Psycho0124

I use a Thrustmaster T-Flight Stick. Cheap, works better than my old Sidewinder. This one looks good too: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA0AT0MB9960

Yep! Imagine what a mess it would be with a sensor installed incorrectly though. Call me old-fashioned but I'd really prefer a flesh and blood pilot at the controls if I were to be a passenger on one of those. Haha! Yeah, those legs are going to need a new paintjob. I went to an interesting bonfire out on Padre Island a few years back. Our genius hosts lit ~40 wooden pallets all at once. The radiant heat was too much to handle at anything less than 40 feet and bubbled the paint on car bumpers ~20 feet away. Imagine what the radiant heat coming off that exhaust plume must be like for those poor lander legs.

Other: Orion. Nothing else could have been relied on to bring thousand-ton payloads to orbit. Need a skyscraper on the moon? No problem. Naval destroyer around Mars? Sure thing. Shame it was never built.. The book written about the project by Dysons son is pretty hilarious though. Lots of great rocket scientist humor.

Depends on the overall mass of your ship. Save it, try for orbit, check fuel gauge and you'll have your answer. Did you edit away your original question or something?

Yep, pretty much what Hoy said. 1. A drill that can extend into the surface (test it out on the launch pad to see how it works). 2. Any size kethane tank anywhere on the craft. No special placement or connection needed. 3. A converter. Can be in the same stack as your fuel tanks and it will work fine. You can also have it in a seperate stack, just run your fuel lines to it. It consumes "empty fuel tank space" so it should be downstream of your outboard tanks. 4. Power to run it all. A gigantor array or pair of them works great for most kethane setups. Less power just means more time to convert. You can convert at up to 100x time compression.

Nervas are your only real choice for interplanetary travel. No other engine offers reasonably efficient use of your fuel. I routinely do massive station deployments using a single NERVA pushing more than 4 jumbo-64 tanks (TWR of 0.04) and have never had a problem with burn time. Do incremental burns, start burning early, be patient. Use alt+> to do physical time acceleration and you'll be set. Patience with low thrust-to-weight ratios pays massive dividends in delta-v. As for the docking maneuver; just eye-ball it. Set your camera to 'chase' with the v key. Keep your view moving; checking different planes and relative velocities. It looks like you should have more than enough mono-propellant to go slow and take your time with the docking.

Minimus. With the kethane mod, it becomes a giant orbiting gas station. The low gravity makes it really fun to fool around on too; like a giant bouncy castle.

Just completed a trip to the northern ice cap. Visited something interesting crashed on the land next to the ice pack.

In-flight tunable ASAS is what we need. A right-click menu and a few sliders. Maybe buttons for Forbid RCS/Engine gimbal/control surfaces. It would be glorious.

I get this a lot with my docking kethane rover/miners too. Try returning to the tracking station and then returning to the stuck rover. Reloading the world seems to fix whatever issue causes that.

Jeb is the reason I started making missions recoverable and making a point to land them near KSC. I've had him (in his first iteration with no 'end mission' usage) personally pilot station placement in the orbits of Kerbin, Mun, Minimus, Duna, Laythe, and Pol. He landed colonies on the Mun, Duna, and currently on his way back to Kerbin after placing a colony on Laythe. Bill has been piloting a Kethane mining tug at Minimus station for years now. Bob did some weapons testing in LKO (SRB torpedos! Fun!) but has been chilling at Kerbin station for a few years now. I'm currently shipping all three back to KSC to 'get the old gang back together'. I designed a modular NERVA tug/space-plane/vertical lander ship for them to attempt a Grand Tour of the Kerbol system together. I'm a little nervous about the Tylo and Eve landings but I'm sure Jeb will pull it off with the right equipment.

I love NERVAs! My standard interplanetary stage consists of one Jumbo-64 with a single NERVA on the back. Set up a burn, light the engine and go grab a coffee. My general rule of thumb is to use NERVAs any time my ship isn't within an atmosphere or fighting a strong gravity well. That 800 isp is just too sweet a deal to pass up for me, especially since I fly seat-of-the-pains and need to make corrections here and there. Once you're in orbit, you have all the time in the world to make your burns.

Sometimes you're going to be forced to rearrange your stages when you dock two ships. It's a pain but I don't know of any other way to sort things out. As for both engines firing, right-click the opposing engine and click 'deactive engine'.

Great! Thanks for working on it! Couple quick bugs: I ran into a little issue(?) with the RTG functionality. The mass on the vanilla RTG is only 0.08 tons but the 1.25m stackable RTG I created weighed in at over 1.7 tons. It produces a little more power (1/sec) than the vanilla unit (0.75/sec), and I guess the structure should have some weight but custom RTGs seem overly massive at present. Maybe .12 tons for the custom RTG and some extra weight for the structure? Also ran into a little UI glitch. Changing the oxidizer amount while 'auto' in checked results in a crash. Maybe add a little function to force-uncheck the auto checkbox if the oxidizer value is selected? Might be easier to just 'grey out' the oxidizer field while 'auto' is checked instead. Thanks for releasing/developing this tool by the way. It adds so much flexibility to rocket design. I will honestly be surprised if there isn't eventually a "Landos Tank Fab" building out between the VAB and space plane hanger. Thanks again!

