HvP

I admit that I'm not very good (or patient enough) to rendezvous with asteroids, but on the upside if you bring mining equipment with you the asteroid will lose mass as you convert its ore to fuel. Based on previous threads I believe that asteroids stay persistent once they are safely on the ground, but I have no first-hand experience to confirm this. I would be very careful about letting your ship explode during the landing process however. If your probe core explodes while the asteroid is moving through the atmosphere (even for a little bounce) and there are no other ships within physics range, then the game might delete it.

Hello @Ethen Sun and welcome to the KSP forums. As Ultimate Steve said, if you aren't focused on the asteroid the game will consider it destroyed as soon as it enters the atmosphere. However, if you want a challenge, it is possible to grab an asteroid in space and land it on Kerbin with a ship designed to safely recover it. I've never attempted such a feat, but I know there are others here who can give you pointers on what it takes to land one.

I understand. You know when you see that yellow bar at the bottom of the screen before it would go to the menu? That is the part where the game is loading in all of the files it needs to operate. But if it doesn't find some of the files it needs then it might not be able to go any further or load the menu. Since it isn't loading the menu that means some files are corrupt, missing or in the wrong place. The game can't find what it needs to go further. Or something is trying to load that is interfering with the normal operation of the game. Old or incompatible mods might do that. I know it's no fun when your game won't work, but it's hard for us to help you because we don't know what files have been changed or where they are at. Can you give us a list of everything that is in your GameData folder? And can you be sure that you haven't moved or changed any other files outside of the GameData folder? Did you try any of the steps I mentioned in my last post? If so. What did you try? It looks like you are playing on Steam, so it would really be a good idea to verify the integrity of your game files as I explained in the previous post. Make sure to make a backup copy of your "Saves" folder first. And just to be sure, what version of KSP are you running and where did you get the picture of the screen that you uploaded? The version number shows that to be a very old copy of Kerbal Space Program. The most current version of KSP is 1.3.0.1804

@HebaruSan @Cpt Kerbalkrunch I don't think that the original poster is looking to gain specifically by using the Mun for a transfer, but simply has ships already at the Mun for other reasons and can't get an efficient escape from the Mun to go interplanetary. Another option is to drop down towards Kerbin when your periapsis near Kerbin will be at the angle you want to make your interplanetary ejection burn. The speed you build up by falling towards Kerbin uses the Oberth effect to make a more efficient transfer burn.

The trick with going interplanetary from a moon is that you have to wait until the MOON is at the point in its orbit that matches the ejection angle you need. Basically, pretend that the moon is your ship. If you need to be at a 120 degree angle from Kerbin's line of orbit to launch interplanetary, then you need to wait until the Mun is at a 120 degree angle from Kerbin's line of orbit. When the moon has reached the right place then you create a burn that sends your ship in the moon's prograde direction.

Your game can't run without the Squad folder and all its contents in place. Did you delete it? Can you recover it from your recycle bin? Do you mean that you put the Squad folder and all of the files and folders within it back in the GameData folder and it still doesn't work? Using an old version of Modulemanager can also cause a game to crash or freeze. Remove anything that says ModuleManager from your GameData folder and try again. If KSP still doesn't run then I think you may have accidentally corrupted your installation. Are you running the game on Steam? On Steam you can verify your game files by right clicking the name of the game in your Steam library and going to Properties. Then select the "Local files" tab and click "Verify integrity of game files." If you installed without Steam then you may have to download and reinstall the game again. It would be a good idea to make a back up copy of your "Saves" folder so you can transfer them back over to your new install, but be aware that anything you built that used modded parts cannot load if you don't have that mod installed. In the future always check to see that a mod has been tested to run on the version of KSP that you are using.

Hello @Mukita12 it's good to have you here. Have fun!

Hello @Terryl and welcome to the Kerbal forums! I hope you're having fun with the game, and let us know how you're getting along.

Well, in real life rovers are only used to travel very short distances. If the EVA jet pack wasn't so overpowered on the surfaces of the Mun and Minmus then rovers would fill their niche of giving you a faster way to travel between bases and biomes without the ability to just fly over there. And of course they still travel much much faster than any autonomous rover ever did. So it's entirely possible to drive farther in a few minutes than any autonomous rover has in its entire mission.

Did you happen to delete the Squad folder inside GameData when you were removing your mods? KSP needs the contents of the folder called "Squad" since that is where the default game data is stored.

I went through about three different iterations before settling on the design you see here. I had the overall designs complete after about four or five hours work spread out over the course of a few days when I had time to work on them. While adjusting the legs was a bit tedious, once I got into a groove it wasn't too bad. The main problem is that while a tripod is stable as long as the center of mass is somewhere over a triangle formed by the three feet, flexing of the legs can easily cause the mass to sway outside of those lines and -- well they ended up on their back a lot, with lots of fireworks. The other problem is trying to give them a sense of being in motion. A tripod would have to walk similarly to us by shifting the center of gravity forward allowing them to "fall" onto the foot that is coming down in front. This can't be done with static models in KSP -unless I'm quick enough to catch a screenshot before they fall on their face. It is possible to have the model stable on two feet if the center of mass falls on a line directly between the two points of contact with the ground. That's something I have managed to do for my next series of scenes.

Close but not entirely. @EpicSpaceTroll139 is correct about which mods were used for what. Procedural wings for the collar, TweakScale to taper the legs and for the heat rays. Since they can't walk they were placed with VesselMover. Very possibly. At first I tried to make the collars using stock wings and panels, but the angles were driving me crazy. I've seen some remarkable use of stock wings by players more skilled at reproductions than myself, so I'm sure they could be done better. I figured that the key to getting the legs to look right was to make sure they had a gentle taper and TweakScale was the only way I knew of to accomplish that realistically. But constant diameter legs wouldn't look bad either.

