jimmymcgoochie

Put your logs on a file sharing site (Dropbox, Google docs etc.) and post a link here. Have you installed mods in the Steam copy of KSP? If you have, don’t- Steam breaks modded KSP all the time. U install all your mods, verify the game files through Steam (right click KSP > properties > local files) and then copy KSP (steamapps/common/Kerbal Space Program) and paste it somewhere else e.g. on your desktop, then put your mods in this new copy instead.

Why did you use PVG to launch from the Moon and then repeatedly break it by messing with the inclination? It was swerving north, then backwards, then south, then north again and wasted a huge amount of fuel. The pilot on the CM in orbit got more stressed because a) he was alone and b) the other two were on the ground which adds a bit of a bonus, and also c) individuals vary quite a bit even on short term lunar missions so it’s possible that the pilot was above average and the others below average. You can combine targeted moon landing and landing with rover, but only if the rover targets are in/very near the targeted biome or if you send a big rover that’s more like a small base on wheels to keep them alive for a longer period. For the station, a D-2 with block 2 mission module would tick all the boxes and with a modified service module would hold all the resources needed for the 30 days as well as being a backup in case a visiting crew couldn’t get home on their own vessel.

Screenshot of the vessel? What is the Swivel engine attached to?

The HG-5 is a rather puny relay dish with a fairly short range. There’s some complicated calculation to calculate the maximum range when you have more than one antenna on a vessel and the distance two vessels can talk to one another, I suspect you’re just too far away to reach the relay with a low-power antenna on the lander. If you warp around for a few orbits so they get closer, does the relay work then? Use the Communotron 16 and not the 16S when you can, the 16S doesn’t stack with other transmitters so has a fixed maximum range whereas every other antenna can stack to increase the overall communication range.

How about a Blue Streak-Black Knight launched first satellite before Sputnik 1? The technology was mostly there at the time and in AH-land you can handwave away the bureaucracy and funding issues.

If you go into KSP/saves/New Horizons/backups, you’ll find some backup save files which are date+time stamped. Grab the newest persistent-(time stamp).sfs, rename it to persistent.sfs and move it to KSP/saves/New Horizons, overwriting the existing one, then load the save in the game.

Built a plane, took it for a test flight, got a bit ham-fisted on the controls, ripped the wings off. Whoops!

Right click KSP in Steam > Properties > Betas, you should get a list of all the versions of KSP, pick the one you want and it'll automatically download.

Only a couple of launches to go, but not this time: With a new engine installed everything went fine and Goliath Nova 2 completed its objective. Apparently the guy that paints the detailing on the probe was off sick that day... Some time later (and a lot of delays due to lack of funding) Goliath Nova 3 launched to a more sensible inclination to complete two contracts at once. It was only after this flight that I noticed I could have completed the final prerequisite for the Program at the same time, but too bad. This is still one of the better parts of P&LC. And to finish, Goliath Nova 4 completes the atmospheric analysis satellite contract. I'm ending this career here. The basic premise is good and I intend to start a 'normal' RP-1 save with the same limitations, but I don't think it's viable in Programs and Launch Complexes just yet.

