capi3101

Better question is whether or not you have a docking port on the lander already. If not, you won't be retrieving the lander...

You can grab the mounts...I know because I was able to do it with my last spacewalk mission. I'd just send up an empty mount of two along with the same flight, use a Kerbal to attach the mounts and then start moving the containers on over. KAS won't let you grab the mount while there's a container in it, unfortunately, which is too bad because it would save both time and mass. On the other hand, extended spacewalks are kinda fun...

I think some of the other folks have answered that question adequately at this point. I'd go with them; I've never tried my own self. ...I managed to finally get this ugly monstrosity design to the point where I could get it into orbit, dock with an orbiting transfer stage, transfer out most of its fuel and land it safely on the runway. Took me forever to get the proper fuel balance for landing back down though...with the orange tank fully emptied, she was flip-happy, even with the RCS tank ballast system I'd set up (the rear one's full at launch, the forward one's empty; in orbit I pump from rear to front to move the center of mass forward). Flying spaceplanes? I have that down. Building spaceplanes? I still have some issues...

I was fixing to send up an unmanned lander anyway; I could easily throw on a couple of parts containers, detatch them from the lander and re-deploy them to the station. Any suggestions for which parts (in your experience) would be the most useful to put in them? A couple of struts, obviously. Maybe some radial chutes.

Yeah, I still haven't figured out a good way to figure in the change in Isp over the course of a launch; might be something worth studying. I also neglected to subtract off the delta-V necessary to get the contraption up to 1700 in the first place. I don't know if those two factors combined would be sufficient to make lifting a payload - any payload - a possibility or not. I have successfully employed LV-Ns as a launch stage rocket before...twenty-five of them in concert......

Yeah, UmbralRaptor had it correct first; we both wound up with the same figure after rounding when I made my second attempt. Makes me wonder at what payload mass the LV-N becomes a viable launch engine (by which I mean stick a few SRBs that can get it up to at least 1750, decouple them and let the LV-N take over from there and get the payload into orbit). It couldn't be that terribly high... Well...let's work that out. Minimal acceptable launch TWR is around 1.2, so let's go with that. Optimal is 1.6... TWR = T/GM, T/(TWR*G) = M 60 / (1.2 * 9.8) = 5.102 tonnes 60 / (1.6 * 9.8) = 3.827 tonnes delta-V = ln(M/Mo) *Isp *9.8 4500 = ln(M/Mo) * 390 *9.8 M = 3.24590Mo = 5.102, Mo = 1.57183 M = 3.24590Mo = 3.827, Mo = 1.17903 Answers that - the math says it's impossible...the dry mass of an LV-N by itself is 2.25 tonnes......

Use the turbojet; you don't want to bother with the basic jet unless you're really jonesin' to spaceplane and haven't unlocked the turbojet. By the same token, you want the ram air intake - don't bother with the circular or radial unless they're the best you've got, and then swap them out once they're available. And if you really have problems, some folks really like the RAPIER.

Well, using the same method as earlier, there's 580 seconds difference between sea level Isp (220) and vacuum Isp (800) for an LV-N. 390 is 170 above the sea level Isp; divide 170/580 to get 0.293, subtract from 1 to get 0.707. So it should surpass 390 when the atmospheric pressure is around 71% that of sea level. The scale equation for Kerbin from the wiki is p = e^(-alt/5000), thus: p = e^(-alt/5000) = 0.71 -alt/5000 = ln(0.71) alt=-5000*ln(0.71) = -5000 * -3.4249 = 17,124.52 meters Feel free to check the math, y'all. EDIT: Okay - one of us is definitely off... EDIT-EDIT: And it's me. On a second calculation and ignoring the earlier rounding, I get 1,733.62 meters.

Oughta be somewhere in the neighborhood of 336, if I'm doing the math right. Laythe's sea level air pressure is 80% that of Kerbin's.

