jimmymcgoochie

It depends heavily on what size of solar system I’m using- for the stock system or similar scale I use a small-ish SSTO plane which can carry up to 25 tons per flight, plus KSTS to automate it because those flights are tedious; for JNSQ and similar scale I go for ‘recoverable’ boosters where possible, usually relying entirely on Stage Recovery to pick up the dropped boosters on parachutes and the larger core stages with propulsive landings (I did once land one of those large core stages myself so it’s theoretically possible, but with 8 huge 5m boosters attached to the side of my largest launcher (kiloton to JNSQ LKO!) that isn’t practical; for RSS everything is disposable right now, though most of my launches are for boring satellite contracts so the second stage doubles as the satellite and carried whatever payload the contract requires.

Put jetpacks in a suitable container; Cheat it out to the affected craft(s) with jetpack-less Kerbals on board; Dock, klaw or otherwise attach container to craft(s); Transfer over jetpacks; Profit.

If I was installing a mod manually, I’d take the contents of the mod’s GameData folder and bung it into KSP’s GameData folder, or if there wasn’t a GameData folder inside the mod then I’d grab the folder with the parts etc. folders inside it and put that into KSP’s GameData. But really I’d use CKAN and let that do the folder faffery instead.

You too If you mark my first answer as ‘correct’ then it will show your question has been answered, so if anyone else has a similar problem in future and finds this thread they’ll know what to do.

Are you referring to Breaking Ground pistons? Do you have the Advanced Tweakables option enabled in the main menu settings? Can you provide screenshots of the problem?

That launch rocket is totally overbuilt for the payload you’re trying to launch- three Mainsails and two Rockomax Jumbo tanks per booster is massive overkill and would be close to reaching orbit with the side boosters still burning if the delta-V is showing vacuum numbers, or could make orbit with fuel to spare if they’re the surface numbers. You’re also potentially going too fast at low altitude, so any attempt to adjust your trajectory causes massive aerodynamic stresses that will make the rocket unstable and prone to flip or break apart. Add fins on the core stage, make your boosters much smaller (1.25m boosters using Reliant engines- or 1.875m with Bobcats or Kodiaks if you have Making History- would probably be enough, or use Thumper or Kickback SRBs with some fuel tanks on the top and crossfeed enabled on the decouplers) and autostrut all the engines to the root part, the fairing to the heaviest part, the booster tanks to grandparent part and the nosecones on the boosters to the root part to keep it all locked together without being rigid to the point of breaking as rigid attachment tends to do. You should also set the fuel tanks to drain from bottom to top which helps to keep the centre of mass as far forward as possible, then add a 1.25m reaction wheel to the top of the first stage which should be more than adequate to control the rocket at high altitudes or in space. Rockets tend to flip because there’s too much drag at the front, so fins on the bottom of the booster help to correct that, or because the weight balance is too low, which is largely resolved by draining the tanks from bottom to top and can be improved by using smaller, lighter engines in your core stage and radial boosters rather than big, heavy engines on big, heavy stages.

Just a guess, but SSPX (station expansion redux) changes the models for those three stock parts so might be the culprit here. It’s impossible to say without seeing the logs though so please read this guide and post your log files: Make sure you have the right versions for your version of KSP and all their dependencies. When did those parts disappear and what did you do before they disappeared (any mods installed/updated/removed etc.)?

KSP worked today thanks to the addition of “MOAR RAM!” but none of my modded versions would work. Started a fresh career, launched the usual science-y rockets then lobbed both Jeb and Val at the Mun without patched conics and brought them both back alive; Jeb from a free return flyby and Val from orbit, but the return was terrible and took at least 5 aerobraking passes before re-entering.

56.75!? You’re saying that you can get 56km/s of vacuum delta-V per ton on a spacecraft? Strange, since the best you can actually get with the stock parts is about 33 using an OKTO2 probe core, a Dawn ion thruster and between 6 and 8 PB-X50 xenon tanks. I would be very interested to know just how exactly you got nearly double the maximum possible score...

