capi3101

Send up Bruce Willis Kerman and Ben Affleck Kerman, and let them stay on the rock as it plummets into the surface... Alright - if I'm calculating this right, impact is in about 15.5 days. The good news is that you've got Stability, which is the pre-requisite for General Construction, which is the pre-requisite for Advanced Construction, which is the pre-requisite for Actuators (which gives you the claw). That's only 295 science points you need to get before you've got it. You're missing a couple of other techs that I would consider essential for a rendezvous and docking mission -General Rocketry, Flight Control and Advanced Flight Control, possibly Fuel Systems as well - which amount to another 245 points, so about 540 points total. The good news is that you've unlocked enough tech to put together a Geschosskopf Science Pack. I'd build one of those bad boys and do the first two of Geschosskopf's suggestions - put a pack at a 100 kilometer orbit and bring it down, then do a second mission to 400 kilometers and bring it back down. If you've done that already, a Munar fly-by or two should get you the tech you need. Those missions might take you a day, and if you're judicious about how you build them they'll cost you not much more than 30,000 kerbucks a pop or so (that was about the cost of the one I sent to Mun, and that one could land). Long and the short of it - you've got time and you've got the equipment, as long as you've got moola you can pull off a graboid mission.

Personally, unless you're clipping the little lights at the end of the runway and tearing stuff up, I wouldn't sweat it too much if you have to use the whole runway to take off; wheels too far back eliminate the threat of tail strike as a rule. Where you're in trouble is if, after flying off the end of the runway, you start nosing down towards the drink instead of picking up altitude. If I see that, I revert to the VAB toot-sweet... If your back wheels are right by your CoM and you still can't take off, I'd suggest throwing on a pair of canards or three (as long as it doesn't overcorrect your CoL, that is) to give yourself more torque by the nose. In my experience, craft in KSP (stock anyway) fly better with a combo of canards and elevons. If that doesn't work - check the mass of your craft, make sure you're using enough thrust and lifting surfaces, and don't try taking off until you do unless you want to send your Kerbals swimming.

Nice looking ship there, SRV Ron. I don't use KW myself - if I wanted to try to replicate that craft stock, what would be the best equivalents? Myself, I did moar parts testing for kerbux (funds? dollars? what's the general consensus on the meaning of that little radical symbol the game uses for "money" anyway) and did my first career Mün shot with a Geschosskopf Sci Pack lander, netted about 550 Science. Not much but I'm still low enough down in the tech tree to unlock some important stuff, like RCS and thermometers. I've got a Kerbal rescue mission coming up; figured I wanted RCS for that, and the thermo will let me launch reusable sci probes for bux (at last). Followed Kashua's advice for the TR-18A test. Overshot the parameters on the launch but I was able to get in the right spot to conduct the test on the descent; managed to bring the whole contraption down intact west of the VAB.

Getting back to your original question, you want your turbojet TWR somewhere around 0.75 at takeoff, or roughly 1 turbojet per 15 total tonnes of craft. You also have to have enough lift-generating surfaces to actually take off; swept wings and delta wings support about three tonnes of craft per wing (i.e. six per pair), while wing connectors generally support one tonne each. Control surfaces also support about one tonne a piece. That's just some general guidelines when it comes to design.

You mean take the obvious route? Didn't think of that... #facepalm.

Since you're short on funds, I'd suggest taking parts testing contracts. In particular, if you can find ones that let you test while landed on Kerbin, those will help you beef back up your coffers; Wanderfound's method works wonders. If you haven't got Staputniks yet, use a manned pod...and make sure you've got a chute on it...

Make sure you've got your separators on the BZ-52, not in the BZ-52. That one got me a few times in the early going... A visual might help - Left hand side of the screen, just to the right of the Stage 1 stack seperator icon, you see a probe there attached to a CSM using BZ-52 and the tiny stack decoupler. Note how it looks - if the separator was in the BZ-52, it'd appear to be about half as tall, and it wouldn't decouple properly. It's also aimed so that the separator will stay attached to the CSM, thereby freeing the ant engine to work on the probe. In the VAB, that particular combination looked like there was no physical connection whatsover...that was kinda freaky. As far as the docking port goes, what options are you given? Is there just "control from here", or is there also one that says something like "decouple" or somes-uch? You shouldn't see "undock" when there's not a corresponding docking port on your probes.

