Snark

+1 to this advice, in general (and absolutely, try this to see if it helps!) In the current case, though, the (probable) aerodynamic instability, and/or that materials bay (if that's what it is) exploding so that the heat shield is no longer attached to the pod, seems to me likely to spell doom.

In general, yes, it's possible, for a ship that's designed in a way that can take it. That ship, however, is probably doomed. Problems here: Unprotected parts. The mystery goo and Z-400 batteries are sticking off the side of the ship and are not behind the heat shield. It's not going to protect them, they're going to be exposed to the oncoming airstream, and they'll quickly be toast. Vulnerable part in direct contact with heat shield: I'm not sure what that part is right behind the heat shield, but I'm guessing it may be a Science Jr. materials bay, perhaps reskinned from some mod? If so, then there's a good chance it may be a goner, too (though not a foregone conclusion). That part has a max temp of only 1200 K, and a heat shield during reentry can get substantially hotter than that. It miiiiight be OK on a fast steep reentry (ironically enough), if the heat shield doesn't have time to raise its internal temperature up too high. But it'll be dicey. Aerodynamically unstable. It looks to me as though your CoM (center of mass) is probably way too high, i.e. up by that heavy dense pod, and not down by the heat shield. (Because you've got that big, fluffy, low-mass part under the pod). This means that, aerodynamically speaking, that ship is really going to want to flip around and point nose-first, which would cause you problems even if the above-listed ones weren't an issue. The only thing you have available to stop you from flipping is your SAS... and even if you had the hold functionality available (which it looks like you don't), you're going to be pulling so many gees on that steep reentry that probably nothing can stop it from flipping. So, yeah, unfortunately you're probably toast. About the only way I could see that you could pull this one out of the hole would be if you've got an engineer aboard there who can go EVA, disassemblethe ship, discard all the extraneous science gear, re-attach the heat shield directly to the pod, and then re-enter that way. That, I expect, would work fine. For future reference, ways to avoid this sort of problem happening again: Keep everything behind the heat shield. Any part that sticks out from behind it, like the mystery goo and Z-400 batteries here, is gonna have problems. For example, in this case, if you wanted to keep those parts safe, you could have mounted them up on the sloping sides of the command pod, where the command pod's wide bottom end would keep them safely in its lee. Don't attach anything with a low melting point directly to a heat shield. For example, a materials bay is only 1200 K, which is really low. You can mitigate this by attaching some part with a decent temperature tolerance (for example, a Z-1000 battery) between the heat shield and the melty part. Make sure that your CoM is close to the heat shield so that it will be aerodynamically stable during reentry. Don't put big, lightweight parts where they'd need to be in the front of the ship (i.e. at the heat shield end) during reentry. By far the simplest, sturdiest, toughest design for reentry is a conical command pod (like the Mk1, Mk1-2, or similar) that has a heat shield attached directly to the pod. That's an incredibly tough design, is rock-solid stable during reentry, and can handle very fast, steep entries with no problem. I'm sorry I couldn't be the bearer of better news, here.

Moving to Gameplay Questions. A few options: What Vanamonde said. Leave a powerful relay in orbit. Use one of the relay dishes (not the deployable antennas) on your lander. These are sturdy and won't snap from aerodynamic forces. (If you have concerns about their not being aerodynamic, you can have them encased in a fairing.) Use one of the fragile antennas, but keep it retracted while in atmospheric flight, and only extend it after landing.

This thread is sufficiently ancient (well over 8 years) that it would have been done on a much older version of the game, and may no longer be relevant. Certainly everyone involved in the original discussion has long since moved on. Accordingly, locking the thread to prevent further confusion. Thank you for your understanding.

Some content has been redacted and/or removed, due to heated debate crossing over the line into personal remarks. Folks, it's fine to argue your points. Please contain your commentary, however, to the points in question (yours, and anyone else's), rather than the people involved. Address the post, not the poster. Please also bear in mind that while it's fine to make evidence-based arguments about what's realistic or not... a major part of this debate simply comes down to a matter of opinion (e.g. what people like or don't like), for which the question of realism is entirely moot. It's not possible to argue with opinions, because everyone has their own, and everyone's opinion is just as valid as everyone else's. People are going to differ, and that's fine. Please don't try to argue with someone's opinion, or criticize it, or get angry about it, or try to make assertions about what "most people" would like. You're the authority on your own opinion, and nobody else's. It's fine to state your opinion-- please do!-- and give your reasons for it if you like; but leave it at that and don't take it personally when other people have opinions different from yours. Thank you for your understanding.

