Anquietas314

Not really. The actual satellites have next to no mass unless they have goo canisters or materials bays; it's the fuel and engine to get them into place that matters. You can launch several of them using one tank/engine pair if you know what you're doing. It does make things harder and more interesting though

This is actually generally true of any big object . Stuff won't flex as much if you're pulling it. I've never tried it with an asteroid though, but I think you'd need to be quite careful about the design. In particular, you don't want the engines close to the asteroid, or they'll be less effective (the engine plasma'll just push the asteroid in the opposite direction, cancelling some of your thrust...)

Hi, welcome to the forums Just so you know, the Mun doesn't have an atmosphere. So, y'know, don't expect parachutes to work It's not a dumb question; getting to the Mun is hard Okay, so having just had a go at the tutorial (I learned to do it the hard way... like most people - the tutorials came roughly around 0.18 and I think they were updated in 0.90), you have enough fuel to do the mission, but not a huge margin for error. I guess what you're struggling with is figuring out where to place the maneuver nodes. The tutorial does tell you how to use them, but it's a bit difficult if you're not familiar with the terminology; you want to stick the maneuver node somewhere on your orbit - anywhere will do; you can adjust it later - and then drag the prograde marker (the green circle with 3 lines sticking out of it, but no cross) until your apoapsis (the "high point" in your orbit, it's the "Ap" marker) reaches out to Mun's orbit. Once you've done that, slide the maneuever node around in your orbit until you have a good intercept. It should look a bit like this: Don't worry about the various icons and overlays on my screen that you don't have - or that the navball is bigger. That's caused by the mods I have installed. Next, you want to tweak the prograde/retrograde (the opposite one) to get your Mun periapsis (low point - it's the Pe marker) down to about 30km (to be safe - ideally you should go lower). If you go too far (Pe marker disappears - that means you'll hit the Mun) use the retrograde one to drag it back. Don't worry too much about precision. After that, you need to aim at the node marker on your navball - it's the dark blue one the arrow is pointing to. Try to get the dot in the middle of the navball to line up with the blue one on the marker as closely as you can. Since it's the tutorial, you can also use the "hold maneuver" button to the left of the navball when you activate SAS (T key) - it's the top right one in the list. Normally you need to level up kerbals pretty far in career mode to have that ability though, so it's worth learning to work without it. It's also slightly buggy in 0.90, so be careful about using those. The ship you're given takes about 2 minutes to complete the burn plotted by the maneuver node, so wait until 1 minute before the node (i.e. "Node in T - 1m") before starting the engine. Double check you're aiming at the maneuver node at the time though! As you're burning, try to follow the node marker - it'll almost always move a bit; that's because you usually can't line up with it perfectly, but don't worry about it. Once you've completed the burn (the "m/s" bar is very close to zero), cut engines (X key to do it instantly) and then time-warp until you're about to cross the "Mun Encounter" marker. Slow down timewarp to 1000x for that - there's a minor bug where timewarping through those markers too fast will alter your orbit. After you've crossed the marker, your orbit around Mun should look a bit different, and change colour. Next, place a maneuver node at your Mun periapsis, and then drag the retrograde marker out to bring the orbit down from a big arc into a nice, neat circle. You want to get your Ap/Pe to about the same value, but within 5km will be fine . It should look something like this: Next, just complete the maneuver exactly like last time: aim at the navball marker, wait until 20 seconds before the node, fire the engines until the m/s bar reaches zero. And that's it . Your flight screen should look like this:

I can confirm they are regenerated by KSP in 0.90.

Well, having been sat in a polar orbit of Laythe for the last hour, I'm inclined to agree that the biome just doesn't exist. It's possible it's some super specific point similar to the Moholes on Moho, but even those are visible on the ingame biome map.

In a very odd sort of way, yes

The trick is to build your plane so that the center of lift is just ahead of the center of mass. That way, as fuel drains it moves slightly towards the back of the plane (usually), but not so far back that it makes the plane unstable. There's not really a way to build the plane so it stays perfectly balanced, at least if you use more than one fuel tank. You can get an idea of how CoM will shift by manually draining the fuel tanks in the SPH . Just don't forget to fill them up again before launching EDIT: derp. I meant put CoM ahead of CoL

Planes are generally much faster than rockets in the atmosphere actually. Especially if you use turbojets. The reason is you can have a much higher thrust-to-weight ratio with jets without a significant cost to fuel efficiency. It takes me about 20-30 minutes to hit a target half way around the planet. If there's more than one of them... well... I don't need to do that for every single marker - I can just fly from one to the next The thing is, even with the in flight above ones, if they're a decent distance from KSC you're going to be nearly at orbital velocity when you get there. Turning to hit the next one isn't really an option unless you have way more fuel than you need, which means you need a way bigger, more expensive launcher.

