king of nowhere

I'm having a nerdgasm just by reading some of those names. Exotic nuclear propulsion experimental electrostatic thrusters microwave power transmission awesome

whether the line is gold or purple makes no difference, the game just uses different colors every time you change system or reference. I can't understand what you mean by "craft shows no sign of movement". where was your craft?

Part 17: The north pole of Tal Poles always have interesting terrain.

autostruts is pretty much the only thing I can think of

the golden line is your trajectory inside mun's sphere of influence. the purple line is your trajectory in kerbin's orbit. so if you execute the maneuver you will go on the golden track, up until the circle - that's where you will escape mun's gravity and be back in kerbin's gravity (in case you don't know, the game considers the gravity of one celestial body at the time, for simplicity of calculations). after you escape mun and end up on the purple track, you will stay in that orbit - until eventually you'll cross mun again, but that's a different issue. your maneuver is not working because it's poorly made. why do you have a 222 m/s radial component? there are times when you make radial maneuvers, but it's very rare. most of the times you'll only pull a few m/s radial as course correction. try a 280 m/s prograde maneuver in that same spot, and you should return to kerbin. if it does not work, try to move the node a bit. mun is in a high orbit around kerbin, and while you are orbiting mun you are also in such a high orbit. to return to kerbin you want to lower periapsis into the atmosphere, so you can start aerobraking. and to do so, you need to burn retrograde. and it's exactly what you do. except that your frame of reference is mun, not kerbin, and you will get an additional deviation by mun's gravity, and so there are some changes to take that into account. basically, you want to exit behind mun - that will mean you're slower than mun, so your orbit will get lower. what you are apparently trying to do with your maneuver instead is to aim straight at kerbin - of course it does not work, because you are also rotating around kerbin at the same time. in fact, if you read the full instructions shown in your screenshot, the advice is better worded. it says drag the prograde handle until you have an escape trajectory. now move the node and watch as kerbin's periapsis changes. if you can't get less than 2000 km, then increase the burn - more prograde, not radial - and move the node again. incidentallly,, if you miss your mun return and end up in kerbin orbit, it's not a big deal; you can just make a new periapsis lowering maneuver one in kerbin's orbit. it's going to be less efficient, though

Part 16: Let me out of this Talhole! Dancing Porcupine descends into the Talhole. The mouth of the Talhole seen from inside. Unlike other holes, it's almost perfectly rectangular

does a 7000 ton mothership landing somewhere and spending some 10 years slowly refueling counts? you misunderstood. you are not supposed to go interstellar.

pitching or yawing is only a matter of how your rocket is rotated on its axis. completely irrelevant. just aim for 90 degrees. it's not different from orbiting kerbin. what do you do when orbiting kerbin? as soon as atmosphere is no longer a concern, you aim 90 degrees. unless you want a polar or retrograde orbit, but let's not make confusion. on mun is the same, except that there is no atmosphere and so you can go for a much steeper gravity turn. also, with the lower gravity you need a lot less speed to orbit. incidentally, as long as you pick up horizontal speed, any direction will give you an orbit. 90 degrees is just more convenient for inclination

Oh, one last bit; since a vessel you're not controlling is set in his solar orientation, the easiest way to travel a long time is to orient your vessel properly (recommended ways include waiting a solar storm and turning it around until radiation level becomes nominal), then go in the tracking station and time warp from there. If I recall correctly, this avoids the bug. I ran four grand tours with kerbalism - two of which with expanded planetary packs - and I wrote extensive reports; they probably contain the most detailed informations on how to deal with kerbalism radiations - and other issues - available anywhere on the planet. I'd refer to those, unfortunately the information is scattered around descriptions of interplanetary transfers, tracking of life support resources, and sightseeing

