Streetwind

So, have the suggestions here helped you? Is your planned mothership coming along nicely?

This is something for which there is no straightforward way to do it in the base game. As Jimmy said above, the engine plates included in the Making History DLC are specifically meant for this. If you don't have them, you need to use surface attachment to circumvent the lack of dedicated parts. Start by attaching the fuel tank of the lander to a fairing truss node, with a full size decoupler in between. No bi-couplers or anything here, don't ever use them in between stages, it never works. Just lander tank -> decoupler -> truss node. This leaves you with a clean, full-size node stack top to bottom without any of the engines getting in the way. Now, rightclick the fairing and turn off the interstage truss. Not the nodes, just the truss, so that your attached lander is magically free-floating but still attached. Yes, it looks stupid, don't worry, it'll be fine later. Then, you surface-attach engines to the bottom of the lander's tank inside the hollow decoupler, in such a way that they won't catch on the decoupler ring during stage separation. But what if you want engines that cannot surface attach? Well, that's what the BZ-52 Radial Attachment Point is for. You surface attach a pair of those to the bottom of the tank, which gives you extra nodes outside the main node stack to attach the engines to. Next, switch to the Move tool, select the decoupler, and move it down towards the fairing base until the engine bells are nice and close to it. Don't clip into it, that may not end well. Finally, build the interstage fairing. Once it is closed, you'll no longer be looking at a magically floating lander - it is now (at least visually) supported by the interstage. Set the fairing to Not Staged, and it'll remain a fixed structure that never gets ejected until you leave it behind when the lander decouples.

Okay, turns out the 5m parts are likely oversized for this. I slapped this thing together real quick, and it pushed a 40-ton dummy payload into LKO with 1600 m/s left in my test. And I only used Mastodons, not even Mainsails, and throttled all the engines to 90% already because it felt like it still had a bit too much thrust. So you could probably assemble your spacecraft in orbit of the Mun or something (It has the antenna power for it too.) Has tons of control authority, lots of battery power, no weird shapes, zero need for autostruts. Flies straight like and arrow, just mindlessly follow the staging order. Only thing is, I used the L-size probe core, and that's one of the final tier techs. Not sure if you have it. You can probably load the craft in a sandbox save and replace the core with something else if you want. It won't hurt the vehicle - you'll just lose some high-end SAS modes like follow maneuver. The avionics section is tucked away in the structural tube on the upper stage, directly below the fairing. Take off the fuel tanks below to access it. Just be careful when reattaching the tanks that they attach to the structural tube, not to the parts inside.

36t to LKO is not hard, in principle. But it might become tricky when you realize that objects that heavy tend to have a certain bulk, while you're requesting something easily steerable. These two things don't generally come together, because aerodynamics. What tech level and what DLCs do you have available to use? The 5m parts from Making History would be the obvious choice.

Yes, you need monopropellant. RCS thruster blocks require it, and will not fire without it. If you want a reaction control system that runs on LF/Ox bipropellant, you can use the Vernor thruster. It requires a higher tech level, though. And since it's single-nozzle, you need to think a bit more carefully where to place them. The easiest solution is just to slap a monopropellant tank or two to your existing design.

To transfer fuel, you select two tanks, right? One source, one destination? Well, the trick here is that you don't need to stop at two tanks. You can select as many as you want, and then do 1->N or N->1 type transfers. In your case, you would select your six large fuel tanks, and then one of the tanks of the refuelling vessel. Then you order that one tank to empty itself. Its contents will be equally distributed to the six other tanks. Afterwards, if the refuelling vessel has other tanks too, you deselect the empty one and select a new one, while still keeping the six destination tanks selected. And then you just repeat. In case you ever encounter a situation where one of your ships has tanks in hard to reach places, or just a really large number, you can also use the resource overview window in the toolbar to select a resource, which will select all tanks that contain this particular resource.

