jimmymcgoochie

Pol’s not bad, just a bit out of the way to visit. When visiting Jool, most people just go to Laythe because it’s the easiest to land on due to the atmosphere, or possibly to Val as it’s still close in to Jool but you don’t need to deal with re-entry heating; Pol is pretty inclined relative to the three inner moons and also rather far out so it requires quite a lot of delta-V to get there, relatively speaking, but the low gravity makes it ideal for a mining outpost and it’s easier to reach than Bop which is much more inclined.

The answer is probably mods, as there are only a few stock paint options for the fuel tanks (2-4 at most). A few part revamps are out there- Restock and Ven’s stock revamp are two that I know of- and there’s also a mod out there that lets you recolour stock parts using TUFX, though I can’t remember the name and haven’t used it myself.

It's update number fifty! Have I really been doing this for that long already? The Mars flotilla now have reasonably precise capture burns plotted for their respective missions, as well as KAC alarms for when they hit Mars' SOI and for the nodes too. Another Grey Hotdog photography satellite was launched, this time with all the necessary parts and propellants on the right stages so the second stage will deorbit itself and the satellite can point at the sun: And now, due to the huge success of Moon Landing 1, here's Moon Landing 2- the sequel! Despite some challenges relating to KCT time warping six hours past the circularisation burn for the lander and requiring some judicious use of the set orbit cheat to put it in a proper, but higher than intended, orbit, the mission went fine: Now that's going to be an issue... The contract wants a landing in Mare Fecunditatis, but that's completely out of the plane of this orbit and also currently in the dark, and I can't wait for nearly 2 weeks for it to line up properly. The landing will instead aim for Mare Orientale on the far side of the Moon, which has already been visited by a sample return mission at some point but which will still yield some substantial science rewards- plus it's in daylight. The terrain was a bit scary looking but I found a nice flat bit to land on* and despite having to waste some fuel to aim at the flat bit still landed with over 200m/s of fuel to spare. Cue the Moontage! It turns out that with all the extra weight in the suit- batteries, scrubber, oxygen, water, food- the EVA pack doesn't provide enough thrust to fly on the Moon, seriously curtailing exploration around the landing site. There was an interesting looking hill nearby but it was just too far to walk all the way over there and back for a single photo. With nothing else to do on the surface once the science was gathered, it was soon time for Ann to rejoin Viktoriya and the Gemini in orbit, which involved quite a lot of ham-fisted control inputs to try and intercept the pod as it hurtled overhead. There was even time for Viktoriya to do a lunar EVA before they headed back to Earth, completely forgetting about the crewed Moon orbit contract that I was supposed to be doing in this mission too. This mission grabbed a few hundred science including transmitted crew and EVA reports, but failed at both contracts so another Moon landing will be needed for those. Ann and Viktoriya clearly enjoyed their flight, electing to stick around for several more years upon their return. And now on to the mildly cursed Green Albatross 2, launching to do a SAR altimetry scan of Earth- first there was no antenna, then I fixed that but forgot to put the fairing back on, then I fixed that but the fairing wouldn't deploy and the payload was stuck inside, then eventually I fixed that too and everything worked as intended. The SAR scanner has a relatively small field of view of 1.7 degrees, but at 7500km that covers a pretty big swathe of the Earth's surface. There are some brand new experiments on this probe too- the latest RPWS and magnetometer parts plus more new science in the avionics core. The contract to scan 80% of the Earth's surface only took a few days to complete and I expect full coverage fairly soon too. A lot of free points from the Moon landing plus a good chunk of contract sat money went into KCT points for R&D. Full album: https://imgur.com/a/yphq5fw Coming up next time: The space station is next on the build queue with a Gemini pod set to be launched at around the same time. There will also be a third Moon landing, in the right place this time, in the near future but for that I require more funds to build the craft to actually do the mission. Oh, and the first probe to reach Jupiter will be arriving in its SOI soon, but that SOI is so huge that it'll be there for several hundred days!

KIS cardboard box? Put into the KIS inventory or the 1.11/BG stock inventory? KSP version, mod list, logs? For KIS you should be able to either grab it with G or drag it out of their inventory and let go the LMB to then place it as normal, does this not work?

The ka-sploosh as your pod full of tired Kerbals finally splashes down in the ocean just off the KSC coast after a long and difficult voyage to far-flung destinations, running on fumes and with the tiniest of margins left on all resources, but packed to the gills with sweet, sweet science...

