jimmymcgoochie

In a rare bit of forward thinking, I knocked together a test rocket to rack up data units on the Juno IV 6k engine to try and reduce its high failure rate, as it only has 3 ignitions and will usually need all three for the mission to work: Three flights later and the failure rate on ignition is down from 15% to just under 4%, a marked improvement. All the more impressive considering I accidentally set it on fire the third time: That's not rocket exhaust, that's the fins burning due to aerodynamic heating... And now for my rather novel approach to putting a crew pod into orbit. The new Mercury and Mk1 pods are 2m diameter, but my current 150 ton launcher uses a 1.25m diameter upper stage- solution? Just whack the 2m pod on the top and use the extra space for deorbit motors, it'll be fine. Right? First re-entry attempt burnt up despite the Mk1 pod's built-in ablator, so I decided that in future I'll use up all the remaining fuel on the second stage to slow down and then the deorbit motors to push away from the discarded stage so it doesn't come back and smash the pod; those solid motors under the pod will also double as some form of launch escape system as they can provide a short but intense burst of thrust. Simulations say it can easily complete the orbital contract and rack up some solid science data while it's there, plus the supplies will last for over a day (power won't though, not yet) so there's scope for slapping a service module on the back and doing the 1 day duration record too. And then, just when my quartet of intrepid pilots were leading a conga line through the Astronaut Complex's canteen chanting "Go-ing in-to or-BIT!"- Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo! I forgot to do the proficiency training when I started unlocking the node and it takes 260 days to boot- or to put it another way, right up until December 1957, plus there's mission training to do before they can actually fly the missions. There goes any chance of getting a Kerbal into space this year... And just to make things worse- Grey Tet 2 went out to the Moon to add more science, but if I had pushed the latest science node before crew pods it would have had even more science experiments, plus the engine was on squint so it flew a bit weirdly: It made it to the Moon and inserted into orbit, so it's gathering a bit more science now, but I forgot to put into a polar orbit to get more data from the poles. Looks like I'll have to cover those biomes when I launch my first SCAN satellite. One more contract completed, this time for a tundra orbit satellite: And I did that "accepting loads of contracts when I probably shouldn't have" thing again: Venus in three years, Mars in 4, and a radar altimetry scan of Earth which needs a part I haven't unlocked yet? That should be fine Full album: https://imgur.com/a/ajeBMsE Coming up next time- Saving up for a bigger launchpad to land a probe on the Moon and throw more probes at other planets.

Where did you get KSP? The KSP store, Steam, somewhere else? If you got it via the KSP store then you should be able to download an update/patch from there and run that; if on Steam, it will usually auto-update but if not it should give you the option to update it- unless you’ve set it to a specific version, in which case right-click KSP in your library > Properties > Betas tab > set the option to None. I don’t know how to do it from somewhere else.

I’m not sure that grip strips are climbable, but just jump and the structural plates should let you climb on them.

The in-game console has very limited information in it. To find the cause of the problem and hopefully fix it, you need to share the log files; use this guide to find them: Once you have those, edit your first post and add them in. You should also include your version of KSP there too. Have you checked that your mods are compatible with your version of KSP? That’s a common reason for things failing.

Level 1 solar panels are here, and here's a quick illustration of how much better they are: Level 1- Level 0- They cost half as much, produce over 50% more power and wear out slower too; this is going to be useful for future missions. Another boring satellite contract to pay the bills: Then I got enough science together to put a science node into the queue: Infrared spectroscopy, two versions of the SCANsat radar altimeter and the orbital perturbation experoment which takes TEN YEARS to complete. I'm guessing that multiple vessels are meant to do this at once? After blowing a silly amount of money unlocking the (currently not very useful) LR87 booster from the Titan rocket, which is worse in pretty much every way to the LR79 and LR89 I have now, the next contract's advance went into KCT points instead: I spent A LOT of time doing simulations to try and get a Moon lander on a 150 ton launchpad, but it just wasn't happening no matter what I tried. The next launchpad is 350t and costs 250k funds, so I think I'll wait until I complete the big comms network contract and use that money to build the pad that I'll need to land on the Moon. And would you look at that- it's 1957! Will this be the year Kerbals make it to space? And then I started thinking about that comms network contract a bit more carefully, and realised that by combining the first stage of the Green Starling with the second stage from the Grey Cube I could get a rocket with enough payload capacity and range to make it to the required orbit, even with the extra mass of solar panels and a proper communications dish. This design will build in a little over 15 days per rocket, so a bit slower than Green Starlings but much faster than the Grey Cube, plus it can launch from a 60 ton pad. In the screenshot above the communications dish didn't deploy because it was clipped too deep into the avionics core, but that has now been rectified and the newly named Green Seagull will be making its first real flight in the near future. Full album: https://imgur.com/a/Wp2d10w Coming up next time: I completely forget a fundamental part of RP-1 and end all hope of putting a Kerbal in orbit in 1957, oops

Could be the ultra terrain shaders, or reflection quality bring too high, or some form of bug in an aesthetics mod (scatterer, EVE or a config pack for them), or terrain scatters, or having the KSC or other physics-enabled objects nearby... Logs would help to diagnose if it’s a mod issue or not, or try turning some graphics settings down a bit and see if it improves.

