technion

Thanks guys. It just seems unusual. When I activate my aerospikes and click on them, this rocket roars into the sky and hits terminal velocity fast. When I right click those four aerospikes, it tells me they are thrusting at 175kN. With 111 in the above screenshot, I really thought I'd get moving.

Hey guys, I'm just having my first play with jet engines. I've set them up as the first stage of this launcher. However, I can't seem to make anything move. I can see a glow that suggests they are firing, and fuel seems to be going down, but this thing won't take off until I move to the next stage. The configuration is a "Mk1 fuselage - Jet fuel" with a turbojet underneath and ram air intake on top.

One small tank and one rockomax engine... I was floored at how much this could pump. I flew straight up for 195KM...

Thanks for the feedback guys! I know there's a few things I'll improve for v3. The command module hauled a lot of monopropellant and didn't use any of it once it left Kerbin - I should have put small tanks on top of those fuel boosters that we ejected early. There were a few parts on the final stage that could have dropped earlier without an issue. I went back and forth on this several times. The v1 edition definitely had thrust issues at low atmosphere, the aerospike component was mostly dry before we hit the gravity turn. I did weigh up the SRB vs a small tank and T30 - never did come to a good conclusion about which was better for this scenario. My frustration with exceedingly long burns carrying this weight the whole way there was outweighed by the mind numbing failure of the previous mission not returning to orbit. I do know there was a mistake though - the lander was tested extensively to be water landing capable. Since adding in those SRBs, it isn't (without flipping over), and I only found out once I landed. Landing struts may not weigh much but I sure had a lot of them.

Not a difficult intercept to make... Coming in.. Touchdown!

Thanks for that!

Hey guys, I seem to have some sort of issues with correcting burns. Specifically.. if I get on an intercept, then my "current" path is still that "blue" line, and the "new" path after the intercept becomes reflected by the purple line. I'd like to try and adjust my burn at this point, but the blue lines seems to become unclickable and any manouever node I make ends up on the purple line. I've had this across several games - is it meant to be normal? Edit: Doesn't happen all the time. Sometimes I can zoom out and back in, or time warp for a bit, and it seems to fix it.

Aerobraking into Laythe orbit. Screenshot missing: transfer a kerbal to the lander. I really didn't want to waste any of the lander's fuel deorbiting to an appropriate landing site. Touching down only to find I'd spent too much to get back would be crushing, and with Laythe being mostly water, simply arranging a deorbit wouldn't do the job. So I performed a bit of a hack: I turned the whole rocket around and had the command module burn the nuclear engine retrograde until I like the target. Then, we separated, and the command module resestablished its orbit. You can see the lander - which we towed this whole way - was just shy of 70T. Heading down in a ball of fire! Creative mixing of parachute types allowed for enough early braking that the sudden jolt when the lower atmosphere ones kicked in never hurt anything. Touchdown! Celebration! Back into orbit. The final stage. A full orbit was established before we got here, so we had an LV-909 and full tank to deal with docking. Who cares about good intercepts when you can make a 500m spacewalk to get back to the command module? Everyone safe and sound, most of a full tank. Nearly 250T left Kerbin's orbit, and here we see less than 30T embark on a return trip.

The final result is well put together and quite capable - if I do say so myself. I exited Kerbin using six? separate, three minute kicks. I took a lot to get this moving and I wanted to be as efficient as possible with it. Shortly into the mission, we can empty out the fuel tanks that came with the command pod (they were half empty by docking time anyway). The major 2.0 upgrade in the command pod: separatrons on this stage! Go go! It took a long ass burn to get here.. over 40 minutes to intersect the orbit with Laythe in fact. And I couldn't physics warp whatsoever without having the rocket shatter. A view as Jool approaches. Aerobraking at Jool! wow that was scary... Time to launch those probes and let them do their own thing. Can you believe how finely we cut it on the fuel? This is where we were at once we got a Laythe intercept. It's just the return pod and the Lander now, hovering over Laythe...

You've probably noticed - we haven't added any Kerbals yet. This command pod serves a few purposes. Primarily, it delivers our kerbals to the system. It's also - the return unit. Finally, we have two ion powered probes and some additional fuel coming along for the ride. Getting this into orbit is a breath of fresh air after the last two launches. One final dock to put the entire mothership together.

Our lander meanwhile, has had a significant revamp for version 2.0. The first edition was unable to make orbit, so this new version features extra fuel, and two additional stages. Here we see our Kerbal testing the ladder system on kerbin. The complete launcher. The lander, now in orbit. I really hate docking. When people show me space stations with seven docks I cringe. It took a long time to pull this off, especially with such bulky units. That big tank on the end isn't actually a part of the lander - it's just there to provide fuel for the docking process, and to top up the traveller. Remember it was 700 units down? We have that much to spare. Dumping that tank! Be sure to kill the aerospikes.

