sedativechunk

You're "supposed" to use seperatrons to gently move rockets away from your main vessel once disposed. This becomes a huge problem, though, with bigger rockets. Too many seperatrons will destroy your rocket from their exhaust blast. Also in reality, with rockets huge enough do you really think they would want them surrounding the main rocket so closely?... I've got a new strategy for all my rockets. It's kind of hard to tell in this picture but I use the long girder segments to make my additional rockets/fuel/SRBs farther away from the main rocket/ship. I use hydraulic manifolds because they have the most ejection force, and then I use a structural girder segment and then attach the rocket to the segment. THis keeps everything farther away from my main ship and when I seperate them they don't smash into the main rocket so badly. Just make sure you use struts on the rockets you are attaching as well as the girders otherwise they may fall off. Here is my screenshot, look at the smaller fuel tank right in the middle of the photo to see what I mean:

The others here are correct. This is nothing contract related about retrieving asteroids (although there should be). The whole asteroid redirect thing was the collaboration between NASA and SQUAD. There's nothing really special about it apart from capturing them and I believe taking a sample. They should implement something where they pose a threat to Kerbin, maybe they now will destroy the KSC if you don't intercept it.

I am doing a trial run now of everything for this challenge. If this works out I will be recording my entire journey for this challenge live on Twitch in a second attempt. Here is my ship: Main vessel is the Solarflare x-103 - 4 Skipper engines to break Kerbin orbit followed by 12 nuclear engines with enough fuel on launch to deliver 15,000+ m/s of delta V (that is without the vehicles docked at first). Because I take this game too seriously, everything has TAC life support installed (main ship is carrying enough supplies for 6,000+ days in space) plus the main ship is carrying a cargo container for the lonely space ridden Kerbals as well as a spacious science vessel for them to eat snacks in during the voyage to Jool. First docked - Athena LEM - this ship will be my first Tylo-ready lander and once the fuel tanks detach it has retracted legs underneath to land on Val, Bop, and Pol. Second docked - Delphin III - the third ship design of it's type, this is my Laythe capable ship which will be landing IN WATER and ascending using jet engines. It's my most efficient space craft I've ever built. Third docked - the A.z.z n J.U.G.S lander (don't ask about the name): Additional fuel cargo to compinsate for the extra mass of everything, roughly 13,000 tons of fuel (or whatever units it's in). This is using the KW rocketry 5M parts which were also used to get the main ship in orbit. More details to come. I am doing this as a trial though and then twich TVing the whole thing in a second so everyone knows this is legit.

