jimmymcgoochie

pretty planet! Definitely some glowing lava-type stuff going on there too.

Just jump before you jetpack to break the contact with the ground.

First of all, it’s T Z space, not T space boom. Even if Jeb had managed to EVA, it wouldn’t make any difference… 17:34 look who has the EVA parachute in their inventory! I suspect that RCS thruster just below the pod may be blocking the hatch on the command pod. Moral of this story- always put parachutes on something if you want it to come back down, even a “space station”. Definitely worth checking that Jeb could EVA from that pod in orbit before coming down. RIP Jeb

I say the green of Kerbals’ skin is due to a photosynthetic symbiont that has since turned commensal, providing no net gain for the Kerbals as their energy production is limited and Kerbals are a more indoors-type civilisation now (no, I don’t subscribe to the “Kerbals live in caves” theory, instead preferring “Kerbals live in houses but that never got added to KSP”). (Alternative theory, Kerbals use copper in their blood instead of iron which would make their blood blue-green and affect their skin colour.) Big heads, presumably with big brains inside, but small bodies with a small digestive system would explain their fondness for snacks- it’s a biological necessity to constantly top up their body’s energy levels and continue to function. Also consider their mouth size compared to their bodies, a single mouthful would probably be a whole meal for them.

You haven't seen it yet... Next chapter is nearly ready, I plan to post it tomorrow once I've gone through and proofread it from beginning to end.

Landed on Phobos (7m/s orbital velocity so it didn’t take much to get down there), drove around on the Moon a bit and then landed on Mercury. My last Mercury mission was meant to land, but ended up woefully short on delta-V; this one ended up considerably overbuilt with loads of fuel left in the upper stage when I had to ditch it for landing and enough fuel in the probe itself to do a 60km hop to a second biome after the first landing. Although there were a couple of mishaps with that Moon rover…

Does your heatshield have ablator on it? What is it attached to? Heatshields do pass some of the heat on to whatever they’re attached to, so try putting the heatshield onto something that’s heat resistant. You could also try using the experiment return capsule that I think comes with one of the RO mods and which is more than able to take the heat of re-entry.

Screenshot please? Does it work properly with no mods installed?

If you just want to fly past a planet without coming back, Eve is the better target- it’s SOI is even bigger than Kerbin’s making it a pretty easy target to get an encounter with, plus it’ll be really close to Kerbin when you arrive so signal strength will be high. Duna is a bit further away and a smaller target, but you can easily get a flyby of Ike during your flyby of Duna to gain double the science. Both planets can give you a gravity assist, Eve giving the bigger nudge as its gravity is much higher, and with a bit of planning you can set yourself up to encounter Kerbin- or go somewhere else, an Eve slingshot can be used to get closer to Moho or Jool depending on how you do it. Going directly (or even indirectly with an Eve gravity assist) to Moho requires a lot of fuel, Dres is tiny and Eeloo is too far away, ignore them for now. Despite the distance, Jool is also a good target- it’s quite a bit further away so you’ll need really good communications to get any data from it, but it’s SOI is HUGE and the moons are perfect to get gravity assists, allowing you to capture into orbit of Jool without using any fuel at all if you time your encounters with Laythe and Tylo right. Laythe, Vall and Tylo all orbit Jool in the same orbital plane so if you manage to align your orbit correctly you can get multiple encounters with each moon, or use their gravity to nudge your trajectory towards the outer moons Bop and Pol which orbit in pretty inclined orbits. If you want to leave, the moons can help with that too. Playing gravity pinball with Jool’s moons isn’t easy, but the rewards can be huge and learning that will make it that much easier when you send a crewed mission to land on all five moons .

I tried it with a small (30t) asteroid, hit the atmosphere at almost 30km/s and- it exploded before it got to 75km up. I was expecting it to last a lot longer than that.

