capi3101

1) Go to My Computer or Finder, depending on your OS, and navigate to your KSP folder. 2) There's a subfolder there called "saves". Open it, and then there should be another folder with the same name as your name in the game. Open that one. 3) You're looking for a file called "persistance.cfs". You want to open that up in Notepad or TextEdit (again, depending on your OS). DO NOT USE WORDPAD OR MS WORD. Notepad++ is a good tool that will work on multiple platforms. --Caveat: I'm pretty sure that's the filename; if not, it'll be similar. 4) Use the Find option to look for the name of the specific craft you're working with. You'll need to do this more than once if you're working with two or more craft. 5) Scroll down until you find the corresponding docking port; I'd give you the part name so you could just jump to it but I don't have the game open and don't know the name off the top of my head. 6) Find the line that says "state = acquire", delete "acquire", type in "ready", and save the file. 7) Fire up KSP. Once you locate your persistence file, you might consider backing it up (i.e. just copying it and pasting it to your desktop) before you go mucking about with it. In fact, I would recommend doing this just to cover my own butt; you can pretty easily screw up your entire game by changing the wrong thing. Don't know what the Linux equivalencies are for My Computer/Finder/Notepad/TextEdit; hopefully that's not an issue in this case.

Haven't built a multi-Kerbal rover myself yet; so far I've just made simple rovers based on RoveMates with the small probe chassis for control purposes. I don't know if you can attach those to one another or not; might be worth a try.

For the record, you can dock with Seniors...I've got them employed successfully on an orbiting refueling platform I've built and a "detachable booster". DMagic's suggestion is probably your best bet; at a glance it looks like it should be working. Always annoying when it should be working and isn't...

Well...three jumbos by themselves weigh 108 tonnes...plus 104 for the superheavy...about 212 total? F/m=a...so 1,500 kN/212 tonnes......7.075 m/s^2, a little over seven-tenths of a gee. Oughta be something a docking port can handle (tug might be the wrong term here; these things will be pushing, not pulling).

It doesn't hurt to play things conservatively on rescue missions - having a bit extra is useful, particularly if you wind up in a situation where you have to make a major declination change (which happened to me over Eve; that was a situation where I should've done a quickload, in all honesty). I mean, you don't need the equivalent amount of an X200-16 tank to land on the Mun and get back safely - but depending on how things go... Told you wrong earlier; the second burn was to get the periapsis near the target; the third was to descend onto the target, a maneuver that really takes some nerve. Once again, knowing where the deck is makes things a lot easier.

Started playing around with Clamp-o-tron Srs. Played around with a "detachable booster" design. Attempted to launch a "superheavy" interplanetary tug design into orbit about half a dozen times. Started re-positioning the tug from my last interplanetary mission for refueling - ran it out of gas inclined about 50 degrees off the equator (started around 80, so I'm actually okay with this). It was a slow day; not a lot of RL time. Tonight's fun will probably be a continuation of yesterday's...get that superheavy tug into orbit and refuel the last tug.

An RGU with two PB-NUKs, a hitchhiker storage container with eight chutes attached radially, an X200-8 with a Poodle with 4 radially attached FL-T200 tanks with fuel lines running back to the X200-8 and two of the large lander legs apiece should be all you need for a successful Mun rescue. That's somewhere around fifteen tonnes or so. You could probably stick it on a Proton-K rocket and be just fine, though I might suggest replacing the tank in the third stage with an X200-32 and the second stage engine with a Skipper. Use the third stage for your Munar transfer burn. Haven't crunched the numbers on this, so hopefully I'm not leading you astray here. As far as the rescue is concerned, I have done that same sort of thing before; it was recommended to me that I do three burns for the landing; the first to get the declination over the target, the second to put the periapsis right over the target, and the third to descend to the target. It took me a couple of tries to get it right. Just be patient. One other thing I'd suggest: go to your stranded Kerbals and note their altimeter; it'll let you know exactly where the deck is, so you know when you really need to be below 10 m/s.

Morning all, I guess this thread's more for Temstar than anyone else, but y'all feel free to chime in. I've been using the "heavy docking port" subassembly part for some time now and I've gotten a lot of good use out of it; it's helped me get to Duna, Ike, Gilly and Eve so far (nowhere else just yet because of some problems with my initial interplanetary design / poor piloting / lack of time). However, I've been taking a good, hard look at the Clamp-o-Tron Sr. since 0.20 came out. My chief reason for using the quad port was to sturdy up the connections; my understanding is that the Senior does this fairly well as well but that it has a tendency to "break". My big beef with the quad port is that I occasionally don't get them aligned properly and have to re-dock modules together. So I'll ask the experts: should I switch over to the Sr., or should I continue using the quad port? Next big project is to improve on my interplanetary design, doable by adding more of the existing service stage designs. Because each one of those is 130 tonnes a pop I'm building a "superheavy" tug module - 25 LV-Ns, gives me the thrust of a Mainsail and the Isp of LV-Ns, made for flying some seriously heavy loads.

Wiki says they both output 1 kN. The way the stats are written, the only major advantage to the linear ports over the blocks is a substantially higher impact tolerance (50 m/s as opposed to 15). They have more drag, a lower maximum temperature, fewer thrust vectors (of course) and (though this doesn't matter yet) a higher cost. Otherwise they are exactly the same.

One thing I'm noting here...which radial decoupler are you using for your asparagus? The TT-70 or the TT-38K? You don't list those with the rest of the parts, which is why I'm asking. Won't affect the delta-V calculations too much. My numbers are coming up similar to Mr. Shifty's; any differences I have are probably me accounting for the extra delta-V you have due to RCS. Which ain't much: I come up with a delta-V of 6923.5 m/s.

I do have a heavy lifter design - it's two jumbo tanks with a mainsail and eight radials, with a set of eight double-stacked jumbos with mainsails and eight 24-77s around it, with another set of eight double-stacked jumbos with mainsails surrounding that. Light the whole thing at once and has fuel lines running from the outer tanks to the inner ones. It's rated for 130 tonnes. I've heard my design described as "onion staging", in that I "peel off" rings of boosters at a time. Ugly, strutted all to heck and if you leave the third stage at full throttle at separation the stack pancakes, but it gets the job done. In your case, I'm a bit lost because I'm not familiar with the parts in the mod you're using. Which stages correspond to your payload? What's its mass by itself?

A few of them seemed a bit suspect to me as well...I had assumed there was a large peak on Moho or something, which is why that was as high as it was. They're probably reasonable figures to go with for most cases, though.

The delta-V map on the wiki has "low orbit" figures for all bodies in the system (it's been updated recently too, if you haven't looked at it for a while). Here's what it says: Moho: 50 km Eve: 107 km Gilly: 10 km Kerbin: 80 km Mun: 14 km Minmus: 10 km Duna: 52 km Ike: 10 km Dres: 12 km Jool: 150 km Laythe: 65 km Pol: 10 km Bop: 10 km Vall: 15 km Tylo: 20 km Eeloo: 10 km "Low orbits are 10 km above atmosphere or clear of obstacles"

Hmm...try stitching the decoupler to that Rockomax adapter. Just run a couple of struts between the two. Maybe also between the adapter and that tank it connects to on the booster. If it still fails, try to launch at 2/3 throttle and see if that has any effect; the payload on my heavy TSTO lifter will come off if I run the third stage engine much faster than 1/3 during orbital insertion, so too much booster could also be the problem. Out of curiosity, what are your stage TWRs? If they're much above 2.2 you definitely want to throttle back.

I've heard there are some bugs with Ferram Aerospace; this could easily be one of them. I don't actually use Ferram; best advice I can give is the standard "put struts between the two pieces"

Best way to overcome that is to build the ship in orbit. Launch tug, launch fuel, launch lander, dock them all together (USE SENIOR'S!!!). It's what I usually do. At least, it's what I started doing after I encountered the very phenomena you're describing first time I shot for Duna...

