Zacspace

I have my rover controls bound to the arrow keys so that I can just leave SAS on all the time in low gees. A lot of my smaller rovers probably just front flip if somebody with normal keybindings tries to drive them now that I think of it.

Theoretically, a lower starting orbit is always more efficient due to the Oberth effect. In practice, long burn times introduce inefficiencies due to steering losses (the maneuver requiring you to point away from prograde, basically) that can pretty easily outweigh the gains from starting lower, and that's before you even consider what you're leaving on the table by bringing more rockets than you need. There's not really a "best" altitude. There's probably a most efficient altitude for doing a one-shot transfer in any given craft, but I truly have no idea how you'd find out what it is besides trial and error. If you need more time, you need more altitude. Yeah, so your trajectory inside your target's SOI should be where you want your orbit to be, just like you say. But between leaving Kerbin orbit and arriving at your destination, you're in solar orbit. What your orbit around the sun looks like, and where along your solar orbit your encounter takes place, determines how fast you're going to be going when you enter your target's SOI. You want to be going slow, both so that there's less velocity to burn away, but also so that you're more influenced by the planet's gravity, which makes it easier to slow down. To do that you want to basically make sure your orbit around the sun and the planet's orbit around the sun don't cross at a large angle. Ideally you want to encounter your target near the tip of your orbit, like if you were docking with it. Like I said, it's hard to do it with Eeloo, but you should have an easier time tuning your Jool encounter because Jool has a huge SOI and long transfer windows. Once mechjeb makes your maneuver node, try wiggling it around and adding/removing a little velocity to get it just right. As far as doing the capture into Jool with gravity assists goes, I do have a picture of that if you fiddle around enough with prograde/retrograde and radial in/out while plotting your course correction, you can fine tune exactly when you to get to Jool to make sure the moons are in a position you want them to be when you get there. since the moons orbit in resonance, you should be able to copy this exact trajectory if you wanted, but the important part is meeting Tylo in pretty much that part of its orbit around Jool, where it's going the same direction you are. That's going to give you the biggest slow down. because it'll give you the most time inside Tylo's SOI, being influenced by its gravity. Here, all I did was encounter Tylo and it threw me directly into a Jool orbit for free, and one that encounters Vall even, which is where I was going. I made sure the Vall encounter was "low energy" in the way I described above (the Vall encounter is really close to my Jool Pe), and it only cost me 400m/s to get from a Jool flyby into low Vall orbit. Obviously we're getting a little advanced. You don't need to be super precise like I was here to capture with Tylo, but it helps. It's also possible to use Laythe's atmosphere to aerobrake if you bring a big enough heat shield. It's easier than aerobraking in Jool's atmosphere. Either way should save you a lot of dV and let you make a much smaller rocket.

I looked at your kerpollo thread and noticed that your Dres rocket was an absolute unit. The one you used for Eeloo was more reasonable, but the transfer stage seemed a bit overkill. I have a few tips: - You don't need high TWR in orbit. Am I wrong to assume you're using mechjeb to plot and pilot your interplanetary transfers? I know it just slams you into the atmosphere if your burn takes too long because it tries to do it all in one go. Consider either doing the transfer yourself, splitting it up into multiple burns, or starting from a higher orbit so that you'll have enough time with smaller/fewer engines. The mass of extra engines (and their fuel) adds up quick. - I saw your Eeloo encounter was very energetic it probably took a lot more dV to capture into Eeloo orbit than you expected. Try and keep your encounter with another planet close to your solar apoapsis and you won't need to overbuild so much (saving you mass). It's hard to get a direct Eeloo encounter in the first place, so I understand, but you pay for it in the end. For Jool specifically, if you get a nice, clean encounter you can gravity capture into orbit of one of the main 3 moons using a Tylo encounter for just a few hundred m/s (or none at all if you're very patient). It saves thousands of m/s over doing a capture burn into Jool orbit and then transferring to a moon. - the struts you used on your Dres rocket would make sense in real life, but KSP's modeling of structural stuff like that is probably where the game diverges most from reality. Struts aren't really structural elements so much as they're like a visual representation of the physics engine considering two parts to be connected. There's practically no benefit to having a strut between two parts that already have a strut or are directly connected to each other. Strut orientation doesn't matter, and it doesn't matter where on a part you connect a strut. You want, generally, to put struts and autostruts between the extremities of your rocket and parts that have more inertia, or parts that are far away from it. I autostrut to root and to heaviest part a lot. People on here seem to recommend against it, I think they just use too many. You'll also want to stay away from rigid attachment mostly, if you make your ship too rigid it won't be able to absorb vibrations and will just shake apart. You can also have this problem from too many autostruts. - Build wide, not tall. Don't be afraid to give your boosters boosters, and put boosters on those boosters if you need to. I don't know what parts you have unlocked, but you'll find this a lot easier if you make everything you're taking to Jool as small and light as possible. Kilograms of payload you save can be tons of rocket you don't have to build.

