king of nowhere

despite reading the wiki pages, i never understood much how communication works. so, i sent to minmus a probe with a HECS core. I have a level 3 tracking station. i didn't worry about communication, i don't have to relay science. and i lost control of it. now i see that probe cores, regardless of type, only reach as far as 75% the distance of minmus. ok, i have a space station coming to minmus orbit with a HG-5 high gain antenna. i was hoping this would help, as it has relay capacity. but the station is now two-thirds along the way, and still i can't control the probe. I also will send a new module with the strongest RA100 antenna to the space station as soon as i have it unlocked, but the probe itself has no relay antenna, at this point i'm not sure it will be able to use the station as communication bridge. did i lost control of my probe forever? or getting a relay antenna close to them will let me recover it?

well, i always said that any sufficiently advanced technology can used as a weapon. you are further proving my point. as for myself.... i am now dealing with the shortcomings of the previous mission. red part was supposed to bring a tourist to orbit and back, and it did its job. yellow part was supposed to rescue two astronauts stranded in mun orbit, in two different crafts. and i rescued the first, all right. then i went into an intercept with the second. only then did i realize the second stranded astronaut was orbiting the mun in the opposite direction. matching speed would require more deltaV than i had. i stil made the intercept, to take control of the astronaut. this gave me the jetpack for additional deltaV. but even so, it was very expensive to rescue him. though in retrospect i should have done just that. so i decided, instead of rescuing that astronaut, i would just use its jetpack to move to a kerbin intercept, from which i would deorbit by gravity drag. turns out, astronauts are far more fragile than i assumed. after lots of trial and error, i found out that a 66.5 km periapsis is the lowest i can go without killing him. it drags about 50 m/s of orbital speed. so, in a dozen atmospheric passages or so, i will be in low orbit. from there i can try to finish the deorbiting (i read that it is possible. i also will have to land without a parachute, but i already did it by accident and survived, so that is also possible) or i can stabilize the orbit and send a rescue craft. meanwhile, i discovered that another ship i sent back from mun lacked a parachute. which would not be too bad, it was mounting the spark engine and is very light, so it can just do some aerobraking and finish with some rocket braking. it could, if it had more than 60 m/s of delta/v left (isn't it marvelous to be so efficient at planning missions that i don't load any excess useless fuel? ). So, since i could not rescue the second astronaut, i decided to send the yellow part to dock with this stranded vehicle and give it some fuel, so it can land. of course, since i am so efficient at designing missions, the yellow rescue vehicle only had 200 m/s left itself. i mean, it is a perfectly reasonable safety margin, if you don't suddenly decide to change the mission. anyway, using a lot of advanced aerobraking (including inclining my ship during aerobraking to change my orbital plane without using the rockets) i managed to park in an orbit slighly lower, within a few km, than the craft to be rescued. i have 100 m/s of deltaV left. the other craft has 30 (i had to raise it from suborbital trajectory). with that budget, i must dock the two vehicles, leaving enough to rocket brake the stranded one. as that is lighter than the rescue yellow ship, i calculated it is possible. if i use no more than 30 m/s for the whole docking. 20 would be safer. but for now i have to way. yellow ship is slightly overtaking the other ship, as it orbits 7 seconds faster. and it must recover more than half the orbital lenght. it should take a couple of weeks of in-game time. as for the part that was supposed to attach with the lander, it did, all right. i eve was left with some spare fuel, so i decided to keep the pink transfer module halfway through the landing, you wouldn't want me to discard a half-full fuel tank on mun, right? too bad that tank made the lander wobbly, heavy and instable, so i crashed onto mun a couple of times before i learned to compensate enough. it didn't help that i was trying to land near the north pole, which is very rugged terrain. after going back to orbit again, the blue reentry module headed back to kerbin. the two science container are placed to the outside of the ship to provide drag and keep the ship pointed in the correct direction during aerobraking. hooray! great design! it would be great design, if one of those two containers was not a SEQ3 unit, from the breaking ground expansion: something that is extremely frail to heating. if i used two, i could just burn them in the atmosphere and keep on normally. but the other one is an experiment container, much more robust. so, if the first unit breaks, the ship becomes unbalanced, it spirals out of control, and it exposes the frail probe core to the atmosphere, destroying the ship. so, i must be very careful in aerobraking the blue module. i found a trajectory that would lose 60 m/s without destroying the ship. it is an open bet if this thing will take more time to land, or the astronaut trying it in EVA. but both those missions will be long done before the yellow craft will finally reach its mark. meanwhile i sent another probe to fulfill the survey contract, since yellow clearly could not do it. it would have been far more efficient to send such a probe to rescue the stranded vehicle, while yellow did its survey mission as planned.... i hope this is not too confusing.

