Enorats

Awesome. Totally didn't want to have to choose between the two, lol. Now if only I can figure out what's broken my sun's light in this kopernicus/sigma dimensions 2.5x rescale I'll be good to go. A project for tonight I guess.

Noticed that Near Future Tech now has a launcher pack and I figured I'd try it out with the rest of the NFT mods and Kerbal Atomics/Cryogenic Engines. Before I do though, I thought I'd ask.. is BDB compatible with NFT and its cryo engines/boiloff mechanic?

So, I'm not entirely sure what caused this as I've never really used Kopernicus before. I just copied my game folder (with a number of mods I've used forever, none of which should conflict with Kopernicus or this), and added Kopernicus and Sigma Dimensions so I could play in a 2.5x scale. I actually used the numbers you gave at the top of this page for the settings.cfg as that was the scale I was hoping to play anyway. Now, everything seems to have worked.. Kerbin's atmosphere is higher, the Mun is 2.5x farther out.. all seemed good. That is, until I went to the Mun and noticed that there was no light side to land on. In fact, my Kerbals have been banished to a universe of eternal darkness.. with two suns. There's the normal sun in the middle of the solar system, and a second one way off the edge of everything that actually looks bigger and brighter. Neither is actually illuminating anything, though I didn't test solar panels. Anyone have any idea what I could have broken? The second one almost appears to be part of the skybox, but it's not there at all in my more or less identical game that hasn't been 2.5x'd.

Out of curiosity, is the Sarnus V and accompanying Apollo-like hardware supposed to be balanced for the stock game, or something else entirely? It felt massively overpowered in the stock game, but after booting up a 2.5x game it's almost spot on perfect. Stage 2 has about 500 dv left in a 90 km orbit, stage 3 has a similar amount leftover after the TMI burn, achieving munar orbit takes half the fuel out of the service module, the landing burn left the descent stage with around 500, the ascent stage had a measly 90 left upon docking, and the return to kerbin left the craft with only 240 dv at the end of the mission. Now, granted - I drained about 3/4 of the ablator out of the heat shield (as I always do), so that reduced the mass somewhat making those numbers all slightly higher than they would have been. I sorta regretted that when I came blazing back into Kerbin's atmosphere at a whopping 4800 m/s instead of a more normal 3000, but somehow survived as heat shields seem nearly indestructible even when out of ablator.

So, I'm a bit confused here. The P125, P205, P375, and the Super Krago engine all require the technology largeControl.. which doesn't appear to be a thing. I have all the other parts in my game so far as I can tell, but those ones are not as the technology required to unlock them isn't on the tech tree. Is this a community tech tree only node that isn't on the stock tree? Edit: Changed the to landing, advanced landing, heavy landing, and precision propulsion respectively and now it's all working fine.

CPU. KSP isn't graphically intensive, it's just got a lot of math powering it.

That latter part was in regards to KSP, where they are easier and cheaper for certain. As for the first part.. it doesn't get much worse than the shuttle on safety. Buran might be worse, but it's unlikely. It has no launch abort system at all, used solid boosters, and had lots of debris raining down on all the important bits. The longer it was used the less safe it became. Soyuz on the other hand has a slightly better death to person to orbit ratio (far fewer deaths, 4.. but also fewer people to orbit), but more importantly it hasn't had a fatality in nearly four decades. While the STS got more and more dangerous as they grew older, Soyuz only became safer.

I'm fairly certain the shuttle has had the worst safety record of any manned craft ever built. They killed 14 people, far more than any other craft, and ultimately 2 of the 4 ever flown failed. Buran may have had flaws, that is true. We don't know. What we do know is that Buran didn't have the problems that ultimately killed the Shuttle. That, and Russia was smart enough to realize that the design for both STS and Buran was utterly stupid and killed the program after proving they could get a shuttle design flying. To the OP - as others have said, a true SSTO spaceplane is easier to build, cheaper to use, and more reliable. I'd go that route rather than repeat the mistakes of the past. If you absolutely need to have a vertical takeoff / horizontal landing spaceplane go for an X-37b design. At least then you have an easier time dealing with the center of mass/thrust problems.

Yeah, that's about how it works. If your intercept occurs on the far side of the Mun then you'll end up getting a gravity assist to a much higher orbit. If you come in on the inside of the Mun's orbit you'll end up in a lower elliptical orbit instead, possibly even dipping into Kerbin's atmosphere.

Ah. So you timewarp past the insertion burn and end up getting a slingshot instead. You can avoid that by simply clicking that part of the orbit and hitting "Warp here". Kerbal Alarm Clock is also an option, or Mechjeb's automated flying (I normally let it warp to the node then fly myself). You mentioned it was low tech, but you'd likely get far better performance with a different engine on that lander. Swivels are mostly for 1.25m booster stages and are pretty inefficient in space compared to most alternatives. If you're not doing any docking RCS is pretty pointless too. RCS is horribly inefficient, if I'm not docking I generally don't even take monopropellant or RCS thrusters.

