π The Kerbal Thread - Share Your Kerbal Creations
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Have you managed a Tylo landing/takeoff yet? 0.8 g and zero atmosphere, yikes.
I did a landing a while ago (before the 5m parts), but didn't do the takeoff because I was uncertain if I'd be able to make it back to Kerbin without a nuclear tug. Conveniently, I still have a couple screenshots.
Note the ridiculous amounts of drop tanks.
One stage from orbit dropped for the landing, and I seem to remember the outer tanks being mostly empty.
With the improved joint strength since then, the improved Isp on the Skipper and Mainsail and the 5m parts, I think it's going to be much easier next time.
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Nice. I've cratered it about 4 times now, but my "no cheating" policy makes it take a lot of time to test a lander there.
You can use Kerbin as a "practice area". But I still haven't pulled it off. I've made some great landers that have like a ton of hover-time on Kerbin, but none of them have worked on Tylo itself.
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Yeah, the descent is pretty scary, even with a > 1.0 TWR on Kerbin.
I think those three stages in the lander above would have been nearly enough for a MΓΌn round-trip. If your lander can do that in its entirety (while maintaining ~1.0 TWR), it's probably good to go. The difficult part is then getting something that massive into orbit, to Jool, and then to Tylo. I had to refuel the outer stages a couple times between transfers.
Laythe, Tylo, and Eve ascents all pretty much require specialized craft.
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I got the demo installed last night, experienced much hilarity in the tutorials. Couldn't figure out how to properly deploy the parachute. It deployed, but it didn't "fan out" or slow me down and my capsule didn't survive landing.
I'll definitely be getting the full version sometime. Orbiter was lots of fun, especially for learning basic orbital mechanics and maneuvers, but I really like games that make you design/engineer stuff.
Does KSP have multiplayer, or plans for multiplayer? Races could be fun. Especially if there are any kinds of weapons mods.
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Does KSP have multiplayer, or plans for multiplayer?
No and no.
Especially if there are any kinds of weapons mods.
FUCKING NO.
If you want a game about shooting at people, there are already 50,000 of those. Get the hell away from Kerbal and play one.
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Dres, super-easy landing (basically Mun all over again, but even less craggy). But getting there is annoying, since it's in a weird orbit and doesn't have the gravity pull of Jool.
BTW before you criticize my fuel usage there, I landed from super-high orbit because I'm worried about my mothership's consumption-- might be iffy getting back. (It's the mother ship pictured above above Duna, but with about a third the fuel it has in that shot.)
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Choices, choices... do I load up the lander with fuel and make a break for Kerbin? Or do I stick with my much more fuel-efficient atomic engines, but have them haul 3 times the weight?
I need about 2200 m/s delta-V to get back from here... the 1918 in the screenshot plus another maybe 100-200 to get in Kerbin's atmosphere.
I'm 99% sure the lander can pull it off, so I'm going to try that first.
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Good luck, Jebediah!
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He's ok, I just finished the "big burn" back to Kerbal intercept, and he's got 217 units of fuel left. In the lander. That's more than enough to get in Kerbin's atmosphere, and parachutes take it from there.
I'm curious whether the atomics would have made it, so when I'm done I might go back and try that. Atomics are hard to eyeball fuel consumption on, because they're literally twice as efficient than any other engine type. (800 compared to the 390 on that lander's LV-909s.) But they also weigh shitloads, like 2.5 tons each.
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Due to some *ahem* inept piloting, poor Jeb just barely made it back with 49 units of fuel to spare. (I should have done the aero-braking burn much further-out.) But hey happy ending.
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So. I achieved orbit. Apparently my technique was all wrong (installed Mechjeb to teach me how not to suck, now back to flying on pure seat of pants) Running in career mode, so I've been spending time bootstrapping things.
Summary:
- Built a modular booster/mission module system for the initial orbital work. This system has the advantage of actually having fuel left in the second stage liquid tanks (one of those big orange Rockomax suckers) after circularization.
