WafflesToo

First, welcome to KSP and the forums Second, don't let yourself get too discouraged; Mun landings are considered a major mile-stone event and are really (at first anyway) difficult. LANDER DESIGN Two things to consider with your lander. #1, a wide landing base is a must. One trick you can use in the VAB to get just a little more footprint out of your legs is to hold the <SHIFT> key and hit <W> (or is it <S>? I can't remember) a few times to angle the legs out a bit. Most of the designs people have suggested with radially-mounted fuel tanks or girder sections are good things to look at. The other (slightly less important) is mass. Generally speaking, it takes about 10 tons of rocket to lift 1 ton of lander into orbit so I'd recommend against RCS and RTG spam for this reason. Also related to mass is your Thrust-to-weight ratio. Of course you need a minimum amount of power to be able to land (and take off again) but too much makes throttle control really difficult when you get close to setting it down. I'm sure you noticed that just as you're trying to set it down you'd lower your throttle a tidge and the thing drops like a stone; tapping the throttle up a scosh and lander tries to fly back into orbit. This is a sign that the lander may be overpowered. I'd recommend trying Markus Reese's design, only swap the LV909s out for the 48-77 engines (that should drop your Munar TWR down to about 3:1). I'm willing to bet it'll handle easier for you. A downward facing spotlight can be a real life-saver when it comes to judging how close you're getting to the terrain; and can help you gauge if it's level enough or not. LAUNCH and ORBIT Not going to talk about design too much outside of suggesting you not use SRBs after stage one. They're really not that efficient and are mostly there to get a quick boost of speed early on. Efficiently launching can make a huge difference in how much rocket you need to get to orbit. First, watch your speed. I could tell you about terminal velocity, air resistance, and map out maximum efficient velocity every 1000 meters... but that would be stupid and overwhelming. The rule of thumb is 100m/s off the pad, keep your G-meter at about 1G, and you want to hit about 200-240m/s when you reach 10,000m. Second is turning the rocket over. The easy way is to turn it over to about 45-degrees at 10km of altitude, then turn it over to the horizon at about 30km. It's not the best turn, but its a good place to start from and you can work out better ways as you gain experience. Third, you want your orbital altitude as low as possible. I used to go all the way out to 100km but these days I put my parking orbit down around 75-80km. Less energy spent getting into orbit and (unintuitively) less energy spent with your Munar injection burn. GETTING TO THE MUN This is easier than you think. Plunk down a maneuver node. Grab the prograde green karat and pull on it until you have a ~860m/s maneuver plotted, then grab the blue circle on the node and wave it around your orbit until you get an encounter with the Mun. You can fine-tune it from there. I think that covers some of the basics. I'll upload some designs later when I get home and have access to my own computer (this laptop sucks too hard to play much with ) Hope some of it helps you out. Good luck.

To ion or not to ion, that is the question. A lot of it comes down to why you're playing the game; is it the journey or the destination? If all you want to do is get somewhere quickly then they are not for you. If you find some sick, perverse pleasure in the slow, building anticipation of making pass-after-pass, gradually coming closer and closer to escaping the clutching grasp of Kerbin' s SOI until finally being ejected out into the freedome of the solar expanses, free to roam wherever you will... Excuse me, I need a cigarette.

I set my network up with six satellites up in GSO (KSO? anyway) each equipped with a Communotron-32 antenna. That gives me coverage over LKO. Two of the satellites are also equipped with a pair of 50Mm dishes; one pointed at Mun and one pointed at Minmus. When I get to it I'll be adding com satellites around each of those bodies; probably a ring of three satellites equally spaced around a 2Mm polar orbit (also geared with Communotron-32s) and a pair of satellites in a 2Mm equatorial orbit equipped with one Communotron and a single 50Mm dish antenna pointed back at Kerbin. That's the plan anyway. I'm not planing on expanding the network beyond Kerbin, instead I was going to take advantage of 6-kermins = a command station and set up localized nodes exploiting it that way.

Actually, I just had a better idea. Let us set the SAS gain-rate in the tweakables department.

I just got ninja'd Was going to say "50 48-77's" but it looks like I was thinking too small.

Restore 0.21 SAS if you would please

Is this an explanation of how it works or a sales pitch? Because it sounds like a sales pitch. The ONLY thing that the 0.22 SAS does better than 0.21 is hold the heading. It hunts really badly and has a bad tendancy to oscilate after minor heading changes which is a pain now that electric change is something of a premium. Argue that you like it better if you must, but don't dictate that it's "better".

Gilly shouldn't be a problem.

I'm with you

That would be correct SUH! Actually, glad you mentioned it because I'd completely forgotten about that . But no, the Mk.III cargo unit does not carry fuel (the Mk.III crewtank on the other hand... Guess that'll make the Pelican-A a gatecrasher when her day comes )

So disappointed with my performance on this one... sigh... All the same, here's the Pelican-K (cargo variant) that I used to put a series of satellites into orbit in my newest play-through of the game.

