king of nowhere

you already got an excellent trajectory. you are using only gravity assists to go from a flyby to a trajectory that has your desired periapsis and apoapsis at laythe for free. there is literally nothing more than that you can save with gravity assist. you can't lower your apoapsis below laythe when you are doing a laythe flyby. however, i question the wisdom of your target orbits. those are not good orbits for relays. they will get eclipsed by jool, or by some other moon, all the time. for jool relays, i would use a high polar orbit instead. then again, a polar orbit also gets blocked when your relays are on the wrong side of the ecliptic plane.

the previous times i did it, i used a similar arrangement, but i used four big-S delta wings. those caused problems, though, because they tended to flip the rocket during launch. launching from kerbin was very hard. i didn't use airbrakes because i figured, with their low thermal resistance, they'd break. knowing they don't may save some troubles on future eve landers. I also include inflatable shields on the front, they help somewhat with aerodinamic stability by creating a drag in what will be the back of the ship, but without a "weathervane" they would just cause the ship to turn laterally instead. they are also pretty good parachutes, helping reduce speed. descent profile was to use rocket brake for eve orbital capture (some 400 m/s) and gradual aerobrake to circularize to low orbit (some 1300 m/s). I used a 75 km periapsis, closer than 70 would have killed me. i only went below 70 in the final orbit, and even then, doing that too fast would have killed me. which is why i always object when i read the common advice "go deeper in the atmosphere, you'll get less heating", hell no, it only works on very specific kinds of crafts. part of the problem, both for engineering and trajectory, was to leave an engine exposed. i needed some extra course corrections after the shields were deployed, so I needed an engine free to fire. so I had 4 shields at the bottom, and there was a small hole in them through which a mammoth could fire. Thinking of it, i could have probably added a terrier or poodle on the front for those manuevers, and jettison it before reentry. i could have aerobraked harder without that hole in the shields. the kill zone was at 50 km altitude, i needed to slow down a lot before reaching that low. I describe the mission in greater detail in the kerbalism grand tour mission report linked in my signature, parts 3 and 5.2

actually, there are other ways to work around those low thrust limitation too, but i could write treatises on the argument without exhausting it long story short, oberth effect make it so that it is always more efficient to burn close to the planet. but sometimes other considerations may force you to revise priorities

lower, always lower. the reason is that you get more oberth effect from being closer to the planet. a couple of not-really-exceptions: - if you are using ion engines with really low thrust, you may prefer a higher orbit because it is slower, and it will give you more time for your burn. in some cases, what you lose in oberth effect you may gain in lesser cosine losses - if you have ISRU, then it's convenient to go to minmus to restock in fuel before leaving. but that's another matter entirely

it's not that have found something that works. i have to jump through hoops all the times. it's just that i launch ships too complex to just strap a heat shield on the bottom and call it a day. i've never sent to eve anything that was not meant to come back, and that means a hundred tons launcher at least. yes, i agree. i was trying to figure out why some heat shields fail when they shouldn't. i mean, i am trying to understand whence the advice "don't go for a gentle aerobraking, go for a more decise one" comes; for it is my experience that if you are not using a thermal shield with ablator, then the whole point is just wrong; and if you are using a heat shield properly, then you should never have a reentry problem, whatever you're trying to do, period. so I am suggesting it may be more of a case of improperly designed ship rather than a reentry profile

i've never seen it happen, but I have seen something that can be mistaken for the same: a ship brakes too much in high atmosphere, then its trajectory changes to a steep descent, going too fast too low and burns. while another ship stays in the middle atmosphere long enough to slow down more before going low. but it's never "prolonged exposure to high atmosphere aerobraking" that does damage; it's a secondary consequence of that, namely, you fall down too fast thermal shields are ridiculously sturdy. at least, they are for someone regularly used to not using them. i recently made a reentry at 9 km/s, got hit by 37 g deceleration, was fine. and i didn't even use half of my ablator for it. using ablator should be overkill for most manuevers. but some ships are not fully covered by those shields. maybe they have some bits spreading out, and that's the part that breaks. or maybe they are aerodinamically unstable, and too much drag will make them flip. or maybe they have sensitive parts attached to the shield. or maybe the ship is very big and the shield small... there are a lot of reasons an aerobraking can go wrong, without them being the fault of the shield or the ablator themselves

