jimmymcgoochie

Robotic parts have always been wobbly especially with lots of loosely held weight on one/both ends, and autostruts can’t cross over robotics as they’d mangle the entire craft if the robotics parts were moved and the autostruts suddenly recalculated or tried to resist the robotics movements. Use normal struts on whatever parts are on each end of the robotics stuff and you should be OK.

Can you post a screenshot of the “correct” appearance then? I’m genuinely curious what you think is wrong with the images above.

Do you really think that the development team- those who wrote the code etc. to create the game- we’re unaware that there were issues before the launch? They had a deadline and no doubt tried their best to meet said deadline with the best version of the game they could make in that timeframe. There’s only so much testing even 50 people can do compared to 50 thousand users who will often try things nobody in the dev team thought to test. Once the initial “waaaah it’s totally broken!!!1!” backlash has subsided a bit, people will realise that actually KSP2 has a lot of good things about it too, albeit with some major issues that get in the way of fully enjoying the game. To paraphrase Carnasa on his livestream yesterday, once you accept that there are problems and start working around them the game is actually a lot more fun; mods are already out to fix the wobbly rockets, disappearing orbital markers and a few of the other more egregious issues to make KSP2 more playable and enjoyable; some of the issues might not even be KSP2’s fault- I’ve heard that running the .exe directly can result in much better FPS than running via Steam and there’s a bug in Unity itself (the underlying system the game is built in) that’s causing some of the problems in KSP2. I’d much rather the dev team were working on fixing bugs and optimising the game’s performance than getting embroiled in pointless twitter wars that won’t make the game any better.

I've heard that launching KSP2 directly from the .exe and not via Steam can significantly improve FPS, try that?

After several days spent aimlessly floating around in Gael orbit waiting for... something admin-related(?), Poody finally got tired of waiting and demanded that the Iota landing mission went ahead ASAP. The administration team squawked and protested about "red tape" and such, but Poody was having none of it and started describing in considerable detail exactly what they could do with said red tape- apparently forgetting that all radio transmissions were being live-streamed to the entire world. Fortunately for all concerned, the Ceti rover drove up a hill and did some more science and the admin team hastily marked the "Ceti Probes" program completed and started filling out the paperwork for crewed exploration of Iota and the funding that Gael's governments and industries were offering for it. Because as first words on another planetary body go, you really can't beat "That's one small step for a Gaelan, one giant leap for Gaelington Model Rockets and Paper Products Inc."... Up close, Poody and Jade were able to confirm what the probes had reported earlier: Iota is the complete opposite of flat, there's no flat ground anywhere at all and the entire surface is lumpier than the vegetable gloop- er, soup- they serve in the GSC canteen. With no obvious landing sites in sight, Poody just aimed at the surface and hoped for the best; if she landed on a cliff then the gravity was low enough that the lander would most likely be able to recover and fly away. In the end she ended up on a fairly significant slope, but low gravity plus six landing legs meant the lander was stable. Gaelans' first words on another planetary body? "That's one small- oops *bonk* ow my face, no wait stop rolling away COME BACK YOU STUPID TIN CAN!" Turns out the SAS turned off when she got out the lander and after tripping and head-butting it, it began rolling down the hill at a rather sedate pace until she caught up with it, pried the door open and dragged it upright again with the reaction wheels and RCS. She climbed out a bit more carefully the second time and did the whole flag-planting-photo-op thing. Some of the R&D team wanted her to try something with the emergency ration and object size comparison reference a.k.a. a banana, for scale. Why exactly they wanted her to hit it with a hammer wasn't clear, but what happened next was... tragic. She stood like that for several minutes, occasionally letting out a little whimper, as the shattered banana shards slowly slid down the hill, getting coated in dust in the process. To distract her from the Great Banana Travesty, Mission Control had Poody do some other tasks- gathering samples of the Iotan surface, deploying some longer-term surface experiments and so on. When Jade flew overhead again in the command module Poody flew up to join him. A trivial rendezvous and docking later... And Jade headed out on an EVA of his own, clutching a part of some kind that he insisted wasn't required for the continued functioning of the spacecraft. Poody wasn't convinced... The return trip to Gael was uneventful, right up until Poody decided to keep the lander attached to the top of their capsule for re-entry. Mission Control weren't overly concerned when she did that with the little docking target probe earlier, but an entire lander!? What happened to the old stickler-for-the-rules Poody who nearly mutinied when they tried to cut the launch countdown short on her first flight? When the plasma subsided, the lander was somehow completely intact and- better still- remained that way after splashdown. The research and engineering teams were positively salivating at the thought of getting their hands on it to see how all the various components had handled the extended spaceflight and the trip to Iota's surface and back. Well, most of them... Though the spate of banana-related injuries at hospitals around the GSC is probably completely unrelated. Where to next? Back to Iota for an extended stay, over to Ceti, out to other planets? Stick your ideas in the suggestions box and at the end of the week Director Jean will stick them all in a bag and pull some out at random.

