OrbitsR4Sissies

I haven't read it yet, but you might consider Stephen Baxter's "Voyage." It's an alternate-history depiction of NASA that keeps the Saturns operational to work into a Mars manned expedition.

This is the very first mission failure I've had with them. I've made dozens of rovers before with them. But they seem especially sensitive to heavy gravity. Rovers aren't built to be 4x4s and my reading suggests many players try to drive them like cars--too fast and too recklessly. Not everything in KSP is about power and speed--rovers are a balance. I've dropped many a powered rover to the Mun, Moho and Duna with these wheels, like this one here. So I don't fault the part here if I use it outside its tolerances. Landing at 4 m/s or less is a good plan. Decouplers today are overpowered and may kill them at even the lowest setting.

Some days, you just can't revert and have to accept your fails. You remember this magnificent Eve probe, with two landers inside 2.5m service bays ("Manley-class" re-entry modules). Well, it didn't go off well. I already noted the aerobraking challenges that left me making a normal orbital burn for everything. Then things got worse. I didn't add reaction wheels to the entry modules, each with an OCTO2. The first module tumbled uncontrollably to entry interface. I could only hope that aerodynamic forces would push the thing into Eve's atmosphere the right way. That worked! But on landing and rover deployment, the decoupler's force (which I'm sure was set to minimum) was far too much for the rover wheels under heavy gravity. The rover moved just enough to expose a few solar panels, enough to transmit some data as a lander. The second lander could safely enter but would result in the same fate on deploy. Attempts to decouple the rovers in orbit, with and without the bay doors open, resulted in the rover's ejection/obliteration. I've had failures to orbit and land, but this one stung. Next time, Eve. Next time.

Granted. The world is now a Moebius Strip. Try explaining THAT to a flat-Earther. "I wish that my spacecraft in KSP would not explode."

Yes. I have a love-hate relationship with that tool, but I lit up everything to find any trace of them, even it it was a little stack separator or something.

Ike...that thing's like an overbearing big brother that keeps suitors from visiting its big, redheaded sister. The Tracking Station should show that relay's name, no matter where it is, so long as it still existed. Nothing. There's a chance that Ike grabbed it. However, its orbit was well within Duna's SOI and pretty highly inclined. At least that one was explainable. But the probe is still weird.

I'm not a KSP veteran but have had enough experience since I began playing in June to understand the game mechanics, especially about how some local ship debris may be cleaned up by the game. Running KSP 1.5.1, a new install, on MacOS. The mods are simple: Kerbal Engineer Redux Docking Port Alignment Indicator Trajectories Kerbal Alarm Clock I had a small ion-powered probe, still attached to a chemical pusher stage, that was working on the Duna 3 Challenge, making a Mun and Mimmus flyby before going to Duna. Without a decent transfer window, I believe I parked the probe in an elliptical orbit around Kerbin, well outside the Mun's SOI. As part of a contract, I had placed a relay around Duna in a generally circular orbit at some 40 degrees inclination. Time has gone by (perhaps 20 game days). I cannot find the Duna relay at all (which came to Duna with a rover, still OK on the surface). The Duna 3 challenge probe is completely missing, with only its pusher stage, marked as debris, in Kerbin orbit. I've read some older threads for a few unfortunate folks where this has happened. The only technical change was that my 1.5.1 MacOS installation began with a copy of my 1.4.5 Windows save games (my iMac dual-boots Windows 7 and so I tried MacOS to see if performance improves a bit). Not worried about the loss of the vehicles (I can just spawn them back if absolutely necessary to continue my game), but wanted to know of other's experience and why this sometimes happens.

