jimmymcgoochie

I keep warning people about the KSC canteen’s five-bean chilli surprise, but they never listen…

Worth mentioning Station Science, the parts are large and power-hungry but the experiments are in little pods that are easy to send up to a station and return to the surface. Loads of science available from those and work everywhere in space. There’s another station-based science mod that relies on KIS/KAS but I can’t remember it’s name, maybe NEOS? There’s KDEX (Kerbal Dust EXperiment), adds a single part and experiment for space-based science; DMOS (DMagic Orbital Science), adds many science thingies; KrakenScience, though that may be out of date now; Interkosmos, Solar Science.,. There’s also Kerbalism, which makes science experiments take time to run and makes some experiments (e.g. mystery goo and materials bay) produce samples (not data, real physical samples) that need to be returned to Kerbin or processed in a lab to get science. Science-only config works in 1.12.2 as far as I’ve tested it, compatibility with some mods e.g. DMOS is available but not with others, worth a look if you don’t like the one click science system in stock but be warned, some experiments take years- or even decades!

Here’s a handy guide to getting your log files and making them available: For PC/laptop specs it’s usually RAM and CPU clock speed that matter- KSP is bottlenecked by single-core processor speed as the physics calculations are all done in one processor thread and have to be run for each frame on the screen, but that only really affects how slow the game gets with lots of parts on the same craft; if you run out of RAM the game (and sometimes the PC/laptop itself) will probably freeze and/or crash, which sounds like what you’re seeing. Try running KSP with task manager open on the tab that shows all the graphs (performance?) and watch your RAM use as it loads- if you hit 100% or close to it, you’re probably running out of RAM and the only way that I know to fix that with stock KSP is to get more RAM. Close everything you possibly can that isn’t KSP before playing KSP to save RAM, even Steam itself once the game starts loading.

Came back from a week-long trip home, saw signs for a satellite exhibition at the airport (because apparently they want to turn it into a spaceport too?), but the signs were pointing the wrong way and I couldn’t find the way in . Probably best not to accidentally trespass on an active airport, I’ve heard they don’t take very kindly to that sort of thing…

Threw a couple of probes at Dres and Minmus to get some long-term science and improve communications. I need about 50 more to unlock some additional deployed science equipment which will then justify going out to Dres and Minmus again to deploy said equipment, and also fix up the deployed mystery goo machines which have scraped up a whopping 2% data over the last 110 or so Kerbin days; a good scientist could boost the miserable 5% science generation rate to 45% or more and there are contracts riding on getting at least 50% of that data back, preferably sooner than 7 years’ time…

