jimmymcgoochie

I’m not sure where you got the 590m/s number from, but Titan’s orbital velocity is quite a bit higher than that- it’s larger than Earth’s moon by almost 50%, so even with its slightly lower gravity orbital velocity is around 1800m/s. In comparison, 120m/s is less than the difference you get when launching equatorial prograde versus polar on Kerbin; it might make a small difference, but regardless of their direction you probably wouldn’t want to fly out into winds that are close to being category 5 hurricane force, twice over…

There’s an experimental dev branch for 1.12(.x) on the RO GitHub page, try that?

Despite the many hours of KSP that have happened since the last update, there's not a whole lot to show for it. Most of that is for one reason and one reason alone- GPS network contract. But first... Geostationary communications network contract wants four satellites in GEO with 1750 units of commsat payload each? No problem- stick four of these little box-sats on the first two stages of a Blue Chip rocket and it can easily put them into a resonant orbit to deploy nicely in geostationary orbits. That contract unlocked the GPS and GLONASS contracts; I picked GPS because the failure cost was much lower, the two contracts pay the same overall and require the same number of identical satellites either way. Minor tweaks to the probes from the GEO network and the Blue Chit rocket and the Blue Token GPS was ready to go. Launch four probes in one go to each orbit, position in a 3/4 resonant orbit then circularise one on each of the four subsequent orbits. Not difficult, but time-consuming as each circularisation burn takes over 10 minutes (0.06TWR ) and having to stop and do a burn every 8 hours or so means not much time progression- and of course having more than one set of probes on the go at once just makes that worse. Little dinky solar panels cost about 1 fund each and weigh a few hundred grams, but are enough to keep the probes powered as long as the avionics are off; with the avionics on they last a few days in total. Sloooooooooow burns with these things, but at 10x physics warp it's not so bad. Normally the RCS systems will go nuts at 10x physics warp and repeatedly overcorrect as they can't seem to react quickly enough, but that little generic engine from ProbesPlus has thrust vanes which act like a gimbal- no RCS panic, just smooth flying. In between all that, Blue Bishop Jupiter was busy playing gravity pinball as it visited three of Jupiter's major moons in less than two orbits of Jupiter: Each encounter provided a small gravity assist, then a burn of about 500m/s set an intercept course with the next one. Unfortunately Ganymede doesn't want to play- it's in the completely wrong place to get a flyby within the next orbit, or the one after that either. There's still about 2500m/s of fuel left in the tanks overall though so reaching it won't be too difficult, however capturing into orbit of a moon will probably need more gravity assists to reduce the relative velocity. Coming up next time: More GPS tedium, but there's also a Mercury window due to open and a Mercury rover waiting for it, plus a few other missions doing course corrections (including the four White Herschel S probes going to explore the moons of Saturn) and that Ganymede flyby.

Edit- turns out I was wrong, SABRE doesn’t liquefy the incoming air before burning it, however the precooler’s helium cooling system dumps heat into the hydrogen fuel in air-breathing mode so other fuels wouldn’t really work for that. Hydrogen is also very light and has a higher specific impulse. It also turns out that Skylon is intended to be a full SSTO, not suborbital; would a suborbital TSTO version be better than the full SSTO?

I don’t see Skylon (the spaceplane using SABRE) as an SSTO, but rather as the first stage in a two-stage launch system with a small second stage (reusable or not) to reach orbit. In that role it would be competitive with any VTVL two stage reusable rocket as the combination of using air-breathing engines and atmospheric lift saves a lot of fuel over a conventional rocket using brute force to counter gravity. A spaceplane has no real need for a TWR over 1 so the engines can be lighter, using air as oxidiser means you need to carry less oxidiser so the fuel tanks are lighter and the inherent cross-range ability you get with an aircraft would offer greater flexibility- just think of all those backup Shuttle runways that would be ideal as either launch sites or landing sites with refuelling infrastructure. (Of course, setting up the infrastructure to refuel a plane that burns liquid hydrogen as fuel wouldn’t be a trivial task.)

The rocket equation determines how much delta-V you have. Increasing ISP directly increases delta-V; while chemical rockets tend to have ISPs of anywhere from 250-350 seconds for kerosene/liquid oxygen and possibly up to 500s for liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen, a fission-powered nuclear thermal rocket can easily hit 900s and electric propulsion (e.g. ion thrusters) can reach a few thousand seconds. A fusion drive like the Daedalus has a theoretical ISP of several hundred thousand seconds of ISP, maybe even millions. The Orion nuclear pulse engine isn’t necessarily efficient in terms of ISP, but for sheer brute force there’s not much comes close to propelling your spacecraft with a series of uncontained nuclear explosions.