#1: Used a good tool for trajectory planning. First off you need a good tool for interplanetary travel. Personally I like this tool more for plotting trajectories than the alexmoon one: http://ksp.olex.biz/ The above link will show you where the planets need to be in alignment for doing a successful burn. The customizable "parking orbit" is where you ship currently is in orbit around Kerbin (or whatever planet you are leaving). So if you are in a 80km orbit (80,000 meters) above the surface, you would change that number to 80km. I would recommend avoiding that other site unless you care about exact numbers and the math, otherwise you will confuse yourself. All you have to know is where the planets roughly need to be to do your engine burns. #2): Start somewhere easy. First and foremost, if you are planning your first interplanetary mission, I recommend you send a probe first and not a kerbal or you will likely lose them. And I recommend your first destination be Duna as it is probably the easiest planet to get to. 3): Understand the basics. When you want to go to a planet that is farther away from the sun (Kerbol), then you want to while at sunset. What does this mean? See the map on the olex.biz site I linked to above? If you set your target to Duna, you will notice that, in your orbit around Kerbin, it tells you to burn about 30 degrees on the bottom right of the orbit. To understand this, look at your orbital map from a top down view. Kerbin, just like everything else, has an orbit with an apoapsis and periapsis. Line up your orbital map exactly as it appears on olex and you can see how Kerbin is moving towards it apopasis. Your ship, even though you are in kerbin traveling at around 2,300~m/s, is still in Kerbin's sphere of influence, and you are actually traveling at Kerbin's velocity around Kerbol. You want to add velocity into this Kerbin orbit you are in so that your orbit becomes bigger than the one around Kerbin. It's so easy to understand but hard to explain on a forum! Just try to follow exactly how that site shows you where to burn engines. 3) Approach the target closely. Just encounter a planet isn't good enough. If you are going to Duna but you will be 21 million km away from the target, then you will probably not be able to get into a proper orbit. Also, you may come in too fast. To fix this... 1) Get the engine burn right from Kerbin. If you are going to Duna or any planet for that matter, you want your periapsis where your encounter is to be almost in a vertical line with where your apoapsis is at Kerbin. If you encounter Duna too fast in a curved orbit where you aren't meeting at the other side of your orbit, then you will probably be coming in horrendously fast to get into orbit. 2) Get close enough. Once you break free of Kerbin, try to fine turn your orbit along the way. Ideally you should do this when you are past the halway market to your target. You will see a "closest approach" on your encounter. Add a maneuver node and play with it to try to get your orbit as close as possible, within at least 50,000 meters. 4). Build the right ship. Most interplanetary ships are very slow with nuclear engines. They have a high ISP but they lack the thrust that other rockets do. There are a few workarounds to this. Personally on my ship, it makes it harder to launch, but I attach four massive fuel tanks with mainsail engines. These are basically to help me push my rides out of Kerbin's sphere of influence. Once you break free from Kerbin, usually it's pretty easy to line up your target and make orbit. Whatever you do, build your ships as disposable as possible. Use several smaller fuel tanks with fuel lines and eject them once they run out of fuel. For your return trip, ideally you only need one nuclear engine and a fuel tank to come home without all the cargo and other junk you brought to the planet. I hope this helps!

Sorry to bump this post or anything, but I wanted to update my forum post. I found a bug report about this issue here: http://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/2825 This is the exact problem I am having just as pictured. I built a detachable base on my ship and I leave it behind during ascent. The same still thing's I'm on the ground even though I'm not. I guess there's no workaround for this issue then and it's a known bug?

Hello support people, So I got a weird issue with KSP right now that has happened before. I've built a ship for laythe that can land in the water and return. Well on both Laythe and Kerbin, when I take off from the water the game still think's I'm on the ground or "splashed down". It won't let me quicksave and sometimes my kerbal blows up if he tries to get out of the ship to save the game or do anything. Anyone got any ideas how to workout this problem? I want to do the Jool 5 challenge and I Don't want to have to manipulate/hack my game to fix this in a middle of it.

I've been planning in my head how to do the Jool 5 challenge on these forums. In fact, I've paid several visits to Jool already and my last mission I successfully visited two moons in one trip. I was thinking of taking on all 5 moons with deadly re-entry. I've already used it and Jool itself is far enough from Kerbol to not develop heat as far as aerobraking on Jool. The real challenge is with Laythe! I wanted to see if anyone here has gone to Laythe (or done the Jool 5) with deadly reentry. I've lost two ships with deadly reentry attempting aerobraking on Laythe. For one reason or another, I'm always coming in stupidly fast when I visit Laythe (I'm talking velocitys of 5,000+ m/s). If I go JUST to laythe, I can manage to land and return from Laythe by burning retrograde, but to do the Jool 5 challenge, bringing all the extra cargo along and additional laythe lander (which is the lightest SSTO I've ever built with jet engines), I don't see it being a viable option for me to burn all the fuel to get in orbit. IT would take too long and too much fuel. Has anyone aerobraked a huge vessel around Laythe with deadly re-entry? Furthermore what kind of velocities do you all have coming into Laythe? Every time I visit I end up having to burn fuel for 25+ minutes shedding off thousands of m/s of Delta V. Laythe is hard to get to and tricky to orbit. Even if i was cable to implement heat shield(s) on my entire ride to Jool, the velocities are too high, the heat shields would get too hot and/or the kerbals would experience too much g force. Any thoughts how how to approach this? For now, I'm thinking I'm going to attempt the challenge without deadly re-entry first, but it will be llooooong mission so I wanted to revisit the idea of using the deadly reentry mod again!

