Kerbal Space Program

Fire_fly · 23 Jul 2013 at 15:29

Got a satellite to orbit Minmus last night, it is much more trickier than the Mun but I managed to get there in the end.

Once I arrived arrived and got into a roughly stable orbit I though I would be smart and use the ion engine to give me a nice round orbit, then realising that I had forgot to add the Xenon fuel tank to the satellite.

Also managed to touch down with a couple of rovers on the Mun over the weekend.

edgedemon · 23 Jul 2013 at 15:30

wow - bought this in the steam sale - brilliant and so so addictive

hardkore · 23 Jul 2013 at 15:33

I've literally just spent time making rockets which have the most amount of fuel left when in orbit.
I have been using mechjeb to do all the orbiting stuff, maybe that's why I'm struggling?

Davey_Pitch · 23 Jul 2013 at 15:45

Yup, I would get rid of Mechjab until you have a basic grasp of things. I've still not used it, though I might when I want to start going to further planets.

It's only my opinion, but I think if you can get into orbit, get yourself to the Mun (and Minmus), land, take off and make it safely back to Kerbin, all on your own without anything like Mechjab, you'll have given yourself some really good basic knowledge that you can use throughout everything else you want to do.

Reaper 392 · 23 Jul 2013 at 18:54

Anyone up for some mini-challenges? I've been doing silly stuff on KSP with a mate of mine like going for the land speed and the water speed record or the lightest manned SSTO craft to get to a stable Kerbin orbit. Since we have plenty of mods between us we've been using them but for any challenges here I would suggest going for stock parts only.

Anyone else up for this sort of thing? If you are feel free to suggest challenges

For anyone interested, with mods I managed 448m/s (1002mph) on land, 110m/s (246mph) on water and I got a 2.9 tonne manned craft into orbit (thanks mostly to the sabre engine from KW-Rocketry)

hardkore said:
I've literally just spent time making rockets which have the most amount of fuel left when in orbit.
I have been using mechjeb to do all the orbiting stuff, maybe that's why I'm struggling?

I would agree with Davey except I would keep mechjeb just for the delta-v information. Once you're done building your ship i would take it off again. If you have a very heavy ship that isn't very stable then the rotation information is also useful. My eve ship weighs about 350 tonnes once its in Kerbin orbit and loves to spin around on ascent. It can often take a good couple of minutes of solid RCS burning to stop the rotation even with 20 or so RCS thrusters, so I use mechjeb's info to make sure I'm pressing the right button

macmodder · 24 Jul 2013 at 15:53

Reaper 392 said:
I would agree with Davey except I would keep mechjeb just for the delta-v information. Once you're done building your ship i would take it off again

I really wish they would just incorporate delta-v into the vanilla release. It's pretty vital for some missions (returning from surface of Eve for example) and useful for all of them.

robmol · 24 Jul 2013 at 16:43

This is incredibly impressive, makes me feel rather incompetent.

Reaper 392 · 24 Jul 2013 at 17:13

any chance of a quick summary for those without half an hour to spare? I saw it was on the ksp weekly but i didn't pay it much attention then because of its length as well

Glaucus · 24 Jul 2013 at 19:16

.21 is out

Huggie86 · 24 Jul 2013 at 20:30

Damn it stuck at work tonight, want the update so bad

Glaucus · 24 Jul 2013 at 20:41

Already updated and landed on the mun, off too work in a bit though

Mun looks amazing from orbit. Bit disappointing when landed though, unless I jsut picked a dull area.

Overlag · 25 Jul 2013 at 00:15

I got lucky today. Spent most the afternoon building a new pc and deciding to delete my KSP folder to start fresh, only to find that 0.21 had come out! Great timing

zom247 · 25 Jul 2013 at 09:03

I bought this a couple of months ago when it was on offer but I can't bring myself to play it! Every time I look at the icon on my desktop I just think it's going to be too hard/complicated and I'll hate it and never play it again! I must grow a set and try it tomorrow as I've got the day off work.

KautoStar · 25 Jul 2013 at 09:38

I wouldn't bother with the games tutorials. They are really quite terrible, especially for type of game.

molinari · 25 Jul 2013 at 10:10

zom247 said:
I bought this a couple of months ago when it was on offer but I can't bring myself to play it! Every time I look at the icon on my desktop I just think it's going to be too hard/complicated and I'll hate it and never play it again! I must grow a set and try it tomorrow as I've got the day off work.

