Goomblah

Has anyone else had issues with Mun orbiters mysteriously disappearing? So far the Mun has eaten both Jeb and Bill, in two separate instances. Both were in safe, stable orbits well above any dangers, fairly close to equatorial. Pe was about 15km for both, though Jeb was elliptical out to 400km to pick up high science. Both disappeared while I was timewarping while focused on a different craft, so I think the game may have killed them thinking that they collided with the ground. All I know for sure is that I'm steering well clear of the Mun until I can figure out what's happening. Landers on the surface are OK, and as long as the craft remains the active vessel, there will be no problems (making flybys generally OK). Also, if anyone's interested, I'm working on a dV table; I've calculated out estimates for most planets (with a very rough estimate for atmospheric losses) and I'm working on plotting interplanetary transfers. If anyone wants to help, or wants to see what I've worked out so far, just let me know. Though, a lot of the fun of this mod is exploring the new system for yourself, so I totally understand if you want to avoid "spoilers"

That's correct - the NBS will just give you a biome average until you do a surface scan in that biome. One you have done that, it will start reading different values for different locations in that biome. The UI's color coding will not change, but the data values will no longer be uniform.

Finding a good mining spot with good ore concentration is really just a three-step process; you don't need to spend a ton of time scanning every single biome. To get a good spot (which may or may not be the best on the planet/moon, but it will be well above average) you really only need to do three things: 1) Use the orbital survey scanner to get a general idea of where ore is located. Find a spot with relatively high concentration that's in a good spot (close to the equator and on a flat surface). 2) Send a lander equipped with the surface scanning module to the area you selected. Precision isn't terribly important; it just has to be in the same biome as the target zone. Do the surface scan; this will give the NBS more accurate data for that biome. 3) Use an orbital NBS passing over the target, or drop a rover with it in the area. Make a few passes over the area to find a good ore spot; you can click around on the UI to find a good place. Write down those coordinates, then drive a rover over there to function as a landing target. If your rovers are manned, plant a flag. I find that, when searching for good mining locations, it's not worth your time finding the absolute best spot, or scanning every biome trying to find the best ore. Just locate a location that looks good, then scan the immediate area for the best nearby spot. You actually have almost all the scanning you need done; just send a lander with a surface scanning module to the spot that had 8% ore on the NBS. Then you will get more accurate data - that 8% is a biome average, so you can probably find a spot with even higher concentration once you have the surface scan done.

Aside from Kraken issues (which generally result in mission failure with or without ignore max temp) I have never had any significant issues with KSP's heating system. The only engines which ever get toasty for me are the Twin-Boar and NERVs. Under what circumstances are you getting these crazy heating issues? (Saying this to both milosh and cantab)

I've been doing big things in KSP today! Big, painful, slow things with lots of F9 and reverts. I managed to get an E-class asteroid redirected into an aerocapture using only Vernors because my asteroid tug's nukes were too close to the asteroid and would melt all 2000+ tons of it in about a second. However, the asteroid survived a pass at 35km at 3.5km/s no problem (though my Gigantors melted), so clearly engine wash is the most deadly thing out there. I also launched another big interplanetary ship - one that will hopefully phase out most of the other tugs and such that I've been using in the past. Presenting ICT-03 Exogenesis, 450 tons of NERVAs, fuel, and Mk4 cargo bays It's rated for 5km/s dV with a 120-ton payload, though it's perfectly capable of hauling 300 tons of fuel tanks in its cargo bays. It loses some range with a heavier payload, naturally - I think it drops to <3km/s at that point. TWR is a manageable .22 (Kerbin ASL) at 120 tons payload with full tanks. On-board facilities include crew space for 16, plus a science lab, all science experiments, an ISRU unit, and a pair of Klaw tugs in the forward cargo bay. There are 18 docking ports scattered around the ship; 5 large ports, 5 normal, and 8 small ones (two of which are dedicated parking spots for the tugs). Exogenesis is designed to protect itself and its cargo throughout aerobraking/aerocapture maneuvers; the "abort" action group retracts all the panels, and "2" will toggle all the cargo bays and hatches, so the whole thing can be sealed up in a hurry. After a lot of testing and explosions, it's now timewarp-safe as well - as long as nothing weird's attached to it (extra engines or kraken-y payloads) it should handle 4x physics acceleration no problem. Overall, I'm very pleased with it (even though launching the thing took a looong time to get right) because it's both functional and looks cool

It all started with KER... Then MechJeb... Then KAC and Chatterer, and more and more and more... I now have like 20 mods installed, and it's starting to spiral out of control. help I can't control myself I installed four today alone XD

