king of nowhere

that rule about more information specifically mentioned mods - and I was kinda puzzled about the meaning of it in the first place. In fact, I went and asked about it (there's some posts about it in page 22). You may also notice, in this post, how I was extremely surprised by the notion that simulating may be against the challenge, as it's something I always consider implicitly to be the proper way to go. And the answers I got mentioned mods, which led me to think that only the use of mods was the problem. I disagree. Getting funds early game was boring, but not hard. Some contracts to test parts on the launchpad, some to run surveys on the ground. As soon as I launched the first orbital rocket, world first got me enough money to last for a while, and then science from X and more ground surveys did the trick**. Nothing i ever did there required testing. The major difficulty to me was the first unmanned landing on mun, which I achieved with a probe with no attitude control. And going for that was actually unnecessary. And I posted that part on december30, before having any inkling that the rules may be interpreted different from what I thought. Had I lost too many probes on Mun, worst case scenario I could have fulfilled the terrier test contract, gained some more money by easy surveys, and then take another test terrier contract to launch more probes. So, I'd say I didn't get any undue advantage. ** In my first try, I did try to get a more difficult contract for more money, and it resulted in jeb killed. I was still one hour into the career, two at most, so I just restarted it from scratch, and I learned to avoid those kind of contracts. it's mentioned in the mission report. I already said I can agree in principle; I am merely arguing that it is not unreasonable to think otherwise based solely on the rules.

No reload is one thing. No simulators is an entirely different thing. No simulators except what you could conceivably do in the game is yet something different. No reload means that you have to accept what happens. you made a blunder and killed your astronaut? too bad, you have to hire another. your mun lander exploded during atmospheric reentry? you have to start back from the launchpad. you can't point your ship towards minmus and ignite and hope to get there - well, you can, but you've got to have a B plan in case you miss. you can't find the proper periapsis for aerobraking by trial and error. No reload forces a different style of gaming. You can't launch contrived contraptions that explode 9 times out of 10. you can't make suicide burns at the last second to save fuel. you have to keep more safety margins. more fuel for every manuever. no daredevil ideas. Always a contingency plan, always an eye for safety. I'm dealing with all that, so passing "simulating" as "reloading" is a false equivalence. Then there's "no simulators". I am making a Mun lander and want to see how it performs, i have to go to mun. Build the whole ship, go there. Do notice that there's no such thing as "no simulation", because every time you launch a probe and it explodes, or every time you launch a manned rocket and it flips and you eject the manned module with the parachute to save the crew, that's basically a simulation. you were trying to launch, but you instead got a failure that taught you how to improve the design, which is basically what a simulation is. However, every time one of your rockets explodes, you have to pay the cost for it. And if you try a mun landing, you must send your rocket to mun every time. And if it's your first Mun landing, well, you can't really simulate it; if you simulate successfully, then you've landed. The effect on gameplay is that it encourages the use of reliable, time-tested designs over more experimental ones. No simulators except what you could conceivably do in the game is a special subset of simulation. It starts from the fact that you can, indeed, test your stuff - as long as you are willing to let your rocket explode every time. So, you can test your Mun lander probe. You just have to launch the rocket, go to Mun, release the lander, see it explode; then you pick up a few more "science from X" and "survey" contracts to make easy money, you build a new rocket, you send it to Mun again, release the new improved lander, see if it works. No risk involved, only time. So running a simulation of that does not give you any unfair advantage you'd have in a no simulation challenge. It merely saves time of farming money and building a new rocket every time. By that metric, you can't do any test that would endanger a kerbal, and you can't do testing in places you've not reached already. I am playing under this concept, and I'm facing a lot of additional limitations. I can't test my tylo and laythe landers on their target bodies, and as a result I have no idea how my laythe rocket will perform under laythe aerodinamics. I've been forced to make a design twice as heavy, with 4 km/s deltaV to stay safe - and I'm still not 100% sure it will work. I can't test what would be the ideal altitude to start the suicide burn on tylo, and as a result I had to make - again - a heavier design to add a lot of extra deltaV. I am taking a lot of extra problems and limitations because I'm only running unmanned tests around kerbin, so, again, it's a false equivalence to treat all simulations equally. Mind you, I am not saying you are wrong on the "spirit of the challenge". You say that part of being a caveman is not having simulators, I can accept that. But you can't say that reloading and simulating are the same thing, because they are completely different mechanisms that have very different consequences in how you approach the game. And I must point out that the rules of the challenge don't say "no simulations". Therefore it is perfectly reasonable, for someone looking for a hard challenge, to read the first post, think "ok, here it says I have to play with this difficulty settings, which include no reloading. But simulating is something else, and of course it would be allowed". A lot of those rules are kinda vague, and could use some clarifications. Is it so rare for others who took the caveman challenge to draw this conclusion? Personally, I do believe that the purpose of a challenge - any challenge - is to push the player to get creative, while forbidding simulations pushes to only use stuff you already know, it pushes against creativity, and therefore a challenge without simulations makes little sense. Though I'm gradually coming to accept that eschewing weird experiments, when coupled with other constraints, is a challenge of its own.

