Francesco

yup, you are coming in perpendicular to Duna instead of parallel, so it's going to require more energy to slow down. you have to do a correction burn as Awaras said, and you can't wait to be already inside Duna's sphere of influence, otherwise it's going to be very costly in terms of delta-v (as you have experienced). I usually do a combined inclination + periapsis height burn at the AN/DN node, which puts my final periapsis on Duna at 11-12 km of altitude or so, to take full advantage of aerobraking. edit: sometimes though, especially if you don't have RCS on your ship, you won't be able to set your periapsis precisely enough with the first correction burn, so you'll have to wait to be closer to the planet to fine-tune it. like, just a little before you enter the planet's sphere of influence, or just after you've entered it. so, for example, the first correction burn will set the periapsis on the equator and will bring it closer to the planet, and then the second burn will set the periapsis exactly at the desired altitude. also, remember that aerobraking on Duna can be tricky the first times, due to its thin atmosphere: if your periapsis is too high, like at 15km, aerobraking will help you slow you down but not much, and you'll have to fire rockets anyway; but if your periapsis is too low, like 9-10 km, you risk losing too much speed and going straight to a landing. play around with this for a while

pffff, and you call those behemoths "minimalistic"? :P how about this: or the ridiculously small landers the guys have built in this thread: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/36419-Smallest-Craft-to-Various-Milestones

X = Kerbin Years Y = Earth years X = Y * 365 / (106.5) (roughly)

on the Mun, it comes down to time warp (if you need to use it, that is): it's 50x at 10km and 100x at 25km. for practical uses, I would go for something in the 25-30 km range. but you may fancy a better view which only a higher orbit can offer.

hmmm, yes, so there is actually a difference: asparagus is a form of crossfeeding, where fuel lines run in multiple directions, while simple crossfeeding has fuel lines running in only one direction. still, crossfeeding IS that which allows high payload fractions in KSP, which would otherwise be unreachable in reality.

I don't know if this has already been asked in the thread, but... what do you guys mean, exactly, by asparagus? for me, asparagus = crossfeed = using fuel lines asparagus doesn't necessarily mean the classic 6 side boosters, it could be just two - like the Falcon Heavy, which is a very sexy rocket, contrarily to those of you who say asparagus is ugly :P anyway, has someone calculated what's the max payload fraction when using non-asparagus staging (e.g., serial and parallel)? with asparagus, we know it's in the 15-18% range.

thanks, but... why is this in the spacecraft exchange?

it's funny, I thought Kerbals grew onto trees, like pears

damn, no lag at all with that thing? what kind of computer are you running??

sort of: I tried building unpowered impactors some time ago - had some luck with a "sandwich" technology to make them, uhm, impact safely on Kerbin. subsequent tests on the Mun didn't lead to satisfactory results, though

bad challenge submission is bad. you may want to add some more rules to this.

lol pwned

could be a problem with staging? I can't tell from here, are those sepratrons supposed to fire at different times? like, some together with the big SRBs, and some after?

you know that what you wrote doesn't mean anything without a proper context. which SRB? which size of boosters?

actually, he is: you have to escape Minmus as if you were going back to Kerbin, set a low Kerbin periapsis (70-75 km), and then boost those final 200 m/s (?) to escape Kerbin and head to Duna. So you can actually leave the Kerbin system with more delta-v on board, as opposed to starting directly from LKO. of course, this method requires Minmus to be at the right place in its orbit around Kerbin.

KSPX yes, but actually I was referring to the FL-T100 fuel tank. that thing is soooo useful on small probes, I want it to be added to stock parts badly, or I hope zekes will let it slide

hey KasperVld, those are not stock parts! :P

they don't. command pods and probes do.

ha, this reminds me of the challenge game by zarakon a while back. let's kick this off with a simple one: Land a Kerbal (or more than one!) on the Mun and bring him back safely to Kerbin. The whole rocket must weight no more than 40 tons. Stock parts only.

now let's see what real life counterparts you can come up with for SRBs

english please welcome!

that's the key point: you need to know exactly how much delta-v you have, otherwise it's going to be hit and miss. kerbal engineer can help you with that. or mechjeb, or a lot of other plugins also.

I would say this is one of those things where having some rule of thumb is useful, but then it's mostly about your intuition and experience. as you already know, the actual burn time is always going to be shorter than the one estimated by the manevuer node system. on Kerbin, I usually keep burns 4 or 5 minutes long at max, by fractionating longer ones in two or more parts. so for a 7-8 minutes departure burn, the first one is going to be exactly 120 seconds before the node and 120 after. for burns that are shorter than that, or for the "final" burn during periapsis kicks, I follow a sort of 3/7 + 4/7 rule: I create a maneuver node, cut the estimated time in half, and round it up to a lower number. so let's say for a 3' 21" burn, I won't start 1' 40" before the node, but more like 1' 30"-ish. this is where a number of other factors come into place - like, having a LV-909 pushing your ship instead of a LV-N means your TWR is probably going to rise quicker, and therefore your burn time is going to be even shorter. other small things could be having to throttle up from 0 to 100% at the beginning (unless you use action groups), which is going to take a second or so, and having to throttle down while approaching the end of the burn to avoid overshooting. but I would also say, don't get too OCD with this: as long as you did a fine job with planning a node in the beginning, and get a good ejection angle, you'll have a lot of time to make corrections while still close to Kerbin. the only exception being Moho I swear putting a ship inside its SOI is the most frustrating thing in this game.

last time I checked it was actually a lot less than that: 2.7 - 2.8 km/s from LKO. where did you get the 5k value? yes, if you want to go through the effort. as stated above, it really doesn't take that much to reach solar escape velocity: something like 7.2 km/s from the launchpad.

but we're talking about real life there. by the same token, engines should only be restartable one or two times after cutoff (if they can be restarted). I was curious about this antenna thing because it's not an option we're lacking in terms of game code, but something which has been actively limited.