eliterrell

Update: After almost a week of trying I successfully corrected my orbit using the separation rockets. My math was almost useless. In the end it came down to brute force experimentation. Stock KSP is not the best for this kind of approach. Trying to warp to a specific time is difficult. Many times you will go over your target. Precision aiming on the nav ball is equally tedious. It tells you your heading but it is hard to guess your elevation if you're off the orthogonal directions. I wasted a lot of time trying things, collecting useless flawed results until I downloaded the Kerbal Alarm Clock and Steam Gauges. Kerbal Alarm Clock lets you stop warping at a specific time. No going over at high warp, no waiting forever at low warp...then going over anyway because you dozed off. Steam Gauges has a heads up display that is many times better than the nav ball for quickly finding an exact direction. Once I'd got these two mods, it only took one more session to nail down my solution.

I'm on a Mac and no Time Machine right now so I can't get back to my old save. I didn't actually put my Mac to sleep, it was on and the game running, several hours. Yeah, I should have paused it. Also I had not been switching views prior to leaving. When I came back it was rotating many, many RPMs and I don't think there's a reasonable explanation why. @Kasuha intercepting my spacecraft as it approaches Kerbin would be an option for someone better at the game than me. Right now I think my best bet is to get a solution to colide with Kerbin using those separation rockets.

I'm a newbie, just doing my first trip to Duna. Finally figured out how to land, left a base consisting of a habitat with 2 Kerbals, and got the rest of the ship back into orbit on the way home. I didn't really pick a time for my return flight, so the transit was really messy and wasteful but I had plenty of fuel for it. Anyway, I was in the processes of fine tuning things, I had my Kerbin periapsis down to 51,000 km, when I was called away. I THOUGHT I put my computer to sleep but apparently did not. When I came back hours later, my ship was on the screen, spinning at insane speeds. When I got it slowed down, I saw the engines were gone. Actually one of my three engine pods was torn right off, apparently by the rotational force. All my fuel was still there so I didn't leave anything on, must have been a bug. I didn't put RCS on this thing, but I did put 2 separator rockets on my command pod. They have enough delta V to screw up my encounter with Kerbin any way I burn them so presumably when I get closer there should be a solution that will let me hit the planet. Flight Engineer says they provide 114 m/s. But they are mounted on the surface of the Command Pod, so they are not parallel to my axis. As they are on opposite sides of the pod the total thrust is on my axis, but my guess is that Flight Engineer is providing that figure based on rear facing rockets and some of my force will cancelled out. Can someone confirm that? I say that because I did a little math and, in purely linear terms, I should be able to displace 51Mm if I burn about 5 days before my periapsis. So I spent some time save scumming, fast forwarding to the correct time and separating on an orientation perpendicular to my path. Couldn't get any closer than 26Mm. I played with changing the time too but I since I don't know how far off am its pretty rough going. If someone could help my figure out the actual delta V I'm getting from 2 separators on the tilted surface of a Mk1 pod that might be a step in the right direction. It would also help if I could place maneuver nodes. But the game doesn't want to let me. I can only put a node on my purple orbit after it's shifted by my Kerbin encounter. I can't put one on my light blue current orbit. Is that how the game works or am I going something stupid? Nodes would be super handy to figure things out. Thanks to anyone who can answer any of my questions or give me general pointers, PS You may wonder why, if I'm willing to save scum a solution why don't I go back before I messed up. Well, I would have. When I got my ship to a stop and saw the devastation I instantly thought "no problem I'll just load my quicksave" ... and hit F5 to do it. Yeah, I'm a newbie.

Summary: I just launched my first (semi)successful Mun Mission. I got there before when I was playing with the demo a while back but never with anything that had a chance to come home. A couple of interesting and bizarre incidents occurred during the course of the mission which warrant further investigation. The Plan: Similar to the recent ill-fated mission to Minmus, my intention was to get 3 kerbals to the Mun, bring back one of them, leaving the others in a suitable habitat with all the scientific facilities of the stock parts library. A picture will make my design apparent to the people of this forum: Execution and first incident: The first part of the mission went fine, although it took me a few tries to land. I planted the flag, zoomed around the site, and so on. It was everything I dreamed it would be. But when I was ready to go, something went terribly wrong. I was sending my pilot back to the Command Module for his solo flight home, using his jet pack as ladders are so tedious. He collided with it at a speed which was apparently excessive, though it certainly didn't seem to be at the time. The result was that the CM was detached from the Service Module. Solution and second incident: This naturally scrubbed the return flight. I decided that all three Kerbanauts would have to remain on the Mun for the time being. It was necessary, however, to remove the extraneous stages in order to deploy the habitat's solar panels. On the picture above you can see the SM's engines hang down by the side's of the habitat. While everything is on the surface, power comes from the command module but wouldn't work any more. My first step is to get rid of the Command Module. I know it's possible to push unconnected parts but my SM is going to be taking off uncontrolled and the last thing I need is for it to drop the CM on my habitat or start spinning too soon. Fortunately, I equipped my CM with small separator rockets, because why not? So my pilot was able to gingerly board the CM, taking care not to dislodge it, activate the separators, and fly the useless capsule to a safe distance. Once I got him back to the habitat, I dialed up the rockets on the Service Module up to the point where the could almost lift the whole assembly and fired the last decoupler. It rose majestically away from my habitat and a started to fly away. That is when the second strange thing happened. After a few moments, the SM's path started to curve due to slightly imbalanced weight, which didn't concern me as it had already cleared the habitat. It arced across the crater before appearing to lodge in the crater wall, intact. I thought "That's funny, I thought it would at least explode or something." I could still hear the engines firing (In space, no one can hear you grind your teeth at the unrealistic sound effects) so I sent a kerbal out to investigate. As my perspective shifted, it became apparent that the SM had NOT lodged in the crater wall, but was floating something like 50-100 meters up, engines firing. When my kerbal started to get close, the laws of physics started working again and it very quickly crashed and boomed. Now if only I could get some earth moving equipment up there. I bet there's some kind of crazy monolith buried in that crater. PS- is there a way to prevent incidental EVA collisions from destroying my spacecraft?