SanderB

Is there a way to see the exact predicted keolocation (lat long) of predicted landings, using FAR? I'm trying precision landings to within 5 meter radii. With stock, Mechjeb works ok with a little manual steering during descent.

press 4 to change root parts press 3 for rotation press 2 for offset press 1 for normal mode

severedsolo I don't think that's quite possible. I think you'll have to add at least 1 translational RCS port aligned with the CoM and a little onboard monoprop (from the capsule monoprop tank) so you can precisely target your landing once you've staged your capsule. At first you'll want to overshoot the projected landing before staging, but the sensitivity of the mechanics will force you to make some additional adjustments once staged.

I haven't seen your craft, but if you have side boosters and they have only 1 point at which they connect to the main booster they need at least one strut to connect them to the main booster to ensure that they don't wiggle and cause rotations. This may cause some rotating or mucking around otherwise.

probably so you can set the rear wheels to brake at a higher rate than your front wheels, therefore preventing your rovers from tipping over when applying the brakes because more brake force in the back means a forward pitching momentum thus pushing your front into the ground while breaking. if all wheels have equal braking force and they're symmetrically placed along the forward axis you may tip over your rover.

in settings there is a setting for how many pieces of debris there need to be before the game starts despawning the oldest pieces. By default it is set at 250.

I find that 300-400m/s vertical velocity is a happy medium for ascents to space, reducing throttle to reduce gravity losses, until pitched to 15° at which point 100% throttle is restored.

I didn't know that undercover smurfs worked at NASA, why else would people turn blue?

About 2.9km/s to LKO is possible with stock parts: You might confuse a some users with 3,000-3,700m/s dV but I think that may misinform some others. I realize that that's a trade off.

If you can stand to do a little mental arithmetic, Take the Semi major axis of your transfer orbit and divide it by the SMA of your target and take that to the power of 3 and then take the square root and multiply by 180°. That should give you a rough phase angle.

Can you be more specific?

Does it go something like this? If this is ok, then it did track 1 in exactly 3m.

I think the dV cost of kerbin (and preseumeably other atmospheric bodies) are very pessimistic. None of my vessels break 3,400m/s unless I'm trying to launch ready made pancakes into LKO. A couple vessels dont even break 3km/s. There needs to be some sort of disclaimer or a 3,000-3,700 figure for kerbin and something similar on other atmospheric bodies, imo.

cybersol, the ascent profile I use is just about the limit for how low you can go without losing more dV to drag than you do gravity, and the fins are just 25$ anyway, have served their purpose by the time they melt away and save mass for the orbit insertion burn. With trim-only there is always a random element that determines how fast you pitch over (if you stay hands-off until about 1km/s of velocity) so probably some manual corrections are always necessary and in my particular video this meant a very shallow ascent. The lines on my screen are from Navhud mod. Pawelk your mun vessel looks fine though a bit inefficient (my own first mun landers weren't very efficient either). Generally it is a lot more cost effective to use the least amount of engines possible, and that isn't done with the kind of asparagus staging you used and you didn't lead any fuel lines from the outer tanks into the main booster which made it even less efficient. For every 15 kN of thrust from a liquid engine you want about 1t of fuel on your booster whereas you had about 60kN of thrust for every 1t of fuel on your main booster stage. Your ascent profile was also quite steep. Ideally you want to pitch down about 10° for every 100m/s of surface velocity you have, until you're pitched up from the horizon by only 10-20° or so. I think the most efficient way to get to the mun and back with a probe is as displayed in the video below. The exception is it should have 0.2t more fuel and a parachute to really get the final stage back in one piece. To get the mun encounter without maneuver nodes an Ap of about 10,800km above kerbin is reasonable.

you have to begin maneuvering the asteroid before it hits your SOI, preferably even 90° ahead of its encounter with kerbin to alter its close approach inclination and 180° to close its approach to kerbin, ideally. More than likely 45° ahead of the encounter is more realistic. What it seems like that you're doing is maneuvering the asteroid at its highest relative velocity to kerbin and that is extremely expensive and generally unfeasible. Changing its orbit well before its encounter will allow a much cheaper option of hitting the atmosphere at a Pe of 15-40km and aerobrake it from there. I haven't done it before myself. You may have to decouple your ship until it has passed the kerbin atmosphere to prevent your asteroid redirection vessel from burning up in the atmosphere. Once attached to your asteroid at 45° or more from the encounter (relative to Kerbol) it should be easily possible to change an asteroids periapsis to 20-30km. In my sandbox test, the 2,500t asteroid needed to be at a Pe of 25km to aerobrake enough velocity to be captured. Any lower than that and it re-encountered the atmosphere too soon and it did not allow the redirect vessel to reattach and raise its Ap fast enough. ~10km higher and it would escape.

There isn't a "better altitude". You have to gain about 300-350m/s of vertical velocity and once you have obtained should not go above or below it until you have pitched almost horizontally. (KER is a mod that will allow you to monitor vertical velocity precisely.) Ideally continual 350m/s vertical velocity is held by going through a perfect gravity turn but it is safer to have a steep ascent, and reduce throttle in order to keep your vertical ascent/speed to 350m/s. Gravity losses are generally sustained by thrusting vertically in excess which is why reducing throttle can save you fuel and dV. A vertical velocity of about 350m/s is a happy medium for a fuel efficient ascent. A swivel engine with 8 tons of fuel can easily orbit a 1t payload within a pointy fairing. This video is a swivel engine (set to 55% gimbal limit), 8 tons of fuel, 4 tailfins, a pointy 1.25m diameter fairing and a decoupler orbiting a 1.1t payload. With a trim ascent, fins on the back of your rocket and a bit of monitoring of what's going on during gravity turn, orbit is not so hard. Getting to orbit can be very seamless and easy looking in KSP. The rocket in the video had no SAS until much later in the video. Instead I once applied trim with one tap of Alt + D, set throttle to 100% and hit spacebar. Using trim plus tail fins to ascend for your ascent to orbit takes a bit of practice but I think it is the most efficient way. To use trim, use Alt WASD and QE, to reset, press Alt X. Also, if your fins burn up you have to absolutely extend your finger to turn on SAS and activate stability control because your rocket will at that point be in danger of flipping. Otherwise getting to orbit can easily be a hands off experience from launchpad to your 70km apoapsis for any payload that allows your rocket to be stable through the use of fins.

