jimmymcgoochie

Fortunately (for my sanity) yes.

From what I’ve seen in the KSP2 dev blogs etc., colony “life support” is more likely to be ‘feed the colony x amount of this thing and it’ll work y% faster than the baseline’ than ‘feed the colony x amount of this thing or EVERYBODY DIES AND THE COLONY IS RUINED’. Give them nice snacks instead of dehydrated rations and they’ll build your new spaceship faster. On ships, probably nothing at all- interstellar flight would make life support unmanageable even without having to worry about radiation exposure over such a long timescale and with some form of nuclear power and/or propulsion system.

Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag. Mostly because I spent nearly six hours creating it in Dyson Sphere Program a few days ago: And yes, I had to configure Every. Single. One. By. Hand.

After a long journey away from the Sun, Blue Mandolin Vesta finally arrives at its destination. Much braking later, it had an apoapsis (good) but the periapsis was negative (bad) so a course correction is needed. But while that probe floated slowly towards its next burn, Purple Circle 1 was ready to launch in an attempt to orbit Mercury. I think this is the first 1500 ton rocket launch in this career. Despite making it to orbit with this much rocket left, it's pretty unlikely that it'll actually make orbit of Mercury due to the huge delta-V requirements. And smash cut back to Vesta where the orbit was established and the contract was completed. There's even some fuel left to try and land, though that'll wait until after the orbital science has been done as there's probably not enough to get back to orbit after landing. Mercury isn't the only transfer window available though- there's also one for Jupiter and two probes queued up to launch. With a new science node unlocking just a few days before the ideal launch window, the second probe was refitted with better science while the first launched as-is. Unfortunately, at this point I did some mod updates and something broke Minimum Ambient Lighting completely. If you don't know what that does... The issue persisted with the next launch, a geostationary contract sat: Although that wasn't the only issue that that mission ran into: The usually reliable RD-58 failed to ignite for the circularisation burn. So much for superior Soviet staged combustion... To get over that disappointment, I went over to Venus to land Blue Sitar 1's two remaining landers. Much like the first two, the Kraken was lying in wait in the Venusian atmosphere. Most of the external parts- solar panels, RCS, parachute, experiments- were lost, but the impact was still survivable and the experiments inside the probe core itself kept working, as did the surface scoop. No more jettisoning the heatshield though, it's a recipe for disintegration. The fourth lander, for some reason I can't quite figure out, had the correct parachute configuration for Venus rather than for Mars. Yet it still managed to land upside down and only flipped over after I decided jettisoning the heatshield to flip it right side up was worth the risk. Once again the solar panels didn't survive, but they generate almost zero power anyway so it didn't matter too much. The onboard batteries lasted for about five days, enough time to gather some useful data and transmit it to one of four orbiting probes to relay it back to Earth. Now a quick crewed mission for some dubious contract cheesing- sending a Gemini with two crew aboard up to the Yellow Timpani space station will complete two contracts, one for sending a new crew and one for adding a power module; since the station already generates enough power for the contract, just docking anything to it will do. Another mod update messed up the docking port, making it not decouple the nosecone when it was staged. This definitely worked before, but weirdly when I sent Patrick out to do some EVA construction on it, the nosecone popped right off by itself. Within a day they were closing in on the station: Once docked, they shuffled some supplies around, dropping off some of their food, water, liquid oxygen and lithium hydroxide in exchange for a bit of extra RCS propellant for the upper stage. Having made this mission at least nominally legitimate, the crew bumped their apoapsis up a bit to start their orbital flight with 2 crew contract, but also to get a good view of Blue Mandolin Jupiter 2 as it launched. Rolling back mod updates fixed the darkness issue: And the probe is away, carrying with it a selection of upgraded science experiments including that new magnetometer boom. Coming soon: Crewed lunar contracts are ticking down and there's a new 1500-ton single launch Moon landing system to try out. I also need to start working on a Moon base and station.

