jimmymcgoochie

A twin RD-108 first stage, you say? Way ahead of you

Engine failures give a big data unit bonus on the engine that failed, but the TestFlight UI shows each engine individually and they aren’t affected by others- the failure will improve reliability for later engines, but not those already built and in flight.

And the moral of the story is- don’t physics warp when you splash down!

Rainbow codes- colour-coded code names used for many British secret projects including the Black Arrow orbital launch rocket. The format is always colour then noun, so it can be applied in other languages besides English. Unlike the original concept, I don't assign them at random but instead the colour denotes the size/weight class, then a theme for the second word e.g. Green Bird (seagull, albatross, sparrow, swallow, capercaillie, condor...), Orange Brass (trumpet, cornet, bugle, horn, trombone...) and so on. White Cloud (nimbus, cumulus, stratus...). It can make remembering which rocket is going where a bit less straightforward, but removes most of the challenges of coming up with names- get a good theme going and you can get dozens of missions out of it.

Wait, what?

Lamenting the tyranny of the rocket equation: landing a 200kg probe on the Moon requires 1000kg of braking stage, which requires nearly 5 tons of lunar transfer stage, which even 150 tons of launch rocket can’t currently put into orbit (and I don’t have a launchpad that can take the weight anyway). Each engine can only be started once, which makes things much harder. However, there’s a new engine coming that can be started a whopping two times that might solve these problems, or if I shift my research priorities I could get one with five ignitions instead; maybe by then I’ll build a launchpad capable of launching the thing.

New theory: through a combination of differing visual spectra and the ability to see polarised light, what Kerbals see is noticeably different to what humans see. Minmus is green due to refraction of polarised light in the surface crystal layers, Eve is purple because Kerbal vision extends into what humans consider ultraviolet and the planet’s composition is naturally UV-reflective, and Jool’s green colouration can be explained by a combination of the same polarisation effects as for Minmus and different overlaps in the light frequencies that their photoreceptors can detect, like a milder form of red/green colourblindness; in reality, Jool is a more typical gold/brown gas giant, but Kerbal vision doesn’t work that way and so it looks green.

Looks like the sort of thing I've seen before with TUFX, try disabling any post-processing effects (TUFX and KS3P) and see if it improves?

Kerbals look weird with RO sometimes because RO rescales a lot of parts, so Kerbals don’t fit in them properly- in some cases they look tiny because the parts have been made larger, but in others the Kerbals are too big and end up with their heads stuck through the ceiling which can block internal views. Re. the parachute issue, it sounds like FAR is broken and a game restart should fix it.

I dug out an old design I made a while ago- twin RD-108 first stage- and polished it up a bit with improved avionics, better engine configs and considerably stretched tanks to make it capable of launching interplanetary probes. Two Algol-1s give it a helping push off the launchpad, while the second stage is powered by a fairly beefy LR-91 and the interplanetary transfer stage uses an RD-0105, though that might change to an RD-109 when that unlocks due to the higher ISP, integrated RCS and good reliability. As tested, there's just enough delta-V to get a flyby of Venus, though the probe on top wasn't particularly suited for the task and I'm sure I can do better. The Venus window is over a year away, so no rush. Another test flight looked at the feasibility of launching multiple satellites at once for a contract that needed five sats with 120 units of payload each. Turns out, launching them all at once and then separating them in orbit does satisfy the contract parameters, so this one's going ahead. Real launch time, and the first of the Yellow Percussion series (somehow I've ended up with Yellow for crewed vessels again) is ready to launch; though in this case, without crew. It's also the first launch of 1960! Yellow Cymbal 0 is a test of all things Mercury related and carries an advanced biological sample capsule to imitate the real Mercury flights with chimpanzees on board, or the Soviet Vostok missions with dogs aboard. The mission has three main goals: prove that everything works correctly in the rocket, complete the 'orbit and return' contract and gather all the advanced biological sample data in one flight. A whole day of orbiting will also test out the capsule's on-board systems close to their limits, as the Mercury comes with a day and a half of life support and battery power. In the end, the launch went absolutely fine; however the second stage briefly lost guidance as it was too heavy for its avionics (it recovered without incident after burning fuel) and the decoupler under the pod got stuck on the retropack for a while after staging. Those problems aside, the mission proceeded without incident. 24 hours in orbit completed the science experiment and the retropack rockets were fired to bring the capsule back to the surface. I've never actually used the proper Mercury capsule before so I didn't know exactly how well the retropack would work; as it turns out, better than anticipated, so instead of landing in North America it ended up coming down in the Pacific south-east of Hawaii. Parachutes deployed correctly and the splashdown didn't break anything. A very lucrative contract payout plus 50 science- 40 for the experiment plus 10 for returning safely from Earth orbit- was well worth the effort. Future launches of the Yellow Cymbal will carry crew and have minor updates to resolve the issues found in this flight. The build queue currently looks like this: Orange Horn is the navigation satellite cluster to complete a contract, Orange Tuba is a radar altimetry satellite which will complete a contract to do so and Orange Trombone is an orbital imaging satellite (a.k.a. Corona), which requires five satellites to complete and their samples dropped back from orbit. After some experimenting I've finally made a sample return capsule that can actually return from orbit- slapping a 1m heatshield on the bottom did the trick- which is why these are appearing now. There were also three Orange Cornet contract satellite launches, though they're pretty repetitive and I won't show those any more. The last one got a good view of Earth though due to its high apoapsis- Africa is visible on the left on the dark side of Earth, Madagascar is just on the terminator. Coming soon: Kerbals can into space!

