FinalFan

I was recently circularizing orbit with a manned craft when I noticed that the satellite attached to the nose was suspiciously lacking in probe control units. Other than that little detail, though, it was really dressed to the nines. [edit: this was shortly after discovering that a resource scanning satellite en route to Minmus has no antenna. It has the fancy presets, thankfully. And I do have one crappy relay sat there (HG-5 was my fancy new antenna at the time of its launch so I was slapping them on everything in sight) but apparently it was on the opposite side of the planet or something...]

I went through a phase where it was not rare for my rockets to flip a couple of times and then I would regain control and the rest of the launch would be fine. I never really figured out what I was doing wrong but I grew out of it somehow.

The same rocket as in the OP had a comparable design issue with its liquid boosters but I was able to solve it with a second pair of separatrons in the rear. The core was the NERV powered craft with radially mounted engines and Mk.1 tanks running up the side almost to the fairing, and stuff was all over the tanks so the boosters couldn't attach there. So I stuck girders to TT70 standoff decouplers right above all that junk and added sharply angled upper separatrons to the boosters because it was imperative to get those girders away before they fell into the other stuff. Techically I think it would have been possible to thread the needle, but the design team was under strict orders to hide this fact from Jeb. So this created an obvious secondary problem that the whole thing was going to swivel right into the NERVs, but I figured correctly that a second set of separatrons below at a slightly straighter angle would solve the problem and possibly even help the first set pull up and away. It was my first time using separatrons and that part of the launch went perfectly.

What I have in mind here is the most disastrously bad launch that actually still managed to achieve an outcome you were willing to call "success", and I don't just mean "my kerbals succeeded in escaping alive from the flaming wreckage". What inspired this thread is the launch I just had that is my worst thus far. I was launching a new design of mining exploration lander that was hopefully destined for Duna (which I haven't been to yet) but was currently scheduled for a shakedown tour of Kerbin's satellites. My liquid booster stage had followed a far too optimistic launch profile and after separation I found myself 35 seconds from a 51km apoapsis needing something like 600 dV from the exploration vehicle's NERVs. Fortunately the vehicle in question had strong attitude control (relative to most of my rockets) and plenty of fuel available so all I needed to do was avoid falling too far, burning up, or losing control due to the atmosphere. I tilted to 45° and hoped it would be enough. It was enough to slow the countdown considerably but I still had over halfway to go when I crested. I started dropping and soon enough I had to begin tilting back down to avoid losing control of the craft. As I got close to orbital speed, heating became a serious issue so I set SAS and began rotating to give the stressed parts a break. I bottomed out at about 41km and my new apoapsis was literally almost exactly on the opposite side of the planet from KSC. But hey, at least I was close to my target inclination.

Extended Mission Report Part 2: When the sun set on my landing zone the Rhino's tanks were only half full, and the ship was unable to balance without SAS motors running (not that I could mine at night anyway, lacking fuel cells). So the crew took off and tried to fulfill a storyline contract of rendezvousing with another vessel in Minmus orbit. However, once again the contract failed to complete, only this time I'm pretty sure it's not my fault. Oh, well. We'll see if it fixes itself upon return to the KSC. After that, the crew decided to see if they could land a half-full monster attached to the lander's nose as well as a mostly-empty one. Even Jeb was only 90% sure it would work, but everyone agreed that at worst the landing legs would explode and they could probably manage an emergency takeoff. In actuality, the landing was even smoother than the first one, probably due to the extra weight. For added difficulty, the crew chose one of the two smallest ponds on Minmus, which interestingly enough were Flats and not Lesser Flats. (Actually, I would have had to wait half a rotation for more flats to come into daylight if I missed this one.) [ http://i68.tinypic.com/24g6t4z.jpg ]

It's a three part contract, so I'll do the other two pieces and then override the contract if it doesn't fix itself when my guys return to KSC.