That moment when you realise you just destroyed a perfectly good snack "for science"...

I was looking at trying the Zenit orbital imaging capsule because I'm doing the Soviet capsules this time, but it's absurdly heavy and power-hungry compared to the ordinary experiment. In fact, I'd be better off launching five of the normal orbital imaging experiments on the same rocket than one Zenit- oh. Oh no... KSP was not happy about this- over 200 parts so the launch was in single-digit FPS, it froze for a good four seconds when the fairings deployed and the lack of RCS on the second stage combined with some very slight part clipping meant that the five satellites all got thrown off in weird directions, but somehow it worked and that's good enough for me. It's on the build queue, but quickly got bumped down the priorities in favour of interplanetary missions. Like this one: I wasn't expecting a Mercury flyby with this design but the transfer window was pretty good and only minor modifications were required (like those extra fuel tanks on the transfer stage and avionics that actually work). It's a fairly quick trip over to Mercury so maybe it'll have a signal when it gets there? Between the transfer windows for Mercury and Mars, another Salmanzar Moonlander Mk2 launched out to the Moon; I missed some screenshots for this one and it got interrupted by other missions part way through. The interruptions came from Venus: Unfortunately I've once again overestimated the communications range and neither Venus-bound probe had a connection to Earth during the flyby. Worse still, they're both heading closer to the Sun after their flybys so it's unlikely they'll get a signal any time soon. This is becoming a habit, and not a good one... Back at the Moon, the Moonlander Mk2 ended up in a polar orbit and so the target landing site was the north pole. The south pole was probably a better option considering it's September and so the north pole will soon be dark for several months due to how RSS simulates axial tilts, but I can always go there later. The lander ran out of propellant mere metres off the ground and landed intact. There wasn't initially a line of sight to Earth, but about twelve hours after landing it appeared over the horizon. Now for Mars-bound probes, outfitted with newly unlocked tech level 4 communications systems to boost their range. During the refits I added better experiments to one of them, mostly for the solar science than for Mars, while the other got slightly bigger solar panels as an experiment. Two launches in under two weeks sent them on their way. The first to launch needs a small course correction but the second has a good trajectory and will come back down towards Earth after its flyby which might help get a signal? After the Mk2 kept running out of fuel and with new science experiments available, the Moonlander Mk3 was created with more fuel, better science and a few other minor tweaks. It's carrying a visible imaging 2 experiment, which ticked the box for the lunar orbiter and mapper contract and so completed the entire lunar exploration Program. No point completing the Program just yet though, there aren't any good options to replace it and there's plenty of funding left that'll pay for facility upgrades and/or more rockets. Following that success, a landing site was chosen in the Mare Fecunditatis and the lander touched down with ample fuel to spare, helped in part by a nice low parking orbit. With plenty of science gathered and being transmitted home, more research nodes can be added to the long, long queue... Eventually. Next time: More interplanetary stuff.

Is there a website that does side by side comparisons of computer parts? All this talk of RTX9000s and such means diddly squat to me.

So apparently today is International Cat Day and the makers of ModuleManager stuck it in as a joke. The same thing happens on 1st April because it's April Fools' (Fool's?) Day.

If I had to narrow it down to just one thing, it would be hunting down all the easter eggs- both on the various planets etc. and also in part descriptions, background scenery in the VAB, all the little puns that make things that little bit more interesting.

The U-2’s flights at 20km are equivalent to about 10km on Kerbin; 20km on Kerbin is like 40km on Earth, well above the altitude that any jet-powered aircraft ever made could reach.

