king of nowhere

alas, i put my saturn mission in indefinite hiatus for the moment. it was too much of a slog. And if I say that, after spending many monthsrunning grand tours with superlaggy ships, after spending days in interplanetary trips doing nothing but harvesting crops and fix aging hardware, it means something. I already spent close to a month in that mission. It looked good, I finally got to launch the ship. several days ago. I spent all those days raising apoapsis. engine maintenance was a bother, with 50 huge engines that could not be toured with an easy trajectory. I managed to fix that by editing the file. I was hoping to find a "number of ignitions still allowed" number, or something like that, but I discovered that it was in the engine config file. I didn't want to change that, as it would impact my - more serious - main mission. so, no way to increase the number of uses of an engine. however, the engine in the save file did have a number of times it was ignited. I wondered, will the game actually accept a negative value? Bingo! Now I have 1000 ignitions, and I can run the engines for more than a day nonstop. One problem solved. So I spent several afternoons rasing apoapsis. slowly. very slowly. leavng behind a mess of discarded drop tanks. Once I even hit one of them by accident. given the size of the ship, and the size of the tanks, and all of them passing in the same spot, and the number of tanks, it's not so unlikely anymore. I have a 3800 m/s burn I needed to reach Mars. From Mars, a couple resonant gravity assists would send me to Jupiter, from where I'd go to Saturn. I made close to 3000 m/s, and I spent most of my drop tanks Yeah, I still have a bunch left, but 12 of those are filled with only liquid fuel, because I plan on landing and getting new oxidizer in the moons of saturn. well, I may have enough to arrive to Mars, and I may even manage to reach Saturn only with gravity assists, but once there - even in the most efficient scenario of using aerogravity assists from Titan - I still need at least 2 km/s before I can land on any of the moons. So, I must get new drop tanks. Lots of them, because Ringrazer goes through 2300-tons drop tanks like a truck driver guzzles beer cans. So I prepared new drop tanks this time I made them longer trying to save time! four 1000-ton tanks instead of 2. I also doubled the reaction wheel per weight, so that now the tank can turn around in a few minutes instead of several minutes. And I cheated this stuff in orbit, because this mission started with the caveat "assuming I don't have limitations of mass" Now only thing to do was docking. Yes, docking. first despite 30ish vernor rcs, this ensemble was still sluggish as a brontosaur. you ever tried to get a brontosaur to move? good luck with that, they're all dead. second, after half an hour of trying to carefully align the docking port, and bouncing fruitlessly against each other - and I must point out that I am an old experienced player with a passion for titanic ships, I'm not new to challenging dockings - at some point the drop tank broke in half. I made some math. It took me half an hour, and still I haven't managed a docking. Then those are 7 tanks, and they total 36000 tons; I need to add like 200000 thousand tons, so I need to make such a docking over 40 times. then I have more sluggish apoapsis raising. then some orbital manuevers that are not trivial, but nothing special compared to other stuff that I've done. and some landings on very low gravity moons, which would be easy except I'm trying to land a 100000 tons ship. still, I tested the landings, and they are easy; but with an abysmally low twr, they take hours anyway. oh, did I mention that this ship lags plenty? yeah, I just lost the will to do it. it's not any more tolsome than my grand tours, but it lacks the challenge. the challenge was building a ship of this size, showing that it could be launched, could be assembled, could be landed, and I've done that. there isn't any special challenge there to give me the motivation to continue. I'll go back to my regular grand tour. who knows, maybe in time I will want to resume this mission.

it could be the asymmetry. I see there is something leaning on the left side, looks like a magnetometer. this would cause extra drag on that side, which would steer the rover. this hypothesis is further corroborated by the rover listing only after picking up speed, i.e. when drag becomes significant. try it on mun or another airless body and see if you still have the same problem. if it's not that, then i'm baffled P.S. great job in making your first post and including a video and even a copy of the rover! lots of new people make their first post like "my rocket doesn't work, please help", to which the usual reply is "how can we tell what's wrong if we don't know how it's actually made?". your request was very complete.