Interesting replies, thanks everyone. Like some of you have been bringing up, I am on the boat that they could and would have covered it up because of their national pride. Even to this day, even after the end of soviet Russia and their new world relations, think about it. Wouldn't Russia look kind of stupid admitting after 50+ years that Vladimir Illyushin was actually the first man in space? They would have to rewrite history books, tear down statues of Gagarin, and ultimately make themselves look bad. Another thing to think about is, how would a rumor like this even surface? Even for those who hated Russia back in the 50's and 60's, why would you create a conspiracy about someone else going up into space within their own country? It sounds like this conspiracy theory may actually have some truth to it. Why do I care about any of this? Well, don't you all feel Illyushin should get the credit then for being the first man in space if he really was? Even if his flight was a crash land, he would have still technically been the first person to break Earth's orbit and risked his life in doing so. I don't think we will ever know the real answer. I think the history books accept Gagarin as the first man in space, but I think it's always going to bother me and I'm always going to question if he was really the first one. Not that he isn't a hero by any means and accomplished a great feat himself in the first successful orbit and reentry from space, but I will always wonder if he really wasn't the first one to try.

Hello fellow kerbalnauts! Not sure if this was ever talked about on these boards but I want to bring up the subject of the first man in space. Let me start by saying this is a slightly serious discussion from someone who's studied space and astronomy in college, I don't believe in crackpot theories like the fake moon landing or anything. I also have a huge respect (probably more than most Americans do) for what the Russia has done for space exploration in general. I am just curious as to see how other people feel or think on this subject. A few months ago I watched this documentary on amazon about Vladimir Illyushin and how he was the first man in space. Now yes, this was only a documentary, and documentaries can be made to convince their side of the few and etc. (like the fake moon landing ones). Most of them out there are total BS. With that being said, I've done some of my own digging and research into this question; was Vladimir Illyushin really the first man in space and not Yuri Gagarin? From one side of the story, I've heard that most of the documents on the early days of the Russian Space Program have been declassified. There were not "official" records of him ever having gone to space, and there are many accounts/witnesses that have said Illyushin did not go to space. Russia pretty much recognizes Gagarin as the first true man in space. All is good, right? When we start piecing things together, however, it does seem logical to think that Illyushin really did go to space or they tried to get him there. The story of it is, he did in fact go to space, but a problem occurred during reentry and he ended up crash landing somewhere in China I believe. Evidence to support this is the facts that he was supposedly in a car crash two days before Yuri Gagarin went to space. Isn't that kind of odd? Not only this, but the Soviet Union, their political system was nuts back then. They were a very scandalous country still shaped in the ways of Marxism-Leninism. They could and would have covered something like Illyushin's crash up if it were to cause some kind of political implications or negative image against the Soviet Union. Furthermore they were so notorious that they could have threatened everyone and anyone who could have known of Illyushin going into space. Even after the USSR disbanded, people still feared them hence why declassified documents give a different opinion. What do you all feel, here on the KSP forums? Has anyone else thoroughly read/researched this topic? I do this there are a lot of crackpot theories behind the death of Yuri Gagarin. I personally don't think he was assassinated as part of a cover up or anything, he was a national image of Russia. I do believe however, that it would have been possible that Vladimir Illuyshin was the first man in space and it could have been a cover up after a failed reentry and crash landing.

Like others aid, I recommend using the mod "Kerbal Flight Engineer", it's probably the most popular/used mod of KSP and it baffles me why it isn't an official part at this point. Flight engineer gives you very detailed stats on the mass of your ship, ISP in and out of atmosphere, your delta V in orbit around various bodies, and more. Great mod.

Can't wait to see the stable 0.25 release of this mod! I hope you feel better soon, kickasskyle, and thanks for this great mod! I love the new gigantic parts, they were just what I needed for getting my interstellar ships into orbit. Needless to say, any missions to Jool for the very least are grounded till I have my mega rockets back.

