capi3101

Regarding your fuel - these days, you want to try and design your spaceplanes to have about 1,800 m/s of delta-V solely for the rockets. Since you're using an aerospike, the vacuum Isp is 340 and Tsiolkovsky says: dV = ln(M/Mo)*Isp*g = 1800 ln(M/Mo)*340*9.8 = 1800 ln(M/Mo) = 1800 / (340*9.8) = 0.540216 1-(M/Mo) = 1 - e^-0.54216 = 0.41738 = 41.7% <-- your propellant mass fraction (i.e. how much of your plane's mass at takeoff that has to be devoted solely to LF/LOX for the aerospike) So assuming you're going with the old recommended value of 15 tonnes per turbojet, your plane has a maximum mass at takeoff of 30 tonnes - 12.51 tonnes of the plane has to be rocket fuel. Note that that's the mass of the FUEL, not the mass of the FUEL TANKS (subtle but important difference there). Your turbojets need no more fuel than they used to - 150 units of LF per turbojet is plenty for the run-up, and since the Mk1 Fuselage holds 400 units these days, a single tank is good for two engines (and you have a little surplus). You don't need to airhog anymore though - one intake per engine is plenty. These days you also need to begin flattening out and starting your run-up to speed a lot sooner than 20k. Most spaceplane jockety these days begin their runs in the 10-12k regime; flatten out and accelerate, keeping yourself 5-10 degrees above the horizon (generally rate of climb will be less than 100 m/s if you watch that gauge). If you start seeing heating bars, steepen the climb. You probably will see flames; that's natural these days. Make sure you're in a save you can revert the first few times... Now, as far as the bobbing behavior is going on - what you've got there is a little bit of [url=http://code7700.com/stability.html]phugoid oscillation[/url]. I see it a fair amount my own self; the important thing is that it damps out with time.

Didn't do much with KSP yesterday - knocked out another eight of my mods yesterday as either reported working, having unofficial builds available or being willing to test them out myself. Only one left - unfortunately, that one is KER... Due to severe weather in my area last night I tried to stay off my box, and only got about half an hour or so to play. I spent it working on an airframe design for the [I]Albatross 7-II[/I] spaceplane. Orange tanks do not a stable structure make - and the S3 series is barely any better even if you stick them all in a row. That said, I did get the thing into the air a few times. I really wasn't making a serious attempt to build a working plane last night - was just having some serious 'splody fun. Sometimes you need it... Tonight I might try to get the [I]Albatross 7-II[/I] into space, or I'll work on my 1.0.2 career save. My wife is now scheduled to have a baby this coming Thursday - so only two more definite nights of KSP playing in the forseeable future (if I even get that).

[quote name='UpsilonAerospace']I don't know whether I'm using the new jumbo-sized engines correctly; please advise. [url]http://i.imgur.com/3ePIQip.jpg[/url] -Upsilon[/QUOTE] Looks fine to me...

Didn't accomplish a whole lot over this weekend - RL was kicking my butt pretty hard. I began checking for mod updates on Friday afternoon; nine of my mods had yet to be updated for 1.0.5. Unfortunately, one of those was KER, so switching over was a no go. I'll be checking those remaining nine as the week progresses. Meanwhile, I'm still in 1.0.2. Friday I switched from my career save over to my litterbox save and designed a target vehicle. I've been meaning to see for some time if the [I]Magpie 7[/I] spaceplane would be capable of doing its intended job - namely, to haul ore down from orbit. Launch of the target vehicle (appropriately named [I]Agena 7[/I] - look up your history of the Gemini program) was a success and the test flight took place on Saturday. It would be accurate to say that the Magpie has "relaxed stability", but aside from pitch-up tendencies with the airbrakes deployed the craft was controllable, and it performed a successful launch, rendezvous, docking, re-entry and landing with the target payload aboard. I think I can tone down its spoilers (right now they're set to full deflection; a lesser deflection may be adequate) and I do need to remember to set TAC to keep its nose full of fuel at all times, but other than that the plane is good to go. I also worked with my [I]Albatross 7[/I] heavy refueling plane design over the weekend, moving its center of mass aft to compensate for a too stable profile. The craft is still too stable; on those instances where I could get it off the runway (damn thing had a tendency to just fly apart for no reason whatsoever), it would go into an unrecoverable dive - no matter what altitude I leveled out at. I'm considering scrapping the existing design altogether at this point and starting from scratch; right now it's not capable of delivering much besides a good headache every time I try to fly the stupid thing... I'll be heading back to my career save sometime in the very near future, if for no other reason than to do the actual [I]Magpie[/I] mission. I am considering whether or not I could use the plane to make ore deliveries [I]from[/I] the surface at this point - if there'd be any utility in doing that or not as opposed to just bringing up gas or not. I'll have to do more research there.

