triffid_hunter

have a play with Fuel Tanker no MechJeb.craft - if you want mechjeb, just stick the AR202 on the central orange below the stackable probe core. Feel free to ditch the upper orange tank which is just payload and substitute your own. if you need to lift bigger payloads, feel free to add another ring of orange tanks with appropriate strutting

if wobble is not evident, what causes this is parts being pushed through each other vertically by the thrust and becoming clipped. this is fixed by MOAR STRUTS! can lift ~50T last time I checked and I don't even need to disable the gimbals

you start off at some altitude, with some horizontal velocity from the planet's rate of spin. When you are in orbit, you have a higher altitude and a higher velocity (unless the planet is spinning more than fast enough to tear itself apart). You need a particular velocity at any given orbital altitude which reduces as you get further from the planet. If you don't have enough horizontal velocity, you will fall back into the atmosphere and burn up. On kerbin, you start off with a horizontal velocity of something like 220m/s at an altitude of about 50-60m above sea level. The atmosphere ends at 70km and you need about 2300m/s velocity at that altitude to remain in orbit. So a kerbin launch requires you to gain 2100m/s in horizontal velocity and lift your launch mass by at least 70km vertically. I usually go for at least 90km so I don't risk grazing the atmosphere during rendezvous maneuvers, and prefer 125km since I can warp faster there. It takes energy to push mass up a gravity well. it also takes energy to impart higher velocity to that mass when remaining at the same 'height' in the gravity well. That accounts for most of the dV required to get off the planet (I guess at least 3400m/s). The rest is consumed by atmospheric drag- it takes energy to push all that air out of the way on the way up! fwiw I'm finding that it's possible to achieve orbit with as little as 4400 m/s dV these days, have a play with my Fuel Tanker no MechJeb.craft and see how you go. It also demonstrates asparagus staging which gives a _huge_ boost to dV by dropping empty fuel tanks and superfluous engines as early as possible. ps: note that the dV figure has already taken the mass of your craft into account, and balanced it vs the thrust of your engines and their fuel efficiency. That's why the required dV is approximately the same for both very large and very small craft!

is it a glitch inducing rotation against the fixed stars, or simply the navball rotating due to your ship remaining stationary vs the fixed stars but moving relative to the moon, and your craft's respective orbits pulling them out of alignment? if the latter, point your docking ports parallel to your orbit's axis which is north-south for an equatorial orbit. Then the apparent rotation will simply result in the docking port rolling rather than moving away. Also the orbits will be cocentric and simply cause your crafts to move closer and further away along the docking axis rather than shifting around. MechJeb's Smart A.S.S. has Orbit/NML+ and NML- for this. I always lock my space stations and other dockables to that orientation. If all else fails, try docking in a higher, slower orbit. hope this helps, post your results for anyone else who comes across this thread

now that's some ninja debugging, nice work hopefully that's the only reason that KSP.x86_64 has been reported as unstable! So.. until fixed, don't install so many mods that KSP uses 4G ram?

Another way to do this, assuming your lifter has some fuel left, is to put a probe core on your lifter stage. After decoupling payload, shut the engine down, point retrograde, put throttle to max, reactivate engine then switch back to your payload. Make sure you're not pointing prograde when you decouple or you'll torch your payload with engine exhaust! I successfully use this technique from orbits as high as 200km- with a strong engine and fairly empty tanks it's amazing how much dV you can shed while still within physics range

hm, I don't disable gimbals on the outer engines, and have great launch stability.. I did try disabling them once and couldn't turn!

That's an exploit, IMO exploits take the fun out of any game or sim. (Basically, a form of cheating) I really hope they fix that. I see that as a workaround for the lack of instrumentation such as MechJeb's Smart A.S.S. and lack of ability to toggle RCS, SAS and ASAS individually. With Smart A.S.S., the only time I use that trick/cheat is when trying to use RCS to translate and ASAS to maintain a heading, without the ASAS making my ship spaz out by firing all the RCS wildly.

