jimmymcgoochie

If you’re starting from Kerbin then Gilly is better- your solar panels are vastly more effective and the delta-V requirements are considerably lower to get there. Bop and Pol are both small and have inclined orbits around Jool so getting to either can be difficult and going from one to the other is even more difficult. They’re a bit bigger than Gilly, meaning their SOIs are a bit larger but their orbital velocities are also higher, there’s hardly any sunlight so solar panels work at a mere 4% of their nominal output (bring RTGs if you can) but Pol is a marginally easier target to get to. Oh, and beware the Bop anomaly...

You can: enable the biome display in the cheats menu which will show the biomes in map view; use KerbNet with the more advanced probe cores (OKTO2, HECS2, RoveMate and possibly the RGUs too); use the surface resource sensor or the narrow-band scanner; or a variety of mods which will tell you which biome you’re in/over or where you’re going to land. Or you could build rovers instead of ordinary landers to be able to drive between different biomes after landing.

If you’re referring to this: Then it isn’t explicitly marked as compatible with KSP 1.10(.x) so that might be the problem. Are you getting any errors in the logs, and have you downloaded all the dependencies?

In terms of getting to them I'd say- Ike, Gilly, Pol, Bop. While the Eve transfer window opens more regularly than the Duna one, Ike's orbit is both planar and geostationary plus it's the biggest of the four moons, however that can be a hindrance rather than a help if you don't actually want to go to Ike but it gets in the way; Gilly has an elliptical and inclined orbit and a tiny SOI, but it's easier to get to Eve than to Jool; Pol is less inclined than Bop which makes up for it being the outermost Joolian moon. For landing on them, probably- Gilly, Pol, Bop, Ike. Gilly is the smallest and has the lowest gravity (I think), and if I remember them correctly from the one time I've been to Jool's moons Pol has flatter terrain than Bop which is very lumpy, making Pol the easier target; Ike is the biggest so requires more delta-V to land from orbit. For overall ease of operations when you're there- Gilly, Ike, Pol, Bop. Gilly has the advantage of being closest to the Sun and so gets a lot more power from those solar panels, plus it will hardly ever be eclipsed by Eve, however the low gravity makes it more hazardous; Ike is regularly eclipsed by Duna, but again the solar panels will still give you a reasonable dose of electricity and the gravity is high enough that you don't have to worry about floating around too much; and both Pol and Bop are too far out to get any meaningful power from solar panels (1EC/s from a Gigantor if you're lucky) so there really isn't much to choose from those two. In my current career game I've reached the stage where I'm planning the first interplanetary mission, and I'm going with Gilly- much more solar power than at Duna will make it easier to gather a whole load of long-term science from it.

A short but fairly active day today with quite a few launches. We begin where we left off, with big funds and science reserves. A contract came up to expand Space Lab Two by 5 Kerbal capacity, which conveniently is exactly the capacity of the Mini Shuttle that's already being used to ferry crew up and down to that same station. One routine flight and one eclipse later, contract completed and two Kerbals took a ride home in order to fly on the next mission to deploy a seismic sensor on the Mun- and level up to 2 stars in the process. Not quite how that landing was meant to go, but any closer and it would be on top of the deployed science cluster- much better than a few recent attempts by MechJeb's landing system which were hundreds of metres off target. Let's see how that seismic sensor does with a little missile, hurled at over 4km/s straight at the Mun! less than 1.5%... An evacuation ship was sent up to the Mobile Mun base in case the crew need to leave for some reason. This was built as a rover with the return vessel able to detach and fly away, Apollo lander style, and arrived at the Mobile Mun base with absolutely no use of the 'set position' cheat after I forgot to include a Bon Voyage autopilot so it couldn't drive there itself . And finally, two more missions were launched- a grabber to rescue yet another stranded Kerbal from LKO and a scanner probe to do every possible SCANsat scan of Moho- and a new strategy was activated- Contract slot machine, which will randomly change contract rewards by -75% to +200%. After all that, today was still a net profit. The Gilly base has completed construction in LKO and now awaits supplies, fuel, crew, radiation shielding, a transfer window to get it to Gilly and a transfer stage to propel it there. Science continues to be gathered from both space stations, the Mun base and the four Kerbin bases plus a trickle from the Eve landers. Both space stations and the Mun base still have enough supplies to last for years, however Space Station One's crew are beginning to show signs of excessive radiation exposure and may have to be replaced before all the science is gathered. Full album and descriptions here: https://imgur.com/a/Wk2xN8G What's next? The Moho transfer window approaches, followed by Dres. A design has been drawn up for a second mobile base, this time on Minmus, but there currently aren't enough Kerbonauts free to crew it so this might have to wait until after the Kerbin labs have gathered their data. At some point the launchpad will be upgraded to level 3 too and some new launch rockets built to carry much heavier payloads.