Hello KSP community! So about a week or so ago, I posted here because I was having a problem with my save game of KSP crashing after removing mods. Basically my game would either crash or when I would get into the screen with all the buildings, I would not be able to click on any of them or basically do anything and I feared that my save game was corrupt! But due to some responses on this board, I found the culprit of this issue. If you game is acting up after removing mods (particularly, in the contract career mode) then your problem most likely is CONTRACTS. Certain mods (tiberdyne shuttle to be one as an example) create their own contracts to use their parts in different scenarios. If you delete mods that create contracts, KSP will not reset the contracts and will cause your game to act up/crash. There is a moderately simple fix to this, and this is how I went about doing it (FYI, I happen to be a programmer and game developer myself so I poke around on these issues): 1) Back up your game saves 2) Go to you saves folder for your problematic career save 3) Delete your quicksave files 4) Open the "persistent" file for your game save 5) In the file you will find a section of code called "Contracts", and in between contracts there are the individual contracts labeled as "contract" with their own bracket system of code. I use a program called "Rapid PHP Editor 2014" (for my work) but in this case I used it for my KSP file. I selected all the code between the "Contracts" brackets (that contains the individual contracts) and deleted all the current active contracts. If you don't have a fancy program, you can go through and individually delete contracts. Just make sure you leave the outer "contracts" bracket, just delete the individual one named "contract". 6) This should fix your game, any KSP mods that were forcing you to use contracts should reset and new KSP contracts should come up! Note, this will reset contracts available at the contract building, but this is the one sure fire way to fix this problem from what I discovered. Another forum poster told me this issue may be related to kerbals stuck in orbit that were part of a contract. The fix for me was to simply remove all the contracts related to modded parts. Anyway I hope this helps someone, if you need help respond here and I will try to assist you in fixing your KSP saves!

... mines currently been stuck loading an HGR part for five minutes in 0.25, not sure if HGR is to blame as I have several mods but it is stuck on this particular one (that's why I just got on this forum actually to see if anyone else was having this issue):

I want this an explorable planet (including alll it's moons). Nothing else.

Hey people, Well I'm surprised at the feedback my little forum post as got! As Lemay's comment pointed out, I'm not here to really "complain" so much, I was just curious who else was really that enthusiastic about the career mode edits in the 0.25 update. I see I'm not alone in my feelings. I just don't care about the career path for the game. One of you mentioned getting bored with the game after exploring/building stations and etc. KSP doesn't get boring to me, it never will. The career mode for me dictates too much of what I want to do and sometimes forces me to play the game in ways I don't want. Personally I have played KSP almost 500 hours now. I started playing a very long time ago just on the demo when there was still just the old launch pad, and then I actually bought the game around 0.22 I think earlier this year. Not to re-iterate things or go against the forum rules of posting "features that will never be implemented", but I wish there was more grander features added rather than the whole career bit. As my original post mentioned, I would die for an official "Saturn" like planet. Maybe not just Saturn, but a complete solar system because right now we are missing a few obvious gas giants! Saturn is the most beautiful planet in our solar system and most mysterious with it's ring system. It would have complimented KSP so well if we could have Saturn as part of the game as an explorable planet IMO. They always talk about making more difficulties with this game, Saturn is the place they could do that. Add the rings and make them treacherous to fly a ship through. And Titan, Saturn's moon, in real life they say the atmosphere is so dense that you could literally swing your arms around to fly in it's thick atmosphere! That would be a very interesting element to have in KSP, trying to land a ship through an atmosphere like that an avoiding it's acidic lake systems. What about a molten world as well like the real life Io? We have "Pol", but it's just another boring rock where Io is a stunning moon that is constantly geologically active. I also heard about an asteroid belt, would it be nice if there was an actual one in the game and you had to carefully maneuver around it in a harder difficulty? This game at it's core was a "NASA sim" and part of it's magic was being able to leave the planet and explore space. I feel that the career mode stuff, although it adds more of a "purpose" to the game, takes the focus off of make this game have a grander universe. I am also an indie developer/programmer myself, I get that this game is huge and takes a while to add things. I'm glad they followed through with the career mode as it feels like something they always wanted in the game. But now that it's here, I want the focus to go back to new worlds, exploration, and new ships/parts. I also heard they (Squad) were religiously against adding other stars/solar systems but to be honest, I don't see why not. NASA discovers new exo planets almost on a weekly basis. Assuming we had a dedicated space program with 100+ years of experience in traveling in space, reaching these other solar systems and worlds isn't really that impractical. I'm just an explorer at heart. I've studied astronomy and "the big bang universe" in college, I'm also a hobbyist astronomer with a dobsonian telescope. Part of the magic in KSP for me is the exploring aspect. I like the "science" system in the game because it gives me a purpose to go to these places, but the currency and contracts are piling on features I don't really want and kind of diverts what I want to do in the game. There's also tons of mods that I feel should be part of the "official" game as well but that's a different argument for another day. I'm just stating my dislike for the focus on the career mod.

