InfernoSD

The game lists them as having the same "surface gravity", but in reality Jool is much bigger and heavier, and it has no real surface. The wiki gives this interesting bit of trivia for Jool:

Well, my finalized plane barely resembles what I started with. After an almost complete rebuild, I got as high as 19.9km with the propellers which is probably the best I can hope for with this much mass. The new wings are quite large and practically mirrored on the vertical axis. My final run made orbit with 1200 dV in reserve. The fuel cell arrays ended up on the front decouplers where the propellers are. It simply doesn't seem worth it to hide them in anything. The kerbals got moved to command seats in the cargo bay -- not exactly travelling in style. The six Darts were replaced with three Skiffs. Admittedly that's less thrust, but it's also less weight and drag, and it has acceptable isp for that altitude. Lesson learned on wings: If you have weaker engines with low TWR, you're better off keeping the wings for the lift and control they provide. Doubly so if you're lacking in gimbal and reaction wheels. Whereas if you have powerful engines like the Vector, you can power into a bullet trajectory earlier and drop all lifting surfaces. Lesson learned on performing a gravity turn: Same thing. Stronger engines can power through the atmosphere at a shallow angle. Weaker engines benefit from a high angle to get out of the atmosphere sooner. If I one day embark on making an Eve SSTO, the question is this: Nerv or Dawn? Nerv makes sense because spaceplane wings and fuselages are some of the few fuel tanks that can carry pure liquid fuel. Dawn makes sense because the use of rotors already requires significant electricity generation.

Haha. Well I made it back to Kerbin SOI with 2200 still remaining, so then I did a vertical landing on Kerbin because why not.

Yes. You just can't discard the relevant parts of the vessel. The orbiter by itself will not retain credit for going there. That credit is retained within the lander. It would probably be sufficient if the only thing you retained from your lander is the probe or command pod.

Am I the only one that struggles with finding anomalies? I will sometimes orbit a planet or moon for days trying to place navigation markers as close as I can to anomalies. When I finally land at one, the anomaly is no where in sight. In some cases I have multiple markers for one anomaly that are kilometers apart.

Sorry to ruin this for you, but there's already an easy button combo to switch between nearby vessels in the console version. I think it's L1+Left or Right on the d-pad. That's with the radial control setting, so it may be different if you picked one of the other control settings. There's actually a ton of controls you'll probably never learn about if you don't hear about them from someone. A few more are R1+Triangle to focus active part action windows and L1+left stick and L1+R2/L2 for RCS thrusters.

Just finished up a trip to Eve. It took me three days, actually, but it couldn't have been done in any fewer, so sue me.

Nothing is harder than Eve. But beside that, I struggle with bringing enough dV for all the objectives I intend to complete. I often make rockets with 6+ stages, consume several of them just circularizing to LKO, then have to immediately bring up a fuel tanker to refuel before I go. By the time I come to a stop at the next planet, I'm down so far on fuel again that I have to consider either sending a second tanker or limiting the scope of what I had planned. It's not as if I don't know how space works. I build aerodynamically, I wait until the ideal interplanetary transfer window, I use as much oberth effect as I can, all that. It's just that I always build too big to begin with, and I can't build enough lower stages to travel far. In other words I'm bad at building small. It doesn't help that I actively avoid Nervs, Dawns, and ISRU.

Yeah, go ahead. It makes sense as a broad concept, but it's hard to figure out what the finer details would be, where running out of life support would be genuinely bad but not so restrictive that it would ruin an exploration type mission.

I think this kind of thing is a lot more complicated than what their goals are for the game. Not that programming can't be an interesting engineering feat in itself, but it gets away from the core gameplay. My expectation is that once you complete a flight such as a delivery to a colony, the game will offer to repeat that flight for you automatically and in perpetuity. Hopefully this will be something you can actually see on-screen, e.g. by watching it in the tracking station or by standing in the colony and watching the ship come down for a landing. But I wouldn't even be surprised if the automation was entirely virtualized and entirely off-screen, only because of the difficulty of duplicating a flight path in a constantly moving solar system. Agreed. Hopefully KSP2 gets rid of the concept of physics range. KSP1 creates a sort of "physics bubble" just around the player, but one can imagine a version of the physics system where a "physics bubble" is created around every object that is currently in atmosphere, moving on the surface of a body, or close to touching another object. Agreed. This is one of the biggest upgrades a sequel can offer. I wonder if the answer to this question could be cryogenics. Maybe kerbals are forced to go into hibernation pods once they run out of life support. With some kind of rule that the player can still wake them up but only so long as the player is actively controlling them. The rest of the time, they have limited functionality with regards to science, ISRU, etc.

Looking at this again, you have hinges in both designs, no? Have you tried locking the hinges before the grab? Hinges like to create huge phantom forces. It might make the difference. You might also try grabbing a free floating object in space just to see if anything weird happens there.

I find it very useful to be able to revert to a save from just before launch. Too many times I've been waiting in orbit only to realize I forgot some important part or misengineered some critical feature. Plus I like to be able to tweak my trajectory slightly as I fly. If I put any effort into other missions during wait times, I eventually regret it.

