jimmymcgoochie

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?

Docking can be difficult in stock KSP, but there are a variety of ways to make it easier: Docking can't be rushed. Take your time, line the two vessels up and then move in slowly. Fine control mode (caps lock key to toggle, it turns the orange pitch/yaw/roll indicators in the bottom left blue) is very useful to get more precise thrust from your RCS. Align the vessel that's actively docking with the target with the target docking port in advance, then move so that the target is directly ahead of you and facing you, and then move in to dock. Trying to line the ports up while moving at an angle is much more difficult and thinking about three axes of rotation and three planes of movement all at once is a good way to get really confused and either collide with the target or miss entirely. Having the two vessels point in opposite directions is a good way to take rotation out of the equation and let you focus on moving the docking vessel to where it needs to be. If you don't have the fancy SAS modes (specifically pointing at target), you can still make two vessels point in opposite directions using SAS. Control both vessels from the docking ports you want to dock with, set one to normal and the other to anti-normal and they'll point the two docking ports in the right directions to dock and then hold them in that orientation. If you do have all the SAS modes, the old point-and-squirt technique can avoid some faff- control from docking ports, set the other port as target on both vessels and set SAS to target+ to point them at each other, then a bit of thrust to make them move closer. It's possible to use this to dock even with no RCS, but the lack of lateral thrust can make it tricky and you can spent a lot of time drifting past the target instead of at it. There's also a little mod* that adds two new modes to stock SAS, parallel+/- which will point the two targets in the same or opposite directions respectively; parallel- is what you want for docking. MechJeb's Smart A.S.S. system also has this ability, plus MechJeb comes with a docking autopilot that can do the hard work for you, though at a cost of potential inefficiency and occasional disregard for other parts of the vessels like solar panels. * See:

Don’t use those extending docking ports at all, they’re too big to be used with other ports and are excessively heavy too. You could try sticking a D-2 or Apollo Block 4 mission module on the front instead with a docking port on the end of that, the Block 4 module comes with a built-in lab and capacity for several crew experiments (plus, fun fact, synoptic terrain and weather photography experiments actually regenerate their samples in a lab faster than the experiment uses them so you can do the whole experiment in 1 flight not 3).

If you’re willing to dip your toe into modding KSP, SimpleLogistics is a small yet useful tool that allows you to transfer resources between vessels when landed within a few hundred metres of each other, without having to attach them to each other. Drive up to the vessel needing fuel, activate SL’s interface and you can pull resources from the miner into the other vessel and then leave without the faff of docking or the risk of getting Kraken-ed to warp factor 7 when you reload the vessel. It only works when vessels are loaded though, not in the background.

It’s not often that I get two engine failures on the launchpad and even less frequent that I go ahead with the launch, but the two failures were on opposite sides of the rocket so thrust was balanced and the eleven remaining engines still had the power for the ascent, even if it required a slower pitch over to compensate for the lower thrust. A third engine failed during the ascent and a fourth lost power shortly before staging but they didn’t affect the ascent much and the rocket made it to orbit as planned, sending a probe hurtling towards Saturn. Engine failures give more engine data which improves reliability on all subsequent launches, so having those failures and yet still completing the launch as planned is the best possible result. Unlike the real-life N-1 which used 30 of those same engines and suffered four launch failures due to their (un)reliability, including the world’s largest non-nuclear man-made explosion.

Did you change versions with mods installed? That is A Very Bad Idea as it can easily cause corruption of the game and/or mod files and cause strange issues. It’s better to create separate copies of KSP and then install mods in those copies. What issues prompted you to change from 1.12.3 to 1.10.1? Guide to find logs:

I think the problem you’re having is that you haven’t throttled the engines up and so they (correctly) produce no thrust. Build this in the VAB: Mk1 pod > FL-T200 fuel tank > Swivel engine. Make sure there’s a Kerbal in the pod, by default Jeb should be in there. Click launch to get it out on the launchpad. Throttle up to full power with Z or by holding shift until the throttle reaches 100%. Stage with space. Take a screenshot and post it here. The rocket should go up extremely fast; if it doesn’t then something is wrong with your install and you should try uninstalling and reinstalling the game. Solid fuel engines don’t need to be throttled up and once ignited will burn until their fuel runs out, but liquid fuel engines (both rockets and jets) are throttle-controlled and won’t produce any thrust unless you increase the throttle.