Dude wants to go, and I've already collected the rest of his money for the contract, so why not? I just hope the other three tourists on the same contract get back from Kerbolar orbit before he fries himself... :cool::cool::cool: Seriously, the plan is to get him back at some point - keep him there long enough to get the contract money, then pull his backside back to Kerbin (hopefully before the contract times out).

Last night's activities (still in 1.0.2) began with a delivery run - the Project Peacock craft docked at Kerbinport was used to shuttle Lubree, a tourist, to Sun Diver 7 to begin his historic and suicidal journey to put himself on a suborbital Kerbolar flight. Peacock borrowed some fuel from Enola Gay, also docked at Kerbinport. The flight was relatively short; Sun Diver was passing within five kilometers of the station anyway (don't know how I pulled that one off and I don't think I could do it again), so the rendezvous took a single orbit. Docking was successful, Lubree was delivered to his craft and Peacock returned successfully to Kerbinport, transferring its remaining fuel back to Enola Gay. The evening's activities ended with Lubree's initial warmup burn. And warm up it did - the sixty tonne craft is propelled by a single NERVA engine, which after three minutes of burning had to be shut down to avoid exploding. As of this morning, Sun Diver's apoapsis is a mighty 390,000 meters. I'm hoping that things will get to where the engine will be able to burn for longer periods as the craft's fuel drains - otherwise the thing will never get out of Kerbin's SOI, let alone get to a suborbital trajectory of Kerbol. In the middle, I loaded Bob and tourists Jenedith, Jerbles and Phogy aboard Bockscar, also docked at Kerbinport and with a full tank of gas. With Jeb at the helm, the craft departed Kerbinport and was launched into a Kerbolar trajectory. The burn was successful, and the craft will exit Kerbin's SOI in about ten days. She's got about 60% of her fuel reserve remaining, so I should be able to get her back to Kerbin. Hopefully relatively quickly... I also sent the recently refueled Carrier Pigeon craft docked at Munport 1 to Munport 2, docking specifically on the far end of the station's fuel module; rendezvous and docking were successful. The plan is to have Carrier Pigeon bring Munport 2's fuel module back to Munport 1 for refuel. I don't know yet if this plan will work or not - Pigeon was designed to haul a seven tonne craft between Kerbin's moons, not a twenty tonne craft between space stations. Should work, but there's an operative there... Last thing before Lubree's run was (at long last) the arrival and successful docking of Minmusport's power module. The module's arrival brings Minmus up to a fully sustainable refueling depot, with ore refineries in orbit and on the surface capable of servicing any visiting craft. Naturally, I have no craft scheduled to head out that way any time soon. Though it does occur to me that I do have a contract to put a nine-Kerbal base on the surface...if I were to hook that up to the Wildcat rig it would house a hell of a lot of engineers...on the other hand, I have nobody scheduled to go out there any time soon. Still. A hell of a lot of engineers... Weekend plans involve lots and lots of planes. I should take a glamour shot of my planes, just for the hell of it.

No problem. I wonder how popular making submarines is going to be in general, now that water behaves as it should. If they turn out to be really popular, I could see someone conceivably making a FAR-like mod that would voxelize your craft and give you a better approximation of its volume, show you its buoyancy tendencies, maybe come with a few ballast tank parts so you could be all Das Boot and everything... Might be worth Squad's time to put a few easter eggs under the ocean is what I'm saying here, I guess.

