jimmymcgoochie

Most planet packs have to remove all the stock planets before adding their own so you can probably find the required Kopernicus config in a planet pack somewhere. I doubt it’ll make much of a difference to performance though.

So whatever formatting the code block is adding overrules the default font colour- in this case the white text of dark mode(s). I’m no UI expert but that doesn’t seem too difficult to fix…

If Alt-F4 is working for you then there isn’t really a problem at all. Sometimes I have to end the process in Task Manager to get KSP to close.

Those are directional antenna cones produced by Real Antennas. Switch the CommNet visualisation mode to “first hop” or “path” and most of them will go away while still showing the most useful information for the active vessel.

After reading through the entire story from start to end when the last chapters got posted, it’s clear to me that your writing has come on in leaps and bounds since you started. Excellent work and I look forward to your next one!

I have a patch that adds the BV controller itself to RP-1 but not any of the upgrades, just making it work was good enough for me. I’ll post it here when I can, probably in a week or so. If you’re using BV with Kerbalism (which you are if you’re using RP-1) then RTGs don’t register any power generated in the BV control window; turn on infinite power before setting the autopilot to get around that issue when you don’t have solar panels.

You can turn off all Kerbalism messages with the pause key, but it turns everything off for every vessel so you might miss something important. Those ultra imaging satellites need a dedicated S- or X-band relay network to get the data down at anything near real time. Three or four relays that can all talk to each other with S/X band dishes pointed at each other (use the antenna targeting button) and have either dedicated dishes pointed at each satellite or a high power but lower gain/wider beam width dish aimed at Earth, with each satellite pointing a dish at each relay, is the way to go.

With the future lunar station core ready to go, it's about time I figure out how to get the rest of the station's modules out there. The propulsion and habitation modules together are about the same size and weight as the core module and so the same (huge) rocket can be used to get them there, with a generous margin: The lab module is a bit heavier than the hab module but significantly lighter than the propulsion module and can be sent on its own on a smaller rocket. Considerable science is being returned from Mercury as the Violet Hydrogen and Helium return data from the innermost planet. (Ignore the buildings under the ground, they're just glitchy sometimes) The transfer window to Mars is open, so cue the launch montage! A rare event- interplanetary transfer burn actually aiming right at the target planet. And now for the big one: With those probes on the way, a quick stopover at the Saturn-bound mission to perform a course correction. Note to self: accept the Enceladus flyby contract once the Saturn flyby contract is completed. And then it's onwards to the crewed lunar infrastructure launches, starting with a crew rover to take crew to and from the upcoming surface base. Lots of fuel left in the thrusters is good, however due to a bad capture burn putting it on a suborbital trajectory it ended up on the wrong side of the Moon and will have a loooong drive ahead of it to get over to the base. It seems Violet Hydrogen finally got enough data back to complete the Mercury landing contract and earns a BIG payday. Now for something a little different and a little, well, little. The second asteroid landing contract says nothing about it being a different asteroid, so this tiny probe is going after the same asteroid as the first one, sitting in a polar and very elliptical Earth orbit. The Moon base mission started as it was to continue with a staging error on the clamps resulting in it clipping the topmost clamp with the bottom of the rocket, almost tipping over. It recovered from this and continued on its way. It was going quite well until I remembered that the J-2 only has three ignitions and I'd already used two to get to a relatively high lunar orbit. The J-2S is throttleable to a fairly low minimum which helped control the rate of descent before the LMDE took over for the last few kilometres to the surface, but it wasn't an easy descent. Things got worse as the base touched down with some lateral velocity and began tipping over, forcing it to lift off, correct the resulting horizontal velocity while hovering over the surface and then set itself down again. No screenshots of this because I was too busy frantically trying to avoid losing the entire mission. Is it a base? Is it a D-2 capsule and mission module with some extra greebles and gubbins stuck to the sides? Is "both" an acceptable answer? Final scores: Next time: Completing that Gemini mission that failed last time due to the engine models being changed, then more lunar infrastructure launches.

You have to start somewhere. Well done on reaching Earth orbit What did you do between 3000km downrange in 1954 and orbit in 1960 to delay it that much? And is that a sounding rocket with SIX TINY TIMS!?

That exception suggests to me that Kerbal Health and/or Connected Living Space are to blame, try reinstalling the latest versions of both and see if that helps? If not, uninstall both; if it works then, try each one individually and then together to see what’s to blame.

Details please? Specs of your PC, any mods installed, screen resolution will all affect performance.