Wow, lots of cool stuff to check out this month. It's a real treat to be included along with such creative players. Thanks!

Cool, I'm getting a ST:TOS Doomsday Machine vibe from that first animation.

That detail on the internals -- WOW! Cool and creative!

Yes, the developers have been working on that and it will be fixed in the next bug patch in version 1.3.1. Apparently, it was a side effect of a technique they used to fix a problem with the shadows. You can read about it in the KSP Weekly for June 23rd: Here is the relevant quote from them: "The Sun movement has been fixed, so we still retain our shadow rough patch/fix while also restoring the movement of the sun back to the way it was before (nice and smooth)."

Hi @JStevenson I agree with what linuxgurugamer said. It's a habit of mine to keep the relays hidden in map mode and tracking station, but if you launch an unmanned probe with a relay dish then it gets marked as a relay automatically. You won't see it if you have the filter for relays turned off on that bar at the top.

My grateful appreciation again to everyone for your wonderful comments. I had been working on an updated model with grasping tentacles but I think I broke the VAB. I keep getting log spam due to what I think is too many parts connected in series (Error: Too deep hierarchy to perform rigidbody ordering. Nested rigidbodies might look strange). It has corrupted the craft file for the model I was working on which now will not load in the VAB Still, it is only a delay, I have backed up the three original models and I have something else planned but will take a while. In the mean time, the brave Kerbals have mustered some ingenious counter attacks against the Martians. First, Cavor Kerman tried to infiltrate their home planet in his spacecraft, but a navigational error sent him a little off course. But here we see H. G. Kerman with his assistant Dr. Griffin Kerman in an attempt to use their new inventions to stop this war before it even begins.

Looks great, and not only is it functional, but it's even a real SSTO. That's hard to pull off. Cool!

Thank you all so much for your kind comments! I was quite proud of these as you can imagine. Surprisingly enough they do stand on their own legs under normal gravity. They don't even need the unbreakable joints cheat, although I did sprinkle in a generous dose of autostruts. Now I wouldn't call them exactly stable, though. You could sneeze and knock them over -- so I guess if you had a cold you could kill them all. There's a significant and worrisome wobble when they first load in which lasts for about a minute before they stabilize enough to even quicksave. The three in these pictures are actually three different models, each with slightly different head and leg articulation. I wanted to do a few more poses, including one where the rear leg reached under the machine to take its weight or even crouched down, but severe oscillations ripped them apart. Maybe if I can be sure the Ubiozur part welding mod works with 1.3 it will open up more possibilities. No, I haven't done any modeling, but I appreciate the compliment. There are so many good modelers and creative artists in this community that I'm just happy to contribute what I can. Each walker is only 543 parts if you can believe it. With over 50 Oscar-B tanks and 40 FL-A10 adapters per leg that means that fully half of the part count is in the legs, unsurprisingly. The only mods used were B9 Aerospace Procedural Wings Fork (for the collar), and TweakScale (mostly to gradually narrow the legs and other "tubes", and to reduce the size of the orbital scanner for the heat rays.) Vessel Mover was used to put them into position, of course. I still have ideas to improve them, like adding the grabbing tentacles to the front, and a variety of different poses. @Dafni, @Stevie_D Thank you! The Martian war machines should be intimidating and terrifying so I knew there had to be smoke and flames. It's amazing what you can catch when you spam the F1 button twice a second. Haha, thanks. That's not even the creepiest one I think. Here's an honorable mention that I didn't include because I didn't want to overuse the same pose too much. I like this one because it gives a real feeling of hiding behind a building but looking up and seeing that you've been caught.

"A monstrous tripod, higher than many houses, striding over the young pine trees, and smashing them aside in its career; a walking engine of glittering metal, striding now across the heather; articulate ropes of steel dangling from it, and the clattering tumult of its passage mingling with the riot of the thunder." - H. G. Wells, 1898

@felcas Yay problem solving! Just a suggestion for the future, don't be afraid of asymmetry. You can always balance out those parachutes with a counterweight on the other side. The RCS Build Aid mod that Physics Student mentioned earlier is something I consider an essential addition to the game and is a huge help in balancing craft in this situation. I'm glad we could be of some help. Happy flying and have fun!

Another delivery option

Attaching the wheels is the main difficulty with building a rover with KAS. It's sometimes hard to get them level with each other. But mainly you have to have the main body raised up off the surface so that the wheels don't clip into the ground after attaching them. Bring along one of the KAS ground pylons or other raised structural part and then attach the central body of your rover to that first. It's kind of like putting your car up on a lift. You can then lift the whole rover assembly off of the pylon and then carefully drop the rover on the ground (explosions are common in KAS if some parts are dropped directly onto the ground; always raise them up a little and let them fall to the ground.) Alternatively, you can build it upside down and then just turn it over when you need to add stuff to the top.

A sky crane doesn't have to be any more complicated than a fuel tank with a few radially mounted engines and a decoupler underneath to drop the rover from and maybe a probe core or docking port on top so that you have a control point to orient yourself for descent. A probe core on top of the sky crane will make life easier, so that you can better aim the probe away from your rover when you decouple it. But decoupling just above the surface with the engines still running will do just fine for ditching the delivery vehicle even without a probe core. Separatrons staged with the decoupler will work too.