Thank your for the impact info. I think we are almost saying the same thing now! To recap, my original point was "for the weight of those landing legs, you could add two parachutes which would be even better at ensuring safe landing on Kerbin." I don't disagree with anything you said, but there is one thing I didn't understand of what you said: "It takes multiple chutes to have the same effect that one chute has on the craft in this topic." Please help me understand this. *Landing gear is certainly useful in these cases, but when I am concerned about tipping damage, I like (when possible) to give the ship a bit of angle and/or sideways motion just before touchdown (using a bit of engine perhaps) so the parachutes won't cut out when you land; this generally gently eases the nose to the ground. But if you're going for precision landings on the launchpad I guess you'd definitely need legs.

No, the stuff in the picture is literally everything that I have ever sent to Minmus. Thanks for the info, though.

Update: the lander has landed. The orbiter, after gaining about 3 m/s relative velocity and about a kilometer of distance, is once again at 0.0 relative velocity to the satellite inside 20 meters. I have a descending node in 3 minutes that says it will be at 0.0km, 0.0 m/s. I have an ascending node in 57 minutes that says it will be at 0.0km, 0.0 m/s. Mission incomplete

That is a good idea. One of the vessels is unmanned, but they both have a 100% connection to KSC and I am in full control of the probe. The contract doesn't say I need to be in control of the vessels, but I have to "have" them so I wouldn't have been too shocked if your guess was correct. From looking online, it seems that the storyline contracts can occasionally bug out, and sometimes when they do you get tons and tons of the reward for it when you return to KSC—perhaps as if it was repeatedly granting you the reward while not ending the contract? I guess I'll find out if this is one of those cases when these guys get back to KSC.

As I said, the smaller one that is targeted in the picture did NOT launch with any other vessel in Minmus's SOI. The two big ones that are docked are from the same launch. My understanding is that these would count as one vessel for the purpose of such contracts. Do you think it's possible that the fact that the two docked ships are from the same launch is somehow messing up the contract logic, even though there is another non-affiliated vessel that they are both rendezvoused with? Yes, both vessels (or all three, depending how you count it) predate the contract. However, contracts with that sort of requirement invariably say "build a new xxx", or words to that effect, don't they?

I'm trying to fulfill one of the missions in the Minmus storyline contract: -Rendezvous two vessels in orbit of Minmus (Have two different vessels in orbit of Minmus within visual range of each other and kill their relative velocity in order to achieve this goal.) -Return to Kerbin from orbit of Minmus -Return to Kerbin from a fly by of Minmus I have held at 0.0m/s relative velocity for over a minute at less than 20 meters distance and this portion of the contract is not marked complete. The vessel targeted in the picture launched about 40 game days prior to the bigger docked vessel. (Both docked ships launched at once and would not by themselves qualify for this contract.) When I "zeroed out", of course I didn't quite get it to 0.00000, since I'm human. So I figured maybe going from +0.01 to -0.01 would make the difference, but after reversing the drift it still doesn't work. Any ideas? [edit: TinyPic is dead; long live Flickr. Original link for insanity posterity: http://i64.tinypic.com/15qoyu0.jpg ]

I would argue that if I understood the OP's earlier statement correctly he included the legs out of concern for the landing on Kerbin. Thus they're not totally unrelated. Adding parachutes is generally a more effective way to ensure safe landing speed on atmospheric bodies. I was not 100% sure about whether removing the legs without adding at least one parachute would be safe; being relatively noob, for all I knew, the legs were absorbing force from an impact speed that would have been fatal to the lander can, and I didn't take time to analyze whether taking 0.2 tons off the can's weight would or would not outweigh their utility. Certainly adding two parachutes would be overkill, though.

He could make the vessel lighter ... or he could use more parachutes! Four LV-1 landing legs have the same weight as two Mk2-R radial parachutes. As for the dish, I had assumed he chose that one for the "good aesthetics" but if not then yes that is obviously unnecessary. And it just happens to weigh the same as a Mk16XL parachute