That looks fine to me.

KSP is limited by CPU, not GPU- physics simulations are done by the CPU in a single thread for everything within physics range (~2.5km), so the more parts and vessels you have in physics range the more work that single CPU thread has to do and the slower the game will run. The game goes slower when close to terrain and flying in atmosphere than in vacuum for the same reason, more physics to calculate. Try disabling the FPS limiter and V-sync to boost your load times, loading is locked to frame rate for some strange reason and limiting the FPS slows down the loading process when you start up KSP. More mods also make it load slower, though your GameData folder looks pretty tame in comparison to some I've seen (including some of mine!). Look up the mod Hyperspace, it can help improve loading times to a certain extent.

Future Moon missions will require proper coverage of the far side, so a proper commoonicat- communic- no, I was right the first time, com-moon-ications- network. The relays might not be all that heavy, but sending three of them out to the Moon and setting them up in an evenly spaced high polar orbit will require an OR-4 Salmanzar. Any excuse to try out the new toy orbital launch rocket. Offset rotation on the three satellites means all three can get sunlight on their side panels and keep the entire craft powered up during the flight out to the Moon. Carrying a dozen TL3 communications systems on the same craft results in a pretty sizeable idle power draw which a single relay's panels couldn't keep up with in previous tests. This was also the first use of the Juno 6k upper stage which did its job without incident, parking the stack in a resonant orbit so that the three relays could then position themselves for optimal relaying. With their orbits synchronised down to the millisecond, they won't be shifting any time soon! Back on Earth, with Voskhod on the horizon it's time to get a second astronaut on the books and trained up for future missions. Welcome, scientist Walter King. Here's the user manual for the Voskhod capsule, the exam's in seven months, see you then. It's now early 1964 and a Venus transfer window approaches; in my first RP-1 career I sent a crewed mission to Venus in this transfer window, although that was in easy mode and RP-1 has been changed significantly since then, generally slowing things down. Still, better late than never. There was a pretty big flaw in the probe design- the avionics weren't able to handle its weight until nearly all of the propellant was dumped. An oversight compounded by the addition of solar panels on the top surface of the probe's body that are completely blocked by the antenna when it's deployed, making them nothing more than dead weight. Despite this issue and the tiny propellant reserve available on the probe, the transfer was completed and a small course correction by the upper stage sent it on its way for a nice close flyby of Venus. About a week later, the second identical probe lifted off. No time to fix the avionics, but again dumping propellant did the trick and it still made its intended trajectory. Back over to LC-400 for the first of the Mk2 Moonlanders. Heavily upgraded compared to the original with novel features such as "orbiting before landing" and "meaningful science payload", this new design should drastically improve the science rewards for landing on the Moon just in time for all the Moon landing contracts to end; all that's left is a far side landing, which with the new commoonications network up and running should be easy enough. Time warp related trajectory changes forced a suboptimal capture into a higher than planned orbit, then starting the final burn earlier than intended to land in a new biome meant that the probe itself had a lot more braking to do and not a lot of fuel to do it. In the end, it wasn't enough and the HTP ran out about fifty metres up. Not for the first time, the main thruster took the brunt of the impact and saved the probe itself from any further damage. Intact, upright and connected to the relays, science came flooding back. Each mission costs at least 9000 funds to build and at least 5000 to roll out to the launchpad so I need to make at least that much between launches, as well as hiring more researchers to try and speed research up, as well as keeping facility upgrades going, with Program funding that varies with each year of the Program- sometimes quite profoundly- and all three active Programs have different start dates so it's a constant balancing act. Next time: Going to Mars and- Mercury?

Looks fine, you’ve deployed the science experiments with a scientist and the solar panels with an engineer for maximum science and power production respectively, so all that’s left is to wait for it to generate science over time. For more distant targets you’ll need the deployable antenna (or a powerful relay nearby) and there’s a deployable RTG available late in the tech tree but by that point you probably don’t need the science from deployed experiments any more. There’s also a handy little mod called Deployable Batteries that adds, well, deployable batteries that can keep other deployed science equipment running when the solar panels aren’t generating power (a.k.a. night time).

