jimmymcgoochie

@RizzoTheRat @Grogs When I was trying to complete the Mun seismic sensor I just launched a 2.5m rocket into LKO, set up a transfer that would put it on a collision course with the Mun then burned surface down inside the Mun’s SOI and accelerated to several KPS before impacting. A little bit wasteful, launching a rocket just to smash it into the Mun, but one massive hit at tremendous speed was enough to max out the sensor even with less than perfect accuracy and a relatively low setup multiplier. Speed matters much more than mass for the seismic sensor.

Started building a second space station around Kerbin, launching stuff using KSTS to save the faff of rendezvousing them. That was fine, until I included 2 crew on a module only to realise once it was in orbit that the module didn’t have any oxygen supplies- I’m playing with Kerbalism so no oxygen = death in 2 minutes flat! One frantic docking procedure and one mildly crashy docking later (4m/s with the- admittedly tiny- RCS thrusters braking furiously), the module was attached to the station (in the wrong place, but I was in a hurry!) and my two poor Kerbals lived to tell the tale of how they were 92% dead from suffocation. After moving them to the station core, I put the new module in the right place and decided not to send any more Kerbals as only the core itself has life support. Two more crew will go up in a proper spacecraft to complete the complement of 4 and do some long-term science experiments. Space Lab One, the first LKO station, was disassembled and several of the larger modules deorbited, leaving a couple of utility modules and KIS/KAS stuff which could come in handy over at the new station and which are self-propelled, plus two crew. While the old station had over a decade worth of supplies, it was also held together by the half-size docking ports and the entire design was horribly lopsided; it also had no orbital science experiments aboard and building a new station was more practical than trying to refit or extend the old one.

Asteroids are still A-E and comets are (I think) G-I. Comets often have distinctive names like Froly-Lerdun-Arbretty rather than being Ast. ABC-123 and are either found in very elliptical orbits with really high apoapses, or else they’re hyperbolic and are escaping the solar system entirely.

Have you considered using something like FMRS or Stage Recovery to get money back for dropped stages? It makes a big difference when you can get a hefty chunk of your launch rocket costs back especially on an upscale system- I’m doing a career in JNSQ which is 2.7x scale, so a 3.2x scale isn’t going to be too different from that. Combined with a good launch profile or a launch automation mod like KSTS, it becomes pretty easy to put stuff into orbit around Kerbin without breaking the bank; you can also change the parameters for FMRS or SR to vary how easy it is to recover stages and the refunds for doing so, in case it seems too easy. You you’re set on using an SSTO, you could also try the (borderline cheating) method of using atmosphere-breathing nuclear engines for low altitude flight: Near Future Aeronautics has 2 and while they’re large and heavy, they also allow you to fly in the lower atmosphere for zero fuel expended because their only propellant is the air itself. (There is some historical precedent for this type of engine, look up Project Pluto.) If you’re determined to go down the SSTO route, they’re a good bet as they have plenty of thrust and high maximum speeds, although they tend to run out of thrust quite quickly at higher altitudes.

I don’t have any comments on Moho, haven’t really been there or looked closely at it much. Reverse Eve’s rotation and Gilly’s orbit to match, then add a second little moon around Eve orbiting retrograde (the same direction as Gilly does now). Lower the sea level on Eve so that there aren’t nearly so many bodies of water and the atmospheric pressure would be 5 atmospheres at sea level rather than 4, but make the atmosphere slightly thinner overall (80-85km). Shift the Mun’s inclination slightly, less than a degree but enough to make it marginally harder to get to and a bit less likely to cause a total eclipse at the KSC. Minmus stays as is. Duna’s terrain could be more pronounced, maybe with a couple of old volcanoes (there are a few in the JNSQ version of Duna and they’re pretty spectacular) and deeper valleys. Ike could also do with a bit more interesting terrain but is OK as it is. Dres? What’s that? Jool is fine as it is; rings would be overkill unless they were incredibly thin, and then hardly anyone would see them. Laythe is OK, Vall is OK, Tylo might be better with an incredibly thin (0.01atm, 40km or less) atmosphere- its gravity would justify it considering what Laythe has- and that would make it a slightly different challenge to land on: slightly less delta-V due to air drag, but also atmospheric heating. Laythe, Vall and a Tylo should have the same resonance as Io, Ganymede and Europa and all tidally locked to Jool too. Bop should be retrograde to make it more challenging to get to, Pol is fine. Maybe a few more outer moons of Jool, little more than captured asteroids or a Trojan trailing behind Tylo, enough to throw an occasional spanner in the works when coming in/out Jool’s SOI or going between the moons. Eeloo could use a moon or two, or something else to make it more interesting. In terms of adding new planets, a binary planet would be more interesting than a gas giant- 2 planets orbiting a barycentre, not as close as Rask/Rusk and with enough space for low orbits of both planets individually inside abnormally small SOIs, with moons orbiting the barycentre rather than the individual planets. Maybe it could be added beside Dres, with the canyon facing the other planet, so there was something there worth visiting... While a new planet(s) further out would allow gravity assists from Jool, unless it was put really far out so even nuclear rockets would struggle to get there directly I don’t see the appeal. OPM is a little bit too like the real solar system to be stock and I don’t see the appeal of having lots of small planetoids and dwarf planets on the outer fringes of the system. And once those adjustments are made, slash the number of biomes on each planet and moon to no more than 6, except Kerbin. With fewer biomes per body, filling out the tech tree will require more planets and moons to be visited and with more planets and moons to visit the total biome count would be similar overall. I don’t see any need for a rescale or reposition in the stock system, it needs to be easy enough for beginners to get into space and fly around once they’re there. Larger systems are fine for mor experienced players or those who want a challenge, but the game has to cater to everyone so stock scale is more than adequate.

