Uberick

I'm a big fan of integrating the skycrane into the rover. . . For smaller ones, I usually pack them on top(bottom, since the LM is inverted) of the LM with a docking port. (make sure to include a probe body so it can control itself) Hope this helps!

In regards to the above ship: I would change the engine to a 909, and increase the amount of fuel to a 360l tank(especially if you want to get home with it). As it stands, that vehicle has about 1600 d/v. As such, if you want it to do a transfer, landing, reorbit and return you're going to be short of fuel. (That, all told, takes around 2000 including a margin of error) If you change the engine to a 909, you increase to 2200 d/v, and you will also get much more throttle responsiveness. If you upgrade the fuel tank to a 360l one, you go up to more than 3100 d/v, about double before with just a few small configuration changes. That is plenty of D/v to get there, land, and get back without giving yourself a heart attack every time a mistake costs some D/v. Here is a picture of the altered vehicle: To do that, all we're gonna do is toss a couple boosters under it. Effectively, put a decoupler under your 909, then put three 360l tanks with an LV-45 at the end. Then, put four radial decouplers with two 360l tanks each, and put Lv-30s on the bottom of those(we only need one thrust vectoring engine, and the 30s have better thrust and less weight.) After you've done that, go put four struts from the tank immediately below the 909 decoupler, to the tank above the 909 decoupler. Like so Finally, put four fuel lines from the bottom of the outside tanks to the bottom of the inside tank.(If you do it from the top tanks, it will unbalance the craft) After that, you're all good to go. I managed to get it into LKO and circularized with 700 d/v still left in the launcher, so this will have TONs of dv left over after coming back from the moon Have fun!

Farthest I've ever gone is about 10 km. . .

It is indeed possible to assemble a ship in orbit and send it to Duna. This is a simple example: I used this ship to make my Duna tour. I had enough dV to visit Duna, then visit Ike, then transfer back to Duna, and then transfer home. Good luck!

Like this: http://i.imgur.com/24dhZc0.jpg' alt='24dhZc0.jpg'> Put the cubic struts with four times symmetry around the edge of the fuel tank. Then you can snap engines to them. If you space them out enough, you can fit a fifth engine in the middle. Usually however, it's more efficient to put a skipper engine on a stack of tanks than a series of LV 45s or 30s.

That particular one is overbuilt assuming a pretty generous margin of error. Tons of fuel, tons of rcs, high thrust engines for ease of use.

Ha. I havn't done that, but while I was exploring Dres with RCS, I flew too fast and turned one of my Kerbals into dust. . .

In regards to EVA, as said above^, it isn't that tricky if you take it slow. Use the right mouse button to center the the camera on your target, and then give W a short press. This should re-orient your kerbal pointing towards the ship. It might take a while for him to get there, but in space, slow and steady wins every time. If he's heading towards the ship and the hatch is on the other side(or oriented in some odd fashion), you can always swap to control of the ship with [ and ] and change its orientation. I recommend quicksaving, and then taking Bob out for a couple EVA practice runs. Get used to circling around your ship, going up and down, and getting a couple hundred meters away and returning. When you go back to the command pod it will refill your EVA RCS fuel back to 100% for free. I use EVA with spaced command pods(every 20km or so) on low gravity planets to move Kerbals from one point of interest to another. It's faster than rovers, and you don't have to keep sending fuel down because the RCS replenishes for free. On many super low gravity moons, you can even put a kerbal into a pretty serious orbit with just EVA thrusters. On Eve's moon, you can even achieve escape velocity. Once you get the hand of EVA, it's much easier to EVA a kerbal from one vessel to another(even over a couple hundred meters) than it is to dock.

