It sounds like the guy plugged his HDMI cable into the MOBO instead of the GPU
I had a somewhat similar experience where I sold my old PC to a friend and when he hooked it up he said no games met the minimum requirements and the rare ones that did ran like crap. So I went over to look and he plugged the HDMI cable from the motherboard to the monitor instead of from the GPU to the monitor. If you plug your cable into the motherboard instead of the GPU, the PC will use the CPU to render games which mean stuff will run terribly or not at all.
Download something like GPU Z and see if it can even register having a video card in there.
Most (all?) high end GPUs require two or more PCIE cables to power the GPU. Make sure you read the GPU's manual to see how many PCIE cables it needs.
You guys are making it a lot harder than it has to be. When your relative speeds are that low, just point yourself to the other spacecraft.
The game keeps auto switching your navball to target mode for a reason!
And your intercept changes when you turn because the RCS is causing micro changes to your orbit.
Going to your apoapsis does not change your orbit. Your orbit is your orbit and will not change unless you add or cancel out more velocity with your rockets and rcs.
Your spacecraft is wobbly because you didn't balance your RCS and its creating torque on your craft when it fires.
Target is you pointing at the target. Anti-target is you pointing away from the target. These are perhaps the most important directions to point when you are trying to rendezvous. As as I typed earlier, when your relative speed is as low as it is, just throw away what you know about orbits and just think about how would you get close to something down here on Earth. If you're in your car in a parking lot, and want to get closer to another car, you drive straight at it. AKA you point your craft towards the Target position on your navball and accelerate.
You guys are in perfect position for half the video but you keep going relative prograde/retro instead of just pointing at the craft.
You guys got the right idea at 21 minutes, but your relative speed is too high. In a case like that, point retrograde while in Target Mode and cancel out all relative speed, then point target and go.
31 minutes in, and I think you just had your Eureka moment. You are doing the right thing, I hope you realize why its working. Sorry for writing a fucking mini essay in here, but rendezvous and docking are very hard to do, especially if you don't read/watch tutorials.
You do have retro thrusters, your RCS. I think its N to activate retro RCS? Or maybe J, I can't remember.
Slow down at closest approach, don't do it right away.
Now you guys have the opposite problem now that you're close. Just point target retro grade to get speed to 0. You guys just did that 10 minutes ago! Target/Anti-target is not the ships prograde/retrograde. Target is literally just you pointing at the other object. You want to burn retrograde to 0 out your relative speed.
Holy shit guys just point retrograde. This is so frustrating especially since you had to do that to get this close to begin with.
The debris is going faster than you because its more aerodynamic so it has less drag slowing it down.
If those mountains weren't there, you would've been fine. To make reentry even better, put a drogue chute on your craft, in addition to the chute you already have. Drogue chutes open at a higher altitude and speed, slowing the craft down enough to safety deploy the main chute. I bet you would've survived the mountain landing if you had one. Drogue chutes are the orange ones.
You guys absolutely have enough fuel to go out and there and return. That thing has so much fuel you can go on a solar system tour if you wanted to.
the fuel tank didn't skip off the atmosphere when you saw it. I'm guessing the game just wasn't rendering the heating effects. Skipping out of the atmosphere means your periapsis was not low enough to prevent you from leaving the atmosphere again. So technically the fuel tank (and you) skipped off the atmosphere, you just weren't witnessing it at that time.
NASA was so concerned about the Apollo missions skipping off the atmosphere because, coming from the Moon, it would be days until the craft circled around the Earth for another re-entry, and the astronauts didn't have enough life support to last that long. But in KSP, where there is no life support, and Kerbin is 1/10 the size of Earth (so no orbits lasting days), skipping off the atmosphere isn't really a big deal.
The 'magic number' you want your periapsis to be for reentry is 35km. You could be coming in from the far reaches of the solar system going insane speeds, and the atmosphere will still catch you at 35km.
Also, please read this part for the sake of better quality videos: On the top right of the screen, there is a square button with a blue circle with the letters 'PS' under it. This is the Planet Shine mod. Click that button and look around the options and find all the stuff that deals with ambient light. Increasing those will raise the ambient light levels, making the night side of objects look so much better in the videos.
I'm 1 hour 52 minutes in right now and I really want to write about how to rendezvous for you guys, or for anybody who needs the help.
1st step: Match inclination with target.
2nd step: Get close approach with target by fiddling with maneuver nodes.
3rd step: At the close approach, turn navball to target mode and burn retrograde until target speed is 0.
4th step: Once target speed is 0, burn towards target and get a closer approach.
