korda

So I managed to put my 180t lander in space, I needed to use some of it's fuel so I will have to refuel it, and then build and send transfer ship. How much delta V I will need for transfer from LKO?

I was even thinking about using KAS to dock it, since I will use quantum struts anyway. Since I'm not actually building it as one ship (Lander and Transfer Stage will meet at Kerbin orbit) I actually need some way to dock them before flight to Eve. I guess I can always slap decoupler and then docking port. BTW, my PC wouldn't like lifter needed to put both parts of mission as one to orbit, so this isn't probably an option

Well I've already stated that this is my plan. Sorry if I didn't made that clear already. I'll edit my post to make it more clear.

Well, that would be really good (this last 2-3 thousands of delta V are actually my biggest design problem).

Yeah, seen some stuff on spaceport, even tried some. (but not sure if it was this mod or other similar). but as I said "I'm not really interested in using mods that will make this much easier/different than while using stock parts". I'm treating this as some sort of a challenge.

Problem here is mass of lander. Not sure what minimal mass I can get on it while actually putting normal command pod and some stuff like ladders or lights. So far it seems that it will weight at least few dozens of tons. Getting that (without using its fuel) to Eve orbit with only one small engine would probably end up being extremely boring (those burn times). So I'm using 2.5m nuclear engine from one of mods. It weights more than 9t but gives 240kN of thrust (still it has similar TWR to stock nuclear engine). I've also have separate lander for kerbin, but it's really simple - 2.5 probe core, hitchhiker, ladder, legs and chutes. I've put it in-line in my nuclear rocket using two decouplers. I plan to start reentry with whole rocket then decouple Kerbin lander. But that isn't important in fact. I've already landed here and there and got back. What is challenge for me is getting back to orbit... from Eve.

So I decided it is time to make mission to Eve that involves getting back. If what wiki states is correct I will need to build, send, and land lander that has almost 12km/s of delta V left after landing (and enough TWR to actually fly). I've installed Kerbal Engineer Redux (I decided it is actually better to use it than to spend few hours trying to complete mission that is doomed to fail from the very start, didn't use it before) and started planning of lander. Few quick drafts showed that even simplest lander (by that I mean it's really stripped down from every decal I usually put) is very hard to design hard for me. 13 engines asparg-something-bored-to-google-it-every-time staging rocket barely reached 10km/s of total delta V and I'm not even sure if I will be able to put it into space to send it to Eve in the first place. Or how will I land it (my first tests showed that I need absurd amount of parachutes on Kerbin to land it without exploding. and 10km/s was without mass of parachutes). Ideas I've got so far for my mission, I've put my questions in bold: - build and send lander as separate mission, dock it with nuclear rocket that will send it to Eve and then dock it again after getting back to Eve orbit, scrap lander and get back home with nuclear rocket. EDIT: that means that lander will only be needed to get from orbit around Eve to Eve and back to orbit around Eve. Please don't post this again as advice, that was my first idea for this mission anyway - put some sort of landing engines high on lander, make them decouple. strap army of parachutes on them. high placement is supposed to help keeping correct end of rocket pointing space. How many chutes per tone of craft I will need on Eve to slow down to say, 5m/s? Are there ways to calculate this? - land somewhere high, so I don't have to start from sea level. How much less of delta V I will need then? Does it even worth trying? Are there any easy (big and flat) high ground landing spots? Any other advice is also welcome, of course also I'm not really interested in using mods that will make this much easier/different than while using stock parts (like turbojet engines for Eve, I don't know). Also don't show me your designs so I can feel at least tiny bit proud of making sth useful at least partially by myself

Well, I find rovers useful sometimes. For some time ago I was sending new crew to my Mun base to change the old guys that will be getting home, I didn't landed perfectly and I ended up few hundreds of meters from base. I would probably be capable of throtling it up and getting closer or getting Kerbals to use their jetpacks to fly around, but decided to use rover I had at base and that solved problem of transferring crew. And if it was celestial body with heavier gravity then jetpacks wouldn't help and perhaps I wouldn't want to risk losing some of precious fuel on my craft. So having rover around can be useful. With Kerbal Attachment System mod and some small tanks you can use it to refuel stranded landers too.

Use navball during last hundreds meters of docking to put your self going straight to target - when you have target distance displayed above navball prograde and retrograde marks show your speed relative to target, so you should keep your docking port facing target - pink marks on navball - and try to put prograde marking on pink mark as well. If your station can turn around to face you with it docking port it's much easier - you don't have to worry about going from right side anymore. EDIT: you can wait to new version of KSP if you want. it will be way way way way easier after changes in SAS (no more disabling SAS to turn around, no more losing all RCS because of SAS wanting to have some fun, no more wobbling like hell)... Also start with docking with both docking ports being put along 'main axis' of your ship, my experience with docking ports on sides (ah docking spaceplanes) shows that KSP doesn't always show info about directions right when you do that (even after using "control from here" and selecting right port as target).

