jimmymcgoochie

Ten years is a long time- back in January 2012 we were all worried (or not) that the world would end at the end of the year, the Higgs boson was about to be discovered and the Curiosity rover was hurtling towards Mars. In technology terms it’s even longer, and a combination of greatly improved hardware resulting in ever larger games and older parts slowly wearing out and slowing down will make running new games on an old PC a slow and rather limited experience. You could try getting an external SSD and storing your copies of KSP on that, which has greatly decreased the loading times I’m seeing for KSP even with heavily modded games. They’re usually not that expensive and should speed things up a bit generally, as well as giving you more storage capacity. Alternatively, if your PC’s overall performance is starting to suffer it might be time to replace it; it’s not a great time to be looking to buy a new PC due to the global chip shortages and inflated prices as a result, but it’s still possible to get a pretty decent performance PC without spending silly sums of money on it.

Delta-V readouts are easily confused when you have engines in multiple stages but no decouplers, as in the case of large interplanetary ships- the calculations don’t know that you’re planning to undock stuff. Try disabling fuel feed from all the tanks on your landers, leaving only the main ship’s tanks active (click the little green triangles beside their fuel bars to turn them to red crosses), this removes the contents of those tanks from the equations and should give you a more accurate delta-V number.

I’m tired of endless fiddling with nodes to get those four probes to orbit the four main moons of Jupiter. What’s next? Ah yes, endless fiddling with nodes to get four probes to orbit the four main moons of Jupiter… But these ones are rovers and that’s totally different

First the Io-bound probe managed to completely reverse its course and start orbiting retrograde around Jupiter, when it was previously orbiting prograde and aligned with Io’s orbit; and then its Europa-bound sibling ended up on an escape trajectory right out of Jupiter’s gravity well when it should have been on course for an encounter with a small (~200m/s) course correction in its orbit. And on multiple occasions I had to edit the save file since some cryogenic propellants keep disappearing- including the rather unexpected loss of all the liquid oxygen from the crewed Mars lander but the liquid hydrogen was untouched, when usually the hydrogen goes missing first. The sooner I finish this save, the better.

Screenshots would be useful here. Are there no city lights in map view, in flight or even on the ground? Check that you’ve installed all your mods correctly and that your mod versions are appropriate for your version of KSP; or, even better, use CKAN to do it for you!

KSP2 should have automation for supply missions etc. built into it exactly for this sort of scenario- no need to babysit your colonies all the time while you’re off on an interstellar adventure, just set up the automated supply chains and let them do their thing.

Crewed interplanetary mission number 2 is underway as the Venus ship burns for Venus. Nearly all of the transfer burn was done using the side boosters, with the last couple of hundred metres per second done by the core booster. And now for some probes doing some course corrections and capture burns, which will be happening A LOT in future. First up, White Ptolemy C2 gets a nice close periapsis over Ceres to capture and start mapping: Next, Blue Draughtsman Vesta arrives at the asteroid belt's second largest member and captures into orbit. Contract completed, science is gathering and there's more than enough fuel left on the probe to attempt a landing in the future as well. Meanwhile on Mercury, the White Lagrange has made its way over to the rover waypoints and nets a great big payout from the Mercury rover contract, not to mention about ten thousand science per biome in total! (I definitely need to do this earlier in my next RP-1 game!) Upon arriving at Venus, a small problem raised its head- the radiators can't quite prevent hydrogen boiloff this close to the Sun. Fortunately, the capture burn occurred in the dark (as is right and proper) and by the time the ship re-emerged into the sunlight, the tanks were cool and the radiators could just keep them that way. At this point I discovered something odd- the synoptic terrain and weather photography experiments, brought in triplicate aboard the main lab and those two mission modules, weren't using up any samples when they were being processed in the lab. In fact, processing the samples in a lab makes them regenerate faster than they're being used! I don't know if this is intended behaviour or not, but either way it means those mission modules were largely superfluous- though one of them does have some extra crew experiments so it's not totally pointless having them there. With all the science coming back, I finally managed to complete the entire RP-1 tech tree: Each of those end nodes will take about a month each to research at current rates so it'll be a few years yet before it's properly complete, but as of this point science points have no value any more. And after a long journey out to Jupiter, the White Herschel quartet began their capture burns and a series of further burns to take them to their respective moons. First to arrive was the White Herschel Io, which by coincidence got a decent view of its target moon on the way past. Coming up next time: A whole lotta fiddly orbital manoeuvres to get four probes in orbit of four different moons as efficiently as possible, and a glitch that eclipses even the first Mercury probe's 30 degree plane change in solar orbit...

