Fishslap

My rationale is that the game crashes too much for me to play it properly even without any mods running. The 32 bit Windows version of KSP is no good. At least that`s my working hypothesis. I had zero problems with 0,90. It never crashed and I could run mods. Then 1.0, very excited, pay Squad money and instantly no more game. And it then got even worse after 1.02. The last time I bothered trying KSP it insisted on crashing every time I landed a ship. Having temperature gauges on each landing strut was too much for it I guess, and you can`t turn those off. Have now uninstalled KSP and am waiting for a 64 bit version or something promising in future patch notes to make the game playable for me. It demands way too much investment for it to randomly crash all the time like it does.

I just wanted to mention that I updated my Nvidia drivers and remembered the feature GeForce has for optimizing games. When I activated KSP optimization there it really helped me with performance. I haven`t crashed since I did that and the loading times are much more manageable.

Thanks. I`ll try this. So it`s basically switch to Linux or live in squalor then? No plan for a 64 bit Windows version of KSP?

I tried that too and it didn`t help. Also I haven`t had any problems before. Anyway, you`re probably right. Just a bit frustrated.

I`m not sure if this is the correct place for this thread but here goes. I haven`t tried any mods yet because I wanted to get a feeling for what I wanted first, rather than flood myself with mods I hadn`t developed a need for yet. But now I tried some mods and to my disappointment I can`t even load up the game if I have any mods in the Game Data folder. If I remove them the game starts up fine again. Have I put them in the wrong place or is there something else I need to do first? Secondly I am having greater and greater trouble with random crashes and excessive loading times. I was wondering if that is a Steam issue or something with the latest patch. As it is the game is pretty much unplayable, at least on the difficulty I prefer. On my last mission the game crashed during reentry and I had to relaunch it, which took about five minutes. I then had to get back to the flight using the tracking station. When I did my parachute had already exploded because of heat and I crashed to the ground, losing two contracts I was doing as well as Jebediah because I was unable to revert mission. I prefer to play without saving to make it more exciting so I couldn`t reload. So that was that game basically, which I had spent many hours on, and I now feel as if I have to restart the career. But why bother when it`s just gonna crash and kill me again right? Right now I am feeling slightly ripped off by KSP, simply because I can`t play it when I really wish I could. PS: Edit: I was actually just now able to run the game with some mods installed. I just had to remove a few of them. Maybe that`s just a version issue then.

Your pilot will have an ability you can activate to keep your craft retrograde while you approach. That way you will be slowing down but also cancelling out any orbital, or sideways, movement. Most of my early crashes came because I was still moving horizontally when I got close, and then it`s more or less totally impossible to land. You want to be going completely straight down for the last KM or two, so all you have to worry about is lowering the speed. If you rely on the retrograde ability of the pilot then you should remember to bring some batteries and solar cells because it uses a lot of electrical energy. But it is the simplest way.

Oh please! No reaction wheel, no struts and no fins and you blame Squad?

Good to hear. And you`re right about the velocity to escape Mun. But I was talking about the speed you need in order to find a good peri on Kerbin. And again, you need to develop much less speed using your fuel if you go backward rather than forward because Mun just disappears along its orbit as soon as you throttle up. It is actually a very good idea to stay in orbits for a long time at first to experiment a little with the various angles you can use to leave. If you grab the central wheel you can move your maneuver node around the orbit to see where you get picked up. And a short burst from Mun`s orbit will intersect with Kerbin only if you go backward. Straight down it`s a medium burst, and you usually also have to build speed first to get picked up and then brake again after to shorten the peri. So you might actually end up with two medium bursts just to get home. And of course if you go the wrong way you`re not very likely to make it back at all, at least not early on. You`ll be tailed by Mun for ages before you can even find a peri on Kerbin. And then it might not even be deep. You can sometimes even find yourself in a circular orbit when you get free and have to again brake to cut an apsis down to reentry level. I think 30 degrees retrograde sounds right. But it depends on what you`ve been doing on Mun and whether you have a circular orbit when leaving or not. You certainly don`t want to waste fuel circularizing your Mun orbit before leaving. In the picture I posted above I came out at a somewhat inclined orbit and ended up tangential to Mun`s orbit going outward, so it was certainly not perfect. But it was still only a 12 second burst with this lander: Anyway, I guess you`ve proven that taking off to the west is a bad idea then. Those numbers sound about as I expected, and it is certainly not for people running out of fuel at Mun... I`m not aware of any reentry difference depending on which direction you`re coming from though. Apparently there is more air resistance at the poles I am told - at least in real life - because cold air is more compressed than warm air (heat causes everything to expand/vaporize). What you say about the direction sort of makes sense though. I guess we`ll have to study up and find out about it:)

You can reduce the amount of boosters, scale them down by right clicking them or add fins to the bottom of the core launch engine for maneuverability. Occasionally it will also work to just keel over right above the launch pad like 5 -10 degrees so the excessive thrust at least goes somewhat in the right direction. It`ll then be easier to turn the rest of the way higher up. Early on I managed to get a few rockets up that way. The best ascent vector is entirely dependent on the craft. Ideally you want some initial altitude to get as much thrust out of the launch phase as possible. But the degrees don`t really matter so much, as long as you make a straight line somewhere. What matters is the curve of your beginning orbit, which is a function of your velocity and angle. If you have a slow second stage you need to keep your nose higher to gain altitude and if you have a fast engine you can just flop down to the equator and stay there as soon as the boosters drop. With the medium engines you can actually circularize your orbit directly from launch because you are able to keep up with the apogee of your orbit. Ideally you should be about 40-50 seconds behind it. Any less and you`re losing altitude. Any more and you`re too steep. Anyway, if you`re too steep it`s either because you`re using the "Reliant" which doesn`t come with steering, because you`re not using fins at the bottom of the craft or because you`ve overdone it on boosters. But like I said, you can sometimes overcome it by leaning off the launchpad so you get started on the general angle you want as early as possible.

