FREEFALL1984

Jets, Jets and more Jets, have a single turbojet attached to the bottom of a single FLT100 and a single radial intake attached to the "outside" then fix these with TT-70 couplers to the outside of your rocket, each of these "modules" can lift a shade under 20 tonnes at peak airflow. Use these to either increase the efficiency of your main rocket or to deadlift it half way into orbit, once your airflow is too weak to maintain any reasonable acceleration or once you're concerned about flameouts should happen around 15000m (depending on your T/W and drag) throttle back a little then jettison the turbojet modules and ignite your main boosters, but you NEED to be travelling vertically when this happens because your turbojet modules will fly off in all directions thankfully the careful placement of the radial intakes forces them away from you. Then as soon as you are clear of the debris, starts a steep gravity turn. Your basically raising your launchpad up to 15km, meaning you're not wasting your main fuel reserves on atmosphere Of course the drawback is the effect this has on part count, for 180t of orange tanks you'd need at least 10 jet modules just to get just your cargo of the ground, assuming a 700t lifter and your looking at 880t of total deadlift which makes 44 of these jet modules, each requiring 4 parts and now you've made and additional 176 parts... Which on top of your main rocket is enough to cripple most computers My current career mode lifter uses the same principle (only much smaller) with 12 basic jets and allows me to get a lifter comprised of 10 FLT800 tanks and 5 LV-T30s (asparagus) into a stable LKO with almost half of my total fuel remaining and with almost 16 tons of cargo.

Are you running any mods or just the vanilla game?

I know I'm extremely late in posting this, being that this thread is 8 months old, but in case anyone else should stumble upon it this thread, I solved this same issue just recently by creating a Jet module using the smallest FL-T100 tank, with a standard jet engine attached to the bottom and a single radial intake to the "outside" these can then be retrofitted onto the outside of your lifter by using radial couplers and can sit them as high as you need them to help to balance the whole thing. Each one of these jet modules can easily lift 13 tons on top of its own weight and have more than enough fuel in their own tanks to last 4-5 minutes, a typical 300 ton rocket would need about 24-25 of them to get off the ground. The obvious advantage of this is that you can either get your main rocket up to 10000m before you even need to ignite your main engines or you can simply ignite the whole stack and limit your main engines to 50% in order to boost net ISP. Once you hit the 10k mark its the simple matter of throttling back then waiting a few seconds before staging off the jet engines and hopefully not getting blown up by them as they fly off in all different directions, since they take quite a while to stop once you throttle back, For this reason I tend to hold off on starting my gravity turn until about 12km. But using the first method I can now happily get a 15-20 ton payload into orbit with only 1.25m tech and then still have enough dV to get me to any nearby planet.

To answer this question we must ask ourselves "Why are we playing KSP in the first place?" KSP is one of those games where what you get out of it is directly proportionate to what you put in. I find that the people who enjoy this game the most are the people who are prepared to use their imagination to build scenarios, create missions, storys and plot lines in order to further enjoy the game. Imagine its like playing with action figures as a kid, sometimes it doesn't make perfect sense, but we do it because it's fun, People send large scale missions to Laythe, such as this fascinating read by Brotoro http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/27552-Long-term-Laythe-Mission-%28pic-heavy%29-_-With-Part-28-_ This being said you need to ask yourself, is the MK1-2 lander pod really useless? or could it serve as a command and control point for a Munbase, or a cockpit for an interplanetary voyage, or could it be to a command pod for a single Kerbal and ton of imaginary provisions for a long voyage. My point is, feed your imagination

Thanks guys I'm sure these will help, I also read somewhere else in the forum that I can edit the Settings.cfg file to reduce ocean load distances and subdivisions which may help a little more. I will also kill some background processes while playing, disconnect my internet and turn off my anti virus then boosting KSP to an above normal processor priority in task man Edit: is there any good part welding mods for 0.23 you can recommend, and what's the pros and cons of using them?

Hello all, I am currently playing KSP on a bog standard Toshiba satellite laptop, I can't quite remember the model number but it only has 4GB of RAM, and a poor 1.8 dual core CPU and onboard graphics, The specifics elude me at the moment, partly due to shame, and partly due to me being at work and unable to check. But basically it falls just below the minimum requirements of KSP. Now it runs the game admirably on low settings and slogs on like a little trooper at between 30 and 20 FPS during normal single ship missions. Problem comes when I try running more than 150 or so parts on a ship, or when I'm docking two ships in orbit. Typically when docking my frame rate can drop as low as 2-10 FPS and when I launch a large complex rocket my craft occasionally just disintegrates at around 15km. Also when handling large rockets the game occasionally crashes to desktop when I try jumping in and out of the VAB (probably due to my little laptop cooking its CPU or lack of memory) Now I've like to be able to perform big interplanetary surveys and whatnot, but I'm aware that this probably lies outside of the realms of possible with my hardware. What I would like to know is whether there is any means of improving the optimization and performance through a MOD or any other means to try and squeeze more power out of my sorry excuse for a laptop (sorry laptop) while I have reasonable computer skills I'm not as knowledgeable as I would like to be so any suggestions, even simple pointers might help Right now I'm playing the vanilla game on almost minimum settings, but I recently installed Mechjeb just to try it (although I don't need it to succeed) and I have Scansat installed which I keep meaning to remove. I'm aware that future updates might improve optimization but they also might end up adding more memory demanding features too so in the long run I will need a more up to date machine. Any advise would be greatly appreciated and could vastly improve my enjoyment of KSP

Hello fellow Kerbinauts, I have been playing KSP for a while now but I was unsure of this point and wanted to ask before experimenting on a fresh career mode. So here goes... If I perform a new experiment on a new career without ever performing it before (for instance a ground sample on Minmus) and I recover the data, it gives me X points. If I where to then play a completely new career and perform the exact same experiment but instead I choose to transmit the data, I would obviously receive far fewer points. Also as everyone knows, performing the same experiment under the same circumstances it not very profitable and essentially "wastes" science modules. So my question is, if I where to transmit the data on mission 1 and then go back and keep the data for recovery to Kerbin on mission 2, would I actually end up forfeiting points? Basically is it worth transmitting data or would it cost me in the long run? My main aim is to gain science as quickly as possible in as few missions as possible without potentially "wasting" science.

Thanks you, what can I say I'm a KSP purist

Hi, I'm new to Kerbal forum but I've been playing KSP for about 4 months now I only play vanilla but like to try the occasional mod (such as scansat) just for the fun of it, I refuse to use mechjeb as I think it takes half the fun away from the game. I've managed to land on Duna and return safely and build a 4 module space station in a Minmus orbit without it so I don't think I need it to get by. I'm here to attempt your challenges and share information