- Figured out that if I slap on a docking port, some solar panels, a mechjeb module (tiny addon to make a stage autonomous? I think I'll keep it installed!) and some RCS gear, I can build a fuel depot.
- Put a few extra docking ports on one to act as a fuel station core and have been slowly filling it up when I don't flub the intercept (from the ground straight to an intercept without any synchronization orbits is fucking hard).
- Concept here is that when possible I launch to orbit near this site, dump the expensive liquid stage in orbit, and go about the mission. While that mission is in a cruise phase, I swap back to the liquid boost stage and transfer most of the remaining fuel to the depot. The remaining fuel is then used to do a controlled deorbit to a splashdown, so I get to recover the expensive-assed main engines.
Started gearing up for a Mun mission.
- Built a bigger heavylift booster/mission module system for deeper space work. Unfortunately, the second stage booster on this one doesn't have enough fuel to deorbit itself if you circularize at any non-dangerous altitude. So it's either dump it and do the circularization burn on mission fuel, or litter orbit.
- Built and tested a single stage lander on Kerbin. Has enough fuel to get down safely without chutes, but it has them anyway - it'll also be the mission-end landing/splashdown (depending on how much fuel it has) unit.
- Built and tested a command module. Basically a lander with a bigger fuel tank and no provisions for landing.
- Launched both missions with a total of 4 kerbonauts on board. One to hang out in Mun orbit and 3 to land. Docked them successfully.
- Successfully launched a transfer orbit to the Mun.
- Disaster! I hit the shift key by mistake trying to select the two RCS tanks for a fuel transfer. Naturally, I also failed to lock out the main engines, so I make an unscheduled burn. I will no longer enter Mun orbit.
- I have some decisions to make: Abort and just take the return, or burn to enter Munar orbit. At this point, the landing is off the table. Really should jettison the lander because fuel margins are tight as-is, but I don't have enough seats on the command module. I burn to enter munar orbit.
- Successfully enter orbit of the Mun. Yay! I circularize, very high up. Don't have enough fuel margin to go low.
- Burn for transfer back to Kerbin.
- After escaping the Mun, I start looking at my Kerbin entry. I only have 3 seats on a landing capable craft, but 4 nauts. I see two real options: Use the big booster on the command module to burn for a direct crash reentry, transfer the 3 most valuable 'nauts to the lander, and let the mook die, or try to get heroic and attempt to circularize, praying for enough fuel to complete that manuever and then deorbit the lander. No such luck.
So, I now have my entire Kerbonaut corps stuck in a mildly eccentric high orbit with no fuel, my science and monetary budgets totally screwed because I was counting on big science and contract payouts from the Mun, and no ready rescue vehicle.
In keeping with the 'strap shit together' attitude I've kind of taken to, I'm thinking I'll have to investigate intercepting them with my fuel station core. It has fuel, a (previously thought vestigial) main booster engine, and RCS ports.
I'll need to boost more RCS tankage, though. It's kinda massy and probably doesn't have enough to leave margin, even if I only stabilize it near the rescuees and use the RCS on those ships to do the docking. Might include a simple parachute lander on the RCS tanker, so I have something to deorbit the forth kerbonaut inexpensively.
Yeah, this is getting kind of exciting.
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(one of those big orange Rockomax suckers)
Started gearing up for a Mun mission.
How'd you manage to unlock the orange Rockomax tank before landing on Mun in career mode?
Edit: BTW, without autopilots, docking two ships together (at least initially) is very very challenging. I'm dismayed that you've done several of these before a Mun landing. Dismayed!
But it's your game, play how you want I guess.
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Cranked up the bonuses quite high. Probably too high.
Oh, and I should point out that my mun landing plan involved 3 dockings: One because I sent the ship up in two pieces, a second because only half the ship lands, and there aren't enough seats just to crowd everybody into the command module, and the third to recover resources and the last kerbonaut (although bothering to dock is just being fancy - a close approach and EVA would have done it).
