Anquietas314

Hey, it's not my model. Go annoy arkie , although I will say this seems implausible given more deltaV fundamentally means more fuel used (for a given rocket), never mind the fact payload mass means much higher dry mass, so your TWR doesn't increase as quickly. In that model, that means much less fuel efficiency. Arkie's model does assume SSTO, so of course you'll have less efficiency loss in practice with multi-stage rockets, but then as we all know SSTO is the cheapest if not the most efficient in KSP, since you can return the entire rocket to KSC for (almost) a full refund .

No, this actually has a large effect on efficiency since if you have low TWR, you're suffering from quite large gravity losses all the way up. Of course the reverse situation is also very inefficient - crazy high TWR (and no throttling to compensate) will make you suffer drag losses. Install mechjeb and use its gravity/drag losses readout for a low thrust rocket and compare it to one at around 1.6 launch TWR to see for yourself. For an airless body the effect can be as much as 70% of your fuel wasted for an unrealistically optimal ascent profile: source. With an atmosphere it's even worse because you have the atmosphere limiting your acceleration, even ignoring drag losses. No, it's not. Watch the mission timer in the video. Having flown many vessels with a TWR of 1.6 in the stock souposphere, he should be ascending much faster than that. EDIT: Just checked the video. With mission timer at 10 seconds, velocity is 35.6m/s, so the TWR is approximately 1.3-1.4 which is too low for stock atmosphere (absolutely fine for FAR though).

(stolen borrowed from pecan's post) Wow dude, no wonder you had issues. That'll add about 2km/s to your deltaV requirement in gravity losses alone, never mind the fact you're starting a gravity turn at 75km... Yeah, just follow Pecan's advice on this one.

The conic patches thing LD was referring to isn't a bug; the game has different modes for drawing the patched conics. See the link for details on each mode (covered at the bottom of the page), but don't worry about the settings file - precise node lets you set the conic draw mode on the fly . I think the issue you're having with the SoIs might be the time warp bug: if you time warp through an SoI switch, it slightly changes your orbit. It's not really noticeable until around 1000-10000x though, so just be careful to slow down as you're approaching it. At 100000x it can quite drastically change your encounter (also be careful not to warp right through periapsis with it... I've done that a few times ).

LOL! I had an impact on the name of someone else's youtube video . Yes it's okay lol. *watching video* You used actual SRBs as sepratrons? Nice. Your TWR is way too low though; you want it to be about 1.6ish at launch in stock aero and maintain at least that most of the way up (MOAR BOOSTERS!). Honestly it'd probably fly just as far if you just ditched one orange tank from the core and each booster. Gravity losses bite . You want to be a lot more aggressive with the gravity turn too if you're going for efficiency. More TWR will allow you to do that. Ideally you want to be nearly horizontal by ~40km with your apoapsis at or above 70km in my experience. If you install the Kerbal Engineer Redux mod that'll help you optimize your flight path ; you want to keep "atmospheric efficiency" at 100% during the vertical ascent, and then reasonably close during the rest of the flight (it becomes impractical/unnecessary at higher altitudes to keep it there since terminal velocity skyrockets). You're also better to launch into as low an orbit as you can without grazing the atmosphere (due to oberth effect). Obviously with that rocket it's not really practical though because it's so heavy / TWR is too low . Add struts between the core and the payload though - that'll help with the flexing late in the flight

That should just be "horizontal velocity" . Delta-V is the capacity to change velocity. Yay lithobraking

If you're having difficulty getting a youtube video to work, you could always just upload the .craft file (this is stock, right?) and we could try it ourselves. Except me... gaming rig's broken

If you followed those tutorials to the letter, then your maneuvers would have been fairly efficient - not optimal, but good enough to not matter much (it's better to get into a ~70-75km orbit instead when you launch from Kerbin). Hehe, that's a uh... very literal interpretation of "troubleshooting" . On Minmus you can usually just use the capsule's reaction wheel torque to turn it upright. If that doesn't work try raising the landing gear first, then redeploy them once upright. Same goes for most of the low-gravity worlds. It can work on Mun too, but usually only if you have extra reaction wheels. Much safer than smashing Jeb into the thing

I'd be more worried about public indecency charges and such to be honest...

Make it light, put loads of control surfaces on it. Winglets (the controllable kind) and canards are especially good. There's really not much else to it tbh. A parachute (and engineer) might be a good idea if you expect to be able to land in one piece though . One of the more effective designs (for speed, at least): You don't really need that many control surfaces to make one fly though. It's perfectly possible to make ones that look somewhat similar to real planes .

No, they appear to be fractions. Tier 1 is 0, tier 2 is 0.5, tier 3 is 1.0.

