Fraktal

I ultimately just brute-forced it and ate the travel time. I mean, I had something like 2100 m/s, so I could spare the fuel. On the way home now with about 700 m/s left, which should be enough for aerobraking and station docking. Really damn irritated me that whenever I got very close to getting an encounter with Kerbin while tweaking the maneuver node, the game suddenly went "nope" and hid the Closest Approach marker. Every damn time. Dodging around Ike's SOI was easy by comparison.

Currently trying to figure out how to get back from Duna. The community delta-V map is of absolutely no help: if I burn exactly the amount of dV stated in the right direction during the transfer window as specified by the alarm clock, Kerbin is way out of position for an intercept. Like, 16 million kilometers out of position. Burning twice as much gets me where I want to go, but adds something like 60% to the trip's duration (1 year 8 days). And I can't figure out why. Is the game lying about the timing of the transfer window? EDIT: ...something somewhere IS lying, it would seem. The alarm clock says the transfer window is 14 days away, the Astrogator mod says it's 321 days away, meaning that I already missed it.

The nearest engineer is currently on the surface of Duna with a dV budget that does not allow this kind of detour. That and I think he only has three repair kits.

Landed a rover on Ike, although I had to cheat with CommNet coverage to make it happen because even though I brought two relays in the same transfer window, my knowledge of how combinations of direct and relay antennas behave (ie. boosting a relay with a direct on the same vessel does not actually allow the DSN to be bounced through the boosted relay, so the boosted relay now behaves as a direct antenna) was incomplete. Also will need to touch the save file because I was unaware that fairings and breakable wheels do not like each other (ie. ejecting a fairing that clips though wheels because the VAB allowed it breaks the wheels).

Today I decided to bring that triple Duna mission I had en route for months now to their destination. Then spent over an hour fighting the spotty DSN coverage. Then went "hold on, the wiki says level 2 ground stations are 50G, why is everything except the KSC only 20G?" and spent another hour investigating that. Then nearly ripped my hair out in frustration upon figuring out that the CommNet Constellation mod silently nerfs non-KSC DSN transmitter power without a single word about it anywhere in the mod description.

Successful abort and splashdown during a botched blastoff that pitched over too hard and destroyed my Mun lander's parachutes with atmo heating. Out of the dozens of times I launched in this save, this is the only one where me having set up the abort action group actually came in handy: killed all engines, detached the lander and performed a feather-soft 0.4 m/s splashdown in the ocean using the lander's engines. First time I tried anything like this and it worked like a charm.

Daily fail: after setting up survey equipment on the Mun, I tried to have my scientist let go of the ladder he was on in order to jetpack to the command module hatch so that we can go home. I ended up staging off the lander's engine instead because the cursed "previous/next craft" button switched from the survey equipment to the lander instead of the kerbal.

Perfect refueling! Just enough left in the fuel hauler for it to deorbit itself.

It is buggy, unfortunately. By itself it works as advertised: have a kerbal equip it as an inventory item, go EVA, go where you want it, click the deploy button, move the kerbal to aim it, then drop it. It will stick itself to the ground and you can now have an engineer kerbal use EVA Construction to add a docking port to it. Actually lining up a landed vessel's docking port with the anchor's is the hard part. The problem is that the ground anchor is NOT exempt from the physics easing introduced a couple major versions ago: when a landed vessel enters physics range, the game raises it above the terrain a bit and then loads it so that none of it explodes due to suddenly being affected by gravity incorrectly causing the engine to think it crashed into the surface at high speed. The ground anchor, however, is MEANT to intersect as part of its normal operation, but the easing code doesn't care and raises it several meters up the next time you load it - and due to being autostrutted to the ground once deployed, it will NOT fall back down, meaning that your whole base will be floating from that point on.

