That's one of the things you learn while playing KSP, orbital mechanics are quite different from the standard SF "go where your nose points" space travel. Escaping the orbital pull of Kerbin means most likely that you are just in a solar orbit now, one that is probably almost the same as Kerbin's. Seeing planets is difficult too. It's not like in those cheap space backgrounds with half a dozen planets in view as soon as you break atmosphere. Seeing a planet as more than a white dot means you are damn close.
We have achieved orbit and descended safely back to Kerbin! Not bad for just the demo. How do you guys null out your roll rates? I'm fine with yaw and pitch, but the roll seems overly sensitive and I can't easily null it out.
You have to add SAS or ASAS modules to your craft. Then you activate them with the 't' key and they really help a lot. I dunno if they are in the demo though Also, you should watch the following video. It is the single most important tutorial I watched... http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com...Mechanics-101-A-Kerbal-Space-Program-Tutorial It is the first video in the post, called orbital mechanics 101. I guess I should mention this really has nothing to do with your question.
Exciting news from Kerbal Space Command. "We have suddenly just realized there is a perfectly good moon orbiting Eve with absolutely no Kerbals stranded on it." Kerbal high command, if that is their real name, set off immediately to rectify this grave injustice to Kerbals everywhere. A craft was constructed to carry some Kerbonauts to Gilly, the smallest moon in the Kerbol system. While filling the ships tank with fuel at the local stop n' go, (that is where they fill all the spaceships with fuel), when asked if he should 'fill-er-up?', a Kerbonaut replied to the attendant, 'half a tank should do. It's not like we are planning on returning or anything!' Then the craft lifted into the heavens. The huge eyes of Kerbals everywhere watched with great anticipation for the typical fiery explosions heralding the premature end of another highly successful flight. There was no exploding spaceship, no colliding boosters, and no random parts falling off for no apparent reason. And then it was gone. Go brave Kerbonauts. You carry with you the hopes and dreams of all Kerbals, who wish they may too some day, be stranded on an alien world far from home with no chance of ever being rescued. Many years of mostly random floating in space have passed, and by luck or something else, no, it was luck, I mean, what else could it be? (I only figured out about phase angles after this flight. So yeah, luck and lots of wasted fuel). The craft approaches Gilly and sets gently down on the tiny rock. "We are about to land. How is the fuel situation?" "We are running on fumes here." "Great job!" "We landed" "We can never go back home." "Great job!" "There is so little gravity on Gilly, look how high I can jump" "I can't wait to tell the Kerbals back home...Oh wait!" "Great job"
Thanks jellyfish. I watched this video: and was absolutely entranced. I'm so close to buying this. But how did he control his ship so well? I'm all over the place with mine - I don't have nearly that degree of control. My ship is always drifting this way and that, even with the smallest of manual changes. So how does he do that? What does a SAS do? I don't expect to be able to jump in a build a Mars lander, but where in God's name do you learn some of this stuff? The learning curve seems so ungodly steep...
SAS is an automatic stabilizer. basically you keep it on all the time and the ship shouldn't roll around by itself. Then you turn it off to steer, and as soon as you are pointed the way you want, you turn it right back on, and it stabilizes the ship and maintains heading and whatnot. It works really well as long as your ship is symmetrical. I think they belong in every rocket. SAS parts are available in the demo version so definitely add them to your rocket. Also maybe a few winglets might help with control. Also they look cool. I usually put like twenty of them all around and around and then when I eject a booster it clips some of the many winglets and the rocket blows up. So don't do that. Also, there is a learning curve. I have been to half the celestial bodies so far and I just today learned I have been doing it wrong all along. And there is still a lot I want to try and I don't even know how to do any of it yet. There are a lot of great resources available for learning what to do. And you can start having fun right away.