Update to the above- an electrician came round today to fix the problem switch, took it off the wall and found this: HOW DID THIS THING STILL WORK!?!?!?!?

Only a fraction of a second? Those are rookie numbers. The game will freeze up when it autosaves and the bigger the save file, the longer it takes. You’re probably noticing it now as your save has become larger, with more vessels each with more parts, more mods adding more part modules to each part, more contracts completed, more experiments run and so on. It will only get worse over time, not much you can do to avoid it except not adding more mods or launching more vessels. Right now I’m coming to the end of an RP-1 career save where the save file is over 50MB and until recently contained over a hundred different vessels with many part modules, many contracts and autosave freezes that can last for over ten seconds at a time.

My chemistry teacher gave out plenty of homework. He also burnt a hole through the curtains with a jelly baby, dented the ceiling with a hydrogen bottle rocket, dropped a big lump of sodium into a water bath and then chased after it with a wooden splint to try and set it on fire as it fizzed around the tank, and on his last day at the school set off a thermite reaction outside (I still have the little lump of iron that resulted, though weirdly it’s not remotely magnetic )

So apparently the power switch for my shower is not supposed to get very hot, emit a strange fishy smell when turned on, occasionally switch itself off/get jammed off/get jammed on/trip the breaker and have a strange discoloured lumpy bit on the plastic? Good to know after using it for literally months like that

After stumbling across a suggestion on an old thread and a quick search of the forums turned up no results, I’ve decided to start this thread to discuss what goes where on the KSP Monopoly board. (It also turns out that getting a picture of the original Monopoly board that’s a decent size is pretty difficult on a tablet, so this generic one will have to do.) There are 28 properties in total on the board- 22 in the coloured groups, four stations and two utilities. One option to fill them would be the planets and moons of Kerbol system (17 including Kerbol itself) and the buildings of the KSC (9 in total), with three left over which could be Dessert Launchsite and Woomerang- in this case I’d put the Launchpad, Runway, Woomerang and Dessert as the four stations, VAB and SPH as the utilities, then (from cheapest to most expensive): [Dres, Gilly] [Minmus, Admin Building, Pol] [Bop, Astronaut Complex, Ike] [Mun, Mission Control, Eeloo] [Duna, Tracking Station, Vall] [Moho, Research and Development, Jool] [Laythe, Tylo, Eve] [Kerbol, Kerbin]. Anyone got any other ideas? Maybe including the Kerbals themselves (Jeb, Bill, Bob, Val, Wernher, Linus, Gus, Mortimer, Walt- which conveniently could replace the KSC buildings in the above example with some re-jigging of the order), or maybe you think my order is rubbish and clearly Kerbin and Kerbol should be the utilities

Spent an inordinate amount of time trying to control four separate missions at the same time, each one trying to make orbit of a different moon of Jupiter and with reasonable, but not massive delta-V budgets. As the innermost moon, Io is the hardest to reach- not helped by MechJeb deciding that the best way to intercept it is coming in perpendicular to its orbit, rather than meeting it at the probe’s periapsis when the relative velocity is at its lowest, resulting in a 12km/s capture burn. And in between all that I had to launch a contract sat as I somehow ran out of money…

