ThatBum

Design your rover and drive it around KSC first, then worry about a delivery system. Landing on a planet with atmosphere is infinitely easier than without an atmosphere, because of drag and parachutes. Here's one of mine: the Duna Exploration Rover Probe. or DERP. It has a lander arm on the back so it can right itself if flipped. Here is the skycrane and heatshield that got it there.

When you get to your periapsis, you'll be going very fast. Sometimes the physics engine doesn't know what to do with things going a few dozen kilometers per second and shakes the ship apart (the Kraken). Please tell us how it went.

This mod has a hitchhiker module that's also a command pod, so you don't even need the 3 man capsule at the front.

The subassembly you're saving has to have one of those green attachment nodes somewhere on it. If there's not you need to save it as two halves.

I love MechJeb 2, it's much more capable. I don't see how it's less user friendly. If anything it's more user friendly, because it actually shows you what it's doing, using the nodes created by the Maneuver Planner.

I think my first Mun landing consisted of hovering for about 5 minutes going 'oh god oh god oh god' and inevitably running out of fuel, because I didn't know how to kill horizontal velocity properly then.

Let's just express version numbers in binary. That will really confuse 'em. We're currently on version 00010011.00000001.

Son of a gun, that happened to me earlier today! I was experimenting with attaching winglets directly to decouplers, so I could ditch them when the rocket leaves the atmosphere. I decoupled them on the launchpad to test that they'd decouple properly and not clip into itself and spaz or something, and they infiniglided similar to the video.

The energy required to raise your orbit might offset the reduced energy to change inclination at said higher orbit. Probably too late at this point, and would be simpler to change inclination where you are. You're pretty close to a polar/90 degree orbit anyway, so it won't take a terribly large amount of Dv to do. Again, make a maneuver node at where your orbit is highest and tell it to burn down, or antinormal. Alternatively, go to the lowest point and tell it to burn up, or antinormal. Note that these directions are not prograde and retrograde, these will just make your orbit higher or lower. Maybe this will help.

Burn along your negative normal direction at your ascending node (the high point of the inclination, or on the high end of the axis on which it's tilted), which should be pointing near South. Be sure to use maneuver nodes to experiment and see what the burn does before you do it. Edit: Clarifying what the normal vector is, in case you don't know. It's perpendicular to your direction of travel. Normal + is facing directly up relative to the planet (front of spacecraft facing North pole), and normal - is facing down. This is different from radial +/-, where you're also perpendicular but facing directly at the ground or away at space.

Both camera mods are made by Romfarer, actually. Sorry, but his framework is cooked into each mod he makes, and is an integral part of it.

Here's my ol' standby interplanetary rocket: Transfer stage closeup: It can get pretty heavy payloads to orbit. The transfer stage has 5623 m/s of Dv innit. I'm considering using the docking port blanks instead of the aero tailpieces for the nuclear engine mounts, as they're lighter, but these look so cool!

I do use the launch clamps to hold onto things sometimes, when doing drop testing of delivery systems. If the launch clamps exploded, the framework holding it up would fall on top of my rover/probe/capsule/whatever. It's a shame though, I like docking cam. Supposedly this behavior will be reverted to the default non-explosive launch clamps when the relevant bug in vanilla that's necessitating the explosive launch clamps in the first place is fixed. I'm hoping this will happen in 0.20, as Romfarer is now a dev and probably has some influence over fixing a bug that affects his mod.

I tend to put them on probes in the stage that they're already in orbit with. They're good for orbital adjustments, like when trying to get a precise orbit for mapping or something.

In layman's terms, delta v is how much total oomph your rocket can exert, regardless of speed or direction. Therefore it is a dimensionless unit, unlike acceleration, which has a vector associated with it. Dv is different from your thrust, which would be a measure of your instantaneous oomph, rather than your total oomph. You can have high thrust and low Dv, like with the gas guzzling Mainsail engines, or low thrust and high Dv like with the ion and nuclear engines. Your rocket has a potential of Dv stored inside it, based on how much fuel you have and how efficient the engines you've chosen are. Doing certain things like getting to orbit or transferring to another body require a certain amount of Dv to do, and if your rocket has insufficient Dv left in the tanks, you'll fall short and run out of fuel before you can complete the maneuver. You can find your rocket's Dv totals manually, which involves an obscene amount of math, or you could let Kerbal Engineer or MechJeb do it for you. The KSP wiki has useful Dv numbers for various situations that you can use for reference. Good luck!