yes, i could have used a swivel, or i could have added reaction wheels. i didn't because i wanted to figure out what was wrong. a well-crafted rocket should not need either. i generally accept that i'm flying an inferior rocket as long as it does the job, or that i'm flying a cumbersome payload and stability problems can't be avoided. but in this case i wanted to know. so, let me get this straight: i always considered the gravity turn a manuever to be performed, but perhaps i was wrong here. you are telling me that all rockets will capsize, no matter how well balanced they are. and that a succesful gravity turn does not entail steering along the trajectory, but accelerating at the right speed so that your rocket will capsize at the right speed to make you turn successfully? seen in that light, it makes everything clearer. i don't marvel anymore that most rockets will capsize. the fins were not there in the first design. i went through several iterations. in fact, the first attempt i made at this rocket was very much along the lines you suggest: higher TWR in the first stage, compensated by another intermediate stage higher on, and no fins. it also didn't work. in fact, the first stage almost got there, but as soon as i detached the first stage, the rocket went wild. anyway, i said i eventually did launch it with a bobcat engine.

basically, you put in the extra effort, and you have a lot of practice at it. that's how people reach excellence, usually. how do i share a rocket?

Premise: many of my rockets aren't all that great. because i am flying cumbersome payloads, or because i am trying to save money by using suboptimal engines, or because i didn't care enough to make it better when what i had was alreayd enough to get to orbit. But in all those cases, i can see why my rockets are suboptimal. i can see where the problems are. and generally i can still get them to orbit, if i have to fight with the controls along the way. which is why i was totally baffled yesterday when i made a very simple rocket, with a very simple payload, that should have a good aerodinamics and obey all the golden rules for making rockets, and it didn't work. at all. here is the rocket (i called it "save private rafnia" because rafnia was about to reenter atmosphere without a craft, i had to intercept him on the fly. though later i changed my mind and am now just trying to aerobrake an EVA stranded kerbonaut directly back from mun orbit. just for the sake of trying it) the engine at the bottom is a reliant. the cargo bay contains a probe core (i need to leave room in the capsule for taking in rafnia, after all) and 2 batteries. starting TWR is aout 1.25, a bit low but enough. still, i only get the worst effects when i picked up enough speed, so a slow start should not be a huge problem. i've tried many iterations of this simple design. the large first stage was originally split in 2, but the craft lost control when i separated the first stage. i treid removing the solar panels and add more batteries in the cargo bay. i tried fiddling with winglets. nothing to do. always this rocket capsizes. it won't do it immediately, but as i start to tilt eastward, it will gain more and more tilt. despite me pumping hard on the reactions wheels to fight that tilt. it generally reaches 45° at 250 m/s, and by the time it's at 500 m/s it's flying almost horizontally, well before getting high enough for orbit. i suppose i could have fixed it with a couple of reaction wheels, and i would likely do that on other flights. but i didn't want to do it in this case, because i wanted to figure out why this thing wasn't working. in the end i only could make it work when i made a larger base and used a bobcat as first stage engine. and since i was there, i also split the large first stage in 2, with a reliant for second stage. the craft became very stable this time, getting to orbit with nothing to do but throttling the engines. incidentally, it also refused to steer, but at least it stabilized at 45 degrees, so it could enter orbit with a decently optimized trajectory. adding a couple reaction wheels would have been cheaper, anyway. i would like to understand why such a simple, streamlined rocket had such huge aerodinamic issues. because all i thought i knew about rockets is telling me that this thing should fly like a dream; or, in the worst case, it should have problems steering but it should stay pointed in the right direction.

i was trying to visit all mun biomes, where i discovered some discrepancies on my sources. the wiki says there are 17 biomes. however, the map included in the page only lists 15. and after many orbits, i found 16. to complicate matters, my game is in italian, and while some names have obvious correspondences, some are not clear. the map is missing farside basin and lowlands. i am fairly sure i got the lowlands. i am missing farside basin. so, can anyone point where is it? thanks

yes, because you are a better engineer than i am * but i've totaled enough hours and built enough crafts that i can't really be called a beginner anymore (except for some specialized parts of this game, like building and flying plane, that i didn't spend much time on). hence, if i cannot make a fire and forget rocket, it means it's difficult. hence, i would not suggest it to one who has problems with the basics. let him learn to make passable rockets before he can make excellent rockets. * actually, i've never tried to make such a rocket. but all the ones i ever made needed corrections. then again, i like to fulfill as many objectives as possible with as few rockets as possible, making them as cheap as possible. this means i often intentionally make a worse rocket to save some money. and i often have huge, complex, often asymmetric payloads. as long as it saves money. i'd be really surprised if it was possible to make those payloads fly themselves without significant cost increase.

