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Arrrggh gutted.... but yes, done that. Hit the target so hard both craft were annihilated along with crews. As Dazhat points out. You got it all right bar the final few key presses. Some tips to help prevent similar setbacks: Use little engines to shunt the modules around when they are close to each other... I generally have a skipper as my service module engine to get the rendezvous. I kill that for a ring of 4-6 rockomax radials once i have that first intercept in map view since thrust is no longer my friend. Consider braking engines for large unwieldy modules.... I sometimes have an issue turning my module over its own length in a decent amount of time to perform gentle braking thrusts. If you overdo it you are then flipping again to put more speed back on. A ring of 4 orange rocko radials mounted backwards by the top of the module lets you make a braking burn while pointed prograde like a beefy RCS. I set the ring mentioned in the first tip to activate engines on action group 1(and skipper off) then both rings to toggle on action group 2. This lets me hit 1 as soon as i have a decent intercept, and then 2 toggles between forward and reverse 'gear' for the fine-tuning. From 10m however im almost always pure RCS. A very very heavy module benefits again from the setup i mentioned where RCS is too weak to do anything in a reasonable time-frame. General rule of thumb: Move really slowly for most of the close-in work. You have a timewarp and less than 1ms is just fine.

Just made a horrible flight that is probably worthy of this thread. Assembled a large station in LKO, 800 parts, made up of 5 components. Pushed said station to low duna orbit, was slated to next proceed via Dres out toward Jool, yet it appears to have burned way more fuel on this first leg than anticipated. Pause mission and start designing/launching refuelers. All tanked up I send it towards Dres, realise as I come to brake into Dres orbit that there are no fewer than 16 little rockomax radials fighting the nukes, leftover docking assistance engines from various assembly stages that were not deactivated. Between them they were canceling out 6-7 of the 12 transfer nukes, it was a miracle the thing even went forwards tbh.

Cant recommend RealChutes highly enough for what you are after. Firstly they deploy in stages, so no more 15g+ whiplashes, second the author added inline chutes, and thirdly he added combo drogue/main chutes. love it, love it, love it! Career mode is easy for me, I play a lot of KSP and am at least moderately good at it. As others have pointed out, theres a point where you have enough tech to build just about anything you want. The more inventive you are at design and the more highly skilled at plotting/piloting the earlier this point comes. In 0.23 my third mission tends to make 2-3 surface landings on minmus, this has a tendancy to crack the tree open, and while i miss a few goodies (often sr. ports) I can usually wipe the board with mission 4. The hardest thing is not doing this. Just now I try and design logical realistic space programs with craft that can just accomplish their primary goal so that im not tempted.

It doesnt surprise me you are decoupling on first press. To be honest the only surprising thing is that the engines lit at all. Stage bottom to top, engines lowest, then decouplers, leave whatever pod icon is created by your design and chutes in stage 0

You got your head around the basic logistics of this trip. Your checklist of modules looks good. I guess the lab is there to clean material bays/goo pods since you stated a desire to return the science. Fair enough, i use throwaway multiples of the experiments, but whichever works. As other folks have said, Moho is not the easiest first time target. Of all the landing sites in the system that one is top 5 for difficulty. The lander itself isnt too tricky, but braking into moho parking orbit, and then braking in kerbin return orbit are both highly expensive. A big transfer stage with enough fuel to do the trip, pushing a lander needs more than 1 nuke or your orbit burn at moho will become 25 minutes in a 20min SoI very easily. Watch your TWR! When returning science we have the awesome new 0.23 feature whereby we can move the experiment results on an EVA and stash them in a pod. Remember however that surface sample still cant be moved like this, so the pod that makes the landing is probably the one you want to re-enter into Kerbin. Bear this in mind during design. A decoupler right below the lander pod lets you ditch the lander deadweight to push the pod home. This also means it wants chutes even if it doesnt need them for moho (unless you deorbit it at kerbin with a 'chuted' module to help it down.)

