king of nowhere

damn! I misread that part! I thought it would be cheaper to intercept at apoapsis, because normal rendez-vous are. Not sure what changes for a planetary transfer, maybe starting from eve getting to moho's periapsis is cheaper because you get lots of oberth. but I can see, in retrospect, i have to move my orbit much less if I meet eve at periapsis. Unfortunately, doing so requires reloading back to my last kerbin flyby. perhaps even earlier.

and yet... I took all the long sequence of gravity assists. Here I got as best as I could with eve. Almost as best; i still have, like, 4° inclination, but I couldn't find a way to get rid of them. I'll try again tomorrow, but it shouldn't make a huge difference. As you can see, I matched periapsis with Moho's apoapsis almost perfectly. Mohoìs apoapsis is give as 6,315 Gm in the wiki, but the game subtracts the sun's radius of 261 Mm, giving a final figure of 6,064 Gm. My solar periapsis is 6,037, very close - especially considering that I eyeballed eve's insertion point. the orbit is touching moho's very lightly, a great hohmann transfer. But despite that, I still get 2300 m/s to capture. despite getting a close periapsis to the planet to get oberth effect (in practice, with a 30 minute burn time, I will be much less efficient). when you subtract oberth, it becomes much less efficient than your calculations. And alexmoon planner keeps telling me of ideal transfers with as little as 1250 m/s capture burn. From a 100 km periapsis. Including circularization. And without matching orbital planes. I have done all I could conceive to lower intercept speed, and still I get much worse results than what calculations dictate. I am trying to figure out what I'm missing.

this is exactly the kind of technical answer I was looking for. I hope I'm not bothering you if I ask some additional questions, since you are apparently very knowledgeable about this: why use expensive helium instead of cheap nitrogen? or why not use an electric turbine? why not have the methane tank pressurized by evaporated gaseous methane? ok, I know the raptor is supposed to be fueled by supercooled methane, so not much will evaporate, but what's to be gained there? On second thought, the answer is probably above my ability to comprehend. But why use nitrogen here and helium for the turbines? why not have a single nitrogen (or helium) tank feeding both the tanks and the turbines? again, why not use electric control valves? I had a whole university exam on industrial chemical establishments, which included a lot of piping and valves, and I don't remember any mention of valves controlled by external fluids. unless we count no-return valves, of course

let me get this straight, though: if you had a simple system with just the two pipes for fuel and oxidizer, both with a valve and a turbopump (electrically powered, with batteries aside), and of course you still used the cold fuel to cool the nozzle; would the system still work, albeit at a lower efficiency?

well, I know rocket engines are the most complex and expensive part of a rocket. recovering them is the main cost saver. all that pile of criogenic propellant is actually small chip besides it. And I know that they are extremely complex. Just look at all the piping on this thing However, I can't just figure out why rockets are so complex. I mean, you take a fuel and an oxidizer, you mix them together, put in a spark, and they burn. You orient the exhaust gases backward with the nozzle, and it will provide propulsion. Basically, you should need a pipe for the fuel, a pipe for the oxidizer, a combustion chamber and a nozzle. Obviously, you need so much more. Can someone explain me why?

I may join the "overrated laythe" train. No, don't get me wrong, Laythe is beautiful, I visited every single biome, flew all over the planet, found the green monolith twice, and even pulled an elcano on it. it is one of the best places around. still, there are too many missions just for laythe. i haven't seen any mention of vall, so I'll nominate it as underrated. it's one of the most beautiful places to drive a rover i've ever seen, the scenery is amazing. I did drive a rover halfway across its circumference, and it was a great experience. i miss those times. nowadays i play with multiple mods to make things harder, and vall is deep into jool's radiation belt, staying there for more than a few hours is no longer possible

yes, but the plane change is generally awfully high, and that way of making transfers is inefficient when the difference in inclination is significant. it's generally much better to meet the planet on the node, so that the injection burn contains also the normal component, and you gain the advantage of pitagora's theorem and of oberth effect.

yeah, but those equations only work if there is no inclination to account for. the inclination of moho is a big factor that's... surprisingly low. I've only been to moho a handful of times - and always starting from eve, which should result in less intercept - but i never got anything less than 2500 m/s intercept.

