Norcalplanner

Just be careful the new nose doesn't get too close to a certain existing design...

I figured that was yet another facet of the challenge of GEP Primary, but part of me is glad that I won't have to pack quite so many solar panels. Out of curiosity, is that supposed to be watts/m2 at the top of atmosphere? I seem to recall that it's somewhere around 1354 IRL.

I can testify to that. This screenshot was taken in GEP Primary at 2.5x in KSP 1.4.3: When I tried a Kerbal X, the upper stage was misaligned so much that the Poodle (which has a lot of gimbal) could barely keep it straight-ish. Turning off SAS resulted in the the craft spinning around with frightening velocity. And when the heatshields are misaligned (which they frequently are) the capsule tends to blow up on reentry because it isn't fully occluded (and because the heating is greater with a rescale).

I see what you did there @OhioBob... Pulling a page from the Minmus playbook, you sly dog... Thinking about players who want to build sprawling bases and giving them a dedicated biome to do it... THANK YOU!

On the other hand, stock scale GEP Primary with the Decoupler Shroud mod is eminently playable. :-)

Awesome sauce - thanks for the tip. I played stock solar system 1.4.4 for awhile and didn't have any noticeable problems, yet 1.4.3 GEP at 2.5x scale is nearly unplayable atm.

An annoying small kraken appears to reside on the 2.5x Nodens launch pad, misaligning parts on nearly every launch with resultant CoM and CoL difficulties. This new career may have to wait for updated mods and version 1.4.5. Other than bugs with the install, the only changes I've made are to reduce terrain height in the rescale to 0.58 (the same as 2.5x Gael) and increase the cloud height config from 9000 to 10000. With these changes, the KSC is at 5km altitude or so, and the clouds no longer resemble ground level fog.

Great minds think alike! Although I'd be lying if I said that Battlestar Galactica and Dragonriders of Pern had no influence on my thinking...

Fully understood and acknowledged. I anticipate spending a lot of time on and around Belisima cranking away on the science to unlock some of the higher tier modded parts which will make interplanetary travel feasible. [cough - DSEV - cough] FWIW, the idea is that the crew of the colony ship from Gael (pictures posted earlier in the thread) successfully colonized Nodens. This was followed by some unnamed cataclysm during which they lost contact with Gael, along with much of their accumulated knowledge. No knowledge of Karborundum remains, but the enterprising Nodensians (?) did discover some old computer files transmitted from Gael millennia ago labeled "WBI". It's time to rebuild the space program from scratch, and explore the Grannus system. And if things go well, they just might eventually try to travel back to Gael.

2.5x GEP Primary install currently being finalized...

Thanks in advance for all your help.

Quick question - does the newest version of SSTU still have the tank mass upgrades? In my 1.3.1 career, I frequently used the lightweight and superlightweight options in the late game. I can't seem to find the tank mass upgrades in any of the nodes in the R&D center in my new 1.4.4 career. No worries either way - just looking to see if the feature is still around or if I need to begin a mod compatibility bug hunt. Update: Well, the various tank options are there in the config file, so it looks like they're intended to be there. Can anyone else using SSTU confirm whether the tank upgrades are present in their save? In other words, is it just me?

It depends on how many CTT nodes you have, and your preference for grindiness during play. If you plan on using the science lab, you'll still likely be done with the whole tree without going further than Minmus. If you're using other mods which provide a use for science points (BARIS, Kerbal RnD) then you can keep the percentage higher. My own yardstick is to tweak the percentage down until you regularly find yourself in situations where you can't do everything you want to do, while still being able to do many of the things you want to do. Whether that's at 70% or 50% or 30% is up to you. One final suggestion - don't use Science Relay unless you have an extremely low science percentage.

