jimmymcgoochie

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?

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.