Kulebron

When standing on the launchpad click on the navball title "Surface" and switch it to orbit view. It will show you the orbital speed, 176 m/s. This is the equatorial rotation speed of Kerbin. Many moons are tidally locked (Mün, Laythe for instance).

I did some calculations for Earth-Moon transport, although I thought of putting it to a lower orbit each time. You can benefit if you use a combo: the fuel and other stuff is sent beforehand with a space tug (ion engine), and the crew flies a small capsule and docks with the big and well-equipped cycler. If you send fuel and other parts together, the saving is some smaller, since you have more weight to apply this big delta-V.

I made a huge rover with a skycrane and an ascent stage above it (the smallest manned pod & small fuel tank & 4 engines). I did not remove the skycrane and just started riding. It rode a lot, then tipped over. I tred to turn it back with landing legs & pumping the fuel back and forth, to no success. I just decoupled the crane and the ascent stage in it and used the stage (which could stand inclined in the air with SAS turned on) to push the rover. Had to chase it 3 km with EVA pack after that, but finally everything was ok. What made me mad and why I deleted the entire game folder was that it crashed again because kbd keys stopped working at some point.

I think Kasuha pretty much answered your question (that you need to drag the maneuver node around to find the perfect moment for injection). According to Oberth effect, the lower your parking orbit is, the more delta-V you get on injection. Injecting from a higher orbit makes you use more fuel in total. When passing near Mun, lower periapsis also saves some fuel. I prefer the figure 8 orbit (Apollo style, free-return trajectory), because it saves delta-V on lunar orbit insertion.

I hadn't problems with Mainsails, maybe because I dispense with a 1440 tons in main stage and 2*1440 & Skippers on the sides, and this is the most common thing I use, with some adjustments to get proper dV & TWR. I only need a pair of struts on each side stage to keep them straight, and in those upper stages that have a narrow engine between wide tanks. Apart from that Mainsail is just enough, and TWR is about 1.7-2. This way I have few stages and a lot of TWR to circularise easier. I tried to do in Apollo style, with a Poodle on 3rd stage to circularize and translunar-inject, but the whole ship became bigger and more expensive, and indeed oscillated. That experiment with reaction wheel was just out of curiosity. Thanks for help!

By the way, I put a big reaction wheel in a main stage over mainsail engine, and it collapsed. Are they so soft?

Well, I did use these indicators, yet if it's slightly off-center (which you can't clearly see), it starts rotating with thrust. I tried installing four engines on long trusses, which helped, but there were other issues (the 1.5MN engines were too weak, the 20MN were too strong, so it either had too low dV or too overpowered, hard to control). Which RW part do you use?

1. How do you fine-tune the CoM of a vehicle? I have a rover with center of mass a bit off the center, and when tried to land it, it pitched when thrust was applied, so it started slightly rotating (which was slow, but too much to maintain control) and crashed into the surface. I had to test it about twenty times to finally eliminate any rotating moment. If there were a tool for that, it would be nice. 2. How can I balance weight dynamically? If I put a kerbanaut in the rover before landing, it will be very disbalanced and surely will start rotating with thrust. All that comes into mind is just ditching some monopropellant and move all of it to the other side.

I have a question: does it correctly calculate Delta-V when you use pipes between stages? I load 1440 fuel and Mainsail on the central stage, then 4x1440 and Skipper engines on the sides, with sequential pipes. And it seems I have more delta-V than flight engineer predicts. I might load a bit more than needed for LKO (usually I make about 4900 m/s). Last time I had about 700 m/s of delta-V left in the central Mainsail stage, which was almost enough for translunar injection. A couple of ideas: when you make an apollo-style missions, it's impossible to calculate correctly the command/service module delta-v, because first it's used together with lunar module, but the rest of Delta-V is used for this stage alone. And same problem arises when you have two ships docked: you don't know the delta-V before you actually undock or decouple a stage (if I want to deorbit it later), which makes you leave too much fuel in the tanks. If this could be resolved, users could spend much less fuel and avoid unnecessarily huge rockets.

A decoupler upside down is an interesting idea. And I use Flight Engineer plugin which calculates delta-v. Although when you try to assemble an Apollo-like spacecraft, it fails to calculate the delta-v. I'm not sure if it handles fuel pipes correctly. Any idea how to test the hardware without flying to the orbit? If I put an engine above the upside-down decoupler, will it shoot through it?

^^ I did need a decoupler, because the LM stood the other way around. I'll try your options, thanks to all I think maybe I could undock the service module from the decoupler, forgot about this option, thanks!

I made a ship in which the top stage is a lander. I decouple from the orbit module and descend. But the decoupler stays on the orbit module, and I can't dock to it on return. A docking port is not quite possible, because I have an engine there or just don't want to carry a docking port in the bottom and spend more fuel. What are the ways to drop it? Or another lightweight design that lets you dock afterwards? Why need to dock? To transfer the extra fuel from the lander into the orbiter for more safety margin on return.

Thanks, will try!

Ok, so finally I could try this out somewhere, I mean an orbiting simulator with easy UI. Downloaded it yesterday and bought in a few hours. Managed to send KSS core, then make a dockable module, approach, dock it, then dock a truss with an engine (still 2nd stage). Docking the first one was just the approach and hard to learn to control translation. (actually this 1st pic is seconds before bumping with parachute into the docking ring. Had to repeat the approach, align both ships and dock well at 0,2m/s) The second one was easier, since I got used to it (and got used to control looking at the craft, quickly steering then countesteering, then moving the way I needed.) Almost collided, because it started magnetizing a bit off the axis, SAS started blowing everywhere, I turned it off, pulled away a meter, then corrected, and it attracted correctly (5 degrees off-axis though ).

By the way, how do I make a ship with both docking ring and a parachute?

Ok, that explains everything, thanks a lot guys!

What's a fairing? Can you give a link to a wiki page?

Hi, I managed to send KSS core to a circular orbit, and now how can I send a truss and solar panels there, without ridiculously huge rockets? I can't find a reasonable way to do this: either everything sticks out of the rocket (which is unreal from aerodynamics POV), or it's a space shuttle mode. I see decouplers hide engines inside, but don't hide anything else. Will appreciate any help. Also, when I open a rocket in the construction site, how can I see what part is under the cursor?