jimmymcgoochie

Just getting somewhere, I’d say Moho, just because it takes so much delta-V to get there. With a gravity assist (or assists) from Eve that number comes down, but then you have to try and time the launch and multiple encounters with moving targets which is arguably even harder. Landing, Tylo obviously because of the orbital velocity you need to brake off just using rockets, and getting back from is Eve without a doubt, although coming back from Laythe could also be challenging due to how deep inside Jool’s gravity well it is.

Spoken like someone who has never worked in software development, trotting out the same tired old clichés. I work in a software development team, and I'm telling you now- it's far easier to work with people when you're in the same room as them. No amount of virtual meetings and email chains can make up for just turning round in your seat and having a quick conversation with someone beside/behind you, looking at the same screen, or just the spontaneous conversations that aren't even work related but which can break up the day and give you five minutes to focus on something else before coming back to a tricky piece of work. Working from home has its perks- no commuting time/costs being a big one- but it's a rare development team indeed that can produce just as much work when they're all WFH as they do when they're in the office together. I don't think it's delaying them- I know it is.

That’s not how software development works. COVID was only one part of the reason the game was delayed and it’s far from over yet; I see no chance of accelerating the timescale and no reason to do so- if they finish developing early, that’s just more time to test before release.

Yes- look in KSP/Logs/ModuleManager and you’ll get the patch logs from module manager which should show which patch(es) were applied to any given part. Pick a part, find its part name in the part file and then search for that part name in the patch logs (ctrl/cmd+F, don’t just scroll through it!) to find every patch that gets applied to it, then track down the patch that is removing its command ability. I find VSCode particularly useful when digging into configs etc. as it can search for text within every file in a directory, so when I open my KSP GameData directory it’ll look in every part file and every patch config file.

Wow, almost a year since I started this story already! And we're still in lockdown Next chapter is nearly 9000 words long so far and will no doubt get even longer, however it might still take a while because, without spoiling anything, it's going to be BIG so I want to make sure it's just right.

OK, I lied- more Mars planning is still to be done. The difference this time is that it's for this Mars transfer window, not the one in two years' time. But before that, a test run of the new Moon Base V2's descent went, er, mostly according to plan: Note to self- land on flat ground! An attempt to put that base on top of a White Stratus launch rocket revealed something interesting- the White Stratus is still using the old F-1 and M-1 configs instead of the newer, more powerful versions. Upgrading those and switching to more powerful NK-15-VM hydrolox engines in the second stage increased its payload capacity by 10 tons, but using longer fuel tanks (tooled up for the huge Black Viscount rocket I made last time) increased it even further- up 40 tons to 190t to LEO, and so the White Nimbus was born: A series of frustrating test failures followed as the Mars sample return capsule I made kept burning up on re-entry when its ablator ran out; I later discovered that the procedural heatshield I was using is decidedly broken and sheds ablator far faster than the 'normal' lunar-rated heatshields. After switching to a 1m lunar rated heatshield the probe re-entered (mostly) intact first time, parachuted safely to the ocean- and promptly sank like a stone... Aiming for land may be required for this one, or possibly an airbag to make it float but those are heavy and mess up the fairings a bit too. Now for my latest crazy contraption- a NERVA-powered space tug capable of hauling 500 ton payloads around in LEO: The test payload tank containing 500 tons of ballast was pretty easy to shift, but this thing isn't fast in any respect- its acceleration is terrible, its handling is ponderous at best and when docked to a payload it'll take ages to turn while using very large quantities of RCS propellants. Oh, and the nuclear engine takes a good 15 seconds or more to spool up to full thrust. Some of those issues can be solved by adding more control systems (doubling the number of RCS thrusters and tripling the number of reaction wheels), but this thing isn't meant to go fast; it's meant to move stuff around in LEO as efficiently as possible, so speed isn't that much of an issue. And now a test with that shiny new White Nimbus to see if I can actually launch 190 tons of nuclear space tug into orbit: The design work I've been doing for the Mars sample returns has produced two new craft- Blue King, which will collect the samples from Phobos and Deimos before giving them to Blue Queen which will take them back to Earth. I still need to make one for Mars itself, but that's a project for another day. Full album: https://imgur.com/a/FRNu5qo Coming up next time: I'm going to stop doing all these simulations soon and get on with doing some real missions- there's crew training to be done for the Yellow Croissant flights plus flying out to that Moon station and Moon base (which will need new craft built for that), plus the upcoming transfer window to Venus which I intend to cram with as many missions as I feasibly can.

I made a thing! Water tower for scale...

