king of nowhere

have you checked on that? i think the most likely option at this point is that your rocket is commanded backwards. that's the only thing that could tilt a rocket with so much thrust and gimbal. we need INFORMATION!!!! PICTURES!!!! DATA!!!! even a full video of an attempted launch would be great we have no idea what went wrong if you don't give us the means to figure it out

Is the step-by-step answer i tried to give you here inadequate? if so, how? well, let's try with pictures. Here i will demonstrate an Eve transfer, for the simple reason that I had a save ready on an eve launch window so it was more convenient. start: a probe in low kerbin orbit. eve targeted since eve is closer to the sun, i must exit kerbin behind. i know from the deltaV maps that i will need around 1000 m/s to reach eve, so i will try with that. At first i make a manuever node in the general direction of leaving kerbin from behind. it's unlikely to be accurate, but i will refine it later so, this was the first try. and it's not good (actually, by now i am good enough at eyeballing those that my first try was spot on. but i changed it to a bad one for the sake of demonstrating). how do i know? because when the manuever is done right, the solar periapsis (or apoapsis if moving away from kerbol) is right behind the sun. also, see that the point where you exit kerbin's SoI is not behind kerbin but more lateral? either way, now we try to move the manuever node around until we find the lowest solar periapsis. this will be the most efficient time to burn. i keep the 1000 m/s, but i move the manuever node. here i moved the node a bit forward, and periapsis was lower. let's keep moving the node (by very small increments) until we find the minimum and see, the minimum is indeed when the solar periapsis is behind the sun. but that is 9.9 million km. eve orbit is at 9.6 million km. so i must burn prograde a bit more. this time the manuever node stands still, and i'm changing the amount of burn done. it's only a minor change, so i won't try to move around the manuever node to improve it. i would if the change in the burn was large. so now my periapsis goes closer to the sun than eve, but still i see no close approach marker. that's because i'm not crossing eve's orbit, but rather i am passing above or below it. so it's time to work on orbital planes. let's make a manuever on a node here i am using the descending node, which i will meet on my way to eve. let's try to equalize orbital planes and there, just as the angle got close enough to 0, i got a close approach marker! now i will go back to the first node, and tweak it a bit to turn it into an actual encounter. this can only be done by trial and error at this point. so, first i try to add some retrograde. but the distance increases. so i will try if prograde helps yes, it helps! distance is getting smaller until i finally reach eve's SoI. i could still refine the trajectory, but you will probably need a small correction manuever at some point anyway. the important thing is, you got your encounter. be very careful with your mouse during this operation: as you can see by looking at the numbers, it was a very small amount of deltaV that made the difference between an encounter an a miss. on very careful manuevers, sometimes i don't even pull on the node, but i write the numbers in the box directly, changing them by increments as small as 0.001 m/s. when i deal with mauevers so fine, i generally put thrust limiter on the engine at 1% sometimes you lose the close approach marker. in this case don't panic. it's generally because your plane changed. maybe your increase in speed also cause the plane change manuever to be less accurate now. go back to fixing that, and you should get a close approach again, this time closer than before. with difficult targets like moho or eeloo this iterative process can take quite a long time now, let's look at the deltaV map: it says i would need 930 m/s to escape kerbin and 90 additional to reach eve, for 1020 m/s. i used 1045, close enough. plus 340 m/s of plane change, which is within the limit of 430 by the deltaV map. so, this is a rther standard transfer to eve. the alex moon planner instead says that i could do this transfer with a single ballistic manuever with only 1062 m/s, without plane change. indeed, it's possible, but harder. i figured out how to really optimize on plane changes only recently. for now, stick to the easy way. finally, there's plenty of people here who have been trying to help you. and your gratitude amounts to getting all angry and passive-aggressive at them. frankly, after your previous thread, i had decided to ignore your questions, if you don't like our answers, good luck figuring them out yourself. but some other posters didn't give up, and that made me decide to come back here and spend 45 minutes of my evening to take screenshots and make this post. but really, you should be more tactful towards people who are trying to help, else you may eventually find in a situation that nobody would want to help you anymore.

