Temstar

What I recommend is to have the docking system for the rover to be top down instead of horizontal. Even if you tested it to work on Kerbin by say, placing a rover on the runway, drive it off the runway, place the miner on the runway and then drive the rover back onto the runway to dock with it, even if the test work there's no guarantee that it will work on the Mun as 1/6 gravity will cause the suspension on the rover to be compressed to a different degree. A vertical docking system (particularly if your docking thing is connected to a base by truss) means that you can build the docking port to be higher than the rover's top docking port on Kerbin. Then on the Mun just drive the rover underneath, retract landing legs and let the docking ports "fall" down on top of the rover: But still, if you really want a horizontal docking system it will work too using the same method: Not sure why you would want a rover that's both a rover and a fuel shuttle, I have a difficult time as it is trying to land large rovers horizontal. For moving Kethane offworld I prefer to use a dedicated tanker rocket. However in order to make use of one you need to come up with a system to be able to move landed tanker rockets: You can read more about the above systems and how to setup matching docking port height for surface docking at: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/50685-Modular-Base-Creation-Kit http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/48876-The-art-of-modular-base-building For Jool system, I say Bop or Pol. Tylo is out of the question. Laythe has very little land and the atmosphere causes difficulties in pin point landing. Vall's surface gravity is slightly too high to be worth while setting up a large mining operation.

Yes you can do this stock. 1. Get a Kerbal out on EVA, get him right up to the capsule holding the reports 2. Right click on capsule -> Take Data 3. Either enter the target capsule, or fly up against it and right click -> Store Experiments

Mun stations are excellent places for mobile labs or propellant depot. Instead of having to do an Apollo style mission for each landing site, you could design a re-usable Mun lander purely for shuttling between LMO and the surface. A tiny spacecraft purely designed to return samples from LMO and the station becomes the centre of activity for these two crafts and any incoming tanker rockets. Here's my setup at the moment. The little Mark 1 capsule with it's tiny SM is the sample return craft. The big lander carries all the experimental kit and does trips down to the surface. And in the event that I send a Kerbal out on a one way MMU powered trip to a biome away from the landing site the one man lander underneath detaches to go down and get him back.

I like to think I specialise in big interplanetary missions involving motherships and multiple landers: But people probably remember me more for the launch vehicles and base kit.

It's absolutely critical that you make good use of mountain top locations to shave off delta-V requirement. A mountain top launch could cut something like 5000m/s off the requirement compared to a seal level launch. Imaging designing a rocket with 7500m/s of delta-V for your payload, then imagine designing another rocket that could lift that whole vehicle into LKO. How huge would that bottom rocket be? Instead of trying to come up with a solution for 5000m/s, you're better off designing a surface roaming stage for your 7500m/s rocket so that once it lands, it can relocate itself to a mountain on wheels. See the thing is, it's easy to put downmass onto Eve's surface, it's hard to take stuff back. If you want to take sample of both surface and ocean you're better off dropping people down on a rover, drive to the ocean, take sample, drive back to the mountain top to meet with your return vehicle; rather than try to design a return vehicle with 13,000m/s of delta-V to launch from the coast line. Here is an old manned Eve return mission in did using the rover concept: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/30909-Two-men-Eve-landing-and-return-%28image-heavy%29

Are they getting rid of the old landing legs entirely? If the new springy landing legs have some kind of "disable suspension" option then this construction method will still work just by switching entirely to the new type of leg.

Yes retrograde orbit insertion cost slightly more delta-V than prograde since you're paying that angular velocity twice landing and lifting off. But the rotation of the Moon/Mun is so slow that the amount is very marginal. The reason why Apollo went for a retrograde orbit mission profile is so that in case service module engine failed to fire behind the moon to place them in lunar orbit, the moon will slingshot them back to Earth. Even small burns using the lunar module engine will place the craft back onto the re-entry corridor if they are not already on free return trajectory. If you try to insert around Mun/Moon in prograde orbit and your service module engine fail to fire, then the spacecraft will get a prograde slingshot and be thrown into a solar orbit. For the Apollo spacecraft that will be fatal.

Yes TWR becomes less important the more horizontal your rocket becomes since the more horizontal the less loss due to gravity drag. Put it this way, it's not so much "upper stage need less TWR", instead it's more "upper stage doesn't need as many engines since it's thrusting sideways". By fitting less engines to the upper stage (the part of the rocket that you can get away with that sort of thing) you decrease the weight of the upper stage without hurting the performance much which results in both smaller stages underneath/around it, and bigger payload to orbit since the dry weight of that upper stage is now lower.

With objects that long does it actually experience tidal stabilisation so that one end tends to point at Kerbin and other end outwards?

Injection stage as in the upper stage of a booster that puts the payload in final orbit right? I use TWR of 1.2 at the start of the stage burn but you can actually do <1 TWR, it's just trickier to circularise.

100 tons to 122km? Nova is designed to lift 110 tons to 75km orbit, so it's probably close, are you able to use some delta-V on the payload? Alternatively just use Supernova: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/33381-0-20-2-Zenith-rocket-family-%28modernised-for-0-20-x-with-perfect-subassembly%29

Yes for that you need to disable the fuel flow from the rover's fuel tank. Using up the fuel in the rover's tank causes CoM shift and will unbalance the ship. Having to bring the rover down fully fuelled means that you need to do some sort of refuelling as it doesn't have enough fuel for a one shot trip directly to the surface. Either keep the rocket stage in LKO and refuel that rocket, or refuel the lander stage in Mun orbit before going for deorbit burn. Also, as a rule of thumb it's a good idea to do your deorbit burn from a low orbit. If I were to bring that rover to the surface I would go for a 20-30km orbit above the Mun surface, refuel to full by sending a tanker to meet it and then perform the powered landing.