Well, I guess at least Jeb would be proud; moar boosters! As long as the video's 15 mins or under you should be fine - if it takes you that long to get to orbit (after accounting for lagsbane) you're doing something wrong, even with spaceplanes

Agreed; you have to either spam satellite(/similar) contracts or try pretty hard to max out science within Kerbin's SoI. Mind you, given how much those contracts pay in terms of funds that may be worthwhile, if a bit repetitive. Plus, having the full tech tree before you go to other planets properly does make it a bit easier .

I'd love to see that. Boosters? What boosters? Oh wait... do you mean the big engines at the bottom? Or heaven forbid the orange tanks?

1: Get the Precise Nodes mod, it solves all your problems with maneuver nodes, even if the way it does it is a bit messy (GUI with numbers/buttons). 2: While it's not great for landings, you can switch to the "chase" camera which orients the camera so that "up" in stage view is the same as "up" on the navball and so on. Great for docking. You can also use certain asymmetrical markers on the ship (such as the hatch location on lander cans) to help orient yourself. For some capsules like the Mk1-2 this doesn't work quite so well, but you can always have a system where, for example, the RCS thruster closest to the ladder is "left". 3: If you focus view on the planet/moon you're going to encounter, you get the orbit prediction for your encounter. While you're still planning the maneuver node, tweak the different vectors just slightly to see how your orbit changes. The end that moves the most is the opposite one to the one you arrive at. The Precise Nodes mod helps a lot with this . The curvature you mention is actually very helpful for determining the orientation of your encounter, if you know how to use it . Technically you don't need to get the encounter direction just right though - unless you're going to Moho, it's really cheap to just fix it when you get there; do a radial burn "inwards" as soon as you enter the SoI.

Might be worth explaining how to build a launcher to lift that thing; OP did say they were very new. You can get away with 3 lander legs though (2 really since it's Minmus), which'll save a tiny bit of deltaV and make the thing just slightly more stable on slopes if you land it appropriately (you can always get 3 legs to touch the ground, not necessarily true with 4, plus you can more easily play with the suspension after landing to make it stay vertical). OP: Can you post a link to the tutorial you used for reference? Also, how did you approach getting to Minmus and landing, if that wasn't covered by the tutorial? It's possible your original design is perfectly adequate but you're being very wasteful with maneuvers (remarkably common with new players - orbital mechanics is hard).

Y'know, we only had sandbox at one point. We (older players) turned out fine, mostly

Wow... at that scale, I think you would have a far better time (both launching and flying, not to mention refuelling) if you used a (sizeable) LV-N cluster and LF+O. You should use the 2.5m tanks instead of the 3.75 ones though - they have a better wet/dry ratio (= moar deltaV!). If you insist on using ion engines, the stack tanks are marginally more efficient in terms of wet/dry than the radial ones. Interesting launcher design too, but probably overengineered . Is it at least SSTO? It's hard to tell from the screenshot.

Bugs happen in stock too . OP: Go to Duna or Eve and their moons. I would recommend you don't send a manned lander to Eve, at least at first, but since you're using FAR it should be a fair bit easier than stock if/when you do . If you want to make interplanetary missions harder you should probably install TAC first (and experiment with it by going to Minmus and such - Mun's close enough that it hardly matters). Eve/Gilly will probably be easier to go to first if you use TAC, seeing as the round trip will be a fair bit shorter overall .

So did I, right up until the snide comment at the end of your last post.

The atmosphere thing is completely unrelated and far easier to solve: periapsis < X. As for calculating SoI changes, it would make much more sense to do this per-vessel as you perform maneuvers that could cause SoI changes in the first place. Doing it afterwards with constant updates is silly. This is no different from SoI changes; while you're still performing the maneuver to do the transfer, physics is updating every frame. Once you're in time-warp or switch ships, this is no longer an issue. The same is perfectly true of physics spheres. Really, you're going to take the "you're unpaid so you're obviously full of crap" approach? This doesn't deserve a response.

You can actually do it, but it usually takes a bit of fiddling to push the maneuver node through the weirdness. Just be sure you keep dragging retrograde to increase the orbit after you've passed that point. EDIT: damnit, ninja'd.

Hmm, like the other posters I haven't experienced this problem (in spite of using windows nearly exclusively for the last 13? 14 years? something like that). I can see how it might be an issue if you're half asleep though. Moving the buttons to the bottom would be more consistent with typical UI layouts, but it would be more annoying to have to move the mouse that far to click them (especially for the poor laptop users who insist on using their trackpads). If there was a hotkey for both accept and cancel (that you were unlikely to accidentally press) I think that would be great though .

I think that's mainly that the camera hasn't been a priority so far - the existing one works fairly well most of the time. The maths for a better camera (pretty much quaternions) is quite complex and may not be directly supported by unity (I would have to dig through the documentation to check). OP: Hell yes to everything , though perhaps clarify what you mean by EVA camera. It actually isn't self-explanatory

The "visible" distance is 100km exactly .