Uberick

Holy cow those bases are awesome! After I finish my Eve return I'm definitely building one In regards to the OP. Find something that you haven't done, and do it I know EXACTLY what you're talking about. When I first got this game, I landed on the Mun, Minmus, and Duna in quick succession, and for a long time I found myself just sitting in a rut. I felt like I had "done everything". I mean, how much more can there be to do? EVERYTHING This game is literally filled to the brim with possibilities. I got myself out of my rut by setting a long term goal of landing on EVE and coming back alive. After that I built a space station, then worked on rovers, then built an SSTO, then worked on Ion probes, etc. Find out what it is you haven't done and go do it! If you like this game in the first place, you'll get completely sucked in on a new projects.

Don't lose hope! Remember that the game is still in development phase, and fast development is a good thing!

Exactly what has been said, you can tweak the design but the principles remain the same. Scott Manley is the bomb!

The atmosphereic drag chart is on the wiki @ http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Kerbin Lots of good information there. There are a great many ways toget to orbit, you'll read alot of things on the forum about the "right' way to do it, and the "wrong" way to do it. Don't pay attention to those yet. Alot of the people who've been playing this game for a while will discuss the best way to achieve an objective, but when you're just starting out, you only need to worry about achieving the objective in the first place. The "perfect" ascent path is a complicated thing to find and execute. The good news, is that you won't waste that much delta v if you're off by a few degrees, or follow "rules of thumb" rather than hard math. Don't worry about bringing too much fuel, or overbuilding. Overbuild everything! AS you play, you will become more familiar with what you need to get stuff done.

Effectively, start your turn at 10km. this is the point at which the atmosphere becomes so thin that gravity becomes more important than drag. At this point, you start to turn East(90 on your nav ball). Make the turn gradually, just "tipping" your rocket to the 90 degree side. Let your prograde marker slowly slide down to the 45 degree mark(45 degrees pitch, not 45 degree heading. You still want to aim 90 degree East the while time, and slowly tip over until you are 45 degrees "tipped over" to the horizon.). After your Apoapsis gets around 45-60km, let it drop the rest of the way to the horizon at keep firing at 90 until you establish the apoapsis you want(70km is the minimum to NOT hit the atmosphere) Once you have the apoapsis you want, place a manuever node there, and drag it until it encircles the planet, and creates a Periapsis as close as possible to your current apoapsis(lets say 80km). Once you do that, a blue dot will show up on your nav ball, and to the bottom right of the nav ball, a timer will show up showing you how long you will have to burn for, and how far away it is. If you complete that burn, you will circularize your orbit. Congrats! One note though, if the burn is, for example, 20 seconds, you want to start your burn 10 seconds early. (half the time) You do this because the manuever node assumes that you are adding all your speed(Delta v), INSTANTLY. Obviously, you cannot do this, so you must try to average out the speed you add; half before the node, and half after. As far as going too fast in the lower atmosphere, that is due to terminal velocity, which is determined by the drag of your vessel and the density of the atmosphere. there are tables out there for terminal velocity of Kerbin, but I don't have them in hand(will look). As a rule of thump, you want a thrust to weight ratio of 1.7 on most of your rockets, that will usually keep you below terminal velocity. If you really want to be precise, get MechJeb, that will tell you the terminal velocity at your current altitude, so you can always be most efficient. I've got a class, but hopefully someone else will put up more data:) If not, I'll put up pics and a solid guide later tonight! Here's a ship to base off of, Welcome to KSP! Happy Launchings!

I assume it has an Ion engine in there? Yes, that can go to Duna. It only takes about 1050 d/v to get to Duna with a proper transfer. However, because Duna is an outer planet, to get there you need to do a Dark Side burn, which means that Ion engines won't work for the ejection burn.(no Sun). As such, you should put a small fuel tank with a 909 or something under your probe with enough delta v for the initial ejection burn.(give it about 1200d/v prolly) You can also throw some batteries on that same fuel tank if your probe will run out of juice without them. If your launcher has enough D/v(which it might), then that'd work too. Good Luck!