In general, you want your craft to be as neutrally buoyant as possible before you stick it in the water. Kerbin's ocean's now have the same density as regular water - 1 metric tonne per cubic meter. You want your craft's density to be about the same. So what you can do (and this is a very crude method of doing it; an exact method would involve differential equations) is pop open the engineer's tab and find your length, width, height and mass. Multiply the length, width and height by one another; this is your crude volume. Divide your mass by your crude volume, and you've got your crude density. With a crude density value of less than one, your craft will be positively buoyant and have a tendency to float. With a value greater than one, it'll be negatively buoyant and have a tendency to sink. In either case, you'll need propulsion units to counter the buoyant tendencies of your craft; positively buoyant craft can also be made neutrally stable by adding ballast - say a set of monoprop cylinders set on decouplers. And then you'll need some kind of main propulsion system, obviously. I'm pretty sure that a craft with a crude density equal to one would also have a tendency to sink. Why? The method of determining volume (length times width times height) is for a rectangular prism (a box). Unless that's how you're designing your craft, your actual volume will be somewhat less than this "bounding box" volume. Volume and density are inversely proportional to one another, so as you decrease volume, density increases. Fair warning that you're really probably looking for a value somewhere in the 0.9-1.0 range, with the exact break even value dependent on your craft's design. That oughta be enough to get you started. I will say this - air acts like a fluid (the five words that give meteorologists nightmares), so almost anything you can apply to an aircraft you can apply to a submarine. You're just dealing with a medium with a roughly thousandfold increase in density.

Page 2001 - I get it. Cue the Blue Danube. That type of space station is totally doable, too...these days you can get it awfully close with some carefully fitted Mk2 Crew Cabins. I have my own mostly successful attempt at a circle station from a few versions back...I'll have to find the screenie again. EDIT: Ah - here we go. I'm thinking this was either 0.24 or 0.25; don't really recall. Just needs a second tier. And a docking bay. These days I'd probably shove an ISRU on there somewhere too; they didn't exist back then.

Let's have a look at your plane, see if we can't give you a few pointers. For too stable, in general you move (or sweep) the wings forward and the mass back. Monoprop containers housed in a service or cargo bay make great ballast. Last night (still in 1.0.2) began with the design and launching of Sun Diver 7, an expensive, nuclear-propelled one-Kerbal death trap. Took a screenie of it for y'all to enjoy/laugh at, but naturally I left the damn thing at home again. I wish I'd taken the time to add a few Sepratrons and a few more parachutes to the booster stages; I use Stage Recovery especially for √200k rockets like this one, and due to the crummy design I got almost none of that money back. Lubree had better be happy for all the trouble I'm going to on his behalf. Stupid tourist wanting a sub-orbital Kerbolar flight......at least he's the only one. The other three just want to go into Kerbolar orbit... Spent the rest of the night fiddling with refueling operations at Mun. I was able to fill the Munar Wildcat rig up with ore completely and use the Midas lander's ISRU get it completely full of fuel, at which point Theogel and Verise launched for Munport 1 and the ore processing facility there. The station's ISRU worked very well; the power module recently added to the station did its job, and by the end of the night I had topped off the monoprop tanks and filled a lot of the smaller fuel tanks at Munport, including a refuel of Wildcat's own tanks. The station's Mun Buggy is still low on gas and its fuel module is still bone dry, so I'll be making another run down and back soon. A power module for the Minmusport arrives in the moon's SOI in four hours. Its arrival will signal the final emplacement of mining and processing infrastructure for Kerbin's moons, something I've been working on for quite some time. A lot of other stuff I need to do. A lot of it involves planes...

