jimmymcgoochie

Welcome back to Bob's Duna Adventure! Today Bob spotted something odd on the horizon and decided to take a closer look... Up close, it turned out to be a strangely familiar looking rock formation. The rock was very unusual- nay, unnatural- as at times it looked to Bob like he was sinking into the surface yet at others he seemed to be floating some distance above it, all while standing on something solid. How odd. He tried planting a flag in the rock, which worked exactly as it was supposed to. Linus: WOAH! Bob found a Phantom Boulder! Wernher: A what now? Linus: You know how occasionally we see a rock or something that levitates above the ground? Wernher: No!? Linus: Really? You've never noticed that? I see them all the time on the rover cameras. Anyway, those are Phantom Rocks and their apparent dimensions don't quite match their real ones- sometimes you can collide with it even though it looks like you didn't, and sometimes it looks like you did but you didn't. Jeb: That sounds like that asteroid I went chasing after, the entire Klaw seemed to sink through the surface before the grapples engaged. I'm pretty sure Val said something similar happened to her. Linus: Yeah, that's a Phantom Boulder alright- they're much bigger than the Phantom Rocks, but exactly what causes this phenomenon is still a mystery. Cliff: Quantum physics shenanigans. It's always quantum physics shenanigans. Linus: ...anyway, they can occasionally be dangerous and cause strange things to happen if you stay around one for too long. I think some of the problems we had with the first few generations of rovers were caused by them interacting badly with Phantom Rocks and Boulders and I've been noticing some of the same symptoms in the data coming back from the rover on Duna too. Wernher: Sounds like we should tell Bob to leave it alone before anything happens to him or the rover. Linus: Agreed. Gene: I thought they were Magic Boulders? Wernher: No, that's something completely different. *** Mortimer: Ah, Wernher. Do come in. Wernher: I do have to warn you- what I'm about to propose will be rather expensive. Mortimer: Oh boy... Wernher: The simple fact is, we can just about get to Moho with a small-ish payload and a fairly large transfer stage with a nuclear engine; we could probably get there with a bigger payload if we used a huge transfer stage with more and/or bigger nuclear engines, a bit like the one that's currently being used by the Duna mission; but there's simply no way that we can get back from Moho without managing to conjure up a huge amount of extra delta-V from somewhere. Mortimer: You're not seriously thinking about sending a crew to Moho, are you? Wernher: Well, yes. But before we do that, we need to be able to get them back. After reviewing the data we've gathered from Moho it's clear that there's absolutely no water to be found, which is a problem because we need water to get hydrogen to make fuel. However, the data coming back from Gilly suggests that there is some water present in certain areas. Unfortunately, those areas don't coincide with areas where carbonaceous minerals can be found, which is a problem because we need carbon to make fuel too. Mortimer: Let me guess, you want to send a mining machine to Gilly to make fuel. Wernher: Not exactly- I want to send two mining machines to Gilly to make fuel. One can specialise in producing hydrogen in regions where there's water while the other can specialise in producing carbon and turning it into fuel. Then all we need is a fuel tanker of some kind to haul the produced fuel up to the waiting ships in orbit and we have a means of getting back from Moho. Wernher: This is the water miner- the tanks on the sides will store liquid hydrogen because it's much denser and easier to store it as a liquid than a gas. Wernher: And this is the carbon miner. It can make fuel and also oxidiser, which will mostly be needed for the RCS on the tanker as trying to make hydrazine for monopropellant RCS thrusters is a much more complex production chain. Wernher: And this is the tanker. That entire tank at the bottom will carry the fuel up to ships in orbit, the other tanks are just for fuel for the tanker itself to use to get around. Mortimer: OK, just give it to me straight- how much will all this cost? Wernher: If we send both miners on the same transfer stage down to Moho, then send the tanker separately, about... 600,000 funds. More or less. Mortimer: Six hundred thousand!? Wernher: Oh, wait, I forgot launch costs- these things will be pretty heavy so we'll need that big SSTO rocket Bill and Bob made to haul them into space, then a few flights of the Kronus to fill up the tanks because they're too heavy to launch with full tanks. Factor all that in and I'd say it'll take about a million funds in total. Mortimer: You do realise, don't you, that we don't have a million funds? Wernher: Really? I thought we had loads of funds? Mortimer: Had. Past tense. Until somebody decided they had to buy the toolings and integration systems for EVERY. SINGLE. ROCKET. PART. IN. EXISTENCE. AT. THE. SAME. TIME! Bob: Hey, everyone? I just drove up to this really weird looking pyramid-shaped mountain and suddenly my radio seems to be broken. It's playing this really annoying beeping sound on a loop, like I've got a phone call incoming or something. Linus: I think I know what that sound is. *keyboard mashing* Wernher: What is it? Linus: Decoding, one second... Bobak: ...I don't get it? Wernher: So we have four figures standing next to a pyramid firing a beam of some sort out of its peak, then three white blobs above an orange one, and something that looks like a weird hybrid of F, T and P with another blob in the other corner? Cliff: Fascinating... But also utterly meaningless. Linus: The orange blob could be the sun, or Duna itself, or even another star- Bob: That's great and all, but have you recorded this yet so I can leave? It's really getting on my nerves.

