king of nowhere

dunno, was just making hypothesis. though i did something like that. I made a big fuel depot that I would fill in mun's orbit, and then i sent it back on LKO to refuel all ships that just came to orbit. It allowed for much smaller launch vehicles. And even then, the fuel mining was super convenient. a good 60% of the fuel mined on Mun could go in the depot; then the depot could go to LKO with only 300 m/s, using aerobraking to circularize. And then it needed 1000 m/s to get back, which is just 10% of the fuel. I could send in LKO as much as half the fuel I mined on Mun. yes, the most efficient thing to do is to have a land-based facility to mine fuel, and then land a tanker near it, transfer the fuel, and bring the fuel to orbit. this way you don't have to send in orbit and back the drills and convert-o-trons. But it's a lot more time consuming than just putting the drills and refinery on the tanker, and the efficiency gain is mininal. so, it's most practical to have a mobile tanker/rafinery

In the past, whenever I've been looking for anomalies, I've been using the rovemate core, with 100% detection. easy. now i'm doing a caveman challenge, and the rovemate is not available. I considered looking for anomalies, and i have a probe core with 6% detection. but what does it mean 6% detection exactly? - when it passes over an anomaly, it has 6% chance to detect it. if it doesn't and you save and reload the game - or you go back to tracking station and then return to the vehicle - it has again a 6% chance - when it passes over an anomaly, it has 6% chance to detect it. it will have another 6% chance to detect at every subsequent passage - when it passes over an anomaly, it has 6% chance to detect it. if it doesn't, it will never, ever detect that anomaly, period knowing that will affect my gameplay. if it's the last option, i need a fleet of searchers, while in the other two options, a single probe and some patience will win the day.

We can't say what you're doing wrong without knowing details, but you're doing something wrong for sure. A ship with a large tank can easily take 5000 m/s deltaV. A trip up and down Mun, even considering a large inefficiency margin, is 1500 m/s. It leaves you with 3500 m/s of gained deltaV. Possible reasons you are spending more fuel than you gain: - you ship has too little tanks, or too much other stuff; too little deltaV - you are trying to refuel your ship when it's already mostly full, so that you carry a lot of fuel up and down - you are being incredibly inefficient with your burn - you are coming in from low kerbin's orbit, spending the additional cost of going up and down from LKO to Mun. If you lose fuel, you are probably doing more than one of those, as just one would only make the process less efficient. Here is a simple design you can use for reference: https://kerbalx.com/king_of_nowhere/Recycling-Point-Express-RPE

Part 3: the first landings Landing the first time on Mun and Minmus

If I try a challenge, I try it at the highest level. One year ago, i considered the caveman challenge - and of course, I had to do it at nanocristalline diamond level. I gave up soon, stating "too much grinding, I don't like it". Instead, I went on and did a bunch of large scale missions with kerbalism. The last one was 320-year long. Greenhouses require manual harvesting twice every year, and I had 19, so i clicked "harvest" over 12000 times. The mission also required manually servicing the nuclear reactors every three years, again, that's over 100 times where I had to go EVA and fly around the ship. Afer that, I felt I really can't complain about grinding. So here I am, trying the nanocristalline diamond caveman. Part 1: the low-hanging fruits Getting initial science from Kerbin and its orbit Part 2: flyby season Getting more critical science from Mun and Minmus flyby It's been quite a change of style. From managing ships weighting thousands of tons, and costing tens of millions, I'm reduced to flying some awful junk with punitive mass and parts limitations. Most troubling of all, I can't reload games; I am prone to taking risks and try dangerous stuff, that's been my main bane in my previous caveman attempt. But I've adapted surprisingly fast. Already flying a ship without SAS feels natural, and I learned to avoid any dangerous manuever with my manned ships.