A creature with a tail that emits fire? Where have I seen that before…

Is it still plagiarism if you copy your own work? Definitely unrelated, new rocket: OR-4 Salmanzar. Any resemblance to the Green Fruit rocket seen in It's Only Rocket Science is entirely coincidence, that used 2m tanks and this one is 2.25m and this one is actually green this time. Totally different. A test with a two-stage configuration was successful, but only just- LEO with 15m/s left in the second stage is a bit too close for comfort. Adding a third stage adds cost and mass, but added ~200m/s in orbit with the same 10 ton payload so is worth the extra effort. The rocket is ready, but the LC is not. Back to OR-3s for now with some Moon landers. A hard landing due to time warping that little bit too close to the ground, but only the engine and landing gear were destroyed and by that point both had done their jobs. Future Moon landings will need to go to the far side, which needs a communications network to get a signal back to Earth. This is a job for the OR-4 and newly unlocked Juno 6k engine: The 6k might not be the most powerful, most efficient or most reliable engine out there, but it's cheap! Do you need more than three ignitions? Back to Moon landings, now featuring some minor upgrades (solar panels and a mass spectrometer on the lander, more efficient TLI stage engine, stupidly reliable first stage core and booster engine configs) which give it slightly more delta-V and slightly more science. Somewhere in the upgrades, something went wrong- as soon as the braking stage fired up it began to wobble, wasting a lot of fuel pointing not-retrograde and so not slowing down. In spite of that, I somehow managed to get the lander on the ground almost intact: It landed on a hill and rolled for a while, breaking all the solar panels, but it managed to transmit all its science before the battery died so technically mission successful, if only just. The much greater payload capacity of the OR-4 means a much better lander design is possible, one that can capture into orbit first to pick its landing site with some precision instead of *gestures vaguely at the Moon's trailing edge* there-ish. Hmm, might need a bit of practice... The heavier lander only carries a small amount of HTP for the final descent and relies on the braking stage for almost all of the descent from orbital velocity as well as capturing into lunar orbit. And then suddenly it was 1964 and Wernher von Braun decided to quit. He was replaced by Sergei Korolev, whose discounted staff wages almost perfectly cancels out his reduced Program funding. I may replace him later... Coming soon: It's 1964 and I haven't sent a single mission beyond Earth's SOI yet. That has to change!

What part of "Kerbol system will be unchanged" wasn't clear? Besides, OPM2 will probably show up soon enough if KSP2 is as modding-friendly as advertised. I don't particularly like OPM and the whole "it's basically Sol system but Kerbal-y" thing; either fully commit to it and use KSRSS, or do something totally different like Galileo's Planet Pack or Beyond Home do.

Recent research has unlocked some new engine configs- the RD-107 and -108 don't gain any significant performance increases but they do get some frankly ridiculous reliability improvements with ignition failure rates of just 0.06%, a number that will only go down as they're used. The RD-0109 upgrade also improves reliability to a 0.15% failure rate with minor improvements in ISP and thrust too, which is good news for the OR-3 as it uses three of them in the second stage and usually another in the third stage. Moon landing number two: A decent science gain, however the lightweight lander only has the barometer, thermometer and telemetry report experiments as everything else is too heavy, would require too much power to run and transmit, or both. A larger lander that could run more science will need a bigger rocket as the OR-3 is at the limits of its performance just getting the one ton lander and braking stage out to a lunar intercept. On to something a bit different- uncrewed Vostok test flight, a required contract for the Crewed Orbit Program. Putting only half the ablator on the capsule saved some weight but it ran out part way through re-entry, though at a low enough speed that the capsule itself could withstand the rest. Vostok is pretty heat-resistant anyway due to the spherical shape. With that out of the way, the next Vostok flight was the first crewed mission of this entire save- in 1963! Rhonda Bell becomes the first Kerbal in orbit, staying up for several hours (unlike Gagarin who came back before completing even one orbit) and running some science experiments. With the science done it was time to come home again. Much science, 200 free workers for the new LC-400 once it's built and Rhonda is staying for over two years longer; all in all a complete success. And back to the Moon landings: Three landings in three different biomes, purely by chance since there's not much I can do to aim this thing. There are some science experiments still to run in lunar orbit, however the OR-3 is overkill for a mere lunar orbiter alone. There's also a contract to do a rendezvous with a crewed vessel, but Vostok isn't really designed for orbital manoeuvring- but a purpose-built probe would do the job just fine, and is light enough to rideshare with the lunar science probe. Rendezvous target dropped off, now the lunar probe is sent on its way. The next launch is Vostok 3, aiming to rendezvous with that target probe one way or another. This mission is also doing a crewed orbit contract and some more crew science. A bit of orbital shenanigans later... This would probably be completely impossible in reality due to the lack of windows on the Vostok capsule and the risk of the probe crashing into the capsule. Oh well. Science done and contract parameters met, it was time to come home. Another year from Rhonda and more science to add to the collection. All that's left in the Crewed Orbit Program is to do an EVA and a docking, both of which require considerable research to be possible- the Voskhod capsule and airlock and some docking ports respectively. Coming soon: A new rocket?

