jimmymcgoochie

Every time you start timewarp the physics system has to switch to “on rails” and this can introduce small imprecisions; the greater the jump in speed, the greater the imprecision will be and the more your orbit can change. Always start timewarp yourself by bumping it to the first speed, then click the “warp to node” button or speed it up yourself. It’s also a good idea to slow down timewarp before SOI changes or your trajectory can shift too- KSP does this automatically, but at high timewarp speeds it might not slow down fast enough.

The idea of “real-scale” planets is the Japanese knotweed of KSP2, no matter how many times you try to burn it down it just. keeps. coming. back… Kerbin orbit velocity just above the atmosphere is about 2200m/s; just above Earth’s atmosphere it’s over 7800m/s. A rocket that can just get to low Earth orbit has the delta-V to fly to the Mun, land and then come back to Kerbin orbit again without aerobraking. KSP parts are woefully underpowered for a 10x upscale, but rebalancing them to work at that scale makes them stupidly overpowered for stock scale. There’s also the not-insignificant issue of how few KSP players can actually fly into orbit, let alone go somewhere else after that; making bigger planets would only make that worse.

Yeah, ore drills only work if there’s actually ore in the ground to drill…

I think this is the launch of Blue Violin 4 to the Moon, but honestly I can't be sure. It might be some super-secret prototype that I was testing and just forgot about between then and now. Given that the next screenshots after this are of Blue Violin 4 going to the Moon, I'm going to assume that this is it launching. The upper stage had to be discarded with a significant amount of fuel remaining because the lander's TWR is so low when fully fuelled that it can't actually land safely without burning off a lot of fuel first. A flaw that I may correct in future, if I decide to launch any more of these missions. With that lander on the surface I took some time to cull the craft list, discarding debris, dead probes and missions that just didn't work any more. One that survived the cull is Blue Violin 2's lander, now in orbit of the Moon, which got its orbit adjusted to get even more science. With transfer windows approaching and contracts available, I did a burst of mission designing: a Venus mission adapted from the Blue Guitar multi-probe missions and fitted with four Venus-spec landers; a Mars rover based on the Green Huckleberry Moon rovers but with a skycrane above the rover instead of a landing stage under it; and an upgraded Green Cucumber contract sat launcher that can carry 2000 units of payload and is only marginally more expensive than the existing 1500-unit design. I've also had a rummage through the newly unlocked parts and configs to see if there are any upgrades I can make to existing designs. A few show promise, but aren't yet finalised so aren't ready to be shown off yet. Following a month-long stay on the surface, Blue Violin 4's lander returned to orbit and docked with the return probe within twenty minutes of lifting off. With the return probe's tanks topped up and batteries recharged, the lander undocked and remained in lunar orbit while the return probe set a course for home with the precious sample on board. Interrupting Blue Violin 4's return was Green Banana Mercury 3, launching into the optimal Mercury transfer window. Yet another engine has mysteriously lost data units- the RD-0110 in the second stage has dropped to a little over 2000du when it used to have the full 10k, though reliability is still very good and no problems occurred on this launch. And a few days later Blue Violin 4's return capsule blazed a trail across the mid-Atlantic sky as it re-entered, enduring some pretty brutal deceleration of up to 15g as it did so. A successful mission, and a vital injection of much-needed funds which were getting critically low: Three missions are currently under construction for the upcoming Mars transfer window, a fourth for Vesta and another for Venus; there's also a space station partially built and awaiting its turn in the VAB again and a Ceres mission at the back of the queue. A second lunar landing is also on the cards at some point with both parts also on the queue, while a crewed LEO Gemini will be needed to visit the station and complete that valuable contract. That should keep the VAB crews busy for a while. Coming soon: A bit more design work, possibly a geostationary contract sat and the first launches to Mars.