then, even if the rover doesn't have an antenna, the satellites should still be able to contact it. it's close, and they must have decent antennas to contact kerbin. perhaps a few pictures would be in order

i am sending my mothership on moho to drop a lander. the mothership, for various mod-related reasons (use of kerbalism isru, needs water to make fuel, and there was no water on the more convenient places) must start from Ike and land back on Ike. From Ike I took a Kerbin flyby, which put me in a resonance for a subsequent kerbin flyby. I'm currently there. When i am in moho orbit, I drop the lander. I don't need to circularize, I have another shuttle that can bring the lander to low orbit. After moho, I will take a burn to eve, get an eve gravity assist, and use it - with multiple subsequent assists - to return to Duna. I started at Ike orbit with 5400 m/s. I spent 380 to get the kerbin assist. at moho intercept I estimated 3000 m/s (by the deltaV map it should be less, but I have low thrust from nuclear engines, i factor in some inefficiency). Once it's time to leave moho, it takes 1000 m/s to reach eve. From there I try to get all the way to Duna with just gravity assist, aerobrake at Duna, and get to Ike. I will need some 150-200 m/s to capture and circularize around Ike, and I have 250 m/s high thrust I'll use for landing - but I'll need an additional 200 m/s low thrust too. So, this gives me an approximate figure of 4500 m/s to perform the mission, and I have 5000 m/s. I have 500 m/s left for course corrections and whatever small manuever I may need. the best moho approach is to get an equatorial orbit, elliptical to save some fuel when reaching eve. arriving with inclination won't be a huge deal, though; once I am captured in elliptic orbit, I can make a plane change at apoapsis to go equatorial again, for a small cost. ideally, my apoapsis should be directed so that it will make cheaper to leave for eve later, but i have no idea how to calculate that. Though those 500 m/s extra are probably enough to forgive some small mistake here

did you check if your satellites have relay antennas or not? not all antennas can carry signals from other probes

I am going to Moho and back with limited fuel, and I am using gravity assists to make things cheaper. Shortly in the future I will have my last Kerbin flyby, which will send me on an Eve flyby, which will give the final correction for moho. To have the lowest intercept speed, my final orbit must barely touch Moho's orbit; this requires putting the intercept on the opposite side of kerbol respective to my eve flyby. where I place the eve flyby, then, will determine where I can meet moho. I have two options to reduce intercept speed. first, I can encounter eve when it's at the eve-moho planar change node. this way I can use eve's gravity to reduce orbital inclination compared to moho. reducing speed on the y axis will reduce overall intercept speed, i expect 200-300 m/s less. Second option is to meet moho at apoapsis. at apoapsis orbital speed is lower, intercept speed is always lower for any rendez-vous when done at apoapsis. On the downside, meeting moho at apoapsis would require the highest plane change, especially coming from eve. I probably have enough fuel to take a mildly suboptimal trajectory, but I ask anyway. Is it more convenient to use eve's flyby to match orbital plane, and meet moho halfway between apoapsis and periapsis, or is it more convenient to use eve to meet moho at apoapsis, while having the greatest planar difference?

do those satellites have antennas with enable relay connection? if they don't, then there's nothing you can do short of sending a new satellite with a relay antenna. or changing the game options so that you don't need signal anymore (it's in the difficulty options, "enable communication net" or something similar. disable it, and you can always control your probes, anywhere). I actually suggest you disable communication net and you test your rover around to see if it works. if it does, you can reload the game and send a new relay. if it doesn't, you saved the time of having to send a new relay. if the problem is not the lack of relay, then i have no idea. in that case, posting pictures may help. Oh, wait. it is also possible that the rover is simply on the other side of the planet respective to your satellites? in which case, you should get control back in a few days

three minutes is still not all that large. but if done in kerbin orbit, you still get some inefficiency for cosine losses. 16 extra seconds out of a 3 minutes burn? 8% more deltaV required, could be a reasonable result

