technion

But how do you align that with the multiple stages I referred to? My burn time is 2-3 minutes until I'm halfway through it.

Hey guys, I know this topic is somewhat done to death but hopefully I'm asking a slightly newer question. I've never been overly precise with transfers and often didn't mind just circling the system once or twice, but a new game with the combination of TAC, and not all of career mode opened, is killing me. I'm trying to get a rocket to Eeloo. I've done it three times now but TAC has killed me on the way back each time One of the difficulties to come up each time has been how to do the transfer. By the time my rocket is in orbit, there is ~800dv left on its (Edit: Skipper powered ) lifter stage, and planning a manoeuvre node tells me it's going to take about two minutes. Only one minute in, I drop that stage, and now I'm powered by one nuclear engine and have 24 minutes left on the burn. So question number one, how do you time this? In several of my efforts, I've found that, by the time I'm 15 minutes in, I'm pointing directly at the blue manoeuvre marker and yet my remaining dv on the node starts going up. My orbit doesn't look like it's moving. I can turn and point prograde and watch the orbit get a lot larger a lot quicker - but that doesn't address the fact that, based on the Alexmoon calculation, a large amount of the Eeloo burn is supposed to be on the normal plane. How do you plan a move like this?

It's similarly sized to the multiple sea-level Eve ascenders I've built.

It would be incredibly painful though.

Great work. I found the inclination of Dres was a killer.

I'm basically packing 4 x food, one each of carbon, water, and the recyclers for those, of the circular ones that site on top of an FL-T800. On the lander, I pack two of the radially mounted life support components. I'm on my third try at Duna, having landed, and run out of electricity and died. You get used to landing and just time warping until daytime - solar panels are fine here. With TAC, don't forget the batteries

I don't get it. Eve's inclincation always prevented me from ever getting a "single burn" node to work.

Having built sea level rockets before.. I know that once I hit 23km and start a gravity turn, you're basically looking at four of those FL-T200 tanks sitting around a middle one, with 47-8S's on each - with an FL-T100 staged on top of all of it - to hit orbit.

They do now. I've learnt that lesson the hard way. .Except where I couldn't afford the weight of a fin.

I know for my early experiments with FAR, turning as early as people suggest often ends up pushing the prograde marker to ninety degrees and trying to navigate the globe at 15km, even when the rocket is still pointing at 45 degrees.

You can hit up Ike with a science lab while you're in the area.

You don't need a particular lander. This would indicate there is at least one duplicate that would get involved. For example, maybe you already did an EVA report and you're about to bring another one back. When in doubt, quicksave, get in the lander, and then right click and "review stored data". You should see it all there, probably minus one duplicate.

Yes, in this ridiculous episode, we attempt to get into orbit using only Ant engines. Some interesting things occur here. Firstly, we find that, although the Kerbal Engineer parts have 0 mass, they do appear to have drag. Because with FAR installed, placing a KER part on top would send this thing upside down straight away. Secondly, dealing with FAR makes me see another major deficiency. This thing literally can't fly without a nosecone. The only nosecone for something this size, the "Standard NC", has more than three times of the mass of the significantly larger "Aerodynamic nosecone". The latter actually made this much easier to fly, but looked stupid. The standard NC is also the same exact weight as the Mk1 parachute, meaning we might as well use one of those. At liftoff, there are 48 engines running. Again, FAR makes things interesting. Turning this thing low like we'd like to is just about impossible since there's no gimballing, limited torque in our small probe, and fins would make it too heavy. We therefore are forced to take a very inefficient profile and turn at about 22km where the air really thins out. Here we migrate to the smaller Oscar tanks, each with two engines. Nearly there. The upper stages. Circularisation burn. Orbit!

Don't you love it when a plan comes together? Did you launch the lander and that huge transfer stage in one go? How ever did you get that into orbit? I always ended up draining half the lander and refuelling it in orbit before sending up a separate transfer.

I just put this picture in another thread.. You can't see the lifter in this picture, but this managed to get to Duna, land and return. There's a probe which allows the transfer stage to stay in orbit and rendezvous with the lander after reorbit. A large portion of my weight is in TAC add-ons and parts for deadly re-entry, so players without these mods should have no problems.

The nose cone in particular is a huge pain and I generally just "don't bother". You can't place it anywhere but on the front, and I've usually got a clamp or a parachute sitting there. The general experimental parts such as thermometers all have the same mass. So you can radially place a thermometer opposite a barometer for example, and it will be balanced. The goo cannisters, I usually suggest packing two, even if you only want one, just to deal with symmetry. I don't have a better picture from it here, but I've recently restarted .23 career mode and my Duna lander sounded like exactly what you're describing. Look at the top section. Basically, underneath the command module, which doesn't necessarily need to be able to separate like mine, there's a science jr with two radially mounted tanks. Each of them has a 47-8S engine underneath, and radially mounted science components. There is a clamp under the science jr. This lander was capable of managing a Duna land and return, and includes solar panels and battery packs. Edit: Despite what I said above, there is a nosecone on this image. It's the only thing that blew up during my descent (I play with DRE) and I haven't used it since.

I don't believe fuel consumption can change without an ISP change (or the rocket algorithm would be broken). A few tests demonstrate that a manoeuvre node to Jool from low down shows a lower dv than one in a high orbit. In other words, the node accurately reflects what is required to burn, it's the dv needed to get where you want, and therefore the size of the node that changes.

Well done! I'm continually impressed by the tiny size of the Tylo landers I see. Mine was twice that size and still struggled.

You appear to have abandoned your earlier thread, to make a new one about getting this crew home? Plenty of people have said on your earlier thread, that you should be able to crash straight into Kerbin.

If it's your first trip... An FL800 with an LV-N is capable of doing a Duna flyby if you can get it into LKO first.

I just returned from Duna with < 15 points of fuel at the time I entered Kerbin's SOI, and managed to land fine. Very rarely do people tug 3200m/s worth of fuel on an interplanetary mission with a plan to perform a non-aerobrake capture at Kerbin. I dare say the majority of my missions wouldn't have been workable in this configuration. I don't get where the issue is here - just fly straight into the planet.

You'll notice this is exactly what happens. In some less than efficient manoeuvres, I've had one unit sitting in a low, circular orbit, and another at a highly elliptical orbit (usually a rescue ship and a lander). Create an intercept such that they come screaming towards each other at 1km/s. Then, when they are near each other, zero out the speed as discussed. At the end, you will find the orbits nearly identical.

What ever are you talking about? Obama's healthcare website was built in the foundation of "we want it when I say I want it" and that's been a roaring success. Edit: As a side note, lets compare this <$50 product with the $14,000 we spent in Symantec's "Backup Exec". "Guaranteed support for Windows 2012 by August 2013" gave them over year to release that version. We're in February 2014 and it's still not out. That's not a small gaming firm - that's currently one of the major enterprise vendors. I think Squad are a long way ahead of the curve.

Hey guys, I was pretty amazed by this. This is an intercept I have. Now we fired a decoupler. How's that intercept now?

Imagine an intercept, where the Pe is "5km" (anywhere under roughly 30km really). Since you have no chance of getting down that low, and turning back around and leaving the planet, you'll keep going down until you land.