Mic_n

Heavier rockets are also going to be burning a lot more of their dV in atmosphere and suffer higher gravity and especially drag losses.

Not sure of the number, but I've absolutely gone from the surface of Minmus up to my lab in a 50x50 odd km orbit (with monoprop to spare) in the current version. Not much, but enough.

If you can take off into a circular orbit around Kerbin and then plan a manoeuvre node to meet the Mun, then you can take off at dawn, fly straight up until you're out of Kerbin's SOI to establish a circular orbit around the Sun and then plan a manoeuvre node to meet Duna. Exactly the same thing. Just a whole lot more dV and, if you don't hit a proper launch window, time

wha? Oh, ok. Never dawned on me that you'd be clicking the icon rather than using the hotkey So yeah.. hit X to increase the symmetry count, Shift-X to decrease, "C" to enable/disable snap (you should pretty much always have it enabled unless you have something very specific in mind) and "R" to switch between Radial and Mirror modes.

Then I'd suggest working on that first. Maybe not quite as exciting but the mechanics are exactly the same and it's not as huge an effort to "get going". Replace Kerbin with the Sun and the other satellite you're trying to meet with another planet, and the concepts are the same. It's also really useful if you're wanting to do anything like a return mission or drop a little lander down to the surface of a moon or something and bring it back before progressing onto another body. * Establish an orbit in the same plane as your target. That means burning 'down' (purple down-pointing triangle in your navball) at the Ascending Node or vice versa until the angle is ideally at 0.0 (ideally ideally 'NaN', which is like SUPER zero, but "close enough") * Extend one point of your orbit to touch (not cross) the orbit of your target. Ideally, start your burn opposite the nearest 'node' of your target's orbit, so you're either pushing your Ap up to its Pe or reducing your Pe down to its Ap (unlikely if you're coming up from the surface of Kerbin to dock with a satellite, but what you're going to be doing transferring to an inner planet.) This should give you a single set of red markers to indicate the location in your orbit where your closest approach is (it'll be at the intersect of the two orbits) and another to indicate where the other object will be at that point. Two sets of orange and brown markers means your orbits cross. Not a problem in itself, but it's easier to follow and learn if you're only dealing with a single intersection. * If you're in a lower orbit, you're following a shorter path with a quicker orbital period, so you'll "catch up" to that object with each orbit. Orbiting higher will let it catch you. * Once those two markers are close, create yourself a manoeuvre node just before that intercept and adjust your prograde to fine tune it... As you adjust faster and slower you should see that "target position" marker move closer or further to your closest approach. You want to push your orbit so that those two markers get as close as you can get them. At that point if you're doing a planetary transfer, that's quite possibly going to be 'close enough' to put you into that system's SOI, and you should be able to do some aerobraking to get captured and go where you want inside the system. However for a 'docking' kinda meet-up, you still need to zero your relative velocity. You can either do that with another manoeuvre node just past that "meeting" intercept that speeds up or slows down to match orbits and keep that 'target position' indicator in the same spot, or by switching your navball to "target" mode, waiting until you hit your closest approach (when your distance to target starts increasing again), lining up your retrograde marker there and burning until your relative velocity with the target hits zero. To dock from there you need to point back towards your target and creep up on it. Properly balanced RCS or at least strong SAS is invaluable here. Watch your target indicator and prograde indicator and keep them both aligned (preferably over your centre marker). Line up your docking port with the target and hope it doesn't bug out It's a tricky concept to get your head around, but muck around with it and you'll get the hang of it with time and practice. Don't try to go too quickly, and just do one thing at a time. It's really easy to get things wrong in a hurry. Basically, play with manoeuvre nodes and see how changing your orbit in particular directions at particular points in your orbit impacts your rendezvous.