@seyMonsters what you’re getting with the stage that won’t stage is easily resolved- put a blank stage 1 below the stage with the RCS etc. in it and stage them both, the staging system gets confused sometimes when you separate vessels like that but adding an extra empty stage usually solves it. To my knowledge, RealAntennas and Kerbalism together seem to consider the signal bandwidth per vessel, so in theory multiple probes can use one relay and all will get the full data transfer speed rather than it being divided between them; or at least that’s what I’ve seen. And as for the upper stage, it’s probably acting oddly because the avionics were set to debris on staging and debris can’t be controlled. Hire Earl Jones and nickname him “James”

Sounds like a centre of mass/lift imbalance, those rocket engines right at the back will make it tail-heavy and with the tanks empty it would be prone to flipping tail-first, not helped by the tailless design. Move the main wings back and give them a slight upwards incidence (tilt a few degrees up so the leading edge is above the trailing edge) and add some sort of tail fin and you might find it a lot more flyable, or add some ballast in the nose to prevent the CoM shifting too far back.

I don’t see the need to add fancy ores, just put the resources themselves in the ground and have drills to dig them up as for ore in KSP now. This area/biome has lots of water in its surface, be that liquid water, ice, hydrate minerals etc., that’s all you need to know. Having complicated production chains would detract from the “building and flying spaceships” thing that has repeatedly been stated to be the core of KSP2. Might as well throw in my own two cents/pennies/whatever’s worth: Liquid fuel (kerosene fits best, but it could be liquid methane); Oxidiser (liquid oxygen, or hydrogen peroxide if LF is methane- Kerbalism certainly thinks so); Monopropellant (hydrazine); Xenon; Solid fuel (probably metal-based); Metallic hydrogen; Fusion fuel (for fusion rockets- helium-3, deuterium, tritium, some combination thereof); Fission fuel (mostly for reactors- uranium, plutonium, thorium…); Fission pellets (for pulsed fission drives such as Orion) Fusion pellets (for reactors and pulsed fusion propulsion such as Daedalus); Antimatter? Colony supplies (some combination of food, water and oxygen to keep colonists happy and working hard); Waste products (from Kerbals…); Metal (very generic, used to make both ships and base/colony structures). Even that list seems like a lot considering stock KSP only has the first five. Adding in different ores that have to be mined and processed to then begin producing even more materials would become a logistical nightmare; I thoroughly enjoy games like Dyson Sphere Program which feature that sort of production chain system, but it wouldn’t fit nearly so well in KSP2. Keeping resources simple also means that ISRU and production chains can be simple too- ore can be turned into liquid fuel, oxidiser, monopropellant and ore plus metal makes solid fuel; metal plus fission fuel makes fission pellets; fission pellets plus fusion fuel makes fusion pellets. Xenon can be found in some atmospheres, antimatter could be found in low orbit above certain planets e.g. Jool or generated using a dedicated colony reactor that eats a ton of power to do so, while colony supplies could be generated from a combination of ore, waste and power to eventually create a closed-loop system instead of sending them from Kerbin.

‘Like’ isn’t exactly the best reaction… Get well soon

How to make a Mars rover in three easy steps: Take an existing design for a Moon rover; Add a parachute; Uh… moar solar panels I guess? Getting to Mars isn’t that much more difficult than getting to the Moon, with the added bonus of having an atmosphere to aerobrake in once you get there (even if it’s a really puny one) and a parachute-assisted powered landing is easier than a purely propulsive one.