My best guess is that you have another setting turned off that means shadows aren’t shown at all- shadow cascades just controls the resolution of the shadows and AFAIK is not an on/off switch, Alternatively it’s an issue with your graphics driver software, try updating that?

Please read this: Then, find the logs, post to a file sharing site then link to them here. Most likely the game is throwing an exception during loading/compiling which is causing it to stop loading, and the logs should show what’s going on. A list of mods would be helpful too, as would your OS (e.g. windows 10) and your machine’s specs- CPU, GPU and RAM. If the loading screen stops when the load bar says something about loading expansions, that’s usually a sign that an exception has occurred; if it’s earlier than that then the message at the bottom of the screen might reveal what’s being loaded that caused the freeze.

Glad I could help something similar happened to me recently so it was fresh in my memory.

Install the Kerbin Environmental Institute (KEI) mod to automate science collection around the KSC itself. It's easy to get a good haul of science even before launching a single vessel if you gather all the EVA and crew reports and mystery goo observations, and any time you unlock a new science experiment go back to KEI to get the science out of it. Building upgrades also unlock new 'biomes' meaning more science. Use the Stage Recovery mod to salvage a considerable portion of your launch costs by recovering spent stages and boosters, as long as you attach enough parachutes. It adds to the part count and reduces payload capacity, but drastically reduces launch costs for minimal effort. You can reach orbit with just the first three nodes and all level 1 buildings, just remember to take all the science experiments you can with you- and recover them! Science Jr a.k.a. the materials bay is bulky and has poor heat resistance, so as soon as you unlock the science sample box use that to store the experiment results rather than trying to re-enter with the materials bay stuck to the bottom of your pod- it tends to flip and burn off your parachute. Kerbin has lots of science available, but getting it can be difficult and time-consuming- the best way to do it is to build rovers and use the Bon Voyage mod to drive them in the background, repeat as necessary when you unlock more experiments. The same applies to the Mun and Minmus, although it's better to wait until you have all the science experiments unlocked before doing that. A permanent base on the Mun or Minmus with a science lab on it can rake in science if you remember to collect each experiment twice and bring it back there, and having a scientist on hand means you can reset mystery goos and materials bays to re-use them on other biomes. Once you've gone orbital, don't rush to go to the Mun or Minmus. There's a lot of money to be made by doing tourist contracts to Kerbin orbit, so build a rocket that can carry tourists to orbit and back (if you have Making History, the 'Pomegranate' pod is quite good for this, otherwise the stock 'Slim Shuttle' works pretty well too) and try to land them as close to the KSC as possible each time they return. Spaceplanes are difficult to make without the top technologies, but there are ways to make them using less advanced parts so have a look around on the forums to find some good designs; spaceplanes are more efficient than rockets and can carry more tourists too plus they can fly back to the runway and land instead of just parachuting down wherever they happen to end up. And most importantly- have fun!

@Zosma Procyon have you tried flying that plane in Eve’s atmosphere with the wings still folded? It would require some of the outer control surfaces to be either disabled or reversed, but with the thicker atmosphere it should be possible to at least glide it down rather than messing around with parachutes or trying to pop the fairing on the surface.

Mun is easier to type (no umlaut so it works with pretty much any keyboard), easier to pronounce (no umlaut to change pronunciation, it’s said exactly as written to rhyme with sun) and is notably different to Moon (which Mün isn’t, since ü ~ oo) which refers specifically to the moon of Earth. Mun is how it’s been since I started playing KSP and I see no reason to change it now- but if you want to see Mün, go in and change the localisation files to add those umlauts.

I see nothing here that says I can’t use mods, and I know of a rather nifty ion-style monopropellant thruster with ISP well over a thousand plus a 2.5m monopropellant aerospike that might work for Eve... Look up the ‘monopalooza’ challenge from a few months ago, there were some interesting designs in there due to a strict stock parts only rule and a weight limit of 100 tons- I managed to land Kerbals on Eve, Gilly and Duna with a single launch (none came home again); there were some creative attempts to get around the ISP issue in atmosphere that could be useful here.

