jimmymcgoochie

No new LV this report because I botched the LC construction and now I have to wait another 450 days because it was a) too short and b) not crew-rated. On the plus side, all this waiting around means I have more than enough free cash to save up for all the tooling costs for the Moon landing stuff. The Venus missions are arriving, so now I need to choose whether to drop the little atmo probes/landers off in a higher orbit, saving fuel but giving them a hotter re-entry, or in a low orbit which costs more fuel but will be more survivable. I have two probes, so one of each will do. The first mission to arrive dropped its probe from an apoapsis of 2500km, which turned out to be too high as the heatshield exploded. The second waited until it was in a nearly circular low orbit and the atmosphere probe survived re-entry and the fall to the ground in one piece. A tweak to the orbiter's orbit to let it communicate with the "lander" and Earth at the same time to relay the signal and the surface science flowed. You can tell this install is struggling by the newspaper for these missions. The game is freezing up my entire PC on a fairly regular basis when loading saves or switching scenes after it starts, requiring a PC reboot to fix. With LC-400 finally upgraded, those two Moonlander Mk5s sitting in storage can finally fly. The second one landed at the north pole just to do something different. No more of these now, it's full steam ahead for the Moon landing- which means a lot of time warp. Next time: The D-2 seems to have a very long build time and with the LC delays I won't be beating Apollo 11, or possibly even 12, to the Moon.

To clarify: story/writing/etc. about KSP and Kerbal-related subjects goes here- https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/39-ksp-fan-works/

The official release of RP-1 v2.0 (RP-2?) with P&LC has already happened, so there goes my goal of trying to finish this career with a Moon landing before that happened. I'll wrap this up as quickly as possible to try out the "proper" P&LC experience instead of my current WIP build. Starting with the Venus launches: Both were dispatched within about a week of each other and are on course for good Venus encounters, their little dinnerplate atmosphere probes ready to be deployed- and possibly land intact, who knows. Then I found a Moon lander sitting in lunar orbit that I'd forgotten about for a while and landed it. More science is always welcome, though by this point the research queue is over a decade long so it's not that urgent. Staying with Moon landings, I redesigned my trusty crewed Moon lander with parts tooled in this save and made sure it worked, which it did. I may trim some of that excess fuel to make it light enough to be sent out to the Moon in the first place. On a related note, I also designed a lunar D-2 and tested that out on the OR-5 Balthazar, now sporting a suitably hideous paint scheme. Aside from the crew all suffocating due to only having the shoddy 2-day scrubber unlocked so far, everything went according to plan. The next launch was Voskhod 4, which due to an error in the experiment selection had an experiment that couldn't be run- it needed an engineer, but the crew were a pilot and a scientist. It's also launching out of sequence because Voskhod 3 has an airlock and I'm giving that flight to the newbies to get some more experience once their training is done. A few days in orbit later and they made a surprisingly accurate re-entry, dropping down on top of Miami just down the road from Cape Canaveral. Uh... so apparently X-planes contracts can be completed by orbital launches? I took that Program because I had a spare slot and it lasts so long that I'll be done before it expires which means free money! Much plane, so wow. After much training time, the newbies Valerie and Nicole were finally ready to fly. Voskhod 3, on the other hand, wasn't: a strange miscalculation meant that the rocket was too heavy on the pad until I detached one of the interstage fairings. It had more staging issues in flight with the fairings surrounding the capsule not separating properly and the capsule itself ending up in a spin, just short of orbit, after the upper stage shut down. Some well-timed engine burns bumped the periapsis sufficiently and the crew got on with their science tasks while attention shifted to Mars. Despite reliability issues in the past, the Juno 6k worked as advertised for the braking burn and this probe parked itself in a 200x4500km orbit to gather all the science it could. It's not inclined enough to do orbital perturbation, but with only a dribble of HTP left and no ignitions on the main engine there's no way to fix that. Program complete! I'll probably replace it with the one for flybys of Mercury, Ceres and Vesta since there's a Mercury window coming up (and I've already done a Mercury flyby anyway). Back to Voskhod 3 where Nicole and Valerie were faffing around with the docking probe, only included because it balanced the weight of the airlock, and waiting for the airlock to inflate so they could do some EVAs. With all their tasks done, another surprisingly accurate re-entry ensued- this time they got the latitude right but overshot a bit on the longitude, whereas last time the longitude was about right but the latitude was a bit off. Another rocketplane contract completed by a Voskhod... With LC-400 getting an upgrade to be human-rated so that it can launch a D-2 to LEO for testing and science, there are a lot of engineers sitting around doing nothing. Might as well try doing some rocketplane contracts legitimately... Despite zero sim testing, the Q-1 performed pretty well overall. The only real problem was that it didn't get fast enough to complete the contract, so the engineers just sawed a metre from each wing and it worked perfectly. Staying with crewed stuff, I hired two more astronauts to go straight into D-2 training. Now I have two sets of pilot, scientist and engineer so there are two crews for lunar missions. All I need now is the Block 2 mission module with the space for a docking port on the end, or I could caveman it and not bother docking... Back to Mars as the second orbiter approaches. Once again the Juno 6k works properly... ...and the probe settles into a low polar orbit for biome mapping. Some experiments can't run as the orbit isn't eccentric enough, but that's why I sent two probes. Next time: Gearing up for a Moon landing!

