wolfedg

Congrats to the OP. As long as he enjoyed it he is playing the game correctly(that is the purpose of a game). Personally I have never used cheats or mechjeb and I feel that there is more sense of accomplishment in doing so. I started the game learning to fly suborbital, then orbital, then to the mun, then landing on the mun, then interplanetary, and finally rendezvous and docking. Now I focus on improving the efficiency and safety of all the aforementioned areas.

Sadly, as good of a space sim as this game is, it is seriously lacking in the area of aerodynamic flight. I call my spaceplane missions a success if they make lko with almost no fuel left, I don't even bother trying to land them anymore as they always spin out of control as soon as they get any appreciable atmospheric deceleration(around 30-35k).

All my rovers have always used a vertical landing followed by a gravity topple. My newer rovers all have landing struts on the front to prevent damage to the front wheels from falling. My first rover the Mark 1. I had to manually lift one of the legs to allow it to topple. My later versions self topple on landing by eliminating one of the landing struts from the design as it is unnecessary, thus no screenshots of them vertical. Mark II-The struts on the side made this one very hard to accidentaly roll while driving. My latest revision, the Mark IIIB Incorporates parachutes for atmospheric landings.

Just how are we supposed to rescue kerbals that just happened to land on places like Eve? I hear it's harder to launch from Eve than Kerbin, not to mention getting a fully capable launch vehicle to the surface of Eve.

I think mod managers are a must with this game as well if you use mods. Lately I've disabled all my mods because they were causing the game to run slow and it took forever to sort through the parts to find what I needed.

Here Are My Go-To Ships Quest IB - Light Duty (Moon Capable-Landing and Return with 2 launches) Quest V - General Use for Mun/Minmus Missions and by far my most used Launch Vehicle (Quest VM) (Quest VM Mark III Rover) {Quest VM LS Light Shuttle) Pluto I - My Current Go-To interplanetary Ship (This is the Mk 3 Rover Variant) Pluto V - For Extreme Heavy Lift (This Is The Apollo Style Launcher) Mark III Rover - My Go to Rover (Duna) (Ike) (Mun)

My personal favorite so far, the Munar Grand Canyon

On Topic: Personally I have never tried mechjeb and probably wont because the game works just fine for me without it Off Topic: The debate about whether or not to use it (also mods, cheats etc...) - esp. in a singleplayer game should really be left to the individual. It has no bearing on how anyone else plays the game. It might effect skill level to a degree, but from what I gather most people using mods, mechjeb, cheats etc... are already experienced players trying to add functionality or decrease tedium.

You might add the Spacecraft Engineer who tries to make realistic looking spacecraft. (NOT 20 Jumbo fuel tanks tacked together with 200 struts and overshadowing the entire launch pad)

Good to know and it explains a lot. Thank you, as you can probably tell i'm fairly new to the game and don't know all its quirks Also, I don't have any mods currently loaded, but did have some that have been unloaded by JSGME. Also the ships in question are of fairly basic design, so I don't believe its a strut issue unless that can carry over from its initial complex launch configuration which did have a lot of struts. Example of the launch vehicle in question, the Pluto V M, an Apollo style lunar orbit rendezvous type mission. It has already lauched and sucesfully returned 3 crews to the Mun prior to this mission.

Yup i've noticed this as well. Also if the front wheels are higher or lower than the back ones. Also on a side note. Is that dog in your sig named Laika by chance?

Now now take it easy on the champagne. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO (Spark Zap Pop Boom Sizzle) get that champagne away from the control console. Note to self, add "No food or drink" sign to mission control room door. On a more serious note. I was really wondering if this random jettisoning of parts has happened to other players or if its a random bug.

