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You mean you find it hard to precisely land on the runway? You can set a flag at the start of the runway and set it as the target while landing an aircraft. Or if you are lazy you can use mechjeb's spaceplane assist to autoland.

I found a handy mod (below) that allows you to deploy payloads to a specific orbit automatically once you've done it once. Now I wanna expand it to be able to recover ships. I've checked the Vessel class and it does not have a recover() method, just a IsRecoverable property that gets whether the vessel can be recovered. So how should I recover the ship? Maybe land it on the runway so that I can pick it up from space center, that'll work too. If that's the way to do it how would I get the coordinates of the runway?

I've played over 300h. I've pretty much nailed rendezvous, but docking is still a pain in the a for me, so no shame in having problem docking.

It's just a balancing issue. It's smaller and lighter, so it's inferior than the bigger one in every way you can imagine. If you are still so angry about it, just go into the game files and patch it yourself. Or if you don't want to mod the game and still think it was made completely useless, just don't use it. There are plenty of parts in the game that I never used. No need to argue it out.

Didn't work for me. But I actually didn't have many contract issues, so maybe it might.

Great mod! Although it would be nice to be able to also launch to other planets/moons. I guess you can just check the current soi, if it's not kerbin then set minAltitude to vessel.orbit.ApA and maxAltitude to the edge of the SOI. It would be a little complicated around the sun, though. Maybe just disable orbits around it then. Edit: NVM I did it myself.

It is clearly not the most time efficient way. The most time efficient way is to point you ship towards the target, accelerate to light speed, reach target, and decelerate to match speed. In reality you don't have that kind of thrust of course, but the solution is still going to be something similar, involving accelerating for half of your trip and braking for the other half. Also, maybe what I wrote is a little misleading. When I wrote "plot" the location of the target, what I meant was to write out the function, put it on the LHS, and put the actual orbit of the target on the RHS, and solve the equation. It's not iterative, it's quite analytical.

The control is not based on north, east or up, it is based on pitch, roll and yaw. Based on what you are saying, the only way is to take off your pod, turn it 180 degrees, and attach it with the other end. This'll be easy to do if you are using probe core, harder if you are using something not symmetrical. Edit: on second thought, no you cannot only change one axis using rotation and translation. You'd have to use reflection, which is not available in ksp.

No, Hohmann transfer is for circular orbits. You cannot use it for elliptical orbits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hohmann_transfer_orbit As for how you would do it, I'd say maybe google the representation of the satellite's orbit in polar coordinates (I believe you can find r(t) and theta(t) in the deduction of Kepler's first law). Use these to find the tangent of the original orbit at any given point, find an ellipse that is tangent to both orbits, calculate the time you need on the transfer orbit, retrace and find the required location of the ship you are trying to rendezvous with, plot it out as a function of t, and find where it intersects the actual location of the target. At least that's how I'd do it. Not sure if this is actually the most energy efficient way (actually I'm 95% sure there are certain cases where this is not efficient). Anyway, that's not a kiloton of calculation, anyone who knows calculus should be able to do it, but it takes a really long time. Also, I've only tried mechjeb's rendezvous once, and it is very inefficient. I mostly plot the maneuver points myself and just use mechjeb for execution.

Sadly, I've tried lifting one of the drills, and it is still too tight. I'll think about the ramp idea. Also, how do I design one that does not have this problem? With the landing legs and drills it seems pretty hard to leave some space for docking.

So I spent hours designing my first mining station, tested it out on kerbin for overheat, spent over 200k funding to send it to minmus, and then realized I didn't leave enough room for my rover to claw on, so I jumped my rover on it: Any suggestions on how I might still salvage it? Or do I have to jump my refuel rover since now on? Also, what would a reasonable design look like?

Like the others said, when syncing speed with target, use the pro/retrograde marker instead of the target marker. Also, 1km is pretty far, I usually make it less than 200m. If I'm trying to rendezvous with a ship orbiting mun, I usually set up mun encounter and lower the pe on mun encounter all the way on kerbin, and make the orbit almost tangent to the target halfway from kerbin to mun, burn retrograde at periapsis to enter mun orbit and setup encounter at the same time, and fine tune the encounter distance at apoapsis. If the relative speed is too big at encounter, you can get in an orbit closer to your target's, use Kepler's 3rd law to calculate the exact apoapsis you need if you want to rv at n orbits away, and fine tune the rv point at the apoapsis of your last orbit before encounter. The maneuvers are easy to plan but hard on execution, though. If you don't have a high level pilot or don't want to use one of dem expensive probe cores, you are gonna need mechjeb. If you are not playing career mode then it would be a lot easier.

Not necessarily. I have two rapiers on my measly SSTO that was meant for low orbit carrying a payload of about 1t. The TWR is so big you can pretty much fly it like a rocket (at least at low altitude). The wings are there for reentry only. Of course, that's just my over-powered poor design. A more sensible design would have a more sensible TWR, and thus needs to fly horizontally.

We probably all have seen the community delta v map. It says that to achieve low kerbin orbit you would need 3400 in delta v. So I tried to calculate that by hand, here's how: the increase in potential energy equals mgh (I'm assuming constant g, in fact it would be even lower). The increase in kinetic energy is 0.5*mv^2. Assuming we are trying to achieve low orbit at 75km, the total delta v (calculated by sqrt(2*E/m)) would be about 2850m/s, and I didn't even use the rotation of kerbin itself. In reality I was able to send rockets in low orbit with slightly less than 3400, but still way more than 2850. Granted that I didn't consider aerodynamic forces but how much could that be? So what am I missing? (And if it is air resistance, I'd appreciate if you could provide some calculation on that)

Hi, this is a dumb question, but how do I install the mod? I just downloaded it from spaceport and merged the GameData folder with my folder, and it did not work at all.