You don't need to do any of those things. I think the Kerpollo challenge stipulation for a mothership to be left in orbit could be satisfied by something like the Apollo CSM. 3 landers is honestly probably a good idea, but I've seen designs where the Tylo lander is also used for the smaller moons (usually after staging most of it away). I've also seen a couple Jool 5 runs where a single lander docks onto modules that allow it to land on Tylo and Laythe. A lot of people bring SSTO spaceplanes to Laythe because they work there and because they usually have a plane ready to go for the mission. If you don't and aren't comfortable building one, I honestly suggest skipping it, at least for now. It's completely possible to land on and take off again from Laythe with a conventional lander. Since it sounds like you don't know yet, Laythe is pretty much just Kerbin but again. it has 80% the gravity and a slightly thinner atmosphere, but if you don't do a lot of flying in this game you probably won't notice the difference. Parachutes basically make landing on Laythe free. I'm looking at your landers and am noticing even the small ones have aerospike engines on them. Those are very cool, but also very situational engines. You'll want to be using more efficient ones mostly, especially for your transfer stage/mothership and your landers for Bop/Pol/Vall. The Terrier, the Spark, the NERV typically. I can't really tell but it looks like you have parts from Making History? if you do I think the cheetah as also worth considering. If your going by the TWR reported by the little dV panel in the VAB to decide what engine to use, make sure you have it set to vacuum when you're designing anything that's meant to be used in space, and for your landers set it to the moon it's supposed to be landing on to see the real TWR on that moon. I think you'll find you can get away with a lot less thrust. Do you know how to "asparagus" your launchers? basically you feed fuel from your outermost boosters into the next stage so that only the stage that's about to be jettisoned is losing fuel at any time. It's theoretically the most efficient way to build a launcher. I've managed to lift some seriously stupid things into orbit like this and people on here have done even more. I don't know if I'm telling you what you already know since it looks like you deleted any launch stages from your craft before posting screens. If your problem is literally TWR on the pad, Use the 5m fuel tanks and spam Vector engines. you can put like 10-11 comfortably under each booster stack. Massive lagfest, but it'll get you to space for sure.

There are dozens of us. I don't know if you're playing on steam but I recently switched to running the windows build under proton. It's had much better performance for me, as well as actually functional joystick support and the ability to use certain dx11 exclusive mods. It's not perfect, but the trade between windows version issues and linux version issues has been an easy one to make overall. If you're able I suggest trying it out.

Hey everybody, I decided to design a new rover instead of driving the one I'm supposed to be circumnavigating Vall with. Anyway Here it is: It's mission profile is basically the same as the last rover I posted: Refuel stuff and do all the science while fitting in an SSTO payload bay. The main advantage to this one is it fits in a half-size bay so my smaller SSTO can carry it. The disadvantage is those little wheels make it worse at actually roving than its bigger sibling and despite appearances I did have to leave out a couple small features like sas torque and the spinny ore scanner. I think this the first time I've used the munar module pod in a craft, that front access is kinda nice on a rover. You can override traction control to get your wheels to run at full power in low gravity. The tradeoff is they have virtually no grip, so you lose control and it takes forever to get up to speed, but you could always try a light override on just your front or back wheels.

It might interest you to know before attempting the full run that you can use a Tylo gravity assist to capture into Jool, no burn required. When you're doing your correction burn around the sun you can exchange prograde/retrograde for radial in/out velocity (or vice-versa) to change the timing of your encounter so that you directly encounter whichever of Jool's moon you want, at whatever part of its orbit you want. A Tylo assist can not only save you the Jool capture burn, but also correct your inclination and even set you up for another encounter. Here's a screenshot from a mission I recently flew to Vall that hopefully illustrates what I'm talking about. You'll want to encounter Tylo about where I did for best results. The only caveat is that you can encounter Jool too fast for any of this to work, so you want to make sure when you plot your transfer burn from Kerbin that your Jool encounter is petty close to your apoapsis

Thanks! I'm trying to keep it interesting to read

I really appreciate how squished the Odyssey looks at the end of its mission. You can just see the distance it's driven. Makes me wonder how much farther it could have gone.

