Kerbal Space Program

[warpus]

@hobbsyoyo

Ahh looks like I misunderstood that one step, re: my question about your step 7.

I thought the part you bolded was in relation to the initial burn that gets you the intercept. So nevermind

Your instructions are good, no worries.

It doesn't help that I'm swamped at work and can't really respond right now.. or that I usually do not play the game sober

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Drunk docking is the only way to do it!

 

[trader/warrior]

The scenario called "orbiting the moon" or something like that is good for final stage docking training, it has a cool Apollo 11 replica with the Lunar Module docked to the Service module.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

That is awesome.. How is the lag?

The lag is awesome too (and i have an i7 2600). But only at the first stage when the 64 boosters (yes now they are 64) are pushing, from that point it is like any other big rocket.

The new even heavier version (5500 tons) has an stage more to circularize better and reach higher orbits which is placed over the payload, it pull instead of push (this pic is of a previous version the final one has 64 boosters and some other details):

Spoiler :

An useful thing i have learned about large rockets with complex stages is to add tiny retro-boosters to leave the used stages behind quickly that way there is not accidents.

Well it was hard but finally i have this big gas station orbiting. Is time to learn docking.

Spoiler :

 

[warpus]

The Christian Space Program proudly announces its FIRST EVER SUCCESSFUL MOTHER%&(^#^& DOCKING

Space station "Cross of Christ" is now operational with 6 inhabitants and luxurious 3-person capacity quarters ready for the space pope.

Spoiler :

Unfortunately the beautiful gigantic solar panels that were on the piece that was put into orbit first (the long top symmetric part with the middle multi docking piece) were either ripped off during launch or forgotten to be installed in the first place by a forgetful engineer.. or removed right before launch by an Islamic saboteur. Some say that gigantic solar panels are a sin in the eyes of God and that whatever happened was probably for the best. Others think that they would have looked friggin awesome

Either way, I've learned a couple things during this mission (which surprisingly enough didn't last too long):

- The closer your orbit shape is to the orbit shape of the thing you're trying to dock with, the less the markers on your navball will jump around. I saw basically ZERO jumping! This was incredibly helpful.

- When you initially start burning retrograde wrt to your target your orbit is going to start getting wonky, if you press M and check it out (compared to the other object). However the closer you get to your target and the more you repeat the "1. burn retro 2. burn towards target" process, the more your orbit begins to take on the shape of the other orbit. I wish I could have seen an in-corner version of the map so I could observe this process in action because I'm very curious as to how exactly it gets from A to B. By the end, right before I docked, my orbit was almost exactly the same. You could barely tell the difference.. I did not see this happening with my earlier attempts.. I think taking special care to match the orbits really really helps.

- Placing the RCS thrusters at the centre of gravity is a huge help.. and I know that this was pointed out to me before.. and I did listen to that piece of advice, but this time I did everything SUPER carefully.. and it really paid off. I wasn't sure how to deal with the fact that the loss of fuel was going to change my centre of gravity.. so I didn't. It didn't seem to have an impact, but I can see how it can with larger vessels.

- When things are symmetric, everything is a lot easier

- Keeping your docking ports as close as possible to the centre of mass of your station helps a lot too. That way they move far less when you rotate your station around its centre of mass.

- When you're docking, only dock using ships that have a docking port at the tip. Anything else and .. good luck.

I got better at using RCS, especially H, N, Q, and E. The other keys however, still annoy me, and I'm still not used to them. The tip somebody gave to align stuff to the navball (and I believe Scott did this too) gave me some ideas, and I did include that in my "docking solution", but in the end it was done by eye and moving the camera around.

The docking camera didn't help at all - because when I look at it and use RCS, I get disoriented. The navball has the target right there and it tells me exactly which direction is which in terms of where I'll end up when I press left or right or up or whatever. My brain likes this. Trial and error keyboard touches don't work for me at all yet - I try to do it, but then always end up just crooked and crap and I reload, because it's far easier to return to where I was than to try to orient myself the right way again.

So I've done it, and I think I could do this again, but.. I don't know if I could easily dock much larger pieces, in order to build a starship to send to other planets for larger missions. Does anybody have tips for that sort of thing? What should I be keeping in mind? Are there standard things that I need to consider when doing this?

Also, any comments on my station design? Interested to hear what you guys think I could improve... If you're wondering why my starting piece has 2 ASAS units, it's because I was trying really hard to send something up that was 100% symmetrical, or at least close to it.