I would call it an improvised nozzle ;p

#1) Struts are mysterious buggy things capable of warping the very fabric of reality inducing bizarre and unwanted forces into your rockets. Use sparingly. #2) Learn how to read a delta-v map #3) Learn what delta-v even means. #4) The Tsiolkovsky rocket equasion #5) More does not always mean more. #6) Patience is a virtue #7) Ion drives require a lot of patience. #8) RCS is heavy. Bring it only if you need it. #9) so are RTGs #10) check your staging #11) Gigantors are also very heavy. #12) be wary of any advice containing the words 'always', 'never', or 'Hello, I'm Scott Manley'

I love how people like this can make such an absolutist statement with the incorrect assumption that their point of view is the only point of view. Ion engines reward the patient. If you do not have it then they are not the engine for you.

No worries I like the improved readability with the renamed resources. Looks like an easy fix too.

Save breaking kinda messes me up really badly... but you're saying the only issue is one of the resources got renamed? So if someone were to go through the source and replace all instances with the original resource name it wouldn't break the save? Just thinking out loud here...

Wanted to throw my two-cents in with regex. I think I'd rather see the days-of-supplies-per-ton be reduced than to have to divide by four on the fly just so there's less guesswork.

It's WAY better than the Mainsail. Better Isp too. Seriously, what pile of cartilage thought the most OP engine in the game needed a buff in the latest version?

Yeah, at 50 bleeding kilograms each! Way too heavy to want to install more than a few. My bad, 5kg each. Still more than I'd like to indiscriminately throw around one doesn't weigh much, but next thing you know you've tossed 20 of them around the ship and you've added 0.1 tons to your mission package.

Just something I figured out for myself the other day and thought it might be of some interest to someone else out here. Kind of nice to know how many batteries you need to keep your kethane scanning or coms relay satellites operational as they pass through the dark-side of the planet. All you need to know is the Gravitational Parameter of the body you're orbiting, the radius of the body you're orbiting, and the semi-major axis of your orbit (works best with circular- or nearly circular orbits.) First you need to find your orbital period (either by calculating it as below... or by looking it up in the KER window, you cheater) T = 2pi * SQRT(a^3/u) Where T = Orbital Period (in seconds) a = Semi-Major Axis (in m) u = Gravitational Parameter (in m^3/s^2) Next, find the arc of your orbit that will be in the shadow of the planet w = 180 - 2 * SIN-1 (SQRT(a^2 + 2ar)/(a+r)) Where w = arc width (in degrees) a = ave altitude above surface of orbit (in meters) r = radius of orbited body Which we plug into a percentage formula to find the amount of time we'll spend there (in seconds) s = Tw/360 Where s = time spent occluded from the sun (in seconds) T = Orbital period (in seconds) w = arc width (in degrees) So, if we're orbiting Kerbin in a nearly circular orbit with an average altitude of 75km... T = 2pi * SQRT(675000^3/3.35316 * 10^12) = 1900 seconds (about-ish) w = 180 - 2 * SIN-1 (SQRT(75000^2 + 2 * 75000 * 600000)/(75000 + 600000) = 125 (ish) degrees Which means we'll be spending 1900 * 125 /360 = 660 seconds (11 minutes) in the dark. Hope someone finds this helpful.

Haven't run into problems yet, just trying to think ahead though. Spent my lunch hour going through the source code a bit and did I read the values correctly for electrical power consumption? ~1/3 a charge-unit per second per Kerbal and an additional 2/3 charge-unit per second for each manned crew can. So a Mk.1-2 can is costing you 1-2/3 charge units per second. And I thought the coms antennas were power hungry! I suddenly think I'm going to need to beef up the electrical systems on my ships Oops! Missed a step, that was 1200 charge / Seconds Per DAY, I had misread it as hours. That puts the electrical consumption at 0.013889 per second per Kerman and 0.027778 per second per crewed capsule which is far more reasonable. Man did I overbuild the electrical system on the Pelican-K

All for keeping it simple. One unit = one day worth of that resource is perfect. But the containers all need to mass the same for balance so it's units per can that needs to be adjusted accordingly. If I remember the article correctly, water should be the heaviest per unit, then food, then air.

I kind of had the same thought the other day myself. I think the reason behind the different supplies is the OP eventually wants to add both recyclers and planet-specific resource harvesting (such as air and water from Laythe, maybe just water from Vall, etc.) All the same, I think you're onto something. I might play with the *.cfg later and see how it goes. EDIT: Just had a thought; maybe the support cans should have the quantities of reach supply shifted around so all three run out at the same time? Just a thought.

Interesting... I just started a new playthrough too with the RemoteTech and Kethane mods, I'm giving serious thought to adding this one too (give my Pelican SSTO more to do once the satellites are launched). How close are you to getting the recyclers working? Be a neat mission delivering these new parts to the station.

Actual in-game reasons? I can't think of many. Out-of-game? I can think of a few. Pride is a big one, or rather 'fun' if you enjoy sqeezing as much as you can out of as little material ad possible (like I do ) System specs could be another. My 7 year old dinosaur starts wheezing if I throw much more than 250 parts at it. ) And one last one, if you are depending on a limited resource like kethane it's good not to wipe out an entire deposite just delivering the mining equipment