jimmymcgoochie

The X-20 was meant to be launched on a rocket with really big fins on the bottom to keep it stable, see link below to the image because I can’t get it to embed right now. https://images.app.goo.gl/m5GNPFeA6QbXE3wU8 Build a normal rocket that has the required delta-V to reach orbit, add an extra 10-20% margin to account for the higher drag and then stick some wing panels to the bottom - no need for control surfaces, engine gimbal and passive stability should be enough. You could also disable the control surfaces on the X-20 itself during the launch as they’ll probably do more harm than good and destabilise the rocket. And if you haven’t already, enable advanced tweakables in the main menu settings and autostrut everything to stop it wobbling itself to pieces.

There may be something in the log files that can show what’s going on. There’s a section in this guide to help you find them: One potential workaround is to copy KSP and paste it outside the Steam folders, delete the PDLauncher folder and then launch the game directly from KSP.exe, in case either Steam or the launcher are the cause of the problem.

It may be worth uninstalling and reinstalling the whole game at this point. Copy your saves from KSP/saves/(your save name here) to your desktop, then use Steam to first disable cloud syncing, then uninstall KSP completely and then reinstall it. Modding the Steam copy of KSP often causes weird issues, so in future if you want to use mods make a copy of KSP and put it outside Steam’s folders, then use CKAN to make new copies from that copy and add your mods.

Only the most bodged Moon landing I've ever done... Turns out the engines I used on the lander's TLI and capture stage just don't work if you wait more than 90 minutes from the first ignition before trying the second, so the lander had to use up a significant part of its own fuel to capture; no landing, right? Except the crew are arriving just 20 minutes later and their craft has the same engines and has a big delta-V margin, so I can refuel the lander, right? Except the engines are different versions of the same engine that use nearly identical but distinct fuels, so I can't refuel the lander; no landing, right? Except I can use that delta-V margin to just throw the lander at the Moon before undocking, reorbiting the crew craft and then landing the lander with that much more fuel in it. Which meant it landed and then made it back to orbit, but ran out of fuel doing so. So I had to use the crew vessel to do the last rendezvous and that almost ran out of RCS as well. By the time they were docked together both vessels had fumes left in their RCS and one single ignition left on one engine to get the crew home again, so it had better not fail... And then the return burn overshot slightly and I couldn't correct it, so the re-entry was too steep and the crew got hit by 39 gees as they slowed by nearly 11km/s in less than 30 seconds. Ouch. But the mission completed, so I call that a success!

Working as intended. Adding RO and RP-1 to an existing install is a bad idea anyway.

Open the scatterer settings in the KSC view and switch from TAA (temporal antialiasing) to SMAA (sun pixel morphological antialiasing(?)).

Many parts have internal temperature tolerances much lower than their skin temperatures and 750K is very hot for a lot of them. Which parts in particular are exploding?

There are separate signal occlusion settings in the difficulty options, atmospheric and vacuum bodies. Atmospheres can bounce signals slightly so the atmospheric one defaults to being set slightly lower. A value below 1 can lead to signals travelling through the visible terrain.

Pol-O Mints. Just Polo Mints but with a hyphen for legal reasons, definitely a different thing please don’t sue us…

Multi barrel guns and cannons exist and for a few good reasons, many of which would also apply to a laser system- each laser only fires for a short pulse and then has time to cool before being fired again, the spinning improves airflow and by extension cooling, etc.- and the failure of one laser wouldn’t break the whole drill, merely slow it down a bit. (pun mostly intended)

Kerbal Konstructs is likely to be at least partly to blame, it adds a lot of extra buildings and structures which will all be tracked in the save file. JNSQ’s built-in KK bases are large and well-stocked with stuff, but I don’t remember having any huge issues with save file bloat the last time I used it (admittedly it was a couple of years ago now). Try removing Kerbal Konstructs, copy your persistent.sfs and then delete all those lines- except for those referring to the KSC itself- from that copy and see if that save loads faster.

.zip folders won’t work, you need to unzip them and put the contents into GameData. I strongly recommend you use CKAN to install mods as it will get the right versions and all the dependencies for your version of KSP and install them for you. Not everything is on CKAN though, so for manually installing mods: Unzip downloaded folders first, they won’t work otherwise. If the mod folders contain a GameData folder then this should be merged with KSP/GameData or the contents of mod/GameData copied into KSP/GameData. If the mod folders don’t contain a GameData folder then you’ll probably want to take the first folder down which has the mod name but not a version.

