celem

I dont let my srb's enter the math like that. Rather than allow for them, and then have your TWR dropping off halfway through your main launcher's ascent, you still design the launcher to have the TWR you want. You then run it at greatly reduced throttle while the srb's are active, and ramp it up again once the srb's are dropped. Net result is usually extra fuel reaching orbit in the form of a half-spent orbital burn stage or whatever. Just take it with you as bonus fuel or use the left-overs to de-orbit your insertion stage. Otherwise as you point out, your craft ends up a little gutless in that window between srb's dropping and ditching whatever jumbo/mainsail style launcher you are using. For me this is often round the 20km point, which is a dangerous place to be strapped for thrust. An alternative is to use several rings of the smallest booster instead of a single larger one, they burn a little over half the duration, so 2 rings equals out to about 1 ring of big boosters, and by carrying that second ring into the trouble-zone with you, you can kick through the low TWR phase by applying that thrust exactly when you need it. (On some of my launchers i carry a ring of the smallest srb's to fire after I drop the last asparagus tank, this is a point where im suddenly on 1 mainsail yet still pushing a pair of orange jumbo tanks from the launcher, along with interplanetary/payload. Even in thin air, thats a lot to shift) Net result is exactly as you suspect. srb's dont do delta-V, they are all about grunt when your rocket lacks it on an uphill climb Edit: Incidentally: Top-down is definately the smart way to design, especially since you seem to actually be doing your math. (or using ker for it, either way)

Yeah, the mission log making mention of that let's you know that the exhaust is indeed playing across the tank. It doesnt imply any problems in the current edition of the game where parts have basically 2 states of damage: 'fine' and 'bang' glad the seperatrons helped you, a lot of good hints for smooth staging in this thread

Cant find the exact link, but recently saw this mentioned by a staff member. Good point. Multi-point docking doesnt work like you think, the game only actually 'docks' one of the ports regardless, the other connection points may click together but dont get the strength boost.

Yes, KAS is the strut-on-eva mod. I find it very effective. And it's probably the best solution, docking ports are very flexy. Alternatives that dont involve a mod: Very very gentle thrusts, when moving my station I tend to get it moving using rcs thrust (h) before I light the engines (at maybe 4%), just to take the G-shock down a bit. Look into ion propulsion too perhaps, it will take forever for a big station/craft, but its a non-violent method to start your move. Also try and keep any docking clamps on the centre of thrust, docks off-centre with more deadweight beyond them causes severe flexing. Lastly, docking port snr. to snr. seems to be the most solid. Using adaptors to go from thick-body rockets down to regular clamps and then back up to thick again is very wobbly Remember to disable SAS when moving stations or big multi-part ships (always even, sas and lots of clamps dont mix), it's compensation can often rip you to bits.

exactly right on the seperatron placement. Dont worry about the seperatron flaming the main tank, it wont be for long enough to damage it. I position mine usually right on the 90* so that it's exhaust is pointing along the same vector as your decoupler/tank, then angle it slightly downward. This should push it directly away from the main tank, if your seperatron is low enough it shouldnt tip relative to your rocket but fly straight out (and down)

Yeah this can be an issue, especially if you are dropping the asparagus tanks during a gravity turn. Try the whatsit manifold decoupler. Whilst it doesnt hold things as far from the main body as the wide radials, they do tend to push away harder. Its my decoupler of choice for any of the jumbo rockomax tanks Failing that seperatrons will indeed fix the issue. You dont need a matched pair per drop-tank, just one on one side of it will suffice to push it away from the main rocket (it will spiral with a lopsided seperatron, but wont spiral fast enough to cause a tangle.) This is especially an issue if you put tail-fins / other controls low down on the main tank, spent drop-tanks like to clip the fins on their way off, and losing one of a matched set of fins causes horrid instability

Yup, ran another launch to double-check with f3 and it is indeed the nuke shroud. Thanks guys, gonna mean a redesign (it is tri-sym and theres no clear shroud ejection setup that still can put legs below the nuke) I'll probably split the lander/interplanetary stages. Half the issue is that I wanted to land with the damned nuke, guess i'll brush up on rendezvous/docking edit: also, yes. those radials did turn out to be clipping and wouldnt stage

This is a lander i've been fiddling with. The radial tanks are on the decouplers that hold things away from the central piece. The engine in the centre is an LV-N. It's staged to fire with the decoupler sheathing it. On the radials are 48-7S's, they are not igniting with the nuke. Problem: The stage that triggers the decoupler and lights the nuke causes the lander to detonate, in most cases losing 2 or all 3 of the radial tanks, though not always destroying the nuke. Manually decoupling releases the dead-weight launcher (not shown) fine, but lighting the nuke will blow the lander anyway. Is it heat from the nuke blowing the 800's? I thought they were held out far enough, they are quite low since I needed to get the legs low enough to land with the nuke.

