Sky Vagrant

As far as I can tell, the number of craft in the system is not a cause of crashes. I have over 40 out there. For a ship that shakes it self apart after it successfully loads, try autostrutting some of the bigger parts and docking ports. Autostrutting is turned off by default in Career Mode so you’ll have to find it in settings and turn it on first.

I play on Xbox, but same thing there. I'm totally paranoid about it and save often with a specific naming convention. I never delete the last save from the previous day that I played because I had a bad crash that wiped out some previous saves (but that was mid-last-year). Did you ensure you have all the updates loaded? Some of these problems have gotten better on Xbox over the last year, but not all. I've experienced the other issues you've mentioned infrequently. Here are things that seem to work for me on the Xbox to minimize the occurrences and the frustrations - Always quicksave games in space, not at the KSC screen. Some of my worst crashes and losses were from saving on that screen. - Keep the number of quicksaves to one screen. - When I'm done playing for a bit, I stop the game software. On the Xbox and PS4 the game will stay in a paused state if you don't stop it manually - even if you turn off the console (see the next item). Yes, the load time is very long, but this is probably the number one thing that prevents crashes. - Actually power off the console when the crashes/glitches get more frequent. Neither PS4 nor Xbox power off by default when you "turn off" the system - you need to go into settings and do this manually. - Don't leave the game paused for long periods, shut it down instead. - When ships randomly explode on loading, reload the last save (even if it is the auto-save) and then go back to the ship and it should be fine. - If I can't control a vessel I can switch vessels or spacewalk and switch vessel and this will fix it (sometimes). - If I lose controls (usually button functions) in the VAB or SPH I go back to the KSC screen and back to the VAB/SPH and it is fixed (sometimes). This one hasn't happened to me in a while. - Keep the number of VAB and SPH craft files to one screen each (i.e. you don't have to scroll). I've started to ease up on this one and haven't had any problems yet, but this seemed to be an issue for me in the past. Some of these are probably unnecessary now, but I don't know which ones and I'm in these habits so I don't need to do trial-and-error to find out. Hopefully this helps on the PS4 like it seems to on the Xbox. Now you are wondering if all this is worth it. I say yes, but totally understand if it's not for you. I just got the PC version for my laptop (Steam sale $10) and it loads in about five seconds rather than the two minutes on my Xbox and my laptop was NOT built for gaming. The advantage of the Xbox is that KSP is beautiful and I want to play it on my HDTV.

Did a lot of aerobraking at Jool and Laythe. A lot. But I got them there... eventually. Ongoing mission thread for my Jool expedition. That is an attractive vessel. I'm usually too frustrated making aircraft that fly like I want them too to spend much time on aesthetics, so I'm impressed. Was it difficult to make it fly well? Looks like the quad-fins/rudders on each nacelle give you a lot of control. Did you leave those rudders in all the flight control groups?

That is truer to the spirit of vagrancy. I applaud you.

One of my two space stations ran out of fuel getting into Jool orbit, so I sent my big Kerbal hauler to bring it fuel that was mined from Pol. After I got the station back on track to Laythe, I sent the hauler to Vall to await the other Kerbals and the lander (it picked up a claw tug from the space station): After I put the mining base and polar sat in their orbits, it was time to bring the final vessel into a safe orbit around a Jool moon. This one required multiple aerobraking maneuvers at Jool and Laythe: Also used some Tylo grav assists and eventually I got it to Laythe with the dV it needs for it's mission (hopefully): This configuration was stable in the very upper atmosphere (180km at Jool and 47km at Laythe), but spun out and exploded below that. Since I had planned it's dV around aerobraking, I was stuck making it work. Now that all the vessels have reached their destinations, here are the maneuvers I tracked to get everything into the system: This doesn't include most of the aerobraking maneuvers discussed above as those were after the rest of the vessels had safely parked. This took me until the end of Kerbin Year 12 (the last two entries are for future planning). I'm going to make a pledge with one hand on the green Duna monolith that I will not have multiple crafts pending maneuvers ever again!

