jimmymcgoochie

Nope, one at a time is all you can do in flight. You can, however, left click on the parachutes in the staging menu to open the collapsed stack of chutes and then right click them one by one from the stage list to adjust them, which is easier and quicker than trying to find the parts on the craft (especially if it’s moving).

Do you have an anomaly scanner on the satellite?

There seems to be a bug with B9 part switch that deletes the fusion pellets from the Ranger and Lander, so their reactors can’t produce the power needed to run the engines. One solution is to create a hacky patch to add an RRG-style always on generator to produce that power, and it’s what I did recently when using Endurance as an interstellar ship in the Beyond Home Space Race. I can’t say anything about KSPIE compatibility though, I suspect that as Endurance is a standalone thing it won’t interfere too much with KSPIE or vice versa as they’re both adding discrete parts/systems/resources/etc.

Inflatable modules aren’t always a good idea with Kerbalism as you need to inflate them, which uses A LOT of nitrogen unless you launch them already inflated, which defeats the purpose of them being inflatable in the first place. SSPX is still the best option that I know of, you can always delete the parts you don’t want before running the game to save on memory/part clutter.

If you’re transmitting from Jool, put the most power-efficient antenna you can on the probes themselves (even if that’s a Communotron 16) and trickle the data out slowly, then bring a hefty relay on the main ship to bounce the signals back to Kerbin. Solar power at Jool is around 4% of what you get at Kerbin so even a Gigantor solar panel produces just 1EC/s and the probe-sized panels are barely worth having; RTGs are expensive, but they deliver a lot more power for their weight than solar panels when you go out that far and a slow transmission rate gives more time for the batteries to charge up during the transmission. If you’re planning to throw a probe into Jool and want it to continuously transmit science, RTGs and a static antenna (16-S or possibly RA-2, though relays are power inefficient and slow) are your best bet as anything deployable risks being torn off by airflow. Gravity and seismic scans are the two experiments you need to watch out for wherever you go as they require a lot of data to be transmitted. Atmosphere analysis is even bigger, but only applies when you’re in an atmosphere and only Jool and Laythe have those.

A rocketplane is a rocket plane- a plane powered by rockets. To complete the RP-1 X-planes contracts the best option is to use the XLR-11 rocket engine.

@piodd you should be given the option to ‘recover to SPH’ when you click the recover button while still controlling the plane. If you don’t get this option, check that you have KCT installed and set up correctly.

Are you sure that you actually have 3 Kerbals on that ship?

First up, an attempt at a sun-synchronous satellite which didn't quite meet the parameters that the contract required: Never mind, there's another one on the build queue and this thing is loaded with science experiments to get that much-needed science. Next, Red Leopard 2 completes a weather satellite contract: Followed by Red Leopard 3 which completed the sun-synchronous contract: At this point there are a few different satellite contracts being offered, but I'm not sure that my current rocket design is capable of completing them as they require high and/or precise orbits. Or... MOONSHOT! Those hefty advances paid for a lot of KCT upgrade points, with some funds left over for any tooling etc. necessary for the new rocket that will fling a probe at the Moon. Wow, it's 1955 already! Full album: https://imgur.com/a/PPaOrRy Coming up next time- can I hit a ~3000km wide Moon from ~300,000km away?

It usually shows itself as one side’s wheels jumping to full motor power when you try to steer the other way e.g. right side wheels when turning left; try driving with the wheels’ PAWs pinned open and see if that’s happening. You might need to add some hefty reaction wheels and drag it around with torque, or use some smaller wheels on the front/back to steer with and disable the differential steering on the XL3 wheels.

At a guess, I would say that your UI scale is too large to allow a third portrait, as this would leave the nag ball with nowhere to go. Reduce the UI scale (or increase your screen resolution) and you should be able to add more portraits.

