Blackbird

as some said before you try to do way to much at once. The most important thing is to read into the manouvers you need to do and how to fly to save DeltaV. Start to learn how to do a gravity-turn, how to get to the moon using manouvernodes, how to burn to land on the moon from an orbit and probably most important how to return from moon to Kerbin (thats a point wich i screwed up so often i can't even count because i just didn't know how to do it the right way) Most parts and fuel of your rocket are only for achiving an orbit around Kerbin. Once you got that done it's just a matter of how much deltaV is left and if you can make use of it. And another important point: Try not to use to much Engines and Fueltanks. I started with the same mistake but you realy don't need so much fuel and those engines. Once you are in space it's not a matter of thrust but efficiency. one engine in orbit is more than enough. Here are some shoots I made for you: A Simple design. No asperagus stage, just 1 Fuelline in the first stage. This thing is still a bit overkill for a munlanding but it has more room for error. this is the ship after I got it into an orbit of 110km arround Kerbin. It has more than enough fuel to go to mun and minimus. The stages are: current stage: a normal and a small fueltank with one Lv-909 Engine. Lander: a normal tank with an Lv-909 Engine, ASAS and a decoupler under the capsule wich has a parachute on top. (+3Landinglegs) at a circular orbit around mun (50km), i still got more than enough fuel left. If you use the first stage under the lander to deorbit you can Land with allmost full fuel on the lander. You could probably visit minimus with that: So it realy comes down to maneuver and design of your craft. If you use to much fueltanks and engines it has the opposite effect of what you want to achieve so try to keep it small Keep trying until you succeed my friend and have a nice day

the easiest way to set up the controller is to go into the settings of KSP and map your controller there like you would map your Keyboard. U can map your Sticks under the staging tab on the righthand side (Axis mapping or somewhat.) I use The controller myself but only for spaceplanes and it works well so far. The only problem being that you cant map the RT and LT trigger so you are missing some axis.

I use a 360Controller for flying spaceplanes only. I don't think that u get a better controll of your spacecrafts since u got the SHIFT controlls and im more used to them i guess. The drivers don't allways install themselfs but microsoft offers them for free on their website.