I like sending probes to Eve, but its launch window is woefully slow to show up. With that in mind, I thought to send two rovers in one go. For this mission, I call the rovers "Travellers." Here's my Eve Dual Traveller. I designed it so that the cruise stage would become a relay (a backup to the simple relay that was launched after this mission) once it separated. The stacked rovers would aerobrake with the inflatable heat shield. Once in a weak orbit, small Twitch engines would wait for a good spot to drop a rover, lower the perapsis to a deorbit, deploy a rover pod and reset the perapsis until the final landing site is chosen. I had a bright idea to save some fuel and try to see if the C/G was decent enough to aerobrake the whole thing at around 66 km. You might guess what happened. Chaos. As expected, the C/G was too much and the RCS couldn't match the roll. The whole thing turned over, destroying the cruise stage. Not too surprisingly, the rovers made it through, although they lost their needed propulsion for deorbiting. So after goofing off with this, I went to the planned mode: Separate the cruise stage, zoom it ahead of the Travellers to get it into orbit, and then aerobrake the Travellers. It almost worked. The inflatable heat shield (which, if you didn't know, doesn't have ablation--it's meant for shallow aerobraking or deorbits) did its job, but my 68 km was too low because the inflatable heat shield worked too well. The Travellers had deorbited. Worse, the cruise stage was on the other side of the planet, cutting off probe control. One more revert and it was to my backup plan--let the cruise stage put everything into orbit and await relay #2 in eight days. And around that time, I sent my first Jool mission: The Myriad Multiprobe. I took a page from Marcus House's book at first, but the Kraken did not like the overstacked probes. So I recalled some of Matt Lowne's style and the result is what you see here. Three general probes for Vall, Pol and Bop. An uncomplicated Laythe probe (wanted to send a tiny plane probe for extra coverage but had too little time to research one). But what I'm looking forward to is the Tylo rover. Fresh from my Moho landing success, I verified I could drop a rover from 70 km for a powered landing on Kerbin. With a Terrier crasher stage included for insurance, I will conquer Tylo with a rover landing on my first try, Kraken willing. I added a few more Spiders to it, reducing my total burn time but increasing my braking if needed. All of this gets into a Joolian or Laythe orbit while it awaits a second relay to go with a first relay I sent in the last transfer window.

Using anthropomorphic versions of ESA space probes was done earlier with the successful Rosetta comet mission.

BepiColombo's mission illustrates perfectly why getting to our KSP analogue, Moho, is so painfully hard on delta-V. Moho sits deep in the sun's gravity well. Orbital speed is high. Worse, your descent there will also be high as you speed up due to Kerbol's gravity. While it's moderately possible to try BepiColumbo's trick by using gravity assists to slow your approach in the game, KSP's scale size, I hear, makes this less effective. Here's a very good article on the challenges of getting to Mercury (BepiColombo is only the third ever probe to go there) on The Space Review. It also tells more about the probe's namesake, who would've loved KSP.

Moho has been my nemesis for awhile. Poor delta-V planning led to only one landing success (after a harrowing suicide burn) with three orbiter relays turned sad-flybys. Reading about the BepiColombo mission to Mercury (and how it solves the same problem and uses ion drives itself) convinced me that I was just using ion drives wrong. Too much weight. I need to lighten the load. And then I discovered Mr Stock's impressive ion-powered probe lander. It balanced the delta-V needs, gets into orbit with ease, is easy on mistakes, and lands with some excess power to spare in both cruise and landing. The design only needs four 1x6 panels because solar energy is more concentrated by Moho. For other places, adding one or two RTGs or more arrays is a good plan. The rover makes a self-powered landing. The bulk of its weight are Oscar fuel tanks, about 1200 dV. After checking the general mass of the original lander, I made a special rover that's now (along with a sibling lander) orbiting Moho, about to collect some low science before their landing. I put a test version of the rover on the Mun with ridiculous ease, and adapted a version to send to Dres. It's pretty on the eyes, too. Here's the original design (I built it from scratch, although the craft file is available):

Great ideas. I've already turned down science to 40% by the time I get ion drive and tiny engines. It's far more pleasantly slow going. Still avoiding labs while there's still unexplored biomes everywhere to help there. I really like the life-support mod options but since I haven't started any Kerballed interplanetary missions, it'll wait until I get me sea-legs on ye shipfaring with the wee lil green folk.

