jimmymcgoochie

I'm working in a software development team right now (as a tester, not a developer) and when we started this project the team lead thought we could have it done by June. LAST June. A year later and we're still working on getting a considerably reduced system out to the first users, mostly for a single reason. Initially we had 200 or so word document templates that needed to be converted so that the new system could ask the user for data and insert it in the right places to then make PDFs. We thought we could get 10 done per week, maybe up to 20 a week for the simpler ones. Turns out, when you're dealing with legal notices from a government department, there are many many MANY different rules and regulations (written into legislation, too!) about exactly what you should send and when, so we'd need one version to a homeowner, another to a bank that homeowner had a mortgage from and yet another if it was an odd-numbered day of an even-numbered month and the four digits on the clock added up to a multiple of 3, 5 or possibly 19 but only if the moon was in its waning phase. (OK, that last one was made up, but it's a bit of a running joke in the project about the almost arcane rules we need to follow sometimes...) The work was far more complex than we had first thought, so there was a big delay. KSP2 may well have run into a similar problem, and if development essentially ground to a halt last December and barely got restarted before the current pandemic, it's hardly surprising that there are substantial delays.

Landing directly from a transfer is more efficient, but it's not called a suicide burn for nothing! A slight miscalculation and your rocket is a smear across the surface. Landing from orbit, it's best to bring your periapsis down as low as you can to minimise the distance you have to 'fall' and pick up speed via gravity that you then have to get rid of again, and also to maximise Oberth effect: the faster you're going, the more efficient a rocket burn becomes so coming in faster is better. When you're near your chosen landing site, burn retrograde in what is effectively a reverse gravity turn, scrubbing off as much horizontal velocity as you can while fighting against gravity as little as possible until you end up with only a little bit of velocity at a low altitude. Too much braking and you'll just have to land vertically which uses a bit more fuel; too little altitude and you'll crash into the ground at considerable speed. However, a longer burn with lower thrust can be better as you have a bigger safety margin to abort the landing if you have to and won't make much of a difference in terms of fuel use. It also depends on how precise you want your landing site to be- if you just want it to be somewhere on Minmus' Greater Flats, you can focus more on being efficient, but if you want to land close to something else on the surface (like when you're adding a new module to a surface base, for example) then it's better to kill your horizontal velocity first even if you then have to drop a greater distance vertically and use more fuel, to make sure you land exactly where you want to. MechJeb's landing function uses this method to land at a specific set of coordinates with very high precision.

Just looking at the rocket in that video, to me it looks like (from top to bottom): Parachute- Mk1 crew pod with Z-100 battery, mystery goo can, barometer and thermometer on it- heat shield (1.25m)- decoupler (1.25m)-materials bay- FL-T400 fuel tank- terrier engine- decoupler (1.25m)- 3x FL-T400 tanks- swivel engine on the bottom, with 2x radial decouplers on the first stage and Hammer solid boosters with basic nosecones on top. It's one way of getting to the Mun, sure, but if you have small parts (oscar-B tanks and spark engine) you'd be better off using those and a small probe core e.g. OKTO, HECS, or OKTO2 with a small reaction wheel, as smaller payloads require considerably less effort to get them into orbit; add an experiment storage unit to collect the science from the experiments, an antenna if you're using CommNet to stay in touch with Kerbin and a couple of solar panels to keep the power on and you should be able to orbit the Mun and return without too much difficulty. Crew pods are heavy, probes are generally much lighter. To fly out to the Mun, try to launch into a completely flat (0 inclination) orbit around Kerbin, then wait until the Mun is directly ahead of you when pointing prograde and fire your engine until your apoapsis meets the Mun's orbit- just try not to get too close to the Mun or you might end up crashing instead of orbiting!

Probably out of power. Unless you put solar panels on it, the probe core will gradually use power even in 'hibernate' mode and the batteries will run down. Nothing you can really do about it except either turn on the 'infinite electricity' cheat or destroy the rocket in the tracking station.

Hello and welcome to the forums. Can you take a look at this please: Ideally you should supply the game logs and a list of mods that you're using as this will make it substantially more likely that someone can find the source of the problem. Are you using the right versions of all your mods for 1.9.1? A considerable number aren't updated for it yet, most notably Kopernicus which is required for most (all?) planet packs. Try deleting the module manager configcache and sha files before launching the game next time and see if that helps.

