capi3101

That means it's probably both, of course...

Fair enough. Lemme see what I can do about finding one.

Short answer: nope. Long answer: nope.

No apologies necessary; if a discussion of the topic can help out prospective Eve explorers, I'm all for it. Haven't made the attempt yet, to be honest. I've been focused on my career game of late (finally finished that up last week) and then this week I've been busy taking care of my wife post-surgery, so I haven't had much time to play. I did get a chance to fiddle around with a ladder system and KAS is going to let me do what I hoped it would (i.e. have Jeb pluck them off the side of the ship as he ascends back to the capsule), so there's that at least. I also still need to finish setting up the refuel and return portion of the mission - the transfer stage for the hardware is up; I need to finish getting all the fuel canisters up and then attach the return stage. So still a fair amount to do before I make the attempt. Ship's going to be roughly 1000 parts, so it's going to take some time to finish no matter what.

Well...lessee......if you know how the craft was behaving with standard legs, take the highest speed that you were landing at safely on Kerbin, multiply it by 1.7, and see if you can land safely at that speed. Say....20 m/s or so. I think the impact tolerance of the girder segments and adapters is 80 m/s, so they should survive; the question is one of how well the rest of your ship survives the impact.

@samiamthelaw - the question of why ideal ascents stick close to terminal velocity is largely one of fuel efficiency. Which force would you rather lose the most delta-v to: gravity, drag, or thrust (i.e. getting the hell into space)? Incidentally, the force balance for a launch is indeed drag-downward, gravity-downward, thrust-upward. Newton's Second Law says that in order to accelerate, you better damn well not be 100% balanced...Tsiolkovsky says the same thing - it's the same equation, just cleverly disguised. Now, as far as those forces go, gravity slowly decreases as you ascend (g = GM/R^2), drag is dependent on your velocity, along with your mass (which decreases with time based on your fuel flow rate and is the unrealistic part of KSP's drag model) and the density of the atmosphere (which decreases logarithmically as you ascend). Your thrust is constant assuming you don't fiddle with the throttle but the resultant acceleration it produces is going to increase with time on account of your decreasing mass. Basically, there's a cycle going on there - you accelerate faster, your rate of acceleration changes, you get faster, the drag increases, you accelerate slower. The way you minimize the drag acceleration is to ascend, get lighter (i.e. burn fuel), and keep your velocity reasonable by minimizing your rate of acceleration. The only way you can minimize the gravity acceleration is to get higher up as quickly as you can, i.e. by maximizing your rate of acceleration. Obviously you can't do both, so you have to find a happy medium - which happens to be to accelerate at a rate such that your craft remains as close to terminal velocity as manageable. I don't know if I've made things clearer or muddied them up; if the latter, please accept my apologies. This topic came up on the forums last year - here's the link to that discussion thread: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/43721-WTF-is-Terminal-Velocity That thread is closed, so if you do have further questions on the topic you can either respond here or make a new thread.

Absolutely, and the satellite doesn't need to be all that large, either. There was a challenge to that effect a few months ago. I seem to recall the winning combination was a Stayputnik, a small battery balanced with an unshielded solar panel, an FL-T200 and a 48-7S. Made Kerbin orbit easily. It was SRV Ron's design; he might have the pic. Now, if you're talking about launching a full space station in one thwack, it depends on the design, as Specialist290 has indicated. Mass will be a key factor as will its structural integrity.

There was a question of this nature posted a while ago...lemme see if I can find the link to the thread. EDIT: Here we go - http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/72164-Question-to-the-physics-junkies-out-there-! That was more of a question about how to calculate a perfect gravity turn, but that should be applicable to your case as well. A PM to aNewHope on your part might not be amiss. Just saying.