RP-0? Is this a really old install? RP-1 is on v3.1 now and should be installed in KSP 1.12.3 or later (though .4 and .5 have nothing that affects it).

Check your key binds, maybe the throttle controls got unset? Also check that you have full control of the vessel (green icon in the top left) rather than partial control (yellow icon). Do either fine (shift/ctrl) or coarse (Z/X) throttle controls work?

If you’re on the ground at the KSC then even the puny antenna inside a probe core will give you a signal, unless you ran out of power without realising? Most liquid fuel engines provide electrical power while running, or at least the engines you’d use early in a launch do, so you should have power in flight, but maybe you waited on the pad for too long and used up all the power? You may want to add more batteries if that’s the case.

All that time spent in the Admin Building and still no Val Cleaver

I’m surprised that re-entry worked, heatsink heatshields usually require much more aggressive re-entry with a negative periapsis. You got 39.9 out of 40 because a little bit of it had already been done, probably on the advanced biological suborbital mission in the sounding rockets programs. When you first opened the experiment info it started counting down from about 23h 55m rather than 23h59m.

Early heat sink style heatshields are terrible and so far I’ve never managed an orbital return using one. Do yourself a favour and wait for ablative heatshields (Mercury-spec) which are vastly better. Also keep in mind that heatshields can transfer heat to the part behind so put something heat-resistant in there- a procedural nosecone is a good choice for that. p.s. hire Val Cleaver (I won’t stop until you do it)

Please do!

You nearly flat-spun right down on top of the Space Centre, you can actually see it at about 1:30. The twitchy controls might be due to not using fine control mode (caps lock) which is almost always necessary to not rip your wins off with excessive G-forces in my experience. The X-15 cockpit can be repainted. Upgrade Admin to be able to take a few different satellite Programs at once or add one on top of crewed orbit and X-planes/lunar probes, the extra money is nice but beware of accepting too much too soon as I have in my current save, it leads to a mad rush to try and launch everything when the timers run out. Why haven’t you hired Val Cleaver yet!? The one Brit in the entire game and with big bonuses to keroxide yet you’ve ignored him but hired Glushko?

Have you enabled cross feed on the docking ports?

“How could you possibly not return it?” Ask Laika. Why no Val Cleaver when he gives big bonuses to keroxide?

Rockets flip for a few reasons, but they usually boil down to aerodynamic instability and/or an inability to steer effectively. The test launch of Starship/Superheavy is a good example of both of these things as a combination of failures in the engine control systems and the engines themselves greatly reduced steering authority while the rocket itself was aerodynamically unstable due to the fins at the top creating drag, eventually leading to a complete loss of control. With such a large fairing you're going to get a lot of drag at the front, which is bad- you want the centre of lift/drag to be behind the centre of mass to create passive stability. Adding large fins to the bottom might help, especially if they have control surfaces that can add some extra steering force. Your first stage is dominated by engines that can't gimbal- solid boosters and Making History Kodiaks- with only five gimballing engines (Mainsails or Mastodons, I can't tell from the screenshot) in the centre. With all the gimbals in the centre of the rocket there's not a lot of leverage to correct for any deviation from prograde and the draggy fairing will quickly cause it to flip backwards out of control. Swapping to liquid-fuelled boosters that can gimbal e.g. Mainsails or even Mammoths would give you more control authority.

Breaking Ground is more than just the KAL controller and robotics, there’s a whole set of deployable surface experiments and surface features that you can either scan with a probe or in some cases pick up and take back home with a Kerbal. I’ve used the robotics parts for a variety of things but never the KAL controller, that thing is too complicated for me

If you’re not going to hire any staff, at least do some facility upgrades with that extra money! You could upgrade Admin and get a third Program going for more income or upgrade R&D to increase the researcher cap, or possibly both with what you’ve got saved up. I think you can go all the way to lunar landings if you get a bit creative with Gamma configs, specifically making them able to relight in flight, then there’s the RZ.20 which I used to power a crewed lunar lander (single stage design using small hypergolic thrusters for final descent and the RZ.20-Mk2 for everything else) and as an upper stage both on LVs and for interplanetary probes. Just because something didn’t happen IRL doesn’t mean it couldn’t have happened had the funding not dried up.