Extended Mission Report: to Minmus and beyond? Part 1 Many days later, our intrepid heroes were finally approaching Minmus. They observed that the only thing to precede them, a satellite redirected from another mission after its extra delta-v was noticed, was still happily in polar orbit. Perhaps something could be gained from a visit? (I had a contract for "rendezvous" as opposed to dock at Minmus.) The Mun was desolate, but the landscape of Minmus seems even more alien despite its cheerful coloration. [ http://i67.tinypic.com/2j2z03r.jpg ] Meanwhile, plenty of science was to be had. Can't transmit? Whoops, time to unpack that antenna and dust off the dish. We almost missed a maneuver node because the ship had just begun passing over the Great Flats a minute ago. Well, after the sciencing had died down a bit, the crew picked out a landing spot. And not just any landing spot! Inspired by the low gravity, Jeb had decided to avoid the trouble of ferrying fuel to the Rhino ship by bringing the Rhino ship right to the surface—still attached to the nose of the lander! For this to have even a chance of working, Bill knew he had to find the most absolutely perfectly level spot he possibly could. Fortunately, Minmus is full of them. [ http://i63.tinypic.com/zbryp.jpg ] On the approach, the crew aimed right for the middle of the cute little pond they'd found, but forgot that, unlike the Mun, Minmus rotates more than once a month. They came down near the edge and had to spend a ridiculous amount of time (due to errors) repositioning and zeroing out sideways velocity again. The only consolation was the hilarious wiggling of the Rhino in tune with the course corrections. Once this was achieved, it became obvious that as nice as the lake beds were for landing zones, there was one drawback, namely that aside from the ship's shadow the place was totally featureless. I'd hate to do a night landing here! [ http://i63.tinypic.com/os7uo2.jpg ] Everyone but Jeb had been concerned about how much weight the legs could handle, but they needn't have: they were not only strong enough to hold up the weight of the ship, they were strong enough to catapult it right back off the ground! Fortunately, the ship's pitiful* stockpile of RCS was full, because at least half of it was gone by the time the ship stopped doing jumping jacks. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief and let the RCS keep burning to make aboslutely sure it had settled down. (*This ship was launched before I started packing larger reserves of monopropellant, so there was only the 30 in each command pod for 60 total.) Without further ado, the mining rigs started pumping delicious mint-flavored ore. The onboard scientist went out to manage the experiments much more carefully than usual. Don't rock the boat! [ http://i67.tinypic.com/kcz0hl.jpg ]

Final Interim Mission Report I believe I have discovered an undocumented feature of "put a new station into orbit" contracts: if the station in question is actually a ship with a Klaw, it cannot qualify while holding a piece of junk that another contract has put into space, even if that junk was created after the "new" requirement date. In my case I rendezvoused with one of my pilots (an onboard pilot being a requirement) after picking up two retrieval contract objects (one manned), but after he came on board the station did not qualify until I let go of both of the objects (the rescued kerbal was allowed to stay).

I never used the Mk.2 can for a while, but it's nice for ships that have a science facility: one pilot, one engineer, two scientists. It's also the only [edit: manned] command part that is 2.5m on top and bottom, which can come in handy sometimes. I mostly use it on things where the extra weight is a drop in the bucket anyway, or things where I really want the 2.5m size (e.g. a Clampy Sr. needs to go on top). But the weight of the thing really is nonsensical. You could use a 2.5m-to-2x1.25m adapter, two Mk.1 lander cans, and another adapter, and get a similar result that only weighs about 1.5 tons. And, to add insult to injury, the description calls it "very lightweight"! There may be a reason in terms of the real-life thing it is copying, but in game it makes no sense. The Mk.1 can is much lighter than the Mk.1 command pod, but the Mk.2 can holds fewer kerbals than the Mk.1-3 pod and weighs almost as much. Has more monopropellant but less electricity. Honestly, it probably gets more hate than it deserves, like, "That is too heavy, so I hate it completely disproportionately to the problem and vow never to use it!" I guess the key to what Vanamonde said is that most landers are small and don't care about 2.5m form factor on top, therefore the weight is a bigger problem and what it brings to the table isn't as much of an asset. On that topic, I was wondering: why do you have the second set of legs?

Interim Report 3: As the ship drew closer to its Minmus encounter, headquarters back home got a strange request: FLOOYD Dynamics wanted me to "expand the station Abomination orbiter + Miner Mk.I" from six kerbals to eleven kerbals. For this I would get the princely sum of 119 kilocredits. I've never turned down a contract yet, but this one is very tempting.

