king of nowhere

uploaded the priax circumnavigation. there were a couple segments (of 8 and 3 km respectively) where I did take suborbital jumps to skip heavily bugged terrain, where my rover exploded without reason. technically against the rules, but it was a force majeure case.

Part 13: Ravines The circumnavigation of Priax is eventually completed. Next stop: Tal

I finished priax, will update the report in the weekend. I also already started tal, but it's quite small and won't take too long. I also started tekto, it's something i've been wanting to do for a while; you can see from the picture why i like that place. actually, i've been wanting to fly around more on that moon, but when I had my OPM grand tour I couldn't because of a bug preventing the propellers from working Also to get back what I missed, I decided to use the same vehicle I had - the spaceplane arrowhead. I quite liked it, my most effective spaceplane for general exploration. however, as you can see from the picture below, there is a problem tekto has a dense atmosphere, and a very low gravity. even at 20 m/s, I risk taking off by accident. I currently set the propellers to stay at 15 m/s - going a bit faster here because i'm downhill. I would like to go faster, and I would like to keep using arrowhead, but I also want to make an elcano, so no taking off. would it be ok to use the cheat menu to increase gravity so I could go faster without flying? [ok, now that I read it, I don't think the answer is going to be yes, but asking anyway, can't hurt] Also, I have by now circumnavigated most of the OPM planets, or am about to do it. Hale, ovok, slate, wal, polta, priax. tal and tekto coming. I'd only miss eeloo, thatmo, nissee, plock, karen to get them all. If I circumnavigate all the OPM bodies, can I get an honorable mention as grand master navigator?

and it works?

clearly there is some bug somewhere. not being a pc expert, i can suggest alternative low-tech options - try to remove parts one by one, see if eventually it works. figure out if a single part was responsible. - try to rebuild the thing from scratch. you said it took you hours, but it's only 26 parts, and now that you have the final design, you should be able to replicate it in minutes - try to rebuild the thing from scratch, one piece at a time, starting with just the command pod and the wheel. try to launch frequently. see at which point it stops working.

if that is your goal, braking is the best - and simplest - option.

it has downsides, though. wheel friction is not modeled well - not surprising, since this is a game about spacecraft. A vehicle with wheel drag may still roll indefinitely on a flat surface, but it may be prone to headtailing. it's a common advice for planes turning around on the runway to reduce drag on the front wheel, because that can mess up with the launch.

the key for brake is B. s (as in, move backwards) also helps. it may interest you that ksp does not model wheel drag. on a perfectly flat surface, you keep moving across a whole planet. so, you don't slow down spontaneously unless you are in an atmosphere, or unless you go uphill. also notice that driving in low gravity is a different experience than driving an a terrestrial planet.

yes, exactly; if you refuel on minmus, the way to leave is to lower periapsis first, to get oberth effect.

well, as you yourself recognize, it depends greatly on the mission profile. if you can get to jool with gravity assists, you can spend as little as 900 m/s to get there - starting with using Mun to get out of kerbin's SoI. Otherwise, a direct mission will cost at least 2100 m/s. Once you get to Jool, I recommend to not use the direct injection method suggested by @Superfluous J; that method works well with big moons, where you can get Oberth effect from the moon itself, but not on something as small as Pol. I definitely recommend using Tylo for a gravity assist instead. If you place your gravity assist correctly, you can achieve for free a Jool orbit with an apoapsis touching Pol's orbit and a periapsis somewhere around Vall. From there, it takes roughly 500 m/s to intercept on Pol - a lot less than you could achieve in other ways. And then you need 100 m/s to land on Pol. So, 2700 m/s total. Make it 3000 for safety. Could be as little as 1500 m/s by reaching Jool with gravity assists. EDIT: Aerobrake at Jool is not a good idea. You may do it with a very good heat shield, but even if you are successful, you end up in a orbit with a low periapsis, so intercept speed on any of the moons will be more expensive. Aerobrake at Laythe is possible, actually it could save some fuel if you can partially aerobrake on Laythe but without getting captured, instead using that to enter a trajectory intercepting Tylo, from where you could get to Bop with a lower intercept speed. but it's extremely difficult to control your trajectory out of an aerobraking passage. And if you use Laythe for a gravity assist to Pol, you will have a higher intercept speed than if you did it from Tylo.

