jimmymcgoochie

Try updating your graphics drivers?

Is this happening slowly over time or all at once? If it’s a gradual thing then it might be phantom forces acting on your vessel (a.k.a. Kraken) but if larger jumps them it’s probably the time warp bug. Try rebuilding the vessel and avoid part clipping wherever possible to minimise the chances of a phantom force occurrence. You can also usually quicksave/quickload to get rid of them. There’s a bug in KSP 1.12 where activating time warp can shift your orbit a bit; the bigger the jump, the worse the orbit shift. Try pressing ./> to speed time warp up one notch before clicking any “warp to” buttons and see if that helps, it will lessen but not eliminate the problem and you’ll likely need to do course corrections on longer journeys to fully counter it.

I've started up a second RP-1 report using Payloads and Launch Complexes, read it here: P&LC is considerably different to normal RP-1: contracts don't give you funds, KCT points don't exist, the admin building actually does something and reputation is worth something. Suffice to say my first attempt was a total disaster and I ran out of money after less than a year, but second time around things are going better less terribly. I'll still be focussing mostly on It's Only Rocket Science though.

Duck 5 copied Duck 4 before it, but aimed out to sea instead of inland and got some temperature data from its dual avionics. It was to be the last Duck launch and the last launch from LC-1, which isn't giving enough of a return to justify the costs of operating it. In stark contrast, LC-12 continues to enjoy success after success with the SR-2 Ikwa, racking up a series of successes and contracts completed. Fulfilling everything for first film return except the avionics requirement is a strong indication that it'll work once the avionics are added. Due to the longer build times for these rockets, usually 3-4 months each, the funds kept coming in and at last I could afford to tool up those avionics and start building controllable rockets. The new rockets, named SR-2A "Pila" and effectively an Ikwa with a proper avionics unit instead of a little science core, enjoyed similar successes to their unguided siblings. After the first launch, all Pilas used upgraded aluminium tanks with a better mass ratio and considerably better utilisation as high-pressure tanks than steel. If the part under the film capsule is yellow, it's an Ikwa; if it's blue then it's a Pila. The Pila also carries a biological sample capsule meaning more science per flight. Once the first film return contract was completed, a repeatable version was unlocked which paid out confidence and reputation, though both would diminish significantly with each repeat. I also took the first biological sample return contract to unlock a repeatable version of that, something that LC-1 could have been doing if I had kept it around and done this contract a few launches earlier. Too late now though, I'm not rebuilding it. One big contract I haven't yet looked at is the 3Mm downrange milestone, a key Objective and a big step on the road to orbit. Trying to cobble a rocket together out of what I already have resulted in this: It wasn't successful, but I can't build a taller rocket due to the size constraints of LC-12. I've already upgraded LC-12 to support up to 15 tons, but adding extra height is significantly more expensive than adding extra mass and I have an idea for how to get around the constraints I currently have. Next time: Fit a 23 metre tall rocket inside a launch complex that only supports 16 metre tall rockets with this one weird trick!

