Espatie

You need Electricity to run Reaction Wheels.

It has higher Thrust than the Poodle, and the alternative model fits on a 1.875m stack.

You can save a lot of dV by landing in the right place on Eve.

I think he means that the orbit is inclined, rather than eccentric.

How low are you trying to take it, and (more importantly) why? Sinking stuff deep into a Gravity Well is rarely a good idea.

I've finished the design of the new Mun Hopper, ready for launch tomorrow. In the meantime I've sent the OTV Slingshot with a crew of 5 rookies to Minmus. Their orders are to grab some basic science for the lab to work on from Minmus orbit, and then head to Mun where they will form the first crew for the new downside station that I've been handed a contract for. Also I've realized that the Kerbals on the game's title screen are in a Retrograde orbit around Kerbin, and I can't now unsee it.

Mostly today in KSP was a day of getting things back to normal before the next big moves. Everybody except for the rover team are now back from the Mun (they should be picked up tomorrow), and the LKO station is partially refuelled. Tomorrow will be a day of further "make good and mend" and possibly the deployment of a hopper to retrieve the Rover Team.

Just to check: You do know that you can use your SAS to align to the Retrograde marker, right?

Well... that was disappointing. After all the fun of rescuing the crashed Rover mission, repairing the Rover with KIS/KAS and so on... actually driving the rover anywhere to do anything is about as much fun as pulling teeth. Kelvis and Maduki drove over to the pre-existing SEP layuout, and have expanded it with the next experiements, recalibrated the old ones and so on... but no way am I driving onto the next biome. That was no fun at all. Back to the drawing board. First up: A means to rescue Kelvis and Maduki from the Mun Highlands.

A query: is there supposed to be the same mass/proximity check on simply detaching things without grabbing them (i.e. with H instead of G)? Because it seems like I can always detach even when the object would be too heavy to grab, and the detach distance definitely exceeds the grab distance.

Further adventures with a Moon Rover! Command uploaded some altered control settings to ease the Rover's steering. Instead of WASD, the Rover now steers with NumPad 5123, and 1 & 3 are also bound to the Roll function, rather than the Yaw function, of the SAS wheels. This makes an immediate and noticeable difference to the handling of the rover. It's also discovered that the roll function alone is quite capable of flipping the rover over (or righting it afterwards). For normal use, Kelvis dials the wheel response down to 50%. For a shakedown test Kelvis takes the Rover out the 8.2km to go and rescue Beawell. The drive is actually more like 10km as it's necessary to detour around a small but steep-sided crater. Maduki is of the opinion that it's relatively new (it's very bright, which she says indicates that the formation is quite young) and the micrometerorite "hail" that rains down constantly hasn't had time to erase the sharp edge. "Young" is of course a relative term - maybe a quarter of a million years old. Kelvis tests the rover extensively - and finds a few problems. It has a tendency to veer to the left under acceleration, especially when going uphill. Command is of the opinion that this means that the left front wheel (one of those replaced following the crash) is slightly lower than the right one. Kelvis is going to try softening the suspension on that side to see if it helps the issue, and if not he'll jack the rover up and try to fix it that way. Overall though, considering that the Rover crash-landed in its original form, it performs well. Kelvis will now bring Beawell back to the landing zone, where she will board the Heavy Lander and return to Kerbin. Kelvis and Maduki will then head out - first eastwards, to where a Surface Experiment Package from an earlier mission is deployed. There they will add additional instruments to the SEP and turn northwards towards the Twin Craters biome, about 30km away.

You need to have enough income to operate. Once you have enough income, Science is always more valuable than funds sitting in your account. In other words, it's only worth having funds if you are using those funds. It follows that in harder modes, funds becomes more valuable because funds are scarcer. Science is also scarcer in harder modes, but without a certain minimum level of funds Science is useless because you can't afford to buy the parts it lets you unlock.

Loads of mods edit Stock parts, be it by changing the artwork or by adding new capabilities or deleting other bits. Just make sure your mod is doing it by editing the properties of the other item in the loading process, not actually editing the cfg file.

I have lost multiple Surface Experiment Package setups to the same thing as @taniwha It seems to be localised to certain areas, so I now use flags to find out if the location is an explosion zone before I plant a full setup down.

OK, The Plan to repair the Rover mission has... sort of worked. The Heavy Lander arrived, deliberately injected into a inclined Mun orbit. We had a bit of a wait for local dawn to roll around at the landing site, but then we managed a pretty good descent and an initial landing with a LOT of dV to spare just under a kilometre from the Rover crash site. After assessing the situation, we took the lander on a short suborbital hop and managed to land under 100 metres from the crash. So far, so good! Repairing the Rover was fiddly, but not especially difficult. With 2 of the legs from the lander (it has 6 more; it'll be fine) to act as jacks, Kelvis got the whole thing back upright. Dragging the replacement wheels the 100 metres from the lander was a pain at 6m KIS movement distance per move (they are too big to go into a Kerbal backpack), but eventually Kelvis got the wheels replaced. He then drove the Rover over to the Lander to make it easier to add the rest of the parts. The new port side solar panel and batteries went on fine. The replacement lockers near the rear door (small KIS storage SEP item, if you need to know) were slightly fiddly to get into place without blocking the door, but eventually fine. Unfortunately a short test drive has revealed that the Rover is an absolute pig to drive in Munar gravity, prone to flipping when turning and apparently capable of flipping forward under acceleration if the default keys are used because that also triggers the Reaction wheels. What I need to figure out is a way to have the reaction wheels trigger to stabilise the roll when turning, but not trigger when accelerating. It's been nicknamed "The Lady". Because it's not for turning. Still, We have a working rover on the surface of the Mun. That's better than we had yesterday.