So I built a pretty sweet rover recently and ended up needing to drive it over a significant fraction of Duna's equator to rendezvous with a lander, this was pretty painless and made me think it might not be completely unreasonable to drive the whole way around. Even more recently than that I've noticed Elacno Challenge missions being a thing around here so I decided to try it out in my cool rover. Why am I making a thread about it? Sunk cost fallacy. It's already happening. Hopefully it makes for an interesting read. I chose Vall because it's gravitational situation is pretty similar to Duna, where I know that this rover is capable of high speed long haul driving, It's got mountains that I'm pretty sure my rover can absolutely humiliate with it's climbing power, and it has an easter egg that I've never actually seen in game before. Basically I wanted to know what I was getting myself into, but not so well that there would be no surprises. Except, surprise! I overestimated my vehicle, my computer and my patience quite severely. I fixed a bunch of things with my rover and my PC and decided to move the whole operation to Moho for another try, I start setting up for this almost immediately upon reaching Vall, but actually start moving stuff in Update #4 and the mission on Moho begins in Update #6. Moho's gravity is even more similar to Duna and as far as I knew while planning this move, it's terrain was a little more reasonable. The Journey to Vall: The First Day: I regret everything The Second Log: They're logs now, not days. Third log Report 4: A change of venue Our kerbals make final preparations to leave Vall ahead of schedule as preparations are made elsewhere for their arrival. Five: A new beginning Our crew makes their way to Moho via the absolute safest path because Moho is scary. Guest appearances by Minmus and Gilly. Part VI: A New Continuation Exoloper and her crew finally get underway on Moho 0111: A Continued Continuation The crew of Exoloper further beat a dead horse while making excellent progress across the surface of Moho

Sounds like you've found the pre-built releases, but for future reference, if you're manually building something from a git repo it's important to get the source with git clone instead of downloading the zip and extracting. The zip file just isn't a detailed enough copy of the repo and you'll almost never successfully build a project downloaded that way.

Pretty even imo. Jeb has a solid neutral and aerial mobility, Val's a strong zoner with good but predictable movement options. You rarely see spacies in high-level play these days, so it's hard to gauge, but if I really had to guess I think Val lends herself to a pretty one-dimensional playstyle and a decent Jeb should be able to adapt. Of course, with Bob on the roster now it's kind of irrelevant.

This is really impressive, I'm kind of shocked by how little attention it's getting on here. Definitely getting a download from me.

I decided to see how one of my existing designs would fare. This SSTO is for the technical category since it has non-trivial clipping and a little fairing nonsense. it's launch mass is just under 126 tons and the three full ore tanks it lifts to orbit are 51 tons according to map view, for about %40 of it's takeoff weight. I designed this plane to take less ridiculous payloads interplanetary, I'm surprised it was able to even fly this mission. It even had a little gas left over at the end so it could probably squeeze a few more percent out, but I don't think there's anything I could do to it to compete with the more optimized submissions already here.

This explains many things, not least of all the fixation people who use this mod have with building bases on Kerbin. Good to know the issue was an actual issue and not strictly my own incompetence.

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From the looks it can count and do just about whatever else it wants to as a rover damn. I love how you slam it into the water at 40m/s then turn around and run it up the beach at full throttle and the whole boat just couldn't be less bothered by it.

I have returned to shamelessly post a rover that I've already posted elsewhere. Behold: The Deployable Support Vehicle. A medium rover that can lift itself into/out of a Mk3 cargo bay. It's loaded with all the science experiments and surface scanners including the science jr, but NOT including the mobile processing lab which is almost as big as this rover is by itself. It's deploys it's drills and legs turning it into a little mining/refueling platform making it a pretty nifty companion for an interplanetary SSTO. Pictured below You'd better post it here, that would have to be a truly massive vehicle. I'm curious to see how something like that stays together and drives with KSP's physics being as they are. I'm envisioning an aircraft carrier on wheels. And you will! Current-gen rover family photo

Something I haven't seen anyone else mention yet, that plane looks like it has pretty small/few control surfaces. That combined with how far your center of mass is from your center of lift, I suspect you don't have enough pitch authority to force the nose of your plane up, even at high speeds.