There's no one "right" answer, as with so many things in KSP. However, the Terrier is a pretty good upper-stage engine. It's crappy and useless in atmosphere, so don't try to launch off the pad with it. However, once you're in space (or, at least, higher than 10 km or so), then it's a great little engine-- fairly lightweight, and has an excellent Isp, which means it's very fuel efficient. So, a small craft that can go to Minmus (for example, with a single kerbal in a Mk1 capsule) will typically launch off the pad using some combination of SRBs and/or a useful atmospheric engine like the Swivel, then use Terrier for upper stages. A lot depends on your actual rocket design, however-- using the "right" engine is only part of the battle. It really matters how the rocket is designed, what sort of stages are used, etc. If you could post a photo of one of your more successful craft (for example, the one that put a probe in Minmus orbit), that would really help us to give you more useful advice, because then we could give you more specific feedback on how you could tweak it to do better.

Great, that's excellent progress! (A lot of KSP players never even make it that far.) Could you post a screenshot of, for example, your probe that got to Minmus orbit? Preferably in the VAB, so we can see the whole rocket including booster stages. (If we can see a picture of the rocket, then we can offer advice on improvements etc. to help get you where you need to go.) Here's how to post a screenshot here in the forum, if you're not familiar with it:

Can microscopic flecks end up with a net positive energy, due to a supply of something like solar radiation, heat from ocean thermal vents, etc.? Sure. In infinitesimal quantities that would be utterly negligible on a planetary scale... unless those flecks end up developing the knack to replicate themselves, in which case they take over everything, are no longer negligible, and form a biosphere. But in the sense of substantial percentage of a body's surface crust materials, spread everywhere, in bulk, without benefit of a biosphere? Generally not-- I'm not aware of any realistic model of planetary formation that would allow for such a thing.

Yes, it's technically possible; but the assertion here is that it's unrealistic. Planet-sized bodies generally form in conditions that involve lots of excess heat (the heat of collisions, the heat of gravitational condensation). The rocks, minerals, etc. making up a body have typically been molten at some point. It's highly unlikely that there would be some sort of ore material sitting around that consists of a net energy-positive mixture of reactive materials that can react with each other but haven't done so over the aeons since formation. Water reacts with sodium. It's not physically impossible to have free metallic sodium somewhere on a planet, I suppose (how that could happen I can't imagine, but for the sake of argument let's posit that it's possible.) But you know where you'll never find metallic sodium? Sitting there mixed in with water ice so that all you have to do is mine it and thaw it out and get useful energy. Other than nuclear fuel, and the results of biological processes (i.e. fossil fuels), can you name a single material on Earth that can be harvested to extract net chemical energy from? (Without using atmospheric oxygen, which itself is a biological product.) Water can overflow and wash out a dam because water releases energy when it flows downhill. It can do this because it has the energy in the first place. It's releasing stored energy. To release stored energy, you have to get that energy from somewhere in the first place-- in this case, it ultimately comes from the sun. If you're mining ore and getting a net exothermic reaction out of it, that means you're releasing chemical energy-- energy that never got released before, including through the hot, tumultuous formation of the planet in the first place. So the question becomes, 1. where did that energy come from, and 2. what stopped it from getting released before now? I'm having trouble thinking of any realistic situation where that could happen-- can you? Note that even the term "ISRU" used on the KSP gizmo that does this is taken from real-world space engineering. The idea of using ISRU for, say, refueling the return leg of a Mars journey is an interesting one. But nobody's talking about "we're going to go to Mars and get energy out of stuff that we mine there." It's all about putting energy in (by nuclear or solar power) to manufacture fuel from local materials. Mars will supply the reaction mass and the necessary chemical elements, yes-- but it will be nuclear or solar power that provides the necessary energy to make it into usable rocket fuel.

Hi @SAA, and welcome to the forums! If you're looking for help and advice, I'd strongly recommend posting over in Gameplay Questions. It's the perfect place for "How do I...?" type of questions. That's where most of the folks-who-want-to-help-fellow-players tend to hang out, so it's a good place to get plenty of responses. Out of curiosity, how far have you managed to get in the game so far? For example, can you get to Kerbin orbit OK? Have you orbited the Mun? (Knowing how far you've gotten is helpful when tailoring advice for you.)

