paul_c

Someone more knowledgeable will doubtless correct me, but I believe KSP calculates heat loads in two ways: 1) surface temperature. The ablator normally takes the brunt of this. 2) heat transfer by conduction from the surface to the innards; and from connected components. I don't know the full details of how this is evaluated. So it sounds like the heatshield is doing its job but all the while, the command module is getting "cooked". Also, there's a theory that a shallow entry with a long drawn out slowdown is worse, something to do with the overall heating being to the power of 4 of the speed while the instantaneous heating is to the square of the speed. So a more efficient entry is to drop straight down, except it will impose greater acceleration forces and damage components/kill Kerbals. I believe there's an info page which will show the numbers of the various temperatures of the components too, which will illustrate what is happening too - don't know the button to press though.

Probably for the same reasons we don't currently colonise anywhere else, except Earth. And even then, there are significant areas not occupied by humans. There may be plans in the future to colonise somewhere else, but at the moment its a pipe dream. I guess.....at a push....we could say we colonise the ISS? I wonder how much all-in it costs per month, to support a human there. And you can't nip out for a Twix or a McDonalds easily there either. And so many other things. For example, have any two astronauts ever done "the dance with no pants" on the space station?

You can "activate" an engine by using the right-click menu, then "stage" it some time later while its been running, using the staging (space bar). When I did the NCD challenge I developed a handy little "ready reckoner" of speed vs altitude vs TWR. That combination of speed and altitude is best achieved by having the SRB burn from the launch (by right-clicking then "activate" engine), then it will cut off at xxxxx altitude but the rocket will continue to gain altitude, losing speed as it does so. Then once the speed and altitude requirements are met, press SPACE to activate it via staging. In fact, without going through previous notes and looking closely, that combination of altitude and speed might be on the edge/not possible to achieve with an RT-10 alone - you may need to make a 2 stage rocket, with the RT10 as the second stage, to fulfil it. Don't forget that it only asks for altitude and speed, its not bothered if you do a gravity turn. So, for max performance (max altitude at such a low speed), go vertical all the way. If you are doing it with a live Kerbal and a capsule, and want to recover the RT10 too, don't forget to put enough chutes on - I used 1x chute per 1.5tons. Or you could decouple the capsule once the contract is done. ETA don't be too hasty on pulling the chutes either. Sometimes, if you 'miss' the criteria on the way up, you can sometimes do something funky with aero (like turning sideways to make it draggy) and 'hit' the criteria on the way down.

No, by definition, because a planet has "cleared its orbit" (except for any moons it has). Are you too young to remember the heated debate over whether Pluto was a planet or not? Planets which appear to have intersecting orbits, will either be inclined so they don't actually intersect, or possibly be in some kind of orbital resonance which assures they will never meet (but then its not really a planet?) Otherwise they would have met some time in the past. In real life, orbits of planets can and do alter, so its possible that a long way into the future two could do it such that they eventually encounter. But not going to happen in KSP.

You can reduce the amount of ablator on a heatshield to reduce its weight.

That's why I put it third. Its very much a last resort, before taking it to a PC repair shop and spending money.

A dog is more intelligent than you'd think. I believe Laika flew a pretty good gravity turn and reorientated the spaceship to align the solar panels. But, there is a good point about sending an elephant to space, they are more intelligent still and the trunk is extra useful. I can't see any flaw whatsoever in the idea......

Imagine how much the capsule would stink, after 286 days of orbiting with a cat in it? Reason enough alone, not to include animals.

1. Try a different USB port 2. Try reseating the memory and power connection cables 3. Try remounting the CPU cooler (you will need some alcohol to clean the old paste off, then more paste) If none of those work, I'd take it to the PC shop, since they would have the ability to swap-test other stuff eg try a different CPU, try your CPU in another system, etc. You CPU power connections sound fine.

Apologies, I didn't realise some of the probe cores had a small reaction wheel included - if that's the case, then no, you won't need the additional one. ETA In theory, you don't need 4 solar panels either. It would be a brave soul who took 1 fixed panel. 2 is marginal, 3 guarantees solar power so long as its not nose or tail to the sun (leave it in normal/antinormal - pink marker - to ensure that). If you get to the stage of unlocking the deployable panels then 2 of these will 100% guarantee sun (1 will be 99% and I've seen it obscured!). If the worst happens and you end up in the chicken-egg scenario of out of power, and no power/control to command the controller to turn it, timewarp ahead about 1/4 year and the sun will have shifted round with respect to the craft and it should burst into life again.