I decided to try my hand at the new Payloads and Launch Complexes (P&LC) being developed as potentially the next phase of RP-1. It's rather different to normal RP-1 and so my first attempt lasted about two hours before I realised I'd completely ruined it by hiring far too many researchers and only building puny Aerobee-esque rockets. This is the second attempt, which so far I've only somewhat ruined with bad decisions. The settings: Mostly moderate difficulty with a few minor tweaks (no Kerbalism solar storms because they're broken, plasma blackout on, reverts/reloads also on, RP-1 set to Alt-Hist) and my usual rule of one retry per mission- which of course I immediately abandoned on the first launch, but have stuck to since then (honest!). The leaders: Unlike normal RP-1, the admin building is a critical component of P&LC. It's where you pick your Programs and the various heads of departments that each give you specific bonuses and penalties e.g. faster research for rocket engines, reduced staff costs and so on. I think every leader has two bonuses and one penalty. You don't get funds from contracts- each Program gives you funding over time and you need to complete all the objectives within the time limit to complete the Program. Programs cost Confidence to accept, with faster deadlines costing more and paying the same funding but over a shorter time period. (Side note, Chelomey is supposed to reduce the Confidence cost to accept a Program but seems to be bugged and doesn't actually apply the displayed discount.) I picked Early Rocket Development and Suborbital Research, primarily because there's a bit of overlap between those and none between either of them and X-Planes, plus I can fire my starting astronauts and save some funds. (Something I remembered about 2 months in...) Another change from normal RP-1 is how rockets are built and launched: instead of a single VAB making everything and launchpads that can launch anything under a specific weight, each Launch Complex has to be specifically built with size and (both minimum and maximum) weight limits and each launchpad has to be equipped with storage for all the propellants required, so forward planning is needed when using engines like the Aerobee which use different propellants with different configs. A small LC equipped for little Aerobees weighing less than a ton is cheap and quick to build, but the long term prospects aren't great and you'll quickly run out of things to do with it; in contrast, a larger LC that can launch 10-ton V2-esque rockets takes longer, costs more and has a lot more scope for future use by launching a variety of payloads and completing many of both Programs' objectives. So obviously, I built both. The first launch from LC-1 and indeed the whole career is the SR-1 "Duck", because the WAC in WAC Corporal sounds like "quack". In the past I've always gone for similar colour schemes- red/white/black for Terranism Space Program and red/white for It's Only Rocket Science- so this time I went for something totally different, trying a few different combinations until I found one I liked. I only realised later that it's basically the Ukrainian flag. The first launch went- -terribly. The first time I tried it, one of the spin motors failed to ignite and sent the rocket spinning in the wrong way until it broke apart shortly afterwards; the first retry had an engine performance loss that meant it was barely accelerating, then I reloaded again and the engine outright failed almost instantly. It went just fast and high enough to qualify as "first launch" before getting range-safetied as soon as I could click on the rapidly spinning avionics unit to trigger it. Over at LC-12, the first SR-2 "Ikwa" was ready to launch some weeks later; "Ikwa" because it's small, pointy and pretty low-tech. A minor configuration error means it got launched from the KSC launchpad over at Brownsville instead of a launchpad at Cape Canaveral; I moved the KSC there to not have it sitting awkwardly in the middle of the fancy Cape Canaveral that comes with the high-res express install. No problems with this one, the RD-100 burned for the full duration and sent the payload over 200km up before it came back down and parachuted to the surface. Speed and altitude records were broken and the Karman line objective was completed. Applicants are basically staff you can hire without paying the hiring fee (300 funds each normally), but you still have to pay their wages. Spending too much on staff too early can quickly chew through your funds and leave you penniless, as I found out on my first attempt. Much science was gained from the experiments and also returning the payload from space, with the first new P&LC newspaper appearance too. A nice feature that I'll be seeing more of in future, I hope. LC-1's team of ten engineers aren't happy that the much larger team of 65 at LC-2 beat them to space, so they decided to try and fling the Duck's avionics unit up to space and bring it back intact. They were so determined to do so that they completely ignored the burn duration limit on the engine, trying to push it past 80 seconds when it wasn't meant to do even 50. Unsurprisingly, it failed- first a performance loss cutting thrust, then an outright failure as it kept on burning even longer than planned. It also landed in the sea. Still, moar science is always good. Ikwa 2 also launched at Brownsville because apparently I didn't fix it like I thought I did. The launch went even higher than the last one, almost reaching 300km, before the payload came back and once again landed safely. Another contract completed by Team LC-12 after the failure of Duck 2 to do the same. Inter-team rivalry is growing with each launch. The research team aren't interested in such silliness, preferring to get on with their work. Researching the first rocketry node unlocks upgrades for both the Aerobee (to XASR-1) and RD-100 (to RD-101) but the XASR-1 is only 1000 funds rather than 10,000 for the RD-101 so Team LC-1 got the upgrade. With double the thrust and thus half the burn time, Duck 3 was able to make it to space without overburning the engine. Mission success, but the Ikwa 2 already completed the contract for it. A bit more science gained but at this point LC-1 is looking less and less useful in the long term. Having finally fixed the launchpad location, Ikwa 3 launched much like its predecessors, grabbed science throughout the flight and returned safely. Ikwa 4 did pretty much the same thing, only between those launches I accepted two contracts and cancelled both after realising that I couldn't actually complete them. Wasted reputation, which in P&LC is actually worth something- just don't ask what yet as I still don't really know. Beware of phantom terrain around Cape Canaveral... I need 10,000 funds to tool up an avionics unit to control the Ikwa rocket and so complete all manner of objectives and contracts, but that'll take forever at this rate. Cutting down the engineers in LC-12 from 65 to 50 nearly doubled my net gain without having too much of an effect on production rates, but it'll still be 1952 before I get the funds together. Duck 4 tried something new, sticking two avionics cores on the rocket to get double the science. They launched it west, only to discover that all of Florida is "forest" and nearly all the science has already been gathered flying high over the forest. The next one will launch out over the sea instead. Meanwhile, Ikwa 5 completed a sounding rocket contract by using a couple of tanks stolen borrowed from LC-1 to hold the sounding payload strapped to the sides of the rocket. The 100% recovery rate continues, but returns are diminishing- perhaps taking a leaf out of LC-1's book and double-stacking the payloads will improve that? I was aiming to cover all of 1951 in one go, but at this point I went into the VAB and got a stack overflow followed by a Unity crash, so that was the end of that. Next time: I need that avionics pretty badly or I'll be stuck with just doing sounding rocket contracts instead of hitting the Program objectives. Maybe LC-1 will be closed down? Too bad I can't close the hangar, it costs as much as both LCs put together and gives me nothing at all. I really shouldn't have spent all my money on hiring people so early on instead of saving some for that pesky avionics...