Hello and welcome to Talking Over Each Other, the best panel debate show on TV! Guaranteed to make the auto-subtitles glitch out, every time! Joining us this week: - Vice-Premier Samantha P Kerman, everyone's favourite deputy leader of Kerbin's world government; - Director Eugene F Kerman, everyone's favourite leader of the Kerbal Space Program; - Captain Alexei Ogorodnikov, everyone's favourite cameo in the wrong mission report; - Senpai Tegun B Kerman, everyone's favourite eco-cult-thingy representative who was supposed to be on the news half an hour ago but turned up late so ended up on here instead; - and last, but by no* means least, Larry N Kerman, everyone's favourite* tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theorist. Now please welcome your host- Kerboooooooooooooooooooooo*gasp*oooooooooo Keeeeeeeermaaaaaaaaannnnnnnn!!!*cough*anyone got a throat lozenge? Kerbo: Hello everyone! It's great to be here for another episode of Talking Over Each Other, the show that puts a bunch of people together to argue about stuff and ignore each other's opinions completely. If you haven't guessed already, tonight's theme is The Anomaly, the great cataclysm that shook all of Kerbin- indeed all of the kerbolar system- fifty years ago today. Larry: Lies! Kerbo: OI! Red light on, guests stay silent. Capisce? Larry: ...fine. Kerbo: Tonight you're going to hear five very different takes on those events, hopefully all at the same time, but first each guest gets ten seconds to make their case. Random selector, select randomly! *blinding spotlights flashing in the guests' faces* Kerbo: Larry, you're up first! Larry: Gah, my eyes! And what's with the asterisks in my introduction? *klaxon* Kerbo: Time's up! Random selector! *more blinding spotlights* Kerbo: Tegun, your turn! Tegun: *shuffles notes* well, er, um, we, that is... *squints at notes* I think it's- *klaxon* Kerbo: Time! Random selector! *strobe party* Kerbo: VP Sammy, you're up! Samantha: I had to leave that memorial service early, sit in traffic for an hour and a half and skip two meals, for this!? *klaxon* Kerbo: TIME! RANDOM SELECTOR! *much flash, so wow* Kerbo: Alexei! Alexei: And I thought 12 kilotons of rocket powered by 19 pentaborane engines was crazy... *klaxon* Kerbo: TIME! NEXT! *only one person left, so why not strobe the lights in their face?* Kerbo: Looking at you, Gene! (heh heh, get it? Eugene?) Gene: We launched a space station to the Mun today. *klaxon* Kerbo: Woah, hold up a minute. Did you say space station to the Mun? Gene: Uh, yes. Larry: Lies! Samantha: That wasn't in the last budget statement! Gene: The Azimuth Space Station wasn't as expensive as we originally thought and we managed to reuse a few existing modules already in orbit, so there was enough left over to launch the Mun station. Kerbo: Got any pictures? Gene: Why yes, yes I do... Gene: Station and propulsion systems were launched separately due to size and mass constraints on the launch system, but that also means the station is more modular and can be extended in the future. Gene: We sent the station out fully provisioned but with no crew on board. This was the first use of the "Harrier" methalox rocket engine and it performed flawlessly throughout the mission. Gene: And less than twelve hours after the first launch, the station was parked in an equatorial orbit of the Mun. Once that was in position we sent up the crew, led by the first Kerbal to walk on the Mun, Commander Valentina Kerman. Larry: Lies! The Mun landings were faked! Tegun: Well then why did they bother with the whole "engine exploded" thing? Gene: A couple of days later, the crew arrived at the station, however they had to remotely activate the station's external lights to dock safely as the docking occurred in the dark. Alexei: As is right and proper. Gene: Seriously, what's with that? Why is docking in the dark "right and proper"? Where's that coming from!? Larry: It's a conspiracy! Tegun: It's a message from beyond the fourth wall! Larry: They're planting trees on Duna! Tegun: They're planting flags to contain the Kraken! Larry: It's the Kerbulans! Tegun: It's the Magic Boulders! Kerbo: Clicky clicker, click! Samantha: So many references getting mangled right now... Tegun: That's it! *throws herself at Larry* Larry: Aaaugh! Not the face! Tegun: Fine! Larry: Aaaugh! Not there either! *audience participation time!* *massive brawl erupts in the studio* Kerbo: And that's all we have time for tonight! *dodges flying brick* We'll be back again tomorrow, same time, same channel, for another episode of Talking Over Each Other! Bye for now! *massive strobe party, because it wasn't chaotic enough with the mass brawl and all* Alexei woke up suddenly, heart pounding. He pulled back the curtain and looked out into the sky above Cape Canaveral, sighing in relief as he spotted the familiar- and very much not gigantic- crescent moon hanging in the sky overhead, casting a weak glow over the Kennedy Space Centre. Whatever that crazy dream was, with the bizarre planetary orbits, the anarchic TV show and the bewildering yet oddly familiar string of references, it was all over now. In fact the memory of it was already fading. Just a dream... Right? While in the Kerbal Space Centre's medical centre, Linus suddenly sat bolt upright, exclaimed "Of course!", then collapsed senseless to the floor.

