Kerba Fett

A couple of other fuel saving tips are to use jet engines to get you up to 20 km before you start using rocket fuel and don't match inclination with Minmus. Use the normal adjust to move your path up or down to intersect minmus's orbit and do a correction burn once you're on the way. It will use less than the 200 m/s of dV you'd use to match inclination.

If you want to collect science on minmus EVA reports and surface samples are the big payoff. If you land on one of the flats you can usually use the EVA pack to visit nearby biomes. Also, each of the flats are different biomes so visit a few and their surroundings. (try to land near the edge. Also, when you get back to the capsule with your surface samples transmit them and go back out and get another to return. The combined science points for doing both is more than you get for just a returned sample. Your first visit with just eva reports and surface samples should get you 800 to 1000 points and will allow you to unlock enough of the tech tree to send a larger mothership based mission. Give it a good fuel supply and lab module to reset experiment bays and team it with a lander with a couple of science jr and goo canisters. The lander goes to the surface and uses the sci jr and goo. Takes off and lands in a new location and uses sci jr and goo. Pilot EVA's and takes data from experiment bays disabling them. Lander takes off and docks with mothership. Lander refuels and lab module resets landers experiment bays. Pilot EVA's and removes data from lander and puts it in mothership capsule. Lander goes back to surface and repeats over and over. Later.... a small data courier travels from kerbin to mothership in minmus orbit. Courier pilot retrieves data from mothership capsule and returns it to kerbin for big science gain. Plus all you get from transmitting data. Remember how you get more if you transmit and return. Once you clean out minmus you move the entire operation to the Mun. At some point you probably want to add a refueler or kethane operation, but your mothership should have enough fuel for quite a few lander operations.

Best way to rekindle your interest in KSP is to go play other games for a while. There must be lots of other games you've been considering, but held off on since KSP was keeping you busy. In 2 or 3 months when you've been through some of the other great games released lately you'll be ready for more space action and KSP will seem like a lot of fun again.

One important thing to remember with all the talk about burning prograde or retrograde to dock is that you're actually not. While the navball uses the same icons, when you're in target mode they indicate relative velocity between you and your target NOT orbital direction. If you don't understand the difference in what the navball is telling you it's much harder to understand how to dock

Of course to be really hardcore you also need to disable time acceleration. If you want to do a trip to Minmus you should be prepared to spend 5 days of actual time to get there. And no bathroom breaks. Theres no flush toilet in a kerbal capsule so you can do without too. Ziplock baggies or adult diapers would be the realistic option.

Angle all of your engines outward a bit. It will make it more stable. Start with 5 degrees and go from there. What's happening is that as soon as it starts to pitch forward it falls off the column of thrust it's balancing on. By angling the engines, the ones on the low side become more efficient while the ones on the high side lose efficiency and provide more lateral thrust to make you move. (which is why you pitch or roll in the first place) You'll also need to use at least 2 large reaction wheels to provide the torque to control it.

I don't bother to match planes with minmus. It takes quite a bit of dV (about 220) compared to the transfer burn. (about 930) What I do is start with a fairly circular orbit them make a maneuver node and drag the prograde handle till the AP is a bit past the orbit of minmus. Then I move the node by the circular base untill my projected path intercepts minmus as seen from above in the map view. You should be about a quarter orbit in front of minmus's current position. The projected path should show a purple segment at the encounter if you're close enough to enter Minmus's SOI. If you get the triangular rendezvous markers, get them as close as possible. Next I rotate the camera down and use the purple normal handles of the maneuver node to adjust my projected path's vertical component. (not required if you match inclination with minmus first, but uses less fuel this way.) Get your PE as close as possible. Once I've done the burn and am on the way I'll often make a node and set up a small correction burn to fine tune the minmus encounter. It's a lot easier to make precise adjustments to your path once you're moving in the general direction of minmus than it is in kerbins orbit. This burn is to fine tune your PE, and set your orbital direction and inclination. On your first trip it doesn't matter which direction you orbit in, but once you put an orbiting station there to process your science you'll want to make sure you enter orbit in the right direction to be able to dock. For the trip back I just burn to escape velocity in the general direction of Kerbin. Once I'm out of Minmus's SOI I do a small correction burn to place my PE inside the atmosphere for areobraking then just sit back and wait.

Although you've gotten plenty of suggestions and marked this thread as answered, here's a couple more things to consider. If you use multiple engines, angle them out from vertical. It will make the craft more stable at the cost of fuel efficiency. Suppose you have front and rear engines angled out 5 degrees each. If you pitch forward 5 degrees the front engine is pointing straight down and providing maximum lift. The rear engine is angled back 10 degrees and providing less lift, but some forward thrust. (which was your reason for pitching forward in the first place) Another way to get more stability is to put the engines above the center of mass. To do this you need a mod that allows you to reverse your engine gimbals. (I use Tweak Everything) By hanging the load below the lift you get a lot more stability.

Aside from a couple of reaction wheels to keep your pitch and roll under control, it helps if you can put your fuel tank in line with your COM. On a rocket powered VTOL you burn fuel so fast that your balance changes a lot if your fuel tanks are off center. On a jet powered VTOL it takes longer, but then the throttle lag from the engine spool up makes them very hard to fly without using mods for vertical rate control. Have you played with the stock VTOL to get some design ideas?

Landing planes is easy. (gravity does all the work for you) It's landing them in one piece that's the hard part. Mine usually come apart on impact.

This is exactly what I meant on my post. You're doing the same thing as I do to dock on the backside of a station except that you switch ships twice and think that makes things easier. If you can kill all relative velocity before you get to the station then why can't you wait till after you drift past and do it? And if you can rotate a station to center a target in the navball then why can't you rotate the ship you started in to face the station? And once you've killed all relative velocity and turned either ship you're still going to have to approach, line up with the docking port and connect. Your way seems like a LOT more work. You not only have to push the key to switch vessels twice, you also have to target the station twice.

