king of nowhere

i have some other mods, but i'm not aware of any of them messing with asteroids or comets. basically i have OPM, its dependencies, kerbalism, its dependencies, near future electrical, and a few more minor mods. i did not try a new install. I'd have to try a new career and fast forward a lot, seems like a very time intensive experiment. that string in the config file is set as "true".

i'm playing with OPM, and the game is not spawning comets. I've been told it is because of kopernicus. is there a problem with kopernicus and comets? can i get the game to spawn comets in some way? I'm ready to edit a savegame file if necessary.

duna is also very easy to land on, it has this beautiful atmosphere that's just thick enough to aerobrake and use parachutes, but thin enough to not bother you too much on ascent. In fact, it is cheaper to land on duna than it is to get in mun's orbit. though if you're just looking for a flyby, it won't interest you. yes, duna and eve are the easiest targets out there. both have a moon, but of them, Ike is easy to target; gilly is out of the way, at high inclination, and very small, so getting a Gilly flyby is hard. I suggest Duna

yes, it means total (vacuum) deltaV to get there from Kerbin's surface. Assuming reasonable efficiency on manuevers, and no gravity assists.

so... does this mean a side effect of kopernicus is that i won't see comets spawn, ever? is there some way, with the cheat menu or by editing the savegame file, that I can get comets?

I assume you are going to use isru, because you mentioned your mothership being reusable. So, with 2.5k you go to jool, refuel on pol, then go on sarnus, refuel on eeloo.... even if you can't/won't refuel on every planet, there are workarounds. In my case, using kerbalism, I can't refuel around jool because all the viable planets are either enveloped by killer radiation belts, or they lack the water needed to make rocket fuel. But I can reach Jool with approximately 1500 m/s from Ike, deploy the various landers, and return to ike with about as much, especially using a couple gravity assists and aerobraking on the way back. as for going to the outer planets, it is indeed more expensive to get there... if you are starting from kerbin. I haven't yet been there, but going from a planet to another nearby is much cheaper than going all the way from kerbin. in the stock game, you need about 1500 m/s to reach Dres, 2000 to get to Jool, and 2100 to arrive to Eeloo. Plus, for the two dwarf planets, 1500 m/s of intercept speed. but for a dres-jool you only need 750 m/s, and for a jool-eeloo starting from pol, you can manage with as little as 600 m/s. intercept speeds starting from kerbin are very high because the starting and final orbit are very different, but going between two close planets, you have similar orbits and much lower intercepts. Finally, the further from kerbol you are, the cheaper it is to manuever. So, assuming you go to a gas giant, refuel on a moon, then move to the next, it's going to be fairly cheap. if instead I assumed wrongly, and by "reusable" you mean "go to the outer planet, return to kerbin, gets refueled by a dedicated tanker in LKO", then yes, for the outer planets I would not want to do it with less than 5000. Oh, when you say "mothership", i also assume that you are going to stop the mothership in a high jool orbit, or perhaps orbiting Pol, and will deploy smaller landers to go places. Because it's much cheaper that way. If you want to put your mothership in low orbit of every moon, yeah, the cost is going to increase. Perhaps I really AM making too many assumptions based on how I conduct those missions. P.S. Assuming this second case, where you are going to receive dedicated refueling missions in LKO but will require a lot of deltaV, and you would not be amiss to drop tanks, then I can suggest looking at my "Bolt" mothership (linked in my signature, "kerbalism grand tour at hard level (Bolt/Nail)") as a good example on how to stack drop tanks in a reusable way. Meaning that the refueling mission can resupply you with new drop tanks.

oh, no idea. i never played without the respawn disabled

depends on difficulty level. you can check that by pressing esc and reviewing difficulty settings. one of them goes something like "missing kerbals respawn".

