milosh

Thank you, I will try this So only one mistery remains: what to do to prevent overheating rocket engines in the first place? I've build a lifter with a Sailor attached to an orange tank and no matter how little I throttle up so I barely increase in speed during ascend, TWR just slightly over 1, it will always begin to overheat around 70km and be useless around 120km. I tried the same with two LV30 (the 1.25m ones with fixed gimbal), they begin overheating around 80km and get useless (read: 100% overheated) around 140km orbit. How is one supposed to make long trips with such engines that can barely take 5 minutes of burning time, what am I doing wrong?

First order of business for me is to build some refuel stations into the needed orbits as I like to make interplanetary trips in a SSTO or with only one or two stages left of a rocket. I usually have a station around Kerbin at 640km, one at ~150km and one around each planet I visited which I use for my return to Kerbin. Once those stations are build I refuel them every 3-5 missions before launching for a new mission.

Actually you are right, I just read this morning in a sci-fi book about the problems of getting rid of heat in space lol. Guess I'm just not used yet to the new additions. Is there a way to cool the engines with radiators? Just to try it out I've slapped some large radiators at the fuel tank and hoped this will help (which it didn't), other radiators that would fit onto an engine (rocket, not jet) I couldn't find.

I fail to see the logic in the overheating mechanics of engines. I mean I can somehow live with the fact that they get overheated (though in real life any designer of an engine that overheats before it makes even LK(E)O would lose his job pretty soon) but what I don't understand, why don't they cool down if not used in a 150KM orbit? One would suspect that out of athmosphere it is pretty chilly outside and heat would dissipate quite quickly but no, I was warping through time in the space center for 7d and when I switched back to my rocket, the engine was still overheated exactly the same as 7d before. Anyway I think this hole overheating mechanic is broken, the engine should begin to cool down the instant it gets shut down, especially when there's no air worth speaking of to cause friction on it. This really got on my nerves yesterday so I eventually decided to disable failure to temperature completely in the debug menu. I then managed to get into the desired 10'000km orbit I needed for a mission and discovered that they finally cooled down, so there seems to be a height where they recover from overheating, does anyone know what this height is?

I'm just reading Seven Eves from Neal Stephenson, a writer I very much like for being more science than fiction. The plot of the book is that *something* hit the moon and made it explode into seven pieces (the fiction part). Scientist than quickly calculated those pieces will shortly begin to slam into each other and causing first a white sky and then hard rain as they call it in the book, millions of asteroid slamming into earth for the next 5-10'000 years, obliterating all life. Mankinds solution is to escape into space stations and the second half of the book will focus on how mankind returns after 5000 years back. (This you can read all from the backtext of the book so no real spoilers here ). I haven't read the book completely yet and as of now they only speculate what could've caused the explosion of the moon, maybe a black hole went through or some aliens practiced target shooting. But if you can somehow break the moon appart it'll be pretty much game over for earth for various reasons.

Well I managed to save my Kerbals by restarting the game, going to the space center and warping there for more than 24h until the station was on the dark side of the planet. For some reason it didn't explode then and I could EVA my Kerbals to the capsule. I would've almost lost them anyway because I chose a way to steep reentry, thank the devs for the debug menu I tried to reproduce it by accessing the station while on the sun side of the planet but it didn't explode anymore. It's really time for 1.1 so I can finally clean the whole installation and start a freshly new game, hopefully without corruption

This is driving me nuts, I've send up a rescue vehicel for 3 of my Kerbals that are on a station orbiting Kerbal. I've set the stations dock as target and control from the capsules docking port and engage MJs docking autopilot. As soon as it gets about 20-30m close to the station, both explode without anything touching it. The log says the docking port exploded because of too much heat It also happens when I manually approach the docking port, come 20m close and boom. What is happening, any ideas as to what might cause this? I've build the station on 1.0 and the rescue capsule with 1.04, might this be an issue? I need to save those poor guys because I've ran out of crew to hire... [EDIT]: okay even stranger: I switched control and docked while piloting the station and not the capsule, tataa docking worked. This is a very strange bug I suppose(?). Now let's just hope I can safely undock [EDIT2]: bah it just exploded while both were docked - what is happening??? [EDIT3]: quicksaved right before, loaded again and went right to the space center. I can warp for hours without anything happening, as soon as I take control of the station, 5 seconds later boom...

