king of nowhere

@JacobJHC I was thinking on another jool 5 science mission, after discovering by accident that there are ways to get more science than I thought possible - namely, i accidentally discovered that if I pick a sample with my kerbal on top of a splashed down plane, or swimming around the splashed down plane, it counts as two different samples. so this time i was planning to actually get all the possible science available, by landing an aircraft carrier on laythe and getting the exploration plane over it to get "landed" samples from water biomes. possibly throw in some circumnavigations too. and use magnetometer and eva experiments, that were not available I noticed, also accidentally, that some experiments will give more science if run multiple times. according to this table, for example, I can run mistery goo observation up to 4 times before i completely stop getting science. my question is, should I try to gather the same experiment multiple times? or is that against the spirit of the science grab? P.S. I won't run that mission for a few month yet anyway. I need to finish my latest grand tour first.

there was one called persistent thrust. but it bugged my game, so i uninstalled it

i think it has to do with the planet curve. if you stay in a low orbit, there are areas where you can't see any ground relay station, so you lose contact until the craft orbits above another relay station. you can avoid the problem by having relay satellites, and before that by launching in higher trajectories. either that, or you don't have batteries and you run out of electricity. or you have plasma signal block enabled and you accelerate a lot while still in the atmosphere. but both those problems can be solved easily

atmospheric skipping makes the prediction harder; the lander bounces on the atmosphere, goes upward again, and could turn around the whole planet. with a lower periapsis and the lander reentering hard it is easier to predict the landing spot - but it's also more expensive.

no real way to determine where you have to place periapsis, depends a lot on the aerodinamic profile of your craft. if it's a plane, also on how you fly it. so you just have to go by trial and error. if you are running a no save game, you have to bring extra fuel to compensate for off target landings

why won't you hire new ones?

sometimes - often - the name of the part in the save file is not the name of the part in the game. you have a simple way to discover which one is the actual name. make a new ship with a single part, the part you want to find. give that ship a name you can find easily. launch it. then open the save file, look for the ship you just launched. it will have exactly one part, so you can look its filesave name. then you can look for that part elsewhere. that said, different mods handle things differently, and not always you can fix things by editing config files. in the kerbalism mod, there are two config files that track all chemical processes, so if you want to change something about chemical plants, or radiation shields, you have to go there, not in the part file. but other informations are not in a comfortable editable file, and some edits just cannot be done. if you specify what is the mod and what you are trying to do, maybe someone familiar with the mod will help you better

since apparently you have kerbals in there, but not an engineer among them, you may also launch one of your crew against some solar panels to smash them. a bit radical, but if you want less production from the solar panels... just make sure you stll have enough to get a net positive energy if you point them at the sun yes, but i'm saying that if you carry a big oxygen tank and a big hydrogen tank and make water from them, you end up carrying more mass. the gas containers look huge because they store hundreds of thousands of resources, but it's because it takes thousands of units of hydrogen and oxygen to make a single one of water. kerbalism uses one unit equal one liter, and gases have notoriously low density; so while one unit of water equals one liter, one kilogram, one liter of gas is a few grams or a fraction of gram depending on the gas. hydrogen is the worst, a tank of pressurized hydrogen only carries a fraction of the tank mass in hydrogen itself. so it is better to have big water tanks to last the crew a long time, and small gas tanks to last through the night with fuel cells. which makes me think, how much gases do you actually have? because if you have a water shortage, you may feel fine seeing thousands of units of hydrogen and oxyge in storage, but those wll only make a few liters of water, they will only last a day or two. you may have to try and save the crew back to kerbin as fast as possible.

yes, it's a flaw of the mod that you can tell it to dump water, but you can't tell it to dump energy. depending on how your solar panels are disposed, you can try to make them ineffective - retract them, turn the ship around to remove them from the sun, use an engineer to disassemble them, force the start of enery-intensive science experiments. but if none of that is possible, the only thing you can do is use the cheats. I suggest launching an engineer from the ksc, alt-f12 it in rendez-vous with the ship, and have him disassemble the solar panels. P.S. water containers are a lot more efficient than gas containers, so carrying oxygen and hydrogen and using them to make water is not the best idea. better to just carry water

happens with very complex ships. my biggest motherships used to explode from time to time. just save frequently and reload the game when it happens. oh, and if the ship starts shaking, deactivate SAS and time warp, that removes relative motion of single parts and often can prevent an explosion

