Corona688

Why not mount the big radial parachutes lower to compensate? With spaceplane symmetry, a la \o/, i.e. the 'R' key in VAB.

Sorry, I sneak-edited.

That depends heavily upon velocity. Something really fast at 10K could experience more drag than something slow at sea level. Also, when the atmosphere gets thin, the CoG problem will get worse, because your control surfaces will need to work harder to compensate.

A couple reasons: One of my earlier "rules" in this thread is "revert-flight is okay -- any space agency spends more time training and testing than flying". But you can't train your tourists as well as you train your pilots. Making every craft perfectly safe would mean giving up experimenting. Most of my manned craft feature abort sequences, but there's always big, unwieldy, and/or experimental things where that's not possible, like my "Planespace" vertical-launched aircraft which is definitely all three. Put anyone but a L1+ pilot aboard and they will die. Space travel is still space travel. Weight considerations are king whenever someone else isn't paying the bill.

I was doing a silly part-testing mission, "test the swivel engine splashed down at Kerbin". Flea engine, decoupler, engine, probodyne, parachute. Done. When it splashed down I got distracted a moment, and when I came back I noticed two curious things: A world record for "5 meters underwater". The parachute survived splashdown. Sure enough, parachutes work underwater, and sure enough, it was still going! I let it continue -- though, growing bored of its glacial pace, I cut the parachute. Several world records later it hit the seabed hard enough to destroy the engine, making the pod bouyant again! I came back and did the same thing on purpose, this time with a load of instruments. The rocket engine is nothing but ballast... Not much else is as dense as an engine.

My first ever KSP screenshot circa July 2011: When orbits were smaller, suits were orange, water was pretty, and you couldn't EVA. Yes, it's in orbit at 42km.

I've just started taking tourist missions and am considering this primary rule: No reverting. If a tourist is aboard, no reverting allowed. Logically following from that, all tourist launching craft must have: A survivable abort sequence in case of launchpad accident. A rational re-entry arrangement: Heat-shield, primary chute, backup chute, and drogue at minimum. A center of mass & drag which keeps the heat shield centered without the help of a trained pilot. (Stabilization is OK, 'retrograde hold' is not.) The ability to survive a hard, shallow, unplanned re-entry. 500+ power reserves, solar panels, and an emergency battery (locked, accessible via spacewalk). An accessible exit. A small amount of well-balanced RCS. Something to stop the craft rolling downhill. Bay doors will suffice. That's just common sense, now the "fluff" which doesn't matter but makes me feel better: Tourist craft must carry at least one KSP staff member. If the craft lacks a probe core, they must be a pilot. Tourist craft must have an antenna. Tourists must be kept in friendly accommodations during flight: Hitchhiker container, jetliner pod, etc. They shouldn't need spacesuits indoors. No tourists allowed in the command pod while in flight. Keep away from the blinkenlights!

A word processor can do nearly everything you use your computer for -- but usually shouldn't.

Man, my stations aren't half so pretty. They're cylinders which accumulate tanks and engines as return vehicles are docked and de-crewed, added onto organically as contracts invite me to. The part with the return-vehicle sticking out is my old-style, with the tracking panels. I like those arrangements of big flat panels much better, less of that sticking-out-into-space nonsense. Vehicles can stick out, panels shouldn't, too easy to hit.

The ultrasmall probodynes are really quite small, as are the micro wheels and micro landing legs.

You can create nodes several orbits ahead in the orbit planner, you know. If you right-click on a node it collapses into two buttons, + or -. Each time you click +, that puts it another orbit ahead into the future. Keep clicking + until you see the intercept. Now you can hover your mouse over those lines and know exactly where your mothership will be, when. You can take this further. Make two nodes -- one 20 minutes ahead, and another in its 'after' line. Advance the second node X orbits ahead with the + button until you see the intercept again. You can adjust the T-20m node, and see the results, X orbits later! A tiny burn in 20 minutes can have huge effects 3 hours later. It can put you very, very close for minimal delta-V. Get it close enough and it should show you relative velocities, too. Matching the position does not match the speed, of course. Brute force is still necessary there.

Retrobraking is a perfectly reasonable strategy. I need it often enough for fast and shallow re-entries like those. I'm guessing you're in early career-mode and don't have heat shields yet, so here's a few tips for making do without. If you can force something to re-enter sideways, that generates tons of drag, slowing it down faster, hopefully giving it less time to overheat. I had an entire space station survive re-entry (until it hit the ocean, anyway) because for some reason it preferred to lie flat like that all the way down. Failing that, if you can force it to tumble end-over end, this will spread around the heat -- one part will be at the front and heat up until it turns away, then another one will heat up while the last one cools down, etc.