Rendezvousing on RCS only, eh? Well, despite what you may hear from others, it IS possible to do. But there are a lot of considerations involved... To address your specific question - you can switch to docking mode as others have suggested. Personally, I use NavyFish's Docking Alignment Indicator mod, which lets me keep things out in Staging Mode and let's you "two-fist"; WASDQE for rotation, IJKLHN for translation. In Docking Mode, you just have WASDQE, with the spacebar switching between translation and rotation. Pick whichever set of controls you like. To get it to work properly, you're going to need to design your craft so that the RCS blocks are roughly equidistant from the central axis of longitudinal motion (i.e. the radial center of your craft). If there's any significant difference, you can expect your craft to rotate as you attempt to translate. That's generally very important in the final docking maneuvers, but it can come into play when you're attempting RCS rendezvous. Likewise, for the thrusters intended to control rotation, you want them all roughly the same distance from the center of mass of the craft along that same axis (further from the center of mass produces more torque, making the craft easier to turn). Now, assuming your target is already in orbit of Kerbin, I find that waiting until it's about 500,000 meters uprange of KSC before you launch your source craft will put you in position for a relatively fast rendezvous. Launch as normal, and try to put your orbit at about the same altitude as the target's periapsis. Cut loose your booster and engage RCS. Target the target vehicle - assuming you're in an eastward-moving "standard" orbit, you'll want to thrust northward at the descending node or southward at the ascending node. You won't be making fast changes on RCS only, so feel free to begin burning slightly ahead of the node if you're much past 1 degree difference; you're wanting to zero that out (0.0 or NaN). Once you're zeroed out, do a forward thrust burn at your periapsis and watch what it does to the distance indicated by the little rendezvous chevrons. If the distance decreases, great; get it down as far as you can. If the distance increases, stop and do an aft thrust burn instead (watching your periapsis as you do so; if it gets below 70,000, there's a bit of a problem). Once it's down as far as you can, do the same thing again at the apoapsis. Repeat this process until you can't make any more progress (which should happen within an orbit or two). Once that happens, you'll need to try the same thing somewhere between the -apses. If you can get that distance chevron to within 2.5 kilometers, you're headed to rendezvous. I'll recommend the Gemini 6A and 7 tutorial as a way of teaching RCS rendezvous and docking. My main beef RCS rendezvous it is that they are very time consuming; you can conduct a rendezvous much faster on biprop engines. RCS is still highly recommended for the close-in maneuvers for final docking (by which I mean within 100 meters to the target).

Despite having written it off yesterday, I was able to save my Gilly mission. To recap - my lander got back to Eve orbit in a prograde orbit, with the transfer stage in a retrograde orbit around Eve. The transfer stage was drawing power from solar panels on a side-attached drop probe; I figured any attempt to reverse its orbit would require me to drop that probe off and leave the transfer stage solely on battery power. Quicksaved, then did thus - ran out of juice before I could affect a rendezvous (though I did successfully flip its orbit). Quickloaded, said WTF and tried it with the drop probe still attached; surprisingly the transfer stage ran straight (at least straight enough to hold its course) and I was able to affect a rendezvous with the lander. Once the lander had docked, I was able to use its solar panels for the craft, so I dumped off the drop probe and landed it on Eve for the final bits of Science I could gather, then sent the whole thing home. Had just enough fuel to make it back to Kerbin. Got nearly 3700 science for the mission plus what my drop probes were able to collect from in and around Eve, enough for me to (finally) finish out the tech tree for the first time. Maybe now I can turn my attention to and manned Eve return.

Tell ya what, ThePseudoMonkey, you can have 43rd, I'm comfortable with 44th. I didn't expect to even show, honestly, and I'm not disappointed. Now that the field's properly narrowed down, I might see about jumping in for the final round vote.

You've got five Mainsails to lift a Mk1-2 command pod to orbit? Sounds to me like you may have too much thrust. Try Skippers. Follow the prograde vector and keep your gees down. Push comes to shove, add a couple of round RCS tanks and a block or two to help with the steering. Any chance we can see a screenshot of your ship? Or perhaps the craft file?