Launched two probes to Jupiter and one to Mercury, sent a crew to a space station for all of two minutes to cheese some contracts and shuffle some supplies, parked a probe in orbit of Vesta and dropped two landers on Venus- weirdly, one of those landers had the proper parachute (2 metre diameter) rather than the massive Mars-spec parachute the other landers on that mission had (50 metre diameter).

I sense some EVA deconstruction is coming to lighten the lander and give it the delta-V to return.

I don't see anything particularly wrong with those screenshots. Using scatterer alone is unusual, try adding EVE (Environmental Visual Enhancements) and a set of configs for it- EVE has a set of default configs available or there are other mods such as AVP and Spectra that have their own. Scatterer adds atmospheric and ocean effects, EVE adds things like clouds and aurorae as well as (in some cases) textures for towns and cities on the surface of Kerbin complete with lights at night.

Or, refuel at Gilly then refuel at Minmus when you get back before going to the Mun. It might be worth making the mining gear detachable from the mothership and leaving that on Gilly, then setting up a separate Minmus mining operation in the meantime to have fuel ready when the mothership returns. Trying to make your ship a jack of all trades usually results in it bring mediocre at everything and heavy to boot.

OK, I’ll admit that I picked that example because I could remember both the main character’s name and the propulsion system; I’ve read all of two books in the series and that was a few years ago now. Point is, the more details you add the more they box you in and the more likely it is that you’ll end up having to retcon some extra details into the system to then handwave your way past them to make some critical piece of plot work. Let the reader do some work for you.

Aerobraking at Eve can save you a lot of delta-V, but it is definitely not for the faint-hearted due to the very high (>4km/s) velocities involved which will incinerate almost anything other than a heatshield. If you can do ISRU refuelling at Gilly, I’d say do that instead of risking an encounter with Eve’s atmosphere. I just did an Eve landing as part of a Grand Tour and this is what it took to keep the thing pointing straight: (Ignore Ike in the background…)

At some point you're going to realise that 'science fiction' is a sliding scale and adding more 'science' will restrict the 'fiction' part, and vice versa. Unless you're looking for documentary-level details, making things vague gives you a lot more wiggle room so unless it's absolutely critical to spell out exactly what combination of propellants or fusion reactor design is involved, don't. James Holden never expounds on the inner workings of the Rocinante's fusion torch drive, Honor Harrington doesn't wax lyrical about the magic space-bending, 600g-accelerating inertial drives that yeet skyscraper-sized spaceships around her neck of the galaxy, and any attempts to try and pseudoscience Star Wars come across as exactly that. You don't need to know exactly how a jet engine works to write a contemporary story involving planes, just that it sucks in air at the front, adds fuel in the middle and produces thrust at the back. If that's good enough for technology that's been in use for nearly a century, why be any more detailed about fictional future technology? Throwing buzzwords at it and hoping something sticks is going to produce an incoherent soup of confusion and contradiction, making life harder for reader and writer alike.

Moho is done, so it's back to Eve to link up with Temerity again. This took a while... But after a really, really long time, it eventually got captured by Eve's gravity and a rendezvous could happen. A minor mishap caused by the control point facing the wrong way later (just wasted some xenon is all) and it's time to head to... Jool! The transfer window was wide open and most of the remaining mass of stuff will be used there- the Nuclear Space Tugs, Tylo Lander, Laythe Plane and the Vall-spec Lander With All The Shielding will all be used and in most cases discarded in the Jool system. After arriving, a quick bit of resource management will allow some empty xenon tanks to be dumped, fuel to be put where it needs to go and- Whoops... I blame autostruts, specifically to the heaviest part which most likely changed as the fuel was pumped between tanks. This is why I saved before doing the resource juggling. Flag count so far: 6. Next time: Which moon first?

