Vanamonde

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.

It's not easy to read at first, but the numbers check. At least the ones I know check, anyway. It looks like you can just add the figures between where you are and where you want to be. Extremely handy.

What sort of trouble are you having? A basic rocket needs a capsule, a fuel tank, and an engine, and that's all, though it won't go very far, and the pilot won't survive the trip. To keep the pilot alive, put a decoupler under the capsule and a parachute on top of the capsule. When it runs out gas, hit the spacebar twice. To make it go farther, add tanks and engines. When it gets too big to fly straight, add guidance devices. When it gets so big that it's too slow to fly well, start putting decouplers between the parts so you can throw away bits you don't need anymore. Repeat these steps until you get to the Mun.

My missing pilot glitch de-glitched itself while I was playing with other flights! Yay! Now Thomphus is out exploring that pretty crater. (Is the plan to make the rocks solid some day?)

Currently, yes. The game is still a work in progress, and they took the old tutorials out in this version. But there are lots of player-made tutorials stickied at the top of the how-to page.

The most helpful insight I had when I was figuring out rendezous is to set up the conditions and let time do most of the work. Look not so much where your ship and the target are now, but look ahead along their trajectory lines and manuever to bring those lines together. Match orbital planes but slightly above to let the target catch with you or slight below to catch up with the target, and once you get within about 20km, you can start gently steering directly for the target. But don't let your approach speed get too high, or you'll lose the trajectory match and/or not be able to brake in time.

The Apollo program also orbited the moon before attempting to land, so your program is doing fine. How much a tank of fuel can do depends on the engine and mass of the ship, though, so there's no single right answer to your original question. Often it helps to post a picture of your ship.

Everything in the Kerbal solar system rotates and orbits west-to-east, or counter-clockwise when viewed from north. A few bodies are eccentric and/or inclined, but no natural objects (non-spaceships) have a retrograde motion or rotation.

Cool. I've been using the equations from the Kosmo-not/Ancient Astronaught guide, but without knowing what the units were. My education proceeds apace!

However, I believe that since .16, it's no longer safe to fly through them. If you want to try it anyway, at least quicksave first.

The thing that drives me nuts is that for months now I can't give anyone a point because the interface complains I need to spread the love around some more. I'm not trying to just give points to the same people, and I don't remember who I did and did not give points to. Since it's been weeks since it allowed me to give anyone a point, I've pretty much forgotten it's there at all.

Since there's already plenty of wreckage to be had on Kerbin, why would you go to all the trouble of importing more?

How does one convert that kind of delta-V rating to the kind we've been using, such as 4700 for Kerbin orbit? (Sorry, I don't know the proper terms to ask the question more clearly.)

Who runs the wiki? Could somebody add surface-to-orbit delta-Vs for the various worlds? I don't want to fly my 80 part lander to Eve just to SEE if it can get off Eve again!

What an odd question. Yes,.17 is harder and more frustrating than .16, but in the same way as the real world, in which getting to orbit and the moon was done 40 years ago, but we haven't even tried to put somebody on another planet yet. And believe me, I know from frustration; I'm one of the people for whom the game is freezing up to 5 times per day. But there's a reason we all switched to .17, right? Which is all the new stuff to do. If the new stuff was as easy to get to as the old stuff, it would just be more of the same.

That's a RIGHT click, by the way.

It is, isn't it? Unfortunately, I can't take credit for it. Several of us are using the technique, and I myself got the idea from a Scott Manley video. But that slingshot was all me!Progress report: All 3 ships have now arrived. To maintain the illusion that I am a master pilot, let's just skip over the hideous messes I made out of the other two approaches and cut right to the good parts. After some excitement when the deceptive slope of the terrain induced Jeb to discard his booster stage so low that the exploding debris hit the lander, he came down on a scenic slope over looking a wide valley on Ike, just in time to watch an eclipse from atop the Minor Moon Explorer-3. 　 Meanwhile, orbiting 30,000m overhead, Matlie gives the CRV-2 a mid-flight inspection.

