HvP

Although it may not be the most satisfying answer, you can force the contract to be complete from the cheat menu. If you press ALT+12 there is a category on the left for "Contracts." If you feel it's justified you can find the station contract in the list that shows up and press the button to mark it completed.

If any part of the station comes from craft that were launched before you accepted the contract then it won't count as new. Every part of the station must have been built and launched after you took the contract. You may be able to undock any older parts and send up new replacement parts if that's what happened.

The Matrix, Sentinel (an HvP sci-fi replica) At only ten tons and 1630 parts, this "Sentinel" drone is the perfect search-and-destroy machine. If you have certain subversive biological elements that fail to integrate into your virtual reality matrix these intelligent and highly efficient living machines will ruthlessly carry out infiltration and elimination missions in the "real world."* *the real world is assumed to be the planet Kerbin, its stellar system, and associated planetary bodies. Not liable for failure to operate in a higher order reality if Kerbin is found to itself be code in a computer generated virtual reality. In addition to the Making History DLC, and (excessive) use of Tweakscale, coloring and textures are provided by Textures Unlimited and Textures Unlimited Recolor Depot. Recommend deploying only in ½ Kerbin gravity. Moderate use of autostruts secure the tentacle ends to root of craft. It stands on its own, but is still very unstable - be patient. Craft is in a fixed state and cannot be moved without Vessel Mover or like mod.

Hello @Chritoph If I had to guess as to the cause, I would say that autostruts are the likely offender. It's normal for connections between parts to flex and stretch once gravity kicks in when you load in a vessel. But autostruts don't necessarily turn on quickly enough to catch those parts in their original places and they can switch positions depending on whether or not the heaviest part or root part have changed since they were turned on in the VAB. This can cause them to twist vessels into unnatural shapes and even sometimes causes ships and stations to shake apart. The extreme gravity on Eve can multiply this effect. My recommendation would be to right click several parts and disable their autostruts if you have them turned on. Strut to "grandparent part" seems to be the safest option if you must have them, because that connection shouldn't normally change. Many times turning off the autostruts then saving and reloading will fix misalignments, but I can't guarantee it.

Docking ports can cause sluggish performance because every open docking port is constantly checking to see if there is another port nearby to connect with. A large number of lights added to your station can also slow things down. Your total CPU doesn't have to max out in order to slow down the physics calculations, there just has to be a bottleneck in one of the cores. And it does look like two of your CPU cores are showing around 80%-85%. So while the calculations aren't coming to a halt by freezing up the system, it is slowing down a little. Reducing the graphics settings will help a little, sure, but I still don't think this has much to do with your problem. An intermittent yellow clock is perfectly normal with large builds and I've never seen a problem quite like this before. Having large structural parts come unglued just because a docking port is targeted is very, very weird. My first instinct would be to try and isolate one of the mods you have have installed, and the most suspicious mod would be any one that changes how parts attach to each other when docked - like the Konstruction weldable joints mod. I understand that you've raised this issue in the forum for that mod and not had much luck, though. If it were me I'd start by reducing your graphics settings until you can play without getting yellow clock timers. If the problem persists then try starting a sandbox game for testing purposes and use cheat orbit to put a large station up with no modded parts on it, no weldable joints. Cheat a vessel into a rendezvous with it and see if you still get the disconnecting parts problem when you target a port. If it's still happening then make a copy of your KSP folder and remove all mods and test. Add them back in one by one to see if any particular one is causing the problem. If you select the "cheat" subsection on the left the option for "unbreakable joints" is near the top, just under "hack gravity." (I like your station BTW. It's a pity it's giving you problems)

My God... it's full of parts!

I'm particularly fond of sci-fi replicas like this, and that is a great build. Love it!

Well this is really weird. So I went back to my test craft to see if there was any common scenario that caused my fix to not work. I tried flipping the segments around, using a different root part, turning on and off fuel crossfeed, changing the fuel flow priority. Nothing broke the fix with the extra stage - UNTIL... I added an extra docked segment onto the end of the free docking port. You have three segments docked together and I only tried mine with two. Guess what? When I added a third segment the fix didn't work anymore. BUT... When I added a third blank stage at the top of the list the fix started working again! How odd. It looks like the number of docking ports in the stack is the variable that causes this bug to show up. To confirm I reverted and tried a different configuration with a fourth segment. Sure enough it needed a fifth blank stage before the fix would work. BUT if I left out a docking port and connected the butt of one fuel tank directly to the bottom of the docking port above it, the whole configuration only needed four blank stages in the staging list for the fix to work - or five total if you include the engine stage. So this is definitely related to how many extra docking ports there are above the engines. With this nuclear configuration it looks like you need the total number of stages in your staging column to equal the total number of docking ports in between each segment of your craft - not including any docking port on the end. Can you confirm if this is working the same way for you if you just add a few more blank stages to the column? I would add this to the bug tracker, but my game is heavily modded and the new update is releasing soon anyway. I'll try to reproduce this bug in an unmodded 1.9 game when it comes out before reporting it. (edit to add: The problem seems to be caused when any engine plate is staged with the space bar OR an engine plate has its staging deactivated in the VAB. I was able to reproduce the problem with non-nuclear engines as well as long as there was a combination of engine plate + docking ports. Otherwise identical configurations worked perfectly normally if all I did was remove the engine plate from the design.)

