JAFO

Regular progress reports are fine. Out of curiosity, what difficulty level are you playing on? Also, screenshots are very welcome!

Bravo!! That was epic. Well done!

Not really.. but you can always uninstall it, and reinstall it again afterward. If you don't want to lose any custom settings, just move the KER folder to someplace else, and put it back when you're done.

Or Eve. Visited, yes.. landed, no.

Touché.. very well said. Well sir, I shall wish you all the best. See what @fourfa has written above, and well done on being willing to borrow the idea of the science roller.. truly one of the great early caveman inventions, that we pretty much all make use of. Don't be afraid to look back through the 3(?) Caveman threads, looking for inspiration in other ways. There's no need to re-invent the wheel, after all..

You may want to not try and take on the current TLD Halloween challenge, DarkWalker. Without knowing the various maps well (to say nothing of the game mechanics), it will probably be incredibly frustrating. (But you do have two weeks to try and get up to speed before the challenge ends!)

Ahh.. I somehow missed (or more likely, forgot) those.. I'll have to go check them out. But yes, still very impressive.

Well done @RoninFrog! That's two fantastic accomplishments right there. Firstly, very few cavemen attempt a crewed return mission to Minmus. I'm pretty sure there are still less than half a dozen of us. Secondly, (and someone correct me if I'm wrong here) I think this is the very first successful crewed return Mun mission! To the best of my knowledge, they've all been either one-way trips or probe missions. If it IS the very first, to my mind, that's worthy of an Order of the Trilobite award.

Ok.. I think I see the problem. Tell you what. Don't give up entirely. But do take a break from KSP. Instead, go and play The Long Dark for a while. But not in Story mode. Just play Survival (sandbox) mode. Survival Mode is basically Ironman mode. There is no reloading. But don't try to start on the most difficult (Interloper) mode. When they first come to TLD, lots of "Tough Guys" try to begin on the hardest mode "I've played plenty of survival games before, I know what I'm doing!" . But they all give it up after a while and go back to an easier mode to learn how to play the game. The learning curve is, in some ways, as steep as KSP, and until you know your way around, you tend to die a lot. But each death teaches you something new. So each re-play, you last longer than the one before. If any game can get you over this hangup about reloading, perma-death, etc, it's The Long Dark. Perma-death is something to embrace, not something to run and hide from. And once you've learned to embrace it, come back to the Caveman Challenge. (Oh yeah.. The Long Dark is currently on sale on Steam for 66% off!)

Indeed it would. And I feel your pain over killing your pilots already. But then, you did intentionally start out choosing the "Nintendo hard" option. Nobody will think less of you if you choose to take on a lower difficulty setting option just to get a feel for things, before going all out.

Yup. Good question.. I haven't messed with KSP for a couple of years, so I'm not qualified to answer it. But even so, as I mentioned, using relays will need thousands of HG-5s per unit, to reach any sensible distances (the law of diminishing returns that's built into the antenna-stacking formula sucks). And I suspect only a masochist of the highest order could cope with assembling one, let alone half a dozen or more.

So.. several relay stations orbiting out at various distances, timed and placed such that they all align at the corrrect time(s) for the mission? Complicated as heck, I'd imagine. In part because you'd need comms available for mid-course corrections as well as during the Jool operations. And the "pretty huge number" of HG-5s you'd need would number in the several thousands for EACH of the relay stations (and you'd likely need something like a dozen relays). Plus enough panels (and batteries) to power those massive arrays. AND each of the arrays would need to be assembled in orbit, and then flown out to, and accurately placed in, its' designated orbit. Even as a group project rather than an individual one, I think the logistics involved would be horrendous, to put it mildly.

The word "impossible" comes to mind. Unless CommNet has been massively altered since I was last playing, a couple years back. About 3 years back, I did some experiments to see how feasible it was to "stack" antennas for extended control range in Caveman missions. To quote myself from back then...

What? The only? Dream on.. we were doing podracers bigger, better and badder years before you...

We all have to start somewhere, and theres no time like the present.. (if you're in isolation shutdown like most of us, literally so!) Go for it...

All I can tell you is that I've come across references to throttleable SRBs that were not baked-in types, that Scott Manley has talked about it in one of his videos (possibly the one where he was invited along with some other youtubers to the progress reveal of KSP2), and that the KSP2 team intend to have them in-game. If I recall correctly, it involves using steerable baffles to redirect the rocket exhaust, similar to the way a jet engine does to produce reverse thrust. More than that, you'd have to research yourself.

On demand.

Cheating? Not necessarily. Throttleable SRBs exist, and have for some time. Only Squad never seems to have heard of them. This is, in fact, one of the deficiencies that KSP2 intends to fix.