Still trying to wrap things up in my 1.0.2 career save - last night I successfully landed a Raven 7b spaceplane at KSC, delivering two rescued personnel, one tourist, two pilots and about thirty Munar science experiments from the Kerbinport space station back down to the surface. I had to make two attempts - FAR borked on me and tried to throw physics out the window (must've been because Val was on board the plane - same thing happened last time she was aboard a Raven except that flight wasn't so lucky), so I had to revert. Reverting worked, though; I nearly came down right on top of KSC, which is not the sort of thing you want to do in a spaceplane (what with the usual method of landing and all). I was able to pull the plane up in time about ten clicks from KSC 09 and kept her in the glide slope the rest of the way in, landing successfully. The success of the flight cleared three contracts and scored me 1,706 science points, enough to unlock three techs on the 550-point tier. All I've got left on the tech tree to unlock at this point is Ion Propulsion - 550 more and I'm done. And I have 179 left as of this morning. I picked up a few more contracts - one to put a base on Duna, and one for Science around Mun. I was dismayed to discover that of all the crap I've got at Mun at the moment, the one thing I don't have is an orbiting sci satellite. So, I'm now planning on putting that off until the next group of tourists is scheduled to visit Mun. To support that goal, I focused on my Munar mining operations - four days worth, long enough for Enola Gay to return to Kerbin from Minmus with Cerxie and four tourists aboard. I've been waiting for one of those tourists to get back from Minmus; she and three others at Kerbinport have a Kerbolar orbit on their itineraries. That flight will probably commence tonight - I have yet to pick the craft to do it since both Enola Gay and Bockscar are available. Whichever one doesn't go will be hauling tourists to Mun as soon as I can confirm that there'll be enough fuel available to haul them all down and up again. Meantime, Munar mining is going well; the tanks on the surface are full and I need to convert some fuel to deliver ore to Munport 1 for processing at this point. The power module for the Minmusport space station arrives in two days. At this point I'm thinking about loading up the station's engineering staff and bringing them home. Maybe after a vigorous flag-planting mission...

Pointers are on the FAR wiki - start here. Basically, anything red on the static tab is bad and needs testing on the dynamic simulation tab for sure. Test the value of the sub-script; a value of 1 is sufficient in most cases. The behavior of the graph tells you things - a slowly increasing amplitude in an oscillating curve is bad, and a curve that shoots off to Kraken-knows-where is even worse. An oscillating graph that stays the same or damps down is good. Note that you should test Mw and Lß even if you're green across the board. As for testing itself, use 0m/Mach 0.35, 10,000m/Mach 1 and 20,000m/Mach 3 as an initial set of benchmarks, at least until somebody around here gives you a far better set... That answers half your question. As to how "most easily change a single/couple without making the rest worse", it takes experimentation, and i haven't figured all of the details out there my own self. Let's just say don't change something you can't undo, and sorry for the non-answer there.

Yesterday afternoon like so many of you I downloaded KSP v.1.0.5, thus beginning the long slog for mod updates. I won't switch over from 1.0.2 (yeah, I never upgraded to 1.0.4) until I can confirm they're all working. So that brought me to last night. I began by planning for the evening with a check of the two Kerbin rescue contracts I had on the block - both were in low orbits below 85k - as well as a check of the maximum compliment of the Kerbinport space station (sixteen, with seven Kerbals aboard at the beginning of the night). With that information in hand, I fueled the Project Peacock craft docked at the station and rescued Calster, a pilot, and returned him to Kerbinport. I then loaded scientists Nina, Nedcas, Lagerette, Granie and Seandard along with tourist Hilliana aboard a Raven 7b spaceplane and sent them to Kerbinport as well. Rendezvous and docking was a success, though the Raven arrived a little lower on gas than I would've preferred. Nina joined Bob in the lab and the remaining scientists were offloaded into the station's habitation module, jumping the lab's sci production rate up to about 2.6 sci per day; still low, but higher than it was. Calster was loaded as a passenger on the Raven, as was Valentina; Gwezny was placed in the craft's cockpit (Val's still in hack for crashing a Raven and killing a bunch of tourists a while back, even though it was the due to the machinations of the Q continuum throwing the laws of physics out the window (read: FAR crashed on me that night and I hit quicksave instead of quickload)). After doing some calculations, I sent the Peacock out again to pick up Stellie, a scientist, from Kerbin orbit. The rescue was a success and the craft successfully returned to Kerbinport despite running out of fuel - the craft's got overpowered RCS capabilities, and it turned out to be a good thing. Stellie was loaded as a passenger on the Raven. Finally, the Raven was loaded with some truly precious cargo - Bob's thirty experiments that he conducted on his last trip to Mun. The plane was rigged for a return flight to KSC at the tail end of the evening, and the flight is scheduled to take place first thing next time I play the game. Enola Gay returns to Kerbin from Minmus in five hours, after which I've got plans to send a batch of tourists into solar orbit. At this point I need to send up more fuel for Kerbinport. Still haven't landed the Vulture plane from the last fueling mission - I really oughta get onto that sometime soon. In fact, I've got a lot of plane flying in my near future: Land the Raven, Land the Vulture, send up a Magpie (which still hasn't been fully tested) to dock with a craft in orbit to haul down to the surface, and get the damn Albatross refueling plane working or send up another Vulture. All planes. All very very soon...especially if I want to start a new career save.

