Fraktal

I'm yet to play career, mind you, and only recently got to Duna for the first time ever before I reset the tech tree, downgraded all facilities to level 1 and cranked up aero heating to 120% in order to experiment with the addition of 1.11's EVA science kit and how much it alters the 10% tech tree progression while I'm waiting for the Duna->Kerbin transfer window. I thought of my first career game being 10% science as well, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to pull it off without running out of money early on due to having to fly a LOT of missions to progress early on. I'm yet to see any green monoliths either and of the black ones, I only found the munar equatorial one so far.

You say you did that a couple years ago? Heh. After 1241 hours in the game, I'm yet to play with anything other than 10% science. Far as I'm concerned, it's how KSP was meant to be played. Hence why, when I was looking at overhauling the stock tech tree, I was thinking of applying a 0.1 multiplier to all science rewards by default due to so many people complaining that the stock tech tree is too easy to unlock if you grind in Kerbin's SOI, which I aimed to fix by making the grinding mandatory - but then realized that if I did that and someone additionally set the difficulty multiplier below 100%, they'd get stuck very quickly from having run out of science in range of their current parts and thus being unable to develop the parts that would let them gain access to even more science. Hell, even in a 10% game you can get deadlocked if you unlock the tier 4 nodes in the wrong order (ie. if you unlock aircraft before the Terrier, since by that point Kerbin's entire remaining science won't add up to another 45 points even if you fully grind out the KSC itself, preventing you from proceeding any further unless you edit your save file or pull off a REALLY lucky suborbital flyby of the Mun). But if we were to add in anomaly hunting to give the player a heads-up, that would indeed be rewarding.

Stock game's already possible with that, if you don't mind having to visit Minmus orbit before landing on the Mun and having your first couple interplanetary visits not use Nervs.

I ran into that issue too: the jetpack doesn't produce any lift on the Mun until about 40% thrust at default kerbal loadout (ie. parachute and jetpack).

I don't know about the stock dV display, but the KER one doesn't combine dV values if you disable crossfeed on either docking port. Damn ninja kraken...

Or you could always just mount the engines said fuel is needed for radially. That's what I usually do for my landers: engines are mounted radially, heatshield is on ground level, all docking is done at the front, rather than the back, so nothing needs to crossfeed through the heatshield.

Not bad at all. When slapping together a plane with these early parts, what gets me all the time are the rear landing gear. I put the main wings at the front, so the rear wheels can only go onto the fuselage, which makes them very narrowly packed. You dodged that issue with the canarded rear-wing design. Also, am I seeing it right that you're packing two Mk1 fuel tanks in addition to the Mk0 ones the engines are mounted onto? That much fuel is enough for, like, circumnavigating Kerbin around 2/3 of the way. Not sure of the exact number, but one is enough to reach the poles. Just an FYI.

Would indeed be useful in zero gee, considering how awful the EVA camera control is.

Manley got me into this game too years ago, around... 1.4, I think. Got me in a bit of a dilemma trying to decide between KSP or Space Engineers, both of which I was eyeing but neither of which I had a strong enough PC for. I ultimately chose KSP.

Never, for the same reason why the ESA is sticking to non-reusable rockets despite SpaceX outcompeting the excrements out of them in launch price: every rocket that isn't single-use is one more rocket that doesn't need to be rebuilt from scratch in the factory. Less rockets means less work for the factory, less work for the factory means layoffs to maintain profitability, layoffs mean unemployment, unemployment means the politician who pushed for reusability can say goodbye to reelection. Try to portray that in KSP. Seriously, them kerbals have it easy. Now I find myself wishing for a mod that can restrict which engine can drain which tank without having to mess around with crossfeed...

I'm aware, but insufficient dV almost always requires more fuel (unless the problem is low Isp). Mixing engines of different fuel types is and always has been a case of "do it at your own peril". And if your TWR is really that low that it can't deal with a little extra weight, that's an engine choice problem, not weight problem. MOAR BOOSTERS is not always the solution... but every other time it is.

That's a design issue, not a fuel issue.

There's no such thing in KSP. No margin of error is asking for trouble in a game with orbital calculations as rounding-happy as they are.

