Jimbimbibble

Which planet/moon is this on?

The one you don't want to change is the "name=" line. The name is what ksp uses to identify the part.

Take only the small winglets and move them to the very bottom of the rocket. Remove the big wings. When you fly it, don't move outside the prograde marker by more than a few degrees until you get to about 40km. When you design your rocket, keep the center of lift behind the center of mass or it will be unstable.

The trouble is that there are just too many variables to get an explicit solution. However, if you make a few assumptions, you might be able to do the calculation. You can assume that the throttle stays at 100% and that you fly a perfect gravity turn (research gravity turns). You would also have to make some assumptions about the aerodynamics (many more assumptions with FAR.) Then, you would varry the initial angle that you launch at and iterate until you find the best one. You will probably need to know about differential equations to write this program. Good luck.

One thing you could do about the molynia orbits is use MechJeb's "launch into plane of target" feature. Use hyperedit to position a target where you intend to put your satellite and launch for it. I wouldn't consider this to be unrealistic/cheating because if you were going to do something like this for real you would be able to calculate how to do the launch and program the rocket.

You might want to increase the altitude a bit, maybe 80km. If you're too close to the atmosphere it can be hard to rendezvous with an orbiting craft.

There are a few possibilities. If you did not restrict that winglet on the tail to move only a few degrees, it could be causing the roll you're talking about. Those winglets are very powerful. Also, because the distance between the CoM and the tail is so small, your tail is not very effective as a stabilizer.

Increasing the length of the fuselage should give you much more lateral stability. Also, removing the control surfaces on the front of the wings would be a good idea.

It's a good idea to used drogue chutes and then main chutes. Set them up in such a way that you can jettison your chutes and landing gear before liftoff. If your return module is light enough, you can mount 2 large legs on a large radial decoupler and ditch them on liftoff.

FAR does knock some delta V off the launch but it makes the rocket more difficult to fly and it forces you to fit stuff into fairings. In FAR, if you pitch your rocket over 45 degrees it will spin out and the center of lift actually matters. I think you should try it for a week and see how it goes.

You can also aerobrake into a prograde Laythe orbit if you come in on the correct side of the planet. It might not take very much to do this.

Also, it doesn't really matter if you shoot your debris into orbit around the sun. Just design your interplanetary craft so the first stage of the transfer has at least 1000m/s. For use around Kerbin, I do one of three things. Either I design my final stage to have enough dV to circularize and perform any necessary maneuvers, or, if I'm going to Mun or Minimus, I crash my transfer stage into the target, or, if I want a high Kerbin orbit, I launch strait to that altitude and keep my Pe below the surface so my lifter crashes on its way back.

I think that would be impossible. You need somewhere around 20k dV to do a Moho landing/return and the only way I know to do that is the LV-N with lots of drop tanks on top of an asparagus lifter.

It looks like the initial method you described is essentially Euler's Method (am I correct?). If you want to improve your approximation, you can use the Improved Euler Method and iterate a few times per data point until it converges. This would be too tedious to do by hand, but you could write a program in VBA to solve this. In case you don't know, VBA is a programming language used to write macros is Excel. You can access it by going to the toolbar settings and turn on "developer". You can use the spreadsheet to read in data and output results, which is convenient and there are a lot of built-in functions in VBA that make it easy to learn.

One thing to consider is that when you take into account variable Isp, staging, varying TWR, varying TWR requirements (as you change your speed), drag, and miscellaneous parts like decouplers, these formulas lose their usefulness pretty quickly. Honestly, your best bet is to download Kerbal Engineer Redux and go build stuff.

If going to Duna or Eve, use Minimus. If going to another planet, it's actually better to start from a low-Kerbin orbit. You actually need less dV for the transfer.

1. There is no obvious bad practice, but it seems like you could be more efficient with your interplanetary transfer based on your numbers. 2. MechJeb has an aerobraking calculator, but I don't remember what it's called. It only works with stock aerodynamics, so if you're playing with FAR there's no way to tell what Pe you should use. 3. Gravity assists only work to slow you down relative to the parent body of the planet (the Sun if you're assisting around Duna, Duna if you're assisting around Ike.) To slow down you must fly in front of the planet/moon relative to its orbit around its parent body. To speed up, you fly behind it. Practice this with the Mun. See if you can fly a free-return trajectory and a gravity assist to escape. 4. The best way to land on an airless body is to come in with a Pe as close to the ground as you dare go. Then, burn retrograde to slow down. You will gradually pitch up to stay retrograde. In the ideal landing, you finish killing your velocity just above the ground. With experience you will learn how low you can go. To takeoff, do the reverse. Basically, you want to burn as close to the surface as you can and always prograde/retrograde. Landing on a body with an atmosphere, use parachutes to slow down as much as you can. On Duna it should take <100 m/s to land. Mount parachutes on decouplers to ditch them after landing so you don't have to haul them back to Kerbin. 5. The theoretical most efficient way is to burn strait to escape, but this is impractical because you probably won't get the ejection angle correct (and waste dV.) Just get into a very low orbit and it's not too inefficient. 6. dV map is a good way to go. Also, keep in mind that you can refuel in Kerbin orbit if you need to. Efficient Duna designs don't need to refuel, though. X. Consider using a separate lander for your Duna mission. Also, check out a mod called Protractor.

Pds314, I would recommend that you update the rules of your challenge. In HORSE, the win condition is typically the first person to replicate the stunt. You could rewrite as "first person to fly 10km wins."

Challenge completed! The rules did not specify that it had to be multiple launches and there were no specifics for what the "station" had to be, so I interpret the rules to say that any two vessels docking counts. I launch both vessels at the same time so that I can un-dock the top one and then re-dock them. That way they start out already aligned. Lifter stage separation, still ascending to orbit. Correct orbit verification. Un-docking. Re-docked! Notice Jeb's portrait is grey because it takes a couple seconds to load after docking to another vessel. Transferring Jeb back to the other vessel. Departing. Parachutes deployed! Kerbals recovered! Here's my challenge. Destroy Kerbin! You must capture a Class E asteroid and cause it to crash into Kerbin. The asteroid may NOT be on a course that would impact Kerbin before your ship arrives at it. Pics of my attempt coming soon!

I would come in as shallow as you can, semi-deploy ASAP and full deploy at 2km. You can also stagger your chutes if you're concerned about breaking things on deployment.

From a more practical perspective, using a single LV-N with drop tanks is the best way to maximize dV without painfully slow burns. Set it up kind of like asparagus staging, except the outer tanks have no engine. You can then take this assembly and mount it on a large asparagus staged rocket with enough dV to get the upper assembly to escape. Another cool trick is to do a powered gravity assist around Jool to drop your solar Pe to almost 0 and then burn the rest of your fuel close to the sun. By the time you get back to Jool you can be going upwards of 50km/s.

All bodies in KSP rotate counter-clockwise, so a prograde orbit is always East and retrograde is West.

I've found that the best way to maximize dV is refueling. You could create an impressive asparagus staged rocket (preferably with only 1.25 m parts) and launch it to orbit without doing any staging (so it's intact) and then run a few trips up to refuel it. You can also ship fuel to your destination to use for the return. I managed to land on Eve and return using 3 launches this way and non-whackjobian proportions.

Research asperagus staging. It can significantly increase your dV. Also, remember that if you TWR is not high enough the rocket won't be able to take off. On Kerbin, you don't want to go much below 2 on takeoff, but your upper stages can be a bit lower. Also, when you're already in orbit, TWR is less important. It just takes a really long time to do stuff with very low TWR.

You can't seriously expect to create something like that and not show us. We need pictures of your phallistic missile!