I made a thing! Yes, you read that correctly- 500 tons to LEO in a single launch! The rocket itself is nearly 11kt on the pad, powered by twelve F-1A engines (six on the core, six boosters) and six UA-1205 solid boosters to get it off the launchpad, followed by five NK-15VM hydrolox engines (from CH-4) in the second stage. 500 tons per launch is at the lower end of what I'll need for the Mars ship, but I've been working on a nuclear powered space tug to drag stuff around in LEO meaning I won't need to add all the control gubbins to get the various pieces in the right places for orbital assembly. And then... The contract acceptance binge to end all contract acceptance binges- over TWENTY MILLION FUNDS in advance payments alone! I immediately spent 10 million of that on KCT points- a whole 500 of them- and bumped R&D up a bit while getting all three VAB build queues up to parity, or near enough. Other things without screenshots include- nuclear LEO tug to grab 500 ton payloads and drag them around in LEO; delivery system for the crewed Mars rover (now with heatshield to survive re-entry at interplanetary velocities); fixing the Orange Cliff design after I launched one only to discover that only one of its four boosters had a fuel line to the core (fortunately(?) the engine on the other side had a thrust loss to balance it out a bit); and scrapping the White Kepler 'hydrolox tank to Mars' idea in favour of just making the Mars ship bigger. Full album: https://imgur.com/a/QNrFAaI Coming up next time- I think I've done enough Mars mission planning for now- the next Mars window is far too soon to get everything built in time, and the window after that is about two years later so there's plenty of time to wait for tech upgrades etc. before finalising everything. Instead, I'll probably look at further interplanetary missions for the next set of transfer windows to Venus and Mars, or just scraping up all the science I can get from within Earth's SOI by deploying all the latest science experiments.

I can’t quite believe this... I’ve been running EVO 0.2 for several days without incident (downgraded from 16k RSS textures to 8k to try and ease the memory load) but this morning it crashed my PC at the same point as before; rebooted, reloaded and the second time it worked perfectly. The only difference is that the second time, I had the sound muted on my PC but the first time sound was on . I have no idea how or why this is the case, but it seems that as long as I leave sound on mute until the game has fully loaded I’ll be fine, which is good news as I really like the upgrades in 0.2.

Plasma blackout doesn’t stop you using SAS modes unless you’ve also selected “require signal for control”. You can still use SAS with partial control as far as I know.

Deploy them on flat ground, they’re not particularly stable and will easily fall over on even a fairly shallow slope. Flat ground is also easier to land on so aim for the level areas whenever possible.

Designed and tested a crewed rover for Mars. It has all the mod-cons: pressurised cabin, ample supplies of snacks, integrated rover autopilot, sizeable quantities of Science! and some repair kits to repair the inevitable broken solar panels. Driving on the ground was fine, landing from low Mars orbit was also fine, now the challenge is actually getting it out there in the first place- at 9 tons it'll take a pretty beefy rocket to get the required delta-V.

OK, so ISRU is a bit of a bust. Water electrolysis is just too slow to produce useful quantities of H2 and O2 without sending a lander out one transfer window in advance, and since the next window is in 100 days and I don't have all the tech nodes unlocked yet it would have to wait for another 2 years, pushing the crewed expedition back even further. I have a few ideas for the Earth-Mars-Earth ship and a lander/ascent craft which doesn't use ISRU, and I'll probably make a crew rover based on the Mk2 lander can to do some exploration (actually, maybe I could use that as the lander? I'll have to think about that...) and on top of all that, I have to deal with radiation- more shielding increases the time before the crew get irradiated to death, but also adds A LOT of extra weight that severely cuts down on delta-V. Going to Mars isn't easy! On a more positive note, I've done some mod reshuffling which has allowed me to run EVO 0.2 which looks even better than 0.1 In other news, it's time to say goodbye to the Yellow Eclair space station as I'm no longer using Gemini pods for LEO stuff and it doesn't actually have a purpose any more. The Gemini pod on top was built to survive re-entry as an emergency evacuation system, so it came down intact and was recovered; the rest, not so much: Now on to a test of a Venus rover and its EDL systems- once I remembered the parachute, that is! KRASH went a bit weird after that though, making Venus spin at a ridiculous rate in the wrong direction and, well... This is fine. Next, an Apollo Block 3 based lunar shuttle to visit that lunar space station I'm about to launch. Getting it there will probably need a 700 ton launch rocket, but it should have enough fuel to capture, rendezvous and return on its own. And finally, a crewed Mars rover design takes shape, using the Mk2 lander can (in 'lander' mode since the 'rover' option isn't available, but that means there's plenty of storage space) and a fairly simple propulsive/parachute landing system: EVO 0.2 adds Martian sandstorms, which are great until you have to try and land in one! It drives well enough on the surface, has a built-in Bon Voyage controller, supplies for 3 crew for 70 days, sizeable solar panels and backup fuel cells with enough fuel to run everything for 40 days on their own. It also carries deployed science equipment, which I may have a patch for that'll work with Real Antennas, and some science experiments to boot. Now all I have to do is figure out how I'm going to put 9 tons of rover into low Mars orbit. I also just updated to the most recent master branches of RO and RP-1 which add compatibility for SSPX, meaning many more parts for crewed vessels are now available; the only downside is t they're ever so slightly bigger than the hitchhiker and MPL (and the stock Mk1-3 Apollo-alike pod). Whoever did the configs also helpfully added shared costs so after the first part was bought the rest were really cheap. Full album: https://imgur.com/a/TsHpvBj Coming up next time: More designs for Mars probably. I've been doing A LOT of that lately, with some designs looking more promising than others, but I'd rather do something a bit more interesting than faff around in the VAB editor or run yet another simulation.