Thanks! That's going to make landing on kethane deposits so much easier! Waiting until low altitude for it to automatically switch to surface setting is such a pain (if it even switches at all; I've had to eye-ball high altitude landings on Minimus with my gimbal set to orbital velocity so many times.)

You can manually switch between orbital/surface velocity on the gimbal? That would be so useful! How?

Pop some empty cockpits or probe cores on that thing. The extra torque will help you turn it and you don't need to worry so much about RCS fuel. The "Probodobodyne OKTO2" will give you the best torque:weight ratio at 12.5 torque per ton (.5 torque per unit) but they'll require some power and will increase your part count to make your ship manuiverable. The "Mk2 Cockpit" comes in second for T(orque)WR at 10 torque per ton (10 per cockpit). The "Command Pod Mk1" gives a TWR of only 6.25 per ton at only 5 torque per pod. I haven't tested but I would think having the torque applied near center of mass would give best results. You could also try turning on "physical time acceleration" (alt+>) to 2x-3x to make the maneuvering go faster. Just keep an eye on your ship and turn down your time acceleration if you see too much wobble/flexing.

Any plants to add the MK2/MK3 Fuselage shapes? This app would be perfect for tuning the liquid fuel/oxidizer ratios for space planes!

No, it all seems pretty self-explanatory: (Categorical 'my way or the highway' statement) (another 'my way or the highway' statement) This one I supposed I don't follow. Wasteful. How do you define waste in this case? Do you consider an asparagus staged liquid booster, dropped when emptied a few seconds after launch, to be waste? What constitutes waste in a lifter by your definition? Kerbal Engineer mod provides lots of info too, sans the auto-pilot functions. I installed it this evening to see how much all my cringe-inducing, orange-tanked monstrosities weigh. Sorry, I have a compulsive debate problem. It kicks into high gear when I see someone making categorical claims about subjective subjects.

Are you.. touting your knowledge of wastefulness and efficiency... in a sandbox game where cost is irrelevant? Oh, you're pretending that fuel and equipment costs have an impact an imagined budget and have set a goal for yourself of keeping that impact to a minimum and accomplishing missions! Neat! I think you might have forgotten that not everyone shares your goal of cost efficiency (or is even aware of it). It all looks pretty self-explainatory: "Prevent overheats, auto-stage, corrective steering, prevent flame-out, limit to terminal velocity, Ascent path editor". It looks like lots of 'win' buttons checked off in your screens to me but meh, who am I to judge how someone else plays right? It's your game!

Radial stacks twisting maybe? It'd be great to see the actual rocket you're having trouble with but from what I've experienced, you're probably getting a little tilting/twisting in your outboard engines/tanks. They like to lean to one side a little while under thrust if they're not supported well (and a single radial decoupler/hardpoint/pylon is almost never enough). If they lean at different angles, it will set up lots of ugly momentary forces and send you tumbling. If you get lucky, they'll all lean one direction and you'll only get an axial roll. Add a strut at the top and bottom between your radial stacks and maybe one to the center stack at the top of each to stiffen the whole structure up.

Are you touting your ascent flying skills... while using mech-jeb to fly you into orbit? Why not? The OP asked for more Delta-V didn't he? Check the Delta V on that station I posted. Extra fuel adds flexibility and fun. It's also a fun challenge to get large quantities into orbit! Also, with an orbital payload of only 14 tons, your space-plane was only 6% as massive as my Cruiser.

20... tons? You're right, for tiny payloads like that, mainsails would be a terrible waste of delta-v. What you fail to realize is that not everyone tinkers with such small payloads. Mainsails are the only (cpu friendly) option for lugging huge loads into space. 185 ton refueling station (I like it full when it reaches orbit). This is my Laythan refueling station. Jeb seem to really like the view out here: 226 tons with no kethane probes/torpedos loaded. VTOL capable (low grav obviously) Kethane mining/refining ship. I also like this guy full when he reaches orbit. Places to go, kethane to mine, stuff to destroy ya know? All tanked up and ready to drop back to Kerbin and Oberth out to Laythe to pay Jeb a visit. Hehe.. Just ignore the mission timers... I was toying with dropping a probe from a very high solar orbit down into Kerbol at ultra-high speed. Forgot to load after all that time acceleration. Is there any way to reset those?

Ahh yeah. For atmospheric stuff where you need lots of delta-v quickly (LOTS of thrust), Mainsails bolted to big orange tanks set to jettison in an asparagus configuration (feeding fuel inward) will solve all your problems. If you don't make it to orbit; add more tanks+Mainsails! Asparagus setups will let you jettison tanks as they empty out; minimizing dead weight. They make lots of debris so I usually avoid them unless there's a big rock underneath me to drop them onto (in an atmosphere or on a landing trajectory). You could just as easily turn off debris saving and asparagus-drop tanks all the way to wherever you're headed.

Add more fuel and use as few high-efficiency engines as you can. I've gotten into the habit of using one of those orange "Jumbo 64" tanks with a single Atomic Rocket at the back. Burn times are long but it'll push massive payloads to wherever you want. You just gotta get it into orbit first.