jimmymcgoochie

Moving towards a longer-term Moon mission, I now have a base on the Moon with a proper rover (pressurised and everything!) for the crew to drive around and gather science, and a station in orbit of the Moon which has just received its first crew. This first mission has already come across a few issues with the designs (lack of RCS propellant and water for the crew to drink) which will be corrected in future, and now they’re waiting for a lander to be sent out to let them visit the base. There’s plenty for the to do on the station while they wait, including several lucrative contracts and some propellant thievery from the station’s own RCS reserves- I really hope they’re using the same RCS configuration!

RSS/RO/RP-1, with close to 100 mods, I’ve hit over 100k patches; but now I’ve cut it down to 40-50 thousand by ditching stuff I didn’t need. Yes, my load times are quite long, how did you guess? In a more ‘stock’ version of KSP (ie no RSS/RO/RP-1 patching literally everything in the entire game) I usually get anywhere from 10 to 20 thousand depending on the mod set e.g. my JNSQ career game is closer to 20k right now, my stockish-with-Kerbalism is under 10k.

Too many mods could be a factor- cut anything you don’t absolutely have to have to ease the load on your PC. Maybe, instead of trying to force the game to load after an exception is thrown, you should find the cause of the exception and remove the mod(s) responsible.

I can’t help feeling that that booster would have been useful to make up the delta-V shortage...

That folder structure is wrong. First of all, you have a GameData inside your GameData which is wrong- if a mod provides a GameData folder, you need to put the contents of that into your KSP GameData folder (or merge the two GameData folders when looking at the root KSP directory). Secondly, AvP.v4.1 isn't right either, that looks like you've downloaded AVP v4.1 from e.g. curseforge and then dumped the download straight into GameData. You should always check the contents of your downloads and put the right folders into KSP/GameData or it won't work. I suspect if you open that folder up you'll find either a GameData folder, or one called AVP and possibly ModuleManager too; put those into KSP/GameData and delete the unnecessary folders. Likewise for Parallax.1.2.3 and scatterer.0.0.0723 Third, you don't need BoulderCo- that's the default EVE config and will conflict with AVP's configs once you have them installed correctly. To install AVP in KSP 1.11.2 through CKAN, click Settings > Compatible KSP Versions and then select everything from 1.8 to 1.11, you should then be able to install AVP using CKAN- but first you'll need to delete the EVE, AVP, scatterer and module manager you have in there already. You can also install Parallax, DOE, waterfall and more this way.

Are you getting errors when you load the game, or is KSP loading without the effects, if at all? I just installed AVP with 8k textures, EVE redux, scatterer and MM in KSP 1.11.2 and everything looks exactly as I'd expect, so I suspect you've installed it incorrectly- make sure your KSP/GameData folder contains the folders: AstronomersVisualPack; EnvironmentalVisualEnhancements; scatterer; Squad; SquadExpansion (if you have either/both DLCs); and ModuleManager.4.1.4.dll Try installing your mods with CKAN, it makes life much easier especially when using lots of mods: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/197082-ckan-the-comprehensive-kerbal-archive-network-v1300-glenn/&do=findComment&comment=3858583

There are people around still playing years-old versions of KSP because they like particular mods that don’t work in later versions (for example); sure, KSP2 will be big and shiny and new and all, but it’ll take time before mods become available for it and for the inevitable post-release bugs to be exterminated. I don’t expect KSP to go anywhere- indeed, the developers have said it’ll still be worked on for some time yet- and while some people will move to KSP2 and never look back I expect many (including me, most likely) to play both, and some just won’t play KSP2 at all.

I’ll assume you meant Terrier the whole way through rather than Poodle, which is a completely different part. The Terrier is lighter, cheaper, available earlier in the tech tree, smaller (so more practical on landers) and conventional LF/Ox so has many more fuel tank options than the NERV which requires aircraft parts to function effectively. The only reason to use the NERV is for its outright efficiency, when money is no object and you need the maximum possible delta-V.

