jimmymcgoochie

Olympus Mons is so large, if you stood at the base of it you wouldn’t be able to see the summit because it would be below the horizon.

I think the issue was that time-warping skipped the altitude requirement (<3500m AGL). So you want to try and land that upper stage with a TWR of over 25, no throttle and limited ignitions?

Buying hard copies of games is a thing of the past, necessitated by the lack of alternatives (downloading games would take days on a dial-up modem) and the waterfall development cycle that was all about one big release then minimal updates afterwards. Games have gotten much bigger since then, internet speeds have increased by orders of magnitude so downloading takes far less time and software development has (largely) shifted to smaller, iterative releases with incremental changes- just look at KSP itself with big feature updates every few months then a series of bug fixes after that as issues are found and resolved. If you’d bought KSP on a disk back when it was released as version 1.0, you’d be left with a horribly outdated version that would still require a sizeable download in order to be brought up to date, assuming your PC/laptop even has a disk reader in it (many don’t these days), plus you could lose or damage the CD/DVD/Blu-ray (delete as appropriate) and so lose the game completely. I’ve had games in the past that stopped working due to the CDs using formats that are no longer supported or because the code doesn’t work with a modern OS even with “compatibility mode”. Hard copies of games are an anachronism, unnecessary in the era of fibre broadband and iterative games development. Unless your internet connection has a data cap or is chronically slow, downloading games from an online platform like Steam is the way to go.

Mars Sample Return entering its final phase- returning the samples. This would be so much easier if I had enough fuel to do it, but I don’t so I had to improvise a bit: first I used up every last drop of fuel from the Mars sample lifter that has brought up some samples from the surface, then I dumped that, did a 180 and kept burning with the return craft’s own engines until it reached the right mass so I could decouple the main avionics on the nose to shed over 200kg, which was just enough to get the remaining pieces on course back to Earth. And when I say pieces, I of course mean that literally- I crashed back into the decoupled avionics and the magnetometer boom on the avionics broke a solar panel on the return bit. There should be just enough fuel left for the final course correction, then an attitude adjustment for re-entry at Earth and a bit of spin stabilisation; the re-entry capsule has RCS thrusters, but I forgot to put any fuel in it.

Recoverable boosters might help you. If you’re not interested in a “cheaty” mod like StageRecovery, modifying your launch profile to aim mostly up with your first stage and then circularising with the second stage fast enough that you can switch back to the first stage and land it (propulsively, via parachutes or even by sticking wings on it and gliding to the surface) can get a decent chunk of your launch costs back each time; even more if you can also recover the second stage from orbit.

Not really. Any differences due to the different orbital inclinations would be cancelled out by transferring between them at their relative ascending/descending nodes, though you may have to wait a while for that to happen at a time that also suits the departure burn. Any differences in Oberth effect for going to either moon first will disappear into the variations you get for different launch profiles, as would the difference from launching into the plane of Minmus (6 degrees) rather than the Mun (0 degrees).

Does the game freeze on the screen but continue to function in the background (can you still hear sound effects), and usually near terrain? This is something I’ve had in the past and the errors you’re getting in the logs are the same. I think KSP 1.12 updated its Unity version, which has caused this same problem in the past. Try downgrading your graphics drivers to an older version. If that doesn’t work: Create a desktop shortcut for KSP.exe; Right click the shortcut and click Properties; Where it has the path to the real KSP.exe, add the following: —force-opengl (with two dashes in front of it, in case that’s unclear) That will run KSP in a different graphics mode that might avoid this issue.

No. As far as I know, you can’t edit stuff like that while the game is running.

