jimmymcgoochie

In a bid to scrape up every last bit of science available, Green Capercaillie (just a Green Condor with a pair of tiny science probes on top) was launched. The probes have no attitude control, but are powered by RTGs so it doesn't matter. One probe was dropped in a low orbit while the other was hurled as high as possible to stay in space high above Earth for as much of each orbit as possible; not easy when space high is nearly geostationary altitude! Next to launch is Orange Mug 3, the third Moon rover so far: Between the TLI burn and arriving at the Moon there was time for a quick contract sat launch, which revealed something rather interesting despite what I thought earlier, the KSC hasn't actually moved (or if it has it's by a couple of miles at most), but instead most of Cape Canaveral's terrain has vanished as you can see here: That launch completed 2 contracts again, with two more accepted in their place. Back to Orange Mug 3, where I learnt 2 things- first, the Orange Mug rovers can act as signal relays: And second: An apparently minor tweak to the design made it catastrophically unstable when the SRBs fired and there was no way to recover it. RIP Orange Mug 3... And now for the main event! Yellow Crumpet 1 heads to the Moon to orbit, dock to the Orange Ramekin target and do some contracts. There were two ignition failures on the RL-10s for this flight, but neither were critical in any way- there are three engines, two can keep it pointing the right way if the third isn't working and they have 10 ignitions each. A carefully tweaked orbit meant that rendezvous could occur in a single orbit after capturing, so Tim decided to head out for an EVA in space high over the Moon: A delicate bit of docking later... And it was time for Terri to do an EVA of her own: Shortly after this image was taken I realised that the vessel was drifting away and spinning slowly, because the Yellow Crumpet had run out of RCS propellant. With that in mind, I called time on the mission and brought it back as soon as possible instead of waiting the 20 hours for the Lunar orbit contract to complete. Re-entry was a bit dicey as the Gemini's avionics can only handle 3.5 tons but in this configuration it weighs almost 5 tons at re-entry; fortunately I had the pod roughly aligned before jettisoning the equipment section (which has its own avionics) and descent mode kept it pointing the right way. There was a big payout waiting for them when they got back: Tim and Terri both levelled up to level 2 after this flight and both decided to stay for several more years: Then I held the wrong key when buying KCT points and instead of buying just 5, I ended up buying about 90 in one click and spending virtually all the available funds in one go. A couple of contract sats made up for it though, so in the end it wasn't too disastrous: Full album: https://imgur.com/a/CrOWFDZ Coming up next time: Two words- MOON LANDING!!!

Always create a copy of KSP before adding mods- you can keep the unmodded copy to get updates and spin off more copies for different mod sets, while each modded copy stays put and doesn’t update so compatibility never breaks due to a new KSP version. The solution here is option c) copy the modded KSP, mods and all, then delete the mods from the original and then you’ll have a copy with mods and a copy without.

You realise that the current version of KSP is 1.11.1, right? I don’t really see your point, Kerbals in the game still look like the Kerbal in the thumbnail/icon (possibly a bit higher resolution, though) so I see no real need to change it.

Nyan cat is a distraction in this case, it’s because today is Cat Day somewhere apparently. You probably just need to clear input locks, this can be done either by pressing escape > show version info (or alt+F12) > console > input locks > clear input locks) or by pressing the button that a mod (which mod, I can’t remember unfortunately, but it’s probably one @linuxgurugamer manages since he seems to own about half the KSP mods in existence ) adds to the toolbar. The terrain rising and engulfing buildings is a minor nuisance but as long as you can still use the buttons on the left to access the various buildings then you should be fine.

It’s usually best to run the newest minor version of the second-newest major release- currently that means KSP 1.10.1 since the newest release is 1.11.1, 1.10.1 has a lot more compatible mods and should be stable enough to use without any major issues. Given time, mods will be updated to work in 1.11.x and they’ll probably be done by the time 1.12 gets released in a few months’ time.