Radiators are more or less exclusively for use with the nuclear engines during long burns. Radiators aren't really necessary or don't help at all with most other types of heating in the game; most engines don't put out enough heat to make radiators necessary, and they don't help with re-entry heating. I'm not sure if they would be useful for spacecraft in low solar orbits, or for Moho visits (I didn't need them for my Moho mission, though I didn't use the nuclear engines). Also, regarding radiator usage with the nuclear engines: You should mount the radiators on whatever part the engines are attached to (usually a fuel tank). This will really help dump the heat more effectively and keep all your delicate bits safe and non-melty. You also don't need more than one medium-size deployable radiator per engine, unless you're going to Moho. Usually one small deployable radiator is enough, and for short burns (<800m/s) you really don't need them at all.

Poking around the Tracking Station looking for asteroids today, I found an E-class asteroid that will be making a pass near Kerbin in about 50 game days. Unfortunately for kerbalkind, it will be engaging in a high-velocity lithobraking maneuver if it continues on its current course. Does anyone know what the heat tolerance and impact resistance is for an asteroid? I plan on giving it a little nudge so it aerocaptures instead of smacking into Kerbin. In other news, I sent up my first space station torus - a ring of Mk3 fuel tanks. The thing is such a pain to send to orbit - it's ridiculously draggy and horribly wobbly under acceleration, despite a liberal coating of struts and structural reinforcement. It also probably doesn't help that it weighs 750 tons

I personally took a weird hybrid approach - it's not Mun orbit, it's not Minmus orbit, and it's not LKO, but it's close (as in 250-300m/s away) to all three. My Kerbin Gateway Station is in an approximately 24x24Mm (24,000km) orbit - about twice the Mun's orbital altitude. This allows for exceptionally cheap transfers to and from Minmus every 10 days or so, as well as easier course plotting (no SoI change to deal with, no orbital inclination relative to Kerbin/Mun either) Getting out there from LKO is a bit expensive - about as much as achieving orbit around the Mun or Minmus, but it's generally worth the extra design hassle for most craft. Getting fuel from Minmus to the station is super easy, and although the two-step interplanetary transfer (drop Pe to 80km or so, then do the burn) is a little trickier than just going from LKO, you actually save a significant amount of dV due to Oberth and all the potential energy you are storing in the higher orbit. This also makes things easier on low-TWR spacecraft, since the escape burn is smaller.

I managed to beat the Skua fairly consistently by making a plane that flies even more erratically; one of my first attempts at flying under FAR resulted in an aircraft that was just barely stable enough that it could stay up in the air, while constantly tumbling all over the place. For whatever reason, it actually beat the Skua quite often, generally by causing the Skua to stall and/or crash while trying to follow it XD

I never use the 3-kerbal 2.5m command pod. The mass of the thing (4t!) is ridiculous for its crew capacity, and I'm a good enough pilot (even without MJ) that I honestly have never seen the need for the more durable capsules. I used it once, gasped in shock at the mass during my next visit to the VAB, and never used it again. I almost never use spaceplane cockpits, either, particularly the Mk2 ones. Why waste 2.06t on 2 kerbals when you can cram 4 into a passenger module that's 2.5t and slap a probe core on? Between MechJeb and my stock habits of using probes (ALL HAIL OKTO2) and passenger modules for everything, I presume that my pilots are pretty upset that they don't ever do anything... whenever I get bored and decide to blow stuff up with BDArmory, I put Jeb, Val, or whatever other pilots I have on staff in my latest war machine and pretend they are getting revenge on Administration/Mission Control/the engineering staff for not letting them do stuff

I don't use RCS thrusters on spaceplanes anymore; they cause too much drag and often burn off during ascent or descent. You've got tons of torque anyways, given both the cockpit and the module on the tail. Definitely pump all your fuel forwards to ensure that your CoM is in front of your CoL. Keep the nose up as much as you can throughout your descent; this will generate a lot of drag and some lift, which will help slow you down more in the upper atmosphere. Nosing up will make your descent take longer, though, because all that lift is keeping you in thinner air for longer. This makes the descent much safer, but also means that you can easily overshoot KSC if you haven't prepared accordingly. Since you are using FAR, there's also a greater danger of your wings ripping off, so as you approach 30km, reduce your AoA to maybe 10 degrees or so; as you have found out, the air suddenly gets really thick and nasty at about 25km, which can easily result in unwanted explosions. Before then, angle as close to radial+ as possible (atmospheric forces will pull your nose down gradually) to maximize drag and slow your descent.

