Kerbal Space Program

First things first, this guide and the guides for missions to the other planetoids are the first guides I have ever made, so they may be a little rough. If you don’t think the guide was good enough, please let me know why!

Secondly, I am new to this game having only put in about 20-25 hours at the time of writing this. I will talk you through what worked for me and how I pulled this off without having much experience. If you are a more experienced player, then you may find yourself laughing at how I approached this and specifically at the ship I used… But it got me to all the planets and back again so that’s something. Moho was pretty straight forward, and in completing the mission I also unlocked the achievement for completing a landing. So if its your first time to sunny Moho, you can knock off 3 achievement-birds with one stone

Finaly, it is also worth pointing out this game is full of bugs, each worse than the last. The worst one being that after a while the game will no longer save. It doesn’t matter if you manually save, make a new file or reinstall the game; you will still be unable to save. So every time you load the game up again you have to resume from the last time the game saved before the bug took effect. Given that I have never been able to run the game for more than a few hours without it crashing, this is severely problematic. Fortunately for me, I had made a ship which was more or less capable of interplanetary travel right as this happened, so after about 5 minutes of modifying, I was able to get myself ready for the next launch. It is probably best to wait for all these issues to be fixed (I know I should have), but if you are extremely patient and want to proceed anyway, then read on. I will cover everything from acquiring the needed skill set, to building a capable ship, to executing the mission itself.

Grumpertson’s 12 Step Guide to Interplanetary Success:

1. Complete the games training missions so that you know the basic controls and how to execute maneuvers properly. I personally did all of them except docking and asteroid redirection before I proceeded

2. Fire up a sand box file. I personally turned “Re-Entry Heating” to 0% because the last thing I wanted when I was to burn up due to a miscalculation after spending 2 hours getting to a planet and back.

3. If you are new like I was, then mess around for a while until you are able to complete a mission to Minmus and back again safely. “Completing a mission” consists of having an encounter with that celestial body and then safely returning to Kerbin, so fortunately no landing is involved. You will need the skills learned from this to proceed beyond Kerbin’s orbit.

4. Now its time to build your interplanetary vessel. Here is where I am going to show you my novice, cobbled together solution to interplanetary travel. You can laugh; It’s okay. But I was able to make it to all of the planets in the Kerbin System and back again in this. At the time of writing this the only celestial bodies I had not yet made missions to are 4/5 moons around Jool. Feel free to use the “Coastal Inspiration” as your own, as something to laugh at, or as a starting point for your own crazy creations.

The start of my ship was as follows:



Started with an “MK1-2 Command pod.” I then attached 4 “MK12-R Radial Mount Drogue Chutes,” 4 “Z-100 Rechargeable Battery Packs” and 4 small solar panels. A small mono-propellant fuel tank sits on top of the pod with an “MK16-XL Parachute” topping it off. Under the pod is a decoupler followed by a reaction wheel and 2 “Rockomax X200-32 Fuel Tanks” and another decoupler respectively. In 4x symmetry, I added a stack of 3 “FL-T400 Fuel Tanks” with a “LV-N “Nerv” Atomic Rocket Motor.” In the image I also have a “Z-1k Rechargeable Battery Bank” in the stack of fuel tanks and small solar panels and a few Thermoelectric generators, but those were a throw back to my previous model and may not be necessary. I then selected each fuel tank with “B” and removed all the oxidizer to reduce mass as these engines only need liquid fuel. Then connect a fuel line going FROM the central tank TO each of the 4 stacks of 3 with the engines attached. The direction is key. This will be referred to as “The shuttle” for convenience



