Are delta-v planners still reliable? My feeling is no. The one I remember using before says it takes 4k delta-v to get from Kerbin to low orbit. I built a 1-stage ship with only 3k delta-v (according to the current game version's in-game tools) and was able to get to low orbit with it, and I'm not particularly good at ascent profiles.

What's wrong? The planner? The in-game tools? I'm curious how I can plan longer trips to other planets if I can't rely on the tools. :/

Was it 3k delta-v at sea level or vacuum?

Also, the calculators are generally decently accurate but they can be faked out with design clipping and other type of games that minimize air resistance, overpowers engines (e.g. clip multiple engines into each other) or hides fuel.

Have you been watching twitch or youtube reviews of the new expansion? the NDA dropped today. The expansion comes out tomorrow at 1pm edt.

The new features look awesome but still a little buggy.

Is the in-game calculator giving you sea level or vacuum? Can you change it?

I haven't watched anything about the expansion (and I don't have Making History yet either), just kinda picked KSP up again for the first time in awhile.

In the VAB, click on the delta-V box on the bottom towards the right side of the screen. It gives you the altitude options for the current stage.

Ran out of gas coming back from my first trip to Ike, could only get to a sub-Duna orbit around the sun. Need to send Valentina out on a rescue mission. I didn't put any docking stuff to allow for fuel transfer so I guess I'll have to cart everyone home

Use the claw...

Oh baby!



KSP2 Announcement!

Hey nerds, curious if anyone can explain this aspect of gravity assists. I've kinda hit a wall in terms of having a hard time building ships w/ enough delta-V to get past Duna, so I need to either...
a.) build some kind of refueling station in orbit that I haul fuel up to in order to launch larger crafts w/ less fuel and then add more fuel up in orbit or something like that, or
b.) learn to use gravity assists to lower the dV required to get places.

I've been messing around with b.) a little and am curious about a situation I ran into. In this flight I've had a couple encounters with Eve that helped fling me out this far, and I've now planned out a third, but the weird thing is that no matter what I do it seems like it takes energy away from me:



We can zoom in on Eve and look at the currently-planned encounter up close:



So, this is kind of a random angle coming underneath it, but with the position where my ship is right now (at its apoapsis wrt the sun), I can fine-tune my approach to Eve very easily with very small maneuvers. But what I don't understand is that, no matter where I place my approach path around Eve for this encounter, the resulting orbit around the sun has a significantly lower apoapsis than where it is now.

So, that doesn't super make sense to me. The KSP wiki has this image, where it seems like coming around the right side of Eve in that second pic should generally match the "gain speed" scenario. But in practice, it seems like any form of this encounter taking place is going to result in losing speed.

So, uh, what's going on?

Side note: gravity assists seem hard. I watched a couple Scott Manley videos and it didn't really help, he skips over all the details and is like "oh it's nbd, you just have to plan your exit from one planet to send you towards another one" and then the sped-up video shows him doing that like 5 consecutive times and I'm watching this like "wtf, I have no idea what you did or how you planned that out to make that all work". Plus, since most planets have different inclinations, it seems really hard to exit a planet in a way that matches the inclination of where you want to eventually end up, so then you have to burn a shitton just to get the inclination right.

I'm not sure, it might be the angle of approach. But the only object I would ever use is Mun.

In terms of exploring the planets, some type of refueling is required. Minmus is a perfect place for a mining operation and refueling depot.

To go to places like Duna, I just tank up in low Kerbin orbit.

One of the Scott Manley videos I watched recommended not using Munar assists and favoring planets instead. Like the other things I had trouble with in those videos, it really wasn't explained why.

I've been doing more unmanned probe ships so I tried putting together a commnet around Kerbin to make sure I'd be able to control them. I launched all of these in an equilateral triangle at roughly 1.1Mm altitudes. My 3 satellites are orbiting at:

A: Ap 1,101,976m, Pe 1,097,961m
B: Ap 1,102,348m, Pe 1,098,289m
C: Ap 1,101,755m, Pe 1,097,829m



You might look at this and say "well B is a little more off than the others, it's probably the one that drifted from its place in the triangle". Nope. B is the topmost one.

