AHHans

Well, O.K. This does make navigation quite a bit harder. () One advantage of having the control direction pointing upward is that you could set SAS to "Radial Out" in surface mode. That will make SAS (try to) point the the top of the rover straight up (away from the center of the planet / moon), righting your rover if it was tumbling. I experimented with that a bit, but decided that it wasn't worth the problems with navigation. (I kept getting lost ... while driving around the KSC. ) Well, you sound like you're making progress, so: Good luck and clear skies.

Why would you need another antenna when you have relay antennas? They work perfectly well to control the craft as well. (The single exception if if you only have HG-5s: they need to be deployed before they work, so you probably need something else for your launch until you are out of the atmosphere.)

Anything with relay dishes, a probe core, solar panels, and maybe some batteries. Some means of propulsion is usually also included. I typically build my comsats around a FL-T400 (-T200, or -T800) tank with a terrier engine because I move them to their orbits from a suborbital trajectory under their own power. Others use a delivery vehicle and only include some RCS. I also usually stick two or four of the largest dishes I have available onto them, in extreme cases also up to eight (e.g. when I only have the HG-5 available) but there are diminishing returns, see the wiki article. In my career games I also start building my comm-network by using the "Put a satellite in a specific orbit" contracts. Do enough of those and you don't need to worry about specific orbits. The exception is lat in the game, when I place my long-distance constellation of three satellites with four RA-100 each into orbit. Those I want to have spread out reasonably evenly. I do that by putting them all in about-equatorial orbits at about-120 degrees phase angle to each other, but make sure that the orbital period that is displayed in the maneuver view (since 1.7) shows exactly the same (1 Kerbin day) for all three of the satellites. That way they stay in their relative positions over time, and while the positions might not be perfect they are good enough. Another thing I do is that I stick some relay antennas onto everything that is designed to stay in orbit anywhere. (And many on things that aren't.)

Well, to me it looks like you have the control point pointing upwards not forwards. (And, yes, in this case the wheel control will work mostly fine.) It could be that you have the docking port on the top of the rover set as the control point. Do you have the RoveMate as the probe core? (It is hard to see, but it looks to me like that.) make sure that you "control from here" on the RoveMate, and have it set to "forward". (When you turn the rover left and right, the coordinate grid on the navball should move left and right and not rotate around. Once you have that, make sure that navigation to a target is activated and turn the rover around until you see the target marker on your navball. Drive in that direction - the prograde marker should show up on top of the target marker - as the terrain and you rover allows, and you should get there. You probably already noticed that driving a rover on Minmus is not pure fun. The low gravity and bouncy wheel suspension make for an unstable ride.

I prefer "unphysical". But then, I studied physics, so it might not sound as damning to others as it does to me.

Well, that's also doing it a bit too simple. If the orbits of Duna and Kerbin were otherwise close, then even this small inclination could have a significant effect. What is important is the absolute distance to the ecliptic plane compared to the distance in the ecliptic plane. As a quick check to see if I need to bother, I computed the largest possible distance to the ecliptic at that inclination ("sin(inlcination)*apoapsis") and compared that to the minimum distance in the ecliptic (Duna_Pe - Kerbin_Ap). The result was as expected: I don't need to bother taking the inclination into account. Oh, that is (sort of) fixed? (I expected it to change when you zoom out.) Hmmmm... I don't see any setting that looks like it adjusts the camera FOV to me in the settings menu. There are some settings of which I don't know / understand what they do though. Well, there is also the question if KSP implements a render distance for planets, a distance beyond which it doesn't bother to display objects even if they would be visible.

I don't think so. AFAIK the jet engines now have a fixed "loose that % of thrust at this height" curve. LOL. Sorry, but that typo brought the image of small jet-fighters that shoot down big SSTOs to my mind.