Experiments with pentaborane-fuelled rockets. When your propellant is described as “as toxic as nerve gas” you should probably rethink several major life choices...

@Spaceman.Spiff I just downloaded it. It’s very... green.

The current Moon mission plan looks like this: Send crew on Yellow Pain-au-chocolat (lunar rated Apollo block 3, up to 5 crew) to Yellow Profiterole (lunar space station), complete contracts; Send Yellow Yum-yum (Moon base) out to the Moon and land it somewhere interesting, with lots of biomes nearby if possible; Send Yellow Crumpet (Moon lander) out to the station and dock, crew can then transfer over to lander; Land beside base, complete contract; At some point, send a proper Moon rover out to the Moon so crew can drive long distances to different biomes without the issues of long-term EVAs (aka running out of life support resources). To that end, I've created an upgraded Yellow Crumpet using the latest technologies (TL6 RCS and thrusters, which surprised me as I was only expecting to have TL5 available, and TL5 solar panels that can power the whole thing, avionics and all) which uses a White Stratus to launch; a bit wasteful, since my previous Moon missions managed a Gemini and that lander on the same rocket, but with a space station rendezvous to consider it's worth the extra cost for the extra margin available. Test runs look good with a healthy reserve of fuel, which is good to have in case of an engine failure. A quick check on the Blue Bungalow rover on Venus revealed that it had completed the 'drive here' part of its contract and only needed to transmit science from the surface to complete the contract. Also, it's still on fire... The last Blue Bishop interplanetary probe launched to Neptune. Using the most efficient transfer would have taken over forty years to get there, but with plenty of delta-V to burn a much faster transfer was available that will take less than a decade, with enough fuel left to capture into orbit and possibly even to get a flyby of Triton: Due to the long burn time and the sheer distance to Neptune, the transfer burn missed its SOI entirely and a considerable course correction will be needed in about 2 years to get it back on track. A quick trip to LEO for Elvira, Elvira and Daniel racked up two contracts, even if Daniel managed to get locked out of the pod once they'd landed in Mexico afterwards. No science, no experience, ~200 days added to Elvira and Elvira's retirement dates and 300 to Daniel's, but 350k funds in contract rewards made it worthwhile. Shortly afterwards Venus rotated enough that Blue Bungalow got a signal and dumped a huge quantity of science back to Earth, completing its contract for 900k funds and giving about a thousand science points- and 50 KCT points for free. And then I did something bad... New engines on the Black Viscount launch rocket plus bigger SRBs increased its payload to LEO by 150 tons, to 650t; the only downside is those engines are RD-270Ms. They burn pentaborane. The fuel density and ISP are better than kerolox and the RD-270M produces similar thrust to the F-1, but pentaborane is as toxic as nerve gas and spewing thousands of tons of boron fumes across Florida and the Bahamas is probably not a good idea... Full album: https://imgur.com/a/PE2btzm Coming up next time: I've been working on a Jupiter mission that would launch four probes in one go and complete the transfer burn, then separate the probes to capture independently and visit all four of the Galilean moons. The probe design is fine, but for some reason sticking it on top of the White Nimbus heavy launch rocket is causing real issues as the M-1 core engine seems incapable of controlling its attitude once the F-1A boosters have separated and it always ends up pointing straight down before I terminate the sim. I might try an RD-270M based version to get more control during the ascent

No, you don’t need to worry about powering the relays and the transmission speed of their relay dishes isn’t a factor either (some mods change this, but stock KSP doesn’t care). I think the only thing that matters is signal strength as reduced signal means less science from your transmissions, but I don’t know if that’s actually true or not.

The science-only Kerbalism config is meant for the stock solar system. You could try adding RO-Kerbalism but disabling the life support features, though I suspect it might not work.

