Lazy returning player..

[MoridinUK]

34 minutes ago, Kertech said:

@MoridinUK curious, WoT reference??

@Kertech Absolutely, although I am a likeable pussy cat!  My elder brother had the handle Forsaken so I wanted to one-up him... So many years ago!

23 minutes ago, Corona688 said:

1) build small

2) drop your material bays and empty tanks before you leave

3) Get rid of some engines before liftoff.  You only need a high T/W ratio to land, not to leave.

Makes it so much easier.

 

 

 

So much more planning!!! lol... but yes I can see the advantage.  I tend to build my landers with a little too little twr I think this may be my problem.  I forget that once I've made my burn to intercept Mun it doesn't cost fuel to coast...  Planning empty tanks to ditch sounds complex though!

37 minutes ago, Corona688 said:

My understanding is that an efficient landing is a quick landing.  Wasted time is wasted fuel, because the longer it takes, the more speed you have to cancel.

So, you want to come down from a high orbit (since it's efficient to decelerate there) into an orbit that doesn't QUITE graze the mun or whatever.  Once you're at the orbit's lowest point, thrust retrograde until your velocity is all gone.  This will leave you falling gently from a kilometer or two, giving you time to get things steady without wasting whole minutes basically hovering.  Don't bother slowing yourself down past 100m/s until you're below a few hundred meters.

This strategy means your lander can't have too outrageously low a T/W ratio though, or you'll end up lithobraking instead of retrobraking.

The logical extreme of this technique is the "suicide burn", where you time it so perfectly that landing and retrobraking are the same step.  This is called "suicide" for a reason though, there's not really much margin for error.

 

 

I have 'tried' this, but I was too high... gained way too much horizontal speed again as I plummeted...  I don't think I'd have too much of a problem if I didn't need to land, bang on the right spot.  

Edited July 2, 2016 by MoridinUK

[Corona688]

6 minutes ago, MoridinUK said:

So much more planning!!! lol...

All it amounts to is an extra stage, really.

[MoridinUK]

lol, I just right clicked and dragged right to try to spin it...

 

[Corona688]

I feel your pain!  I do that to screenshots all the time ><

Sadly the 'front' of the craft was in shadow or I would have screenshotted from there, but there's not a lot more to see, just the hatch and one more ladder on the center pod itself.  There's not even a fuel tube, I just transferred fuel into the center tank manually before liftoff.  It had 3/4 of a tank, I probably could have made it all the way to Kerbin with it if I'd been more optimistic and brought a parachute instead of a docking clamp.

...then again maybe not.  I forgot about the heatshield.

Edited July 2, 2016 by Corona688

[MoridinUK]

heatshields!! argh more wieght, leave it in orbit around mun, pick it up again on the way back?

or in orbit around Kerbin..

 

[jarmund]

Lazy answer for a lazy returning player, here is a list of the mods I have installed. The ones prefixed with an asterisk are the ones i consider essential. Please note that some are merely remnants from the 1.0.5 days and I've never bothered uninstalling them.

*Action Groups Extended (AGExt 2.0b)
Alternate Resource Panel (AlternateResourcePanel v2.8.1.0)
Ambient Light Adjustment (AmbientLightAdjustment 2.5.8.5)
*BetterBurnTime (BetterBurnTime 1.4.4)
Community Resource Pack (CommunityResourcePack 0.5.4.0)
*Docking Port Alignment Indicator (DockingPortAlignmentIndicator 6.4)
Firespitter Core (FirespitterCore v7.2.4)
ForScience! (ForScience v1.4)
HyperEdit (HyperEdit 1.5.2.1)
*Kerbal Alarm Clock (KerbalAlarmClock v3.7.1.0)
Kerbal Attachment System (KAS 0.5.9.0)
*Kerbal Engineer Redux (KerbalEngineerRedux 1.1.1.0)
*Kerbal Flight Indicators (KerbalFlightIndicators R13)
Kerbal Inventory System (KIS 1.2.12.0)
Kerbal Joint Reinforcement (KerbalJointReinforcement v3.2)
MakeItSmall (MakeItSmall 1.1)
Module Manager (ModuleManager 2.6.25)
Navball Up Default (NavballUpDefault v0.2.2)
NavBallsToYou (NavBallsToYou 0.1)
Olympic1's ARP Icons (Olympic1ARPIcons v0.9.0)
*Precise Node (PreciseNode 1.2.3)
RCS Build Aid (RCSBuildAid v0.8)
RCS Sounds (RCSSounds 5.0.1)
RealChute Parachute Systems (RealChute v1.4.1.1)
Rover Wheel Sounds (RoverWheelSounds 2.2)
SafeChute (SafeChute v1.9.1)
SCANsat (SCANsat v16.3)
*TAC Fuel Balancer (TacFuelBalancer 2.8)
Thermal Monitor (ThermalMonitor 1.3.2)
*Toolbar (Toolbar 1.7.12)
Trajectories (Trajectories v1.6.2)
TriggerAu Flags (TriggerAu-Flags v2.8.1.0)
USI Core (USI-Core 0.2.4.0)
USI Kolonization Core (USI-UKS-Shared 0.2.4.0)
USI Kolonization Systems (MKS/OKS) (UKS 1:0.40.4.0)
USI Life Support (USI-LS 0.4.4.0)
USI Tools (USITools 0.7.2.1)

[Corona688]

2 hours ago, MoridinUK said:

heatshields!! argh more wieght, leave it in orbit around mun, pick it up again on the way back?

Pretty much what Apollo did, except they left an entire vehicle.

[MoridinUK]

Clever boys them nasa types...

 

[Curveball Anders]

On 2016-07-03 at 1:20 AM, Corona688 said:

Pretty much what Apollo did, except they left an entire vehicle.

An Apollo-style munar mission was actually one of the first 'serious'(-ish) mission I completed in KSP.

 

[MoridinUK]

My problem with them is that I find rendezvous quite challenging... I once had to wait a couple of years for an encounter that made it possible withint the fuel... I simply do not fly well! lol  Very kerbal!

 

[Curveball Anders]

5 hours ago, MoridinUK said:

My problem with them is that I find rendezvous quite challenging... I once had to wait a couple of years for an encounter that made it possible withint the fuel... I simply do not fly well! lol  Very kerbal!

I did it manually a couple of times (after watching Scott Manley doing it).

But after that I used MJ (I refuse to repeat boring stuff).

[MoridinUK]

Yeah I must get my head into MJ.  I don't find docking boring, but trying to get the encounter right can be difficult to plan...

 

[Guest]

Another quality of life improver that doesn't seem to have been mentioned here is Connected Living Spaces. I'm not big on manned missions, but even I like to keep it around.

[Corona688]

On 7/4/2016 at 11:07 AM, MoridinUK said:

Yeah I must get my head into MJ.  I don't find docking boring, but trying to get the encounter right can be difficult to plan...

 

Funny thing though -- docking is the one thing mechjeb is painfully bad at.

Edited July 5, 2016 by Corona688