Stock RCS would be challenging, but I know of a nice monoprop arcjet thruster with an ISP of 1300...

These contracts can be a little bit broken sometimes. If you open the contract list in flight (on the right hand side of the screen) what isn’t ticked off on the contract? If you’ve completed everything that the contract asks you to do but it still won’t complete, you can just cheat complete it- open the debug menu (either alt+f12 or escape > show version information on the pause menu), click the ‘contracts’ tab then ‘active’, and click ‘complete’ on those contracts to make them complete and pay out their rewards. It’s OK to do this when you really have completed the contract but the game doesn’t accept it, but don’t do it just because you made a mistake or ran out of time.

@ConArt70 that number seems excessively high. What’s the wet and dry mass of this probe? My calculations say ISP*g is 240s*9.807m/s/s = 2353.7m/s, so to get over 10,000m/s of delta-V, ln(m0/m1) would have to be well above 4; the inverse of ln(x) is ex and e ~= 2.72 so if ln(x) = 4, x = e4 which is 54.6! KSP fuel tanks don’t have mass ratios nearly that good- I don’t think any of them are even in double figures- so I suspect you’ve done the calculation backwards somewhere, but without knowing your m0 and m1 (and without having KSP open in front of me to replicate the design) I can only guess. edit- after reading your previous comment, I think you have m0 and m1 mixed up- m0 is wet mass with full fuel, m1 is dry mass with zero fuel.

That re-entry heating issue is because you put an avionics directly on top of your heat shield- heat from re-entry gets conducted from the hot heat shield to the much less heat tolerant avionics and can easily cook them, so it’ best to attach a heat shield to something more heatproof with the avionics on top of that.

KSP is set in a solar system that is ~9% the size of the Sol system, yet Kerbin has the same gravity and surface atmospheric pressure as Earth which is over ten times larger. On Earth you need to accelerate to 7800m/s to stay in LEO compared to just 2200m/s around tiny Kerbin, so if KSP rockets had realistic mass fractions they would be hilariously overpowered. Just to put that into context, Pluto’s primary moon Charon is almost exactly the same size as Kerbin, but has 0.02g gravity or 50 times less. Basically your point boils down to “the fuel units aren’t in litres”, which is entirely true- generic units of unspecified fuel (some people say kerosene, some say methane...) are all that’s needed; it doesn’t matter if that’s in litres, gallons or fluid ounces because what matters for rockets is fuel mass, not volume. Sure, fuel tanks have terrible mass ratios which limits their total delta-V, but that’s fine in a 1/10 scale solar system because you don’t need vast delta-V reserves to go places and the 9km/s you’d need to get into low Earth orbit can take you to Duna and back

Did you actually turn it on? MJ has many different modes, are you talking about the aircraft autopilot? You need to set the flight parameters like speed, altitude, heading and then engage the autopilot; just turning it on will usually default altitude to 0 (which isn’t a very good idea!), and setting the parameters without engaging the autopilot won’t do anything and the plane will just keep flying uncontrolled (if SAS is off, though SAS doesn’t do too well with planes anyway) and you'll probably end up crashing.

You’re going to need to give more detail than that. What version of KSP, Kopernicus and RSS are you using? Where are the log files? What other mods are you using?

