celem

Hey, had some problems installing RO from the wiki guide. Problems I solved and will now share for anyone else passing by. The RO mod itself was failing to install from CKAN; It was fetching it (v13.0), and then throwing an error along the lines of "Manifest error, GameData/Realism Overhaul contains no files to install". Went back and forth through the process several times, reinstall KSP, purge CKAN cache etc. Even tried manually adding RO but was fazed by its dependencies. The solution was to update CKAN itself, after which the mod went in just fine.

I get how to use merge, but I dont see the purpose if im honest. I havent identified anything that it lets me do, that sub-assemblies didn't already do. I had my happy solution to this engineering exercise as soon as we got the root tool (it was workable even before that if you understood how KSP assembles craft). Saving a craft with a node free on the root piece, then bringing it into another craft to attach.... thats exactly what we've been doing through SA.

I used to have a droppable heatshield too but cant find it anymore. I guess somewhere out there is a modpack where the author added a decoupler to their custom shield. I, like the others here, dont drop the kerbin return shields, i'll often blow away aerobrake heatshields however. I dont drop the return shield because its weight is fairly negligible when looking at parachutes. Its weight is significant however when looking at overall craft design, and I will often remove some of the ablator resource in the VAB prior to the mission to shave mass. Coming in from Munar orbit with a multipass re-entry i will usually remove 1/3 to 1/2 from the 1.25m The other tactic is to leave the payload inside its aeroshell from launch at kerbin until after it has arrived on site and completed it's aerobrake. I use this one a lot in RSS. If there are components you need to protect at kerbin launch, but will then need to use along the interplantary stages (or docking ports for LKO refueling) then you can nest the aeroshells, having a major launch shell, then a second aerobrake shell inside. As for predicting aerobrakes, I use the Trajectories mod a lot, be advised that you will never be properly aerocapturing at Duna without some kind of burn, its atmosphere is just too thin and too low for you to bleed enough speed on the first pass without coming in seriously low and hot, expect to have to help a little.

You could also deliberately make a multi-pass reentry. Coming in from the Mun i'll often take about 38km which slows you down over 2 or 3 passes, just make sure the payload has enough battery and control to orient through multiple passes. Failing that, airbrakes on the tail will also let you dump some speed. I agree that no burning till 10km sounds wrong, you should be roasting from 35ish on down, doubly so if coming in steep. I will say that I dont use a heatshield on the Mk I pod, it has one built-in, however as soon as you bring down more than just the pod you will need the extra one to cover the new bottom face. I'll often aerobrake with my engines pointing retrograde, fire off their remaining fuel at periapsis to help speed things up and then ditch to let the pod come down alone after popping back out of the atmosphere once or twice.

As people have said, the lightning orbits are the cheapest in terms of time and dV. Though my personal favorite is land-based deep-space listening. You launch a couple of large dishes sub-orbital on Kerbin and land them on the surface spread out. I usually go with 3, 1 left by the pad and two others launched around the planet a bit. I tend to put similar ground relays on the inward face of tidally locked moons too.

Yeah, set up a node as soon as possible infront of your ship and tweak it to try and lower your Duna apoapsis, its probably the radial handles. Ideally into the upper atmosphere, 35 always used to be my number for a Duna firstpass but its been a version or so. Fold solar/comms and orient retrograde for aerobraking. Spend your dV retrograde at periapsis (or as you climb after if you need solar/comms back out). Dont start too much before the periapsis or you will be lowering it. Duna doesnt do much aerobraking, you gotta get deep for the thick stuff but i dont recall offhand where the new cutoffs are. 35 is definitely in air, but definitely wont land you. As soon as the orbit closes (is still elliptical) you can cut engines and make more aerobrake passes to bring yourself down close to circular, then you raise that apoapsis back out of the atmosphere and voila!.

I will say that if you are experiencing wobble across a weak joint like this then one of my main steps is to disable all the torque and RCS stuff from above the join. It doesnt help that on launch your main core is gimballing at the back and the pod up front is trying to torque, leads to aggravation of the flexing. Once out of atmosphere its less harmfull but imparts a lot of stress during atmopsheric flight if your rocket keeps assuming a banana-like profile.