I also don't quite understand the ascending/descending node thing. These are the nodes you burn at to change your inclination properly? The min/max sort to speak? Scott touched briefly on these 2 things in his docking video, but I missed what he was saying, and from what I remember he was almost saying it in passing. This is something I need to know when sending a mission to Duna for example, when I need to dock with my return ship when my lander comes back from the surface.. right? Matching orbits seems really easy when your inclination is already matching. I am not sure how well I would do if they were radically different.. or even slightly.

So I've done it! It feels good and I've learned many things, but I don't really know if I want to dock anything else until they fix the couple things that were irritating me during the process

Right after I docked and the view changed I literally jumped out of my seat and started screaming like a madman, swearwords flying left and right, my arms raised in fists, pumping back and forth. I am not even kidding when I say that I have NEVER celebrated ANYTHING with that much ferocity and emotion. It's been like a half an hour and I can still feel my throat tingle from the literal screaming. I am not kidding. I was screaming with joy

This was basically what I did right after the camera view changed.. except I remained standing I wouldn't be surprised if I freaked out my neighbour with my screaming.. I wonder what she thought I was celebrating. She probably thinks I won the lottery or something

Spoiler :

This game really brings out emotions in me not even women could.

 

[cardgame]

Larger docking is essentially the exact same thing as small-scale, just be careful with your RCS thruster placement and make sure you bring enough fuel. Also, be damned careful about how fast you go to the docking target, RCS thrusters will not slow you appreciably over even a 60 second timespan, and you will collide at 1.8m/s completely obliterating your target.

edit: ascending/descending nodes are your inclination markers relative to the planet or selected docking target. To match or change inclination, burn normal or anti-normal at those nodes as they are essentially the ap/pe of inclination. 0 degrees is perfect, but unachievable. 0.1 or -0.1 is perfectly acceptable. Coming in at an inclination of 0.5 degrees or so can help line up an otherwise boring/difficult docking intercept, but be aware the relative velocities will be greater.

 

[warpus]

Larger docking is essentially the exact same thing as small-scale, just be careful with your RCS thruster placement and make sure you bring enough fuel. Also, be damned careful about how fast you go to the docking target, RCS thrusters will not slow you appreciably over even a 60 second timespan, and you will collide at 1.8m/s completely obliterating your target.

edit: ascending/descending nodes are your inclination markers relative to the planet or selected docking target. To match or change inclination, burn normal or anti-normal at those nodes as they are essentially the ap/pe of inclination. 0 degrees is perfect, but unachievable. 0.1 or -0.1 is perfectly acceptable. Coming in at an inclination of 0.5 degrees or so can help line up an otherwise boring/difficult docking intercept, but be aware the relative velocities will be greater.

Aha, that makes perfect sense about the nodes. I think I'd be ready for a Duna mission with docking if that's all there is to it.

Larger docking is essentially the exact same thing as small-scale, just be careful with your RCS thruster placement and make sure you bring enough fuel.

It seems like it'd be really hard to place your rcs thrusters properly on a relatively large and complex piece you're sending up to attach to a starship under construction. Any tips?

And now I need to figure out what I should do next in the game... Or if I should take a short break from it, because Football Manager has been calling my name. Maybe I'll fire up FM for a bit tomorrow and then switch back to Kerbal on the weekend.

Oh the life of a single computer geek. As if I'm ever getting married now that games like these are out.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Congrats Mang!!!!!!!!

I will post more later, got to go to class but I wanted to congratulate your mighty accomplishment! The space God favored your efforts this day.


---BTW, I can show you how to make a ship capable of landing on Duna and returning without using any docking if you want.

 

[warpus]

Congrats Mang!!!!!!!!

I will post more later, got to go to class but I wanted to congratulate your mighty accomplishment! The space God favored your efforts this day.

Thanks!

Now, I can die.

---BTW, I can show you how to make a ship capable of landing on Duna and returning without using any docking if you want.

Oh, I've done that before, landed a rover on there with the mission too Was my first successful interplanetary mission that I returned home from. I totally didn't have to drop the rover from my lander separately, but back then I really didn't know what I was doing, compared to my knowledge today. Made for an interesting mission and learning experience in terms of trying to get a good landing vector though.

I want to launch larger missions though. I suppose I could send several craft all at once, instead of docking them into a larger mothership. That actually wouldn't be so difficult I don't think - and now that I think about it probably a lot less tedious than docking everything together.

