Rusty6899

It took me so many attempts to land a space plane on that island. After I managed it I made the healthy, informed decision to return to rocket design as soon as possible. There is nothing that could have been on that island that would have justified the time taken to get there.

The reluctance I have with mods are that I feel it make turn into a bit of a game breaker. I realise that some are just about including extra parts for making your craft look better/function better, but I am having plenty of fun with what's available already. I think I could well get lazy and just infinite fuel myself anywhere I wanted after a while if I allowed myself to use them, and I'd rather learn to do my own calculations rather than relying on MechJeb. I think that it may be better to get the game when it's at 1.0, as I feel that when the game's full release comes I will have done everything to the death, pretty much. I'll probably save the mods until I'm at that stage. You'll probably enjoy it more if you have a grasp of the basics, but don't exploit ever update fully as they come in. I am really looking forward to money coming in. At the moment I find that having unlimited building power means that I can stick with a tried and tested rocket (with modifications to the landing stage to suit the mission), even if it is massively oversized for most missions I undertake. I think that having limits on what you can build will help with spacecraft design. The tech tree only really limits you for the first half dozen missions until you have the essentials. I actually think that it's better that the game is being developed with the current Solar System, I'm more looking forward to setting up a mining base on the Mun than exploring another couple of planets.

Triple check your staging before take off. There's always room for more struts. Quicksave. Remember to add solar panels. Always, always land on the bright side of the Mun.

Light rovers tend to be a bit sketchy on bodies with low gravity, such as Mun. I normally build fairly heavy rover, and ensure a low centre of mass and as large a width/height ratio as possible. You can pretty much test any rover design on Kerbin, but a major problem comes with finding a way to land your rover and jettisoning the engines that you used without damaging it. Also it is important to keep your speed as low as possible when driving your rover on the Mun - just because you can max it out to 20m/s doesn't mean it's safe to drive it that fast. My rovers are all liable to break apart when I drive very fast, particularly when going through a change of gradient.

The only time I have run into that problem was when I had run out of electric charge. Aside from that I really can't think of why you would lose control. Maybe you ran out of RCS and your craft was too heavy to use SAS for torque. Effectively there is no practical difference between landing on Minmus and Mun, just a matter of distance and differing gravity for landing. I would try to replicate the failure and try to work out what went wrong. You may also have a structural failure on your craft, which messes up the level of control you have (although when this happens to me it is usually obvious and can be avoided by lowering the throttle of you craft wherever possible). I think that you should have another look at your craft if you think this may be the case, as this sometimes happens to me when I have had to build a structurally insecure craft (normally when I want to transport a 12 wheel rover).

I find that with larger crafts, SAS doesn't quite cut it. I think that due to the very low weight of RCS thrusters and fairly low weight of monopropellant, its worth loading up on that and using RCS to orient your ship. The level of torque generated by a single SAS module alone is so low that it isn't worth dealing with. Saying that, SAS is very useful for a landing stage, and so I will normally design a craft to depend on RCS initially and then use SAS of the landing stage when SAS delivers all the torque needed.

Surely when accelerating when in orbit, your acceleration at a given moment is T/m (from Newton's second law), assuming that you are accelerating directly prograde/retrograde? When ascending from a point on the ground, you are counteracting gravity, but when in orbit, the inertia of your orbit is negating your weight, so weight doesn't need to be considered. I assume that the mass flow rate of a tank is constant for a rocket in orbit, so the total delta-v of a stage would be approximately T*t/((m2+m1)/2). The average thrust/mass ratio multiplied by the time of the burn. I hadn't actually meant to say that the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation wasn't applicable, just that I din't see how it was sufficient. With a TWR of 2 it all makes sense though. Thanks for all the help anyway, I should be well on my way now.

