Rusty6899

I managed to land on the Mun tonight without patched conics, it isn't actually too difficult, as once you've hit the SOI, you don't really need them, and it's big enough to have a fair amount of leaway in terms of hitting it. It is a bit awkward if you are on an impact trajectory, or if you just catch the edge of the SOI, but all that will do is eat up a bit of your fuel. I can imagine Minmus is a pain to hit. Once you're in the SOI, I can't see any difference whether or not you have patched conics.

I have found that you don't need to be that close with the orbit. I think on one of mine I cut my engine about 5% short of the target Ap, it still gave me credit for completing the mission. I think it's probably the direction.

I have only done one survey mission, but I did find it quite tedious. I was using rockets as I'm pretty sketchy with planes. I just went vertically up to about 10km, pitched over and flew most of the way between 20-30km, then made small adjustments to make sure I was at the right level when I passed over the target. I'm pretty sure the missions would be much easier with planes, as I had to use one rockey for each target.

Same. I managed to get to Duna and back. That was also before I learnt about delta-v, the implication of Isp, the oberth effect and that thrust was not a good indicator of how far you would get. I remember thinking "why would anyone use those nuclear engines? They have such a low thrust?"... Mainsails for interplanetary transfers, asparagus staging in vacuum, I committed a lot of sins back in the day.

Mun and Minmus are fairly simple to get to without manoeuvre nodes. Both of them generally move about 45 degrees in the time it takes to intercept them (so if you are looking at the north pole of Kerbin in map view, you want them between one and 2 o'clock if you are planning to start your burn at 6 o'clock. Minmus is easiest to get to if you intercept at the ascending/descending node, so zoom out on map view, past its orbit, with the camera on the equatorial plane, and you will see where the orbits cross (pan round until you see both orbits as two intersecting lines). I must have been playing for about a month before I learnt how to use manoeuvre nodes. I hadn't anticipated how useful they would be and so didn't bother using them. You can only imagine the horror one feels when they are trying to cowboy a transfer to Duna and don't get the intercept ("obviously" I wasn't setting objects as targets either, so I had no idea how far away I was).

I normally try to pick the right engine for the mission. If you're going to Jool or Moho, you'll probably be wanting nukes, as it would take a lot of fuel to give a normal liquid fuel engine enough delta-V. The solitary stage might be cheaper for liquid fuel engines, but the mass of all that extra fuel would be expensive to get into orbit.

I think what I'll probably do it have a Hard Mode save and a Normal save, and only play hard mode when I'm feeling like a challenge. On hard mode, every mission takes your full attention, and I think that a lot of the time, I'd rather just be able to mess about a bit. The main problem I have had is the tracking station. Funds have been tight, but I have been going for "science data from space around Mun" contracts, that pay out $30k+ (probably 45-50k on hard mode) and I can get there for less than $10k. It's not exactly a windfall, but it is manageable. The worst thing is not knowing whether you have an encounter with Mun, or your periapsis height, until you are in the SOI. I stranded Jeb already by being flung into horrific orbits by consecutive gravity assists. It took all my fuel to avoid going into interplanetary space, and almost all my EVA fuel to get into LKO (That's right, I finally got $100k together and had to spend it on upgrading the Astronauts complex instead of something more useful, just to save Jeb). The finances will be fine as soon as I have a probe core, a solar panel and a thermometer, though. It is a bit of a shame that those 3 items are all you even need for infinite funds (unless that loophole has been closed in 0.90).