Oh yeah! I didn't even think about the dummy docking port parts, I'll try using those instead of the aero tail pieces next launch. Still need to get used to all these crazy new parts. Also it's actually remarkably stable. Rock solid attitude throughout the ascent. The cross struts really improve structural integrity. With that much gimbaling it executes the gravity turn very quickly. I calculated it so the 3rd stage (the one before the nuclear stage) has just enough fuel to get it to 100km, then it's jettisoned and the nuclear stage circularizes, to avoid debris. Actually, it has a little fuel left in case of heavier than usual payloads, but still, not much Dv is wasted.

The rest of my rocket:

Yeah...it takes about 860m/s Dv to get to the Mun from LKO. 10K is overkill to just go to the Mun.

Yeah that's a pretty old machine for KSP. This is my machine, and it starts getting slow around 500-600 parts, depending on how many struts are in use and how much motion/thrust is happening.

Always control the more maneuverable of the two spacecraft when trying to dock. Use Lazor Docking Cam if you want a camera. EDIT: Ninja'd... It was actually caused by a conflict between MechJeb 2 and all of Romfarer's plugins. Romfarer's UI inadvertently overrode MechJeb's UI, and r4m0n fixed it but coded it so Romfarer's addons' UI looked like Nyancat.

You could fractionate your orbital maneuvers by doing periapsis "kicks." It maximizes efficiency due to the Oberth effect. Illustrations: (Images taken from this thread on nuclear engines.)

Graphically, KSP isn't too intensive at its highest settings, as it's just DX9. It hits the CPU and memory hardest. Expect optimizations to come in future updates. There is one involving loading times and memory usage coming in the next update.

I feel this is a case of the old engineer attitude of "I am right and you are wrong and nothing in the universe can change that, ha ha ha!" Many people here are at fault because of this, including me sometimes. Let's just agree that everyone has their own way of doing things, and getting something large to orbit is an accomplishment in itself. If it works, you're doing it right. This is KSP after all.

I found Cowboy Bebop ships to be pretty realistic. When they're changing attitude you can see RCS thrusters firing. An example.

Jeez. All the compliments on my orbital stage. I built it in like 5 minutes, calm down. I do use it for pretty much any interplanetary mission and stick different payloads on it with subassembly loader. I also liked to use KSPX's 2.5m nuclear engine, but I find this configuration of the 4 smaller ones gives more thrust with the same fuel efficiency. I'll put an image of the rest of the rocket up later when I get back home to my gaming machine. Also yes, if you have a TWR of 1 on the launchpad, you won't get anywhere. That literally means that your thrust is just breaking even with gravity and you'll hover in place. If it's close to 1, you'll lift off very slowly and will probably not make it to orbit, as rockets perform poorly at low speeds (Oberth effect, it still takes effect at suborbital speed). For example, the Saturn V had a TWR of around 1.5 at liftoff. There's also a fundamental problem with rockets: they need to lift their own fuel. Say you want to lift a payload of a certain weight. You need propellant to lift the payload. But, the fuel weighs something, so you then need more fuel to lift that fuel, and more still to lift that, ad infinitum. Fortunately you're saved from an infinite loop because the rocket gets lighter as you burn the fuel and discard stages, and other effects like the atmosphere getting lighter and the gravity turn making gravity affect you less. It still goes to show how even a little extra mass can have exponential consequences on how much fuel you need to bring with you, so try to be minimalistic in your rocket designs. There's also the concept of max Q. It's like terminal velocity, but in reverse. There is a speed at a given altitude where the force of thrust from your engines pushing you up reaches equilibrium with the force of drag pushing you down. If you go faster than that, the drag force wins out and you're wasting Dv. See this table for terminal velocity numbers at various altitudes on Kerbin. That's about all I have to say on the matter, good luck!