jimmymcgoochie

Yes, it can be done. Some planet packs e.g. Beyond Home have bases on other planets/moons using Kerbal Konstructs, but you can also make your own using the KK menu in flight; they might not persist after switching vessels or reloading the game though.

You should be able to remove them if you go close to them and use a bit of camera clipping trickery to see ‘inside’ the structure of the station. As long as there’s nothing attached to the fuel tanks you want to remove, they should be removable; I’m assuming stock parts only, but which tanks in particular? Screenshots of the station in orbit would also help.

This Dres design has ended up in a mass spiral, requiring progressively more mass to be added to each stage to counteract the greater mass of the one above. Lighten the payload by removing extraneous mass and everything becomes easier. I think you’re also overestimating the range of a 2G antenna with the hard mode debuff. A 15G would be a much better choice.

Right… That design is really strange and also hugely overbuilt for merely going suborbital. There is no situation that will ever require you to stick a dozen Swivels (or possibly Reliants?) in four sets of three to the side of your rocket as a second stage like that. The drag from that will be massive even without the very draggy KV-series pod which also adds much drag, plus it all adds more weight which then needs a bigger first stage. It’s also a bad idea to put engines in the centre of a stage like that as their gimbals will be far less effective and stability will be adversely affected; the KV-series pods have no internal reaction wheels either so you need good control from other sources to make it flyable. You don’t need nearly that much rocket just to do a suborbital flight- use the pointy Mk1 or Mk1-2 (Gemini-like) pods instead to make the aerodynamics easier, or put a fairing over the KV pods if you really want to use those. Once you have your capsule, put a single stage rocket underneath it with around 2000-2500m/s of delta-V and a TWR of at least 1.3 at sea level (a Swivel might do, or a Reliant and some controllable fins, if not then slap some SRBs on the sides) and you should reach space without any real issues. Fly slightly sideways to increase your descent time back through the atmosphere, reducing the chances of crashing into the ground because your parachutes either failed to open or broke from the stress of opening at too high a speed.

This might be a bit late, but… There’s only one i in Minmus. Have you unlocked the “Project Eeloo” engine yet? It’s an absolute doozy for SSTOs as it uses the air itself as propellant, then switches to liquid fuel for rocket mode, though it’s also huge, heavy and very expensive. Worth the effort to get it though as you can get effectively infinite range in any atmosphere regardless of whether there’s oxygen there or not.

EVA the engineer, enter EVA construction mode by clicking the hook icon on the right, remove the docking port from storage and attach it where you want it. Engineers can only do construction (or destruction!) when on EVA in EVA construction mode, not from inside the vessel- how would they be able to attach stuff to the outside of a vessel when they’re inside?

Engage the first level of time warp manually, and then click warp to node. I recently had a lunar flyby change to an apoapsis of just 11Mm (from over 350Mm!) by just clicking warp to node, so now I always quicksave before warping and bump the warp one notch manually before letting anything else take over. MechJeb seems less prone to this error as it engages time warp one step at a time, resulting in relatively small trajectory changes (which can still be annoying, but manageable) whereas the stock warp to node button cranks it up as high as it can immediately and seems to make the problem much worse.

Why do you want to land pointy end first? Unless you’re trying to land horizontally with wings, you want to re-enter retrograde so the parachutes don’t get cooked by the heat and the blunt end of the craft generates more drag, slowing you down so you don’t spear into the ground at considerable speed. There are other reasons why real spacecraft almost always re-enter retrograde, but most of them boil down to “don’t kill the crew” in one way or another; the only exception that I know of is the Space Shuttle, which glided back to a runway rather than using parachutes, but that used a pretty significant nose-up attitude for re-entry which isn’t all that far from how a capsule does it. Pictures of the craft would help, as would knowing why you want to not face retrograde.

Tie the antenna deployment to an action group, retract before re-entry and deploy after landing- put it on the lights group as it’s unlikely to be used for anything else and you can use it at any time (unless you have “require signal for control” on). Use a fixed dish on the lander, such as an RA-2. Put relays in orbit and use a 16S antenna on the lander to maintain control during the descent, with a bigger antenna that deploys after landing to phone home. Skip the bigger antenna part above and just use a 16S and orbiting relays.

I think KSP Community Fixes adds collapsible lists to PAWs so you can open each submenu individually when you need it and then close it again to save screen space.

That reminded me of my first Moon landing in my current RP-1 career- frantically trying to reduce the vertical speed to avoid an earlier than planned “landing”. Good thing you had that extra delta-V, eh?

Looks like you got a better transfer window than I did when I tested that design, I had about 1km/s left in Moho orbit and landed on fumes but it seems you’ll have twice as much. The balance might be a bit iffy with that surface scanner though I can’t remember how heavy that is but I think it’s heavier than the other experiments.

Try a sandbox save and use the cheats to go to different planets and moons, it's a lot faster than doing it in a potentially buggy career game.

Ore is very heavy. ISRU equipment is very heavy. Heavy stuff reduces delta-V. Build an ore mining ISRU lander and put it on Ike: it's easier to get to Duna orbit from Ike's surface than Duna's due to the low gravity and Ike's low orbit of Duna and you don't need to deal with any aerodynamic effects or risk breaking solar panels etc. to get to Ike and back either. Once that's in place, use a fuel tanker to carry fuel made on Ike to any waiting vessels in orbit of either Ike or Duna, leaving the heavy mining and converting gear on the surface to keep on mining and converting while your other vessels can be lighter and simpler as they don't need their own ISRU stuff and the associated power/cooling gubbins. The alternative is to send the entire mothership to the surface, but that would just use more fuel and could be difficult to do depending on your design. Once you have a mining rig in place, you can use it for all future missions. Put them on Gilly, Dres, Pol, Minmus and maybe even Vall and you'll never need to worry about fuel again- so long as you can get there, you're all set.

