Tips and tricks you found out yourself

[Tank Buddy]

That's interesting, I'll try that out.

It never occurred to me to use subassembalys for going between the SPH and VAB. I think you just saved my life.

Edited November 19, 2013 by vexx32
Double posting is unnecessary; please use the Edit function in future :)

[SkyRender]

One of my most interesting discoveries was the easy intercept principle. If you have a bit of fuel to spare and a decent sense of timing, you can easily go from surface to intercept with a craft that's in a fairly close orbit just by pushing the retrograde marker so that it and the anti-target indicator line up. Then just keep firing at retrograde until your intercept distance listed on the map is nice and close, and make adjustments as necessary once you've come in close enough. Saves a ton of time when returning a lander to its mothership.

[Brotoro]

When landing on bodies with no atmosphere, whack a maneuver node at ground level and adjust it fully retrograde until the resultant is zero at ground level. Then you can suicide burn every time, and not have to worry about fuel wastage.

Now there's a cool tip.

[eurybaric]

Jagermeister makes for a very, very unpleasant hangover

[SuperBigD60]

I have a ship in my vab the is basically a docking port at the end of a cargo bay which I use to build my shuttle payloads such that they fit in the cargo bay.

this works thanks to the sub assembly feature.

Also, having a center of lift behind the center of mass on a plane will tend to make it more stable at higher speeds.

[Frederf]

I have a few home-brew tricks:

1. Set some small electric charge part to lock resource to ensure you have a battery backup in case you run out of power unexpectedly, even purposefully. To extract the power use the right-click transfer to an unlocked battery and use the power to reorient your craft so your solar panels work again.

2. If you point your craft orbit-normal, usually N or S for equatorial, the roll of your craft is a sort of clock for longitude. The amount of roll your craft undergoes is the same as the orbital position angle.

3. Disappearing the navball from the map prevents accidental throttle usage.

4. Double clicking IVA windows changes the view.

[SpaceSphereOfDeath]

It's easier to get a laythe intercept from a hyperbolic Jool trajectory then a tylo (in my experience)

[Johno]

There's no such thing as too much electrical power. And since everyone forgets to deploy the Solar Panels once in a while (and because Murphy's Law says that you'll always need to do something when it's dark and you've run out of power!), it's always a good idea to sneak an RTG onto the spacecraft somewhere. Generally I have the lander powered by RTG, which allows it to double as my emergency backup power source.

(This means that if the CSM loses power while the lander is on the surface, there's a problem. Therefore, make sure you deploy the Solar Panels before you land. ).

(It's also a good idea to have a few non-deployable solar panels somewhere).

[Soda Popinski]

When landing on a planet or moon using a powered descent, shut down your engines a split-second before hitting the ground, rather than throttling down (set a hotkey in the VAB). I've found that this greatly reduces the risk of having your lander topple over since you have no residual thrust from your engines which could cause the craft to "bounce" back.

I'll add to that use RCS to thrust down ("N" key) when you touch down to both avoid bouncing up, and toppling side-ways.

[Martijn404]

- Use the same Action Groups for all your rockets. That way, when you dock 2 vessels, the "deploy ladders" and "fire lander engines" commands aren't mixed up.

- All Normal and Radial force is most effectively used FAR from the celestial body. Pro and retrograde are most efficient CLOSE to a body.

- Calculate Moho paths using Eve gravity assist by first choosing an Eve> Moho transfer window and then making sure you arrive at Eve from Kerbin on the right day. This saves both dV on your Hohmann transfer to Moho, as well as for circularizing over Moho as you're coming in from a lower orbit. Understand and use Launch Window Planner!

- Shift-Tab for changing focus back sounds useful, but it involves SHIFT! Which means throttle!

- Remapping the Stage button to Pause/Break takes a little getting used to but saves a lot of accidents!

- When going to the Jool moons, it makes a huge amount of difference WHERE on it's orbit you encounter a moon. From a Kerbin Hohmann transfer to Tylo orbit only takes 300m/s when you encounter Tylo when its on the sunny side of Jool, but 6300m/s on the side away from the sun. That is because Tylo orbits at 2000m/s which is roughly the same speed as you have relative to Jool, from the Hohmann transfer. Relative to the Sun, Tylo moves at Jool's 4000m/s, +/- 2000m/s from Tylo's orbit, so between 2000 and 6000m/s.