My car was away at the garage getting new brakes fitted so it would have been the garage's loan car rather than mine.

Got a knock on the door. From the police. Someone set a car across the road on fire this morning and I slept through the whole thing...

If I can run KSP with the graphics settings turned down without a GPU, I'm fairly sure I can run KSP2 with the graphics settings turned down with a GPU that has so far handled every other game I've tried it with, without too many issues. The "minimum" specs are for 1080p; turn your resolution down and limit the frame rate and you might find it works just fine on less capable hardware.

When using Bon Voyage you need to set the waypoint and then set the rover autopilot to drive to the current waypoint. It does have a habit of occasionally breaking/exploding wheels, something to do with the maps BV uses being subtly different to what’s rendered in physics range I think?

Then why are you wasting time electrolysing ice? If you’re looking at interstellar levels of technology then gas giant harvesting is the obvious answer.

With crewed missions coming up in the near future, it would probably help to actually hire some "crew" for it. But only one, they're quite expensive and I won't be launching them nearly frequently enough to need a second. Welcome to the team, Rhonda Bell, have fun doing training for the next nine months or so. A communications satellite launch didn't go to plan: But a week or so later with a new engine installed, everything went fine. Next up was a Tundra orbit satellite. The Rehoboam barely managed a Molniya orbit, but a minimum weight Methuselah rocket was more than enough to send the satellite to the higher orbit. With two completed Programs on the list and years left in both of them, I could leave them sitting there to make some easy money. Or... Yet another potentially catastrophic long-term decision, but one which I have a good chance of actually completing as the lunar surface exploration Program only needs one science node researched (admittedly it's going to be quite close) and the interplanetary stuff will bring in lots of science as soon as a couple of nodes are researched in the near future. With that done, time to design a lunar lander. It won't be easy- the braking stage is an unguided, unthrottleable U-2000 and the final descent will use a combination of a generic thruster and RCS thrusters for a bit of fine control, all running on HTP. After a few mishaps... ...a successful landing was achieved. Well, successful enough. Minimal science payload to maximise delta-V, no solar panels and only just enough battery capacity to last until landing and then transmit the science. It's on the build queue, but so are several other things too. Much Program funding means full speed ahead on facility upgrades and a healthy profit margin on top. I've decided to shut down LC-60 as there's nothing more for it to launch besides one last rocket that was being built as a commsat but was refitted to the Rehoboam-R spec for flying high science. Flying around the Earth twice in the upper reaches of the atmosphere bagged a load of data, before the RCS propellant ran out and the return capsule came back down. The first Methuselah-LL (Lunar Lander) launch was scrubbed due to a booster engine failure: A couple of weeks later with new engines: And only a moderate amount of save-scumming later: And it landed the right way up! With plenty of funding coming in and the OR-3 already pushing towards its limits just launching basic lunar landers, it's already time to look at what comes next. Which looks suspiciously like the Green Fruit rocket I used in It's Only Rocket Science but with slightly different tank sizes to reuse what I've tooled for this save, plus a suitably eye-catching paint scheme. The test launch managed 10 tons to LEO, which isn't too shabby. A new Launch Complex is required for this new OR-4 rocket, so I'd better get that going ASAP. It'll also be quite expensive to unlock the new parts, tool whatever needs tooling and rollout costs on CLC-200 are a lot higher than anticipated so I had to turn down the speed of the facility upgrades in order to not run out of money before each launch. On the plus side, the Programs currently active will pay even more in the near future than they do now so those money problems should disappear soon. Coming soon: Crewed orbit!