jimmymcgoochie

I remember Armstrong having some pretty distinctive terrain scatters, but I didn’t see them in that video- do you have scatters enabled? Maybe Parallax is blocking them, I didn’t use that...

Kronal Vessel Viewer.

My next attempt has begun, follow it here:

Indefatigability- it's pretty similar to intrepidity, but bigger. Much like this mission aims to be like Intrepidity, but this time I'll actually land on ALL the planets and moons rather than just most of them. Intrepidity missed Moho completely and yet I still didn't manage to visit either of Kerbin's moons. A combination of design issues and less than ideal trajectories is most likely to blame, so this time I'm cutting back on the dead weight and pushing the delta-V to new and exciting heights. The best way to do both of those things is by using better fuel tanks. But wait, you say, there are no better fuel tanks in KSP! Well, not exactly... In the centre, a regular xenon tank with a mass ratio of just 4. On the right, a Kerbalism huge gas canister filled with xenon rather than the more typical oxygen or nitrogen, with a mass ratio of 50.87! That sort of advantage is just too big to ignore. The only problem really is that ion thrusters are a) incredibly weak and b) very power-hungry; surely you can't make an interplanetary ship that can operate all the way out at Eeloo with ion thrusters? Enter the mods: Near Future Propulsion with a plethora of bigger and more powerful xenon-fuelled engines; Near Future Electrical for the nuclear reactors needed to power those bigger and more power-hungry xenon-fuelled engines; Heat Control and System Heat to deal with the cooling for those nuclear reactors; and I added Near Future Launch Vehicles just to get a 5m cargo bay to store stuff in. Xenon-fuelled Hall effect thrusters and a 1.25m reactor are enough to create a craft that can tow my entire Tylo lander stack and a year of supplies, with a delta-V of 13km/s and some of the best plumes out there: A bit of design work to adapt the Intrepidity has resulted in this, the Indefatigability: The top half is nearly identical to Intrepidity, but with a few key changes: the Eve lander now uses liquid-fuelled boosters rather than SRBs (maybe that'll make it easier to land where I want to?); one Hitchhiker has been removed to save weight, along with the 2.5m cargo module and most of the cargo parts that I ended up throwing away last time; and the life support and chemical modules have been tweaked to recycle waste resources into usable oxygen, water and even monopropellant. The bottom half, on the other hand, is completely new: a 5m cargo bay (from NFLV) houses all the reaction wheels, radiation shields and RA-15 dishes along with four large nuclear reactors (NFE) to power the engines and three tiny reactors (also NFE) to power the rest of the ship; below that, a 5m probe core and a 5m engine adapter (both NFLV) are completely engulfed in xenon canisters, with the four VASIMR engines on the bottom. Radiators (Heat Control and System Heat) are positioned on the engine adapter, the 3.75m-5m tank and on the reactors themselves, while some capacitors (NFE) can provide a dribble of power while the reactors spool up. The ship is also outfitted with two independent RCS systems- a high-thrust system using NFLV monopropellant thrusters, and a low-thrust system using NFP xenon RCS thrusters. That xenon-fuelled space tug I showed earlier is also included on this design, however the Laythe plane is missing (it can't be docked in the VAB) and I plan to add a solar-powered xenon space tug to make the trip to Moho and back, which might replace the backup Tylo descent stage depending on how heavy it is. Those VASIMR thrusters can vary their ISP and thrust- more thrust means less ISP and vice versa- and at maximum efficiency this ship in its current form has a delta-V of... 60km/s! Obviously this won't be the case in flight as the TWR in this mode is a pitiful 0.03, but with the engines set to 50% efficiency the TWR is broadly comparable to what I was getting when I tried using a dozen 5m NERV-powered boosters, yet the delta-V is more than triple what the nuclear version could manage at a tenth of the total ship mass. This isn't the final design- I might change the smaller nuclear reactors for a cluster of RTGs to avoid the risk of a failure and I've added some solar panels to the back of the cargo bay to power the ship's systems in the inner system, which can then be ditched when I head out beyond Duna. At this point I've basically given up on the idea of doing this "as stock as possible"; I tried that, it didn't work very well, time for a different approach. Full album: https://imgur.com/a/TFMD7Nv Flag count so far: 0, because I haven't started yet

Using rockets inside a ship of any kind sounds like a terrible idea- one faulty wire or accidental button press and you fry your own crew. The simplest solution is to stick a few guns on your ship- if we're talking about ocean-going cargo ships then a light autocannon with a simple stabiliser will outrange any pirates with assault rifles and RPGs, and out-aim them to boot as they try to stay standing up on a speedboat bouncing over the waves; in space there are no waves to mess up your aim, but any ship that tries to approach another will be very conspicuous against the cold black vacuum of deep space, giving the defending ship plenty of time to aim. A spacecraft also has the advantage of being able to spin on all three axes, making a close approach/docking/boarding considerably more difficult.

