jimmymcgoochie

Hold shift, then rotate the main wings very slightly so the leading edge (front) is angled upwards by a few degrees. Wings in KSP only generate lift due to their angle of attack against the flow of air, so you need to angle your wings up slightly to generate lift on the runway. I would suggest that you use smaller wings on that plane though, those huge main wings will generate far more lift- and drag!- than you need for that small plane; try a delta wing or some of the structural wings which are much lighter and cheaper.

Let's face it: if someone threw me out an airlock with no tether and no thrusters of any kind (not even a fire extinguisher!), I'd be flailing around in a blind panic too... And everyone knows 'frantically bashing every button in sight' is the correct way of flying stupendously expensive spaceships- just ask any KSP player!

Speaking from experience working in a software development team (as a tester): Unless you have a gargantuan budget and/or life or death consequences from using any piece of software, there will always be bugs. Some will be simple and easy to fix, others require weeks or even months of effort to fix; some will have a minor impact on everyone whereas others will result in total system failure but for a mere handful of people. Sometimes it’s preferable to leave a bug in the system because fixing it would require a huge rework or rewrite of a fundamental underlying system. You really think that the game’s developers are just twiddling their thumbs right now without caring about the pile of posts and reports about that fuel transfer bug and others besides? They’re working on the next release which will almost certainly fix the fuel transfer bug (clearly it was too gnarly to patch quickly or a 1.10.2 release would have happened by now) and a few others, as well as whatever new features are coming in 1.11. Besides which, it’s a separate entity that ports the game over to consoles (which have hardware limitations causing lower performance with big vessels) and if things aren’t getting updated on the console versions then it’s their fault, not the developers who make the game.

I made an almost real scale Black Arrow replica- nearly identical in size and even in performance in the first two stages compared to the original. This rocket turned out to be really similar in size to stock parts (2m first stage compared to 1.875m parts from Making history and 4’6”- 1.37m- second stage which closely matched the 1.25m stock parts) which made things much easier. I also made a replica of the hypothetical ‘Black Prince’ rocket that used the first two stages of Black Arrow as its second and third stages, with a larger Blue Streak missile as the first stage for increased payload capacity. The Black Arrow alone can do Mun or Minmus land and return missions using a small and lightweight probe, and the Black Prince with a much larger probe made it to Gilly’s surface and returned with fuel to spare. Also on the theme of historical accuracy: all four Black Arrow rockets were launched from the Woomera test range in Australia; there’s an additional DLC launch site called Woomerang which is clearly named after Woomera (and boomerangs, also Australian) on Kerbin. It’s about as historically accurate as you can get in stock KSP to launch a Black Arrow from Woomerang!

1) Fuel transfer bug is a known issue, the fact that it hasn’t been fixed yet would indicate that it’s a rather complicated thing to track down. 2) That’s what time warp is for? If your ore and/or power production rates aren’t high enough when you switch vessels then you’ll probably run out of them and then it won’t produce any more until you switch back again. Either keep the focus until you produce the fuel you need, or leave it running in the background for a while with enough ore and power being generated to meet the demand for both. 3) Gilly has puny gravity, so it’s not surprising that wheels don’t work well. The floating part sounds odd, but a top-heavy design in really low gravity could be unstable especially if the wheels are spinning while off the ground then abruptly apply some acceleration when they touch down again, causing the whole craft to rotate.

This is turning into a flame war, which benefits nobody. @Popestar When your craft burns up in the atmosphere, what causes it? Hit F3 after it happens to get a play by play of what happened when, then take a screenshot of that and of the part that’s re-entering before it hits the atmosphere; upload to the image hosting site of your choice then insert them using the button in the bottom right of the reply text box (directly above ‘submit reply’) so we can take a look. It’s hard to figure out what the problem is without seeing the problem. I routinely play KSP with re-entry heating at the maximum level (120%) and yet a regular crew pod with a heat shield can survive a direct return to re-entry from the Mun or Minmus with no issues even with only 10% ablator on the heat shield. They can also survive re-entering from LKO in a rescaled system almost 3 times the size of the stock planets, with an orbital velocity approaching 4km/s (beyond escape velocity for stock Kerbin), even with the re-entry heating maxed out. If you’re using a probe, put it inside a 1.25m service bay as those are really heat-resistant and will shield the probe core inside from the heat of re-entry. Parachutes won’t deploy inside a service bay unless it’s open though so remember to open the doors once you’re through re-entry.

