king of nowhere

yes

this is exactly the kind of problem for which an rcs would help. but, assuming you don't want to use an rcs, it's still not so difficult. First, from some distance (say, 100 meters) burn toward the docking port. then immediately turn around. Stop your station part at a few meters from the station. the closer, the better; you want to make drifting negligible. make your speed 0.0 meters. at this point, you turn the arm around again, carefully align the docking ports, and then you push. slowly. 0.2 m/s, 0.3 at most.

but it still mens 5 m/s of acceleration, of which 1.5 are spent battling gravity. it's low acceleration. and since getting a 0.5 kerbin twr doesn't cost much mass with a wolfhound, reducing the mass of the engines is not convenient there. or, if it is, it's at the point where it makes little difference. In any case, I wouldn't go below 0.5 twr for practical reasons. boredom among them. 1.5 twr (mun) equates to 0.25 twr (kerbin), and it means it would take something like 4 minutes for a mun ascent. You also start suffering serious cosine losses on manuevers. Trust me; on a 1000 ton ship, adding 12 tons of engines is a pittance. it barely makes a difference. Doubling thrust, on the other hand, changes your life. your comparisons are improperly made. You should not compare 4 rhinos vs 4 wolfhounds. that's not a significant comparison, because they are very different engines, supposed to be used in different amounts. You should compare at equal thrust, because that's what you want. so a good comparison could be 2 rhinos against 12 wolfhounds. Of course, construction simplicity comes into that. if fitting 12 wolfhounds is too much for your craft, then go for the higher thrust engine. Also, that TWR is way too low. Those gravity losses are way too high, even with such low twr. Unless you are launching straight up - which is a very inefficient way to launch - normal gravity losses for a mun launch are around 100 m/s. low thrust would increase those losses, but unless you get to VERY low thrust, you shouldn't lose more than another 100 m/s.

Wolfhounds, no questions. When you make a fuel tanker, the mass of the engine is a very important factor for your deltaV. So having two sets of engines is absolutely out of the question; any advantage they'd give for greater thrust would be lost by their extra mass cutting into the deltaV. For the same reason, I recommend your TWR remains between 0.5 and 1 (kerbin values); any advantage you gain with more thrust is lost for the greater engine mass. One may wonder if using rhinos instead of wolfhounds would improve matters; one rhino thrusts as much as 6 wolfhounds, for half the mass, so it is conceivable that what you save in lower mass compensates for the lower Isp. Being one who uses a lot of large ships, I did experiment on it, and the answer is just no. The mass saving on the rhino is not enough to compensate for lower Isp. The one possible competitor are the nuclear engines. Those have over twice the Isp of the wolfhounds, but they have a lot less thrust. I know for personal experience and calculation that for a Vall lander nukes are bad, because to get enough thrust you need so many of them, so much wasted mass, you'd get better results using wolfhounds. But Mun is smaller than Vall, so maybe for Mun a lander based on nuclear engines may save some fuel. worth experimenting on it.

I successfully lithobraked not just from orbital speed, but from hyperbolic trajectory Of course, since the celestial body was Deimos, with an escape speed of 6 m/s, it wasn't much of an achievement

I never landed something that small on duna, only bigger stuff, and the way to go is to use parachutes to slow down. terminal velocity is around 30 m/s with a parachute, probably will be less for your small, light probe. In fact, a couple of radial parachutes may be enough to slow it down to the point that the landing legs can take the impact. If not, the smaller engine that can give it TWR 2 on duna (0.6 on kerbin) should be enough. Perhaps 3 ant engines attached radially and your smaller fuel tank on top.

