jimmymcgoochie

Sent a crew up to do some crewed orbit contracts- this required a longer stay in orbit than I originally planned so I sent 3 crew instead of a possible 5 to save on life support, completely forgetting to check the hydrogen/oxygen for the fuel cells... They survived, but the pod ran out of battery whilst descending on its main chutes. Suffice to say, lessons have been learnt and the next models in the series have been retrofitted with solar panels to help the fuel cell fuel last longer. I’m also one tech node away from building a prototype ISRU mining system to send to Mars and/or its moons, ahead of eventually sending a crewed mission out there. Making some fuel on site would be much better than having to ship it all out from Earth, but until I try it I have no idea how, or even if, such a thing is possible on the scale required.

The best way to find out is to try it and see. There”s no fixed rule about these things as they depend on so many different factors, so actually installing it and checking if it works or not is the only way to be sure.

As far as I know, the shadows are only really high detail at extremely close ranges (within a couple of metres of the camera point), any further away and they become blurrier and less detailed. Probably done for performance reasons, or just never updated because there's not much of a demand for it.

They load into view at ~2.3km I believe, as soon as they enter physics range. Comets are pretty big, but they’re not that big- 1.4km should be plenty of room to miss it. I recently had an incident in RSS where I approached an asteroid and it loaded in, only the asteroid was bigger than physics range so my little probe ended up inside it, with predictable results... At stock scale though, comets and asteroids are much smaller so there’s no danger of that happening; just watch your approach speed so you have time to slow down beside it.

Flew a complicated mission to the Moon, involving an engine ignition failure (it only has 3 to begin with and it's my landing engine so kinda important), an autonomous rover showing up to carry one of the crew to the top of a nearby crater wall for a contract, an attempt to make Breaking Ground deployable science and the 1.11 EVA experiment kit work in RO/RP-1 (the latter doesn't work at all, the BG stuff all deploys and starts up fine but has no signal due to Real Antennas). Finally left the surface, flew into orbit nice and efficiently, got cheap plane change and intercept burns, rendezvoused, docked, transferred crew from lander to orbiter/SM, all is good. Then I tried to be fancy, and sent the engineer out on EVA to grab the fuel cells from the lander and bolt them to the service module and HUGE EXPLOSIONS! I should probably have saved before trying that... Fortunately, there's a save from before I did the intercept burn with the node set, so it took only a few minutes to get back to where it was before, but I think I'll leave those fuel cells be and just head for home without them.

Unless your payload is narrower than the fairing base, it'll get stuck inside.

Where are you looking? I recommend using CKAN to do your KSP modding as it deals with all the details- dependencies, version control, updates- and adding or removing mods is as easy as clicking a check box and hitting 'apply'. JNSQ, Kopernicus, EVE and module manager are all there (as are many others) and CKAN can also offer recommendations and suggestions based on some mods which give you additional mods to complement those you've seleted- for example, scatterer for atmosphere and ocean effects if you install EVE. If you want to do your modding by yourself, check the forums- most mods have a forum page with a link to download that mod. Many are also listed on SpaceDock (https://spacedock.info/kerbal-space-program) and/or CurseForge (https://www.curseforge.com/kerbal/ksp-mods) and if all else fails, search for them on github.

Have you ever built a long, tall rocket, launched it and then turned up the time warp only to see the whole thing collapse on itself like an accordion, bend in half and/or tie itself in knots mid flight? Autostruts can fix that. Autostruts are like regular struts- they add rigid reinforcements between parts to hold everything steady- but unlike normal struts an autostrut is free, weighs nothing and can be connected to three parts- the heaviest part on the vessel (which can change in flight especially docking, so use with care); the root part (tends not to change unless you’re docking so pretty safe for general use) and the part’s grandparent (e.g. an SRB attached to a radial decoupler attached to a fuel tank, the booster’s grandparent part is the fuel tank) which doesn’t tend to change at all and can be used just about everywhere. When building a launch rocket, I tend to set all the engines to autostrut to the root part to stop the rocket compressing under thrust, radial boosters to grandparent part, most fuel tanks to grandparent part and nose cones on boosters to root part, with the root part itself (usually a probe core or command pod) autostrutted to the heaviest part unless it’s going to dock to something. It’s not a good idea to use autostruts on your payloads if you intend to dock them to something else, unless they’re really floppy; in which case remember to turn them off again before docking. Docking changes the root part and recalculates all part relationships so autostruts can get confused, causing weird vessel warping, parts stuck at odd angles and possibly even a total collapse in the physics system leading to massive disassembly- a.k.a. Kraken attack. Note that rigid attachment is not the same thing and generally not advised for anything in an atmosphere or expected to accelerate rapidly- attaching parts in a rigid way makes them more prone to snapping under stress than if they’re able to move a bit. There’s a reason trees sway in the wind, and planes with rigid wings often end up losing them when you pull some G-forces, which is usually a bad thing...