Ok, this looks like my next purchase (ya know, TODAY!). I wanted to lay out a few stair-step missions to get started. I was thinking about the following missions in the following order: 1. The John Glenn - Launch a Kerbonaut into space @ around 150,000m. 2. The Alek Leonev - Launch a Kerbonaut into space, perform an EVA. 3. The Gus Grissom - Launch two Kerbonauts into space, move to a higher orbit and then back to a lower orbit. 4. The Jim Lovell - Launch two Kerbonauts into space, orbit the mun. 5. The Lunkohod - Launch a lunar rover into space, land on the mun. 6. The Tom Stafford - Launch two Kerbonauts into space, orbit the mun, make a low lunar orbit 7. The Neil Armstrong - Launch two Kerbonauts into space, land on the mun, fly back to Kerbin. Is this is a good order and plan, or should I pursue other goals along the way? Oh, and are there any must-have mods?
Your plan sounds great :D I consider RemoteTech to be essential and KW Rocketry to be partly essential (I use the fairings but not the engines)
After seeing (I think it was) Calistas post about playing this with his kid, I did the same. My almost 3 year old kind of loves it, but it bores him. He likes to hammer the space bar about 30 seconds into the flight, which usually means insanely horrible death for the Kerbals. But it fills him with glee. Sometimes, he tells me that I'm him and he's papa. Yesterday, he said "You go to daycare, I'll go to work." I asked him what he's going to do, he said "fly rockets." I guess he thinks I work in the basement at my computer, and seeing as that's what he's seen me doing at my computer, it makes sense. I told him that was my dream job, and he kept saying "that's my dreeja." I think this game will improve for him as he gets older. And that it will be a great way to get him interested in space. I can't wait! At the moment, one of his favorite movies is Space Dogs, about Belka and Strelka, the first dogs to successfully orbit the world. It's a terrible movie, but he gets super excited when the rocket launches, now.
You can't go wrong with the mods on spaceport. Ignore the Sci-Fi sounding ones and and the others are likely to be fun.
Kerbol, the great sun in the sky, visible every day, looking down upon us all, mocking us, taunting us, reminding us of the one celestial body upon which no Kerbal shall ever be stranded and unable to return home. No more shall we live in shame. The day has come. Today, we choose the sun. We shall strand hapless Kerbonauts on the face of the sun. Wait, that's crazy. Let's strand some Kerbonauts on Moho instead. The Kerbal Space Program has entered the Protractor age. Armed with this mighty implement, we no longer cast about aimlessly in the icy void, hoping to bump into a passing planet by chance or ...luck or...ummm providence? Anyway, a nondescript Kerbonaut was overhead announcing to no one in particular that no interplanetary craft should leave Kearth without it. And so we do not. However, we are leaving without return fuel. Also flashlights. so if we end up landing on the dark side of Moho, that's gonna be a problem, as Moho is tidal locked to the sun. We might get lucky and land on the perpetual day side. It can't be any hotter than any of the numerous fiery explosions we routinely face every day on the launchpad, can it? We beseech the mighty protractor to impart it's great wisdom on this matter. But the mighty protractor is silent. Except for telling us exactly when to launch and when to burn for Kearth escape. On that matter it drones on and on and on. So here we are, floating about in interplanetary space, about to release our fuel tanks, when suddenly, from out of the darkness appears a puzzling sight. Moho, our destination. How can it be that we are ejecting our last tanks of fuel and we have already reached our destination. This has never happened before. Usually we just run out of fuel and then some Kerbonaut says 'we just ran out of fuel. I wonder if we arrived at our distant destination?' And then all the Kerbonauts look out the back window (of the space-ship. It has a back window ) and they see Kearth taking up about the whole view because we hardly got anywhere and we already spent all of our fuel allotment for the whole journey. But good, because that was our plan. We never wanted to make the return trip in the first place. And now this beacon, this guide, this damned protractor, has illuminated the path to our shining star (planet, whatever) without expending hardly any fuel at all. The Kerbonauts panicked. Okay, that is not unusual. What if there is enough fuel to return to Kearth? We will not be stranded. We will complete a round trip mission to the innermost planet of the Kerbol system, and return safely home to disgrace and utter shame at our failure to get stranded. By the way, this is one of the Kerbonauts saying all of this. And the other Kerbonauts agree. They are freaked out. Okay, that is not unusual