i never trusted the ksp controls of helicopter, so I always brute-forced the problem by putting lots of reaction wheels and set the SAS to point upwards (one of the two radial directions, i never remember which). it has the advantage that it doesn't require active control on my part, so i can just skip the long, boring ascent by doing something else in background. The heavy reaction wheels are discarded in the same stage as with the propeller blades, of course. the mass added is negligible compared to the rest of the rocket

I finally launched Ringrazer. though it's still going to need a refueling before leaving the Earth SoI. and probably a couple more on saturn. the ship is not imploding as the engines are ignited. that's already progress Bad ship design, the drop tanks are hitting the engines. the silver lining is that the ship accelerates so slowly, even with the equivalent of 25 mammoths behind, that the spent tanks just bounce harmlessly and slide away. For the ones further on, though, I had to throttle down the engines Speaking of engines, a major nuisance is that under kerbalism i have to repair them after two ignitions. And I'll need at least 10 apoapsis raising manuevers before I can leave Earth. here bill is looking at the forest of engines, in disbelief that he really has to go through all of them And here you can barely see bill in the middle of the image, again for some sense of scale I even found a secret passage. those 7.5 meter parts are big enough that a full kerbal can pass through. Looks like the entrance to some ancient temple... for today i managed 1000 m/s of manuever. this ship lags, though somewhat less than my usual motherships, and it had a lot of freak accidents forcing me to reload.

Run some testing on my biggest ship After being unable to make manned landings on the inner moons of saturn because of the strong radiation belt, I calculated that those landings could be possible by including 8000 tons of magnetic radiation shields. and 300 tons of nuclear power plants to work them, but those are trivial at this point. the rest of the ship, of course, must be at scale with that. the result is close to 200k tons, and I fear I still have nowhere near enough fuel. Anyway, today I tested landing on Mimas. From the beginning, things went poorly; the crew cabin detached itself as soon as I cheated the ship in place. well, this is mostly a test of engines And then some engines went kaboom, too. despite the extremely soft landing and the very low gravity (0.01 g) Ringrazer is just so heavy Here I'm bringing valentina just to give some scale to the picture and here's poor val, sitting on top of one of the engines I was about to scrap the mission, since this thing keeps on exploding. But then, it's actually stopped all in one piece. some engines broke, yes, but the ship is already supposed to discard some engines as it loses drop tanks and becomes lighter. plus, still because of the drop tanks issue, it's going to be a lot lighter when it comes to mimas in the actual mission. so, for now I'll keep at it. P.S. somebody posted on youtube a megaton rocket, so it's theoretically possible to go a lot bigger than I am. However, this is not just a big rocket. this is a big rocket that actually does something.

yes, it is perfectly normal when you have a complex ship. You can't even blame the game; it cannot know what you intend to do with your multiple engines and docking ports. personally, ever since I made my first mothership, the Marco Polonium, I stopped using the in-game deltaV gauge and I make my own calculations instead

you can place a small engine on the opposite side of the docking port, or maybe a full rcs system. you use that engine for the docking operation, as it's pushing straight through the center of mass. then, once you docked, you discard the engine. eva construction or decoupler, your choice

can you post pictures? provide hard data? how much drag do you have during ascent? lift-to-drag ratio? how much deltaV do you use in the various stages of ascent? what's the effect of using a bigger engine? we can't troubleshoot without hard data, because every vehicle is different. it could even be a bug; I once had an aerodinamically-shaped vessel make a huge drag because it was united by a docking port and the game was modeling both as if they were exposed to full airflow. what I can say for sure is that there is some problem with your whole setup, because if you take a big fuel tank and you put an appropriately-sized engine underneath and a nose cone on top you can get to orbit with over 1000 m/s to spare. if your plane fails to match that performance, then it must have some problem, but we have no way of telling what it could be without specific information

