Thomas Cook

I tried to build a huge ship to get everything to Duna. However as I don't have a super-brilliant PC, the Framerate dropped like a stone once I had a serious ship. Ever since I dropped the idea of one ship and am now building a fleet of 5 ships and bring them to Duna. So my advice: unless you got a really strong processor, I would advice to save your effort and build a fleet instead of one huge ship. Other than that, I'm always loving images of huge stations.

I'm currently in the process of my very first mission to another planet, and I've chosen for Duna. As I was building I came to the following idea. Duna is mostly made of sand (at least I think) so I wanted to make the whole mission a "nomad / tribe" style to it. So everything I send to Duna has to be at least slightly mobile and able to move. So for the living quarters I made a simple mobile home with a rover attached to it to make it mobile. Simple Mobile Home Rover

So both planes are sub-orbital. I think my answer is semi valid IF you take a trajectory where it doesn't take much effort to bring the crane in stationary orbit. Doesn't have to be a decent orbit, as long ad it doesn't fall back. Once it has a decent orbit where it doesn't crash back to a planet, you can shift your focus to the lander, which should always have some minutes left before it crashes blind on the surface.

Oops. Excuse me. I think I misread the situation of your question...

In a stationary orbit I often just retrograde until I got a decent landing spot. After that I immediately detach both ships and prograde the command module back in orbital speeds. If you perform this maneuver it also doesn't have to cost that much delta-v The landing vehicle still has the deorbiting speeds so that vehicle should land. In a 1x speed you should have plenty of time to perform this maneuver before both ships reach dangerously low altitudes.

As a last post before I change this to "answered". I've redone the mission again. The only difference is instead of just bringing home the capsule, I tried to bring back the entire lander back to Kerbin. It all went pretty well except the landing on Kerbin, where something odd happened. Reentry picture of the original lander Since I had very little fuel left (about 182 units) I transfered all the remaining fuel to 2 of my engines, opposite of each other to keep stability. Image of parachutes deployed I deployed my parachutes and they deployed very well. However I saw that I was still dropping at 15m/s, which is too fast to keep the lander intact. So at the last 100 meters I fired up my engines to slow down to 8m/s. However the whole shuttle crashed in the ocean breaking everything, including the command pod. I don't really know why it happened, as 8m/s is an acceptable landing speed in my experience. However that's another question apart from this one. I think I got the basics covered in how to build efficient rockets, and I'm definitely going to use it more because it was a lot of fun to work on this. Everybody that added their input I thank you all.

Thanks SRV Ron. This is indeed a very good way to start cheap with smaller ships or satellites. However do you also think the SRB's could be usefull on bigger vehicles?

Thanks Vanamonde. It's true that you should never match exactly the amount of delta-v shown on maps, because I would always like to have some extra margin for errors or mistakes. Construction is something I got under control the last mission. Now I'm going to try (as you said) to build the mission as reusable as much as I can. I need to be able to salvage: 1. The skipper boosters on the side. 2. The lander part of the lander. I think I can save it by adding parachutes and a bit more fuel to bring it back to Kerbin. [EDIT] 3. The rover. I need to get it reattached to the lander once I'm done. Maybe some RCS can do the trick.

LOL!!! Awesome. As long as Jebediah is safe I consider it a mission well done.

It's true that the atmosphere gets thinner while you ascend, which should make your engines more efficient. Did you make that ascend easily though? I mean with a decent amount of delta-v left?

Stage 4 and 3 give you around 4600 delta-v in atmosphere. In a perfect ascend to an orbit around Kerbin that should *barely* be enough, but I don't see much elbow room for margin errors. If you change stage 4 in an asparagus stage, I bet you could pump extra delta-v out of your rockets. And another hint I'm slightly sure of: removing stage three and add some extra power and fuel to stage 2 would make your ship a bit lighter. Then the lifter also has extra delta-v. After that the trip to the mun should be doable with the lander alone. Dropping the amount of fuel and using skippers instead of mainsails could also do the trick. Use a mainsail in the middle and skippers on the side. Mainsails are awesome in thrust, but they drink like templars. But as Specialist290 said: how does your launch look like from Kerbin. With those thin margins I can imagine you get in Kerbin orbit almost, just not yet.

Hey Johnno. I've just finished a simple mission I've played about 6 weeks ago, rebuilding the whole ship again from scratch. It was fun to do and it taught me quite a while. I did play it in version 0.20 though, instead of 0.21 as I didn't move my ships to 0.21 yet. The mission back then was to send a 2 Kerbal landing ship with a simple rover to the mun. Image of original lander. Old ship design. When I made it I was pretty proud I achieved it. Keep in mind that when I built this I was way less experienced. When I look at this now I almost feel ashamed to share it. The ship had 147 parts, weighed 310.15 tonnes and cost around 142,260. Once I had the delta-v map and your process of how to build your ship efficiently, I quickly realised I didn't need the "interplanetary" vessel in the middle at all. Since the lander only had to operate in space or on the mun, I just needed about 300 units of fuel extra. The four LV909 engines had more than enough thrust and are pretty efficient since they only needed to land on the mun. A whole simplification process began, ending in the following ship: New ship design. As you can see it just has the lander on a +/- 5000 delta-v lifter. Lander design. The lander got a decoupler, and an extra tank with three small engines, just to bring me back to Kerbin. The total rocket now has 93 parts, weighed around 197.7 tonnes and cost around 92,370. That was a 100 tonnes and 50K reduction. Awesome. There was some stuff left unrecoverable in 0.21, but I think I can find solutions to that as well: 1. as mentioned: adding parachutes to the lifter stages. 2. adding parachutes to the lander so I can fly the whole thing back to kerbin and save it. 3. Need to find a way to redock the rover to the lander, to bring it back along to Kerbin. I think I start to get the hang of this. Thanks.

