king of nowhere

what? personal parachute? last time i had insufficient parachute on my reentry pod, i didn't have the luxury of personal parachutes - i removed them for weight saving. i had 3 kerbals jump out of the capsule inside the ocean, and they all lived. meh. those kids and their personal parachutes. in my days we had no fancy parachutes. and we walked uphill to our rockets.

no mods for bigger ion engines, and i couldn't afford the power if i tried to keep them realistic. 50-odd nervs is the way to go. took me 5 or 6 apoapsis raising manuevers to leave kerbin, but that's still manageable. i could perform the eve capture burn at reasonable efficiency

it sounds like the name of a mod, but i'll choose to assume it's just a question about there being multiple living spaces close to each other. the answer is yes, and i did notice i seem to lose less nitrogen when i move the kerbonaut in some isolated habitat; but i still ended up losing much nitrogen. although, thinking about it, that time i went out of the unpressurized cockpit i still hadn't reactivated the pumps after the previous eva, so maybe i was just refilling what i lost previously? i will have to check that. but it also seems there are limits to this, because my previous ship had a string of 5 greenhouses, 3 laboratories, and 4 Mk3 passenger modules, and still it didn't seem to lose too much air when i went eva. or perhaps i simply did not notice the few times i went out of there

ok, let's expand the question a bit then: besides packing more nitrogen and performing less EVA, are there other tricks i can use to try and minimize eva nitrogen losses? actually, i know there are tricks, because i went out of my lander and i lost 100 nitrogen, while i went out of my main ship and i lost several thousands. and both times i was going out of the same Mk1-3 command pod, and i'm trying to figure out how to lose 100 every time instead of losing several thousand.

i tried using xenon. 200 tons of xenon, over 40000 m/s of deltaV. but the ship got bugged. the engines stopped working, despite having all the required resources. before you suspect me of some noob mistake, i opened a question with pictures, and no, it was a legitimate bug. i tried many times, i always got the same bug hit sooner or later. couldn't even leave kerbin orbit before it struck. I found that i could fix the bug only by removing persistent thrust. but without persistent thrust, burn time would be way too long, so i had to resort to the next best thing, nuclear. Now, i see you mentioning 1 m/s of acceleration, so perhaps you think you can get away without using persistent thrust. Lol! You clearly have no experience with big ships. Let me present some calculations. My ship is supposed to make a grand tour, with a life support mod, and land a rover on every planet. I have over 200 tons of Eve lander alone (and that's already a huge improvement over my previous eve lander, which was 400 tons and carried only one person). i have 50 tons of habitation module, which is already smaller than ideal - it also needs radiation shielding, which is heavy. over 10 tons of food, water, oxygen and supplies. And I have over 100 tons of rocket fuel, because ions would work in space but i still need to land on the various planets with regular rockets, and i can't use isru as part of the challenge. so i have around 400 tons of weight i have to carry around. to which i need to add at least 200 tons of xenon to get a good deltaV. Around 600 tons. Every dawn engine pushes 2 KN, so to get 1 m/s I'd need 300 dawns. But those would be 75 more tons, so now i'd need 40 more engines just to push the engines. so, 340 dawns. I'd also need trusses and structural parts to attach all those engines around, for extra weight, but let's ignore that for now. As each dawn requires about 9 electricity/s, I'd need around 3000 electricitry. Which I could supply with 100 gigantors at kerbin. But I have to go as far as eeloo, so i need rtgs; each one is 0.8, so I'd need 3600 of those. Of course, since they weight 80 kg each, that would be 300 extra tons of rtgs. or, for 10 minutes of operation, we'd need 1.8 million capacity on a battery, which we could achieve with 90 tons of batteries. in any case it would require more engines, more fuel, etc. To stay within a reasonable buget and part count, i had 24 engines, which could push my ship at an incredible acceleration of 6 cm/s. And I didn't even have enough rtg to power them full time; with kerbalism rtgs gnerate radiation, and too many of them will kill the crew. So, nuclear had to be

i tried disabling the pressure controllers, but the nitrogen is still lost as soon as i reactivate it again, even days later. and i'm pretty sure i lose much more than 5 days of leaks

if you mean physics warp while burning, then no. i had the persistent thrust mod installed, and the first project of this ship was with ions, and much smaller. unfortunately, something broke, and after multiple attempts at making it work, i had to shift to nuclear

well, i do agree on a certain level, and i make a point of using some manual struts even if autostrutting would be more convenient. however, i still use autostruts when it's necessary. mostly for docking large ships, as those tend to blow up after docking if you haven't autostrutted them. also, when i use large ships, to reduce part count; when you are using a 1000-part ship lag is a problem, my cpu can take all the help it can get. and in such big ships, the few quintals saved on struts won't make a difference anyway

i'm having problems with the nitrogen losses during extraveicular activity. every time i get a kerbal out of an airlock, i lose nitrogen. lots of nitrogen. i get a continuous loss while he is out, and i keep losing nitrogen even after he's come back inside, for up to a few hours. the user manual says nothing about it at all. is there any way to prevent that from happening?