Well I just tried out the 0.25 update last night and I love the space plane additions as well as the revamped explosions. But one thing though is the whole "career" stuff with funds and everything. Am I the only one that doesn't care about the currency system in the game and the whole space organization thing in general? Personally I love acquiring science and using it to unlock parts. But at the same time, I like to launch my own missions and do my own things rather than be forced to abide to silly contracts and risking running out of funds. I'm all for them continuously updating the game but personally I would rather have more parts, more worlds to explore, and more science things rather than this whole contract/career business stuff. Also, KSP is extremely time consuming as it is, especially to launch interplanetary missions (like the Jool 5 challenge). I don't have all that time to just play this game all the time and waste time doing these silly contracts, especially ones that involves building convoluted rockets to try to get a certain part to a certain altitude and etc. More so than anything, I want to see Saturn make it to the game with all it's awesome moons to explore (including Titan!). Make it happen Squad!

I'm a Unity developer and this news kind of scares me. I did not hear about this and one thing is, I like Unity the way it is now. It is a very tight woven community and the entire platform, well, it's very "fair" in terms of licensing and so forth. You don't have to just be a developer to enjoy it. People can make "assets" for games including models, graphics, sounds, music, animations, and etc. and sell them on their asset store which is really cool and saves time when developing games. I fear if someone else buys them out, they are going to change their policies, make the software more expensive/harder to acquire, and the quality of the Unity software package for developing games will go down as a whole. If another business/company does buy them out, they better keep it the same and not try to change something that is not broken. I want to add on to the Google argument; for the love of god, I pray that Google does NOT buy out Unity. I do like Google and use their products, but they are also a dirty business at heart (especially with their adword campaigns where all their revenue comes from, adwords IMHO is an enormous ripoff and waste of money and I don't know how or why people keep sending on it). They have bought one too many tech/IT start ups already. If they buy out Unity, then they will most likely water it down (for the casuals) and force their branding and "Google account" system into every ounce of it. Them and Microsoft can go suck it.

#1,534. Not picking up enough steam! I haven't bought a lego set in a decade but I would probably get a KSP one!

... when is .25 coming out anyway? Is there an official release?

^ This is for redoing the interior and adding the heatshield.

As a matter of fact, I did and I think the mods somehow may have caused a corruption in the game save. Let me try to explain this whole situation. I wanted to remove several mods from my KSP to the game would load faster and I also got tired of the deadly re-entry and life support. When I deleted the mods, it somehow corrupts my game save but now allowing to click on any buildings or anything, it's like the interface completely bugs out or something. I completely deleted my entire KSP folder (after backing up my saves), re-installed KSP with nothing but the squad folder and NASA Mission folders in the game data, and when I try to load my game save in an un-modded copy, it acts up. SO here's the deal, or what happens anyway... when I load my game save the way into the vanilla KSP, it pops up with several messages saying there are missing parts/components (which is to be expected when mods are moved). The game acts up after I close all those windows. Like, I can't click on any of the buildings. When I try to press escape and go back to the menu, it just gets stuck on the screen with all the buildings. The only one I can visit is the research building and after I try to back out of there, the menu bugs out. When I reload KSP after all of this, my game crashes and creates a crash report. I attempted several things already: 1) I happen to be a programmer and I attempted to modify the game save and remove parts/vessels of mods. This did not work. 2) I attempted to reload all of my old KSP with the mods and delete all active ships in orbit and everything that was using modded parts. My game save is STILL corrupted. I also tried to do this with the vanilla version after deleting everything with mods reloading it into a vanilla version. 3) I've tried both 32 bit and 64 bit versions of the game Basically, what is going on here is the game save is messed up. When I load in, I can't click on any buildings on the main screen anymore. I've looked this issue up a bit and I seen something about not being able to click on buildings if kerbals are missing from science nodes are something. All in all, I just want to be able to use my game save with all my current currency, science, and landing sites (where I planted flags at). I've already sacrified a giant space station that took me over a month to build so I can get a clean game going with less mods. Any ideas?