You'd be forgiven for missing Scott Manley's part in Stowaway- he has one line right at the beginning, during the go/no-go sequence. The cycler concept itself has one irritating flaw in its design: why spin it at 1g when running at 0.3g is enough to prevent bone/muscle loss, reduces the strain on the cables, requires less energy to start/stop, matches Mars gravity and makes it easier to ascend to the central hub should the need arise. Few people would notice the difference if they said it was 0.3g but filmed in 1g, so I suspect the reason was purely for plot since even though it would make more sense to run the centrifuge at 0.3g. There's also the mystery of how that stowaway got there in the first place, considering

The post you replied to is from late 2013; the game has been through many versions since then so it's not surprising that it didn't work. It's possible that stage locking doesn't exist in KSP any more, or that it doesn't have a default key bind and you need to set one up in the main menu settings.

I’m not aware of any mods that add more moons for Jool, but it would be pretty easy to adapt an existing planet pack- take something like XPC or Dwarf Planets Plus, then change the configs to put some of those extra moons or planetoids in orbit of Jool at whatever height and inclination you like; remember to change their descriptions too.

They go on the front of the Breaking Ground motors. Have you tried sticking them on the top of an Ant engine which you attached via surface attachment? There are mods that add extra small parts- Knes and Luciole both add 0.3125m parts and I'm sure there are others I haven't come across.

KSP is limited by CPU more than anything. The reason the game slows down with high part count vessels inside physics range is because it needs to calculate the interactions of all those hundreds of parts, every frame, and it does so using one single processor thread because that's how the physics engine works. Most modern CPUs have multiple cores to allow lots of stuff to happen at the same time, but KSP can't use those other cores. Adding parts mods, especially those with detailed interiors or high-definition textures, will increase your RAM use considerably, as do planet packs (I think); adding more RAM will give you more room to add more mods, but it won't make the game run any faster if you're flying with a multi-hundred part vessel nearby.

Thrust of the Twin-Boar: 2000kN. Half of 2000kN: 1000kN. Thrust of the Vector: 1000kN... The Twin-Boar is actually modelled on the Pyrios boosters proposed for the SLS so making a single-engine version doesn't make a lot of sense; if you're interested, Restock+ adds a single Boar engine which is pretty much the same as the Vector but with lower ISP.

I disagree with the OP idea of having to refly it manually- that would make it a boring chore that detracts from doing more interesting and important stuff. I would think that the act of actually flying that mission (in the background) would be enough to keep whatever crew is flying it up to scratch to keep on flying it. Re. @Single stage to ocean's point about using high-tech parts for low-tech freight runs- the cost of producing the necessary resources to build, fuel and operate said high-tech parts would be deterrent enough to avoid using metallic hydrogen torch drives to do a grocery run to the Mun, plus by that point you'll probably have moved on from doing stuff near Kerbin to getting resources from across the solar system (or systems!) so it could well be a moot point.

There's something a bit funky with the numbers for the square fixed graphene radiator- the half and double variants are disproportionately heavy and the one-third and two-thirds variant are disproportionately weak- in fact the two-thirds version has half the cooling of the half variant even though it's clearly larger, and the two-thirds variant is also the cheapest of the lot. The triangular graphene radiator is fine and all the numbers for that one make sense, but the square variants just don't add up for me. I'm using Heat Control 0.6.0 in KSP 1.11.2 with System Heat 0.4.1. On a related note, the stack-mounted heat sinks don't have SystemHeat configs.

Do you need shielded docking ports? If not, just use the normal version and the arms will be symmetrical, making assembly easier. Alternatively, use the docking ports themselves as decouplers to save some parts and avoid the bug at the same time.

Finished off my Kerbalism Grand Tour, which unfortunately didn't actually complete the Grand Tour as it skipped Moho, Mun and Minmus (maybe I just don't like celestial bodies starting with M?) I'm going to take another run at it with a new and improved ship- less clutter and less junk, more delta-V and more resource recycling- but first I need to do a bit more design work.

I doubt we'll see centrifugal artificial gravity any time soon- to generate enough gravity for it to be worthwhile would require either a small centrifuge spinning very rapidly (a 10m radius would need just over 5rpm to get 0.3g, but if you were standing in that your head would only get about 0.25g and just standing up or sitting down could make you dizzy), or a much larger centrifuge spinning slowly (we're talking 70m radius for 0.3g at 2rpm, or nearly 300m at 1rpm) which would be prohibitively heavy for anything but a truly enormous interplanetary ship. There's also the mechanical strain of spinning up or slowing down that much mass or just holding it all together, you can't really make any course changes or attitude adjustments with a centrifuge deployed and spinning, there's a lot more surface area to cover with radiation and micrometeorite shielding etc. and a lot more volume to keep at a pressure, temperature and atmospheric composition that's compatible with humans, etc. And that's only for Mars gravity, which is about as low as you can go before getting bone and muscle losses- to get full Earth gravity would be even more difficult.