Part 7: With the last drops of water Boundless finally has the right alignments for Fophie. It was a very difficult target, because its high apoapsis means it takes a long time to reach it - while its high inclination makes it too expensive to encounter at periapsis. Boundless is supposed to have life support for 50 years, and it managed this trip in slightly above 49 years, making it a very close thing. The various celestial bodies relevant to this chapter 7.1) Everything you wanted to know about a trajectory to Fophie (and much more than you never wanted to know) 7.2) Postcards from the journey 7.3) Fophie promises nothing, and delivers 7.4) The way back won't come but once. Be steadfast

for the sake of the argument with your friend, I made a full jool 5 without maneuver nodes (and I landed on Bop and Pol without maneuvers and without reloading games). however, while you can go everywhere without maneuver nodes, i would still call them essentials, because using them is an entirely different matter

additionally, having thrusters on the front will not remove the need to flip the vehicle. no way the direction you'll have to burn will be aligned with your vehicle.

lol! what does this even mean? don't let yourself be intimidated. those analytics always twist the legal wording to make it sound more ominous to try and trick you into accepting. but really. i have no idea what kind of "personalization" they could implement, but it can't be important. we played for decades with games that didn't collect your data and worked perfectly regardless. just ignore it

I see. it's really a terribly inefficient way to make interplanetary transfers, only partially mitigated by the refueling on minmus. if you do things like that, going to moho does indeed cost 8 km/s, and going to eeloo will cost only slightly less. with proper navigation, going to moho will cost less than 5 km/s. with a single simple gravity assist you can push this down to 4 km/s. with more difficult chained gravity assist you can do it all with 2.5 km/s, or even less. the difference is even more dramatic going out. arriving to eeloo your way is going to cost maybe 7 km/s. going to jool first, with just a simple assist to get captured there, and it goes down to 3 km/s. with chained gravity assists, you can make the whole trip to eeloo with 1.5 km/s, even less if you can manage the inclination. are you sure you don't want to try and improve your navigation? perhaps first thing try a launch for jool from low kerbin orbit, as jool is a bigger target to hit and far enough to get good savings this way? with those premises, the answer to your original question can only be it's not a matter of the target being demanding. it's entirely a matter of how you get there.

don't sell yourself short. and don't conflate the difficulty of the task. there's gravity assist and there's gravity assist. some are easier than others. getting a chain of multiple gravity assists is relatively difficult. using a gravity assist to change inclination and intercept a comet is very difficult. but that's not what you are doing here. a basic gravity assist is simple. in fact, you may have done them without even realizing. from low kerbin orbit, make a normal transfer to mun. to go to mun, you will have to make a capture burn at periapsis. stop there. do not make the capture burn. you will pass close to mun, and then you will be shot out of the kerbin sphere of influence. it normally takes 930 m/s to escape kerbin's gravity, but you spent the 850 m/s of a mun transfer, and you still got out. you have taken a gravity assist. basic gravity assists are easy. similarly, when you arrive at jool, aim at tylo or laythe - they are so big, you can find them easily - and you will notice your trajectory change after passing close to one of the big moons. there, that's a gravity assist. with a bit of trial and error you can use that to get captured for free. sure, there's a lot more about gravity assists, and to perform the complex ones you need practice and you need to know what you can and cannot do with them. but don't let yourself be intimidated, it's something you absolutely cannot do. in this specific case of reaching moho, try instead going for eve, and pass close to eve. depending on which side of eve you pass, your solar orbit will get higher or lower. choose the side that will lower your orbit. and there you go, you have lowered your solar orbit without using fuel, with a gravity assist. a single passage like that will not get you to moho. for that you would need to know about intercept speed, and you would have to chain multiple assists. however, your single passage already brought you closer to moho than you were before. it will save maybe 1 km/s, and it's not overly difficult; all you need to do is intercept eve, and you already know how to intercept planets. so it's worth doing, isn't it? P.S. 8.2 km/s is very high, even for moho. did you by chance eject from kerbin into solar orbit, and then lower solar periapsis from solar orbit? that would explain why it's so expensive for you.

eloo is a lot less demanding. the closer you move to the sun, the more expensive maneuvers are, you are fighting against higher gravity. you can optimize trajectory to moho, anyway. with gravity assists, I got from landed on ike to moho orbit and back with 5 km/s. for eeloo, starting from jool in the transfer window is really cheap, less than 1 km/s.

