jimmymcgoochie

If only someone had warned you about that Eve mission not having an alarm set...

Unless you have an RC-L01 Remote Guidance Unit (the 2.5m version), remote probe control only works for single-hop connections i.e. the vessel being remotely controlled needs a direct CommNet connection to the controlling vessel. Trypophobia can control Fat Man because the two are communicating directly via Fat Man's trio of 88-88 dishes, however Clamp's puny C16 antennae are far too weak to directly connect to Trypophobia so it won't be controllable even if Fat Man relays the signal. The solution is to add a more powerful antenna to Clamp so that it can communicate directly to Trypophobia and be remotely controlled. It might also be able to be remotely controlled by Cylinder, assuming that ship has either an RGU or one of the crew modules (Mk1-3 command pod, Mk2 lander can or MEM) so the pilots can control it. I'm surprised that Trypophobia is actually able to provide remote control at all, since according to the wiki page the controlling ship needs a relay antenna to serve as a probe control point. Are you sure there are no relays on it?

A picture is worth a thousand words- screenshots are always a good idea when you're having trouble with a particular design. At a guess, you either have no signal to the ground because you're using the deployable Communotron 16 but it isn't deployed (or was deployed but broke due to aero forces), in which case you should use the static Communotron 16S, or your probe core is in hibernation mode and so isn't providing full control, in which case turn hibernation mode off. It's also possible that you're out of power, which would result in a loss of attitude control when the reaction wheels had no power to operate but the engine(s) would still work OK- assuming the engine(s) don't generate any power when running, which most large and/or booster engines like the Mainsail and Swivel do but which upper stage engines like the Spark and Terrier don't.

The staging list is spacing the visible icons as if you've expanded all the groups of parachutes so they're all shown individually in the list. It's a harmless visual anomaly, is all.

Take a look at some of these:

You didn’t set an alarm for the Eve lander mission, or the crewed Eeloo flight. You’ll also want to put a burn at the Dres mission’s apoapsis to fine-tune your closest approach for some Very Aggressive AerobrakingTM to try and slow down. This is just another lesson in “don’t trust the stock alarm clock, click on the trajectory and ‘warp here’ instead”.

A contract completed on the Moon as Green Huckleberry 4 arrives at the rover waypoints and does a few drifts to celebrate. Between that money and the advances from several large contracts- including lunar base and space station- there was enough to pay for the final R&D upgrade plus change. The Green Kiwi rovers arrived at Mars, spread a couple of days apart, but... Landing on Mars without a heatshield from low Mars orbit is possible; landing on Mars without a heatshield on a hyperbolic trajectory is emphatically not. RIP Green Kiwi 1 and 2. But weirdly, this contract completed: I'd say the generic contract blurb is actually pretty accurate in this case- I learnt much about the atmosphere of Mars, specifically "don't just yeet probes at it on an interplanetary flyby trajectory without a heatshield". From Mars to Venus: Blue Sitar 1 launches, somewhat late, to head to Venus. A good encounter that will set up a polar orbit, ideal for scanning and for deploying the four landers. Still with the interplanetary missions, Green Banana Saturn launches for a flyby of the ringed planet. The heaviest Green Banana to date (and probably ever, since it's almost 350 tons on the pad), it'll need all the fuel it can get to fly past Saturn and maybe, just maybe, make it into orbit. Despite dipping to 120km altitude during the transfer burn (probably should have remembered that from the sim and launched higher) the probe was sent off to Saturn without any trouble, even setting up a blink-and-you'll-miss-it flyby of Enceladus on the way past. Whatever fuel remains in the upper stage and the probe's own tanks will be used to try to capture into orbit at Saturn, potentially allowing more moons to be visited to bag even more contract money. And finally, the first flight of the Green Cucumber GEO to geostationary orbit went flawlessly, bagging the first of many geostationary satellite contracts and proving itself ready for mass-production. Coming soon: Prototyping a 1500 ton rocket, and getting caught out by my own hubris...

