Atkara

And then I went nuts... 325kg this time around, 320 without the antenna :p It's got barely enough monoprop to make it down to the surface of the Mun, but lands -safely

Well... I did something just now Stands at 515kg without a Kerbal on the chair.

And then it will be the dawning of the Age of Aquarius This particular rendition has been "haunting" me, eversince I took notice of it, in an episode of the original Cosmos series, by Carl Sagan

I generally don't like posting old screens, but you seem to be in need of motivation: The rest of that expedition's mementos can be found here. You're smart, you'll understand what I was doing PS: The extraction vehicle is a 3-seater (there's a 2-seat module inside that fairing). Better than the old Mk2 capsule, in terms of mass.

It's not that it won't heat up. It will come close (even really close), but once you finalize your initial target periapsis and do it right, it won't explode. Another thing to keep in mind, is that if a plane can't re-enter Kerbin's atmosphere really well, it has no chance of surviving Eve. So you need to design carefully.

You'll have better results if it's mostly empty when you interface with Eve's atmosphere. You will also need to come in at a high angle (~70-80 degrees), as you want to bleed off a lot of speed, before hitting the lower atmosphere. Your initial target periapsis depends on the design. The one thing you don't want to happen during the plasma phase is to flip -you really don't want to. If it does, play around with your remaining fuel, or re-design. Once out, the craft will propably be close to entering a stall. If you see it wobble left and right, it's time to let the nose drop. If done right, it's far easier than trying to come down and land vertically. I was doing it in my 1.3.1 career save and I did again last week with a smaller plane I landed there, for testing purposes.

I did that some time ago -won't bore you with old screens. Aerobroke and landed like the plane it essentially was and took off like that also. But I was already using spaceplanes a lot around LKO and a good chunk of the required knowledge was there.

I know they default to the rear door. But you can click on the top door and get them to use it, through the transfer/eva menu. Come to think of it, I was doing the same on the mobile labs, whenever I wanted a Kerbal to exit from a specific door.

This lander can... this lander can....

I won it on a spacecraft design contest/giveaway

Then practice, practice and then practice some more. For example: Treat each rescue contract as a docking op. You'll get it sooner than you think Haven't played around with MH a lot. Only recently I've included it's parts into my playthrough -and to think that I've had the DLC for 9 months or so. You'd certainly need the 1.875m tanks, along with the Bobcat engine for the main booster stage and the SM-18 service bay. Not sure about the rest -was never interested in re-enacting the space programs of the 60s. That's not to say I wasn't listening to "When we left Earth" & "Space Race" series while playing, back in my early KSP days. But it was my own designs landing on the Mun, Minmus and pretty much everywhere else over the years. If your goal is to learn how to dock, you don't need all that jazz. Do what I proposed above with the rescue contracts, or put two simple vessels into orbit and practice. Start small and once you've gotten that, feel free to think as big as you can handle. It'll come to you

Why the sad face? Did anyone expect you to be born with the knowledge and skill? Failure is part of the learning process which, depending on who you ask, is half the fun in KSP.

I first used them out of curiosity and ended up liking them. The reason is that they keep my left hand firmly on the WASD buttons and my right hand on the mouse, which I use all the time to check the alignment during docking/capture. You'd think that mods like docking port alignment indicator would eliminate the need (and they do) but I also work with the claw for which there's no "magic ball". With my closure rates never exceeding 1.5m/s past the 300m mark (getting down to 0.05m/s when the magnets kick in) I have plenty of time to align properly. And there's target tracking ofcourse -I speak of the function you find on the navball, readily available in sandbox and accessible by rank 3 pilots and high-tech probe cores in career. As long as your docking port isn't off-main axis (KSP guidance has some trouble with them for some reason) you can use it to offload rotation to the pilot/probe core, leaving translation to you. At this point, docking mode becomes a way to re-assign WASD buttons to translation. As I said earlier, with docking mode I barely move my hands around -but it did take some getting used to. I even dug into the configuration file and assigned the docking mode toggles to the side mouse buttons -shows how much I ended up liking it These, as far as keyboard and mouse goes, since none of this matters if you're a joystick user -you just assign translation to one of the hat switches and you're done.

