Fearless Son

I do still find struts useful for some very specific kinds of functionality. For example, I like to arrange discarding boosters such that their attachment point is high up along the booster's body. I then use a strut to fix the bottom of the booster in place so it doesn't "wiggle" from the top. Add a little winglet to the bottom of the booster, then when it detaches the explosive bolts in the separation part push the top of the booster away from the craft, causing it to peal neatly away from the body of the lifter. If I auto-strut the boosters, the auto-strut would calculate from the center of the booster part's mass, which would limit the leveraging forces during detachment. But in general, yeah, the auto-strut system has drastically reduced my part count overall. Same. I do a tiny bit of clipping for aesthetic reasons, such as making fixed solar panels more flush with surfaces, or pushing something partly inside of a structural part that can fit it ("Cut-and-weld" is how I like to think of them fitting together.) But I avoid clipping if I thought it would plausibly interfere with the functionality of the thing.

I want to emphasize @eddiew's point here: part count on a single vessel is a huge factor. KSP actually runs pretty well on most machines provided you don't try to explode the part count, and if you do go overboard on parts it is going to eventually grind to a crawl no matter how powerful your machine is. The factors the simulation needs to calculate at once can go up exponentially as you add parts, and you quickly hit diminishing returns for system power versus performance gain. It's not too terribly restrictive, so long as you use some moderation in your design. [EDIT]: I should mention, I am talking about the stock game here. Once you start adding mods, you are going off the map as far as performance goals are concerned, "Here There Be Space Krakens" and all that. Mods can be great, but as far as performance impact goes you are assuming your own risk.

You are a newbie on the forum, so I don't have any other posts you made to extrapolate intent from, but if you were a forum regular, I would swear this was a humble-brag. You're computer will run KSP just fine.

So long as it doesn't get the chance to accelerate more than a few meters per second on it's way to the ground, it should be fine. You can generally just drop it from a lander. The biggest worry is if the rover gets stuck on some piece of lander geometry when it detaches. Like if it fell out of a vertically oriented cargo bay and flipped over, or something like that. If it can get wheels down on the Munar regolith, you are good to roam.

I have found benefit from using larger parts as substitutions for many smaller parts. For example, using larger wing sections instead of smaller structural wing components. The Making History expansion has also done a lot to add multi-functional parts which can use a single part to take the place of several others. For example, the Munar Excursion Module combines the functionality of a command module with a small built-in fuel tank, monopropellant tank, battery, control wheel, and RCS system, with enough space for two crew. Similarly, the Kerbodyne Engine Cluster Adapter Tank lets me stick lots of engines on without needing to use Cubic Octagonal Struts or Aerodynamic Nose Cones onto a short fuel tank.

Grats on hitting the milestone! Your craft being slightly askew... did you leave the SAS on? If you have it on and set to stability, it will try to keep the nose pointing in the same direction unless you tell it otherwise. Assuming it is just leaning a little, you can try turning the SAS briefly off, let gravity pull it into a normal vector relative to the Munar surface, then turn SAS back on once it is lined up since it has "recalibrated" the direction you expect it to keep pointing.

One more thing: it's easy enough to get up to a full speed driving across the surface of the Mun if you have enough flat open space to build up a straight-line acceleration, but it requires almost as much space to slow down again. The aforementioned low gravity means that the friction on the tires is pretty weak, so it will roll for a good long while without adding more power to the drive, and also means that the wheels will slip and slide over the surface even as you hold down the breaks. Imagine you are driving in icy conditions and you will have a good analogy for how it feels. If you go too fast, you may find yourself launching into wide jumps off the crests of hills that wouldn't pose a problem in stronger gravity, or unable to slow down fast enough to make a tight turn to avoid a collision without flipping end over end. Make sure your rear tires are set to use maximum breaking force and try to avoid the temptation to accelerate to top speed if you want your rover to last without smashing itself apart because it lost control.