Every body in the Kerbol system has something to dislike about it, if you try hard enough: Moho takes a lot of delta-V to get to and from, with a relatively small SOI making orbital capture more difficult with the long burns you need to get that delta-V. Eve is evil, high gravity plus thick atmosphere makes it incredibly difficult to get off of Eve, while the high orbital velocity makes it hard to get down without getting cooked and getting into and out of low orbit requires a lot of delta-V. Gilly's gravity is so low that it's very difficult to land, and stay landed, plus its SOI is very small compared to Eve's and so it's quite hard to get to as well. The Mun has so many biomes that it's all too easy to clean up the entire tech tree without going anywhere else, plus the day/night cycle is long so solar-powered vessels are likely to run out of power during the night. Minmus is an oddball that's harder to get to than the Mun, with far fewer biomes and terrain that's either perfectly flat or very steep, plus it isn't nearly as deliciously minty as everyone seems to think. Duna has just enough of an atmosphere to be annoying (breaking solar panels etc.), but not enough to be particularly useful (good luck getting parachutes to work) and the terrain is pretty forgettable. Ike is like the Mun, only smaller and more boring, plus the mutual tidal locking with Duna means it gets in the way of a lot of Duna-bound missions. Dres is... well, Dres. 'Nuff said. Jool looks nice, but you can't land on it and orbital velocity is immense; with very little solar power you'll probably need RTGs or fuel cells for power or a lot of batteries and slow science transmission. Laythe has almost no land to land on, a thinner atmosphere than Kerbin meaning wings generate less lift and jets generate less thrust, and did I mention the lack of land? Oh, and most of that land is very rugged with almost no flat areas so have fun landing your very expensive plane. Vall is a pretty missable little blue lump, the biomes are out of order and there's not really much to see. If you're using Kerbalism, Vall is the deadliest place to land in the entire Kerbol system because it's right in the middle of Jool's radiation belt and lacks the protection that Laythe's atmosphere offers on the surface there. Tylo is an absolute pain- equal in size to Kerbin with only slightly less gravity, it requires more delta-V to land on than anywhere else due to the lack of atmosphere to aerobrake in, needs just as much delta-V to return to orbit afterwards and there's not all that much to see down there; it also has a tendency to give you gravity assists that can throw you down into Jool's atmosphere or completely out of Jool's SOI, whether you want it to or not. Bop is a lumpy potato miles off Jool's orbital plane, hard to get to and not much to see there once you get there (with one notable exception...) Pol is also a strange little lump, even further from Jool than Bop and with some potentially nasty terrain. Eeloo is so far out that it's hard to get to, solar power is effectively zero and it's not all that interesting when you get there. Of course, they all have their good points too...

Screenshots alone aren’t enough to diagnose the problem, for that we’ll need logs and a full mod list. However, something you said gives me an idea: are you playing KSP with mods through Steam? This is A Bad Idea as Steam can cause corruption in modded KSP. The simplest solution is to make a copy of KSP (with no mods installed) and then install your mods into that copy, leaving the Steam one untouched so it doesn’t meddle with anything.

Lab modules are cheating- you can put every experiment in each lab module and it will produce all the science each time; put the same experiment data into a different lab, even on the same vessel, and it’ll process it again for double the rewards. By the time you get a functioning orbital lab running, odds are you’ll be doing a lot of timewarping for long-term missions so the wait times will be minimal and the science gains will be huge, though by that point you’ll probably have the entire (stock) tech tree completed. Labs have the added bonus of being able to restore experiments like materials bays that would otherwise need a Kerbal scientist to make them usable again. You can also store multiple copies of any science experiment on the same vessel either by having a Kerbal collect the data and store it in e.g. a crew pod, or by adding experiment storage boxes which can store the data even without crew. Take several copies of every experiment, put some in a lab (or labs) and return the rest to Kerbin to maximise the science points gained, since most experiments need several runs to get the full data and will only give partial rewards for transmitting the data (materials bays are a good example). Transmitting data means reduced science gains, but it’s a lot easier than doing a sample return mission.

Don't use the version on CKAN, go to the GitHub link listed on CKAN and download the master branch, then install manually following the instructions on the Readme. https://github.com/raveloda/Coatl-Aerospace If that still causes issues, delete any parts that are blocking the game from loading and retry. The mod works for me in KSP 1.12.3.

That’s the rocket equation for you: delta-V has hard limits based on your ISP and mass ratio. You can either try to increase your mass ratio by using lighter, more efficient tanks (e.g. using lightweight aluminium-alloy balloon tanks) or increase your ISP by using different propellants and/or engine types (e.g. switching to hydrolox or even nuclear thermal rockets), but there are problems with both- fancy tanks are expensive and difficult to make, hydrogen is very un-dense and needs larger tanks than other propellants and NTRs are heavy with a relatively low TWR. Ion thrusters using e.g. xenon provide vastly more delta-V due to their extremely high ISP, but their thrust is incredibly puny in comparison. The largest rocket I’ve ever launched in RO/RP-1 put 650t in low Earth orbit- I actually launched that thing six times carrying the propulsion modules for crewed Mars and Venus missions, plus a one-off mission that had well over 30km/s in total thanks to extremely efficient hydrolox rockets, just to put a one-ton lander on Mercury’s surface. Total launch mass was at least 12kt each time, limited mostly by the size of tooled tanks and how many boosters would fit around the core stage.

