jimmymcgoochie

This error message is harmless in the case of FAR, but to get rid of it I think you can: Open the craft; Edit it in any way; Save the craft. Try that and let me know if it works- I'd rather not be giving out useless/incorrect advice if I can help it

I just put Intrepidity through its paces in orbit, and oh dear... 2FPS at best, dropping to 1 at full power; 6 seconds of real time per 1 second of game time; at x4 time warp it actually becomes seconds per frame and still takes 3-4 real seconds per game second- and all this AFTER I stripped out a hundred or so parts by simplifying some of the secondary propulsion modules. This isn't going to be workable, 4 minutes of game time took almost half an hour and the apoapsis was barely half way to the Mun by that point. Solution 1: use some mods to cut down on part count- 5m fuel tanks carrying only liquid fuel would be particularly useful, supersized solar panels to generate loads of power would be good but could backfire due to part failures, even bipropellant (LF/Ox) multi-nozzle RCS thrusters would be helpful; but this would take away from the challenge of doing this as stock as possible- the stock system shouldn't need (m)any mods to do a Grand Tour even with Kerbalism. Solution 2: increase physics warp rate considerably, hope everything doesn't disintegrate (which is pretty likely). Solution 3: persistent thrust? Burn in the background so the vessel isn't loaded and the game doesn't chunk along at glacial pace, but not sure how that would work as I've never used it before. Solution 4: go with it as it is, let MechJeb worry about throttling down once the burns are done and pay attention to other things while KSP runs in the background for a very, VERY long time. Thoughts anyone?

There’s a Kerbal Atomics patch to make most LF-only engines use liquid hydrogen, I think it’s called KerbalAtomicsNTRsUseLH2 or something similar on CKAN or could be found inside Kerbal Atomics itself if downloaded directly, which makes all nuclear engines from most mods use hydrogen instead with an ISP buff to go with it.

I’m genuinely amazed that you managed to run RSS/RO/RP-1 with just 8GB of RAM- in my experience you need at least 16GB and I could barely get KSP (1.11.2) to run in a playable way with 8GB on my old PC. The only thing you can realistically do is buy more RAM.

Get the log files for KSP, upload them to a file sharing site of your choice (preferably one that others can access, like Dropbox or google docs) and then post the link(s) here. You’ll find KSP.log inside the KSP directory, other logs can be found using this guide: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/83213-stock-support-bug-reporting-guide/ Are you playing KSP through steam? If so, try verifying the game files- right click KSP in your Steam library > Properties > Local Files > verify integrity of game files, then launch KSP again and see if that fixes it.

If the trick was to create Kerbal Slideshow Program!

Tried adding an expendable transfer stage to hurl Jeb at Laythe from a high (100Mm) orbit of Jool, burning aggressively to force an encounter with as little time spent in the deadly radiation zone as possible; Jeb still died before escaping again, and I discovered that all the heavy shielding on the cockpit means that the plane will sink if it lands in water- not good for a moon that’s almost entirely ocean!

I looked into water to hydrolox ISRU systems a while ago and until you unlock the big ISRU in one of the last life support/ISRU nodes it’s not practical even on Mars where water is more readily available than the Moon. It would take years to produce enough propellant for a single Moon landing because the rate of water electrolysis is so low, plus you have to either find or transport the water and deal with two weeks of continuous darkness every month. Storable propellants can’t be made, but they also don’t boil off and require smaller tanks. A suitable rocket could throw 50 tons or more into Lunar orbit, enough fuel for multiple Moon landings; once the 50 ignitions on the KTDU run out, swap it out for another one with KIS/KAS.

OK, hear me out for a moment: KTDU plus generic thrusters. KTDU does most of the work during the descent, generic thrusters with a TWR of just above 1 (or below 1 but also chunky RCS with a bit of throttling, fore by throttle switched on and toggleable with an action key) using the same fuel do the final touchdown, KTDU does the ascent, generics for rendezvousing and so on in orbit to save ignitions. I haven’t tried it myself, but I see no reason why it wouldn’t work.

