Specialist290

Regardless of how this turns out, it's going to be good.

Nicely done! Visiting your first new planet is always a thrilling experience, as is every new one you visit thereafter.

Agreed. I'd like to see these displayed for the body you're in orbit around whenever you don't have anything targeted, as well as more orbital information in general. Ah well, if wishes were horses...

To put it briefly, the mechanics behind aerobraking are a little difficult to predict without either having a "feel" for it from experience or having a calculator do the math for you. A while back a fellow by the name of alterbaron crunched the numbers and put together some nifty charts that might help you out with your mission, as well as this demonstration of their effectiveness. Of course, they're more intended for stock aerodynamics, where most of the time the drag coefficients for non-winged craft tend to be close to the same, but it might serve as a helpful jumping-off point. I've also been helping another user debug an aerobraking calculator that looks very promising at the moment. It's not yet ready for public release, so I can't say too much more about it, but the user in question has used it to perform some analyses here, which should be very informative. As for information you can collect: In theory, you could just take your craft's current orbital velocity and altitude, your orbit's periapsis altitude (if it's within atmo), your direction of travel (clockwise vs. counterclockwise), and the height and scale height of the relevant body's atmosphere to get a general idea of what the final orbit (or suborbital trajectory) looks like. (Not that this is easy to do accurately by hand, mind you. Believe me, I've tried...) However, predicting an exact landing site takes more information than the stock game really gives you; you need to have (or be able to derive) information about all six of the orbit's basic parameters, as well as the atmospheric data and rotation period of the body you're wanting to land on. At least, that's if you want to do it mathematically. The best way to do it practically is to just practice over and over again and get a feel for what seems to work best. Set up some kind of target on the ground, get something in orbit, deorbit it multiple times (quicksave / quickload works well for this), and pay attention to what's going on. Eventually you'll start to get an eye for where the ship needs to be in relation to the planet. Disclaimer: I'm hardly an expert on the subject myself, but I've managed to get a few capsules within eyeshot of KSC before. Like everything, it takes practice and familiarity with your craft and controls.

Nothing out of the ordinary, citizen. Jeb's always been like that

On my first ever EVA, I got Jeb stranded miles away from his capsule, with no chance to return.

You can change the way he's facing by clicking and dragging on the kerbonaut in the main screen. Unfortunately, by default the directional controls on the keyboard all go off of a "feet-down" (pointed towards planet / moon surface), so trying to change the direction he's actually moving will reset the way he's facing back to what the game calls "normal." You can try to get him lined up, then change his facing afterwards, though. Very helpful when the ladder is just above his head.

Welcome to the forums! As Kerbart has mentioned, the solution generally depends on what sort of problems you're encountering. What exactly is giving you the most trouble? Getting into orbit in the first place? Getting the right orbit for a Mun encounter? Actually getting into orbit around the Mun once you get there? (A screenshot of the craft from your most recent attempt might help, too, if it's a question of running out of fuel, not having enough engine thrust to slow your drop, or something like that.) In general, however, you might find Vanamonde's tutorial helpful. You can also download the rocket for yourself, or just try using his advice with your own design.

Sure thing I'd be more than glad to take a look and PM you any corrections I see. I studied it a bit in college, and I think I still remember a good chunk of the grammar (at least enough for little two-word descriptors like these). Re lacus vs. stagnum: Both of them are correct and perfectly good translations for "lake." After doing a little research into it myself, though, it turns out that the preferred term for lunar features is actually lacus, at least here on Earth. Of course, given that you've already made the map by now, I won't mark points off if you decide to keep using stagnum from here on out, since, again, it's still "lake" when you translate it back into English.

This is a bit off-topic, I'll admit, but do you think you could describe what was giving you trouble? It took me a while to get the hang of the changes myself, but now that I'm used to it, I find the new SAS to be quite helpful.

I grew up knowing the default controls from other flight sims, so I was already fairly used to the arrangement (though I had to train myself to remember WASD instead of the arrow keys). Hasn't really caused me any problems yet.

I think the one at the top of my list would be this train of thought: "Hey, I've just sent a lander to Duna and it went fine, so I think I've got this interplanetary stuff down pat. Let's send a manned mission to Moho!" Then, one (in-game) month later: "WHY? WHY EVERYTHING?!"