there is a trick to go fast in low gravity worlds, which is to point rockets downward to simulate a kind of artificial gravity. of course, you are limited by your fuel supply. and it makes the whole rover much heavier. you'd need some 300 m/s to get from minmus surface to kerbin. good luck with that. as for a spiral ramp in solar orbit, there are some kraken drives using similar principles. somebody made a whole interplanetary mission by having a kerbal go up and down on a ladder. and there is a challenge to make a rotating ship spin fast and then cut it in two to get propelled to other targets.

spricigo basically said it all, except perhaps to mention the microclipping bug on docking on the ground. personally, i gave up on that kind of manuevers long ago. now i have my mining ships carry the drills and the convert-o-tron. it's less efficient in deltaV terms, but all you have to do is land the ship and take off again.

The hard way is to simulate. simulate getting from the moon to the planet (at the lowest possible cost) and then making a big burn at planetary periapsis, and see where you end up. try for different orbits, until you find one that sends you in the right direction. i found an easier way, that requires having another ship orbiting the planet. Use that ship, in low orbit of the planet, to plan the interplanetary transfer. make the manuever at the right time. then take your ship orbiting the moon, and target the guide ship. you will see its planned trajectory. use that when exiting the moon, to place your planetary periapsis as close as possible to the manuever node. this will ensure your elliptic orbit will be oriented correctly. Here is an example. blue ship is the guide, i used it to plan the periapsis of the other ship tha's much more complicated, because gravity assists are never neat. you will get a push in multiple directions, skewing your perfect alignment. and if you park in that orbit, you will need a lot of correction manuevers to avoid meeting the moon again. but the last nail in this approach is, the moons are always pretty far from a planet. from mun to the edge of kerbin's SoI is 100 m/s. from Ike to the edge of duna, even less. And close to that even for Gilly, not that gilly would be any good for gravity assists. So, raising your apoapsis with the moon can only gain you 100 m/s at most. unless you are at jool, which is an entirely different scenario with entirely different challenges. i tried that manuever a few times, i always ended up spending more in correction manuever than i would gain otherwise.

i had a similar problem that was caused by overheating. during time warp heat is handled in a different matter. not sure on the specifics, but all the heat produced would not dissipate fast enough, and as soon as i got out of time warp, the poor part would suddenly feel all that, and it would explode. using the radiator panels avoided this. if your probe has no radiator panels, i would put this as the most likely reason.

as others said, a mun to minmus transfer is basically the same as an interplanetary transfer. how do you go about it? you are around mun, you will make a prograde burn in a point of the orbit that will result in your vessel leaving tangential to mun's orbit. your burn will be powerful enough to raise your kerbin apoapsis all the way to minmus. and you may have to do a plane change somewhere along the way. and of course you must pick mun and minmus when they are in the right positions, or the manuever becomes much more expensive. well, interplanetary is the same. you can try with duna or with jool, they are the easiest to reach. use alexmoon planner to find a transfer window. when the time is right, plan a manuever node so that you will leave tangential to kerbin's orbit. have that burn be powerful enough to raise your kerbol apoapsis enough to reach the other planet. tweak a bit deltaV and exact position of manuever node to ensure an efficient transfer. now, at this point you probably didn't get an intercept yet. but you must be close. now, plan a plane change too. you can add a normal/antinormal component to your burn, or you can set another burn at the orbital nodes, which by now will be highlighted. the first is generally cheaper, the second is always easier. anyway, when your planned orbit is touching your target's orbit, and your plane change node is also nearby, then you should get a close approach marker. from there, it's easier. when you get some practice, you will also be able to eyball where your target planet will be, and make your manuever accordingly, skipping the part with the close approach marker. this will also help you with more complex manuevers it's late now. if you want, tomorrow i can post pictures

