Bobe

And by radius you mean altitude right? Honestly, I do get confused sometimes because the periapsis and apoapsis are always in terms of altitude, rather than the distance to the orbital focus. Looks like that would return the distance in metres as opposed to kilometres. So an orbit with an altitude of 100,000 km would return a threshold of 4 km, which seems about right.

Is there a target distance threshold under which the rendezvous autopilot will attempt small burns to close the separation, or will it always perform the same procedure of creating a new phasing orbit and then intercepting? Sometimes I will launch to rendezvous and arrive within 10 km of the target, but even then it has to do the whole routine and it will take about 2 hours game time to reach the next intercept.

To help explain, in a nutshell, every player warps independently of other players and when time and circumstance permits, or when the player chooses, their actions are synchronized with the other players. Just think of it as time travel. So for example, imagine two players starting a game. One player launches a rocket and puts it in orbit without warping. The other player sees this more or less in real time (this is a bit buggy). However, then they transfer to another planet and warp, their position from the other player's perspective is locked where they started the warp. When they end the warp and return to real time, the other player gets the option to synchronize, which essentially sets their date and time to the furthest player in time, after which they will see the current position of the other player's ship. That's my basic understanding of it anyway. I can't think of any other way to maintain a stable multiplayer system.

Might it be possible in a future build to create a launch sequence with scripted events at varying time intervals and conditions? For example, you might set a specific time or T- interval and specify to ignite the engines three or four seconds prior to launch, set throttle to 100% a second or so before launch and then decouple the supports at T0. You could then program it to perform a roll and/or tilt five or so seconds after launch to set the correct heading and attitude. Of course these aren't really required as the current launch guidance works fine, but it just looks too rigid. No rocket (that I know of) would go directly upward until ~7km (or Earth's equivalent) and then sharply pitch down. At the moment of launch, or rather after the roll maneuver, the vehicle is already set on a tilted attitude which continuously declines at a steadily increasing rate. Almost an asymptotic path. So really this is just something I'd like to enhance the realism somewhat.

I like the idea of picking out a location on the map and then having that area cleared out and flattened for you to then construct your space center. That might also call for the ability to zoom in a bit further on the orbit view.

I never let it get that far, but I'm sure it would have. I wouldn't even know where to being looking in the log as it was some time ago now, but if I can recreate it I'll take a look.

Of course I always quicksave before doing anything important. I tried several times but I could not get it to behave. For non-powered landings I do typically disable it after the deorbit burn and course correction, but I couldn't even do that in this case. The deorbit burn alone was putting the landing spot hundreds of kilometres from the target. Maybe I was just getting unlucky, but to be honest I think it was a lost cause anyway. I did eventually give up and just let it coast to the surface, overshooting the target. However, without a braking burn, my 40 t lander couldn't withstand the force of the chutes deploying, and I didn't install and drogue chutes. I never really intended it to land on Duna, but I'm having trouble getting my ship any further, which is another issue entirely.

Does the landing guidance module require you to be at a minimum altitude for a given body for it to work properly? I was in an 80 km orbit around Duna and picked a target almost on the other side of the planet so it had plenty of time to prepare. However after the initial high deorbit burn, instead of pitching up and doing a minor course correction, it pitched down and started burning away from the planet indefinitely. The blue predicted landing indicator was also way off target. I tried increasing my orbit to 100 km, but got the same result. Is there something I'm missing or is it just buggy?

Is it normal for the flyby maneuver sequencer to take a very long time? It's been about two minutes and it's at about 10%.

That's why I'm asking for a method by which to do the maths. That definitely looks like a useful tool, but it doesn't look like it does what I need it to. You didn't read my whole post did you?

Well that's more or less common sense. What I'm after however is a way to determine with a certain degree of accuracy the optimum orbit I should aim for, not just a superlative.

Six satellites approaching Jool. Suddenly, Kraken.

Let me lay down some assumptions and constants. First of all, I'm using MechJeb to do most of the heavy lifting. You can assume I'll always be in a circular equatorial orbit. The ship I'm in weights in at just over 100 t, and the lander is an additional 42 t. Ironically, bringing the lander for the purpose of refueling seems to reduce my total ÃŽâ€v by more than a third, from 7191 m/s to 4467 m/s. So a direct trip to Jool is cutting it pretty close. Considering the size of the ship, I can't really park it 5 km from the surface. Obviously a smaller lander would be more efficient, but my lander doesn't have that luxury and it's really beside the point here as it pertains to determining a value based on many variables, among them the mass and thrust of the lander. The lander, with it's single Poodle engine, has a total ÃŽâ€v of 922 m/s in a vacuum, though I typically afford myself a bit more by converting kethane as I ascend. For reference, a launch to a circular orbit of 60 km around Mun and maneuvers to rendezvous with the ship required my full starting fuel supply of 810 (litres I presume) plus the converted equivalent of almost 8000 kethane. I actually didn't consider de-orbit burns, perhaps because I thought they would be closely correlated to the launch burns. But I'm not searching for answers regarding my specific case, I'm just using it to help illustrate my query.