Blue King arrived at Phobos to begin sample collection. The orbiter section has a healthy fuel reserve, which will be useful as any fuel it doesn't use will go to the Blue Queen to make up the shortfall there. There was also a juicy contract for doing a landing on Phobos. On the subject of contracts- due to the really low movement speed on the Orange Island rover it'll take 93 days of continuous driving for it to reach the rover waypoints- and that's without stopping at night, which it might not have to depending on how Bon Voyage reacts to the batteries being charged by an RTG that it doesn't recognise but which still generates power. And on the subject of roving- Brian and Dave took the Yellow Mille-feuille rover out for a spin to visit some new biomes and grab some surface samples to analyse in the base's lab. This went mostly according to plan... Bon Voyage kept spawning it in standing on its nose, but the front section is angled so it always dropped down onto its wheels and no damage was done. I then discovered that Brian and Dave couldn't get the samples out of the rover; this might be fixed by a reboot and reload, or I may have to do some grappler-related shenanigans to transfer it to the supply rover and from there to the base. And last, but certainly not least, Black Galileo arrived at Mercury, braked into orbit and then landed on the daylight side. The upper stage had a huge fuel reserve- over 3km/s when I had to ditch it just before landing- so the lander itself had almost all of its fuel remaining after touching down in the midlands. Two million funds for the Mercury landing contract, well over a thousand science even from the lightweight set of experiments chosen to maximise delta-V and enough fuel to do a short hop over to the nearby highlands for double the science! (The target in the image below is the engine from the crashed transfer stage seen in the image above) With all the science from the Moon, Mars and Mercury rolling in, the KCT points really stacked up: That's a lot of freebies! And a lot of science points to throw a lot more nodes on the research queue, and plenty of funds to add even more KCT points to speed up R&D even more. Full album: https://imgur.com/a/tdWbaQz Coming up next time: After the big science gains from Moon roving, I think sending a proper science rover to the Moon would be a good idea to scrape up every last dribble of science I can get. I also need to send a replacement crew up to the Moon as Dave and Brian need to get home for a contract, and a break from their several months in space.

Solar retrograde. Throw a probe (or better, an asteroid) up to a really high apoapsis above the sun, burn until the orbit reverses, get an Eve intercept when it’s heading straight for it and hope that you don’t hit the ocean… With a sufficiently high speed, you’ll bomb through Eve’s atmosphere in a few seconds which might be fast enough to prevent everything exploding.

Landed a rover and an SSTO rocket on Mars to collect samples and carry them to orbit respectively. All that’s left is the Phobos/Deimos sample mission which is rapidly approaching its own capture burn, then the whole “getting ALL THE SAMPLES from Mars and its moons” thing- good thing the rover can drive itself in the background or it would be a very long and tedious 7000km trek to the rover contract waypoints, but this also means I get more samples along the way. I also have a mystery mission on my alarm clock, can’t remember what it is or where it’s going but it arrives in a few weeks’ time. I’m sure that happens to NASA all the time…

You should take a closer look at that island… Definitely worth going in for a closer look, and also taking a little scenic trip up the coastline to the north of the KSC, there are some great beaches a few miles kilometres up the coast

I did it again... Those two, plus contracts to do All The SCANs of Ceres and Vesta were enough to pay for a new unlimited-class launchpad and throw a lot of KCT points at R&D. With that out of my system, I went back to check on Blue Queen and fortunately enough it saved after capturing into orbit, before the game crashed! Unfortunately it doesn't have the fuel to get back to Earth even without all the samples aboard, so I'll have to steal some fuel from something else. There was a short break in the list of capture burns and course corrections, so I launched the first White Planck fuel tanker up to the Moon: It'll take a few days to get there; in that time there are more Mars missions to take care of. First up- the White Pawn sample launcher, which suffered an engine ignition failure during its capture and ended up on a suborbital trajectory, but that worked in my favour and made an equatorial landing possible. White Planck then arrived and docked at the Moon station. It's blocking the port for the second Apollo craft, but it was late at night and MJ already messed up the docking once so I just wanted it done at that point; I'll move it when I need to. The next day, four White Herschel probes had course corrections to set them on course to visit their respective Jovian moons. Some weird boiloff issues happened though- two of the probes had lost ~20% of their lox but had no boiloff, but the other two were full of lox but had active boiloff. Weird. And the weirdness continued with the Orange Island rover- the moment the cruise stage decoupled, the whole craft began spinning wildly and the fairings looked like they were peeling apart. This was a problem at 5500m/s during a direct descent into the Martian atmosphere, but amazingly the rover survived unscathed, pulled some staggering G-forces as the parachute deployed and landed safely. Now it's a simple 7000km drive to the waypoints to complete the rover contract, plus however far it is from that point to the landing site of the Blue Pawn to drop off the samples it's collecting along the way. Full album: https://imgur.com/a/hqqX5Tz Coming up next time: The last of the Mars flotilla arrive, plus the Black Galileo arrives at Mercury. There's another probe arriving somewhere too, but I can't remember its name or where it's going...