And now that I've screwed it all up, it's going to take... Uh. 4 or 5, maybe 6 once you figure in the RCS tanker, refueling flight, etc. I halfway anticipate a collision incident - I'm still not terribly good at it.
Of course, the safe and sane thing to do would be to just build a dedicated rescue flight and EVA the assholes over. I think I have the tech to do one as an SSTO (though I have never flown a spaceplane).
So I now have two awful options. I'll think on this one while I drive home (still at work)
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Cranked up the bonuses quite high. Probably too high.
Oh I didn't know you could do that. Yeah that's a little ridiculous. You can do Mun and back (at least with a single Kerbalnaut) using only medium 1.25 meter parts. Scroll all the way up to see a successful 2-stage lander built this way. (Although it was marginal, it did successfully land.)
Doing the Apollo thing is kind of cool though, that's what I've been doing with the ships for interplanetary stuff, except instead of a command crew I just use a remote control unit. It changes a lot not having to worry about life-support.
Doing a test burn now to see if the butt-end of the lander + mother ship combo could have made it back to Kerbin-- looks like it would have worked fine, tight but no tighter than the lander-only return. Of course now I have to throw the thing away, sigh.
Edit: now comes the really fun part, flagging Jool moons. Maybe this game I'll try putting a science station in Jool orbit and using it as a base of operations, then landing all the experiments back to Kerbin all at once.
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Does KSP have multiplayer, or plans for multiplayer?
There's KMP for now. Time warp presents some challenges for implementing multiplayer, but these guys seem to have done enough proof of concept work that Squad has committed to adding it to a future release.
Squad has been known to hire modders from the community and bring mod content into the core game. A couple notable examples would be the C7 aerospace parts and the 0.25 Mk2 parts. The fact that they are so open to modding is pretty cool.
Races could be fun. Especially if there are any kinds of weapons mods.
Weapons aren't planned in the final release. However, some modders have filled that void if you want to have a dogfight over Duna.
BTW before you criticize my fuel usage there, I landed from super-high orbit because I'm worried about my mothership's consumption-- might be iffy getting back. (It's the mother ship pictured above above Duna, but with about a third the fuel it has in that shot.)
Given that you can't aerobrake on Dres, any excessive fuel usage is forgiven. My only trips to Dres have involved nuclear landers.
I'm curious whether the atomics would have made it, so when I'm done I might go back and try that. Atomics are hard to eyeball fuel consumption on, because they're literally twice as efficient than any other engine type. (800 compared to the 390 on that lander's LV-909s.) But they also weigh shitloads, like 2.5 tons each.
I don't remember where the decision point is (someone's made a chart somewhere of optimal engine choice based on weight, % fuel, etc.), but if TWR isn't a major concern, nukes are pretty much the best choice except if the craft is really small. If it IS really small, the Rockomax 48-7S is not to be underestimated. It makes 60% the thrust of a 909 but only weighs 1/5 as much, and that usually compensates for the inferior 300/350s Isp.
Even when they're a significant part of the mass, like on my ~40t spaceplanes, nuclear engines make > 1000m/s more delta-V than aerospikes or 909's.
So. I achieved orbit. Apparently my technique was all wrong
Welcome to the club (on making orbit and on realizing that you'd been doing things wrong). I think we've all had a lot of failures before making orbit.
BTW, without autopilots, docking two ships together (at least initially) is very very challenging. I'm dismayed that you've done several of these before a Mun landing. Dismayed!
Very true. Docking is hard at first. It's easier once you master maneuver nodes and trimming velocity with the navball.
Also, I've always had an easier time landing on Minmus first. It takes slightly more delta-V to transfer, but it's so much easier to land and take off.
RCS
One thing about RCS is that as you get more practice with it, you'll find you need a lot less of it than you think. What I do is try and set a trajectory towards my target using RCS, timewarp until I'm closer, perform any necessary corrections to get back in line, timewarp again, repeating until I'm really close (i.e. 5-10m away). I used to think I would need > 200 monopropellant to dock a small craft, and now I can do it with about 10-50.
