king of nowhere

Two days ago I was trying to launch the second part of my mothership to orbit in rss. Doing so took a 40k ton, 1500 parts rocket, which didn't just lag, it caused the pc to crash completely. After spending two days trying to reach orbit, and getting a pc crash every single time - I once even reached as far as the second-to-last stage, before game crashed - I decided to try and get to orbit with one less booster pack. My previous attempt failed to reach orbit by some 200 m/s, adding a booster crashed the game, maybe better launch optimization would succeed. I adopted a steeper gravity turn. I was going straight up until 15 km, which is a lot less terrible than it sounds; in stock game it would be awful, but in rss it takes a lot longer to achieve orbital speed, so one needs to gather more vertical velocity - and accept more gravity losses along the way. And while it turned out an earlier, steeper turn was correct, to vindicate my assessment the difference was small: maybe 100 m/s gained. Still not enough to get to orbit. This would look like an orbit for those used to stock game, but in rss atmosphere extends to 140 km So I tried to further improve the launch vehicle - without doing anything that could crash the pc again. I already removed the 65 tons of water. now I also removed the 6 tons of monopropellant (which I'm using as a convenient way to store nitrogen) and a few more tons of uranium - not many, because I was already starting mostly empty there. All this gained a couple dozen m/s. Not enough. So i did use longer fuel tanks on the first stage This added 6 parts; 150 more parts crashed the game but 6 are probably ok. The flight lasted around one hour, courtesy of lag. All the while I was nervously comparing screenshots to check how much I was gaining over the previous launch. real earth is beautiful Finally I orbited with 100 m/s left. There's stilll hope for my next grand tour! The next main risk is whether the game will be able to handle the fully assembled mothership.

I tried to turn earlier. this is how it went in rss atmosphere ends at 140 km, so I missed orbit again. by maybe 100 m/s. it's 200 m/s better than the previous attempt, where I stopped at 7600 m/s. but most of that, I gained by emptying the water tanks - 65 tons of water that I will resupply with another mission. So, by using a steeper turn, I gained maybe 100 m/s. However, this gives me faith that it can be done. I can't add another booster without crashing the pc, but I can get to orbit, just barely, with what I have. Also because I had some engine malfunctions all on the same side that caused instability and forced to make some corrections. So now I'm launching again. I further discarded some monopropellant, and some uranium, and I used longer fuel tanks for the first stage. All together, it should buy me the deltaV that's missing here. EDIT: Yay! it worked! In orbit with 100 m/s

nope, no RO or other tweaks. after reading all the stuff RO does, i decided some of that was too annoying to keep track of. as for other tweaks, I decided to go rss to increase difficulty, balance tweaks would defeat the purpose. The rocket is the one here As it is, it keeps crashing the pc because it's too big and complex. I know that with one less stack of boosters the pc can handle it, but i missed orbit by some 200 m/s. I'm trying to see if I can optimize the ascent profile to recover those 200 m/s. It's a big asparagus stack, it starts with twr 1.8 and it gradually goes down as more boosters are discarded. Last stage is twr around 1, with 2000 m/s. Everything before that is no less than 1.4 I don't want to use mechjeb or anything. plus, seeing as how mods increase lag and my pc is already crashing, i don't want to add mods just on principle. Normally, I would have gone for a more horizontal profile. Especially with a rocket so big, aerodinamic losses are less than gravity losses - despite the draggy payload. However, a flatter ascent profile means that I will level up early. This can easily be countered by pointing upward of prograde just enough. But that beast is already very draggy - even on a purely vertical ascent, maxQ is around 30% of weight; pointing above prograde while in the lower atmosphere would increase drag immensely. Which is why I was reluctant to do it. Also, I've seen real rockets and they go straight up for several km before starting the gravity turn, so I figured it could be the best way. I will have to try that, though. If nothing else, because I already spent 2 whole afternoons trying to launch that monster and getting the pc crash every single time. Once I even reached the second-to-last stage, wasn't even lagging so hard anymore, and then it still crashed.