I'm not sure about the fuel implications though, especially the interplanetary stages. I will have to do some thinking - I want to return to Duna now that it's been mentioned. But what kind of mission? Hmm.. Maybe I should head to Moho next after all - that elusive intercept should be easier now. Or Jool?

This weekend might end up being very Kerbal after all. Tonight I play FM thought - my team is getting impatient. I've been with them for 10 seasons and got them into the Premier League from the 8th tier and my wonderkids are in their 20s now. It's quite exciting. /tangent

 

[warpus]

Hey, how do you guys deal with the "sticky keys" issue? This happens to me during launch and I'm sure it happens to others. I'll hold down shift for a bit and get kicked out of the game with a stupid sticky keys popup. Win 7

 

[trader/warrior]

Grats on the docking!

It's time for you to do an epic Jool moon exploration mission IMO. Several moons in one go.

Control panel - Ease of Access - Change how your keyboard works - Set up sticky keys.

 

[warpus]

Jool *would* be fun. I went there once and the mission was a total failure

Which moons should I land on? I would prefer to land on one I could take off from, because I don't like to strand astronauts on planetary bodies unless I'm setting up a base.

Thanks for the sticky keys info yo

 

[Thorgalaeg]

First docking here too! It was specially hard because my ship was equipped with heavy RCS placed in projected structures to have more moment and better control in launching but in a smaller ship any little correction translated in a big rotation so it was a pain in the ass. I was not very clever and didnt think it would be a problem at docking while designing the rocket. In any case adding an aditional set of small RCS in my future designs will fix it. Translations OTOH were not a problem using the precission mode.

I continue thinking this game should have a much more completed interface, there is good bunch of raw data which would be nice to have in screen, for instance apo and periapsis times and distances or at the time of docking a way of knowing how you ship is oriented relatively to your objectives since trying to figure it using the chase view is a poor way of doing things (i dont want to be tiresome but they should take a look at Orbiter). I know the game tries to have a funny look like the sims or something, but spacial operations are complex and precise and we need more numbers. Mechjeb does a good job patching some aspects but the game should do it for itself.

Well, here is my manned ship attached to the gas station. Now i will see how refueling and such things work. However it will be another day since it is a bit too late here. (damn amazing game i need to sleep!)

Spoiler :

 

[warpus]

Congrats! Your docking job seems a lot more impressive than mine, good job.

I continue thinking this game should have a much more completed interface, there is good bunch of raw data which would be nice to have in screen, for instance apo and periapsis times and distances or at the time of docking a way of knowing how you ship is oriented relatively to your objectives since trying to figure it using the chase view is a poor way of doing things (i dont want to be tiresome but they should take a look at Orbiter). I know the game tries to have a funny look like the sims or something, but spacial operations are complex and precise and we need more numbers. Mechjeb does a good job patching some aspects but the game should do it for itself.

I wouldn't be surprised if the devs started talking to some of the mod creators into integrating the mods right into the game, perhaps in an altered state, before the full game is released.. I mean.. There's a lot of cool stuff the would be awesome in the final game and why should they spend time reinventing the wheel? The community has already done a lot of work for them, it'd be pointless to reinvent it all and go through the development process all over again.

There might be issues with profit sharing or whatever, but I can see a lot of mod creators being content with having their names in the credits and maybe what.. I don't know. Free 10 copies of the game to give to friends.. or whatever.

Either way though, they still seem to have along way to go in terms of delivering a polished product, and I think the community sort of realizes that. Development takes time - we're lucky they're letting us play alpha versions of the game in the first place! And as such should not really be complaining about lack of features.. and no I am not giving you crap here for doing that, after all I am probably the worst offender

What's your next mission? I am thinking of sending a fleet of habitat modules, rovers, and a return vehicle to Duna and landing them right at the edge of one of the caps. That, or since I just realized it's already 9:30pm, I might try to put a giant rover on the Mun. I also wouldn't mind sending some probes to map surfaces of planetary bodies for me, to find interesting places to land and explore. Ahh so many options. I will have to think about this

 

[cardgame]

How would you like more information to be integrated with the GUI? Mechjeb does a passing job but as a stock setup it's rather horrifying to imagine.

I'm thinking take the most important bits [Inclination, AP/PE, vessel weight, possibly d∆, seconds of burn-time remaining per stage, (damn, they tried, but the resources tab is pretty useless for me)] and put it along the bottom left and right of the Navball.

