Madmak

For those having trouble making a usable claw grapple, add a pair of hinges, flip one 180 deg and then attach the claw to that.

Hello! I was hoping that the lovely denizens of the forums (you all) would be helpful enough to help me figure out how to do something with ksp. I am trying to build a craft that will go into Munar orbit and then release a cluster of small child craft that will each be able to move under a good amount of control and conduct orbital maneuvers and eventually land under their own power. The mods I\'m using are: Mechjeb Muon detector Novapunch My craft consists of: First stage to get into LKO, drops a couple boosters, then TMI burn and then circularizing burn. I detach when in LMO. The upper stage consists of a small LFT, a LV909 engine, 1 RCS tank with 6 thrusters, ASAS, a short range muon detector and a side mounted mechjeb. Four radial decouplers attach the child craft and a standard decoupler atop holds a FL-R25 fuel tank with RMA-3 Orbital achievement engine, mechjeb pod and 3 landing legs. The child craft each consist of a single FL-R25 LFT, RMA-3 LFE, 3 landing legs, a short range muon detector, top mounted small mechjeb and nosecone. (for the record this last image was -before- mechjeb crashed it into the surface under landing autopilot.) Now, I can get into LMO, establish a circular orbit of 7km, and then detach each child craft individually as I change my inclination so as to scan a wider area of the surface. The problem I have is that when I then focus on the individual child craft, I have almost no control whatsoever. I can\'t move the navball reliably at all and when I fire the engine it just starts spinning uncontrollably. Then, when I focus on the original craft and my original pod, equipped with even less control surfaces and equipment, the thing flies like a beauty. I can change the inclination and land the pod no problem. I know that pods have more control built in but is it possible to get the same control in my little child satellites that I have in my pod? I\'ve tried using SAS, nano-SAS and RCS. I don\'t really wanna sock on all the weight of an ASAS when I don\'t think it\'ll really do anything. Any ideas? Madmak

Still doing my recon on the south pole.. Tough spot to find.

I\'ve built a hovering platform that flies at 10km and can launch a craft that will fly off of it. The problem is that when you build the thing, it is balanced one way, and after you launch the child craft it is balanced a completely different way and there is no autopilot yet to fly it and keep it level. You can have enough fuel on board for it to be up there for hours but it\'ll flip over because the balance is all wrong and we don\'t have enough axes of control.

I have a hard time getting the decoupler at the top of my rover stack to carry the weight of any larger rover. Lame-o. Anyway, here\'s mine: Sometimes I detach the rover, then switch focus back to the skycrane to fly it off.

I could retropulsively land, but decided not to for this one. Maybe I\'ll go back for it. 307.9m/s

Well... ok. It took me 1:45 to build my ship Then, since I got a circular orbit around 200km, I decided to go to Minmus, since a kerbol escape seemed kind of silly. When I landed, I hit at about 0.3m/s, but the uneven ground disconnected my engine, meaning my boys are stuck :/