You know what, I don't know what "logitudinal axis" means either..doesn't help that I didn't spell it correctly. Doesn't matter; you're not launching it upright. I'll go back to my original suggestion; raise the position of the engines on trusses. Take a cubic girder piece and stick it on the decoupler you already have. Stack about six or seven vertically, attach one more out horizontally and put your engines on those. Something like this bad ASCII art... x x ↓x x↓ x x x x x x x x x(O)x For good measure, put some lander legs along your horizontal piece. I don't actually know if that will work; just a suggestion.

If you're using the 'spikes, you'll want to use launch clamps anyway. Those things get knocked off with the slightest bump. I had a ship with aerospikes and the stupid thing wouldn't launch; it turns out that they were being knocked off the ship by the launch pad. Clamps solved the problem.

Hmm...sounds like you need to find a way to lower your center of mass. It'd look ugly as hell, but have you considered raising your rockets/fins upwards on trusses? What does your booster look like for this, just out of curiosity? Are you trying to launch it upright? It doesn't look like it'd be balanced along one of the logitudinal axis; if you're launching it upright, that's probably what's causing you headaches.

Hmm...lesseeeee.....from the screenshot, your finished ship has got 9 Jumbos, right? Working on that assumption, your liquid fuel mass is going to be right at 288 tonnes. Now you say the ship weighs 500 tonnes...so, the mass ratio is about 1.736. Skippers in vacuum have an Isp of 350. So that works out to about 1894 m/s of delta-V. You wouldn't be able to return from the Mun on that; you'd be better off using a Poodle. LV-Ns have a vacuum Isp of 800. So that works out to about 4,329 m/s of delta-V. That'd get you to Duna/Ike/Dres and back. For interplanetary flights, thrust doesn't matter as much as efficiency. If you don't think five LV-Ns will cut it, add more; you could easily slip 25 on the design you've got (assuming I've missed a central set of tanks). Just take an LV-N, attach it to the bottom of the tanks, then attach four BZ-52 Radial Attachment Points to the bottom of the tank right next to them, and slap LV-Ns on those too. Poof: you suddenly have as much thrust as a single Mainsail and about 3 m/s^2 of available acceleration given your mass. Still ain't much, but then again you're pushing 500 tonnes around...

This is from a mod, right? Just asking; the stock command modules all float. If you're talking about a hitchhiker module, you might try putting something underneath it like an RCS tank or perhaps a series of lander legs; yes, you don't need them to land in water. I suppose you could be hitting the water fast...eight radial chutes will usually slow down the payload enough. I have that configuration working with a large RGU and two hitchhikers; eight radial chutes slows that down to about 5 m/s. How massive of a ship are you bringing down? A screenshot would be helpful.

Subassembly is the only one I'm currently using; it does save a lot of headaches when it comes to putting the same booster on a bunch of different payloads (like what NASA has planned with the Space Launch System). A lot of folks like Mechjeb (though there are just as many that don't); haven't used that one myself so I probably shouldn't recommend it. Couldn't say much about the other mods.

To name a ship: click in the box at the top of the VAB. A cursor will appear; just delete "Untitled Space Craft" and name your ship something cool like "Inevitable Ball of Fire That Will Be Visible from Space 7" or some such. Once named, the game will save the craft file with the same name. No solid tutorial for action groups out there and I have only a vague notion of how they work my own self. And I'd have to be playing the game to give you an idea of how they work. Sorry I can't be helpful on that question; perhaps later today.

You want your center of mass to be as close to the engines as you can get it in the early going. Design your ship like a pyramid (narrow at the top, wide at the bottom). If you're still tipping over, try adding fins to the lower parts of the rocket; fins do absolutely no good near the top. Just general ideas. To get a good idea of what you would need to do in this case, a screenshot would be useful.

EAS-4 Strut Connectors: The most useful part in the entire game for keeping the whole stack from coming apart. You'll find them more and more useful as your rockets get larger and larger. Incidentally, if your nose cone is glowing red on takeoff: 1) You're going too fast. You're wasting fuel. 2) Nose cones don't do anything in the current version of KSP besides adding do-nothing mass. You might want to consider removing them...