king of nowhere

i'm planning a grand tour with kerbalism, with the caveat that i must use atmospheric CO2 to make fuel. kerbalism replaces regular isru with a more complex chain, and all those tiny body conveniently placed to be mined are just too convenient for my purposes. CO2 seem absent from most atmospheres, though. in particular i got no CO2 - or 0.04%, which is below the treshold that can be mined - on kerbmun, tannor, oshan, egad, totooa, gannovar. even the other planets have a tiny tiny amount of CO2, with the sole exception of derbin, which is not suitable for refueling anyway. is it intentional? CO2 is very abundant everywhere

when i did something similar in one of my grand tours, i rejoined the ships at duna; it's a convenient staging ground.

you did not mention friction, so i assume it's the problem. the front wheel is making drag on the runway. you can right-click on the wheel and manually lower its friction parameter

engine reliability didn't depend on time in the version i'm still using, so they changed it, and maybe there are bugs. but engine reliability does depend on ignitions and burn time. so if your probe has a low thrust engine requiring very long burns, you may have exceeded its burn time. or maybe you turned it on and off too many times, exceeding the ignitions. i cannot know with the limited information you provide. in any case, my standard policy in kerbalism is redundancy for everything. never use a single engine if you can use two. alt-f12 an engineer in rendez-vous with the probe. you can also adjust the probabilities of remotely fixing the issue from the difficulty level options

Part 6: The ups and downs of Polta From equator to north pole, Polta is a swirling patchwork of gentle hills and plains.

Not ideal, inclination complicates things in ways that are difficult to explain... still, ending up in an inclined orbit around kerbin is not a big deal. do that, reach apoapsis, and burn retrograde to lower periapsis and get captured by the atmosphere. Now that I see if, you only have 900 m/s. that's very short. Returning to kerbin with so little fuel from an inclined orbit would not be trivial for me either. You have to orbit mun in an inclined orbit, then manage to get ejected equatorially. There is a point in your orbit, if you make your burn there, you will start leaving mun and you will exit the SoI just when your speed is horizontal. You can find it by trial and error. Then, once you find that, you also need to eject when mun is in the right point in its orbit that you will exit retrograde. Again, you do it by trial and error by moving your maneuver to future orbits. Basically 1) orbit mun; this should consume 600 m/s, leaving you with 300 m/s. 2) make a 300 m/s maneuver at a random point in orbit. Check how that orbit would do once in kerbin's SoI. 3) move it around until you get a low kerbin inclination 4) now start clicking on "next orbit" until your maneuver also results in a low periapsis - low enough for aerocapture. this is the clearest I can explain. I hope it is enough

wrong. you can very well escape kerbin and get ejected into an orbit that crosses kerbin again; it all depends on the direction you get ejected. oh, you won't get captured; you'll make a flyby of kerbin and be ejected again - unless you crash on the planet. still, the change of influence can be jarring. [snip] Anyway, probably solution. I surmise that you are trying to escape kerbin's SoI first, get into solar orbit, then get an intercept for Eve. And it's failing because you keep getting captured back by Kerbin. Putting aside that this is a terrible way to make interplanetary transfer, as you lose all Oberth effect AND all the excess speed you had exiting kerbin, you can eject from kebin in a trajectory that will get you captured again. Specifically, you are ejecting either forward and upward, or backwards and downwards. In the first case, now that your orbit is higher than kerbin you slow down compared to it, and kerbin catches up to you. In the second, now that your orbit is lower than kerbin, you will catch kerbin. This kind of stuff happens in real life too, look for quasi-satellite or horseshoe orbit. In any case, if you don't want to fall back towards kerbin, you have to either learn proper interplanetary transfers, or eject with a different angle, or eject with some more speed - because really, this is only happening because your speed relative to kerbin is very low, as you're ejecting with the least possible speed to save fuel. I hope I correctly guessed what you were doing.

how does it not help? you want to go to eve, you tell the tool to go from kerbin to eve, and it will return a graph with the best times - in blue

