Be aware that the nuclear engine does not have a huge amount of thrust (like the same as the LV-909.) If your rocket is heavy enough, you might have to do orbit pumping (increasing your apoapsis a chunk at a time over several consecutive orbits until you escape Kerbin) to make it to an interplanetary trajectory. If your projected burn is much longer than about 5 minutes (in LKO), you can easily end up deorbiting by accident during the latter half of the burn.
I’m a sucker for making maps, so I went and installed ScanSat.
I can get one of those into orbit on my small, cheap booster with sufficient dV to follow the main Duna mission, which will get me maps, with which I can plan a manned landing.
Fishbreath has already answered this. But honestly,.just open up sandbox, make an overpowered rocket (using an engine plate) to fire a.simple probe core + normal fuel tank + NERV into space. Then you can see for yourself how it works.
Wow look at what this guy made!
If you (like me) have been annoyed enough by the deployable science message spam to stop playing for a bit, you can stop the spam by flying the experiment control station from the tracking station and disabling the part in the right-click menu. No science, but no zillions of messages, either.
I had an idea for an Eve surface landing mission which, sadly, is impossible: use the new propeller parts to make a helicopter skyhook, from which you drop an airplane to land on the surface. Return to the skyhook with the airplane, move the kerbals to the skyhook, ditch the airplane, dock a rocket to the skyhook (presumably fairly high up in the atmosphere), take off from there. There’s no way to switch away from the skyhook, though, so no good. There might be some benefit in an Eve electro-helicopter-rocket, though, which takes off vertically under rotors before kicking in the rocket when the rotors can’t lift it any higher.
I tracked a random class A asteroid, and lo and behold, it was going to smack into Kerbin. We can’t have that! So, I whipped up a little asteroid mining ship, on the theory that it would be a fun test.
The asteroid was coming in on a highly-inclined orbit, so I had to do a bit of maneuvering—bump my Kerbin apoapsis out to make the plane change more efficient. That and the plane change cost about 1400 dV all in all, a few hundred from my mining ship and the remainder from the orbital insertion stage of my booster.
After that, all I had to do was burn for an intercept.
Some fancy maneuvering got me close—after the 0.2 m/s burn pictured, I had a 2km intercept with about 440m/s of relative velocity.
To catch up to it at a reasonable pace, I had to start the burn 73 seconds before closest approach.
Some awkward maneuvering—not enough reaction wheels on this ship—and there you have it!
A quick radial burn to pull the periapsis into low Kerbin orbit, and a 16.7m/s burn to turn it into a new moon. The only problem is that my miners won’t mine—the drills say Status: Operational, but never generate any ore, despite the power, engineer, radiators, and active ore tanks on the vessel. Eventually, I want to capture a bigger one and turn it into an edge-of-Kerbin-SOI refueling station, but if I can’t get the mining to work, that’s not going to happen.
That would have been so cool.
On the asteroid missions. How much time does one have in career before asteroid strike Kerbin?
So, aside from some random testing of planet packs several years ago, I haven’t actually launched a vessel outside of Kerbin’s SOI since probably 2013, well before there was a career mode. This morning, I successfully did my very first career mode Duna landing.
I’m playing Probes Before Crew, so the goal here was to launch a communication satellite with 4 RA-2’s for probe control relay. (In the PBC tech tree, the RA-15 is a Tier 9 (1000 science) technology, so I don’t have access to it yet.) And also launch a lander that would use the comms satellite for relay. I was hoping to get myself a fat load of science to transmit back to Kerbin.
I spent an hour or so contructing the satellite (including an M700 stacked in using fairing interstage nodes) and lander, then adding nuclear transfer engines and a Mainsail for launch. Launch proceeded beautifully.
I blew the fairing and parked the rocket in a nice 125km orbit to wait for my launch window.
This rocket had a ridiculous amount of delta-V (about 4,000 m/s on orbit), so rather than wait 300 days for the optimal launch window, I just launched early, within a couple of weeks of making orbit. The cost was about 2300 m/s total instead of 1600 m/s,but I had plenty.
I managed to fine tune my approach during the interplanetary cruise to achieve a polar fly-by at about 1300km, perfect for M700 scanning. I circularized and got myself a nice heat map of Dunar ore deposits.
