king of nowhere

what do you mean by "necessary"? if you're arrived to dres, by now you should have unlocked the full tech tree, and have virtually unlimited money, so nothing is really necessary. if you are just asking "can I scan that stuff? is there scannable stuff on dres" then the answer is yes. I have never seen this specific rock formation, but i haven't been to dres in several updates; you may also have graphic mods. either way, dres has two scannable objects, so a rover arm will be useful. I don't know why you didn't include one already; i see your rover has six of the biggest wheels, totaling 9 tons alone. plus the mk3 cockpit and a bunch of crew pods, that thing must be at least 30 tons. compared to that, the 300 kg of a rover arm make no significant difference, you may as well add one.

which target are you talking about? i didn't notice any. if your purpose is to complete the caveman challenge - that is, just grabbing some more science - you can easily make a couple more mun landings in different biomes and get easy science. if your purpose is to explore all the planets, you can make it at least as far as duna with the money you have. though for me going interplanetary in caveman was quite the challenge and it required learning on the fly

yes indeed. in your case, you were already pretty high in the node, and the normal component was a lot smaller than the retrograde component, so it was a clear case of combining being better. there are other cases where splitting is better, as you said.

your maneuver looks excellent. if you still end up with a degree or two of inclination, you can fix it with very little fuel. no, I don't know any way to change the reference system of your burn. but you handled it really well as it is, and managing like that is a lot faster than trying to find a mod to do slightly more easily something you can already do pretty well on your own. P.S. splitting the manuever is not going to make it cheaper, in fact by combining the manuevers you save fuel thanks to pitagora's theorem. you get the normal and radial components almost for free.

Another spectacular RUD. This one involving my 7000 ton, 1100 parts A'Twin mothership. I was using the engines at 4x time warp, and it started shaking, and it ended like this. At least the central nucleus is still recognizable

Part 11: Closest thing we've got to a comet I wanted to include a comet in the grand tour. Since the game is not spawning any comet (new bug #33), I went for the closest approximation available: an asteroid in a highly inclined, elliptical orbit. The target is very challenging, but the Cylinder/Fat Man combo is up to the task. If the game is not spawning comets, I'll at least pick a large asteroid 11.1) Preliminary work 11.2) Outbound trip 11.3) Encounter 11.4) Return to Iapetus base Bugs compilation updated Broken parts recap

well, your last post wasn't a question, so I sort of assumed you were fine. anyway, I'm not the greatest expert on planes.

you can arrange a rendez-vous with nuclear engines too, and with ions - I've done it - but it's a lot harder; you've got to plan in advance, pass several kilometers in front of the other vehicle so that your gradual slowing down will get you closer to rendez-vous. but one step at the time; for now I'll teach you to do it with high thrust, low thrust later. the thing about a high apoapsis is that a small push at periapsis will change your orbital time by a lot. You can use that. 1) get your circular orbit with the same inclination of that of the target vehicle, and with the same height. 2) make your orbit elliptical, with periapsis in the rendez-vous point. You must do this several days in advance, to have time to set up the next step 3) for your next passage at periapsis, plan a prograde burn. The idea is to change your orbital time so that your next passage at periapsis will be timed exactly with that of the target vehicle. For example, target vehicle will pass there in 2 days 3 hours 15 minutes? Then you must burn so that your next orbit will have a time exactly of 2 days 3 hours 15 minutes. You don't need to make calculations, because once you are close enough the game will show you the close approach. Unfortunately I don't have a good picture to show this exact process - it's been a while since I needed to use it. But I can show a similar picture, only difference is that in this case I was coming from a higher orbit. so, the vehicle to be rescued was traveling along the light green line. the rescue vehicle is labeled as "Eve mission + comet catcher". It's in high orbit around Minmus. First thing I planned the yellow maneuver. It raised my apoapsis, and that was made to change the orbital time. Then the purple maneuver. Ok, there are two of them, the one on the left for 8.2 m/s. That's a plane change, because I had yet to fix inclination. Finally the purple maneuver on top (17.8 m/s) to lower periapsis so that it touches the trajectory of the stranded vehicle. and you se, it says intersection at a distance of 0.2 km. That happened because my first burn prolonged my orbital time just enough that I'd fall down to periapsis with the proper timing. this was actually more difficult than the maneuver I'm suggesting you, because the time depended on two different maneuvers and not only on one. the rendez-vous tutorial is good for a vehicle in orbit. but it doesn't help with a vehicle on a hyperbolic trajectory.

