Jason Patterson

Climber, did you try this at all? All I can see in this thread is you suggesting that other people try X, Y, and Z, but no actual attempts from you. Tylo is cake compared to Eve, there's really no comparison. It's hard, sure, but Eve is absurd.

That's really weird. I was going with a stuck shift key... If it happens again (hopefully not) you could try deleting your settings.cfg file rather than the entire save game as a workaround, but definitely post a bug report. I've not heard of any kind of bug of this type, but someone has to be first to find any bug, you know?

One very useful thing to do is once you have the phase angle set up (using the info from the link RawChicken provided) is to use a maneuver node on you Kerbin orbit to plan the ejection. Even though the calculator also provides an ejection angle, it assumes an instantaneous burn, which you're just not going to have, especially if you're using an efficient interplanetary transfer stage. By planning a node you can see roughly how long the burn should take and begin burning early accordingly.

The difficulty with deleting a part from an existing ship is that it changes the structure of the vessel. In the persistence file the parts are included as an ordered list, from 0 up to (N-1) parts. So rather than saying that your command module is connected to an ASAS unit, it knows that your command module is connected to whatever is listed in PART section 1 (the command module itself being part 0.) If you deleted the ASAS from this fictional ship, then the fuel tank below would become part 1. But that part lists a connection to the original part 1 (which has now become itself.) All of the other parts in the vessel become connected to the wrong stuff. Mayhem ensues. Basically, unless the KE chip happened to be the very last thing you installed, you can't delete it without messing up the ordering of that list. However, what you can do is replace it with another small part. Back up your persistence file, then open it in a text editor. You can then copy a strut part from another vessel (one that will never see this vessel, preferably.) Paste it into your space station in place of the KE chip. Your two parts will look something like the following. Keep the parts in bold from each. Combining the two should result in a strut part stuck in the same spot as the chip and connected to nothing else.

Once you get the first port docked, is the second port more or less in the correct position, just not docked, or is it significantly off? If it's close (i.e. the first port docked and dragged the second into position) then you can undock, immediately go to the space center, go to the tracking station, and return to your vessel. This process will reload both vessels into full physics but will not give them time to move significantly. They'll immediately redock and the second port will connect as intended. If the second port is off a bit, there's not a lot you can do other than to undock and attempt to redock in the indended orientation. It should be fairly straightforward to do this though, since you're already in position for one port. Unfortunately, to get the original port to function normally after undocking you will need to go through the process I outlined above to get it to reload into physics. I've done something similar to this several times when building motherships. I place docking ports on trusses using 4x symmetry and then build a grid of ships that are locked in place by up to 8 separate docking ports. That's the intent anyway. Getting 4 docking clamps to engage simultaneously has never happened for me. I get 3 all the time, but the 4th just won't connect. It's strange really, since to get 3 of them connected the 4th has to be in the right spot at the right time, but the game disagrees. It's definitely possible - I've done it on the ground with more highly constrained setups, but in orbit, no dice for me. Best of luck. You can always send an RCS resupply vehicle to transfer fuel around.

Surprisingly, wikipedia is a fairly good place to start. Reading any of the articles about orbital mechnics, delta-v, hohmann transfers, bielliptic transfers, gravity drag, or orbital maneuvering can give you quite a bit of information about the mechanics of spaceflight and most (all?) of the articles include some of the math involved. The actual equations are a bit clunky, but not particularly difficult to use, given good information.

Still coming up short getting to orbit. I suspect that losing a couple of tons of jet fuel would do the job, and certainly if you add another pair of intakes and drop jet fuel. I was topping out at around 850-900 m/s near 18km altitude before starting the rocket. It's almost surely possible to go significantly higher and faster by throttling down and burning off most of the jet fuel.

You've got tanks inside of other tanks and all sorts of crazy mess in that rover. Somewhere or other you've created a fuel feed loop. As a result, the rockets are only pulling fuel from one of the two branches, leading to your problem. Solution - rebuild at least moderately sanely.