Can you rendezvous with another craft in orbit of Kerbin? Then you can rendezvous with another planet in orbit of the Sun. Exactly the same principles, you just need to escape Kerbin's SoI first. Also.. strictly speaking, you don't need to establish an orbit of Kerbin first.. You can just point straight up and keep on firing, though in the end you're not saving a heap of dV. If it's a planet further out that you're aiming for, take off 'forward'.. ie launch right at sunrise and go straight "up", which equates to Kerbin's prograde path in its orbit around the Sun. When you accelerate out, this will mean you're going faster than Kerbin and therefore climbing into a higher orbit. For planets inside, the opposite. Wait until sunset so you're on Kerbin's retrograde and again head on straight so that you're slowing down and dropping closer in in the solar system.

Just in case: "control from here" on the probe core in question? It might have 'lost' that when it de-powered or something, dunno. Just guessing.

Not at all. Aerospike has better ISP than the 30 or 45s, and much more thrust than a 909, though yeah it's a little heavier. Rapiers are more powerful and operate at higher altitudes than any other airbreathing engine, plus you get a free rocket engine to go with them. You just need to acknowledge that they have an envelope you need to get to before they really shine.

I tend to agree with what's been said.. If you're going for SR71 style then you've got two engine pods to work with.. so either rapiers (don't add the turbojets inline behind them.. it's weight you probably don't need and on the technicality - that's not an SSTO) or turbojets with perhaps aerospikes clipped in on top of them, which is kinda cheat-y but if you're going for visuals works pretty well. But the thing is, with those two engine pods, you look way too heavy. You're just not going to be able to push that much fuel up to the 900-1000m/sec you want to be hitting before you start burning oxidiser. Empty some of those tanks or switch them for cargo bays and have something you can use as a shuttle to deploy probes/etc from. The liquid fuel in your engine pods there (what's that, a precooler and mk1 LF?) should do you for your atmospheric flight, and you probably ought to be able to get your rocket thrust from a single one long Mk2 LF+O tanks (with the mk2-mk1 adapter at the tail there as well). It can be a bit surprising just how much 'less is more' can achieve. Your vertical stabilisers there are a little awkward.. From the looks of it they're right there at your CoM and CoL and are likely going to be of limited usefulness.. they should be trailing your CoM to add a little drag at the rear to keep your nose pointed straight ahead. Personally I'd get rid of the "pairing up" of them like you have and try to get them a little more to the rear. (That probably goes for your entire wing assembly, actually.) Also make sure you right-click them in the SPH to set the control surfaces to yaw only - particularly with them being off-vertical like that the system will likely try to use them for roll and pitch control as well. Also.. yup, bigger control surfaces will help with your pitch control (take a look at a diagram form of the SR-71 - those elevons really are huge).. vernor engines and RCS is not something you should be mucking with. If you want, you could also use the small rectangular wing sections and strakes to extend your wingform up the sides of the main body toward the nose, and tuck some little elevons up the front there to act like canards. Alternately, you could continue the SR-71 theme and use fuel control to shift your CoM around. Either disable fuel flow on your rearmost tanks from launch or alt-right click a pair of tanks to transfer fuel in-flight to make it a bit more tail-heavy and help get your nose up... be very careful there though.. too much will make you flip uncontrollably.

Biggest difference I've seen so far with Mk3s is in heating. Even flying the same basic profile as with Mk2 designs, these things seem to get way hotter, to the point that I've actually blown up probe cores tucked in a 2.5m service bay on ascent. No "Firey Phoenix" stuff going on, either.. not even getting past 900m/s at 20km.. the heat seems to be coming in higher up, in the acceleration to orbital speeds. Seems like these might need a much steeper profile and to have a much more defined "ascend, then circularise" profile that keeps most of the acceleration right up high in the atmosphere. Similarly, much harder & higher aerobraking while coming back down.

Hrm.... shouldn't be. I quite regularly attach different multiples (eg legs/solar panels/radial chutes) to the same part with different numbers in radial symmetry. On "child" parts, yes. You can't place three fuel tanks around a central stack and then switch to four-way symmetry to stick some launch stabilisers on them, which makes perfect sense. However you should be able to put for example four fins in symmetry around the tail of a fuel tank, then switch to two-way symmetry to attach a couple of decouplers and boosters in the space between them on that same core stack. I do that sort of thing quite regularly, for exactly the sort of scenario you describe: lander legs, solar panels, parachutes, etc...