Yeah, this is getting kind of exciting.
The unexpected challenges that inevitably arise are part of what makes this game so fascinating.
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Welcome to the club (on making orbit and on realizing that you'd been doing things wrong). I think we've all had a lot of failures before making orbit.
Yeah, but I've been trying off and on since basically day 1. Every month or two "I should try Unsuccessful Rocket Simulator again!"Was still better than Goat Simulator.
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Then you're doing Goat Simulator wrong, in all honesty
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Well, apparently I get a do-over on Kerbin entry. Apparently I didn't save before quitting or something.
The rescue operation sounds Fun. I'm going to attempt a modification of the crash-reentry plan - drop the lander with 3/4 of the crew into a reentry trajectory and steer the command module into the best orbit I can. And then figure out an SSTO rescue.
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Finally got to work on my spaceplane with the new Mk2 parts again. I like the odd number of turbojets to even number of LV-N arrangement because KSP doesn't feed air evenly and this leads to unpleasant flameouts. If I have an odd number of engines, I can turn off the outer two as I run out of air and not go into a dead spin. This one's a 3 turbojet + 2 LV-N which I'm calling Megalon because I'm going with Godzilla monsters as the theme for this series of nuclear spaceplanes.
This might qualify as a ridiculous amount of intakes, but the longer I can keep my jets running, the more fuel I have for orbit.
Now, while KSP doesn't feed jet engines evenly, it does feed them in the order you've placed them. I placed the center engine after the outer two so that it would harmlessly flame out and serve as a warning that air's getting low, so I can switch on the LV-N's for some added boost.
Once the air gets really low, I turn off the outer two jets and let the middle one take over. This jet stays on until we're out of air completely.
The thrust on the center engine is declining, but it's still greater than each of the LV-N's, and we're moving so fast that it doesn't really matter.
And we're in space...
3900m/s remaining from 120km orbit - more than enough for an unassisted Jool transfer. That number's going to go down a bit because I plan on adding rover wheels, RCS, and VTOL to this craft, but so far this is looking like a promising platform.
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My only trips to Dres have involved nuclear landers.
I'm kind of putting those in the "feels like cheating" category. I only use atomics for interplanetary stuff, my landers always have conventional motors.
Even when they're a significant part of the mass, like on my ~40t spaceplanes, nuclear engines make > 1000m/s more delta-V than aerospikes or 909's.
In this rocket (the one I posted about today, from Dres), I should have stuck with the atomics. Considering that, when emptied of fuel into the lander, it still had enough Delta-V to make it home, detaching the lander was probably the wrong choice.
That said, the lander on its own made the trip fine, but. The main takeaway is that I'm always super-conservative about fuel usage, and usually waaay over-build my craft.
Also, I've always had an easier time landing on Minmus first.
The only problem with that is you can build a ship that can land on Minmus and not land on Mun. You can't do the opposite... I see it kind of like once you get a Mun-capable ship, the Minmus landing you can consider "bonus".
One thing about RCS is that as you get more practice with it, you'll find you need a lot less of it than you think. What I do is try and set a trajectory towards my target using RCS, timewarp until I'm closer, perform any necessary corrections to get back in line, timewarp again, repeating until I'm really close (i.e. 5-10m away). I used to think I would need > 200 monopropellant to dock a small craft, and now I can do it with about 10-50.
I generally use my main engines to 200m or so before switching to RCS. You can see on the "Jeb returns" image above, the lander had 125/160 RCS after docking with its mothership, and I considered that a pretty clumsy docking. The lander had poorly-placed RCS nozzles, so it had a tendency to "tilt" with thrusting any direction other than forward or back.
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Nice.
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Long Range Lander v.2
Changes:
- Double the amount of atomic engines, and double the fuel available to the atomic engines, by removing the somewhat-useless (old) 3rd stage.
