jimmymcgoochie

Somebody in the PR department decided to do a public vote on which animal should be sent to orbit aboard Goliath Aster: a dog named Jake, a koala named Kevin or a chimp named Susan. A slight oversight when setting the vote up (namely the fact that sending mail from Europe to Australia is really expensive) meant that all the votes came from Australia and Kevin won by a landslide. The science team weren't particularly happy about this- and neither was Kevin! The craft spent a full 24 hours in orbit, at which point the mission team realised they should probably have positioned the capsule so it would deorbit over Australia before separating the upper stage; as it was, it had to deorbit towards central Africa which was in the dark. Aside from air-dropping a grumpy koala on some very confused residents in the middle of the night, the mission was a resounding success from a scientific, technological and PR point of view, fulfilling the promise made after Sputnik 2 of bringing our animal astronaut home alive. Getting him back to Woomera might be a bit more of a challenge though. A few days later Romano took the XR-4 Aurora out for an altitude record attempt, aiming to push above 140km. A fault in the RCS system caused serious control issues and this attempt was aborted, however it still met the secondary objective and landed safely. The fault was traced to the fuel systems and a fix applied. The braking parachute also failed to deploy again, but after several safe landings without it the decision was made to remove it rather than try to fix it. Just over a week later, Romano did break the altitude record and breached 140km, though the RCS system still didn't work properly as the previous fix caused other issues in the fuel system that will need further work. The next flight had no complications whatsoever and completed the hypersonic flight research. New pilots Damien and Olga just finished their training to fly the Aurora, but will now be straight back into the classroom with Romano to learn how to operate a space capsule in low Earth orbit. Over the last couple of years the Goliath has proven itself to be reliable and effective, but too small to carry the more advanced payloads needed to push beyond Earth orbit in a meaningful way. A new rocket was therefore designed to meet this need, using a broadly similar layout but with a larger first stage powered by twin RZ.2 engines with improved thrust and reliability. Well, that was the plan... The first launch of the OR-2 Princess, a name chosen due to the design being derived from an earlier proposal named Black Prince, was to carry a probe called Blue Moon towards the Moon where it would gather data and then crash into the surface to kick up dust and debris from the surface to be studied by telescopes. Despite the assertions from Rolls-Royce that the new RZ.2-Mk4 was more reliable than its predecessor, this launch suffered two separate engine failures on the launchpad, first one and then the other on consecutive launch attempts. Although frustrating, these early failures gave some valuable insights that could be applied to the engine design for the future to improve its reliability even further than originally expected. With the modifications made, the third launch attempt was a success. Another first for this mission was the use of a single-chamber Gamma engine to power the lunar transfer stage. Sometimes less really is more- the single engine offers a substantial delta-V advantage over using a Gamma-2 due to the reduced weight, while the lower thrust means that the transfer burn can be controlled more precisely. And then it was off to the Moon. A direct hit on the first attempt provided plenty for the telescopes to study, which along with all the data gathered during the flight makes this an exceptional scientific success. Bagging another first in the Space Race doesn't hurt either. Feeling somewhat left out by the almost entirely British Princess, a French team have been hard at work developing their own rocket engines and have taken a leaf out of the Gamma's book by designing variants of the same engine optimised for sea level and vacuum performance. Designs for the OR-3 are already being drawn up and these new Viking engines could be the key to creating a rocket to rival the mighty Sovlet R-7.

Polar orbits are better for science, you’ll cover more biomes that way for any biome-specific experiments and also orbital perturbation needs high inclination. By my calculations, 1477m/s over 17.1 minutes gives an average acceleration of 1.44m/s2 on the upper stage, which against Ganymede’s gravity of 1.43m/s2 isn’t going to cut it. Suggestion for the D-Curie: smaller solar panels. It was still at perpetual power with only one of them open so you can save some weight by making them smaller. You could also do with a bigger water tank if you’re going for solar power, but I’d still keep at least one fuel cell as a backup. That re-entry would have been salvageable on the first pass if you had rolled inverted so descent mode pushed the capsule down rather than up, you’re lucky that the crew didn’t suffocate before they landed.

