jimmymcgoochie

The Mando finale felt a bit too rushed, too many things to do and not enough time to do them. Without spoiling too much:

The change you’re seeing is actually very small- 0.0002km is 20cm. Even tiny variations in the vessel’s attitude will change the orbital parameters slightly.

SSTOs are hard; SSTOs that go somewhere beyond Kerbin orbit are hard2; SSTOs that carry mining equipment with them to go somewhere after they’ve gone somewhere beyond Kerbin orbit are hard3. From your description it sounds like you have too much drag and/or not enough thrust. Can you share some images of the vessel in question? Try flying with the aero overlay on (F12) and see if there are any really large red spikes trailing from specific parts which indicate that they’re producing huge amounts of drag, then turn on the drag debug (alt+F12 > aero I think) to confirm exactly how much drag is being produced and then tweak the affected part(s) to try and reduce it.

Yes, those exceptions seem to point to a file permissions issue. Do other Steam games work if you run them? If not then there’s a bigger issue but if they do then it’s a problem with just KSP. There’s probably a simple way to allow access to the files but I’m not a Mac person so I can’t help you with that.

KSP staging operates in reverse order- the bigger the number, the sooner it’ll be used. Stages are displayed in this order from bottom to top in both the editors (VAB/SPH) and in flight. Put your parachutes in stage 0 and work your way down the rocket from there.

Sounds like the game is encountering a problem during the loading process which usually stops the game loading but doesn’t cause it to crash or exit. The best way to find the cause and fix it is to post your log files so someone can take a look, here’s how: What are you trying to run KSP on i.e. PC, laptop, chrome book etc. and what are the hardware specs? KSP is limited mostly by RAM during loading and by CPU in flight so those matter most, but you may also have issues if your hard drive has insufficient free space.

Added external drop tanks to a plane to increase the flight time, cruising at Mach 2 drains the internal tanks in under 10 minutes and the new tanks almost double that. The cockpit still heats up like a sauna (internal temperature over 60 degrees Celsius and plenty of glass to let in the blistering Australian summer sun) but that’s a problem for another day.

So when I said "new" LV design... See, I already have a 700-ton class launch rocket that works perfectly well in It's Only Rocket Science, Blue String, so I just copied the design and made some small changes, chief among them replacing the second stage RL-200 with two J-2s since the RL-200 is part of CH-4 which I'm not using in this playthrough. The design works, unsurprisingly, but tooling the new parts will be a bit more of a problem. (Sneak preview of the livery too!) The new LC is under construction, however paying for the new tooling will be a much bigger challenge as it has to be done all at once, up front, rather than being able to spread the cost over time as with facility construction/upgrades. Something to suggest for future P&LC development maybe? The Mars transfer window is open, cue the interplanetary launches! Salmanzar Mars Orbiter 1 is sent earlier in the window while the second will follow in what MechJeb insists is a more optimal time but which TWP isn't so sure about. This is one of several reasons why I built two of them. Meanwhile, back on Earth: Following some construction reprioritisation, what was meant to be Voskhod 3 is now launched as Voskhod 2 since the new astronauts aren't even close to being able to fly yet ad I want them to all get an EVA. This mission does without the airlock and docking target and has two goals: longer term crew experiments lasting up to six days, and staying in orbit for a whole week. Seven days later, re-entry was targeted at Florida... And to my surprise, that's exactly where it ended up! That's Miami in the distance, so splashdown will be somewhere near the Florida Keys? Much better than my usual "targeted" re-entries, that's for sure. Between the science recovered and already transmitted, that's enough to keep R&D going for another year at least. Over to the Moon now with an upgraded Salmanzar Moonlander Mk5 featuring new bipropellant RCS and thrusters. Not that it needed those, strictly speaking, but the extra margin is always a good thing. The landing site ended up being at the edge of a fairly substantial crater, but the lander found a less steep area that wasn't too lumpy and set itself down. In the dark, obviously. The landing was on the far side of the Moon in the highlands, a biome unvisited until now. Science should be sent back via the lunar relay network just as soon as the sun comes up. I've been playing around with the idea of a low-tech Mercury orbiter but without a whole lot of success, it really needs the extremely high ISP of hydrolox to stand a chance of getting there unless I figure out how to use a slingshot planner of some kind. Next time: Second Mars launch? I'm not entirely sure if the second Mars-bound probe has been launched already or is still waiting, everything before the Moon lander was done a couple of weeks ago and I've only recently come back to this save.

