king of nowhere

I don't remember, it's been a while. But I probably did, I know about clearing input locks and I did try a bunch of stuff.

really? and here I thought I knew everything about gravity assists...

in general, the major problem with moho is intercept deltaV. to minimize that, you want your orbit to be as similar as possible to moho's orbit. the closer the two orbits are, the less expensive it will be to switch from one to the other. to tell what you are doing wrong i'd need to see your gravity assist, but without knowing specifics I can guess your mistake maybe is that you are not meeting moho at the periapsis of your own orbit? if your orbit and that of moho look like the olimpic rings, they look close, but they actually require a huge radial burn to overlap. you already made a similar question, and I gave some more detailed answers there. Oh, there's also a possible other thing you may be doing wrong now that I think about it. maybe you sent your mission to moho, and are now trying to get moho gravity assists to circularize. that doesn't work, it's impossible. when you make a gravity assist, you always leave the planet with the same speed you came in. so you can use a gravity assist on a planet to raise or lower your solar orbit, you can use it to change inclination, but the one thing you cannot do is use a planet to reduce intercept speed on itself. what you can do is take gravity assists from eve. this way, instead of having to burn from kerbin all the way to moho, you only burn to eve, and you save fuel. and at moho, instead of having an intercept from an orbit going all the way up to kerbin, your orbit only goes up to eve, lower intercept speed. post pictures of what you're trying to do if you want more detailed explanations.

higher reliability parts are built sturdier, and that requires more mass. maybe they have thicker structural parts; where there are moving parts, they are bigger, to hold more stress. electronics is less miniaturized, or perhaps additional redundant components are already included. it makes sense for most parts. perhaps antennas are the one exception I can think of.

no, i have neither of those mods. on the plus side, after i brought the offending vessels to orbit with the cheat menu, the game has been working fine.

I can further show this example of going to Gilly (where you can refuel with isru) to moho surface (where again you can refuel with isru) for less than 4000 m/s, which is an easily achievable target for a lander. 1) start from Gilly. Leave it when eve is intersecting the plane of moho's orbit, so you'll be able to avoid a plane change. the spot was eyeballed, because i don't have any tool to do this accurately you want to lower your eve periapsis, to have lots of oberth effect when you burn for moho. lowering your periapsis from gilly would cost you some 400 m/s. but you have a trick to save fuel there: instead of burning to lower your eve orbit, burn to leave eve, with the minimum amount of thrust. fiddle with the ejection direction and exact thrust, and you'll be ejected in an orbit that's extremely close to eve, and will meet eve again on the next orbit. notice the 250 days eve periapsis, when eve year is 270 days. the red manuever is a correction burn, mostly a plane change because the inclination with which you arrive at eve will determine the direction you'll be leaving 2) when you pass at eve periapsis make a burn to lower solar periapsis. Of course, your eve periapsis must be angled just right for this manuever to work: that's the purpose of the correction burn (here yellow) and also of the original burn. Make sure, before you leave gilly, that you fiddle with the planned manuever so that now your eve periapsis is facing the right way for this ejection. I also angled the trajectory to leave eve going downward. so now the inclination with moho will only be 2.2 degrees, a lot less than it normally is. This manuever wasn't perfect. I return to eve in 250 days, 20 days sooner than desired, and so I am not perfectly in the node and I can't completely cancel inclination. this manuever could have been better. still, that's good enough for most purposes, and it took me 10 minutes to set it up; further refining it would have been a lot harder. The ejection burn from eve must send your inclination node with moho overlapping moho orbit, so you get an encounter. It must also be close to your solar periapsis, and as close as possible to moho solar periapsis. notice how none of those conditions is respected perfectly, but all are "good enough" Finally, when passing at solar periapsis, make a small manuever to change the time of your orbit so you can syncronize it to meet moho at a later orbit. In this case, by setting up a manuever forward and clicking repeatedy "next orbit", I was able to discover that in 1 year 120 days I'd be passing very close to moho. at this point, a small 2.5 m/s burn was enough to get an intercept. the violet manuever is the one I used for this, and I'm also using it to refine the encounter, setting a properly low moho periapsis. At this point, having followed all those steps to ensure my orbit would be as similar as possible to moho's orbit, I get an intercept deltaV of 1750 m/s - including the cost for circularization. It would be possible to improve on this by up to 400 m/s, in theory - as I said, I've been inaccurate on getting the eve periapsis. However, getting more accurate than that is very hard. anyway, add 900 m/s to land on moho and you're done. 100 m/s to leave gilly, plus 900 m/s to lower solar periapsis to moho, plus 1750 m/s to capture and circularize on moho, plus 900 m/s to land on moho, plus 20 m/s to orbit gilly, plus 50 m/s of various correction burns: total 3720 m/s. A ship with isru and 3800 m/s can reach moho and return without staging. Took me half an hour to get that, it's not too difficult if one has the expertise. It's possible to do it with as little as 3500 m/s if one can also optimize hard the trajectory. but that would require a lot more effort, and i'm not trying it.