according to kerbalism, liquid fuel is already liquid methane.

many, as it will be my next big mission report. the ship is intended to carry my second kerbalism grand tour, this time with the additional challenges of no isru and visit the green monolith on all planets

yes, i toned it down to 15 degrees. also, i had to include a substantial normal component in the burn, and so it would be really difficult to keep that manually, so i just left the ship pointed towards the manuever. kinda hard to figure out burn efficiency with a ship that's shedding drop tanks between burns while aiming for a mun gravity assist, but i estimate i have lost around 5% efficiency.

either you are using it wrong, or you are too heavy. ok, technically, what counts as "too heavy" depends entirely on you. if you want to land a 1000-ton thing on mun, you can, and of course in that case a terrier is inappropriate. but for a simple early mun lander, up to 10 tons of mass on the lander, a terrier is perfect. so, if your lander weights less than 10 tons (and i doubt you alredy started adding features like i do), then you are using the terrier wrong. probably you started burning too late. if you failed your mun missions because you didn't have enough fuel to return, you either have insufficient fuel in the rocket, or you are using too much in the landing. easy to find, look how much deltaV you have when you start descent. if you want to be able to land, return to orbit, and return to kerbin, you need 1500 total, though you'll probably need 2000 because i won't try to coach you on a tight landing yet. anyway, if after you land you have 700 m/s less than when you started, then all is fine. if you have 1000 m/s less than when you started, you are making a bad landing and wasting fuel. or perhaps you spend more because you are making bad ascents? do you know to gravity turn for efficient orbiting? if you go straight up and then straight laterally, you end up spending some 20% extra. anyway, i tried troubleshooting the most likely reasons, but if you want specific advice to fix your mun mission, you need to give us more information on it. with pictures, possibly

well, i've been running big missions with kerbalism. you need life support, and radiation shielding, and more electricity because it must keep life support going, and food and water and oxygen and other stuff, and everything can break so you need multiple copies of everything... well, you need big ships there, and big rockets to move them you set them by right clicking on the part (you can do it in the vab but also in flight), they basically create virtual struts. they work more or less like regular struts. they have no weight, and you don't see anything. if they have any downside, i am not aware of it - except they glitch with robotic parts, because they hold still something that's trying to move, but that's a user mistake. for the really complex stuff, i put both autostruts and regular struts.

??? my starting orbit is circular, so i draw it as circular. i don't see how it changes the answer anyway, except for reducing the window in which i have small losses. on the other hand, for a non-istantanous burn, burning prograde all the time also raises the periapsis. and raising the periapsis loses on oberth effect. and on the other other hand, a higher periapsis means a longer time spent close to periapsis, a longer time when the ship can burn with limited cosine losses, thus less cosine losses on further orbits. so many variables... by 30 degrees i mean i am burning as long as the difference between prograde and manuever is less than 30 degrees. the cosine of 30 degrees is 0.87, so i'll be losing 13%. whether that is an acceptable loss depends entirely on what is the fuel budget, the actual thrust, and the time available before losing the launch window

I have a ship with low thrust, and i need to make a manuever with multiple apoapsis raising. pretty standard for this kind of ships. i'll start burning some 30 degrees before the manuever, and until 30 degrees after the manuever. i'm wondering, though, if i should burn prograde all the time, or if i should burn according to the manuever instead. Option A or option B? (sorry for my low graphic skill, but i think it's understandable) On one hand, i think i should burn prograde all the time, because i need to increase my orbital energy and prograde is the only direction that does that. on the other hand, i think that if i burn prograde, i have a component of my burn (would be vertical in respect to this page outline) that's cancelled between the times i'm before and after the manuever node. my gut, which is generally very good with numbers, tell me that since both those arguments are good, in practice it won't make much of a difference; i suspect there is some mathematic demonstration that it makes no difference at all, you're just losing efficiency in different ways. so in the past i didn't worry about it. now i'm curious, though. is option A more efficient? is it B? does it make no difference?

class C is an asteroid, not a comet

for the glitch, you deal with it two ways. one part is autostruts, and the other part is saving often. yeah, with big ships you have glitches. for the rhino, i never had much use for them before making the really big ships. but now, i use them often, they have a good vacuum Isp and a high thrust, making them good vacuum engines for large ships when wolfhound clusters aren't enough anymore.

