king of nowhere

those three wings are providing stability. unfortunately, a 10 m heat shield makes for a lot of drag, it takes more than that to counteract. in fact, this is a common solution. although one has to be careful, when i tried it the ship tilted sideways and disintegrated. now my eve landers include heat shields both on top and bottom, and other things to increase drag at the top and keep the ship correctly oriented. here's an example you can see i also built the top shields on top of high towers, that to push them farther behind the center of mass and give them more leverage. eve's atmosphere increases in density abruptly shortly below 50 km, a ship gets 10 g of deceleration, that part is absolutely brutal. it's not easy to make something that survives that.

wrong. deltaV spent is irrelevant of the ship's mass. the ship's mass affects how much deltaV you can get from the same amount of fuel, but that established, 2000 m/s is 2000 m/s, no matter what. the problem with your approach is that you miss oberth effect. the injection burn is more efficient if you perform it closer to the biggest source of gravity around; so it is cheaper to make it around the planet than around the moon - which is itself cheaper than making it far away from the planet. once you are in a jool intercept, you can end in a circular vall orbit with 1000 m/s easily without gravity assist, and you can do it with as little as 500 m/s with advanced gravity assists.

the moons of jool are an entirely different story, as they are basically their own miniature subsystem. first, no need to make injection burns at jool ever, you can use laythe or tylo to get a gravity assist and get captured in the system. second, once you are on a moon, visit them in sequence. a transfer between laythe and vall uses the same principles, on a much smaller scale, as a transfer between kerbin and duna. when i visit them, i prefer to go for tylo first, because it requires a very big lander, and using it first i don't have to cart it around for the rest of the mission. laythe second, for the same reason.

Definitely my first kerbalism grand tour (mission: lucy in the sky with deadly radiations). Even though I am now trying more complex versions of it, with more additional objectives, I know the mod much better. The first time i didn't knew well how to deal with radiations and malfunctions As for something on a smaller scale, the rendez-vous of Dolphin 3 with the Dream Big in the aforementioned mission takes a special place. Dolphin 3 was a return capsule with ion engines in a high energy trajectory to return from Eeloo in one year. The Dream Big was on its way to getting a Kerbin gravity assist to eventually reach Duna with limited fuel. They met in Kerbin's SoI, coming from different directions; both ships were on escape trajectories - Dolphin 3 was even in an escape trajectory from Kerbol itself - there were over 3000 m/s of speed difference between the two crafts, no chances of getting a close approach marker. The Dream Big was too big, low on fuel and on a delicate trajectory to move, and Dolphin 3 had low thrust ion engines. And the docking had to happen before periapsis, because Dolphin 3 was supposed to swap crew, get resupplied, pick up a lander, and then make a retrograde burn and get captured by kerbin. I had to try it a half dozen times to get it right

in fact, i believe you don't eyeball that transfer. what you do, you go roughly there, you miss the planet. but you count exactly by how many days you missed the planet, and you make a burn in solar orbit in the moment your orbit touches that of duna to change your orbital period and meet duna on the next pass. it's much more expensive, but easier to do. and packing more fuel is not a big deal.

done it a few times when i missed the manuever and had to do it. but if i set up a rendez-vous, then slowing the ship to match speed is easy enough.

tip to land on Dres: don't do it! That planet sucks! You should land on Mun instead, it's like Dres, but better and easier to reach. ok, more seriously... no, there is absolutely nothing special about landing on Dres. Getting there is a bit complicated, but once you are there, any lander that works for Mun works for Dres too. In fact, Dres has less gravity than Mun. On the other hand, rovers that work well on Mun may not work well on Dres, because the lower gravity and more bumpy terrain tend to flip them. but i doubt you are interested in rovers right now.

as for going to Gilly, though, you do not need to have a good inclination, nor you need to match inclination with Gilly. The best way to reach Gilly is to park around Eve in a highly elliptic orbit, then from close to your apoapsis you aim for where Gilly will be, and you get there. your orbit is very slow at apoapsis, so you can generally make a burn with a large radial/normal component and get away with it, and it's cheaper than trying to match inclination. I can generally do it with a few hundred m/s, with an extra 400 m/s for capture. Some examples here the orbital nodes are really close to Eve, so i'd have to spend a fortune to change inclination. but a slight 120 m/s burn did the trick of setting me on intercept course. ù here it's even cheaper, just 66 m/s this time i even saved the components of the burn, you can see it's a complex tridimensional one And here is a return trip to rejoin the mothership, again it displays the burn components. I could have made it cheaper if i waited the next orbit, but i have a life support mod and i didn't have enough food to wait. So, those trajectories are complicated, especially for someone who has problems with regular planetary transfers. How do you find them? Set Gilly as a target once in Eve orbit. You will see the ascending/descending nodes. You do not want to make a manuever there, as they are generally very close to eve and require a very expensive burn. What you want is to intercept Gilly's orbit with one of them. Plan your manuever node in some point high in your orbit. Doesn't matter exactly where, but it must be far from Eve. Then try to move one of your inclination nodes on top of Gilly's orbit. Try first with normal/antinormal component, you should get there. once you reahc your intercept, the game will provide a close approach marker for you. Of course, you won't have a Gilly's intercept yet. You are merely crossing its orbit. But the close approach marker will let you know when Gilly will be there. So now you have to change your flight time to make sure you also pass in that spot at the same time as Gilly. A prograde burn will make for a higher Eve apoapsis and will make you lose time, if Gilly pass behind you. A retrograde will make you arrive there faster, if you need to catch up to Gilly instead. radial burns will change where you intercept Gilly's orbit. If you can't find a good solution because Gilly is too distant, try the next orbit. During those manuevers, you will move around the planar nodes, and you will lose the close approach marker. Fear not! Just change your normal component until you put your planar node back where it must be, on top of Gilly's orbit, and the close approach will appear again.

