Ron Devu

Will do!

The story: (TLDR? skip to paragraph 5) Bob and Jeb set off to the moon on a low-orbit rescue mission, with Jeb piloting a Mk I command pod and Bob riding in the back in a Mk I crew cabin. For the trip home Jeb rode in the crew cabin with Bob, and the new guy piloted for the trip home. Unfortunately the new guy messed up the de orbit burn, wound up re encountering the Mun again and then ran out of fuel. A second rescue mission was launched with the same ship design piloted by Valentina with Bill in the back seat. Of course on arrival it was discovered that only one Kerbal could be rescued. Bob drew the long straw and Valentina, Bob and Bill headed home. Because Jeb's stricken ship was halfway home when the rescuers arrived, Valentina arrived in low Kerbal orbit with a ton of spare fuel, so she cleverly burned it all to give everyone a nice low speed re-entry. She jettisoned the the empty tanks and engine at about 60,000 meters. Soon it was apparent that there were some small mountains ahead and Valentina delayed parachute deployment to let the ship coast past them. It almost worked but at 4000m AGL it was clear the far side of the mountain was a cliff and it was directly below. Valentina manually activated full parachute deployment and gave the order to abandon ship. She then EVA'd, jumped and pulled the rip cord. Bill transferred forward to the command pod and did the same. Last man out was Bob. Upon Eva, while still clinging to the ship, it was discovered that he had no option labelled "deploy parachute". Maybe scientists do not get issued parachutes? Bob got back in the capsule and decided to take his chances, riding the ship in. Meanwhile our two parachutists had realized that due to a very limited choice of landing spots they would be unable to land simultaneously. Seeing this Valentina decided to execute some hard spiral turns to lose altitude rapidly, giving her time to clear the landing area for Bill. Unfortunately she forgot to set her altimeter properly, and she thought she was 2500m AGL when she was 2500m ASL, and augured in at about 120 m/sec. Bill landed safely about two minutes later, finding no trace of Valentina's body. So he called in the recovery crew. Valentina was posted as missing. Now Kerbals must have a pretty amazing recovery organization because they returned to the scene in time to see Bob and the parachuting spacecraft touch down at a graceful 4.2 m/sec. On an eighty degree slope. The spacecraft was destroyed and poor Bob went with it. The odd part is, Bob was listed as KIA, not missing like Valentina. The persistent file listed him as "assigned" even though his craft was destroyed and the pieces were recovered. I went into the persistent file and editted "assigned" to "available" but even after a complete game shutdown and reload he is still listed as KIA in the astronaut centre lists. How do I get Bob back?

Is it possible that the program is calculating the thrust for these boats as if the propellers were in air and not water? If so, those props need to go a LOT faster.

Thanks for the reply, I think I'll take that as a confirmation. I figure this is part of the reason Scott Manley does so much with so little rocket, the other part is (I think) he knows how to set up the classic elliptical transfer orbit so the transfer is exactly tangent at both ends. If I'm not mistaken, being ten degrees off at the destination end can add 1500-2000 m/sec to your insertion burn. (Kerbin to Duna transfer).

Today I did an experiment with throttling back during launch and got an unexpected result. I used this simple setup: Stayputnik 1.25m fairing 3x FL-T440 fuel tanks Reliant engine The fairing was shaped to a simple cone about as long as one of the fuel tanks. The first run I throttled back and held at 300-350 m/sec, avoiding supersonic shock waves, and throttled up as soon as possible. The trajectory peaked halfway to the Mun. Second run, I throttled back when flames appeared. Trajectory peaked well past Minmus. Third run I went full Kerbal, max throttle all the way. I wound up escaping Kerbin and orbiting the Sun. So it looks like the idea of throttling back to avoid wasting fuel fighting aerodynamics is completely wrong! If you can fly without exploding, go max throttle for max results. Anyone want to try to replicate this?

Welp I got multikerbals on the job and that is helping. However my engineers seems to be much better at producing explosions than building anything. Still working on that one. I am having trouble with the RTS-1 unit. I have installed them, and I have installed JS-1 sockets on nearby ships, but every time try to grab the connector on the RTS-1 the game just beeps and nothing happens. Note to mods: apparently there is a better place for this thread but I can't find it. I have looked twice. Please move the thread if that seems necessary.

Docking tips If you have a three star pilot, docking is much easier. You can turn on SAS, and tell the pilot to point at the target, turn on the RCS, and use the capslock key to enter fine control mode. Normally this would be disastrous, because your RCS thrusters are usually not perfectly aligned with your center of mass, and when you use RCS it tends to add rotation which the RCS system detects and corrects with large burns that wreck your approach. But if you are in fine control mode, these troubles can all be avoided by using short taps on the controls. You still get rotations, but they are so small that the reaction wheels correct them before the RCS system triggers. That makes it really easy to line up all three markers on the navball. When that happens, you know you are on target approaching in a straight line. The only other requirement is that you start from roughly the correct position so that as you travel in the ports will meet more or less squarely. which is a pretty loose requirement. If you blow a docking attempt, go to 5x warp and back to normal speed. This will kill rotation on both you and your target. It only takes a moment, and avoids that awful scenario where you are trying to dock and the target is rotating slowly enough that you can't see it. Some odd things can happen while docking. Check to be sure you and your target have the same size of docking port. You might even want to check the both you and your target do have docking ports installed! Retract solar panels and radiators and antennas before docking, because they can easily get sheared off if the approach goes wrong. Lastly, beware parts that are installed close to either docking port. They can prevent the ports from meeting at all.

Then there's the Kerbal way. Retract landing gear. Hit V until you are in locked view. Roll the ship until you are pointing uphill, or at least not straight at a mountain or crater wall. Now, play with the the WASDF controls until you are sure you know which button will pitch the nose up. (Watch the rocket nozzles and which way they respond to figure this one out.) Set SAS to radial out if you have that option, otherwise set to hold course. Lean on that pitch up button and fire the main engines. With a bit of luck you'll get enough of a bounce to get you "airborne" without destroying the ship. The reason I say this is the Kerbal way, is that it does work about 30% of the time and the rest of the time you get really cool explosions. As soon as you have 50-100 m/sec in an upwardsish direction, you can usually cut the engine, get properly oriented and burn for orbit with time to spare. You'd be amazed how fast you can get a suborbital trajectory that peaks at 20+ km, and once you have that you have several minutes to get organized. Due to the 30% success rate you MIGHT want to quicksave before you try this. Oh and don't do what I did .... I had several hard bumps , somehow managed to stay intact.I got up in the air, saw blue on the navball, locked into that course , then pointed the nose 10-20 degrees above the horizon burned for dear life. After circularizing I was in a nice orbit, only inclined six degrees from the orbit of the fuel ship waiting above. I set up a rendezvous, though the numbers did not look very good. Soon I was approaching the fuel ship. At over 1000 m/sec. I was in the perfect orbit, but retrograde.

Ok that should help a lot. Swarms of Kerbals are available up there. Sorry if I posted in the wrong place, I did spend a couple of minutes trying to get it right, but I guess I missed anyways.

I have a space station in orbit, and some of the modules are connected by pairs of Clampotron Jr.s. I would like to take an engineer up there, remove the clampotrons and join tanks and other large parts directly. Is there a way to do this? Whenever I try to grab a fuel tank it tells me it's too heavy and advises me to "get more kerbals".

Problem solved. I got sidetracked by all the little buttons near the top of the post. Thanks.

I decided to add the KAS system to the game. It seems to be strongly recommended that CKAN be installed first. This led me to a developer site called GitHub, where the user guide says: " Installing the client is very easy: just head to our releases and download the latest version of ckan.exe. " They seem to have a very strange idea of what "very easy" means. Apparently it is a novel way of saying that it is very easy to do if you have four years of university programming training and several weeks of experience using the GitHub site and a substantial background in modding. In other words, for the average user, "very easy" means you are about as likely to succeed as a one-legged ostrich in a tango competition. I followed the releases link and arrived at a page that looked nothing like any download page I have ever seen. I did not see a list of downloadables, nor did I see any buttons anywhere labelled "download", nor were there any tabs labelled downloads. Instead there was a page that looked like this forum page with posts containing links to things like the high-level code for CKAN-like programs or sub-programs that may or may not have something to do with the version I need to help me install KAS. But that didn't matter because the option to download anything did not appear anywhere. Enough rant. Can anyone walk me through this fiendish minefield?

Wow so many answers, which one is best? This is a gold mine of ideas, thanks guys. I see there are certain things everyone is doing in a similar way, I'll have to adopt those for sure.

I have tried several ways of managing launch profiles to attain LEO at about 100km circular. 1. Lean over to 20 degrees asap and hold that attitude. Typical result is a massive altitude overshoot, and a suborbital trajectory. 2. Lean over to 20 degrees then follow prograde. This also leads to a massive altitude overshoot and a perigee of 45 km, but the peak velocity is better. 3. Lean over to 20 degrees, follow prograde until apogee is 100 km, then fly horizontally. This results in flying horizontally while still in the atmosphere and the drag is pretty ferocious, and the Terrier spends a lot of time burning in suboptimal conditions. There has to be a better way, anyone know it? The rocket used was a basic capsule, a T400 of fuel and a Terrier, boosted by 3 T400 cans on a Swivel.

I do have contracts involving both the "green bracket" ships I have. I think you nailed it.

What do the green brackets around ships in the tracking window mean? They don't move when I shift focus from ship to ship.

I did your test, and discovered that works, if you remember it's alt-click and not ctrl-click! Doh again.

Hold on.... you have to be docked to transfer fuel?

I tend to get a lot of spent stages floating around with fuel in them. I tried to rendezvous and transfer the fuel from one, but the ctrl-click thing wasn't working. So the question is: To transfer fuel, are we required to have a live pilot in each ship?

I'm in a position where about the only science missions I get are the survey ones nobody does. Research is not progressing and the science missions I do get are generally well beyond my abilities. For example, I frequently get missions to test equipment I have not unlocked yet. Is there a way to get more, do-able science missions?

Are you saying there is a better way to tilt an orbit than burning normal? It's the only way I know.

Tried eyeballing, it looks like the orbit expands a lot if you are off the nodes. And it's not for a contract, I'm just using up a spare ship from a rescue effort. So i tried eyeballing it anyway and got about a 60 degree tilt and a large enough orbit to avoid annoying eclipses. Good enough.

What is alt f12 all about? And why didn't Werner von Kerman tell me about it? Oh and completely off topic, have you seen Scott Manley's perpetual thrust machine? It's hilarious, it really looks like some crackpot garage project and it delivers 1 m/sec^2 forever without engines or fuel. Trouble is, to operate it you have to issue commands very fast, so you need to write a script to make it work.

I have a probe in equatorial orbit around the Mun. It has fuel and I'd like to make the orbit as polar as I can. Trouble is, it's the only thing I have out there, and I can't figure out how to get ascending and descending node markers to show up. Is there a way to do this?

Ah. tyvm!