jimmymcgoochie

I’ll throw in a couple of card games: Dobble: it’s like Snap on steroids- each card has ten different things on it and has at least one in common with every other card, you just have to get your card in first and say what you’re matching. Works better the more people you have. Jungle Speed: Again super-Snap but with a greater chance of staved knuckles- see a match, grab the wooden totem in the middle, hand highest to the top wins in the event of a draw. You might not have all your fingernails when you’re done, but it’s good fun nonetheless, reaction times dependent. Many players. Dutch Blitz: Another one where fast reflexes are key, it’s possible to play it with regular playing cards but you’ll need two packs. Two piles in the middle, you can play a card one higher or lower on top and the aim is to get rid of your cards as fast as possible and then pick a pile for the next round- pick the smaller one! First to empty their entire hand wins, so it gets very tactical near the end. Two players only.

You need to shed weight to land, which in this case probably means fuel. Point normal or antinormal ( or ) and burn until your TWR goes above 1 or you go below 1000m/s of delta-V; if your TWR goes above 1 first you have a chance of landing, but if you have less than 1km/s then you don’t have enough left to attempt a landing. A single ion engine may not be enough for a Moho landing since Moho has relatively high gravity and ion engines are pretty weak. If you get a high enough TWR and have the fuel left to attempt a landing, lower your periapsis to just skim over the surface at periapsis, then brake hard at periapsis to slow down for landing. Try to control your vertical speed so you don’t crash, but remember that pointing away from retrograde will cost you more delta-V and hovering is just wasting fuel.

Fun fact- adding a power module is as easy as docking a crewed spacecraft, the fuel cells plus the station’s own power systems will be more than enough to tick all the contract boxes. Swapping crew, adding more capacity and adding a power module can all be done in one flight with pretty much any crewed spacecraft for a tidy profit. The upper tank on the DOG3 look totally wrong, it has UDMH/NTO for the booster engines not NTO/Helium/(Aerozine50 or MMH) for the RCS and the SPS engine. RCS always needs a pressurant like helium or nitrogen as they’re pressure-fed, so if you don’t have that then you’re clearly not configured right. Once an engine fails in TestFlight, it’s gone for good. TestLite lets you restart them if they fail but TestFlight does not. You just got unlucky and rolled a 99.9% for the failure chance.

Tylo: has 0.8g gravity. @seyMonsters: decides to hover 3km above the surface. Also @seyMonsters: launches vertically to 200m/s, swerves around all over the place trying to match planes long before reaching orbit, and then wonders why he ran out of fuel. RIP Jansey

I’m no expert on orbital mechanics, but this is not Oberth effect- you’ll see a similar effect orbiting any body at any velocity, from tiny objects like Deimos (orbital velocity of 4m/s or so in RSS with patched conics) to stars orbital velocities in the tens or even hundreds of kilometres per second. Orbits aren’t linear and gravity decreases exponentially with distance, so applying a linear acceleration at periapsis will have an exponentially greater effect as you get closer to escape velocity until you go too fast for gravity to bring you back again.

I updated to WM 2.8.3.4 again and the earlier issue has not re-occurred. I'm going to chalk this one up to just running RO/RP-1 for a few hours which brought on some strange behaviour which I wrongly attributed to updating this mod.

To me, the structure in the bottom right of the image looks like the really big launchpad that's been shown in earlier videos/images- see 1:21 in the original KSP2 trailer, for example, or this image from the KSP2 page linked in the banner at the top of the forum home page: I'm sure I've seen shots of the same pad with a circular moat around it before too.

