jimmymcgoochie

Landed on Eve and Gilly, stops 1 and 2 of 14 for my Kerbalism Grand Tour. Now I have to decide if I go to Moho next, which would be a logical step from Eve, or to Jool instead, where I can use a load of purpose-built landers and shed a lot of excess weight to gain some delta-V overall, and get the hardest landings out of the way as soon as possible. I’m carrying a plane for Laythe, purpose-built landers for Vall (much shielding because of Jool’s terrifying radiation belts) and Tylo (less shielding, more delta-V, requires a descent stage) plus a backup for the Vall lander and Tylo descent stage; hauling all that stuff down to Moho is a waste of fuel, but I haven’t yet figured out if going to Jool first will be a net gain or loss of delta-V.

I’ve been thinking... The Eve lander/ascent system was nearly a hundred tons and a hundred parts, so I went there first to get rid of that weight and to deal with the most difficult landing first. Now that that’s over with, I have no less than five attached craft to deal with Jool- landers for Laythe, Vall and Tylo plus a descent stage for Tylo and I’ll need to sacrifice either the Space Tug or the backup Tylo descent stage, or possibly a nearly empty nuclear booster, to get to Laythe and back before radiation kills the crew; several are full of heavy shielding and all can be used then dumped, dramatically reducing the dead weight being hauled around the system. Eve to Jool might be expensive, but I could try to use Eve and/or Kerbin for gravity assists to save some delta-V. Once at Jool, the biggest challenge is getting to Tylo- the descent stage is only for the descent, and likewise the ascent stage will only do the ascent, so I need something else to get them into low Tylo orbit; either I’ll need to use a Space Tug to tow them out there, then tow the ascent stage back to Intrepidity, or I could take a risk and send Intrepidity itself into Tylo orbit, timing it just right to get the minimum possible exposure to that deadly radiation belt- go in, capture, land and return within one orbit then leave within a second orbit. The backup Tylo lander then takes the Vall lander to and from Vall, with some EVA construction surgery on the lander to dump any parts I can (fuel tank and engine mostly) to save weight; the landing stage can manage about 2700m/a with the Tylo lander, so I’m budgeting about 2400m/a with the heavier Vall version. If I have to, I’ll do the rendezvous back to Intrepidity with the Kerbal clinging to a ladder to gain more delta-V as I really want to have the Space Tug around for other planets, so I want the backup Tylo landing stage to come back from Vall to then fling the Laythe plane at Laythe. Once I’ve done the inner moons of Jool, the rest of this Grand Tour should be a piece of cake

After weeks of planning and testing, and several days of painfully slow progress for the mission itself. the first flags of this Grand Tour have finally been planted: On Eve- And following a brief pit stop to refuel, and swipe some food/water/oxygen pods from one of the nuclear boosters to extend the lander's duration from 5 days to over 200, on Gilly- Following both landings, the Space Tug was deployed with a Docking Adapter to catch the lander and bring it back; in the case of the Gilly run, because the lander actually ran out of fuel during the rendezvous. I tried a bunch of experiments over Eve and Gilly, but unfortunately I forgot that unlike in RO/RP-1, with 'stock' Kerbalism there's very limited data capacity on parts- only enough data capacity for a crew and EVA report from the surface of each body and one sample slot for the surface sample; Alice was very upset that her nice Eve rock (that she spent several minutes running around in a full spacesuit, in 1.7G, in nearly 400K temperatures, to collect) had been left behind, and Stephanie tried various EVA experiments on and around Gilly that ultimately had to be deleted to free up the storage space for the crew and EVA reports. To resolve this issue, I've added an antenna to this particular lander (stolen from the Docking Adapter, which doesn't really need it) so it can transmit its data and theoretically get more science. Not that science really matters in this whole thing, but I want to see how much I can get with the limited selection of experiments I've brought with me. Full album: https://imgur.com/a/rEJoO9p The next Moho window is in 55 days and costs 5km/s delta-V in total, or I can wait another 120 days and save 500m/s; I might look into doing Eve->Eve->Moho trajectories to get a gravity assist of some sort to bring that number down, since I currently have about 13km/s in total left on the nuclear engines, though that's improved recently as I got rid of the heavy Eve descent/ascent stage. I'm a little bit worried by how much fuel I've used so far just going to one planet, but with Eve and Moho done it should get a lot easier from there.

KSP and KSP2 are being made by different developers. Chances of crossover, close to nil. If you want interstellar travel in KSP, download KSPIE (or FFT) and the extrasolar planet pack of your choice.

