Specialist290

For some reason I was expecting the scoop to explode in a shower of parts in orbit, thus leaving far more debris than it would have picked up in the first place. That would have been hilarious.

Nicely done! As AlamoVampire said, the aeroshell is a nice touch. This reminds me: I'd better get a move on with my own plans for a manned Duna mission...

For that matter, even when the only download link is on the forums, you can usually still find the links to the actual mod by using the Google cache. If you put in a search string like "Kerbal Space Program [name of mod]", it should bring up a link to the forum thread. Out to the side, there should be a little drop-down arrow; click on that, and it will give you the option of viewing the cached version of the thread from whenever Google's crawler bots last archived it.

Not meaning to pressure you into doing something you don't want to, but there are different benchmarks for "interesting." Some of the mission reports I enjoy following the most (like this guy's blog) are things that I could replicate fairly easily if I wanted to, but I still enjoy them because the authors find ways to spin colorful yarns out of what they do and fit the things they encounter in the game into a story that I find entertaining and meaningful. But anyway, ultimately it's your own decision. Do what brings you the most enjoyment. So as not to go off-topic, I might as well add this one: Speaking of stories, I might as well share the one that goes with this image. This is actually the orbiter piece from an orbiter-lander combo I sent to Duna. One of the mods I use was Deadly Reentry, so finding that happy medium between a safe aerobraking trajectory that kept the craft from disintegrating and one that just skipped through the atmosphere and out into interplanetary space again turned out to be a bit more than I had bargained for. Fortunately, I was able to find a good trajectory that slowed me down enough that my orbiter's engines could establish a (quite irregular) orbit and deploy the lander, but it took a very large chunk of my fuel. Some time later, after doing some silly things with other craft elsewhere, I figured I'd check in on my Duna rover and get some more roving done. However, to my shock and horror, I found that my orbiter had somehow been flung on a course that would throw it out of the Duna planetary system! (I suspect it was Ike's doing, but juries are sticklers for proof beyond reasonable doubt, and thus the perfidious moon has escaped justice to wreak havoc upon innocent spacecraft another day.) This left me in a bit of a conundrum. I was able to reestablish a stable (and very high and even more irregular) orbit, but that left me with only the scantest dregs of fuel in my orbiter, which would surely be flung once more into the cold, lonely vastness between the planets the next time it encountered Ike (which it almost certainly would). Was there a solution? As it turned out, there was. I figured that I could use Ike's quirky habits to put my craft back into a favorable orbit through the judicious use of gravity assists. Turnabout is fair play, after all; Ike had gotten me into this mess, so the least it could do was help me get out of it. Call it "community service" or something like that. By being very careful, I managed to deflect my probe into another aerobraking maneuver which put me in a low enough orbit that I felt safe from Ike's devious ways. The mission was saved, and my imaginary Mission Control support team whooped and hollered for joy at their proud accomplishment. That is the story of how I saved my orbiter using only seven of the ten units of fuel left in the tank. The image is a screenshot I took on the close pass to Ike, both as a reminder of that story and because it makes a rather pleasing scene in its own right.

Still, the fact that it's a gas giant implies it'll have a large moon or two that we can visit. It won't be a totally pointless addition.

I send new missions to the Mun all the time. Sometimes I'll use the Mun and Minmus to "field test" equipment I plan on sending elsewhere later, just to get a feel for their handling. I've also got a small base and a rover or two down there at present. Sometimes I'll take the rover for a spin just to see what I can spot over the next ridgeline; even though I haven't found any proper anomalies, the new terrain still produces some interesting vistas.

I think at some point the devs were mentioning Eeloo eventually becoming a moon of a second gas giant. It's possible that this Uranus analog might be that planet. ...Which could be interesting, depending on how much we read into the comparison. Uranus's most well-known feature is its high axial tilt relative to its orbital plane, and all of its moons follow orbits close to its equatorial plane. A planetary system whose moons are highly inclined compared to Kerbol's ecliptic plane would present quite a unique challenge.