Erm.. I'm yet to be convinced that transonic drag is actually modelled in-game beyond the performance curves of the air breathing engines.. The dive that people perform to "push past the mach barrier" is generally also into thicker atmosphere and therefore increased drag naturally. Without being able to build speed beyond that sweet spot, you can't get into that positive feedback loop of increasing speed generating increasing thrust. The summary of it is, though: You're too heavy. Intakeair doesn't really make the difference it used to.. Airhogging might (might) keep your thrust going for a little more altitude, but it's really not enough to worry about IMO.. there's still way too much atmospheric drag around at the heights the engines cut out for them to keep you accelerating. Basically, you need more engine for the weight of your craft. Just as with rockets though, that's going to exponentially increase things. I've managed a very light spaceplane that'll lift a ton or so to orbit with a single turboram and lv909, and another that'll take about 12t with 6 turborams and 2 lvt45s (now aerospikes)... I've unlocked Mk3 parts now and am still working on a useful heavy lift design, but without the quad adapter or suitable 2.5m engines it's a little tricky to get the power there. Plus the Mk3 parts seem to build heat like crazy.. is it just me?

After poo-pooing the "what's everyone complaining about with this heat stuff?".. I've now unlocked the Mk3 spaceplane parts and ...? Even just launching these things are getting scary hot, still building heat up and cooking my probe core in its service bay at >30km while accelerating to orbit. Coming back down, nice and slow and never ever "flaming up", and still every single part gets a temperature gauge showing up on it. This is madness!

Yup. Go back to the satellite craft and set the root node to be the thing you want to attach it by. It needs to either have an open attachment node or to be "surface attachable"... ie something like a fuel tank that you can just attach radially. It can take a bit of fiddling to get right sometimes.

Tried to fly by holding giant foam wings tucked under my armpits and running down a hill (I was probably... 7ish? at the time?). Got some longish jumps in there. Nothing quite orbital, though. Oh, and I did kinda build a model rocket once in a brief foray into the "Cavorite club" at school. From memory it got crushed in my school bag long before it ever had the chance to get a motor installed and sent heavanwards... Which realistically translates to "I glued some cardboard tubes together, stuck some balsa fins on one end and a plastic nose-cone on the other."

If the five year old in question knows Netwons basic laws of physics, it's pretty easy. "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." That's the principle of a rocket engine. You take a bunch of very flammable stuff and make it explode. You put a big shield around the explosion so that it all goes in the one direction, which in turn makes the shield go the other way. You attach that shield to something you want to go very fast in that direction. Voila: Rocket. With that out of the way... Force = mass * acceleration and (not Newton, just calculus.. five year olds probably shouldn't be mucking with rocket science, I guess) acceleration = change in velocity (dV) / change in time (dt) The explosion you just made exerts a particular force on the shield - the bell housing of a rocket engine, which is attached to fuel tanks and ultimately your payload. therefore: Force = mass * dV / dt dV = Force * dt / mass 1: To increase dV, you must increase force, the time that force is applied or decrease mass. 2: We can't decrease mass, which means more force or a longer time to apply that force. In our situation, that means adding more engines and/or more fuel. 3: More engines means you burn your fuel faster, lowering your dt. 4: Since for 'lifting' stages we're working directly against the acceleration of gravity, we need to be able to maintain a minimum acceleration to overcome that, which means we can't just increase fuel load indefinitely without also adding engine force... So to increase dV we realistically need to add both fuel and the engines to maintain that thrust to weight ratio... we can't let dt climb too high. 5: More fuel = more mass 6: More engines = more mass 5: Therefore, more dV = more mass. 6: See 1.