Just downloaded 1.0.5, though to see if a bug (if any) persists, I'll probably have to wait until there are compatible upgrades of all the mods I use. KIS/KAS at the minimum.

Howdy all, So, I've got an issue with a set of drills I've got on the Mun - Not the best screenie in the world but it's the only one I've got; I'll provide a different one if it becomes necessary. The drills are on the two landers over on the left side of the screenie; those are two are identical to one another. Granted, I did take a winch off the tipped lander and stick it on the one set of drills, but this rig was acting up before that happened. East Crater if that's relevant. 1.0.2 if that's relevant too (just haven't ever gotten around to upgrading to 1.0.4 and I probably won't given that 1.0.5 is in experimentals already). What's happening is that with this particular set of drills, they won't continue mining if I go focus on something else and come back to them later. They do mine ore just fine when I'm present and focused on the rig. They've got plenty of power to operate, there are fuel cells on the one lander tipped on its side for night operations, there's plenty of ore present in the area. I've got a rig almost identical to this one on Minmus, and it continues drilling when I'm not around just fine. Any ideas as to what might be happening with this particular rig? And, more to the point, what should I do to try and correct it? I don't like having to stay focused on this rig just to get it to work right.

I had a decently busy weekend. I kicked things off on Friday night by launching Bob aboard another Fireball 7c craft on what I had hoped to be his final scientific exploration mission. Launch and transfer burn went off without a hitch, so afterwards I went ahead and checked in at the Minmus mining site. Sufficient ore had been gathered to send up another load to Minmusport, so I unhooked the Wildcat 7 lander from the rest of the mining rig and sent it on up. Docking was a success; the ISRU kicked on and started chugging away. I wound up filling up all of the fuel tanks associated with the station completely - including a refuel of the Wildcat - and I had excess ore, more than enough to fill the refinery module's storage tanks while still leaving some in the Wildcat. My plan for now is to leave the Wildcat in place - I won't send it down again until more ore is needed. I'm pretty happy with how my Minmus mining operations have gone up to this point. After that I went ahead and launched another Mosquito 7 drilling rig en route for Mun - while my Minmus mining operations have been a rousing success, Munar ops have been less than stellar so far. Launch and transfer burn went off without any trouble. With that done, I decided to go ahead and try to move some craft off the berths at Munport 1, starting with the Project Peacock craft docked there - I refueled the craft with what little fuel remained at Munport 1 and flew it down to dock with Munport 2 in a lower Munar orbit. Munport 2 was also low on gas but still had sufficient fuel remaining to refuel the Peacock when it arrived. Moving the Peacock turned out to be serendipitous... After focusing on Munar mining next, Bob arrived and began his run. He hit the Twin Craters and Southwest Crater regions without issues. There were several reverted attempts to hit a narrow, nearby stretch of Canyon by the Southwest Crater, but after three attempts it was decided to just have him hit the Northwest Crater instead. Landing at the Northwest Crater was harrowing - he wound up in a region with a 26 degree grade, tipped and slid down a hill. Fortunately nothing broke off of his craft and after finagling his craft for a few minutes I was able to get it upright again. Not the easiest thing to do on Mun without RCS. I got most of the Northwest Crater science gathered, but the Kraken struck when Bob went EVA for a surface sample. That pretty much killed Friday night's gaming. When I loaded the game on Saturday, I discovered the Kraken had had no ill effect (thank God), so I finished gathering Bob's science. With his craft low on fuel, I launched him to orbit, only to discover his craft didn't have enough gas to return to Kerbin. He was only twenty degrees off the plane of Munport 2, though, and I remembered that I had moved the Peacock there, so I went ahead and aligned him with the station and then sent the Peacock to rendezvous with him (Peacock was designed with rescue ops in mind, after all). The rendezvous was a success; Bob collected all of the science he had gathered and transferred it to the Peacock, and the Fireball was abandoned. The Peacock was then sent back to Kerbin and made a successful rendezvous with the Kerbinport space station. Bob was immediately put to work in the station's science lab processing the experiments he gathered and filled up the station's data buffer. I only needed 2200 science to max out my tech tree and there's 2500 potential in the station's buffer, so aside from the insufficient fuel hiccup, Bob's mission was a success. Plans were drawn up to have more scientists sent up to Kerbinport to assist in the emptying of the data buffer, as well as to transport the experiments back to KSC. Meanwhile, the Mosquito launched on Friday arrived at Mun and was put into orbit. It subsquently landed very close to the existing Mosquito lander on the Munar surface, but not close enough to the Midas processing lander for the winch cables to reach. Luckily, Theogel was on the surface and he still had the KAS tools from the refueling op he'd done earlier last week, so I got him out, took one of the winches off the Midas (that thing tipped over so it's not like it was going anywhere any time soon), attached it to the existing Mosquito and ran the line from there: Munar mining output now exceeds that of Minmus, when I can get the damn thing to run right. I had big plans for yesterday but I wound up doing some much needed maintenance on my computer, including a disk defrag. Those plans will have to wait until this evening, I guess.