well, the problem is deciding what's "information that i wouldn't have in the caveman challenge". because, for example, a deltaV map or a biome map is definitely information that i wouldn't have in the caveman challenge. All my baggage of experience coming from other challenges is stuff that I wouldn't have in the caveman challenge. and ok, it should be easy: "silly gamer, of course you can use the stuff you already know". But it leads to the paradox that, for example, i am not allowed to show biomes on the map. But, if I already know the biomes for having seen that with alt-f12 in another career, then it's fine, because it's stuff that i know from before. Or, I can't use a mod to get special information on a ship i'm making. But, if I made a ship in a career, I can remake it as it is, and i have that information. Personally, I believe that all challenges should have the assumption of perfect information, unless there's some clear boundary to make. Because assuming otherwise would lead to all kind of problems.

is that not allowed? I mean, I am testing the functionality of my spacecrafts in another save. I build the craft in the other save, try it, fix what's wrong. when i have a functional design, i take it to the career. seems only sensible; much better than spending hours to mine money to pay for those experiments. not to mention the risk to pilots. At least, I do that if the original design fails a couple time and i realize it would take a lot more trial and error. or is the specific use of mods on other saved games to get information that's not allowed? and if getting informations from outside this career is not allowed... how is that any different from knowing a biome map? or a deltaV map?

A question on the rules: what does mean? In separate games? what do separate games have to do with anything?

what's MPE? depending on the lenght, running a mission without resupplying could be easier - the Bolt mission was a lot simpler than the other missions requiring new fuel. Just strap on more drop tanks and more supplies. Of course, this changes if the mission lenght becomes centuries. In that case, the constant accidental spillings - each one draining exactly 10% of your current amount of a given resource - quickly make it vastly unpractical. Regardless of feasibility considerations, I find this mode of resupplying more satisfying. Stock isru is unfun because it's too easy. Having a limited amount of refueling sites, and some strict constrains to use them - not to mention devoting most of your ship's dry mass to industrial machinery - makes it another factor to plan the missions around, and it improves the fun.

- radiation detox is in the hitchhicker container. it requires some additional technology first, so you may not have access to it. anyway, once you do have the hitchhicker and the tech required, you put the kerbonaut inside the container, you right click on the container, and there will be an option "RDU: heal [name]". You activate it, and it will heal the kerbonaut by about 1% every 4 days. it consumes some additional oxygen, though. - greenhouses are not convenient except in extreme cases. you need 2 greenhouses (total weight, almost 10 tons) to feed one kerbal. if, instead of putting in 2 greenhouses weighting 10 tons, you give the kerbal 10 tons of food, he'll eat for over a century. furthermore, growing food consumes water. by weight alone, it takes more water and nitrogen and carbon to grow food, than you get in food and oxygen. even after you account for recycling organic waste. greenhouses can only be convenient if you plan a trip lasting over a century, and you have access to outside resources. i did put them to good use in my A'Tuin mission, which was a 327-years-long grand tour with outer planet mod, and I could get new water and nitrogen for the greenhouses when I landed. but that's an extremely corner case. aside from that, though, there are a few additional advantages to bringing a greenhouse instead of its own weight in food: it's cool, it looks cool and it makes you feel good about colonizing space, it provides some additional living space to the crew (stress reduction), and it's required for a couple of experiments. In theory, plants should also give a bonus to happyness, but they don't, probably a bug. - isru in the stock game just requires you to find "ore", which you find more or less everywhere, have a drill and convert-o-tron, and you're good to go. with one electricity per second, you can make somewhere around a ton of fuel per day. You bring in 6 tons of machinery, including a couple of gigantors solar panels, and you can refuel a large (tens of tons) ship in a few weeks. In kerbalism, you need to use water and carbon dioxide to make fuel. Water is rare, a lot of planets don't have it, others only have it in one or two biomes. Carbon dioxide can be extracted cheaply by the atmosphere of Duna, or by that of Eve (but Eve has no water, so you can't do anything with it). Otherwise you need to extract it from ore, which is a process so energy intensive that I needed 500 tons of concert-o-trons and 20000 electricity/second to produce no more than 1 ton of fuel/day. I had to get nuclear power plants from near future to get enough energy, and that added the additional requirement that the landing zone would also have uranium. If you look at my A'Tuin mission, subchapter 0.2, you see a more detailed explanation of trying to do ISRU under kerbalism.