Nah, all wheels are bugged. Not to the 'world is over' degree some say, but habits and designs may must change a bit to accommodate them.

What do you mean by 'capture'? Just land, or actually brake it into Kerbin orbit?

Forget falling for a moment, take gravity out of the equation. Imagine a piano rolling along the floor to squish you against a wall. 500 kilos at 50m/s hits just as hard on Minmus as Eve. Eve will certainly help that piano get up to 50m/s faster though, at least in the downwards direction.

Yesterday, I used Infinite Fuel for the very first time. I made a boneheaded mistake in leaving one single puny Oscar B tank empty, and for that, the satellite could not orbit. This was a very carefully planned mission with everything weighed and no junk left in space, and my exacting care was my undoing -- fuel removed for dV checking wasn't always replaced. I realized this many hours and craft-switches after launch, so reverting was not an option. Technically using infinite fuel was a bit more punishing to me than editing fuel into the persistence file. If I'd done that, I'd now be able to accept that contract to move its orbit, as it'd have lots left instead of zero, but I'm not going to infinite-fuel a functioning satellite, just a boneheaded error.

I think I saw it done in the 'what did you do in KSP today' thread. A bad landing left a mun lander or something with an intact pod with docking coupler atop, but no fuel or engine. He landed a "thrust pack" of fuel tank and radial engines atop.

If it's a life or death situation, screw efficiency. Let the mothership take as much of the burden as it can. That'd be option 1.5 -- a very close flyby. If you miss, the mothership can meet you halfway. Also, if there's atmosphere, the mothership could conceivably aerobrake, an option not open to the lander.

It's almost surely more efficient to accelerate the smaller, lighter craft than the bigger, heavier one. If the mothership was already in a wide, slow orbit, where little amounts of DV can make big changes in the orbit, there might be some benefit. But you say 'flyby', meaning, already at escape velocity. Option 3 is a waste compared to option 2. Think it through: It's a choice between a little craft breaking orbit once, vs a giant craft spending double that amount of dv -- enough to make orbit AND enough to leave. There's a third question however -- distance. The lander doesn't just have to be at the right velocity, it also has to be in the right place. You can't just leap 1km sideways to meet it without serious acceleration then serious deceleration, and if the mothership's not in orbit, a miss will leave you behind. For that, minute changes in the mothership's trajectory could definitely be helpful. A little change in dv some hours/days/as long as possible in advance can make a huge difference in the lander being the right speed in the right place.

Docking isn't easy, as much as it's easy to practice. Rocket doesn't get enough delta-V? Revert, hit space and wait several minutes. It's a slow process. Miss your docking manuever? No need to revert, no waiting involved, just try and try again until it works. There's also a few ways of doing it, whereas delta V is kind of an immutable wall.

When I still had to recover them, I just spammed a lot of parachutes. And I mean a lot.

You could probably do with 5K-10K at a very rough guess. Last time I went to Jool was before the science revamp, when you could continuously re-transmit data to approach the recover value (and when the atmosphere analyzer data size was ENORMOUS). I sent a drop-probe with 30,000 battery and it did a reasonable job. Not sure you can wait for fuel cells unless your drop-probe has wings to linger with. Jool's atmosphere is thick, but its gravity is heavy, it will suck you down with surprising speed despite parachutes. I usually don't see any point in using any antenna but the basic Communotron. The DTS-1 is slightly more power efficient, but only SLIGHTLY and it looks breakable. Even when speed matters, you can just attach more than one Communotron, whenever you hit 'transmit' and one's busy it'll use another.

It most definitely would not, it violates conservation of momentum.

This is the planespace, an attempted answer to all those "take 13 temperature measurements on the other side of the planet" kind of missions. A plane which you can send on a suborbital hop, which arrives flying and fully fueled. I stacked rockets on the simplest, most stable airplane I had, and found a way to make it re-enter without quite exploding via retrorockets and top-first re-entry.

Remember my crazy 1-launch mun base? It became a crazy 2-launch moon base, as I had to dock 1440 fuel with it to get it to the mun. I also added a rover while I was at it. And then I landed it, my first ever off-system base! ...and then I landed it THREE MORE TIMES because the kraken ate my rover wheels sometime enroute. Gone without a trace. I had to fly the entire base to each waypoint instead D: It did so, barely. Worth it. The waypoints crossed biomes. With a science lab to process it, that's going to be worth a lot, A LOT. The Minmus base of similar design is... still enroute. A moon base arrives in hours, a minmus one takes days.