VERY effective. even a small part, like a 2.5 m battery, on top of a crew cabin will completely negate solar storm radiations if the ship is properly oriented. however, there are a few important caveats: - if the ship has multiple crew modules (anything with a living space, including greenhouses), the game takes an average of all of them. it doesn't matter if you keep all your crew in a single compartment, and that is shielded. the game takes the average. - unless you completely surround the crew pod with other stuff, you have to point the ship in the right direction to keep it shielded. if you leave the ship, it will just save the last orientation; but if you stay with it, it will slowly change over time, causing your crew to be irradiated again. So, prepare yourself for a slow interplanetary trip where you have to stop and fix orientation (and possibly run repairs) every once in a while - also, this only works for solar storms. It has no effect on radiation belts (for those, shielding is the only real option) and background level (that one can be covered by an active shield, or a RDU running full time). - finally, importantly, this effect is bugged. at high time warp, the game does not register your ship as shielded even though it is. I noticed this behavior with my DREAM BIG ship, where at x1000 warp I was perfectly fine, but if I warped faster I would get radiations again. that time, I just slowed down at every storm, and took many hours for a duna-jool transfer. later, with longer missions, I just set shielding efficiency at 100% when taking interplanetary trips, making all radiation problems moot (since I always used max shielding). I brought shielding efficiency to the default level when approaching planets. All in all, you may be better off just deactivating solar storms in the first place.

One mistake in the map: nissee is indicated as having a relatively large, vall-like deltaV to orbit, when in truth it's smaller than minmus. it should be 120 m/s or so

you can put max shielding in all parts, and increase shielding efficiency in the difficulty options. you put it to 100%, and radiations won't affect you at all. it will cost some extra mass, but it's reasonable.

This is actually from a few weeks back, but I just realized its significance At first glance, it looks just like a rover - on a world with a yellowish texture that some may recognize as Tal, from the OPM planet pack. A more accurate look will notice a helmet under the rover, almost covered by the trusses. It's Bill being run over by the rover. Well, I just realized it's probably the very first instance of a car accident on Tal. I don't know how many people visited the place, but I'd bet not many brought a large rover, and probably nobody tried to jump over it with a jetpack while the rover was moving and ended up being trampled instead. A poor pedestrian goes all the way to the outer system to avoid car traffic, and ends up being run over anyway.

Part 15: The obstacle course Beginning the Tal circumnavigation. Boulders create collisions, and avoiding them is hard in the low gravity.

Huh. it never did occur to me that somebody in this game may launch an interplanetary mission without knowing what he'll find at the destination...

if you have 200 mods, perhaps there are issues. I am surprised your pc didn't explode already. that said - as a rule of thumb, the more you advance in the tech tree, the bigger the memories of the command modules and probe cores. however, modded stuff may not be recognized by kerbalism; in that case, it will get the lowest possible value, by default. this could be the source of your issues with memory - antennas are bugged by themselves. Like, I had a mothership with 6 RA100 antennas on the mun, and it was transmitting like crap because there was also a smaller antenna, and it was limiting everything. I got better speeds from jool, where the smaller antennas weren't working. I never bothered with trying to solve antennas problems because transmission time is not too important. So, antennas can have issues on their own. Add 200 other mods? no idea what could happen. I believe you should sacrifice a goat to the gods of information theory that the game starts at all, and count yourself very, very lucky that all your issues are easily solvable by some manual management (as in, just manually stop those redundant experiments). In my last grand tour I recorded no less than 47 bugs and glitches, and I only had kerbalism, rss and a few minor others.

when you have completed an experiment, it should not run the same experiment again. it never did for me. as for data transmission, why you're in such a hurry? it took over 3 years for the new horizon probe to downlink all the data it gathered from the pluto encounter; if you have similar issues, it's the mod working as intended. though if you "just started" a career, then early experiment generate only a few hundred kb of data, which can be downloaded in minutes. late experiments like gravioli readings take longer, but by then you have access to expanded memories and better transmitters

