, take a tourist to LKO and do a few rescue missions. As such the payload has to have the satellites on it, I tried putting a pharynx over it but it would smash off of the fuel nacelles and break my solar panels. I think your right, boosters from space y. These are some helpful hints, for some reason my response to having tipping problems was to try to make it shorter and stalkier because it seemed to give more control and prevent tipping. I hadn't payed much attention to TWR because I frequently just controlled my throttle instead, however it seems like maybe this is less ideal as the aero forces are not nearly as bad as the gravity forces. You guys have given some interesting advice and I will look at how I can use it to make more stable designs and perhaps get this stuff more under control. Thank you.

http://imgur.com/a/U7YZL http://imgur.com/a/AyJNK This would be a good example of the problem I had to work on this one for a long time the other night just to get it up into orbit so that it wouldn't flip. COM is obviously closer to the bottom around the engine for the no atmos stage. For reference those solids on the side are from interstellar and have gims (also set to 40% so they last till I clear atmos), the attached AV-R8 are scaled up to 200% and the booster are set in a separate group to trigger when I start to have difficulties with control. The central thruster is a t30 tweaked to 3.75 on an x200-8 tweaked the same and the tanks around it are 2 stage asparagus with regular t45s (just for the gim thrust) The 4 nacelles on the top are just for the orbital stage, they are fuel tanks setup in a 2 stage asparagus with no engines feeding to an x200-8 tank that has a single terrier scaled to 2.5. Even though I was able to use this rocket to achieve the mission this is the best working model of all the ones I had that kept tipping over I could never do the gradual side shift you guys are talking about or even keep it going without flipping most of the time, Clearly the COM is on the bottom but always above the drag however as I drop the solids and the first liquid stage I have a massive shift that causes me to loose control and usually flip. The reason why I am asking general tips is because this is a very typical design style for me so if you have advice it may be generally helpful.

I could never play on console and I have to admit your doing pretty good to manage it. Other than maybe the opportunity to use a joystick for flight navigation I see no advantage. In fact just the limitation of not having KER means having to do all the delta-v calculations manually and switching through screens for info much more than should be necessary. So hats off to you. What? I mean at current rendesvous is basically the easiest thing in game (unless the maneuver nodes start bugging out), probably easier than landing on kerbin and docking while not easy to learn is pretty simple once you know how to target the docking port and use control from here.

typically that works ok until I drop boosters then it flips same with when I go to drop depleted asparagus staging. I am thinking this is because of reduction of drag from the bottom portion but if I have to not use boosters or asparagus staging, I am definitely not saving on delta-V.

is there any good guidelines for reducing drag and being able to execute these sorts of turns? I often do a similar maneuver to these two you quoted and would really like to use a more efficient route, but suffer from severe drag forces that always want to tip my rocket over from even the most slightly out of center petrograde before the 20km mark where I often hit 45 until I near whatever my preferred apeostasis is. I knew this was a waste of delta-v but I have no idea how to stop drag from making my craft flip otherwise. The first 2 I have already tried a lot, the second I am less familiar with in terms of Kerbal rocket design. I might add this is something that happens to me with even very benign stuff like I last launched a hitchhiker with mk1 command + reaction wheel and 3 small comms satellites to setup an omni-LKO sat network.probably wasn't that heavy at all, but it just would not stop with causing drag and I will likely have to launch more satellites to setup the network to cover the other bodies in the SOI. With this 3rd option am I building a number of smaller lift payloads with no central engine or something around my vac stage payload? It just seems like a counter-intuitive ship design (usually the cart goes before the horse), but makes sense on considering I can see how the main problems I am having are probably from loss of drag on the back when I jettison spent fuel containers and boosters. How far forward does thrust need to be? Just ahead of the COG of the non-atmospheric payload?

There are like a million mods that address a lot of your complaints including some really cool mission mod packs. Have you tried the realism overhaul or USI with LS or remote tech?

Actually that's the cool thing about kerbal engineer is that the surface tab will tell you all about the terrain below you as well including what slope it is. I honestly can't imagine why it isn't in stock.

I usually use Kerbal engeneer and land on the light side. It's probably not worth putting lights on unless you need to land on the dark side. Really though maybe your landing funny. I don't know how others do it but when landing on low-grav/no-atmos bodies I like to draw my orbit as low as possible (a low apeostasis ensures low vertical velocity on final decent) and set it up so that my craft is really close to the landing area then kill my horizontal velocity when I have just enough time to land on the spot. When done right, I just drift down on a brief efficient controlled decent of a few hundred meters. Seems to save fuel vs other methods like suicide burns at high alt or killing both gradually from a higher point. I also think it is an easier way to land and easier to navigate to land in specific areas.