Story Version Incident Report The csm was in the process of orbital rendezvous with the lunar module. Remote command (read:the player-me) observed the landing legs mysteriously jettison from the lm upon visual acquisition of the target. They determined the incident was not an issue at the time and proceeded to switch control to the lm to line up the docking port. After aligning the lm docking port, control was switched back to the csm. This was the point of sudden catastrophic failure of the stack separator between the cm and sm. Mission result- 3 astronauts stranded in lunar orbit. So what happened? Remote command operators swear they never touched the keyboard and the stage indicator screen in the mission control center still showed the stage as not having been activated. TLDR Non story version I was attempting lunar rendezvous and parts were mysteriously jettisoning from my ships causing me to not be able to complete my mission.

Don't feel bad, I play the vanilla game (no mods) and docking took a while to figure out. Here's what I do. First make your space craft and put an RCS tank on it. Then put 4 symmetrical RCS thrusters over the center of mass of the part of the ship that will be docking. Then launch to an orbit 25 km higher than the target. Make sure that your orbits Apoapsis and Periapsis are close to the same value on both spacecraft. Time accelerate until the spacecraft on the inner orbit is about 1" behind on the orbit map. Target the target ship. Then create a maneuver node somewhere ahead of your current position and pull the retrograde marker until the periapsis of your orbit crosses the target orbit. Click and hold on the big center circle of the maneuver node to move it around until the closest approach arrows line up at less than 10km( you may need to time accel a bit more to get it to line up. Then when the time comes do your burn and wait till your are at the point of closest approach. Then make sure "target" is dispaled in the velocity box and burn retrograde or prograde until it reads 0. Next burn towards the target "pink circle with dot" only going <20ms. Wait till the distance number starts to increase again and burn prograde or retrograde to reduce your relative velocity to 0. Rinse and repeat burning toward the target until you get within 200m, then right click all your engines and deactivate them. Congratulations, you have completed rendezvous. Now for docking Aim your ship in such a way that its orientation lines up with the target docking port. Activate docking mode (it may be helpful to reassign the keys here I use WSAD for sideways and shift/ctrl for prograde/retrograde. Note that it helps to be in chase view too) Use your rcs trhusters to line up closely with the target and approach very slowly (like .01 m/s) Try to get the target marker, the prograde marker, and the aim marker to line up with each other. You may need to momentarily switch back to staging mode to fine tune your alignment. It takes some practice and "for me" it is a very slow process, but it usually works (unless I forget to turn of the main engines and switch back to staging mode, which can be disastrous). Hope this helps. You will likely find refinements to improve upon this description as you learn as I probably missed a few things and my numbers may not be optimal.

Having never tried it myself, I always wonder how you do burns on ION engines without missing the window by hours.

I had a lot of trouble until I figured out how to put the rcs over the center of gravity. Now its easy, just time consuming. I don't use any mods either.

The maneuver nodes are a lifesaver here. They allow you to experiment with different engine burns without wasting fuel.

Hey, just wondering where to get those nice (ejection?) seats

I am currently running windows 8 and hated the interface so much that I downloaded a mod called classic shell. Now it looks like XP and runs like windows 7 so I guess after the mod its better than 7.

We should have kept the Saturn IB and V in service. They were much safer and much more capable.

I could point you to several sources of research that effectively disprove evolution, but I'd wager like most others you would dismiss it without even considering looking at it.

Despite what you may have been taught, evolution is still a theory. One with many holes that evolutionists like to ignore. Also that is why I put it in brackets as I expected some would not agree with it.

There is so much that science cannot explain (beyond theories) such as creation, laws of space, laws of time, laws of matter, complexity of (design) of plants, animals, ecosystems etc. EDIT: When I mention the "laws of", I am referring to the origin of these laws not the known parameters of the laws themselves.

How about when you go switch back out of docking mode close to the target to change your ships orientation only to find out you forgot to deactivate the main engine...

MK I Rover (My very first rover-Very hard to drive) MK II Rover A significant improvement, but still needed work MK III Rover The Latest and Greatest ~At the Munar Grand Canyon-Yes it drove down into it and back out ~A Sunday drive on Ike In case you were wondering, the landing gear on the front was put there to allow for a vertical landing, followed by a drop of one of the landing struts without damaging the wheels from the impact