Peppe

If I can figure out aerobraking, this might just work... How do you get aerospikes on the tri-coupler? Half the time I can't get the spikes to attach to fuel tanks and have to place a tank a few times and try the spikes again. Did not think it was possible to get them directly on the coupler.

Thrust just gets you moving. You need to sustain the thrust over time to get into orbit. How much fuel do you have for that engine? First guess, it sounds like you need more fuel in your first stage rather than adding any more thrust. For stage one, a general target is 1.5-2 thrust to weight ratio. More thrust than that will often be wasted in atmosphere if you over throttle (you accelerate into your terminal velocity). Without doing a lot of math you can ballpark your thrust to weight by comparing the thrust / 10, example for your stage one it is 155. compare that to your total mass. I don't recognize most of your parts, but looks like around 40-50 tons. So you are probably in the 3:1 to 4:1 TWR range. In game should be able to feel it as not needing much throttle to get moving. For 100km orbit you need about 4700 m/s deleta-v for average control. Very good control could get it down to like 4500 m/s. This is a little harder to calculate, so to ballpark just add more fuel tanks if you come up short in a stage. Its more efficient if you can drop empty fuel tanks on the way up, but if not you can always add more fuel and more engines (thrust) to keep your thrust to weight positive (above 1, but again target 1.5 - 2 for ascent). Once you are in space you can get away with much lower thrust. If you plan to land on anything with a lot of gravity though you may need to adjust your engines for that stage to allow an ascent.

What is the heading talk in the first line of the how to use section: How to use these values? Using these values for interplanetary flight is no more complicated than obtaining them: Place your ship in a circular, 0° inclination parking orbit around your planet/moon of origin. For a destination in a higher orbit, make this orbit at a 90° heading; for a lower destination, go for 270°. ----------------- 270 heading orbit is a retograde orbit, is it not? When do you burn in a prograde orbit to get to eve? The only real question that matters is how to get there in the lowest delta v.

For the parachute you can view the attachment point level/little above and aim way high then you think it needs to be and it will snapdown to the center point. Usually just have to make sure your mouse doesn't hit any other surfaces and mouse near the green point. Still working on orbits. The transfer calculator works planet to planet or moon to moon. Am I missing something or shouldn't they be transfer calcs for moon to planet? Or is the most efficient thing to come off the retrograde side of a moons orbit... get picked up by the planets SOI and just kill velocity to be pulled in?

For my testing i knew the design was fairly wastful. I just extended the design I saw the threads PakledHostage's linked to where they searched for optimal ascent paths. Adding a 4th tank gets it into orbit with ~66.7 liters of fuel in the current best path i have found. I think the goal of the design is to minimize error if you flew it manually, so you have asas, fins, and no staging. I figured after finding an optimal flight path in the current version making the smallest lunar lander + return could follow. The super small designs the OP is looking at probably mostly come from older versions which had either different atmosphere for kerbin, fuel bugs, or just plan differently balanced engines. Looks like with default ascent you finished about 1L fuel... I don't know what rockets it is true for, but for small/low drag rockets this path seems to be fairly optimal finishing with 5.4 L of fuel: I think for most designs the 70K target for the end of the gravity turn should be brought down as you spend most of your ascent coasting in low drag regions of the atmostphere with a mostly vertical ascent. So you get low drag loss and high gravity loss.

Are Lagrangian points modeled in KSP? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point#L1

"• I almost never use MJ auto-pilot, but after ~20 tries of not getting an SOI with Duna, I gave up and used MJ to get a transfer orbit. Looking forward to doing it again, but not cheating this time." check the new mechjeb. It now has the current phase angles for you. Orbital information has your angle to prograde. Wait for duna to read 44.3 and then wait for orbit angle to prograde to read ~150.9 (100km orbit). When all those things align burn prograde till you get near duna's orbit/intercept. Not sure if you should burn prograde (follow it as it moves) or hold it on 90 degrees the whole way... i did a mix and still got an intercept You can double check your ejection angle for your current orbit. http://ksp.olex.biz/

What is the smallest craft that can make kerbin 100km orbit? Looking at old threads nothing super small works anymore. Did some tests with mechjeb auto asscent. Built a simple rocket. Don't know if it has enough delta v to make 100km orbit -- haven't made it yet Aero spike, 4 winglets, 4 T400 fuel tanks, small ASAS, and small 1 man capsule. Fired the rocket straight up and jeb reported 2k m/s loss to gravity. 860m/s loss to drag. basically best case for drag and worst case for gravity. Tried various other trajectories and closest I have gotten to 100km orbit is 100k apo ~ -62k per. I believe those accent path settings were 6, 70, ~50% slider (1 sliver of black above the final red bar). 4416m/s delta v expended. 976 lost to drag, 1370 lost to gravity. Edit: Got periapsis down to -40k with better turn finish altitude. Spend more time burning in orbital prograde. Ran a bunch of launches and did a little manual binary search on end turn altitudes. Found 48.5 provided the max benefit with the curve adjusted to have the last full red segment (upper right) shown fully. Moving slider right begins the flat line along the top. Sliding it left flattens the curve and induces a lot of steering error. Starting altitude may note be ideal, but it feels pretty close.

Your simply designs posted anywhere? I've deleted most designs I came up with even if they worked they ended up pretty ugly. Only played a couple days and still figuring it all out. Learned about gravity turns last night and found a whole new world of options. If they add docking/fuel transfer/cargo type activities then I think these designs will be very useful. If they stay simple all the better. I assume kerbalish is when you stop looking like a rocket and start looking more like your launching building.

New to this, but burn limit seems hard to build for and are solid rocket boosters allowed? I'd be interested in the most efficient way to get up a double large fuel tank. I got one large barrel (1600L) into 300k orbit. Also got the large double barrel into orbit (3200L) with a similar design and just adding a booster first stage. I think i could scale it to 3 large doubles... part limit might be issue at 3 or more.

Anyone getting ~4k m/s or more in .17?