Hi, I am CozmikR5 and I am a Kerb-a-holic!

[CozmikR5]

Following the advice of a friend I have tried Kerbal Space Program and I am now thoroughly addicted! Being at this for only a couple of weeks I'm pretty sure I do some horrendous n00b mistakes but the rewards are priceless. Now if I can only learn how to land and dock !!!

Fly dangerous!

o7

[AceGamer]

Haha welcome to the community and remberer "A landing that you can walk away from wasn't fast enough!" -Scott Manley

[Capt'n Skunky]

Happy Launching!

Arrr!

Capt'n Skunky

KSP Community Manager

[Mokmo]

Hey Coz,

Tell me it's because of my facebook cover picture that you tried this, been on it for almost 2 seeks now and it's awesome!

(hoping the nickname will reconnect with one of your Eve-O Brutopia buddies from a bit ago)

[Runboy]

Isnt it "A landing you can walk away from wasn't fast enough!" -A wise kerbal.But,whateveritwas, Welcome to the Community!

Edited May 21, 2013 by Runboy

[sal_vager]

Welcome to the community CozmikR5

Noob mistakes are not a bad thing here unlike with other games and communities, as one of the things that makes KSP so great is learning how everything works, like orbits and rendezvous and delta vee

The best thing you can do is experiment, and if you mess up see what you can do to save a mission rather than end the flight, you might surprise yourself

[CozmikR5]

Hey there Mokmo! No, this is Letrange's fault again. He is my "pusher of electronic crack"

Thanks for the welcome everyone!

[Nachtengel]

...Now if I can only learn how to land and dock...

landing comes in two shapes, ambiguous landing and targeted, first you must figure out what your landing speed MUST be, F = ma so take the total weight of your lander and consider it the mass, now the speed of your lander at the point of impact will actually be your acceleration, because the celestial body will not move. so your speed at that moment is reduced to 0 and therefore we can say that is your acceleration. now the legs you put on the lander have a certain compressive strength, place that in the F position of the formula, so say i have a leg with compressive strength (or shear depending on orientation, shear means sideways) of 200, and the mass of my lander is 5 tonnes. then 200=(5000 kg)(final velocity). This will be enough to tell you for your lander at what speed you must be under to land safely. as a benchmark you would want to land at around 5 m/s or less usually is a good rule of thumb if you don't enjoy doing the calcs.

now that you have the speed you can adjust your plan. Ambiguous landing: you have no target, the game is simple, once you are in orbit around the target celestial body, retrograde burn to deorbit, and keep pointing retrograde the entire time. after your short deorbit burn warp to about 10k altitude and turn your engine on very low, you should be within, this will largely depend on the planet, you may need to start higher than 10k, but do some gravity math or just trial and error and you'll get a feel for when, but you burn the engines low. gradually losing speed, you will watch two things, your altitude and your engine thrust. the idea is to steadily decrease the speed as you are coming down. the ideal case you are aiming for is that you reach 0 m/s at altitude 0, if you keep pointed retrograde the entire time, eventually your arch will be straight down, the side angle is enough to cancel your lateral translation, so dont overdo it. near the ground you may have to increase engines to get your speed down, dont overdo that either, keep a steady increase or decrease no matter what you do. no sharp movements in either direction. if you overshoot , you will overshoot a lot and its difficult to correct.

Targeted: same as before except the deorbit burn will occur about 45 degrees from the target, now execute your deorbit burn and watch the map view until your arch is beyond your target by about 5 km. once this is complete, goto 10k again and continue as normal. your target should be close by if you are slow and consistent in your burns. the key is subtlety, no large burns anywhere, just low constant velocity loss.

with practice you will get the hang of it.

Rendezvous:

rendezvous requires one extra step if you are trying to reach an inclined orbit. For 0 degree inclination orbits you can proceed directly to the next step. for inclined orbits you must first go into map view, and wait until the orbit of the target is directly over your launch pad. then launch. this will save you fuel and time trying to correct your orbit otherwise apart being very hard to do so.

the next step is to figure out of the target is behind or in front of you (do this as you increase your apoapsis to orbit height. to get a better idea of where the target will be at the moment you reach orbit.)

now this is key, if the target is ahead of you, you must move faster, and therefore require a lower orbit. the opposite is also true, if the target must catch up with you, take a higher orbit. lower orbits have higher speeds due to the required lead for the gravity force vector to keep it in perpetual free fall (a simple way to think of it is a ball on a string you are swinging around, the closer the ball is to your hand, the faster you must spin it to keep it in the air.) don't make the altitude difference too great, remember you need to join orbits eventually. match the orbit eccentricity as you normally would at the apoapsis.

now you wait for the target to get as close to you as possible, warp if necessary. at this point, your target should be nearly above or below you burn at an angle nadir or retro-nadir (toward or away from the earth) in the direction of the target, and then reestablish your orbit. once complete, burn the main thruster very low (you should be within a few km at this point, you are getting to a couple hundred meters) again gentle movements. be slow, careful. do not go 200 m/s, try 20-40. once close lose your relative velocity with the target and engage RCS. now you are a hundred or so meters away from target, RCS only from now on. use the keys to gently inch yourself closer to the target, like landing you want to make contact at less than 2 m/s or so, you will get close, kill your relative velocity, align with target and readjust, then continue. do this until you are aligned and within a few meters. then the magnetic force should take over and pull you together, now you turn off ASAS to allow it to turn slowly into position, and it will dock.

GL!