king of nowhere

i never had a standard launch vehicle back when i was playing career. instead i would make a new launcher for everything. pretty standard designs, anyway. the only time i actually developed a standardized launcher was for the no contract career challenge, where i did develop an efficient launcher to squeeze the most out of my limited money. it was an ssto based on the twin boar, for the following reasons: - with ssto i can recover the cost - i was not skilled enough to pilot a spaceplane - i did not have the tech unlocked to build a spaceplane - i was limited to level 1 VAB to save money, so i could not afford the part count to make a spaceplane in any case - i was limited to level 2 launch pad, so mass limit 140 ton my launcher then was basically a twin boar, 2 jumbo tanks, a probe core, and a couple parachutes. worked really well, though, being able to launch 25 tons in lko and being fully recoverable, with a cost of sending stuff to orbit of less than 500 kerbucks/ton nowadays i play different variations of grand tours with kerbalism. those involve some really huge motherships, as they need to include life support, radiation shielding, large habitats, and multiple copies of everything to deal with malfunctions. forget easy isru, either, so fuel must be plentyful too. my general policy to send those things up is to make a booster with a bunch of big tanks and a mammoth, and strap as many of those to the vehicle as needed.

how are you doing at hardware maintenance? did you suffer many or few malfunctions?

save games exhist for a reason. real life space agencies can't save and reload, so they have to spend years to drive a few kilometers. we don't

the bottom of the mariana trench, with a pressure 1000 times greater than surface pressure, has water being compressed. By about 0.8%, if i remember exactly. Yes, the old adage "liquids are incompressible" is not exactly true if taken at face value. But they require ludicrous pressures to compress very little, so for virtually all practical and engineeristical purposes, we can consider them as incompressible. If you compress your fuel to 1000 atmospheres, which is already well above the maximum pressures you can sustain on a large tank in a practical way, you will be able to stuff 1% more fuel in it. Maybe liquid hydrogen/methane/oxygen/hydrazine are more compressible than water, in which case you may even squeeze an extra 2 or 3%. In any case, as far as actually putting more fuel inside, it's meaningless. One can do whatever one pleases in single player, but I have to point out when one's headcanon is scientifically unsustainable. personally, i've done some clippings between wings (with inside tanks) and fuselage to make the thing look better. but not to any large degree.

actually, it's liquid. you can't compress it further.

if by "progression" you mean unlocking tech and money in a career, then it depends mostly on the reward % you set. I would say, as long as you just go to mun and minmus, there isn't much difference. missions are too short for stress, radiations and malfunctions to become a concern; life support just means adding a few tens of kilograms. occasionally a mission will fail because an engine will explode; if you want to bring redundant engines for safety, that increases weight further. you feel the full weight of it going interplanetar. radiations start to become relevant. your crew will get too stressed, and it will cause you problems. parts start to fail. On a manned ship you can run maintenance on them and at least avoid the worst of part failure, but at the cost of needing life support. isru becomes almost impossible. instead of mining "ore" and turning it into fuel, you need to get water and carbon dioxide. Water is fairly rare in all the inner system; eve and moho don't have it at all, while the other inner bodies only have it in a smattering of biomes. Carbon dioxide is even harder to get; on duna you extract it cheaply from the atmosphere, but everywhere else you require a process that's so energy intensive and slow, it takes a convert-o-tron 2 years to produce its own weight in fuel - provided it has 200 electricity per second. if you don't want that extra difficulty you can still use the stock isru, but you are not supposed to. mods i can recommend to go with it: - outer planets, because those extra gas giants each have their own radiation belts to add to the flavor. - near future electrics, if you want to run isru, because you will need a nuclear power plant for it (actually several nuclear plant, you need backups in case one breaks). also, you can mine uranium. possibly other near future stuff, if you want to try your hand at large missions. personally, in the last five months i throughly enjoied building vehicles for deep space missions under the constrains of kerbalism. having to provide life support and redundancy for everything makes your spaceships much more interesting than when they were just a crew pod and a bunch of fuel tanks.

