jimmymcgoochie

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.

Well, when a mummy goo and a daddy goo love each other very much- ...oh, you said what it’s made of? I thought the part description said it was found growing at the bottom of a bin outside R&D or something similar. It’s probably just a lump of toxic waste that got irradiated and turned sentient, nothing to worry about, we put it in those really sturdy canisters to protect the Goo from space, not protect space from the Goo...

Not at all.

I spent an inordinate amount of time poking, tweaking and/or otherwise messing around with my first Mercury orbiter design to eke even more delta-V out of it. At one point I realised that I could drop an entire stage from the design and barely lose any delta-V, but in the end I left it on to squeeze maximum range out of it. I tried swapping engines, swapping fuel tanks and even discovered that despite the upper stage being a staggeringly efficient engine with an ISP of nearly 500s, removing some fuel out of that actually increased total delta-V as the small loss on that stage was compensated for by the improvements in the lower stages. The best I could get from this design was a smidgen over 32km/s of delta-V. Around 9 of those are needed just to get into low Earth orbit, followed by anywhere from 16 to 20 for a direct transfer into low orbit of Mercury, and at least 4 more to land. Yes, land- the previous design has a mere 29km/a of delta-V so I don’t expect it to orbit and then land, but this one has a pared back science payload and just about everything else has been stripped back for maximum range so it might just- just- make it to the surface in one piece; or if I did my calculations wrong, several pieces and a nice new crater.

I was scrolling through the list of active vessels and spotted a pair of Grey Hotdog satellites in low Earth orbit. For those of you who don't remember (including me!) those are third generation planetary photography satellites, so are completely redundant now that the Grey Kebabs are up and running, but they've finished their films so it's time to bring them back down. Oops... Note to self- deorbit the whole satellite next time to try and absorb some of the heat, otherwise the pod will get cooked long before it reaches the surface. Now that's more like it! And now for something completely different: Apollo block 3 pod, custom service module, lightly modified Orange Cliff booster rocket. It's relatively cheap to make, can carry 5 crew and keep them alive in space for nearly 10 days (maybe more with a bit of supply tweaking) and will serve well as a LEO space bus to a future space station or just to transport crews up to a waiting ship in orbit to head further afield; like, say... MARS. Ascent test complete, re-entry test was next; no issues there. But what about the abort system? As you might expect, it works exactly as intended. However, there's a problem- that LES tower is big, heavy and expensive, adding 4000 funds to the cost per mission and knocking nearly 1km/s off the total delta-V. Surely a much smaller, lighter and simpler system would work using the generic separation motors attached to that front cover? As it turns out, yes, yes it will. This is after the new abort system has successfully pulled the pod away from its booster. At this point, said booster is crashing into the ground and causing no end of problems- the game freezes for ~5 seconds between each frame as individual parts explode on the ground and there's obviously some aggressive calculating going on- but with the concept proven three of these new Yellow Croissants are added to the build queue. There are some new crew experiments exclusive to Apollo-era capsules that they'll be doing, with the exception of the space TV broadcast that requires space high. And that's all for now. I'm filling the time between interplanetary windows with some design work, which should at some point culminate in a long-range crewed vessel for travelling out to Mars. I'm aiming for boots on the ground by the end of the decade, and boots on its moons while I'm there; though trying to stand on a body with a few mm/s gravity could prove difficult... Full album: https://imgur.com/a/DJSEZs1 Coming up next time: No idea, I haven't done it yet

Lander can? As in the grey octagonal Mk1 lander can, or the white circular/cuboidal Mk2 lander can? No wonder it exploded- those things are not meant for re-entry and have really poor heat tolerance; the thermal conduction from the heat shield (attached directly to the underside of the lander can perhaps?) would be enough to overheat the lander can, assuming the heat shield was large enough to completely shield the can from airflow. You’d be surprised how much of a difference even a relatively small increase in speed makes to re-entry heating, so slowing down as much as possible is recommended. A steeper descent will mean you reach the thick part of the atmosphere sooner and slow down more rapidly, meaning a sharper thermal peak but less overall heating because you slow down quickly, whereas skimming through the upper atmosphere means you get most of the heating but over a much longer time period as you don’t slow down as quickly, which is where parts with low core heat tolerances (like lander cans) tend to go boom.

