Hikaru

I couldn\'t help myself and created this ... *thing* to prove you right/wrong. The answer became obvious once we saw an image of your ship, but it was still fun to fly. With 4 lfe\'s it takes roughly 47 secs to run out of fuel at full throttle; with 8 lfe\'s it takes ~22 seconds, roughly half of the time. I used a stopwatch to take the times, so it\'s probable it\'s a few seconds off - but on the plus side it\'s obvious one uses more fuel.

Thank you for making segmented downloads available, using them I was able to get a complete download after only a few retries of individual parts

Oh please. People will find ways to cheat in the game regardless of the author\'s stance - or most gamers - on it. As far as I\'m concerned \'cheating\' should be allowed - and by that, I mean very simply - let the player playing the game decide for themselves what that means. Don\'t think a cfg edit that shoves you instantly into orbit is fair? Don\'t do it. Don\'t think using mods that allow for hilarious mixes of impossibly powerful and economical parts is fair? Don\'t do it. Personally I\'m seeing plenty of useful ideas for this cfg edit - for one, it\'d make testing the landing stage of a lander a *lot* simpler. I won\'t be using it under normal circumstances - but, for me that\'s the point of being able to do something like this. Under extraordinary circumstances, I like to cheat a little to make the game easier.

There are a lot of little things I do that make mun landings easier. For one, while in HIGH orbit, I deliberately slow my movement to as close to zero as possible - this reduces (almost) any sideways movement to manageable amounts. During this phase I am (ab)using the map to determine where I\'m going to land - if I stack the center of the mun on top of the center of where the icon for my craft is on the map, I get a reasonably good idea of where my ship\'s going to land. I want to land on the lit side of the mun and somewhere in a crater, preferably. If I\'ve truly screwed this up, corrections can be made on the way down - but I\'ll need to go through a zeroing of the movement again, which will waste fuel - so it\'s a good idea to get it right the first time. When I\'m sure I\'m going to land, I point my ship vertically, turn on the rcs thrusters with an asas and try to drop down vertically the rest of the way without any further input. Sometimes this doesn\'t work and I have to make adjustments, so I again zero all my movement. When I get close enough to the surface to see the ship\'s shadow I should be moving at less than ten meters per second, better to have it even slower than that if possible. When about to touch the surface I want to have the ship\'s throttle set that the ship\'s thrust is being very slightly overcome by the gravity, so when I hit the ship won\'t suddenly bounce off the surface. Speaking of which, remember how I said I have an asas with rcs thrusters enabled all the way down? Three reasons for this: Any stability problems on the way down will be corrected automatically, when you hit the surface if you *do* bounce off, your ship will automatically recover if it decides to flip over, and if you *don\'t* bounce off the asas will assist to slow your ship\'s horizontal movement down since you will tend to tip towards the direction you\'re moving when you hit the ground. And of course, the best way to learn how to land a ship is to do it. Make a nice sturdy ship with plenty of fuel and give it a shot.

This mod is awesome. On my first try I landed on the mun; I made it back to kerbin and nearly managed to \'land\' the ascent stage of the LEM in the water, but did the math wrong in my head and crashed/splashed instead. I probably didn\'t have enough fuel anyway, le sigh. Obviously the ascent stage isn\'t intended to do what I did with it anyway. This mod needs docking so bad.

What can I say - when all you want to do is get to 20k of height in style, this will get you there. Jeb approved.

This version of the rocket requires 0.13.1 The only mod part this uses is the lander leg from here: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=977.msg7757#msg7757 This is a minor revision to V6 above; the srb stage had to be redone from scratch again, but it\'s just as powerful. In addition, the engineers were a mite bit confused by the direction of the fuel lines. It seems one day somebody painted the arrows on the lines backwards and so all of those had to be redone too. Functionally this is the same rocket, however. One minor twitchy problem with this rocket I\'ve recently discovered shared with V5&V6 is due to the sheer width of the landing area, one of the lander stage\'s legs routinely collides with the second set of liquid fuel tanks when they are dropped. The collision itself is slow enough not to cause problems, however the rebound can cause the destruction of your craft if you\'re unlucky, have thrust on, and that particular part of the stage intersects your lfe\'s thrust plume. The best way to avoid problems is to shut off your engines before you jettison the stage, then power up slowly until it\'s clear. Given, at this point I\'m usually very close to making orbital velocity so I haven\'t really had a problem with making the adjustment midflight.

I love this thing! I can fling it into orbit with ease, and it\'s so tough even after BOUNCING off a mountain it still keeps the crew alive!

