jimmymcgoochie

Landed rovers on three moons of Janus (Beyond Home’s Jool)- two failed because “wheels aren’t touching the ground” so neither I nor Bon Voyage could drive them, and the third worked but drove itself inside a mountain and exploded. On the plus side, I landed an interstellar mission on Dynasty (Duna but with 0.8g, oof) and got another rover plus a deployed science cluster set up and running/roving.

Probably not what it was designed for, but when I made a 250km/s burn with a fully constructed Endurance the whole thing began heating up alarmingly to the extent that some attached parts were a few degrees from exploding; maybe radiators on the engine modules to cool the reactors would help? The same thing also happened to a Lander I tried to fly into orbit while carrying a freight module underneath, which had massive drag issues and barely broke the sound barrier before its core heat went too high; 1500K core but 3300K skin is a bit odd. Re. launching the Rangers on a rocket, it might be possible to do so using a Making History (or Restock+) engine plate plus the separate Ranger mounts. It’s easier to just stick them all together and launch it in one go though, even in an upscaled system (Beyond Home but at JNSQ scale) I put the entire Endurance ring plus Rangers and Landers in orbit as a single unit, using the most inefficient right angled gravity ‘turn’ you’ll ever see to fight the monstrous drag- not even the NFLV 7.5m fairing can fit around it.

Look up the ‘4ksp’ mod, it’s exactly what you’re looking for to scale the UI elements up for larger screen resolutions and is a very simple mod to install and use.

Do you mean that fuel isn’t being drained from the tanks correctly or not at all? Check the decouplers aren’t set to enable crossfeed as this can really mess with the fuel flow when fuel ducts are also present. Fuel ducts are useful to use LF side boosters and feed their fuel to the core stage as well so that when the side tanks run dry their engines stop and can be dropped, but with crossfeed enabled all the engines can drain from all the tanks and everything will use all the fuel until it all runs out. Fuel priority also makes a difference, the tanks that the duct is going from need to have a higher priority than the tanks the duct is going to as fuel tanks get drained from highest priority to lowest. Pictures would help here, either in the VAB editor or in flight.

Next time you fly the plane and it crashes on landing, hit F3 and see which parts are exploding or breaking first- this will tell you what the issue is. Brittle landing gear is one possible cause, plus the fact that it’s attached directly to the cockpit means the force could easily push the gear into the cockpit and destroy both, or the gear snaps off and the cockpit immediately hits the ground. I would recommend switching to a tricycle gear setup (but keep the tail wheel to avoid tail strikes) and adding a pair of elevators on the tail to greatly improve the pitch control; right now I see almost no pitch authority as the elevons on the wingtips are very near the mid point on the plane’s length, so they can’t apply much force. Landing a plane can be tricky, so try to find out its minimum speed while you’re well above the ground and then stay above that speed when you’re trying to land. Kill your vertical speed when you’re just above the runway then let the horizontal velocity slowly bleed off and set the plane down gently. With a bicycle/tail-dragged setup you need to take it easy on the brakes or you can face plant the nose, something that plagued various WW2-era planes and which can easily destroy the cockpit on the nose of your plane in KSP too.

Googled a load of synonyms for ‘endurance’ to name my fleet of Endurance spacecraft in the Beyond Home Space Race, only to discover that one single Endurance can carry enough components to build up to six gab plus science module ‘bases’ and launching that instead. Then the whole thing nearly overheated while making a ~250km/s burn, then I found out the fuel priority was wrong and that will take a lot of fixing with the fuel transfer bug and the 1.5FPS I’m currently getting out of it. On the plus side, no further launches should be required to finish off all the milestones and by extension the race itself.

Beamed power feels a bit cheaty to me- just park a massive reactor in orbit or a huge solar array near the sun and magically beam the power for a power-hungry base or ship right there without having to actually produce the power on site. There’s also the question of how detailed to make it- one single type of beam, different frequency bands, individual frequencies with different stats for distance losses/accuracy/heating/atmosphere penetration/etc.?

Not all of KIS/KAS is being replicated in the stock game- being able to attach parts between different crafts for example- so while the stock system seems to be more generous in terms of weight capacity (affected by gravity where KAS/KAS is not) there are still some things that the mods will be useful for; fuel lines, winches and tow bars are all pretty useful but won’t be possible using the stock system.