Taking this item-by-item: Yes, you do. To put it in layman's terms: Your thrust-to-weight ratio is the measure of the amount of force exerted by your engines pushing up versus the force exerted on the craft by gravity trying to pull it down. If it's over 1, that means your engines are enough to overcome the planet's gravity; under 1 means You Will Not Go (Back) To Space Today. The number the equation puts out is the number of units of force the engines put out for every unit of force generated by gravity. While engine thrust can be measured directly, surface gravity is a measure of acceleration, and to get a meaningful value for force we have to plug that figure into the equation "F = ma" along with the craft's mass. As I explained above, that is indeed correct. I don't have a hard-and-fast answer for which specific TWR would be ideal, but the KSP wiki page for Duna should have some helpful info, including a terminal velocity chart to help guide your ascent. Give me a second to verify the math myself. I'll edit it into this post when I'm done. EDIT: Calculating from the three parts you've given (and not including the other "greebles" on the craft, which will bring the mass ratio down a little by virtue of adding extra mass), I get a full mass of 15.5 and a dry mass of 7.5. A "Poodle" provides a vacuum Isp of 390. Plugging these in to the rocket equation, we get: dv = 9.81m/s^2 * 390s *ln(15.5 / 7.5) dv = ~2775m/s This should be more than enough to land and take off again, especially if you help along the process with parachutes. EDIT2: Because it's late, I'm bored, and it caught my fancy, I figured I'd do a practical exercise. I'm sharing it since you might find it helpful. Most of the delta-v charts I've referenced tell me it takes about 1380m/s of delta-v for a one-way trip to or from Duna. For the sake of convenience, let's include a little "elbow room" and say you want a lander with 1600 m/s delta-v. We can plug that value into the rocket equation along with the Isp value for the Poodle and standard gravity (constant): 1600m/s = 9.81m/s^2 * 390s * ln(m0 / m1) Solving for our mass ratio, this gives us: (m0 / m1) = e^(1600m/s / 9.81m/s^2 * 390s) (m0 / m1) = ~1.52 (with some judicious rounding) Inverting the ratio gives us the payload fraction: 1 / 1.52 = ~0.658 = 65.8% payload And subtracting this from 1 gives us the propellant fraction: 1 - 0.658 = 0.342 = 34.2% propellant We know that an X200-16 fuel tank holds 8 tonnes of fuel (Full mass 9 - Dry mass 1 = 8), so we can put this in terms of a ratio to get the total mass of the craft for our target delta-v: 0.342 = 8t / x 0.342x = 8t x = 23.4 tonnes Subtracting the known propellant mass of 8 tonnes gives us the dry mass of the craft: 23.4t - 8t = 15.4 tonnes As a check, we can plug all this back into the delta-v equation, and it should come out with something close to what we started with: dv = 9.81m/s^2 * 390s * ln(23.4t / 15.4t) dv = ~1601m/s And for an extra check, we can divide dry mass by full mass to get the payload fraction again: 15.4t / 23.4t = ~0.658 = 65.8% payload In other words, once we take into account the weight of the Poodle, the command pod, and the dry mass of the fuel tank, we can find how much mass we have to spare for "extra goodies" for the mission (such as parachutes, landing legs, docking ports, RCS tanks and thrusters, decouplers, etc.): 15.4t - (4t + 1t + 2.5t) = 7.9 tonnes Pretty nifty, isn't it?

That's basically what I meant, although I've always heard it called "target prograde" (i.e. if you're pointed in this direction, you're looking right at the target). It does get a little confusing, I'll grant.

You can find orbital data for each of the bodies of the Kerbol system on the wiki. You should be able to work out vector data with a little math; the orbital shapes are basically ellipses, with Kerbol itself at one focus.

There's the whole reason, right there, distilled into a single pithy phrase

Congratulations! Landing on the Mun for the first time is certainly a huge accomplishment, and one any player should be proud of. I'm especially intrigued by the fact that you chose the method you did instead of a direct-ascent lander or an Apollo-style mission. That's certainly something you don't often hear about for a first-time Mun landing. But anyway, since you've demonstrated that you know how to rendezvous and dock two spacecraft and how to encounter, land on, and return from another body, you really know almost all you need to know to do the same just about anywhere else in the Kerbol system. The rest is all about designing the right ship that can get to the right place at the right time for the mission. Happy launches! While we're on the subject: September 29 is also the 25th anniversary of Discovery STS-26, the first Space Shuttle launch in the aftermath of the Challenger disaster. Certainly an auspicious anniversary to share your first Mun landing with!