I finished unlocking the tech tree yesterday. I realise it has been a while, but I set myself the constraint of not sending any one-way manned missions. I was thinking that now I should really learn a bit about designing efficient rockets (at the moment I generally just rehash the same, massive tapering rocket, which I am confident can land me on any solid body in the game, but will cost a king's ransom once money becomes an issue). There were a few things I was wondering, mainly about Delta-V and TWR. The way I see it, TWR should only be relevant in sub-orbital flight, where T > mg or else you won't budge / will decelerate if in the air. And; acceleration=(T-mg)/m. I have heard people on here talking about TWR in orbit, but my understanding was that you are weightless in orbit and your thrust/mass ratio is relevant (g=0 in the above equation). As for Delta-V, The impression that I have is that the Delta-V of a rocket is the total change in velocity that the rocket can experience as a result to engine thrust (maybe not a textbook definition, but I'd say it was close enough for now). I am comfortable with this concept and the calculation of it, for orbital flight, but I don't really see how the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation can be applicable when ascending to orbit. The way I see it, even if you calculate a very large Delta-V, if your TWR > 1, or even just above 1, you will never get to orbit (Delta-V seems to be independent of thrust). Are there any extra equations that are necessary for designing a rocket to reach orbit, or at least rule of thumb concerning TWR for ascent? One final thing is atmospheric drag, does this have further effects on the Delta-V calculated using TRE or is atmospheric drag the cause of Isp reductions at low altitudes (meaning that it is already factored in).

A retrograde planetary orbit has the major disadvantage of meaning that orbiting one of the planet's moons (assuming it is retrograde like all moons in KSP) is almost impossible, with the exception of Laythe due to the option of aerobraking. As for landing on a planet, it is more efficient to land or take off prograde. One thing I wonder about is orbiting, though. I haven't really looked into the numbers but I am aware that in real life most captured asteroids around the gas giants orbit retrograde, which would suggest to me that it could be more efficient to get into orbit retrograde, although I am aware there could be other reasons for this.

That's all really helpful. I had always wondered about the flickering/changing Pe markers but I had just decided to accept them as part of the game. I'm guessing it will help a lot to do corrections mid way. One of the things I like most about the game is that there are so many different areas to perfect. I thought I nearly had the game sussed when I first landed on Duna, but that's really just the start of it.

Yeh, I had considered trying to aerobrake, but I think I'll probably try to get a prograde orbit next time. I hadn't thought of focussing on Jool to see how I was approaching it, I'm pretty sure that will do the trick. Thanks.

That seems pretty bizarre. It seems like the engine that is burning quickly is only using up one of the Jumbo-64 tanks, and after burning out, the other tank above it is being switched to the engine next to it. I do think I caught a fuel duct at 3.25 in the video for a split second, but that could have been in a later stage. I couldn't really tell.

On career mode I decided to send an unmanned probe to get some science done around Jool. My plan for the mission was to encounter all of Jool's moons and do some science in the space above them before landing on Laythe. Unfortunately, I approached Jool from the wrong angle and became stuck in a retrograde orbit. I had a fair bit of of fuel remaining, but nothing like enough to allow me to get into orbit around Laythe (5.2km/s of delta-v, ay right), as I was travelling in exactly the opposite direction to it. In the end, I encountered all the moons (except for Bop) and then got some extra science from a low Jool orbit. Is there any advice on how to avoid this happening again? I don't use mods, so generally I just try to encounter a planet and then retroburn at the periapsis. I hadn't started exploring the moons of other planets until recently so it had never really mattered before about the inclination of a planetary orbit.

Well I managed to get there and back anyway. I was pretty close to running out of fuel on the way back. Cheers.

I just use guess work for the angles. I don't use any mods so I'm not sure if there's any way to calculate them. I just make sure I don't overshoot them when I'm timewarping them into place. Then I'll check how far away I am with a manoeuvre and correct it. For changing the inclination, assuming you are attempting to match your orbit with the plane of another object/planet, you need to set the object/planet as a target. Then you will see two lines joining the orbits of your ship and the target. These are the ascending and descending nodes and are the points where the planes of the orbits of the two objects intersect. When you cross the ascending node, you need to burn 90 degrees to your direction of travel (if you go on the orbit map and set a manoeuvre node it will be the directions that the pink symbols indicate), so if you are in a Kerbin orbit perfectly west-east, you need to burn north to increase your inclination. Alternatively you could burn south at the descending node. The other option to encounter objects with inclined orbits is to set up to encounter them at either the ascending or descending node. This is easy enough with Minmus, but I imagine it would take a long time to do with Eeloo as it would rely on Eeloo being in one of two specific points in its orbit and the timewarp is painfully slow for getting to the distant planets.

