jimmymcgoochie

I want to “finish” a career game by getting flags on every possible planet and moon; any form of the stock system- normal, with extras e.g. OPM or rescaled with JNSQ- I’ve started all of them but never come close to “finishing”. My first career in 1.7.3 with OPM hasn’t gone beyond Duna with a Kerbal and the 1000 part contraptions I made to fly out to the outer planets took an entire day per transfer burn (2+ hour transfers at 1/4 speed due to the part count, ouch...); my JNSQ career started in 1.8.1 but I managed to bump it up to 1.9.1 and have a crewed mission currently parked in Tylo orbit after landing a nuclear spaceplane there (yes, JNSQ Tylo has an atmosphere- but no oxygen), although once again the part count is really high and the game is going really slowly; and my current Kerbalism game with just the stock planets hasn’t sent a Kerbal out of Kerbin’s SOI yet. I have some designs for what should be an Eve SSTO, a variant of which I used for Tylo in the JNSQ career and which might even make it possible to fly to Nara’s surface (45 atmospheres of pressure ), but then I’ll probably do what I did before and get distracted by shiny new things and end up playing a career with a Beyond Home instead .

It’s still possible to gain orbital velocity when burning retrograde, if your thrust is low and the parent body has a large and/or powerful gravity well. Jool has the biggest gravity well of any planet and a really high orbital velocity, so it’s unsurprising that the rather low acceleration your engine can produce (especially for smaller engines and even more so for ion thrusters) is being outmatched by gravitational acceleration as you fall towards periapsis. The important thing is that your retrograde burn is making you slow down relative to just flying on a ballistic trajectory, which is why you’re capturing into orbit. Your speed will stop increasing when you get close to periapsis and will start dropping once you’re past it. You can see the same phenomenon if you try to decelerate a heavy vessel using RCS when you’re about to re-enter on Kerbin; your periapsis will still drop even though your orbital velocity is increasing, because it’s increasing by less than it would with no thrust applied.

I suspect it’s because that save file was made in 1.10.1, and you’re running 1.10.0.

There’s a cutoff for all craft that means they get deleted if they go below a certain altitude- I think the game is pretending that they either burnt up or crashed into the surface. Some mods like FMRS or Stage Recovery can still salvage those vessels or debris, either by rewinding time and letting you fly them (FMRS) or simulating their descent with parachutes and/or a powered landing (SR), but the stock game doesn’t let you do this.

Going straight up is the least efficient path for a rocket as you’re fighting directly against gravity the whole time which wastes (on Earth/Kerbin) 9.8m/s of delta-V for each second that you do it. A gravity turn minimises the losses due to gravity and air drag and is a lot more efficient which saves fuel. Likewise, a high angle suicide burn at escape velocity uses more fuel than a low altitude deorbit then a short descent. It’s entirely possible to time a direct ascent to intercept the Mun (as demonstrated in the video) while still having a periapsis below the surface of Kerbin, but it’s a lot less efficient to do so and you’ll save fuel doing it the normal, orbit-y way.

To get more range you can try: Removing excess weight. Landing legs, parachutes (unless you’re going to return to Kerbin’s surface with the same craft) and anything else you can get rid of will reduce the deadweight and improve your fuel ratio which increases delta-V. Using a more efficient engine. The Poodle is the most efficient pure stock LF/Ox engine, but if you have Making History the Woldhound offers an ISP of 380 (but a very high mass with it) and might be better for particularly bulky craft where the excess weight is less of an issue. The NERV offers drastically better ISP than any chemical rocket (800s) but is quite heavy and has low thrust, and ion thrusters have exceptional ISP (over 4000) but are incredibly feeble and require a lot of electric charge to operate. There are a variety of mods that add different engines, from methane and hydrogen fuels to nuclear to plasma thrusters to fusion and antimatter drives, with much better thrust and efficiency than stock parts, but if you’re playing with just stock parts the Poodle and NERV are as good as you can get. Moar fuel! Although the extra fuel makes less and less difference due to that pesky rocket equation and will hurt your TWR too. You can get around it to some extent by using drop tanks to shed the empty tank mass as you go but in the end the fuel efficiency of the engine sets a maximum limit.

We all had to learn to do that. Space is difficult and you’re going to make mistakes, but as long as you keep learning from them you’ll be doing Mun landings in no time, and landing on other planets shortly after that. There are plenty of people on these forums so if you need help, just ask!

Can you reload while in atmospheric flight? I thought that wasn’t possible, so that may be the reason?

Check the logs, there’s probably an exception causing the game to stop loading. Find KSP.txt inside the KSP directory and Player.txt/Player.log; on Windows 10 it’s under C://users/your-username/AppData/LocalLow/Squad/Kerbal Space Program. Upload those two files to the file sharing site of your choice then post links to them here so someone can take a look at them. A screenshot of the loading screen at the point where it freezes would also be good, as would your version of KSP and a list of mods you’re using. One possible quick fix would be to check that you have the most recent version of the USI mod(s?) and that they are compatible with your version of KSP.

Sticky keys. You pressed shift five times too quickly and sticky keys turned on- probably with a bleep from your PC. You describe bleeps when pressing shift and possible control too which happens with sticky keys. It usually requires you to click yes on a pop-up but that might not happen depending on your PC settings. Pressing the shift key five times again should turn it off, or go into the settings as @Streetwind has said and turn it off completely. It’s a real nuisance on EVAs as you have to keep pressing shift to fly above the Mun with an EVA pack, and sticky keys is intended as an accessibility feature so if you don’t need it for that, switch it off completely.