I aslo don't see any solar power on it, though I can't see many details (zooming in on the station before taking the picture would have helped).

considering it's us who are helping you, you are the one responsible to make our job easier. you know, if you bring your car to the mechanic, they ask you what's the issue, in as much detail as possible; I don't know of anyone who ever said "why are you lazy enough to not drive it and see for yourself", but I don't think it would get a good reaction. same if you bring your laptop to technical support, or if you call the plumber, or whatever. also, are you aware that each and every one of your kerbalX uploads seem to have the same exact picture? the one of the same plane crashing into the ground? it's not helpful even for someone who would actually want to download your stuff.

expanding what @Vanamonde said, your propellers are above the vehicle, so they not only push you forward, but they also give you an angular momentum. to counteract that, you can move them down - contrary to what @18Watt said, I used a lot of plane/boats with propellers touching the water, and nothing bad ever happened, though you do not get thrust from using propellers underwater. alternatively, you ccan put more floaters in front, to counteract the nose-sinking tendency

I wanted a ship with close to 100 gigantor solar panels, but also capable of hard aerobraking. For this, I got the idea of putting the panels on extendable trusses inside cargo bays. Spent some time fiddling with it. the result is pretty nice. Too bad they wobble. I could make those trusses shorter - I already did - but I have no heart to. Maybe I'll remove another segment in the final version, who knows I also covered the engines with those nose cones, they are from near future launch vehicles and can be opened on hinges - didn't think to showcase that in the video too.

it says the video is private

Why can't they use tungsten in the base? it's got a high enough melting temperature that it would survive the flames, it's also notable for staying hard at high temperature, and it's surprisingly cheap for its relative rarity. I assume there is a good reason for not using it, probably it doesn't work somehow. but why?

is there any chance that support for kerbalism - or other kinds of resource managements - would be implemented in the near future? I started with the idea of running a grand tour of this system, but without those mods I don't really feel like it

as a rule of thumb, when you ask for advice you should post pictures. else people will have a much harder time troubleshooting. especially in a case like this. sure, people could share with you projects of ssto that work. but to see the problem with your specific ssto and give advice for it, we need pictures.

as I predicted. You can estimate intercept speed just by looking at the map. A planet is moving very fast, and your ship is also moving very fast, so when they meet, they will have great differences in speed. but, just like two cars speeding on a motorway can touch each other lightly with minimal damage because they are moving in the same direction at very close speed - but a lateral of frontal impact would be devastating - you can achieve a low intercept speed relative to a planet if you reach it while going in the same direction. it's called a hohmann transfer this case shows earth and mars, but the principle is, look at the point where the transfer orbit intersects mars orbit: both mars and the spacecraft are moving in the exact same direction. this results in (relatively) small intercept speeds. if you cross the orbit of your target body, the intercept speed is a lot bigger, because you are moving in different directions. but sometimes, like in your case, you can't avoid it. a reentry pod with a heat shield can withstand a lot of punishment, hence my prediction that - even though you'd have to cross kerbin's orbit in your trajectory and therefore would have a high intercept speed - your ship could survive. it appears from the picture that you don't have a thermal shield but rather a cargo bay; that's also very good for thermal resistance, unfortunately it creates drag in front. and when a ship has drag in front, it wants to flip. good for you, SAS was strong enough to prevent that

UPDATE: I quickly simulated a couple trajectories for you to get an intercept in less than 2 years for half your deltaV budget. You can see below that kerbin, eve and your spacecraft are in a similar position to what they are in your save. Not a perfect much, but as close as I could reasonably get, and close enough that the same strategy will work. actually getting in that position with the cheat mode was the hardest part. so, let's see how you can return to kerbin with the two options I gave you option 1): move slower than kerbin start immediately a prograde burn. raise your apoapsis. eventually you'll reach a point where you'll spontaneously intersect kerbin - provided you have zeroed your inclination first, of course (if you don't, fix your inclination; it should only take a few hundred m/s). the tricky part is that the game won't recognize your intercept unless you help it along the way. do notice, on the left, the purple maneuver node for 0 m/s. that's only because it helps the game to find the encounter. without it, the game was looking for an encounter 7 years in the future; the encounter-finding algorithm is not great. by setting that node, I instructed the game to look for intercepts shortly after that node, which is where you'll find it. alas, the tricky part of advanced orbital mechanics is often that the game will not find the intercepts on its own, so you have to eyeball a good approximation of an intercept blindly, and then add some 0 m/s maneuver in the right place to get the game to actually see the intercept, and then refine it. option 2): move faster than kerbin First thing I did was to plot a retrograde burn. I plotted it near apoapsis because I want to still intersect kerbin's orbit; luckily, the ship is close to apoapsis right now. burning retrograde I moved periapsis down, quite a lot. but crossing the orbit of moho is not a problem, encountering it by accident is extremely unlikely. then, at periapsis, I made a small prograde burn to raise orbit and cross the orbit of kerbin. Do notice that the periapsis maneuver is not in the first periapsis passage, but in the second; that's because it will take two orbits to overtake kerbin. I planned those maneuvers, and of course I did not got a close encounter. but then, it's only a matter of increasing or decreasing the initial burn; this changes your orbital time, so that if the simulation shows that you will be passing behind kerbin, you need to get there faster and so you must lower periapsis a bit to reduce orbital time. and if you pass in front of kerbin, you are too fast and you must raise periapsis. be wary that this fiddling will also move your second maneuver, so you have to move it back to periapsis every time. both options will leave you with some 1500 m/s, which should be enough for kerbin capture even if your approach is not very favorable. so you can do this even if you don't have a thermal shield and aerobraking capability. EDIT: also, your whole management was quite inefficient. You may want to look up some tutorials on hohmann transfers, they are generally the cheapest options.

