I have been playing this for about a month now. I have more or less dropped planet side 2 in favor of this. I think my biggest leap forward was finally figuring out orbital docking and what maneuver nodes were all about. I run the flight engineer mod ( gives you a little item you add to your spaceship and it gives the delta Vs of all your sections and some useful in flight data . I used to run the sub part assembler mod , but that is now taken up in the last upgrade.
I haven’t started on the career mode yet, having a lot of fun in sandbox and also learning, trying to figure out how to do a launch and straight to the Mun without orbiting for a few days or hours waiting for alignment, same deal for an orbital docking. I am building a big ass fuel station to practice and as a fueling point for a landing somewhere other than the Mun. Somewhat less than pro tip, make sure you put your docking port Sr the right way around. Many frustrated hours spent bumping two orange tanks against each other in a futile attempt to dock two parts that will not dock.
The whole ‘mod’ aspect of the game development is interesting, I suppose it gives the developers an insight into where people want the game to go. Does anyone know what happens when a mod is essentially absorbed into the game, such as the sub assembly mod, does the mod/add in developer get a credit or something?
They can transmit simultaneously, allowing you (provided you have sufficient power resources, which this model does) to simply hotkey all your experiments to number keys and transmit them home all very quickly.
I gave in an installed Kerbal Engineer Redux for my otherwise stock career. Basically I have picked all of the low-hanging Science! that’s available on Kerbin, so I need to head to the Mun next. But while the “that looks about right” approach works well enough for putting a Kerbal into low orbits where I can recover them if I make a mistake, it doesn’t seem right to send poor Bill to his doom in an orbit that doesn’t quite make it to the Mun.
As I rationalize it to myself, I’m only using the engineer mod to calculate ΔV, which I could do by hand if I really wanted…
No shame in using mods. I’ve managed to get to the Mun, Minmas, and Duna (and back) without mods, but it was pretty hard, and after accomplishing those I decided that anything more was an exercise in tedium and installed Mechjeb again. I did at least learn how to use the artificial horizon to cancel my horizontal velocity.
A return mission from Eve at sea level still eludes me. I came very close on my last attempt–but the thrust to weight ratio wasn’t quite high enough. I optimized a bit more and now have a 40-ton lander with 12+ km/s of deltaV and some pretty serious TWR (the first few stages use a single Mainsail engine). It needs a bit more fine-tuning, but I think I’m very close.
Actually, the main problem is getting into the damn thing. I can’t sacrifice the weight for even a single ladder. I may have to land a gantry to drop a Kerbin on top (where the seat is).
That’s what I like about the game, you can pretty much play it anyway you want. Once I can master docking and a mission to Duna and return Ill probably start with mechjeb.
The Engineer Redux is a great tool, I suspect they will build that into the game anyway.
Yes! Finally brought a Kerbin back from sea level at Eve. The ship was about the most minimal thing imaginable. I had to drop a mobile gantry just because I couldn’t afford the weight of ladders. I made it into orbit with literally under half a liter of fuel remaining. It was enough, though. I rendezvoused a return craft with it, and then EVAed my Kerbin to the craft.
Piccy here. That’s actually not the final version, but it’s pretty close. The first stage uses a single Mainsail. The upper stage is a large cluster of mostly 48-7S engines and FL-T100 tanks. Both of these engines have a very high thrust to weight ratio. I’ve found that this is more important than strict efficiency–some early designs had stages with an Eve TWR of just around 1, which basically means the rocket is hovering in place.
I could probably give myself a bit more margin by tweaking the ascent profile, and maybe losing the battery. Still… it worked! I think this is the hardest “real” goal in the game (some people have built ships that take off from Jool, but you have to cheat to get there in the first place, and the physics pretty much break down there anyway).
I am playing this again for the first time in a while and I don’t understand career mode yet. I know I need science points but I am unclear on the mission progression to get the points.
I got the first tier by launching a Kerban up. That gave me the five points. I need 18 points for the next tier and launched a Kerban in to space but sub-orbital and got 10 points. Do I actually need to get into orbit for the next 8 points?
Is there another way to gain science points that I am missing, because I wonder what I’ll need to do to get the next 20 science points.
ETA: The controls are much more forgiving so far than they were in the sandbox.
So it is! For some reason, I had been thinking that Kerbal was the species/race/whatever, and Kerbin was an individual.
With the second tier, you’ll unlock the mystery goo container. Even without getting to orbit, you can use that to gather more science and return it. That said, getting to orbit should be a goal–you can easily do it with the tier-2 parts. In fact, it’s possible with the tier-1 parts, but difficult.