So there is a lot of fun in planning your Missions and everything and since a lot of people have some problems or just don't know how to do it I'm going to show you how I do it...just for the lolz I usually do a lot of planning, notes and test before even thinking about launching something into outer space. Let's go trough a mission and see how it goes!. I will try to keep it simple and focus on the main points. Feel free to make your own points and expand your plans. (PS. I'm from Germany, so please spare me and my english ;D ) A TRIP TO DUNA (?) At first, we start to set a clear objective about what we wanna achive and what the outcome should look like: --------------------------- MISSION: I want to set a little base up on duna with two Landers to hold 4 kerbals and a rover to explore the planet a bit. -------------------------- As easy as this step sounds, a lot of people don't get any further because they don't know how to move on. The next steps are the way I like it and it's up to you how you do them. One thing I recomend though is that you use mods or webpages to get the information you want and need, since a lot of usefull information isn't implemented in the game at the moment. I only use the Kerbal Alarm Clock and Mechjeb, because both of them have all the information and functions I need to get the most out of missions. Well, lets move on: FIRST: PUT DOWN YOUR NOTEPAD! We know our mission so now it's time to write a little "Script" on how to accomplish our mission: LOG: 1. Launch a Carrier into Kerbin Orbit (110km) and park it. 2. launch the two Landers and dock with the Carrier. 3. launch the rover and dock with the Carrier 4. refill the Carrier 5. departure for Duna (deltaV?,when to burn?) 6. Intercept and Aerobrake on duna and establish an Orbit (around 100-200km) 7. Land both Landers at Duna and establish the base. (deltaV? how to land?) 8. send the rover down (deltaV?) 9. The Carrier stays in Orbit for future uses This simple Log makes future planning a lot more easier, since we can now focus on every single point and work in detail trough everything. find out if your list is complete and has every keyepoint of your mission in it. This kind of "Metascript" will take us trough our planning. (I will call it like this from now on if you don't mind ) This is only the start of the script! as soon as something about the mission comes to your mind make a note about it. I will show you the finished script I had at the end of this mission: LOG: 1. Launch a Carrier into Kerbin Orbit (110km) and park it. (~5000m/s dV. RCS and Lights needed to dock) 2. launch the two Landers and dock with the Carrier. 3. launch the rover and dock with the transporter 4. refill the Carrier (if dV<3000m/s) 5. departure for Duna (about 1100 dV, Alarm Set for Duna) 6. Intercept and Aerobrake on duna and establish an Orbit (around 100-200km, aerobrake at around 10km) 7. Land both Landers at Duna and establish the base. (both Landers are docked to each other to Land together. ~70dV required. touchdown without engines required. RCS needed. Lights for Landing needed) 8. send the rover down (Skycrane needed. ~70dV to deorbit. Landing close to Base, RCS optional) 9. The Carrier stays in Orbit for future uses Reminder: - at least 4 Kerbals needed HOW MUCH FUEL DO WE NEED ANYWAY? The next thing is to find out how much fuel we even need to get to duna. I searched a bit around the forum and found a nice spreadsheet about the Delta-v required to get to other planets. You can see that it takes about 1100m/s to get to duna. I want to have at least 2000m/s so i don't need to worry if something goes wrong and i have to make major changes wich may require some Delta-v. Since duna has an atmosphere we can use parachutes to land our equipment at Duna, so we only need a little bit of fuel to slow us down the last few km's if we are to fast so we dont smash into the surface. There is no real number on how much Delta-V you will need to land since it is mostly based on your skill, so the best thing is to test it on kerbin or use Hyperedit to make some tests on Duna. So, our fully equiped transporter needs at least 1100m/s to get to duna. Lets make a note in our Metascript and move onto the next step: PHASE ANGLE Since we want to get to another planet we need to know when to start our burn towards Duna. This is the point where you can save the most delta-v if you do everything the right way. There are different ways to approach this step, you can use spreadsheets and try to read the angle from the mapview or you use differnt mods to help you out. If you want to know more about phase-angles and how to visit other plantes you should check the forum or youtube, there are a lot of people out there who will teach you anything about KSP . The one thing you should know is that going into a stable orbit around sun and after that waiting for a burn to intercept Duna is not an option because you will waste a lot of fuel this way. We will let Kerbin do the solar orbit for us und just do the intercepting burn when the "window" has opened. The easiest way to set this up is to use the Kerbal Alarm Clock and set the timer for it as shown in the picture below: As you can see, I set up an Alarm to 10 minutes before the so called window arrives and we will start our burn towards duna. However, because we need to dock everything together and refuel it we need to stop a few days earlier so everything is ready to go when the time comes. At the moment, i have about 188 days left before the window arrives. Since I dont want my kerbals to stay that long in space we are going to warp to about 30 days before the window for now. this should give us enough time to do the rest of the work and give our kerbals some rest. So we know the Delta V we need and we have our timers set up. Now we can start to build our ships fitted for the mission. But where to start? Let me show you: FORGING OUR WEAPPONS The best way is to start from "last to first", wich means that we will first design our lander and rover, and after that the carrier to carry them.The reason behind this is that these Landers are the "first Stage" and we don't need to design them based on another stage. (We cant start with the carrier because we first need to know how heavy our payload will be) you can design whatever you want, but there are a few things we need to allways keep in mind when building ships: 1. make them as light as possible and design them for their purpose, nothing more, nothing less. 2. allways keep your main goal in mind as well as your other designs to make them work perfectly together 3. check twice if you didn't miss anything. (jeb doesn't like it when he can't climb out of the craft because u messed up and forgott to put a ladder on it) 4. ALLWAYS check your Script for the things your ship has to do and check if it is able to fullfill it's tasks With that in mind, let me show you what i came up with for this mission: 1. THE LANDERS I want to land both of them at the same time so I don't have to land one first and after that try to land the other one next to it. This needs extra fuel and a lot of trial and error because they don't have wheels and I think it is possible to land both at the same time since I designed them so that they don't need an engine to land. The plan is to dock them both together after they undocked with the Carrier and deorbit them together. At an altitude of about 11km i will decouple them and while mechjeb/ASAS will hold one of them steady I will use RCS the keep the other one close while they both decent next to eachother. I RECOMMENT that you use Hyperedit to test your lander and see if it works the way you want. I don't like cheating, but there is no other way at the moment and there is nothing more frustrating to find out that your craft is useless after you managed to get to another planet. Docked together, they got about 79m/s Delta-v and a lot of RCS wich is enough to get the orbit down into the atmosphere and land them. I tested them before and practiced to Land 2 crafts simultaniously and it worked, so they are ready for the mission Next thing is the Rover: 2. THE ROVER Not much to say here, i build a rover and attached a skycrane so it can land without problems. As you can see it has enough Delta V and a high enough TWR to land at Duna. After we build our final stages we have to design the carrier: 3. THE CARRIER As you may or may not notice, i put a lot of those crewcabs on top of my craft. Why you ask? well because they simulate the mass of the Rover and the two Landers. Of course we dont leave them on there we just need to simulate the mass in orbit so we know the Delta-V we've got with full payload. As you can see we got about 5000m/s of Delta-V wich is pretty much overkill for this mission, but since i like the simple design and i want to use this craft for further missions we will stick with it. If you wanted to return the carrier to Kerbin you would have enough fuel left to do so. Our preperation is pretty much done to this point. The only thing we can do now is to look at our Script and Crafts again and search for mistakes we might have done or improve and expand the mission. The rest from here on is to launch and fly your crafts and finish the mission you set yourself. Nothing to talk about anymore. Here are some shots I did for this mission: http://imgur.com/a/Bt1jz Have a safe flight and thanks for listening to my stuff bye bye, Blackbird

First: what a great tool to play with. It just helps me a lot since you can get sooo much information without a lot of typeing. Thank you a lot for that awsome tool. But there is one thing that I think would be a nice little extra in your program. I like the part that you can see the Intercept Angle and even the time in your Hohmann Transfers part. But I think the angle is only usefull if your Target is something that you can actually see on your screen so you are able to read the angle from your HUD. But if you want to intercept e.g. an other ship its quite hard to figure out the angle since messurements on the map are quite....wrong, i guess. I figured out a nice little formula that can estimate, based on your intercept Angle, the distance between you and your target to start your intercept burn. Since you are able to see objects in space at about 100km distance at your HUD this is a nice alternative to intercept another spaceship or station. Let me show you: A = sqrt[ (Rb + Rk)² + (Rc + Rk)² - ( 2(Rb + Rk)(Rc + Rk)cosß) ] A is the distance between you and your target to start the burn. Rb is the targets orbital radius Rc is your orbital radius Rk is the radius of Kerbin ß is the interception angle so if you are on an orbit at about 680km and you want to intercept another ship at 700km you need a distance of 50,7km between you and your target to start the brun. I have tried this out a few times now and you can get to about 1km distance between you and your target if done right. This was the closed one I achieved (3. try) http://www.abload.de/img/screenshot106edev.png I hope you did understand what I was talking about (my english, u know ;P ) and I hope this wasn\'t mentioned before since I haven\'t read the whole threat. Have a nice day and keep it up!