Vanamonde

Some tidbits I've gathered: Without using the engines at all, 4 large chutes were enough to bring this lander down safely on Duna, though just barely and I plan to add another chute or two before taking my next mission there. Edit: It appears this was largely dumb luck. It's harder than I thought even with a 5th chute, and my next 4 attempts crashed. A little last-minute nudge with RCS or engines seems to be a good idea after all. The RCS pack will just barely get you airborne on Duna, but you drop like a stone as soon as you stop thrusting. As I approached Moho, I noticed that my nuclear engine bell began heat-glowing at 30,000m, even though it was off. Yikes! While orbiting at 25,000m, it seemed to be gradually getting hotter, so it seems 30k is the lower limit of a safe, sustainable orbit. Of course I tried to descend anyway (after saving), and the engine blew up at around 14,000m on full thrust. Kerbals can walk on Eve. (An earlier post said they fell and couldn't get up, but they can at least walk.)

Ugh! Bill spent just under 3 years flying my experimental distant moon lander to the Jool system, only to find he doesn't have enough fuel left to brake and land anywhere. At least the scenery is nice:

Not 270 degrees! This confusion arises endlessly. Trying to lift off opposite of the world's rotation does nothing but waste fuel overcoming its rotational speed, while going with it gives you a little speed boost. Once you're in orbit, the distances involved mean that getting to a moon or other world is just as easy either way, so there's no advantage to going retrograde.

The spacebar is the correct button. Are you remembering to turn the throttle up? If you turn an engine on but the throttle is set to zero, nothing with will happen. Also, is there a way for fuel to get from the tanks to the engines? They have to have a connection of one sort or another. Posting a screenshot of your rocket would help. If you have version .17 (the current one), have you tried flying the example ships? Do they work for you?

This game is extremely frustrating, and very hard. But after struggling with it for a while, you won't believe how rewarding it is to finally get something to work. The struggle is part of the fun. Don't be alarmed that so many players talk about the math so much on the forum; it's just one style of playing. You will be more efficient if you do the math, but you can get by without it, too.

The dumb but simple way is to just quicksave, launch to orbit and time it, then do a little math to figure how far your target's orbit will have carried it in that time. Quickload and wait until the time is right. Presto!

10km is MUCH too far away to see a monolith. They're hard to spot from 1-2kms away even if you know where to look. They don't do that sparkly thing from a distance like the arches. I've been playing the game constantly for 4 months now, and I've still only found 3 monoliths, two of them with partial help of some spoliers I couldn't avoid.

As first landings go, that's really not bad. I just stuffed a couple of landers deep into the surface of Ike. Quicksave is your friend! It cracked me up that after the ship crashes and parts fly off, Bob runs after the engine module, as if it's not too late if he can only catch up with it and put the ship back together. So it blows up and then he stops, as if only just realizing that he's boned.

After about 5 years in a one-man capsule, my experimental outer solar system micro-moon lander approaches Ike. On final approach, the view includes Duna, where another of my experimental landers sits. Bill Kerman, first man on (my) Ike. To be honest, this was my 6th landing attempt, as I practiced several times before making the "real" first landing. An unexpected hurdle was that this ship is so small that firing off the decoupler to eject the interplanetary stage throws it several dozen meters up! By the way, is Ike pronounced like "bike" or i-kay?

Oh. Duh. I don't know why I was thinking that the changing number of engines burning at a given time would complicate things, since that isn't a factor in the delta-V equations anyway. In my defense, it was late at night when I posted that.

Drat. There goes my hope of using spaceplanes to come back from the surface. It makes sense, though. Gases that could combust would naturally react chemically with other substances and be removed from the atmosphere. The only reason earth's atmosphere has free oxygen is that plant life continually replenishes it.

Why was the landing a letdown? You're on another freaking planet! At least your kerbalnauts are seasoned pros now.

There are 2 arches above ground, and for some reason, one underground that you can't reach. Those are all on Mun, and I don't think anyone has ever found one anywhere else.

It doesn't have to be a sad story. I've left Jeb parked in just a capsule on Eve for 8 game years while I've been trying missions to the outer planets. He hasn't run out of air or food yet. Those capsules have really terrific wi-fi, too, so he's not even bored.

Then you are starting too late and/or not burning hard enough. Try killing your horizontal speed while you're higher up.

I've been getting good results with a certain stage layout, but I don't know how to calculate its delta-V. In the pic, the inner stack and outer stack engines are activated at the same time, but the outer stack is not only consuming fuel, but pumping fuel into the inner stack at the same time. When the outer stack runs dry I eject it, leaving the inner stack running. In effect, the outer stack is acting as a droptank for the inner stack, but it's a drop tank with an engine that supports its own weight and more. Meanwhile, I'm getting full use of the inner stack engines at the same time, but it still has full tanks when the previous stage is ejected. So there are two stages, but they overlap rather than acting sequentially. Can I simply I treat it as one calcuation as the whole assembly, then re-do the figures as a separate stage of just the inner stack, and add the two?

What other bodies are you concerned about? In this vicinity there's only the moon, and the real probes never got anywhere near it. If the N other bodies are not close by (in relative terms), then it's essentially a 1 body problem, which KSP simulates just fine. Is the confusion perhaps about the word "retrograde" itself? Retrograde with respect to Kerbin's orbit is a good thing for reaching inner planets. Launching retrograde with respect to Kerbin's rotation is NEVER a good idea.

Since "jet" and "Eve" are both 3 letters long and thus unsearchable (Urgh!), does anybody know if jet engines will work in Eve's atmosphere? I seem to recall reading that they work but are less efficient, but of course I can't search for it. If nobody does know, could somebody teleport a jet plane there and try it?

Fun fact: the cart mod as a "sticky" factor built in, to keep it from bouncing around over bumps. In fact, they're so sticky that you can drive on the underside of the arches: I haven't tried it with the other model of cart, like yours, but why don't you give it a try? Quicksave first, of course.

Another factor in the cancellation was public worries about nuclear reactor safety.

New large engines combined with new large tanks means stronger forces trying to crush your ship, and structural strength does NOT scale up with size. Think about this way: throw an empty coke can at the beach at 5mph, and it will just bounce. But drive a supertanker into the beach at 5mph, and it will crush. Also, as you burn fuel, you also have the same thrust applied to a decreasing mass, meaning higher G loads yet. Try throttling back once you're up and running. The first few seconds of getting off the pad are just about the only time that engines really NEED to be at full throttle.

Could you stick some cart mods on the bottom, drive it to the water, and eject the carts?

Is it a harbinger of the end times? I bet doomsday cults are going to be a good business to be in. Hmm, maybe I should start one?

Whoever may still be contact with Skunky, thank him for all his hard work, especially with shepherding newbies.

(Not the first to do it, I know, but I'm excited.) I shot off the experimental XRc Duna on a bad launch window, because I didn't know if it was going to make it anyway. The approach and intercept took around 1200 days (in a 1-man capsule: ouch!) to arrange, but approach I did: I deployed the chutes, not knowing if they'd be enough to get me through the thin atmosphere safely: But they did. And so Matlie Kerman became the first Kerbal to set foot on Duma, and the first Kerbal to land on another planet in a ship able to take off again. (Jeb is currently awaiting rescue on Eve, having bravely volunteered to take what was essentially a manned atmosphere probe on a one-way trip.)