I think helmet lights are U by default. IDK I have mine on Numpad * Unlike @bewing I fly long distances almost entirely by Navball in EVA mode. I find flying by eye impossible unless at really close range. Quicksave, try it, revert if failed. You've got about 200 m/s Delta-V in the pack. It's perfectly possible to cross kilometres between ships once you have enough practice with the technique.

OK, so after Yesterday's crash Mission Control had a long think about how to salvage the situation, and came up with a Plan. Firstly, we're going to launch another iteration of the (tried and trusted) Heavy Mun lander. This craft has worked before, and we're sufficiently confident in it working again, especially because we now have eyes on the landing site. We're going to drop in with a couple of empty seats and an Engineer on board; we've even found an Engineer who will get enough XP to level up from the adventure. And we've managed to find space on it to fit all the parts required to get the Rover back into working order. The mission profile is: Drop the Heavy Lander onto the Rover crash site. Repair the Rover to working order, and send one of the pilots (probably Heldred) in the Rover to pick up our rescue mission target, Beawell. Drive back to the lander, and then Urny (the pilot of the Heavy Lander), Beawell and Heldred will lift off, leaving Kelvis and Maduki to recommence the Science gathering mission they came here for. Or at least, that Maduki came here for, but Kelvis is fine with an extended stay on The Mun. I've also figured out that I can probably re-use the final stage of the launch vehicle to build a third OUV from spares in orbit, with maybe a few minor things extra to be shipped up later. We'll see how that goes at a later stage; in the meanwhile the upper stage can be safely left to drift in an orbit just a bit above The 90th Kilometre Market.

You can set the target for your EVA Kerbal to the rescue ship. That gives you the yellow box on screen, the pink target on the navball and directional movement markers. Your Kerbal will always orient him/herself to be in-line with the North-South Axis of the planet or moon whose SOI you are in. This means that your forward and back thrust always accelerate you in one plane. Forward is always away from your Camera position in that plane, backward towards it, left and right are done with respect to the camera position. Personally I remapped my EVA movement keys onto the Numpad, but it's up to you how you do it.

Science Mission made it to the Mun. Things... did not go according to plan. The plan was to drop a well-equipped rover with a large skycrane lander onto a site where I had a rescue mission for an Engineer, Beawell. I was to leave the Rover, Beawell and a Scientist (Maduki) to roam about a bit and put up some SEP packages, while the Pilot (Heldred) returned back to orbit and helped build the new station before returning with a pickup lander (or possibly just bringing down a permanent base). The first sign of trouble was when the Science team go to orbit and found (with the assistance of an engineer at the construction site) that the lander design was flawed - it wasn't possible to fit the supporting arms to hold the required thrusters with KAS tools, for some reason (need to investigate why KAS and Structural Tubing Restructured parts do not play well together). With the help of some spare parts from the station build (nobody will miss 'em, honest) we worked around the problem and went in for landing. A mild amount of overshoot (8km) from the target site, but nothing *too* bad... until Kerbol suddenly vanished over the horizon and my landing zone went pitch black. I tried to cautiously retro down, but the terrain was both higher than estimated and treacherous. The first impact blew off the left side wheels and some of the AKI storage lockers, and the second took out one of the 4 thruster pods. Thankfully the 3rd was sufficiently gentle that the rest of the craft survived, but with only 2 wheels it's not roving anywhere any more. https://imgur.com/i4g1pKS It's a bit bent - the Mk1 lander pod for the ascent stage is *inside* the tank that was used to replace the strutwork. The whole thing is also wobbling in a way that makes me think that if I unload physics for any reason the whole thing will cease to exist in an explosive fashion. The first thing I'm going to do is get the SEP packages away from the wreck, as well as both the crew. If it does spontaneously cease to exist I don't want to lose 2 good Kerbals. After that I'm going to send Heldred the 8km to get Beawell. If we can salvage any kind of minimal launcher from the wreckage (assuming it doesn't just explode) then that'll be a good start. So, I've gone from one Kerbal needing rescuing from the Mun to 3... In other news the OUV Faust is still a week away from rendezvous with the Slingshot Bus that was stranded earlier.

I use a TLA designation for the ship's purpose, in a deliberate homage to the Culture novels. OUV is "Orbital Utility Vehicle"; SCT is "SOI Crew Transport"; CCS is "Container Cargo Ship". Then each has a name, which is usually something to do with an event that happened in game. So the SCT Slingshot is named because it's shakedown launch resulted in an unexpected slingshot journey around the Mun in order to get home, while the OUV Faust was named because it was launched on a mission to save an earlier ship called Demon.