I know that, but i was asking specifically about setting a celestial body or other ship as target. EDIT: ok, blaarkies answered this.

I'm trying a caveman challenge, and I have a couple of questions to cope with the low tech buildings: 1) It seems I can't set targets. But when I was playing a no contract career challenge, even with the tracking station and mission control level 1, I was still capable of setting up rendez-vous by targeting the target ship. here it seems i really cannot. is it something that changed in past versions? is it a glitch that I can revert somehow? If it's something that I have to live with, any tip from experienced cavemen on how to manage rendez-vous? I mean, the general tip about raising/lowering orbit to go faster or slower, ok, but once I get within a few kilometers this way, I'm lost. if there are small differences in inclination, I don't even know where to start on fixing them. And if I manage to get within 50 meters, can I align the docking ports manually? will i have enough precisions to touch docking ports if I can't look in the navisphere? 2) I remember there was some chart detailing where you need another planet relative to you in order to eyeball a transfer. like, 50 degrees forward or stuff like that. So far, I could eyeball a few mun transfers, but they were orribly inaccurate. now I'm shooting for minmus, which is much smaller and further away. any help in pinpointing it would be great

1) i don't. I use transfer windows and gravity assists to reduce deltaV cost as much as possible. If I still need lots of deltaV, I use ions. If ions are not an option, I use nuclear. All things you won't do. So, if you want to build ships with lots of deltaV with only LFO, the only thing you can do is build a huge ship with multiple stages. No other way. The rocket equation states that deltaV=ln(Mw/Md)*Vex: that is, the deltaV is equal to the logaritm of the ration between the wet mass (Mw) and the dry mass (Md) of your ship, times the velocity of your exhaust gases (Vex) - which is equal to Isp*g. So, to increase deltaV, there are only two things you can do: increase Isp, or increase the Mw/Md ratio. You don't want to increase Isp, so you've got to increase the Mw/Md. Which goes threefold: a) reduce the weight of the payload. self-explaining b) increase the amount of fuel. again, self-explaining c) use multiple stages. As the amount of fuel you bring increases, the mass of dry fuel tanks increases too. And of course, to lift all that stuff, you need a big heavy engine. So after you burned most of your fuel, you want to ditch all those empty, useless, heavy spent fuel tanks. And you want to ditch that big powerful engine that's no longer needed, and use something smaller and lighter instead. Drop tanks are also an option. Still, you can't prevent the mass from skyrocketing fast as you increase deltaV. Say your probe weights 1 ton, and you want 2 ton of fuel to give it 3 km/s. then if you want to add 3 more km/s, you need to make another stage with the same 3:1 ratio between dry and wet mass, so you need 9 tons. An additional 3 km/s will again require three times more mass than before, so 27 tons. Three more km/3, to bring the total to 12 km/s, and you're at 81 tons. And then 240, and so on. Past a certain size, rockets become hugely impractical. Which is why people prefer to use orbital mechanics to reduce deltaV requirememnts as much as possible, and to use more efficient engines. This game lets you "cheat" by mining new fuel everywhere cheaply. that also reduces the deltaV required. of course, if you're using kerbalism, then you're not supposed to use that - or you're supposed to use the kerbalism isru functionalities, which make refueling less practical than the alternatives. 2) it's not exactly required that high deltaV=low thrust; the rocket equation has nothing on thrust. However, there are two practical factors that link high deltaV to low thrust: a) to maximize deltaV you want an engine optimized for efficiency. those tend to have lower thrust b) to reduce your dry mass you want a smaller engine. and of course this means less thrust than with a bigger engine. So, nothing to do there. you want to maximize your deltaV, you can do it by sacrificing thrust. Regarding your concerns with kerbalism, yes, it requires a lot of additional life support resources, but not too much. in the end, the mass of the food and water and oxygen is still a pittance compared to that of the living space. My suggestion there is that it's still a lot more convenient to add more supplies for a longer trip, than it is to add more fuel to travel faster. One kerbal can live one year with less than 100 kg of resources. To shorten the trip by one year, you could easily need to double the mass of your ship. Put three redundant units for everything essential, and you'll be fine regarding malfunctions, too. you can easily last 20+ years that way if your ship is well made. Again, it's a lot cheaper than making a ship three times bigger to have a shorter trip. 3) you can take a look at my kerbalism grand tours linked in my signature; but the short answer is, with a BIG ship. Of course, a smaller crew would allow a much smaller ship either, and I like to put additional functionalities. the one that most closely resembles your mission parameters is Bolt, from my second mission; a relatively small ship, only 4 crew members. Only living space was 4 hitchhicker containers, a lab some cupolas (all stuff that reduces stress). the living space itself was about 50 tons, and with roughly 10 tons of supplies I could have lasted almost 30 years. Still, to avoid isru and make a grand tour, I needed a good 20 km/s on the main ship. Which I got by a multiple drop tank design, and it raised the total mass up to 5000 tons. even using nuclears.