Maximum spring, maximum damper. Soft springs just wallow under load, which with Eve's high gravity just means they'll bottom out and break; but you don't want to get bounced back into the air and fall over, so high damper strength to stop the legs just pogo-ing you off whatever hill you land on and faceplanting. Jetpacks don't work on Eve because a) they don't work in atmospheres and Eve's is the thickest of all the stock planets, and b) they barely have the thrust to fly in Duna's gravity (0.3g), let alone Eve's (1.7g). Jumping won't help either, your only option is climbing with lots of ladders and making absolutely sure they reach all the way to the ground...

I've had no success trying to get this to work. First it was Kerbalism drills not being able to get the right resources, then it was EL smelters still wanting the old resources (and Sandcastle parts too), then more configuration weirdness with the drills getting stuck in a config loop of three resources and being unable to select anything else but those three. I'm going back to v1.33 for now, so far that seems to be working.

Does it only happen on Iota or are other planets/moons affected too? I don’t think it’s scatterer as Iota doesn’t have an atmosphere as far as I know and scatterer only affects atmospheric bodies. Try updating your graphics card driver?

It’s not immediate, you need to wait a while for it to detect the asteroids over time. You also need to have the telescope orbiting the sun for it to work, and it will only spot asteroids near the orbit of the next planet out from its orbit (if orbiting between Kerbin and Eve, that’s Kerbin; if between Kerbin and Duna, it’s Duna) so position your orbit accordingly.

Time to land the Blue Violin 2 sample return mission. Unlike its predecessor, this one landed softly and without any damage. Science is a-gathering, so the lander will wait on the surface for a month to get as much data as possible and to allow the orbit of the return craft to line up again. 2.3km/s of delta-V should be more than enough to get back into orbit and do the rendezvous and docking after that. Still on the topic of the Moon, Green Huckleberry 2 is heading there now: 250 tons of rocket to put 250kg of rover on the surface of the Moon. Pesky rocket equation. A safe landing- on the wheels, no less!- and in a new biome too. There's almost a whole year left on the rover contract, so it'll stay put and get more science for now before driving almost 4000km to the waypoints for that contract. Science coming back from the Moon and Mars (and possibly Venus too) means lots of free KCT points, which were duly spent. I'm keeping some cash in reserve as there will no doubt be a lot of mission designing going on in the near future to complete some of the many many contracts I accepted recently. Meanwhile, I keep bodging new vessels out of existing designs to eke out more science: The Orange Alphorn Docking Target worked out well, so here's another Orange Alphorn-derived probe- the Orbital Science version, carrying all the new experiments into a highly inclined and elliptical orbit of Earth with an apoapsis of just over 100Mm. There's plenty of science to be had from high Earth orbit and this thing should slowly gather most of it. A brief design session produced this: Essentially the same avionics unit as the probe above, but outfitted for landing on Mars instead with a parachute to slow it down to a reasonable speed and RCS thrusters for throttleable thrust for the final descent. The first test proved successful, deorbiting from a low Mars orbit and landing safely with a bit of a lifting re-entry for good effect, however it lacks such frivolities as 'science experiments' and 'solar panels' so there's still work to be done. Coming soon: Not much for the next week and a bit, I'm finally getting a proper break after Covid cancelled my Easter plans.

RO/RP-1 recently disabled the stock delta-V calculation, which also removes the estimated burn time for nodes and the stock TWR calculations, but not the staging bar itself- that should still be there. MechJeb’s numbers are the most accurate for RO/RP-1 due to things like residuals (fuel that can’t be used), variance (using slightly more or less of a propellant than expected) and propellant mixes that stock doesn’t calculate well/at all. Which instructions did you follow? There’s an RP-1 express install option on CKAN and that’s the recommended way of doing it.

Was that a not-so-subtle way of telling Bellein that she’s fired?

Reminds me of this challenge from a couple of years ago: I might try to dig up the craft files I used then, make some tweaks and give this a go.

Take the same design, but replace the Science Jr module with an FL-T200 fuel tank and stick a probe core (OKTO would do, but don't use a Stayputnik) between the pod and the parachute with a 16S antenna on the back of the pod, then remove most of the ablator- 40 should be enough- and launch it uncrewed. Fly to Minmus, capture into orbit, then get Bob to grab the science data from the lander on the surface and then jump and jetpack to orbit. Use the new rocket to get close to Bob (within 1km would do) and then use the remaining fuel in Bob's jetpack to fly in and board the pod. Return to Kerbin, recover Bob and science, profit!

In CKAN click File then Save installed mod list, then copy and paste the full mod list here. I’ll make a copy of KSP 1.12.3 and install the same mods to try and figure out what’s going wrong.

“What would you do in this situation?” How about using the maneuver planner that’s right there on the screen to fine tune the closest approach down to 200km? And manually bump up to the first tick of time warp before accelerating further, that seems to reduce the number and severity of those “oops your orbit just completely changed” incidents.