Thanks - are there particular tech/strategies that are good for launching deeper space/more involved rockets (like your combo manned mission suggestion)? I'm having a difficult time getting my dV solidly above the 8000 mark without adding stupid amounts of boosters with increasingly diminishing returns. Just orbited Duna for the first time last night but didn't have enough fuel to land and still get home. (on the bright side, having a polar orbit meant getting EVA reports over almost every biome, came home with tons of science)

I'll check that out too

The way I do planetary missions is not in one launch. I build and refuel the ship in kerbin orbit. I also tend to send a fleet of ships to a planet The fleet includes data transmission probes/satellites, separate rovers for the planet and it's moons, a manned ship and a fuel ship (usually attached to the manned ship).

A planetary transfer window can sometimes take years to arrive so I try to do a lot when it's available.

8k should be enough to send a ship to Ike and back. 4500 to LKO, 1060 to Duna intercept, aerocapture to Duna orbit + drop lander for free, about 900 to Ike's surface, 900 back to Duna orbit, then 500 to Kerbin intercept. That adds up to 7860, so you're maybe a little light when you consider course corrections and inefficient maneuvers and the like, but just add some more boosters and you can get there.

One tech unlock that's good is the fuel pump. I notice that your rescue ship had a ton of solid boosters. SRBs have a lot of thrust, but they don't actually produce a lot of dV per mass (low specific impulse). If you aren't struggling to get your rocket off the ground, using liquid boosters is usually a lot better for your total dV. It's also more efficient to have the boosters feeding the center core (which is what you need the fuel pumps for), so when you drop the boosters they are empty and the center core is full.

Just a minor expansion on Bobman's good points. I think he meant fuel ducts not pumps. And google "asparagus staging" for the technique he's referring to.

A small aside, SpaceX initially considered using fuel transfer between boosters on their Falcon Heavy...

The airplane modeling is always very fidgety and not all that fun imo. The only real fun I've had with it is building a single-stage-to-orbit spaceplane, which is quite a challenge and semi-useful for cheap space tourism contracts. I think some people use SSTOs to ferry fuel into orbit cheaply.

Only other useful thing about planes is you can fly them to some of Kerbin's biomes early in the game and farm you some science.

If the lander tips over too much, you can try mounting fuel tanks raidally for a lower center of mass. Here's an example I found on google:



Don't forget the fuel lines if you do this!

I recently started playing this and made a point of not looking up anything online. However, I couldnt resist opening this thread and learned a lot already.

Thanks for those. I'm glad there's a Maneuver mod, trying to move those nodes drives me crazy.

Kerbal Engineer will come in handy too. My ships are getting ridiculously heavy and must be very inefficient. The farthest I went is the surface of Mimus, with that monstrosity:



2598 tons in 255 parts including 44 engines...

You might think that the top stage is pretty tall and narrow and unlikely to stand up. You'll be right. After falling flat on Mimus I managed to leave when I played with the landing struts, which made my ship bounce up a little, throttled up, and went on my way. That was a fun moment.

Anyway, if I want to visit other planets I need to start making more efficient ships. Hopefully the mods will help.

Whoa!!! That's a serious amount of rocket. I bet the explosions during debug were spectacular.

Question about this - how do I "drop a lander for free"? I mean I get that I'll have some lander with an engine attached to a coupler and I'll let it go in orbit over Duna, but I'm not sure how to design that into a rocket build since radial symmetry matters and I probably don't want to attach two landers on opposite sides if I'm only using one.

I'm not sure what Bob meant. On Duna, using only parachutes will not slow you down enough to survive. You need some retro-rockets to slow you to landing speeds.

Early in the research tree, I use to hang two rovers balanced on each side of the rocket. Later on when I had larger diameter rockets and fairings I just put a rover on top in a fairing.

Other piece of rover advice: add a reaction wheel to all your rovers. It's easy to flip them while driving and a reaction wheel will allow you to flip them back on their wheels.

This is not true for small probes (or big probes with a lot of parachutes). You can build a simple one-way probe with a Science Jr., a probe core, some legs, and a single normal-sized parachute. Just stage it off with an apoapsis inside Duna's atmosphere and it will land just fine. You don't even need a heat shield if you release the probe after you aerocapture your main ship.

This thread has inspired me to get back into KSP after a long absence. Came close to landing a space probe on Moho, but was about 300m/s short of deltaV for a safe landing. Just gotta try again with a bit more rocket.

KSP/SpaceX humor:



BTW, gl Cranberry Tea!

Successful landing on sunny Moho! Landing here is a real *****, because you come in ridiculously fast and there's no atmosphere for aerobraking, so you just need to bring along a whole lot of fuel.

Sweet! I've never landed on Moho. I've also heard others talk about how hard it is to get an intercept and then be able to slow down enough to land. Great work.

That's a great pic. I've never been to Moho before.