Upon reading that spaceX managed 380 s Isp on their vacuum engine, I thought "they made the wolfhound"

A (failed) launch of my last mothership, seen mostly from IVA on a rearward looking cupola. includes lots of stuff exploding as the various boosters are separated and collide into each other. ultimately includes the mothership exploding, too, as a result of a staging mistake and stuff colliding with it

So far I tried building it for the Kerbin system. It conveys accurate information on how much you need for a Mun-Minmus transfer, and it still looks readable to me the graphic is very basic, I am not capable of giving this a fancy outlook so I'm not even trying. For now I'm trying to persuade people that the extra information is worth including. The Mun-Minmus transfer in both ways has the same cost, but I checked with some Joolian moons and it's not always the case, so I'm leaving the moon-moon transfer with the two directions written separately. Same for interplanetary transfers, they can be asymmetric, especially when plane changes are taken into account.

while the map is useful, it has a limitation: it only works for mission starting from Kerbin. For planning a Jool 5 or a Grand Tour, it is basically useless. I was thinking on adding information to the deltaV map that would make it more helpful for those kind of missions, allowing a realistic estimate of the cost of moving from one moon to the next. Would such an undertaking be appreciated? If I manage it, is there some chance that the "official" map gets revised with new information?

would that actually work? to the best of my knowledge, the vis-viva doesn't take into account inclination. nor does it have good ways to calculate oberth effect

i trapped myself neatly, didn't I? In the next days I may give it a better try. Difficult to say. Generally speaking, everything everyone does in this forum only appeal to a small niche of players. Most players quit the game before ever leaving Kerbin's sphere of influence. Most players don't visit the forum and never even learn about the deltaV map. Most players who visit the forum use alexmoon tool or mechjeb or other stuff and don't use the deltaV map. I am in none of those categories and still I don't use the deltaV map for reasons explained above. I could say that the map already appeal to a small niche of players. And those with OPM installed are an even smaller minority of that small minority, and yet somebody took the effort to expand the map for OPM. On the other hand, the jool 5 challenge thread has dozens and dozens of submissions. Making the map useful for the Jool 5 experience is the main benchmark of my suggestion, so it would at least appeal to those players.

I've never run an interplanetary mission to a single planet. I found that once you put in all the effort to get your payload in orbit and on escape trajectory from kerbin (4300 m/s total), then it becomes much cheaper to give your probe a little bit of extra fuel to send it to a second planet than to build a new probe from scratch and pay again the 4300 to escape from kerbin. The deltaV maps are very good at calculating the cost to reach a target from Kerbin. but once I am not starting from kerbin, they turn out to be completely useless. The only useful bit of information there is how much it takes to land on a planet. Look, for example, at jool. So i go in kerbin orbit, with 3400 m/s. Then I spend roughly 2000 m/s to get a jool intercept. So far, the map is accurate. Then the map tells me I need 160 m/s to get captured by jool. Putting aside that it's always easy and preferrable to get a jool capture by gravity assis (as the map won't take that into account) I found that to hold if i enter with a low jool periapsis. Which is something I really don't want to do; it saves a bit on intercept speed, but it gives a much higher intercept speed on the moons. Much better to enter at the moon's altitude. Let's say then i want to go to tylo. It