Shot in the dark, but- are you using KSP 1.10 or later, with Simple Logistics (and deployable batteries), and is the Deployable Solar Panel from the Breaking Ground deployable science set the part that’s freezing? If so, delete the SL patches for all breaking ground parts (and for deployable batteries if you have that) and this may resolve your problem. Without a mod list and looking at your log file on a tablet with no search function, that’s the best I can do right now.

If I was on a PC right now I could add pictures, but I’m not so I can’t. Maybe I’ll add some later? How to build a rover: Pick your probe core. The RoveMate is the obvious choice here but anything which can do an ‘up’ and ‘forward’ control point will do as this allows you to fly it like a rocket to get somewhere then drive it like a car once you’re there. OKTO2 is another good choice as it has good SAS modes (RoveMate just has the basis mode and no prograde/retrograde etc.) and is both small and light. Stick it down in the SPH as horizontal building is easier for rovers plus it defaults to mirror symmetry which you want for a rover. Add rover related accessories- wheels, obviously, then power supply and storage, reaction wheel- which the RoveMate and OKTO2 don’t have and which other probe cores only have feeble versions of, so you need at least one proper RW to avoid flipping and crashing- science kit, communications kit and possibly some lights or a chair for a Kerbal. With a RoveMate the probe core itself can work as the chassis with everything else bolted on, but otherwise some kind of structural parts like girders or I-beams are recommended to make it sturdy and give you space to attach everything; if you’re using fuel cells then a fuel tank can also do the job. Make sure there’s a free node on the bottom of it, and possibly on top too; you’ll need those to attach rocket-y bits. Test drive your rover around the KSC. Feel free to use ‘hack gravity’ to simulate your target body’s conditions or even cheat it out there to drive it around, then if you find any issues (or don’t!) revert it back to the SPH and pretend that was just a computer simulation. Inside a computer simulation... Fix problems, repeat step 3 until you’re happy with it. Switch to the VAB editor by pressing the plane shaped button in the top left. Keep your rover loaded and it will still be in the VAB editor, but when you pick up the root part it will rotate; correct that rotation so it points up again (wheels down) and start attaching your landing rocket to the bottom. You won’t need another probe core on the rocket bit as the rover itself will provide the control if you switch its control point to ‘up’- which might just be called ‘default’- during flight Generally speaking there are two ways of landing a rover on an airless body- rocket underneath as for Lunokhod and Chang’e missions, or with a skycrane as for Curiosity/Perseverance: putting the rocket underneath is the simpler way of doing it but comes with the potential problem of getting the rover off the top of the rocket and onto the ground without breaking anything (hence why the real missions drove their rovers off a flat platform using a ramp), whereas a skycrane is more difficult but allows you to land directly onto the wheels as well as stick parachutes on it for bodies with an atmosphere (like Duna/Mars, for example). If you’re going for a skycrane, make sure your rockets don’t point too close to the rover or stuff will get fried by the exhausts and explode! Test your deployment system by cheating the rover into orbit of your chosen target then trying to land it. Make changes as needed to make it work with a bit of fuel to spare, repeat step 5 until you’re happy with it. Build the rest of your rocket to get where you’re going. This bit needs to get you from Kerbin’s surface to the orbit of your target body that you tested with in step 5, or lower. If you can’t (or won’t) cheat/revert then try the KRASH mod which lets you do simulation runs in pretty much the same way.

I second that suggestion- MechJeb can nearly fly your ships for you as long as you tell it what to do and when. There’s also kOS which is an automation scripting system to really make your ships hands-off, but I’ve never tried that and it requires some level of coding knowledge; however you can probably find others’ scripts on the forums to steal borrow.

Wasted a lot of time trying to make a Moon lander when I clearly don’t have the required tech unlocked yet, then moved on to adapting an existing, and very successful, launch rocket to set up a LEO communications network for a contract (and to improve communications, if I do it properly). It won’t be a particularly well positioned network, but as long as it works to some extent it’s worth it.