The problem is this biome appears to be indistinguishable on both the ingame biome map and the one the wiki has. I wouldn't really expect SCANSat to do a better job

The idea with the contracts as they are now is to give you the choice of how to approach it. You can use a rover, but you can also use a spaceplane or do suborbital hops on Mun and so on. There are a few (rare) contracts that are exclusively surface-based, but if you want to "make" a contract like that you would need to make a mod. The Contracts Configurator mod should let you make them using just text files, but I don't know if it allows you to be this specific. Yep, you can do it, see below.

Probably to make sure you can't actually reach it. Since you need 1000 rep to use the rep->___ strategies at 100%, I guess the idea was to stop you from getting into a situation where you couldn't get any more rep at all.

No fuel used? o.O Minmus has no atmosphere and a typical encounter arrives at 200m/s (well beyond crash tollerance)?

Well, code's got nothing to do with it really; biomes are just stored in an off-screen texture (which is displayed using the alt+f12 option). Did you try landing on the land in that area instead of the water?

Nah, as Leszek said it's just that it gets scaled based on how close to 1000 you are.

Temperature scans can't be done in "high orbit" either, which is a problem for Gilly apparently.

Then you're not really ready to do the surface survey contracts . The aerial ones are doable with rockets but because you're spending so much launching rockets, they're hardly worth doing if there's more than one marker. Especially on hard difficulty, planes are really the only way to make them worth doing (even then, the payout/time investment isn't good compared to e.g. satellite contracts)

You probably need to explore both Duna and Dres first. I never got around to doing that in a career save before 0.90, and I'm not quite there yet . If you've already sent a probe to Jool it probably won't show up at all. Apparently those work the same way as the altitude record contracts at the start of the game. You should still get the contracts to explore the moons though EDIT: Nope, apparently just Duna and Ike.

Subassemblies: click the little arrow in the top left to open the advanced tab. Subassemblies are there for some stupid reason :/ Mods: if it advertises it works with 0.90, it works with 0.90. At least, one would hope so Some 0.25 mods work too, but be careful with those. Some have dev builds or patches for 0.90 which may be unstable (crashes)

You could try using Kerbal Engineer Redux's biome readout to find it. The biome map on the wiki and the ingame one (alt+F12) are completely useless unfortunately Also, spoiler tags exist for a reason The far right crater towards the north looks vaguely crescent-shaped. There's nothing distinguishing it on the ingame biome map though http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/w/images/9/95/Laythe_Biome_Map_0.90.0.png You could also try using Kerbal Engineer Redux's biome readout and just orbiting in a polar orbit until you pass over it.

Apparently this sometimes works with orbital stations, but I think it depends on which part of the station is made the root. I don't really know if there's a way to know which one it will be before you dock though.

That was removed. I've completed several of these contracts while I've still had SAS, controls pressed and the engine running at the time it triggered.

I'm not sure if there's a way to do it directly, but you can just stick another probe somewhere on the rocket that'll last until you reach orbit that's aligned correctly. It'll do until the ion plane can take over Of course, you could always just fly the rocket manually and rely on the instruments/visual to do the launch It's not too hard

For an idea of how much deltaV you'll actually have with the asteroid (assuming you have something like KER/VOID/MJ to tell you), swap the claw for a docking port (in the VAB! don't launch it!), then stick 3-5 full rockomax orange tanks on top of that, and lock the tanks (right click them and click the little green play button). That should give you a pretty good analog of the asteroid; those tanks weigh 36 tonnes each, some of the bigger asteroids are around 150 tonnes.

Use the atmosphere to slow it down, or better yet just deorbit it in one shot via the atmosphere if you're going to land it anyway. Unless of course you have a contract that wants it to be put into orbit first. This part's very important though: line up your thrust with the asteroid's center of mass! You can target it by right clicking when you're close enough. That should help to minimize the spinning, although it's pretty much impossible to stop that completely. Unless you are mechjeb and can compute corrections on the fly (I don't think mechjeb the mod can actually do that though )

skyfire322: Your screenshots look perfectly normal. Intake air isn't like most resources; it's updated every game tick based on your altitude, AoA and so on. You should normally be able to run the engines up to and sometimes beyond the point where the bar hits zero. Since you have KER already, I recommend adding its intake air readouts to the display; in particular the percentage one. I've found that for turbojets you can run them up until 1000% intake air usage. RAPIERs seem to be around 300%, and I never tested normal jets.