jimmymcgoochie

It’s hard to tell from the initial screenshots, but are you sure those Whiplash engines are actually running? They have very distinctive blue plumes when they are but I don’t see those at all; compare that to @swjr-swis’s copy. I also believe that the underwing pods have NERVs on them rather than Whiplashes- in which case why on Earth Kerbin do they have shock cones? Swap those to NCS adapters with small nosecones on them and you’ll get more fuel and less drag.

I find this kind of attitude really irritating. Take KSP. Add a whole lot of parts mods to give new fuel types and propulsion systems (nuclear fission and fusion, ion/plasma, antimatter etc.). Add an interstellar planet pack. Add off-world vessel production. Add life support. Add the ability to harvest a lot of different resources in certain places e.g. helium-3 from gas giants. Add graphics mods to make the ground, water and sky pretty and the parts shiny. And once you’ve endured the 30 minute load times and the slideshow FPS whenever you build something with more than 50 parts or try to fly in an atmosphere, consider the fact that KSP will have all of that as stock PLUS the performance will be drastically better PLUS you won’t need to worry about updating all those individual mods as and when updates happen PLUS it’ll include more features that probably haven’t even been announced yet PLUS a fully integrated colony/base system that can be automated and left to get on with it PLUS built-in multiplayer PLUS all of the stuff they’ve already shown. As for the release date, it’ll be ready when it’s ready. Whether that date is tomorrow or December makes little difference to me, it’s not like KSP has suddenly disappeared or turned awful in the meantime and *controversy alert* there are other games out there too. I’m looking forward to KSP2 as much as anyone, but I’m not losing any sleep over the idea that I won’t get hold of it until the end of the year and if it happens sooner then it’ll be a nice surprise.

Just launched a trio of communications relays to a fairly high Earth orbit, only to realise that the long-term science experiments included on them need a higher inclination. No problem, the third stage still has enough fuel left to- *fzzt* RIP engine.

