Laie

Your description doesn't tell me much anymore. However, it seems that you simply don't have the technology to complete that contract yet. RCS will provide enough thrust / dV to get the job done, but it will be so much easier if you can also rotate your satellite. Arguably, you can still do it without control as long as you can still open and close the throttle. That used to be possible even with the sounding rocket core, but i don't know if it still is. It's been a long time since I played RP-0, and and didn't like most of what has been added in RP-1. Way back when, you could rake in enough science points with only 2-4 sounding rockets, also enough funds to finance the first building upgrades. It would take a while until it was finished, of course, but without running costs you could just fast forward, launch a few satellites, and timewarp again. IMO the game doesn't really start until you have Atlas/Agena.

Nominal output, that is, Kerbin distance. And 100% insolation. Good luck with that. Probably not, but I don't think that's entirely necessary. Once you're seriously past PE, time is no longer quite as essential. You can afford to do several mine/burn cycles where mining happens in timewarp. Even more so at AP. The need to do very long burns is most urgent near solar PE or when trying to capture at Kerbin. I'd still recommend to not rely on solar panels, though: covering the whole comet with solar panels will be a lot of work to begin with, keeping them oriented towards the sun can be a PITA, and for all that your capture burn may be interrupted by entering Kerbin's shadow. Good to know, thanks -- I won't even try the Sentinels then. A long long time ago I tried to aerocapture a large asteroid. It had a nasty tendency to spin and tumble, exposing my tug that was supposed to ride safely in it's slipstream. Boom. Also, comets are said to break up in the atmosphere.

RCS is both throttleable and multi-ignition. Just wait until you get to Gemini: you'll do a lot of maneuvering on RCS then. Might as well get used to it.

So, let's do some math. Delta-V values dependent on propellant fraction ore concentration: ISP 80% 90% 95% 340 (Rhino) 5370 7680 9990 380 (Wolfhound) 6000 8580 11150 800 (Nerva) 12600 18000 23500 This neglects the mass of the hardware you're sending, but that shouldn't make much of a difference. For all practical purposes, you're limited by your mining and ore conversion rate. A maneuver of 250m/s will consume 3% of the vessel mass at ISP=800s, and 7% at 340s. Even with a rather lightweight G class of 25kt, that resolves to 750t or 1750t, respectively. That's a lot of propellant. Either you bring enough tanks to store the required amount, or enough converters to create it on the fly, or any combination thereof. By and large, converters (incl. fuel cells, radiators, drills) are way more mass efficient than stocking up on tanks. If the Wiki is to be trusted, one drill per converter will be good down to 30% concentration for chemicals, or 10% concentration for nukes. It takes 1.2 converters to provide for a single nuke, 5.4 converters for a Wolfhound, or 32 for a Rhino. These numbers assume a 5-star engineer. More numbers in the spoiler. Operating a Rhino also requires 20 large radiators and approx. 150 Gigantor Panels or ~220 large fuel cells, and when running on fuel cells you need 2-3 more converters just to provide for the fuel cells. Up to now, I've only detected comets when they were already inside of Dres' orbit, often even inside Duna's. Unless you get really lucky with Kerbin's position at the time, you can only reasonably rendezvous with them after they went through their PE. Placing Sentinels beyond Jool may give more of an early warning, though I don't know how useful that will turn out to be in the end. The typical mission profile will probably include maneuvers at high solar AP, followed by gravity assists near Eve or Kerbin or Jool, possibly several of them.

Well, a new module gives them the ability to make things work differently, for better or worse. I've tried drilling a comet and it looks as if the comet doesn't actually lose mass, even though the data in the PAW says so. This dramatically reduces the dV you can get from mining the comet, by about half. You also don't get the benefit of a steadily increasing TWR.

Treat it like an rendezvous: the first time you get to your DN with Moho, do a burn to lower your solar AP so that you will encounter Moho on the next round, or the round after that. Try to also fix a good deal of your inclination while you're at it. Looking at it more closely, it may be better to do that burn a little after you crossed the DN, plus a small correction on your next AP around the sun to nail it perfectly. This will be more expensive, dV-wise, than a straight capture burn at Moho, but not much more expensive. Moho is quite small and you don't get all that much help from it's gravity anyway.

...You sure? Fixed my post. The problem isn't leaving Kerbin, of course, but doing a Kerbin->Jool transfer. After periapsis kicks, you still have >1000m/s to go, which is a bit much for a single maneuver.

Ouch. Streetwind has really covered the essentials: your power consumption is bursty, so what you really need is enough storage for the worst burst. Between burns, you can fill 'er up on a trickle charge. The most mass-efficient solution will probably be something like 3 RTGs for every 4000u of battery capacity, but it really depends on the vessel and mission profile. Once you are at Jool, I don't think you will have to do a maneuver of more than 300m/s in one go, and may get by on 200m/s. However. leaving Kerbin for Jool on an acceleration lower than 1.5m/s² will require more effort than just a few periapsis kicks. Even 2m/s² is already pushing the envelope.

