jimmymcgoochie

I created a reusable Moon lander which is theoretically capable of making many trips from low Lunar orbit to the surface and back; precision not guaranteed due to a fairly low acceleration rate, but I already have a rover on the surface which can ferry crew from their lander(s) to the surface base and back. My current Moon lander, which the new one is based on, uses the Apollo-style two stage system with the descent stage staying behind on the surface (often as not because I used up every last drop of fuel for the landing), but this means I need a new lander each time which is very cost inefficient. A reusable lander and a fuel tanker probe to shuttle the propellants out to the orbiting space station around the Moon will make things much more sustainable (and cheaper!) for keeping this base occupied and doing science while the rover embarks on some medium-range expeditions to new biomes hunting for science. And yes, I did say Moon lander, not Mun- this is the real Moon we're talking about.

@ngdemusdid you try updating the driver for the integrated graphics card as for the OP? Huh, now that I've been looking through this thread I just realised that I'm having very similar symptoms to the OP- dedicated graphics VRAM is nearing the limit but shared VRAM is barely registering. Maybe I have the same issue and never realised? Edit- I've done a bit of internet sleuthing and it turns out you're supposed to get high dedicated GPU use- that's the big powerful GPU doing its thing; shared GPU memory is vastly slower so you don't want to be using that. 1.8 and later also added new higher definition terrain options so maybe turning that down will help reduce the VRAM use?

Yes, you can pick them up- just right click them then click "pick up". You can only do this if the Kerbal you are controlling has the room in their inventory- they need a space for it to go and the volume/mass for it to fit. If you pick it up when it's half way through an experiment, for example because you've levelled up a scientist and can get a faster data collection rate, it doesn't mean you'll get more than the maximum science cap- if the experiment produces 100 science in total and you've transmitted 40%, picking up and re-deploying will probably generate another 100% data but you'll only get another 60 science points for it. The data needs to be transmitted back to be received, so packing a deployed dish can be useful for more distant targets; it's fairly powerful, but if you're going further than Duna you'll probably need relays to boost the signal back to Kerbin. There's nothing to stop you from landing a probe beside the deployed science setup with a big relay dish though, just bear in mind that you still need an unblocked line of sight to Kerbin so there'll be times when you can't send data back- relays will fix that as they do for any other mission.

On the subject of reusable landers, I decided to put my money where my mouth is and make one: It's based on a Moon lander I've already been using but with a single stage design. One KTDU-425 plus four 2.2kN generic thrusters set to UDMH+NTO to match fuel types, Al-Cu integral tanks and the advanced Mk1 lander can which has two seats. I'm using tech level 5 solar panels for power and 6 RCS and generic thrusters, but it should work with lower tech levels with a little bit less delta-V, but that won't be an issue as this thing is completely overbuilt with a massive fuel margin: Landed from a 30km orbit, then launched back to a 50km orbit with over 1km/s to spare- and that was before I rebalanced the fuels as seen in the first screenshot. It'll probably require 15 tons of fuel per round trip, plus life support and fuel cell resources as needed. Weird trick- the lander can has pressurised tanks, so put a bit of fuel in that and set the fuel priority to drain it after the main tanks and you don't actually need the main tank to be pressurised, saving a lot of weight.

I'm back from my (mis)adventures doing grand tours of the stock system with Kerbalism. Now what was I doing here? While I figure that out, I tried building a DynaSoar but it flew like a fridge and crashed. Then I went and made a reusable Moon lander, which will save a lot of money over having to launch a new one every time I want to send some crew down to the Moon base. It's based on the existing Yellow Muffin and uses pre-tooled parts so is pretty cheap and quick to build, but offers a considerable excess of delta-V and is more than capable of landing and returning on the Moon: Re-uses much of the existing lander designs and tooled tanks, cheap and quick to make, generous fuel margins, room for two crew and still within the 20 ton limit for the lander can's built-in avionics. There really aren't any downsides to doing this! Fuelling it will be a relatively simple operation- just stick a tank onto the Yellow Pain-au-chocolats which will be visiting the lunar space station, dock and transfer fuel to the lander. I'll probably send up two landers and keep one docked to the station while the other is on the ground to allow any crew on the base to return to orbit. Full album: https://imgur.com/a/J0y6B5J Coming up next time: What am I meant to be doing? I need to re-read my own mission reports and figure it out. EDIT- I was half way through doing a simulation and started seeing warnings about EVAs running low on resources. It turns out I have two Kerbals on EVA on the Moon; they were half way through deploying a deployed science cluster beside the new base the last time I played this save and I completely forgot about them. The perils of coming back to a save that you haven't looked at for a while...

Absolutely not. It's not broken, so don't try and fix it.

I was trying to avoid using mods; I made the exception because of the stupidly high mass ratios of those Kerbalism gas tanks when filled with xenon. I don't think there's necessarily going to be a next time, at least for the near future- back to Terranism Space Program for now.