I was about to suggest the Landing Leg Pogo technique, but you don’t have an engineer on board so can’t do EVA construction. Looking at your design and the delta-V available, you should be able to return with just the upper stage. Get Bob out, grab all the science data and samples from the lower stage and stash the, in the pod, then decouple the top stage and use a combination of RCS and Wildly Mashing The KeyboardTM to make the pointy end point more towards space than not, then gun the engine and pull up so you don’t scuff the ground until the whole thing explodes. Once in orbit, find a burn that will send you back down to Kerbin and then brace for a tricky descent- you didn’t put a decoupler between the heatshield and the fuel tank so there’s a good chance you’ll flip pointy end first during re-entry, and with no means of generating power on that upper section you’ll run out of electric charge pretty quickly especially after floundering around on the Mun for a while. Probably best to wait until the sun is up and the batteries are full before trying to leave, or use the resource panel to shift all available power to the command pod and whatever batteries (if any) are attached to it. For future missions, your lander design is too tall and skinny: you need something shorter and squatter to keep the centre of mass low and within the base of support at all times, otherwise it’ll tip. You have a lot of weight near the top of the lander and with much of the fuel in the lower stage burnt the centre of mass will be much higher than it should be.

Whoops!

V is velocity, delta is a change in a parameter's value. Delta-V is a change in velocity. On the ground, things like towns and cities are generally stationary. Driving from, say, Berlin to Madrid or Los Angeles to Dallas will always be the same distance if you drive on the same roads, so it makes sense to state the range of a car in distance- miles or kilometres. The same principle also applies to boats and aircraft, with the caveat that water and air can and usually do move so you naturally go further with the wind/current than against it. In space, things are different: everything is constantly in motion and the distances between them change from one second to the next. The straight-line distance from Earth to Mars varies drastically as the two planets travel around the Sun in their different orbits, sometimes coming close to each other and sometimes ending up at opposite sides of the Sun. Just sitting in low Earth orbit, you're travelling close to eight kilometres every second, so the International Space Station covers a distance of almost a quarter of a billion kilometres every year without actually going anywhere relative to the Earth. Orbital mechanics are all about relative velocities, not straight-line distances. The only way to change the shape of an orbit is by altering its relative velocity, which requires a change in velocity (delta-V) to make it happen. If you add to your orbital velocity you'll push your orbit higher on the other side, but once you get there you'll actually be going slower than you were before due to the conservation of momentum- you've traded velocity for altitude. Add enough velocity and you can escape from the gravity well entirely. To get from A to B in space where they're both orbiting the same parent body (Earth and Mars, Minmus and the Mun, Phobos and Deimos, Laythe and Tylo...) you'll need to increase your velocity to escape the gravity of the origin body, fly an elliptical trajectory between the two bodies and then decrease your velocity upon arriving at the destination body to get captured by its gravity and stay in orbit. Ideally, your trajectory will be an ellipse where the periapsis just touches the inner body's orbit and the apoapsis just touches the outer body's orbit, and both bodies will arrive at those points at the same time as the spacecraft; this is called a Hohmann transfer and is the most efficient way of doing it, minimising the change in velocity (delta-V) required to make it work.