Module manager warnings can be a bad thing, but I’m a lot more interested in the log files as these give an insight into the game’s inner workings. Here’s the guide that tells you where to find the logs:

Planetary rotation? If you’re stationary on Kerbin’s surface then you’re still ‘moving’ in orbital terms to the tune of a little under 200m/s because the planet itself is rotating with you sitting on it. Flying east this effectively makes you cover more distance across the surface of a (static!) sphere than you actually cover over Kerbin’s (moving!) surface, because said surface is also moving; going west the opposite happens. Right now I’m sitting stationary on a chair, but I’m also hurtling around the planet at somewhere close to Mach 1 because the Earth itself is spinning on its axis.

@code99 to clarify- it doesn't actually control the engines/throttle or anything else, only the start timer. Don't expect it to make your burns for you, for that you'll need MechJeb or some other automation tool.

I once tried to build a mining rig on the Mun using a series of modular rovers and a bunch of laws attached to robotic parts. Terrible frame rates, stability issues (the little rovers with just klaw arms were bouncing all over the place) and in the end I binned the whole thing after it tore itself apart. Now I use the SimpleLogistics mod, which lets nearby landed vessels share and transfer resources without having to be physically connected to each other. They’re all still within physics range so having lots of high part count vessels in close proximity will still make the game go slow, but they won’t spontaneously disassemble each other as they tend to when connected up by robotics and docking ports or klaw.

That appears to be a burn time indicator adjuster, which at a guess will change what proportion of the burn you do before the node time itself- in your case it changes the ‘start burn in’ time so that you start the 30 second burn with 30 seconds until the node and finish the burn at 0, but the most optimal way of doing it tends to be making the burn evenly on both sides of the node, hence the default 50%. I think it’s a stock feature called ‘advanced burn information’ or something similar, buried in the main menu settings.

There are some mods that let you ‘simulate’ a mission as you like e.g. KRASH, with configurable setups that can make it cost funds to run a simulation or do it all for free. It’s not something you’ll find in the stock game though.

With a lot of mods, it takes a while for the game to load everything in and compile before it can get to the main menu. While that happens it’s common (in my experience anyway) for the game to appear to freeze, often for several minutes, with the ‘KSP is not responding’ error, before it eventually pulls itself together. Check the logs to see if you have any errors or exceptions that are causing the game to freeze or crash at this point, and if there are share the logs here (or just share them anyway so someone can look over them)- don’t dump the log contents into the forum, put them on a file sharing site then post links to them here. It would also help to know what version of KSP you’re running and mod versions, as an out of date mod can easily cause game problems.

So when your space shuttle makes it into space and you try to decouple the module inside the cargo bay, it doesn’t decouple and stays stuck to the shuttle? Are you sure it isn’t stuck in the shuttle- a brief burst of time warp will usually be enough to make the two separate themselves, but don’t stop warping while they are overlapping or bad things happen (explosions mostly)- and that you are actually decoupling the module correctly? Space station modules usually have docking ports on the ends, which can be manually decoupled by right clicking and then clicking ‘decouple node’ or ‘undock’, so you don’t need any decouplers to detach the module from inside a cargo bay. Pictures would help here, it’s hard to think what the problem is without seeing it.

KSP2 is very focussed on the future- advanced technologies, interstellar travel and space colonisation- not the past. While a competitive multiplayer mode would be possible, actually developing an AI system that could build and launch its own rockets as a competitor agency sounds like more work than it's worth. Many of KSP's parts are analogous to real things in their names, appearances and functions; there's the whole 'Making History' expansion which adds a lot more of the same to recreate real life missions like Apollo and Soyuz along with missions based on real events; not to mention the RSS/RO/RP-1 combo to literally let you play KSP like you're the real NASA or Roscosmos (or whatever they called it in the Soviet days) and compete against the real life timelines. I see no need to continue that trend in KSP2 when the biggest part of that game has been the interplanetary/interstellar thing that is still many years in the future of human spaceflight.

Spaceplanes tumbling and ending up tail-first is usually because the centre of mass moves behind the centre of drag, which is aerodynamically unstable- in everything from badminton shuttlecocks to styrofoam gliders to archery arrows, the heavy bit needs to be at the front and the draggy bit at the back to keep it pointing the right way. Heavy rocket and jet engines on the tail is a common reason for spaceplanes being unstable during re-entry. Try- shifting your centre of mass further forwards by changing the fuel drain priority of the fuel tanks to drain any nose-mounted tanks last or not at all; using the inline Mk2 cockpit with a Mk2-1.25m tank then an NCS tank set as the lowest fuel priority; adding some RCS thrust to the top of the nose which will push the nose down during re-entry; adding some sort of drag at the tail by deploying all the elevons/tail fins with an action group (I usually use abort/backspace); increasing the control authority on your front canards so they don't end up adding drag at the nose when it's at a high angle of attack; and/or sticking to a fairly shallow pitch which will make it harder for the plane to start pivoting.

