Colonel_Panic

+1 essential mod. Also consider picking up Subassembly Manager, since it's going to prove invaluable for working on larger ships, especially if you want to send them up piecemeal.

These are all known issues with these mods since .20. Check the ISA MapSat Development blog for updates to the alpha plugin, and post your issues there so they can get fixed. There is also a new subassembly manager, which is community supported, and may or may not have full working features yet.

The basic principle is that as your kerbol periapsis gets lower, the faster you slingshot around the sun. Given moho's orbital eccentricity, how close to kerbol you have to come, and therefore how fast you'll be moving on capture, will vary with what point on moho's orbit you intercept. If you can plan your transfer to intercept at moho's apoapsis, you'll need the least delta v to capture. Due to moho's eccentricity and inclination, it may be worth considering abandoning a traditional injection burn from kerbin, and instead launching when kerbin is at moho's ascending or descending node, thereby eliminating the inclination change burn, and leaving your kerbol periapsis above moho's orbit. Then you can wait and plan the most efficient hohmann transfer to moho, by intercepting at it its kaerbol apoapsis.

I'm using an octo with structural panels in a cube form, not the cube core.

Hi, I second subassembly manager. I was using subassembly loader for a long time, and it's pretty much an essential for modularizing rocket designs. If you're looking for a lander you can take for a spin or pick apart and look at, there's one linked in my signature called igaluk, which includes a rocket. For more information on rocket design and launching, also check out my linked tutorial on the subject. It's long, but will cover everything you need to know to be building and launching your own rockets easily and efficiently in no time.

This is actually a really good idea and I might do something like this in the future. ion engines are probably overkill tbh, you don't need a lot of delta v for a sat like that, better to use an oscar b and ant engine. More acceleration, less weight, smaller size, no need for large batteries or solar panels.

I use cubesats with propulsion and it fits in there rather nicely in my experience... just drop an oscar b right below the probe core and an ant engine on the end, enclose in cube except for the back end, where you can stash your batteries and any other instruments you want to carry discretely.

Some burns take a while. hit Alt+. to enter physics warp 2x. Ding 3-4x though will amplify wobble a lot. Use maneuver nodes to plan your burns, and get an estimate of burn time... then start your burn early enough that you're halway through at the midpoint (aka, if it says a burn will be 4 minutes, start it at T-2 minutes.) Longer burns will be less efficient and require more adjustments after the fact. Try and fire ALL of your LV-Ns at once though when transfer burning (and ONLY LV-Ns) to maximize acceleration and efficiency. It helps to design your lander to have its engines mounted out from the center where they can burn with the lower stage still attached.

Important to note, if you HAVE more than one LV-N with you (such as LV-Ns on your lander), you want to burn with all of them, not just one. The idea specifically is to BRING as few engines as possible with you, so you're not spending fuel to lug around their extra weight. If you already have LV-Ns on the lander, you don't need to bring an extra one for your transfer stage, as you can just burn with the lander engines.

Hi, I think I can help. First and foremost, I would suggest watching the rocket building tutorial in my signature. the first half goes over some design considerations for landers and interplanetary ships. Here's the meat of it though: For landers, weight is EVERYTHING, and less is more. You want to make it as light as possible so it can land and return to orbit using the smallest amount of fuel. No unnecessary crap. Use a light weight lander can or series of lander cans, or even just external command seats to carry your crew of kerbals to the surface. You have to burn a ton of delta V on landing and ascent from duna, so you don't want to carry anything you don't need down to the surface with you, even fuel. Only bring the fuel you need to land and return to orbit. Leave the rest of the fuel up in orbit, and rendezvous with it again after taking off to return home. LV-Ns weigh 2.5 tons each. 6 of them is a LOT of dry weight you don't want or need to carry down to the surface with you. Use less. a smaller lander and crew pod, less fuel, fewer engines, or lighter engines if you need the thrust of more than 2-3 LV-Ns. use kerbal engineer or mechjeb to calculate your delta v for staging in the VAB when designing your rocket. That way you know if you'll have enough thrust and delta v to make the trip. I cover that in more detail in the tutorial I mentioned. For the interplanetary stage (getting from kerbin to duna and back), again, less is more, and this time, you don't even need to worry about thrust so much, so you can skimp on the engines even more... in fact, since you're carrying engines on your lander, the interplanetary stage doesn't need to be anything more than a fuel tank for your lander engines to draw from, to push it there bad back. Learn where to conserve fuel in your transfer. You want to burn to duna from a very low kerbin orbit to maximize the oberth effect. use the phase angle calculator at http://ksp.olex.biz/ or a plugin like protractor to get your burn timing right. Always do your inclination changes when moving slowly, far away from the planet (as soon as you enter its sphere of influence) to get a flat, 0 degree inclined orbit, or as close to it as you can. Do your fine tuning for intercept about 1/3 of the way to the target, so you burn less fuel, and fine tune a second time if necessary later. use aerobraking, and a shallow landing descent to conserve fuel by better parachute use.