The initial "acceptable distance" is ANY encounter. Keep in mind though, that if you want to save fuel, you want to hit the planet when it will be about 180 degrees from your current position(opposite site of the sun). Thus, if you find yourself encountering the planet far earlier in its orbit, you are probably burning too much fuel. The amount of Delta V required for a minimum fuel transfer to Duna is about 1050 d/v. . . if you slingshot past the moon you can get there for like 850 d/v. If you find your maneuver nodes adding up to much more d/v than 1050, you are not aiming for the optimal intersect. I recommend using http://ksp.olex.biz/ to plot your course. It will tell you what phase angle to aim for, and what ejection angle and burn you need. in regards to course corrections. The halfway point(or an ascending or descending node), are usually the best places to make course adjustments. To do this, hover your mouse over the periapsis node for your intersect(so you can see the Pe distance). Then, fire your ship at the cardinal directions on your nav ball, 0, 90, 180, 270, and then burn towards the sun(dot on the middle fo the blue side) and away from the sun(dot on the brown side). Obviously, opposite directions(for instance, towards and away from the sun), will undo what firing in the opposite direction does. To describe the process. Wait until halfway point of your journey around the sun. Then, fire north(0 degrees), while watching your Pe. If it starts decreasing, hold your burn until it stops decreasing. If you "miss", and burn too long, the distance will start going up again. As an example, say you have a 100km Pe; you burn north and it takes it down to 75km, and then starts increasing. You see the increase, but by the time you cut engines, it's already at 80km. to correct this, simply fire South(180), and it will undo that previous burn. hold your burn there until you hit 75 again. that is the closest you can get while firing in that direction. continue this process firing North/South, East/West, and Towards/Away from the sun. when you are finished, you will have an intersect that SHOULD make you hit the planet directly. Note that if you are not at an ascending or descending node, firing to adjust your inclination(north/south), will not be perfect, and as such you will never get a perfect intercept) After you enter the planet's SOI, you can further adjust your orbit. Place a maneuver node and use the blue circles to move your orbit closer or farther away from the planet. On Duna, this will allow you to set up a specific aerobraking altitude so that you don't have to waste any d/V decelerating.

I'm gonna guess that the dev's have designed it more as a luxury item than a practical item. Ideally, you would have a small capsule with just some dials in it. The absolute minimum required to serve the intended function. The cupola is fancy, shiny, and cool, so it has to be less practical to use. I only put them on stations and craft that don't have delta v requirements, like stations and long term satellites and probes.

20 right now, but it's growing quickly as I start to set up probe networks on various planets.

My Eve lander. Lander is about 100t.

I don't have pics of my landings saved. I've got some rovers there(one at a mun arch), and a flag that I'll post when I get done with a long ion burn(still got 30 mins to go) Until then, here's some other pics I've got floating around Duna Cool valley on Dres Default flags. This was the first thing I did after .20 came out. I swear I had photos of the landing but I guess not. . . http://i.imgur.com/z4b1oq2.jpg' alt='z4b1oq2.jpg'> Rover hunting for moon arches.

If I'm doing a "mission", then I do. If I'm just testing and putting things up for fun, I don't worry about it.

I just got orbiter this last Saturday after playing KSP for a month. After learning now to use the MFDs, It's not anywhere near as difficult as I thought it would be. After learning the screens I managed to dock with the ISS, Mir, and go to the moon. Sometimes the MFDs are a little difficult for get information from though. In KSP I find myself looking at the actual orbit in the map view , so it's really intuitive to see what changes you have to make to it. In Orbiter, I find myself looking at long lists of numbers and comparing them. After I learned what everything meant, it made sense, but it's much less user friendly. However, I have found that the added precision can make some tasks actually easier in Orbiter than in KSP. I think rendezvous/docking is much easier in Orbiter due to the amount of raw data they give you. . . those MFDs can tell you TONS of information that you have to guess at in KSP(or calculate by hand). Still, I was surprised to see how much of a foundation KSP gave me! Now I have to download that Apollo mod and learn where the SCE to Aux switch is:)

In regards to "keeping" a station in orbit. . . no, as long as you keep it out of the atmosphere(70k for kerbin), it will stay up on its own. It does NOT need an SAS unit of any type either. the only thing that an SAS will do it stop your vessel from rotating when it's on. An ASAS unit will attempt to maintain current heading when active, as well as fight roll. When you are not in control of the station, it will automatically maintain its heading on its own. As for engines. . . it depends on what you want to do with the station. I have some stations with engines on them so I can re position them as I want. If all you want your station to do is "sit" in orbit, it doesn't need engines at all. It doesn't even need RCS if you don't plan on rotating it quickly either. If you stick a command pod on it to give it some torque, you can re orient most stations with that alone.

I love the mod makers in this game, they do some awesome stuff! MechJeb FTW!

Pretty much all the planets with a lower gravity than Kerbin will allow your kerbals to RCS or jump high enough to get anywhere. I don't even include ladders anymore.