Thank you all for clarifying this, I wasn't sure anymore if my mind plays tricks on me and this was always the case. I see the point somewhat about the shifting CoM but it never affected my SSTOs severaly because once the jet fuel is half drained I'm in high alt with little lift anyway and switching to rockets. Rebalancing fuel during rocket ascend is thus not possible because the weight of my plane would shift to one side which does affect ascend. Tempering with the cfg would be a possibility but I'd rather first try to work with this new "feature", maybe use rocket fuel tanks all around even for the jet engines as I did in some earlier SSTOs with reduced oxydizier. But I sure wished there'd be a box to tick in the editor to enable or disable this behaviour.

Hello, it's been a while since I played the game but I'm pretty sure that something profound was changed: jet engines draw fuel from my rocket tanks which kinda sucks big time. On a typical SSTO I'd have some rocket fuel tanks attached to a rocket engine and some jet fuel tanks with whipsplash jet engines attached. I calculate the fuel for the rockets so I will have enough D/V to get into orbit once I'm in flame out height of the jet engines, around 22-24km. But when I disable the jet engines now I find my rocket tanks only slightly over half full with no way to reach a high orbit around at least 130k km, the jet engine draw fuel evenly from all my tanks as if I'd have fuel links between the tanks. This makes no sense to me, if I have a jet engine attached to a jet tank I want it to only draw fuel from that tank, anyone knows if and how I can achieve that? Thanks

- I used Debug Menu to complete two missions when I had only two unlocks left in Career Mode, because I was completely out of money and forgot that I get money already by accepting a contract. - I never mind to warp a year forward for a good starting window towards a planet, finished career in year 15 - After transitioning once manually to Duna I always use Mechjeb Porkchop to reach a planet. But I'm not always going for the most DeltaV efficient launchwindow, if 200 more Delta mean I don't need to warp a year forward, I'd take it. - I killed one of the Kerbals during EVA on Duna, to high groundspeed while trying to "land" with his RCS pack. Sadly I forgot his name but his mission won't be forgotten, he was the first Kerbal in my Career to have ever put a foot on another planet.

Judging from the color of your "landing" site you tried to land on Eve and Eve has an athmosphere. So why don't you put some parachutes on? 3 Radials will bring your ship down to ~10m/s, a small burn 50m above the ground will bring it down to 1m/s. Seriously, landing on a planet is far easier than on a moon if you have chutes

same here, I played only in sandbox mode until I got bored. Then I've laid it aside for a while and when I came back a few months later, I fired up Career Mode in 0.25 and I love it, gives some purpose to what I am doing anyway. With contracts it's very easy to unlock the techtree and the fact that a ship or crew can actually get lost adds some tension to the game. One of my missions in the future will be to gather all the Kerbals around the system that are sitting around alone on a lonely planet - I'd never do that in sandbox mode lol

After 5 different Rover prototypes, 3 or 4 different lander and many many out-of-deltas or target misses I finally brought two Rovers to Eve in Career mode. Well actually three rovers, the big one rolls too

Hey many thanks, that works! It's like a completely new experience, I can switch between my rovers as much as I want, great