I bought it in the Steam sale and was a bit nervous to try it, but I did. I spent a few hours playing it, having fun but not really knowing what I was doing. I followed the tutorials but they are pretty poor and don't really help you much. I then found this YouTube vid which actually helped me to achieve my first successful launch, orbit, and re-entry (into the sea

)

. I'll be watching more like this to help me build up my knowledge of the game.

uncle_rufus · 25 Jul 2013 at 12:24

Attempted my first ever Mun landing last night... Decided not to risk any Kerbals and try to land a little probe lander first. It turned out to be the right decision because I just couldn't nail the landing at all :confused:

My speed was just far too high and I've been trying to think why...

So is this what I did wrong - Once in orbit around the Mun I burnt retro-grade at the Apoapsis to bring my trajectory into contact with the surface but at a very shallow angle.... I think this is where I went wrong - for a planet with drag and an atmosphere to get through like Kerbin I guess this is necessary but for the Mun do I just need to burn retro-grade very hard to bring my orbital speed almost to a complete stop and then just float down to the surface?

bJN · 25 Jul 2013 at 12:30

It will depend entirely on your ship design and what your landing module has power wise! I hadn't updated the game for months and then decided to start playing it again a couple of days ago and loving it again so much. Got several launches completed with successful orbits and landings, satellites up in orbit too.

Need to start a design to get to the Mun and beyond though! The rockets just seem to eat fuel like there's no tomorrow though (with no mods)!

Squark · 25 Jul 2013 at 12:37

I'll give that 101 video a watch later, I could do with some tips.
Thanks for the link

Glaucus · 25 Jul 2013 at 12:49

uncle_rufus said:
Attempted my first ever Mun landing last night... Decided not to risk any Kerbals and try to land a little probe lander first. It turned out to be the right decision because I just couldn't nail the landing at all My speed was just far too high and I've been trying to think why...

So is this what I did wrong - Once in orbit around the Mun I burnt retro-grade at the Apoapsis to bring my trajectory into contact with the surface but at a very shallow angle.... I think this is where I went wrong - for a planet with drag and an atmosphere to get through like Kerbin I guess this is necessary but for the Mun do I just need to burn retro-grade very hard to bring my orbital speed almost to a complete stop and then just float down to the surface?

Shallow angle is harder, as you have to kill more horizontal speed, meaning your spacecraft is in the wrong orientation when you are close to the floor. Probably the more efficient delta-v though at a guess.
You can't float down to the surface, the mavity will accelerate you to ~400m/s+
Depends on your TWR, but I just get down to 15km~ go hell for fire till get to 100~ m/s then you need to land at sub 5m/s with as little horizontal speed as possible.

Darg · 25 Jul 2013 at 12:57

uncle_rufus said:
Attempted my first ever Mun landing last night... Decided not to risk any Kerbals and try to land a little probe lander first. It turned out to be the right decision because I just couldn't nail the landing at all My speed was just far too high and I've been trying to think why...

So is this what I did wrong - Once in orbit around the Mun I burnt retro-grade at the Apoapsis to bring my trajectory into contact with the surface but at a very shallow angle.... I think this is where I went wrong - for a planet with drag and an atmosphere to get through like Kerbin I guess this is necessary but for the Mun do I just need to burn retro-grade very hard to bring my orbital speed almost to a complete stop and then just float down to the surface?

You don't want to cut orbital velocity completely at that stage, you'll still fall very fast to the surface due to mavity. You probably do want to come in a bit steeper than you would for a planet with atmosphere though.

As you're approaching the surface, maybe 10km up, start slowing your velocity by burning retrograde, this will also have the effect of slowing your lateral as well as vertical velocities. By 5km you want to be down to around 200m/s, as you get closer to the surface, around 500m you want to have completely removed any lateral velocity with a relatively slow -30m/s vertical speed. Once you can see you're getting close to the surface try zeroing your velocity then slowly letting the craft drop down at around 4-5m/s and try to keep lateral at 0. It's also handy if you can aim at a flat part of the surface