If I had to guess, I'd say you need more RAM. I recently tried to run KSP on an old laptop with 4GB of RAM and it didn't work- it took over half an hour to load, sat at 100% RAM use for most of that, finally reached the main menu screen and promptly crashed to desktop. (Admittedly this was with some mods, but I doubt stock KSP would be much better.) @ray17241 What do you mean by "when the download starts"? Do you mean when the KSP loading screens appear with the yellow progress bar at the bottom? Does it reach "expansion loading complete" and then crash/freeze, or does it fail earlier in the load process? The log file you've attached is very short and contains no errors, which to me suggests you're running out of RAM. (@maddog59 not sure why you think I'm a technical expert ah well, fake it 'til you make it, right? )

Try downloading EVO again, clear the existing copy out of KSP then install the new one. Also check you have all the dependencies and haven’t included the EVE default configs as well.

A few things to think about for interplanetary trips: Unless you have a magic torch drive with really high thrust and delta-V in the millions, you can’t just go anywhere whenever you feel like it. Planets move at different speeds around their star, often with orbits at different inclinations, so you need to pick the right time to travel between them to minimise the delta-V expended to get from A to B. You can get a feel for interplanetary transfers by going from the Mun to Minmus or vice versa- the fuel costs are much lower, travel times shorter and transfer windows much more frequent than going interplanetary so it’s a good way to practice. Long burn times are bad for three reasons: first, cosine losses, caused by burning in a direction that isn’t directly pro/retrograde, mean you expend more delta-V than you actually accelerate, so basically you’re throwing away delta-V; second, with burn times that long the burn represents a significant proportion of your total orbital period so you’ll probably be burning almost directly towards the surface to start, causing cosine losses and also pushing your periapsis down towards the atmosphere and probably into it; and third, the accuracy of your burn will be drastically worse with a longer burn time as the node tool assumes you change velocity instantaneously to reach the new trajectory- for a burn lasting one minute the accuracy is pretty good, but for one lasting 16 minutes it’ll be really bad. There are a couple of tricks to make those long burns more manageable: you can break it up into smaller chunks by performing a series of periapsis kicks, with each burn lasting a minute or two and boosting your apoapsis higher without getting significant cosine losses or losing accuracy too much, before the final burn to escape velocity completes the transfer- you can tweak the nodes after each burn to ensure you’re staying on target and for propulsion systems with issues around heating, charging or anything that would make a single continuous burn problematic this is a good way to go. There’s a mod called Maneuver Node Splitter that can do this automatically. You could also try a spiral trajectory by breaking the burn up into a series of evenly spaced chunks of e.g. 100m/s to find your starting point, then hold prograde and burn continuously and you should end up going in roughly the right direction. For planets which are at different inclinations, you’ll almost never get a transfer window at the relative ascending or descending node so you’ll need to change planes at some point. It’s more efficient to do this as part of your transfer burn when staying in the inner system (inside of Duna) as the cost of changing planes in solar orbit is high down there and you’ll get a bit of Oberth effect in Kerbin orbit, but for going to the outer system it can be cheaper to do your plane change in solar orbit as the velocity is lower and so the cost is reduced. A mid-course correction also allows you to fine-tune your approach to the target, giving you the chance to set up an encounter with a moon (e.g. with Tylo to help capture into Jool orbit for free) or to avoid one (e.g. with Ike which interferes with a lot of Duna missions) or to fix your periapsis to get the desired orbit of the target planet when you arrive. There are a bunch of tools available to plot transfer burns between planets- MechJeb, Astrogator and the 1.12 stock maneuver tool can all make the nodes for you, while others like Transfer Window Planner will show you when and where to put the nodes.

Built a space station for the Mun with all the mod-cons: life support for years, long-duration crew experiments, oodles of solar power with loads of batteries and a pair of backup fuel cells to get through the dark periods, several docking ports for visiting crews to use and tasteful lighting to show where the doors and docking ports are, and to illuminate the station so it can be spotted when rendezvousing in the dark. As is right and proper. Propulsion system to get it to the Mun deployed separately due to mass limits, supplies and fuel sent separately as well for the same reason. No crew yet, the station itself is parked in LKO for now to await its crew and then head over to the Mun.

