king of nowhere

Part 4: Mars and Venus Cylinder goes to Venus, drops landers. Meanwhile Trypophobia, taking advantage of the reduced lag, sends the remaining landers on Mars. After Cylinder returns, A'Twin takes a long refueling stop to prepare for Mercury. 4.1) One becomes two 4.2) The long route to Venus 4.3) Mars and Deimos landing 4.4) The most difficult landing 4.5) The most difficult ascent 4.6) Back to Phobos 4.7) The even longer pit stop Broken parts recap

you shouldn't do anything. You can do pretty much anything you want. if you're not running a challenge for lowest mass or lowest part or lowest something, you can use different solutions and they all work. that said, if you use xenon, make sure you can have electricity that far from the sun. it is a perfectly viable choice, but a bit uncomfortable to apply i did use solar panels at eeloo to power ion engines. it took 6 gigantors for a 15-tons ship. twr was extremely low, of course (i had engine at 5%) but even though burn was very inefficient - I basically did make the burn in solar orbit - it was more than compensated by xenon efficiency. and, more important, the ship was an escape pod from a larger ship that had to carry it, so having a low mass was more important. I suggest using the persistent thrust mod to use ion engines while on time warp. Before discovering it, I just left the game in background for hours.

difficult to understand your problem, but i suspect you cannot save the game? seems like the same bug i had with my own vehicles; i launch them all right, but then the game cannot be saved and always reverts to before launch. I found that the only solution to that is to use alt-f12 to move my vessels in orbit (or, in your case, in the sea)

assuming there are no construction mistakes or power shortages or anything like that, there are a lot of glitches with propellers. they can get bent in a variety of situations, like being exposed to the harsh aerodinamic conditions of an eve descent, or being accidentally turned on in space. If that happened, then your rotors would behave differently, and this could cause torque

can't tell from the picture, but most likely you are orbiting in a retrograde direction. Open advanced information on orbit (on the bottom left menu, second tab), you can see your orbital inclination. See if it matches with what you are supposed to do, or if it's shifted by 180 degrees

having a lot of experience with long missions and part maintenance, I've noticed that the nominal duration does not correspond with reality. Nominally, there are only two possibilities: some parts last long, and some parts last short. then there's high and low quality. So, nominally, a high quality drill should have the same average malfunction as a high quality eclss. but in my experience eclss break quite often, I serveced them by the dozen, while in my current mission - which is now at 20 years in rss, equivalent to 60 kerbal years - I only had to service one single drill once. That's too much of a discrepancy to be a statistical coincidence. Then eclss should last longer than reaction wheels, because the latter have short duration. and yet, i have to service reaction wheels less often than eclss. I have around 30 eclss in the ship, 60 drills and over 100 wheels. I also have to service antennas more often than reaction wheels. so, if having more of a part should make it more likely to break, i should break more wheels. The part that gets broken more often are the nuclear reactors, they should last as long as the wheels, but I must service them every year and I keep finding some needing servicing - I have 12 big ones, which are really problematic, and 6 small ones, which instead never get broken, though they should have the same duration. meanwhile, I have a bunch of low-quality rcs on command pods, i didn't bother making them high quality because i don't use them, but they never break. never need servicing, despite being low quality. So, if having less parts of a certain type ccauses more malfunctions, having only 4 rcs should kill them fast. Unless they are included in the attitude control group; but in that case, the nuclear reactors are included with a lot of fuel cells (which I do not use for electricity, but to turn monopropellant into nitrogen), so they should be protected too. why is the nominal duration of parts not reflected in the slightest in their actual duration? EDIT: similarily, why the "failures" tab often reports that a part needs servicing, when an engineer sent to check it will tell everything is ok - and conversely, a part may bust even though the tab says all is fine?

a chemical plant will sustain dozens of kerbals, maybe hundreds. they consume very little oxygen. i bet you did not tell your chemical plant to dump hydrogen - or you told it to, but it wasn't dumping, because there's a bug with dumping. so your chemical plant was not doing water electrolysis, and not producing oxygen. if i am right and it's indeed the bug, the only way I know of dealing with it is to refresh the "dump" setting on the chemical plant. the good news is that you only need to do it once for a process, and it affects the whole ship. for example, you have 6 water electrolysis on your ship, all set to dump hydrogen. then you leave the ship, and when you reload it again, the hydrogen is not being dumped. then you only need to tell again a single one of those chemical plants to dump, and all 6 will dump regularly.

this one mk1 command pod, 14 fuel tanks, swivel. It can reach high orbit it well piloted, and it can even be recovered whole. it only requires to unlock a single tech - well, this version also has a couple extrra science instruments, but you get the idea. it's the simplest ssto, really. for ascent path, start turning early, and hit 500 m/s with a 45° inclination. Stabilize around 30° until you get suborbital.