it's one year old by now.... editing the files in the right place wasn't trivial, i couldn't do it myself and needed the help of my brother, who's the best IT expert i know. just changing an engine is easy - go in config file and edit some values, it's pretty intuitive - but to convince the game that there is now a different engine, it takes some more fiddling. i can't say how it was done. I've just been copy-pasting the parts folders between versions. Anyway, i got the wolfhound3, wolfhounds three times bigger with the same stats scaled up, and they work perfectly. and the nerv3, nervs 3 times bigger. which tend to overheat to the limit, and have been known to explode if running too long. I had to reduce their heat production. The nerv5 were a failure, they exploded very fast once turned on; so for bigger nervs one has to turn down the heat. I could have done it with the nerv5, but my current motherships use nerv3 and they are fine.

the tips i can give are - use gravity assists to reduce deltaV required. - send up the largest missions in multiple smaller modules that can be docked in orbit. ultimately, while you can work on mass and efficiency, to get a high deltaV you need to use a lot of fuel and stages. not much to be done about it. also, if your problem is the lack of science, you can mine the multiple biomes of mun and minmus for it. though i doubt that's what you want.

Part 2: Launching A'Twin, while fending off the krakens Launching to rss requires much more deltaV, requiring some really colossal launchers. So colossal, in fact, that they often broke my pc. I did succeed at launching every single part regularly. But the numerous glitches forced me to use the cheat debug menu to fix them. 2.1) Launching Cylinder 2.2) Launching Trypophobia 2.3) Launching everything else 2.4) Orbital assembly

and here i though I'm the only fool doing a rss grand tour with stock parts... your solution for venus was very elegant. I needed a much bigger ascent vehicle. then again, I don't want to imagine how many tries it took to pull off that "catch from suborbital trajectory" stunt. I've done it myself at times, but always with ships that were almost orbital and would take several minutes to reenter atmosphere anyway, here's the ship that I will be using for my rss grand tour with stock parts, life support and part failure.

I went far enough into my grand tour that I'm finally certain it is happening, and it's not getting eaten by one of the dozen krakens I found in the last two months. It's time to make a cool cinematic for my ship and to start a full mission report I'll spend the next few days catching up with the mission report until my current timeline, where I'm refueling on Phobos. I'm not in a hurry. I spent a couple hours doing necessary repairs, and I'm still not done. And after I'm done with repairs, it will take 10 years to complete refueling - ore concentration is very low - and in that time I will have to run maintenance at least a couple more times. See all those drills? I've got to get close to each one of them and right-click "inspect part", to repair those that are getting old. And then I turn around and there are more drills. And then there are over 100 reaction wheels... and with a 1330 parts ship, the game is a lagfest. I'll be honest, the best part about my missions is planning them and looking backwards once they are done.

A'Twin is landing on Phobos while Mars is on the horizon. A good view on the valles marineris and a few major volcanoes

Part 1: Projecting A'Twin and picking the crew My previous mothership A'Tuin was already very well designed, tackling very efficiently most of the problems posed by long duration missions with part failure and life support. I did realize during the mission it could still be improved, though. So my first hope was using an improved version of A'Tuin. For start, A'Tuin had way too many oxidizer tanks. Those were needed to land and take off from Duna, but even then, there was too much. By converting some of those LF/Ox tanks to pure LF tanks for the nuclear engines, I could gain close to 1000 m/s. Then there was the limitation of having to carry around fuel for landing. A mission to Moho started from Ike, returned to Ike, and in all the trip to Moho I had to carry around the fuel needed to land on Ike, as dead weight. If I made some drop tanks that could be detached and left in Ike orbit, it would increase efficiency. That could gain maybe another 1000 m/s, getting to 8 km/s available deltaV. That's nowhere near enough. First, I need to add 100 tons of water for prolonged life support, as well as having bigger landers to account for the higher deltaV requirements. So a lot of that extra deltaV will be eaten up. Second, even 8 km/s isn't enough for a roundtrip Mercury mission. At least 10 are needed. The only way to get that much deltaV was to get rid of all the dead weight unnecessary for the trip. Not just the fuel required to land, but also the heavy mining equipment, and the heavy nuclear reactors, and even the heavy chemical engines. So I made the new mothership with the same general structure of A'Tuin - a shell of fuel tanks on the outside, with the living space inside protected from radiations - but I split it in two in a way that would allow a heavy mining module to stay behind, while the exploration module can trek much farther. This ship being basically A'Tuin made of two twin parts, I called it A'Twin. 1.1) A'Twin mothership 1.2) Spider heavy lander + Hartman rover + Mars/Mercury extensions 1.3) Clamp light lander 1.4) Fat Man taxi 1.5) Nitrogenie in a Bottle Titan lander and nitrogen harvester 1.6) Milly the Windmill Vanus ascent vehicle + Dagger Venus exploration plane 1.7) Service Probes + Wings reconnaissance probes 1.8) Dolphin Escape pod 1.9.1) The importance of being Adai - selecting crew members for resistance to stress 1.9.2) Welcome to the Hotel Above California