I ask those with experience in real solar system how the gravity turn goes. in the stock game, you generally want to turn very fast, starting already around 50 m/s, being down at a 45° angle already at 500 m/s. that because in stock you orbit at 2200 m/s, you want to be horizontal at that speed. in real solar system, at 2200 m/s you still miss over 5 km/s to orbit. I had experiences where I did start angling down early, and I had to pull up later. on the other hand, I am now trying to go straight up until around 15 km altitude, and while this enables a proper gravity turn afterwards, going straight up at 700 m/s doesn't feel right. it can't be optimized, can it? and orbital launches in rss last way too long for me to want to go by trial and error. any good tip on when I should start turning?

i reworked the boosters, reduced engine count by 200 - keeping everything else the same. the game goes a lot worse now. so no, it's not the number of engines

It's not that. Yes, I've seen that video of the megaton ship, where fuel transfer was the cause of lag, but it's not the issue here. I've been using a lot of big ships, some with a lot more fuel tanks. I guarantee, the main factor is mods. Second main factor is complex parts like life support and modules parts. sheer part count is a distant third in determining lag. Number of fuel tanks starts to matter only when they become hundreds. Which, ok, I may be getting close to that. And I have over 400 vector engines, and that's surely contributing, but it's not the main deal. Anyway, I can't optimize tanks and engines any better. I need the vectors because they have the highest thrust per space occupied. Only with vectors I can lift those giant tanks and get decent TWR. As for the giant tanks, well, can't use anything bigger.

1520 parts. main mods are kerbalism, rss, near future parts. pc specs... i don't remember them, and i don't remember where to check out. it's a lenovo legion y540 laptop, though. not that it matters. i'm not going to buy a new pc if this one turns out to not be powerful enough. it's nothing unusual anyway. ever since i started running kerbalism grand tours 16 months ago, i've been pushing for more and more complex objectives, tied to more mods, requiring bigger ships, and causing more lag. the main culprit is mods and kerbalism life support; a ship with lots of parts made entirely by fuel tanks does not lag much. and an 800 parts ship in stock had barely noticeable lag, while 800 parts with A'Tuin was the worst I've experienced before now.

After my previous 30k tons launch, I need to send up the second part of my mothership. It's a bit lighter maybe, but the other one got nuclear engines to squeeze more deltaV out of it. Whatever the reason, I needed a 40k ton launcher this time. The lag is staggering. it takes over 10 minutes to load the rocket on the launchpad. And once i press space, it takes another minute or two to do something. Afterwards.... Do notice how, in the whole video, the game timer only moves 2 seconds. the first time I tried to launch it, game crashed on the launchpad. The second time, it crashed upon second stage separation. The third time, it crashed upon first stage separation. I did manage to launch to the end with one less group of boosters. I missed orbit by some 200 m/s. you've seen the time it takes. that's all I did this afternoon. By the way, the game gets bugged by the very act of launching those rockets. After I launch them, I cannot save the game, or go back to the space center, or really do anything except stay with the ship. Closing the game requires ctrl-alt-canc and deletes all progress. But after I reach orbit normally, I can send the ship in orbit with alt-f12 and call it a fair game, and so far it seems to be working. Of course, once I put the various ships together, I have no idea how the game will perform. There's a good chance my next grand tour will stop before even beginning.

i doubt it's possible. it would require reaching eve orbit with 1700 m/s left. hard enough on ion power

no, those are very different things. when you cut down wood with a chain saw, wood is a high-energy material. you can burn it and it releases lots of energy. wood, and other combustibles we have on earth, are very special and they are not found elsewhere. the thing is, nature tends towards low energy. wood releases energy because some plants took low energy material and used sun power to push them to higher energy. in other planets, with no life, you don't get wood, oil, or anything like that. you don't get high energy substances. in the billions of years since the formation of those planets, everything had time to react. So, for example, spacex wants to mine methane and oxigen on mars; but you don't get those stuff on mars. on mars you get carbon dioxide and water, which are low energy substances. to convert them to hydrogen and methane, which are high energy, you need to give them energy. as much energy as they release when burning, according to the law of energy conservation. more, because in practice you always have some inefficiencies and losses. So, mining other planets for fuel is not like cutting down wood for energy. it's like carrying water uphill, to power a hydroelectric dam. and then hoping that the water falling down will get you more energy than you spent to carry it up.

well, it's not exactly single stage because the xenon to go to gilly is spent and not recovered. but impressive nonetheless. the grand tour challenge thread has already a fully reusable grand tour, but it used a modular design with a mothership to make it work.

