jimmymcgoochie

Landings on Moho and Gilly, after enduring temperatures of over 1000K at Moho’s low, low perihelion (Gigantors were making 1500EC/s per panel!) and long, long, long ion “burns” to get there. Radiation is understandably through the roof and even the heavy shielding on the pod and specially designed sun shield module with active and passive shielding isn’t enough to protect the crew from Kerbol’s fury, so the less time spent here the better. @IncompetentSpacerhave you considered an unguided lunar capture with solid motors? If you set up the lunar capture burn as soon as the TLI burn finishes, then point at the node, spin up and decouple (with a 0 force decoupler! otherwise the trajectory gets messed up) then the probe can use solid separation rockets to capture into orbit. If you angle the solids so they point at/near the centre of mass, the small margin of variance on each motor won’t be enough to knock it off course thanks to the spin-stabilisation. This is how I did it: The TLI stage also completed a lunar impactor contract, though it required a bit of cheesing the system by packing a small, locked battery so it would have some stored power at the moment of impact. If you’re not restricting yourself to just American engines, the RD-0105 is the best upper stage out there in terms of overall delta-V, just watch out for the puny gimbal force from the verniers; the upgraded RD-0109 is even better. For early hypergolic upper stages, I’ve always favoured the Juno 6k over the AJ10-mid as its ISP is higher, propellants more dense and reliability slightly better(?) despite the limited ignitions.

Look at mods made by, say, Angel125 or Nertea- they have their own art styles that are pretty different to stock parts. There are also mods that aim to recreate real rockets and spacecraft in as much detail as possible; while some stock parts (especially from the Making History DLC) are clearly based on real rockets, they’re not replicas. It’s not just about looks, though: I’d argue that ‘stockalike’ also covers part performance as while some mods are balanced similarly to stock parts or have trade-offs to compensate for their superior stats in some areas, others are pretty blatantly overpowered compared to stock parts.

AVP works fine for me in KSP 1.12.3 and I can’t see anything obviously wrong with how it’s installed in your screenshots. Try uninstalling and reinstalling it in CKAN, and if that doesn’t work downgrade scatterer to the last 0.07xx version and see if that helps.

This is most likely a memory issue, not a problem with SSPXr. It’s a very resource-intensive mod (especially if you add the interiors) due to the size and detail of the parts and if you’re already constrained by available memory (mostly RAM) then it will only make this worse.

@seyMonstersWarned you…

Me: nobody seems to be writing good KSP fiction any more- *finds this post* Keep it up!

No need to worry about the delta-V for a Jool capture, a good assist from Tylo can get you into orbit for free; or eject you from the entire solar system if you do it the wrong way.

In that case, build a rover and use the mod Bon Voyage to have it drive around in the background while you do other things. It adds a special part to use the self-driving system, but the RoveMate gets one built in to reflect its rover-oriented design. The Mun has more biomes than any other body and the largest craters are all unique biomes so it’s pretty easy to rake in the science this way: drive to a biome, run science, transmit science, drive to the next biome and repeat. You can do this by hand, but Bon Voyage will save you from days of tedium and potential fiery crashes and in my opinion is a must for using rovers effectively on virtually every planet and moon out there. It also has a water mode which works with jet engines, so self-driving boats are also possible on Kerbin and Laythe. This is less reliable in my experience, but still better than doing it yourself.

Let's get this over with... Many, many aerobraking passes (and a few reloads after coming down on steep slopes or just too close to sea level and being unable to return to orbit) later, finally a good landing site- in the mountains, but with a relatively benign slope. The flag was planted, the surface sample taken and some questionable EVA construction performed to shuffle the ladders around a bit so Gerdorf could climb back up to the pod; much of said climbing was done upside-down, apparently the game doesn't like it when you put some ladders pointing down and others pointing up. Once aboard, more EVA construction was needed to remove the ladders entirely and steal one of the boosters' nosecones for the top of the ship, since I completely forgot to take the nosecone that was stashed aboard Temerity and don't have the patience to do all those hours of long ion burns again. The last step before liftoff was to jettison the wings and parachutes, at which point one of them decided it wanted to become a boomerang. It fell under the landing legs, got yeeted off into the air while spinning, flew about 200 metres away and then turned and came back- fortunately not straight back into the lander. Eventually it ran out of momentum and hit the ground. No screenshots of the ascent since I was rather preoccupied with just flying the thing through the absolute soup of an atmosphere and making it to orbit before the fuel ran out, but here's one of the final circularisation. Nearly a Kerbin day of ion burns later and the Ion Space Tug has managed to rendezvous. And even more ion burns sent the combined craft spiralling back up to Ike, taking a few days to get there in the end. The lander's supplies would have run out by then, but the IST has loads more so it can go to Moho and back. The final rendezvous was done with the lander's engine and the small rocket fuel reserve in the IST, because there's no way I'm doing a 5 minute ion burn at 3FPS... Both the lander and the IST were set to auto-dock to some free ports and I left the game running for a while until everything was done. Free of the heavy, bulky Eve lander (the upper stage will be stripped for parts and then discarded since it's unshielded and unpressurised) the next step for the mission is a trip to Moho. This will definitely require the Vall lander with its superior shielding, as well as the new Moho sunshield module and the theft of Temerity's pair of Gigantor solar panels for the IST to use all four engines at once instead of just two. Flag count so far: 4! Next time: To Moho, and also Gilly.

