Helicopters in um... space?

[spacehelicopters]

Hey guys, my name is spacehelicopters, and I am relatively new to KSP. I played the demo for about a month, and then bought the full version, so there was some adjusting in terms of parts. I am quite pleased to find a community of like-minded (hopefully) individuals who I can interact with. Enough about me, tell me a little bit about yourself.

Also, pointers on mun landings would be very helpful.

Edit: My steam is spacehelicopters, hit me up if you feel the need to. I play many other games, and have need of people to play them with.

Edited November 4, 2013 by spacehelicopters

[Specialist290]

Welcome to the forums!

There are a number of tutorials you can refer to for your first Mun lander -- I'd highly recommend Vanamonde's tutorial and training rocket, as well as

on how to conduct an efficient landing.

One general tip from my own experience: Don't aim straight for the Mun's surface on your transfer. Instead, put yourself in a low, stable orbit around the Mun first. This will allow you a greater degree of control over your final landing site and reduce the amount of guesswork involved in your final landing burn.

Hope this helps!

[Xacktar]

Welcome, SpaceHeli!

Most of the game can be boiled down to thrust/weight. Stage your rockets so that the stage below is pushing the stage above with at least 2x the thrust need to life the stage above and you'll normally be in pretty good good shape.

Once you can get a rocket into orbit with at least one stage at full fuel, then try for the Mun. Add a maneuver to your trajectory on the map screen. Green tab expands or contracts your orbit(see also, Retrograde and Prograde), Blue tab shifts your orbit left or right on the axis of where you are burning. sends you 'uphill' or 'downhill' compared to your orbital plane. You can slide the node along the blue line of your trajectory, this helps in finding a Mun intersect. Keep in mind that if your ship passes by the node while you are messing with it, the node is no longer valid on the map screen, but you can still burn toward it if you had it good and want to try and catch up.

Once you get the node at a flyby of the Mun, you can look at the NavBall and it will have a blue marker on the ball. This is where you're going to want to burn toward. Beside the NavBall will 2 sets of time readouts. One is Est. Burn, this is how long the game thinks it will take your ship to burn up to the speed required, the other says 'Node in T' Then it will be plus or minus a time. Minus two minutes means you are two minutes from the burn, Plus means you are behind the burn point. Try to time your burn so that you are halfway through burning when you hit the node. There will be a yellow bar by these numbers that shows you how much burn you have to do in m/s.

Use these maneuver nodes to get your Mun intercept and then slow down your Mun flyby into an orbit with a retrograde maneuver.

Good luck!

[Sirrobert]

Welcome.

Start with landing on Minmus. The reduced gravity makes it alot easier

PS:

[Starwhip]

Hello there!

I hope the forums live up to what you expect. And if you've nothing better to do, check out the game section.

[Monkeh]

When attempting to land on a surface click the 'orbit' section of your navball so you can see your speed relative to the surface you're approaching. This is very important for a few, very obvious, reasons.

Good luck.

[Sirrobert]

When attempting to land on a surface click the 'orbit' section of your navball so you can see your speed relative to the surface you're approaching. This is very important for a few, very obvious, reasons.

Good luck.

That's wrong. Even when you are standing completly still you still have orbitall velocity, as the place you are standing on is orbitting (around the core).

Instead, have the navball set to 'surface' and just make sure the retrograde marker is sitting exactly ontop of the navbal (with the entire area blue). That means that you have no vertical velocity (relative to the surface. That's the important part)

[SuperWeegee4000]

We have sent a helicopter to space. It's called Skylab.

[bradley101]

We have sent a helicopter to space. It's called Skylab.

Hahaha Too true