I wasn't doing the calculation for any general case, I was doing the calculation for Duna being viewed from Kerbin. Of course you cannot generally ignore the relative inclination of the orbits, but for Duna and Kerbin you can. I though that was clear from what I wrote. I even quoted all the relevant values in my message. (Well, except perhaps the fact that Kerbins's orbit is the definition of the equatorial ecliptic(*) plane and thus Kerbin's orbital inclination is zero.) In a very similar fashion of course "sin(x)" isn't in general equal to "x". But in astronomy the angles are usually so small that the error you introduce by just assuming "sin(x) = x" is insignificant compared to the measurement error. Edit: (*) Relevant here is the ecliptic plane, not the equatorial plane. For Kerbin both are identical, but for e.g. Earth they aren't.

Which is why they don't like actual numbers. Once you start writing them down, there is not enough space on the blackboard for all the digits of Pi.

Well, show me a "true"(TM) mathematician who cares about actual numbers. Edit: And it's not just engineers, everyone who actually measures something only cares about the first few significant digits. (Well, nearly everyone, some physicists make a sport out of measuring some values extra precise.) Please think about that question, and why there is no answer to it. (At least not without additional information.)

Which is why I said to not count on them. Just because they are easy when you know how to do them doesn't mean that it will be easy the first time you try. Well, the main advice was is what @Brikoleur wrote: set up the maneuver node(s) and fiddle around with them until the resulting orbit - after the encounter with Tylo or whatever you are using - is to your liking. By doing a combination of radial-in/-out and pro-/retro-grade you can adjust the time when you cross the orbit of another body, and thus if and at which angle you encounter this body. (You also need to get the plane right, but that shouldn't be news to you.) What makes gravity assists when capturing at Jool easy is that you can combine that burn with your (probable needed) plane-change burn during your transfer to Jool. Doing that burn far away from Jool (and thus its moons) gives you a large amount of leverage so that even small burns have a large effect on when you encounter your target. My suggestion is: next time you set up a transfer to anywhere: play around with the transfer, pass "in front of" or "behind" the target at different distances, and observe the resulting orbit after the encounter. Not really to actually do that, but to see what kind of encounter will have what effect on your resulting orbit. One exercise is to set up one burn in LKO that will take you to the Mun, fly by the Mun, and get you back into Kerbin's atmosphere for an aerobrake, with only that single burn in LKO. (That's how NASA did it for the Apollo missions, and why Apollo 13 could get back to Earth after their main craft failed.) Edit: Once you have some understanding how an encounter affects the orbit, try to set up the mid-transfer burn on the way to Jool to a) encounter Tylo and b) get captured at Jool by that encounter.

Which is why I wrote: "theoretical closest approach"! Obviously (well, to me at least, and I'd hope to any astronomer) the actual angular size will change over time with the distance of Duna to Kerbin. But having shown the calculations here, it shouldn't be too hard to compute it for other situations. You did see that I commented about that? How many significant digits will be unaffected by ignoring the inclination of Duna's orbit? Yes, I gave way to many "significant" digits in what I wrote. And, yes, in a test I would probably have deducted points from a student who wrote down that many digits. But copy&paste is easy and actually switching on your brain is hard. In general the rule-of-thumb is that anything beyond the 3rd or 4th significant digit can be safely ignored.

Hmm... So I wasn't as clear as I thought to be. So: with 8295 m/s in LKO you can get to Bop, land there, and get back to aerobrake and land on Kerbin. (Well, yes, it is always possible to screw things up, but I don't expect you to.) You should not need to, but as @Brikoleur said: they are easy to do when entering the Joolian system, can give large benefits, and are good training.(*) One note about Bop and Val: they are not in the same plane around Jool. So if you plan to land at both of them then you need to plan on having to use most of the 2440 m/s for a plane change when going from one to the other. (You should also try to avoid having to use all that, but planning for the worst case is always prudent. Ah, yes, the good old "Here goes nothing!" feeling when you launch your first interplanetary mission and don't know yet if it will end in triumph or disaster. I guess you'll do just fine, and probably sooner than later will miss that feeling when you "know" that you can master everything that Isaac Newton throws at you. (Well, except Eve. Eve is a challenge on its own.) P.S. (*) And not just in the army version of "good training" but also in the regular version.

Because you did something wrong. (Well, there is a chance that your copy of KSP is broken.) Without knowing where your vessels are it is pretty hard to give you an useful answer. Could you post a screenshot of the map view with the full commnet display on and the two vessels visible? Or - even better - the save-file with the vessels? P.S. This also fits better into the Gameplay Questions and Tutorials subforum. So I'll suggest that to the moderators.