Trying to figure out how to find comets and what to expect when I meet them, this is what I found so far. Please add more information if you have it. It seems that perhaps one in ten objects discovered in the tracking station is a comet. They're quite obvious: while asteroids are clustered near Kerbin, comets turn up ...elsewhere. I could spend a hundred words describing it, but they really stick out when they show up. So far I found one class E (1500t, in the ballpark of an E class Asteroid), one class G (40,000t when I visited), and one class H (191kt). Unlike Asteroids, their mass appears to be fixed at the moment they fist show up in the tracking station: I got exactly the same mass on several visits to the same comet. With asteroids, you can saveload: they only get their mass when you first get into physics range -- or at any rate, it was such when I last caught an asteroid in KSP v1.7. I see resource concentrations in the usual range, and this stat is subject to saveloading: the H class mentioned above showed resource concentrations of 85%, 87% and 92% on three visits. On my first attempt I couldn't mine the resources (perhaps the drill not getting deep enough?), on the next try with a different vessel it worked. Strangely enough, vessel mass increases while mining. Here are masses (in tons) before/after mining 1500u (15t) of Ore: Asteroid Mass Resources Vessel mass 191,946.377 176,589.442 191981.142 191,931.377 176,574.442 191,996.142 -15 -15 +15 Asteroid Mass and Resources mass were taken from the PAW, vessel mass as reported by MJ (in-game I only see it down to the nearest 100kg, but within that accuracy I get the same result). The PAW shows the appropriate mass loss, but can it be that the actual mass remains constant? Otherwise I don't know how gross vessel mass could increase by the amount of ore mined.

@SomewhereOutInSpace: thanks. I started looking and it seems that perhaps one in ten objects discovered in the tracking station is a comet. They're quite obvious: while asteroids are clustered near Kerbin, comets turn up elsewhere. I could spend a hundred words describing it, but they really stick out from where they show up. So far I found one class E (of similar mass as an E class Asteroid), one class G (40,000t when I visited), and one class H (191kt). Unlike Asteroids, their mass appears to be fixed at the moment they fist show up in the tracking stations -- I got exactly the same mass on two visits to the same comet. With asteroids, you can saveload: they only get their mass when you first get into physics range -- or at any rate, it was such when I last caught an asteroid in KSP v1.7. I see resource concentrations in the usual range, 80-90%, but it seems as if comets cannot be mined: The drill shows a "Start Comet Harvester" button, but pressing it only wiggles the drill for a moment before it deactivates on it's own. No Ore is being mined. As my drill nearly touches the surface even when retracted, I don't think it's a matter of it not getting deep enough. Mining worked on the next attempt with a different vessel. ETA: crossposting this to Gameplay Questions.

May I inquire about comets? The wiki still lacks information about them, and this here looks like a good place to ask. a) how do I find them? If I enter the tracking station at game start, it doesn't take very long for a small population of Asteroids to turn up. Will comets work in the same way, only requiring more patience? Or is some kind of player action required to trigger their appearance. b) what kind of mass do I have to expect? The screenshot above shows a 50,000t comet -- do we already know whether that is one of the lighter or heavier ones?

@Alex and Drew got it already: the problem is the engines. Goliaths tend to overheat, badly, when you take them trans- or even supersonic. It gets better again at higher altitudes, say 7+km. The FAT-455, on the other hand, has a pretty low heat tolerance, which is probably the main reason why it lights up. The heat gauges turn on when a part reaches a certain percentage of max, and if max is lower, the heat gauge comes on earlier. My best guess is that the heat is totally non-critical, and that the wing actually acts as a powerful heatsink. The large airliner wing has a lot of surface to shed heat with, after all.

We haven't had a payload fraction challenge in a long time. Three years, if I'm not mistaken. How about another? Last time, we were allowed to assemble our own payloads. Quite naturally, these tended to be dense, tight, and aerodynamic without a fairing. Now I don't know about you, but my payloads tend to be rather bulky. So I wonder if it would be alright to provide a dummy payload? And if so, which? Here's two suggestions. One tries to look like a halfways sensible module to start a space station with. The other happens to mass exactly 14t at a cost of 10,000 funds, which I think would come in handy. What do you think? Would *you* even take part in a that challenge if you're supposed to launch a prefab payload? And, given that I'm willing to run at most two size classes: what sizes do you believe to be sensible?