Today I scared the socks off of Tito Kerman. It's a new 1.4.4 career, featuring all of @Angel-125's WBI mods. Including BARIS. With launch failures and catastrophic failures enabled. [gulp] Tito was very eager to be the first tourist into space. As a result, we pushed things a little too fast trying to get him up there. 100,000 funds reward, 15,000 fund ship - how hard can it be? Failure #1. Thankfully I had set up the abort action sequence correctly. Failure #2. At this point I'm starting to get concerned that we might not make much money on this contract. Failures #3 and #4 were variants on #2. Failure #5. A little hard to see the failure message, but the lower tank developed a leak, followed by the upper tank following suit. At least we got past the Karman line for a little suborbital hop. Failure #6. The upper stage tank exploded catastrophically, forcing us to come back down before ever leaving the atmosphere. The stage was set for success thanks to a timely event card. Seventh time's the charm. Jeb and Tito finally made it into orbit, and were able to stay there for the four hours specified in the contract. On reentry, BARIS showed that it has a sense of humor. Both capsules had failures in their Snack storage compartments in the upper atmosphere. The mental image of panels coming loose and two streams of snacks flying out of the craft seemed oh so very Kerbal, and put me in stitches. For the record, we lost money on the contract. It was worth every penny.

Awesome. Thanks for the heads up.

It's official - this mod (along with The Spice) is a part of my new 1.4.4 career. I may have questions in the future after I unlock some of the more interesting parts. :-)

Great mission report. Keep up the good work!

An upscaled system with stock-ish part stats and Kerbal R&D can be a fun way to play the game, particularly with Community Tech Tree. You'll always be torn whether to spend science points unlocking a new node, or improving the stats of parts you've already unlocked. I'd also recommend against Science Relay, as it makes it far too easy to keep multiple labs fully fed with science data.

In my experience, MKS and USI-LS just slow things down, especially when you're in physics range. The only advice I can give is to use fewer larger converters and tanks, especially if you're using reactors or anything else which generates heat. And if you're in a career save, be ruthless in limiting the number of craft that the game has to track. I've actually had saves where I never upgraded the tracking center past level 2 just so the asteroids would never spawn.

Landing on Lili is one of the many awesome activities in GPP which goes into the "Interesting Challenge" category. They all contribute to making GPP the premier planet pack that it is.

One more thing in case some folks aren't aware - the idea of putting fuel tanks on top of SRBs has a real life basis. Although it was never built, the proposed Saturn V/4-260 would have had four massive SRBs with fuel tanks on top of each SRB feeding the center core. The solution was intended to solve the structural and manufacturing problems associated with stretching the S-IC first stage (a modification found in several other Saturn V study variants), while still massively increasing the total payload weight to orbit. More info can be found here: http://www.astronautix.com/s/saturnv4-260.html

A single Kickback costs 2,700 funds, and puts out 650 kN of thrust for a little more than a minute. To get equivalent performance from an LFO engine and tank you'd need a Skipper (5,300 funds) plus (if memory serves correctly) a Rockomax 16 and a Rockomax 8 (2,350 funds) for a total cost of 7,650 funds. The Skipper and fuel tanks will weigh less, and be more versatile due to gimbaling and throttling, but they can't compete with the Kickback on cost.

There was a challenge thread a while back based around lowest cost per ton of cargo for vertically launched rockets using LFO engines and SRBs. I recall that many of the successful entries had fuel tanks on top of clusters of Kickbacks; the tanks would feed the center core, and were sized so they ran dry at the same moment the SRB clusters would be staged. Sounds like the OP is on the right path, imho.

The kraken was kind to me, and thoughtfully put all the ship parts back where they belonged. As a result, we got this: Followed by this: Culminating in this: Not sure if I'll keep going with this career at this point, since I'm a bit burned out. 44K science in the bank, 60M funds in the bank, several billion worth of Karborundum in Gael orbit, and we've validated the ESLD jump beacon and Karborundum torch drive hardware and architecture so that it can take us anyplace we want to go... which doesn't seem all that challenging or interesting at this point. Probably take a break for a while, then come back with a new career featuring Angel-125's mods just to shake things up a bit.

My thousand-ton colony ship finally arrived at Nodens in my 2.5x GPP/GEP career. Here's the ship making one of a half-dozen burns to slow down, match planes, and intercept Nodens. Gael is very far away. The end is in sight. The first of three burns resulting in a 500 km orbit. It is finished. In a circular 500 km orbit around Nodens, second planet around the red dwarf star Grannus. Brought to you by Karborundum torch drives. :-)