to calculate the deltaV available there is a simple equation: deltaV=Isp*g*ln(m0/mf) where Isp is the specific impulse of the engines, g is the gravity of earth (yes, always of earth; it's because of the weird way Isp is defined), m0 is the current mass of the rocket, and mf is the empty mass. g can be easily approximated to 10 So, when I am in map view and not focusing view on any specific target, i can see the mass of my ship. By looking at my resources, I can also look at how many units of fuel and oxidizer i have, and each one of those is 5 kg. So, here is my really complex ship. the game has calculated 112 m/s in some weird way. it doesn't even have stages on its own, it's just that it has other ships docked, and those sometimes have stages. anyway, i take the final mass, 1732.7 tons. then i sum up my oxidizer and liquid fuel and multiply by 5 kg, i get 543.5 tons of fuel. so i subtract the fuel to the current mass; the ship will be 1189.2 tons when dry. so I can divide the initial mass with the empty mass: 1732.7/1189.2=1,457. Now I make the natural logarithm of this number, I get 0.376. I know my ship is mounting 20 wolfhounds, which have Isp 380. So I multiply the logarithm I just got by 380*10. 0,376*380*10=1430 m/s. More info on wikipedia As for TWR, I know each wolfhound is 375 kN. And 10 kN are basically equivalent to 1 ton, i.e. they will get TWR 1 on a 1 ton mass. with 20 wolfhounds I have 375*20=7500 kN = 750 tons. I just divide this by my mass, 750/1733=0.43. But then, TWR 1 (in kerbin gravity, as calculated with this method) means 10 m/s of acceleration. So my ship will accelerate 4.3 m/s2. It means that for my 360 m/s manuever, it will need 360/4.3=84 seconds. So I know to start the engines some 40 seconds before the node. now, this calculation has limits. it works for a single ship, it gets more complicated otherwise. say you go to duna, then drop a lander, recover it, and return. you may want to consider the lander fuel as dead weight in your calculation. assume your lander will use 5 tons fo fuel, you will remove 5 tons from your fuel while making the calculations. this will give a wrong result: when you are returning, that fuel will be gone, your ship will be lighter, you will have more deltaV. but it is a decent approximation, and it will underestimate your deltaV, which is always good for an approximation. you can use that value when designing your duna craft. but say that you want to go to jool, then you drop two shuttles to orbit every moon, and those shuttles will have smaller shuttles to land, and then they will rejoin your mothership, where one of them will stay, and the other, after binding two more other docked vessels, will get more fuel and go to Eeloo, while your mothership will go back to duna. what is your deltaV for your mothership? will that be enough to get to jool and back? the answer to that question is "screw that, i'll just eyeball it". and afterwards, you'll find yourself 300 m/s short, spending hours trying to find some gravity assist to make it back...

in general, the more complex your craft and your mission becomes, the less reliable is the game's calculation. nowadays i mostly run very complex stuff, and i always make my calculations by hand.

check if your liquid fuel engines are throttled on. check if you have control (an astronaut on board, or a probe core with electricity). try to press space again. try to restart the game. if all this fails, take some screenshots and post them here.

wait, i have an idea. you said you had still 1.1 twr, but with very complex crafts, the game gets unreliable. Ever since i launched the Dream Big, I had to do calculations by hand. so perhaps the game is telling you wrong and you don't have all the thrust you think you have? then again, we all spent a lot of words on how exaggeratedly big that rocket is. it should still be capable of lifting 44 tons. perhaps you are just tilting it too fast? maybe try to fly up for a longer time before turning the rocket. another option is, perhaps you discard a command pod with a particular stage and then the rocket is commanded by a pod that is oriented backwards? this is quite common, and it screws up a flight. maybe take some screenshots of the moment when your rocket starts going bad (you can reload afterwards, we don't want you to lose more money just to give us a test)

your common sense is wrong. common sense would be, if you can conceive it, then it's very likely someone made it. go to kerbalx.com and search for bike. it gives 70 results. a handful of them are true motorbikes.