Wow, it's been that long since I played this save? There's only one save file from this year! Coming back to an old save after a long hiatus can have some unexpected side effects, as you'll see later, but for now I'll start with the launch of the second Green Basalt lunar rover. It was only after I'd launched this that I remembered I was going to keep it for a while so I could test out the first one for a while, but that's what I get for not really playing this save this year. It's nice to be back in a save where I can just launch something to the Moon in a few easy clicks instead of spending the whole time penny-pinching as seems to be the norm in P&LC. This mission overlapped with the arrival of two much bigger ones, however by pure coincidence the timings didn't clash at all and I could focus on Mercury. First up, Violet Hydrogen arrived at the innermost planet and captured into orbit, eventually. A million funds, just like that. I've missed this... But this mission isn't just stopping in orbit! It turns out I'd underestimated the delta-V required to land on Mercury and even with the dregs of the capture stage chipping in I still only landed thanks to past me planning for this eventuality with a very powerful decoupler under the rover and some emergency RCS to allow it to land itself. Parallax really doesn't like Mercury, it looks ugly at a distance and got really glitchy up close; those black areas are texture glitches and they were flickering like crazy whenever I moved the camera even slightly. Science is a-gathering but without a signal to Earth it'll be a while before it can be sent home or the Bon Voyage autopilot activated to drive the 4200km or so to the waypoints for the Mercury rover contract. Yes, I landed on the wrong side of the planet; no, it wouldn't have been all that much better no matter how long I waited, the orbit I ended up with was nowhere near the waypoints. Barely a day later, Violet Helium arrived and did its capture burn with equal success. Both missions had some hydrogen boiloff but a combination of small bonus tanks of hydrogen and pumping from the lowest stage to top up the other tanks and then dumping lox to reach the right ratio meant they weren't impacted, and I'd budgeted extra fuel for that reason. After a brief panic when the capture burn left it suborbital and heading for the surface, the probe recovered and parked in a ~495km circular polar orbit and deployed its science and scanning equipment. The big SAR scanner wants a much higher altitude but space low science and the radar altimeter scanner are happy where they are. A quick jump over to the KSC to fly the SJ-2 supersonic plane for an easy contract, where the various mod updates that have come in since the last time I played this save nearly cost me a plane: the cockpit now has an ejector seat that's automatically set to the abort action group, but I use abort to toggle the airbrakes on my planes and nearly yeeted the poor pilot out of his plane while approaching the KSC; fortunately for me the ejector seat only works at subsonic speeds and it was going too fast to actually deploy, giving me time to change the action groups. This addition does mean I can get rid of the cockpit ejection system and the solid rockets that are currently making these contracts not complete because "It HaS rOcKeTs", so I've been alt+F12-ing them complete up until now. Back to the Green Basalt 2 which finally arrived at the Moon and landed on the far side via the usual "land on the engine and crush it" technique. The rover was stuck for a while until I remembered it had RCS thrusters underneath to make it "fly" and dislodged it from its perch. And now for the part where all those updates finally caught up to me. I'd rolled out a Yellow Gong F for a nice easy Gemini mission a few months ago and just launched it today without checking if anything was wrong, because why would anything have changed? Uh... That's not good... And once again ejector seats nearly killed my Kerbals- they didn't have their own parachutes!- but once again it was going too fast to trigger it. The engine models have obviously been changed in the last few months, something I now remember seeing when porting rockets over from this save to Get With The Program but which I forgot about coming back here. The engines still worked perfectly well despite being recessed a few metres into the tanks but the verniers didn't have nearly enough leverage to control the rocket's pitch, so it just kept pitching over and ended up pointing downwards and causing the launch abort. The crew are unharmed but lost their mission training. I could build another one and fix the engine issue, but with the first LEO D-2 almost ready and most of my astronauts training for that I'm not sure if it's worth it. I'll double check the contracts to see if they'll time out before the D-2 is ready to launch. Next time: Launching a lunar space station?

Are you using a stock Saturn V or an RO Saturn V? You can do a Mun landing and return in stock KSP for less delta-V than it takes just to get to low Earth orbit because Earth is ten times larger than Kerbin and orbital velocity is much higher as a result- 7800m/s or so. You need minimum 9000m/s (vacuum) delta-V to get to orbit in RSS, it’s totally different to stock and you should treat it as such. You should try MechJeb’s ascent guidance Primer Vector Guidance (PVG) mode to fly your rockets up to Earth orbit, it’s designed specifically for this task and is similar to the guidance systems used by real rockets.

@Flush Foot Science Jrs are very susceptible to heat and very likely to explode on re-entry, if you’re trying to get them down onto a planet with an atmosphere then you’ll need to protect them from both the direct heat of being exposed to the airflow during re-entry and from heat conducted through other parts. Sticking a structural part such as a fairing base or service bay directly above the heatshield usually does the job, though you may still want to put the samples in a science return box or two just in case. As for pressure and G-limits, they’re set generously high along with temperature limits and impact tolerance. The only place you can get close to the pressure limit is close to “sea level” on Jool.

