Monkeh

Well yeah, I always try to keep the node as close to the periap as possible for that reason, but for the sake of a couple of hundred m/s on a craft with nine or ten thousand or more, it seems trivial. I'm probably wrong.

I have been to most worlds and moons in the game now and have never waited for an alignment. Wouldn't actually know what to look out for. I guess I just naturally over engineer things so I can launch, burn and then just play with the position and delta v of the maneuver node until I see an encounter pop up.

It looks to me like maybe you just have too much power! Getting all that mass up to over 230 m/s before you hit 4000 m high sounds like you have one hell of a thrust to weight ratio going on there along with one hell of a weight, that thing must weigh a helluva lot. Just keep yourself throttled down. Alternatively, open up your parts folder and change the strength of the strut to 3000 or something, that should help. Alternative alternation, B9 aerospace has some strong, (and invisible), struts to use that kept this baby of mine together really nicely.

To Duna!

I worked around it with a little decoupler on a central generator. Works like a charm. Now to resist the temptation to cheat my way to Duna... Oh KSP, why you give temptation so?

Planning my mission to Duna. I got the lander with it's rover and an orbit return drop ship. It's stuck on a little insertion stage of a poodle and pancake so the idea is we get it to Duna via some nice nuke powered interplanetary stage and get all of that up on a massive lifter. So as it hits the Dunan (?) atmosphere we pop the parachutes on it's back, drop the drop ship, which has it's own parachutes, and hopefully land within rover distance of each other. This lifter isn't quite up to the task yet, probably need another asparagus stage on those, but it's looking nice I think, and yes, I like purple

So I just had a go and it seems it works when I made a new part, but even with a strength of 0.1, (from 150 normally), it still didn't break. Ah well, now I know I can edit arts to make new ones...hmm, a mainsail with 100,000 ISp you say.... MU-AHHHH-HAAAA-HAAAAAA-HAAAAAA-HAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

2 very simple changes will work wonders I reckon. First, get rid of that whacking great and heavy RCS tank. You don't seem to even have any RCS thrusters nor docking ports, it's pointless weight. Change to nuke engines, or even engine, (singular), on the top stage. You've saved a nice bit of weight with the RCS gone and the higher ISP of those will get you very far once in orbit. Slower, granted, but suck up those long burns, concede to the lord of efficiency and you'll do fine. The lower trust to weight of the nukes can actually be an advantage on the long burn out to Jool, you have more accuracy to land that closer periap.

Hope this is in the right section... I'm trying to make a cargo bay lander that holds a little rover and a return to orbit ship for a Duna mission. Here's what I've managed to put together so far: It has a sliding rail and hinge so it will drop the...well, drop ship I suppose, out of the bay and they'll both drift down on parachutes. Problem is, it bends too much before it gets deployed. I added a strut here to stop it bending down and it worked fine. But the strut is too strong for the robotics arm to break. So the question is, if I make an exact copy of the strut connector parts folder but tweak the --- Strut Connector parameters --- in the .cfg, change the 'title' to 'weak strut blah blah', and save it in a new folder, will I get a new part that works the same only it breaks with a weaker force? Or is that just wishful thinking? And yes, I like purple

Hmmm, yes...yes indeed. I feel a quick trip to the VAB is in order. Another hinge and command chair later and we have a tandem rover, how cute.

The chances of an interesting alien species evolving in the time frame we could observe them and still being around now makes the chances of us finding them very remote if they are out there. The rare Earth theory has gained a lot of foothold in the portion of my brain that still works. All the little things that happened to bring our Earth to safely evolve life are many and compound. The large gas giant, the biggest moon in the solar system in relation to planet size, all those tides and seasons are vital to life, the dinosaur killer, the iron core, the goldilocks zone, the stable sun, the single sun system giving stable orbits, the cue ball earth getting melted due to volcanism...the list goes on and on and it makes very interesting reading. I feel life such as ours is special, probably not unique in our time frame but very, very special. I doubt there are many intelligent species out there right now, if any and the chances of us blundering into each other are miniscule.

Today I made a rover to clip into one of the cargo bays from B9. I made it so the command chair is on a powered hinge from Infernal Robotics so it doesn't clip through the roof of the cargo bay when attached via the docking port. I was proud of myself.

