jimmymcgoochie

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.

It was with some trepidation that I reloaded the game after that Unity crash at the end of the Yellow Cymbal 2 mission- if the game had saved at the wrong point it could erase Vera and her capsule from existence. Fortunately enough, it auto-saved just after the capsule touched down but before the EVA so both are safe and sound. More simulations, first for a radar altimetry scanning satellite destined for the Moon, which is pretty much identical to the one going to LEO except for better communications kit. It turned out that I'd really overbuilt this- that upper stage still had 2500m/s left when I decoupled it. And that got me thinking- what takes around 2500m/s from low lunar orbit? Landing! By taking the lander design I tried out a while ago, swapping out the rather unpredictable and uncontrollable solid braking stage for this hypergolic one using the Juno 6k, it's entirely possible to land on the Moon with fuel to spare. OK, I scuffed the landing and broke half the solar panels off, but it worked. Re-using the same rocket, but with a different payload again, I've created something of an orbiter/lander mission for Venus. The lander part might not work due to using a LEO-rated heatshield and a sample return capsule to try and take the heat, rather than the lunar-rated heatshields that are recommended for such missions, but at this point I have little to lose by trying. It has the delta-V for it, but the next transfer window is a mere 90 days away so no chance of launching this then. Next transfer window, though, we're going to Venus! All I need now are the two tech nodes for the RD-58 and fuel ducts and my next-generation heavy launch rocket will be ready to go; the 350 ton launchpad is already under construction and will be ready before the tech is. After realising that I can just squeeze a flyby probe into the next Venus launch window, I cobbled together a probe to do so out of the rocket used by Orange Bugle lunar satellites and sent that without really testing it at all. That was a mistake, as I soon discovered... As soon as the first stage separated, the problems began- the second stage avionics were woefully insufficient to control the whole craft. This was the case with the Orange Bugle too, but with an even heavier payload this time it was uncontrolled for even longer and a lot of fuel was wasted. The second stage only just managed to limp into orbit running on fumes, but that was enough for the third stage to then fire up for the transfer burn to Earth's nearest neighbour. It's a really simple probe- avionics with some HTP tanks for the RCS, a decent-sized S-band dish for communications and all the science experiments that'll generate any data, with a single solar panel on the bottom to power it all. It should be enough to get a nice close flyby of Venus, transmitting as much science as possible both from Venus' SOI and in solar orbit. A good transfer burn and a little bit of course correcting later, Orange Sousaphone 1 is heading out of Earth's gravity well. (No, I didn't know what a sousaphone was either, but I'm running out of brass instruments so you'll see a few more obscure ones until I switch over to the larger Green Fruit-class rockets.) So long, pale blue dot. Much closer to home, the Orange Tuba 1 was bumped up the priority list when the radar scanning contract began to near its deadline. The first launch attempt went well, until I decided that using x6 physics warp in the lower atmosphere was a good idea and, well... Every mission gets one free revert and I stayed away from physics warp on the second attempt, which went exactly according to plan. The probe was put into a polar orbit, the upper stage deorbited itself with its RCS thrusters and the radar scanner got to work. And a mere two days later, the contract was done. Final scores for this report: I also turned my hand to making a Molniya satellite launcher, which worked relatively well despite the lack of fuel ducts. 900 units of payload is more than the contracts are asking for (so far) and if I need more payload or a higher tundra orbit, I can always add MOAR BOOSTERS! Coming soon: Orbital imaging satellites and 350 ton launch rockets.

If anyone else stumbles on this thread because their tutorials are broken, use this to fix them:

CKAN is designed specifically so you can easily create new copies of KSP, with totally different mods in each. Click File > manage KSP instances > create new instance > clone or fake new instance. Use the existing one as the base to copy, create a folder to hold the new one and let CKAN do its thing, et voila: you now have two copies of KSP. They’ll be identical at first, but you can now change all the mods you like in the new copy with zero impact on the old and vice versa.

This isn’t stock Kerbal, this is RO/RP-1. I can barely get my own astronauts into low Earth orbit; a crewed Moon flight is some way off yet. I might take the opportunity to launch some relays/science probes to the Moon with the scanning sat though.

I pre-ordered the collection of Expanse short stories a couple of months ago and it just arrived yesterday. Sheds some new light on several events in the “proper” books, and also begs the obvious question of why the ‘Strange Dogs’ part was included in the sixth series of the TV show when it doesn’t seem to fit that timeline and as far as I know they’re not going to add the last three books to the series.