Calculate? No. Eyeball? yes. for start, you go from Kerbin to Dres, Dres moves slower because it is farther from the sun, so you need Dres in front of Kerbin. By how much exactly? No idea, but I eyeball them by trying, from Kerbin, a prograde burn until I hit Dres orbit. For efficiency, make sure to start in the right place; move the manuever node slowly, you'll see that the apoapsis will change. Find the position where you get the highest apoapsis. Be aware that it will change if you change the deltaV, so keep adjusting. eventually you will find the cheapest prograde burn to intercept dres orbit. You also need to set up a plane change, though it's generally not the best way to reach dres. When you match planes, you will see a close approach marker. If you're passing in front of your target, you have to wait. if you'll pass behind, the transfer window has passed. this way you eyeball a transfer window this method applied to a sarnus-jool transfer. my spaceship would reach jool's orbit before the passage of jool. By roughly eyeballing the angle and jool's orbital speed, i estimated waiting one to two years. this is also a good way to reach your target with an efficient burn; when you do it at the right time, you'll get an intercept, or at least a close approach that's close enough that you can get there with some small corrections. indeed, two years later i easily got an approach. close approach was very close, at this point it's just a matter of fiddling with all the directions and seeing what will cause you to pass closer to the planet.

I suggest you increase ambent light to take pictures. It's something I discovered recently, but it's been a huge improvement to taking visible pictures and appreciating shaded landscapes. I finally started liking Bop after I was able to actually see the surface. On the other hand, other planets look bad with it. Among them Vall and Eeloo. You can find the option among the graphic settings, and you can change it in-game at any time. I suggest keeping it at 25-30%, it's enough to clearly see around all the time, but not too much that it will unpleasantly saturate colors. I also take the chance to add some pictures to the gallery, i hope you won't see it as trying to start a competition or hijack your thread A few better images of Vall south pole (kraken maw peak); at the time I still didn't knew about light amplification, but I still got some good shots And this is the north pole of Tekto, from OPM; this impressive spire is several km high, and surrounded by smaller spikes. I named it Barad-Dur; if it doesn't deserve the name, nothing else does

Part 15: The long pit stop A'Tuin uses its last fuel and nitrogen to return to Duna, where it proceeds to mine new fuel, nitrogen, uranium. Taking off from Duna is very expensive, so A'Tuin lands on Ike afterwards, to refuel again. 15.1) Navigating towards a safe haven 15.2) The trail of discarded debris 15.3) Capture, descent and landing 15.4) The longest pit stop 15.5) Duna ascent and exploration 15.6) Final refuel on Ike, looking towards Moho

Part 14: Grabbing a comet From Jool, A'Tuin manages a rendez-vous with comet Lidia 1. The main problems are the available deltaV and nitrogen supply. 14.1) Everything is better with a Tylo flyby 14.2) Comet time! 14.3) What could have been

I have experience with complex ship, and while I'm not sure I can give you what you want (and the mod in question could be a better way) I can give you an advice for dealing with multi-engine ships: instead of using a hotkey to toggle on/off the rcs of every single ship, you could have a single key to turn off rcs on all those ships, and a different key to turn on individual groups. I'll try to explain better with an example. My current mothership has a lot of shuttles attached to it, pointing in all directions. I'm not using rcs for simplicity and part count, but i do have to turn on and off engines all the time, and the situation is similar. So I have the main ship engines, those don't have an action group. they are supposed to be always on. For every other engine, I set up 9 to shut them down. It's super convenient. I did multiple dockings, now I have to perform a manuever with the mothership, and i worry about having forgotten a shuttle engine on, with efficiency losses? I press 9, and I know only the mothershipìs engines are working. And for turning the engines on, I use 5 (no special reason to pick 9 and 5). I'll never press 5 when I am using the mothership - though if I do by accident, i can just revert it with 9. but when i release a shuttle, i control it and press 5, and its own engines are turned on. Only exception is a long-range towing module that's supposed to be stuck to other ships. that one has 6, this way I can press 9-6 and have only the tow engines active If I get this right, it would totally help your situation. You want a quick way to enable rcs on your soyuz, but when they are docked you want them disabled. you never want to activate the rcs of a docked soyuz, at most you'll want to activate its rcs just after undocking it. And you want your station to always have rcs active, with its own main rcs. So, my setup would work perfectly for you. set one key to deactivate all soyuz rcs, and another one to activate them all. leave the iss rcs without hotkeys - you can deactivate them with R, I can't think of any situation where you'll want to deactivate the main station rcs while leaving the ones on a docked soyuz active. This way, you can make sure all rcs of the docked soyuz are disabled, while easily enabling them for every one that you undock. and it only costs 2 action groups.