At what point does KSP2 become Dyson Sphere Program/Satisfactory/Factorio/etc.? Connecting up different production and consumption sites should be left to an automated system to manage, not a manual system that needs to be monitored and maintained while your attention could be elsewhere.

Press F4 to toggle the craft markers. Some of those Strategia strategies don’t work properly with Kerbalism, especially those that change science rewards. And yes, the coasts on Ash are hot. Very hot…

Check the recycle bin?

Can you provide logs? Here’s how: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/83213-stock-support-bug-reporting-guide/ Check your GPU drivers are up to date, that’s a common cause of game crashes. Does the same thing happen in other games, or when using the integrated graphics system on the motherboard?

The missing Swivel is a known issue- the Swivel engine got a new model in 1.12.2, but this is a new part and the old one got hidden in the tech tree as for other older models; the tutorials didn’t get updated though so are still looking for the old engine that isn’t there. You can still find the Swivel in the tutorial though, click the arrows in the top left of the screen then the tabs to search by size (1.25m) or manufacturer (Jeb’s Junkyard).

MLI is a type of foil-like insulation added to spacecraft to insulate them against the heat coming in from the sun and/or the frigid cold of space, I think mostly to reflect solar heat away as spacecraft tend to have more trouble staying cool than staying warm with all those electronic systems generating waste heat and limited options to get rid of it. The current HECS2’s gold exterior is one example of foil-type insulation and the Restock mod gives most stock probe cores the option of having gold or silver foil on the outside. MLI is also used to insulate fuel tanks to prevent cryogenic propellants from boiling away into space; this isn’t modelled at all in stock KSP but for real rockets boiloff is a real issue as liquid hydrogen, methane and oxygen will all slowly evaporate away and escape, which MLI can slow down or even stop by preventing heat from the sun from reaching the cold liquid(s) inside.

For some silky reason the default key controls for wheels are WASD, which also control pitch and yaw; the yaw bit is OK, but pitching when you want to drive is annoying and unhelpful. Change your key binds so you drive with the arrow keys and that problem is solved forever, you can keep full SAS and reaction wheel control without it interfering with your rover driving.

The pressure parameter sets the minimum atmospheric pressure that the parachute needs in order to deploy- this will need to be adjusted depending on where you’re going- Duna has a really thin atmosphere with a maximum pressure of 0.06atm (6kPa), so you’ll need to set the minimum pressure on your parachutes as low as you can or they just won’t open before you hit the ground; in contrast, Eve’s maximum pressure is several atmospheres (either 400 or 500kPa, I can’t remember which) so you should set them to open as late as possible to reduce the strain on the chutes, and to reduce the time you spend floating down to the surface. Once the parachute deploys, it’s only half open and won’t provide maximum drag until it fully opens. The altitude parameter sets the altitude above the surface that the parachute fully opens and provide full drag. Keep in mind that it takes about 5 seconds for the parachute to fully open up after it’s triggered so don’t set this number too low- anywhere from 650 to 1000m is suitable for Kerbin, I’d go as high as possible on Duna and really low on Eve (500m or maybe even less). There’s a third option that I think is enabled with “advanced tweakables” switched on in the main menu settings, which has three options- deploy when safe, when risky or immediately: when safe is the default and will wait until you’re going slow enough that deploying the parachute won’t break it, when the parachute icon is white in the staging menu, but that also means that there’s a chance the parachute never deploys or deploys too late to slow you down; when risky is just that, opening the parachutes when the icon is orange, with a risk of breaking the parachutes but also a chance that they’ll be fine and will open early enough to slow you down; immediate is also self-explanatory, the chute will deploy at the pressure and altitude values you set regardless of whether it’ll survive or not, you’d need to be pretty desperate to use this option as odds are the parachute will just break. In the staging menu the parachute icon can be white (safe to deploy but not armed), orange (risky) and red (unsafe), but will turn blue when it’s armed by staging. The background also changes colour, going orange or red when the conditions are too hostile to deploy the chutes e.g. during re-entry. Drogue chutes can deploy faster and at lower pressures than mains and will help slow the craft down before the mains deploy, for high value craft (like crew pods) and larger craft it’s worth adding a drogue chute or two to make sure that the main chutes will work properly. When landing a crew capsule on Kerbin I usually have the main parachutes set to 0.6atm pressure and 750m altitude, this is enough to open the parachutes well above the terrain unless it happens to be heading straight into some mountains- in which case I drag the pressure all the way down so the chutes open as soon as possible. I always leave the parachutes set to “deploy when safe”, it’s rare that the situation would require anything else.

