Magzimum

@Sharpy, I think I may not have explained my point so well. What I meant to say is that thanks to the answers in this thread, I am now able to get back to Kerbin from even (slightly) inclined orbits. The science was explained quite thoroughly already, and the tools handed to me by all of you get me a periapsis of between 7000-20000 km above Kerbin, which is not so bad. I meant to say that I can do the final finetuning myself, so that I arrive around a 100 km periapsis, so I can do the final burn at a nice low altitude, so that Mr. Oberth is happy. As for the inclination of my departure orbit: I quite understand the disadvantages of having to do an inclination change. I did not choose to be in the inclination that I am in... Gilly did. I understand the mechanics / physics of changing inclination: the further out, the cheaper it gets. I still have 2 gaps in my knowledge - at least I feel like I do (there's probably more): My first problem is that I would like to know how to be on a 0.00000 degree inclination around Eve. How can you do that? There is no convenient Mun to target. Gilly is useless. Is that only possible with additional mods, or is there a way to do it in stock+KER too? My second problem is that the Alexmoon tool (transfer window planner) tells me to go 500 m/s prograde, and 83 m/s normal. I assume that the tool kinda expects me to do a little Pythagoras, and some more trigonometry, and then aim somewhere off the actual prograde marker at something like the sqrt(500² + 83²), and blast until the correct dV is reached. In Stock+KER I have no markers to aim for, so I have to do them separate: either normal first, then prograde, or prograde first, then normal. If there is a way to execute both in one single burn, rather than two separate burns, I would love to know how to do that in practice. Let me emphasize that by now, I think I am confident that I understand the physics, but I still need to know some more tricks in the game to put that knowledge to use.

And around Eve? *** In the meantime, I would like to thank you all. I got my crew back on a trajectory to Kerbin thanks to a lot of very useful tips. My method which I tested only once so far: Get the data from the transfer window planner. Realize that this is a prograde and a (anti)normal part (that was new to me, amazing I missed that thus far). Place two nodes, one of which is the prograde, one has the (anti)normal part. Then execute them one at a time, and actually hit the mark. I still don't understand which I should execute first. My Spidey-sense tells me that first 500 m/s prograde, then 83 m/s normal is not the same as going going first 83 m/s normal, then 500 prograde, as in the 2nd case I actually changed which direction prograde is pointing. However, luckily both got me to a Kerbin Periapsis, although not the same. For now, my methods improved a lot, and I think I can use a little eyeballing to get that periapsis down to the very low value that I am looking for, to make my friend Mr. Oberth a happy man.

And around Eve?

I played "Catchup", but failed. You think docking in space is hard? Try docking at 2000 m. The game is simple. Launch this. The on the runway, have Jeb climb into the seat (leaving the bottom plane unmanned - it also has no drone core - but it will still launch and fly as long as the top one is docked). At altitude, undock. Engage Juno engines. The bottom one will just go straight from there on (if you were flying in a stable course). Then try to catch up. As you get closer, it gets harder. This is as close as I got. Revert back to SPH, and back to the studio. I am sure that with a lot of trying, and a better design, I could get closer. But I just slapped this together quickly, and never improved the design or even stability of the small plane. It was just some fun. Was surprised the big plane even went straight for more than 1 min.

Thuds are used when "Moar Boosters" is actually just a need for "Moar Power", and not "Moar Fuel". So without having to redesign anything, you can slap extra power onto rocket - because there is almost always some empty space radially to my rockets.

This here (quote, above) is mostly new to me, and may therefore be the key information that I needed. I'll try later today to see if I can use this to get my ship back from a high and inclined Eve orbit to Kerbin. In the meantime, I understand that you follow the tool sometimes blindly. What I mean is that you do the ejection burn without finding the confirmation when the Pe at the destination planet pops up at the end of the burn... since sometimes you only get that at the mid-flight correction burn. I may consider installing the transfer window planner mod - getting accurate information is not cheating, in my opinion, so I am open to such mods. Thanks for a great reply!

