Trekkin

It happens every once in a while, sure. It\'s why I do my roving fast enough to pop up between chunks on my RCS.

You can do either, but I don\'t really see a reason to bother trying to tilt back. It\'s faster to just take off horizontally. Personally, I aim for the tallest hill I see, open up the throttle, and do my best Jeb impression as I reach orbit, but that\'s more of a personal preference.

Yeah, the SOI of Minmus isn\'t too hard to get within unless you can\'t get the incline right. Then again, it IS far enough out that a 0.1 degree change in incline or so can throw you off.

Landing on Minmus sans MechJeb is easier than doing so on the Mun. Given patched conics, I\'d actually rather do it manually now.

You know, having done this repeatedly, and with increasingly heavy landers/rovers, I\'m starting to think Minmus isn\'t all that hard to get to. It\'s a different set of challenges, on the whole, but by and large and easier one, I think, than the Mun, especially from a design perspective. Which bodes very well for any asteroid belts we may get in the distant future. Landing on small, light things is amazingly fun.

I believe we know the inclination to be 15 degrees. Also, what\'s the adjective for things relating to Minmus? If the Mun is Munar...

It\'s a revised version of approximately the first thing I did in 0.15 - make a little rover to skate around Minmus. I haven\'t tested it on the Mun yet, but it\'s got more than enough fuel to do less than perfect orbital maneuvering, and it\'s fairly intuitive to operate. It helps to pitch over with W after jettisoning the descent stage so your heading alterations are intuitively A and D. Skating On the pad Also, the ASAS is a huge help.

In response to your question, feature suggestions go in the development board. I\'d search first, though, to make sure someone hasn\'t suggested something similar. It might also be a good idea to wait until the flurry of 0.15-related issues dies down.

Landed and drove around for a bit, then took off and came home. My first successful horizontal takeoff in 0.15, come to think of it.

It\'s inclined, but perfectly aligned so that if you launch from a fresh save it\'s relatively easy to hit. If you\'re not aligned, burning normal or anti-normal will change your inclination. The hard part for me is the low mass. It\'s not exactly difficult, but it\'s funny getting used to the altered speeds at which your orbit changes and how long it takes to actually fall and land.

Tester firsts don\'t count, of course, at least not before release.

Two hundred and fifty tons of TNT is not a bad energy equivalent. ;D

The Squad logo, as Awaras said. Why is this in a dev log thread?

And that is why the challenge is so named. 8) Now that I think about it, the challenge may be premature without an addition: if you have video of you clipping through the Mun, your mass and velocity when you first start to clip through is also valid, since it\'d be when you\'d crash anyway. One hopes this gets fixed soon, though. The challenge just isn\'t the same without seeing the Mun-shattering kaboom.

Ah, so you had. My apologies, and you\'re on the leaderboard.

Awesome, excalibur! I\'m afraid I can\'t read the speedometer, though; what\'s your impact momentum?

This is a relatively simple challenge, albeit one that requires Mechjeb (and no other mods). Just smack into the moon with as much momentum as possible, as measured in ton-meters per second. Make Jeb proud. 8) Obviously, since we\'re relying on Mechjeb mass readings and Mechjeb goes offline on impact, some estimation may be necessary if you\'re hemorrhaging mass on your flight in, but a screenshot of a very low-altitude or post-impact screen would be ideal. Highest impact mass x surface velocity wins! So let\'s see how massive a rocket we can slam into the Mun at multiple kilometers per second, shall we? Leaderboard: 1. Excalibur, at 5196.9 m/s x 81 tons = 420,949 ton/ms-1. 2. Maltesh, at 10,464.4 m/s x , 5.6 tons = 58,600 ton/ms-1.

Thanks, everyone. It turns out it\'s not as hard as I thought to just set up a transfer orbit that gets me where i want to be in the middle of it, then circularize, which is probably the closest I\'m going to get.

Is there any way to simply move along an orbit at a different rate without changing trajectory? I always end up just behind my rendezvous targets, and can\'t find an angle at which I can burn to simply move faster.

A few things I would have wanted to know: 1. You can toggle a setting in settings.cfg to snap VAB parts vertically, so you can distribute the weight over really wide rockets with lots of nozzles better. 2. Your command module already contains a pretty good SAS system. 3. ASAS is only a control computer, not a gyroscope. By itself, it does nothing, and you only ever need one. 4. Building the biggest rocket you can isn\'t nearly as viable as building the smallest rocket you need, and lag is the universe\'s way of letting you know that. 5. The navball has the green mark without an X as your prograde vector, the one with an X as your retrograde vector, and the purple ones refer to your vector to the KSC. 6. You can click on your orbital velocity display to change it to surface velocity. This is good for landings so you can have zero lateral velocity. 7. Basic orbital mechanics. Speed up(go prograde) or slow down(go retrograde) at apoapsis to raise or lower your periapsis, respectively, and vice versa. 8. Your Kerbals bear a striking resemblance to phoenixes: born to die in fire. You will lose many of them, and can recover them by restoring persistent.sfs if you find some you particularly like. 9. As a general rule, Kerbin\'s SOI is about 80,000,000 m, and the Mun\'s about 2,000,000 m. If you see your orbit apoapsis higher than that, you probably will change SOI and orbit something else when you get there. 10. Fuel lines are your friend. Try to have as few tanks draining simultaneously as possible so you can jettison them as you go. 11. LFEs will keep their last throttle setting when you change stages away from them, but you forfeit control when you do. If you\'re trying to escape a wreck in progress, throttle down till you hit the stage you want, THEN throttle up. 12. Failure is not an option. It\'s an inevitability, and pretty fun at times. 13. You can get back from the Mun and make a safe landing on one full half-tank of fuel and a mini engine. Anything over that is very probably excessive mass, and you\'ll need more engine power at launch to account for it. 14. If you want space junk cleared, you can delete the saves folder.

I can see how it\'d have that effect. Mine is as big taking off as it is landing, and I still have considerable lag. That\'s an insanely cool rocket, though. I love the cluster SRBs.

Nice, Crass. It seems like large bundles of 4 fuel tanks on one LFE are the way forward on this.

The only thing I can really think to say is 'thanks, guys, for making a game that\'s shaping up to be everything I\'d ever wanted in a spaceflight sim via a dev process I\'m proud to support.' Oh, and of course many wishes of good luck and serendipity in coding. You guys are seriously amazing.

Same here. I could see it if the mass and empty mass were balanced against the fuel capacity, as an admittedly less than optimal solution to the processing slowdown on rockets with many parts, but as it is, why even have a fuel system at all if you\'re going to do this with it?

The only ways I know involve too much math to be useful in game. You\'d have to calculate relative speed of the faster object to the slower one (as a fraction of the orbital distance over time), relative altitude, and that\'d give you a relation of angle over time via trig.