ComradeGoat

Ooh, harsh! As you get close to the station, make a habit of shutting the engines down. It's saved me a lot of grief.

You should be able to get a pretty high inclination by going right to the edge of Kerbin's SOI, doing a bielliptic transfer into polar orbit over Kerbin, bring your periapsis in to about 40km (yes, I know it's in the atmosphere) and then thrust as you pass periapsis to gain escape velocity, and use Kerbin to slingshot you into a highly inclined solar orbit. I haven't tried it, but it might work. Failing that, use Jool.

I was fortunate enough to have done orbital mechanics in secondary school maths, so I already knew about conic sections, thrusting prograde/retrograde, etc.. I expect it would have been a very steep learning curve otherwise! The space station in the orbit above you is going slower than you, so in order to match its speed, you speed up. Makes perfect sense!

I have a Tylo mission using staged landers about to enter Joolian orbit any week now. If successful, the kerbals will return to my station at Laythe.

Yeah, it's really not hard. Just wait a bit, but not too long, and you can do the adjustments a couple of weeks out using RCS. It's not like you're trying to nail equatorial Jool orbit with a precise periapsis for aerobraking to Laythe from 180 days out (which is perfectly doable in KSP). IDGI; when I finally plucked up the guts to do a Moho mission after putting it off for ages, it was a non event. Just take a nuke and lots of fuel, and build light. It's, IMO, easier than getting to the Joolian moons.

From LKO, 1 nuclear engine, one of the biggest grey tanks, 6 of the 720 unit smaller tanks arranged in asparagus fashion, lightweight lander, 3 kerbal command pod. More than enough Delta V to do a Moho mission, landing and back, entirely stock.

But if you want to enter low Moho orbit, you'll want to time your burn to happen at Moho periapsis to take advantage of the Oberth Effect. Entering orbit at the SOI is much more expensive.

Your yaw is happening because, as the engines approach flameout, they reduce power. If you have more than one, they won't reduce power symmetrically, inducing yaw. You can counter this by having a HUGE RUDDER, and/or by throttling back manually. The RAPIER is a pretty poor engine, BTW. A turbojet and 2 LV 84-7Ses works much better. The trick is keeping them fed with air until you're at almost orbital velocity. Climb rapidly to 20,000, then gently, bringing your speed up to about 1,300 m/s before you hit 25,000 metres. Try and level off at 30,000 and fly horizontally until your periapsis appears. Keep flying horizontally, and your apoapsis should start to climb into space. When this happens, pitch up to about 45º and reduce power to avoid flameout. Keep this angle, reducing power to keep the engine burning, until you reach about 40,000m, then go horizontal again and keep reducing power for as long as the jets will run, to keep your apoapsis from falling. Once the jet dies at zero power, turn it off and switch to your LV 48-7Ses. You should only need about 100 m/s or less to circularise at apoapsis. A plane with one of the small 360 unit fuel tanks, one turbojet, 2 LV 48-7S engines and 4 radial intakes should be able to reach orbit and have loads of delta V left, as long as you get the ascent profile right. Also, try to keep your centre of lift just behind your centre of gravity. That will make your plane nice and stable.

My first Eeloo trip had the lander eaten by a clipping error :-(

Current save (restarted for 0.22, I think) Year 3, day 7. Orbital stations: Kerbin *2 (did have a third, beyond Minmus' orbit, but the Kraken fused all the docking ports together, so I deorbited it) Mün Duna Laythe (with 3 planes docked there) Bases: Mün Minmus Landed on: Mün Minmus Duna Gilly Moho Laythe Missions in transit: Laythe (resupply & station extension) Eeloo (land and return) Tylo (land (I hope), return to Laythe station) Missions waiting in LKO for launch windows: Duna (station resupply and extend) Jool (Outer moon explorer, to be based at Laythe station) Laythe (delivery of 2 new planes - a design I've been testing/honing at Kerbin and am now really pleased with) Turns out I like Laythe.

First time I went to Duna, my LANDER had an orange tank and I used another 2 to get there. I hadn't realised that Duna is hardly any more expensive to get to than the Mün and that you can get down and back using a Mün lander with a parachute attached.