After repeated aerobraking and re-entry attempts through Eve’s atmosphere yesterday I can conform that the inflatable heat shield does what it’s supposed to and protects everything behind it. Try attaching the shield to something with high thermal tolerance to add a layer of insulation between the shield itself and what you’re trying to shield, that will reduce the conduction from the hot shield to the sensitive parts beneath. As RO/RP-1 showed me, attaching heat shields directly to parts that can’t take much heat resulted in those parts melting from conducted heat while the heat shield itself was fine, so I suspect deadly re-entry is having a bit of an effect.

I’m sure there’s a Dark Knight Rises quote in there somewhere... ”Oh, you think lagginess is your ally. But you merely adopted the lag; I was born in it, moulded by it. I didn't see the framerates until I was already a man...”

A small course correction half-way to Eve made for a nice low periapsis and a nice equatorial orbit. Capturing will take time, but I decided to save myself some fuel by leaving Intrepidity in a more elliptical orbit and just send the Eve lander down to the surface from there. A bit of EVA construction was required, both to ready the lander and to fix a strange issue with one of the fuel hoses on the inner boosters- it had somehow clipped straight through the central tank and attached to the opposite side booster, causing uneven fuel draining which required TAC fuel balancer to fix; I took the opportunity to drain two of the outer boosters and ditch them to save weight, though this also undoes most of the TWR gained from burning the fuel to get here. I only took engineers, but that's no reason not to try some EVA science: Doing EVAs at really low frame rates is actually pretty difficult, since the poor Kerbal keeps trying to fix their heading but always overshoots; doing EVA construction even more so. I'll need to fix the settings so they don't keep trying to face camera forwards, and to separate 'rotate to camera' from 'go down' as both are bound to the control key. Followed by a very slow and precise docking- those ladders have to line up or there'll be no flag planting (or a flag planted but no return): Initial deorbiting with the SRBs: I've tried many different aerobraking altitudes, but it seems the planet is in the worst position possible- the periapsis is about 30 degrees in the night side of Eve and almost everything from there to the opposite horizon is ocean of some kind. I think I'll wait until the opposite side of the planet moves into the light before attempting to land on land, as this rocket simply can't take off from water. Amazing to think that it took several hours just to do this. I was hoping to actually land today, but it looks like that'll have to wait until tomorrow. On the bright side, that lander actually runs at full speed and after watching the 2FPS, 1/6 real time slideshow during the capture burn it's like playing a completely different game!

Glass isn’t crystalline, it’s an amorphous solid. Minmus is most likely ice tainted with copper and/or iron oxides and possibly some ammonia or methane clathrates too- decidedly not edible!

@seyMonstersnegative apoapsis means you’re escaping, that probe isn’t coming back... I told you the sun was worth looking at .

Dres is real... ...but it’s not a planet. It’s barely even a dwarf planet. I remember seeing a forum thread recently (but can’t find it ) that showed all the planets and moons in the Kerbol system side by side and just how tiny Dres actually is; from the KSP wiki, Dres (138km radius) is puny in comparison to all the other planets and is only just larger than Duna’s moon Ike (130km), or considerably smaller than the Mun (200km), Moho (250km) and Eeloo (210km). That star map in the tutorial is obviously showing full planets, not wannabes that can’t even clear their own orbit.

In the stock game it’s little more than a token nod to space station building, but throw some mods into the equation and it can become a very useful part indeed- for example, Kerbalism makes the Hitchhiker a vital part for long-term missions with a decent internal volume, a radiation detox unit to stop them getting radiation sickness from their years in space and a TV in the corner so they can binge-watch box sets instead of freaking out about the fact that they’re in a tiny tin can surrounded by the nearly infinite expanse of cold hard vacuum. It also has a massive inventory in 1.11 meaning it’s a great place to stash repair kits and so on within easy reach of the crew.

One last "refit" (read: magic teleportation of a replacement craft into LKO and mysterious disappearance of the old, with a few gratuitous explosions thrown in for good measure) and Intrepidity is now nuclear-powered, with the four Gigantors on the main body able to handle all the power needs close to the sun and 48 RTGs to power it out to Eeloo. All that was left to do was send up engineers Alice and Stephanie, top up all the tanks and plot a course for Eve. The transfer to Eve wasn't particularly bad at about 1600m/s, but due to an appallingly bad TWR of just 0.16 that would take over 15 minutes of solid burn time- at under 1/5 real speed. Instead, I split the burn into a series of 200m/s chunks, each taking 2 minutes to complete, which cut the final burn time by half but also meant multiple engine starts and repeated trips through Kerbin's inner and outer radiation belts- 10% radiation damage before they've even gone past the Mun's orbit isn't a particularly auspicious start, but the radiation detox units in those Hitchhikers can heal them on the long trip out to Eve. I ditched persistent thrust as I thought it might be messing up my trajectory during time warp with the engines off, but the replacement (better time warp) was no help at all- engaging any form of physics warp with something this big and with so many pieces tacked to the sides caused some alarming wobbles that could easily have torn the ship apart even with the relatively slow acceleration rate. Five long burns (and a few real hours) later, Intrepidity is on its way to Eve to begin this Grand Tour. The intercept is mediocre at best, but I'll fix that later. At this point it's too late to make any changes to the design, so if there's something missing that's mission critical then poor Alice and Stephanie are doomed; though with so many high quality parts, multiple redundant backups of all the life support systems, about a hundred repair kits and supplies enough for three Kerbals to last the entire trip rather than just two, they should be fine.