Looks like your design is missing a couple of chutes as is (the side chutes and the top chute) on the capsule. You could also stick that solar panel over on the fuel tanks...by the time you're in re-entry they won't be any good anyway. You probably could set up a lab-lander the way you proposed without issue; might have to try that kind of design my own self. Bear in mind that your TWR will be a bit lower; you could offset that with an X200-8 tank and engine under the lab, unless you've still got oodles of TWR.

Basically, you want to crack open your intakes when you've got somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.05-0.07 intake air per turbojet on your craft. And then when you've got them all cracked open and you can't get more air, you throttle back a bit. You want to keep your jets going for as long as you can and it's only when you've run out of jet fuel or can't accelerate further on your jets that you switch over to rockets; at that point you want to close your intakes - though they aren't generating very much drag, they are generating a little bit. Takeoff, get your nose up; you want to get above the soup (i.e. above 10,000) as quickly as you can manage without stalling. After that, you want to start leveling out a bit and picking up horizontal speed - about the time you're above 15,000 or so, you don't want a lot of vertical speed - 10 m/s or so is plenty. The zone from 20,000-25,000 is where you want to try to pick up as much of your horizontal velocity as you can; by 30,000 the air is starting to get a bit thin. There are several good spaceplane piloting tutorials; I'll have to get you a few links. That oughta get you started, though.

Finally got the Too Little Too Late 7 mission rendezvoused with the Class E. Decoupled the steering booms one by one, dotted the rock with the things, and was able to steer the big sucker. Next trick is going to be to reduce the inclination of the thing - I've already verified that the TLTL mission won't have enough delta-V to get it all the way to the equator, but it should get it down to 22 degrees inclination, which should make a third rendezvous mission easier. I'm just thrilled that I can finally steer the damn thing. Switched over to the Pipe Dream 7 to finish its mission to rendezvous with Mere. Hit time warp and it was instantaneously eaten by the Kraken. Not sure which Kraken that was...from the descriptions, though, it sounds like a General Kraken. I thought the General Kraken was supposed to be dead. The replacement mission for Pipe Dream 7 got into orbit okay but once it hit MECO - I swear the engine was off - I noticed that its orbit was continuing to increase. Sounded like the beginnings of a Warp Kraken, so at that point I reverted that flight and got out of the game. I'll try again with the Pipe Dream mission tonight if I get an opportunity - I'm anxious to finally get to put the station to good use.

You can definitely do a lab-lander and I think that configuration works pretty well for Minmus, less so for Mun. The trick with lab-landers becomes making sure you've got enough chutes to successfully retrieve the lab when you get back to Kerbin - labs have a notoriously low impact tolerance (just 6 m/s). Lab-landers also have a tendency to be bulky and top heavy, so be mindful of how you put the thing together. Minmus is a worthy target to be sure; there are nine biomes, and the sci multiplier is 5x for surface experiments (as opposed to 4x for Mun - though it has fifteen biomes).

That's definitely doable; two of your landers would wind up minus a chute (the one on top of the command pod) but that shouldn't be an insurmountable problem; they'll just come in a little faster than they would ordinarily but should still impact at a survivable speed. Geschosskopf's sci pack landers as they appear in the second post of his thread (in the pictures) have a mass of about 10.786 tonnes; three of them together with a transfer stage big enough to shoot them to the Mun would weigh 77.19 tonnes (assuming a single LV-909 is used for the transfer stage and that you pack 22.8 tonnes of fuel tanks - an X200-32 and an X200-8 would come close to that; if you have nukes, so much the better). You oughta be able to get that into Kerbin orbit with a classic 4-stage asparagus setup with a Mainsail and three radial engines in the core and mainsails on the boosters, with each stack containing an orange tank, an X200-32 and an FL-T400 (or an X200-8 with 40-45% of the fuel removed). Each lander would arrive with enough delta-V available to it to make the transfer to Mun, land, launch and get back to Kerbin; since they'd get to Munar orbit fully fueled, you should have plenty for inclination changes. Price might be the limiting factor on that mission; I haven't calculated that...