We also have stock fuel tanks, and fuel lines to connect them. Why not do something similar to what I did with my ship? While I used a mod lander leg part, I bet fins would work just as well - attach four fuel tanks to four radial decouplers on the landing stage, attach four fins to the tanks in the appropriate spot, and there you go. Wider base for a smoother landing, you can control the thrust output, and once they\'re empty you can ditch them. What\'s not to like?

This version of the ship is a minor revision to V5 above, and thus requires the same mods and game version. Usually, when designing upgrades to a ship, I ignore Jeb. All Jeb ever seems to say from day in and day out is \'MOAR BOOST!\' - in this case, I listened for once and told him that if he blew himself up, he could pay for his own clone this time. Strapping himself in, all I got was a ;P out of him. In any case, to my surprise the launch was an unqualified success. Though this version of the rocket requires double the static winglets the previous one did, and EIGHT TWELVE more struts to keep the srb\'s from blasting into the bottom of the rocket upon lighting them, it is in every important way an improvement - after dumping this stage, the liquid stage has to *slow down* from over 100m/s and in fact, I need to dethrottle almost immediately to keep my speed under 100m/s (We\'re less than 12k at this point!) for fuel efficiency. The previous build barely sustained velocity at 75m/s after that stage dropped - I haven\'t gotten it into an orbit yet, but I imagine this is going to save us a bit of liquid fuel. EDIT: Took it to orbit. Previous version of the ship had a little under a tank and a half in the ascent stage left over; this version has 3&1/2 tanks left over. Wow. For once, Jeb was right!

Holy dog this game works so much better now. Have a gander. These two rockets are overly large and similarly built, though obviously with different parts and designs. The speed difference is *striking* - especially since the old video was recorded at 800x600 and the new one at 1440x900. It\'s *THAT* much faster on my computer. 0.12: 0.13:

This version of the rocket requires 0.13.0 The only mod part this uses is the lander leg from here: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=977.msg7757#msg7757 Big redesign of the rocket, due to 0.13.0 enabling the ability to attach lft\'s to radial decouplers and fuel lines, I was able to finally rid myself of Ye Olde Hated tricoupler. (And there was much rejoicing!) In addition, the midstage used for orbital corrections and making the transit to the mun is no more since I was able to pack the fuel needed into radial decoupled tanks on the lander. Putting all the fuel needed on the lander enabled me to do a number of things, from reducing rcs fuel and jets required, reduce total weight by not having an extra engine or decoupler in the stack, and make the lander landing area wider and more tolerant of poorly aimed landings. The radial liquid tanks on the lower stage allow me to decouple spent fuel and unneeded engines for each portion of the flight, which allows me to actually get into an orbit with less fuel to begin with and more fuel to orbit with - I haven\'t flown it perfectly yet, but I tend with my goofy flying to get into a too high orbit of ~100k ap with one and one half tank of fuel left over in the final lifting stage. My previous rocket had an extra eight tanks and two engines in its lifting stage, and required the use of the transit stage to actually get into an orbit. The only part of this rocket I\'m not happy with yet is the solid booster rocket stage - it tends to twist a bit, and isn\'t producing the amount of thrust I\'d like - but it\'s difficult now in 0.13 to add tons of boosters since they tend to need winglets to dissipate heat or they go *boom* and detonate the rocket. Oh, and before you ask? V3 and V4 of this design were... unusable. There\'s a reason you didn\'t see them. =P

Personally I\'ve found a good munar landing all comes down to how much preparation beforehand I\'ve done to attempt to simplify the landing. Generally speaking, whenever possible I try to land in a crater since it\'s fairly low, sloped, and has an average height all around the same. Around 3000m I switch the readout from orbital to surface display, then cancel all of my momentum out, and point myself straight up so I\'m going to fall straight down. At 1000m I doublecheck to make sure my momentum is *only* vertical, and slow to less than 50m/s. At this point I stop doing all control input other than throttle and turn the ASAS on with rcs thrusters. Why will become apparent in a moment. I continue slowly approaching the surface - on the light side of the mun, I can see the spaceship\'s shadow as I get close. On the dark side, I have to slow to less than 10m/s, and hopefully won\'t bounce. When I\'m sure I\'m very close, I slow to less than 5m/s, and try in fact to get it down less than 2m/s if possible. Sometimes this is tricky. I want to have the engines throttled at this point to where they\'re *just* not quite able to stop the ship accellerating downwards vertically. When I hit the mun\'s surface, I should be moving slowly, and this throttle setting will prevent me from bouncing. I then turn the throttle all the way off once I\'m sure I\'ve planted on the surface. If I\'ve bounced, I instead throttle up; the asas will keep my ship from flipping over and will point me back in the right direction, so I simply fly up to around 1000m, kill my velocity, then try landing again. Mind that my lander has two tanks of fuel for landing and going home, and I rarely use more than half of a tank on the actual landing... Now, the reason for having the rcs thrusters on with the asas is that with insufficient thrust to get off the surface, I am going to tip in the direction downwards in the crater. This will (with the engine on) cause the ship to move slowly in that direction. Once you turn the engine off, you\'re going to be dragging along the surface - but the asas is going to be trying to force your ship to point in the direction it was set to using the rcs thrusters - which will have the side effect of slowing your ship down. Once you\'ve stopped moving, shut the asas off, of course. No need to waste the rcs. I\'ve landed and taken off more than ten times using this technique, and it\'s only gotten easier with time. By not having to worry about killing my horizontal velocity or manually fly my ship when landing, I can more readily pay attention to fuel remaining, vertical velocity, and can react faster when things go wrong. Just thought a tip or two might be useful.

