kurja

Orient yourself by rotating the view, in eva left, right, up and down are always what you see on the screen. Then thrust just a touch at a time, don't rush - get the kerbal going in the direction you want then just let it float there, don't keep thrusting or you're pretty much guaranteed to overshoot.

I've tried a couple times to send a ship with half dozen probes to Jool, thinking I could disperse them to Jool's moons but there are some obvious challenges in doing this. Best I've achieved so far is probes on (or orbiting) three moons and Jool itself... Have you done something similar, and how did you succeed - or not?

Put some small cubic trusses on your payload and then some more on your middle stage tank and strut those to each other, that's how I've solved problems like this. Your current strutting does not help at all because the first failure is between your sas and rc modules, I suspect from compressing into each other during acceleration. That happens with heavy payloads.

No, I was just letting it fly on it's own. Ap was climbing steadily as long as I was in contact with the atmosphere.

Only part that you really need to unlock go to Mun is the decoupler, so you can stage. Well there are ways to do that without decouplers but that's a bit cheaty in my opinion Here's Scott Manley's excellent Mun video, it's an older vid in sandbox so you'll need to adapt a bit, but almost everything applies as is

I wrote here earlier that both Pe and Ap would rise, seems like I got that wrong and Pe actually did drop by 3 meters. At the same time, Ap rose 26 kilometers, which is not the whole truth as the first screenshot is from after Pe, total change was greater. Intuitively that makes no sense to me but maybe someone with a better grasp of these numbers can tell whether or not energy is increasing. I did make that pass a couple times, and saw the same thing happen each time. I guess that if my Pe kept dropping a few meters at a time I eventually would have gotten enough braking to bring Ap down... unless my Ap had reached escape by then

Turning a craft can cause some wiggling of the orbit, especially if it's a big ship but this is a small probe and we're looking at both Ap & Pe rising, Ap rising over a kilometer per second spent in the upper atmosphere. That's just not supposed to happen, ship is gaining energy by slowing down in the atmosphere... Either that, or even worse, it's accelerating by hitting the upper atmosphere.

doesn't need to be a docking port or decoupler, it's just easier that way. Whatever your root part is, it needs to have a free attachment node on it; if your rover is built with a probe core as the root part, it needs to have an unoccupied node on it, and that's the only point at which you can attach it to your rocket when you load it as a subassembly.

Nope, these errors come along even when there are thousands of units of electricity available.

Good solution, thanks. I've been exploiting time warp to get around this - in non-physics warp, transmission speed stays normal but batteries charge at the warp-factored speed, so your panels will charge the batteries quick enough to avoid those out of power errors. That's still useful however, when you have say 200 units of power but want to transmit something that takes 300.

When substance of your response consists of "I don't know" is it really worth your while to make that post? Sorry about being a jerk.

They always sink in if the craft is very heavy, especially in high gravity. Adding more legs to support the weight helps, to an extent. You could also put on some trusses and then put the legs on those, to get them lower so your engines won't touch the ground even when the legs sink in. Some have also built their own stronger legs with structural parts. That's about it, as far as I can tell.

Yes, I know that I get more aerobraking at lower altitudes. It has also been brought up in this thread a couple times now. That is not the point of this thread.

Hm no, there are no wings or fins or anything.

Gravity assist from orbiting a single body, hm that's a new one... Who wrote ksp physics, someone from the flat earth society?

tomatos, tomatoes... It's a ~30 part probe ship, abt 3 tons

You'll have to elaborate if you want me to understand.

Why, what's the problem with semi major? Hm by hitting the atmosphere both Ap and Pe rise, I'm not supposed to gain energy with friction, am I?

I did spend more than a few seconds in the atmosphere, and the Ap was rising steadily, not flickering about in a random rounding error fashion. I know I don't get very much breaking at that altitude, I thought better to do it little by little than too deep...

So I went to Eve and aerobraked to get captured, then raised my Pe a bit higher so I could do another aerobraking pass without ending up on Eve and maybe go to Gilly... But, when I touch the atmosphere my Ap is rising??? What's going on, has anyone else seen this happen?!? And moments later....

definitely what Vanamonde said.... your docking ports are bolted on the wrong way 'round

Sure, going opposite to the body's orbit would make a difference. But that's a 180 degree difference, Eeloo's inclination is 6 degrees - how much would this add to capture burn dv requirement, as opposed to what needs to be spent to match inclinations in solar orbit? If someone more mathematically inclined is reading, would you care to offer some numbers on this =)

I see what you mean, but in ksp the rest of the universe ceases to exist once you enter a body's soi - it's just the planet and you coming towards it. Does the velocity from inclination difference carry through over there, I do not know.

Physics warp speeds up transmissions. Ordinary warp afaik doesn't.

But burning during an encounter to get an orbit costs the same regardless of your inclination, at least I can't see why the required change of velocity would be any different? That's what I had in mind.