Looking at those numbers, I’d guess that your target is probably a Making History KV-1 pod meaning you can throw it into the atmosphere without worrying too much about it overheating. You would need to add parachutes to it though, so it’s probably best to send out a mission with at least one engineer aboard to land next to the stranded pod, weld it on top of their own vessel and then fly back with it to Kerbin or possibly add some type of skycrane assembly (with parachute!) on the KV pod’s top node and use that to fly back. You can recover parts from the surface of a body like Minmus with a rocket or rover based system and grabbing it with a klaw, but it’s much harder to do. Building a Mk3 based cargo ship or shuttle would be one way of doing that which would avoid the perils of imbalanced thrust and weight that you’d get just by grappling the pod with a rocket and flying away with it, but that’s still pretty expensive compared to using a much smaller lander and doing some EVA construction.

Try using KSP 1.11.2, I think that included a fix for the RCS related bugs that came with 1.11,

If you want to go from orbit of Duna to orbit of Ike, try the Poodle- high ISP even landed on Duna, decent thrust for a moderately sized vessel and it isn’t too big or heavy either. You can even land on Duna’s surface and fly back again with a Poodle engine, depending on the mass and fuel of the vessel it’s attached to. Other similar engines are the Terrier at 1.25m or the Cheetah (from Making History) at 1.875m, but you won’t need anything bigger than that just to shuffle crew between Duna and Ike and I’d recommend going for the smaller, lighter engine to i prove your delta-V even if that makes it have a lower TWR, which is less important in this use case. Ion thrusters are only good if you’re flying a small probe over very long distances; they can’t be refuelled by ISRU in stock and their thrust is weak (though still ten thousand times higher than in reality!) so are poorly suited to crewed vessels. While the NERV does offer good ISP it’s also heavy, expensive and the fuel tank options are limited- either you use normal tanks and waste the majority of their capacity by emptying the oxidiser, or have to use the few fuel-only tanks available which can cause their own problems. Regarding your ISRU setup- I’m firmly in the “refine where you mine” camp as ore is incredibly heavy and not that easy to bulk transport, especially trying to fly it into orbit. Put your IRSUs on the same craft as your drills and make the fuel/oxidiser on site, then carry those in a dedicated tanker craft to the waiting orbital crafts/stations instead of hauling that heavy ore into space and wasting a good chunk of the fuel you make in orbit just filling up the ore hauler for its next trip.

And..? What is it about pre-release versions of KSP that so fascinates you? Newer versions look better, run better and have many more features.

One graphics mod (I can’t remember which) gives Laythe luminescent clouds at night, which I thought was an interesting touch. Other than that, though, Laythe itself wouldn’t be particularly pretty to look at- dim sunlight would wash out most colours and with bland, mostly volcanic sands and rocks and an ocean that’s most likely close to saturated with salts would see to that, From a biological perspective, life on Laythe (if it could exist at all) would most likely be primitive chemosynthetic microbes living on hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the oceans and not much more. Acombination of volcanic activity caused by gravitational forces, lack of sunlight to fuel photosynthesis, high salt concentrations- especially of heavy metals which are toxic to life- and the radiation threat of orbiting that close to a large gas giant would challenge even the hardiest organisms. That atmosphere may have oxygen in it, but with so many volcanoes (some of those crater-like islands are likely to be volcanic in origin) odds are it’s also full of sulphur and carbon dioxides, which would explain how it holds a liquid ocean so far from the sun but would also make the air a noxious soup. Far from being a second Kerbin, Laythe could easily be its evil twin.

If you’re on steam then you’re probably on v1.11.2; you can see the version in the KSP main menu or by hitting escape then “show version information” on the pause menu. You can change the version by right clicking KSP in your steam library > Properties > Betas tab in the pop up window > select the version you want and it should download automatically. Going forwards a version with a save is totally fine but going backwards will not work. I still recommend checking for a backup save first rather than changing version which can easily cause you more problems.

I think that’s due to a typo in Titan’s EVO scatterer config, referencing RSSVE instead of EVO. Found that myself a while ago and fixed it, with the correction it looks great.