The Intrepidity is nearly complete: On the top, the lower stages of the Eve lander; they're heavy and only have one purpose, so I'm aiming to go to Eve as soon as possible so I don't have to drag it around everywhere else. Attached just below the top cupola, four lander craft- Mk1 pod, FL-T400 tank, Terrier engine, some gubbins to provide power and some more gubbins to dock them to other things at either end. One has no shielding to be used on Eve, where delta-V is critical and radiation is less of a concern; two have maximum shielding to go to Vall, there's a spare in case of critical part failures as Jool is pretty late on my list of destinations; and one has a little bit of shielding to land on Tylo, and possibly Moho too as it has a weird little radiation belt around its equator. They have ~2400m/s or so of delta-V each, depending on shielding levels, so will be more than adequate for landing anywhere else- I tested one on Duna and with a single parachute stuck to the top it landed with no issues and made it back to orbit with fuel to spare. Below those, three boosters/space tugs- one of these will do the Tylo descent, another is a spare for that and the third will be used to throw landers around if necessary. There's a 1.25m>0.625m docking adapter on the fourth port where the Laythe plane will go, it can't be added on in the editor as it uses an inflatable airlock as its docking port, which has no front attachment node. The central core consists of a Hitchhiker, lab module and a greenhouse which I'll use to produce extra food when close enough to the sun and then switch off when it starts drawing too much power. Plenty of interior volume for a crew of three, no problems with stress, all fully shielded plus three active shields and the radiation detox unit in the Hitchhiker should mean radiation isn't a problem either; that RDU will be getting used A LOT around Jool! Below the crew section is a sort of service module, containing batteries, reaction wheels, food/water/oxygen for the crew to stay alive, nitrogen for pressurisation, hydrogen for the emergency fuel cells, many backup life support systems and lots of spare parts packed into a big cargo container. There are three active shields to protect against low level radiation, effective against up to 0.12rad/h which is much more than you'll get from the sun under normal circumstances, but will do almost nothing at all against the radiation belts of Kerbin, let alone Jool. Two enormous solar wings house a total of 44 Gigantor solar panels, with four more on the central module to provide power when the ship is under construction. Four Communotron 88-88 dishes- two on the body and one on each solar wing- cover long-distance communications. Under that, the propulsion module- the central core has 16 NERVs and a single Wolfhound engine, with each of the eight radial boosters housing another eight NERVs and one Wolfhound apiece. Each radial booster has its own solar panels, RCS and reaction wheels, radiators, control core and a small relay dish to allow remote control, as well as a small docking port on the top which could be used to dock a lander or the Laythe plane to, to get them where they need to be- or back to the mothership. Fully fuelled and including the Laythe plane, this thing is looking like it'll weigh close to 3500 tons; initially I thought I might be able to launch up to 400 tons at once meaning one propulsion module at a tine, however... Things get a lot easier when you can launch over 1500 tons on a single rocket! I tested it with four of the radial boosters for Intrepidity and it handled them with no trouble at all: Unfortunately things didn't go so well when I started docking them together for orbital storage- one three were connected up the whole thing tore itself apart in seconds. That pesky Kraken... I tried again, but launching most of the ship in a single go, minus fuel. Things were going well, right up until the boosters were due to separate; the game froze for over a minute, then... A quick test flight of the Laythe plane I'll be using proved a) it's more than capable of getting down from an orbit higher than Bop's, aerobraking aggressively in Laythe's atmosphere to a direct descent, landing, flying back to orbit and then escaping Jool's radiation belts again, and b) that if I do all that, the pilot will inevitably die of radiation poisoning several days before escaping Jool's radiation belts. It's a good thing I have some space tugs and maybe even one of the radial boosters to hurl stuff around much faster than the most efficient Hohmann transfer, between that and some good timing I might be able to dive through the belts, land, wait a while for the next escape window (radiation on Laythe's surface is very low, the atmosphere absorbs most of it somehow so it's relatively save down on the surface) and then burn like crazy to escape again. Now, I could try launching this thing in many pieces and building it in orbit... Or I could install the KSTS mod to pre-record a flight of that mega-rocket carrying some ballast as payload mass, launch a space station with it, then use the space station as an orbital shipyard to build the Intrepidity in orbit instead, costing me nothing but time- nearly 300 days in fact- and saving me a lot of hassle with docking thousands of tons of spacecraft together with the frame rates chunking along like a slideshow due to the huge part count. I'm doing a Grand Tour with Kerbalism on hard settings, why would I want to complicate things any further than I already have? The only problem with the KSTS route is that it sometimes goes a bit, er, wrong... That was supposed to be the same Laythe SSTO shown in the image above, but somehow it got utterly mangled when it spawned in and I barely managed to deorbit it before putting a replacement in orbit and docking it to the station for safekeeping. The first window to Eve is over a year away, so there's plenty of time to do some additional test flights to make sure everything works before I set off. There's also time to select my three plucky Kerbonauts who will be making this fateful trip- rather than use Jeb, Bob, Bill and Val I'm going for three totally new Kerbals, one scientist to run the lab and two engineers to repair stuff and do EVA construction. No pilots- between probe cores and MechJeb I don't need them.