Just a few comments and ideas: You can land a mothership with nukes on Minmus (easy to do on the flats), making refueling a lot easier if you have lined up a docking port to make surface docking easy. You probably only need 1-3 nukes for a large (10000 unit liquid fuel) tank. So if you have 7, that will be really easy. Put some large reaction wheels on the ship. Turning the large ship can take as long as accelerating it, and you sound like an impatient player . Also, if a ship turns too slow, you may overshoot a maneuver node. Start the design with the payload (as always). Realize that the payloads for Duna, Eve and Dres may be drastically different. My advice is to design all the payloads first, and only then look at a capable mothership. A large part of the payload will only travel half the distance (one-way to the planet). Your return cargo will probably be significantly smaller, since you're likely to use stages for the lander, and may drop a probe or two onto the planet that will not come home at all. Unless you enjoy building 'building by feels', consider getting KER. It is not cheating to just get more information. KER does not do anything other than supply you with information, and you can customize which information is being supplied to you.

I don't consider KER a mod, lol. It's an essential and should be stock. So yeah, I have KER. I meant stuff like MechJeb which will just do all the flying. How do you figure out where the ascending/descending nodes are for interplanetary travel? They only show up after you leave the Kerbin system and you enter a Solar orbit, but I usually do all the acceleration while still in LKO, to get some Oberth effect. Eyeballing it doesn't seem to work for me. Also, it is possible to change the inclination to equatorial? On Kerbin that's easy, as you can just target the Mun and change at the ascending/descending node. But on Eve, Gilly is not useful for that. How do I find out where my ascending/descending nodes are to go to an equatorial orbit around Eve?

Congrats! If the airbrakes heat up too much, make sure to place them within the diameter of the 10m heatshield. Everything that sticks out will burn up. They will however still stabilize your craft, even if they are not directly exposed to the 3000 m/s fireball!

I struggle so often finding a periapsis when I try to travel interplanetary. Eve as well as several other planets are not in the same plane as Kerbin, so sometimes the orbit of the ship and that of the planet are so far off that the ship does not go through the planet's SoI. Instead, my Ap/Pe is above/below the planet's plane. I end up dragging the maneuver node along the orbit at all kinds of velocities, hoping that the "Pe" or "Ap" symbol appears near the desired location, incidating that I found a trajectory. It is a rather aimless iterative process by me and I hope that I can learn how to improve that. For reasons unknown to me, the tools that are available (e.g. https://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/) cannot be trusted blindly - required velocities are often off by a bit, and the angles at which I launch to find a Pe/Ap directly are often quite different than predicted. Maybe this is because my orbits are not exactly equatorial (how do you even do that?), maybe because they are not exactly circular. Maybe because executing a maneuver node is not an exact science either. How do you guys launch your interplanetary missions? Just blindly follow the above tool, and correct for the plane mid-flight to catch the Pe/Ap? Or are there tricks to adjust the plane of the planned trajectory while still in a safe orbit around your planet of origin? And how do you do that when leaving for example Gilly back to Kerbin? First go equatorial, then circular, then launch back to Kerbin? And do you just eyeball it to go equatorial / circular, or is there some science to it? The worst fear of my Kerbals is to miss their encounter, and drift around the Sun with empty tanks. Btw, installing mods to help with this is a no-go for me until I understand it myself.

I had the same problem, and asked the same question (for a 1.1.2 game): I took the lessons learned, and built Jeb an Eve lander. I just put a bunch of wings and airbrakes on the top to prevent it from flipping, and nicknamed it "The Moose". For me the airbrakes were the magic part - and since I read only wings in your post, that may be worth a try. Thread comes with plenty of pictures to show the contraption at the top (24 (!!) airbrakes, 4 wings):

My careers all have a "Munar Lander Mk1". Except once I searched high and low for my lander, couldn't find it anywhere, got really annoyed that I had to redesign it, to find that I had called it "Lunar Lander Mk1" instead, and therefore had to search under the L rather than the M. [edit] Actually, come to think of it, I think that by now "contract trash" is the most common name in my careers. That's what I name all vessels that I essentially will discard after they get a contract done.

Well, at least the contract asks for "sub-orbital" so you really only need to go straight up. In a quick-and-dirty test, I found that the design in the spoiler below will reach the needed altitude, with the thumper unused (i.e. available to be activated through the staging sequence): So, you will need to build a rocket with multiple stages. I am working on the assumption that you have access to the basic decouplers. Put the thumper at the top, and put another thumper below it as a 2nd stage. Then place some more thumpers (e.g. 4 of them) radially around the bottom one. With the basic rocketry-violence sorted, you may want to look whether you're going to satisfy just that contract, or perhaps do a little science too. If you are already at 240,000 m altitude, and you ignite that last thumper, you may reach altitudes that you haven't reached yet. Better do some science up there! However, landing the science equipment will also be more challenging than previous missions. You will need a heat shield, and depending on the design, you may want to package the science equipment in some container to keep from exploding. Btw, often the contracts also demand a certain velocity (next to the altitude), which makes life more difficult. If your contract does not, don't worry about it. If it does, please update this thread, and we can see how that complicates things.