I'd be surprised if that couldn't make orbit. It's probably got excess jet fuel, but otherwise it looks perfectly fine to me. I'll give it a whirl. ETA: As it stands it has a balance problem. Even if I set the fuel to only drain from the rear tanks, the center of mass shifts toward the back and the plan becomes unstable, eventually nosing up and flipping out of control. I moved the wings back significantly and it was much more stable as a result. I also replaced the ASAS with avionics (because I'm not a great pilot and avionics is basically piloting for dummies.) I only had time to give it one good go to get into orbit, and I came up about 500 m/s short. I suspect that if you cut some jet fuel mass and/or added another pair of intakes you could get it into orbit. If I have a chance I'll try again tonight to see if I can make orbit only by moving the wings.

Um, you said 6 hours, not 6 days, so no, I would assume that EndlessWaves doesn't think that 6 days is normal. How would anyone know how long you've been waiting in total? It's odd that it would take that long. I've had to wait a day or so in the past for things to update, but never 6 days. Perhaps one of the forum moderators can give you concrete advice.

After undocking do your engines still make noise and consume fuel when they're active and throttled up? If so, hit F3 and figure out which part is blocking the engine's thrust.

I'd be more inclined to suspect the source of the data, honestly. There is clearly a non-zero gravitational field surrounding Kerbin out to the edge of its SOI (which is 84,000km and change.) If you drop your orbital velocity to zero, you will begin falling toward the planet, if nothing else. Sure, it's very gradual at high altitudes, but also definitely non-zero.

The most efficient landing mirrors the most efficient launch. As a practical matter, you want to set it up so that you're coming in very shallow, with your periapsis barely above the ground. Wait until periapsis and burn horizontally as long as possible. This combines the benefits of Oberth with the fact that you're killing your velocity by burning sideways and avoiding gravity drag. As your velocity begins turning vertical, follow it until you're burning vertically and landing at the same time. Getting that to line up with actually landing at the spot you want to land at is more than just tricky, so what you can do, without losing any delta-v, is burning at your periapsis (which is at maybe 2-5km, depending on the body you're landing on) and circularizing your orbit. Then you're able to orbit until you're at whatever position you want and descend from there. ETA: Stopping and then falling onto your target is very wasteful of delta-v. It's equivalent to launching by shooting straight up, then burning straight sideways at your apoapsis. It works, but you burn an awful lot of gas doing it.

They have suspension, so if the wheels aren't holding up enough mass to compress the shocks a bit, you'll pretty much always wind up with wheels above ground. There are a couple of ways to get the height to be as close to equal as possible. One is to lower the object so that it is almost touching the floor of the SPH/VAB. That gives you a good visual for the height of the wheels. The other way is to move your wheels up and down until you find a corner on the part that they are connecting to, a spot where the object switches from horiztonal to vertical suddenly, or at least where it changes angle dramatically when you move it a tiny fraction on the screen. If you keep your camera at the same position and place your other wheels in the same way (along the same corner, that is) then they should all be the same height.

Struts break automatically when you decouple/undock in exactly the way that you would want them to. I've never had any trouble with them not disconnecting in the way that capi3101 describes (because of the direction of the strut install, that is.) The best reason to install from the child object to the parent is that the strut part is lost when the child decouples. This helps keep your part count down with very large vehicles and in the long run can help the game run more smoothly.

Not within the confines of the game. If either vehicle is mobile, then you could drive one to the other; 35km isn't terribly far. This assumes that both have docking ports that are at compatible positions on the vehicles, of course. The only option for direct transfer is persistence file editing. Back up your persistence file, open it in a text editor, then find the relevant missions and the relevant fuel tanks in those missions and do the swap manually. That said, if you're going to finagle the fuel from one to the other in a way that defies physics, you might as well just assume that the fuel transfer was done and was sufficient for the return mission and turn on infinite fuel in the debug menu (press alt-F12.)

Yes, the part numbers increase as you would expect, starting with 0 and going up until the last part.