So to follow up on the previous day: The Bus took a turn around the Mun, with a Retrograde burn just before exiting the Mun's SOI changing the inclination of the Kerbin orbit from 60 graden to only 9 (why does burning Retrograde in Mun's SOI do that for the Kerbin orbit? Trying to follow patched cones mystifies me sometimes). However, while the inclination is good, the Ap and Pe aren't so friendly; it's going to take a couple of weeks before it swings back into near-Kerbin space. It's only just avoiding going into Kerbin orbit! Working out the Faust's intercept also shows that it will be out for a while to set the intercept up properly. With the Faust gone construction on The 90th Kilometre Market is going to be at a standstill; the station's little LKO runabout simply doesn't have the grunt for shifting the launched mass into intercepts. At the same time, I've gotten a contract to build a station around the Mun (how useful would that have been when the Bus came in?), so I have decided to bring forward the construction of the second OUV. This one is getting the Retractable Deployable Solar Panels instead of the OX-STAT ones (the Faust has had this change retrofitted with the magic of KAS). I'm also going to fit it with KIS/KAS Container holding frames (which I plan to retrofit to the Faust as well, when I remember). Sadly there's no 1.875m in-line KIS parts, or I'd add those. I'm also experimenting with fitting a Service Bay to hold minicraft and drones. I don't know how useful it will be, but ultimately I can take it out if it's a hindrance once in orbit. I'd like to give it more Monopropellant as well, I think. Lastly, I finalised and launched my next Mun Science mission, which aims to land a rover which is carrying 9 sets of Surface Experiment Pack equipment. This should keep the Science Department busy for a few weeks!

Oh boy, Comedy of errors time. Doing a bit of playing about with the Science Lab I've just fitted to my LKO station. So obviously I need some Science to put in it. I launched a simple 2 man orbiter (based on my LKO rescue ship) into a polar orbit to get some EVA reports. I forgot that the Delta-V costs to change orbital inclination in LKO are so insane, and I don't have the Delta-V to reach the 90th Kilometre Market (that's the name of the LKO station). So I burn the Delta-V that's available to get into a slightly more useful orbit, and decide that now is the right time to launch the "Bus" I've been designing; a simple 5 man ship that's going to run back and forth between the various space stations exchanging crew members. I'll launch northeast into a matching orbit for the stranded Science vessel, work an interception, transfer the crew and the Science and then finesse a fly-by around the Mun to return to LKO and the 90th km market. The bus is designed to do round trips from LKO to Minmus and then come back via the Mun, so it should be able to handle that. Lower stage of launch is an absolute swine, pulling the rocket heavily against the limits of the SAS. It *really* wants to flip, but Val fights it into something like the right trajectory - 6 graden off line and far too steep, but not mission-ending. Then, as I stage the boosters off for some reason one of them turns sharply inwards and impacts the Mainsail. Thankfully it only takes out the engine without (somehow) blowing the half-full LFO tank ahead of it up. Val hurriedly stages the now useless tankage off the back of the rocket and engages the upper stage. Thanks to the too-steep trajectory the circularisation burn eats the rest of the upper stage dV and about half of the fuel in the actual bus... But it gets (just) a Pe above the atmosphere (70,064). I've got enough dV to make the intercept with the stranded Science team and make a Mun insertion burn (maybe... I'm in a horrible eccentric orbit that's way off the Mun's plane of orbit). If Mun is kind, I can probably finesse a fly-by into a free Kerbin return. What I definitely don't have is the Delta-V to get back into LKO with no Orbital inclination. Which leaves me some problems. My first option is to take the Bus to the Mun and get into orbit there and wait for the OUV Faust to come and fetch me with a load of fuel. The second option is to get back into Kerbin SOI and get the Faust to make an intercept at Pe. Which the Faust can definitely do, but it's fidly and will need the Mun to cooperate in changing the plane of orbit. Decisions, decisions...

I second that recommendation, but in my opinion you've missed out on mentioning the single best item in it, which is the Palici Pod. Regarding Space Station docking: I tend to have my main ship dock oriented in a particular direction - usually pointed to Retrograde so that vessels coming up from KSC simply launch directly into docking alignment. Also, given that we've mentioned mods already, shout out for the indispensable Navball Docking Alignment Indicator mod. Easily the single most effective mod I ever installed, in terms of gameplay effect for memory use.

Yeah it completely messes them up. As I said upthread, the automatic staging ordering goes wrong as well, and I think these are both related to the "decouple at base, not at top" implementation.

What I actually did in KSP today: built about half of a Space Station using KIS/KAS, and then nearly destroyed it by accidentally hitting full throttle rather than nudging 10% as I bought the Orbital Tug in to dock up. Frantic RCS retro thrust was applied! Thankfully I only lost a bit of empty tankage and a couple of junior docking ports; easily replaced. Tomorrow I'll push the Lab, Cupola and more tankage up along with some cosmetic touches like flat end adapters.