Turns out, the second Mars probe that captured around Mars just before the game crashed actually got saved after the capture burn and before the crash. Next up was the sample gatherer for Mars itself, which braked into a rather elliptical orbit due to an engine failure and the mysterious disappearance of the RCS propellant but which managed to land almost on the equator the next time it went round- just 3 degrees south on the edge of Arabia Terra which is a pretty good spot to land as it’ll give two launch windows per Martian day to launch to the return craft in orbit. There’s still a rover and a sample gatherer for Phobos/Deimos to arrive, so I’m hoping they have fuel to spare as the sample return probe seems to be rather short on fuel to get back to Earth….

I thought that without having “missing Kerbals respawn” turned on, they were listed as KIA not MIA?

Pick some random German words and sound like you’re really angry about something. Krankenvagen smetterling hauptbahnhof kartoffelkopf! (Translation: ambulance butterfly train station potato head ) Then there’s einfahrt verboten, which actually means “no entry’ but sounds a lot funnier. And in English- moist, flange, plinth, squelch, reciprocate, filibuster.

There are two very different paths for you to go down. One is RO/RP-1, the other is not. Realism Overhaul and Realistic Progression 1 are built to turn KSP into Human Space Program, with real rocket engines, realistic technologies and, in the case of RP-1, a tech tree that reflects real life technological developments. If you want to try and beat Sputnik to orbit or Apollo 11 to the Moon, this is the game for you- but be warned, this is a pretty hefty mod set that requires many gigabytes of memory and which takes a good 15+ minutes to load even on an SSD, and game performance can be a bit slow because it’s being made to do things that it was never really designed to do. There are a few options for RSS graphics mods- RSSVE, EVO and the still-WIP REO; if your PC can handle the load, EVO looks incredible and has a few neat features such as dust storms on Mars, but if not then RSSVE is less intensive but still looks good. For parts, you could go down the route of using mods that include real rocket parts- BDB and Tantares cover most US and Soviet designs respectively- and replicate real missions, or go for the procedural parts route and make everything yourself, which can take a lot of fiddling but is also more flexible and lets you build your own stuff instead. There’s also a Kerbalism config for RO that makes the science system more realistic (no more one-click results, experiments take time- sometimes decades!) as well as adding life support. For SpaceX stuff, I think Tundra Exploration works with RO. Be warned, RO/RP-1/RSS is a very different experience to stock KSP! The other alternative is to do something completely different and more Kerbal-related. Try out a new planet pack with some new challenges- Beyond Home, Whirligig World, Grannus and more are available at stock scale, or if you want something bigger and more difficult you could try JNSQ or resizing either the stock solar system or a planet pack- Beyond Home has a config to make it bigger and Grannus has a patch to make it work with JNSQ, for example.

Logs? Screenshots? Mod list? …any information at all?

I’m not sure how the console controls work, but you should be able to select a specific resource from the list (e.g. liquid fuel, oxidiser) and then pump fuel in or out of any tanks that have it on board; it respects fuel crossfeed though so make sure your decouplers and docking ports allow crossfeed before pumping the fuel and disable it after to avoid issues with fuel draining from the wrong places.

I think I know what the problem is- direct dishes only count for the craft they’re attached to and nothing else so the lander is trying to relay back to Kerbin using nothing but the little 5Mm relay dish, which isn’t nearly powerful enough. If you had something like an RA-15 instead, that would be a different story and it would probably work just fine.

I’m not entirely sure how Kerbalism does antenna range calculations, but the relay antenna might be too weak to reach the probe on the ground- C-16 to HG-5 range is pretty low in stock so it might not be enough to reach the probe. Alternatively, the time when the probe can reach the relay might be when the relay is behind Dres, so can’t reach Kerbin.

I’m not an expert, but I’ve done a bit of save hacking and have seen this same issue before. What I did was: Make a named save file so you can roll back any changes that didn’t work or recover if something goes wrong. Very important when save hacking! Find the part name of the part that keeps duplicating- this isn’t the name you see in the editor, but the name in save and craft files which is listed in the part configs. You can either use a code editor like VSCode to search through your entire KSP folder tree for the right file(s), or dig into the folders by hand and open the parts that are being replicated. For example, liquidEngineMk55 is the part name for the Mk55 Thud engine, but others are less obvious e.g. the Twin Boar is called Size2LFB_v2. Once you’ve found the part names for the duplicated part(s), copy(!!!) and open the persistent.sfs save file, then search using ctrl+F for the part name that’s being duplicated. You’re looking for the entries in the tech tree nodes and should find a bunch of duplicated values in a row for one tech tree node. Delete all the duplicate values, save your edits and load the edited save file. Check in R&D that the duplicates are gone, buy the part if necessary. Create another named save, repeat as necessary.