You know, you could launch an SSTO with empty tanks, fill it up with ISRU on the runway, then deliver your kerbal to orbit, refuel from a space station (supplied from Minmus) and land back at KSC for a profit​, no contracts necessary.

You CAN go anywhere without refueling, but it doesn't necessarily mean you should. Generally, if the mission craft's mass in LKO is more than 40 tons, or it is reusable, I will refuel before leaving Kerbin's SOI. The larger your upper stages get, the less practical it is to launch it fully fueled, since your lifter will be growing much much larger.

It's a bomber, not a fighter, but I like the Avro Vulcan:

This was one of my first SSTOs: No wing parts, just fins and body lift. I also made this abomination just for the lols:

xebx, the performance of real-life engines has no bearing whatsoever on KSP's fictional, scaled-down solar system. Realistic engines would be extremely OP in the KSP world, because all the bodies are so much smaller than they are in real life. An engine with 400 Isp and no balancing downside (heat for the NERV, huge electrical consumption for the ions, and low thrust for both) is, for the purposes of most challenges, very much OP. Nuclear engines do exist (although they haven't been implemented in a launch system), and can have Isp ranging from 800 to 2000 seconds. Our Nerv engine is comparable to the real-life NERVA system, with a similar Isp; though it is balanced with the huge mass and heating issues in-game. You really need to stop snarking about "[whatever] is unrealistic/absurd because it doesn't perfectly match up with commonly used real-life technologies," "spaceplanes and nuclear engines are evil and a joke because they don't exist in a finished state," "stop it with the sci-fi and start doing real science," etc. You aren't contributing anything except for an excessively negative attitude. KSP takes a slightly near-future / alternate history approach to the space program, with near-future tech like the RAPIER/SABRE engine and spaceplanes, as well as semi-abandoned older tech like nuclear rockets, all of which (including all the other rocket engines and parts) are balanced to accommodate for KSP's smaller planets. If the lack of present-day realism bothers you, just install the appropriate parts mods, use 64K or another scaling mod to tweak Kerbin up to a more realistic size, and stop griping about the stock game, which is more or less balanced.

Efficiency and the speed of gameplay in KSP are intentionally irrelevant. Despite the sense of progression that Career and Science modes provide, KSP is first and foremost a sandbox game. Within your Career file, you are given a ton of wiggle room to take different approaches to running your space program; you really aren't forced to take a specific path towards your goals, whatever they might be. You very well could make that 100k by doing ten missions, or do it all in one; it's the player's choice. Player choice is what actually gives things in KSP value - funds, resources, and even Kerbals' lives are meaningless unless the player gives them value. In general, someone playing a game is putting in their time and expecting to get entertainment out. Time vs entertainment is really the core element of all value in KSP; funds have value because they represent time spent (grinding for funds) and can be used to produce entertainment (fun missions). If you can get funds in an enjoyable way, they lose value because you have to spend less time doing not-fun stuff to get them. If each of those ten missions is suitably entertaining, or each goes ten times as fast as the one big one (including development costs), then it's worthwhile to do all ten instead. But, in general, doing things at larger profit margins for bigger rewards produces more funds for a given time investment, and are often rewarding and entertaining as well - big missions are cool. Efficiency matters only to the extent that it remains more time effective than less efficient methods, taking into consideration that funds and infrastructure (like mining colonies) cost time as well. Now, exactly what activities are "fun" versus "not fun" in KSP is extremely subjective, and different players' approaches to the same problem will vary widely. Some people (myself included) enjoy the engineering and design elements of building an SSTO. Efficiency may be less of a requirement (as in, the space program will fail without it) and more of a goal to strive for. That's why there are a number of challenges featuring SSTOs; some people just enjoy making the most efficient/simple/small/easy to use spacecraft they can, regardless of how practical or necessary they are for career mode. There doesn't need to be an in-game justification for everything players do; what matters are out-of-game factors, such as time use and enjoyment of the game. It's up to each player to decide how they want to tackle each mission, and how they want to devote their in-game and out-of-game resources towards finding a solution.