Autostrut all engines to the root part, it makes them much more stable and less prone to pushing themselves inside whatever they’re attached to when using physics warp; it also helps to autostrut some key components to the root part to maintain the rigidity of the craft along its length. Autostrut boosters to grandparent as it makes them far less wobbly, especially when you attach things to the boosters (e.g. nosecones or fuel tanks) as they autostrut each part to every booster. Autostrut heaviest is Kraken bait and should not be used, the heaviest part changes after staging and can really mess up your vessel. When docking stuff together, turn all autostruts OFF or they’ll recalculate when you load the vessel and lead to horribly warped vessels with parts bent in all directions.

After some experimenting, I've come up with a new plan for the big Mars mission: remove one of the moon probes and push right up to the 700 ton weight limit to maximise delta-V. One of these is already under construction, with a second added to the build queue when I checked and found out that the real Mars transfer window is actually a lot later than KAC said it would be. Another upgrade to the Blue String rocket, the Block 2B features uprated RD-253-Mk2 engines which provide noticeably more thrust. First to test this new config is Blue Violin 4 on its way to the Moon: The probe captured into a nice low orbit of the Moon, however the entire near side is in darkness right now so it'll have to wait for a while before landing. The return probe was detached and left in orbit while the lander waited for the right time to land, mopping up some low orbit lunar science in the process. While waiting for the Moon to spin around, Green Banana Ceres arrived at its destination. No flukey resonant orbits with this one, just a single flyby, so it used up most of its remaining fuel to slow down as much as possible to maximise the time spent gathering data. A Mercury transfer window is opening and two probes will be sent there- Green Banana Mercury 2 and 3, both flyby probes since capturing into Mercury orbit is ridiculously difficult. 2 will launch now, while 3 waits a little longer. Everything worked as planned thanks to the very high reliability on all the engines and the probe is on its way to Mercury now. Capturing would take another 8km/s, which this probe doesn't have. With all the science coming in and some big contract payouts and advances, the third VAB queue is now up to the same speed as the first two: Future KCT points will mostly go into R&D to unlock new technologies faster and try to keep those VAB queues busy. Coming soon: Mercury and Mars missions and possibly the launch of a space station.

Maintaining a full 1g isn't really necessary: Earth has the highest gravity of anything you could feasibly be landing on in our solar system and (after discounting Venus for obvious reasons) nothing else comes close to that; Mars and Mercury are both less than 0.4g, Ganymede and Luna (Earth's Moon) are less than 0.2g and it only goes down from there. Assuming that this hypothetical spaceship is going to Mars, why maintain a full 1g when reducing it to Mars gravity will help the crew adapt to the conditions they'll find on the surface, reduce the mechanical loads on the ship's structure and will also help to negate the disorientation that can arise when your senses disagree on whether you're standing still or moving. As for a T-shaped ship, it would be vulnerable to Dzhanibekov effects which would be very unpleasant for anyone on board. See the EVA experiments kit added in KSP 1.11 and at 22:20 in this video, for example: Not something you want to have to put up with for years in space.

Science multipliers are only part of the story. Eve might give plenty of science per biome, but there aren't a huge number of them and several are pretty hard to reach due to much of the surface being covered by oceans. If you're dropping single-use landers and need to maximise the science returned per vessel, somewhere with a high multiplier is a better choice, but if you're sending a mission that can move (e.g. a plane or rover) and/or that can return samples to Kerbin for the full reward then pick somewhere with many biomes such as the Mun. It's possible to complete the entire tech tree just by going to the Mun and scraping up all the available science from there, or even to complete the tech tree by exploring Kerbin itself and not even leaving low orbit.

I believe that difference is down to differences between how the stock and MechJeb calculations work. Assume MechJeb is right, since newer versions of RO have disabled the stock delta-V calculator entirely.

Sending small crews of highly trained astronauts for your second Mun landing to maximise the science returns? THAT’S NOT KERBAL! Sending nine tourists who all queued up outside the Astronaut Complex waving their wallets for your second Mun landing, all in one go, to maximise profits? THAT’S KERBAL!