I made a couple of tweaks to my Moon rover design and- it crashed spectacularly. For some reason the rover itself has a centre of mass that’s subtly offset, so when I add the deceleration SRBs on the bottom their thrust is out of alignment and the whole thing pitched beyond the power of the RCS to control it- even with extra RCS thrusters on the SRBs to try and counter this same problem. A small redesign has solved this issue for this craft (the CoT is now aligned with CoM for both the SRBs and the landing engines) but it’s probably time to build a proper rover using the RoveMate rather than something I stapled together out of whatever parts I happened to have at the time.

How about you either a) don’t play career mode (no contracts, no problem), b) turn off contract decline penalties (no penalty, no problem) or c) just do what everyone keeps suggesting, and use the mods that will stop those contracts appearing. Or you can d) just keep on complaining about the problem instead of lifting a finger to fix it, your call.

Looking at a map of Laythe’s surface, there are several very large impact craters. What if Laythe was once an icy world with a subsurface ocean, powered by the multitude of volcanoes which appear with Breaking Ground and also explain the thermal geysers on land, but then a huge impact or series of impacts shattered the ice and blasted most of it into space, exposing the subsurface ocean beneath and adding enough heat that some water was broken up into hydrogen (that was lost to space) and oxygen (that stayed put) and keeps the ocean liquid? All the volcanoes would produce an atmosphere rich in CO2 (keeping it warm) and sulphurous compounds which would probably be toxic to Kerbals; as I understand it the toxic gas in Pandora’s atmosphere in Avatar was probably sulphur hydride a.k.a rotten egg gas.

Getting low on funds, so first up is another contract sat: Then I accepted the Saturn flyby contract; with the window rapidly approaching, the probe ready to launch and the transit time of just 4 years when the contract allows 15, it makes perfect sense. Next to launch is Orange Mug 2, another rover on the Moon: A pretty precise landing less than 2km from the first waypoint. Spot the mistake... These rover contracts all seem to put the waypoints right on the borders between biomes, in this case between Highlands and Midlands. This means more science! More contracts accepted: After spending most of the advance money on KCT points, then spending all of those on R&D, I noticed that the latest orbital rocketry node had finished researching and bought this: High efficiency (for hypergolics at least), decent thrust, unlimited ignitions- this could easily replace a cluster of generic thrusters in the future. Probably not on the Moon lander though, as the engine bell is too big. Orange Ramekin's combo mission was next to launch, sending a scanning and science probe into a high polar orbit of the Moon and a docking target and science probe into a low retrograde orbit of the Moon: Retrograde because free return trajectories are retrograde and I plan to send all the crewed missions to the Moon on free return trajectories in case an engine fails or something similar. The difference in delta-V required for a prograde vs retrograde landing is negligible since the Moon rotates so slowly. Oh look, another contract sat... The RD-107 and -108 engines just got config upgrades too, though the -107's seems completely pointless since the stats are virtually identical but reliability is worse (a shocking 0.07% failure rate! The current config has a few thousand data units and has 0.01%); the -108 gets more thrust and slightly better ISP though which will be useful for these contract sats and indeed most of my current launch rockets which are now all using these engines. After discovering that the design for Orange Saucer 1 had disappeared from the craft list I had to rebuild it from scratch for Orange Saucer 2, heading to Mars this time. Testing showed that it could make it to a low orbit of Mars with fuel to spare: 4km/s for the transfer burn, ~2.3km/s to capture means there's plenty of fuel to spare for the inevitable course corrections, shifting orbits to drop the lander and so on. One last contract sat: I then went and accepted two different commercial communications satellites- tundra and molniya orbits- without realising that only one can be accepted at once, so the molniya orbit contract immediately failed and wasted most of the advance money. Oops... One last launch for today, in the form of Orange Tureen 1 which is heading to Saturn: Dodging the rings nicely (it doesn't actually matter as they're not solid, but still), the transfer will take just over 4 years. I might drop the extra moons from this game for a while, they're not actually useful right now. Final scores for today after more KCT points go into R&D: That one contract failing tanked my reputation by about 25%, but I have no idea if reputation even counts for anything in RP-1 so it probably doesn't matter. Full album: https://imgur.com/a/B1T9LQu Coming up next time: It's getting close to the first crewed Moon mission, all I need to do is get the crew training sorted. I've chosen two pilots to do the necessary training for the lander can in order to land on the Moon- Diana Zonova and Alexei Ogorodnikov- so they'll be busy doing that for the first half of this year. Two Mars missions are on the build list too with the transfer window about 6 months away, more contract sats are waiting to be outfitted with their payloads and I've thrown every available node onto the research queue, even the pointless plane-related nodes which at this point can be researched in as little as 2.5 days.

