jimmymcgoochie

It’s very hard to fly that fast in a plane in KSP for a few reasons: you’re getting close to orbital velocity (hence why SSTO spaceplanes are feasible) so the plane will naturally want to climb into the upper atmosphere where its engines will run out of air and flame out; most engines and almost all air intakes can’t operate effectively at such high speeds and the few that can (Whiplash and Rapier) aren’t very fuel efficient; you run a significant risk of overheating at lower altitudes; and flying higher to get thinner air means the engines don’t get nearly as much thrust so while cruising at high speed is possible and indeed very fuel efficient, it’s much harder to accelerate than when you’re at lower altitude. Rather than trying to push towards Mach 5, it’s easier to build a plane that is very stable and can cruise efficiently at around Mach 3 (1km/s or so) and just use physics warp at x2-x4 to get where you’re going sooner. The fastest sustained flight I’ve done recently was 1400m/s, but that required a couple of mod parts and was on the verge of overheating for a lot of its flight time.

The patches for making this ship use hydrolox fuel are causing a zero-mass bug at low fuel levels- the ship becomes totally immovable when any of the tanks are empty or nearly empty. Using just the drone core, it's also lacking in battery storage to keep the tanks cooled and reaction wheel power to move such a large ship around in space. I had to throttle the engines back drastically using hydrolox as the TWR was over 4 on the launch pad and at one point I hit 7.5 during ascent with the power at 100%.

Hi there, It's going to be very difficult to figure out what's happening just with a pair of screenshots. Can you take a look at the thread below and provide the information it suggests; as a start, KSP version, computer OS and what mods (if any) you have installed plus the log files KSP.log (in the KSP folder) and Player.log/Player.txt (location can vary by version and OS, try C:/users/your username/AppData/LocalLow/Squad/Kerbal Space Program, AppData is a hidden folder so you'll need to enable 'show hidden folders' to see it). If you downloaded the game through Steam, try verifying the game files (right-click KSP > Properties > local files > verify integrity) and if that doesn't fix it, back up your save games somewhere and then uninstall and reinstall the game completely.

Little blue arrows should appear on your orbit and the orbit of your target indicating where the two will be at the closest approach, and the arrow on your orbit will also tell you the distance from the target, relative velocity and when it will happen. You may have to switch on 'always show closest approach' for this to work properly, it's in the main menu settings and is well worth switching on as it's very helpful and (AFAIK) doesn't impact on game performance. Transfers to the Mun are pretty easy to judge- if you're pointing prograde and the Mun is directly ahead of you, that's the point when you make your burn- a transfer to the Mun takes a day and the Mun orbits Kerbin every 4 days. It's a good approximation and can help you get the rough encounter so you can then tweak it to be more efficient.

I've found the cause- the engine patch is dependent on Cryo Engines being installed, not Cryo Tanks like the RCS patch is. I have Cryo Tanks but not Cryo Engines so the engine patch (correctly) didn't apply.

The last time I used that mod, I couldn't launch any crewed rockets without the crew seats having the first available Kerbal(s) assigned to them and I couldn't remove or change them. I also find the mini-klaw useful for dragging the pods etc. out of orbit and getting rid of them; the whole thing costs about 2000 funds and weighs under half a ton so the klaw isn't really having an adverse impact, but my mod list runs to over a hundred already!

Why would anyone use a half-sized klaw? Personally I find it very useful for doing those Kerbal rescue contracts as I've built a rescue pod using the Luciole command pod with a detachable Restock mini-klaw because every now and again some dumb Kerbal needs rescued from a pod with no exits. A 2.5m super-Klaw would be nice but I don't look at asteroids right now so I wouldn't use it.

Why do the RCS thrusters use hydrolox when the engines are LF/Ox? Is there a patch or something to switch the engines to hydrolox too?

@southernplain I get those all over the place- in KSC, on various planets and moons and often some of the squares have odd little triangle-y shapes on them too. I've also had Laythe's entire oceans disappear in two completely different KSP setups- one in my heavily modded 1.8.1 game and another in a 1.9.1 test of the Kopernicus fork above, anyone know why that happens/how to stop it? It's quite hard to find land when the oceans are invisible!