Achim and Antony are pretty jealous of fellow newbies Christa and Marvin going all the way to the Moon on their first flight, but they'll just have to live with it and get ready for their own debut mission as they head to the Yellow Timpani space station. A couple of post-orbital insertion burns later and they arrived at the station within 36 hours. Two contracts paid out just for that, with a third on the cards after they leave the station and move to a higher orbit for a few days. Meanwhile, over at the Yellow Carillon lunar station, Christa was ready to take the lander down to the surface; this is mildly problematic because the lander is in the middle of the stack, with the Gemini capsule on top and the upper stage booster (that'll take the Gemini back to Earth later) underneath. The upper stage should be controllable, but for some reason (most likely forgetting to add batteries) it wasn't and began floating away in a slow spin after releasing it from the lander, so Marvin was forced to chase after it with the combined Gemini/station and dock with the slowly tumbling booster as Christa watched on. With their ride home secured (didn't think about that when you were laughing, did you Christa?) it was time for the landing. The crewed landing and rover exploration contract put its landing site just a bit further south than the station's orbit, so a bit of an inclination change was required before landing. The landing looked good until near the surface, at which point it became clear that it was undershooting a bit. Not great for the future rover driving, but close enough to be drivable by hand. A safe landing in the midlands soon followed. With the immediate post-landing tasks done, Christa deployed the mini-rover and took it for a spin. Yup, tiny rover with lots of weight on the top makes it rather unstable. It also turns out to be pretty good at massive lairy drifts when going at speed. (It's going more or less in the direction of the camera in this shot.) It took over half an hour to get to the waypoints- should have landed closer- but with that done the contract was nearly complete. There was even time to drive a little ways south to the lowlands to get double the science from this landing. There were a few incidents during the driving, but nothing too serious... After "arriving" back at the lander, Christa abandoned parked the rover and got ready to head back to the lunar station. The landing site is still some way south of the station's orbit, but the lander's generous fuel margins mean that's not an issue even after the plane change before the landing. What is a problem, though, is the solitary docking port currently occupied by the Gemini capsule. With no way to dock, Christa bailed out, grabbed the science and jetpacked her way over to the station- which due to the number of times the rover flipped over had nearly no nitrogen left. She grabbed the station with 0.1 units left in the tank! They'll be staying at the station for another thirty days to complete the lunar station contract, plenty of time for Marvin to process all the surface samples as well as the crew experiments on board the station. Meanwhile, Achim and Antony are done at Yellow Timpani and undock to head to the higher orbit required for the orbital flight contract. A successful few days with lots of contracts either completed or just waiting for the crews to return, lots of science gathered and all the interplanetary missions steadily building in the background ready for the upcoming transfer windows. Final scores: Coming soon: Returning these crews to Earth and probably some interplanetary shenanigans.

The most challenging part of any Grand Tour isn’t designing the vessels or planning the route, it’s putting up with abysmal, slideshow quality frame rates as your thousand-plus-part monstrosity thrashes the single CPU core doing all the work. Docking or doing any kind of EVA work is so much slower and even more painful at 3FPS, plus I’ve found EVAs a lot harder to control properly as they always seem to overcorrect instead of just pointing the way I tell them to.

