Fraktal

Something definitely changed in 1.9: the changelog says they messed around with time warping and a pretty nasty trajectory bug (engaging timewarp rounds something down in the orbital calculations, causing just enough of the craft's current orbital energy to vanish into the ether to make precise interplanetary encounters impossible due to the closest approach changing every single time timewarp is turned on and with enough timewarp on/off toggling miss the target body's SOI entirely) appeared around the same version as well, so I wouldn't be surprised if an undocumented change, possibly performance-oriented, messed things up. So yes, something is definitely wrong with the orbits in the game. Haven't seen this particular issue you're pointing at, though, as my patched conic setting is too low for it.

Actually, I'm currently experimenting with a slightly lighter design where I drop one of the Terriers and replace the other three's offseted girders with a stack tricoupler. Minor improvement, yes, but still gave me a couple dozen m/s more dV. I also offseted the engines outwards to reduce the rotation angle, but still need to find the exact angle at which the thrust vector just barely avoids the heatshield. The heatshield still uses the same girdered configuration, just radially attached onto the bottom of the tricoupler and offseted into the exact center.

I don't have the proper parts for that yet and I'm deliberately trying to use tech 6 and lower parts.

Yes, it's definitely RAM depletion you're experiencing. When I first played KSP, I only had 4 GB of RAM and experienced the exact same symptoms as you to the point where it took the game around 15 minutes to finish shutting down whenever it crashed (and it crashed a lot) and loading times between screens were off the charts (I could literally go and have a full dinner while the game loaded). Then I got 8 GB more RAM for a total of 12 GB and KSP runs much smoother now. Still not perfect (my CPU is also underpowered), but way better than before, to the point where I can actually leave Chrome running on my second monitor now. So yes, go ahead and stick more RAM into your PC because KSP is one hell of a glutton with it.

Seconded, with an additional tidbit: we should also be able to view the tech tree in sandbox mode so that we can tell which part is on which node without Alt-Tabbing out to look at the wiki, in case we're using the sandbox to design and test craft for career use down the line and thus need to keep tech nodes in mind when picking parts.

I seem to remember that vessels don't get counted if you turn off display of that vessel type in the Tracking Station. I turned off relays and my three relay sats around Kerbin are no longer counted.

I don't have Breaking Ground.

Upon launch, the orbiter had about 2516 m/s. After aerocapture and circularization into a 61 km equatorial orbit, it has 1089 m/s left with the weight of a fully fueled lander. After separation, the lander has 2087 m/s; a round trip to Duna with parachute descent is going to use up nearly all of that, so the orbiter's delta-V is going to rise from the mass decrease and I'm planning to transfer the lander's remaining fuel over to the orbiter for trans-Kerbin injection (the lander has two Thuds, so the orbiter will likely have higher Isp). If I'm lucky, I'll even have enough fuel for circularization around Kerbin. I do trim my ablator down for single-use crafts, but this orbiter is designed to be 100% reusable, with the heatshield attached via a docking port so that it can be jettisoned and replaced at Kerbin once it's used up. That and I have no idea how much ablator it's going to take to aerocapture around Kerbin during the return trip; if it's going to be similar to what it took to aerobrake around Duna, I should be able to squeeze out one more round trip before it needs replacement.

Just yesterday, I launched my first mission to Duna which arrived safely, but ended up using quite a bit more fuel (more than half) than I anticipated. This is due to me having decided to experiment with an engine design I never tried before. This is the engine assembly of the orbiter: four Terriers radially attached with a roughly 26° rotation so that their thrust vectors narrowly avoid the edge of the heatshield while still being behind said heatshield and thus fully protected during aerobraking. Yesterday I successfully tested this design out with an aerocapture at Duna, which used up slightly more than 1/8 of the heatshield's ablator to insert the craft into a 61 km orbit, with nothing on the craft ever showing overheat bars. I also wish to future-proof this design eventually to the point where it could survive aerocapture at Eve at 120% reentry heating. But anyway. Due to the offset thrust of the engines, I found out the hard way that KER's option of calculating delta-V with vectored values does not apply to the KER readouts for the duration and timing of maneuver burns: my trans-Duna injection took quite a bit more time than indicated, missed the planet by more than 300 million kilometers and used up more than half of the orbiter's fuel. If it weren't for the orbiter having been designed for aerocapture, I'd have been stuck at Duna due to using up too much fuel for propulsive deceleration. I thought that the few hundred m/s lost from angling the engines is acceptable, but this is clearly not the case. So my question is, which of these two options is better for increasing efficiency by way of lowering the thrust offset angle? Offset the Terriers outwards, partially exposing them to the airstream but allowing them to operate at a lower offset angle. Add more girders between the engines and the heatshield to increase their distance from each other, increasing weight by 125kg per girder (for reference, the whole orbiter-plus-lander assembly is exactly 61 tons when fully fueled) but allowing me to lower engine offset while still maintaining full heat protection. The heatshield is already autostrutted, so it shouldn't have stability problems. One extra girder already allows me to lower the offset to 14-15° without blasting the back of the heatshield.