da italiano, aggiungo che il nome italiano degli edifici che devi potenziare è rispettivamente stazione di tracciamento e controllo missione. a quel punto potrai fare le manovre. [just clarified a bit on the italian translation of some game terms]

it's not. it's a wonderful exercice to push your shipbuilding and planning mission to the limit. I loved running grand tours with kerbalism. I've done 4 of them, and I may do more. They are great, with some frustrating parts. actually, the most frustrating part of the experience was the whole "lag" thing, and that's not the fault of the mod. even servicing parts would be a much smaller issue without lag. lag is caused by kiloparts ships, but that's a price to pay. in fact, what I love more about kerbalism is that it gave me the chance to really go wild on motherships, and make those huge things with each and every single part having a carefully considered purpose. Spending weeks designing and testing every part of a ship to fulfill the multitude of requirements introduced by this mode, then putting such a ship to the test, was immensely fulfilling. Sure, I can build a 5000-ton ship without kerbalism by stacking more crew pods, but they serve no real function, and where's the fun in that? EDIT: while radiations are irrealistically strong, they work perfectly for the purpose of providing an additional challenge, I like them as they are /EDIT I realize your consider my grand tours with kiloton ships to be outside the scope of the mod, but it may interest you that I also run a realistic jool 5, without any future parts mod, with a mass to orbit of 140 tons (the same of a saturn 5), 118 parts, no nuclear/ion engines and no nuclear power; I only used the equivalent of tried-and-true exhisting technologies, with the only exception of one active radiation shield for the interplanetary trip. it is possible to significantly push the boundaries of what the mod was intended to do even without going crazy on ship design.

on the other hand, radiations are a lot more dangerous in kerbalism than they are in real life. an unshielded ship in the main belt of kerbin would take a lethal dose in a fay or two. I checked values over the internet and made some conversions, and if my calculations are correct, it would take months of exposure to kill an astronaut in the van allen belts. same goes for everything else, radiation levels in space are dangerous but not that dangerous. and heavy shielding on a crew pod should block a lot more than 90% of incoming radiations. so, the rdu is a magic wand that removes a problem that would not be there if the mod was more realistic. what annoys me most, though, is servicing parts. taking an eva around your ship, checking every part, running maintenance on those showing signs of aging, that's cool. the first time you do it. maybe the second. In a multi-century mission like my grand tour, I am going to run a hundred maintenance run, manually checking hundreds of pieces, and it adds nothing to the experience. it would be a lot better if the whole "part aging" thing was completely reworked to remove the need to fly an engineer around. if something breaks, it breaks, and that's it. maybe make it so that an engineer on board gives a passive bonus against breaking, but don't force me to spend most of a mission flying around a ship. it's pretty clear that the people who made kerbalism mostly tested it for the early stages of a career. given the extra difficulties involved, they didn't think people would actually try to send interplanetary manned missions - i was even straight out told by gotmachine that it was flat out impossible, lol! and so it shows, the mod is not optimized for the experience of running long crewed missions.

I heard, but I'd be extremely surprised if they could make this way a rocket that's as good as the real thing. when we also factor in the assembly, I don't think it would be possible to assemble a large and optimized rocket engine in space from locally derived components. there's also the issue that some of the rarest metals required in some alloys would be very hard to find with isru. ultimately, a spaceship capable of repairing itself perfectly is still outside of our capabilities. if it were possible, we could build one, and that one could mine resources from asteroids and build copies of itself one component at a time, and we could settle the universe like that. motherships acting like cells. but that's far future stuff.

Part 6: Small worlds After a doomed attempt to find a trajectory for Fophie, Boundless visits Wers, Egad and Rik in one go, before returning to Oshan to refuel. All were fairly easy targets. This picture encompasses most of the Kaywell system, and all the worlds Boundless visited or tried to visit in this part of the mission 6.1) I spent afternoons looking for that transfer! 6.2) Wers and Vizea, Pol-like twins 6.3) Egad and Yeerbor, the explorables 6.4) Rik, glorified asteroid 6.5) Totooa is not a gas pump 6.6) First refueling stop is never forgotten

