king of nowhere

I saw your upvotes trickling in, and realized that you were reviewing. Pity about the wifi. My reports do tend to be very heavy.

https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/List_of_easter_eggs this link lists all easter eggs, present and past. read only if you don't mind spoilers. you can hunt for anomalies in the game by activating kerbnet from probe cores functionalities.

I got into a building frenzy and made a barge pretending to be an aircraft carrier. the thing is, standing on top of another vehicle counts as landed instead of splashed down, which will let me collect more samples from water biomes. so I planned to send an aircraft carrier to laythe. but i quickly realized i am too lousy a pilot, i can't even come close to the ship, much less crashing on it, much less landing on it. so I made a barge with a water ramp, where the plane can water land nearby and climb on the barge. after being done, i set up for beautification by adding landing lights everywhere unfortunately, adding lights created so many new bugs. autostruts failed everywhere, symmetry keeps changing for no apparent reason, the plane randomly malfunctions when close to the barge-carrier. I'll just have to go back and use the non-beautified, but functional version. was it worth to work one hour just to take some pictures?

jumping in very late, but i must ask... you started playing ksp at age 8?? like, you could actually understand something of what you were actually doing? last time i brought my little cousin (age 9) on the trampolines, i could not get her to understand that in order to make a somersault she had to push herself forward, not upward, because forward and upward speeds are different. i thought ksp could be an educational tool for high schools, not earlier. How could an 8 year old understand a maneuver node? what was the trick to get a child to use ksp with some competence so young? I may want to use that in the future

The only drills i had available were ore, water, nitrogen, uraninite. No option to drill hydrates. But my installation is a couple years old - i modified it to create bigger chemical plants needed for my grand tours, and i was loathe to lose all that work. So, it is fully possible that the newer versions did include hydrates drills. Or maybe it worked for you because you installed rational resources separately. Whatever the reason, i am happy that the mod now works as intended. My missions using it are long since finished anyway, and despite the idyosyncratic resource distribution, the actual purpose I had - that of adding to the challenge by restricting possible refueling spots to a handful of planets - was fulfilled

I see. Unfortunately, kerbalism does not allow mining hydrates, at least it didn't one year ago. But that's a kerbalism issue, nothing to do with this mod

A big milestone in my skill level came as i learned to make chained gravity assists without knowing the end. It takes knowledge of what you can and cannot do with a gravity assist, which comes with experience. And a bit of a leap of faith. I never plan more than two consecutive assists. In your case, i'd go for the first eve flyby knowing that i can keep ejecting in resonant orbits as long as i need to reach jool. Or, if i don't have enough speed, i can fix it with a kerbin flyby, or maybe a periapsis ignition if deltaV is not a big deal.

Water is rare, some planets never have it, but it should be present. I always had water, at least in some biomes. But i haven't updated to the latest version, it is possible that one could be broken. Or it could be a mod conflict. Regarding rational resources, it should be included wuth kerbalism already. But i found it anything but rational; you get no water in place that are literally supposed to be balls of ice, like vall or minmus. And you often get percentages exceeding 100%. I did some ranting on the topic in some of my mission reports. I also left a message in the mod thread, but got no answer

yes, of course. making mods compatible with scenarios is a lot of work, for something that very few players will even notice

what bug? there were no kerbal in the ship, that's no bug. sometimes they load authomatically, sometimes you have to choose them

I haven't tested the flight yet, but my plan is to simply brute force the whole thing. the "carrier" is just a handful of massive fuel tanks, with structural panels to provide an even ramp for the plane to crawl over from the sea (i am not capable to land the plane on the ship, I'm landing it on water and sliding it over a ramp instead). so if I fill those fuel tanks and strap some rockets to it, I expect to have at least 5000 m/s. that's enough to fly straight up slowly until I'm out of the atmosphere. So I'm ultimately adding a crapload of mass to brute force a problem. I got used to kerbalism missions with 5000 tons ships, the carrier is going to be in the 1000-2000 tons range, it's nothing new. it's surprising how rare it is that a problem can't be solved by adding mass. I am close to the end, but I don't expect to be done before another couple of months. reaching ammenon requires 5 km/s to lower periapsis, and 10 km/s for intercept. I'm going to spend weeks running gravity assists there. what? no rule against realism, certainly not. the only relevant rules on ship design are those if your ship does not violate those two rules, it's fine