The next part of the ship is integral to its success, as these are the core engines the ship uses. Attached to the coupler at the bottom of the shuttles fuselage is a “Rockomax Jumbo-64 Fuel Tank” with an “LV-N “Nerv” Atomic Rocket Motor” sitting at the bottom. I then added 6 more “Rockomax Jumbo-64 Fuel Tanks” with “LV-N “Nerv” Atomic Rocket Motors” to the center tank using “TT-70 Radial Decouplers.” The control on the console are flakey at best so this took some time to get them to attach correctly. I ended up using 2-fold symmetry and just did it 3 times. Like with the shuttle, remove all oxidizer from these tanks, as it is only extra mass. In the picture I have placed fuel lines running from the tanks attached to the couplers in stage 7 to the tanks attached to the couplers in stage 6. These tanks then have fuel lines running to the tanks in stage 5 which have lines running to the central tank attached by the coupler at stage 4. 2 more fuel lines then run from the central tank back to tanks attached in stage 5. The reason I did this as this was initially what I used to get past Kerbin’s atmosphere so I wanted to shed mass as I lost fuel. This allowed me to funnel fuel out of the tanks attached in stage 7 first, then detach them to lose mass, then drain the tanks attached to 6, etc.. The last 2 fuel lines going back to the stage 5 tanks was so that I would end with having 3 engines going at once. So because we are not using this to get off Kerbin, you probably don’t need to do this, but because it was already there from my previous design, this is how I rolled. Next cap off the tanks with nose cones and then strut everything together so it doesn’t blow apart when breaching the atmosphere. I have 3 struts going to each adjacent tank and then 1 from each nose cone to the shuttle. This will be the core and most important part of the ship for moving between planets.



Now here is where I decided I needed a way to get the entirety of what I had built so far into orbit without having to use any of the fuel since nuclear engines work best in the vacuum of space. So a then attached “TT-70 Radial Decouplers” to each of the “Rockomax Jumbo-64 Fuel Tanks” and then proceeded to attach a stack of 3 “Kerbodyne S3-7200 Tanks” to each with an “S3 KS-25x4 “Mammoth” Liquid Fuel Engine” at the bottom of the stack. I then capped them off as best I could by using “Kerbodyne ADTP-2-3” adapters and “C7 Brand Adapter – 2.5m to 1.25m” fuel tanks with a nose cone on top. These rockets use the same staggered staging system as used in the main body of the ship. Stage 11 flows to stage 10 flows to stage 9, and each pair is ejected as it runs out of fuel. These are “The boosters.” Strut each of these to its adjacent stages like before to make sure it doesn’t blow apart.



Now here is where a bit of drinking played a role in my decisions moving forward. I then attached another set of “Kerbodyne S3-7200 Tanks” with “S3 KS-25x4 “Mammoth” Liquid Fuel Engines” with radial decouplers. Each of these has a fuel line running to the tank it is coupled to so that the outer 6 tanks will be drained before the inner most 6. This is then staged so that all 12 engines fire at once. Add struts connecting each engine to its adjacent engines and to the engine it is coupled to. Once the outer tanks are empty, all 6 outer tanks are simultaneously ejected, leaving you running the 6 original boosters with full fuel pretty far up into the Kerbin atmosphere. It is really not elegant, but against all odds it actually worked. It controls like a brick flying though space and I didn’t realize why until I dissected its design for this guide… There are no thrusters… All control relies on that one control ring attached to the bottom of the pod. So if you use this, feel free to add some, but I can testify that it manages to work without them.

5. With your ship built and having some basic piloting skills, you are ready to leave kerbin behind you. I am going to explain how I did this with my ship specifically, so if you built something of a wildly different design it may differ slightly. With my ship, it is idiot proof to leave orbit. Fire all 12 boosters at 100% thrust and then engage “SAS” for stability control. All you do for the next 5-10 minutes is move through the stages as the engines use up their fuel. You do not need to turn or anything. Just stay in staging view so you can eject them when needed and wait. Once you are down to your last pair of thrusters, switch to map view and wait until you are on a course to escape Kerbin. Then time warp until you hit the escape point and voila! You have now left Kerbin’s embrace and are now orbiting the sun. At this point you should have ~1/4-1/3 of your fuel left in 2 thrusters.