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object at SaveUpgradePipeline.v180_ModuleControlSurface.ConvertControlAuthority (ConfigNode mNode, ModuleControlSurface module) [0x00017] in <55ba45dc3a43403382024deac8dcd0be>:0 This looks like the likely candidate. EDIT: turns out ModuleControlSurface is a stock module included in deploying aero parts. I don't see any mods in the list that would obviously mess with this except possibly AtmosphereAutopilot I suggest you verify your game files first of all and if that doesn't solve the issue: Clone your KSP instance with CKAN (I'm guessing you use CKAN otherwise that mod list would have taken a looooong time to collate!); Export your modpack to make it easy to reinstall all the mods later, you'll need it; Remove half of your mods in any order you like; Run the game and see if the problem persists- if yes then skip to 6; If the problem is gone, reinstall all mods then uninstall the other half, run the game and see if the issue is still there- if not, there's some kind of interaction going on that will be really difficult to pin down, but if it still happens proceed to 6; You should now have a list of mods half the size of your previous total. Repeat steps 3-6 as many times as you can until you either find the culprit or until the problem stops happening, at which point there must be an interaction going on. Hopefully by that stage there will be something obvious that you can remove to stop the problem. If you find the responsible mod(s), add all mods back in then remove those that are causing the problem and it should now be gone.

While it's good that you've included the player.log, you need to enable access to it! I got an access denied error. Try verifying the game file integrity; if that doesn't work, reinstall the game from scratch (if you have save games, copy them somewhere else first!) It might also be useful if you followed up on the thread below to avoid duplicate threads about the same issue:

Same error here: A quick google of the error code found a thread on Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/app/220200/discussions/0/1745643248318056076/ The suggestion there is to verify game file integrity and if that doesn't work, reinstall the game. Try that and see if the problem is resolved.

After putting a 750 ton payload into orbit using a Black Hole rocket (so called because it sucks in funds never to be seen again!) I figured that a few tweaks and a slightly lower orbit would make it launch a kiloton. (Why would I need to launch a thousand ton payload in one go? I have no idea, but it was a nice round number to aim for.) The Supermassive variant was created with more fuel, inflatable heat shields deployed by robotic hinges and pistons to recover the whole of the second stage (previously only the engines and probe core would be recovered after dumping the fuel tanks) and some tweaks to the payload fairing to fit the larger stack of ore tanks used as payload mass. 100 meganewtons of thrust from 43 engines on the launch pad but the TWR was only 1.45 as the rocket weighed almost 7000 tons. I got a 200x200km orbit with about 100m/s of delta-V to spare but after dropping the payload that went up to 1400m/s. Total costs after recovering the dropped stages and re-entering and recovering the second stage was about 550,000 funds; not bad considering it cost 2.3 million to launch it and quite a bit cheaper than the first iteration of the design which only managed 250 tons to a similar orbit but cost over a million funds overall. And only three four unplanned disassemblies during testing I call that a resounding success! (edit- this was in JNSQ where the planets are 2.7x larger so the delta-V required was around 5200 to get to that orbit)

I vote skycrane: simple to do, easy to get rid of once you're landed and the rover itself can still be mounted on a stack for launch. You can also use the last dregs of fuel from your transfer/deorbit stage to make the skycrane fuel go further. Just remember that the best way to fly a rover on a rocket is with the control point pointing up, but to drive it around it should be pointing forwards. Some probe cores (RoveMate, OKTO and a couple of others) can do this but some can't. You should also add some small reaction wheels into your rover to keep it stable on the ground especially as RoveMate and OKTO2 don't have any at all and the other probe cores' are feeble.

Can you try switching to Restock/plus 1.0.3 and see if KR&D works then? If you see the same thing as I do then that's pretty strong evidence for what's causing the bug.

Bah, stop spoiling the fun!

I can't speak for Kerbalism but I'm using it with several of the Near Future mods and it works fine in most cases- the variable engines in NFPropulsion don't seem to change their thrust or ISP the way other engines do but other than that everything seems to work OK. Just be careful when changing fuel tank masses if you have cryo tanks installed as pure hydrogen tanks can end up with negative empty masses which causes all kinds of trouble. @linuxgurugamer have you had any luck tracking down the cause of that 'no original-stats for part' exception that I and others posted about last month? I think there's something in Restock 1.1 that's causing this, reverting to 1.0.3 solves the problem with no other mods present AND with nearly a hundred different mods installed, @dan1ell1ma @AccidentalDisassembly are you also using Restock 1.1 or later when you see this error?