Having a fairing has a big effect on aerodynamics. Don't forget, for a small rocket, its a significant weight though, so deploy it at the optimal time (which is, when the penalty in control/speed from aerodynamics is less than the weight penalty) - around 40-50km is a good guide there. A rocket is controlled by 3 things: reaction wheel; RCS; engine gimballing. Its possible that engine gimballing has complete control over it - but only while engines are running. Reaction wheels convert electricity into control movements, and are needed once off the throttle. For orbital positioning, its very useful to be able to point it a direction with no throttle at all (for precision burns) so I'd always recommend at least some reaction wheel, although its interesting you got it into orbit without! Full SAS controls is a bug in the latest version of KSP. It should be that OCTO has SAS, while the HECS gets prograde/retrograde controls too (I think....but we're going back a few versions now!)

I did NCD Caveman challenge and cost-control is very much part of that. It takes a LOT of clicking thru the contracts to select the most profitable ones. Anything tested at the launch pad is great, but they don't pay that well. In flight or splashed down tests pay about 4x more, and anything suborbital can normally be bundled into 1 or 2 stages and fully recovered (2 stage can be recovered so long as you blow the chutes before separation; and keep it in physics range of the stage with the controller). I never did quite get 100% reuse from anything orbital, so you just need to suck up the costs, with other contract work. "take Kerbal on a xxxxxxx flight" never paid that well - it was always going to be ~9000 earned for an ~8000 flight. So in the end I only did "satellite to Mun/Minmus" and coincide it with my own science goals; and "science from xxxxx" which always pay well once you have the craft in orbit/surface landed. I never did make anything interplanetary profitable, so I effectively planned it out then saved up using other contracts to do that bit.

With a 42 minute burn, I'd do it in 3 stages: 1. Burn at -3 mins to +7mins of the ideal ejection angle to get the orbit looking more/less pointing in the right direction. I'm going to guess your Jool burn is ~1900m/s so that's (say) 500m/s, which means it will take you, I dunno, Ap 1000km? You can shut off the burn early or keep going a bit longer, to get the angle right (Now, as the orbit gets more and more eccentric, the fact you're burning not at the Pe will have less and less influence on the ArgPe). 2. Do another burn to get 'just' before the Mun, you don't want an inadvertent Mun encounter! So, its going to be be about another 350m/s. 3. Do a burn to leave SOI of Kerbin plus whatever else is needed to send you on your way. I think its going to be more efficient to keep burning here, even though its not at the Pe, ie the Oberth effect outweighs the cosine losses. But if its looking bad, just stop and wait until you're out of Kerbin's SOI. Once you're out of Kerbin's SOI and on the way to Jool, the low TWR isn't really an issue - you have a very wide margin of when to do an inclination change burn (like, weeks.....) and any mid-course correction to tighten up the approach nice and low over Jool.

Turn on "advanced tweakables" then set the priority on the right-click context menu, which will have a bunch more options available.

I know.....its Val I feel sorry for, she's orbiting the sun and its somewhat unchanging. In theory, now the challenge is complete I could do an upgrade or two and try launch rescue missions to retrieve Bob and Val (I suspect Bob is easier!) but I've been enjoying a return to my 1st career, with fresh eyes. In that, its on normal settings and its ~1200 game hours in, so the tech tree is pretty much complete and £66m in the bank too. But its made me approach rocket design and flying with new ideas, no longer am I sticking on everything including the kitchen sink, I am using a "less is more" philosophy and keeping the upper stage(s) light, properly planning things like solar panels, batteries, etc. And the flying is more precise and confident too - I'm flying most ascents completely manually; and doing complex interplanetary stuff I might never have had the confidence to try before. I can thoroughly recommend The Caveman Challenge to give a fresh approach to KSP.

The weight difference of the 100G antenna isn't that great; and its design means it can be mounted quite easily too. So it kinda renders any 50G gap-filler moot.