MechJeb’s plane autopilot is very prone to overcorrecting itself, try using something like Atmospheric Autopilot which can iron out the twitches and wobbles. It’s under graphics > aerodynamic FX, increase the setting to increase the visible effects (but I think increasing it decreases the performance a bit as those effects have to be calculated for each part). There’s also the Reentry Particle Effect mod which adds sparks and a plasma trail during re-entry (and sometimes to launches or even planes if you go really fast in the atmosphere). Advanced tweakables are definitely worth keeping on- autostruts alone will justify it.

Check the backups folder inside KSP/saves/your-save-name, it holds several backup copies of the persistent.sfs save file (I think default is 5), maybe that will help?

Landed a rover on the Moon, a mere 2km from the target waypoint, only to discover that the control point for driving forwards was upside down. A quick “software update” a.k.a. hack the save file was unsuccessful because there are four rotation values for each part and I have no idea which does what, so in the end I just cheated a second rover (with the control point fixed) out to the same place, brought the first one back (it exploded when it spawned in for some reason even though it was above the ground) and called it even.

As a full time software tester myself, that’s pretty much what testers do. Or at least that’s my excuse when I break stuff and people start shouting at me

@ItsJustLuci Downloaded and installed EVO 0.1b but I don't see any aurorae anywhere (likewise with 0.1a), the city lights across NA are still too obviously tiled for my liking and the scatterer atmosphere effects don't seem to be working right, the sky looks washed out and dull compared to 0.1a. Edit- The TUFX config that comes with EVO just makes everything horribly blurry for me, is that meant to happen? Unrelated, it appears EVO and Titan don't get along together at all:

Another design gets put through its paces, this time a double double mission: an orbiter and lander for both Phobos and Deimos all launched on a single rocket and transfer stage. New level 2 solar panels, the best science and communications technology unlocked so far and the huge efficiency of hydrolox make for a potent combination: The node delta-V bar lies- there's more than enough fuel in the transfer stage to make this burn and enough in both probes to capture into orbit of Mars, make their way to their target moons and capture there too. Orbital velocities around those tiny Martian moons are stupidly low- as in single digit metres per second low- so the landers are powered solely by RCS thrusters to avoid accidentally hitting escape velocity with a single fat-fingered press of the Z key. Now back to the Blue Nougat 3, which successfully landed on the Moon but once again used up all its propellant trying to not fall over; I really need to fix the landing leg suspension configurations to stop that happening, and put the antenna back on the lander stage since that went missing from this one so the data it gathers can't be sent back... After launching the return stage back to Earth there was enough time to launch Yellow Biscuit 5 and complete the first part of its orbital flight contract before Blue Nougat 3 came down and re-entered: And then back to Yellow Biscuit 5 to complete the second half of its contract: Another combo mission now- two probes heading to the Moon: a scanner and science probe to sit in a polar orbit and map its biomes and get space high science, and a docking target probe which will go into a low retrograde orbit to get some space low science as well as allowing some rendezvous and docking practice before I do it for real with the Moon lander. I'm running out of names at this point- a ramekin is a ceramic bowl used for cooking. I may need to resort to crockery if I make too many more 350t missions. A couple of unremarkable contract sats went up, made some money, no need to bother with them. Much more important than that: I fixed the EVA packs! OK, the screenshot is very dark, but they use EVA propellant again and Diana here was jetting all over the place making sure it all worked. I could have done this for Yellow Biscuit 5 but I forgot. Another contract sat, a second Moon rover and that Saturn probe are all waiting for their turn to launch; a very large quantity of KCT points have been spent on R&D to get that research shifting, and the first month of 1960 has been a resounding success. Bring on the other 119 months of the sixties! Full album: https://imgur.com/a/JKIvCbd Coming up next time: Maybe I'll get on with sending a Gemini pod into orbit of the Moon? Or maybe I'll get distracted by something else instead, as usual .

