jimmymcgoochie

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.

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.)