This is my A'Twin mothership. I used it to do a rss grand tour, which lasted 360 years - equivalent to more than 1000 kerbal years. Every piece has at least a 6-fold redundancy. The ship mines new fuel over many years with 12 large chemical plants over 4 years if there is enough ore in the ground; losing chemical plants would proportionally increase refueling time. There are 36 ore drills, 12 water drills, 12 uranium drills to feed 12 large nuclear reactors, in all cases refueling speed would be acceptable with half of them broken and sucks-but-the-mission-can-go-on with three quarters of them broken. The ship can split in two, leaving the heavy mining equipment behind to gain deltaV and reach some expensive targets; both subships have at least 6 life support systems and 6 copies of all the chemical plants needed for food production - 1 being enough. The exploration module has 6 small nuclear reactors for power, plus two more in storage containers. 90 reaction wheels split between the two ships. Propulsion is by 24 large nuclear engines (nervs scaled to 3x the size and power), they are mounted on docking ports so that I can detach one and attach a spare - I got 3 - grabbing it with a claw and moving it with a purpose-built probe. I also use six 3x wolfhound engines and six cougar engines for higher thrust during landing and takeoff, with one spare each. Once orbiting the target planet, the mothership releases a taxi that will carry a lander to low orbit, and the taxi also has 6 redundant life support systems, multiple redundant engines (I fixed the issue of asymmetrical thrust by using more reaction wheels) with three spare engines back on the mothership. Aside from that, the taxi carries less redundat parts, because those parts - mostly reaction wheels and antennas - can be swapped by eva construction, and I had containers stuffed full with spare parts. All the landers are tested to function with a broken engine, and they have spare parts on the mothership. Landers do NOT have backup life support, because without it the crew can still breathe for 10 hours, which is more than enough to land and return; putting 6 backups would have added too much mass on the small landers. The taxi and landers are powered by RTGs, so no need for backup there. Finally, the ship also includes 3 escape pods for emergencies, each one with 6 redundant life support and backup engines and reaction wheels in storage containers, and two science/relay probes, each with backups. Fully loaded, it totals a bit over 7000 tons and 1000 parts, which - considering what this ship does - isn't unreasonable. Conceiving and projecting this jewel has been one of my most fulfilling ksp experiences. Flying it was a total lagfest, but ultimately worth it. It broke some 40 parts during the trip, and the worst consequence was some slower refueling.

well, it would give you the exact data for the transfer too, but I myself cannot make sense of all those numbers.

well... yes? it's not like in reality we only have one active mission at a time. frankly, I don't understand the issue. if you are playing career, then I suppose you will want to feel like you are building something, hence multiple active missions at the time. some people just takes centuries to explore the solar system, but I can't watch the clock and pretend everything is fine. otherwise, if you want to play one mission at a time, why play career in the first place? why not sandbox? wait, why you say that you are forced to launch every mission with the current tech level? if you really want to play one mission at a time, can't you just do it? maybe it's because of a relay network? never had one of those myself. anyway, it doesn't matter how you are supposed to play. kerbalism adds a lot of realism changes, you can take those you want and not the rest. you can set part failure to 0%. you can remove radiations. you can do whatever you please. me, I was looking for an extra challenge, and part failure provided exactly that. plus, if I have to include multiple redundancies for every part, it just gave me the perfect excuse for the humongous megaships I had always wanted to build but could never justify.

yes, it does slow the game. it depends, though. if you launch a single small mission, having to run maintenance every once in a while is not a big deal. if you launhch a big mission, it's a lot worse. if you have a career with a dozen missions simultaneously, it's awful. however, having to plan for possible failures - making ships capable of surviving multiple malfunctions - is part of the fun

you could have a mixed lf/ox tank and drop it when it's empty of both. in any case, you don't need that much oxydizer, so it wouldn't save that much weight. in fact, I'm failing to see when it would ever be relevant; if you deorbit on kerbin, you are likely just going to land and recover the plane, and if you deorbit on laythe, you will want oxidizer to orbit again. anyway, there are mods that let you make oxidizer-only tanks. but as I said, they rarely have uses.