5th step: Repeat steps 3 and 4 until you're parked next to your target.
You guys got steps 1 and 2, but you burned anti target instead of retrograde. You eventually sorta figured it out by keeping the pro/retrograde vectors on the target and anti-target.
I was wondering why my KSP video was getting so many views, thanks for putting it up here! The Luda Lander has many things I would change, but at the end of they day, Vinny managed to pack quite a bit of delta-v in that thing. I hope they try to go beyond the Mun, there is still so much more to do.
and this will probably not be the last thing I do with the Luda Lander. I have something in mind that would probably gives the Beast crew a panic attack. I just need to find the time to do it.
Good job you three. Austin's idea about the atmosphere bringing down the apoapsis is actually a real technique called aerobraking, and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (and a lot of others) actually used aerobraking to get into orbit around Mars. You guys were very conservative with it though. I've found that the point of no return is a periapsis of ~30 km, and as long as you have a heatshield, your craft will be totally fine, even going at interplanetary speeds.
Also when it comes to aerobraking, you don't have to hold the craft retrograde yourself. The pod is naturally aerodynamic and will point the correct way on decent without you even needing to do anything!
One more thing. I decided to see just how far I could get with the Luda Lander. I tried to recreate it myself and essentially made as close to a clone as possible. I managed to land that thing on Duna, the Kerbal's version of Mars, and return safely to Kerbin. So if you guys want to go interplanetary, you don't even need to build a new ship! (although I'd recommend that you do)
I just got to the part where you realize that you're on a collision course with the Mun. You can raise your orbit so its out of the Mun by burning away from the Mun. You can see it on your navball and maneuver node. Its that blue circle. They're called radial and anti-radial. Burning radial will raise your trajectory and anti-radial will decrease it.
Radial nodes can also help you make a circular orbit too. When you're roughly halfway between apoapsis and periapsis, burning radially will increase your apoapsis while simultaneously lowering your periapsis and vice versa. I might have those reversed actually, but just experiment.
You're gravity turn was so much better, you see how much fuel a gravity turn saves? You did it a little strangely with the whole 40 seconds thing, I usually just turn slowly until I point at the horizon and then cut off engines when I'm at the apoapsis I want. Then make a maneuver node to circularize at apoapsis. But hey, your way worked pretty well.
Probably won't read this but maybe some newer player will get some help out of it.
Asparagus staging isn't as effective as it used to be because theres more realistic aerodynamics in the game these days and all that extra stuff just increases drag. I don't really bother with it anymore.
You realllly need to look at the Isp of the rockets you use. There are mainly two types of rockets in this game: high thrust with low efficiency, and lower thrust with higher efficiency. Once you're in orbit, use those more efficient rockets to get you around space.
The rocket you use on your lander stage is one of the best rockets in the game when it comes to efficiency, you just have to much mass on your lander. Why do you need so many solar panels? Why do you need the biggest set of landing gears? Get that landing and return stage as light as possible.
Also you should read up on the different vectors on your navball. Those blue circles are the radial and anti radial points. Basically pointing you towards or away from whatever you are orbiting. Using those would have greatly helped you when creating better orbits.
You're worrying too much about starting your mun burn from periapsis. What you are doing is called the Oberth Effect. You get the most out of a burn when you're at the lowest point of the orbit. Thats great for highly elliptical orbits, but don't worry about it when trying to go to the moon. Just get into a nice circular orbit, above 70km, and make a maneuver. And think about it like this, the point where you start burning for the Mun, if your orbit is circular to start, becomes the lowest point of your orbit, so you auto get the Oberth Effect.
Probably the most important thing I have to say. You really need to get a good gravity turn. Start turning almost immediately, you're trying to turn at 10km which is no longer good since 1.0 with the updated aerodynamics. Stay on a 90 degree heading (you can tell if its 90 by looking at the bottom of the navball, it'll say HDG: 90) and just slowly work your ship down that line until you're almost pointing towards the horizon. A proper gravity turn will save you sooo much fuel. Watch youtube videos if you have to, just make sure the video is after patch 1.0. Gravity turns are essential if you want to get anywhere. And to help your ship turn, you should use rockets with vectoring on them.
I'm 10 minutes in and oh god are they actually going to try and rescue those kerbals when they have a poor grasp of how to do it (don't mean that in a mean way)?
Also, the rocket they have 10:26 in has 4740 delta V. They could get into orbit with just that stage. They accidentally build a single stage to orbit rocket.
edit: and their second rocket design could get to Mars.
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