Jason Patterson

It's bigger than you want, but here is a craft for a vehicle that uses only the parts available in the demo to get to and from Eve. Due to part number constraints that are built into the game (struts and fuel lines disappear after ~2000 parts) I had to land at 4km altitude and also had to transfer from my ascent vehicle to an orbiting return vehicle to make it work. Here's video of the flight. Unfortunately I no longer have the files of the crafts that got me to Eve and back originally. They're monsters as well, though less so than the one that I just linked.

More along the lines of realistic. Launching from sea level with stock parts, I don't believe that anyone got under 130 tons or so in the old Smallest Eve Ascent Vehicle thread. You apparently haven't tried the thing you're attempting to give advice about. I would suggest that you do; it's amazingly difficult to get back to orbit from Eve sea level, especially with a manned vehicle (and a 3 man capsule is nuts.) Launching from a mountaintop allows you to cut at least 50% of the mass of the ship. An efficient Eve ascent vehicle is not the same as an efficient Kerbin ascent vehicle. Launching from Eve sea level you are pretty much stuck with aerospikes (you can get away with LV-30's from the mountains, but the fuel efficiency hit from sea level is just too big.) Thus you've got mediocre lift/thrust and no realistic way to use something like an LV-N for any significant fraction of the vehicle's ascent, because they're just too heavy to carry and waste vast quantities of fuel for most of the ascent. Going from 0m to 4000m (or 6000m, which is where the smallest ascent vehicles were launching from) involves burning upward at a velocity of 50-70m/s - call it 60 m/s average. There is almost no net acceleration, so we can ignore the delta-v requirement for going faster, but gravity drag and aerodynamic drag across that span are enormous. Eve's surface gravity is 16.7 m/s2, and on an ideal ascent, the acceleration from drag will match that, so you're looking at 3.4 km/s of delta-v to get from sea level to the top of the mountain from which they were ascending (2.2km/s to the high plateaus that are a much easier landing target.)

The good news is that you have more than enough fuel left to get to Duna, the bad news is that it's likely going to take a while to actually get there. I don't know whether you are proficient at docking or not, but here you're in a similar situation. When you dock (or try to make an encounter with a planet) your goal is to wind up in the same place at the same time. What you have produced is a situation where you'll be in roughly the same place as Duna but always trailing behind it a bit. Just eyeballing it, it looks like Duna will eventually catch up to you, but it might take hundreds of game years before that happens. Your periapsis looks like it is touching Duna's orbit, more or less. Try putting a maneuver node there with a prograde burn. You should be able to add enough velocity to the burn to eventually get an encounter. I don't know how your ship is put together, so this might wind up being more delta-v than you've got to spend. A less costly way to do it would be to make a small prograde burn at your periapsis (maybe 100-500 m/s) and then make an orbit of the sun. Duna should have changed position with respect to you by a noticeable amount in that time. Do laps of the sun and let Duna catch up to you. On the last lap (when it looks like Duna is going to pass you by on the next orbit) plan a retrograde burn at periapsis that is just large enough to get an encounter. As Vanamonde said, this is going to take some time, but you get the old school experience.

<admission>I did not carefully read all six pages of this thread, apologies if I'm repeating something better stated elsewhere.</admission> First and foremost I'm happy for those who have been added to the dev staff. While being recognized by your fans for your work is fantastic, being paid is also pretty darned nice, and if any of these people are involved in the design/gaming industry, this will be a nice note for their CV's. It's also important to remember that mods stop being developed all the time. Modders are just like the rest of us; we play a game for a period of time and then move on. Rather than the authors of your favorite mods going away from the game entirely and leaving their mods to die, they've now become part of its official development and will be able to influence the direction in which the entire game moves. In the short term it may mean that some mods are lost, but in the long term, it should produce a better game.

