Khrissetti

There was a vogue a few months ago for naming everything in the kerbal-verse with a \'k\' as in (Kearth, Krussia, Kupiter, etc) doing that now will get you shouted at. Otherwise, welcome!

This is the first plane I\'ve ever built which has actually managed to stay aloft -- the Wright It glides fairly well, the only problem is controllability, I have to take SAS off, enter a direction, then hit the SAS back on again to control it. Still, made it half way to KSC2 with 2 fuel tanks left on the first go.

Well, it wasn\'t quite KSC2, but the \'Wright\' as I\'ve christened her, is down. So gently that I didn\'t even realise we\'d touched down until the velocity dropped off.

I\'ve finally managed to build a spaceplane which actually flies. I\'ve crossed the home continent on the way to KSC2 (hopefully, though the actual destination is just landing it somewhere in a fashion I can walk away from!) and am currently over the ocean. Only problem is, I\'ve never actually landed a craft with wings before. Any tips to stop me becoming yet another smear on the landscape? This is the currently unnamed beast (why bothering naming something you expect will be dead within 30 seconds?)

If it was at 36k you\'d have got back fine. Get within the atmosphere and you\'ll aerobrake down.

Challenge 5 done Challenge 5: Orbit around Minmus and take pictures of the methane lakes. Show pictures of each lake The crew of the Medusa I return to Minmus, following in the footsteps of the Khione I tasked with surveying all of the littlest moon\'s ice lakes. They return with pictures of each lake and sea, completing the mission by first orbiting eastwards, then changing plane to a polar orbit to check for any smaller lakes around the poles. http://s289.photobucket.com/albums/ll232/chrissetti/Medusa%20I/ EDIT: Challenge 1 done as well - With stock parts only! Project Shackleton was underfunded from the very start, forced to rely on \'stock\' parts dragged in from scrap metal yards and off the side of the road. The challenge was simple, to capture images of the poles, North and South, which the crew dutifully did, before dropping down somewhere in the northern wastes. http://s289.photobucket.com/albums/ll232/chrissetti/Shackleton/

I love it, reminds me of the theme to the 90s TV show The Cape - A drama set in the Cape Canaveral space sentre. Ah takes me back to my youth!

I know what you mean, being presented with the massive collection of spaceplane parts is a bit overwhelming at first. The best policy is to stick to parts you recognise until you can get to grips with all the new bits.

nicely done, sir. Just need to complete a return mission, now.

Congratulations! Did you take any pictures of your accomplishment?

at about 5,000m slow down to about 20m/s, keep an eye out for your shadow or if you\'re on the dark side, look for when your exhaust starts to go through the surface of the planet, after that get your speed lower than 10 m/s, the closest to 0 the safer you\'ll be. The fastest I\'ve ever safely landed was 13m/s The best thing is that when you\'re lower than 5m/s you\'ll be able to clearly see which way your lateral movement is going. you want your retrograde symbol (the green/yellow circle with the \'x\' in it) pointing to the very top of the blue part of the nav-ball. if the symbol is a little to the left or right use the \'j\' and \'l\' keys to fire RCS to bring it back in line. If the symbol is too far up or down, use \'i\' and \'k\' I practiced on Kerbin, bouncing around KSC until I got the hang of it enough to land on the Mun as this was in v0.13 before the advent of save files.

Yeah when I visited KSC2, my rover drove through the base of the launch pad, it doesn\'t seem to have a collision mesh.

Thomvis Kerman, he was the first of my kerbals to land on Minmus and successfully landed my first permanent Mun structure. it only seems right that he should take that \'one small step for kerbal...\'

It\'s simple if you\'re experienced. chances are good, though that if you\'re flying manually you\'ll get the incline or the timing slightly wrong and have to adjust your plane anyway.

At the moment they\'re just interesting artifacts to fly through, land on, get to and crash into. they don\'t \'do\' anything.

Ahh you\'ll never get the same sense of satisfaction of landing a ship on Minmus yourself with mechjeb.

