Vanamonde

My landers are very resistant to damage and tipping, because I was such a lousy newbie pilot that I was forced to find ways to MAKE them survive bad landings.

Interplanetary travel is all about the fuel efficiency, and while long, low-acceleration burns are less precise, they are fuel efficient. Could we see some pics of your ship?

Well, for one thing, it didn't require rolling the game back to a state that undid feature implementations.

If I recall correctly, she felt her character wasn't developing and asked to be written out of the show.

The shape looks pretty good. How fast were you going when you rolled?

I can't see the details of your ship very clearly, but I have some suggestions/questions for you. Redesign the ship so that the LV-N engines are not the link between stages. The length of the engine seems to provide leverage for masses ahead of it to swing around and draw the ship off heading: far more so than with any other engine. Are only the rear set of engines firing at the time you're talking about? Engines to the front of the ship contribute little to stability. What kind of capsules/cores are you using for guidance? Do you have enough torque for the mass in question?

I see people saying that they can get links between assemblies through 2 or more sets of rings, but in my own game I only ever see one solid link and one rubbery link that parts under stress. In this failed design, for example, you can see that the docking rings at the front of the tanks, even though they claim to be docked, are not holding under acceleration.

Even if an update doesn't officially break previous saves, there's always the potential for an unintentional break. Remember 20.1 (or whichever it was) when everybody's Mun stuff got moved underground? It's just something you have to expect when playing a game that's still in development.

If you're getting that close already, wait until you get halfway there, place a maneuver node, and move the little markers around until you get an intercept. There's nothing wrong with mid-course corrections; real space agencies use them.

So attach them to decouplers and eject them after docking. Nice idea, by the way.

Did you go through your Windows control panel calibration?

Hey! I started a thread about re-useable ships, but a mod moved it to Spacecraft Exchange (for some reason) and it got almost no attention, so I thought there were only 2 of us trying this. Anyway, as noted there, http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/37952-Stock-Round-trip-ships I've got one that has been to Eve, Dres, and 3 times to Duna, and another that has been to Vall and Eeloo.

Which markers are you talking about? The ones on the node itself? Tugging on those allows you to see what the result would be of adding a velocity vector of that magnitude in that direction. They have formal names such as "prograde" and "anti-radial," but each one just points in the direction you'd need to burn to achieve the indicated effect.

Not meaning to be argumentative, but that doesn't sound right to me at all. While the upper reaches are thin, the effect ramps up extremely rapidly, and when I tried 10,000m it ended up as a ground impact. At any rate, 13,000m drops you in an elliptical orbit with an apoapsis roughly halfway between Duna and Ike. From that first pass, it's pretty easy to alter the orbit to whatever you want it to be. As for the ship in my pic, the shape is due to that being a multipart mission. It consisted of the ship that made the round trip, in this instance carrying a lander, a shuttle to run crew from high orbit to low, and two robotic fuel tankers.

The Tylo mission carried 72 tons of payload and came home with just a trickle of fuel left, but the fuel efficiency was reduced by the fact that I launched a bit late for the outgoing window and had a devil of a time trying to plot a return directly from Tylo orbit to Kerbin, and finally had to use the really sloppy but conceptually easier method of launching from Jool orbit, matching orbits with Kerbin, and waiting about 1.3 kerbin years for an intercept. So I'm sure that ship could get to Moho with a reduced cargo, but it might have to be a REALLY reduced cargo because of the difficulty introduced by Moho's inclination. Thanks for the refuelling options, of which hyperedit sounds like the tidiest.

Coming from Kerbin, a 13,000m pass at Duna will drop you into an orbit with a periapsis of about 40% of Ike's orbital altitude. This ship has done that 3 times without taking any damage or losing any parts, so yours should be fine.

A while back, some very clever person figured out a way around this problem. (Sorry I don't remember who it was; the post was wiped out in the forum massacre.) Build the lower tri-coupler assembly like this, so that each piece only has the 1 parent part that Unity requires, then rotate it and save the design before going to the launch pad. When the software assembles the ship on the pad, all 3 pairs of docking rings will link quite solidly when physics kicks in. I've used this and it works pretty well.

So really? Only a couple of us are doing this? I thought there would be more. By the way, as much as I dislike cheats and try to avoid mods, flying 4 to 7 fuel tankers to refuel my ship between every flight is getting really tiresome. How could I just wave a magic wand and make its tanks full?

Thank you.

Right now, re-entry is only a visual effect and generates no heat.

Thank you for the kind words. I do intend to eventually make more tutorials, but if you've ever tried to make one of your own, you're already aware that they're a great deal of work. I plan the mission, fly it a couple of times to make sure I've got the instructions clear in my head, then write out the steps, then perform the mission one or more additional times so that I can take screenshots to plug into the text. And that's assuming I've already got a suitable ship, so if not, I need to build that too, and test it several times before posting something that I'm sure will be easy for people to download and fly. However, I did just finish my previous big project, and I have considered making my next tutorial an Apollo-style Duna-and-return. But that would require one or more dockings, so I'm wondering if a docking tutorial would be necessary first, and I hesitate to take that on because I think it's a subject that might be better handled in video format, and I'm not set up for those. However, you have given me food for thought, and renewed enthusiasm for the idea. Thank you!

Thank you. I'm glad you liked it. It's my favorite little plane, and I rebuild it in every version.

You can upload your craft files to a free service like Mediafire.com, and include the link they provide in your post.

Isn't that simply that the SAS system allows a slow drift, allowing the inherent balance of the plane to assert itself? I've always assumed that in space, there are no little forces strong enough, or at least not consistent enough, to make the effect evident.

I'm afraid you've misunderstood my remark. This is a guide for new pilots, and Minmus is harder for new pilots to reach because it may require the complication of a plane change maneuver to deal with its orbital inclination, and because from a 100km orbit (and using rough numbers because the battery in my calculator died) the SOI of Mun subtends an arc of around 12 degrees while that of Minmus is a much smaller target to hit at just under 3 degrees.