Hit escape in game > show version information > contracts > active > hit complete on the contract to force complete it. You’ve done everything the contract asked for, so cheating it completed is justified in this case; just don’t do it too often

Mod list and logs please (https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/83212-how-to-get-support-read-first/ tells you how). I suspect either a communications-related mod is failing at high time warp, or something related to power, though the fact that your ion thruster still says it has full power available suggests that the latter isn’t the case.

Nearly half of all real Mars landers have failed. Probably none of them failed because the CoM shifted too much as they burnt their fuel during descent and became top-heavy though.

@The Destroyer @maja I too am interested in using Bon Voyage with RO/RP-1 so I've had a look in the RO files and this is what RO uses to configure its RTGs: The module name is ModuleResourceConverter and the ConverterName is RTG, maybe this will help to make a patch for RO? I'd like to try it myself but I have no experience compiling .dlls- I'm a tester, not a developer, my job is to break other people's code .

Massive, shiny buildings, one teeny tiny Kerbal in the middle wandering around and some very nice (if slightly spooky) atmospheric music. I'll take ten of each please, do I get free shipping if I buy in bulk?

The fourth Yellow Biscuit is the last crewed flight not just of this year, but the entire decade! It's December 1959 and in a few short weeks it'll tick over to 1960. Strange that veteran Diana looks terrified but newbie Viktorija is thrilled, it's usually the rookie that's screaming. Good news- I fixed the EVA packs to not use nitrogen! Bad news- they use hydrazine now!? The heat shield exploded on impact with the ground, but other than that the mission went according to plan. Well, at least until... I tried to plant a flag, but the flag immediately exploded (due to excessive G-forces, apparently); the game was waiting for the flag plaque dialog box to be closed, but the flag was gone so there was no dialog box- all I got was a dead-eyed, mouthless stare from Diana here and no controls would work so I had to recover her and the pod separately. A good haul of science and Viktorija is staying for another three years, pushing her retirement date back to the first day of 1969. The orbital flight contract for this mission also paid out its 400k or so funds. As usual, I spent most of that on KCT points; not as usual, I put them into the VAB this time to get the rockets building a bit quicker: That science was then spent on nodes for even more science experiments and upgraded communications, including X-band communications which are much more powerful than S-band (higher gain = longer range), but have very narrow beamwidth so are completely useless at short range, possibly even as far out as the Moon. A problem to worry about in a couple of years' time at the rate nodes are getting unlocked... Now a bit of simulating- there's a nice planetary alignment coming up that will let me lob a probe at Saturn, with a tiny gravity assist from Jupiter that conveniently sends its trajectory right between Saturn's atmosphere and its rings: This does come at a cost of almost 8km/s of delta-V, however thanks to the power of hydrolox it's feasible with a 350 ton launch and will reach Saturn in around 4 years. That Saturn flyby contract is starting to look rather interesting, what with its 15 year deadline and all. A second probe that was originally meant for Saturn, but launching with a 150 ton rocket, was woefully short on delta-V; instead I sent it to Mercury, which was a bit of a waste as its comms are overpowered and it uses RTGs instead of solar panels, but that was the only transfer window that I had available and this probe has all the latest science on it so I might as well throw it at something. From one probe to another- at last Orange Bowl 4 arrives at Mars nearly a year after its sibling, snapping some nice pictures of the new and improved Mars textures thanks to EVO, a new visual mod for RSS that I only just discovered but already really like: All four inner planets are in that picture, though Mars is quite hard to see at this range. Science gathered and transmitting (slowly, due to degraded solar panels), this probe's long mission has at last paid off. The launchpads are getting a bit busy at this point with three separate rockets either on a pad or rolling out, though the latest crewed mission is waiting for its crew to be trained up and will have to launch next year. A routine satellite launch is made much more interesting by the new and improved appearance of Earth: However at some point between installing and uninstalling various mods I've accidentally moved the KSC to an island a few miles off the Florida coast, but I don't know how I did it or how to put it back at Cape Canaveral, or indeed if it's still at Cape Canveral and the surrounding terrain has been changed instead. Blue Nougat 3 heads up to land on the Moon and bring some samples back. Due to various timings overlapping I'll be bringing this one back in the next post, half way through a crewed orbital flight. With some extra cash lying around I bought even more KCT points, which this time went into R&D to get that huge backlog shifting a bit faster. And then it was 1960! What a decade it's been! Just ten years ago I was bumbling around Florida in a little plane while shooting military surplus anti-ship rockets into the sky, but since then those teeny little rockets have grown bigger, fatter, heavier and more powerful-er than ever; back then just getting above the Karman line was a challenge, let alone reaching orbit, but now there's a satellite in orbit of another planet, ten separate soft landings on the Moon's surface (including Blue Nougat 3 I think, spoilers ) and crewed flights have gone from poking above the sound barrier to poking above the atmosphere to spending a week in space at a time, with more soon to come on that front as that Moon landing gets closer and closer. I do have a bit of a quandary though: I could push ahead with the Moon landing at full speed, but at the cost of ignoring every available transfer window for the next year or so, or I could put more effort into interplanetary exploration which will yield huge quantities of science and fulfil many contracts but take up some of the build time that could otherwise be used making crewed vessels for the Moon landing and quite possibly delaying that until 1961. Do the opportunities offered by exploring other planets and the long-term benefits, mostly the huge quantities of science and free KCT points, outweigh the chance for a 1960 Moon landing and the gigantic contract payouts that would ensue? Vote now! Full album: https://imgur.com/a/k1nEieh Coming up next time: The sixties kick off with a major breakthrough- I fixed the EVA packs so they use stock EVA propellant and actually work! Sure, it's "not realistic" but I'll take fake but working over real but useless.