- Much longer-firing second stage, the first two stages bring me to about 20k and 550 m/s, if I did this right the third stage should get Kerbin escape without much trouble before I ever have to touch the atomics or their fuel supply. EDIT: 29k and 690 m/s.
- Improved placement of Stayputnik on mothership.
- Upgrade of solar cells on mothership.
- Addition of a couple Gravoili Detectors on mothership, to boost science output of mission.
- Addition of "oh shit" antennas on both mothership and lander, so I can salvage the science if a mission fails.
- Improved placement of RCS quads on lander, hopefully docking will be easier this time around.
- Lander solar cells moved to a more sensible location, where they're less likely to get stepped-on and broken by a clumsy Kerbalnaut exiting the ship.
- Probably a few other things I can't remember.
One change I'm making right now but isn't on the screenshot: replace the docking port between the two components with a Rockomax-sized one, for added stability during launch. EDIT: hm, that puts the docking port dangerously close to the LV-909s. Well I'll try it anyway.
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Long Range Lander v.2
As entertaining as these pictures are, there's something weird or wrong about a game where you have to make them, instead of the kind of things that are actually used in the real world.
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As entertaining as these pictures are, there's something weird or wrong about a game where you have to make them, instead of the kind of things that are actually used in the real world.
I don't get what you're saying. These are the "kind of things that are actually used in the real world." All the Kerbal parts are based on actual parts that can be (or, more often, have been) built in the real world.
If you're saying you'd prefer a piloting sim instead of a building sim, those exist. If you wanna get into an Apollo program LM and tool around on the moon, try Lunar Flight.
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New stack has trouble staging. :( I drop my outer boosters, and they bang into and destroy one of the engines. Even after giving them a 5-count. Feh.
EDIT: fixed it by switching to a radial decoupler with less ejection force. Go figure.
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This sucker has 29.9 minutes of atomic fuel after escaping Kerbin. Woot. And that's not counting what's in the lander tank.
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I don't get what you're saying.
Of course not, Drax.
All the Kerbal parts are based on actual parts that can be (or, more often, have been) built in the real world.
Yes, because the world is full of rockets with 27 first stage components OH WAIT WE DON'T DO THAT BECAUSE N-1.
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Yes, because the world is full of rockets with 27 first stage components OH WAIT WE DON'T DO THAT BECAUSE N-1.
Right; but the real world has 24 hour days, Earth has a lot more gravity and atmosphere than Kerbin, etc etc etc.
The reason it's "Kerbal space program" and not "human being space program" is specifically because it takes place in a science fiction setting that is not our own solar system.
Besides, it's probably impossible to build a sim for a real-life space program while still using click-together lego parts. I doubt it would be any fun if you did.
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Holy crap, not enough SAS to turn this sucker with those tanks still attached. Shit, she's got a fat ass.
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i'll toss a picture this way i guess.... Remember I use mods1.
I have my munar array of coms satellites deployed, i still need to get the polar orbit repeater satellites around Kerbin, but i've got the semi-major axis of the three equitorial orbit satellites pretty well aligned so they're staying in place without drifting too much.
now i don't need to send Kerbals who need expensive and heavy life support modules. I've turned off the indicators for the directional antennas as they made it look a bit too much like a ball of spaghetti.
1: In particular i'm using:
- TAC life support
- Deadly Reentry
- Interstellar Mod
- RemoteTech
- FERRAM Aerospace
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I foolishly took that ship to Moho.
On the one hand, I made it there successfully. On the other, poor Jeb is now fucked and going to need rescue. Well at least I can flag it first. All this because I didn't want to build a Jool station without a Rockomax-sized inline battery.
I figure I can rescue him with the same ship, but "headless" (i.e. launch without any lander components, just a docking port.)
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Ok so remember how I said, "hey my docking port might be too close to the LV-909s"? Look at this loveliness:
The magnets are pulling but the ships ain't docking. Why not? Turns out apparently the docking port collision doesn't match the visual on the screen-- the LV-909 bell is blocking it physically, even though visually it looks like it should slot right in there. Ugh.
