MockKnizzle

Am I the only person on this entire forum who doesn't really use that many struts? All you need to do is disable engine gimbal on your mainsails, and like 70% of your wobble problems will disappear

Using the +NRM setting in MechJeb's SmartASS helps immensely, since it will continuously adjust your orientation as your orbital inclination changes.

You realize that the new ASAS system can't magically balance asymmetric things, right? It's just less wobbly than the old one.

Mmmmk. You're like 90% of the way there. What you're describing (when the target prograde swings around to your velocity retrograde) is you passing closest approach and starting to drift away again. What you need to do now is cancel out your relative velocity when that starts to happen. Orient yourself along your velocity vector and use either RCS or your main engines to drop your velocity relative to target to zero (or just close). By doing this, you're essentially stopping when you're closest to your target. Once you've canceled out your velocity, orient yourself towards target prograde and burn a little, to get yourself moving in the general direction of your target again. Rinse and repeat until you're within a couple meters, and then dock with RCS translation. You essentially want to close the distance in a series of steps. An all-in-one burn straight to your target is really, really, difficult.

Learning basic orbital mechanics will help you with matching orbits and getting close encounters (if you're ahead of your target, enlarge your orbit and it will catch up to you; if you're behind it do the opposite) and learning to use the navball will help you with getting your ships together and docked. I find that Scott Manley's method is the easiest: Step One - Get close. Something in the realm of 2 or 3 km is fine. Step Two - Switch the navball to relative velocity mode. Orient retrograde and burn to bring your relative velocity down to zero. Step Three - Orient towards your target (the pink prograde marker) and burn to close the distance. Step Four - Repeat steps 2 and 3 until you're like right there, then orient your ships +NML and -NML. Step Five - Translate and dock. Easy mode.

Dersen Kerman. He was the bravest Kerbonaut who ever lived; volunteering for a solo, no-return flight to Eeloo. Your sacrifice will be long remembered.

...But then you're lugging around the extra dead weight of the two nukes that aren't firing

For non-critical burns (out to the Mun, circularization, etc) I just briefly throttle up to reset the estimated burn timer and then roughly cut that time in half. For more critical interplanetary transfers (like out to Eeloo) it's a little more complicated. I take my maneuver dV, divide it by my maximum acceleration (I have a Mechjeb window that displays the relevant stats) and then multiply by a factor that depends on what proportion of my fuel I'll be burning and how massive my ship is. For a large burn that will take up a large portion of fuel and thus a large portion of my total mass, I'll multiply by a small fraction like 3/7. For a smaller burn, I'll multiply by something closer to 1/2, like 4/9. Then I just add about a second and a half of throttle-up time and I'm good to go.

Well yeah, but that means you've overdesigned your lifter.

Ehhh, if they're on a first stage they're not burning for very long, so you're not really saving all that much fuel. They'd be better suited to an asparagus core stage where they'd be burning for the entire duration of the flight. For first stages, TWR is more important so you're likely better off with the LV-30.

I'm having trouble with some of your data... The acceleration due to gravity at sea level on Kerbin is defined as 9.8m/s^2, so why then are you getting around 16m/s^2 at 20km up? I see they're the same numbers as the Eve data, did you mistakenly copy/paste?

If we're counting back to KSP savefiles of yore, then Duna. But on my most current... Eeloo, believe it or not. Although it was a little bit more like high-speed lithobraking as opposed to a traditional landing. Also our valiant hero Dersen was completely out of fuel with no hope of a Kerbin return. So I guess it was more a Kerbalized Viking funeral than anything else.

Well... ...Kinda?

Hehehe, it seems fittingly Kerbal that the prehistoric astronomers who named the star were scientifically correct completely by accident

I dislike the Mainsail, solely because the engine bell isn't nice and pretty like the LV-30 or the Skipper.

Gimbal lock? Check. Crossfeed disabled? Check. KillRot engaged? Check. Is rocket pointed towards space? Check. Let's do this.

Today, Dersen Kerman embarked on a one-way mission to Eeloo. You will be remembered, brave hero.

As far as I know, all fundamental physical laws and constants are true to reality. A meter in-game is a real-life meter, a kilogram is a real-life kilogram, gravity is still proportional to 1/r^2, etc. The only unrealistic thing (besides aerodynamic model) is the density of the planets, which are cooked in such a way that a 600km-radius Kerbin has a gravitational acceleration of 9.8m/s^2 at the surface. The engine powers and fuel/dry-mass ratios are considerably less than their real-world analogues as well, but they're still consistent with conventional physics and it's entirely reasonable that Kerbal engineers (bless their little hearts) just haven't quite figured out the most efficient designs yet.

The Skipper is a beautiful thing. I started a new, stock save for .20 and I'm trying to simplify my designs into smaller, lighter packages with fewer parts... Most of my payloads are around 10-20 tons to LKO, so I don't need all the thrust of a Mainsail. The Skipper fills the first-stage engine role nicely, letting me avoid the complication and part-count of clustered engines. With these kinda payloads I usually have a pretty low TWR at launch, so it also gives me an excuse to use SRBs which makes Jeb happy

I don't think there's anything in the game that necessitates Kerbals have the same sexual dimorphism as humans. I've always figured that they were asexual, or that they reproduce through some other means... perhaps similar to the Asari from Mass Effect? Perhaps any Kerbal can mate with any other Kerbal. Theoretically, Bill and Jeb could have a little baby JimBob! Additionally, I'm a strong proponent of the theory that Kerbals are photosynthetic, thus the green and apparent lack of dependence on any sort of large quantity of solid food (outside of snacks). Their mouths are for ingestion of water and screaming, obviously.

Favorite: Duna, since it's far enough away to be interesting but close and hospitable enough to do all sorts of fun missions. Least Favorite: Jool, because all-in-one-launch missions are a lot more limited (I can easily dock in orbit, I just haven't had the patience lately) in the scope of what they can accomplish. All the cool things I want to do like a Laythe base and multiple rovers/orbiters require a lot more time and effort.

In my universe, Kerbals have a somewhat different attitude towards manned flight and safety... Dying in space is widely regarded as the highest honor a Kerbal can achieve, and any Kerbonaut would gladly sacrifice his/her life in service of the noble goal of expanding the frontier. With that said, the issue of stranded Kerbals is a more minor concern since the little green dudes are photosynthetic. With a supply of air and water, a Kerbal can survive almost indefinitely with no real problems, as evidenced by the three-man crew currently relaxing on Laythe.

You can pause youtube videos and rewatch them, did you know that?

It's easy enough to just go into map view and line your craft up directly opposite some of the debris that is no doubt strewn about KSC. Rotate the camera so you're looking through the planet, and just wait until the debris and your ship are lined up in the middle of the planetary disc. You'll be close enough without needing to bother with any mods.

First step to basic docking: match your orbits. It doesn't matter where your ship ends up in relation to your target ship at this point, just make sure that the two ellipses (circles, nominally) are very very similar. Judging from the picture you posted a couple pages back, that's your first problem. While you might have the same values for the apoapses and periapses, it's so much easier to have them in the same place.