Performance degradation that extreme is probably due to an exception repeatedly being thrown. Post (a link to) your log files, see guide below, but if the logs are several megabytes in size then it’s a big giveaway that they’ll be full of exceptions. Try uninstalling and reinstalling Parallax and see if that helps? By any chance, did you install mods in the Steam copy of KSP?

Bill and Bob’s rescue lander on the Mun just before they left to head home again. They were stranded when the engine of their transfer stage exploded during the Kerbin > Mun transfer burn, requiring the launch of this lander and a two-crew rover to get them from one to the other, but made it home safely.

That’s one way to solve the problem, but adding an option to rotate a docking port through the full 360 degrees would be more useful in my opinion , allowing greater flexibility to build structures with unusual shapes or symmetry (e.g. 5 or 7 sided) and allowing you to just dock first and worry about alignment later.

In a different folder.

Not technically "in" KSP, but today I deleted a bunch of old modded KSP copies that are either obsolete or which I made but never actually used. I'd say at least 50GB was deleted, possibly more.

Dres had a moon in that orbit, then something *cough DART cough* crashed into said moon and shattered it. The surviving objects eventually formed a ring.

Green Mango 2 is first in line for the launch pad. Unlike the other orbital imaging satellites which will be launched to low-inclination orbits, this one's going polar to cover the entire planet with its SAR scanner, although this will reduce the data gained from the orbital imaging experiment due to the high radiation at the poles (the experiment has an upper limit on radiation above which it doesn't work). Probably should have noticed that earlier, but as far as the game is concerned the solar panels are working at full power. All four dishes are pointed at the four Green Nectarine relays and data begins streaming back to the ground via the DSN. This next launch might be Purple Circle Mercury 2? I can't remember exactly what it is, there's only one screenshot but I know that mission was due to launch at around this time so I'm going with that. Assuming that's the right mission, everything is going OK so far and a course correction is plotted to get a Mercury encounter. Back to the simulator for a Moon base design. I've worked on this before but now it's finally ready for a full flight test- and I have a rocket that can actually get it to the Moon! Quad RL-10 Lunex engines will bring it down from lunar orbit to the surface with fuel to spare, though this test landing was a bit rougher than expected... By this point the engines had done their jobs anyway so losing them doesn't matter. Having those wide fuel tanks also means it's pretty stable even if it touches down with a bit of a sideways drift, though it'll also make fitting it into a fairing that much more difficult. Test launch using the new Violet Element superheavy rocket. The fairing is larger than anything I've used before at 7.5m diameter, which means much tooling costs (but fairings are weird with their costs so it's actually no more expensive to tool than to build it untooled) and the 40 ton base plus its 60 ton lunar transfer stage are well within this rocket's 150 ton capacity. This is also the first time I've gone for an RL-200 upper stage over clustered RL-10s, it was simply too heavy to use the smaller engines this time. I looked at the J-2 and it looked like it would get marginally more delta-V (despite being a heavier engine with lower ISP, must be the fuel mix?) but the unlock costs are too high and the weird restart limits are a disincentive too. I also took a swing at a reusable Moon lander, with mixed results: yes, it has the fuel to land and return and with the advanced lander can too (so two crew), but at almost 20 tons it's nearly double the weight of the existing lander and just not worth it. Even with a newly unlocked tech node that gave TL4 RCS tech to improve the generic thrusters' ISP, thrust and mass, it'll still take almost 15 tons of propellant per landing as opposed to a 10 ton disposable lander. Unlocking the AJ-10 Transtar with its stupendously long burn time would be great for this, but that's many nodes down the line yet. A brief check-in on Blue Mandolin Ceres to perform a course correction: Still no hope of an orbit, but a slow flyby should generate some data and I have an even bigger and more capable-r probe in the works for the next transfer window. A crewed launch now, with a slight twist: a Yellow Gong D carrying Klaus and Vera up to the Yellow Timpani station in LEO. This mission is carrying a small module on its nose containing two vacuum scrubbers to take over from the existing lithium hydroxide scrubbers once they run out of lithium hydroxide. Once docked, I checked to see if any contracts had completed only to realise I'd forgotten to accept any contracts. Sending a crew up to the station gets a decent chunk of funds, an orbital flight contract would have given even more. Ah well, they're up in orbit now and once more astronauts are finished their training I can send another crew up for some extra contract money. Another Green Mango launch, this time with no additional science experiments to save money and launched to about 30 degrees inclination. There's another one on the queue and I'm thinking about adding a fifth to make up for the reduced gains from the polar orbit one. Over to Purple Circle Mercury 2 for a course correction, using up the last of its hydrolox stage in the process. This is slightly concerning as the last Mercury orbit mission needed a good chunk of fuel from that stage to reach orbit along with virtually all the other propellants, but maybe this transfer window is a bit more friendly? If this doesn't work, the next Mercury mission will be launching on a Violet Element and brute forcing an orbit and maybe even a landing too. Now for something a bit strange: a derivative of the Green Cucumber but with a huge fairing covering the second stage as well as the payload. The oversized fairing is required due to the payload- a lunar satellite with a large SAR scanner on it. The heavy SAR array made the whole vessel lopsided, but a combination of sticking everything else on the other side and using the CoM shifter in the avionics has mostly balanced it out. I've been looking at turning this design into an interplanetary probe to be sent to Venus, Mars, Vesta and Ceres with different configurations- the Venus and Mars probes are identical except for additional solar panels on the Mars version, while the Ceres and Vesta probes will be powered by small nuclear reactors that provide just enough power and are almost exactly as heavy as the SAR scanner so will balance the probes nicely. Coming soon: Vesta and Saturn windows are approaching with a launch for each, while crewed lunar operations are set to resume as soon as there's a crew to do so.