it's normal, ion engine drains lots of electricity. You have two options: 1) add more solar panels/RTGs 2) use them ion engines at low thrust. if you pick 2), i recommend the persistent thrust mod, that will let you use your engines during time warp. it's a real time saver.

by taking gravity assists. lots of them. In this mission report, I describe how I started from Ike, orbited moho, and landed back on mun, all within a 6 km/s budget - including landing and takeoff. In this other report, I describe going from eve to Moho on a reasonable budget, and then using several gravity assists to get to duna again on a reasonable budget. Still, going to moho is rather expensive. You can use gravity assists to get a solar periapsis touching moho and a solar apoapsis touching eve, but you can't do any better than that, and you still have to pay a fairly high price in intercept speed. that cannot be avoided. you can save a lot over more conservative approaches anyway. The general rule is that the more your orbit is different from the orbit of your target planet, the higher the intercept speed will be. This is why if you go to eeloo from kerbin you end up with 1300 m/s of intercept speed, while if you start from jool you get almost nothing. with moho, your main issue is minimizing intercept deltaV, and you use gravity assists from eve to make your orbit as similar as possible to that of moho. Now, as I discuss in the first mission report, ideally you would want to meet moho at its solar periapsis, but there is also the issue of orbital inclination; it's probably a bit more efficient to use eve to equalize orbital inclination, even if that results in meeting moho far from periapsis. The trick to multiple gravity assist, again as explained in the first mission report linked, is to enter a resonant orbit. Eve makes an orbit in 261.95 days, so you want to take a gravity assist that will result in a trajectory with an orbital time that will generate a resonance; for example an orbit lasting 175.7 days, so that 3 of your orbits will equal 2 orbits of Eve, and you'll get to eve again for another gravity assist. the deltaV map does not account for gravity assist. it is also VERY unreliable regarding the navigation around jool, giving completely nonsensical figures for transfers between moons. it's a good tool for beginners, but i long since stopped using it, except to get an estimate of how much deltaV i need to land from low orbit on any given body.

Is there any list of anomalies/easter eggs for this mod? At first I assumed there wouldn't be any. then i found two on vesta, a green monolith and a snowman. then I assumed there would be two on every planet, but when i came back to look, i found no anomalies anywhere on mercury, venus and the moon

a picture would help. how much deltaV do you have exactly? maybe you do have enough to return with accurate landing, or at least to return to orbit. anyway, I'd say NO GO. rescuing a tourist from the surface of the mun is a LOT more difficult than rescuing them in orbit

