Search the Community

Hello everyone. I was playing KSP and then I had this bug : my third stage engine doesn't work even if the fuel tank is full. I tried to restart my game and my computer, but it's still not working. The bug starts when I get out of the athmosphere. It says that the engine is on but the fuel doesn't flow. I can't play anymore with that bug! If you know how to fix this, please reply. Thank you very much.

I've done some poking around to see if this is addressed anywhere, and so far I can't find it... please pardon me if I'm repeating a question already answered somewhere else (and, if you could point me to that answer, great)! Building a whole new rocket each time makes sense for the VAB. They're generally expendable launch vehicles, and with the StageRecovery mod, you can notionally re-use dropped stages calculated to be in good enough shape for re-use. No worries there. But... cross the tarmac to the SPH, and all of a sudden it's a whole new ball game. If I go up and do racetracks/touch-and-gos for training on the runway, it doesn't make any sense to "Recover" the plane and then build a whole new one for my next flight... do I just park it off the runway? How far off the runway in order to avoid it being "cleaned up?" And how about refueling... do I need to put in a drill and ISRU to have a fuel tank ready for topping off, or is there a simpler way to do it? (Am I making this too complicated? I tend to do that...)

i have recently updated KSP and some available mods to 1.1.3. I have the interstellar fuel switch mod downloaded which i am thinking is the problem. this is because during startup of KSP, windows popped up saying that the mod needs to be updated. the annoying thing was i had already updated it from spaceport. So i decided to delete interstellar fuel switch by search it in the Squad game data folder. i deleted the file and then about three other items that were white. i don't know if it even relates or the whole thing is just a minor bug. Any help is extremely appreciated as i love the game.

It's been bugging me for awhile that, while larger, the Mk2 short liquid fuel fuselage has the same amount of fuel than the Mk1 one. Shouldn't it have a little bit more than that? If it doesn't, there's really no big advantage in using it instead of a Mk1.

Simple mod that adds config files to enable changing of the fuel types for stock fuel tanks. Download SpaceDock Disclaimers Requires: Module Manager Re-distributes: Interstellar Fuel Switch by FreeThinker Re-distributes: Community Resource Pack by RoverDude

The past few weeks I've been trying to make spaceplanes for other users on Kerbal X. As such I've been restricting myself to designs that require no mods whatsoever to fly, but the problem I'm hitting time and time again is fuel balance. As you may be aware , all jet engines in game drain fuel evenly , from every tank in the vessel. If your plane is down to 50% internal fuel, every tank onboard will have 50% of it's full capacity, regardless of size. Eg. your FAT-455 airplane wing will now have 300 LF out of 600 max capacity, whilst your mark 0 fuselage will now have 25 out of 50. Adjust your airplane so that there's as many tanks ahead of CG as there are aft of it, then everything balances perfectly, full to empty with no handling problems. FULL TANKS EMPTY TANKS *this plane was modified off a design Bewing sent to me, original here Now the problem is, when you fire up the NERV or any rocket engine at all , for that matter. Rocket engines only take fuel from the stack of tanks immediately ahead of them, radially attached wings or tanks on other stacks are ignored. Well , if that was the only problem you could run fuel ducts, though given how bugged the drag from these are, it's not great. But I've made some designs that kept ducts to an absolute minimum. But the real show stopper is that the rocket engine drains the tanks sequentially. It looks for the furthest away tank that's on the same stack as it, and empties it completely before taking so much as a drop from the others, then moves on to the next one down. So, by emptying tanks at the front first, the plane's CG moves aft, behind the CoL and suddenly it wants to do backflips. Other than using mods, what can you do about it? use a single large tank per engine. I suppose for LF/O engines you have options. You could mate one FT800 per Terrier engine and that'd be about the right compromise between fuel endurance and thrust for a spaceplane. If LF only however, the biggest we have is the 400 capacity mk1 fuselage tank. The mk2 has an 800 LF fuselage tank but it's the wrong diameter and much draggier. fuel ducts. Draggy ! Also, the tanks have to be the same size, because unlike the jet engines, ducts don't take account of how big the tank is that they're pulling from. It will pull (for example) 3 fuel per second from each tank whether it's a little Oscar B or a Kerbodyne. locking tanks and manual transfer. TBH, this arrangement works pretty well if you're keeping Rick Wakeman, Tony Banks, Geoff Downes or other legendary keyboardists chained up in your basement, they can work all that for you while you operate the flight controls. Unfortunately the food costs were breaking me and i had to let them go. So devs, how about a nice little toggle on each engine so we can set fuel drain mode between sequential and balanced? I can sort of see why sequential mode exists for rockets.. gravity feed and all that, it assumes you're combining three FT400s into a single large tank, but it's not the same if the tanks are lying horizontally in an airplane. Even in a rocket, do the tanks not have internal baffles, multiple pick up points etc? Seems to just be an artificial way of increasing difficulty in the VAB on early career mode. Make us want to spend science points to unlock larger tanks even though they're exactly the same in terms of dry/wet mass ratio, diameter, heat tolerance and fuels carried.

