jimmymcgoochie

I already stole borrowed the idea so go ahead. I might reuse it later too. I am but it's the day-to-day details that are causing the biggest hold-ups right now. I don't want to call it "filler" because it will serve a purpose (or a few) but there's a big difference between coming up with big, broad-brush ideas and actually turning those into a coherent story. I have a nice little story arc for the next few chapters all laid out and ready to go.

I would say game time is better than real time, otherwise you could just build rockets etc. in another save and then use them in the competition. It’s also a lot easier to track than having to clock watch (and what if your hour runs out half way through a launch/landing?) Personally I don’t have any preference for 1.8.1 or 1.9.1, the few extra parts won’t really help and 1.9.1 was largely about aesthetics which aren’t really relevant for JNSQ.

I’ve been doing a career in JNSQ for a while so I might join in on this one. It would probably be more of a challenge playing in career or science modes as sandbox gives you everything straight away and that’s boring. Are we talking about real time or game time here?

Take the Expanse route- high pressure water/steam for RCS, possibly heated by whatever fission/fusion reactor is on board to boost thrust and/or ISP. Easily replenished unless you’re really close to the local star, you need it anyway for your crew and it can also act as radiation shielding. Ion systems just won’t produce the thrust needed to control a huge and heavy interstellar ship. Even KSP’s massively overpowered ion thrusters aren’t up to the job; the KSP version of BepiColombo produces about 7kN from its ion thrusters whereas the real version’s produce about 0.0003kN of thrust.

You’ll just have to send some Kerbals out there to find out and Minmus is minty so why not? Just make sure they take the samples inside first though, taking helmets off in space doesn’t end well.

Just making a small star cluster will give more than enough planets, moons etc. to explore. There are more than twenty stars within 12 light years of our own solar system and many more not much further away so a few light years across is all you’d need in Kerbal scale. Torchships and Daedalus drives would then be enough to go between them in years or decades rather than centuries or millennia and no need to add physics-melting warp drives either. Intergalactic travel is pointless when you have billions of stars in one galaxy to explore and colonise.

Force roll 180 the whole time will keep the shuttle ‘down’ like the real thing.

1- Staging is wrong, you’re dropping the clamps and then the side tanks before even engaging the main engine. That won’t end well. 2- Emancipator is a vacuum engine and will be considerably less effective at sea level. It also burns uranium and is very heavy and expensive, so stick with a more traditional launch rocket or try the ‘scylla’ nuclear aerospike which is built for launches and is also in Kerbal Atomics (I’m fairly sure) and which burns hydrogen/oxidiser at low altitudes and pure hydrogen for better ISP but lower thrust later on. 3- Not strictly related to the engine, but that adapter under the fairing is the wrong size and will likely produce some odd drag. Switch to a larger one which fits the top and bottom and will also have more fuel in it too.

Look in the backups folder within that save game, there should be some (5 by default) backup persistent save files with date and time information in their names. Grab the most recent version of that, put it in the save folder and rename it persistent.sfs and the game will treat that as your main save file and should (hopefully) load it up again. You might lose a bit of progress but it's better than losing all of it!

Just started a new career game and I went to the Mun first because I still had a level 1 tracking station (so aiming at Minmus is much harder) and I only had the Stayputnik probe core (no SAS). If you're trying a caveman-type Mun landing using only level 1 buildings (or just haven't saved up to upgrade them yet) then the Mun is the better target.

I see four non-stock parts in that tech tree node, do you have any mods installed and if so what are they? One of those could be to blame.

Alt + .(>) turns physics warp on in space and on airless bodies. Just be careful with it, it can also cause unintended side effects like your ships turning inside out, parts breaking, parts getting twisted out of shape and general kraken-y stuff like that. Autostruts help with some of it but just make sure your ship is stable and increase the warp gradually to make sure it can take it.

