jimmymcgoochie

If this “KSP2 real edition” is built out of KSP2 but by a different team, thus not taking anything away from KSP2 itself, I’d be happy enough with that; having to pay double for it, not so much. I still think that RO2/RP-2 etc. will be mods built by the KSP community, but with KSP2 being built from the start to support modding making it much easier than the clunky hodge-podge of mods that exists now.

If you really want to know what mods someone is using, ask that person. I’m sure they won’t mind sharing that information with you.

Try the Hyperspace mod, it can knock a decent chunk out of your load times especially with heavily modded games.

Finally started using different types of rocket engine correctly- high thrust, short burn duration engines are for boosters; moderate thrust, long burn duration engines are for the core stage. I did it backwards before and somewhat predictably, doing it the right way around resulted in more payload to orbit for a much lower cost than trying to use sustainer engines as boosters and vice versa. 150 tons doesn't seem like a lot of payload to orbit, but this is payload to Earth orbit and requires ~9km/s of delta-V, about as much as you need to land on Duna and return in the stock scale Kerbol system.

A bonanza of simulator runs in this update as I try to expand my catalogue of launch rockets to include something a bit, well, BIGGER! Even my biggest rocket so far can't manage 50 tons to LEO, but that's going to have to change. But first, an important lesson- make sure you put your launch clamps on the stage AFTER your engines, or this happens: Dropping 1500 tons of rocket on the launchpad understandably didn't do the launchpad any favours. This is a 1500 ton rocket using three F-1 engines on the first stage and two J-2s on the second. Total payload capacity is 65 tons, or 75 tons but that pushes it over the 1500t limit so would only be able to use an unlimited class launchpad. Tooling costs on this thing are pretty steep though- a brand new and very large 7.5m balloon tank will cost 300k funds on its own plus the interstage and fairings in that size and the avionics to handle the weight. The Red Orchid, my current largest launcher, will be quite a bit cheaper to launch but can only handle 45 tons of payload. This new rocket, named Red Cottage (Red because it's in the 1500 ton bracket and Cottage to start a new series which is different to the Red Flower series I already have), could become a workhorse launcher for larger payloads. All that tooling, plus buying up all the Apollo-related parts that just unlocked (and pretty much every other part I didn't already own) has eaten into the financial reserves quite substantially: But I have a plan to get more, and it involves a Moon base: Fine, it's a Mercury-era capsule stuck to an Apollo-era capsule, but it ticks all the boxes for being a 'base' and can conceivably land on the Moon if I can get it there. Not on this simulator run though- it's still going at 600m/s in that picture! Why a Moon base, you say? Well... 5.4 million funds, that's why! Next up, a load of simulations for a probe that can reach orbit of Vesta and Ceres; the delta-V requirements are pretty similar for both as Ceres is a bit further away but has a slightly higher orbital velocity so less braking is required to capture into orbit. Those delta-V requirements are still pretty huge though- a 6.3km/s capture burn at Vesta is well above what I can do with the solid motor and generic thruster combo I'm testing here, which is itself a distant descendant of the probes I sent to the Moon. New plan, and it involves liquid fluorine Ripping the LR87s off the Blue Chocolate rocket and swapping a single F-1 and some Algol 2 solid boosters in their place, then using one huge J-2 powered second stage and a H2/F2 Agena configuration for the final capture burn gives me a staggering 20km/s of vacuum delta-V on the launchpad, which should be enough to make orbit of either Ceres or Vesta and possibly to land on either of them too. The only issue is that the best transfers for both Ceres and Vesta are in nearly 2 years' time: Now back to my quest for a better launch rocket. The Red Cottage was good, but how about if I add Moar Boosters!TM? 125 tons to LEO, not bad at all. So, how about if I add even moar Moar Boosters!TM? Swap all the F-1 engines to M-1 hydrolox engines, with some semi-asparagus staged drop tanks using dinky little LR87-LH2 engines to offset their weight. This technically works, but the price is getting ridiculous. One long conversation on the RP-1 discord later and I've discovered that I'm going about this backwards- the M-1 is a sustainer engine best suited to the core stage, while the boosters should use F-1s for their greater thrust and better fuel density. Two test runs followed- one with 140 tons of payload, the other with just about every fuel tank tweaked as far as it could go within the existing toolings and with a payload of 155t: OK, 155t is pushing it a bit, but the new White Cumulus A (140t) and B (155t) will be my heavy lifter rockets from now on. All I have to do is tool the avionics needed to handle their mass- the B variant weighs over 2600t on the launch pad but I'm setting the avionics up to handle 3000t so they can be reused in the future if necessary. Full album: https://imgur.com/a/k6C6Qdw Coming up next time: A real launch, perhaps? I've launched one real rocket since Thursday and that was just a boring contract sat. The next major mission will be the third Moon landing with a slightly improved lander; either that or it always had that science core with some extra experiments on it and I just wasted it by not turning any of them on...