I think I’m going to use this, thanks!

RO isn’t a graphics mod- in fact it has nothing at all to do with how the game looks. It’s all about making the game more like real life rocketry by adding in complexities like ullaging, limited engine ignitions, realistic fuel mixes and fuel tanks, and removing the near-magical reaction wheel abilities that stock KSP has. I’m running RO and RP-1 In KSP 1.11.1 right now (because 1.11.2 wasn’t released when I upgraded and bumping a minor version isn’t worth the hassle) and honestly, I think 1.10 is a better bet- the additions in 1.11 aren’t really relevant to RO or RP-1 and are more of a hindrance than a help depending on what other mods you’re using- changes to RCS and EVA jetpacks are the biggest issues for me. RO and RP-1 just had new releases which bump them up to 1.10 support and everything will run in 1.10 quite happily too; with a PC as potent as that, look at EVO instead of RSSVE as I think it looks much better and comes with up to 64k texture sets. Performance can be a little bit of an issue but only when using large vessels or those with many parts, much like stock KSP, or running with really high resolution textures. Re. the DLCs, Making History isn’t all that useful for RO or RP-1 as the only parts you really get out of it are generic copies of real pods- Gemini and Vostok/Voskhod- and that’s pretty much it; BG isn’t configured at all, so none of the robotics, surface features or deployable experiments are available (I made a patch to make the latter usable but haven’t yet tested it) so you’d be better off just deleting both DLCs to save some memory and load times. If you’ve never done an upscaled system before, try one of those first- JNSQ is a good example, or you could try one of the sub-scale real solar systems (quarter scale would be a good choice). The jump from stock Kerbin to Earth is pretty huge as Kerbin is less than 10% of Earth’s size and the orbital velocity is close to four times higher in LEO than in LKO, but getting used to a larger system first makes that jump less of an issue; or at least, it did for me. If you’re only interested in good graphics in the stock Kerbol system, try a mod like AVP or Spectra to improve the planets’ appearances, add in TUFX and Magpie Mods to make some parts look nice and Restock if you want a new look for the stock parts.

I made this:

Painting fuel tanks can be done with the right mods- I think it’s TUFX and TU recolour to repaint both stock and a number of modded parts. I don’t expect this to be added as a stock option in KSP but it’s confirmed for KSP2.

TWR only really matters if you’re trying to take off or land somewhere, in space it’s much less relevant- though a really low TWR will make everything take longer and you’ll lose a bit of fuel by firing the engines in a direction other than directly prograde/retrograde. What you really want in space is delta-V, which depends on two things: Engine efficiency, known as specific impulse or ISP. This is measured in seconds and represents how long a given engine can produce a given thrust with a given quantity of fuel; much like miles per gallon in a car, more is better as you’re sipping the fuel instead of guzzling it. Vacuum-optimised engines like the Terrier and Poodle have high ISP in space, but are usually pretty bad in atmosphere; in contrast, heavy lifting engines like the Mainsail and Vector have lower ISP overall but it doesn’t change much even at sea level on Kerbin. The rocket’s mass ratio. This is a key part of the rocket equation as it tells you how much of your rocket is fuel and how much is, well, rocket. You want the fuel fraction to be as high as possible, so using one FL-T800 will be better than 8x FL-T100 tanks as the dry weight of the bigger tank is comparatively less for the same mass of fuel. This is one key reason why rockets use stages- dropping the dead weight of empty fuel tanks and heavy booster engines makes you go further with what you have left. Cutting weight where possible e.g. using fewer, larger tanks or removing some parts you don’t absolutely have to have, will improve your delta-V under most circumstances, but the heavy stuff like science experiments are why you’re going out there in the first place so there’s always a balance to be struck. Delta-V is simply how much can you change (delta) your velocity (v). Speed is distance (in metres, m) over time (in seconds, s) so delta-V is in metres per second (m/s); not to be confused with acceleration which is a change in velocity (m/s) over time (s) and is measured in m/s/s or m/s2. Going anywhere in space requires changing your velocity so delta-V gives you your range- using a delta-V map gives you an approximate guide to where you can get to with the delta-V you have available and there are some in-game mods that are helpful for this too, such as Astrogator and Where Can I Go. When designing a mission, start at the top with your mission payload. Decide where you’re going and if you’re coming back, then design your probe/lander/rover/whatever accordingly. Add the uppermost rocket stage to have enough delta-V to do what you need to do, whether that’s returning from the Mun or capturing into orbit of Eeloo, then add each stage below so that each has sufficient range to let the next one do its job with a small margin (I’d say 10-20%) on top. Keep the weight down by using a smaller number of bigger tanks e.g. one FL-T800 instead of 8 FL-T100s, and make sure to check the surface TWR and delta-V for the first stage to ensure it can get off the ground in the first place. One useful trick for launch rockets is to add fuel tanks on top of radial solid boosters and enable the crossfeed on their decouplers- the tanks on the boosters should drain first, powering the main engine(s) and then being dropped with the spent boosters. This can give you quite a lot more fuel without impacting your surfaceTWR too much as solid boosters are generally pretty powerful for their size and weight. Trial and error is the best way to learn. Videos and tutorials can help, but they’ll only get you so far and you need to do it for yourself to really understand it. Don’t be afraid of making mistakes, by learning what doesn’t work you’ll also learn what does. Poke around with the stock crafts to get some ideas and if you don’t understand anything, ask! Everyone had to go through the same learning process one way or another and there are no stupid questions- it is rocket science after all!