These VASIMR engines are unusable with Persistent Thrust, I was doing the final burn to Eve and they were down to less than half thrust despite running all the reactors at full power. Maybe there's some kind of interference between PT and Kerbalism or between one of those and NFE, but the upshot is those burns are going to be prohibitively long especially when I have to do them at 1x speed- and that's considerably less than real time due to the fairly high part count. The ship has the delta-V to complete the trip, definitely- up to 50km/s depending on the engine settings- but I just don't have the patience to leave the game running for hours just to make a single, horribly inaccurate transfer burn from Kerbin to Eve that's not even 1km/s, let alone the much larger burns to reach Moho or Jool, and then do course corrections after every burn and then course corrections for the course corrections... As frustrating as it is, I'm pulling the plug on this mission.

There's some serious weirdness going on. First, MechJeb keeps doing the stupidest transfer burns ever, including this absolute beauty: Yes, let's go SOLAR RETROGRADE to Eve... And on top of that, the VASIMR engines aren't working properly- they're using far less power than expected (which is actually good, I only need to run one reactor instead of four) but are producing less than half their maximum thrust when using persistent thrust under time warp making all those long burns take even longer. In addition, the persistent heading part of it isn't working either which just makes things worse. If I can't fix these issues, it might be the end of this Grand Tour; I'm not waiting for real life days to complete these incredibly long burns.

This isn't exactly news, those were announced weeks ago. Unclear why you felt the need to create a new thread for this when the announcement threads are still there.

Anyone else getting really stupid interplanetary transfers with the advanced transfer function? A simple Kerbin to Eve transfer requiring <2500m/s total delta-V and MJ decides to do the transfer burn either entirely radial in (crashing into Kerbin in the process), entirely retrograde (5.7km/s retrograde burn!?) or else it decides to just crash into Kerbin and not even bother going to Eve. I've had similarly bizarre nodes plotted by MJ advanced transfer maneuver planner before e.g. from Eeloo to Dres it again tried to go retrograde, with other vessels which also had high part counts. KSP 1.11.2, stock Kerbol system, MechJeb 2.12 (the mod list below says 2.11 but that's because I've rolled back a version to see if that has an effect), I have ~50 mods installed but nothing that I can think of that would be causing this behaviour. It's a fairly high part count ship (~700 or so parts) which might be having an effect? Logs and mod list: https://www.dropbox.com/s/cdrqo288ye0clby/KSP.log?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/dtk35ndf0xdoc8n/Mod list.txt?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/8src2rn66bznabz/Player.log?dl=0

NTRs aren’t as useful as you think, the combination of low density hydrogen and high engine mass means you need some absolutely MASSIVE tanks to get anywhere with a meaningful payload; radiators are really heavy too which makes things worse, plus the engines throttle up/down very slowly. They have a lot of restarts though, and can throttle down quite far compared to e.g. the J2. On an unrelated note- Basey McBaseFace

Indefatigability is finally complete and ready to go following the addition of the new and improved Laythe SSTO- improvements include a heat shield and an RTG. With that added, all that's left is the crew: I then noticed that a few important parts were missing, so sent up a little probe to deliver those: That crew pod will stay in LKO until Indefatigability returns to then take the crew (and science!) down to the surface; assuming all the parts don't fail following decades of drifting in space with no maintenance. With the ship fully kitted out and a year to wait until the transfer window to Eve, there's plenty of time to get the easy flags planted on the Mun and Minmus, something I completely failed to do with Intrepidity. To the Mun: Not the best landing ever, but nothing was damaged during landing or liftoff so it's fine. And then to Minmus: This was the first real test of the solar-powered Ion Space Tug, which has passed with flying colours- admittedly the TWR of 0.07 with a fully loaded Vall lander is rather dismal, but with 25km/s of delta-V including that fully loaded Vall lander, there's more than enough range to get to Moho and back. It can even run four Dawn thrusters at full power around Kerbin so will be more than capable of working around Eve and Moho. Completing these landings does mean that I'm no longer able to launch anything new to add to Indefatigability as the voyage has technically begun, even though it'll be parked in LKO for another year or so. Full album: https://imgur.com/a/DNW4fp3 Flags planted so far: 2!

Is this a competition? And if so, what exactly are the rules for judging entries?

A Kerbal player was enraged, Because they accidentally staged; Jebediah was doomed, As his rocket kaboomed, And the parachutes were not engaged.

No, it definitely docks to the junior sized ports. That’s in the part description and after docking one to junior sized ports on several occasions recently I can confirm that it’s true: Screenshot is a bit dimly lit but you can quite clearly see that the airlock is docked to a 0.625m docking port.

