jimmymcgoochie

I don't actually use Alt+F12 (I use escape then click the little button in the bottom right of the pause menu that says 'click here for version information' or something like that) so

Try it and find out! Decided to try this out on my current 1.8.1 RP-1/RO/RSS setup as the load times are pretty long due to well over a hundred mods: Before: Elapsed time is 538.028s First time, with 55k(!) MM patches created: Elapsed time is 663.4737s Second time with cached MM patches: Elapsed time is 338.0936s Wow! That's over 3 minutes faster, a 37% improvement. And that's with 32GB RAM and a 512GB SSD dedicated solely to KSP.

That’s a time stamp...

Here’s a novel idea: Put some jet packs in a cargo container Teleport said container to Gilly, then put it next to the ship(s) with the missing jetpacks and get a Kerbal to grab them Profit

Note to self- DO NOT make rash contract decisions right before stopping for the night, it leads to BAD THINGS. But first... This is fine. Once the *ahem* minor stability issues on the launchpad had been resolved, the Grey Tetrahedron (or just Grey Tet for short) actually showed a lot of promise, making it into something very close to the contracted orbit: The irony is that the TLI stage had around 600m/s of fuel left when I dropped it, because the avionics are near-earth and so won't work out at the Moon. The simpler and cheaper solution was to add more solid motors to the capture 'stage' aka a decoupler with a dozen separator motors stuck to the bottom, then use RCS to reach the desired orbit then point its huge solar panel at the sun. More KCT points added: Now for blunder #1- the suborbital crewed flight contract: There was nothing wrong with the flight- Ann Horton became the first person ever to go into space- apart from one minor detail which you might spot in the image below: I was rather confused when I landed as the contract didn't complete, then I double checked the fine print and noticed why: Target altitude- 150km, maximum altitude on that flight- 145km. That did slightly dampen the achievement of a crewed flight getting into space, but Ann Horton didn't care: One boring satellite contract: And one LEO camera satellite: That's the first of five Green Falcon sats, since each camera only carries 20% of the total samples so it takes at least 5 to get the whole experiment done, and you have to recover the films, and they're too heavy for the re-entry pod's avionics to work properly. This could be interesting... And then blunder #2 happened, because I got overambitious late in the day and forgot to read the small print AGAIN... A million fund advance for a crewed orbit? Ideal! Let's do that- hang on, why did that suborbital crewed flight contract just fail? (checks small print) *facepalm* The bright red warning text on that contract, just off the top of the contract window, clearly says that if you accept the orbital flight contract then the suborbital flight contract gets cancelled. Did I read the big bold RED warning text on the contract? With a million funds to spend, I could upgrade R&D and Mission Control with plenty of funds left over; the R&D upgrade allows nodes of up to 50 science to be unlocked, including the first capsule node and some new science experiments too. Full album: https://imgur.com/a/eqAggWF Coming up next time: Can I actually complete all those incredibly valuable contracts in time? I have 4 years to get a crew into orbit and 3 years to land a probe on the Moon, so there's plenty of time, but judging by my most recent run of terrible decisions it wouldn't surprise me at all if I managed to accept something ridiculous and ruin everything again. Oooh, a Mars flyby contract!

Just based on first impressions immediately after downloading the new release: EVA construction mode is so much better than the KIS/KAS system, much easier to use and no massive pauses every time something gets added/removed. While it doesn't have the tubes/cables that KAS brings, overall it's a better system to work with and I like it very much. The new 'EVA science' kit is nice, but so far I've only seen one action (playing golf), are there others available on other planets/moons? Either way it's good to have something else to while on an EVA and it seems to be reusable too? Those helmet visors tried to sneak in under the radar, but they're a nice touch and look good. New lights and light control systems are good, easy to use and understand. Obviously the light strips will be going on the bottom of every rover, ever, since it says that's definitely not its purpose . Everything looks better with neon underglow lighting! The only issues I've seen so far are that Kerbals and vehicles (or at least the one that I quickly stuck together to test the new update) still slide around on terrain, and an unladen Kerbal can jump upwards at 4.5m/s which means they fall over when they land. While I won't be doing a huge amount with 1.11 in the near future due to incompatible mods (the perennial curse of KSP updates) I will definitely be upgrading as soon as possible to make use of these excellent new features.