Two words: engine plates. They’re exactly what you need for building proper engine clusters, with a built-in decoupler and a variable length interstage. I’m also disappointed you looked at the Cheetah and Poodle but somehow missed the Wolfhound right beside both and its superior 380s of ISP and higher thrust to boot. In that situation I’d have gone for one Rhino and an engine plate though, the extra thrust is worth whatever minor loss of delta-V you’d get, assuming one Rhino is more than 8 tons.

This is fine.

Jool isn't that much harder to get to than Duna, well within the realms of chemical propulsion (a stage or two with Poodle or Terrier engines should get you there from low Kerbin orbit), and if you get your timing just right you can capture into orbit without using any fuel at all! A good Laythe and/or Tylo slingshot can bring you into orbit for free, though it'll take a lot of fiddling to make it happen. Laythe, Vall and Tylo all orbit on the same plane so you can string together a series of flybys to get a lot of science very efficiently, set up a low-energy encounter with a specific target to capture into orbit or to send a return mission back out of Jool's SOI more cheaply. Triple gravity assists from Tylo, Vall and Laythe in that order, all from a single course correction burn. I was only aiming for Tylo, but it's very easy to start playing gravity pinball if you get into the same plane as those inner moons. I built this probe to have loads of delta-V to visit all the moons of Jool in one go, but it turned out to be hilariously overbuilt because of these gravity assists. (Ignore the grey one, that's just Eeloo joining the party in a lightly modded Kerbol system.)

*wipes away drool* I'm getting some F-1B vibes (about time the F-1 was properly represented, the Mastodon wasn't nearly powerful enough). Looks like the gas generator exhaust is mounted on extensible pistons so maybe it can gimbal for roll control? And the little dancing Kerbal too...

Known problem, the faster the jump to time warp the worse it gets; bumping up to the first level of time warp before clicking the ‘warp to’ button seems to reduce the impact (at least it has for me) but I don’t know of anything that can stop it entirely- maybe try turning off orbital drift compensation?

Water calculations don’t always work correctly if the fuel cells are dumping water as the crew drinks water intermittently, but definitely worth keeping an eye on in case they actually do run out of EVAs available is a stock Kerbalism feature and doesn’t work for RO/RP-1. If I had that many engines on a service module, I’d be blipping them until they all had ignition failures to cheese ALL THE DATA UNITS in one go. The RCS issue is a PITCH input, not roll- you may have disengaged MJ pitch control but it still tries to stabilise the pitch; only disabling the actuation toggle for the RCS in the pod will prevent that, or just switch it off since it’s stable enough on its own. And you completely missed the bravest Engineer on the list too, and she wasn’t too stupid either…

Children of a Dead Earth features limited delta-V and long, low-acceleration trajectory changes as a core feature. The trajectory widget looks strikingly similar to KSP’s node editor but the planned trajectory adjusts in real time according to the vessel(s)’s acceleration with arrows to show the direction of the burn and a continuous line to show the resulting trajectory. It also has an automated burn calculator to do things like interplanetary transfers, rendezvouses with other vessels and simpler trajectory intercepts for merely flying by a target (and blasting it with railguns etc., but which in KSP would be ideal for a flyby science probe). CoaDE uses n-body physics so it’s not directly comparable to KSP’s patched conics system, however many of the bodies have incredibly low gravity so that aspect doesn’t always matter; KSP can already show trajectories spanning multiple SOIs so it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to make something similar work here. The real issue would probably be trying to plan out a very long burn such that it can spiral out of a planet’s gravity well going the right way for an interplanetary or interstellar journey, which would require a level of forward planning that just sticking a node on an existing orbit and adding the necessary changes in velocity doesn’t really give you. With a proper node planning tool on hand, though, it would be much, much easier.

