![]() ![]() Good news - the situation is not that bad, and it'll be fun to rescue each craft. If you've managed to throw your pilots into solar orbit, you may be better off starting with a clean slate. P.S.: This all assumes that you're stuck in Kerbin orbit. Additionally, if you've got your stranded ships on eccentric orbits, do your de-orbit burn at the apoapsis as this will take less fuel.īe sure to check your rescue rocket before launch the VAB likes to auto-crew your rockets and that is a problem if you need a free seat. You may be tempted to put together some kind of massive rescue mission that will save everybody at once, but don't do it! You need to practise bringing one pilot home before you can get on to bringing all of them home. De-orbit the rescue ship and now you've got a pilot. ![]() Rendezvous with that pilot's capsule, set relative velocity to zero (or near-zero it doesn't have to be perfect as you won't be staying for long), and EVA the pilot over to the rescue ship. Do that until you are comfortable with the idea of leaving a de-orbiting reserve, and then you can take out that tank-and if you forget and strand that crew, you'll know how to fix it.įinally, pick one pilot who is in a good, near-circular orbit close to Kerbin, and rescue that one. A low-mass rescue rocket should be able to reenter from any low Kerbin orbit on the contents of a ROUND-8, but the FL-T100 has the benefit of being the same diameter as the Terrier and the Mk. Second, this means avoiding the problem that got you into this mess in the first place, so I'd suggest having an FL-T100 or ROUND-8 tank in your last engine stage, but with the tank locked so that you won't accidentally use up the fuel until you unlock it. Keep the orbital stage short and you can use the capsule's reaction wheels it'll be slow to turn, but it will turn. Take out half the ablator from the heat shield to start and be ready to take more-you may not even need a heat shield at all, if you're careful. Don't take science parts, and you likely won't need more than a single OX-Stat solar panel and one small battery for power. Rescue in this case means rendezvous, not docking, and you can accomplish that with a Terrier and thrust limiters. First, this means efficiently using what you have, so take out any monopropellant-you won't need it. Next, you need to be certain that once in orbit, you can accomplish a rescue, so that means adequate fuel. Try one, and if it doesn't make orbit, revert, redesign, and try again. Go for tall, thin rockets with fins at the bottom and with fuel flow figured so that it drains from the bottom up-you want the mass to concentrate in the tip and the drag to concentrate at the base. Besides, given that you can reliably make orbit, this is a valid next step in developing your skill set. Designs for these kinds of rockets are all over KerbalX but you'll get more out of it if you try it yourself-also, I don't know what tech you have unlocked, so there's no guarantee that someone else's design is something that you can even use. Good rocket design will give you something that can reliably make orbit with a little nudge right off the pad (of about three to five degrees prograde) and no further control input from you except to touch the throttle. ![]() You may need an antenna to keep a link to KSC (and thus be able to use nodes) and a bottom-tier probe core with Stability Assist would be nice (so no Stayputnik), but this is perfectly doable. Knowing how much fuel you need to de-orbit and return to Kerbin is critical, and so is cultivating the ability to say, 'I need to re-think this,' scrap the mission, and get home while you still have the fuel to do so (especially if you've saved and reloaded, which means 'Revert Flight' won't work).įor this, I say that you should take an empty probe-controlled rocket and fly it manually. What's happening instead is that you're not taking enough rocket to orbit to manage efficient in-orbit burns, and you're not keeping an eye on the fuel gauge, either. Obviously, you have the basics well-in-hand and can reliably fly a rocket to orbit (otherwise, you wouldn't have been able to strand every single one of your pilots in space), which means you probably have a good grasp, or can get a good grasp, on how to get back down again. Without knowing what kinds of missions you're trying to fly, I can't say much about your flying skills and how they are contributing to this, but even if you're a terrible orbital pilot, I will say that the root of your problem here is resource management. Besides, you pay good money to hire those pilots it would be nice to use some of them more than once, especially after you've hired a number of them and hiring new staff becomes stupidly expensive. While it's true that if you wait long enough, more pilots will appear in the Astronaut Complex, that doesn't address the basic issue of stranding them in the first place. ![]()
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