Part 10: Air, water and fire After a lenghty inward trip, Boundless reaches the inner Gememma system, exploring twin planets Lowel and Ollym, minor world Gallant, and Gannovar. The various bodies in the inner Gememma system 10.1) Inching inwards 10.2) Running on fumes 10.3) Fixing the damn plane - and everything else 10.4) A cradle of life 10.5) The land of volcanoes 10.6) Not just another glorified asteroid 10.7) Where ice meet fire 10.8) Preparing for Ammenon

wha do you mean by "ok"? it's ok in the sense that it will work? as far as i know, yes, because pretty muh anything can be made to work. I'm going to land a whole aircraft carrier on laythe, a shuttle won't be an issue. it's ok in the sense that it is best optimized? depends optimized for what. certainly not for low mass, as you can go below 5 tons. but it may be a good way to do what you want. whatever it is you want to make. in this game there is no such thing as being "ok", there are only mission objectives. only the challenge keeper can answer that, but regarding quicksaves: don't you any any more recent quicksave? or did you already delete all of them, except the first one which you accidentally loaded instead? i recommend you never delete your most recent quicksaves. the persistent file is not reliable. also, the best way to delete quicksaves is to go in the game folder, not to do it in game one at a time

without downloading the file, I can assert that it's very normal for early tech planes to have poor performances. just accept that your first low tech plane won't be a great one. that said, my early tech plane could get to 10 km easily, so it's likely it can be improved. you'll have to wait for someone to download that plane. i recommend posting screenshots of the plane in flight and in the sph too, with as much relevant data as you can think. few people will want to download a plane and launch it in their game to give you feedback, but a lot more people will be happy to look at the pictures and give feedback on that

I suspected something like that, which is why I asked twice to clarify that part. I'm glad we can finally be on the same page. So, you mean the malfunctions tab you can open in the kerbalism menu. I never used it, because it's unreliable when using very large ships. anyway yellow and red. both refeerring to a ship in orbit, not shown here. orange, i didn't have any, I had to break my own engine here to create one. corresponds to yellow highlight. so, color-coding malfunctions the way you prefer: - yellow means the part is still functioning, but it may get broken eventually. it shows in the tab, saying "needs maintenance" (or something similar, I have the italian translation), but the part is not colored in game. - orange means the part has malfunctioned. it is highlighted yellow in game, as shown in the second picture. An engineer can still fix the part in this state; indeed, the tab says "needs repair" - red means the part is broken and cannot be repaired, period. Then I can use this color coding to clarify. yellow parts are still working. your probes are fine for now. with time, yellow parts will degrade further, and they will become either orange or red; in both cases they will not work. for my manned missions, orange or red are completely different beasts - one entails a short eva with an engineer, the other entails losing the part for good - but for your unmanned probes there is no difference; even if a malfunction could get fixed, you'd be better off sending a shiny new satellite rather than an engineer to fix it. in this case, you'll make full use of your deorbiter. when i said malfunctions do not progress, i was saying that orange does not become red. i do not consider yellow to be malfunctioning at all, because - due to some quirks of game settings and really large ships that the devs never thought someone would make - those yellow parts, in my games, will stay there for centuries. but it's a quirk of how i use the mod, in your case they should last the nominal time of a few years. hope that clears things up

your docking ports are placed correctly, but you have two big ships that are not perfectly aligned. in this case the magnetic docking ports will align the ships, but it will take time. and it won't happen if rcs and reaction wheels are holding the shops in place, so, as @18Watt aleady said, you have to turn them off. preferably on both ships.

there is no orange, only yellow and red. wait, i did not upgrade the latest kerbalism versions, maybe they changed it?

again, for the sake of clarity: what do you mean by "damaged" and "busted"? because i thought by "damaged" you meant "yellow", but if you instead mean "needs maintenance", then it will break. this engine is red, it is broken, it does not function, it cannot be fixed by an engineer. hence I am decoupling it and will place a new one on the docking port, i prepared those engines to be interchangeable. the drill on the left is equally broken. the convert-o-tron is yellow, also the engine on the lower right. they are broken, they do not function, but they can be fixed by an engineer. now, if you have a yellow part, it will stay yellow. it will not become red. but you talk like you do not mean yellow and red, you talk like you mean a part without color, i.e. a part that is not broken and that functions. and in that case, those parts will eventually become yellow or red.

what's annoying about it? your comms satellites are still getting malfunctions. being unmanned, they can't be fixed when they malfunction. even if they could, some malfunctions are critical and can't be fixed anyway. your deorbiter can still make itself useful. wait, are we talking about the same thing or there was a misunderstanding? I understood you asking if a part with the reversible malfunction - yellow - can become red, and no, it cannot. maybe you mean you sent a kerbal in inspection on a functioning part and got told that a part needs maintenance, in that case yes, it will eventually break and get yellow or red. likelyhood and timing of either scenario depends on settings and difficulty level in any case, if you let yourself get stopped by game mechanics, you wouldn't make a deorbiter because you can always delete debris from the tracking station anyway.

