Vanamonde

I de-orbited a Kerbal on Minmus with RCS, but when I tried it on Mun, he went splat. However, it was a last-ditch attempt to abandon a doomed ship, and he didn't start from the best circumstances (low altitude, near orbital speed). However, last night I did reach orbit, circumnavigate, and de-orbit Patly Kerman on Minmus, solely with the RCS pack.

Nothing like getting something backwards in print to make you feel stupid. You're right, Pyre. I guess it's just too early in the morning for me.

That IS the method! Match orbits with the objective: same plane, but slightly lower altitude. This will give you a slightly higher speed, and wait to catch up with the stranded ship or person. Once you get within about 20km, you can start carefully steering toward the target with RCS, almost as if you're both not moving. The key is setting up the conditions and letting time do most of the work. It can take several orbits to get into position. Just be patient and keep using small burns.

Why do so many game companies fail to acknowledge this PAINFULLY OBVIOUS point? Hackers just see the protections as challenges to their skills, while legitimate purchasers have to work around the inconvenience and glitches that arise when you make software more complex than it needs to be to get the job done. I can't tell you how refreshing it is to hear someone being SANE about this!

Is Moho derived from MohoroviÄÂić? (Like maybe it's a planet with no crust over its mantle?)

Back in 15.2, I touched down on what looked like flat ground from above, but turned out to be the edge of a steep crater. The uneven landing popped off a lander leg, then to my horror, I watched as the ship began sliding downhill. It got up to speeds of around 12m/s, scraped off an engine and another leg... but somehow stayed upright, finally grinding to a halt just under a kilometer from the initial impact point (marked by the position of the first lander leg up by the skyline). You can see by the mission clocks that the slide lasted over 1.5 minutes.

From the Krakensbane dev blog: Is gravity also calculated separately for each piece of a ship? It would have to be, wouldn't it? Momentum, velocity, all that, would have to be, or bad designs wouldn't realistically rip apart on takeoff like they do, and that sort of thing. If so, then a single ship is already an N body problem.

If you're having that much trouble fine-tuning the speed, maybe your engines are just too powerful for the weight of your lander? What does you ship look like (in screenshots)? Maybe you could get close to the speed you want with the main engine, and then use RCS bursts to fine-tune. You might also build your lander shorter and wider, in which case you can bounce a little and still land upright. But mostly I suspect that if you're going sideways 20m/s as you're about to touch down, you're waiting too long to cancel your horizontal velocity.

Mostly it doesn't matter, but if you mount any stages on the sides (with radial decouplers), things can get really screwy. Everything you add below that tries to skip the side stage and consider itself part of the stage above the side stage. After you place the part on the ship itself, you have to manually move its icon on the staging sequence display on the side of the screen to make sure it's activated when you want it to be. Later if you adjust any of the higher parts, that may cause many of the lower pieces to revert to the wrong stage, and you have to go back and re-fix them all. It's a major pain in the behind.

_Aramchek_, I think your ship is at one of the arches.

When you're ready to park, retract the landing wheels.

This is interesting, but I'm struggling to understand it. Can't the dimensions be handled as two separate vectors that add up to the final trip? There's the 47,000km horizontal trip and the 4900km vertical trip, and if you're going to have to cover the vertical leg one way or another, why does it matter at which point in the journey you make the burn? It's still going to have to be enough fuel to cover the 4900km at whatever speed is required to complete that leg before the horizontal leg comes to its end, isn't it? (I hope I don't sound argumentative. I've learned that when I disagree with Maltesh, it's because *I'm* wrong. I just want to learn why I'm wrong. )

I will deal with the return-from-the-planets issue by considering my Kerbals settlers rather than explorers. Problem solved!

I hope this isn't a dumb question, but why isn't the most efficient time to alter plane at the beginning of the transfer? My thinking is that any deflection you achieve there will be magnified by the length of the flight. By contrast, at 47,000km you need to deflect 6 degrees, but at 23,500km you have to deflect 11.87 degrees, to cover the same 4939.9km that Minmus is above the ecliptic at that point, right? (This game is forcing me to re-learn math I haven't used in 20 years. Not that I'm complaining. ) If not, what am I overlooking?

I'm still waiting for my $50 million. What's the holdup?

The SAS freeze sometimes happens to me after coming out of warp, but I haven't had a ship fall apart because of it.

That will simpllify fuel storage, as I no longer need to keep the two types separate to avoid feeling like I'm cheating. On the subject of technical matters, it sounds like aerospikes are effective in vacuum? I've read about them a little, but that part isn't clear to me. If they use the air flow around the engine to form something similar to an engine bell, wouldn't they expend force in useless directions in vacuum? And in the game, does greater wing area increase the altitude the plane can attain, or just its lifting capacity?

What does it look like? Can you post pics? You probably have too much lift in the nose, too much weight toward the back, the engines are thrusting from too far off-center, or some combination of those. (Or what EndlessWaves said. I need to learn to type faster. )

I also would like $50 million. Maybe for space, maybe not. I haven't decided yet. I'd just like it. I also am not shaken to ask people to give me money.

Getting hit by debris is a low probability event for any one player on any one mission, but there are thousands of players now and we're all flying many missions. Every now and then, somebody draws the short straw.

The running lights mod comes with some parts already set to be activated with P, and I didn't change that. I myself have put nothing on P.Karolus10: Double posting, second post has been removed and merged bellow - please using "Edit Post option", thank You. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Hey, guess what it took me over a week to figure out? There are two cart mods! Once I installed the other one, the floodlights worked. Thanks for your help, guys!

Get a free account at a serivce like imgur.com, upload your screenshots there, and use the links imgur provides in your posts.

I had a lot of trouble with disorientation when I was learning the game, too. Some things that helped me: 1. The navball always is using one of the worlds as its origin point. If you point the little -v- indicator at the yellow dot in the middle of the brown half of the navball, you will be looking straight "down" relative to that world, and your ship will be pointing directly at it. Note that when you transition to another world's gravity-simulating sphere of influence, the navball will jump suddenly because it's now using the new world as its origin point, even if your ship has not actually changed heading. 2. Similarly, you can point the navball -v- marker at the prograde indicator. Then you know that when you switch to map view, your ship is pointing directly along the pale blue projected trajectory curve. Either way, once you know which line in space you are facing, you can switch back and forth from the live view to the map screen, and just roll the ship until the other two spacial axes line up with the map view. Then, fly the same direction in space as on the map view. Once you get used to that, you can line up on the sun, or a part of the background nebula, or a constellation, etc., whatever is easiest. It also used to help me to put some little piece just above the door* of the crew cabin of the rocket, like the small hardpoint here: because then I could tell at a glance that this direction was "up" for the navball. *On the new 3-man capsule, it should go on the side with the windows, between them.

I haven't tried this yet, but shouldn't the process be almost exactly the same? As long as your apses line up on both orbits, won't other factors cancel each other out?

You can do that now. Just hit N with the RCS activated. And yes, that has saved a couple of my Mun landings.