maltesh

The challenge is not completely insoluble, however. In the KSP physics simulation, there are points where you can be A) In an unpowered orbit, and stationary relative to a point on Minmus\' equator, for the requisite time period. Where these points are, I leave as an exercise for the player.

Minmus\' stationary orbit radius is significantly larger than Minmus\' SOI.

Minor point: kg*m/s and ton*m/s (mass multiplied by velocity) are units of momentum, not kg/ms-1.

Agreed. 99% of what I do when editing the persistence.sfs file is debris deletion, and teleporting objects into orbit. The topic=9344.0'>Kessler Editor is a bit user unfriendly, but the fact that it A) understands the file format, and automatically backs up the original version of your persistence.sfs file when you save a modification means that it\'s my go-to program for universe alteration. I haven\'t even touched the shared universe asynchronous multiplayer part, so I can\'t comment on how well that works. Notepad++ is my fallback when the Editor won\'t easily do what I need done.

More fun with rotatrons edited to rotate freely. Introducing the Jebmobile. 4-wheel drive. Top speed, 16.3 m/s. Range: 1km. Handles like a gold brick on wet ice. It spawns so many 'X was damaged by thrust from rockets' events in the end flight screen that trying to scroll through them will cause ridiculous levels of frame rate slowdown.

So, what can you do when you edit the jointSpring and jointDamping fields of Damned Robotics Rotatrons to 0.00001?

It\'s not so much that it had such a velocity, but that you had such a velocity relative to it when you left the SOI. If you\'re still really very very close to the Kerbin SOI, you can point your ship at the KSC marker on the navball and burn for it. If you\'re not, your best bet is probably to get into a circular orbit in the same plane as Kerbin, but about 30,000 to 40,000 km closer (if you\'re behind Kerbin) or farther out (if you\'re ahead of Kerbin), and wait to catch up. This will take awhile. KErbin\'s 84,000km SOI is so small compared to its 13 million km orbit that it probabably would be very difficult to intercept at any range, even with the new Patched Conics system, if you were feeling around for it. With the 30,000 km difgerence in orbital altitudes, you\'ll eventually punch back through... if you\'re on the same plane.

The cliff I jumped off of was over 5.7km in altitude. It was so high, that the FDAI\'s velocity indicator assumed I was in orbit.

Alternatively, (if you\'re running 0.15 or later) on the map screen, hit pause, then hit F2 to hide the UI. Hover over the markers to discover your Time to Periapsis and your Time to Apoapsis. Subtract the smaller from the larger, and double it. That\'s your orbital period.

0.15.1 does appear to have fixed the terrain issue. I can unequivocally say that we\'re looking at at least 5724 m up here. Note that the speed readout assumed that I was in Orbit at that altitude and automatically flicked over. It\'s also pretty flat. How about 'The Maxmal Plateau?'

Question: Is using rockets to get the vehicle to its starting position allowed? For an example, flying a boat into the ocean, then dumping the rockets, coming to a complete stop, and then using the secondary fuelless propulsion system?

The pod is indeed still usuable. All you have to do is generate it in V 0.14.4, save the craft file, and move it over to v0.15. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4057920/KSP%20Shipshare/Untitled%20MechJeb%20Craft.craft And you have a built version of the Unmanned pod that you can use as a starting point for your designs.

I\'d edited the Cylinder to make the Piston about a month ago, used it and a Kosmos reverser to make a one-shot launching pad pogo stick (as I hadn\'t yet edited the Piston to be more crash tolerant), and forgot about it until this week. Remembering Minmus\' low gravity, I figured that the hang time would be long enough for ASAS to flip the craft upright if it started to tumble, and for the most part, I was right on that score. Some revisions were in order. This variant can jump twice as high, but isn\'t much better at forward motion. I halved the speed of the pistons, from 30 to 15, (the DR Cylinder has a default speed of 0.30), and was able to get horizontal velocities of about 0.3 m/s across the ground mid-jump but not much better. Still getting too much rotation. I suspect I\'m going to have to design to individually set the heights of the pistons.