Oddly enough, pointing at the mun (as it rises above kerbin) and burning will actually take you to the mun.(more or less) Though of course you wouldnt want to burn all the way there, i can totally see how that went wrong. Cant say I had these issues, being from a classical physics background. But knowing what not to do, did not really help much when it come to what to actually do. KSP has a learning curve that just keeps on curving

Decided to send out the first interplanetary craft of my 0.23 save. 60t CM and 18t LM. In previous versions I would have launched this all in 1 piece, and probably bloated both craft considerably, just strap it to a monstrosity 300t+ rated launcher. Well, not a single one of my older designs made the transition to using FAR. Not even slapping nose-cones on everything fixed the stability issues, so a new line of launchers is being drafted. This was assembled in orbit as seen below. Lander has about 4.5k dV ssto running on a poodle. The 2x FL-800s strapped to it are destined to be fed into the CM stage (also a poodle) and dropped en route. CM has around 3k dV once it has pulled juice from the lander radials. Im thinking probably Duna first, landings on both the planet and the moon, then return in the CM pod (its got the only heatshield so a duna landing would have to be powered). Lander also carries a RADAR altimeter, multispectral biome sensor and a kethane scanner. The rearmost section is leftover launcher, maybe 350ms in that tank with the KW dual-motor and 6x rockomax radials Was fun to build with the limited parts available at this stage of career. Have skippers but no 'sails. No nukes either. The dock of this craft was by far my best since beginning KSP. Got a 900m intercept in my usual fashion, then burned a tiny bit radially as i closed past 5km to yield a collision course. Brief engine flare at 600m and all I ended up doing was flipping the lander to coast in straight as an arrow at 1ms. Didnt even turn the RCS on.

I'd second 5thHorseman's suggestion of decouplers under the jr's. If you go this route then you can weld (regular attach) 1 pod to each sci-jr, since these 1-shot experiments are gonna get used up at the same rate they can be jettisoned together. You already have the 4-symmetry that will work with this; as you flyby each moon you grab a high-space reading, then a low-space one on the opposite sci-jr, transmit them both and jettison the matched pair of experiments before moving to the next moon. Transfering from stable orbit around each moon means a lot of window calculations and considerably more dV for little benefit (provided you are comfortable setting up the low-space flybys, cant recommend conics mode 0 enough). (Given that you have KSPI im assuming enough dV to do this the long way is readily available; it would just be much faster, ingame time and your time, to grab the readings on flyby) Im assuming no landings are planned since that doesnt seem setup to land on anything but the smallest worlds. Edit: also, you are like 2 sci-jr's/pods short of optimal as far as i can see. A high/low space read for each moon, assuming no attempt to read laythes atmosphere (since that rarely works in aerobrake, requires sub-orbital trajectory) is 10, then you need 4 for jool, high/low space and high/low atmosphere for the impactor stage. 14 total.

The 'click on hatch' method for EVA'ing your Kerbals works on any pod/capsule too. It's useful for when you cant remember which Kermen are in which modules.

Read the post again, thats just his transfer.... landers still to come. XD I like it though, over-engineered it may be, but if that doesnt reach laythe then its pilot error and not dV lack.

I am pretty certain RSS alters solar panel strength. Really quite certain. Check the documentation that came with the mod if you can. But unless im much mistaken thats from RealismOverhaul by NathanKell, one of the baseline RSS mods. Its not RT, that much im sure of

If you want the maximum amount of science from your mission then you do need an antenna. The crew report experiment filed on your capsule needs to be transmitted before another can be filed. This is the only report you should transmit, its 100% so dont sweat it. Theres been a lot of confusion in this thread regarding interpretation of the word 'lose'. If you transmit an experiment with a % lower than 100 then yes you 'lose' some of the value of that report you had generated. That science doesnt disappear though, it goes back into the 'pool' that you draw from if you sample it again later (whether you return that one or transmit again matters not). But again, if you want max science/mission, you may as well just transmit crew reports and store everything else in the capsule through EVAs then return it.

