GoDores

Thinking about it, it might work to launch retrograde around Kerbin and then burn in daylight to transfer to Duna. But that would take a lot more dV than a standard launch and transfer, and if your ship can't handle being in the dark for the transfer burn, it'll die as soon as it makes its first Duna orbit anyway.

You'll be in the sun for 100% of any transfer orbit because there's nothing to block the sun out there in space. If you mean that you want to make your transfer burn in the sun, that's harder because you need to increase your Sun apoapsis to go to Duna, which means accelerating in the direction of Kerbin's orbit, which means burning at night. But you're in dark for the same time (or less) than you would be in a single orbit of Kerbin so if your ship can't handle darkness for that long you may need some more batteries or RTGs.

Looks to me like you have the outer fuel tanks all connected to each other in a loop. The game doesn't handle that well. The first tanks to be staged shouldn't have any fuel lines running into them and the last tanks to be staged shouldn't have any fuel lines running out of them.

How does one do that? Would it get the thing right side up again? And what caused this in the first place?

Update: when I reload the save, if I immediately hit Esc and end the flight, it deletes the rover and (presumably) returns the flight crew to home. This is the option I'll use if I can't make the rover reload correctly, but I would really rather make everything work so I can finish my tests and properly return the crew to Kerbin.

I was testing out a new rover and heavy lander design on the Mun and due to the test nature of the mission was using lots of quicksaves. My last quicksave was after I put Jeb, Bill, and Bob into the seats of the rover as it was parked by my lander. After yet another incident I wanted to retry, I used the quickload. The rover regenerated half upside down and buried into the Munar surface, and after a couple seconds it generated lots of explodey noises and either killed Bill or at least permanently buried him under the surface. I've reloaded the same save probably ten times but with the same result. How do I fix or properly use the current quicksave? I can live with losing the rover but I don't want to use any of the Kerbals; I just pulled them off of my space station so they could be actively involved in new flights. The rover was just sitting on the surface right side up, not moving, with everyone properly seated when I made the save so I have no idea why it reloads upside down, and I can't switch to it with [ or ] before it starts to explode.

I try to have all boost stages remain suborbital, and if my payload isn't performing the final orbital insertion burn itself I have a probe core on the stage that is, so it can deorbit itself. My interplanetary module is reusable and doesn't stage. But I still leave debris off since the game doesn't always handle it properly. For example, I'll commonly eject my last boost stage in a 300km x 35km orbit and then circularize, but the game will happily leave the debris in that orbit forever without decaying even though it's in the atmosphere and should crash fairly quickly.

It can be convenient to build a little rover including any mods like Protractor that you use to calculate launch trajectories and then drive it a few km away from the launchpad. You can switch to it and warp at high speed to your launch window, then launch your ship. This is really handy if you have a big or unstable design that likes to take itself apart on the launchpad under warp.

It's hard to tell from the pictures but it looks like you're using only aerospike engines on the stage you want to orbit. On something with that mass, no reasonable amount of pod torque is going to keep control; you need gimbaling engines. I have a design that uses Rockomax tanks with three aerospikes underneath each just like you have, but I mounted them farther out from the center, which leaves room to mount an LV-T45 at the center attach point for control. My design is intended as a booster stage to get my lander down to and off from heavier bodies (everything except Eve) but has enough dV to get into Kerbin orbit as an SSTO without my lander attached. Try this, or work out another way to get one gimbaling engine per two or three aerospikes, and see if that doesn't let you fly controllably to orbit.

Have you tried flying it manually? Mechjeb doesn't always know quite what it's doing, and if you're taking off from the Munar surface with something that has 1500m/s dV you should have plenty of fuel to rendezvous with something in Munar orbit, assuming you're relatively coplanar (I.e. you're not launching from the pole to rendezvous with a module in an equatorial orbit). Another question: why relaunch your rovers? That's a lot of mass that does you no good once you're off the surface. It would be more efficient for you to land a rover and a lander separately. Leave the rover on the surface once your crew is ready to return, and you save the launch mass and have a rover that can be used for future exploration. I also put a probe module on all my rovers so I can do some uncrewed driving around places I land even if I don't plan to send a crewed mission back anytime soon.