Eve, I setup some probes on it and wanted to explore more before I started a new career using USI-LS/CTT and now I have installed remote tech... So it may be a while to get there again, but one day I am going to setup a base there and study all the biomes. Not sure if I will get the crew off though, but that's... not as important.

There are probably certain ones that would and would not be possible, I think through some feet of engineering you could do it but would need to design the engines on the nacelles to consume much less fuel than the central thruster. But I've long past graduated from putting engines on nacelles, that's such a waste of thrusting power. I feel like condemning it within the limitations of stock would be absurd though.

True, but at the same time this is just a technical limitation of the game that makes it impossible while the same physical outcome as asparagus staging could be achieved if you were allowed greater control, for example if you could control crossfeeding as a staging or action group. you could easily setup a staging that fed off 4 separate pairs of nacelles in order and dumped them as it switched to the others. So while I can appreciate that asparagus staging doesn't happen in real life, I feel like the possible equivalent alternatives being limited to you in the game makes it such that it is not really game-breaking to use. If there were a mod that would allow me to put crossfeeding into the staging I would seriously consider altering game play, however as it stands my opinion is that asparagus is just a way to work around several of the broken mechanics and artificial limitations of the game.

Not sure I have rules as much as guidelines. 1) Don't cheat unless the game screws you. I usually don't do this anyway other than when rendezvous nodes don't move as expected and I find I wasted a tonne of fuel and need just a bit to make a return. 2) Killing kerbals is moderately discouraged 3) Don't delete space debris, it's wildly improbable but what if it caused an accident? That would be cool. Also try to reuse parts if you can, I know I dropped a fuel tank that had quite a bit left just orbiting Kerbin and ended up picking up the fuel after a bunch of rendezvous to keep the mission going. Though, nowadays I plan my rockets delta-V much better, but any craft parts that can be reused is good, I have left old mining vessels floating in space to be picked apart over time for parts. I often use a designation that isn't scrap for important debris I don't want to see disappear (put survey probes in same category to hide). Sometimes it's kinda cool to just look at all the debris and see where it is and where it's gone, see what stuff might be in other SOIs than it was left in. 4) I make minimalist living spaces, but now with UKI LS... that isn't really a possibility. I honestly don't know how I will manage to do a Eve science station. 5) Don't update until all your mods are compatible. 6) And finally I'll just do one more launch or, I'll just plan the ship out for this launch are totally legitimate ways to keep playing even if you are glued to it for hours and need to stop. That said, I feel like the reason that asparagus staging is the norm in KSP and not in real life is not so much just because it is difficult to design properly. I am pretty sure you could setup a system that opened and closed gravity feed fuel from nacelles that could then be dropped and in the real world we don't have to deal with the mechanics of KSP or the limited shapes, form and size of parts available in the game. I also suspect that tracking the falling debris would get more problematic if you were dropping more of it much closer to your launching area.

See I thought that was the case, I started playing 1.0.5 and I definitely remember exploiting the hell out of this. Yea you have to bundle missions and plan quite a bit, But I play with a lot of the difficulties on hard so if the mission pays for a station that's worth it, never-mind what you can net by tying in extra contracts. If I recall all of the components in the parts list have to be new not the station as a whole. This may not sound like a great deal but with large crew contracts it can be a big deal. Other way to make bank on em is to incorporate tourism missions to fill out the crew capacity and make money.

@ultraviolet150 & @Spentec you guys must have missed it but crew capsules are not able to be tweaked, it says that it is known that putting crew in tweaked capsules will cause crashes. It is labeled as a known issue on the 1st page, so I assume fixing it is a priority that may get fixed in a future patch.

All of the batteries are kinda a pain in the ass, If I had to pick a favorite I'd pick fuel cells just because they make mining really possible. That said, the near future electrical mod has some good larger variations. It's much more useful to have larger battery banks than more batteries because of lag. If your conducting a rendezvous of multiple and/or large ships it can become a pain if you have a bunch of z-100s creating lag.

Has anyone found the scaling of price a bit problematic in tweakscale? I just started using it and found that whenever I scale a part up or down like a fuel tank or an engine, it is frequently cheaper than identical or equivalent in game parts. For example a poodle scaled down to be the size of a tarrier is only 230 while the stock tarrier is 390. Similarly an fl-t200 scaled up to an x200-16 size is only 1200 while the stock robomax is 1550. I know these things seem to be minor, but it would seem to be somewhat harmful to gameplay in the career mode. It's possible that parts should have a percentage increase of the base cost to be scaled up or down. Not sure what the math on it would look like or if there is in fact a good figure to reach for all parts. Has this been considered before?

If I had to pick a favorite. It would have to be the one that I could least do without. The one that if eliminated from the game I could not find a replacement for. This would obviously have to be the Nerv rocket. a lot of the others can basically be swapped for others if you use tweakscale. However the Nerv is pretty unique in it's high ISP for inter-planetary travel and can save loads of valuable time. I recently started a new career to use the community tech tree and kolonization+lifesupport, but my previous career revolved around building almost no permanent bases and building most structures with a series of Nerv nacells around them anchored to the structure by beams.