Another cargo-related problem, this one's a definite bug. If tooltips are enabled, they also show up when mousing over inventory parts in the PAW during flight. If the part you mouse over on the PAW is Breaking Ground deployable science equipment and you click the deploy icon, the PAW closes but the tooltip does not. Instead, the tooltip keeps indefinitely following the mouse around until you open another PAW and mouse over, then out of, any inventory item, at which point it disappears as normal. Are you calling the tooltip hiding command from a mouse-out event handler? Because it sounds as if the event doesn't fire if the PAW gets closed this way.

Just had a very good haul on Minmus. First trip there on my current game, landed and scienced 5 biomes in one mission, then got back to Kerbin with only 12 m/s of fuel left. Would've had a greater margin of error if I hadn't gone for the polar biome right off the bat from an equatorial orbit, but at least it's out of the way now.

That one is caused by the symmetry parts technically being new parts, I think. I've seen a similar issue in Ship Sections: place a part without symmetry, give it a section name, move it elsewhere with symmetry. The counterparts will not inherit the original's section name, but instead get assigned to a default one. Grab the original again and put it back down, counterparts now properly inherit the original's section name.

According to the wiki, all parts have G-limits, but 99% of the time it's set to 50g. Only wheels and decouplers have a different value, so I think it was copy-pasted ridiculously high as an anti-kraken measure.

If you're using KER, it's roughly the mass with which you'll get 3400 m/s of dV if your sea-level launch TWR is at least 1.4. Any lower dV and you won't reach orbit. Any lower TWR and you'll lose too much dV to pushing against gravity. For an upper stage, you can get away with less TWR but too low and you won't be able to circularize in time. That's really the best I can say.

Look at it this way. At least the game is future-proofed in terms of hardware utilization.

It was just a launcher update, not a game update.

Command pods have built-in antennas, but those cannot transmit science data even if in range (they're also weak, so a relay will only connect from close range to begin with).

About to attempt my first return from Duna to Kerbin. Never done it before, so now I'll get to find out how risky interplanetary aerobraking at Kerbin without a heatshield really is. Also turned out that Astrogator's auto-generated maneuver node for the return was a load of BS that missed Kerbin by 3.5 million kilometers, so I tossed it out and made my own that not only costs less dV but actually intersects Kerbin's SOI.

Eh. I had single-digit meter differences in Mun and Minmus relays and they still drifted off after a year. I use probe cores almost exclusively as onboard avionics for manned craft, so I only need the comm uplink back to Kerbin for maneuver nodes.

I use only a few equatorial sats. 'Few' as in, I used to go for three per body but got tired of orbital drift inevitably throwing their spacing off. So now I just use one sat in a medium-height orbit and learn to live with having a limited transmission window.

Try a <0 km periapse reentry from the Mun. If that doesn't work, try it from Minmus.

Rimworld, it's a no-brainer. Hell, you already have to build a spaceship from scratch to win the game and there's a mod that lets you continue playing on the ship itself in orbit.

It might not necessarily be repairable, though. Remember that Sojourner looked intact too aside from the engine nozzles being crooked from groundstrike, yet we're told it's unrepairable with what they have on hand.

I swear someone on the production team is into KSP... Situation: Mars lander needs to get up from the surface to its orbiter to medivac an astronaut, but it doesn't have enough fuel to even get into orbit, let alone dock. They also don't have time to wait for ISRU to make enough fuel because the astronaut's condition can't wait that long. Solution: Mars lander takes off from the surface with the astronaut strapped to the top of the ship. Lander boosts up to a suborbital trajectory within sight range of the orbiter. Near the peak of its trajectory, the lander cuts engines with 7% fuel remaining. Lander tips forward and at the same time, the astronaut unstraps herself and gets flung off towards the orbiter by momentum. Astronaut uses her MMU pack to rendezvous with the orbiter. Lander falls back into the atmosphere on a very steep descent trajectory and lithobrakes with a suicide burn. Last shot is the pilot walking away from the busted and smoking lander like a boss. And least we forget, the gigantic twist reveal last episode that

OK, updating CKAN did the trick. Auto-update was turned off because it has been throwing a 404 error for a long time now. Addon installed fine this time. Sorry for the inconvenience.