i was in your very same situation, having more or less completed all the challenges offered by the regular game and reaching a point where they feel easy. i installed kerbalism. a jool 5 with isru is fairly easy for an experienced player. add in life support, radiation damage and your ship breaking up, it becomes a challenge again. maybe too much of a challenge, for your request. also, just avoiding isru makes things more challenging. you need to conserve deltaV again, and keeping enough for a large mission is not trivial. i have no experience with rss, instead

most pilots of experimental vehicles have engineering degrees. it gives them a better survival chance anyway, she could have been a second scientist, or a second engineer, and you'd still be asking what's her purpose. a second pilot is as good as anything else

you have a few ways around that 1) make a nuclear tug with low thrust to bring you in Moho's orbit. Once in Moho's orbit, detach the lander. make sure that the lander has large tanks, so it can go up and down with much spare fuel. refuel the lander, bring it back to the tug, and transfer fuel to the tug. then land the lander again, and dig more fuel. repeat until the tug is refueled. 2) make a slightly bigger tug. Do not bother with refueling it. in fact, if you drop the mining equipment in favor of fuel, you're probably good already. reach Moho. drop the lander. recover the lander. Now, going to Moho requires at least 3000 m/s, unless you are willing to spend many decades making slow gravity assists. but going away FROM Moho is much cheaper: with 1000 m/s you can get to Eve, use an Eve gravity assist to go everywhere. You can get an intercept to kerbin, where you'll aerobrake (you'll need a heat shield). So, refueling at Moho is not all that necessary, you only need a fraction of what you spent going in 3) instead of going to Moho, go to Gilly. Refuel at Gilly. Now go to Moho from Gilly - falling down on Eve first, to get Oberth effect. It's much cheaper to go to Moho this way, so you won't need refueling at Moho. In fact, you can drop your mining equipment at Gilly for reduced weight

so, you basically say you cannot land, because you tried that a few times and you always crashed. well, how much experience do you have flying planes? because i also was unable to land and had to use parachutes, but i learned when building a space seaplane. anyway, landing is harder with bigger planes, and i assume you are referring to your eve ssto, so, a big thing. landing small planes on water is generally easier because it is a perfectly flat surface, but i'm not sure about big ones. to land on water you are supposed to have your landing gear extended, hit the water with the landing gear, and that should slow you down. with a larger vehicle, that may not work. I think, in your case, landing on land may be actually easier. the important thing is to keep a low vertical speed. it's not hard once you figure it out.

is there anything that is not for fun in this game? i like driving rovers around if i have a purpose for it. if i am trying to minimize the time spent to set up a mun base, then perhaps i am not enjoying setting up a mun base. and i'd probably drop the idea and do some other kind of mission that does not require doing boring stuff.

wouldn't a rover be more convenient for the same task?

I'm sure there are gravity assists to do Eve-Jool with less than 1000 m/s, plus whatever you need to get out of Eve's SoI. As for Eeloo, there is a transfer window from Jool when you can do the trip with as little as 500 m/s. It's active between years 7 and 10. There isn't another such launch window for 40 more years afterwards, and it's the only chance you can ever get of getting to Eeloo cheaply, from anywhere. I generally set my schedule around it Alternatively, if you reach Eeloo before the end of year 8, there is a nice window where you can get to Jool for less than 300 m/s. The problem is that getting to Eeloo is much more expensive than going to Jool, of course

pol is beautiful. I can't wait to bring my rover there. the terrain is magnificent. Just look! Gilly also is beautiful. I had fun driving a rover there too, once I figured out how to stay on the ground Also, Gilly is a wonderful place to refuel, thanks to the low gravity. Eve surface is off limits, and Moho is super expensive to reach; Gilly is the best location to refuel in all the inner system. Even better, in kerbalism it has water. It is the only place in the inner system where you can find water. Again, this allows refueling.

the thread was from one year ago. i haven't tried eve ssto ever since; they are actually not convenient for the kind of missions i make nowadays

many people advise to not depend on steam for ksp, and to instead copy the game folder somewhere else and use it from there. i also wanted to test some small modding, and doing it on a copy was safe. so, i went on and did the copy. but i tried taking a screenshot, and i can't. at least, the key does nothing. i checked in the input to make sure i have the right key, and i do. i checked in the screenshot folder, and there's nothing new there. well, i assume that's because it's steam's screenshot folder. but besides confirming it's not taking screenshots, i can't do more. so i have two problems: first, how to get the game to make screenshots again (there is a sound and notification when you make them, so i'm pretty sure they're not being taken). Second, where are those screenshots made. I guess i could use the print key and copy the screen content on an image file, but it's clunky. i made thousands of screenshots, i'd rather have something more comfortable. So, can someone explain me how to enable screenshots again from my copy game? thanks

