Pecan

Doesn't Editor Extensions do symmetry 1 - 50?

*Sigh* I am procrastinating instead of getting on with the things I should. Two Kerbals, 260km orbit, then Kerbin escape, re-orbit and splashdown. 340 points? I dread that I might want to make a 20-Kerbal bus next.

Duna and Eve are within deltaV capabilities anyway, which is why I'm including them. Laythe is 'probable' with aerobraking, if Stickyhammy wants to push his luck, but I'd recommend not for first interplanetary. Jool is only 'possible', don't you think? Assuming the point is to get back I wouldn't want to rely on aerobraking to that extent if I'd never used the ship-design before, etc. etc.

Duna takes 1,700m/s to reach and establish orbit, without aerobraking, from LKO. With 4,500m/s needed to launch and orbit in the first place that's a total requirement of 6,200. You should be fine.

LOL. We should, perhaps, mention that KER and VOID are popular alternatives. To quote my tutorial campaign, "important and sometimes vital information you need for designing vehicles, such as TWR and deltaV stats. There is a lot of overlap in what these can display so you only need one of them, but you may prefer more. KER is the most popular, VOID (anecdotally) the most accurate and MJ the most flexible, being an autopilot should you wish to use it for that." @ Stickyhammy: Remember those figures are one way! If you want to come back you'll need to double them - which would limit you to Pol at most. You can aerobrake around Kerbin though of course, so there is a saving to be made there. On the outward leg your only options for aerobraking are Duna and Eve, but you have so much deltaV you can do those easily without it anyway.

:-) So did 80% of the rest of us in a recent forum poll, since it's essential for mission planning and ship design. KSP does show you the ISP and thrust of engines in the parts catalogue - and the total (wet) mass, but not in the VAB/SPH. You have to click Launch then change to map mode (M) from the flight screen, then click the 'i' information button at the mid-right of the screen. You'd have to subtract the mass of fuel manually to get dry mass. Calculating the ship's TWR is pretty easy: total thrust/(total mass * 9.8) but that is much less important once in orbit. Go to the R&D centre to activate the MJ parts; assuming you've already unlocked the node where it lives you'll have to 'buy' it (free) there. If you don't have any luck with MJ or just feel bad about using a mod any spreadsheet program and most calculators will be able to do the deltaV calc for you. The trouble with that is that whenever you make any change in the VAB/SPH you have to update the input figures in the spreadsheet, or whatever.

As you will have read, you NEED to know the ship's deltaV in order to determine where it can go. If you think mods are cheating and like doing the maths yourself it's not too hard - UmbralRaptor gave you the equation. Once you have that figure this list is in order of deltaV requirement (m/s) from Kerbin LKO: Mun 1,170 Minmus 1,430 Ike 1,550 Duna 1,700 Eve 2,880 Gilly 2,950 Dres 3,860 Tylo 3,860 Vall 3,890 Pol 4,040 Laythe 4,360 Eeloo 4,790 Jool 5,170 Bop 5,920 Moho 6,640 Kerbol 33,680 Eeloo, as you can see, is not the hardest - that's Moho, or the sun itself if you count that. NB: these figures ignore potential for aerobraking and the order is different if you also want to land. ETA: Oh - and you need to know WHEN to go as well: alexmoon.github.io/ksp/

I think this is the first challenge I've submitted an entry for, despite speculating about many. It's not technically hard, of course, because the 48-7S is such a great engine. My computer, on the other hand, isn't great and even with this it started to stuggle :-( I'd do a tour, but I think the thing will melt, so I'll leave it at this simple orbit-and-return. ETA: Oh, I only think it's worth 40 points btw, but it was interesting messing around with Oscars.

Sunday finished 10 minutes ago. I reluctantly drag myself away from ecstatic worship at the Church of mhoram (<- Wot? No Capital! Must be humility) ETA: LOL - apparently I haven't given enough other people reputation to be able to give you any again yet.

Things are announced in the announcements forum. Discussed as they develop in the Daily Kerbal forum. It's a bit late to be surprised now :-( Think about your quote here though - how can SQUAD (a company) promise anything about what MODS (individuals and/or other companies) might do about hosting their products on CURSE's (a third party) servers? Anyone who writes and releases a mod owns copyright in it. Should they have a problem with Curse, including 'just because ... so there', they can choose not to put their stuff on there. Squad can't do a thing about that - and almost certainly wouldn't want to! Mods are stuff that is developed by other people (possibly companies, but I don't know of any) to work with KSP. Squad has no involvement or responsibility for any of them. ETA: And now I've tripped over it again - http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/79011-The-Curse-Thread

Good grief! Two Spaceport threads in one day, despite the official curse thread? All the discussion is in http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/82460-What-is-the-reason-spaceport-is-gone-And-why-I-don-t-like-curse-%28YET%29 ETA: Oh yeah - http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/79011-The-Curse-Thread

Reformatting and proof-reading complete, I hope. Please continue to report remaining typographical, grammatical and other errors by PM. I'll try to get the last two chapters posted during the week, but now I'm off to the pub. Have fun :-)

Incidentally - you might find the Minmus/Mun vehicles in chapter 5 of my 'Exploring the System' campaign useful - they're designed for first lunar landings :-) http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/79658-Exploring-The-System-%28Pt-1%29-A-design-tutorial-campaign

The devs discuss such things in the "Announcements" and "Daily Kerbal" sections of this forum. Career mode is set to get a contracts system and money, meaning what you do and why will be about much more than just grinding science to get parts. I don't know of anyy other planned features for the game because I don't keep up with it all the time; I'm happy to wait to see what we actually get, not what was planned :-) As far as I'm aware though, there have been no announcements about changing the aerodynamics, including re-entry.