Realistic Progression One: allow me to introduce myself. Not interested in trying to replicate the real life Space Race? Probes before Crew, UnKerballed Start, Unmanned before Manned etc.: allow us to introduce ourselves. Also, it’s Kerbal Space Program- dithering around with dinky little planes and puny little probes that can’t even clear the atmosphere isn’t much fun compared to getting your first Kerbal into orbit- and bringing them back!

Somehow I don’t think NASA et al would ever launch a spacecraft with a “Mary Poppins drive”, it just doesn’t have the gravitas of [insert Greco-Roman mythological being here] that they use for everything else. Also it was already called Medusa since the 50s/60s so too late to change it now

Coming at this from probably the wrong direction, but- instead of yeeting nukes out the back of your spacecraft and using a dinky little pusher plate to take the hits, just stick a huge parachute in front of your spacecraft and yeet the nukes forwards instead; the chute catches more energy from each nuke, provides a smoother acceleration curve as there’s a lot of cables etc. between chute and spacecraft to act as shock absorbers plus the whole assembly is designed to reel in and out with each blast, and doesn’t need to be as heavy as a pusher plate or be coated with ablator to not melt from the nuclear explosions. And thus we have Medusa.

Whoops, missed that

Can you provide the log files please? They’ll likely contain important information about what’s going wrong and could suggest a solution. Here’s what to do:

Q: Why does my plane veer violently off the runway? Supplemental answer: Wheel friction can cause this. Enable advanced tweakables in the main menu settings, then select the front landing gear, set “friction control” to “override” and reduce friction to <1, preferably <0.5, which will make the front wheel less likely to ‘dig in’ and cause the plane to pivot around it. It’s also a good idea to use a lower brake force setting on the front wheels and a higher one on the rear wheels for the same reason. Q: Why doesn’t my plane lift off the runway? Supplemental answer: KSP wings produce lift based on angle of attack alone, there’s no aerofoil-based lift involved. If you put your wings onto the plane pointing straight into the airflow (zero angle of attack), they produce zero lift; if you attach your wings and then rotate them a few degrees so the leading (front) edge is above the trailing (rear) edge, they’ll have a positive angle of attack and will produce lift even when the node of your plane is level with the ground on the runway. Increasing the angle of attack too far can cause excessive drag at higher speeds though, so it’s a good idea to combine this technique with a landing gear setup that has the nose raised slightly when landed to increase your angle of attack even more on the runway. Q: Do I have to bring those experiments back? Supplemental answer: Most experiments will give you some of their data if you transmit it back, but in many cases this is less than 100% of the available science for that experiment. Experiments that produce (theoretically) physical samples such as materials bays and mystery goos will give much less science for transmitting than for returning the data to Kerbin inside a craft, and many experiments require multiple runs of the same experiment in the same situation to give full data; again, materials bays and mystery goos are notable examples. However, you don’t need to bring the science instruments themselves back to Kerbin- just the data. You can transfer data into an Experiment Return Unit and send that back, have a Kerbal get out of the craft, take the data from each instrument and store it in a pod (or ERU) and in the case of Scientists, reset materials bays and mystery goos so they can be used again. In addition, you can store more than one copy of each experiment’s data on a craft as long as they’re in different parts- it’s usually impossible to store duplicate data on a single part, but if you have a pod with an ERU on it you can store e.g. a mystery goo sample from Kerbin space low in both the pod and the ERU and get the science points from both when you return the craft to Kerbin. Some experiments e.g. materials bays are not particularly sturdy and often won’t survive re-entry so transferring the data into something more resilient is a good idea.

At some point the forum software got updated and broke some special characters. The Mun was sometimes called Mün and the ü got mangled.