Way back, when I was just a beginner, I made a rover for the moon, which i would find was useless and I wanted to walk away from. I sent a tourist/rescue ship to go retrieve the pilot and failed to profile the engine low enough causing it to be destroyed on impact (before i learned about autosave). Had 2 tourists and 2 employees stranded on the mun The tourists meant it would be a tricky rescue. So i started researching teh internetz and found a lot of cool mods including KIS/KAS, Many people told me to just get a claw and I suspect now that would have been a better idea. However my bright idea was to use KIS/KAS to send a engineer up there who could strip the lander down, and setup a winch connection. I built this mission and sent it there, when I did I found not only was it super difficult to lift it off the moon tied to a rope, I also found that any time I had to fast forward my winch would loose connectivity. It took a while, and many EVAs to reconnect the winch, but eventually i got it back to Kerbin and was able to drop it into a 35-40km decaying orbit then normalize my rescue craft. Got both back. Nowadays, I do so much planning it would be unimaginable to do something that stupid, either the origonal things that got stranded or the rescue, but with how difficult it was, I was pretty proud I had done it.

It includes a main station with some pretty massive thrusters 8 massive nacells with 4 nerv atomic engines on each one. A large fuel extraction module to help refuel on lightweight moons and two landing modules on it. 1 small probe set for a non-return landing on Eve and and a small lander to be used to collect biome data and relay it to the science lab onboard the station. It cost millions to get it all together and I had to sign up for a bunch of missions to even keep my career mode from going bankrupt. As soon as i finish refilling the giant nacells and dealing with some stuff around minimus, it will head for Eve>Moho>Duna. Then I am not sure what I will do afterward. I might get more modules for the outer planets since there are other challenges I will have to deal with there. Edit: Here she goes off to Eve

specific designs aside where the 2x3s fit into a design better (uncommon) it is possible 2x3s might have more surface area and may be more resistant to being bumped from on the end. I could also see ship designs where if you wanted to include a lot you might want to put 2x3s on the top so that they wouldn't block lower panels. I don't think this is currently how light is calculated though. That said, more often than not they aren't as good, are more likely to break and in my last career mode that I restarted on normal I never bought them.

This is true, but at the same time this seems like it would be really arduous. to do every time I want to connect it. Though, I will likely only do it once per planet if that. So it might be easier than I expect.

I have frequently used these Nacelle designs (though these ones are much larger than others), and as long as I attach it with girders and secure it top and bottom and all around with struts I haven't had problems. In fact it is largely becoming my new design preference, for non-atmospheric travel designs. I don't anticipate that this will be a problem. Here is a similar design on my mining/refueling craft: http://imgur.com/UUcPhEZ The port on the top is for a small craft, the bottom has a Sr. docking port for the refueling apparatus, but I could move the small port to hook up to the refueling craft instead.

I want to build a massive space station for the purposes of going around the solar system collecting biome data for research from all the easy low gravity planets. For some reason, this is my big idea. I was under the impression that what I should do is build a large ship with many Nerv engines (32 to be exact, 4 each on 8 nacelles) and a detachable refueling unit and then throw some sort of detachable data gathering craft onto it. I started by designing this and throwing it onto a larger fuel mining ship I already had. One problem that immediately occurred was that in addition to the fact that those parts alone put me at 2mil before I even had assurances that I put the craft together right to make orbit. When I went to try it out, the less propelled refueling station fell right apart from the main stage. So I got to wondering, how stable are docking ports on a station in space? Will my craft hold together if I send these up in 3 stages and then connect them to maneuver throughout the system? Is this a realistic goal, or are there better ways to do this? Here is a picture of the general design for the station base, without the other craft docked. http://imgur.com/F48GWBy

I was trying to find if this was possible, as I am near the end of the tech tree and beginning to go out into space frequently with my kerbals. Rather than building one ship to go to each of these planets or bases, and given that the planets and moons have many different biomes, I was wondering how to do this. Currently my Idea is to build a massive space station that is a host to a mining craft that will mine in low G and a small fuel efficient craft to buzz around the low g planets/moons collecting the data. I assume that I would need to have some kind of lander for higher G bodies as well... I don't have to process the data on the bodies, I am quite fine with doing that on the station, I really just like the idea of this floating kerbal science station surveying all of the planets and moons in one trip. What would I need to include, Does anyone have design ideas?

Something we don't really know is how long a kerbal is supposed to live then or how resilient they are. Is 250 years too long? I definitely think it would be easy to make an age mod and implement things like cryo storage of some kind. Though I am unsure if it is actually a realistic technology.