1903

It’s been just long enough that I can’t remember the specifics, but I think ‘WASD’ still rotates your ship rather than moving laterally, which is why I remember the ‘IJKL’ control keys being helpful.

1904

In standard mode, WASD rotates your ship and IJKL moves your ship laterally with RCS. In docking mode (which I never use) WASD moves your ship laterally and you can switch back and forth between docking and standard mode to rotate/lateral.

Do you have any batteries on the upper stage? It looks pretty cool. You’ll have to write up an AAR for how it went. Can you post a screenshot of the KER panel configured for Kerbin and vacuum instead of Mun and atmosphere? I suspect your nuke stage doesn’t have enough thrust.

1905

Haha! Holy cow did I screw up! I hadn’t even thought about the fact I was leaving Kerbin to get to the Mun. Look at that mighty .06 TWR :)

TWR
TWR.jpg871×180 57.1 KB

I am making changes and switching it to 7 Cheetah engines. I lose 400 dV, but that still should leave me plenty to get to the moon and dock @2,000 dV (I hope it’s enough).

1906

AAR from few days ago’s attempt.

Jeb: “Sir, we have plenty of fuel, the rocket is solid, but I’m unsure of a few of your design decisions. Namely your few Nukes to leave Kerbin’s orbit to hit the Mun and dock with our polar orbit science station. Do we really need to take THAT much fuel up there?”

Me: “Yep, you know I’m a terrible planner and worse pilot. Remember when you got stranded on the Mun? And the time you got stranded in orbit? And the time you were on an out-control-trajectory to leave the entire solar system?”

Jeb: " Yea, how did I end up back on Kerbin? I just woke up back home"

ME: “Never mind that, ummm let’s light this candle I wanna see this thing fly!”.

And thus we launch this 1,305 ton monster. The launch is slow but surprisingly smooth. Because of its measured ascent I can follow the apogee marker right into a perfect 72,000 km orbit needing just a tiny bump from the Nuke engines to finish orbital insertion as I was just 50 kph short. I make my maneuver node and am shocked to see I’m going to have to perform… a 23 minute burn?! Holy crap and I don’t have a warp mod, so this is gonna take forever. 8 minutes later I start my burn and am wondering if I should make dinner while this thing inches out of Kerbin’s orbit. I also wonder if it’s going to take so long it will totally screw up the intercept calculation.

It takes a long time before I even see my orbit change. For 5 minutes I literally thought maybe it was not gonna happen at all. At the 10 minute mark I notice my orbit is being altered from what was planned. It is throwing me wide of the Mun and it’s getting worse as the minutes go by. I start trying to adjust my angle to try and stop being cast so far out but it just makes things worse, so I bring it back to the computer’s marker. I finally get to Mun intercept, and create my new M Node, but somehow I mess up and it throws me behind and past, speeding back to Kerbin. I must have bumped something? Thankfully I saved just before and reload. I find on this next try my maneuver has such a tiny insertion window I must have moved and not noticed it before. I successfully get into orbit, and set up 3 more maneuvers to change my inclination to the polar orbit. I’m happy as I nail the final one and have my orbital nodes perfectly aligned with the space stations. I’m in a lower orbit so I’m going slightly faster than the station.

I speed up time and watch 20 more orbits pass as I slowly catch up to the space station. At 3 km I try to intercept the space station, but at this point it’s like letting a blind man drive a dump truck. I try docking mode, which as I found out doesn’t work from 3 km away. I find that my RCS thruster placement may not be optimal because controlling this thing feels like trying to drive a potato through a straw. Attempt after attempt I am disoriented as I get a little closer then the station passes on a oblique angle and scurry to try and correct. But because I’m constantly turning, my controls are constantly changing as for what directions WASD relate to. After ~12 attempts of needling myself closer I give up as I simply don’t know what I’m doing and on repeated reloads I am running out of RCS fuel. If I can get to 1/2 km I think I’ll be good as the docking controls will take over, but getting there is something I need to research. I logout and post to QT3 :)

1907

Echoing the crowd: that’s a really pretty rocket. Nice proportions!

1908

Well keep in mind that the nuke engines have 4x the thrust in vacuum that they do at 1 atm.

1909

Yup. If you press the ‘atmospheric’ button on KER it’ll show you the different ISP.

In general nuclear engines are only useful once you’ve established a stable orbit of Kerbin.

1910

Yea I can now get reliably within 500 meters!

But, I’ve run into a problem where my space station won’t stay in the normal/anti-normal orientation. It’s not “spinning” per say, but it just keeps drifting relative to everything on the navball even with SAS on. Is there anything I can do about that? As I get closer to dock the docking port rotates away from me. Also the space station does not have a probe nor kerbal that can do automatic normal/anti-normal.

1911

Do you have the docking port on your space station set to “control from here”?