Such a rendezvous also generally requires an order of magnitude greater accuracy. The greater the orbital period, the greater accuracy is required to achieve the same distance at rendezvous. While a .1 m/s difference doesn't matter all that much in LKO, a solar rendezvous might require accuracy as low as .01 or .001 m/s variance from the target burn to get a reasonable proximity without further adjustments at closer range.

Wait, how is it possible to botch a munar insertion like that? Do you mean you botched the insertion burn and either burned the wrong way or didn't have enough delta-v to achieve orbit (leading to the Mun slingshotting you out of SoI), or do you mean you missed the Mun entirely? Either seems rather unlikely to me, unless you're playing without some sort of delta-v calculator and had no idea what your ship could handle I guess. I think the closest I've come was a no revert save where I was sending my first lunar mission of the career to a new mod's moon (Iota). I swung in close and was intending to combine my insertion and landing burn but came in too low. I hadn't mapped the unfamiliar moon's topography with ScanSat before so I didn't anticipate a giant mountain right at my periapsis. Noticed it just as I came out of time warp, oriented radial plus and burned.. then impacted the surface about 5 seconds later at greater than orbital velocity. Lost the engine and entire lower half of the craft, but the kerbals all survived in a command pod with no delta-v at all. They had to be rescued from an oddball orbit, but still within Kerbin's SoI.

Right, but that's more or less what Mechjeb does too.. except in game and it'll make a manuever node for you and even perform it if you like. How much assistance you want it to give you is up to the player. Regardless, all I meant was that a tool of some sort is all but required for that sort of transfer (unless you're quite comfortable with advanced math). It's possible to get a reasonable transfer with something as simple as Kerbal Alarm Clock's transfer window calculator and a bit of guess and check with nodes. Just gotta have something that'll tell you when it's a good time to go.

5 years? You didn't like, I dunno.. forget to time warp? Those interplanetary trips can be a real pain without something like Mechjeb to plan burns for you. I've been playing for about three years or so and have more than 1100 hours in game and I still can't really eyeball that sort of transfer. I just recently got the hang of using moons to reduce delta-v requirements. Swinging by one of Jool's larger moons to cut off half the insertion burn just never occured to me until I saw another player do it in a video.

I recommend picking up a winch cable to use as a safety line. They work wonders for that sort of thing. Also.. one could do the reverse. Pick up a winch cable.. and knock the winch into the water. I hear the Kerbal Mafia makes extensive use of concrete bases with winch attachments.

This. Stowaways are my most commom problem.

I'm reading a book called "The Plundering of NASA" at the moment that argued that really isn't the case. The way NASA is legally required to handle contracts isn't exactly conducive to recieving finished products in working order in a reasonable timeframe, let alone under budget. The Ares-1X launch alone cost more than NASA paid for the first three falcon 9 flights, and the whole upper half of that rocket was more or less fake. Even if that is true you're still building a station in lunar orbit, a fuel depot, taking your ship to lunar orbit, taking fuel to lunar orbit, and taking your ship back out of lunar orbit. Even if that final step costs slightly less than burning from LEO you've overcomplicated the process to the point that you could have done the mission a half dozen times over with less effort.

Guessing Nibb is right, this seems like mostly make-work for Orion and SLS.

It doesn't really add any element of safety though. Wouldn't it be better to send a transfer vehicle up to LEO (with an orion capsule, or take on up with crew as a second launch). It could spend awhile on a shakedown cruise in LEO with Earth mere minutes away if something goes wrong. If all goes well, then go to the moon with it to perform tests outside the magnetosphete. The Orion capsule would act as a lifeboat and could get them home even from lunar orbit. At the end of the test, come back to LEO and drop the orion with crew back down. Send up fuel and another orion and you're good to go for Mars. Or, send a second generation transfer vehicle up already fueled. Now we don't even need orbital refueling. Compare that to building a station over many years (requiring multiple launches), then sending a transfer vehicle to lunar orbit, testing it there (repeatedly bringing crew to and from lunar orbit.. or bringing the craft back to LEO between launches?), sending fuel to lunar orbit to refuel there, leaving from an inefficient location, and returning to someplace that isn't actually your final destination to park your spacecraft you potentially want to reuse outside of the protection of the Earth's magnetosphere.. in all that radiation that can't possibly be beneficial. Or not, they could bring it back to LEO at the end after the lunar station has "facilitated its return". Which begs the question, why was the station even necessary? As for publicity.. It'll all be bad. Any layman will immediately think, isn't that what the ISS is for?! Why did they build that and just abandon it to immediately go build another one? They're looking to build this new station right about the time the ISS is decommisioned, so the headlines won't be pretty. They'll quite rightfully think it's just another big project without any clearly defined mission. As much as I love space exploration, NASA tends to be forced (by Congress or their own management) into very awkward projects with no real purpose or goal. This seems to be another of those unfortunately.