Not sure what FTS means but I think you mean range safety, which is used on (most) real rockets to prevent hundreds of tons of highly flammable and in some cases toxic materials from crashing down at high speed onto delicate launch pads, people, buildings etc. Unless you’re really interested in bring as ‘realistic’ as possible and/or are playing with no reverts, just revert to launch/VAB if it all goes horribly wrong or use a mod like KRASH to simulate your rockets before you fly them and find any glaring design flaws without the weather forecast becoming “cloudy with a chance of heavy rocket part rain later in the day”.

OK, now I'm really confused- after running perfectly fine for a couple of hours, I decided to reload the game to add in a minor update to a mod and it crashed my PC again. No EVA footprints installed, just EVO 0.2, nothing in the logs. I might just have to stick to 0.1b, or possibly try to cut out the most memory-intensive (and also the best looking ) parts to try and make it work. I really thought I had it figured out earlier, but it seems I was wrong..

Rover wheels can break if you leave the motors on and the brakes off when they’re not touching the ground- they spin up instantly to silly speeds and immediately break. Keep the motors switched off (I set the gear action group to toggle the motors on/off) and brakes on until you’re landed and they should be OK.

Three things to report today: R&D is now maxed out, meaning I completely scrapped and re-added every tech tree node several times while I tried to figure out my priorities; in the end I decided to push hard for ISRU tech in order to launch a demonstration mission to Mars and/or its moons. If I can make fuel there instead of hauling it all the way from Earth, it'll be much easier to do an eventual crewed mission out there, and it'll be much better to try it small-scale first than send out a big, expensive mining setup only to discover that it's completely unworkable. I tried a variety of different designs to take the White Galileo Mercury orbiter and turn it into a lander for the next mission. Serious payload optimisation (aka ditching much of the science and downgrading what was left to save weight) and extensive engine and fuel tank comparisons eventually ended up with something that looks like this: Although the initial costs are quite high, that's just because they're brand new and highly advanced balloon tanks and I'll re-use them in future. This is a three-stage setup since two-stage designs had less delta-V and were more expensive to tool too. 32km/s seems like a stupidly large amount, but getting to Mercury directly is really difficult (probably why most real missions did Venus slingshots, but that's even harder to plan for) and my calculations estimate that this should be just enough to attempt a landing. Blue Bishop Jupiter was renamed and repurposed to go to Saturn instead, since the window came up a lot sooner than the Jupiter window and the original Blue Bishop Saturn was still some way off being completed. The launch wasn't particularly interesting, but I did notice some nice details in the Waterfall plume for the F-1 (you can see the dark brown of unburnt kerosene if you look close enough) and the fluorine Agena has a red plume now instead of blue: In other Saturn-related news, a small course correction for the Orange Tureen 1 will send it past Enceladus for an incredibly brief flyby encounter. It'll probably last for mere minutes, if not seconds, so probably not enough to get an experiment finished and grab the flyby contract, but that would be the first flyby of a gas giant's moon and should generate some very nice pictures as it flies past. And just for fun, I made a Black Arrow replica, sticking as closely as possible to the real thing's dimensions, burn times and staging pattern as possible: Full album: https://imgur.com/a/a3WWFcE Coming up next time: Hopefully a bit less simulating of many variations of the same design and a bit more time passed to research those ISRU nodes. I might build a rover with some Breaking Ground deployable science gear stuck on it and send that out to the Moon ahead of the next (and possibly last) Moon landing, using a home-made RP-1 configuration for the BG stuff. I don't yet know if they'll actually work properly, but I guess I'll find out!

Did you get the latest fallout/halo/fifa/CoD/super mario/whatever for free because you bought the last one? KSP2 is a brand new game, made by a different developer, with a vastly greater scope than KSP- integrated multiplayer, interstellar travel, colony building and so on- and that stuff doesn’t just happen for free. There’s still a year to go until KSP2 is likely to be released (or maybe more) so there’s still plenty of time to start saving up for it; in the meantime, if you’re a PC player there are some KSP multiplayer mods out there that might work for you.

