Axelord FTW

Some rover stuff. Then, I swapped out the cannibalized furnaces on Hyperborea with a single, full-sized one which was integrated with the launchpad (with dedicated heat-loop). I only had to detach them and push them off, so easy stuff. Finally, I changed my administration strategy from science over funds, to funds over science, which now turns 80% of all science earned to funds. I was getting dangerously low.

Meet Hyperborea, the fifth interplanetary factory I've made. Though still incomplete, the core is done (still need a launchpad). I went for a slightly (very) smaller form-factor this time, as this one is not going to be manned permanently anyway, but will serve as a groundside waystation in the Joolian system. I kinda did a woopsie, again, and forgot to include a furnace, AGAIN!, so I went and cannibalized the Factory Starter and the third intermediary stage for their small furnaces, which I winched up the side of the factory and plopped in place. Don't have the radiator power to cool them by themselves but I simply hooked them to the fission reactor, which isn't too far in terms of loop temperature anyway. The loss of efficiency isn't much of a problem. I also completed and lifted the second section of the Fresnel AM engine from Glassvein and docked it with the engine section in a 20km circular orbit above Minmus. If all goes well, it should have something in the order of a million m/s of dV once finished. The next section will be for power, having both a fission reactor, and a fusion plant. I'll lift the deuterium from Kerbin, obviously, but I'm pretty low on money again (less than 4 million).

Eyyy, the Calypso (Jool Explorer) has arrived, and has orbited (and scanned now) all the worlds except Laythe so far. The crew of 13 is now all level 5, and I'm sitting at over 30,000 science points! Vall was chosen as the location for the Joolian system Factory. I will do another redesign of the factory again, to exclude exotic fuel production this time. Other than that, I released two four-parts microrelays I first built off the hull of Calypso (via KIS/KAS) which were then detached and gently bumped away.

I can't tell you about migrating the game right now, but I know I validated my KSP 'key' on Steam when it became available on that platform, so the odds are good. KSP can be launched via steam, but even that 'version' can be played by simply launching the .exe in the folder without steam being on. There's effectively no DRM, and all files are open. You can have multiple instances of the game running in parallel, even. Carrying over saves and mods is as easy as copy-pasting two folders, essentially, so whatever migration you might do in the future will be painless.

Now that I think about it, sharp surface features are (effectively) non-existent in KSP1, so it would be nice to have them in KSP2. Cliffs, canyons, mountains with slopes over 45 degrees... That sort of things where you could legitimately kill a Kerbal by stepping where you shouldn't. Kerbin has some really steep mountains, which is nice, but it's kinda unique to it.

EDIT: Yeah, ignore what I said before. It's most probably you're still looking at the atmospheric dV of the NERV. In Lowne's video, check out what he does at 1:58.

Minmus is at the edge of the low-mass worlds list where rovers are useful at all. Barely worth the trouble, at best. As soon as you get the technology, a small ISRU surface hopper becomes much more viable, though by that point you've gotten most of the science anyway.

Unusual concentration of decaying elements in the core?

Tidal heating. A moon like Europa having a thick enough atmosphere to retain surface heat might have something like surface-apparent liquid. It would probably have to be an hypersaturated solution instead of plain water, though.

I got that, and I still sometime get that problem.

nuh huh my magic 8-ball said not

Yep. A cylindrical-ish tank with bulged ends* (of 4m flat length and 2m diameter) will give you about 14.66m3 of volume, which is very close to the 15m3 volume the coolant tank in the mod has. It's obvious the tank model isn't that big, however, so I just assumed the coolant volume metric is just different altogether in the mod to keep every relative changes in line (screw trying to figure out the coolant ratio volume in the piping). I already made 120m3 and a 960m3 tanks for testing. (i.e. for 8Lx4d and 16Lx8d volumes), so each double the size of the previous (resize factor being 2 and 4). Dry weight likewise following the same trend (though not perfectly since pressure container wall thickness doesn't increase linearly with size, assuming the internal pressure stay constant). I gave them a 5% and 7.5% decrease mass from 'nominal' each. So far, testing has been going well. *(precisely a 'Horizontal 2:1 Elliptical with 2:1 semi elliptical tank heads' tank is what I used for calculating) EDIT: As for heat exchangers, could it be possible to also upscale them? Would there be a point, even? Rescaling and changing the internal volume would be easy, but would that change how much heat it can transfer? Might the efficiency keys be softened or something?

