r_rolo1

Yeah, it seems a little not well thought out. As it is in Manley video the only real aproaches to the recovery are SSTO ( either plane or rocket ), that is other way of saying no recovery of ejected parts or putting probes in the detached parts and do some really crazy arcs on the payload orbit to give you time to control the falling debris ( to avoid auto deletion ). It really looks like the devs wanted to put a cool feature and gone away without thinking it through ...

Finally, after 8 x1 hours of driving in the dark in the Mun, I see sunlight ...

Hum , nice thread. This is how science should work in the game, not just "took a measurement, no context required" Regarding Laythe, don't forget to give a visit to one of the polar caps. If you think about it, Laythe shouldn't have them ( if you assume the temp there is basically from thermal heating from the effects of the massive tidal forces of Jool and Tylo ) , so some science is needed about their existance. BTW, when you were forced back in the day to abort the first Jool window due to ... incidents , you probably could had made a Eve gravity assist for a Jool mission. Have you considered that option, and if you did, why have you not gone that way ?

How about making a boat race to the island airport ?

It depends If you have a good steady hand and some backround in physics ( rember, rocket science is physics ... ), you can learn the game pretty fast. But don't let yourself be discouraged: after all , it took NASA decades to do their first landing, so you are far ahead On the landing planning, if you use point at retrograde, you need to take in account that you will still have horizontal speed and that the Mun is rotating below you ( barely, but still ... ). That probably explains your 75 km in diference . The issue is that it is hard to judge how much earlier you need to burn without having some experience in descents ... and that is why people with some experience ( like Manley ) tend to prefer suicide burns or the lower periapsis + horizontal burn technique, since those allow for far finer control of the landing place. If you want to train the place where to land, you can do what I did back in the day: I chose myself a place where to land ( say, the twin craters ) and try to land there with the same ship until you made a bunch of sucessful landings. That will give you a idea of how much earlier you need to start burning. And yes, you would do well in training on Minmus, since it's gravity and flat surfaces at 0m make things far easier.... P.S ANd in case of you being worried with your kerbals being stranded ... like Kryxal says above, they have a lot of monopropellant in stock. In fact it is even possible to put a Kerbal in Mun orbit from the surface on the Mun using only their monopropelant. Not that I advise you to try that , but just to say that they do not need to walk

A LV909 is probably enough for what you want, but for safety, you could use 2 47-s engines. But you need more fuel in that lander or less lander, as Claw suggests above Regarding landings in any body with no atmosphere , there are 3 main techniques that work well: 1) Point at retrograde. Self explanatory: you are in orbit and you burn retrograde, changing the orientation of your ship as the speed vector moves to compensate. It is not the more efficient way but it is the easiest one to learn, so I recommend you to try it. 2) Suicidal burn. THis ones suposes you already killed most of your horizontal speed ( or had little to begin with , due to a colision course ), and it means that you mesh the button to start burning at the last possible moment in retrograde fashion. More efficient than 1), but really not recommended if you don't know well your ship abities/ don't have nerves of steel. 3) Lowering the periapsis of your orbit + horizontal burn. Assuming you're in a mostly circular orbit, you burn at the exact oposite side of the planet you want to land and lower the periapsis of your orbit ( that will get into directly above the place you want to land due to the burn ) as low as you can/dare ( depends of the altitude of the place you want to land and the altitude of the planet in the orbit you are in ... be careful with tall mountains ). Then wait until you get to periapsis and burn horizontally as fast as possible until you killed all the horizontal speed. You might need some extra burning at retrograde to make corrections, but in theory ( periapsis at 0 m and a perfectly flat planet ) you can simply do the above and turn the ship upside up ( since you do not have vertical speed at periapsis ). This is the method that is the most efficient ( burns at high speed are more efficient ( Oberth effect ) ) and, while also nerve wracking, it is far saner than 2) . But it requires some finesse pretty much no one has in the first attempts, so it is far better to start with 1 )