Have to time your launch a bit.. If you can't launch straight to a rendezvous (and I can't, especially with a spaceplane), it's better to launch just a bit ahead of those LKO ones - it's faster to go higher and let them catch up than vice versa. I've been getting the "recover kerbal X and their wreck" lately, though. I did one in my Mk2 spaceplane with a Klaw in the cargo bay.. get in and close and lock it in then close the doors over it. I also have KAS/KIS installed, so I've taken to putting a winch in the bay.. I don't have the electromag or harpoon unlocked yet though, so it's a matter of taking an engineer up there with a wrench and some connection ports. I tried doing it "properly" just a while back.. very high orbit (near polar orbit between Mun and Minmus), so I launched a tug/lander to go get it.. had a Clamp-o-tron Jr on top and another one in inventory (along with a few other bits and pieces).. Rendezvoused with the craft, took my engineer on EVA with another Clamp Jr and bolted it on, then proceeded to try to dock the things, where I ran into the good old clamp bug that still seems not to have been squashed, where the 'magnets' kick in and it just wobbles around trying to get close but presumably never quite working it out and actually clamping, until it's eventually thrown clear and the ports basically de-activate, never to clamp again. I wound up grabbing a couple of KAS connector ports out of inventory (which I'd also fortunately packed), fixing them over top of the clamp ports and then 'joining' the two. Hideously unaligned, but I still managed to get a "good enough" retro burn to get back into atmosphere, where my chutes took over and let the whole hideously asymmetric mass come spinning gracelessly into the ocean. I really wish they'd fix the damn docking port bugs. They've been broken like that ever since they were made.

depends on context, but SQRT is often shorthand for Square Root.. as in the mathematical function.

You answered your own question - the service bay is clipping other parts on the ship. You really need to avoid clipping service bays and the parts inside and around them.. for some reason the game freaks right out when it happens and you can very easily get the result you describe.

I haven't used KER (though I'm thinking it's something I should grab to eliminate some of the guesswork in my designs, though I kinda enjoy some degree of trial-and-error).. but AFAIK, it's more about information.. presenting you with all the various stats of your craft so you can better predict how it will work, but without the autopilot-type features of mechjeb.

The general idea is to be "almost stalling". It really depends on the individual craft, though... but in a nutshell, you want to be very slightly nose up and with just a little bit of thrust to keep you pushing along. You need to almost think about it as a completely different way of flying, and when you're in that sort of attitude, you work your elevator and throttle controls around the other way: if you want to go faster, push your nose down a little.. if you're falling too fast, give it a little more throttle. You should be able to just about stall it in. Practice makes perfect. kinda like this:

Just to make sure, you haven't inadvertently mucked with your trim? Think Alt-X will re-center it if you have..

you're launching 1000T payloads? Dear god, that's nuts. No wonder you're having trouble launching them. I mean.. play the game the way you want to, by all means.. but IMO if you're trying to launch things you can't achieve with even the biggest stock engines out there, then you're doing it wrong.

Grab Firespitter. Not only does it have helicopter parts, there's also floats, so you could make a seaplane to land on the water at/over the object and retrieve it like that. Put a cargo bay facing downwards with a KAS winch in there and pull the part in, dock it, and close your bay back up again before taking off and heading back to base. I haven't mucked with the options lately, I know they mucked with the stock part buoyancy recently.. Used to be you could use the radial mount intakes as floats, but I've heard they changed that. Not sure about the girder segments and/or octo struts though. Waaaaayyy back I built a command-pod recovery VSTOL all stock with a little crane gantry thing based around landing gear rolling along straight wing segments with docking ports to lock it in and the radial rockets to move it along. Otherwise, yeah.. jets and a slow and steady hand, and RCS can help with the fine tuning rather than trying to spool up and down laggy turbines.

If you're staging apart like that in atmosphere still, then.. yeah, maybe it has its benefits. As far as decoupler force.. Netwon's 3rd law.. that decoupler applies its force equally both ways. flipping it wouldn't have any impact. In fact, since the 'mass part' of the decoupler would be staying with the plane, then that equal force would equate to a greater dV for your payload!