Anquietas314

I covered both arriving from the surface and arriving from Kerbin orbit. I also covered a way to make even a 180 degree plane change relatively cheap to perform on the first page of this thread - which is an unrealistic worst case. I should add that the phase angle is actually less important than you make it sound - you can time the injection burn in LKO to make your apoapsis slightly ahead or slightly behind the Mun, which can be used to eliminate almost 90 degrees from your plane change (when dealing with a polar target orbit).

There are actually buttons for this in the pause menu for the space center as well.

Easier to some extent maybe, but cheaper? In Mun's case the surface's rotation is so slow it's barely worth mentioning, so your inclination doesn't matter a huge amount there. Depending on where you decide to make the adjustment, you can deflect your transfer to Mun to arrive in a polar orbit for under maybe 20-30 m/s? In Minmus's case, the gravity's almost negligable - this is somewhere where an EVA pack is enough to land and return to orbit. You could also say that because a polar or equatorial orbit is (pretty much) exactly aligned with a direction marker on the navball, it's easier to get to from the surface. You have to deal with the body's rotation in both cases anyway, as well as timing the launch to make rendezvous faster.

It might also be mission control since technically targeting another object could be considered flight planning. I didn't actually test this in my save - I upgraded both at the same time.

Yeah that's always a risk with something like this. We could always just say that the Kerbals have so much fun being blasted into space that they don't need/want to be paid for it

Well, okay, but what purpose would they serve that the existing parts don't already accommodate to some degree? Remember a whole new class of parts means a significant investment of the devs' time, or incorporating a mod that already exists (which admittedly will still use a lot of dev time due to planning and so on). If there's not a significant benefit for that, I don't think it's worthwhile at the moment A larger class of parts than the ones in the game, for example, would serve a purpose: you can lift even bigger things to orbit with them. Similarly a smaller class would let you build even lighter probes/satellites/etc allowing you to send a probe to, say, Laythe, for even less than is currently possible. I do of course want to see more parts in the game, but only if there's a decent reason for them being there

Rusty6899: Don't misunderstand me, I agree that the current transfer windows are mostly okay. I realise 11km/s is a little pessimistic for Duna, but for a reasonable transfer delay at a bad time, you do get pretty close to that (9-10km/s). Moho's another beast though - its inclined, low orbit can make some transfer windows quite a bit more expensive than others, not to mention you'll arrive at a pretty crazy velocity (if you don't pick a nearly-ideal time to transfer) with not a great deal of time to slow down before you leave the SoI again. You should double check your figures though (and units! ), because there are times within the first 400 days that do cost up to 3200 m/s for a reasonably short trip to Duna. If you're going to take longer than 400 days on the trip then you may as well just wait for the next window. You'll get there and back slightly later, but your poor Kerbals won't need to be stuck in a can for a (kerbin) year

Bill Phil: I think the current restrictions are about right for tier 0; tier 1 should be somewhere between that and tier 2... maybe for the launchpad move the current tier 2 up a little to say 200 tonnes; enough for quite a large rocket, but not enough for carrying seriously large payloads to orbit (e.g. some of the harder Mun bases required by contracts). Similarly for the other buildings.

I think that's probably unrelated lol

Musil: There is also a fun little exploit where you can get out on EVA and literally push your ship home. I've done that a few times - it takes a certain amount of skill to do without making your ship spin out of control though. If you have RCS left over you can of course use that first - it's a lot easier to control that

Rusty6899: remember the wiki is almost entirely community-managed. As a technical definition, sure you can define a Kerbin month as 38.6 hours... but that's not a useful unit of time given a week is just under a day longer. Granted the whole idea of a week originates mostly from religion, and maybe the Kerbals don't have any religions on their planet, but that doesn't really matter. EDIT: Shouldn't those be called "minths"?

This is also a good point

Musil: Well, if you want to do things that close to the metal, I guess that's your choice I've always found it really doesn't make a huge difference in launch costs or total fuel requirement to budget ~300m/s over - and that's after 3 years of playing the game for at least a week pretty much every release! I've tried a lot of variations on things in that time. Edit: just checked, I just passed 500 hours logged on KSP in steam, and that's not counting the non-steam modded versions (edit 2: steam versions that I copied to a different directory to prevent things being broken by updates) I've used, the time shortly after it went on steam that it reset my hours to 0 (it was something like 150 at the time), or the time spent playing the game before it was on steam.

Well, have fun As long as you're doing that, it really doesn't matter

The advantage of a polar orbit is that you don't have to do a plane change at all when launching from the surface - you can just wait for the orbit to pass over you, then launch into it.

While it's not a bad idea, I think the fact you can launch a manned rocket almost to space for $1000 suggests that the kerbals are being paid a completely insignificant amount of money

You should not be cancelling contracts in that situation. Declining them is different - you never agreed to the terms of the contract in the first place.

It's actually not quite as simple as this. I've had a few cases where I've cancelled a contract, and the penalty has been neither the loss of the advance money, or the loss from failure - it's been somewhere in between. It appears to depend on how long you've had the contract and how close it is to the deadline.

Even for large craft, 200m/s is nothing during the launch stage. KSP simply doesn't offer that level of granularity in the tanks. Sure you can always take some out before launching, but why bother? Fuel is dirt cheap. If you're making a reusable transfer stage, chances are it'll have nuclear engines, which means 2 things: 1) you don't need as big a margin - the lower thrust means you're much less likely to screw up in a big way, never mind the fact 300 m/s of margin is mainly for getting to orbit - there's a huge amount of variance in delta-v requirement for getting to orbit depending on subtle variations in your flight path. 2) 2-300m/s of delta-v with a nuclear engine, even for quite substantial loads, is not a lot of fuel. The engines themselves will probably cost you more in terms of mass. The thing about the fuel requirement being exponential only really matters when you have a large difference between full and dry mass - that is what the exponential affects. You don't have that when you're shifting a station from LKO to LMO.

This is the wrong forum for these kinds of issues. You'd have more luck asking here, assuming you're not using mods: Support (unmodded installs) See the corresponding forum for if you are using mods. You could also wait for a mod to move the thread, but that could take quite a long time. Never mind, looks like either you got lucky, or the mods are paying close attention today Be sure to read the known issues/self help thread and the bug reporting guide - both are stickied.

Sure, that's where it comes from, however... why should we assume the Kerbals have the same construct? 6 days is pretty much their equivalent of a "week". (We also know better now that a month isn't actually very close to the Moon's orbital period at all - it's a few days off, never mind the fact month lengths are all over the place. February is closest at 28 days - the Moon orbits in ~27 days according to google).

If you don't think docking stations to satisfy those contracts should work, then.... why do you think doing that is okay? That's just as cheaty, if not more so.

Good to know you found that feature

Since we're talking about launching station parts, in most cases you'll either have to use a new transfer stage every time, or you'll need quite a large reusable transfer stage, in which case you may as well give it plenty of fuel anyway - it's already going to be heavy.

http://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/ According to this, the worst case for duna is just over 11km/s, including using an aerobrake maneuver to slow down when you get there. For somewhere like moho or eeloo it's much worse.