Hit your name on your post, or the 'Forum Actions' dropdown at the top bar and edit profile. Can tweak your signature from there. And good work on your station edit: still working away at my challenge. Ran it once and missed the capture. Launched into a bad inclination, took a sub-optimal transfer with a swing off the moon to try and fix stuff, but every burn was running over budget and the station was under its own power before breaking Earth's SoI. Got the Mars encounter and made an aerobrake pass at 55km but the station didnt have enough in the tank to close the orbit and ripped through to become a solar station. Discovered a number of critical design flaws along the way, the lander has half-empty tanks (which means a lot for the launch vehicle, derp), bunch of RCS ports are set to the wrong fuel type and so on. Tweaked, revised. Redesigned my mission somewhat, we now have a refueling mission in LEO to deliver 14t Hydrogen and 80t oxygen. Its OMS matches the fuel mixture for the main mission's RCS systems so it can top that off too. Primary mission has also gained a probe lander for Deimos and Phobos each.

Oh wait i've not seen this trick. Your SRB first stage is welded onto that decoupler on the bottom of the main stack? thats neat... I cant tell what all the engines are, there are a few odd choices however and Im not sure you can easily orbit that. As soon as your SRBs go you are on what? a skipper? with 0.87 atmo TWR its really gonna struggle, even given that you'll be up around 10km. Then it looks like a poodle above that, which is a good munar transfer engine, and produces much more dV than in the atmospheric screenshot, but due to the low dV of the rocket at this point you will end up circularising on it, which wont go well. The top stage with the radials is probably thrusty enough for your mun launch, though those have heinous efficiency they would work well to assist your weaker launch stages. It probably all adds up for a mun landing on paper if you hop between vac and atmospheric dV display, but you dont have thrust in the right places and im not confident this will orbit kerbin. That skipper or whatever it is under the bottom decoupler is definately gonna need a friend at anyrate, and you will need more dV if you plan to have the 'guessing poodle' as a transfer and not have to double as circulariser(it really wont do that well, its gonna suck). Some tweaks I would make off the top of my head. Halve the fuel on the poodle or whatever that third stage is, give what you removed to the skipper. give the skipper four of those radial buggers, you want at least 1.0 sea level TWR to have any hope of making the climb from where the SRBs deposit you. Ideally it needs another stage, that poodle is awful in any kind of atmosphere. In a perfect world you shorten the skipper stages fuel very slightly, call it the topstage and stick a mainail below with gas for days. The lander is quite top-heavy looking, but you dont appear to have radial decouplers yet. Its tricky to lift 4 guys out in a hitchhiker like that, you are on a narrow base. You can fake radial attachments by using the little girders, but since you probably dont have fuel lines you then move all the gas to the radials, engines under them and put the legs out there too for more stable landings. edit: just went away and had a fiddle in the VAB, using what I read to be your tech. I cant come up with a solution to be honest, not without busting weight caps. You capped at 140? More boosters pushes really hard off the pad but doesnt help you massively longrun since they get pretty bad pretty quick as you climb. Also its gonna start getting very hard to steer.

guys, this thread is really, really, REALLY old. And has now been raised from the grave twice...

Yeah.... Having some issues with Liquid Hydrogen boil-off now. I had consciously put the hydrolox on the transfer stage since it is all burnt leaving LEO, the station makes its own capture using the infinitely less-efficient hypergolics because I cant realistically preserve the more volatile cryogenics for the entire flight duration. The hypergolics also represent the vast majority of my throttling and restarting engines. But despite launching 3 days before the window im too low on the IP-stage. I suspect the heating I suffered on ascent exacerbated the boil-off... Currently fishing through various part packs looking for cryopumps, im sure I had some in a previous RSS install. Also, dont suppose anyone knows offhand where I can get hold of a J2-X? Thats another engine I used to have, right now I have have the 5-clustered version from the SatV second stage, but that ones a single ignition again Im pretty sure I recall the solo nozzle having 3 ignites. Will have to keep digging, a big part of making the move to RSS/RO is grabbing as many motors as possible for NathanKell's configs to convert for you. edit: ahah! It was FASA that had the decent hydrolox topstages; J-2 and M-1. Gimbals and multiple-ignites, goodie goodie! Also grabbed bobcat's soviet engines which are looking pretty awesome. Off to redesign my transfer stage somewhat.