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I’ve run KSP on a PC with just the integrated graphics doodah when my GPU broke, it wasn’t too happy about it but it worked nonetheless. 20GB of RAM should be more than enough as well. Can you post the full log? There might be a problem in the loading process that the logs would show, or it might just be a resource issue with your CPU or GPU not coping and freezing the game so it never loads. When the game says “expansion loading complete” on screen, it’s actually compiling and running all the code; an error in that process will leave you at that screen forever so only the logs will show what’s going on.

Two extremely expensive Mercury missions need paying for, maybe I have an active contract to do something? *checks contracts* Land on Deimos? Less than 5m/s of propellant later (including to reorient the craft a few times) and nearly a million funds for it. It was only after landing that I realised Deimos is tidally locked and I've landed on the outward-facing side, limiting communications as this probe can only reach Earth via the Blue Guitar probes in low Mars orbit, but it occasionally gets through (somehow) and after gathering all the surface data I can put it back in orbit to finish that off. Meanwhile, over at Mercury, Purple Circle Mercury 2 was arriving. A combination of a lighter science payload and potentially a better transfer window means that this probe was easily able to capture into a low polar orbit of Mercury with a decent fuel reserve left over at the end, not literal fumes as with its predecessor. A valuable contract is completed and all the science instruments are running- hence the elliptical orbit as a couple required >0.04 eccentricity Violet Hydrogen, the Mercury rover, is already on the build queue, but using basically the same craft but with a different payload should mean I can get terrain and biome maps of the surface too for much contract funds, though the upfront cost will be steep... The Mercury window coming up soon is a pretty good one, but the following one will cost almost 1km/s more and with a likely rollout time of 12 days per mission I can't launch both of these to Mercury at once. Unless, of course, I build a second unlimited launchpad at a mere 2 million funds, which I currently don't have but can get by completing some crewed lunar contracts. But before that, Green Okra launches a set of four relays into a high polar orbit of the Earth to try and eliminate communications blackspots for freshly launched rockets in LEO. The relays were released into a resonant orbit and then circularised on their own, their orbits synced to within 0.001 seconds to ensure they'd stay put for a long time to come. With those relays in place, the old Green Apple relays (the three low orbit relays seen above) can be decommissioned. Re-using much of the Green Cucumber GEO's hardware yet again, Green Quince is a station resupply mission to fully top up the tanks on the Yellow Timpani station since it's out of liquid hydrogen, nearly out of water and getting low on food and lox as well. A relatively straightforward rendezvous and docking ensued within a day of launch and the supplies were transferred over to the station. I thought about changing the station's orbit with the probe's engine, but it had only one ignition left and I used that to deorbit it instead. Next to launch was Green Mango 5, the last of the planned imaging satellites. It was positioned and deployed without incident. And now to the big event- another crewed Moon mission! Newbie astronauts Christa and Marvin are in for an absolute treat for their first flight into space as they're heading to the Yellow Carillon lunar station and then one of them is going to the surface to do some roving. The launch, using RD-253s because I never bothered to change them to NK-15s they're extremely reliable, had some issues with the second stage spontaneously combusting, but a slightly slower pitch rate solved that second time around. Once in orbit, the trans-lunar burn was started- and then the troubles began. First the upper stage burnt its remaining fuel, but then the stage separation didn't happen properly and the RL-10s on the upper stage didn't light, then only one of them fired up and I had to turn the others off and back on to get them to work, then the node got reset for some reason and I had to complete the burn by eye and then repeatedly correct for the orbital drift knocking the periapsis below the surface. Once captured, I set up an intercept with the station- and then it hit the ground because timewarp shifted the orbit. Stupid timewarp orbit bug! Docking was a bit tricky because this vessel was never designed to do so, so in the end the station did the hard work with its much more balanced RCS system. Christa and Marvin made themselves at home as the contracts completed. Besides these two contracts, there's also crewed lunar orbit, lunar station and crewed lunar landing and rover exploration contracts which this mission should complete. That funding was enough to build the new launchpad, allowing both Mercury missions to leave at the same time and also allowing larger orbital assembly projects in the future. Coming soon: Two more newbies go up to the Yellow Timpani station and someone gets their first Moon landing. Besides Mercury, there are transfer windows approaching for Venus and Jupiter as well and a flotilla of missions being built for those opportunities.

Sent a crew of two newbies on their first spaceflight- to the Moon! They’re holed up in a brand new station to wait for the landing site to be directly under their orbit, at which point one of them gets to go down to the surface and test out a new mini-rover, and complete some valuable contracts in the process!

