Shpaget

On my first 1.0 return from a Mun flyby mission I set up my Pe to 40 km. It was enough to reduce my Ap to about a 10 000 km. I did one more pass and got the Ap to IIRC 3 000 km, I then reduced the Pe to 30km and burned retrograde in atmo. The craft had a Terrier at the bottom which survived the whole thing. I only lost two radially attached batteries. Not quite what you describe, but apparently, on some missions, you can aerobrake small crafts in multiple stages.

This doesn't look like a broken connection. When that happens the CoM moves upwards, not way behind the rocket. Also winglets can still be seen moving so ASAS is still controlling them.

Take one of the ships and select the other one as target. In map view you'll get two new points on the orbit line called "Ascending node" and "Descending node". They tell you the difference in the inclination of the two orbits in question. Your first maneuver is to get rid of that difference. Click on the orbit on one of those nodes and pull maneuver node in the "up" or "down" direction depending on the node you picked. Make sure your inclination difference is as small as possible (0.1° - 0.2° is easily achievable and is fine enough). After that you need to match the phase. If the ship you are controlling is behind the target ship, enter a lower orbit to catch up. If it is in in front of the target, a higher orbit will slow you down. You only need to adjust one side of the orbit (periapsis or apoapsis). Start with small adjustments (10-20 km difference on one side, as little as possible height difference on the other). You'll see how it is going, adjust accordingly. If your crafts are in equatorial orbits it helps to point one ship's docking port directly towards north so it doesn't spin around. Once you fiddle with the orbits to the point where their closest approach is 2-3 km or less (you can get that information from the map view), you can switch to stage view or docking and use RCS for the final approach. Don't go too fast, or you could alter your orbit too much on the other side. Once you start using your RCS, the first thing to do is to kill all the lateral motion (with navball set to target and not orbit or surface, you should match your prograde marker with the target marker). Make your final approach slow (no more than 5-10 m/s when closer than 200 m and 1-2 m/s when closer than 50 m. Under 20 m you shold go as slowly as possible. Use your main engine with care. It can drastically change your orbit and throw away all your hard work.

Thanks guys. Control from here works as advertised. A new chapter in space exploration is being written. The one that does not involve firing rockets in wrong direction. Well, not so often...

I've been playing since 0.13, I believe, with on and off periods, but since the 0.20 release introduced some pretty awesome stuff I decided to give my space program a new kick and burn some more boosters. Anyway, I'm still to visit anything other than the Mun, which I can orbit and land on without too much trouble. I'm having great fun even within Kerbin SOI, but Mun landing is great. The problem I'm having is a rover + lander combo and my failure to design anything I am fully happy with. My usual approach is to put a small rover under the lander can so that when I extend the landing gear the rover is just above the surface. Then I just drive off. That part works ok, but in order to do that I usually need to put the lander and rover upside down on the lower stage which leads to some issues with the navball. The most obvious is the fact that the ground (the brown half of the navball) is "up" and the sky is "down". The maneuver nods are on the opposite side of the ball so a bit of guessing is involved when it comes to it's position. SAS/ASAS sometimes throws a fit as well. All in all, it's a less than perfect design until I detach the lander from the transfer stage. When I try to flip the lander with the rover right side up the rocket usually becomes a lot more unstable even though it appears to maintain the center of gravity in the middle. Sending a rover and a lander on two different mission is an option but I don't like it. It's not in the Apollo spirit and it's not a self contained mission. So, how do you guys do it?

I find it amazing that the attitude is "Oh look, an anomaly. It appears as if we have lost an engine. Oh well... The computer will adapt, no worries." Even more amazing is that they had enough fuel to reach the planned orbit and deliver the cargo as if nothing happened. Good engineering and planning on their part. However those flying bits and pieces don't look harmless. Those could have easily caused a chain reaction, and how many of the engines can they lose and still complete the mission?

I feel the need to input some science... Water on the Moon can not exist in liquid form, but not because of low gravity but because low vapor pressure (no atmosphere). You can boil water at room temperature if you expose it to vacuum. You can also have liquid water in microgravity and there are countless videos of ISS inhabitants playing around with floating blobs of water and juices (inside the ISS where the atmospheric pressure is significant). Gravity on Earth forces water to be in liquid only by exerting pressure indirectly through the atmosphere. Bulk modulus of water (the measure of resistance to uniform compression) is 2.2 GPa, which basically means a lot, but it is far from infinity which would be required to claim the water to be incompressible. Increased gravity will cause the water to compress more, but again, only indirectly through the pressure. Bulk modulus of steel is 160 GPa (70 times as much) but you don't hear claims that steel is incompressible.