Part 0: Introduction and goals Welcome to the fourth iteration of kerbalism grand tours by king of nowhere. The first mission was the first kerbalism grand tour, though it still used some facilitated isru mechanics. It featured an extremely cool mothership, though in retrospect - knowing what I now know - I can see a dozen of mistakes and poor decisions in its construction. The second mission did another grand tour at hard level without isru. It had a fully disposable - and much less ambitious - mothership, which is not as cool. The third mission used the outer planet mods to increase the number and distance of the targets. It lasted 330 in-game years, using nuclear reactors to perform isru with the full kerbalism rules. Now I need something more. After completing a challenge, I want to push farther and outdo the previous mission. What more can I do than a grand tour with OPM? A grand tour of the real solar system (rss), of course. I've always known I'd have to end up there. It's the ultimate goal. The real solar system is a lot bigger than the stock system. This roughly triples the deltaV cost to do anything, as outlined in the deltaV map What does it say about this game that a google search for deltaV map returns hundreds of kerbal maps and only one for the real solar system? Made for the rss mod, not for the actual solar system, at that It also triples travel time, which means more malfunctions, and more resources needed for life support. I've been reluctant to convert to rss because it's generally assumed to go together with realism overhaul. Which gives you more efficient engines and fuel tanks to bring them in line with their real counterparts, but also adds extra nuisances like ullage gases, limited ignitions - how do they mix with kerbalism already limited ignitions? - nerfed reaction wheels, and a lot more stuff that I'm unsure how to cope with. Like, I don't know if I can replenish my ullage gas stockpile by isru, and having to add rcs would require rcs thrusters - with the 6-copies redundancy policy, how many parts would I need to add? What of lag? To keep things simple, I decide to forego realism overhaul and use stock parts. So, the third grand tour, with A'Tuin, was already very complicated. Now I'm trying to do the same, with the same resources, but tripling the deltaV requirements. The one saving grace I have is that it's a lot easier to find water in rss than it was in opm. In the previous mission I had a narrow list of available sites for refueling, this time I can do it almost everywhere. In particular, using the moonlets of mars as refueling station will make exploration of the inner system possible at all. I must foreward eventual readers (wait, is there even someone who actually reads all my excessively lenghty reports?). This is my fourth mission of this kind, and I lean heavily into what I learned in the previous missions. I keep those reports as a kind of diary to myself, first and foremost - but I try to make them accessible to other readers too. It's getting harder as I keep getting more familiar with the mods and taking things for granted. Should I talk in detail about the complicated mechanics of kerbalism isru? How much shall I discuss kerbalism mechanics like part failures and stress? I fear that, even if I do try to explain stuff, a lot of this will come off obscure to someone not familiar with my previous missions - that is, the half dozen people who may have read my reports in full. I also can't explain everything fully again, becase then the narration would become repetitive and boring to someone who already knows those missions. And as I said, I write those reports mostly for myself, I do reread them on occasions, and I don't want to reread stuff I already know all the time. So, a lot of extra details that are explored in my previous reports are not repeated here. I'll still try to make it as readable to someone new as I can

