Temstar

The trick is to plan your munshot in stages, just like how the Apollo program did it. Stage 1: Learning orbital mechanics In this stage all you need to do is to build small rockets that can put a bare bone spacecraft into LKO. Here you will need to practice and familiarize yourself with orbital mechanics, namely learning to only thrust at AP and EP to save delta-V. This mission is nearly identical to the mission of Apollo 7. Once you can reliably put small spacecrafts into orbit and deorbit them safely, move onto stage 2. This is the craft I used for stage 1: Stage 2: Trans-Munar Injection and Trans-Kerbin injection In this stage you will apply knowledge learned from stage 1 to use to travel to the Mun without actually landing on the Munar surface. This means a mission of this type will involve first entering LKO. Then performing a TMI burn to place your PE about 60 degrees in front of Mun\'s orbit. Once there perform a retroburn to enter a Munar orbit. Then once ready fire your rocket again for TKI injection burn to return back to Kerbin. On arrival perform another retroburn to get into LKO before picking a spot for deorbiting. Don\'t be scared by the vast distances your ship will have to travel - the actual delta-V for for TMI and TKI are quite small when done right, gravity will do most of the work for you. This is the same mission profile as Apollo 8 This is the craft I used for stage 2: Stage 3: Building heavy boosters Since an Apollo style Munar orbit rendezvous is not possible (yet), the only way to land on the Mun and get back is to use a Direct Ascent mission profile which requires you to lift quite a large spaceship to LKO. Building reliable heavy boosters is not easy, both in real life and in KSP because the size of your rocket does not increase linearly with the payload. I find the best way to practice building big rockets is to aim to lift a big space station into LKO. Build the space station to a size bit bigger than the munshot spacecraft so when the time comes you can just scale down the heavy booster a little bit for the munshot. This is similar to the Skylab 1 mission. This is the craft I used for stage 3, those things at the front are spacecraft docking arms: Stage 4: Munshot You now have all the skills you need to go to the Mun and back except for one - powered descent. Unfortunately there\'s no way to build a LLTV equivalent (or is there?) to practice on Kerbin so the only way to learn is to actually do it. Once your lander is in position for powered descent do a quick save with F5 and backup your .\saves\default folder. Then keep at it using F9 for quickload if you crash until you land safely on the Mun. Remember, once you\'re on the Munar surface you need very little delta-V to take off and get back to Kerbin. So while giving yourself some margin of safety aim to build the smallest lander possible. This mission is the Apollo 11 equivalent. Here is my Munshot rocket:

From the lessons learned from today\'s orbital rendezvous test, following improvements have been made to the docking arm: [li]Tip of the arm now uses decoupler rather than fuel tank, this is because decoupler seems to have a bulging mid section for the claws to grip onto[/li] [li]claws are now placed at the very top of the decoupler, improving length of the grip as well as make the legs close tighter tighter[/li] [li]notches are added on the arm to provide some traction for the claws to grip onto[/li] [li]increased number of claws per arm from four to six to increase strength[/li] Hopefully we\'ll see some improvements in the firmness of the docking in my next test. Note to devs if you\'re reading, please please make Advanced SAS work for ships not being piloted. 90% of the hard work in docking comes from trying to align the docking arms up on the same orientation. Just as you get it all lined up and ready for RCS translation the target ship will roll in some random direction forcing you to start over.

Well, why not? Here is my Olympus 3 Space Station, built to dock up to three spacecrafts with the three docking arms After many attempts, here is my LKO spacecraft successfully engaging soft dock with the station. The ship has clamped it\'s claw onto one of the station\'s docking arms. Jumping into the station, I closed the station\'s docking claw around the spacecraft to strengthen the docking. After both sets of claws are engaged, I then used the station\'s RCS thrusters to pin the docking arm against the spacecraft for a better grip. Some issues with the fuel tank models, they\'re clipping into each other here. After this I did some test on the strength of the dock, conclusion is that it\'s pretty weak. I\'m not sure if the pads on the end of the landing legs are actually solid objects, but I know at least it\'s not long or tight enough to firmly grip the smooth side of fuel tanks. The arms will prevent any lateral movement of the two ships but if there\'s movement long the length of the arms then the docking arms were unable to prevent the two ships from separating. Next step I plan to put some bumps on the outside of docking arms with struts to provide more traction for the claws. Let\'s see if that improves things. If things work out then a Munar Orbit Rendezvous mission profile for munshot may be possible.

Gimbal is actually (kind of) the correct name for the thing we call 'nav ball', at least in the Apollo program. If you go watch Apollo 13 closely you notice the crew will yell 'gimbal lock!' from time to time. This happens when two of the three pivot axes line up causing the gimbal to lose the ability to track one degree of freedom. Although to be totally correct, a gimbal is a device that drives the nav ball, that ball\'s correct name is 'Flight Director/Atitude Indicator'. The Apollo crews call it the 8-Ball.

I\'m interested in making a modified stock landing leg by flipping it laterally. I want to use it for 'nose first' landings and as a rearward facing docking claw. I tried to modify the part.cfg but there doesn\'t seem to be a way to invert the landing leg. Modifying the landing leg parameters was also not successful since the landing legs seems to have a fixed 'deployed' angle of 155 degrees and modifying the pivotingAngle only changes the angle of the legs when retracted. Is there an easy way to make laterally inverted stock parts?

I wonder if Kessler syndrome (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_Syndrome) can happen in KSP. We\'ve all seen rockets break up during flight into individual pieces. So it seems possible that a collision in space will create a debris field filling LKO with dangerous objects. Of course unlike real life we could always wipe that save and start a fresh one, or even better restore a save from before the collision. But still, leaving all that space junk up there make the LKO look mighty ugly.

Don\'t fight the fuel flow, use it to work for you: See here I have the two lower side tanks connected to upper center tank. At liftoff I fire all three engines and fuel starts to drain from each stack. However the upper center tank is constantly being topped off by fuel feed from the two lower side tanks which in effect means the three engines are draining the 4 side tanks in between them. When the two side stacks run out of fuel I stage stage 4 which blows off the side stacks leaving me with a center engine still firing and two full tanks of fuel still. Unfortunately if you are planning to drop only empty fuel tanks and do so one at a time the only way to do it is horizontally. The point is though it\'s kind of a waste since as your rocket lighten you should be dropping engines along with tanks. If your rocket isn\'t doing that then it means either you will have too many engines later into the flight or not enough at lift off.

To release satellite to orbit without creating any space debris you need to build a space tug. The tug will have to 'pull' the satellite into orbit. Any use of 'pusher' configuration rocket stages behind the satellite for final circularisation burn will result in spent rockets staying in orbit with the satellite once released. All stock parts, here\'s my space tug with a 'space station' mockup still attached. The space station is stage 4, the stage 5 decoupler will separate the station from the tug (it\'s lower on the stage list even though it\'s physically ahead of stage 4). After staging stage 5, stage 6 (the thruster section of the tug) becomes stage 5 and stage 4 becomes blank as the space station is released. The tug itself still have plenty of fuel and RCS fuel left. Once docking comes in I\'ll be able to use that tug for another payload transfer job + deorbit burn at the end.