Loaded up a save I haven't played in a while, launched a rocket already on the pad but mod updates meant that the engines had moved up inside the fuel tanks and lost most of their control authority as a result. The rocket did its gravity turn OK but then just kept on pitching over until it was pointing down, at which point I aborted the launch and the two crew ended up coming back home a lot sooner than planned.

What a ridiculous idea. Why would the developers of the game not implement the game’s core features because some amateurs made a mod? ”Nah, we don’t need to put tyres on our cars, two blokes in an industrial unit are already selling those.”

Propellant storage tanks would be a good addition, plonk a miner down on Ike and it’ll be cheap and easy to get fuel over to the station in Duna orbit via tankers.

You put mods into the Steam copy of KSP. Big no-no, Steam breaks modded KSP all the time and usually in weird ways like this. Copy your save files to your desktop. Uninstall all your mods. Uninstall and reinstall KSP through Steam. Verify the game files in Steam and run the game to make sure stock KSP works. Copy KSP in its entirety from Steam/steamapps/common and paste it somewhere outside of Steam’s folders so it can’t interfere. Install your mods into this new copy and add your save files to it.

Getting to orbit on Earth is a very different challenge to getting to orbit on Kerbin. Orbital velocity is about 7800m/s and you’ll need at least 9km/s of delta-v to get to even the lowest orbits- assuming a launch from Cape Canaveral, the greater your launch site’s latitude the higher the inclination you’ll end up in and higher inclination orbits use more delta-V. That number is very dependent on your rocket design and ascent profile, in some cases I’ve managed it for 8700m/s but in others it’s closer to 9500m/s. The advice that many experienced RO players give is copy a real life design- I’d suggest something simple like the Titan that can be built with under 10 parts, rather than something with lots of engines (e.g. Proton or Saturn) or a complicated staging process (e.g. Atlas or an R-7 derivative). Alternatively, try RP-1, the career mode for RO which starts in the 1950s and follows the real world development of rockets and related technologies through the Space Race up to today and in some cases into the future. It’s a steep learning curve, but starting small with sounding rockets that just go up and moving forwards towards orbital rockets and then going further afield can give you a better grasp of what you need to do to succeed in RSS and RO.

A bit too much faffing with fuel cells this episode, you don’t need the solar panels on the service module and you can get rid of the waste/waste water tanks to make more room for water. Switching to vacuum scrubbers would help too, they use more power (so more water being made) and also remove the need for LiOH (so more room for water), they’re the best option for longer term missions.

This Europe-only malarkey is a lot harder to do in P&LC than I thought it would be- for one thing the RZ.1 engine for the Blue Streak uses a completely separate unlock cost tree than the Gamma engines and it's impossible to afford both, so I had to cheat in the necessary funds to unlock the RZ.1 to use it. The lack of leaders is another issue, the relatively small array of engines yet another... P&LC also feels significantly slower than normal RP-1 to me with a lot more waiting around for things to be ready. In this case, 1958 Orbital Rocketry took nearly a year to research and I didn't launch anything at all in that time to save up enough money for the tank tooling for the new rockets I'd need for orbital launches. But eventually, the first (and only!) DR-2 Penumbra was ready on the launchpad. It used the cheaper aluminium fuselage tanks previously tooled for the Adler and Horizon rockets on the second stage to save some tooling costs, but that didn't hinder its ability to complete the mission. Work continued on the new OR-1 Goliath and the Nova satellite it would carry to orbit, however getting it ready to launch faced repeated delays due to a lack of funding (I think I lost about 2 or 3 months due to being out of funds for the duration of the rollout which stalled everything). An engine problem was also encountered which delayed the launch even further. At last, on 12-12-1957, it was ready to launch. Instead of the fairings originally planned to enclose the payload, a simpler hollow nosecone was used instead and jettisoned via a pair of small solid rockets when the third stage decoupled. This was the first test of the vacuum-optimised Gamma-8V configuration and it didn't disappoint, performing exactly as intended. The relatively light satellite was sent to a polar orbit to complete two contracts at once and even then it had a significant delta-V margin. Alas, Sputnik 1 won the race to orbit due to those pesky funding-related delays. A few more Goliath Nova missions are on the cards to do a sun-synchronous orbit, scientific satellite and solar-powered satellite, hopefully allowing the expensive tooling for the even larger OR-2 Princess to be purchased and the necessary technologies unlocked to carry on. I may revisit the idea of a Europe-only run in normal RP-1 as it might work better there; P&LC definitely feels significantly slower than regular RP-1 even without the limitations I've added here and I'm a couple of years behind in pretty much every major milestone in both of my P&LC attempts so far compared to It's Only Rocket Science which was in normal RP-1 on the same difficulty. Maybe X-planes are worth doing after all?

