king of nowhere

Part 12: First fuel line completed Completing the first of four long lines of drop tanks. Structural stability is both promising and disheartening at the same time.

bump @JacobJHC I don't want to put pressure on you if you have real life business. just don't want this entry to be submerged in new posts

Be careful: NERVs are very heavy, and their own mass will quickly eat into your deltaV to the point that they won't be convenient anymore. I once made a Vall lander with NERVs, and 70% of its dry mass were the engines. I later run some calculations, if I had used chemical engines I'd have saved so much mass, I'd have gained deltaV even with the lower Isp. In my experience, for a large ship it's better to keep the NERVs TWR around 0.1-0.2 (kerbin), and use some chemical engines to have higher thrust for landings.

monopropellant follows different transfer rules, i think. anyway, with the information we have, we can't do anything more.

heat shields block fuel transfers. decouplers also do; decouplers can be set to allow fuel transfers, not sure about heat shield as for how to send screenshots, default is f1 to take them, then you can upload them on imgur

i always found that, when dealing with complex motherships with landers, it's a lot easier to just run the manual calculation using the rocket equation

this one, most likely. use the move tool in the vab, hold shift while moving, and you can move a part any distance, while the game will still consider it attached

B should gain speed, A lose it. though actually you exit a sphere of influence with the same speed you enter it - you change speed compared to the sun.

there can be a lot of possible options. among them - you need a level 2 science lab to transfer fuel (assuming you play in career) - some parts may block fuel transfers those are the more likely options. Can you post pictures? as a rule of thumb, if you ask "i need help", we won't be able to help you. we need informations to figure out the problem. the more information, the better.

the readings seem very correct. you are using nervs, so you hare making full use of your liquid fuel and high isp. the staging is set to use the rapiers after the nervs are exhausted; but when the nervs have run out of liquid fuel, then you have no more liquid fuel for the rapiers either. 4000 m/s looks right for a spacecraft of that kind. which is just right for a round trip orbiting eve and then duna, and then returning to kerbin. anyway, as a general rule of thumb, when you have different engines with different fuel requirements and different performances, then the stock deltaV becomes very unreliable. there's nothing to be done about it, it's just too complex a system. personally, i do the manual calculations with the rocket equation whenever i have something more complex than a single rocket.

you have the kerbalism menu in the top right corner. in there you have some different tabs, one of them is config (cfg). you can set up when you get notifications, and one of them notifications is whether a solar storm is occurring. it is not active by default, but you toggle it on, and it will stop time warp and give you a message every time your ship is about to get hit by one. Also, you'll see a lightning symbol in theory, yellow means you're exposed to moderate radiation, red means you're exposed to hard radiations. but in the case of those screenshots, i was being fully shielded from radiations and the crew took no damage, so not sure how it's counted. anyway, the best way to protect against solar storms is to turn the ship so to block direct sight from the crewed modules to the sun. even a solar panel will suffice. unfortunately, the game mediates exposure from all the crew modules, so make sure that all of them are shielded; if you have landers or shuttles docked, make sure they are protected too. the best way to protect against radiation belts is to stay away from them. if you have to manuever on them, spend a short time in there. once you research some tech, the hitchhicker container enables the radiation decontamination unit. it will slowly reduce radiation damage on a single kerbal inside it, while consuming oxygen (you have to manually activate it). i'm not sure if it works on lifetime radiation, but i suppose it does

After some exceptions in the first part of my career, I now name my rovers based on the similarity with common object. A rover with four "columns" and a flat surface got named Stool, an U-shaped one was dubbed Horseshoe. A plane became Arrowhead.

on the plus side, you can light up your ship without using lights, just by increasing ambient light. which, however, leads to a paradox: of my three kiloparts motherships, the last one - A'Tuin - had no lights, and it had the least parts. it was also the one lagging the worst. so there's a lot more than lights. i've also been told that docking ports cause lag, but my second mothership - Bolt - had comparatively little lag despite a crapton of open docking ports and no less then three dozen drop tanks connected with docking ports. And it had purely aesthetic lights, too.

you only need to return the crew. people pushing for low mass/low cost have been returning with nothing but a kerbal and his jetpack

I got to two thirds of my slate circumnavigation. which i started in october. I've been playing it on and off when i wanted to relax from my main missions Included crashing my trusted Tamarromobile rover in many new ways. I got used to keeping speeds of 50-60 m/s on relatively flat ground, but now i'm again in rough terrain and I should start to be more careful again. A particularly spectacular accident falling into a crater In my main challenge, I launched four more fuel canisters for my Navis Sideralis Neanderthalensis. With this I'm at 13... out of planned 80. See that long line of fuel tanks, that's seven. I must reach 20. And then I must do the same on the three other piles. And hope the ship won't self-destruct by wobbling.