Thanks rpayne88. That is indeed the meaning of the question. Career mode can introduce some new aspects I haven't taken into consideration at all unitl now. Ofcourse it also depends what Squad will have in store for us. Do they introduce maintenance or repair costs for broken parts? Payrolls for Kerbals you hire? Costs for R&D? One thing for sure is rocket building costs, and I want to lean up my building style. At least getting more aware of it. Your idea of the "Cost to Weight" ratio is awesome.

Thanks fo your input Johnno. That was very interesting. I'll definitely take it into consideration. In that way you really build the thngs you need, instead of what you think you need. Also by using 'dummy mass' you can also test if the ship works as a total, unlike each part seperately. I'll test this whole process comparing a new mun rover lander with an old one I've made. See if I can make it smaller and cheaper.

Hello everybody. I've been playing KSP for about two months now and I love it. Currently I've been training a lot to get the basic maneuvers right, and it goes very well lately. Always within the Kerbin boundaries though, but currently I'm thinking about making a fleet to get my first steps to Duna. However since 0.21 I'm aware that in a future release, you will get to build rockets within financial limits. Until now I just grabbed everything off the shelf whatever I needed, overkill or not. Lately I've been looking at all the rockets I've built. All of them did the job decent to very nicely. However I've noticed that I haven't built my rockets very efficient from an economic standpoint. I can also see that in the following situations. Examples: 1. Having to ditch a lot of my launcher stages in sub/lower orbit with a lot of fuel left in them. 2. Returning from a mission to Kerbin atmosphere with a tonload of fuel left, something you dragged along all that time. 3. Having to ditch a pretty big ship on the Kerbin surface. Only the command module with the Kerbals in them needed to be saved with parachutes. The rest will be unrecoverable as it crashes. Do you have some more information how to build or rebuild rockets to make them do "the same with less"? Or if you build a new rocket for a mission, what do you do to keep your rocket lean and cheap? Do you take into consideration if you want to recover as much as possible for example and how? I know this is not a technical question that can be answered with a single answer. However I do think that a mixture of answers can make my rockets much simpler, better and cheaper. As an extra info: I'm not making use of MechJeb, and not planning to in the near future. Currently I only make use of the Kerbal Engineer and the Subassembly Manager. My sincere thanks in advance for all the input you give.

Minmus was real easy for that maneuver. However once something fell on the Mun, and especially something big, I spent quite a lot of time to get it back on their feet, if able at all.

Even if you try and succeed to bring them to other planets on their own, I wonder if you could kill interplanetary speeds with the ion engine alone and remain in orbit.

No, you need to attach docking ports on them, depending on the docking size you want.

I don't know if this answers your question, but what I saw in other people's tutorials: You can just place something on the launchpad or the runway and then accelarate time to 100.000x Since a day has 86.400 seconds, you should be able to burn more than a day in a second.

My closest circular orbit was with 150 meter difference or so between periapsis and apoapsis. Having to yank the prograde and retrograde nodes beyond that point was way too sensitive. Maybe manually fiddling with very tiny engines during flight might do the trick?

My humble thanks. Do you mean practicing the basic maneuvers in general or specifically docking in the dark? I'm currently only learning the basics before I want to go full blown with this game. I think it's good to know how to dock/orbit/transfer/land/return well before you want to launch multipart ships to other planets. Just started playing with the tutorials from Scott Manley, and added complexity from that point on. But after a while you'll always get stuck in certain situations that I just couldn't solve. And therefore I ask you guys. I think it's really cool to see on this forum that noobs are just as accepted as pro's, which is awesome. It's not like you see that everywhere. On the contrary.

I haven't even considered docking with my roll axis in mind. It was not nessecary since I only practiced docking maneuvers with the same ship shot twice in orbit. I guess I should learn it too, if I would like to make nice symmetrical space stations.

LameLefty and King Arthur, thanks for the input because it worked!! I tried it three times now and it gets better every time I do it. Within two km's I slowly reduce my speed. Next I select the docking ports as control points and align both ships together. After that select one ship and gently RCS to keep the prograde of the ship with your own prograde. That did the trick. The first time I had some trouble fiddling with RCS in respects to the NavBall. But once you understand that, it get's easier everytime. Docking Image <- Hope it works. Funny detail. I added lights to the ships, but didn't need them. My thanks people. All I need to find out now how I set this thread to "Answered"

Thank you very much King Arthur. And with your answer I assume you set the target on the docking port? I'm going to try this and get back to you. Visually eyeballing is indeed pretty inaccurate and inefficient. I've had quite a few situations where I thought both ships were aligned, only to discover they were not as soon as I changed the camera angle.

Thanks for the answers everybody. Lights are on from now on. I've tried to install the Lazors Docking Camera but something glitchy happended and my docking ports didn't want to attach to my spaceships. So I uninstalled it. I'll definitely try the mod Karolus10.