It is my experience that the heavier the ship, the better aligned the docking ports need to be. In your pictures, the docking ports are close enough, but they are quite a few degrees off the perfect alignment. Try to align them better when you approach. I also struggled a lot with this, but I found out that the trick that made it easier for me was to put RCS evenly distributed around the center of mass - that allows you to use the IJKL keys to translate the ship. Then you can just align the ships (e.g. turn both to 'normal' or 'antinormal'), and translate it until the docking ports are on the same line. My recommendation is to do this one axis at a time (first only JL keys, until that's aligned, then IK keys until they too are aligned, then some fine-tuning - again one axis at a time - if necessary). After you achieve that, it is just a matter of moving forward. I am not sure I understood your comment about what happens when you decouple - do you mean that you decouple a small part of the larger tug, which then suddenly docks without problem? That would be in line with what I suggest: that smaller part is a LOT lighter, and the docking ports can pull that into alignment. [edit] Obviously, when RCS is not distributed around the CoM, you can still translate, but that will also cause a rotation on the ship. This rotation can then be prevented by just putting a lot of reaction wheels on the ship. But that is really just a medicine for a problem that you can easily avoid.

True, it's a "world firsts" so it does not double any missions. For example, it asked me to orbit Duna, then return. I did that, and got the cash (and the science). Now it asks me to dock on or around Duna, or to dock on or around Ike, or to orbit Ike and return. Obviously, I could just do all these missions in one go, but I wouldn't get paid for the docking missions and the Ike visit, because they will only show up one at a time, and only after I returned from the 1st mission. Even with the trick of sending docking probes ahead, I think that I still need multiple launch windows (one for Duna, one for Ike) to get crews to the ground because the missions don't show up sooner. I am just trying to see if people have found tricks to advance quicker. I also wonder if I can use two probes, dock them around Duna, then undock, fly to Ike, and dock these same ones again, completing both missions (assuming these missions appear when I need them).

When 1.2 came out, I started a fresh career. Loving all the improvements thus far. But kinda struggling to appreciate the World-firsts contracts. My problem is that they keep sending me back to the same places, which is a bit of a grind. First a flyby, then orbiting-gather-science-and-return, then a docking mission... and it asks these for a planet, but also (and separately) for the moons. So, it appears that the game wants me to fly to Duna/Ike about 4-6 times before it is satisfied that I have explored it enough. You can of course just warp forward until you get a different contract, but it will keep recycling the ones you haven't completed, so at some point it keeps spamming me with docking missions around Duna and Ike, which I don't want to do because they are boring and yield very little science (I got that science when I landed on Duna). How do you guys achieve these targets efficiently? I am now considering to always send multiple ships: one lander with all the science and crew, and as a bunch of dummy-ships, just so that they can dock. The lander will then do its mission, return, while the dummy ships wait patiently in orbit until the contract comes up. At least I can do that docking contract without waiting for the transfer window. These can also carry a thermometer in case someone wants to pay me for science-from-orbit. It appears a little silly to send so many ships - especially when I will get to Jool and its 5 moons. Also, it appears a little weird to send ships ahead to anticipate a contract that hasn't even come up yet. Did any of you already come up with a quicker way to satisfy the Kerbin World-Firsts Record-Keeping Society?

I started a new career in 1.2. My latest feat is to land Jeb and 4 friends on Duna.

I saw the Kerbals first on a youtube series called Crash Course Astronomy, with Phil Plait. Worth watching if you haven't already, btw. The Kerbals are never mentioned, but they are just silently standing on a shelf in the background, or on the table in the foreground. Then I stumbled upon the youtube channel of jacksepticeye, which featured many videos in which he's basically just playing KSP. I got hooked on the videos for a few days - until I bought the game and got hooked on the game itself. That's 5 months ago now. Now that you mention it, @Starhawk, I also read XKCD.