"Stupid tiny window, I can barely see anything from here." Not again, thought Gene, but it was too late. "Woo! First EVA around this crazy planet goes to Jeb, mark it on the scoreboard." "Jeb, we don't have a scoreboard. You smashed it up when I beat you to Duna, remember?" Val radioed back. Jeb pretended he didn't hear that. "Whee, 'science experiment' deployed. You guys will call anything 'science'- this spinny thing, playing golf, the top hat and magic wand, the banana thing-" "What magic wand?" Bob interrupted him. "We don't put those in the EVA experiment kits." "Well there's one in this one," Jeb replied. "Whatever." "Jeb. Get down here. NOW." Gene's tone left no room for arguing, even by Jeb. "And bring that rocket back in one piece, we're running out of parts as it is." "OK, OK, fine." Jeb didn't sound happy about it, but he did his deorbit burn anyway and started coming back through the upper atmosphere. "Hey, there's something down there! Looks artificial but it's too far away to-" the rest was lost to plasma static. And inevitably, the rocket flipped pointy end forwards and nearly burnt off the parachutes so Jeb decoupled and let the booster crash into the ground. "Oh." "What is it now, Jeb?" Gene sighed. "Mountains. Like, kilometre-high cliff mountains." "Jeb, grab the data drive and get out of there. You did bring your EVA chute, right?" "Woo, parkour!" Jeb shouted as he let go of the capsule and deployed his own parachute. "That's not what parkour is!" Bill replied, but the mountains blocked the signal so Jeb didn't hear him. "I really hope that pod doesn't get smashed to bits on that cliff," said Bob. Alone on an alien planet, with no communications to the KSC even though it was relatively nearby, Jeb's fearless facade began to crumble a little bit. The terrain around here was just downright weird, all lumpy and spiky in a way that Kerbin never was, and every time he looked around he was sure the ground shifted ever so slightly. "Stupid Val and her stupid TV show freaking us all out," he muttered to himself as he trudged downhill towards what was left of the capsule. Most of the external parts had been destroyed as it scraped down the cliff then rolled further downhill, but the capsule itself was relatively intact and the data drive inside undamaged. Ah, right- data drive. Knew there was something I forgot. A recovery team arrived shortly afterwards to haul Jeb and his pod back to the KSC, where he got a thorough telling-off from Gene, Wernher, Gus, Val (as head of the Astronaut Corps, a position Jeb hadn't even bothered applying for) and then Gene again for good measure. By the time they were done, the Spaceplane Hangar doors had opened to reveal possibly the most bizarre aircraft the KSC had ever attempted to fly. Jeb was sent aboard- as navigator, disappointingly- to direct Val towards that mysterious structure he had seen during the descent. The plane's cavernous cargo hold contained a relatively tiny payload: a copy of the rover sent to the moon earlier. ("We should really think about naming these things," said Walt in the lunchtime status meeting. "Calling it 'the moon' isn't very informative when there are two or possibly three of them around here." Which of course meant he was given the job of naming them.) "Thunderhawk is airborne, turning to heading 270 degrees." Val reported. "Thunderhawk? What sort of a name is that?!" Jeb complained from the navigator's seat. "That's what it said on the blueprints for this thing, so that's what we called it." Said Wernher over the radio. "If you don't like that... too bad." Around fifteen minutes of very noisy flight later... "Visual contact with the unknown structure, looks like some kind of airstrip?" "Opening the bay doors, stand by for rover release." Bill reported. "Three, two one-" The ventral doors were an unusual feature of this particular model of cargo bay, but they made air-dropping payloads much easier than the conventional dorsal doors on top. "Payload is away, good chute. Monitoring altitude... And touchdown confirmed." "So can we land now?" "Seriously, Jeb? You want us to land at some weird abandoned airfield on an alien planet with no backup and almost no communications back to the KSC, who would take days to come and rescue us if something went wrong?" Bill asked. "...yes?" Bob looked a bit green. Er. "You forgot to mention the part where nobody has ever landed this plane before anywhere at all, never mind some questionable 'runway' made of dirt." Val added. Bob turned even greener-er. "I'll fly over nice and low and slow so we can get a good look at it," said Val, swinging the plane oh so slowly around to line up with the dubious runway. "Wow, this thing handles like a shipping container. No, scratch that, it handles like the ship that carries the containers." And then she pulled the lever to deploy the landing gear and Bob closed his eyes. "Easy peasy. This thing actually flies pretty well at low speeds." Val said as she shut down the engines. "I'm going to take a look around; Bill, Bob, don't let Jeb anywhere near the controls." But of course that didn't work... *scraaaaape* "What did I just say!?" "Sorry." "What? All I did was turn us around so we can fly out again!" "Ugh, now I have to check you didn't break anything." "Jeb, you idiot, you broke the outboard elevon off the wing!" "Oops..." "Bill, get the rover up here if you can, we can check it over to see if anything broke during that airdrop before we set it off exploring. Jeb, taxi over to those hangars, and do it gently- *thud* I SAID GENTLY!" "Drive it up the ramp, Bill." "Yup, everything looks good here, go ahead and-" The cargo bay doors opened and dropped both Van and the rover to the ground. "Ow!" "Sorry, wrong button!" Bob shouted. He didn't quite catch all of Val's muttered response, but judging by what he did understand, it was probably for the best. "OK, rover looks good. Back it up and let's get out of- ah." Someone had forgotten to install a ladder in the cargo bay, so there was no way for Val to get back to the door she had fallen out of exited from earlier. "Jeb, retract the landing gear." "But we're landed." "Yes, I know that." "Won't that, you know, scrape the paint or something?" "Jeb, you already broke one of the control surfaces off literally five minutes ago." "Oh yeah. Never mind, then." "What a weird place to put an access hatch." A bit of scraped paint and a lot of reverse thrust later, the Thunderhawk took off, wobbling around a bit due to the missing elevon, and flew back towards the Space Centre, leaving the rover alone. It deployed its antennae and solar panels, tested its laser system on the nearby ground and then settled in for a long wait as the seismometer and gravitometer gathered their long-term readings. But as they flew home, Bob's attention was drawn to the little moon in the sky. Something seemed off about it somehow. When they returned to the KSC he headed to the old observatory, deployed the telescope within- and almost fell out of his seat when he saw the surface of that other moon. "Is that... LAVA?"