In practise I finetune my orbit on entering Jool's SOI, move it to *where* i want to encounter Tylo's orbit. Then I fiddle with my pro/retrograde speed for *when* I encounter Tylo itself. Usually 10-20m/s is enough as Tylo orbits fast and its very far out.

[spacetortoise1]

I just discovered a super lazy way to rendezvous with something. Just set your target, make a maneuver node behind your ship and then timewarp while dragging the maneuver, it will move behind you so you can see the intersect points get closer and closer, not making random nodes and stopping the time warp.

[Brotoro]

Doing a quicksave/reload will put your re-packed parachutes back in the staging sequence.

[KerbMav]

The game does not save shortly after loading a savegame. So, if you messed up and get thrown at with errors of crafts not being loaded, just ALT-F4 out and your save is still safe.

[Brapness]

Attempting to reach Duna from Moho by slingshotting around Kerbol, whilst awesome, is far less efficient than flying straight to Duna

[nadreck]

Doing a quicksave/reload will put your re-packed parachutes back in the staging sequence.

Wow, that would be neat! That one is a frustration and now I have a work around.

BTW OP (that bit of vernacular makes me think of Ron Howard in Andy Griffith) thanks for starting this thread it has been a gold mine!

Here are my contributions:

1-) Use 4 radially spaced high power lights as landing lights on vertically landing craft, use them in the day time, and use get a tool that can help you align your craft on landing, determine (with a little practice) AGL altitude accurately, works day and night, and can help protect against "terrain" risk.

2-) RTGs make very solid attachment spokes for wheels on rovers (I have a rover/lander that uses them)

3-) an inline docking port (aligned to point up) is a perfect "control from here point" for VTOL craft using the 24-77 thrusters mounted perpendicular on a fuselage

[User Unrelated]

I was having trouble with accidentally releasing stages too early, particularly on stressful, twitchy landings.

so I started adding a bunch of empty stages between key staging components, so that "just in case"... I don't crack my return stage in half and fire the solid separatron booster stage while landing on the Mun.

[Superfluous J]

Attempting to reach Duna from Moho by slingshotting around Kerbol, whilst awesome, is far less efficient than flying straight to Duna

You may need to specify there that you mean "time efficient." If you're looking for fuel efficiency gravity assists are all the rage.

In this game, neither time nor fuel is a stopgap (yet) so the only true commodity is player time. While the more direct approach gets you there faster in real time, the gravity-assist route has more to do along the way and many find that challenge fun.

[Superfluous J]

One I discovered last night:

If you alt-click to copy a strut, the strut you place down will automatically connect in the same way that the original strut was connected. Makes strutting around the outside of asparagus stages far easier. It also works with fuel lines and is just as beneficial.

[NoPanShabuShabu]

Put a flag or probe core at the end/start of the runways (KSC and Island) to make for easier landing. Knowing that the runways are both exactly East-West, if the indicator for the target runway is at 90/180, then your lined up. You can also target them to get them on the navball, which is super handy, but stay in Surface mode.

The day after I had this brainstorm I was thinking that I should sign up on the forum and tell the world about this great idea, and suddenly saw it all over the place.

[thereaverofdarkness]

1.) I always notice that optimal points for doing things tend to occur at specific points on the navball or along an orbit. For instance, you can align your orbit with another by burning north at the descending node or south at the ascending node; to put your orbit along the equator of the planet when absent a point of reference, point your ship directly north or south. Don't use the nav ball, but rather point it straight up or down visually while in orbital camera mode. Then wait until the heading on the navball aligns with the north or south pole on the navball--that is when you burn to straighten the orbit onto the equator. Zoom out a bit until you can see the orbital paths of other planets, or use the starline//milky way to visually align your orbit to the equator.