Watching you try to fill up those tiny cargo containers when there’s a whopping great 2.5m cylinder with massive capacity right there… You could get so many batteries in that thing. You’re also sending the data using one of the HG-5 dishes which isn’t set to allow partial (there are four of them!), set them ALL to allow partial and it’ll send that science back.

You’re doing things right, but maybe a higher orbit will help? The narrow FOV is less of an issue up there and you should be able to see everything and mark them. Alternatively, use SCANsat and do an anomaly scan to automate the whole process and get usable maps with precise locations that you can then use on other crafts without messing around with waypoints etc.

Mod list, definitely; logs, preferably; screenshots, absolutely! And also the version of the game you’re using.

Tried to run KSP on my old laptop that I recently rediscovered (4GB RAM and it uses 2.2 just idling on the desktop ). 35 minutes later it finally made it to the main menu screen- and promptly crashed. Bah .

Internal views are a big cause of lag and slow performance and the more Kerbals are on board, the worse it gets as the game has to keep track of each one. One option is to delete the IVA views, but deleting stuff from mods can be a risky proposition if you do ‘t know what you’re doing, let alone from stock parts. Option two is keep your crew count small as fewer Kerbals = fewer internal views to keep track of.

@devblazer Facility upgrade costs are controlled by the “funds penalties” setting in the difficulty options, increasing that to e.g. 200% makes them cost twice as much. The world first payouts can give you a significant amount of money for doing new things, but if you don’t want it, just get rid of the money using the cheats menu. You could also turn on unlock parts in the difficulty settings so you have to research tech nodes with science and then buy individual parts before you can put them on a craft (I think this is to simulate tooling the manufacturing processes, buying blueprints etc.) which adds to the cost of progressing through the game.

Look at the part and where the contract wants you to take it: a solid booster or a powerful launch engine isn’t much use in space so don’t take those contracts if it wants the part to go beyond Kerbin’s SOI; in contrast the Poodle, while quite large and heavy, is the best (non-DLC) bipropellant engine in the game as well as producing over four times the thrust of the Terrier, so taking that further afield isn’t too difficult. Then think about what else you could use the part for- a powerful solid rocket (e.g. Thumper) or booster engine (e.g. Mainsail) could be very useful if you used it regularly, giving your launch rockets more payload capacity depending on the part/weight limits you’re working with. Early access to something like the Poodle could make sending larger missions to other planets easier when the Terrier alone wouldn’t be enough. And finally, check the tech tree- is the part in a tech node you’ll unlock soon? Would being able to access it earlier make things easier for you in the short term so that you could complete the contract later on? If the part is in an expensive tech node or one locked behind an R&D upgrade, consider taking the contract even if the conditions are a bit weird (Thumper to the Mun or Minmus, for example) as getting access to that part we’ll ahead of time is more valuable than the contract itself. A single Thumper can be a potent first stage for a small-ish and cheap-ish launch rocket, for example, even if throwing one out of Kerbin’s SOI seems like a tall order- and besides, nobody said that Thumper had to have any fuel in it while on that escape trajectory .