Spent the weekend filling out parts testing contracts. Good way to build up some extra coin and a sci point or two in the early going. Still have a TR-18 contract with some really touchy parameters I haven't figured out yet (the band is 17,000-19,200 meters at 90-190 m/s; anyone got any pointers that don't involve spaceplanes?). Sent up a science satellite. Forgot that a Sci Jr. is one of those experiments that has to be re-set when you transmit the data from it, and I haven't unlocked docking ports yet (but hey, that's why the good Lord invented RCS and KAS, right?) Sent Jeb up on Geschosskopf Science Pack missions to low and high Kerbin orbit; I've got enough of the tech tree unlocked at this point to attempt a Mün shot and about 200k Kerbucks (or whatever the crap people are calling them) saved up from contracts. I'm really enjoying 0.24 so far.

Landing gear is for the weak...... :cool: Yesterday President O'Bummer Kerman decided to funnel a few kerbucks back into my space program (i.e. I played seriously last night for the first time in about six months). Tried out the new career mode; I'm enjoying that so far. I got Jeb up into orbit, ran him out of gas with a periapsis in high atmosphere. Still trying to get him down. Did a couple of parts tests too. Trying to remember my preferences for unlocking the tech tree.

Both cantab's and Reactordrone's advice is sound - particularly with small, overpowered rovers.

I'd follow Kashua's advice. I will only add that if it's your first time out to Gilly, you should know that it's a really small target - its SOI is just over 125 kilometers across, so your burn is going to have to be pretty precise if you want to get the intercept - there won't be much separation between colliding with Gilly and missing it completely. Don't want to make you nervous or anything, just a friendly head's up.

It's not hard, though familiarizing yourself with KSP's brand of flight controls will add a degree of challenge to it. The lack of landing guides (you know, an ILS) may also take some getting used to, unless you want to build such a system manually. A flag or base at both ends of the runway makes a good ILS for alignment (especially if you add more markers - one at 1 km, one at 5 km and then every 5 km after that out to say 30 km or so), doubly so if you name the flag/base after the distance to the runway because you can then use it to figure your approach glide slope and tell if you're too high or too low. Since you've got a flight sim background, the specifics of the actual landing should be old hat.

Not much else I can add here - check to make sure your probes are independently powered, and I would second the advice to use stack separators (or even stack decouplers; the little ones work great on probes, especially if you attach a BZ-52 to the sides of your ship and then stick them on from there). Switch control with the bracket keys after it's decoupled and pray you haven't screwed anything up design-wise.

General guidelines for rovers - build them low, build them wide, add/use SAS/a reaction wheel, and use docking mode while driving. I also like to encase the critical bits (probe core, batteries/RTGs, etc.) in parts with high impact tolerance (structural panels/girders), so the slightest bump doesn't cause a massive, mission ending explosion. I definitely would not use the probe core and it's main battery as a hood ornament... Folks here have given you some good advice; if you're not adverse to redesigning your rover, I'd do that. Otherwise I'd just slow down if you can...Duna does have some majorly sloped terrain (trust me, I know).

While you're doing your braking burn over Mun prior to landing, make sure your speedometer is set for Surface mode and keep an eye on your vertical ascent/descent meter. If you start descending, pitch yourself up towards the vertical - not too much; as a rule you don't want to start ascending at a rate much more than 5 m/s. Make sure you're burning retrograde. Lower to 2/3 throttle as your speed goes below 100 m/s, then again as you slow past 30 m/s or so. Once you're roughly vertical, go IVA and find your radar altimeter. You're generally okay to freefall until that starts twitching - but keep your speed low (no more than 50 m/s). Once it starts twitching, you'll have an idea of the location of the deck. At that point it's just keeping speed under control; you don't want it greater than 12 m/s if you want to survive landing, and generally 5 m/s or less assures that nothing will break. Those are just general guidelines; for a better walkthrough, I'd need to see your lander.

Once you've EVA's a kerbal, use the bracket keys to switch control back to your ship, EVA the next kerbal, rinse and repeat. Bear in mind that you can only control one Kerbal (or your craft) at a time.