Some pieces can be pretty top heavy, that orange tank for storing fuel is one. You can still drive the rover with it on top, you just have to be gentle when accelerating, braking and cornering. The rover does have a 1.25m SAS onboard and I find turning SAS on helps in keeping the rover level.

Unfortunately there's no clear formula for dividing up the stacks. However do realise that the stacks are not suppose to be divided evenly. The centre stack should have much more than 22% of the total fuel since: It has bigger engines, so it can carry more fuel for a given TWR It needs less TWR, since it's an upper stage I think generally Zenith family core stage has around a TWR of 1.2 - 1.3 at the start of the core stage burn. This results in a TWR curve of something like: Ignition: 1.7 1st booster pair separation: 1.6 2nd booster pair separation: 1.5 3rd booster pair separation: 1.2 The reason for this is that first and second pair of boosters are used for the vertical climb stage where engines are fighting gravity and drag so they need good TWR. Once you cut loose the 2nd pair of boosters the air is pretty thin and you start gravity turn, by the time the last pair of boosters burn out you are getting close to horizontal (so minimal gravity loss) and in near vacuum. With both gravity drag and air drag near zero you can then finish the climb to orbit at a leisurely pace. Having a low TWR for final stage means you're not lugging as many engines up to the final orbit (so more payload) and the gentle TWR means it's easier to achieve circular orbit. Say we aim for core stage TWR of 1.2 at separation for your rocket. That means core stage + payload is around 276 tons. With a 138 ton payload you are left with 138 tons of rocket. So minus the weight of your engines and guidance systems and you are left with the target wet weight of fuel tanks.

Well, if you know 78% of your lift off thrust comes from the outer ring of engines all that's left to figure out is how many engines/boosters. Basically the idea is more is better. The more the booster you have the smaller each slice of the rocket equation will be. However you don't want to make your rocket to be too complicated so I stick with 6-8 boosters in a ring.

There is, I discuss it here in this tutorial: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/48876-The-art-of-modular-base-building It's basically a relationship between landing struts and docking port. If you consistently place them in this way they are guarantee to line up without even having to test.

Balancing asymmetrical truss load is always a problem and there's no easy solution other than trial and error. If you can't get your particular load to work properly then I would recommend delivering the truss in an extra load and double up on the odd pieces. You'll just have to do one more launch and get rid of the extra pieces from tracking station once it's landed.

Hmmm, so hab module is in place and you want to get the crawler out from underneath it? You have to click on one of the docking ports underneath and use the "undock" option while the hab module's legs are extended. If that's not yet I must be misunderstanding something, show us a screenshot.

Sure why not. In fact even if I don't I sure someone would. It's pretty easy to design new modules that are compatible of you follow that tutorial.

Not to mentioned toppled over and probably covered in a layer of dust due to the ascent stage taking off, so it would be much much harder to find. They started planting the flag further away from the LM starting from 12.

Hmmm, at first I was going to say "what's the point" since each piece of the rocket to be assembled have to be launched from Kerbin, might as well assemble the pieces in orbit. But then I thought more about this and you do have a point. Say for sample we have a mountain top base on Eve for launching harvested Blutonium and colonists. Instead of having two classes of rockets one for people and one for refined nuclear fuel, we could just have one rocket designed to lift X tons back into orbit and then have two different sets of payload modules lying around. Then depending on the need we'll assemble the payload module on top of the rocket, hoist it up to the vertical and launch. If nothing else, it will at the minimum look really cool, I mean: I can think of two says - one we use the landing legs as lifts, since each leg is only so long the hoist will have to be done in many stages. Alternatively we could construct a rocket powered lift.

Actually no, why would it? It's not like in a 180° burn you're burning retrograde at the start or something. All that burn is prograde so you're still converting 100% of your delta-V to prograde acceleration that you need, gravity is just doing the work for you to bend your path so as you reach escape velocity just as you happen to hit the correct ejection angle. The only difference is that other than the very start of the burn you're losing out progressively more and more on Oberth effect as your orbit widens. Although I don't have the calculation I don't think that loss in Oberth effect is going to cancel out more than double the Isp compared to chemical engines.

One thing that seem to help with the steering is to lock the centre two wheels in straight forward direction, I find that actually improves the steering. Also you might want to turn on SAS while driving and it uses the reaction wheel to try to keep the rover level.

No it's perfectly legitimately, in fact real life missions have been planned using this type of "spiral orbit": http://www.astronautix.com/craft/stus1957.htm Ernst Stuhlinger came up with a mission planned to Mars known as Stuhlinger Mars 1957 which called for nuclear reactor powered, ion thrusters propelled spacecrafts to accelerate prograde for some 124 days in a spiral orbit close to 400 revolutions around Earth before building up enough velocity to reach escape velocity. The ship continues to fire the engines on the way to Mars before turning around half way and firing retrograde. When it gets to the edge of Mars's SOI the ships then perform a 126 day deceleration inwards in a reverse spiral orbit until it reaches low circular Martian orbit. Yes, you do lose out on Oberth effect, but the idea is that if your propulsion system is efficient enough then the loss is more than offset by the increase in specific impulse. Firing prograde in an arc is the same idea only not taken that that extreme.

Or follow the prograde marker and start the burn earlier, instead of following the maneuvering node