Sadly, no Mars ship departure yet. Instead I went and spent four days making a geostationary contract sat launcher. But first, I made this: It's a Mercury rover which should[citation needed] have the delta-V to make it down to Mercury, then down to the surface. It's also the first time I've tried a six-booster version of the White Cloud rocket, which I'm calling White Cumulus; at just over 4 kilotons it's about as far as I can push this design, there's no room for more boosters around the core. Now back to the geostationary rockets, which took so long because I painstakingly compared all the available options for the upper stage and second stage to find the best combination for each- comparisons were made between build cost and time, overall delta-V and burn time, mass, reliability and ignition count. The winning combination was an upper stage powered by the Agena 2000 and a second stage powered by the RD-57M; the Agena 2000 is pretty reliable and offered the best delta-V of any available hypergolic upper stage whilst maintaining a reasonable TWR and burn time, while the RD-57M offers better performance at a lower build cost and time than the other engines I tested for that role and 11 ignitions- but with a frankly terrible 14% ignition failure rate! With 5000 units of payload on board the F-1A first stage is a bit overpowered, producing a TWR of over 2 at full throttle and about 1.7 when operating at minimum throttle (about 85%), but with 10,000 units of payload the greater fuel requirements bring it down to a more reasonable 1.5 at full thrust. Testing concluded that geostationary contracts were feasible so the tanks were tooled up and two different rockets were made- Blue Chit holds 5k of payload, while its big brother Blue Chip holds 10k. That's all well and good, but that 14% failure rate is worryingly high and could really use some improving. Enter the Blue Meeple, a hasty conversion of the Blue Chit into a lunar orbit science probe with the best experiments money can buy. The reduced payload mass meant it could be launched on a first stage using two E-1As as an F-1A stage was stupidly overpowered, while the RD-57M on the second stage had extra telemetry to improve reliability as much as possible. Sure enough, the first ignition was a failure and once TLI was completed the remaining ignitions were used up to try and induce more failures; across the two Blue Meeple probes there were a total of three failures which improved the ignition failure rate from 14% to just 2.5%, which is much better. At the same time as those missions, I also launched a crew up to the Moon to fulfil that "crew the Moon station" contract that timed out a little while ago, as well as a crewed lunar orbit contract. Of course, this being me I didn't realise until they docked to the station that the lunar orbit contract required a higher orbit than the station was in so they'll need to do that before they go home... And while all that was going on, a crew were sitting in LEO for a couple of weeks for two more crewed orbit contracts. At this point I started experimenting with TUFX profiles- when I tried this before I got annoying circular artifacts on any planet or moon, but now that seems to have been resolved and it looks rather good. Before TUFX: After applying EVO 0.3's TUFX profile: Looks nice, right? And finally, the first real launch of a Blue Chit geostationary contract sat, which went totally according to plan with no- Oh, who am I kidding? It was terrible! First the gimbal on the F-1A was limited too far so it kept flipping out before it reached max Q, then the upper stage avionics were insufficient for the weight of the craft and it had to burn a load of fuel to regain control (while tumbling slowly and pointing retrograde for some of it!), then I messed up the calculation for the timing of the resonant orbit to get above the point on the surface that the contract wanted and did it backwards; fortunately for me I was doing it backwards to begin with, so the two backwards-es cancelled out and it ended up right where it was meant to go in one orbit. And once again, my contract curse struck: completing the geostationary weather sat contract meant that second-gen weather sat contracts are no longer offered, which removes the majority of the income for each Green Condor rocket launch. While I can still build them in just over a day and they have a large profit margin even with just sun-synchronous contracts, I feel like it's time to call a halt on that. After many years and close to a hundred successful launches across the various iterations of this design, this is the last launch of a 60 ton contract sat. Coming up next time: Mars ship departure? It might actually happen this time, but there's still more stuff I can do. There's a Mercury window about to open and a third White Galileo probe standing by to launch for it- this one uses a nuclear engine because why not; the Mercury rover won't be ready in time so will have to wait for the next one.

A screenshot isn’t that useful- please send the log files (upload to a file sharing site and then post the links here, please don’t copy and paste the logs into the forums as it makes it unusable).

Dwarf Planets Plus has a sort-of Planet Nine gas giant in it, though it seems to be long abandoned and says it’s only updated to 1.3.1 (which is odd, as I distinctly remember using it in 1.7.3…) and it works with OPM. JNSQ also features a Planet Nine, though you probably don’t want to install JNSQ just for that considering how much it changes, well, everything in the stock system (not least the 2.7x rescale). You could always create your own Planet Nine, either by editing the config for a suitable planet from a planet pack to move its orbit or making your own.