ok, for the part that some contracts never go away, do you mean that you keep getting contracts of the same type, or that the very same contract stays there? in the second case, it could very well be a bug. i read some other bug reports from contracts in the last version. in the first case, ok, we have pinned on something you'd want that would be ok with other players: a possibility to switch off completely some kind of contracts. yes, i agree it would be a good thing. anyway, you can also use the alt-f12 debug menu to delete contracts or create new contracts. but it's harder work, and some may consider it cheating. I still think, though, that you're using the wrong options for this game: you say that there are very few types of contracts that you like, yet you want to keep playing career. well, the moment i was in a similar situation as you, getting bored by most regular contracts, was the moment i stopped playing career and went looking for more stimulating stuff. career is great to gradually introduce new players to gradual complexity, but once one is experienced, it's basically the same old stuff over and over. perhaps it is time for you too to make the transition to challenges?

well, that node clearly is not an eve manuever. it won't intercept eve's orbit. you can see that apoapsis and periapsis are wrong. also, plane inclination. you are better off planning the manuever again. it's just an eve intercept, with a plane change manuever to set inclination to 0. easy to make anew. on second analysis, there is indeed something very wrong with that orbit. it says periapsis in 3 yers and apoapsis in 7 years. that's an 8 years orbit, for staying inside kerbin's orbit. it should not be possible to have an orbit longer than one year. but the problem then is not the manuever node. unless the time is the result of some other mod i'm not aware of, you certainly have plenty of popup mod windows on your screen. but for now try to replot the manuever

strange, as those are directly opposite to my long experience at this game... though, upon considering it, i finally realized why my experience is different: i do not use ablators. not much for a conscious design choice, but i tend to build everything reusable, and ablator is not reusable. i can't make a reusable eve ssto, but i still drop stuff that's meant to launch to orbit again, and that's big enough to require the inflatable heat shield, which has no ablator. if you have no ablator, then the gentle aerobrake is better. the lower part of the atmosphere is always worse, and any amount of slowing you can get before that is welcome. if you have ablator, then the lower atmosphere is still worse, but at least you'll have ablator to protect you. if you try for a gentle aerobrake, you will run out of ablator and then you'll be exposed in the lower atmosphere. and the braking in the high atmosphere will still be minimal. same goes for multi-pass aerobraking. you can land on eve without ablator. but you need to be gentle to make it work; first capture into an elliptic orbit, then gradually lose speed. make the final reentry from a low circular orbit. be ready to see red bars all over your vehicle. in my case i used rocket burn for capture, and then i gradually burned some speed at every orbit, something like 20-40 m/s at every pass over several days.

probably you were not exactly on the node, then. the closer you are to the node, the closer you can get to 0. if you burn a bit away from the node, it will start moving away from you. i assume you started burning, and the node moved. in which case the better thing is to stop burning and wait until you are on the node again. ok, i always burn before the node, because this way the node will move forward, and i can stop the burn and reach the node again in a short time. if you did your burn after the node, moving it behind you, it gets a bit more complicated. in which case you have to push one of the nodes towards the intercept point here i gave a more detailed explanation on interplanetary transfer, including dealing with inclination.

does it really need to be fixed, though? just because you, personally, do not like it, and do not like any of the suggested solution, it does not mean the game should be changed. as suggested, you can turn off decline penalties, and this way you won't have any problem rejecting those contracts. admittedly i have not followed the discussions on reforming the contract system, as i stopped playing career six months ago. still, i am pretty sure there must be people enjoying the current contract system, and randomly changing it would liquid those people. I will also point out that you don't even need to decline a contract. just wait a few days without accepting it, and the contract will disappear by itself, without any penalty. and the game will gradually stop giving you contracts if you stop accepting them. Frankly, i don't see the problem with contracts. you are 100% free to pick the contracts you want to pick. you are free to decline them without penalty, you are free to let them expire without penalty. if you still decide that you want to get penalties for declining them, that's on you. in which case, though, you cannot complain that the game is broken.