PRVE is for RSS I think, not stock Kerbin. However it’s only a visual mod and won’t affect launch sites. Check that you have ‘allow other launch sites’ enabled in the difficulty settings (escape key > settings > difficulty settings) for this save, it gets set differently for each save game.

You know, after the second RUD I would have put a launch escape system of some sort on there, or at least an abort action group to get the crew to safety while the rest of the rocket exploded around them.

There were more than a few crossed fingers (and toes) in Mission Control as the final launch countdown began for OrbSat 1, the first attempt to orbit this strange planet that the KSC and its staff now called home. Production facilities unused in years, or in some cases decades, were being brought back to life to make bigger and better rockets in future, but for now they were restricted to only the smallest and cheapest parts they could make in a hurry and whatever spares could be scrounged up. The launch went without a hitch. The rocket may have been small and powered by a relatively low-power engine, but the combination of weaker gravity and thinner atmosphere on this new world meant it was capable of reaching orbit without even igniting its second stage. It was still hard to believe the sight of those two suns in the sky, though. The two shadows thing was just plain weird; poor Linus nearly had a heart attack when Val came shuffling towards him with arms outstretched, helmet visor down and that double shadow, repeatedly saying "Hey, who turned out the lights?", leaving many onlookers utterly baffled until someone explained the reference. Following a successful orbital insertion, mission controllers ordered the probe to burn all remaining fuel in its booster stage and all of the second stage in an attempt to change its inclination from an equatorial orbit to a polar one, a move that was largely successful. It was a tense wait while the probe orbited around the planet with no communications, but eventually it came back over the KSC and began to download its science data and plenty of images from orbit. All the instruments still reported that they were orbiting Kerbin; the science team were eager to learn what they'd say when they went somewhere else. The orbital path of the planet's first satellite move away from the KSC, but while controllers waited anxiously to regain communications with it the VAB team were hard at work putting a second identical rocket together to explore that strange moon, apparently mutually tidally locked with the planet so it always hung low on the eastern horizon from the KSC. This launch followed a trajectory to fly directly to that nearby moon, apparently positioned perfectly for a launch straight to a transfer orbit without circularising first. Launching at a point where the moon was almost directly between the two suns and the planet, OrbSat 2 was able to confirm the presence of an atmosphere on the moon, even if it was incredibly thin- surely no more than 30km, though Bob argued it must be less than 20. Once again the rocket proved to have excess delta-V in the first stage, which did the entire launch and transfer and still had fuel left to do most of the capture burn too. Wernher made a note to reduce the sizes of all fuel tanks on future launch rockets. The probe's arrival brought more confirmations that were nevertheless still surprising: the moon had liquid water on its surface and even signs of life in the lower regions, while the atmosphere was incredibly thin- it couldn't be more than 10 kilometres high above the surface of those lakes, and barely half that over the mountains. Liquid water, yes, but probably not something you'd want to drink... *** "Sorry I'm late, dozed off and had a weird dream about Bobak taking over the Space Program," said Gene as he trudged into the boardroom. "Where do we stand on the rover project, Wernher?" "The cryogenics team have restarted liquid hydrogen production and we should be good to go on that front within the hour," Wernher replied. "The rover itself is being mounted to the rocket right now." "How are you making the hydrogen?" Gus asked. "And does it have anything to do with most of the construction equipment driving