First of all, you can make monopropellant in an ISRU as far as I remember. Xenon refineries were one of the first things to be revealed in the show and tells. That said, xenon isn’t a very common gas in real life and so actually making the stuff is rather difficult- with an abundance of 87 parts per billion extracting it from air is an energy-intensive process. Other noble gases are more abundant (and so cheaper to produce) and are also suitable for ion propulsion- hence SpaceX using krypton in some Starlink satellites to cut costs over the more expensive xenon, and a number of ion and plasma propulsion ideas that would use argon, which incidentally makes up about 1% of Earth’s atmosphere and is far easier to get hold of.

Launched a “power module” to a space station, which was really an avionics and propulsion module with a little solar panel on it to power itself. Except, it couldn’t power itself and ran out of power before it got anywhere near the station. Ironically enough, the station already has enough power generation capacity and I was trying to cheese the contract a bit by adding something it needed (propulsion and control) instead, so serves me right really… Good thing I had a backup waiting in case the first one failed, now modified with a small fuel cell to power itself until it reaches the station.

Bad idea at interplanetary distances, truly awful idea at interstellar distances. I've said it before and I'll say it again: having a huge, expensive, took-years-to-build-the-thing interstellar spaceship go ploughing into a planet or hurtling off into deep space rather than parking in orbit due to a tiny mistake in timing or trajectory drift, when all you can do is watch it crash because "light speed delay" means you can't make the tiny and eminently sensible course correction, isn't my idea of fun.

With a 700 ton launchpad I've put boots on the Moon (and the rest of the crew too; walking in low gravity isn't easy!), but it took two launches spread two weeks apart. 700 tons is enough to get a fairly simple orbital probe out to Jupiter or a sizeable cluster mission to Mars or Venus, but to go to more exotic locations- and in a reasonable timeframe- size matters. Which is a long-winded way of saying I bought a 1500 ton launchpad. Construction should finish in about 60 days, give or take. Back to that whole 'Moon landing' thing and Yellow Xylophone 2 arrives safely in lunar orbit to await the arrival of the crew for this second Moon mission. As soon as the rollout is complete, Yellow Glockenspiel 3 launches to join it. Robin and Patrick have already orbited the Moon on the Yellow Glockenspiel 1 mission, but this time one of them gets to land on it. During the TLI burn I noticed a potentially major problem: the upper stage avionics was supposed to have RCS propellant in it, but some kind of configuration mixup has filled it with batteries instead. I don't need the power, batteries are pretty heavy and now the RCS has to steal propellant from the Gemini service module's (admittedly sizeable) reserves instead. I thought I fixed that... Lunar arrival went without further trouble, with convenient timing and a well-planned capture burn allowing for a rendezvous with the lander within a single orbit. Once docked, Robin (who won the impromptu rock-paper-scissors face-off) headed over into the lander to begin her landing attempt. First try! 1967-06-08, still two years before Apollo 11 and the second lunar landing is complete. By nothing more than sheer happenstance, I even landed the lander in the right biome for the targeted Moon landing contract. Should've looked at the contracts at some point during this mission. With the surface stay complete, Robin heads back to orbit. No failures of any kind happened, probably because I used up all the failures trying to land. Direct rendezvous during the ascent saved time, but left little fuel in the tanks by the time Robin docked up again. A single ignition remains on the RD-58 engine, but it won't be needed. Once crew and science data have been removed from the lander and any usable resources transferred across, the lander was undocked and deorbited to avoid space litter. It feels like a waste, throwing these landers away each time, but at some point I'll put together a reusable version- maybe using one of the AJ-10 engines with the ridiculous rated burn time and infinite ignitions, or with generic thrusters all round. Mission accomplished, the contracts pay out some big bucks. More science gathered from the (newly unlocked, apparently) deep surface sample crew experiment and that blood thing again, plus a big retirement delay for Robin and a decent one for Patrick too. Coming soon: The belated launch of Blue Sitar 1 to chase the Venus transfer window and the first Mars-bound missions arrive.

Finally got underway for a Kerbalism Grand Tour. Goodbye Kerbin... And hello- DRES!?

