RoboRay

What I mean is that I didn't put a ladder up the outside to the cab, so Crew Manifest is needed to get Kerbals up to it

You might think that... if you haven't checked out the Steam KSP forum. I tried to be helpful there, but gave up after a few days. At least they're there and not here.

You can always capture, even with a ridiculously low TWR, if you plan ahead. On my one ion-probe mission to map Moho, I determined that I would need a two hour burn to barely capture just into a highly elliptical orbit, and at my interplanetary velocity would only be in the planet's SOI for one hour. Compounding that, the several minutes right after Pe would be in shadow, over the planet's night-side, so I'd have no power for the engine. So, a little over an hour before reaching the SOI transition, I aimed my dinky little blue lightbulb at Moho's limb, just above the south pole, and started the burn. I made it. It's still the only time I started a capture burn before even entering the destination SOI.

Ah, I see you too are a fan of three-sided Aristotelian logic.

Nucular wessals.

You can do kicks in reverse, on the other end... You need one long burn at the closest point of approach, much like your last burn on the transfer injection, to get captured into a highly elliptical orbit. Once you're captured, you can make repeated retrograde burns near Pe to bring your Ap down more efficiently than with one long burn (if the delta-v requirements are high enough to even bother). The challenge is making sure you burn enough on the first pass to actually get captured to begin with. Personally, I usually just aerocapture if there's an atmosphere to take advantage of. I've only been to Moho and Eeloo one time each, so burning to capture is a rare event in my space program. I use the Protractor mod for my phase angle and ejection angle info.

The division between raising Ap and circularizing varies greatly with your ascent profile. A long coast to Ap followed be a long circularization burn is less efficient than building more horizontal velocity once you clear most of the atmosphere (50km or so). I frequently expend just 200m/sec or so circularizing. I've also done single-burn to circular orbit a couple of times.

You forgot RCS that doesn't spin you around when you design a ship poorly.

Please post pictures when asking for help with a design. That makes it easy to identify the problem and the value of the responses you get will improve dramatically. In your case, if you have gimbal-control motors above the Center of Mass (which is what it sounds like you are doing), you must disable their gimbals. Gimbal behavior doesn't reverse itself properly when mounted above the CoM, so your gimbals are steering your craft away from vertical while the ASAS thinks it's steering the gimbals toward vertical.

It's easier for Squad (and us) to just ignore silly suggestions by people who obviously haven't done their research first than to try to implement a system to block them from posting them. Just say "meh" and close the thread if you don't feel like offering an explanation.

Drop a booster stage with Pe below 22km, if it's almost empty, to ensure it doesn't become spacejunk. If you've got enough fuel left to reach orbit, hopefully you've also got a probe pod and battery on the booster so you can deorbit it with the left-over fuel after discarding it. It takes very little fuel to to this, as the booster will be very light with no payload and nearly empty fuel tank, and you only have to get the Pe below 22km. Drop a transfer-stage on a course that impacts the destination world, so it also doesn't become spacejunk. Then, steer clear of the impact trajectory with your craft.

Your last burn will be much longer, as you note. You can minimize it by pushing your Ap out to Minmus on your last kick, but that makes your orbital period several days long, which may be less efficient in the long-run if it pushes your final burn past your optimal phase angle. However, by that time, your orbit is going to be so elliptical that the curvature on each side of your Pe is much shallower than if you were in a circular orbit. This helps efficiency, as more of your thrust is going to be aligned with your prograde vector even if there is a normal or radial component to your final injection burn.

That's exactly what I do. All my manned pods have the chatterer module added to their part.cfg.