says I have to spend another 400 m/s to get an intercept. Maybe. Maybe not. Actually, if I am in elliptic orbit around jool, chances are I will soon get a tylo encounter anyway. And then the map says I need to spend 1050 m/s to get a circular tylo orbit. Again, that's bogus. Finally, it says I need 2270 m/s to land/take off, and this is the only useful piece of information there. Afterwards, if from Tylo I want to go to Vall, the map gives me zero help. Nowadays, I'm not looking at the map anymore. So, here is what I propose to improve the map. 1) for all moons, do split the intercept speed in "to get in elliptic orbit" and "to circularize". In tylo's case, it would take 250 to get captured in elliptic orbit, and 800 to circularize. This is supremely important for planning a multi-moon mission, because once you're out of a moon's SoI, you can start using gravity assists. Before that, you have to pay with rocket burn. So this addition would tell me that, if I wanted to go somewhere else after landing on Tylo, i have to pack 2270 to reach tylo's orbit, and then I'd have to pack at least 800 more to leave tylo's SoI. If I wanted to stop in an elliptic orbit around tylo, to then leave again for another target, i'd only have to pay 250. If I want to place a mothership in tylo's orbit and then separate a lander, the mothership would only need 250, but the lander would need 800 to circularize in addition to the 2270 to land. As shown in the tentative picture here (of course it doesn't look good, if I knew how to do this properly I'd consider doing it myself) This information is the most useful, and it would also be very easy to add. If you do nothing else, please do this 2) do add costs for going from one planet/moon to its next neighboors. For Tylo, include an arrow to go to Vall, and another arrow to go to Bop. For Jool, include arrows to go to Dres and Eeloo. One can make a Jool-Eeloo transfer with as little as 400 m/s, but from the map there's no way to tell. EDIT: this is a tentative example. Still very crude; a proper one should split the deltaV between extra to leave the starting moon, and intercept to get captured on the second. Plus the diagonal number for the plane change. Also, the values are filled by memory and unlikely to be accurate 3) for gas giants, instead of calculating the costs assuming intercept with a periapsis 10 km above atmosphere, calculate them assuming periapsis equal to the orbit of the innermost moon. It's still not a perfect solution, but much more realistic than what's currently done. 4) just like there are symbols for "aerobraking possible", do add a symbol for "gravity assist possible", followed by how much you can realistically gain from a moon. Relevant only for gas giants. Every experienced player knows how to get captured around Jool with a flyby of tylo or laythe, but looking at the map there's no way to tell. In fact, in my first jool mission, looking at the map, I tried instead to aerobrake on jool. Of course, it ended poorly. And now I have installed OPM; is it possible to get captured around Neidon by gravity assist? its moons are Vall-sized, is that enough? can I plan my Neidon mission assuming I'll be able to skip injection deltaV, or not? I know I can use Mun to gain 50 m/s, doing a duna mission with 950-1000 m/s because mun pays the rest of the cost. I can use Mun to reduce intercept speed by a similar amount on returning. Adding to mun a "gravity assist: 50" symbol would give this information without needing to figure it out by trial and error. Now, someone may argue that there's no need to add this information because people already know it. To which I'd reply that we veterans already know how much you have to spend for the various intercepts, so there's no need for a deltaV map at all. In general, the purpose of a deltaV map is to give informations useful for planning missions, and I believe my proposals would lose nothing, and make the map much more useful.