"Why didn't you tell us about this before!?" Gene's incredulous shout drew everyone in Mission Control's attention towards him- and Mortimer, who looked suitably abashed. "I put them in the wrong drawer when the deal got signed and forgot they were there." Gene sighed. "Well, at least we have them now, though how we're going to manage to build the thing when we have no parts left at all-" "Actually, about that." Wernher interrupted. "We might have a way to build something on the ground, but it's going to involve dismantling a lot of the ground facilities across the KSC." "Like what?" "Oh, nothing important- the Astronaut Complex games room, the cookers in the VAB canteen, some of the consoles in Mission Control, maybe a Tracking Station dish or two, nothing too important." He ignored the increasingly indignant grumbling from the onlookers in the room. "If it gets us back into space- and back into proper contact with everyone on Lua- I say it's worth it." Gene watched the onlookers' expressions change to grudging agreement. "Alright, let's do it," he said. "But this better work!" Much facility dismantling and one desperate but unsuccessful attempt by Linus to save the karaoke machine in the R&D rec room later, their newest creation was ready. Unfortunately... "What do you mean, we don't have anything to launch?!" "We didn't think that far ahead! Just stick a big box of rocks in it as a mass simulator or something." And that's what they did. Jeswell, Tatiana and Panand weren't too thrilled by having their first flight into space be in a new spaceplane of dubious construction ("Why do all the light switches ping like a pinball machine when I turn them on and off?"), but Mortimer assured them all that the design was tried and tested with only a single minor mishap in its otherwise blemish-free service; he refused to elaborate what said mishap was, which did nothing for the crew's confidence. "This is, uh, Independent? Ready for takeoff." Pilot Jeswell reported. "Cleared for takeoff, Independence," the tower controller replied. "Here goes nothing..." Jeswell muttered, pushing the throttles to full power. "This thing is quick!" Flight engineer Panand exclaimed as they broke through the sound barrier. "The engines are producing more thrust the faster we go!" In what felt like mere seconds they were well on their way to orbital velocity and climbing high into Rhode's atmosphere, the four Broadsword engines straining in the tenuous air to keep on accelerating. "Switch to closed cycle mode." Said Jeswell. Moments later there were a series of ominous bangs from behind them. "What was that?" "Oh. Oops..." Mission scientist Tatiana muttered. "Wrong button. I think I just folded out the solar panels instead of switching over the engines." "And the engines?" "Oh. Right. I should probably do that." Jeswell and Panand gave their crewmate dirty looks as she finally(!) switched the engines over to burning onboard oxidiser, producing another surge of acceleration. "MECO in three, two, one..." The cockpit fell silent. "Circularisation burn plotted, rig for space operations." The aircraft's cargo doors opened, the docking port on top of the cockpit extended and the solar panels- were scattered over an unexplored continent far from the KSC, torn off after being deployed into hypersonic airflow. Oh well, better make this a quick mission then. Cargo erectors rotated from stowed to deployed, the forty tons of miscellaneous dirt, rock and minerals were released into an orbit that will definitely never hit anything else that happens to go to a low equatorial orbit of Rhode, ever. Let's just blame it on the fact that the mission planners had to do their planning sessions while kneeling at their desks because someone stole all the chairs from the Administration Building to make spaceplane parts. Don't even ask what parts they went into though, it's probably better not to know... The re-entry burn was performed nominally, however a brief aerodynamic anomaly (read: wild flip-flopping and pointing backwards due to an imbalanced CoM before dumping all excess oxidiser and a lot of excess fuel too) meant that they fell well short of the KSC and had to fly the rest of the way back using the engines in air-breathing mode. Low-speed handling was described as "like pushing a shipping container through treacle" but Jeswell still managed to set it down on the runway in one piece. Well, apart from the solar panels, but that goes without saying. Great success! And fully reusable too, assuming the crew presses the right buttons at the right times *scowls at Tatiana* and with a huge delta-V reserve it should be capable of handling much heavier payloads. Maybe.

For a launch site that has a latitude below or at the Moon's inclination around Earth (around 28 degrees, so Cape Canaveral and Kourou both count but somewhere like Baikonur does not) you can launch directly into the plane of the Moon's orbit. If you're a few degrees out (e.g. Woomera or some of the other US launch sites) then you can probably launch east then do a dogleg to fix the inclination, but otherwise your options are either a) launch to the inclination of your launch site's latitude and with the same LAN as the Moon and do your transfer burn at the relative ascending/descending node, or b) launch into a polar orbit and do the transfer burn when the Moon is in the right position; in both cases you'll get two windows of a few hours where the transfer is straightforward per month, so timing matters a lot more. If you're struggling to launch to orbit consistently, you should use MechJeb's Primer Vector Guidance mode in ascent guidance. This is only available on the dev version of MechJeb, which you can find in CKAN by clicking Settings > CKAN settings > metadata repositories > new > add MechJeb2-dev. I recommend you set the pitch start to 50m/s, pitch rate to somewhere between 0.5 and 1 depending on your rocket's TWR on launch (higher TWR = faster pitch rate) and use the "launch into plane of target" option to time your launches to the Moon from a low latitude launch site, or "launch to target LAN" for a high latitude launch site.