either. For some strange reason it takes an enormous amount of fuel to land on Moho. I have no idea why. So all the fuel is used up during the landing and that drama is resolved. Moho is the closest body orbiting the sun. It is hot! Maybe when the sun sets it will cool off. Did I mention the part about the tidal lock? On a previous mission, the brave Kerbonauts discovered the descent ladder does not extend far enough to reach the ground. We had to make a tough choice whether to allocate our top scientists to solving the short ladder problem or getting enough fuel in the ship to insure a safe return mission. Just kidding. Despite working tirelessly on this project, and this project only, the scientists have still not managed to get the damn ladder all the way down to the ground. It gets closer though, so good job scientists! Maybe at some point in time far far away in the technologically advanced distant future? KSP - we can land on other planets but we cannot figure out how to build a ladder that reaches the floor! And now little Kerbal children everywhere (they have huge eyes) can stand proud. For as they lift the gaze of their massive eyes heavenward, they must no longer feel small (except the eyes) beneath the sun. For although no Kerbal is stranded on the sun, there are three proud Kerbonauts stranded on its closest neighbor, looking at the sun, watching it, and longing for home. Kerbal children are taught to imagine that all those stranded Kerbonauts may very well be establishing advanced civilizations on the distant worlds where they are stranded. Perhaps one such society will reach the near magic level of technology necessary to extend ladders to the floor. And maybe they are not the stranded ones, but we, the children left behind, are stranded and waiting for those brave Kerbonauts to return and rescue us. Meanwhile on Moho...
For what it's worth, I started a Let's Play on my first experiences. I don't know how long I'll keep it going, but it's kind of fun to do it right now. http://brokenforum.com/index.php?threads/kerbal-space-program-a-beginners-tale.4547/#post-398288
Check this out - A bunch of geeks Live Action Roleplay (in a manner of speaking) Kerbal Space Program. One guy is locked away as a pilot, in in-vehicle view, the others at mission control do maths on whiteboards. Awesome.
While we are waiting for our top scientists to solve the too-short ladder engineering problem, a task we are told may take millenia to complete, even with time-warp set to max, we decided to share some candid photos from our time documenting the Kerbal Space Program. Hope you like them. Start pilot Jeb photobombing his own launch. Wait a minute...If he is out here, who is piloting the ship? That leads us to our next photo. A typical succesful launch with star pilot Jeb. Here is a typical succesful trip to the supermarket with star pilot Jeb. Happy new year to Kerbonauts everywhere!
Anyone have a good, basic ship building guide or video? I tried following this one: but it didn't work. Different version, I guess, because it just couldn't make it (not to mention it looks like shit). I'm struggling to build a 3 man capsule that can actually get into space and then eventually get me to the moon. Edit - and the default ships must be pretty outdated - they don't even get off the launchpad! And is there a way to zoom out when building a ship? The +/- keys don't work.
Yeah, I know how to throttle up. The problem I'm having goes far beyond basic flight controls. I literally can't build a ship to get to the mun - something I could easily do in the demo. I've looked online and I can't find anything out there on v0.18 to get a 3 man capsule into orbit with enough fuel to burn to the mun. I know it's possible, but I'm having major difficulties. I don't know how to explain the difficulty without breaking it down component by component. The moon ship is fine - a 3 man capsule, half a fuel tank and the poodle. I'd go smaller, but it doesn't seem possible to go from a 3 man capsule to a FL fuel tank (I guess it's possible but then the ship is all fucked up aerodynamically). Needless to say, the poodle isn't going to do much more than get me in mun orbit, land and get off the mun. So now I need something to get me into orbit. That's the problem right there - small doesn't get me in orbit. Big weighs too much. The big "Mainsail" engine goes through fuel so fast it's friggin' useless. The smaller engines don't seem to have the lift. The boosters don't get me high enough. So on and so forth. I've been working on this much of the day and I'm still no closer to figuring it out, so a little constructive help would be cool. It doesn't help that I can't seem to go from 3 to 1. I can use a stack Tri-Coupler to go from 1 to 3, but can't seem to find a way to go from 3 to 1. Case in point: Stable rocket, but it doesn't even have enough juice to get into orbit, never mind to the mun.