As promised, Voskhod: The docking target and airlock nearly balanced each other out, though the second stage's verniers were getting close to maximum deflection trying to keep it straight near the end of the orbital insertion burn. The docking target probe was released, moved into dock and- loss of signal just as the sun went down. Voskhod has no translation and very limited attitude control, however for once things worked out alright as the probe was heading straight at the docking port and managed to connect on the first bounce. With a total of 7m/s, the probe won't be any use for orbital manoeuvring but its RCS will be a useful addition to eke out the puny reserves of nitrogen on the service module. Next on the agenda is an EVA: Both Rhonda and Walter got a chance to do an EVA, though they had to hang on tight to avoid floating away into space as there would be no way to get them back. Several days later, with the science done and duration records broken, it was time to come back home. With that done, some changes need to be made. First off, I need a new science Leader since Van Allen retired: Then I hired an extra duo of astronauts to allow more frequent crewed flights and also enable one of the crew experiments which requires an engineer: They'll be ready to fly in about a year. Then a few months later I decided to switch up the Programs to get a significant injection of funding: I've decided that the end goal of this playthrough will be completing the Crewed Lunar Exploration Program, requiring no less than three lunar landings. There isn't a lot of content beyond this point, a big limitation of P&LC in its current state. I also went back and completely reprioritised the research queue, pushing for better rocket engines so I can build a bigger and better launch rocket for those lunar missions and unlock the other necessary tech as soon as possible. All the facilities that can be upgraded are being done at 100% speed and yet I'm still making a tidy profit thanks to the new Programs' generous funding. There are two Mars orbiters on the build queue for the next transfer window, though I may delay those a bit to try and get a Mercury mission away; three more Voskhod missions are also on the queue, though only one will carry the airlock and docking target probe as the other two will be purely for the science. Next time: New LV design?

KSP 1 and 2 aren’t the same game and trying to get a craft file from the former to work in the latter would probably take a lot of work: wings are completely different, parts have different names, shapes and sizes not to mention mass and engine performance, the fuels are different and in different ratios, to name just a few of the things to consider even before you think about the parts that don’t exist in one game or the other (e.g. the DLC parts) or from mods. All of that assumes that the files are structured in the same way using the same parameters, which is a big assumption that could completely scupper the whole idea if it’s not true. It would probably be easier to just manually rebuild each design in KSP2 unless it’s a really intricate design or replica.

Official mod support isn’t ready yet but is on the roadmap, I wouldn’t be surprised to see something like this added down the road.

To those advocating the Thud… Why? Aside from the gimbal range, it’s terrible.

Terrier and Cheetah for me, I’ve landed on and returned from every body in the Kerbol system using either or both of them, they’re small enough to use on 1.25m rockets and provide the best balance of efficiency, weight and cost; the Wolfhound might be more efficient and more powerful but the excess weight means it’s only really a better choice for very large and heavy payloads whereas the Terrier and Cheetah work on everything from Baby’s First Kerbin Orbiter to crewed Eve and Tylo landers.

Near Future Launch Vehicles might just fill that need, it contains 3.75m and 5m probe cores with powerful reaction wheels, modelled on the avionics unit on the third stage of the Saturn V.