That's what docking looks like in KSP1 next to docking in real life (time lapse). I admit not to being very knowledged on this subject, but one appears to be slightly more complicated than the other. I'm sure there will be some who feel differently, but I always find docking to be overly easy in KSP1. You can slam into a docking port at high speed, with bad orientation, and with bad alignment, and you'll still magnetize into a clean lock. I find myself hoping that in the next game there will, at the very least, be a difficulty slider for "docking port magnetization" so that factor can be turned down. But I think there are several other additions that could make docking less trivial. Things like requiring a specific orientation, requiring a low velocity/force, maybe even actual moving parts that need to lock together instead of a magic ring touching another magic ring. What do you think?

If you have a save from before the kraken hit, you should return to that and try again. When you load in to the satellite, there's a few things you can try to calm the kraken: Shut off SAS if it's on. (Circle) Shut off the moving parts. This may be difficult if they're already moving, but easy if you have them bound to an action group. Lock the moving parts. Once they're locked they become very hard to move. Deactivate and reactivate autostruts on parts affected. Autostruts create a lot of stability when set to heaviest part, but they sometimes need to be reset between stages and dockings. You may need to enable Advanced Tweakables in the settings to see this setting. Time warp. This usually resets parts to their intended positions. You can post images in the forum by uploading them to an image host and copying the direct URL here.

Hmm, that's good info. I suspect the MK2 is giving me a decent chunk of lift, which shouldn't be overlooked. But I will have to give this a try. It is multistage. I like this idea in theory, but the rocket really likes to flip backward as soon as the wings detach. I'm thinking maybe it's a combination of the tail rudders messing up CoM and the MK2 cockpit which adds significant lift at the nose. Currently my third stage is pretty close to being a regular rocket already. I'll try to shave off as much of the second stage as I can, or maybe I can drop some parts inbetween stages. Atmospheric entry on Eve has been the most baffling thing for me in this game. Everyone on this forum makes Eve reentry sound so casual compared to my experiences. Observe: here I am entering with the fuel tanks empty. The props begin blowing up at 89km, so they would have to be kept in a protective shell. By 85km I have to pitch down hard to keep my wings cool. I can hold 5 to 15 degrees from prograde without overheating them. Somewhere around 67km, drag finally starts to overtake gravity. Velocity has reached its maximum of 3247 m/s and is now beginning to drop. Once all the wings are gone the plane presents its belly and falls below 3000 m/s. Also missing are various rotors, adapters, decouplers, and one of the landing gear. But the MK2 parts survive. I'm inclined to believe the console version uses different physics for atmospheric drag and heat than the PC version, but I've been too lazy to prove it. Surely the 2400K wings are meant to be able to survive entry, right? In any case, I'm sure I will be fine if I add a stage to slow down before entering. The inflatable heat shield blew up last time I tried it. Nah, like I said at the top, I've tried lots of different designs. The one successful trip I made to Eve actually was an asparagus design, but it was also set inside a fairing on top of three Mammoth boosters that got it off the ground. This plane was my attempt to make something lightweight, if you can believe it. Ok, thanks for your responses. Back to the SPH to test things out.

I spent some time looking at Eve SSTO threads and I learned some things. Thanks, you're not wrong. Dry mass is 20.07t after staging off the propellers. Wet is 62.07t. Unfortunately I'm not great at designing planes in general, so I'm not sure I can do much better with the wings. I experimented in the past with detachable wings, but I lost control instantly without them; the whole plane flips over backward. I think I could perhaps detach the forward wing section alone. I might also be able to remove or simplify the yaw stabilizers and the x-shaped wing strakes. I also have a big task ahead of me to figure out atmospheric entry. I've never created a single vessel of any shape or size that could enter Eve's atmosphere from orbital velocity without catastrophic damage. I chose the MK2 parts initially thinking their heat tolerance would make reentry possible. Now I'm not sure that's going to happen. Additional questions: Should I ascend at a shallower angle? I've never known what the right way to figure out a gravity turn is. It seems like successful Eve SSTOs burn at a shallow angle of between 2 and 20 degrees. I've been starting my burn at 45 degrees to try to get away from the drag sooner. Is there a good place I can stash fuel cell arrays? I need two for this design, and I'd like to put them somewhere they won't cause drag. Even better would be if I could stage them with the propellers since they're dead weight after that point. Maybe I can put them inside a fairing with the propellers during reentry. I'm also considering replacing the Darts with a smaller number of more powerful engines. I think having good in-atmosphere isp is less important at the altitudes I'm using them. If I do get around to making an SSTO some day, I will have to use two different engine types so I can make the most of my fuel weight. And I will have to try a helicopter design so I can skip wings completely.

The basic lander can really is quite good. Nothing wrong with using two of them. Or use one lander can and one pod, which is what I did for my landers in the beginning.