Actually, missing parts tend to prevent loading, missing modules within parts are often OK as the part itself can still be created (in most cases).

Well, sometimes you hunt the Kraken, and sometimes the Kraken hunts you...

I had an epiphany of sorts yesterday about solar panels. Those big solar wings house a total of 44 Gigantors, which weigh almost half a ton each when they’re set to high quality with Kerbalism to make them less failure-prone. Add in the structural girders they’re mounted on and those solar wings weigh at least 20 tons. Parked in Kerbin orbit, I’m getting nearly a thousand power per second out of them- monstrous overkill when I need less than 20 with everything switched on. The only reason I added so many Gigantors was to produce enough power out at Eeloo, but the sun is so weak there that the same solar arrays that generate 980EC/a at Kerbin manage just 17EC/s at Eeloo, which is less than 1EC per ton of solar panel. And that got me thinking- why am I lugging around all those big, heavy, breakable solar panels when they’re dead weight almost everywhere I go, when instead I could use RTGs for power far from the sun and let the four Gigantors on the ship’s main body handle everything from Duna down. To get the 20EC/s I need at Eeloo requires about 27 RTGs; with a half-life of 28 years and some intermittent use of power-hungry systems I might as well take 50 to be on the safe side. 50 RTGs will be dramatically lighter than the solar panels, they can’t break or fail and while they emit radiation they can be positioned far away from the crew modules so they aren’t a hazard to the crew. I should have thought of this much earlier!

The almost-final design for Intrepidity, now featuring modified 3.75m fuel tanks containing 100% liquid fuel because the heavily clipped Mk3 fuselages caused many explosions whenever I tried to load it in after switching vessels. Some minor tweaks were made after I took this image- the radiators and struts on the boosters were removed to save weight. I've ditched the lab and greenhouse idea and just gone for two Hitchhikers instead, which reduces weight but also dramatically reduces the space inside so it's a bit cramped for three crew- but just fine for two. Yup, I've changed the plan again- now I'm only sending two Kerbals on this mission. I've added some chemical plants for some added utility- turn waste into shielding, turn CO2 into O2 and shielding, electrolyse water to replenish the fuel cell fuel and turn ammonia and oxygen into nitrogen and water, though that last one won't be used much- and a pair of RA-100 relays have replaced the 88-88 dishes attached to the main body so that when the landers are out, er, landing, they can still communicate back home and be slightly less stressed as a result. I reduced the shielding on the crew modules to half of maximum- a tactical risk, since the huge 5m fuel tank and the boosters will be a perfect sun shade to protect the crew from solar flares and the active shields will handle the rest. No entering into Jool's radiation belts, but then again I didn't plan to with this thing. A few save hacks to remove all autostruts later and it was in orbit, not exploding, and the Laythe SSTO could join up to complete the assembly: Oops... Not to worry, it's not like there are nearly a hundred nuclear rocket engines here or anything Assembly complete! Intrepidity is now ready to depart, all its resources fully topped up. All that's left is to send the crew up, plot the course for Eve and this grand adventure can finally get underway. Those huge solar arms, though... They bother me a bit. 44 high-quality Gigantors plus the associated structural girders are adding a huge amount of dead weight which won't be needed until I go out to/beyond Dres, and are currently producing about 900EC per second which I just don't need right now. If I could, I'd leave them behind for the visits to the inner system and then pick them up again when needed, say around Duna; but that goes against the idea of the Grand Tour- one ship for everything, no splitting up and going in different directions because it's convenient. I can take some solace in the fact that that big, heavy Eve descent/ascent stage on the front will be getting dropped off at the first port of call, removing over 90 tons and a hundred or so parts from the equation.

I was never a fan of procedural parts, but now that I've spent several months playing RO/RP-1 using many many procedural parts... I still don't like them. The limitations of using a small set of fixed parts is part of KSP's charm, in a way that endlessly adjusting a load of barely legible sliders to tweak trivial details of a fuel tank or wing just isn't. Then again, trying to create a nice looking and functional wing with the selection of wing boards available in KSP is equally fiddly especially when the wing needs to be angled to generate lift instead of using real lift physics with aerofoil shapes etc. I'll wait and see a) how KSP2 implements them and b) if planes are actually useful in KSP2 in any way to need to use them.