I would suggest you add a small additional fuel tank to the launcher which contains just enough fuel to deorbit it, then set that to not get drained during the ascent. The extra mass might hurt your payload capacity slightly, but it also means it’s really easy to fill up just enough fuel to return to the surface without a complicated juggling act. Or you could try using a mod to record a launch and then reuse the recorded flight instead of having to fly each mission yourself. You would only have to get it right once that way and then you’d be able to automate it in future.

Does the entire vessel highlight when you hold G or H and hover the cursor over the docking port? Do you get an error when holding H and hovering over the port saying the part is a root part. If Yes to either of those: hold H, hover over the part the port is attached to and then ‘detach’ the whole vessel from the port. That should cause the port to detach and it should then behave as expected.

Try the ‘max persistent debris’ setting in (I think) the main settings page: main menu > settings. You could also either delete them from the tracking station, or turn off the display in map or tracking station view so that debris isn’t shown. And @Geonovast just ninja’d me to the answer

There’s definitely an opening in the current set of stock parts for a medium solar panel to plug the chasm between the OX and SP panels (1.6 EC/s at Kerbin) and the Gigantor (~24EC/s at Kerbin) and if it could be done as a circular panel rather than a square/rectangle then why not?

Are you looking for mods that can be used with RSS/RO/FAR for MOAR realism, or instead of them for less?

And when one lands in the wrong place? Better to have one lander that can move than two that can’t.

I would build an electric plane or a rover for this contract- unless it has to be completed in the specific order: atmosphere, splash, land, touching down on land first will complete that objective followed by a nice drive (or flight) to the nearest body of liquid to complete the contract. Planes are faster and you can get away with very small wings due to Eve’s thick atmosphere, but don’t expect much speed and you’ll need either electric propulsion (robotics or from a mod), or something more exotic like explodium breathing engines or an atmosphere-breathing nuclear engine; rovers are slower and less versatile, but can easily be done with just stock and with the help of Bon Voyage you can cover a lot of ground in the background.

Check the control settings, maybe it’s no longer bound to the mouse wheel? Even if it is, clear the bindings for the mouse wheel and then re-bind them and try it again.

Build the fuel refinery on the surface, not in orbit: ore is really heavy, so it makes sense to convert it into less heavy/dense stuff like fuels as close to the source as possible and then fly those into orbit instead of the raw ore. The refinery gets a constant supply of ore, fuels are always produced and can be shipped out as and when you need them to be, either because the fuel tanker vessels are full or because you have a ship waiting to be refuelled, plus you’ll usually find good ore concentrations on at least some of Minmus’ flat regions which are easy to land on, drive on and build on.

I’m assuming you want to use it in 1.10(.1)? Try it and see, it might work in 1.10; just copy your save file and save it somewhere else as a backup before you do, in case something goes wrong. You can override CKAN’s version checking system: click the versions tab on the right of the CKAN window then pick the most recent version and install that- CKAN will complain about it being ‘incompatible’ but will run anyway. Alternatively, follow the link to the forum page, spacedock page or github repo and download and install it manually so CKAN has no control over it.

Wings are dead weight in space- only bring them if you’re planning on going somewhere with air (like Laythe or Eve, for example) or are flying into orbit from Kerbin’s surface with a spaceplane. Either way, they’re no use on Minmus and the best way to deploy a rover there is with a skycrane, as with the Curiosity rover on Mars; look at the stock ‘rover and skycrane’ craft to see how a skycrane can be done in KSP.

I usually just build the smallest possible contraption that fulfils the requirements and send that- a current contract wants a base on Eve with space for 5 kerbals, a docking port, an antenna and some power generation; I stuck 5 Mk1 crew pods together with the other gubbins to meet each requirement then stuck that to a rocket and sent it into space. Although now that I think about it, I’m not sure if there was a power storage requirement for that base too so I’d better go and check that BEFORE it leaves for Eve Some mods provide good incentives for having surface bases e.g. Kerbalism has many science experiments that can be done while landed on different places and which can take years to complete, while other mods that provide parts for bases have their own science experiments to run there or dedicated surface installations that can be used to build new ships somewhere other than Kerbin- launchpad on Vall anyone?

Are you sure those are I-class asteroids? When you track one, do they have the usual Ast. 12345 name or do they have more unusual names like Bamfrey-Jodbrun-1? If it’s above class E, has a very high apoapsis (out to Jool or even beyond) or is on an escape trajectory out of the system entirely, and/or has a visible tail when inside Duna’s orbit, it’s probably a comet.

Vertical speed matters a lot more than horizontal speed for landing planes. The best way to land a plane is to perform a ‘flare’ like real planes (especially larger ones) do- pull the nose up just before touching down to cancel out your vertical speed, floating down the runway while shedding horizontal velocity before touching down at a much lower speed both vertically and horizontally. Adding deployable flaps and/or slats on your wings can help to increase lift at low speeds which will help with landings. You should also attach your landing gear to something very sturdy like the fuselage or possibly a really big wing e.g. Big-S delta or FAT-455 wings, before using the move tool to offset them to where you want them for aesthetics/stability purposes. Landing a plane isn’t easy; there’s a reason pilots have to do so much training for it!

Flew planes for about 10 hours of in-game time, which even at x4 physics warp (it was more like x3 as it usually is when using physics warp) took a looooooong time. Two long-duration flights netted a decent haul of science though and for a relatively low cost as the plane was recovered on a runway every time so only the fuel wasn't refunded.