No idea. With my penchant for huge, complex motherships and multi-decade missions, I faced this problem a lot, and i talked about it many times in my mission reports. But it's not a specific discussion, just a few bits here and there in the middle of everything else. "and here i almost failed to get the astronaut back on the rocket because the ladder got misaligned", "and here the ascent suffered much greater drag because parts got misaligned", "and here the rockets got pointed sideways and I had to use alt-f12 to get a new rocket", "and when i reloaded the game, the parts were perfectly aligned again, miracle!". But tring to condense my experience with it: - the more parts you have in a linear arrangement, the more likely you are to face this bug. My previous mothership was a very long cylinder, and at times it became more similar to a banana. My current mothership is a large circle of fuel tanks, and the bug never manifested - it is more likely to strike when your ship faces heavy forces. flying in atmosphere is most likely, I've never managed an eve reentry without skewing my propellers, but a hard docking also could do the trick. - even if you do nothing wrong, it can still strike at random - sometimes, it spontaneously reverts upon reloading the game. I wish I knew how to replicate that feat, but no idea. I just know that every once in a while my banana-shaped mothership would become a cylinder again.

yes, alignment bug has been a problem for many long missions. personally, i solved it by attaching a disposable crew pod at ground level that secondary crew module is then jettisoned before ascent.

just a small piece to show a beautiful view: a comet near periapsis. I like the way pieces of debris float around the screen

RCS make things easier, but they are in no way needed for docking, that is indeed true, but you can do it with the main engine easily, you just need to use it carefully. if you don't have a fine hand on the throttles, you can manually limit the engine power. Two main ways: if your prograde is close to target (as is the case in the picture) you can point your ship on the opposite side of the target marker and burn; this will accelerate your ship, and it will move the prograde towards your target. This won't immediately give you a docking, because there's orbital drifting. but it will get you closer. repeat the process when you're closer, and you'll get even closer. eventually, you'll get so close that orbital drifting will be negligible, and you'll dock. by the way, when you're close enough to target individual parts, you should set the individual docking port you want as target. On the other hand, if you burn close to retrograde, you can push your retrograde marker towards the target by burning on the opposite side, and it will match your speed to the target, while getting closer. in this image i'm doing exactly that, in what's perhaps the most complex docking i ever achieved. one ship was coming from jool, in an escape trajectory, it was getting a gravity assist. the other ship was coming from eeloo. But see how my ship is pointing? the retrograde marker is near the anti-target marker, meaning i am moving towards my target - mostly. by burning a little away from it, i am pushing the retrograde direction towards the anti-target. I kept burning in that direction, and i gradually found myself moving towards my target like this. this is an indication that you're going straight for it. though, since there are still 25 km, there will be some necessary course corrections to perform. but you always do them with the navball. and if you point retrograde to your target, you can slow down your speed relative to it, until you stop completely. You can also do if if you lost your orientation, then you stop completely, then you point towards the target and you accelerate again. once you are within a few km from your target, your prograde marker is pointing close enough to the target marker , only use the navball to push the two to overlap. you don't need anything else.

what do you mean? i know several issues with the close approach indicator glitching, disappearing when you get closer. but you said "it was successful", which implies you actually went to duna. and then you said you knew you had no hope, and i have no idea how to take that one. but if the issue is indeed he close approach marker disappearing, it generally get fixed when you take care a bit better of orbital inclination. setting up a future manuever at the ascending/descending node to have 0 inclination should make the marker reappear

i support surface exploration. I suggest you try the south pole of vall, there's a glitched mountain there i named "kraken maw peak"