Finally getting around to making a run at this challenge in RSS. Said I would, some months ago, but its finally happening! Mucked about a bit trying to assemble in orbit, but gave up. Docking around Earth is significantly harder than Kerbin and I cant get it to work without costing epic dV. The main issue is getting the two pieces into an orbit with the same inclination. Due to the fact that Earth is tilted where Kerbin is not, and the fact that I dont have a perfect equatorial launch site (like KSC) I have to really focus to launch into a desired inclination, and an error of about 0.5 degrees eliminates all fallback fuel. I have mechjeb installed, but he is not capable of launching ships that are under the Realism Overhaul mod-suite, since he doesn't respect the fact that the vast majority of the engines can only ignite once (I would have to design with that in mind, and dont want to limit myself), so I cant use him to hit the perfect inclinations.. So while I assembled my craft successfully in LEO I realised it had cost so much fuel for Orbital Manouevering Systems to rendezvous and dock that Im actually better off launching a monolithic monster. Which is what Im doing now...pad weight is eight and a half thousand tonnes and climbing. Station will be heading to Low Mars Orbit. After 6 and a half real-world hours in the VAB and testing stuff in LEO Im pretty happy, will make a few last tweaks tomorrow and then see if I can get this beastie on-site. Kinda gave up on designing with the scores in-mind, I had planned to have a miner that could hop down to Mars, mine up some Ore and bring it up to the station, but that just doesn't work. The masses and dV-requirements involved, combined with the fact that I only have 2 engines with throttles, and maybe 6 that relight, makes single-staging off the martian surface only just possible with a bare minimum science lander. I want to say its actually impossible with the hardware I have here (modeled on realworld designs), which makes some kind of sense since these are mission profiles beyond humanity's current tech. (the payload fraction on my Mars SSTO is a joke, it should be able to get down from low-orbit, pop chutes, burn a little to help the landing and then scrape back to LMO, but its gonna have about 200dV for redock. And thats just with a 2man can and a few teeny sci instruments, the damned thing weighs over 40 tonnes. The very idea of mounting a drill is absurd, nevermind actually lifting Ore back to orbit.) Once its on-site I might take a look at building a bare-bones unmanned miner and sending it out to join, but I dont hold much hope. Im also gonna have to try and calculate whether its going to be worth refueling it once it arrives in search of "mass-score", I imagine thats not really gonna work, its likely to cost me more points than it gains. The distances involved here are crazy, i have 9400dV to LEO, 3210dV to Earth escape, 1060dV to Mars intercept. There is an atmosphere, but its so wussy and aerocapping is so sketchy in 1.0.4 that I doubt I'll risk that, so another 1440dV to capture to LMO for over 15kdV one-way, vs 6240 in stock (which would barely clear Earth's atmosphere and certainly wouldnt orbit...infact a stock craft that can reach Eeloo low orbit after max plane-change still lacks dV for low Earth.) Earth to Mars really feels like pushing the edge of the envelope for a payload of this size in a single launch, its costing hundreds of pad tonnes to squeeze a few hundred more dV out of the design. Teaser: All that work...all that mass and dV, just to carry 8 comfy seats to Mars XD It is 176m tall (almost twice as high as the VAB, thankyou Hanger Extensions!) and weighs 8,497t with a vacuum dV of nearly 18k. Its partcount is just 164 including clamps and fairings. Yay procedural parts! The primary lifter stage uses a 10m core with a Saturn-V style F-1, but it wasnt powerful enough so it got huge boosters (those are the SLS liquid boosters, and im using 4), which still lacked oomph so there are SRBs too! The circularisation finalizer doubles as the interplanetary stage (gold in image), that centre core is 50m tall! (RealFuels kinda works like that, its burning Hydrolox, which has appalling density and leads to truly mammoth tanks) The engines on the transfer are Aerospikes. The station itself is powered by a Aerozine/NTO Aestus II cluster Theres neither asparagus nor onion. Couple of fuel lines are used but they all originate in engine-less tanks. I could probably make my life easier by using these tactics, but they feel a bit cheap if you have already gone ahead and opted for realism mods. Despite the apparent inefficiency of my monstrous, single-piece interplanetary stage thats mostly cryo-balloon tankage and doesn't mass so much as you might think when dry. Stay tuned...

Yeah as the guys illustrated above (and you seem to have achieved on your way in) Tylo is free-dV. In both directions, you can always either speed up or slow down at a flyby. I suspect you can find a solution for Laythe too, spend most of your dV at this next grav assist to make use of Tylo's rather reasonable Oberth effect, even if you cant get a direct Laythe encounter then an encounter with any of the other inner bodies should provide opportunity for yet another free course change and shot at laythe aerocap. Multi-moon bodies are awesome, you can pinball round the Jovian System on a shoestring budget if you have time and patience. I definately second the recommendation further up-thread about a mod like PreciseNode, this is a pretty brutal task on stock nodes.

Thanks for crunching the numbers on those Norcal, nice clear examples. I will also go ahead and say that I've taken a look at the current incarnation of SR and some of my topstage concerns have been somewhat alleviated. The author has done some solid work since I used it, with allowances for heatshields and powered landings. It would be possible with this to recover upper stages too, even those moving over 2kms, but the truth is that your gonna get awful distance %'s. I might take a look at heat-shielding some stuff..but those are both heavy and yet more money, and then more chutes..and so on.