Last night's activities began with a check of a replacement contract for Bob's science mission to Mun, since I wrapped that up last night. I got a contract to plant a flag on Minmus, which gave me an excuse to resume mining operations down there. Wilney and Joegee were sent down again in their Wildcat 7 craft to the Minmus mining site, linking up with the drill and converter modules on the moon's surface. There was almost another full load of ore ready to deliver; it was about 300 units short. I anticipate being able to make another delivery this evening. I also planted a flag - it was a pretty easy little √100k... The fuel module I launched towards Mun yesterday also arrived; I put it into the same orbital plane as Theogel's Wildcat 7 craft performed a successful rendezvous and docking. With nearly full tanks, Theogel was able to return to Munport 1: He picked up Verise and returned successfully to the Munar mining site in order to resume drilling operations. I've got some definite weirdness going on at Mun...I should ask about it. Meanwhile, I had an empty fuel module in Munar orbit. With nothing else to do, I went ahead and attempted to rendezvous it with the Munport 2 space station. Turns out I had enough gas in the transfer stage to do it - the rendevous was a success though it definitely had me doing some very low flying around periapsis; passed within 400 meters of the surface. With docking complete, I detached the transfer stage, pumped the remaining fuel from Munport 2's transfer stage into the fuel module, decoupled it from the station and sent both transfer stages to collide into the Munar surface. I still have no idea what I'm going to use Munport 2 for, aside from as an additional berth for craft like Project Peacock and Carrier Pigeon. Ended the night with a √15k contract for science over Kerbin; I hailed a satellite already in orbit and sent back a non-existent (and non-profitable) barometric reading for a quick √15k - which in KSP terms is about enough for a latte. I also began designing a nine-Kerbal habitat module for Minmus. I'm not satisfied with the design I've got right now - it's 35 tonnes and awful top-heavy. I'll be tweaking the design tonight, as likely as not.

True. Clarifying then - where do you intend to use your rover, OP?

