jimmymcgoochie

I'm one Janus base away from finishing, so I'll hold off on posting this week's stuff until I'm done. I seem to have misread the milestone for 'first interplanetary base' as 'interstellar' and put a base on Dynasty instead of somewhere easier to reach like Hydrus or Scaythe (or their moons). But it's a base, on a planet that isn't Rhode, so that still counts! I didn't realise when I started this just how ludicrously OP the Endurance actually is- half a million ISP plus really lightweight fuel makes for some truly absurd delta-V numbers, and even the Landers and Rangers manage ISP of 18,000 seconds which gives the Lander about 40km/s delta-V when unladen. Unfortunately there are still a few bugs like missing fusion pellets, strange heating problems and control points not working right resulting in a few near-misses with moons after burning 'prograde' which was actually straight down.

This often happens when autostruts are enabled and you dock things together- the struts can get very confused about which parts they're meant to be strutted to and things end up pointing in the wrong direction or in some cases causing massive explosions and random parts end up stationary in space over the planet/moon's poles (which has happened to me quite a few times and written off more than one space station!). Turn off all autostruts before docking stuff together, it seems to reduce the chances of this sort of thing happening.

You're probably not seeing AVP because it isn't marked as 1.10 compatible- you can either switch the filter to 'all' or go to Settings > compatible KSP versions and add 1.9 (and 1.8) so CKAN will accept all mods compatible with those versions as well as 1.10. As a general rule, most mods that work in 1.8 and later will be OK in 1.10, though some changes to fairings and drag calculations in 1.10 can break parts that are made for older versions; for planet packs like OPM you'll need the bleeding edge Kopernicus- go to Settings > CKAN settings, click 'new' for metadata repositories and add the Kopernicus BE repo to get access to it via CKAN.

Any time something drops below ~25km in Kerbin's atmosphere and isn't loaded in (outside physics range or in space centre/tracking station) the game just destroys it automatically, which means no matter how many parachutes you stick on your stages it won't have any effect. Stage Recovery is my favourite solution, it makes a huge difference early in a career game to be able to recover those boosters either using parachutes or later by powered recovery. It's entirely possible to make entirely stock reusable boosters that can launch a payload towards orbit, burn back and land at KSC before being refuelled, a new payload attached and launched again without recovering them, but this requires some pretty specialised design and flying and the payload has to be thrown high enough to still be in space when you switch back to circularise its orbit.

If you're using KSP 1.10 (or possibly 1/9? I can't remember exactly when this feature was added) you can use the 'set position' cheat to teleport yourself to any point on any planet or moon you like- the only problem is that the game will give you co-ordinates in degrees-minutes-seconds whereas the set position cheat uses decimal values, so it's a bit of guesswork to get vaguely close then tweak the numbers a bit to get closer, or find a conversion site on the internet and use that to get the numbers you need.

Mobile devices have puny hardware compared to consoles, let alone gaming PCs. If you tried to port KSP to a phone or tablet it would look terrible (because it would need to run at minimum settings), the UI would need to be completely redone to work with touchscreens and, most importantly, the phone or tablet would chew through its battery and get uncomfortably hot in the process. I don’t know about you, but I prefer my mobile games without second degree burns on my fingers.

I think the reason that the Ranger VTOL engine doesn't work is because there's no storage for IntakeAtm- I haven't yet tried adding that to the config but I suspect that will cure that particular issue. The Ranger landing gear is broken in any case, the front legs just fall through the ground when fully deployed. I also tried sticking some radiators into the engine module config but they seem to make very little difference- radiators running over 200% but the whole thing still heated up considerably. But let's face it: flying the Endurance on an interstellar voyage with the music from Interstellar playing in-game (Astronomer's Music Pack has some in it) is going to take some beating!

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.