Short of it, and the probable, is engine efficiency and TWR being mishandled. Engines in KSP (and in real life to a very great extent) are more efficient in vacuum than in atmosphere. Always (mostly). The differential between those two level of efficiencies will vary greatly from one engine to another, however. Fuel flow being a constant (throttle% being the same), an engine's thrust will increase as you rise up from Kerbin, to reach its maximum once you reach 70km. Two identical crafts, thus, will have different delta-v depending on where exactly they are. Thing is, some engines are made to be as efficient as possible in different environments. Lower-stage lifter engines (the ones you want on your first and maybe-second stage) generally don't get that much more efficient in space, but the tradeoff being more powerful from the get-go. Upper stage engines, and vacuum-grade engines more particularly, can have bad to horrible efficiencies in-atmosphere, but do great when the air is rarefied or just absent altogether. This is the reason why Eve is such a deathtrap. The atmospheric pressure at sea-level there (and even at its peaks) is much higher than at Kerbin's sea level, thus making even strong, lifter engines there weak. Ideally you want to make sure your dV budget when you're building in the VAB is enough to fulfil whatever mission your are building for, and that your TWR for any given stage is also high enough. Anything you want to land or take-off which has to have enough thrust to do their job efficiently, while you can get away with very low TWR when doing orbital/transfer maneuvers. For example, I usually hover around 1.4 TWR on the first stage on Kerbin, but that level of thrust is mostly unnecessary once in space, and chemical-rockets with 0.5 TWR are perfectly acceptable there. There are many tools available in the VAB to see exactly what you have, and you can also check your TWR in relation to different bodies. TWR of 0.5 is not nearly enough to land on Kerbin (without parachutes), but once you reach Minmus you could see your TWR ratio jump up to over 10 easily. You can right click on parts in the VAB to see more info, like their ISP (i.e. their 'atm' and 'vac' efficiencies). The higher the number, the better. Lifter engines tend to have those two values to be okay, but very similar, while vac engines will have horrible atm and great vac values. You could also be loosing dV to inefficient maneuvers, as efficiency isn't all about engines either but what path you're taking to reach your destination. I always give myself more dV than I need, to account for inefficient moves, and/or mistakes in planning that I make. Not everyone is suited to pull a Stratzenblitz75 out of their bum and visit every single worlds in KSP sitting on top of one separatron or something, and giving yourself 25% extra dV is perfectly acceptable.

Continued tweaking the coolant tank (upped the weight significantly since it can only be a 'dry' tank and coolant amount doesn't change anytthing), and even made an even BIGGER one. The original is 15m^3, the first custom tank is 120m^3, and the last is now 960m^3. Weight is linear, -5% on the second and -7.5% on the third. I also completed a HUGE training mission to bring 19 fresh kerbals to Level 3. Went well, except for the fact I forgot the parachutes and had to launch a small RCS tug of sorts with lots of fabric dispensers attached on. Thankfully I had used a shielded docking port as the craft's nose even thought I hadn't expected to be using it. I even recovered the lift stage, even though I normally don't bother. Finally, I launched (from Glassvein, Skipjack's successor on Minmus) and landed both the storage and extractor for He3 on the Mun. P.S. That Storage module looks SWOLE!

A balance button would absolutely be nice, though the fuel transfer thing can still work it out if you have one tank significantly bigger than the others to work as an equalizer.

There are mods that add fixed cameras-as-parts, though that's something I've never really cared about so I can't really help much.

Well, the 'problem' here is that Noita's mods cannot conflict, and cannot overwrite one another in sequence (it HAS a load order, but the way it works is not as clear cut as in other games). People who make mods for Noita understandably make them to be as standalone as possible. They add stuff, rarely modify and when they do it's something in the base game itself. The requirement of ModuleManager for >95% of KSP1's mods is not something that became just for fun. Some mods have patches to modify one another at the same time, so a bare linear load order like Skyrim wouldn't work either. Well, the later could work since we're looking at a brand new mod-scene-to-be, in which mod makers could build everything up to either have dependencies or be dependent, but never both at the same time toward another mod that would do the same. You'll starting seeing compatibility patches as standalones (like in Skyrim) to fix conflicts, though, which is a huge pain in the cheeks for anyone to support. MM isn't a perfect solution to all that, but its ability to set patches within the same config file to be dependent or a dependency really is something you don't really see in many other places.

