Kerba Fett

Seems like lots of people have some good tips on targeted landings. MockKnizzle raised a good point about an inclination change often being needed to put you at your base. Normally I do that when I set up the node for the de-orbit burn. I also start from a lot higher. I keep a refueling depot in orbit around the Mun in a 100km orbit so that's usually the altitude I enter orbit of the Mun and the altitude I de-orbit from. I usually start about a quarter orbit before my base and don't touch the throttle till I get down to about 15km. Like the others I set my de-orbit to overshoot my target so I can use the retrograde marker to decelerate. I don't like to start my descent from too low an altitude since the Mun has a lot or hills and ridges and I don't like too much surface speed close to the ground. I've flown into hillsides because I was moving too fast to get over them even at full throttle. On the subject of throttle, when flying manually I sometimes like to tweak my engine power down once I get close to the ground and have gotten rid of most of my velocity. A lower TWR lets you use more of your throttle range and gives you more precise control at low descent rates. (like for your final landing) This is only practical for single engine setups though since you'd usually have to spend more time than you can spare tweaking a bunch of engines to the same settings. Finally for the players reading this that don't mind using mods, There's 2 that will make landings a lot easier. One is Diazo's vertical speed controller, the other is MechJeb. For MechJeb you want to make a custom window. (they're real easy to make) The info you want for landing is: True altitude, vertical speed, surface speed, time to impact, time to suicide burn, and remaining dV. The time to suicide burn is the most useful for me as it tells me when to start braking hard from my de-orbit trajectory. I usually start decelerating when it gets to 15 seconds and try to slowly work it down to about 5 seconds. Once you get to about 500m on manual throttle you can use the vertical speed controller to manage your descent. This lets you concentrate on managing your horizontal speed for a precise landing. If a ship is fairly tall and I'm landing it among buildings I also like to put a ring of linear RCS thrusters right at the top and use the IJKL keys to operate them. The reason I only use the top mounted RCS is that if your ship is drifting forward and you activate the forward RCS thruster it will kill some of your velocity. It will also cause the ship to pitch back a bit which also slows you. When you stop thrusting with the RCS MJ or the SAS will return the ship to vertical. If you've got enough fuel to hover for a while this lets you place things exactly where you want them letting you make your base a nice tight cluster of buildings.

If you want to make a base the first thing is to send a small lander down to scout the area. Find a flat area and mark a landing spot with a triangle of flags. To get down to it from orbit make a maneuver node with the end point at your base site. After you complete the burn you should be on track to crash directly at your base site. Next go to your map view and use that to fly most of the trip down. As you burn to slow your descent watch your projected course line and using the navball adjust your attitude to keep your impact point at your base. Once you're within a few KM of the surface you can leave the map view and land as normal. Don't forget to turn labels on (F4) to make it easier to spot your landing zone.

The reason I'd go with a tall ship for a tanker is to keep the part count low. My space tanker are normally a docking port, probe core, large sas, large battery, orange tank, poodle, and some solar panels and RCS tanks and thrusters on the tank. If I was landing on the flats of minmus I'd add some girders to the base to widen it's stance and some large landing gear. If he's got a refueling station in LKO then it's probably got lots of parts and may have ships docked at it. Since you can only put so many parts in the same area without lagging out I prefer a low part count tanker to a high one. Also, when you're finally docked it's more convenient to pump fuel from one tank rather than a bunch of little ones. And you need to leave a bit of fuel in the tank to get back to minmus. Radial mounted fuel tanks take more effort to balance. Some of this stuff seems kind of minor, but by your 20th trip you'll be happy for anything that helps even a little.

While moving the rear gear forward so the plane can pivot up on it may work, you also increase your chance of hitting the engines on the runway on takeoff. Since most people fly with the keyboard you're either pulling the controls back fully or not at all so it's much harder to take off without striking the runway with the tail. What would help a lot would be an extended front landing gear like the concord.