i hae to disagree on that point. a rocket holding prograde won't make a good gravity turn automatically, not unless it is excellently manufactured. most real rockets, in my experience, will fall down too fast, and fail to enter orbit, if they are not given manual correction.

mostly, yes. i'm sure different rockets would have slightly different optimized launch profiles, but there's no way to optimize so much without complex calculus. but yes, you should turn your rocket. this is the most efficient way to launch. we're talking about a deltaV saving of over 1000 m/s over launching straight up. consider this: when you raise your orbit (which you have done in the tutorial, burning prograde) you take a curved trajectory. you don't burn up and circularize. launching is a similar movement to raising your orbit, so it would stand to reason that you'd need a similar trajectory as for rendez-vous and docking, i'm not sure about tools, but the game allows you to do it. have you done the docking tutorial? the manuever for rendez-vous is the second shown there: you have fixed your orbital plane, now you need to raise (or lower) your orbit, you need the right time. but the game helps you there, because it shows you the intercept and it lets you find the exact moment where you have to make your transfer burn. and then once you are close to the target you burn retrograde to the target (be sure that your speed is set on "target" and not on "orbit") until your speed is reduced to zero i could give more detailed instructions, but your questions were rather vague and i don't understand exactly what you want to know.

or, without modding, you can salvage the station by sending a new module whose sole purpose is to provide some docking ports with the right size and orientation. you attach it to the working clamp-o-tron senior, and this module will include several clamp-o-trons of different sizes, oriented correctly. this happened to me too. i think it happened to everyone. this game's major flaw is that it really lacks explanations. you have no way of knowing that docking ports of different sizes don't attach without trying it, and likely scrapping a mission.

I've flown this monstruosity of a composite ship. single launch. it wobbles even worse than it looks like. it wobbled within the fairing! and it was unbalanced at launch despite being symmetric! during launch i always had a skipper engine going at 100%, only to provide stability; and still, it wasn't enough to keep the thing stable. wait a bit before judging me, i had reasons. this is actually a masterpiece of launching multiple crafts and objectives on a single rocket. and i even managed to bring it safely to orbit without exploding it two times out of three. have to state some premises. - i have a reusable lander in mun polar orbit that needs resupplying - i have two rescue contracts for astronauts in mun equatorial orbit - i have a bunch of tourists so, i launch the whole thing in orbit. then i detach between green and yellow. red part contains a tourist that paid for kerbin orbit. so i brake a bit (periapsis at 65 km) and detach red. yellow raises periapsis back above atmosphere. red tourist lands safely, contract fulfilled while only adding one ton on mass in LKO, and 10 m/s of deltaV. yellow docks back to the main ship, fulfilling the contract to dock two ships in kerbin orbit. yellow then goes to mun, on equatorial intercept. it has 3 seats, one is a tourist that paid for mun orbit, so i get that contract. i rescue the two stranded astronauts, get them back. coming back from mun, i aerobrake into a high inclination orbit. i then fulfill a survey contract i had pending (there is a thermometer on board). overall, yellow fulfills 5 contracts. it has a mass of roughly 5 tonnes, including fuel. pink+blue+green go to mun on a polar intercept. they dock with the reusable lander. pink is the transfer module, it has plenty of extra fuel. after docking i transfer the fuel to the lander, then i ditch it. green is a small, light piece with 2 new science instruments that i just unlocked that i had to include in the reusable lander. it will stay docked forever. blue is four tourists that paid to land on mun, plus some fixed experiments and a science container. i land on mun, do all the science, and put it in the science container. i lift off in orbit. then i detach blue from the lander, and fly it back with the bare minimum of fuel, recovering the four tourists and the science. all together, this thing fulfills a dozen contracts, in four different places, while leaving the mun lander refueled and refurbished, without wasted effort. and it only costed 80thousand , including the launcher you may notice a lack of solar panels along the thing. yes, i forgot to put them. i had to reload and launch again (and that's why i can give a 2 successful launches out of 3). i also forgot to put the docking port on the yellow piece , so i had to make a small, simple probe with a docking port to fulfill that specific contract (it was so small, i launched the whole thing with 3 spark engines in the first stage). but my next contract is making a minmus flyby, so i'll just send the diminutive probe there to save time. the diminutive probe costed 3300 , launcher included, so still a good show of efficiency. of course, i could have flown multiple rockets for the different pieces. but i like it more this way.