Also note I used up literally every gram of fuel and RCS fuel to attempt this docking.
So now the only way to rescue Jeb there is with a spacewalk. Which means I need to send another man-capable ship to Moho.
I'm tempted to see if the mothership can "push" the lander to Moho escape, which would save a shitton of fuel...
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Wouldn't dropping a decoupler and basic command module on top of your mothership stack instead of a docking port suffice for a spacewalk rescue? Given what I've seen of pushing physics in KSP, I'd expect disaster to ensue.
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Wouldn't dropping a decoupler and basic command module on top of your mothership stack instead of a docking port suffice for a spacewalk rescue?
Yeah, the main problem I have is that the ship I have built simply won't do the trip in one launch. I think I need to piece together a 2-part ship like the old "fuel train" ships I used to do trips like this in my first save.
I also gotta do a long spacewalk with jeb to get all the experiments in the cockpit. I'm not sure how much science he can carry per trip... I think cockpits can carry infinite experiments, but I'll have to look that up. EDIT: nope, this cockpit can only store 8. Well I got the most valuable ones.
The pushing didn't work, naturally. I had the mothership transmit its data and then crash into Moho. Jeb's all alone for the next 2 years or so.
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Ah. Recovering the science. I think cockpits are 1-per, and you need the lab module thingy for more.
What about the Advanced Grabbing Unit?
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What about the Advanced Grabbing Unit?
I thought about that. I could try to grab on to one of the landing legs.
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I suspect bad things would happen applying thrust asymmetrically like that, unless the center of mass on that lander is very low. Attaching to the pointy end, though, is probably a go.
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why not grabby the docking adaptor? should be able to get the grabber in there.
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Maybe, but in reality there'd be no purchase since it's just a flat plate.
I could grip the top, at the parachute. That works I suppose.
As for asymmertic, anything I latch on to that is gonna have like 16 SAS at minimum, I don't see that as a issue.
Here's a "first draft" of my grabber ship:
It's gonna be looong slooow burns, but it has a ton more fuel. The bottom two Kerbodyne tanks are drop-tanks.
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So here I havea bigass 50-ton SSTO/heavy aircraft delta wing dealie (inspired in no small part by @Groaner's 40-tonners. Sucker has three cargo bays (one large, two small, two auxiliary crew pods for a seating capacity rivaling many small airliners, utterly insufficient RCS (need to work on that), and 3 slots for air-breathing engines, and 4 more more that are usually atomic rockets.
Right now she's in strictly air-breathing configuration, because I have some rocket motors on underwing hardpoints to carry out some in-atmosphere contract testing. Note the two additional SRB's on the tail hardpoints. Those are so this big fat sonofabitch can actually achieve test velocities.
I've yet to achieve an actual landing-from-space with this bird. She always starts to tumble unrecoverably around jet engine ignition altitude. Even if I don't start the jets but just try to glide in.
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Here's a "first draft" of my grabber ship:
That's a lot of LV-Ns. But that's also a lot of 14400s.
So here I havea bigass 50-ton SSTO/heavy aircraft delta wing dealie (inspired in no small part by @Groaner's 40-tonners. Sucker has three cargo bays (one large, two small, two auxiliary crew pods for a seating capacity rivaling many small airliners, utterly insufficient RCS (need to work on that), and 3 slots for air-breathing engines, and 4 more more that are usually atomic rockets.
Going straight for SSTOs, eh? That's like one of the hardest parts of KSP because you have to balance so many factors. It's also one of the most rewarding.
Is that 7 turbojets? That's a lot of lifting power for 50 tons - I would probably use 5 for a craft that size. Then again, I'm not typically carrying cargo, and the extra power would be useful for climbing before the turbojets reach optimal thrust.
I've yet to achieve an actual landing-from-space with this bird. She always starts to tumble unrecoverably around jet engine ignition altitude. Even if I don't start the jets but just try to glide in.