Put me down for the third one, I have a title to defend! I have a couple of stock Black Arrow-related rockets so I might use those, the newly Restocked engine plates will come in handy for those.

The higher your TWR, the higher you’ll get the same rocket with the same mass as it can fight against gravity better. On airless bodies, this is all you need to worry about- for example on Tylo, which has around 0.8g gravity- and on lower gravity bodies it’s easy to get more than enough thrust even with smaller vacuum engines. However, in atmospheres you also have to deal with aerodynamic drag. Drag is highest at low altitudes and builds up a lot when you go supersonic, so too much thrust can cost you more fuel by going too fast too soon- especially on Eve- and so a more moderate TWR is probably the most efficient compromise between gravity and aero losses. I personally try to get a TWR between 1.35 and 1.5 on the launch pad, any lower and it doesn’t climb fast enough but any higher and the drag can build up too much. TWR rises as you climb due to a combination of decreasing mass (as fuel gets burnt) and increasing ISP (less atmospheric pressure) so if necessary throttle back a little to keep your TWR below 2 until you reach around 30km, at which point air drag is minimal and you should focus on gaining orbital velocity. Just try to avoid cooking your payload on the way up!

That’s a mod part, but I don’t know which mod it comes from. Try to find out the part name (might require some save file sleuthing) and then track it down in your GameData folder- a program like VSCode is good for this as you can find the part name in a file and it will also show you where the file sits in the folder tree. Once you know where it comes from, ask in the forum thread for that mod.

Throwing away a perfectly good nuclear engine?! Such decadence!

@Quasar It's the probe cores! They've turned sentient and are determined to destroy the space program to avenge the losses of their fellow probe cores on all those 'expendable' missions and 'accidental' RUDs/suicide burns/etc. Once they TAKE OVER THE WORLD they'll send Kerbals out on one-way trips instead and return all the stranded probes, rovers, relays and landers to Kerbin. Then they'll build an armada of self-replicating spaceships to fly to other planets, replicate themselves and TAKE OVER THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE!!! ...or am I overthinking it?

I'm glad I decided to look at this thread- Bon Voyage for EVA Kerbals? I WANT ONE!

I suspect it's your processor- Pentium G4400 isn't particularly powerful and there's a good chance that the CPU-heavy processes required to get the game running are too much for it to handle. Try closing down everything else but KSP before launching the game, including steam- you can launch the game directly using the KSP.exe application inside the KSP root directory (steam > steamapps > common > Kerbal Space Program > KSP.exe). Leave task manager (or resource monitor for mac) open and watch the graphs for RAM and CPU use, if they go up to 100% then that's the cause.

If you don't know how to play the game, try the in-game tutorials and built-in missions to get an overview of each specific part of KSP- from building and flying rockets and planes to doing the complex stuff like interplanetary transfers and orbital docking. It took some of the best and brightest minds many years, or even decades, to figure all this stuff out in real life so don't expect to master it in a few days! KSP is open-ended and has no real story beyond what you create for it (although there are plenty of good stories about KSP; see the 'fan works' section) so it might not be clear what to do next. Try career or science modes if you want a sense of progress as you play the game, or play sandbox if you just want to build and fly ridiculous rockets. If you're looking for something to do in the game, look in the challenges section of the forums where there are many different ideas, from something as simple as flying around the VAB on a rocket to the marathon challenge of landing on every planet and moon with a single craft.

I've had warped craft appear when autostruts were on and then the craft was docked to something else. Try disabling all autostruts, switch to something outside of physics range/go to KSC/tracking station, then return to the craft and it might be fixed. If that doesn't help, a bit of save file editing to turn off the autostruts might do the trick; don't try and adjust the angles in the save file itself, that usually ends badly...