Regarding contracts to visit certain sites, I would avoid accepting them in the first place. Unless the contract is for a very low-gravity moon like Minmus, Gilly, or Pol, where hopping a lander from place to place consumes only a small amount of fuel, they generally aren't worth the time and effort to drive a rover or send a larger hopper. If all the sites are fairly close to one another, with rover-friendly terrain in between, rovers can work. The Mun has enough gravity that rovers can drive well, but not so much that hopping is completely impractical. A hybrid approach may work well - land at one site, drop off a rover and drive it to another nearby one, then hop to a distant site. For surface outposts and space station contracts, the Hitchhiker module is your friend (and later the Mk3 passenger bay). If you don't have that unlocked, a 9-capsule stack will be rather impractical. You can also have two sets of landing gear on your outpost lander - one set on the "bottom" for the initial landing, and another on the "side". After landing vertically, tip the whole thing over onto the second set of landing gear. Then you will have a much more stable, flatter setup.

In my latest game, Jeb is stuck in orbit around the Mun with just barely not enough fuel to make it back to Kerbin. Usually this wouldn't be too much of a problem - getting out and pushing has helped sole this problem in the past, but this time around, things are... ...different. I recently installed the New Horizons mod, which shuffles all the planets around and adds a ton of new ones, so the Mun and Kerbin are now both moons of a large gas giant. This is making things quite a bit more difficult, especially because there isn't a delta-V map handy, on top of all the usual early-career woes.

The thing with returning from a moon is that you don't need all the dV that you used to get out there - you just need enough to get back to the elliptical encounter orbit that you used to transfer to the moon. Looking at a dV map, your Minmus mission should look like this: Arriving at Minmus: 3500m/s to achieve LKO > 300 to match planes, assuming you start equatorial > 930 to raise Ap to Minmus orbital altitiude > 160 to brake into a low Minmus orbit =4890 m/s Landing and Takeoff: 180m/s minimum, plus 50m/s safety margin plus 50-80m/s margin for plane change and course alterations (MJ isn't too efficient at landings) = 280-310m/s > 180m/s to reach orbit again (MJ is much better at ascent) =490 m/s Return: 160-180 to escape Minmus > 10ish for course corrections > aerobraking into a slower orbit, or even simply landing straight from the elliptical orbit =190 m/s Total: 5570 m/s Your current rocket has 7833 m/s, which is 2,263m/s more than you need, even with the decent amount of wiggle room this estimate provides. The landing-and-return stage doesn't have to do everything the transfer stage did in reverse; there's no need to Hohmann transfer back to Kerbin when you can aerobrake or simply land straight from your return. I generally make a few aerobraking passes to keep anything from getting too toasty; passing through the atmo at 40 at 3km/s should be safe, as long as you are facing retrograde (to make the engines and fuel tanks act as a heat shield). You may be able to dip a little lower even, but re-entry makes me nervous when Kerbals are involved, so I generally take it slow. I was able to reach Minmus, land, and return to Kerbin with 1000m/s to spare using this: It rides the Kickbacks to 10km, at which point you manually activate the Poodle while the boosters are still going; stage as necessary until you reach orbit. It takes a little while, given the low TWR of the Poodle stage, but MJ handled it just fine. The Poodle handles circularization, the plane change, and half of the Hohmann burn; the Terrier above it does everything else. I was able to safely return by passing through the atmosphere at 35km twice, without touching the 1km/s in the last stage's tank at all. Overall, it's much smaller, and for the purposes of Career, much cheaper.

This one is more of "i don't even" than awesome, but it's pretty cool in its own goofy way: I got bored a few days ago and decided to build a tiny SSTO. This little guy can reach LKO and land safely, has excellent in-atmo control, and has a stupidly high TWR. The only hard part about flying it is keeping the throttle low enough until you really want to floor it - this thing will go hypersonic at sea level at 2/3 throttle, no problem; that is, until it melts at 1400m/s. Its design abuses part clipping and magical RAPIER exhaust, but is kraken-free under all circumstances, and the CoM barely moves throughout its flight. Now, such a small aircraft can't possibly do anything useful, can it? Well, it sort of can - it can deploy satellites! Although putting satellites in an 80x80 orbit isn't really all that useful by the time you have RAPIERs unlocked, it's still fun to fly and relatively harmless; the total cost to deploy this "pancake satellite" was 188 kerdits, plus 2900 for the satellite itself. With Tweakscale this thing could actually be semi-viable, with a smaller RAPIER and some ion engines (or possibly a tiny nuke), it could go out and put even smaller Tweakscaled satellites wherever you want for very little money. I'm also considering sending a sciencey version out to Laythe, so it can deorbit, land, scoop up some science from a biome, the return to orbit and dock with a research station. It's still really silly though, lol.

