Nibb31

I just had a kerbal jump out to attempt this, and he splatted... At first view, it's going to be hard, because EVA kerbals don't have a nav ball, so you have no idea of your orientation or speed, although for the latter you can use the map view. Ultimately, however, I suspect that the EVA pack simply doesn't have enough Delta-V to shed the 600m/s needed to land safely on the Mun. It might be possible on Minmus though.

I dunno. Why don't you give it a try ?

It's ancient and hasn't been updated. I might still be hanging around in the Addons section of the fo, but it will be out of scale and lacking features.

Try to achieve a stable 50km orbit around the Mun before landing. If you start your landing from an orbit that is too low, you might not have enough time to brake.

You should decompose a Mun rocket into stages that are optimized for their job, top-down: - An ascent and return spacecraft: to get you back to Kerbin from the Mun's surface. - A descent stage: this can be used to deorbit and land. - An munar transfer stage: this will take you from Kerbin orbit to the Mun. - A launcher: one or two stages in charge of putting your Munar stack into Kerbin orbit. You have a lander spacecraft on top of a big launcher, but you seem to be missing something in between. Which part of your rocket will do the Munar transfer burn? Your lander won't have enough delta-V to do everything. It also looks too tall and the fins are useless. You want your lander to be light and low and wide. There's nothing more frustrating than making a perfect landing... just to see your rocket tumble over because you were on a slight slope. You can combine some of the stages described above. You seem to have combined the ascent and descent stages in your design. I usually find it more efficient to combine the Munar transfer stage with the descent role, and drop it just before the final descent, like 200m above the ground. Again, you want your ascent stage to be as light as possible because you certainly don't want to be carrying empty tanks back home with you.

Any crewable parts cannot be piloted when they are unmanned, even with those mods. KSP seems to block them. Also, when they are manned, they are never controllable like a real pod.

There are several of them. Try finding them with the Muon Detector plugin or the ISAMap plugin. It is much more rewarding that way than using a forum to find the coordinates.

It only needs a tiny bit of the third stage for the final circularization, which conveniently jettisons the second stage into a reentry trajectory. I don't like leaving debris in orbit That third stage has between 10 and 20% fuel left when I jettison it during the final descent, at around 200m above the Mun's surface.

You have to keep it simple and design your rocket top-down. Start with a lander capable of returning to Kerbin. A half-size 2m tank should be enough and keeps the lander light. However, you want to land with a nearly full tank, so the trick is to use the same booster stage for the Munar transfer, the orbit injection, the deorbit and most of the descent. A standard 2m tank is enough. After that, all you need is a two stage booster to get the above into Kerbin orbit. This is my design for a simple Munar rocket: The only trick is that the first stage outer boosters crossfeed the core stage, so that it takes off with 5 engines and when it jettisons those boosters it still has a full 2 tanks to finish the work. Other than that, it's a simple efficient design that can be even uprated to put a base on the Mun.

I don't use the rendez-vous tool. It's confusing and unnecessary. The other features of the MechJeb are pretty much a requirement though.

I achieved a similar rendez-vous and docking yesterday. I had done it in the past, with 0.14, but the spacecraft would spin out of control as soon as they collided (something to do with mesh collisions). I don't know if something has changed in the code, but this time, the docking was much more gentle and stable. And of course, do not warp of switch to the tracking station. I used a Dynasat Adapter to maintain the attitude on the space station target. It works ok as long as you don't have any crewable parts on it (crew tank, airlocks, empty pods, etc...), but you can fit ladders to the space station for EVA.

I like them all, but I have a soft spot for Gemini because it was the first "real" versatile spacecraft, capable of rendez-vous and docking, high orbits, and long duration flight. There were also plans to make it reusable (Gemini-2 was actually the first capsule to be flown twice, the second time as Gemini B for the Air Force MOL project). Apollo got all the glory, but Gemini was the slapped-together underdog that made all the accomplishments and technological milestones that were required for the Moon missions to be possible: knowledge acquisition, astronaut training, long duration flights, orbital manoeuvers, rendez-vous, advanced avionics, EVA, docking, technology demonstration... And all that knowledge was to be passed on to the Apollo program, which had actually started before Gemini. Gemini was also the most "buck-rogers-starfighterish" real space craft ever built, with its twin cockpit, gullwing doors, ejection seats, and even its military pedigree. It was also designed to land like a plane if only they had finished the paraglider project in time... I love Soyuz too. It's ugly, but its the safest and most versatile workhorse, capable of just about everything Man needs to do in space. Exactly what a spacecraft should be about.

SRBs are actually much lower tech than turbopump driven liquid bipropellant rockets. They are closer to chinese firecrackers. I tend to avoid them because I like to be able to control thrust on my rocket, and I find that liquid engines are usually more efficient and versatile.

Orbital Operations > Trans > Mun

Skylab wasn't made piece by piece. It was sent up in one piece. Other than that, you'll have to wait for docking to be implemented, maybe in 0.18, maybe later...

What you have just described are the basics of the Space Elevator concept: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator The difficulty is carrying the mass of rope (or carbon nanotube tether) necessary to reel down thousands of kilometers (whatever geostationary altitude is for a planet 1.7x the gravity of Kerbin) to the surface.

If they are at a similar distance, Eve will require more Delta-V to reach than the Mars-like planet. It takes more Delta-V to raise your orbit around Kerbol than to lower it. Also, the gravity will require that you burn off a lot of Delta-V to land. In the absence of realistic atmospheric heating, you could just aerobrake your way down though.

It would be easier to use bouyancy to escape the lower layers of a dense atmosphere. I think a rocket launched from a balloon would work much better in that kind of environment than wings.

Wobble on the launch pad is often caused by gimballing engines. Design your rocket so that it rests on non-gimballed engines or boosters, or use decouplers or the new launch supports from 0.17.

The "-oid" suffix means "in the shape of", so a "Minmoid landing" would be a landing that looks like Minmus, which doesn't make any sense.

Pretty much impossible until docking is implemented, along with support for multiple pods on the same spacecraft.

A MechJeb helps you know where you are and stabilize your ship, but it's pretty much impossible without a little bit of math as explained in the thread linked to by sal_vager.

I've been in that situation, and it's a real mess. Now I tend to minimize space junk by designing my ships so that most staging occurs before achieving orbit and the upper/TLI stage does the final circularization burn. I also usually arrange to crash my TLI stage into the destination body before landing.

Orbiting Kerbol is easy. All you need to do is get to an escape trajectory from Kerbin. So once you're in orbit, just keep accelerating until your trajectory takes you out of Kerbin's SOI. Any rocket that get you to the Mun should be able to do the trick. Now, what I assume you want to do, is to orbit Kerbol at a closer distance than Kerbin, which means that once you are orbiting Kerbol in the vicinity of Kerbin's orbit, you simply need to lower your orbit to go closer to Kerbol by decelerating. This can take a lot of Delta-V and time. And the return trip will be tricky

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