king of nowhere

at some difficulty levels, you can't transfer fuel through a claw. besides that, I had fuel transfer bugs, but redocking in a different spot actually helped. also, sometimes fuel transfer is very slow, so maybe it takes several seconds to see the fuel level change. so, if it's none of the usual culprits (fuel transfer through claw not allowed, buildings to updrade, lack of control) I have no idea.

I thought I had seen some 5 m reaction wheels in this mod, but I can't find them. is my memory tricking me?

It has a similarity, but it's not quite right, because orbital phasing entails changing your orbit, then going back to the original orbit. It's actually a mix between orbital phasing and hohmann transfer. I'm surprised it doesn't have a name, ever since I started using rss - which has a lot more inclination than the stock system - I use this more than regular hohmann. resonant orbit is not quite it; it's when you take a gravity assist from a planet and time your ejection orbit to return to the planet in a few more years

wait, I got it: depending on the difficulty setting, a probe in low orbit may have no contact, because the tracking stations are few and far between, and you can have all of them be below the horizon. that could explain sudden loss of signal

Lately I'm finding myself doing a lot of transfers according to a certain pattern. First, I make an ejection burn from the parent body like on a Hohmann transfer, as shown in the image However, this is NOT a Hohmann transfer, because I do not meet the target body at periapsis (or at apoapsis if I'm moving away from the central body, let's keep with the example from the pictures for simplicity) I do not meet the target body immediately, because the transfer was not syncronized. Instead, when I am at periapsis, I make a retrograde burn (or prograde, but it would make for a more expensive intercept). This changes my orbital time enough that I will meet the target body at periapsis at a later orbit. It can be the next orbit, or a few orbits in the future; generally you can pay less if you're willing to wait more. The picture shows it. Yellow manuever, at periapsis, is the change to get the right orbital time. In this case it's a big burn because the target is a small moon with negligible oberth effect, so I lose nothing by burning in open space - and I avoid cosine losses. but it's normally a small adjustment manuever. purple is not a manuever (0 m/s), but it's there to get the game to see the intercept several orbits into the future. And finally red is the capture burn. I've done this extensively to reach all the moons of saturn. I've done it in going from ceres to vesta I've done a slight modification in going to mercury. I've done it when leaving Venus. This manuever is as expensive as a regular Hohmann transfer - give or take a small excess for the burn you make in interplanetary space, which is not as effective as burning near a planet. It takes longer, possibly multiple orbits. It has the advantage, though, that you can pick your planar nodes. When you have to make a transfer with high inclination, you can avoid a plane change if you make a hohmann transfer on the planar node; in that case you get to pay the plane change with the eject or capture burn, saving a lot of fuel by both oberth effect and combining two burn. But this hohmann transfer requires the right placement from you and the target body; you can't always count on the planets aligning for a hohmann transfer right when you're passing through the planar node. So you make this manuever instead, starting the hohmann manuever on the node, and then you syncronize to meet your target later. You can also make this manuever when you are in an elliptic orbit, and you must burn at periapsis to leave cheaply, and you can't pick your direction. In this case, again, you leave when your ellipse is best aligned to save fuel, and you syncronize to meet your target later. Doing grand tours, I often find myself in an elliptic orbit, it's a lot cheaper to park the mothership like that than it is to circularize and then raise apoapsis again. So I've done this manuever a lot, possibly more than any other. Yet I don't know a name for it, I don't even know if it has a name. I checked if I could find names of orbital transfers, but I only find the bi-elliptic transfer, which is something entirely different. So, do anyone know if this manuever has an official name?

