Chapter 1

This is a book about KSP related learnings. It is in a continuous state of WIP

Checklists

Follow these checklists to prevent mistakes. These are useful in Hard mode playthroughs. Consider adapting them to your needs.

Rocket Construction

• Staging
  • Correct order and groups
• Delta V
  • Sufficient for flight plan
• Fins/Aero
  • Centre of drag sufficiently behind centre of centre of mass
• Crew/Pods
  • Probe core
  • Crew capacity
  • Correct crew
• RCS/Reaction wheels
  • Sufficient to maneuver vessel
• Power
  • Solar panels
  • Consider NRTG if going to Jool or beyond
• Signal
  • Antenna on every separate part of the ship
  • Relays if necessary
• Heat shields
  • On the correct side of any decoupler
  • 1.875m minimum diameter heat shield if protecting an RC-001S probe core
• Parachutes
  • Sufficient for landing
• Science
  • All available science
  • bring cheap science in case vessel is required to fulfill contracts.
• Landing
  • Below engine bell
  • Sufficient strength of gear
• Flight plan and Contracts
• Custom actions

Construction of Mining vessel

• Convert-O-tron
• Drill
• Power
  • Solar panels and/or
  • Fuel cells
• Ore container
• Heat dissipation

Pre-flight

• Transfer Window
• Crew
• Go to launchpad
• Staging
• Flight plan
• Abort options
• SAS
• Throttle
• Stage

Orbit/Pre warp

• Solar panels
• Antenna extended

Atmospheric Pre-entry

• Bail out scenario
• Heat shields
• Parachutes
• Landing site (water, day, flat, etc)
• Periapsis

Atmospheric Entry

• Burn off delta V
• Bail out if needed
• Landing speed under 6m/s

Rover requirements

• Wheels
• Power
  • Batteries and solar panels
  • Fuel cells and fuel
• Control
  • Command seat
  • Probe core/Antenna
• Reaction wheel

Gravity Assists

Most tutorials for gravity assists online say to “just play around with maneuver nodes and you’ll get better at it” but I don’t find this answer very satisfying. Instead I have distilled the following 6 rules to help me plan what assists to use before I take off:

1. You enter a sphere of influence with the same speed you exit
2. If you do two assists in the same location, you will enter the second assist with the velocity you exited the first
3. The greater the mass of the body, the more it can bend your trajectory in a single assist
4. The greater the relative speed, the more you can get out of assists
5. High inclinations and oblique angles means greater relative speed
6. Fly to where you want the encounter to be, rather than where the planet is.

TODO

• Eve SSTO
• Reusable boosters
• gravity boosts

Highest and lowest altitudes

https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/topic/173446-lowest-highest-points-of-celestial-bodies/

General

• Low Kerbin orbit is about 2200 m/
• Press O on the keyboard to put on your helmet. Kerbals inside a firing will die without it.

Delta v guide corrections

• Ike has a safe minimum altitude of 29km not 10km
• Moho has a safe minimum altitude of 16km, not 50km
• Minmus plane change is ~40m/s not 340m/s

Moho -> kerbin

• Start with 3393
• 141m/s to get to SOI edge
• 2733 eve encounter 660m/s from moho down from 2400
• 2600 to kerbin encounter

Delta V cheatsheet

• low Laythe orbit -> Laythe SOI edge: 600m/s
• Laythe SOI edge -> Tylo: 60m/s
• Low Moho orbit -> Moho SOI edge: 310m/s

Technique 1:

• Tylo capture, set Pe with som margin above Jool
• Laythe assist to get a smaller orbit and another tylo assist
• Use the next Tylo assist to set the Pe/Ap and inclination at the level of your planet
• Capture burn at your moon
• Budget 200ms of delta v??? + capture burn

Science

• There are 5 altitudes for science: Space high, Space low, Flying high, Flying low, and Surface.
  • Flying is only available if there is an atmosphere
• Every science experiment can only be performed once in space high, except for the gravioli detector, which is per biome.
• Every science experiment can only be performed once in space low except for the gravioli detector and EVA report which is per biome.
• Every science experiment can only be performed once flying high except for the atmosphere analysis which is per biome.
• Every sciecne expermient can be performed once per biome flying low except for the mystery goo and barometer.
• Every sciecne expermient can be performed once per biome on the surface except for the eva experiment kit.

IVA info

• Use pahse angle to get an intercept with a planet
• An inclination of 0 degrees is east
• Mun -> Kerbin ejection angle 32 degrees (target at 32 degrees pitch on navball), with an extra 50m/s of dV.
• Minmus -> Kerbin ejection angle is about 90 degrees. Just burn at lowest velocity.