Eve has been a tremendous challenge for me. I've built at least ten unique Eve ascenders but only succeeded in reaching orbit with one of them. That was a 400 ton monster that relied on ISRU, so I wasn't very proud of it. All of those attempts were rockets, and heavy ones, so I thought it would be worth trying to use propellers for the first stage of my next attempt. Well, after a week of trying and countless revisions, I've finally made it to orbit once in testing. Video synopsis: First couple minutes of the video are just to show how it flies. Then I skip to Eve atmosphere and climb slowly to 18.1 km. From there I drop the propellers and activate six Dart engines, reaching an altitude of 47 km. Final stage with two remaining Dart engines continues from there. Ends at orbit with 48 m/s left in the tank. That's less than 1% of starting dV. So I'm happy that I've made it this far, but since planes are so complicated, I thought I would ask for advice before I call it final and take the next step. I'm sure there's room for improvement. Anything obvious stand out? I find the drag system entirely confusing and frustrating. I checked some numbers in-flight and was surprised at how much drag I'm getting on parts along the front of the plane, even the nosecones. The MK2 service bay is also showing enormous drag. Can any of these be replaced with something better? I was having constant problems with stabilization. It was either flipping over, going into a flat spin, or targeting retrograde. Now I finally have it flying pretty smoothly in all three stages. Frankly I'm not sure how I did that, but it must have to do with the exact angle of the wings. Hopefully it sticks.

Playing on PS4 so it's a little older version. The worst case of docking I've had was with my rover on Eve. The issue there was that the rocket I was connecting to was much heavier than the rover itself. The rocket's weight would instantly travel into the rover wheels and damage if not destroy them, then shake the rover around violently. I'm sure you're not dealing with that much weight, though. Maybe the best thing to do would be to look at the flight log to see what the first parts that break and expode are. It's also worth saying that I've never tried grabbing an object from above as you have. The surface of planets is very solid, and clipping objects into that surface is an easy way to make them explode. It's possible that in the moment of contact you're exerting too much downward force and clipping that object into the ground for a brief moment.

I've found hovering above surface objects equally challenging, especially on those tiny moons. In retrospect I should have used RCS and treated it like docking. I have used a rover with wheels on hinges and a claw on a hinge. With it I was able to pick objects up and drive around with them pretty smoothly. I haven't tried doing the same thing with a recovery mission, but I don't see why that would be any different. Your rover looks pretty good. It sounds like your problem is perhaps less to do with the robotic parts and more to do with the claw not working correctly. When is your ship exploding?

From what did you arrive at the number 4000? Bear in mind that in-game dV readings take atmosphere into consideration. A rocket on the launchpad or in the VAB will appear to have a low dV because of engine efficiency being low while in atmosphere. And that number will visibly go up as you exit the atmosphere. You can also click the dV button to switch these calculations between vaccum and atmosphere.

The reason torque limit doesn't matter is that, by default, a rotor is much more powerful than you need it to be. If you reduce the motor size, or if you add more mass for it to turn, then you'll start to see it struggle to maintain target RPM. If you want better numbers control, you may want to delve into the world of KAL-1000 Controllers. You could for example bind the Throttle to Play Position on a KAL Controller. Then set the KAL Controller to alter your rotor's RPM. Maybe set it to just a specific range, like from 200-360. This will give you small increments with Shift/Ctrl, but in a narrower range. You can take this a step further by combining multiple KAL Controllers, perhaps creating different gears for the rotor. But it gets complicated fast. Most likely what you're trying to do is fly a plane, in which case you should instead consider binding Throttle to the Authority on your blades. Tweaking the blades gives you better control than tweaking the rotor, and since the best blade angle changes with air pressure and speed, it's something you'll want to have direct control over anyway.

From experience, it's much cheaper to burn up to a highly elliptical orbit, get out past Eeloo, then alter course to a polar orbit. Three burns instead of one. You save 30-40% dV, but you lose many years of time.

It's not expected behavior. Mirror symmetry is ideally supposed to be a perfect mirror reflection of a part or assembly. It doesn't always work out that way, especially with robotic parts. Likewise, it's not intended behavior for anything to behave differently in-flight than it does in construction. In any case, I haven't seen and can't recreate your specific problem with hinges. What this issue would boil down to would be the exact order of operations you followed to place those hinges, including when you used specific symmetry modes, what chain of grandparent parts are above it, and to which nodes all those parts are attached. A picture or description might help, but even with a picture it may be hard to recreate the exact circumstances again. I'm assuming you've already checked for obvious things, like checking the PAW in-flight to see if the motor is staying enabled on both hinges. It's happened to me before where one hinge ran out of electricity but not the other. It's also worth asking if you use the Locked setting for those hinges, which I find has some peculiar behaviors.

I completed a something-like-20-year mission to put up a basic relay network in solar orbit. This is what a relay network is supposed to look like, right? It makes cool shapes in the tracking station anyway. Also got this station hanging over Duna. I just barely fit the whole thing inside a fairing to get it out of Kerbin's atmosphere. The solar panels can be folded down for docking. It has plenty of leftover delta-v, so it may make a trip to Jool in the future.