One final task remains before starting this mission proper: a last-minute EVA to check things over and ditch some excess fuel tanks. Ger heads outside for some EVA construction and to check on various vital systems. Almost right away he spots something wrong: There are meant to be three active shields in there, not two! One must have exploded at some point and I didn't realise. The mission should still work with two, but the loss of redundancy could be problematic in the future. Ger complained of a loud crackling sound in his radio, but that's probably just static and definitely not the suit's built-in Geiger counter going nuts at the four huge nuclear reactors and nine(?) large RTGs spitting out radiation everywhere. I'd like to have all the fuel tanks full before leaving, but with these frame rates and a lack of available docking ports it would be more hassle than it's worth- at this point the ship has over 50km/s of available delta-V with the engines at full efficiency, a number that'll only go up once the massive Eve lander is removed. A handful of tanks (five, weirdly, should be six but one of those probably exploded off-camera too) were drained to fill the rest, then discarded by Ger. An action that was somewhat complicated by needing to add the KSP Part Volumes mod, required to make the Kerbalism parts (and others besides) EVA construction-friendly as they were for the Indefatigability. More space litter, but those Kerbalism tanks are prone to MASSIVE EXPLOSIONS!!!!1! in EVA construction mode so better out the way so they can explode on their own. Once Ger was back on board, some save files were edited and reloaded to put the TVs and radiation detox units back into Temerity's Hitchhiker modules, since those had mysteriously gone missing at some point too. And then it was time to go. Operating at 75% efficiency, those VASIMR engines use a total of 8000EC/s, generate about 380kN of thrust- and an ISP of 5000 seconds, meaning total delta-V is about 46km/s at this setting, but the TWR is about 0.04 and total burn time is about 20 hours. The 200m/s kick burns took about ten (game!) minutes each, followed by a final burn to get a nice close periapsis for an efficient capture. So far, so typical Grand Tour. But here's where things change. Normally, the first place any Grand Tour mission would go is the Mun. Easy target, equatorial orbit, hard to miss, easy landing to start things off. But not in the Snarkiverse- here the Mun orbits at a 62.5 degree inclination and a highly eccentric orbit, which isn't all that difficult to get to and from but means that going somewhere else afterwards is a lot more difficult to plan. No, in the Snarkiverse, the most obvious first destination... ...is Dres. Pseudo-orbiting around Kerbin in a slightly inclined and slightly eccentric solar orbit, Dres is always close enough to reach within about 15 days without having to try too hard; the low transfer velocity makes it very cheap to get to and capture; the low gravity makes it an easy first landing, saving fuel for later. And yes, that's Minmus in the background. Another good reason to come here first, two landings in one system without even needing to refuel between them. Flags planted so far: 0. Next time: That flag count is about to go up. With a modicum of planning, the lander should be able to land on both Dres and Minmus in one go before returning to Temerity, and I might get some syrupy smooth framerates again for a little while.

Korolyov, Korolov, Korolev..? I've seen it spelt a few different ways, all of them ripe for Kerbal-ification. There's also Tsiolkovsky, of rocket equation fame, whose name is easily butchered altered to Tsiolkerbsky. If there's a Woomerang (referring to Woomera, site of a grand total of two orbital launches, one successful) then surely a Kerou (referring to Kourou) would be feasible; couldn't be worse than the alphabet soup that is Baikerbanur, though why that wasn't called Baikernur is beyond me. Perhaps a Naro-related launchsite on that conspicuously Korea-looking peninsula east of the KSC?

Have any of you tried clearing the input locks? Alt+F12 > input locks > clear input locks, or if you have the ClickThroughBlocker mod (a pretty common dependency) then it adds a button to the toolbar that looks like a mouse and a padlock and does exactly the same thing. If that doesn't work, logs and screenshots will be needed to get to the bottom of it.

Looks like Realism Overhaul to me, in which case the stock delta-V system was deliberately disabled by RO since it's very inaccurate. Use MechJeb's SmartASS instead of stock SAS, the maneuver planner to create and execute nodes and the delta-V window to get (mostly) accurate delta-V readings, and make sure to switch on 'prevent unsafe ignitions' in the MJ settings menu so that you don't waste engine ignitions without ullaging first (the engine icons in the staging menu should be white, not red or yellow, to prevent that 'vapor in feedlines' problem). One more thing- move the Apollo capsule to an earlier stage as that activates the capsule's built-in RCS for re-entry.

