John Bedlam

My best circular orbit was within a meter of difference, but that was a right pain.

There's a sweet spot between drag and gravity. If you throttle too low (or the TWR of your ship is too low), you're just throwing most of your fuel against the ground to stay as high as you are. Mechjeb seems to try not to exceed 200m/s in lower atmosphere.

Duna has an atmosphere just barely thick enough for aerobreaking, you could have spent a lot less fuel on slowing down if you'd gotten your periapse to about 12 kilometers high. Good first try though.

They're currently sitting in a pod that landed just outside KSC, after a visit to Duna. I'm keeping them there until I know what to do with 'em.

Are you still in a Kerbin orbit while doing this burn? If so, have you upped CONIC_PATCH_LIMIT in settings.cfg? If you haven't, you won't be able to see any intercepts until you leave Kerbin's SOI.

Lately I've been listening to this album a lot, I find it sets the right mood for a bit of space travel.

I'm seeing the same. 100% efficiency, not going anywhere, even though the thrust-to-weight ratio is 2.2. Bug?

Just a note on the unmanned thing: The portraits don't show, but if you click the hatch, you can still EVA them. It's probably because of whatever changed for IVA.

Nah, gravity on Eve is too heavy for the set to take off, but with a parachute, it could probably land.

What can I say? I aim to misbehave. I agree. Those changes should make my example incapable of Kerbin launches, yet still a somewhat viable Duna lander and return vehicle, if flown properly.

Duna is supposed to be a little difficult to get to, it's a whole other planet. I think it's unreasonable for a ship like the one I attached to get from the surface of Kerbin to the surface of another planet and back to Kerbin. Note that there isn't a lifter stage attached at all, it's using those tiny little capsule engines and less than 2500 units of RCS fuel for the entire trip. It's a fun ship, but its performance is absolutely ludicrous.

I really like this thing, but the engine might be a little too efficient. I strapped two of the new large RCS tanks to it. It made it into orbit. It made it to Duna. It landed. It went back into Duna orbit. It then made it back into Kerbin's SOI before I had to dump the external tanks. The capsule itself had more than enough left for the final aerocapture and precision landing at KSC, which is the only part of this journey that's realistic. [ATTACH=CONFIG]33251[/ATTACH]

Starting out, I made it a point to get to orbit and to both moons and back manually, but now I use it all the time. From time to time, I do a completely manual mission to see if I still have it, but most of the time I can't be bothered. Putting something in orbit, pointing in a certain direction and burning for a certain amount of time strike me as a computer's job. But hey, the whole point of sandbox games is that everybody can play them as they want, right?

I so know how that feels. That balloon kept me up all night when I'd just bought KSP, even though I had to get to work the next morning. I regret nothing.

After playing around with an aerospike modified to simulate Eve's gravity: If Eve's gravity really is 1.7G, there is no way for that amount of fuel, and that amount of lift, to even break Eve's atmosphere, let alone get into orbit. The devs have dropped some information on them. The numbers I've been using come from here.

Yeah, but you'll either have to build a three person lander and EVA one of them before lift-off, or add one of the modded parts that can hold extra crew.

I'm sorry, but if the surface gravity that's currently in the wiki (1.7G) is correct, the six engines in the first stage together only get you a TWR at lift-off of 1.02, which is barely enough to start rising. Most of your fuel will be going to fighting gravity for a good part of the ascent. If you feed the six ascent tanks into the center tank and add that engine, you get an initial TWR of 1.2, which stands a better chance of to getting orbit, but I still doubt you'll have enough delta-V to get back to Kerbin, especially considering there should be more drag due to the thicker atmosphere.

It's an escape trajectory, but there is nothing to escape to, so you stay in Kerbol's SoI, perpetually drifting off.

Have you tried landing it like that? The one design I accidentally put the wheels on like that, they ripped off during landing. Wasn't all that rough a landing either. Retracting sideways is also quite common IRL.

Yeah, the debug console is pretty nifty. I use it sometimes to put a descent stage in orbit so I don't have to build the rest to test it. I doubt you'll be banned for mentioning it.

In vanilla KSP, that is the only way to be sure you're going where you think you're going. You could install Mechjeb, which has panels displaying this information.

You are actually able to sprint on Kerbin right now. Just hold shift while walking.

I do believe so. In the video Scott Manley did on it, he uses a one-man pod and an old tank and engine.

The fuel bug comes from a wrong calculation of the amount of fuel used by engines. For example, if you burn at 50% power, you only use the equivalent of burning at 25%, and at 10%, you only use what you'd normally use at 1%. So your stages last a lot longer if you can use minimal thrust. This means that any ship that you build now that seems to do what you want will possibly not work in 0.17. You can mostly avoid it by only burning at full thrust, and I believe there's a workaround plugin.

Great! Now do it without Mechjeb. Kerbin differs from Earth in that your orbit doesn't decay above 70km, where Kerbin's atmosphere suddenly and completely ends. You need to do a deorbit burn (align to retrograde and burn until your periapsis is sufficiently below 70km for Kerbin to pull you in) to get back. I'm afraid you'll have to send a rescue mission for poor Alvin.