Firstly, the reported mass of a fuel tank is its dry mass + mass of fuel, so the dry mass in this case is 0.25 Secondly, Delta-V, isn't the speed you can obtain from Kerbin's surface. It's a property of a fueled rocket that, in general, tells you how far you can go. From the surface of Kerbin it takes around 4550m/s to get into orbit, but that is a measured, rather than calculated value, and is only applicable for an efficient ascent. Your orbital velocity at a low orbit will be around 2200m/s. As a very (very, very) rough estimate, an efficient ascent to orbit will have a TWR of around 1.5-2. It would normally take 2000m/s to get to 10,000m, at which point you'll be travelling at around 260m/s and will want to pitch 45 degrees East, another 1500 to get your apoapsis to above 75km and another 1000, when you get to your apoapsis, to burn east parrallel to Kerbin's surface to reach orbit. This means that a LV-909 engine fully throttled would probably be a better choice for your rocket than a LV-T30 as it would have an initial TWR of 1.4, would use a more fuel efficient engine and would be cheaper. It would have between 2500 m/s and 3000 m/s delta-V. Delta-V as a concept makes more sense when you are in orbit. If you are travelling at 2300m/s and have 500m/s delta-V, then if you burn all of your fuel prograde, you will be travelling at 2800m/s and delta-V requirements can be calculated rather than estimated.

I had started to play custom on 10% funds, but it's far too hard. Some contracts gave single figure rewards. I'm on 40% now and it is difficult. The cash has definitely dried up a bit. I think they have cut the rewards in half. On my 20% funds 0.25 game I think it rewarded around 30k for science data from around the Mun. Now t offers that on 40%. If you want to play on hard mode, it's going to be a bit of a slog. The best thing to do is to deploy a satellite around Mun, Minmus and Kerbin ASAP and get a steady stream of funds from the contracts that come in.

I had played on 10% funds in 0.25 and it was a struggle, I had to only choose the most lucrative contracts. Now they seem extremely tough. I think the fund rewards are lower.

I just saw the comment above and was going mad trying to work out how that was true. This makes sense. Although I'm not sure I understand the need for standard gravity in the equation at all (Tsiolkovsky rocket equation cancels it out after all). I suppose it does fix the units. I'm guessing that's the answer.

Yeh, I just read through again. To be honest, I has started on 10k funds. The game should probably have either a few thousand starting funds as a minimum, or introduce a loan shark.

I don't know if funds have been rebalanced, but I started on 10% and it does seem a bit more tight than usual. I don't really see too much of a problem with having a fail state, especially if you're being masochistic with the difficulty settings.

https://mega.co.nz/#!AIoTGY7Z!Q--KTO6dfywTc4n7gsQRSh3EClFjgdnhwaJpvaARiwI That should link to the spreadsheet (although it's not inconceivable that I have made a hash of it). The highlighted cells are the ones that contain formulae and so should not be messed with. I have included a table for asparagus staging as well, although it just tells you the delta-v obtained from 6x symmery asparagus staging with the input you choose, rather than telling you how much fuel to use. Basically, you need to choose an appropriate engine, input its stats, the required delta-V and the local gravity (if applicable) and it will tell you the minimum amount of fuel required (assuming full fuel tanks). You then put in the amount of fuel you are actually going to use, generally round up to the next most convenient number, and it tells you the delta-V you have, your TWR and the duration of your burn. It's worth noting that you design from the last stage to the first, so if you are planning a return trip to the mun, the first stage you calculate for is from Mun to Kerbin (If you don't plan on staging on the way back).

I'm such a lazy docker. I used to do it "properly". Get close. Point one craft north, the other south. Use IJKLMN or whichever keys it is to translate and thrust. Nw I get within 20m point the docking ports directly towards each other (this is a bit long winded as you need to set each one as the other's target and then point to target, switch ships, point to target, switch ships, point to target, etc. until they are close enough). Next I get within about 5m and repeat, then to touching distance and repeat and hope the magnets do their job.

This is what I do in my spreadsheet. I also have cells displaying the TWR and duration of the burn, which can be pretty useful for certain burns (I'm looking at you, LV-N). It's quite strange to look through someone else's maths and see how differently they conceptualise things. A few points I would like to make. If setting up a spreadsheet, you may want to include a cell for additional mass. If you have an SAS module or other stuff in a stage below the payload it will affect delta-V slightly. If you want to use the LFB KR-1x2 engine (The 2.5m engine with fuel tank). You can take the mass of the engine as 6 tonnes and then the full/empty mass ratio will still be 9 (assuming you use =/> 32t of fuel). You could altrnatively have mass as 10t and have a "large" number as your full/empty mass ratio (the "large" "number" is "infinity", but excel doesn't really like that, 1000 is probably high enough). This option allows you to calculate how much fuel you need if you are going to use a partially empty tank. The latter method is also the best method for calculating delta-v from solid rocket boosters. Use the engine mass as the dry mass of the booster and a full/empty ratio of 1000(ish).

