king of nowhere

actually, thinking of it a bit more, the comet does not have that high of an apoapsis, intercept speed on the previously suggested trajectory may well be over 3 km/s. the one below is probably better, though harder to get an intercept this way also realized another issue you may have, though it seems you already have plenty of missions that will pay off in a year, and your issue is that you want reputation right now. but a comet contract is slow. this trajectory won't give you a comet rendez-vous before 4 years, and you may have to wait another apoapsis before returning to kerbin if the alignments are not right - we're talking 10 more years, easily. the previously suggested trajectory will get you to the comet in 3 years, with excellent chances to get back to kerbin in 3 more years, even then it's 6 years in total. if you're worried about your reputation and you want a quick fix for that, to the point that you are not willing to wait a few missions to arrive to eve, a mission that will pay off in 6 or 15 years is not a solution. If you want fast fixes for reputation, I am afraid ferrying tourists around the moons of kerbin is the only way to go. once you take interplanetary missions, it's going to take years in any case.

Ok, I am confident I could meet the comet at apoapsis starting from LKO with no more than 5 km/s, probably a fair bit less. Could be as little as 3 km/s, depending on the inclination. however, it's very difficult to describe how, especially to someone who probably does not know the technical details. which brings us to the crux of the issue. I do not mean to be rude, but - as by your own admission you have occasional troubles even with regular mun missions - this is probably above your skill level. still, I'll try to describe the technique. You should leave Kerbin on the red ellipse. From LKO make a big prograde burn to raise solar apoapsis. You need to go very high, higher than the comet apoapsis - but fortunately, the farthest you go from the sun, the cheaper it is to raise orbit. It takes 2 km/s to raise orbit from kerbin to jool, I estimate roughly 3 km/s to get the high apoapsis needed for this maneuver (note that I did eyeball it here, the actual apoapsis may be higher or lower than that). You want to intercept the comet at apoapsis, so you will need to raise your apoapsis enough that you will pass right on the comet apoapsis when the comet is passing there. it will be a high speed intercept, but again, far from the sun costs are much lower. I estimate 1 to 2 km/s for it. You will also need a plane change somewhere, if it's far from the sun it will be cheaper. Once you are on the comet, you can make a slight tweak on your orbit to get a kerbin intercept, and from there you aerobrake. Yes, it is difficult, but it is the only way to intercept that comet in a reasonable time at a reasonable cost. To make an easier rendez-vous you need over 10 km/s, which requires ion.

well, the best way to get money, science and reputation all together is to get a tourist contract to land on mun or minmus, put science instruments on it, land on a new biome. you get money and reputation from the contract, enough to pay the spaceship and more, and you also get science from the new biome.

intercept the comet near apoapsis, it will be slower and easier to catch. pack a lot of deltaV - if you want to go safe because you're unpracticed, put in an ion engine and 10 km/s of deltaV. of course, to use that far from the sun, you will also need an rtg... which you may not have. and patience, a lot of patience. I would tell you to not try a rendez-vous like you would do in a normal circular orbit, but instead just to point straight at the comet when it's at rendez-vous - that is, go in an elliptic orbit similar to the comet, then make some corrections. but i am afraid your skill may be insufficient for that. still, one has to start somewhere. by the way, i understand you want to play a no reload career, but when a station explodes because you did some eva construction on it, that's an obvious bug, you can allow yourself to reload

even in elcano 4th, I got permission for those kind of brief, reasonable uses. at least, I was always very open about them in my reports, and the previous challenge keeper @18Watt never complained. either he never read the actual reports, or he was also willing to apply some leeway.