If I try a challenge, I try it at the highest level. One year ago, i considered the nanocristalline diamond. I gave up soon, stating "too much grinding, I don't like it". After that, I went and did a 320-year mission with life support. Greenhouses require manual harvesting twice every year, and I had 19, so i clicked "harvest" over 12000 times. The mission also required manually servicing the nuclear reactors every three years, again, that's over 100 times. Afer that, I felt I really can't complain about grinding. So here I am, trying the nanocristalline. If it's ok, I'll update by editing this post. Caveman is not glamorous enough to deserve a proper mission report Part 1: the low-hanging fruits Part 2: flyby season this is getting very long. I decided to open a thread for this after all https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/206163-stars-to-stones-my-nanocristalline-diamond-caveman-attempt/

I finally completed my extended grand tour Kerbalism + OPM + near future electrics (needed nuclear plants to get energy for my massive ship far from the sun) Additional challenges: bring a large crew, have the mothership orbit every planet, send a spaceplane to skim the atmosphere of all gas giants, include an asteroid and a comet in the tour. took me 6 real life months and 324 game years to finish

don't know of any tutorial. and yes, i complained about the lacking wiki myself too. but the modders are working for free, can't ask too much of them. that said, your problem is simple, and it's dictated by how kerbalism changes science. in kerbalism you do not run science like you do in stock. in kerbalism, experiments don't run istantaneously like in stock. they take their time. a time that can vary between 30-something seconds for a crew report, to several years for some advanced scanners. in kerbalism, experiments can be left on or off. if you leave and experiment on, it will run every time it has the right conditions, and it will keep running until its conditions are met. so, you activate the first goo canister, and it is set to run while it's meeting the right conditions. you go through the lower atmosphere, the goo runs its experiment for low atmosphere. you go through high atmosphere, the goo keeps running experiment, this time for high atmosphere. you go through space, and it runs experiment for space. and you can't have two copies of the same experiment running on the same ship, so if you try to activate the second, it will tell you the first is still running. now, some experiments - notably, the goo and the material study - have a limited amount of data they can produce, before they get exhausted. and then you have to send a new unit. the goo canister should last through 4 measurements if i remember correctly. i'm not sure if you can activate a second goo if the first is nominally running, but exhausted. worst scenario, you manually stop the first before running the second.

not sure about sspx inflatables, but there is already an inflatable part - the gravity ring - that does not allow shielding to be added. as far as i know, it's a glitch. you can fix this in two ways: 1) produce shielding in situ. there are several processes to do that. 2) save the game, and edit the file.

the data or samples produced are stored somewhere on the ship. if there is no storage space, the experiment is halted.