I wanted to share a couple of pics taken near the south pole of enceladus, i find them absolutely breathtaking

A couple of pics taken near the south pole of enceladus, the moon of saturn

Part 8: The lord of the rings: a stroll inside Chernobyl's reactor The extreme radiation make the inner Saturn moons unapproachable by a crewed ship. Fat Man and Clamp perform unmanned landings. This time Saturn is properly spectacular 8.1) Ranting on realism and radiations (recognizing routing with a rooster results in reverse) 8.2 Rhea and Dione: easy starts 8.3) Mimas: as bad as Mercury 8.4) Unremarkable Tethys, beautiful Encelado 8.5) Isru, return and other burocracy 8.6) Bonus: how do the rings of Saturn look from up close Bugs compilation updated Broken parts recap

I'm not aware of it. As for myself, I just learned to avoid touching other parts with the mouse cursor

Well, I also discovered a bug in this. I discovered that in a subsequent mission Clamp had contact with Trypophobia, but not with Cylinder. Which made no sense, because Clylinder was a lot closer than Trypophobia. So I changed vessel to Cylinder, then changed back to Clamp, and TA-DAAAH! I got control. Just another bug. #28 on the list I'm compiling.

It usually takes around a month to perfect the hardware to run my large missions, possibly more. They are not a single system, though, but a collection of a mothership to carry everything around and a bunch of specialized smaller ships to perform specialized roles. For a single system... it probably took a couple weeks to perfect my Dancing Porcupine's armor and robotic joints. Nowdays I use much simpler models, though.

it would be easier to give advice if we had an idea why exactly you can't rendez-vous... anyway, you can try this foolproof way: 1) make sure you have 0 inclination. exactly 0.0 2) get into a matchin orbit, that's only a couple km offset. if the ship you want to rendez-vous with is in a 80x80 km orbit, get into a 78x78 orbit. this way you'll get a rendez-vous eventually, though it's not the most efficient method. Oh, by the way, there are some bugs with the close approach marker, sometimes it disappears. don't let yourself be fooled when you know you have a rendez-vous.

Part 7: The flop of the rings - the two moons A'Twin moves to Saturn, where it refills on fuel on Iapetus and on nitrogen on Titan. The chapter title is because the rings of Saturn look very underwhelming compared to expectations 7.1) A surprisingly expensive transfer 7.2) Bouncing on Titan, aiming for Iapetus 7.3) There's life on Titan. Bugs and krakens, to be precise Bugs compilation updated

Look, instead of having us play guessing games, can't you actually tell us what is wrong and why it should not be that way? The only I can see, you have highlighted the battery, 1% and duration: perptual. Looks absolutely normal: the satallyte just moved out of the planet's shadow. So its batteries got discharged during the night, and now they just started to recover.

no relays, but there is a pilot on board.

I've been playing this game for years, and yet remote probe control still eludes me. I am trying to make a rendez-vous between two unmanned vehicles around Rhea, a moon of saturn. One is the Fat Man stage. it has a okto2 core, it's equipped with 3 communotron 88-88 and one HG-5 relay. it has signal to Trypophobia, a manned ship around Iapetus. Trypophobia has a crew of 3, 1 pilot. none of them inside an actual command pod, I'm keeping them in hitchhicker containers for kerbalism reasons, but it doesn't seem to make a difference; trypophobia has no relay antennas. The lander Clamp, instead, is equipped with two communotron 16. it's 500 m from Fat Man, and uncontrolled. It can sometimes pick up signals from Cylinder, another manned vessel (crew 6, 2 pilots) which also has relay antennas powerful enough to connect to earth. Clamp has no control. Both Trypophobia and Cylinder have a RC-001S probe core. Now the question is: why don't Clamp use Fat Man's HG-5 as relay to connect to Trypophobia? Would slapping a Communotron 88-88 on Clamp (by eva construction as soon as I get back to a manned vessel, because I have to go to other moons too) help? How about a HG-5? Is it better to have both, or just the most powerful communotron 88-88 would do the trick in all situation? Please, don't link the wiki page on probe control point. I am already familiar with it, and i'm still unsure on the details

I don't know about your specific case, but as a general rule I found that the staging graphic display is prone to all sorts of glitches when the ship starts to get a bit of complexity. it doesn't affect the game, so you can ignore it and keep playing.