You already got a lot of recommendations from everyone. My 2 cents are: Go to the sandbox mode, and build yourself a Eve lander/launcher. Learn what it takes to get to Eve orbit if you can discard stages. Frankly, it is more than difficult enough for most players to land on Eve and take off again if they don't have to bring everything along until the end. Other than that, your best teacher is not in this thread: just try to build that "small probe with a 1.25m shield and a nuke or two", and get it to Eve with the alt-F12 option turned on (e.g. infinite fuel). Once you're safely landed on Eve, turn off the cheats, and see what works and what doesn't. We all have lots of ideas and dreams, and because KSP is such a good simulator (or because mother-nature is a b****), unfortunately most don't work. p.s. We are all curious to see pics of the ship you built! If you are off your phone, feel free to post some!

Thanks for all the feedback (I am getting used to the quality of the answers here, but I don't think we should take the quality of the forum for granted). What I learned from you all is that the rockets indeed behave a little different in 1.2. I will have to unlearn some behavior (in design, and in flight). I think that with more time, I will probably get a feeling for it. The designs I have here may be a little too draggy, and could probably be strutted down a bit more tight. At the same time, they are making it into orbit, so I am not getting stuck. A little feedback from my side: Tail fins: The first design has some tail fins. Also, after reading the feedback, I equipped the "medium size" design with tail fins (8 in total, one on each radially attached part), and the rotation did not reduce. While tail fins help if you have a rocket that is draggy at the top, this was not the solution for me. The radially attached parts are strutted, but typically only with one strut at the top of the part(s). Movement of these parts relative to the central tanks is minimal (not visible during flight), but I cannot exclude that this cannot be made better. I think that "Moar Struts" may be a solution here. I am skeptical that more reaction wheels will help so early in the launch. I feel that the tail fins and especially a Mainsail engine (gimbal at 100%) can correct the heading much better, and the input of the reaction wheels will be lost among that violence. Btw, in my career game, the problem is solving itself. I will soon have the 3.75 parts, and can then launch much larger payloads using just a single tank at the base. If I need to expand even wider than that, I'll come back to this thread!

I started playing 1.2 since it came out. In my new career, I have now reached the point that I build (slightly) larger rockets that also have SRBs and/or additional LFO rockets on the sides. I notice that very often these start to rotate along the vertical axis when I start the gravity turn. I used the symmetry tool in the construction, so it is certainly not a lack of symmetry in the design. From an aerodynamics point of view, it makes sense to me: the rocket is (for a short while) not pointed exactly prograde, so the booster that is on the outer side gets more drag. If that booster is turned even the slightest to one side, that drag will start to rotate the rocket. This keeps on going as you make corrections. I would not be surprised if real rockets also experience this - although most rockets don't use nearly as many radial attachments as we use in KSP. But from a gameplay point of view, I just want to get rid of that rotation, because it screws up a LOT of my launches... Any tips? I made an Imgur album with 3 examples of rockets that show unwanted rotation (below, in spoiler), but please note that this is a general question, not one about these examples.

@RoboRay, if you meant the fact that the parachutes now branch out like they do on real space craft, as your pic clearly illustrates, that's a feature that I totally love. They looked silly in 1.1.2.

Things I did today. Install 1.2 Start fresh career Realize how hard it is to play without KER and maneuver nodes Still get to orbit Quickly upgraded a few buildings and get some basic science Do a Mun flyby (the actual highlight of the day, no screenshots) Build Jeb a plane to get more science from biomes Take a cool screenshot Post on the forums Btw, I love 1.2!!!! Installation on Linux was no issue at all. It feels so much more polished. A lot of little details make the game so much better. The VAB works better (brighter colors, and many more categories of parts!). The exp. storage unit is awesome. Wheels appear a little sturdier: they didn't explode on this little craft, and I even managed to land it on the tier-0 bumpy runway, (which I then still upgraded ASAP, cos it still sucks, lol)!! @Vanguard319, I really do not recognize your complaint about planes and the junos. This one can take off at 30 m/s, and climb at 40 degrees up while maintaining a good 60 m/s velocity. Horizontally, top speed it around 200-250 m/s (although I used it more for short hops, never maxed it on the horizontal). Although it's a new design, it resembles my successful basic plane from 1.1.2. To me, junos feel the same as before. Its mass is only 4.2 tons - how much is your plane?

If you add that in the stock game, please keep everything as it is, with a big checkbox clearly visible stating "Make Stuff More Realistic but also Moar Complicated". When checked, all the options you suggested can appear. But with it unchecked, the game should remain accessible for newbies, with such complex issues simply hidden away. (Some, or even a lot of) newbies suffer from an information overload already.

All of Europe is already done with dinner. [edit] Except Spain, but that has nothing to do with time zones, and everything with weird eating schedules .