magnemoe

Moho don't have an atmosphere, you could use Eve, however I doubt its cost effective. Now if you used an mothership as first stage you could mine on Moho to get the fuel, however I doubt you would not save more than 25% of the dV budget on the probe.

Did it, is in 14x18 km solar orbit. Orbital still takes 6h 49m. I acutaly ended up with 1000 m/s dV left. Did this the simple way, burned from LKO, first an 500m/s burn to avoid Mun, this also gave me an longer second burn close to kerbin, Continued to burn until PE around sun was 100KM, did multiple braking burns around sun. Ship was launched with 1+6 orange+ medium gray tanks and mainsails. Nuclear stage used one LV-NB 150KN nuclear engine, large gray tank and two simlar drop tanks. Ion stage used two PB-ION 5Kn engines, and 9 PB-x300 3000 units xenon tanks where 6 could be dropped. The ion engines might have a bit to high TWR, however I carried two solar panels on struts I did not need.

Using some stronger ion engines from an mod, together with larger solar panels who I didn't need so I manage an TWR of 0.15. Even better I will manage low solar orbit. mechjeb messed up the calculations because the xenon drop tanks. Most frustrating thing now is that most of my orbit is so low I has to use physical warp.

testing this now, should be doable with an nuclear first and an ion upper stage. Unfortunately I used to large solar panels and not enough xenon gas so I can not reach an circular 100-200km orbit. Using droptanks on both stages.

I always put them on top facing inward. As you are under trust the bottom part is below your rocket a fraction of an second after decoupling, the top part might hit the center stage or usualy the other boosters and the top placement let you only use one and and the seperatron rotate it outward. You might get warning messages about damage on center booster but has never gotten any problems with it even with two orange tanks length boosters. Only time I had problems was then dropping boosters without trust, rocket underway to Eve and Gilly, kept the last two boosters as drop tanks for the nuclear engine. During the adjustments for aerobraking they run dry so I press space while not under trust, the boosters rotated around center of mass and their tops hit and destroyed the nuclear engine, I should have separated them manually and done a short burn to get away. First pass aerobraked nicely, the second pass was an crash, I managed to land the Eve lander, but the mapper and Gilly probe was lost.

Horizontal speed of a couple m/s is not an huge issue, its just an problem on small probe landers who tend to rotate to fast making accurate burns hard. My issue is that I tend to chicken and brake to early. One benefit of landing on Kerbal is the atmosphere, it also kill horizontal speed for you so you can pretty much leave asas on and just brake.

One thing you can do is to dock an strut with extra solar panels on, I have done this to add extra functions like protractor to ships so many times the large ones always have an docking port for this use.

yes activating RCS then mechjeb leaves warp and turn it off then its done turning would probably solve this. has this issue myself with an huge rocket who deliver 150 ton spare parts. so I need to turn 270 ton, during circulation I drop the main stage leaving just the 200 ton upper stage.

Landing an base on Gilly Yes it was an successful landing. An larger basemodule 2 on Laythe

Yes, mechjeb has issues, her its that it don't align the ship before doing the circulation burn and a masive ship uses a long time to turn, one way is to use mechjeb for launch but turn off warp, add an node at AP and do the burn, you might use mechjeb circulate to get an rounder orbit then done, works well if the ship is aligned correctly.

This is my current design. 9 large gray tanks, equivalent to 4.5 orange tanks. Just two drills, I should have 4 to increase speed. optionally manned and carry an small rover I can redock and take with me. This was for the grand tour challenge, would replace it with more drills if it was just used for mining. Able to land and take off everywhere but need to mine before taking off on Kerbin, Laythe and Tylo.

Also note that the rovers roll for a long time then after throttled down. you need zero speed to go to space center with an rover not just no throttle.

This is common strategy. I even found that trim tanks are a good idea. I would recommend using quantum or docking struts on your ship, it pretty much removes wobbling.

More like going to Jool and crash with Duna, geting the Mun to mess up you Minmus launches is to easy.

An very simple design is the orange tank on top of an small gray with an mainsail below, use 2-4 struts to connect the gray tank with the orange. use 4 or 6 booster with orange+ large gray tank in asparagus. Now if I want to launch an huge interplanetary ship I either use the nuclear engines on it as the center of the asparagus or add dropable engines on it. Far easier to refuel than to build in orbit.

makes perfect sense as an addition on an probe lander, put one of this on a side and decople it after landing. Put the science instruments on the lander. use it to look around the landing place or close up of an abnormality.

Depend, keep LKO clear, this mostly consist of deorbiting the upper stages. My moon missions created lots of junk from the transfer stages until I found it was trivial to deorbit them but got lots of junk in solar orbit.

Yes an 50 kilometer physics radius might give me an 3-4000 part count in LKO if very unlucky. space dock, two mothership, an huge tracking station and the current ship.

You managed to dock with something going suborbital? I have been thinking about this method, however my idea was to use an basket to catch the pod in with landing legs to grip it. With some forward radial engines for braking it would be able of snatching the pod fast and get away.

You could but this would reduce the rate of fire, say you have 1000 in orbit, you would then have 6 to use each day in 180 days, if you wanted to use 100 the first day in the war, then between 10 and 20 the following days and the war last an month it would not be an very useful weapon.

Some major differences, america was an shirtsleeve environment who could support the colonists without future missions. They was also refugees, staying was another bad idea. An Mars mission would require regular supplies like the IIS or an moon base. It would be cheaper to return after 3-6 months than to continue to supply them for decades. You would also want to explore various parts of Mars, doing multiple missions makes this more practical. Yes you save delta-v with an suborbital jump, but hard to move the mars base, better to create an new one, as it's temporary you can use an far smaller one.

Time warp just stop rotation, not flexing. You can however reduce flexing by turning time warp on and off repeatedly then the flex is minimum.

Main problem with an DLC of KSP is that the game is during development so we do not know the part who will be included in the final game. The game also don't have an main quest or story. It could be tempting to cut parts of the game to release it faster and then get more money from DLC. I have no issues with well done DLC like the ones for Fallout.

Do you start the gravity turn at 6000m? Know that many rockets are stable then going straight upp with ASAS but once you turn it off they become very hard to control some even flip over.

I did an "landing" with an manned balloon probe on Jool and got back into orbit. Much harder than Kerbin even harder than Eve, as you had to reach the orbital speed of 5.800 m/s at 200 km height. The balloons took me up to 40 km after I dropped the science platform, the transfer stage and other stuff not needed for takeoff.