Streetwind

I'd just like to point out - landing a probe with a single ion engine on Moho absolutely can work. I've done it before. It just can't be massing two tons. You can get about 1.5 terminal TWR out of a single ion engine while still doing some useful science. It's not fun or easy to land with that, but it's possible. Sample probe: 1x Dawn engine, 1x HECS probe core, 1x radial xenon tank, balanced on the other side by 1x DTS-M1 antenna, 2x OX-4L panels, 2x Z200 batteries, 1x thermometer, 1x barometer, 1x seismometer, 1x gravioli detector. Wet mass 529 kg, dry mass 489 kg, wet TWR = 1.400, dry TWR = 1,515, wet dv = 3238 m/s. You could shave off a battery but I packed two for the sake of the antenna which is pretty hungry when transmitting. Solar panel output should be above 21 EC/s before heat losses, so the engine is going to be fine even with a slightly unfavorable sun angle. The descent trajectory should still be chosen so that the solar panels remain in sunlight - i.e. ideally a polar orbit around Moho aligned with its solar orbit. This will also prevent you from losing your commnet link. The probe has no landing legs, so it must balance on its engine. The HECS' reaction wheels should help keep it upright as long as it has power. If the probe did not spend too much dV maneuvering prior to descent, and you're worried about falling over and/or losing power while on the ground, you might have enough dV to get back to orbit before starting to transmit your surface science.

Yes, you can - because two docked spacecraft aren't two spacecraft. They are one. The docking procedure merges them into one vessel under the hood. As such, there is no problem with attaching parts to both of them.

That sounds like a large build, so another guess is "not enough reaction wheel for its mass". But we can only guess blindly if all we have to go on is a vague text description. Maybe you could post a few screenshots, or even the craft file?

I'm going to assume that when you say "SSTO", you actually mean "spaceplane" instead. Because it's trivially easy to make a standard rocket go single stage to orbit with plenty of dV left over. Your plane has 4000m/s of vacuum dV, which should be plenty, given that it should only take about 3400m/s to reach low Kerbin orbit with a standard gravity turn trajectory. Hence, your choice of trajectory is to blame for losing about 600 m/s worth of dV along the way. Getting more TWR and climbing a little longer can certainly help improve this. But keep in mind that one major contributor is your launching off of the runway. That's just never going to be as fuel efficient as a start from the vertical pad. Also, if getting more TWR means that you lose maximum dV in return, you may find that you gain little to nothing along the way. Your maximum possible upside from trajectory optimization is less than 600 m/s; if you stick to the runway start, it's probably in the realm of 400 at most. Switching from a Dart to a Swivel will drop your dV by about 300 m/s, depending on how much the extra weight is going to impact your plane. So you might gain about 100 m/s tops when reaching orbit. Workable, but not ideal. (Of course, all of this is guesstimated, so your results may vary ) Another thing you can do is take a page out of the Space Shuttle's book, and make do with flying like a brick. As in: bring less wing, or bring more tank. This makes your landing approach harder, but it'll give you more dV to work with in orbit. You're at less than a 12x multiplier of your Isp in terms of dV, so you aren't that deep in the diminishing returns of your mass fraction just yet. If you can get back to like 4000m/s while mounting a Swivel, without increasing your wing surface, that should allow for more fuel leftover in orbit.

Alright! By popular request, and by that I mean @StrandedonEarth who looks reasonably popular, the title has been vaguified

3400 m/s vacuum dV from surface to low Kerbin orbit. You probably want to add some margin, though.

In the editor, set your performanc calculation app (the one with the dV symbol on it in the toolbar) to Moho. Then, click on the stage with the lander's engine in the list on the righthand side of the screen to make it pop out and show advanced info, like thrust to weight ratio. You can configure what info is shown exactly in the app. Remove two thirds of all fuel from the lander. At this point, you want a TWR of at least 2.5, or it will be difficult to land. Not impossible; you can land just fine even with a terminal TWR of below 2. But the lower it gets, the more piloting skill is required to not add a new crater to your destination.

Welcome to the forums The issue is that your relay satellites... are not actually relay satellites. The DTS-M1 is a direct antenna, which cannot receive and forward other signals. The part rightclick info in the editor shows this, albeit just as a single innocuous line. Refer to this table for a quick overview of what antennas can relay. As a rule of thumb, relay-capable antennas are always heavier and higher-priced for the same perfomance.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I wrote this "little" explanation piece about the phenomenon you observed, and some of the lessons you can derive from it. I recommend giving it a read, and looking at your rocket stage design in a whole new way afterwards

Yes, you can do that, if you don't mind the extra mass. Your controls should not change as long as your control point (cockpit/probe core) does not change. I recommend mapping your various engines to action groups so you can easily toggle them on and off as needed.

I don't know for sure about PS4, but on PC, to get progress for a flyby contract, all you need to do is have an uninterrupted trajectory through the target's sphere of influence. Meaning, as soon as you have a trajectory that enters the SOI of Minmus and then goes on to escape it again, you're performing a flyby. You should get the progress attributed to you at the very latest when your vessel actually enters the SOI. You can even change your trajectory with a burn after that (f.ex. to capture) and not lose the flyby attribution. If your trajectory hits Minmus directly, that doesn't qualify. That's a collision, not a flyby Additionally, if the trophy specifically says "flyby of a planet", then Minmus itself may simply not qualify, because Minmus is not a planet. It is a moon. Try with Duna or Eve, they are both fairly easy to reach as long as you are within the correct transfer window.

Welcome to the forums Are you playing in career mode? If yes, do you have the VAB/hangar upgraded enough to unlock custom action groups? You should also be able to edit action groups in flight. Back when the feature was introduced, it always gave you full access to all action groups, even in career mode without any upgraded buildings. Not sure if that is still the case, but you can always check...

