jimmymcgoochie

Whatever the writer’s block version of drain cleaner is, order @CatastrophicFailure a metric ton of the stuff, industrial-strength, same-day delivery preferred. Now with added diazoazide azide and fluorine peroxide! (And whatever other ghastly substances were in that rocket Val flew in near the end of Book 2 )

“Not much cooler”- in a very similar way that human body temperature is “not much cooler” than boiling water (373K-330K=63K difference, 90K-33K=57K difference for oxygen/hydrogen boiling points). Liquid hydrogen is the second coldest liquid around- only liquid helium is colder- which combined with all the other advantages makes it the best fuel for NTRs by a sizeable margin; only its poor density lets it down.

NTRs can run on many things besides hydrogen- water, ammonia, CO2, methane... Hydrogen is the obvious choice because it’s very light (so can be accelerated more = higher ISP), very cold (cools the very hot nuclear reactor) and is also a neutron moderator so it actually increases the rate of nuclear fission- the combination of increased reaction rate and increased cooling makes it (relatively!) simple to operate as the flow of hydrogen directly controls the reactor output in a linear and controlled manner, though it also means you’ll need to throttle up and down slowly to avoid damaging the reactor by cutting the fuel flow and overheating it. Water, ammonia and methane are options as all are fairly light molecules containing hydrogen- methane is lighter and cryogenic so its ISP would be higher, and can be used for chemical rockets too, ammonia can manage a decent ISP and can be found in solid ices in some parts of the solar system, but water is more dense, more useful for humans and also more readily available without the need for ISRU systems as water ice exists all over the Solar system, whereas methane and ammonia would need to be found in the rare places they exist or made via ISRU. All of this is ignoring the huge advantage hydrogen has over literally everything else as NTR propellant in terms of raw ISP, which can get over 900 with a conventional solid-core NTR; the hotter the reactor can run, the higher the ISP can go. Making that hydrogen by melting then splitting water ice is power intensive, yes, but if you have a multi-gigawatt nuclear reactor for propulsion then tapping just a few percent of that power to generate electricity will take care of that, plus waste heat can be used to melt more ice. Back to the OP’s point about what to do with the oxygen if you’re running a hydrogen NTR- some of it can be injected into the engine as a kind of afterburner, increasing thrust but reducing ISP; see LANTR. If you’re talking about a ship with a crew aboard, they’ll need oxygen too so some can go to keeping them alive. Finally, any nuclear ship will have some kind of secondary propulsion system for when firing up the reactor wouldn’t be worth it- nuclear reactors can’t just be turned on and off on a whim, and they’ll likely have a limited number of start-ups as well as the inherent risks of starting up a nuclear reactor; in some cases it would be better to have a conventional chemical rocket burning e.g. hydrolox, so that excess liquid oxygen could be useful for that.

Do you actually need RCS for rotation control? Unless you’re talking about RO or are using a mod that seriously needs reaction wheels, or possibly about a pretty gigantic ship, you should have enough control just using reaction wheels to orient your craft, saving RCS propellant which can then be used for translation instead.

Further design work for this Kerbalism Grand Tour of mine has revealed just how horribly deadly Jool is when you're playing with Kerbalism. Kerbin's radiation belts are nasty enough, but Jool's are not only vastly more powerful, but also vastly more vast- the outer belt engulfs Laythe, Vall and Tylo entirely and the inner one ends just inside Laythe's orbit. Depending on the positions of Tylo and Jool in their respective orbits, it's possible to get to Tylo, land and return with minimal irradiation as it grazes the very edge of the outer belt; Vall is a trickier proposition due to its closer proximity to Jool (more radiation, and it takes longer to get there and back); but Laythe... It's safe on the surface of Laythe with radiation levels barely registering, but start climbing through the atmosphere and the radiation levels rise, and rise, and rise! Once you reach low orbit it's worse than Kerbin's inner belt, but it'll take hours or even days to escape as opposed to mere minutes. If your orbit happens to intersect the inner belt even slightly, say goodbye to your crew, shielding or no shielding. I originally planned to use the upper stage of my Eve lander/ascent craft to land on most of the other moons and small planets, as well as for the ascent stage on Tylo and possibly for Vall as well, but it's going to take a completely separate craft for the moons of Jool as it'll need full radiation shielding, which is too heavy for the Eve craft to deal with. Once I've sorted Jool's major moons, the rest will be a piece of cake- getting to Moho will be a pain, dodging the radiation at Jool means no convenient slingshots from the moons, and I'll need thousands of tons of drop tanks to get the delta-V; but apart from all that, it should be a piece of cake!