Remember that big changes and development to career mode are promised for version 0.24 - it probably isn't worth you tweaking and setting-up too much for the current version.

Taking your questions in reverse order: There are a lot of tutorials here in the forums, in this very section in fact. A good thread for finding them is forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/entries/445-The-Drawing-Board-A-library-of-tutorials-and-other-useful-information There are, especially, a lot of tutorials and other threads on docking as it is - like in real life - about the most difficult of manouevres. Broadly, it falls into two phases: 1) rendezvous by matching orbits, 2) actually moving slowly closer and aligning docking-ports to dock. Both these are well-covered here. There is no way to stage the landing legs but they are automatically added to the 'Gear' action group when you place them on your ship. Action groups use keyboard buttons to activate items - G for gear (not neccessarily capital). The wiki page on keybindings may help (http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Key_bindings) but you'll get used to them quickly: stage=space (not much use), brakes=B, gear=G, lights=U, RCS=R, SAS=T, abort=backspace, Custom01 - Custom00=1 - 0. You can set any and all of these in the VAB/SPH by clicking the middle button at the top-left of the build screen. Click an action group to edit it, click a part to select it (other similar parts added to symmetry also selected too), choose the available action in the list shown. While there are landing tutorials the 'simple' - not most efficient - way to practice is to turn your vehicle retrograde and burn the engines to make your orbit-line hit the surface (the de-orbit burn). Then keep your nose on the retrograde marker, watch your altitude and vertical speed (indicator next to altimeter), burning to land slower than -10m/s and with almost no horizontal speed - which, like many essential things KSP won't show you in stock. Anyway, as you initially burn towards the horizon, from de-orbit, you're initially killing horizontal speed. As you do more of that your vertical speed, falling towards the surface, becomes more significant and the retrograde marker moves towards the vertical. Keep your nose on it all the way, gradually putting more and more thrust into killing vertical rather than horizontal speed. Start all this from a low orbit (7-8km for Mun) and if possible use the IVA (inside) view instead of the normal one - most cockpits include a 'radar' altimeter that shows your true height above the ground instead of above "sea" level as the main altimeter does. Note that although it's harder to GET TO, Minmus is so much easier to LAND ON and TAKE-OFF from, that it is the easier mission overall. Especially using quicksave (F5) and quickload (F9) you can do the transfer to Minmus, get a good low orbit, quicksave ... and then practice to your heart's content, quickloading if it all goes wrong. Minmus's gravity is so low it is easy to accidentally start going back up again but don't worry ^^. ETA: Nearly all available tutorials are written or videos, in-game tutorials are very few and far between and I don't know of any off-hand.

MJ is what MJ is, if you want to be able to do all sorts of other 'autopilot' things you might want to look at KOS, Telemachus and/or one of the scripting-language add-ins (I still vote for Lua!). @Claw - no worries, I know you're not the 'snotty' type and I didn't take it even as disagreement particularly - just "yes, terminology is a problem, I'm using it like this ..."

Agreed, the RCS pack is disabled on a ladder, that's why you can use W/S to move up and down it.

Yep, I've thought exactly the same as you for the same reasons. In as much as I ever use it it's for single-stage vehicles where several things have to happen at 'launch'. Oddly enough, looking at my current fleet, that's just on rovers - first time they're used module torque and things get switched off.

Sorry, I have no better information than I've already given. Totally understand your intentions though - who really cares what the lander masses; you just want to know how much extra fuel you'll need to give it each trip. Excellent! Please give me a nudge when you have the graphs, I'd love to see them :-) The deltaV chart I'm using shows 1,300m/s for Duna orbit though, not 1,380. Meanwhile, don't forget you'll need some fuel for rendezvous. You'll also need to top-up with monopropellant every now and again, of course.

I think we need to be careful with terminology here, to avoid later confusion over controls, especially with aeroplanes. Yes, the pitch of the heading is being reduced but, in a normal equatorial launch, that's done with the "yaw-right" D key, not the "pitch-down" W key. The term I try to use for the gravity turn is 'reducing pitch' as it also covers all those situations where the vehicle has rolled during the ascent. Similarly, I use 'reduce/increase/adjust' pitch when discussing landing, regardless of which controls are actually required. Yes, I realise this sounds a bit like nit-picking, but it's not meant to be - I'm trying to avoid situations where people automatically hit W/A to adjust pitch. Apologies if it's just rubbish.

MultiBitMap, rather than 'Psion series 5', although that may have used the extension too: http://file.org/extension/mbm My old CS2 can't open that type of file; try looking at the formats supported by CS6 in file > open

Personally, I use 48-7Ss on my Duna lander, but it's vastly over-engineered. One thing that makes your question more complicated is tht you are landing and then returning - you can use parachutes to land, or at least assist with landing, so your deltaV requirement is greatly reduced. Just EVA and repack them on the ground. Tavert's mass-optimal engine charts are a great resource for this sort of design question (if not the deltaV calcs themselves): forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/45155-Mass-optimal-engine-type-vs-delta-V-payload-and-min-TWR

Fuel-flow was my initial suspicion too, but the problem is harder than that, isn't it? The engines ARE receiving fuel and burning, but not producing thrust, I thought?

MechJeb usually doesn't play nicely with FAR. The improved aerodynamics of FAR mean you must start your gravity turn from much lower and turn much more gradually than MJ does. I don't use FAR myself but IIRC the recommended gravity turn starts at 2km or so, never pitching-over so fast that your heading indicator on the navball moves outside the circle of the prograde marker. An expert should be along soon ...