Interim report 2 I've done some additional research, and it turns out: 1. It is OK if the vessels have previously docked. 2. If they have previously docked, they must dock again within the Mun's SOI. 3. In my specific case, there was a PPD-10 in the middle that originally launched on one of the parts. Its presence messed up the first re-dock attempt because I left it on the other part. I don't know if having a piece of one part on the other part would prevent contract completion if it wasn't located at the junction, but either way separating them fully and then re-docking will work.

This is probably something pros either know or don't need, but for my fellow noobs, if your ship has RCS thrusters, use them to fine-tune your burn. That is, if you overshot your Kerbin-Mun burn and now it's got a periapsis of 100 meters, use RCS to nudge your speed back a bit. Or use it to nudge forwards and avoid overshooting in the first place. It's a lot easier than flipping the whole ship around and also easier than adjusting the throttle on your engine, especially if you have multiple engines.

Thanks, and sorry for leaving everyone in suspense on my other mission. Now you know why!

My First Space Station, and Misadventures Related Thereto PART 1 In which mistakes are made I was waiting for various maneuver nodes to come up on my first manned trip to Minmus, initiated almost at the same time as the consummation of my first unmanned trip to Minmus (my first mining-refining vessel, on the Mun, decided to have some mission creep). In the meantime, I decided to accept a bunch of contracts regarding putting a space station into orbit, which I had never done before intentionally. (There was an early-game derelict spacecraft—a crossfeed error made it run out of fuel unexpectedly and I had to rescue the pilot via EVA—but other than that I had never put any kerbal carriers into permanent orbit.) There was one for Kerbin (10 kerbal capacity, research station) and one for the Mun (5 kerbal capacity). Additionally, I already had a contract for docking two vessels on or around the Mun, but it turns out that a lander returning to an orbiting mothership doesn't qualify. (Perhaps it was that the vessels had to be launched separately.) I thought I could kill three birds with one stone if I launched a space station with a shiny newly unlocked Clampy Senior, and then launched a lander-miner-refiner Mk.II capable of pushing it to the Mun. I decided to give the station a dedicated lander (capable of potentially ferrying tourists to and from the Mun) and a couple of escape pods (partly for fun, and partly because of an "orbit Kerbin" contract that I didn't feel like carrying to the Mun). Soon I was launching Alpha Space Station into orbit. It clocks in at almost exactly 50 tons, counting 27 tons of fuel and monopropellant reserves, and seems to have more than enough battery to last through a night-side orbit while still researching. [edit: TinyPic is dead; long live Flickr. Original link for insanity posterity: http://i63.tinypic.com/2a8jlnk.jpg ] Moving and re-docking the lander proved conclusively that I am genuinely bad at complex RCS maneuvering. I can sort of handle translating in the cardinal directions, and pitch/roll/yaw aren't too different from doing it with reaction wheels, but any attempts to control any two impulses at once degenerate quickly into hopeless, hilarious failure. Nevertheless, I managed it. I noticed that I forgot to put any solar panels on the lander, so my tourists had better not dawdle on the surface before coming back up. 150 electricity should be enough for the command pod reaction wheel on a trip like that, right? Just gotta remember to turn off the SAS when I'm not using it, like after landing. [ http://i68.tinypic.com/90y5fp.jpg ] Recovering the second stage brought the total launch cost down to 59k. Not great by some standards, I'm sure, but not too bad for something I hope will see lots of future use. Next up, launching the propulsion vehicle. It's a spiffed-up version of my previous mining vessel. Since the last one is still in the field with all its onboard science, I didn't have enough to unlock everything on my wish list (large ore tank), but this is still a big improvement, largely because of the 2.5m-1.25m quad adapter and better thermal dissipation. It also has its own research facility and houses a crew of 4 (using the 2-man can to fit a Clampy Senior on top). Four-way symmetry should help my RCS control a little compared to the Mk.I's three-way. I think I'll call it Prospecting Unit/Lifter/Lander. Kind of a mouthful, but it does a lot of stuff, I hope! The team slapped on a PPD-10 to add a few last-minute Mun tourists to the itinerary, and a small manned probe hopefully capable of making polar orbit, and then blasted off! No second stage lifter needed here—the package to be delivered can do its own work after the initial boost. If I need extra fuel to get to the Mun I can borrow from the station. Cost of lifter: 46k (69k less 23k recovered) for putting 70 tons of craft in orbit (less perhaps 5 tons of fuel I used from the nukes to get to the rendezvous). Without further ado, mission A.S.S.-P.U.L.L. was a go! About 115 tons put in orbit between station and miner/tugboat for a slightly smaller number of kilocredits. PART 2 In which Bob thinks he can pilot a ship, but is wrong. It didn't take too long for Mission Control to realize they had put a scientist in a ship with no probe. Well, I guess old Bob could use the practice. Also, I put the tourist who only signed up for Kerbin orbit into an escape pod with Valentina (so I could have at least one kerbonaut holding down the fort at home; I cleaned out the place for these launches) and pulled the trigger. Up until now there had been thirteen (13) kerbals aboard the A.S.S.