With a Mars transfer window approaching, it might be a good idea to send something in that direction- but first I need to design it. I have an idea for an ambitious cluster mission to send landers to Mars and probes to both Phobos and Deimos. The design for the Mars lander initially used airbags to soften the landing, which proved unreliable both for absorbing the impact and for landing right side up. Switching to tiny landing gear, as for the Moon landers, fixed that problem. Launching two of these landers along with two probes to visit Mars' moons proved to be too much even for a new Block 2A version of the Blue String rocket; while it could make it to orbit and probably to Mars, it wouldn't have any fuel left to try and capture into orbit. While the upgraded launch rocket isn't powerful enough to throw the better part of ten tons at Mars, it proved useful later thanks to the extra oomph from the six Algol 2 solid boosters. Before the crewed Moon landing can occur, a rather different vessel is heading to the surface of the Moon: Green Huckleberry 3, an improved Moon rover. The rover itself has been upgraded with better power generation to compensate for the high power drain of the rover's avionics* and its rocket has replaced the Juno 6k with a more reliable and efficient AJ-10 Advanced**. Despite attempting a reasonably targeted landing near the rover waypoints, it ended up coming down almost 1000km away from them. The power upgrades came into their own at that point, allowing a much faster rate of travel across the lunar surface than the previous rovers while still running all the science experiments and transmitting the data back to Earth. It didn't take long to reach the waypoints, complete the contract and then set a course for a new and as-yet unexplored lunar biome to get even more science. Back to the Blue String Block 2A for the launch of Yellow Xylophone 1, the crewed lunar lander that will take one lucky Kerbal to the surface of the Moon- and back! This vessel had some last-minute upgrades applied including the addition of solar panels and extra propellant, while the rocket was upgraded to the Block 2A configuration to give it a bit more oomph off the launchpad. Less than five days after launching, the lander is in a stable orbit around the Moon and awaits the crew's arrival. Pointing the solar panels at the sun also means the fuel tanks are facing away from it, which should reduce boiloff of both the propellants and fuel cell fuel. The crew launched a few weeks later than the lander, partly because there's only one launchpad that can handle the weight and partly because the Astronaut Complex upgrade is still in progress and must be completed before the landing attempt is made. As dawn rose on the 23rd of September 1966, Klaus and Vera boarded Yellow Glockenspiel 2 and prepared to head to the Moon. Following the no-jetpacks fiasco of Yellow Glockenspiel 1's mission, extra care was taken to ensure that both astronauts had their EVA packs with them. The Gemini craft is significantly lighter than the lander so no solid boosters are needed, however a minor change has been made- the RL-10 engines were adjusted so their thrust was aimed closer to the centre of mass, potentially allowing some control if one engine failed. As the crew approach the Moon, they begin their science experiments and take some nice pictures. A carefully planned capture burn and a tiny course correction allowed them to rendezvous with the lander after a single orbit. Rendezvous and docking took place in the dark. As is right and proper. The final approach and docking took place just as Earth rose over the lunar horizon, allowing pilot Klaus to pop out for a publicity shot. Or at least that's what he said he was doing... With the critical building upgrades complete... The landing can commence! Or rather, it could commence, if it wasn't for the fact that the entire near side of the Moon is currently in darkness. The crew have ample supplies for an extended mission and propellant boiloff is well within safety limits, so they settle in for a ten-day wait to let the Moon's near side rotate back into daylight. Klaus won the (literal) coin toss and so got to fly the lander to the surface while Vera waited in the orbiter above. The chosen landing site was Mare Crisium, which has already been visited by a probe lander but which fell directly under their orbit and has a large, flat expanse that's perfect for landing on. Once you clear the mountains on the eastern edge, that is. The lander's main engine- another last-minute upgrade- performed most of the braking towards the surface, but also used up three of its five ignitions during the descent after Klaus stopped the burn slightly too early and the hypergolic thrusters couldn't slow him down in time before hitting the ground. Despite this minor mishap, the landing proceeded smoothly and Klaus touched down gently on the surface on the 8th of October 1966. Time to do that "first small step" thing. Alas, the stay on the Moon would be short- Klaus tried to be clever and adjust his landing site to the north to try and be under the orbiter's orbit when it was time to leave, but this actually had the opposite effect and he should've gone south instead. If he waited too long, the rendezvous could become prohibitively expensive. Less than two hours after landing, Klaus lifted off again and headed to orbit. A bit of skilled piloting put his trajectory on course to rendezvous directly with the lander, combining the orbital insertion and velocity-cancelling burns into one. With the return window rapidly approaching, the crew transferred all usable supplies and propellants from the lander to the orbiter, undocked the lander and sent it down to crash into the surface. The lander's design may one day allow it to be developed into a fully reusable one, but for now limited ignitions mean they're single-use only. It's a quick five day trip back from the Moon and the crew gather even more science on their way home before strapping in for re-entry. Getting even one degree out of alignment could spell disaster at 10 kilometres per second, but the well-trained crew know exactly what to do and paint a streak of fire across the Sahara desert from Tunisia all the way to Saudi Arabia. A safe landing, despite the extra weight of Moon rocks causing the capsule to hit a bit harder than usual and destroy the heatshield in the process, and the contracts pay out. Much funds? Check. Much science? Check. Much retirement delays? Check. All in all, a complete success! So naturally I decided to do it all again for even moar much funds, science etc. etc. With the VAB now fully upgraded, a significant investment was made to boost the third build queue's speed, however most of the funds went into R&D, both in KCT points and in another facility upgrade. All available nodes have already been queued at this point and the research rate is going to be the limiting factor for a while. Coming soon: Mercury and Mars transfer windows await, while a space station lurks on the build queue awaiting its chance to fly and more as-yet undesigned missions will need to be prepared.