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Uh, what? Second stage double the weight of the first stage below it? That simply doesn’t add up- putting something heavy on top of something light will result in dreadful delta-V for the lower stage due to the high dry mass of the stuff on top. The lightest stuff has to go at the top; that’s how the rocket equation works. There’s also the requirement for a surface level TWR greater than 1 for the first stage to actually get to space in the first place, requiring big, powerful engines (and often boosters) to get moving and consequently lots of fuel to feed those engines, whereas the upper stages don’t need that as they’re not fighting directly against gravity and so can get away with smaller, lighter engines and tanks (hence why upper stages often use hydrogen as fuel). Look at real rockets- Saturn V, N1, Falcon 9, SLS, Ariane 5 etc. etc.- and notice how every single one has the heaviest stage on the bottom, in many cases with solid (SLS, Ariane 5, Atlas V) or liquid (Falcon Heavy, Ariane 4, R-7 and derivatives) boosters for extra thrust.

Build some really small, really cheap probes and throw them at Eve and Duna- at Eve you can try to aerobrake, though it’ll be a whole lot hotter than re-entry at Kerbin gets, while at Duna the atmosphere is much thinner so less heating but also less braking. In both cases you can try to get flyby, orbit, suborbital and entered atmosphere payouts as well as the possibility of buzzing their moons (Ike is much easier for this than Gilly) for more payouts.

You don’t need a plugin to do this, it should be possible with a ModuleManager patch (which is a .cfg file). That would look something like this: @PART[KerbalEVA*]:AFTER[Squad] { @MODULE[*whatever the MODULE is called, I can’t check right now but it’ll be in every KerbalEVA part file] { @walkSpeed = 3 } } Though with a walk speed of 3m/s they’ll look more like they’re skating across the surface than walking.

Whatever makes Saturn that golden yellow colour and whatever makes Uranus and Neptune blue must be present in Jool in roughly equal quantities.

No, stage 2 with the twin Poodles and the tiny tank.

Oh, you want humans in there!? I was really just going for atmospheric probes that you could yeet into the atmosphere, pop open the heatshield/aeroshell combo after slowing down enough and just unfurl a balloon like a parachute then use the RTG to heat it.

In a gas giant, the optimal means of flight would be a hot air balloon, filled with pure hydrogen if possible, using an RTG for both power and heat. It wouldn’t be controllable in the sense of moving around under its own power, but would have some altitude control and also uses the waste heat from the RTG (over 90% of its total watt output, from what I’ve read).

You already can- click the # button on the PAW and it switches to typing mode where you can type in the numbers you want.

I’d recommend a clean install of KSP as it seems yours has become corrupted in some way.

New geostationary contract sat launcher is finally finalised (must. not. tweak…) but the second stage engine is a new one with poor reliability. To make up for this I turned it into a science probe and sent a couple of them at the Moon, with extra telemetry on the second stage engines to maximise the data gained (and thus the reliability improvements); sure enough, first ignition was a failure but a) it gained about a thousand data units right away and b) the engine has another 10 ignitions left. After lobbing those probes at the Moon I repeatedly restarted the second stage’s engines to try and induce more failures, which actually worked and will improve reliability even more on the GEO sat rockets. Since I first had the thought “hmm, nothing much to build right now, maybe I can do some geostationary contracts for the money?” I’ve essentially spent four days worth of KSP time working on it…

Screenshots would really help here. Are you saying that if you picked up a part (e.g. an Ant engine) and hovered it over a part with inventory (e.g. a crew pod), it would automatically add the Ant to an inventory slot in the crew pod? KSP version, mod list, log files please; see this guide for how to get them:

Sounds like your save is getting corrupted by something. If you can, try to reproduce the issue and then grab the logs, put them on a file sharing site and post a link to them here. You might also want to try creating a fresh copy of KSP and adding RP-1 etc. through CKAN with the express install option.

You've put it in the wrong place- that's the KIS inventory, not the stock one. Stock inventory parts only work in the stock inventory.