The new lander can does simplify some things, don't you think?

Saw this too. Launching without mods fixed them. Then I took out Precise Maneuver from my mods list (KSP was whining about it), which didn't improve the situation. Eventually, I narrowed the issue down (or so I think) to KerbalX and/or KXAPI earlier this morning. Removing them restored the VAB filters back to full functionality for me. Either way, they work fine now on my end. "Or so I think" was the magic phrase. It seems to be either something with Module Manager, or the way 1.6 generates it's part database -or maybe both, I don't know. The guys over at MM are looking into it anyway.

I remember that one, yeah.

Haven't used wheels like that to be honest. Back when I was still doing modular bases, I'd just drive the modules in. But hey, it's ksp so, everything is correct

Blame your wheels orientation

Okay, here's my take: You've got a situation with a vessel/surface installation, currently resting (somehow) on a really high inclination. It seems that in order to reach the said target, your only solution is to cross that inclination on the perpendicular direction, so you're going to use the NERVs to keep the rover wheels from sliding down the slope. Judging by the docking module and what seems to me like crew modules, you're taking Kerbals off that vessel/installation and back to orbit using the NERVs, once you've gotten rid of the rover wheels. Looks like a rescue mission to me.

In addition to what has been posted so far, maxing dampers gets rid of the bouncing in most (if not all) cases.

Assuming I understood the question correctly, when you accept the rescue contract, the to-be-rescued Kerbonaut does show up in your astronaut complex as assigned, even though it's not part of your roster yet. No need to open the save file for that. Check the 'assigned' tab -you'll find them there.

Yeah. At some point I thought of using Minmus itself as a 'fuel dump' of sorts -basically fueling up interplanetary vessels in orbit around Minmus before sending them out. Problem is that ejecting so far out of Kerbin, means you're doing it without all the energy you'd otherwise have from it's gravity well. But what if you came back down for a close "fly-by" (technically, you haven't left the system yet) got back all that energy (plus the amount you converted to potential energy by going to Minmus in the first place) and performed the ejection burn down there? In theory, you'd have exchanged 150-170 dV for the comfort of performing fueling operations in Minmus' low gravity conditions, while saving ~800 of your vessel's total dV budget (since you're coming down from Minmus fully fueled). Haven't tried it myself yet, but I understand it makes calculating transfer windows more complicated than usual and frankly, I don't know if it really works as well as I think it does. So, seeing you mentioning Minmus, my mind went straight there and I was one step from asking how well it works for you. Then I said to myself "he propably doesn't mean anything of the sort" so, I waited

Gradually gathering funds on my new career, ferrying tourists, placing sats, rescuing kerbals and training crews. Not going after the science this time around -I'll just park one orbital lab around Mun and Minmus respectively, grab some science on the surface and get the rest from them. During one of these early training flights, I took my time to look back at Kerbin, something I rarely do anymore: Something to be said about the simple things, right?

Since most of my interplanetary craft launch empty of fuel and get prepped in orbit, I launch them without crew on board. Kerbonauts only go up when the craft is ready and the transfer window is about to open. I also don't leave crews on a body's surface, without some basic amenities. This means something that qualifies as an outpost and some means to explore (a rover) And I never send them on a one-way trip. Crew rotations are scheduled, with means and methods that will reliably take them on and off the surface -alive. This requires further infrastructure -hence why my careers always grow to the extent they do, leaving me looking at the RAM usage go up and up, in horror Never thought of any of this as roleplay to be honest. I just do what feels right.

I could've easily derailed the thread, when Pecan's mention of Minmus picked my curiosity. Choosing to wait for once, it turns out that he was talking about the simple case of bringing fuel back to LKO, instead of what I had in mind. Anyway, I don't think you can talk about SSTO planes without having their uses in mind (unless you make them just to look at them, like Tyko said earlier) and their quirks. And while it can be argued that further details maybe better to be left for later (or another thread entirely) I believe certain things have to be said, so that you won't break your plane on the way out and/or back.