jimmymcgoochie

There's a special config for Beyond Home to rescale it to JNSQ (2.7x) scale: https://github.com/Morphisor244/Beyond-Home-Rescale I don't have that particular copy of KSP any more but from what I remember you need Beyond Home, Kopernicus* and Sigma Dimensions, then put that config in the GameData folder and it should work- Rhode will be ~1575km in diameter if it does and the atmosphere should go up to ~85km. * You don't need the bleeding edge Kopernicus any more, there are versions of the normal Kopernicus for 1.10.x and 1.11.x which work fine.

Went chasing after another asteroid, this one had been captured into orbit of Earth (I suspect the Moon may have helped it) so would be ideal for longer term study. Strangely, when I sent the probe off on its intercept path and switched back to the booster to deorbit that the contract for an asteroid landing completed. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the moment I got within physics range of the asteroid the probe just exploded, scattering debris in all directions and with the F3 report saying the probe core had taken 1300G acceleration before failing. From this and the single frame of asteroid blinking into view, I have to conclude that the asteroid was actually larger than physics range and when it spawned in the probe ended up inside it. I should probably have expected something like this though: the asteroid was called NDX-666...

@seyMonsters is it just me or is the music in the last couple of videos strangely slow? I think this one and the last VBSS video are both affected. Interesting use of BG parts on that nuclear tug.

Five days after its launch, the Yellow Pastry rover arrives at the Moon. There's a small problem with the alignment of its orbit (it's nowhere near the target landing site) but that's where the Bon Voyage autopilot should kick in. Firing all five SRBs at once was a recipe for catastrophic spinning (probably due to misaligned thrust) but firing them sequentially in a 2-2-1 pattern mitigated that issue and the rover landed safely on the Moon's surface; safely, but nearly 1500km from its destination... With a top speed of a blistering 1.3m/s in autopilot mode it might take a while to get there, especially since it's about to enter the two week long lunar night, but I'm not in a hurry- all the astronauts' mission training just expired so I need to wait a few months for that to be ready again anyway. After the success of the Phobos mission, its twin arrived at Deimos and braked into orbit. Orbital velocity here is about 3m/s and "space high" is a mere 5km, so there's plenty of opportunities for science gathering. I'm holding off on the landing part of this mission as I might try landing the whole thing instead which should allow a lot of biome hopping and increased science gathering. Two contracts came up for flybys of Uranus and Neptune; a quick check showed that there was a window to Uranus in just three weeks, leading to the hurried construction of a new Blue Bishop probe and its swift departure. The transfer was neither efficient nor accurate, but it'll get to its destination in less than 20 years and should have enough fuel to capture into some kind of orbit; I don't expect any encounters with the Uranic moons though, since they orbit with the planet's rotation at an inclination of over 90 degrees. I tried to correct this probe's course twice, but on both occasions the game crashed so I've just left it alone and will come back to it in about 1980... I have a cluster of KAC alarms set for various transfer windows which is informing the build priority of the various missions. With no windows looming, there's time to build some crewed vessels, contract sats and another Blue Castle to chase after an asteroid; the Mk2 version is designed solely for use in Earth's SOI, ditching the more expensive parts of its predecessor (like the RTG and H2/F2 engine) to make it cheaper, but also carrying a thermometer and barometer to try and get some science out of whatever space rock it happens to "land" on. With all the waiting around for rockets to build, Yellow Pastry eventually arrived at the target co-ordinates: I trimmed the co-ordinates to a single decimal point to avoid having the rover and the base trying to occupy the same space at the same time (which usually causes many explosions), but forgot how much bigger RSS is even compared to JNSQ and the rover stopped just outside physics range of the base. Adding a further decimal point should move it to within a few hundred metres, close enough to be useful without posing a hazard to the crewed lander that will eventually show up. The next R&D upgrade costs 9 million funds but will unlock everything, so that's the current top priority. I've maxed out on 2-star contracts so can't accept any more (like flyby/orbit/land on Jupiter's moons, for example) but can still accept 1-star contracts like those weather and comms satellite contracts and 3-star contracts like a crewed Mars mission. (Not yet...) Full album: https://imgur.com/a/kUOk401 Coming up next time: More crewed stuff, hopefully, including a long duration stay on the Moon!

Learning new things about the game that despite many many (many ) hours of playing, you still didn’t know. Like the fact that the “funds penalties” difficulty setting also changes the cost of building upgrades at the KSC, or the +/- orbit buttons on nodes that make it much easier to plot future intercepts or evenly space your relay network. And then there’s the community content- I can flick through the forums and get an hour-long cinematic, a thousand part monstrosity to visit every planet and moon and a robotic flappy bird game in quick succession.

No problem. I actually prefer Spectra to AVP as I think it looks better and performs a bit better too.

I second this- RLA has a lot of small parts, from fuel tanks to mini NERVs to electric monopropellant thrusters with 4-figure ISP, so if you’re doing a lot of small probes and such then it’s a good addition; not sure if it’s configured for the alternate tech tree you’re using though. Restock+ also has some additional fuel tanks in the 0.625m size range and Luciole adds a good collection of great-looking parts in this area too.