I would say, as long as your propulsion is entirely based on wheels, every jump is ok. Here it comes to the challenge-holder discretion. Too many individual cases to cover all with hard rules. I would sum it up with "rockets are allowed to help wheel propulsion, but their use must be limited in scope". That is, want to have backwards-pointing rockets to help climb steep slopes? acceptable. downward-pointing rockets to cushion the fall when you fall down a crater? fine. downward-pointing rockets to keep you glued to the ground in low gravity world? ok. Because in all those cases your method of locomotion are the wheels, and the rockets are only providing some minor extra utility. I think we can all understand the difference between that, and taking a suborbital jump. but there will always be edge cases, that will have to be evaluated individually. this is more or less consistent with your preferred option, except your preferred option would disqualify using of rockets to go uphill. would doing this be so bad? (notice the inclination of the slope on the navball, and compare the speed with the orbital speed for vall) regarding propellers, a second rule could be "on atmospheric worlds, propellers can be used to provide the main thrust, provided the vehicle stays on the ground". atmispheric worlds have too much gravity for that to create issues with suborbital jumps anyway.

i don't know what's the issue there, but i can at least confirm it is not a problem with transfer. the game does not model it. however, I have to ask, is having one convert-o-tron at 65% such a big deal? refueling a ship with a big convert-o-tron takes a few weeks, a few months even for a very big one. in the time scale of transfer windows, that's short. if one of four chemical plants is working at two/thirds capacity, you'll take a few extra days to refuel, nothing more. this game is full of those little glitches that you just have to live with

I have also noticed that at time warp greater than x1000 some of the authomated things don't work correctly anymore. the first time I had this issue, I simply had to limit time warp to x1000. the most annoying things was solar storms, I had to stop and wait with x1000 warp for them to end, because otherwise the shielding would not work properly. imagine a 3 years transfer to jool during a solar high with storms lasting a day or two at a time and happening every few hours. The other times I did play kerbalism I structured things so that I could ignore those malfunctions. I crafted resourse production so that I would have an excess of everything, it's slightly less efficient but it works regardless of time warp. as for radiations, after establishing that the shielding worked I used to deactivate them during interplanetary travel. I never paid much attention to science, though, because my goal had always been grand tours, and while I like to also collect science I don't really care how much i'm actually getting. so I can't comment specifically on your case

I can attest that I made a mission where I was able to harvest carbon dioxide successfully from duna, so it's a bug of some kind. Maybe a mod conflict, that "atmospheric composition" window seems like it could come from a mod that messes up the atmospheric settings.

a fiery descent on Lito, innermost moon of Reander, whirligig world planetary pack

Part 8: Reander and the seven moons Boundless visits the giant planet Reander and its seven moons. Not many difficulties here, but a lot of interesting worlds to explore. A family portrait of all the moons of Reander 8.1) No, we're not ready to start yet 8.2) A tour of the inner moons on the way to Lito 8.3) Lito: plains, mesas, and a giant ball in the sky 8.4) Totooa, the gas dwarf 8.5) Mally and the kangaroo race 8.6) Yawer, miniature Mesbin 8.7) Yalthe, land of volcanic plains 8.8) Yokane, the one with cliffs 8.9) Dakkon, cracked snowball

by the way, I tried the same method to see if I could trick the game to think I am landed on jool, but no such luck. standing on another ship only works on water. i even tried strapping 100+ parachutes to the contraption to make it fall so slowly it would count as standing still under normal circumstances, but it wasn't enough.

@JacobJHC I was thinking on another jool 5 science mission, after discovering by accident that there are ways to get more science than I thought possible - namely, i accidentally discovered that if I pick a sample with my kerbal on top of a splashed down plane, or swimming around the splashed down plane, it counts as two different samples. so this time i was planning to actually get all the possible science available, by landing an aircraft carrier on laythe and getting the exploration plane over it to get "landed" samples from water biomes. possibly throw in some circumnavigations too. and use magnetometer and eva experiments, that were not available I noticed, also accidentally, that some experiments will give more science if run multiple times. according to this table, for example, I can run mistery goo observation up to 4 times before i completely stop getting science. my question is, should I try to gather the same experiment multiple times? or is that against the spirit of the science grab? P.S. I won't run that mission for a few month yet anyway. I need to finish my latest grand tour first.

there was one called persistent thrust. but it bugged my game, so i uninstalled it

i think it has to do with the planet curve. if you stay in a low orbit, there are areas where you can't see any ground relay station, so you lose contact until the craft orbits above another relay station. you can avoid the problem by having relay satellites, and before that by launching in higher trajectories. either that, or you don't have batteries and you run out of electricity. or you have plasma signal block enabled and you accelerate a lot while still in the atmosphere. but both those problems can be solved easily

atmospheric skipping makes the prediction harder; the lander bounces on the atmosphere, goes upward again, and could turn around the whole planet. with a lower periapsis and the lander reentering hard it is easier to predict the landing spot - but it's also more expensive.

