jimmymcgoochie

In the middle of a mission I've suddenly realised that a key piece of hardware- an ion-powered space tug- is attached to the mothership by a small docking port which is surface attached. The Ion Space Tug was attached as a subassembly in the VAB when the mothership was launched but now it can't be decoupled, undocked or otherwise detached; the undock button does nothing and there's no option to decouple in the PAW or via action groups. Is there a way to get this docking port to let go, or do I need to resort to dubious save hacking to either forcibly detach it or else destroy the docking port and fix it afterwards via EVA construction?

Try this: Huge relay dishes up to 7.5m wide, extremely expensive and heavy but also extremely powerful. There are configs for a 10m dish too, but you’d need to re-enable them by editing the file to uncomment the configs.

I don’t think so. The exterior models alone cause a noticeable drop in FPS for me, let alone adding detailed interiors.

Advanced tweakables enables an additional feature of parachutes- spread angle. You can set this higher to make all parachutes in a symmetry set spread out more, or less so they cluster together, but it only affects chutes in one set, placed together using symmetry in the editor.

Maybe this will help?

Might as well use the infinite propellant cheat since using ISRU without drills is effectively conjuring fuel out of nothing. Alternatively, make a ModuleManager patch based on an RTG and set it to generate either ore or fuel, or use the negative thrust KAL-1000 exploit to generate free fuel.

A few things that might help: Enable advanced tweakables in the main menu settings. Much of what I’m about to say requires it and it’s worth having that switched on anyway for the other abilities you gain e.g. autostruts. Turn down the friction setting on the front wheel(s) of your planes. The nose wheel tends to ‘dig in’ especially when using jets at the rear of the plane, meaning any slight deviation from straight ahead will be exaggerated as the engines keep pushing forwards but the front wheel acts like an anchor until the plane pivots sideways, drops a wing and ends in a long chain of fiery explosions. This can also affect rovers, though to a lesser extent as they generally lack high-power thrust and don’t go nearly as fast. Swap the wheel controls to different keys. By default, wheel controls are set to WASD, the same as pitch and yaw control, which causes a lot of interference and can lead to poor controllability especially on low-gravity bodies like Minmus. Set your wheel controls to use the arrow keys instead and you’ll completely bypass this problem without having to faff with reaction wheel settings or losing the ability to control the rover’s attitude at the same time as driving. Balance your brakes to be more rear-biased by reducing the brake force on the front wheels and increasing it at the back. It’ll increase your stopping distance a little bit, but decreases the risk of face-planting into the ground. Avoid braking and turning at the same time as this can lead to skidding and then flipping. Increase the suspension spring and damper strengths to keep the rover/plane stable when turning and to reduce the risk of clipping the ground with something other than a wheel which can easily ruin your day. If you can provide some screenshots- or better yet, a video- of the problem then we can give more specific advice.

Can you post the game logs? Here’s how: Which file is getting stuck?

Sometimes radiators have a bug where they effectively heat up by pulling heat from each other and overheat, which causes the other radiators to overheat and so on. ISRU is overrated, just build a more modular system with a lander that can handle Vall, Bop and Pol and a booster to land on Tylo (1.875m using a Cheetah is good, or 2.5m with a Poodle but that’s heavier) then use an SSTO spaceplane for Laythe (I can send you some craft files..? or look at the Indefatigability Grand Tour mission report in my profile signature) and send the whole lot out to Jool in one go.

I feel obliged to point out that jet engines exist and are a common way to get to orbit with an initial TWR well below 1. There are also motors and propellers which technically have no TWR at all since the game can’t calculate them, which could be used to artificially reduce the average TWR for a spaceplane. I’m sure I’ve heard of someone using only propellers and ion thrusters to fly an SSTO to Kerbin orbit using some serious physics exploits.

The Making History Mastodon is pointless. Less powerful and less efficient than the Mainsail in atmosphere and vacuum, the only possible benefits are the (slightly) lower mass and (a bit more than slightly) lower cost. It’s supposed to be the F-1 engine, so why is it so puny when the Rhino, an analog of the M-1 which had comparable thrust to the F-1, has 2MN vacuum thrust? Giving the Mastodon at least 1800kN vacuum thrust would make it worthwhile.

“Why won’t the engines gimbal? Why won’t the RCS fire?” It sure would be nice if there was a warning that flashed up on the screen whenever you didn’t have enough avionics to control the craft…

New series- SeyMonsters Does EVAs Until He Knows Which Button Is Which. The smaller 1.25m ISRU is a complete waste of time, it wastes almost all the ore fed into it whereas the larger one uses it all. I’d suggest redesigning that lander so the ISRU stuff could be dumped for the Tylo ascent and doing that one last, filling up on one of the other moons before attempting a Tylo landing because Tylo needs A LOT of delta-V.

Do you have control of the vessel (powered, signal to the ground, avionics can handle the vessel mass)? Did you put the right propellants in the right type of tanks- unless you’re using a gas like nitrogen or helium, most RCS propellants need a pressurant such as nitrogen or helium as well as the ‘real’ propellant, and all RCS options require high pressure tanks which can be selected for conventional (separate) and integral (isogrid) structure tanks and are standard for all service module tanks.