Here's one possible cause: you're putting mods in the KSP controlled by Steam. This is A BAD IDEA. Steam interferes a lot, deleting stuff that it thinks shouldn't be there- including when you add mods. The great thing about KSP is that you can copy it as many times as you like, have multiple copies on different versions of the game with different mods in each, so you can easily avoid this problem. Try the following: Copy your save game (KSP/saves/your save name) and keep that somewhere else- desktop would do; Completely uninstall KSP through Steam, delete everything; Reinstall KSP through Steam, then verify the game files (right-click KSP > Properties > Local Files > verify files); Run KSP to make sure everything shows up as expected; Assuming it works properly, copy the entire KSP folder out of steamapps/common and paste it somewhere else outside of Steam's control- again desktop would do; Install the mods into that new copy, where Steam can't mess them up, and copy your save game into it too. Keep the Steam version of KSP completely stock, no mods whatsoever, so it can collect game version updates when they are released, while your copies with mods don't get updates that could break mod compatibility.

I’m at the stage of considering a direct approach from the Jool transfer, bombing down at interplanetary speeds with an expendable booster just to slow down to a survivable speed before tanking into the atmosphere. Relies a lot on very precise timing though, plus I’d also have to capture the main ship into a high Jool orbit at around the same time which could get messy... Vall should be a bit easier, but now I’ve also discovered that using even one unpressurised pod (Mk1 pod or cockpits) makes the entire ship unpressurised- even when their habitats are disabled; really ruins the stress score, but there’s nothing I can do to fix that. Or is there? A little part hack here and there would do the job nicely methinks.

Fair enough. Maybe if they slowed the flashing down a bit though..?

@Spaceman.Spiff hang on- they removed the Friday emoji!? Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo(deep breath)oooooooooooooooooooooooooo

@king of nowhere maximum shielding, to the extend that it makes the plane sink if it lands in the water, but I still get huge radiation issues going down to Laythe from a 100-125Mm orbit of Jool, the best I’ve ever done is 48% irradiation to the surface and I might be able to push back out again in the high nineties; shielding efficiency is worse with higher difficulty levels so this might explain the discrepancy. I was at 1100 parts, trying to cut that down by trimming anything I don’t absolutely need to try and make the game (more) playable.

Depending on what I’m doing I can use anything from zero (on my old potato computer) to over 100 (my current RSS/RO/RP-1 game) and anything in between. I usually include MechJeb, Restock/+, KAC and EVE/scatterer/DOE/whatever graphics pack is applicable for my current solar system; Near Future mods are high on the list (and most of Nertea’s other stuff like SSPX and Kerbal Atomics), SCANsat is a must have and I like to use Kerbalism, even if it’s just the science config, to make gathering science more complex than just pressing some buttons and the experiments are done just like that.

Kraken montage: In other news, persistent thrust turns out to work pretty well- it runs about 10x slower than it should, so at 10x time warp game time actually runs at real speed- but further experiments will be required before I know it'll do what I need it to do. I also think I know how to get to Laythe and back without radiation killing the poor chump who gets sent down there- using one of the space tugs (slash spare Tylo descent stage) as an expendable booster gives enough delta-V to crash down through the Jool Death ZoneTM and only take 48% radiation damage by the time they land on Laythe, with the spaceplane itself handling the return and with some decent timing making it back out again without reaching 100% radiation. Laythe's surface has just 1% of the radiation that you get in orbit so staying on the ground until the last possible moment will be key; having to wait for even half an orbit before the escape burn could be lethal. I've also made some changes to Intrepidity's engines, swapping the Wolfhounds on the outer boosters for more NERVs- less thrust, but better efficiency and the way they're feeding fuel that's more important than outright thrust, I can break up the longer burns into bitesized chunks to avoid wasting fuel.

There are pros and cons to both options- Procedural fairings are more customisable, both in terms of shape and appearance, and will automatically adjust their shape to whatever payload you attach, whereas stock fairings have a limited set of colours and you need to build their shape manually, and also have a maximum radius; Stock fairings can be made open-ended or connect to other parts e.g. an LES tower, which procedural fairings don’t seem to do as far as I can tell- procedural parts tend to be for one specific use e.g. a fairing, an interstage shroud or an engine boattail, whereas stock fairings are a bit more flexible and can do any/all of those things if you want (this is based on my experiences in RO/RP-1, using procedural fairings in a more regular KSP game might be different); Stock fairings can have multiple stack nodes to mount more than one payload, for example a set of relays, which procedural fairings do not; In the end, it’s up to you to try them both and see which version you prefer.