a repair kit is 5 kg. four repair kits are the most that can be carried by a kerbonaut, since he also needs a jetpack to move around. so you can get away with 20 kg of repair kit for any malfunction. even in my longest grand tours - several centuries - I still had to contend with 30ish critical malfunctions, which would require no more than 600 kg to repair. and 600 kg is nothing on a space station scale. it's not actually a "lesser cost", it's negligible and mostly a nuisance when you have to click on the repair kit 200 times on ship design. even if you run out, getting some extra on a small probe is trivial. As for 3d printers, how else would they repair a broken engine in orbit? my head canon is that they already have those on board, and that's how they make the spare parts that they use to fix the fixable malfunctions. critical malfunctions are those you cannot just fix with a 3d-printed piece. That could work; it could make it a real mass cost, unlike the very light repair kit. Actually, having a "spare parts" resource, and a "3d printer" module that can use spare parts to fix malfunctions, that would be the best option. Kerbalism uses the (ir)rational resources, and every planetary surface gives a complex composition that is never really used. Introducting some extra drills that would mine various metals - that the game already has in planetary surfaces - and machinery that turns those metals into spare parts. the idea is that there should be a cost - a real cost, not a symbolic one like 600 kg of mass on a space station - else there is no challenge. and you may as well just remove malfunctions entirely. However, it would still make sense for some malfunctions to not be fixable. You can't make a microchip with 3d printing. And while I'm not sure on the full capabilities of that tech, I'm pretty sure there are limits. I'd be extremely surprised if you could replace an exploded rocket engine just with printing; you probably can get something that works, but that's not terribly optimized. And I would not want malfunctions to become too cheap. Part of the charm of my motherships was all the redundancy, which actually gave me a good excuse to really go wild on ship design - and size. if I can avoid that by carrying 20 tons of machinery, where's the fun? I find that kerbalism is not compatible with a complex space program. Having a dozen ships around the place, and having to regularly service each one of them, would be too time-consuming. Kerbalism works best with a single mission, or a small number of missions. I had a lot of fun with kerbalism challenges, but it was always one single massive ship and I would always only control that one. what I love of kerbalism is exactly the challenge it gives in adding extra design constraints, at a time when the stock game had become too easy. ok, I can stick a command pod on a fuel tank with a rocket and do things, now let's add all other complications and see if I can manage a ship that will stay functional in the face of food shortages, radiations, malfunctions and everything else. In fact, when I became good enough to actually deal with all of that in a controlled manner, I mostly lost interest in the mod. Ok, I can deal with all those problems just by adding extra mass; so I could play stock and add a bunch of useless mass to the ship and pretend it's all the kerbalism stuff, it will be the same thing and it will lag less. Actually, that's exactly what I'm doing in my latest mission - though that's because kerbalism wasn't compatible with the planetary pack. As for you, if you want to deal with kerbalism, you want malfunctions to take a toll, but you want them to be ultimately fixable, you can easily do that by playing pretend: put on your station some big tank of some resource you don't need. could be monopropellant, or maybe ore. Pretend that's spare parts. Deactivate critical malfunctions, all malfunctions can be fixed. But, whenever you have a malfunction, you vent some of your "spare parts" into space. It would do exactly what you want - replace critical malfunctions with a different, lesser cost. You could even choose exactly how much "spare parts" you should vent for every malfunctions, thus tuning the cost of malfunctions to what you feel is appropriate. Sure, the game won't display it as such, but as long as your imagination can pretend that ore is your spare parts - and when you go grab more on the planetary surface, you're really collecting raw materials to feed into the 3d printer that you put into that science lab that you added just for the sake of pretence - it will work out the same. And it's a lot easier than programming a whole bunch of new functuons into the mod

consider that, if permanent malfunctions could be fixed by a simple repair kit with a mass of 5 kg, it would undermine the whole point of malfunction. instead of carrying 6 backups of every critical system as I did for my grand tours, to deal with malfunctions, I'd just have to pack a few hundred repair kits and be fine. if you want all malfunctions to be fixable, you can just set critical malfunctions to 0% in the kerbalism options in game.

another trick if you have to launch a payload with a really bad aerodinamic is to put the rockets on top. it looks horrible and would not work in real life, but it does wonders here another option is to just have enough power and gimbaling to compensate for aerodinamic instability. this thing has even worse aerodinamics than your station, but all those mammoths kept it flying straight. finally, another option is to fly straight at low speed until you are out of the lower atmosphere. sure, it does require a lot of extra deltaV to compensate for gravity drag, but sometimes adding a bunch of fuel tanks is the simplest solution. especially if the payload is cumbersome but light