maltesh

If you want to extract it yourself, you're probably going to have to look into plugin coding, and grab the information from the Orbit class. I don't think a Molniya orbit around the Mun is possible. Quick mucking around with an orbital calculator (and assuming a 38-hour 36 minute sidereal period for the Mun) gives me an apoapsis of about 3300 km on an orbit with eccentricity 0.74 and a period of about 19 hours 18 minutes. That's higher than the Munar SOI radius. You've got to drop the eccentricity to about 0.3 to fit the orbit inside the Munar SOI. With Kerbin, you've got a different problem. Kerbin's sidereal rotation period is 6 hours, requiring a 3-hour period for a Molniya, but a three-hour orbit with eccentricity 0.74 hits the planet. I chose to lower the eccentricity to 0.679611726 for my Molniya constellation, which works out a periapsis at 100km altitude

Blast it, I uploaded the wrong one. Apologies. I've now swapped it out with a new persistent.sfs file that has the asteroid in it, but I won't be on a computer that will allow me to double-check for a few hours.

Done. All links in the original post should point to current forum links, and I also updated the persistence file to a v.0.16 version.

There are five Monoliths on Kerbin that I know of. There's one within a few kilometers of KSC. Can't pick out the black spot in the OP image though. Picture's too dark for me.

Another option, if you have the alpha version, is to build your spacecraft so that you have the last pre-lander stage still available on final descent. You can then drop it, and its distance from your spacecraft when it explodes, compared with the altimeter, will tell you approximately how close the surface is. Another thing that I've noticed happening intermittently... Sometimes, if you have the camera set on Orbital mode on descent, it will flick to a side view when the terrain gets close.

They're in the "Old Version of Bigtrak" linked in the first post. I imagine they'll be included once everything else gets straightened out with the new version.

As of the current version, (v0.16) Kerbol doesn't rotate. You can easily demonstrate this by switching between Orbital and Surface velocity while in interplanetary space; They will always have identical values.

I don't think I've ever seen anyone refer to the Mun as a planet on these boards. Have any examples?

Given that there's no required amount of time to remain in Kerbol orbit, I'm inclined to agree. THis is basically "Leave Kerbin's SOI with as little relative velocity as possible, immediately turn and burn back in.", with the only hard part being plannign the return burn. If there's a stock Munlander in your ship stable, it can fly this mission. Would still like to see the Original Poster's attempt at the challenge, though.

Don't wait to enter Kerbol orbit; take advantage of the Oberth effect instead. Significant fuel savings. Get into eastward, circular, equatorial, low Kerbin orbit. Say 100km or so.' Go around Kerbin, wait until you're a bit before the Midnight Line. Burn prograde up to more than about 5000 m/s. If you've got the paid version, the patched conics will show you escaping. If you want to be moving as fast as possible as you escape Kerbol, keep burning until your tanks run dry. Coast. You'll leave the Kerbin SOI in a direction pointed near the direction of Kerbin's travel, and you'll escape Kerbol.

Flies fine for me. Though some differences in the fuel flow and staging suggest the build could be more efficient in a 0.16 version. Might have to be; I haven't done a good comparison of fuel tank and engine performance with v 0.15

A secondary problem: Under normal circumstances, objects further than 2.5 km from the active scene aren't visible. THey get a marker if they're within 100km, and are completely invisible otherwise, regardless of size. A tertiary problem: Solid rings around objects are unstable. James Clerk Maxwell realized that in 1859, proving that it must mean that the rings of Saturn were made of innumerable small pieces in orbit. Larry Niven didn't realize that in 1970, leading to chanting at Sci-Fi conventions and three sequels.

Unpowered slingshots past the Moons will either increase velocity, making harder to do that efficient low-pass against Jool that you were intending to attempt, or rob velocity from you, forcing you to make it back up when you go back to Jool. If you have any fuel when you're going racing through the Moons' SOIs, you're better off saving it for when you head back to that low pass over Jool, where you're moving the fastest, and the Oberth Effect can most efficiently turn that delta-V into kinetic energy in your departure. Nothing that orbits Jool will come even remotely close to that benefit

Surface. When landing, the surface is what you're trying to match velocities with.

Ah, fair enough. My apologies.

50 km/s? No, you probably can't get that much off gravitational slingshots of the moons. Among other things, you'll have to be able to produce a good fraction of that to /reach/ them from your starting point at a 200km altitude circular orbit above the gas giant, and its moons are not going to be massive enough, or moving fast enough to give you much more than a tiny boost. You cannot use an unpowered gravitational slingshot around Jool to gain velocity relative to Jool. If you want to do a powered gravitational slignshot past Jool... that's what you're already doing by directly burning into the 50 km/s hyperbola from your 200 km altitude circular orbit. I suppose the real question is "Why are you in a circular orbit that close to the gas giant without bringing enough fuel, if you planned to return?"

One sat at L4 or L5 and one sat at L3 means that a sixth of the Munar surface is hidden from both satellites. You need at least three sats to attempt full coverage of a spherical body. (Six is the minimum to guarantee it.) Lagrange points aren't good spotsfor fuel depots . If you're planning to head to a specific destination on launch, anything you could do with refueling tanks that you have to rendezvous with at several kilometers per second relative (And they will have a relative velocity to you unless you happen to be running right through the lagrange point, a very very rare occurance) is something you probably should have done with drop tanks at your departure point.

Big engines have more thrust, so you can fly them with a lot less throttle, allowing you to abuse the fuel bug more effectively.

There's no real extra time or cost involved.. You propose two satellites at the distance of the Mun (L4, and L5), and a third satellite farther out than the Mun (which would be L2, not L3), that the game can't currently model. Easier and quicker to just put three satellites in a circular orbit just inside the Munar SOI, separated by 120 degrees in their orbits, and ignore the lagrange points entirely.

Using L4 and L5 as relays for munar communications would double the light-lag time. You're better off having three sats in the Munar orbit high enough above the surface that each one has LOS to the other two.

Lagrange points aren't places where the gravity forces between the two bodies are equal hey're places in which the gravity of both the larger and the smaller object provive gravitation in the proper direction to make at least limited stable orbits possible in 1:1 resonance. L1 (a point between the two objects), L2 (a point farther out from the central body than the satellite), and L3 (a point on the opposite side of the sattelite's orbit of the central body, a little farther out than the satellite) are only stable in limited directions, so objects tend not to stay there. L4 (60 degrees ahead of the satellite) and L5 (60 degrees behind) provide stability in all directions, so those can wind up occupied naturally. There are over five thousand known asteroids occupying the L4 and L5 points of Jupiter's orbit, and two of Saturn's moons have smaller moons occupying the L4 and L5 points in their orbits (Tethys has Telesto and Calypso, Dione has Helene and Polydeuces).

Gravity hasn't been calculated separately for each part of a ship since v.0.11 Kind of a shame, really, because I didn't get the idea to try to pull of gravity gradient stabilization until v.0.12. As it is now, every piece of your spacecraft feels the exact same gravitational accelleration in the exact same direction.

Would you rather the atmospheric deceleration on that steep re-entry have killed your Kerbals?

In the free version, Kerbol has gravity. In the paid version, Kerbol has gravity, and an invisible surface at about 4500km altitude.

You have an RCS tank, but no RCS modules that I can see. Edit: I can say that, even with the fuel bug corrected, that's flyable to the Mun, though a bit tough to do so. Landing and return... Iffy. The lander looks pretty unstable.