Traches

Y'all don't mind watching slideshows? I built a grand-tour mothership that all told was around 500 parts, but it just wasn't worth it. Stripped it down and hacked myself some custom parts to get it down to under 300 including the eve lander iirc.

1. The pros are that you can get more performance (Usually anywhere between 5 and 20%) out of the same computer components than stock. The cons are that these parts will generate more heat which will usually require better cooling than the stock heat sink, if you push it too far you'll reduce the useful lifetime of your parts, and it can take hours of tweaking to get a solid, stable OC. 2. It varies hugely based on what specifically it is that you're trying to OC. http://www.overclock.net is a fantastic forum for that information. The basic process for a CPU overclock is, assuming your motherboard supports it, go into the BIOS, change some voltages and the clock speed, reboot, and run a stress test to see if it's stable. Based on the results of that test, you go back into your BIOS and try new settings, until you've got a combination of voltage and clock speed that is stable and doesn't generate more heat than your cooling system can handle.

You can use physics time warp (alt+.)-- 4x is better than 1x. Still takes forever though.

Going back to the aero probe and microsat-- I loved the idea, but the implementation was just a little off. They both have way too much torque, to where pointing them precisely was almost impossible for me, the microsat had too much thrust, so much I couldn't put it in a precise orbit, and the aero probe's engines are overpowered in general.

Manned mission to dres; cut it the closest I ever have coming home. Set up a 13km periapse halfway through my transfer orbit, when finished I had no fuel at all and 1.36 units of monopropellant.

Seriously, your fuel lines on that thing are crazy. An imbalance that only happens after you've burned up a stage screams of a fuel imbalance. If you right click on a tank, you can see how much fuel is in it-- next attempt click around and see where your fuel is draining from.

It's tough to tell from here, but it looks like with your fuel line setup one side of tanks might be emptying before the other. Also, putting your engines up high won't help with stability. Make your rockets look like real life rockets and you won't go too far wrong. Edit: keep your control surfaces down low, well below the CoM.

Set up an almost perfect keostationary orbit.

Taking off from eve is HARD. Most who do it, including me, only send a chair and a kerbal back. The final stage on my eve-return lander, worth over 4000 m/s dV, was a small fuel tank, probe core, chair, and rockomax 48-7s.

Haha yeah, like capi and others have pointed out-- KSP is a lot about trial and error. Accept that you'll explode a lot at first. It's still fun, I promise

Yep, I was gonna point out the RCS build aid mod as well. If you don't want to use a mod, make sure your RCS thrusters are positioned as close to the CoM as possible, taking into account where that will be when your fuel tanks aren't empty. It helps me to have a trim tank pretty far forward in the ship that I can move fuel to in order to put my CoM closer to where the RCS is balanced for. An unbalanced ship is a nightmare to dock.

Haven't tried this myself on Tylo specifically (maybe I should!), but the Apollo landers used a "reverse gravity turn", where they basically burned retrograde during the entire descent with the goal of hitting zero altitude and velocity at the same time, with some safety margin built in. It's not really a suicide burn, where you wait till the last second to burn at max thrust. The math for figuring out when to start your burn, how long to burn, and what rate of acceleration to use isn't coming to me intuitively though. I'd figure decelerating at whatever rate corresponds to a TWR of around 2 would be reasonable, assuming your ship can do a little more than that in order to have a safety margin. Beyond that, Idunno? I just WAG it by looking at the map view. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_turn#Descent_and_landing_procedure

Break it up into smaller pieces via docking ports and move those? Edit: You've piqued my curiosity. What project are you working on here?

Low And Medium Gravity Modular Lander Makes me think czo has military experience, what with the unnecessarily long and complicated acronyms

Ferram, just wanted to break up the long line of problems that get posted in your mod threads and say that this mod is awesome, and you're awesome for offering so much support with it. That goes for all your other mods too. Thanks!

Excellent map, thanks! I like to keep a delta-v map printed out for quick reference, but this one's a little difficult to fit onto a standard 8.5"x11" sheet of paper. Most of it fits, but everything right of laythe (Jool and some text) winds up cut off when I use the standard system dialog (even with "fit to page" checked). It's a small thing, but do you think you could make a version formatted to fit a little better? Edit: Never mind. I'm dumb. Apparently "fit to page" does exactly the opposite of what I thought it did.

It's gone through several updates and rebalances over the years, but basically it's a small ship that new players can get into and fit easily, and yet still be worth something in a fight. Also because winmatar.

Designed an eeloo lander & transfer stage, then test drove it by taking it to the mun and back, kicking off stages prematurely to approximate the interplanetary burns. KIDS is evil.

Kerbmav, it's great that you've studied a little physics, but I promise you're mistaken. In the real world, a gravity turn isn't "Fly to 10km, then pitch over to 45 degrees and burn till your apoapse is at 75km." Once clear of the launch tower, a real rocket will pitch over a few degrees (5 or so) and then gimbal the engines straight. It essentially pulls no lateral g's from then on-- only forward acceleration from the engines. Gravity does the rest-- it slowly pulls the velocity vector down towards the surface, so you are pointed more and more towards the horizon as you climb and accelerate. You basically let the rocket slowly "tip over" on its way up to orbit. Since gravity is the only force acting laterally, and everything accelerates due to gravity at precisely the same rate, the occupants of a rocket feel no lateral g's during a launch.

overclock.net has a rep system that I think is well executed -- I think for more people to use it you need 2 things: clearer indication of how much rep a user has (I had no idea what that green bar meant until this thread), and a bigger, more obvious +rep button. The reason nobody uses the current system is because nobody sees it.

Gets crowded quick if you orbit things in retrograde.

The gravity turn is caused by exactly that -- gravity. You pitch over a few degrees at launch, and then let gravity pull your prograde vector down towards the earth as you accelerate. Since gravity pulls on everything exactly the same, there are no positive or negative G's to worry about, except for those created by the rocket engine.

With a couple of quick loads, some decent timing, and some excess delta-v on the rendezvous tanker it's definitely possible. I've pulled off some pretty sweet sub-orbital rescues before.

I use B9 and KW rocketry, and while they each have several parts that are really handy I could do without them no problem. For me the important mods are things like Kerbal engineer, FAR, KIDS, editor part extensions, select root, RCS fuel balancer, docking port alignment indicator, etc. Basically, mods that change gameplay mechanics and improve the UI, rather than just big ol' parts packs.

Kerba, try KIDS. Stock KSP has too much drag and engines that are too efficient-- FAR fixes the first while KIDS fixes the second. Both mods = KSP on hard mode, especially if you're playing a career.