You can't be that specific in setting these orbits with the stock game, even setting rocket thrust to the lowest possible value and barely tapping shift, so I was hoping that at least if I got them close enough (certainly A/C-level close) they'd mostly be fine and maybe sliiiightly drift over the course of years, but it really didn't take that long to get pretty messed up.

Same thing on Minmus:

A: Ap 300,600m, Pe 299,896m
B: Ap 300,718m, Pe 299,975m
C: Ap 300,873m, Pe 299,482m



I launched these more recently so they're not that bad yet, but clearly trending that way. Part of the frustrating aspect was that even if I got my launching craft into a really stable and exact orbit to launch each satellite off of it, the decoupler has enough force that it makes an impact of hundreds of meters on the Ap/Pe of the satellite. So annoying

If it's a communication network, use the hack menu and just set the sat's orbits after getting it close.

Thanks for the tip

Are you playing fully vanilla?

I mostly was - I recently added Kerbal Engineer Redux and Kerbal Alarm Clock, but those are mostly helpers and don't do much on their own.

I'm still having an annoying time trying to set up intercepts with distant planets (like, Dres or farther) sometimes, where I set them as target but I can't even get the "closest separation" markers to show up when I make maneuver nodes to extend my orbit out - I tried looking for a mod to help with stuff like that (maybe making the markers better or showing where planets are in the future?) without outright making the nodes for you, but couldn't really find one.

BTW, next Monday 1.10 comes out with a bunch of fixes, new parts and new comet missions. Also you can color your Kerbal spacesuits with different colors. e.g. You can now use Star Trek colors for your different Kerbal professions.

Maybe something like this?

https://spacedock.info/mod/1087/Mane...Node%20Evolved

If you want to get into modding a bit, I strongly suggest using this:

https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com...-19-june-2016/

You get a full list of compatible mods and can pick and choose.

Me personally, I would also add new sat parts, see if an antenna pack interest you and maybe a minor parts pack like something more configurable where you can pick the separator force.

Then again, I never started KSP without at least 60 mods hahaha.

Yeah, I have CKAN, it def makes installing mods easier. idk if that mod would do much for me, I feel like I'm pretty comfortable manipulating maneuver nodes with existing tools which seems like the biggest thing that helps with.

Trying to send some comm satellites to Moho since a transfer window just opened up. Using this site to plan planetary intercepts:



Okay, sure, let's try that:



I'm sure it's not perfect, but it's close. Now let's try to get an encounter:



^ using roughly the recommended delta-V burn (the recommended value gets lower when I correct for my 250km Kerbin orbit) from the first screenshot, and then adding an inclination transfer burn at the DN, is not even close to getting a low enough periapsis to encounter Moho.

So, that failed, let's try doing it ourselves:



Now we're hitting the orbit, but wherever Moho is when we're doing so, it's not even close enough to get the "closest encounter" markers to show up.

This part is really frustrating for me - doing this sort of thing unaided (like, stock game), you have a crude set of tools to do basically an infinite search through a multi-variable space (time of departure + burn location in current orbit + actual burn vectors), and your only hope of knowing you're on the right track for anything more complicated than Duna or Eve is if the game happens to give you the very inconsistent "this is how far off you are" markers. Even using that transfer planner site to eliminate a couple of those variables, my resulting attempts are so far off that idk if the site is even accurate. But I'm loathe to use something like this (which tells you the exact burn numbers to plug in to get a magic intercept you never would have found on your own) or any mod that's like "click to make a maneuver node" since it feels like cheating - is there anything in between?

So I was listening in on a zoom teacher's symposium.

This physics teacher (who's way overqualified and basically retired) tried to teach physics with Kerbal Space Program.

He wanted to teach a bit of physics (basic stuff like if you make the rocket big, it will be hard to escape atmosphere.)

All the kids wanted to do was build the biggest rocket possible and create the biggest explosion possible by crashing it back down. Future ICBM engineers IMO.

I always thought KSP would make a great community college for kids summer program. Each week kids work on different segments of a program that will end with launching a rocket to Mun and back.

Similar to the minecraft programs that many offer.

KSP2 out in early access. Anyone playing?