"Sparrowhawk 1, tower. You are cleared for takeoff." "Copy that, tower." Val pushed the throttle forwards gently, giving the lethargic jet engine time to spool up; it wasn't called the "Wheesley" for nothing, after all. "Sparrowhawk rolling." Not much more than some surplus aircraft parts welded together, Sparrowhawk 1 was a testbed for a new fly-by-wire flight control system; if this flight met all its criteria, the system would be rolled out fleet-wide to the squadron of SSTO passenger and cargo planes, intra-Kerbin jets and even the future Duna spaceplanes, assuming the prodigious quantities of red tape surrounding that particular mission could be cut through in time. Stupid radiation regulations, Val thought to herself for the thousandth time. That's what the radiation detox units were made for. Just as she reached takeoff speed and lifted Sparrowhawk off the runway, a blinding flash lit up the entire sky and all the flight instruments went dark. The controls went dead in her hands, the jet engine behind her began winding down and the plane dropped like a rock back onto the runway. The nose wheel buckled on impact, sending the plane careering down the runway in a shower of burning jet fuel and twisted metal. Amazingly, the cockpit's reinforced crash structure lived up to its name and Val was unharmed bar a rapidly growing bump on her head where she'd bounced off the canopy. "Sparrowhawk, tower. Are you alright?" "Still in one piece, tower, though the plane sure isn't. Bumped my head, but nothing a bag of frozen peas won't deal with." Her eyes flicked to the horizon- and froze in stunned disbelief. "But... how?!" "Uh, say again Val?" The tower controller sounded confused, but he must have looked out the window just then because Val heard some rather inventive swearing through the radio before it clicked off abruptly. Val pushed back the canopy and clambered out of the wrecked plane, staring in fascination at the impossible sight on the horizon. Not just the mountains rearing up where no mountains should be, but what lay beyond. "I don't think we're on Kerbin any more."

Let's take a step back from this OpenGL stuff and just focus on the immediate problem- broken mods. First of all, don't put mods in the Steam copy of KSP. Just don't. Steam breaks modded KSP, especially if you're switching versions with mods installed. There's a good chance that reinstalling KSP and then copying it to use mods will solve your problem, so 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. If that still doesn't work and the game won't load, we'll need the log files along with a full mod list, a screenshot of your KSP GameData folder and a screenshot of where the game loads to before freezing. If you don't know how to find the logs, this guide will tell you where to look: Put the log files on a file sharing site and post a link here, please don't try to paste the entire log files directly into the forums as it's nearly impossible to read them like that.

Enter build mode and pick them up that way? If that's how you got into this mess, there's a good chance it'll get you back out too.

Payload fractions in KSP are much higher than in real life because while engines and fuel tanks are worse than in real life they’re not proportionately worse- in fact stock parts are rather overpowered in the stock scale Kerbol system. It’s possible to get payload fractions of over 20% in KSP even without using any cheaty exploits that can create thrust out of nowhere or lift without drag, whereas in real life 5% is good and 10% nearly impossible.

Actually, getting to low Earth orbit takes a lot less than that- it tends to be 9000-9500m/s in my experiences with RSS and RO. Kerbin being a fraction of Earth's size does make things much easier, since accelerating to hypersonic speeds with air-breathing engines takes you most of the way to orbital velocity (1500m/s out of 2200m/s) whereas on Earth you're not even close (1500m/s of 7800m/s). I once made a stock parts replica of the Black Arrow orbital launch rocket, which in real life could put a ~150kg satellite into a relatively low Earth orbit; the KSP version had nearly identical delta-V in all its stages, but managed to send a ~500kg probe to the surface of the Mun and back. Besides the difference in scale, there are a lot of things about space travel that KSP doesn't include for the sake of making the game fun for more than the hardcore simulator-ists: ullaging, residual propellants, performance variation and engine failures, life support, speed of light delay for communications, crew health and radiation exposure, actually building and testing the rocket in the first place before launching it... There are plenty of mods out there to add realism in many different forms, but the learning curve for KSP is steep enough as it is without having to get to grips with all of that at the same time so they're not a part of KSP and to my knowledge won't be included in KSP2 either.

I've been doing a lot of test flights involving bigger and better rockets, which have once again converged on the R-7 design because the latest configs for the RD-107 and RD-108 have a failure rate of less than 0.1%. An early Moon lander, using a solid braking stage: Too much delta-V from the SRB, it ended up flying back the way it came and the little landing thrusters on the lander itself couldn't slow it down enough after that. Take the same rocket, remove one booster and stick three communications satellites on top: More than capable of launching them into the desired resonant orbit for even spacing, though the fairing did shred the bottom satellite's solar panels and has subsequently been adjusted to not do so in the real version. After the big payout from the first crewed orbit, I spent a quarter of a million funds on a new 350 ton launchpad; I considered a 250 ton pad to save a bit of money, but that lunar lander above was right on 250t so there would be no room to improve in future, but a 350 ton pad is more than enough to launch some serious interplanetary missions and lunar landers. Much of the remaining funds went into KCT points, bringing the VAB up to triple figures and boosting R&D too. Some of it was also spent unlocking new engine configs from the orbital rocketry node that just unlocked. Now for the "real" missions. First up, a boring Orange Cornet launch made slightly less uninteresting by the use of that new RD-108 config along with the RD-0109 config, boosting thrust, ISP and reliability over the base RD-0105. Both worked perfectly and another contract was duly completed. Next, Vera Schultz gets her Mercury flight, but things don't go entirely to plan... MechJeb's PVG was still using the settings from the Orange Cornet launch earlier, which has a much higher TWR and climbs much faster and so needs a faster pitch rate; that would probably have been fine on its own, but a weird staging issue reared its ugly head as soon as the first stage burnt out- the LES motors fired as they should to detach the LES and throw it away, but the decoupler did not; cue crazy spinning as the deliberately asymmetric thrust totally overpowered the puny gimbals on the RD-0109 and the equally puny RCS thrusters on the second stage: Let's try that again... But with the correct PVG settings and staging this time! It worked exactly as planned second time around, putting the capsule into a 200km circular orbit where it stayed for nearly 33 hours before the life support supplies and battery charge began running low. By that point Vera was getting a bit stressed out too, but the 'orbital flight with one crew' contract's timer had completed so all that was left was returning to the surface. Like Yellow Cymbal 1 before it, Yellow Cymbal 2 aimed for Cape Canaveral with its deorbit burn, and once again missed- though not by much, you can actually see the Cape from here. A safe landing later, the contract paid out its weirdly specific 59895 funds and Vera decided to open the hatch and leave her pod. Then she tried to get back in, jumped- and triggered a Unity crash. Oops... Fortunately for me, the game saved after Yellow Cymbal 2 touched down but before Vera did her game-breaking EVA so no harm was done. Coming soon: Going interplanetary! And a lot of simulated Moon shenanigans.

