Starman4308

I'm not 100% sure why. My only real guess is I was able to afford a reasonably nice GPU, which I can use to throttle KSP graphics to the max. Will try to post one more chapter tonight: I'm working on the Theseus-Ariadne project, and once that's up, I'll pretty much be caught up with my backlog of things to post. Right now, I'm filming it using NVIDIA ShadowPlay, and realizing I have no idea what I'm doing with the movie. I'm now treating it as a practice run for later missions. If you have any comments, by the way, fire away. This is my first real creative project in a long, long time, and I am almost certainly making mistakes. Like not turning the video recording on or leaving my microphone off. There are multiple reasons why the video of Theseus-Ariadne II will never see the Internet.

Project Hermes II: Year 302-303 In preparation for extended lunar activities, communication relays were placed in polar orbits over Ceti and Iota, with two powerful directional antennae, one always pointed at Gael, the other oriented to assist in communicating with inbound vehicles. Placed about 5,000 km above the poles, these relays have only two small dead-zones near the equator, which move as the moons rotate beneath the relays, and may be covered by direct communications to Gael. More constant equatorial communications could be achieved either via a pair of satellites in highly elliptical orbits reminiscent of Molniya orbits, or a trio in equatorial orbits. Unfortunately, geostationary orbit around these moons is impossible, as they rotate so slowly that geosynchronous orbit is well outside their Hill spheres. Project Richter: With Sincerest Apologies to the Moons Year 303, Day 140: Richter 1 Launches Now confident in our capabilities for remote vehicle control, plans were laid for our first robotic landers, under the aegis of Project Richter. Massing 21 tons at launch, propelled by a KW Maverick-1D, with the lander itself massing 3 tons (750 kg dry), the design was relatively minimalistic: no heavyweight experiments were included, just a lightweight RWPS, magnetometer, thermometer, barometer, and seismometer, which would be used to record the effects of lunar impacts. Day 142: Richter 1 Landing The landing was, almost surprisingly, successful, although significant over-throttling was applied, leading to wastage of propellant on descent. The lander continues to operate today as a seismometer, although no more full-time staff are assigned to its mission. Day 175: Richter 2 Launch Day 183: Richter 2 Landing An identical probe was sent to Ceti. Standing policy has been to design probes and landers capable of landing at both moons, as delta-V requirements are similar, and the vast majority of scientific experiments can be conducted at both moons. Landing was once again a success; a weak magnetic field was detected, indicating that the core does rotate, albeit slowly. Year 303: A Foray into Double-Dipping Contracts Multiple commercial objectives were met with a single probe. A radio company was hosting a PR stunt to advertise their radio antennae as being able to hear transmissions all the way from Iota, one of our primary fuel-tank contractors wanted to test a heat pump for cryogenic propellants, and we needed a good impact to help calibrate the sensors on Richter 1. It was a smashing success. Project Rayleigh-Cartographer: Orbital Telescopes and Multispectral Scanning of Gael Year 303 Once again combining objectives, project Rayleigh-Cartographer combined launching the second ill-fated orbital telescope with a Gael survey telescope and a multi-spectral sensor to help further map Gael. It accomplished its Gael-survey objective in a week, before returning to a lower orbit for telescopy observations, returning the famous "A Distant Blue Miracle" photo of Tellumo.

You guys are quite comprehensive about answering questions. Thanks: I suspected that was the case, but I wanted to check before posting the next chapter.

So, quick question: I know double-posts are usually frowned on, but if I'm the OP of a mission report thread, am I allowed to post different segments in consecutive posts? It's not seeing much traffic yet, and I'm ready to post another segment before anybody has replied. Should I just edit the prior post if I have another segment done before anybody replies?

It would help to have a craft file, because then we can see how much fuel each stage has, etc. I would suggest installing either KER or MechJeb, and checking the delta-V. My initial suspicion is too much thrust, not enough fuel/burn time per stage. EDIT: And it may help to refer you to KerbalX, a craft file sharing website.