towards R&D this morning?" "Ah. Yes. I was meaning to tell you about that. Anyway- all the terrain surrounding the KSC appears to be some kind of thick mud. Plenty of water in it, but we need to squeeze it out and purify it before we feed it into the electrolysers. We're using that construction stuff to dig up the mud and cart it over to the old astronaut training pools, where we've got a couple of road-rollers driving across it to force the water out. Everything's electric, so we should be fine as long as we can keep the power on." "Walt, how's the power situation?" "We're good for the next year or so, Gene- those prototype NTR reactors are more than enough for us right now and we'll have plenty of time to build a longer-term solution before they run out." "I still can't believe you hooked up a bunch of nuclear rocket engines to our power grid," muttered Mortimer. "Still, at least now you have to admit that not getting rid of them was the right decision." "You've been waiting this whole meeting just for that, haven't you?" Walt rolled his eyes. "I literally have nothing else to do- what use is money when there's literally nobody else on the planet to buy or sell from?" Mortimer seemed to deflate a little as he heard his own words. "Maybe not, but everything we used to buy in from outside is in critically short supply now," said Gene. "We'll need somebody to keep an eye on the inventory and stop certain rocket scientists from getting a bit carried away with their designs." Wernher made a face at him and Mortimer smiled. "That's a good point, actually. Rocket parts are currency now, at least until we can make them on-site. Assuming you can do that?" "We can probably get production up and running in a few weeks, but if somebody hadn't pulled the funding for Project Sandcastle we'd be able to start right away." "You've been waiting this whole meeting just for that, haven't you?" "And what about us?" Jeb interrupted. "Are we meant to just sit around twiddling our thumbs when there's a whole solar system out there?" "After what happened to Val and Bob, we've grounded all crewed flights until we can get some communications satellites in orbit." Jeb stood up, paused to push his chair over when it didn't fall over, then marched to the door and tried to storm out only to get stuck for ten seconds trying to pull open a push door. "Should I have someone follow him around, make sure he doesn't try to steal a rocket or something?" Gus asked. "Nah, we don't even have any rockets for him to steal," replied Wernher. "He'll get over it." Or so they thought. *** Powered by all cryogenic propulsion systems, the rather unimaginatively named Rover 1 lifted off to head to that strange moon and explore its mysteries, like how could something that small sustain an atmosphere and liquid water on its surface and what were those strange structures on the surface that Bob had seen with his telescope? The first stage once again managed to launch the vessel all the way to an intercept with the moon, but the second stage proved to be underpowered and struggled to slow the rover down. A few in Mission Control were regretting using a direct descent trajectory, but at last the parachute opened and the combination of drag and thrust slowed the rover to a safer speed. Landing in the mountains didn't help the situation due to the wimpy atmosphere at that altitude. A last-minute stage separation dumped the second stage and then the rover touched down safely, deployed its antennae and solar panels and finally its mast camera. And then... "Wait, Jeb, we weren't finished-" "Too late! So long, suckers!" *gleeful cackle* "Hey, check it out, the moon has another moon next to it! Is it a small moon closer up or a big moon further away?" It seemed Jeb had turned off the speakers for the pod's radio, or maybe it never had any to begin with- it was only a mock-up after all, hastily fitted out to be flyable- because he seemed blissfully unaware of the blistering tirade being bellowed at him by Gene, and Wernher, and Mortimer, and pretty much everyone else too. "Woot! First orbit of crazy alien world, Misterrrrrr Jebediah Kerman!" Then Jeb noticed something that very nearly left him speechless. "Hold up a minute- there are three moons?"