So, if I understand the current situation: Bob is currently in a Polar orbit of the moon and needs a craft to rendezvous and rescue him? If that's the case, he should spend his remaining fuel trying to circularize his orbit. After he's done that, any remaining fuel should be spent trying to remove any inclination change in regards to Kerbin(Set Kerbin as a target, as then set up maneuver nodes at the Ascending or Descending nodes. Use the pink triangles on the maneuver node to change inclination.) Okay, so once That's done, Bob's done all he can do; it's time for the folks back home to pick up the slack. The ship below can do this mission with about 1000 m/s dV left over, plus another 350 dV of RCS fuel. I don't know how experienced you are at rendezvous, so I packed a ton of RCS.(Make sure to put your RCS thrusters with four way symmetry around your Center of Gravity, if they are properly placed it will make translation easier.) This ship is basically a one man command pod(make this your first part, that way the second, three man command pod will spawn empty so we have room for Bob), on top of a three man command pod, on top of two 1440l fuel tanks and a Skipper engine. I use four more skippers paired with 2 fuel tanks and three solid boosters each to put it into orbit(not the ideal solution, but it works fine and is fast to orbit). If you want to use your own design, the design objective is to get a pod with an empty seat and parachutes so that Bob can EVA over, get on a Kerbin intercept, and splashdown to safety. You can do this with probe cores, as part of a lander mission, etc Put 4 radial parachutes on the three man pod, separate it from both the fuel tanks below it AND the capsule above it with decouplers(add struts for stability). What we're going to do, is fly to the moon, rendezvous with Bob and have him EVA over. Once he's in the three man pod, we will EVA over our other Kerbal(the one who piloted the ship) to the three man pod as well. Then we will plot a trajectory from the moon back to Kerbin, such that we will be captured by Kerbin's atmosphere and return to "Earth". Just before entering the atmosphere, we will decouple the three man pod from the rest of the vehicle, and the radial parachutes will take care of our decent. I assume you know how to get to the moon, since you've done it already. The only thing different about this time, is that once you arrive you're going to set up your orbit to match Bob's orbit for a rendezvous. Plop a maneuver node and change the inclination(pink triangles) and pro or retrograde(green circles) until you are aligned with Bob's orbit. Boom! Set up a rendezvous, have Bob spacewalk over, and burn home! If you haven't done a docking or rendezvous yet, I highly recommend looking up Scott Manley's docking video on youtube(or any of his videos) If you'd like further info, I can "run the simulator" and take photos to highlight a particular area. Docking, especially if you haven't done it before, can have a steep learning curve. Good luck!

As said, photo would help(try imgur or something of that nature). Without a photo, my guess would be that the way your rocket is staged is such that the bottom stages don't realize that they're only supposed to be drawing fuel from a certain section of the rocket. A combination of rearranging decouplers, shutting off fuel crossfeed, or fuel lines should fix it. If you can throw up an image with some more details maybe we can get a more accurate diagnosis.

Also, if you're using a low thrust engine that has long burn times, and you know your ejection angle, you can start doing a series of small burns to slowly build up to almost escape velocity over several orbits of Kerbin. Then, wait for your phase angle to line up, and then perform your final burn to achieve escape velocity. This can help you keep everything lined up if you have very long burn times.

Do you mean sorta like this:? There are some mods for other solar panels, but I don't have any experience with those.

To get to LKO takes about 4500 d/v, on average. To get to Duna costs about 1050 dv in addition to that. Throw in another 100 or so for perfecting your orbit so you end up aerobraking, and you can land for free, and get yourself into orbit for a little bit more than that.

Do you mean the fuel tanks that are stacked on top of one another are collapsing into eachother, or do you mean tanks that are adjacent to one another? If they are adjacent, and you have connected them connected directly without using a separator of some kind, that might be causing the problem. . . I could see the tanks phasing into eachother if they're that close to start.

Build a piece of scaffolding around that joint if that's what's collapsing. From the bottom orange tank, put an i-beam or equivalent with 3 or 4 times symmetry just below your decoupler. Then, on the top orange tank, do the same thing. Then, connect the ibeams with struts. This will transfer the stress around that joint, and hopefully stop your craft from collapsing. Image as example: http://i.imgur.com/FhVd725.jpg' alt='FhVd725.jpg'> Hope that helps!

Hi all! I've been experimenting with gravity assists for the past couple of days, and was wondering if there's a way to calculate or predict how a gravity assist will affect your trajectory. I know this IS possible, because real life spacecraft seem to do it all the time. However, I don't know if it's simple enough where it can be done by hand for this game, or if its complexity restricts its use to real rocket science. Ideally, I'd like to be able to use gravity assists and powered slingshots to lessen the fuel costs of interplanetary travel, and be able to use the moon to help accelerate out to the outer and inner reaches of the solar system. I'm only proficient in pre-calc level math, so if it takes anything more than that I'll have to study up a bit first(calc is next semester), but I'd love an explanation that'd take me a semester to understand if that's what it takes Thank you in advance for everyone's time and consideration:)

^^^ Yup, pretty much what everyone else says. I wish we could open a wormhole or something to the Kerbal universe and give them designs for good engines. . . the SSME has an ISP of like 450, and there are small engines that get almost 470 ISP.