Hello @Cat12 welcome to the KSP forums. It's hard to say what's going on without a picture of your craft. You can take a screenshot by pressing F1 in the game and then finding that picture in your KSP directory under a folder marked "Screenshots." Then upload that picture to a photo sharing site like Imgur.com then paste a link from there into your post here so we can see what these parts look like. What you may be noticing is that the KSP developers have been updating several of the parts recently to modernize their appearance. You could just be seeing the new revamped textures in place of the old models. Or perhaps you are using a mod that replaces some of the models. Mods like Stockalike Station Parts Expansion, Ven's Revamp, and ReStock will change out the default textures for a new look to many stock parts.

Ok @maphi100 I recreated the basics of your designs and I seem to have figured out a workaround. This doesn't fix the underlying bug, but it should give you a usable readout if you follow these steps. 1) Go the staging list on the left side and create a new blank stage with the plus sign below the engine stage, as pictured below. You'll notice that the delta-v info appears, but not with your engine icons. 2) Just drag the new stage up to the top of the column, but don't remove it. Leave it empty at the top. Now the staging list looks mostly correct with delta-v info complete for your engines and maneuver nodes are correctly calculated too. If you try and delete the blank stage by clicking the minus sign the error appears again with no delta-v info showing. Weirdly, the bug kept happening for me even after I undocked from the other vessel. Repeating the steps to create a new blank segment at the top always resets it back to normal. I'm not sure why it's doing this, but at least it seems there is a way to get it to read correctly and the extra blank stage isn't much of a concern. I hope this works for you, too. Good luck!

Does the yellow timer start happening when you come into physics range of your station? In space the game loads in nearby vessels when you approach within 2.5 km of each other. Also, does your station hold together if you never attempt to dock or target it? Or does it start flying apart even if you don't? If the station shakes apart even if you aren't trying to dock then I think you might have the order of causation backwards. You could be getting the yellow timer BECAUSE the station is unstable and beginning to shake itself apart - which would count as extreme physical stress. Try switching to your station when there are no other ships around and see if it still flies apart. If it does then you may have a glitch that can strike vessels that have either 1) too many autostruts across flexible parts of your station, or 2) very weak joints with flexible parts causing uncontrollable oscillation. The possible fixes for either of these problems on existing vessels are mutually exclusive. For (1) you need to turn off as many autostruts as you can as quickly as possible, for (2) you need to turn on autostruts for key parts of the station as soon as you can. It's possible to pause the game (ESC) and then bring up the cheat menu at the same time (ALT+F12) even before the scene finishes loading in. This should give you time to turn on the check box for "Unbreakable Joints" which might give you time to test the autostrut hypothesis. I don't know if any of this will help, but it's my best guess based on what you've said so far.

Hello @maphi100 and welcome to the KSP forum! Unfortunately, it's hard to diagnose a problem with the craft without more information about it. And since we can't upload pictures directly to the site, you'll have to upload to a photo hosting site and then post the URL link for the photo here for us to see. Imgur is a popular image hosting site to use on this forum because you don't need an account there to upload and post. There are a couple of bugs in the game that are known to mess up the delta-v readout. Changing the fuel priority for tanks can do it, so can the engine plates from the Making History DLC. One thing that would be worth checking is if you need to rearrange the stage icons in the staging stack on the side of the screen. I've noticed that some stages leave behind an empty or unused icon in the staging list, especially if they are activated out of order. This can confuse the delta-v readout. Try dragging unused stages up to the top of the staging list and see if it changes things. You might even need to separate certain engines into their own stage group, which you can do by clicking the plus sign (+) beside the stage icons and dragging the engine icon into the new spot. There was a bug where delta-v was not shown once entering into the sphere of influence of the Mun. I haven't seen it recently so it may have been fixed in the last update, but it could still be around for some players. As far as I know, visual mods should not cause these bugs.