The wings can and do help with lift. but I have no idea if you are placing them properly. I also have no idea what's the effect of low thrust on a rocket plane, the general assumption is that you use jet engines and they use very little fuel anyway. so higher thrust is certainly worth a try it really depends on how different the orbits of the two objects are. in this case you have to raise your orbit, so I'd factor at least 150 m/s for that

have you tried closing and reopening the manuever node? there are glithces that can be fixed like that. by the way, because they are so heavy nervs are only convenient with a large ship and low thrust. if you have to send them up separately, it means they are heavier than the rest of the ship. in which case it's not convenient to use them

drag may be the answer. open aerodinamic window and check your drag. your ascent profile looks fine enough for a rocket with good aerodinamics, you should most definitely NOT spend 4000 m/s for it. twr may be the other option; what's your twr? how long do you spend in the low atmosphere accelerating to 450 m/s? overall, though, I think the most likely problem is aerodinamics. post some pictures of your vehicle to get a better diagnosis

even without that mod, I've managed huge stuff simply by moving it around. the part I'm working on is inside the wall, I move the ship so that that part is now in the center. while trusting simmetry to take care of the part of the rocket I'm not seeing.

A spectacular RUD involving a 58000 ton launcher

I tried to outdo my previous massive launcherTM with something even more massive, at 58 thousand tons. More than the few extra tons, I tried to revolutionize the design. My main limitation is the number of engines, too many of them and the game crashes. But I can use bigger tanks without problems. This led to designs with low TWR and high gravity losses. So I thought, is there a way I can drop the spent tanks while keeping the engines? And I made this. Engines and tanks are on separate sides, so they can be dropped separately. At first I drop the tanks from the bottom, and I start dropping engines when TWR goes above 2. This should really increase my payload to orbit, from 1300 tons to well above 1500 Of course in reality it would never work, the mechanical stress would be too much. With a rocket this big, the first challenge is just to make it sit on the launchpad without exploding. there were several... interesting RUDs but I got a flying model, eventually The first couple of drop tanks, barely visible amid the exhaust, is dropped as the rocket is barely at 30 m/s. But adding fuel tanks is practically free. The second set of tanks is dropped And the third, and now TWR is going up and the rocket is a lot more efficient There are 184 mammoths lifting this thing, plus a smattering of smaller engines, plus some vacuum optimized engines as last stage that are yet to be turned on Now with high thrust, the rocket starts discarding engines too And now also the wolfhounds (my modded 3x version) are ignited. Not that they make much of a difference against 150+ mammoths There was also a bug where bits of broken rocket would fall from the sky, I took many screenshots but for some reason they aren't there, I guess whatever glitched the game also prevented screenshots Unfortunately, the rocket didn't last At some point, the engines just crumpled. I tried putting lots of extra struts, I tried shifting some engines to the bottom of the rocket (gasp! blasphemy!), but nothing worked. In fact, they crumpled even faster than that. I'd call it a bug. The structural load on those rocket racks is maximum at liftoff; if it survives that, then later - with lesser thrust, as many engines were already discarded - should not be a problem. On the other hand, I really wasn't expecting this thing to work. It is ridiculous to even conceive. For now I stopped working on it. Loading time on stuff this big are a real pain, killing a lot of fun and requiring a whole afternoon just for a few iteration. Especially because you make a small change and suddenly the rocket starts exploding on the launchpad, and you go crazy trying to figure out how or why. But who knows, maybe in the future I'll want to try and make it work. It certainly is an awesome beast to launch, if not for the sinking feeling that something is going to go wrong at any moment.

no, there aren't any special requirements. the tracking station assignment is done according to some parameters that I don't know, but they are quite random. my last ship was dubbed a plane just because it had a Mk3 crew cabin, even though it had no wings. anyway, it makes zero difference. if it's to fulfill a contract, then as long as it has the crew capacity and the parts specified, you are fine. if you just want to see "space station" in the tracking station, you just have to manually set your station as such. go to your station, select any crew pod or probe core, right click on it, "configure vehicle name". there you can also decide if your vessel is a station, plane or whatever

all this is very strange, because in my experience stuff explodes easily. I keep having problems with my huge launchers because spent boosters touch theh rocket and stuff explode. Even when I activate indestructibility from cheats, stuff still explode if hit hard enough.

