AHHans

Well, I also used to be like this. But Breaking Ground powered propeller aircraft are extremely physics-warp unfriendly. So flying longer trips can take really long times. I mean really long. I actually had a shower while one of my planes was traversing Eve.

Check yo' staging! Happened just yesterday. I don't recall what exactly I was trying to launch, but after <T> <Z> <SPACE> the engines fired but the rocket didn't leave the launchpad. Well, O.K., I probably forgot the launch-clamps. So I hit <SPACE> again (probably not the smartest move), and the SRBs took to the skies. Beautifully straight. But the rocket still remained affixed on the launchpad. Straight out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon . Well, nothing exploded, so it wasn't anything that a quick trip to the VAB couldn't fix. But I laughed as hard as when I saw Jeb's face after his little test-flight mishap.

Hi. Welcome to the forums. I don't really understand what you are talking about. I don't recall seeing "Target scanning" being mentioned anywhere in the game. Can you mention a concrete example where this showed up? (Maybe with a screenshot?)

It should not! A probe core should add SAS capability to a non-pilot Kerbal in command. (As much SAS as the probe core can provide of course.) See also in the KSPedia in the game under "Communications Network" -> "Commnet" -> "Control Links" P.S. I assume with "mk3 pod" you mean the: Mk1-3 Command Pod

Well, about jet VTOLs the only useful comment that I have is that the gimbal range of the J-404 "Panther" makes it a good choice. Hmmmm... *sound of gears grinding* hmmmm... O.K. you want to have kind of two input for the thrust setting of each engine: a general (collective) that defines how hard the engine lifts your craft and some modification on that modifies that thrust a bit to pitch / roll your craft (in a helicopter this would be the cyclic). Unfortunately that cannot (yet?) be done directly with the KAL-1000. What may work is to set the thrust limiter with a KAL-1000 to modify the thrust limit of the jet engines. Set it to change the limit from e.g. 80% to 100% for the engines on one side and from 100% to 80% for the engines on the other side. Then the play position in the center will have both at 90%, i.e. same thrust on both sides, but changing the play position will give more thrust on one side or the other. If that works that should give you pitch or roll control. Hmmm... and for both you could double up the engines. I.e. not have four engines, but have four pairs of engines. And then use one of each pair for pitch and the other for roll. Have you tried building a quadcopter from what I wrote earlier? If you think it will help you then I could also put my basic quadcopter onto KerbalX.

LOL Yes. That's Eve for you.

Jebediah got a bit peeved that Bill and Bob wanted Valentina as their pilot for the big Eve-Return mission. So he vanished in his workshop. Some hours later he asked KSC control for takeoff clearance for "a quick test flight". A few minutes later it looked like this: Jeb claims that the test was a full success, and that his ... plane I guess ... flew perfectly fine. He just forgot to set up the control settings before the start, and forgot to watch the battery charge while flying manually. He now asked for a standard mark 1 orbital lifter and permission for a launch tomorrow morning. When asked what this is all about he just said: "You'll see tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, depending on low long it takes me in orbit."

What kind of "motors" are you talking about? Jet / rocket engines or (electric) rotors with (helicopter) blades attached to it? What works quite well for me is a quadcopter with four electric rotors and helicopter blades. In order to have a separate collective control I attached the blades not directly to the rotors but with a small rotation servo in between to set the collective pitch of the blades. Cyclic control is done by using the blades as "regular" control surfaces. Because the blades are always clearly on one side of the center-of-mass of the craft, KSP doesn't get confused whether an individual blade should generate more or less lift as a result of a control input. Then I set up the target angle on the servos to be "incremental control" on one axis (I chose the translate forward/back), and set the rotor torque to be controlled by the throttle. P.S.: If you plan to use robotic parts for control, the please no that SAS doesn't use the yaw/ pitch / roll axis groups:

Well, with an engineer (or scientist) Kerbal in a command pod, you should still have full throttle control, even if you don't have commnet connection to the KSC. If you also have a probe core then the only control you are really missing is the ability to manipulate maneuver nodes. What you describe (z and x works, but l-shift and l-crtl doesn't) is standard for a vessel with a probe core but no commnet connection or Kerbal in command. Are you sure that the Kerbal is in the command pod and not in a passenger pod?

I think that the biggest danger of autostruts is when they shift around. Which is also why autostruts to root or heaviest are dangerous: Accelerating drains fuel from the - up to now - heaviest fuel tank until another part becomes the heaviest part -> autostruts to heaviest flip. You stage away or undock from the root part of the combined craft -> autostruts to root flip. You dock to another craft -> the combined craft has only one root -> autostruts to root on one of the docked vessels flip.