What the color change is trying to tell you is that the game can no longer compute physics in real time. It has to take more than one second in real time to process one second's worth of in-game time. This makes your simulation appear to run in slow motion. Every experienced player gets this a few times in every game, especially for a yellow clock. Occasional yellow clocks are normal and shouldn't be a concern unless it's running in the red frequently and causing the game to be unplayable for you. Unless you are using certain mods the CPU is the main bottleneck - especially when using high part counts, during moments of extreme physical stress on the craft (like explosions, atmospheric shock, or decoupling several parts at once), and when using physics time warp. Accelerating physics time warp in atmosphere will almost always cause the clock to turn yellow or red. The graphics card of your computer isn't really being used to simulate the physical interactions of parts in your ship, and the game has been balanced so that you'll usually have graphics options that don't slow down a computer too much. Some stock graphics setting that can slow things down quite a bit on some systems are "terrain scatter" in the main settings menu, and atmospheric effects quality. But having said that, several graphics mods such as Scatterer and visual packs for textures can increase the complexity of the rendering enough to slow things down too. Usually this results in loss of frame rate and sluggish control, but I've had it slow down the physics clock on my older system too. RAM is not an issue with the physics clock at all. If you run out of RAM at any point the game will simply freeze and/or crash to desktop.

Hello @pieterwNL and welcome to the KSP forums. The first engines available to you in career mode are solid rocket motors. They are basically just big fireworks - you light them once and then they burn at full power until they run out of fuel. You can't throttle a solid rocket motor, nor can you stop them once they start. This is normal for those type of engines. The liquid fuel engines that you unlock with later tech can be throttled down. If that wasn't your problem then we need to know more about your rocket.

Hello @jirka828 1) Yes, overlapping parts so that they intersect and/or occupy the same space (partially or entirely) is what people mean by "part clipping." 2) The check box for "Part Clipping in Editors" doesn't have as much effect as it used to. As I understand it, the KSP editor was much more stringent about how much overlap it would accept when you attached parts together. I believe this was before the rotate, and translate editor gizmos were introduced. At the time there was a good reason to restrict part placement since it was harder to correct their alignment afterwards and the game wouldn't let you place parts near each other that overlapped significantly. Now, you can attach parts and then move them out of each other's way with the editor gizmos if you want to. If I remember correctly, checking the box to allow part clipping may allow you to attach multiple parts to the same attach node. 3) As a single player sandbox environment game your play style is mainly dependent on the rules you want to enforce on yourself. Adding more player control over part placement opened up greater opportunities for designers of custom and replica builders to experiment with. Some also cite instances where the density, weight distribution, or other properties of stock parts could be considered unrealistic or otherwise too restrictive compared to the options available to real-world craft designers. Consider that in the real world it would be easy to just use a structural girder that's half the size of the small one in the game if that's what you needed for your craft. But in the game the only solution might be to attach the girder provided and hide half of it inside the fuel tank or somewhere it won't be seen. It's still entirely possible to build craft without relying on part clipping/overlapping, but the game is simply not as restrictive as it used to be. I am unaware of a way to enforce the restrictions against part clipping - except by sheer willpower.

I think I can chime in a bit here considering that I'm currently reading the journals of Lewis & Clark right now, coincidentally. Although the Lewis & Clark expedition did include hired hands, many of them had arranged to leave and go back to St. Louis part way through. And all of them were fully aware that this was not just exploration for the sake of it, but also an economic expedition for the purpose of opening up (and monopolizing) commerce with the natives, the French fur traders, and the ports on the west coast. One of the most important goals along the way was to make contact with Sacajawea's tribe and barter for horses from them so that they could continue over land when the river courses were no longer navigable. They brought trade goods along with them for this very purpose. It was only "unknown" to the population of white settlers from the United States. The expedition fully intended to make use of the knowledge of the native tribes they met along the way for hunting advice, seasonal recommendations for travel, and directions through the waterways and mountain passes. Lewis and Clark also found out that the waterway of the Colorado down from the Rocky Mountains would be too rapid and dangerous for boat travel - which they predicted, but was confirmed by the Shoshone tribe. They knew they would be entirely unable to complete the journey westward without aid from the Shoshones in the form of horses and manpower. I think it's clear Mars is entirely inhospitable in relation to just about any part of the Earth. That's not to say that the life in the wilderness of 1804 Montana was a cake walk. Many of the tribes were barely subsisting, especially those in the mountains that didn't have access to the buffalo. But even that was a result of being pushed out of their territory by other tribes. So yea, there's really no comparison between going on a one-way trip to Mars, and exploring the North American frontier. On one hand you are completely at the mercy of instant death in an airless void, and totally alone, having absolutely no support in dire circumstances; and on the other hand, literally going where many thousands have gone before through a green, bounteous, haven of life.