I'm still a bit new, but with all this space history in my head, I've found myself developing some guidelines that increase my fun as I play in Career Mode only for now. Reduce the Science reward to 50% or less. This makes it really challenging to scrap for points every place you can with very little resources. This also forces me to do missions as I wait for transfer windows, earning me more money and points to get things designed and built right the first time. No use of the science lab module. That was fun at first but it really makes your game unlock a lot of stuff before you even leave Kerbin. Probes over Kerballed missions first. This is cheaper, obviously. Give your Kerbals some space. I'm not yet using realism mods for food and water, but it's not realistic to lock a Kerbal in a Mercury-sized can for more than 14 days. Use Experiment Storage Units. These are godsends for farming science around the Mun or Mimmus with a returnable probe. You can send far more delta-V on a lightweight probe that can bounce to several biomes and gain points with even the simplest experiments. This idea doesn't seem practical for interplanetary trips, but it earns the science points needed to unlock the tech to get there but without having most of the tree opened before you fly to Duna or Moho. Mimic how NASA and JPL did stuff. At least at first. I've loved Marcus House's videos, which show great economy in going to Eve and Duna without opening your whole tech can with a 200 part mission. Simple is best. Can you live without a big can of fuel hanging off your tail just to orbit? Can you just plot a dive to the surface for a lander/rover, especially for dV-saving places like Eve? Why does your spacecraft look like something made by Willy Ley and Chesley Bonestell's acid-tripping opioid-addicted one-eyed depth-perception-deprived lovechild? KSP doesn't require me to do it NASA-style, but it introduces complications that make things interesting. Ion engines are cool. I try to make relays for interplanetary missions with these and would love to duplicate a Grand Tour-like mission, only I won't wait for a perfect alignment.. I'm still enjoying the first missions I've ever sent to places and I'm old, so I have patience. Reverts and quicksaves aren't always good. If I'm going to learn, I have to suffer complete failure from time to time. I have probes in orbit that I can't land because I didn't plan. NASA couldn't revert their missions or losses, so emulate the bad with the good. I will revert if a Kraken eats my mission and it's a bug, not a serious design fault. Pretend you're NASA with that unlimited budget. That means you fill as many hours and days with missions and cause Kerbal Alarm Clock to smoke with counters. Explore what's out there and prepare, send lots of stuff and enjoy the richness of stuff. Spaceplanes, meh. SSTOs are the one concept that throws me out of my suspension of disbelief in playing KSP. I see them as overpowered. I'm liking reusable rocketplanes or space-gliders (think Dyna-Soar or Dream Chaser-types) to make great LKO ferries, fueling and small probes and will probably start there once I get going. Elegance over power. KSP lets you go very big, but small can be a fascinating way to get around. I'm learning its easy to throw parts at something but that doesn't make it better for enjoying things over time.

One other photo. I was building, over a series of launches, my first Mimmus space station. On connecting my last fuel tank, the Physics Kraken decreed Thou shalt not build imbalanced structures and the whole station exploded in a way that only the film Gravity could do better justice. After a few reloads that confirmed the station would continually be Kraken-food in that configuration, I hastily rearranged station elements (love the use of the large Clamp-O-Trons for this). The stable but unexpected result looked as if Skylab and the International Space Station had a love-child. My very first station was a Skylab-like place, minus the explodey mess of the original. I named it "RE-Hab," realizing I would need it if KSP bonded me to my chair for too many days on end.

With my obsession on Entry-Descent-Landing spacecraft, dropping rovers to a planet without an orbit (note my username), here is one of my two rover missions to Eve, with a really potent cruise stage that becomes a relay satellite after dropping the rover aeroshell into Eve at around 4000 m/s at an periapsis of 56 km. It's a little overpowered but, hey, my first time with Eve. I can do this better with a smaller vehicle, now that I know a bit more. Entry was fine, descent was fine. But my overhead release of the rover's descent tower tried to use Separatons. I learned that those little firecrackers would explosively blast my rover into bite-sized chunks. A few reloads later, I lucked out and got the rover down intact and rolled it over eventually to the Explodium Sea-shore.

