Anquietas314

In short, yes, space shuttles are really a terrible idea for economic efficiency - the cost of two of those SRBs - never mind ditching the orange tank - makes it not worth while. Scott Manley did a on designing them a few weeks back that went into the economics of it later on in the video.

Unless you're using deadly re-entry (and perhaps even then), re-entry flames are completely harmless to your kerbals I'm not entirely sure what happens if you "recover vessel" on a ship with kerbals in those seats though, but I would expect it to work just fine Be sure you don't exert too much G-force on the kerbals though, since that might knock them out of the seats, which will most certainly be a death sentence (unless you get that <5% chance they bounce)

"facilities for X Kerbals" just means you need to have a crew capacity for that many Kerbals. A lab only holds 2, so of course a lab and a 2-kerbal lander can wasn't enough; that's only space for 4 . Anything other than the command seat (the exposed one) seems to count towards crew capacity

I'll just add that with the new interface in the VAB, you may be better off creating custom groups in the subassembly screen for things like launchers, probes, station pieces, etc since with a lot of subassemblies it can be hard to tell what's what. You need to do this part first since you can't seem to change the groupings after saving the subassembly like you can with regular parts.

In stock as far as I know the only use for that is contracts information, but there are several mods out there that use it for other purposes; for example StageRecovery uses it to let you know when (and how badly) your stages land.

Sorry, but Duna's atmosphere is much thinner than Kerbin's. Parachutes usually help to slow you down, but they're certainly not safe to rely on for a typical Duna lander - you'll frequently need to use engine thrust for touching down safely. "damn near impossible" is the phrase you're looking for there For planning transfers to other planets, I would recommend this calculator. By default it picks the most efficient transfer window in the given time frame, but you can also choose an earlier one at the cost of a small amount of delta-V.

That's a pretty creative use for jets, I have to admit. Really though, the fact they're necessary suggests you'd be better off slapping more turbojets on with more intakes to match. That way you have more thrust and less dead weight at high altitudes That has the lovely name of JATO/RATO (the latter technically makes more sense), but given how much more fuel-efficient jets are, you really want to avoid it if at all possible. If you can't get off the runway under jet power alone, then you probably won't have the thrust (never mind intakes) to get to orbit efficiently

KER only gives numerical readouts during construction and optionally in flight - there are no autopilot features whatsoever. Some of the readouts certainly make it easier to design and fly rockets/planes, but I wouldn't really say it affects the balance of the game. For example there's a readout for intake air usage (as a percentage of available) which is handy for keeping the throttle low enough to prevent flame-out, and you get per-stage deltaV readouts during VAB and in flight which helps to minimize the guesswork(/maths) in designing rockets. That's also good for telling you whether it's safe to go ahead with that Mun landing or if you're just going to run out of fuel and crash

It's not

As on 0.90, you can use alt - right click to transfer from however many tanks into a single tank, or do the reverse: transfer from one tank into many. You can't transfer from many tanks to many other tanks though, unless you go through a single tank first.

That's fine, except it takes 'til just after (the start of) year 3 to get there in the first place if you're trying to do the initial transfer from Kerbin somewhat efficiently - and that's even being a little wasteful to keep the travel time reasonably low.

That's exactly what I did... the produced figure was 1.7k 1.6k (actually more like 1.8k 1.7k if you don't want to wait on laythe for 2 years) 1.6k for getting from Laythe's orbit to Kerbin (also considering the earliest departure is approx 640 days year 3 day 12). As for the rest, sure but a direct return's a little difficult to get the timing/nodes right for. I have done that before though (but it's probably been more than a year) EDIT: I may have slightly forgot the flight length in estimating earliest departure >_>

You might just need a few more intakes (lol), but it's certainly possible to do with turbojets (easier for small planes though). Ideally you should be able to keep going past 40km, but probably not for long. As for Laythe, I'm not sure exactly how much deltaV you need (it's been way too long since I've went there lol) but going by this you need at least 2k for the transfer from Kerbin to jool, plus maybe 10-40m/s to adjust your trajectory to be a Laythe encounter. For the return trip, you need ~2.8k for escape velocity from Laythe (a little less just to get back to Jool's SoI) and then roughly another 1.7k for the transfer from there to Kerbin. So as a rough estimate 6.5km/s?

That's what I just said... linear controls = translation

That's a nice-looking spaceplane right there I think getting to Laythe and back with it might be a tiny bit overambitious though - at the very least it'd be very very close. If you can get up to 2200m/s at 35km, I think you should be able to get to space using only the jet engines - just keep (slowly!) going higher and throttling back as you get higher. Once you're in space the LV-N's low thrust obviously isn't a serious issue . I know mechjeb has a thing that will handle throttle automatically for you based on intake air; you could try that to see if it helps, but it's quite prone to letting engines flame-out asymmetrically in my experience. Kerbal Engineer Redux has an intake air usage/consumption readout which I find to be more useful for managing intake air manually

You could try going back to the space center and then back to the ship. I don't know if it would help though. Also try MOD(Alt on windows)+X, which resets trim. The effect seems much too strong for it to be that, but I've seen a few odd occurrences in my game where that's been the problem

EVA packs do work on Duna, but only just.

No problem I would recommend testing your designs (on kerbin/mun/minmus) in future though

Two things: 1: you can add those targets to the navball so you know where you're going (and so don't need the map view at all really), 2: If you don't mind mods, you can use Kerbal Engineer Redux or MechJeb to give you a readout of the altitude above terrain. There are other mods that have that feature (and only that feature) but if you're going to use a mod for it, it may as well be one of those

So I just ran a test to see if blasting the docking ports off was possible. Since I can't see exactly what kind of engines you used, I tried LV-T45 and LV-T30; neither were able to overheat the docking ports before running out of fuel entirely. I guess your only realistic option then is to dock new engines to it, with a new set of landing legs (be sure to add a tank so you can transfer fuel - and to compensate for the dead mass). You should have plenty of deltaV on that thing to land on Duna though EDIT: I also tried doing this with decouplers in place of the docking ports; same effect. However, LV-Ns can blast off the docking ports. I guess the game must simulate the fact they have way hotter exhaust

How long did you leave the throttle at max for? It does take about 10-20 seconds for them to explode (a lot of fuel wasted, I know, but that might be okay). Also, I really wouldn't recommend ramming the ports to try and break them off, because that'll almost certainly cause collateral damage

You can actually just do the reentry with the pods still attached to one another, and then activate the parachutes on the way down, before releasing close to the ground (probably after chutes have deployed). It's not quite realistic but it should have the desired effect

The parts connect if you place part A onto part B. If it placed properly, it's connected. Otherwise, struts are really the only way to connect them.

Or you could just rotate the ship with reaction wheels (gently!), which will give the payload a nudge. If you have RCS you can just use the linear controls to push yourself away from the payload too.

I think you'll find there are several games out there that have AIs that can make new ships from joining pre-defined parts together. Star Ruler and Sword of the Stars are two examples, although the latter has a lot fewer customization options than the former. It's certainly possible, just difficult to do in a way that makes the AI produce half-sensible ships that actually work.