Dealt with repeated game crashes, some of which required a PC reboot, before I eventually had to copy+paste my entire save, delete the persistent file, rename an old save to persistent.exe and then it finally worked. Worth it though. In your face, Apollo 11.

KSP doesn't have copy-protection on it, you can copy it as many times as you like. This is the best way to mod KSP as you can have different copies, on different versions of KSP, with different mods in each. Unfortunately, Steam likes to stick its oar in and can often cause game corruption when mods are installed. If you're going to mod KSP then it's best to copy KSP out of the Steam folders and use that copy instead. Try this: 1. Right click KSP in Steam library > browse local files. 2. Copy KSP/saves/<your save name> and paste that on the desktop. 3. If you used CKAN to install your mods (and you should!), click File > export modpack and save that to your desktop too. Screenshot your GameData folder with mods installed (even if you use CKAN) so you can check that you’ve reinstalled them all later. 4. Uninstall all mods from KSP. 5. Right click KSP in Steam library > properties, disable Steam cloud. 6. Completely uninstall KSP through Steam. 7. Reinstall KSP through Steam, right click > Properties > local files > verify integrity of game files. If you want to play a version other than the current release (1.12.3), pick that version in the Betas tab and verify the files once Steam has installed that version. 8. Run KSP and make sure it loads properly without mods. 9. Browse local files again, then go up one level (to Steam/steamapps/common) and copy the Kerbal Space Program directory, then paste it where you want to keep it- make sure it’s outside Steam’s folders so it can’t meddle with it in future. 10. Rename the KSP folder so you know what mods you’re using in it (e.g. 1.10.1 RO/RP-1, 1.12.3 JNSQ), then add this new copy to CKAN and use the modpack created in step 3 to reinstall all your mods; or reinstall them by hand if you don’t use CKAN. Double-check that all files and folders you had in GameData before uninstalling/reinstalling everything are there again, if not then you’re probably missing some mods. 11. Move your saves from your desktop into your new KSP copy’s saves folder, run KSP, load save. A warning about vessels having missing parts is usually because a mod is missing or wasn’t installed correctly.

Carefully choreographed launch procedures involving many safety checks? THAT'S NOT KERBAL! T Z SPACE GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! THAT'S KERBAL!

That depends on your screen resolution and UI size settings- mine defaults to showing two. When launching crewed vessels, the game seems to default to filling the first part if there are free Kerbals in the Astronaut Complex. You should always check the crew tab in the VAB before launching to make sure you don't have any unwanted stowaways.