Take two Mk1 command pods, stick them together pointy end to pointy end, add a pilot and a scientist inside, stick a thermometer, barometer and goo pod x2 to the narrow bit in the middle and then stick it on its side on the pad so you can roll it around the KSC. Each facility is its own biome and most buildings are their own biomes too- each dish at the tracking station, different R&D buildings, even the fuel tanks and ancillary structures like flagpoles and water towers count- so roll up to one, do a crew report and run all the science experiments then get the scientist out to grab all the data, do an EVA report, restore the goo pods and stash the samples in one pod, then run the experiments again and stash them in the other pod. Repeat until the batteries run out, then launch it again and keep going. Control is a relative term with this thing, don’t go too fast or stuff will explode and good luck trying to steer! Alternatively, there’s a little mod called KEI (Kerbin Environmental Institute) which runs all the available experiments in all the KSC biomes in one click, saving you a lot of time and effort over doing it manually.

You’re not a real Kerbal player until you try to launch a rover with the control point facing forwards instead of up

Are your avionics on and sufficient for the craft’s mass? Do you have the correct RCS propellants (HTP and helium I believe)? Are the thrusters actually enabled and with pitch/yaw/roll authority enabled? If you really have no attitude control but the capsule is spinning, wait until it points vaguely retrograde and fire the retros.

Left Ike orbit to head to Eve’s surface, which despite only being about 6000km lower took HOURS of burn time due to puny ion engines and a massive shortfall in power production. Eve periapsis is still over 300km but the lander can probably manage that on its own; the periapsis is on the dark side of Eve so no way to try and reduce the apoapsis before trying to land. (And yes, I did say Ike and Eve- in the Snarkiverse Ike orbits Eve, not Duna, while Gilly orbits Moho instead.)

I ran into a problem last week: the Ion Space Tug, the one with the solar panels, wouldn't detach from the side of Temerity's cargo bay. Nothing I did would fix it, and then I had a week of doing tourist-y things and zero KSP time so couldn't fix it. Fortunately, the issue has now been solved thanks to some fellow KSP forum-goers and the mission can continue as planned. Cue the docking port shuffling. The Moho sunshield won't be needed yet, so it can go back and dock to Temerity. The structural girder that allowed the Eve Ascender to attach to the front of Temerity was discarded as the upper stage was moved into place, with the Ion Space Tug docked to the front of it. As Eve appeared over the horizon, the four ion engines began firing at full power- -oh. Right. Turns out four of these 'AFTER' ion thrusters use waaaay too much power to run them on solar power at Eve. I can run two of them at two-thirds power and just about break even on power, or a little bit more thrust for a while and use the two small capacitors to periodically boost the battery charge before a long recharge cycle of their own. Side note, I discovered that adding one autostrut made this craft completely stable even at 12x physics warp, which is great because these burns took FOREVER... A TWR of 0.06, in Ike's puny gravity, tells you all you need to know about how painfully long it took to even get out of Ike's SOI, never mind get the periapsis down towards Eve's atmosphere. I even resorted to using Ike for a gravity assist even though the orbit was pretty inclined compared to Ike's, requiring a small but significant plane change burn. But eventually, seven days after undocking from Temerity, Gerdorf was finally ready to undock from the IST and fire the lander's deorbiting engines to send it hurtling towards the clouds. In the dark. Ah. Flag count so far: still 3. Next time: Serious save-scumming for the hardest landing-and-return in Kerbol system. Did I pack that nosecone for the front of the pod?

Good news- after much save file hacking using KML (and a few gratuitous explosions) I finally freed the stuck docking port by setting it to 4000 degrees Kelvin and blowing it up, then replacing it with a new part which I copied from another part of the same mission and then fixed with a bit of EVA construction. After all that effort, actually landing on Eve should be a doddle, right?

To clarify: The problem docking port is NOT attached to another docking port. It's attached directly to another part (an NFLV 5m cargo bay) on the top node (the end that docks to other docking ports).

Go to wherever you've installed KSP, open the KSP root folder and you'll find a text file called KSP.txt or KSP.log, then follow the guide above to share it. Try deleting the problematic part's config and see if it loads after that, or reinstall ROEngines. Are you installing mods in the Steam copy of KSP by any chance?

Deploy the ladders and MOVE DOWN!