Nope, relays have been there for a long time. The only new type is Science and you only get that if you have the Breaking Ground DLC and the deployed science stuff it contains.

There are a few mods that give Dres some company- one adds a little moon called Spud, another makes Dres itself a moon of a larger planet- as well as the slightly older XPC that adds moons to several stock planets (2 for Eve, a Trojan behind Ike for Duna and a couple for Eeloo as well). You could also take a planet pack (for example, Minor Planets or Dwarf Planets) and bodge some configs to put some moons around Dres yourself, although this might take a bit more work and require more changes than just the orbits.

I found the Monopalooza challenge a few days ago and decided to give it a go. After having a variety of high efficiency mod monopropellant engines ruled out, I made a few attempts before pulling off a major fluke by flying to Eve and getting a slingshot almost perfectly to Duna where Bob deployed his lander craft and touched down (almost) gently; sadly all I could get from Duna was a minor bump on my periapsis which meant I had to wait thirteen years for the next Eve encounter followed by some seriously hairy aerobraking attempts (20 or so in all) to direct Bill to Gills while Jeb landed on Eve itself- Jeb had the only heat shield, you see. I was originally planning to land on Eve/Gilly first but then realised that the design was all wrong for that and rather than just reverting and switching the three landers around a bit I made it harder for myself by flying all the way out to Duna then waiting for ages to get back to Eve. But that flukey slingshot to Duna made up for it, three flags planted on three different bodies and nobody is coming home any time soon...

@sevenperforce Three Kerbals, three little spaceships, three different bodies with flags on them- Duna, Eve and Gilly. Total mission time was about 16 game years and I did about twenty aerobraking runs in Eve's upper atmosphere- couldn't go lower than 88.5km or poor Bill got cooked! I blew up six nearly full fuel tanks and lost about 100 monoprop doing the Eve braking burn, that really hurt the delta-V and forced me to do some really long and repetitive aerobraking to get to Gilly and even then Bill had fumes left in his EVA pack. https://imgur.com/a/NZz1Ubl for the full album. Screenshots from LKO are missing unfortunately, I suspect I just forgot to take them POINTS: Launch from KSC (15) (who actually launches from Woomerang, ever?) > LKO (50) > leave Kerbin SOI (40) > cross Eve orbit (100) > cross Duna orbit (100) > flag on Duna (100) > flag on Eve (100) > flag on Gilly (80) = 585 points.

After a failed attempt to get to Duna (I got to Duna, just didn't have the fuel to get back off Duna and would only be worth 205 points) I'm going to switch tactics a bit and use @bayesian_acolyte's mini lander idea. I might need to take multiple Kerbals though as I want to try and land on as many planets/moons as I can to get more flag points- @sevenperforce you get 100 points per planet/moon you plant a flag on, right?

Is anyone else seeing weird biomes on Laythe? For me, the Polward Sea faces towards Jool; the other half of the ocean is Enclosed Faults; there are random little specks of Krenwich Sea between islands; and I have yet to find a single piece of Joolward Sea, although SCANsat insists that it's there somewhere. On a semi related note- does JNSQ Bop still have everyone's favourite cephalopodic sea monster on its surface?

Not without buying the game again through Steam. Somehow I doubt going to Steam and saying 'I bought this game somewhere else but it isn't working right, can you give it to me for free?' will work.

Sometimes those rescue missions will spawn Kerbals in mod crew parts with no exits, so I built a little rescue pod that has a klaw (AGU) on the bottom to grab the pod, then transfer the Kerbal over to the pod and drop the whole thing out of orbit before dumping the old crew pod and klaw and re-entering with just the rescue pod. Literally every part comes from a mod (Luciole for the rescue pod parts, very neat 0.625m stuff, and Restock+ for the half-sized AGU Jr) but it comes in at under half a ton and has surprisingly good delta-V.

@patfree14094 you did see the part where the launch mass couldn’t exceed 100 tons, right?