So the challenge is to build either a plane with the most flight range and speed as possible, or a spacecraft with the most delta-V for its mass, using the in-flight construction system?

If you just want to get the Kerbals back home then send another mission- you’ll need an interplanetary propulsion system that stays in orbit the whole time and two landers to get down onto Duna and then back up again with the 8 Kerbals (I say take two in case you land in the wrong place or crash). Fly out to Duna at the next transfer window, park the propulsion bit in a low Duna orbit then send a lander down to land near the stranded Kerbals, insert Kerbals into lander, return to orbit, dock with transfer stage, fly back to Kerbin at the next available transfer window, then send up a craft to bring the Kerbals down from Kerbin orbit. It’s more practical to build a high efficiency interplanetary stage/ship and short range landers than it is to make the landers able to go down to Duna’s surface then all the at back to Kerbin. If you need to get the ship back to Kerbin, you’ll need to do some considerable surgery to get it pointing the right way (roll it around until it’s pointing up the hill then use some Vernor thrusters and/or big reaction wheels to get it vertical again) then fuel it up before flying back into Duna orbit and from there back to Kerbin.

If the game is running slowly it’s usually due to the processor- the physics calculations run on one thread on one processor core so multi-core, multi-threading processors don’t offer any benefits and in fact can be worse than a processor with fewer cores/threads but a faster clock speed. RAM is also an important factor and the more mods you want to use, especially mods with lots of parts and doubly so for parts with detailed interior views/IVAs, the more RAM you’ll need. Stock KSP can run on as little as 4GB total but ideally you’d want to have 4GB free on top of background processes for it to run smoothly, and a heavily modded game can use much more- the most I’ve ever seen KSP using is about 17GB when running RP-1/RO/RSS which is pretty memory-intensive, but before I upgraded my PC from 16GB RAM to 32GB other modded versions would regularly use up almost all of the 14GB or so that wasn’t used by background processes. You can sometimes improve the game’s performance by turning down (or off) some of the options e.g. terrain scatters, texture quality and patched conics; aerodynamic and reflection effects seem to be big performance reducers as the aero effects need to have physics calculated for them and reflections need a lot of computing especially at higher resolutions. An integrated graphics card should handle stock KSP with reasonable graphics settings, but if you want the highest resolution everything and all the special effects like clouds, detailed water reflections and accurate reflections from your vessel parts then you’ll need a dedicated graphics card to run those mods. Other little tricks that can help your performance include hiding all the Kerbal portraits in the bottom right of the screen, flying a less efficient steeper ascent which reduces the time you spend in the atmosphere and so reduces the aero effects, using fewer parts whenever possible to reduce the physics calculations required and turning the terrain detail setting down- this is not the same thing as the terrain texture setting- though this does pose a significant risk to anything you’ve already landed as it changes the shape of the terrain itself and can put your existing landers/rovers underground when you load them again and they immediately explode.

Try using this guide to find all the log files: The logs will probably say what’s going on, but some more information from you might help such as: KSP version; PC specs (processor, RAM and GPU are the most relevant but OS and hard drive may also help); If you have any mods installed, the names and versions if possible; Does the loading screen that never loads to the main menu play the main menu music?

What do you need building blocks for? There are some square and triangular structural parts in Making History and I think they’re duplicated by Restock+, maybe those are what you’re looking for?

I’ve seen some long-ish load times before, but only when using many mods (80+ each time), a save that has a lot of active crafts in it (especially with mods like Kerbalism that add a lot of extra data into many parts) and when loading large (hundreds of parts) crafts onto the launchpad or runway. Culling unnecessary old crafts and debris seemed to improve things, running the game for long periods made it load slower and having more save files in the saves folder also made it go slower, so an occasional reload and deleting old saves might help keep those load times under control.