I've never tried it, but this mod is supposed to allow things to continue rotating in timewarp. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/67821-Timewarp-Rotation-Fix I played with rotating stations quite a while ago, but haven't built one in a while. If you want to dock at the hub, it's pretty straightforward. Just add some roll and fly from the chase view or IVA. The background might make you a little dizzy, but if you just focus on the station it's just like normal docking. Another option if you were using the infernal robotics mod would be to put an unpowered rotator and split your station into a stationary docking hub and a rotating habitat module. I don't think you're going to need to use fuel to balance the station. Just build symmetical. If you did try to spin it up with something attached off balance the station would probably tear itself apart before you got the fuel transfered to balance it. So you'd need another mod to show your center of mass before you tried to spin it. If you haven't already seen it, Wayland Industries has a station ring for .18. You'd need to update the config file to use it in the career of .23, but you could copy most of what you need from the config file of the hitchhiker container. There's also this mod that has a ring with IVA. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/64442-0-23-Habitat-Pack-v0-3-Flat-hab%21 As for the people suggesting that you need to turn your station to face an approaching ship, that's just silly. If you can fly well enough to dock, you can fly well enough to get to the other side of a station and dock there.

Is this another "I can't dock" thread? Cause there was one started a couple of days ago with plenty of advice. And another one started a few days before that. In fact there's probably been 1 or 2 of those threads per week since they added docking ports.

I tried my hand at making objects a while back. Like the OP says, Unity is a mess and the devs haven't really posted much info on how to mod. As a result everyone seems to work out their own method of doing things and you end up with 5 different explanations of how to do the same thing. (4 of which probably won't work for you) hatches and ladders are a great example of that. It got to where every session was spent bouncing between Wings 3d, Unity, Photoshop, and KSP. After a couple of weeks I got frustrated and put KSP away for a while and spent some time on other games. After a couple of months I started playing again and don't have the slightest desire to ever make another mod again. As for the long load times, he's probably got an unused network connection active. KSP seems to hate that and your load times go through the roof. My loads went from 18 minutes to 2.5 minutes when I got rid of hamachi.

Actually you right click on one tank then hold ALT while you right click on the other to bring up the transfer menu.

Although you get less science for a transmit than a return, if you do both you get more total science points. For surface samples for instance you should take your first sample back to the pod and transmit it. Then go back out and get a second sample for return. You end up getting more total science points than just returning the first sample. As for transmitting then returning an experiment module, it won't work. Once you transmit with a goo canister or science jr, the data is gone from them and theyre disabled. You can re-enable them with a mobile lab module, but the original data is still gone.

I'd completely agree with that. The gravity is lower, there's huge flat areas to land on and everything you do there is worth more science points.

That video was exactly what I had in mind I just wasn't sure how much to lead the target. I'll try the 60 to 90' range and see how it works. As for it being more difficult, anybody can fly in a straight line and my rockets often have lots of extra dV so even if it does take more fuel I don't think it will be much of a problem.

I know how to do a regular Mun landing, but I'd like to try a bit more basic mission. The idea is that instead of wasting all that time flying in circles I just fly straight up from the pad to the Mun's surface. No gravity turn or orbiting just a slight correction after I detach from the transfer stage so it doesn't hit the lander on the way down. Then a suicide burn a couple of km from the surface and I'm on the Mun without all the fuss and bother of a normal mission. The problem is that you need to time your launch pretty accurately and I'm hoping someone here has already figured out how to do it. Any advice?

I find the only way to get those info windows to close is to right click on empty space. Unless you had them selected in the resource window in the upper right corner. If you select stuff there all instances on a ship stay visible till you unselect it. That can be a lot of info boxes on a complex ship. If it is a bug you could try going to the IVA view and back and see if that clears it. (IVA is the C key by default)

Are you trying to select parts on the stuff you've detached from the capsule? For instance, make a rocket starting with a capsule, then a fuel tank, then an engine. You should be able to select or remove the engine by itself. If you select and remove the fuel tank, the engine will go with it. You can't take the engine off the fuel tank at that point, because the game considers them one subassembly. If you've removed the capsule from the rest of your rocket and deleted it, there's no root part and you'll need to add a new capsule then attach the rest of your rocket to that. You should then be able to remove individual parts from it. If you're trying to change payloads on your rocket and keep everything else the same, you'd make a subassembly. (if you wanted to make your final stage a lander rather than on orbiter) This is done with the subassembly tab in the editor next to the science tab. Load the rocket you want to start with. Detach the parts you want to use from the capsule and drag them to the save box in the subassembly tab. Click on the new button to start fresh then build or load your new payload. Go to the subassembly tab and select the rocket parts you saved there and attach them to your payload.

Actually, I say chess sucks any time the subject comes up. The pieces don't look like what they're supposed to represent and the rules seem pretty arbitrary. There's no terrain or line of sight usage, no flanking, no ranged attacks. Frankly, I'm surprised anyone even plays it any more.

I didn't realize that. It sounds very accommodating of them. Perhaps the pilot isn't very good with RCS and they're worried he'll run into the station if he has to steer around it. In any case, I don't see a need to rotate my stations in KSP since I can just fly around the back and dock.

I usually leave them off entirely. Stations are supposed to be stationary. Why would you need to rotate it? So a ship can dock easier? Just let it drift past the station and approach from the other side?

You can carry 1 surface sample from each biome, but there's no restriction on how many surface samples in total a pod can carry. I think you can only carry 1 surface sample on EVA so if you use the jetpack to visit other biomes, you'll need to go back to the lander and drop it off after each one.