If you’re playing with the “require signal for control” setting switched on, you’ll probably need some kind of fixed antenna- stock KSP is limited to the Communotron 16S and the relay dishes, which are very weak and rather large and heavy respectively, so putting a relay dish on a probe of some kind that you drop off ahead of landing the rover might be a good idea. If you aren’t using that setting, just use an action group to deploy any antenna you like once the fairing is gone.

Can you share the craft file? It's probably easier to demonstrate that way.

Uh, have you tried actually switching the RCS on? It clearly isn't in the screenshot above. That plane design is bad: the control surfaces are completely the wrong shape, too thick vertically and horizontally (front to back) but not wide enough (left to right), they should be little more than extensions of the back edge of the wing; the tail wings are too far forwards, which will give you less pitch control and also make it tail-heavy and so more likely to pitch up when at high altitudes with less control authority; the rear RCS thrusters need to be much further back to provide pitch and yaw control, while your roll control won't be that great without RCS thrusters on the wingtips; and I'd change those RCS thrusters for the 3-horn version without any fore/aft thrusters as those aren't necessary on a plane.

It's possible that you've installed something incorrectly- check inside each folder and make sure there isn't a GameData; if there is, you need to take whatever's inside that GameData and put it into KSP's GameData. If that isn't the case or doesn't fix the problem, grab the log files, upload to a file sharing site and post links here (don't copy+paste the whole log files into the forums, it's nearly impossible to read them that way). Link to guide that shows you where to find the logs:

Lunar 0 was more than enough to hit Moon, all it needed were some RCS thrusters to fine-tune its trajectory and a competent pilot using the second stage’s RCS to stop it spinning after staging and wasting loads of fuel. And would you believe it- spending all that hoarded money to upgrade the build speed means you can build stuff much faster! If only someone had told you that two weeks ago But that flukey flyby though…

At last, the first Orange Trombone orbital imaging satellite is ready to launch. The launch was a success and the satellite is now busy taking pictures of stuff. Definitely not any secret military bases or anything... After the comms-related foul-up on Orange Sousaphone 1 I wasn't expecting to ever hear from it again; however it managed to get a tenuous signal at its closest approach to Earth and send back the data it gathered on its fly-by of Venus, completing the flyby contract in the process. The next launch was the Orange Horn "navigation network", lobbing five "satellites" into orbit at once. With some high-value contracts completed it was time to upgrade the VAB to level 2. This also upgrades the spaceplane hangar building to level 2 now, which is a nice touch- I had to tweak the save file to do that last time. The second build line is terribly slow right now, but will get faster soon enough; in the meantime it can get a second vessel going before it gets bumped up to the first build line for completion. Another Venus mission and another inexplicable planning failure- I'm sure this thing worked perfectly well in the simulations, but when I did it properly it was woefully short on delta-V so instead of a combined orbiter/lander mission it can't even make it to orbit; I'll just have to hurl the lander at the atmosphere and hope for the best. The next Green Fruit series rocket didn't fare much better: Green Apple is built for Molniya and possibly tundra orbit satellite contracts, but the first launch suffered an ignition failure on the second stage's first ignition and failed to reach orbit. The second launch succeeded where the first one failed and the first Molniya satellite contract paid out. A few more contracts will need to be done before the really high-value commercial contracts start getting offered, though the Green Apple can take 1000 units of payload with the two booster configuration or 1500 units with three boosters so I expect to make a lot of money out of them. Coming soon: Launching more than one Kerbal into space at the same time? Side note: the next transfer windows to Mars and Venus are the ones I sent crewed missions out on my last RP-1 career; a combination of playing on a proper difficulty level and substantial changes to RO and RP-1 are the main reasons for the drastically slower progress this time around.

A good landing is one you can walk away from. A great landing is one where the plane can be flown again afterwards. (Probably a terrible misquote but you get the idea)

You don’t put zipped folders into KSP, they need to be unzipped.

I think several of your problems would be solved just by using the [ and ] keys to switch vessels at close range, or by clicking the orbit lines to switch vessels from map view when they’re beyond physics range. As for the rest: Yes, timewarping through SOI changes can bork your trajectory; that’s why the game slows down in the first place. You don’t have to go to Eve after Kerbin, but much like real life it’s a good target for early probes- it’s pretty easy to get there, you get more solar power so need fewer/smaller panels and transfer windows open pretty regularly too. You can also lob landers at it, use winged aircraft very effectively in the thick air and even send boats or amphibious rovers to explore the surface. The alternative targets are either Moho, which has very high delta-V requirements, or Duna, which needs more solar power and has a wimpy atmosphere that might just support a parachute assisted powered landing, plus the perpetual hazard of Ike waiting to throw you back into solar orbit. If your staging isn’t working, try adding a blank stage at the bottom and staging that; alternatively you might need to clear input locks in the debug window. Staging doesn’t work in map view as far as I know, probably to avoid fat-fingering the button and getting stranded. The only times I’ve seen UI windows prevent control inputs is with MechJeb windows; all the stock ones will behave the same whether you have UI windows open or not. Atmospheres don’t interact with communication signals at all- the different connection settings for atmospheric and airless bodies is intended to imitate either signal refraction through the atmosphere (allowing connections when line-of-sight is blocked by terrain) or signal reflection off the atmosphere (blocking connections that go through the atmosphere), but there’s no attenuation anywhere except during re-entry and that’s a separate option. You can make your own radial separators using cubic octagonal struts and stack decouplers- attach the cubic struts radially, attach the “top” node of the decoupler to one end of the strut and then attach the stuff you want to separate to the “bottom” decoupler node, then a bit of part rotating and moving to make it look nice. The decoupler will leave with the booster and all you’re left with are tiny, physicsless cubic struts hidden inside the body of your craft contributing minimal mass. Turn down spring strengths and turn up damper strengths on landing legs and wheels to avoid the jumping on load problem, and wait until they’ve settled again before switching away. It’s only really a problem where the gravity is really low e.g. Gilly, where it takes a long time to float back down, and a brief burst of RCS can fix that. If you want to see your trajectory several orbits in advance, put a second node after the first one and move it forwards a few orbits using the buttons either by right-clicking the node itself or in the node editor widget on the bottom left of the screen. You could also try increasing the patched conic limit. Having random interactions appearing many orbits after the one you’re interested in is a distraction.

