king of nowhere

In the past month, I went to Plock and back with life support. During the outbound trip (32 years) there were some accidents that seriously shortened my water supply, leaving me without enough to come back safely. I then devised a high energy trajectory that would spend most of my remaining fuel to get back fast, taking a first jool gravity assist, then reaching kerbin (23 years). On kerbin I was way too fast to stop, but I could place 8 crew members on escape pods and send them on the ground to save food. the remaining crew member remained with the ship, piloted it using kerbin for a gravity assist, to get into a resonant orbit for another kerbin assist 3 years later, to get into a trajectory to reach duna 4 years later (i could have gone there faster, but i'd have had a too high intercept speed). On duna I was coming in slow enough to aerobrake, then land on Ike with the very last drops of my fuel, where I could mine new water and fuel to return to kerbin. I run out of water and food 80 days from Duna. After over 60 years of travel, I missed the mark for 80 days. I could reload and do better on the Plock approach, but I'm not going to replay 60 years of gameplay like this. Plock was the last planet I had to visit, so I just reloaded back to my latest kerbin flyby, placed the remaining crew member on an escape pod too, and called it a day.

it's a glitch. the part is spawned randomly, and it can get spawned on a slope. in which case, it will start moving as soon as it gets into physical range. when it happened to me, i did manage to save it by approaching downhill and placing my rover along the way to stop the part's freefall. but as a rule of thumb, i recommend using the debug menu

I've done a lot of reentries and aerobrakes, and I can confidently say it's impossible that small differences in the trajectory would compensate a difference in speed of 4 km/s. furthermore, i still had ablator on the shield after landing.

I just brought my crew back to kerbin after a long mission. I used a well tested capsule design, whom I knew could survive reentry at over 8 km/s. Imagine my surprise when I reentered at 4 km/s and almost burned anyway. Here's the recent reentry. 40 km altitude, 4.2 km/s, it's only avoiding destruction by the thinnest margin Here's the old reentry, dated last february. nearly twice as fast, already lower in the atmosphere, it's not even close to overheating. the limit to reentry speed was not heat, but acceleration - it killed my crew if i tried to go faster. the capsule is basically the same. there are a couple rtg attached to it, not enough to make a real difference. So, what the hell? Why in the past I could pull that stunt and now I almost died at a much safer speed?

well, technically you can increase ambient light, and then you don't need lights, ever. on the other hand, that can be considered a bit cheating. lights are very useful to see better otherwise. i would always put lights near docking ports, it helps a lot to perform dockings in the dark

had a curious behavior with parts in storage containers. i put some spare parts in storage containers before starting the mission, hoping they'd be protected against aging. i took several out, and even after 300 years they still worked perfectly. reaction wheels, antennas, even lights, all were as good as new when i first installed them. not so the parachutes. when i took the parachutes out and installed them on the crew escape pods, all 6 parachutes broke instantly. i suppose this is a (minor) bug, since every other part behaves just fine? EDIT: update, it's not related to aging. just moving the parachutes breaks them

launching my latest mothership. nose cones help with the atmosphere, but for the long mission in space they are just dead weight. i put them on decoupler to remove when they're no longer needed. unfortunately, i didn't point away from prograde enough before decoupling. the decouplers propelled the nose cones forward. then the ship started accelerating again, and soon it slammed against its discarded nose cones. it was a most spectacular explosion taking a daredevil approach to laythe, skimming jool's atmosphere from a polar trajectory and hitting laythe on the way out. I am optimistic, my sturdy spaceplane can resist the 5.5 km/s reentry. Spoiler alert: it couldn't not only it could not resist reentry, it got completely disintegrated in 10 seconds. to top it off, i later realized with the amount of fuel i spent for the manuever around jool, i couldn't have returned to laythe's orbit anyway

I have seen a similar bug when the dump valve authomatism gets broken on reload. I reload the game, and it does not dump resources anymore. but i only have to fix it in one copy of my chemical plants and everything works afterwards. you could be suffering a similar problem EDIT: as for planner in general, i found it to suffer from limitations when dealing with complex chains, especially when there are processes working intermittently (like recycling water, where you get some new waste water at regular times and it gets processed quickly). i generally calculate enough safety margin that I can discount imprecisions there. if I really need that kind of precision, i either run the calculations manually, or i try empyrically

well, i did manage to make a kilopart ship work, with over 200 processes, without anything crashing. so it's possible to do it. but you have to be creative sometimes. fuel cells, did you check if they are set to dump the exhaust (in your case, i think nitrogen and water)? Because if they are not told to, they will stop working when the nitrogen/water storage is full. they won't dump those precious resources. you have to manually set them up to, there is a "dump" option on them that you can toggle. at high timewarp, though, there are other bugs with chemical processes. again, i did manage to run full isru cycle at x100000, but it's not always easy, and it can be very idiosyncratic. extremely rewarding to make it work, though, so i encourage you to go on

yes, well, you have to do a lot of complicated operations before going eva, but the game would not gain any fun by it. i do believe it's a glitch. if you leave pressure control open while an astronaut is outiside, you lose a lot more nitrogen. i also noticed that if you stop pressure control entirely on your ship all the time, and only restart it once in a while when pressure drops a bit, you can keep full pressurization while consuming a lot less nitrogen. i assume the way the mod deals with pressurization is bugged.