Exactly as has been said already; Your orbit can be as low as you want until you hit either atmosphere(which will slow you down), or a mountain(which will slow you down faster) I usually orbit non atmospheric planets at super low altitudes. It looks really cool

I built a whole rover with those wheels and sent it to Duna. . . and the bloody thing got such bad traction that it couldn't turn hardly at all. Or accelerate. I've not found a proper use for them as of yet, groups of smaller wheels seems to work better.

I highly recommend you grab a mod to check your d/v, otherwise use the rocket equation to check. Without that, you'll never really know:) Once you know your delta v, and your thrust to weight ratio, you can take 99% of the guesswork out of getting to, and getting back from, anywhere. Getting to Duna actually costs just slightly more than getting to the moon. With a proper gravity assist, it costs almost EXACTLY what it costs to get to the moon.

This isn't too bad. If you already know how to rendezvous and dock, you've got the toughest part down. Side note for changing inclination. . . it costs less DV the farther out you are, for extreme inclination changes adjusting the eccentricity of your orbit can make it cost less fuel. Now then, to rendezvous! Firstly, you want to wait until the target orbit is overhead. In this case I've decided to burn south, southwest to catch up with it. (I used 5300 d/v total for this, including the launch(which is about 4800 of it) make sure to bring excess if you want to deorbit or meet up with your station) Once you hit 10km, do your gravity turn. Try to aim along the compass to where you the orbit looks like it sits. For this one, I've guesstimated that it's south, southwest(obv). Since 270 is west, and 180 is south, I split the difference and go with 225 as my heading. Set up a phasing orbit just on the inside or outside(depending on if you are ahead or behind the target) of the target's orbit. A phasing orbit is just a slightly different orbit that will intersect the target's orbit at one or two points(or get close enough for target mode). Since this orbit is "inside" the target orbit, we will be circling the planet faster, and will gain a little bit of distance with every orbit. Watch the closest intersect nodes. As they get closer(you should get a feel for how much you are gaining every orbit) slowly expand the size of your phasing orbit so the increment of distance that you "catch up" to the target orbit gets smaller and smaller. Once you get a node that's reasonably close(within 50km ish), create a maneuver node at your periapsis and add delta v until the intersects get close enough for a rendevous.(In this case, about 2 km) Since we have made our periapsis close to the target's periapsis, we can make adjustments there without throwing ourselves into a wild orbit and risk missing the target. I used probes for this so they don't have docking ports, but that's close enough:) Now you have your probe samples!

I stopped adding to mine around 450 parts. . . it gets FPS in the mid teens, which is the lowest that I'm comfortable having it at. Until the game gets optimized further I'm just gonna stick with building multiple medium sized stations for various roles. Or maybe I'll go put together a new computer with one of those new haswell cores. . . I wonder how well that'd run this game. . .

Yup, just put the clamps on it and lower the legs. You can even drop the lander from the clamps to test the legs. I use this technique extensively to "drop test" various landers and rovers to determine how resistant they are to impact.

Just crash(land) it and send a rescue mission with version 2.0! You'll give your Kerbals a great story to tell their friends! Side note, for some reason nuclear engines have a horrible tendency to separate from their host fuel tanks for very little reason. Try to get into a habit of just routing a pair of struts to every nuke engine if you don't mind the part count.

Seeing as how this question has already been answered, I'm gonna toss in my 2c seeing as how it can't hurt. First of all, that Atomic Rockets link is BRILLIANT,thanks Specialist. Also worth reading(if you like calculations), is http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/16511-Tutorial-Interplanetary-How-To-Guide As a side note, you can find the gravity values for all the planets and moons on the KSP wiki. Substitute those into the equation in place of 9.81 to see if your ship will take off of THAT planet. As an example, Duna's value is 2.94, vs Kerbin's 9.81. As such, you need about a third of the thrust to lift a rocket on Duna. You can use that to pack the minimum amount of engines required, so you don't have any dead weight.

Good call, I hadn't thought to change that around at all! Move them up until they just give you ground clearance enough so that the engine won't hit the ground when landing. If you find you have a problem with tipping, you can use stuff to increase the base of support your landing gear provide. I find that the structural wings, for some reason, make your landing legs more resistant to high speed impacts without popping off. (also, they give you enough clearance to fit a nuclear engine, which is why I actually started using them) Downside is that on a vessel this small it costs you a bit of delta V(but this'll still have tons anyways)