Built a new rolling base to deploy on Minmus using KSTS for in-orbit construction. Switched to the base when it was ready and it was a mangled mess with most of the important parts (wheels, fuel tanks, engines etc.) at stupid angles. Switched it out for a new one (cheat to runway, recover, launch again, cheat back to the same orbit- if the game decides to break a perfectly sensible vessel then I’m prepared to use the cheats to fix it), wasted a good 30 seconds burning for Minmus with the wrong control point set before correcting it, set up a nice Minmus intercept, hit time warp and the intercept vanished completely- apoapsis wasn’t even that close to Minmus any more, requiring more fuel to be wasted on a correction burn. I think in future I’ll just check the cost to do orbital construction with KSTS but then cheat the vessel into orbit and deduct the funds, that way it might actually work without random explosions and everything getting jumbled.

If you just want to fly by the Mun and come back, it’s more than possible to do that with all level 1 buildings. A probe is slightly easier than a crewed mission as probes are lighter, but you’ll get more science with a Kerbal on board to do crew and (if possible) EVA reports. The best way to do a fly-by is to get a free return trajectory, so that the rocket comes back to Kerbin without needing any additional thrust after the transfer burn. It’s really hard to do without patched conics so is best performed with a level 2 tracking station, but if you’re using a probe then just bombing past the Mun before transmitting back what science you can isn’t a terrible idea.

If you can’t do it by having an engineer on board or on EVA transfer the fuel from a storage part to the engine, then it can’t be done. I’m fairly sure that it was designed so that it couldn’t have its nuclear fuel restored as the engine effectively runs in an open cycle and destroys its own reactor as it runs.

Deploy a satellite with SCANsat scanners- radar and SAR for low and high resolution altimetry scans to show the terrain height and slope, and a multispectral scanner to map the biomes- into a near polar orbit (90 degrees +/- the smallest FOV of your scanners, to ensure that the entire planet or moon is scanned) and then wait for scanning to occur as the satellite orbits. SCANsat also includes visual and resource (ore) scanners and some can detect anomalies on the surface like monoliths or other Easter eggs. Once scanning has happened, open up the SCAN global map and switch to the slope map, then find areas which are relatively flat and level and put waypoints down on them. I usually look for points where several biomes intersect and then check for flat bits nearby to maximise the science gains per landing if it’s a rover or a crewed ship. MechJeb’s landing guidance mode can land at waypoints, so select the newly created waypoint and set it as the target landing site then let MechJeb do the rest. If you have Breaking Ground, it’s worth adding a BTDT (Been There Done That) scanner to help find scannable surface objects as well as the anomalies and Easter eggs; it’s pricey, but it helps.

The 100- just watched series 1 of it and have some serious issues with it: The basic premise of the show is that a nuclear war has rendered Earth (almost said Kerbin there ) uninhabitable so 12 orbiting space stations joined together as the last surviving humans. First of all, twelve stations!? Secondly, some of those ‘stations’ are huge, vastly larger than the ISS, and yet somehow they are able to stick them all together. The combined station orbits for almost a century, somehow never running out of anything important like medical supplies, life support or air, supporting a population of several thousand, until the whole thing suddenly starts to collapse. The station has gravity throughout, but only one ring structure actually spins- the rest would be in microgravity like the ISS and yet every scene on the station is in full gravity. When people from the station get down to Earth’s surface (surprise surprise, it’s habitable) they have no ill effects at all from going from a lifetime of low-G to full Earth gravity. At the end of the first series, the entire station is deorbited (minus the spinning ring for some reason, unclear why as the deorbiting thrusters- ridiculously large for any space station to use for station keeping- are firing directly down the axis of the ring’s rotation) and yet some sections manage to not only survive re-entry intact but also engage rockets to try and control their descent for a relatively soft landing of a mere 70mph; as if crashing a space station into the ground at motorway speed is going to be anything other than lethal for anyone who didn’t burn up. Crashing a car at that speed is nasty enough and they’re built to withstand those sorts of forces, never mind a century old space station that’s just gone through atmospheric entry. Exactly how much nuclear fallout do they think there was? If they think it’s enough to render Earth hostile to life a hundred years later then the levels of radiation would have to be truly staggering, implying the use of enough nukes to produce a nuclear winter that would freeze the entire planet for many years. Clearly nobody ever looked down, though, or they would have seen the huge forests; forests which glow in the dark, Pandora-style, despite this having no basis in science as trees can’t magically mutate and start emitting bioluminescence.