no idea why the order is scrambled oonce you launch, but the very easy solution is to double-check the staging order on the launchpad before launching the rocket, and eventually fixing it. also, if you fail a launch because you forgot to fix staging, you can revert flight and you lost a grand total of half a minute. why should it ruin your entire experience? unless you want to run a no reload career, but if you won't use reload to fix technical issues, that's your choice to ruin the experience, not the game's. wait, you mentioned that the order is reversed; i normally would not ask, but since you are new to the game and all... are you aware that the first stage activated is the one in the bottom of the staging panel? if the order is the reverse of what you expect, maybe you are just trying to order them with the first stage on top.

You likely can, espoecially if your ship has a heat shield to aerobrake from a fast intercept, but it's hard for someone not very experienced. Let's start with some basic orbital mechanics; the lower your orbit, the faster it goes. It means, since your orbit is inside kerbin's, that you are orbiting faster than kerbin. but not a lot faster, becuse your orbit is still fairly similar to that of kerbin. you probably have an orbital time of 300 to 350 days - it would have been nice if you had included that in the picture. which is a problem if you want to return to kerbin fast, because you are moving faster than kerbin but you are slightly ahead of it. so you'll basically be chasing kerbin, for a full orbit. you'll only gain a few weeks every orbit, so it will take a while to catch up. It's going to be fairly cheap, at least. So, to shorten your return, you can use some of your large fuel allotment to try one of two things: 1) go slower than kerbin, so that it will be kerbin to catch you. 2) go a lot faster than kerbin, so that you can reach it faster. option 1) requires you to raise your orbit - either apoapsis or periapsis, apoapsis is likely more efficient - until you have an orbital time of some 500 days. this way, kerbin should overtake you in one orbit or so. option 2) requires you to further lower your periapsis - down to an orbital period of 200 days or so - so that you'll move a lot faster than kerbin, and you will overtake it in two-three orbits. in both cases, you are likely to not cross kerbin's orbit in an hohmann-like transfer, so you'll get a very high intercept deltaV - hence the need for a strong heat shield. more troubling, in both cases, you still have the problem of getting an actual intercept on kerbin. it's doable with more orbital mastery, but not easy to explain. I don't think I can do it in a post.

can't understand what you mean. distorted how? a few pictures would help

I made some calculations there. on a probe with 50% of its mass as fuel (a common case, by what I see for some notable missions), replacing hydrazine (Isp 230 s) with LH2/LOx (Isp 440 s) while keeping the same wet mass would increase deltaV as long as the extra mass for refrigeration and insulation is below 35% of the dry mass (or 17% of the mass of the whole probe). So, for a probe with 1 ton to orbit and 500 kg of propellant, using cryogenics would be convenient as long as the extra mass for insulation and refrigeration would be no greater than 170 kg. I doubt a small refrigerator and a stirrofoam suitcase could be that massive. so I'd think the issue not the extra mass, but something else. possible advantage of hydrazine would be reduced complexity and single point of failures, reliability of cryogenics engines over long missions, and total probe volume. none of them look insurmontable as far as I know, but I'm not enough of an expert to judge.

space probes use hydrazine fuel because it can be stored. cryogenics will eventually boil off, so they have to use hydrazine even though it's got half the Isp compared to LH2/LOx. couldn't they use some kind of refrigeration system instead to keep the cryogenics cold? the hydrogen tanks on the apollo missions would have taken years to boil off, so if those tanks are well insulated, it should really take very little energy to keep the fuel at their ideal temperature. yes, you'd need to add some kind of cooling system, and you'd need to add insulation to the tanks, but you get to double your specific impulse; you should still get more deltaV for the same mass