If you want to do kethane mining I'd recommend doing it on Minmus. The objective is to get back to LKO with as much fuel as possible and Minmus allows you to burn less of it getting off the surface and leaving orbit. You should also be areobraking at kerbin to drop your AP without using fuel. Start with your PE at 45km and work your way lower with later trips till you find an altitude that drops your AP just enough to get to the altitude of your station. Then once you get to AP you just use a bit of fuel to raise your PE and you're ready to rendezvous and dock. Also, when you build your tanker try and keep the non-fuel stuff as light as possible. No 3 man capsule just cause it looks cool. The larger probe cores work great for tankers. Since your tanker will have a lot of mass when docking, don't skimp on the RCS. I use 2 rings of 4 quad blocks on each end of an orange tank. and either the big RCS tank or 6 of the larger radial mount tanks. This gives you plenty for docking and you still have lots left to resupply the station. When you land your tanker on minmus you might want to deactivate the RCS ports at the bottom and leave the top ones active. When landing tall ships the RCS on the top can reduce your chances of tipping. Try to start with a kethane deposit on one of the flats to make for easier landings.

Is it possible that when sitting on the runway your nose is low enough to cause a negative angle of attack on the wings? If that's the case you wings would be acting as spoilers and holding you to the runway even after you reach flight speed. I don't build many planes, but I usually try to mount the landing gear so I have 3 to 5 degrees of pitch when sitting on the runway. Once I turn on SAS and open the throttle I often don't have to touch the controls till well after takeoff. If moving the gear is too much bother, you could try a few of the linear RCS ports on the bottom of the nose. This might provide enough lift to get your nose up for the takeoff.

I find it disappointing that the project was abandoned since I've been looking for something that does this for a while. I use Diazo's vertical speed controller and it makes landers and VTOL's much easier to fly. This seemed like it would be a good companion. I've had a number of mods that install the Firespitter.dll but I've never seen an interface for it. Is there another firespitter plugin or does the one I've already got do something I wasn't aware of?

...but it turns out I'm nowhere near smart enough to do the 3D modeling or use Unity. But I figured I'd throw the idea out here to see if anyone else was interested. I noticed recently that when I approach my Mun base or the station I've got orbiting Kerbin that I've been getting a lot of lag. Most of the players that have been in KSP for a while have probably experienced the same thing. You add stuff till it lags then stop going there because it's too laggy. So then I figured, what if my base had all the same functionality but only took a few fairly simple parts. My first thought was a saucer configuration since it seemed appropriate for little green men, but pretty much any shape would work. The image below should give you an idea of what I had in mind. The pillar in the center of the ship would be the core. This would be a probe core so it would be the basis of your ship but wouldn't be able to fly the ship by itself. (more on that later) Attached to the core would be the upper and lower mounting plates. There would be a couple of variations of each depending on how you wanted to set up the ship. Choices for the lower plate would be single center engine or multiple engine setup. (multi would be needed for an unbalanced ship) Choices for the upper would be a flat disc, or a dome for a second upper deck. Between the upper and lower plates and surrounding the core you'd have a number of wedge shaped modules. This is where most of the customizing happens. These wedges could be maned cockpits or drone cores. They could be fuel tanks or batteries. They could be short term passenger compartments for many or long term compartments for few. They could be kethane converters or KAS storage lockers. And of course you'd have a few empty boxes that you could fill with normal KSP parts. The nice thing is that most parts are just a mesh and a config file so if you distribute a UV template image with the mod people can paint their own textures, add a config, and get any module they want. Up to this point it's just standard KSP stuff with less parts in a different configuration. If I'm not mistaken, anyone can define a resource in KSP. This would allow you to customize installed modules by adding stuff like CPU cycles or Crewed Workstations or Science Equipment. For example: suppose you add a lab module to your ship. It would weigh 3 tons, need 2 crew to operate, contain 5 science equipment, and need 10 CPU cycle. And it would transmit at the same level as a stock lab. Add another 5 science equipment to it and it weighs 4 tons, needs 20 CPU cycles, and needs 3 crew to operate, but transmits 5% better than the stock lab. This should all be possible with config files and most modules would be upgradable, but there would always be a tradeoff. I was also thinking the tradeoff would carry over to the drive system. You could choose from chemical rockets for high thrust but low isp, electric drive for high isp and low thrust, (like a more powerful ion engine) and a third system that allows you to adjust the thrust/isp ratio on the fly. Of course that one would be less efficient than either of the other options, but more versatile. (one of the mod packs out already has an engine like that, but I can't recall which one just now) Of course the engines would also require CPU cycles so the basic core alone wouldn't be enough to run them. You'd also need a drone pilot or crewed cockpit. You'd still have to compromise at every stage of the design, but would end up with a ship with less parts that should be less prone to lag. One other thought is that if the central core was surrounded by invisible docking ports rather than just connect nodes, and each module had a built in docking port, you could change modules in orbit. Anyways, that's what I had in mind when I started the object in the picture. Now that I've realized I don't have the ability to pull it off perhaps someone more talented would be interested in it.