No, it's there in the Mk1 Command Pod - right side of the navball, just below the altimeter (which is just below the rate of ascent/descent gauge) The X200-8 trick works pretty well; it actually provides the same amount of fuel as an FL-T800 - more than you need, but definitely gives you a nice margin for error.

I have to haul the strut up there with a container or grab it off another craft, right? I use KAS (those are KAS winches on the insides of the locks and I did a big spacewalk to add a series of radial connector ports to the hub), so this is an option for me. Still haven't used it all that much. Occurs to me that I added those winches and ports to assist with the docking procedure but I wound up not needing them...anybody foresee disaster if I try to hook 'em up and try to use them to reduce the gaps? Glad y'all like the design; Tex_NL really deserves the credit for it. I just followed a recipe.

Didn't do much of anything yesterday besides parts testing. On the plus side, I got six parts tested in a single launch., Made 200,000 in profit and 160 science; helped offset the tremendous cost of the Mere space station and the launch of Too Little Too Late 7 (which is still en route to its target). Yeah, yesterday was pretty boring 'side from the parts testing...

Wanderfound and Sirrobert have given you the advice I would've - widen the base; depending on how far along you are in the tech tree, the easiest way to do that is to replace the single FL-T400 with an FL-T100 and attach 3-4 additional FL-T100s radially, using fuel ducts to feed those tanks. You then set your lander legs on those outboard tanks, which then widens and shortens your stack and makes it less prone to tipping over on landing (which is an issue a lot of us have faced the first few times we make it down without 'sploding - correctable with pod torque on Minmus but a catastrophic mission killer on Mun). If you haven't got fuel ducts, keep the FL-T400 but put the lander legs out on Modular Girder Segments; this does nothing to shorten the stack but it at least makes it wider and you should still have enough fuel to make it there and back. Consider adding an FL-T100 to the stack offset the delta-V lost to the mass of the girders. Once it's available, swap out the Mk1 Command Pod with a Mk1 Lander Can. Less dead-mass = more delta-v, and only slightly less steering authority (still enough for your purposes). I might also suggest a light or two aimed at the surface once they're available; the reflection off the surface will give you an idea of how close you are to the deck (i.e. how much longer you've got until you really should be slowing down). RCS is also unnecessary for a lander that light; the command pod will provide plenty of steering authority on its own. It's generally less necessary unless you plan to do docking operations with your craft; then it becomes almost essential. As far as science is concerned, there are varying schools of thought. I personally subscribe to the Geschosskopf school of "hit that biome once and never have to go back ever again", but whatever works best for you works best for you. The science pack is a pretty handy way of gathering a boatload of science at a time, though (particularly if you use an action group to set up a "sci bomb" like Geschosskopf suggests, activating all the tests simultaneously with a single keystroke). Still relatively cheap to construct as well. Something to consider when you've got more practice with landing. Lessee....other advice. IIRC somebody mentioned going IVA to use the radar altimeter; I can't stress enough how good that advice is if you're playing without a piloting assistance mod like KER (which I highly recommend) or Mechjeb (which I've never used so I can't say one way or another how good it is). When I play the demo, I still use that method. What you do is after you've made your braking burn and you're pretty much vertical, go IVA and look for a gauge that looks like this one: The needle won't twitch until you're closer than 2,500 meters to the surface. Once it reads 2,000, go back to staging view (hit "c" to toggle between IVA and staging view) and note your altimeter reading. Take 2,000 off of that reading; the result is the rough elevation of the deck. Use that estimate to slow down. If you need to, occasionally go back to IVA and glance at the gauge again to figure out how much further you've got. With the basic design I mentioned in my last post, bingo fuel is at 80 liquid fuel units. At 90, be thinking about heading back into space if you're not close to the deck. At 80, you better be hitting space. At 70, you might as well finish landing because you're not making it back to Kerbin... Last bit of advice I can give: hit F5 before you make the landing attempt and hit F9 when you mess it up. Practice, practice, practice until you get it right. Best of luck.