Fairing size 4 is a 5 metre part from Making History, though there are plenty mods which also add fairings etc. in this size category- Restock+, Near Future Launch Vehicles, or use TweakScale to make the 2.5m fairing double the size.

Have you looked at “Dang It!”? Not one I’ve actually used but I think it does at least some of what you want.

There was a change to the way KSP calculates delta-V values, maybe KER needs an update to match it? It’s a brand new version of the game, there will be some niggles until mod makers can update their mods to reflect the latest changes.

Try moving the parachutes a little further away from the hatch?

Do you have a battery on your rocket? The early avionics cores have some battery on them but procedural avionics cores don’t by default and you need to add that in. I can’t tell what you’ve got on that rocket in the screenshot so it’s possible that you just don’t have any power. Can you provide: A screenshot of the rocket in the editor; A screenshot of the rocket on the launchpad; And a screenshot of the rocket in flight when you can’t use the experiments. Are you sure you aren’t keeping the experiment data when running them on the ground, or launching before the data gets transmitted for surface readings?

At last, some restartable rocket engines have unlocked! However, it's pretty clear that something else will be needed to put a probe on the Moon, as even with a 150 ton rocket I was still some way short: Whichever way I slice it, there wouldn't be enough fuel left in the second stage to do the transfer burn, which is important as I need all of the solid upper stages and the fuel in the probe itself to actually land from LMO. Perhaps a smaller lander would be better? In other news, I rejigged the Green Sparrow X which previously made it to Lunar orbit to go into a high Earth orbit instead and sent up the Green Sparrow Y to get some science. Some science was gathered, but power production is an issue and it ran out of battery pretty quickly, so I doubt there'll be much more science to be gained from it. With the 1960 orbital rocketry node come more engine config upgrades, including one for the LR79 on the first stage of the Green Starling (and other related rockets), meaning I can do higher orbits with bigger payloads and do more contracts: Then I realised that I could take that failed Moon lander and turn it into a pretty successful Moon orbiter with a few minor design tweaks, so I took a contract to do precisely that: And now, back to some crewed flights! The brand new X-plane 3 was wheeled out for its first flight- and promptly wheeled back in when it was discovered that the X-15 cockpit has no power storage on board and cannot be controlled without power. One mildly embarrassing edit later a battery was installed and it went up to attempt to break the 100km Kerman Kármán line. Not entirely surprising, it was the first flight of this new design and it needs a few tweaks to make it fly properly- sticking the same wings on a larger, longer and heavier plane didn't do much for its handling, so canards on the front will be added to make it fly better. I'm also switching to HTP for the RCS system as the engines already use a little bit of HTP and it's much more dense than N2O even if the latter has a better ISP. Then I took it out for a second flight, with the extra modifications, and this happened: And then this happened: So, long story short, coming back down from that altitude at that speed generates A LOT of heat, which caused the battery to explode, which caused the plane to lose all control, which caused a water 'landing' with the parachute, which wasn't balanced with the new canards so it went in nose first and started bouncing off the water like crazy. It survived, but only with a little help from super slow-mo time warp and a few carefully timed 1% gravity hacks to stop it bouncing at 20m/s every time it touched the surface. Note to self (and anyone else)- do not land on water! Ever! Despite the mishaps on the way down, it was still a successful flight: Full album: https://imgur.com/a/QyVq6oW Coming up next time- a whole flotilla of satellite launches, a Moon orbiter and possibly even an attempt at sending one of my pilots into the cold black void of space.