Release the Arch Computer.

Increased the speed and collision resistance of the Damned Robotics cylinders. Will have to redesign for better forward motion.

Thanks, everyone. it was...mostly boring to do. Luckily the BigTrak was sufficiently stable that I could watch other things while driving most of the time. At typical BigTrak speeds the Mun could probably be circumnavigated in 12 hours, 6 player-hours if you were willing to do the whole drive at x2. A standard Cart could probably do it in 5 ( or 2.5 at x2), if the Mun was flat, but frequent recovery from flips would make the trip annoying. There were only about 80 objects in the universe, including all the landed craft and debris. Admittedly, that made autosaves a bit of a pain. Some Probodobodyne and BACE, http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=6397.0 Kosmos Spacecraft Design Bureay, http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=7178.msg101159#msg101159 Gaby\'s Quick and Dirty Miscellanea http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=5710.msg73692#msg73692 SherbetLemons\'s Truss Pack: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=9026.0 And a bit from Sam Hall\'s Parts Pack. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?action=showpost&postid=401685931 Minmus is not yet safe to circumnavigate. Crossing the terrain seams tends to be fatal. On the other hand, Jumping a BigTrak back is significantly easier than doing so from the Mun. The velocity targets are lower. Thanks. To be honest, the whole Larsen Base Disaster storyline was a complete accident. I spent hours trying to land that thing on the Mun, and only today did I realize that the reason Mechjeb kept having an extremely low-altitude freakout was because I\'d been forced to add the eight outrigger thrusters individually, and as a result, they were as symmetrical as I could make them, but not Symmetrical Enough. After a particularly picturesque smashdown, I decided to go with it. A descendant of the Larsen Base design is now Ice Station Minmus, which came down smooth on a single liquid rocket. Though without the nuclear reactor, it probably needs solar cells more than radiator sails.

The most recent version of MechJeb does appear to task SAS modules for stabilization purposes. When testing my most recent heavy lifter into orbit, I mistakenly used the version with several SAS modules and a mechjeb on board, and Mechjeb intermittently toggled SAS on the ascent and when locked in Prograde.

There\'s a lot of fuel in the PuddleJumper rocket pack. Getting back from Minmus is easier, the velocity targets aren\'t as high. http://www.dropbox.com/gallery/4057920/2/Kerbal%20Space%20Program/BigTrak%20Minmus%20Return?h=0ae2b8 I\'ve been able to get it as high as 55 km on Kerbin before running out of fuel. No chance of making orbit there. I suspect Jumping from the Munar Surface to Minmus, then to Kerbin is possible.

TKI stands for Trans-Kerbin Injection

Agreed. Prior to the 0.15 update, I\'d get into an eastward orbit at about 10km altitude, wait until my spacecraft crossed the middle of the near face, and then burn up to about 900-925 m/s.* This put me in a hyperbolic orbit that exited near the center of the trailing point of the SOI and 19 times out of 20, this would result in an orbit that dropped my spacecraft onto Kerbin with no further burning. The rare times that it didn\'t, only very brief correcting burns were needed. If all you care about is returning to Kerbin, the most fuel-efficient way of doing so is similar to that method. (*)The velocity window is actually wider than this, but I haven\'t really explored how much wider. 900-925 is designed to lhave a velocity close to the 545 m/s of the Mun\'s velocity just before you leave the SOI, but in the opposite direction.

The surface gravity of Kerbin is the same as Earth. The mass of Kerbin (5.29 * 10^22 kg) is less than 1% of the mass of Earth (5.97* 10^24 kg.)

Minmus is only 47,000 km from the center of Kerbin. It\'s a more difficult target than the Mun, but not nearly as challenging as another Kerbol-circling planet would be. By comparision, Earth\'s Moon is 384,000km away.

