Vanamonde

What a difference a day makes. The closest I got to Laythe yesterday: And the closest I've gotten to Laythe so far today:

That's kind of a big question that doesn't have a simple answer. There are a lot of ways to build successful ships. I suggest you look around the Spaceship Exchange section for ideas. I'd post an example for you myself, but Imgur seems to offline to replace its servers today.

There are good days and bad. I spent most of yesterday wildly missing/ running out of gas before reaching/ exploding on the way to Jool. My best effort is a ship that has a pretty good chance of achieving an intercept, in about 89 game years.

Utterly ineffective. The current version of Kerbol is more interesting to look at, but has neither heat, atmosphere, nor solar wind. That was just me attempting to be funny. But you are destroyed by some invisible barrier at around 120,000m, even though the visible surface is much below that. I think somebody did land on it, though, most likely due to a glitch.

If the gravity is high enough, you can hold down the shift key to make the little guy run. I'm not sure what the cut off gravity is, but you can run on Duna, but not Mun, Minmus, or Ike. I think you can run on Eve, but I'm not sure. I haven't landed anywhere else yet.

Are you using the "restart flight" button? Apparently, it doesn't always reset everything just perfectly, and it's advisable to go back to the VAB before taking off again, even if you don't make any changes to the ship.

You need to copy your ship's .craft file from your KSP folder/saves/your game's name/ships/VAB to someplace like Mediafire, then post the link here so people can try it out. But as long as you've got fuel and an engine, the ship should be capable of reaching orbit. What trouble are you having?

I am going to sound like an old guy, becaue I am kind of an old guy, but most movies now try to substitute violence for scariness. Body parts flying everywhere isn't scarey; it's just kind of gross, and gets downright boring if the whole movie is like that. But an article I was reading pointed out that Alien really isn't very violent. Early on in the movie there's the bloody scene where the chestburster bursts John Hurt's chest, but after that, almost all the violence takes place off camera, and you're creeped out because you remember that earlier scene and keep expecting more like it. Instead, the movie skips the parts where you really know what's going to happen anyway (biting and blood flying), and the other characters find, or sometimes don't find, the mess that's left. In fact, one of the more violent bits of the movie is when Ashe goes nuts and tries to strangle Ripley by jamming a rolled up magazine down her throat. That's more disturbing than the monster, because it's more realistic. Now, you can still have blood flying and all that violence, but that works better as an action movie like Aliens. Ziff, you should read Who Goes There?, the short story by John Campbell upon which The Thing was based. It's not violence and gore. Instead, the critter can imitate people perfectly, so the guys trapped at the antarctic station don't know which of them is the monster. It's quite a different kind of story, but it's interesting to see where the ideas for the movie came from. In the first movie, they didn't do the shapeshifting because of limitations on budget and the special effects tech of the time, and nobody since has tried to do much with the original imposter idea. (At least I don't think so. I haven't seen the latest version.)

There are a lot of deep, steep canyons around Mun's northern polar region.

Alien. (Well vBulletin, how do you expect me to be dramatically terse with more than 10 characters?)

Yeah, that's over 3 times the maximum safe contact speed, but also, it sounds like your lander is REALLY heavy: so heavy that it's gonna go squish at even lower speeds than that. You'll find that while it takes a really big rocket to get off of Kerbin, a little bitty one is enough to get back from Mun because you're not fighitng atmosphere and heavy gravity on the up, and Kerbin's atmosphere actually helps you on the way down.

I'm doing pretty well with Duna/Ike (landed 6, brought back 5), I can get to some others but not land (Moho's heat blows up engines, Gilly is bugged), I've landed on Eve but haven't tried to get back from it yet, and my missions to the Jool vicinity aren't going so well. The one ship I managed to get out there was eaten by a glitch, and I apparently screwed up the math and my other attempt ran out of gas halfway there. So, not terrible, but not great.

I decided I was just being overly bashful, and it wouldn't hurt to share the ships after all. The Mk 41b Minor Moon Explorer can reach Gilly and Ike, and of course Mun and Minmus, but I don't think it can reach any placer farther, and I haven't tried. Remember that it's not meant to return to Kerbin, and can only return to orbit of the body it's has landed upon, though it can reach a pretty high orbit (around 50,000m around Ike). Not atmosphere capable. Craf:http://www./?5cp4qht0j5d84tt The Mk 39b Duna Lander is not easy to use. It will get to Duna orbit well enough, but then you need to very carefully bring it through most of the planet's thin atmosphere with a combination of aerobraking and the booster stage firing during a shallow descent. It will land entirely on the parachutes, conserving the lander's own fuel for later return to orbit, but you really should get it down to 300m/s or less before relying on the chutes. And I haven't been able to land it precisely enough to test the chutes at a high altitude landing site, though it probably can if you don't mind tapping into the lander's own fuel supply. With full fuel tanks, it can reach an orbit of 80,000m or more to meet a recovery ship. Craft: http://www./?uogi3u8chcg1a68 Both landers can touchdown anywhere on the target world, including the poles because the CRV below will expend the fuel to meet them wherever they come up. The Mk 38c Crew Recovery Vehicle can reach Duna or Eve orbit, relocate to that planet's moon and establish orbit there, rendezvous with a ship at each world and pick its pilot, then return to Kerbin and splashdown. For the fuel efficiency it needs to do all this travelling, it gets by with just the one NERVA on the interplanetary stage. Unfortunately, this means that transfer burns can take around 10 minutes, though the last chemical stage should be able to at least give you a good start as you're leaving Kerbin orbit. It's pretty steerable, though it tends to roll sharply. Remember to evict two of the original tenants before launch. Craft: http://www./?mnpmdd26ootmort I can't promise perfection, but they've been pretty well tested, and have all flown these intended flight plans succesfully at least twice.