Stage Recovery and FMRS would both fit the bill- FMRS allows you to fly the payload up to orbit then rewind time and land the booster manually, whereas Stage Recovery does it all in the background either using parachutes (just stick the chutes on, no need to even arm them in staging) or a simulated powered landing (fuel and control required). I’ve used SR quite a lot and it’s very configurable plus it has a helpful UI in the editor for judging how many parachutes you need. There’s also KSTS which lets you record a flight taking a given mass of payload to a given altitude, then reuse it to take any payload you make in the editor into space up to that mass and altitude, for the same price and flight time as the recorded flight; it ties in with both FMRS and SR to offset the costs of recovered parts from the total. It also has a ‘transport’ mode which lets you carry resources or crew up to space or back down again, and with a suitably staffed space station can even do in-orbit construction over time by flying repeated launches to carry the equivalent mass then waiting a while for the engineers on the station to “build” it- very handy for large or awkwardly shaped payloads that wouldn’t work on a conventional launcher or for building monstrous ships in orbit that would never get into space otherwise.

A big set of mod upgrades has happened, with new releases of several key mods including RO and RP-1 as well as ROE-Waterfall, so now engines are bright in the middle when burning, which looks even better: I thought about it for a while, but eventually I decided to land the little lander on the surface of Deimos: Science data will take a while to send back at just 17B/s, but with the contract complete I have a chance to get a sample return contract to go with the one for Phobos. I took a run at designing a lunar space station, which ended up being a Big Gemini stack plus service module with some solar panels and docking ports stuck on it. Testing using a White Stratus stack went well enough to show that it can get into the required orbit of the Moon, and also showed off some really nice new plumes for the F-1 and M-1 engines: Another design got put through its paces- this time, a Mars rover! The first attempt crashed due to failed parachutes, the second attempt failed due to firing the engines far too late, but the third attempt worked nicely with the chutes slowing it down just enough for the skycrane-style landing thrusters to do the rest: Bon Voyage still doesn't recognise RO's RTGs, so I would have to turn the motors down to 10% total power to make this thing work using BV, but that means the RTG can power the science instead. With that out of the way, I tried to bring Elvira and Elvira back from the Moon. Annoyingly, they couldn't take the surface samples out of the base's command pod so had to go and get new ones before leaving, but when they did things went really weird... Almost from the moment of liftoff the craft became increasingly unstable; every part was vibrating strangely, I couldn't save the game and when I tried to cheat it into orbit beside the waiting Gemini then switched craft, I ended up controlling the base on the surface instead of the Gemini craft right next to it. The situation was unsalvageable and it was late at night anyway, so I decided to fix it the next day. Look at those fuel tanks with their badly warped textures- do they look OK to you? After reloading the game the next day and reloading a slightly older save file, suddenly the issues were all gone- saving was possible again, the samples could be retrieved from the base and there wasn't a wobbly part in sight. Returning to orbit was easy, but docking was a tense affair as the fuel tanks were all but empty and I was down to 4m/s of propellant. With a lot of very gentle control inputs and fine controls mode firmly switched on, Elvira and Elvira eventually got docked to their waiting Gemini pod and could move over with their precious samples to head for home. Small problem- the orbit they're in is completely out of plane with the Moon's orbit around the Earth making returning difficult, but they do have almost 3km/s of delta-V left so a plane change burn is a viable option, right? I forgot something critical- those J-2 engines only have 3 ignitions each, and at this point they only have one left; I only remembered this after turning them both on... Cue a frantic turn to prograde to try and scrape up a return trajectory (fortunately enough the plane change was happening in a place which allowed a return to happen) and after finishing the burn with the Gemini's own thrusters, it was a relatively short 3 day trip back to Earth. And cue the contracts! I had to force complete the base contract as it simply refused to recognise the Yellow Doughnut as a base even though it ticked all the boxes; there were also those two Moon landing contracts that completed when the last LEO flight returned, so this mission was worth about 10 million funds overall! Over 2000 days each for Elvira and Elvira is a new record; both level up to level 2 and another ~400 science is added to the total, waiting for that final R&D upgrade to complete. Speaking of upgrades- with so much money lying around there's plenty to spare on a huge pile of KCT upgrade points. Most went into R&D, however a significant number went into the VAB to level up the third build queue; it's now almost as fast as the first two. One last contract sat launch later and the final scores are in: The fleet of Blue Chess-class probes continue to be built, ready for their respective transfer windows; most are simple first flyby/orbit probes but the Venus mission carries all three SCANsat scanners- biome, radar and SAR- and has contracts waiting for it when it gets there. Full album: https://imgur.com/a/IHU5xrD Coming up next time: A Mars sample return mission sounds like a good idea, maybe I'll design the necessary craft for that since the interplanetary windows are still some time away.