I think the point that @fulgur means - but isn't explicitly pointing out - is that the RAPIERs (in open cycle mode) gain a lot of thrust at speeds above 400 m/s. So once you got to 400 m/s then accelerating even more becomes comparatively easy. But accelerating through the sound barrier from 300 m/s to 400 m/s can be a bit of a hurdle, so pitching down can (maybe even trading height for speed) can be needed.

My $0.05: I guess the biggest hurdle is to figure out when there is a transfer window from one planet to another. In addition to the URL that @Signo posted, there is: https://ksp.olex.biz/. Or you use a mod in the game. I personally use Kerbal Alarm Clock (use the "Calc by Model" option, not the "Calc by Formula"), but there are others around. Duna is the planet with the lowest orbital inclination (except Kerbin, which you can consider the reference), so going to the other planets usually requires a mid-course plane change maneuver. (But I believe you'll figure that out. If not then you know where to ask. ) It is also possible to "force" an encounter when not starting from a transfer window. (By fiddling around with the maneuver node(s).) But those require more dV, sometimes ridiculous large amounts of dV. The GUI got more busy (and IMHO informative), but nothing that's important here changed.

I guess xkcd kind of made the same joke: Types of Approximation

Making subassemblies and then connecting them together again tends to mess up the staging order. Did you check that this was correct? What does the dV calculation of the stock game say? Do you have a working control point on the lander or the rover? I.e. either a pilot Kerbal in a command pod, or a working probe core with commnet connection to the KSC. What does the control icon in the top left of the screen just right of the time controls say? Can you be more specific about what your problem is? To be able to dock, you need a docking port of the same size on both craft.

In order to change (create, edit, or delete) maneuver nodes you need: a pilot Kerbal in a command pod on board a (non-pilot) Kerbal in a command pod on board a commnet connection to the KSC an active (powered and not hibernating) probe core and a commnet connection to the KSC (In career mode you also need to have maneuver nodes unlocked by upgrading Mission Control and the Tracking Station.) By disabling the Comm Network in the difficulty settings you remove the requirement for a commnet connection to the KSC. What does the control icon in the top left of the screen just right of the time controls say? (And what is a "CJ-H3" supposed to be?)

HPC Engineer with a strong penchant for physics Well, my question was a joke, but I guess it was pretty much an inside joke. My point is that astronomical measurements are notoriously imprecise compared to other fields of physics. Which is understandable, you cannot easily e.g. prepare a number of main sequence stars in a lab to really measure their properties. And while an error (aka measurement uncertainty!) of several orders of magnitude is unlikely, errors of a factor of "a few" can happen.

Ah, thanks. (So the search function of the forums is not too user friendly, the one important option is at the bottom of the list.)

Is "Superfluous Nodes" another mod? Hinges already have attachment nodes, so that side should be fine. (I would try attaching a Cubic Octagonal Strut to the wing part and move it so that one of its nodes faces the free node of the hinge. But for the time being I'm quite happy with autostruts and locking.)

@Geonovast: As it says in the ReCoupler description: That makes it a bit tricky to use with wings that don't have stack attach nodes. (Not impossible though.)

Sorry, but in this regard Eve is much easier than Duna: in Eve's thick atmosphere the propellers have good "bite" and generate a lot of thrust, also the stall speed is really low making landings easy. On Duna I struggle to generate decent amounts of thrust with propellers, and the stall speed is so high that nearly all my attempts to land an aircraft have resulted in crashes. O.K. you don't break speed records on Eve, but I don't recall if I was much faster on Duna. In short: flying a solar-powered propeller plane on Eve is fun! On Duna not so.

If I understand you correctly, then you want to use several hinges in parallel to share the (mechanical) load. You can do that by first placing the required (or wanted) number of hinges, then connecting the moving part to one of the hinges, and finally connecting the the free end of the other hinges to the moving part with regular struts. You'll have to make sure that all the hinges move synchronously, I'd suggest using a KAL-1000 to do that. if you don't need to deal with large mechanical forces while the part is moving but have large forces while the moving joint is not supposed to move(*), then you can also engage the servo lock on the hinge (or whichever robotic part you use) and set appropriate autostruts on the non-robotic parts behind that. A locked robotic part allows autostruts to traverse the part, making for fairly sturdy and rigid structures. (*) E.g. you have folding wings, that you only (un)fold in microgravity in orbit or in low-load flying situations. I've made several folding-wing aircraft that can fold their wings to fit into a fairing and behind a heat-shield, but can unfold them and then do e.g. aerobatics in Eve's atmosphere. I believe that KSP is programmed in a way that allowing parts to have multiple parent parts would require a fairly major re-programming of the underlying code. So I don't expect that to happen to KSP 1.

Do you have power or a Kerbal on board?

Looksee here:

OMG. The number of times I right-clicked in a picture here in the forums because I wanted to rotate the view...

What? Are you an astronomer?