Phobos' puny gravity combined with the generous RCS propellant storage on the lander can mean only one thing- biome hopping! That little white speck above the lander in both of the above images is the Mars Ship in orbit of Phobos- it's about 6km away so would probably be clearly visible if not for the 2.5km physics range. Once the photo op was done, the trio split up- two jetted off to two nearby biomes while the third stayed by the lander, all gathering crew reports and surface samples from three different biomes before returning to the lander. The lander then relocated to a crater northwest of Stickney Crater putting three more biomes within reach, and the samples gathered there completed the set. The crew then returned to the orbiting mothership and made a short burn using the lander's trio of RL-10 engines to push the whole ship out of Phobos orbit; the burn was about 4m/s in total and the lander's engines have plenty of ignitions to spare, no need to fire up the big engines on the ship itself if we don't have to. The return window to Earth is in about 300 days, more than enough time to process those samples in the onboard lab and send the results back to Earth. Staying with crewed interplanetary missions, the last piece of the Venus mission was launched to orbit and docked to the Venus Ship along with its crew. Which makes it sound so easy... See, I stuck a couple of Apollo Block 4 mission modules together for the Venus Ship to get more films for the terrain and weather photography experiments, since putting duplicate experiments on the same module doesn't work. I figured the Yellow Croissant was up to the task of rendezvousing and docking since it had plenty of delta-V on its own. What I hadn't considered was that when the mission modules were docked to the front of it, all the RCS was at one end. Whenever I tried to use the translation controls, it rotates and has to counterthrust in the other direction, making it incredibly unwieldy and often as not trying to move in one direction would actually make it go in the other direction as the RCS fought to keep it pointing straight. When, at last, I managed to dock the thing to the Venus Ship, I moved the crew over, undocked the Apollo craft and prepared to deorbit- and then suddenly the whole thing was 50km under the ground and everything exploded! And I forgot to save after the docking was complete . The second time I did it, I did so the sensible way- no MechJeb docking mode which was so utterly inept last time, just gently tiptoeing into position at barely 0.1m/s so the thrusters could balance out without the whole craft swerving drunkenly across the sky. This time I saved it! Alexei (pilot, and one of my original 4), Dave (scientist) and Gloria (engineer) moved over to their new home and made themselves comfortable, while pilot Victoria said her farewells and returned the Yellow Croissant to Earth. I also took the time to check on my fleet of rovers, sending the White Lagrange and Orange Island to new biomes on Mercury and Mars respectively to gather more science. Mercury produces some frankly ridiculous science returns when landed, with some experiments generating several thousand science each over the course of 90 days, which combined with all the data coming back from the Mars mission, all the other probes orbiting various other planets and moons and those uber-cameras orbiting the Earth with that 20-year, 10,000 science experiment, has produced over a thousand KCT points recently, all of which have been poured into R&D. I've also put every science node up to the 2050-2099 nodes (the second last tier) onto the research queue and a few of the final tier as well, with just nine left to add. Coming up next time: The Venus mission departs, some probes arrive at their destinations and some contracts get completed. And the Venus ship definitely doesn't get turned inside out by a Kraken attack caused by physics warping too fast during the departure burn...

Check that all of the following are true: The engine is attached directly to a fuel tank. The engine is a liquid fuel/oxidiser rocket engine (e.g. not a jet engine, monopropellant engine/RCS thruster or ion thruster). The fuel tank has fuel in it. Fuel flow from the fuel tank is enabled (beside the liquid fuel and oxidiser bars there should be two buttons with green triangles, not red crosses). The engine has a throttle limiter >0. The engine is switched on, either through staging or by manually activating it in its right-click part action window (PAW). The vessel is controllable (either a Kerbal on board or a probe core, connection to KSC and electric charge >0). Screenshots- or even better, a video- would really help here.

"I can't be bothered using mods, so the developers must include everything I want regardless of how much work it will be, how long it pushes the release back by or how much bloat it introduces for everyone else playing the game." KSP2 will not feature Sol system as stock. End of discussion.

Eh? Surely the Moon must move away from the Sun for half its orbit around the Earth? Anything constantly accelerating towards the Sun would eventually crash into it.

That's... not how to do a course correction. Decouple the big, heavy deadweight of the transfer stage and let the little probe move itself much more efficiently; if you have to wait to get a signal, wait. The transfer stage looked like it had no RCS propellant and no control at all when it was trying to point at the node, you might want to put some proper RCS thrusters and tanks on it. Re the power problem, turn off a) the avionics and b) the antenna transmission (in AUTO), and if you have to disable some experiments too then do it. And re. the disappearing encounter with Mercury, check the third tab on the stock orbital info panel to see how far away you're actually going to be, the closest approach markers can be a bit glitchy sometimes.