Godspeed. EDIT: In other news, I've been fiddling some with SystemHeat's coolant tank. Specifically, I duplicated it, doubled its size, quadrupled it's mass, and appropriately changed its volume from 15m cube, to 120m cube . Sure, the tank isn't actually a cube but screw doing anything more precise than that. Honestly, it's obvious the coolant tank doesn't actually hold that much volume and some of that volume comes from the hypothetical plumbing but whatever unit of measurement is actually more realistic considering the model, the difference between the volume of the original and this new, bigger tank is still a constant ratio. In any case, playing some more with that large tank and the heat exchanger from the mod, it quickly became evident that, for certain applications, radiator surfaces could be toned WAY BACK. Testing with the Emancipator nuclear rocket tells me it can fire for over a minute before needing to cool down, and a small radiator on a second loop can slowly trickle the heat away over time if that loop is active. I'm pretty certain this can be scaled up to some of the more exotic engines. Mostly as a measure to keep part count low, I'm bet this can come in handy. More testing to come. EDIT2: Some successes, but a lot of dead-ends with this idea. Other than finding a way to trick SystemHeat into instantaneously dropping the temperature of a loop to match another (which I'm not going to use), the practical uses are limited. For example, I can use the best AM engine with the shortest length (and hardest to cool) by using it in burst. The advantage of the extra coolant is that those burst are longer. But, well, I don't min-max my spacecrafts anyway, and I think there's a place for exotic engines with a crapton of coolant volume and very little radiator surface. I'll see.

Kerbal Engineer Redux. The Forum has a handy tooltip feature for some keywords. If you see something hash-underlined, placing your mouse cursor over it will tell you something neat. Unless you are on mobile, I wouldn't know how it show up (if it even can).

I've had issues with the game not being able to recognize huge amounts of dV, or glitching out to 0 at seemingly random moments. After a lot of work (the problems being inconsistent didn't help) I decided to just rely on KER instead, which always gave me much better (and without fluctuation) dV readouts.

Well, the first thing you should do is read the first post in the thread carefully. mcbmaestro-guy asked for help on the Steam discussion page too, but with some more helpful context there. I can't say about you but his problem was simply the lack of proper radiators. And I mean, the total lack of availability in-game; he hadn't downloaded HeatControl and didn't look into what SystemHeat is and how it worked. Trying to cool FFT engines with stock radiators...

I'm currently going through the very early paces of building a new computer, and my baseline really is 'As long as it plays KSP2 and I can push the game without issue, it'll be good.' My current setup is an okay-ish prebuilt (which I'm finally upgrading the RAM for as soon as I get it) and it runs KSP1 to the same level, okay-ish. For KSP2, I want Better than Okay-ish at the minimum. I'm one of the original 5000, and even all the way back then KSP1 was just oozing potential. Knowing what I know now, I would absolutely tap past me's shoulder and tell him to buy the game the moment it became an option. Not that past-me actually waited or anything, I pulled out my wallet the moment I could support development monetarily. For KSP2, I would absolutely buy a pre-alpha version right now.

Well the first step would be to learn KSP as a whole before you get into the minutia of... whatever exactly is your endgoal.

Well, I disproportionately hire engineers with low stupidity. It's what I need. Sure, rescue contracts give you a free kerbal and usually as much (if not more) money than it would have cost to hire them in the first place, but it's really more of a surprise candy bag. Sometime, you get black licorice. That said, all pilots... EDIT: Hit a surface feature with the rover, AGAIN!

Going on an adventure. Already did the surface feature scan contract, but might as well go to other biomes, and visit one of the anomalies on Dres. First rover didn't have any reaction wheels and ate crap about 30 minutes NW from the factory. Second rover was sent without the scanning arm and a seat for a Scientist to ride along, mostly to restore the goo and Science Jr. Plenty of reaction wheel torque at hand (almost fudged it up again because stability control does NOT care that you forgot to set the rover orientation correctly but it all ended nicely in the end. Currently on a long drive, over an hour of real time. All the science will be transmitted once, then acquired again for storage in the factory's science lab. The return trip will be rocket powered, I'll just send a taxi instead of driving all the way back. Also, at 30m/s, this rover gets some serious air. P.S. I also earlier made a many RCS-driven craft as a 'proof of concept' (not that I needed to) as an example to a question in another thread. So small it only took 52 seconds to build in the Gilly factory. It performed quite well. EDIT: Good thing the MJ Autopilot can quicksave on each waypoints (which is why I made quite a few between starting point and destination). I'm watching some youtube video then all of a sudden POW! Quick alt-tab back to KSP and, shocker! Goddamn surface features!