I've just discovered a slight problem with my grand plan to build a fleet of Endurances- to unlock all the remaining parts (Ranger/Lander SSTOs, the engine pods, science and base parts) will cost me 9600 science. Throw in the little Viper craft (mini Ranger) and that goes up to 15k science! Fortunately, I now have a formidably powerful propulsion system using two of Endurance's engines powered by 3 chunky fission reactors that can reach delta-V values of well over a million seconds; the game runs horribly slowly (under 2FPS in some cases) and the burn times are several hours long, but blatting over to Gateway in 30 days instead of 4 years will definitely help get that science as fast as possible. The Jupiter program has begun, firing an interstellar probe at Kerbol and a slightly smaller (but still pretty huge) probe at Gateway to start gathering the ~10,000 science needed to finish off the Endurance. https://imgur.com/a/6ZFqTu5 If this race had started now I would be giving some serious consideration to Far Future Tech as the beta for that was recently released, but I'm committed to the Endurance now and FFT is too new and unfamiliar.

Interplanetary travel is difficult in KSP because there's nothing to say when you should make your transfer burn and you can't easily create nodes far in the future. An 18Mm periapsis and 1km/s capture burn suggests that you made the burn at a time when the two planets weren't well aligned meaning you have a lot of excess velocity when you arrive at Duna, which to me suggests you burned too late. Generally speaking, when heading outwards from the sun you want the target planet to be about 45 degrees ahead of the one you're orbiting, and when heading inwards it's about 45-60 degrees behind the one you're orbiting. It's often easier to make a pure pro/retrograde transfer burn towards the target and then match its inclination in solar orbit, which also gives you an opportunity to correct your trajectory and adjust your destination periapsis or to compensate for an inaccurate transfer burn- common for long burns with low TWR craft as many interplanetary vessels are. While there are some helpful guides floating around the forums and the wider internet, the best tool for basic interplanetary travel is the Astrogator mod, which tells you the time until the next transfer window for every planet and the moons around the current planet, the delta-V required to get there and can even create the nodes for you to tweak as you like.

AAARG(r)- another data dump. Hmm, now what have I already posted and what's new? This posting once a week thing is getting confusing. I'll split them according to which Imgur album they're in, which might make it easier to keep track of. Milestones: First interplanetary landing- Y3, D113, 2:20. First Kerballed interplanetary landing- also Y3, D113, 2:20. Interplanetary comms network- completed at Y4, D350, 2:31. First Rhode space station- Y4, D352, 2:58. Construction of the Jupiter 1 interstellar probe is underway and it will be heading up as soon as I stick a lander on it to lob at the first available planet or moon. Imgur albums: https://imgur.com/a/y078Syi https://imgur.com/a/f6TBKxC https://imgur.com/a/YIzEqkf @GuessingEveryDay Can I move the Rhode space station to Lua and count that for the 'first space station around a moon' milestone, or does it have to be a brand new station?

By a combination of "hurling a probe at the suns" and blind luck (because those sunflares are retina searing even on a screen!) I actually managed to orbit Fate and then escape again. It turns out that a solar probe is actually possible after all!

Of the stock music my favourite is probably ‘Frost Waltz’, but I use the Soundtrack Editor mod to add more music to the game- the composer of some of the KSP music has a huge library of music available to download, and I recently found out that Astronomer’s Visual Pack has a set of music to go with it including from ‘The Martian’, ‘Interstellar’ and M83- Outro (used in the KSP2 trailer). If I could add any music at all to the game, I’d go with both Saturn and Uranus by Holst, some music from ‘First Man’ and the launch scene music from ‘Apollo 13’. And then sneak in the debris scene from ‘Gravity’ to make EVAs properly terrifying.

Some snapshots from the Beyond Home Space Race: Rhode just appearing over the horizon on Lua. A fast fly-by of Fury in progress. I just noticed that Fury's moon Anger is also in that picture, just hanging off the right edge of Fury. Rhode and all three of its moons, including Armstrong where the rover is landed. Because why wouldn't you aerobrake a huge asteroid with a rocket grappled to the back and a Kerbal strapped into the rocket. Rhode perfectly framed by a 'ballute' during a re-entry of Lua's pitiful atmosphere (under 15km high even with a 3.5x rescale).

@GuessingEveryDay I have five probes going to five different planets and moons beyond Rhode's SOI, and two of them have arrived at their destinations. I also have a crewed vessel which has made it to another planet and is ready to land. Can I do the landing, claim the two interplanetary landing milestones and then finish off the comms network later (as it's already in progress) or do I have to wait until all five relays are in orbit of five different planets/moons before doing the landing (which will delay the landing by over a year)?