Can you post some pics of your ship? [EDIT] Also a huge thing is terminal velocity. Don't go faster than the second number when at the first number height. meters-- m/s 500--105 1,000--110 2,000--120 3,000--130 5,000--160 8,000--215 10,000--260 13,000--350 15,000--425 16,000--470 32,000--2,250
Also, no big orange tank in there? It is a very handy one/size to use. Ok. Hmm. I will have to look later when I am at a PC. And you really shouldn't be shy about using mods. They are almost always scaled perfectly for the game's "realism" and so add a lot more options. You really need options as the default engines are few, fuel tanks too.
Can't find a way to put the big orange tank on there. That's part of what I was saying before - since I'm split into 3 stacks, I can't find any piece that gets me back to one big stack. Even putting three more solid fuel boosters on the above ship (stick one in between each of the 3 sets of 3) doesn't help. I'm still not into orbit and I'm already on my last fuel tank. I can't see any way of making that last all the way to the mun and back. Even on a perfect fuel run, the burn to get to the mun's orbit leaves me with 1/4th of a tank left. Not enough...
I've found that there is also an incredible amount of variation in how far you can go that depend on how well you fly your craft. For your first flights, you want to always point east to take advantage of Kerbin's spin. Second, don't go above the speeds in the chart above, third you want to absolutely minimize on maneuvers. You basically want to go straight up until at least 20k meters, then tilt east, then when your apoapsis is say 90-120k meters you point due east and wait until you are about 30 seconds from apoapsis then burn at full throttle. Don't pass your apoapsis...if it looks like you're going to, then tilt "up" a bit.
And as an example, here's my most successful mun lander. It has a *lot* of stages :) tall srbs discarded, short srbs fired then discarded, two 1440 2m tanks, then another two Then the middle section to get to the mun. (two sets of asparagus staging tanks) Then the lander Finally return with the middle section
Got you Blacky. I would suggest not using a tri-coupler and using a big orange tank or two in the central stack. Also, asparagus fuel lines will keep your central stack quite topped up, maybe even giving you enough for your Munar burn (or part of it, at least). More later.
I replicated your design and I'm having the same trouble. I can't get the ship into an orbit either. The first thing that strikes me is that you just can't use so many tanks...you're just adding all kinds of weight by having so many discrete tanks on there. With some pretty small modifications I created something that got to the mun, almost landed (legs were too short), got back into munar orbit, and ran out of fuel about 5 seconds before my return burn would have gelled. The difference was basically the number of discrete tanks.
They're in the structural section. There's a << and >> button to page through the items. If you can't see this on 18.2 there's a very strong likelihood that your install is corrupted.
I only have 2/3rd of a page of structural items and I got nothing that looks like those (see screenshot below). I strongly doubt my installation is corrupted because the game works. You sure those aren't an add-on or something?
lordkosc is right. First column, second row, red thing with framework base. And I've had a corrupted install where the updater didn't pull in all the parts...they're sort of discrete so the installer used to miss them somehow. But admittedly I have a lot of stuff installed and I forgot what the barebones structural section looked like. One other tip: The mainsail engine is currently broken. It can't be throttled up to 100% when attached to a rockomax 64 tank due to a known bug. If you attach it to the shortest 2 meter tank it will not overheat as easily but it's a hassle. The cooler way to go (ha!) is to use engine clusters. You take the smallest framework bit (center column, 2nd from bottom) and do either 4 or 6 symmetry on the bottom of the tank then put 1 meter engines on the framework piece. It is *extremely* fiddly though. Sometimes it just will not let you do it and you have to re align and re align over and over again until it works.