while there are many options to recycle stuff, there are always losses. you never recover 100%. which suits me well, in reality you don't recycle 100% either. though greenhouses definitely need a buff, i summed up all the numbers and discovered that, even considering recycling wastes, it takes 4 kg of resources to produce 2 kg of food and oxygen. though greenhouses let you transform raw materials from a planet into food. with some big pressurized tanks you can last for decades, though. my mothership has been running almost 20 years now, 15 years since last resupply, with a crew of 9. long term stations are definitely possible. ground station sustaining indefinitely can exhist, since they can generate anything with resources from the planet. you can get full protection from radiation too. the only unsurmountable limit is stress. when stress reaches 100%, you get something bad. sometimes you get lucky, and nothing happens. sometimes you lose 10% of a random resource, if you are mining a planet it's not a problem. sometimes a random part is broken, though, and some of those times it cannot get fixed. so, nothing will last forever. again, my mothership has been running almost 20 years, and it has several broken pieces by now, but it's still going strong. you can't last forever, but you can last many decades with proper redundancies. as for normal malfunctions (those induced by aging and decay), they can be prevented almost entirely by having an engineer run periodic checks on everything. as for resources, they are tricky, because they are hard to find. we can focus on the four elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, as everything else can be derived from those - oxygen is very common. molthen regolith electrolysis will get it in large amounts almost everywhere. no worries here - hydrogen is found in water. water is rather scarce, but you can find it in the poles of most planets. sometimes you also find it in some specific biomes in each planet, but it's very rare. it should definitely be more abundant; minmus is described as an iceball, yet it has very little water. all the moons of jool should be very rich in water - it's the single most common chemical compound in the outer solar system - but again, it's limited to few places. last time i tried, bop had some in all biomes, pol had nothing. anyway, you can find water on most planets, and it's not hard to mine. getting hydrogen out of water is energy intensive, but manageable - nitrogen is very rare. most planets don't have any. duna has some, but ground concentration never exceeds 2.5%. and the drills can't get it if it's less than 2%. the main problem is that drills are very inefficient. a water drill will get a few units of water every minute, and that's a few kg. a nitrogen drill will get a few units of nitrogen every minute, but a few units of nitrogen are only a few grams. the atmosphere of laythe should have nitrogen, but laythe is deep inside jool's radiation belts, even with the best shielding my crew got 50% radiation damage for staying there a couple of days. forget a laythe base. anyway, while nitrogen is rare, you need very little of it to go on, so you can live on stockpiles. my aforementioned ship has been unable to resupply in nitrogen, but it still has almost half of what it started with. despite using it as ammonia to run the greenhouses, and despite losing some to stress. so, very hard to resupply, but lasts a long time. I suppose it's rather realistic, though; I cannot find any hard data on nitrogen availability, but nitrogen gas is very stable, it doesn't make many rocks. small planets with no atmospheres, those that are easier to resupply from, won't have it. - carbon is the big offender . you can get carbon cheap from some atmospheres (duna and eve, basically). everywhere else, the only source of it is the molten regolith electrolysis, and it produces only a smidgen, it's ridiculously energy intensive, and ridiculously slow. i am experimenting there, 150 gigantors and 5 large convert-o-trons can only produce a kilogram of carbon every few minutes. yes, carbon is rare in regolith, but carbonaceous minerals exhist across all the solar system; I think they should make a carbon resources that can be found and mined in a few biomes, just like water and nitrogen. that's the real bottleneck of any isru process. on the plus side, your greenhouses won't need much of it, and you can get it in excess with waste incineration. so you can run greenhouses with few problems. making fuel from it is very hard. it is enjoyable exactly because it's not made for it. a mod that is made to let you colonize space, well, it will pave the way for you. there is no challenge there. there are also many games where you launch spaceships just by clicking a button, but in ksp we go with the gritty technical details. and if we are good at solving all the problems, then we can fly a ship. well, same for kerbalism and space colonization. it's basically the super-hard difficulty level. but yes, it is very enjoyable only if you are looking for a challenge. use some more friendly mod otherwise.