If you want 8 symmetry tanks and asparagus staging you'll need to have a couple of things: 1) Perfect symmetry. Your shots show the outer tanks not lining up with the inner tanks. This is very important. Draw a mental line from the middle of your central tank out through the first layer and on to the second. It should be a straight line that moves through the centre of each outer tank. Your third picture shows imperfect symmetry. 2) Dropping the right tanks at the right time. The way to think about this is to imagine that each outer tank feeds EVERY inner tank connected to it or the tank it's connected to. Having four tanks on each side of your central one means you should pick a tank and attach it to the next one along. Connect that one to the next one along and then once more and then the fourth one should be connected to the tank on the inner ring next to it. Next you connect the first inner one to the one next to it, that one to the next one, and again and then that one into the middle tank. Repeat for the opposite side. Sort out your staging and BOOM! You got poifect asparagus staging and a whole load more delta v. Make sure you go in the opposite direction as you connect them on each side so the tanks you drop are also on opposite sides of your rocket and you keep a nice weight symmetry. The diagram up there illustrates this quite well. Once you get your head round this it really helps a lot. This one of mine had 15 mainsails to start with Dropped 8 on the first staging Then 4 Then 2 All along it kept the symmetry and stayed straight. Then it landed Then it became a rover/base builder Whoops, that was a bit too many pictures...ah well. Good luck.

Don't forget to use the quicksave, (f5), and quickload, (hold f9), for practicing the landings. Remember to kill the horizontal velocity by burning toward your retrograde marker to start with. Once that's down you will start to fall and then it's little burns to keep to a decent descent speed, keep it below 100 m/s as you should be able to stop from 100 m/s quite quickly when you need to. Keep burning towards your retrograde marker and it should start to move towards the top of your navball, ie you're falling straight down. Also, RCS is pretty much pointless unless you're docking with something, there are uses, but nothing that you'll need to worry about for A mun landing. Ignore RCS, you don't need it to stabilize, that's the job of the SAS and the pilot Click on the 'orbit' button which will then show you your speed relative to the ground you're approaching and not orbit, this is very useful. But yeah, remember the quicksave key and then when it goes wrong you can just hold 'f9' and have another go. Good luck, the first landing is such a buzz, you'll be so proud of yourself. Be warned though, it's very addictive.

The Earth is dying. Sea levels are above 99% of all land mass. The air is a choking poison. We are barely surviving. We find a habitable planet within reach of our new colony ships. Awww, sorry human race, we found some lichen there. It's a no go. Best just die out and be done with it. Nope. Screw anything else. We must come first. Burn the lichen. Build the power plants. Take the land.

When attempting to land on a surface click the 'orbit' section of your navball so you can see your speed relative to the surface you're approaching. This is very important for a few, very obvious, reasons. Good luck.

Nah, it's katateochi's constellation mission to Duna. Amazing stuff.

There also seems to be a certain lack of fuel for them to burn as well Long burn time accuracy can be improved by burning half the estimated time in front of the node and half behind. So an estimated burn of 10 minutes should be started at t -5minutes and finished at t +5minutes.

What you need to do is rotate the engines so the seams of the fairings are all pointing outwards. Add 4 symmetry decouplers to the bottom and then the adaptor on those. You can also use docking ports as well, they'll attach at all 4 points when the ship 'drops' on the launchpad. Good luck.

No doubt a decent version of this would entice a whole load of new people to pay for the game. I think Squad like it when people pay for the game. Interesting indeed. Good luck with it, might just see if I can get our community to throw up a server for this, we may just have some spare capacity lying around waiting to be used.

Do you have the steam version? If so just use f12 and it's all gravy. Right click on the steam icon in your little tray thingy at the bottom, click screenshots and the rest is pretty self explanatory. If you don't have the steam version then I'm sorry for wasting both our time.

I believe the maker of this video has posted somewhere in this thread and I turn to him as inspiration for you. Have a little look at this video and see if you can do anything even remotely close to it: Still blows my mind. Yes, it's quite long but it's also all kinds of awesome. So here's what to do next: BEAT THAT!

This...this...this is silly! You hate mods but you really wish one was part of the stock game! Just use it for God's sake, who are you trying to impress by not installing a mod you really want? That's just cutting of one's nose to spite one's face.

Well seeing as they don't work yet I have no idea. Just making my base safe before I fill it with ships. Don't want some nasty pirate types to come screaming in out of void and destroy it all now do I. All those missile and gatling turrets will hopefully keep me safe. Well find out in a few updates time I suppose.