Part 19: Homecoming! Refueling on Karen would have made for a very easy mission. For the sake of a challenge, I decide to try and return to Kerbin without renewing resources. This ends with the crew successfully rescued during a Kerbin flyby, though A'Tuin has to be abandoned. An attempt to leave Bill on board to rescue the mothership to Ike fails by the narrowest of margins. The train of escape pods is about to enter Kerbin's atmosphere, while A'Tuin is about to engage some gravity assists 19.1) Status and mission plan 19.2) Race against the clock 19.3) Bring them home 19.4) The journey has ended Now I have to find something else to do in ksp. And for all that A'Tuin was slow going and it took me 6 real time months for this mission, I'd do it again. I am seriously considering downloading some hardcore planet pack and unleash A'Tuin (a just slightly improved version) for a grand tour of that too. Strictly WITH the additional water tanks, this time!

ok, doing some math your ship accelerates at 1.5 m/s, with 26 minutes burn you have a deltaV of 2400 m/s. a duna intercept should cost 1000-1100 m/s from LKO, so there's definitely something VERY wrong with the planned manuever. Doing the manuever from solar orbit can easily be twice as expensive. the good news, though, is that for duna it shouldn't matter too much. you'll spend perhaps an additional 500 m/s

it's tricky, but you can do it. the easy way is to split your burn into smaller 4-5 minutes burn until you covered at least 500 m/s. orbital time will still be short, so you only lose a few days. which won't be enough to make a big change in the transfer window. to perform the multiple burn, plan a normal manuever. then burn close to it, say from 2 minutes before the node to 2 minutes after the node. then delete it, and set up another manuever node in the same place; it will be cheaper, because you already burned some of the way. repeat as much as needed. you'll need some small correction manuever afterwards. the hard - but better - way is to plan a mun gravity assist. of course, you won't be able to get to it. but you start raising your orbit just like in the easy way. finally, as your orbit is high enough, you time your last apoapsis raising so that it will send you back to periapsis just in time to cross mun orbit as mun is passing again. basically, you plan a gravity assist and you actually finalize it in the next mun orbit. the advantage is that having mun there will provide you a reference to keep your manuever straight; furthermore, you can use the gravity assist to get rid of small deviations instead of a correction manuever. the straightforward way, if you can get away with only 1 periapsis raising, is to create a manuever node for the near future. say, you move your manuever node forward in time so it's 1 day away. Now you raise your apoapsis until your orbital time becomes exactly one day, then you use the manuever node normally. by the way, how big is your "probe" that you need 3 nervs and still 26 minutes? either you're sending a 200-tons probe to duna, and i have no idea what could be in that probe to be so heavy, or you're burning for a lot more than the required 1100 m/s and you're taking an awfully inefficient trajectory

but then, why did i got overheating? you saw my screeenshot, it was 4 km/s, and it was perfectly retrograde

first of all, shielding only works for the crew. for uncrewed vehicles, there shouldn't even be shielding available. as for radiations, they do age machinery fast, but it shouldn't be immediate. i've been doing short passes in the radiation belts for a while without problem. worst exposure was an uncrewed ship for one year at 5 rad/h, and it had several part failures in that year, but i had multiple redundancies for everything and i was fine. so, if by "immediately" you mean, as soon as your stuff get into the radiation belt everything breaks, then it's a bug. but if instead you mean your parts don't last long, that's normal. i suggest you use redundancies, multiple antennas, multiple reaction wheels. it helps survival.

don't know about those engines, maybe the mod they come from was poorly ported in. the wolfhound engine has around 30 ignitions. it also has 380 Isp, making it the closest equivalent in game to the raptor vacuum. i suggest you use that one. lacking that option, you can always manually edit the file. not that i know of

Part 18: the last planet Plock was much, much more difficult to reach than any other destination. A'Tuin went first to Neidon, to get new fuel on Nissee. Then it reached the dwarf planet after a long trek. 18.1) The greatest challenge 18.2) Return to the beautiful violet planet 18.3) The troubled road to Plock 18.4) The farthermost planet