I must have missed that, or my data was wrong. Either way it makes NERVs look even better.

The rocket equation: Delta-V =g0xISPxln(m0/mf), this tells you how far you can go; g0 is standard gravity, 9.807m/s/s; ISP is per engine, let’s assume 350s for the Poodle; m0 is the wet mass of the craft including all the fuel; mf is the empty mass, after all the fuel has been burnt; any excess propellant e.g. monopropellant counts as dry mass for this equation since you’re not burning it in the engine. ln is natural log. The mass ratio is m0/mf, or in simple terms how much of your rocket’s mass is fuel compared to not-fuel; in stock KSP this is limited by fuel tanks which have a mass ratio no greater than 9, so you can’t have a mass ratio above 9 even if your rocket is made of thousands of fuel tanks and one tiny engine. ln(9) is 2.197, so let’s put that into the equation: delta-V = 9.807 x 350 x 2.197 = 7541m/s. This is the fundamental limit for the Poodle engine, no matter what you do you cannot go higher than this on a single stage. Swap to the Wolfhound with 380s, the maximum possible delta-V is 9.807 x 380 x 2.197 = 8187m/s. If you use multiple stages you can get more delta-V overall, but just remember that for each stage, whatever it’s carrying on top is counted as dry mass, so your mass ratio will be even lower and so delta-V will be reduced on that stage. If you actually want to get somewhere and do something useful when you’re there, your mass ratio will be worse than the ‘ideal’ value because of the extra weight of your payload and to get a usable thrust to weight ratio so you actually get there without sitting for hours and losing delta-V through cosine losses, which happen whenever you burn in a direction other than directly prograde or retrograde. Now the NERV is a little bit different because pure liquid fuel tanks (which are all based on aircraft fuselage shapes- Mk1, Mk2 and Mk3) are less mass-efficient than LF/Ox tanks so the best mass ratio you can get is 8 (ln(8) = 2.079) but on the other hand, ISP is more than double what any LF/Ox engine can manage so the maximum delta-V is higher: 9.807 x 800 x 2.079 = 16314m/s. The Dawn ion thruster is another level up from the NERV with a massive 4200s ISP, however xenon tanks have really poor mass ratios of 2.728 (ln(2.728) = 1.004) and the thrust is really low. Maximum delta-V with those is 9.807 x 4200 x 1.004 = 41620m/s! And just for fun, monopropellant- the Puff engine has an ISP of 250s, slightly better than RCS thrusters, and the best RCS tank has a respectable mass ratio of 8.5 (ln(8.5) = 2.140); 9.807 x 250 x 2.140 = 5246m/s. Not nearly as good as even the least efficient LF/Ox engines which manage 290s ISP in vacuum. TL;DR version- LF/Ox delta-V can’t go above about 7.5km/s on a single stage using the best stock engine (Poodle), or about 8.1km/s with the DLC Wolfhound engine; NERVs can get twice as much delta-V but their thrust is a lot less, ions can get over 5 times as much but their thrust is puny in comparison. NERVs are the best choice for long-range flights because of their superior delta-V compared to LF/Ox engines and their much greater thrust than ion engines, which also require electricity to function and producing/storing that power adds mass, reducing delta-V. Getting to and from planets in the stock system isn’t all that difficult, as long as you travel at the right time- there are various tools and mods that can help you time your transfers to use as little fuel as possible, meaning you can carry a bigger payload, use a lighter rocket or go to more places. Orbiting Duna and Eve with a crewed craft and returning is feasible with LF/Ox engines, though for larger vessels or trips further afield e.g. the moons of Jool, nuclear is the best option.

