king of nowhere

it's not. it's a wonderful exercice to push your shipbuilding and planning mission to the limit. I loved running grand tours with kerbalism. I've done 4 of them, and I may do more. They are great, with some frustrating parts. actually, the most frustrating part of the experience was the whole "lag" thing, and that's not the fault of the mod. even servicing parts would be a much smaller issue without lag. lag is caused by kiloparts ships, but that's a price to pay. in fact, what I love more about kerbalism is that it gave me the chance to really go wild on motherships, and make those huge things with each and every single part having a carefully considered purpose. Spending weeks designing and testing every part of a ship to fulfill the multitude of requirements introduced by this mode, then putting such a ship to the test, was immensely fulfilling. Sure, I can build a 5000-ton ship without kerbalism by stacking more crew pods, but they serve no real function, and where's the fun in that? EDIT: while radiations are irrealistically strong, they work perfectly for the purpose of providing an additional challenge, I like them as they are /EDIT I realize your consider my grand tours with kiloton ships to be outside the scope of the mod, but it may interest you that I also run a realistic jool 5, without any future parts mod, with a mass to orbit of 140 tons (the same of a saturn 5), 118 parts, no nuclear/ion engines and no nuclear power; I only used the equivalent of tried-and-true exhisting technologies, with the only exception of one active radiation shield for the interplanetary trip. it is possible to significantly push the boundaries of what the mod was intended to do even without going crazy on ship design.

on the other hand, radiations are a lot more dangerous in kerbalism than they are in real life. an unshielded ship in the main belt of kerbin would take a lethal dose in a fay or two. I checked values over the internet and made some conversions, and if my calculations are correct, it would take months of exposure to kill an astronaut in the van allen belts. same goes for everything else, radiation levels in space are dangerous but not that dangerous. and heavy shielding on a crew pod should block a lot more than 90% of incoming radiations. so, the rdu is a magic wand that removes a problem that would not be there if the mod was more realistic. what annoys me most, though, is servicing parts. taking an eva around your ship, checking every part, running maintenance on those showing signs of aging, that's cool. the first time you do it. maybe the second. In a multi-century mission like my grand tour, I am going to run a hundred maintenance run, manually checking hundreds of pieces, and it adds nothing to the experience. it would be a lot better if the whole "part aging" thing was completely reworked to remove the need to fly an engineer around. if something breaks, it breaks, and that's it. maybe make it so that an engineer on board gives a passive bonus against breaking, but don't force me to spend most of a mission flying around a ship. it's pretty clear that the people who made kerbalism mostly tested it for the early stages of a career. given the extra difficulties involved, they didn't think people would actually try to send interplanetary manned missions - i was even straight out told by gotmachine that it was flat out impossible, lol! and so it shows, the mod is not optimized for the experience of running long crewed missions.

I heard, but I'd be extremely surprised if they could make this way a rocket that's as good as the real thing. when we also factor in the assembly, I don't think it would be possible to assemble a large and optimized rocket engine in space from locally derived components. there's also the issue that some of the rarest metals required in some alloys would be very hard to find with isru. ultimately, a spaceship capable of repairing itself perfectly is still outside of our capabilities. if it were possible, we could build one, and that one could mine resources from asteroids and build copies of itself one component at a time, and we could settle the universe like that. motherships acting like cells. but that's far future stuff.

Part 6: Small worlds After a doomed attempt to find a trajectory for Fophie, Boundless visits Wers, Egad and Rik in one go, before returning to Oshan to refuel. All were fairly easy targets. This picture encompasses most of the Kaywell system, and all the worlds Boundless visited or tried to visit in this part of the mission 6.1) I spent afternoons looking for that transfer! 6.2) Wers and Vizea, Pol-like twins 6.3) Egad and Yeerbor, the explorables 6.4) Rik, glorified asteroid 6.5) Totooa is not a gas pump 6.6) First refueling stop is never forgotten