SpannerMonkey, I'm positive you're right about it being some stupid simple little thing. I went through this same issue about 6 months ago last time I thought I was smart enough to make KSP objects. I spent days watching crappy videos. And more days fighting against the interface in various 3D programs. In the end I managed to get Unity to spit out a few KSP objects, but it was a totally random thing. Sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn't. I never did figure out what the magic combonation was and even looking at my old unity projects I can't see what I'm doing different. Finally I got so sick of it I gave up and stopped playing KSP for 4 months. Part of the reason it bugs me so much is that I got into 3D a long time ago. Ever heard of Cad3D? It was my first 3D program on the Atari ST written by Tom Hudson who later went on to write 3D studio for Autodesk. Then I got an Amiga where there was lots of 3D software. I got pretty good at Sculpt 3D, Videoscape, Imagine, Real3D, Lightwave on the video toaster, and probably a few I've forgotten over the years. But then I got out of that hobby and didn't touch a 3D program for a couple of decades. When I went to try it again last year I found out that not only had I forgotten most of what I knew, but that relearning it was very difficult/impossible. Apparently the part of my brain that used to be good at that sort of thing is no longer functioning. The bad news is that this could happen to you guys one day since the only way to prevent old age is death. So enjoy your ability to do this while you've got it cause it might not last. Anyways, as I said, thanks for all the advice but I think it's time to go back to playing Xbox games for a while. It's more rewarding.

Nli2Work, As far as I can see my heirarchy looks the same as yours. I looked at that video that you suggested. It's one of the many tutorials that I followed through and got nothing from. He spends a lot of time talking about where to download stuff. If people are smart enough to make 3D models and use Unity doesn't it stand to reason that they could probably figure out a google search? For a first tutorial, why would he choose an animated part? Isn't a basic fuel tank confusing enough for the first lesson? And if he's really enough of an expert on Unity to be giving lessons then couldn't he struggle though using the default layout for 15 minutes to make it easier to follow? But I'm just nitpicking details. The bottom line is that the video didn't help with my problem. Anyways, thanks for the help guys. I've spent about 19 hours in the last 2 days struggling with trying to get an object from my brain to KSP. Clearly I'm just not smart enough to do it and have wasted enough time trying. :^(