You can strut stuff together once you’ve docked (or grabbed with a Klaw) but not while they’re separate, using EVA construction. KIS/KAS work differently and you can connect different vessels up using that, though stability varies wildly and those mods aren’t (yet?) compatible with the stock inventory system.

The Earth doesn’t rotate once every 24 hours. The Solar day might last for 24 hours, but during that time the Earth has moved just under a degree (on average) around the Sun (365 days, 360 degrees) so the Earth has to rotate 361 degrees on its axis so the Sun is in the same place in the sky again; this is known as the solar day for obvious reasons. The time taken to rotate once on its axis is known as the sidereal day, which on Earth is 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.091 seconds long- this is the orbital period required for a geosynchronous orbit which maintains a fixed longitude above the planet. Geostationary orbits are just geosynchronous orbits with 0 inclination, so their latitude is also fixed; since they are effectively stationary in the sky they’re very easy to point at, making them very useful for communications (including satellite TV) which is also why you’ll typically see all the satellite dishes in one area pointing in the same direction they’re all aimed at the same satellite.

GPS constellation in progress- three launches have out 12 of the required 24 satellites into orbit, with 9 of those in their final orbits and the rest sitting in resonant orbits to be spaced out evenly. A little bit tedious, but it gives the VAB teams something to do and the contract reward is pretty good. At this point I’m starting to regret not looking at the TWR on the satellites themselves, which never goes above 0.08 and makes for some painfully long burn times.

My suggestions are a bit less ambitious than others have been, but I suspect a good number of achievements will be for the early game. Point correct end towards space: Complete the first tutorial. Spaaaaaaaace: Reach space. Half way to anywhere: Reach Kerbin orbit. What goes up...: Return from Kerbin orbit and recover the craft. Good landing: Bring a Kerbal back safely from atmospheric flight. Great landing: Bring a Kerbal back safely from Kerbin orbit. Oh the kermanity!: Lose a Kerbal. Dear Mun: Fly by the Mun. Scanning for cheese: Orbit the Mun. One Small (Mis-)Step: Land a Kerbal on the Mun. Ooh, shiny: Fly by Minmus. What an Achieve-mint: Orbit Minmus. This is definitely not edible!: Land on Minmus. (Because Minmus is apparently going to be made of glass in KSP2...) Home sweet home: Build your first colony. Not that kind of boom, Jeb!: Trigger a boom event for a colony. Are those potatoes?: Build a colony on Duna. 404 Not Found: Land on Dres. Jool's jewels: Land on all of Jool's moons. HOW!?!?: Return home from the surface of Eve. The. What.: Land on the surface of Jool. I can't even...: Land on the surface of the Sun (Kerbol). Star player: Reach another solar system.

This won’t work, you can’t put struts between different vessels, only between parts of the same one. You’d have to be docked first to add struts and undocking breaks the struts automatically.

Principia? You’re on your own… Joking aside, SCANsat might help you- if you make a biome map of Kerbin, you could use that to see the probe’s trajectory over the surface and find a time when it crosses over Welcome Back Island that way; no idea if it works with Principia though. Does the contract require that specific satellite to do the gravity scan, or can you just launch anything up there into an equatorial orbit with a much better chance of passing over WBI and get the scan done that way?

First of all, don’t put mods into the Steam copy of KSP, Steam breaks stuff especially when mods are involved and doubly so when you update the game. Keep the Steam copy free of mods and just copy it when you want to make a new modded install. Second, you’ll need to do some save file hacking to roll back from 1.12.3 to 1.12.2 as save files aren’t forwards-compatible (a save won’t work in a version earlier than it was last used in); most likely changing the versions from .3 to .2 will fix it, though the docking port changes may cause problems if you roll back. Lastly, just use a backup if you have one. The less you mess around with hit, the fewer chances there are for something to get broken. Keep the 1.12.3 copy for later use, it won’t go anywhere in the meantime.

I would caution against trying to update the base KSP version while you have mods installed in it- better to make a new copy of KSP in the new version and then copy your mods and saves across to it, that way if it all goes wrong you still have the original to fall back on.