Looks like the Restock-ed version of the stock large drill to me. A flurry of rocket launches, flinging cameras and small creatures into space for a few minutes at a time for mostly scientific purposes, a couple of high speed aircraft flights and one rather disastrous attempt to staple wings and a cockpit onto one of the aforesaid rockets to make it a rocketplane, which ended about as well as you’d expect- it ripped its own canards off and then killed the pilot by flying too high and too fast before tumbling out of the sky in an uncontrolled tailspin.

Parachutes are optional on Venus.

It might work, but it’ll add a lot of drag and cost you a lot of delta-V. Fins with control surfaces are the better choice. You could also try adding some small vernier engines e.g. Twitch or Making History’s Cub, or Thuds for a larger rocket, which would give you more control and a bit more thrust at the cost of reduced fuel efficiency (just turn them off in the upper atmosphere), but would still be a good idea to add fins too.

Thalia has strange heat characteristics, apparently that’s by design. And now you’ve got that song stuck in my head (theeeeeeere’s Antimony, Arsenic, Alumin(i!)um…)

The yellow lights, not the drill?

After a few hours yesterday trying to make a new plane, I decided to try just sticking some better engines on the one I already have- and it worked! It's also significantly cheaper than building a new one since the only changes are replacing the engines and some minor fuselage remodelling to make the larger new engines fit properly. I also tried a two stage sounding rocket, found a serious stability problem on the second stage and solved it with some credit card sized fins to keep the pointy end up and the flamey end down.

Video ended rather abruptly A bit of trial and error with azimuth and elevation on the antenna can get a signal when you’re close to Earth if you’re patient enough. Or maybe put (with set position cheat) a tiny “probe” beside each DSN station to make it easy to target them? A crewed Mars mission is no easy undertaking: I needed five launches in total including four extremely large rockets that were ~12kt on the pad to get the ship into orbit and assemble it, though it’s possible to do a larger number of smaller/lighter launches including orbital refuelling to get the same result. ISRU for a Mars ascent craft would need to be sent in the previous transfer window because it’s SLOW; I went for just taking a lander that could do the landing and return with the main ship as it was less hassle.

Tested some variations on a plane design to try and make it faster and even managed to land one on the runway without anything exploding.

Do you by any chance have a controller plugged into your PC? It might be sending an unwanted control input.

If it flips during ascent: BIG fins on the bottom of the rocket and lock the spaceplane’s control surfaces if possible. If it flips while flying as a plane: check that the CoM is always in front of the CoL no matter how much fuel is in the tanks. In both cases you want the drag towards the back of the vessel and mass towards the front, like a shuttlecock or a dart, as this will make it much more stable.

RealAntennas is a requirement for Realism Overhaul and is meant to more accurately portray real communications systems with large dishes only able to send and receive signals in a fairly narrow area depending on where they’re pointing (though RA doesn’t go into quite that much detail, you don’t have to physically point the dish at Earth to get it to work as real spacecraft do). Not really recommended for stock-ish KSP.

It could be a crossfeed issue if the engines are draining from tanks other than those directly above them, is there any fuel/oxidiser present in the central part? Pin some fuel tanks open during the launch and get some screenshots (or better yet, a video recording) as they drain and then when the engines stop. Are the engines falling off once they stop producing thrust? Have you tried adding (more) struts?

Most planet packs have to remove all the stock planets before adding their own so you can probably find the required Kopernicus config in a planet pack somewhere. I doubt it’ll make much of a difference to performance though.

So whatever formatting the code block is adding overrules the default font colour- in this case the white text of dark mode(s). I’m no UI expert but that doesn’t seem too difficult to fix…

If Alt-F4 is working for you then there isn’t really a problem at all. Sometimes I have to end the process in Task Manager to get KSP to close.

Those are directional antenna cones produced by Real Antennas. Switch the CommNet visualisation mode to “first hop” or “path” and most of them will go away while still showing the most useful information for the active vessel.

After reading through the entire story from start to end when the last chapters got posted, it’s clear to me that your writing has come on in leaps and bounds since you started. Excellent work and I look forward to your next one!