asia does not resemble the real one, india is all wrong. i wonder if it's an intentional easter egg or something random. draw enough random figures, and some of them are bound to resemble other things

there's still an enormous difference between "i'll try this thing 10 times, keep reloading until I get it right" and "I'll try this thing 10 times and see if I can manage it reliably/figure out something that works, and then I'll do it for real". Especially when you have an unmanned craft and you only risk losing some time. more important, i tend to take for granted that the purpose of a challenge is to push designs and limits, and testing is a fundamental part of it. it was hard for me already to start thinking along the lines of "can't make risky manuevers because i must be able to pull them off 100% the first time". Like, not doing the suicide burn at the last possible second to save every last drop of fuel? that goes against everything I've done in the past year. Not even running tests? I guess it's such an alien concept to me, I can't conceive the idea unless it's very clearly and explicitly written. to me, testing is fundamentally in the spirit of any challenge. I'm so used to the concept that testing is fundamental and natural that I didn't ever think that the rules could be read otherwise. I was like "yeah, nothing I do in the test sandbox is affecting the career in any way, so of course it can't be against the rules - after all, nobody would ever think to forbid testing, or to consider it unfair." I only learned that there were different opinions when reading someone else's mission report.

because my difficulty level does not allow save/reload, or revert flying. And there's really nothing in my testing way that I couldn't have done in the actual career. but grinding up some money at 10% reward, building a probe, launching it, and testing - for example - how it reenters from high speed, is a lot more time consuming than using alt-f12 to move it in place. so, testing somewhere else is basically just an excuse to be able to use cheat menu and revert flights, which is just a way to save time over having to move the crafts in testing position and paying for them every time. which is why i decided to not test stuff around jool

the poodle also has a far better TWR than the wolfhound. I'd say a sane space program (as in, a space program that does not try to make extended life support grand tours with kiloton ships like I do) should have a lot more use for the poodle than for the wolfhound, because it shouldn't have many ships big enough to justify a wolfhound in the first place

it's like i'm reading my own mission reports, but without all the hassle of actually making them

I'm not saying the part is useless per se. I'm saying it is so heavy, everything you gain from it you lose for the weight, and you generally have more mass-efficient ways of accomplishing the same task. i used it in caveman as an impromptu aerodinamic connector, because I lacked better parts to perform the task.

did my suggested fix work? if so, then do it again. Save often, so you won't lose much time whenever you have this kind of bug. If not, then we couldn't help you earlier and we still can't help you. in any case, there's some problems with your game, for sure, but we have no way of figuring out what. do you have mods? too many mods can make the game unstable

sometimes it does that. not sure why. but in my experience, the game generally transmit everything if you just give it time, whether it is authomatically flagged or not. either way, you can just manuallu flag it, so it's not a big problem

the strut on the right is not crossing any docking port, and yet it also got removed

