SRV Ron

Career Mode forces you to start simple. But, even with Sandbox, start out small and simple. Even with Nova Punch mods, which has some huge tanks and engines, it comes with a balanced set of small items that will place a Stayputnik into Mun orbit and return.

As mentioned, my Orbiter Jeb not only makes it easily to Mun and back, it was placed into 25K Mun orbit and returned to an aerobraking landing with fuel to spare. Note how much resources were left for that return maneuver especially in the capsule battery. That is due to slow maneuvering to position and shutting off the SAS as soon as maneuvers were complete.

Whatever mode you start in, you need to start out simple. Start with sub orbital launches. In Career, that is the capsule, parachute, about four fuel cans stacked, and the LV-30 engine. Launch straight up, then about 5000meters, get a feel on how to use the WSAD keys to steer into a trajectory. When steering, the Navball is your instrument of choice for showing you what your rocket is doing, not the visual view. Note what works and what doesn't. Also, learn what the staging controls do when building a rocket. As you gain more knowledge how things work, you can start building two and three stage designs, learn the limitations of the engines used, and learn how to get into orbit using map mode as your guide and the Nav ball to track what your rocket is doing. And, radial mount parachutes will attack to the Kersputnik as seen on this Duna probe landing.

Those early rockets relied on gyros, vary primitive hard wired computers, timers, and tons of slide rule calculations to time the burns and launch profile to achieve orbit. As an example of that difficulty was the first US satellite launched from a Redstone rocket in which a payload stack of three stages of non steerable spin stabilized SRB sounding rockets were used to achieve orbit. Certainly, a similar first step could be achieved with the Stayputnik, a battery pack, and a single stage sub orbital, later two stage orbiting with recovery needed for full credit of the mission. Then, the tree could be unlocked for manned missions. BTY, One small probe design from 0.21 using Novapunch mods for flight, now flies stable using the gyros from the Stayputnik alone. The SAS ring in the photo is no longer needed. As the mod itself was not change, this new stability could be from improvements made to the Stayputnik itself.

One can advance easily by limiting to single engine, stack of four tanks, and several sub orbital flights to land at various locations on Kerban. Any more risks parachute failure. Stacking SRBs and staging them by blowing them up with overheating should not be an option. With careful planning, enough of the tree will be unlocked to build a proper two stage orbiter or three stage lunar orbiter. Designs should remain simple, no Wackjob style monsters. (Later career budgets would prevent such construction). For balance, two Goo pods can be placed on the capsule of just below it since recovery is needed for full science credit. For the first test of career, it works quite well although I would have preferred to start the space program out with launching and recovering probes before committing to manned flights.

Early orbital attempt. Boosters overheated and blew off. Made orbit with fuel to spare but was a bitch to control the first stage. Center engine burned longer then the ring of three. Made Mun orbit and back

Note that both maneuvers are set up for fail safe reentry.

If you have batteries already, you should be able to build this and orbit Mun or Minmus. This assumes that you have the radical decouplers and the LV-909 for the upper stage. Your intercepts and return maneuvers should look something like this; Build no more then needed . Without bracing, you will have control issues in larger designs. Orbital Jeb has minor control issues on the SRBs that bracing would eliminate.

Without struts and other aids, big rockets will be unstable period. Build simple and you will be able to get into orbit. With this much tech tree; This made it to Mun orbit and back With less then shown, this made orbit with some control difficulty and can still make Mun or Minmus, Simpler designs have made sub orbital flight. It is possible to build a SSTO at the first level but you want a water landing since you will be carrying a lot of extra weight on the parachute without decouplers. For the first flight, stack four fuel cans on the LV-30 with pod, parachute, antenna, launch, throttle back near the end to avoid excessive acceleration. Once you get decouplers, build a two stage for getting into orbit. Be mindful of how your design sits on the pad especially when using clusters on the first stage.

After unlocking part of the tree with suborbital experiments, I was able to build a proper orbiter. It had enough resources for a Mun orbit and return. The unlocked tree. Orbiter Jeb; Setting up the Mun burn Mun orbit The return aerobraking burn Landed on Kerban Report

They may also be place holders for future updates where the parts are currently unavailable.