wait, clarify the first part: you switched out the command module you was using, and the problem went away? this is already a nice indication that the problem was there. but now you have the same problem when you build spaceplanes, with stock command pods. there shouldn't even be a difference between spaceplanes and rockets in the game, besides a descriptive tag for the user. so i assume that it's some modded part that's causing problems.

i don't think it makes much of a difference. in a normal eve mission, the ascent vehicle is by far the most heavy part, whether you send it with an orbiter module or with a station changes little. I can recommend a three component architecture on what you send to eve: the lander/ascent vehicle, a return to kerbin vehicle, and a tug. you arrive at eve, rocket brake just enough to put everything in elliptic orbit. detach the lander, have it airbrake gradually until it can land. return it to orbit. then (or perhaps after landing) you circularize the tug's orbit, and with the tug you pick up the crew. you return them to the kerbin return vehicle, which can now return with a limited cost. I recommend this because circularizing around eve is 1300 m/s, and leaving low orbit is another 1300 m/s, so you don't want to move all your ship down there. I'm... not sure exactly what you would gain by putting a station in eve's orbit, unless you were planning to have such a station anyway .... I now realize, in ALL my eve missions i was doing a kerbalism grand tour with a multi kiloton mothership, so for me the lander was the small part. my experience is out of the ordinary. but the three part architecture, that i can always recommend

damn. all the symptoms and signs point to the crew being in a passenger module, but you clearly have a command module there. but it looks like a modded command module? so maybe it's a problem with the game not recognizing the module. your list of mods is long enough, glitches are to be expected

try to go in the astronaut complex then. what happened to the astronauts?

maybe the game read it as a relay probe, and therefore hid it? check if there are hidden categories in the map view, and if your probe may fall under them

this is a picture of a booster without any visible crew pod. it's not very helpful. we must be able to see your ship, not just a small part of it. but it may provide enough information, because of the yellow probe icon on top. it says the vehicle is not manned. it means you have no crew in a command pod. not all crewed parts are equal. some are command pods, and a kerbal in them can pilot the ship. some are not command pods; kerbals can stay in them, but not control the ship. in the editor, you'll find the command pods under the same category where you also find the probe cores, while the crew pod are under utility. your crew is in a crew - not command - pod, and therefore you have no control. if you have a command pod, you can transfer your crew to the command pod, it will solve the problem. if you don't have a command pod, you must make a new rocket

i rarely use most of them anymore; my huge missions have very precise requirements. nervs - dozens - to move my mothership around with high deltaV. wolfhounds - again, dozens - to move the mothership around with high thrust. the multikiloton mothership is launched to orbit with mammoths - once more, dozens of them. running grand tours with life support and large crews requires big ships, and they require big engines. i had to mod my own scaled-up engines to reduce part count. i do find use for smaller engines on the service ships, though. the dart has become a favourite for spaceplanes (i don't want them to be limited to oxygen atmospheres), it's in the right power/weight class and it has high efficiency both in atmosphere and vacuum. also, it looks more aerodinamic for when i'm not using it and just flying with propellers - no idea if it actually is. and I'm getting a lot of use for the cub engines. with part failures, i want redundancy. a single terrier for a lander would be better, but if it fails, it strands the crew to die on a planet. sparks would work well, but how to fit them around a lander? the cubs have good stats overall, they fit the right mass/thrust spot where I can use 6-10 of them, and the radial mount makes it easier to fit them around a lander.

I'm sure there are mentions of chlorine somewhere, it would give that color. i'm not sure how realistic it would be to have free chlorine around like that, though. chlorine is not such a common element that it could make up a whole layer in a gas giant, and - more important - it is a very unstable gas that's prone to reacting with other stuff, so it wouldn't stay there.

I'd add that the main cost is from LKO to reach either mun or minmus. after that, it's rather cheap. small differences in efficiency don't matter too much