In a blinding flash of creativity, the larger Nova with expanded payload options was named the SuperNova. Any questions? No? Good. It still has no guidance systems of its own, but has been upgraded with a Super Sprite kick stage to get into its target orbit as the Gamma engines can only be started once- for now. The solar panel facing almost side-on to the sun was the only issue on this mission and even then it was a minor inconvenience that made no real difference. Doing several contracts at once is pretty lucrative- let's do it again! Next up, a suborbital test of the Aster- a special satellite carrying a live mammal to space and back again(!)- to check all the systems ahead of the full orbital launch. The Sagittarius rocket can't put an Aster into orbit, but it'll get close enough to give the new ablative heatshield a good test. The Aster reached over 6km/s orbital velocity before the final stage cut out, turned retrograde and fired its retro-rockets for a full trial run of the deorbit system. Solid rockets can be a bit variable in their thrust and burn duration, however the capsule remained stable enough for a safe re-entry. Everything looks good for the orbital launch; unlike the Soviets, our four-legged friend will be returning to Earth alive and (hopefully) unscathed by 24 hours spent in orbit. Following the success of the Chimaera and Gyrfalcon rocketplanes, a team has been hard at work designing something new and even better to continue the push towards space. A new, fully pressurised cockpit should allow flights right up into space while twin XLR-25 engines will dramatically increase the speeds that the new plane can reach compared to the Gyrfalcon, which used only one engine. The XR-4 Aurora is a more conventional design than the Gyrfalcon with trapezoidal wings, rear elevators and front canards and featuring a three-axis RCS system. The first flight immediately pushed higher and faster than the Gyrfalcon ever could, peaking at over 125km and 2500m/s respectively. Romano wasn't entirely happy with the flight though, reporting that something had definitely broken on the nose during the intense heating as he descended back into the atmosphere. It seems nobody remembered to tell him that the "spike" on the nose was designed to break away in a controlled manner if it reached a critical temperature, allowing it to take the brunt of the heat to protect the rest of the aircraft whilst improving the aerodynamics during the ascent. Unfortunately, at this point Romano is the only remaining pilot as the other three have all retired. This won't do at all! Damien and Olga will be straight into training to fly the Aurora, allowing an increased flight cadence and paving the way for a crewed mission to orbit in the near future. Design work continues for the next big mission, working name Blue Moon.

Did you break anything e.g. a solar panel on the surface? That can cause this bug.

The log files will contain a lot more details to help diagnose the problem. This guide vvv tells you how to get them.

Alt+F4 IS the fix; or failing that, end task in task manager.

Designed two cluster missions to complete some lucrative contracts, grab some science and set up something of a communications network for low Earth orbit. At about 5 tons each, neither is really pushing the (brand new) LV which can manage 10 tons to orbit but they can’t be launched in one go due to size, shape and target orbit constraints. Also did a flyby of Venus the day after Venera 1 did it IRL, however unlike Venera 1- and most of my early flyby missions in various saves- this one actually had a signal back to Earth and returned much data as it flew past.

I see a magnetometer boom, some kind of radio plasma wave science array, two mystery goo-looking capsules, a camera array and something that could either be a telescope or a mass spectrometer tube. It's like every stock KSP experiment rolled into one convenient package!