I found my love again for KSP and almost finished the tech tree in Career mode, I thought I will stick to sandbox for ever but career is much fun. But during the last 2-3 Days I've written down everything that I'd wish the devs would address. Most of my issues are editor related and they announced already a big rewamp of the editor in the next version, so some points might be obsolete by then. Also, although I've clocked already 200 hours inside KSP I still consider myself a beginner and learn new things about it on a daily basis, so maybe some of the issues are only an issue because I don't know how to do it right: Editor: - Rocket vs Airplane Hangar: Please replace the two hangars with one hangar where you can switch by hotkey between Airplane or Rocket editor mode. It's not so easy to add a modell that you have build in the airplane hangar , say a Rover or Shuttle, to a Rocket you're building in the Rocket Hangar. I'd really love to see a better way of integration between this two modes. Right now the only way is to save the model you've done in one editor as a Subassambly and than use this in the other Editor. This would be fine if there would not be one major issue: The part from the Subassambly menu only has one connection point for whatever reason, in my example I could attach the Rover only in the middle of one of it's Axis, although there are plenty more as I see in the original Editor where I've build it. -Make the parts more snappy in the right place. Attaching a Booster to radial Decoupler in 4, 6 or 8-way symmetry mode is one of the most annoying tasks in the game. When I drag the booster near the decoupler it should just snap into the right place, not be attached to the left or right of the decoupler as it is very often the case. It's only an issue when you are at least in 4-way mode because the view then is limited and for the love of the universe I just cannot see if the booster is positioned right until I let go of the mouse. No sorry mate, it's again left, let's try again. To make things harder, when you click on the part it "snaps" onto the mouse pointer so you literally have to guess each time if you've positioned it right. - Therefor, please don't make parts snap onto the mouse pointer when you click on them but do not move the mouse. It should stay in place where it is so I can micro adjust (shift+wasdeq) it's position. - Some parts "sink" into others, I tried to attach a ladder to a structural platform but instead of getting placed on top, it was placed inside the platform, no chance to have it "on" the platform. I hope this will be fixed. - It would be great to have a hotkey that when I press it, it let's me move a part vertically up and down while staying on the same horizontal position. Say I select a part, press and hold ctrl and scroll the mouse wheel or move the mouse forth and back, this should move the part up and down. Would help alot when you want to achieve placement symmetry between lower and upper parts of a larger rocket. - Navigating inside the hangar with the mouse around the modell can also become quite a frustrating task, especially in Rocket mode. There seem to be two areas in the Rocket Hangar, inside and outside of the white circle that is painted on the ground. It happens sometimes that a rocket get's outside the white circle and then you are in troubles. The zoom is very limited, once the modell is outside the circle you can only zoom in half the way to the object and you also cannot longer go around the model. Getting it back into the circle is also tricky and took me a while to figure it out, you need to flip the rocket up, circle and flip it down again. Therefor please introduce a hotkey or similar to reset position of the model, so it gets placed on the ground in the middle of the hangar and eliminated the issues with the white circle. A zoom that is always free would be nice but even better would be the possibility to switch between build- and navigation view, the later being totally free and not focused around an object. Having Airplane/Rocket Editor in one hangar would achieve a similar effect. - I'd also love to see more parts for everything Rover, more structural parts to build them, more different drives (chaindrive, kerosin/gas driven), better deployement and attachment possibilities, maybe some sort of a buildable cargobay with moving doors or even a crane if you really want to get crazy. There are probably addons for this but given the volatile state of the game (as in "many things change from version to version") I prefer to stick to stock parts. And rovers are a really cool way to get around the planet as I just discovered recently Okay this post becomes too long for probably anyone besides a dev, so I'll hurry up now. But I'm finished with the most pressing editor issues Other issues/wishes: - I really need some way to see what is bound on which hotkey of the Custom Action Groups while piloting a ship. I love this feature and use it alot, most of the times I have something bound to all of the keys from 1-0. While I try to maintane some sort of a system throughout my models it's not always possible. So seeing the keybinds would help a lot (and prevented some deadly mistakes, like decoupling instead of raising solar panels lol). - Let us select which ship we will control after decoupling, so when I decouple a rover from my lander I want to be piloting the rover. I thought this worked once with the "control from here" option but it doesn't (anymore? it's more than six months since I worked last with KSP), I have to go to the space center and select the rover there. Or at least give us an option to click on a modell nearby and switch to it. It's possible in the map view but my planets and moons get more crowded day by day and then the map view select is useless because all models are drawn on the place, making selecting a specific model impossible. - Just a small request but while you're at it... Could you make the default orientation for rocket editor and launchpad 90 degrees? I'd argue that most of the launches are heading towards 90, so why start at 0? - And lastly, please please let us multiselect (shift-arrowdown/up) objects for Recovering and Reconstruction. I have so much trash flying around my space and I'd need to click everyone of them, click destroy, click confirm, next part... so I don't bother with cleaning up and probably will end up some day crashing into trash while warping x100000 lol. That's about it I really really love this game, although the list of things that could be improved is long (and that's only my list ) it gives so much back and is so rewarding. Landing on Dunna with only Tier 5 Parts painted a big at grin on my face for the day. It combines two of my favorite things, space and science and also let's you build stuff that really works. I spend hours sometimes thinking about new concepts on how to do this and that and other hours just thinking about what "this and that" could be next. So I hope this post is regarded as an appreciation for the game and the work the devs put in it and not as pure criticism.