Sounds like you’ve got a corrupted KSP. If you got KSP through Steam, right click KSP in your Steam library > properties > local files > verify integrity of game files, which might solve the problem; if not, copy your save games from KSP/saves/<save name> to your desktop, then completely uninstall and reinstall KSP. If that still doesn’t fix it, put the log files on a file sharing site and post links here. To find the logs, use this guide:

You left that braking burn too late- fire the engines before you hit the atmosphere and then throw the stage away so it doesn’t come back and break the heatshield or spin the pod so the chutes burn up.

On one hand, I like the idea of making solid rockets more like liquid rockets with a more modular system that lets you tailor how much booster you want. On the other hand, how much detail do you want? Would it behave exactly like liquid fuel rockets with more solid fuel = more delta-V but fixed thrust, or more segments = more thrust with the same burn time as for real SRBs? Are we including fuel shaping to control the rate of combustion and so the thrust curve, and is that on a per-segment basis or controlled by the nozzle for the whole booster?

OK, I lied. No orbital imaging satellites, because that lunar landing contract is about to time out and I simply can't afford that. But first, Orange Sousaphone 1 reaches Venus: Flyby completed, but unfortunately I must have used the wrong settings in the antenna planner because there's no signal! By some fortuitous coincidence, however, Venus gave the probe a gravity assist that will make it fly out beyond Earth's orbit right away and let the planet catch up a bit, which might be just enough to get a signal from the probe and send back the vital science data needed to complete the Venus flyby contract. Failing that, an expensive Tracking Station upgrade will be needed. The first of two launches today is Yellow Cymbal 3, carrying pilot Klaus into orbit to try and set a two-day endurance record. As you might expect with failure rates below 1% on both engines, the launch went flawlessly and the capsule was dropped off in orbit before the upper stage tried to deorbit itself, but failed due to a tiny RCS propellant reserve. Two days later... Food, water, oxygen, power and lithium hydroxide are all running out, the scrubber is starting to fail (it has a two-day half-life) and Klaus is getting cabin fever from being stuck in this tiny capsule. Time to come home, and conveniently the capsule is in a good position to try and land near the KSC- no, never mind, I keep underestimating those deorbit motors. A slightly inauspicious landing in either north-west Mexico or south-west USA and the orbital flight contract also pays out. Total income for this flight is around 200k funds, which is going straight into KCT points to try and get this Moon lander ready in time. With less than a week left on the contract, and after a painfully slow 14 day rollout to the new 350 ton launchpad, Green Dragonfruit 1 is ready to launch. Using three brand new and untested engines, this is a launch with significant risks- if any one of those three engines fails, the contract fails and I'm in serious debt. Despite the R-7 style design, the boosters refused to do anything remotely resembling a Korolev cross. New engine 1: RD-0107. A successful full-duration burn to orbit. New engine 2: S1.5400. Successful TLI burn, followed by stage separation and four more successful ignitions (no free data units this time by making it fail, but it's a pretty reliable engine already). New engine 3: Juno 6k. The least reliable of the three new engines with an ignition chance of 90%. Braking burn successful. The probe's trajectory took it right over the nearly flat terrain of Mare Crisium at an altitude of barely a kilometre and almost entirely horizontally, making the braking burn very efficient and the vertical velocity very easy to control- no risk of crashing into the terrain when a 3 degree pitch up is enough to halt the descent. Touchdown confirmed! With barely two days left on the contract, Green Dragonfruit 1 lands safely on the Moon and begins sending its science data back to Earth. The contract is complete, the funding issues mostly alleviated and while October 1961 isn't setting any speedrun records, I'm happy with the progress I'm making. Coming soon: More Green Fruit class rockets, and maybe I'll get around to those orbital imaging satellites at some point this month?