There are contract for "go out and use a scanner arm" and "go and do some deployed science". I have not seen any contract that requires the use of the robotic parts.

Hmmm... That looks at the same time very different and very similar to my combination of the Duna Glider docked to the Interplanetary Transfer Shuttle, which are currently in transit to Duna: There is actually some backstory to this: originally I had planned to send the Duna Glider with its crew but otherwise alone from Kerbin to Duna. But then it occurred to me that while the Duna Glider has enough space that the crew should manage to keep the cabin fever in check, after several month in micro-gravity the crew would need some time of convalescence before it could start work on Duna. Then I planned to send the Duna Glider without crew to Duna and have the crew follow in the IPT Shuttle. But shortly after undocking the glider from my gateway station in Kerbin orbit I remembered that while the glider has a probe core, it was designed to operate with crew so It doesn't have an antenna that allows communication over interplanetary distances. So Harbert Kerman needed to step outside the station and run (well, jetpack) after his ride. The next problem was that coupled together the combined craft is not very balanced, so that acceleration would be a serious pain. What I did was first send the glider on its way to Duna, and the follow with the IPT Shuttle and rendezvous in deep space. Well, now the crew can enjoy the relative comfort - and especially the centrifugal gravity - of the IPT Shuttle while they wait for their arrival on Duna. On another note, yesterday I finalized a contract to safely land an asteroid on Kerbin: The KSC administration was not amused, in particular the head of the legal department complained about having to walk to the runway in order to catch his "adequate mode of transportation" - as he likes to call them. But this time it wasn't Jeb who played a practical joke on the administration, but Gene from mission control directed the asteroid to it target. (He claims he only aimed for "close to the KSC" and that this kind of reentry cannot be aimed with pinpoint precision anyhow. But there is a suspiciously high consumption of monopropellant during the last minute or so of the descent.) Unfortunately there were an uncomfortable number of temporary reality failures at the KSC (also known as program crashes), so Jeb was asked to park his flying rock outside of reality creation range from the runway and the launchpad to ease the load on the reality generation engine. And to avoid cumulative vessel distortion of the robotic parts from repeated reality creation and disassembly cycles. So the flying rock is now parked 3 km to the south of the KSC. Jeb didn't complain too much, he needs to use a rover anyhow to get to the height where he can reach the control seat of his contraption. But I miss the additional ornament on the KSC.

The short answer is: 8295 m/s in LKO will get you into orbit of any other planet or moon. Depending on the target and your flying you might not have enough fuel to also get back. The slightly longer answer is: have a look at: Community Delta-V Map There it says that you need: to leave Kerbin's SOI: 930 m/s to get to Jool's SOI: 980 m/s plus a possible 270 m/s for a mid-course plane change to capture in Jool's SOI: 160 m/s (If you don't aerobrake or use a Tylo assist) to get to Bop: 220 m/s plus a possible 2440 m/s for a plane change to capture into a low Bop orbit: 890 m/s (to land on Bop from said orbit: 230 m/s) So in total a minimum of 3180 m/s up to a maximum of 5890 m/s. In my experience you cannot fully avoid the penalty for plane changes, the 2440 m/s inside the Joolian system seem a tad excessive though. If you capture on Jool in the right way you should be able to avoid most of it. So with decent flying and aerobraking on the return to Kerbin you should be able to land on Bop and get back on 8295 m/s.

Well, according to the KSP Wiki Duna's relevant parameters are: Periapsis: 19 669 121 365 m Orbital inclination: 0.06 ° Equatorial radius: 320 000 m For Kerbin we have: Apoapsis: 13 599 840 256 m The low orbital inclination means that we can ignore it. (Feel free to do the math yourself.)(*) So we can do for a theoretical closest approach: Minimal distance Kerbin-Duna: 19669121365 m - 13599840256 m = 6069281109 m Diameter of Duna: 2 * 320000 m = 640000 m Angular size in radians(**): 640000 m / 6069281109 m = 0.00010544906200685917 Angular size seconds of arc: 0.00010544906200685917 / pi * 180 / 60 /60 = 21.75043030347386 I don't know if Duna ever comes this close to Kerbin, but if it does: there it is. P.S. (*) Not to self: typing while in transit over Eve's Explodium Sea is O.K. Typing while on approach for landing is discouraged. (Don't worry, no Kerbals were harmed while typing this message, but it was a close call. ) (**) sin(x) = x for all relevant x.