Yes, it’s The Snarkiverse. Worth a look if the same old Kerbol system is getting boring but you can’t run a full system-replacement planet pack as it only rearranges the stock bodies.

A few things stand out to me: The logs seem to indicate that you're missing ROLib, a dependency of various RO mods. How did you install these mods and when? The logs also seem to be incomplete, I'd expect to see something at the top with the KSP version and then either your system's RAM or VRAM (GPU) depending on which log it is. Which version of KSP are you using? You've installed mods into the Steam copy of KSP. Don't do that, Steam breaks modded KSP a lot- instead, create a copy of KSP and install your mods into that: 1. Right click KSP in Steam library > browse local files. 2. Copy KSP/saves/<your save name> and paste that on the desktop. 3. If you used CKAN to install your mods (and you should!), click File > export modpack and save that to your desktop too. Screenshot your GameData folder with mods installed (even if you use CKAN) so you can check that you’ve reinstalled them all later. 4. Uninstall all mods from KSP. 5. Right click KSP in Steam library > properties, disable Steam cloud. 6. Completely uninstall KSP through Steam. 7. Reinstall KSP through Steam, right click > Properties > local files > verify integrity of game files. If you want to play a version other than the current release (1.12.3), pick that version in the Betas tab and verify the files once Steam has installed that version. 8. Run KSP and make sure it loads properly without mods. 9. Browse local files again, then go up one level (to Steam/steamapps/common) and copy the Kerbal Space Program directory, then paste it where you want to keep it- make sure it’s outside Steam’s folders so it can’t meddle with it in future. 10. Rename the KSP folder so you know what mods you’re using in it (e.g. 1.10.1 RO/RP-1, 1.12.3 JNSQ), then add this new copy to CKAN and use the modpack created in step 3 to reinstall all your mods; or reinstall them by hand if you don’t use CKAN. Double-check that all files and folders you had in GameData before uninstalling/reinstalling everything are there again, if not then you’re probably missing some mods. 11. Move your saves from your desktop into your new KSP copy’s saves folder, run KSP, load save. A warning about vessels having missing parts is usually because a mod is missing or wasn’t installed correctly.

American crewed spacecraft tended to be flown from the spacecraft itself, either by the crew or by sophisticated onboard computers. The ability to fly the spacecraft by hand was vital to the saving of Apollo 13 after the oxygen tank explosion took out most of its fuel cells and with it the power needed to run the main flight computers. A lot of American astronauts were former military test pilots, which probably had some influence on spacecraft design too. In contrast, Soviet computer technology wasn't as advanced so the computers were larger and heavier, making them impractical in spacecraft where mass and space are both at a premium; this meant that Soviet spacecraft were more reliant on ground commands than their American equivalents as they couldn't calculate their manoeuvres in space and needed ground computers to do so. On the other hand, it also allowed the spacecraft to be operated without a crew and this was done many times: the Vostok capsule was operated as an orbital reconnaissance satellite (named Zenit) with cameras inside the capsule instead of a person, while Soyuz needed only minor changes to turn it into a cargo vessel (Progress) which has been used to supply various space stations for over forty years. The Space Shuttle always required pilots to fly it regardless of mission or payload, but the Soviet Buran was designed to be able to fly autonomously and flew to orbit and back successfully with no crew aboard before the whole project ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Here’s the TACLS forum page, maybe there’s information there? I skimmed the wiki but saw nothing about waste being recycled into anything else,

KSP 101: check your staging! Even experienced players make that mistake, like the time I accidentally left a launch clamp one stage too high so it was fired at the same time as booster separation: Nobody went to space that day…

First of all, why are there compressed folders inside your GameData folder? Those definitely shouldn’t be there, either move them somewhere else (preferably not inside the KSP folders at all) or delete them. Second, you have two ModuleManager .dlls which you should never have, and to me is a sign that you’ve installed a number of mods manually and not with CKAN. I suggest you start from scratch: In CKAN go to File > export modpack and save that to your desktop; Uninstall all mods using CKAN; Remove everything else from GameData except Squad (that’s KSP itself, you need that!); Use CKAN to reinstall the modpack you saved earlier; If you want to add mods manually after that, unzip/decompress them in your downloads folder first and them copy them over to GameData. Make sure you only have one ModuleManager, the one with the highest version. If that still doesn’t fix the problem, in the Kopernicus error there are clear instructions about what logs you should provide to get proper debugging: KSP.log and ModuleManager.configcache are inside GameData while Logs/Kopernicus is in the root KSP directory. This might help:

Can you post screenshots of your GameData folder and also engines in game with whatever plume effects (if any) you do have? It’ll also help if you can find your log files, put them on a file sharing site (preferably one without nasty malware popups) and post links to them, see this guide for details: Check the Waterfall forum page and make sure you also downloaded any and all dependencies- if Waterfall relies on another mod to do something but you don’t have said other mod, Waterfall won’t work right/at all. Final question- did you buy KSP on Steam, and if so did you put mods into the Steam copy of KSP? Steam has a habit of corrupting modded KSP so it’s always a good idea to make a new copy of KSP (just copy the whole Kerbal Space Program directory and paste it somewhere else e.g. your desktop) and then put mods into the new copy where Steam can’t meddle.

Meg taking in the view from Duna's surface during my Snarkiverse Grand Tour. That's Pol on the right and Bop on the left; Pol is at its periapsis and only about 130km above Duna's surface.

Blue Mandolin Vesta 2 is next to launch, using NK-15 engines on the first stage rather than RD-253s to try and improve their reliability. Not entirely surprisingly, one engine failed during the ascent: That didn't stop the launch from proceeding as planned and the probe was duly dispatched towards Vesta where it will orbit, land and potentially have fuel left for some biome hopping. Purple Cube Saturn 2 launched days later, hitting the peak of the transfer window. The last two launches have somehow gathered the maximum 10,000 data units on the NK-15 so it's now (reasonably) reliable with a 1.6% ignition failure chance. Another long transfer burn later... And by aligning the Saturn periapsis with the Titan relative ascending node, an encounter with Titan was set up on the same orbit that will allow the probe to capture into orbit. Considering Titan's thick atmosphere and low gravity, I might try to land this probe after it gathers all the science from space. Next to launch is another Green Mango imaging satellite, which was deployed without incident. Now on to yet more simulations, this time for a Venus rover to fulfil a contract I forgot about. It'll be doing a direct descent from a hyperbolic trajectory, because why not? The first test started in a highly elliptical Venus orbit just to test the re-entry system: Good news, it landed almost completely intact despite having no parachutes; bad news, the landing broke an antenna and the heat destroyed the other antenna. After adding parachutes and swapping to more compact and heat-proof antennae, an all-up test from launchpad to landing. Once again, Green Cucumber GEO provided an extremely reliable launch rocket and the RD-58 (in 11d33m guise) served as the upper stage for the entire transfer burn and any course corrections afterwards. With an intercept set up that'll get close to Venus (subject to time warp related trajectory shifts...), time for 190 days of time warping with a flagrant disregard for other vessels' nodes, transfer windows and contract deadlines. A slight nudge to set the periapsis at about 90km and then the upper stage used its remaining fuel to slow down just before atmospheric entry. One parachute failed when it opened at 5km altitude, but I saved the other one as a backup and it opened at about 500m with no issues to allow a safe soft landing on the surface. There's no connection to Earth without the relays in orbit, but they'll be launching in the same transfer window so this mission is good to go. Naturally, I'll launch two in case one fails. The build queue was almost empty a little while ago, but not any more! Coming soon: Six of my new astronauts are about to finish Gemini mission training and there are contracts to send crews to both the Yellow Timpani station in LEO and the Yellow Carillon station in lunar orbit, as well as contracts for Earth orbit, lunar orbit, lunar landing, lunar roving...

The NERV might not have a lot of thrust, but it also has double the ISP of even the best liquid fuel/oxidiser engines so you’ll go further in the long run. A good combination of engines for SSTOs is: RAPIERs in air-breathing mode for atmospheric flight- they might not be the most fuel-efficient, but they can produce a lot of thrust at higher speeds than any other air-breathing engine; “Dart” aerospikes for climbing towards orbit- not the most powerful, but very efficient both in atmosphere and vacuum; NERVs for orbital insertion and beyond- raw ISP gives it the edge over other engines even if it’s not very powerful and a bit on the heavy side. It’s possible to do a liquid fuel only SSTO by only using RAPIERs and NERVs, but that’s not something I’ve ever done. If you’re doing a career or science mode game and haven’t unlocked those more high-tech engines, combining the Panther or Whiplash jets with the Reliant or Swivel rockets can make a decent SSTO if done right.