Yeah thats how I understand it to reckon the numbers too, but I was finding (again...RSS scaled) that the SRBs have a tendency to come down nice and close. Im probably barely inclined when they get chucked (assuming stock ASL-tuned booster types). Quite right that the recovery values need to be monitored, if it doesnt pay for the chutes its pointless.. In retrospect I imagine a lot of my different experience here has to do with NathanKell's RP-0 rebalance. My upper stages were not cheap, J-2s are shiny, and shiny stuff is always expensive. The entire reason I got so heavily into StageRecovery during that particular career playthrough was the Rocketdyne F-1 in Saturn V config. You cannot ever afford to lose one of those motors as the driveblock has a 6-digit pricetag. Yes, I needed about 40 radial chutes to soft-land it, which drove the cost up even further....fine, but the engine bell must survive. There are very few pieces like that in the stock-game, even the 3.5m engines wont ruin you in that fashion if you pop them... But the one time I lost an F-1 it set me back years in the career (as i couldnt afford to launch anything interesting/heavy) and I then went looking for ways to avoid it. Thanks for the feedback guys.

Is this on the pad/runway or in orbit? The ground is a lag monster for a lot of rigs. The very first thing I do when my craft loads is look straight up, I tend to fly the entire ascent from below. The same applies to low orbit often, you can pick up a decent chunk of fps by rotating the view so the planet is behind the camera. No idea why your particular setup is causing such problems, but if you already axed gfx then thats the only trick I have left in my book.

Oh... *scurries off to rebuild every 2.5m stack across 4 installations* (otherwise...yeah, smaller tanks at the top) Nice series of posts. Well thought out and adaptive to feedback, good stuff. Particularly interesting discussion on recovery, its not something I've really done for many many versions now. (havent really played since stock got heat and dont think i mucked about with recovery under DRE except at RSS scale). StageRecovery mod was a lot of fun to use during my RSS career, but I found it mainly useful for the situations you list where other techniques dont work so well. Particularly 1st stage SRBs and early asparagus LFO cores. Once you get into the upper atmosphere and the later stages then stuff you drop is gonna burn up, I always suspected it was not allowing for orientation retrograde like a player would do to put the heat on the engine-bells. So I ended up letting StageRecovery take care of the first stage, and then manually re-enter the primary core for maximum refunds. This was my experience at RSS-scale at least, anything going sub-orbital will burn if you are not riding it, though the first stage does tend to land at 95% range even allowing for realistic (early) gravturns. Perhaps stock heat is less aggressive. Are you able to let stuff ride in from LKO unattended without the plugin declaring it incinerated?

I might have to try this one, spacing sats was always an issue for my OCD. I used to do something like this for RT relays, though I tend to put circularise dV on the sats themselves rather than the bus. I stick a satellite up in the desired orbit and take a look at its orbital period. I then launch a bus carrying n satellites which raises apoapsis to match the desired orbit, and then raises periapsis until its orbital period is 1/nth of the desired one. (with high values for n and lower target periods this doesnt work so well, you cant get a phasing orbit short enough) At this point the bus drops the sats and heads home and the satellites circularise themselves. You kick one satellite to circular each time the swarm passes apoapsis and they space themselves that way give or take human error. My OCD then makes me remove the first satellite because its not equidistant, but you dont even need that if you know the target period already.

that one seems puzzling, however I've never actually used docking mode so have no clue whats going down there. Its certainly possible to do without it if you play about a bit with the RCS to figure out what button has which effect on the navball indicators. If not in docking mode then im pretty sure 'h' and 'j' are your forward/reverse thrusts

Well you seem to have the theory correct. 1. You make a burn somewhere and get an intersect node, you wait a bit and you are passing close by to the target. 2. You set the navball to target mode, you then burn retrograde to target, thats a purple icon...just incase you are burning on the green retrograde for this step. If you are doing this correctly then the speed displayed by your navball which is in target mode should decrease to more or less zero. If it falls, but then starts climbing again before hitting zero or close to it then you are definitely burning on the wrong indicator. To be very clear, once you set a target in map view two purple icons appear on the navball, these are used for exactly this situation, one is target prograde, the other target retrograde. In general watch that target speed display, it should never rise while you perform this step. 3. Once your relative velocity is more or less zero then the intersect marks on map view stop meaning very much, they just describe closest approach as the 2 ships drift slightly closer together and/or further apart. As long as your target speed is around zero then you will track the target and remain more or less where you are relative to it. 4. There are a few edge cases to watch for, attempting to intercept craft in very low orbits is dangerous, you might get your close approach of only 5km or whatever, but its 5km vertical, the target was at 72x72 and your approaching craft is gonna hit the atmosphere, this obviously wrecks everything and happens to me a lot. I prefer not to dock below 80km for this very reason, so that a sub-10km closest approach is always gonna be vacuum.

