capi3101

I don't remember that; have they updated that mod in the last few months?

I would agree that OP should be using a larger docking port given the size of what he's hauling around. That said, pulling the payload as a rule produces less wobble than pushing in my experience. Only other thing I can think of trying would be to bring that set of engines closer in to the centerline of the craft; the further out the engines are, the more unwanted torque that will be produced when your SAS attempts to compensate for the wobble. Quantum struts might help here; do they stay attached when the payload undocks, or come back into play when the payload re-docks? I don't know enough about the mod to say one way or the other...

To be honest, I think a fair amount of whether multiple NERVAs are necessary is a matter of which mods you're using. If you've got a lot of mods that improve the accuracy of your burns (Mechjeb still around? It's been a few months for me, guys; it's the one I'm thinking about here), you probably could get away with fewer. If you're less confident of your piloting or playing stock, I'd suggest multiple engines despite the increased cost and decreased efficiency; thrust definitely matters when you're sitting there having to eyeball it.

1) Mars was one of the potential mission sites for the proposed Constellation Project as I recall, and there's a challenge here on the forums that's been going on for a few versions now that replicates that project. Constellation would've seen craft docked in orbit before heading on to their final destinations. Got an imgur album of the Duna portion of my entry in the challenge; others too but that's the only one relevant to the question. 2) Nope. You want nukes. One nuke gives you good efficiency but crappy thrust; more gives you better thrust but cuts into your efficiency. Myself, I use clusters of fou; seems to be a good balance. At least, it did a few versions ago. 3.) How many Kerbals would be a reasonable number to send? I've been thinking three, but that seems monumentally too few for such an important mission. There's a mod part that is a 7 seated capsule which looks very interesting. Do you think 7 is too many for a first mission? 3) Naw, send as many as you like. The more you send, the more Internets you earn. Me, I sent six in that album. Could've sent more if I felt like leaving a few behind.

Aw, dagnabbit...I was hoping to get to that Eve SSTO myself. I suppose it helps if you pick up the game every now and again...

Checked in with y'all today for the hell of it; it seems I haven't even bothered to log in to the forums since April. Anybody want to give me the low-down on what all I've missed?

What's the TWR on your booster? I've had issues before with payloads being served up at IHOP, and I traced back the problem to too high of a TWR. In general, keep the gee meter at the top of the green zone after you've made your gravity turn and you should be good; throttle down if you need to. The other thing is to ditch the big RCS tanks entirely; a quad of RCS cylinders holds just as much monoprop as a big tank and they're a hell of a lot sturdier. You can set them diagonal to the docking ports, or perhaps cluster them up on the end of that Rockomax Adapter you've got there.

I've had the unintended impactor experience on Dres my own self. Moar delta-V helps, obviously.

Yeah - the only thing about Eve that's even remotely difficult (well, compared to any interplanetary mission) is the ascent from its surface, but boy howdy is that ascent difficult. Designing a vehicle that can do it is one of the major challenges of the game; I have yet to do it my own self (really need to unpack the vehicle I was going to make the attempt with in 0.23.0 and see if the optimizations in 0.23.5 would make it any easier to fly; its part count was what held it back, and the one I designed in 0.23.5 doesn't want to steer).

http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Drag#Drag - that should answer your first three questions succinctly. To be thorough: 1) Drag is independent of AoA 2) You do use the average drag coefficient, which in the stock game is 0.2 for almost every part - so much so that you can in general use 0.2 in all cases and get away with it. 3) Drag is calculated the same at both subsonic and supersonic speeds As for lift, that's another story; to be honest I'm not sure how it's calculated.

Tried to launch the Eve Two on its epic journey to Eve. Discovered the damn thing won't steer worth anything. Kinda hacked off...

Fixed the chute problem by sticking rockomax decouplers underneath the big decouplers. Not an optimal solution by any means, but it's a working solution. At this point, Eve Two's ready to fly. I wonder if I should add some RCS to the design for the flight to Eve; thing's pretty hard to steer as is. Added RTGs tonight; put them with the lander leg clusters on the external tanks so they should eject off right after take off at Eve. Power needs are set. Still need to get the whole thing into Kerbin orbit to see if my overall plan is going to work or not.

That......is pretty damn awesome. With the Claw, wouldn't it be possible to put a structure down there now and keep it there permanently? That begs a challenge of its own, me thinks...better check to see if its feasible first. Points based on structure mass and depth with some prerequisites (like inhabitability) and bonuses (science instruments or whatever; anyone want to point me to some good base-building challenges, that'd be helpful.)