Career game met with abject disaster today. For starters, my Ike flight seems to have completely disappeared; I caught Jeb sipping coffee in the astronaut complex when he was supposed to be orbiting Ike. Things also made a turn for the worse with my Gilly mission. After realizing that the mothership couldn't produce electrical power on its own (all the solar panels were on the drop probes and the two returning to Kerbin had battery packs only), I left one probe attached and went ahead and sent the lander portion off to Gilly, with the mothership staying in Eve orbit. Landing went okay, but on return to Eve I discovered that I had managed to put the lander in a 180 degree retrograde orbit relative to the mothership. With only 100 m/s of fuel left and a hell of a lot of science at stake, it's definitely time for me to begin planning a rescue mission. The hope is to save both parts of the mission; aerobraking to get both in the same flight might be tricky at best.

Nothing today on account of my youngest son having an allergic reaction that required hospitalization. Last night, landed probes on the surface of Eve for Science. First success in landing anything at all on Eve to date.

Rule of thumb I go with is one turbojet engine per 12-15 tonnes of total craft, or one engine per 9-12 tonnes of payload mass (assuming that an engine, a pair of wings, the fuel for the engine and its intakes come in somewhere in the neighborhood of 2.5-3 tonnes or so). Nothing wrong with having more thrust, of course. In full, the general guidelines I give are: 1 Turbojet per 9-12 tonnes payload, leaning towards 12 if you like to go airhogging and 9 if you don't. 200-250 units of liquid fuel per turbojet. You can get away with less if you're a halfway decent pilot. One pair of swept wings or delta wings per six tonnes of aircraft. No fewer than three ram intakes per turbojet engine. Higher intake to engine ratios generally afford you more tonnage per engine.

Asymmetric drag? I never noticed that when I was flying it....since it's looking like I'm out of the competition in any event, what exactly does that mean and how do I go about fixing it in the future? Guess I really should've fixed that tail problem while I had the opportunity.

Okay - this is basic trigonometry. You've got three satellites that you want equidistant from one another, each at an average orbital distance of 1003.5 kilometers (splitting the difference between 1001 and 1006). Kahlzun is correct in pointing out the 600 kilometer figure, but incorrect about its usage - if you check the wiki, the equatorial radius is 600 km. That figure is the radius, not the diameter, and so you have to add 600 km to the figures, not 300. Okay. So you know that the distance from the center of the circle (the orbit) to the edge (where your sats are) is 1600 km. Each one is sixty degrees from the other. What you can do is draw the triangle from one satellite to another, and then draw a line from each satellite to the center of the circle. You can go ahead and then extend the lines headed through the center to the opposite side of the triangle. What does this do? It sets you up with a hell of a lot of 30-60-90 triangles is what it does, and the hypoteneuse of each (the one corresponding to the 90 degree angle) is your 1600 km figure. So we look up wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/30-60-90_triangle#30.E2.80.9360.E2.80.9390_triangle And discover that the length of the sides are in a proportion of 1:2:sqrt3, with 2 corresponding to the hypoteneuse. So - we half the 1600 figure and then multiply it by the square root of 3; half the distance from one satellite to the another should be 1385.641 km (you can verify that figure with the law of sines, incidentally). Multiply that by two - 2,771.281 kilometers. And that's your answer. Here's a diagram, in case any of what I said above is unclear: ...and no, that's not supposed to be the Deathly Hollows. EDIT: Double ninja'd. OP, look on the bright side - you've got three folks throwing you the same figure. Pretty sure that means it's correct.

Not much done today. I finished filling up the Typhon 2 transfer stage (finally) through a Barn Burner mission. Not "reusable", but it delivered a lot more fuel at once than the Auk VIII. Might fly the Auk again when economy comes into play in a few versions. I'll be flying four more Barn Burner missions to the Typhon; those will be fuel payload to send to Eve along with a return stage for my Eve lander. My Eve lander is nearing completion; I just need to add ladders for Jeb at this point and it'll be ready to go. Most of the elements are in place at this point for me to make the attempt. Will keep y'all posted on how it goes.