Another Blue Bishop launch, this time to Vesta: Other than the name and destination, it's identical to Blue Bishop Ceres and will be doing a minor course correction before arriving at Vesta, in a fairly high 100km orbit to avoid crashing into the surface since Vesta is very oblate (read: fat in the middle). Next, Blue Bungalow arrived at Venus and captured into orbit successfully. With only a couple of gratuitous explosions during the descent, the rover landed safely on the surface. Just ignore the sulphurous clouds and lead-melting temperatures, everything is fine... 'Only' 85 atmospheres of pressure and 720 Kelvin... Due to a fortuitous (and completely unplanned) coincidence the probe captured into an orbit that was almost perfectly aligned with the target site for the rover contract; unfortunately the rover dropped a bit short of that target due to the crazy soup of an atmosphere so there's a bit of driving to do; fortunately, I don't have to do it because Bon Voyage will do it for me. After a short experiment with a cluster of tiny cubesats to be used as relays in LEO, which failed because I woefully overestimated how far they'd spread in orbit, I launched two sets of four relays to replace the old Green Seagull constellation; now anything in low Earth orbit will be covered by UHF, S- and X-band communications thanks to a set of 4 relays in a 500km equatorial orbit and a set of 4 relays in a 5000km polar orbit, with their orbits synched to within 0.1 seconds in both sets. Next up, the big one... So big, in fact, that it doesn't fit on the launchpad properly, or the screen: After the two White Galileo probes wound up abysmally short of delta-V considering how much they had on the launchpad, I decided it was time to go big- by taking everything from the second stage up from White Galileo 2 and mounting it on top of a Black Viscount superheavy launch rocket. The payload is well within the Viscount's abilities and with a frankly ridiculous 35.9km/s of total delta-V on the pad or 26.7km/s in LEO, this should be more than enough to brute force my way to Mercury and land on it, whether it likes it or not. Most of the upper stages use NK-15-VM hydrolox engines (from CH4), a powerful and efficient workhorse that I've been using extensively due to its tremendous thrust (nearly 2MN), high efficiency (~450s ISP) and 5 restarts; the fact that there's no TestLite config so it can't fail is only a minor consideration- really! The top stage is the stupidly efficient ATV engine (also CH4) with 492s ISP which can deliver immense delta-V (over 11km/s here) and with enough MLI to prevent boiloff even when diving at the Sun like this. I have high hopes for this mission, what with the 10km/s of excess delta-V it's packing... Black Galileo 1 is now on the build queue, thanks to a little bit of research reprioritisation to push the necessary solid rocket node through and get hold of those UA-1205 boosters; I wanted to come up with a new name scheme, but it was too late in the day for that and Black Galileo sums it up pretty well- it's just White Galileo stuck on a Black-class >10kt rocket. Full album: https://imgur.com/a/z5y0tpg Coming up next time: The Neptune transfer window approaches, as do a number of crew training completions that might allow some journeys to the Moon to visit the new station and the so-new-it's-not-built-yet surface base. For that, I'll need a lander, so some small tweaks to the old Moon lander designs will be on the agenda too. (Forgot to mention- Orange Beach 2 was the first launch of 1963; with the next transfer window to Mars just over a year away, I’m still on course for a 1965 Mars landing!)

Apparently they talked to some random guy off the internet called Scott Manley...

Launched a cluster of tiny relay seats using the old ‘shotgun them out while trying to change planes’ technique, but the decoupling force was but a tiny fraction of orbital velocity around Earth so they didn’t spread nearly far enough. I scrapped those, then launched a new set of four relays into a low equatorial orbit, but they were too low to actually communicate with each other; cue another launch of four more relays in a high polar orbit to bridge the gaps and ensure complete coverage from almost any point on Earth’s surface or low/medium orbit. I even went to the effort of matching their orbits to within 0.1 seconds per orbit so they’ll stay in place for a while.