Now this sounds interesting! I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for the Black Arrow- the best looking rocket of its time IMO and one which had a lot of potential - so I’ll be interested to see where you go with this. One minor thing though- sometimes the music is a bit too loud and I find it hard to hear the voiceover, can you turn the music volume down a bit or the voiceover up a bit please? (P.S. spaceport in Newquay or Sutherland? )

Restock/+, because there are some useful extras in Restock+ and the part style matches Near Future which I also often use; MechJeb, because why would I do everything myself when I can get the game to do the number-crunching for me; Kerbalism, in my most recent career games at least, because it’s a pretty comprehensive setup for life support/Kerbal QoL and makes science experiments take longer than one click and you’re done; Astrogator, because while MechJeb’s advanced transfer tool is what I usually use to plot the nodes, it’s nice to have the time until the next optimal transfer window for everywhere displayed in one window along with delta-V requirements; ScanSat, to make nice maps (and more science); And KAC, because it’s far too easy to time warp past nodes otherwise. I’ve also been using KIS/KAS and KER recently but I don’t use them every time, likewise with Stage Recovery which I would use for any career but is advised against for RP-1 for game balance reasons; I also use some Near Future mods in most of my careers but this varies- I never use NFSpacecraft but almost always use NFExploration for the probe parts expansion.

Before I do anything else- I've finally got TUFX part painting figured out: It's a little bit annoying that not all parts can be painted though, that thing would look much better if the wheels and cockpit matched the rest. That flight ended with a successful contract completion and a minor case of CO2 poisoning for the pilot, because for some reason it has no scrubbers in it and the CO2 from each flight stays put between flights. I had to switch the cockpit out for a brand new one to solve that problem. After buying the AJ10 engine from the tech tree I stuck together a cheap and fairly crude sounding rocket to get some data units into it and improve its rather poor reliability- 30% ignition failure rate, 20% overall. Fortunately, the rocket was recoverable and only the fins needed replaced; unfortunately it only lets you recover stuff to the SPH... I'm not sure this is an intended part of the RP-1 experience, but it works so I'm running with it. One new cockpit later and another X-planes contract gets done without any problems at all. Red Jaguar took to the launchpad to reach orbital velocity- 6500m/s- and then return to the surface. Despite some minor glitches on the launchpad at first, everything worked out fine: A hefty financial reward plus a bit of bonus science, combined with the data that Red Tiger 4 has been sending back from orbit, means I have enough science to restart the R&D department and get some research done! This node looks interesting- procedural probe cores will look nice and deep space avionics are required to go to the Moon and beyond: The next contract is to reach orbit and then return, which offers a substantial reward but will require a new rocket to handle the weight of that sample return capsule. With the advance money from this contract and the reward from the last one, I can unlock a load of new engines with much better performance than the RD-100 series I've been using so far, although their reliability isn't particularly good to start with. Unlocking the LR-79 made many of the other American engines much cheaper (and some earlier ones completely free), so I also had the funds to unlock balloon tanks which are very expensive but have a ridiculously high fuel fraction. With those new parts I could build a new rocket (with shiny new paint scheme) and test it out in the simulator to see if it can indeed make orbit and return: Unfortunately the simulator runs didn't work for various reasons and then I ran out of time. Full album: https://imgur.com/a/m1eo4uX Coming up next time- the quest for science continues as I attempt to put an advanced biological sample capsule into orbit for a whole day and then return it to the surface.

Four KRASHed launches (with a brand new rocket design, intended to reach LEO and then drop a return capsule to the surface while the probe remains in orbit for more science); Three X-plane missions (one of which was cut short due to a catastrophic CO2 buildup in the cockpit, necessitating a new cockpit being added as it doesn’t have any capacity for a scrubber); Two sounding rockets (to improve a new engine’s reliability); And a (sample return) capsule dropped in the sea. That wasn’t originally intended to turn into “twelve days of Christmas” but it worked out OK in the end- I even got the rhythm right, if you (mis)pronounce it as KRASH-ed .

I don’t understand what you’re asking for. If you want the in-flight clock to show Kerbin time just click the button that says MET and it will change to UT with the year, day and time. Regarding those tourist contracts for the Mun- if you reduce your orbital eccentricity to less than one, which you have to do in order to land on the Mun and means you have both a periapsis and apoapsis, then you’re “orbiting” the Mun- even if that’s on a sub-orbital trajectory; any tourists wanting to orbit the Mun will have that contract completed by landing on it. If you’re staunchly against using the maneuver system and want to continue throwing your rockets on purely ballistic trajectories (which won’t work beyond Kerbin’s SOI) then you would need to calculate the timing for when the Mun is directly above the KSC by using the sidereal rotation period of Kerbin and the sidereal orbital period of the Mun (these are not the same as a solar day or month so aren’t the 6 and 24 hours you’d expect), and you’ll end up with a value approximating 8 hours.

