Axelord FTW

Hey he was born like that! How dare you!?

Still waiting on my GPU to arrive... The i5 12600k is a beast but I still don't want to subject its integrated graphic processing unit to KSP. As usual, when I can't play KSP directly I start designing stuff in my head. I'm looking at starting ISRU operations on Minmus and the Mun soon, so those need to be explored more fully.

Ooh, interedesting!

FFT's end-tier engines (like the frisbee AM-LH2 engine) really are badly matched to a game like KSP, where ships are a collection of independently calculated parts. It's hard on framerate, not to mention vessel integrity. The lack of persistent thrust also helps us none, as a 12 day burn to 1,000,000m/s is more than 'good' in any sort of sensible scenario you can imagine. As an aside, AM is either ludicrously expensive to buy, or complicated and untimely to produce. Compare that to NSW which is a breeze to make, the ships being smaller and easier to produce/fly, and NSW-engines having really good thrust... Yeah, you can't go wrong with spicy space drink.

My solution to interstellar comms was to upscale one of the Restock-ified antennas to something ludicrous like 50+ meters in diameter, and appropriately scale up the antenna power. It's effectively like putting a ground-side radiotelescope dish... in space. It was able to reach over the target system (Event Horizon planet pack) without problem (though another has to be built there, or else sent directly). If you really want it to be hassle-free, just disable comm-requirements for control for a few seconds and thaw a Kerbal at the opportune time. You can easily explain it by just saying there was an timer on the pod or something. What I've found out after a LOT of FFT engine fiddling is that you are MUCH better served by using smaller crafts with mid-late tier engines (like the second NSW rocket motor). I've made a HUGE antimatter-powered ship, and while it did get a lot of dV (300,000m/s) and could carry upward of 60 Kerbals (plus an Extraplanetary Launchpad starter craft), but it would have been simpler to send a small fleet of ships instead. I've gotten over 500,000m/s with nuclear salt water, and it wasn't even optimized. I've tried to get Persistent Thrust working, but I've gotten nowhere and gave up. The NSW-powered craft has GREAT thrust and could do its whole escape burn in about ten minutes (at 4x phys warp). The AM-LH2 craft was MUCH more finicky to get going, and didn't like phys time warp at all. Still, that big ship was able to reach the next system in roughly 70 years.

More Kerbal rescuin' This time, four in a single mission. First was in a low, prograde equatorial orbit around Minmus. Second was in a higher, moderately inclined retrograde orbit around Minmus. Third was in a very high, very inclined retrograde orbit around Minmus, plus the collecting the craft itself as stipulated in the contract. Fourth, was near the Mun's north pole on the surface. All done in a single mission. Four new souls to torture as part of my space program, along with around 850,000Kosh in contract rewards. I had originally wanted to only get the first three, and let the one on the Mun get picked up by an upcoming tourist mission in passing, but once again my extra dV margins have done me good. I also came across an Angel above Kerbin when returning another, simple one-Kerbal rescue craft. Jebediah, get in the robot!

While the vessels are unloaded? There are utilities that can play with craft parameters on the fly, but nothing that can comprehensively do anything by their lonesome. RemoteTech's guidance computer is effectively a very limited form of MechJeb. You can fly whole mission 'by wire' with MJ, and it can do some very precise maneuvers, though nothing toward unloaded crafts. One of the best function I've found is rover autopilot, which can drive your rover over to waypoints, keep stable with reaction wheel help, and quicksave regularly, even while the game is minimized completely. MJ can otherwise schedule, place, adjust and execute burns, provided you tell it to do those things.

Gee, Bill! Two rescue missions!? Two contracts for saving kerbals from the Mun showed up, and they were pretty lucrative so I accepted both. Two problems, one of them is on the surface, which isn't that much of a problem really, but the contract stipulated I must also recover the wreckage. Getting there was easy, obviously, but I needed a way to grab the capsule. What I ended up doing was 'lasso' the damn thing up to a suborbital orbit, release, grab, and circularize. UNFORTUNATELY, I went chasing after the wrong capsule in orbit, as I had forgotten to delete the wreckage from a previous rescue. Worse, that other capsule was in a retrograde orbit, and the actual second kerbal's wreck... wasn't. Oh well, thank god for my dV margins! Kicked up the AP high, and inverted my orbit there, before coming back down and meeting with the actual second mission target. That one I only had to transfer the Kerbal to my ship, before returning to Kerbin. About 450,000Kosh in reward, and two Kerbals. Good day's work.