reliability buff for ion engines? they are by far the most reliable of all, in all my grand tours - which included small ion-powered auxiliary ships - I never experienced a single malfunction to an ion engine. nuclear engines are fine, if you repair them before their time expire. the trick is that while an engine has a certain burn time, it will start with a greater chance to break a lot before that. high quality nuclear engines are nominally rated for 52 minutes, but I always did maintenance to them when they had 30 minutes left. my latest kerbalism grand tours involved 18 and 24 nuclear engines respectively, and both had expanded planetary packs, and I suffered a half dozen critical malfunctions combined between both grand tours. I would say neither needs any reliability buff.

Indeed, a few months ago I asked permission to do an elcano on a plane, just going slow enough to not take off. And @18Watt approved the intention, provided I'd cut off thrust if I made a jump longer than a couple seconds, and I'd try to get down to ground when airborne. the spirit of the challenge is to drive the plane on the ground, and there's also quite some reason to use that plane - related to one of my grand tours where I would have liked to stay longer on Tekto, but I couldn't because of a bug. Anyway, there was enough of a case. Incidentally, I got to around one sixth of the way before becoming engrossed with other projects and I haven't progressed in months, but I may come back to it eventually. Now, one may question if I would actually abide by those limitations, or if I would obey the rules a couple of times while taking screenshots, and then fly gleefully the rest of the way. But then, if one wanted to cheat, one could just as easily alt-f12 his rover in a dozen places spaced around the planet and take screenshots, and pretend he circumnavigated the thing. At some point, you have to trust people. After all, what's the worst that could happen? Someone makes an entry in an internet challenge related to a 10-years-old game without fully earning it? Earns some underserved bragging points with the couple dozen people who actually bother looking at the scoreboard? if people have a cool idea and want to try it, i wouldn't worry too much about the technicality of the rules or the prospect of cheating

No. My longest mission lasted 1000 kerbal years. I kept some "needs repair" components that way as a backup, because they could not break further and i could reactivate them as needed. Never had any further issue

Is your rocket flipping? The command pod has very low drag. If it falls head first, it keeps accelerating and will go too fast for the parachute. It must fall tail first. And it's been a long time since i last tried that, so i can't help any more

I considered, since @JacobJHC seemed to appreciate radiations adding spice to the mission, I have my second kerbalism grand tour that I never submitted here. It was done at hard level, which means radiation shielding is three times less effective - effectively tripling radiation doses. It led to a very tense mission where radiations, bugs, and life support shortages conspired to almost cause complete failure - until finally, after a dozen attempts, I managed to leave Laythe and rejoin the mothership with 10 m/s spare deltaV, 90% radiation damage, and half a day worth of food and water left. Definitely one of my exciting missions, worth submitting here

where to start... take a rotor, put some ducted fans on it. for rotor size and blade size and number, go by trial and error: you obviously want the rotor to be as light as possible, but if it can't push the propellers at 460 rounds per minute in the conditions you want to achieve, then it's too small. the hard thing is blade angle. make sure angle of attack is activated on the blades. put a KAL controller on the plane. use it to control blade angle. the thing is, propellers generate thrust only with proper blade angle, which changes with speed (and possibly a bunch of other factors that aviation nerds will be able to tell at lenght, I'm not a plane guru). your blade inclination must also change with speed, hence the kal controller to do it in real time. You also need to keep the aerodinamic interface open, as you see in the image (also featuring beautiful Neidon from the OPM pack). the number you want is total drag, because thrust from the propellers is displayed as negative drag. So in that image I have -22 kN drag, which means that propeller thrust minus actual drag totals -22 kN. And with the kal controller I slide the bar to change the inclination of the propellers, and I watch the drag number, trying to get it as negative as possible. Some people prefer to link blade angle to the main accelerator, but all my planes are rocket planes, I prefer to reserve the main accelerator for the rockets. on a purely atmospheric plane it could be easier, though. How to set the blade angle in the fist place? I go by trial and error. I place the blades, set the angle, then test the plane and see which way thrust is produced. I fiddle with the blade orientation until I get thrust in the right direction. Controller generally goes from 90 to 45 degrees, a 45° arc is more than enough for what you need and gives more fine control. I'm sure the greater experts use more refined means, but my method is robust to be used by someone who doesn't really know the details. All you need to know is to set up the kal controller to change the blade angles, everything else you can figure out with trial and error.