The station is the starting point for my interplanetary colonization efforts. Although Jouni gave a good and correct physical explaination, my real reason was KSP limit in warp speed below 600km orbit. Depending on which planet I want to reach I need to warp through several years for an optimal transfer - doing that without maximum warp speed is not a fun thing to do @Himynameisjake: I really like how thoughtfull you have structured your lifter as seen on your last pic, now that's a clean design and not cheap-strutted as mine on Page 2 - I will certainly take this as an inspiration for improving my lifter Only missing thing: the tanks should be able to manoveur by themselfs, as each of them needs to dock on a docking port at my station and they should also each cary an RCS tank for refueling my ships RCS tanks. That's someting I'd have to consider when adapting your structure.

same here - there are better and more complete software to train orbital flight (Orbiter ) which also are closer to reality than KSP. In fact, without MJ I probably wouldn't be that hooked to KSP as I am because other than the physics it has not much to do with how real space flight is done. In Orbiter you can do the whole Apollo 11 mission with a xerox copy of the original flight check list - try to do this in KSP

Yes I know, that's part the reason for the post. Because with the manoeuver planer it does not take me 200km beyond my targets orbit I was wondering, why the AP does. But as blizzy78 has correctly posted, it takes more time, depending where I end up in relation to the target after ascending to my orbit.

Okay I see, so MJ does what is most time- but not necessarily fuel efficient. In this example though I didn't have to wait that long by doing it manually, only 8 hours to warp through while the AP skipped like 2 hours only and with an SSTO, fuel is more important to me than some warp'able hours. Thanks for explaining

Marvin as you can see from two posts above I have already a working modell that can reach 600km with "only" 44 orange tanks if I counted correctly (41 orange tanks + the grey ones which add up to 3 orange tanks). I used 4 struts per tank though I'm not sure if I'd really need them all, I just wanted to be sure As some have suggested different techniques for my "problem", like kethan mining or putting empty tanks into orbit I need to clarify maybe what I intend to do with them. Which is not per se refueling my SSTOs or similar but to populate the system. I want to put a station around every planet and the Kerbin station is the launching port for it. So next I'll fly up a small station, get one or two orange tanks from my Kerbin station and then continue to Eve or Duna. Then most of these tanks go to Duna and I continue on to the next planet like wise. That's why I need (want) to bring as many tanks with as little launches to my station. Once I've done that I will think about optimizing my stations by kethane mining or similar, but I'm still new to KSP and want to progress with baby steps That's not to say you should stop posting your ideas, please do so, I'm always happy to learn new things or get inspired. When I started this thread I thought this to be a common problem that all veterans here have solved already, which, given the responsens in this thread, is not the case, there is no "golden" way. But for now I will stick to my design, I've put to much thinking and try-and-error-ing into it to just go with a completely different approach. I'm now in the tweaking phase but the basic concept I came up with under the shower, works