@Souptime I looked it up, and it turns out that my home nation Scotland is a bit of an outlier in that the age of majority (legal adulthood) is 16- everywhere else in the EU (and the UK) it’s 18, though many of those (including the rest of the UK) will allow marriage at 16 under certain specific conditions. Now that I’ve got the malaphors out of my system... Re. mods, so far I’ve mentioned several Near Future mods (Aeronautics and Launch Vehicles mostly, though others were on my mind when I wrote some details of spacecraft), Cryo Tanks and Engines, Mk-33, Mk4, Luciole, X-20, SSPX, SCANsat and JNSQ of course. There could be more that I’ve forgotten, it’s been a while and I’ve played various different KSP games since I started playing KSP- stock, stock with OPM, JNSQ, stock with Kerbalism, RSS/RO/RP-1... That being said, I don’t necessarily intend to ensure that everything I talk about has a real KSP analog- for example the Lindor V is essentially a Kerbal Saturn V with three stages and burning hydrogen in the second and third stages (the stock+MH Acapello only has 2 stages and wouldn’t make it to Kerbin orbit in JNSQ) and the Trailblazer is loosely based on a design I used in a career game in JNSQ to go to Duna, though that ship had zero life support because I wasn’t using a LS mod in that game.

I’m trying to do this without using parts mods, just what Kerbalism includes itself and what it does to the stock parts. DLCs are stock in my book so I’m using both of them and Restock just changed how the parts look rather than how they work so that’s fine, but so far the only part I’ve used outside of that so far is the 3.75m docking port from Restock+, and I can probably remove that since I now have a nice little launch rocket that can handle up to 2 kiloton payloads...

So this whole thing is your fault then? I’m trying to build a much smaller craft than your Dream Big, just to make the game run at something close to real speed for the several hours of burn time I’ll end up with

That log just cuts out in the middle of a line, no obvious errors before that so it could be a resource issue (running out of RAM) or you just need to leave it running for longer to let it load. A mod list would help, as would the more detailed Player.log found at C:/Users/your username here/AppData/LocalLow/Squad/Kerbal Space Program

A dozen LT-2s can support a ~100 ton craft landing on Eve at 5m/s, so I see no reason why four can’t support a 15t craft at 3m/s on the Mun. 15 tons does seem a bit heavy for a Mun lander though, screenshots please?

Radiators do absolutely nothing against re-entry heating, they’re only useful for dissipating the heat that your ISRU equipment generates. If you want to shield your drills more effectively, put them inside service bays which should protect them as long as you keep it closed, or inside fairings.

Has it really been a year since I started this story? Back then we were only into the first lockdown; since then we've had Lockdown 2: Electric Boogaloo; Lockdown 3: This Time It's Personal (Protective Equipment) and possibly Lockdown 4: A New Hope Normal. I can honestly say that when I wrote the first chapter I wasn't expecting the story to end up where it is now, and while it's been a bit of a slog trying to get the recent chapters done (and I expect that to be the case for the next few as well, sadly) I'm hoping that Tina's tale has many more years of life left in it yet.

Try removing the @ from HAS[@MODULE as this is incorrect syntax, you only need HAS[MODULE there.

I regularly hit 32GB used (out of 32!) when loading the main menu in my heavily modded RP-1 game, to the extent that I have to do a complicated little routine to avoid causing my entire PC to crash; just running it after that usually takes about 15GB though.

Good news and bad news: Bad news, I won't be posting here for a while. Good news, I'll be posting here instead: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/202342-project-intrepidity-a-kerbalism-grand-tour-attempt/ Much like the RSS/RO/RP-1 bug bit during my last career (Kerbal(ism) Space Program), now I've come full circle and returned to the stock system with Kerbalism- this time for a full-blown Grand Tour on hard difficulty, though with F5/F9 enabled. Once I'm done with that, I'll return to this career save- I have a Mars to put flags on after all!