SP-38 Starwhale I've been working on this one for a while. Actually I've been working on the Eve return vehicle that's supposed to share it's cargo hold with some other equipment for a grand tour, but I've grown frustrated with it and decided to just release the plane with a different vehicle instead. The plane has the lifting capacity and range you'd expect of something designed to do a grand tour, owing largely to it's low-drag construction. It's able to land on Duna which I consider to be the most challenging environment for an aerodynamic vehicle like this to land in after Tylo. It remains balanced at all stages of flight so that it never becomes aerodynamically unstable, however it may be desirable to manually pump fuel around in some situations to improve handling, or to induce instability. Deployable Support Vehicle I built this in part just to have something to release the Starwhale with, but I've also wanted to come up with a vehicle with this approximate size and capability for a long time. I really like the way this one came out, it's sort of like a small version of my Heavy Refueler, but with science. Very industrial and compact, and the way it folds out into a drilling platform is pretty cool. It took a lot of experimentation to arrive at that solution. Due to it's size and construction, this should be pretty easy to slap onto a mid-sized rocket and bring anywhere.

Yeah, T got my shuttles mixed up there. This is pretty much an argument for what I'm talking about though. NASA had to decide if it was worth it to try and fix it. They also, if I recall, considered either sending up another shuttle or having the Russians give the crew a lift home (this was also a contingency planned from the start of ISS) but they ultimately decided to YOLO because it worked for some classified flights that had similar problems. You're right that it caused organizational changes at NASA, In KSP you play as NASA. My suggestion is basically to give you decisions like this one to make about your missions and how you design future missions. Also, if they add a mechanic for repairing things in-situ it should be pretty bulletproof. it would be super dumb to have a player try and fix their craft only to discover they made it worse. I don't know about you, but I'm pretty lazy about docking, I bonk into stuff sometimes. So yeah, adding these kinds of failures would inconvenience me specifically, but it would also incentivize me to play like an actual spaceship pilot. if the incentive was total destruction of vehicle, that would be kind of annoying. Something I can fix or work around would be better. One of the coolest experiences I ever had in this game was trying to re-acquire an asteroid during an aerobraking pass. It suddenly came at me and sheared off an engine and some control thrusters. Having to suddenly switch gears and try to reconfigure the ship to save itself was pretty exciting and notably the only time a I've ever had anything like an emergency in space. I'm assuming they do. I'm talking about literally the same instance of a rocket without recovering it. Spawn your rocket on the launchpad, that's a new one. Doesn't make sense on Kerbin, but I feel like we should be incentivized to protect sensitive aerospace parts from saline environments on, say, Laythe, But the incentive probably shouldn't be instant explosion. I'm really not interested in modeling manufactuing defects, that's just random failures. Those suck. Defects introduced after launch due to my own carelessness? Model the heck out of those. I mean, lots of people play this game, don't say nobody. But I was really mostly talking about engines. I don't think it's unreasonable for an engine to survive being used to hold up a lander, I think it's unreasonable to be completely certain you didn't mess anything up when you did it though. or propping up a lander with solar panels? Bend them a bit or something, make them track the sun more poorly or unable to fully extend. That's literally true. But tempered glass isn't really a simple homogeneous material. It has stresses induced which make it resist certain forces better than others, and there's variation across a pane in how those stresses distribute themselves, like the grain of a piece of wood. it's literally deterministic if/how a phone breaks when you drop it, since it's not a quantum scale thing, but it's effectively random to you because you can't reasonably know enough about the starting conditions of the system to make a prediction. Maybe having a consumable durability bar on an engine is realistic, but from a game design perspective, we already have consumable fuel. It's kind of a hat on a hat in my opinion. I guess it could incentivize having your ships serviced regularly, or influence the players choice of engine for really long missions. Who knows!