 

[warpus]

They could have a sexy female AI hologram kerbinette flying around and offering paperclip-like tips during missions

"It looks like you're trying to get a Duna intercept.."

Then later, once you've turned off the beginner/paperclip mode and have learned how to do stuff, she could chat you up about the mission and offer quips and nerdy jokes within context of what's happening.

I guess that could get annoying

Nevermind, bad idea.. but I would love to see a bit more information onscreen in various places.

 

[cardgame]

I told you about the telescopes, man!

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Congrats! Your docking job seems a lot more impressive than mine, good job.

Thanks. It took me ages though. And it was not totally clean. the manned vessel had the mechjeb thingy mounted in the front but was destroyed in a colission at aprevious attempt (the mechjeb data you can see in the pic comes from the module mounted on the gas station). So any further operation with it is going to be totally at wild guess ("a ojímetro" as we said in spanish)

And what is that big grey indicator at the left up corner at your "cross of christ" pic? Some sort of addon?
Also mechjeb has a tool which matches your orbit to the inclination angle of your target orbit. It iscalled rendez vous module.

I wouldn't be surprised if the devs started talking to some of the mod creators into integrating the mods right into the game, perhaps in an altered state, before the full game is released.. I mean.. There's a lot of cool stuff the would be awesome in the final game and why should they spend time reinventing the wheel? The community has already done a lot of work for them, it'd be pointless to reinvent it all and go through the development process all over again.

There might be issues with profit sharing or whatever, but I can see a lot of mod creators being content with having their names in the credits and maybe what.. I don't know. Free 10 copies of the game to give to friends.. or whatever.

Either way though, they still seem to have along way to go in terms of delivering a polished product, and I think the community sort of realizes that. Development takes time - we're lucky they're letting us play alpha versions of the game in the first place! And as such should not really be complaining about lack of features.. and no I am not giving you crap here for doing that, after all I am probably the worst offender

Of course i am not complaining. This game is totally brilliant. However i think that the intentions of the developer is to give it a casual look with the most simple interface possible so people do not get scared with tons of data which may not be very intuitive at first, but i think this way the game losses potential. Obviously games like this with accurate newtonian physics are not for casual gamers anyway but for people already interested in the topic so some hard data would not do any harm.

What's your next mission? I am thinking of sending a fleet of habitat modules, rovers, and a return vehicle to Duna and landing them right at the edge of one of the caps. That, or since I just realized it's already 9:30pm, I might try to put a giant rover on the Mun. I also wouldn't mind sending some probes to map surfaces of planetary bodies for me, to find interesting places to land and explore. Ahh so many options. I will have to think about this

No idea. I have still to learn a lot of things about what all the different parts are for, all those utility and scientific things, how exactly fuel tanks and electricity works (many times my ships rendered unusable it took me several hours to discover it was because the batteries were exhausted, etc. So i think i am no yet prepared to go other planets. So i am going to develop a bit more my space station before going further beyond. (i realise that my spacial program resembles a lot the real one i hope i dont get stuck too)

BTW are there interesting places to explore? I mean are the different planets surface homogeneous or are there particular things to discover? That would be great! I can imagine caves, gas and minerals to drill or even lost extraterrestrial artifacts That would get a lot of players hooked. I hope the developers add things like that (i bet they are going to be very busy trying to add all suggestions from the fans) But thinking on it the possibilities are unlimited and maybe even doable!

 

[Thorgalaeg]

How would you like more information to be integrated with the GUI? Mechjeb does a passing job but as a stock setup it's rather horrifying to imagine.

I'm thinking take the most important bits [Inclination, AP/PE, vessel weight, possibly d∆, seconds of burn-time remaining per stage, (damn, they tried, but the resources tab is pretty useless for me)] and put it along the bottom left and right of the Navball.

What about a cuople of multifunctional screens superimposed over the different views which you can turn off and on. That way it would be possible to add almost unlimited amount of data using different pages. The MFDs could be modeled in the cockpit too to see them in the interior view. It would be like this but smaller and eyecandier to leave more room for the external views:

Spoiler :

And inside the cockpit

Spoiler :

It would be possible to add unlimited amount of data and useful things made by developers and also MFD addons made by users. That way the game could be highly enriched. Of course since i dont know anything about the sourcecode i dont know if such things could be easily implemented, but looking at mechjeb i would say it is.

 

[Leonel]

The Christian Space Program proudly announces its FIRST EVER SUCCESSFUL MOTHER%&(^#^& DOCKING

Space station "Cross of Christ" is now operational with 6 inhabitants and luxurious 3-person capacity quarters ready for the space pope.