I won't pretend to know how the physics engine does what it does, but it seems likely that the game calculates the force of gravity and the acceleration due to the net force on an object independently. A negative mass should experience an upward force from gravity, but that would cause a downward acceleration (because the minus sign would cancel out in F=ma.) It's also possible that if you stuck a rocket underneath it that an upward force on the object would cause it to accelerate downward, so it would stick to the pad even more firmly.

I would love to see your own attempt at this, if nearly 1000 items isn't quite enough.

Yep. You do use a bit more fuel on the ejection burn, but when you meet up with Moho you save more than the excess that it took to get there. The other thing that can help is trying to get your encounter at or near one of the orbital nodes, since that can keep you from needing to make any sort of normal burn at all. That's not going to line up with Moho's periapsis though, of course.

You definitely want to encounter Moho at its periapsis, because the velocities will differ by less at that point. Other than that, it's just a matter of bringing along enough delta-v. It's a high delta-v mission; there's no avoiding it.

The problem exists because you've got a non-physics part connected to your docking port. It's a known bug, but I don't know whether it's going to be fixed or not. Apparently it wasn't anticipated that the non-physics struts would be used in as many ways as they have been, including as a standoff for docking clamps. When the two parts dock, the strut doesn't reverse itself in the new, combined vehicle and mayhem results. This is one of the reasons for stations built with docked components exploding - if it's an extended object it will simply tear the entire thing to shreds. The moral of the story - Don't use octagonal struts to connect docking ports to your vessel.

It's possible to use the target indicator to learn a great deal of information about the planet you're moving toward and your relative velocities. Burning directly toward it from Kerbin would indeed use up huge amounts of fuel, and there are just about always better options normally. If you accidentally enter an SOI and then mess up and burn your way directly back out of it, burning toward the planet will get you right back into the SOI without much fuss. I also burned toward (or toward-ish) the planet target marker extensively when I did an and back, but that's clearly a special case.

When placing the struts for your lander legs, hold shift and press W (? or maybe QEASD) to rotate the stack of cubic struts out away from the ship slightly. Then add the lander legsand press shift-S (or whichever shift-QWEASD combo rotates the thing downward) the same number of times to make the legs mount vertically. Your fairings should release as intended and the legs will work better now that they have a larger base.

There are only three stats for an engine that really matter: Mass - for any engine less mass is better, as you likely have guessed. Maximum thrust - allows you to fit the engine to the job so that your ship's thrust to weight ratio is about right (2 for an atmospheric ascent, for instance) Isp - This is basically the fuel efficiency of the engine. Engines have two values for this, one at sea level and one in vacuum. High Isp is good. Generally speaking, you want to find an engine based on the thrust you need for a job, then find the engine with the best combination of Isp and mass for the role you want. Each of the engines has a role that it fills best. LV-T30/LV-T45 - Engines for ascent/descent of medium sized rockets. Can be stacked to make a great heavy lifter, the 45 provides thrust vectoring in exchange for decreased thrust and increased mass Mainsail - Heavy lifter. A better option is the LV-T30/45 combination, stacked, but that can cause part count problems Poodle - Large lander engine. It's not really very good at that job; this is one that doesn't get used often. LV-909 - Good small lander engine. Sometimes an LV-N will be better. Also useful for spaceplanes. LV-N - Excellent for transfer stages between planets or other large delta-v maneuvers. It can be a good lander engine when the lander also has significant maneuvering to do, but its length is problematic. Mark 55 Radial - Liquid engine for increasing TWR. It's kind of awful compared to the other engines. 24-77 - Can be used to increase TWR for landers or spaceplanes. It's not a great engine by itself, usually, but it's good when you'll need a burst of extra power for a short time. Aerospike - Good rocket for use near sea level. Practically speaking this could be stacked to make an efficient heavy lifting rocket for a first stage on Kerbin and is pretty standard for Eve ascent vehicles. It's also useful on spaceplanes. LV-1 - Surprisingly effective engine for probe maneuvering. For an ideal launch you want to ascend at the terminal velocity for a given altitude. At sea level that's something like 110 m/s, and at 10km it's about 250 m/s. You can go a bit above or below that throughout without wasting too much fuel.