If you can get within 1km of the target, the easiest way to dock is just point both vessels at each other and thrust towards it at a couple of metres per second, gradually slowing down as you get closer. There’s a mod that adds new SAS modes to point parallel or anti-parallel to the target which means they’ll point the same or opposite directions, or MechJeb’s Smart ASS can do the same thing. If you don’t have the SAS modes to point at the target due to an unskilled crew or low-tech probe core, pointing one vessel to normal and the other anti-normal will also keep them pointing in opposite directions which will make docking easier. Also remember to press caps lock to engage fine control mode which will save propellant and also make the controls much less forceful, making it easier to do precise adjustments for docking. You should also disable pitch/yaw/roll controls on your RCS thrusters as reaction wheels are more than up to the task of attitude control and using RCS for it will only mess with your trajectory. During the final approach, switch to camera locked mode and look down the length of the vessel doing the docking, rotating the camera as necessary so that the translation controls (IJKL) match what’s on the screen (i.e. pressing I moves you up, etc.). Move your prograde marker so that the target marker is between prograde and where you’re pointing and the target will move closer to the middle of the navball: (centre of navball) -> , if the target goes too far then move the prograde marker to the other side and bring the target back to the centre. As with many things in life, practice makes perfect. Put two probe cores with RCS and docking ports on them into orbit together and practice your approach and docking (use the set orbit cheat and infinite propellant if you want ) until it makes more sense and you can reliably dock them together. It took a lot of clever people doing a lot of number-crunching and at least one failed mission before docking was achieved in real life, so don’t worry if it’s not immediately intuitive- it is rocket science after all!

As long as they’re docked (or klawed) together, they’re treated as one vessel and you can strut away. You can’t attach struts between two different vessels in EVA construction though.

Use the gravity assist! Plane change to be flat compared to Tylo (even if it’s a retrograde orbit) and you save yourself a ton of fuel for the capture by letting Tylo’s gravity slow you down on the first pass and then the second pass is much easier. Brute-forcing it with the heavy lander still attached is A Bad Idea.

Turn off all the autostruts you can, these can sometimes bend the vessel out of shape if they shift in flight e.g. if the heaviest part becomes lighter, when you come back to that vessel the autostruts recalculate and can cause issues. If that doesn’t work, I say use the new craft you cheated over and not the old, broken one; Eve is difficult enough without glitches making it harder still.

It was, I initially posted with the wrong version numbers because I was looking at the wrong mod’s versions in the list on CKAN and corrected it. I’ll try to reproduce it again this evening.

@linuxgurugamerBit of an odd bug with v2.8.3.4 in my RP-1 install, in map view left click was toggling visibility of rovers and right click would toggle visibility of all vessels. I wasn't clicking on the tabs at the top of the screen, it happened whenever I clicked anything at all. Rolling back to v2.8.3.3 completely solved the issue. Log with 2.8.3.4: https://www.dropbox.com/s/4hqqlq81okmhrtd/Player-prev.log?dl=0 Log with 2.8.3.3: https://www.dropbox.com/s/zm41xkrrzcy6vgg/Player.log?dl=0 I'll try to replicate in a less heavily modded copy of KSP. Update: I tried to replicate this bug with just this mod and its dependencies but couldn't do so.

