jimmymcgoochie

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:

X-band omnis are the way to go around Earth, especially for connecting to the DSN stations. Alternatively, just launch the relays into a much higher orbit so they can cover the whole Earth with their cones and add secondary antennae to communicate with each other to make it a proper network.

I disagree entirely- there’s no need to arbitrarily divide the forums up even further, plus trying to sort all the existing threads into those new sub-subcategories would take a ridiculously long time. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Easy on the all caps and exclamation mark spam. To my knowledge there is no mod that specifically renames Kerbals to use the names of real astronauts; either do what everyone else does and change their names in the save file using the find and replace functions in the text editor of your choice, or go ahead and make that mod yourself since it’s clearly bothering you.

I think there’s a MechJeb setting to disable the use of RCS for rotation control and just rely on reaction wheels to do that, if you search through the options you might be able to find it. Good for stock- no sense wasting valuable propellant and messing up your trajectory when you can do it for free with easily replenished electricity without changing course- but exactly the opposite for something like RO where reaction wheels are next to useless so RCS is the only way to control your orientation, especially on anything larger than a small probe.

You can’t transfer shielding, and Kerbalism runs on an average value across the vessel so one or two heavily shielded modules won’t really help if the rest is lightly shielded. Joining it with KIS hoses that can be switched easily from ‘docked’ as one vessel to ‘undocked’ as separate vessels would be one way around that, though I haven’t actually tried it myself.

Fired up KSP on my old (and a bit rubbish) PC, started a new career with 10% rewards all round, made it to orbit with a slightly dubious booster setup- a Swivel-powered core with two SRBs attached via stack decouplers to a girder. 10% science returns makes things more difficult so my first few ‘launches’ were a pair of pods stuck together to roll around and gather science on the ground. I find it a bit weird that the EVA jetpack is available from the start since it requires facility upgrades to do an EVA in space to use it; I also spotted a typo in the EVA parachute description (hopeffuly).

It could be, but it would be nearly impossible to tell. It’s just something that happens sometimes.

I would expect MJ to deal with an engine failure more gracefully than that; in my experience (with RO/test-lite rather than Kerbalism’s engine failures admittedly) it can deal with losing an engine and even if it can’t make it to orbit, it doesn’t just blank out the UI screen. Did you try staging away the stage with the dud engine? Maybe it’s worth raising on the MechJeb forum thread, perhaps someone else has had the same issue.

Looks like a typical NaN glitch to me, where something that should be a number stops being a number and the game can’t deal with it. That save is now corrupted so I suggest you try reloading an earlier save, you should get the craft back if it’s from before the glitch.

It could be related to the persistent load out feature, that happened to me recently but on a brand new save. There’s a setting you can disable which might help- ‘persist Kerbal inventory’ or something like that- try disabling it and see if that helps. Alternatively, make a quick save, copy the file and then do some delicate surgery to change the EVA propellant values from 0 to 5; normally save file editing is a risky business (hence the copy, so you can undo it) but changing one number should be relatively safe.

A bit late, but here's my entry in the modded section: Cheapo 1, 1137 funds to orbit. Two mod parts, both from Restock+: Oscar-D fuel tank (4x Oscar-B) and 0.625m fairing. The whole rocket is tilted a few degrees east so that it will fly a ballistic gravity turn; due to a complete lack of guidance on this stage, this often resulted in serious deviations from the desired trajectory, often ending up horizontal after 30 seconds of flight- going east or west! It didn't help that Jeb decided not to wear his helmet and so had to put it on every single time I launched. Once the Shrimp SRB burnt out, the Spark LF engine took over. A combination of engine gimbal and aero stability from the fairing helped keep it on track. I was a bit too busy trying to fly the thing to get any more screenshots, but Jeb made it to orbit with propellant to spare: There were some, um, interesting side-effects of repeated reverts- sometimes it would load in as this:

First launch for today is the new Yellow Crumpet Mk2 Moon lander, heading out to the lunar space station before the crew ride down to the new lunar base: More on this later, but they still have to wait those 30 days so I fulfil the contract (even if it doesn't register properly) before heading to the surface. Next up, a 'go big or go home' design that takes the last RD-270M-powered monstrosity and makes it even more monstrous by doubling up on engines on the radial boosters- previously I tried 13 RD-270Ms and 6 UA-1207 SRBs, but now I've ditched the SRBs and gone for 19 RD-270Ms; 7 in the core and 6 boosters with two engines each. My initial target was 750 tons to LEO, but the first attempt fell short by about 100m/s and after adding 200m/s by beefing up some fuel tanks, it fell short by 50m/s!? I may have slightly rage-quit KSP at that point, but came back this morning and tweaked the payload down to 725t and it worked fine: A brief visit to Deimos to try and move the little lander on its surface to a new biome was complicated slightly by the game thinking it was still landed the whole time and a very limited fuel supply, but it managed to move from lowlands to craters so there's more science to be gained from it; unfortunately there's no fuel left at all now so no further biome hops will be possible. Now for the big one. Literally, it's the biggest rocket I've launched so far by some margin. Black Galileo 1, launching a few days late because I completely forgot to factor in rollout times in my calculations, was launched and managed to catch the tail end of the transfer window to the innermost planet. A 10km/s transfer burn plus a minor course correction afterwards was enough to send it at Mercury, so a small correction half way there will give a nice low orbit with a ~6km/s capture burn- and a whole 8km/s of fuel remaining, assuming the boiloff calculator doesn't go crazy and steal half of it when I look at it next. With that launch out of the way I could get back to the Moon and send two of the three crew down to the surface. Unfortunately, I forgot about the deployed science stuff and sent a pilot instead of an engineer, but that's not too much of an issue because a) the contract requires a crew of four, not two, and b) the central station is apparently too heavy for a Kerbal to carry, most likely because of my hacky hack to make it use Real Antennas, so will need a further hacky hack to make it carryable. Still, Dave and Vicky are safely landed on the Moon, less than a mile from the base, and will be gathering some surface science before heading into the base to wait for some of their colleagues to join them out there. I may have called that rover Yellow Baklava before, but turns out that was a different prototype and the one I actually made is called Yellow Mille-feuille. I'm running out of names for these crewed craft so Yellow Baklava will probably get re-used for the Mars version of this rover. Full album: https://imgur.com/a/yTp5jIy Coming up next time: Expect a week-long gap before the next update, but when I'm back I'll be sending a second crew to the Moon and putting that rover through its paces.