Last night was pretty busy overall. I began by launching a fuel module to Mun in order to rendezvous with the Wildcat 7 lander currently stranded in orbit forty degrees of the plane of the Munport 1 station. After that rendezvous, the plan is to return Wildcat to Munport 1, pick up Verise and then get my engineers back to work down on the surface. The rendezvous should completely drain the fuel module, but I still think I'll try to send it on to dock with Munport 2 once I'm done with it. The only other choice is to crash it into Mun... After the launch of the fuel module, I went ahead and launched a power module for the Minmusport station of the same design that I launched yesterday for Munport 1 station. Launch was a success and the module should arrive in Minmus's SOI in fifteen days. Before the close of business last night, the power module launched yesterday arrived at Mun, and I affected a successful rendezvous and docking with the station. Hopefully the station will now have sufficient power production to run its refinery module at full power for extended periods without depleting its power supply. With four Gigantor panels and two Fuel Cell Arrays each, I'd certainly hope so... Next, Bob returned from his science mission from the Mun; the mission was a success despite problems late in the mission and the apparent failure of his craft's SAS system (still don't know what happened). He wound up bringing home 3130.9 points worth of science back to Kerbin; with it I unlocked the Twin Bore and Rhino engines, the RC-L01 RGU, S3-14400 fuel tanks and PB-NUKs. I have managed to unlock all the 1000 point nodes on my tech tree at this point; what's left are four nodes on the 550 level, so another 2200 wraps up my tech tree. Bob will make one final trip to the Mun, probably beginning tonight. Bob's arrival with the sci also rounded out a contract, which I need to go ahead and replace next chance I get. The Nahquadah 7 ore hauler arrived at Kerbin last night and is now in a 115x115 orbit around the planet. I will be scheduling a flight of a Magpie 7 spaceplane to take its payload back to the surface, hopefully rounding out a long-standing contract in the process. I don't know if that flight will happen tonight or not, but soon. Last thing I have to report is that Enola Gay, piloted by Cerxie with four tourists aboard and en route to Kerbin from Minmus, made a course correction burn that put her in the same plane of orbit as the Kerbinport space station. Hopefully by doing the plane change now instead of later I'll have saved myself some significant delta-v and won't need to worry about supplying a greater amount of fuel to the craft when it arrives. Enola Gay arrives back at Kerbin in eight days. Plenty going on. Doesn't seem like a lot is getting accomplished, though...

Both Kerba Fett's and 5thHorseman's ideas are excellent, and have been done/proven in the past. Another option - ion propulsion for downforce. Same concept as Kerba Fett's idea. Couldn't tell you which idea is more efficient.

Oh? That's news to me...how do I activate it?

Once you've got KER installed and up and running, you'll see the VESSEL tab pretty readily (there are four tabs - ORBITAL, SURFACE, VESSEL AND RENDEZVOUS). To use it in flight, you'll have to include the Flight Computer part on your rocket; that's a Science part, and you can attach it pretty much radially anywhere. I've never had one blow on me for any reason other than running it into the ground at unholy speeds. There used to be another mod out there that would let KER operate without adding the parts; sadly I've forgotten the name of it. Incidentally, if you've got a maneuver node set up, the ORBITAL tab will contain information on when to initiate the burn based on your current TWR as well as when to cut it off after you've started burning. KAC is another fun one. You can use it to set up alarms before important events (such as when you're making burns). I usually go with a twenty second margin on the burn, though if you've got a craft that doesn't like to turn well, a one-minute margin helps more. The others I've never used. MJ2 and KER might be redundant downloads; again I don't know enough about Mechjeb one way or the other since I've never actually used it myself.

That's a fair question - which mods have you installed? If you've got KER or Mechjeb installed, there should be a tab that tells you what your remaining delta-V is. I'm not that familiar with Mechjeb myself (my plan since 0.21 has been to reward myself with Mechjeb if I ever pull off a successful manned launch from the surface of Eve), but I use KER and I know that it's the VESSEL tab with that mod. Before you deorbit, compare your Surface speed to the ship's remaining delta-V; if your speed is greater than your remaining delta-V, don't land - don't even attempt it. I suppose you could also manually calculate your remaining delta-V. For that, you'd need to go into your resource tab and note the remaining LiquidFuel and Oxidizer levels; tally them together. Then go to the map tab and look at the current mass of your ship - write that down. Each unit of oxidizer and LF has a mass of .005 tonnes; subtract that out of your current mass and you've got your dry mass. You then need to know the vacuum Isp of the engine - you can find that data on the wiki; for a Terrier engine, it's 345. Plug all of that into the Tsiolkovsky Rocket Equation and you'll get your remaining delta-V. You'll need a scientific calculator (or just turn your iPhone sideways), something with the "ln" function. I used to do that sometimes. Nowaways I use FAR. So, assuming you've got the delta-V, you really just need to watch your speed, point retrograde and burn if your speed gets too high. You'll accelerate due to gravitational pull, so you might have to do that a couple of times. Maintaining a set speed really isn't necessary in the early stages of your landing; it gets more important as you approach the deck, and then it's a matter of finding the right throttle setting - if you're accelerating and don't want to be, turn the throttle up. If you're decelerating and don't want to be, turn the throttle down. You want to use the fine-tune throttle controls (Left-Shift and CTRL) as opposed to the full-blast toggles (Z and X).