they are answers. perhaps not the kind you expected, but the only kind you can get. First, all we have are suggestions because there isn't one single correct way to do things. if it was the case, then this game would be boring indeed. there is a problem, and there are many things you can try to fix that problem. You pick what seems most convenient, and you try until it works. that's how you troubleshoot. Second, we ourselves are not sure what could work and what couldn't. especially if you don't post pictures. making a spaceship work is complicated. an experienced player can put together a simple design that will do something simple and will work at the first try. For anything more complicated, we must go by trial and error too. We start with a design, and we refine it along the way. So we cannot just tell you how to make your eve lander works. how do you expect us to know how many landing legs you need for your lander when we don't know if you lander weights 5 tons or 50 or 500? If you want more detailed instructions, you have to give us more detailed information. Else, if you just want to see a design that works, go on spacecraft exchange subforum and ask for some ready-to-use eve landers. Third, even if we actually knew exactly how to fix your problems, we wouldn't tell you "just do X". This is your game, your choice. And as I said, there isn't one single way of doing things, so we present you with the different options on how you can do things. Fourth, you say you don't get an explanation of the physics of things and why they should be done a certain way? I see those explanations scattered around the answers, maybe just because I know to recognize them? " the mammoth is very sturdy and well suited to the task. " is an explanation. it explains that you can land a ship on a mammoth engine because that engine is very resistant. "Soft springs just wallow under load, which with Eve's high gravity just means they'll bottom out and break;" is another perfectly good explanation for why spring load settings work how they work. that's just in the first two posts. I don't know what more explanations you could want, but if you do want them, then you should make more accurate questions. Fifth, you get "I've never done that but I would try X" answers because this game is so vast, chances are nobody is doing what you are doing. A lot of people have landed on eve, but none of them has used your specific design. As for "I don't know but I would do X", the first point should already cover why we answer that. those are very useful answers, and the best answers you can get. For reasons explained in the previous points. Sixth, you using a playstation does not matter. as far as I know, it makes almost no difference. it certainly makes no difference on what ships work and what don't, and it makes no difference on the answers you can get. You may also notice that there's only a handful of people regularly answering questions in this subforum, if you want someone using your same console you may not find one. you using ps makes no difference anyway in the kind of answers you are getting. Seventh, you started the thread by asking "wondering if I should increase? or decrease? the spring or damper strength for an EVE landing? ". @jimmymcgoochie answered immediately "Maximum spring, maximum damper". As in, increase them to maximum level. that answers your specific question fully. So, you can't even say we're not answering your questions. Eight, when you answer someone by asking additional details, you should quote them in your post. Your quoting ensures that they get a notification that you quoted them, making them more likely to read. if you just answer in the post, many people will simply never read your new question, because they already answered this thread and have no reason to look at it again. In short, you come here asking vague questions without giving us any details, and you somehow expect us to know exactly how your ship is made and how to fix it just by looking. You expect us to read your mind and give you exactly the answer you want. Even when you get an answer that tells you exactly what you were asking - a simple binary answer to a simple binary question you bolded - you are still somehow dissatisfied. You claim to want explanations for how things work, though you did not ask for them, but when you get them you are still dissatisfied. No, you do not make additional inquiries, or new requests for more details or explanations; you still expect us to somehow read your mind and answer you the way you expect. And you are now blaming us, and making up far-fetched conspiracies where we discriminate you because you're using playstation. Ask better questions, and you will get better answers.

the onion pod is very draggy. draggy parts tend to move backwards, that's why your ship spontaneously orients itself like it does. use a more aerodinamic crew pod in its place. though, like @jimmymcgoochie said, there's no reason to want to enter point-first.

it would require changing the whole code. anyway, kerbalism does reward preparation. you simply have to carry multiple engines. if you take a look at some of the kerbalism mission reports in my signature, you'll see that I always use designs with multiple engines, making sure that the ship can function with any one engine broken. the most common option for landers is using 6 cubs instead of 1 terrier. yes, of course the ship performs worse; adding redundancies adds mass. it's the price of being prepared. I also make sure to have backup engines. Finally, if you want to always be able to repair engines, you can simply go in the kerbalism options and set critical failure chance to 0. this way, all failures will be noncritical

