Kerbal Space Program

[trader/warrior]

One thing I've started wondering is whether I am getting into orbit of Kerbin properly, though. So I go straight up until I hit 10-12k, then I burn at 45 degrees to the horizon until my AP reaches 30-35k.. Then I burn fully laterally until I'm in orbit.. and my periapsis does finally poke out from underneath the planet, and voila, I have an orbit!

To maximize the efficiency of your ascent the key is to let gravity do as much as possible of the actual turning for you, so you get the most possible thrust to speed you up rather than changing direction. I haven't looked to much into it, but I'm pretty sure the best way is to turn 45 degrees at 10k as you said but after a short burn pull back up to about 60 degrees slightly under the yellow direction marker and then keep your thrust at or just slightly below your rockets direction while gravity pulls it towards orbit.

Sort of.. parts of it are still in the atmosphere, right? So I've got to get over my apoapsis and burn until the periapsis goes above 60k or so, right?

But I can't - because I'm still in the atmosphere, and would crash back into the ground if I stopped burning.. So I burn slowly, to keep myself from descending while I travel towards the apoapsis, but that increases my apoapsis as well. So by the time I get there, my orbit is rather.. eliptical. Of course I can then correct that once I'm at the highest point in my orbit, but..

Keep in mind how much the atmosphere drops off. After 20-30k you'll at most lose a few thousand meters so it can usually be ignored above that during launch.

What I usually do is set up a maneuver to circularize the orbit at my apoapsis around 80-100k, and unless you are dropping fuel tanks or such the burn time displayed should be pretty accurate to get a circular orbit straight out of launch.

Another way if you have enough power is to burn untill apoapsis is at your desired orbit, then wait untill your craft is 30 seconds or so away from apoapsis and then burn so that you see the countdown stop and start to reverse as you "push" the apoapsis in front of you. Balance this untill you have orbit.

Another question, this one regarding rocket assembly. Say my 2nd and 3rd stages aren't aligned properly in terms of.. how to explain this.. Say that the 2nd stage has 8 boosters but the top one only 6. I can spin and spin and spin the 2nd stage all I want using Q and E, yet it never aligns with the 3rd stage.. It just moves far too much when I hit Q or E, so I can't ever align them. Is there a way for me to finetune the rotation and align my rocket parts properly so that it is more stable?

Not sure if it's what you're after, but Shift(or is it alt?) + QWEASD is fine adjustments.

 

[Leonel]

I'm definitely downloading that when I get back home from the holidays. Going to rocket crane it, ala Curiousity rover then fly the crane out into a crater.

 

[cardgame]

To circularize your orbit, burn 5-10 degrees under the horizon until your TVV is horizontal (and check the map occasionally to make sure you don't drop your peri below atmo until you get the hang of circularization).

 

[Luckymoose]

You should do all of your burns on the map. There is no benefit to watching your ship in an orbital burn.

 

[cardgame]

<nvm>

 

[warpus]

Keep in mind how much the atmosphere drops off. After 20-30k you'll at most lose a few thousand meters so it can usually be ignored above that during launch.

That's what I used to think.. but recently I have started using the map a lot more often for these maneuvers, and started noticing that my orbit degrades quite a bit and at times the periapsis is dropping so fast it seems like it will disappear beneath the planet completely. Now, this might be very well normal, but I just don't remember it happening before, when I'd go between map view and rocket view.

Right at the time when I started using the map view more, I re-designed my rocket, so I wasn't sure if this had always been happening and was normal enough, or if my new rocket was screwing crap up.

I wasn't quite sure how thin the atmosphere gets where, so thanks for that info

 

[cardgame]

Am I the only one who can't use throttle in map view? The only control I have over it is to kill it off entirely with X.

 

[warpus]

Am I the only one who can't use throttle in map view? The only control I have over it is to kill it off entirely with X.

You can't when your navball is hidden. Pull it up and it should work.

 

[Leonel]

You can use the throttle in map view?! I've been playing this game longer than you all have and I'm finding this stuff out for the first time!

 

[cardgame]

Marvelous, thanks.

 

[Luckymoose]

You can do everything in map view, even open solar panels.

 

[warpus]

Can you see how much fuel you have left? That very useful tidbit of information disappears when you hit M.

I'm going to try to send a successful mission to Duna again. I succeeded once, but, if you remember, I sent a lander and a warpus-style rover. The rover landed (successfully or not, I have no idea) 20km away from where my lander did, and my lander had its hatch welded shut by accident, so the mission was a total failure in that regard Oh yeah, I think the lander also fell over.

It felt good to get there in the first place though. My rocket has been redesigned for days, but I've been busy eating and drinking with family.

Let's get this show back on the road!

 

[warpus]

Is there a way to get rid of debris?

 

[Joecoolyo]

Can you see how much fuel you have left? That very useful tidbit of information disappears when you hit M.

Click escape to get the escape menu, then click it again and you should have the resource tab appear in map mode.

That's how I get it to stay open.

 

[warpus]

I just had my first Dunawalk!

Here is my lucky kerbonaut looking away from the exploding ship that was supposed to take him back home.