If you’re orbiting the Mun while the Mun is orbiting Kerbin, there will be times (on the far side for a prograde orbit) when you’re moving in the same direction round the Mun as the Mun is round Kerbin making your relative velocity to Kerbin higher than the Mun’s; conversely on the other side (the near side for a prograde orbit) your relative velocity to Kerbin is lower than the Mun’s. It’s this difference in speed, worth a few hundred m/s in Kerbin’s SOI and even more around Jool’s moons or for interplanetary transfers, that makes the biggest difference in delta-V between returning from orbit of a moon and just returning from the same orbit as a moon (but not inside said moon’s SOI)- the moon you’re orbiting is giving you some of the ‘extra’ delta-V for free, which you paid for when you arrived and braked into orbit in the first place. Think of it like a stored gravity assist, ready to be released when you make your transfer burn. There’s a little bit of Oberth effect going on too, but for a Mun orbit the effect will be pretty small.

If you count DLCs as ‘stock’ then you might be able to combine Breaking Ground’s propellers and motors with ion engines to make a pure electric SSTO, though props have a low top speed and altitude ceiling which is probably not enough for ions to get the rest of the way into space.

Each experiment will give you data for different situations- landed, splashed down, flying low/high and space low/high- and many are also biome-sensitive so will give you science for each different biomes you run the experiment in. Farm the KSC biomes first, or install the KEI mod to do it for you with one click (saves driving around the KSC repeatedly each time you unlock a new science experiment), then try and reach other biomes on Kerbin- you can reach Shores, Grasslands, Highlands, Mountains and Deserts going due west from KSC and Oceans by going east a bit beyond the islands, then build a long-distance plane and fly due north until you hit Tundra, Ice Cap and Northern Ice Shelf (there’s a weird little sliver of Southern Ice Shelf in the north almost due north of KSC at the edge of the ice caps, use KerbNet, SCANsat or the show biomes cheat to track it down and save a trip to the other pole) and then head to the opposite side of Kerbin from the KSC to find the Badlands and complete the collection. It takes a bit of time to do and the rewards aren’t huge, but that science could unlock something useful to expand your space program and head further afield, like the Mun or Minmus. A small fleet of tiny landers can get a lot of science from the Mun (or Minmus, but it has fewer biomes) fairly cheaply across different biomes. Rovers are even better as they can move to different biomes, just be careful not to crash! Each large crater on the Mun is its own biome, plus some areas like canyons and basins which are visible from orbit; pretty much every planet/moon’s poles are also a different biome, but terrain can get pretty weird at high latitudes so be careful when trying to go there.

Graphics freezing while the sound still runs is probably caused by out of date graphics drivers, it happened to me when 1.8 released and a driver update cured it completely.

Probably incompatible mods crashing the game during loading- I suspect you’re using mods inside the Steam controlled copy of KSP which is a bad idea precisely for this reason. Revert to 1.10.1 by right clicking KSP in the steam library > click Properties > go to the Betas tab > select 1.10.1 from the drop down menu > wait for KSP to be ‘updated’ > copy the whole KSP folder from inside steam/steam apps/common and paste it somewhere Steam can’t interfere with it > remove all mods from the steam copy and play the non-steam copy by double clicking KSP-x64.exe inside the KSP folder to run the application directly. Log files would definitely help find out what is going wrong but I see a Kopernicus error which is a good indicator that your game has updated.

Don’t wait for contracts or you’ll be waiting forever. Just go for the Mun and leave the boring tourist-to-orbit runs behind. Stick science bits on the sides of an OKTO probe core with batteries and solar panels to transmit the data, then just lob it at the Mun and get all the science you can. You can easily get a free return trajectory to come back from a Mun flyby with no extra fuel used which is great for bringing back mystery goo and materials bay samples, and use an experiment return box to drop them into the atmosphere as the probe itself burns up (materials bays are very hard to recover). It’s easy to hit the Mun’s SOI even by eye, just burn prograde when the Mun is directly in front of you and you’ll get there; Minmus is a bit trickier due to its inclined orbit, but pays off with higher science values and lower gravity meaning you can land there cove less delta-V than on the Mun even including the greater delta-V to get there from Kerbin.