It might be four weeks behind the (admittedly rather overambitious) target date, but Sagittarius Nova 1 is finally ready to launch on the 27th of January, 1957. Depending on how you count them, that's either 28 or 1216 Gammas- 28 chambers in total, four Gamma-301 boosters, Gamma-8 first stage, Gamma-2 second and third stages. Nova 1 was deployed into orbit successfully, gathered temperature, pressure and mass spectrometry readings and transmitted them down to listening ground stations. It was also easily picked up by amateur radio operators across the world until the battery ran out some hours after launch, attracting worldwide attention and stunning both American and Soviet space organisations who had until that point assumed that the public activities at Woomera were merely a cover for a military ICBM program. Europe had just won the first leg of the Space Race. Once the celebrations were over, work began on EuROSTAR's next rocket, a DR-2 Penumbra that aimed to accelerate to over 4000m/s orbital velocity and then return to the surface. Getting up to speed was the easy part, getting back down without being incinerated by the atmospheric friction... not so much. At least until someone remembered an old Super Sprite rocket stage originally built as a spare for a Viscount launch but never used. Once up to speed and altitude, the upper stage turned around and spin-stabilised the return section before releasing the payload and its deceleration stage pointing retrograde. The Super Sprite maintained its reliability streak and Lucky the dog endured a somewhat bruising but survivable deceleration and a spicy re-entry before parachuting safely to the ocean below to be picked up by an Australian naval vessel. It was now clear that larger mammals could survive the rigours of a rocket launch and the harsh environment of space, at least for a while, so planners turned to the next logical step- putting an animal into orbit and bringing it back down, alive(!) and intact. But before that, it was time to debut a brand new orbital launch rocket. The negotiations with the United States had concluded in late 1956 and Rolls-Royce began producing licence-built copies of the S-3 kerolox booster engine under the name RZ.1, which was now ready to power the first stage of the OR-1 Goliath. With two of the Gamma-301 boosters used on the Sagittarius giving it a helping hand off the launchpad and an entire Penumbra on top, with extended nozzles on the Gamma-8 to match the Gamma-2's efficiency, Goliath was only slightly heavier than Sagittarius but significantly more capable, launching the much more sophisticated Nova 2 satellite into a polar orbit where its science package could gather data over the next month or so, its batteries kept charged by solar panels covering the satellite's surface. Nova 2 remained operational for a whole month after launch, completing all its primary scientific missions and further cementing Europe's lead in the Space Race. In early October the Soviets finally launched their first satellite, a somewhat underwhelming affair that was on a par with Nova 1's capabilities but used a significantly larger and heavier rocket; meanwhile America languishes in third place after their first launch attempt didn't even make it off the launchpad. Following a significant number of inquiries, work has begun on an upgraded version of the Nova satellite that can carry a wide range of ancillary payloads for commercial customers, a potentially lucrative source of income that could fund future scientific endeavours like, say, sending a probe to the Moon?

As an aside to this conversation, landing on more than one celestial body with the same lander and then recovering it on Kerbin will only give you the science bonus from one, which I believe is the one with the highest science multiplier as when I brought back landers from a Grand Tour mission it always gave the science for a vessel landed on Eeloo when it had visited several other places including Tylo and Moho and also landed on other places after Eeloo.

Take them back home and let someone else deal with the ramifications.

A wild Moon appeared! Go, Impactor Probe! Impactor Probe used Headbutt! It’s not very effective…

Why would you land with one of the crew inside the Hitchhiker instead of the ascent stage? ESPECIALLY after an engine failed! Try adv > sun > up, it’ll hold the spacecraft pointing directly away from the sun which maximises solar panel output and also shields the crew from radiation (at least in theory, Kerbalism’s radiation system is buggy though). Never use stock SAS in RO/RP-1, it just doesn’t work properly.

There are a few things you can try: Increase the mass-strength slider on the fins, this makes them sturdier and less likely to break. Spin more slowly, a fast spin can actually destabilise the rocket or lead to parts being ripped off, especially fins. Use small solid rockets and/or small control surfaces to spin up at launch and leave the fins completely vertical so the spin doesn’t get too extreme at higher speeds. Don’t spin at all, you probably don’t need it on a rocket that size and you’d be better off with a guided rocket instead. Make the fins bigger. Those small fins won’t produce enough force to correct the drift from prograde before they fail from aero forces, larger fins might do the job. Look at the real Bumper/V-2 for guidance. Here’s what I did in my most recent RP-1 game: The camera is inside that stripy bit in the middle with the avionics above it; the top tank is jettisoned after engine shutdown and both camera and avionics are recovered together, though it would work just as well with the camera and avionics at the top, I only put them in the middle to save on tooling a nosecone. It doesn’t actually need the fins as it’s fully guided and the A-4 (and RD-100 and possibly the American V-2 as well) provide enough control for this sort of design.

Tested out a few upgrades on my current fleet of LVs, launched a couple of satellites… Oh, and sent the first person into orbit almost a whole year before Vostok 1, and she actually completed an orbit, and a full 24 hours to boot. (Vostok 1 was a massive scam: it landed west of where it launched and never completed an orbit of the Earth, Gagarin had almost no control at all- the override code to enable his controls was locked in a box!- and had to eject from the capsule and parachute down separately, all of which was conveniently omitted from the Soviet propaganda… Hence why the RP-1 first crewed orbit contract requires a full 90 minutes in orbit to complete.)