Part 6: 44% of the asteroid belt A'Twin visits Ceres and Vesta, which together make up 44% of the asteroid belt by mass. I also discovered anomalies! 6.1) There is no such thing as a simple Hohmann transfer in rss 6.2) At Ceres 6.3) Ceres to Vesta 6.4) Exploring Vesta Bugs compilation updated Broken parts recap

do the ship has still fuel? assuming it has, you are still close enough to kerbin that you can just set kerbin as target, point towards it, and burn. else, if you have little fuel, your orbit is very similar to kerbin, you should be able to return there in the next orbit. set kerbin as target, you should see a close approach marker. if kerbin is in front of your ship during the close approach, then burn retrograde - while your orbit is still touching kerbin's orbit! important - and watch the marker get closer until you get an encounter. if kerbin is behind, then burn progade instead. this is actually not difficult, but I have no idea how much experience you have in interplanetary traveling. if the ship has no fuel, you need to send a rescue mission. send another ship in solar orbit, and do a rendez-vous just like you would do around kerbin. only, it's going to be a lot slower. Regarding needs, if you can strap 30 pollux boosters on a ship, you can go everywhere. I suspect your ship and flight was very inefficient, else you wouldn't just be in solar orbit, you could go all the way to eeloo and back.

this is the wrong subsection of the forum. this is the "tutorial" subsection, where people post tutorials. you're more likely to get help if you post in questions, as this is indeed a question. also, you have 91 posts active, by now you should be experienced enough to know that you must give more information if you want people to be able to help you. all I get is that you are trying some kind of spaceplane with vector engines and that it is somehow aerodinamically unstable. and instead of trying to make your plane stable, you are trying to fly it while unstable. All I can tell you is that if you want to fly an unstable vehicle, you can add lots of reaction wheels to compensate for aerodinamic forces. or, you could reshape it to make it stable.

I have a problem: some of my nuclear reactors are not working. My mothership has 11 excalibur reactors, each one producting 3000 electricity, so it should produce 33000. it's instead producing only 24000, and out of electricity. trying to find the problem, i did discover three reactors that are just not working. here is one you see, now it's stopped, and the ship is producing 24000 energy and now it's running, but the ship is still producing 24000 energy. It's not broken or anything. The ship, obviously, has no problems with supplies - it has tens of tons of uranium, and it has storage space for xenon and depleted fuel too - not that it should matter, since it's on "dump" mode. I checked the file, but I could not find any relevant difference in the "easy" parameters (status, broken, and similar) and the rest are too complicated. Anyone knows why this happened and how to fix it? P.S. it may have been caused by some of those reactors getting broken (not-critically) in the past, and subsequently repaired. Already I had problems of broken reactors not working after they were fixed, but a reload always solved the problem in the past. Also, five different reactors broke on this ship, (well, six, but one was critical and was dropped, hence why I have 11 reactors and not 12), and only three are not working. P.P.S. I probably could fix the problem by copy-pasting into the saved file the data from another, working reactor. I am however afraid to break stuff, like, touching the data on where the reactor is placed on the ship. In this code (spoiler for brevity) can someone tell me which part I should copy from a functioning reactor, and which part I should leave? thanks to any who can help

no cargo bays or fairings anywhere near close. there are a lots of parts attached to that crew pod, and though i did not intentionally clip anything, something may be slightly clipped. and yes, there was docking and undocking involved. Anyway, I did "solve" the problem creatively: I did move the docking port to another position, now the crew can use the top hatch. for that, I had to grab the rover with a claw, because after it undocks the docking port becomes the root part. and for that, I had to send another engineer from kerbal. but it works, better than the alternative

Trying to eva with my crew, the message in italian says hatches are obstructed, can't get out. except, hatches are not obstructed. the Mk2 landing can has 2 hatches, on the top and on the back. the one on top is obstructed by the docking port, but the hatch in the back is completely free (can't best be appreciated from this angle, but trust me, there is nothing covering that hatch). And I actually tested this vehicle previously, and it worked, the crew just got out from the back. And then I got this problem, but I removed a ladder and afterwards it worked. and now it doesn't work anymore. ANyone knows how to fix this bug?

my install is not in steam, and i have the same problem. I do believe it's a mixture of rounding errors and encounters disappearing. when you set the encounter right, it will still be there, and you'll meet the planet if you time warp carefully. if there is a rounding error, then the encounter truly disappeared, but you can avoid that by starting time warp to 10x manually regading manual confirmation of the encounter using the navisphere... look at the navisphere, the prograde marker is straight over the target. this means you are moving exactly towards the target, so you have an encounter (notice that you have to set the navball on "target") Here the prograde marker is not exactly on target, so you're going to miss (in this case the target is another ship, but the principle is the same). But you can adjust your trajectory. see where I am pointing my ship? this will both slow down compared to the target, and move prograde towards it. I also recommend saving the game before time warping, and checking that your apoapsis and periapsis remain the same. Ultimately, I suffer the same bug as you, but it never had a significant impact on my mission. You can mitigate it.