A fairly short update compared to the last one: Some funds were spent to shuffle crew to Space Lab 2, which then allowed for the orbital construction of the Gilly base which will eventually go to Gilly and stay there for a few years. Although now that I think about it, it has about 500m/s delta-V so won't even get to the Mun and I forgot to add a docking port or something to attach the transfer stage to . Construction will be complete in a mere 18 days, so plenty time to send up a small vessel with some extra parts which can be attached to the base by those engineers using KIS tools, and to design the transfer stage that will take the base out to Gilly- over a year to the next transfer window though so there's plenty of time for that. A new design was created for the old rolling lab concept, which aims to complete a long-ish term science experiment on Kerbin. The new design is considerably cheaper than the last one and didn't break all its wheels immediately upon spawning on the runway- win-win! Yes, 10 Gigantors is a lot, but they're only generating half their nominal power output on the surface due to atmospheric scattering or some other Kerbalism sorcery. The last design really struggled because of this, so the solution was just add MOAR GIGANTORS! The contract Eve 'base' arrived at Eve and made its descent: Then a similar design was sent to the Mun for another contract: As soon as that contract was completed, the base was fired upwards then crashed into the surface to get some deployed seismic sensor data, but nothing was registered. Closer examination of the deployed science cluster revealed a small problem: 404- seismic sensor not found And the Moho rover fell into the Mohole a few times, broke local gravity and forced a game reboot and some save file editing to move it somewhere less glitchy and fix the antenna that mysteriously broke a few days ago. Moar pictures and details here: https://imgur.com/a/tl55i8v Next steps? A few contracts came up to do the full suite of SCANsat scans of Moho, so a probe was built that can get into Moho orbit with all the SCANsat components and will be launched in time for the next transfer window in 43 days. The Gilly Base will need some upgrades once it's completed, not to mention filled up with fuel, supplies and radiation shielding and a transfer stage that can take the ~100t completed base all the way from LKO to Gilly orbit. And a seismic sensor needs deployed to that Mun science cluster ASAP! Any further contracts will be completed as and when I can be bothered there's a gap in the launch schedule.

KSP and KSP2 are totally separate games, being developed by different studios. The original game will continue to be developed independently of KSP2 and I suspect for some time after the sequel is launched (pun intended ).

There’s a backup folder inside saves/your save name which contains the last five (by default) persistent files, check and see if an old copy is there which still has the progress you lost and if there is, move it up a level out of the backup folder and load the save in game. I made some considerable career progress yesterday- landed probes in 3 biomes on Eve, dispatched a ‘base’ to also land on Eve (it’s amazing what passes for a ‘base’ when you focus on just meeting each criterion with minimal cost) and upgraded both Mission Control and the Astronaut Complex to level 3 which in turn enabled some more long term experiments on my Mun base. Some save file hacking occurred to fix a problem with the labs on that base and two space stations that re-enabled their long term science experiments, and an attempt was made to build a jet-powered Rotordyne, which ended with almost all of the parts still attached, the craft still the right way up and the pilot still alive- mildly traumatised, probably, but alive: a roaring success!

If you can’t find any, try enabling the BG cheats to indicate where all the surface features are. They’re usually biome specific but Gilly has so few biomes that you’ll probably find some wherever you go. There’s also the SCANsat BTDT part which can detect them at short ranges.

I encountered this before, the solution is: Attach a (really small) part to the bottom node to block it; Attach the engine to the previously blocked node inside the ‘pit’ while holding alt; Remove the bottom node part. Not ideal, but it works.

And we're back! Today was probably a record for time elapsed, and definitely a record for funds gained! There was some good news straight away as I hacked the save file again Mission Control pushed a software update to re-enable the lost lab experiments on both Space Station One in Mun orbit and Space Lab 2 in LKO. Although I've just realised that all the Atmospheric Fluid Spectro-Variometers have lost their experiment configs too- with Kerbalism the AFSV can host one of a number of atmospheric science experiments, or one of a number of oceanic science experiments, or be configured to extract resources like nitrogen or oxygen from the local atmosphere. Looks like another save file hacking software update is in order! Two missions were dispatched to Eve; unfortunately there are no screenshots of the first (the Eve 'base') because I forgot I was doing this but here's one of the second mission, the triple landers for Eve, making their transfer burn. The crew of Space Station One were alarmed to get a component failure message, but it turned out to be a searchlight and thus not mission critical in the slightest. A few other bits were showing their age after a few years in space, so Deblin headed out for some (percussive) maintenance. For the record: Eve is weird... But all three probes were landed, netting a large quantity of free funds for some world first achievements and some jaw-droppingly easy contracts (enter Eve's atmosphere? Science data from Eve's surface? ) which combined with a quick but profitable rescue mission in LKO which landed unusually close to the KSC and a few more contract advances for easy contracts (science from Moho surface- got a rover there now; deployed seismic sensor data from the Mun- already deployed and waiting for some stuff to be crashed into the Mun) were more than sufficient to fund some facility upgrades. First, Mission Control: Which unlocked more contract slots to fill up with more contracts, many of which will be completed with existing or planned future missions and which gained back a sizeable percentage of the upgrade costs in advances. Next up- the Astronaut Complex: Why that, and not the Launchpad? One reason- SCIENCE! Upgrading the AC allows both the previously unusable crew experiments on the Mobile Mun lab (which is actually called Mobile Mun Base 1, but I might change that to Mobile Mun lab instead because I've been calling it that anyway- but I digress ) to be run; or it would, but one requires a level 3 engineer too. Still, more science is always good and there's enough left over to upgrade the launchpad, or to begin constructing the Gilly base in LKO with enough left over to fuel it up and send it on its way at the end. All of that took over 200 game days, so there was a lot of waiting around. And during all that waiting around, someone got bored and decided that what the Space Program needed more than anything else was a gyrocopter with jet engines on its rotor tips. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this didn't go too well... Full album with more details here: https://imgur.com/a/rlcu34D What's next? Probably that long-awaited Gilly mission, given that we have the funds and the facilities to extract maximum science value out of it. With no realistic prospect of a rescue mission, this will be a significant undertaking and there will probably be a few backup supply missions sent out there to ensure that there's enough food, water and oxygen to last the duration of the mission. And when ISRUs and drills eventually become available, maybe a mining rig will also be sent to refuel it and/or start up a fuel depot. Oh, and a lander for Ike, because there are some contracts for that and nothing currently in Duna's SOI can do them.