When not in actual use, turn off SAS. Leaving it on will drain batteries. My first Mun orbiter of career mode has no extra batteries.

Something has to be interfering with his install. Mine is behaving. After building a basic sub orbital using four tanks stacked and getting a bunch of science points, I was able to unlock the tree to get the parts to build this; The 55 additional science points came from the single mission of that two stage with booster that had more then enough resources to orbit Mun and return. One important thing with building rockets with no launch controllers. They have to sit flat on the pad, example, the three boosters support the rocket, or bad things will happen.

One of the objectives of the first few levels is learning how to conserve limited power. Most important when placing a craft into orbit or doing a Mun flyby with the limited resources given to you for the first levels.

You should have a capsule, parachute, antenna, FL-200 tank, LV-30 engine, and the small SRB as available parts. Go for a suborbital flight with water landing and recovery first. Be sure that some basic science is done for that mission such as an eva while in space. That should unlock the next stage where you will get a decoupler to build a two stage to get you into orbit for more serious science or do several suborbital missions with landings on various places on Kerban - good for even more Science credit.

Designed and flew simple rockets in 0.22 Little Kerbal Two carries a balanced pair of Goo and returns it to Kerbal The clustered booster design blew up from overheating Little Kerbal Six easily made orbit but is tricky to keep on course during the orbital turn. Also, center tank burns slower then the outer clusters. Little Kerbal Five, the max size limit on the engines, should be capable of a Mun encounter. Until I can unlock radical couplers and braces, the size is getting limited. If Goo doesn't need to be returned. I will eliminate the thrus and fasten the pair on the side of the last stage.

It is a balance between atmospheric drag and the drag of gravity. Something as simple as an engine change can nearly double the performance of a given design when it falls into that sweet zone of performance. A test suborbiter using Novapunch mode reached 71K altitude using the K2-X engine which had too much acceleration for the weight being launched. Using a smaller RMA-3 gave an altitude of 182K. An LV-909 gave less altitude for a longer lower powered burn. Play with different engines, stagings, even SRBs for the initial launch phase, to find the sweet spot.

I believe about twice the normal large booster. Enough to start the orbital turn. You can tell how long it is from where the yellow striped decoupler is located for the small liquid fuel stage. Still, the liquid fueled version is far more efficient in sending the probe to low Mun orbit. Like the real NASA mission, the thruster pack on the probe is used for final low Mun insertion.

Would be far more efficient if a mod is created that uses fuel and oxygen for power generation. A small doughnut tank should last two weeks while creating the continuous power of a dozen huge solar panels. Would be good for career mode for powering missions needing constant streaming of data back to Kerbal.

It should start out with using probes for suborbital testing, then graduate to using Kerbals for more advanced scientific research. That is what I have been playing with this week with building basic sub orbital and orbiting craft. I'm sure things will change with testing and comments about what is currently available. Have downloaded the update and will be playing with career mode soon.

Try the NovaPunch mods. There is a variety of SRB to play with from minis to big powerful 2.5 meter ones and a long burn one. But, as usual, they are only suitable for use during the launch phase. Long burn booster used to test the NASA Minotaur design;

When doing suborbital craft, one will often hear the booster splash down prior to the capsule splashing down. Usually, those boosters can be recovered as well.

1. If you create a shortcut to the game, you can bypass Steam. 2. I saved an archive copy from the SteamApps\Common folder after such updates take place. 3. Steam automatically updated in a couple of minutes when I activated my account an hour ago. 4. A valid point since I have a Steam copy on my desktop and purchased a store copy for the laptop even though Squid allows multiple copies on different computers for a registered user.

Came down in the shadow on Duna by parachutes but was going too fast. Couldn't see the ground to slow descent at the last second.

Continuing Kerbals in Space research. Their first sub orbital rocket. With a K2-X engine, they got to 72K on the trajectory. With the better balanced RMA-3 pictured, the sub orbital trajectory made 182K. Later flight mimicked Alan Shepherd's sub orbital. Redstone orbiter was then developed with a thruster pack being mandated. The final design placed the booster in a decaying trajectory while only requiring about 25% of the thruster pack fuel for achieving low Kerbal orbit. Bob will be returned after a couple of orbits.