Well yes. Its what I do when returning from Mun/Minmus. Land on the equator under the moon's retrograde path and launch straight up for free return trajectory. Off Kerbin its a bit trickier, then planet will spin some lateral into your launch anyway as the air you are moving through in the early stages is spinning with the world. It makes sense, and probably works after a fashion. I wouldnt like to suggest what it might weigh out at on a dV-cost basis.

I was quite honestly forgetting the 0.23 EVA technique, which is odd, but there you go. And thanks Fenrir, that girder worked beautifully for the chutes, i'm really looking forward to finding and unlocking a wider heatshield next. Feels wasteful to keep throwing my ECLSS O2 regenerators away to burn-up but they are too fat.

Loving playing with DRE for the first time, great mod. Got a design problem now though and wanted to ask some of you guys haunting this thread: My usual early-career re-entry is the small pod with a science-jr under it, thermometers, solarpanels and such stud the sci-jr and I have to add a pair of radial chutes since the single top chute cant soft-land a pod/sci-jr. This is all well and good, but im having some serious issues getting my science back through the atmosphere now! Specifically, no matter how well I chase the prograde marker I lose everything radially mounted to the sci-jr. I put a heatshield under it, so it itself is surviving the heat, but the things stuck to it just burn off (all my lovely science ) How do you normaly get around these issues with DRE guys? I recently picked up the 6S service compartment mod, which certainly seems to have some potential for protecting the little instruments, but what about the radial chutes (my sci-jrs all get destroyed on touchdown). Do I need to put everything like that onto the sloping sides of the capsule to get it out of the line of fire? Or can I put them slightly lopsided and use the capsule's shadow/wake/lee/whatever? Some guidance please! Also, if it gets to the point I want to put landers on Kerbin (or other atmospheric bodies), does this now mean powered descents to stop legs from frying off rather than high-velocity aerobrakes??

Slingshot on Eve yes (well, gravity brake i guess), you can reduce your braking costs by a considerable chunk with that. With good timing you can sling it again on the way back. You really do have the rough end of the list left. I did Moho on nuke CM and a lander able to reach kerbin orbit. I certainly drop tanks, though im happy with low twr and carried just 1 nuke, so no engine drops there. Scraped under the bar with approx 25min braking burn in a 30min SoI encounter I even brought the lander back (0.22 sci). I dont think an eve ssto is possible using stock parts, so you will definately be shedding like crazy ascending from a flag plant, not much can be done about that. Laythe i didnt find too bad. Its kerbin with a slightly lower aerobrake and easier climb out, i often sling off a jool intercept directly into laythe aerobrake (precisenode and conics mode 0). Its probably a good one to aim for first off that list. Along with moho. Tylo i still havent done, or eve. Your existing vessels may well adapt to some of these. Eve ascent is a custom build though with limited options just due to the constraints of physics, thats a unique lander. moho lander isnt an issue, its just the interplanetary work thats hard.

I very often use Skippers. Yes you carry a lot more fuel. But sure I can do that. Clustered 48-7S i try to avoid, since spamming those is a bit OP. Its highly effecive though for getting a decent TWR on huge interplanetary payloads

oh very very nice! Looks awesome.

I generally sort out arrival order mid-course. They depart based on dV spare, the guys with tight mission profiles get the launches closest to the optimal window. Once in flight, tiny burns will shift arrival time considerably. When it comes to armadas I tend to treat them like el-coyote above. I generally have the whole fleet in parking orbit and chuck them outwards as each ship approaches ejection angle. Low TWR interplanet stages means i'll often let a ship do another lap so that I can start a burn properly before the node (i like to split my burns 50/50 across T+0). I would add that you should be wary of spacing the arrivals too tightly, especially with Duna as destination (im assuming you will aerobrake). You need enough time for each vessel to complete its brake before the next one starts, since only the vessel you are 'riding' will actually brake (the rest will rip through on rails and escape).