i belive the most difficult achievement in this game is an eve sea level ssto, without using kraken aerodinamics.

sorry, i don't get that. i mean, you want to land a heavy payload on tylo, great. you want to land multiple crew pods, maybe habitats, stuff. what does that have to do with landing an engine you won't need? If you just want a heavier lander, you may as well carry down an ore container. especially because, besides reducing unnecessary payloads, there really isn't much you can do to optimize tylo. You need 4500 m/s (make it 5000 for safety), and you need all that with a fairly high twr, and that's it. you can't really cheat on that. your whole system actually looks pretty good as far as landing and orbiting your intended payload. there's nothing i'd change about it except removing dead weight. you could use slightly different tanks, or arrange them differently, doesn't change things. all you need is those 5000 m/s and that twr > 1.5. Personally I tend to set up staging with a heavier second stage, to have a first stage with 1500 m/s and a second stage with 3500 m/s. this way, I can reuse the second stage to land on laythe too, after refueling. But once I did the opposite, used a small and underpowered lander as last stage, a lander intended only for low gravity world; and I strapped some bigger rockets on it that would stay halfway through the ascent. in both cases, design was dictated by wanting to reuse the last stage for something else, and not by any specific need for tylo. with isru it becomes much easier because you can land from orbit, refuel on the ground, orbit again, rejoin a mothership. you only neeed 2500 m/s on your lander. though having to carry heavy mining equipment is going to create some problems, it's still much simpler than the alternative.

all i can say is that i've never seen it happen, so it's definitely not how radiatiors are supposed to behave

as far as i am aware, propellers do not work underwater because of a malfunction of the physical simulation of the water. yes, it sucks. that was 6 months ago, i'm not aware if the problem has been fixed in the meanwhile. I'm also not aware on whether somebody made a mod for it - though i don't see much hype around submarines, so i don't expect it.

was coming to say exactly that. landing on tylo is almost 5000 m/s on the round trip, you don't want to get saddled with any extra weight. so you should leave everything you don't need in orbit. take off that weight from your lander, and you'll be able to get away with many less engines and fuel too. aside from that, not much else to improve. tylo requires a lot of deltaV and a high thrust, so you must have a big lander. people get away with smaller landers by using command seats strapped on a baguette tank as last stages, but i don't like that. i want to feel like i have a real spaceship

Part 6: Tumbling on Moho Bolt splits in two; the habitation module and lander go to Moho, while the main fuel tanks go directly to Duna to save fuel. Moho is explored 6.1) BolTransformer 6.2) Planning the next destination 6.3) Eve to Moho 6.4) Exploring Moho This was pretty straightforward. I don't expect any significant difficulty until i reach Jool

yes, but the difference is so small as to be negligible in most cases. and a constant altitude ascent is much trickier to pull off. I try to do it, but i must continuously make corrections, and that may easily lose me that little gain