Have you tried clicking the reset button in EER’s toolbar menu? Those buttons often stop working for me but the reset button fixes it every time.

I’m getting Captain Scarlet vibes with the flying base.

I’m of the opinion that rockets should require some design / construction work to make them fully rigid, but it shouldn’t take much more than a few strategically placed struts or some common-sense design principles. Rockets shouldn’t ping around like an accordion when the engines are switched on/off, bend in half between stages or have boosters oscillate in and out until everything explodes, and the player shouldn’t have to add dozens of autostruts to every other part to hold everything still. Real rockets almost never have single points of failure when things like boosters are concerned so adding struts to stabilise those feels reasonable, but throwing struts at every interstage, payload fairing and wing joint is excessive. Depending on how part progression is implemented, unlocking all the tanks of the same series e.g. all the 1.25m cylindrical tanks, at the same time would avoid creating monstrosities with large numbers of small parts stacked together when one or two larger parts can do the same with far less wobbliness.

At some point you’ll realise, as I did, that launching into the plane of the Moon is almost never the right choice for interplanetary missions. The Transfer Window Planner fork provides a much better LAN to launch to that eliminates most of the normal/antinormal part of the departure burn without adding any additional delta-V requirements to the launch itself. Long-running saves are prone to freezing on saves because the save file is large, try deleting some unwanted vessels. For transfer burns, it’s almost never going to be accurate so assume a course correction will be needed every time.

The initial 260x260km would have been fine. The second stage actually did get to orbit, it stopped at 250x200ish. Kerbalism has a known issue where automation doesn’t work at high time warps, so setting things to turn on at high power levels is prone to missing the trigger and so not turning on. It only fires when power goes above 80% and doesn’t check continuously as far as I can tell. Just turn them on full time and turn off the power warnings instead, or set another trigger e.g. daylight to turn them on as well to double your chances.