I would point out that if the 'tilt' gets progressively worse as you climb then my suspect would be an erroneous fuel-line. That produces weight imbalance scary fast as is usually the culprit if my designs pitch that fast. With that said however, flying crooked through the first 10km will also lead to flips and tumbles as your direction of travel departs significantly from the direction you are actually pointing. So it could be a knock-on of a much simpler issue. Definately check f3, if a radial tank breaks when the physics kicks in on the pad, yet is still carried with you due to strutting, well it wont drain fuel and leads very rapidly to imbalance.

Horrible, missed the encounter with a manned mission and didn't notice quite how bad my trajectory was until it was too late to do anything about it in a vaguely fuel-efficient manner. Jeb ended up doing a trip with a total time of 9 years and didnt even score a flyby (though he did flyby the Mun eventually on his return and claimed that was the plan all along. Took the 'very' scenic route.). Once I got used to intercepting it however it became a fairly simple mission, I tend to try and catch it right as it crosses Jool's orbit to remove as much as possible of the need for an inclination change. (though the direct burn is usually somewhat more expensive). Over-engineered trip #2 to death and had enough spare in the CM to make an unscheduled Dres stop on the way back in. Thankfully I had brought the lander back from eeloo with me rather than ditching it empty in orbit, so we got a touchdown at Dres too.

Programmable Logic Gates. I always wanted my ship to actually read the data from sci instruments and be able to trigger a staging event or action group at a given threshold. (i.e. read the barometer, trigger chutes at X). The ability to include a concept such as 'if' into our ship's parts. P.S. Implement it like RSD and I keeell you! Single part I already use that I couldnt do without would ofc be the KER chip.

Axed the pre-packaged toolbar and lifted the one from this thread. No changes to my issues. Did however notice that whilst the toolbar is flickering, it is infact loaded and the blank first icon corresponds to KAC (if i can click it during a pass where its actually drawn then the KAC window maximises). I'll see about getting you a video cap of this issue.

Started to see some visual issues very recently (since i setup my 0.23 career today). My suspicion is that these issues are 'yours' since its the bar thats behaving oddly, could always be a mod thats using it that has the issue however. Never used your plugin before today, so apologies if this is known/common, skimmed the thread. Today i put the 0.23 KAC and 0.23 FAR mods into my install. Firstly, I dont see KAC anywhere at all, im used to using this mod pre 0.23, so i know what it normally looks like (looked like in .22). From your OP i assumed the kac alarm clock icon would be one of my toolbar icons, perhaps erroneous assumption? I do get your toolbar with a FAR button embedded in it appearing when I launch the game. (i got your mod packaged with far i think, certainly didnt manualy apply it, it came with something) In space centre view it flickers rapidly in the middle of the screen real-estate and the arrow (drop-down menu) is unresponsive. Once in VAB im abale to interact properly with the toolbar and leash it to a specific area of the screen through the menus. It also ghosts in and out rapidly in tracking centre view. Works correctly once in flight, though i noted that moving from vab to pad with it unlocked for reposition/resize left me unable to relock and therefore access it once i hit launch, had to revert to vab, lock and relaunch. Going to try removing FAR and the toolbar and see if KAC reappears. Im 99% sure I had the KAC icon correctly displaying using 0.22 release KAC and 0.23 stock KSP. Ideas? Brand-new rig for this 0.23 install, never used your mod (or FAR) before. Will try and exhaust driver possiilities tonight and get everything completely updated. modlist in sig

If you are having difficulty with the rocket designs then the only mod I would recommend would be Kerbal Engineer Redux. I could not recommend that one highly enough. If you are not a mathmatician or engineer(or willing to learn some), then this is a major headache-saver when learning how this actually works. Otherwise I would be careful with the mods, a reasonable number in these forums actually increase the difficulty curve in some fashion. I didn't start adding the packs like kw/np until i was chasing really really large payloads. If you find yourself doing a lot of orbital assembly for huge craft and find it tedious then the large diameter parts on launchers lets you lift a lot more in single pieces. The utility mods are good places to start. Kerbal engineer, alarm clock, maybe a manoeuvre node mod. Dont add mechjeb if you think you will let it start flying a lot of your missions, you need to learn how to do this, mechjeb is for automating it when its the zillionth time and you are busy.