RizzoTheRat

Yikes, it's Mr USI himself. So by the sound of that (and your GitHub documentation) USI-LS is focussed on the long game and with Kolonisation is the better choice for someone who want's to build a space empire, while TAC-LS is more focussed on the complexity of a keeping ships supplied? For a new career game I'm wondering if TAC-LS might prove more rewarding in the short term (more to think about in early mun/minimus/station missions let alone interplanetary), while UKS provides much better scope to build permanent off world resupply bases that would start to become more interesting later in the game. Tough decision, I'd love to have a proper refuelling/supply depots spread around the solar system, but on a new game it'll take a long time to get to that point. Love the idea of health and space madness, how far off are they? Keep up the good work.

I tend to leave landers in orbit of wherever they landed on, then future missions can refuel and reuse it rather than hauling their own lander. I suspect RCS cockups are quite common. I've forgotten to turn on symmetry and only put 1 block in instead of 4 on a resupply ship before now, ended up having to manoeuvre the mothership to get them to dock

I cheated last night! New career game and I forgot to put a solar panel on my first Mun flyby ship. Ordinarily I'd have reverted to VAB (which some people consider cheating) but I couldn't as I'd already popped out to the KSC as I'd also forgotten to upgrade the tracking station. I could have de-orbited it then launched another mission, but I couldn't because I'm lazy. So I just edited the quicksave file to give Jeb some electricity. I do consider that a cheat, but then again it's in a part of the game I've played loads of times and was only to get around my own stupidity. Had I reverted to VAB or had a save game to load I wouldn't have considered it cheating so it's funny how we all have our own boundaries, and how little there really is between something we consider fine and something we consider a cheat So I think I don't consider it cheating if I know how to do it properly. eg I use Mechjeb to automate stuff I can easily do but can't be bothered to (execution of nodes I've already set up, setup nodes to match velocities, etc), and occasionally to launch large craft where lag makes flying them manually a bit tricky, but always do my own landings and dockings. Someone who uses Mechjeb straight away for all their operations is missing out on something in the game that I find fun, but maybe that's not what they're playing the game for. Clearly I'm missing out on elements of the game such as driving trains round the planet or building submarines, but that's not what I play for. I'm probably cheating in real life at the moment too because I'm browsing the KSP forums when I'm being paid to do work that I don't have.

I fancy having a dabble with life support in the new career game I just started. Hunting around the forums I think I prefer the added complexity of TAC over USI, but I really like the idea of the USI Kolonisation mod, the download page for which suggests it supports TAC, but a few other forum posts (mainly on Steam) are suggesting it doesn't any more. Anyone using TAC-LS and Kolonisation? As far as I can tell the resources are different so how do they work together? Am I better off using TAC-LS and one of the greenhouse mods rather than Kolonisation? Is it worth using the simpler USI-LS in order to gain the nice complexity of Kolonisation without any issues?

When your wife cooks a lovely roast lunch for your birthday and invites some friends round, and you're trying not to be grumpy about it because you'd rather be building that new station that you've been thinking about.

Been working abroad for the last few months so only getting to play KSP at weekends, and then not all that often. Finally succumbed last night and took my work laptop home. Installed KSP, KER, KAS, KIS, ScanSat and RemoteTech, started a new career game and got as far as doing a flyby of the Mun with a couple of materials labs and goo containers. It's good to be back. Think I'll add in life support and Kolonisation this time too.

Locking the camera is the key thing for me (although it now seems to work slightly differently than it used to and slews with my position relative to the target), along with setting the vessel to control from the docking port, and targeting the other ships docking port. Then it's just a case of flying it on the nav ball. WASD to keep the nose pointing at the target, and IJKL to keep the prograde vector pointing at the target, or off to onside slightly if you want to straighten up your approach. Unless it's a big unwieldy station I'm docking with I'll usually switch to the target and rotate it so the docking port faces the ship too.

Ed Lu's a dirty cheat, spending all that time training at NASA just so he could do better than other noobies at KSP! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHjaqeeoAKk

Although that's possibly cheating the forum not cheating the game I'm sure everyone has their own idea of what cheating is to them, and that's likely to change depending on what they're doing at the time. Personally this game is about me vs physics within the construct of the game, so anything that gave me an unfair advantage like infinite fuel or turning drag off would be a cheat, but for someone who wanted to see how high a pogostick could bounce or just have fun zooming around the KSC in a flying chair they might not be. Flying trains look a bit cheaty to me though

Precision landings usually involve judicious use of the quicksave in my case. One way which usually works but isn't the most efficient is to put a manoeuvre node over the target site dropping the speed to zero, to find out how long a burn you need to stop, then start that burn at half the time from the node (ie if it's a 30 second burn start 15 seconds from the node). This lets you counter most of the bodies rotation as you position the node quite soon before landing, and having killed your horizontal speed you drop down vertically on the target. 30 days is plenty to get to the mun and back, how much extra weight would have to carry to have them survive a day or so in the lander before you could rendezvous with an orbital fuel/supplies dump? Minimus takes a bit longer but still easily doable in 30 day, and if your lander's manned (kerbal'd) you don't really need a comms network, but could have an antenna on the supply dump if you like to keep in touch.