Is it really a glicth though? Seems to me that the parts were deployed, not dropped. To pick them up again, you'd simply need to undeploy them (outside of construction mode).

It's intentionally something you leave behind. Don't even bother waiting for it. You don't need a Kerbal present to operate the equipment. Once deployed, it operates by itself. Everytime an experiment collects (I think) 10% worth of progress, it auto-transmits as soon as it can find a valid signal path home. You'll get a notification every time it happens. The point of these experiments is that you take them with you whenever you first land on a new celestial body, set them up, and leave them behind. Over time you get science passively accumulating in the background. Given that there are 14 different land-able bodies in stock KSP alone, all of which you can put these stations on, that adds up. And when a high level scientist deploys these things, it goes three to four times faster.

The screenshot is a bit small to really see the menus, I'm afraid. But as far as the setup as it is goes, the result you're getting is normal. There is not enough power. Each of the three consumers requests 1 but receives 0.667, so none of them work. The communotron is offline, the control station is offline, and the science experiment is offline. Ergo, the fact that they show as connected but unpowered is perfectly normal, and the fact that you have no control signal is perfectly normal. Now, you say you can undeploy any one of them and the situation doesn't change? That sounds less normal. Could you undeploy the seismometer and leave the control station, solar panel, and communotron deployed? Make a screenshot of that, ideally a somewhat larger one, so that the menus are clearly legible.

@Gargamel Did you by any chance split off a different post than you meant to? OP isn't asking a question, but rather is answering one.

Part clipping can absolutely cause issues in some rare cases, especially when the clipped parts bear a lot of load... ...But, as always when it comes to asking for help troubleshooting specific vehicles: screenshots please

It depends on the burn. Reason being: the maneuver node is a single point in space-time. You reach and pass it in a single instant. But, running your engine to affect the change of velocity you want takes some time. The more dV you wish to spend, and the heavier your spacecraft, the longer it takes; the more thrust you have, the shorter. If you think about that, it makes logical sense to center your burn on the maneuver node in almost all cases. You'll have half your burn before the node, and half your burn after it. Both introduces a small error because you are not perfectly on the node, but because you have an even split before and after, these errors actually cancel each other out near-perfectly. In the settings menu, under "general", you can toggle "show extended burn indicator". I honestly forget what the exact difference is between leaving it off and turning it on, because I simply always turn it on by default and never play without it. But when I make a maneuver node, I have little buttons next to the burn time that let me set a split. It defaults to 50%, which means an even split before and after the node, and that's perfect for 99% of all cases. And there are three bits of timing information: "Node in T - xx:xx", which means how far away the actual node is; "Burn Time", which is how long the actual burn takes; and "Start Burn in", which gives you a countdown for when you need to ignite your engine. This last field will change depending on how you set your split. But as mentioned, 50% is perfect for almost any case.

If you mount a tank that contains LF+Ox to an engine that consumes only LF, then that engine will run out of fuel once all the liquid fuel is gone, with the tank still being roughly half filled with oxidizer. This not only means that you're carrying around the mass of the useless oxidizer, which requires more propellant expenditure to accelerate, and more lift to keep it airborne, which requires more wing, which creates more drag, and also add mass, which requires more propellant expenditure... yada yada; but also, only half the tank's actual volume will be dedicated to carrying fuel you can use. Which means you need to add more tanks to get the total amount of fuel you need. All of which, again, only have half of their volume dedicated to useful fuel, and the rest to useless oxidizer, which you have to carry along, see above. But even if you think "hey, I can remove the oxidizer in the hangar, no problem", it's still not equal to using pure liquid fuel tanks. Because the fact that you need twice as many tanks still applies. And tanks have dry mass. Meaning, they have a mass even when empty. A base mass that gets added to the mass of fuel inside them. So if you carry twice as many tanks, you're carrying twice as much dry mass. (This, by the way, is why rockets stage: to get rid of performance-killing dry mass.) Now, RAPIERs can be used in closed cycle, where they consume oxidizer. A typical spaceplane will want to carry some oxidizer for the moment when the atmosphere gets too thin to support airbreathing combustion. But you should strive to bring only exactly as much as you need to successfully fly the mission.

I've not tried something like that myself, but perhaps you can work around this by spreading your engine groups across multiple stages. Now, I don't mean stages you actually stage. Rather, when I think massive mothership, I think of a vessel that is already on its final stage. It can undock and re-dock vessels for refuelling operations, but none of that is done through actual staging. That means you're not pressing spacebar anymore. So... just create some virtual stages that don't do anything except having groups of engines in them. Then, in flight, you can pop out the expanded stage info, and receive information for that specific stage, such as its remaining burn time and its acceleration. This display does update as you manually toggle engines via action groups, IIRC. Note that in order to customize what info the expanded stage view shows you, you have to go into the VAB and set it there. It's a global setting, not a vessel-specific one.

One apsis, multiple apses.

Uninstall KSP in Steam Rightclick KSP in Steam Select Properties Click the "Betas" tab Ensure that the dropdown menu is set to "none" Close the Properties window Install KSP again If this does not give you the latest version, please contact Steam support about their client not working properly.

Agreed. Don't start in sandbox or in career... start in science mode. Same limited parts pool as career, but without money or reputation or contracts being involved. All you gotta do is collect science to unlock new parts.

Various "I can't see my apoapsis" posts started cropping up after 1.12, so it's either an intended change in that version, or a bug.

If you want to practice interplanetary transfers without waiting for years, try going from Mun to Minmus and/or back. It's exactly the same principles, except on a smaller scale, so you'll only be waiting for days instead.