jimmymcgoochie

You can change the deployment settings of (some?) RealChutes in flight by right-clicking them. Last time I checked, Lua’s biomes were a bit wonky with no sign of any Polar Highlands or Oceanic Craters anywhere on the biome map. And it’s always a good idea to check the full Kerbalism experiment descriptions before you launch (and whether or not a probe core has reaction wheels!), as well as checking the data production, capacity and transmission speeds so you don’t lose science by filling up the hard drive with low-value data.

Breathing pretty much anything without oxygen results in asphyxiation, but CO2 poisoning is very different physiologically than simple asphyxiation by breathing too little oxygen. It’s not the lack of oxygen that makes you want to breathe after holding your breath for a while, it’s the buildup of CO2 that does that- even single-digit percentages of CO2 in the air can rapidly cause problems and even single-digit percentages can be lethal or at least severely impair your performance; in contrast, breathing pure nitrogen or argon just makes you slow down and fall asleep without even noticing.

Liquid carbon!? If you find it, run away! Liquid hydrocarbons, on the other hand, are not only possible but entirely real- Saturn’s moon Titan has methane (and ethane?) lakes on its surface and with a reasonable distance from a star and a suitably thick atmosphere to prevent them boiling off, they could very easily be found on a planet or moon in KSP2 as well. Liquid CO2 is feasible, but needs a combination of temperature and pressure that’s probably less common than for liquid hydrocarbons. CO2 is also less useful as a raw material for stuff like making rocket fuel and is both poisonous and an asphyxiant; whereas methane can be used in both chemical and nuclear thermal rockets and many chemical processes to generate more complex molecules, and isn’t toxic- though it is very explode-y if you mix it with oxygen and I still wouldn’t want to breathe the stuff for any period of time.

Sometimes a simple solution is the best one. I used this: https://kerbalx.com/Mephisto/Simple-Eve-Ascent-Vehicle With a few modifications (heat shield, retro-rockets to deorbit, some wings to stop it flipping on re-entry and parachutes for landing), it’s easily capable of landing on Eve and returning- with a suitable landing site, the higher the better. And I did it twice on two different Grand Tour missions (hence the docking ports between the first and second stages, I had to connect it up in Eve orbit before going down) with the added weight of Kerbalism’s life support and supplies; without that it’ll be a lot more efficient. Requires Making History though (or you could use the Restock+ copies of the 1.875m tanks instead) but no robotic shenanigans to micromanage, just good old-fashioned brute force rocketry. Fun fact- without the radiation hazards of Kerbalism, you can use that upper stage to land just about everywhere else in the Kerbol system- Tylo is possible with a descent stage and Laythe might be too, but planes are a better choice there; add some parachutes and Duna is feasible too and all the other planets/moons/whatever “Dres” is can be managed with fuel to spare.

It’s worth taking a fresh look at the Des(s)ert Launchsite

1.12.1 was a hasty patch to fix a game-breaking bug, but 1.12.2 will probably take a few weeks/months yet. Whatever the reason for ground anchors being pulled from the release, it’s better to get them fully functioning in a while than buggy or broken sooner. Also consider the possibility that a sizeable portion of the KSP team have now moved over to KSP2 permanently.

A- persistent rotation is your best bet. I think you can set it up so that if you point your control point straight down at the planet, it’ll hold that orientation. B- this is a common issue for space stations, all the various reaction wheels are rarely balanced out properly and if the control point is near one end then switching SAS on can create asymmetric torque, which the SAS tries to correct but ends up worsening by overcorrecting each time until the station is oscillating and the SAS is slamming the controls side to side to try and stop it. A quick burst of time warp solves this problem by freezing the whole craft and resetting it, but not if you have persistent rotation! C- Near Future Construction has some square/rectangular ports that only dock at specific angles, as does PicoPort (though those are tiny, as the name suggests). Alternative methods for lining up dockings include using MechJeb’s ability to set your roll to a particular number, allowing easy docking alignment and station construction, or 1.12’s rotating docking ports which can correct for slight angle errors (up to 15 degrees).

Make your probe as small and more importantly as light as possible. It might seem like you should cram as much fuel as possible on there, but the delta-V gains on that stage are often marginal and the extra weight will reduce the delta-V of your other stages and could end up reducing your total delta-V. You should also keep an eye on your TWR as a low TWR increases burn duration which can lead to cosine losses (due to burning in a direction that isn’t directly prograde/retrograde) that waste delta-V. After a lot of experimenting, I’ve found that if you want a payload mass below 7 tons (probe plus propulsion) or the cheapest mission possible, it’s better to use the Terrier than the NERV as you get more delta-V that way; however above 7 tons the NERV’s vastly higher ISP finally outweighs its much higher mass and you’ll get more delta-V from it than the Terrier. Both have the same thrust, the Terrier has a gimbal (so you need less powerful reaction wheels to keep it pointing the right way) but the NERV has an alternator (can generate power when burning) but the NERV is much more expensive (10k funds versus under 400 for the Terrier) and is much further along the tech tree. Work smart, not hard- burning retrograde at a very high apoapsis (somewhere beyond Jool’s orbit at least) is a lot more effective at reducing your periapsis because the orbital velocity out there is a lot less- removing 100m/s when you’re going at 1000m/s makes a lot more difference than when you’re going 10,000m/s. You could also try using a Jool gravity assist to lower your periapsis, getting some ‘free’ trajectory adjustment at the cost of requiring a pretty precise flyby to eject you solar retrograde from Jool’s SOI. edit: it turns out you can crash into the sun very easily with about 4km/s of delta-V in LKO- burn prograde until your apoapsis is at Jool's orbit, then when you reach apoapsis point retrograde and burn until your periapsis hits the sun- you can easily reverse your orbit and go solar retrograde this way.

