maltesh

You can land on Duna on parachutes, but yeah, you really need to aerobrake first if you're coming in off an interplanetary trajectory. Makes it a lot more difficult to pick a specific landing site, but lets you shed enough of the incoming velocity that you can safely trigger the chutes.

Thrust is independent of fuel consumption. If you wish to know how much acceleration you can get at a particular thrust, it's just the standard Newtonian equation of motion: a = F/m. Gravitational accelleration also uses the standard equations; if you know the Standard Gravitational Parameter of the body in question (μ) and its radius ® and your altitude (h) in the appropriate units... then accelleration due to gravity ag = (μ)/(r+h)2

Aye. Moho's tide-locked to the sun, so it rotates on its axis once every 25 days or so. The ISA Mapping Plugin can map at 50x time accelleration. At that speed , you can map the surface in a polar orbit in about 12 hours. When I mapped Moho, I did that and let the game run overnight.

g is a constant, if an arbitrary one. It's the defined Standard Accelleration due to Earth Gravity, which is close, but not the same as the accelleration due to gravity that you would feel at a point on the Earth's Surface. "Impulse" is a change in momentum. In the SI system, momentum is measured in kilograms*meters/second (or, since a Newton is a kilogram*meter/second, it can also be measured in the equivalent units of Newton * second). "Specific", in this context means "Per unit of [quantity]". In the case of Specific impulse, there are two common ways to look at it. 1. "Impulse imparted by the engine on the rest of the ship per unit mass of fuel.", also known as Specific Impulse by Fuel Mass. When you do that calculation with SI values, you're dividing kilograms*meters/second by units of kilograms, for units of (kg * m / s)/ (kg) = meters/second. This value is also known as the Effective Exhaust Velocity; If all the exhaust had the same velocity, it's the velocity the exhaust would have to leave the rocket with to satisfy Conservation of Momentum. 2. "Impulse imparted by the engine on the rest of the ship per unit of fuel weight measured under a standard Earth Gravity", also known as Specific Impulse by Fuel weight. That's where the 9.81 m/s^2 comes from. The amount of fuel denoted a specific weight when measured under a standard gravity that doesn't change, regardless of where you're doing the burning be it on an alien planet or in interstellar space. Do the calculation in SI units, and you're dividing Newtons * second by Newtons to get a value in seconds. Furthermore, if you're measuring force and weight in pounds or short tons instead of Newtons, you still get a value in seconds, and it's the same value of seconds. So if you're selling your rockets to clients who use SI or the Imperial system, you can tell them how efficient your rockets are using the same statistic. When the value is reported in seconds, it means "The amount of time for which the amount of fuel that weighs 1 Newton (or pound or short ton or whatever) under a standard gravity can be used by this engine design to produce 1 Newton(or pound, or short ton, or whatever) of thrust."

Heck, terminal velocity on Eve is so low because of the thick atmosphere, Kerbals can often survive falls from space .

Indeed, the minimum number of satellites to guarantee full coverage of a spherical object is six: Three in an orbit high enough to cover moderate latitudes, and three in a polar orbit to keep constant coverage to the polar gap of the first three. There will be significant overlap, but that can't really be helped.

It's a bit higher above the surface of Duna than Kerbin's is (2,880 km vs Kerbin's 2,868.7) on the other hand, Duna's a smaller planet, so the actual radius of the stationary orbit over Duna is smaller. However, with Duna, there is the minor matter of a 260-km-wide rock (with its 2000 km wide sphere of influence) occupying a synchronous orbit, sneaking up on any synchronous satellite that dares to venture out of the exact 1:1 resonance.

Click on the speed display on the navball and it will switch from Orbital to Surface speed, or vice versa.

I would guess that the issue you had is because most of Bop's surface is above the "Automatically switch to surface velocity" altitude for an object 65 km in radius. So if you're still on orbital velocity on descent, yeah, the ground tend be moving significantly quickly beneath you, (more than 30 m/s at the equator. So yeah.) If manually landing on Bop, manually switch the speed indicator to Surface.

"Wh-, Where am I-- Can't brea- " Well, I'd try to say that, anyway. I would probably fail.

,so youre clear to go as fast as your computer can handle. Also, dont expect to reach Kerbol escape velocity, because there isnt one.Untrue. Kerbol has an escape velocity. Escape velocity is solely determined by the mass of the object you're escaping, and your distance from that mass. A parabolic orbit is defined by your spacecraft moving exactly at the escape velocity for its distance at all points. In a hyperbolic orbit, you're moving faster than the escape velocity at all points on the orbit. Better to say "Kerbol's sphere of influence has no exterior boundary."

To change the angle of inclination of your orbit, it's player-easiest burn in the orbit-normal, or orbit-anti-normal directions. If you're not using Mechjeb, orbit-normal and orbit antinormnal are unmarked points on the navball, on the horizon line between the blue and brown hemispheres, and exactly between your orbit prograde, and orbit-retrograde markers. If your orbit is or near-equatorial, you can get away with burning North or South on the navbal. If you were to draw a line from your current orbit point through the center of the object you're orbiting TGhat's the line that your orbit will rotate around. Burn in the direction that you want the part of your orbit that's ahead of that line to pivot. If you want to /match orbital planes/ with another target, you'll need to wait until you reach one of the two points on your orbit that go through the plane of the other object (often called orbital nodes). To find those points without Mechjeb, you'll need to go to the map screen, hit tab until the view is centered on the body both you and the other object are orbiting, and swing the view around until you find the angle where both your orbit and your target's orbit appear to reduce to straight lines. When you cross that intersection, that's where you'll need to do your inclination-change burn if you hope to put your eventual orbit into the same plane as your target

Aye, that it does. Used Mechjeb's landing autopilot dialog thirty minutes ago to find a good aerobrake altitude on Jool for capture, and am now in the Laythe SOI feeling around for the aerobraking altitude to put me into Laythe orbit. If you aren't going deep enough into the atmosphere to force a landing, Mechjeb's Landing Autopilot will tell you roughly what your new apoapsis and periapsis will be after aerobraking.