The Dream Chaser is based on NASA's HL-20 lifting body concept, which was considered as an intermediate less-costly option for resupply and crew transport to and from the planned International Space Station. The X-37B has a similar NASA origin as they studied smaller lifting bodies. It was moved over to the Department of Defense, became a very classified project, and gave the Air Force what they have been clamoring for since the old Dyna-Soar project: Eyes in the sky that they can use for almost any project with little attention.

Sierra Nevada doesn't get the credit it deserves as a spacecraft developer and integrator. They don't usually serve as the primary contractor of a space probe, but they design so many components used in many popular spacecraft, including: Mars InSight Lander (arriving next month, November 2018) Parker Solar Probe ORBCOMM 2 satellites Many reaction control systems for satellites I'm happy that SNC got this resupply contract. I'm not big into spaceplanes in KSP but I like the idea of a reusable winged refueler with a reusable booster to save funds in the game. The DC Cargo's look is my inspiration.

Hi, all. I'm a long-time space enthusiast, a Quora participant that loves to answer space history and technology questions, and a KSP player since June 2018. I love this game to heartfelt tears. I've stuck to four mods that are essential and pretty dang stable (Kerbal Engineer Redux, Docking Port Alignment Indicator, Trajectories and Kerbal Alarm Clock). Scott Manley, Matt Lowne and Marcus House are my patron saints, and I am this close to making Career Mode videos of my own since two of these three good men have videos no newer than two years ago, and a lot of updates have occurred since then. Those videos to come only if I can put my own spin on things that hasn't been beaten to death since the game has so much wonderful support already (such as here and the wiki). While KSP doesn't limit you to just any one thing, I'm fond of making probes and emulating their power, beauty and economy over the complication you need for Kerballed flights for now.

The joy of this game is the gradual changes to the aesthetics. I didn't play KSP in alpha or beta but have seen many videos with that. The game looked promising but the stock parts looked, well, poor. Today with 1.4.x, I'm personally impressed by not only the exterior options (although more customizations per part would be welcome if it doesn't blow FPS or stability) but the time that Squad has taken for the interior options. I mean--look at the Munar Excursion Module interior. For something you won't look inside often, someone added those fine details (like the Apollo Optical Telescope, the myriad of switch panels and even an ascent engine cover) at a level that space enthusiasts crave. It's too bad that the MEM's RCS drives like crap all by itself, and you better not forget about adding a reaction wheel to it. Still. I'm glad to have started play just as the detail has become more realistic and beautiful. And I haven't really played with the environmental enhancements, mostly because it'll melt down my computer at present (but soon, soon).

The bug definitely returned with 1.4.5. The only mods I use are common: - Kerbal Engineer Redux - Docking Port Alignment Indicator - Kerbal Alarm Clock Just recently added Trajectories. (So helpful in EDL landing so far.) Added the fix. It is helped well enough to keep a rover from apparently materializing above its parking spot on load, and one three-legged lander with strangely bouncy legs on Ike’s surface not to launch itself into the sky on loading. Thanks for this fix.

Started KSP a few months ago. My life, as I knew it, is now pleasantly ruined. I've been adapting NASA/JPL's idea of "screw orbiting, just land the thing" aerocapture--Entry, Descent and Landing. I needed something to help me pinpoint a place where my rovers don't become submersibles on Eve or lithobrake, so thank you for this mod. I have one problem so far (running 1.4.5): Starting the game up, clicking the mod's button (I use only the default toolbar) works fine. I can click it again to hide it. But after switching back and forth from the Tracking Station or switching to other ships, the button is unresponsive. If the window was not up, clicking the button does not open it. I have to reload the save or game to restore operation. If I had a trajectory plot already in work, the plot is still operating just fine. I just can't bring the mod window back into view. Any thoughts or notes on a workaround or what to do?