Spaceplane design

• Landing gear in tripod formation: 1 at front, 2 in the rear
  • Rear landing gear behind COM
    • Too far forwards and you tail strike or fall backwards
    • Too far back and you bounce when you land
  • Forward landing gear should be higher than rear
• Centre of lift should be behind COM
  • It needs to be about a balls width behind
  • Too low and the craft will become unstable
• Lift surfaces should have AoA built in
• Elevators should be as far rear as possible
• Ailerons should be as wide as possible
• Brakes set to max braking
• Max 4 rapiers per shock cone intake
• SAS OFF when flying air breathing, use option + WASD for trim instead
• Roll instability can be caused by too much aileron authority
• Roll instability can be casued by COG too high.
  • This also happens when you pitch up

Standard actions

• Use F6 and F7 to switch between action sets

Eve ascender

Flying

• SAS prograde
• Never let prograde marker drop below horizon unless descending.

Landing procedure

• Stage off any extra weight
• SAS radial out
• Ensure speed < 30m/s to ensure panels do not break off
• Extend panels. Do not quicksave until landing unless you want the panels to break off!
• Autorotate until about 800m
• Full throttle until speed has dropped below 10m/s
• Throttle down to maintain 10m/s
• When 25m AGL, full throttle
• Cut throttle when close to ground
• Go around by maintaining throttle

When slowing down, use full throttle and then throttle back, rather than slowly throttling up from zero.

Ascending

Propellor stage

Ensure you stay below the following speeds to prevent solar panels from breaking:

• Radial out, full throttle
• Stage extra weight
• Maintain 440RPM max
• At 42km, change to stability from radial out to avoid surface to orbit transition

Rocket stage

• Open fuel tank dialogs
• SAS to stability
• Speed mode to Orbit
• Full throttle
• Stage, and immediately SAS to stability again
• Pitch to 75 degrees
• Maintain 45s to apoapsis with pitch

Launch profile once at max prop altitude:

Launch profile

TWR approximately 1.8

Safe aerobraking altitudes

High bound means we can try 1-2km less next time. The lower bound is when the craft explodes or we feel uncomfortable going any lower

Minmus departures

Laythe

• SOI
  • 40km too low, shock cones almost overheated, but got into low Laythe orbit anything below this and you will land

Kerbin

• From Jool
  • 7km/s re-rentry: 38km altitude is too high. The craft skipped right over.

Optimal ascent

- 5 degrees off prograde: 99.6% efficient
- 10 degrees off prograde: 98.4% efficient
- 25 degrees off prograde: 90% efficient

• The more time we spend vertical, the more delta v we lose to gravity
• Gravity is a much larger effect than air resistance for anything except Eve
• We can pitch down by not throttling and letting the craft naturally pitch over.
• Your craft will burn up/break apart if it is travelling too fast at low altitudes
• We want to complete the turn before apoapsis, otherwise the craft will be going down

Therefore:

• Set SAS to prograde and leave it for max efficiency.
• Pitch over as early as possible, to maximise horizontal speed. Don’t pitch too much or you’ll break up the vehicle.
• Use throttle to control pitch
• Anything under 10 degrees off horizontal, and we only lose 1.5% due to the normal component. We may as well blast full throttle.
• If we can’t complete the gravity turn before apoapsis, you have too little throttle/TWR.

MISTAKE HALL OF FAME

• Saved four kerbals in a hitchiker, not enough parachutes, 8m/s insterad of 6m.s at landing, everyone died. Rescue mission took 2 hours.
• Sent probe to Eve, forgot to extend solar panels, in correct orbit, dead.
• The shutdown temperature for the convert-o-tron 125 is 1500K, but a science Jr. will explode at 1200K. Don’t connect the reactor directly to a science Jr.
• Engineer level 0 cannot repack parachutes. Make sure if you hire a new astronaut, they orbit kerbin first to get a star.
• The light scanner arm only transmits 33% science, even if you find another of the same formation.
• You have to enable the sentinel scanner to make it scan.
• A pod without a heat shield is aerodynamically unstable, and will tend to point nose down
• Use drogue chutes. They can be partially deployed at high velocity, and can help upright a nose down ship. Partially deployed, they have more drag than a main chute.
• Don’t skip the checklists
• If you start a rescue mission and a “dock two vessels in orbit” mission, and send an egineer to attach a docking port to the wreckage and dock with it, it does not count as two different vessels.
• Aseroids have shade, make sure you’re on the sun side of the asteroid or have a NUK