I know this has already been solved, but just in case anyone else has this trouble, the mod that was responsible is World Stabilizer. World Stabilizer changes the way that things contact the ground when they load in, so it makes sense that it was the culprit. The mod author simply exempted the Breaking Ground experiments from being stabilized.

LOL, such creative names! To be fair, despite my intention to give my bases and stations interesting and novel names, I usually end up going the boring route just out of ease and usability. I mean, it's much easier to find the station you're looking for in the tracking station if its called Minmus Station Alpha isn't it? But here's some of my ideas for naming themes. - Precious metals or gemstones + synonyms for adventurous sounding words, ex: The Emerald Emissary, The Silver Sentry... extra points if you match the color of the metal/gem to the color of the planet it is on or orbiting. - Locations from a favorite series of novels, comic books, or TV shows, ex: Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Terok Nor... - Mythological concepts, places or heroes, ex: The Riddle of the Sphinx, The World Tree, The Shield of Achilles... - Do what most explorers of the past did and name it after something from your own home region, or name it after the first Kerbal to go there, ex: New Dallas, Jebediahtown... - Just string together some vaguely impressive words, ex: Timeless Abyss, Cosmic Majesty, Ethereal Twilight... - If it's a science station name it after famous scientists, ex: Hawking, Maxwell... - If it's a fuel depot name it after famous port cities, ex: San Francisco, New Orleans, Singapore, Shanghai...

Well, @Cabadam the name of the sun as Kerbol isn't officially in the game, so there's no reason know unless you've already been clued in by the community. And now you have! Keep in mind that there's no one right way to play. Even with a comm-sat network people have all sorts of strategies, and I'm sure you'll find one that works for you. Glad to hear that you've been having fun with the game. Good luck!

When he said he was on a "quest" I wasn't thinking about contracts, but that makes sense. @killamonjaru - steam name If the "Run Test" button isn't showing up then you may be using the wrong size heat shield from what the contract is asking for. Or, some contracts ask for parts to "activate from the staging sequence." This means that you would have to stage it like a decoupler at just the right time. But to do that you'd have to make sure that the staging is set to "enabled" in the VAB. Other contracts only need to be tested from the launch pad or after splash down. Can you give us the exact text of the contract, and all its conditions?

Hello @killamonjaru - steam name and welcome to the KSP forums. The option to jettison the heat shield is usually the only option for all but one of the heat shields in the stock game. They are intended to be ablative tiles fixed to the underside of a capsule, covering only the limited surface area of their diameter, and can be discarded after reentry. Only the ten-meter inflatable heat shield has the option to inflate to expand to a larger size. What other options were you hoping to find?

@Confutus Hi there. If there's "one neat trick" to building a plane that can fly "low and slow" and remain stable it is this: add a few degrees of incidence to the wings. A positive angle of incidence means that when viewed from the side you rotate the wings so that the leading edge is ever so slightly higher than the trailing edge. This allows the wings to produce more lift at slow speeds without having to constantly pitch the nose upwards. Adding incidence does add more drag to the wings during flight, but not as much as pitching the whole plane does, and that drag is usually compensated by extra lift. It also has the advantage of requiring no extra parts.

Hello @Cabadam and welcome to the KSP forums! I can see how those numbers wouldn't seem to make sense. The confusion lies in the use of the term "Kerbol" in the section you were reading. "Kerbol" is the unofficial term for the central Sun in the game. Thus, the six rings of satellites in orbits out to 50,000,000km really does mean to put them in orbit around the game's sun at those distances, not the planet of Kerbin. This way you get deep space communication coverage across the entire solar system, including planets such as Moho and Eeloo. For the Kerbin system itself a much more modest set of satellites is recommended.

You're overlooking the possibility that the designer/modeler/artist didn't even want to produce a product like this, but was asked to follow guidelines from a director that had other priorities. I.E. "We're looking for a smooth, low complexity design. Prioritize color options over tank butt switching. No make it look less busy. Need it and those other five designs by the end of the week."

I very much agree. Imagine if the scientific instruments were actually useful. A thermometer could turn on and off a bank of drills when they begin to overheat, or deploy solar panels when the sun hits it. Landing gear could auto-deploy at altitude. A barometer would be required for parachutes to auto-deploy. The seismic accelerometer could trigger aborts. Maybe the atmospheric scanner could be repurposed as an angle-of-attack sensor to use as a rudimentary glide angle autopilot. Unlocking the ability to use most part outputs to trigger action groups like you suggest could literally be a game changer - especially with the robotic parts.