king of nowhere

they do? i always attach struts to decouplers. the first and only time i did not insert the decouplers, the rocket exploded, so i figured it was necessary... then again, it's far from the only time my rocket exploded, so in retrospect it did not prove anything.... well, great! more savings.

so. all this time i tried to fix the wobble problem by adding more and more decouplers. and i noticed that occasionally it didn't work, but i assumed it to be an occasional failure. now i learn that i've been throwing money down the drain all this time??? i just removed all the extra decouplers and saved 10% of the cost on the rocket i was trying to launch i use struts to reinforce, but i'd rather not rely on them too much because they increase the chances of the various boosters not separating correctly and exploding/hitting the mothership after detachment.

i have made a rocket, and i used the hydraulic detachment manifold to fix the boosters, because i needed more strenght. and since i didn't want them to wobble, i put two of them per booster instead of one. but the boosters still wobble. i investigated the problem, and i discovered that the lower hdf was not connected to the booster. https://imgur.com/a/kNKP9ya here is a detail of the rocket, in green the hdf properly coupled, in red the one who is not. tested on the launchpad, detaching the lower hdf has no effect, while detaching the higher one alone causes the booster to separate. i noticed this now, but i'm sure it happened other times, with other decouplers. no amount of fiddling solved the problem. i could not figure a way to properly attach the hdf and the booster. any advice?

ok, the cheat mode is very useful to test rovers on various planets. just a question, if i touch the other setting, do i risk to mess things up permanently?

how much fuel? a mammoth engine can go single stage to orbit with the largest fuel tank, but not much useful mass left. and then once you are in orbit fuel is the only thing that really matters

to transfer fuel you must select both tanks at the same time. to do so, right click on the tanks while holding the "alt" key. once you've selected both, two new keys should appear, labeled "in" and "out". if they don't appear, it means there is some part that forbids fuel transfer. the claw is a likely one, as you can't transfer fuel through it. if you don't want to lower the difficulty, you can always claw your ship and tow it to kerbin.

heh... so far, the first piece i designed was the sky crane. it brings stuff on mun from orbit, then it goes back in space and attach to something else. then i designed the mun rover, i landed it with the sky crane, and took off again. the rover works quite nicely, even though it was made without proper pieces and aligned manually. it won't go straight and requires course correction. it goes better after i accidentally broke a wheel. then i launched the science lab, to bring down with the sky crane. here i realized one major flaw of the sky crane: not enough reaction wheels. not a good attribute on something that is planned to do a lot of orbital rendez-vous. took me the better part of one hour to dock it to the science lab. at this point it only had 700 m/s of deltaV left, it needed refueling for a safe landing, but not wanting to bother with it since i was going to scrap the sky crane, i decided to land anyway with the help of save scumming. after many tried i landed without exploding, but the lab capsided. it now lies on its side. so i designed a land crane rover to put the lab back in its proper position, and i sent it with the sky crane 2. landing was good. then i realize i installed the hatch in the wrong direction, so that upon detaching the clamp-o-tron remained on the land crane and not on the sky crane; do notice that the land crane had a clamp-o-tron on top to couple to the sky crane, but for some reason the VAB wouldn't let me attach it properly. it only let me attach the sky crane to the bottom of the land crane (it was delivered on mun upside down, good thing i included a mechanism to upturn it if it capsizes). so now the sky crane 2 lost its clamp-o-tron and is unusable (i sent it to the mun space station so i can at least recover the fuel before terminating it), while the land crane had a big hatch on the bottom touching the ground and interfering with its movement. at least with a bit of sport driving i managed to explode the hatch without damaging the rest of the rover. so i brough the land crane to the capsized science lab, only to discover that the rotory motor on the crane arm is not powerful enough to lift the lab. meanwhile i sent the isru complex on mun orbit, where it will now wait the sky crane 3. which i plan to send coupled with the transfer rover, that will carry the fuel from the isru facility to the shuttle. it will also carry some science instruments that i hadn't yet unlocked when i sent the first science rover (which meanwhile went to fulfill two contracts to take measures on the ground, where i had to drive through most of mun at 10 m/s top speed. i must have totaled 20 hours of driving at least, and i'm not back yet. no, i can't abandon it; it has a pilot). this time i decided to test the rover on the ground as extensively as i can. so, i placed the isru complex on the launch pad, and then i launched the rover from the airstrip to go couple them and try a fuel transfer. first try: the coupling hatch on the rover is too high for that on the isru facility. I make a robotic hinge that lets me move the clamp-o-tron up and down to get the right orientation. second try: i discover the small clamp-o-tron on the rover won't couple with the medium clamp-o-tron on the facility. i change the hatch on the rover to a medium one third try: the hatch coupled, but the torque generated broke the piece off from the rover. later this evening i will look for a solution to that. i'm also wondering if i should try to make a new robotic arm to lift the lab (but it will make the rover less stable), or if i should just leave it where it is meanwhile i exploded the rover on the airstrip a half dozen times, because even though it's pretty stable, i'm getting tired of doing the same thing everytime and i'm starting to drive recklessly this is so much like a real space program. there must be a reason they run so many tests before sending anything in space

