Spyritdragon

Thanks for the information and hints so far everyone :-). Doesn't that put a huge sheer stress on your innermost drop tanks?

This works, but it usually costs more delta-V, getting progressively more as you get further out of phase from the ideal angle for a Hohmann transfer. This is even added to by the fact quite a few of our celestial bodies have no atmosphere, forcing you to cancel out more relative velocity.

Hello, Two questions: 1: Whenever i build things in the VAB, and use any form of symmetry, it seems to lock that part to that symmetry. Afterwards, whatever symmetry option other than 1x i choose, it will always snap to this, forcing me to always use the lowest form of symmetry i will use on that part, or start placing things without symmetry, which im not particularly fond of. How do i get rid of this 'set' of symmetry? As an example, say i'd build an asparagus lifter. I'd want to have 6 radial decouplers and tanks at all exactly the same height, which i'd use the 6x symmetry for, but i need to asparagus-line my fuel lines, and some of the tanks will have skippers while others will have mainsails, making me want to use 2x symmetry, but it won't allow me. Also, is there a way to remove parts added with symmetry without removing their symmetrical counterparts? 2. Stage grouping. As aforementioned, i usually have to set my boosters with 2x symmetry for a 6-way asparagus. It groups the engines up in groups of 2 and one single one for the central stack, giving me four icons. If my upper stages have lots of actions, this can get really messy. How do i group these 7 engines together like it does for symmetry? I've managed to ungroup them one time, not exactly sure how, and im not sure how to regroup them. Sometimes dragging them over one another works, other times it doesn't. I can also manage to surround all 4 with a green line just as it would when i click the groups of 2 (it unfolds them and lines the two grouped ones in green), but if they weren't pre-grouped, the green line will just disappear afterwards and they stay un-grouped. How do i group/ungroup stages?

The first node is indeed very difficult because you don't have decouplers. Experienced players decided to have some fun with this and blow the bottom stages up with exhaust from the upper stages, but this is a carefully managed process which i don't advise to beginners. Rather, if you want to play carreer mode, just put a command pod on the launchpad. Take a crew report, then hover over your Kerbals portrait in the bottom-right and go 'EVA', or step out of your craft. Step on the floor and take a surface sample and an EVA report. Step back into your pod (use the F key to board), then recover it using the big green button that will appear above your altimeter when you hover there. You should now have enough science to unlock decouplers. But, for your easiest start, i very highly advise you use sandbox mode instead. Try restricting yourself to the 'small diameter' parts. The game has three main radial sizes - tiny, which is usually used only for probes, small, which are mostly the FL-T series tanks and the LV series engines, and large, usually branded 'Rockomax'. I advise you to start off with small diameter parts (http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Radial_size): these are easy to handle, its easy to get enough power to get into orbit, and have little tendency to wobble eachother apart. Also, if you want, downloading the demo will very nicely show you what parts are good to use for your first spacecraft. And one last tip: When launching your craft, fly up till you hit 10km, then fly East :-).

Either you can mount a refuelling mission in this case, which can transfer EletricCharge, or you have no ways of gaining power whatsoever, in which case i think there is currently a bug that when switching bad and forth from map view and zooming in and out quickly (mouse-wheel) in map view grants you a little bit of power, which you can then use to tag it as 'debris' since you won't be doing much useful with it anyway.

Are you sure all docking ports have crossfeed enabled, if you have any docking ports in it? Back up your craft, then remove everything in the line from fuel tank to NERVA but the tank your NERVA should be feeding off of. Put on a single NERVA and fire it. If it works, remove the NERVA, the first part that comes after the tank in between, add the NERVA and repeat. This way you can localise what part is causing you problems with fuel transfer, and potentially use fuel lines to connect :-).

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Put it on the runway. Press spacebar and throttle up. If they dont produce any thrust at all, right click them and take a screenie of the context menu and show us it :-) Edit: disable your skippers temporarily for clearer testing. You want to be running only the nukes during test.

4% is a pretty neat bonus, when using large lifter stages. If you start off with a few dozen thousand units of fuel, you can power a NERVA for quite a while.

Okay, ill give that a try then

I'd like to avoid using more mods for now. But with the first maneuver node i place, i can't seem to get anywhere near 500.000 metres of Jool. My Jool periaps just won't go under 1.000.000 . Either i have to spend another 1000 delta-V, which is another half what i used to actually make the burn to Jool, and which i don't really want to use - i'd have to use the fuel which is in my lander to get back, or it just pops me out of my encoutner again.

Now we're near the topic, what settings need to be changed to make the seas transparent?