no real way to determine where you have to place periapsis, depends a lot on the aerodinamic profile of your craft. if it's a plane, also on how you fly it. so you just have to go by trial and error. if you are running a no save game, you have to bring extra fuel to compensate for off target landings

why won't you hire new ones?

sometimes - often - the name of the part in the save file is not the name of the part in the game. you have a simple way to discover which one is the actual name. make a new ship with a single part, the part you want to find. give that ship a name you can find easily. launch it. then open the save file, look for the ship you just launched. it will have exactly one part, so you can look its filesave name. then you can look for that part elsewhere. that said, different mods handle things differently, and not always you can fix things by editing config files. in the kerbalism mod, there are two config files that track all chemical processes, so if you want to change something about chemical plants, or radiation shields, you have to go there, not in the part file. but other informations are not in a comfortable editable file, and some edits just cannot be done. if you specify what is the mod and what you are trying to do, maybe someone familiar with the mod will help you better

since apparently you have kerbals in there, but not an engineer among them, you may also launch one of your crew against some solar panels to smash them. a bit radical, but if you want less production from the solar panels... just make sure you stll have enough to get a net positive energy if you point them at the sun yes, but i'm saying that if you carry a big oxygen tank and a big hydrogen tank and make water from them, you end up carrying more mass. the gas containers look huge because they store hundreds of thousands of resources, but it's because it takes thousands of units of hydrogen and oxygen to make a single one of water. kerbalism uses one unit equal one liter, and gases have notoriously low density; so while one unit of water equals one liter, one kilogram, one liter of gas is a few grams or a fraction of gram depending on the gas. hydrogen is the worst, a tank of pressurized hydrogen only carries a fraction of the tank mass in hydrogen itself. so it is better to have big water tanks to last the crew a long time, and small gas tanks to last through the night with fuel cells. which makes me think, how much gases do you actually have? because if you have a water shortage, you may feel fine seeing thousands of units of hydrogen and oxyge in storage, but those wll only make a few liters of water, they will only last a day or two. you may have to try and save the crew back to kerbin as fast as possible.

yes, it's a flaw of the mod that you can tell it to dump water, but you can't tell it to dump energy. depending on how your solar panels are disposed, you can try to make them ineffective - retract them, turn the ship around to remove them from the sun, use an engineer to disassemble them, force the start of enery-intensive science experiments. but if none of that is possible, the only thing you can do is use the cheats. I suggest launching an engineer from the ksc, alt-f12 it in rendez-vous with the ship, and have him disassemble the solar panels. P.S. water containers are a lot more efficient than gas containers, so carrying oxygen and hydrogen and using them to make water is not the best idea. better to just carry water

happens with very complex ships. my biggest motherships used to explode from time to time. just save frequently and reload the game when it happens. oh, and if the ship starts shaking, deactivate SAS and time warp, that removes relative motion of single parts and often can prevent an explosion

Part 7: With the last drops of water Boundless finally has the right alignments for Fophie. It was a very difficult target, because its high apoapsis means it takes a long time to reach it - while its high inclination makes it too expensive to encounter at periapsis. Boundless is supposed to have life support for 50 years, and it managed this trip in slightly above 49 years, making it a very close thing. The various celestial bodies relevant to this chapter 7.1) Everything you wanted to know about a trajectory to Fophie (and much more than you never wanted to know) 7.2) Postcards from the journey 7.3) Fophie promises nothing, and delivers 7.4) The way back won't come but once. Be steadfast

for the sake of the argument with your friend, I made a full jool 5 without maneuver nodes (and I landed on Bop and Pol without maneuvers and without reloading games). however, while you can go everywhere without maneuver nodes, i would still call them essentials, because using them is an entirely different matter

additionally, having thrusters on the front will not remove the need to flip the vehicle. no way the direction you'll have to burn will be aligned with your vehicle.