the isru mechanics break physics a lot worse than that. you mine ore and convert it to fuel, and burn that fuel to get energy to mine more ore. unless you can mine oil on the other planets, it breaks conservation of energy forever.

i'm not sure if you just leave the probe there, but your best bet is to use the programmed actions. you find them in the kerbalism menu on the top right. so you have a fuel cell and a chemical plant set to water electrolysis - without that, you'll run out of hydrogen and out of power. you set the system to start water electrolysis when battery charge is more than 20% and to stop it when battery charge is less than 20%. you can actually leave the fuel cells open all the time, won't make a difference. with this setup, by night you will run on fuel cells, and by day your solar panels will recharge your oxygen/hydrogen tanks. This mission report of mine, at subchapter 6.2 - after all the musings on landing on Duna - contains additional commentaries and analysis on using the kerbalism programming

I got a very annoying bug that prevents me from playing. when I launch a complex ship, the game apparently keeps working, but it won't save game anymore, nor will it return to space center or do anything else. it won't even exit the game, I need ctrl-alt-canc for it. And then everything I've done is lost, because it didn't save in persistent either. it's not that the game interface is forbidding from saving, like it happens when you move on the surface. no, you click save game and nothing happens. you click return to space center, and nothing happens. I made some experiments; small rockets seem to be fine. large ships seem consistently to generate this bug. on the launchpad, they are fine. even if I alt-f12 them directly in orbit they are fine, most of the times - although the bug can still strike later. but as soon as I activate staging, they get screwed up. My main mods are kerbalism, near future parts, and rss. a handful of smaller mods like simple fuel switch and antenna sleep. I've been launching and using ships a lot more complex than that in the past, and i never encountered this bug, so I strongly suspect rss is to blame - i had all the other mods back then too. but i was using the 1.09 or 1.10 version, now i updated to 1.12, so maybe that's the problem. next thing I'm gonna do is to transfer all those mods into a 1.09 version and see if it does the same. unless someone can help me first.

I'm using near future launch vehicles. I needed near future stuff for nuclear reactors anyway. But I think the problem is in the new version of ksp. one year ago i docked a 450 ton ship with a 4000 ton ship with a small docking port, with nothing but autostruts, and all went well. now autostruts seem to not cross docking ports. ah, that's how it was called! I've been looking for hangar expansion without luck. and then, instead of posting a question and waiting an answer, i decided to just keep on with the normal vab. it's workable. when i work on a side, i just move the ship on the opposite side of the vab. if i must work on the base, i push the upper part over the rooftop, and to work on the upper part i push the booster stack down into the floor. but it's only a mild discomfort. by the way, i made the rocket work yesterday.

I don't understand what's your problem and how changing isp is solving it - ok, i can guess you don't have enough fuel, but if you don't want to reload, then why are you willing to cheat the engines? anyway, starting from the premise that increasing your fuel duration is cheating in any case, if you just want to finish a mission there are a few ways - alt-f12 opens the debug menu. go on the cheat tab, and activate infinite fuel. it does exactly what it says. if you use it sparingly, it is equivalent to increasing Isp. - go in your game folder, open the saves. saves are text files, and ships are a list of parts. go open your save, look for your ship, look for the parts. on the fuel tanks, it is written the amount of fuel contained in them. just change it manually to get more fuel. - go in your game folder, open the game data section, somewhere in there are the parts data, including parameters on all the engines. again, those are text files. edit those engines to change Isp. Editing game files is not difficult, I did it myself and I have no programming skills.

you could make a single stage rocket, and still get a good payload mass fraction to orbit. then you could make a bigger rocket.

In my previous 300-years mission, I noticed that among the crew, four members did not stress. I kept them with TV going all the time, the ship was equipped with every comfort, and the TV was enough to counteract the stress. the other 5 crew members instead were accumulating stress. they were steadily increasing and having a breakdown every few years, despite being in the same ideal conditions as the rest of the crew. and they were always the same crew members. why the individual difference? where does it come from? I did check the saved game file, and I don't see any parameter in the kerbal logs that indicates vulnerability to stress. is it something that can be reproduced between missions? I was thinking of leaving a large crew in a flying hotel for a few years to select those that don't stress for the next mission, but I'm not sure it would work and there could be better ways... EDIT: I already got answer on the discord channel. there is individual variation, and it doesn't figure on the rooster because it's tied to the name. so I have to send a large crew in orbit and leave them for a while to select the stress-resistant, but it's reproducible

