jimmymcgoochie

Disable drag and friction heating and that's easy But to do it legitimately will be almost impossible, and certainly very expensive! You could try mining a whole lotta ore out of Gilly, sticking it in a really dense stack with heat shields on the bottom (the normal kind, not the inflatable version) and then throwing that at Eve, or unleash your inner Marco Inaros and throw asteroids at it instead. Or maybe you could use a Breaking Ground KAL controller to crank the firework launch speed up to stupid velocities and fire those down at the ground while flying?

@maddog59 then it’s probably a save file glitch. You could try editing the save file to remove the duplicate listings, otherwise they’ll just keep replicating themselves if you unlock them again.

Woo! I won! …hang on, wasn’t the competition only open to residents of the USA? Because I’m in the UK

Maybe the KSC monolith could make an appearance, lurking in the background just close enough to show up in space centre view (or whatever they have in KSP2)?

I’m pretty sure the messages only appear when the data is fully transmitted, not when it’s recovered. I think there’s a way to view the results for each experiment (including the blurb) using the Kerbalism experiment tracker button on the toolbar though? Try clearing input locks? Alt+F12 brings up the cheat menu, find the input locks tab and clear them; alternatively the ClickThroughBlocker mod adds a button to the toolbar to do the same thing. Occasionally, Kerbalism trips itself up and the windows/menus stop working, you’ll need to restart the game if that happens.

I might be a bit picky, but can the facilities north of the runway at KSC be moved so that those hangar buildings etc. don’t have a gap between them and the runway’s edge? See the image at the top of the thread, the new SPH has a big gap to the runway and you have to taxi down the edge of the hangar tile then up the runway, whereas the stock SPH sits flush with the runway and taxiing is smooth tarmac to tarmac. It’s a thing in the old KSC Expanded too.

I think you’re missing a mod dependency, double check that you have all the dependent mods for tundra exploration and reinstall them just to make sure.

According to the rocket equation, dV = 9.807 * ISP * ln(wet mass/dry mass). All those values are known in KSP- the fuel fraction (wet/dry) of most fuel tanks is 9; spaceplane parts like the Mk3 LF tanks are a bit less, Mk0 fuselages gives a higher mass ratio but they’re very small and trying to build an interplanetary ship using literally thousands of those will kill your PC. ISP for the NERV is 800 seconds. Add those in and you get dV = 9.807 * 800 * ln(9) = 7845.6 * 2.197 = 17238.5m/s. That’s the best you can do for a single stage with NERVs, but the TWR with one engine will be abysmal and in reality the weight of engines, crew pods and other miscellaneous bits and bobs will increase the dry mass and so decrease the delta-V. The best solution is to use lots of engines and asparagus staging, draining fuel from a series of radially mounted tanks in turn and dropping them once they’re empty. Get used to long burn times, splitting burns with periapsis kicks where possible to reduce cosine losses (burning in a direction that isn’t directly pro/retrograde) and frame rates that aren’t so much frames per second as seconds per frame, but it’s feasible to build a single ship that can carry a crew and landers to visit every planet and moon in the stock solar system in one trip, without refuelling.

Are they appearing several times in the same node, once in several different nodes or several times in each of several nodes? I’ve seen clones of the same part in one node before due to a glitch in a save file, and also the same part in several nodes when two different mods try to add the same part or put it in different places on the tree. Which parts are affected and what mods are they from?

I use it to turn elevons into airbrakes to slow down in flight, but it can also be used to give your plane deployable flaps and spoilers to improve lift for takeoffs and landings, to help hold a specific orientation for re-entry or to mimic DRS for your KSC Grand Prix cars.

My fleet of Mars missions is arriving- rather conveniently beginning with the scanning and mapping satellite which should make picking out landing sites that much easier. There’s a rover, a sample return lander, a sample collection probe to visit Phobos and Deimos and an orbiter that will collect all those samples and send them back to Earth, a pretty major logistical operation that took quite some time to design and which has a great many contracts to fulfil. The low-res altimeter scans took just a couple of days to complete, after which the mapping probe was moved to a much higher orbit where its other scanners could work more effectively. A few hours later the sample return orbiter arrived, braked into orbit and the game crashed

You’re far from the only one having issues with this update, it’s not uncommon to- wait, you put zip files in your GameData!? You’re really not meant to do that: download them first, unzip in the downloads folder and keep them stored somewhere else, only adding the mods you actually want to use into GameData. The issue, as with so many others, is probably Steam mangling some files during the update process, or cloud syncing and mangling files then. Either way, the same solution applies: Copy your save folder (from KSP/saves/your-save-name-here) and put it on the desktop for safe keeping; Clear your GamData folder entirely, leaving just Squad (and SquadExpansion if you have either/both DLCs); Right click KSP in your Steam library, disable cloud syncing and then verify the local files; Run KSP without mods to check that the base game is now working correctly; Copy the whole of KSP out of steamapps/common and paste it somewhere outside the Steam folder tree (desktop, another drive, anywhere at all really as long as Steam can’t touch it), this will be your new modded copy of KSP; Add mods to the new copy, leaving the Steam copy to collect what few updates are still to come without breaking any mods. You can make as many copies of KSP as you want, on different versions and with different mods. With so many mods I recommend you start using CKAN to manage them all, it’ll make your life a lot easier and also makes it easier to create new copies of KSP too. Steam is fine for stock games as you can access the workshop and get interesting stuff there, but it’s bad for modding and regularly breaks stuff especially when updates happen. Let it keep its own, mod-free copy to get updates and stick all your mods in another copy it doesn’t know about.