I assembled the station in Munar orbit with multiple launches. Nineteen to be exact - the hub, four missions for the spokes, eight missions for the individual ring modules, and six missions for the locks (I had issues with two of the locks - one was the original design, one was a corrective attempt that turned out to be too big to connect the two ports together - the ports were clipping into one another; try as they might they wouldn't come together to dock)). I started out by putting the thing together in the VAB as per Tex_NL's original instructions, adding a lock to one side to see how well it would fit and then adjusting the length of the spoke girders until it looked right. That'll probably be what I wind up doing. I'll have to let y'all know how well it winds up working. Yeah, I saw that thread last week, and I mentioned having "a similar issue" then...hence this thread and my promise to stop hijacking that one. Your ring turned out pretty freakin' awesome, BTW.

I had thought that the difference might be due to minute differences in the rotation of the constituent parts. I don't know the best way to figure out if that's the case or not; one of the reasons why I linked the persistence file.

Howdy, y'all. I've recently built a circular space station, a nice hub and wheel design using a set of instructions posted originally by Tex_NL. I call my space station "Mere" (which is a stupid name; I'm thinking about changing it but that's all that important right now). Here's how she looks: I made the decision early on in the design to go ahead and add "locks" in between the modules of the ring to go ahead and link them together, so that I would actually have a fully constructed ring (the original design plans don't call for the locks). Over the weekend, I added the fourth and final lock to the design and I've noticed something off about the station - while I did get a good double-dock on the locks when they went in place, all four of them now exhibit a visible "gap" between some of the ports. The game insists the ports are still docked, though. Here's what I mean: (That particular set of ports is exhibiting the smallest gap I'm seeing; truth be told that probably wasn't the best screenie I could've picked). Any ideas what might be causing this? More to the point, I have plans to move my station to Minmus once I'm done grinding science out of the Mun, so is this something I need to worry myself about? Any suggestions on how to go about fixing it? Copy of my current game's persistence file, in case anybody needs that data to solve the issue. Thanks in advance, y'all.

Finished principal construction work on Space Station Mere: She does have a few issues, so I'll be asking the community for some assistance there later this morning. Meantime, I built the reusable science lander designed to accompany the station to grind out Munar science. It's currently en route. My latest 'tater catcher mission - Too Little Too Late 7 - is also trying to catch up with the second Class E I put into Kerbin orbit at the moment. The mission is hauling autonomous Verner Engine booms and extra fuel to help steer the big sucker, with the goal of getting it into a low, stable equatorial orbit. I still have no idea what I'll do with the thing once it's there, nor do I have an idea of what I'll name it when the time comes...

If the LV-909 is giving you too much thrust, you might consider switching to a 48-7S; it's still plenty powerful for Mun and Minmus landings and it's what I generally use on my designs once it's available. What's the configuration of your lander, anyway? By which I mean what parts are you using? It'd give us an idea of just exactly how light of a lander you're using. I suspect it's a very basic design - maybe a Mk1 Pod, Mk16 Chute, FL-T400, LV-909, 2xZ-100 batteries, 2xOX-STAT solar panels, and 4xLT-1 landing struts - and if that's the case there's definitely some suggestions we all can give you to improve your general design.

The kinematic equations can't be directly applied, though; as I said in my previous post, the ship's mass is not constant (which by Newton's Second Law has the implication that the braking acceleration will increase with respect to time) and the gravitational acceleration is also not constant (by definition, g = GM/R^2, where GM is the body's gravitational parameter and R is the distance to the center of mass - including altitude; since R decreases as you descend and it's inversely proprtional to g, g will increase with respect to time). In both of your example cases, the end effect of these factors would be that you wouldn't be on the ground when you hit zero m/s; you'd be close, but not quite there (the rate at which the acceleration due to gravity increases should be less than the rate at which the deceleration due to thrust increases, though I'd have to run a proof mathematically to be sure).

Had Vernors on my first 'tater catcher design in lieu of RCS blocks. Forgot that the Vernors only shoot in a single direction at a time - when it comes to docking, you have to make sure you set a few to make prograde/retrograde burns. Guess who didn't realize that until the time came to hook onto the rock...