Thanks for the info Blizzy. I'm trying to follow your directions but it's still seems pretty difficult. (yes I'm really that stupid) For instance, you mentioned to not limit selection to visible but then when I'm right clicking on all of those polygons to select them I'm also deselecting the ones on the back side. I assume you were using a lasso or box tool to select them all at once, but after 20 minutes of looking through menus I couldn't find one. Also, if you select a bunch of faces and want to move them or scale them or rotate them a bit, it seems very imprecise. As soon as you click the button in the toolbar, any movement of the mouse moves the faces. To move them a specific ammount seems to require you to left click to drop your selection in the wrong place, then go to the bottom of the toolbar where there's a numeric panel of your last action. Then you can adjust the numbers to put your selection where you wanted it in the first place. But why can't you just bring up the numeric requester in the first place and move your selection where you wanted it to begin with? Are there any really good tutorial videos that you can recommend? I've watched a lot of Blender/Unity tutorials and so far they pretty much all suck. The last one I watched the guy spent the first 3 minutes talking about how you'd need a mouse to use Blender and where to get one. Really? In 2014 this guy figures his youtube viewers that want to learn 3D modeling don't know where to buy a mouse? I got more from the 6 images you posted than I learned from 6 hours on youtube yesterday. Sorry if I'm starting to sound a little cranky here. I had such a simple idea for a mod and it's turning out to be insanely difficult to make happen. Unfortunatly it's starting to look like a waste of time. I managed to get a simple mesh into unity, but when it writes the KSP object there's no texture. Looks OK in Unity and I've followed all the instructions in tutorials on the subject, but it only writes the .MU file. It's probably time to leave the mod making to smarter people than me. Thanks for all the help from you and Sal though.

Yes, I did assign the KSP shader and the object displays correcly in the Unity viewport. I started with an empty hierarchy. Then I added an empty game object to it. Then I dragged the mesh onto the game object. The game object has the little arrow indicating the mesh is inside it so it seems like it should be parented properly. At this point the untextured mesh shows up in the Unity viewport just as I would expect it to. With the mesh selected in the heirarchy I start adding components to it using the inspector panel on the right side of the screen. It already has a transform and animator component, so i add a mesh renderer, then a mesh collider, (and assing a mesh to it) then I add parttools. When I saved the object from Wings 3D as a Wavefront object it wrote 3 files. The Mesh, an auv file that I presume is the material and UV setup, and the actual texture image. In unity I drag the auv file onto the mesh in the heirarchy. Then I drag the texture image onto the auv in the heirarchy. At this point my mesh in the viewport updates to show the texture properly applied. I've gone through each item in the heirarchy and looked at every window in the inspector window and I don't see any blank entries and yet it still won't write the image with the object. Now this is the part that really confuses me. If I've got it set up well enough for Unity to display the object for me, then why isn't it set up well enough to write the object for me? Since you can change the image format that it outputs, doesn't that mean that Unity is going to write that image based on what's in it's memory? And it it can't find it in it's memory then how is it able to display the textured object for me? I also looked at the tutorial by Some_Random_Guy as suggested above. But since he's not using textures it wasn't much help with this problem. Everybody seems to agree that the Scott Manley tutorials on how to play KSP are some of the best, easiest to understand, videos available on the subject. Are there any tutorials of that quality avialable for this subject? I've read and watched lots of tutorials on this and still not managed to come away with enough information to make a simple KSP object.

Yeah Blizzy, that's pretty much exactly what I was trying to do. That took you what, about a minute to model and render? I spent 14 hours yesterday trying to accomplish pretty much the same thing. Every time I get it into my head to try making a KSP object I spend days struggling with every step of the process. If I'm really lucky I end up with a KSP object that looks like total crap that I'd be embarassed to show screenshots of and I consider all that time wasted. Then I go back to playing games for 6 months till I get another mod idea and have forgotten what an ordeal the process is. And by the way, even though that was probably an easy thing for you to model, I notice you didn't mention what software you used or the simple process you used to make it.

As if the modeling end of this isn't difficult enough, now I've got a mesh in Unity and can't get it to write a KSP object. I started with an empty game object. Then I added my mesh to that. Then I added the AUV file to the mesh in the hierarchy. With the mesh selected I added a mesh renderer, a mesh collider, and parttools. I can see the object in the window and the texture is correctly applied. When I try to write the object in parttools I get the .mu file but no textures. Also I keep seeing this error when I write the object: NullReferenceException KSPPartTools.PartToolsInspector.DrawMaterials () I'm sure this is a simple problem but it's another case of a minor issue holding things up for hours while I try to figure out what the problem is. Are there any KSP/Unity tutorials of the same calibre as the Scott Manley videos? I've spent hours watching youtube videos and trying to follow along and still seem to be missing something.

