Tyko

That's a lot of rocket for a tiny payload was this a New Horizons "go like a bat outa hell" launch profile?

Advancing through my SSRSS 2.5x 50% science game... Today I built and launched the first 2 crew capsule. Decided to go with a Soyuz twist for this playthrough instead of Gemini. It's built using modded HGR parts and this craft is only intended for LKO operations. Later when my lifting capacity improves I'll add the round crew compartment from Human Soyuz craft. Using USI-LS the capsule alone doesn't give enough habitation time do a moon orbit/return trip because it's too cramped. Adding the Crew Module will double my habitation time and create a great moon exploration craft. Next step - rendezvous and docking

Glad you got it working

I'm in the early stages of a new 1.3.1 game is there anything I can do to prevent new asteroids from suffering this problem? i'm wondering if I could go into the save file and edit the seed for asteroids I'm planning on capturing so it only has a 7 digit seed. Would something like this work? EDIT: It looks like the seed number isn't generated when the asteroid first appears. At least I couldn't find it in the code related to the asteroid in the Persistent file. When does the seed actually get generated? When I first get into physics range?

Sorry you're having problems. Can you give more detail about what "it wont do anything" means? Tell us what you've tried and what's not working. The first thing to check though is that you followed the install instructions on the first page of this forum exactly. The instructions are very thorough. If you can tell us which step is causing you grief that would help a lot.

I've had this problem before. With my experience it was due to my Root part not being in the upper stage. The root was somewhere in the middle and this threw off KER's logic.

Lots to answer there. The easy one is "what apoapsis would be the most efficient for the plane change?". The answer to that one is as high as possible. The higher it is the slower you're moving and that makes plane changes less expensive. In some cases it's actually cheaper to increase your AP above your target altitude, execute your plane change way out, then bring your AP back down afterwards.

USI-LS uses Supplies and includes green houses to let you produce more supplies. It also has hab/home timers that force you to consider how much living space you're giving your kerbals. It's entirely self contained. MKS uses a more complex life support model and adds more resources to manage plus a ton of additional parts to support large ship and basebuilding.

All great answers here...my quick and dirty solution is to set my de-orbit burn over that giant crater on the far side of the planet - the one that looks like a big target. If I start there and set my PE at 30-35Km I pretty reliably land in the ocean near KSC>

You can also use fuel flow prioritization to keep the COM forward. Usually all tanks in a stage drain evenly, but by adjusting priority you can change that. Use multiple fuel tanks in each stage (which it looks like you're doing). Then for each stage right click on the the tanks and adjust the fuel priority so the bottom tanks are the highest priority. This will cause that tank to drain first and then drain each tank progressively up the stack always keeping most of the weight forward

Welcome! Rendezvous and Docking are two really good skills to use. Imagine you've just completed the Mercury program and now it's time to progress to the Gemini program - orbital maneuvering, docking, etc. The way the Gemini program did this was to shoot up a rendezvous target (look up Agena Target Vehicle). They then practiced docking with it over several missions.

I've seen this before. A payload might be inducing torque of .004 which would be rounded down to .00 by KER. That slight amount seems to get compounded as you make it taller by adding more stages. I've often had to build the entire rocket, then go up and nudge a single science component a bit to zero out torque.

You don't have to write anything if you don't want to. Everything I referenced above is already written and you just have to follow the instructions for installing it...my "coding" is just editing some text files. I leave it to experts to write real code I figured all this out by reading on here and asking a lot of questions. If you want to try it I'm happy to help you. Just PM me and we can work on it together.

"there's a mod for that" - @Sigma88 wrote Sigma Dimensions which provides the underlying code to enable rescaling. Then you add a set of configs to tell Sigma what to do. @Galileo wrote an excellent series of Rescale configs for various sizes : 2.5, 3.2, 6.4, 10 and10.625. That's all you need if you want to rescale the Stock solar system. For my game I used SSRSS combined with RSS to get a Stock-Sized Real Solar System and scaled that up to 2.5x - essentially giving me a quarter-sized real solar system. If you want to try this, I suggest starting at the SSRSS page as Galileo provides complete instructions for adding all the mods. I chose to use a custom 2.5x setup borrowing heavily from Galileo's work, but with many tweaks of my own. The biggest difference is that I moved the KSC to the equator in Northern Brazil so launches start at 0.0 degrees inclination. If you want to try my configs for 2.5x I'm happy to share those.

Brazil 2.5x adventures continue: Placed optical/biome scan sats in polar orbits over Earth and the Moon. After that I landed what I'm officially calling the "cutest little lander evvaaaah!!" on the Moon. Playing at 2.5x is really forcing me to think lean on craft design and I'm loving the challenge. Additional pix if you're interested:

Started a new save using SSRSS scaled up to 2.5x (~5000DV to LEO) using stock/stock-alike parts. Science mode with 50% science returns. On this Earth the Kerbals of Brazil ran the first successful space program launching from a KSC located near the Amazon River Delta. After a few months of launching sounding rockets and un-crewed suborbital hops it was time to put the first satellite into Earth orbit:

Also worth noting that the longer a burn is the less accurate it is. The Manuever node is plotting for an instantaneous burn of the entire DV and the time you spend burning before and after the node can throw your course off. So, if your leaving planetary orbit and your burn is longer than about 4 minutes you might want to think about breaking it up over several burns there's some good info in this thread:

Is it possible to give a crewed part a negative habitability modifier - essentially make it cramped? the use case is Soyuz capsules. The descent module can hold 3 crew, but it’s a lot more cramped than a Mk1-2 capsule. Adding the round crew compartment to the Soyuz capsule gives the crew more elbow room.

would you consider releasing a set of procedural parts textures so custom tanks would match your style?

It's pretty easy to make a quick MM config to add the science box functionality to anything. I added it to all command pods. If you're interested I can post the code here later.

So cool!!!

I just tried Gravity Turn for the first time last night. I thought I was performing fairly efficient manual launches - usually around 3250-3300m/s to launch from Gael. With Gravity Turn it's only taking 3100

Over the weekend I went in and downsized the green 2-crew version of the Soy-Juice to an approx. 1.5m standard. Scaled all the required parts and adjusted weights, tank capacities and engine thrust to match. It's not quite historical, but it makes a really nice middle step between the Mk1 and the Mk1-2 or 3-crew Soy-Juice capsules. It also fits perfectly in a 1.875m fairing. I use USI-LS, so I kind of justified the reduction by moving a majority of the life support to the green Onion. My stock capsules all have 5 day's of life support while the Soy-Juice only gets one day with a lot more in the Onion.

Agreed. I tried the game for a while and was ready to walk away from it until I learned about KER - this one mod turned the game around for me. After that I added a bunch more, but that or MJ readouts are a must-have for me.

THIS...when I moved to 2.5x scale using stock parts my rockets suddenly started looking "realistic" - minimum 2 stages to orbit and 3 stages to the moon. Made it challenging, but still accessible