parts was shows in one of the screenshots, about 1350. a good third of them are struts and launch stability enhancers to keep the thing from disintegrating on the launchpad. as for lag... I took this video from the second largest launch I ever did. this one lagged slightly less, b ecause the payload has less parts, still it's a good comparison. It also used 684 vectors plus a smattering of others

Temporarily paused my current challenge (rss+kerbalism+stock parts grand tour) to make a spinoff challenge: manned landing on the moons of saturn. in kerbalism, saturn has a very strong radiation belt, manned landings on the inner moons are impossible. well, almost impossible; I calculated that if I carry 7500 tons of radiation shields, it will nullify the radiations. So I set out to do just that. to further complicate matters, I also decided to not use nuclear engines. The final ship should be between 50 and 100 thousand tons. I know from previous experience that I can launch at most 1000 tons in orbit in a single launch; any more than that, and the game crashes. So I designed a ship split into 1000-tons modules. Today I sent the first one into orbit. Well, almost. The first part of Ringrazer is sitting on the launchpad. The module I must launch is a bit over 1000 tons, and I need this 50k ton rocket. It beats my previous record of biggest rocket by 25% The problem with a rocket this big is lag by part size. Half of that ridiculous part count is the vector engines, because they are the most compact engine, giving high thrust per unit area. They are the only engine I can put underneath the biggest fuel tanks. The other half is struts and launch stabilizers. Really, it took a few hours just to avoid the rocket crashing under its own weight on the launchpad. Ignition. A few of the vectors engines explode, but that's accounted for. it doesn't really affect anything. The titanic rocket lifts off. The rxhaust from 684 vectors + 25 cougars First stage separation. The smaller boosters could have detached separately, but I saw I'd only gain 10 m/s by dropping the first, and it was more important to get higher thrust during the first phase of ascent. Indeed, I later realized I should also keep the second stage in place longer. I'm used still to kerbin, and on real earth I tend to make steeper gravity turns. I then have to compensate. Flying sideways like this causes a lot of drag, but still negligible over the gravity drag. Plus, most of that energy spent on drag is returned as lift anyway. However, when separating the third stage, the tanks hit the rest of the rocket. the ejection works just fine, if the rocket is flying parallel to the airflow. Ok, try again, with a better trajectory. This time the third stage gets detached all right. I also got to squeeze some 50 m/s more from it; I don't know if because of the better trajectory or because I kept the spent second stage for extra thrust for a while. Dropping the fourth stage too I am at 2.5 km/s, with 5.8 km/s left. Orbital speed is 7.8 km/s, but I'll still lose some to gravity drag, it's going to be a close thing. Unfortunately, the engines have a limited burn time. At the last of the big boosters are running out, that time is over, and the engines start breaking up. Good thing those that remains are enough, but the rocket wobbles precariously. Note to self: when I remake this thing, I have to use high quality engines for those last boosters. Finally, though, even the last boosters are detached without accidents. DeltaV budget, though, is very close Finally, the Ringrazer segment is left to orbit on its own. Ok, it's still got the nose cones - which are full of fuel - and the engines, all those will be detached once in orbit to dock the other modules. Some fuel tanks, instead, will stay as part of Ringrazer's backbone. Ejecting the nose cones. Here I discover another design problem: those high thrust engines can only be turned on twice. Once at liftoff. Now I had to shut them down to remove the empty nose cones, and I turned the engines on again afterwards. But I'm still in the atmosphere. How do I make circularization? What about orbital manuevers? Yes, I did carry the biggest RCS I had (taken from a bunch of big ships mods), but they are still severely underpowered. Also, when I shut down the engines I will want to ditch them, but I can't because the RCS are bound to the detachable part. Eventually, I run out of fuel , just 100 km shy of orbit. Have to try again. So here's the new launch. I did solve the engine problem by using a bunch of wolfhounds. The wolfhounds have dozens of ignitions, so they let me do some orbital manuevering. And they are more efficient than RCS. I also have a bit more deltaV; I don't know if it's because of a different ascent profile, because I launched from Kurou instead of Cape Canaveral, or because I have some higher-efficiency engines; probably a combination of all three. Either way, even though I do have enough deltaV to orbit, I let my trajectory fall too low near the end. So I plunge down inside the atmosphere, and even a last minute correction burn straight up still make me pass at 80 km. In rss the atmosphere extends to 140 km, and at this speed the airflow is hot enough that it destroied one of the radiation shields I'm carrying. So I will have to try again, but I know the system works. By the way, I had to mod myself bigger radiation shields, because kerbalism only offers 2.5 ton ones, and I'd have required 3000 of those