Then I shifted the inclination 90° to equatorial (surprisingly inexpensive in Duna’s low gravity field.) My intention was to put the comms satellite in a dunasync orbit and then fly down to LDO to set up the landing, but there were two problems:
- Ike orbits close enough to Duna’s synchronous altitude that it will eventually catch up to any dunasynchronous satellite and summarily toss it down Duna’s gravity well.
- I stacked the lander on top of the comms satellite, so there was no way to drop off the satellite first.
So, given that I was rich in dV, I just flew down to LDO to drop off the lander first and left deaf and dumb in orbit while I finished setting up the satellite.
At this point, I noticed a major problem: I’d forgotten to build an antenna onto my lander. The probe core has an internal antenna, good enough to keep control using a relay, but not able to transmit science. The science part of the mission would therefore be something of a bust. I gathered and transmitted what I could from orbit and cut my losses.
After dropping off the lander, I threw the satellite in a high elliptical orbit with a synchronous period and apodun above my intended landing spot: the Western Canyons. Ike, BTW is really annoying. It’s so huge and close that it often eclipses Kerbin and causes communication breaks.
With the relay set up, I was able to deorbit the lander. An XL parachute was easily sufficient to slow descent, with a tiny backup from the engine in the last few seconds to give me a soft landing
Right on target in the middle of the Western Canyons, with Ike’s crescent rising over the rim
It didn’t net me any science, but worked well as a proof-of-concept and helped out with the Duna Probes Strategia contract: land a probe in 3 different biomes.
And now I’m interplanetary again!
That is beautiful! I’ve also screwed up and sent something deeper into space without an antenna. Gah! I’ve also of course sent out docking ports installed backwards, RCS thrusters with no fuel, broken links between stages etc etc.
How are you taking pics without all the interface stuff in the way? Your pics are gorgeous. Which graphics set you using again?
F2 removes the UI for screenshots.
I’m using EVE with SVE and scatterer. I think I posted links upthread… oh yeah, here they are:
I will mention, though, that my framerate near Duna’s surface was pretty abyssmal. That doesn’t usually happen with KSP. I suspect it was one of the visual mods.
If you’re using 1.73 version of kopernicus there is some kind of odd bug doing that related to the graphic mode too. They’re trying to nail it down
I wanted to say thank you to everyone who took the time to answer so many of my questions. I have such a good understanding of this game now and enjoy it much more thanks to this. As always QT3 members are wonderful. I’m going through my rocket design saves to thin them out, and see the evolution of those designs- it’s so cool to see.
In at attempt to diagnose my asteroid miner, I went to the spaceplane hangar, flipped it upside-down, and turned it into a giant top-heavy rover. Mining with it worked on the KSC runway, so there must be something wrong with either my captured asteroid or my mod setup.
I’m so glad to hear it! This game really has so much to offer if you can just get the hook set in your mouth. I still find things I want to do in this game and I have to have 1000 hours in it.
I think all asteroids have ore, but the quantity is limited and the concentration makes a difference. The little Class A one I captured claims to have about 2.7 tons of resources—not very much at all. I’ve heard people say that Class E ones can have resource quantities in the thousands of tons. You don’t need a kerbal to operate a drill, but without an engineer, extraction efficiency goes down, so you get less ore per unit weight you extract from the asteroid.
Notwithstanding that I haven’t yet successfully mined an asteroid, they’re actually highly efficient fuel tanks—because their mass goes down as you mine them, a big enough one has a better mass fraction than fuel tanks, even counting the mass of drilling and refining equipment. For a manned Jool mission, I might capture a D or E-class asteroid and turn it into a mothership.
Ohhh cool ideas!
I’ve discovered I am terrrrrrrrible at docking. As in,I’m 0 for 40 and now and heading to bed without success. One odd thing is I’ve got docking port alignment indicator mod but it’s not coming up when I go to dock so I’ve been stuck with the default stock thing. Is there a key you have to hit to get that mod to come up?
Docking is hard. I was amazed I managed to dock relatively easily, without docking port alignment this current campaign. But I’m only going to do that once because DPA makes docking much easier (still hard). If it is any consolation docking was really hard for the first several Gemni flights and docking took the Russians years to master. The first easy docking was with Buzz Aldrin who’s MIT Ph.D. thesis was on the subject.
If DPA is correctly installed it will comeup almost automatically as soon as you click on the docking ports. Double check that’s installed correctly (unzip it in the GameData) you should see it on the right side of your screen.