kermand

I never tried. It might work, or it might increase your drag so much that your plane will turn into a flying brick. Fine tuning wings is a PITA, no doubt. My solution is to have all my wing parts attached through a common ancestor, say, the foremost wing part, so that I can manipulate them at once. You'll have to use autostrut though, to solidify the rest. Don't let this deter you from tuning your angle of attack. I know of no other parameter that can so dramatically improve the performances of a space plane.

One thing that works miracle for nose refusing to pitch up during take off is to modify the angle of attack by rotating the wings a bit. Hit C in the space plane hangar to have fine grained control and rotate the wings very slightly so that the fore side is higher than the aft side.

On my current campaign I decided to spice up things by restraining myself to launch only from Woomerang launch pad. The main difficulty so far has been to rendez vous stuff in orbit. While it is trivial to do so from KSC on an equatorial orbit, the minimum inclination you can get from Woomerang is about 45 degrees, and if you don't time your launches carefully you can end up with up to 90 deg of relative inclination between the first and the second part of a station! So my question is how to compute the optimal launch window to match a specific longitude of ascending node from Woomerang? I tried launching always at the same hour of the day, but because sidereal day and solar day don't match, it works for quick succession of launches over a few days, but when trying to add a module to a station after a few months a I am out of luck. Noting the date and hour of the first launch and computing the new launch time from it works, but is too much bookkeeping. Of course, I could eyeball it and correct inclination with a normal burn, but my shuttle replica's OMS does not have much delta V budget, and I'd rather launch on the correct orbit from the starters.

I found out that clicking on the "decouple" button on the part's right click menu works. I wonder why it does not work with staging. I tried with and without fairing, it never works through staging on my install. Anyway, that will do for me (^o^)/.

Since i installed making history, I can't manage to have the KV 1/2/3 pods decouple from their base, leaving only the round part. I saw that it is necessary to have a part linked under them to decouple, but i tried it and it does not work. When i stage, the part just does not decouple. In fact for a long time i just assumed it was supposed to have a decoupler added under it, like the original (gemini like) pod. I just recently noticed images of the KV-1 properly detached on the net. Am I missing something ?

thanks for the reply. I will take a look. I managed to solve my problem by grabbing the part in a spaceplane and taking it back to the ground altogether. The mission was validated and the Kerbal added to my crew.

Sorry for the reviving but I have had a similar problem. During my last rescue mission, the part supposed to hold the Kerbal was a KIS container, without even a habitation space. No Kerbal was in it. I tried to determine which mod the part is from but couldn't. Is there a way to edit cfg files to make a part ineligible (or eligible) to rescue missions ?

One could approach your problem from the other side : why does your Jool probe weights so much ? Maybe you can set priorities for what you want to send there and remove some dead weight. Or you could split your big probe between several smaller probes to be launched separately. Jool's SoI is quite big and forgiving if you send some of your probes a little before or after a transfer window (because you can't fire them all at the same time).

Hello I accepted an E class asteroid redirect mission, and then noticed the ART mod makes asteroid giant mastodonts in the million tons. Well, at Kermand Space Program we don't let a customer down ! So, I decided the kerbals will complete the mission or die trying. My question is: does the Jaw ans all the converting units in the ART mod benefit from the presence of an engineer ? Or is it just the same if i send an unmanned probe to hollow out the asteroid ?

KAS. You can make great things with KAS, an engineer and a wrench, but often the game crashes, or something explodes. When you reload, it often happen that the kerbal in EVA collides with the ship, and goes spinning like hell at very high velocity, requiring a cargo bay to catch him/her safely. KAS keeps you on your toes by summoning the Kraken.

Now that i think about it, the constraint of having to return to Kerbin makes the Jool slingshot a poor option indeed. It's much more difficult to perform in terms of navigation, and I would approach Kerbol with all the kinetic energy acquired from Jool's altitude, most of which i would have to get rid of in order to set my return apoapsis at Kerbin. Not sure mister Oberth has enough magic in his hat to make this profitable.

I tried to set the maneuver nodes, see where it goes. one 4083 m.s-1 burn to get a Kerbol periapsis under 1.000.000.000 m then one 3322 m.s-1 burn at apoapsis 171 days later to match Kerbin at the second pass. then a 1800 capture m.s-1 burn to return home after a one year trip. Probably less if aerobraking. total 9200 m.s-1 not including the losses due to the most definitely long burn times. The Jool slingshot option looks even more sexy now ^^

Lots of nice discussion here, thank you all. (^o^)/ I have to admit i did not think about correcting my orbit the first time I return to apoapsis. Definitely a brain fart on my part, as this looks the simplest approach. The 15:8 confusion did not help either, but a 8 years mission would be too long anyway for a manned mission with no stop at another body, as I play with life support. A one or two years mission is the best. As for the worth of getting low solar space science, it is definitely not worth it as far as completing the tech tree goes. But if i wanted to do that i could just press the Mun, Minmus and Duna like lemons and it would be done. The goal here is mostly to get the satisfaction of having done a type of mission I never did before, bonus satisfaction if it is done elegantly. As for "do the math"/"use the UI" controversy, isn't it mostly a matter of personal taste ? I enjoy the trial/error approach most of the time, but it is also cool to plan a mission starting from the equations, bringing with you just the necessary fuel and beeing able to say "exatly as planned !" when you land your vessel home. The most satisfactory experience i had in KSP was probably my first Apollo style Mun trip, and i planned every tiny bit of it using equations from Wikipedia (had just bought the game, did not even know that KER existed). The feeling after returning Jeb Bill and Bob as planned with barely the fuel necessary was great. It got old afterward, but it is nice to binge in calculations again from time to time. This is also why I don't want to use brute force, i like my missions to look realistic-ish. (I know KSP is easier than real life, so the "look" is the important part. For example, I like my rockets to look like rockets, not 15 LF boosters with a giant ring station on top of it)

So, I would like to send some probe in space near the sun and get it back to maximize the science gain. And why not, send a Kerbal so he/she can EVA near the sun and tell me about it. Obviously, I need the Kerbal back as no one shall be left behind. My plan was to compute an orbit around Kerbol with a periapsis under 1.000.000.000 m, an apoapsis at Kerbin level and a period in resonnance with Kerbin's, so that after a few years the probe returns to Kerbin's SoI on its own. Alas, the only such orbits I could compute using a spreadsheet have resonance like 15:8, which place the next encounter with kerbin approximately 120 years ahead. I was wondering if there is another method outside of the brute force approach, packing 20000 dv in my probe. Maybe gravity assist or a refuel at eve or moho ? Or am I just computing wrong and there actually is an orbit fitting my needs within an acceptable time frame ?

I have been wondering lately, is "Kerman" really a family name, after all ? It would make much more sense as an honorific suffix, like "-san" in japanese or "-ssi" in korean. Under this hypothesis, Kerbals have only one, very colorful name, but the etiquette of the Kerbal society requires that they address each other by the name + "Kerman". Only Kerbals who have got to know each other closely, like Bill and Valentina stranded together for ten years in a Mun lander short of fuel, would dare to call each other by name only (a practice known as "kermansute"). Just thinking.