Assembly and fueling of my Duna exploration vehicle is complete, with ten days to go until launch. Ten days later the engines come to life and the journey begins. The maneuver node ends up some 140k kilometers off, forcing me to manually adjust trajectory. Sadly, I still ended up missing Duna by more than 3 million kilometers due to KSP's compounding floating point errors making a huge amount of dV vanish into the ether once I engaged time warp, so now I have to load my previous save and start over. On second try, though, our efforts are met with success as Bob finally catches sight of the ship's destination in the distance... Another complication that comes up is KER's maneuver assist readouts having miscalculated dV expenditure for the rendezvous maneuver, resulting in the maneuver using up a LOT more fuel than displayed. Like, I had less than half of my total fuel remaining, not counting the lander, so an Ike rendezvous was out of the question. Luckily, I did design the orbiter with aerobraking capability, so we have that. Fellow KSP players... I have officially arrived to Duna for the first time.

Mine was pretty low-key: I physics-warped while walking downhill on a steep slope. Tripped over and instantly spaghettified.

On that note, I spent today's session preparing for the Duna mission. Redesigned the orbiter completely. It's single-fuselage two-tank now rather than triple-fuselage three-tank, I tacked on a heat shield to the rear, replaced the dual Poodles with quad Terriers and angled them to diagonally fire out from behind the heatshield, their thrust vectors narrowly missing the edge of the shield to provide propulsion while still being shielded during reentry and only losing a few hundred dV (it actually has enough thrust that the whole orbiter could land and take off from Duna by itself, it just doesn't have landing legs). Didn't test how much dV I'll have once the lander is docked, but it should be more than enough enough for the return trip and possibly even refueling the lander for an Ike visit. I'm more concerned with the lander's dV: it has enough fuel to get back up into space, but might not have enough for a rendezvous if the orbiter is too high up. Oh well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it (and the orbiter has its own RCS, so it can go fetch the lander if need be). With the design finalized, I wrapped the orbiter into a fairing and launched it with roughly 2/3 of its maximum fuel load so that my currently largest booster (5x Skippers on the first stage, 1x Skipper on the second stage) can lift it into orbit in one go. It circularized before control signal was lost (I'm playing with DSN off). Next, I designed a tanker. I originally intended to lift two X200-64 tanks but decided that probably won't be necessary and in any case, lifting that and a third X200-64 into orbit for actually getting the other two tanks to where they're needed is beyond my lifting capacity at the moment. So I dropped one of the payload tanks, which turned out to be a good decision down the line. This craft too only managed to circularize before dropping out of contact. By this time I was starting to be really miffed by the constant connection interruptions making me unable to make the two craft rendezvous (they were in fast 86km orbits), so I took a detour and launched three relay satellites in one go and boosted them all up to 1000 km altitude in a crude triangular formation. Need some adjustment for aesthetic purposes but for now, I've got permanent 100% signal strength in Kerbin orbit. With the connection issues debugged, the tanker rendezvoused with the Duna orbiter which docked into the tanker (the tanker doesn't have RCS). At which point it turned out that I brought just the right amount of propellant: of the 1440 liquid, 114 was left once propellant loading was complete. The game had its daily crash at this point so I couldn't continue, but the tanker stayed docked with the Duna orbiter for now so that once Jeb and co. return from their test flight to the edge of Kerbin's SOI with the Duna lander prototype and launch in the actual lander, I'll use the tanker's remaining fuel to top off the lander as well before returning to Kerbin and awaiting the Duna transfer window. I originally wanted to launch the mission from my orbital station and even fitted the station with docking modules for that purpose (with each module having two spaced-apart dorsal and ventral docking ports each, aligned normal/antinormal to make lining up with them easier), but hauling the fuel up to geostationary orbit would've taken a lot of delta-V. Maybe once I'll have nuclear engines. Things are looking very good. I'm starting to get a bit excited that I might actually put kerbals on Duna for the first time tomorrow.