What additional sites do you have? Are they the two DLC sites, Woomerang and Dessert Launch Site, or are they from a mod like Kerbinside? Turn on 'allow additional launch sites' in the difficulty settings (esc > settings > difficulty settings at the top) and check if there are any Kerbal Konstruct/Kerbinside/etc. settings regarding opening their alternate launch sites for use or even showing them on the map.

I stopped playing KSP one evening to start writing about it, then stopped doing that to look up some rocket-related stuff on the internet and suddenly several hours had passed, youtube was autoplaying Scott Manley talking about how reaction wheels were different in reality than in KSP, I was six related articles deep in Wikipedia looking at railway artillery guns from WW2 (eh!?), and I should probably make some food because I haven't eaten in 8 hours and it's getting dark outside...

You should be using ModuleManager 4.1.4 and MechJeb 2.11.0 if you're running KSP v1.8 or newer.

When the game stops loading at the expansions, it's almost always because an exception or error has occurred and the game can't load. Check the logs- KSP.log inside the KSP directory and Player.log/Player.txt which varies by OS and version of KSP (in Windows 10 and KSP 1.8+ it's at C://users/your_username_here/AppData/LocalLow/Squad/Kerbal Space Program)- and they should tell you what failed and how. A list of mods would also help, as would your version of KSP. Make sure any mods you're using are compatible with your version of KSP too as incompatible mods are an easy way to break the game.

Oh no, there’s a minor typo in a part config that has zero impact on the game... I work in software development and I’ve found typos in stuff that have been there for months or over a year with zero impact and which nobody ever spotted; a minor misnomer like that is easy to miss as it’s nearly the same as what was intended, and under most circumstances only the code that’s being changed will be reviewed at in any detail. Or did you think that game developers and testers are going to read every line of code in the whole game, every time they changed one thing? Or can predict every ridiculous thing that users can- and will- do in the game? Even major titles from the biggest names in games development get released with bugs in them, let alone a smaller publisher with limited resources. Complaining about a trivial (and apparently non-functional) mistake like that is like refusing to drive a car because the little carpet under the driver’s feet is missing or the button to switch to radio station 5 doesn’t work; it’s irrelevant to the core functionality and most people would never even notice. Yes, there are still bugs in the game, and yes, some of them probably should have been spotted before making it into a live release; but considering that 1.10 was the first major release since Covid, it doesn’t surprise me at all that some bugs slipped through or that they’re having some difficulty tracking them down. Bad-mouthing the dev team on the forums for a simple typo in a single (and fairly niche) part config is just petty.

I suspect your game didn’t update correctly. If you’re on steam then verify the game files, otherwise try re-downloading the game from wherever you got it from.

Your gravity turns seem very shallow to me- turn later and climb steeper instead of having to fly an aggressively nose-up pitch later, you might find that you get to space for less fuel (and less turning backwards!) that way.

Auto strut the boosters to their grandparent part and the nosecones on top to the root part- the extra struts on the nosecones will hold them steady. If you’re using fuel tanks on top of your boosters (which you should- set crossfeed on on the decouplers and you get more main engine fuel with tanks that are discarded with the SRBs) then auto strut the tanks to their grandparent part too, that will hold the boosters still relative to each other too.

Some random screenshots I found in the screenshots directory of my latest game, courtesy of Spectra plus 64k clouds: And now for a couple of extras:

AVP is certainly a good option, but personally I find that Spectra looks better and has less performance impact so you can put the other graphics settings a little higher, plus there’s a 64k cloud pack for Spectra too. AVP works for OPM though which Spectra does not, worth keeping in mind if you use that. Both require EVE and scatterer, and you may also want to try planet shine and distant object enhancement; PS gives you reflected light from planets/moons on your crafts and DOE makes things (planets/moons and also other crafts) visible at a distance. JNSQ is not a visual mod- it’s a planet pack and a pretty hefty one at that with a nearly 3x upscale and redesign of the stock system plus extras. It has its own special graphics mod- Ad Astra- but that only works up to KSP 1.7.3 to my knowledge and the one time I tried it in 1.8.1 it wasn’t pretty at all! For parts, you could go down the route of using Restock/+ which overhauls most stock parts’ looks; if you do try Magpie Mods which adds some really nice metallic effects to the parts, it has compatibility with a lot of different mods and requires TU to function; you can also look at graphics stuff like TUFX or post-processing type mods. In almost all cases, prettier = slower frame rates so keep that in mind, one setting that really kills your FPS is the water reflection quality, turn that down a couple of notches and the game runs considerably faster.

It is physically impossible to get into an orbit of the Sun (Kerbol) that low- anything and everything will overheat in seconds. I’m ignoring the ludicrous delta-V requirements to do so, which would be better expressed as a % of light speed...