actually i reached over 55 km once i made my plane lighter. i got to reach 600 m/s at 17 km, at which point the engine shuts down because it's too outside its optimal parameters, but by now the atmospheric drag is fairly low, so i keep the speed, and my wings are large enough to keep providing lift. so i keep climbing to 50 km, until i fall back and the engine reignites. it feels like it could be a bug, but it's reproducible. EDIT: it must definitely be a bug, because if i reload a save once the engine has stopped, it won't keep climbing forever, but it will stop pretty soon. even then, i can get to 20 km, which is more reasonable

not sure about that. certainly i advise docking with ports. i don't know exactly how big is your mining operation. from the pictures, though, it seems one of your towers is not bigger than one of mine, and i got 3 towers connected. the problem with bounces is that the game can have small mistakes in accuracy, and those small mistakes can cause a part to be slightly below ground level. this will make the component recoil with a lot of force. my mining operation also tended to jump whenever i selected it, but only slightly. i think being docked does indeed help, because the whole complex bounces as one single unit. but that's about as far as my expertise on the game engine goes, someone more experienced can give better advice here.

i take the chance for an additional, related question. i still have some survey contracts to fulfill that require height above 19 km. is there a practical, reliable way to get this high with only the weasley or juno engine? or should i just fulfill them with a satellite?

i had the same problem with the drill capsizing my mining operation. on mun, even. what i learned from that is to put 2 drills, one on each side, so their respective pushes cancel each other. you can also use 3 or 4, always symmetrical. as for the parts moving, i put my base pieces on wheels, with landing struts. with the wheels i would move the piaces from the landing zones to where i would connect them. then i extended the struts. when extended, the struts would lift the base so the wheels would not touch the ground anymore. never had any stability problems after that.

since i had a decent flyer, i decided to also try landing. the thing can fly at low speed, with the tanks mostly empty. i managed to hit the landing strip many times, at around 30 m/s. sounds pretty good. always, though, the plane bounced in some bad way and crashed. my best attempt (before i decided to do it with the parachutes) ended with me losing a wing and the engine. well, my stint with flying wasn't all that bad, but i think i'll stick to driving rovers in the future. though now that i think about it, i may make an exception to explore the worlds with atmospheres nice. only one thing is not clear: how many m/s is mach 1? on earth it is about 300, but this game has some slightly different physical constants.

i even managed to bring it to 550 m/s, at lower altitude (around 800). after that, if i climb slowly i can keep the speed up to 10 km, before it slows down again. with fuel mostly spent it goes a few km higher, and i even managed to reach 17,4 km and fulfill a contract above height (which i would do with satellites otherwise). but still, despite lower drag, the engine does not provide the same push higher. i assume it's not getting enough air in the thin atmosphere; i wonder if more air intakes and larger wings would let me fly faster and higher?

actually that's wrong. the extra height you gain is not caused by oberth effect (well, not much). it's simply that the further you go from the planet, the weaker its gravity, so it takes less thrust to gain an equal amount of height. in other words, the amount of energy needed to gain the same altitude is lower.

messing around with things is the best way to learn.... but only if you can figure out what you're doing wrong. if you have a bad plane, and you realize you have a bad plane, but you have no idea what you're doing wrong, you can't fix it. the chances of fixing it by tampering randomly are very tiny. well, evolution works like that, tampering randomly and keeping whatever works better. but evolution got 3 billion years; i'd get bored much earlier. thanks to all your advice, i cobbled together a flyer that i would hazard to call "passable" https://imgur.com/a/pWZrvHL it goes at 300 m/s at 10000 meters of altitude with its single engine. the sceince instruments are into the cargo bay. it is stable and will keep flying straight without me tampering the touchboard all the time. i can set game speed at 4x while flying it, which makes survy missions much less annoying. i still didn't manage to take off before the end of the landing strip, though. and it accelerates very slowly - i guess because the engine cannot take in enough air at low speed. i still don't think i could land this thing without the parachutes (also in the cargo bay). but at least making survey missions with this thing is not a chore EDIT: now it's dropped to 200 m/s and 7500 m, and i can't get back again, nor i have any idea why it won't go as high or fast as before. and we really need a headscratching emoticon. EDIT2: now i did figure it out: i forgot to refold the wheels (we also need a facepalm emoticon)

something else that i learn. i was looking at the reputation percentage, and i got the impression that it was the ratio between gained and lost reputation. so even just losing a tiny bit of reputation would affect the percentage badly. so i was trying to lose nothing, ever. now i also know why my reputation still is not climbing as fast as i'd hope. great. when you use a rocket engine it is written clearly how much it consummes, how much thrust it will provide, how many seconds it will work with the available fuel. but for planes? nothing. there aren't even any tutorials on them in the stock game (not that the tutorials on rocketry ever taught me anything i didn't knew, besides how to do it in the game). i have no flippin idea how many air intakes are needed. i saw my plane losing performance at high altitudes, slowing down, i thought "maybe that's because the engine can't get enough air" and put more intakes. so, another good thing to know. as for the command pod... it looks less aerodinamic than the plane command pod, the plane command pod looks more thematically fit for a plane... /headscratch... again, the game provides no informations. is there any way to learn those things besides asking in the forum?