You're missing some crucial information: why are you going to Moho in the first place? As in: is this a mission that just needs to orbit, any orbit, to do its job? Or does it need a low orbit? Does it need a polar orbit, or an equatorial one, or does it not matter at all? Is the craft meant to land? Can it land anywhere, or do you want to hit a specific biome, location, or anomaly? This is relevant because while you can brake into a polar orbit from any direction, getting an equatorial one on the cheap is highly dependant on where you are approaching from. Do the two options you have end up differing in the approach vector they give you, and does that affect your planned mission profile? Same thing with orbit height: the cheapest way to get a low orbit/surface is to put the periapsis as close to Moho as possible and make a fairly expensive braking burn. But the cheapest way to get any orbit is to put the periapsis at the edge of the SoI and make a fairly cheap braking burn.

Always remember: With great power comes great fuel consumption.

@Zhetaan He's asking specifically about the Breaking Ground surface deployed solar panel, which does not generate EC. It just generates power for one connected device, or more than one, depending on the level of the deploying engineer. I've never gotten around to put any of them down outside the Kerbin system, mostly because by the time my first mission to another celestial body arrives at its destination, I've already long since unlocked the whole tech tree. So I don't actually know the answer. @Wcmille Your quickest way to finding out is probably cheating a vessel with the parts in question to Eeloo and seeing what you get.

It's a consequence of the scaling difference between the game and IRL. Kerbin is less than 10% of Earth's diameter. But, the atmosphere is roughly 35%-40% as thick. In other words, Kerbin's atmosphere is way taller compared to Kerbin's diameter than in real life. As a result, RL rockets clear the atmosphere far steeper and far earlier than KSP rockets do. The vast majority of the sideways speed a RL rocket gathers is gained outside the atmosphere. In KSP, the vast majority of the sideways speed is gained inside the atmosphere. And thus, because you're going that fast (relatively - KSP's physics constants are tweaked) inside the atmosphere, you get compression heating and reentry effects even on the way up.

Vessel antenna power = strongest antenna * ( sum of antennas / strongest antenna ) ^ Combinability Combinability is always 0.75, except for the starter antennas. So: 5,000,000 * ( 10,000,000 / 5,000,000 ) ^ 0.75 = 5,000,000 * ( 2 ) ^ 0.75 = 5,000,000 * 1.6818 = 8,409,000 Maximum Range = SQRT(Vessel_1 power * Vessel_2 power) When the two vessels are identical, you're just taking the square root of a square, so the result is always the vessel's own power: 8,409,000 The Mun's orbit is perfectly circular with a semimajor axis of 12,000,000 meters. Therefore, you are correct: these satellites will not be able to establish a connection. Even three HG-5 per satellite would fall just ever so slightly short. Four would work, but with terrible signal quality. Honestly, Mun/Minmus exploration without a DSN connection somewhere in the mix requires jumping through hoops until you unlock the 160-point node that contains the DTS-M1 and RA-2 antennas. It might be worth to just accept that your Mun rely satellites will only link back to Kerbin while the KSC is above the horizon from their view. This should not be a great problem for the science ground station, as it is perfectly capable of waiting for a valid comms link before transmitting its latest batch of science. And you'll still have a link for an entire half of each day anyway. Correct, no third party ever influences the connection between any two given antennas, except perhaps for a celestial body eclipsing one of them.

Are the unpiloted ones still inside your physics bubble? That's within ca. 2.5km of your current control point. If not, the get auto-deleted once they get too deep into the atmosphere.

"Remote Guidance Unit" is just a name. Functionally it's a probe core. But one of the best probe cores. It has a built-in experiment storage unit, and thus can collect and store science experiments just like that part, or a manned cockpit. It has all SAS modes. It has decent reaction wheels. It comes in two sizes: 1.25m and 2.5m. And yes, they do have a feature called a "probe control point". However, that will not work with just the probe core alone, it also needs a Kerbal pilot on the same vessel. Read more about it here: https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Probe_Control_Point

Is it the right time to go to Jool? In contrast to Mun and Minmus, going from Kerbin to other planets has specific times when it is much, much easier to do so than other times. Often, struggling to get an encounter and having to do weird burns is a result of not bing inside the so-called transfer window. Try using the orbit forward function to push your transfer node several days into the future and see if it has any real effect on the difficulty of obtaining an encounter. If it is the right time to leave and you still struggle, there are two methods you can use to help. One is starting with an easier transfer burn that puts you almost at an encounter, and then later make a mid-course correction burn while you're underway to get an encounter. The other is using an external tool like Alexmoon's launch window planner which tells you exactly how to make the node you need for any given date of departure.