Integrated PlanetShine-style light reflections to go with the atmospheric scattering and volumetric clouds? Yes please! The Mun is looking really good, almost like the real Moon in fact...

Swapped six large liquid-fuelled boosters and six SRBs for six twin-engined liquid-fuelled boosters in the hopes that I could get 750 tons to LEO in a single launch; it was just under 100m/s short of orbit, but when I added another 200m/s it still fell short by 50m/s

@Wiseman fun fact- while Bon Voyage doesn’t detect RTGs, it does detect solar panels regardless of Kerbalism etc. changing their output- a relatively small 1m2 TL3+ solar panel would be enough for a small rover to operate, while the RTGs power the science experiments and keep the batteries full (so it never stops driving). I did a Venus rover like that, which went fine until I loaded it up again and it spawned in 5 metres off the ground, did a few forward rolls and broke the solar panel the flip side of that is of course that you’ll run out of power if all you have is that one solar panel; you did bring an RTG, right? Assuming your solar panel isn’t broken by the whole ‘bouncing off the inside of the aeroshell’ thing (or just hack the save file to fix it, I won’t tell if you won’t ), you should be fine Bon Voyage-ing your way there. And remember- Venus rotates retrograde so you’re just into the night; you won’t get sunlight for some time where you are so drive towards the light then try to stay in it as much as possible.

Copy KSP Paste KSP Rename the new copy if you want

To use MJ’s docking autopilot, you need to a) set a specific docking port as your target, b) select the docking port on the active vessel and ‘control from here’ and c) enable the autopilot. If you’re trying to dock using a docking port inside a shuttle’s cargo bay then it might not be able to fit, or you might have to use the ‘override safe distance’ and ‘override start distance’ options to make the autopilot get in closer than it usually would.

It says 4 stars for me; I doubt anyone actually uses it.

Updated some mods, then spent the rest of the evening trying to figure out why it had cancelled a bunch of contracts, not helped by repeated game crashes and PC reboots along the way. I think the contract structure has been changed so that I need to complete contract A to unlock B and complete B to unlock C, whereas before I could accept A, B and C at the same time (and did). This might just be one of those things where I have to cheat myself the rewards for the contracts when I’ve completed the requirements.

Easy- turn the brakes off, roll backwards, handbrake turn and away you go; or just turn the thrust reversers on and fly backwards, what could go wrong?

I’m fairly sure you don’t mean ‘free return’, which describes a trajectory that can get you back from a moon (or the Moon) without any additional energy input, and was used on the Apollo missions to ensure that if they had an engine failure they’d still come back from the Moon instead of floating off into space. This only works when the body you’re trying to visit is in orbit of the one you came from (and want to return to) e.g. Kerbin/Mun or Earth/Moon; it’s next to impossible when you’re talking about two bodies orbiting a common parent e.g. Kerbin/Duna because they’re both moving at different speeds, plus the effects of a gravity assist are much smaller relative to your overall orbital velocity around the sun than they are for a planet/moon system. I’m not saying it’s totally impossible to do, but I don’t think Duna has the gravity to change your orbit enough to make it work without many orbits around the Sun and you’ll probably need a course correction at some point anyway. If you’re talking about the ideal periapsis for re-entry, the only way to find out is to stick down a quick save and try different altitudes until you find one that gets you down in one piece without skipping off the atmosphere and flying back into space or burning up in a blaze of fiery explosions.

Like most probes that travel beyond the reach of solar panels (anywhere beyond Jupiter really), they’ll need some form of nuclear power- either an RTG like the Voyager probes and Curiosity/Perseverance rovers, or a proper nuclear reactor of some sort. There’s also the option of beamed power using e.g. a microwave laser to send power out from a power source, whether that’s a big solar collector close to the sun or a nuclear reactor on the surface of a planet or moon; those don’t exist in reality but there’s no reason why KSP2 with its future focus (colonies, fusion thrusters etc.) couldn’t include them.