Yeah its the most cost effective way to get to orbit, staging gets costly fast. Even assuming you use a mod like stagerecovery to let you parachute in the SRBs and such you still wind up losing anything dropped from above about 40km as it burns up....and engines are expensive! As Just Jim says, full recovery is possible, and even likely since your best chance at sticking a landing is on the runway which is 100%, you only pay for the cost of the fuel itself. That said, spaceplanes have a terrible terrible payload fraction, if you are lifting any significant mass its an exercise in frustration, its probably cheaper to refuel your massive station with a spaceplane that pays only for the payload fuel and its own fuel, but it will take dozens of launches compared to what you can ship in a single dirty costly regular launch. In practice I wont use it a spaceplane if I need to lift more than about 5t to LKO, it either means a lot of trips or a big plane that takes a lot of designing to get right. Actually trying to use one to save you money isn't likely to happen, you need some pretty advanced tech to build a spaceplane, by that point in the game you should have monies, or the ability to gather some with some contract spam. Seriously, getting an efficient spaceplane into orbit without certain parts is an exercise in futility. They are fun to build and fly, but unless you have masochistic patience or a serious budget-crunch in the mid/late-game their actual gameplay value is more or less nil.

This, so much. Apart from anything else it lets you leave the pilots at home and retain SAS locks. Most of my tourist ferries are robotic. I also then install a probe core onto the top stage of my lifters so that it can deorbit them. Also the probe core to retain SAS when the pilot EVAs is a solid tip, had several craft tip on slopes and roll over Jeb because he tried to get out. The single most important thing I've picked up however is perseverance. Mods like KAC/KER and guides by likes likes of Mr Manley are all well and good (they really are), but you can totally learn this on your own without having an engineering background. Coming up with a working ratio of tanks:engines takes a little trial and error, if you are feeling brave you can do some sketchy rocketry equations but that just overflowed my desk with notepaper, easier to "sim" by launching a series of tweaked designs or just pick up KER, which exists primarily to do that bit of math for you. Secondly: Dont be afraid to try some riskier mission profiles. I have a bunch of mates who in theory are quite good at Kerbal. One guy in particular is routinely able to launch directly to docking when assembling stations in LKO, but he has never landed on either of Kerbins moons or left Kerbin's SoI because his OCD is terrified of killing kerbals. Man up and throw the little green guys across space, they love it really. Thirdly: Just dont land on Eve and expect to get your kerbal back. If you are even reading this thread seriously looking for gameplay pointers then you will not pull the return off. ONE DOES NOT SIMPLY LIFT OFF FROM EVE. (with that said its a perfect pinnacle achievement and comes with bragging rights, once you have gotten into the game then rule 2 trumps rule 3, but you were warned...) edit: Theres always been a very "learn to play vanilla" attitude to KSP, new users are actively discouraged from modding. This has always been too fuzzy in my mind, I would agree with not installing MechJeb or any "far-future" parts packs initially however, the parts just outperform all the stock by factors and magnitudes, you wont learn usable design skills. Mechjeb is too tempting to my mind, however he is a valuable learning tool, you really can learn to pull off some manouevers by watching him execute them, and for the advanced players theres a certain tedium removal once you are launching the 19th refueler to your station. I would actively encourage new players to try other mods however, any of the realism bits, stuff that adds depth or near-future tech, cosmetic stuff, outright utilities (navball especially). Just really really watch out for the trap of letting MJ fly it all, you wont ever get better at manual.

Funds is usually the throttle on any given run through of the career for me, I end up with sci faster than I can run the R&D building up like the OP. The way I solve this is with the policy building, usually with a minor sci->funds policy and then a heavy rep->funds one. What do I want rep for anyway? Its something I always gain at some rate and never lose, its the one the currency crying out to be converted... Go Fundraise!

First solar panel > 48-7S > Fuel Lines. I often dont unlock nukes, just build bigger and thrustier.

It doesnt have to be quite as grindy as you made it in the OP. Retrieve Science Data from Space around X does not mean orbit. You can knock those out on suborbital, which you should still manage with a basic pad. That said the building unlock funds costs are a poor way to throttle your progression, they get obscene on Hard and make the other two currencies irrelevant except to convert.. Also while im happy removing flight revert I always keep quicksave. Its not that its a crutch, its more incase stuff glitches. (old habits and all that, not seen enough of 1.0 to know if its so stable that I dont need f5.)