It took me a while to a) find this thread and b) get the right screenshots, but to expand on this point a little: Note the two Kerbals for scale here, and the cuboid-shaped girder they're floating beside. There are four segments in the girder, each of which looks about as long as two Kerbals are tall. Now look a couple of seconds earlier in the trailer to see the full ship: See those tiny structural bits on that ship? Those are the same girders! It's only by having these two images side by side that I really realised just how MASSIVE that ship actually is. If Kerbals are just one metre tall including their helmets, that engine is fifty metres across, minimum; the radiation shield in front of it, probably over 100m wide. Assuming that engine is in fact 50 metres in diameter, I'd estimate the ship's total length is at least 300 metres. So to conclude: How big will ships get in KSP2? Very, very, VERY big!

No. I’m going for a similar style, but this is completely separate- but I might throw in the odd reference here and there to see if you’re paying attention.

A frantic team meeting was called in the Administration Building. It soon became apparent that the KSC itself was completely intact and all the staff were unharmed, but there were almost no aircraft or rockets on site with which to explore their new environment and Sparrowhawk 1 was a total write-off. The only thing they had to attempt a launch was an old mass driver prototype, originally intended to throw payloads back to Kerbin from the surface of the Mun, with some batteries and a probe core welded on to power it. The probe itself was little more than a collection of spare parts hastily stapled together with a few science instruments stuck to it. "Lauching in three, two one..." Wernher pressed the big red LAUNCH button and closed his eyes. There was a loud electric hum, a loud THUD and- "Launch successful! Probe is climbing under its own power, but it looks like we lost the fins." Linus reported. "Running temperature, pressure and radiation scans." The probe's meagre fuel supplies wouldn't be enough to reach space even with the mass driver's help, eventually running out of propellant with an apoapsis of around 65 kilometres. "Huh, that's weird." "What's weird, Bob?" "It looks like the probe is slowing down more slowly than it should be, almost as if the gravity on this planet is lower than Kerbin's." "Atmospheric pressure just dropped to zero and we're not even at 60 kilometres yet," Linus reported. "It also looks like this planet has a magnetosphere of some sort, radiation levels are pretty low." "Images coming in from the probe." Everyone looked to the big screen. "What a barren landscape," said Bob. "Almost no signs of life whatsoever." "We should get some better images and better data when the probe comes back down," replied Wernher. "Yeah, about that..." Said Linus, pointing to the screen. "Atmospheric pressure is a lot less than Kerbin at low altitudes too, the probe isn't slowing down as much as it should." "Will the parachute open?" "Ah, great..." Wernher turned away in disappointment. "We've got enough spare parts to build another probe and the mass driver is still on the launchpad." Linus tried to sound upbeat, with some success. *a little while later* "Three, two one..." LAUNCH hummm THUD BOOM! "Misfire!" Bob shouted as fragments of the destroyed probe sprayed out in all directions and the mass driver itself leapt into the air, almost falling off the launchpad as it came back down. "See, I told you we needed to secure it to the pad!" Said Bill. "We'll need to strip the whole thing down and check it over before we can use it again." "What's the situation with rocket building?" Gene asked Gus. "Do we have any parts at all?" "Right now, not really. We still have the manufacturing stuff stored in the VAB but it'll take time to get that back up and running. We did find some old solid boosters though if you're interested." A search through the darkest recesses of R&D unearthed a small trove of parts which were hastily combined into a two-stage sounding rocket called Atmos 1 and wheeled out to the pad within the hour. "Lift-off! Trajectory looks- uh... Where's it going?" "Jeb, now is not the time for one of your stunts!" Gene shouted over from his mission control