You can actually use gravity assists to a limited degree for any planet which has a moon of significant mass. I've used a pass around Ike or two to help get an orbiter around Duna into a lower orbit in combination with aerobraking for far less fuel than it would have taken with just a single straight engine burn to change the orbit directly. As for interplanetary gravity assists, I believe that Arrowstar's Trajectory Optimization Tool has a feature that can help you find a course that will get you from one planet to another using a third as your "slingshot."

In this situation, it seems to me that a modular configuration is ideal. Have a large nuclear tug and a much smaller lander docked together. The tug pushes the combination into orbit of the destination, while the lander undocks, lands, and returns. The tug then carries the combined vehicle back to the refueling point. You can make a fairly small lander with reasonable delta-v, and it would take far less fuel in total than it would if you lugged all that fuel down to the surface and back with you.

Impressive work as always Looking forward to seeing the first kerbonaut in space soon. A note on your Latin: If you're going for what I think you're going for, you want Stagnum Spei instead. Spero is the infinitive form of the verb, so what you've actually said is something like "The lake, to hope" or thereabouts

Every time this discussion comes up and someone gets really irate about it and insistent that whoever doesn't play by their personal play style is wrong, my mind goes back to the bowling alley scene of The Big Lebowski. The fact that this topic starts with the phrase "Am I the only one who...?" is just icing on the case.

In that case, I'd say secure the link between the two parts at the breaking point with struts. Seen it happen all the time with some of my designs; that usually fixes it.

I actually find the contrast to be fairly helpful. If I can see the "white hat" on my capsule, I know I can still bring back the pilot safely, come what may.

It sounds to me like what's happening is that your designs are collapsing under their own weight. You probably need more struts; the default connection nodes only provide a single point of connection, despite the way the game makes things look sometimes. If nothing's breaking but it's just flipping over in flight, then your center of mass might be moving too high to keep the craft stable as fuel drains.

In my experience, landing always takes a fair bit more delta-v than the map tells you because the map assumes a more-or-less perfect "reverse-launch" style landing, whereas for the most part you're actually going to be burning a fair bit more fuel on the final descent simply to ensure that you're coming down at a safe speed. Thus, I'd say pack enough delta-v that you have about half again the amount the charts tell you. Fortunately, you can generally take off again with a delta-v amount much closer to what the chart tells you. Aiming for a direct impact is actually less efficient in the long run for the same reason that trying to launch straight up from Kerbin is, only in reverse -- you're fighting against gravity the whole way down. What you really want to do is aim for a trajectory that gives you a low (10-20 km) periapsis, then circularize there and begin your descent from that orbit.

Today I crashed a rover, then crashed an aircraft, then crashed the game while looking up something that would help me build an interplanetary ship. I think the game might be trying to tell me something...

Keep us posted on the details.

^ Exactly. The issue isn't so much the thrust, but efficiency of propellant use. Since they're firing at 45 degree angles relative to the direction of travel, each one needs to fire at slightly more than half-thrust to get the same net effect as they would if they were simply firing in that direction. In effect, as opposed to an inline arrangement, where the thrust looks like this: (Red is the vector for each engine's thrust, black is the final vector of the craft's velocity.) With an offset arrangement, you end up with something like this: The black arrow stays the same length, but if you measure the red arrows in each arrangement, you'll find that the ones in the second picture is slightly longer than the first one. Images are not to scale, but they should be enough to get the point across.

This mod is definitely going onto my personal recommendations list, right up there with Kerbal Alarm Clock, PreciseNode, Docking Port Alignment Indicator, and Kerbal Engineer. Nicely done!

Lo and behold, another RogueMason story! ...In planning. Still, I'm expecting good things, given your previous output. First off, congratulations! College is definitely a great experience. Plenty of opportunities to do fun and interesting things (and before the peanut gallery interjects, I'm not just talking about boozing it up at late-night parties...) once you know what you're looking for and learn how to find them. You've also got tons of freedom to study subjects that actually interest you. And good luck on the other matter as well I've recently found myself in a rather similar situation, though I've only had one chance to really talk to the girl in question. (She works at a place I visit fairly regularly, but we're not always there at the same time.) Indeed. Gotta take the bad with the good, but fortunately, the good seems to be worth it in this case. Your schooling comes first, so if your schedule lapses, we'll understand.