Armstrong Return - Science Experiments is a bit of a long name, could do with an acronym

The Gyrfalcon lives! Landing stability issues were solved by switching to two nose wheels as the original single wheel couldn't take the strain. It still doesn't stay entirely straight on the runway but it's much more manageable and doesn't swerve off to one side and smash itself to bits. EuROSTAR is investing heavily in R&D, bringing in more researchers to accelerate the development of the next generation of rocket engines, electronics and scientific instruments. The new Gyrfalcon made frequent flights thanks to a rapid turnaround: from landing to relaunch took just 8 days including the addition of new drop tanks for each flight, airframe checks and mounting it to its carrier aircraft. Once the engineers were satisfied with the data gathered from high-altitude flight, it was time to move on to study the effects of hypersonic flight to aid the development of a larger, even faster rocketplane. Following pilot feedback about sluggish acceleration after separation, Super Sprite booster engines were added to the drop tanks on two flights to alleviate the problem; the first flight reached the altitude limits of the aircraft at just over 75km, but one of the booster engines failed on the second and nearly caused a spin before the pilot dropped the tanks early to regain control. This incident along with the increased complexity and marginal performance improvements meant that the boosters were ditched for all subsequent flights. The rocket teams were still hard at work making the occasional Adler heavy sounding rocket, but these generated minimal public interest. Fearing budget cuts, Team Adler and Team Verity collaborated on the next launch nicknamed Adler XL, carrying the heaviest payload to date. A payload record that stood right up until the very next rocket launch, the debut of the DR-2 Penumbra. Breakthroughs in kerosene-HTP rocketry have led to the development of the Gamma series of "keroxide" rockets which provide nearly all of the Penumbra's power. A late failure on one of the Veronique side boosters couldn't stop this launch from throwing its payload (1000 units!) to over 1400km downrange, at which point a fault in the data recording system prevented any further data from being recorded. Nevertheless, it was a very successful mission and demonstrated that the Gamma engines were ready for use. At this point, the plan was to use a licensed copy of the American S-3D (aka LR-79) kerolox booster engine as the first stage of an orbital launch vehicle called the OR-1 Goliath, however negotiations over the licensing costs were still ongoing with little headway being made. One engineer suddenly had a brainwave: why not use the current keroxide engines instead? This concept had already been studied and dismissed due to a lack of delta-V, but the plucky engineer ran the numbers again with a few small design changes and realised that it might just be feasible to put a small satellite into orbit by adding a third stage. And so the OR-0 Sagittarius was born. Powered by 100% British Gammas- 28 of them in total!- and split into three core stages plus four boosters, the new design was capable of sending a small payload into a low Earth orbit; the orbit would decay in a matter of days and the battery last for mere hours, but none of that would matter compared to the PR coup of launching the world's first artificial satellite. Artist's impression of the OR-0 Sagittarius launch. EuROSTAR has a bold plan that has revitalised the entire workforce: put a satellite in orbit by the end of 1956! Of course, they're not telling anyone outside the organisation that that's the plan; if anyone asks, it's a giant firework for the new year's day display.