You want to be using nukes pretty much for transfer stages only - they work as part of an orbital insertion stage, but they really shine in situations where you need high efficiency without a great deal of thrust. You don't want them on your payload-to-orbit booster, that's for sure (to be fair, I did this a couple of times, but only because I was having a heavy transfer stage launch itself into orbit with the intent of refueling it once it was up there) If you do find yourself in need of additional thrust, you might try designing a transfer stage kinda like this one: Though it's perfectly okay to just use a single bigger can of fuel if that's what you want to do

Yeah, you've got what Keptin calls a "tail-dragger" gear setup. For your first couple of designs, you might want to flip that around into a "tricycle" setup, where the single wheel is up front and you've got two wheels in the back. Just in case you've never seen it - http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/52080-Basic-Aircraft-Design-Explained-Simply-With-Pictures It's a good introduction to spaceplane design. EDIT: And Mesons beat me to it...

40 tonnes isn't all that much to lift; Temstar's Zenith V is capable of lifting that payload easily. Alternatively, you can follow his guide to good asparagus to build one of your own. The Zeniths are a few versions old now but they're still good boosters. I'm still hoping Temstar will at some point put together something that surpasses the Supernova as far as maximum payload capacity... You can even launch 40 tonnes into orbit with a single stage booster, though you'll have to be judicious about how you build it and DEFINITELY about how you fly it (pretty much just throttle back after you've made your gravity turn to the green zone of the gee meter, keeping the AP between 30-60 seconds until you're well up into the atmosphere and a minimal throttle burst for orbital insertion). Pre-0.24, I would've said eight mainsails and nine stacks of three jumbo-tanks each, with fuel lines running from the center stack to the eight outboard stacks. I have yet to fully analyze the 0.24 parts owing to the different wet/dry fuel tank mass ratio. No doubt far larger payloads could be put up with those engines.

I've been to Duna a few times, and you pretty much can do it anyway you want to - either everything in one big shebang or performing various docking missions for whatever stage of the game you're going with. Your strategy (that of leaving a return stage in orbit) is sound and if you want to do it that way you're welcome to do so. Big thing of course is to make sure the final stage will have enough delta-V to get your Kerbals back. Bit rushed at the moment, otherwise I'd post the numbers. Largest number of Kerbals to Duna at once for me: 6. Just FYI.

Responded to your PM. Admins are probably going to lock down this thread for gross necromancy... Those are structural panels held on by strut connectors. There's also a pair of RTGs there; the Hound is RTG powered. IIRC I put that panel out in front specifically to protect those forward RTGs, which would otherwise be outside of that protective "sandwich" for critical parts. The prototype was slightly underpowered, hence their addition. Might've also done that to help better protect the headlight.

Hmm...if you need the canards up front, you might try moving them further back along the cockpit; say as close to the intakes as you can manage sans clipping. It would have the same general effect - it'd put the center of lift further back at takeoff. Still don't know what you're going to do later in the flight. Of course, as the canards move, so would the CoM...so maybe never mind on this one. I'll give the matter some thought and see if I can come up with something more practical.

Been a while since I've looked up this stuff...lemme see if I can find it real quick. Here we go: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/52080-Basic-Aircraft-Design-Explained-Simply-With-Pictures Basically, you need to move your center of lift further back and/or move your center of mass further forward. That might affect the smoothness of the flight in the early going, but unless you're going for a one way trip up, it's an adjustment you'll have to make. Figuring out how to get the right balance between the two throughout an entire flight is what makes or breaks a spaceplane design; I've been there myself a number of times. I will say that TAC Fuel Balancer does quite help a bit, if you're not adverse to utilizing mods. One of the other things I tried in some of my designs was using monoprop as ballast tanks - stick an empty set towards the nose and a full set towards the tail; once in orbit, shift it to the nose - this moves the center of mass forward. I had some success with that. The rest of y'all can jump in any time now...

What you're describing sounds like a classic case of shifting CoM during flight. Do this - while still in the VAB, turn on the CoM and CoL meatballs and temporarily drain the fuel tanks in the order they would drain in flight. If the CoL goes ahead of the CoM at any point, you're going to lost stability and start nosing up pretty much constantly.

Farted around with a Mün lander design. Overcooked it - it was capable of taking off from Kerbin. Mainly was just re-familiarizing myself with the game since it's been a few months since the last time I played.