Last night I tweaked the design again, this time working with a new lander leg configuration. I had forgotten there was a short, fat I-beam in and among the stock parts. I laid one sideways across a TT-38K decoupler, secured it to the decoupler with a strut and attached two of the big lander legs, and then set one of these leg pairs on each of the outboard and inboard boosters. Five parts total per leg set, Sixty parts in all. The reconfiguration didn't add any more legs to the design but it did redistribute the support across the entire width of the lander (as opposed to just the edges with the previous design). Parachute tests were successful; I was able to land the craft intact on land in a 3 m/s landing test. I might've taken off from that point except that I had fouled up the staging - the legs decoupled before the chutes. So that's how that test ended. I might try a full mock landing and takeoff again tonight. Leaves me with one final problem to tackle - how to get Jeb out of the can and onto the ground and back. I'll have to post some revised screenies of the craft as it's standing right now, and I'll need to go ahead and make a version with the manned payload. My cheatsy method I'd intended hasn't panned out, on account of a lack of places to put ejectable lander cans near the bottom of the craft (I was going to Crew Manifest him from the center pod to the ejectable pods. Meantime, other aspects of the overall mission plan are going well. I designed the return vehicle the day before last and successfully flew it intact to Kerbin orbit. I still need to do a mass study for the Barn Burner train (the refueling mission prior to Eve landing) and get a transfer stage designed for that as well. Overall things are progressing reasonably well and I hope to be able to make the mission attempt sometime in the next week or two.

Whatever you've got assigned to an action group activates when you push the right button. Case in point, I've got eight Eve lander probes docked to a mother ship right now plus a Gilly lander. The sci experiments for six of those probes are activated on key 7; were I to push key 7 with the whole kit-and-kaboodle still docked, all six of them would fire off their experiments simultaneously. Were I to undock one, and have control of that one when it was undocked, pushing 7 would only activate the experiments on that single probe. All of them - and I do mean all of them - I've got set up to open solar panels on 1. So yes, you dock two craft together, and one of them does one thing on a particular action group while the other does something else with that same action group, and you hit the button while they're docked, the docked craft will do both things simultaneously. I might not be talking very clearly here - if not lemme know.

Hmmm....where's your center of lift relative to your center of mass when you're coming in to land? I'd wager the CoL is further forward than the CoM at that point, which would explain your pitch problems at low throttle. You might want to take a look at what they're both doing at different angles of attack.

Not using Mechjeb yet; Mechjeb is the reward I'm giving myself if I manage to pull off a manned Eve ascent...

Okay......so I've looked a little bit at BTSM, and so far as best I can tell you've got these parts available - Stayputnik RT-10 SRB Thermometer Communotron 16 AV-T1 RT-20 BACC SRB POT-1 BATT (50e, MASS 0.0375) BAROMETER KKII Unpressurized Cockpit (2t) QBE AV-R8 NOSE CONE GRAVIOLI DETECTOR LV-T15 (1.5, 215 Kn, 310/350 iSP) FL-T800 Mk-16 CHUTE RCS BLOCKS SMALL RCS TANK ASAS FL-T200 FL-T400 LV-909 OCTAGONAL STRUT LAUNCH CLAMP BI-ADAPTER DECOUPLER Mk0 cockpit (1.5 t) cylinder rcs 1.25 heatshield (didn't catch the stats on this one) POT XL-2 BATT (didn't catch the stats on this one) Where does the orange tank come into play with the BTSM mod? I didn't get that far. How similar is the LV-T15 to the LV-T30? I know the -T30 will generate electricity; is the same thing true of the -T15? If so, you might be able to work with that a bit. You might be able to pull some of the magic I'd ordinarily do with Modular Girder Segments with the Modular Girder Adapter instead; I'll definitely need to do some research. From your rocket screenies, you're definitely further along the tech tree than just the first ten techs...do you have a more up to date tech tree screenshot?

Ah, that makes sense then. Okay. I remember that the parts get unlocked in different order with that mod, so I'll have to review it and get back to you, see what you can do with the tech you've got.

Speaking of gravity turns, where would y'all recommend I begin it on Eve? I've heard 40,000 before; that was with Scott Manley's attempt IIRC, but what would y'all suggest? 30k? 35k? Where exactly? I realize I've got other problems to iron out at the moment but that particular piece of information would be nice to have when the time comes.