Temstar

For undocking just undock each of the four docking ports in turn. Once undocked the two docking ports facing each other will go into a "undocked" state and will not go into a "ready to dock" state until you either backed them away to some distance apart, or if you exit to tracking station and go back to the ship. So when you undock the last of the four docking ports the ship will separate into two.

A deep space engine using the quads? Why one already exists: It's here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/24990-0-19-1-Orbital-Propellant-Depot-Olympus-II

After much procrastination I finally designed an interplanetary lander for my unmanned rover. While waiting for my manned Eve mission transfer window to open I decided to engage in a bit of robotic planetary science program, and well this is the result: I'm sure there are other impressive tracking station screenshots out there, let's see who's got the most concurrent interplanetary missions going on.

Why not use a rover to drive to the rocket waiting on the plateau. That's what I planned to do for my manned Eve landing. I tested manned rovers on Eve's surface and they work perfectly fine. This 8x8 rover can climb pretty much any incline on Eve. Even if the condition is one launch, this is a robotic mission so it will be pretty easy to fit a small unmanned rover on the actual ascending rocket. Once it lands on the hill the rover get dropped off, drive to the ocean, get a sample, drive back to the rocket and the rocket takes the sample offworld.

It only costs 4500m/s to reach LKO as opposed to 9300m/s to reach LEO. In order to not make things like SSTOs too easy Squad make tanks and engines perform worse than their real life counterparts. Even then rocket SSTO to LKO is quite simple where as its never been achieved here on Earth, despite Earth having a lot better rocket parts.

No horizontal assembly require rockets with more robust structure to survive being hoisted up to the vertical. A stronger, stiffer rocket has to pay for that advantage with a bit more dead weight in the form of more structural elements, the advantage is that it's much much easier and cheaper to assemble than a vertically stacked rocket. Russians feel that this cost saving for the price of slightly reduced payload is worth it while NASA is always about using the most cutting edge technology and material to squeeze every little bit of performance out of their rocket, even if that meant much more expensive rockets. It's a case of beautifully engineered, hand crafted, exorbitantly expensive machines vs big dumb (and cheap) booster. N1 is quite something. It's so big it needs two trains working together to pull it to the launch pad.

It's 0.28 tons:

Good, for most people they actually consider this the hard part. If you got a handle on this the first part, the rendezvous will be pretty simple. Well to be honest, you don't really need to know it that well. You need to launch sometime before the target overflies KSC. Generally a climb to orbit for a fuel efficient ascent is about 4 minutes, not including coasting to apapsis. For LKO depending on the exact altitude you generally want to launch when your target is over the desert peninsula to the continents west of KSC. But don't sweet it - if you reach orbit and your target is within 100km of you you're already in business. I've done countless docking and only three times I managed to get a "hole in one" where I arrived at AP and the target was right there. Anyway so you're in orbit somewhat close to your target. What you need to do is click on the target until a pop up box comes up that says "set X as target", do this. Once you do this the following steps are trivial: Simple. Once you have your target set you will see two points on your orbit called "ascending node" and "descending node" and a degree on them. These two nodes are the points where your target and your orbit cross. What you want to do is to reduce the inclination difference between the target and you to zero degrees. To do this you simply burn anti-normal at an ascending node or normal at descending node. This is simple once you have your target set too. So you already know that by going into a lower orbit you catch up and if you go to higher orbit you slow down. You notice on your orbit you have either one or two points called "closest approach". What you want to do is reduce at least one of them to as close to 0m as possible (but anything under 1km is close enough for docking via pure visual). Assuming you've already matched inclination with target, if you're ahead of target you burn prograde you will see that the "separation" value at these closest approach points reduce, visa visa for if you're behind the target. Simply keep burning until separation at closet approach is under 1km and warp to that point and you will be in position for final docking approach. Note that if the separation between your target and yourself is too great you might want to do a prograde/retrograde burn without trying to reduce closest approach to zero. What happen is then with each orbit your get closer and closer to your target and the game will recompute the closet approach for you. Once the separation is within a small distance (say 30km), do the above to setup the encounter.

They have to be attached in space because many-to-one relationship for parts is not allowed. KSP's tree structure for crafts only allows one-to-one and one-to-many

I reckon if the payload is greater than 25tons than multiple docking port is worth it. The Eve lander is a hair under 50 tons.