I'm using kerbalism with rss, and I am baffled by saturn's radiation belt. it's a huge 150 rad/h belt encompassing all the inner moons. even at maximum shielding, a crew would be dead in 3 hours. with only the spacesuit, in 20 minutes. I'm baffled because it does not seem real. I can't find any hard data on how deadly those radiation belts would be, but wikipedia does describe saturn's radiation belts as "relatively weak". is there a reason the radiation belts were modeled like that?

but is there an actual pilot inside? because what you say really looks like you have no contact with the probe

while this is certainly true, it's a bit of a zigzagged case, because - while I can't find hard data on radiation levels around saturn - I do read that its radiation belts are "weak". Also, maximum radiation shielding in kerbalism only reduced 90% of the radiation, while in real life one could certainly devise a better shielding. especially in a big mission like mine, where adding a few more tons of radiation shielding would not be an issue. anyway, I'll go on with the original plan of unmanned landings, then

I am doing it with rss. however, I cannot land on the inner moons of saturn. saturn has a radiation belt extremely strong, my crew would die in 3 hours. yes, in my previous opm grand tour I still managed, but the radiation belt was small, it was possible to just spend a small time inside. not this time; saturn's radiation belt encompasses all the inner moons. Travel time is too long. I can't send a kerbal normally. I have two options: I was planning to make unmanned landings on those moons. But I also can fiddle with kerbalism setting to ignore radiations, and plant flags on the innermost moons like that. for the purpose of the grand tour, which would be better?

then I still say it's horribly inefficient. do that rocket need to land? then it's landed, done. do that rocket need to move to another planet? then do an orbital refueling, no need to land the rocket. I just can't see any scenario where landing a rocket from orbit on a plane that will send it to orbit again would be useful.

so, you are thinking that a passing rocket would pass into the atmosphere, and there you would meet it with a plane and give it a push? good luck trying. rendez-vous inside an atmosphere with an object on an escape trajectory. maybe someone could pull off that challenge, but i don't want to even try.

yes, it is exactly the case. there is no trick, it's just that duna is particularly good for aerobraking. for you see, when you come to duna from another planet, you have an intercept speed. in addition to that intercept speed, you fall towards the planet, going faster and faster until you hit the atmosphere. but duna is small. it has low gravity. so even when you fall towards it, you don't pick up much speed. And so, it is possible to come from an interplanetary trajectory and still hit atmosphere at less than 1800 m/s, which is a safe speed in most cases. that is a general rule. the smaller a planet, the better it is for aerobraking - if it has an atmosphere. As for how fast you can go, it depends on the ship, and whether it has some thermally sensitive components. those have breaking points at 1200 K, and they tend to explode over 1500 m/s unless they are in a shielded position. a normal ship with all components having a thermal breaking point of 2000 K.... you can hit atmosphere between 1900 and 2000 m/s. With a thermal shield? I managed to survive a reentry at 10 km/s. Your profile also matters. In the high atmosphere you don't heat much, but you brake even less, so you can take a short passage in the atmosphere if you stay high - useful to circularize, but it won't help you with an interplanetary capture burn. On kerbin you can enter the atmosphere with a normal ship at 2300 m/s because your trajectory is almost circular, you're staying up high, and by the time you drop in the denser atmosphere you already lost enough speed to survive. On duna, if you want to get captured, you have to go low on your first pass, and that means hitting dense atmosphere at full speed, so your maximum safe speed is lower. By the way, somebody may claim that it's better to go deep immediately for convoluted reasons of heat transfer, but it's a urban legend. it's potentially true only in rare corner cases. Perhaps it was true in a previous version.

Right, I got that one. And it was also a large amount, something like 30 tons. Fortunately, the contract did pay 2 millions, so I just made a super duper huge rocket (though still a lot smaller than the stuff I do nowadays) that cost 600k to brute force my way through the contract. I never got it, but I think the most difficult contract is the one requiring a grand tour and using the same part to land everywhere. Any experienced player can make a grand tour, but having to land the same part everywhere? this means using the same lander everywhere, or having some kind of modular lander where you always use the same command pod. The second requires a lot more creativity than a simple grand tour, and the first requires the capacity to make an eve ssto