you wait until you are in the ascending node and then you burn antinormal, or you burn normal in the descending node. only way to get inclination 0 is to burn exactly at the nodes

too grindy. i tried it once. after two hours of launching atmospheric rockets to test parts for pocket money, i got bored. and while i can pilot with no sas or go to orbit with only srb or do other broke-ass stuff, i'd rather avoid it for prolonged times. my kind of challenges is making big missions with ambitious objectives. like getting all science from all jool biomes, or completing a grand tour with the kerbalism mod

my way has always been to save and reload until i got there. even then, it's difficult. only with a lot of effort i can even hit the biggest island on laythe. but if you don't mind wasting some fuel, there is a shortcut: make a high speed pass in the atmosphere. then, when you approach the target, burn your rockets.

as i don't like grinding, after i got good enough to fulfill all the normal career contracts, i stopped dealing with science trees and am now only playing challenges. so, the game can be brought in different directions.

Part 10: A day in the limelight for Dolphin 3 The Digger 2-Dolphin 3 couple reaches Eeloo and lands the FU Eve. Digger 2 then takes a slow route to Duna, while Dolphin 3 makes full use of its xenon fuel to take a hyperbolic trajectory at breakneck speed to reach Kerbin well before the end of food supplies. In fact, it manages to reach Kerbin just as the DREAM BIG was passing there, succeeding in a rendez-vous with the mothership. there it swaps crew and picks up the Can, bringing it to land on Minmus and Mun before landing on Kerbin with most of its bits still attached. 10.1) Meanwhile, the DREAM BIG... 10.2) Eeloo, I love you 10.3) Eeloo-Kerbin in 375 days 10.4) To do things backwards With this, I have visited every remaining celestial body in the Kerbol system, and I brought half the crew back home. I could have just evacuated the remaining kerbonauts during the during the kerbin flyby, achieving complete success. But I am now trying to recover the ship, to achieve outstanding success. Of course, I can still get a partial failure if my remaining kerbals die, but at this point it's unlikely.

i tried that challenge once. i got bored after two hours. i could never do anything so grindy. respect, bro.

it's definitely not a bi-elliptic transfer (i forgot to mention those). it is a form of high energy transfer, because it reduces time at the expence of fuel. it is more expensive than a regular hohmann, but still within a reasonable budget. unfortunately, i have the game open with a very big ship that takes several minutes to load, so i don't want to exit it, or i'd snap some pictures. let's try to describe an example. say i want to go to from Kerbin to Eve, but i missed the transfer window. in a transfer window, i lower solar periapsis to 9.8 M km, and when i reach periapsis, there i find eve. but not now. since i missed the window, now if i do that i reach periapsis and eve is still ahead. to reach eve, i would have to lower my periapsis to, maybe, 6 M km, this way my orbit will be faster, and after reaching periapsis i will go on towards apoapsis and will intercept eve while crossing its orbit. but this kind of setup results in an insanely expensive intercept. the cochlea manuever instead lowers periapsis to about 7 M km, and then at that periapsis it makes an apoapsis lowering manuever to 9.8 M km. and then, if it the periapsis was set correctly, i will meet with eve at apoapsis. i call it cochlea manuever because my trajectory looks like a spiral. this manuever has a fairly expensive burn in solar orbit, but the intercept is very cheap, and it does work after the regular transfer window has passed.

well, the kerbalism mod introduces radiation scans, and the geiger counter report on minmus says "after looking at the radiation levels, you regret tasting the samples".... then again, just because it's radioactive it doesn't mean it can't be an ice cream