Who says you're making those with spaceship parts? We have regular plane parts, and if we're getting sea launches it stands to reason we'll have boat parts too. I'm not saying no splashdowns, just that trying to use a once-splashed down rocket as a rocket probably isn't a good idea unless you rebuild the rocket first. (like spawn a new one, not actually rebuild it in VAB) A seadragon type engine specifically designed to be used like that would be cool, otherwise, maybe design your rocket boats so that the engines stay above the water line. MK2/3 spaceplane parts have a 50m/s impact tolerance so they can encounter anything at any speed less than that and be perfectly fine. other parts have lower impact tolerances, but really even 10m/s is nothing to sneeze at when we're talking about something made out of the minimum amount of lightweight material required to hold it's shape. If I crashed my car at that speed I'd be in trouble, and my car's made of steel. Not that it needs to be completely realistic or anything, we don't really have autopilot, so some tolerance of pilot error should be a thing. those parts are absolutely not meant to be used as landing struts. We have actual landing struts, more of them than ever in KSP2. These parts are so fragile and complicated it's ridiculous that we can bang them around and expect everything to be fine after. Besides, if losing the part would end your mission, don't expose it to RNG. I think you're actually arguing with me against the random part failures mod being made stock. The mod that I also don't use because it just doesn't seem fun. The mod I'm not arguing for the inclusion of. Health bars don't model how things break. Ever drop your phone and the screen shattered? Ever drop it and it was fine? What was the phone's health at each time? The phone's screen has a complicated molecular structure with internal stresses that give it strength. You don't know anything about it until it hits the ground in just the right way and shatters. It's effectively random, but you can control for it by not dropping your phone. It's pretty much the way actual space agencies control risk and maintain safety, and something you do in KSP already. It's just that right now your consequence for improperly assessing the risk is either nothing, or you completely explode.

Jet engines underwater spaceship parts + seawater = fine I guess smack spaceplanes into eachother at 49m/s? no big deal. using sensitive parts as landing struts (engines, magnetometer boom, solar panels. the last 2 of these can break to be fair) Expecting almost anything to work on the surface of Eve unless it's hardened for that environment. (maybe not a reasonable gripe, but my favourite thing about the Venera missions is how overbuilt they had to be.) Right now the only penalty the game has to levy against us for being weird is completely destroying the part, but I think it would be unreasonable to blow up a player for daring to touch seawater. That's often how we recover stuff after all. (plus we make boats sometimes) But what do you think would happen if spacex tried to re-fly one of the Falcon 9s that they dunked without refurbishing it? I don't know either. Probably not good, but the only way to know for sure would be to light it up and try it out. They could also be content with never knowing and just refurbish the booster to control risk and be safe. Also crashing spaceships into each other goes completely unpunished in KSP unless you're REALLY moving when you do it. Challenger was brought down by colliding with some foam, and they rolled for it in real life! Not the first time they did either, just the first time they lost. If you're in a situation where you can't tolerate risk, then you did wrong when you rolled the roll. If the game was constantly RNG checking you for no reason and sending you back to the drawing board that would be stupid. it should only do it when you do something dumb that might work despite being dumb, like landing directly on your engine because you forgot landing legs. You're asking for trouble, will you get it? is it worth the risk? up to you.

My deal is I think RNG fits best between player actions and the consequences. You'd never do the bad thing if it always resulted in failure, but you might if it was a roll. And there's lot of things we can currently get away with in KSP without consequence that should probably have some consequences, I say let the consequences be rolls.

Yeah, that was kind of the idea. Fly the mission right and it goes right 100% of the time. If you screw something up, maybe you can fix it, or at least survive Apollo 13 style. My whole point was that you could choose how much if any chance is involved. Everything starts out fine, but if you treat your spaceship like a bumper car or start taking risks it could be less fine. These are all things you could see coming a mile away and at worst could require a rescue mission. Mostly you'd just have new mission constraints to consider, like using additional RCS fuel to offset a bent engine bell after landing on it. Or maybe you find yourself with a challenger-type situation on your hands and you can either go for the NASA solution or you could be more risk-averse and make a repair or something. And, yeah, if you keep rolling the dice you could find yourself in a situation that there's no coming back from, like an engine out during a landing but then maybe it's the pilot's fault for trusting an engine that's all banged up. There's no mod for this. There's random failures, but that's pure RNG. I want to be able to break my own ships in interesting ways instead of just blowing them up because dealing with my own ineptitude sounds like a fun challenge. Spaceflight is all about risk management in real life. KSP should reflect some aspect of that, though it should definitely be softened for accessibility.