Fearless Son

Magnificent! So little wasted mass in this.

I am assuming that Kerbin has a different ratio of metallic elements than Earth, and that is why their batteries tend to be lighter: easier access to different materials with which to store a charge. I mean, the planet is about the same gravity as Earth while only a fraction of the size, it would have to be composed of different elements.

Two recommendations: The Negative Gravioli Detector - Works over different biomes and different altitudes, so it should give give you plenty of new readings to store and take back home with you. Your own crew. Seriously, having a crew member get out of the craft and take an EVA report. EVA reports also have different responses at different altitudes and over different biomes, so again you get plenty of different reports. As a bonus, you can transmit them when you get back in the craft and because they are only crew recordings you can transmit them back to Kerbin with no loss in science value. You would need to leave the ship anyway to nab the data from the Negative Gravioli Detector anyway, so you might as well take an EVA report while you are at it. Though, uh, for obvious reasons you shouldn't send your crew out during the actual burn itself. But there will be plenty of unpowered flyby time near the planet before and after your burn.

Nice! I wasn't sure from your initial post what your apoapsis and inclination was, and whether that would (eventually) be affected the the Mun's sphere of influence. Glad you made that work.

With special equipment, like say a cup and a small vacuum board. I've had similar ideas, like putting little passenger cabins or hitchhiker containers on the end of several structural tubes. Allow them to rotate freely inside in a custom built hinge with some extendable docking ports that mate with the main hull to allow them to be fixed in place. Maybe put some wheels internally to accelerate them up to speed, that way they don't need their own internal electricity supply. Yes, time warp will cancel their rotation, but at least we can pretend. Or, you could just go simple and make the beams fixed and set the entire ship rotating. I mean, if it's not a continuous thrust design (and unless you are using ion engines and willing to wait years of play time, then it's not) then you don't need an elaborate rotational mechanism when the whole ship can just spin indefinitely, needing only power for initial spin up after finishing the transfer burn and power for spin down before the breaking burn. Should keep the crew healthy enough during the journey.

I need justification for that too, but since I can't really justify it, I dodge the question by adopting a self-imposed challenge of making my crew accommodations much greater than is technically necessary for game mechanics. So like, short trips to the Mun or Minmus, I leave them with small seats. They're only going to be like that for a few weeks, they can train for that kind of journey, like real astronauts, it's fine. But for interplanetary travel, I find that entirely insufficient to keep my mind from wandering strange places. So I over-engineer for that purpose. I'll put in Mk. 2 passenger modules that can accommodate four Kerbals and use them as a sleeping cabin for two crew. I'll then attach those to a Hitchhiker module and use it as a shared space. Probably add a Mobile Science Lab just to give them something to do and more space to stretch out. Add unnecessary copula modules so they don't feel so trapped in a big aluminium cylinder. Yes, the extra volume and mass of these accommodations makes interplanetary missions harder to perform, but I justify it as the extra mass being essential to making that journey (got to bring enough snacks and board games to make it there, along with enough lead foil to insulate the cabins against radiation.) And that extra effort in turn lets me justify how Kerbals can make the journey.

Geosynch orbiting communication satellites is often undesirable, depending on the planet one is orbiting them around. For example, trying to orbit Duna at geosynchronous altitude will virtually inevitably have an encounter with Ike, the gravity of which will slingshot one or more of them out of their orbital positions. In other places, the gravity of the body is sufficiently small that geosynchronous altitude would be greater than their sphere of influence, negating the orbit entirely (not realistic but some concessions have to be made to a reasonably performing simulation.) Generally, it's a better idea to have satellites that are equidistant on the same orbit at a stable altitude (which may or may not be geosynchronous.) Ideally three, since each one of them will be able to trace a direct (and fixed) line of sight to the other two, and between the three of them they can see every point on the surface of the body they orbit.

As others have said, probably limited control due to not being able to communicate clearly with Kerbin. If you want to control any probe on the far side of any extra-Kerbin celestial body, you are going to need some form of relay to bounce the signal around. Alternatively, a crewed ship with a pilot which has line of sight with the probe can also remotely guide the probe, even if neither can communicate with Kerbin. In your case, you probably just need to wait until your probe orbits back around Minmus so it can see your ground-based radio dishes again, you should have control back at that point. Then it's just a matter of timing right to rendezvous with your rescue target. Once the Kerbal is on-board, you should be good to go even if the probe goes to the far side again.

