jimmymcgoochie

Today on "yeah, that'll probably work...": The solid rocket motor is attached to a little probe destined for high Earth orbit to do science and is unconnected to the same old photography probe launched by previous Rehoboam-R missions. The rocket has enough payload capacity to take both, so why not? After ten years of game time, most of my Leaders have retired and now I need to pick new ones. Of course I didn't notice this until the Admin Building upgrade completed and I went to pick a third Program, despite the alerts in the message thingy- which didn't actually flash up on the screen, that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it. While not particularly high-paying, this should provide enough to pay for some new engineers to run the new LC-200 as well as taking up a couple of the launches of the new OR-3 Methuselah. Some of the contracts can be completed using the Rehoboam, though only by pushing it to its absolute limits. New leaders: Only Van Allen and von Braun didn't need replaced, but I think I replaced them after the initial picks at the start of this save and they seem to have much longer retirement dates than the others which may be a bug. LC-200 is done, too bad I have a total of nine engineers to put into it which means building a single OR-3 will take twelve years... On to the first launch of this update, Rehoboam-R 005 with the Hi-Sci bonus probe. Imaging sat deployed, the second stage was reoriented and spun up before firing the SRM and sending the Hi-Sci probe waaaay higher than I expected. I'm not sure it'll get a signal for much of its orbit, but at least it'll spend most of its time in high space getting science. Within a day or so it was time to bring the photos back: Another ten science returned from space, though getting the last few biomes will take a bit more effort as they're less common and more spread out. Launching two satellites' worth of payload in one go means double the contracts for one rocket. The P&LC combined queue is a nice feature, giving a good overview of everything going on at once: I wasn't kidding about that "12 years for an OR-3"! And since I picked a leader that makes hiring people more expensive (if only slightly), don't have a lot of money to hire people right now and LC-60 still has plenty of life left in it yet, odds are LC-200 will be on the back burner for a little while yet. Next time: Designing lunar landers?

This is why you should turn solar storms off- they’re broken and will randomly nuke your crews for no reason at all with no way to avoid them. Just load an earlier save from before the crew died and keep going.

Useful tip: hold Alt while placing a part to force it to node attach only, this ensures your parts don't just surface attach to whatever's under the cursor at the time.

First launch in this update is a Rehoboam-LO going to lunar orbit. Reduced fuel load in the solid rockets resulted in a better capture burn, but it was slightly too circular for the micrometeor and cosmic ray experiments to run as they need an eccentricity of at least 0.04. A successful mission apart from that though. The next rocket was cursed. It's still connected to the clamps, the engine was never switched on and got destroyed after scraping across the ground, yet it continues to gallop away towards the next launch pad over at motorway speeds... It had a similar, though less severe problem the first time I tried to launch it, then this, then the third time around it was randomly floating straight up into the air at which point I just went for the launch. Which failed due to an engine failure. That's probably due to using a relatively new and untested engine, but I'm going to chalk this one up to "cursed rocket" and move on. More Vostok prototyping with an upgraded launch rocket that can actually make it all the way to orbit this time! At this point I'm just going to run with the weird orange/pink/purple colour scheme. Sorry. A complete test flight that worked perfectly. There's still some tech to unlock (like storing all the life support resources, for example) and I'd need to hire an astronaut to test it properly, but it's good enough to work with for now. Facility upgrades in progress: Now for a few launches of the Rehoboam-R satellite. The first is carrying an advanced biological sample capsule, while the rest use imaging cameras for the photography 1 experiment. The Kraken left these missions alone, mostly... Dropped this return capsule right in the middle of Antarctica, but it's October so expeditions could feasibly get out and recover it. A failure on one of the deorbit motors put it into a spin, but the capsule is passively stable and soon righted itself once in the atmosphere. With significant science gains from these orbital return missions I've added a number of extra science nodes to the queue which should keep the researchers busy for a good few years yet. The new LC and Admin Building are nearing completion, however it occurred to me that the new LC will need several hundred new engineers to staff it and each one costs 150 funds, so it may be a while before it gets fully up to speed and LC-60 still has some life left in it yet. Next time: It turns out that Leaders in P&LC only serve for ten years before retiring, and it's been almost ten years since I appointed most of them...

Right now I have a series of rockets that I’m naming after sizes of champagne bottles- Magnum, Jeroboam, Rehoboam and now Methuselah has joined the list. It’s a departure from my usual rainbow code system where the colour represented the size of rocket, or more specifically the launchpad required to launch it (this is RP-1 where larger capacity launchpads are more expensive and take longer to use) and the name after it followed a theme- I had Red Woodwind, Orange Brass and Purple Shape to name but a few. In more stock-ish games I tend to just name it after what it’s doing e.g. Mun Returner, Minmus Rover, Contract Cheese Sat 42…

Rovers in KSP are deceptively fast- 50m/s is easily achievable using those wheels but that’s 110mph (176km/h) and suddenly applying full steering lock at that speed will probably cause a massive crash in anything bar a proper racing car with aggressive aerodynamics keeping it glued to the ground. As for why it flips, a sudden force to one side (steering, braking or even accelerating) will cause the centre of mass to try and keep going as it was due to inertia (straight if turning, same speed if braking/accelerating); the CoM is always above the contact point with the ground (the bottoms of the wheels) so this induces a tilt that will quickly push the CoM outside the area of support provided by the wheels, so it tips over. Low gravity only makes this easier by reducing the pull on the CoM to bring it back down onto its wheels if it tips up onto one side and starts doing a wheelie of some kind. A quick trawl through dashcam footage will show you numerous instances where vehicles hit from the side end up rolling over or trucks (artic/semi trucks, not pickups) going off the road and toppling on an embankment or slope because they have a relatively narrow width for their height compared to a car; KSP rovers are often more top-heavy than any of those so combine that with abnormally high speeds and it’s not surprising they tip over. There’s also the power of reaction wheels which can be a hindrance and a help, but set the wheel controls to the arrow keys and not WASD so you don’t do flips when trying to accelerate and rover driving suddenly becomes a lot more manageable without having to faff around with reaction wheel settings that can prevent you from using them when you need them most.

This is Star Wars in a nutshell: anti-gravity technology so ubiquitous that even dirt-poor farmers on some backwater nowhere-planet have it and thus nobody ever questions how it works or why. It’s space magic dressed up as pseudoscience and trying to explain it properly won’t work because it was never meant to be explained.

Dun dun duuuuuun!

Star Wars: where hundred mile wide planet-killing space stations get taken down in a climatic battle scene that's copied almost exactly from The Dambusters only with X-wings instead of Lancaster bombers and a militaristic totalitarian dictatorship instead of- hang on... I was hoping this was going to be a thread more related to what it would be like to live inside the Star Wars galaxy, but instead it seems to be trying to find even the most tenuous scientific justification behind literal "space magic" for why Star Wars spacecraft can just go wherever they want to. It's space magic, leave it at that.

No, you don’t need RP-1 if you’re only going to be playing sandbox mode.

Does this happen with any save, or just a specific one? Try making a new save and loading that, does the same thing happen? Logs please:

Hello! It sounds like there’s been an exception in the loading process and the game can’t load, but it’ll just sit there and display loading screens forever anyway. The log files are the best place to find what’s gone wrong, here’s how to get them:

Hello! To get to the root of the problem, we’ll need more information: log files and preferably a screenshot in the VAB with a tank’s right click Part Action Window open; see guide below. Did you install all of Cryo Tanks’ dependencies? It needs a few other mods in order for it to work, make sure you have them all. Did you install your mods manually or using CKAN? If it’s the former then I recommend using CKAN for modding KSP as it does most of the hard work for you and rarely gets it wrong.

Those happen sometimes, it’s harmless and disappears once the next screen loads.

If the Des(s)wet Launchsite is there at all, you can use it- but you need to turn on “enable other launch sites” in the difficulty settings (escape > settings > difficulty settings in game)

A bit of this... And a bit of this...

https://github.com/KSP-RO/RP-0/wiki Best I can do, all the install guides want you to use CKAN as downloading everything by hand is a bit of a nightmare.

I copied what was in the BG deployable solar panel config, where the packedVolume is inside ModuleGroundSciencePart- the other deployable parts also put packedVolume inside their respective ModuleGroundXxx modules- and I’m not using KSP_PartVolume.

I've created a small patch to add packedVolume for the AKKU batteries so they play more nicely with stock inventory system. As far as I can tell the batteries still work in 1.12 and from my limited testing of 'stick it in an inventory box, does the available volume decrease?' the patch seems to be working as intended too.