Breaking Ground scanning arms need three things- something to scan, some power to scan it and to stay completely still while scanning. Each planet and moon has its own scannable objects- on Kerbin you’ll find baobab trees in many low-lying biomes and giant pink quartz crystals in the mountains, both of which you’ll find just by heading west from KSC, the Mun has two types of impact crater and some rocks, Minmus has various rock types, Duna has ‘blueberries’ and sand dunes, etc. Some of the smaller ones can be sampled by a Kerbal, but the larger objects must be scanned by the rover arm, so here’s how you do it: Find something to scan. They’re much easier to find with terrain scatters off as those will add more surface clutter and hide the interesting stuff, and there are some options in the cheats menu to show where they are. Drive up to it and park beside it. Those rover arms have a limited reach of just a few metres and will stop scanning if you move even slightly, so park close enough to reach it, but not so close that the arm will hit the object (that will also cause it to stop scanning), and put the brakes on. Make sure you have enough battery capacity to do the scan. I think the biggest arm needs around 600 electric charge to run and the smaller versions will be less than that; you’ll probably have that much power anyway but make sure your solar panels are facing the sun as much as possible before starting. Right click the scanning arm and click ‘scan’, it will tell you what you’ve found e.g. Mun crater or Baobab tree so the button would say ‘scan Mun crater’ or ‘scan Baobab tree’. The arm will extend, do its scans and then give you the science report like any other experiment does so you can keep it or transmit it. The small arm only gets you about 1/3 of the total science, the medium arm 2/3 and the large arm all of it; you can come back with a better scanning arm to something you’ve scanned before and get the extra science out of it, e.g. if you’ve scanned a Baobab tree with a small arm then unlock the large arm, you can scan another Baobab tree and get the remaining science out of it. Some of the smaller surface features like Mun rocks or Duna blueberries can also be picked up by a Kerbal on EVA which will give you the maximum amount of science, but they can’t handle the bigger objects unfortunately- only a scanning arm can do that.

@The Destroyer Wow. Just wow. Where did you get those nuclear reactors from? I might need some of those for my own Mars mission (hopefully also in the '60s, just at the very very end...). Also- Season 1? Does that mean *gasp* there will be moar!?!?

It's been a while since the last update, hasn't it... Time to make up for that with a little trip to the Moon: An engine failure on the descent stage wasn't very helpful- I had to make the entire descent on one continuous engine burn, leading to it running out of fuel just above the ground and the ascent engines had to fire to avoid a crash-and-fall-over situation. Deployed science kit, er, deployed, flag planted and roving done, time to head back home. I don't think the deployed science kit is going to work as I got the patch wrong, meaning they still use the stock antenna system instead of Real Antennas. Maybe a hacky hack would fix it, or else I'll try to find an antenna that doesn't work with RA and bodge together a relay using that. Return to orbit, rendezvous and docking were all fine, then I tried to be fancy and move the lander's fuel cells to the Gemini's service module using EVA construction mode. BAD IDEA! Many many explosions ensued and the shattered remains of the craft began spreading out around the Moon... REVERT! To two hours earlier, before the rendezvous burn started, but better than being stuck in just a lonely Gemini pod around the Moon! Second time round I made sure to save regularly and decided not to do any EVA construction, but instead to bring them home as soon as possible. At this point the TWR on the upper stage was extremely high and it pulled over 12g during the return burn; fortunately Gloria and Terri didn't black out for that one because it was a pretty short burn. Upon their return, two juicy contracts paid out: This makes up for the total lack of science gained from this mission, as they landed in the lowlands which I've already scienced out. Next up, the inaugural launch of the new Yellow Croissant crewed orbital ship, based on the Apollo Block 3 pod with a custom service module. It's kitted out for LEO operations and I have two contracts for orbital flights to do that have overlapping orbits. I checked that the food/water/oxygen supplies would last for the required 13 days of orbiting, completely forgetting to check the hydrogen/oxygen levels for the fuel cells which, er, ran out... Frantic power saving measures weren't enough- the pod ran out of power during the descent. Fortunately, by that point it was descending under parachutes so it didn't matter too much, but that was far too close for comfort! (There was never any real danger to the crew as I would just have brought them back and left the uncompleted contract for the next one to do instead, but that would have been annoying...) A moderate haul of science was gained from crew experiments, but the crew weren't that excited by their near-death experience, adding barely a year each to their retirement dates- except Victoria, who added barely half that. Future Yellow Croissants have had solar panels added to the service modules to make them less reliant on the fuel cells to stop this problem happening again. One last simulation to finish, this time of a descent module for a Mars sample return mission: Not quite sure what happened to this one- at 11km/s, the slightest wobble can be instantly lethal to any parts caught by even the slightest whiff of airflow and the whole thing exploded in seconds. I'll try again with a different (non-procedural) heat shield as the rest of the design checked out fine. Final scores: Full album: https://imgur.com/a/4BfodPf Coming up next time: The next tech tree node to unlock will allow pretty much every ISRU system to be used on the little Kerbalism chemical plant, meaning it's time for a prototype mining operation to be developed for Mars and/or its moons. I suspect Mars itself will be the best choice as it has both carbon and water readily available, but I'll look at the moons anyway as they're so much easier to land on with their puny gravity.

Try asking in the tundra Exploration mod’s forum thread, you’re much more likely to get help for a mod if you ask in that mod’s thread rather than posting here. You should also provide screenshots and logs so others can help: Here’s the thread for Tundra Exploration:

Going to Duna and back, only to realise you have no chute for the landing on Kerbin and having to bail out, leaving all that precious science to get smashed to pieces in the pod? ‘Tis the Kerbal way! Congratulations on a successful mission. There’s plenty more to see and do on Duna (and more science to be had as well) so don’t just rush to the next planet or moon.