After starting my next grand tour, I realized I have to rework my mothership. the problem was a very cool solar array failing to work properly. I wanted to have a massive solar array of 100+ gigantors. It's completely unnecessary. However, this time I am not using kerbalism; as a result, I feel I have to carry around something stupid like that, else it would be too easy But I also want to be able to aerobrake hard, hence I want my solar panels to be retractable inside cargo bays. I initially devised the system shown the panels are mounted on trusses, which are mounted on hinges, which can fold and fit into some Mk3 cargo bays. The problem is that those trusses are long and heavy (to fit 8 gigantors lined up), so they wobble. Especially when using the engines. Time warping while using the engines is out of the question entirely. After a while, I noticed that the panels didn't look good anymore they are being bent. And the mission just started, if they look like that right now, I don't want to know how they'll look after I've landed on a bunch of planets. The worst part, though, was that even though they were supposed to fold and stay folded, they didn't Instead, this happened. And when I tried to aerobrake, all those solar panels went kaboom. Clearly not a viable project. They survived testing, but they didn't survive the wear and tear of space travel. So I devised a new system The solar panels are mounted on individual hinges. The cargo bay is now jutting out of the ship, and the panels are never too far from the center of the hinges. They deploy nicely, they look good, and I tested with full thrust at 4x time warp and there wasn't a bit of wobble. I was worried those Mk2 cargo bays would reduce aerobraking capacity, as they have a max temperature of 2500 °C - compared to 2700 °C for the nose cone cargo bays I'm using to shield the engines. but they hit the air laterally, so they heat less than the nose cones. The main problem now is that the ship is too aerodinamic and does not aerobrake much at all - I only lost 2 m/s from a 40 km periapsis on kerbin. I will have to taper some fuel tanks to create drag. Or maybe add a few inflatable thermal shields to use as parachutes. Anyway, before launching this new ship and restarting the grand tour, I want to do some more field testing with some of the shuttles

well, i can't help you with that. but now that you know all fuel tanks are equal, you have no reason to scale parts anymore

i'm not sure what dmr is, but i suppose it's the ratio between fuel content and dry mass. in which case, nearly all the fuel tanks have a 8:1 ratio; it's the same for all. some of them, like the Mk2 and Mk3 fuselages, have lower ratios - to compensate higher thermal resistance. the Mk0 fuselage has 9:1 ratio, but it's liquid fuel only. you can use it for LFOx if you have simple fuel switch installed.

Since there are a lot of worlds in this mod and it's hard to keep track, I made a map showing the general disposition of the planets and some general characteristics. I think it can be useful; could be included in the first page

there's an errata: thresomin is not in OPM, it's in whirligig world

do you need an autopilot to keep a steady course? For my laythe circumnavigation, I just pointed my "boat" east and alt-tabbed out. For speed limit, speed is set by propeller angle; it kept 53.2 m/s (just below the speed that plane needed to take off from water) without any other input. As for direction, it would steer north or south with time, but I only had to check every few minutes. and I would find in those minutes the "boat" had started pointing 20 degrees north or south, it's ok, it's still going mostly east. So I point it back east, and alt-tab again. no need for any autopilot. As an alternative, you can make a boat that has a lot of lateral control, but no up/down control, and set as target a planet. Choose it so that a boat pointing at it will point roughly east (or west, if you prefer). sure, it will be a bit below or above the horizon, and the boat will try to sink its head underwater, but since you have no up/down control, it won't be able to. and it will keep the east/west direction. as a fancier version of this, you could set up a satellite constellation to use as targets to keep pointing east. You'd have to change target every once in a while, but you may still be able to go a couple hours without inputs. P.S. @18Watt I see my thresomin circumnavigation hasn't been added to the leaderboard yet

from a purely effectiveness perspective, that's the best option. if we were rover racing, we'd all do it. you can steer and use the reaction wheels to stabilize simultaneously, that's a huge advantage. on the other hand, keeping the same controls and turning the reaction wheels on and off has the advantage of being easier to learn and perform, and to require only one hand - leaving the other free to turn around the camera with the mouse. it's a more "touristic" approach

I do, but i deactivate reaction wheels before pushing W. in fact, it's got nothing to do with pitch control, because the rover pitches up, not down. in a realistic simulation, I surmise it's because the wheels are spinning in a sense, and conservation of angolar momentum imposes an opposite rotation on the rover, and in low enough gravity that's enough to pitch up. I don't know how realistic ksp is - as I tried to learn better planes, I was flabbergasted at how much stuff doesn't work realistically - but either way, I've done several tiny worlds with different rovers, and always my rover pitch up. I'm surprised you didn't experience the same on Gilly. then again, from what I understand your gilly circumnavigation was done at orbital speed with rockets pointing downwards, so it was an entirely different experience.