Here's my guess - Boosters 3 and 4 are not strutted adequately. I'm not sure, but that fuel line may be giving the 3 and 4 boosters some structural integrity, which they lose when the first two boosters are staged and the fuel line is severed. I've had similar issues with mysterious explosions upon staging, and MORE STRUTS generally solves the problem. Also, that rocket is really overbuilt for what it's trying to do. The 3-Kerbal command module is insanely heavy (though the thermal and impact resistance are nice), and I don't think you should need monopropellant for anything, since you aren't docking and MJ is probably going to land it for you (right?). Even without RCS, MechJeb can land on target quite nicely, easily to within a few meters of the target. That 750 RCS is a lot of mass that you really don't need, and the same applies to the command pod. My suggestions: -Use a Hitchhiker module instead of the command module. MJ is providing control anyways, and the Hitchhiker weighs half as much as that command module, and seats one more (which won't matter). You could alternatively use the Mk2 passenger module, which is even lighter, but that is a lifting body and can do weird things to your CoL. You will need to put dedicated reaction wheels on your craft, though, since the Hitchhiker and passenger modules don't have any. -Halve the size of your transfer stage, at least. You really only need a Rockomax 16 (quarter orange tank), plus a Poodle engine for your transfer stage. Those weight savings on your lander will really help. -Your ascent stage can be a lot smaller, simpler, and cheaper (though it looks like you're in Sandbox, so that won't matter). Replace your asparagus with an orange tank and a quarter orange tank with a Mainsail, and then stick 6 Kickback (the largest) SRBs on it. Put 6 tailfins in between the boosters, ditch the second set you have now, and you should be set. Ride the boosters with the mainsail off, stage the boosters and activate the mainsail, and then you should make it to orbit without using the transfer stage. Even if you do dip into the transfer stage's dV, with all the weight savings your lander stage should have an insane amount of dV, and should be able to do the round trip no problem.

So far I have only put manned land-and-return missions on the Mun, Minmus, and Duna (with a low Ike flyby as a gravity brake). The Duna mission was supposed to also land on Ike, but due to a staging issue during Duna ascent and a tight dV budget, I had only barely enough fuel to reach Ike, land, and make it home, so I erred on the side of caution and skipped the Ike landing. I've also got a pair of poor schmucks out in orbit around Pol aboard a space station; their space programs abandoned them in dangerously low orbits and hired me to go get them. I've got a Jool-5 capable ship that will be heading out to get a crazy amount of science (aka money, thanks Administration) from Tylo and Vall, which will also shuffle some crew around to get my mining operation on Pol going, with the intent of establishing a Laythe colony. A list of where I've been so far: Moho - Unmanned only (Landed, did suborbital hops, and deployed a cubesat in orbit for science contracts) Eve - Unmanned only (Landed, deployed a rover, put a cubesat in orbit) Gilly - Unmanned only (Landed, did lots of suborbital hops; gravity/seismic scan contracts on Gilly are easy money) Mun - Been there and back lots of times, both manned and unmanned. Minmus - I do a LOT of work here, lots of crew going back and forth from Kerbin orbit and Minmus. Duna - Manned and unmanned (Manned landing and return, also put down an unmanned rover and a outpost for a contract) Ike - Manned flyby, unmanned landing (Also dropped off a rover, did a two-for-one with Duna in the same mission) Dres - Unmanned only? The probe is still on its way there, so there's still room for failure. Laythe - Unmanned only (Sent a lander with some science stuff, as well as a small aircraft instead of a rover. Also has a cubesat in orbit.) Vall - Unmanned only (Orbital cubesat only) Tylo - Unmanned only (Orbital cubesat) Bop - Unmanned only (Landed at the dead kraken, did some hopping around for science, went back to orbit) Pol - Unmanned, but picked up a few stranded Kerbals (Manned landing and return to orbit) Eeloo - Never been there yet, and don't have a mission on the way. I did accept a contract to explore it, though, so I'll be heading out soon. I'm also thinking of doing a solar limbo mission, and try to put a satellite in as low of an orbit as possible.

I believe the surface scanner gives the ore readings for the area directly under the probe, and also improves NBS accuracy for that biome. The NBS has no minimum (maximum of 500km) altitude, and I don't think the scan area changes size or resolution based on altitude. I generally use the NBS in an equatorial orbit, since it covers a wide enough band that I generally wouldn't consider building a mining base outside of that band (since plane changes are gross). I then timewarp until the satellite is over the biome and general zone I want to land at, and then I use the scanner to identify the highest nearby ore concentration. I then write down those coordinates, then either use MechJeb's landing/rover autopilot or, for stock-only, a rover with the surface scanning module to drive to those coordinates, and mark it with either a flag or the rover itself. I then have a target I can set for landing, right on top of the ideal spot.