Not to time compress at 10 000 times speed before Kerbin reentry.

Although engines not being used are dead weight as said above, they do weigh much less than the fuel. Depending on the engine, the difference in weight between one engine with two tanks and two engines, two tanks and a decoupler isn`t too great. And you save having to haul the empty fuel container up to the next stage which is a plus. Early on I prefer a single central engine 30 with one fuel container, along with whatever boosters I need to get up to 10 000 at something like 350-400 m/s. Then a second stage 45 with a single engine with two fuel tanks and a 1-2 tank third stage for circularizing or going to a moon and back depending on the available tech. The flat engines, like the Terrier, are more efficient in vacuum so the third engine should be one of those I think. You can even land on them if you place the struts as low as they`ll go.

So basically be good Germans, is that it? Everything is connected to politics but by golly let`s never talk about it in case someone gets upset? You can censor me if you want. I`m not doing it for you.

I know this wasn`t your main point, but I sort of take issue with it a little anyway. The reason space exploration has stopped is entirely political, and not that it`s impossible. You would have to try to say that and we don`t anymore. Particularly in the USA, NASA was set up as a government-directed economic sector to do several things: 1: Produce jobs and economic growth, 2: develop technology and 3: Long term colonization/human presence on other planets. Since then the USA, and the west in general, has moved into a new system of economic fascism where public resources and the public sector in general has been privatized. And the old NASA doesn`t fit into this model because its activities aren`t directly profitable. Therefore the corporations who have swallowed up the public sector don`t want to spend any money on it. From about the time of Reagan NASA had already been warped into a geostrategic resource and it was apparently more important to have lasers, satellites and God only knows what in orbit as military threats than to explore anything. And then of course the space program was dismantled entirely by Bush JR and Obama and no longer exists. As for human presence in space it`s certainly hard. You would need some way to shield radiation properly for it to even be possible. Just leaving the atmosphere is hazardous and a radiation spike could kill you in low orbit if you`re unlucky. And even if that can be done there is of course the problem of propulsion and distances to contend with. But there`s no reason at all not to keep working on it. If it turns out the way you say then I guess automated terraforming on likely worlds and off we go as popsicles to colonize after a few decades. Our optical and inferometry detection is pretty good by now. What are we up to, 750 confirmed exoplanets?

"As long as it's not below 280m/s it should be fine. If no revert, then try manually reduce the engine thrust when getting close to the completion of maneuver action, and then do fine adjustment (with 0.1 or even less thrust and throttling you can get really high precision - that's how I get my comm satellite network of 400km height with <10m precision) - and you can achieve high precision orbit without wasting ." Yes of course. But the idea is to escape its gravity as quickly as possible, which you do by moving back along the orbit because then Mun is obviously moving away from you. If you go straight up you`ll stay in the gravity well longer and therefore you have to create more m/s yourself = you need more fuel. I just picked a number. You are using the map and stopping the burn when the periapsis hits Kerbin`s atmosphere anyway right? I was just talking about escape vectors and not really the velocity of the lander. Edit: Just thought I`d post this to demonstrate the concept. A short burst back along Mun`s orbit and you make an apo, and naturally the peri is at the bottom of the well. Going in any other direction should require more fuel before the apo gets made, and they might not be this convenient if the burn starts circularizing the Kerbin orbit while you get away from Mun.

You could always build a big enough ship that it will have fuel when it gets there. It is possible to soft land even rockets on Mun if it`s flat enough. If it`s about lander construction I doubt that`s the problem. You can give it a good go almost right at the start of career mode if you do trajectories and orbits right. For the escape you barely need any fuel to get back at all. Remember to escape backwards from Mun when you leave, and not directly at Kerbal. We`re not moving in lines here but in orbits. A line is always slower and more fuel inefficient. Mun moves at 512 m/s along its orbit. The faster you can escape the gravity the faster you`ll be picked up by Kerbal and the less fuel you`ll need. It`s the same with every planet and moon. Naturally the fastest way back therefore is directly back along Mun`s orbit. Just a short burst in the right direction and you`ll go right down your new orbit to Kerbal`s atmosphere. Minmus is the same and it`s almost as if you fall down to Kerbal if you leave it the right way even though it`s very far away. Gotta love science right! To explain why a bit, if you leave Mun along its forward path you`ll be moving at 500-600 m/s but, like I said above, Mun will be moving at 512 m/s along its orbit (Therefore effective escape velocity= 600m/s - 512m/s = 88m/s) so it`ll take a long time to outrun it basically. Go the other way and you`ll be moving as fast while Mun will be moving away from you (Effective escape velocity 600m/s+512m/s = 1112 m/s). Huge difference as you can see. If you go in a straight line toward Kerbal you`ll be somewhere in between. Let`s average out 88 and 1112 and say you`ll have an effective escape velocity of 600m/s. But you will also have less control over the peri down in Kerbal`s gravity well and will need more fuel to get down. You will also stay longer in Mun`s gravity and you will lose orbital speed while waiting to get picked up. Always leave backward:) That`s what we`re doing when we launch every rocket to the east really. West (From the Space Center) is the direction of Kerbal`s orbital movement around the sun and it therefore takes longer to escape Kerbal`s gravity if you go out the wrong way. And because of the equatorial spin it is also harder to get out of the atmosphere that way so a double whammy of physics right in your face. You should try leaving on a reverse orbit and compare how much fuel it takes to the normal way. I haven`t tried it in KSP yet but I wouldn`t be surprised if it took twice as much burn to get to Mun going west. Maybe more. Simple concept really, once you stop and think about it.