Docking with LV-N for transit and orbital adjustments and a proper lander engine for landing? There's also no sense in being concerned with the mass of decouplers (and smaller tanks have the same tank/fuel mass ratio as the large) if you're going to spam LV-N's. It's unusual that a single LV-N or perhaps a pair of them combined with a higher power, lower Isp engine isn't a better solution than larger numbers of them. Otherwise, I also use the 3x struts combined with lander legs. It not only allows you to extend the legs downward to get past the bottom of the engines, it gives you a much broader base to land on so that you don't tip.

Are avionics allowed? They're sort of ASAS light.

Depending on your intent, you might want to restrict the use of ion engines as well. As the rules stand, it seems like it would be relatively straightforward to send a probe on a grand tour in a single launch without too terribly much trouble.

So this isn't a new rocket that is having problems, it's a formerly successful design that is no longer working? If that's the case, then this is a lot weirder than a control problem, assuming it is the exact same vessel. If it's not the exact same design, you could try using one or more vectoring engines, or perhaps adding control surfaces. Ascending more slowly helps as well, but that's only a solution up to a point.

Starting from sea level, you're basically stuck with a big lifter. You can trim tiny bits of mass right when you launch (dropping parachutes and legs, for instance) but that adds to the mass that you have to lift into LKO in the first place. Practically speaking, the mission takes a 1000 ton or larger vessel to happen in a single launch. It's not too terrible to carry the return vehicle down onto Eve's surface. The delta-v to get back to Kerbin is pretty low; a nearly empty fuel tank and any engine you've been using to lift off in the first place can probably do the job once you're in orbit, and honestly, when I've done Eve returns that included vehicle transfers, it somehow took away from the feeling of achievement involved (in much the same way that orbital assembly can.) If you are fine with docking, you can launch your Eve ascent vehicle from the launchpad on Kerbin and fly it to low Eve orbit. Send a refueling vessel or two to fill up all of your empty boosters, then land it and lift off anew.

It's not a problem; it's an intended function of the game. The docking ports deactivate after undocking so that the two vessels don't immediately bounce back together. To reactivate them you have to reload the vessels into physics. The easiest way to do that is to switch to the Space Center, then switch back to the vessels via the Tracking Station. If you want to move away and come back, you have to get out of physics range, 2.2 km.

No. Alt-F12 and turn on Flight Debug Statistics. It gives continuous, high precision LAT/LON along with a variety of other useful information. How do mods or the lack thereof have any impact on the usefulness of coordinates? The OP asked about coordinates as regards a particular landing site or an easter egg. Both of those are entirely usable with in game latitude and longitude; they'll help you find whatever it is you're trying to find.

I do the same thing at least twice a KSP session. Glad that helped.

There are a couple of reasons this might be happening. You can try quicksaving (F5) to see if that gives an error message describing your problem. 1. Throttle down completely (press X.) 2. If your vehicle is wheeled, put on the brakes (toggle next to the altimeter at the top of the screen) to make sure that you are completely stopped. That's pretty much it for the Mun. Congrats on your landing though! Two other reasons why you can't switch out of a vehicle don't apply here, but are common: 3. If you're in flight on a planet with an atmosphere, you can't switch away, you can only end the mission. 4. If you're about to crash into the ground (what qualifies as "about to crash" depends on the planet) then you can't switch away. ETA: Someone posted a bug earlier concerning the large rover wheels causing problems with being able to switch to the space center on Minmus (and on Gilly when I tried them on an even lower-g planet.) Are you using the Rovemax Model 3 wheels on this vehicle? I'm not aware of them causing any problems on the Mun, but they could be, I suppose. Basically they cause the vehicle to make continual small bounces and never actually settle down to rest.

Can you put anything in your signature? If not, it's probably a post count issue. You should be able to click the Settings button at the top, then Edit Signature on the left side and enter it.

As long as RCS is turned on it will help you turn, regardless of the purpose of the turn.

I just tried this with the largest rover wheels on Minmus and got the same result. It was an entirely stock ship. It seems like what is happening is that the gravity is just too weak to pull all of the wheels into contact with the surface, so the rover dances about a bit. It was actually quite hard to get the game to even let me switch to the Space Center. I'm going to try this out with the other two rover wheels. I wonder if it is specific to Minmus, or if this happens on any low-g world. Anyone know?