Sounds like a terrain mismatch to me, I’ve seen a number of craft end up spawning in below the surface just because of the terrain detail settings being changed (don’t do that when you have important stuff landed!), because Bon Voyage used a different terrain map than is active in the game (many a rover has met an unceremonious end that way) or just because the game decided to be a bit spiteful and make a craft glitch partly underground so it either fell through the terrain to its demise, or collided with the terrain and exploded violently sending pieces of it flying off into solar escape trajectories.

There’s a mod to control the ambient light settings- it’s probably called “Ambient Lighting” or something similar and I’m pretty sure it’s one of LGG’s many mods, but I can’t remember the exact name right now. I use it all the time for night-time screenshots.

There are a few things that might help you: FMRS does more or less exactly what you want- you can fly the payload to orbit and then switch back to the booster and fly that back down to the surface using some time reversing trickery. If you want to land your boosters back on the launchpad/runway, this is your best bet. Stage Recovery does it all in the background instead- with sufficient parachutes, or a control point and sufficient fuel, it can simulate the landings and automatically recover the dropped stages for you. If you just want to recover dropped stages anywhere they fall, this is probably a better option than FMRS and is heavily configurable to choose how much value is returned and even add a chance that your stages will burn up on re-entry; it also recovers crew and science from vessels. KSTS lets you record any given launch, including returning boosters, then simply re-use that recording to put your payloads into orbit according to the payload mass and final orbit of the recording for the same cost in funds to build the rocket. It also allows ‘transport’ launches that can carry crew or transfer resources to and from existing vessels in orbit, or ‘construct’ missions where you can create an entirely new vessel in the editor then have KSTS build it in space using an existing space station as an orbital dock- very handy if you want to build a massive spaceship but can’t think of a way to launch it, plus you can build it with the fuel tanks empty then fuel it up later, either with further flights from Kerbin or with fuel mined from elsewhere.

You don’t need a dedicated reaction wheel on a probe that small- each probe core (except the Stayputnik, OKTO2 and RoveMate) has one built in that is more than sufficient to control a smallish probe. You’re probably running out of electricity which is why the probe is tumbling; probe cores have puny batteries and the smaller engines don’t tend to have any power generation capacity when they’re running so you could easily run out of power especially with a big, power hungry reaction wheel to use it up. If you have the probe inside a fairing you can ditch the nosecone and put two solar panels on the top of your probe, then point that at the Sun in orbit to recharge the batteries; you can also enable ‘hibernate in warp’ on the probe core to make it automatically go into hibernate mode and save a lot of power that way.

I haven't tried that tutorial myself (didn't even know there was one!) so this is all guesswork, but- have you tried restarting the tutorial from the beginning? If so, does it get stuck at the same point? Have you tried restarting KSP?

What version of KSP is this, and what mods do you have installed? This should help you track that information down: Best guess- something isn't installed properly or you don't have a dependency that you need to get the sunflare to work. Try another visual pack e.g. Spectra, which has its own sunflare, and see if that works- if it does then it's Astronomer's Visual Pack that's to blame, but if not then I'd suggest checking your mod versions, especially scatterer, are compatible with your version of KSP.

Today I discovered that the “funds penalties” setting directly controls how expensive building upgrades are- setting it to 1000% increased the cost by 10x. I suspect this might be news to a lot of people...

Where do you get those pods and space station gubbins from?

@Mister Spock You should see a "fuel priority" value with a number and +/- buttons. Fuel will drain from the highest numbered tank to the lowest so if your stage has three tanks, set the bottom tank to e.g. 11, the second to 10 and the top tank to 9 so they'll drain from bottom to top. You might have to enable "advanced tweakables" in the main menu settings to see this option (spoiler: you really want it turned on all the time, there are several very useful extra features that get enabled). From what I remember, the radially mounted engines e.g. Twitch and Spider are usually less efficient than the axially (stack) mounted engines e.g. Spark and Ant but have bigger gimbal angles. Screenshots would definitely help though.

Uh... I’m pretty sure KSP doesn’t go beyond 1000 years and even if it did, it would take real life years to fast forward 5 million years in KSP. Changing the time in the save file will probably also move the planets; at this point you’d be better off loading an earlier save and redoing part of it.

Sounds like a weight balance issue to me, you should try setting the fuel tanks to drain from bottom to top which will keep the CoM as far forward as possible. If you have the stack-mounted Ant or Spark engines unlocked, they would be a better option than using multiple radially mounted engines to reduce drag and mass. Have you tried using a 1.25m lower stage then a 0.625m second stage? It was a pretty common thing to do for real sounding and early orbital rockets and if you can squeeze inside the mass limits (and have some form of tapering part to bridge the size difference e.g. FL-A10 adapter or a fairing) that might make it easier to reach space than relying on the relatively inefficient smaller parts. You could also try using a small SRB as your first stage as they pack a lot of punch for their size.