Two months in space bags a significant milestone payout, but also causes worrying stress levels for Klaus and Vera. Probably best to bring them home again before one of them tries to open a window to let the smell out. The funds from the 60-day milestone went into KCT points, added to both VAB and R&D. With that out of the way, it's back to Mars. The Blue Guitar missions have been highly successful so far: the moon probes dispatched to Phobos and Deimos, two landers sent to the surface (but only one of them actually landed intact) and one of the orbiters in its final orbit for science, scanning and signal relaying. Blue Guitar 1 still has its landers on board, so it's time to send those down to the surface. A flawless landing and no damaged solar panels. Maybe the other one can- The final braking burn was slightly too late and the engine was destroyed on impact, then the probe bounced a few metres into the air and broke a solar panel when it landed the second time. Still, three successes out of four is pretty good going considering how crude these landers are. Blue Guitar 1 wasn't finished though, with one final burn parking it in a low polar orbit from where it could scan the whole surface of the planet. A contract came up to do a four satellite geostationary network. Doesn't say they have to be in any kind of pattern, just four satellites in geostationary orbits with 315 payload each, so I can launch all four in one go. A small science core with a service module tank wrapped around it ticked all the boxes, with a lightly modified Green Cucumber GEO rocket more than capable of putting them into geostationary orbit and then deorbiting the upper stage afterwards. A few days later, Blue Sitar 1 arrives at Venus. The boil-off issues suffered by the nearly identical Blue Guitar missions didn't happen on this one, even though it went closer to the Sun instead of away from it, so there was plenty of fuel to capture into a circular polar orbit for science, scanning and deploying the quartet of landers. A valuable contract completed, plus a bonus that appeared during the approach to Venus: Deploying the landers turned out to be rather problematic- a combination of decoupler force and possibly some minor part clipping means that the landers get hurled off and sent tumbling when the decouplers fire, which their tiny RCS thrusters can eventually cancel out. Firing the deorbit motors usually causes them to spin again, then decoupling the retro stage focusses on that stage and not the lander and decoupling the heatshield is a BIG no-no and is just plain Kraken bait. Oh, and the parachutes seem to be configured for Mars, not Venus, with a diameter of 50m when 50cm would probably be overkill. But despite all that, the first lander managed to plonk itself down on the surface with only one solar panel broken on impact (not sure how, they should have been protected by the heatshield) and has begun to run its experiments. Solar power is all but useless on the surface so once the batteries are flat they're dead for good. The second lander didn't fare so well: deploying the parachute early to prevent it from being destroyed by aero forces worked, but decoupling the heatshield caused several explosions and a massive Kraken attack that sent the whole thing spinning wildly. Atmospheric drag stopped the spin eventually, but running at 10x physics warp eventually came back to bite me as first the parachute and then the whole probe were obliterated by ludicrous overpressure that in some cases went into the gigaPascals. Still, two more landers left to try and get some additional science plus I discovered that there are three other probes orbiting Venus that can act as relays, increasing the signal coverage considerably. Coming soon: Transfer windows to Mercury and Jupiter, plus a new set of science experiments that will be researched at almost exactly the same time as the Jupiter window. I have two Jupiter-bound probes to launch, so one will be refitted while the other launches on time.

A set of RCS on the engine modules will make your life much easier. If you don't want to carry them around afterwards, just put them on a decoupler so you can dump them once assembly is complete.

Go into the main menu settings, then graphics. Turn antialiasing on/up, textures to max, terrain to ultra, enable/turn up reflections, but don't use V-sync or frame caps as they slow the entire game down. Just changing the graphics settings can turn this: Into this: Those screenshots are from a career game I started when my PC's graphics card failed. Running KSP on the integrated graphics system still worked, but I had to turn all the graphics settings right down; when the GPU was replaced (hooray for warranty!) I could turn all the settings back up to full, so even with no visual mods it looks drastically better. You might find that turning all the settings up slows the game down, especially during launches. The KSC itself requires quite a bit of processing, higher part counts require more processing and atmospheric flight requires more processing, plus the ground itself needs to be rendered too. Find a balance between 'looks good' and 'not a 3FPS slideshow' that works for you.

Sounds like a problem of having too much control authority. The roll axis is usually the easiest of the three (pitch, yaw, roll) to rotate around and if you have several engines which can all gimbal to exert roll control and/or lots of reaction wheels, they can easily set up an oscillation where the SAS keeps over-correcting. You can disable the roll axis in engine gimbals and reaction wheels (may or may not require advanced tweakables to be switched on, but advanced tweakables is definitely worth turning on regardless- main menu settings > enable advanced tweakables) to try and counteract this. If you want more specific advice or if you're getting a different problem, screenshots of the rocket(s) and/or a video of the problem will be needed.

Height above Kerbol is under 1.5Gm, it's 1000K outside and the solar panels are producing about 7000EC/s. And yet Moho is still further sunward than this craft... They're just generic small separation motors.