What exactly happens when you hit the Launch button? If you are in the Space Center view and click on the runway or launchpad, does it give you the option to launch a vessel? If so, what happens next?

That's really weird. Are you playing the store version or the Steam version (though there really shouldn't be a difference.) The other question is, where is your KSP_Win folder located if you are playing the store version? The preferred location for a Windows machine is in something like C:\Games\KSP_win If you keep it on your desktop, or even in Program Files, you will have trouble with it sooner or later due to system permissions. The game should have created a saves folder the very first time you made a save though, even if you're on the demo. If you're launching the game from a shortcut, you might try the following just to make sure that you don't have two KSP folders going: 1. Right click on the shortcut that you use to start the game (wherever that shortcut is) and choose Properties. 2. Click the button that says "Open File Location." 3. Check the path at the top of the window against where you believe your KSP folder is located. Addtionally, this should be the folder that contains the correct saves and screenshots and all the rest. Does the game retain any information from flight to flight? That is, if you launch a vessel into orbit, or even put one on the launchpad, then hit escape and choose Space Center, can you then go to the tracking station and choose to switch to the flight you just left? If you get out of the game and come back, is the flight still there?

Don't forget to power the probe.

If there is a single piece of debris you would like to remove while leaving the others unaffected, you can edit your persistence file fairly easily. You also can click on it in map view until control switches to it and choose End Mission.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/28789-Establishing-Geosynchronous-Orbit - From page 1 of the How To forum. You won't get it exactly right, and going on rails will shift your AP/PE slightly, but it will take quite a while for any deviation to show up. Even real satellites need stationkeeping in order to stay put in a synchronous orbit, so it's not too unrealistic to need the same in KSP.

I'm not sure if it was your intent or not, but just to be clear, SAS cannot induce a roll, it can only stop one. The source of induced rolls is command module torque, which is defined by the variable rotPower in the part.cfg. You can add additional command modules to a vehicle to increase your handling as concerns rolling.

To land and return to orbit you'll need 1200-1400 m/s of delta-v with a reasonable thrust to weight ratio. Your first design has about 1050 m/s, and the second has approximately 1500 m/s. Ideally the second should be able to get back into orbit, if not necessarily back to the refueling ship. Your second design has quite a high TWR (6.5 or so on the Mun) so you could easily add fuel to get a bit more delta-v if you wanted. Your best bet is to build a rover that uses a smaller command module. Losing a ton or two by switching to the Lander Can will give you a few hundred more m/s without adding any fuel at all.

Because of the way that the thrust system works, at least one fuel with mass must be consumed. As Van suggests, you can increase the Isp to some ridiculous level if you like (100,000,000 would be a crazy large value.) A much easier solution would be to just turn on infinite fuel in the debug console. Press alt-F12 and check the box.

1. Yep, that's right. They do need to face forward, but otherwise it doesn't really matter. 2. Nope, that's wrong. If engine A was put onto the vehicle first in the SPH, then when the game checks to see if there is enough air to avoid a flameout, engine A will have sufficient air but engine B will not, so engine B will flameout (and you'll probably go into a flat spin - very bad.) The solution is to use an odd number of engines, with the last one installed in the center of the craft. When it flames out you've got a bit of time to throttle down before the next engine goes and you can avoid a flat spin. 3. The description for the intakes are not particularly helpful. I believe that the two numbers that are listed describe how much air it can bring in in a time increment. 4. The quantities that matter are the mass and intake area (which you can find in the part.cfg.) The RAM intake has the lowest mass and highest area, and thus is always preferred, unless you're using a different intake for appearance's sake. The intakes are sufficient to provide huge quantities of air as long as you're moving until you get to a high altitude. There are intakes that appear to be able to provide more air than the RAM intake, but they are only able to do so at low altitude (or insane speeds) where the amount of air is more than sufficient using just about any of the intakes, so the extra air is just wasted..