ah, ok, then it's a matter of different ship designs. you clearly are equipped for aerobraking at laythe, and your manuever is indeed the most efficient if you aim for laythe capture and you can aerobrake there - only spending a few tens of m/s in course corrections. for various reasons, i never sent to jool a mothership capable of aerobraking. also, i never entered aiming for laythe; the first time i went first for tylo because i had a really heavy tylo lander and dropping it would save tons of fuel afterwards. the second time i aimed for vall because my isru-equipped ship could only land there - and i had the additional constraint of making a pass inside jool's atmosphere (which is why i had such low jool periapsis). the third time i had the kerbalism radiation problem and it was paramount to get out of the death zone as soon as possible. which highlights an additional problem with trying to standardize gravity assists: the best trajectory depends not only on the alignment of planets, but also on your specific ship and your specific mission objectives.

so, perhaps i am misunderstanding you, because i understood a jool apoapsis change at jool periapsis, which would be in the hundreds of m/s. but perhaps you are already using the first gravity assist to enter jool with the right apoapsis. anyway, my encounters are tangential to the destination's orbit, and the capture burns are fairly cheap as a result. the tylo insertion in the first picture was 120 m/s, and in the second the laythe insertion was 90, and there were no further burns after the plane change manuever one year before encountering jool. perhaps you are better than me at this and you can do even better, but from the way you describe it, i got the impression you were making expensive apoapsis-changing manuevers around jool.

if you are not limited to kerbin, the craters on Mun are excellent to jump. in particular the canyon oriented north-south is a wonderful racing circuit. tylo, with high gravity and lack of atmosphere, is great for high speed. i set my land speed records on that planet (110 m/s of rover speed before braking safely. i even went faster, but i crashed afterwards). however, at that speed you have practically no control, and a crash will break even a reinforced rover. I would not suggest minmus. the gravity is too low, you can't pick up speed. as for kerbin, i'd look at any of the mountain ranges. they are dramatic enough, there should be plenty of good drops

2) I find Laythe to be a more comfortable target for capture in the jool system. i only started using tylo after installing the kerbalism mod, because it includes deadly radiation belts stretching out to tylo. 4) you can often skip that part, and use another gravity assist. if you get the right jool apoapsis, you can also burn at apoapsis. for example, if you target tylo (and you generally want to visit there first, because you will then drop the really heavy lander) a good trajectory is a gravity assist at laythe setting your jool apoapsis at 60k km, intersecting tylo orbit. then from apoapsis you burn prograde to find tylo at the next apoapsis, and it's somewhat cheaper. in theory it would also be possible to get a gravity assist at tylo to raise periapsis, and get captured by tylo at a later orbit for a much smaller cost. in practice, you come across laythe's SoI too often for comfort, and it's difficult enough to set up the whole arrangement that i never managed it without spending more fuel in course correction than i save with the assist. for example, here - after getting captured by jool - i use a second laythe flyby to get a gravity assist putting me in intercept around tylo. total cost 200 m/s between correction manuevers and capture burn at tylo - without circularizing and here i use a tylo assist to kick me directly en route to laythe. and it has a fairly low injection cost too: with just 90 m/s i could get captured by laythe in an elliptic orbit (blue trajectory) (although, since i was using kerbalism and laythe is deep inside jool's radiation belts, i had to skip the gradual aerobraking. instead i rocket braked hard, i landed fast, i rejoined the orbiter immediately, and then i run away as fast as i could. Even then, even with heavy radiation shielding, my kerbonauts took half of a letal radiation dose) what i'm getting at is, the straightforward part is only passing in front of tylo or laythe to get captured by jool. after that there are a lot of possibilities

