RoboRay

I'm loving the new mini-shuttle. Overshot on the reentry, ending up well out over Booster Bay. Had to turn around and glide back to the island.

Is the long range ship being directly targeted by a dish, or is it connected simply by being the Active Vessel? If it's only connected because you have something back at Kerbin set to aim at the Active Vessel, that link will break as soon as you switch your control over to the lander.

I flew my mission with DRE (at default settings) and had no problems. I expect it comes down to how you fly it. Did you do a shallow descent with high-AOA S-turns to bleed off energy, or just plow it in nose-down? Heck, at one point, I was actually climbing again during reentry... Gained about 2km (by accident, really), things cooled off some, then I started back down. The crew cabin temp barely exceeded 1000 degrees and it was the hottest part. I had expected the down-side wing during turns to get hotter, but they maxed out well below 1000.

I do know how to use the tweakables, thank you. Are you seriously suggesting that I should have tweaked things before making a baseline flight at the defaults to see what tweaks were actually needed? I tried my normal rocket ascent in FAR, starting a slow gravity turn just after clearing the pad. I was expecting to be at 45 degrees of pitch at 10km, but was only about 60. I would normally be horizontal about 35km, but was still pitched up about 30 degrees or so (just estimating, I was having too much fun to pay attention to details). Boosters burned out at maybe 40km and Ap was already passing 100km. Sloppy ascent, but I wasn't sure what to expect. I'm sure I'll be able to better with the next ones. I was also fighting what felt like some uncommanded roll along the way. It seemed like yaw adjustments while on the main engines were inducing some roll, making the thing wallow around in the sky. I believe the Space Shuttle Engines mod pack had the same issue at first, and corrected it be changing how the engines gimballed.

Well, it flies in FAR, but it's seriously overpowered on launch as others have noted. I was nearly out of the atmosphere before SRB burnout. On landing, I overshot well past KSC but got turned around and glided into the Eastern Island Auxiliary Landing Field out in Booster Bay. The flight controls got really twitchy once I dropped subsonic, with roll being extremely aggressive. I kept checking to see if physics warp had gotten turned on by accident. I'm going to play around and see what kind of tuning it takes to tame this beast.

I noticed MJ doing something similar with my own shuttle design using other parts when I let the autopilot fly it. I think you're experiencing an MJ problem, not an problem with this mod.

This forum, like every other forum, has an excellent search engine. You just go to Google and type in your search request followed by site:forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com.

Why? The direction of your orbit around Kerbin doesn't make a bit of difference to your orbital direction around the Mun. You just adjust your start-time for the burn so that you "lead" the Mun instead of "trailing" it. Launching retrograde is just throwing away 300 m/sec.

I've rarely had problems with rockets, other than simply screwing up the staging sequence, after my first couple of weeks of playing. Once you've built enough of them, you know what's going to work and what's not.

Try using the Smart Parts fuel-level sensors on your boosters to automatically stage them away when empty.

Or just install them into the legacy KSP/Parts folder instead of into Gamedata. They don't need to be edited if you put them in the legacy folder.

For a passenger-only version, you can just stick some Mk1 lander cans in the cargo bay for extra seats.

A combination of #2 and #3.

Your poll options are "I always use shuttles" or "I never use shuttles." I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that this leaves out the vast majority of users, who may sometimes use shuttles.

I set up a complete-coverage RemoteTech comsat network around Minmus, using a FASA Titan missile.

The hold-down clamps are FASA parts, as is most of the launch vehicle (using Titan missile parts). The clamps are modeled on the real Atlas hold-down clamps and fold back when released: I thought the scorch marks on the inner side was a nice touch.

Notice the V-shaped notch at the top of the Agena docking port? The Gemini's indexing bar slides into that, ensuring you dock at the proper rotational alignment.

After some irritating comms outages for my Minmus exploration crews, I finally sent up a complete six-unit comsat constellation: Complete global coverage in one launch.

Right. Once you get your satellite into it's final orbit, precise to within a hundredth of a second, you only need to take it off rails if you want to give it a new orbit... or several decades of game-time go by. Getting that precision is harder around smaller bodies because the period is much more jittery (I set up a new Minmus network yesterday, which was a little tricky) and will probably still require some station-keeping every few years.

Ah, ok... I see that you've had some success in the later post. When making glider landings, plan to approach KSC with extra energy... you want to overshoot a little (assuming you don't take corrective action) to ensure you actually make it to the runway. During the reentry, once you're certain you are going to overshoot, start making S-turns (like the real shuttles did) - bank the craft to one side for a while, turning one direction, then bank it back the other way to straighten out and come back the other direction. This bleeds off some of that excess energy, slowing you down so that you don't overshoot. If you dramatically overshoot KSC, you can try for the auxiliary landing field on the island out in Booster Bay, or try to circle around over KSC, spiraling downward to get lined up with the runway.

I guess I need to quote your own questions back to you so you don't get lost. Ok, here is the last few posts again... No. The stock feature that you just asked about... solar panels working in timewarp.

Ok, but why would that stock feature be disabled?

The newest MechJeb builds display orbital period to the hundredth of a second. With periods matched to that precision, even years of maximum timewarp produces no significant drift as measured with the phase angles to other satellites in the constellation. Prior to this improvement, with period only displayed in whole seconds, I had about 15 degrees of drift after three years. These are in a 90-minute medium-orbit, not KSO, so the drift was faster than for stationary sats. I don't return to my comsats and diddle with them once they are set up, so they stay where I leave them. The hard part is just having the orbit exactly right before they go on rails forever.

Yeah, Outerra is wonderful at or just above ground level, but really breaks down at high altitudes or above the atmosphere. Here's a look at Middle Earth in the engine, showing the problem when you look at it from high-up...

You're still not saying what actual problem you're having. Can you not keep the nose up? Can you not control the direction of flight? Can you not reduce the vertical velocity enough during the landing flare? The possibilities are endless and without any specific description of what's happening there's really not any way to offer help.