The game physics doesn’t run in a continuous manner, instead it gets chopped up into ‘ticks’. When the game runs slower e.g. due to a large number of parts, the ticks are slower and so a greater amount of time will pass in each tick- MechJeb applies a small correction in one tick, but by the next one the craft has rotated too far so it corrects heavily in the other direction, and so on in a constant loop of over correction from one extreme to the other. Changing the physics delta in the main menu will affect this as it affects how much time can be in each tick- a bigger number will tend to make the game run slightly better with large or high part count vessels, but will also increase the likelihood of getting this behaviour from MechJeb. Generally speaking the physics ticks will correspond to your game’s frame rate so if the game seems to be stuttering it’s probably because the physics engine is struggling to keep up. The time displayed in the top left will also change from green to yellow and then red if the frame rate (and by extension the physics processing speed) drops. Increasing physics warp makes this worse as you’re trying to cram 2-4 times as much game time into the same number of physics ticks. Although I can’t say any of that for certain, so take everything I just said with a pinch of salt. I’ve seen it on even moderate sized craft with tiny RCS (45N thrusters in RO/RP-1), so I think that the physics system is more likely to be to blame; overpowered controls will naturally make it worse as they can overcorrect more violently.

Can’t say that I’ve noticed any issues in 1.11.1, but I’m running the dev build of MechJeb in RSS so it’s probably different to the ‘normal” MJ in the stock system.

MechJeb can be twitchy sometimes, it seems to depend on how fast the game is running as it can end up overcorrecting itself from one extreme to the other. Try switching to fine control mode with caps lock, disabling RCS for a while to let the reactions wheels stabilise the vessel or pointing in a different direction entirely then returning to the desired heading.

Sounds like your save file has been slightly corrupted. If you’re feeling brave you can open (a copy of!) your save file in a text editor, find the affected station and fix the crew capacity values inside it; the safer and easier option is to build a second identical station in the VAB, cheat it into orbit beside the broken one, move the crew over to the new one, before cheating the old one back to the ground and recovering it. One thing I will say- don’t put mods into the copy of KSP controlled by Steam. If you want to use mods, copy the entire KSP directory from steamapps/common and put it somewhere else before adding mods, this will prevent Steam from updating the modded save and potentially breaking your save because a mod was incompatible. You can have as many copies of KSP as you like on your PC, with different versions and different sets of mods (or none) in each, but leave the Steam copy unmodded to get game updates when they’re released.

Fuels like liquid hydrogen are very cold and must be kept very cold or they’ll boil off and escape into space. There are a few ways to prevent this- insulate your tanks with MLI (I’m not sure which mod adds that, might be RealFuels but might be something else in RO), add active radiators to cool the tanks, or use fuels that don’t need to be kept cold such as hypergolics; the downside to hypergolics is that their ISP is lower and they’re generally heavier than Kerouac, never mind hydrolox. One thing to remember is that liquid oxygen is also cryogenic and will also boil off, though not to the same extent as hydrogen.