I'm pretty sure those options are not due to advanced tweakables, sounds like you might be missing a dependency. Check that you have all the latest versions of every mod and all their dependencies, and if that doesn't fix it ask in the SSPX mod thread.

Time to finish what I started last time- the Yellow Muffin Y arrives at the Moon station and, after a bit of finagling, docks to it. The last Moonbound launch for a while, Blue Counter will bring supplies to the Moon base just after two of the four crew have left. While this makes it slightly superfluous, it's useful as a proof of concept and will also add the ability to recycle waste water into drinkable water, further extending the water supply. Victoria and Viktoriya are leaving the Moon base as soon as the 30 days for the contract are done, using the last of the single-use Yellow Muffins. This ascent was a bit problematic- even with over 200m/s in the descent stage to give it a kick off the ground, by the time it reached the station it was running on fumes and barely managed to dock. I suspect a mod update has changed something, most likely Kerbalism as the ECLSS modules now (correctly) only allow one type of life support system in them- this might have added weight to any in-flight craft, though I can't say for sure that this is the case. A simple landing for the Blue Counter was marred by a strange Kraken attack where as soon as the rover decoupled from its landing stage the rover was hurled skywards at over 500m/s, minus a variety of parts and spinning wildly. There's no obvious reason why this happened- no part clipping and the decoupler doesn't have much force in it. I had to use a combination of object thrower to destroy the landing stage and set position to put the rover back on the ground. After all that, the drive over to the base was uneventful as the ground is almost completely flat. With the crew rover directly between the landing site and the base, it made sense to grab hold of that and drive them both over to the base together. A little bit of fiddling with the wheels so it could drive properly and both rovers arrived at the base a few minutes later. No more supply issues! I was originally planning to leave the Elviras and Vicky/Vikky on the Moon station, but having four crew in cramped places was causing stress issues- the Vs were first to get warnings as the Moon base is smaller, but the Elviras got warnings on the way back after I decided to call them all home. During re-entry, another mod update-related issue reared its ugly head- the heatshields are a little iffy and in this case the Apollo heatshield didn't shield the Apollo capsule as it's supposed to, and as it has done many times- only the "ignore max temperatures" cheat saved them this time. It's a known issue on the RO/RP-1 discord, I've stuck a generic 4m heatshield on the next one to see if that's any better. Two contracts- Moon station and Moon orbit- added two million funds, with the extended stay on the Moon base adding several years to Vicky and Vikky's retirement dates and even fellow Moon base veterans Elvira and Elvira adding over a year to theirs. And now for something completely different: The first of the Mars flotilla, the Blue Knight Mars parks itself in a 495km polar orbit and within 48 hours completes the low-res altimetry scans, netting almost a million funds from a contract to do that plus a Mars orbital science probe contract too. It then moved to a higher orbit- all the way up to 4950km- to complete the high-res altimetry and biome scans more effectively, as those scanners work better at much higher altitudes. A few hours after this, the Blue Queen sample return probe arrived for its circularisation burn- and then the game crashed . I'll pick that one up another time. Full album: https://imgur.com/a/zKjGNdH Coming up next time- a lot of probes capturing around Mars and making course corrections for the four Jupiter-bound White Herschel probes. This is why I wanted to move forwards in time, lots of missions in flight and this Mars flotilla has many contracts riding on it too.

Realism Overhaul changes the maximum part pressure limits to avoid this issue, but as for stock parts- you’ll need to write a patch of some kind, maybe look in the RO code base to see how they did it, then replicate that?

Stick another wheel at the back of the tail to avoid tail strikes. Move your engines down so that they’re level with or under the wings. Fix your main gear- they’re angled wrongly and the wheels are pointing in a bit, make them level and it’ll be a bit more stable on the ground. Reduce nose wheel friction (you’ll need advanced tweakables for this) to stop it swerving around on the runway. And most importantly- don’t land in cockpit view, it only makes things harder and it’s impossible to see what exactly went wrong in that landing; I suspect you landed with too much bank angle, the right wing hit the ground and that was that.