At the moment, the reason you get asymmetrical flameout is that each air intake feeds all the engines because it's distribution is ALL_VESSEL like ElectricCharge and MonoPropellant. When you're close to flameout, one engine will consume the last of the IntakeAir, then the next engine that wants some air will find none and flame out, which is deadly as it puts you in a flat spin. If you change IntakeAir to STACK_PRIORITY_SEARCH, you can set your plane up so that each air intake only feeds a specific engine. Coupled with standard aeroplane symmetry and the fact that all the intakes are going at the same speed in the same altitude, each engine will use the last of the available air at the same time- giving symmetrical flameout. This change can be done simply by editing the aforementioned file in a normal text editor such as notepad. A game patch that would make more sense is that if 3 engines all request IntakeAir from one intake, it gives 1/3 of its IntakeAir to each one, and engines keep tagging intakes for consumption until there's no more or they have enough. That however means that resource trees need to be walked twice rather than just once, not sure what impact that would have on game speed but I suspect it would be fairly small. This could also ameliorate the momentary flameouts that happen with rocket engines when changing from the last fuel in an empty tank to a new full one.

heh really need that surface retrograde to line up perfectly with the nadir for landings, especially as your vertical speed approaches zero- that's when the shifting retrograde shows you your horizontal velocity the most!

Have you recently installed FAR? that causes most of my rockets to flip wildly. Have you tried 0.20.2 which apparently includes fixes for the cupola?

I use the following asparagus stage to launch up to 50T into orbit: Asparagus staging is your friend! If you're not already familiar with asparagus, search the term on these forums then come back and watch the video if you find that your launch stage still has fuel left when you're done with it, add some probe cores and a docking node so you can spin it retrograde and deorbit it. when you make something that will be jockeyed into position with an RCS tug, put RCS ports on it. this will help balance the RCS force vs. CoM of tug docked with payload. MechJeb's Smart A.S.S / PAR- orientation is more useful for docking than MechJeb's docking autopilot Put at least two RTGs on your payload. Then you'll never have an uncontrollable rocket due to no electricity if you spend too long in shadow, and they'll balance each other's weight and drag. MOAR STRUTS! Launch stage size and complexity increases exponentially with payload mass. Consider possibility of smaller payloads assembled in orbit using docking ports Multiple docking ports in a specific arrangement will always clamp more strongly and allow less wobble than a single port. Save a craft with the bare minimum of parts, or use SubAssembly Loader. If you want strong CMGs, edit GameData/Squad/Parts/Control/probeStack<Small/Large>/part.cfg and increase rotPower to 30/50 respectively. Now the probeStack<Small/Large> will give usefully powerful Control Torque- not just SAS torque. If you want symmetrical flameout on your spaceplane, edit GameData/Squad/Resources/ResourcesGeneric.cfg and change IntakeAir to STACK_PRIORITY_SEARCH and add fuel lines from intakes to engines as necessary

if you edit your GameData/Squad/Resources/ResourcesGeneric.cfg and change IntakeAir to STACK_PRIORITY_SEARCH then edit your spaceplanes as appropriate you will get symmetrical flameout. Using that alteration, you can make a plane with 3 engines that automatically drops to one at high altitudes without risking a flat spin.

have a refuelling station BOTH at kerbin LKO (100-200km) AND at minmus. kethane makes it a LOT easier, hoisting kethane or processed fuel from minmus's surface is very cheap

yep, stick an X200-8 between orange and mainsail, and you'll be able to run it at max throttle until you run out of fuel

I for one would love a binary patch against 0.20. I'm not interested in 0.20.1 because apparently it loads resources too many times and my system only just has enough ram to start with. will deal with 0.20 until 0.20.2 comes out if for some reason the binary patch is no-go, feel free to post gdb instructions

this happens for me too

hi, I had to recreate my forum account, please let me skip the 5 moderated posts and all that!