Apparently I'm so bad at 3D I can't even explain the problem. I can select the edges where I want to cut it easy enough. I can copy the entire object into another layer and delete all the polygons making up the center of the object leaving me just the top and the bottom. I can do the same thing to leave me just the middle. The problem is that then I have 3 parts that are just a surface with no thickness. The empty areas can be filled easy enough? Sure, I can copy all of the points from the edge where I cut it. Then I can pick 2 opposing points and make an edge between them, then I can subdivide the edge, then I can delete the edge leaving only the points. Then I can hand make polygons 3 points at a time for the 30 I need to close each opening. Then after a few hours of slow tedious work I get the objects I wanted, but for some reason there's twice as many polygons as there should be. (and too many to use the same mesh as a collider) I see some amazing mods released for KSP and I've got lots of ideas of my own that I'd like to try, but I just can't seem to get past the object creation. I know what I want stuff to look like and could carve it out of a block of steel in a machine shop easily in a couple of hours. It's now been 14 hours since I sat down at my computer to try and make 3 simple objects and I still haven't started texturing or importing them into unity. I know what I want to do I just can't get past the programs interface to do it. So, Is there any software out there made for 3D simpletons?

I've got what sounds to me like a simple modeling job. I want to take a sphere and scale it along the vertical axis to make a saucer. Then I want to slice it into 3 vertical segments along polygon edges. And I'd like there to be faces where I cut it just like it was a solid object that was cut. Once again, I want to cut it along a polygon seam and not some random point in space. The idea is that I end up with 3 objects that I can texture and bring into KSP. I just spent the last 9 hours bouncing between Lightwave, Wings 3D, Blender, and Youtube trying to do this. I just want to do some simple part modeling. Is there any software that I can use that is simple to learn and can do this ONE function?

You need to make sure you return your samples to the surface in 2 separate trips. When you land a ship the game will look at all the science points on board and discard duplicates even if they're in different pods. I keep samples in a mobile lab and in the pod. By taking a lab to the surface I can get the best value for transmitting and clean the experiment bays.

I did some experimenting with a lander that integrates a lab. I've got 3850 dV and a refueling base on the Mun. At each biome I repeat 3 experiments. A material observation, a goo observation, and a surface sample. The first time is to transmit. The lab helps with that. The second is to return and gets stored in the pod. The third is also to return and gets stored in the lab. The stuff in the pod goes back to Kerbin in 1 courier ship while the stuff in the lab goes back in a second ship. After visiting 4 biomes and transmitting the first copy of the data for instant science, my first load of stored data was worth 906 points. The second load of stored data was only worth 260 points. A nice bonus for just going outside again at each site, but probably not worth an extra landing to get it. Of course I also did crew reports and EVA reports at each site and transmitted those too.

Keep in mind that some of the best stuff in MechJeb can only bee seen by making custom windows. They're real easy to make and can help clear up some of the clutter on your screen since you can have windows specialized for each phase of the flight. As for the idea that MJ is cheating or cheapens the experience, even airline pilots rely on a meat droid in the right seat. Do you feel cheated that they didn't do everything when you travel?

I was also wondering about this. I use MechJeb and a couple of other mods so it's no problem for me to go to 1km up then set the ship to maintain altitude automatically and build up some surface speed. My lander has about 25 minutes of hover time and it uses pretty low throttle to maintain a constant altitude. I just wasn't sure if it took less fuel to stay close to the ground or to use a high arc with a hard burn at each end.

I really like your mono rover. Is the probe cores torque enough to keep it upright? Does it stay vertical on hills? I assume the little cubic struts are to keep it from falling all the way over if you crash. Can it get back up if you fall over on one of them?