It might be a contract bug with mismatched vessel ID or something, which prevents you from "taking ownership" of the vessel and Kerbal once close. And could also mean it doesn't show up on the map. I am guessing though.

Its probably aerodynamics, at 25km trying to reach orbit you ought to be going pretty fast, and you're still somewhat in the atmosphere. That stages 1 and 2 are okay means you have the drag balanced okay on those (or that its just a bit slower). You didn't include a pic but.....do you have a nosecone? The idea is, you want it slippery at the front and draggy at the back. If you don't have the available parts yet so that its a bit draggy at the front, sometimes you can deliberately make it "a bit draggy" at the back too, it will be less efficient but it will make it to orbit (given enough fuel). Also sounds crazy......but if it starts flipping, turn off the throttle, wait (it will still have upwards acceleration), get it back to pointing the right way and put the throttle back on. 25km is kinda near the edge of where aerodynamics start to not matter any more...and you might just squeak it into orbit that way. Or make the 1st stage TWR higher, its inefficient too but it will "kick it" up higher for the 3rd stage. Regarding TWR, 1.2 sounds lovely and efficient etc but sometimes you want a bit more, it will trade drag with gravity losses though - all the time you are suborbital, you are wasting (or need for gravity losses...) fuel/energy. The higher the overall TWR, the less time is spent suborbital so the lower the "gravity losses" (but the higher the drag losses). ETA you'll need a reaction wheel - the small one should be okay for a low-weight satellite/rocket.

I don't know why its not showing up but how do you know you're close to it? I believe, if you get within 2km you can then switch to it using the [ or ] keys. Is it in a circular orbit? I wonder if its possible to approach it using a guaranteed-to-rendezvous orbit such as if its 80x80, then orbit behind at 79x79 and you'll eventually have to be within 1km. Mind you, you'd need to have the inclination the same too.

I'm not sure I was deceived at all. I saw KSP on Scott Manley's channel - ages ago - and then once I'd bought a gaming PC about 9 months ago, it was on my list of "games to buy". At no point did they describe it as "this is version 1 but version 2 will be brilliant and will be released in 2020.....errr.....not long now..........actually, hang on until 2022". It was only through joining and reading the forum I learned of KSP2 and the vast majority of stuff I've read about it has been written by someone other than the devs. I am sure there is a story behind it all, but since it was made fairly clear it won't be until 2022, I've not really worried about the backstory and continue to enjoy version 1.

It looks too low - what was the Pe?

I currently do not own KSP2. If its bad (I'll not buy it straight away, I'll wait and read the reviews, and/or wait for version 2.1 with the major bugs fixed) I'll still not own KSP2. No net change. I don't let things that don't affect me, worry me. Otherwise I'd be worrying about random events on the other side of the world, over which I have no control. Not a good way to live!

The thing which seals it as a hoax for me, is that the spoken Russian (as well as being poorly phrased, like someone learning Russian as a second language).........has an Italian accent to it! By sheer chance, their sister was learning Russian....... Sure, they intercepted a few transmissions, got a bit of recognition for that...but then it all went a bit quiet, so they decided to start making stuff up instead of just fading back into insignificance. A bit of fun that went too far.

The transmissions need to be successfully received, to earn the points........

There's some manoeuvres where you can fairly precisely "fly" or "control" things - for example a Hoffman transfer from one orbit to another, where you have a big TWR and can do a short burn pretty much at the optimal time . These could include intercepts of Mun/Minmus/other planets (if you calculate the optimal time and ejection angle etc to do them at). Or a take-off from a body with no atmosphere, big engine and flat terrain. And there's others where its much more variable, for example take-offs from something with an atmosphere (the drag losses vs gravity losses vs orbital speed requirement energy would be a complex equation!); or a non-ideal interplanetary transfer. Of course the correct thing would be to put a variance band on the figures - but then it would be needlessly complicated! So, the delta V maps are typically shown with a single figure for each transfer. But you'd be foolish not to appreciate there is some variance and to take excess fuel/performance. I don't think anyone looks up the figures, arrives at "oh its 6056m/s to land at xxxxx on the Mun" then builds a rocket with 6056m/s dV.