Got a lot done this weekend but also spent a lot of time rewinding and finding better encounters, Tylo gravity assists, etc. It always takes longer than I think! Here's the sat hauler entering breaking at Vall: Before this maneuver, I did two small maneuvers to release the sats on retrograde and polar trajectories. Here's all the the vessels from that ship in orbit with the contract orbits/salvage marked: I got the sats in their correct orbits and captured the salvage. The picture of the salvage capture was way too dark to post, but it's one of the shuttle-sized fuel tanks (empty, fortunately). That's a big part to send from Jool to Kerbin and land safely, so we'll see... in several years game time (window back to Kerbin doesn't open for a while). Next on the entering Jool SOI parade is the Tylo lander: I'm not going to be attempting that landing just yet. I have just a little more dV than should be needed by the dV map, but I'm out of practice with landings so will probably land on Vall a few times first (Pol and Bop don't really count for good practice). Even then I might decide to send someone to topoff this lander's tanks before I do it (then it has almost twice what it needs). Next up is the mining base and a polar sat for Laythe. I tried aerobraking, but this ship is too rear heavy and the atmosphere of Laythe gets thick faster than I realized. But that's okay since it had the dV to do the job.

Gathered science data from Jool's lower atmosphere Ongoing mission thread for my Jool expedition.

I've always wanted to play pool/billiards well enough to do trick shots where you hit one ball and it hits another ball that goes right where you planned. I'll have to settle for gravity assists in Kerbin! Here's the Laythe encounter Back to the Jool Atmo-Probe. It has four fuel cell arrays and a fixed relay antenna so that it can transmit all the science from the upper and lower atmosphere. It takes a lot of juice for that much data: The funny "wings" are to test staging the structural pylons while diving into Jool. Here's a very short video of completing that contract: Reentry and science gathering/transmitting went well (I just like to check those boxes, tech tree was finished a long time ago). Didn't really need the drogue chutes, but I wasn't sure how long transmitting the data would take or how low the lower part of atmo was. This last shot is very low in the atmosphere and way too dark, but you can see Vall and Tylo through the atmosphere and that's pretty cool.

Here's the first of the new vessels arriving at Jool. This ship has four separate probes for different contracts. I had a bit of trouble getting this one to Kerbin orbit with all the fuel it needed for the mission so I launched it with a docking port at the rear and launched a replacement stage to get it out to Jool. It also uses fuel from the Atmo-Probe container section. After entering Jool orbit, it was time to deploy the Jool Atmo-Probe. I'll get a better close up later when it performs its mission, but I really like the shadow on the main vessel in this shot. Now I need to put the two Vall sats into a retrograde and a polar orbit while the part recovery vessel needs to go to low, equatorial Vall orbit. I'm getting a grav assist from Laythe for the Vall Orbital Insertion Stage, but I need to get the Atmo-Probe down in the next orbit to avoid Tylo's gravity well (I'll grab some maneuver node pics to throw up here soon).

Oh I have so many more spreadsheets! And I have checklists and To Do lists. So over-planned!!

I took a break and came back and I thought the same thing. Then I thought it was just in my head. Now I think they changed it (I play on Xbox). The rest I feel haven’t changed, but I’m doubting everything now!

Are you trolling us? That link is not on the menu when I go to the site and I don't see any other mention of the Beta on this forum. EDIT: I hate April 1st! You got me good!

Landed on Pol to get pretty pictures Ongoing mission thread for my Jool expedition.

Another landing today in the Highlands of Pol to completely refuel the lander and crew transport: Got Jool in background this time. The side facing Jool was completely dark when they arrived and did the first landing. That's when I realized that Pol was tide locked to Jool (I don't do too much research and try to avoid seeing too many "spoilers" before I go someplace in KSP), meaning I had to do a second landing if I wanted that shot. Also repositioned my erstwhile Eeloo mapper probe (it's named Nanook) to scan Bop. Again, no contract related to that task. Time to fast forward to Year 12 Day 38 and start making some money!