Val: It's time. Bob: Wait, wait, I'm not ready! Val: Too bad, you actually need to go right now or you'll miss the landing zone near to the rover that's already on the surface. Get in that lander already! Bob: Science! Val: Get. In. The. Lander. Gene: Val's right, Bob- go now or you'll have to wait for another Dunan day to try again. Bob: *nervous* OK, OK, I'm going. Bob: Drogue chutes deployed, that's a lot of Gs! Val: Only five, you're just used to the 0.3g in the centrifuge. Bill: True, but that means you're acclimated to Duna gravity. Val: Just needs a little dab of throttle, and- done! Bob: Mission Control, this is Duna Lander, landed on Duna. * riotous celebrations!!!!! * Bob: Proceeding with post-landing activities now. Bob: Not sure about the six-iron though, could have done with a bit less loft in this lower gravity. Maybe a two or three next time? Gene: Sorry to interrupt, but- Bob, can you look straight at the camera for a minute, then turn around and face directly away from it? Bob: Sure... Bobak: Is that helmet painted backwards? Gene: It looks like it. How did that happen? Bob: Huh. I thought it looked a bit weird... Linus: Taxi for Robert! And so begins tonight's special programme, Bob's Duna Adventure! Bob set off in his trusty rover, ready to find ALL THE SCIENCE! across Duna's surface. He ventured north towards the polar ice caps, where he found a strange rock: Alas, the rock was too big for him to pick up and too metallic for his little pickaxe to break a chunk off. Instead, he wandered over to a strange rock formation nearby and chiselled some "blueberries" off from the cluster. Next, Bob headed south, catching some great views of Duna and its two moons as he wandered from place to place to get those precious science reports and samples. He tried to drive west as much as possible by day to prolong the daylight, but couldn't quite outrun the sun so had to slow down drastically by night to preserve power. His quest for science is nearly complete- only a few biomes are left on his checklist and will soon be ticked off. Linus: Don't worry, my children on Moho and Eve, I haven't forgotten about you! Wernher: That rover really doesn't like going uphill. Linus: It's the gravity that's the issue, although those wheels have pretty puny motors in them which doesn't help too much. Wernher: And what about the Moho rover? Linus: Heading for a strange sensor reading near Moho's south pole, although that reading wasn't always showing up in the scan data so it might not actually be there at all. Cliff (Wernher's new intern): Boss! Boss! There's a serious problem over in Research and Development! Wernher: What is it? Cliff: Well, there's no other way to say it- they've run out of things to research! Wernher:

When you watch someone else playing KSP and think "Move over, amateur, this is how you do it!" Or when they finally realise, half an hour into the video, the mistake that I spotted after about 30 seconds and have been yelling at the screen about since.

If you have scatterer installed, it might be that water bug in scatterer, if you have water collision effects on then it can act like a magic trampoline and bounce stuff until it gets smashed to bits.

“Clipping the solar panel through the ground broke it, repairing it broke it again, but maybe if I repair it again it will magically not break?” Just take it off and reattach at a different angle! Also you completely failed to get Theooly to set up those deployed experiments so they’ll be incredibly slow at generating data, except the weather analyser which doesn’t work in vacuum, and you completely missed the deployed antenna part too.

So I decided to try updating this save from 1.12.1 to 1.12.2 to a) get ground anchors, b) get some bug fixes and c) because I wanted to. My last attempt at doing this ended horribly with many errors, but this time I decided to just make a copy of the 1.12.1 version I've been using so far, then just copy+paste 1.12.2 on top of it, replacing all duplicate files with the 1.12.2 versions. Amazingly, this seems to have worked- the game loads, the save loads and nothing has thrown a million exceptions in the logs or exploded yet. I'll need to try it out a bit more to see if it's stable, but early signs are definitely positive. And knowing my luck, by the end of this week 1.12.3 will appear

More information please- screenshots(!), KSP version, mod list and game logs if you can, here's how to get them: Without knowing what mods you're using it's nearly impossible to guess what's going on.

Go to KSP/saves/(your save name)/backups, copy those backup save files and paste them in the folder up then try loading them in game and see if any of them don't have the problem? (Also the text in your post isn't wrapping across lines for some reason, that's a bit weird...)