The commercial side of this space program continues with multiple contract satellite launches: In between launches I took a run at making a space station, of sorts, and came up with this: While it technically counts as a station, there's still some work to be done to make it usable for the contract and possibly beyond. A second Moon lander, now with upgraded tech level 3 RCS and thrusters, joins the build queue; more importantly, the R&D upgrade has completed meaning it now has the level 3 buildings: This upgrade unlocks tech nodes of up to 150 science, all of which are immediately added to the list with some science to spare: New engines, new science tech, new capsules (including some which aren't actually real) and improved balloon tanks are just some of the new parts contained in the latest set of nodes, but it will be a while before they get researched even with the speed boost from the upgrade. The Mars transfer window has opened so two missions are launched, both with new names to reflect the different booster configuration (which I should have done a while ago) compared to the old Orange Dinnerware series. Orange Valley 1, a Mars orbiter and lander duo: Orange Canyon 1, carrying an orbiter/lander pair each for Phobos and Deimos: After completing the transfer burns and minor course corrections, everything crashed. Not just KSP but my entire PC froze and had to be turned off and back on, then it happened again as soon as I loaded the save and went to the tracking station. A lengthy discussion on Discord later and I've pulled a few mods out that aren't really needed, pulled parts out of some other mods, disabled SCANsat's visual maps (not the biome and altimetry maps, just visible light mapping) and downgraded the EVO textures from 64k to 32k and so far the RAM use has gone down a lot. I'm keeping an eye on it now to see if I can go back to the highest resolution for EVO without breaking anything again or if something else is to blame. Another contract sat launch, which like all the Green Condor launches I'm doing nowadays completes two contracts in one go: And now for a PSA: Don't automatically assume that tooling tanks is a good idea and must be done every time. In some cases the cost of tooling just isn't worth it: 100k funds in tooling costs, for a 2k funds saving and just over 2 days saved on build time? Not worth it! I'm only going to use this tank once so it makes perfect sense to leave it untooled and take the minor build time/cost penalties. With new tech nodes unlocked since the original Red Sunflower rocket was designed, and radically different mission parameters to the original's role of launching the Moon lander and Gemini into space, a new version (as yet unnamed) was made which ditches the many SRBs and RD-107s in favour of RD-253 engines as seen on the Proton, which are much more powerful. The second stage was also upgraded to use Proton engines to allow the "space station" on top to be put into a 250x250km orbit: The finished design uses the Agena docking port to make docking a Gemini pod easier, comes with fuel cells for backup power and the Gemini on the top can deorbit itself from this altitude with no difficulty at all to act as an escape pod if necessary. I even put lights on it, just because I could. The combined cost of adding this Yellow Eclair station to the build queue, as well as a Yellow Shortbread Gemini pod to try and do an orbital flight contract before docking to the station for that contract, meant I was once again critically low on funds with no guarantee that there would be enough left to even roll out a contract sat, so I took the contract for a Mars rover which had a generous advance and a ~6 year deadline: Most of that advance then went into KCT points for R&D but there's enough left to keep operating until the contract sats go up. The current Mars window is closing so I have a couple of years to figure out a Mars rover before I need to launch it. Things are currently looking good- the next Moon landing vessels are going to be built soon and a plethora of contracts have vessels being built to fulfil them as well. Full album: https://imgur.com/a/AJKunMJ Coming up next time: Moon landing number 2?

Is it just me, or is the General Discussion section of the forum broken? I get a 500 error any time I click on a link to that particular forum, but not any other section, and I got here by clicking the direct link to this thread; it's happened to me before on a tablet but is happening pretty consistently now on PC. In more KSP-related news, I threw a cluster of missions at Mars: an orbiter-lander combo for Mars itself plus orbiter/lander pairs for Phobos and Deimos. If you thought Gilly was small, Phobos and Deimos have orbital velocities below 5m/s!

I suggest you turn off the dish and two experiments (I'd do seismic and goo) to leave just the control hub and one experiment running on the limited power you currently have. Just remember- when it gets dark, you'll have no power; there's a mod called Deployable Batteries that adds deployable batteries specifically to counter this issue, but you need to charge them up in daylight so you'll still need more solar panels to run the whole thing either way.

I think you just click and hold LMB and drag it around to point a Kerbal in that direction. There's also a keybind to get them to rotate to face forwards relative to the camera position, you can change it in the settings (I did, it was bound to left control which is also my go-down button, so I switched to right control instead).

I think the “old” emojis are actually proper emojis, while the “new” emojis are more like those emoji stickers instead. The animations are the main reason I still use the “old” type over the new , but the new versions’ eyes are slightly too small and the overall size is too big compared to the default text size. I’m not saying the new versions are bad, I just prefer the old ones.

