hubbazoot

1. My current lander has 5 cans of RCS, but that\'s because it\'s also designed to do a rendezvous. 2. Pics of the reinforced landing strut?

Orbit is too hyperbolic to fit in the picture. Speed was 16km/s when I left the kerbin system. Do I win? Stock, btw. 100th post. Woop.

Kosmo-not, I feel a lot the same about it as you do. As an engineer, I feel my goal is to achieve the desired result with the bounds that are currently set in place. So, if the bounds that are set in place don\'t allow for an autopilot system, I don\'t use them. Most of the time I want to talk to someone, whilst playing, I just leave the game running at 1x speed. I have yet to 'role-play' a mun flight mission, where I don\'t time lapse at all (I\'m planning on doing that over the summer). If a game has a built-in 'autopilot' system, I will use it. I use the ASAS because it\'s good at something that would take a LOT of effort to do myself, and it\'s an 'approved' methodology.

Things like this that add more to challenge is nice, and I haven\'t messed with it yet. From the experience I\'ve built as a pilot, some instrumentation that doesn\'t exist in what I fly (real world) would make my job remarkably easier. My general thoughts on it are that if someone else can do it using only the base game, I can do it using only the base game. I\'m very intensely competitive, and I\'m hoping to get every dime I can out of every version release, which is partly why I\'m so excited for this next version. I may be releasing a plugin myself if the ability isn\'t implemented into the base game to my satisfaction, mostly for a 'fair' rover system.In general, I was talking about both plugins and parts. Most likely, I will be looking into the save synchronization plugin for basic multiplayer here, for additional challenges, etc.

So, plugins have become a large part of KSP, but my friends and I have a tendency to view them as 'cheating.' I have used mods in the past, mainly looking for the munoliths, but that was only sparingly and the only parts I really used were the cart and the munolith detector, and that\'s because KSP currently lacks wheels and a form of 'electricity.' Here\'s our reasoning. 1) The impulse of the thrusters and thrust/weight ratios with the plugin parts tend to be significantly higher. 2) The part strength of addon parts is significantly higher, usually, and by several orders of magnitude. 3) Plugins that make orbiting 'easier' or instantaneous take all the challenge out of the game; the entire purpose of the game is to pilot the ship to its goal, and having something do it automatically is flat-out cheating. Now, I don\'t want to start a flame war, and I don\'t want people getting all sorts of ludicrous insane about this, but I\'m curious as to what other people think about mods.

The vertical ascent gauge at the top of your screen will give you your vertical height. Remember that it\'s on a logarithmic scale: Each 'notch' accounts for more units as the gauge moves further and further in either direction. The number displayed over the nav ball is your absolute speed. So, for ballparking it.. your absolute speed minus your vertical speed will give you a rough idea of how much horizontal speed you have. (It\'s actually a square root sum, more complicated). My method of landing is that I try to kill off as much 'horizontal' speed when I start my descent as soon as possible. If the x on the nav ball that shows the opposite of which direction I\'m going (i.e. when you\'re facing \'backwards\'. I\'ll call it the anti-path), I try to get that centered on 90 degrees (or as close to) as soon as possible. Once I have it just about there, I center my ship on the anti-path marker and decelerate. My general rule is speed=(Altitude-3000)/100 as you descend. So if you\'re between 10k and 9k, try to shoot for coming down no faster than 90m/s. This will leave you just about stopped when you get to the surface. As you have more and more vertical speed killed off, the anti-path marker will start to 'drift' towards one side. I always burn at twice the angle it is away from the nav ball (sometimes more) to re-center it back on top of the ball. If the anti-path is at 80 deg, I\'ll do a deceleration burn at about 70 deg. For the final little bit of the path, I tend to lock on my SAS unit and then 'helicopter' down; using the same method as above, I\'ll leave the SAS on but still try to point the ship towards twice the angle of my anti-path. I get the throttle adjusted to the point where my rockets are having me maintain speed, and then I\'ll increase or decrease throttle as needed to adjust my speed. The RCS units tend to come in handy for killing off any remaining horizontal speed when you get down into the >20m/s range. When you get really good with the throttle control, you can get it adjusted so that the main engines are pushing just hard enough to maintain your current height. I\'ve gotten to the point that I usually do this, and then use the RCS thrusters to 'push' me down to the surface. Using this method, I\'ve managed to land on the surface of the mun at 0.1m/s. Also, besides this, having LOTS of landing gear helps; they\'re pretty brittle. I tend to have about 3 per fuel tank. My munar lander uses only the small rockets as they\'re a good deal easier to control.