For some reason I'm seeing negative values for the standard Mk1 pod when it gets recovered while using Kerbalism + standard config in KSP 1.9.1; not sure why this would be the case but it happens every time I use it, from just dropping one on the pad and recovering it immediately to LKO and back (I haven't gone any further in this career yet, only started yesterday!) and it's a bit of a pain early in a career when funds are tight and recovering parts is the only way to pay for the next mission.

version 1.1.0 from CKAN, in KSP 1.9.1

While using this mod I've noticed that collision points will keep glowing after the collision is done (e.g. after decoupling) and seem to move around on the object depending on the camera angle. I even had a Kerbal on EVA with a big glowing spot on his face because he jumped up and clonked his head off the pod I was trying to get him to grab on to, and the glowing spot stayed stationary when I walked him around but moved when I rotated the camera.

I’d say that was Depreciated (with an I) not Deprecated. But, we’re going off topic a bit with the semantics of the wilfully confusing and contradictory trainwreck that is the English language. Back on topic- old parts are still there to not break old saves if someone updates to a new version of the game, but you probably shouldn’t use them because they were replaced for a reason.

Do the panels actually break and just look OK or are they actually intact? Try to check their status when parachuting down to the surface or hit F3 and see if they’re listed as breaking. You could also try adding thermal control units and/or deployable antennae to see if they are also affected.

Quit the editor and open it again? If that doesn’t do it, quit the editor, disable additional launch sites, open editor again; and if that doesn’t work either, reload the game.

Check the logs. KSP.txt inside the KSP directory and Player.txt/Player.log (location varies by OS, try C:/users/your user/AppData/LocalLow/Squad/Kerbal Space Program) should have some indication of what is going on. When the game stops loading at the expansions, it means some kind of exception has occurred and the game can’t continue loading. It almost never relates directly to the expansions themselves.

Try the ‘deflatable heat shield’ mod, it’s a very minor config change that lets you deflate the inflatable heat shield. Robotic contraptions tend to become unstable during re-entry especially at Eve with its higher orbital velocity so deflating the heat shield makes it much easier to either discard it or keep it for later use.

Do you have SAS on? If your SAS is on and your reaction wheels are powerful they could be fighting against the steering force and keeping you from turning.

Three relays, equally spaced, equatorial orbits, as high as you possibly can while maintaining a good signal to the surface (well outside of Ike’s orbit if you can). Then put a fourth relay on Ike’s surface on the side that faces Duna to cover the blind spot when Ike moves in front of the high relays.

If you only recently got into KSP then I suggest you try the stock system for a while rather than jumping in at the deep end with the Sol system which is over 10 times larger. Kerbin’s orbital velocity is about 2200m/s, but Earth’s is almost 9000m/s and the distances between planets are vastly larger too. You’ll almost certainly need more mods to either get real rocket parts or rebalance the Kerbal ones to work at that scale.

I don’t want KIS, KAS or KPBS as stock (tried them all, not particularly interested in any) and can’t stand procedural anythings - stock fairings are more than adequate for the job. The one thing that really annoys me about a KSP is that I have to sit for several hours with the game running stupidly slowly (my latest record is 6 seconds of real time per second of game time due to a near 1000 part super ship with almost 60 kerbals on it and many many mods) to do transfer and capture burns. It’s better than before as I now know how to physics warp it to go a little bit faster (and autostrut everything to stop my ships falling apart in the process) but I once did a 2.5 hour transfer that took literally an entire DAY to complete because it was so slow. Weak engine thrust + high part count + high transfer distance (OPM Neidon) makes for a tedious day, and when you can start a burn and literally leave for several hours, watch two DVDs and it’s STILL NOT FINISHED there’s something wrong. And if I could have one mod in KSP, I’d vote Kopernicus to make solar system modifications really easy. Or if we couldn’t have that, Soundtrack Editor- those long burns would be a bit more palatable with more/custom music and the ability to create playlists by planet/moon would be even better.

Deprecated parts (old versions replaced by new ones) like that Mk1 pod and some rockets e.g. skipper and terrier, are still kept in the game to avoid breaking save games from old versions if the user updates to a new version of the game. You can still use them if you want as they're probably almost identical in performance terms to the new versions, but they're old models and don't look as nice as the newer versions.