Launched a little flotilla of cheap science sats to scrape up some Kerbin science for a contract, then successfully added an extra bit to an orbiting base eventually bound for Gilly. Then I deorbited the extra bit and switched back to the base and- Many simultaneous explosions, 34 pieces of debris stopped dead in Kerbin orbit and slowly falling to the surface, and only a small piece of the base left intact. The last version did something similar before I replaced it, maybe the design is flawed or just tastes nice for the Kraken...

The 10m inflatable heat shield produces tremendous drag due to its huge size when inflated, meaning it’s hard to balance the forces during descent and easy to get flipped backwards. It’s always a good idea to test out anything destined for Eve’s surface by throwing it at Kerbin’s atmosphere instead- you’ll need to accelerate to almost 4km/s to come close to replicating an Eve re-entry but it’s a lot cheaper than getting it all the way to Eve before finding a big flaw in the design. Something that might help you: Put a load of ore tanks on the sides of the 10m heat shield, but don’t carry the ore all the way from Kerbin’s surface to Eve as it’s really heavy and will hurt your delta-V. Send a small mining ship out to Gilly and collect ore. Take the ore to the rover and put it in the tanks before trying to land on Eve. Add something that produces a lot of drag and has good heat tolerance at the back of your vessel- another 10m heat shield, or if you have Breaking Ground either some large wing panels or 2.5m/3.75m heat shields on alligator hinges to open them out for re-entry. You want the centre of mass to be at the front and the centre of drag to be at the back or it will flip around very easily, but a combination of adding ballast at the pointy end and adding drag at the other end will make it easier to keep the pointy end pointing down and increase your survival chances significantly.

I discovered that in map or tracking station view, holding control and clicking one type of vessel hides every other type of vessel e.g. ctrl+click on probes hides everything but probes. Ctrl+click on probes again shows everything again. Is this a feature of tracking station evolved or stock behaviour?

@kerboknaut you’ve fallen for the classic mistake of putting the ISRU on the orbiter, when it really should be included on the lander. Ore is really, really heavy but fuel/oxidiser and monopropellant are not, so it’s much more practical to include the ISRU on a lander and then put fuel tanks either on that drill/refinery vessel or build a dedicated fuel tanker to carry the produced fuel up to the orbiting ship. The setup I last used for Duna/Ike had one large mining ship to land on Ike (I did land it on Duna itself, once, but then all the engines came off ) and do all the mining and fuel production, then a pair of fuel carriers which were equipped with wheels so they could land vaguely near the mining ship and then drive up to it. The fuel tanks were equipped with grabbing claws to ‘dock’ with the miner, avoiding the difficulties of actually docking properly with two vessels on the surface, and also allowing the crew of the mining ship to be rescued when it crashed made an attempted landing and crashed on Duna, by grabbing hold of a crewed lander ship and driving it over to the mining rig for the crew to board and blast off again.