If you just want to generate some Kerbal names, you can use the Kerbal generator in the cheats menu to generate the names at random (escape > click on version information, or press alt+F12, then click Kerbals at the bottom of the list).

A short update this time, I've been working on Audacity instead (see my forum signature for the link ). A few contract sats: A successful rover mission to the Moon to replace the failed Orange Mug 3: The fuel ran out about 10m above the surface; fortunately those wheels could take the force without breaking and it was only 4km to the first waypoint from the landing site. And following its construction, I decided to do a simulator run for Blue Nougat 1, the completely misnamed mission to send lander/orbiter pairs to Phobos and Deimos, to find the optimal transfer window; instead, this happened: Turns out the avionics were upside down; flipping them the right way up fixed that issue and the ideal transfer time is in about 50 days. Now all I have to do is fix the name, since Blue-class rockets are 700 tons but this thing is under 350; after running out of plate-related names I've decided to rename the 4 booster, RD-107/108 powered 350t rockets differently to the older models with American engines and 6 boosters, so future Moon rovers won't be Orange Mugs any more. Final scores: Full album: https://imgur.com/a/PueKdhE Coming up next time: A minor overhaul of vessel names is due, plus planning a second Moon landing and launching more Grey Hotdog imaging satellites. R&D will finish upgrading soon too so I can spend some of that science on shiny new nodes to sit on the end of the research queue for a couple of years.

That link doesn’t work for me, the file is blank. KSP.log is useful, but a more detailed log is available; on Windows you’ll find that at C:/users/your-user/AppData/LocalLow/Squad/Kerbal Space Program/Player.log; AppData is a hidden folder so you’ll need to enable ‘show hidden folders’ to see it. Player.log contains a lot more information than KSP.log, can you try finding that and uploading it as well as checking that the log file you linked to above is correct.

Can you post the full mod list? You have many more mods in there than the 6 you’ve included above according to the logs. Check your mod versions are all compatible with your version of KSP and update them if needed, that might fix the problem.

If you need help with a design, always include pictures of that design- without them we’re just guessing, but with them it becomes a lot easier. When you say “turns the wrong way” do you mean it flies in the wrong direction or flips backwards? If it keeps going pointy-end up but in the wrong direction it might be fixable by adding a few degrees of angle (so it points at e.g. 87 degrees up and slightly to the east on the launchpad) then just holding prograde for most/all of the launch. If it flips backwards then either your aerodynamics are off (too much drag at the front e.g. a massive fairing, and/or not enough at the back e.g. fins) or your weight distribution is off (too heavy at the back and/or too light at the front) which could be solved by changing the order that your fuel tanks get used so they drain from the bottom up. Without seeing the rocket in question that’s about as specific as I can get.