I tend to start a new save anytime there is a major change to gameplay. Now if it is just some quality of life tweaks or part updates, I generally persist. But when a new mechanic is added, it's back to the beginning for me.

I do still find struts useful for some very specific kinds of functionality. For example, I like to arrange discarding boosters such that their attachment point is high up along the booster's body. I then use a strut to fix the bottom of the booster in place so it doesn't "wiggle" from the top. Add a little winglet to the bottom of the booster, then when it detaches the explosive bolts in the separation part push the top of the booster away from the craft, causing it to peal neatly away from the body of the lifter. If I auto-strut the boosters, the auto-strut would calculate from the center of the booster part's mass, which would limit the leveraging forces during detachment. But in general, yeah, the auto-strut system has drastically reduced my part count overall. Same. I do a tiny bit of clipping for aesthetic reasons, such as making fixed solar panels more flush with surfaces, or pushing something partly inside of a structural part that can fit it ("Cut-and-weld" is how I like to think of them fitting together.) But I avoid clipping if I thought it would plausibly interfere with the functionality of the thing.

I want to emphasize @eddiew's point here: part count on a single vessel is a huge factor. KSP actually runs pretty well on most machines provided you don't try to explode the part count, and if you do go overboard on parts it is going to eventually grind to a crawl no matter how powerful your machine is. The factors the simulation needs to calculate at once can go up exponentially as you add parts, and you quickly hit diminishing returns for system power versus performance gain. It's not too terribly restrictive, so long as you use some moderation in your design. [EDIT]: I should mention, I am talking about the stock game here. Once you start adding mods, you are going off the map as far as performance goals are concerned, "Here There Be Space Krakens" and all that. Mods can be great, but as far as performance impact goes you are assuming your own risk.

You are a newbie on the forum, so I don't have any other posts you made to extrapolate intent from, but if you were a forum regular, I would swear this was a humble-brag. You're computer will run KSP just fine.

So long as it doesn't get the chance to accelerate more than a few meters per second on it's way to the ground, it should be fine. You can generally just drop it from a lander. The biggest worry is if the rover gets stuck on some piece of lander geometry when it detaches. Like if it fell out of a vertically oriented cargo bay and flipped over, or something like that. If it can get wheels down on the Munar regolith, you are good to roam.

I have found benefit from using larger parts as substitutions for many smaller parts. For example, using larger wing sections instead of smaller structural wing components. The Making History expansion has also done a lot to add multi-functional parts which can use a single part to take the place of several others. For example, the Munar Excursion Module combines the functionality of a command module with a small built-in fuel tank, monopropellant tank, battery, control wheel, and RCS system, with enough space for two crew. Similarly, the Kerbodyne Engine Cluster Adapter Tank lets me stick lots of engines on without needing to use Cubic Octagonal Struts or Aerodynamic Nose Cones onto a short fuel tank.

Grats on hitting the milestone! Your craft being slightly askew... did you leave the SAS on? If you have it on and set to stability, it will try to keep the nose pointing in the same direction unless you tell it otherwise. Assuming it is just leaning a little, you can try turning the SAS briefly off, let gravity pull it into a normal vector relative to the Munar surface, then turn SAS back on once it is lined up since it has "recalibrated" the direction you expect it to keep pointing.

One more thing: it's easy enough to get up to a full speed driving across the surface of the Mun if you have enough flat open space to build up a straight-line acceleration, but it requires almost as much space to slow down again. The aforementioned low gravity means that the friction on the tires is pretty weak, so it will roll for a good long while without adding more power to the drive, and also means that the wheels will slip and slide over the surface even as you hold down the breaks. Imagine you are driving in icy conditions and you will have a good analogy for how it feels. If you go too fast, you may find yourself launching into wide jumps off the crests of hills that wouldn't pose a problem in stronger gravity, or unable to slow down fast enough to make a tight turn to avoid a collision without flipping end over end. Make sure your rear tires are set to use maximum breaking force and try to avoid the temptation to accelerate to top speed if you want your rover to last without smashing itself apart because it lost control.