That lander(photo), should have about 2600 dv as it sits. If you swap those poodles with nukes, you'll get more like 5500 dv. If you swap out the three poodles with one poodle, you'll get almost 3000 dv. In this case, you only want to bring engines that will make your thrust to weight ratio on Duna more than 1; which for this ship means bringing one poodle or about three nukes. If you have a proper Duna window, I want to say that the transfer costs a little over 1000 dv. Aerobraking will make capture at Duna free, so all you really need out of this lander(base) is enough dv to do a transfer and landing. Even 2600 dv should do this just fine. You will arrive at duna with over 1000 dv to spend on your powered landing. If your bring enough chutes, you can reduce the requirements for a powered landing to just a short burst in the last 100 meters or so to drop your descent speed below 10m/s. Don't forget to include drogue chutes, since the atmosphere on Duna is thinner, parachutes work at about 1/5 effectiveness! So, effectively, if you can get that lander in LKO, it should be able to take it from there.

I usually try to do something that I haven't done before. . . like put an ion probe on a grand tour, or build a rocket powered one seat rover substitute to better scout planets(rovers are slow). Most recently, I've been trying to figure out how to do a proper gravity assist. I can finagle it with maneuver nodes until it lines up, but I want to find out how to line it up using maths if I can. So yea, stuff like that. This game is awesome:)

I, personally, LOVE seeing new people show up on the forums. I, myself, was once new; and I'm pretty sure that everyone else here had a first launch, first failed launch, first successful moon landing, first successful moon rescue mission, etc. I think that it can sometimes be difficult for veterans to put themselves back in their old "shoes" and see how foreign the game may seem to someone just starting out. I remember when I tried to land on Duna the first time. I felt like I was trying to hit a target obscured in darkness a million miles away while looking through a pinhole(which was mostly true). I finished my initial ejection burn, and watched as Kerbin got smaller and smaller as I entered that great span of nothingness between planets. I felt kinda helpless; just wafting around like a speck of space dust. It seemed like magic when I actually arrived at Duna's SOI, and I felt a panic set in as I saw that my orbit was some millions of meters away from the planet. I knew that if I missed it, and slid on by, I would plummet away into the darkness of space. . . and there would be nothing I could do to get back. I eventually corrected my orbit, managed to land successfully, and even send a successful rescue mission later to retrieve the whole crew. But that moment when I actually touched down on Duna after a few months(time accelerated minutes) in deep space lifted a huge weight off my shoulders. To someone new at this game, it can be daunting. Things that veterans take for granted like planetary transfers and docking can seem impossible at first. I think it is the responsibility of the community to help new members understand this game as much as possible, so that instead of having a group of veterans and a group of noobs, we have a single, united playerbase always welcoming in new people. If we can do that this game will become unstoppable:) From my own experience, I have found this community to be nothing but helpful. In no other game have I found people willing to walk me step by step through math problems to allow me to achieve something, and then rejoice in that achievement as if it was their own accomplishment. Keep it up guys!

HOLY SMOKES! I didn't know "Magic torque" was actually real! Totally learned something new. After spending the time to read this whole thread, I don't know if I have anything to contribute other than to say that I hope that this game turns out to be awesome, and doesn't get derailed by any one of a thousand different things that could happen to it along its journey. I think the best thing any member of the community can do is try to be the most constructive and informative he can be, and for the devs to assimilate all that information, combine it with their existing objectives, and press on to make the best game they can make. And, dang, this whole Control Moment Gyroscope thing is amazing!

So basically, I built a giant kraken summoning device. . .*facepalm* Well, the learning is the best part of KSP:)

Well, I guess that station is doomed then. . . it has TWO cupolas. . .Thanks for the info! I'll put up another redesign without them so as not to incur the Kraken's wrath.

I had just launched a space station into orbit, and was taking up my SSTO to dock with it. Everything seemed to be going fantastic; I got within 500m or so, but when I switched from the SSTO to the space station(I was going to turn the space station to align the docking ports), my beautiful space station burst into a thousand pieces for no obvious reason. My SSTO got clipped by some type of debris and was also destroyed. Here's a pic(With Jeb in the foreground) from just after I put it up in orbit. RIP Jeb Hopefully it lasts a little longer.

I've noticed general improvements, but I still can't wait for some serious optimization. I dream of the day I can launch a proper 500 part rocket without having to go take a coffee break mid ascent cuz it's running so slow:) Or when I can view my spacestation in double digit FPS. I'll buy as many t-shirts and coffee mugs as I can if the devs will make this happen:)