One last burn to send us home: Alice and Stephanie waved goodbye to their trusty ship, before burning all the remaining fuel to try and slow down before bombing into Kerbin's atmosphere at around 4km/s! Then things got really weird. I stuck all the unnecessary parts (spare supply boxes etc) under the Eve lander's engine to try and take some heat during the hideously fast re-entry, and it worked. The first things to hit the atmosphere were some spare RCS thrusters, which quickly overheated and exploded. And exploded. And exploded. And exploded some more. But no matter how many times they exploded, the parts just did. not. die. I think this is a bug with EVA construction? Once the explosions had stopped and the (completely intact) craft was subsonic, Alice and Stephanie bailed out and parachuted to the surface. Stephanie made sure to grab the precious surface samples, but those added nearly 300kg so she was falling much faster than normal. And somehow most of the lander stack survived too- there was more, but it toppled over when I loaded it in and some parts exploded then. I can only get the credit for one landing it seems- those two landers between them landed on nine planets and moons. After about 24 years of flight, Alice and Stephanie are back home. Both will be needing some serious medical attention to undo the effects of over two decades of microgravity, radiation exposure and severe stress. And so this Grand Tour ends, without landing on Moho, Mun or Minmus, so it's a Baby Grand Tour? I could probably have made it to the Mun and Minmus if I skipped Dres (stupid fake planet ) but in the end a combination of less than ideal interplanetary transfers and bad design limited my delta-V too much. Full album, with all the flags bar Eeloo which has disappeared (that flag was glitchy anyway): https://imgur.com/a/JcoPxcg Five things I've learnt from this trip that'll be useful for the next one, because there will be a next one: More fuel, less oxidiser. I ended up dumping thousands of units of oxidiser that weren't needed but running critically short on fuel. Bigger fuel tanks would definitely help, possibly with more asparagus-style staging and fewer engines to reduce the dry mass. Keep things simple. Solar panels aren't needed at all, a cluster of 30 RTGs will power a ship that size for the duration of a Grand Tour and a single RTG per lander would be enough; radiators are dead weight, batteries are largely unnecessary with the continuous supply of power from RTGs, processing waste products into usable stuff (water recycling, solid oxide electrolysis to make CO2 into O2, turning waste into ammonia and then monopropellant) will make those resources last so much longer. A nuclear space tug would be a great addition to the mission. The semi-intended Nuclear Booster worked an absolute treat around Jool and the Space Tug also proved its worth, so combining the two would be an obvious choice. Better structural planning. Stacking all those supply tanks, batteries, shields and so on meant that if something broke it couldn't be discarded. There were some parts that I couldn't actually find inside the ship, the engine plates would repeatedly cause things to explode or get jumbled around if I didn't edit the save file every time before loading and the whole ship would wobble alarmingly any time I tried to rotate it. Those girder arms with the RTGs on the ends were also unnecessary; the RTGs could have been mounted on the core section to save quite a lot of weight and make it easier to dock too. Engine plates are bad- they have magic autostruts that keep regenerating every time a save is done- so I'll avoid those too. Less redundancy and fewer spare parts. I threw away dozens of RCS thrusters, spare struts, a whole Hitchhiker's worth of repair kits and many other spare parts that were nothing more than dead weight, as well as the backup Vall lander that did absolutely nothing at all, the backup Tylo descent stage which I used to reach Laythe and the four big communications dishes were overkill; I could have done without the RA-100s and stuck with RA-15s to handle relaying duties.

All that stuff about going everywhere bar Moho? Forget all of that... Good news- I landed on Dres. Bad news- I don't have a screenshot of it, so these will have to do: This was by far the most Kerbal landing of this trip- Intrepidity did some braking at the edge of Dres' SOI, then the lander deployed with the Space Tug while Intrepidity braked some more; the Space Tug braked into orbit, the lander landed, then returned, met back up with the Space Tug and the two then burned to rendezvous with Intrepidity while the latter was bombing past Dres well above escape velocity. It wasn't pretty, and it wasted a lot of fuel, but it worked. Worse news- I am now officially out of fuel. It took some spectacularly creative EVA construction shenanigans to throw away every last gram of unnecessary weight, followed by dumping large quantities of every resource bar liquid fuel overboard to make the ship lighter and eke out the delta-V so that Intrepidity can make it back to Kerbin. Even then it's a simple flyby that grazes the atmosphere, but I've saved just enough fuel so that Stephanie and Alice can jump into the Eve and Tylo landers, brake like crazy with the last dregs of propellant, re-enter (hopefully without burning up!) and then bail out of the landers to parachute down with their personal parachutes. Oh, and hopefully they'll be able to grab those precious surface samples when they jump, or a big part of the mission will be lost. Full album: https://imgur.com/a/2QnPHZV Flag count so far: 11, and it isn't going any higher than that.