Launched the first set of 4 GPS satellites into orbit. A slight error in planning meant that they were dropped off in a circular orbit rather than the resonant orbit needed to deploy correctly at evenly spaced intervals, however each satellite has enough fuel to position itself so no harm done. Meanwhile over at Jupiter a series of moon flybys are underway in rapid succession- I discovered that orbital insertion around Jupiter produced a close approach to the outermost Galilean moon, Callisto, right at the probe’s apoapsis within a single orbit and tweaked the capture burn to get a good encounter; the gravity assist from that combined with a small course correction set up an encounter with Europa within a single orbit, with the gravity assist from that and another course correction setting up and encounter with Io within a single orbit too. 3 flybys within 2 orbits of Jupiter is pretty good going so far and there’s plenty of fuel left to find a Ganymede encounter and possibly to attempt orbital capture around one of the moons later on.

Kerbalism won’t help you here- gravity scans take 14 days so it’ll take literally years to complete. In this case, if you’ve fulfilled every other contract parameter I think it’s acceptable to use the alt+F12 cheat menu to complete the contract- trying to get an experiment done in space high over a biome that’s only a few square kilometres in total on a planet the size of JNSQ Kerbin is nearly impossible no matter how you go about it.

The easiest way to do this would be launching a small suborbital rocket just above the atmosphere from the Welcome Back Island launch site (which only appears with Kerbal Konstructs installed), though launching from the KSC into an equatorial orbit should bring you over WBI fairly regularly and you could use something like [x]Science to grab the gravity scan as soon as you were in the right place.

I can’t give you an exact answer here, however I can point you in the direction of the Deflatable Heatshield mod which allows the stock inflatable heatshield to be de-deployed (ployed? ), maybe you can use that code to make a small patch to add the same toggle to the part you’re interested in?

It looks to me like you’re arriving at Duna’s orbit after Duna has already passed by, in which case the solution is to wait a bit longer before you do the transfer burn, allowing Kerbin to catch up so that your probe and Duna end up in the same place at the same time. The general rule for outbound transfers (Kerbin to Duna, Mun to Minmus, Laythe to Tylo etc.) is: if you’re arriving too early (target behind you when you get there), you’re leaving too late but can delay your arrival with a longer trajectory (add more prograde to move your apoapsis higher) so the target catches up to you; if you’re arriving too late (target in front of you when you get there), you’re leaving too early so best to wait a while before doing the transfer burn. That rule is reversed when heading inwards (e.g. Kerbin to Eve, Tylo to Laythe, Minmus to Mun etc.): in that case if you’re arriving early then you’re leaving early and need to wait for the target to catch up, but if you’re arriving late then you’re leaving late and lowering your periapsis will allow you to catch up.

Anything that includes “largest manmade non-nuclear explosion in history” in its description is the most Kerbalest rocket ever and no amount of MOAR BOOSTERS!!!1! can possibly compete. Sticking 30+ engines on the first stage, with no gimbals and relying on differential throttle to steer, with seriously inadequate reliability (I’ve heard that the designers assumed they’d lose several engines per flight and planned for that) and dubious control systems, was only ever going to end badly; it’s just a shame that the only video of the event is a grainy shot in the middle of the night so you don’t really see the full extent of the gigantic explosion as several kilotons of rocket comes crashing back down onto the launchpad.

Mars ship away, at last! They were supposed to have a rover sent out at the same time to do some surface exploration, but that thing was literally CURSED and repeatedly broke everything- it wouldn’t launch, couldn’t be edited, spammed exceptions in the logs all over the place and I couldn’t even get rid of it in the editor either. Like I said, cursed… In other news, my first Jupiter orbiter arrived and captured into orbit: The capture burn is about as good as it gets, setting up a nice encounter with the outermost Galilean moon, Callisto, almost on the probe’s apoapsis; this encounter also provides a nice little gravity assist to nudge the periapsis higher and hopefully make encountering Io, Europa and Ganymede cheaper in future, which in turn will feed back into the mission plans for the four heavy probes heading towards Jupiter and planning to orbit all four moons and then the rover missions that just launched.