Your lander is way too high for the leg width ... that will not help with the stability and ease of landing. And if you want two places, why not the bigger lander can or simply two of the smallest ? Also, the lander has too little fuel for making a landing and coming back to Mun orbit ( you probably need 600 units of fuel for the payload you have ) ... ANd BTW , what engine are you using ? Can't see it in the pic .. About the rocket ... well, it is hard to say from that perspective, but it looks to suffer the same issue than the lander : too thin for it's height . The 6 SRB also seem too much to be fired at the same time ( there is no point of trying to get above 200m/s at launch due to the atmosphere, so most of that SRB power will be wasted ) and you probably would do better with atleast one engine at launch that can gimbal ( for control issues ). Oh, and don't let yourself to be discouraged by Manley lightness about doing stuff: regardless of his RL backround , he does things look easy because he has years of practise landing on the Mun. In the beginning he didn't even knew from where to make the insertion burn to the Mun ( just go to his archive and dig deep ... I am following him since those days , so I know )

1) Radially mounted engines are very prone to make ships go out of control, due to the flexibility of the connections to the central part ( in your case radial decouplers ). More struts/ SAS on are pretty useful to avoid that. 2) If you use wings/winglets to use aerodynamic control, they must be as low as possible ( think in a arrow ... or Saturn V ). Also wings/winglets mounted in radially mounted parts tend to exacerbate the problem outlined in 1) , so, if possible, mount all your aerodynamic control surfaces in the central body of the ship.

@TheBrisbyMouse: I was not talking of the wheels in terms of impact, but of the other parts connections. A impact at 20m/s can easily make solar panels snap out or disconnect command pods from the rest of the rover if you happen to tackle it in a not perfect angle, things that will not happen at 10 m/s as easily as that ... I might try the chalenge, since I'm getting a heavy train while rovering a Sci lab in the Mun ... OFC this one ( that is stock BTW and has around 30 parts ) for the challenge would be too heavy, but I'm 100% sure it would pass the mini challenge with flying colors. I just need to strip it from all non-essentials for the chalenge , though

Well, TBH I think that there is a part of the game where both keyboard + mouse or joystick really do not work well: rovers. But that is probably more the fault of the game than anything else ( I personally dislike the lack of propulsion control and the stiff brakes ... ). I would defintely like something that can control a rover in a similar way to a car :/

Still rovering in the dark side of the Mun in the dark ... I take everything I said bad of this rover, especially after seeing it climbing the walls of the canyon that comes out of the east farside crater in a 35º+ angle for atleast 1 km. Now, with the help of the Kerbal maps site, I'll continue to rover out the Mun grabbing all the science I can ...

Hum, not wanting to diss, but the mini challenge is heavily biased for veicules with a certain set of wheels, namely the RoveMax Model S2 or the RoveMax Model XL3 ( namely the smallest and the biggest wheels ), since they have a max speed of respectively 10 and 12 m/s , while the other two have far higher top speeds ( 20 and 23 m/s ), and I don't need to explain that a bump at 10 m/s is far less prone to making damages to a rover than one at 23m/s ....

Hum, I might try this out ... I remember the good ol'days of the aerospike, when I took this to Laythe , and maybe a somewhat modified version could make it there anyway ...

Well, technically yesterday, but ... Just getting my grip on the game after a quite lengthy break since 0.17-0.18, and playing on career mode on stock ( to get in touch with the new parts ). At this point I'm just rovering a lab in the dark side of the Mun ... OFC that I forgot that the Mun has 1/6 of the gravity of Kerbin, so the rover is way too light and too top heavy to be as reliable as i would like ... P.S. It survived well to that tumbling. TBH I was impressed ... Anyway, it looks that I forgot to get pics of the skycrane delivery. Will probably make a video of that when the sister ship of this gets to Minmus in a couple of game days. Now I just have to rover this beauty outside the East Farside crater in the dark