Advice

• When creating a manual alarm, it only allows you to input a relative time. If you want to input an absolute time, you can save the alarm. When you edit the alarm, the time input will change to absolute.
• Autostrut is only available after you unlock struts
• Crossfeed and fuel flow priority is only available if you unlock fuel systems in the tech tree
• Kerbals can only deploy their personal chutes if they have at least one star
  • Rescued kerbals have one start by default if you EVA them. If you use the claw on their craft and never directly control them, they end up with 0 stars.
• Align maneuvers before you time warp.
  • If you have a slow turning vessel, you won’t miss your mark this way.
  • If your unmanned probe loses power, you will still be able to execute your maneuver.
• Extend your solar panels before you time warp
• Avoid sending a manned craft for a rescue mission whenever possible: you may need to rescue two kerbals that way.
• For lifting: Kodiaks are the cheapest liquid fuel engine per unit thrust, Bobcats are the cheapest if you want a gimbal
  • Two Bobcats equals a Skipper, three equals a Mainsail.
• For transfer NERV is the clear winner overall
• For transfer with checmical engines: the Ant, Spark, Terrier, Cheetah, and Wolfhound have the highest ISP/weight in a vacuum. Which one you choose depends on the weight of your craft.
  • The chetah beats the terrier at around 28t
• If you make a mistake designing your craft/have the wrong crew, you can recover your craft on the launchpad without launching it for a full refund.
• If you have a problem with a mission, walk away and do another one. You make more mistakes when you’re tilted. Come back to that mission later fresh.
• It’s OK to fail a contract sometimes.
• Engineers are the most useful kerbal, don’t use them unnecessarily.
• Practice aborts ahead of time.
• You need two fuel lines, one going each way to transfer fuel accross a heat shield/claw
• Enter the atmosphere contracts can be done with debris. e.g. eject an empty fuel tank and be in control of it and it will pass the contract.

Principia

• Timewarp always succeeds to exactly one minute.

• Jank:

  • I normally use the maneuver editor in the bottom left corner, which is full of jank. In stock KSP, sometimes the maneuver disappears, you can’t see the total delta V for any maneuver except maneuver 1, it stays grey for a while and then opens. Principia has none of these issues.
  • The rebase functionality is amazing in principia, and allows you to perform cowboy flying without maneuver nodes seamelessly with maneuvers.
  • The Map screen in KSP is complete jank when intercepting multiple orbits in advance, sometimes the conics flicker

Principia

Principia is a mod that provides N-body physics to KSP. My personal take is that after using principia, it’s hard to go back, even when you’re not using fancy N-body maneuvers.

In stock KSP, we have the concept of a sphere of influence. When you get close to Kerbin, the navball shows Kerbin and your speed is shown relative to Kerbin. When you’re close to Duna, your navball shows Duna, and your speed is relative to Duna. We get to choose three frames of reference: surface, orbit and target. Surface mode shows your speed and direction from the point of view of someone on the surface of the body, Orbit mode shows your speed and direction relative to the body without accounting for surface rotation, and Target mode shows your speed and direction from the point of view of someone in another vessel.

Principia does away with the concept of a sphere of influence: we are always being influenced by all bodies at the same time. Therefore, alongside choosing Surface, Orbit, and Target reference frames, it also makes sense that we can choose which body our Surface, Orbit, or Target frame refers to. Inertial reference frames e.g Kerbin-Centred Inertial (KCI), or Mun-Centred Inertial (MCI) are the equivalent of Orbit Reference frames in the stock game. Fixed reference frames e.g. Kerbin-Centred Kerbin-Fixed (KCKF) or or Mun-Centred Mun-Fixed (MCMF) are the equivalent of Surface in the stock game. Target reference frames are … well, they’re the same.

TODO image showing window

Not only can we select any reference frame from anywhere, we can also show any reference frame in the map view. For example, if we have a satellite orbiting Kerbin, we can see where it will pass over the ground using the Kerbin-Centred Kerbin-Fixed reference frame. This is useful for those survey contracts (conduct temperature reading 18,000m above Kerbins despair etc.) in the early game, as it shows exactly where we will pass without any deviation. When we select the target frame, we see the path of our vessel from the point of view of the target.

Getting encounters is easy. In stock KSP, we had to guess where the body would be, and

notes

• In Stock KSP, when you timewarp, the craft will stop rotating, with Principia, this bug is fixed.
• Sometimess things just get yeeted from Duna/Ike.