I've also seen weird things with rovers on the Mun north of the east farside crater. When nearing the rim of smaller craters I kept rolling up the hill then down into the crater. I saw this with a few of the smaller (when seen from orbit) craters. Even the navball and Mechjeb agree that you're rolling uphill.

For simple non animated parts you might want to look at Wings 3d. It just does modeling and has no animation tools so I find the interface simpler than Blender. There is also a video tutorial on YouTube that's pretty easy to understand on how to make a fuel tank from start to finish. (google it or search YouTube for KSP modding) A lot of people like Blender. It's also free and can do animated parts, but I find it confusing and don't like it much.

Last year there was a post about a heavy lift flying saucer called the titan. It looked pretty interesting, but that was last year. Did it ever get released, was it canceled, or is it still being worked on?

There's been a lot of advice offered here so I figured I give some too. First thing is that mechjebs autopilots won't do anything to help you. You mentioned being early in the career and while the basic Mechjeb unlocks pretty early on your tech tree, the autopilot functions are unlocked quite a bit later. Still, there's 2 things that MJ can do to help you with this. The first is the SmartASS panel. This window has buttons for common orientations that you use. (prograde, retrograde, node, target +-, Rvel +-, ect) You push the button and MechJeb will turn the ship and hold it at that orientation while you're busy with other stuff. The second thing is that you can easily make custom windows with pretty much any of MJ's info on them. The image below shows a custom window for docking info that includes my closest approach distance, relative velocity at closest approach, and current distance and time to approach. In concept, what you're trying to do is to have your orbits meet at one point and to have your orbital period different from your target. This picture shows a few things related to that. Both ships are orbiting counter clockwise in the image. My ships orbit is the blue line. The station that I want to dock with is targeted and it's orbit is the yellow line. The station is in a circular orbit at 200 km. My ship is in an eliptical orbit. My PE is 80km and my AP is 200km. (shown in the rocket flight custom window. Both orbit meet at my ships AP at 200km. The little pink intercept symbol on the AP marker indicates my ships position NEXT time it gets there. The one with the line going to the planet represents where my target will be next time I get to AP. Because my target is in front of me at the intercept point and I'm in a smaller orbit, I'm orbiting in less time and will eventually catch up over a number of orbits. Turn up time warp and sit back and wait for it to happen. Eventually when you pass the intercept it will show you that the target will be behind you on the next orbit. At this point you want to burn prograde a little bit and the intercept markers should move closer together. By increasing that last orbit a bit you insure that rather than passing your target you arrive at the intercept point at the same time. While you're waiting to come around on your final orbit make a maneuver node at the intercept point and adjust it so the orbits match. This allows you to match course and speed with your target when you get to your closest approach. While the maneuver node will get you as close as you can in the map, you're still going to have some drift to deal with. When you get close to a target the navball will switch to target mode. The yellow indicators no longer mark prograde and retrograde. They now mark your direction relative to the target. By aligning the ship with the retrograde marker you're pointing your engine in the exact direction you're moving relative to the target. If you thrust till the velocity reads 0 then you're in the EXACT same orbit as your target and not moving in relation to it. If you want to get closer point your ship at the target and use a bit of thrust to approach. You want the yellow prograde marker right on the pink target indicator of the navball. When approaching you want to keep your speed low in the 5 to 10m/s range. When you get within 1km bring your relative velocity to 0 and you can EVA over to your target. While you can do all of this without MechJeb, it's ability to quickly turn and hold an orientation make things a lot easier. For this operation you'd be using the prograde, retrograde, and Node buttons in the orbit mode and the Rvel-, Tgt + in the target mode. The relative velocity indicator on the navball is not that accurate so a custom window with that function helps a lot for parking your ship before EVA without it drifting. Of course if this all seems too complex you could just launch another probe and put parachutes on this time, but at some point you'll want to try docking and will need to learn this anyways.