Sure, but from a realism perspective, it doesn't guzzle enough. In KSP, it's easily possible to run a mining/refining rig on fuel cells alone, with no solar input at all, with the fuel cells powering the mining and refining using only a portion of the LFO produced. As long as there's a reasonable ore percentage at the location, and you've got a decent engineer aboard, it works like a charm. And conservation of energy doesn't work that way. That's the part that's unrealistic. To be realistic, it needs to be flat-out impossible to run it on fuel cells. (To be clear, I'm not advocating that the devs should have done that, or that the current design is "bad". From a gameplay perspective, it makes reasonable sense. It just happens not to be physically realistic, is all, like a few other mechanics in the game.)

Except that they aren't-- because they don't have oxidizers. Ethane is a fuel on Earth, sure, because we have all this free oxygen hanging around that biological processes helpfully produced for us. But on Titan, oxygen would be a "fuel" that you burn. For that matter, Jupiter and Saturn are mostly made out of hydrogen, which is a "fuel", right? Uranus is mostly made out of methane-- same deal. But it's not as though you could go to one of those places and harvest them for fuel that you can get energy out of that can run the fuel-gathering process. Heck, for that matter, there's a lot of water in the cosmos, and you can get plenty of energy out of water-- just add sodium! (to be clear, I'm being facetious, there-- the point is that any body that has water is not going to have free sodium lying around) Lots of naturally occurring compounds exist that could react, given a substance that they can react with. The problem is, if they can react, then they do, and what's left over is the reaction product. Which is then something you can't get energy out of, because it's already been got. Yes, that was my point. Realistically, you're not going to be able to land on a dead planet that has never had a biosphere, and mine some kind of material that you can get energy out of (unless you bring your own reagents to react it with). It's absolutely realistic to mine ore and turn it into burnable LFO-- but only with a net energy input. For it to be realistic, the amount of electricity needed to produce the LFO needs to exceed the energy that you could get by burning it in a fuel cell. (By a lot, actually, given that clearly a lot of energy is being thermally wasted, since a KSP mining/refining rig has to have a lot of radiators.)

Yes... but only if the thing you're harvesting has a net positive energy content. Which, in general, typically only happens with biological processes that store energy (e.g. from sunlight). Naturally occurring minerals do not typically have that property. If they could release energy by burning them, they would have already done so. Which means that if you're collecting material on a dead world that has never had a biosphere, you're generally not going to be able to generate net energy from what you mine. You may be able to put energy into it (for example, cracking water to make hydrogen and oxygen), but this requires a net input of energy to the mining equipment. So, for example, it may be somewhat realistic to be able to have a powered miner that makes LFO from ore. But it's very unrealistic if the power requirements are such that you can burn the LFO produced in a fuel cell to run the refining process-- which KSP allows.

KSP has plenty of places where it cuts corners in the name of playability. For example, there are the magical reaction wheels that can supply torque forever without saturating... or planets 1000x denser than real ones, and so forth. All of which I, for one, am totally fine with. It accurately models certain mathematical principles, provides good enough accuracy to get the feel of rocket science across, teaches the "right" lessons IMO, and so forth. Most importantly, it manages to do all that and still be fun, and I'm absolutely fine with a few unrealistic shortcuts if they help to make it so.

Well, yes, this is fairly well known. After all, real-life ion engines are a tiny, almost microscopic, fraction of the thrust of a Dawn. Thrust that's so low they need to keep it up for weeks at a time to adjust their orbits. If they modeled the Dawn on real-life ion engines with realistic stats, it would be utterly unplayable in KSP 1. (Could work in KSP 2, which will allow for continuous thrust while on rails, but not in current KSP.) Per the Wikipedia article on ion engines: In other words, typical ion engines have a thrust that's 8,000 to 80,000 times smaller than the KSP Dawn's... with experimental units topping out at 1/400th the thrust. Yes, physically they make no sense in terms of real-world physics, the way they're currently implemented. It's clearly a game-balance decision, so it would at least give players the idea of "here's what it's like to use a very low thrust but very high Isp engine" and how that differs from the experience of a traditional rocket engine. It's a step in that direction, even if it had to be unrealistically powerful, by a few orders of magnitude, in order to be reasonably "playable".

Hello, and welcome to the forums! What those requirements mean is that you need to be in orbit around the Sun (not orbit of Kerbin). They're listed that way because it's two separate requirements, and you need to satisfy both of them simultaneously. You need to be in orbit, and the thing you are orbiting needs to be the sun. To be in orbit of the sun, that means you need to escape Kerbin's "sphere of influence" (typically abbreviated SoI). In Kerbin's case, it has a radius of roughly 84,000 km, or not quite twice the distance of Minmus. So,all you need to do is boost your craft until it escapes Kerbin's sphere of influence, and there you go.