Part 5: Missions missions to everywhere, none of them arriving Dealing with a bunch of correction maneuvers. Most noteworthy thing is the launch of a new scanner/relay for the Eeloo mission The Eeloo mission ejects a first couple of drop tanks

at that speed, you are too fast for aerobraking unless you have good thermal shielding, but you can send another ship to rendez-vous. a few days before periapsis, send up a new ship with enough deltaV, and with high twr (because it will have to make large maneuvers fast). put it in an elliptic orbit so that its periapsis coincides with the eve mission periapsis. set your apoapsis so that it will pass at periapsis at the same time as the other ship. get a rendez-vous. transfer the crew on this new ship. then slow down

solar irradiation has got nothing to do with radiation. you see the radiation level in the main kerbalism window. and it's actually always the same everywhere in solar orbit: 0.013 rad/h. it will kill the crew in roughly 3 years without shielding, 10 years with full shielding at hard level. an active shield will completely cover that amount of radiation. there is no special radiation hazard on moho other than its radiation belt

I don't remember, but you can easily test. use the alt-f12 menu to teleport your ship increasingly closer to the sun, see what it takes to burn it

You can avoid all the bad effects from solar storms by just having a fuel tank - or even thermal shield - between the crew and the sun. but exposure to the sun is averaged over all habitat parts, so all those landers sticking out of the craft main body would leave you exposed. there's also a bug where solar storms still have effect at high time warp. in my first kerbalism grand tour, I slowed down time warp to x1000 at every solar storms. and the duna-jool transfer took a couple days at least. in subsequent grand tours, I set shielding efficiency to 100% before a long trip Also, I'm surprised about your statement for moho and radiations. sure, there's a somewhat greater background level, but i've done that trip multiple times with no issues. In my first mission I didn't even have any RDU, and the crew sent to moho got less than 10% radiation. halving its distance from the sun, of course, is going to significantly increase that. My OPM grand tour should be there, then. as it included all the OPM planets

i think the propellers are too high. they push the plane above the center of mass, causing it to pitch. but i'm not a huge expert on planes

your problem is very unusual. my experience with seaplanes is that getting them to take off from water is very hard, while landing is very easy. I can't even imagine a sea plane that flips in contact with water. make a U-turn, that it can do, but a destructive flipping? I don't think I'd be able to do it if I wanted. more details needed. show us your plane and tell us how you're flying it

had a couple minor issues today when catching an asteroid in my rss-kerbalism grand tour. after a gravity assist from Jupiter, I could get an intercept with the asteroid at 3 km/s. slowing down the whole ship, and then spending another 3 km/s to get a new Jupiter intercept, would have been too expensive, so the plan was to reach the intercept, then send my Fat Man long range shuttle to actually rendez-vous. All went well, until the kerbal came back with the precious asteroid sample. And upon returning in the crew cabin, lost it. For you see, kerbalism divides science into data and samples. And both have dedicated storage systems, and it turns out Fat Man had no sample storage space, so it just could not hold the sample (Fat Man is supposed to carry around landers between the mothership in its high parking orbit and the low orbit of whatever planet/moon they are supposed to be landing on, and those landers have plenty of sample space, so this problem never came up before) A grand tour does not require collecting samples, and it doesn't even require landing on an asteroid. But I dedicated 50 years of this mission to getting that sample, and a lot of effort, so I didn't want to just throw it away. The only way to keep the sample was to travel with the kerbal on the ladder, so I set out to do just that. And started the 3 km/s burn to catch the mothership. another complication of kerbalism is limited ignition time for the engines, so at some point I needed to send out my engineer to refurbish the engines. There I discovered the second problem: no more eva propellant. eva propellant is taken from the monopropellant storages of the ship; no monoprop, no eva jetpack. I didn't check before leaving, but apparently I only had 3 units. and my scientist got them all, because the first kerbal to go eva also gets as much propellant as is available. I needed to get eva propellant to my engineer, to go fix the engines. but the only way to get eva propellant back into the ship was to send the scientist in, losing its precious sample. Luckily, I also had a pilot on board, so I could arrange a 3 men swap. I sent out the pilot (without propellant, because there was none). I had him take the asteroid sample (eva kerbals can pass samples between them). then I sent back in the scientist, thus putting the propellant back into the ship. then I sent back in the engineer, and i sent it back out, and this time he got the propellant. Yay! Good thing that ladder was long enough to hold three kerbals And that's it. four hours to rejoin the mothership. I spent those at 4x speed, because I can't time warp with the kerbal on a ladder - and didn't want to risk letting it go to time warp. kerbalism adds mainly life support, so those EVA kerbals only have 2 hours of oxygen. But it was an easy fix; twice during the trip I sent out a new kerbal, swapped the sample, and sent the scientist inside the ship to get new air. I arrived without further accident, still clinging to the ladder.