Blackadar This one is for you: Some general tips on getting to the Mun Ok, before we get started: Install MechJeb from Kerbalspaceport Install any other parts from there you fancy! In particular, the NovaPunch pack is great. You need MechJeb because we need it to do the maths and calculate TWR (thrust to weight ratios) and for it to give us an indication of Delta-V, burn times, etc. Now, build from the top down - as you would expect - as in, the top of your craft will land on the Mun. The middle, will take you to the Mun, the bottom will get you into orbit. Each stage needs to be able to shift the stage above it into position. This requires thrust. Have a look at this screenshot: At the top, a command capsule, ASAS, SAS, a fuel tank and more fuel tanks stuck on the side (just click 'em next to the other tank, they will be 'glued' on. Add a strut or two just to be sure). Fuel lines feed the centre.Landing legs are on the side tanks. Poodle engine. RCS scattered here and there and RCS fuel stuck underneath those side tanks. Actually, this is a lot more fuel than is required, even for a return trip, as far as I can tell. You could trim this down or ditch the side tanks altogether. I like them because I like to have a very wide lander to reduce the chance of toppling. Struts would also do that, I suppose. Now, look at the screenshot and on the left is the MechJeb "Vessel Information" panel (you may have to tick this on in MechJeb's control panel when your ship is on the launch pad). It tells me that the top of the rocket (stage 1) has a TWR of .86 - which is ok, this is the TWR on Kerbin. This part will be landing in low-G so this is more than enough. I also see that in a Vac(uum) stage 1 has a Delta-V of almost 3,000. That's a lot of potential thrust (carrying too much fuel), but that's ok. Lots of wiggle room. The next stage is hard to spot but it is basically a fuel tank (grey, two-sectioned looking tank) followed by a nuclear engine (long white fairing). This bit will take us to the Mun. Again. Way too much fuel - nearly 3,000 Delta-V in this stage 3. Could easily take you to Minmus, maybe even Duna in a pinch? The final stage is an asparagus arrangement of 4 big orange tanks with a couple more tanks stuck on for good luck around a similar core. The extra little thin tanks are to reduce the chance of the mainsail engines exploding. As you can see this stage has a TWR of 2.2 (this is good - this part gets us off Kerbin and needs a lot of thrust!). MechJeb informs us this whole stage will burn for 197 seconds.. which is probably enough to get us to an 80k orbit... I would like a little more time. It would probably have a lot more TWR if I was better about slimming down those upper sections. Anyway, please note, the Stage 5 stats DO NOT INCLUDE the impact of Asparagus staging (which I would be about to set up after the screenshot). Asparagus staging does make everything more efficient - so if you're pretty sure you can get into orbit without it, you definitely will with it. As it stands, MechJeb takes this to 80 with about 15 seconds burn from the nuclear engine to finish circularising the orbit. Again, a lighter top section would make this even easier. So, this isn't the most efficient rocket, not by any means, but it can do the job. How do I know? Because as I built it I'm watching those MechJeb numbers to make sure I have enough TWR, Delta-V and so on. How do I know what numbers I need? Well, most of the time I guess! But I googled and found this GOD DAMNED AWESOME CHART! I assume one takes each stage and adds them together to get the total Delta-V cost, and then also breaks down each stage as required - eg, Low Mun Orbit to the Mun surface is 640m/s Delta-V required (and the same back up to that orbit, I guess - maybe more). There's also a spreadsheet I haven't played with. So what have we learned from this? By the chart it's lucky my launcher stage could get into orbit, and once there, the rest of the rocket could go just about anywhere in the system, I reckon! Funny. Anyway. There's some wall of text that should help you. If you want more, then perhaps I can work on another video (BOOM! HAH! - and yes, I have already promised one).
PS. I slammed into the Mun and exploded with this lander. Never use MechJeb SmartSAS to hold prograde when you're close to the surface. It's really easy to add a little too much thrust, go up from the surface, and then have your ship flip to the new prograde. Damn!