Thanks. The "viewing dome" on back is the cupola command pod from KSPX. The 2.5m to 3.75m adapter cone is from NovaPunch, then there's a 3.75m plate from NovaPunch that's normally used to mount multiple 1.25m parts onto a 3.75m part, but I needed it because the 3.75 BobCat HOME landing legs ahead of it didn't allow surface attachment of some of the internal parts (the cone is stuffed full of batteries). The same structure is repeated up front, except with a HOME command pod on the nose and a Modular Multiwheels truck cab on top of that. There's no way to get up into the truck cab without Crew Manifest for internal transfers, but the other crew compartments are accessible by fixed ladders from the ground, when landed. The electric props are from Firespitter, of course, but the solar panels are my own adaption of the stock fixed panels. I doubled the size so they cover four times the area and produce four times as much power. It really reduces the part count for atmospheric craft that need electrical power. In daylight, I can run all four props at full power indefinitely, cruising at about 76m/sec. At night, the batteries only last a couple of minutes at full power, but it's enough to find a good landing spot after sunset, if desired, and set down for the night. Service ceiling on Kerbin is about 4000m. The vessel's name came to me instantly, as soon as I saw it take to the air. "That thing looks like a sea turtle," I said to myself. I normally use Greek names, but I'm starting to run out. Maybe I'll switch over to Polynesian names for a while.

Maiden test flight of my newest long-endurance exploration airship, the Honu. That's not a bad parking job, if I do say so myself. The Honu is set up for individual forward/aft and stop control of each prop, so precise maneuvering in tight spaces is possible.

While descending, keep your nose on the retrograde mark. This will result in virtually no horizontal drift when you touch down.

If both craft are already in orbit, target the ship and wait until you're at a crossing node. If it's the Ascending Node, burn 90 degrees toward the south of prograde. If it's the Descending Node, burn 90 degrees to the north of prograde. A 35 degree plane change is going to take a lot of delta-v, though, if both craft are already in orbit. It might be easier to just land and relaunch. If only the target is already in orbit and you want to keep the target at 35 degrees inclined, you can launch directly into that plane by waiting until KSC is directly under the craft's orbital path and launch on a heading of 055 or 125 (depending on if the target's orbit is crossing the equator toward the north or the south, at the time). In general, you should always turn toward the east when launching, heading 090. This gives you a free boost by adding the planet's rotational velocity to your orbital speed and eliminates the need for major inclination changes. Unless you need an inclined orbit for some reason, such as polar mapping satellite, a GPS-style satellite constellation, or emulating the ISS orbit.

Don't pick on the moderators!

No. The retrograde marker is yellow (well, it can be green if your monitor color settings are off calibration). The purple/pink markers are the ones that show the direction to your target, not the direction you're moving. In Target mode, the prograde and retrograde marks do not show your orbital direction around the planet; they show your motion in respect to the target. If the prograde marker is right on the target marker, you're moving straight toward it. To take up a near-stationary position in respect to the target, point retrograde and burn until the speed shows zero.

Most joysticks work. Some don't, due to the method KSP uses to read them. I'd kill to use my Logitech G940 set, but it don't work in KSP.

A lower orbit is a faster orbit. So, if your target is ahead of you, you need to be in a lower orbit to catch up. Likewise, if your target is behind you, you need to switch to a higher orbit so it can catch up to you. You don't have to lower or raise both sides of your orbit, just one side, then watch the closest point of approach markers. If you are getting 50km closer each orbit and your target is 300km away at the approach, you'll rendezvous in six orbits. You can adjust your orbit higher or lower to speed that up or delay the rendezvous (waiting for daylight at the rendezvous point, maybe). When you get to the point where you're passing within a few kilometers of the target, make sure your NavBall is in Target Mode and point at the yellow retrograde mark (which now shows your motion in respect to the target). Burn the engines until it shows zero m/sec. This matches your orbits closely enough that you won't zoom past and fly away. From there, point directly at the target and thrust a little bit to start drifting toward it. Don't build up too much speed. If you start to drift off course (and you will, starting from several kilometers away), you can steer back toward the target with RCS or by turning 90 degrees to use the main engine. When you get within 100m or so, point retrograde to zero your relative velocity again. You are now rendezvoused.

The forum was wiped back to October. The last post in this thread was July. It was dead long before the last good backup. Clearly a necro-post.

I can rendezvous and dock effortlessly manually using the NavBall for guidance and barely touching my monoprop supply. I tried to follow MechJeb's rendezvous and docking guidance once and gave up in a couple of minutes because it's such a convoluted process. I suggest just figuring out how to use the Target information on the Map's closest point of approach markers and the NavBall indications. It's simpler.

Stages are sections of your craft that are discarded in flight, not the ability to turn onboard systems on and off.