technion

The problem there is the Mk3 is a really dumb fit if the rest of your rocket is perfectly built around things like orange tanks. Adapters and such can add a lot of pointless weight, along with the aesthetics of it. I used to be able to use one large grey tank and two LV-N's and get enough DV to capture at Eeloo and easily return. Just put it on an ejection stage and you're away. Options now are a lot more limited. The game could really do with some mid-size jet fuel tanks.

Don't forget that an orange tank, by default, has a lot of fuel that the LV-N won't be using

That curve can be hard to predict. I had a terrier in my Laythe launcher and, even at 30km alt, it turned out to be hampered by the atmosphere enough that it pulled a TWR of <1 and wouldn't make orbit. I was sure the combination of Laythe's thin atmosphere, and that height would do it. But no, I forget the exact thrust output, but it was nowhere near what it was capable of.

You measure with one of these.

In 1.05, you won't be able to aerobrake effectively without also using some engine burn. Heat damage kicks in and becomes a problem at a much higher altitude than you need for the atmosphere to slow you down.

But how do you identify when that's happened? int main() { printf("I... deserve better.. \n"); } That example is trivial. Others might not be.

I tried that path too. It takes three of them to land with any stability, and at that point, you're looking at 12.75T of ISRU's, and then you need to deal with drills, panels and everything else. I'm not saying it can't work, but it becomes a lot more weight very quickly.

I've had several goes at this. Remembering that an appropriate Eve ascent rocket is already quite long and pointy, and that landing something long and point is already difficult - any attempt to place an ISRU and the associated components vertically underneath is going to end in tears. You could of course have a separate lander, which I've seen several successful missions do. But that assumes you want to use KAS because there's no stock way of transferring fuel, except to try and align docking ports on the ground, which is well known to be painful. You can start trying to built our landing legs of girders and small tanks radially, but the whole thing quickly starts to weigh a lot more than a grey tank with a Vector (remember the ISRU is already 4.25T on its own), which is capable of making the landing without all the headache.

Yeah, take off from the airfield, fly straight out over the ocean for a bit, then look a bit to the right. It's not an easy place to land imo.

I'd make a different suggestion: pick up that science using an EVA, and then you can use a decoupler to drop those lightweight science bays. Coming down with just the module and heat shield should be easy.

Frankly, I like that - it's given drogues a reason to exist. I just came back from jool at an absurd angle and performed a direct capture to landing. The heat shield did its thing, the drogues turned green at about 8km from sea level, and they pulled the ship up enough to use the regular chutes at 3km from sea level. It's a fun way to land

OK, so we know about DeltaV, burn time. Can anyone explain that entire thing?

Yes, I'm quite sure I could put a single aerospike underneath an FLT-800, underneath that terrier and build something that could make the ascent easily enough. But Laythe means you've got to build for landing on water. And if you can be bothered actually planning a proper land based landing (I usually give up after 5-6 tries), anything that long and high has a good chance of tipping. And I have no idea why but if you lower those outside tanks (easy with the new offset tool) it will flip over in the water.

The game won't let you put a kerbal in a seat and "launch" a rover unfortunately. But what you can do is: Start the rover. Drive a few meters forward so the game doesn't see there to be a rover "currently on the runway". Create a new rover. That rover is just a command module with two kerbals EVA and walk over to your rover. Those seats look close enough to the edge that you can right click and go "use seat" even from the ground.

Hi, I'm planning a lander here and just realising how much more difficult this place is. Issues I'm running into: Landers I use previously were powered by a few small stages of 47-8S's. These same landers in 1.05 hit a top speed of 200m/s when running out of fuel. Landers used when I wanted to be more interesting placed three radial jets along side a small liquid fuel stage. Such jets get the rocket to 15km or so, and then even a terrier sitting under a FLT-400 doesn't have the delta v to push from there into orbit. So you pack more, and realise the atmosphere here is strong enough to cause the tipping problem that I had only previously really thought about on Kerbin launches, and start playing with fins. Fins just don't seem effective on rockets this small, and after a few hours of playing, I've resorted instead to six SAS modules, which seems a far more effective solution. To say I have a solution below is to say I have one that feels like it's a lot larger than it needs to be. The whole thing does of course scream "spaceplane", but that's not really a path I want to go down.

Do know how long the Kessel run actually is?

The trick I go with these days is.. build a lander that's unlikely to tip. Below is my standard lander for most bodies.

On re-entry.. I don't care. As long as the chute is fine, the mission is fine. I really think the heat changes made aerobraking obsolete, and I'm OK with that. You'd be surprised how effectively you can capture at Jool with a Tylo gravity assist. It takes a lot more work than just aerobraking but it's an interesting way to play. Eve is the only other place that aerobraking into an orbit even makes sense, and I think the general rule there is, you don't hit the atmosphere with anything that isn't covered with heat shields.

It's one of the few places that an ion lander can be well outfitted (ie, not with an exposed chair) and have good twr. I always make a trip there in every career.

I'm very interested in how anyone would complete a grand tour with Eve in the picture in 1.05. The type of craft needed to ascend now is much, much more difficult to simply attach to an existing rocket and bring along. The mothership will be rediculously long and bendy with it attached.

Incredibly well done. I always thought it was an established fact that ions couldn't manage the TWR to land on moho.

Honestly it would be a huge lot harder to do this challenge than when I did it. You can't feasibly fit the various landers we use one on top of each other, so you end up with things hanging off the side of your rockets. That's a mess in the realistic atmosphere.

I don't understand how everyone is still fitting nukes. Since the rebalancing, putting one on either side of a large grey tank is no longer a great idea - it gets dv on par with a poodle. The mk2 jet fuel tank looks and handles stupidly under a round command module, and a series of mk1 tanks doesn't scale very well.

And in this game that's not a terrible thing. Plenty of my questions have had Google hits for appropriate answers back in 0.22 or whatever, but they are wrong now. It would be count intuitive for them to be more visible than a current, and correct answer, on the basis of upvotes.

I'm always quite interested in these types of things - they can have some amazing outcomes. At the risk of sounding dumb, what's L1?