6. I would start with Eve or Duna as your first attempt at this, as they are relatively close to Kerbin and are fairly easy to get an encounter with. Select the planet you are going to fly to and set it as your target before proceeding

7. Set a maneuver at the Ascending node and if you are targeting eve you want to pull retrograde. If you made the maneuver on the node, when your projected path crosses orbit with the planet, the closest approach markers will appear. If they are close together, you can usually pull them closer to create an encounter by using radial in and out and may need a little normal or anti-normal for fine tuning. In general, it requires a bit of screwing around with changing the 6 vectors of the maneuver until you get an encounter. If they are not close together, time warp to the ascending node and try the same maneuver at the descending node. If that doesn’t work, then repeat the process. This may take several attempts of making a maneuver as you will need the planets orbit to line up with the range of your maneuver. You can set up maneuvers anywhere in the orbit you like, but I personally found it way easier just to do them at the nodes. Once you have your maneuver and it takes a reasonable amount of burn time, warp closer and carry it out. With the Coastal Inspiration, the only way I could line up target vectors was by physics warping to 4x, and then maneuvering. It turns just fine at 4x! Burn up the fuel left in your 2 thrusters first, eject them and the switch to the main engines. Don’t be discouraged by you burn time going from ~1 minute to ~15 minutes. The main engines generate less thrust but very efficient and will get you to where you need to go. I usually do most things at 4x to save time. Once you have your encounter, time warp there.
Note: When trying to get an encounter with smaller masses, you may overshoot/undershoot and at the end of the maneuver you will not have an encounter anymore on you projected course. If that happens (and it did SEVERAL times for me), then you just need to make another maneuver to fine-tune your approach. This can sometimes require very small burns of less than a second at ~10% thrust, so you just have to be careful and patient.

8.At this point you have hit your encounter and your flyby achievement will pop! Congratulations! But let’s take it one step further. If the planet has no moons you want to visit then just whiz on by and go back into solar orbit and skip to step 9. If it does, and you want to make an encounter, set up a maneuver at the periapsis marker on your trajectory. Pull retrograde until you have a maneuver that will pull you into the planets orbit. From here I tried to line up an encounter with the desired moon in the same maneuver. If you do it right, you can get an encounter with a moon which will disrupt your planetary orbit and then throw you back into orbit of the sun, thus having to use no fuel to break the planets orbit. If that is not the case, you will need to set up a maneuver after the moon encounter at the periapsis of the orbit with the planet and fire prograde to break orbit.

9. So you have now encountered your targets and now you just need to get home. Set your target to Kerbin and do exactly what you did in step 7 to get an encounter. Once your maneuver is set up, follow it through.

10. So you have now made it back to Kerbin but you will fly right past it if you don’t slow down. Do the same as you did in step 8 but with a few changes. Set your maneuver at the periapsis and pull retrograde. Keep pulling until your plotted course is a direct collision with Kerbin. Execute the maneuver and then time warp to get a bit closer. It is worth noting that if you were visiting one of the further planets or checked out any moons, this maneuver will use up all the fuel in the main engines so you will have to finish the maneuver in the shuttle. I have not yet run out of fuel but coming back from Jool after ducking in to get an encounter with Laythe, I came pretty close.

11. Now thanks to re-entry heat being at 0%, the next part is no problem at all. Before you hit atmosphere, eject all the engines so that it is just the pod and the chutes. Proceed to re-enter the atmosphere and once it is safe to, deploy your Drogue Chutes. Then when it is safe to, deploy your main chute. Then wait for your pod to slowly fall down to Kerbin’s surface! NOTE: Using the 4x physics warp has caused me to explode on landing. Be cautions and don’t get impatient.

12. Relish in the fact that you just popped the achievement for a completed mission to the planet and/or moon you just visited! Congratulations!

Now I understand that was a lengthy read but I really hope it helped! As I said I am new to the game, so the descriptions and approaches may be a little iffy, but I did what I could. If you have any comments or any tips to add, please comment or send me a message! I will extend this guide to any planet or moon I can confirm it works on!