No idea. I don't even know nertea's heat control. What I did was bring radiatiors aplenty, and then pretend they were needed. Since the only way heat control influences the game is by not making your ship explode, it brought no change to gameplay

You should also check the drag relative to the size of the plane. I mean, sure, those red arrows look impressive, but the blue lift arrows are also huge; that plane is big, looks like several hundred tons. So you should compare the drag to the weight. If the drag is a lot lower than the weight, then it's normal; big wings need to make big drag to generate big lift. if the drag is high also compared to weight, then it's a problem.

My A'Tuin was powered by nuclear reactors, and even when I wasn't selecting it, everything was working just fine. Maybe it's just a problem with the user interface? try to time warp for a while and see if your ship has been doing what it was supposed to do. Save first, of course

Part 11: Fuel for the fuel god! Beginning the biggest part of the Navis Sideralis Neanderthalensis: the fuel tanks. Also, trying to tackle the strutting problem This is probably the last update for a few weeks; I have to launch 74 more drop tanks, not much to report. Navis Sideralis Neanderthalensis currently at 421 parts and 119.5 tons

I mean translation from italian. In italian they are translated as mother part, and origin part. I don't know which one is root and which one is grandparent Silly, me, I can just check in the VAB. Mother is root, and origin is grandparent I tried to get the game to recognize the proper struts in my ship, but maybe it's too complex for the algorithm. it still leaves blanks when I try to strut to root or grandmother. And I noticed that autostrut to heaviest seem to work like grandparent

Great input. Caveman rules say no cheat menu, but this is not cheat - and if it is, I've already been using the aerodinamic section of it all the time, and posted screenshots with it. So I went and check and I did not like what I saw Of all the autostruts I did put in, there doesn't seem to be a single one of them covering an actual joint. Trying to autostrut to grandparent - or to root part - apparently has no effect, as you can see in the screenshot; I have selected the crew pod, and I selected it to have autostrut root (or grandparent, not sure about the translation there because it's not literal), and there is no autostrut in the part. what kind of crappy autostrut routine is that? Anyway, it doesn't seem to be working. I may have to use manual struts after all. As for the mod, I am pretty sure it does count as "altering gameplay"

thanks for the help, but in the caveman challenge, mods are frowned upon. I don't think I should be doing it. The first part I did add is the center of the ship, so if everything get autostrut there, it would be great. but if that was happening, there would be a lot less wobbling.

When making a large ship, autostruts are your friends. They are practically required to avoid the ship tearing itself apart. But I'm having some troubles making them work now I am building a large ship in caveman. This forces the use of small docking ports, hence the ship is full of weak points. I'm trying to autostrut it in place, but the autostrutting options are not helpful here. Normally, I use autostrut to heaviest part. Most of those huge ships have some huge fuel tanks at their center of mass that are very convenient places to strut things to. Here, however, there are no such tanks, because it's caveman and i have nothing bigger than the FL-T400. Of which I have about 10, scattered around the ship, and most of them in periphereal positions. Then I have the other two options of grandmother part, but the ship is already comprised of over 20 separate modules, what's the root part? The core of the ship are 5 hitchhicker containers, they are also at the center of mass, and I would like to strut stuff there. but I don't know if it's even possible. I put some random autostruts here and there, and it improved wobbling somewhat, but I'm trying to find a better way. P.S. the better way would be to use eva construction to place some manual struts, but for challenge reasons I would like to not use eva construction if at all possible

How is the rocket made? is there a weak joint between first and second stage? Some part that's attached poorly and can get broken easily? Maybe an engine exhaust hitting the rocket and causing a portion to overheat and explode?

As far as I can see, your plane has no yaw control. it shouldn't affect roll, but maybe the SAS is trying to fix yaw in a way that also affects roll. I can't really say, but I think activating the reaction wheels could improve stability