I believe the model could use some stock-ification, but that's otherwise pretty good.

Making my way downtown up the tech ladder again. Contract goodies, some surface collection and scanning, some science, some orbital docking milestone and contract stuff, etc. etc.

Something I normally never do, and only did back when Kerbin wasn't even a planet yet. Strap as many boosters and rocket engines as my computer can handle and hit LAUNCH!

"Yumi Matsutoya - Haru yo koi : Kreygasm RIGHT VERSION" YMMV

I'd be happier with a KSP+Space Engine mashup, personally.

I was able to put a 50+ ton He3-extracting rover on the Mun, lauched from Kerbin. Don't know the CC's mass precisely, but looking at it it can't be over 25 tons. Much smaller too. Sure, I used mods, but it's in no mean that difficult in stock to do the same. Like it has been said before, imagination is only limited by part count.

Myself am waiting on a case and gpu to complete my new pc. LianLi Lancool II Mesh and MSI RTX3060, specifically. With an i5 12600k, 32gb of RAM (3200, 16-18-18-38, CL16) this won't be a world-ending-stronk computer, but it will serve me very well. I don't tend to play new games all that much, and very rarely AAA titles marketted out the wazoo over how 'good' they look. I'm also upgrading from 1920x1080 to a 2560x1440 monitor. Currently, I'm using a gtx1650 in a prebuilt, which is seriously bottlenecked by the i59400F in it. You can always just play with crap visuals, but you can't downgrade computational steps. I've slowed down playing KSP in the last week in anticipation. Current modset is getting a tad too heavy, which is an issue, but only until the new PC is up.

Easily fixed. Just find a time machine on ebay.

EVA fuel replenish upon boarding a craft. You could technically visit all SOIs with a one-part ship. As for me, I don't strand anyone. If I screw up, I devise a rescue mission. That's also why I prefer not landing Kerbals on Eve. Trying to get the off that planet is too likely to fail somehow.

I liek, no snoz.

Yuh. ISO8601 says YYYYMMDD (or YYYY-MM-DD) is the way to go. It's also the correct orientation for alphanumerical parsing which is, you know, kinda useful. Back on topic, though, HAHAHAHAHA!

New career, new planet pack, new mods. Gotta say Parallax runs really well on my totally-not-jank 1650. Really makes the Mun easier on the eyes. One of my main complaints about KSP's looks is how blobby many worlds look like, with the Mun being one of the worst offenders. Ignore the broken bits, this satellite was getting decommissioned anyway and was flown into the side of a cliff mere seconds after touchdown.

Same issue. ScienceAlert just goes nuts as soon as you go EVA anywhere. Even though this post is over half a year old, and nobody seems to have said anything about this since, I'm guessing that the cause was never addressed. From what I can tell by fiddling around the various science-related .cfg files in GU+, these should be only called when on certain bodies, but the default calls are actually open instead of being tied to something like 'PlanetXsrflanded,' which allows them to be run wherever you are. Case in point, those experiments don't fulfill any 'milestone' requirements, and the game won't notice them being done. I get experiments for icebergs, plantlife, rocks, and even Ayys-related stuff.

I'll be quite honest, the lack of Space Dust configs kinda kills it. To the point I'm thinking of cooking up my own, though I have little experience with SD configs and I'm obviously still unfamiliar with GU as a whole. I wouldn't be in the best position to determine what each celestial bodies would have what. GU seems to be well worth the trouble, even then. It's not absolutely necessary at this point but having more ways to gather AM and other atmospheric resources 'out of the box' would have been nice.

About to draft a new, fresh install for KSP. GU seems like the winner for main planet pack (alongside OPM). Am I correct in assuming GU doesn't have Space Dust configs included? What's the word on exotic ISRU and various resource presence and abundance?

It's like riding a bicycle. A bicycle with rocket engines.

Used to have a dozen or so lifter stages tucked as subassemblies for different payload mass and volumes to LKO, but nowadays I tend to rebuild everything from scratch. Each named accordingly. I also overdesign and overpower my rockets anyway. Gones are the days I reached LKO with less than 50m/s left consistently. If the lifter can't haul itself to the Mun once the payload is off, I want none of it. K As for naming the actual payloads and mission crafts, anything goes, which also tend to be the first idea that comes to me anyway. Current Gilly EL base is called OneFartToOrbit.