that's great news! now i know how to avoid boring contracts nice, i wasn't aware of that part. thinking about the phisics of it, i now see it should be obvious. a single one got me to 300 m/s in the previous version of the plane. i tried adding 2 to see if i could gain elevation, with no avail. in fact, it barely goes faster than it did with 1. i know ailerons are meant to be attached to the back edges of the wings, but i can't seem to do it with the editor. I never considered using a radially-mounted tailfin in its place, but it sounds promising. you often mention that i should have less drag. well, this iteration of course drags a lot, since it has those 2 big engines on the wings. but the previous one only had the engine on the back, so it should have had a low drag. i mean, i can't see how to possibly reduce drag significantly when i already have a plane as streamlined as possible. i still needed at least 150 m/s to stay in the air (actually, i needed 150 to fall down in a controlled manner: 200 to keep elevation). besides removing those two engines on the wings, how do i reduce drag further? strange. i rebooted my career after losing the previous one to an accidental overwrite, and i never lost reputation once. yet, i keep getting those "survey" contracts. in my previous career, i had a sensibly lower reputation due to killing jeb and letting the game autosave. and yet i stopped getting survey contracts much earlier. anyway, that's also good to know. tomorrow i will try to fix my plane and see what i can do. and probably i will appreciate them some more, though i doubt i will ever like having to fly across half of kerbin just to take a measure. thanks!

maybe in eve gravity the rover is too heavy for the wheels? i had a similar issue, with a rover tested on kerbin that worked perfectly on lower gravity worlds.

i will premise that i don't like making planes or piloting them. not to mention, i know them less than rockets. i would skip that part of the game entirely. unfortunately, i keep getting those "measure something at those coordinates, below altitude X". and i can't do it with a satellite. i am afraid refusing those contracts will drop my reputation, and i feel using cheats to complete them would be, you know, cheating. so, i tried to make a few airplanes to fulfill those contracts. they fly just well enough to do the task. i finally decided i would like to improve the design so, here the thing i'm currently trying to fly: brace yourself. https://imgur.com/a/Qigr20P it has several problems: - it won't take off on its own, no matter how fast i go. it needs to reach the end of the lane, and use the drop there to be in the air. - i need to push up all the time or it will spontaneously angle down. i assume it is a matter of center of mass and aerodinamic push, but when i tried to center the wings better on the center of mass, the plane became much more unstable. - the bar on top of the plane is supposed to control vertical aptitude. i know in real planes it won't go there, but it will be attached to the tail rudder, and also as an additional surface behind the wings. but i can't seem to be able to attach it there. that was really the only place the game let me put the thing. - the plane pulls to the right, so that continuous lateral turning is required. i can't figure out why, since everything is symmetric. - it won't go above 8000 m of altitude. precisely, it will move in a sinusoid, where it goes up to 8000, then it starts falling down to 4000, until it finally manages to get enough lift to stop the fall and start climbing again, in a new cycle. by the way, the parachutes are my mark3 landing gear. i activate them in mid-air, and land in one piece, if not exactly elegantly. they are a marked improvement over my mark2 landing gear (eject pilot with own parachute, lose plane; improved in that i can recover the plane) and my mark1 landing gear (crash on the ground, hope pilot survives; improved in that now pilot survives every time) . yes, i can't land. i assume the first step to land would be having a plane that can fly at 50 m/s to touch down on the landing strip gently enough. none of my planes could ever stay in the air below three times that speed. but i don't need to learn to land. if i could manage to go around half the world at a decent speed without fighting my plane all the time along the way, i would be satisfied. also, since i'm asking, is there any way to make the game stop offering me those contracts? i really don't like flying.

i learned to dock without using the RCS at all. after that, doing it as i already knew was easier than learning a new way. i tried the new way, and couldn't make it work.

wow! it's very rare that i see someone making more math spreadsheet for a game than i do. and it even turned out to be useful. i was expecting the differences to be small, since the two opposite effects mostly cancel each other, but picking the right insertion can save upwards to 20% deltaV for the trip. could you put the calculation sheet available for download? i would like to try it for the various moons too.