The prerequisites don't seem to make that much sense, some techs are available to me after only researching one of two prerequisites, for others they require all prerequisites.

As for the second part, if you are falling at 200m/s and you have a horizontal velocity of 5m/s then you will be descending at an angle of about 88.5 degrees (nearly vertical). If you slow down by burning straight down until you are descending at 5m/s, you will not have removed the horizontal velocity, so you will be travelling at 45 degrees. While you are falling quickly you can only do so much to remove your horizontal velocity. You have to wait until you are falling much slower to remove it completely. If you are moving horizontally, then your craft is likely to roll when it lands, even if you are moving very slowly in the vertical direction, it also complicates things if you land on a slope.

First of all it helps to have a rough idea of where you need to start your burn, so for example with Duna you want Duna to be 30-40 degrees ahead of Kerbin. Make sure you set your target. As Duna is further from the Kerbol than Kerbin, you want to click on the point of your orbit where Kerbin is directly infront of Kerbol (if that makes any sense). This creates a manoeuvre node, which is basically a point with 6 normal directions. For most bodies, you will only really need to worry about the prograde direction, as most bodies lie on roughly the same plane. Drag the prograde symbol away from the centre and the dashed line will show you the orbit corresponding to that level of burn (the delta-V requirement is shown to the right of the Navball). When your manoeuvre line intersects with the orbit of your target, two pentagonal symbols will show up, one on each orbital path. The pentagon on your ship's orbit will show the closest distance that your ship will come to the target. This needs to be within the target's SOI to get an encounter. Burn more slowly as you near the intersect to ensure an encounter. When this is done, you will need to replicate the manoeuvre with your ship. The manoeuvre node will show the time until you need to perform the manoeuvre and blue crosshairs will appear on your Navball to show you the required direction of burn. As you burn, the delta-V requirement to the right of the Navball will decrease and a predicted burn time will be displayed underneath. When the distance between the target object and your trajectory are small, you can use trial and error by burning in different directions and seeing the effect it has on closest approach. When you encounter a planet, burn retrograde at the periapsis and you'll eventually reach orbit. For reaching bodies with orbits on a vastly different plane, such as Eeloo, you need to use the pink symbols on your manoeuvre node to change your orbital inclination. That's all I have to say about that.

Something a bit weird happened to me a few weeks ago. I was escaping Kerbin, when for some reason (it looked like I got some sort of glitched gravity boost) I was sent "On escape trajectory out of the sun". Obviously Kerbol has an infinite SOI so I never actually escaped. Also, there was no trajectory ahead of me on the orbit map, but the line I was taking was perfectly straight. After about 10 years I had reached a velocity of about 0.2C and my altitude got up to about 40128Gm (according to the last screenshot I took).

Basically, I'm trying to perform a return trip to Duna using a 4 stage rocket. I have satellites set up orbiting both Duna and Kerbin for refueling. My first stage uses serial staging with 7 Jumbo-64's. Second stage uses asparagus staging with 7 Jumbo-64's. Third uses asparagus staging with 7 FL-T800's. Fourth stage (return stage) uses asparagus staging with 7 FL-T400's. To get into Kerbin orbit takes up the first two stages and the first 2 tanks of my third stage. The problem is that I would rather use serial staging for my third stage before I dock with my Kerbin Space Station and then use asparagus staging after to get a Duna encounter. This would allow me to retain all 7 tanks of my third stage until after I refuel, making my trip to Duna much more feasible. My question is whether it is possible to disable the fuel ducts during my ascent and then enabling them once I have refueled. I can't see any way of doing it, but if there is I would be happy to hear it. I realise that I could just not jettison the tanks until after I dock, but then I would miss out on engine power that should really be usable.