You\'ve found one of the Mun arches, well done

kerbin is approx 10.65 times smaller than the Earth and has a distance from the sun 11 times smaller, this is to make it a fun game, rather than a detailed simulator in the vein of Orbiter The demo version is good but lacks: A detailed Kerbin and Mun, A persistence file so you can have multiple missions and debris on the go at the same time, A spaceplane hangar Another smaller moon called Minmus A tracking station so you can keep tabs on all your missions The sense of satisfaction in having financially contributed to a community-centred game and a small developer trying to take a risk at launching something unique and different from the thousands of FPS and RPG games on the market. Access to all future updates which will eventually include: More planets EVA so your kerbals can leave their ships Docking Missions, A full campaign mode improved physics engine The longer you leave KSP, the more expensive it will get as the game gets closer and closer to release.

yeah, I don\'t like the \'bouncy\' legs for precisely that reason, and I just equip my ships with 6 of the old solid legs.

Ok, you\'ve worked out by now that Minmus, unlike the Mun is on an inclined plane to yours (about 6 degrees) and you need to match that before you get up there. First put the ship into an Eastwards circular orbit of about 400km, that way it\'ll be big enough to see any changes you make. The attachment is an exagerated version of the sort of plane-change maneuver you\'ll have to make.start by turning your map view so that both yours and Minmus\' orbits look like straight lines.. now, where they cross is where you\'ll want to make your burn to change planes. Tu make your burn, wait until you\'re at that point and turn north or south, depending where on the orbit you are. Fire north (or south) and wath as your orbit starts to incline. If it\'s inclining the wrong way then flip over (so turn south if you were headed north) and burn again until the two lines sit more or less on top of one another. After that it\'s just like heading for the Mun, wait for it to come over the horizonand burn prograde until your orbit path changes to yellow to show you\'ll intercept Minmus. If your apsis goes more tan a 10km higher than minmus\' orbit then just hit the warp button until Minmus catches you up. When you\'re captured by Minmus\' spere of influence, wait until you reach periapsis then burn retrograde until your orbit circularises, after that landing should be relatively easy, just wait until you\'re over somewere flat (those ice lakes are nice) and burn in the opposite direction to your orbit until you kill all your lateral movement, then control your landing to settle gently on the surface. Use RCS to kill any lateral movement you pick up on the way down.

'You got a bunch of kerbals down here about to turn blue...'

If you want to find the Mun arch orbit at 20,000m or less and keep an eye on the northern rim of the nearside crater (Also called the Silisko crater)

Yup, your best bet is to utterly ignore the atimeter, I\'ve found it worse than useless below 5km (above that I use the map) just watch for shadows and the point when your exhaust sinks below the surface. version 0.16 needs to have a proper laser altimeter.

Shoot over the mountains west of the inland lake on the continent west of the KSCD continent. Look in craters. If you still don\'t see it I\'ll post a screenshot of the map later.

The taller your rocket is, the less stable it is, it\'s all down to the centre of gravity on the thing. The CoG is the point around which all your forces act, like the pivot point on a see-saw. The further a force is from the CoG, the more rotational moment it applies, the same as the see-saw, a very light weight can lift a heavy weight if the heavy weight is near the pivot and the light weight is at the end of the see-saw. On a rocket of 10m with its CoG in the middle, if you pitch over by one degree then at the end your engines move to one side by 9cm (approx.), if the engines have an upwards force of 100KN then your ASAS has to counteract 8.73KNm of moment trying to turn your rocket to one side if your rocket is 50m long then that becomes 43.63KNm, at 100m long that becomes 87.26KNm (That maths isn\'t totally right as the angle of that rocket\'s thrust will increase with the rocket, this is just to demonsrate why a taller rocket is less stable.) If you look at your stats for the SAS and ASAS it gives you a measure of the maximum torque they can apply which is (to our purposes) the rotational energy it can use to counteract the rotational energy of your off-centre rocket. if the turning moment is greater than the torque your SAS can apply then it will tip over, regardless of SAS. There are three ways of countering this: 1) Make your rocket squatter. the shorter it is, the smaller the distance between force and CoG 2) reduce your power. As you discovered. 3)add winglets and control surfaces. This gives your SAS more \'torque\' to play with to counteract the rotation.