EVE doesn’t do atmospheres- you need scatterer for that- and as far as I know EVE doesn’t do terrain either- you might be interested in Parallax.

@Kazvan recovery rates do decrease as the distance from the KSC increases (to simulate the costs of actually sending a vehicle of some sort out to pick it up and take it back) but it shouldn’t give negative values for stock parts. Can you create a CKAN mod pack with all your mods in it and post that here? I can use that to try and replicate the issue.

You’re in the modded installs section, so I assume you have mods installed. Which mods and versions, and which game version? It’s usually a bad idea to put mods into the Steam copy of KSP, especially if it then gets updated- Steam frequently corrupts stuff that way. Disable Steam cloud syncing for KSP, copy your save files to your desktop then completely uninstall and reinstall KSP (without mods) through Steam. Once that’s done, copy KSP completely out of the Steam folders (right click KSP in the Steam library and then “browse local files”, copy the whole of Kerbal Space Program) and paste that somewhere else e.g. desktop, then add your save files and mods to this new copy. The new copy is then safe from Steam’s meddling, and Steam can keep picking up updates for the base game as and when they happen. You can make as many copies of KSP as you like and if you do, you should use CKAN to keep track of everything- it can manage mod updates, create new copies of KSP with different mods in each and also produces nice mod lists to share here in the forums whenever something goes wrong.

Do Exotic Minerals actually have value? If you fill a tank with them in the VAB/SPH does it add to the total cost of the craft? If they do, did you get a refund for everything else in that craft as normal, or did the refunds for other things also not work properly/at all?

No, don’t update to 1.12 yet. You could try updating to 1.10 or 1.11 and most mods should still work just fine (or get updates to make them better), but 1.12 is still a work in progress and will be updated again in the future.

Docking ports now rotate a little bit, and much like Breaking Ground robotics parts you can’t autostrut through them any more. Unclear if this is an intended feature or an unintended consequence of making docking ports rotatable.

It’s a known bug, hopefully will be fixed in 1.12.2

Do your fuel cells have fuel? If not then they won’t work. Check that you a) have liquid fuel and oxidiser for them to run and b) that the fuel can flow to the fuel cells, without something like a decoupler in the way. Are your batteries already charged up? If so then the fuel cells won’t run- they don’t operate when the battery capacity is at 95% or up

You’re not moving, but due to the way the runway is laid out there are often minor forces that can cause a stationary plane to rotate slightly. SAS tries to counter that with yaw input, which includes the rudder even though it isn’t moving so has no effect. Start your takeoff roll with the SAS off and then enable it once you’re moving and it should be OK, and check that your nose gear have their friction setting turned down as that can cause runway instability.

I’ve been thinking about that reusable Moon lander and it might just work if you use RCS thrusters instead of the KTDU-425; get the biggest single port RCS thrusters you can and stick them on the bottom, then set their actuation toggles to only fire fore/aft and fore by throttle so they work like engines- including throttling down to 50%. I’d guess four 2kN generic thrusters and 3 of those 1.2kN RCS blocks with the three nozzles would be enough, but I haven’t tried it yet so that’s just a guess. TWR won’t be all that great so long burn times all around, but it’ll use one single fuel mix (which KTDU-425/generic thrusters do not, they have different fuel ratios) and zero reliability concerns.

Update- all my free time recently has gone into Dyson Sphere Program, somI’ve had no time for KSP; that‘ll probably be the case for a while because a) DSP is a real time sink and also really good fun, and b) I’ve gotten a bit burnt out with this game lately so some time away will mean I can come back fresh to make that Mars mission happen. I’ll be back

You actually can rotate parts attached to radial decouplers, you just need to use the move tool to put them back in the right place. Alternatively, set the probe core on the missile the root part of that and attach that to the decoupler, then use the move tool again to put it in the right place.

I’ve recently discovered Dyson Sphere Program- it’s like Factorio but with no annoying beasties eating your stuff and more spaaaaaaace. And in 3D. And in spaaaaaaaace! I haven’t looked at KSP since I got DSP but I’ll definitely be back.

Yep that fixed it.

I doubt it would make a noticeable difference.

@seyMonsterslink didn’t embed?

I’d expect to see a few different types of star, ranging from a white dwarf to a red giant, with some different characteristics for each e.g. power generation, resource distribution and so on. A star with no planets is unlikely and wouldn’t really add anything to the game (except possibly for gravity assists to another star further away), but each star system would need to have its own fully fledged solar system with a great deal of detail for each planet and moon in it so having more of them would increase the work involved I’d expect a pretty limited number of star systems in stock to show off the various new features and to provide different challenges, with modded planet/star packs to add more as with KSP- and possibly some of the KSP planet packs might be remade for KSP2 as well.