I was also inspired by this thread to get back into the game and am working on an Eve mission. I've successfully built a lander that can take off from the surface, but am still trying to land it from orbit. I managed to get it down once, but the reentry heating burned off exactly half of the legs on the lander and it crashed. I then relocated the legs to be more behind the heat shield, but now the outside boosters overheat and explode for some reason! The work continues...

Bob,

Nice challenge you have there. Can you use the inflatable heat shield? After getting through the reentry heating, just eject it (Or land on it)?

BTW, is anyone excited for the new expansion that is coming now? About a month away!

Kerbal Space Program: Making History Expansion - Release Date March 13th, 2018

This game is pretty hard without mods but I like the challenge. It's always a nervous moment when I launch Jeb in a new design but often I'm too broke on hard mode to afford doing a probe controlled test flight first.

The expansion doesn't seem too exciting but I'll buy it. I'm more encouraged that they keep working on the game and maybe the next expansion will be more interesting.

Any chance this game goes on sale soon? Looks like GOG is the lowest right now at $23.99. (Would it still be possible to unlock on Steam if bought from GOG?)

And, are they saying that anyone who bought it prior to April 2013 get it free? So, buying the game now won't come with the free expansion?

The game goes on sale fairly often. But usually in the $20-24 range. Next month's expansion is a separate purchase for $15 and I have no idea how it will affect the price of the base game.

Download the fairly featured and very playable demo on www.kerbalspaceprogram.com
(Steam has/had a much older version of the demo)

And no you don't get a Steam key when not bought from steam. However, you can add it as "a non-steam game" to your steam library.

Thanks. I've been casually watching isthereanydeal to see where it's at right now. Steam used to have the demo, but looks like it was taken down. The demo on the KSP website says it's Under Maintenance. If you know of another reputable way, please let me know.

I'll maybe wait for a sale and then decide. The link to their forum about the expansion said anyone who bought it prior to April 2013 would get it free.

"And yes, we’re keeping our promise that all players who purchased the game through April 2013 will receive the expansion for free."

The April 2013 part is for people who bought the game in early beta. They were advertising at the time that if you buy it, it would include all future add-ons and expansions.

I would guess that 80% of people who own the game bought it later than April 2013 and do have to buy the expansion if they are interested in it.

I assume they took down the demo because the actual program has evolved a great deal beyond what the demo presents. idk, I liked the demo at the time.

Here is a third party source of the demo: Kerbal Space Program 1.0 demo

I hope docking gets to be easy after more practice but perhaps I need to improve my RCS design and placement. I've gotten very comfortable doing rendezvous and rescue missions. Currently have a mission to put a space station in Mun orbit with 2k+ fuel on board and since I'm still limited to 140T I have to send up refuelers to top off the station's tanks before it does the burn for the Mun. I've done one refueling run but need to do at least one more.

I imagine docking smaller craft will go much easier. We'll see soon because I've also got a mission to dock two craft in Mun orbit so I've taken the opportunity to send a manned lander can to the Mun with the intention of collecting science and then docking with another ship I'm sending (with a tourist on board to help pay) so the lander pilot can hitch a ride home.

Also, Mun landings are a pain without a retrograde tracking pilot or probe. I'm only about 50/50 to land a probe upright on the legs successfully since I've only got SAS. As long as I find a flat spot my pilots aren't having any trouble landing though I nearly lost Jeb when his lander ran out of fuel on final approach and I decided not to abort with the launch stage. Legs and lower engine/tank blew up on the 20-30+ m/s impact but amazingly the rest of the craft was intact and upright so Jeb could launch instead of being stranded and needing a rescue.

Jeb is having a bad week. First he tries out a new Mun lander design and after getting into Kerbin orbit he realizes there's no solar panels and only the base 50 electrical juice with no way to recharge the power since the terrier and spark engines have no alternator. He decides to continue and see if he can at least complete the Mun landing and maybe get back into stable Mun orbit before power runs out. After arriving in Mun orbit it's determined there's no way so he sits around until a tourist ship with a spare seat can swing by.

Immediately after coming back to Kerbin a KISS station (Kerbin International Space Station aka Keep It Simple Station) launches to fulfill a contract with the intention to delete the station in orbit. Oops, Jeb snuck aboard and there's no reentry capability so he has to wait around for another rescue.

Took the Mun6 challenge, which I think is my first ever two million dollar contract. Valentina flew by the Mun, Minmus, and Moho, returned to Kerbin for a refuel, then on to Eve, Duna, and Ike. Using detachable fuel tanks and knowing how to transfer fuel around really helps squeeze out that extra deltaV you need for a really long trip.



I think I'm done with KSP for a while cuz I got other games I need to play but for sure will pick it up again.

Kerbal Space Program 1.4 was released today!

Kerbal Space Program 1.4: Away with Words MK-II is now available!