The forum page for Spectra (https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/159443-111-spectra-visual-compilation-140-jewel-2nd-july-2020-force-110111-compatibility-in-ckan/) suggests using KSPRC city lights, available on CKAN or from here if you don't use CKAN: https://spacedock.info/mod/690/KSPRC - Renaissance Compilation: artworks remake (it worked fine for me in 1.9.1 and should be fine right up to 1.11.1) You could also use the city lights config that comes as part of the standard EVE configs, possibly; I haven't ever tried that so don't know if that would work.

Unbind the roll controls, check if the problem persists; if not then re-bind the roll controls to the same keys, see if the problem returns; if it does, switch to other keys for roll control and see if the problem persists again; if not then you’ve probably got a faulty keyboard or the input is being misinterpreted; plug keyboard into another USB slot and see if that helps.

Don’t let MechJeb use RCS unless absolutely necessary- in stock KSP reaction wheels alone should be enough to rotate your vessel in whatever direction is needed. It’s probably firing most/all of your thrusters because the mass/thrust is imbalanced when it tries to fire translation controls, resulting in a rotation which requires correction by firing more thrusters, which messes up the translation and so on in a loop.

Bit of a necro here, but while we’re on the topic- Kerbals very obviously invented wheels before rockets as you can clearly see those yellow cargo trucks whizzing around inside the VAB and SPH or parked around the KSC. Space grade wheels need to be exceptionally durable, able to tolerate everything from powdery dust to coarse sand to jagged volcanic rocks and glass, without any ability to repair them (the nearest garage being on another planet) plus they need to survive the journey through the cold black void of hard vacuum to get there first; obviously building something that durable, able to tolerate extremes of heat and cold, high or low gravity and still go several orders of magnitude faster than real rovers ever did (all the Mars rovers go at centimetres per second flat out, not 10m/s as even the smallest rover wheels in KSP can) will take some time to develop relative to a mass-produced rubber tyre for use on nice smooth (ish!) roads.