Short update with Important ThingsTM in it. First, White Galileo 3 departs for Mercury without even needing to turn on the nuclear engine. At this point I decided to turn off the TUFX filter in flight view as it makes things a bit too blue in atmosphere. I'm keeping it on in map view though, it looks better there. Over to Mars as the Blue Queen sample return craft makes a rather complicated return burn to Earth. First, the remaining fuel in the Blue Pawn lander was burnt to give it a little kick: Then that got discarded and the craft turned 180 degrees to use its own engines, burning until it weighed 1.22 tons. Once it reached that weight, the upper avionics (with the magnetometer on it) was decoupled and the avionics on the sample return capsule took over; that avionics can only handle 1 ton of mass and the upper avionics weighs 220kg, hence the wait for the weight. Once the avionics was decoupled, the remainder of the craft scooted sideways a bit before completing the burn: Not sideways enough- the magnetometer broke a solar panel, but at this point it only needs one panel anyway as the power demands are much lower without any experiments to run or data to transmit. A small course correction will put it on course for a pretty aggressive Earth re-entry, which I'm hoping will work due to the whole "no RCS fuel on the return capsule" thing... Also at Mars, the Orange Island rover has made its way over to the Valles Marineris: That isn't the edge of the valley over on the left, that's a strange cloud layer (that might be a bug in EVO 0.3); those cliffs go up even further than that. Now to launch some stuff towards Mars instead of away from it, starting with a Blue Draughtsman science probe: (Zoom in close on that image and you'll see a tiny orange speck just above the rocket; that's Mars) This launch was followed by (at last!) the departure of the Mars ship: Perhaps unsurprisingly, stability on those boosters was a bit of an issue when physics warp was applied- having two 600+ ton boosters with ~6MN of thrust each attached solely by a single docking port half way up will do that- and then the docking ports didn't release via staging or action groups so I had to drop the boosters by hand, hence the staggered decoupling. Other than the sheer length of the burn (~8 minutes at ~1/3 real speed) there were no real issues, and a course correction burn has been plotted to get a good Martian periapsis with another due later to get into the plane of Phobos. There should have been another launch to send the Yellow Pie crew rover out to Mars too, but that thing was cursed. No, really, it was cursed- trying to launch it via KCT just sent me back to the Space Centre without spawning it in on the launchpad, along with half a dozen random extra buttons on the toolbar (duplicates of a few including KSPedia as well as the mission scoreboard button that should never appear in career mode!); opening the craft in the editor didn't help as it was uneditable and wouldn't disappear when I clicked the new craft button either; reloading the game didn't fix either problem and eventually I had to abandon the idea entirely. I may be able to scrape together a new version by modifying the design used on the Moon rover (which ironically was adapted from the original design for the Mars rover) and building that without KCT to make up for the cursed version. And finally, Blue Bishop Jupiter arrived at its destination and braked into orbit. The capture burn was plotted to get a nice intercept of Callisto pretty much at apoapsis, giving a nice little gravity assist to raise its periapsis a bit and (hopefully) make encountering the other moons easier in the future- and get some easy contract money for four flybys on top of the Jupiter orbiter contract it already completed. I've also been tweaking the new geostationary contract rocket a bit, switching from a 1:1 ratio of weather and communications payloads to 1:9 as commsat contracts need a lot more payload. The interstage between stage two and the upper stage has been changed from a solid fairing piece to a deployable one as stage separation was inducing a spin due to the engine bell hitting the fairing; the Agena engine seems to start up with the gimbal cranked all the way over for some odd reason and even without the fairing present it still lurches to one side before correcting. Completing two contracts at once is a good way to net over 600k per flight, not including advances, though it feels a little bit cheaty as the commsat contracts take 2 minutes to complete after the orbit is reached whereas weathersat contracts require 6 hours, so I have to engage some fairly aggressive time warping to get them both done before the craft blinks out of existence. Coming up next time: I've begun to work on a Venus ship, which looks almost identical to the Mars ship but instead of a lander it carries an Apollo Block 4 mission module and a Yellow Pain-au-chocolat (which may or may not make the final version) and all the crew science experiments you can do somewhere other than low Earth orbit.

ATP synthase, the enzyme responsible for producing most of the chemical energy in the mitochondrion, is in effect a hydrogen-powered turbine very similar to a hydroelectric dam: hydrogen ions are pumped across a membrane and then flow back down the concentration gradient through ATP synthase, which rotates at several thousand RPM to turn adenosine diphosphate (ADP) into high-energy adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the cell’s energy currency. It even looks like a turbine in electron microscopy images.

Are you sure it’s not there? Some broken parts can be pretty small and hard to find/click, you might have to use some tactical camera clipping to peer inside the target craft. You can also carry up to 4 repair kits in a stack in one inventory slot.