True on both but ... First, when I was talking about automation being better, I'm not saying that it is more efficient per se ( not even in real life ). But it is definitely more reliable, because it doesn't rely on the fact that the human pilot will not sneeze at a critical time botching the whole deal . Mechjeb ascent autopilot ( and his landing autopilot as well, btw ) are awful ,especially on bodies with atmosphere, but they are reliable enough if you know what you're doing. On the protractor ... well, in real life we would have the ability of knowing the longitude of what we were flying by by using charts or even via triangulation of radio signals, and both of then could be used to deduce the angles needed, especially combined with timestops and astronomical observation. Alternatively we have a big radio dish in KSC 1 and 2 for some reason That is why I said that both mod were stopping gaps: they aren't what should be there, but they are covering for faults of a game that is far from complete. I do not want either mechJeb or the protractor in the final version; I want some degree of automation, minimally accurate spatial position intel and the ability of planning a mission beforehand

It is not a excuse. It is simply stating a fact that all real life space programs have automation ( and for good reasons ) and that KSP, as a space program simulator, should have it IMHO. Otherwise it is a poor space program simulator , like a flight simulator would be a poor one if you had to manually pump all the hydraulics of a 747 ...

( bolded for emphasis ) Well, I got KSP to run a space program ( btw, that is even in the name of the game ... ). Flying by stick is a part of it, but automation is also another part. And, let's be honest, most of the real space programs missions have no crew at all ( that is, besides some ground inputs , they are fully automated ), so IMHO Mechjeb is only covering for a glaring omission by the devs part until this moment, that is the fact of not being able to run unmanned missions in the stock game and forcing the manned ones to be done by stick even when automation would be 1000% times better. Say, like the protractor mod covers for the lack of in-game stock angle measurements ...

Tha can prove interesting for Duna and back Both Duna and Kerbin have atmospheres, so the wings could help in both takeoffs ...

Congrats, joshblake I do find your ship design familiar for some reason though I told you that was possible to land with some fuel in stock with that design. And also congrats on landing in KSC 1. About that landing method ... well I basically developed it in a challenge in 0.16 to land something in Kerbin that wasn't supposed to be able to land ( that is, no engines, no parachutes, no landing legs and no flat bottom ) for the tests. That is how I know, among other things, what is the terminal velocity of most things in Kerbin It is a very unforgiving method, though, as you learned, and it delivers some quite high g forces. Now, back on going to Duna and back. It's proving to be quite harder than i thought

With 33 tons you can definitely go to Duna and back: I already done it with a combo of 2 aerospikes and a Lv-909 and a total weight below 30 tons IIRC ( definitely below 33 ). Going and back one one engine is another beef though :/ Like EndlessWaves says I've been remarkably close of making it but I've been finding hard to get any better than being short by some hundreds of dV units

Not all the anomalies are monoliths The Munar arches, some caves in some moons and various other stuff that I will not name are considered anomalies

There are some anomalies in the Mun that are buried ...

@bsalis You should never, ever, do anything with the fuel lines that: a) goes from the center to the outside and then comes to the center again something that creates a circular hose system in the ship Both are prone to creating weirdness. In your case it was , since your pretty x-shaped system was creating a bunch of loop systems ( 2 around the whole ship and one for each aerospike + tank ). Adding the decouplers solves the issue, but, and just as curiosity, do you really need those tanks with fuel ? I see you are using then as structural parts to have where to put the landing legs as well, but if you could live without that fuel, there are far lighter alternatives ( from structural fuselages to wings ... ) P:S I was editing my post , Fried I had given a incomplete and misleading answer to bsalis issue that I wanted to correct

Well, you can use ( almost ) all of your engines and still have a tall rocket, if you use non-gimballing engines on top stages and leave space for the exhaust to pass for the engines in top It just needs more work in the drawing board ...

For that launch in particular I used 10km to 45km in the Mechjeb ascent autopilot, with the aim of 72 km ( it helps having some leeway ). I do not recall if I made any corrections on the gravity turn in it self, though ...