My adventures with a Moon base didn’t end the way I’d hoped- first I couldn’t retrieve the surface samples from the base to take them home so I had to head out and get more, then the lander’s ascent module got Kraken-ed and every part started vibrating noticeably, making controlling it very difficult; saving didn’t work, setting its position in the cheats stopped the shaking but only for a few seconds and after cheating it beside the return pod waiting in orbit, vessel switching somehow switched to the base on the surface instead and I couldn’t switch back in map view or go to the space centre/tracking station either. I’ll have to retry that one, there are several very expensive contracts riding on the crew’s safe return as well as a lot of tasty science. @Mister Spock eitheryou need to zoom out further to see them, or you’re missing a dependency for OPM; the only reason they’d be working bu hidden in the map is if you were using ResearchBodies. Double check that you have the correct version of Kopernicus for your version of KSP, plus OPM and its dependent mods which should be listed on the OPM page or included with the download, or installed automatically if you use CKAN.

What you’re describing violates the speed of light. Photons have a fixed maximum speed, be it via a laser or a radio signal, and at interstellar distances the distances are measured not in multiples of metres, but by the distance that light travels in a given period of time e.g. light years; light goes at ~300,00km/s so those distances are pretty staggeringly large- a light year is about 9x1015 metres, or 9 million billion metres! Nothing can go faster than that (bar the so far hypothetical FTL tachyon which might not even exist) and pretty much everything else goes slower. Signal delay is bad enough just communicating to and from the Moon (just over a light second each way) so remotely driving a little rover on the Moon from the Earth would have a noticeable and very distracting input delay; Mars is light minutes away (hence the need to program rovers and probes to do what they’re doing in advance then sit and wait to find out if it worked), Jupiter closer to a light hour and the nearest star over four light years away, so even with the 1/10th scale of the Kerbals’ universe those distances are still too long for direct control even at interplanetary distances.

The only issue with having one giant part is that if you crash into it, half your station blinks out of existence in one go, not to mention the strangeness of trying to combine parts with different stress tolerances (heat, impact etc.) which could make for some very odd results. Ruthless design optimisation to cut out every unnecessary part would be the more practical option, and/or using something like KSTS to create the vessel in the VAB editor then build it in orbit as a single vessel, without the need to actually fly each launch and dock it all together.

Sounds like a corrupted save to me. Inside saves/(your save name)/backups there should be some backup copies of the persistent.sfs file which you can copy out of that folder, paste in the one above and rename to persistent.sfs to load your save that way; you might lose a little bit of progress, but that’s better than starting completely from scratch, Did you do a game update recently? Save incompatible is usually due to opening a save file that was made in a newer version of KSP than what you’re using so e.g. if you updated to 1.11.2 you can open a save file made in 1.11.1, but if you go back to 1.11.1 you can’t then open that same save file as it’s been updated to 1.11.2 as well; you can just edit the version inside the save file but this is risky, especially going back to a previous major version (e.g. 1.10) as parts/systems will be different or missing and the save can easily get broken that way.

I use better time warp in 1.11.1 with no issues. Did you install all the dependencies for it? Check the mod’s forum/download pages to see if you’ve missed something, or try using CKAN to do the hard work for you,

Thanks for the feedback @KSK, it’s good to know that I’m not merrily hurtling along the completely wrong path.

Hello fellow writers. I'm looking for an outside opinion about a couple of things in my story which I'm hoping will help me with the next few chapters. Link: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/193699-audacity-memoirs-of-a-kerbonaut/ First of all- did I go too dark with Val's backstory in Chapter 9? I was originally going to go with something comparatively tame-running away from home to join the Space Program or something like that- but then that idea came to me one day and it has subsequently led to quite a complex subplot that I'm right in the middle of now, but which could be a bit too far for what is in the end a story about some little green aliens making rockets. And second- am I overdoing it with the references to CatastrophicFailure's Krakens trilogy? Reading that was a big part of the reason I started writing my own KSP story, but I don't want to lean too heavily on it; I've also written a short section that copies a poem/song from the second Krakens tale, more or less word for word, which I think would work well in my own story- but not if it's crossing the line between making a reference and blatantly plaigarising/ripping it off. Thanks in advance!

Designed a space station and tested sending it over to the Moon, which went fine until a combination of MechJeb's ham-fisted overuse of RCS propellant and forgetting to turn the engine gimbals back on put it on a collision course instead of capturing into orbit. Good thing it was just a test run, not the real thing!