magnemoe

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.

Main issue here is that my powered manned landings use lots of fuel, This miner is SSTO on Kerbin even with all the mining stuff and a 1 ton rover. Not tried to land it but taking off without the rover that should work nice.

Pictures is upcoming. Did an Laythe aerobreake from 6000 m/s once, found that an slingshot around Jool gave me en direct intercept so I dropped the Jool aerobrake. The strange thing is that mechjeb landing autopilot did not give me an orbit, either deorbit or flyby so I went for flyby and did an braking burn then exiting the atmosphere to enter orbit followed by an second aerobreake to get an low orbit. The Kerbin one was one pass, put it higher than I could as I wanted to send the miner to Minmus.

While the forum was down I completed my grand tour going from the Jool system to Eeloo. After Eeeloo I did not bother waiting for an minimum cost burn, but did an 2600 m/s burn who intercepted Kerbin, the lowest point was close to Moho orbit. This gave me an orbital speed inside Kerbin SOI of over 10.000 m/s, I used two hours from edge of SOI to LKO and the final approach was pretty surreal as it felt I was running on time compression, also took some tame braking even with the g-meter maxed out for over an minute. Any other experiences with this?

Yes, the forum crash was at the same time I did my first manned landing on Bob and studied the dead kraken.

Look like my renamed account work now