as i try to make something more complex than a rocket, i realize more and more than i need to test everything. my tried-and-true method of save-scumming does not work anymore if i sent a month-long mission and i find out upon arrival that something does not work properly. not when in that month i did dozens of other missions that i would lose completely upon reloading. however, i don't have any good way to test pieces. i try the rovers on kerbal, but on the lower gravity of the moons they behave differently. i built a robotic crane to work on mun, and of course it won't work in kerbal's gravity, but will it work in mun's gravity? did i put enough heat radiators for an eve mission? how do i know without getting to eve in the first place? i am afraid my robotic arm is placed in an awkward position and will not be able to extend, can i try it without driving through half of kerbal to find a baobab for the test? so, I'd like to know if there was some easier way to test a piece than driving it all the way to its intended destination. some sandbox mode that would give me the option "try this rover on mun with a crater nearby" or "have those two ships in space to see how well they couple together". is it possible?

all those are just stilistic differences, i only realize one issue: why am i mining mun when i could be mining minmus? i'd spend a fraction of the fuel to land and lift off... never thought much about it. i started building a ground station on mun to get science, and when i planned isru coupling it with the science station seemed natural... well, whatever. i can and will have multiple similar facilities around the system

lifting the whole mining complex is out of the question at this point. eventually i want to make a huge starship that can land an isru complex anywhere to refuel itself, but it's a very long term plan. between the drill and convert-o-tron it's 10 tons of dead weight. add in the crew cabin and energy and heat apparatus and ore tanks, it's almost 15 tons of dead weight that you have to lift off and land every time. sure, i could have the flying tanker land directly over the mining complex, if i had that kind of precision. a rover to transfer fuel from the tanker to the mining complex is simply because i'm never going to land exactly on the spot. coupling a rover is not difficult anyway

i had a similar problem where i lock a robotic arm with a claw and upon unlocking the arm does not work properly anymore, pieces that were attached are no more.

not having access to the more advanced pieces, i used 64 basic batteries and i completely covered the thing in solar panels. it's ok if it does not work in the night anyway, at first. I left plenty of space for coupling, so i can always send a new part with more power capacity. in fact, i plan to put them on the transfer rover; when i don't use it i leave it coupled, anyway. the rover will need multiple hatches, because my actual refueling vehicle has an attach point downward - it's the same i use to bring stuff down, after it lands i refuel and bring fuel up, it saves one trip. but in the future i may want to have a dedicated vehicle with less dead weight, and it would be easier to build it with a hatch on the side

not the answer i was hoping for. having to make it all part of the same vehicle makes it much more complicated as far as launching it goes. i have to make a vertical pile to put it on a rocket, but i will want to spread it horizontally once on mun. luckily i already sent a robotic arm that can move pieces around. so, i am planning to send something like in the image. https://imgur.com/a/P0riJWf once on the ground i detach the lower part and connect it horizontally. and i'll need a rover with storage tanks to move the fuel to a ship. would that be functional? shall i maybe send additional drills, or converters? are there enough heat radiators? are the solar panels enough, or too many? will the tanks last a reasonable time before filling up completely? is there some huge mistake i'm not aware of? thanks

ctrl? ctrl???? all this time i did a painstaking manuevering where i had to rotate the whole ship to change direction in the north-south axis, when i could have just used ctrl??? i'm not sure whether to laugh or cry...