Hey guys, Welcome to my first mission report. I'd appreciate any feedback, although I'm aware of several improvements that have become quite obvious as the mission progressed. Following a success at Duna, I set my sights on Laythe. My first Laythe mission was failure in two ways, both with the transport being fuel limited, and the lander being inadequate for a return trip. This time, things were much better planned and destined to be different. The hero of the mission is this heavy transporter. The transporter appears to be, for whatever reason, incredibly fragile. I tried a copy in which I added over 200 struts, without improving anything at all and ended up reverting. The result is a lifter that can't throttle up beyond 50% in its early stages, without imploding on itself. Although common wisdom argues SRBs should be spend in the early stages, it's about the 6KM mark that the lack of early thrust becomes an issue. Note the low speed even with four of them going. The rocket stages itself to the nuclear engines just a little bit too early, resulting in a nail biting circularisation where the periapsis eventually forms right in right of you and you hit it at about 60KM. You don't mind aerobraking a bit here though, because the Apopsis is 200KM+. The result however, is quite worthwhile, with a capacity for 10,080 Liquid fuel units and less than 700 spent. Sandwich'ed between a senior docking clamp and three LV-N engines, we were looking good to go.

Boom, that was it. Thanks!

I checked all the fuel tanks and they were all even. There's only one monopropellant tank and as you can see, I virtually haven't burnt any of the rest of it.

Hey guys, After finally managing my first Laythe landing, I've run into an issue I wasn't expecting. See this slight incline I've landed on? I've seen tonnes of threads about landers flipping over and failing to land. I didn't have that problem. I do find however, on take off, it's virtually impossible to right that angle and the rocket ends up flying into the ground. I became convinced that the rocket was unbalanced in some way, although it flew fine on Kerbin and made the trip here without a problem. I did once manage to correct it with RCS, but by that time, I'd floated in circles for so long there was no way I was making orbit. I did however go straight up and prove there's nothing unbalanced. Is this a design issue or do I just need to revert to an earlier save and try and land somewhere flatter?

Nothing stops you burning out until your orbits overlap, then sitting there waiting until there's a natural event in which the separation is quite minimal. Then make a node to fix it. I've done all my flights this way, it just involves less maths and confusion than waiting for phases.

Picture says it all.

Thanks for that Kasuha, that's great info. The more I work on something - the more someone seems to be able to come along with a much simpler design that did the job I just replayed it, and managed a 250K orbit. What engines are those? I can never tell from images (and I've been known to rebuild my own from time to time because when I'm sitting in the VAB I often can't tell what I last used). I'm heavily looking forward to making this mission a success, the transporter already dropped a probe there and made it back, so this should be the final piece of the puzzle.

Many thanks guys. The 45' ladder feels like a terrible hack -- in that it clips halfway through the rocket. The image below however, shows my kerbal having just entered so that sorts that one out. Kasuha, I need to do an assisted burn even on Kerbin, the rocket wants to touch down at 13m/s and can't handle more than about 9. The bottom fuel tank is designed to eject early after takeoff, the idea being to use staging without actually having to carry extra engines around. Now I just need to rebuild the lifter to deal with the extra weight and then I can get back on course with this mission.

Thanks Pluto. I'll give that a go. It was about to be "back to assembly" regardless because I switched target to the lander, then back to the kerbal, and suddenly he's 900m away and not getting back any time soon.

I think a better shot answers both of these. You can see in this image that he's able to completely align himself laterally (at least it looks it to me?) Yet at that point, he's can't right click the door at all. If he moves forward at all from there, he'll fall off.

Hey guys, Boy am I glad I tested this on Kerbin before I got it to Laythe (again...). After redesigning this lander to be more capable of getting into Laythe orbit, I can't seem to get a Kerbal to climb back in. Here's me, trying to get in. I even added a horizontal ladder to see if it would make him move along it. He just doesn't seem capable of grabbing the door. As a side note, sanity check: if I deploy this lander from a 20KM orbit, I can land on Kerbin, then get back into a 100KM orbit. Someone please assure me that it'll be able to make it out of Laythe next time

Thanks for that guys. Looks like I kept making the change and then resetting it!

Hey guys, I'm trying to send my lander craft into space unmanned, with a view to docking with a larger ship and transferring staff. The lander works perfectly with one of the probes at the head. However, I'd thought that if I simply added a lander can to that craft, it would allow me to launch an unmanned lander. It lets me configure the ship that way by just removing the Kerbal, but as soon as I hit "launch" it puts someone in there. Is there a way around this?

SunJumper, I just escaped Laythe and was in an orbit around the sun quite similar to Jool's when I left the computer for a bit. I came back and was floating through a Jool encounter that left me on the course in that screenshot.