Putting a rover in a bay is less important when doing a Munar landing since the Mun is completely without atmosphere, unlike Duna. You don't have to worry about overheating some components due to atmospheric burn, nor about how it will affect drag since you won't have any air to drag against. However, landing on an airless body presents some other challenges. Since you can't use chutes, you are entirely dependent on your engines to slow to a safe landing speed. You will need to plan your delta-v requirements appropriately. While there are plenty of alternative designs, the most common design for a rover-lander is a sky crane style approach where the rover sits on the bottom of the lander. An engine on the bottom of the rover itself is probably not a good idea, so you are probably going to have to mount two or more engines radially positioned to expel their propellant past the rover's body. If the rover is short, you might as well add some landing struts to the side of those radial engines. Think of the lander as being like a spider with a rover that clings to it's bottom, then drops off and rolls past it's legs once it touches down. Remember that the Munar gravity is low. This has some effects on rover design. You can drop the rover off the lander without fear of damaging it, but remember to kill the throttle as soon as you touch down, because you are likely to bounce on landing and you need to cancel as much outward force as possible. The rovers themselves have a habit of flipping over during tight turns or when breaking too fast going down slopes, or having insufficient traction to go up slopes. This has everything to do with not having enough down force on the wheels for them to grip as tightly as they need to. Sometimes it can benefit rovers to give them a small downward force by, say, some down thrusting monoprop nozzles, used sparingly when you need a little extra control. Likewise, good use of SAS can keep the rover level. Every probe core will include some reaction wheels, plus any you add yourself. Before launch, set the probe core and reaction wheels to "SAS Only" mode, which will keep you from flipping the rover end-over-end by accident, but will help the onboard core keep the rover level. Remember to briefly turn the SAS off when on a new slope to level the probe's wheels with the slope, then turn it back on before trying to change direction. This should keep the worst of the flipping under control. Have fun! Landing and exploring with a rover can be an enjoyable and educational experience.

According to Steam, 1445 hours and counting.

Rarely do I see such a combination of elegant aesthetics and raw utility. Well done.

I would argue that if the put parts into stock (even as a paid expansion stock) then the gaps were not intentional, or at least not intentional anymore. That having been said, new parts tend to cause balance issues when contrasted with old parts, which I would argue is probably not intentional.

I don't play with life support mods, but I do roleplay the idea that Kerbals need more than just a seat in a tiny capsule if they are going to be living in space for more than a few weeks. So any interplanetary ships, space stations, or off-Kerbin surface bases that my Kerbals have to inhabit I build bigger than strictly necessary, with more livable space (i.e. crew capacity) so they can move about inside, and I pretend that the unused crew capacity means more consumables so the remaining crew have greater endurance.

Last night, I built a Duna science rover, and in honor of the Insight lander, I used a traditional heat shield + aeroshell + sky crane design. I made the transfer vehicle for it deliberately oversized so I could fit a trio of communication relay satellites that could be placed in equidistant orbit to ensure continuous communication coverage. I was close to my ideal transfer window but some days over it, so I added extra delta-v just in case. I was a little worried about the launch because the rocket ended up really tall and narrow, and traditionally that doesn't do well during ascent, but it managed it fine. In fact, I probably had a little too much delta-v, since the main booster had enough fuel left to do most of my transfer burn from Kerbin. The secondary boosters fell back to Kerbin but the main one is in a pretty high elliptical Kerbin orbit, so I will probably have to later send a small grabber unit to nudge it into a decaying orbit. Anyway, I got the whole thing on it's way to Duna, now I just need to wait, maybe do some other missions in the meantime. Sorry I didn't take any pictures to share yet, maybe I will put some up later.

I bought KSP back in early access, a few years before the 1.0 release, back when it still had the "souposphere" atmospheric modeling. Figuring out how to get to orbit was a huge challenge, especially with the limitations on parts and the wobbly connections everywhere. You had to place struts like duct tape everywhere to get something to avoid falling apart when you lit the fuse. I finally figured out you had to go to about 10,000 KM straight up before starting a 45 degree gravity turn, then more practice to get the circularization burn to actually achieve orbit, let alone go anywhere further out. So much easier these days, I can just slap some parts together and make a decent launch vehicle that will put a payload in orbit on the first try.

Prior to Making History, I would traditionally use the Poodle for larger interplanetary vehicles. I treated it like a scaled-up Terrier, I would use it in every situation I might use a Terrier for, just when everything had to be bigger. I supposed I could have technically just added a whole bunch of Terriers to a larger vessel and it might have gotten marginally more efficiency out of it, but if I needed that kind of absolute efficiency I would be using NERVs instead, and frankly a small number of big engines looks (and performs) much better than a huge cluster of smaller ones.

So would you say that the MK2 was a kind of "worst of both worlds" thing? All the disadvantages of the MK1 and MK3 put together, without the advantage of either alone?