go to the tracking station, you have the option to delete debris

nothing, really. it's just a combination of letters that for purely random reasons gave a low vulnerability to stress. I think they used the names of the kerbals as seed for a couple of practical reasons; first, it would ensure that the same kerbal was consistent throughout the career; there's no other value that would remain after multiple missions. Second, they tweaked the algorithm so that the basic 4 kerbals are all good; bob, bill and jeb also have extremely good resistance to stress (during the experiment they had accumulated 21/22% stress, average was 30%, adai at 20% was the only one better than them); val is not as good and she didn't get to participate in my subsequent mission, but she's still well above average with 26%

Had a most singular misadventure today Here is my mining module, Trypophobia, landed on Phobos. I was about to start mining, so I gave the command to deploy the drills Problem is, Phobos has extremely low gravity. 6 m/s is enough to orbit. The drills hit the ground, and caused Trypophobia to bounce. It was a very small bounce, the ship picked up a mere 0.4 m/s speed. Enough that it would take 3 minutes to return to the ground, but still not a big deal. The problem is that the vessel was not on perfectly flat ground, but on an incline. So that bounce also gave it lateral speed. And with this super low gravity, it just does not push against the ground hard enough to make friction. Trypophobia started sliding down the incline. With a local gravity of 5 mm/s2, it was a very slow slide. I tried to stop it using the rockets, but to no avail. Manuevering a ship so big close to the ground is complicated, hitting the ground would have resulted in more bouncing, and any attempt to slow down was frustrated by trypophobia picking up speed again. Using time warp so close to the ground is also very dangerous, especially when I cannot save because I am moving on the ground. Since I had nothing better to do with the time, I did the maintenance round; an engineer went around the ship, checking every component to make sure it's not aging. This kind of operation is the most boring part of my missions, very time consuming. Though in this case, since I did split the ship in half, lag is limited. Anyway, I finished the maintenance round, and the ship was still sliding. So I just left ksp in background and went to do other stuff, waiting for trypophobia to finally reach the bottom of the incline. It took over one hour. During which i couldn't save or stop in any way.

this one is a bug; it's been there for years. my subsequent exchange with gotmachine was about that. shutting down the pressure control generally prevents that bug from doing more harm

speaking of nitrogen lost in eva, there is a bug where sometimes a lot more nitrogen is lost than it should be. I have a recent version of kerbalism, downloaded a couple month ago, and this bug still happened, depleting a stockpile of 1000 nitrogen in a single eva. is there a chance that the bug may be fixed?

you actually have very little nitrogen, a few kg at most; it's just that hull losses are very small, so nitrogen lasts a long time. Load a bigger tank for 50-100 kg of nitrogen, and it will last a lot of evas. You also get somwhat lower losses if you deactivate pressure control while going eva Actually, it shoulnd't be. You don't open the door to space venting all the air within; you pump the air in the airlock into a tank, then you open to space when the airlock is already in near vacuum. Now, some small, simple crafts do actually vent air in space, because it's easier if you only have to go eva once. But I do believe the iss has more elaborate airlocks that recover the air and don't vent it in space. I'm not actually sure, though, and a quick search wasn't conclusive.

it's not even clear how many ants are there, and we can only grossly estimate the mass, so it's hard to tell. But by personal experience - and by that I mean, I almost lost a big mission because my moho lander was inadequate - I would tell you to have at least 950 m/s to land, for safety, and a twr (moho) of 2 with your tanks full. You can get by with a bit less, but it's better to play it safe. I assume you don't want to return to orbit after landing, by the way. A couple more tips: first, you don't need landing legs. You can just land on your engines, and you save 75 kg, which on such a small probe are not insignificant. Second, you don't need batteries; the hecs2 probe core already has lots of battery capacity.