one good thing is that once you get close enough (around 2 kilometers) you can take control of the stranded kerbal and use his jetpack to reach your ship. his jetpack is much more manueverable than any ship i've ever flown. in fact, i learned docking with rescue missions, and then went on to ships, which are more difficult. the only added difficulty you have is that your stranded kerbonaut will always have his head pointing northward, and the jetpack cannot push down. so, you can control well with a jetpack on a flat surface, but tridimensionally it is lacking. the best way i found to compensate for this is to send the rescue craft to intersect the astronaut on a north-south direction slowly (less than 1 m/s) and use the jetpack to move east-west to be there when the rescue ship intersects it's orbital plane. the description is confusing, but it's not hard to do. one advice i can give you is to prepare a rescue ship with a lot of ladders. the stranded astronaut will need to grab a ladder, and every capsule has a shot one prebuilt, but you have to touch it exactly. it's much easier if you cover your rescue craft in ladders until it looks like a porcupine, so the astronaut can grab anywhere. also make sure you have extra fuel for manuevering and enough reaction wheels to have easy manuevering. and save the game when you get close to the stranded astronaut. EDIT: oh, and equip a couple of floodlights to illuminate the rescue craft too. it helps in case you reach the astronaut when it's night.

i want to set up a base on Mun to extract and process rocket fuel to keep a refueling station in Mun orbit. which, admittedly, is not such an original plan, i'm sure 90% of you already did something like that, the real NASA il planning to do something like that, but it just means it's a good idea. what i'm interested is how to actually set everything up in the game. perhaps my questions are stupid, but i haven't tried this before and i don't want to spend top only to find out, after landing everything, that my whole operation won't work because i missed a small detail i didn't knew about. So, if I get this right, i will need 4 parts: the drill-o-matic, that will extract "ore" from the ground. A storage tank, to put ore in it. A convert-o-tron, that will process ore into fuel and oxidizer (1). and a fuel tank, to store the fuel (2, 3). the major problem is linking all those parts, because i am not sure i can/want to send all those on the ground in a single piece. i may want to send separate pieces to move them around better, this begs the question: what about resource transfer? attaching stuff on the ground with a clamp-o-tron is complicated and impractical, and i'd lose all the advantage of sending separated parts. but i just noticed that the CLAW does not allow resource transfer. so having a dedicated rover to move stuff from one tank to the other is out of the question, unless i can provide it with clamp-o-trons and line them up perfectly with those on the tanks. (4) and then there is the problem of actually transferring stuff to a ship, because there's no way i'm going to land one precisely enough to attach to something on the ground. so, i'm not sure how i'm going to move my fuel to the ship. unless i put clamp-o-trons aligned perfectly with the transfer rover on the ship too, of course, which would again require very careful alignments. (5) (1) question: is it possible to also recover xenon gas for the ion engine in this way? (2) question: Did I got the mechanic right or am i missing some piece? (3) question: the convert-o-tron and drill-o-matic say in the description that they work better with an engineer. but they have no crew cabin. where do I have to put the engineer to get the bonus? (4) question: how do i handle resource transfers between the various tanks? (5) question: how do i transfer the fuel from the tanks to a landed ship?

ok, fixed. thanks

sometimes i had a bug where a ship would not obey commands. it fixed by saving and reloading.

as a rule of thumb, whenever you get a bunch of new lines it means your probe will be encountering some other celestial body that will change its original trajectory. in your case, it means you are encountering mun. you found your intercept. and if you put your focus on mun, you will see the trajectory you will make in its sphere of influence.

i read on this forum that with the rovemax xl3 wheels you can make 100 m/s. i have to scan a baobab tree, and i thought great, i will spend less time looking for one. i made a rover with 4 of these massive wheels, and very little else, just to keep it light and go faster. https://imgur.com/a/IaW6wn8 and still it won't go above 15 m/s. what about the promised 100 m/s? why it's not going anywhere near that speed?