I'm having some problems with my KSP. I have several mods installed and wanted to remove quiet a bit of them (including TAC life support and deadly re-entry because they are becoming a hassle to deal with anymore). I destroyed all my active flights/vessels using these parts in my save, then deleted the mods. When I load up my save, I am unable to click on any buildings or anything. I can only go to the research builiding and then it won't let me back to the main screen. Additionally I cannot load the main menu either. Why is this happening? I thought after deleting all the active flights and everything using the modded parts that it would be okay to delete them, but it's screwing up my save still. I tried everything I can think of. I backed up my save files but I'm having a ton of problems trying to get my save to load even without any mods. Can someone please help or know why this is happening? You think removing all the mods would make the save file work correctly but that's not the case.

Well to date I've lost every Kerbin I've sent to Laythe in the past. From deadly reentry to not enough fuel to return. Finally I may this super efficient floatable lander using jet engines to gain speed to break orbit. Well my trip was a success until I decided to use quick save. I wanted my Kerbal to swim to a nearby island but it was too far and upon quicksaving he infinitely fell through Laythe's liquid ocean. This whole mission was jinxed with bugged heat shields, physics problems, and now when I actually got there my kerbal infinitely falls through the map! Regardless, here are some pictures of my success. Despite losing my kerbal the ship had a remote pod and did in fact leave orbit of Laythe pretty easily. I may upload to the "ships" section if anyone wants a lightweight laythe landing system. I'm going to reattempt tonight and try to get my Kerbal off the planet this time. Oh and despite the mechanical jeb, I did all the trajectories/dockings/planning manual, I really only use it to keep my ship oriented correctly during those notoriously long engine burns!

Interesting discussion. I don't know the science behind it, but some people here are talking about Mount Everest. Not-to-long ago I went on a big Everest blitz watching all kinds of footage and even thought about going there someday when I'm older to summit the mountain (fyi, it gave me terrifying nightmares actually thinking about it for weeks). Everest peaks at 29,029 feet, and is commonly romanticized as the tallest mountain in the world (mount Chimborazo in Ecuador is actually the highest point on planet Earth). Anyway has anyone actually researched and watch footage of people climbing Everest? It's pretty terrifying. Even at the lower altitudes of 20,000~ feet, people start suffering from decompression sickness, especially those who aren't used to it. Shortness of breath, vertigo, skin anomalies, and fatigue are just a few of the issues the climbers have, not to mention they can suffer blindness from the sun/snow, sunburns, and more. I suppose Duna might be doable, and I'm sure if such an opportunity existed, someone would try it without a suit in reality because that's how humans are. But on the real life Mar's it's not happening. With that being said, the upper atmosphere of Venus is similar to Earth, and assuming you could make something like "Cloud City" then you might be able to survive in a place like that without a suit...

My BIGGEST pet peeve in this game is wobbling docking ports. I know there is the clamp-o-tron senior, but that docking port is just kind of lame/impractical for connecting any command modules with. The standard docking port should have no bending/wobbling effect IMO. I absolutely HATE it, it looks so cheesy/ridiculous to see a rocket bending and wobbling the way those docking ports do with bigger ships. It also makes anything interplanetary extremely annoying/difficult to fly.