One factor not mentioned is that generally you're moving a lot less mass on the return trip than you are moving outbound. This doesn't directly affect the dV requirements, which are independent of mass, but it makes a big difference in the fuel required to generate the needed dV, and fuel is generally a limiting factor. For example, I recently ran a mission to Duna and Ike. I started from 300km LKO with two landers, two rover landing modules with two rovers each, and a probe module with five unmanned landing probes, all full of fuel, driven by my interplanetary transfer stage with the equivalent of four orange tanks and six LV-Ns. Going from Kerbin orbit to Duna intercept burned over half the fuel in my transfer stage (2 orange tanks worth). But after operations in the Duna system, including dropping one rover and lander and a few landing probes on Duna, transferring to Ike and dropping the other lander, rover pair, and probes there, then picking up the Ike lander and going back to Duna to pick up its lander, I was left with just the two mostly empty manned landers and the transfer stage with less than 1/4 fuel left. That was plenty to return the stack to a 300km Kerbin orbit without aerobraking and still left me with 1/8 fuel in the transfer stage (which was left in orbit for refuel and reuse - I don't want to have to launch anything that massive again) and enough fuel to deorbit and land both of the crewed landers. As I said, this doesn't have any impact on the dV requirements, but it makes a big impact on fuel planning. Just because you burn 3/4 of your fuel getting somewhere doesn't mean you don't have enough fuel to get home.

Your second stage (with the six 3200L tanks, each with their own Mainsail) is massive overkill. If you're close, you might get there just by removing every other Mainsail on that stage and adding fuel lines so you have three pairs of tanks each feeding a Mainsail. Fundamentally, other than your first stage, you have way too much engine for your fuel and you don't need that much TWR.

Neat, thanks! In Voyage, they're trying to develop a NERVA 3rd stage for the Saturn V because the US committed to a Mars trip in 1986 right after Apollo 11 landed and chemical rockets would be impractical. On the first manned flight of Apollo-N (the Saturn V with NERVA 3rd stage), the core cooling system is damaged by pogo oscillations on launch and the reactor blows. The astronauts reenter but die of radiation poisoning. No one else is hurt but the idea of a blown-up reactor in space kills NERVA politically and they have to redesign the mission to get to Mars with chemical rockets. Anyway, it's relevant to the thread, but it's a great book in general. I would definitely recommend it to anyone who plays KSP.

Is there a simple way to locate normal and antinormal on the navball? I have used 0 inclination/0 heading for normal and 0 inclination/180 heading for antinormal when adjusting Munar orbital inclinations and it seems to work but I'm not really sure why it works, or if it would always work.

Thanks! Is there anything useful to be done with space debris? In other words is there a reason to leave it on? It's not slowing down my computer yet but it gets in the way on the map screen. Also, would turning it off affect the two landers I have on the Mun since I brought their crews home?

Anyone ever read "Voyage" by Stephen Baxter. Neat alternative-history fiction of what the space program would have looked like if the US had committed to a Mars landing immediately after Apollo 11. A key plot point hinges around the use of NERVA in a Saturn V stack. I don't know how to do the hidden spoiler thing on the forum yet so I won't comment on what happens, but it's a good read. I would fully support the use of a NERVA type stage if we had something useful to do with it.

I do have a couple questions: How does one set up a signature for forum posts? I swear I went through all the profile options and didn't see how to do this. Apparently any debris (expended stages, etc.) left in orbit are continuously tracked by the game. Does this hurt performance? Do I need to build "missiles" to destroy my expended stages? My current rocket design has its booster stage crash on Kerbin and its second stage has enough delta-V to crash at the destination, but I have a lot of parts from earlier designs orbiting Kerbin, and if I use my current lander design for orbital rendezvous missions I end up ejecting six radial fuel tanks per flight into orbit. Any way around this?

I first heard about the game from the XKCD reference and downloaded the demo a few weeks ago. Played it until I landed (by which I mean stranded with no hope of rescue) a pod of Kerbals on the Mun and just bought the full version last week. I have ten successful missions in two programs under my belt so far. I keep detailed mission logs and screenshots but so far my highlight accomplishments have been: -4 Munar landings and EVAs with single-Kerbal pods, two of which flew safely back to Kerbin -1 Minmus landing and EVA and safe return to Kerbal with a single Kerbal -Kerbin orbit rendezvous of two 3-Kerbal ships (hardest accomplishment to date) -Simultaneous 3-Kerbal EVA in Kerbin orbit -EVA transfer of 2 Kerbals from one ship to another in Kerbin orbit -3 Munar landings and returns to Kerbin with 3-Kerbal landers, including precision landings at my previous sites to rescue the two previously stranded Kerbals Next mission will probably be a 3-Kerbin flight to land and return from Minmus to further refine my ability to fly to a body in an inclined orbit, after which I'll try a Duna-orbit mission (my current vehicle is intentionally overpowered for Mun/Minmus missions and should have the delta-V to get there and back). This game is ridiculously addictive and really makes one appreciate what the people and nations who have done this stuff for real went through. I'm avoiding mods so far and trying to do things the "old-fashioned" way. We'll see how we'll that works for a trans-Duna injection burn