We interrupt the Moon-related shenanigans for a brief flyby of Vesta by one of those probes I threw at it a few weeks ago and keep forgetting the names of... Free KCT points from transmitted science plus bought KCT points from that contract money were split between VAB and lab: Now, where was I? ...oh yes, I remember- MOON LANDING! Had a failure on one of the RD-107 boosters and one of the RD-108 core engines on the first stage. They have failure rates of 0.06%... TestLite hates me, but due to the number of engines and the fact that both failures were fairly late in their respective burns it didn't make any difference. After throwing the Yellow Scone 1 lander at the Moon, it was time for the Yellow Crumpet 2 to take the crew of 2- Diana Zonova and Alexei Ogorodnikov, two of my original four pilots- into space after it: With the launches and TLI burns completed, I ran out of time to finish the mission so had to come back to it the next day, so there are two Imgur albums for this report. A bit of orbital tweakery and no fewer than three incidents where the fuel cells glitched and stopped working so the two craft ran out of power, Gemini and lander came together over the Moon's surface and Diana EVA-ed over to the lander, saving RCS propellant for the post-landing rendezvous instead. The braking burn was long and tedious, trying to reduce horizontal velocity without gaining too much vertical velocity or wasting too much fuel. The lander was overbuilt and had close to 2500m/s of delta-V in both the descent and ascent stages so there was some margin for error, unlike the sample return missions which have all been right on the fuel limits. No throttle made for a pretty jolty landing as the engines had to reduce the velocity without stopping and going up again, but this also meant there was time to cancel out all remaining horizontal velocity before touching down to prevent the lander falling over. TOUCHDOWN! Half way through 1960! Earth looks so small from here... After a couple of false starts caused by catastrophic CO2 buildup (because the scrubber in the lander was turned off, probably after the battery died, and I forgot to turn it on, so Diana's EVA suit ended up with close to 50% CO2 so she had to get back into the lander pretty quickly), Diana Zonova descended the ladder and took her- and my- first steps on the surface of the Moon! Shoutout to Alexei who had to sit in the Gemini pod and watch. You'll get your chance, don't worry. Thanks to KAC translating 1960-185 into a usable date, I now know that this is 03-07-1960, the third of July. By the time Diana's EVA experiments were done, which took over two hours for the recently unlocked deep surface sample, the calendar had ticked over. Cue some half-hearted American propaganda, rather undermined by the fact that most of the rocket engines that sent both the lander and the Gemini out to the Moon are Soviet designs... One good thing about 1.11 that is still relevant in RP-1 is the shiny gold helmet visor, which makes dramatic screenshots even better: Experiments over, flag planted, photos taken, Diana had some time to "experiment with Lunar surface locomotion" or something like that. At least, that's the excuse she used to start jumping around the place grinning like a small child who ate too much sugar: Alas, she couldn't stay long- the landing site was moving out of alignment with the orbiting Gemini above so once all the objectives had been ticked off it was time to go, much to Diana's dismay: I launched quite a bit too early, must be my stock KSP instincts kicking in, but that meant there was plenty of time to sort out the intercept and make it as accurate as possible: The lander did all the docking as it had plenty of propellant left. Once docked, Diana and the samples could be transferred over to the Gemini pod, the 20 hour Lunar orbit contract could be completed and Alexei finally got his Lunar EVA: (He wasn't supposed to be wearing the future suit though, I should probably go through the entire list and make sure everyone uses the stock suit instead as all the EVA science works for that one) Contract completed, the lander was undocked and deorbited before the Yellow Crumpet 2 headed for home: It turns out that this particular setup with the Gemini can barely outrun the upper stage's RCS thrusters, I had a surreal moment when the return burn had completed for the Gemini and then the stage came flying past, still accelerating because its avionics still worked and it still had propellant for the RCS system. I'm sure it'll just disintegrate when it hits the atmosphere, right? The return was pretty routine, but upon decoupling the service module I discovered a problem- due to the extra weight of the surface samples, the pod was slightly over the avionics limit even with an extra avionics unit added to augment its total avionics limit to 5 tons. Fortunately enough the UHF antenna burnt off pretty early, dropping the mass below the limit and allowing the pod to be stabilised to prevent any more damage. The ocean went weird again, totally invisible yet bouncing the pod with enough force to break the RCS pack off the nose- and nearly break the pod itself, now that would have been awkward!- before I fixed it (with a little bit of gravity hacking ) and recovered the vessel. Time to spend some of that money! R&D upgrade for 3 million, admin building for 57k (pointless, but it's so cheap it doesn't really matter) and a lot of part unlocks including the mighty F-1 engine, all the engines from the Proton rocket and all the space station parts, which were by some margin the most expensive overall at close to a million funds for the set; even the F-1's 460k seems reasonable in comparison. And then I fat-fingered the buttons when buying KCT points and spent all my remaining funds by accident, leaving barely a thousand in the account; cue some hurried contract accepting! And to finish the report, the first of ten Grey Hotdog visible imaging satellites was launched; the low-thrust second stage had some real difficulty making it to even a low Earth orbit and after decoupling I realised that a) the second stage had no avionics to deorbit and b) the satellite itself had no RCS propellant to control its attitude. These issues will be fixed on subsequent models. Time to wrap this report up: Full album 1: https://imgur.com/a/5awL3pN Full album 2: https://imgur.com/a/n8N8ZRM Coming up next time: Boots on Mars by the end of the decade? Or maybe I'll just stick to something more sensible like sending that flotilla of probes and landers to Mars, some LEO contract and imaging sats and so on. Or maybe even another Moon landing!

What version of KSP? Parallax and RSS don’t work together as far as I know, remove Parallax and that will probably fix the terrain issue.

I think we’ve already had solar panels for colonies shown in one or two of the demo videos (and the trailer), but I can definitely see some benefit to having wind turbines and geothermal power systems in KSP2; not so much with wave/tide power since I’m not sure either of those will actually feature in KSP2, it wouldn’t be much fun to land on a watery world like Laythe only for your entire mission to be swept away by the tide when you weren’t looking, let alone an entire interstellar colony! By the time a colony is big enough to need a nuclear power supply, even the smallest version shown in that video, it’ll be too big to use wind/wave/tide/solar power anyway.

After several months in this career, a series of steep learning curves and a few conspicuous craters where designs didn't quite go to plan, I landed a Kerbal on the Moon. No, not the Mun, the actual Moon! By complete coincidence, I landed on the Moon on the Fourth of July. The Fourth of July, 1960 that is: Absolutely nothing went wrong whatsoever, nope, nothing at all, nothing like me forgetting to switch the scrubbers on so Diana here ended up with a suit CO2 level of 50% when she tried the first EVA, no, nothing like that...