Commercial weather sat launch, nothing special. The Larch-8 engine had a performance loss during the ascent, cutting its ISP in half, but this rocket has such a huge margin that it still easily made it to its target orbit. Engine problems continued for the launch of the first OR-4 Constellation, carrying an Algol probe bound for Jupiter. (ooc: I did this launch twice after noticing some config errors on the probe itself that I specifically remember fixing during an earlier refit, and on both occasions there was a failure on one of the Vega engines- first time another ISP loss, second time an outright failure on ignition. It still flew to orbit with that failed engine without too much trouble holding its attitude and the third stage even did part of the transfer burn.) Despite the third stage losing an engine on ignition the mission went ahead as planned, flying off towards Jupiter with enough delta-V to attempt an orbital capture. It seems the power calculations were a little bit off, three RTGs isn't quite enough to power all the experiments at once. It can still fulfil its mission, but it might take a bit longer to gather and transmit all the data. Staying a bit closer to home, a Kronos launch sent a Sirius Mk2 lunar lander towards the Moon. It ended up in a polar lunar orbit where it will wait for a suitable landing site to be under its orbit and in daylight. Days later a Procyon Luna Mk2 orbiter is sent up on the new Princess Mk4- in a somewhat radical departure from previous models, the Mk4 has ditched the third stage engine and instead uses the third stage tank to hold extra fuel for the second stage, resulting in slightly improved payload capacity and reduced complexity at the cost of overburning the Vega engine a bit (though within tested burn time). It reached its target orbit without incident and will be busy science-ing away as well as mapping the lunar surface with its video camera to find sites of interest for future landers.

I read MMH and immediately thought monomethylhydrazine, not metastable metallic hydrogen. Too much RP-1… But I’m going to jump on the bandwagon of “if aliens can build a ship that can travel interstellar then they probably have the means to keep fuel usable long term using handwavium/unobtanium/ununhexium alloys”.

I've come back to this save after a while away from it because I've heard P&LC's "release" is imminent- it will become RP-1 in the next major update. With that in mind, I want to finish this one off with a Moon landing and then start afresh with all the updates that have gone in since I started this save and using what I've learnt here. To get to the Moon I'll need something a bit better than the R-7 knockoffs I've been using so far. I spent some time designing new rockets, but then I cheated and just copy-pasted the Blue String from It's Only Rocket Science and changed a few details (RL-200s swapped to J-2s, tech levels adjusted on avionics etc.) to make it work with what I have in this save. Payload to orbit is 32.5 tons, a huge step up from the Salmanzar and enough to throw a capsule or lander out to the Moon; I'll probably reuse my stolen-from-Terminal-Velocity lander again and the D-2 capsule just to try something different again. Meanwhile, the LCs are finishing their assigned construction jobs- two more Voskhod missions in CLC-200 and two Venus orbiters in LC-400- and are now sitting idle, wasting time and money. A couple of Salmanzar Moonlanders will keep LC-400 going for a while and a rather odd science satellite went into CLC-200's queue to pick off some space high science. Really? Engine failure with <0.05% failure rate- wait, why does that engine have a >2% failure chance? Turns out the engine configs were wrong, I must have used the wrong booster craft. A quick refit later and it launched just fine. This launch is more like the R-7 than usual as there's no second stage; instead the tank that used to be part of the second stage is joined to the first stage to give it a longer burn time, with a strange upper stage using five RD-0110 verniers to put the satellite into a very high (40Mm) polar orbit. Three of those engines powered the final part of the launch and boosted the apoapsis up to 40Mm, while the other two circularised the orbit using the same tank of fuel. They're all single ignition, but this pattern meant that none of them were overburnt and they're pretty reliable. Between the infrared radiometer and the orbital perturbation experiment, this should be providing a steady trickle of science for years to come. And to finish, a quick visit to the two Mars orbiter missions to perform course corrections. One is heading to a polar orbit, the other isn't because I forgot to set the course correction up that way until after I'd done it. Next time: A holiday hiatus and then back to launch the Venus orbiters, park the Mars orbiters, do some Voskhod stuff and hopefully move towards lunar landings.

From the KSP Wiki: Breaking Ground added volcanic features- geothermal geysers and undersea volcanoes/hydrothermal vents- which suggest extensive volcanism; since Laythe's orbit around Jool has zero inclination and zero eccentricity, this is most likely driven by gravitational interactions with Tylo and to a lesser extent Vall. If you've ever used Kerbalism you'll know that Laythe is right inside Jool's magnetic fields, coming very close to the extremely powerful inner belt when it passes behind Jool (the magnetic field is influenced by solar wind and stretches further from the planet on the side furthest from Kerbol) meaning that Laythe's core could be being heated by Jool's magnetosphere too.