I was going to go back to my RSS/RO/RP-1 career game (which I've been documenting here: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/198428-terranism-space-program/), but then I read some mission reports of people doing a Grand Tour in the stock Kerbol system with the added complications of Kerbalism- life support, part malfunctions, crew health, stress and radiation and more will put all sorts of constraints on the designs that a pure stock Grand Tour doesn't have to worry about. This being a difficult and complex challenge, I decided to jump in at the deep end with the difficulty set to hard, at least as far as Kerbalism is concerned, with only minor tweaks to the settings to reflect the fact that the 'plants' bonus doesn't seem to be working any more; most of the regular settings are left as they are, but I'm allowing reloads and reverts both to avoid game glitches and to give myself a chance at some practice runs for the trickier landings; landing on the Moon is easier than landing on Tylo due to the much higher gravity and orbital velocity. While the mothership is entirely of my own design, I saw no need to reinvent the wheel when it came to the various landers I'd need to put boots on the ground on every planet and moon in the system, so I took a quick look on KerbalX and found a few promising designs: an Eve ascent vessel, a dinky SSTO that could be perfect for Laythe. A few minor upgrades were necessary- removing ISRU equipment, since Kerbalism does its own thing with that and makes it virtually useless as a result, adding radiation shielding and some backup parts in case something important fails and can't be replaced, and then adapting everything to be lugged around by a single huge craft, requiring some interesting uses of docking ports which should make the design a bit more modular, helping to shed dead weight when it's no longer needed. By pure chance, the upper stage of the Eve ascent craft I found works brilliantly as a lander for pretty much everywhere else, with the obvious exceptions of Kerbin, Laythe and Tylo. With the addition of a single parachute on top for the Duna landing, it'll work fine for Moho, Gilly, Mun, Minmus, Duna, Ike, Dres, Vall, Bop, Pol and Eeloo. With a good descent stage, it'll do for getting back into orbit from the surface of Tylo too. The single biggest problem with doing a Kerbalism Grand Tour is Jool. Specifically, the terrifyingly powerful and absolutely vast radiation belts that surround Jool and make its inner three moons incredibly dangerous to approach. The inner belt will mean instant death if you enter it, and extends out almost to Laythe's orbit; the outer belt is less lethal, but will still kill you if you don't have a lot of shielding, or even if you do and just stay there too long, and extends out beyond Tylo. Those radiation belts are driven by solar output and the planet's magnetic field, so they're a bit lopsided as the solar wind pushes everything outwards- when it's closest to the sun, Tylo is right at the very edge of the outer belt and so will have a relatively low level of radiation, making that the best time to land; conversely Laythe's orbit comes dangerously close to the inner belt when it's being eclipsed by Jool and even Bop isn't necessarily safe when furthest from the sun. To survive getting to Vall and Laythe will require maximum radiation shielding, but this is heavy and reduces delta-V by a noticeable margin (though not by nearly as much as it does in RO/RP-1!). For this reason I plan to have three different variants of that 'lander' design: one with no shielding to land on Eve where any excess weight must be ruthlessly cut to stand a chance of escaping, which will also work for most other planets and moons; one with a little bit of shielding to land on Tylo, and probably Moho as well since it has a weird radiation belt going around its equator at low altitude that could be problematic; and one with maximum shielding to land on Vall, which I'll probably carry a second copy of in case of irreparable malfunctions before I get there. So far I've spent four days worth of KSP-ing on this, purely doing design and testing work on the main ship, its propulsion systems and the various extra bits that will be needed for this undertaking. A few screenshots of what I've been up to so far: Spoiler alert- yes, yes we will... It looked a bit like Kerbin rising over the Mun, then Jool showed up. A night flight on Laythe with Jool hanging low over the horizon and Vall lurking at the very top of the image. The Eve ascent craft was fine for the surface to orbit part, but had absolutely no ability to go from orbit to the surface in the first place. Quite a few attempts later I came up with the simple solution of "staple a bunch of big wings to the pointy end to keep it going heatshield first", which worked better than I was expecting and also means it has some semblance of control via the aerodynamic surfaces, which double as airbrakes too. One parachute on top and some simple landing legs on the bottom are enough to make the second stage of the Eve ascent craft able to land on Duna too. This kind of reuse is going to be critical to keep the weight and parts count down on this mission. EVA construction will be put to use for this one, another reason to allow F5/F9 since it can be a bit unpredictable. That's all for now, but I'll be posting updates to this when I have them and fully intend to complete this challenge.

There I was, trying to clip Mk1 LF fuselages into a Mk3 LF fuselage and using Mk3-2.5m/3.75m adapters, when the solution was right in front of me the whole time- just use a second set of Mk3 fuselages, rotated 90 degrees to create a seamless (if incredibly glitchy looking) 3.75m cylinder with double the fuel capacity and a much lower part count than before; this is particularly important because I’m designing the propulsion system for a Grand Tour ship and I’ll need all the fuel I can get, even if that means a TWR of 0.15 fully loaded.

Has anyone mentioned the Making History inflatable airlock yet? It also doubles as a docking port which docks to small-sized ports (clamp-o-torn jr), or another inflatable airlock presumably. It’s also detachable with its own decoupler for all your Voshkod-related needs.