Merinsan

Quicksave saved my computers life once. I spent about a week building a ship in orbit, from about 30 launches. At some point the game clipped one part through the ship and blew it up. If I didn't have quicksave, my computer would have been thrown against the wall in disgust.

I have nothing to contribute to this discussion, but have been following it. I am now inspired to attempt an Eve return myself. I expect this will keep me busy until resources are added to the game! My gut feeling is that a straight up rocket with asparagus staging is the best approach. Having said that, last night I was messing around with a weird plane powered by 2 aerospikes. I got it into orbit, well would have if I didn't mess up the launch profile. It seemed to use less fuel than I would have expected for a standard rocket, so I will investigate it a bit more tonight.

It is not an easy task, but with practice you'll get there. My most recent attempt I was out by a few kilometers, however it was a rover so I could drive the rest. What I try to do is set up a sub-orbital trajectory that overshoots the target a little. I then set up a maneuver node to try and drop down on the point I want, meaning I kill all lateral velocity. This gives me an idea of how much I need to burn. From then on, I attempt to manually adjust just by burning the right way. I also try and set a target on the ground of the base - make sure you don't have the "Target" mode in the nav ball - This helps you to know the direction you need to burn. Also, when in Surface mode, burning above the retrograde vector, about halfway between it and straight up, will kill lateral velocity while not affecting your landing position. Burning straight up extends your trajectory. Basically to do a good job, you need to practice with burning not on the markers. I myself am not that good at it either. I often land, then launch again to get closer. It works, but wastes fuel.

I've done this once before, and it was a pain, when my Eeloo mission ran out of fuel returning. The biggest problem I had was the physics went a bit weird when I time accelerated and the ships jumped (ie I was within 1km then time accelerated and it jumped to 5km). Once I got within 200 meters the problem stopped. To start with I used the standard rendezvous method you described, but I could only get a closest approach of about 300km. I then waited till that point and switched to target mode to cancel relative velocity, which took quite a while. By the time I was close enough, I had ran out of RCS (the ship itself was not well balanced for RCS) but I managed to dock with engines alone. Good luck.

I have used this method a number of times to track down easter eggs. In fact I did it last night on Bop. Just because you play the game one way does not make it the right way.

Unless of course you are trying to track down an easter egg.

Another method of moving stuff from SPH to VAB is just locating the file and copying across. Then you just need to change the location in the file itself from SPH to VAB (3rd line in I think). I once forgot to change that and it still worked, but it went back to SPH after I ended the flight.

There is no simple answer. I have a variety of ships I launch on a regular basis and they all have different launch profiles. However, I never start turning before 10km, simply because I am getting out of the think atmosphere. I also like to get to 200m/s before I start - some of my heavier ships don't get that until 11-12km. The main reason for waiting is because of the game mechanics - it's hard to do gradual turns, so I end up turning a bit later than I should.

What in Kod's name is that thing?! And how many Kerbals can live there? As for docking, What Tobmaster said is pretty much it. Scott Manly actually did a specific video saying the same thing. One thing I do is try to get my initial rendezvous down to below 1km using the maneuver nodes. After the burn, I set up a new maneuver node to match orbits, at the rendezvous. This gives me 4 things: 1. approximate time of closest approach. 2. Approximate delta v required to match orbit 3. Approximate time I need to burn 4. Approximate direction of the retrograde vector Since you're typically going to be having a relative velocity that is over 100 m/s, it's very useful (especially when you are using nukes). I've done rendezvous to within a few kilometers when I have had to start my burns from 100km out using this method.

You don't want SAS on for turning, and SAS modules don't help. Command pods have a lot more torque than probes. RCS port placement is very important. While linear ports offer more thrust, the 4 way blocks give much more control. I normally have 8 4-way blocks on my rockets, in 2 sets of 4. 4 at the top, 4 at the bottom in 4 way symmetry. The last thing you can do is if you have gimballing engines is to throttle up slightly and start turning using that. I do this when I am desperate.

Well done! Keep working on it, you'll eventually be able to launch huge amounts of fuel into orbit.

I have my fuel depot at about 100km. I use the space from 70km-100km for building interplanetary vessels, which I then use a refueling ship to refuel (too much lag to go to the fuel depot). The height is not so important though, it depends on your ship designs, and what you are planning to do. For interplanetary missions, the later you refuel the better, but you need more fuel to get there. I've actually got another depot around Minmus for more refueling if I think I need it, not to mention depots all over the solar system... The primary benefit of a depot in a low orbit is that it reduces your fuel requirement, so you can get a bigger payload up.

