maltesh

Basically this, both for the Mun and for Minmus. I\'ve flown several dozen flights to the Mun this way, and I\'ve only missed it twice. The Munar SOI is huge and close. Minmus is slighltly harder because of the orbital tilt, and it\'s hard for me to see it from the play screen, so I sight from the map screen.. I typically do a plane correction at about the Mun\'s orbit. to bring my apoapsis into contact, then at about 3/4 of the way out, I start 'feeling around' on the orbit for the SOI\'s patched conic to appear by burning to slide apoapsis forward and backwards along the orbit. Perhaps the latter 'feeling around' is a bit wasteful (not to mention a bit tricky without Mechjeb), but my standard Stock Munlander is suddenly getting into orbit with a lot more fuel than I\'m used to, and I might as well burn some of it off before ditching the LFR three boosters that are typically still attatched at the time, and will likely be thrown at Minmus with plenty of fuel still on board.

The pre-assembled craft packaged with it appear to be compatible.

A single solid-fuel rocket booster is also enough to get a capsule, decoupler, and chute from the surface of the Mun back to Kerbin, if you launch from near the trailing pole of the Mun.

Fair enough: This was the spacecraft. And this is what it looked like at the lowest pre-clip altitude I still have an image at. (edit: Whoops, thought I had a different engine on it.) And at that point, the spacecraft consisted of the gimbaled standard liquid engine, four empty liquid fuel tanks, an empty rcs tank, 3 RCS blocks, a stack decoupler, a parachute, and a Mk 1 pod. Hmm. That\'s only 5.6 tons. So on the 10,464.4 m/s screenshot, the spacecraft has a momentum of 58,600 kiloNewton-seconds. (Or ton-meters per second, if you prefer)

Same thing happened to to me when I hit the Mun at 10.5 km/s on a stock rocket. Clipped through ~300km of Mun.

Did you change the name = line in the part.cfg file? If not, that\'s why it\'s not loading. That value has to be unique in the parts directory to ensure that all the objects you want to load will load.

Get rid of steps 2 and 3, and do your burning into [Mars] intercept from Kerbin Orbit. The directional setup (and slow speeds) you need to get a gravity assist from the Mun obliterates the significantly larger benefits you get from the Oberth Effect by doing all your burning in low Kerbin orbit. If the Mun was much smaller, but with the same mass, such that you could get a significant trajectory bend by scraping its surface at ~ 4km/s, things would be different. And the Mun certaintly can turn an object in orbit of Kerbin into an object on an escape trajectory. But if your aim is, and has always been, to head for something in Kerbol orbit, you\'re wasting fuel by attempting a Munar gravity assist.

Orbital Skydive. With Free Return Trajectory. Swinging by the Mun And Back to Kerbin. Chute opens. But 5m/s is too fast.

Well done. Minor point: Halfway between the apoapsis and the periapsis on the boundary of an elliptical orbit are the ends of the minor axis, not the ascending and descending nodes.

By skirting the sun for his final burn, he\'s taking advantage of the Oberth Effect, which magnifies the kinetic energy for a set amount of fuel being burned. This results in a higher velocity excess as he leaves the system. You could probably really break some speed records on the following flight plan. 1. Get into low Kerbin Orbit 2. Run yoursefl up to ~5000 m/s headed out the leading center of the Kerbin SOI, so you\'re near Kerbol escape veloicty once you exit, saving fuel using the Oberth Effect. 3. Coast out to a far apoapsis, then decelerate to skim the surface of the sun (Bi-elliptic transfer, cuts necessary delta-V to sundive by as much as half over the direct Hohmann drop) 4. At Kerbol Periapsis, burn the rest of your fuel (Oberth Effect again). Takes ridiculous amounts of time and is a very roundabout path, but you\'ll wind up moving pretty darned fast.

The download contains a .craft file that has a Mk.1 Pod concealed inside the BigTrak, a version with the jump jet and a concealed Mk.1. Pod, and Cuttlefish Lander versions of both, which you can use as starting points for your own ship designs. I suspect the jump jets are balanced to provide the designed flight profile with the concealed Mk. 1 Pod.