Two stage to orbit spaceplanes are feasible- use air-breathing rockets (like Skylon’s SABRE) to reach a ballistic suborbital trajectory, then throw the payload out to boost itself to orbit and the spaceplane can glide back down to land on a runway. Depending on the target orbit, they could operate trans-Atlantic from the US to the UK or possibly the other way around for a sun-synchronous orbit. Flying significantly slower than orbital velocity means there’s a lot less heat, so no need for fancy heat shielding when using naturally heat-resistant materials will do. There are plenty of reserved Space Shuttle runways on both sides of the Atlantic for something like Skylon to operate from, with a few additional pieces of infrastructure required (servicing, hydrogen refuelling and payload installation). Making the second stage recoverable is its own challenge though, but it’s feasible to do so with what would be a relatively small rocket- it’s already being done now. But that’s just an alternative TSTO setup; making the spaceplane go all the way to orbit and back would make things even harder, probably requiring a dedicated vacuum engine for orbital insertion and proper heat shielding, both of which are heavy and on top of the plane-related gubbins will really cut down the payload fraction. Re. the idea of braking in orbit to then drop vertically to the landing site- that’s a horrible idea, throwing away over 7km/s worth of fuel (that you had to haul up there with you, wrecking the rocket equation and your payload fraction) when there’s an atmosphere to do it for free. If you’re at the point where you can afford to drag that much fuel into space when you don’t need to, you’re probably at the stage where a space elevator is becoming feasible to get rid of rocket launches entirely, or if not that then some kind of orbital wheel to grab stuff in the atmosphere and fling it into space.

Clear input locks- it’s somewhere in the cheats menu, you can get that by hitting alt+F12 or in the pause menu click “show version information”. That might solve the problem?

Build a supersonic plane with Panther jet engines and one Ant on it somewhere. Speed up to 980m/s, using afterburner mode on the Panthers (toggle mode in the right click menu or set it to an action group). Stage or test the Ant. Profit! That is a bit of an odd contract though, the Ant is really intended as a vacuum engine for small probes and definitely not for sea-level use.

Used my last single-use Moon lander to return two crew from my Moon base to my Moon station, from which they'll head back home at some point in the near future; probably when I can get a new crew out to inhabit both base and station. Also docked my second reusable Moon lander to that station and launched a resupply mission for the base. And in a totally different game of KSP, discovered that GPP's Thalia has some kind of thermal field that can heat up your spacecraft to the point where things start exploding- solar panels, antennae, all the crew modules...

Is Thalia meant to be really hot? I had pieces of my ship exploding in orbit: first four Gigantors exploded, but that could feasibly be due to a 20-minute NERV burn, but then two Hitchhikers and a cupola all exploded during time warp- not physics warp, 100x on-rails time warp. I cheated the surviving lander to orbit Icarus and there were no heating issues at all, but the moment I cheated the craft back to orbit Thalia the heat came back and I had thermal warnings on many parts from high orbit right down to the surface.

The test flight of the Blue Counter resupply rover went well, until it didn't: That's what these simulations are for! There's nothing wrong with the design, it's just hard to tell when to start braking when KER's suicide burn indicator tells you to start 10 minutes early or when you're under the ground. On to another test- with new tech levels available, I upgraded the nuclear space tug concept and tested that it could still be launched. Despite the comically large payload and fairing making this the tallest rocket I think I've ever made in KSP, ever, there were no issues with the aerodynamics or the weight balance and it made it to space comfortably. Yellow Muffin Y headed out to the Moon. The payload fairing on top of the second stage is tiny because of an update to one of the RO-related mods that adds procedural fairings, there was a message about not using Craft Manager (which I do) and opening/saving each craft file to fix this, but a) I didn't do that and b) this design was already built when I did the updates. My initial plan was to try a direct descent using the entirety of that upper stage to brake, but the base was in the wrong place so I ended up aiming for the Yellow Profiterole station instead. There was just enough time left to launch another Blue Backgammon imaging satellite into a near-geosynchronous orbit. Final scores: Ironically enough, the resupply rover is going to take so long to build that the 30 day timer on the Moon base contract will have completed and I can send two of the crew back to space, making the resupply much less important. Still worth doing it though, if nothing else it'll work nicely as a proof of concept and add some tank space for waste water, allowing the water recyclers to work and extend the water supply quite considerably. Full album: https://imgur.com/a/oyCmp1Z Coming up next time: More Moon-related shenanigans- six crew are currently on or around the Moon, but I'm going to send some of them home and once the base is in daylight again the remaining crew will head out in the rover to explore nearby biomes.

Try a new solar system- JNSQ is good, but there are alternatives at stock scale with unique challenges- Grannus (the planets orbit the star very rapidly, also has a JNSQ compatible version), Whirligig (a really oblate planet with crushing gravity and no atmosphere, and higher escape velocity than Earth!), Galileo's planet pack (plenty of places to explore, plus it includes Grannus as a second star so you can use them both together), Beyond Home (very pretty and has some very interesting places to visit), and many more besides.

Mini montage from my long-running RP-1 career- I'm using these and others as loading screens now.

Double check your crossfeed settings? The simplest solution is to use fuel hoses which mean you don’t need to mess around with fuel priority or crossfeed at all.