I found no video with that title. Which I did find was that: Kerbal Space Program - Your Physics Have No Power Over Me! But already the first sentence in the description essentially says it all: "This video has been outdated since the release of 1.0 - it's still fun...." Scott Manley did lots of videos with older versions of KSP in which the physics was implemented differently. E.g. there was no atmospheric heating (sometimes also called reentry heating) implemented, or - what Scott Manley exploited in the video above - some parts didn't have any mass or drag so you could add as many of them without your craft getting heavier. These have been changed in the recent versions of KSP to be somewhat more realistic.

(O.K. That's going somewhat away from the original question, but so what.) For me the issue is mostly with crewed craft, the Mk1 crew cabin is not very heat tolerant, but light and cheap. But don't probe cores follow the SAS settings when they loose commnet connection? I.e. won't a probe without control keep orienting the craft retrograde if it was set to retrograde before blackout?

@ShadowZone manages 18.9km here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFgd1ZOnq1k (ca. 58 min into it). I think I managed to get somewhat higher with my design (mostly because I had blade pitch on an axis group and could fine-tune it) but I don't think I managed to exceed 20km. Also IIRC the new helicopter blades don't really perform better than the elevon based blades.

As @VoidSquid already said: you had your navball in Orbit mode. (Click in the green writing where it says "Orbit" in your picture of the navball to cycle through the settings.) One issue that you didn't ask about, but is important, is that the air on planets with atmosphere moves with the surface (there is no wind in KSP). So if you have a small heat-shield that's just enough to cover your craft and re-enter with your craft oriented retrograde according to the orbit vector, then you will hit the atmosphere at an angle and some of the onrushing air will hit your craft and not the heat-shield. Which can lead to a fiery surprise. Many brave Kerbals died before I learned the art of switching to surface mode before re-entering Kerbins atmosphere. (*) P.S. (*) Well, most of them were tourists, so the loss wasn't too bad.

5.7%? That's swimming in ore! I had to make do with 1.29%. (Yes, and I had to fly uphill! Both ways! Against the wind. ) But, well, see my other comment.

Parachutes have two opening stages: semi-deployed and fully-deployed. The "min pressure" defines how soon (at which atmospheric pressure) the semi-deployed stage opens, the "altitude" setting defines when (how high above the ground) the fully-deployed stage opens. You have these huge heat-shields on the bottom of your rocket. They have large amounts of drag when moving through an atmosphere. The aerodynamic forces will try to flip your rocket around. It's like having a deployed parachute at the front of your rocket, that will also try to flip. For Duna the rule of thumb is to just forget about heat-shields. The atmosphere of Duna is so thin and the orbital speeds are so small that heating is no big danger. (Well, as long as you don't overdo it.) If you do need to have a heat-shield on a larger rocket (e.g. when landing on Eve), then make sure that you you have enough drag on the top of your rocket to counteract the drag at the bottom of your rocket. (This is why many Eve landers have two of the inflatable heat-shields on at the bottom to actually shield against the heat and one at the top to counteract the drag from the bottom heat-shield. You see the "Insert image from URL" at the bottom right of the editor in the forum? Click in that and then enter the address of the image file, including the "*.png" or "*.jpg". The usual imgur link to a single image does not include the ending, so you need to add that by hand. To include the image below I entered "https://i.imgur.com/CIlSFGr.png" as the image link. (And I used <CRTL> - <right-click> on the image to "Edit Image" and make it display smaller.)

Hmmm... Why does that sound familiar? In my career I decided that low ore is not the same as no ore, and if I have to wait 100 days or so for the next transfer window anyhow, then it doesn't matter if refueling is finished in 5 or in 30 days. (The first time I actually used the narrow-band ore scanner, to distinguish the no ore from the nearly no ore regions..)