I'm attempting a sort of non-stop mission whereby I rendezvous with various planets and moons to refuel with a lander. I'm trying to figure out how to determine the optimum orbit around a planet to minimize the ÃŽâ€v required from my lander. Obviously the closer to the surface I aim for the faster I have to go to maintain orbit, meaning I have to burn more. Conversely, the further away from the surface, the more I have to burn to get to that altitude and then circularize. Based on these extremes, it seems that there would be some sort of inverse bell curve that describes the required ÃŽâ€v against the target altitude. Any ideas?

Hmm, the servers must have just been acting up at the time. Downloads fine now.

The Dropbox download doesn't work for me, can I just use the GitHub repo?

Quite simply, I'd like to have the ability to hold shift or something while placing the end point of a strut to make it snap to the nearest 45 degree angle as you move it around, making it much easier to create neat, symmetrical arrangements. Or rather, when you place the start point of a strut, it dynamically creates attachment points on parts that intersect all the angles at 45 degree intervals (a maximum of about 26 I think).

I have a fairly large ship that I'm trying to send to Duna. It has three LV-N rockets so the burn time is about 15 minutes. However, when using the maneuver planner for interplanetary transfer, it starts the burn at T 0, so by the time the burn is over (which I'm still waiting for), the ship is almost on the other side of the planet and I imagine the transfer trajectory might be a bit awkward. I noticed on a test run to Mun that the burn started at T - EB/2 (where EB is estimated burn time). Why is this technique not used on interplanetary transfers and is there a way to manually compensate for it? EDIT: I just checked on it now. At T + 11 minutes, I'm at 485km going 2200 m/s, and my remaining ÃŽâ€v, which had gotten to half the required amount, is actually going up.

Generally speaking, is it more efficient (ie. requires less ÃŽâ€v) to perform a Hohmann transfer burn from an orbit around Mun or Kerbin? Ignore fuel already burned to get to Mun, assume both transfers begin with same amount of fuel. I would think that, if your desired ejection angle was 150 degrees for example, then if Mun was at 150 degrees relative to Kerbin prograde, that burning Mun prograde would effectively have the same result as burning at 150 degrees from Kerbin. And since you're already travelling faster relative to Kol, it would require less ÃŽâ€v, correct? I don't know if MechJeb factors this in to its calculations, but I'm taking a gamble right now and travelling to Mun. Maybe I can see when it schedules the transfer burn. Still 4 minutes left on the burn with these LV-Ns.

I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but every time I try to use the rendezvous autopilot to transfer to another planet (so far just Mun), it just puts the ship into a collision course regardless of what I set as the desired final distance. Similarly, if I choose Hohmann transfer from the rendezvous planner, it puts me on the same course. Also, does desired final distance refer to surface altitude or orbital radius? I manually added a mid-transfer burn to steer away, but now that I have entered Mun's sphere of influence and disabled the autopilot, I can't set it as target. It does very briefly, I can see the nodes appear for a fraction of a second before it goes away. And now it doesn't even give me the context menu. EDIT: Seems the rendezvous autopilot is not that great for interplanetary transfers. I'll try working with the maneuver planner instead.

Just a question in general, is it fine to remove parts that you don't need to reduce load times?

Can anyone give me some ideas for setting up a simple relay network around Kerbin? I'm trying to find the optimal altitude to ensure 100% equatorial coverage with the minimum number of satellites. I'm assuming the best antenna to use for Kerbin orbit is the dipole antenna. Also, say I have a long range dish in orbit around Kerbin, perhaps pointing at a deep space ship, can that relay to a dipole antenna within 500km?

Anyone else having trouble placing 3.75m extended fairing cones and walls? As of 2.5.6B, they don't want to place with triple symmetry. I can place the first one, but the second I have to rotate manually, at which point it shows the remaining two thirds as placeable, but clicking does nothing. EDIT: Restarting the game seemed to fix it.

Nice, I was actually in the middle of redesigning with stock Sr. ports. Just curious though, how much sturdier are two 3m ports compared to two 2.5m ports? If building a fairly long station for example, is there considerably less wobble when turning (assuming inadequate structural integrity elsewhere)?

Hmm, I thought attaching struts directly to engines was a bad idea. I've had issues in the past by placing struts on to the interstage section where an engine is housed, but I suppose that was attaching the stage section rather than the engine itself.