Landed on Duna and Ike, now it’s only Dres and the moons of Kerbin to go and my almost-a-Grand Tour will be complete (I skipped Moho due to a distinct lack of delta-V).

Three whole landings to report today! Eeloo: Glitchy flag decided to hover a hundred metres above the surface. Followed by five years of travel to Duna, which caused quite a few part failures- mostly reaction wheels, which I think is a bit odd. There are plenty of spares and many of the failures were fixable, but it's still odd that I've had a total of one solar panel failure, one life support failure, one engine failure, no RCS failures and yet I've lost at least eight reaction wheels and many more had to be repaired. The trajectory to Duna also seemed off- it took over 2500m/s and a 20 minute burn just to capture into an orbit that was just inside its SOI, which is a lot of fuel I could have used to get to Dres and then to Kerbin. The Duna landing went exactly as planned, using the same lander that has so far landed on Pol, Bop, Eeloo and Eve and will also do the rest of the landings too. Parachuting down to the surface. A small braking burn was required before touchdown but the landing 'legs' took the impact well. With their job done, the spent parachutes were discarded, as was the ladder once it was time to leave, as were the struts and grip pads once the lander was heading back out of the atmosphere. There was an Ike-clipse during the landing: Followed by the closest close approach I've had yet- if I wasn't paying attention, the lander would have torpedoed Intrepidity right in the fuel tanks and it would have been game over. A quick pit stop to replenish the fuel and supplies (and probably clean underwear for both crew!) and then Alice was off to Ike. Stephanie is currently confined to the ship, binge-watching box sets on the TV to try and stave off another stress breakdown; she's already vented some food and while Alice's stress levels go slowly down over time, Stephanie's are going inexorably up and she's nearly at 90%. To Ike! The lander was completely stable even with SAS off when Alice was inside it, but as soon as she got out it fell over. Strange. The return trip was uneventful and Intrepidity is now ready to move on. Unfortunately I just missed the Dres window and the next one is another 2 1/2 years away. There's also the minor issue of fuel- I can't capture into Duna orbit and then get back to Kerbin with enough fuel to do any kind of braking burn. However, I do have an excess of oxidiser which I can use to my advantage: set a course for Dres but leave Intrepidity on a flyby course, then use the Space Tug to carry the lander to Dres ahead of Intrepidity's arrival, do the landing and then catch up with Intrepidity again as it flies by, then set course for Kerbin and dump all the remaining oxidiser reserves. I've also started dumping excess nitrogen and oxygen to lighten the craft further, and dropping any parts that I can afford to lose. There are a number of changes that I'd make to Intrepidity based on what's happened so far: reaction wheels mounted individually so they can be removed if they break; putting the supplies etc. inside structural tubes instead of stacking them as part of the core structure; packing less of the resources I don't need or can replenish in flight- water, oxygen and definitely nitrogen- and adjusting the distribution of others, specifically oxidiser; and keeping the inventories as empty as possible with only a few repair kits and the bare minimum of spare parts. Full album: https://imgur.com/a/EdpdaHD Flag count so far: 10.

RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!!

If you can’t use it for anything else and don’t need it, delete it. You gain nothing from keeping them and it actually slows saving/loading down slightly by having more stuff in the save file.

Use RTGs, not solar panels. One Gigantor is 300kg and produces 1EC/s at Jool and only in daylight, whereas one RTG is only 50kg and produces 0.75EC/s, anytime, anywhere. RTGs are smaller too and unlike solar panels you can’t break them if you bump into them, land a bit badly or forget to retract them in an atmosphere.

For some utterly insane reason, MechJeb decided that the best way to go from Eeloo to Duna was to do a 2km/s burn RETROGRADE instead of going prograde on the other side of Eeloo and getting the same encounter for a lot less delta-V, but I lost that node when I had to reload the game so I’ll have to redo it.

DAVE- Duna Ascent Vehicle for Expeditions, a Duna lander; DDOS- Duna Descent and Orbit System, another Duna lander in a different save; CALLISSTO- Combined Atmosphere-breathing Load LIfting Single Stage To Orbit, a prototype SSTO using atmosphere-breathing nuclear engines that I later refined and turned into SSTOs for Eve, Laythe and Tylo in JNSQ (because JNSQ Tylo has an atmosphere).