Maybe they’re both oriented in exactly the same way, so you won’t see any difference?

If you’re looking for a mod to show you where you can go based on your delta-V in the editor (and based on that delta-V map), look at Where Can I go; very simple and easy to use, it just tells you where you can go, gives values for flyby, orbit and landing and for one way or return trips. It might not be perfect, but then no prediction system ever is and it does the job well enough, even with modded solar systems like OPM or JNSQ.

You might find what you're looking for in here: https://spacedock.info/mod/1929/RemoteTech Redev Antennas Adds half a dozen new communications parts to slot in between the stock options, including a 50G relay dish.

Grey Kebab 4 launched, suffered an engine ignition failure on one RL-10, but reignited it and made it to orbit with no issues: At last, Orange Canyon 1 arrives at Mars after about a year of flight time. Mars plus EVO looks niiiiiice... One contract down after capturing into orbit. Now for the tricky part- deploying the lander on the dark side of Mars, both in terms of sunlight and signal back to Earth. Point probe retrograde, drop to suborbital trajectory, point prograde, decouple lander, point prograde again, restore orbit; sounds simple, but it's a lot harder with no proper controls! The lander dropped into the atmosphere and picked up the atmospheric probe contract, before parachuting to the surface and landing safely (with a bit of rolling downhill at first), completing the lander contract too: Landing on Mars with just a parachute, you need a pretty big chute to catch what little atmosphere is available and slow to a survivable speed. Landing complete, science gathering, solar panels trying their best to keep the batteries charged during the day, all that's left is to transmit the science back via the orbiting probe above. This is problematic though, as due to the landing site there's a significant part of the Martian day where the orbit doesn't go over the lander, and a significant part of the Martian day where the orbit does go over the lander but Mars itself gets in the way of the signal. The batteries on this thing should be enough to last for weeks, especially with the solar panels topping them up a bit each day when there's no data transmission to drain it. It might take a while, but hopefully all the data will be sent back eventually. Next up, a one-off launch using a modified Grey Torus rocket to send an advanced biological sample capsule into space high over Earth, then bring it back down safely. The mission went without a hitch, except for some low battery related issues right at the end, but when the sample return pod splashed down I got this: Eh? Asteroid sample return? I have no idea how that happened, but it's a glitch in my favour so I'm not going to worry about it too much. While I was focussed on Mars, the R&D upgrade completed! This meant that I could immediately stick every possible node on the research queue, but I've still got nearly a thousand science left over and the next upgrade is 9 million funds... Well, I have over 7 million funds right now, so I could just save up a bit more and upgrade R&D again? Nah... It's time for the biggest KCT points spree I've ever done! Over 6 million funds' worth of points added to the freebies I got from the Mars mission (so far) makes 350 KCT points. 250 went into R&D but a hundred went into the VAB, primarily to boost the third queue. The final launch of today's update is the first Yellow Shortbread v4, using a single NK15 engine with small SRBs to help it off the launchpad and equipped with a docking port on the nose to dock with the waiting Yellow Eclair space station. Newbies Brian and Daniel got their first taste of orbital flight this time. They're still there now. I was looking for more contracts related to the station, but there don't seem to be any. It's not clear what exactly they're supposed to be doing up on that station but with plenty of supplies left over they should be fine to stay put for a while. Final scores: Full album: https://imgur.com/a/rDTmmyY Coming up next time: It's getting close to the super Moon landing combo mission with a targeted landing, a landing and rover exploration and a surface base stay all riding on this one launch. It'll also be the first use of the Yellow Cupcake, launching the Gemini and the lander in one go, and the first use of the upgraded 2-crew lander; though thinking about it now, I could probably do with sticking some solar panels on that lander so it doesn't use up all the fuel cell fuel during the 30 day stay on the Moon's surface and leave the crew stranded with no power. KSP 1.11.2 just got released, but after reading the patch notes I don't see anything that this save would benefit from and trying to update this heavily modded copy of KSP is something I don't plan to do again any time soon, least of all for a minor patch.

Scrape some names up by checking the Kerbals available to hire in the astronaut complex, those who appear in tourism contracts or just use the in game Kerbal generator and its name randomiser.

This will tell you how to get the logs and what to do with them. The game isn’t stuck at BG, it’s stuck after that point- verifying breaking ground is the last thing it did before something went wrong, usually during code compilation because an exception was thrown. The logs will show what’s responsible, but to make things easier you should also include your version of KSP and a list of mods. Check that all your mods are compatible with that version of KSP, as old mods often cause issues in new versions of KSP and vice versa.

Delta-V maps are average values. If you had a really low TWR then you’d have higher cosine losses on your burns by burning in a direction other than purely prograde, meaning you actually get less delta-V than expected and so have to use more fuel to reach the target orbit. You’re doing better than the delta-V map expects, I’d be more annoyed if it was the other way around and I ran out of fuel despite having enough according to the delta-V map.