chair. "It's not me!" Jeb protested. "I've got no control whatsoever, the rocket has no gimbal and the probe core has no reaction wheels." "Really? I thought that probe core had reaction wheels." Wernher looked a bit sheepish. "Oops." "We're going to lose the signal soon and then we'll have no way to track it to recover it." Bob reported. "Just fire the second stage and try to get some altitude, we'll worry about getting it back later." Gene replied. The probe's signal dropped off as it arced through the upper atmosphere. "Is it just me, or is there something beside that moon?" Bob asked. He got a lot of blank looks. "Really, nobody else sees that but me?" "LOS on the probe," reported Linus. "Wherever it's going, hopefully the parachutes open in time." Unknown to the KSC team, the probe's parachutes did open in time and it landed safely over three hundred kilometres from the KSC. *** "Why me!?" Bob wailed. "I hate flying!" "You're the scientist, aren't you? Besides, I've already crashed once today so this flight will be fine." Val grinned. "That's not reassuring!" "No hijinks, Val- find the probe, grab it if you can and come home." Gene instructed her. "Easy peasy," Val replied. The old KSC corporate jet lumbered into the sky and turned to the south-west, following the flight path of Atmos 1 before it. "Look! There it is!" Bob shouted, then clutched the armrests as Val turned her head to look and made the plane wobble. "There what is?" "That weird speck beside the moon! Surely you can see it now?" "I can't see anything from up here, the windows don't go that far around. I can come back there and look out your window?" "No, no, just stay there!" Bob replied very hastily. Where were the sick bags in this thing? "I've spotted the rocket, going in for a landing." Val reported from the cockpit. "Be careful, Val!" "Relax, Bob, I've got this." The plane touched down gently. "See? Nothing to worry about- uh oh." The plane's left wing dropped suddenly, hit the ground and broke apart; the plane rolled sideways and ended up on its roof, the entire tail section and engine pods breaking off and scattering nearby. "Oof! You OK, Bob?" Val asked. Bob was too busy hyperventilating into a sick bag to reply. Val walked along the ceiling to the hatch and forced it open, hopped out of the plane- and sank down almost to her waist in the boggy ground. "Well, that explains a lot." She got on the radio. "Uh, KSC? Good news and bad news. Good news is we found the probe; bad news is we bogged down on landing and rolled over, the plane's trashed but we're OK." Something unintelligible came through from the other side; the only word Val understood was 'beacon'. "I've activated the locator beacon, we'll hang tight until the rescue team gets here. Val out." She looked up at the sky. "You know, there's something weird about the sun here but I can't quite figure out what it is." She flipped down her helmet visor and squinted up. "Wait... is that... another sun?!"

Try this: If you have any save games you want to keep, copy them out of the KSP/saves folder and paste on your desktop. Right click KSP in your Steam library, click Properties. Disable Steam Cloud for KSP. Completely uninstall and reinstall KSP through Steam. Right click KSP again, click Properties. Click Local files and then 'verify integrity of local files'. This will check the game files and redownload any that are corrupt or missing. Run KSP (it should be plain stock KSP with no mods at this point) and check that it loads properly. Copy the entire KSP directory out of Steam/steamapps/common and paste it somewhere else. It's a really bad idea to put mods in the Steam copy of KSP as stuff just keeps breaking that way, but there's nothing to prevent you from making copies of the game and doing so is the best way to use mods. Put any save games you copied in step 1 into this new copy of KSP, add mods and continue playing as normal. If that doesn't work, send the logs:

Water (and terrain) are GPU intensive, you’ll probably get much better FPS with a dedicated graphics card rather than the integrated one you’re using now. If that isn’t an option, turn down reflection and terrain settings and/or just look up unless you absolutely need to see the ground/water as this boosts frame rates quite a lot.