Alrighty. So, I haven't had hardly any time to play KSP since the 0.23.5 update came out but last night I was able to get in some time and I used it to work on Eve Two, with the goal of making it prepped for its journey to Eve. So, that meant adding ladders, chutes, lander legs and so forth, and last night I did all that and began testing to see how the equipment would hold up. Usual test battery - infinite fuel on, launch, burn to 25000 ASL, engines off, infinite fuel off, deploy chutes, land (checking characteristics of chute openings), pop off the chutes, take off, pop off the lander legs, try and make orbit. The lander legs held the weight of rocket and I was able to land safely. The ladders reached all the way to the ground, though I noted Jeb clipping through struts at more than one point (he still made it up and down okay, but had problems going anywhere once he was on the ground, like there were problems with collision meshes or something). Chutes deployed without ripping off though they didn't slow me down sufficiently for a safe landing on Kerbin. All in all, a generally successful array of tests. Where I encountered an issue was with ejecting the chutes. I built an improved version of my earlier chute pack for the new parts; each pack contains six large chutes, six drogues and eight radials on top of one of the new very large decouplers, with six seperatrons to push it up and away from the stack. Testing of the pack on a single stack went very well - they performed even better than the original packs in terms of getting clear of the rocket. On Eve Two, I set the decouplers for all six packs to fire in the same stage and for their seperatrons to all ignite at the same time, same as the planned ejection sequence for Eve One. My impression was that everything in a stage activates when you hit the space bar to activate that stage. That's been the way things have been in KSP from the beginning. And yet last night when I got to the stage to eject my packs... 1) They didn't eject all at once 2) The seperatrons didn't ignite all at once 3) When they did finally go, they blew up the upper fuel tank on which they were resting. I'm hoping this was just a fluke, something going on with my local instance of KSP last night. But to be sure, I figured I'd share the Craft file with y'all to see if it does it to you guys too. And if it does, maybe we can all figure out what's going on together. Still need to figure out how best to launch a new resupply stage...

Thanks. I had some issues with the Eve Two last night that I'd like to talk about with y'all; I need to get to work though, so I'll post again here after a bit.

Looks like you've got everything you'd need to build the Apollo 11 CSM/LM payload except for the Mk2 Lander Can, which you get with Large Control. Here's what I'll suggest - instead of a Mk2 Lander Can for now, try putting a Rockomax Brand Adapter on the top of your lander, to which you can attach a pair of Modular Girder Adapters, on the ends of which you can add Mk1 Lander Cans. It'll look ugly as hell and you'll need to be sure to strut the girder, but it should work and even be somewhat lighter than the Mk2 Can. In place of the Apollo tutorial's Stack Seperator, you should be able to add a TR-18A; you'll just need to decouple it from the LM docking port when the time comes. Assuming you throw on a suite of science instruments onto the lander for good measure, you're only looking at a craft with a payload mass of about 35 tonnes. Seven mainsails would get it into orbit single-stage; a stack of six X200-32s per engine should do the trick. Big problem will be keeping the structure stable, something that can easily be done with sufficient strutting.

Well, it's a little outdated at this point, but... http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Tutorial:_Apollo_11 An update of that tutorial might not be totally amiss. The tricky bit of course is the booster; the payload (CSM/LM) oughta be roughly the same as it's been in versions past, maybe with the addition of a solar panel or two. Now that I've suggested that, lemme go through your tech tree to see if you've unlocked all the parts...

I would set the probe chutes to one action group and the probe engines to another. Decouple them from your mothership manually; once the probe is independent of the mothership, the action group will control that single probe and leave the rest of them be. Might consider putting all the solar panels on the probes in the same action group as well; that way when you get it into Kerbin orbit, you can open up all the panels at once. Good way to not run out of juice. Of course, if you're using RTGs, that's fine too. Setting the panels up on an action group lets you close them quickly right when you hit atmo; again, the action group will only affect the single probe at a time once it's cut loose.

So...you're shooting for a 250 tonne payload to orbit on a 4STO asparagus booster? Lessee....basic principles of asparagus here - 15% payload fraction of your rocket to orbit guesstimate, say 1660 tonnes total rocket mass to keep the numbers clean. You want a 1.6 to 1.7 TWR on liftoff, so you'll need somewhere between 26,055-27,684 kN of thrust at takeoff, ideally with about a quarter of that in the center stack (which ain't happenin'). At 3200 kN of thrust a pop, you're going to want nine engine clusters...so you need to be constructing a 5STOa booster if you want to have enough thrust for the job. After nine engines are on, you've got about 1320 left for fuel, divvied up in nine stacks that works out to 146.92 tonnes per stack, give or take. Try stacks with a -14400, -7200 and -3600 in them. If that doesn't give you what you need to make orbit, you can try a combo of one -14400 and two -7200s; you should still have enough thrust then, it'll just be sub-optimal. Basically, what everybody else has been telling you is correct - you've got too much fuel and too little thrust.