2.) Ion engines are useless...if you power them with photovoltaic panels! If you make your ion probe as light as possible while able to power the ion drive without running out of battery power, then your ship's mass will be more than 50% panel. (If it's less than 50% panel, you have other things you can get rid of) The trick is to fit the ship with batteries, enough to run the engines for a couple minutes. These have far less mass. Add a small amount of panels, make sure your panel mass is significantly less than your engine mass. This way you get a ship that can accelerate 3-5x as fast as an ion probe with just panels. When the battery runs dry, take the throttle down and time accelerate until it fills back up again! You can also physics warp up to 4x if you hold shift and press >. Another advantage of this ship design is it actually gets a much greater fuel efficiency, making your ion probes really travel far!

3.) When you are approaching a ship for a rendezvous, you can easily decrease the closest approach distance. Set your navball to target, then find the green (X) reticle (against heading) and the pink (X) reticle (away from target). They should be close together. If you aim your heading such that the green reticle is between the heading and pink reticle, then thrusting forward will move the green reticle onto the pink reticle and decrease your approach gap. Only works when you are relatively close to the target in comparison to the size of the orbit. The pink and green reticles will move apart as you get closer to your target.

4.) You don't need to expend fuel or use parachutes/wings to land. Just stack several cubic octagonal struts into a rod that hangs below your craft. When you slam into the ground at orbital velocity, several octagonal struts will be destroyed, but if you put enough on, your ship will come to a gentle stop, balancing on the remaining struts. You can then eject them if you fit them on with a decoupler.

Edited November 22, 2013 by thereaverofdarkness

[babbos]

Burning on a high altitude for interplanetary transfers provides a way better and more accurate burn. Here's how to do it from launch to burn

1. Launch and get into circularized LKO, not more than 120km

2. In two, and only two spots you need to burn and raise your APO to ~600km. These two spots are at the edge of kerbin as faced from the Kerbol, right on top where half kerbin is illuminated and half is in the dark.

- If you are going to planets that are higher than kerbin then you need to burn on the left (west) side of Kerbin when faced from the side the kerbol shines on it

- If you are going to planets lower than Kerbin burn on the right (east) side.

3. Once you reach your new APO of ~600km circularize

4. Your burning point for interplanetary randezvou is ~20-30' ahead of you, create your perfect node.

5. Burn and win

The high altitude will give you more space for errors and thus more accurate ejections from kerbin

[magnemoe]

2.) Ion engines are useless...if you power them with photovoltaic panels! If you make your ion probe as light as possible while able to power the ion drive without running out of battery power, then your ship's mass will be more than 50% panel. (If it's less than 50% panel, you have other things you can get rid of) The trick is to fit the ship with batteries, enough to run the engines for a couple minutes. These have far less mass. Add a small amount of panels, make sure your panel mass is significantly less than your engine mass. This way you get a ship that can accelerate 3-5x as fast as an ion probe with just panels. When the battery runs dry, take the throttle down and time accelerate until it fills back up again! You can also physics warp up to 4x if you hold shift and press >. Another advantage of this ship design is it actually gets a much greater fuel efficiency, making your ion probes really travel far!

i don't understand this? 6 1x6 pannels is enough to power an solar ion drive around Kerbin at 90% trust so 7 should be enough. this is 0.0175*7 or 0.112 ton. 0.11 ton batteries will power you for a minute or two.

[thereaverofdarkness]

i don't understand this? 6 1x6 pannels is enough to power an solar ion drive around Kerbin at 90% trust so 7 should be enough. this is 0.0175*7 or 0.112 ton. 0.11 ton batteries will power you for a minute or two.

I quoted my figures from memory, and it was a few weeks ago I did it. But I know that when I switched from solar panels to batteries, I saved more than 50% mass for the same thrust, and was able to run it for just over 2 minutes before the battery ran dry. Maybe it has something to do with the truss structures that the panels attach to. But also, a Z-1000K battery weighs 0.05 tons and will power an ion engine for 83 seconds.

[Sarke]

When using RemoteTech 2, put a couple of static solar panels on the ship.

A couple of times I've launched and time-warped to the next maneuver only to find I forgot to extend the solar panels after launch so my batteries are dead (and thus the ship uncontrollable).

[Fluxpoint27]

'Cross fuel capable' means exactly that, and fitting SAS between your main booster engine and your fuel tank, makes a HUGE difference when launching instability prone ships. Only took me forever to figure that one out..