I normally calculate delta-v but my last go at career mode I didn't bother and just designed by eye. I unlocked the tech tree on iron man mode with 20% fund rewards (I did have outsourced r&d on for the last part of it). I reckon if you calculated delta-v it would still be reasonably achievable at 10% funds. The "science data from orbit" contracts make the game too easy in terms of funds to cause any trouble. I'd say those contracts need to be altered, as do the Admin Building options. They make the game too easy.

It's easier to do the calculations yourself. You can set up an excel spreadsheet with cells for the required variables. Pick an engine, put in your payload and required delta-V for the stage, and rearrange the Tsiolkovsky equation to give you the required amount of fuel to get there. This way you can design your rocket and know how far it will go before you even get to the VAB.

Getting to Duna and back in one launch isn't too taxing, but you'll need to know the Delta-V of your ship, so either get a spreadsheet out or use a mod. You could make a detachable lander, but realistically it doesn't take too much delta-V to get from Duna orbit to Kerbin, so you can probably just do it in one. To do this successfully it's also worth mentioning that you'll probably need to aerobrake. It'd be difficult to have enough delta-V if you need to perform capture burns around Kerbin and Duna without refuelling.

The cost needs to be severely increased. At the moment it is by far the most economical craft for almost any purpose. It may be heavy and expensive, but it will give you a much lower mass/delta v solution for a stage than any other engine in almost all circumstances, meaning that the savings on the lifter stage(s) (where the real cost comes in) are going to more than make up for the cost of the nuke. I reckon it should cost at least somewhere between 50-100k. I'm sure it would still prove economical in certain situations.

My favourite mistake is having my ship oriented so that the solar panels are parallel to the direction of sunlight and going on a nice long time warp to drain the batteries. Mercifully it means that I will recover power in around 100 days. Still not ideal.

I turned the income down to about 20%. It means that making cash is pretty difficult and you don't really have enough money to be using the admin centre to get a lot of science. I'm probably about 15 missions in (including test contracts) and have only about 300,000 funds. I'm also paying to unlock individual parts so it makes the cashflow pretty demanding. Saying that, I do have science at 150%, as I find obtaining science is pretty grindy. The thing with unlocking the entire tech tree in 3 missions is that to do it, you have to go out of your way. If you severely limit your funds, and refuse to exploit loopholes, then it is much more time consuming to complete the tech tree. I think the difficulty settings are pretty well set up for giving players a challenge, especially with the custom difficulty settings allowing players to decide to play a funds limited or science limited game. Maybe difficulty settings relating to the admin building would help as they would reconcile the lack of funds/science balance.

I found it really confusing at first as "Power" was thrust in kN (can't remember whether this has changed but it probably has). I also had no idea about the rocket equation and was naively using Newtonian mechanics, which didn't help. Mass is in tonnes (metric) Thrust in kN Isp in seconds Considering that TRE only uses mass ratio, you only really need to know the Isp units to calculate delta-V.

Is your gravity loss not equal to the second integral of dg/dt? Or something like that? So a lower time will result in a lower gravity loss and therefore a lower delta-V expenditure. The best way to minimize the time taken is to have as short a burn as possible at the end of your descent.

Having recently switched from Mac to Windows, I have to say that KSP was so much easier to use on my Macbook. Obviously, it is partly just due to the adjustment of controls/keyboard, but two-finger scroll in VAB was much easier than pg up/dn and shift + 2 finger scroll was much easier than +/-, both in VAB and in flight. Playing KSP on my Mac was a bit like watching a slide show for larger crafts, though. So it's not all bad.