Sounds like something that would be better explained in pictures than words.

Try reinstalling JNSQ, Kopernicus, EVE, scatterer or combinations of the above until it works again. Also check the logs (Player.log/Player.txt) to see if there are any exceptions being thrown that might be related.

Press F12 to turn on the aero forces display and look for the biggest red spike trailing behind the plane, that’s the draggy part. It can be quite hard to find them sometimes, but when you do enabling the aero/drag debug panels in the cheats menu will show how much drag it’s producing. There isn’t much you can do to fix it though unless you’re really good at persistent file editing and can remove the part (assuming it isn’t important!).

There’s a nifty little mod called Where Can I Go that shows you where you can go with your current design in the VAB and also in LKO. It can also calculate the distances assuming the whole rocket gets to orbit, which is useful for getting your payloads designed right. I find it’s a useful tool to get a ballpark figure when designing my rockets, although it doesn’t work as well with spaceplanes because their ascent profile is totally different.

Jeb wanted a second try after the parachute fiasco last time. This time I stuck 5 relays on the top and dropped them off part-way to the Mun so they could be deployed them into a keostationary network. Unfortunately, the relays had a bit too much fuel and Jeb's ship had a bit too little; fortunately, EVA propellant is allowed... This one is called (Ker)Manopalooza, and the only other way I can do it is ‘Menopalooza’ which would logically mean taking a second crew member with me. https://imgur.com/a/r6agrVV full album is here, I even got a shot of the rocket in LKO this time. Turns out this sandbox I'm using has re-entry heat set to 10% so Jeb could re-enter directly from the Mun return, doing an EVA, head first, and survive completely unharmed. Any landing you can walk (or in this case, swim) away from and all that! And then I remembered that extra fuel on the relays, and put it to use scoring as many bonus points as I could- slingshots from the Mun to escape Kerbin's SOI. Points: KSC (15) > LKO (50) > Mun SOI (35) > Mun orbit (20) > crewed Mun landing (80) > crewed with 'safe' return (40) > 5 relays to keostationary orbit (20 + 5x5 = 45) > 5x Mun encounters with those relays several days after putting them in place (35x5 = 175) > 4x Kerbin SOI escapes (40x4 = 160) = 620 points; or 580 if the return was deemed as 'unsafe', although Jeb didn't complain...

Attempt number 2, using probes. I wanted to try the keo relays thing too but just didn't have enough fuel with those added and the Mun/Minmus points were more valuable. Weighing at 99.999 tons, Monopalooza probes carried two independent probes- Munopalooza and Minopalooza- which were sent to Mun and Minmus respectively, but launched to orbit on the same rocket. Probes were landed on both the Mun and Minmus with considerable fuel to spare- so much fuel to spare, in fact, that I launched both of them straight up from the surface and got their apoapses higher than Duna; I'm claiming that as 'go beyond Duna' as they're further from the Sun than Duna is at their apoapses. https://imgur.com/a/UXf75dZ for the full album- I forgot to get images in LKO but everything else is there. @sevenperforce I'm going to claim a load of points that might not stand up to scrutiny, judge it for yourself: Launch from KSC (15) > LKO (50) > enter Mun SOI (35) > enter Mun SOI (35), because I entered it with two separate probes that made independent transfer burns and the Minmus probe clipped the Mun's SOI by pure coincidence > enter Minmus SOI (40) > Mun orbit (20) > Minmus orbit (15) > leave Kerbin SOI (40) > leave Kerbin SOI (40), again two separate probes > go beyond Duna (100) > go beyond Duna (100), I did it twice with separate probes! = 490 points in total, and that's without getting any points at all for actually landing on the Mun and Minmus; if I used half of the value for a crewed landing (40 and 20 respectively) that would make 550 points in total. I think points should be awarded for landing probes on other bodies, especially beyond Kerbin's SOI, but within reason- no stapling ten tiny probes to the same transfer stage and then claiming ten sets of points because you landed them all on the Mun, for example.

Why are you trying to light an engine before decoupling the previous stage?