Just means you've got to go back and learn the fundamentals. Try this - stick 11 FL-T200s on the bottom of a Mk1 Capsule and Chute combo with an LV-T30 on the bottom. Launch that into a polar orbit around Kerbin, and begin taking crew reports and EVA reports while you're flying over Kerbin's various biomes. Collect the crew reports before you climb back into the capsule. Collect as many as you can on one flight, then deorbit. You will lose your engine and a tank or two on impact but the capsule will remain intact and you'll have enough science to unlock at least a few of the other low end techs. Aim for Electrics first, then go for Fuel Systems, and you should be back in the saddle. Great thing about career, in the early going it makes you think a bit. Other advice - shut off SAS when your engines are off. And if you really want an early Mun landing without batts, don't use the LV-909.

1. Terminal Velocity is the speed at which an object's acceleration due to the force of gravity will be exactly countered by the object's deceleration due to the force of atmospheric drag, i.e. the maximum speed at which it can fall barring any additional outside forces. During a launch, it's the speed at which your delta-V losses to the combined force of each (gravity and drag) is minimized, and so you want to try to keep your ascent velocity close to terminal velocity as you can in order to get the most out of your booster's delta-V. In KER, this is also represented by a stat under the Surface tab called "Atmospheric Efficiency" - you want to try to keep that value as close to 100% as you can manage during the ascent; below 100% and you're losing delta-V to gravity, above that and you're losing delta-V to drag. 2. The gravity turn, yes. Your rocket gets a little bit of a boost in its velocity due to the rotational speed of the planet when you go to launch, velocity you get to keep if you launch in the direction of the planet's spin (eastward for all bodies in KSP). Your ship's heading needs to be at the 45 degree elevation mark and you need to hold it there until the prograde vector comes around to match, then follow the vector provided you're at least 35 seconds to apoapsis; if not, stay at 45 until you're 35 seconds to apopasis. Again this is a way of maximizing your booster's available delta-V. 3. As a rule, you don't want your TWR on your launch stage to be any less than 1.2; below that you'll have horrific gravity losses. 1.6-1.7 is considered optimal. Above 2.2 you'll be hitting delta-V losses due to drag (provided you're launching from a body with atmosphere such as Kerbin); you'll also be putting stress on the parts and risking unplanned disassembly. The other part of your question there is mostly irrelevant, particularly once you get into space - deltaV only measures how often and how much you can make changes to your velocity, TWR measures how fast you can make those changes. You can go to any "altitude" with any combination of the two, provided you have the fuel to get there in the first place. That said, as a rule delta-V is more important in most situations. TWR's main importance is during launch. 1.6 TWR and 4500 m/s of delta-V will get you to orbit. Hell....1.2 TWR and 4500 m/s of delta-V will get you to orbit, just not as fast. 4. You're going to have to equip enough chutes to handle a soft landing of the equipment, just like you would with a capsule or any other part of a ship you want to retreive intact. I'll humbly point you to http://ksp.freeiz.com/ , and suggest you don't sweat it too much if the added chutes make your designs more complex than they would be otherwise. If you're really keen on launching and landing with every bit still attached to your ship, you should try SSTO spaceplanes (for which there are several great guides available on these forums; ask and I can point you out to 'em).

Figured I'd chime in to give you another "working good" post. I can provide additional information about my system specs if that would be at all helpful to you.

That's also something that can be tested, and in the same way; you just tweak the amount of fuel and oxidizer in a tank of a known size. Now, if its density is less than 1000 kg/m^3, it SHOULD float. If it doesn't, you've confirmed that Kerbin's ocean is less dense than water. If it floats at a density greater than 1000 kg/m^3, you've confirmed that Kerbin's ocean is denseer than water. I suppose that 1000 kg/m^3 is for fresh water - salt water is slightly less dense. Assuming the liquid in Kerbin's oceans is water, this might be a way of guesstimating the salinity of the planet's oceans.

Fairly easy to experiment - water in RL has a density of 1000 kg per cubic meter in standard atmosphere (1013 mb, or 101.3 kPa depending on how you've been edumacated) and at standard temperature (about 25 C). Fuel tanks in KSP are cylinders, and density is defined as mass over volume. The volume of a cylinder is its area (pi times the square of the radius) times its height; you'd need height and radius data for a particular fuel tank to get its volume, but that data is floating around on the forums. Units of oxidizer and units of liquid fuel are both known to have a mass of about 5 kilograms, so you can use tweakables to predict at what point the tank would float or sink.

Yep - just the Can, two OX-STATS, a Clamp-O-Tron, a small decoupler, FL-T100 and a 48-7S. I wouldn't take the clamp-o-tron down there with me except that I can't attach one with KAS and I'd like to use it to return to Kerbin (I can attach radial chutes, of which the return stage will be carrying two).