It\'s correct. Escape velocity is always sqrt(2)*circular orbit velocity for your distance from the primary. At an altitude above Kerbol of 13,534 Mm, Kerbol escape velocity is 13,126.5m/s.

While I wouldn\'t say Tribal was a cakewalk, but I generally found it fairly easy. You could stock up some pretty big advantages in Creature Mode. Your tribe automatically got a domesticated animal for each other species you ended Creature Stage allied with, for instance, and that automatic protectable food source was a huge benefit. Beyond that, you just basically had to avoid fighting two other tribes simultaneously. If you did it right, Civilization could be a cakewalk. You only had one type of land vehicle, one type of air vehicle, and one type of sea vehicle at any one time, so the one key strategy was to build ridiculously fast fragile vehicles, and claim all the spice fountains within reach, then obliterate enemy cities one at a time, by producing a large number of speedy vehicles, racing them over to the enemy city, and transforming them into nearly-immobile tanks for free until you were unstoppable (assuming your civilizaton was Millitary or Religious, anyway) and could inexorably roll over the rest of the planet with your unconquerable blimpswarm. Space... Well, I do have to admit, once you can basically obliterate an enemy civilization at will, can make milk runs to the galactic center through thousands of parsecs of Grox did get repetetive. A few times that an alien race demanded that I help them stop a virulent disease that endangered the biosphere on one of their colony worlds, I sterilized the planet. But that did get repetetive. Galactic Adventures held my interest for awhile because the adventure designer, while pretty cumbersome, did make for some interesting setups

It\'s Spore. All the creature files are .PNG\'s. All you\'d have to do is find the creature in My Documents/My Spore Creations/Creatures and post it as the image file it is.

Something you might want to try if you\'re having trouble getting a reasonable payload into Munar orbit is the Asparagus Stalk Booster setup, mentioned by Klopchuck. What we\'ve got there is a seven-booster lifter stage, With a central LV-45 gimbaled engine, surrounded by six other boosters (using the non-gimbaled LV-30). the outer boosters are linked with fuel lines to drain in the following fashion. [spoiler: Booster linkage] On flight, in the above diagram all seven engines start out draining from the S4 tanks, and then the S4 tanks and their attatched engines are dropped. The remaining 5 engines drain from the still-full S3 tanks, until they are empty and dropped. Then 3 engines drain from the still-full S2 tanks, until you\'re left with the central engine (S1), whose tanks are still full. As a result, you get high thrust off the pad when you need it most, and get rid of deadweight tanks frequently. If you don\'t get the fuel routing right, your spacecraft will become very unbalanced fairly quickly. If you don\'t get the staging right, you\'ll probably wind up detatching a still-burning booster which will probably hit and destroy your rocket. But if you do get it right, you\'ll probably be on orbit with more fuel and less rocket than you\'re used to having, which means more options when you\'re trying to land. In testing, the rocket in the first image entered the Munar SOI with 2 2/3 tanks of fuel left in the central booster, and still had quite a bit of fuel left in it when I threw the central booster at the Mun to check surface altitude in the landing zone.

Well done. You can easily return a capsule on a half-size fuel tank, though it\'s very dependent on how you decide to do it. If you launch, get into an eastward orbit at ~10km, then run up to ~900 m/s when you cross the middle of the near face, you will probably exit the rear of the Munar SOI directly into an orbit that drops you on Kerbin. If it doesn\'t, all you\'ll need to do is decelerate a bit more and it will. Similarly, a for simple landers, a single liquid fuel tank and a small engine can land, take off again, and return to Kerbin, though it helps a lot if the Munar insertion stage was still around to do a lot of the landing deceleration. The primary concerns are going to be not using too much of the fuel on descent, and stability on the surface. You have to get fairly massive (or choose an unforgiving descent profile) before standard-size LFEs are necessary on the lander.