You'll get a lot more science for them if you can bring them home, or are you planning on landing a lab for them to starve to death in?

Personally I wouldn't leave them to die. I always plan to bring them back and if something goes wrong will send a rescue mission. I'm not using life support though which I presume makes your craft heavier, and rescue missions too slow. Can you leave some of the life support equipment on the surface and have a lighter stage to get off the mun, or do an Apollo style mission where the majority of the life support equipment stays in orbit? Or just leave them on the surface with a bag of potatoes and see how they do.

I hadn't realised that, I've been using the flames as an indication that I'm going too fast at that altitude and altering my profiles accordingly for future launches. Sounds like I need to be to turning sooner and getting more horizontal speed lower down than I usually do. I'm generally needing about 3500 m/s dV on my launchers, is Plusck's 3250 m/s about right for an optimum launch or is anyone getting much lower than that?

In my early days of KSP when I'd just about got the hang of docking in orbit. Tweaked a manouver node so my ship would rendezvous with the station 180 degrees later, did the burn and accelerated time for bit to get them close, didn't start the burn to match velocities soon enough and crashed in to the station, from the other side of the fricking planet! Its not even like I'm any good at pool!

I'd struggle to get away with killing that many crew if I tried it in real life though

One of the things I love about KSP is that it's a space sim but there's nutters like you building beautiful stuff that is way out from what the game was intended for. Bravo sir. Is the Trucking on Duna link at the end just a placeholder for a video that's still to come, I can't see it on your channel.

Ah, I assumed signal delay was standard. I tend to set up manoeuvre nodes and leave it to the RemoteTech autopilot to execute them, which is fine for any tasks except landing, which I've not done with anything unkerballed yet.

Kerbal alarm Clock will let you set an alarm for the best launch window, so you can accelerate time and it'll drop you back to real time at the right point. Alternatively you can use a calculator to work out when the next launch window is and forward to tat time manually http://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/ The tutorials show that point because it's the case in which you'll use the least fuel, you can go any time you like if you accept that it'll take longer and use more fuel.

Is there a added transmission delay for every node you route through? The OP's system of using a LKO network rebroadcasting to a higher altitude network which then broadcasts to the Mun/minimus seems over complicated and if there is a rebroadcast dealy could cause further issues. I go for a network of 4 satellites in LKO, each with a communotron 16 and two DTS-M1s. The 16's keep all the satellites in communication with KSC, and then I have one on the DTS-M1's pointing at the Mun and the other at Minimus (could do just 1 but saves me keep swapping them). The DTS-M1 has a wide enough cone that anything in Mun or Minimus orbit is within the field of view, and the LKO satellites are in the field of view of one orbiting Mun/Minimus and pointing at Kerbin without needing to aim them at specific vessels. For longer range comms I would usually put a geostationary komsat above the KSC with a long range antenna, and a couple of other geostationries to provide full coverage, but having seen someone elses screenshots of his Communotron 16 based ground network, I'm tempted to have a go at building 2 or 3 ground based long range comms stations that would communicate with the KSC via the existing communotron 16 LKO network. Harder work than satellites because I'll have to fly them to their locations and have enough battery power to run through the night, but I choose to do this (and the other things) not because it's easy, but because it's hard.

My designs are definitely more efficient than when I started, I try to keep the weight down as much as I can on the payload (usually landers) so the launch stages are a fair bit smaller for equivalent missions then they were when I first started. I do asparagus but I've never done anything with a second ring of asparagus stages (ie my biggest are 6 asparagus booster around a single core), I prefer that that approach to very tall rockets that tend to be wobbly. I've started down the route of increased realism too. I love the limitations of RemoteTech, and having to set up communications relays and plan probe manoeuvres so that they have a communications signal. I'm very tempted to have a go with a life support mod at some point, and I think the full Realism Overhaul looks like fun but might have to wait for a PC upgrade first.

Lovely story. Great way to spend time with your granddad. Sounds like you ought to have a go with some of the realism overhaul type mods to let him have a play with the real solar system.

Historically that's about the point they release a new version and I start a new career game You can get most of the way through the tech tree just visiting the Mun and Minimus, and after a Mun landing or two you've got the technology to put fuel depots in orbit as Kerik describes. This game I did all biomes on Minimus in one mission and had enough fuel left to go and do a couple more on the Mun, so you can really start to refine your ship designs in the early game and learn valuable lessons for later exploration (why I think career is far better than sandbox for new players). By the time you've done that you'll be getting pretty good at landing roughly on target and at docking in orbit, both very useful skills. Duna or Ike are usually my next stops as they're the contracts that usually come up, no point paying to go somewhere else when I can be paid to go to them.

So with ISRU conversion keeping the same mass (I think), that would convert to 860 tonnes of fuel, or nearly 12 of those big Kerbodyn tanks? I've not tried capturing an asteroid yet, sounds like fun.

I like the fact that several people have liked this post. For me it's a range of reasons Someone gives me a good answer to a question I've answered Someone's done something interesting Someone's achieved something new to them that they're proud off (we all remember our first Mun landing) Someone posts something that I like

Is there a limit to how much ore you can pull out of an asteroid, or can you just keep landing mining and refining gear on it until you have enough to keep the engines running?