Plans for lunar infrastructure are advancing slowly, with designs for a lunar base and a lunar station going through testing. The base needs more work, but the station is ready to go and has been named Yellow Carillon. The station science module on the top has four crew experiments to run in lunar orbit, with more experiments available if I can send extra modules up with visiting crews. Meanwhile, with no crew available to actually fly the new SJ-1 high-speed jet, I took a look at a potential upgrade with a newly unlocked engine (nicked from the SR-71 Blackbird). I also switched to an uncrewed design before realising that the X-planes supersonic contracts require at least one crew on board. With a maximum speed of well over 1100m/s before the nose started melting from the heat, a maximum altitude of 40km reached in a power climb and reasonable low-speed performance (after a weight distribution issue was resolved so it didn't backflip right off the runway on takeoff), there's clearly a lot of scope for boosting the top speed of this plane. There's also a ramjet engine available which could be worth a look, but that would restrict the plane to solely air-dropped flights as it can't function at all at low speeds. Crew training for the X-15 cockpit will begin as soon as crew are free, so expect some fast jet action in 1968. ...wait, it's 1968? Not the worst way to start the year with a contract completed by the Venus missions. Much of that money was spent unlocking tech level 7 communications which includes X-band frequencies that have much higher transmission rates and ranges than S-band. Those new X-band systems were immediately put to use to design a set of high-powered relays for Earth orbit to support a future set of ultra-resolution imaging satellites. Yes, the "10,000 science over 20 years at 40kB/s" one. The Green Cucumber GEO satellite launcher provided a useful platform for sending these relays to a high Earth orbit with delta-V to spare. The Green Nectarine is now on the build queue ahead of the first of four planned Green Mango imaging satellites, also launching on a Green Cucumber derivative. Meanwhile, yet another Green Cucumber derivative, the Green Cucumber OrbSci, was launched into a fairly high (50Mm) polar orbit of Earth with a set of newly unlocked experiments to run in space high. Science should be coming back from this probe for some time to come. Coming soon: A two-week hiatus as I will be AFK (away from Kerbal). X-planes flights and crewed lunar missions are on the cards when I return.

There’s a very well known bug in KSP 1.12 where the orbit lines jump one orbit ahead when time warping which will make encounters etc. disappear (since they don’t happen on the next orbit). Also RIP Ziggy, killed by 20+g re-entry because you decided just tanking into the atmosphere was a good idea, and RIP the entire Jool mission when you realise how dreadful the Tylo encounter is and how much fuel you’ll need to capture there…

This series is on a temporary pause while I figure out exactly what to do next. A few mods aren't playing nicely together so in-situ vessel construction is proving more difficult than it should be, while Kerbalism's glacial ISRU systems mean even if I built something it would take ages to fuel it up. The Lua launchsite is also a bit lacklustre with pretty strict mass and size limits on the launchpad and runway meaning it can't be used to launch large vessels. I might try some config bashing to resolve some of these problems. However, some good news too- a deal has been struck with @TheSaintfor an undisclosed sum of likes on The Scrape Of Things To Come funds to license-build the Independence-class SSTO spaceplane, so I might need to do some test flights of that soon to see how it handles Rhode's thinner air and lower gravity.

Weird suggestion- zoom out? Sometimes the terrain can render above where it should be and so the KSC appears to be floating over water when the terrain is actually above it. It's usually not that extreme though, merely appearing as if the KSC has subsided into the ground a bit, though the fact that the buildings have almost completely disappeared is odd. Try upgrading to KSP 1.12.3 (uninstall mods, update KSP, reinstall mods afterwards to avoid any possible corruption) and see if that helps?

It's a scatterer thing. In KSC view, click the scatterer icon (blue circle) then disable TAA (temporal anti-aliasing) and that should stop it.