Yep, I can see where you\'re coming from with that - if I ever clicked ads, I would turn adblock off for free sites. I wouldn\'t mind helping a site get money that I like. Problem with that is, if the ad is unobtrusive I skip it over without even looking at it. I didn\'t even realize google had advertising in its search results until someone pointed it out, for instance. I just tune it out, it\'s not the information I\'m looking for. If it gets in my face? Sorry, that annoys me to the point where adblock is turned back on. So I never actually *look* at whatever is being advertised - so, no click. People haven\'t been able to invent a form of advertising that gets me to look at whatever is being sold without driving me up the wall yet.

Heh. I often encounter websites that try to guilt me into disabling adblock. Right. So I can view your ads that are selling things I\'m never going to ever click on. Nah. I\'ll save my bandwidth, stop wasting my time trying to guilt me, I\'d never make you money (by clicking on the ad) in the first place.

Three huh? Always tried using symmetry vs all the parts I had connected, on my current rocket that\'s six. Which, um, asplodes when I try it - next time I load up the game I\'ll try using three, or maybe even two.

At least in my shots there were deliberate reasons for facing the sun; in the pic before landing the reflections on the camera almost made a forerunner logo from Halo - thought it was fun. In the actual landed picture, if you have the camera face in the direction where the sun is \'reflecting\' off the ship (which is just plain wrong given I\'m on the dark side of the mun) you can\'t see anything *but* the ship since everything around it is in shadow.

Hm, seems the jury\'s still out on winglets then - maybe I\'m just incompetent at using them! ;P Since I didn\'t say it before I *do* tend to make my supermassive ships using the stock parts, so likely if they are more stable than mod ones, that could be one reason why I\'m able to do the things I am without things asploding everywhere.

Purist? Nah. I just like what works. I\'ve been making rockets for a long, long time with the stock parts - so I pick and choose the things I need in addition carefully. For instance, I only use the joyuse tricoupler since it lets me make rockets that don\'t sway/tilt constantly when thrusting, and I only use the landing legs because I wanted to simplify mun landings a little.

For the fun of it, I tried and succeeded at landing on the dark side of the mun. Along the way I took a fairly nifty shot. Here it is, along with the landing picture.

Requires .12.0 This uses the lander leg from here: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=977.msg7757#msg7757 and the tricoupler from here: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=143.msg45708#msg45708 All other parts stock. Minor revision to my previous version of my mun launcher; this one uses fewer struts, has a more balanced approach with the rcs jets on the lander itself, and instead of firing an srb below the centerline engine on stage 9, it instead fires that engine, since having the added stability of the gimballing engine and the slightly lowered weight from it using up a tiny bit of fuel makes things work a bit better when we transition to dropping the srb\'s and firing the remaining lfe\'s. Strutswise, I got rid of all of them connecting the midstage tanks to the lander since they were unnecessary; in earlier versions of ksp without these struts the ship would snap in half on the landing pad, but it\'s sufficiently rigid now in 0.12 to not need them. The biggest change with the struts is not something that you can see easily, instead of wrapping the outside of the ship with struts and then connecting to four of the outside lft\'s I instead directly connected the centerline lowest lft to the eight outer lft\'s by using four symetrical struts each. Less weight, less drag, and less roll since it\'s slightly more symmetrical. By reducing the amount of struts used, fps tends to be much higher in certain points of flight. This variant has successfully landed on the mun three times, twice in craters on the light side, and once in a valley near mountains on the dark side.

