Trekkin

Tell everyone else in my retirement home. Sorry, just had to make the inevitable joke. In all seriousness, I\'m going to be experimenting with the new parts for quite a while.

Oh, this is the kraken? I thought the kraken involved ships being destroyed.

I\'m trying to fly a relatively large rocket around in Kerbolar orbit, and every time I go faster than about 10 km/s, my ship becomes uncontrollable. It just starts flipping end over end, even with all engines off, and the reaction wheels in the pod just spin it around its y axis. Mechjeb also just starts it flipping, although after about half an hour it stops--off target. The bizarre thing is that it never wants to move in just one axis, but rather in all three simultaneously, in space without any external forces acting on it at all.

I\'ve been trying this. Low PE landings, using a periapsis at 0 and an apoapsis at like 10 km. If one dodges the mountains, it\'s tantalizingly doable; I just keep overusing my retros and going back the other way. Okay, I finally got it! You need a LOT of SRBs as retros, and you start deorbit burning at about 1500-2000 m or so, until your surface velocity and altitude are both near zero. It\'s tricky as heck, though, and lots of RCS helps. That said it does get you on the ground without an orientation change, albeit with enough velocity that not breaking landing gear is insanely hard.

How exactly are you trying to land this? I would think you would try not to change landing orientation at all.

Firstly, hello and welcome and all that. Secondly, more people trust your posted .craft files if you add pictures of the craft in your post. it\'s easier to believe it isn\'t a virus that way, and usually the problems with the craft can be diagnosed visually. That said, your design suffers somewhat from a high center of gravity, and from having the wheels too far back. Flipping the forward gear around 180 degrees will help, as will orienting them orthagonally to the canards and moving the canards up.

It\'s possible theoretically, but there is one very large problem with relative velocities. Put simply, the minimum orbital velocity for the Mun, even at dangerously low altitudes, is nowhere near as low as the maximum velocity wheeled landing gear can take on impact. The game, then, is to rapidly transition from the one state of affairs, that of being in orbit with ludicrously low periapsis, to the other, that being going very slowly. You\'ve also got to do it above a long, flat stretch of Mun to act as a landing strip and recieve your craft without a bump collapsing your gear or a mountain in the way of your orbit. Given that, I\'d use very high-thrust retros--possibly, for a sufficiently large lander design, SRBs, or large banks of linear RCS at minimum. Fly straight and level just over the runway, engage them, jettison them relatively soon after, and then use RCS to control the craft down. It\'s nothing I\'d want to try without computer guidance, though.

If side slip is a problem, have you tried Kosmo-not\'s method of locking your orientation at the vertical and using RCS to adjust your lateral velocity? It works for me.

I tried making a stock-only one. It\'s not strictly inverted, although nothing\'s stopping anyone from flipping over the engine pods. It does, however, have the bottom edge of the pod just above the Munar surface. The key to this, i think, is the Skycrane configuration. Everything else is kind of semantic, no? All the parts look like they take strain independent of orientation. Oh! And the eight legs. They\'re critical; the lander\'s too big to reliably land on just four. Might be what\'s wrong with Boris\' lander; multi-engine landers are heavy.

How do you mean powered descent into the Mun, Gingham? The deorbit burn around the Mun, if your transfer orbit was small enough, is trivially small. Incidentally, slapping on RCS modules wherever they fit rarely helps. They need careful positioning to maximize torque, or they just spew forth fuel to no appreciable result. As far as making your rocket more maneuverable: you\'ve overbuilt by about an order of magnitude, but that\'s apparently what appeals to you. That said, the poor maneuverability is kind of inevitable. If you\'re up for it, I\'d combine stages one and two, so that you don\'t stop burning in Kerbin orbit until your apogee is around 11 million and then circularize; it\'s easier to maneuver under power, I\'ve found, and you\'ve certainly got the capacity to make it work.

Is there any risk of the resultant rapid influx of new participants in the KSP community causing problems therein? Just playing devil\'s advocate as regards the push.

And so, with that in mind, in answer to the original question: Getting space stations into space is tricky, not only given how heavy most mods make them but because they tend to be asymmetrical. I usually mount masses on the outside of mine with decouplers all wired to the same stage such that the station and extraneous mass is close to radially symmetrical with respect to the Y axis. That way it doesn\'t so desperately want to flip over or wobble apart on launch, and I can still have any station design I like actually in space or on the Mun.

You\'ve hit upon the only really reliable way of doing it. Yes, the serial tank drain is a problem, but apparently doing it any other way requires the implementation of a more sophisticated system of part tracking, which is, as I recall, to be developed. Until then, isolating and connecting all the tanks with fuel lines is really the only way to control how they drain outside of the default.

Losing a lander leg isn\'t the worst thing in the world. Coming down on anything other than even terrain is going to put all the weight on relatively few legs anyway, unless you change descent angle and keep lateral velocity zero through extremely tricky RCS burns. That said, it may behoove you to land with less fuel, thereby reducing the lander mass and therefore the force the legs have to brake against.

I wonder if you could put two such craft on opposite sides of the debris, then turn on their engines alternately? In all seriousness, though, that\'s an awesome-looking ship. Might want to experiment with using RCS to maintain course and avoid the asymmetric instability.

With rockets, I get it; you go straight up or nearly so until you\'re out of really thick air, pitch over gradually, and burn till your apoapsis is where you want it; the ascent profile looks like an exponential curve, if you will. Planes, though, are still a complete mystery to me. How do you fly them into space most efficiently? What factors, if changed on a plane, change how it\'s flown into space? This is probably not answerable in complete depth, but anything you can tell me would be most appreciated.

Honestly, I\'m not quite sure what to think, with the pictures of it before landing so small. No offense meant; I just can\'t figure out a design I can\'t see. The lander looks really cool, though; I\'m going to have to steal the idea of moving the RCS tanks forward.

I was under the impression this was true only of landing legs, and that gear can take more horizontal velocity than vertical. Then again, I suppose one could land on gear, then deploy legs when stopped as a sort of brake.

This is somewhat harder, but doable if going from the Mun to Minmus. At least I always use more fuel coming down than going up.

I tried this. It\'s nigh impossible to get an orbit that passes through it that doesn\'t hit something on the way out.

What\'s the direction of your velocity vector relative to the ground? Landing legs need low horizontal velocity, while landing gear can\'t do a lot with vertical velocity. That said, it\'s possible to land at 0.5 m/s, which is pretty safe. I\'ve never risked 7 m/s.

I just figured Jeb spent a few weeks with carefully dropped fuel tanks to blow a trailer hitch into the Mun by carefully liquefying the rock, the better to move it around with.

So just go from point A to point B with a rover? How is this difficult? I mean, it\'s a bit boring to sit there jumping over rocks, but it\'s hardly a technically challenging task to get around on wheels.

Not since the title change, I hope. Thanks for the heads up.

I was tired of my rovers running out of fuel. So I made a bigger one. It got a bit out of hand. 22 tanks will get you pretty much anywhere you want to go on Minmus, though, and a fair way along the Mun. Incidentally, the entire launch vehicle looks like this: It\'s pretty stable to get down to your low-gravity body of choice, and it\'s designed to land tail-down, then launch and flip forwards. Once you do, it\'s fairly straightforward to maneuver as long as you use ASAS liberally and don\'t go too fast without being ready to land softly. 43 tons of lander hitting the ground at 20 m/s is not a good idea for these wheels. Anyway, have fun with it!