lucidLemon

antbin, if you remove the adapter, put the small decoupler between the ASAS and Command Pod, and replace the XL parachute with the smaller one, it gets a delta-V of 2618 and can still touchdown safely.

I wonder if less hacky version could be made as a plugin. Would it be possible to adapt something like the Orbital Construction Mod so that it would slowly bring you up an imaginary tether attached to a geostationary satellite? The tether could just be a drawn line (like in the Lazor mod or Docking mods) between an anchor and the satellite. \ If you could place the anchor, you could use this to deliver things to and from the surface of planets and moons.

I had some serious problems with junk around my KSC in .16 It got to the point where I had to mechjeb all my take-offs, the lag made my ship uncontrollable when I was KSC.

Before zeroing throttle, make sure you've landed. I've killed far too many kerbals this way.

Thanks for all the input, I'll try some of this stuff out.

Do you have fins at the top of your rocket? They always screwed me over when I was first experimenting with fins.

Thanks for all the suggestions, but I still don't think I have exactly what I'm looking for. I'm training for a real-time IVA mission without quicksaving, so I need to have a very detailed plan for landing ahead of time. I'll only be able to know what's going on via the IVA and Map view. Currently, my landing plan, from numerous KSC tests, is this- Finish Lunar insertion. Put craft on suborbital or eccentric trajectory. Point Prograde Fire retrograde radial rockets to finish off the Insertion stage's tank's fuel and kill a lot of velocity Just before the insertion stage runs out of fuel, increase the throttle to max and detach the insertion stage. Quite skycrane-ish Activate the lander's engines and kill horizontal velocity, use ASAS to lock it as close as possible to a perfectly vertical orientation. Kill enough vertical velocity to achieve the target velocity and height. (These values are what I REALLY need to know) Max throttle, deploy landing gear. Kerbal equivalent of prayer. Land, Breathe. Hilariously fall to the Mun's surface after exiting the hatch, courtesy of the upside-down command pod. Basically, is it possible to have a calculation of Delta-V for those necessary values, so I could input speed and height and get a calculation for Delta-V?

This is how I generally do it, it's been fairly successful for me. During take-off, don't exceed 250 m/s, because by that time your probably wasting fuel to fighting atmospheric drag, once you get above 10 km, it should be OK to fully throttle up. Start your gravity turn until your above the thickest part of the atmosphere. Again, a good height is 10 km. Slowly tilt towards the the horizon, in the direction of the planet's rotation. If you are unsure, this is the direction that planes take off from on the KSC runway. by 30 KM, you should be flying at at least 45 degrees by 50 KM, you should be flying at at least 20 degrees It's perfectly fine to have different values for these steps. Just remember to make sure to do a slow, gradual, tilt. During this entire procedure, be sure to check your map. In fact, it is easiest to use the map view primarily and occasionally check the normal view for fuel. There is a small tab in the bottom center of the map-view, click it to bring up a navball so you can control your ship. Once reach an apoapsis of 75 km or higher, cut your engines. If you see that your apoapsis is rapidly falling, apply a little power to keep it up. Wait till you reach the apoapsis (Watch in the map view) You should be pointed slightly above the horizon, still facing prograde, when you reach the apoapsis. Once your at the apoapsis, start your engines up again. If you are going past your apoapsis, point your ship higher up to bring it back to you, if the apoapsis is moving ahead of you, point your ship downwards until you start to catch up. Stay on the apoapsis like this until you raise your periapsis to 75 km. You'll be able to tell when the PE and AP markers suddenly flip around. Bam, your in orbit!

Wait, would it be possible to attach a near inifinite SRB that would cancel out 5/6 of the weight? I think NASA did this to simulate lunar landings. Atmospheric drag can be accounted for by setting drag values on all parts to 0 EDIT: Thought a bit more about it, it wouldn't work, unless I planned on never ever tilting my craft or expending fuel. Could the zero-gravity mod part be modified to simply simulate low gravity?

Basically, I want to know if there are any "conversions" that can be done to see how a craft on Kerbin would perform on the Mun, primarily for a landing and return craft. If I create a new set of parts with 1/6 the weight, 0 drag, and (for engines) specific impulse for a vacuum, will they perform on Kerbin as regular parts would on the Mun? If that does work, is there an easy way to convert parts on a spacecraft to those parts (instead of rebuilding the entire lander with the new parts)? If that doesn't work, are there ways to take data from Kerbin test flights (height and speed for retrograde burn for descent, maximum height reached, etc.) and see how they apply to flight on the Mun?

Bravely stepping foot on a new world... No ladder back up.

Because explosions are awesome; because explosions are awesome.

But not all mods use plugins.

I think my record was 11 mods on 1 rocket... It was totally awesome, though

A lander prototype designed for IVA flight. It was flown from the launchpad and then landed using only IVA view. Thanks to numerous safety features, development only cost the life of 1 crew. They were lost when detached jet engines overheated the command pod during an abort, which led to the nifty fuel line set up currently on the lander. It automatically kills fuel flow on abort.

I've heard that Mun dust puts holes in your brain, best to stay away from that stuff. I've heard Jebediah prefers to inhale Joolian gases.

Even Jebediah fears division by zero.

A map of Kerbin I made using the Mapsat mod and GIMP The Icecaps were a pain to recolor. EDIT: And here's a GIF version

I accidentally left my Mapsat running overnight, and now I have an 881 MB CSV file. Would anyone appreciate such a gargantuan file, and how would I upload it?

I hosted a SRB Lander challenge a while ago. A few people manage to take off, transfer to the moon, and land using only SRB's. I was massively impressed. EDIT: Tracked it down, http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/showthread.php/19925-SRB-Lander Hopefully, some of the ideas people had/implemented might prove useful here.

I can confirm crusaderuk's advice, we're rolling! Is it safe to delete a decoupler attached to the top of my DEMV? It's rather ugly.

I found out that KSP decided my Dunian rover was debris, and for some reason, it won't let me select it from the map view. My attempts to edit it's decoupler into a command pod don't seem to be working. Fortunately, I have the lander I used to put it down nearby. My plan was to fly it over to my rover, and then switch focus to use the rover. Unfortunately, the lander has been left with no crew. Can I edit the persistence file to place crew in the lander, and if I can, how?

AdamKSP is good, I picked a protractor off the the somethingawful forum's KSP thread when the servers were all down. Be sure to burn before your ejection angle, usually ~6 degrees earlier should help.

Dilrey, Wilsen, and Carson stare agape at Jool That's an unfortunate name for something without men.

Shortly afterwards, the KSP advisory board revised their stance on the new NERVA technology.