Linus: The probe now departing from platform 2 is the Eve Sampler service non-stop to Kerbin. Gene: Can you just... not? If you think you're being quirky, you're not- you're just being annoying and I'm getting tired of it. Linus: Bobak: Joolshot 2 has arrived at Jool, on course for Tylo gravity assist to capture. Gene: See, that's how to give a mission update! Linus: *sniffling* The Eve Rover is approaching Eve, ready for EDL procedure. Gene: See? That wasn't too difficult, was *KLAXON!* what was that!? Linus: Two... Two hundred Gs!?!? *faints* Bobak: How did that thing even survive those sorts of forces? Wernher: Eve Rover touchdown confirmed, all equipment is deployed. We'll give it a shakedown to see if anything was damaged during that, uh, aggressive aerobraking, but so far it all seems OK. Bobak: That image seems really dark, maybe the camera is damaged? Or maybe that ambient light booster thingy is switched off? Wernher: No, the camera is fine and the booster is on; Eve is just really dark at night. Bobak: Oh. Wernher: But there's a suspiciously light blob over there that looks like a prime candidate to test the scanning arm on. Linus: Owww, my head. What happened? Wernher: You fainted. But here's something to perk you up again: the Eve Rover is down safely and fully operational, plus we're about to get the last seismic data from the Mun rover- Wernher: Ah. That's unfortunate. Linus: *faints* Val (from Interplanetary Ship 1): Hey Kerbin, how's our Duna rover doing? Is it there yet? Gene: Status update on the Duna rover? Bobak: It's, uh... *frantic typing* Bobak: Flying past the moons, with a nice view to boot. Plenty of fuel left to brake before landing as long as we set the parachutes to deploy at minimum pressure. Bobak: And... Bobak: Touchdown! All systems check out nominally, including that self-righting motor on the roof. Val: Hey Bob, come check out your new ride! Bob: Cool, is that the- wait, why is it my new ride? Val: Because you're going down to Duna, obviously. Bill can do Pol and I'll go to Bop. Valmal: What about me? Val: You can do that science thing in the lab with the samples and stuff. That's basically the only reason they sent you along with us. Valmal: That's not true! Gene: It, kind of, is... Val: Prepare for deceleration! Val: ...is that it? Wow, those NERVs are wimpy. Bill: We used up nearly all the oxidiser for the Wolfhound doing the transfer burn from Kerbin and what little we had left just got used now. Bob: The burn calculator was apparently including the thrust from the Wolfhound when it timed the start of the capture burn, so now we're well behind and the orbit won't be what we planned. Gene: Great... Bob: But the silver lining is we can get a better orbit, one that has its periapsis on the opposite side to Pol and so will never get caught by its gravity. Wernher: Nice work. One problem though- you appear to be in a near-polar orbit, which is great for not getting caught by the moons, but also bad for actually going to the moons when we want to and also not as good for landing and returning. Bob: Yeah, and we'll be in perpetual sunlight which is good for power and for the greenhouse, but bad for that lab experiment that requires darkness. Val: Why are you debating the merits of our orbit when you should be celebrating the fact that WE ARE IN ORBIT OF DUNA!!! WOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!! That night, the KSC had a party the likes of which they hadn't seen since the earliest days of the Space Program- those first tentative steps into the unknown, launching probes and Kerbals alike into the sky in the hope that they'd stay there for a while (and then come back, in the case of the Kerbals!). Valmal produced a small bottle of SpaceKaleTM vodka that she'd brewed along the way, which was tasted and by mutual agreement dumped out the nearest airlock. Such was the magnitude of the party that nobody had time to do the usual Probe Time! update; not that there were any probes to update about at that point, although the Super Relays that had previously ended up bunched in a line in solar orbit were all on the move via some weird resonant orbits and would be reassessed in a few years' time.

Can you be more specific? Screenshots would really help here.

Try pressing the # button on the top right of the part information window? That’s usually what does it.

