Qumefox

I actually have a ship with jet engines eve bound as we speak If the game would quit locking up on me anyway...

He's likely trying to do it with stock parts. Like me.

He's not the only one, but to each their own.

Maybe Bob was just wearing his rubber underwear that day.

You can likely jetpack, even on kerbin, enough to slow a kerbal down to the point of not going poof. They really are fairly sturdy critters.

Install protractor and kerbal engineer redux.. Pretty much the same information (though likely laid out differently) but no autopilot.

Better hope the power doesn't go out... for a few years.

IMHO he's right. I think people should learn how to orbit and fly manually before falling back to mechjeb. I don't really like mechjeb, but I don't have issues with other people using it, however there are lots of situations where it will just get you in trouble.. I've seen ships that are able to be put in orbit fine when flown manually, but mechjeb will crash every time. And when those instances come up, how do you determine if mechjeb is the problem or not, if you don't know how to orbit manually to test the ship without mechjeb? Knowing how to manually get to orbit, adjust your orbit, and de-orbit are NOT bad skills for anyone who plays KSP to have...

Three things. 1) End of mission readout is your friend. It'll tell you what part the failure is starting at so you know where in your ship you need to strengthen/redesign. 2) Struts are your friend. Seriously. Pretty much all designs will have improved stability/strength with well placed struts. Though keep in mind where you put them is a lot more critical than just adding more.. Bad strut placement just eats part count/cpu time with no real structural benefit. 3) Less is more. Really.. The lighter your payload, the easier a lift stage will be to build, and you'll have an easier time getting it into orbit and to your goal. Unless your just screwing around trying to build the craziest stuff you can to see if it'll fly (which is fun too) generally you should try to use the absolute fewest parts you can get away with to accomplish your goal. Mass is your enemy. Fewer parts = less mass. Also.. If your having problems with a ship, we can help you a lot more if you post .craft files.. or at minimum.. screenshots, of your ship.

Protractor assumes several things to give it's readout. 1) that your in a perfectly circular orbit and 2) that your orbit is at the same inclination as your target.. Usually neither are true. following it's output will get you pretty close though, and if you enable closest approach, you can then tweak your orbit to get an intercept.

Well the settings.cfg will be in whatever folder you installed KSP into.. It should be the same place as the executable. Also, which version of KSP are you using? 0.17 or the 0.13 demo? And what OS? Windows or mac?

Well, the brute force way is to just quicksave/quickload over and over again, trying various escape trajectories until you get an intercept.. I managed to get to duna on my first attempt with no mods.. by sheer luck.. The solar orbit took the ship past duna's orbit, and I managed to score an intercept on the return leg... barely.. I think the closest peroaposis I could get for the the intercept was like 1.6 million meters.. If your like me, and dislike the mechjeb easy mode, I pretty much run a vanilla install except for two mods. Protractor and Kerbal Engineer Redux.. Both are purely information displays. No autopilots etc. Just remember, you have to put the associated parts on your rockets/planes for the plugins to work. You can just stick them anywhere. I like to stick them on the front of capsules before I put the parachute on on most of my builds.

I'm backwards.. I have better luck building stuff in in the VAB than the SPH.. all my planes end up... unstable... at best.

Apparently realistic isn't fun for some people though. It being hard is why it's fun for me. IMHO, at least to me.. Mechjeb autopilot + fuel hacks + cheater parts, etc is pretty much the equivalent to playing a FPS using an aimbot that always gives you headshots and all you have to do is click. I mean, seriously. I just don't get how people can find it fun for longer than 10 minutes. I personally only use two mods.. protractor and kerbal engineer redux... and all those do is replace an actual protractor and a spreadsheet.

You should have the kid's insomnia treated then. Because I do hear they should sleep every now and then. heh

Playing (mostly) vanilla is actually what makes KSP fun for me I use protractor and kerbal engineer redux for information displays, but that's pretty much it. All they do is remove (well, transfer rather, since anyone with half a brain would still end up making a spreadsheet to do most of the number crunching for them.) some of the math and perhaps a slight bit of build trial and error.. Making it to the other planets is so much more enjoyable when you do it yourself as opposed to just pushing a button and watching.

Not sure how that would be enjoyable for anyone. You wouldn't be able to land on it. Your lander would get torn apart just like it does when you try to land on a normal planet and you have lots of horizontal motion. And even if it were possible to get to the surface, you wouldn't stay there. if the rotation speed on the surface was faster than the orbital speed at the same altitude, the planet would literally just throw you back off. Not to mention the fact that any body with any significant mass in reality would just tear itself apart fairly quickly if it was spinning that fast.

That's not a kerbal saying, it's one of mine, and I say it nightly.

Someone has to catch it first, which nobody's managed to do yet. (beyond randomly crash into it) At least not that they're saying.

Not that i'm aware of.. Not without it involving shenanigans anyway.

I'm not sure mechjeb will work with the demo. I also don't advocate autopilots, but i'm a bit of a purist.. Info displays like protractor and kerbal engineer redux are pretty much the only mods I use. The challenge is why I keep (unintentionally) stranding kerbals all over the solar system. (I try to get them home.. Honest!)

cheers! So true it's funny.. I had a rescue mission almost need rescuing themselves after a run in with space cthulhu once. Two of the ship's four fuel stacks/engines separated and fell off.. which is in itself not extremely horrible... if not for the fact that the two that were left both ended up on the same side.... Still managed to get a kerbin intercept from solar orbit like that, then do a deorbit burn and parachute the capsule down. First time i've ever managed to do anything productive with half a ship.

Probably the only realistic way to get off Eve without resorting to cheater parts or other shenanigans is a hybrid plane/rocket. Fly the return craft as high in the atmo as possible, then shed the plane parts/atmo engines/mass and burn the rest of the way to orbit conventionally. It's still going to be a rather large craft any way you go about it though.

Um. An eclipse is an eclipse no matter where you are dude. heh

I think the excessive use of profanity kind of rules that out...