I'm tired of having to use another piece or waste time on the bars to put the amount of fuel I want. If there is already this functionality in stock in some game or Mod would be happy to know. PS .: sorry for bad English

Astronauts, lace your boots before flight ! Seriously, since cargo bays occlude radially mounted engines and air intakes so regularly, i thought i'd try get this working in our favour for once. Offset those wings inside the cargo bay and run a few fuel ducts between them. Blast off the pad with not much fuel and a stupidly OP engine, see how high we get before falling back. Do the same with the ducts removed. After all, both ends of the duct are inside the cargo bay so there should be no drag, right? With Ducts - max altitude 44,058. Without ducts - max altiude 67,486 It's an issue because ok, nobody really needs this many ducts. But I'm trying to build the most efficient stock SSTO I can, and there's a few factors i'd like to combine to make something great - *big S delta wings, since their mass:lift rating ratio is the same as all the other wing parts. And they hold LF too, as fuel tanks they have the same fuel mass:dry mass ratio as any other tank *generous wing area, for low angle of attack at 25km + altitude, therefore low drag in the closed cycle part of the ascent *... due to the low drag and wing supported flight, low twr, high ISP NERV engines can be used, leveraging the LF capacity of the wings. Little or no oxidizer to be used. *generous wing area leading to low landing speeds offworld - when refuelled this SSTO can go to Duna and Laythe safely What messes all this up is the fact that NERV (all rocket engines for that matter) will not pull any fuel from wing tanks without ducts. In fact even if you just use dry wings and a stack of fuel containers above each engine, you're going to have horrible CG issues because the rockets empty the tanks front to back. It looks like you're just meant to attach one large tank to each engine and discard both when empty. Also, if your wings aren't doing any thing for you fuel wise, they become dead weight, which is i guess why people fly to orbit with tiny stub wings that can barely take off given the entire length of the runway. Like I said, I prefer larger wings that enable better STOL performance in my SSTOs.. What's the answer , if you 're trying to be 100% stock? Transferring fuel manually is out of the question, the average user has their hands full with the flight controls, trying to maintain a good ascent profile (myself included). Fuel tanks can't be bound to action groups so you can't lock stuff off to eg. force the jet engines to use the wing tanks during air breathing phase. You could build small like this (two of the biggest wings, one engine, so we need only two ducts). But that wing has lower heat tolerance, which i can work around, but isn't going to be easy to fly for most people. Also it's not going to be a big enough craft to put the sort of loads most people want up there. So, all I have left are mods that'd disqualify me from any K prize or that might put off new users downloading the craft from KerbalX. eg. tweakscale, so i only need one pair of wings and 2 fuel ducts eg. auto fuel balancer like GPOSpeedPump A WIP SSTO. I've noticed that if I set prograde assist and drop my AoA to zero, it has no effect on the drag from fuel ducts - unlike drag from fuselage parts. The fuel ducts of this design cost about 6% more total drag here.

Have pumping fuel around the space craft been changed? I tried holding Alt+RightClick.... Just shows the two right click menues, but no buttons for pumping fuel around. Anybody else seen this? Have the keys changed from 1.05 to 1.1? Sorry... stupid question... I need to upgrade R&D building first of cause..... silly me.