You're running into exactly the same problems that have vexed aerospace engineers for decades. Building a plane that can fly to orbit means balancing paradoxical requirements- it needs enough lift to be able to take off fully laden with propellants and payload, yet without producing excessive drag at higher speeds; to carry the necessary fuel to make it to orbit, yet be light enough to actually make it to orbit and have a meaningful payload mass; to cope with a wide range of aerothermodynamic regimes, from near sea-level flight to hypersonic to orbital re-entry, yet be stable in all of them with and without the mass of payload and propellants. All the wings and control systems needed to make it fly in the atmosphere are dead weight in space, while hauling your empty fuel tanks around wherever you go will reduce your delta-V and make re-entry more difficult too with a larger area to try and shield from the heat. The only orbital spaceplanes to ever fly are the Space Shuttle and Buran (once), both of which were more like rockets that happened to have wings for coming back down- the Shuttle discarded its external tank with every flight while the solid boosters could be recovered and reused and the shuttle itself brought the main engines ('first stage') and its OMS system ('second stage') back down with it, and Buran was more of a side-mounted recoverable second stage on the Energia rocket which was fully expendable; grand plans of making the four boosters return and land propulsively a la SpaceX, and indeed Buran itself, ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union with a single uncrewed test flight completed successfully. The closest thing to a true spaceplane that flies to orbit and back is probably Skylon, which needs several revolutionary technologies- the SABRE air-breathing rocket engines, air pre-coolers capable of chilling superheated hypersonic air to cool subsonic air for said engines to breathe, a skin that can handle the full heat of re-entry with a lot more finesse than Starship's belly-flop technique, using light and efficient (but not very dense) liquid hydrogen as fuel and getting a lot of oxidiser for free from the air. It's still a long way from flying, but just look at the design required to theoretically let it put a few tons into orbit per flight: To put it simply, spaceplanes are HARD. KSP doesn't really explain that- reaching 1600m/s on air-breathing RAPIER power means you're about 3/5 of the way to orbital velocity, while doing the same with Skylon's SABREs means you're only about 1/6th of orbital velocity and have a lot more altitude to gain to get out of the atmosphere too. Spaceplanes in RP-1 are feasible as upper stages to send crew around in Earth orbit and possibly even to the Moon, but it's incredibly difficult to build a usable SSTO spaceplane or even one that can throw parts away. There's also little incentive to build one as by the time you're far enough along in the tech tree to be able to reap the benefits of a reusable launch system, you're probably past the point where the small payloads a spaceplane can manage are useful. Maybe if you build a winged rocket and use airlaunch to put it at a fairly high speed and altitude on 'launch' then it might be possible?

That’s a lot of mods… You could try editing the save file to downgrade the facilities - just remember to copy the file and edit the copy so you have a backup if you accidentally break something. Open the save in a text editor (notepad will do, but something like VSCode or Notepad++ will make it a bit easier) and search for runway, you should centrally find a list of facilities and their upgrade levels; reduce the number for their level by one and load the save to see if that’s downgraded them. Alternatively, try KML - an editor program that’s made specifically to edit KSP save files.

We’re going to need more information to get to the bottom of this issue: Screenshots and/or a video of the problem would be a big help. Logs will also be useful, see below for how to find them and what to do once you have. A mod list- if you installed your mods using CKAN, click File > save installed mod list and it’ll generate a list of mods and versions for you; if you installed them manually, screenshots of KSP/GameData and any version numbers you have. Why aren’t you using KSP 1.12.3?

The more ‘official’ lore that gets added, the less room there is for players to make their own. Is Kerbin a barren post-apocalyptic wasteland, or did the devs just never add towns/cities/roads/etc.? Is Jeb the same Jeb as the junkyard owner? Which (if any) of the anomalies scattered throughout the Kerbol system are related to each other and which are not? Are the ‘big four’ fresh out of school or seasoned veterans with decades of experience in their respective fields? Why is everyone called Kerman- is it a societal caste system, some political stunt to foster feelings of unity or something else entirely? I recently did a career report where I decided to make Jeb Val’s younger brother just because I thought it would be an interesting angle that (to my knowledge at least) nobody else has used yet- all the ‘unofficial canon’ about Jeb being accident-prone was then explained by him trying to one-up his equally competitive big sister. Meanwhile we have people writing entire novels based on KSP but with wildly different ideas of how Kerbin and Kerbals work- for example, in KSK’s First Flight much of the plot is driven by Kerbals’ symbiotic relationship with a species of tree. Leave the game light on lore so we can make our own.

Near Future Propulsion is a good bet- it has a variety of ion thrusters similar to, but slightly better than, the stock one (one has an ISP of over 19000s!) as well as Hall effect thrusters and a variety of plasma-based systems too (including PIT and VASIMR with variable performance), though they all use huge quantities of electricity in the process so you'll probably need nuclear reactors to satisfy their hunger for power. The only other mods I know that add electric propulsion add one tiny ion thruster each- SSR MicroSat and OctoSat.