Versatility. The base game itself gives you a load of parts that you can assemble in (almost) any way you like, so there are a near infinite number of ways to get to space or create gigantic explosions while trying to get to space. Difficulty can be adjusted in many ways and each game mode has a different emphasis even though they are all basically doing the same thing in slightly different ways. Both DLCs add a lot to the game- Making History’s additional parts are both functional and look very like their real world counterparts, and the mission system adds a whole new set of challenges to overcome; Breaking Ground has the robotics parts and adds a lot of new things to do after planting a flag. Both add new spacesuits as well and the BG future suit is particularly good looking with the adjustable light patterns. Mods add so much more on top of that- new planets and even solar systems, new looks, new visual effects, more parts, autopilots and tools and so much more. Hyper light ships, colony ships, space stations, ground bases, terrain mapping and imagery, aircraft, submarines, life support and so much more in various flavours and various levels of realism is available for you to add to the game, for free! Want to pretend you’re NASA or ROSCOSMOS sending the first (Ker)man to the real Moon with real rockets and real life support? You can do that, just add some mods. Want to build your rockets out of garden furniture and kitchen appliances, make all your Kerbals have purple hair and paint all your rockets the same shade of green as a Kerbal? You can do that too, just add some different mods Want to host a full scale war, on Eve, with twenty people building the tanks/planes/ships and then watching the battle unfold across land, sea and air, before someone decides to nuke them all from orbit? Yep, you can do that too! It’s a fun game, but just playing it I’ve learnt a huge amount about space, space travel and how difficult it actually is to get there in the first place.

KSP is meant to be fairly realistic- while the planets are tiny, everything else obeys real physical laws and behaves like the real deal. Warp drives are purely fiction and are also unnecessary for such a small solar system. There are mods that add different types of warp drives, from point to point warp beacons to Star Trek-style hyperdrives and various sub-light interstellar drives too. A DLC just around warp tech wouldn’t sell much and would be considered cheating by quite a lot of people, including me. Making History added custom missions and a new size class of rocket parts; Breaking Ground added scannable surface features, robotics and deployable science experiments. I don’t see what else a warp drive DLC could include to make it worth the money and without overlapping with the many mods that already do it, and/or KSP2 which is much more focussed on interstellar travel with futuristic tech.

Use ore tanks for ballast- if you’re adding ISRUs to your base then you should already have drills to get ore, plus ore is very heavy and you can get a lot of mass in a pretty small tank. Launch them empty then fill them up when you’re on the Mun and then your crane will be more balanced. The robotic parts are pretty flimsy, but you should be able to build something resembling a forklift truck with a klaw on the front to grab and then lift the modules of your base and move them around to where they need to go. Use the rotation parts to make your wheels pivot rather than steer for more precise driving and stick a probe core on top that rotates to the same angle as the wheels which will make it easier to drive. Cranes will be flimsier and less useful even in lower gravity unless you plan to make something like those cranes that load and unload container ships with a huge and wide wheelbase for balance and where the grabber is right in the middle.

Paddle Wheel Challenge, yet you immediately exclude the robotics parts from Breaking Ground that are the most obvious way to power a paddle wheeler??? That’s basically impossible without building some kind of circular contraption that spins the whole thing to move, and that is probably not what you’re after. First, prove it can be done at all by posting a video where you do it yourself.

There was a little snippet in the trailer of two Kerbals flying what looked like rocket-propelled rocks through either an asteroid field or a planetary ring system, so I would expect ring systems to be solid; however the potential performance hit from having hundreds or even thousands of individual objects floating around in the same place and bouncing off each other in a cascade of collisions if you happen to nudge one the wrong way could be substantial. It could also be dangerous for ships approaching from other planets/solar systems if they accidentally blunder into the ring and get instantly splattered by rocks.

Player.log says this: Graphics crash is to blame, I suggest you try updating your graphics drivers as KSP 1.8 changed the game's Unity version and I had some trouble with game crashes after that until I updated my graphics driver which completely solved the problem.

If you're interested in using a mod, there are a few to choose from- transfer window planner, astrogator and mechjeb can all help making maneuver nodes for transfers between planets and mechjeb can also perform the maneuvers for you. If you aren't interested in using a mod, as a general rule the best time to make an outward transfer is when the target planet is 45 degrees ahead of the one you're orbiting. Put your maneuver node so that prograde around the planet is also prograde relative to its orbit around the sun, then add prograde velocity until it meets the target's orbit. Slightly early and you'll have to overshoot a bit to let the target catch up, slightly late and you'll need more velocity and have a longer braking burn. With 5600m/s to play with you should be fine, and there's little/no difference in inclination between Eve and Kerbin so you can probably get away with ignoring inclination for the transfer burn and just correcting at an ascending/descending node en route.