i vote duna because without it, all my kerbalism grand tours could not exhist. it doesn't help that the kerbalism isru practically forces you to refuel at duna and nowhere else. anyway, pros and cons Moho very expensive to reach, dull surface, not useful for anything. The gravity is good but the surface is too bumpy to drive a rover comfortably, a major sin in my book. Bad planet Eve Extremely hard to leave, but that's enough to make it a special challenge. it has some nice panoramas, and some great mountains. good for planes. great for gravity assists. Mostly good planet, though grand tours require a special lander just for it. Gilly it has some of the most beautiful scenery in the kerbol system. Most importantly, it is the only location in the inner system where it's remotely practical to refuel. Very cheap to visit. Great planet. Kerbin it's your home and starting point. for this reason, it's my least visited planet. One day I would like to make a special rover that goes uphill and explore the mountains. But i find rovers that can't take off and change planet on their own power to be boring. Neutral planet Mun You can get gravity assists on your way out of kerbin, and it's a great place to drive a rover. Minmus is a better refueling station, but it's easier to leave from mun. Like it! Minmus Great place for refueling, thanks to flat surfaces and low gravity. I stopped doing it because it was too easy. Anyway, good Duna It's the only planet where you can aerobrake a massive ship that's not specifically built for it. leaving it is also fairly cheap. This makes it a perfect stop in some transfers, where you can aerobrake at duna as an intermediate step to lose/gain some orbital energy. I found that for several destinations, especially with low twr, going to duna and then to the other place is cheaper than going to the other place immediately. Nice place for a rover, the atmosphere is thin enough that it won't be a great obstacle but it allows to aerobrake and use parachutes, orbiting it is cheap enough that you can mine it, it has good features, it's still warm enough that solar panels are effective. It gets even better with kerbalism, because - it's the only planet with a CO2 atmosphere that you can use for fuel without spending crazy energy (and by crazy I mean, you need tens of millions of electric charge to get a single unit of fuel) - it's one of the few planets to reliably have water on it - it's one of the even fewer planets to reliably have nitrogen on it. It's basically the only planet where isru is remotely practical - it's in an intermediate enough place that you can refuel at duna and still reach every other planet - it has a magnetosphere to protect from radiations, but no radiation belts to provide additional hazards Best! Planet! Ever!!!!!!!!! Ike It's good to provide gravity assists on your way out of Duna, or to park there to get an extra kick when leaving duna. aside from that convenience, it's not interesting. good Dres I was even forgetting it. Completely useless. bad for rovers. the canyon is not a big deal. Bad. Jool the best scenery of the game is there. i would not count as a planet, though, as you can't land on it. it's more like its own mini system Laythe Beautiful, great for plane exploration. Good for gravity assists. Unfortunately, the atmosphere is unsuitable for aerobraking. Anyway, good Vall One of the most beautiful places to drive around. Cryovolcanoes rock! And it has real mountains. Good planet Tylo Good for gravity assists on the way in and out. Not much else to recommend. Very expensive to visit. If I have a restricted policy about isru, it requires its own special staged lander. Mixed opinions. Bop Ugly, and totally unsuitable for rovers. Bad Pol Beautiful, and a good place to refuel. Good Eeloo Very hard to reach and nothing to do once there, but I like it nonetheless.

besides that already accurate answer, you can easily see the problem in a test. Start on mun in low orbit, your speed should be around 550 m/s. Now make a small deorbit burn to lower your periapsis at ground level. you will crash on the ground, of course. Look at the speed at which you crash on the ground, it will be around 600 m/s, you only gained a few tens of m/s. Now try to make a big burn in low orbit to stop your orbit completely. you will fall on the ground; again, let yourself crash on the ground and register your speed. it will be much, much higher than 50 m/s. if you stop on the ground there, you still spent more fuel. you had more time to accelerate towards the ground. those 600 or so m/s are the orbital energy, a sum of kinetic energy and gravitational energy. that's the miminum cost you have to pay to orbit/deorbit, you can't cheat there. if you could make a suicide burn at precisely ground level with an engine with infinite thrust, you'd spend exactly that deltaV. everything more you spend are gravity losses and cosine losses.

it has to be stated that it is also the most dangerous, though, because starting the burn too late will result in a patch of debris on the planet. the later you start the burn, the more efficient it will be, until the point where you crash

oh, you mean the decoration you put on rockets! I was thinking "flags" as in "those that kerbonauts plant on the ground". But in my editor they list 12 m/s as maximum impact speed.

simple fuel switch was my target. i don't want to add other fancy stuff, and i am especially concerned of them causing conflict with other mods. i'd rather keep things light. thanks!

the stock game has fuel+Ox tanks and just fuel tank as different parts. the liquid fuel tanks are airplane parts, except the Mk1 and Mk0. and they have worse mass ratios. also, they look bad. and my project needs 5 meters parts, and there are no liquid fuel containers of that size. I know there is a mod for choosing the content of your fuel tanks. You take any tank, and you decide whether it will hold liquid fuel or a Lf+Ox mixture, or maybe even monopropellant. but i can't find it. i don't know its name, so i tried to search. But "fuel", "tanks", "mod" are such common words around here, i get flooded by results. and i could not see it in the mod library. Someone help me locate the mod, please

the resource is, indeed, nitrogen. you find it on only a few planets; as far as i am aware, just Mun and Duna, and not sure if there is an additional source in the outer system. yes, getting nitrogen is a pain. on most planets it won't even register on the scanner, that's why you don't see it on the scan of minmus. try doing the same for mun, you should find some. i also had problems there, i think it's a bug and you should not try to inflate abitats until they fix it.

so, you are saying it is supposed to not give a message if i have no techs to discover? because i wrote that's exactly the case here

I am on a tour to find all the green monoliths. I found the monoliths at eve and gilly, and for each one I got a message. Now I reached the one at moho, and i got no message. Why is that? multiple possibilities - i have no techs left to discover; not even the two "fake" techs that i'm told are placeholders - i have no communication. but i also waited long enough for the main ship to pass overhead and give me back communication, and still no message. then again, maybe it only checks when i enter in range of the monolith, and this was not the case? - something else went wrong.

but what i mean is, how do you stick flags on a ship like that? i never tried, but i never knew it was possible