I don't remember it haveing the "cockpit" for the claw part. And it is a lot bigger in my memory. I could be wrong. It was 20 years ago.

Sun makes both a nice subject and background.

One of my first encounters with lego technic was at a friend's house. He had a giant truck with a pneumatic grappling arm that would move in any direction with the pull of the levers. That thing was so awesome. That's also the only time I've seen that truck.

Guys, you have seen that new skybox, haven't you??!! I think I'll spend a few moments just getting lost in the stars.

Very nice! I like it.

So they used a brush to clean things? Not really worth of mentioning in the title. Unless there is a dedicated microgravity vacuum bolt receptacle metal shaving cleaner of the proper dimensions that has not been packed in the toolbox and left on the workbench on Earth.

Gimp has a batch edit plugin. Are you trying to edit the gif you got from a video? In that case I would apply all the editing and effects to the video and recreate the gif.

Well, sort of. This one is not a competitive event. It has no point system that will determine the winner. Whoever decides to participate wins a cookie or a jar of them, whichever they decide to bake for themselves. Objective: - Recreate a photo from a real space program. Rules: - Provide both the original photo and your work. - Use any mod, technique or cheat. - You are not restricted to KSP. You can do it for real, if you can; or in some other game, if you prefer. - Have fun. My entry to show what I mean, done in stock 0.16. This is actually my second survived landing on Mun ever.

The branch of mathematics called probability theory states that the probability of something hitting any exact value on a continuous scale is 0. For the orbit to be perfectly circular, you can take any periapsis or apoapsis you get, but then you have to match the other one exactly. You've got 0 chance to do that, and I'm not talking about a very low chance, I really mean zero, as in you can never get it exactly right. You might be satisfied with around 100 meters difference and call it a day, or you may want to push it a bit and try to get ~1 m difference. In theory you could get even lower eccentricity, but even if the display shows exactly the same number, it's just rounding up the displayed figure. There is always one more decimal position for you to be off at.

That depends on airspeed and the angle of attack. If your jet is flipping it sounds like you might need more speed.

For industrial scale shipping?

What troubles me more is the method of deorbiting any significant amount or ore without causing serious disturbance down here.

If they can ask those and even the questions of inter-family affairs on Minecraft forums (where the average age of users is around 13) I don't see why that wouldn't be happening on any other forum, even if prohibited by the rules.

In Gimp you can go to Filters -> Noise -> RGB Noise... Play around a bit with the settings. Then go to Colors -> Desaturate. That's it. In PaintNET: Effects -> Noise Adjustments -> Black and White If you have Lightroom, you can add some nice grain in the Effects section of Develop If you want to add those lines where the film was damaged (scratched or bent) you'll have to draw those lines (or get them someplace) and layer them over the image, then adjust the opacity to suit your taste. KingAirDriver, I love the black and white livery.

I thought I'd share this... thing. Still can't believe I managed to get it to a proper orbit (circular 250 km). It's all stock and those "collector" ain't deploying in orbit:D. This is what it looks like on the ground: The inner engine is supposed to stage after the 6 outer ones, but it wobbled around a bit and, on all the flights, When the time came for it to shine it just wasn't there... Ah well... Overengeneering took care of it. Special thanks to the fuel bug as well, I suppose. You need to ride it at about 2/3 throttle at all times or it disintegrates. It still has 2 full FL-T400 tanks and one full RCS tank, though. I also staged the 6 engines still with some fuel in it and the inner stack never got the chance to do any good. I suppose some strut connectors would rigidify it so it doesn't wobble, but I had some issues with the spin so I removed them. With it working perhaps there would be enough oumpf even with the fuel consumption fixed. Hope you like it.

Sure it's important to preserve Appolo 11 site. But there are others where that significance diminishes. If you designate every spot a one time landing site, you'll run out landing zones. Preserve one or two, let the others be visitable.

I wonder why would they ask others to avoid those sites. It would certainly put an end to all those conspiracy theories. One way or the other. I wasn't aware that ESA had a plan to land a human on the moon in near future. China or North Korea (NK with its Kerbalesque approach) would be my guess.

Pozdrav iz Zagreba!