There’s a sort of cheaty trick you can do too. If you get your vessel aligned where you want it and then activate time warp, it locks the vessel to that orientation.

Also, as it orbits, the station will seem to rotate (relative to the surface below and relative to any nearby orbiting spacecraft) around its center of gravity. The axis of rotation is the normal/anti-normal vector extending through the center of gravity. (Really, your vessel’s orientation is fixed relative to the distant stars, but the orbit makes them seem to rotate relative to everything nearby.) If your docking port is off-center, it will also rotate around that center of gravity. If you point an off-center docking port normal, it will drift off normal, but it should still describe a small circle in the vicinity of normal as your vessel orbits.

1912

This is what must be happening. Besides the warp trick (does it stay that when you disable warp?), is there anything else I can do? Can I somehow semi orbit to match the rotation the science station is constantly going through? I can be perfectly lined up with the port, then a few seconds later the port is had rotated 180 degrees around the back.

I have a claw arm on the station that was a mistake as I used robot arm parts that are super floppy, so even though I have the arm stowed, when I go back to control the science station it’s all floppy and messed up. I wish I could break it off somehow.

1913

If it’s that rapid, it sounds like there’s an issue with the other craft. The effect Matt is describing should result in a spacecraft rotation rate equal to that of how long it takes to orbit Kerbin. The issue I’m describing used to happen quite frequently when parts were colliding with other parts on the same craft, but I thought it was addressed in a patch.

1914

The claw arm is creating torque causing the station to spin when it is all floppy and lets lose. I just loaded it up and somehow it was locked in place the station was rock steady.

BUT… I found a major design booboo in my newly redesigned refueler. I thought the Verner RCS thrusters were 4-way thrusters just like the normal 4-way RCS control engines. Looks like they only shoot out perpendicular, so I have no forward/backward RCS thrust control as I have them in sets of four around the diameter of my refueler.

1915

Great story.

Way back when I was playing too much KSP in beta I built a probe with ion engines to make a tour of the outer planets. One morning I lined up my burn, fired up the engine and went to work. When I got home I made course corrections and continued. For several days whenever I wasn’t using the computer for something else I’d continue burning toward my next destination.

1916

OMG hahahaha. You have so much more patience than me!

1917

YEA!!!
Thank you @Fishbreath @Matt_W @Strollen @Fozzle @Pod @meeper @GreasyPig @Thrag @Alan_Au :)

Finally%20Docked
Finally Docked.jpg2237×1363 273 KB

1918

OK a few important things I discovered.

#1 - I am stupid.
#2 - If you’ve never docked before, having to use ports on the side of both craft is stupid beyond belief. It is super duper hard since you have to switch orientations at the last moment.
#3 - Big long craft for docking is not good since they become so wiggly.
#4 - Having the smallest robot arm attachments to attach and run the claw is also super stupid.
#5 - Having Solar Panels near where you need to dock is super duper stupid.
#6 - Having RCS thrusters that only go in 4 dimensions instead of all 6 - pretty stupid.
#7 - Sometimes just eyeballing it in is easier than using a docking port aligner.

#8 - Satisfaction of finally docking after 5 days of trying? Priceless.

This was my redesigned Refueler where I added Vernor RCS thrusters on the very top and bottom of the craft so I could move forward and backwards. I also got rid of all the boosters and re-did them with powerful large staging. Compare to this monstrosity .

Refueler%20Rocket1
Refueler Rocket1.jpg2461×1425 847 KB

I can now decouple the probe (hopefully it won’t mess things up because I have probes on the Refueler which is now attached), and the empty tanks. Later when I drain the rest of the fuel off the Mun intercept fuel tank it will make even more room.

Dump
Dump.jpg2545×1433 866 KB

1919

Congrats!!!

Yup. I let a big ass whoop when I did it for the first time. Even this campaign after not playing the game for a year. There was big sense of satisfaction.
#2 it is pretty damn funny though. I must say I never tried docking with side ports.

Oh and thank you for asking questions my docking has gotten much better since they started

1920

Any of you using the “RCS Build Aid” mod?

I’m trying to figure out how to interpret these 3 options:

Munlandercomparison
Munlandercomparison.jpg2211×1127 456 KB

OK found out the red circle is how fast it will rotate, but the big issue is the red arrow which represents torque - which in this case is very bad due to a big red arrow:

Mun%20lander%20RCS%204
Mun lander RCS 4.jpg1579×1437 504 KB

1921

Just had a Eureka moment. I had been ignoring those capsule RCS thrusters thinking they were just - I don’t know, puny nothings. So I deleted my top RCS thruster group and the amount of bad torque generated went from 8.72 down to 2.49. Should be much easier to handle now, though it will change direction a bit slower.

Less%20torque
Less torque.jpg1400×1386 427 KB

1922

Neat, I haven’t seen the RCS build aid thing before. It’s been a while since I last played. I am tempted to jump in and start over yet again to check out the new built in tools.