1- How exactly do you plan to get quadrillions of tons of water into the middle of the Sahara desert? 2- Fake sea-ice will still melt; if using fresh water it’ll create a cold layer at the top of the ocean that can cause all sorts of problems, while pikrete would need huge quantities of wood and would then dump that wood into the ocean and any ice-making system would require huge quantities of power. 3- Just drop nukes on volcanoes to make them erupt, you’ll get vastly more atmospheric aerosols than you’ll ever get from contrails. 4- Mmm, giant algal blooms spewing toxins everywhere, deoxygenating the ocean and killing all the marine life (and plenty of terrestrial life too if it washed up on a coastline). 5- Steel making is a huge source of carbon emissions, plus who’s going to make that much steel just to throw it into the sea? And where is the power coming from? 6- Trees. Two things that we know will reduce global temperatures: volcanic eruptions and large numbers of nuclear explosions. Drop some nukes into semi-active volcanoes and set them off to trigger huge eruptions and cool the planet by sheer brute force; Krakatoa cooled the entire Earth by about a degree for a few years and there are thousands of old nukes lying around and plenty of remote volcanoes not erupting enough…

I should have posted this link earlier.

The only way to avoid this is to move the part into position without symmetry enabled, then set the symmetry there. If you hover over a part at e.g. 4x symmetry, the game will detect that the prospective parent part is at 4x symmetry and switch to match that since it can’t suddenly start attaching stuff in, say, 6x symmetry.

Longitude of Ascending Node is the point at which the orbit crosses the equator heading north. Argument of Periapsis is how far around the orbit the periapsis is from the LAN; 0 means the periapsis is on the LAN, a value between 0 and 180 means the apoapsis is below the equator and between 180 and 360 means the apoapsis is above the equator. For contracts, the target orbit line should be visible on the map which makes it easier to aim at it; there’s a bit of wiggle room on the exact numbers too. Can you screenshot the contract window to show what items on the list are ticked or not? Make sure you’re going in the right direction, have all the required extra components (power, antenna, docking port, science experiments and/or survey scanners depending on the contract’s specifics) and if you meet the parameters then the orbit line on the map should disappear.

Screenshots please? To my knowledge, SVE is pretty old and if you’re using newer versions of things like EVE and scatterer (and KSP) then try a different visual pack like Spectra or AVP instead?

Download ProbesPlus master branch from the GitHub (link on the forum page or via CKAN) and not the release which is very out of date. If that doesn’t work, post logs please: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/83212-how-to-get-support-read-first/

Try deleting the settings.cfg file inside the KSP folder, then it’ll recreate it with the default settings after reloading the game which may fix the problem but will also undo any changes you’ve made to the settings ever.

Something like VASIMR or a similar electromagnet-based ion/plasma thruster is a good bet: high ISP gives lots of delta-V, they can use the relatively plentiful (on Earth at least) argon for propellant and low thrust doesn’t matter over interplanetary distances, hence the use of ion thrusters on a number of spacecraft including BepiColombo and Dawn. Using a nuclear reactor for power is a given for a crewed ship using such a propulsion system- a fission reactor now, but possibly fusion in the future which would probably benefit from any improvements in electromagnetic technologies gained by developing the propulsion system, and/or vice-versa. Nuclear thermal propulsion is the higher thrust option, trading an order of magnitude of ISP for several orders of magnitude of thrust, however that also introduces the problem of hydrogen boil-off which would need to be actively managed, as well as needing very large fuel tanks to hold all the hydrogen needed for an interplanetary voyage. An NTR with a secondary loop to generate power when not producing thrust and possibly a lox afterburner would IMO be the best option if such a mission was to be launched within a decade from now, since NTRs have been tested since the 70s and liquid hydrogen infrastructure is relatively widespread in rocketry. A fusion thermal rocket would boost the ISP considerably, though this would probably require very large quantities of deuterium rather than ordinary hydrogen and so would be much more expensive. Hydrolox chemical rockets are another option, trading even more ISP for lower mass, smaller fuel tanks and greater versatility, plus there’s extra oxygen available for the crew and to pressurise the ship. The delta-V margins are going to get very thin indeed and will probably involve a lot of staging and fuel tanks or boosters being scattered in its’ wake, but a mission to Mars or Venus is possible on chemical propulsion (or so my experiences with RO and RP-1 would suggest) and going further afield could be done if ISRU refuelling became practical. Methalox would have even slimmer margins and would be harder to refuel anywhere other than Mars, but also has less of a problem with boiloff.

Colin Chapman’s maxim is as relevant to spacecraft as it is to sports cars, arguably even more so. Besides, ol’ Musky lobbed his car at Mars so there’s precedent Edit: oh dear… you did exactly the opposite of what I said and now it’s more complicated, heavier and still misconfigured for Moho: atmosphere analysis experiment, deployed weather analyser, unnecessary solar panels (ironically I typed that before it sat in orbit for many days without power) but still potentially short of delta-V to even make orbit of Moho, never mind land and return.

Why bother with a slope at all? Just make the ramp perfectly flat, ignore the curvature of the planet and just drive up it into space. Space elevators are SSTO when you think about it, plus they don’t need propulsion systems powered by little children’s birthday cake candle wishes or bulldozing a straight line across an entire continent to make them happen. A shipping container going from A to B might need a truck to take it from A to a train to take it to a ship to take it to another train to take it to another truck to take it to B; the container ship doesn’t do the whole journey, so why should space cargo be any different? Specialisation brings efficiency: the deep space vessel can be optimised for that role, the means of transporting cargo to/from the surface of a planet can be optimised for that role (cough space elevator cough) and there’s no need for a spaceship, probably built in space, to ever not be in space.

You vastly underestimate the delta-V needed to get to Moho- and back again. Simplify, then add lightness.