I have bad news and good news. the bad new is, it's a know bug, and indeed there is nothing to be done, except hacking the save. the good news is, it's a predictable and reliable hack, and somebody made a tool for it. check this kml editor, it can edit save files in many ways, and it does fix broken docking ports. I never checked its other functionalities, but I did use it to save my own mission when I had this bug myself, and I can attest that it is reliable, it works just fine, and it does not mess up anything else. Also, if you destroy the docking port with the intent of fixing it later with eva construction, there is a good chance that breaking a broken docking port will crash the game.

I can also add that your kerbal may have a jetpack, giving it a lot of manueverability. once you get close, the kerbal can fly to the rescue ship on his own. if, instead, your kerbal does not have a jetpack, it's a lot more difficult. you have to make a rescue ship covered in ladders, and bump into the kerbal, and try to grab a ladder while at it.

right, they do! 20% heavier than stock ones, but the biggest are 270 times stronger. that was my original plan too. unfortunately, won't work. i am tyring to beat my own size records, which means a lot. for I have decided to make a manned landing on the saturn moons in kerbalism. the problem is that there is a really huge radiation belt that will kill any kerbal coming near in a few hours. kerbalism offers a few strategies to cope with radiations, but none effective there. except potentially one: the active shield, which reduces radiations by a tiny amount. I calculated that I will need 7500 tons of active shields to nullify the radiation belt of saturn. and I decided to make it a personal matter, and do exactly that. Of course I will also need fuel and stuff - mostly fuel, a lot of it because it takes 4 km/s just to get an intercept from earth to mars or venus, and from there i can start working with gravity assists. it would take 8 km/s to go straight to saturn. So all things considered I estimate 50k tons of ship. but with those oversized parts I can keep it all under 1000 parts, so it's good. the problem is launching. I know, from previous experience, that I can only launch about 1000 tons (orbital payload) at a time. Any bigger than that, and the launch vehicle necessary is so huge, it crashes my pc. literally. So I have to make a 50k tons ship that I can send to orbit and dock in several dozen 1000 ton parts. I'm thinking a central core of a dozen modules with the radiation shields, with the drop tanks attached laterally. In all this, I'd really rather not try to figure out how to bind the rcs. If i put it on the central core, I risk its exhaust being blocked by the drop tanks and becoming ineffective. If I put it on the drop tanks, I will drop it eventually. Putting on a single oversized reaction wheel per segment is just so much more practical.

just checked them. they are no more powerful than the regular 2.5 m reaction wheels, while weigthing 3 times as much. I supposed it can be used as a thermal covering... for a spaceplane during reentry, since they have very high heat resistance... except that a spaceplane covered in reaction wheels would be too heavy to fly, so I'll just file them as "useless junk". As I am looking for ways to save on part count on large vehicles, that would otherwise require 100+ stock wheels. the 5 m core at least has some actual torque to it; still, it's as strong as 3 regular wheels, while being 8 times heavier. seems like I will have to make rescale some stock parts if I want to get some big reaction wheels

the cheat menu is your friend for testing. perss alt-f12, a menu opens. there is a cheat section. you can teleport to any orbit you want.

it's totally worth playing, if you got to the point that stock is too easy and boring and you want some extra challenge. as for other mods, there may be problems. I am not an expert here, kerbalism is compatible with all major mods but you should check that. worst case scenario, the game does not work and you have to remove kerbalism

actually, it is always more efficient to intercept from a lower trajectory. the reason is that it takes fuel to raise your apoapsis, and then fuel to lower it. so for an 80 km equatorial orbit the right orbit to intercept efficeintly is a 75 km orbit