You can always accelerate time by keyboard shortcut upto a limit of 4x, even when your situation bars it normally by holding alt whilst hitting '.' (beware of forced-warp on fragile craft, may break up) Landing on an engine without legs isnt as hectic as you think on low-grav moons, safe landing velocities are not stressful when floating downward like a leaf Seriously, theres some gold in this thread, I think I collected like 5 things I didn't know.

I always put an escape on my spaceplanes, since they have a tendancy to flat-spin on re-entry. Seperatrons on the cockpit throw it upward, since as mentioned, my aborts are generally of a downward uncontrolled-rot fashion. I tend to flyout my rocket failures, if something goes badly wrong at the backend of the rocket i tend to try and reland the payload independantly where possible. Conflagrations on the pad lead to revert

Gilly has feeble gravity and is one of the easiest landings around. Some thoughts: Gilly has a pretty eccentric orbit round Eve, I have most luck getting into a high-eve parking orbit that brushes Gilly's closest approach, then timewarp to wait for the alignment, chasing the moon generally leads to wasted dV for me. You dont want high relative velocity when encountering it, due to the feeble G it will take a lot of fuel to capture, try and get an encounter that synchs speed (easier if using the above tactic to intercept) I get into low-gilly parking, round 10km, just beware of some of the mountains and check your blue orbital path on the map to ensure its not clipping the terrain somewhere. It takes very very little to kill horizontal velocity, you wont even be making 100ms so the deorbit burn is cheap as chips. If you kill horizontal V too early you will have a very long float down, much of it below 8km and limited to 1x. You may need to force timewarp with 'alt-.' Its more efficient to come in very shallow, as you never reach scary speeds here and late-braking at low-altitude is completely unstressfull as you drift aimlessly downwards You dont even need legs for gilly, landing on an engine is fairly simple as getting a landing speed below 1ms is feasible. I dont have a screenie on this machine, but my last lander was a pancake tank with a poodle on it, couple of little radial tanks without engines (with decouplers and fuel-lines) were including purely out of habit, i usually ditch these on ascent from a world to lighten for the return to kerbin, but escape from gilly surface back into eve soi is like 130 dV and I didnt need to drop those radial backup tanks until i was actually back in kerbin soi. All in all its a fun landing. From entering it's soi to leaving it again shouldnt really cost you more than a couple of hundred dv tops

Well, the tree itself is buried somewhere in the gamefiles. I know its possible to alter the tree, but iirc it requires some 3rd-party mod to crack open the bits you want, and I dont know the process. A workaround for you. In KerbalSpaceProgram/GameData/Squad/Resources you can find ScienceDefs.cfg This file is notepad editable. It contains a massive amount of spoilers if you havent run through most of the science stuff already, but it also includes (for each 'experiment' entry in the list) a baseValue parameter. You could drop all the basevalues by a % to devalue the science you collect, this would slow your race through the techtree. Theres surely a way to change the cost of each node in the tree, maybe someone can chime in with specifics edit: best back-up the original sciencedefs.cfg incase something goes awry

Indeed, adding the steam turbine component to a NERVA should probably result in an even longer engine model with even more mass. Cant say i've noticed if the NERVA charges my batteries, must admit i always assumed it did, but never relied on it. I'd agree with the others who have said that the 909 is not a launch engine and therefore has no alternator, makes good sense to me that ascent engines are the ones generating power. You can abuse this slightly if power is really an issue and you dont have the required tech. Mount a symmetrical pair of small tanks horizontally somewhere on your launcher and stick an electricity producing engine on them. Light them both together and they will cancel each other's thrust while producing power. This is laughably inefficient and pretty stupid viewed from the real-world perspective... but if you gotta have juice...