Stowaway- the fastest stage burnout in history (first and second stages in less than a minute) followed by a transfer burn to Mars which is apparently done whilst still inside Earth’s atmosphere (someone calls out Max-Q in the middle of it, which only happens much lower in the atmosphere, plus I wouldn’t want to be riding in a capsule with open windows going at over 11km/s in the atmosphere point first). And for some reason the ‘third’ stage for trans-Mars insertion looks like it has landing legs and engines that look like they’d be more at home at sea level than vacuum. Spoiler alert- there’s someone else on board, somehow crammed inside a piece of the life support module which is inaccessible from inside and outside and with no obvious means of getting there; he says he was working on the second stage, which regardless of what rocket was used on the launch is well below the payload (there’s an entire stage in between which is a key part of the whole design) so couldn’t have just slipped and fallen into that module. Now the life support system is damaged and there’s only enough oxygen for 2- with three crew and one stowaway on board. It’s incredibly bad planning to include just one of any critical system, especially something that the crew needs to stay alive, and doubly so when the ship was only built to sustain a crew of 2 and a single failure will be fatal to at least one of the crew. It’s not even a particularly big component that’s damaged so I see no reason why they wouldn’t have included a backup. There are a few occasions where they go out on EVA but don’t lower their visors (which would be blindingly bright in full sunlight), except for that one time when someone lowers their visor to look straight at the sun... And why are they aiming for 1g of spin gravity, which can be very disorienting even with that ~200m radius, when a mere 0.3g will be sufficient to prevent health issues and matches Mars surface gravity?

Any errors or crash reports? Is your PC just running out of RAM during loading? (That happens to me even with 32GB, for some unknown reason it hoovers up all 32 when the main menu screen loads in...) Have you tried removing some mods you don’t absolutely need, or even just parts from mods that you don’t use?

A year late, but here are some craft files: https://kerbalx.com/jimmymcgoochie/Black-Arrow https://kerbalx.com/jimmymcgoochie/Black-Prince I also made an RO/RP-1/RSS version which matches the real thing almost exactly in every way, but this has some real stability issues if staged according to the original staging pattern; the one time I tried to launch it, it flipped as soon as I decoupled the first stage. Looks nice though, doesn't it?

Ok, but how does the deorbit section get back to space? The same centrifuge launcher?

Mod list? Clearly from the logs you’re playing RSS, but knowing exactly what (and how many) mods you have will make things much easier. I can already see that you have both EVO and RSSVE installed, which is a bad idea, as well as lots of part-heavy mods like BDB which will put a lot of strain on your RAM- PC specs would also help. My first thought is that you’re running out of RAM, so try stripping out any mods you don’t need, using lower-res textures for RSS and/or using just RSSVE and not EVO; your logs cut out without warning so unless the game closes itself I suggest leaving it for longer, or possibly adding Hyperspace to make it load faster.

Looks like Kerbin with Spectra to me.

Does that satellite have a relay dish on it, or just a normal antenna? As the names suggest, direct type antennae can only transmit a signal to something else- Kerbin or another craft- but relay dishes can also receive a signal from another craft and then forward it on. Orbiting the Mun, a relay with a few HG-5 deployable dishes would be sufficient, but further out you’ll need the RA-class fixed dishes. A good relay network will not only prevent loss of signal and loss of control but also means your individual rovers, landers etc. only need small direct antennae to reach the relays above, rather than carrying a big, heavy one to communicate all the way back to Kerbin. I suggest you build a simple relay with either a few HG-5s or a single RA-2 and put several of those in orbit around the Mun (and Minmus too) to ensure that you get complete coverage of the surface: put them in sets of 3 in a high polar orbit, regularly spaced, so they can communicate with each other and will cover almost every part of the Mun/Minmus’ surface.

Try increasing the damping settings on the robotic parts, or use a more powerful motor in the part or even a more powerful part- the motor in an electric screwdriver won’t be much good at shifting a jumbo jet’s main landing gear, and likewise using tiny robotics parts to move big and heavy rocket parts isn’t going to end very well.

Spammed a load of contracts to make some money for an upcoming Moon base, built a few cheap(ish) probes based on an old contract sat launcher to make use of new experiments, and dispatched a probe to Ceres in an utterly unremarkable launch, nothing special about it at all, no siree, absolutely no booster backflips during the ascent due to insufficient gimbal on an F-1 engine running at close to 10,000kN...