^Okay, thanks alot. I think i still have a quicksave from before i preformed the burn, so i might use that if it doesn't work anymore in the situation im in right now.

I've hit a nice Jool transfer window, made my burn and am now heading towards Jool, only, i can't really spare the fuel to arrange for capture myself - my ship is built under the assumption i can aerobrake. Only, i don't have a clue how to bring my periapsis down within the atmosphere now. I can make an inclination change so i arrive a bit equatorially, but the periapsis just won't go down. When and where do i burn to arrange an aerobraking maneuver?

For me, of course, one point is aesthetics. I like to have a station to science on and such. One of the most useful properties of a station is the possibility to house large amounts of fuel in orbit, allowing you to refuel your craft in orbit, greatly extending your operating range. It also makes that you don't have to deorbit your interplanetary ships, landers etc, and can just keep them in orbit for further use. One thing i also like is that stations allow you to keep multiple ships together. I dunno why, but i like it organised this way. It prevents me from having a whole bunch of stuff flying around, and allows me to always have fully fueled Munar/Minmus landers in orbit.

It doesn't always turn out too well though. Slight fuel misdivision put me into a spin only half an hour ago, resulting in a few deaths of Jebediah i had to use the time-space-transmanipulator to reverse. I don't mind the orbit being inclined, although im not sure if it'll exactly stay geostationary when its on an inclined orbit. Will it? And hey cake ^-^. Nauthy, don't we have a space on the station left? My module is really a shuttlecraft and fuel tug - the shuttlecraft will spend some of its time at ground level, and the tug will spend some of its time attached to the Fuel Station or just plain orbiting Minmus and Kerbin.

I think it says something that KSP is higher on the list than Eve Online, a quite reputable online game.

KSP has Science now. And it has Jebediah, and never in the real world has anyone as crazy, loopy, awesome and badass at the same time existed, so its also fiction . Voted ^-^

Are you sure the mod has been updated to support tech-tree integration? Some mods haven, some mods haven't. Also, make sure you're running Kerbal Space Program in administrator mode, and check if the parts show up in a sandbox game. Also, make sure you're actually far enough in to the tech tree to have access to the parts.

Activate the engines on the launchpad first, bring them up to full then decouple the stability enhancers, see how that happens. Also, to see whats going on, bring your stability enhancers up to a reasonably high level. Throttle up and activate your engines, then right-click them. If you dont get a context menu, you have a structural failure on your craft even before you hit the ground and you probably need more struts. For the engines to work normally, they should be in a nominal state in the context menu. Also, as mentioned before, those large stack seperators aren't all too strong, and you have a (very) heavy lander. Attach nukes to that instead of poodles, and you have a Jool craft. Jool and back, probably. You'd better replace them with a decoupler and try again.

Dharaks like "Wheres my radar? We're coming in hot." goes 30 m/s. Im like "I wonder if i should slow down" goes 100 m/s straight downward. Im not a very cautious person . I litterally tend to keep at least 100 m/s of velocity untill im within 800 metres of the surface.

Im not sure which is most efficient, its really a tradeoff between how much delta-V you're willing to use and how long you're willing to take. With timewarp, however, it shouldn't take long to catch up. Not as long as it would've taken to post this . If i were in your position, i'd lower the periapsis of A to aroundabouts 80 km. Kerbins atmosphere ends just below 70km up, so you won't have any problem with encountering the atmosphere. That way A can catch up to B reasonably quickly. When you estimate you have less than one orbit left to catch up to B, create a maneuver node, move it around your orbit a bit while pulling the prograde and retrograde markers back and forth a bit (its really a bit of a feel you gotta get for this - usually just pull it prograde untill your orbit goes slightly above the item you're trying to RV with) untill you get an intercept of under 5 km. Preform your maneuver, then wait untill you get to your closest approach. Then cancel out all target-relative velocity, burn towars your target a bit. Then burn retro to stop when you're within about 100 metres, and dock with RCS from there on. Beware that when you burn retro with main engines, your thrust can push your target around, so avoid using your main engines when you are very close to your target.

Noicisoporp aneub anu se.

Whatever i make is usually under 300, and sticking to that i havent had lag problems yet. I have yet to findnwhere exactly itll lag, but i do know that number is under 800.

Liquidfuel is often to ususlly liquid hydrogen. Since the burning of hydrogen with the usual oxidiser, liquid ozygen, generates water, your smoke is likely water that condenses because of rapid depressurisation and cintact with cold upper-atmosphere air. Its also whitr, reinforcing my theory.