Heh.. as if the payload limits weren't tight enough as it is!

There is indeed a much more elegant (and, if you have many part mods, more useful/versatile) solution.. it's called 'The Janitor's Closet'. From @linuxgurugamer, naturally.

Well, except that KSP uses an old, outdated and buggy version of Unity, whereas the KSP2 team are using the latest and greatest version, which has had considerable improvements made to it, particularly when it comes to performance. Despite what many fanbois of other game-engines claim, Unity itself is not the problem.. the original game has always been crippled by huge amounts of clunky legacy code that was introduced long before the game evolved into what it ultimately became. Most of the blame should be laid there, and not at Unity's door. Not to mention that the dev team are all huge fans & players of the original game, and hence are very aware of KSP 1.x's limitations, which they're keen to fix. By starting from scratch, the new team will be able to avoid all the short-sighted poor decisions and bad design choices that hamstrung KSP. In short, I confidently expect that KSP2 will be pleasantly surprising in how much better it performs. Ahh.. yeah, there is always that..

Welcome back.. I imagine you're excited about KSP 2.0? Which is why we IT types keep banging on about backups! And backups of backups.... I have terabytes of local backups. And the most important of that stuff is also backed up online. (Please note that I receive absolutely NO remuneration for what follows.. I'm just a very happy customer sharing the joy.) For my online backups I like to use the service provided by Backblaze. A personal account is just US$6 per month, and provides genuinely unlimited storage with no extra data charges, password-based file encryption (optional), your files can be directly downloaded (by computer or from your iDevice or Android device) or Fed-Ex'ed to you anywhere in the world, on drives that you are free to keep or mail back for a full refund, and many other cool features. Best of all, there's nothing to set up.. it simply backs up ALL your user data, unless told otherwise. It's truly set-&-forget. It can handle external drives as well (they need to be plugged in now and then, of course!), and runs on Mac & Windows. I've tried a number of online backup solutions over the years, and Backblaze is simply the easiest and best I've encountered.

If you're going to do that, at least please consider adding your patch to the Community Database of Module Manager Patches for Stock KSP.

Yes, there's one procedure I've implemented that helps considerably, which might be regarded as 'best practice'. Firstly, you need to understand a little about how GTc works. GTc is incapable of knowing if you've made significant changes to a design, and doesn't actually "calculate new parameters" after you make a change. All it does is start from an initial 'best guess' (which is often surprisingly accurate) and then use a series of iterative launches to try and narrow down the best settings. The initial parameters are never changed after the first launch. Therefore, if you've made changes based on those launch tests, GTc will continue to use the old parameters on subsequent launches, which may no longer be optimal. While it's not always easy to determine what constitutes a "significant" design change, my rule of thumb is that adding or removing large parts, changes to fuel load or thrust settings, etc, (which your SRB throttle changes count as) are likely to significantly alter launch parameters, and therefore require a GTc 'launch parameter reset'. So, my normal procedure used to be as follows. Any time I made a significant design change, I made a change to the name of the craft. (GTc uses craft names to identify and save settings for each craft.) For example, Test_craft became Test_craftA, Test_craftB, etc. What this does is force GTc to ignore the results of previous launches, and treat it as a completely new craft, starting over with a new initial 'best guess', and needing to undergo a new set of test launches. (Or, instead, you could go to GameData\GravityTurn\Plugins\PluginData\GravityTurn\ and delete the gt_launchdb_SHIPNAME_Kerbin.cfg file with the name of the ship in question, but this is a pretty long-winded and awkward way to go about things.) Alternatively, (and this is the best and simplest way to do so, and is now my preferred method) the same thing can be accomplished by simply telling GTc to drop its old parameters and start over. This is done by keeping the alt-key pressed while clicking "previous best guess". This resets every parameter which is not locked back to defaults. After this, you will need to click on 'First Guess' again. I learned about this method from @AndyMt after I made a feature request for a 'reset launch data' button.

Is this happening to just one craft, or any craft? If for all craft, then deleting the GT folder and reinstalling may be the solution. If just this one craft, then you have a couple of options, the first one being as described by @AndyMt in an earlier post: Alternatively, you could just delete the setting for that one craft, and start the 'training' process over again. You can find the individual craft settings in: GameData\GravityTurn\Plugins\PluginData\GravityTurn\ and just delete the gt_launchdb_SHIPNAME_Kerbin.cfg file with the name of the ship in question. You could also back up your other craft settings files before deleting the installation, if you go that route. That would save you having to 're-train' any other craft you've already dialed-in with GT.