there's better than twin boar. A mammoth engine under an S4-512 tank has roughly 6000 m/s of vacuum deltaV, with enough thrust to lift off. It can therefore reach LKO with well over 2000 m/s. It should be able to get an eeloo intercept without even a need for gravity assists. with gravity assists, it may actually be able to land on eeloo. speaking of gravity assists, i'm not aware of any (remotely practical) way to use them to reduce capture speed around Moho to less than 2500 m/s. Or to reduce the price of getting from moho to Eve below 1000 m/s. So, gravity assists all you like, you should still need 3500 m/s for a moho orbit mission. you may use gravity assists to get a free moho intercept, and once you go moho to eve, you can then use eve assist to go anywhere. but you need that 3500. Please prove me wrong because i must run a moho mission starting from low mun orbit and returning to low ike orbit with 4500 m/s.

put a fairing in front, and a bit engine in the bottom. turn your rocket horizontal immediately after launch. that should give you the thrust and heat resistance to reach that speed at low height. I did something similar once, I remember. In my case i was low in the tech tree, so I disregarded drag completely, and i strapped a heavy booster behind a thermal shield, with a bit of reaction wheels in between. I have no idea how I avoided flipping the rocket. Maybe I put fins on the back too.

i agree with @Lt_Duckweed, 6000-10000 is the realistic value, depending on how much of your ship is payload. and with Nervs, it is most efficient to keep TWR between 0.1 and 0.2. Below that, you'll lose more in cosine losses than you gain in saved mass. Above that, your engines will add so much mass, it won't be convenient no longer to use them. I once made a ship powered only by nervs to land on Vall; it weighted 500 tons, and it had 24 engines, for a total of 72 tons, the majority of its dry weight. I later calculated that if I made the ship chemically powered, and I swapped out 24 nervs for 4 wolfhounds, the ship would have the same TWR - actually even a bit better, because it'd have the same thrust for a lower mass - and it would have actually had more deltaV, because the reduction in weight would have compensated for the lower Isp. It has to be pointed out that, especially if you use some smart gravity assists on the moons, you should not need a huge amount of deltaV. My current mothership is also made for OPM planet hopping, and it's dragging around a third of its dry mass in mining equipment because I'm using mods that make mining more realistic - and, hence, more difficult. I also have to land it whole on planets, so I have some chemical engines to push twr to 0.5 during take off and landing. i only have roughly 4000 m/s of purely nuclear propulsion once I am in orbit - exact value depending on how much chemical fuel I need to keep in storage for the next landing. And I expect it should be enough; a Urlum-Neidon transfer will be a lot cheaper than a direct Neidon transfer from Kerbin. at least I hope it will be enough, I invested a lot of time in that mission with your 6000-10000 m/s, you should be more than fine.

I am trying to find a comet, but the game is spawning none. i even used cheats to check all the unidentified objects, there are many asteroids but no comets whatsoever. what can i do?

do also notice that you can get this information when planning manuevers, without calculations. the small window on the bottom left of the screen will show you apoapsis, periapsis and orbital period. if you plan a manuever, while you are selecting the manuever node, that window will show apoapsis, periapsis and orbital period after the manuever.

Part 5: The Kerbin system I had a bit of extra fuel, so I landed on Minmus and Kerbin. After that, I had no extra fuel anymore, and I barely landed A'Tuin with 30 m/s left. I discover that uraninite drills are less efficient than I thought, forcing to reevaluate the landing areas. 5.1) Split the party 5.2) Kerbin landing - and naming the spaceplane 5.3) Minmus, and names for a lander 5.4) Servicing, landing and refueling 5.5) The uranium problem, and revising the landing spots 5.6) Landing again, on polar crater

I don't get much the question; there aren't many ways to rendez-vous. there is always one single way to rendez-vous, which is: 1) get your orbit to touch your target's orbit, followed by 2) change your orbital time to end up in that place in the orbit at the same time as your target. but for the most convenient way to renzed-vous after returning from Mun: after you return from Mun, you'll be in an elliptic orbit. make sure that the periapsis of your elliptic orbit is touching the orbit of your target station. make sure to have dealt with plane changes. you can fix inclination in the high part of your orbit, and it will be cheap. if you've done that, now your elliptic orbit is touching the target orbit. you should see a "close approach" marker. As your orbit is higher than your target, it will be slower and take more time. you can change your orbital time by lowering your apoapsis (by increasing it too, but it would increase intercept speed). Do it until you get an encounter. to plan for that, set your manuever node just after the close encounter, and start simulating a retrograde burn. you should see the close approach marker move around the orbit, and periodically give a rendez-vous.

Part 4: if a rotor blade gets bent on Eve and no one's around to hear it, does it make a noise? A'Tuin arrives at Eve and releases landers for it and Gilly. The alignment bug messes up with the Helicopterocket - not unexpectedly - and forces calling in a replacement. A few more bugs also struck. 4.1) Check-up and travel 4.2) Landing on Eve 4.3) To Gilly 4.4) Back from Eve 4.5) Return to Kerbin

I may have established a record for the mildest intercept speed, ever! This is the planned mun intercept, coming back from minmus it makes almost a full orbit of mun before escaping. And this is the planned injection burn 0.06 m/s! When 60 m/s is a small injection burn, 6 m/s is almost unheard of, and this is 100 times less than that. no, as far as actually improving the mission, it's meaningless. one or two m/s don't make any difference. but it's nice nonetheless EDIT: I actually improved it to 0.004 m/s The actual intercept speed was not the intended target; i merely wanted to raise periapsis as much as possible. coming in to circularize around Mun on a high orbit will help getting a cheaper rendez-vous with my target. first, because i have a plane change, and second, because rendez-vous on elliptic orbits are cheaper at apoapsis further improving on the lowest speed injection burn was just a bonus

yes, maybe because of your periapsis position it found it can save 5 m/s by waiting 3 days, and it is programmed to return a minimum. Orbital transfers, in their current state, are more of an art than a procedure. you have rules and calculations, but you can't just input data and get authomatically a good result. Barring the very simple cases.