I was going to restart my RP-1 career, but instead I got distracted by the idea of a Kerbalism Grand Tour and spent most of today designing crafts for that. Well, making some and stealing others off KerbalX then modifying them to meet my needs and work with the rules of Kerbalism. It’s nearly impossible to make fuel with the Kerbalism ISRU system (getting hold of carbon is the tricky part) so the main ship will need to pack enough fuel to visit pretty much everywhere in the Kerbol system without refuelling, meaning it’s going to be LARGE.Add in the landers for Eve, Tylo and Laythe- anywhere else should be a doddle in comparison- and the rules about building it in LKO and then no more launches once you leave, and this could be harder than it looks... On the other hand, minimal crew plus maximum resource recycling plus no real need to do anything but land, plant a flag and leave again on each body means I can skip the science gubbins and save tons of weight- literally, in the case of crew and lab experiments- and bring only what I absolutely need, shaving weight off the payload and improving delta-V.

I for one welcome the new Station Parts Expansion Redux Expansion- Now With Even More IVAs!* Excellent quality, as always. * I don’t actually look at IVAs most of the time and often delete them to save RAM and boost performance, but I can appreciate the effort that went into making them- especially that fish module!

Not in RO/RP-1 they aren’t, because they don’t exist in RO/RP-1. I have 100% on the crew stress-o-meter, which is as good as it gets for a spacecraft- not alone, call home, exercise and panorama bonuses.

Just a quick update- I'm back following a short trip back home to see family and have managed to dissuade myself from going off and trying a JNSQ grand tour; instead, I put some more work into my Mars mission and have come up with this for the design: At over 2200 tons it's impossible to launch in one go, but the design is modular to allow construction in space- the three tanks on the bottom can all be launched separately, with the two on the sides providing most of the Earth->Mars transfer burn and the core doing the rest of that plus the capture burn at Mars, and possibly the return burn as well if the fuel lasts that long. The upper stage is intended to do the return burn and a capture burn at Earth, but I may end up sending a pod up to grab the crew and any remaining science while it's still coming in on an escape trajectory- at last, a justification for those asteroid intercept missions! There's not a whole lot of crew space- a cupola, habitation module and lab is all they get- but with a crew of three there's ample space for them all and the Kerbalism calculator says the crew will be OK for up to 4 years before stress becomes an issue, and 5 years before radiation reaches lethal levels; with redundant power and life support systems and the crew section protected by almost a hundred metres of fuel tanks, they should be fine even if they get stressed and start smashing stuff, plus I packed some repair kits which might be able to fix some damaged parts. I'm planning to send a few other craft out to Mars in the same transfer window: a rover for the crew to live in during their stay on the surface and do some exploration; an ascent craft to get them back into orbit; and some kind of lander to get them down there in the first place, which could also go to Phobos/Deimos if I design it right. I may also include a set of relays using X- or Ka-band dishes, since apparently K-band isn't something the DSN dishes can receive... There's still some work to do- it needs a proper communications system both for local communications and to send data back to Earth- but I don't plan to change anything substantial unless I really have to. The transfer window is in just under 600 days, but it's good to be prepared!

I should probably clarify- I meant X-band omni to connect to the DSN. This is my X-band network- the relays are marked as ‘bases’, imaging sats not shown but the cones from the left and bottom relays are pointing at them: I used an omni antenna on each of my high-throughput relays to connect to the DSN stations without having to worry about positioning or antenna cones, then a load of directional dishes to communicate with the other relays and each of four visible imaging satellites, which all had 3 dishes pointed at each of the three relays. At 1.4Mb/s or so the data rate is more than ample to get away with an omni, and at GEO altitudes (or lower in my case) even the built-in probe core antenna is enough to get full signal to the DSN. I suspect the reason for not using omnis for higher bands is because they’re so weak compared to a directional dish so are useless for communicating interplanetary; for intraplanetary use they seem to work fine e.g. from a lander or rover to an orbiter which can then forward the signal to Earth. You could always put your relays in a higher orbit so the signal cones cover the whole planet and interconnect them to guarantee a signal that way, the increased range is irrelevant for X-band signal strength and you’ll never lose sight of the DSN with all three at once even though Earth is rotating under them.

@Superfluous J AstroGator? Space squid were bad enough, but space alligators!? I too suggest Astrogator as a nice transfer planner tool, along with WhereCanIGo to tell you if you can get there (and back!), and if all else fails MechJeb’s advanced transfer maneuver planner can get you from just about anywhere to just about anywhere else with the added bonus of a delta-V/transfer time/time until burn Porkchop plot that can sometimes highlight unexpected combinations like a much faster, but slightly more expensive, transfer outside of the normal “window” that could be available sooner. I use KAC to keep track of everything, but sometimes time warping can overrun an alarm and sometimes I just forget to set one in the first place resulting in a failed mission .

