jimmymcgoochie

Kerbals had conquered space. In mere decades they went from rickety pods held together with spit and tape to huge space stations and interplanetary spaceships, from cheap solid rockets and inefficient, unreliable liquid-fuelled engines to the ludicrously high ISPs of electric, nuclear fission and fusion propulsion systems, from tiny probes that could be strapped to the back of a pickup truck to gigantic interstellar vessels longer than the KSC runway assembled in orbital shipyards that could have held the entire KSC inside their structures, ground and all. The next few decades were a waiting game as those first interstellar probes hurtled across the cosmos at up to 15% of light speed, crossing the unfathomably vast expanse of the space between star systems to discover what lay at the other end. Kerbol system was colonised in a big way with populations building up on Duna, Laythe, Eve, even Tylo. Technological advances made in these intervening years made possible the next grand phase of Kerbalkind's expansion beyond its home system: interstellar colonisation. The reports started trickling back from those early probes. Dozens of star systems from four to fourteen light-years away were investigated and many found to have worlds that looked conducive to life, with a few showing indications that life may already exist. The colossal interstellar ships sent out to begin the long process of colonisation and terraformation could have impaled Gilly with several kilometres of spacecraft sticking out at each end, their engines so large that the ignition lasers had to be carefully tuned to take the speed of light delay into consideration when they fired so as to strike each car-sized pellet of fuel at exactly the same time, every time. Eleven targets were chosen in all, each given its own Colonisation Task Force. Those working in Task Force Nine were focussed on the star Ciro which- almost unbelievably- had two potential targets for colonisation. The fourth planet, assigned the name Gael by the automated planetary name generator, was similar in size to Kerbin, almost a perfect twin in fact, while the fifth planet Tellumo was significantly larger with a much thicker atmosphere and nearly double the surface gravity- in both cases exceeding Eve! Perhaps unsurprisingly Gael was chosen unanimously. At some point, Colonisation Task Force Nine became known as Gael Force Nine, a play on an old way of measuring wind speeds where a gale force wind was nine on the scale. The first automated vessels departed for Gael about a decade before the initial colonisation crew, giving time to set up all the necessary equipment before the crew arrived to deploy the big terraforming systems. A century of cryo-sleep later the crew arrived and discovered that their new home had a breathable atmosphere and the automated systems had already begun releasing spores and seeds across the land and oceans to kick-start the planetary ecosystems. They worked for another decade, building up a whole city to await the arrival of the main colony ship carrying half a million new inhabitants. But it never came. Years passed, the new Gaelans' hopes fading all the while, until their ship's long-range scanners detected a massive object approaching at a significant fraction of light speed. They watched as it approached, joy turning to alarm as it made no effort to slow down, then disbelief and horror as the huge colony ship bombed straight through Ciro system without stopping and kept on going. Radio hails went unanswered and telescopes couldn't focus on an object moving that fast, but from what data they could gather it was clear that the colony ship's propulsion section was badly damaged, or possibly missing entirely. The population on Gael could do nothing but watch as the crippled ship receded from view, vanishing into the cold void of deep space forever. Gael Force Nine found themselves on a planet that was perfectly habitable and would comfortably support a population of several million Kerbals indefinitely, but with mere thousands of Kerbals to populate it with. Kerbol system was seventeen light years away and a huge cloud of dust and gas had moved in between the two stars. Ciro's companion star Grannus, a stone's throw away relatively speaking, hadn't been chosen for a colonisation mission as Ciro was a more viable option. Almost all the other stars chosen for colonisation missions were even further away than Kerbol and would be using their interstellar communications systems to talk to Kerbol, if at all- with round-trip delays best measured in generations there was no such thing as a quick reply. Gael Force Nine were totally alone. The contingency plan prepared for exactly this scenario was activated: strip the ship of anything useful, deploy the gestation pods to start turning frozen embryos into the first true Gaelans, transition back to a level of technology nearly a millennium behind what they were used to and build back up once the population was stable and the planet's resources could be utilised. Centuries passed. Kerbin became a legend, a mythical land lost in time and space. Technologies were reinvented, key principles rediscovered and then one day a group of like-minded individuals got together for a traditional working lunch to discuss setting up a new venture. Gaelans loved to look up at the sky, see the planets and moons moving in their ceaseless dance, and dream of joining the dance themselves some day. Some day had become today. It was time for Gael Force Nine to once again reach for the stars.

My chemistry teacher once stuck a jelly baby into a test tube with molten potassium permanganate at the bottom, triggering a reaction that briefly caused the jelly baby to get stuck in the tube until gas pressure fired it out the end, on fire, with significant velocity, whereupon it immediately burned a hole through the curtains. More of a cannon than a rocket really, but a fun science lesson nonetheless.

A long, thin structure with the control point at one end will be susceptible to this kind of issue- since the control point is far from the centre of mass it’s disproportionately affected by any wobbles and will act to correct it, causing an even greater swing in the opposite direction and so on; the oscillation will get worse as long as SAS is active and trying to fix the problem that it created. Autostruts would help by holding certain parts still relative to each other and so stiffening the structure, as would putting your control point closer to the centre of mass so it doesn’t move nearly as much if the craft starts wobbling. A quick burst of time warp will freeze the parts and stop the wobble, though this is just a temporary fix and it’ll come back if you leave SAS on.

I'm baaack! Which naturally means I have to try and figure out what I was doing two weeks ago. A simulated launch of the new lunar station core module went well enough to build it. During the tests I experimented with an even larger version of the Violet Element rocket with four boosters and a launch mass of 4000 tons (a 33% increase in mass and booster count) but the meagre delta-V gains weren't worth the additional tooling cost required to build it- for now. I also worked on some lunar tanker designs to carry the necessary fuel out to the Moon for the reusable Moon lander. In order to avoid engine ignition limits (and failures) the lander uses generic thrusters which aren't particularly efficient, so the fuel required for one landing is heavier than sending a new single-use lander and the tankers are correspondingly large. This is the 'light' version carrying enough fuel for a single landing and able to get itself to the station once thrown in the general vicinity of the Moon. Reusing existing toolings means this is a pretty cheap option, which also explains the weird blister tanks on the sides which contain food supplies for the crews out at the station. Those are 3m diameter tanks. A considerably larger tanker with 5m diameter tanks, carrying almost triple the fuel. It'll take some tooling, but only costs about 50% more than the smaller tanker despite packing more than double the fuel, though the rocket required to get this heading Moonwards will be considerably larger and more expensive too. Lander for reference. And to finish off the simulations, the new Moon "base" which by this point is a D-2 capsule and mission module with some extra food and some landing legs stuck to it. Cutting the weight of the lander led to savings elsewhere and means it can launch on a 1500 ton Purple Geometry rocket instead of the larger and more expensive Violet Element. There was also a cursed geostationary contract sat as MechJeb stubbornly refused to accept that the descending node existed, preferring to put the GTO burn at a random spot about 10 minutes before the ascending node (which funnily enough worked fine if I told MechJeb to put the node there) until I eventually just plotted the burn at the AN and moved it around myself until it was at the right place. Coming soon: I need to do a sit-rep on all the active and planned missions to refresh my memory, so probably a very image-heavy but progress-light post.

One big reason for oops-I-fell-off-the-runway syndrome is that your nose wheel can “dig in” and produce too much friction, acting as a pivot point for the rest of the plane to rotate around and sending it veering off to the side. To fix this, enable advanced tweakables in the main menu settings then select your nose wheel(s) and override friction control, then set wheel friction to somewhere between 0.2 and 0.5- not 0 as this will make them useless for steering. The rear wheels should be fine as they are, friction at the back will help keep the plane stable. You should also increase the brake force at the rear and decrease it at the front to improve passive stability on landing, though the basic nose wheel has no brakes so this is more for later when you unlock retractable landing gear and also for rovers. Advanced tweakables has a lot of useful extra features that can be very helpful, including greater controls for rover wheels, the ability to autostrut parts together to prevent wobbly rocket syndrome and assign fuel tank priorities to drain tanks in a specific order; I usually set them to drain from bottom to top in a stage as this shifts the centre of mass upwards and helps to keep the rocket passively stable.

4GB of RAM isn’t going to be enough, in my experience 8GB is the minimum required to run the game. 4 gigs is barely enough to run Windows these days…

KSP(1) is limited by single-thread CPU performance, hence the slowdown when vessels with many parts are in physics range as each part has to be calculated for each frame and only one CPU thread can do it as that’s how the game was made. More RAM is good up to a point, however you only need a lot of RAM if you’re using a lot of mods and KSP has a habit of eating up all the memory it can find regardless (~95% RAM use with 16GB and after upgrading to 32GB it’s still ~95%) and in my experience 32GB is sufficient unless you’re planning on using 200+ mods, which is a bad idea anyway. My experience running KSP without a GPU after mine broke is that the game will still run quite happily without one unless you look at the ground, at which point the frame rate tanks badly, so just having any GPU is better than nothing but getting a really good one isn’t critical- for KSP at least, other games may vary considerably. Don’t just take my word for it though, I’m not a computer hardware expert by any means and the most technical thing I’ve ever done to my PC was remove that broken GPU and put the replacement in (hooray for 3 year warranties!) so you may want other opinions on the matter.

Kerbals like a) snacks, b) shiny things and c) snacks. Any opportunity to find the most exotic snacks on other worlds- cheese from the Mun, mint from Minmus, cinnamon and other spices from Duna etc.- would surely provoke a metaphorical gold rush as anyone with the means raced to secure the supply of those pricey, tasty morsels. The fact that doing so requires making some very shiny spacecraft would be the icing on the proverbial cake.

If it burns, it can (*probably) be used as rocket fuel. If we’re only talking about liquid-fuelled chemical rockets here then there’s a long and varied list of propellants that have been used, or at least tested, from the common to the bizarre to the outright terrifying. These include (not an exhaustive list!): Refined kerosene, aka jet fuel, energy dense and pretty easy to get hold of in large quantities, usually burnt with liquid oxygen although in some cases (cough Britain cough) hydrogen peroxide was used instead; Liquid hydrogen, lightweight and very efficient but also very un-dense, extremely cold and prone to boiling away and escaping through the walls of your fuel tanks, usually burnt with liquid oxygen although hydrogen-fluorine rockets were proposed at least once as fluorine is a better oxidiser than oxygen; Liquid methane, offering a half way point between kerosene’s density and hydrogen’s efficiency and cryogenic properties, a few real rockets are going to use methane as their fuel but so far no rocket has made it to Earth orbit using methane, typically used with liquid oxygen; Hydrazine, a compound of hydrogen and nitrogen, able to be stored for long periods and used as either a monopropellant for RCS or small rockets or as a bipropellant, hypergolic and spontaneously combusts when it contacts a suitable oxidiser, usually nitrogen oxides; Mono- and dimethylhydrazine, derivatives of hydrazine with extra methyl groups added, widely used in hypergolic rockets such as ballistic missiles as they can be stored for long periods in missile silos and launched at short notice, also used for RCS, upper stages and almost all US crewed spacecraft, typically used with nitrogen oxides although one Soviet engine combined UDMH (unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine) with liquid oxygen, see also Aerozine-50, a proprietary blend of hydrazine and UDMH used by rocket engines made by Aerojet; Pentaborane, absolutely ghastly stuff that’s as toxic as nerve gas but provides a higher ISP than other hypergolic fuels, the Soviet RD-270 engine was converted to use pentaborane (as the RD-270M) with nitrogen tetroxide but fortunately never flew, other boranes are similarly energetic but similarly toxic too; Chlorine fluorides, WHY!!?!??! Toxic, corrosive, will burn with almost everything including sand, asbestos, water, fuel tanks, engine components, humans… DO NOT USE! Ethanol, used in some of the earliest liquid fuel rockets including the V-2 missile and some versions of the Redstone missile used for suborbital Mercury capsule launches, poor ISP compared to kerosene and prone to mysteriously going missing from the storage tanks, usually used with liquid oxygen or nitric acid. Aniline, or aminobenzene, used in very early US sounding rockets with furfuryl alcohol and nitric acid; Cavea-B, a monopropellant researched in the US to replace hydrazine but ultimately abandoned due to safety concerns, decomposes violently in a self-sustaining reaction once started with a dab of UDMH hence the safety concerns of the reaction racing up the pipes and into the fuel tanks; Liquid ammonia, considered for a Soviet upper stage engine combining it with fluorine but this never made it to reality; Liquid lithium, just don’t ask how you’d keep lithium molten in a rocket with liquid fluorine in close proximity and gaseous hydrogen nearby too and just look at that crazy high ISP! Tested with an ISP of well over 500 seconds, well above even hydrolox, but impractical and lithium has since become very valuable for batteries. There are other, more niche propellants out there and rare combinations such as a kerosene-hydrogen-oxygen tripropellant rocket, and that’s not even mentioning solid rockets, nuclear thermal rockets or ion/plasma/electric propulsion systems or the most famous rocket propellant of them all: Coke and Mentos.

Perhaps someone spiked their lunch with copious quantities of hot sauce, or even laxatives, which the lunch thief then stole and ate- and promptly regretted doing so. I’ve heard similar tales from real-life workplaces and Kerbals are even more obsessed with food than humans are, so it makes sense.

You can change to a polar orbit from anywhere, but with a high apoapsis after capture it’ll be really cheap to do so at the apoapsis. The weirdness with the capture burn is because the stock delta-V system doesn’t play nice with RO and has actually been disabled in more recent versions of RO. The wobbly RCS is a new one, but you could have kept it pointing in the right direction with a bit of spin-stabilisation. The previous stage hit the residual limits of the SPS engine, if those smaller tanks hadn’t been there it would just cut out earlier. Moral of the story- don’t cram all the science into the middle of the craft in one big limp, spread it out and use the CoM offset tool in procedural avionics and RCS Build Aid to balance it out. And as for the spinning: it’s nothing to do with engine issues and everything to do with not shutting down the engines until the node was over burnt, with MechJeb dutifully trying to point back towards the node that was now behind it.

But more importantly- going from suborbital to SSTO using MOAR BOOSTERS!

Building an SSTO spaceplane with a usable payload is tricky, but it’s definitely possible even without the fanciest parts. Here’s one I’ve used extensively that I found on KerbalX: https://kerbalx.com/Kronus_Aerospace/Kronus-LowTech-20-Ton-SSTO As the name suggests, it’s fairly low tech (only requires a level 2 R&D) and in my experience it can handle 20 ton payloads for a net cost of around 6000 funds per flight if returned to the runway. It also flies well with and without a payload attached and is pretty simple to operate, so if you just want a functional SSTO that can actually put a decent sized payload into orbit, it’s a good place to start.

It does seem a little low, but real life reaction wheels are pretty weak and if anything the large wheel seems overpowered. It may be the case that this part was deliberately changed in RO to be weaker since those other posts you found.

KSP is a gas, in that it expands to fill the available volume of RAM: when I had 16GB it went up to almost 100%, when I added another 16GB it went up to almost 100%… Highly detailed textures on parts will use more RAM and so will fill it up faster, hastening the inevitable performance slowdown and possible out-of-memory crashes; interior views for crew parts can be particularly bad for this so if you don’t need those it can be beneficial to delete them, some mods like Station Parts Expansion Redux even offer the internals as a separate download for this reason.

The solid rockets you got contracts for are Restock+ 0.625m boosters, I think they’re deprecated after the stock 0.625m SRBs were added. Try adding SRB Waterfall Effects (SWE) so solid boosters look as good as liquid fuelled engines (you do have Waterfall installed, right?) and if you’re going to be doing any rover stuff, BonVoyage is an absolute must so they can drive themselves in the background to go places instead of having to drive them by hand for mile after tedious mile- er, kilometre?