had to recover two kerbonauts stranded in Mun orbit. no worry, i made a space station in mun orbit equipped for just such an event. it has automated crafts to refuel other rockets and a specialized one to recover lost kerbonauts. it is positively covered in ladders to make it easier to grab, and it has floodlights to be easier to spot in the darkness. it has extreme manueverability. it is a wonderful ship built exactly for this kind of need. too bad i didn't think to add a crew module. i recovered a kerbonaut, then left it grabbing the ladder while going to recover the second. i am now manuevering to reach back to the station. all with the two poor kerbonauts grabbing the ladder all this time. it wouldn't even be bad, except that i cannot speed up time or change ship or save game while i have those guys there. i have to deattach them, save the game, then grab the ladder again. i dream of the day i will stop forgetting such minor components like crew cabins or parachutes when designing a ship

I got a mission to recover a piece of junk from orbit. I decided on a minimalistic approach: unmanned craft, no science, just the bare minimum. I take a robotic core, a cargo bay to store the piece safely, a robotic arm to grab the piece, a reaction wheel for better manuevering, some batteries and solar panels for energy. then i start adding engines. yet i have the lingering feeling i forgot something, but can't quite figure it out... i launch on an intercept trajectory. for the first time i try to time my launch to the passing of the piece, instead of just launching and reaching the piece later. good success, i get on an intercept course early on. I close in, so far so good. the robotic arm has a malfunction in that the game figured out the wrong attach point, so i am unable to fully twist and extend it, but I'm still able to grab the piece and store it safely in the cargo bay... yay! time to go back to ground. Only then do i realize what I forgot: the parachute I still managed to land with aerobraking and the remaining fuel. good thing the craft design was so light, it was able to brake in the atmosphere enough, and the rocket was powerful enough to slow it down for the last leg even if it was a vacuum-optimized one. I pondered a bit on some great missions that had some big issues: the galileo mission, the rosetta landing on a comet. ultimately, an oft-forgotten part of rocket science is that you launch your big rocket, then you realize you forgot some essential bit, and the rest of the mission is figuring out how to salvage what you can with what you have how did you make the rotating ring? I can't figure out how to do that with the regular pieces. is that part of a mod?

well, making a gravity assist is not difficult if you don't need to line things up too accurately. If you want to try, you can use a simple one on mun to escape kerbin gravity. Normally you need about 1000 m/s of delta-v from a low orbit, but you can instead made a burn for about 850 m/s, and direct it to pass close to Mun, and behind it. this will send you on a trajectory away from kerbin. If you do it when Mun is pointing towards the sun, you will lose orbital speed compared to the sun, and will save fuel for visiting the inner planets. If you do it when Mun is away from the sun, you will gain speed, and you can visit the outer planets. I could lower my periapsis enough to intersect Eve with this simple manuever. now, the actually difficult part is lining things up. If I had wanted to reach my periapsis on Eve's orbit right at the time when Eve is passing there, that would have been much harder (i'll just park on a higher orbit and wait eve to reach me). And if you want to come out from your gravity assist lined up with a planet so you can get a gravity assist from it and reach exactly another planet... well, that's why we have rocket scientists. even with some course correction manuevers, it still requires the planets to be roughly in certain positions. but performing a basic gravity assist is very simple indeed. try it for a "i am a rocket scientist" feel

i want to assemble a mun base, and i realized my pieces won't assemble themselves. i need some machine that can move around a bit, grab them from where they landed, and position them in the correct place. also, overturn one that got capsized in the landing. basically, i need a crane. i tried to build one with actuators, and it sort of works. it certainly can move around its arm and grab stuff. but it has two problems. one is, the arm is extremely wobbly. i tested it on kerbin, and it shakes a lot under its own weight. on mun it will be in lower gravity, but it will also be expected to have stuff attached second, biggest problem is stability. of course i have this high structure that can extend out of the rover, it's going to make it unstable. of course i could fix it by adding weight on the base and adding a counterweight, but you can understand, i am extremely reluctant to add weight on something i want to launch in space. I considered using an empty fuel tank and filling it when i land on mun, too bad the whole ISRU complex that would produce the fuel needs the crane to be assembled. is there a solution? do i have to send a crane with counterweights, or accept that the parts of my base will just stay wherever they are dropped, or can i do something smart about it?

you can use a single probe if you use gravity slingshots well, like the voyager missions. the voyager missions took advantage of a special alignment of the planets that only happens every century or so. since you can speed up time in the game, you can afford to wait the right moment, and if you want to do something cool, it would be a nice thing to do (in fact, i'm surprised this isn't an achievement on its own). but if you just care for visiting planets, go for different rockets.