Linus: MONTAGE! Gene: Wait wha- Linus: Laythe Quartet 2 is down! Linus: That's number three down... Linus: And four. And all landed on actual land! But we're not done yet! Gene: *hides under desk* Linus: Whoops, that was close- just 3m/s left in the tanks there! Linus: Hey, how come this thing thinks the "highlands" are below the "midlands"? Wernher: *terrified sobbing* Bobak: Why is that one so much darker than the rest? Linus: Forgot to turn the ambient light booster on, just a sec... Linus: There we go! Just one probe left, nice and easy- not that way mountain MOUNTAIN!- Linus: Sheesh, they should really warn you about things like that. Lost a solar panel on landing, though considering it ran out of fuel and hit at nearly 30m/s that's pretty good going. Now all we need to do is wait for the data to come oozing back at 0.1B/s or for all the parts to die from radiation damage. Nice work, team, everybody take five! Wernher: *still sobbing* Five isn't going to do it... *plane noises* Gene: What the-? Mortimer: Who did that? Sanlan: What? You said the signal back from Jool was terrible, so I made a relay to fix it. It has science-y stuff too and it'll last a really long time because it won't ever go down into the radiation belts. Think of it as a long-term investment in future Jool operations. *** Great. Someone totally stole our thunder by covering all those probe landings on Laythe and Vall. Ah well, looks like it's going to be a very short instalment of Probe Time! Gilly Scanner: 8/10. Started braking burn too late so flew right past Gilly at over 2km/s, eventually braked into orbit of Moho and managed to fly back to Gilly to capture into orbit. Gilly's SOI seems to be too small to support scanning operations even using parts with the lowest minimum altitudes possible. Insert outro link here. *In the KSC canteen* Gene: It's OK, Wernher, just breathe. Wernher: *breathing into paper bag* Linus: *sheepish* Hi, guys, sorry about earlier. I got a bit carried away. Gene: A bit? Linus: OK, a lot. But I do have some good news- I've fixed the Gilly scanner! Gene: How? Linus: Well, it was pretty simple really- I tweaked the config to increase Gilly's SOI by 5km so a probe can orbit above 20km to use the scanners found a resonant orbit around Gilly that uses the gravity of Moho to keep the probe from leaving Gilly's gravity. So far everything looks like it's working, though it might take a while to cover the whole surface because the probe's orbital period is almost the same as Gilly's rotation speed. Sanlan: Did he just talk in strikethrough text?

If you don’t have a signal then you can’t drive the rover. Check the keybinds in the main menu settings and change the keys for wheel co trolls from the default WASD to the arrow keys instead- this will make them separate to the attitude controls which makes driving a rover so much easier. Once you get a signal, make sure your brakes are off, motors enabled and you’re controlling from a forwards-facing control point; if you have advanced tweakables enabled (and it’s worth doing so) you can play around with friction and traction control settings to try and find the best combination to make that rover, er, rove.

Three landings on Laythe- all on actual land!- plus four on Vall to conclude the primary goals of the Laythe and Vall Quartet missions; science transmission rates are extremely slow and radiation levels are stupidly high (though Laythe's atmosphere takes ~95% of that off at sea level) plus some of those experiments are long duration so there might be some science that just can't be gathered or transmitted before the probes inevitably fail. If you've never played KSP with Kerbalism, just imagine a giant doughnut surrounding Jool, extending out as far as Tylo's orbit on the sunward side and even further than that on the outward side, where radiation levels can range from "what's that burning smell?" to "why do I have extra fingers?" on Tylo and then rise to "my eyes are bleeding!" on Vall and "my insides are melting!" in orbit of Laythe; Laythe's atmosphere absorbs most of it so the surface is relatively(!) safe, but still not a good idea to stay for too long, but Vall lacks such protection and is by some margin the deadliest place to land in the whole Kerbol system. Oh, and as if that wasn't enough, there's a second smaller ring just inside Laythe's orbit that's ten times worse and will kill anything and anyone that dares to enter it, shielding or no shielding.

Has anyone made a patch that adds LqdMethane options to NFX fuel tanks when CryoTanks/CryoEngines is installed?

Is anyone going to talk about the very obvious hazards of propelling your spacecraft with a relativistic projectile gun?

Landed on Laythe. No, really, landed on Laythe, which considering the fact that the entry capsule wanted to go pointy end (with parachute) first instead of blunt end (with heat shield) first, and there was limited fuel to try and pick a landing spot, and the general lack of land on Laythe generally, is saying something. I also managed a water landing with another probe but then the game did that weird can’t-save-can’t-leave-can’t-quit thing and I had to alt+F4 it so that lander is back in orbit again.

When driving a rover on Minmus you want: Minimal traction control (<0.5) so you can actually get the wheel torque down, otherwise it will stop the wheels from spinning and you’ll never get anywhere; Maximum friction control so the wheels can grip the surface, which also helps keep the traction control at bay; Maximum spring and damper strength so it can absorb the bumps; Front wheel steering only to avoid the risk of turning too fast and rolling; Brake strength much higher at the rear to stop it going head first onto its back if you brake; And have the wheel controls separate to your attitude controls- I set my wheels to work with the arrow keys rather than WASD. Try sending the station over towards that lander, then EVA the engineer (with some repair kits in their inventory) and fly over to the lander, bring it down beside the rover and fix up that antenna, grab the stray part on the surface and take that back up to orbit on the lander. It’s entirely possible to attach a probe core to a craft via EVA construction, it doesn’t even need to be the right way round as you can still control it from the lander can’s co tool point.