Objective: get to Kerbin orbit (Pe > 70 km) starting with the least fuel (liquid+oxidizer+solid). Stock parts only (sandbox mode), no mods, manual piloting (SAS/RCS/reaction wheels allowed), no cheating, no refuelling. Multi stages allowed but be nice and don't use decouplers for propulsion. All stock engines allowed excepted electric. Payload/reentry not required, just get a pod to Pe > 70 km. Scoring: least fuel at takeoff (liquid+oxidizer+solid) wins. Unused fuel doesn't matter. Tip: you don't need to take off with completely filled tanks. My record (pictures to come): 30.6 liquid fuel + 22 oxidizer = 52.6 units.

I always run out of fuel. I full throttle out , point to Kerbin, wait until I get out of Mun's gravity into Kerbin's orbit (~3000000m pe) to kill my engines. then I drift to pe, point retrograde and throttle up. But no matter what I do, I run out of fuel before making 300km pe orbit.

The Hypermile Challenge Your challenge is this: Construct a craft, fly it around Kerbin once, and land at or near KSC, using as little fuel as possible. Rules: --Stock parts only --Must be Kerballed in a cockpit or pod. If there's enough demand, we can create a separate category for Command Seats --Air-breathing engines only, liquid fuel only --Informational mods (e.g. KER) and autopilots (e.g. MechJeb, Pilot Assistant) are fine. --FAR will be judged separately --All fuel tanks must be full on takeoff, OR you must provide a screenshot at takeoff showing how much fuel you started with, so we know how much was used --Your craft needs to return to KSC in one piece (no staging off bits). I'll give you some leeway if you lose a few parts on a hard landing. This challenge is more about craft design and piloting at altitude than it is about your ability to stick a landing. --Exploity stuff isn't allowed, with the exception of nose cones or small parachutes on the back of engines. Alt-F12 stuff is ok, as long as it's only informational --You don't have to land on the KSC runway. Just be reasonably nearby. If you're going east, as long as you get past the mountains that lie to the west of KSC, that's probably close enough. --For credit, please provide screenshots: 1) at launch, with the Resources Panel open, showing your starting fuel. This shot is optional if you start with full fuel tanks 2) somewhere on the opposite side of the planet, halfway through the flight 3) after landing, showing your ending fuel Leaderboards: (feel free to enter as many of these as you like. Each submission can count towards multiple challenges. If you'd like another category, feel free to suggest it) 1) Scrooge McKerbal: Least fuel used. Your score is (fuel at launch - fuel at landing). If you have a rough landing, you only get credit for fuel still attached to your cockpit/pod. 2) The Engineer: Prove you don't have to sacrifice speed for efficiency. Multiply the total time by the fuel used, and divide by 100,000. Lowest score wins. For example, if you use 2,000 units of fuel and it takes you 2 hours from launch to landing, your score would be (2,000 * 7,200/100,000) = 144 3) Sardine Can: Least fuel used per passenger, a la the Regional Jet challenge from a couple months back. Scrooge McKerbal The Engineer Sardine Can 1) ihtoit - 2200 1) ihtoit - 99.462 1) ihtoit - 2200

Maybe someone already suggested, but I didn't find in quick search trough links/threads. Can engines have toggable fuel drain switch ? For example, jet engines have this: That allows balanced drain from all fuel tanks. But it is not always desireable option. Sometimes I might want for jets to drain fuel only from first stage. Jets are efficient on thick atmosphere, so could bring rocket to above 10km and drop that stage. Only after that rocket engines are fired when there is less aerodynamic forces to destroy craft. Another example is oposite, I want to create spaceplane based on nuclear engine that drains fuel unbalanced from first fuel tank that is attached to, but for space plane eaqual balanced fuel drain is preferable to maintain center of thrust and center of mass aligned.

Russian rockets like the Soyuz are listed as using RG-1, while American one's, even if they use Russian engines, like Antares: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz-2_(rocket) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antares_(rocket) I also read that the oil reservoir used to make RG-1 was depleting, and that this was a concern for their rockets. What is the difference between RG-1 and RP-1, and could an engine be modified to use RG-1 just as easily as RP-1 (which seems to be more common)?