When I crashed Val into the mountains, I built a monument for her becase of its pose, I called it the Valentina redentora Here's a moment of the rover transport to the site. which was quite challenging, it was a caveman career and 30 parts isn't much to make a monument AND the rover to carry it in place.

this attempted docking what? it looks nothing special? well, do you see that green smidgen on the tip of the farther ship? here's the same part magnified now, as this may still be lacking in scale; that extreme tip on the right is a cupola. it's attached over a Mk3 crew cabin. the antenna dishes you see are RA-100, the biggest available. now go back and see again how that tip compared to the rest of the ship. that was an attempt to attach a cylinder of six 4000-tons fuel tanks to a 200 thousand tons ship. I got a lot of mods with bigger parts, still got 1300 parts. well, that's not the first 1300 parts ship I used, but it does lag worse than others. and rotation was slooooow, even though i had several modded reaction wheels each equivalent to many dozens regular wheels (and with a mass equally upscaled, I may add). and after half an hour to wait for everything to align, the fuel tank cracked in two parts. that was when I gave up on the whole Ringrazer concept. ______________________________________________ the most difficult docking I did succeed in making - indeed, I perform it on a semi-regular basis - is not the one on multiple Ringrazer subunits; I did perform a docking between two 100 thousand tons subunits, but it went well enough. For a while I thought of the docking of the FU Eve... The FU Eve, my first Eve lander at over 400 tons. It's quite suboptimal in many of its design choices. I can only say I got better later. ... with the DREAM BIG, my first major mothership. At 3000 tons it seemed gigantic at the time. This was quite the tricky docking because I was using a small docking port. The alignment had to be really perfect, and there was the lag... but then I remembered, the DREAM BIG actually had an RCS system. Which is something I don't do anymore; I don't want to move my expensive, fuel-hungry mothership to dock, it's more effective to move the other ship around the mothership. Indeed, I had no more occasions to use that RCS system during the mission. But it did enable that first docking, so it wasn't too hard. _____________________________________________ no, the most difficult docking I successfully perform is to mate the two subunits of A'Twin A'Twin is the mothership I'm using for my kerbalism + rss grand tour. it must carry over 700 tons of mining equipment to make new fuel, because mining in kerbalism is much harder than in stock. It has a mass of 7000 tons when full, yielding roughly 7 km/s; enough for anything around kerbol. but in the real solar system everything is a lot more expensive, and there are several missions where 7 km/s are nowhere near enough for a round trip. So I designed the ship to be split in two, with all the heavy machinery remaining behind while a lighter exploration module can reach 11 km/s. The shape is a sort of box to protect from solar radiations (another feature of kerbalism). You can protect from solar radiation just by putting a heavy fuel tank between the crew pods and the sun, but when the ship is landed and refueling, it will be forced to stand still while the sun moves in the sky; so I have to put fuel tanks all around the ship for protection. As a result, docking entails inserting a huge ship inside the gap of another huge ship, and there is a very tight fitting on the edges. generally the two subunits get stuck a few meters before the docking port touch, and I have to give a gentle push with the engines - or several not-so-gentle pushes - to get them moving again. As an aside, docking a Dolphin escape pod in Cylinder after use is also quite difficult. Yes, it's called an escape pod, it's supposed to be a one-use feature. You're not supposed to dock it back in place. But, well, as those ships have excellent long-term life support and a long range xenon propulsion, I keep finding improvised ways to use them.

you don't. ok, you should have small lines, but small is a relative concept here. and often, when the lines are small, they are hidden inside the parts. the aerodinamic overlay has limited utility. the aerodinamic window and the aerodinamic menu on a part (both functions that can be activated on the alt-f12 menu) are a lot better to check your aerodinamics. the overlay, though, has an advantage. you visually see where the drag is coming from. if there is a single source of drag, you can identify it easily. for example, in this case i had this rocket for a caveman challenge, and it's a pretty crappy rocket, because of caveman restrictions. and i knew it was dragging a lot more than it should have, but why? the landing legs on the side? the tapering for the frontal drop tank? this overlay let me know immediately that the problem was the kerbal I was trying to cart inside the cargo bay - I thought he would be shielded from aero effects, but the game considers it as fully exposed to the airflow. so, the aerodinamic ovelay can be a useful troubleshooting tool, but no more than that.

strange, i normally don't have this problem. I'd duggest to just add a few more probe cores to the station to increase the hard disk space; they are lightweight

as far as i know, you just keep going on and on. people have waited hours at maximum time warp, and the ship kept going on in the nothingness

I'm trying to make a fast roundabout mission to eeloo in 2 years, using high energy transfers. but the approach calculator is terrible at calculating approaches on hyperbolic trajectories. here something never seen before: the game calculated a "close approach" in the past! you can see that instead of being T minus something it's T plus something, with eeloo's position as it used to be 250 days back. Maybe I can use that as a reference to predict how much Eeloo will have moved by the time I intersect its orbit? I'll probably just go by trial and error.

Part 4: Scrap it and do a better job The mission to Eve and the comet catcher were awful, and couldn't perform their missions. So I had to reload back and remake those vehicles, with a bit more testing. The Moho mission too. Temporary Eve lander + comet and asteroid catchers

without mods, it's quite hard to make stuff sink. the best way is to put ore tanks inside a cargo bay. many ore tanks clipping into each other. this way the game does not model what's inside the bay as far as buoiancy is concerned, but it still does register the mass, which causes the rover to sink

If it was a manned ship, you can look for the crew in the astronaut complex. They will be reported as killed in action. Or, at the lowest difficulties where dead kerbals respawn, they will just be available in the astronaut complex