Putting a rover in a bay is less important when doing a Munar landing since the Mun is completely without atmosphere, unlike Duna. You don't have to worry about overheating some components due to atmospheric burn, nor about how it will affect drag since you won't have any air to drag against. However, landing on an airless body presents some other challenges. Since you can't use chutes, you are entirely dependent on your engines to slow to a safe landing speed. You will need to plan your delta-v requirements appropriately. While there are plenty of alternative designs, the most common design for a rover-lander is a sky crane style approach where the rover sits on the bottom of the lander. An engine on the bottom of the rover itself is probably not a good idea, so you are probably going to have to mount two or more engines radially positioned to expel their propellant past the rover's body. If the rover is short, you might as well add some landing struts to the side of those radial engines. Think of the lander as being like a spider with a rover that clings to it's bottom, then drops off and rolls past it's legs once it touches down. Remember that the Munar gravity is low. This has some effects on rover design. You can drop the rover off the lander without fear of damaging it, but remember to kill the throttle as soon as you touch down, because you are likely to bounce on landing and you need to cancel as much outward force as possible. The rovers themselves have a habit of flipping over during tight turns or when breaking too fast going down slopes, or having insufficient traction to go up slopes. This has everything to do with not having enough down force on the wheels for them to grip as tightly as they need to. Sometimes it can benefit rovers to give them a small downward force by, say, some down thrusting monoprop nozzles, used sparingly when you need a little extra control. Likewise, good use of SAS can keep the rover level. Every probe core will include some reaction wheels, plus any you add yourself. Before launch, set the probe core and reaction wheels to "SAS Only" mode, which will keep you from flipping the rover end-over-end by accident, but will help the onboard core keep the rover level. Remember to briefly turn the SAS off when on a new slope to level the probe's wheels with the slope, then turn it back on before trying to change direction. This should keep the worst of the flipping under control. Have fun! Landing and exploring with a rover can be an enjoyable and educational experience.

According to Steam, 1445 hours and counting.

Rarely do I see such a combination of elegant aesthetics and raw utility. Well done.

I would argue that if the put parts into stock (even as a paid expansion stock) then the gaps were not intentional, or at least not intentional anymore. That having been said, new parts tend to cause balance issues when contrasted with old parts, which I would argue is probably not intentional.

I don't play with life support mods, but I do roleplay the idea that Kerbals need more than just a seat in a tiny capsule if they are going to be living in space for more than a few weeks. So any interplanetary ships, space stations, or off-Kerbin surface bases that my Kerbals have to inhabit I build bigger than strictly necessary, with more livable space (i.e. crew capacity) so they can move about inside, and I pretend that the unused crew capacity means more consumables so the remaining crew have greater endurance.

Last night, I built a Duna science rover, and in honor of the Insight lander, I used a traditional heat shield + aeroshell + sky crane design. I made the transfer vehicle for it deliberately oversized so I could fit a trio of communication relay satellites that could be placed in equidistant orbit to ensure continuous communication coverage. I was close to my ideal transfer window but some days over it, so I added extra delta-v just in case. I was a little worried about the launch because the rocket ended up really tall and narrow, and traditionally that doesn't do well during ascent, but it managed it fine. In fact, I probably had a little too much delta-v, since the main booster had enough fuel left to do most of my transfer burn from Kerbin. The secondary boosters fell back to Kerbin but the main one is in a pretty high elliptical Kerbin orbit, so I will probably have to later send a small grabber unit to nudge it into a decaying orbit. Anyway, I got the whole thing on it's way to Duna, now I just need to wait, maybe do some other missions in the meantime. Sorry I didn't take any pictures to share yet, maybe I will put some up later.

I bought KSP back in early access, a few years before the 1.0 release, back when it still had the "souposphere" atmospheric modeling. Figuring out how to get to orbit was a huge challenge, especially with the limitations on parts and the wobbly connections everywhere. You had to place struts like duct tape everywhere to get something to avoid falling apart when you lit the fuse. I finally figured out you had to go to about 10,000 KM straight up before starting a 45 degree gravity turn, then more practice to get the circularization burn to actually achieve orbit, let alone go anywhere further out. So much easier these days, I can just slap some parts together and make a decent launch vehicle that will put a payload in orbit on the first try.

Prior to Making History, I would traditionally use the Poodle for larger interplanetary vehicles. I treated it like a scaled-up Terrier, I would use it in every situation I might use a Terrier for, just when everything had to be bigger. I supposed I could have technically just added a whole bunch of Terriers to a larger vessel and it might have gotten marginally more efficiency out of it, but if I needed that kind of absolute efficiency I would be using NERVs instead, and frankly a small number of big engines looks (and performs) much better than a huge cluster of smaller ones.

So would you say that the MK2 was a kind of "worst of both worlds" thing? All the disadvantages of the MK1 and MK3 put together, without the advantage of either alone?