After some time off from KSP, I'm finally getting around to going to Jool in a big way. I play on Xbox, I've only ever had one saved game (Career Mode), and I started before the game did dV and TWR calcs. When I started playing KSP, I quickly realized that you could complete multiple contracts with one vehicle/launch. I started stacking my contracts on missions and really enjoyed the challenge of getting a lot done with a few vehicles. So when I finished with Duna and Ike I filled my entire contracts page with Jool missions: That's both pages photo-shopped together - 15 contracts! Then I needed to design the mission vehicles for these contracts, so I put the contracts and the requirements in a spreadsheet: And then I designed the vehicles and needed a spreadsheet to track the dVs and costs: Total profit should be $10,837,622.15 I don't know if anyone else takes this approach; I'd be interested to hear if you do something similar. But leaving the Kerbin SOI on the Xbox almost necessitates some of this. Without mods you need to figure out a lot more things on your own! One of the big challenges for Jool is designing for landing and getting back off of Laythe. I've never been great at spaceplanes (I basically copied the ones I regularly use), but I gave it another shot with the needs of Laythe in mind and I'm very happy with the results. The problem is, how to get my spaceplane(s) to Laythe. So I built this fuel tank for two of my spaceplanes (named Lidenbrock III and Lidenbrock IIIP) to push all the way there and aerobrake: I'll have more pics of the rest of the vessels as they arrive at Jool, but here are EIGHT vessels in flight from Kerbin to Jool: And because I'm an Xbox player I don't have Kerbal Alarm Clock and I need to keep track of all my vessels maneuvers over the course of mutiple Kerbin years: The naming scheme here is based on Jules Verne ships and characters. Sometimes I use numbers if I created multiple versions of the vessel in the design phase. A while ago I sent a mapper-probe and a network of comms relays to Jool, but that was it until now. The mapper-probe mapped Tylo, Laythe, and Vall, but then I ran out of fuel. I left it drifting through the Jool system and it eventually caught a gravity assist that sent it out of the system and on a course to leave the entire solar system! Good lesson about watching those unplanned encounters in the Jool system! I also had a mapper-probe at Eeloo that had a ton of spare dV so I sent it to Jool to map Pol (which isn't in any contract). When I started planning the Jool expedition, I still had Kerbals in the Duna SOI and I realized I could send them and their lander to Jool if I used the Duna space station as a lower stage (it is in solar orbit now). They arrived about a year ahead of the rest of the vessels and they landed on Pol: That's all I'm going to have them do until the other ships arrive. They haven't completed any contracts as that's the job of the new vessels, but they'll be there to support and maybe save some of the missions if they don't go as planned. Let me know what you think and what you'd like to see as I start flying out these missions.

Sorry, thought you were using Rapiers - that’s what my advice was based on.

Stay in level flight at about 300m or less until your speed is over 400m/s. Then pitch up. When the atmosphere bar goes to medium blue, pitch down to 15 degrees until your speed is over 1400m/s and your intakes start to whine (about 9m/s in your intake on that craft). Then hit the closed cycle (and close your intakes) and pitch up carefully to raise apoapsis out of the atmosphere.

Sounds like you may have changed the vessels control point from the cockpit to a docking port. Try select the cockpit and select “Control from here.” The other possibility is that you are in docking mode still and the controls are set for linear and not rotation.

I’ve tried it on Xbox and it doesn’t work. I’ve seen videos of it working, but I think they were all pre-1.0, so it probably doesn’t work on PCs either at this point.

I find this service module rather frustrating. It won’t let you easily access stuff that look like it should be exposed but if you stick stuff through the sidewalls they work just fine. It’s like they intended something different for it. So if you have trouble accessing the sensor in flight, try zooming in until you are inside it. That should work.

That’s a bummer. I didn’t have anything landed at the time so I got lucky.

The recent update switched gear on existing craft to “override” settings. You should be able to change the settings on the gear/legs to automatic and either use that setting or then tweak the springiness.

Long shot guess, but if you switched from sandbox or science mode to career mode then you don’t see all the nodes until you upgrade the tracking station. if that’s not it then I can tell you I’ve seen full node on Xbox since the last update so maybe reload the game?

That’s why they don’t tell you in the contract - the skies would be filled with stranded pilots nobody needs.

Is that your theory or have you seen a reference that Gateway will be in one of those orbits? What is the benefit of these orbits?