hello, forgive me if this was asked already, I searched the forum but didn't find anything. While trying to build an SSTO I noticed a very odd behaviour in MJ. Wenn I launch directly into or close to the orbit of my target and then fire the rendez-vous autopilot, it increases apo- and periapsis ~200km over the targets orbit and then plots a plan to intersect from this orbit with my target. But when I select an orbit far below my target it rendez vous directly into the targets orbit. My stations for example is at 640km. When I launch my SSTO into a 600km orbit and select the RV autopilot to reach my station, MJ would put me in an 800KM orbit first. But when I launch into a 400km orbit and then start RV autopilot, it puts me directly in the 640km orbit of my station. Same is true for targets in 270km hight, I need to launch first into a 125km orbit or otherwise I need enough DeltaV to get into a 400km orbit and back. Am I doing something wrong? I can do manual Hohmann from 600km to get to 640km without any problems. Even with the Rendez Vous planer of MJ (not autopilot) I can select Hohmann transfer to target and I reach my station just fine, it doesnt tell me to burn up until my apo is at 800km - so why is the autopilot doing it? This is quite bugging me as my focus lies entirely on building, I don't want to spend my time Hohmanning manually all the time, at least not yet So for now I just launch into 200km below target orbit and then auto RV to my target. Hope someone can clarify that for me. have fun

I only docked once manually to see how it works in KSP, didn't like it (no freaking ILS) so I usually let Mechjeb Dock. The navbal is okayish but I have troubles imagining my vector without ILS as you only see that you are over shooting when you have overshot. This is the way I learned to dock in Orbiter: But my focus lies entirely on building right now, so for now, docking is just a means

Yes I did it!!! As I said, just add more It's quite a straightforward design, layer after layer is peeled away until the final stage takes it to orbit, onion's the way to go Here is the 1773t monster sitting on the launch pad: First stage gone: One stage later: Up up you go: Last lifter stage: I was still missing 22 DeltaV for a 0.0001 ecc orbit so I took some drops from the payload: But honestly, who cares - had the wind blown in a different directions I'd have had maybe those 22 Dv left I'll post some pictures tomorrow of the complete station, need to go to bed now... Thanks again for sharing your work and providing lots of inspiration. There's another thread asking if KSP is deserving it's hype - I say, damn sure yes, fantastic community and the grin on my face when reaching 600 wont vanish that quickly [EDIT]: just realized my final inclination is quite a bit off, it should've been 0.015 - so there are my 22 Dv

that's a nice concept you have there psyper even if it doesn't quite solve my problem. I haven't played around with kethane mining as I'm still pretty new to Kerbal but I might use this technique for my next station. How do you setup auto-fuel transfer, can you do that without any mods? Manually refueling can get quite annoying with several tanks, a way to automate it would help alot

Wow lots of different ideas Alpheratz I think that your design comes closest to what I'm trying to build. But first, now that I'm at home I can post a pic of the payload I'm trying to get into orbit, 216t: It turns out that the old saying "just add more" does help indeed After looking at what you guys came up with I did some thinking and went back to my first design that was able to reach 45km. I just added another stage and guess what, I finally could escape Kerbins gravity. I raised my apo to 400km then I've killed the flight, because I've only reached 68km with the final lifter stage, then I had to turn on the poodles of the payload. I would still end up with 9/10 of each tank full I think but I want to get to 600km without the need of a single drop of fuel from the payload. Anyways, this 1300t beast seems to do the job, just some finetuning needed (don't mind the left over holding port, I've fixed that already): Every stage consists of four engines with two orange tanks that are fuel linked to the tanks of the next stage (onion, not asparagus). It might be enough to asparagus the second stage as it has enough left-over TWR or I just add another stage But I probably wont be able to improve it today as I'm going to watch now Gravity in 3D with my wife