I don't think so, because i don't think it is possible to write a guide. gravity assists are more art than science. there is the general rule that passing in front of a body will slow you down, passing behind the body will speed you up. and the faster you are compared to the target body, the less benefit you get from a gravity assist. but aside from that, it's all dependant on specific situations. the more i get experience at using gravity assist, the less i think there can be a guide on them that's more than a collection of examples and a few general rules. I've used some very complex gravity assists in my latest mission, but i found them by spending several hours simulating all the possible options before picking the cheapest

I will add another possibility that's become possible with the last update: put the antenna somewhere else, and then use EVA construction mode to shift it where you want once in orbit. but that's the thing that doesn't add. i send 25 tons to orbit with a single twin boar, which is equivalent to 3 skippers. it should take 6 skippers in the first stage for 44 tons. i can understand using 10, but 23 seem way exaggerated for 44 tons to low orbit.

space station don't have much use mechanically. but then, very few things have; if your objective is to make money, you can wait until you get the"test parts on the launchpad" contracts. if you want science, you can just land on ever mun and minmus biome and that will unlock the tech tree. so, once established we're doing things just for cool factor, here are some things you may want to put in space stations... - antennas. may as well use it as a relay - science lab: it's not a space station if it doesn't have a lab. whether or not it has any actual use. - big fuel tanks: use the station as a resupply spot - multiple redundant science instruments. just to make clear that your station is there for science. - various shuttles for different tasks: back when i was still bothering with a career, i gave all my stations a refueling vehicle (basically a 10 ton flying tank) to service ships in distress, and a manned capsule to go pick stranded kerbonauts. - a crew escape pod. ok, there are no emergencies unless you are installing specific mods, but still, it's nice to have an escape pod. there are many mods providing life support, making stations more exciting than just putting together a lab, an antenna and some solar panels and throwing them in orbit.

no, it's not supposed to. can you post some pictures? it would help with the troubleshooting.

sorry, but your traditional ways are highly inefficient. 200k for 44 tons to orbit? I don't have a dedicated 44 ton launcher, but my donkey launch vehicle sends 25 tons to orbit for 30k, and it recovers the rocket for 20k recovered. even when i am not trying to save money, i won't spend nowhere near that much. last time i had to send a 50 ton payload to orbit i spent, like, 50k. the thing is, this is a game where you learn stuff all the time. i never had a standard launcher until after i had hundreds of hours of gameplay, because every time i had to launch something new, i would make a new launcher and it would be better than the previous one. if you stick to your traditional ways, you can never improve. that said, another thing you can try that i didn't see a suggestion for would be to start the core stage from the beginning, burning at less than 100%. this way, when you detach the boosters, the core stage already lost some fuel, and it will have a better twr. of course, that would be less efficient, but still better than any alternative if you don't nwant to massively redesign the rocket

I docked a 400 ton eve lander with a 3600 ton orbiter with a small docking port, and it worked. of course, it required autostrutting. and rcs and major precision and lots of patience for the docking. so yeah, the OP likely won't make it

Part 9: Journey before destination DREAM BIG has to find some gravity assists to reach Duna with its limited fuel. Digger 2 has to find a trajectory to reach Eeloo in less than 3 years, while saving enough fuel to land and possibly to return. Digger 1 has to make a Duna landing without control. Dolphin 2 chances a high speed atmospheric reentry. All objectives accomplished the second part of the DREAM BIG trajectory 9.1) Digger 2 pushes on to Eeloo 9.2) DREAM BIG finds a course for Duna 9.3) Dolphin 2 returns to Kerbin 9.4) Digger 1 lands on Duna

i tried first aerobraking without, and the antenna broke easily. then i used this mod, and it went really well. good job

Elements symbols have the first letter capitalized, but the second, where it exhist, is lowercase. Without this distinction it would be hard to distinguish some symbols; for example, CO could either be carbon+oxygen, or cobalt. Instead, cobalt is Co and carbon+oxygen is CO. So your list is revised as CHON Fe Si K Na Ca Al Mg Ti chemistry teacher leaves the room