a repair kit is 5 kg. four repair kits are the most that can be carried by a kerbonaut, since he also needs a jetpack to move around. so you can get away with 20 kg of repair kit for any malfunction. even in my longest grand tours - several centuries - I still had to contend with 30ish critical malfunctions, which would require no more than 600 kg to repair. and 600 kg is nothing on a space station scale. it's not actually a "lesser cost", it's negligible and mostly a nuisance when you have to click on the repair kit 200 times on ship design. even if you run out, getting some extra on a small probe is trivial. As for 3d printers, how else would they repair a broken engine in orbit? my head canon is that they already have those on board, and that's how they make the spare parts that they use to fix the fixable malfunctions. critical malfunctions are those you cannot just fix with a 3d-printed piece. That could work; it could make it a real mass cost, unlike the very light repair kit. Actually, having a "spare parts" resource, and a "3d printer" module that can use spare parts to fix malfunctions, that would be the best option. Kerbalism uses the (ir)rational resources, and every planetary surface gives a complex composition that is never really used. Introducting some extra drills that would mine various metals - that the game already has in planetary surfaces - and machinery that turns those metals into spare parts. the idea is that there should be a cost - a real cost, not a symbolic one like 600 kg of mass on a space station - else there is no challenge. and you may as well just remove malfunctions entirely. However, it would still make sense for some malfunctions to not be fixable. You can't make a microchip with 3d printing. And while I'm not sure on the full capabilities of that tech, I'm pretty sure there are limits. I'd be extremely surprised if you could replace an exploded rocket engine just with printing; you probably can get something that works, but that's not terribly optimized. And I would not want malfunctions to become too cheap. Part of the charm of my motherships was all the redundancy, which actually gave me a good excuse to really go wild on ship design - and size. if I can avoid that by carrying 20 tons of machinery, where's the fun? I find that kerbalism is not compatible with a complex space program. Having a dozen ships around the place, and having to regularly service each one of them, would be too time-consuming. Kerbalism works best with a single mission, or a small number of missions. I had a lot of fun with kerbalism challenges, but it was always one single massive ship and I would always only control that one. what I love of kerbalism is exactly the challenge it gives in adding extra design constraints, at a time when the stock game had become too easy. ok, I can stick a command pod on a fuel tank with a rocket and do things, now let's add all other complications and see if I can manage a ship that will stay functional in the face of food shortages, radiations, malfunctions and everything else. In fact, when I became good enough to actually deal with all of that in a controlled manner, I mostly lost interest in the mod. Ok, I can deal with all those problems just by adding extra mass; so I could play stock and add a bunch of useless mass to the ship and pretend it's all the kerbalism stuff, it will be the same thing and it will lag less. Actually, that's exactly what I'm doing in my latest mission - though that's because kerbalism wasn't compatible with the planetary pack. As for you, if you want to deal with kerbalism, you want malfunctions to take a toll, but you want them to be ultimately fixable, you can easily do that by playing pretend: put on your station some big tank of some resource you don't need. could be monopropellant, or maybe ore. Pretend that's spare parts. Deactivate critical malfunctions, all malfunctions can be fixed. But, whenever you have a malfunction, you vent some of your "spare parts" into space. It would do exactly what you want - replace critical malfunctions with a different, lesser cost. You could even choose exactly how much "spare parts" you should vent for every malfunctions, thus tuning the cost of malfunctions to what you feel is appropriate. Sure, the game won't display it as such, but as long as your imagination can pretend that ore is your spare parts - and when you go grab more on the planetary surface, you're really collecting raw materials to feed into the 3d printer that you put into that science lab that you added just for the sake of pretence - it will work out the same. And it's a lot easier than programming a whole bunch of new functuons into the mod

consider that, if permanent malfunctions could be fixed by a simple repair kit with a mass of 5 kg, it would undermine the whole point of malfunction. instead of carrying 6 backups of every critical system as I did for my grand tours, to deal with malfunctions, I'd just have to pack a few hundred repair kits and be fine. if you want all malfunctions to be fixable, you can just set critical malfunctions to 0% in the kerbalism options in game.

another trick if you have to launch a payload with a really bad aerodinamic is to put the rockets on top. it looks horrible and would not work in real life, but it does wonders here another option is to just have enough power and gimbaling to compensate for aerodinamic instability. this thing has even worse aerodinamics than your station, but all those mammoths kept it flying straight. finally, another option is to fly straight at low speed until you are out of the lower atmosphere. sure, it does require a lot of extra deltaV to compensate for gravity drag, but sometimes adding a bunch of fuel tanks is the simplest solution. especially if the payload is cumbersome but light

click on insert image from url, but you have to add .pgn to the copied link manually. are your planes symmetrical?

it's absolutely normal. not really a bug, but a quirk of how the game handles construction. the probe core is the root part. you cannot manipulate root parts in eva construction, in any way.