Are you sure that’s the temperature on the surface?

The Moon's surface has now been mapped to over 80% coverage with more to come. (Side note, if you open the SCANsat window and switch to maps of the Mun, then go into the colour settings, you can change the cutoff values for the terrain map. By default the maximum is something stupidly low like 5km meaning most of the terrain is just white, but crank that value up to maximum- 16km- and suddenly you can see everything clearly. Tweaking the minimum setting to ~5km worked best for me, your mileage may vary but it's definitely worth changing the maximum.) Another LEO cluster mission, Lyra is a quintet of navigation satellites launched by a Kronos into a polar orbit. They're equipped with some limited relay capabilities as well, albeit with a very short maximum range and the low altitude orbit will limit their coverage. One of the two Vega engines failed on its third ignition causing a spin, but the Larch upper stage was able to recover and had enough delta-V to make up for the loss. The satellites were put into a resonant orbit before separation to spread them evenly around the planet, with circularisation burns over the next day or so. By the time the last satellite was in position, it was clear someone had miscalculated: instead of spacing 5 satellites correctly, the resonant orbit had mistakenly been set for 6. This might actually be a good thing though as due to the relatively low orbit correct spacing would probably result in the satellites being unable to communicate with each other. As it is, they can chain a connection the whole way along the network and connect to the Sirius relays too. Task failed successfully? There was just enough time to get a Vesta flyby probe ready to launch, but the Mars and Ceres windows came and went with no launches; judging by the Vesta launch, the identical Ceres-bound probe probably wouldn't have made it. Procyon Vesta is the first spacecraft to use radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) as its power source rather than solar panels, which would need to be prohibitively large and heavy to produce the same power output so far from the Sun. Procyon has worked well for relatively close targets, but something bigger will be needed to visit Mercury and anything beyond Vesta. New scientific instruments and propulsion systems are in the works to create a next-generation science probe with the eventual aim of not merely flying past a planet but braking into orbit and studying it in far greater detail. There's also the small matter of landing people on the Moon in less than five years...

Fun fact: you can type times in with the format “1y 2d 3h 4m 5s” for MechJeb’s “after a fixed time” mode. No need to calculate how many seconds, just type it as you see it. I would just leave the Ganymede probe in that high orbit, it’ll take many years to get all the data whatever you do so no need to faff around with it too much. It’s probably a good idea to delete those multi-gigabyte data sets to get more valuable data sent back instead; with the later experiments data size becomes an important consideration and taking a high value experiment with a huge amount of data generation can sometimes be less effective than the lower tech version with a much smaller amount of data to transmit. Putting a dish with more transmitter power would also help, 25dB at Jupiter is very low.

Not necessarily, but as a general rule yes: relay dishes are bigger, heavier and more power-hungry than a direct antenna of the same transmitter power and so are better suited to orbital relays whereas things like landers and rovers would be better with a direct antenna as those are lighter, smaller and use less power. With a good relay network, you don't even need to include a transmitter on each mission that can reach all the way back to Kerbin, just one that can reach the relays that then bounce the signal home with their powerful relay dishes. Almost every command part (crew pod or probe core) has a built in antenna which is pretty weak but good enough for most of a launch, while a single Communotron-16S will cover you for most low orbit situations, either directly connecting to a DSN ground station or to a relay.

Post the full logs please? This is the unmodded section of the forums but you've mentioned mods so a mod list would also help if you're using any. Keep Task Manager open next time you start KSP up and when it crashes look at the graphs for resource use, especially RAM. Out of interest, did you install mods in the Steam copy of KSP? If so then try verifying the game files in Steam, and if that doesn't work:

Liquid fuel engines are controlled by the throttle so 0% throttle = 0% thrust. Press Z to go to full throttle or shift to increase it gradually, X to go to 0% throttle and control to reduce it gradually.