I don't know of other instances, but simply there isn't anything more to say for this question. you asked how to improve your landing struts. you got a bunch of answers of things to try. that's it. your question was answered. the console business came as a consequence of me suggesting alt-f12 to test faster, and that's answered too.

was engine fatigue failure changed? because i'm losing a lot more engines than usual. In less than one week into my new mission, I lost more nerv engines to material stress than I did for all my previous missions combined.

but where is the reliability.cs file? I'm not a specialized programmer, I can edit the text files that I see but I'm now suspecting there are a lot of hidden files my pc isn't showing me...

bump because it's getting swamped, with update. i've been looking at the kerbalism code, and i've seen nothing referring to that. i'm not thinking, since you can inspect parts when you can also get other options with them (like open/close for cargo bays) that the relevant instruction must be in the stock game code. still hoping someone can help me, though i'll keep finely combing at the code. it's far less time consuming than all the repairs i have to make

it is intentional. the xenon can be utilized to fuel ion engines. My mothership had a few small scout probes that were fueled entirely by the waste of the reactors. though the amount of xenon produced is really small, it's unlikely to be useful. anyway, you do not need to edit files or anything to use the reactors. as i said, you merely must tell them to dump xenon. like this

they do generate electricity. make sure to tell them to dump xenon. they produce small amounts of xenon, and if they cannot store it somewhere, and are not told to dump it, they stop working. as for the heat, no, they do not produce it as they should. nothing stops you from still using radiators.

Repairing my mothership is a painful operation requiring a long spacewalk to fit a kerbal into every nook and cranny, all the while under heavy lag. It's fascinating the first time, but it gets tedious after a while. It occurred to me that I could significantly shorten the operation by increasing the range to which the kerbal can perform such repairs. Instead of having to fly around the ship, I can just do everything with the kerbal standing still on a ladder. And all it would take would be manually editing a single value in a file; the one telling the range for inspections and repairs. Unfortunately, that single piece of information in the large code is like the metaphorical needle in the metaphorical haystack. Do anyone know where I can find that instruction? thanks

I finally managed to make my new mothership work, overcoming all the kraken attacks that killed it previously, by updating the game to the latest version, which is more stable. Now I no longer get the ship horribly twisted. The propellers still twist and turn horribly but miracolously, the moment i stop time warp (for the big propellers in the venus ascent vehicle) and remember to lock them (for the smaller propeller for the titan plane), they go back into shape with no damage. I reached as far as Mars. It required a 4000 m/s burn, made with a heavily laggy ship with less than 0.1 twr. slowly raising apoapsis from LEO, took a whole afternoon of repeated burns. I went as far as mars, then i had to return for the silliest reason: I forgot a crap container. for you see, my crew needs the greenhouses on board to grow to keep eating. the plants in the greenhouses require CO2 to grow. CO2 from astronauts breathing is not enough to sustain the cycle; the rest has to come from burning organic waste. but the waste incinerators need some crap stockpile to work on. without a storage container for crap, the waste is disposed immediately, the waste incinerators cannot work, the ship has a negative carbon balance and the crew will starve. it only needs a tiny container, just 2 kg of mass, and all is fine. but that container, being a modded part, cannot be manipulated by eva construction - ok, some modded parts can, but that one was never implemented for it. otherwise, i could have just used alt-f12 to get one in place. Ok, if it was just for that, i could have gotten one such container attached to a docking port. while i was trying to determine if i should replay the last day of playing or restart, i noticed that all the spare parts i did load into containers also vanished - an accidental effect of having to rebuild the ship in the VAB at some point, i lost most cargo parts stored inside. Anyway, I'm back to painstackingly raising apoapsis for a 4000 m/s manuever