Depending on the nature of the mission, sometimes you can land a ship on a body and so long as it has all the requirements of the base contract (usually a power generator, docking port, space for [X] Kerbals) it will count as "base" for the purposes of the contract. All you need to do is let it sit there long enough to be considered stable (about ten seconds) and then you can take it back off again and return it to Kerbin. However, if that is too much of a hassle (like if it requires more crew spaces than you can comfortably return) you can just land it once, then manually turn the vessel's ship type to "Debris" when you go to rename it. The base will still stay there, but the simulation will treat it as a piece of debris and ignore it for contract purposes, even if it is still technically functional. It won't even show up in your tracking station unless you tell it to track debris.

I love that submersible! It's so tiny and looks so functional!

I am going to echo @Cavscout74 on the point about drag. Drag is a huge limitation on spaceplanes, drastically increasing their fuel requirements to reach orbit. Further, every extra bit of mass you add just to get it into orbit becomes more dead weight (figuratively speaking) once you get there. With a multi-stage launch (like most rockets) this isn't a problem since you eject the mass that's no longer useful, but with an SSTO spaceplane that's not the case. So a "less is more" approach is really important here. The tyranny of rocketry applies everywhere, but everything goes double for SSTOs since the first stage is also the final stage. If you can strip it down, do it. You really don't have the luxury of making something big and fancy for this kind of mission profile.

I have landed rovers on Duna a few times. I find that parachutes are helpful, but the atmosphere is so thin that they rapidly hit diminishing returns, it takes more mass to do an unpowered landing with parachutes than it does to add a small rocket engine or two. Primarily I will use a couple of drogue chutes to help slow the rate of descent and leverage the lander's orientation so that the landing engines can be smaller and require less fuel to slow it to a safe landing speed. As for the landing, I haven't really had much luck with sky crane style deployment. Basically anything where the wheels of the rover have to take the impact of landing is something I try to avoid, since wheels can be broken by pressure or impact and a drone rover won't have a qualified engineer nearby to fix them. So often I will have a rover that is smaller than the landing struts on the lander itself, then detaches from the bottom once the landing struts take the impact of landing (I like to stuff a bunch of communication network equipment on the lander and use that as a "ground relay" for the rover.) For the majority of my Duna rover missions, I actually try to make a rover small enough to fit inside a 2.5m service bay, and build the lander around that. I can avoid landing struts that way while still keeping the rover safe. Once it touches down, the bay opens, the rover detaches, and then rolls out onto the Dunian soil under it's own power. Oh, and just a general note on powering rovers: while RTGs are ideal, they are expensive so you might not want them in a one-way craft, and they only get unlocked near the end of the tech tree so they might not be an option in earlier career and science mode. That leaves you with solar panels as your power plants for rovers. One school of thought is to put a bunch of fixed panels across the top. It charges slow, but continuously. The other school of thought is to have a deployable solar panel that charges more quickly, but only as long as the panel is deployed. You want to avoid deploying a panel while the rover is in motion because they are delicate as heck, but even if you choose to go that way I recommend adding at least a tiny fixed solar panel so you can be sure the rover will always have some power left to it. Otherwise you may end up going back to mission control, then transferring back to control of the rover months or years later to find it was out of power and without power can't process your signal to let it deploy it's solar panels.

That's some nice Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrt!! you got going on there.

The first thing that popped into my head when you posted that was "chonky".

This is a little tangential to that, and it's been a while since I tried it so things might be different now, but I have found that a cluster of Whiplash engines surrounding a rocket engine actually makes for a decent launch booster. The Whiplashes alone won't lift a heavy payload to exo-atmospheric velocities, but they add thrust to the existing rocket engine, and as the rocket continues to accelerate more air gets forced into the Whiplashes' intakes, allowing them to keep adding thrust as long as they are still in-atmo. That is probably too expensive for a discarding launch vehicle, but can be useful for a reusable lifter, especially since the Whiplashes give the thing some atmospheric cruising range on return from orbit, making it easier to get back to KSC (or wherever you are recovering from.)

Excuse me while I pick my jaw off the floor...

Same. I mean, I haven't got my mining operation started up yet, but I was planning on the Mun over Minmus. I figured that was a better place to start when doing a slingshot around Kerbin because of the matched orbital inclination. Not technically as much delta-v saved, but a lot more options for timing.