DMagic

I haven't tried this with two small crafts, but it worked great when docking a small craft to a much bigger, and slower one. I tried it both ways, it works better when you are controlling the bigger craft (which probably isn't the most common way of doing it), but it worked pretty well the other way around, too. I'm sure at some point the larger craft will be too slow to really make this useful. Until you get to that point it works great, you just have to go slow, but you have to do that anyway.

How far away you are from Kerbin doesn't really matter as far as a gravity assist is concerned. The only way that 'free' energy (it's not free because, while the planet pulls on the spacecraft, the spacecraft pulls on the planet) can be transferred from the planet to the craft is when you are measuring velocity from another point of view (your velocity relative to Kerbin after an encounter with the Mun for instance, or your velocity relative to the sun after an encounter with Duna). Kerbin's gravity increases your velocity as you get closer to the planet. The advantage of this is that you can perform your burn (and you want to do this as close to periapsis as possible) when you are going much faster than you would be in a circular LKO. Or, more specifically, that you cover a greater distance in a smaller amount of time. Meaning that you can burn your engines for a shorter amount of time than you would be able to if you were going slower. The other advantage to starting with an elliptical orbit from Minmus is, obviously, that you are already close to being able to escape Kerbin orbit. It only takes another 50-100 m/s of delta-v to escape Kerbin's SOI at this point, if you burn at your periapsis. You could perform the burn at some other time, but the point when you are at maximum velocity is the ideal time to do it. So the short answer is, no you never get any free assist from Kerbin, not unless you start and end your encounter from an orbit around the sun.

It's also not a bad idea to make backups of your save folder every once in a while. I wouldn't overdo it, but it can really be a good idea in situations like this.

I think I've done something similar to this, though I'm not totally sure about what you're planning. I build a carrier with 4 docking ports to transport landers to 4 of Jool's moons. They aren't all of equal size, which can cause a lot of issues, but it let me carry some very heavy ships without doing each individually. And if you look closely you can see that each craft has several probes and rovers stacked above and below the landers. These can all be separated at the appropriate time to land or go into orbit around the moons. There is a lot more info on this mission on my thread here.

This seems like it accomplishes the same thing as using no-clipping. You're not explicitly activating no-clip mode, but is the end result any different? I do enjoy finding these kind of strange exploits though.

I've had success using radial tanks to mount the landing legs around a LV-N in the center. To avoid making it top heavy, just use the smallest 2.5m fuel tank and put the small engines on the bottom of the radial tanks. This should give you plenty of thrust to land on all but the heaviest of planets/moons, and if you need more you can attach radial engines. A stack of I-beams can be used to mount 1 or 2 ladders to let you reach the ground.

I think your idea of setting up the Gilly probe first is a good one. That way you shouldn't even need a transport vehicle to Gilly, just put one of the tiny fuel tanks (or maybe 2) and the smallest engines on each probe. A small probe with 1 tiny tank and engine should have about 1000 m/s of delta-v. That should be enough for orbital insertion at Gilly, and to set up an inclination change. A similar sized probe should probably have enough delta-v to get into the right inclination at Eve, too. But you might want to use the transfer vehicle for part of that inclination change, then finish it with just the probe. You could also consider ion engines. At Eve the solar panels are much more efficient, so just 2 or 3 regular sized panels are enough to power a single engine.

One method I came up with is to put the rover directly under your main engine. Use only radial engines for the descent, and main engine only for ascent. These landers are for Vall and Tylo, so they are way bigger than anything you need for the Mun. But the same principle can be used (the radial engines are from the HOME mod, but the stock version would work just fine, too). Just make sure you have room underneath to fit the rover without crushing it when landing. Another small decoupler and truss segment can be used below the rover to attach it to the main rocket.

As we continue with the mission, our intrepid Bop crew begin their descent to the surface. The landing site is a small valley just south of the equator. After a successful landing the crew is excited to get out of their cramped lander can and explore the area. However, as Bop Mission Commander Grezgor Kerman is occupied collecting samples, Mission Specialist Jenby Kerman begins behaving erratically. He starts wandering off towards the northern polar region of the moon and can be heard over the comm link repeatedly whispering "I just need to get a little higher." Commander Grezgor is forced to track down Specialist Jenby and escort him back to the lander. The decision is made to return to orbit immediately. Meanwhile, the Pol crew has successfully arranged an encounter with the moon during their second orbit of Jool. After burning for orbital insertion around the strangely colored moon they release the Sat Map probe, which changes its orbit to a polar inclination to survey the surface. No anomalies are detected on Pol, however, an interesting geological formation is identified that could be the remains of a large impact crater. The lander probe is released and prepares to set down in the crater. The probe descends to the surface, while Jool and its inner moons rise, with Kerbol in the distance. Closer to the surface, several strange formations are seen on the crater floor. The Pol crew decide to land in the same region to study these formations. After a rather rough landing, the spacecraft comes to a stop, and the crew prepares for EVA. The crew are excited to be outside, and take a moment to enjoy the spectacular view. They take a closer look at one of the formations, which they have taken to calling Pol Hoodoos. Mission Specialist Ludzon Kerman manually inspects the probe and recovers data from its instruments. After a successful Pol EVA the crew prepares for ascent. As they fly over the surface they note some truly fascinating terrain features. Next up the crews of the Vall and Tylo landers prepare for their descents.