Misnamed Adler Q montage! Each one did a contract and gathered a moderate quantity of science. An upgrade to the Veronique engine changed its propellants to increase ISP. This upgraded engine immediately failed on the first launch, though it worked second time around. The first XLR-11 rocketplane engines arrived from the US, but there's no plane to use them on- or is there? The XJ-2 Geminus is no longer useful as a jet, but its flight characteristics are good and it should be good enough to do some low-level rocketplane stuff while a new plane is under construction. So, naturally, on the first flight this happened: It turned out to be very unstable due to a weight distribution issue and the pilot only just managed to regain control and fly back to Woomera. The next launch would send a small monkey up to 3000m/s in space aboard a DR-1 Horizon SP. Or at least, it would have if the new Veronique hadn't failed again. The monkey returned a lot sooner than planned and no data was gained. An identical rocket was ready to go a few months later and this one actually worked! Construction of the new XR-3 Gyrfalcon high-performance rocketplane was completed in early 1955, featuring a novel wing design: it is in effect a biplane with the lower wing swept backwards and the upper one swept forwards, linked at the wingtips. The lower wing is equipped with full-length flaps to make landing much easier, while the upper wing has the pitch and roll controls along with a pair of canards near the nose. Powered by a new and more powerful XLR-25 engine and with a pressurised cockpit able to fly up to 75km, it's a substantial upgrade over the jerry-rigged XR-2. Pilot Elise was first to take it out for a spin. Literally. A momentary fault in the flight control systems made the plane develop an uncontrollable pitch-up force that quickly turned into a tumble, but Elise dragged it back under control and managed to complete the rest of the flight. Aside from the big spin, Elise's report was glowing: the plane is stable (when the control systems are working), glides extremely well and holds its speed at subsonic velocity, can remain airborne at under 70m/s- and immediately threw itself off the side of the runway as soon as the nose wheel touched down. More work will be needed to make the Gyrfalcon more controllable in the air and on the ground, but apart from that things are looking good. And no, a supersonic rocket biplane is not an oxymoron. A brief interlude in the form of an Adler P launch, sans return capsule for maximum altitude: And then it was Horvath's turn to take the Gyrfalcon's controls. The flight went well enough, but the landing... Once again the nose gear caused a violent left turn; unlike last time the right wingtip hit the runway hard enough to break the little wheel added to prevent exactly this sort of thing, and the rest was inevitable. Horvath ended up rolling sideways down the runway at motorway speed before the cockpit finally came to a halt, scraped and dented but substantially intact. Pilot and science data both survived making this landing officially "good". A replacement Gyrfalcon will be built as soon as the engineers figure out why the first one was so unstable on landing. Scale models are already being tested, though the results so far aren't promising.

Your philosophy on vessel modification concerns me- making tanks wider costs a lot more in tooling than making them longer (or just using a second identical tank), while those truss decouplers are just overly heavy and somewhat glitch-prone (due to the larger collision area and likelihood of clipping into engines etc.) compared to a ring decoupler or a nice thin hollow cylinder procedural decoupler. I’m sure there are better engines than the KTDU-425 for interplanetary probes too, at that distance from the Sun you could possibly get away with kerolox and a lot of MLI and small radiators. My efforts for a reusable lander usually end up with a lander that uses loads of generic thrusters and needs a tanker significantly heavier than the lander itself to ship the fuel out for each landing, though economies of scale can kick in with a really big tanker. An engine like the AJ-10 Transtar would be great for a reusable lander due to its extremely long burn time and high reliability, with some sizeable RCS thrusters to provide some throttleable thrust for landing, but that’s much further along the tech tree.

Another brand new rocket design took to the launchpad. And by brand new I of course mean "stick the return-y bit from the Verity S on top of a Viscount and call it a Viscount S". With that done, attention turned to the task of launching a rocket a whopping 3000km downrange from the launch site; by an interesting coincidence, most of the land area of both the UK and France is within 3000km of Moscow. These facts are entirely unrelated. The launch surpassed the goal, reaching around 3500km distance in total and setting an altitude record in the process. Another Adler launch gave another species the opportunity to experience the wonders of spaceflight. This time it was the turn of Hammy the hamster, who definitely wasn't "borrowed" from one of the researchers' children while they were at school. It's fine, Hammy will be back home safe by lunchtime and nobody will be any the wiser- ...oh. Oh no... The abort sequence was triggered and the return capsule detached and deployed its parachute, but there just wasn't enough altitude for the chute to open fully meaning the impact was at an unsurvivable 45m/s instead of the usual 6. (The scientist who "volunteered" Hammy for this flight is now frantically driving around nearby pet shops looking for an identical looking hamster.) In other news, the Avon jet engines on the XJ-2 Geminus have received a significant upgrade with the addition of afterburners, boosting the plane's top speed to beyond Mach 2 at the cost of significantly higher fuel consumption to the extent that the first flight actually ran out of fuel shortly before landing. Faster flights will require more fuel so drop tanks will be added in future. In what could have been an unfortunate repeat of the previous attempt, the next Adler P suffered an engine failure on the launchpad and had to be rolled back and repaired before launching on the second attempt. This run of low reliability on the A-4 engine is just one reason why efforts are being made to accelerate the development of a replacement: the best candidate so far seems to be a combination of kerosene and high test peroxide (HTP) which has a rather low ISP but makes up for it with simplicity- decomposed HTP can be used to spin the turbopumps and is hypergolic with kerosene- and a dense oxidiser allowing a lot of propellant in a smaller tank volume; it also simplifies the RCS system which also runs on HTP. But that's a story for another day. The XJ-2A reached 600m/s and sustained it for several minutes, a feat that it will repeat several more times to gather data on Mach 2 flight. Another new* rocket design, the Adler Q adds a larger capsule for a larger animal in a double-height payload bay. It was the turn of Lucky the golden labrador to take to the sky. The mission proceeded without incident. The more advanced capsule needs significantly longer to generate the full suite of data, suborbital missions won't be enough. The photographic camera array is also reaching the limits of its utility, there are only so many pictures you can take of the same areas around Woomera before they cease to be useful. All four pilots- Walter, Romano, Elise and Horvath- took the XJ-2A out for a Mach 2 cruise around the Outback. They were all slightly concerned by the temperature warning lights but completed their designated runs and gathered all the data necessary to design the next generation of high-speed aircraft. Pilot training has already begun for the new high-speed, high-altitude plane. A deal has been struck to import a few pump-fed XLR-11 engines, as used on the X-1 rocketplane in the USA, for use on the new plane. Discussions are ongoing about acquiring XLR-25s from the short-lived X-2 project as well as for a large booster engine for use on a rocket, though the latter will likely be too expensive in the short term.