To make a node you either need a) a pilot on board- scientists and engineers can't do this, only pilots- or b) a probe core, electric charge > 0 and a signal to a ground station on Kerbin. In career mode, you also need a level 2 tracking station to unlock patched conics, and a level 2 mission control to unlock 'mission planning' a.k.a. nodes. If you think you have all those requirements but still can't make nodes, post a screenshot of the vessel (or even better, a video where you try and fail to create a node), a mod list if you're using any mods and the log files, which can be found using this guide:

More information please- a modlist would really help, as would the full logs (see below). Is this the stock Kerbol system or a planet pack? Are you using the stock tool to create this transfer burn?

Oops, I did it again... I let a contract time out and went 12k into the red, at least until I re-accepted the contract to get the advance payment. In other news, Orange Cornet launches now use the RD-0105 instead of the Gamma-301 in their second stages; the Gamma-301 is more reliable and twice as powerful, but can't compete for efficiency or burn time so the RD-0105 can get much more delta-V overall and the oxidiser is lighter, if a bit less dense. Multiple launches have gone without any failures so far. Another successful flight of the AR-3.1 picked up another contract. I didn't realise it at the time, but with the two remaining pilots about to retire this is actually the last flight this plane is ever going to do. And I didn't crash it once! Now for the headline act- Orange Bugle 2 going to the Moon, and unlike last time it actually gets there! Second stage deorbited with RCS, all three stages performed nominally and the probe was sent on its way to the Moon. Following the burn, the third stage pointed the probe in the right direction for its unguided capture burn, spun it up to stabilise it and released the probe before spinning down and changing its own course to crash into the Moon, at which point the battery was turned off to preserve the electric charge required for the impactor contract. A few days later... Bonk! Significant funds and science gains just by crashing the transfer stage into the surface. Barely three minutes later, the probe itself arrived at its capture node and fired its quartet of solid motors, capturing into an elliptical orbit of the Moon. Big payout and the science gathering can now ensue. Solar panel orientation isn't ideal, but it's enough to be power positive even with all the experiments running and transmitting throughout the orbit. It's 1959-04-27, a whole seven years ahead of the first real lunar satellite, so while I won't be winning any speed running awards any time soon I think I'm doing pretty well. With both of my remaining starter pilots retiring as the Orange Bugle 2 was under construction, I had to hire some more crew for the upcoming orbital flights(!). Say hello, Vera and Klaus! I wanted to hire an engineer and Jean-Luc Picard Bernard looked the best of the bunch, but I don't think I need an engineer just yet and that's funds I can spend on KCT points instead. I'll probably need to hire some extra astronauts in the future, but these two will do for now. The remaining funds from the lunar contract payouts went into KCT points: Next launch was another successful Orange Cornet flight, which met its target orbit despite one of the solid kick motors exploding... And then I did what I always do and accepted a HUGE contract- first crewed orbit! Most of that advance got dumped into a whole 40 KCT points, spread fairly evenly. And last but not least, Orange Bugle 3 headed up to the Moon. Upgraded tech levels for solar panels and avionics meant it could carry some heavier, more power-hungry experiments without losing any delta-V. However, not everything worked as planned: Castor booster explosion aside, the launch was successful and the mission followed the same path as its predecessor- RCS to deorbit the second stage, TLI on the third stage followed by probe pointing, spin-up and then third stage course correction onto a collision course. And the final scores for this report: 1960 is only a few months away, the two new astronauts are training for the Mercury capsule which is nearly researched. The first Mercury launch will be ready before the crew are, so I'll send an advanced biological sample capsule up to emulate the real Mercury launches with chimps in the capsules, gaining some science and completing the 'orbit and return' contract in the process. Coming soon: Mercury shenanigans, and I should probably start looking at interplanetary missions soon too.