Could be that weird magenta square artifact that I’ve seen before, try updating your graphics drivers and if that doesn’t help reduce your graphics settings/remove some visual mods and see if it goes away. What KSP version are you using and what mods do you have?

I’m going to suggest that you try the Simple Logistics mod instead of an elaborate KIS/KAS setup- SL works when you’re inside physics range so doesn’t need a physical connection between vessels (which can be glitchy especially with KIS connectors) and will add a SL module to every command part, both stock and from most mods, so there’s no need for extra parts. You may need to trim out a couple of SL patches for the Breaking Ground deployable science things as these can make 1.10 freeze on loading.

Verifying Breaking Ground is the very last thing that happens before the game compiles, so if anything at all breaks (like an exception) then the game will freeze with that on the loading screen. To find out why it’s failing, you’ll need to get the logs. You can find how to do that and what to do with them here:

I always find that sticking a small SRB under a pod and lobbing that into space is the best way of making them black out- you can easily pull 10 or more Gs with a Flea or Hammer booster for long enough to make them black out, and if they’re stubborn then reduce the Kerbal G-force limits in the settings menu to make them even feebler and black out faster.

High pressure separate structure tanks (the steel ones at least) can hold sounding payload, much better than using those awful service module tanks and their dismal mass ratios.

A new 150 ton launchpad is completed. It has a light on it. I don't actually need a 150 ton launchpad yet so it's actually costing me money and not getting used, maybe I should have waited for a while before making it; oh well, too late. The next launch was the Green Sparrow X, heading out to the Moon to park itself in orbit. Well, that was the plan... One engine failing I can tolerate, but two in one flight? With a <3% failure rate on the Gamma 2? That's just not on. REVERT! Everything worked fine the second time, right up until Persistent Rotation did strange things when approaching the Moon and the probe stopped spinning, pointing the wrong way. It took A LOT of save file poking to rotate it back to the right direction (why are there four rotation values for craft in the save file? I still don't know what any of them actually mean) but eventually the cursed mission made it into orbit of the Moon: It then sent back a generous helping of science before the batteries eventually died. A bit of tech reprioritisation was done, with Hypersonic Flight added to the list and immediately bumped up to second so I can have a suborbital spaceplane ready for when the crew have been trained for it. Two contracts for doing the same thing is a good idea: Bought a load of KCT points with the money, then started the four pilots on X-15 proficiency training: With the science that came back from the Moon, I added 1960 orbital rocketry to the list which contains that hypergolic AJ-10 and its infinite restarts: At this point I see no reason to continue posting boring reports about repetitive satellite launches, so I'll go for a TL;DR version: It's 1956! The VAB is producing a rocket every 21 days, dropping to every 19 days when I added the most recent LR79 upgrade and could drop the quartet of AJ10 boosters from the Green Starling setup. Some rockets were launched, some contracts were completed, with only one minor mishap where I forgot to put enough payload in one rocket and had to roll it back and fix it. Now I've decided to stop launching one satellite for one contract, and go for the more lucrative satellite network contracts: The communications network will be fully functional, with a proper antenna and a large solar panel on each so they can provide a semblance of communications to anything in LEO; solar panel degradation will eventually make them non-functional, but by then I'll have a replacement constellation in geostationary orbit (hopefully!). Full album: https://imgur.com/a/8vASOrP Coming up next time: Many satellite launches, which are boring and repetitive, then the first flights of my new X-plane 3 and the final flight of the old Plane 2, which will be retired after a long and successful series of missions, two ditchings at sea and only one major crash!