The control station shows an active commlink at 0.79 signal strength. While that's not ideal, I don't think signal strength matters for transmission of deployed surface science - mine have transmitted just fine with less strength in the past.

I don't know for sure, but there is no biome named "oceans" on Eve. The ocean biomes all have individual names like "eastern sea" and so on. Thus I would guess that it doesn't refer to any specific biome, and you could likely complete the contract by achieving the splashed down situation anywhere.

Yeah, it works for me, and yeah, the solar panel doesn't display correctly. @Klapaucius, your solar panel was not deployed by an engineer. Else the experiment control station would show "Total Power Available: 2". I have no idea why the solar panel shows units produced as 0. It does the same thing for me; I tested it with both a 0-star and a 1-star engineer. Same result each time. Then I loaded up an older save where I had a surface science setup on the Mun, and there, both solar panels correctly showed 2 units produced. Mind you, those panels were set up in an older version (1.11). So either 1.12 bugged out the display of newly deployed surface solar panels, or this effect happens if you set it up on Kerbin. Not sure which it is right now. Either way, it's a display issue only, and on the solar panel only. The rest of the parts appear to work just fine, and the solar panel does produce power if it was set up correctly.

Honestly, the setup shown in the screenshot should work, assuming the panel has been deployed by an engineer. Even a 0-star engineer should get the panel to produce 2 power, and only 2 power is required by the setup. I'll go have a look if it'll work for me...

It sounds like rocket construction is an area in which you can improve further. You'd be surprised just how much proper construction matters. A launch vehicle of five hundred tons in mass should get you really, really far if you built it well. I bet I could get a direct Hohmann transfer to a low solar periapsis in less mass than that, no need for a bi-elliptic one. If you're encountering a case where adding more fuel to your rocket is no longer improving its dV, you are most likely adding that fuel to an already overloaded stage, thereby causing other stages to get choked by the added mass. The way rockets work is that everything you add on top affects everything that exists below. This may sound daunting - that's like, an unlimited number of variables to take into account! Good news though - it's much easier than it sounds. Because the way the math works out, there's only one single number that matters for each individual stage, and you can in fact eyeball it most of the time and it'll be fine, so long as you avoid going really far off track. Doing the math just helps you learn how to eyeball it. I've written about it here before. Apologies, it's kind of a wall of text. I have a regrettable tendency towards those. Trust me though, it'll be worth your time Note that this is very inefficient, due to something called the Oberth effect. It's a particularly arcane bit of orbital mechanics, and you had no way of knowing this beyond figuring it out through trial and error, so don't be hard on yourself over it This is what the forum is for. The way it works, in simplified terms, is that spending fuel is more efficient the deeper down you are in a gravity well. It's not exactly that, but that's what it boils down to in practice in KSP. What you have been doing is spending a small amount of fuel to get out of Kerbin's gravity well, then spending a lot of fuel to aim at your actual destination while you are not anywhere near a gravity well. Thus you spent more fuel than you needed to. What you should have been doing instead is spending all your fuel deep in Kerbin's gravity well - in other words, making the full transfer burn in low Kerbin orbit. Counterintuitively, the same amount of fuel - indeed, the same amount of dV - would give you a noticeably deeper Sun periapsis then. Or, well, you can follow Zheetan's suggestion and do a bi-elliptic transfer. But even then, you'd ideally do the full transfer burn to your high solar apoapsis directly from low Kerbin orbit. Escaping Kerbin before even plotting your transfer is always the least efficient method. But how do you get from this tiny circle around Kerbin to your destination in solar orbit? Well, imagine Kerbin wasn't there. Imagine if it was just your spacecraft in a solar orbit that happens to be identical to Kerbin's solar orbit. What would you do to lower your periapsis towards the sun? Burn retrograde to your solar orbit, of course. And if you wanted to get out to Eeloo? Burn prograde, of course. So that's what you do, except that you must do it while circling Kerbin. You are in a low orbit around the planet, but your goal is still to make a burn in the correct direction relative to Kerbin's solar orbit. For example, if you want to go closer to the sun, you want to make a burn on Kerbin's sunlit side, so you are ejected from Kerbin's SOI "backwards". In other words, you make a prograde burn (relative to your low Kerbin orbit) that ejects you retrograde (relative to Kerbin's solar orbit). And going out to Eeloo is the same, just on Kerbin's night side. You make a prograde burn (relative to your low Kerbin orbit) that ejects you prograde (relative to Kerbin's solar orbit). In this way, the burn to escape Kerbin's sphere of influence is at the same time a burn in the right direction relative to solar orbit, so you can just keep burning in the same direction to lower your solar periapsis (or raise your solar apoapsis) despite still being just a few kilometers above Kerbin's atmosphere. Of course, depending on the amount of dV you must spend and the acceleration your engines provide, making a very large burn in low Kerbin orbit can be very tricky. Because the orbit is so strongly curved, and you traverse a significant portion of the circle in just a few minutes, burns you make there grow less and less efficient the longer they get. If you burn at the maneuver node, you'll burn off-prograde for most of the time, whereas if you follow the prograde marker, you'll not burn in the right direction for most of the time. Rule of the thumb is that if your burn is longer than six minutes (three before the node and three after), you're starting to get inefficient. You can get around this by splitting the burn. For example, make one burn that raises your Kerbin apoapsis to around where the orbit of the Mun is. (Take care not to actually encounter the Mun, you don't want that here.) Loop around once, and as you come back towards your Kerbin periapsis, make a new maneuver node there and start a new burn in the same direction as the first one - basically continuing what you started. Once you have an escape trajectory out of Kerbin's SOI, you can keep burning until you have achieved your desired solar orbit destination.