Mining works best in the background- as long as you can produce enough power to run all the drills and converters in the background AND produce enough ore to fuel the converter, it will happily continue to do so when you're not looking at it. Just check in on it every now and again to see if you've filled it up. You should set the converters and drills to deploy and start/stop mining or converting with action groups- this can be done in the VAB/SPH in all versions of KSP and in flight from 1.8 onwards or by using a mod that adds this functionality. One key press and they all switch on/off at once, much simpler than doing it all by hand! The exact numbers of drills and converters you should use will vary, but if you've set the game to have scarcer resources then you'll need more drills and for higher ore concentrations less drills are enough. Don't waste your time with the convert-o-tron 125, it's horribly inefficient as it can't be cooled enough to operate properly by design; the 250 is much better in every way, just heavier and larger.

Going into the red zone is generally considered bad for Kerbal health, if you have Kerbal G limits applied that is. More G forces will make your Kerbals pass out faster and at extremely high Gs (50 or more) parts will fail if you have that option selected in the settings. It takes A LOT of effort to hit 50 gravities though, usually a head-long crash into something (either the ground or an atmosphere) will do it but on occasions some weird part clipping issues can cause sudden and violent accelerations and parts will fail as a result. The green bit is just for show. Just remember that the G meter will show the combined acceleration forces in all directions.

Chapter 6 - Overture A cool breeze ruffled the treetops, setting their leaves rustling gently in the twilight. The sounds of the woods were changing, the day shift clocking out as the night shift began arriving; at one point a loud squeak indicated that one of the former had just fallen prey to one of the latter. Zero noticed all the details, saw the small predator with its latest meal dangling limply in its jaws trotting away through the undergrowth. Zero was utterly in tune with the surrounding environment, because to be anything else was fatal in Zero’s line of work. Nobody really knew Zero’s real name, not even Zero. Names were just anchors to slow you down; Zero had gone by many names before and today went by the name of ‘Alpha’. “Alpha to all units, report.” Murmured Zero/Alpha into a throat-mounted radio microphone. “Beta, in position.” Whispered Beta. “Gamma, ready.” Breathed Gamma. “Delta, standing by.” Rumbled Delta. “Alpha to all units. Hold position and await further orders.” For two more hours Zero/Alpha remained motionless and silent, not even flinching when a particularly large and fearsome insect crawled over an eye, fangs brimming with deadly venom. Zero knew how to combat those insects, how to treat their bites and how best to prepare them for eating. Zero did none of those things and instead watched as it pounced on an unfortunate forest critter, paralysing it with venom before laying its eggs inside it. Darkness was never truly dark, even on an overcast and moonless light, and tonight the stars were more than enough to illuminate their target. Not that they needed to- its entrance was lit by two bright spotlights and more lights were scattered around the perimeter. Two security guards were at the entrance paying only token attention to the world outside their little hut and the small TV inside it. “Alpha to all units. Engage.” For a long time there was no obvious result to this order. Nothing changed and nothing moved. Zero wasn’t worried by that; on the contrary, that was the plan they had agreed on. Move up silently into position unnoticed, then strike without warning. Delta moved first, unfolding from a large bush like some kind of forest troll and hurling a smoke bomb straight into the open door of the guard hut. Both guards stumbled into the open, coughing and blinded by the smoke, where Beta was waiting and struck once, twice, dropping them before they even knew what had hit them. Delta lumbered up silently and moved the two unconscious guards into the bushes where they would be found by first responders bound, gagged and completely unharmed save for identical lumps on the backs of their heads and with no clue what had happened. Beta scaled the entrance gate in seconds and moved inside the compound, followed shortly after by Delta who went through the gates in a very literal but surprisingly quiet manner. Two clicks followed by three over the radio was the only warning before all the lights went out, courtesy of Gamma. Zero’s eyes were perfectly adjusted to the darkness and could easily see Beta and Delta moving to their next objectives, planting the explosive charges as they went. Nothing else moved and there was no sign of the other two guards. “Beta, charges set, moving to position 3.” “Delta, charges set, moving to position 3.” Torches flashed on the other side of the compound as the remaining guards came out to try and fix the lights. The first encountered Beta and abruptly went out; the second encountered Delta and simply vanished. Beta moved to the last objectives while Gamma carried the second pair of unconscious guards, one under each arm, to leave them with their colleagues in the bushes. “Beta, objectives complete.” “Delta, objectives complete.” “Gamma, objectives complete. Ready for detonation on your command.” “Alpha, detonate.” A series of muffled thumps came from the compound, small clouds of dust and smoke rising from their sources. The charges were small and did only moderate damage, but each was placed to cause maximum disruption by destabilising foundations, destroying equipment or in one case knocking out the compound’s power and phone lines. No dramatic fireballs to attract attention and no ka-booms to carry over the breeze, exactly as planned. “Alpha, mission complete. Fall back to position 7 for exfiltration.” Zero took one last look at the objective, the sign outside the gates completely legible even at this distance in the faint afterglow from the lights that had previously lit it up. The damage to the facilities complete with Gamma’s hacks would be putting a huge dent in the latter half of Jebediah Kerman’s Junkyard and Spacecraft Parts Company’s activities for some time to come. Zero was still there in the morning when the proprietors arrived to find the Junkyard in disarray, gates broken open and much of the machinery destroyed or rendered inoperable. Local law enforcement arrived, did some preliminary investigations but were clearly at a loss to explain how, or indeed why, anyone would try to sabotage a junkyard. Zero was still there when the Children’s video message hit the media, claiming responsibility for the sabotage and warning that it was merely an overture to a far greater campaign. Unless and until the destructive and wasteful Space Program was halted, it warned, more action would follow. Zero was still there when Jebediah Kerman III, proprietor and CEO of Jeb’s Junkyard (and uncle to the famous Kerbonaut) gave an interview in front of his business denouncing the Children as ‘ignorant imbeciles’, pointing out that Jeb’s Junkyard was the biggest site not only for upcycling discarded scrap and unwanted machinery into useful products for the aerospace industry but also for refurbishing and reusing spent rocket boosters. By destroying that capability, Jeb the 3rd said, the Children had just removed one of the most environmentally friendly parts of the space supply chain and now instead of reusing those stages the Space Program would have to buy in brand new rockets made from virgin resources, precisely the opposite of what they wanted and as ironic as it was idiotic. Zero was still there when darkness had fallen again, a police cruiser parked by the gates and twice as many guards as before prowling the perimeter. Slowly, imperceptibly, Zero backed away into the woods, blending into the shadows and vanishing without a trace. Chapter 7