That's actually really freaking good for your first time. How fast were you going when you passed?

It's customary to post screenshots of the ships along with the files, because shoppers like to see what they're buying. By the way, there's a section for sharing ships, but don't worry, the friendly neighborhood moderator is going to come along and move this for you any second now.

The game is still in development and things get taken out, put back in, switche around, etc. There are 2 more basic tutorials that were taken out for .17, but will be replaced.

Second Duna-trio mission concluded. After spending some time taking samples from Ike, the lander met the recovery ship. On they went, and up came the Duna lander. The view out Jebediah's window just before (dirt) splashdown. And strecthing their legs while waiting for crew pickup.

Hit R first, and that turns his little rocket pack on. Then you can jet him around using WASD and two other keys I can't remember because I remapped them, but they're listed under "settings" and "input" from the main menu.

To free up seats on the ship, have a Kerbal go EVA, then click to "end flight" him while he's hanging onto the built-in ladder rungs on the capsule, then "return to space center." That rocket will still be sitting on the pad, with an empty seat, formerly occupied by the guy who did not fall to his death. You can then return to that rocket either by clicking on the launchpad from the main space center picture, or through the tracking station. Repeat these steps to free up a second seat. Kerbals never starve or go insane. They can hang around in marooned capsules for years or decades, so there's no hurry. How did the booster hit the upper stage? Did you eject it while the engines were still running, or did the upper stage tumble?

Are you trying to get the two ships to meet? What kind of trouble were you having? If you're orbit is not parallel, have your ship turn 90 degrees in the direction of the other orbit and burn the engines, watching on the map view as the orbits get closer to parallel. (It's more efficient to stay 90 degrees from prograde during the burn, but kind of tricky to keep turning the ship at the right rate.) Once the orbits are lined up on the same plane, speed up (burn toward the prograde marker) on the part of your orbit where you're below the other orbit, and slow down (burn toward retrograde on the part of your orbit where you're above the other orbit,) again watching the map view to see how this affects your path and brings it closer to the target orbit. This is NOT the most efficient way to do it, but it is a good way to get a feel for how orbits work. Don't be a hurry, don't make big dramatic burns, and just keep tinkering until you get an intuitive feel for what's going on. To actually meet the other ship, once you have the orbits matching shape, the next part seems backwards. If you want to catch up with a ship ahead of you, slow down. This will cause your orbit to drop below that of the target, where the slight fall will speed you up, and you will begin to overtake the targer ship. If you want the other ship to catch up with you, speed up. The slight climb will slow you down as gravity fights you, allowing the other ship to catch up. Again, keep the changes small or things will rapidly get out of hand. Once you get to within around 20km, you can begin to steer directly toward the target ship without messing up your orbit too badly, as long as you don't go too fast.

I don't remember hearing about Wordpad being a problem. What's the issue with it?

Your upper stage is very compact, making it easy for forces to induce a tumble around its axes. That's not a flaw, but it is a cause. Try moving the side tank/engine combos further down, even overlapping the central engine, to give the stage more rotational inertia. Perhaps even replace those eight 400-capacity tanks with one 1600-capacity big one and eight of the little 200-capacity tanks as side engine moutning points. That will give the stage identical weight, fuel capacity, and engine mounts, while making it longer and therefore more resistant to unwanted rotations. Also, since the gimballed engines are its strongest form of attitude control, try firing them immediately upon decoupling. I was just having a similar problem earlier this evening, and getting the engines on the job of resisting unwanted rotations right away did a lot to overcome it. You might as well save the RCS fuel and turn them off, by the way, since the current thrusters are not really scaled to be much use on the larger ship parts.

I'm flattered that you'd ask, but I haven't finalized my designs yet. The recovery ship is temperamental on launch, I haven't tested the Duna lander's parachute descent method at high landing altitudes, and none of them have been optimized for their jobs fuel-wise or in terms of number of parts. I wouldn't mind sharing them once they're debugged and reasonably efficient, but I'm too much of a perfectionist to let anyone see them now. Besides, as frustrating as it may be to not be able to reach places you see other players going, you won't believe how much more satisfying the struggle makes it when you finally do pull it off with a ship you made yourself.