so, you can do it the easy way, or the hard way, or several harder ways. let's discuss the easy way. you start from kerbin, equatorial orbit, during the time of the transfer window with duna. to calculate the transfer window time, i suggest using alexmoon tool. Select Duna as your target. To reach Duna, you are supposed to burn for 1000 m/s, more or less. So make a prograde 1000 m/s manuever node. Anywhere in the orbit. You are unlikely to make it in the right place, but we'll fix that. Zooming out on the map, look at your solar apoapsis. Depending on where you place the manuever node, you get different solar apoapsis. Now move your manuever node around the orbit, you'll see your projected solar apoapsis move too. Move your manuever node until you find the position that will give you the maximum solar apoapsis. That's the most efficient place to make the burn, and it should give you an apoapsis on Duna's orbit. If your apoapsis is not exactly on Duna's orbit, change the burn. If you're going past Duna, reduce the burn, if you're too low, increase the burn. After you do that, change again the position of your manuever node; the optimal position changes with how much you're burning. But for small changes, it's negligible. So, suppose after placing your 1000 m/s node you saw that it falls short, so you increased it to 1050 to touch duna's orbit. Then you move again the manuever node, and you see that you can get a bit past duna. Now you reduce the burn, say to 1040, and you're touching the orbit, and you didn't make enough of a difference to be worth moving the node. Do be careful; a handful of m/s more or less may throw out an encounter. Now you probably won't be seeing a close approach marker. That's because you only see them when you are actually touching the target orbit, and even though your apoapsis is as high as duna, you're not touching it, because of orbital inclination. You should be seeing the ascending and descending nodes. So you plan a second burn on the planar node closer to you; if it's the ascending node, plan a burn downward, on the descending node a burn upward. This will reduce planar inclination. When inclination becomes 0, you should see a close approach marker, and you should be close to it. Refine the burns by trial and error to get an actual encounter. Keep in mind that you will have to plan correction manuevers later, because no burn is exact. but they will be small. be careful that mun doesn't get in your way. You could use it to get a gravity assist and save fuel, but that's harder. You also can avoid the plane change and make sure you meet duna on the manuever node, and it often saves fuel, but again, it's harder. You are doing all this because your objective is to raise orbit. to raise orbit you want to burn prograde, except that you are orbiting a planet orbiting the sun, so it's a bit skewed. So you want to leave the planet on a trajectory that's prograde compared to the planet; that will be the best way to move away from the sun; similarly, you'll want to leave retrograde to move to the inner planets. But it's not easy to find the best way to burn around the planet to leave prograde compared to it, because you're still moving around the planet; that's why you do it by trial and error, moving the manuever node by small increments. At this point, you ensured that your apoapsis will be as high as duna's orbit. Being at the right time in the transfer window will also ensure that duna will be passing there just when you do. but you're still not done, because the orbits have different inclinations; you'll pass above duna, or below it. matching inclination is the simplest way to fix this problem, though it's often not the optimal one. Seconded In both cases, it seems your problem is that you did not launch at the proper transfer window. so you touch duna's orbit, but duna is not there.

thanks, but it's not needed. I can live with having part 1 and part 2 separate

In my years playing this game, I produced a bunch of mission reports that I use as a sort of a diary. Sometimes I go back and read them. I would like to conserve them for the future - again, like a diary. And internet is not the best place for the long term. In 10 years, what the chances that the images will still load correctly? it's not even guaranteed this forum will still be here. So I'm thinking to save those threads in my pc. Is there some practical way to do it, without having to take screenshots of everything and painstakingly copy it into a single document?

that depends entirely on how big your payload is. if it has to drop a whole mun base, it may actually need big engines. you should look at the TWR - thrust to weight - value. you can see it in the VAB. for the first stage, you want a TWR around 1.5 (sea level). for subsequent stages to reach orbit, you want a TWR around 1 to 1.5 (vacuum), though you can get by with a bit less. for stages in orbit, you want a TWR around 0.5, less power to save mass on the engine. that's also enough to land on Mun, though more thrust makes things easier. yes, always. the point is that you are too fast for the planet gravity to hold you, and so you slow down until that's no longer the case. how else did you manage to get captured in the past? to get to Mun, you burn prograde from low kerbin orbit until your apoapsis reaches Mun, it should take around 850 m/s of burn. You want to have a low Mun periapsis - around 10 km is best - because it will make injection cheaper. then you reach Mun, and when you are at periapsis you burn retrograde; if you do it well, it should take roughly 100 m/s to get captured in an elliptic orbit, and another 200 m/s to circularize the orbit. if you are spending more, it means you can improve

Everywhere multiple times in the stock system, and on many modded planets. I also made a point to travel on the ground (rover or plane where possible) on every planet. While most people who started this game probably stopped before landing on Mun, and most players stopped without visiting the other planet, I doubt many of those write on the forum.

how much deltaV do you have left? how much thrust to weight? there are many things you can improve with your manuevering. You have a very high periapsis, which is a reason why you had so much trouble closing the orbit; you should plan your manuever node to enter with a low periapsis.

Part 3: To Mars and Phobos A'Twin goes to Mars and resupplies on the small moon Phobos. The ship is doing fine, though I initially underestimated the deltaV requirements. The krakens are still attacking. 3.1) The alignment bug strikes again 3.2) We choose to go to the Moon right now because it's slightly more convenient than doing it later 3.3) Third time is the charm 3.4) To Phobos 3.5) You better get used to Phobos 3.5) Bugs compilation

if you apparently can't change your orbit no matter which way you boost, i suspect you are not boosting after all. does your orbit actually change? maybe you run out of fuel, or maybe you are using an unmanned probe and you have no control. or maybe you have no reaction wheels, so you can't control your direction. pictures would help

if you want help, ask specific questions. we certainly cannot help you like that

I vote my coolest guy Adai Kerman. What's so special about that name? the kerbalism mod has a stress mechanic, and stressed astronauts create problems. different astronauts have more or less resistance to stress, according to a random algorithm that uses their names as random seed. well, I did some training to select the coolest astronauts; I sent up a good 40ish kerbals in a large sky hotel for three years. Three real time years, equivalent to roughly 9 kerbal years. And afterwards, I'd check their stress. And of all the 40ish participants to the experiment, adai was the one with the lowest stress value. He's the coolest guy possible; cool-headed, at least