krenshala

Assuming Kerbin's orbit defines the ecliptic, you may want to shoot for the ascending or descending node as well. That should minimize the deltaV needed for capture. Though, due to my newness at the game still, I could be missing something important here in my assumption.

What I did to learn this was watch a few videos that are already out there, put two ships in orbit, one about 20 or 30 km higher than the the other. Once they were both in a stable orbit I added a maneuver node to the lower orbit that brought Ap up for a possible intercept and started sliding the node around on the orbit to to minimize separation at intercept and when about 4 km out got the relative velocity pointed directly at the outer ship. Of course, when tired, I ended up with a perfect intercept and smashed the lower (faster) one into the higher (slower) one, because I was worried more about the relative velocity vector and not paying enough attention to the distance. My second attempt, however, went much smoother as I remembered to slow down to 20m/s at about 30km, 5m/s at 3km, 2m/s at 300m, and finally 0.5m/s at 80m, and I was able to dock no problem. Just remember to stay below 0.2m/s once you are close enough for the Illuminator Mk2 to light up what you are docking to and you won't ram it accidentally, and add spin that makes things even more ... interesting.

I'm going to say "lots of goodness".

Theoretically, yes, you can achieve a perfectly circular orbit. In practice, once you get the difference it down to tens of meters (instead of hundreds or thousands) then it normally isn't worth the time and effort needed to refine it further.

Accomplished my first rendezvous and dock last night using the Docking Port Alignment tool. I definitely helped line things up quicker.

This is the camera (or the objects you are looking at, depending on your point of view) jumping around like mad as you move it, separate from any orbit jitter from the "ancient physics system Unity uses."

No crashes, but I've noticed that after 6 to 8 hours (or more) map mode gets all kinds of wonky jittery and I have to completely shut down and restart KSP to fix it. If its a memory issue, its with allocated RAM not system ram (I've got 16 G, but the game didn't even have a full 2G allocated when the problem first happened). This was vanilla, by the way, so it isn't mods. I'm about to leave the game running all night (finally installed some mods today) so I'll be expecting it to be crazy when I wake up and check it before heading out to work.

Darn. Is this something already on the to-do, or at least on the would-be-nice, list?

Maybe use the Mun for a slingshot to Minmus? In theory it could save you some fuel, but probably isn't convenient enough to be worth trying for.

I'm tempted to always throw a clamp-o-tron jr (well, two, for CoG balance) on the side of stages that have a high chance of not crashing back into the planet after separation. In theory, a kerbal could dock a tug of some sort to it and tow it somewhere where it can be useful.

I may have missed the answer in all the information available, but is it possible to have the Kethane scanner scan while you are not flying the vessel doing the scanning? I'm just starting, and would rather work on building my space station than sit and stare at the probe in its polar orbit of Kerbin. It appears that I have to pick "build station" or "scan planet" and can't do both at once, but i wanted to verify.

Thank you, annallia! I keep forgetting its that easy, and reinstall so infrequently I usually forget how to do this.

That sounds right, MKI (though it looks like you did early Pentium math there). I second Kerbal Engineer Redux (the only mod I have installed), as it has an option specifically to show you your numbers in each planet and moon's gravity.

I was going to suggest calling them "Shish" probes

I'm also new, but one thing I've found that makes lining up a rendezvous easier is that you can move a node around on your current orbit to see how the intersection changes. This works best if both orbits are of the same shape (e.g., both circular) otherwise the deltaV needed can change quite a bit depending on where in the orbit you put the node. Now if I can just manage to get the rendezvous to actually happen in my game ...

I'm planning to make a ring station as well, and am already seeing the difficulty. I really need to learn to dock properly before I try this, I think. Of course, I've already started launching peices. Personally, I was going to use the "dock, check angle, undock and try again" method. Remember, at a certain point the margin of error is small enough it won't matter outside theoretical studies.

Are the three fins part of the part that spins? I see that the right RV-N (in the picture) is lined up perfectly to try and flame that fin off, and that may be affecting the thrust symmetry. Also, did you check the centers of thrust and gravity when building that part? It may simply be that the two of them aren't lined up on the same axis, which would definitely cause it to spin. The farther apart for their axis, the more force needed to counter that spin.

With 0.21 you can just launch with only one kerbal on board. If you use the PPD-12 and a Hitchhiker can you will be able to have a pilot and fill the can with whomever needs to be picked up.

Troubleshooting 101 -- Is it plugged in? Is it turned on? I've lost count of how many times forgetting one or both of those questions has lead to tech support headaches (since I'm the tech).

For me, I posted this, had to wait for moderation (first post from me ) then just a few minutes later the site went down for maintenance and this is the first time I've had a chance to check for replies since (darn day job). Took me a bit to find it again due to forum redecorating until I remembered to look in my profile. Except for whats above the decoupler, yes, that is exactly what I built and attempted to fly. Yup, the 200L is for 2.5m parts, as I discovered the hard way during construction. With the fuel lines, are the docking ports needed to ensure the bi-coupler thinks it can also pass fuel "upward" toward the engine (from its point of view)? Are all the multi-couplers designed to only pass fuel (or the connection) "downward" like the TVR-200L is? I'm assuming your method of ensuring the docking ports are properly coupled is still required when using this setup. In the end I switched from the FL-T800s to some X200-8s (same mass and fuel capacity) and that allowed me to drop both bi-couplers and launch. So, now I have one probe in a 52 day solar orbit after a 20Km Mun encounter (ran out of fuel half way through the burn to make orbit), and a second that I goofed on staging and am attempting to get to the Mun anyway (its in a Kerbin orbit that reaches about 150Km further than the Mun's orbit, but is about 75 degrees behind the Mun at its current position).

Would this same thing be why my three stage rocket isn't getting fuel to the engine? For my initial stage I've got (from the bottom up) a Mainsail connected to a TVR-200L bi-coupler, and a couple of FL-T800s that are supposed to be feeding the main engine to get the thing off the ground and (mostly) to orbit. When i try to launch it says the engine claims it is fuel starved and fails to ignite. If I throw an X200-8 tank between the bi-coupler and the engine it actually lights up, but I'm not sure if it is actually getting full fuel flow or not (only tried one launch and reverted that).