Logs, a mod list and screenshots of the affected parts would be a good place to start.

That’s Ike’s shadow. What you’re seeing are eclipses. You’ll see the same thing on other planets (Kerbin and Jool) when they get eclipsed by their moons.

Have you looked at the logs? Try editing (a copy of) the craft file and change one part at a time to be a different part e.g. strutCube, that might narrow down which part(s) are responsible.

Another Verity S carried an ant farm into space and back. The ants didn't seem to mind. Before it became the V-2 ballistic missile, the A-4 was used to send cameras into space. Missile-based photoreconnaissance is probably not the way forward, but you never know until you try, right? Plans for the new heavy sounding rocket, the SR-2 Eagle, were in their early stages when a delegation of German rocket scientists arrived at Woomera. Not everyone was happy about this development given recent history, but with the ever-present threat of a Soviet invasion into West Germany and then the rest of western Europe, any contribution West Germany could provide to improve the security of western Europe would be to their mutual advantage. The new arrivals were quickly integrated into the SR-2 team and after some negotiating the rocket's name was changed to Adler, the German word for eagle. Several variants of the design were created to fulfil different mission requirements, though all shared the same basic design and carried a camera assembly in an internal payload bay which would be released after engine shutoff and parachute back to the ground with the main avionics unit. The launch travelled several hundred miles downrange before the return capsule landed safely under its parachute. Finding it in the middle of the desert took a while though... A second launch a few months later went further still. The SR-3 Verity also got an upgrade with the addition of a second stage to create the SR-4 Viscount. This second stage is powered by a Sprite peroxide rocket motor originally developed by de Havilland as a rocket-assisted takeoff (RATO) booster for the Comet jet airliner. This second stage increased the payload capacity and maximum altitude over the Verity, without taking any longer to build or costing any more than the Verity S with the biological sample capsule. The next rocket launch was a Verity S, which got away on the second attempt after an engine fault forced the first launch to be scrubbed and the engine repaired. A rabbit was sent into space this time, with the capsule triple-checked to make sure it couldn't escape after landing; Australia has history with rabbits... A newly developed jet engine has been shipped out to Woomera from Rolls Royce in the UK. The Avon, an axial flow turbojet, promises significantly more thrust than the Derwent and a significantly faster top speed. Rather than build a brand new plane, engineers took the existing XJ-1 Trident and replaced the three Derwents with two Avons to create the XJ-2 Geminus. The new engines increased the top speed from about 350m/s to just over 500m/s, a marked improvement. A flurry of rocket launches followed: A biological sample capsule was added to the Adler's return section and a few frogs got to ride into space along with the camera. The XJ-2 made several flights but quickly ran into fuel issues- specifically, not enough of it- as it was pushed to faster cruise speeds. Something different will be needed in order to fly even faster and higher. A rocket-powered plane is in development, designed to be carried up to altitude by an old Lincoln bomber retrofitted with jet engines and then released to fly on its own. It should be ready for its first flight before the end of 1953. Just as soon as the scale models stop crashing every time they try to land.

The z-fighting is because you were using physics warp and the engine was pushing that stage into the one above. Autostrut all your engines to root and that’s not an issue.