Save incompatible sounds like you’re using an older version of KSP than the save was made in. If you open the save file in a text editor it’ll tell you at the top what version of KSP it was last used in; if it says 1.12.5, you can probably change that to 1.12.3 with no consequences as .4 and .5 were very minor updates with minimal changes to the code.

Screenshots please?

When the rocket separates, what direction does the navball face when you control it? If it’s attached via a radial decoupler then there’s a good chance that that radial decoupler becomes the root part facing the wrong way; SAS tries to point prograde but ends up facing the completely wrong way and it spins out of control. Setting the probe core on the rocket with an action group for “control from here” would probably fix that. Alternatively, the weight of the engine and fuel at the back could be making it unstable and at a relatively low speed the little fins might not be enough to counteract its tendency to flip heavy end first. Bigger fins or a longer rocket might solve it in that case.

The official photographer was away attending the birth of his first child, or some frivolous nonsense of that nature, so there were no official photographs taken of the GeoNova mission's launch. As the name suggests, it's a Nova commercial satellite sent into a geostationary orbit, mostly to prove it could be done and to experiment with communications systems using such an orbit. The results were promising and several telecoms companies have expressed interest in launching similar satellites in future. Sticking with the commercial satellite theme, the very next launch carried a brand new commercial satellite system called Magnetar into orbit. Significantly larger than the SuperNova, Magnetar offers a mass and size budget several times larger to meet the needs of the latest generation of commercial communications satellites. Communications systems sold separately, we just supply the spacecraft and the ride into orbit. Another satellite market has been identified as potentially valuable- weather satellites. They're generally much smaller than the big communications sats and so a Goliath would be overkill, but their orbital requirements are quite different so there's no chance of a rideshare. With the Gamma engines now phased out and replaced by the improved Larch, the old Sagittarius blueprints were dusted off and given a comprehensive upgrade: new engines here, new engines there, new engines everywhere! The Sagittarius Mk2 that resulted used three boosters rather than the four of the original, but still produced more thrust on takeoff. It also features a single-chamber third stage engine and upgrades to the guidance and electronic systems. A new Nova-XXL satellite was also created, larger than the standard Nova but smaller than the SuperNova. It's not as lucrative a market as for communications satellites, but the Sagittarius is pretty cheap to build. Yet more commercial space operations, but this time with a Dawn mission to low orbit to conduct various experiments from paying customers. Just being able to say your experiment was run in space would bag you some significant bragging rights in some circles of academia, so it's no surprise that most of the customers are universities. Following Damien's deorbiting incident on Dawn 2, it's not surprising that Olga is flying this one. After a full day in space it's time to come home. Last time Olga landed within 300km of Woomera, but she reckons she can do better and the mission planners have risen to her challenge. Most of the Woomera staff were standing outside, squinting against the midday sun to try and spot the capsule as it flew overhead. A combination of atmospheric variance, imprecision in the measurements and timing and a slight inclination mismatch meant that Olga missed her pinpoint landing- but not by much! Helicopters arrived on scene within minutes of touching down, just as the air conditioning drained the last of the batteries in the capsule. A successful mission with the most accurate landing to date, but Olga won't be happy until she drops her capsule right onto the launchpad itself. And then it happened... A draft text for a speech by US president John F Kennedy leaked, in which he would commit the United States to the goal of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth by the end of the decade. Upon hearing this, a member of EuROSTAR staff scoffed and said "End of the decade? We could do that inside five years!" Unfortunately he was on live television at the time, it got blown up out of proportion and then some bright spark in the PR department thought it would be a good idea to announce a sponsorship scheme where any individual or group that paid into a "Moon Boots Fund" would get their name written on the side of the Moon lander, engraved on the flagpole or stitched into the fabric of the flag itself. And now the governments of several European nations are publicly backing the effort while privately running around in a panic because there's no way they can afford this and it was supposed to be a cover story for making nuclear missiles and what do you mean the Soviet Union says they can beat us there? Fat chance, Russkies, you're on! Wait, is this live? At this point it would take more time, effort and money to try and disentangle from the whole sorry mess than it would to just land on the Moon... The huge influx of funding has paid for massive upgrades at Woomera- a second assembly line to build two rockets at once, improved research facilities, a larger launchpad to cope with the next generation of launch rocket (currently nearing completion) and more besides. Various technologies are being studied- hydrogen rocketry, improved heatshields, improved life support systems- and a design for a new two-person crew capsule are also being drawn up to give the lucky Moonwalker some company on the long trip there and back, plus the ability to fully stretch out both arms without both touching the sides of the capsule.

