THE META

some times when I launch one of my clamps doesn't unclamp and simply tears half a booster of my rocket, resulting in my ship being a SSTO (single stage to ocean). so yeah, they may be glitched.

I don't get lots done since although I play KSP a good bit, I never have the time to finish things, so heres my pretty bad one:

kerbal safety? whats that concept? here at META CI, we use kerbals as our test dummies, in the rockets we think are going to explode!

once again, I was using a non-returning probe, so I didn't have a altimeter to use, however my parachutes just seems to act as drougue chutes, they didn't have enough drag to slow me down. thanks for all the input people have put though, I may try use this to next time I go to duna, but for my next lander probe I will just go to eve, cos my lander seems to be just a bit to heavy for my parachutes to work.

thanks guys for the opinions and tips, these will help me a lot, and the discussions been good as well. thanks!

I seem to have not emphasised what type of mission I was doing. I honestly have no doubts that duna is the best place to get off of and go back to kerbin with, nor do I have any problems with the DV it needs, in my experience my things become in efficient because I have too much Dv, because I still have lots of fuel left over by the time I ditch the transfer stage. my problems with it is its ridiculously thin atmosphere making it hard to land on (however I only had 4 parachutes o the thing, so a drogue chute and some more main chutes may work), and its small SoI which makes setting up encounters a very fiddly and sensitive process. however for this thread i'm mainly talking about probe landers as I really had no intention of returning with this mission, otherwise I would have a more complicated set up. also, I don't really see what you mean by how jool takes kigh amounts of DV to reach, because as you push your AP up, it requires less speed increase to push it higher, and as I've already said, i'm am in no way low on DV for my rockets.

title says it all. I was trying to land a small probe on duna today, but every time I just failed. and after this happened several times, I thought, 'why in the name of jeb am I going to duna.' I thought this once I realised that duna Is probably the hardest atmospheric body orbiting the sun to land on. this is for a couple of reasons: 1) it is the smallest atmospheric body orbiting the sun, meaning it has a small sphere of influence to aim for, meaning that you need the phase angle to be almost perfect and you could waste precious fuel making correction burns since you have a small window of time and delta-V to aim for. because of this I eventually had to resort to mech jeb phase angle readouts to get the correct time. 2) Ike. it even says it on the Ike description. ike is in the perfect place and is the perfect size so that most times you will get a encounter with the troublesome moon. What's more, is its coin flip nature of the gravity assists it gives you. it can either leave you on exactly the same path you were on before, or try to fling you off back in to interplanetary space meaning you have to spend even more DV cancelling that out. 3) this is the thing that finally caused me to rage quit trying to land on duna. its extremely thin atmosphere. unfortunately, duna has an extremely thin atmosphere. this means a lot of things. aerobraking requires you to go deep in to the atmosphere, parachutes may work however they will barely slow you down and in my experience just cause more problems than they solve, as you will still crash ans explode without engines, and you will have very little time to make the burn required when landing to stop yourself since you still going at considerable speed. overall that is why I think that duna is actually harder to go to than eve and even Jool in some respects. eve and jool both have nice, big SoI's to aim for, thick atmospheres to aerobrake, and in eves case parachute land with, and no pesky moons to throw your orbit off course (yes jools got 5 moons, but these are quite spread out and are mostly all small so they are easy to avoid.

Ok it definitely seems to be the increased G-force in the upper atmosphere that was destroying my ships, will have to take note of that during future launchs.

I don't have any LV-N's on my craft no, as its meant to dock with a ship in a highly circular 300KM orbit. I was thinking that it may be the G-forces, I'll keep an eye on the G meter and if I see it going too high then I will throttle down, because that might just be it. if it still doesn't work then I will provide pics.

so I'm trying to get a ~65 ton payload in to a orbit of around 300KM apoasis to dock with my space station. however every time I launch it runs well, but then I run in to a structural failure once I reach the upper atmosphere, always in the launch stage. each time it happens I either add more struts or reorganise my strutting, which sometimes fixes the problem but then if it does stop then another structural failure happens. I don't know what to do! if anyone needs to know what launch stage I am using, it is the spacier launch stage that HOCgaming uses. iif you know how to fix it or if you have any helpful suggestions that may stop it from happening, then can you please tell me.

ok thanks for the info guys, however I do not want to use mods, as i'm just looking at the traits as a 'educational exercise'.

i was looking through my game files to try and find the crew traits. I've checked everything in the steam folder but I can't find it. can someone please point me in the direction I need?