alt-f12 opens the cheat/debug menu. among the various options are physics-heat. go there for options

or, if you have mining equipment designed for laythe, you can get to ike instead, and refill the tanks there. from ike to jool is cheaper than from kerbin, too

from your image, i also get the impression that there is another part clipping through the heat shield, and therefore not protected. otherwise, heat shields work normally

it shows you've not been running megaships for long enough. I got used to low frame rate, and now i move easily in EVA with the lag. On the down side, when i don't have a huge ship to slow down the game, I have problems because the kerbals move and react too fast (i'm actually overstating it; Bolt is nowhere near as laggy as the Dream Big, and I'm getting used to working in real time again. but still, i handle the jetpack better with a bit of lag)

Fwd: I tried to figure out why the lander flew so badly it did not seem to have such a poor aerodinamic, by eye. ok, there was a big clamp-o-tron in the back, but it was just one. so i checked with the aerodinamics menu. and i discovered my lander was actually quite fine, except for a kraken intervention for you see, all three clamp-o-trons have similar drag value. the one in the back was expected, but the other two are docking each other, they should be covered. they should be no more draggy than the fuel tank. instead, the game glitched and is now thinking they are both exposed to the elements in full. I can further confirm that this is a glitch because it happened during laythe descent. i tried to go from orbit to surface directly with the alt-f12, and then i could fly just fine, no drag from the two used docking ports. I checked (after teleporting there a puff engine to enable the command pod to move on its own) whether undocking and redocking the parts would fix it. well, it fixed one of the ports, not both. i decided it was not worth the effort. there is also this strange case here, when drag has already gone down significantly with the thinner atmosphere, except for one single docking port, which alone accounts for, like, 70% of the total drag of the rocket. No idea there, but drag changes with orientation, and I suspect I happened to hit a reverse equivalent of a magic wing: something that makes a lot more drag than it should. So, my design was actually functional. i could have gone to orbit, even from sea level. i could have gone to orbit with 500 m/s left from the mountain top. instead, i barely made it. Goddamn kraken.

yeah, one ton seem to be about the upper limit. you can actually see it in the VAB: right-click on a part, and a bunch of extra information appears. among them, whether it can be manipulated during eva construction. if it does not explicitly say yes, then it cannot be manipulated. also, you can't manipulate root parts. caused me some grief when i decoupled a lander and it authomatically assigned as root the docking port.

Easy. When i spend weeks projecting a massive mothership for one of my challenges, possibly I spend another week or two flying it to several planets... and then it gets eaten by a kraken. In a way that cannot be fixed with a judicious application of alt-f12 or reloading. or sometimes when i discover that i made some small but crippling design mistake that prevents mission completion. In both cases I have to restart and lose weeks of work

in the past days, i landed on laythe at the equator and i flew a small airplane all the way to the green monolith - which in my case spawned somewhere north of crescent bay. then i returned to my lander. i did not bother with testing it, it had 3100 m/s and one should only need 2900 to orbit laythe. unfortunately, between high drag and low thrust, the lander turned out to be unfit for the task. it misses orbit by at least 400 m/s. it's not even close enough for the orbiter to come grab it from a suborbital trajectory. so i had to revert back to a previous save and take care to land on top of a mountain. starting at 4500 m, the lander can reach orbit with a comfortable margin. of course, i'll have to replay a few days worth of gaming

from the Mun you can get 50 m/s of extra speed with a gravity assist, 100 at most. as others have said, the more massive the body, the stronger the gravity assist. in fact, the cheapest trajectory to jool entails using a mun gravity assist to leave Kerbin's SoI, to get an orbit with an exact duration of one year so that you intersect kerbin's orbit the next year and get a gravity assist from it, sending you on the opposite direction from jool: to eve. all because eve, with its great mass, is wonderful at gravity assisting. that trajectory requires a few more flyby of kerbin and eve, and a transfer done like that takes over 30 years. but you can reach jool from LKO with less than 900 m/s. as for mun, i try to use it whenever i leave kerbin, because saving 100 m/s is better than not saving them. but it's not enough to make a significant impact on the mission