No spoilers, but try exploring Jool’s moons in some detail. You’d be terrified amazed by what you’ll find out there! The whole “kraken” thing is for a few reasons: it begins with K (obligatory for Kerbal stuff!), it’s a scary monster that would attack ships and rip them apart in the age of sail (blame the rum…) and as a shorthand for all the various physics glitches that KSP had/has, it sounds better to blame a mythical monster than giving it a boring code-related name.

You’ll probably find that anything Missing History adds, Restock+ does better; the only part of Missing History I use now is the patch to make the FL-A10 adapter into a fuel tank.

Created a brand new copy of KSP and threw all sorts of mods into it- most important being JNSQ, GPP and GEP with the latter two having a 2.5x rescale to make them (almost) match the scale of JNSQ. I plan to use this for some kind of big interstellar game and to try out various mods too, but of course as soon as I was done making it I went and did something else, in this case a second Phobos landing and some EVA exploration to get surface samples from three nearby biomes.

Note- this guide is talking about geostationary orbit over Earth, not Kerbin; however the same technique can be applied using Kerbin's faster rotation time and shorter sidereal day in the same way. Step 1: Reach low Earth orbit. Step 2: Plot a node to boost your apoapsis to geostationary altitude (~35793km according to the RP-1 geostationary satellite contracts) at your nearest ascending or descending node. If your launch site is in the northern hemisphere you'll want the descending node, and vice versa. Step 3: Find your target longitude on the surface. If you have a contract to put a GEO sat over a specific point, there should be a waypoint for that contract visible on the map; if you can't see it, try using the Waypoint Manager mod to make it visible. If you don't have a contract but want the satellite to have a specific longitude, try adding a waypoint (again, Waypoint Manager helps with this) or just pick a recognisable feature on the surface and aim for that. Step 4: Look at your time to apoapsis. Typically this will be in the 5 to 6 hour range and will vary depending on your initial parking orbit. Step 5: In map view, position the camera so that you're looking down on Earth from above the north pole, with your apoapsis at the top of the screen. Imagine a clock face superimposed on the Earth, the apoapsis is at 12 o'clock and the periapsis at 6 o'clock. Earth rotates on its axis once every 24 hours*, so it takes two hours for any point on the surface to move one clock face number anticlockwise (e.g. from 5 to 4). With this in mind, you can use the current position of the target longitude to calculate where it will be when you reach apoapsis. If it happens to be right underneath you, great, but usually it won't be. In this example, the target longitude was directly underneath the point where the geostationary transfer burn occurred, so it's at 6 o'clock; if it takes 6 hours to reach apoapsis, the target point will now be at 3 o'clock as shown. Step 6: Plot two burns- one to set your inclination to zero and another to circularise immediately afterwards (if using MechJeb to plot the nodes, use the 'after a fixed time' option on the second burn and set the time to 0 seconds), then combine the two nodes using MechJeb's node editor (other mods are available, but I'm assuming you already have MechJeb installed for its Primer Vector Guidance launch controller) into a single node that does both the inclination and periapsis changes in one go. DO NOT EXECUTE THIS NODE. Step 7: Calculate a resonant orbit. Regardless of where your target point is, set the denominator to 24 (the default in MJ node planner is 2/3, change the 3 to 24). If your target point is ahead of your apoapsis (i.e. from 6 up to 12 on the clock face) it's pretty simple: starting at 24, subtract 2 hours for every clock face number the target point is ahead of you and use that as the numerator (e.g. if the target point is at 9 o'clock, you want 18/24 as your resonant orbit setting); if the target point is behind you (i.e. from 12 up to 6) then things are a bit harder- there's a hard limit on resonant orbits which is set by the size of the Earth, anything below 10/24 is likely to crash into the atmosphere or the planet. If the target is really close behind you, it might be feasible to boost up higher than geostationary orbit to let the target point catch up to you, but this costs even more delta-V and so isn't a particularly good option. In the above example the target point is at 3 o'clock, unreachable with a single resonant orbit. Instead, calculate a resonant orbit that will get you into position over several orbits- in this case try 18/24 and wait three orbits, like so: Step 8: Once you've calculated the resonant orbit, merge that into the combined circularisation/plane change burn, and execute it. Step 9: Circularise when the target point is below your apoapsis. By waiting for a few orbits, the target point ends up right underneath the apoapsis and circularisation can occur. Keep in mind that circularising and changing inclination at the same time is the most efficient way of doing things in terms of delta-V as it minimises the cosine losses of the large plane change burn by combining it with as much prograde as possible; doing the two separately will require a lot more fuel and the further from circular you go with your resonant orbit, the more fuel you'll need. Conversely, you can do a resonant orbit that's much closer to circular, taking longer but saving some fuel in the process- not recommended if you don't have solar panels on board! The same system can be applied to Kerbin. but remember that the geostationary altitude is much lower at 2863.33km and the sidereal day is much shorter at 5h 59m 9s, so your target point will move two numbers anticlockwise for every hour that passes. Another advantage to using resonant orbits like this is that you can deploy a series of satellites and space them out evenly: just release one satellite every time you come to your apoapsis and circularise its orbit.