In an ideal world, a brand new rocket would be tested with a dummy payload, a big lump of concrete to make up the weight or something similar, before being used to launch something important. Such a test launch would ensure that the rocket was fully functional without risking an expensive payload, but who has time for that nonsense when there are valuable scientific payloads to be launched and a Space Race to win? Thus the OR-3 Kronos' first launch carried a real payload, a Sirius probe to the Moon. The Kronos was designed to use up to 6 solid boosters to give it a helping hand off the launchpad, however this payload is lighter than its 10 ton capacity so none were needed. Sirius braked into lunar orbit a few days later, by which point the keen-eyed rocket watchers had noticed that Sirius bore a striking resemblance to the Procyon, had been mounted to the same upper stage that had previously launched Procyons to Venus and the Moon and then mounted on top of the Princess' third stage, all ensconced inside the Kronos' capacious fairings. It didn't take long for the calculations to be done, then checked and double-checked when the results showed Sirius would arrive at the Moon with enough fuel left in its upper stage to reduce its orbital velocity to zero. Sirius was going to try and land on the Moon. And it did. In just over a year EuROSTAR has gone from just throwing probes at the Moon to putting one in orbit and now landing one safely on the surface. Earth's loyal companion has been studied in increasing detail, old questions answered and new ones asked in their place. The next launch was also destined for the Moon with a radar scanner to map the terrain and an impactor probe to kick up some more material from the surface for telescopes to study. It was later concluded that a guidance error resulting in a less efficient transfer burn, compounded by the extra weight of the impactor, resulted in the Procyon Luna Scan probe being left with insufficient fuel to reach its target orbit; it was left with an aposelene much higher than intended, meaning the scanner couldn't function for much of the orbit as it only works within 500km of the surface. Perhaps it was hubris after all the successes that had come before. Next to launch was Kronos Draco, a set of four orbital relays and a lower-altitude Earth terrain scanner going into a polar orbit. Launching five satellites in one go is a record for EuROSTAR and indeed for anyone, but once again the Kronos didn't need the help of any solid boosters to launch the payload. The initial launch was to 495km to deploy Draco Scan, which was duly sent on its way to begin its radar mapping along with some long-term science experiments. With that done, the Vega engine ignited for the third and final time to boost the apoapsis above 3000km before the Gamma-powered upper stage took over propulsion duties, setting up a resonant orbit to ensure even spacing of the four relays. A problem with the propulsion system on the third relay delayed its circularisation burn by several minutes, but a second burn later corrected the orbit to ensure that it was within parameters. Further refining over a two-day calibration period synchronised the orbits to ensure they'd stay in position with contact to the next relay ahead and behind. They won't cover the entire surface of the Earth, but they'll cover a good area and provide a connection to some vessels in low Earth orbit when they can't directly reach a ground station along with some valuable bandwidth for commercial operators to bid over. If at first you don't succeed... No impactor probe plus a proper transfer burn positioned the second Procyon Luna Scan probe in the desired orbit to cover the whole surface of the Moon. There've been a lot of Moon-bound missions lately, but with transfer windows approaching for Mars, Ceres and Vesta it might be time to try another interplanetary mission or two.

If you can't find the mod, editing the craft file and replacing all appearances of cjtroopseats with strutCube will swap them all out for cubic struts which are easy to find and remove. Do a find and replace in the craft file, but I'd advise saving a backup copy first in case things go wrong.

A couple of tweaks to the settings and suddenly the Moon's terrain is clear as day!