more like this: This is the ship pre strut changes. As you can see, even prior to the minor change I made, it\'s easily flown to the mun and back. It was made mostly with stock parts. This version of the ship is available here if you want an example to work with: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=3392.msg45384#msg45384 Let me know if you\'re interested in the revised design, it\'s not much of a difference but may give you insight into how the struts can change flight dynamics. EDIT: Decided to post my updated design since I have changed a few things to it, take a look comparing the previous version vs this to see how to reduce strut use without compromising stability http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=3392.msg54654#msg54654

I\'ve had various problems building large rockets to be stable with and without asas. Honestly, throwing asas and lots of RCS/winglets/gimballing engines at the problem can make the problem *worse* - too much correction can quite literally snap your rocket in half, or worse, destablize your rocket and flip it upside down faster by overcorrection. Some things to remember that I\'ve noted about the various control methods: 1. RCS jets are constant, never change their correction speed, and so are the most reliable but use their own fuel source. Best way of correcting a wacky rocket when nothing else works IMO, but I try not to rely on them during launch with the asas enabled since the RCS fuel is much more useful for turning the ship under manual control. 2. Winglets are constantly inconsistent and only work in atmosphere. Their inconsistency primarily comes from the variances of altitude and speed you encounter in flight. The slower or higher you go, the less counteraction they have - and vice versa. At very high altitudes you will not get much, if any, correction from them so it\'s useless to have them on higher stages. In lower altitude at high speed their deflection force can be so powerful as to unexpectedly destabilize a large ship with asas enabled. For an example, if you have a very large and powerful first stage of srb\'s that gets you up to 150m/s in low altitude, your winglets are going to have a *ton* of deflection force... which will suddenly and unexpectedly go away when you stage and your speed cuts out. Typically I drop the first stage and the second only has the ability straight off the bat to keep around 80m/s... which means the winglets lose a lot of their deflection force, and the asas winds up flipping over the ship due to control loss. Whoops. I tend not to rely on these at all due to their disadvantages. 3. gimballing engines Of all of these, this tends to be the one I use for doing attitude control with the asas from launch to orbit, but the use of them is tricky. It\'s best not to have too many of them on a large stage, since they\'ll all try to assist turning the ship at the same time. On my ship with nine engines, having them *all* attempting to adjust the attitude caused the stage to explode from the engines colliding. Instead, it was sufficient to have the centermost engine with gimballing only with the other 8 normal nongimballing. Gimballing engines will help stablize your ship\'s attitude, but will not help with roll - so you\'ll still need something to counteract that, like rcs if that\'s a problem with your design. Otherwise like RCS jets, they are constantly consistent and will help you turn your ship - with the exception that your engines must be firing for them to do anything. Two gotchas you might not expect: Compared with the nongimballing engines, they\'re slightly less powerful and use slightly less fuel. This typically means that the other engines will lift more weight, but use more fuel, which means if you mix the two types as I did with my design you may have problems. On my ship, the outer ring of 8 engines runs out of fuel while the centermost engine still has 2/3 of a tank to go. Not a problem with that ship per se since it\'s already in orbit by that point - but I could see a multistage design having problems with this earlier in flight. Besides that, I\'ve found a lot of the problems with my designs tend to be related to the placement and usage of struts. Putting struts anywhere on the ship in an asymetrical fashion is just asking for trouble; a lot of slow roll and turn problems I\'ve discovered have been due to very small inconsistencies in my strut placements. Try to always use the symmetry tool when placing them - even better, try to use as few as possible. On my large mun rocket design, I wound up redesigning the strut placement recently. On the second stage which has nine lfe\'s and something like 52 lft\'s, on the lowest set of lft\'s I attached from the centermost lft in quad symmetry mode to four of the outer tanks, then I did it again from the center to the last four. It wound up looking something like this if you looked at it from the top of the ship down: o o o \ | / o-o-o / | \ o o o By doing this I was able to remove several struts, since I\'d been connecting the outermost tanks to themselves on the outside, then connecting four of the outermost tanks to the inner one. This not only sped up the game slightly, but since I was able to use the symmetry tool to place them, the ship had less roll problems. Biggest thing I ever did for myself though was to start with a simple rocket with one stage, launch it, make adjustments - and go from there. Every time you add a stage or new equipment, I suggest launching it before adding the next stage and making it more complicated - fixing a problem is a lot simpler when you know where it came from after all.

Alternately, save the file, then rename it to the correct name and extension after saving. Sure, it\'s annoying having the wrong name, but the data in the file isn\'t affected by the glitch.

It seems somehow since I last downloaded this part that the copy on the website has gotten corrupted, so I\'m uploading my version of it since it\'s a prerequisite for my rockets.