A very profitable few days at the 'Space' Program. "Why 'Space'?", I hear you ask. (Or maybe that's just my imagination; working from home since April is starting to take its toll ) That's why. Launching an amphibious submarine drone to dredge up some science from the water off the coast of the KSC, and putting the newly installed constructed KSC harbour to good use for the first time. Total gain around 10 science and all the funds (minus a dribble of jet fuel) were recovered- which is important, as the Program is one step away from raiding the vending machines and charity collection tins to keep paying the bills at this point. A cheap mission was needed to gather science from space around Kerbin for a contract; an EVA report from Kerbin space high would fulfil it, and fill a gap in the science reports. Contract completed, science acquired, the mission made a small profit but more importantly freed up a contract slot so more contracts would be offered. This turned out to be extremely lucrative! A series of part recovery and Kerbal rescue contracts kept spawning, using up all of the remaining part grabber probes in the set of 7 sent up last report. Several part test contracts also came up which required parts to be tested while splashed down- that new harbour was perfect for those. And then, while preparing to test a large parachute at low altitude, the rickety old 'Science Plane 2' which is the earliest surviving plane design in this career, had a mishap on takeoff which removed the entire tail section- elevators, tail fin and main landing gear. Oddly enough, this configuration is actually completely flyable and fairly stable to boot, but without the main gear the only option was to deploy that test parachute over the runway and hope for the best; it was either that or have the pilot bail out and let the plane crash, and we still needed the cash at this point. Close enough! Nothing exploded on landing and the pilot was unharmed: the definition of a successful landing! After accepting a few more contracts including one to do some more scans of Eve, the final numbers look like this: Almost a million funds gained! Not in a particularly exciting way, but still important as it will mean the interesting space missions can now be funded without resorting to raiding Jeb's piggy-bank, plus Mortimer has finally stopped hiding in the stationery cupboard, flicking his fingers over his lips and making bibble bibble noises. (He's now hiding under his desk and has to be coaxed out using chocolate, but it's an improvement!) Full album and more details: https://imgur.com/a/n4QtA27 What's next? More contract farming, maybe- that 4.2 million funds R&D upgrade isn't going to pay for itself! The VAB and SPH both need over a million funds to upgrade those too, plus the runway and the admin building... The next maneuver nodes aren't for over a hundred days and the next transfer windows are still some time away too, so plenty of time to fully prepare the Gilly Base before it leaves Kerbin's SOI. That time will also allow more scanning to happen and more high value contracts to be completed.

This. You need docking ports on the hub as well as the parts you're adding to it. Easily resolved using KIS/KAS, you can just send up some extra ports or 'borrow' them from something that's already there and then stick them to the hub, but if you aren't using those mods then you'll need to send a new hub module with docking ports attached- and make sure they're the right way round!

I think that the only way Kerbals with the same name can be told apart is by using their middle names, or by picking really obscure (and sometimes ridiculous) names to make sure nobody else has the same name. That would certainly explain some of the ludicrous monikers I’ve seen: Billy-Bobrim, Erlemone, Thompvin, and my personal favourite, Derbal the Kerbal . I’m a bit surprised nobody else has mentioned Kerea, the Korea-shaped peninsula east of the KSC. Trying to Kerbal-ify real countries is probably not the best way to do it though as just shoving K or Ker into their names won’t work in most cases.

I can only assume that you didn’t see the entire section of the forums called ‘Mission Reports’? There are reports in there ranging from single missions and incidents to entire career games spanning over a hundred game years and a few that turned into proper stories in their own right or which are being done like a real space agency would, with logos and twitter-style updates.

@king of nowhere I tried to build that SSTO rocket above but it didn't work for me, it was quite a bit short on delta-V for a 20 ton dummy payload even with a nosecone on the top and never made it to orbit. What am I missing?

I've found the cause for the apparent discrepancy in some MH parts- the new appearances were added with a newer version of Restock/+ (1.2.x) than I was using (1.1.2 in KSP 1.9.1), bumping to the latest versions added the new paint jobs for the MH pods as expected. I haven't got far enough in this career game to see if the MH version of the Saturn V engine adapter can change the number of engine pods yet, so I'll fire up a sandbox game and see. I did have to replace the config for the mini-klaw from Restock+ 1.2.1 with the version from 1.1.2 to make it usable as the former has been deprecated by the stock version. EDIT: I checked both the MH and Restock+ versions of the Saturn V engine adapter, but no sign of any options to change the number of engine pods. I have B9 part switch installed, is there something else I'm missing? The description says it should have variants with different engine pod setups but I don't see them anywhere.

I can't even... RSS career? With stock parts!? And NO CONTRACTS!?!? Wow. Just wow...

Taking the plunge and updating this game to 1.10.1, mods and all! Hopefully there aren't too many bugs to deal with... EDIT: Got an unending wall of NullReferenceExceptions when I loaded up the save game. Oh well, looks like I'm sticking to 1.9.1 for the foreseeable future.

I think most of it is just running the game for too long, I may need to close and reboot the game more often.

The save file has a version in it, and updating the game also bumps the version in the save. You can use older saves in newer versions (e.g. a save made in 1.9.1 works fine in 1.10) but NOT the other way round, so a save from 1.9 won’t work in 1.8.1 or earlier and a save from 1.10.1 will be incompatible with any version other than 1.10.1.