Rayleigh Project: The Outer Planets Year 304 Gratian: Absolutely Not Duna, Nor "Mars" from Human Space Program A stark, arid planet, very similar to Duna, but with smaller ice caps. While Duna was the first target of the Kerbin-system space program, the GSP will almost certainly focus first on Tellumo, a fellow terrestrial planet. No known moons exist, certainly none so grand as Ike. While no obvious signs of an atmosphere exist, the presence of ice caps is strongly indicative. An exploratory probe will likely be expended to check whether or not there is an atmosphere. Otho: The First Gas Giant The nearest of the gas giants, Otho has four known moons, of which the two largest (Hephaestus and Augustus) are named, with the other two pending naming. Otho, much like Gauss and Nero, is brilliantly banded in ways Jool never was, although some would argue Jool had much more interesting moons. Augustus: Otho's First Moon Relatively large and brown with a heterogenuous surface. We need better cameras. Probably airless. Hephaestus: Otho's Second Moon Also large and brown, although the composition is likely different from Augustus. The Lippershey Society wants another go at this, since the appearance of Otho is clearly artifacted, with possible data corruption. Gauss: The Second Gas Giant, Blues Edition Blue, unlike the other gas giants, Gauss has very visible turbulence and very large storms. It is known to have two satellites, Catullus and Loki, of which Catullus has its own satellite, Tarsiss Catullus: An Interesting Moon And Tarsiss, its Sub-Satellite Catullus is a small, grayish moon, with a thin halo possibly indicative of atmosphere, and possible ice-caps. Orbiting it is Tarsiss, a smaller, brown rocky sub-satellite. Loki: A Small Moon of Gauss No imagery available, because somebody forgot to take the photo of technical difficulties. Approximately the size of Tarsiss. We really, really need better cameras. Nero: The Third Gas Giant A seemingly more sedate gas giant, Nero is known to have at least one un-named moon. More thorough investigation will be required once we have another telescope up: see technical notes below. The one known moon was discovered using the first version of our telescope pointing software, and the image is... poor. Grannus: The Second Star It appears the Ciro system is binary, with Grannus orbiting around the larger Ciro with a closest approach of 4 Tm. While it will require very sophisticated antennae to communicate to, we are hopeful that it will provide new knowledge about the formation of solar systems. Technical Notes on the Rayleigh Project There have been two orbital telescopes involved. The first telescope was a temporary affair, launched in the middle of year 302. Due to dissatisfaction with the fixed operating system and underpowered electrical system, it was decided that we would attempt some risky photos of some of the inner planets. This ended in failure, as it pointed too close to Ciro and the optics were fried. The second orbital telescope was launched four months later, and obtained some brilliant imagery of Tellumo and Grannus before an inexperienced operator accidentally released the camera instead of the shutter. It was used, however, to develop the second version of software for telescopy, which will allow for much improved scanning for moons, allowing consistent pointing at an offset from a planet, instead of having to manually offset, which was a very unsteady process.

I thought it was common knowledge that unless the atmosphere is on fire, it is still not enough power. But, this is one of the great things about KSP: you can push things to absurdity on the cheap, and then show everybody screenshots when it finally ceases to work.

SETI is not some authoritative rebalancing; it is one way to rebalance things, and others may disagree with parts of that. Due to the ARR license, it's impossible to package in SETI (and no, not everybody uses CKAN), or redistribute any modifications* to SETI, etc. An ARR license gives you total control over the package, which inherently denies anybody else control over the package. *The configurations might be over-writable by adding a second MM patch to run after SETI, though.

But what if you add more power? I mean, you haven't yet added a second pair of wings, or over-wing/fuselage-mounted engines or a RATO/parachute-assisted landing system.

I think @linuxgurugamer, @CarnageINC, and possibly others are trying to make a comprehensive rebalancing package, and they can't bundle an ARR mod with their package, thus, reinventing the wheel is necessary. As to command-pod masses, I'm seeing roughly 800 kg per astronaut at minimum, out to almost 2000 kg per astronaut for the big, long-range, extended-duration vehicles. If there were a way to enforce a maximum range from home, I'd be halfway tempted to leave the Mk. 1 as-is, and have the bigger capsules pegged to maybe 1-1.25 tonnes per astronaut.