While I never built anything reality-inspired (parts tend to be too high up in the tech tree for my preference), I did a lot of experimentation with KV pods and can state with absolute certainty that you can, in fact, launch a KV-1 pod to space without a fairing, but it requires a completely different rocket design methodology than a Mk1 command pod. You need a strong lower stage. Looking at an image of an R7, that seems to be the case already, but what I'm saying in particular is that whatever stage you mount your fins on, DO NOT DROP THAT STAGE until you're well above 50 km altitude. Anything lower and the rocket will flip from the air resistance. The longer that stage stays on during ascent, the better, vacuum Isp be damned. Use gimbal engines, not non-gimbal ones. A reaction wheel is NOT strong enough to counteract flipping. Once you reach around 55-60 km, even a single Terrier has enough gimbal to keep you from flipping by brute-force overpowering the aero forces on the KV pod, even if you don't have a reaction wheel (though not having a reaction wheel means you won't have roll control). High AoA is your enemy. Lock SAS to prograde once you begin the gravity turn and use time-to-apoapse to control your trajectory (ie. throttle up to push it further away to make your trajectory steeper, throttle down to let the AP closer to flatten out your trajectory), not steering at crazy angles. Keep the rocket short and squat. Remember physics class: torque equals force times lever. The taller the rocket, the further away the KV pod is from the CoM, which makes the pod's aero drag pull the rocket sideways into a flip even harder. Example: This craft can go to the edge of Kerbin's SOI and back without reaction wheels and no flipping during launch.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. Until you get mid-game launchers, functional is pretty much all you can do efficiently. ---- My most frequent and frustrating problem is getting un-aerodynamic payloads into orbit. KV pods in the early game, labs, hitchhiker storage modules and 2.5m fuel tanks afterwards. Putting it in a fairing pretty much never helps (and is not an option for KV pods anyway), regardless of whether it's fairing-ended or interstage-fairing. I also constantly find myself struggling to build a 1.875m rocket with any kind of useful performance increase over a 1.25m rocket.

Probably the latter. Wiki says it should be capable of over ten times that speed. I only ever used the S2 wheels myself so far, but even those can propel a rover weighing a few hundred kilograms much faster than that.

Laugh if you want, but I found myself finding out how hellishly difficult it is to eyeball a suborbital flight from a non-equatorial launchpad into a non-equatorial biome of respective longitudes around 60° away from each other with a pre-Terrier rocket, no maneuver nodes, no time-to-apoapse readout and no Trajectories mod telling me where I'll land. I eventually just gave up after my last attempt flew over the target biome and into the highlands on a high-angle 8 g reentry. I haven't the faintest idea how Elon Musk plans to pulls this off in real life (though that one's probably not going to eyeball it).

They already do, minus a flammability warning sticker that's already unwelcome as it is due to how it's 90° off if the tank is radially attached. But some of the tank paint schemes are indeed off in the sense that the actual texture does not match up with the color scheme. For example, the FL-TX440 and FL-TX1800 both have their white and black & while schemes swapped up.

Something I was wondering about. Not a bug, just a thought. Is there mechanically no way to tie part availability to facility upgrades? Because in a new 1.11 career game, removing the rank requirement of parachutes and allowing kerbals to equip them right away is nice - but even if you equip them with a parachute, they can't actually USE that parachute in an actual emergency situation because the game won't let them bail out in mid-air until the Astronaut Complex is upgraded. So as paradoxical as it sounds, a personal parachute is dead weight until you explicitly pay for it to be otherwise. What's the point of even putting it on the Start node, then? Also, another thought that came to me while I was writing this, this one might be a bug: kerbals with an empty inventory are no longer capable of landing on their feet on Kerbin even if they jump straight up with no horizontal velocity whatsoever because the mass reduction causes them to jump so high that upon landing, the game force-ragdolls them from hitting the ground too hard. That definitely shouldn't happen. Auto-ragdoll velocity should be raised (and I always thought it was ridiculously sensitive anyway).

You may want to consider getting the Trajectories mod. It gives your map view a visual prediction of your actual trajectory during reentry and approximate location for landing, based on your craft's drag, lift, AoA and how much Kerbin will rotate under you while you're coming down. Once you have it, it's merely a matter of setting up a maneuver node for deorbiting and tweaking it until the X that indicates where you'll land is near the runway. Then it's just a matter of putting the shuttle down on the ground once you're past reentry.

I see. Thanks.

I find it somewhat weird that bug report guys keep asking for output_log while mine hasn't been updated since October 2019 and KSP's crashes stopped making their own folders around 2018. Only players.log is up-to-date.

Anyone else ran into the garbage collector suddenly crashing and taking KSP with it while in the VAB? Never seen that before.

KER for one doesn't. It stops calculating delta-V and exception-spams the console if the current craft contains any manned parts due to the new "weight of crew and their inventories is included in part mass" mechanic in 1.11. I actually had to start using the stock delta-V readouts in the VAB to get anywhere.

Now this is a very nice suggestion. Docking ports are already optionally stageable and the game doesn't calculate delta-V properly in the VAB unless you enable it. I was about to say that we should also be able to stage landing legs when I remembered that we already have a whole action group for that. Staging science parts would be more of a convenience feature, but staging airbrakes during landing would be neat. And another possible use case I can think of is using staging to turn off reaction wheels so that a craft designed to be responsive while loaded with a lot of fuel no longer spins out on a dime once that weight is gone.