Did some testing around the above and found something interesting: EVO 0.1b, no issues, started up fine and used ~87% total RAM on the main menu (PC idles at 9-12% depending on its mood); EVO 0.2 only, no issues either, started up fine and used ~82% total RAM on the main menu; EVO 0.2 plus Kopernicus expansion EVA footprints from the EVO download, crashed my PC at 100% RAM use as soon as the main menu tried to load in EVE/scatterer effects- Earth was there but no glowing atmosphere and then everything ground to a halt; Took EVA footprints out again, crashed at main menu in the same way as before; Deleted EVO and added it back in, it stuttered for a moment on the main menu but then worked fine, used 70% RAM. I think the EVA footprints thing is at least partly to blame, but maybe the fact that I had to turn my PC off and back on meant that it didn’t boot up right and that could account for some of the odder behaviours I saw. I’ll continue with no EVA footprints as everything else seems to be working well now.

As I understand it, colony formation would go something like this: Land somewhere. Build a rudimentary base as you would in KSP and start supplying it with the necessary resources. Once the base reaches a certain size, it can start building its own stuff instead of shipping it out from Kerbin, but it still needs to be supplied with certain resources or component parts brought in from elsewhere. Build a specific building (some kind of colony HQ) and then you can start using the colony editor to build the colony out, base-builder style. As the colony grows and expands, both in size and population, new stuff becomes available like those fuel refineries and nuclear reactors in the recent show’n’tell videos until the colony can build and launch its own ships and becomes self sustaining, potentially then spawning a colony of its own somewhere else. I expect that not all colonies will do everything- some might be optimised for resource mining/harvesting, others for production of spacecraft parts or other useful things that are needed by other colonies, and still others are effectively space cities with nice views and good amenities, where Kerbals would want to live (not much fun living beside an ore mine, unless you happen to work there).

You’re going to need to narrow it down a bit, there are several different mods that add liquid hydrogen in some form and they use very different systems to prevent boil off: Cryo Tanks used active cooling, expending electric charge to prevent fuel boil off for both hydrogen and methane, and is a requirement for several of Nertea’s other mods e.g. Kerbal Atomics and Cryo Engines. If you’re going for a fairly stock-like set of mods, this is probably the one you want as it’s the simplest to use and even adds the same cooling abilities to stock fuel tanks and those from some other mods too, however that electric cost starts stacking up with larger tanks and when you’re far from the Sun you’ll need nuclear reactors to cool all those tanks, or you can switch the cooling off and watch your fuel slowly disappear... Realism Overhaul and the various mods that power it use a different, and realistic, approach- you can add insulation to your tanks which reduces (but never totally prevents) cryogenic fuels (hydrogen, methane, fluorine, oxygen and so on) from boiling off, but the downside is that these add mass and if you expose them to air heating during launch they will catch fire and explode. Every time. Radiators might help keep the fuel cool but in RO but they’re also heavy and much less effective than in stock. If you’re using something different e.g. KSPIE then that could well have its own way of dealing with this issue; I’m not familiar with that so can’t really comment on that.

32k, with RSS 16k textures in KSP 1.11.1. I’m going to investigate this further this evening (alas, work must come first ) in case I got something wrong in the installation or just need to turn some options down a bit. 0.1b was running quite happily in the low 80s % RAM use before I did the update to 0.2 and that was with other programs running in the background.

I upgraded from EVO 0.1b to 0.2 but it’s causing my entire PC to crash whenever I get to the main menu screen- at the point where the scatterer atmosphere effects normally load in, instead it uses up 100% RAM and then everything grinds to a halt requiring a hard reboot with the power button. I’ve tried rolling back every other mod change I made at the same time so I’m fairly confident that EVO 0.2 is to blame but there’s nothing in the logs to indicate why that might be so I can only guess it’s a memory outage issue- which is odd as I’m running 32GB RAM; I’ll try rolling back to 0.1b tomorrow to confirm that 0.2 is causing it.

Did you try KSP 1.11.2?

If it freezes at loading expansions, it’s NOT because of the expansions- pretty much every time that happens it’s because of an exception during compilation which happens right after the expansions are loaded; since expansion loading is the last thing that worked before the whole thing broke, that’s what you see on the screen. All I can see at the end of the logs is a massive list of “cannot compile part” warnings for just about every part, so clearly something is fundamentally broken with your game- probably an incompatible mod somewhere. I suggest you check your mod versions and even if they’re all compatible, delete anything you don’t absolutely have to have; adding too many mods can cause issues of its own.