One thing that helps is to make sure your lander has a high TWR. It's a lot easier to accurately land at a specific location if you can quickly kill your horizontal velocity. This way you can wait until you are almost directly over your target, then kill horizontal velocity, then go straight down. It may not be the most fuel-efficient way to land, but it's a lot easier than trying to correctly time a 2 or 3 minute burn.

Yep, a stack of I-beams works great for this, just make sure that the engine shroud doesn't get blown into the beams. You should be able to see the seam where the shroud splits apart and figure out which way to orient it. You might have to fiddle around with the I beams to get it placed right, but it works really well.

I believe you want the point in your orbit when you are on the side closest to Kerbin and in the opposite direction that Minmus is moving around the planet. That is, if you are orbiting Minmus in the same direction that the moon orbits the planet (a prograde orbit, counterclockwise when looking down on the north pole). If you are in the opposite orbit then you would burn at the point when you are on the opposite side of Minmus, further from Kerbin, but still burning in the opposite direction that Minmus is moving.

Do you mean 666 units of fuel in that big tank? That should be way more than enough to get back, or you could just blow that off and use the nuclear engine to get back. The 180 units of fuel in that tank should also be more than enough. But if you want to do it the hard, more fun way, you could send up a small rescue vehicle. Put a 1 man command pod on top of a lander-can and use that to ferry back your stranded pilot. You could separate the command pod and just use the lander to return to Kerbin in, or just drag the whole thing back. Rendezvous shouldn't be too bad because you don't actually have to dock, slow down and get close enough to do an EVA over to the rescue vehicle.

Time warp is just that, it makes time go faster, but it stops all physics calculations. If you are in a stable orbit, then you will stay that way as long as you are in time warp (you can still have encounters with other planets and moons though). You can't use it when in an atmosphere, or with the engines on, and you can't change anything when in time warp (like the direction you're heading, activating solar panels, RCS, etc.). With physics warp everything is still being calculated. You can activate engines, enter an atmosphere, or do anything else, just a little bit faster (only 2X - 4X regular speed). Physics warp can also break things if your ship is too big or complicated, or too many things are going on at once. Time warp is just there to make the game tolerable. A transit to Jool can take 300 days, or 75 days with physics warp. But it just takes a few minutes with time warp. Physics warp is the same principle, making you not waste so much time waiting for something to happen, it's just that the complexity of the physics calculations make it not feasible to go much faster than 4X regular speed. Also, you don't want to go too much faster than normal when important things are happening, like using fuel, or being in an atmosphere.

It can get wobbly. The first way to combat that is to try and make it balanced, keep the center of mass as close to the middle as possible. You can also try draining any fuel you have from the rover to keep it from being top heavy. You can play around with having an bigger-than-necessary fuel tank and draining fuel at different stages to do this without leaving your final stages with not enough fuel. And also, struts. The rover in my picture is just connected with a single docking port to that tri-connector piece. But there are several struts holding the whole thing together, they are just hard to see. One other thing about landing it horizontally. It can be really tricky without some kind of properly oriented control point. The cockpit and any docking ports will make your navball orient the wrong way. Pointing directly up, at the center of the blue side of the navball, will make your rover come in vertically. You need to stick a probe core on there somewhere so that it orients correctly or else your pro/retrograde markers won't be aligned properly and you'll have a hell of a time getting down safely. And mechjeb will be of no help here. Edit: Here is a not-totally-clear picture of what I'm talking about. There is a probe core on that central stack coming off the top of this thing. That lets you orient correctly for landing.

It can really be tricky to fine tune your approach from very far away. The best option is to use this maneuver node mod. It doesn't do anything automatically for you, it just vastly improves your ability to use nodes. There are 3 things it does. You can use the 'o' key to reopen a node that closes itself (this is absurdly useful when you're trying to manipulate the node when zoomed very far out), you can type in exact numbers instead of only being able to drag the icons around, and you can change the way that your orbit is shown while setting up transfers to another planet/moon (you can also do this by changing the settings file, but that is way more trouble, and I think you have to reload the game every time you change it).

If you are having trouble saving this in subassembly loader it's because the main control point has no access nodes. You need to have at least one free point to connect something to the first part you chose for the rover (I assume that's the cockpit in the middle). To get around this, just take one end of the rover, starting from those circular battery packs, and temporarily move it to the other end, so that you have a free connection on the cockpit. Then you should be able to save it subassembly loader. As for landing it, you can try the horizontal thing, as shown above, or you can just put an engine and some landing struts on one end (with a docking port or a decoupler to separate the rover from the engine), land vertically, then tip over. A pair of 1-way RCS thrusters, one on top, and another on the bottom of one end are enough to tip over without damaging anything. Something like this.

After entering the system it was time to set up aerobraking nodes at Jool to get all three crafts into orbits intersecting their respective targets. The main craft came in at an altitude sufficient to put me into an orbit intersecting that of Tylo's. I must have had lucky timing, because I managed to successfully intercept Bop and Tylo on the first orbit. The heavy lander was released from the carrier and achieved a stable orbit around Tylo. And here, the light, Bop lander came in for a somewhat disconcertingly close approach while burning for orbital insertion. I kept my periapsis above 18 km, but I still passed barely 1km over some of those mountains; be careful around Bop. After getting into orbit I released the Sat Map probe and put it into a nearly polar orbit. After releasing the heavy lander at Tylo, the Endurance carrier went in for another round of aerobraking to set up orbit around Vall, this was made somewhat difficult by how severely unbalanced the craft was, but it worked out okay in the end. After just 2 orbits I met up with Vall, released the lander, and completed a Sat Map survey of the surface. The orbital map looks a little more civilized now, with just the Pol lander and the carrier left in Jool orbit. And after a few more rounds over Jool I made it into Laythe orbit, although I somewhat stupidly ended up in a retrograde orbit, but that shouldn't make too much of a difference. Here the carrier orbits over Laythe, passing just above my base situated on the eastern edge of the crater lake seen at the bottom of this picture. Back at Bop something interesting occurred. After completing the Sat Map survey of the surface, an anomaly was detected in the northern polar region. Due to the high inclination required to reach the target, it was decided to send in the lander probe so as to not waste too much fuel altering the main lander's orbit. All telemetry was nominal as the lander passed over the treacherous terrain on its initial approach. As the probe approached the anomaly, the data stream became increasingly intermittent. What follows is a series of increasingly distorted images, as disturbing as they are fascinating. From a distance it's not clear what is being seen, but as the probe continues closer it becomes apparent that the object is not an entirely natural occurrence. On closer inspection the object appears to be of biological nature, but exhibits no signs of activity. At this point the data stream from the probe becomes increasingly erratic; unexplainable gravitational distortions and electromagnetic interference are recorded. The automated probe software proceeds with solar panel deployment after landing, at which point all of the probe's instruments record signals above their maximum tolerances. A single image is transmitted before all communications are lost. The crew of the Bop lander report their findings to the mission commanders. Analysts at the Laythe base command post, however, report receiving nothing unusual from the data transmitted via Jool Relay 1. The decision is made to carry on with the landing at Bop, though as a precaution the craft will set down in the southern region of the moon, well away from the anomaly...

This too, but in my experience you have to actually be a few meters away when doing it. You can't just back off 10cm, save/reload, reset the target and have it immediately dock. There seems to be some minimum distance required before you can select the target and have the docks activate.

I think the distance is more like 5 meters, maybe 10 at most, I've done this many times to get things rotated correctly. Just make sure you retarget the station's docking port. If it still doesn't work then maybe something is wrong or bugged and you should switch back to the tracking station.

If you are playing the steam version you can also use F12 to take screenshots. Those are saved in some steam folder, but they are easy to access directly from the game's page in your library.

It seems that the second wheel has failed on Kepler. From what I understand it can't be used for much without three functioning wheels to keep it pointed at the same place. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/16/science/space/equipment-failure-may-cut-kepler-mission-short.html?hp http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/05/rip-and-good-planet-hunting-kepler/

Left/right and top/bottom probably aren't the best descriptors to use when talking about orbit. And north/south aren't great either, but that's the direction you want the docking ports pointing. That would be at 90 or 270 degrees on the navbal, and directly between the orange and blue halves. This isn't always an issue in LKO since you are always orbiting fairly high up, but on small moons, where you might be only 10km above the surface, this can really make a difference.

Nuke engines aren't so great for landers, especially ones entering the atmosphere. And they are really heavy. I pretty much always make something detachable for the lander. You have to deal with docking in orbit again, but I think that's a lot easier than trying to design such a big lander. You can definitely bring down the periapsis before getting into orbit. It can be tricky because tiny changes early on in your transit can make big changes to your encounter. But generally I use the 2 blue icons on the maneuver node to get me closer, and I usually do these correction burns at the ascending or descending node so that I can use the purple icons to get the inclination just right. Sometimes you have to fiddle with all 3 axes to get it just right, but this is definitely the best way to set up an encounter.

I see what you mean about aligning the icons. But if you are passing by the target at 100 m/s that means your orbits are very different. That's why it's a good idea to have fairly similar orbits before trying to get a close approach. Even if you can't do that, it's still possible to get in close, you just need to burn as close to approach point as possible, obviously this is easier if you have lots of thrust. The distance might increase from 500m to maybe 5km, but that's not really that bad. Even if you are 5 km away, if your relative velocity is 0 it should be easy to get closer, not as easy as if you were starting from 500m away, but not too tough either.