“We’re going to go American.” Proceeds to use the German V2 rocket engine.

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My advice is to think of a specific goal e.g. get a 100-Kerbal colony set up on Duna, and then pick some mods that you think will help you get to that goal. Just going in and blundering along without really knowing what you're going to do next can often lead to losing interest and giving up, but so can adding a ton of mods and being bewildered by the vast array of parts and systems. My very much not comprehensive list of suggestions is as follows: Economy: StageRecovery/FMRS to recover dropped stages, The Gold Standard for a mining-based source of income. Science: Kerbalism to make experiments run over time and in the background, DMagic Orbital Science for more experiments, [x]Science and ScienceAlert if you're using the stock science system, Tarsier Space Telescopes for, well, telescopes in space, but also a rover mast with a laser, SCANsat to make terrain/biome/visible/resource maps of planets and get science. General gameplay: Strategia to shake up the admin strategies, Kerbal Construction Time to make rockets take time to build instead of instantly appearing on the launchpad, ResearchBodies to hide most planets and require you to 'discover' them. In-flight tools: MechJeb to automate almost everything, Kerbal Engineer Redux for all the data the stock readouts don't give you, Extraplanetary Launchpads to build vessels in flight, Sandcastle to make individual parts in flight, SimpleLogistics to move resources between different vessels when landed within physics range (no need for hoses!). KIS and KAS still have some things to offer that the stock EVA construction doesn't, but a lot of what they can do is now covered by the stock systems and I don't think KIS/KAS are fully compatible with the stock inventory stuff, so it's up to you if you want to use those. Crewed vessel parts: Stockalike Station Parts Expansion Redux (SSPXR) for many great-looking parts for your stations and even bases, all with (optional) internal views too, Kerbal Planetary Base Systems (KPBS) for many modular base parts and tools to assemble them on-site, Near Future Spacecraft for additional crew pods in varying sizes. Probe parts: Near Future Exploration which includes a variety of new probe cores, structural parts to match those and (Re-)stock probe cores and a whole new antenna system, ProbesPlus for semi-Kerbalised versions of real probes such as Venera, Surveyor and Cassini-Huygens (it says 1.4.3 on CKAN but it works fine in 1.12.3 as far as I can tell), OctoSat Continued if you want a really modular system to build your probes from, SSR MicroSat for a dinky little probe that can still pack quite a punch. Rocket parts: KeR-7 if you have the Making History DLC as it fleshes out the Soviet parts with service modules, engines and a proper core tank for the R-7/Soyuz rocket among others, General parts: Basically anything by Nertea (Restock/+, Near Future everything, Far Future, Kerbal Atomics, Cryo Engines/Tanks) and Angel-125 (Mk-33, Sandcastle, Buffalo, Blueshift...) as their stuff never disappoints. Stock system planet packs: Snarkiverse (rearranges the stock system), Outer Planets Mod (adds stock-ish Saturn/Uranus/Neptune/Pluto), Alternis Kerbol (rearranges the stock system and redoes some stock bodies). OPM can be used with both Snarkiverse and Alternis Kerbol to expand the system. Stock-scale planet packs (replaces the stock system entirely): Galileo's Planet Pack and Grannus Expansion Pack, can be used separately but are designed to be used together, options available to make either system the home one or put both as interstellar options from the stock system; Beyond Home, has a binary star system so requires a special Kopernicus config or solar panels won't work right, also features (some of) Kerbol system as a second star system, Kerbal-scale Real Solar System (KSRSS) does exactly what it says in the name. Upscaled planet packs: JNSQ redesigns and expands on the Kerbol system at 2.7x stock scale, some other planet packs also have dedicated configs to make them larger (GPP/GEP, KSRSS and Beyond Home have configs to scale them up to a similar size to JNSQ) while you can make many others- including the stock system- larger using Sigma Dimensions and appropriate rescale configs. Above ~3x scale you'll probably need a mod (e.g. SMURFF) to rebalance parts as stock and stock-balanced parts become very underpowered. Realistic KSP: Real solar system, Realism Overhaul and Realistic Progression 1 (RSS/RO/RP-1) to make KSP as realistic as possible- real rocket engines and parts, technologies unlocked in the order they were developed in reality, engine failures/ullaging/performance variations and more based on historical data. Not for the faint-hearted and not (yet) fully compatible with KSP 1.12, but rewarding once you get over the learning curve. I haven't used all of these mods so I can't say that they'll all work properly or that they'll play nicely together, but I hope there's enough in there that you can find something that you like the look of.