Looks like you have either a bad localisation file or it’s missing entirely. Try re-downloading the DLC or (on steam) verifying the game files.

You should consider replacing that cluster of RL-10s with a single J-2, it’s much more powerful, lighter and would be considerably cheaper too.

I spent most of my KSP time today and yesterday doing design work- so far I've made a brand new launch rocket with a pretty respectable 75 tons to LEO and a payload fraction of 5% (better than the Saturn V and the Ariane 5); an interplanetary orbiter probe with 20km/s of delta-V including the launch rocket, enough to get into orbit of Ceres or Vesta and probably to land there too; and the beginnings of a Moon base which would still need to be launched into orbit, docked to a propulsion module that was launched separately and then flown to orbit of the Moon using said propulsion module before landing under its own power. Gratuitous screenshots of test flights: That rocket is about 50 metres high, just to put that massive plume of fire underneath it into perspective. I'm a sucker for a pretty sunrise/sunset, especially during a launch.

With all the interstellar tech in KSP2, there's no point in throwing a primitive probe at another star system using a gravity assist trajectory when you could wait a couple of decades, build a probe with some extremely high delta-V propulsion and then send that in a fraction of the time.

Grey Tet X has arrived at the Moon, capturing into a 7500km circular polar orbit to do SAR scans and gather science: The next notable launch is the Yellow Bagel space station. While the station itself isn't much to look at and won't actually do anything, it'll bring in substantial revenue from the contract to launch it and further contracts to send a crew to it for a while. The station launched empty, but the next launch- a Yellow Shortbread- will rectify that after it completes its own orbital flight contract: It's the first flight for Elvira and Elvira, and yes, I did put them together just because they had the same name... They do an EVA together before heading to the station for a 30 day stay, smashing the crewed duration record in the process. Apologies for the horribly shiny ocean in these next images, I think the scatterer settings need fixed. A profitable mission indeed, making 2 million funds in total and giving both Elviras a taste of orbital flight- they're both eager to stay for more and will be sticking around for about another 3 years. Continued science transmissions from the Moon and Jupiter meant there were loads of free KCT points to spend, plus 2 million funds to buy more; as usual, they went into R&D to keep that backlog of research moving. Full album: https://imgur.com/a/5Qus6wE Coming up next time: A lot of simulator runs as I build a new launch rocket powered by the mighty F-1, upgrade the Yellow Scone lander to a two-seater configuration and start working on a possible Moon base; if two pods stapled together can really be considered a "base" that is...

So you: Fill your fuel tanks with the right type of fuel; Stage the engine; Set full throttle; Wait for the engine to reach full power (this takes 2-3 seconds typically); Release the launch clamps. And the rocket doesn’t go up? Check that you haven’t clipped your engine too far inside the fuel tank or other parts into the engine as they can block its thrust. Screenshots, or even better a video, would help here.

Personally, I don’t care about the interiors- they could be done to look pretty just for the portrait pictures in the corner of the screen and completely blank everywhere else as far as I’m concerned, because I almost never use internal views and the memory saved by not having them there could be used elsewhere, e.g. to make the outside of those ships/bases/stations look better as I see those all the time. IVA would be a bit of a waste of time IMO, it doesn’t contribute anything to building and flying rockets and the effort of developing it could be better used elsewhere.

I can see both sides of the argument. On one hand, a dedicated “realistic” game could be made to optimise the game engines etc. for the larger scale and complexity of RP-2(?) without necessarily being limited by decisions made by the KSP developers, as RP-1/RO/RSS is by KSP, but that would require a tremendous amount of work that someone somewhere would have to do and most likely get paid for (plus the potential complication of trying to use someone else’s code, requiring some type of licensing agreement which would add to the cost); on the other hand just making it as either a mod pack or a single monolithic mod, possibly recycling some assets from RP-1/RO if practical, and running that in KSP2 would be the easier solution, though it would again have to play by the rules of the base game to a large extent and which would limit some of the features that could be added. I for one would be content enough with just having KSP2 released as a finished, polished product with all the promised features, good performance even with high part counts and graphics settings and minimal bugs; RP-1 et al will still be there for KSP and I expect that RO2/RP-2 will be made as mods for KSP2 rather than making a completely standalone game for it.