A substantial amount of content has been removed, due to unsubstantive and inappropriate content such as: personal remarks arguing about arguing Folks, I assume we're all familiar with the difference with objective fact versus opinion, yes? If someone is making claims of objective fact, and you believe those claims to be wrong, then you can argue with it, sure. You can cite your evidence. On the other hand, opinions? You cannot argue with someone's opinion. It's not physically possible. "Your opinion is wrong" is a meaningless statement. Why? Because a person's opinion is simply a statement of what they like, and there's only one authority on that, and that's the person themselves. Trying to argue with someone about their opinion would be as silly as arguing about which ice cream flavor is better, vanilla or chocolate. (Chocolate.) This thread is purely about opinions. There is no "objective fact" here, because everything in this thread is about what people would (or wouldn't) like. Anything you read in this thread, you need to mentally prepend whatever the person said with "I, personally, would enjoy it more if <whatever is written>." Accordingly, please don't try to argue about it. It's pointless. If someone says "I would like X, because <reasons>", you are in no position to tell them they're wrong. You can certainly respond with an opinion of your own, if you like. For example, "I, on the other hand, would hate X, because <reasons>. I would much prefer Y instead, because <reasons>." It's also hopelessly silly to get angry at someone else's opinion, just because it's different from your own. Different people like different things. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ So, to summarize: This is a thread about opinions, not facts. You can't argue with opinions, so please don't try. It's fine to state your opinion. It's fine for other people to state their opinions, too, even if those are different from yours. Your opinion is no more (or less) valid than anyone else's, so please don't act as though it is. Your opinion is yours. Please don't presume to speak for anyone else, including what "everyone wants". You don't know what everyone wants; you only know what you want. If someone wants to say what they want, they are welcome to do so for themselves. Above all, please do not descend to personal remarks, or get into off-topic areas such as arguing-about-arguing. Thank you for your understanding.

Some content has been redacted and/or removed. Folks, in case it wasn't clear when Vanamonde said ...this also implies: please do not make personal remarks, in case that wasn't clear. Thank you for your understanding.

Various content has been removed, due to: personal remarks and provocative language accusations backseat moderating Folks, let's please remember that we're all friends here, and there's no point in picking fights. A few important things to remember: Please try to stay on topic. The topic of this thread is this mod. Getting into debates over general legal matters isn't really germane to the topic. Please leave the past in the past. Discussions of current matters in the current thread are fine. It's not appropriate to drag in complaints about past interactions with anyone; that's a form of personal remark and doesn't belong here. Address the post, not the poster, please. Please do not make accusations. It's not allowed. Please do not tell anyone what to do or what not to do. You're not a moderator, and it is not your place. If you think someone is behaving inappropriately, by all means report it and the moderator team will have a look. Best to leave lawyering to the lawyers. Anyone who's not a lawyer is in no position to make legal assertions, particularly not to anyone else. Of course you may have concerns about legal matters, and how you choose to act on those concerns in your own affairs is your own concern; but please don't presume to lecture anyone else on the topic. It's perfectly reasonable for people to make suggestions. Please don't jump down their throats when they do, regardless of what you think of the suggestion. It's perfectly reasonable to say "no" to someone's suggestion. This is self-evidently obvious and needs no further elaboration. A final note: it's generally never a good idea to post while angry. If you can't respond to something reasonably and calmly, best to wait a bit until you've calmed down enough that you can do so. (Or if that's not possible, just don't respond at all.) Angry responses never solve anything, and generally devolve into unproductive arguments where everyone (including innocent bystanders) loses. So, can we take it down a notch, please? Thank you for your understanding.

Hello, We're sorry, but unfortunately Cormorant Aeronology's license does not permit this: The "No Derivatives" clause of the license means that you're not allowed to make any modifications to the mod and then distribute the modified copy. What it boils down to is that nobody but the original author can update the mod. We're sorry for the inconvenience. Thank you for your understanding.

Perfect, thanks!

Hello, and welcome to the forums! Thank you for sharing your new WIP mod. No worries, we've got it all sorted out for you. I see from your share link above that you've included a license file, with your download, which is great, thank you. Could you please also indicate in the OP above what the license is? (Don't need the full text of the license, just a brief blurb stating what the license is.) Thanks!

A large amount of content has been redacted and/or removed due to getting into politics (which are not allowed here-- c'mon, folks, you know this!) as well as off-topic matters. Please avoid politics and try to stick to the topic. Thank you for your understanding.

Various content has been removed. Let's please stay on topic, folks, and not engage in interpersonal bickering or accusations. Thank you.

Thread locked by OP request.