The launch of the first (and only) Orange Flugelhorn didn't get off to a great start with an engine failure right there on the launchpad. Fortunately it's easy to fix- roll it back and roll it back out- so the launch was only delayed by a few days. The objective was to throw a sample capsule up to 150km and 6500m/s and then bring it back safely, which went without a hitch. A mass spectrometer was included to try and get some high atmospheric data, but it didn't work because it was inside the sample capsule which was closed for nearly all of the flight. Oops. This single contract paid out enough to get 9 KCT points, so I added a bit of the reserves to make it a nice even 10 and split them between the VAB and R&D. Obligatory Orange Cornet contract sat launch: Followed by an X-planes high contract for the AR-3.1 which flew the entire mission without any issues but managed to bounce off a seam in the runway at 25m/s and leap into the air before coming straight back down onto the cockpit and bouncing both wingtips off the tarmac; fortunately the cockpit held up and the wingtip wheels did their jobs so no damage done. I made a token effort to convert the AR-2 into a supersonic jet, which didn't work very well. It could fly at over 550m/s in level flight, but the low speed performance was dismal and there were a few incidents during the simulations... That idea got scrapped, since despite the significant money on offer for the long-overdue X-planes supersonic contract the risk of losing a pilot is simply too high. And now for the main event- Orange Bugle 1 shooting for the Moon to complete orbit and impactor contracts. It was all going so well, until- Yup, two consecutive RD-0105 engine failures- first the second stage gave up half way through its burn, then when I tried to light the third stage to salvage the mission as a high-Earth science probe that one didn't ignite at all. The probe itself fell back into the atmosphere and burnt up over the Atlantic, well short of orbital velocity. If there's any consolation to be had, at least it gave a lot of extra data units for the engine so future missions are less likely to fail. Coming soon: Going to the Moon again, and actually getting there this time!

Looked like the second stage engine had an explosive failure to me, F3 or the TestFlight window would have proved it either way.

If stock KSP is causing your GPU to crash, then I'd suggest the problem is in the GPU, not KSP.

Repeated the Moon orbiter launch that failed last time, everything worked fine second time around and the probe is now in orbit of the Moon gathering all the science it can, while the upper stage successfully crashed into the Moon for science and profit. I also lost my two remaining Kerbals to retirements, but hired two more to replace them; I just realised as I write this that the new crew will be going for training on an orbital pod- Mercury or Vostok- so now there’s nobody that can fly my rocketplanes.

That’s not a relay…

Obligatory “you’re coming in retrograde” warning for that Jupiter probe.

First question- crew or no crew? For crewed vessels, maybe something like Angel125's Buffalo or Nertea's Near Future Spacecraft will have what you're looking for, or possibly NovaPunch which is currently being maintained by Linuxgurugamer (along with about half the total mods on CKAN); for uncrewed landers, I'd suggest Near Future Exploration (though that more or less requires Restock), possibly SSR Micro-Sat if you want something small and cheap to drop in groups. I don't use any mods specifically for landers, generally my strategy is "stick a rocket stage under a probe core, add legs and call it a day".

It’s not really a good idea to look at CoM/CoL when the plane is vertical in the VAB, look at it in the SPH instead.

Last year the GPU on my PC failed. Despite having the same processor and 32GB of RAM that it had before, running KSP through the integrated graphics system made it perform noticeably worse even with plain stock KSP. Looking down at terrain wrecked the frame rate most of all for some reason, something I’ve also seen when running KSP on an old potato desktop that was the cheapest in the shop a decade ago, so definitely aim the camera up as much as possible!I don’t recommend trying to use visual mods if you can barely run KSP without them. Turn the terrain details and textures down as low as you can, disable terrain scatters, turn off anti-aliasing, turn down part details and textures, turn off aero effects, reduce the number of patched conics to 3, reduce the max persistent debris to a very small number (but above zero, just in case), disable V-sync and turn off the frame rate limiter- this last one won’t do much when the game is running but can make a huge difference to load times as for some reason KSP loading is frame limited and I’ve seen three- or even four-figure FPS numbers loading off an SSD. Building vessels with more parts puts more pressure on the CPU and KSP is single threaded so modern multi-core, multi-thread processors can’t use their full potential.