For the life of me, I can't figure out what's wrong. You might try dumping the contents of "ap" to the terminal just before calling the EXECUTE_ASCENT_PROFILE method, so you know exactly what's being passed. When in doubt: throw print statements everywhere.

You may also want to try increasing the wing area. You're running up against the square-cube law: wing area is only going up as the square of dimension, while volume/mass is going up as the cube. You may want to take a look at the An-225 Mriya cargo plane; it has pretty large wings relative to its fuselage.

Mostly because Squad. The parts, as they are right now, can be a bit incoherent, and Squad's focus on Kerballed exploration doesn't really help for small probes. I know one of @NecroBones's mods has a mini radial decoupler, I think in his Modular Rocket Systems pack. I can forget which part comes from which pack, in part because I have most of his mods installed.

First: it's not a memory leak unless it isn't garbage collected and just accumulates. Second, if the memory accumulation coming from Unity classes, there's basically nothing Squad can do about it. Remember that Unity isn't the ideal option for KSP: it was simply the least bad option, and that a "good" engine for KSP doesn't exist, because KSP strays so far outside the norm for video games. Third, there's a lot of background calculations that are going to generate a lot of temporary variables. While in theory, you could do something to try to keep those memory addresses open for the next physics tick... that's basically manual memory management, something that takes a lot of programmer time not just to make sure it works, but also that it doesn't cause an actual memory leak.

Wait, I misread your scripts the first time. It's getting into territory I haven't particularly trod in; I've gone for monolithic scripts without much in the way of functions, mostly because I've only really needed single-purpose scripts (such as "execute maneuver node" or "point telescope at thing"). My only kinda-guess is that launch.ks doesn't have access to the EXECUTE_ASCENT_PROFILE method of ascent.ks, and is freaking out as a consequence. I'll have to look into how kOS handles importing libraries and methods from other files, though hopefully someone else will come along who's done that kind of work before.

You should, instead of setting twr once, use the LOCK command, which re-evaluates that expression repeatedly. Will make the post more detailed when I'm back at my desktop. EDIT TIME: So, while I'm not sure on how the second line is working (you can always try something like PRINT myEngine to make sure it's what you think it is), the bug is pretty obvious. At line 3, it sets the variable twr to the current value of myEngine:THRUST / (g * ship:mass). It then never updates itself. SET is a one-time thing. There are two solutions: #1, replace line 3 with "LOCK twr TO myEngine:THRUST / (g * ship:mass). You may then want to add an UNLOCK command after line 5 so that you don't waste CPU cycles continuing to compute that. The difference between SET and LOCK is that LOCK is evaluated at every tick. #2: Run the SET command in a loop, as so: SET g TO body:mu / (altitude + body:radius)^2. SET myEngine TO SHIP:PARTSTAGGED("Firststage")[0]. SET twr TO 0. // Give it a dummy initial value before running the loop. STAGE. UNTIL twr > 1 { SET twr TO myEngine:THRUST / (g * ship:mass). WAIT 0.1. // Wait 0.1 seconds in between runs through the loop. General good practice since kOS takes more electricity the more evaluations it does. } STAGE. As to why launch.ks fails... the first command is "RUN ascent.ks"... without any parameters, and the ascent.ks script expects three parameters.