With a bit of tweaking I managed to squeeze the propulsion and habitation modules for my new lunar space station onto the same rocket, while the lab will follow separately on a much smaller rocket. Combined with the core module already waiting its turn for launch the new station will host anywhere from 2 to 8 crew at a time and has docking ports for two visiting crew ships, two landers and four further ports for fuel tankers or other vessels. In theory. In theory, this will become a hub for lunar exploration and research and a valuable testbed for a future crewed Mars mission. In theory…

7:00 - Looks like we’ve found the Impostor. The stuttering frames on launch could be due to looking down at the terrain, try aiming the camera up next time? It could also be due to an exception of some sort, try a launch with the debug console open and see if anything pops up, check the log files if it does.

Put your logs on a file sharing site (Dropbox, Google docs etc.) and post a link here. Have you installed mods in the Steam copy of KSP? If you have, don’t- Steam breaks modded KSP all the time. U install all your mods, verify the game files through Steam (right click KSP > properties > local files) and then copy KSP (steamapps/common/Kerbal Space Program) and paste it somewhere else e.g. on your desktop, then put your mods in this new copy instead.

Why did you use PVG to launch from the Moon and then repeatedly break it by messing with the inclination? It was swerving north, then backwards, then south, then north again and wasted a huge amount of fuel. The pilot on the CM in orbit got more stressed because a) he was alone and b) the other two were on the ground which adds a bit of a bonus, and also c) individuals vary quite a bit even on short term lunar missions so it’s possible that the pilot was above average and the others below average. You can combine targeted moon landing and landing with rover, but only if the rover targets are in/very near the targeted biome or if you send a big rover that’s more like a small base on wheels to keep them alive for a longer period. For the station, a D-2 with block 2 mission module would tick all the boxes and with a modified service module would hold all the resources needed for the 30 days as well as being a backup in case a visiting crew couldn’t get home on their own vessel.

Screenshot of the vessel? What is the Swivel engine attached to?

The HG-5 is a rather puny relay dish with a fairly short range. There’s some complicated calculation to calculate the maximum range when you have more than one antenna on a vessel and the distance two vessels can talk to one another, I suspect you’re just too far away to reach the relay with a low-power antenna on the lander. If you warp around for a few orbits so they get closer, does the relay work then? Use the Communotron 16 and not the 16S when you can, the 16S doesn’t stack with other transmitters so has a fixed maximum range whereas every other antenna can stack to increase the overall communication range.

How about a Blue Streak-Black Knight launched first satellite before Sputnik 1? The technology was mostly there at the time and in AH-land you can handwave away the bureaucracy and funding issues.

If you go into KSP/saves/New Horizons/backups, you’ll find some backup save files which are date+time stamped. Grab the newest persistent-(time stamp).sfs, rename it to persistent.sfs and move it to KSP/saves/New Horizons, overwriting the existing one, then load the save in the game.

Built a plane, took it for a test flight, got a bit ham-fisted on the controls, ripped the wings off. Whoops!

Right click KSP in Steam > Properties > Betas, you should get a list of all the versions of KSP, pick the one you want and it'll automatically download.

Only a couple of launches to go, but not this time: With a new engine installed everything went fine and Goliath Nova 2 completed its objective. Apparently the guy that paints the detailing on the probe was off sick that day... Some time later (and a lot of delays due to lack of funding) Goliath Nova 3 launched to a more sensible inclination to complete two contracts at once. It was only after this flight that I noticed I could have completed the final prerequisite for the Program at the same time, but too bad. This is still one of the better parts of P&LC. And to finish, Goliath Nova 4 completes the atmospheric analysis satellite contract. I'm ending this career here. The basic premise is good and I intend to start a 'normal' RP-1 save with the same limitations, but I don't think it's viable in Programs and Launch Complexes just yet.