When you head straight upward, you take maximum gravity losses, because the full power of the gravity of at your altitude is opposing your thrust. When you're close to the surface, it's like subtracting 1 from your thrust-to-weight ratio. If you're at the point in a circular orbit that's optimum for your burn to send you in the direction you want to go, you will be thrusting parallel to the surface of the planet, so gravity isn't dragging on your direction of thrust. Which lets you get to the proper ejection speed quicker, with less fuel spent. And if you do a proper gravity turn to get to your parking orbit, you can reduce the costs to getting to the parking altitude iver burning straight up. Basically, every single real-world space launch does something similar.

Seconding the Protractor mod. It can show you the point on your orbit where your spacecraft gets closest to your target, and tells you the distance at that closest approach. From there, you can experiment to find a direction to burn that turns that close approach into an intercept.

This is one of those challenges I'd like to see the OP attempt himself, as a good-faith measure. I'm not demanding success, just asking to see screenshots of the attempt.

Originally, the meter was defined as one ten-millionth the distance from the north pole to the equator, (through the Paris Meridian, I think). Currently, the meter is defined as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299792458 of a second.

Basically, all other things being eqal, if both craft have the same Full mass/dry mass ratio, delta-V (the amount of change in velocity the spacecraft can accomplish by burning all its fuel) scales linearly with specific impulse. ANd if the specific impulse of all the individual engines that are burning are the same, then the specific impulse of the entire engine system remains the same. At the end of burning all its fuel from standsitll, in the ideal, no gravity, no atmosphere, no drag case, burning in a specific direction, using two ships that devoted the same fraction of their total mass to fuel, a spacecraft relying entirely on Nerva engines would wind up moving 2.05 times faster than one relying entirely on aerospikes.

Struts, like fuel lines, break whenever the attached subassembly decouples.

Correct. It's not metallic, it's golden.

Didn't really check on it. I want to say about 3/4 of that last large tank. On a later flight, where I added four winglets to control that hideous spin, I was able to establish a booster orbit with almost the entire tank, but lost the flight when the decoupler ruptured under pressure. A subsequent flight with four winglets and some extra struts managed to push the apoapsis to 31 Gm before running dry. Under a better pilot than I, I'm sure further distances are possible.

Grabbed the Kosmos mechjeb. Flew it up on the jets about 10km, then lit off the main engine, dropped the jets, and began the gravity turn. I probably would have done it sooner, but the thing spins like a whirling dervish, and I lost some fuel trying to get it back under control and wrangled eastward for orbit. Gravity turn saves you fuel because your velocity isn't pointed directly downwards so the force of gravity isn't directly opposing the thrust you're applying, you're just letting gravity do something that you want to do anyway; pull your spacecraft so it's pointing the direction you want to go in. Almost every real-world spacecraft launch does this. At any rate, circularized at about 80 km, then waited until I was about 1/8 of the way around the night side, then burned prograde until I got a hyperbolic trajectory. Moost real-world interplanetary spacecraft do their transfer burn from low earth orbit altitudes, and I can't think of a single one that's ever used the moon as a slingshot (Outside of movies that are terrible on their science, anyway) Wasn't watching the map screen, so I overshot a bit when the tanks ran dry. Apoapsis 29Gm. Definitely could have pushed it farther if I'd stopped the spin and pulled off a more proper gravity turn, but it was my first time flying the craft. Well, actually, it was my second time. The first time I didn't throttle down when dumping the jets and they took out the booster.

I can't actually load the spacecraft as I appear to be missing parts it contains. "Kosmos.VA.Mumech.Autopilot." However, of the stock liquid-fuel engines, the only thing worse for flight in vacuum than the Rockomax Mainsail is the jet engines. Once you're safely orbitable, you really should be using a different engine. Most people wind up using the LV-N atomic rocket motor as the interplanetary transfer stage: With a vacuum specific impulse of 800 seconds, it's the most efficient space rocket in the stock game. Attatched to the same set of fuel tanks, you'd get almost three times the delta-V out of the LV-N in vacuum than the Rockomax can give you. Swap out the LV-909 for the LV-N and in that last stage alone, you'd have a spacecraft with more than enough delta-V to go from low Kerbin orbit to Duna's surface, and land.

That was a response to Moach's comment about using the Mun as a gravitational slingshot. As a powered gravitational slingshot, burning from low kerbin orbit gives your spacecraft more kinetic energy than burning anywhere above the Mun's surface, as per the Oberth Effect. As an unpowered gravitational slingshot target, you can't get close enough for the Mun's center of mass for it to give an appreciable boost at the speeds you should be travelling by that point for an efficient interplanetary trip. Minmus is even worse. Is it possible to build a ship that can only reach the desired interplanetary target by slingshotting past the Mun? Yes. But nobody's going to be able to diagnose what the issue is with your spacecraft without at least a screenshot, and probably not without a screenshot and .craft flile.

The thing is, you were moving faster, in a deeper gravity well, when you were over Kerbin, and your fuel would have been more efficiently turned into kinetic energy back there. If you start at Kerbin, there's no point in doing a powered gravity assist with either of Kerbin's moons.