I've been experimenting with it using the RMB aero display option and made this scatter plot of velocity vs the displayed drag coefficient of my nose fairing: The dots that don't neatly follow the apparant curve are similar speeds at very different altitudes. the Cd is what the game displays on the frontal fairing of the same vessel displayed in my original post. It will seem that Cd spikes at around Mach 1, then tapers off to where it used to be.

I know that drag generally is something like [Drag Coefficient * Density * Velocity ^ 2]. However, with the new aerodynamics things are looking a little different and there is this debug menu that shows graphs concerning drag profiles. What do all the numbers mean? What is on the x and y axis' of both graphs? What does everything mean? How do I calculate exactly or at least roughly what forces KSP applies at any given altitude/speed/craftorientation? My craft, going at 303.3m/s at 2000m altitude experiences 2Gs of drag, a few moments later at the same altitude it experiences 1G at 253m/s. At both points the craft had no fuel and its mass was constant nor were any engines producing any thrust. The velocity ^ 2 proportion seems not to be everything there is to KSP drag anymore and I'd like to understand it.

Once your vessel is roughly in front of the target docking port, do a "Control" from from the target docking port and note the orientation shown by the navball. Then go to the main vessel and use translation (or if you know how, use main engine thrust) to move the docking port target marker on the navball in the opposite orientation . if docking port is facing due east, put the docking port target marker on the main vessel due west using translation. Once the docking port is in the correct orientation, it should be a simple task to dock. You can also use the anti-target marker by pushing it into the same direction as the docking port using the "control from" option in the right click menu. Demonstration video.

Do a horizontal landing, like so (<- demonstration video): Have a vessel that doesn't have a very narrow angle between the base of its landing legs and its center of mass. Be in a low and circular orbit with your orbit going over the target area Lower your periapsis to the maximum altitude of terrain features on the target planet (6km on the mun or check kerbalpedia or kerbalmaps.com). 90° from the target area, lower the orbit further until from the map view the orbital line hovers just above the surface features Place a maneuver node over the target area and maximize the retrograde arm Start your retrograde burn when you're halfway to your maneuver node (ie, time to node is 1/2 of burn time). A little earlier if your surface TWR is <1.5. Control your vertical velocity by pitching up or down as appropriate down. Reduce thrust as you approach your target area but keep controlling your vertical velocity. Burn off prograde left or right to adjust your direction and thus your landing site. Throttle down and pitch up to keep on progressing toward your intended landing site, to prevent canceling your horizontal velocity too early. When hovering over the landing site, cancel horizontal velocity and approach landing site and monitor your radar altitude and keep your surface velocity at 1/10th your radar altitude. Touch down at no more than 2m/s. Quicksave & Load a few times. Successful horizontal landings take practice. As long as you don't burn too much (more than 30°) off of your retrograde, you shouldn't expend much more dV than necessary. *note: in the video I raise a landing leg which turned out to be a mistake. Don't try to adjust to a slope by raising a landing leg if your extended landing legs are level with your engine.

The reason we don't have more science beyond earth its orbit with astronauts is because we need a lot of different foods to stay healthy, and the food doesn't stay fresh for long enough. If we could produce a balanced diet off-world in a closed loop (without needing extra supplies from earth), we'd have at least a few explorers much farther out than low earth orbit. The difference in this regard between off-earth science and stock KSP is that kerbals don't by default need any life support, at all. People would be better in space, but probes and rovers are a lot simpler or less costly until we properly colonize space, not just visit it.

why not add a ~ to the dV figure of atmospheric bodies, and a disclaimer in the bottom right hand corner saying that the figure will vary by as much as (for example) 10% in either direction depending on the design of the rocket and the ascent profile?

airbrakes facing toward the engine can make retrograde (engine-first) aerobraking extremely effective and very precise, as long as they are on the far end of the center of mass of the ship compared to the oncoming airstream. You can easily pick a higher than normal (like 5-15km higher) periapsis with aerobrakes because they can increase your drag by 5 to a 100 times depending on how large the surface is that they cover versus the surface area of the craft that is facing into the airstream. I used airbrakes to a precision landing on the launchpad in a challenge earlier today.

If you have a liquid fuel engine, TWR of 2-3 is desireable so you can approach 300 m/s with a ~20° pitch as soon as possible (to decrease gravity losses), and then maintaining 300m/s vertical velocity by continually throttling down while holding prograde. This kind of gravity turn will result in an ever increasing horizontal velocity and an eventual apoapsis at 75km for about as minimal a dV as you can get for almost any vehicle with the TWR and dV capacity.

The space goose flies to space like a breeze, it can not be said in words how easily it gets to space and how cheaply it gets to space. It's like a goose taking off from a lake on a nice sunny summer afternoon. Take off and pitch up 30° and level off to 15-20° and maintain that 15° pitch until apo is >75km, at which point it is a simple matter of fast forwarding until you circularize. With help of mods and such it isn't too hard to land either but its a challenge (for me, anyway).