yes, but the problem is, as built the equation does not make practical sense. it assumes that fuel tanks and engines are weightless, because the rocket size does not influence the dry mass. a better approach would link the answer to the fuel mass. instead of asking you the dry mass, it would ask you the mass ratio. for ksp, fuel tanks are 12.5% dry mass, plus you need about 5% mass for the engine. so you write mass ratio 0.175, and the program should calculate the dry mass accordingly. this would work. "you need a huge mass of fuel to lift a small mass to earth orbit. this huge mass of fuel goes into a huge fuel tank, which needs to be pretty thick to not be crushed under its own weight. and then to lift all that huge mass you need a big, heavy rocket engine. After you burned most of your fuel, you have this huge, heavy empty tank, and this huge, heavy, oversized rocket engine, and they are just dead weight. it's a lot more convenient to dump them, so the rest of the rocket is much lighter and can get a lot more propulsion from the fuel it has left - with a smaller, lighter engine. on the downside, adding a stage only requires that you add a decoupling mechanism - which is very lightweight compared to the overall rocket - and an additional engine, much smaller than the one for the lower stage, again its weight is a pittance compared to the mass you're discarding. by adding a very small mass to the initial rocket, you get to discard a lot of dead weight. and since you're there, the second stage engine will only need to work in vacuum, so you can optimize it much better for vacuum, getting more propulsion out of it". that's how i would explain it. equations? That equation is hard for me, and I like equations. I wouldn't try it even on my brighter students. you can't use equations on a layman. I could also try with a similitude: "imagine you have a fuel tanker truck. the truck is full of fuel, which it can use to travel. but it's very heavy, and it consumes a lot. Now, imagine that you remove 300 kg of fuel from this truck, weighting several tons. it doesn't matter much to your authonomy, right? many tons of fuel, add or remove 300 kg is not a big deal. but in place of those 300 kg of fuel you put a motorbike and a couple fuel canisters. with those, you can abandon the truck once it runs out of fuel and make over 1000 km on the motorbike. you get a lot more mileage than if you had carried the truck all the way through"

but there are so many more factors contributing to this. a major one is the dry mass/wet mass of your stages. you'll notice that in ksp we tend to make short stages, each providing some 2 km/s, because going much above that the gain decreases exponentially with increased fuel tank mass and increased engine tank mass. real life rockets have longer stages because the dry tanks weight less than in ksp, and the engines are also lighter. Also, I can't figure out what "Mdry" and "Mpayload" are exactly: is the dry mass referring to the second stage? both stages? how the hell does the equation know? is the "payload" just the dry mass of the upper stage? or perhaps the whole mass of the upper stage= and moving the gauge of the staging separation will skew the wet/dry ratios for all stages involved, with no easy way to account a bigger second stage by increasing its dry mass. frankly, I'd call that datasheet useless if it was well made, because there are a lot other more important considerations for staging. the way it's organized, with the masses expressed like this? i call it rubbish. I'm sorry for the guy who spent time doing it, but it fails at the basic premise of giving useful information. separating "payload" and "dry mass of the upper stage", with the second being dependant on the additional fuel used - by measure of an additional gauge setting the wet/dry ratio - and doing a similar thing for the second stage would make it at least marginally useful.

yes, the active shields do stack. as i said, i used 130 of them to protect from 5 rad/h solar storms. the problem is, there's very little reason to try and stack them. to protect from the low background radiation, a single shield is enough. to protect from radiation belts and solar storms, you need over 100, which are generally too impractical. 2 shields is too much for background radiations, and still negligible against the higher radiation environments.

depends on many factors full shielding reduces radiation by 90% (at normal level). it always reduces 90%, whether you're hit by 1 mrad/h or you're crossing the inner jool radiation belt. active shields reduce radiation by 0.04, again, no matter what the outside level. so if your ship has to deal with constant low levels of radiation, an active shield is better. it completely negates all radiation. nuclear reactors on board count as a constant low level of radiation. and by the way, if you move the reactors far from the crew cabins, the radiation will be less. if you have to cross a radiation belt, then it's better to have shielding. when you're facing 10 rad/h, reducing it to 9.96 with an active shield doesn't make an appreciable difference. but reducing it to 1 with passive shielding does. i also point out that multiple active shields are very heavy and highly impractical. My DREAM BIG sported as much as 130 active shields because i was unable to deal with radiations at the time, and they added 400 tons of weight to the ship, and they drained 350 EC/s, and they protected from solar storms but around jool they were useless anyway (they'd have been useless even if i had had the power to run them). if you are planning a jool mission or something equally elaborate, i suggest you use both. the active shield will protect you during the long trip exposed to the background radiation, and the passive shield will protect you for the short time when you cross the radiation belts. plus, passive shielding isn't THAT heavy. in my experience, it's generally around 5% of a ship's dry mass. for my grand tours, i use a single active shield (I actually carry several ones, but only for backup) and maxxed passive shielding.

1) bringing it from home. really, shielding is heavy, but not TOO heavy. on the other hand, all the sources of shielding through chemical processes require years to make it. I can suggest the molthen regolith process if you're on a planetary surface and must extract the carbon and oxygen anyway. but it's very slow going. 2) TV relieves of stress very slowly. if all the most optimal living conditions are implemented, stress will stay at 0%. maybe. depending on individual astronaut, because some are more resilient than others. don't count much on it. on the other hand, you generally don't have problems with the electricity, so no reason to not leave it on 2b) RDU cures 1% radiation damage in roughly 4 days. So, if you're planning a laythe mission, you will have to spend almost one year for your crew to recover. it consumes oxygen and produces CO2, so I advise having some oxygen recycling if you plan it on a large scale. on the plus side, it is a convenient source of carbon, and it can feed a greenhouse by itself. it works on an astronaut at a time, it must be inside the crew cabin, and you will then find an option to cure that specific astronaut.

I don't understand that craft, though. it has a parachute, for landing. and a stage, for ascent. and it has landing legs in the second stage. what are those landing legs for? they can't be used