-P.U.L.L. mission, which is by far the most I've had at once. To be fair, I've never combined two launches into a single mission before. Meanwhile, it turns out that the lander attached to my A.S.S. is throwing off the balance—the reaction wheels aren't able to compensate enough to keep the ship straight at full thrust. Perhaps if I emptied out the fuel? But I only have spare tankage for the liquid, not the oxidizer. My A.S.S. is still just too fat. I could nurse the thing along at half throttle, but it's already a long burn. In doing so, I might even briefly drop out of space mid-burn, not that it's dangerous to be at 69km or whatever, but to heck with that! I have tons of monopropellant and even if this isn't what RCS is meant for, it's sure good enough to do the job! [ http://i68.tinypic.com/209j0ic.jpg ] And after repeating the same ridiculous scheme at the Mun capture burn, I'll be ready to land and rejuvenate all this stuff I've been burning. But first, what about Bob? He has the opposite problem: too much control. His unsteady hands are capable of doing a full rotation when only a modest adjustment is needed. After locking the engine gimbals and setting wheel authority to 50%, though, he's starting to feel like a real pilot. Now let's get some polar orbital contracts/science! Literally eleven minutes (game time) before entering the Mun's SOI, I get a contract offer to "return or transmit scientific data from space around the Mun". Well, I'm not going to say no to that! Speaking of our Mun burn, the fuel is running lower than I expected, but fortunately I lifted off with full ore tanks to refine more fuel with en route, which I've been converting to liquid fuel. And a little extra monopropellant, which I was shocked to find in danger of actually running out. But, after all, it was just for convenience, not a mission requirement, although I'm resolving to hang on to some for "real" usage. After a routine circularization burn, other than continued RCS abuse, I detached the miner-lander and proceeded to a landing that was completely ordinary, including my continued ability to pick a landing zone that is too steep for comfort but not quite steep enough to prevent landing. [ http://i65.tinypic.com/2589y8k.jpg ] The miner comes back up to dock. I'm a bit worried that I STILL won't get credit for the docking because even though this includes hardware from two different launches it came to the Mun in one piece. Additionally, I left one piece that was originally part of the lander with the station when it detached. Will this count? Or is the contract's secret requirement that two vessels dock FOR THE FIRST TIME in the Mun's orbit? Nope, this doesn't count either. But I haven't given up all hope yet; I can still detach the PPD-10, land with the Mun tourists, and come back up to dock two vessels that don't have any pieces of each other in them yet. The miner/refiner refuels the station but the modest ore hold isn't enough to completely refill both the liquid in the station's LFO tanks and the prodigious amount of monopropellant that we burned. Oh, gee whiz, what a tragedy to have to land back on the Mun for some more. As it happens, when I finish refining my ore I'm very close to an equatorial Canyons biome passing underneath. Sounds good to me! I quickly detach and kill most of my orbital velocity, lining up my remaining path with the canyon. ... it turns out that canyon floors look really nice and smooth, and they are smooth, but not flat. Had to burn a lot of fuel changing landing zones twice to achieve a mere 15 degree tilt, which I think is my steepest yet with these disconcertingly tall landers. [ http://i64.tinypic.com/2ijl0xy.jpg ] When I undocked, the name changes gave me hope that this time the contract will work. The station got its old launcher name back, and hilariously the lander got bequeathed the station icon and name. So yes, KSP says I have a space station landed on the Mun. OH COME ON The docking was an exercise in frustration; after the second bounce I went in with a perfect plan, only to have the docking ports stabilize without completing the docking. Why do you hate me? A short expenditure of RCS later (by the station, since it's lopsided and probably lighter anyway) and I'm finally docked, and yes, the contract finally completed. What replaced it? Well, turns out I need to get "scientific data from the surface of the Mun." Does it count scientific data I've already collected even if I'm no longer on the surface? Yes. And now, time to go home. It turns out I did not sufficiently think that part through. It was easy enough to carry over a dozen kerbals to the Mun with this space station, but bringing them back without bringing the space station back is trickier. In the end, the two scientists volunteered to man the station's lab, and the ship left while the engineer was admiring the view from the station's cupola. My Mk.II miner was a modest success, and maybe it's the sunk-cost fallacy but I don't quite feel like deorbiting the thing, so I slapped together a 10-kerbal SSTO ferry (8 returning from the Mun, 1 pilot, and 1 LKO rescue) and took off, after sending it back from the launch pad for a last second addition of a stored-science-retrieval kit. I had to research the Klaw for this vessel as tourists cannot EVA. That solution seemed easier than designing the ferry to include a Clampy Senior. This thing really jumped off the pad, so Valentina decided to try a much shallower ascent path than usual to minimize gravity losses; we hit 70km apoapsis just as the speed was threatening to fry the solar panels so she coasted up and circularized. [ http://i64.tinypic.com/p0emc.jpg ] As the Mun tourists returned to Kerbin, Mission Control didn't want the ship to go too deep into the atmosphere for fear of breaking the satellite dishes, and gentle airbraking was way too boring, so the NERV engines were put to good use again doing most of the work. The miner sidled up to the waiting Klaw ship and the tourists and data transferred over. KSC was drawing near, and there was a fair amount of fuel remaining, so a hasty deorbit put us reasonably close (by my lax standards). No sooner had we landed than new contracts came in asking us to use our brand new Klaw, to rescue kerbals and objects around the Mun, no less! Looks like the engines on my P.U.L.L.er will barely have time to cool off. END OF MISSION

