Subbota

Oh now I understand what Jaxal1 was saying. That's the first I've heard that warp drives magically transport a vessel without velocity. Is that a Star Trek concept?

Why wouldn't you be able to turn the ship around and fire the FTL again to bring the velocity back to a maneuverable range?

Just what I needed! I have a fleet of 16 ships about to arrive at Duna so this will be a big help to manage the chaos. It's always a pain not being able to target a craft because it's too close to something else.

My first landing was mostly successful. I landed my ship on its side, but cycling the gear was enough to get it upright and ready to return home with no damage. After that things got really...dark. I smashed several subsequent missions into the surface so hard little or nothing remained. Then we got the .21 update and the new terrain features made it much harder so I had a long series of missions where I got the approaches right but always ended up breaking important parts off landing on slopes. Now I have this fear of the mun that makes me avoid it for the most part. TL;DR: First landing went fine. Since then not so fine.

When my landers turn into debris fields I like to think of it as spreading kerbal technology across the kerbol system. Someday alien civilizations may find all those rocket parts and learn something from us.

A couple of weeks ago I stranded 3 kerbals in the middle of really inhospitable mun terrain. After several failed attempts at landing a rescue nearby I finally crash-landed a rover near enough to get it to them so they could scout a better landing site. That took forever but finally I found some ground that if not flat was at least flatter than the massive crater peaks all around the crash site. After many quickloads I finally managed to get a lander in there without tipping it over. So after finally managing to get my crew off the mun and back to kerbin I had a lot of extra fuel and decided to burn it on my way into the atmosphere, and the 4 nukes were slowing me down a lot more than I expected. It looked like I might actually be able to land the whole thing on kerbin without separating the crew module for a parachute landing. I though I was going to make it until I got to about 1000 meters so I decided to abort the vertical landing and pop the crew out, but for some reason the parachutes never activated and after all that work all 3 kerbals were killed at the moment they finally returned to kerbal soil. On the bright side, I got a really cool photo of the descent to kerbin (for science!).

Which is a big improvement over the 2500 ft you get in real aircraft.

Presenting the KSS Titanic 878 parts, 417 tons, 20k units of liquid fuel, 18 kerbals, 2 heavy landers (7 kerbals each with a 7-kerbal rover included), 4 unmanned mini landers, 4 unmanned rovers, 2 long range satellites, and a utility tug. I'll never do that again. Lag is so bad it took 45 minutes to complete an 8-minute burn to Duna, and it wiggled so much I had to spend the entire time making small steering corrections (and used up most of my RCS fuel). When I finished the initial burn I ended up undocking everything that can make orbit independently and turned the mothership into a fleet. But so far zero icebergs hit, so it's a huge success.

Thanks for all the answers, guys. I'm going to try playing with the design some more to see if I can get it to work better. I'm pretty new to the game so I'm trying to understand the core of the game before I start adding mods.

I have a fully stock setup with asparagus staging that isn't working as I'd expect it and I'm not sure if it's a bug or something I'm just not understanding. I'm trying to deliver an X200-64 tank into orbit and don't care if it's full when it arrives, so I ran 2 fuel lines down to the first stage asparagus boosters using 2X symmetry. When I run the first stage engines, 4 out of 5 of the first stage -64 tanks stay full as long as they're being fed by the upper tanks, but one of the tanks fed directly from the upper tanks has a small but significant drain as if there's more flow in one fuel line than the other. Craft file is here. Photos of the vehicle in VAB and during fuel burn on the pad are here. The goal of connecting the top tanks to the bottom was to prevent a a top-heavy situation when I start my gravity turn. When I finish the initial launch burn I pump fuel from the center -64 back into the upper before separation to let a skipper finish the job. For now I can work around it by constantly pumping fuel from the top tank to the leaky tank until the top is empty. It works, but it's not ideal and if I can fix this it'll make future launches a lot easier.