Well, you could try to calculate the complex and interlinked effects of thrust, mass, gravity and drag... Or you could just launch the thing and let the game do all that for you, then revert to VAB and tweak thrust/fuel levels as needed to hit the goal.

A few things to check: Got power? No power = no control, make sure you have batteries and some form of power generation (solar panels, fuel cells or RTGs) to keep them charged up. Got command? If you have CommNet switched on, you'll need a signal back to a ground station on Kerbin to have full control. A few different settings can affect this- enabling extra ground stations makes it much easier to have a signal, while enabling "require signal for control" means you need a signal or nothing will work at all. Make sure you have an antenna powerful enough to reach back to Kerbin and a line of sight to one of the ground stations, which may require a relay satellite of some sort to cover the blind spots in low Kerbin orbit or when other bodies are between your vessel and Kerbin. You can turn CommNet off and ignore this problem. Is the probe core on hibernate mode? This disables control to save power, make sure it's not hibernating when you want to use it; it's a good idea to enable "hibernate in warp" mode on every probe core you use as hibernation saves a lot of power.

It looks like your Kerbal is in a Mk1 passenger cabin, which is not a command part, and I'm guessing you didn't add a probe core so there isn't any command point on the vessel and so it can't be controlled. Add a command part (the first tab down in the VAB/SPH editors, either a probe core or a pod with a Kerbal in it) and try again? If there is a command part on it, can you post a screenshot without the fairing so we can see what's under there?

Try uninstalling, then reinstalling in a different location? e.g. if installing through Steam you get a prompt for where to install it, create a new location and install it there. Uninstalling then manually deleting any leftover folders might also help?

Putting a prototype Moon base through its paces. Smashed all four engines on landing, but they had already done their job and it's not like the base is going anywhere after landing.

KSP 1.8 had a big Unity update and any mods that weren't recompiled against it will not work in KSP 1.8 or later. Either delete all mods not marked as compatible with 1.8 or later or go back to KSP 1.7.3 to use them. There's a more up to date version of Kopernicus Expanded available here:

It’s probably the reflection of whoever took the photographs of the inside of a real Soyuz that have been used to create the interior model. The green is probably from the insulating cover on the outside of the capsule, a feature of many Soviet crewed spacecraft, or possibly a lighting artifact.