Today I learned a valuable lesson about heavy, lopsided ships whose engines lack gimbal and which want to do a long burn at full throttle but don't have enough reaction wheel authority to fly straight. Fortunately, the "ship" was a miner/refiner pushing a station so, instead of doing something responsible like suck it up and do a longer burn or split it into two maneuvers, I just abused my vast reserves of RCS. I love her expression in that picture!

I recently desired to take a small manned craft into polar orbit, so on an unrelated mission I hauled up a pod stuck to 800 fuel and a tiny engine and hurled it into the void. But going from equatorial LKO to polar LKO is not best done from LKO. If I did a single maneuver the delta-V would have come close to 3200! I know that with large inclination changes it can be cheaper to raise your apoapsis, do the inclination change, and then re-circularize, and that was certainly the case here, but is there any easy method to determine whether this is the case? Or more importantly in the example, is there an easy way to approximate how much the apoapsis should be altered for the most efficient maneuver? Or a ratio of altitude delta-V to inclination delta-V? I just did a bunch of permutations of the two maneuvers until it seemed like the diminishing returns weren't really worth the effort anymore, but I was wondering if there was a "right" way to figure this out that doesn't require an actual rocket scientist.

I happened to have a satellite in Kerbin system with a survey scanner on it (contract I think), and I haven't scanned the planet yet, so I put in 1400km polar orbit and hit scan. Ran out of battery power while transmitting results! Is there any trick that might help here? I tried toggling the "partial transmit" button, but I'm not sure which way is which and I don't know if it applies to this situation. If I lowered the orbit, would it need less electricity to communicate with the KSC? Is there some other way to get it to finish its scan? Or is the satellite just too weak?