capi3101

Ah. Much thanks. Going to have to go back to my Soviet flag and correct the spelling of "Kerbal"...

Actually, the landing on the Mun tutorial isn't in the full game either...and the demo is three versions old at this point. I have done a landing with the ship from the Mun 1 tutorial, but it's tricky and made all the more difficult by a) lack of ability to go IVA in that mission - the radar altimeter is very helpful! - and no lander legs on the ship for some reason. You are going to need to practice; that can't be helped. Here's a quick and dirty procedure, though. 1) Hit F5 to quicksave. You are going to screw it up the first few times; that can't be helped (took me eight tries before I finally got it right). After Jeb dies in a big fiery ball or is stranded, hold down F9 and try again. 2) Use your nav markers to pick a good landing spot. Ideally you want someplace flat. The center of a crater works well in general. 3) Make the de-orbit burn when you come up on the marker like any other maneuver. 4) If you can, switch to IVA (C-key) and find the radar altimeter. It's the gauge that looks like this: Except yours will be in meters, not feet. You can't do this in the Mun 1 tutorial, unfortunately; do like the Apollo guys did and pick a landing spot just after sunrise or just before sunset so you can spot shadows on the surface. 5) Switch over to the staging view (C-key to leave IVA). Accelerate time until your altitude is 8000 above base level. 6) Aim your ship retrograde (the marker that looks like the Mercedes logo, not the one that kinda resembles an airplane). Lower your gear (G-key) 7) Make sure your speedometer is set for "Surface". If it still says "Orbit", click on it until "Surface comes up. 8) Begin a full burn and watch your speed. When it gets to 100 m/s, reduce to 2/3 thrust. When it goes below 50 m/s, reduce to 1/3 thrust. Follow the retrograde marker as it edges towards the vertical. 8A) While you're doing this, you want to switch back and forth to IVA to check the radar altimeter. Start this at 5000m and check it every 500 meters or so until the needle starts moving. At that point, you should have an idea of where the deck is and aim to be below 12 m/s when you get to the estimated altitude. 9) When you get below 10 m/s, kill your burn. Ideally, the retrograde marker will indicate you're vertical at that point (smack in the center of the blue side of the eight ball - like you are when you go to launch from Kerbin). You'll start picking up speed again. Give it some low thrust - one or two notches at most. You're just trying to control your descent speed at this point. -Caveat: If you get to this point and the altimeter needle still isn't twitching, don't bother; stay at IVA until it starts to move before you worry about your speed. 10). When you get within 500 meters of the deck, make sure your speed is not above 10 m/s. Ideally you want it around 5 or so but you can still land safely at 10. 11). As soon as you hit the deck, kill your burn. You might bounce; that's fine as long as you don't tip over. A squat lander with a wide base helps minimize this; tall landers can use RCS to upright themselves if necessary. 12). You're there. Engage any ladders if necessary, have Jeb hop out (hover over his picture and click "EVA"), walk him around, have him say a few words about "small steps for Neil, but a long one for me", and whatever else you feel like doing. You've only got the demo, so you can't go about planting flags unfortunately. A key thing is to make sure you don't burn up too much fuel in the descent. Watch your resources while you're doing this. If your fuel level gets below 90, you want to consider aborting; below 80, you need to hit space, below 70 and you might as well land since Jeb's not making it back in any event... This is a novice way of doing it; folks will tell you a "suicide burn" is more efficient and they're right. Problem is when you're doing it vanilla and its your first rodeo, you more often than not get to experience firsthand the effects of lithobraking. Just practice, practice, practice and you'll get it right eventually. Once you've made your first successful landing, then you can try fancier maneuvers.

Got to plant my first flag on the Mun tonight. Of course, I'm now forced to wonder about Jeb's politics... For the hell of it, I decided to see if I could have him fly up and land on top of the flag. I kinda made it. Actually, this shot looks pretty bad... Posted this here because somebody had asked in the how-to forums how to make an image of a real flag - they wanted Poland first but mentioned something about the Soviet flag. Sounded like fun, so I decided to try it out... This is the how-to forum, so I suppose I should ask a question. On the new map screen, how do you get more than one type of craft to appear at once? I've noted I can have capsules - or - landers - or - stations - or - flags; how do I get more than one of them going at once? I'm thinking of using flags for navigational reference (had Jeb plant one just off the launch pad, a mission which - in true Kerbal fashion - proved fatal).

Right click on the tank you want to fill. Hold down the ALT-key, then right click on the tank you want to fill it from. You should see a set of buttons on screen (labeled "In" and "Out") that will let you move resources around. Of course, that was in 0.19; I don't know if that changed in 0.20 or not. I imagine not, but...

To get a Kerbal available, I just built a ship consisting of a Mk-I Lander Can and nothing else (I call it the "Port-a-John 7"). You just have him EVA, walk down out of the Launch Pad area (or be nice and give him a lift on a rover you've also driven off the launch pad), then put your SRB/seat combo ship on the pad, and have him climb in. You get to kill a Kerbal and maybe toast a rover this way...

Temstar's Downmass Tug design incorporates drogues. IIRC, he's got four of them attached to BZ-52s along the sides, so they in effect deploy like radial chutes. It's a pretty solid design; if I had the link I'd post it (help here would be appreciated).

What kind of payload mass are we talking about here? From the design, I think you could start off with whatever kind of command module you want. Put a Rockomax Adapter and a Hitchhiker below that, then a Rockomax Adapter 02 and a stack decoupler. Put a small RCS tank and the core engine main stage fuel tanks below that and an LV-45 below that. Stick a couple of radial decouplers on, attach the same number of fuel tanks to those and put LV-30s on the bottom of that. Run fuel lines from the outer rockets to the core. You'll have a rocket that looks about the same as the Heavy (and produces roughly the same amount of thrust - 630 kN as opposed to the Heavy's 620 at launch). Only tricky bit is going to be figuring out the number of fuel tanks needed. If you want to make the payload a space station core, use a set of BZ-52s along the sides of the Hitchhiker, and attach Clamp-o-Trons to them. Add solar panels and presto - instant space station. Tricky bit is going to be making it a 1:1 replica; this will give you something that at least approximates the overall look.

You'd be amazed what you can accomplish with those little RCS blocks. A couple of quick puffs forward or backwards (H-key or N-key) with as few as four RV-105s (the multi-directional Apollo Service Module blocks) can raise or lower an apsis by a kilometer or more, if you apply them at the right time. As for reorienting your craft, try shutting both RCS and SAS off and turning on torque only. You'll need to be patient if your craft has a lot of mass, but it'll save on RCS fuel. Use RCS to re-orient only in an emergency (like if you absolutely have to have to have to have your ship pointing in X direction right that moment or you'll miss a transfer burn, stuff like that).

Do you have any kind of system installed to upright the rover if it gets turned over? If so, you might consider sticking them symmetrically onto the side of a lander, like this: Got three rovers to the Mun myself that way; just added a trio of BZ-52s and some stack separators to the side of an existing lander design.

Temstar's design is pretty solid. He's also got a whole line of heavy booster modules for varying payloads; his largest will do a little over a hundred tonnes. I have one myself that will do 130. The trick, of course, is to keep the stack from telescoping in on itself during the launch. For that, you're going to need MOAR STRUTS.

I appreciate hearing all y'all's opinions. I do realize the answers are subjective; what's awesome to one person might be lame to another (take me and my wife: I think KSP is awesome and she thinks it's boring, though she does find detonation of stack separators for no apparent reason interesting). So far with me it's the multi-part ship missions to Duna and Eve, though putting a satellite in geosynch orbit around Kerbin with an ion thruster was fun. One more dumb subjective question: do y'all only count craft you have built yourself, or do you still count accomplishments done with pre-built stock craft? For example, I have my flight wings for Kerbin, but that was done with one of the planes that came with the game; would you count that or not?

I keep a rover parked nearby for a victory lap. No, that's not true...usually I just hit "end flight". (But that would be cool).

How are you on RCS? You could still aerobrake at any point and use RCS thrust at the apoap to put the periap above the atmosphere. It's what I've got on my interplanetary tug (and like yours, it's not designed to land). Got a similar problem at this point - sent Jeb to Eve by mistake, standard lander so no landing there, so I shot for Gilly and missed; wasted a hell of a lot of fuel and now a return is looking unlikely, so I thought I'd send a resupply mission to rendezvous. Possible? Yes. Difficult? Better believe it.

Hey all. I've been using the ribbon generator for a while now and I do my best to follow the rules listed here. My question for y'all is simple: since you can only have one craft device on a ribbon, what do y'all consider to be the list of "priorities" for them? By which I mean do y'all think a station is more impressive than a rover, or is a multi-part ship more impressive than a station. I have my own opinions on this; I want to know about yours.

By the definitions, pilot/purist/space geek/astrophysicist. I love to build stuff but the "purist" part conflicts with the builder definition.

Here...I did this just yesterday. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/29312-how-to-create-an-unflippable-rover?p=364177&viewfull=1#post364177

Some updates on my forays with rovers...and a chance to see if I can get some images posted again. First of all, the 24-77 idea worked, but you can't give it too much juice. Ultimately used a Round-8 instead of an Oscar; it was easier to sling under the chassis. Having tested the design on Kerbin, the next step was to get some rovers to the Mun. I repurposed an early Duna lander for the mission: the Muad'Keeb 6 (sometimes known as the Phallus 7; never stick a chute on top of a PB-NUK). To do that, I slapped on a trio of BZ-52s, added some TR-2V stack seperators, and stuck the rovers onto them. Probably not a good idea to dangle a rover off the side of a rocket by a nuclear power generator, but it worked. The deployment system leaves a little to be desired; first time I tried, I released all three rovers at once and they universally landed upside down. Not a lot of room under the lander for getting them upright either. Fortunately I had the foresight to quicksave before letting them go. I blew up all three driving around the surface. Next go I learned my lesson and released them one at a time, uprighting them as necessary. The last one actually landed upright. Couldn't believe it: took six deployments before one landed on its wheels. No quips on using that lander for a Mun landing; turned out to be a good thing I had that much thrust available to me. I overflew a Mun arch on my way to my intended landing site and decided to land there instead. Probably means the lander isn't coming back up ever. Next thing I need to learn is how to drive on the Mun, apparently; damn things have a tendency to "drift" a bit. I know I can't be the first noob to ask about driving; anybody want to save me the searching time and just point me to the correct thread?

Let's see your designs. I bet we can find a spot or two to slap it on...

I started my own initial forays into rovery last night. So far I've got a simple rover - a mini-probe chassis stuck onto a rovemate, four type-I wheels, 4 PB-NUKs and a headlight. She'll do 20 on Kerbin, faster on the downhills and has enough juice to go for a while before needing to let off and recharge. Tried adding a stack separator to release and act as a navigational target to tell how far from KSC I am but the damn thing more often than not explodes as soon as it hits the ground. Rolled the stupid thing over trying to drive it off the launchpad first thing. Tried adding a lander leg to right it again; that didn't work. I think tonight I might try an Oscar/24-77 combo; I remember that the first few times I successfully landed on the Mun and my lander tipped over, it was ample RCS thrust that allowed me to upright it again. Anyway, I too am interested in this topic; might have to compare notes.

How exactly are you doing your ribbon image, as an image file or as a link to the ribbon generator website? If its a link, it should look like "http://ribbons.cgagnier.ca/image.php?ribbon=xxxx" in your signature line, where xxxx is a specific number. Images on the forums have been wonky since the Great Coffee Spill; that may be an issue of where your image was being hosted, if you were going that route.

Uh......question. There's no command pod on that lander, right? So how do you control it?

That explains a great many of my early failures with Duna missions...may have to try one of those designs again.

If you set a port to undock, it won't immediately re-grab the other port; you should be able to do it manually if you have no other option. Figuring out which ports to click on can be tricky; this I know from experience. Just undock all four ports and use RCS thrust to back away. And setup an action group to do the job next time you're at the VAB.

"Telescoping" is the more common term for this, unless I'm mistaken. Like sal_vager said, it's a combination of mass and thrust. More struts help, particularly set vertically between the orange tanks (alternatively, you could replace them with pairs of X200-32s; those have been observed to be more structurally stable. You can try throttling back too - if you're going faster than 130 m/s at 3000m, you need to throttle back. Same goes for 160 at 5000m and 215 at 8000m.