Double-checked the Imgur albums and I've missed out two posts. Time to make up for it. First up, the Eve Ascender- the upper stage is already attached to Temerity, but the vast majority of the size, mass and parts is yet to be launched. The Laythe SSTO was next, requiring a couple of attempts due to an underpowered launch rocket, power issues and running out of monopropellant during docking. And finally, a new addition to this mission: the Moho shield. Going to Moho and back was just about survivable in stock, but with Moho so close to Kerbol in the Snarkiverse radiation would likely be lethal. The shield uses both active and passive protection (a Kerbalism active shield and a big ol' heatshield respectively) to try and protect whatever poor chump brave Kerbal goes to Moho; for delta-V reasons I won't be sending the whole ship if I can avoid it. That'll fit in there, right? CLUNK Maybe not... The xenon tanks can't fit past the Cheetah engine on the Space Tug/Tylo ascent stage backup, a problem which I solved by undocking the lander that the shield was trying to dock to, docking those together and then re-docking the lander at an angle to cheese the part collision system. This might result in some MASSIVE EXPLOSIONS!!!1! when I try to undock them again, but I'll cross that bridge if I come to it. With all that assembly finished, all that's needed is a crew- Oh. Never mind then. Next time: To the Mun! Which with such a low TWR and low FPS will take far longer than it should.

So I’ve definitely skipped a few posts here, jumping from a half-assembled ship to ready to leave without covering the Eve or Laythe crafts, or the new radiation shield for the Moho leg of the mission for that matter. Oops…

SSTOs won't work just by throwing buzzwords at them. Solid boosters are exactly the opposite of what you want on an SSTO: they have a high dry mass to withstand the pressures, burn unevenly and unpredictably, suffer from poor residuals (not all the fuel in an SRB burns) and produce residual thrust as leftover scraps of fuel keep burning slowly after the rest has gone out. Their ISP is worse than conventional liquid bipropellants like kerosene/lox (and even kerosene/HTP) and their main strength- high thrust- isn't really that important for a HT/HL SSTO spaceplane but would incur high drag losses as it tried to brute-force its way through the thickest parts of the atmosphere. Trying to conjure usable thrust out of atmospheric plasma is a fallacy and the power supply needed to try and do so would be large, heavy and better used to directly generate thrust in an NTR, even an air-breathing one. Humans are delicate, squishy things. High g-forces are to be avoided as much as possible to avoid loss of consciousness, thrombosis, strokes and other potentially lethal health issues. The only ways to avoid that are either a) juice them to the gills with drugs (see: The Expanse), b) some form of magic anti-inertia technology to allow extremely high acceleration without turning the crew to puree (see: Honor Harrington) or c) straight-up warp drives.

Green Huckleberry 4 has waited patiently in lunar orbit for the landing site to be both in daylight and vaguely near its orbit. Time to land. *ahem* That whole "landing upside down and having to roll side to side with the RCS to get the right way up again" was not the plan; stupid MechJeb tried too hard to chase the retrograde marker and ended up landing at an absurd angle, which would have been survivable if not for some minor wheel weirdness causing it to suddenly pivot over onto its back. No harm done though and it's driving towards the contract waypoints now while scraping up all the science it can. Staying with the theme of landing on the Moon, it's about time I put another pair of boots on the ground up there. Much the same as last time, it'll be a two-launch, lunar orbit rendezvous deal and the lander, Yellow Xylophone 2, is up first. During the trip I noticed that the upper stage's avionics was wrong: instead of holding RCS propellant, it was full of batteries which just added a load of unnecessary weight and required some propellant to be stolen from the lander itself in order to get there. I thought I'd fixed that... It'll be a while before the crew can launch, during which time a few things need to be taken care of. First up, a heavily modified (in more ways than one) Green Banana probe was designed to be launched all the way to Saturn; it only just scrapes under the 350 ton weight limit and should have just enough fuel to make it to a flyby trajectory of Saturn. Assuming it doesn't do what it did in the simulated launch and end up burning vertically up because MechJeb made a right mess of the launch. Trying to get the necessary delta-V without straying over the weight limit or ruining the TWR on the pad was tricky, but I think I got there in the end. Assuming MechJeb can fly it properly, it should be more than adequate for the trip out to Saturn. A few days later and the crew of the Yellow Timpani space station have been in orbit for thirty days. Thirty days of continuous tumbling due to the lack of avionics control, constantly short on water as the solar panels produced too much power and the fuel cells didn't run, yet the experiments still got completed and partially processed in the experiment module's little lab. Time to come home. A safe splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico and the contract paid out. Not to mention the science: And a bunch of free KCT points, which were spent on R&D to unlock the new stuff faster. Coming soon: Moon landing #2!