You can get quite accurate results on your flight path angle by looking at the angle your velocity indicator is above the horizontal direction. That\'s what my program initially did. You can get extremely accurate results by taking two altitude and velocity measurements ten seconds apart, assuming that the spacecraft moved in a straight line between them, and retroactively working out the flight path angle from that. That\'s what my program eventually did. If you know your altitude and velocity at any two points, and the time it took you to travel between them, it\'s possible to work out the exact shape of your orbit from that, though the math gets hairy when you remove the 'I traveled in a straight line' assumption. I\'d intended to eventually rewrite my program to do that, but by then, we had a map view. Of course you want to hit the Mun. You just want to do it slowly enough that the spacecraft survives. Coming to a stop inside the Munar SOI will ensure that the former happens. Burning at the right time before impact to allow the latter is the tricky part.

Well, he said he did use an orbital calculator program. The game provides your altitude, your velocity, and your flight path angle on the instrument panel Along with the mass of the object you\'re orbiting, you can determine the exact shape of your spacecraft\'s orbit, and its position in that orbit from that information. With the object\'s radius, you can work out whether or not you\'re on course for impact. I wrote an orbital calculator that did that about nine months ago. There are a few options to ensure that you\'re going to hit the Mun. 1. Slow down. If you slow down enough inside the Munar SOI, you\'ll hit the Mun. 2. Burn in the R- direction. It\'s halfway between your orbital prograde and orbital retrograde directions, on the Navball, and on the arc that passes through the 90-degree pitch dot in the center of the brown hemisphere. Doing so will steepen your descent angle, resulting in being on course for impact.

The Kosmos Space Station Pack includes some nice, small inverters. Used one of those, and a .cfg edit on the cylinder speed to make a one-hop pogo piston a few weeks ago.

I suspect that this is the highest mountain on Kerbin, but can\'t say for certain. At 3752m, It\'s definitely the highest point I\'ve sent anything to, and it\'s higher than any point currently in my Kerbin Mapping Datafile. This is the mountain. And this is the range. As I recall, it\'s fairly easily scalable by Cart from the north east, with an almost planar side. I\'ve referred to it as the Jebberhorn before, but I\'d prefer to name it 'Mount Vildan.'

You still have an operational engine and a full tank of fuel. On a burn, You might be able to push your nose skyward before Munscraping tears your craft apart. As the Spider-Friends say, 'GO FOR IT!'

You have RCS fuel and RCS thrusters. Even if your tanks are dry, you have enough RCS to kill that velocity As long as the Mun doesn\'t interfere on your way down, you\'ll be fine. Edit: Oh, you\'re currently /in/ the Mun\'s sphere of influence. And re-checking, you have plenty of fuel. Yeah, burn retrograde, and attempt a landing. If you crater, C\'est la KSP.

Well, if you\'ve got side-mountable structural pieces that themselves support side-mounting, you can pull it off. I used the small truss girders from SomethingAwful Member Sam Hall\'s Parts Pack. Edit: Suplex!

In general, I\'d say that nights on which you have the opportunity to sight the ISS (assuming weather permits) are slightly more common than nights on which you don\'t have the opportunity to sight the ISS. The Chinese space station, Tiangong-1 can get pretty bright. Not as bright as the ISS can get, of course, but enough to be fairly easily spottable by eye in bright locations. And Iridium Flares can get brighter than Venus. Venus can get up to magnitude -4.6, and I\'ve seen nighttime flares as bright as -7. Haven\'t managed to see one in daylight yet, though.

Your lander looks very likely to tip over if you bring it down on even a slight incline. At the very least, you\'re going to have to be near-point-perfect on lateral surface velocity on touchdown and will probably need to work the stick and RCS to keep from tilting. If you\'ve got to have the two-stage lander, I really would recommend a wider base for the legs. Though the ways you can do that on stock parts tend to be heavy. Edit: Here\'s one way to a wider base on stock parts. The lander has four half-size tanks, which gives it as much fuel as the last two stages of your two-stage lander. I\'d guessthat it currently has more than four times the fuel I\'d need to get it back to Kerbin (the last pre-lander stage did the slowing to a low-altitude vertical descent, and was then chucked at the Mun to gauge local altitude)