So your Gigantor XL array just got broken by clumsy docking/space debris/Kraken/button mashing during an EVA/whatever... It’s attached at the end of a long truss on your space station. How do you get out there to fix it? Use the EVA jetpack, obviously. But if you only had one slot, you couldn’t carry the repair kits and the jetpack at the same time; if each repair kit had to be carried separately, you couldn’t fix the solar panel; if you just added more inventory slots then you’d be back where you started but with a more cluttered UI. Stacking them up keeps the UI straightforward and also means you have to carefully choose what you’re taking with you on each EVA- you don’t need a parachute in orbit or a jetpack when flying around Kerbin, for example.

I think this has come up before; there might be a setting for KSPIE to disable automatic TCS deployment but I can’t remember the solution that was posted before.

Do you get a delta-V value with the KER or MechJeb delta-V calculators? Screenshots might help, preferably with the smallest possible craft- pod/probe core > fuel tank > NERV, in the VAB, on the pad and in orbit.

How to solve this problem: Copy KSP in its entirety (steam/steamapps/common/KSP) and paste it somewhere else, outside of Steam’s control; MOD THE COPY! Leave the steam version alone to accumulate updates without having to worry about broken mods, when you want to update a modded version just create a new copy and transfer the mods and save files over (CKAN is great for this, you can create a l do list and then install everything in bulk, doing it manually is a bit of a pain but you could always copy+paste from the older version’s GameData to the new copy, excluding the Squad and SquadExpansion folders of course). Steam often meddles with KSP game files and when mods are present this can cause things to go wrong; so remove Steam from the equation.

The value is % of sea level pressure, so you can approximate the number after the decimal (to 2 significant figures e.g. 0.10) to be the pressure in kPa that the chute will open. Most of the time I set mine to around 0.65 which is safe enough anywhere but over the highest mountains and means the time spent slowly floating down under chutes is minimised compared to, say, 0.1.

You seem to think that the old textures were the “planned” versions, rather than being what they had developed at that point with every intention of improving on in future. Software development is iterative these days and sometimes it can be months (or even years!) between when something first gets made and when it gets polished up and improved to its “final” state.

10% career successes- first a probe, then a Kerbal landed on the surface of the Mun following a few probe flyby and return missions. The probe was there to stay, but fortunately for Val her lander had the fuel to get back home- even if I over-timewarped and ended up going pointy end forward at 40km on a Munar return trajectory- with 120% re-entry heating too! SAS to retrograde and frantic spacebar smashing meant Val survived and returned on the next pass, bringing some juicy science and smelling faintly of burnt hair after the full force of re-entry came blasting in the window...

TOTMception? Don’t do it, you’ll get trapped down there forever like DiCaprio! Or maybe you’ll just fade out BTTF-style, or create a paradox that turns spacetime inside out and unleashes the Kraken into the real world where it can play havoc with all that space junk orbiting Earth, or make the forums throw an NRE and crash, or...

Repair kits stack in groups of up to four, just add a other repair kit on top of the one that’s already there, then repeat until you have enough repair kits. If you’re in space, you don’t need Kerbal parachutes so keep the jetpack and swap the chute for repair kits; if you’re landed on a planet with an atmosphere (or flying, but why are you flying in atmosphere while a Kerbal is on EVA!?) you don’t need the jetpack and probably don’t need the parachute either, so swap one or both for repair kits- or an EVA experiment kit.

There’s a mod called PAPI Lights that does exactly what you’re looking for. I think Kerbinside adds functional(?) landing lights either end of the KSC runway too, not sure about others but it does add a bunch of extra airfields too which might interest you.

Lithobraking at its finest! However I feel like I should point out that in all those cases, poor Jeb was stranded on the Mun with no way to get back home... That’s going to be a real headache for poor Walt to explain to the press.

My 10% career continues- two probes headed to the Mun, one flew past then crashed into Kerbin (‘s atmosphere and burnt up) and the other flew past, captured into orbit and then crashed into the Mun. Science was gained from both as well as some bonuses for world firsts and completing parts of a contract, now all that’s left is a proper Mun and back return mission that actually survives. Getting enough science with 10% gains is pretty difficult so I launched a couple of ballistic missiles with some science gear and Val stuck on top from Woomerang to the northern ice shelf and ice caps too, along with the usual scraping up science from the launch sites and adjacent biomes with each new experiment.

I’m partial to VSCode personally, but even ordinary notepad is enough to do a bit of config/save surgery.

@Stratzenblitz75: megaton rocket, designed to crash into itself and shatter into a million pieces on staging. All the millions of Kerbals who happen to live downrange and who are now being carpet-MIRV-ed by many thousands of tons of debris: