You mean I can re-enact the ending to Dr. Strangelove? Cool! We need a Kerbal with a cowboy hat.
Holy crap! What does it take to land on Tylo? I have a lander with a Delta V of 3700/4900 and a TWR of 2 for Kerbal and I can’t even land it, never mind land and re-orbit.
I have had successful stock missions to Mun, Minmas and Duna and got tired of re-designing my landers for every mission and thought that if I could just design a lander for Tylo I would be good for any mission imaginable. All I would have to do then was design a delivery system (actually my Snark explorer can deliver 100 tons to any planet in system and return) and I and I can do anything. The heavy lander I designed is about the best I can reasonably do and I thought the 5K delta v would be enough. I downloaded the hyper edit mod so I can just go straight from the launch pad to Tylo orbit to test my designs (I spent weeks getting to Duna the first time only to learn that my lander was insufficient to the task) and it is much harder than I thought. Has anybody done this? What does it take?
Wait a second, three missions with that kind of success rate? I think you need to look for common denominators; are you sure it’s the Kerbals?
That should be enough under optimal conditions. The orbital velocity is <2200 m/s and there’s no atmosphere. I’ve landed and returned from Tylo, though I don’t remember the delta V of my lander offhand.
So… I thought this was an awesome idea and tried it :). Sadly, it looks like they tweaked the aerodynamics or something and Jeb now loses grip on the ladder when the plane goes too fast. No hanging onto the bomb. Oh well. And my K-52 bomber looked pretty nice, all things considered…
Looks like my Tylo return mission used a lander with 6790 m/s of vacuum delta-V. Here’s the entire vessel. It’s not small, even with a pretty trimmed down lander (that only had the small science instruments installed).
I picked up the game again after a long hiatus to play with career mode a bit more. In particular, I wanted to play around with planes again after the recent (hah!) patches.
So I made a new plane, launched it to explore the mountains and, since it’s massively efficient, fly to the south pole. As I was maneuvering, I noticed that the Kerbal’s sun Kerbol looked kind of weird.
“What the heck, why does it look like that? Kind of dark, with a bright ring around the edge?”
Oh, yeah. Cool! A full eclipse, right at the launch of my new spaceplane… what timing!
The Kerbals must have planned it. They obviously know more about what’s going on than anyone realizes.
I built another Tylo lander, this time a bit bigger and with all the different science instruments. I used something like 6000 m/s delta-V with a moderately efficient descent/ascent profile. MechJeb doesn’t do a great job on the descent and I had to do most of it by hand (it still does a fine job on the last few hundred meters).
If I had much larger acceleration–say, 40 m/s^2–I could have shaved off a few hundred m/s, but obviously there’s a tradeoff here with mass. It’s more efficient because there is less “gravity drag”: I had to start my descent burn at about 25 km since it took that long to kill both my orbital speed and any extra speed I pick up by falling. With more powerful engines, I could have started the burn at a lower altitude, which means less speed picked up falling to the ground.
I re-started a career mode after finishing the tech tree in my first one. Now I’ve installed the Kethane pack (really cool!), and I’m going to try setting up some mining and Kethane fuel depots.
This really is an awesome game.
It has to be. There are no other sentient beings in the game. I can’t think of another possible cause.
Amazingly though, the entire race of Kerbals seems to be getting smarter. Over time I’ve noticed they aren’t making as many stupid errors, like trying to fly to Jool in a rocket that clearly doesn’t have enough delta-V to get them home.
I’d think it would probably work if you put him in one of those external command seats and attached it to the bomb.
Added today (amazingly, not an April fool): asteroids, bigger rockets, and a grabbing claw! Unfortunately, my main sandbox save file is completely refusing to produce any asteroids, and I cannot figure out why. 
Damn, I have exactly no time to play this in the next few weeks. When I do though, I’ll finally have the chance to break out the Saitek X-52 Pro I got for Christmas. (Well I’ve used it a bit playing Rise of Flight but it’s a bit silly on planes that don’t have a throttle and turn by yanking on a wire that bends the wings.)
I like the look of that grabbing claw. I can think of quite a few uses for it - tugboats, semi-trailers, rover docking…
Pretty cool. I built a giant launcher with the new SLS parts and a nuclear tug. Found an E-class asteroid that was on an impact trajectory with Kerbin and raised the periapsis to 500 km. Woot!
With my first craft I tried pulling on the asteroid, but it didn’t work–the asteroid blocked the rocket exhaust and I wasn’t getting anywhere. With the second effort I pushed on the asteroid, and this did work after a fashion, but I had a hell of a time keeping the whole thing from spinning (shame I can’t break the asteroid into small chunks using that method).
It might work better if I put the whole thing on a long truss so as to increase the lever arm (and hence stability), but I’m not sure. It might also help to have three grabbers in a triangle to decrease the flex. Or, go back to the pull concept, but with a long boom and angled rockets so they don’t get blocked. Lots of things to try…
I saw on the forum apparently you can right click on the asteroid and show its center of mass, which should help line up where you want to attach the claw so when you thrust you don’t start rotating. Haven’t seen or tried it myself though.
Pulling is probably the best method if you can though.
Yeah–I figured that out randomly about halfway in. It definitely helps, but it’s not quite enough; being off by even just a pixel on the artificial horizon is enough to cause problems over time. It seems like the thrust vectoring should be enough to prevent rotation, but I think the connection just isn’t rigid enough (it wiggles around a lot).
OK, I just installed this. Where do I get missions to start gaining Science? Granted, launching Bill on ever more insane rocket builds is fun, but I figure I should start actually playing the game.
If you’re starting from scratch, the best way to start is to just put a manned rocket on the launch pad, then do a crew report. Then have your Kerbal get out and do an EVA report. Get back in, and launch. Do another crew report from the lower atmosphere. When you land, do another crew report/eva report.
Launch a rocket on a ballistic trajectory, and once it’s out of the atmosphere you can do another EVA report. When landing, aim for different parts of Kerbin, as there are multiple ‘biomes’, and landing in each one lets you claim more science from crew/EVA reports. You’ll also get science when you recover the vehicles successfully.
Build out your tech tree to get access to the various scientific instruments as soon as you can. Once you have a mystery goo container and materials lab, you can repeat the previous missions and gain even more science with those. To make this the most efficient, for each mission carry three of each on the first mission. Then you can sample on the ground, in the atmosphere, and in the biome where you land.
That should get you enough science to buy enough rocket parts to get into orbit. Then you can do crew/EVA reports, mystery goo and materials study from there, in both high and low orbits. If you don’t want to buld a vehicle that can land safely with the materials containers hanging off it, you can do an EVA in space and have your Kerbal collect the science results from them. Then you can separate from all that hardware and bring just your capsule home on a parachute.
From there, you can fly a free return trajectory past the Mun and collect science from high over mun after you encounter it. At that point, you should have enough science to buy enough parts to start thinking about mun orbit and landing on the mun. Lots of science to be had there.
You don’t need any specific ‘missions’ to collect science. You just have to go where the science is. If you can’t remember what science you’ve already collected, go to the tech tree and in the upper left there’s a button for your science history and you can see what you’ve got and what you don’t.
That is playing the game.