Shooting rockets at the Moon, part 2 begins with Green Sparrow and a booster engine losing thrust right off the pad: It made no real difference though as those boosters provide less than 5% of the thrust of the core engine. Lunar collision course was duly acquired and Lunar impact carried out with only the minor inconvenience of forgetting to upgrade to a level 2 antenna to transmit more science. There are only two Lunar flyby contracts in total but three Lunar impactors; looks like I'll need a different contract, maybe something like this: That's right- orbit the Moon! Moonshot phase 2 is go! The Early Human Spaceflight Materials Science node went into the research queue, another prerequisite for crew capsules and also unlocking the ability to store food/water/oxygen in service module tanks, which is rather important. A new launchpad begins construction, it'll be needed to go beyond LEO with anything substantial but possibly not to make orbit of the Moon- there may be a way to get that done with a 60 ton launch. The rest of the money went on KCT upgrade points: A few easy satellite contracts were completed with the Green Starling rocket- just the first two stages of Green Sparrow with up to 117 units of payload in the avionics core, though pushing the payload that high does mean that the RCS is pilfering HTP that would otherwise go to the main engine (though the margins would have to be really thin indeed for that to have an impact). And another X-planes contract thrown in for good measure: Green Swallow completed its Lunar impact without incident, netting more funds and science: Funny how something that just days ago was ridiculously ambitious has become so routine... The Crew Survivability tech node was added to the queue, the last prerequisite to the earliest crew capsules and by extension to crewed orbit; though I could unlock a plane node to unlock the X-15 type parts instead, which has been available for a while but which I never prioritised. The final scores, after buying even more KCT upgrade points: 2 months left in 1955 so I could still make a Moon orbit happen by the end of the year, if the design I have in mind pans out. Full album: https://imgur.com/a/ULrkIdB Coming up next time- Orbiting the Moon? Possibly. Sending pilots over the Kerman Karman line? Possibly. More boring satellite contracts? Definitely! I'll try to stick to the highlights only for those, they'll most likely all use the same rocket design anyway.

Check the NKD forum thread to see a) if you’ve got all the dependencies installed, b) if anyone else has had the same problem and c) if you’re actually using the thing correctly. Did the bomb do any damage (e.g. to KSC if you used it there)?

I think you’re just running out of RAM, the error when the game crashes is a system out of memory error. DynamicHeapAllocator out of memory - Could not get memory for large allocation 178956976! Could not allocate memory: System out of memory! You’re running quite a lot of mods for only 8GB of RAM, so either reduce your mod count or if possible get some more RAM. (Or is that “MOAR RAM!”?)

The centre of lift can sometimes be misleading for rockets. A picture of the rocket that flips would be helpful to see if there’s something wrong with the design or if it’s a genuine game issue. A few small fins are usually enough for a 1.25m rocket.

I don’t actually see any fatal error messages for TweakScale in that log file, are you sure it’s the right one? There are a few parts that get non-fatal errors- Making History engine plates and structural tubes- but the final TweakScale log entry says 0 show stoppers found. Try deleting the log file from your KSP folder, then re-running KSP to generate the errors again and then post the newly generated log file.

As a general rule of thumb- accelerate vertically to between 50 and 100m/s*, turn to between 5 and 15 degrees*, hold surface prograde until the navball automatically switches to orbital then hold orbital prograde until your apoapsis is the same as your desired periapsis, coast to apoapsis, burn prograde until you get the desired orbit. * pitch speed and angle are very dependent on the individual rocket- TWR and drag (especially fairing drag) are your main factors, so higher TWR and less drag will allow you to turn earlier and steeper. Turn too much and you level off in the atmosphere and can easily burn up, turn too little and you waste fuel fighting gravity.

KAC adds warp to AN/DN in map view. The reason you don’t see the target AN/DN for Duna while in Kerbin orbit is because the game can only show you AN/DN for an object in the same SOI- once in a solar orbit it will show you the AN/DN for Duna relative to your ship. @18WattRe. AN/DN not showing with a node- it’s entirely possible that the next AN/DN is after entering the target’s SOI, and you either don’t have enough patches on the conics or the craft will be on a solar escape trajectory when it leaves the target’s SOI. If you’re targeting Jool and put a node after the last AN/DN before entering Jool’s SOI, then you probably won’t see another if you’re trying to get a prograde orbit as the gravity assist will hurl you right out of the solar system.