Well, Class E starts at ~800t and I don't know where it ends. The heaviest I've personally seen was 4500t. Capture into any kind of orbit around Kerbin can often be done on 300m/s or so... back-of-the-envelope I guess that this would require something like 200t of propellant for the heavier rocks. Once captured, you can send refueling missions until it is in the target orbit. Totally doable, though perhaps a bit tedious (and expensive). Another way to make it easier for you: the mass isn't set until you see it for the first time (with default settings, that happens when you first get to within 2.5km of it). So you can save the game shortly before the encounter and reload the game until you meet a rock that suits you.

Everybody knows that splashing into water is a gentler landing than impacting on solid ground, but unfortunately, in KSP it isn't. All parts have an "impact tolerance" listed in their stats. Hit the ground (or the water) faster than that, and they will be destroyed. However: if you hit the ground, the part takes some of the shock of the impact before it explodes, and the explosion, too, is likely to slow the fall of anything on top of it, which will hit the ground a moment later and a little gentler. This can work like a crumple zone, really. While if parts enter the water, they just disappear. That way, whole stacks can vanish in an instant. But the TL;DR of it all is: you're coming down too fast. Bring more parachutes. Or have a little fuel and run the engine in the last moments before impact. Or follow @bewing's advice and build a rover.

Nope, that's just how it is. @TaranisElsu arrived at his numbers by carefully going through a NASA post-flight report that gave detailed numbers as to food consumed and garbage created. That was a shuttle flight, and hence the numbers are based on shuttle food: freeze-dried, single-serve, shrink-wrapped. It's all laid out in a spreadsheet: Humans require 835g of actual food and 3909g of water per day. Kerbals, being smaller, require less. The food resource used by TACLS (and canonized in Community Ressource Pack) includes the packaging, which more than doubles the mass. As mentioned previously, that's not the kind of food you could grow in a greenhouse: for that, you better look at @RoverDude's mods utilizing Snacks and Mulch. I've just done the numbers: in TACLS, including all overhead from packing and containers, drilling for water reduces the mass of resources shipments by 60%. You don't even have to land on the poles: with a bit of luck (or saveloading, or savegame editing), you can find water anywhere on Duna. Only low concentrations, but then again, you don't need much: my single drill will easily provide for 100 Kerbals.

In my attempt, I've been using TACLS which uses freeze-dried food. Drilling for water is trivial, and provides for the bulk of the mass. I'd have to look it up, but presume it's on the order of 50-60% mass saved, with one 1.25t drill.

I assure you this was 100% intentional. Data loss does happen: That's life. The mitigation effort is trivial (or should be) and well known. I you care about your data, back it up. If you don't, the presumption is that you never really cared. But. Please notice that the statement also serves as a rhetorical means to set up the corollary: if console players cannot save their data, or cannot keep their saves for longer than a few days, that goes way beyond anything I'd still describe as bug. I said "pure evil" and mean it.

No Backup? No compassion. No such thing exists on the PS4 version. Ouch. I have no patience for fools who fail to save their game every once in a while, but if you're actually not allowed to create and manage your own savegames, well, that is pure evil. Bad things do happen, after all.

I'm doing the same, that doesn't mean I'm 100% happy with it. My preferred unobstructed area would be something ellipsoid, with the long axis stretching from bottom left to top right. Disclaimer: the above is only an approximation, but I hope you get the idea. This leaves me with two corners for big stuff, and two corners for small items. Of course, I'm also throwing mod windows into the mix -- leaving one big corner available for mod stuff probably would be a good idea. As it is, I'd prefer to move the staging menu up and place the navball below it. Haven't figured out how to do that, though.

+1 to digital clock style being bad. In terms of screen clutter, I'd prefer to have the middle clear: the Kerbals on top and the timer on the bottom are bound to get in the way. In a similar fashion, the navball will restrict the view at launch time. I understand that they want the staging to sit in the same place during flight & assembly, but am not convinced that this justifies moving the biggest blob to the lower left. "Adventure mode" seems like a good idea. I do not like Career mode in it's current form, and am quite happy that the whole premise is being reconsidered. From what I can gleam, they are on the right track.

...wether you want to or not. Sometimes it feels like a pinball machine.

Essentially, nothing in the game really locks the thrust limiter of SRBs: you can't change it because it's not visible in flight, that's all. I could change it by kOS some years ago, IIRC the kOS devs have removed the ability since. I still can do it using kRPC. Of course, having the workaround built into the stock game is something different.

Pogo stick on Gilly / Pol / Bop? Well, if they have colliders they're also subject to drag, are they? Massless wings, anyone?

Alright, one more: This was an attempt to carry as much as I could -- but VTOL on both ends requires two Engines and hence reduces the loadout. 574u of solid fuel in each booster -- I'd rather have taken 600 per, but unmodded tweakables won't let me. One definitely obliterates the Tower, not certain about the hangar, though. 1148u of solid fuel in a little over 2Min, VTOL. As usual, moving pictures are available. Once again the flight was controlled by kRPC, leaving my hands free to control the camera.