Does it specifically say the word "dock" anywhere in the contract? If not, then all you need to do is get them within physics load distance of each other - in other words, within roughly two kilometers. Note that the two spacecraft performing the rendezvous must be from different launches. You cannot put two probes on the same rocket, throw them at the Mun with slightly different trajectories to separate them, and later have them meet up again once there. That won't complete the contract. Also check the contract (and the app in the toolbar) carefully for mentions of requiring newly-launched spacecraft. This clause is common in satellite contracts, for example, and I'm not sure if it also exists for the rendezvous contract. If you also happen to have a "build a space station in orbit of the Mun" contract, you can do both at the same time. One launch to put the station there, and another launch to either just visit it, or to add whichever missing parts didn't fit on the first launch due to bulk or weight issues. The visiting spacecraft can also be a lander looking to touch down on the surface (or coming back from it).

Try upgrading your tracking station. It improves the display of orbit lines, and additionally, unlocks extra data displays in one of the menus on the bottom left in flight mode.

Nah, it's working fine. It is, in fact, working perfectly fine. Too perfectly, one might say. I've previously written about this here:

First thing to check: that node towards Duna, does it ask you to burn right now? Or in XYZ days? Due to Kerbin's circular orbit around the sun, the direction the node sends you in changes as time passes. The direction doesn't need to be correct hundreds of days ahead of the transfer window; it only needs to be correct at the time you need to execute the transfer burn. The tool should place your node in the correct position for the alignment to match properly at the time of the burn. Second thing to check: are you playing via Steam? If so, let it do a file verification on the game. If not, completely uninstall everything, download the game fresh, and reinstall in a clean folder. Then, see if your alarm clock issue perists. If yes, please give us a number of steps which for you lead to to this issue reoccuring every time, which anyone can do for themselves. As in: start new sandbox save, spawn Kerbal X, launch into orbit, etc, etc. If it only happens in one specific savegame, provide that savegame for download, and explain whether it is a new save you started in 1.12, or an older save you've carried forward.

I have never seen anything like it. Can you take a screenshot or video of the effect?

For the limitations of the current implementation, see the link below. Meanwhile, if you can actually produce a situation in which the transfer tool creates a node that literally does not work (like not even leaving the SOI), then please try and see if you can find a way to consistently reproduce it. Like, a series of steps going "load this save file, go fly craft XYZ, use tool to create node to destination ABC". If you can find such a reliable reproduction method in a save completely without mods, please create a bug report with it at https://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com and then link to it here. I'll make sure it gets seen. Provide all the information you can, such as a save file for download, and precise instructions on what to do with it.