Kerbal Space Program

Turns out I had to purchase the parts from the R&D before I could use them

I swear though this game is gonna give me an aneurysm! Thought I'd give Duna another go but with a second detachable probe to land on its moon and the main probe to land on the surface.

I timed out beautifully: on my to Duna orbit I caught an encounter with the moon so separated the two probes, got the smaller one in a good orbit around the moon for later and headed for Duna with my main probe.

That's when I realised I didn't have any solar panels on the probe core once I separated the main engine! That's right,I did it again!

I know, I thought, I'll try to use the engine and the parachute to slow the decent enough to keep them together.

I forget I had time acceleration still on and hit hard!

Without thinking I hit the load quicksave.

The last quicksave I did was yesterday afternoon!!!!!

**** **** **** ****!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I lost all the science I'd gathered!

I'm so annoyed with myself right now.


I'll post some pictures up tomorrow to show my ridiculous failures :D


Anyway, how's everyone else's launches going?
 
Mechjeb, why do you do this to me? Set it to auto rendezvous with something, it did half then just stopped halfway through its follow, I'd left it alone, had loads of spare fuel, electric & rcs, and bam, nothing!

Same with asking it to dock for me, just starts calculating, moves a bit then nothing again (This is with a docking port selected as controlled & targeted) (Is there any easier way to taregt another crafts docking port than having to pan all over it with manual zoom cams from your own ship?
 
Managed to get my first Duna intercept last night :D

I had 2 issues though:
  • Forgot to put any batteries on the probe. I had solar panels but transmitting anything was a pain as it took agesssssss.
  • I got my intercept kind of wrong as I managed to get an orbit at around 270 degrees rather than a nice 90 equatorial heading. As I wasn't landing the probe I needed a decent orbit to return to Kerbin. Oh well more to learn for next time!
 
It's fun reading messages from relative newbies to Kerbal – I can tick each and every one of the mistakes off the list of mistakes I made (usually several times).

I tend now to do a sanity check once in Kerbin orbit on the fuel panel. If the battery level is dropping I go to unfurl my solar panels. It's then I realise that I don't have any, and it's only 5 minutes wasted.

I also now tend to put a couple or 4 of the simplest solar panels on, so I don't lose power if I forget to unfurl the main panels.
 
benhaha85:

It's relatively simple to fix as long as you do it before you do your orbital insertion burn. The moment you enter the sphere of influence of a planet or moon it shows you which way you are going to travel round it. If you are on the wrong side you just need to burn pointing at 90 degrees on you navball until your path travels through the planet/moon and comes out the other side. It's not to big a deal as long as it's done as soon as you enter the sphere of influence – the longer you leave it the more delta v is required.

You can also do the same thing to bring your periapsis closer.
 
Built a lander and skycrane, had a go at getting it on Eve - took a few attempts as the gravity is so much stronger, built a container for it out of panels and an adapter lol, seems to work quite well.

 
Nice one, looks good, what did you use you make the container and be able to jettison it in one go?

Put my first Kerbal on Eve and about half an hour ago, good old Bill may be out there for some time after he clipped a mountain side and had no RCS to correct!

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lol harsh,

RCS isn't that much good on eve in my experience, as the gravity is so strong - everything is just pinned to the deck.

I made the container with the rockomax adapter surrounded by structural panels, inside that there's the octagonal support, on top of which is a small stack decoupler - this is attached to the bottom of the rover, the top of the rover is attached to the skycrane.

The container basically acts as a heatshield for entry, once it's entered the atmosphere the first stage releases the rover from the container, the next stage triggers the skycrane, the third decouples it for landing,

I don't technically think I need the container, it's just kinda cool watching it come out lol
 
It certainly is that, was a nice video :D

I'll be trying Eve again tonight, maybe taking something more than one piddly lander though now I know about the gravity situation, would be great to be able to take something like a lander, rover & start of an Eve base, I have a nice reliable launch stack now, so just need to work on putting stuff on it!

Any advice from anyone regarding my mechjeb issues btw? I'm confused :(
 
Finally managed to get my lander/rover hybrid onto the main landmass of eve. Great fun just driving around. Might get it back to kerbin next. Mechjeb is very helpful! Have found it easiest to land on the poles of kerbin since they are so large and flat. Wheels certainly make landing easier, as does the mechjeb landing feature (although it terrifies me most of the time leaving the final burn to the last possible moment).

Have started extensively testing everything on kerbin first. Have forgotten key parts too many times when arriving at distant planetary bodies!
 
I hate to be johnny rain-cloud here, but do all of you guys talking about eve know that to get something from the surface of eve into orbit takes a considerably bigger rocket than it does to get into orbit from the surface of Kerbin?
(I think its 11500m/s d/v from ocean level compared to kerbin's ~4500m/s d/v, I don't know about the numbers from mountaintops but it is still considerably bigger than 4500m/s. You need ~2x the thrust:weight ratio to cope with eve's increased gravity as well)

Also, having tried (and failed due to a parachute failure) to make a rocket that can land on eve and get back to kerbin, the landers are quite large for trying to lug back to kerbin. To lift a ship consisting of the lightest pod, the lightest docking port, a tiny fuel tank and one or two of those tiny orange rocket motors from ocean level (totalling ~1.2 tonnes) I needed something like a 300 tonne lander to get into eve orbit.
 
I actually went to space!!!

I made a space plane using basic parts. I was inspired by the new bigass solid booster that got me entirely out of the earths atmosphere by flying entirely vertical, and basically did a huge loop the loop as I landed back at KSC:

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Version 2 just didn't work at all but looked cool:
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I then tried an SSTO, it suffered some pretty bad what I call "arse dragging". If anyone could clarify what actually causes this I'd be very grateful!!

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I then made a pretty good SSTO that managed to do a loop of Kerbin and land back at KSC. I didn't take any screenshots of the launch but I launched with normal jet engines until about 27,000 where the lrb took over:

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Batship
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After an hour of piloting and landing back at KSC I foolishly thought i'd fly to the island airfield to take some nice screens.

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I made it back to KSC though so yay!

Going to space is quite good in KSP!
 
almoststew1990 said:
I then tried an SSTO, it suffered some pretty bad what I call "arse dragging". If anyone could clarify what actually causes this I'd be very grateful
Click to expand...

Nice! Try pumping fuel to the front of the ship, it gets a bit tail heavy as it tends to use fuel from the front first.

EDIT: listen to this dude ↓↓↓↓
 
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