Last night's activities began with the design and launch of a power generation module. Probably one of the best booster designs I've built in a while; got the payload into orbit without too much fuel left in the final booster stage. The initial module is on its way to Munport now; I'll launch a companion module for the Minmusport station tonight. I spent the rest of the night in an attempt to get Bob and his Fireball 7c craft off the surface of Mun by refueling it. Theogel and Verise were still aboard Munport at the beginning of the night, so I left Verise at the station and had Theogel grab the KAS tools out of the Project Peacock craft still docked at the station. He then departed in the Wildcat craft, which already had the necessary hardware for the repairs incorporated into its design. Theogel affected a successful landing and refuel of Fireball 7c, but in the process was left out of fuel in Munar orbit forty degrees off the plane of Munport. So now he's out of fuel - and since his Wildcat craft is the only ore hauling lander I've got at Mun, my Munar mining operations are on hold until I can get his craft refueled. I don't see an alternative but to send a fuel module to dock with him - I had hoped to not have to send another one of those up to Mun (the mining ops were supposed to render those obsolete, they're expensive as hell and tricky to launch). So the lesson there kiddos - If you don't think you can pull off a landing and get back into orbit safely, you probably can't. So don't land. Otherwise you too might ruin your mining operations. Things didn't exactly go peachy for Bob after the refuel either. He pulled a reorientation roll a bit too quickly during his launch from Mun and managed to rip his solar panels right off due to centrifugal force. He is heading back to Kerbin now and should make it, but I've had to lock his batteries down so that he'll have some juice left for opening up the chutes at the end. Just one more damn thing, right? Hopefully tonight I'll have better luck with things in general.

It's been a while since I did the Mun part 1 tutorial - is that the one where they give you the ship with three Terriers on a tri-adapter, and no lander legs? That's a pretty crummy ship to attempt a Mun landing with, I know - but I also know from first-hand experience that it is possible to do. I'm assuming you have never landed a craft on Mun successfully and that you don't use flight assistance mods like KER or Mechjeb, something that would give you a flight readout of your altitude above ground or calculate at what altitude you must begin a suicide burn (or die). So, general tips for Munar landing, then. Keep your speed generally below 100 m/s as you descend; the more thrust your craft produces, the faster you can go in the early stages of the landing - the point is that you want to be able to decelerate quickly. What you'll then want to do is go into IVA mode (C-key by default) and look for your radar altimeter gauge - the one that looks like this: The one in your cockpit will be in units of meters, not feet like the one in the picture; otherwise they'll look and function exactly the same. The moment you see the needle on that gauge start to twitch, you're 2500 meters over the deck. Switch back to normal view and check your altimeter, and subtract 2500 from it - the result is the elevation of the deck, at which point you're going to want to be stopped. Burn retrograde (set your speedometer to Surface mode if you need to by clicking on it) until your velocity is 20 m/s or so, and then reduce that down as you get within 100 meters of the deck to about 5 m/s or so. For the Mun landing tutorial, since the craft has no lander legs you're going to be setting down on the engine bells, so you need to touch down as gently as you can manage. That's not the most efficient way of making a Mun landing - for that, you want to do a suicide burn (a burn that drops your speed to zero the moment your pads touch the deck, a tricky maneuver that only veterans and folks with flight assistance mods can pull off). But it's a good way to learn until you can get the hang of it. One other piece of advice - and this is for practice purposes - is to quicksave before you begin your landing (F5-key). When you botch it, hit F9 for quickload and you can try again. Everybody botches it the first few times - which makes the first time you pull it off all the more awesome. Even when you become more seasoned, F5 before landing is an essential part of the procedure - I've been playing the game for something around three years now, and I still screw up Mun landings occasionally. And I use KER, so go figure that one out...