Finished harvesting Kerbin's SOI of science. Also did a flight test of my Duna lander to just outside the SOI and back, followed by an aerobraking reentry and parachute landing. Landing legs turned out to be too high up, resulting in the docking port being crushed upon landing, which was remedied in the VAB. No time for more testing, however, as my Minmus flights and the outbound flight test took more time than I thought; I only have 11 days until an optimal transfer window to Duna, in which time I need to get both the orbiter and the lander up into space, dock them together and fuel them up in orbit before sending them off. When fully fueled, the orbiter's dual Poodles will have slightly over 3k m/s of dV, while the lander's dual Thuds will have 2k m/s. Both have RCS and the lander docks into the front of the orbiter aft-first. I know I'm massively overengineering it, but I'm doing that on purpose due to the fact that I can't quite make bi-weekly trips to Duna like I could to Minmus (hence why the orbiter is bringing no less than four experiment storage units plus antennas, to make sure I get everything from whatever biome I end up landing in). That and if I'll have enough spare dV upon taking off from Duna, I'll attempt a visit to Ike as well for more juicy science. Still a bit uncertain about whether I'll be able to pull off aerobraking at Kerbin upon return without a heat shield, since the orbiter is using a triple 2.5m fuselage and the lander can't mount one to its rear either because it'll block off the docking port's crossfeed.

Finished my longest Minmus mission ever just now. After having spent several real-life days harvesting the Mun bare of science (I'm playing at 10% science, so it left me about 40~ points short of finishing tier 5 of the tech tree), I finally got to Minmus for the first time in my current save and promptly visited no less than five biomes with the same craft, resulting in a ten-day mission. End result was 308 science (which, again, is equal to 3084) plus about 70 more transmitted throughout the mission. Never did anything like this before, but it left me very satisfied. Another 3 or 4 missions will finish Minmus completely, giving me ample parts for putting together my first manned Duna mission while I wait for the transfer window (it's slightly over 100 days away).

Tested out the KV-3 on reentry from Minmus today. Used slightly more than 1.5 ablator at a 5g reentry and returned just fine.

Okay, I seem to have done goofed. My mistake.

Sounds like the Thuds are giving your rocket insufficient torque. How many fins do you have at the end of the rocket? Too many will make the rocket excessively stable and hard to steer.

A lot of things need mods and Squad can't put everything in without bloating the game to the point where it won't even run on low-end systems and consoles anymore, instead of running merely adequately.

Nothing wrong with being helpful. Frankly, it's people like you who keep the community going, more than even Squad does.

It's the standard response to everything on this forum, but you probably know that. That and I've already found that trying to appeal to the woes of people whose rigs can't keep up in any context is a lost cause; community's too dead-set on pushing the envelope at 120% power at all times.

The stock game already shows your eccentricity relative to the ecliptic in the orbital information in the lower left; you need to switch to the second tab (above the ORBIT text). You can also see your eccentricity relative to a celestial body by opening the map view, setting the body as target and mousing over the ascending/descending nodes (the Mun is on the ecliptic, so doing this with the Mun will show your absolute eccentricity). For eccentricity after a maneuver, KER can display that - and it always displays the eccentricity you'll have in the same SoI as the maneuver, meaning that you can create a maneuver node to see what your eccentricity will be after an SoI change before you actually get there. This is a good thing because even a 3° inclination around Kerbin can get you into an 81° around the Mun to give you a much wider choice of biomes to land in without having to spend dV manually changing your inclination at the Mun (though you'll do need to expend dV to lower your Ap to an altitude from where you can start a not-excessively-vertical landing approach).

Huh. A space telescope in Hawaii located an object approaching Earth at an unusually slow speed from a nearly circular heliocentric orbit. Said object might be the Centaur upper stage of a lunar probe launched in 1966. Trajectory predictions say it's going to get captured by Earth's gravity for four months before drifting off again.

They do for me too, but so very briefly it usually doesn't even start raising the G-LOC meter of wimpier kerbals.

That's why I set my chutes to start opening at 0.1 pressure and fully open at 1000 meters. Causes only moderate g-forces on full opening while still having a several hundred meter ground altitude safety margin even in highlands. Continued harvesting the Mun in my current save. Only have five biomes left, which will complete tier 5 science and allow me to start building what will eventually be a geostationary spacedock about 120° ahead of the KSC. I also still need to finalize my advanced munar lander designs; the stock one is more or less complete and tested, the Making History one still needs some engineering to compensate for the KV-3's weight. I'm also thinking of possibly retooling the stock advanced lander into a manned rover, but putting it together is going to require some serious engineering and possibly orbital assembly.

Right. It's just that I've heard contradictory statements over the years about whether open nodes cause drag or not.