That sounds kinda like a bug to be honest... not sure about a fix or workaround. I do know that the types of symmetry are different between the two and can break things if trying to edit one type in the other editor. Here's what I do to get around this when making rovers: I start with a probe core, and attach a docking port or decoupler to it, and then start building the rover starting with the docking clamp on the other side... this way, I can use subassembly loader to grab the entire rover below the docking clamp, and save it as a subassembly to be imported into other ships inside the VAB. This only works because the root piece is NOT on the rover, but on the part the rover attaches to, thus allowing me to remove the rover and duplicate or attach it anywhere else I please. If you don't have subassembly loader and still want to import it into an existing rocket or lifter file, you can copy the internals of the craft file of the rover (not including the header) and append it to the end of the craft file of the rocket you want to attach it to... then you'll be able to grab it in the VAB and attach it.

large delta wings, made with a combination of delta wings and wing segments.

consolidate more of your drag, engines, wings and intakes toward the rear of the plane. Keep in mind that drag plays a role in stability as well, but there's no 'center of drag' marker to balance, so it's a lot of guesswork... the fact that your center of lift is far above center of thrust though is a bad sign to that end.

Giving sats propulsion is a generally good idea since it allows you to adjust and deorbit them easily. It also doesn't take much... a single oscar b fuel tank and ant engine will give it everything it needs to get around without a lot of weight or parts. I presume you mean the relative inclination, as no two orbits will ever have non-intersecting planes. You adjust it the same way you adjust inclination between any other two orbits. You burn at the normal or anti-normal at the ascending or descending node between the two orbits (where they intersect). As for spacing out satellites on the same orbit (this isn't something I do, by the way...) a hohmann transfer to a higher orbit and back again will do it.

The MKI cockpit isn't the best choice for a rover. You want either an open rover, or a lander can for that job... but it's doable if you want it that much. Check out my igaluk service lander (linked in sig), includes a downloadable craft file with a reusable rover/lander combo like you described (although it doesn't have parachutes, so it's only for non-atmospheric landings... but you could add parachutes if you want)

Switch to the craft that you want to dock WITH, using the [ and ] keys, then select the docking port and 'control from here' and point it to your normal (North or South in an equatorial orbit), then kill your rotation by warping for a brief second so it's not spinning at all, then switch back to the docking craft again using the [ and ] keys, and resume docking. Your target ship will now no longer be moving or rotating with relation to you as you try and dock with it, and as long as you keep your ASAS on or ship oriented in one direction while docking, you will no longer drift out of alignment. If your ship is poorly balanced with RCS, it may start to spin when you try and maneuver it. If this is the case you need to better balance your RCS, or make better use of SAS and precision controls, firing your thrusters only in very gentle, brief bursts with ASAS on. Again, see my tutorial (linked in signature) for everything you need to know about balancing them for docking.

Hi, Please see my RCS and orbital rendezvous tutorial in my signature, it outlines everything you need to know for quick and easy docking. You can skip ahead to the docking part if you're already confident in your RCS balancing and design skills.

The problem posed is that if you have ANY mannable command pods, the game will ALWAYS man ONE of them, so if you want to have an unmanned ship with a mannable command pod, your only option without using crew manifest is to EVA your kerbals out of the command pod and end mission on them before launching. I recommend just getting crew manifest. It has many uses.

I would also suggest staggered launch times, as I've had good success with it... the orbital position shouldn't be off by much from your target if you're consistent about your launch phase angle. Easy mode: just launch when the last satellite is directly overhead, and put the next into orbit behind it. Ultimately though your sat networks won't stay perfect and pretty forever. Your orbit could be off by as little as 100m, and given enough time, they'll all get out of order again. I tend to prefer to make the distribution of inclinations and planes pretty and the orbital periods 'close enough', since the plane and inclination will never change as the satellites orbit.

the big one should, just don't rely on the arms... the idea behind the wide box/basket design is you can just line up and push just about anything out of orbit with it

Generally assume that nothing that works in stock will work in FAR and vice-versa. save them as .cratf files in your saves SPH folder.

Nice. (: Not at all!

IIRC the arrow is the hard one to reach orbit because of it's weight and only one LV-N, so you need the jet engines to help and just throttle down to avoid flameout. The Javelin has plenty of fuel and thrust, but is very heavy with not a lot of lift, so you need to keep the nose up above your prograde a lot. When you start reaching the ceiling with that one, just try and keep your prograde pegged level and bring the speed up until the prograde starts moving up toward your nose again.

Ah ok, well I forget the exact flight ceiling, but basically you want to ascend steep (I usually peg it at 70 degrees until around 14km, then nose down to 45 degrees until within 5km of the flight ceiling) until you get close to it and your intakes start dropping, then level off about 2km below the maximum flight ceiling and just burn at about 10 degrees up from level until you're going about as fast as you can, then pull up sharply and just before your jet engines burn out, disengage them and engage your LV-N using their action groups (it also closes your intakes when you use the action group). For one of them, I forget which but I think it might have been the arrow, you'll want to instead of just toggling both engines, throttle down to prevent a burnout and engage your LVN when you get close, so you're burning with all 3 engines to get the thrust for more velocity before you leave the atmosphere. When your throttle gets down below 1/4 or so, finally switch off the jets and throttle back up. I usually dock and refuel at around 85km instead of 120, but 120 should be doable, though it will be close. if encessary, you can use some RCS fuel to help circularize (I've done this before after a particularly bad ascent with the x-wing)

Hi, the SSTOs won't have a lot of fuel when they reach orbit. They're intended to be refueled before being used for more than a quick rendezvous or two in LKO. The idea behind them is that their small size allows you to do more with less fuel. so you can refuel many times from one refueling tanker for multiple missions. I might have forgotten to remove the protractor part from the craft before uploading. I'll do that when I get a chance and re-upload. In the meantime if you want to use it now, you can download and install the protractor plugin.