RoboRay

And people still keep making these pointless threads...

The performance problems can be completely avoided by simply adding larger parts. I installed NovaPunch simply to get access to the 3m and 5m parts, and the longer 1m and 2m tanks. Even using the stock engines (I deleted all the NP engines, other than a couple of 3m and the 5m one because they are not balanced with the stock engines), I can now launch huge, heavy lander/return craft on interplanetary flights with no performance issues at all during the launch, because I'm doing it with a launcher consisting of 80 big parts instead of 200+ small parts. I'm not saying optimizations aren't needed. They are. But for now, replacing a huge triple stack of six 2m tanks with two 3m tanks works great as a work-around.

Stop the insanity. If you have a thought that's worthy of discussion, post it in it's own thread. A conglomeration of unrelated discussions doesn't belong in the same thread, anyway.

What difference are you expecting, in regards to the launch? Even the pull of our moon will not have an appreciable affect on the launch. The injection burn will require the same Delta V either way. It's the launch where you save fuel by going east. The speed required to attain orbit is the same regardless of how the body is rotating. If you do launch in the direction it is rotating, you get its rotation speed as your starting velocity. If you go west, you have to burn additional fuel to equal a Delta V double it's rotational speed... For no benefit at all, once you do get into orbit.

Why do people keep saying you have to be in a retrograde orbit to head to an inner planet? YOU DO NOT. You only have to make your injection burn retrograde in respect to Kerbin's orbit around the sun, which you can do just as easily in an easterly prograde as in a westerly retrograde orbit. All you are accomplishing by launching on any heading other than 090 or by other ways of getting into a retrograde orbit is wasting an awful lot of fuel. Please stop telling people "this is how it's done." That is not how it's done. Example: the real-world Venus probes did it... they all injected from easterly, prograde orbits.

That would depend on if you were looking at it from above the plane of the ecliptic or from below it. Prograde/retrograde (in regards to the rotation of the object being orbited) and even easterly/westerly eliminate the ambiguity.

I could not disagree more. RCS is ideal for trajectory correction on long flights, where tiny changes make big differences. A single puff from the main engines may be too much for the fine adjustments needed to line up an aerocapture at the proper periapsis and inclination. With RCS, however, it's easy.

The angles are going to vary with the elliptical nature of the orbits. There is no hard & fast "always correct" answer. That said, Protractor is the best solution I've found. It will get you as close as any other method that assumes circular, non-inclined orbits.

I want to see your proposed launch vehicle and transfer stage from Kerbin.

Try adding some Sepatrons to push your spent stages clear of the craft. They can help reduce collisions with parallel staging.

If you set your PE for 10 or 11km as you approach Duna, you won't have to burn much fuel at all to get into orbit. Aerobraking through the atmosphere will capture you into an elliptical orbit. From there, just a a little bit of fuel will let you raise peridun up out of the atmosphere if you wish to remain in orbit, or you can pick a landing point and set right down immediately.

Not real high, but they show markings for anomalies and other points of interest, and you can get LAT/LONs for plugging into MechJeb or other stuff. They've also been good enough to let me drive rovers to find a few odd things they detected.

He means, burn in the direction opposite the direction the Mun is traveling around Kerbin (Munar retrograde). So, if you are on the near-side of the Mun (you can see Kerbin up in the sky), take off and turn east (heading 090) and hold a course parallel to the Mun's orbital path while you burn. If you are on the far-side, head west. This slows you down relative to the Mun's orbit around Kerbin, so you tend to fall right down toward the planet after leaving the Mun's SOI. You can probably line up an atmosphere-grazing trajectory right here and not require any additional burns.

Yes, like I said, fighter aircraft do tend to put the CoM and the CoL together, or even rarely reverse them like in the F-16. But we don't have those computers in KSP. If you want a stable craft here, move the CoM aft.

Center of lift should be close to but must be slightly behind the center of mass, if KSP behaves like the real-world. This imparts positive stability, with lift-induced drag weather-vaning the aircraft to keep the nose out front. Putting the CoL on the CoM creates neutral-stability, so you can literally spin the plane around all over the place, regardless of which direction you are trying to go. That's great for fighters, which do put the CoL very close to the CoM, but not so good for passenger or cargo craft, which keep them much further apart for a more stable ride. Putting the CoL ahead of the CoM results in negative stability, where you will find it almost impossible to keep the nose pointed in the right direction.

No. That would require solving the n-body problem. KSP makes do with simpler patched-conics for 2-body solutions.

Moho for Morons?

You need to thrust radially (toward or away from the planet) to swing your AP around.

Well, yes, but a PE of 3km vice a PE of 10km doesn't change the actual entry angle much, at all. The important thing is the PE itself, as it's defined by the entry angle (and depth of the atmosphere). They are directly related, so if you're talking about changing one, you're changing both. It's just a different way of saying the same thing. We can discuss angles, or we can discuss altitudes, but we're still talking about the same thing in the end.

Yes, I'm planning to implement Zubrin's "Mars Direct" strategy on Duna, using the Kethane mod for in-situ propellant production. I'd land an unmanned or minimally-manned Return Vehicle (setting down with nearly empty fuel tanks) on Duna, once I've found a good spot, and start working on filling the tanks. Then I'd land a large Rover (in testing now, with a 3-man cockpit and a 5-man crewtank mounted on a large rover chassis. A couple of seats may be empty, if I need a small crew for the Return Vehicle.) The huge rover (more of a mobile base, really) will land somewhere on the same side of the planet, but it doesn't really have to be anywhere near the Return Vehicle. Once the Rover crew has seen enough of the sights, they'll drive to the Return Vehicle, load up and fly home. The Rover is also equipped (via ORDA parts) to act as a fuel-tanker, able to transfer up to 500L of fuel on each sortie, if an unforseen event requires fuel produced at one location to be transported somewhere else for use. If for some reason I can't get in-situ propellent production going the way I want (haven't used the kethane mod yet), I may need three flights... I'll keep the same Rover, but the Return Vehicle will need to land with enough fuel to at least get back into orbit. It may becomes simply a Return-to-Orbit craft, if I can't include enough fuel to fly it home. This would require a Dunar-orbit rendezvous with an Orbiter craft,transfering the crew again to get them home.

If you download the ISA MapSat mod, you can send out mapping probes to discover those things for yourself. Be sure to include the MapSat dish on your landers and rovers, too, even after the planet is fully mapped, so you can examine the map during their missions.

How about launching your craft and just assembling it orbit? I'd honestly hate to be able to just build anything I wanted to in orbit, as it would remove a great deal of challenge by basically removing all constraints from the actual spacecraft by not requiring it to be launchable.

I'd love to have a set of plastic stock rocket parts.

Good for you. Just say "no" to MechJeb autopilots, at least until you are fully satisfied in your ability to do things yourself. Use the pointing tools and translation tools if you want, because they are really helpful and you do need to understand what you're doing to use them, but don't use MJ as a crutch.