I don't remember the last time I used a Reliant on a rocket and the only time I've used one at all that I can remember is on an SSTO spaceplane, where I eventually replaced them with Swivels or aerospikes as I modified the original design. For dumb boosters, solid rockets are cheaper and fewer parts which both count against the Reliant in career mode, while the lack of gimballing makes it less suitable for core stages. If it was a bit more powerful or unlocked earlier in the tech tree (or the Swivel a bit later) then it might get a bit more use, but the small advantages in thrust, sea level ISP and weight over the Swivel don't outweigh the inferior vacuum ISP and the lack of gimbal in most cases- at least in my experience. Were the Reliant able to produce 300kN and the Swivel only 150 in KSP2, it would be a different story...

Can you use CKAN? I’ve heard it doesn’t work all that well on macs but it’s the easiest way to install RO (and RP-1) with the RP-1 express installation- RP-1 only matters in career mode so if you’re playing sandbox then it makes no difference, or you can uninstall what you don’t want afterwards.

The Mercury capsule and the Mk1 (stock starter pod configured as Mercury-like) are both less than a ton fully loaded. Vostok alone is 2.3 tons, not including the service module which is about the same weight and which contains the batteries etc. needed for it to function. This is going to be harder than I thought... A three booster version of the OR-3 has about enough delta-V to get it into orbit, but not quite. Neither the Vostok or KV-1 could make it all the way to orbit even using all the (admittedly meagre) fuel in the service module. Re-entry from almost orbital velocity is still a good test though, one which the Vostok capsule passed despite having no control systems. The capsule appears in the staging list but it's not clear what that does. A rough landing at 10m/s, but still survivable. Now, the OR-3 prototype I've used so far has used pre-tooled separate structure tanks to keep costs down, however I could use integral structure tanks instead to improve the performance, possibly enough to get the 400m/s necessary to put the whole Vostok assembly in orbit without using any fuel from the service module. And sure enough: Upgraded fuel tanks gains about 400m/s which is exactly what I needed. Much of the tooling costs comes from the new 200 ton avionics and the fairings; the new fuel tanks aren't that expensive in comparison and reusing one tank size (2.25x5m) for everything- one on the second stage, three in the first stage core and two per booster- keeps that cost down. Same rocket but with separate structure tanks that are already tooled, the tooling costs aren't all that much less and the performance is noticeably worse. Next time: Back to the Moon, then some orbital return missions to kick off the crewed orbits Program.

Return capsule testing for the "reach orbital velocity and return" contract, but launching it all the way to orbit: As with the last time I tested this capsule, it needed an additional heatshield to survive re-entry and the heatshield melted in the process. With the design now ready for use, two rockets were added to the build queue under the name OR-2C Rehoboam R (for Return). And on the topic of designs, here's a brand new one: Yup, this is definitely the worst colour combination yet... And the fairing was supposed to be orange, not blue, not sure why that happened. Following a few minor hiccups in the development process: The new design was ready, with 3 tons to orbit from a 150 ton launch mass. Not terrible considering this is 1950s tech. The new rocket requires a new Launch Complex. Initially I was going for a 150 ton LC but then I realised that the prototype OR-3 could be improved by just adding MOAR BOOSTERS!!!1! and would need an even larger LC to compensate; upping the capacity to 200 tons means it can handle a minimum of 150 and so launch the 2-booster version, while the extra capacity will definitely come in handy soon. Construction of three buildings simultaneously would eat all the incoming funds if they were all at 100%, which probably wouldn't be too bad as I have a decent amount of money in the bank and the OR-3 design uses almost entirely pre-tooled parts. Coming soon: Designing a crewed orbiter. I've done Mercury and the Mk1 pod before, so maybe I'll do Vostok this time- wait, how heavy!?

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Yes you can- you’re fundamentally not understanding how orbital mechanics work. In space, EVERYTHING is moving and when you leave the gravity of one body you’re in orbit of its parent body e.g. Kerbin > sun (Kerbol) or Earth > Sun (Sol). Even in the simplified single body patched conics system used by KSP, where you’re only affected by the gravity of one body at a time, it’s pretty easy to eject from e.g. Kerbin’s SOI into an orbit that will bring you right back to Kerbin after a while. Many real missions (especially going to Mercury or even closer to the sun) use repeated flybys of Earth and/or Venus for gravity assists to reduce the delta-V and therefore fuel required, with BepiColombo doing six flybys of Mercury to gradually match orbits before capturing. Now, how about those screenshots?