There are 4 mountain ranges on or near Eve's equator all with peaks greater than 6km. They come in two closely coupled pairs with one pair on the "ocean" side of Eve and another pair on the "mountain" side of Eve. Those are prime landing spots. A 6.4km launch reduces delta-V requirement from 12,000m/s required from sea level to about 7500m/s. A saving of 5000m/s makes an enormous difference in the size of the rocket required to return. I think the smallest stock SERV could return two Kerbals (hanging onto ladders on the side) back to LEO in under 20 tons. Before 0.18, Eve had one mountain top that was almost 11km high. Then 0.18 gave Eve's surface a complete do over so now the highest point is only 6.5km.

Like docking, precision landing can be divided into two parts: an orbital phase and a "visual range" phase. Before you start the orbital phase, switch your navball to surface mode Orbital phase: I'm going to assume you know what powered descent and reverse gravity turn is if you're attempting precision landing. You should be at least able to safely land on the body you're targeting 9/10 times before you attempt precision landing. Anyway the idea of the orbital phase is to setup your suborbital trajectory so that you overfly the target at low lateral velocity. You don't want your suborbital trajectory to end exactly at your target as this makes the visual range phase much more difficult as you have to deal with both lateral and vertical velocity. Setting up your trajectory is pretty simple, thrust normal/anti-normal to fix drift tangent to the target, thrust prograde/retrograde to increase/decrease your downrange distance. Use free cam and look below for your target, once you feel you're about right on top of it fire retrograde to cancel out all lateral velocity. Your retrograde indicator should be on the roof of the navball and you should be falling down more or less right on top of your target. At this point you if you open up map view you should now see your orbit end right on your target. Keep your craft pointed up and use the engines to control your rate of descent. Visual Range phase: I usually count this phase to start when physics for your target kicks in, in other words when you're within 2.3km of your target. Hopefully that 2.3km is pure vertical distance but more likely than not you will have some offset. Visual range phase is about correcting for this offset so you land right next to your target. Now then, imagine your craft as a helicopter. For a helicopter the only thrust it has is the main rotor propelling you upwards (let's ignore tail rotor as it doesn't apply here to spacecrafts). So if you only point your engine up you either go up, go down or hover depending on your thrust level. If you look at how helicopters fly they move around by pitching/rolling so that some of that thrust upwards is redirected sidewards. So for example if they pitch down, the main rotor is now facing diagonally backwards and the helicopter flying forward. Likewise if a helicopter wants to slow down to a hover while it's flying forwards it will pitch up so that the thrust is directed forwards. This is the exact same concept as visual range phase flying for precision landing. But there is one catch: You want to set it up so you only manoeuvring on one flight axis instead of two. Say for example you're near the surface and you see your target 500m in front and to the left. If we consider roll and pitch as our two flight axis, we can use hover to move closer to the target by rolling first to the left to introduce a left-moving motion, then return the craft to vertical for hover while it drifts left (this is very important!) and then rolling to the right to cancel the lateral movement. Then a pitch forward to move forward, return to vertical and then pitch backwards to stop forward motion followed by a final touch down. But this is more complicated than what it needs to be. Instead you could just yaw your craft so that the target lies directly ahead of you, then pitch down to go forward, return to vertical, pitch up once you're near the target to cancel lateral movement and then touch down. Unlike helicopters you have (hopefully) the one advantage of RCS system which allows you to introduce small lateral motion without tilting the craft at all. Use them for small adjustments and then touch down gently near your target.

I reckon the high inclination moons are not practical locations for resource mining, or at least fuel/oxidiser mining. If you look at Gilly for example, it takes more than 1300m/s delta-V to reach Gilly from Low Eve Orbit, more for actually capture into Gilly orbit, potentially a lot more for inclination adjustment. So then, if it takes 1500m/s for your interplanetary ship located in LEO to reach the Gilly orbit propellant depot, why would you actually want to go there? For 1500m/s I could return to Low Kerbin Orbit for refuelling, and chances are if I need fuel in Low Eve Orbit I need it because I want to return to Kerbin. Alternatively if we put the propellant depot in Low Eve Orbit we could lift fuel off Gilly's surface to it. But it takes something like 800m/s to go from Gilly surface to Low Eve Orbit. If I'm going to spend 800m/s to get fuel from Gilly to Eve why wouldn't I just spend 1000m/s instead to move fuel from LKO to LEO?