to find out the launch window, i generally use alexmoon planner. fairly straightforward. some other tricks i learned when this does not work so well, though... - orbital plane management: matching orbital planes is straightforward but expensive. it is often cheaper to make a smaller manuever to move the ascending and descending nodes so that you will meet the planet on a node. - the moon-to-planet slingshot: when you are orbiting a moon, you can fall down on the planet and make a burn at planet periapsis for an interplanetary destination. you will get the full oberth effect from the planet, while still keeping most of the energy you spent to reach the moon in the first place. for this same reason, if you're using a mothership-and-shuttles approach, it is convenient to park the mothership around moons - the cochlea manuever: I don't know it it already has an official name. It's a way to reach a planet when you are too late for a transfer window; it's more expensive than launching in the window, but it is cheaper than a normal transfer out of window. to make a transfer after the window, if you go for an inner planet, you have to lower your periapsis a lot, so your orbit will be faster and you'll catch the planet on your way back. this results in high cost for lowering periapsis, and high intercept speed. the cochlea manuever makes an additional burn at periapsis to lower apoapsis. this allows for a higher periapsis, and a lower intercept speed, making up for the extra burn. when going to an external planet, you start with apoapsis higher than the planet and then you raise periapsis - the two stage transfer: I am sure this one has an official name; when you are way off a transfer window, you make a transfer manuever to touch the target orbit, and then you make a burn there to change your orbital time and meet the target planet on the next orbit. it is basically a rendez-vous manuever applied to a planet. this manuever is very useful when using gravity assist, because the planets will rarely be aligned right to reach your target immediately. it is also useful when you have a radiation mod and you are in a hurry to leavethe jool radiation belt, but it's not a good time to transfer. - the duna aerobrake assist: when going from an outer planet to an inner planet or viceversa, it is sometimes convenient to stop at duna first, on an ike orbit (see moon-to-planet slingshot): using ike for the moon-to-planet slingshot ensures that you don't lose too much energy in the stop. the benefit is that you can insert into duna orbit for free with aerobraking (if your ship can do it, at least), and this will let you cancel a lot of high apoapsis or plane change for free. for example, when coming back from dres, i had 1 km/s of speed along the plane that i would have had to pay with rocket braking at kerbin; instead, at duna i was able to aerobrake that speed away, and then i had a much smaller intercept speed when going to kerbin. I'm sure i know other tricks, but those are the ones i can think of right now

I accidentally discovered a new, effective way of lithobraking! here i was landing on mun. despite a long, long time playing this game, i still have problems getting those manuevers right at the first time. i eyeball when to start braking, and i prefer to brake at the last possible moment, especially when fuel is critical. of course, the result is that often i will go long. And so, here was a failed mun landing. i still hadn't braked all the way when i touched the ground at 70 m/s but i bounced off!!!! and i survived the landing. slamming into the surfaced saved some 50 m/s, which on this specific mission were very critical. ok, actually, i broke three engines. but earlier i had a similar accident on minmus (this bad lander has low thrust, so i keep going long), and that time i survived unschated. so, lithobraking for 50 m/s is possible! this can make a difference when one is short in fuel

i am not telling him not to ask. i am telling him to not be rude to the people he asks when they can't figure out his problem at first

it's kinda hard to tell what you ask, or how you wanted to get an answer. the thing is, this game is so complex, there are so many things that you could be getting wrong; without very accurate instructions on your part, we won't know your issue. we can only shoot blind for the most common problem. and the topic is complex. we must try to guess what you know and what you don't know, and you must try to guess what we are taking for granted and what we shouldn't take for granted. and in any forum conversation there will be someone misunderstanding the question; I can't even remember it ever happening that in a complex question there wasn't anyone misunderstanding the question or giving unwanted advice to stuff i already knew. you should try to help us figure out your problems. you said that some of the posts were helpful, but you don't tell which ones. I mean, i think i understood your issue, and i tried twice to give a good answer to that. but you never replied, so i have no idea if i actually got it right or not. All we can do is ask that if you aren't going to answer to our requests of details and clarifications, or ask in a way that we can understand what you are actually asking for, then please don't ask.

so far, the most likely explanations that we can't rule out yet are.... - your payload is installed with an inverted probe core, and that inverted all your rocket guidance - you have a tall payload without struts, leading to lots of wobbling, that eventually capsizes the rocket - you have a lot of drag in front; united with a launch too fast, it overcomes the gimbaling and overturns the rocket because of aerodinamics - mechjeb is programmed incorrectly - you try to make a gravity turn way too early - there are other problems with the rocket construction