Are you getting crew reports ( right click on the capsule and hit crew report) and you can have your Kerbal do an EVA whilst at the peak of his arc and get an EVA report (right click on your kerbal for EVA report) for more points. Just remember to hit F pretty quickly after making him go on an EVA or he will let go and drift off. Bob Kerman is particularly bad for this.
Once you can launch and get orbiting (or almost orbiting) you take crew reports over the north pole, the oceans and the desert to get different crew reports and more science.
Then repeat for crew reports and eva reports ( and goo reports) in different places (altitude , around the mun, etc) . You can also just put a crew capsule on the launch pad and send the kerbal out on a EVA and collect soil samples from the launch pad and the grass. When you also get up the tech tree there is a science lab part where you can do science experiments for more points.
It is best to get the reports and bring them back to Kerbin rather than radio them back as you loose science points. I gave up on transmitting until I got solar panels and am abut to send a probe on a tour around the sun, that thing isn’t coming back.
Although now I said that, crew reports transmitted back do not have a penalty, so if you have enough power taking crew reports and transmitting multiple ones back , so take a crew report at launch, I think there are 4 altitudes (the final one being 250,000) that you can get different crew reports from .
I found a bug when trying to land on Minmus - I got down to about 1000m above the surface, with all engines off, when the craft started pitching end-over-end rather slowly. After a number of corrections and repeats of this, the ship - and, for that matter, the ET clock - just froze, although I was able to exit out of it.
This is part of a sequence of “adventures” trying to land on Minmus:
Attempt #1: direct hit…on Mun…at full speed. Not good.
Attempt #2: I finally figured out how to get into orbit around Minmus (that orbit map is confusing once you get into another object’s sphere of influence); I descend for landing, press G to lower the landing gear…and notice that, when building the latest version of my rocket, I left the landing gear off. Not that it mattered, as I crashed into the side of a mountain anyway.
Attempt #3: this time, with gear, and I land on Minmus - sort of; I had too much horizontal velocity, and the craft ended up landing on its side.
Attempt #4: after figuring out what went wrong (“you need to keep firing retrograde”), I finally land on four legs, get my Kerbal out, plant the flag, return him to the craft…and notice that there’s no ladder, so it’s pretty much impossible to get back in and return to Kerbin.
“Keep firing retrograde” doesn’t quite work for cancelling your horizontal velocity (though it might be close enough). The better solution is to fire “more than retrograde”. Say that you have come close to the surface–within a hundred meters or so–and find that you still have some horizontal velocity. The retrograde indicator will be displaced from straight up by some amount. Instead of aiming exactly at the indicator, (mentally) draw the line from the “up” point to the indicator, and then continue on for the same distance. Now fire. The retrograde indicator will move towards the up point, and when it does you kill your engines.
Now, you’ll be moving straight downwards. Reorient your lander to be exactly vertical, turn on SAS, and land normally.
Just managed a career mode probe around the Sun (under a million KM to surface) , no return so I had to transmit the data back. I started on a planed return probe to bring back the data for more points, but I had spammed the transmit so much it is hardly worth it for the points now.
That rocket was repurposed as a Jool probe with a planned return, but I ended up in some weird arse polar orbit when I got there so I just dove it into the atmosphere getting Science pod and goo pod results on the way down, unfortunately the motherloade of science points was from deep inside the atmosphere and I was somewhat foolishly coming down on the dark side , so ran out of power.
Koh!
I think I will need docking ports, nuclear engines and some space station refueling for a true return mission from Jool. That and figure out how to not end up in a polar orbit when I get there.
I may also have to figure out how to kludge flight engineer redux into the tech tree, anyone know how?
I’m seriously impressed with everything I’m seeing on the thread. I’ve only just managed to land a probe on Minmus (using 10 long fuel tanks to get there), then tipped it over and blew it up trying to take it off again. How do you measure the performance of your rockets? I can’t even find how much mine weigh.
I generally use the MechJeb mod. It has a nice chart of the delta-V of all your stages (not to mention weight).
I’ve also run the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation by hand, as well as written my own simple scripts to optimize things (it turns out that the Rockomax 48-7S is a *fantastic *engine). But I think I may be expressing my inner geek there…
Thanks, I just found the latest rev of the flight engineer redux is already sorted for the tech tree. Fanganga I seriously recommend that mod as it does a lot of the mass and thrust calculations and doesn’t do any actual flying for you.
Dr S will have to take a look at that engine , I see they raised the thrust by 50% in .22