@king of nowhere if you right click an antenna and then click ‘require complete’ it will change to ‘allow partial’, which stops it giving up and starting from 0% if it runs out of power; however this does also mean your transmissions can transmit less science back home in some cases and it will bump along transmitting little bursts as soon as it has enough power so you can’t really do anything else. NOT recommended if you have no solar panels or other forms of power generation! The stripes on the planet are indicators of ore density, you can change the cutoff value in the control panel to only show the most ore-rich regions and change the colour scheme too which might make it easier to see what areas have the most ore. Use both together to find the best sites to start ore mining as mining ore is faster when there’s a greater concentration of it around. The deployed science kit (in the payloads tab) needs to be transported in the SEQ-3 (or SEQ-9) and then deployed by a Kerbal. To deploy it, right click the SEQ-3 to see what’s inside it, then pick a part and drag it over a nearby Kerbal who’s on EVA, outside the spacecraft. Drop the part into the Kerbal’s empty inventory slot and they’ll carry it around on their back. To deploy it, click the arrow beside the carrier part and it should appear in front of your Kerbal; press space bar to deploy. Note- science experiments work best if deployed by a scientist and power production (solar panels and later RTGs) work best if deployed by an engineer, and higher levels of both result in faster science generation or greater power production. Deploy the control station first, then power, then science. If deploying beyond Kerbin’s sphere of influence (Kerbin, Mun and Minmus) and you have the comm net enabled, you’ll need the deployable dish too or that science will never get back home. There’s a mod called Deployable Batteries which adds some surface deployable battery packs to power your experiments when it’s dark, as without sunlight they’ll just sit at night without making any science. Higher level engineers boost their total power capacity and so the length of time they can power your modules in the dark, just remember you’ll need more power generation to charge them up in the day as well as run the experiments.

Deployed science experiments on the Mun should always be placed on the side that faces Kerbin and with a clear line of sight to Kerbin. The Mun is tidally locked, so that side of the Mun is always pointing towards Kerbin so you’ll never lose signal. The HG-5 antenna is actually pretty weak and has very limited range when used in combination with the PECS (deployed science control box), whereas even the level 1 tracking station has far more range. Enable extra ground stations in the difficulty settings to improve your comm network.