But that sort of ejection is quite inefficient compared to simply leaving directly from low orbit. You always want to do burns as deep in a gravity well as possible, not on its outer edges. As for fuel depots.. we've never even attempted orbital refueling so far as I know, and this station is not a fuel depot. It's a tiny habitat with a service module. Possibly eventually an airlock. Besides, if you want to refuel we're taking fuel from Earth. If you want to build a fuel depot you want to store it were you'll use it, and we're going to use it in LEO.. not lunar orbit. Why haul fuel all the way out there? If we were putting a permanent fuel refinery on the moon's surface and hauling it up into orbit.. then maybe. Even then it'd probably be better to haul it to a depot in LEO though. As for experimentation, I don't think this station is being designed with much of that in mind. It's far smaller than the ISS and won't even be manned permentantly. Regardless, I think we have a decent understanding of the effects of space on human physiology. It does nothing good to us, and the only thing we can do is exercise our muscles and try to block as much radiation as possible. We don't need a hundred years of research to figure that out, and robotic probes can easily measure any environmental data we need to build a craft to survive that environment. At that point you just need to build the craft and test it.. not build an entire facility to test various components of your craft for a decade. That's like building an aircraft carrier to test the flightworthiness of a jet built for the marines. You can do one without the other.

But that's the thing.. why do we need a "deep space habitat"? Simply to test how well equipment works outside the magnetosphere? There are simpler ways to do that. Why do we need a replacement for the ISS? The only purpose it really serves is to give NASA a reason to funnel money into commercial programs. We have no use for a station at the L2 point (where they've discussed placing such a station before), or anywhere outside LEO. If you're leaving on a trip to Mars you're leaving from LEO, not someplace far off or god forbid lunar orbit. Going to lunar orbit takes nearly as much delta-v as Mars orbit. It makes more sense to me to send up the transfer vehicle (what they planned for the early 2030's) and test that in lunar orbit with an orion capsule as a lifeboat for emergencies. A second such vehicle could be sent up (or the first brought back to LEO and refueled, something never attempted), and we could then be on our way to Mars. The station serves no purpose.

I'll have to try that. They were directly in line with the engines, but quite a distance behind them. roughly a full mk1 liquid fuel tank's distance back, perhaps more. That was indeed the problem. Moved the two "basic canards" I was using for horizontal stabalizers up slightly and now it works fine. Can't believe I've never run into this problem before with all the planes I've made. Suppose I normally put engines at the rear, not under the wings.

So, I came across this article tonight discussing NASA's plans for a mars transfer vehicle. https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/for-the-first-time-nasa-has-begun-detailing-its-deep-space-exploration-plans/ They want to build a small station in cislunar space, then.. eventually build a transfer vehicle like 10 years later that they needed that station for some reason to build. To be honest, I'm really not too clear on what the purpose of the "gateway" is. I absolutely love how slide 7 says "8.4m fairing for SLS cargo to be provided through innovative procurement methods". So.. found lying by the side of the road?

So, I have quite a few mods installed.. but this is a problem I have never seen. Have no idea what could possibly be causing it. I built a super low tech plane, weighing in at around 3.5 tons total, to move around KSC and the surrounding area collecting early game science points. The only problem? It won't move faster than about 2-3 m/s. The stock .625m jet engines are pumping out ~18 kn a piece to no avail. Put bigger .625m mod engines on it, 40 kn each. Still nothing. Even bigger radial .625m ones that pump out 45 each. Nothing. Drop fuel to almost empty.. nothing. Then, the radial engines actually burned my horizontal stabilizers off the rear of the plane.. and it jumped from 2 m/s to about 100 m/s almost instantly. Poor Jeb did not survive. Thinking it was some problem with that particular part's drag coefficient or something (though I think it was a stock piece), I swapped it out for a normal wing section with a control surface. Identical parts to what the wings on top of my little cesna style plane were made of. Surprisingly, I got the same result. Hardly any movement at all. Take those parts off the rear, and boom.. it roars down the runway like normal. Anyone have any ideas what could possibly cause something like this? So far as I know I don't have anything modifying the stock parts or aero, so I can't imagine what sort of mod could cause this.

Just completed the contract. Sending a new pod up and docking it with the ship I started constructing before accepting the contract actually worked. Wasted a bit of delta-v because I needed to undock it and redock with the descent vehicle I'd sent already to get USI-LS to reset my hab time, but it got the job done.