An interesting idea, but I don't think that KSP's physics system would handle it particularly well and it's hard to see what advantage they would have over a conventional rotor. And then I got distracted on Wikipedia reading about the project (another promising piece of British technology that never reached its full potential ) and then went and made one; I think the results speak for themselves... Any landing you can walk away from and all that...

You reverted the mission? From JOOL!? Yep, NERVs are on the weedy side for their size and especially mass leading to a low TWR and thus low acceleration, so descending into Jool’s gravity well with a few of those on a biggish ship will lead to outright velocity increasing as you get lower despite the retrograde burn.

I always autostrut engines to the root part- it seems to help the whole rocket remain stable when physics warp is active instead of everything compressing together and in rare cases the engines end up inside other parts, which promptly explode due to exhaust heat... When you have parts that are attached radially e.g. boosters on the sides of your core stage, autostrut those to their grandparent so they stay still relative to the core; if you put parts on top of those e.g. fuel tanks or nosecones, grandparent autostrut will lock all the boosters together which can really help with stability and stop the 'boosters pivoting around decouplers until they snap off and everything explodes' thing from happening. Be careful with autostrut to heaviest part as the mass will shift during flight- especially launches- and that can make things less stable; it's also prone to causing unfortunate side effects if you dock craft together so if you're docking stuff, turn the struts off just in case.

The point is that only the MH parts are being shown, but I want some of the Restock+ versions instead- like the Saturn V adapter tank with the variable engine pods and the command pods with different paint schemes (SP-1/2/3 and Acorn). Are these available with MH installed or if not are there any plans to add these to the stock parts with Restock+? EDIT- just bumped up to the most recent version of Restock/+ (which is marked as 1.10.x only, but is working fine in 1.9.1) and the pods have those variants I was after, but the Saturn V adapter tank doesn't. I might go digging in some configs to try and make that happen.

Question- Restock+ adds some stuff that overlaps with Making History, but some of those things seem to be better than the stock versions (alternative paint schemes for the crew capsules, the Saturn V engine mount can be adjusted to hold more engines, etc.) so are there any plans to apply these options to the stock parts they’re based on, or does anyone have a patch or config to add them?

That sounds about right to me. While an orbit of Minmus at 70km might take a little over an hour and half of that orbit will be over the night side of Minmus‘ surface (or any planet/moon), the time that the orbiting spacecraft is in Minmus’ shadow is quite a bit less than half of an orbit. Minmus casts a conical shadow pointing directly away from the sun: on the surface this means that sunlight and shadow are approximately equal but in space the extra altitude means that there’s a longer arc before you enter the shadow on both sides of the orbit, reducing the time that the vessel is in shadow; with an inclined orbit- which you’ll be using for SCANsat scanning- that number comes down even more as depending on the positions of Minmus and Kerbin you can have times where the shadow is perpendicular to your orbit so the vessel is in constant sunlight. I would try to draw a diagram, but I’m not on my PC and it would probably be terrible anyway.

Hmm, I’ve seen that type of flickering before but only when using modified solar systems with either lots of planets far from the sun, or additional solar systems which are even further away. I never found a solution for it though; try updating your graphics drivers?