Spoiler :

Unfortunately the beautiful gigantic solar panels that were on the piece that was put into orbit first (the long top symmetric part with the middle multi docking piece) were either ripped off during launch or forgotten to be installed in the first place by a forgetful engineer.. or removed right before launch by an Islamic saboteur. Some say that gigantic solar panels are a sin in the eyes of God and that whatever happened was probably for the best. Others think that they would have looked friggin awesome

Either way, I've learned a couple things during this mission (which surprisingly enough didn't last too long):

- The closer your orbit shape is to the orbit shape of the thing you're trying to dock with, the less the markers on your navball will jump around. I saw basically ZERO jumping! This was incredibly helpful.

- When you initially start burning retrograde wrt to your target your orbit is going to start getting wonky, if you press M and check it out (compared to the other object). However the closer you get to your target and the more you repeat the "1. burn retro 2. burn towards target" process, the more your orbit begins to take on the shape of the other orbit. I wish I could have seen an in-corner version of the map so I could observe this process in action because I'm very curious as to how exactly it gets from A to B. By the end, right before I docked, my orbit was almost exactly the same. You could barely tell the difference.. I did not see this happening with my earlier attempts.. I think taking special care to match the orbits really really helps.

- Placing the RCS thrusters at the centre of gravity is a huge help.. and I know that this was pointed out to me before.. and I did listen to that piece of advice, but this time I did everything SUPER carefully.. and it really paid off. I wasn't sure how to deal with the fact that the loss of fuel was going to change my centre of gravity.. so I didn't. It didn't seem to have an impact, but I can see how it can with larger vessels.

- When things are symmetric, everything is a lot easier

- Keeping your docking ports as close as possible to the centre of mass of your station helps a lot too. That way they move far less when you rotate your station around its centre of mass.

- When you're docking, only dock using ships that have a docking port at the tip. Anything else and .. good luck.

I got better at using RCS, especially H, N, Q, and E. The other keys however, still annoy me, and I'm still not used to them. The tip somebody gave to align stuff to the navball (and I believe Scott did this too) gave me some ideas, and I did include that in my "docking solution", but in the end it was done by eye and moving the camera around.

The docking camera didn't help at all - because when I look at it and use RCS, I get disoriented. The navball has the target right there and it tells me exactly which direction is which in terms of where I'll end up when I press left or right or up or whatever. My brain likes this. Trial and error keyboard touches don't work for me at all yet - I try to do it, but then always end up just crooked and crap and I reload, because it's far easier to return to where I was than to try to orient myself the right way again.

So I've done it, and I think I could do this again, but.. I don't know if I could easily dock much larger pieces, in order to build a starship to send to other planets for larger missions. Does anybody have tips for that sort of thing? What should I be keeping in mind? Are there standard things that I need to consider when doing this?

Also, any comments on my station design? Interested to hear what you guys think I could improve... If you're wondering why my starting piece has 2 ASAS units, it's because I was trying really hard to send something up that was 100% symmetrical, or at least close to it.

I also don't quite understand the ascending/descending node thing. These are the nodes you burn at to change your inclination properly? The min/max sort to speak? Scott touched briefly on these 2 things in his docking video, but I missed what he was saying, and from what I remember he was almost saying it in passing. This is something I need to know when sending a mission to Duna for example, when I need to dock with my return ship when my lander comes back from the surface.. right? Matching orbits seems really easy when your inclination is already matching. I am not sure how well I would do if they were radically different.. or even slightly.

So I've done it! It feels good and I've learned many things, but I don't really know if I want to dock anything else until they fix the couple things that were irritating me during the process

Right after I docked and the view changed I literally jumped out of my seat and started screaming like a madman, swearwords flying left and right, my arms raised in fists, pumping back and forth. I am not even kidding when I say that I have NEVER celebrated ANYTHING with that much ferocity and emotion. It's been like a half an hour and I can still feel my throat tingle from the literal screaming. I am not kidding. I was screaming with joy

This was basically what I did right after the camera view changed.. except I remained standing I wouldn't be surprised if I freaked out my neighbour with my screaming.. I wonder what she thought I was celebrating. She probably thinks I won the lottery or something

Spoiler :

This game really brings out emotions in me not even women could.

Oh yeah that is the greatest feeling in the world. Enjoy that feeling because from here on out, docking will be humdrum and mundane...