I really don’t think that you’d want to put liquid oxygen into a nuclear reactor, hot oxygen is very reactive and will try its best to destroy everything it touches which in a nuclear reactor is never good. And why so many layers of complexity? What does feeding the already very hot steam coming from two reactors and a combustion chamber, with small quantities of up burnt hydrogen/oxygen depending on mixture ratios, into yet another nuclear reactor do, besides create more superheated oxygen to react with another reactor’s delicate innards? Steam decomposes well below the temperatures of a typical NTR reactor so in the end you’re just using a reactor to un-burn the hydrogen you just burnt earlier.

Created a stupidly overbuilt lunar orbiter to do some mapping for a contract, then realised it was so overbuilt that I could use it to put landers on the surface too- and it was still overbuilt.

Screenshot of the whole KSP screen including the contract in the contract list? It doesn't keep track of that parameter when the vessel isn't loaded, but you should still be fine.

Misaligned with Kerbin means the telescope is too far in front of or behind Kerbin in its orbit. Leave it there for a while, once it gets back into position near Kerbin it’ll automatically detect asteroids and comets.

The deployed science gubbins is well worth the effort- taking the stuff there isn’t a significant burden, deploying it is easy and after that you can forget about it and let the science trickle in while you time warp between missions. The only exception is the passive seismometer, which requires you to actively crash stuff into the planet/moon/whatever Dres is to get data; a few well-aimed transfer stages can do that for you without much trouble- this was done by several of the Apollo missions with the third stage of the Saturn V to get readings from seismometers deployed by previous landings.

There are a couple of KSP settings that can make parts shiny (or not), I believe they're reflection quality and reflection refresh rate? They're in the main menu settings option, though they might also be available in the pause menu settings too.

There’s this, but it’s possibly not ready for use yet: Also this, which is quite old and possibly doesn’t work in newer versions of KSP: Use at your own risk…

Theoretically, yes. From what I've seen/heard, the precooler system required for SABRE to function has been developed and tested (although perhaps not at full scale?), while the engine itself will use expansion deflection to improve its ISP both in atmosphere and in vacuum, a technology that is relatively unproven but still very much possible. I've seen concepts for a fully reusable launch up to geostationary transfer orbit, where the Skylon itself waits in LEO while an upper stage boosts the payload up, then returns to Skylon and docks to it again before returning to the surface. With modern composite materials to take the heat of re-entry, there's no reason why Skylon couldn't work, except for one pretty big one: cost. Getting Skylon operational will be expensive. If (and hopefully when) it does, it'll be entering a pretty saturated market- even without the much-hyped Starship-Superheavy lobbing a hundred tons to LEO per flight in a fully reusable manner, carving out a niche against both current and future conventional rockets will be difficult- Falcon 9, Soyuz, Ariane 5 and GSLV/PSLV are all in the ballpark of Skylon's payload to orbit, with plenty more rockets- Vega C, Angara, Neutron, Ariane 6 to name but a few- all under development or nearing operation. To compete with all of those, Skylon will have to be very reliable and have a very rapid turnaround time between flights, something that won't be easy when the whole thing goes to orbit and back every time. There's also the not so trivial issue of producing all the liquid hydrogen needed for such a rapid launch cadence. Once up and running, Skylon will be very cost-effective, but until that point money is the main problem to be overcome.

I’ve tried a few different visual mods for RSS: RSSVE, I found it to be a bit too low-res for my liking; EVO, looked great but ate RAM and caused game (and even PC) crashes unless I didn’t focus KSP when it reached the main menu and turned the sound off ; REO, caused some stuttering on atmospheric entry/exit and some strange effects, though the clouds looked great at close range; PRVE, I’m trying out right now, looks good so far but I’ve used it for a total of one day so far. (Edit- oh dear, those clouds are terrible… very pixelated and no volumetric effects) All are mutually incompatible with each other, try them out and see which one you like the best.