lewisd

I'm trying to fly a long-distance flight, and it's proving to be a huge trial, because however much I might try to make my plane symmetrical, the yaw/pitch/roll continues to drift slightly once it's in the air. Adding a couple SAS units (and plenty of power via RTG and solar panels) make it much more stable to actively fly (to the point that I can barely fly it without them), but they don't seem to do much, if anything, to counter the continual slow drift. I've tried using MechJeb2's Spaceplane Autopilot to maintain a fixed heading and altitude, but every time I turn it on, it goes nuts and puts my plane into a spin. Searching for other autopilot mods didn't turn up anything, other than a scriptable one, which seems way more complicated than I need. What options do I have for a long flight, other than constantly babysitting it?

Success! I got my 32 Kerbal colony to the Mun. The colony itself is 80 tons wet, which includes 3100m/s delta-v, and has a TWR on the Mun of 5.0. The stage that gets it from LKO to orbit around the Mun is another 50 tons, so I needed to launch 130 tons to LKO. I ended up using the Supernova launcher from the Zenith launch vehicle set, which I can't recommend enough. With a 160 ton payload capacity, I didn't need to add the boosters, in the end, but I wanted to save as much delta-v in my colony as I could, for a bit of munar exploration. Notice, however, that the colony has wheels too. It's able to maintain a pretty steady 18m/s on the surface of the Mun, while remaining very stable. I leave SAS on though, because sometimes it catches a bit of air from munar terrain, and keeping it level as it's flying is essential for landing in one piece. I used MechJeb2 for the launch, all orbital maneuvers, and the landing, targeting coordinates quite close to my first-touchdown flag on the Mun. After landing, I did a bit of roving to go find the flag, then I got the whole colony out for a group photo. (There seems to be a bug of some kind, the nosecone didn't go away when the previous stage decoupled. I tried editing the persistance file to remove it, but somehow doing that rotated my whole colony 90 degrees, leaving it embedded in the surface of the mun. Glad I made a backup first.) Pretty happy with how that mission went.

Wow, thanks so much for all the time and effort you've put into this. This is wonderful! The Supernova is a perfect starting point for getting my 32 Kebal colony to the Mun. It weighs a bit over the payload capacity, so I've added some boosters to help get things into LKO, before setting off for the Mun. Edit: I meant to add, it's working great for me with MechJeb2. I get a bit of destructive wobble on the last stage, but I seems like disabling the gimbals on 2 of the 3 engines cuts that down to almost nothing, while still giving MechJeb enough to work with to keep things on the calculated course.

Yeah, I guess I could try that. But as you say, they'll probably just go spinning off once I launch, if they won't even stay on against gravity.

Wow! That's a very impressive mun base. I'll definitely checkout that Zenith set, looks interesting. Thanks

Wait, what?? There's a video demo of 0.22? Where?

Yeah, I have a few screenshots already, but they're on my desktop machine, at home. I'm at work now, posting here on a "coffee break". I'll post them next time I'm at that computer.

I have launch gantries attached to each of the boosters on the trusses, just not to the ones right beside them, and the ones beside them keep falling off. The launch gantries should mean the middle ones don't do any wiggling around, and they stay on, but the ones attached right beside them drop like flies.