I see this in your logs: d3d12: failed to create 2D texture id=4640 w=128 h=128 mips=1 d3dfmt=28 [0x887a0005] This looks a lot like something I’ve had before which was caused by an outdated graphics driver, so try updating your graphics drivers and see if that resolves the issue.

Three things that make rockets more stable during launch: Balance the mass carefully. The heaviest part of any moving object will naturally try to get to the ‘front’ and unless you can correct that with other forces e.g. aerodynamics, that’s what will happen. Set your fuel tanks to drain from bottom to top in each stage, drop spent boosters as soon as possible and avoid using big, heavy engines when you don’t need to. Solid boosters are fairly powerful for their size and cost, but are also heavy and so you shouldn’t use those in your core stages; stick them on radially to give the rocket an extra kick off the launchpad then drop them once they’re spent. Watch your aerodynamics. A big blunt fairing on the front of your rocket can add a lot of drag and make it unstable, so try and keep your payload sizes in line with the size of the booster and add fins on the bottom of your first stage if necessary to keep it pointing towards space. You shouldn’t need controllable fins unless you have a really huge rocket, and avoid adding fins to upper stages as they’re dead weight in space. Engine gimballing. Many of KSP’s liquid fuelled engines have some degree of gimbal (exceptions include the Reliant and Terrier) which means they can point their thrust to one side and correct their course while the engine is running., however these don’t provide roll control unless you have more than one engine nozzle e.g. the Mammoth, or the Making History Bobcat. Radially mounted engines such as the Thud, Twitch and the Making History Cub tend to have particularly high gimballing angles to be used as vernier engines, providing less thrust but a lot of control; verniers were used on the Atlas and Soyuz rockets as the main engines were fixed, whereas the engines on the Black Arrow and Space Shuttle had a high gimbal angle to provide control. Most real rockets didn’t need fins at all as the gimbals or verniers provided enough control.

Probably just need(s/ed) to clear input locks to resolve this, either through the cheats menu or that mod which adds a button on the sidebar but I can’t remember which, maybe click through blocker?

I was referring to using engine gimbal to point the spacecraft in the direction of the burn while the engine was on, rather than using RCS or reaction wheels to do it- during a burn gimbal is the best way to do it, but only once you’re pointing the right way. Firing the engine when you’re pointing in any random direction and relying on the gimbal to turn the ship around to point the right way is farcical.

If you’re in space, either in orbit/microgravity or on a low-G body, taking off a helmet would be pretty easy even for a Kerbal- twist to unlock, then push it upwards and it’ll float off their head. For higher gravity situations I would expect some kind of shelf-like device that the suits get stored in would support the weight of the helmet and allow the Kerbal to duck/wiggle out from underneath it.

As Donald Sutherland said in Backdraft: Burn it. Burn it all.

The idea of using nothing but engine gimbal to control attitude for a burn fills me with horror; there’s always a better way, whether that’s reaction wheels (even in RP-1 there are reaction wheels good enough for pointing small probes) or RCS thrusters. The most useless thing I’ve found in KSP is the drain valve and its 5 seconds of ISP- there’s always something better to do with those resources as you can get thrust or possibly power generation (throttle so your TWR is below 1 when landed) from them instead of literally throwing them away.

I’m torn between Extraplanetary Launchpads and KSPIE- EL because I once spent many hours manually dismantling an old base on Minmus using KIS/KAS and storing it in a big ship to take back to Kerbin, involving several illogical explosions and at least one Kerbal that got hurled off into space for no apparent reason, whereas EL would have allowed me to create something useful by recycling the parts; and KSPIE because it’s tremendously complex and I don’t tend to use planet packs with other solar systems to need it. And if I had to pick a third, the new Far Future Tech which looks ridiculously good but again is overkill for stock or even JNSQ scale solar systems.

If you’re so desperate for funds that you’re resorting to attempting to deorbit and recover old satellites, then something has gone badly wrong. Take a few easy contracts like part recoveries and Kerbal rescues, which pay decent rewards, give you more funds for the parts you salvage, gives you practice at recovering stuff in case you want to continue with salvaging your old satellites and gives you free Kerbonauts if you recover them; other options include doing science returns from xxx when you already have something at xxx with the required experiments e.g. a probe or rover. If you just want to declutter the tracking station, terminate them; it’s usually not worth the hassle of trying to recover anything unless it has several very expensive parts or resources on it.