The biggest rocket I ever launched was about 7 kilotons on the launchpad with a payload of 1kt to low orbit of JNSQ’s Kerbin. Big parts are essential- I used Near Future Launch Vehicles for its 5m and 7.5m fuel tanks along with 43 engines in total on the first stage core and boosters; it lagged the game extensively due to the sheer size of the thing and the number of parts involved, but it worked. Put fuel tanks on top of your solid boosters and enable crossfeed on their decouplers, this gives you more fuel for the core stage without adding dead weight as the empty tanks get dropped with the boosters. This works best with bigger boosters, but make sure the fuel in the tanks gets drained before the boosters run out of solid fuel or you’ll either throw away usable fuel and delta-V by decoupling them, or end up dragging the dead weight of the boosters along with you until the fuel runs out in the tanks and lose delta-V that way.

StageRecovery maybe? Or post the logs when it’s freezing, something else might be breaking.

Check the log files, they provide much more information: I can’t think of anything that might be causing this issue, but the logs would help.

Probes are useless, all they do is go to far-flung places for a fraction of the cost and weight of sending a Kerbal, transmitting valuable science data to unlock better parts and without having to worry about bringing them back like you (should!) do with a Kerbal. What a waste of time... Humans haven’t gone beyond the Moon themselves, but probes have landed on Venus, Mars and Titan and visited every major planet in the solar system, a variety of moons, asteroids and comets and even returned material from some of those. A real probe has to balance the power and mass requirements of its various experiments and make them capable of surviving for long periods in the harsh environments of space or whatever celestial object they end up on, so the data it can generate is limited, but humans (or Kerbals) can bring much more sophisticated equipment and so generate more and better data from the same environment or sample. There’s a reason sample return missions are such a big deal- a cutting edge research lab on Earth has no restrictions on the weight or power consumption of its equipment and so can do vastly more detailed and intensive studies on samples of, say, Mars or a comet than any spacecraft ever could. If you really want every experiment to generate and transmit all the possible science, try the science- full reward/full transmit mods; alternatively if you want something a bit more realistic, Kerbalism’s science-only config will make experiments take time to complete but they also run automatically in the background. For a probe autopilot, MechJeb is the answer, or kOS if you feel like coding your own scripts (or using someone else’s) and then there’s RemoteTech to make flying probes ‘realistic’ with signal delay and so on.

You can’t add parts with symmetry in EVA construction mode, only one at a time, so the motors are saying they’ll be changed independently which is what you’d expect them to do.

There will be an autopilot in KSP2. Not necessarily a stock one, but I expect something like MechJeb to be one of the first mods for KSP2 and anyone who likes to do things the old-fashioned way can keep doing so. I don’t see the appeal of flying everything by hand every time- an autopilot can do it faster, more precisely and more efficiently and if it’s something that I’ve already done many times before I don’t consider repeating the task to be fun in any way so why wouldn’t I let the computer do it?

Shiny metal textures usually turn out black in flight in my experience, could be something to do with reflections being turned off in flight as having them switched on kills the frame rates. Paint them proper colours instead and that should work. On an unrelated note- if you’re using TestLite, use the RD-107 and RD-108 instead of US rockets for your launchers, by the time you get to the mid sixties tech nodes they have failure rates of 0.07% with no data units in them, plus they have better performance than the US engines in most other aspects- more thrust, higher ISP and built-in verniers for 3-axis control. I went down the US path for a long time with the LR79, LR89 AND LR105 on most of my early orbital launch rockets before I realised how much better the Soviet engines are in the early stages of RP-1 and unless you’re going for a purely historical re-enactment type game, I suggest you stick with the Soviet stuff instead.