In addition to those already mentioned (which are quite good), the Drawing Board (link in my sig) has links to a number of other resources on rendezvous and docking that might prove helpful. EDIT: Including a number of written tutorials. As far as general tips for advanced rendezvous techniques go: 1. Objects in higher orbits tend to travel more slowly on average. If you're behind your target and want to catch up, lower your periapsis; if you're ahead of your target and waiting for it to catch up to you, raise your apoapsis. 2. Set your target, then plot an intercept. Any intercept, as long as it brings up the "Closest Approach" data. Then move your maneuver node around in the orbit and see how the data changes. Ideally, you want an orbit whose apoapsis / periapsis just barely grazes the target's at the point of closest approach within a few kilometers. (You may need to make additional tweaks to the node itself to refine this). 3. Once you're within about 10-20km (depending on what you're comfortable with), confirm that your Navball is set to "Target" mode, then start steering your prograde velocity marker (the open yellow one) onto your target prograde marker (the open pink one). Each burn will "pull" the prograde marker towards the heading your nose is pointing to; you can thus pull your vector onto the target by pointing your nose so that, on a line drawn from your prograde vector marker to your heading indicator (the "airplane"), the target marker falls somewhere between the two, then burn and watch how the prograde vector moves. (A similar thing happens with regard to your retrograde vector marker (yellow marker with an "x"), except engine burns "push" rather than "pull"; thus, while you're killing your velocity on your approach, you can try to "push" the retrograde vector onto the target retrograde marker (pink dot with triangular crosshairs).) Hope this helps

I've accidentally taken out more sets of solar panels while lining things up for docking than I care to count.

Crashing something into it gives its name as Mission Control, so that's most likely indeed what it's there for. The Research Complex is going to be yet another building entirely, though, from what I've read and heard in the past.

I have fond memories of my own first landing as well (from one of the 0.18 releases): I did it Apollo-style. Since I had only learned to dock a few days before, getting the two modules back together was really tense, since I wasn't quite good enough to do it with full efficiency. Still, they made it home safely, so all was well in the end EDIT: Is it just me, or has anyone else already gotten so used to the new surface with the procedural craters that the old one in these pics seems unusually flat and smooth?

I still remember a lot of firsts -- first orbit, first docking, first Mun landing -- and how I felt when achieving them. Like Aphox mentioned, it's amazing how things that were once titanic hurdles to be cleared are now more-or-less routine. On the other hand, there are still plenty of things I haven't done in the game, so I still feel a little bit of that same sense of triumph whenever I do something new for the first time.

On the plus side, if you can somehow get high enough that gravity stops being a problem for the LV-N's thrust-to-weight issues, they reach 99% of their Isp efficiency just after 43km up, at least if the same principles apply as in Kerbin's atmosphere. Granted, I have yet to actually test this to see if it's practical.

Nicely done! I like the idea of putting landing legs on wings to give better ground clearance to the engines. I've seen it done before, but I can't remember who did it. In any case, this has reminded me that I still need to try something like that.

You forgot to Photoshop the Challenge badge onto all the ribbons. On topic: Mine are in my signature below. I try to keep honest about what I've done for what it's worth, even to the point of counting those three kerbonauts in Moho orbit as "Lost." (They never actually perished or left the solar system, but I'm likely never going to revisit that save file, since it's in a much older version of the game.)

Nice touch with the booster cam. If it's based on what I think it is, then it's a nifty shout-out.

I would like to note that it's entirely possible to build a craft that takes off vertically on a "tall and thin" launcher but lands horizontally.

Edit your first post and select "Go Advanced." That should take you to a screen where you can change the tag to "Answered" from "Unanswered."

I have to say, my first landings on the Mun and Duna are both very high up there in terms of personal accomplishment. In terms of craft, however, I'd have to say that this little wonder is my favorite ship to fly and my favorite rover to drive.

Thirded. I've seen it done in flight simulators in general for as long as I can remember.