What I usually do for rovers is stick a Bon Voyage autopilot module on it and leave that to drive the rover in the background while I do something more interesting. Useful at stock scale, even more so in bigger systems e.g. JNSQ or RSS where the distances between interesting stuff is vastly larger. Besides the minor risk of going back to the rover to find it’s underground and immediately explodes, it works pretty well. To answer the question that this thread is asking- I spent a lot of time yesterday trying to eke out enough delta-V to make a Moon lander but continuously came up short by about 1km/s. There’s a hard limit on how small I can make the lander before the avionics can’t fit inside it, so I may need to wait for some proper engines instead of using horribly inefficient RCS based thrusters (127s ISP) as the final landing stage or try to pare back the mass as much as possible, sacrificing some science equipment in the process.

@Spaceman.Spiff it’s entirely feasible to do that.

@InfernoSDIt’s a lot prettier than my Duna landers usually are and I like how compact the design is to make it all fit neatly.

I'm baaaack! Now what was I doing the last time I played this game? Ah yes- navigation network satellites. Cue the montage! Network completed and nearly 300k funds from the contract. Green Starling is reaching the end of its operational life as I shift towards engines that can be restarted, but there are still a few easy satellite contracts that it can do and I can build two of them per month. Now back to the tricky issue of putting a Kerbal into orbit- or more specifically, getting them back down from orbit. Turns out the LEO-rated wings and fuel tanks are in the next plane node along, which costs 51 science and needs a level 3 R&D department. Sticking a 1.25m cockpit on top of a rocket and chucking that into space also didn't seem to work as any RCS fuel tanks burnt off while it was still above 90km altitude, swiftly followed by the RCS thrusters and then the cockpit itself. It also turns out that the 1.25m X-15 cockpit is nose-heavy even with 2 tons of lead ballast in the back of it, which may just have been weirdness caused by spawning the pod in the upper atmosphere at orbital velocity. Fortunately, the Grey Tet keeps on sending science back from the Moon and combined with the science I could salvage from the Green Falcon camera sat there was enough to unlock proper crew pods: Another easy satellite contract: And finally, the Grey Cube Molniya launched to complete a Molniya orbit contract, only I had to relaunch that one because I forgot to bump the avionics from 60t to 150t. Then the upper stage engine failed during ascent, which was fine because it has 3 ignitions and I only need 2, except that it failed again when I tried to burn into its final orbit; one quickload later and it worked fine. With 2.5km/s of delta-V remaining in this orbit, this thing will probably be able to make it to geostationary orbit- assuming the engine works properly, that is. Maybe I'll make a sounding rocket type thing to get some data units into it; the AJ10-mid has infinite ignitions, but the ISP is worse and it needs high pressure tanks which reduce its delta-V considerably. The next communications tech node was unlocked too, unlocking new relay dishes, S-band communications (much range, but narrow cones of communication) and another upgrade to the tracking station as well as level 3 communications tech, which is better in some way that I haven't yet found out. Level 1 solar panels are arriving in a few days too, then research switches towards crewed stuff; there's a Venus transfer window in just over a year which will be perfect for a science-laden flyby, followed by a Mars transfer window in a little under 2 years. Full album: https://imgur.com/a/CKsiLQa Coming up next time: Building and launching a communications network to plug the gaps in radio coverage for LEO. And possibly some science probes around Earth/Moon to keep the research going.

@eberkainnot that I know of, but it’s probably due to MKS (and other mods) using CRP and so scansat displays all the resources it can- I tried deleting the configs from within scansat but it didn’t like it at all. Maybe that should be a feature request or something: a filter to show/hide resources in the overlay options to get rid of what you don’t want to see.

When I’m trying to get tourists to orbit and back I tend to stack Mk1 command pods with radial parachutes on each, which isn’t the prettiest way of doing it but does mean that it has plenty of control to force itself into the airflow and slow down, plenty of space for drogue chutes and those pods are more than capable of taking the heat of low orbit re-entry so no heatshields needed. Another alternative is to use the KV series pods from Making History which have 1.25m bases, are very good at re-entering and can hold up to 3 Kerbals, though they also have considerable drag during ascent and no built-in reaction wheels so can be a bit tricky to use.

Well, it comes after [REDACTED] which is right after [CLASSIFIED] happens, which follows on from [SPOILERS] that continues the [XXXXXXXX] between [] and [TOP SECRET], which links back to the [403 FORBIDDEN] which in turn is directly related to what’s going to happen in the next chapters. Hope that clears it up

Tubes plus engine plates can look better than a fairing for interstages and tubes don’t disappear when they are decoupled, but fairings are generally lighter and more customisable. On a less rocket-related note, those structural tubes can also be used with Breaking Ground motors as wheels or other mechanical devices.

The stock grabbers are actually meant to do that, but only if you have ‘free pivot’ enabled. Check that you have advanced tweakables enabled in the main menu and the next time you grab something check if the pivot is locked or free.