You need an excuse for eye candy?

How long is a piece of string? In the real world, fighter jets can range from something like the English Electric Lightning, which was little more than two jet engines with wings and a cockpit stuck to them with a minimal flight load to make it a rapid response fast interceptor, all the way to a heavy air superiority fighter like the F-15 Eagle which can carry three external drop tanks and (if my memory is correct) can fly around 5000 miles across the Atlantic without stopping, relying on sophisticated electronic systems and guided missiles rather than close-quarters agility. How much fuel you need depends entirely on how far you want to fly and what kind of plane you’re building- a smaller, more agile plane will need less fuel to give it that agility but this will cost it flight range, whereas a plane built for greater endurance will suffer from the extra weight of fuel it has to carry around with it. Cruising in “dry” mode will save you a lot of fuel when you don’t need the extra thrust of the afterburners.

180 mods is too many, try cutting back on that number by dropping every mod you don’t absolutely need. The logs are full of errors for a variety of mods, some of which I’ve never heard of, which makes me think some of your mods may be outdated or incompatible with the current version of KSP- it’s definitely worth checking, KSP 1.8 came with a Unity version change that broke all mods not updated to be compatible with it, so anything compatible with 1.7.3 or earlier is likely to not work in KSP 1.8 or later.

That first probe isn’t making orbit. Not even close. Stock SAS also wasted a ton of RCS fuel rocking side to side in the roll axis, use MechJeb instead as it doesn’t do that. The reason the second stage is having to climb so much is probably because those solid boosters aren’t being decoupled after burning out. It would also be worth checking the PVG settings and reducing the pitch rate a bit so you get more altitude and so have more time to accelerate to orbital velocity. As for those course corrections- let MechJeb take the strain, it’s usually more efficient. You may want to consider adding a small, cheap UHF antenna to your transfer stages so you can control them and plot a correction node right away.

Is it a solid rocket? Those will fire as soon as you activate them regardless of throttle settings. Adding 150-odd mods isn’t a good idea, it’ll make it a lot harder to narrow down the cause of this issue and will probably cram the parts list with a bewildering array of parts. It’s easy to get carried away and add ALL THE SHINY MODS but it’s better to add them gradually and find out which you like or dislike, which work together and which don’t etc.

Parts-heavy mods will use more RAM than the DLCs, but if you’re set on cutting down on the DLC content you should look at the Making Less History mod which disables the missions content from Making History, as well as the ability to launch from the Woomerang and Dessert launch sites; I’m not sure if this is the case with the 1.12 launch sites.

Wingtip vortices are well beyond the stock aero model and quite possibly beyond FAR as well. Wingtip winglets add weight and drag and almost no fast planes (from military jets to Concorde to rocketplanes like the X-15 all the way to the Space Shuttle) have them; however those aircraft generally don’t worry about fuel consumption as much as a commercial airliner.

Build a rover, stick all the science experiments, two science containers and a seat on it and send Bob (or other scientist) out to drive around the KSC. The ground around each of the KSC facilities is a separate biome and even more importantly nearly every building is a separate biome too- each of the Tracking Station dishes, the various R&D buildings, fuel tanks, water towers, even the flagpole- and will give you science from each one. Run the experiments, store in one container, rerun, store in the other container, then move on to the next one. You can get thousands of science points this way (difficulty settings dependent). Or if that sounds like too much work, install the Kerbal Environmental Institute (KEI) mod that does it all in a single click of a button.

Even if Kerbal anatomy allowed for this (which with those huge heads and tiny bodies is unlikely, there’s just not enough space to fit it in along with everything else needed to stay alive), what good would it do? Aside from the moral implications of trying to produce “rocket fuel” that way, it would require considerable refining before it was useful in a rocket as contaminants would reduce the fuel performance and could even cause blocked pipes and engines going boom, in the not-fun way. Just dig it out the ground, it’s the only way to produce methane at the scale required for a space program to use it as their primary fuel.