The Rayleigh Project: Surveying the Ciro System Year 303 With substantial payloads being sent to space, the Gael Space Center, in collaboration with the Lippershey Astrononomical Society, funded a 1-ton space telescope equipped with a camera capable of 12,800x zoom, and began to categorize the major bodies of the Ciro system. Ciro: The Central Sun Ciro is the center of the Ciro system, a smallish, pale yellow star 45 Gm from the suspiciously perfectly reasonable circular orbit of Gael. Again, no giant space monkeys need be invoked here. Presumed to not be hospitable to Kerbal livelihood at close distances. Imagery: Are you going to point your camera directly at a star? I didn't think so. Niven The only other planet known to orbit closer than Gael. Not much is known, in part because we're waiting for a good angle to look at Niven without frying our telescopes. Imagery: None yet available. Gael: Home Our new home-away-from-home. A beautiful, life-bearing planet very similar to our original home, Kerbin. There are three major continents. The GSC, located on an island near the site of the Transplantation, is on the continent Toto. The largest continent is named Glinda, which has two auxiliary launchsites; the DomRok launchsite on an island just west of it, from which we perform retrograde launches, and the Southern Site, located on a bay 60 degrees south, from which we conduct most of our polar launches. The last, smallest continent is named Oz, and has not been explored as well as either of the larger continents. Imagery: Numerous. Iota: Gael's First Moon Iota, along with Ceti, gave a strange sense of familiarity to our ancestors when first deposited on the surface of Gael. Relatively small, a mere 320km in radius, and 88,000 km distant, but very bright in our sky thanks to its high albedo. Studies of this moon are underway in preparation for our first landing on another world in the Ciro system. Ceti: Gael's Second Moon Ceti is the larger and further of Gael's two moons, at 480km in radius with a semi-major axis of 174,000 km. Much more darkly colored than Iota, and on a more inclined orbit, it is considered a tougher target than Iota, and is second on our priority list. Its strange, mottled appearance is a subject of debate among Kerbal scientists, as it is clear that large sections are dominated by different types of rock. Tellumo: Our Terrestrial Neighbor Tellumo is a subject of great interest, as it is A, close to us, and B, well... Gael is not the only terrestrial world in the Gael system. Its ice caps appear more extensive than those of Gael, and has but one tiny little moon, Lili. No obvious signs of intelligent life exist, although plans for Tellumo exploration include extremely strict planetary protection requirements. A sample of life on Tellumo is greatly desired, to see if it matches Gael life-forms, which would confirm a panspermic hypothesis of how life originated on one or the other world. Lili: Tellumo's Only (known) Moon What is known about Lili: it appears rocky, it orbits Tellumo, and it's tiny. Bigger telescopes are required.

There are offsetting factors, to the point at which even the RO crowd accepts procedural tanks as having mass proportional to volume. The bigger your tank is, the more aerodynamic stresses it will endure, and you have to thicken the tank walls. Pressurant is probably roughly proportional to volume. There's fuel lines, there's sensors, there's wiring, a thousand other things that make the "tank mass proportional to surface area" model a poor representation of reality.

A few small things: First, I'd like to thank you for helping keep CactEye alive; I've started to use it recently, and it's brilliant, particularly if you're using a planets pack mod and literally don't know anything about the solar system coming into it. Second, the OP has some text saying "a quick tutorial here", but I see nothing there. Do I just need a telescope to see it? Third, will there be any way to keep gyros inactive (and prevent decay) until used for the first time? I'm strongly contemplating sending a telescope on a sundive so I can take a look at the inner planets without frying said telescope.

Wrote a kOS script to handle telescope pointing for me. Specifically, it lets me point the telescope at an arbitrary body, and then pan the camera, using either the arrow keys to pan an arcsecond at a time, or "PITCH X" and "YAW X" for a custom number of arcseconds. I then got it to print out the name of the body closest to where I was pointing at, so I could ID moons without looking at the map. I found Lilli, a small moon in a close orbit around Tellumo that way (it's a tiny little thing, just poking above the horizon of Tellumo). Naturally, I then clicked the "release" button on my telescope, only to find out that that releases whichever camera was installed into the telescope. Time to send up my third telescope. No update for my mission report tonight: I spent all of tonight writing that script.