And Mars doesn't have an enormous moon, like Ike. The KSP bodies aren't exactly like their real world analogues. Europa doesn't have a thick atmosphere like Laythe either (its atmosphere is extremely tenuous, I believe), let alone one in which you could burn jet fuel.

IIRC, one of the devs is on record as saying that Laythe is Io if it were a bit warmer and with an ocean. There are plans for it to have active volcanoes in future.

Laythe is the Io analogue though. If there's a Europa in KSP, it's Vall (see sig).

Oh snap! This is what's left of an asparagus mothership, the central core of my first Moho mission: Minmus is a great resting place, as you can land just about anything there. I don't usually *have* spent motherships though, as I usually send flat-pack stations and leave them at the body I'm visiting.

It really is.

I've seen the same issue the OP has. This happens when there *is* sufficient command authority to maintain heading, but SAS simply doesn't try to use it.

In 0.23, SAS doesn't do a good job of holding pitch if your centre of lift is a long way from your centre of mass, and you aren't festooned with control surfaces, it seems. I've had a few flights where I've had to hold down S to climb away to orbit because SAS refuses to hold the angle of attack.

Ooh, clever! Alternatively, you could just set an action to switch modes...

But they do it asymmetrically, if you have more than one, so use a GREAT BIG RUDDER O' DOOM on your twin-engined planes, people!

It doesn't need to. Orbital speed at Laythe is much lower. Don't need to suck on tenuous atmosphere while fighting gravity quite so much. Hell, just climb at 30 degrees under full power, never level off, go suborbital and circularise using the NERVA. Won't work on Kerbin, but Laythe doesn't need all the delta vees.

I take back my earlier comments about the RAPIER killer app being NERVA powered planes. There's a much better way to get those working. Just use the standard turbojets, but take off with most of the fuel tanks empty (yay tweakables!), making the plane much lighter and giving the NERVA less to do. Right now, I'm struggling to find a use for the RAPIER in my space programme. Tweakables and the fixed intake system make NERVA planes/larger craft more practical with the good old turbojet and no other rocket engines (just refuel in orbit at a space station - you no longer have to design a plane that can haul its full weight up to orbital speed), and for small stuff, the turbojet+2 LV 48-7S cluster owns. This engine really is not unbalanced. It's a not very good alternative to the turbojet + A.N. Other engine(s), where the other engines depend on your requirements.

Some of us are just not that interested in career mode, and want to EXPLORE! Having a stock way to manufacture fuel while "out there" would still be really helpful.

The older methods still work better on smaller craft too. Started using a RAPIER when designing this thing: And found that even with auto switching off, and the ascent micromanaged to eke out the last drops of altitude and speed from air breathing mode, it still drank nearly all my fuel by the time it make orbit. Then I switched back to the old reliable combo of turbojet and 2 48-7Ses and it was faster, flew higher, and reached orbit with around 1.5k m/s Dv left. I think the killer app for the RAPIER is spaceplanes that use a NERVA as their main engine. Previously it was hard to get enough altitude and speed to carry you to orbit with the NERVA, so you'd typically need a couple of LV 24-77s or something to get you through the worst of the drag. The RAPIERs in rocket mode have some serious punch to them though. There is still the problem of turning forces being generated as they start to starve themselves of air, before the switchover though, and my preliminary tests with a 1 NERVA + 2 RAPIER config suggested best results were obtained by turning auto swathing off. Summary - changes to the intake air system mean that the old workhorse combo of Turbojet + 2 48-7S engines still rules supreme for most applications (including smaller craft - seriously, try it), but there are niche applications where the RAPIER is very useful.

I like the mono prop resource in capsules. For a long time, I've been wanting to build small lightweight landers where shaving grams counts, and lamented that there isn't a really small, lightweight mono prop container. The 50 is too large. The 40 is still quite large, and won't stack mount so you get weight balance issues using just one. Now the small capsules have a tiny bit of mono prop, it's great - I can design landers and other lightweight thingies, dock them, and not need to waste precious weight and fuel dragging around far more monoprop than I need, or risk burning the station with the exhaust from my rockets trying to do a thruster-less docking.