In a bid to scrape up every last bit of science available, Green Capercaillie (just a Green Condor with a pair of tiny science probes on top) was launched. The probes have no attitude control, but are powered by RTGs so it doesn't matter. One probe was dropped in a low orbit while the other was hurled as high as possible to stay in space high above Earth for as much of each orbit as possible; not easy when space high is nearly geostationary altitude! Next to launch is Orange Mug 3, the third Moon rover so far: Between the TLI burn and arriving at the Moon there was time for a quick contract sat launch, which revealed something rather interesting despite what I thought earlier, the KSC hasn't actually moved (or if it has it's by a couple of miles at most), but instead most of Cape Canaveral's terrain has vanished as you can see here: That launch completed 2 contracts again, with two more accepted in their place. Back to Orange Mug 3, where I learnt 2 things- first, the Orange Mug rovers can act as signal relays: And second: An apparently minor tweak to the design made it catastrophically unstable when the SRBs fired and there was no way to recover it. RIP Orange Mug 3... And now for the main event! Yellow Crumpet 1 heads to the Moon to orbit, dock to the Orange Ramekin target and do some contracts. There were two ignition failures on the RL-10s for this flight, but neither were critical in any way- there are three engines, two can keep it pointing the right way if the third isn't working and they have 10 ignitions each. A carefully tweaked orbit meant that rendezvous could occur in a single orbit after capturing, so Tim decided to head out for an EVA in space high over the Moon: A delicate bit of docking later... And it was time for Terri to do an EVA of her own: Shortly after this image was taken I realised that the vessel was drifting away and spinning slowly, because the Yellow Crumpet had run out of RCS propellant. With that in mind, I called time on the mission and brought it back as soon as possible instead of waiting the 20 hours for the Lunar orbit contract to complete. Re-entry was a bit dicey as the Gemini's avionics can only handle 3.5 tons but in this configuration it weighs almost 5 tons at re-entry; fortunately I had the pod roughly aligned before jettisoning the equipment section (which has its own avionics) and descent mode kept it pointing the right way. There was a big payout waiting for them when they got back: Tim and Terri both levelled up to level 2 after this flight and both decided to stay for several more years: Then I held the wrong key when buying KCT points and instead of buying just 5, I ended up buying about 90 in one click and spending virtually all the available funds in one go. A couple of contract sats made up for it though, so in the end it wasn't too disastrous: Full album: https://imgur.com/a/CrOWFDZ Coming up next time: Two words- MOON LANDING!!!

Always create a copy of KSP before adding mods- you can keep the unmodded copy to get updates and spin off more copies for different mod sets, while each modded copy stays put and doesn’t update so compatibility never breaks due to a new KSP version. The solution here is option c) copy the modded KSP, mods and all, then delete the mods from the original and then you’ll have a copy with mods and a copy without.

You realise that the current version of KSP is 1.11.1, right? I don’t really see your point, Kerbals in the game still look like the Kerbal in the thumbnail/icon (possibly a bit higher resolution, though) so I see no real need to change it.

Nyan cat is a distraction in this case, it’s because today is Cat Day somewhere apparently. You probably just need to clear input locks, this can be done either by pressing escape > show version info (or alt+F12) > console > input locks > clear input locks) or by pressing the button that a mod (which mod, I can’t remember unfortunately, but it’s probably one @linuxgurugamer manages since he seems to own about half the KSP mods in existence ) adds to the toolbar. The terrain rising and engulfing buildings is a minor nuisance but as long as you can still use the buttons on the left to access the various buildings then you should be fine.

It’s usually best to run the newest minor version of the second-newest major release- currently that means KSP 1.10.1 since the newest release is 1.11.1, 1.10.1 has a lot more compatible mods and should be stable enough to use without any major issues. Given time, mods will be updated to work in 1.11.x and they’ll probably be done by the time 1.12 gets released in a few months’ time.

I made a couple of tweaks to my Moon rover design and- it crashed spectacularly. For some reason the rover itself has a centre of mass that’s subtly offset, so when I add the deceleration SRBs on the bottom their thrust is out of alignment and the whole thing pitched beyond the power of the RCS to control it- even with extra RCS thrusters on the SRBs to try and counter this same problem. A small redesign has solved this issue for this craft (the CoT is now aligned with CoM for both the SRBs and the landing engines) but it’s probably time to build a proper rover using the RoveMate rather than something I stapled together out of whatever parts I happened to have at the time.