Mean anomaly is a measurement of time to or since periapsis in terms of the angle (in radians) that a hypothetical object in a circular orbit whose semimajor axis is the same as your spacecraft\'s would travel. Here\'s a document I\'ve been nursing for the past few months that explains many of the orbit-related fields. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fmTW6P91OVFj5Tuj0JzKcnfpcw79RqveQTAywrPIIrI/edit

Here\'s a Quickgrid map with colored contour lines. Bold lines are every 1km altitude, lesser lines, every 200m. *polishes monocle, puffs pipe* Investigation of the data provided by Dani and refined by togfox indicate that the highest point on Minmus may be over 5,720m above the base datum, with the best known contender atop that mountain that sits near 60S, 75E. Is it not the Sworn Duty of this Society to send an expedition to scale this mightiest of peaks in the Known Universe, and confirm it?

I get a lot of mileage from the Cart plugin. And I\'ve been making quite a bit of use of the BigTrak mod for the Cart Plugin. With a concealed Mk. 1 Pod inside, it\'s very stable. With the PuddleJumper fuel tank, SAS Modulle, it\'s ridiculously stable. You can easily floor the pedal for long periods of time and trust in the SAS to keep you upright. So, in the trailing days of V0.14.4... I figured I might as well circumnavigate the Mun. First issue was getting it there. Easy enough. I landed it at 60 degrees East, which was my best estimate at the time of the location of the center of the near face of the Mun. I now judge that to be closer to 45 degrees east, based on finding the leading pole of the Mun at close to 42 degrees West. But, well, Circumnavigation is boring. As a result, I wouldn\'t recommend doing it on a new moon. There\'d been a reasonable amount of stuff on my Mun, and what I wound up doing was planting stations every sixty degrees, and miscellaneous objects halfway between each of those. This ultimately meant that there was usually an indicator dot visible ahead that I could point at to keep bearing, and the various satellites whizzing overhead kept me moderately entertained So let\'s take the tour. GWraught (120 E) was just a spacecraft I had in orbit. It didn\'t quite stick the landing. Hindsight Station was so named because it sits at the opposite of the Munar Prime Meridian. I\'m still puzzled as to why the Munar Prime Meridian isn\'t in the center of the near face. Depot 210 was a simple supply depot. Larsen Base (120° W) was a dream given form: A huge, nuclear-powered installation that was to land at the halfway mark of the circumnavigationary journey, near the exit of that huge canyon on the far side. Unfortunately, it landed...poorly, destroying the nuclear reactor, and killing most of its personell. Do not worry, Larsen Base! Help is on the way! The Circumnavigators reached the site of the disaster, and prepared them for evacuation. Stabilized in-transit with supplies from Outpost 270 And at Bowsprit Station (The closest station to the leading pole), were evacuated to Kerbin. Up, Up, And away. They passed the 330 Anomaly, which, much to my surprise, did not spontaneously eject itself from the surface and rocket into the sky of its own accord, like it had on previous attempts to put one of these on the Mun. And Marker 0N0E , which had seen better days. And as the survivors of the Larsen Base Disaster were making a safe landing... The Circumnavigators arrived at Monolith Base, which wasn\'t too far out of their way. One more leg and they were back where they started. A trip of over 1200 km, around the entire Mun, mostly at the equator. In the entire journey, I rolled the BigTrak only five times. I did quicksave every 10 km or so, and had to restore from it three times. Most of the trip was at 25-35 m/s. So, what do you do with a BigTrak that\'s been around the Mun? I may have scratched the paint there a little. It\'s two thousand miles to KSC, we\'ve got no restrictions on power or supplies, it\'s dark, and I\'m sure we can find some sunglasses around here somewhere. Links I should have included in the original post: BigTrak Rover is by ChickenPlucker http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=9404.0;topicseen And requires Tosh\'s Cart Plugin http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=8431.0 And, of course, the paid version of Kerbal Space Program.