jimmymcgoochie

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.

Could be an autostrut-related issue- autostruts don’t like it very much when you dock stuff together as the root, grandparent and heaviest parts will all change, potentially glitching the struts and thereby glitching the craft. (If you’re not sure what an autostrut is, you’re almost certainly not using them)

Raise a bug for it on the bug tracker so it can be fixed.

I haven't finished creating the rules yet, so start date TBD. When I have something concrete, I'll make a new thread.

This “landed while flying” thing is common when you break solar panels on the surface- the broken panel pieces are on the ground, so the game incorrectly thinks the whole craft is still landed when it isn’t. You can fix this by editing the save file, but if you’re not sure how to do that don’t even try- you could end up corrupting the file and lose your save. Try freeloading a save when the lander is still landed, then using EVA construction remove any broken solar panels (or radiators) from the craft, save, then reload the new save- it might help.

After playing through the challenges myself for a while, I've discovered that combining Kerbalism with Probes before Crew makes for a really tedious start. With that in mind, I'm going to allow everyone to start with 10 science to unlock the first two tech tree nodes, which makes everything happen a whole lot quicker and makes Gael orbit feasible in 3 or 4 launches; pick up the Terrier and you'll be orbiting and landing on its moons in no time at all. Re. mods, the answer is still no- there's no need for them, be creative with the stock parts. Assuming this goes all the way to interstellar (Grannus) I'll probably have to relax that rule as the Grannus system is very compact and so requires high delta-V to get anywhere, on top of the delta-V required to get there from the Ciro system, but I don't want to see a single mod part before then.

No, but they do need to have a relay antenna to relay a signal, a direct only antenna won’t cut it. The relay dishes in KSP are: HG-5 (really weak), HG-20 (Making History part), RA-2, RA-15 and RA-100 which all include their ranges (in Gm) in their names. See this diagram for the effective ranges of each antenna versus the DSN; remember that communicating from a small probe to a relay the signal will be weaker.

I did! Thanks for the TOTM, whoever nominated Audacity just got themselves a cameo

I said “go north up the coast”. Also, there IS something different about that island in the crater, worth checking out up close

Slow progress over the last few days, I've been trying to design a resupply rover for the Moon base to solve the "nearly running out of water" situation, among other things. In the meantime, I went through the 86(!) albums of screenshots and picked out some of my favourites to use as loading screens. Montage! And a bonus shot of my Black Arrow replica too, because for some strange reason I just like the Black Arrow, OK? Link to the full album with MOAR PICTURES: https://imgur.com/a/GUlxtpH

Oh dear... That's one HUGE log file full of errors. I think the problem is that you've put mods in your Steam copy of KSP; Steam just keeps on mangling people's mods in KSP, I see this every single time I look in this section of the forums. My advice- delete all your mods out of your Steam copy of KSP, then verify the local files (in Steam library, right-click KSP > Properties > Local files > verify local files) and let that fix up any missing or corrupted files in the base game. Once that's done, run KSP and make sure it works. Once you have a working copy of stock KSP, copy that out of the Steam folders (in your case, D:\Steam games\steamapps\common\Kerbal Space Program) and paste that somewhere else that isn't inside the Steam folders (for example, put it in D:\ or on your desktop), then put your mods in that new copy. You can create as many copies of KSP as you like, on different versions and with different mods in each; leave the Steam copy of KSP to get game updates or to switch versions if you want a specific game version to put mods in, but don't put any mods in it after that.

Unless you’re in a perfectly circular orbit exactly matching the Mun’s inclination, your orbital parameters will make doing the transfer cost a slightly different amount of delta-V over time- the planner might be waiting until you’re doing the burn at periapsis to save a little bit of fuel, or until the burn occurs at the ascending/descending node to avoid adding a normal/antinormal component to the transfer burn, or some combination of those things. While this means you’ll squeeze every last drop of range from your craft, it might also mean waiting for what seems like an excessively long time when it isn’t really necessary to do so; if you’re relying on that <5m/s by doing the perfect transfer vs just going ASAP, then you’re better off packing a bit more fuel somewhere or shedding some excess weight.

Agreed- though judging by the most recent dev diary, this might already be happening in KSP2. In the meantime, Texture Replacer lets you customise your Kerbals in KSP with different hair styles and colours, facial hair and skin tones- much better than generic clones that all look identical.

Logs please! They’ll show what’s going on to trigger this issue. Here’s how to get them:

You probably need to upgrade R&D.

A few things could be wrong here, but we’ll need the logs to find out what. Here’s how to find them: Check your graphics drivers and update if there’s an update available. Try removing all mods (if you’re using CKAN then make a mod pack so you can reinstall them easily later!) and check if KSP works then; if not then disable Steam cloud syncing and verify your game files. When it’s working again, copy KSP out of the Steam folders, add that copy to CKAN and add your mods to the non-Steam copy instead; Steam breaks mods pretty often so keep it out of the equation and you’ll get on a lot better.