Wow, it's been that long since I played this save? There's only one save file from this year! Coming back to an old save after a long hiatus can have some unexpected side effects, as you'll see later, but for now I'll start with the launch of the second Green Basalt lunar rover. It was only after I'd launched this that I remembered I was going to keep it for a while so I could test out the first one for a while, but that's what I get for not really playing this save this year. It's nice to be back in a save where I can just launch something to the Moon in a few easy clicks instead of spending the whole time penny-pinching as seems to be the norm in P&LC. This mission overlapped with the arrival of two much bigger ones, however by pure coincidence the timings didn't clash at all and I could focus on Mercury. First up, Violet Hydrogen arrived at the innermost planet and captured into orbit, eventually. A million funds, just like that. I've missed this... But this mission isn't just stopping in orbit! It turns out I'd underestimated the delta-V required to land on Mercury and even with the dregs of the capture stage chipping in I still only landed thanks to past me planning for this eventuality with a very powerful decoupler under the rover and some emergency RCS to allow it to land itself. Parallax really doesn't like Mercury, it looks ugly at a distance and got really glitchy up close; those black areas are texture glitches and they were flickering like crazy whenever I moved the camera even slightly. Science is a-gathering but without a signal to Earth it'll be a while before it can be sent home or the Bon Voyage autopilot activated to drive the 4200km or so to the waypoints for the Mercury rover contract. Yes, I landed on the wrong side of the planet; no, it wouldn't have been all that much better no matter how long I waited, the orbit I ended up with was nowhere near the waypoints. Barely a day later, Violet Helium arrived and did its capture burn with equal success. Both missions had some hydrogen boiloff but a combination of small bonus tanks of hydrogen and pumping from the lowest stage to top up the other tanks and then dumping lox to reach the right ratio meant they weren't impacted, and I'd budgeted extra fuel for that reason. After a brief panic when the capture burn left it suborbital and heading for the surface, the probe recovered and parked in a ~495km circular polar orbit and deployed its science and scanning equipment. The big SAR scanner wants a much higher altitude but space low science and the radar altimeter scanner are happy where they are. A quick jump over to the KSC to fly the SJ-2 supersonic plane for an easy contract, where the various mod updates that have come in since the last time I played this save nearly cost me a plane: the cockpit now has an ejector seat that's automatically set to the abort action group, but I use abort to toggle the airbrakes on my planes and nearly yeeted the poor pilot out of his plane while approaching the KSC; fortunately for me the ejector seat only works at subsonic speeds and it was going too fast to actually deploy, giving me time to change the action groups. This addition does mean I can get rid of the cockpit ejection system and the solid rockets that are currently making these contracts not complete because "It HaS rOcKeTs", so I've been alt+F12-ing them complete up until now. Back to the Green Basalt 2 which finally arrived at the Moon and landed on the far side via the usual "land on the engine and crush it" technique. The rover was stuck for a while until I remembered it had RCS thrusters underneath to make it "fly" and dislodged it from its perch. And now for the part where all those updates finally caught up to me. I'd rolled out a Yellow Gong F for a nice easy Gemini mission a few months ago and just launched it today without checking if anything was wrong, because why would anything have changed? Uh... That's not good... And once again ejector seats nearly killed my Kerbals- they didn't have their own parachutes!- but once again it was going too fast to trigger it. The engine models have obviously been changed in the last few months, something I now remember seeing when porting rockets over from this save to Get With The Program but which I forgot about coming back here. The engines still worked perfectly well despite being recessed a few metres into the tanks but the verniers didn't have nearly enough leverage to control the rocket's pitch, so it just kept pitching over and ended up pointing downwards and causing the launch abort. The crew are unharmed but lost their mission training. I could build another one and fix the engine issue, but with the first LEO D-2 almost ready and most of my astronauts training for that I'm not sure if it's worth it. I'll double check the contracts to see if they'll time out before the D-2 is ready to launch. Next time: Launching a lunar space station?

Are you using a stock Saturn V or an RO Saturn V? You can do a Mun landing and return in stock KSP for less delta-V than it takes just to get to low Earth orbit because Earth is ten times larger than Kerbin and orbital velocity is much higher as a result- 7800m/s or so. You need minimum 9000m/s (vacuum) delta-V to get to orbit in RSS, it’s totally different to stock and you should treat it as such. You should try MechJeb’s ascent guidance Primer Vector Guidance (PVG) mode to fly your rockets up to Earth orbit, it’s designed specifically for this task and is similar to the guidance systems used by real rockets.

@Flush Foot Science Jrs are very susceptible to heat and very likely to explode on re-entry, if you’re trying to get them down onto a planet with an atmosphere then you’ll need to protect them from both the direct heat of being exposed to the airflow during re-entry and from heat conducted through other parts. Sticking a structural part such as a fairing base or service bay directly above the heatshield usually does the job, though you may still want to put the samples in a science return box or two just in case. As for pressure and G-limits, they’re set generously high along with temperature limits and impact tolerance. The only place you can get close to the pressure limit is close to “sea level” on Jool.