Surveyor Project Year 302 With basic infrastructure in orbit, the Gael Space Center set its sights on mapping Gael as it never had before, from the ultimate birds-eye view. The first component was the Latchsat satellite, with a powerful radar scanner for altimetry data and a basic camera to take images of our planet. The second component was Valentina's historical launch to orbit, the first Kerbal to orbit Gael. Orbiting our planet three times, Valentina described wonders such as seeing a pod of luminous whales come up for air, the auroras over the poles, and the stars overlooking Gael, one of which may be our original Kerbol shining from a vast distance. Year 303: To the Moons of Gael Project Boomerang By the end of the second year of GSC operations, mission control and Engineering were feeling confident about the chances of sending an exploratory mission to one of our moons, Iota and Ceti. Iota has been often compared to the Mun, being the closer of two moons, just 87,700 km from Gael; however, its albedo is much higher, shining more brightly in the sky despite being smaller than the Mun. The scientific staff would like to once again reassure the public that yes, it is just a coincidence that the Mun and Iota both have almost negligible inclinations and eccentricities. Seriously, stop with the consipracy theories. Giant space monkeys do not need to be invoked to explain four orbital elements. Project Boomerang, Which Yes, Flew Around Iota The Boomerang probe, sent to fly by Iota, was carefully constructed with a bevy of scientific instruments, a high-resolution camera, and a powerful antenna. Flying a mere 40 km over the Iotan surface, Boomerang obtained excellent measurements of Iota's weak magnetic field, and for the first time ever, executed a scientific program without communication to Gael. While a repeat mission to Ceti was suggested, this were put on hold, as bigger plans were underway.

Aniline and RFNA (Red Fuming Nitric Acid). Part of the book "Ignition!" describes how, in the early days, they were experimenting with an aniline-RFNA propellant mix, and thoroughly hated it due to how corrosive and toxic the propellants were; you had to load them at the last minute, in the field... and again, toxic. Its sole redeeming feature was that it worked at a time when they hadn't yet fully discovered how amazingly useful the hydrazine+MON/RFNA propellants were.

I'm getting some serious flashbacks to @CatastrophicFailure's Kraken fics here. Also, was Chief Pilot Aniline temporarily paired with a certain Remote Flight Navigator's Assistant until nobody could live with the two of them together anymore?

Sent off my second orbital telescope, also carrying a mutlispectral scanner to map Gael's biomes, and with DMagic's telescope part (not to be confused with CactEye). The Gael telescopy part of the mission is mostly accomplished (missing just one biome), the multispectral scan is over 50% complete, and afterwards, I'll use the CactEye scope as long as the reaction wheel holds out. I'm also increasingly convinced that Grannus is no moon gas giant, and is instead a red dwarf star. I'll have to double-check the angles at which I've made my prior observations, but I suspect it's shining with its own light, and won't get any partial shadows at any Gael-Ciro-Grannus angle. The rest of my telescopy from today will come up eventually in my mission report thread, for which I'm still working through my backlog. I've got some ideas for my next big mission, though. What I usually do at this point is just send a Kerbal on a free return around the moons; this time, I think I'll take advantage of experiment storage units to bring back much more science than I otherwise would in a single mission. I'll probably use two storage units for space high over each moon, two storage units for space low, and one for science from a robotic lander I send ahead of the manned mission*. *I can keep the second duplicate set of results from the lunar surface in the capsule.

To echo the primary sentiment: single-player game. Play it how you want to, and don't feel bad if you have to take it easy on yourself. It is literally rocket science, and a lot of the difficulty toggles are there because it is a lot to take in. That said, if you want to learn how to play using as few abstractions as possible: #1: Loads of tutorials on Youtube and here on the forum. Keep in mind that, the older the tutorial, the more likely something is to be out-of-date. Anything advising you to build a gigantic asparagus-staged pancake rocket, for example, pre-dates 0.90. #2: Learn to use the trackball for immediate navigation and maneuver nodes for charting your course. #3: When in doubt, throw an expendable probe at it. #4: A few of the basic mathematical concepts Tsiolkovsky rocket equation: delta-V = Gm * Isp * ln(full mass / empty mass) = V(exhaust) * ln (full / empty). This specifies how much you can use your engines to directly change your velocity vector. Oberth effect: the faster you're going, the more orbital energy you can accumulate for a given amount of delta-V; furthermore, prograde and retrograde burns are the best way to add and remove orbital energy. Remember: you always return to the point of your last maneuver unless something gets in the way. #5: No EPA to get offended by slamming nuclear thermal rockets everywhere.