Well, at one of my first Munar landings my rocket ended up landing on side (I didn't managed to kill horizontal velocity on time) but I actually managed to take off and get back to Kerbin this way. I don't even remember what version of game it was. Recently I had that plan of sending my rover (for kerbals waiting at Mun base) in fairing that will land on it's belly. Obviously that was rather hard thing to balance, but I've spend lot of time at it and was pretty sure that my 'lander tug' which was send as separate ship will be able to land it right. Problems started when I saved at 5000 meters. Soon after it it turned out that I didn't make it perfectly balanced and I had to load save. Whats worse while I've had disabled 2 RCS's tanks on my rover before saving they were active after loading again and this destabilized it even more. I made a lot of tries and when I was ready to give up I crashed in way that keep rover intact and able to drive out of fairing. Lander tug fell apart and was ripped of from top of fairing. You can see whats left of it (but the most of parts simply decided to explode).

Umm... Don't struts break when you decouple? Never had this problem.

Letter S will be bad then. Obvious.

I was quite sure that this design will cause problems, but on the other hand strapping rover on top of rocket just feels wrong :<

Well, I had that plan of sending my rover (for kerbals waiting at Mun base) in fairing that will land on it's belly. Obviously that was rather hard thing to balance, but I've spend lot of time at it and was pretty sure that my 'lander tug' will be able to land it right. Problems started when I saved at 5000 meters. Soon after it turned out that I didn't make it perfectly balanced and I had to load save. I've had disabled 2 RCS's tanks on my rover but after loading they were active again and this destabilized it even more. I made a lot of tries and when I was ready to give up I crashed in way that keep rover intact and able to drive out. Lander tug fell apart and was ripped of from top of lander. You can see it's RCS tank on top of lander.

That's a long time o_O The worst thing for me (when it comes to docking) was to master the last few dozens meters... Then I noticed that you can actually use navball to almost dock with closed eyes >< What saddens me (and wasn't mentioned already) is that game forgets your selected target when you change ships and forgets which fuel tank you disabled after loading save (I ended up crashing because of this).

That's why I usually try to focus on one thing only that I can complete before next update (like learning to build SSTO planes, or getting huge base up and running), so when THAT time comes I can just delete my save and get to another topic (if I would do few things at same time I would have to start over and over and never finish). I can imagine that lot of stuff will actually get broken now if you are using modded coffins command pods, since the way they are put in config files changes and I'm not sure if devs will leave old way of defining them still available. Biggest issue for me is "mod lag" - the more mods you are using the more probably they won't all be ready for new version until very close to another update. And some mods are just way too cool to leave them - they become important part of the game once you get used to them.

F5 to quicksave (doesn't work in some situations, like in atmosphere there will be text informing you that it didn't save though), press and hold F9 to quickload. Useful when you are learning how to land or doing something really hard.

They won't change engine anyway, too much work. It would be like writing the game all over again (really). Choosing Unity may be considered as some kind of error even by Squad themselves now, since it puts some limits on them. On the other hand without ready engine they wouldn't be able to make that game anyway.

Does it fly somewhere outside Kerbin atmosphere then? My biggest heavy lifter has only 13 Mainsails (and dozens of SRB's) and it uses asparagus staging. I kinda envy you that you can run that monstrosity - my heavy lifters are making my laptop go 2FPS already... If that game could actually use all 4 CPU cores though... EDIT: also if you still plan landing and going back from Mun remember that you really need only something small (really small) to make to lunar orbit and then back to Kerbin. Big lander will be hard to get to the Mun, better invest in transfer stage. My Mun mission would look like that: 1) Lift rocket that would place me in orbit (or at least high enough to use LV-N to make orbit) 2) Transfer stage with perhaps LV-N as it's very efficient 3) Leave transfer stage to slow down descent, throw it away only as late as you can 4) you have small lander with plenty of fuel left now on Mun, getting back is easy thing now. BTW, do you use quicksave and quickload?

Found it googling it:

Well today I had that standard menu background with Kerbal on Mun (and crashed rocket after traveling to other parts of menu) and then I noticed small detail - simple castle made from Mun sand, at first I thought that I'm just blind and didn't noticed it earlier or maybe it was just recently added and I didn't care about it so much. I had problems with one mod (like no parts at all in VAB) and I restarted game. There is no castle now am I crazy or did I just found some easter egg?

http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/0-18-2-kas-kerbal-attachment-system-v0-1/ Also, this can help you keeping ships stable after docking (or attaching hooks) http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/quantum-strut/

The hard thing is to build Spaceplane that actually can reach orbit without throwing away anything, at least it was hard for me compared to sending missions to other planets...

Laythe, it looks nice and I managed to get there with my SSTO Spaceplane (I needed to stop for refuel at station at high kerbin orbit though)

thx, it helped...