I've been spending the last few weeks building a large, orbitally assembled ship in a caveman run. Now the ship is hold together entirely by weak clamp-o-tron jr. joints, and i need to reinforce it with struts - autostrutting did no good. I can send a kerbal in orbit in a cargo bay to place those struts; but then, as soon as I move away from the ship, when I reload the ship into physical range, the struts are gone. here are the struts i placed. i put some in various positions to see if it depended on how they are placed and, after going to tracking station and returning to the ship, here's what I find. the struts are still there, but they lost their connectivity. this is why autostrutting does not work: all struts are placed to a near part, none of them crosses a docking port. not that trying to put a manual strut between parts already connected by an autostrut prevented the strut from disappearing. i tested on a different ship, and struts worked just fine. any suggestion on how to fix this mess? i'd hate to lose four weeks of progress

i guess, since you are sending probes to comet, that you did upgrade the tracking station long since. but it could be a related bug. I have a career where sometimes it thinks my astronaut complex is level 1 (even though it's 3) and is forbidding me from going eva. in my case, i did discover that restarting and reloading the game works. Not just restarting the game, and not just reloading. I must save the game manually, then restart the game, when I enter the game in the ksc I must then reload the game where i was driving my rover, and then it let me go eva. if I move to the rover from the tracking station, i still get the bug. if I reload the game without restarting, i still get the bug

Part 13: milestones and testing The second line of drop tanks is also completed on Navis Sideralis Neanderthalensis. Fire test is performed; struts are needed, but they appear to be bugged. More workarounds will be needed.

it's probably a corrupted file, but good luck guessing what the problem could be without more information. the game does include authomatic backups; you enter the game folder, you have a subfolder "save", you click on the desired profile, there is a subfolder named backup with a few "persistent" files, with time stamps. those are older authomatic saves. You can try to delete the persistent file from the main folder (i strongly suggest you make a copy), put one of the backup files in its place, rename the file as "persistent", see if it loads. of course you have to restart the game after doing that.

not sure, but i stopped using robotics because of near constant gitches. anyway, it took me a lot of fine tuning to make the system work. One thing I did discover is that distancing robotic parts helps; if you have two hinges attached to each other with a claw in the end, it is more likely to break; I did put an octagonal strut between the two hinges and another between the hinge and the claw, and I was able to repeat a couple cycles without problems. I never went past early testing, though; my vehicle was supposed to be an eve ssto capable of releasing a smaller rover, but i didn't have the skill to make an eve ssto at the time

yes, that is feasible, and actually more mass-efficient than the alternative. the ramp weights 4 tons, with a 3-tons cargo bay you can load a bigger rover

yes, had the same problem. a smaller rover would fit, but then, a 4-tons part to deliver a small rover is a total waste. it can look cool, though

well, depends on what you define "useful". It's certainly a very heavy part for very little utility, so there's not much practical value out of it. you can use it to do stuff that looks really cool, though

oh, this looks like far future stuff. you can't have fully fuelless rocket, the rocket equation demands you expel something. To orbit, you must raise your periapsis while in vacuum, and to do that, you need some kind of fuel. the closest I can conceive with near future is to use an atmospheric engine to reach orbital speed, and then an ion engine to circularize, spending very little fuel. but "very little" is a completely different concept than "none at all".

err.... and how exactly are you planning to achieve orbit with propellers alone?

Elcano slate coming close to the north pole, I got some great pics of Ovok and the rings of Sarnus there's also Hale, barely visible because it's a lot smaller

it happens sometimes that the programming on a kal controller gets lost. I'm not sure exactly on when, it's been a while since i last built a ship using it, but i did remember having similar problems. on the plus side, i am fairly sure you can change the programming in flight, so you can reload to before atmospheric reentry and fix the issue

why newcomers always think we can troubleshoot blind? there are a dozen things that could be going wrong, from construction to staging to piloting. we need informations to try and figure out your problem. posting pics of your ship is the first step, but any additional detail (thrust, mass, symmetry, etc) or description (when exactly does it flip, how it flips, etc) is also potentially useful

I finished docking the 20th drop tank to my Navis Sideralis Neanderthalensis project. And I tested for structural stability, because 20 drop tanks docked on small docking ports are a scary proposition. Here's what I found (the video is at 4x speed, normal speed would be boring) On the plus side, nothing broke, and I was able to point the ship retrograde (a direction I picked at random just to see if I could control attitude) eventually. The project may be feasible without struts.