Spoiler :

There were a couple problems with this mission.. It started out well enough:

Spoiler :

It seemed like I got my angles right (I even spilled a full glass of water on the floor trying to measure crap without any proper mathematical tools), but the mission seems to have had several critical flaws:

1. The lander was too big
2. The http://ksp.olex.biz/ calculator gave me an ejection velocity that I did not reach. I stopped burning early because I saw a Duna entry thing pop up and disappear - so I burned retrograde and got back to it. Fast forwarded, and tried to add a maneuver to get an orbit.. but it ended up costing me 2200m/s and a whole crapload of my fuel.. I had to basically crash into the planet at full speed at that point, still somehow hoping that I would have enough fuel to get home (yeah, right).. I was going so fast that I had to use up 99% of my remaining fuel slowing down in the atmosphere.. I used 4 parachutes and even then just barely slowed down enough... but something happened and crap blew up - i was still going too fast. Next thing I know I'm just in my tiny capsule, so.. yeah..

So.. I got my initial angles wrong? Or I shouldn't have stopped burning after I saw the Duna entry thing come up?

The way I inserted into Duna orbit the first time around seems easier and less risky.. (I matched the orbit almost exactly and then swooped in)

I ended up at the south pole by the way. There's ice everywhere. The mission was worth it, even though one man is going to be really bored for a quite a while. I seem to be dozens if not 100+ of kilometres from the dunes that I flew there to see in the first place. I'm gonna have this guy walk towards them while I sleep, we'll see how far he gets.

Click escape to get the escape menu, then click it again and you should have the resource tab appear in map mode.

That's how I get it to stay open.

Sweet, I'll give that a try, thanks.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I am missing so much cool stuff. When I get back, I'm going to spend a good hour or three just reading through this read and spamming out replies.

 

[warpus]

I had a bit of a meltdown when trying to design a new rocket yesterday: it was taking hours, everything was infuriating me, and in the end I ended up with a missing wall, two dead relatives, and a slight distaste for certain UI aspects of the game.

Just kidding about some of that, but this game turned into a bit of an obsession for me. I'd wake up at 7am on a saturday after going to bed at 3am and think "OMG I HAVE TIME TO TRY TO LAND ON THE MUN NOW. I will catch some zzs after I land".. and next thing I know it's 8pm and I still hadn't eaten any food that day. My imaginary girlfriend/shrink/voices in my head tell me that that's not a very healthy thing to do.

My last session was extremely frustrating and saw me rebuild a rocket from scratch 2 or 3 times.. plenty of ctrl-z's and just a lot of activity that I didn't find particularly enjoyable.. Designing rockets is fun, but.. Once your rocket gets complicated enough, it becomes tedious and/or even dangerous to make changes. I don't know if it's just me, but either way I'm taking a short break. Maybe my complaints will be resolved when the next version is released.

I also found this today though, so I might be playing again sooner than I think.

 

[warpus]

My first time playing again and I tried out a far more minimalistic rocket design with far less crap going on... It ended up not being big enough in terms of allowing me to get home after landing, but it was A LOT easier to get into orbit from the launch pad.

This is a rover and return pod on top of it. The idea was to land on the wheels, then decouple the lander, fly upwards a bit, land again on the legs, and hope that the lander has moved a bit. Here I am still falling down, trying to figure out how close the ground is.

Spoiler :

Aw crap, landed on a slope, not to mention moving sideways quite a bit

Spoiler :

Fortunately the wheels happened to be aligned in the direction I was moving in - this happened purely by accident, really.. I ended up easily separating the return vehicle

Spoiler :

And landing it, with the rover in sight

Spoiler :

I landed on a slope like I said, and the rover was making its way down that slope.. I had to send Bill after it

Spoiler :

When I got there, I accidently bumped into the rover, and it went flying. It was weird - it wasn't that much of a bump - it's like mysterious forces were at work. The lander landed some ways away and I went to investigate

What's going on here? Bill was freaked out

Spoiler :

The game was re-loaded and Bill was faced with a strange feeling of dejavubutnotquite when he caught up with the rover this time. He tried getting into the rover, but the F thingy wasn't showing up anywhere.. I used [ and ] to get to the rover, and then tried using G to lower the wheels, but that didn't seem to do anything.

Spoiler :

Before bumping into my rover and wasting any opportunity to actually use it, I did manage to get Bill into/on top and tried to use it. And.. No matter what I tried, the rover wouldn't move. Does this rover need a power source? Or was it messed up because there was a decoupler attached to it? I tried using W A S D, while Bill was in the rover, and nothing.. tried the IJKL keys too, and nothing... I wasn't sure if I messed it up by landing on it maybe, which I thought was unlikely...

What a strange place, this mun.

I went back to my lander, after spending a bit of time trying to find documentation for the rover.. but in the end I decided to screw it and see how far I could get with the fuel I had left back at the lander 500m away. I just barely had enough to get in Mun orbit. The mission could have been a success with a slightly better design! I am going to beef up my rocket a BIT. The second stage needs to be larger and that should be enough for a similar mission to the mun.. I think.

I'm going to do some tests with the rover on Kerbin too.. to hopefully see where I messed up

 

[cardgame]

You have to put a command pod on the rover or it won't do anything. It's just another piece of debris.

 

[warpus]

Haha.. So basically all I did there was an interesting landing with a 2 stage lander on wheels. Awesome

Bill was probably sitting there the whole time, thinking: ".. Where is he going with this?"