Got enough SAS units/cockpits and control surfaces? Does your center of mass drift far from your center of lift when the tanks are empty? Fuel flow issues are pretty insidious, and I've had to scrap a few designs that flew just fine at take off, but were horribly unbalanced with almost empty tanks.
As a plan B, you can just add parachutes and then such landings are harmless!
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Normally it's just 3 turbojets and the rest are nuclear. That particular flight was pure atmospheric and I needed the extra thrust to attain specific speed altitude combinations.
I also need to trim down on oxidizer. Currently I'm lifting a lot of extra non fuel mass because my dumb ass didn't realize jets don't need it until I was watching levels during those tests.
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I also need to trim down on oxidizer. Currently I'm lifting a lot of extra non fuel mass because my dumb ass didn't realize jets don't need it until I was watching levels during those tests.
Adding a jet fuel fuselage or two should compensate for that. The engine nacelle and radial engine body are also nice for this purpose.
After doing some significant redesign for better balancing and weight loss (having both parachutes and VTOL is kind of excessive), we're down to 37 tons.
As much as I would like to use the radial engines for VTOL, the 48-7S is hard to beat since 360kN worth of them only weighs 1.2 tons.
Inner engine doesn't flame out until 1500m/s - not bad.
And 4km/s from orbit. This one's a keeper and going to Laythe. Meanwhile, we've also got a non-atmospheric lander ready for Jool...
I submit this as proof of @blakeyrat's assertion that nuclear landers are cheating. If I take the science modules off that lander, the result is OVER NINE THOUSAND m/s in a single stage.
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That's a lot of LV-Ns. But that's also a lot of 14400s.
Getting 4 (full) 14400s along with 16 LV-Ns and associated miscellany into Kerbal escape is... challenging.
I'm kind of jealous of you airplane guys, because goddamned planes are hard in Kerbal and I usually don't have the patience.
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I gave up on elegance, I'm brute-forcing the fucker. Suck it, physics engine.
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It's a thing of beauty. *sniff*
It also has woefully insufficient RCS and SAS. But whatever, I'll try it anyway. Tomorrow.
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I bought the full game last night. The tutorials are WTF. To The Mun Part 1 ends with "In the next tutorial, we'll show you how to land!" Then To the Mun Part 2 starts with my ship landed on the moon and the guy says "Looks like you were able to land! Good job!" At no point was I taught how to land on the Mun. I kind of understand how thanks to Orbiter, but the Delta Glider had main thrusters and hover thrusters so it was probably simpler.
Also no mention of Mission Control in the tutorials, but it mentioned science so I figured that was the most important thing. Since I didn't know missions existed, I wasn't making money for flights and burned through all my credits trying (and failing) to gain science.
I restarted the game and I think I'm starting to understand these things.
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best tutorials for KSP i've seen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puC-YV_h9Us&list=PLYu7z3I8tdEmqpOkQZCl5SZB5t0vXuxE0
some of the videos are for older versions, but the principles are pretty much the same and Scott Manley does a great job of explaining most of the why of what he's doing.
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Since I didn't know missions existed, I wasn't making money for flights and burned through all my credits trying (and failing) to gain science.
Just FYI, all missions give an advance that I believe (in theory) is the minimal amount of money you can complete the mission with. But you can take 10 mission advances at a time. So if your bank is empty, you can just accept missions and cruise on their advances for awhile.
But frankly, I didn't find the economy mode very fun. When you get further along, you'll have to grind boring missions to get enough cash to build the rockets you really wanna build. (Land on Mun for the 27th time! Yawn!)
I switched to science only. But the weird thing about that is, they've re-balanced science assuming economy mode, so now it's actually a lot harder to unlock shit in science mode-- for example the ship I sent to Moho? I still don't have half of the top tier of science finished. (In the old version, if you had gone to, say, Ike and Gilly and returned with experiments, you were done with the science tree easy.)
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At no point was I taught how to land on the Mun.
You generally land by turning off the engines.