Just a few minutes ago, I time-warped past an encounter, and I thought maybe the same thing is happening to you. I knew I was close to the encounter, and the encounter disappeared. I did time warp carelessly, and I found myself having passed my target (vesta). I actually got the encounter - kerbalism science activates authomatically if it is set so, and I did get science from vesta. but I did not get anything else because the time warp was high. It stops authomatically when you change SoI, but it had enough delay that i found myself out of time warp but already out of vesta. By the way, I was in a collision course, but i did not explode because the game didn't have time to register that. Anyway, my point is that when you KNOW you have an encounter because you had performed your burn correctly, perhaps you still have an encounter, and you just need to time warp more carefully. if you don't time warp to max, maybe the game will finally see you are on an encounter when you enter duna's SoI

how can we help you if we don't know how your rocket was made and what engine you used? post pictures and describe your problem more precisely. the simplest explanation, though, would be that the guy on youtube was seeing vacuum deltaV, and you was seeing sea level deltaV. vacuum deltaV is higher, especially with a vacuum optimized engine

I don't know mechjeb, but the fact that it cannot make an encounter does not necessarily mean anything. If you are passing close to the planet, you can make a correction manuever to get there, always. perhaps you should just get reasonably close and use the navisphere to finish the encounter - do you know how to use the navsphere to make a rendez-vous? if not, i can explain. By the way, in part 26 of my caveman jool 5 challenge I explain how to get an interplanetary encounter in a couple orbits without using manuever nodes at all - because in caveman you cannot use them. you may find it useful as an alternative

because i don't want things to be too easy. i use near future electrics because the only way to get the 20k electricity I need for isru while far from the sun is nuclear reactors, and i use near future launch vehicles because with a 1000 parts, 5000 tons ship having bigger fuel tanks reduces part, with annexed lag and bugs. but none of that is game breaking. stuff like antimatter engines - or even higher efficiency engines - would trivialize the challenge

some parts are too big to be moved in eva. if the description in game does not say it can be moved in eva, it cannot be moved. so no, you can't move it

I'm not sure if it is compatible with kerbalism and near future electrics

damn, I just got stuck with that bug, and it's not one of the other well-known issues I knew, it's worse. So I was planning a trajectory to Ceres, and I got a close approach at 500k km. Then I set up another node further ahead, and the close approach disappeared. I didn't do anything with the new node, it just disappeared. And then I deleted it, and still there was no approach. I fiddled a bit with prograde/retrograde, and I got again a close approach... at 2 million km. I even got an encounter, which disappered as soon as I tried to set a new node in front of it. And then, even though my original node hadn't moved at all, I could not make the game see the encounter again. i saved the game when I had the encounter planned. I reloaded the game, the encounter is not there anymore. Unfortunately, while I can confirm that there's a very annoying bug here besides the rounding error, I have no idea how to account for it.

I did a laythe elcano, and it was indeed boring. on the plus side, i could just leave the game running in background doing something else, and only check on it once every few minutes to correct drifting, so it wasn't onerous. as for difficulty, it's difficult to explain. i like difficult. i did pick slate as one of the most difficult terrain to drive on. but... there is a difference between difficult and annoying. and it's hard to define, and it is why I can't explain it. But other planets are difficult. mountain terrain on tylo is difficult. the poles of Vall are difficult. slate is difficult, and now i am doing wal and it is mighty difficult, but in a fun way. not dres. dres is annoying, without being difficult. moho straddles the line. this difficulty to explain is also why i appreciate someone else sharing my opinions; perhaps, even if I cannot define what makes dres annoying, there's something objective there.