there are several very interesting worlds in the whirligig world planetary pack. I scored a few circumnavigations there too. however, if you want to circumnavigate ALL planetary bodies, it's going to be a daunting task, as there are some 44 of those

do keep in mind, however, that doing mixed thrusters forces you to use twice the engines; your engine pack will get heavier, cutting into your deltaV. however, to have something that could have 6 km/s of vacuum deltaV while also being able to land on duna, while carrying significant payload, there was no other choice. I could have had almost 9 km/s of deltaV if I had used nuclear propulsion alone. of course, 6 km/s are enough to go everywhere with smart gravity assists, and there aren't many places where you can find water and nitrogen, so it was an obligated choice. but it was a choice that sacrificed almost 3 km/s of deltaV - and that's calculated with empty oxidizer tanks

you can't move stuff to the launchpad because the launchpad is not a ship, the game only lets you modify ships. however, you can create a rover with the lights you want and park it near the launchpad. not too close, or you won't be able to launch new stuff. that's the closest thing you can get

not only it's possible, but as far as i can tell it has no relation to whether the docking ports get bugged. on the downside, if they do get bugged (it happened two or three times to me in 3 years of playing) and you can't use kml editor... i'm afraid you'd lose the whole ship.

with docking ports, the most common issue is them being attached on the wrong end. but your port evetually worked, so it's not the issue here. other times docking ports just get stuck for no reasons. kml editor can fix that

oh, right. the antraquinone is already enough to consume all the hydrogen produced. still, what i said about tampering with automated processes to make it work intermittently can also be applied to the antraquinone process. set the antraquinone to only work in daylight, and you will lower its hydrogen consumption my A'Twin mothership had 36 large ore drills, 12 large water drills and 12 small uranium drills. You can always have raw production greater than consumption. just add more drills. Of course, I don't know how much mass you can sacrifice for that. actually, A'Twin's 96 large convert-o-trons could drain all the produce of those drills, but i didn't use all of them. incidentally, with all that machinery (and 12 large nuclear reactors to power it) it still took 10 to 30 kerbal years to get the 5000 tons of fuel A'Twin held. However, my limitation was the molten regolith process, that required really a ludicrous amount of chemical plants and energy. you only have water, so you should be a lot faster. in fact, depending on your need, a convert-o-tron may even be overkill. water is drilled fast, and both water electrolysis and antraquinone are fast processes. well, you can either build lots of datasheet to calculate exactly how much you need of everything, or you can go by trial and error. yes, it could be an easy enough addition; just like engines can be manually limited. they could also add resource stockpiles to the automated conditions. now you can tell the ship to do stuff when it's light, dark, low battery, high battery, exposed to radiations, and a bunch of other conditions I never used. having the option to authomatically stop the antraquinone process when oxygen level drops below 20%, and restart it when it goes above 80%, would also do the trick.

huh. that's a problem. kerbalism has some weaknesses there. what's the depletion rate? you could authomate the process to shut down h2 liquification when not in sunlight, which will stop hydrogen consumption for half the time, allowing the oxygen level to recover (do remember to set the electrolysis process to dump excess hydrogen in that case). however, automated processes malfunction at high time warp. still, this could be your best option. if you have multiple chemical plants - with kerbalism, using backups in case of malfunctions is only sensible - you may be able to shut down most h2 liquification plants to have an excess of hydrogen. if you have enough water supplies to last a few days, you could manually turn h2 liquification on and off. if none of those is an option, I'm afraid you may have to rebuild your ship with more drills or less liquification capacity. there's a reason all my isru ships worked in push - more resources extracted than used - and it's not the efficiency. though i did discover i could have a lack of CO2 and the greenhouses would still work at regular speed, as a rule of thumb i made sure to have an excess of everything so i wouldn't have any issues like yours. the ideal thing would be to have the possibility to shut down a process depending on the availability of other resources, but authomatization options lack that. even if it worked, though, I already said those options have issues with time warping.