I like these ribbons and finally got round to doing mine. The only problem I have is I don't know which craft device to select half the time, since a lot apply most of the time.

Pretty sure this would fall under the tweakables that they have planned - the ability to change the state of parts in the VAB.

I tried building a shipyard in orbit by docking strut like objects in orbit. Besides the fact that my design made it very hard to get things square, it started lagging well before the point where it would be recognizable as a shipyard. And as soon as I tried using what I had there as a shipyard it became ridiculous. I deorbited it soon after that.

I personally think this is a missing feature. I sometimes have modules that are attached with decouplers which are not meant to be staged. I deploy them at some point in the mission, based on need, such as probes in the Joolian system. Now I know I could use docking ports, but then I have the problem of fuel crossfeeding through the docking port, and having to remember to check the fuel before I detach them. It's not a huge issue, I normally just put them all in stage 0 and try not to accidentally stage (it happened once), but it'd be a nice polish to the configuration options.

A lot of people recommend halfway there, ie halfway from the burn to the intercept. In fact the best time is the same time you do the transfer burn. However it's extremely difficult to work out where you are when you have the encounter due to the camera controls. Maneuver nodes help in that you can set one up and play around trying to get it right without using fuel. I will actually spend a fair amount of time trying to set up a reasonable encounter before even burning, and generally get close to what I set up. I'll then do another burn around 15 days from the SOI transfer if I think I need it. Also, don't have time acceleration running when the SOI change happens, and the predicted periapsis doesn't change.

What exactly do you define as really slow? I do my dockings at about 0.2 m/s. In reality 0.2m/s is fast, I believe real life dockings happen at a slower speed.

Yep, 1Mg is generally called 1 tonne, but Mg is perfectly legitimate. To be honest, this is the first time I've ever seen it used. I suspect many people confuse tonne and ton - I know I do - so Mg would be much less confusing (you would think!).

For take off from the mun, you just want to throttle up full and tip over to almost the horizon almost immediately, depending on your TWR, however with a target at 150km, you probably don't want to go so extreme. I'd be putting the station lower down. In my case, my station orbits the equator prograde, so I launch and tip over towards 90 degrees. I seldom try to rendezvous from launch because I am lazy and I probably have twice as much fuel as I need, besides it doesn't save much. I aim for a at least a 5km initial apoapsis and a speed of about 500m/s from the initial burn. I then circularize and plan the rendezvous with the station. Also, my Mun landers often use nukes, simply for the fuel efficiency. You don't need much thrust, and the nukes work well for big landers.

I'm fairly sure heat is no longer an issue with Moho. I recently landed there, throttling at full thrust with small engines and didn't get any overheating indication. I believe that when they removed the atmosphere the heating effects were also removed. I've still not done a successful return though, it's a lot of work. To do it, you'll want an interplanetary stage that you leave in orbit while you land.

I've had this happen with stock. I worked out that something had clipped through something else due to time acceleration/being on rails, and when physics kicked in (within 200 meters), it recognized the collision and blew up. My only solution was to revert to an earlier save and rebuild what was missing.

I just spent the last week designing and trying to get into orbit a space plane with interplanetary capability (aka nuclear engines). Last night I succeeded. In fact, I almost had enough fuel to rendezvous with the orbital fuel depot, but not quite. So I sent out my large tug, with enough fuel to refuel it. Got within 100 meters and switched to the space place, to open the docking port. Toggle it open and the inline docking port and cockpit break off, leaving me with 2 pieces of junk unable to deorbit themselves...

The docking ports don't do anything, until you dock. If you connect 2 together in the VAB, then the Decouple Node option becomes available, allowing you to undock them. If you dock in orbit, the option is undock. There are 2 docking ports that can "open". The shielded docking port and the inline docking port. The other 2 are just exposed. I personally prefer the exposed ones, because I don't need to open them when I go in to dock.

I love this community. Someone asks a newbie question and people give an answer, rather than calling them a noob. To add to what KasperVld said (or had a picture of), you want 4 boosters, so you would want the same as the Asparagas diagram with 4 stages, just drop the S4 tanks/engines and move the S3 stage to the center so it's right angles to S2. The fuel pipes from S3 to S2 remain the same.