i hope you have a decent grasp of what is deltaV to start with (if not, ask further, but you can find a lot of good explanations there). That said, on the issue of how much you need to go places, refer to the deltaV map. the deltaV map tells you how much deltaV (vacuum) you need. For example, to make a mun mission you need 3400 to orbit kerbin, + 860 to get a mun intercept, + 280 to get a circular mun orbit from there, + 580 to land, +580 to return to orbit after landing, + 280 to get a kerbin atmosphere intercept. from there you need another 860 + 3400 but you can get them free by aerobraking, as the arrow shows. so in total your rocket should have 6080 m/s of vacuum deltaV for a full mun mission with return. A few things, though: - those values represent optimized trajectories. if you are doing things wrong, you will need more, possibly much more. if you are very good, you can get away with a bit less. if you start using gravity assists, you can save some of those costs - this map is in vacuum deltaV. be wary that vacuum deltaV and kerbin deltaV are different, because engines lose efficiency in atmosphere. make sure that your engines are adequate. - just because there is an arrow, it does not mean aerobraking is practical. you can theoretically get aerocaptured by jool, but it takes a very special craft to survive the 9 km/s atmospheric speed. the one time i tried it, i got completely disintegrated before i was 3 km deep in the atmosphere. eve and laythe also have very unforgiving atmospheres, while duna is aerobrake-friendly. but you won't get there for a while, so this is a worry for the future. all in all, you should take the deltaV map as a general guideline. but it is very useful to give an idea of how much deltaV you should pack. adding weight decreases your deltaV. adding fuel increases you deltaV - but you may need bigger engines afterwards, and engines are weight, so you can only push this so far. also, some engines are better for use in vacuum, others are better for use in atmosphere. if you say you lack fuel, then your problem is more likely to be deltaV. thrust to weight, or TWR, is how much your rockets can accelerate your rocket. 1 refers to the local gravity, so a rocket with twr 1 on kerbin will have 6 on mun, because on mun the gravity is 6 times smaller. it is very important for liftoff, because if it is below 1, then your rocket won't be able to lift - it won't be able to push against gravity. once in space, you can get away with lower TWR. as you spend fuel, your ship becomes lighter and your twr increases. adding engines / using more powerful engines increases your TWR. adding anything else decreases it. this one has got me laughing. no offence meant. I mean, you can have a tutorial. or you can have an in-depth explanation. But you can't have an in-depth tutorial. this game is just too complex for that. in fact, i could spend hours writing, and still be missing stuff. I tried to cover the basics. try to practice that. try a mun mission with this new knowledge. start with a lander. it must have enough deltaV (vacuum) to land and orbit mun; that's 1200 m/s. but it's not a lot; you would like to also be able to return to kerbin with it, and make some manuevers around mun. and landing with the exact amount of fuel is very difficult, better to keep some extra for safety. overall, 2000 m/s are a good target. and check your TWR. for a practical landing, you'll want at least 3 times the local gravity, so either 0.5 (kerbin, vacuum) or 3 (mun); you can set up the VAB to show you the TWR. this lander covers everything from when you get in mun orbit. now you need to get there. so couple your lander on a rocket that must reach mun intercept. you'll want 3400 m/s for kerbin orbit, and 860 for mun intercept, plus some extra. 4500 is a good target. it's quite a large amount, so it's better to split it in two or three stages... check the deltaV and TWR on each one.

this works in the VAB. not sure if it works in EVA construction, which you seem to be using by your mention of green and red lights. anyway, wheels - and a few other parts - are like that. you can't attach parts on them. for the same reason that you can't attach stuff on the bell of a rocket, even though it is a big flat surface.

by the way, 4500 m/s seems a bit too much for an Eve return. I would associate it with a Jool return

i would not use a cargo bay due to the difficulty of getting the part inside. a claw, a lander with wheels to move on the ground, many reaction wheels to compensate for thrust imbalance, and you should be fine

i was thinking that trees require average temperature greater than 10 degrees for at least one month to grow, and laythe does not have that. the fact that we have plenty of plants on earth, and plenty of tundra terrain, and yet none of those trees adapted to live there, makes one think that it's som,me kind of hard limit, and not something that could easily get adapted to. then again, i was thinking trees, but it was mentioned vegetation. grass and shrubs can grow everywhere as long as you get some snow-free time, so my comment wasn't really all that relevant. still, laythe is much harsher than it looks like, and i have a hard time seeing anything macroscopic living there

why many people assume vegetation? laythe has an oxygen atmosphere, but that's no reason to even assume life at all, much less complex life like plants. in fact, there are a ton of reason why laythe would be unable to have plants. from temperature to lack of sunlight to radiations. it could have microbial life, and even some fish. or it could be completely lifeless. personally, i prefer to never answer the question

then again, it's a world in a very cold zone that keeps liquid oceans because of tidal heating. a world like this is bound to have a lot of rains, that erode mountains. on the other hand, it's also bound to have volcanoes... anyway, i always said that laythe needs some underwater thermal vents. would be a great target for a submarine mission. but it could also take volcanoes.