I also use simple fuel switch, it's a small mod that makes a big difference when it comes to using nuclear. without that, I used Mk1 fuel tanks. this is the Marco Polonium, a nuclear mothership I made for a challenge to land on as many planets on limited funds. Modular design because I was limited to 30 parts by the level 1 VAB. Today I can do better, but it was a great accomplishment at the time. twr was around 0.12 fully loaded I once tried to use Mk0, but the game lagged a lot, and I didn't gain much anyway. in the same model, I tried to make something that could land on vall, but trying to get high thrust from nervs is too inefficient. this is flying christmas tree. It wasn't well designed. with the mk0 tanks it had 500 parts, and lagged significantly. giving it enough engines to land on vall increased dry mass so much, I calculatged I'd have been better off getting the same thrust with wolfhounds. but it does look cool ultimately, I found a twr between 0.1 and 0.2 is a good compromise between engine mass and practicality. when i accepted modding, I started using simple fuel switch, much better for dealing with tanks. if I needed higher thrust, I used some additional chemical engines A'Tuin is one of my best motherships. to enable it to fly in space with lots of deltaV but also land on duna, I gave A'Tuin a mixed propulsion system: 54 nervs, modded as a bigger version to reduce part count, for a 5300-ton ship to give a twr somewhat lower than 0.1. Quite uncomfortable for long burns, but we're already talking 160 tons of nuclear engines here. A'Tuin already had to carry a lot of extra mass to deal with the additional challenges introduced by the kerbalism mod, I cut where I could. for higher thrust it had 54 wolfhounds, also modded as a bigger version for reduced part count, granting a twr of 0.5, just enough to take off from duna - to land you'd want better, but on landing the fuel tanks are mostly empty. I would have used rhinos, for better thrust, but they broke too easily with kerbalism. on the downside, the game cannot calculate deltaV with the different propulsion systems, I had to make my own datasheet. And I ended up giving A'Tuin way more oxidizer than it needed, I could have gained an additonal 1 km/s of vacuum deltaV while still being able to land on Duna A more simple model, the Trucker, was attached to A'Tuin to carry around landers. A mothership has to carry everything, it's very big and expensive to move, and it's better left in high orbit to depart cheaply. A lander needs high thrust, so increasing deltaV is really problematic past a certain point. Trucker is meant to carry a lander from the mothership to low orbit. it doesn't have to do anything fancy, so i used nuclear engines alone, with twr around 0.2

a view from 1 wers, of the whirligig world planetary pack

the isru processes use water and o2 faster than the drills, but still you are limited by your other drills - getting CO2 from regolith, right? so, get your stockpile of hydrogen and oxygen full. after that, the electrolysis will slow down, only working to replenish consumed hydrogen. oxygen should not be a problem, since you get a crapton of it as byproduct of the molten regolith process. I did refuel ships on the ground in my A'Tuin and A'Twin grand tours, it's perfectly feasible - if long. you may check those mission reports (linked in my signature) for additional input on kerbalism isru. in particular, chapter 1.1 here has some detailed description of the isru machinery involved. section 3.3 of the same report also describes the refueling process in some detail. another tip: you are using a crewed isru ship, so it must be something pretty big. so, add more water tanks. a few tons of water will have a negligible impact on the deltaV of a large ship, but they will keep your crew alive for years. and you'll have less problems with water running out during isru. also, use large water tanks and only carry minimal amounts of oxygen and hydrogen; you can make those by water electrolysis, and the water tanks are a lot more efficient than pressurized gas containers.

https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/List_of_easter_eggs you can find coordinates for easter eggs here. except for the green monolith, which spawns randomly

the thing is, this game is a sandbox. and a space station is just whatever you define as a space station. it literally does not matter how you make it, as far as the game is concerned. you don't really need it besides completing the contract. of course, if we approached the game this way, it would be boring. so you can add as many things to your station as you want. but they are not actually needed, besides anything else you may want to do with your station. so, don't fret too much over it. if you do something and you're not satisfied, you can always send a new one. basically,, launch the station and see if it does what you want. if later you see you'd have wanted to add more, that's how you learn what you want in a station

crystals are surface features, and should not feature in kerbnet. really weird.

huh. that's... definitely not how kerbnet should work. those are examples of how it should work as you can see, there are 1 or 2 anomalies at most - except on mun and kerbin. and I get more accuracy the closer I go. if you see many question marks in a small area, and there's nothing... there are contracts that have you look for anomalies, and lead you into a chase as you go looking various places. maybe those question marks are spawned by those contracts? if that's not the case, i really have no idea. it could be a mod issue. it's definitely not working as intended, because kerbnet is accurate and does not mislead

Kerbnet is very accurate, if used properly. As @Superfluous J mentioned, if you are in high orbit and click on a pixel, that pixel is probably several km wide. If you hit the wrong pixel, you can be tens of kilometers off. My first time using kerbnet i made that mistake, and ended up having to search a large area on eve. Next time i learned to lower orbit, and all my readings eere very accurate. So, i do suspect you're misusing kerbnet. The fact you mention clusters of question marks give it away. You are probably seeing the whole planet from afar, clicking roughly on a question mark, and get wildly inaccurate. When you make a checkpoint, kerbnet marks the exact spot you click, not the position of any anomaly. Try to refine the position of the anomalies by going in a lower orbit, and being more careful of where exactly you click the checkpoint

There is a bug that occasionally causes the game to think i have level 1 structures. If I am in the vab and i click to change to the sph, the game reverts both to level 1. Only way to fix is restarting the game. It generally happens that when i open a report i forgot some pictures of the vehicles. So i open vab and take all the pictures i'm missing. When i move to the sph, it triggers the bug