AHHans

Only if you want to. KSP really is a game where you set your own goals. So there's as many ways to play it as there are people playing it.

Have you activated G-force limits in the difficulty options?

You're welcome. Some more ore less off-topic comments: Well, you don't need much of the tech tree to go interplanetary, and I also enjoy the challenge to get something done with limited resources. But everybody plays KSP differently. And if there's one thing that I hope you "take home" from my write-up then it's to not worry too much about getting the relay network right. There are two sliders in the difficulty section that define a modifier to the effective size of bodies with and without an atmosphere. And the default for them changes with difficulty setting, for easier difficulties the bodies are effectively smaller but on hard they have their actual size. (And btw. bending of radio waves around hard objects (diffraction) and in atmosphere (refraction) is a real thing, but diffraction around planets is insignificant for communication with satellites or space probes.) If you are playing without additional ground stations, then there is also the late launch problem: when you did a nice, flat, efficient gravity turn, are coasting to your circularization burn, and notice that you loose control because you lost line-of-sight to the KSC, don't have a relay that you can reach with the tiny antenna in the probe core, and forgot to unfold your main antenna. Luckily no Kerbals were harmed figuring this out.

Well, if you were already using any mods that change the solar system or do other changes to the game balance then that would have affected the best way to do this. Ah, O.K. The way that it is listed in the chart is a bit unfamiliar to me. 20 in-game years is not all that much to go hanging around in the outer solar system... To answer some more of your questions in the original post: I don't think a particular launch time will make a big difference for the approach I outlined earlier. You can easily change how long you hang around in the outer system by going a bit farther out or not. And I don't think there is much that you can do with an ISRU on the rescue craft. All the planets are going the same way around the sun, and Haycal is going the other way. (What might work is using a large asteroid with a high ore-fraction as an efficient fuel-tank. But that is a bit far fetched...)

Is this a stock game, or do you use any relevant mods? Do I see that correctly that poor Haycal is in an orbit at about the same distance to the sun as Dres? I haven't some such a rescue, but I did two rescues from low solar orbit. My first try kind-of failed and I needed a number of additional pusher craft to get them back. (Whenever I though "this is surely enough dV" I was wrong.) My second try used a craft that had 27 km/s dV after refueling in LKO. Of that there were about 7 km/s in a nuclear stage and 20 km/s in a stage with ion engines. (Not too much TWR in the ion engines, but fuel for 3.3 hours at full (*cough*) acceleration...) You can probably take your time for the burns (i.e. effective TWR isn't really important) so that you can do with limited EC generation for the ion engines. (Have a good amount of batteries, burn in physics warp until they are empty, recharge them in time-warp, rinse and repeat.) How much time can you take to get the rescue done? Without gravity assists I guess the least amount of dV would be needed if you went to really far out from the sun (where the orbital velocity is low), and do your plane change (aka orbit reversal) there into an orbit with its PE on Haycal's orbit. But that can take a few in-game decades. You also need to think about if you can risk aerobraking with 10 km/s or more at Kerbin on the way back. I've never tested the limits of what can be done there. But if you don't need to reverse your orbit again after picking up Haycal then you can save nearly half the dV (and time). (O.K. that's it for now. I may add more at a later time.)

You can lock the robotic parts, which makes them stronger and allows autostruts to traverse the robotic part. (Without the lock the two sides of a robotic parts are considered two different vessels as far as autostruts are concerned.) If you want to move them while under load, then there isn't much that you can do to make a single link stronger. What you could do is try to distribute the load over multiple parts, or use larger and thus stronger parts.

Sorry, to me @Mars-Bound Hokie didn't sound angry. He just wanted to emphasize his point. And I would love to see your supersonic propeller plane - even if it needs infinite electricity to fly.

Hmmm, quoting the wiki: So if you manage to do this in 80 minutes, then it should help. But probably not enough to matter. Well, and it only helps if you do manage to do it in about 80 minutes...

@Flying dutchman Have you tried fuel-cells?

Well, I think the important part of this constellation is at the very bottom of the page: it allows you connections to 2G antennas (DTS-M1 / RA-2) nearly everywhere in the solar system. If you are willing to put larger antennas onto your deep space probes, then you can make do with a lot less. My strategy for commsats is the following (I play without the extra ground-stations): In the early game when I have only the HG-5 available: I put a few satellites with 4 HG-5 antennas willy-nilly into orbits around Kerbin. (Usually I just fulfill a couple of "place satellite here" contracts.) I make sure that one of them is in polar orbit around Kerbin This is also usually the time when I place my "arrays" around the Mun and Minmus: one (4 x HG-5) satellite in a polar orbit and two on opposite sides in an equatorial-ish orbit each. (I eyeball the "opposite side" part of the orbits and then make sure that the period of the orbits is as identical as I can make it.) When I unlock the RA-2 I use that for any new satellite, but I don't do anything special, same for the RA-15. Natural evolution (just putting relay antennas on everything that stays in space longer) fleshes out my network in the Kerbin system. When I unlock the sentinel telescope I usually also have the RA-15 available, so I put two sentinels in orbit to monitor Kerbin (two in well spaced orbits between Eve and Kerbin are(were) enough to fulfill all the "find asteroids" contracts (before they became broken: bug #24282)) with four RA-15 each. These are my main relays for the inner system up to Duna. When I unlock the RA-100 I place my main relay: three satellites in a triangle in stationary orbit around Kerbin with four RA-100 each. Four RA-100 have about the same power as a fully upgraded tracking station, so these guarantee line-of-sight in all directions from Kerbin even without the additional ground-stations. It also gives 100% coverage for the antennas in probe-cores in LKO. Whenever I explore a new planet I usually start with uncrewed probes that will do the first exploration (= gather all available science from space) and then remain in orbit as relays. So the M700 Survey Scanner probes become the relays on polar orbits and other probes go on equatorial-ish orbits. I also usually put a space-station in orbit, which - of course - also has relay antennas. The antennas I choose depend on the planet: RA-15 for everything up to Duna and RA-100 for Dres and beyond. (The RA-15 doesn't use much more space than the RA-2, so I don't use the RA-2 often after unlocking the RA-15.) For Jool I plan to re-use the scanner probe, so I sent a carrier with one RA-100 satellite and 12 RA-15 satellites to Jool to cover the moons. (In addition to the station, asteroid-tug, and probes that are already or will be in or around the Joolian system.) This doesn't give me guaranteed 100% coverage everywhere, but with the appropriate antenna I will have a connection as long as nothing blocks the line-of-sight to Kerbin (or the three long-range relays there), which is good enough for me. Most (all?) no connection incidents I had were either before I set up the initial HG-5 array or when I forgot to add an appropriate antenna (e.g. forgetting to add any antenna at all for LKO before the long-range relays are up). [Shameless Self-Promotion] And because every self-respecting space program needs a powerful radio-telescope, I also have a Very Kerbal Array in orbit around Kerbin. [/Shameless Self-Promotion]

I seems like the servo got stuck already in the SPH. I never had that problem, but I think others had similar problems before. Did you check the different threads here in the BG forums? P.S. Yes, I know this isn't all that helpful. But maybe more helpful than no answer at all.

Well, by choosing the right time to launch (when your launch site passes below the orbit) you can always launch into an orbit with a larger inclination that your latitude without having to do a plane-change. It is only when you try to launch into an orbit with a lower inclination than the latitude of your launch site (i.e. where you never pass below the orbit) that you have to do a plane change. So I think the best orbit is one with an inclination of the latitude of the launch site that is furthest from the equator. (And then carefully choosing launch windows and directions.) P.S. O.K. the above is what they do for the ISS and what I believe is optimal in theory. While playing I would put my station in an equatorial orbit and just pay the costs when launching from Woomerang or the desert launch pad. That way I don't have to worry about launch windows when going to or from the station.

Yupp, looks that way. I never paid much attention to that before. O.K. From what I've seen in a quick test it seems that the wiki is plain wrong. Signal strength does have an effect on how much science is transmitted: at 100% signal strength you get that 40% bonus, at a lower signal strength (through a relay or whatever) this bonus is reduce by the signal strength. The scaling is approximately linear for high (>50%????) signal strengths but falls steeply for low signal strengths. (At 38% I didn't get any bonus anymore.) Another fun fact is that in my simple test the CommNet preferred to take the direct connection even if the signal strength would be better when going through the relay. (I.e. I got better signal strength by going into the shadow of the Mun.

Hi @jirka828 Welcome to the forums! Are you sure that you get the relay transmitting bonus? Or is it only the fraction of the full science that you suffer for transmitting and not recovering?

I've only seen that in the context of docking ports that are actually docked to something. And there the primary docking node is the one that has the "undock" option, the other one has the option to make it the primary one (which makes it have the undock option). And as far as I can tell, that's the only effect of that option. Nope. When you have more than one pair of docking ports connecting two spaceships then you need to undock all of them to separate them. Yes, one of the pairs is the "primary" in the sense that the order which part is parent and which is a child to its connected parts goes through this, but when you undock this and there are other docked ports, then one of these other becomes the new "primary" until you undocked all of them. This may have been different in earlier versions, but 1.8.1 behaves as I said. (At least in the test I just made...) This is set by the "control from here" function.

Well, my solution was to not land everything that I need to get back to Kerbin on Eve. The result was much smaller. (And then BG came out and I started making solar powered Eve planes...)

I thought so, but not everyone who is new to the game necessarily does. And I hope you don't mind my cheap joke (too much). Well, for landing on airless bodies (like Mun or Minmus) the terrier is an excellent engine. So if I don't need higher thrust then that's what I use. The next go-to engine for me is the poodle, but this needs larger landing legs. For all other engines - and usually also the poodle - I build some kind of structure so that I can mount the landing legs lower than the mounting point for the engine itself. On bodies with air I usually just use parachutes. Except for Duna where I use both: parachutes for deceleration and stabilization and (vacuum-rated, i.e. terrier or poodle) engines for final landing. Well, more fuel for the lander means more or larger fuel tanks, both of which increases the mass of the lander so the transfer stage from LKO to the target needs to be bigger, further increasing the mass that you need to lob from Kerbin's surface into LKO. My first Eve return vehicle got bigger and bigger until I got to using Mammoths to power strap-on boosters to get the thing off the launchpad. (At which point I stopped the project and fired the engineer.) Well, they have to do a suicide burn (even though they call it a "hoverslam") because they cannot throttle the engines down far enough.

AFAIK it wasn't really the rendering as such, but the fact that the surface itself had a glitch. (In other words: the rendering engine was fine, the date fed into it not.) More information can be found on its wiki page.

Are you asking how to launch into a polar orbit, or how to use the cheat menu to get into a polar orbit? If you want to launch yourself, then - as @Vanamonde said - just launch due north or due south. If your goal is to use the M700 Survey Scanner then I don't think you'll need to correct for the eastward momentum you get from Kerbin's rotation, the scanner isn't so finicky. If you want to cheat, then set the "Inclination" value in the cheat menu to 90 degrees.

I'm sorry to have to break it to you, but even late in the game the solid fuel engines don't have throttle control. (SCNR! ) (But in case you didn't already know: not being able to throttle or stop before burn-out is the most defining feature of solid rocket motors.) To add some constructive text to an otherwise mostly useless post: the most fuel efficient way to do a propulsive landing is a suicide burn, wait until the last moment and then burn full throttle until you come to a stop just as you touch the ground. This is called "suicide burn" because it leaves no margin for error, I still occasionally crash land because I wanted to do it too nice and misjudged the timing. A safer way to land is to come to a stop (relative to the surface!) fairly high above the ground, and then keep your speed in the survivable range (below 10 m/s for most craft) while you make your way to the ground. My suggested way to learn propulsive landing is to start with the second method (bring enough fuel!) and then gradually modify your technique to be closer to a suicide burn (come to a stop later, don't fully come to a stop, etc.) as you get a feeling for it.

I do believe that there is a mod that allows to fairly easily create your own customized contracts. But I don't know which one it is exactly. (Because except for KAC I don't really use mods.) So if nobody else helps you out here, then I'd suggest to browse through the Add-on Releases forums (probably with the help of the search function), and / or ask in the Add-on Discussions subforum.

I guess that's kind of the point: both have advantages and disadvantages, so which one is better depends on what you want to do.

Why don't you say so? We were just discussing about quadcopters in another thread: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/190880-controlling-a-quad-copter/ In there you can find the discussion of (and links to) two quadcopters with different control schemes. Feel free to shamelessly copy ideas from anyone else, everyone does that.

Don't worry, we've all been there.

Oh, my! Yes. That would be great. O.K. Your rovers seem to be more stable than mine.