I used it to get a few mates hooked on kerbal. They thought the monstrosities I built were too unrealistic and sand-boxy. So I fired up the Kerbal X since it looks a bit more legit and parked it on Minmus. I also used the kerbal x launcher as a midstage on one of my early super-heavy launchers. Mainly just because it was already assembled and im lazy.

Im 30. I build whatever will work. It's not unusual to see a 40 tonne 15m long rover just boot-strapped horizontally and strutted down onto the top of an ascent stage. Everything is a heavy monstrosity designed to be pretty independant, I have an aversion to landing things that cant at least get back into orbit of whatever they are sitting on (including base sub-components). So my duna base breaks down into 5 parts all of which can reascend to LDO, though only 3 pieces are in situ to-date. Part count on kerbin launchpad rarely dips below 400

You found your issue, but i'm curious. Thats an aerospike on the centre fuselage, yes? What is that central body/tank? Not sure I recognise the part. Im guessing it's a rocketry part rather than an aircraft body since your aerospike needs oxidizer to light and wont ignite at all if stuck on an airframe body. (Im guessing its a proper rocket body, im sure you would have mentioned if the aerospike wouldnt ignite, just curious which part it actually is.)

It's most efficient to burn away the horizontal and vertical together. Basically you come in like an uncontrolled meteor and dump both lateral and vertical together with an angled burn timed to leave you at a dead-hover right above the ground. However without knowing the true ground-height and without knowing your craft's decceleration this will result in craters a lot in early career. Whilst less efficient i find it easier early on to cancel the horizontal first using methods listed above (switch to surface speed and burn on the retrograde), then drop vertically. You should be aware that with a low gravity, 0-atmosphere body like, say, minmus, once you've killed horizontal and start the vertical drop the planetoid is still spinning beneath you, and you will pick up a little horizontal surface velocity as you descend anyway, always make a final correction nice n low. Higher gravity bodies tend to pull you in fast enough that this rotation is less relevant, while bodies with atmosphere wont display this at all really as the atmosphere spins you with the planet during the descent

I was just thinking something similar myself, though there are a few titles that are tricky to edge out (4,000 hrs in x3:Albion Prelude, as high as a year in some old-timey MUDs). Despite this ksp is making a go of it, im somewhere in the 800's myself. If I had a wife im sure she'd be annoyed. As it is, my dog is less than pleased.

That's the steam launcher, and grats on a healthy addiction!

At about 17km you run out of air. If you hover the mouse over 'resources' where fuel is displayed you will see intakeair dropping as you climb. A spaceplane design needs to switch to a liquid-fuelled rocket by around the 17km point (can stretch it with more intakes). The beauty of spaceplanes is that by the time you have to kill the jets and close the intakes in favour of the rocket, you can already have a good 80% of your orbital velocity, you just light a rocket and pull the nose up to pop the apoapsis clear of the atmosphere Im guessing the pitching is an asymmetrical flameout of the jets or something. You want to manually kill them before they choke (use action groups for that and open/close intakes)

I like em in utility to be honest. Yes, its a form of propulsion, but not in the same league as any of the other options under the prop tab. If I had my way the RCS tanks would also be in utility, though the rcs thrusters being control makes some sense. I always assumed the ion to be in utility just to drop a little hint to the player that they are ill-suited as a main propulsion mechanism.

Stuff doesnt aerobrake if you are not currently 'flying' it. Go figure. If you watch from it's pov it ought to deorbit at periapsis

Logs of what science you have done so far is another 0.23 feature. Will make it easier to spot what you have missed too. In 0.22 theres not much you can do im afraid, other than repeat the run to be sure. Diminishing returns should tell you if you got it first time.

Its pretty tricky without an addon. Most folks use mechjeb or kerbal engineer redux which will give you goodies like twr / dV for each stage. Otherwise your going to need a big bit of paper, a pencil and a calculator, and the help of someone smarter than me.

I use probes in my launchers. The last central tank of my asparagus launcher tends to still hold some 2-3% fuel after circularizing at Kerbin. It's capped with a probe core and seperator so I gently unhook and de-orbit it, rather than leave it cluttering lko. Out of good practice in anticipation of future career updates it parachutes down to the surface and can be recovered at the tracking station. Otherwise I will sometimes send an early-career probe to a spot I cant get kerbals back from, or as folks have said, drop one on eve's land and one in the ocean for cheap !science!.