Ironically of the four best locations on Earth to build an equatorial launch complex, KSC would actually be roughly close to one such sites. The four locations are: Jubba Delta, Somalia Manus Island, New Guinea Baía de São Marcos, Brazil Christmas Island, Australia And mankind has yet to build a launch complex on any of them, though US Army did consider build up Christmas island at one stage. Somalia is a pretty good location for a launch complex, if it wasn't for you know, warlords and pirates.

This one? Just download the craft files at http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/24990-0-19-1-Orbital-Propellant-Depot-Olympus-II and save the part as your own subassembly

I wanted to do this for a while now, finally got around to it: Offloading the AMRV Mosquito Pilot climbing down MOLAB Lift off Approaching the peak Coming in for landing Successful landing

Challenge accepted: Offloading the AMRV Mosquito Pilot climbing down MOLAB Lift off Approaching the peak Coming in for landing Successful landing

Basically, if you can do a powered landing without parachute on Kerbin, you will be able to do powered landings on every body in the Kerbolar system... ...except the dreaded Tylo.

Here is my Thunderchild II with Eve stack assembled in LKO. The big craft on the nose is a 2 man Eve ascend craft. The rover will carry two crew down to Eve surface and drive to meet up with the Eve return craft. The nuke powered Gilly craft is broken into two sections with the tug section docked to starboard docking port while the little RCS lander is docked to the bottom of the Eve rover. The craft at the bottom is a LKO tanker rocket.

This, the one on the equator is also right on the edge of a huge Munar mare so it's excellent location for a base to study both the highlands and the mares.

This got me thinking though, if we were trying to place a probe to as low of a circular Kerbolar orbit as possible for a given delta-V what method would we go for? 1. Direct ejection from Kerbin SOI, then hohmann transfer orbit then circularise. 2. Kerbin -> Eve, powered slingshot from Eve, circularise 3. Kerbin -> Jool, powered slingshot from Jool, circularise In additional, if we have the infrastructure set up at Eve or Jool we could also go for: 4. Kerbin -> Eve transfer, refuel at Low Eve Orbit, ejection from Eve SOI, hohmann transfer orbit then circularise 5. Kerbin -> Jool transfer, refuel at Low Jool Orbit, ejection from Jool SOI, hohmann transfer orbit then circularise Which method would get us the lowest Kerbolar orbit? (Now if only we could "aerobrake" using Kerbol's corona)

46 ton LV-N ship sounds pretty reasonable. You could of course use in space staging and combine nuclear and ion propulsion to get even higher delta-V:

There is some reasoning behind me choosing 75km. The way I figured it, if the goal is to send the largest single piece payload possible on a given rocket one would aim for the lowest stable orbit possible. Once the payload is released into this low stable orbit you can then dock space tugs to it and take it to the final target orbit, where ever that is. 70km is too dangerous and unwieldy to use so I settled for a 75km orbit. It's possible to launch progressively smaller payloads to higher and higher orbits on the same rocket (eg, Nova launching the 70 ton MOLAB to Munar orbit), but it's not possible to launch inert payload much larger than the one on the specification no matter what you do since you're left with only 5km to play with. To launch heavier payload than on the specification you either have to go one size up, or if Nova can't handle it then you will need a new rocket.

Yes but how would a negative mass interact with a positive gravitational field? How would that interaction differ from interaction between negative mass and "negative" gravitational field that this mass and mass similar to it will generate? If negative gravitation field work like we imagine - eg negative matter push each other apart then negative mass planet can't exist since planets (and stars, and galaxies, and superclusters) are held together by the force of gravity. But that doesn't mean negative mass spacecraft parts can't exist since ordinary objects are held together by electromagnetic forces instead of gravity. Since we're toying with the idea that this negative mass still has normal electromagnetic properties since we can build spacecraft parts out of it then I feel it's pretty safe to assume it interacts with normal gravity in the usual way. Eg - it still gets pulled by regular objects and their regular gravity, but at the same time its own negative gravitational field repulses both regular and negative matter.

Wouldn't negative mass cause the object to fly away ONLY if it's the planet's mass that's negative? What's keeping you planted on the ground is not (at least mostly not) your own gravity field but the gravity field of the planet under you. If if the mass of the object is negative and is exerting a force that pushes all matter away from it it will be overpowered by the "positive" gravitational field of the planet.