Next on the list of landings are Moho and Gilly, probably the highest delta-V part of the mission because Moho is stupidly close to Kerbol in the Snarkiverse (its perihelion is under 2Gm compared to over 4Gm in stock) and so orbits really fast. A quick check of the VASIMR engines: And a quick bit of EVA construction to steal all the usable parts from the Eve lander before abandoning it in Ike orbit: And then Temerity heads to a high Eve orbit, outside Ike's reach, to wait for an efficient Moho transfer window. They're frequent, but the inclined and eccentric orbit means some are much cheaper than others. When the window is open, Meg hops into the Vall-spec lander and takes the combined Ion Space Tug-Moho Sunshield (now called the Moho Space Tug) along with the two Gigantors stolen from Tenacity and prepares for the trip sunward. Five minutes in and she had to abort the burn due to power issues, but by moving two of the Gigantors to allow all six solar panels on the craft to face the sun at once, the day-long transfer burn could continue. With that complete, and a fairly small plane-change to set up a nice encounter, Meg keeps the craft oriented so the sunshield will protect her from the ever-increasing radiation as she spirals down towards Kerbol. External temperature readings peak at over 1000 Kelvin! Total solar power production is about 7000EC/s because at this point Kerbol is less than 1.5Gm away- that's less than five times the distance from the Earth to the Moon! AVP adds an effect to Moho that makes it look like the surface is being ablated away due to its proximity to Kerbol, which I think is even more appropriate in the Snarkiverse. Another extremely long ion burn was interrupted by Moho eclipsing the craft, which coincided with Gilly popping out from behind Moho to say hello. A lot more braking later and at last an apoapsis appears. A few more burns were needed to raise the periapsis back above the surface and then capture into a low-ish orbit before Meg could begin her landing. Dodge the lava... Touchdown and flag planted. Radiation levels here are high and temperatures are higher so the less time spent out on EVA the better. Taking the lander with full shielding has had an unfortunate side-effect though: there's not enough fuel left to get all the way back to the Moho Space Tug. If only there was a vessel with over 60km/s of delta-V in Moho orbit... MST did the rendezvousing but the lander used the last dregs of fuel to match velocities since the rendezvous itself took place in the dark, rendering the MST's ion engines useless. Moving in under cover of darkness, Meg poked her head out the hatch to stick the docking port back on before docking back to the MST to refuel and prepare for a jaunt to Gilly. A little bit more EVA construction, putting the larger docking port on top of the smaller one, allowed the lander's engine to perform the Gilly capture burn due to a double eclipse just before reaching periapsis. Landing on Gilly is a trivial business. I could have landed the entire Moho Space Tug with the lander attached, the gravity is so low. Meg found a nice rock, but forgot to take a picture of herself with the flag she planted. Maybe heatstroke is to blame? Whatever the reason, the flag actually was planted and now all that's left here is a fairly short wait for the next Eve transfer window. Active and passive shields plus Moho's magnetosphere are keeping radiation levels relatively low for Meg in the lander can, but they can't quite block it out entirely. Hopefully she'll last long enough to get back to Temerity where the radiation detox unit awaits. Flag count so far: 6! Next time: Back to Eve, then onwards to either Duna or Jool.

Coatl Aerospace ProbesPlus, download the master branch from the GitHub and NOT the version available on CKAN. Two reasons really: Generic thruster with a gimbal; Tiny radiators to reduce boiloff. Near Future Exploration adds a load of new antennas, some of which are actually rather good; Hyperspace makes the game load noticeably faster as long as you don’t need to rebuild the ModuleManager cache; Soundtrack Editor lets you add more music into the game and I use it for every KSP install I make now- there’s a good selection available in the Astronomer’s Music Pack (find it on the AVP front page) and Kevin MacLeod (who did much of the KSP soundtrack) has a vast library of stuff available for free, as do others (again see AMP). I can give you a patch I made that makes PicoPort miniature docking ports appear in RP-1, very useful for probes.

Some tutorials were broken by a recent update that redid some engines, the old models of the engines were hidden from the parts list but the tutorials weren’t updated to use the new ones. This should fix it:

Reinstall KSP fresh (back up your save games first!) and if playing through Steam verify the game files afterwards. If that doesn’t help, post screenshots of the issue.

Or, you could just use the infinite electricity cheat in the debug menu (alt+F12 > cheats, or pause > show version information will also open it) to get infinite power.