khyron42

Congratulations! I\'m also amused that subsonic speeds are enough to do this, assuming that Kerbin\'s speed-of-sound is about the same as Earth\'s. Thanks to this thread, I researched on wikipedia and learned that the Earth\'s atmosphere is being dragged along at roughly 1.3 times the speed of sound by inertia and gravity (at the equator, less as latitude increases.) Interesting, a little scary, and something I should have already known from weather patterns.

This sounds promising, so long as it isn\'t overwhelmed by RP\'ers pushing the names they\'ve already come up with and still feeling like they 'own' that name/area of the map. This could easily populate a whole 'place name suggestions' subforum, with polls for the name of each continent/subcontinent and areas within them.

I\'d definitely recommend practice. You can always download the current persistence file and practice landing near the bases. As for aiming, that\'s all down to shaping the orbit before you ever begin the landing. I usually do some burns right after I enter the Mun\'s SoI to pass over the target site at a altitude, either set up to crash some distance after I pass over the site or set up with a fairly low Pe right over or near the site. Then I do corrective and braking burns around 100 km to be over the site at around 10 km up, and go from there with a normal landing as I\'m passing overhead.

There\'s 8 more people to go before you... Expect at least a week.

Because we don\'t precalculate it, I usually end up having to fly every new design twice (or more.) The first time, I don\'t know how well it will accelerate and how much fuel it will have left when it\'s getting close to the moon. I either run it out of fuel, or start braking way too late and plow into the surface at 200 m/s. The second time, I start braking earlier/later and usually land ok with enough fuel for a return trip. I do tend to err on the side of 'running out of fuel' lately because, worst case, I\'ve built my return section as a separate stage and can use it to abort.

You\'re doing the exact opposite of what you want to do on a return trip - you want to slow down at Ap to bring your Pe down to about 30 km, then ta-da! single orbit return. I have done a long return where the Ap was still up around 6000 km and the Pe was 50 km when I accidentally hit space bar instead of throttle, which took forever to gradually bleed off the excess speed over a dozen orbits. I\'ve also ended up on a non-return orbit (10000 km x 1000 km) that re-entered the Mun\'s SoI hundreds of days later, and through sheer luck the gravity-assist ended up putting me on a very direct return orbit.

I was scouting out south polar landing sites... It really is quite rugged down there, but I landed on a ledge overlooking the crater I think you were talking about? Minimal lander, designed to leave three stable tanks behind on landing legs when it returns. This\'ll be my next ship. The view with the camera positioned exactly at the south pole: Location:

Here\'s the explanation. Gravity is acceleration over time. Every second you are near the surface, you gain 1.68 m/s downwards speed. Let\'s say you drop from 500 m/s to a complete hover at 20 km, then kill throttle and fall. You just killed 500 m/s velocity, but over the next 2 minutes you fall 12 more km and regain 200 m/s speed. If you had fallen the same 12 km without braking at 20 km, you\'d cover that distance in 23 seconds and only sped up from 500 to 539 m/s. That\'s a lot less speed you have to kill in total! You slow down higher to have margin of error, but it\'s most efficient to brake only once.

I like the 'land in a canyon' idea. Those who don\'t lag into crashing will still have the original site option.

Oi, what\'s this doing down there on page 2? Get back up there! I did a test run just now against the most current save - you definitely want to be at a hover around 200m when everything comes off of rails, but the lag was bearable once everything loaded. Might be time to find another site if we get one or two more complicated landers, though.

Jesus KerBeard, you might want to also download the Kosmos pack. Aside from an overwhelming amount of station parts, they have inverters that would let you flip the direction for any attached part.

I remember those days. Time to see if that orbital speeds table is still out there on the wiki...

I should have made an even longer post, I guess. If company A, which is managed and 2/3rds owned by single highly motivated individual, only cares about making enough money to cover costs & salaries plus 5% to pay the other 1/3rds owners some profits - they can operate a lower-efficiency rocket for cheaper than company B(oeing), which has a tried-and-true lower-cost launcher but also expects to rake in about 20% profit per launch for their shareholders. Company A might even force B to lower cost-to-orbit by improving their design further or dropping it to 15% profit-per-launch.

It could also have died down because many of the active members are young, and various schools have spring break weeks throughout the month of April.

This needs 7 pages of comments. get to work, everyone.

For the record - SpaceX\'s Falcon 9 uses LOX and kerosene (RP-1), not LH2. That reduces cost and pollution to produce & store the fuel, but adds all the normal pollutants of any hydrocarbon during the launch itself. My take on SpaceX and some of the other new space companies is that they aren\'t aiming to make money. They\'re aiming to broaden the scope by putting market pressure on the big companies to match their capabilities. By looking really likely to start privately built manned-to-ISS launches within a few years, it makes Boeing dust off their 1990\'s plans for the same. If they pull it off, they\'d love to have 3 other companies fighting for those launches, because the people who invested in it are more interested in building the industry than getting rich. As far as the 'private spaceflight' thing - SpaceX fully privately funded the Falcon 1 launcher (Thanks, PayPal.) Falcon 9 has been built with partial NASA funding. They\'re kind of in a grey area.

Congratulations! I\'m glad people are finding designs and methods that work for them.

I normally use your approach for lunar landings. Stage one disconnects on a suborbital trajectory, stage two stays with me until almost landing on the mun and then crashes there. Another trick is, if you have a launcher where you know one of the stages will be left in orbit - put an extra mechjeb in that stage and make sure it still has some fuel when you jettison it. You can then deorbit it using mechjeb, assuming it has a gimballing engine.

Station Beta is ready for visitors. (Alpha didn\'t work out so well...)

Of course weird things happen when you fly close to a sun; haven\'t you guys seen Star Trek IV?

On the MechJeb retrograde thing: MechJeb uses the orbital retrograde, not the surface-relative one. When you\'re above 12 km it works right, but below there it\'ll always end up pointed off to the east from your displayed retrograde.

Members of PMLA, do you want that detailed guide, have you already had enough helpful tips for now, or do you need something else? I just went through the process and came up with, fittingly, a 12-step process.

Please tell me this numerology does not mean the ponies might be escaping their designated thread? (I have no interest in the show, just assuming the worst here.)

I\'m working on a practical, detailed, step-by-step to null your horizontals up around 10 km altitude, so that you can fall completely straight down and just do braking thrust and maybe a few IJKL-key adjustments with RCS. I\'ll update once it\'s done. ... of course, what I was gonna work on is the 'how to assemble your new bookshelf' style guide to what Thorfinn said right below. The only major difference is I was going to say to kill the horizontal velocity at 10 km, for even more room to not worry about running out of time while trying to get it right. but, um, mine will have pictures!

I\'m sure we can come up with others for other nation\'s space programs, though. 'Shuttle Fleet retired after enough people finally voice concerns that \'Dey might hit Jesus while horsin\' around up thar!\'' I\'m sure there\'s things for Russia, China, and the ESA.