For those not in the know, the Onion, Pea and Pomegranate are the Making History Soviet-style capsules. I believe the question is, do these parts have a window in them like the real Vostok/Voskhod/Soyuz (delete as appropriate) did to aid reorienting them for re-entry from IVA view, in which case the answer is probably no.

Simple answer, no. At least not in stock KSP- you could use a fairing to create an interstage, or if you have the Making History DLC then engine plates are another option, but both will add more weight and you’ll still need a decoupler on top of the fairing (engine plates have one built in).

You might be better off splitting this into several burns instead of one: changing inclination is cheaper the slower you’re going, so do that first; then burn at apoapsis to lower your periapsis so that your orbit overlaps the target station’s orbit slightly; then reduce your apoapsis until you get a close approach with the target with a low relative velocity on a future orbit; and then match speeds when you’re close by. It could even be cheaper to raise your periapsis before doing the plane change burn, if the saving from the plane change outweighs the cost of raising and then re-lowering the periapsis. There’s always MechJeb’s maneuver planner which can calculate the burn for you and usually gets pretty close, but you might still need to tweak the burn a little (e.g. if your orbit shifts when timewarping as it seems prone to do in KSP 1.12) and only having to worry about one or possibly two of the three axes/planes makes that much easier than doing all three at once.

Test simulation of a modified version of the scanning sat shown at the end of the last post, considerably enlarged and refitted to operate around Ceres and Vesta: The transfer stage has enough delta-V to do the transfer burn, while the probe itself has the delta-V to perform the capture- with a generous margin in case of boiloff and for any course corrections as necessary. I'm not expecting too much boiloff going that far from the Sun, with 50 layers of MLI and active cooling from radiators, but you never know... Back to "real" missions as the SJ-1 completes another supersonic X-planes contract: Scatterer settings were a bit messed up, hence the strange wall of light around the horizon. Unfortunately I also messed up the fuel loading and the plane ran out of fuel on the way back to the KSC, forcing a water landing that destroyed the engine. The pilot was unharmed and the rest of the plane was undamaged, plus there's a jet engine node about to complete on the research queue that unlocks the SR-71 engine that'll give much more speed so it can be refitted right away. It even completed the contract! Up on the Yellow Timpani station, water is in short supply and liquid hydrogen reserves are also low. Time for Klaus and Vera to come home, sadly contractless as I forgot about that bit. Back in the bouncy ocean of perpetual energy. The SJ-1 had no such issues, maybe because it was larger and heavier? This might also be a scatterer setting that I've borked and need to fix. No contracts, barely any retirement delays, barely worth doing. Still, the scrubber module is a long-term investment and there's scope to expand the station if I can resupply it. A few days in the Spaceplane Hangar later and the SJ-1 is reborn as the SJ-2, featuring a better engine and significantly increased wingspan to reduce the minimum speed and make landing easier. Without having to worry about stability at extreme speeds and altitudes and with the engine able to push the plane right up to 1200m/s before it melts its innards and explodes, moar wing area = less possibility of explosions on takeoff or landing. A flawless and profitable flight. Not a huge payout mind you, but the plane was cheap enough to build and costs barely anything to operate. Simulation for a Mercury rover up next. Yes, skipping right past lander to a full-blown rover, which despite its ~300kg mass will require >2900 tons of Violet Element to get it there. That tiny thing on the very top of the rocket is the rover. It needs three rocket stages on top of the launch rocket just to get out there. Following the simulated transfer burn, there's still enough left in the tanks to do the capture burn (almost 10km/s!) without using the fuel from the landing stage. Boiloff will be problematic, but much MLI plus radiators should keep it somewhat under control and I've added a little extra hydrogen to compensate. Purple Cube Saturn 1 is the first mission to use the NK-15 powered Purple Shape rocket, and also the first rocket to use the NK-15 at all. Perhaps unsurprisingly... Two engines failed on the pad- but since they were symmetrical and the TWR was still good enough the launch went ahead. A third engine failed mid-ascent with a fourth losing thrust near the end of the burn, but despite those setbacks the mission proceeded to orbit without any trouble. The long transfer burn used the remainder of the second stage's fuel, all of the third stage and a bit of the upper stage to finish, taking almost ten minutes in total. Despite aiming for a target as large as Saturn, a course correction will still be required to set up a good encounter which should allow multiple flybys of the various moons in future. A second identical probe will be launching in a couple of weeks, right at the peak of the transfer window. Coming soon: A launch to Vesta, a launch to Saturn, maybe a launch to the Moon station?