I split this post up into sections to make it a little easier to 'take in.' Warning, walls of text. The planet of Kerbin orbits in such a way that taking off into the east is easiest as the planet\'s surface will help 'launch' you forward. This is because with reference to the poles, the planet\'s surface is always moving about 140m/s to the east. The top of the atmosphere of kerbin is at 69100m. If the lowest point of your orbit is not above this height, you will have some atmospheric drag which will slow your ship back down. So, to help you understand basic orbiting... think of an orbit this way. If you\'re throwing a tennis ball, it\'ll fly a short ways before gravity succeeds in pulling it back to the ground. As you throw the tennis ball harder and harder, the tennis ball will have more and more horizontal travel distance before it falls back to the ground. If you throw it hard enough, you can get the tennis ball to fly horizontally far enough that the curvature of the planet starts to come into play, and it\'ll 'fall' at the same rate that the ground is 'falling away' from it. So, as you have more horizontal speed, you can 'fall' around the planet a little further and further. If you have enough horizontal speed, you\'ll 'fall' so fast that you\'ll actually ascend. You\'ll have the most effect on your orbit by either facing directly parallel to your path, or directly perpendicular to it. If you are facing along your path, the two key points are the Apoapsis and the Periapsis (Ap and Pe). These are the two key points for accelerating or decelerating your ship to have the most effect on your orbit. If you accelerate at the Ap, you\'ll increase the height of your Pe and get a rounder orbit. If you accelerate at your Pe, you\'ll get a more oval (more eccentric) orbit that will extend further away from the body you are orbiting. If you decelerate (or accelerate backwards) At your Ap, your orbit will become more eccentric and your Pe will decrease height. If you decelerate at your Pe, your Ap will decrease height. In general, acceleration at x will increase the height of y. Decelerating at x will decrease the height of y. If you do a burn perpendicular to the path of your orbit, you will be able to change the path the orbit goes around the planet. If you are initially orbiting the equator, you can make your orbit shift towards the north by accelerating north. The same effect can be achieved by pointing south. Your orbit\'s path ahead of you will shift north or south, respectively, while the orbit path behind you will shift in the opposite direction (Newton\'s second law: equal and opposite reaction). WATCH YOUR AP AND PE HEIGHTS AS THEY CAN 'SLIDE AWAY' FROM YOU IF YOU ARE NOT ALWAYS PERPENDICULAR TO THE PATH OF YOUR ORBIT. A completely round orbit is almost impossible to achieve in KSP as there are slight rounding errors that will always take effect. Although, in all practicality, you can get the high and low points of your orbit within 5% of each other. Make small changes, it doesn\'t take much to make a large effect when you\'re in space. Remember, there are no 'reactive forces' in space, such as drag and friction. If you accelerate, you\'ll accelerate until you quit applying thrust.

(the other dot is station alpha with SRII on it\'s tail.) this is about as close as I can get, docking could be tough! ;D If you get within a KM and relatively close speeds, that\'s close enough to power your way in and then use RCS to do the fine navigation.

Because nobody has been able to build ANYTHING to get ANYWHERE using stock parts... :

I do think the poles are the best alternative to a dry lake bed, 100% smooth and level, not a single bump. It\'s just getting the rover there Now time to design my Advanced Land Speed Record machine and associated polar delivery vehicle and see if I can trump 300m/s! I\'ve found that small canards mounted in pairs above each wheel, and on Damned\'s rotatrons allows you to control the downforce on each axle individually - helps massively with stability! The terrain has been my big downfall. Time to try this.

There\'s a threshold for objects approaching kerbin. They will 'vaporize' if they re-enter the atmosphere when they are not the focus ship.

Remember that caps lock will toggle precision flying mode. This helps, but yes it is a constant dance.

That\'s usually when I start my 'straight in' phase.

@Mastere: The speed run I did was using tosh\'s cart and all stock parts aside from that. I had a single fuel canister with a large engine on the back, and then two of the advanced fins for stability.

I only used one tank and one booster, not very long of a buildup. The problem I was having is that the surface of kerbin is too rough for this (we need a dry lakebed ;P ). Usually, during the end of the burn I\'d accumulate enough force for the cart to gain lift, and then I\'d panic and crash instead of just gliding back down all anakin-style. I had runs where I was reaching speeds of 220 m/s, but every single one of those ended in tears because of this problem.

Well said, sir. Oh, in reply to the original post: After I did a little more plunking around, I wouldn\'t recommend having the PE of the orbit closer than 69100 to Kerbin at all. I had some PE\'s that were just inside that, and I was losing a couple hundred meters every orbit. At that rate, it may not take long to actually have them get completely sucked in.

Using only the cart, I got up to 143 m/s, sustained and stable. I think I can beat that, though.

Fix\'d, stupid sites being clever.

'Originally built as a placeholder for a demonstration mock-up of a rocket...'

Looks like you\'re awfully still. Do you think your spaceship knows which way to go?

Nailed it.

Very possible. It can actually less to a lot of orbital clutter.

I\'d use the word sporadic over eccentric, because eccentricty is a matter of roundness. So, less eccentric orbits are more sporadic.

The orbit must be retrograde so that you 'fall' back to Kerbin instead of going faster than the Mun and leaving the system.