I've build an interesting colony that I'm trying to get to mun. I'm using stock parts, other than MechJeb2 to help fly this thing. (I don't consider it cheating, since even the Apollo missions were flown by computer.) I have a small 2.5m rocket in the middle, surrounded by 8x symmetry long trusses, with a hitchhiker storage container on the end of each. There's a bunch of other anciliary stuff, batteries, lights, solar panels, SAS modules. This rocket+colony, on it's own, should be able to get from munar orbit to the surface, in one piece, according to MechJeb2's calculations. The total passenger compliment is 32. The design of the rocket part of it is a bit odd, I think, but functional. It has a single engine, but is 2 stage. The single engine is in the middle, with a small fuel tank on top of it. Each of the hitchhiker pods has a small fuel tank on top fo them too. That's the final stage. Then, on top of the middle engine's fuel tank, I have a stack separator, and a large fuel tank. Ringing the large fuel tank are a few of the solid fuel seperator motors. The idea is, the fuel from the top tank gets used first, during deorbit and initial deceleration for landing. Once it's dry, it's ejected *upwards* (and to the side somewhat, since a few seperator engines are sideways) and the remainder of the colony ship lands gently on the surface of the mun. The trick is, of course, getting this monstrosity into munar orbit. And I'm determined to do it in one gigantic launch, rather than launching space tugs, or refueling ships, or anything practical like that I've been learning that asparagus staging, while useful, may not be the way to go for this. It takes an awful lot of power to get this thing aloft, somewhere around 8 mainsails on my first stage, to lift the colony and the stages in between. With asparagus, it would be losing an engine each time it dumped an empty tank, and even starting with 13 engines, it just doesn't get high enough before that happens, and the loss of the engines means there isn't enough thrust to keep climbing. The way I've attempted to build it is this: Under the colony lander engine, I've stacked an orange tank, with a mainsail on the bottom. Around that, in 4x symmetry with radial decouplers, are the same, orange tank with mainsail under it. That's my center 5 engines. Then, under each of the hitchhiker pods is another orange tank and mainsail, so that's another 8 engines. That on it's own launches fine, would even less than half the engines, but doesn't have nearly enough delta-v for orbit. So I did basically the same thing again underneath. However, this one needs around 8 of the engines going to be able to climb, and if I run the 8 outer ones, then when they run out and I eject them, I'm not high enough for the 5 remaining engines to keep me climbing. I've stuck 3x8 booster rockets outside the 8 tanks, to fire along with the first 8 engines, but it still doesn't get me high enough to continue the climb with 5 engines. At this point, with all the struts needed to keep things in one piece, my ship is over 800 parts, and my fancy new gaming rig is running KSP at around 4 FPS, but with MechJeb doing the flying, the framerate doesn't matter quite so much. Once I start ejecting stages, I'm sure it'll improve a lot. Anyway, I'm wondering if anyone's succeeded in getting something this size to the Mun in one shot, using stock parts? (other than MechJeb, as previously mentioned) Any suggestions for approaches to redesigning the ship? I'll try to post some pictures, and maybe the .craft, later.

I was having a weird and frustrating problem with a ship yesterday evening. After adding a bunch of solid boosters around the outside of my enormous ship, I decided it wasn't quite enough, so I slapped some radial decouplers onto the side of an upper stage, used long framework trusses so the exhause would clear the lower stage, and stuck a solid booster on the end. I put a launch clamp on the solid booster as well, and used some struts to help support the booster. That worked fine. It was kind of like this (top view) o===OOOOO===o (it's actualy built in 8x symetry, one O tank in the middle, 4 around it, then 8 around the outside, in 8 symetry from the center. Sorry I don't have any pics handy.) The problems came when I put a solid booster on either side of that one (shown on the left booster, but I did it to the right one as well): o o===OOOOO===o o As soon as I got it on the launch pad, some of the new boosters would just fall off as soon as the physics kicked in. I added struts galore, holding the side ones to the middle one, and to the closest fuel tank, and they'd still fall off just as frequently. I even tried separating the 3 solid boosters with the tiny truss pieces (and tons of struts), but they still would just fall off. Is there something I'm not understanding? Are direct booster-to-booster connections really weak or something? I've stuck boosters on the side of big orange tanks before, without having them just fall off, so I don't understand what's going on. It's a rather... large... ship. A bit over 800 parts (I can see the jaws dropping and heads shaking from here), but I was able to run it at around 4 FPS on my new gaming rig, so what the heck.

The only idea I have involves mods, but I'm not sure if that's ok with you. For that matter, I don't even know if it would work. You might be able to use MechJeb2 (or maybe original MechJeb) to fly one, while you fly the other. I'm not sure if it'll be able to control a craft other than the one you're focused on though. But, if that *does* work, then immediately after detaching, you could use MechJeb to quickly set up a maneuver node to put the orbiter back into orbit, and execute it, then switch to your lander to manually control it's landing.