I decided to try to top myself, and so within minutes of each other, I launched a Duna lander, an Ike lander, and their recovery ship. You know how the patched conics display will sometimes flip back and forth, telling you you do and then don't have an intercept? Well, that happened as the first ship was approaching Duna. I knew the display was lying so I just kept going, but I hadn't been able to zoom in and see what kind of intercept I had. When I suddenly popped already into Duna's SOI, I was aggravated to find I was coming in retrograde at a fairly high rate of speed, which is not the way you want to approach a world whose atmosphere isn't going to help you brake. I was about to load my quicksave when I realized there was a much cooler thing I could try. I braked enough to bring my path skimming the orbit of Ike, then arranged this: A slingshot in which I simultaneously braked, matched planes, and flipped my path prograde with respect to Duna. (I hadn't decided where to land on Duna yet, so the plane match was entirely for the sake of coolness.) Trying to anticipate how you're going to come out the other side of a transit through 2 consecutive polar frames of reference is EXTREMELY counter-intuitive, and I freely admit that I used a dozen quickloads and I'm still sure I didn't do it optimally. But I did it successfully, and the lander is now coming in for an aerobraking pass or two. Update: The star marks the landing spot I was aiming for. Am I a bad ass or what? (Oh man, the longer I look at this mission, the more glitches I find. What's with that longitude?) But what's this? Some kind of flipping glitch: the pilot vanished somewhere along the way. I still had control of the ship, but there's no one to EVA. That sound you hear is my head hammering the desk. Ack, and I just noticed that I screwed up the staging, and one of my chutes didn't fire. Oh well, as the saying goes, any landing there's no pilot to walk away from... (Also, the forum is acting up, and it took 3 tries to post this. > Nope? That makes 4 tries.

Not to be nitpicky, but it is possible to make a gyroscopically stabilized rocket, but then ALL it can do is go in a straight line.

I don't remember the details of the first one, but the other two were ships I put in orbit, left for months while made other flights, then revisited. There was no message about acceleration when I returned to the space center from the mission the second time, and of course I didn't think to look and see if they were still there on the tracking station after I left them running. They are not listed on the tracking center now, and thinking back to this morning, something seemed wrong about the number of flights listed on my resumable game menu, but it didn't set off enough alarm bells to make me think to check the count.

The insightful thing about Turing's test is that it's the only proof we have that other people are thinking like we are, let alone machines. Neither can be directly observed, so his suggestion was to use the same method for both.

Rockets wobble for a number of reasons. That's realistic and unremarkable, so the important question is not what causes it, but how to control it. For one thing, the longer a rocket is, the more it flexes along its length, so when designing a ship, it's best to keep it as short as possible by building outward. Right now, there's not much penalty for that because air resistance is not fully implemented in this version of the game. SAS is supposed to be the more simple version, and is good at stopping unwanted rotation around the long axis, but not so good at stabilizing the other two axes. ASAS is supposed to be the advanced version. It's a little weaker at stopping lengthwise rotations, but better at stabilizing the other two axes. SAS exerts a force, and more than one exerts more force. ASAS exerts a lesser force, but is amplified by contol devices such as fins and RCS thusters. More than one ASAS does not exert noticeable additional control. In practice, one ASAS and no SAS is enough to control all but the largest rockets. The two means of effecting control are control surfaces (fins, elevators, canards) and the "thust vectoring"-capable engines. Surfaces only work in atmosphere, while vectoring engines work anywhere, though they are slightly less powerful than static engines. If your ship doesn't have some of these things, it's essentially an unguided, ballistic missile that just goes where it's pointed, and can't be steered. Also, look at your ship as it flies. Are the parts flexing with respect to each other? If so, that can contribute to wobbliness. You want a rigid rocket (who doesn't?), so attaching the flexing parts to other things with struts may help stabilize the whole ship. Getting to other planets is almost exactly the same problem as getting two ships to rendezvous in Kerbin orbit. Have you tried that? Practice that for a while, and planet-voyaging will seem familiar to you when you get the full game. Just pretend the planet is the target ship for the rendezvous. "Prograde" is indeed the direction of the ship's travel, but it can also refer to the direction a planet is rotating, or to the direction the planet is orbiting the sun. "Retrograde" is 180 degress away from whatever you're calling prograde in your current frame of reference.