S1 Ep1 The Expanse: Canterbury is parked, grabbing ice from Saturn’s rings with big robot arms and storing it inside its hold. Not a tractor beam or auxiliary craft in sight, just oversized litter-pickers. The Expanse also covers a lot of the rendezvous stuff too- torch drives burning to within close range and matching most of the speed then complete the velocity matching and docking with RCS, not unlike your typical KSP docking. Re. The Martian, what is that EVA jetpack chair if not an auxiliary craft? Yes it’s tethered to the Hermes, but only for safety- it would have been possible to fly that over to the MAV, grab Witney and fly back. Stowaway is a bad example- why would they add a robot with RCS and a set of arms sophisticated enough to gain access to the booster’s lox tank and siphon it off, just on a random hunch that it might at some point be a useful thing to have on board? A simpler solution- a winch and cable running down one of the tethers- would allow access to both the core and the booster when it was spinning without the risk of sliding down and crashing to the bottom potentially damaging you and/or the spacecraft, but why would they ever need to go to the hub or the booster when it was spinning? If you have a magic warp drive, you can afford to carry around the excess weight of every “just in case” gizmo you like, but if not it’s just dead weight that’ll slow you down and potentially mean you don’t get where you’re going; see Stowaway, where the excess weight nearly caused them to abort the mission.

I've spent a good while trying again and again to get this ship into space, but it just isn't happening- one way or another it explodes on the launchpad. I even tried just parking the ship itself on the pad, no autostruts and with the indestructibility cheats switched on, and parts were floating around all over the place. I don't know what's wrong with it, but it looks pretty terminal and I really don't have the patience to try and fix it when each launchpad explosion takes several minutes to happen and often requires a game reboot to recover from. The one time it almost worked, I got all the way to booster burnout before everything spontaneously shattered: On closer inspection, it seems that Indefatigability has some weird structural issues when it sits on the ground in 1g: Floating parts that would wander around for no reason at all, horrlble instability and all that with the indestructibility cheats switched on- as soon as I turned those off, many explosions ensued. It seems Indefatigability can't handle gravity at all. With no other option, I deployed KSTS again; first launching a payload of ore into orbit then re-using the launch profile to send Indefatigability up in one go, without the constant RUDs that happened when I tried to launch it using the very same rocket as in the recording. At last, Indefatigability is in Kerbin orbit, awaiting the Laythe plane (now upgraded with a heat shield on the nose) and its duo of plucky adventurers who will be making this voyage. And for the first time, I got a look at the Waterfall plumes for those VASIMR engines, which are suitably stunning: A test run showed that it would take about 90 minutes of continuous prograde burning to reach escape velocity, taking a whole orbit of Kerbin and a pretty long trip through both of its radiation belts in the process. Periapsis kicks might be an option, but with a TWR of 0.05 that would mean many doses of radiation which I'd rather avoid; plan B is to burn prograde until the apoapsis is half way to the Mun, circularise up there and then plot the course to Eve. Speaking of Eve- the next transfer window is a whole year away, so there's plenty of time to get those flags planted on the Mun and Minmus and giving me a chance to test out the solar-powered ion probe that will eventually be taking a lander from Eve to Moho and back. Full album: https://imgur.com/a/MWOQUoJ Flag count so far: 0, I still haven't started yet!

Uninstall and reinstall? Turn off cloud syncing for KSP, that can corrupt tour install sometimes especially if it didn’t work the first time; try checking the integrity of the local files and if that doesn’t work, remove KSP entirely and reinstall it.

I think I've tried at least eight times to launch Indefatigability into space over the last 24 hours, but every single time something has gone horribly wrong and the game did that "frozen for ages because everything is disintegrating" thing. At first I thought it was my hastily bodged together rocket that was to blame, but the same 2kt launcher I used for Intrepidity (with KSTS that time) also had issues. I'll come back to it later, but having repeated failures for no particular reason is annoying and I have to reboot the game each time it happens.

A word of advice- don’t ever puts mods in the copy of KSP that Steam has control over, it just loves to meddle with it and causes issues like this. Instead, clear your mods, make a copy of the entirety of KSP (steam/steam apps/common/Kerbal Space Program) and save that somewhere else, then put your mods in the copy. Leave the Steam version to get game updates while your modded versions are kept safe from Steam’s meddling- you can have many different copies of KSP at once, on different game versions and with different sets of mods in each, but if you’re going down this route then CKAN is strongly recommended to keep track of everything.

Did you install the scatterer default config as well? What version of KSP is this and can we have a mod list? (CKAN can do this for you) Logs would also help, see this guide to find them: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/83212-how-to-get-support-read-first/

Here's one for you- When writing the name of a ship in italics e.g. Starchaser, if you were referring to something belonging to that ship, like its crew or engines, would you italicise the 's? Is it Starchaser's or Starchaser's, which looks better?

That’s odd, the DOE config worked for me. Did you delete the default config?

The next chapter is shaping up nicely. In the meantime, though, I was re-reading my own story and noticed something in Chapter 1 that I didn't notice before, definitely didn't plan, but which totally works for the story now so I'm using it.