it is not on google play. it is not a app or addon or anything. you don't have to download. it's just an internet page. http://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/ click on the link and see for yourself.

it's not that simple. actually, if you made a purely normal maneuver (90° inclination over your direction) to get a 45° plane change you'd need to have as much normal velocity as prograde velocity, so you'd need 724 m/s. but this is not what happens, becase you'll notice that your maneuver also includes a retrograde and radial component. If you use the plane of Mun as a reference, you'll see that your ship has a complex velocity with a component in all the 3 x, y and z axis. and you want to end up with a different velocity, including a 0 net component on the y axis. And your maneuver node uses a different frame of reference too - it uses your current orbit. Now, if somebody held my family at gunpoint and forced me to make the involved calculations, I probably could do it - if I could figure out a way to calculate the exact direction of your ship at the DN to work out the velocity in the three axis. But unless I have that kind of incentive, I'm really not going to try

my condolences. but alexmoon still works. you can open it from your mobile phone, it still works and the information you have to input is simple enough. It's really your best option - dare I say, the only one. If you are on console, you also probably can't install mods. And then there really is nothing better than "just eyeball it". Mind you, eyeballing can be done. I've done my whole rss grand tour eyeballing transfers. When the external planet is one-fourth to one-third of a circumference in front of the inner planet, that's when you can have a transfer window - though by eyeballing you won't get the very best trajectory, but good enough. But I wouldn't recommend eyeballing unless you're already very experienced.

I find it very strange that old saves in the previous career didn't work. Never heard of such an occurrence.

I haven't been playing career in a very, very long time. as i became too skilled to find pleasure in the simple "place satellite on X orbit" contracts, I started to play only individual challenges. that said, back when I was playing career I was trying to have as many missions simultaneously as possible, to not waste time. by the first half of the year, I had missions to everywhere. then I got bored.

Save frequently. I also had to occasionally reload for accidentally hitting the space bar. Dockings seem difficult now, but with some practice they only take a few minutes

http://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/ this is the best tool I know to figure out the transfer windows.

for the sake of completeness, there are two school of thought there. one says, like you did, to remap the controls. the other says to use an action group to deactivate all reaction wheels on the rover - so that they won't try to flip your rover while you're accelerating. Both are viable strategies.

Your laythe intercept is horrible. You are crossing the planet orbit. using the screen as a reference, laythe is moving to the bottom, while your ship will intercept laythe moving towards the top of the screen. of course the intercept speed will be huge. here's a few screenshoots on how you should approach a moon - they are taken for another moon named wal, but it's the same principle see, this is the proper way to inject on a moon. you touch the orbit while the moon is moving in the same exact direction as your ship. This way, the speed of the moon is subtracted from your incoming speed. in this case, it results in 300 m/s intercept speed here you can see an intercept like you are doing, and it's much more expensive, at 450 m/s. It's the same principle for which hitting a car in front of you while going in the same direction will result in less damage than a lateral crash. But you may say, the difference between 300 and 450 m/s is not much. Yes, because Wal moves slowly, and so subtracting or adding its speed to the intercept matters little. Laythe moves at more than 3 km/s, so subtracting its speed means a lot. Salvaging your mission is very easy: you can get a cheap intercept (I'd wager less than 500 m/s) just by moving your intercept properly like I showed in the figure. Use a combination of normal and radial burn, 1 m/s should suffice. Also, you must not use your deltaV at the SoI edge, but at periapsis; you save deltaV by Oberth effect.

i feel bad about doing this, but bump again

you don't have to try and match orbit, in general. you have to get a close encounter (possibly with relatively low velocity), and then you zero velocity when you are close

why couldn't you get closer than 40 km? what is your problem exactly? how do you try to perform rendez-vous? rendez-vous on high orbit is no more difficult than on low orbit. I find it even easier, because it's cheap to maneuver and this gives you additional options. anyway, if you get to 40 km distance and then you burn towards the target, it works. you can get a rendez-vous that way. why do you think it won't work this time?