Next time it crashes, get the logs and post them in this thread, using this guide: If the game is crashing the logs will probably say what’s causing it, which could help find and fix the problem. Are the mods you’re using all compatible with 1.11?

Today in KSP I did... nothing. My old PC (all I have due to being back with family when they put the whole country into lockdown again) can barely run the stock game due to a lack of RAM so I bought MOAR RAM to fix that issue; turns out that the motherboard can only cope with so much RAM per slot and in total and I was overdoing it, causing it to either not boot up or display scary blue screen errors. There might not be such a thing as “too many boosters” but apparently “too many RAMs” is...

I’ve found planes in RP-1 to be incredibly twitchy and prone to massive overcorrections with either SAS or MechJeb’s autopilot, but the Atmospheric Autopilot mod really helps dampen those down and makes flying planes vastly easier; I see the icon on your toolbar already, why not give it a go? Those airbrakes are deploying the wrong way, they should deploy down to act as flaps rather than up which reduces your lift.

This is not the way to do it! Unless you’re really short of hard drive space, make a new copy of KSP (use CKAN to clone an existing one then remove the mods, or keep unmodded copies of different versions of KSP to copy and mod when you want) and keep your mods separate from each other. You can tell what mods are compatible by looking at their version information in CKAN- click a mod, then look at the ‘versions’ tab on the right; each version will list the KSP versions it works with. As a (very general) rule, any parts that work in 1.8 should be OK in 1.9 and many mods have updated versions all the way to 1.11, plus CKAN can be told to accept mods for specific versions of KSP to allow a bit of backwards compatibility if a mod hasn’t been updated. You won’t need real fuels etc. for JNSQ as stock parts (and most mods that are balanced against stock e.g. BDB/Tantares/Near Future) are already balanced in a 2.5-2.7x rescale (stock parts are overpowered in the stock system).

Really? I though Woomerang was MH and Dessert was BG

BG is a lot more than just the robotics parts: Propellers and rotors to make planes, helicopters, drones etc. which can be particularly useful for getting off Eve or for making electric aircraft which have nearly infinite range; Deployable science experiments that gather science over time and can be expanded when you unlock the new experiments, it’s something else to do after landing and planting a flag which is good; Surface features and scanning arms which can give you more science in stages as you unlock the better parts, or get a Kerbal to grab a sample and return it; Cool spacesuits with coloured lights- who wouldn’t want underglow neon on their spacesuit? Additional launch sites, the Des(s)ert launchpad and runway are good for reaching different biomes than you can easily reach from KSC. Plus you’re supporting the developers by giving them money to keep them employed and updating the game with new features and bug fixes.

I suspect that the extra mass of those boosters, combined with Eve’s high gravity (1.7g I think) is overloading the landing legs and causing the suspension to become unstable. Crank up the spring and damper settings or add more landing legs, preferably to the boosters themselves so you can drop the extra weight as you ascend. Or try with no landing legs at all and just land on the boosters/engines, they can take it

@Sokar408 @king of nowhere I haven’t done a lot with 1.10, certainly not with sentinels tracking comets, but for spotting asteroids they generally have a specific orbit you need the sentinel telescope to be in e.g. inside Kerbin’s orbit, which is usually specified in the contract. Just parking the sentinels in that orbit and letting them do their job over time should mean the asteroids (or comets) will be spotted pretty quickly, unless there are some weird conditions about eccentricity or inclination to worry about. You did turn on the sentinel telescope’s object tracking, right? And the probe with the telescope on it has control, power and a communications link back to Kerbin?

Exactly the opposite- just leave the sentinel sat in its orbit and do something else, they’re designed specifically to be left in the background to spot asteroids and now comets. I don’t know if having it as the active craft prevents it from spotting asteroids/comets but at best it’s wasting time that you could use for other missions.

If you have fuel for the EVA jet pack it should be fairly easy to get a Kerbin intercept, then all you need to do is send up a rescue mission to grab, catch or otherwise insert the Kerbal into a craft that can survive re-entry at interplanetary speeds.