It's time. It's been a long time coming, but at last: CREWED MARS LANDING COMPLETE!!! The crew did some reports, gathered some samples and did other science-y things for thirty days, before gathering everything they could into the upper compartment and preparing for liftoff. (For redundancy reasons the lander carried 60 days' worth of food, however the majority of that was stored in the habitation module and service module on top of that, both of which were left behind on the surface. Oops...) Returning to orbit was pretty easy, but rendezvousing took time as the Mars ship was at pretty much the exact opposite side of Mars at the time the lander circularised. Two days later they finally got there. With most of the fuel gone and minus the heavy hab/service modules, the lander turned out to be pretty agile and with a decent amount of delta-V just from its RCS thrusters- information that will be very handy for the Phobos leg of this mission. Docking was a pretty simple process and soon enough the crew were back aboard their ship, along with the precious surface samples that Terri immediately dragged down to the lab for analysis. The trans-Phobos burn was performed with the core booster, however there wasn't enough fuel left in that to do the capture burn too so the remaining fuel was siphoned into the lander and the booster was discarded, sent onto a collision course with the little space photato. The ship's own pair of engines were used to capture at Phobos, braking to a frankly ridiculous 6m/s orbital velocity. That leaves four ignitions to get back to Earth with- getting out of Phobos orbit could feasibly be done with RCS, then trans-Earth burn, course correction (which will probably be needed) and capture burn, with a spare pair of ignitions in case of failures. 'Landing' on Phobos is a relative term: the Kerbals' EVA jetpacks are more than enough to do that, however the contract requires 2 crew and a 12 hour stay so the lander is required. Fortunately, the puny gravity is no match for its RCS thrusters, which have oodles of delta-V for the task, and with a relative velocity of less than 5m/s compared to the surface it's not like it'll use much fuel. The landing site was on the eastern edge of Stickney Crater; fortunately there are plenty of those strange ridges with the nice flat bits in between (probably due to low-resolution terrain mapping from real-life missions, I suspect the real terrain would be smooth), but unfortunately this landing site is on the outer side of Phobos and so will never face towards Mars for some scenic shots. Oh well, I can always do another landing later... Due to the design of the lander, the crew hatch faces vertically up making boarding a little tricky. Not everyone got in on their first attempt... With the flag planted and science gathered, the crew returned to orbit moving at speeds of up to 7 metres per second! Wow! Coming up next time: I could do landings in every biome on Phobos to get all the surface samples, try a precision landing beside the little lander currently parked on the western edge of Stickney or even jetpack down and back up, though that last option is a bit risky due to the limited supplies carried while on EVA. There's loads of science to be gathered out here and the transfer window home is over a year away.

I think that’s meant to be like that? It’s not like we have lots of high-definition images of the Uranian moons to work with, since it’s been visited by a total of one probe and that was hurtling through on course for Neptune so didn’t have much time to take pictures, and used a camera from the 70s.

Try it and find out.