If you want more impact force, don’t burn retrograde, burn surface radial in- retrograde removes velocity, radial in will add more vertical velocity to hit harder.

That's the neat part. You don't. According to Ye Olde Delta-V Mappe*, you need about 7km/s of delta-V to go from low Kerbin orbit to low Moho orbit, about another 2km/s to land and return to low Moho orbit and a further 5-6km/s to get back to Kerbin (assuming full aerobraking). Call it 13km/s for the ship and 2km/s for the lander. Chemical engines just aren't going to cut it for Moho as they lack the ISP to get enough delta-V. Your options are a) use the superior ISP of the NERV to build a large and probably quite ugly ship that can carry a small lander to Moho and back- I managed to throw one together that uses two large Mk3 liquid fuel fuselages and four NERVs, with a dinky lander and space for one crew, for less than 140 tons in LKO; or b) make a smaller NERV-powered ship and add mining equipment so it can make enough fuel on Moho to come back. Option A is simpler but would require hours of burns in total to get to Moho and back; option B would probably be lighter to launch to LKO and involve shorter burn times all around, but also comes with the risk of not being able to refuel and getting stranded. Don't subject yourself to ion engines; they're incredibly efficient, but also incredibly weak compared to the other options- and yet still tens of thousands of times more powerful than real ion thrusters. Discarding empty fuel tanks along the way with some clever staging is one way to boost your delta-V numbers, since an empty tank is just more dry mass which directly reduces the mass ratio and so reduces delta-V. Extra tanks attached via decouplers with crossfeed enabled or fuel ducts to feed into the main tanks are a good way of doing it, sometimes with extra engines on those tanks to compensate for the really low TWRs you get with those kinds of big, heavy, slow ships. The other option is c) cheat with mods. Add some stupendously efficient yet reasonably powerful engines (such as those in Near Future Propulsion, for example) and you can get huge delta-V without suffering too much on the hours-long burns front.

There's nothing wrong with that image at all, you might just be getting confused by the patched conics mode. Inserting the image you linked above: The orange dotted line is your trajectory after the planned maneuver is completed; the purple line is your trajectory inside the Mun's SOI; the green line is your trajectory after leaving the Mun's SOI. The purple line you see floating in space nowhere near the Mun is just patched conics displaying the trajectory relative to the body you're currently orbiting (Kerbin), which can be pretty misleading until you get used to it. If you focus view on the Mun, you'll see the trajectory relative to the Mun which should be completely normal. TL;DR this is fine. Really. Try changing the patched conics mode in the main menu settings and see if a different setting works better for you.

Don't land! Tourists can't EVA and need to be returned to Kerbin for the full contract to complete; you'll get a little bit of money for landing them on the Mun but the vast majority of the payment only comes once they're home. If you land, getting that tourist back home will be much harder to do due to the lack of EVA-ing, whereas from orbit it's a (relatively) simple matter of docking and transferring the tourist to a return craft, or stapling some extra fuel tanks to the sides to get the necessary delta-V to return.

Trying to find out how fast a plane could fly on Rhode’s moon Lua, I accidentally ended up on a sub-orbital trajectory- of Rhode. Yup, flying in the atmosphere below 2km yet it had the speed to launch itself right out of Lua’s gravity and travel all the way back to Rhode. Now all that’s left is to figure out the trip from Rhode to Lua and runway landings on Lua; my first attempt at VTOL rocket engines didn’t work due to lack of thrust and Jeb’s Cobra manoeuvre resulted in a 20m/s vertical “landing”, which somehow damaged nothing but left the plane stranded on its back.