A 30k ton rocket putting on quite the light show during ascent. that's over 400 vector engines

I don't have KIS, and I don't want to install more mods. Game is laggy enough already. If I could choose, I'd make a robotic clamping mechanism with claws on hinges. Alas, such mechanisms are the favourite food of the kraken, I don't dare doing it.

that's the issue. i did place struts, but they were tied to the lower stages, so when i jettisoned those, i lost the struts. I'll have to put more struts from the central tank to the outer nerv engines. it's an easy fix. when the ship will be operational - and will use the big docking port to mate with its other part - I already planned to use eva construction to manually place struts after docking, and remove them before undocking.

I launched my most powerful rocket yet: 30 thousand tons! I am preparing my new grand tour in rss, and it takes a lot more launch mass to send stuff to earth orbit. For such large launches one should go for asparagus stack, but the part I'm launching is a sort of umbrella made of fuel tanks, intended to shield the crew from radiations. I was worried that if I made an asparagus with all the push in the center, the lateral tanks would break apart. So i projected a convoluted tower meant to spread the force evenly on all the rocket it broke apart on the launchpad Clearly it can't work. Too tall for structural stability. So, I go and make an actual asparagus. To avoid breaking apart the lateral tanks, I strenghten it with lots of struts, both auto and manual Despite 1100 parts, it loaded in one minute and it's not exploding. Encouraging And it actually took off at the first try! This thing is powered by 432 vectors and 49 ocelots (a modded engine that's basically a slightly bigger mainsail) I needed the vectors because they have the best thrust-size ratio. This ship is already a lot larger than the VAB, working on it is difficult. The vectors let me use a more compact design It's drinking 160 tons of fuel per second! First stage separation. All well. Second stage separation. A spent booster collides with the rocket. the flight is lost Ah, crap. That's a problem. So I started the flight again, and this time I was more careful to avoid movements during stage separation. I even reduced throttle, so that collisions would be at low speed. Indeed, the fourth time (second and third exploded early because i tried to use 4x time warp to make ascent faster) the spent boosters did collide with the rocket, but they exploded harmlessly Two of the spent boosters exploded, but the rocket is intact Without smoke, a better view of the engines The third stage, though, was another matter.... Three of the remaining vector boosters exploded. In an attempt to salvage the flight, I detached a fourth so that the remaining two would be symmetrical I did throttle the engines to a minimum before detaching, so that it would not hit the rocket. Didn't shut down all because it's kerbalism and engines have limited ignitions After discarding that stage too, I ignite the nuclear engines of the main ship However, despite a 5 m docking port, the binding between the ship and the rocket is frail Today's launch is unsuccessful, but I learned lots of things - the general design works, and the rocket does not fall apart on the launchpad - despite its ludicrous size (actually, I've been calling ludicrous rockets much smaller than this. I need a new adjective). I can even add more boosters if I need - the later stages need more thrust. I used ocelots because they have higher vacuum Isp, but I may have to use vectors for their higher thrust. - I really need to find a way to safely detach those boosters - I must attach the struts to the ship to the later stages, and not only to the first ones. For a launch this big, going that far in a couple of hours is good progress. Soon I will have my working rocket. And - krakens permitting - my next grand tour will start.

flat? I did drive some 400 km on Moho, and I've been using it to test landing gear since earlier. I find it the second more irregular body in the stock system, second only to Bop - but on bop you feel it less for the lower gravity. Though it does depend a lot on the location, so maybe those two times you just never landed amid the hilly parts. In fact, I went back to look at the relevant mission report, sometimes I use them like a diary, and I found this comment on the comparison between Moho and Dres

while your technical accomplishments are always amazing, I can never appreciate them because your style of report doesn't explain what you actually do. I would actually appreciate some elaborate technical discussion on how the ship is made, why it's made that way, what's the mission plan, what are the main technical problems and how they are solved.

moho is least visited. i don't remember ever seeing a report or challenge or anything mentioning moho, except for grand tours. it is the planet i visited the least often. dres' reputation of uselesness actually benefited it, for a sort of streisand effect.