king of nowhere

if i wanted to go up and down, plant a flag, and dilly dally, i could use a command seat. which i refuse to do anyway, because i want to keep up at least some pretence of realism. what i actually want is to go down with multiple crew members, spend multiple days traveling around the place conducting science, then go up, and then reuse the whole system.

impossible. you get pressurized tanks from the very start. you need pressurized tanks of hydrogen and oxygen (unless you are using a oxygen-monopropellant fuel cell, but those are less efficient). if you right click on the part in the editor, it will tell you exactly what you need, and that's hydrogen and oxygen

there is no unique answer, because it depends on what you find challenging but not frustrating. most people would find kerbalism itself frustrating in the first place. that said, i'd stay at 100%, because finding some resources is damn hard. nitrogen and water are extremely rare, in many planets you don't find them at all, in other planets you only find them in a few biomes. for a self-sustained base, you need water, nitrogen, and ore, all in the same place. in the whole inner system, there are only two places where this can even happen: mun and duna. the are the only inner bodies with some nitrogen, and they only have water in a very few handful of biomes. with abundance at 60%, tose few biomes may have no ore. or no nitrogen. it would be very frustrating to not have ay single biome suitable for habitation, anywhere.

i missed the part about being at higher difficulty. yes, that triples the radiation. still, in my current run - at hard level - i managed to reach laythe at 30% radiation damage. i did have to make a burn directly towards the planet, though, spending a good 1000 m/s extra between accelerating and braking. when going through the death zone, even just saving a few minutes make a difference

it's a bit like watching my life from outside... what's your part count? the Dream Big wasn't so bad, and it was 1300 part. My pc is a good laptop, but not excellent, and a fixed pc could get more powerful wait, there is another trick. the game has some issue with ram usage, where it keeps accumulating it. you have to close and restart it regularly when using big ships. try that and see if it works regarding the laythe plane, is it shielded? on a fast trajectory, a vehicle with shielded habitats should get around 10-15% radiation on its way to Laythe.

in fact, considering i can make a comfortable laythe rocket with 15 tons, it may be just cheaper to send disposable stuff everywhere

I've been unable to get the plane to have low drag during engine ignition. Probably it's the Mk2 fault, mostly. The big wings certainly don't help, too. Unfortunately, the characteristics that make a good rocket spaceplane and those that make a good explorer propeller plane are often mutually exclusive. add in the need to add radiation shielding, food, redundant life support; of course performance is going to take a hit there. Anyway, this means that the best way to launch is, after getting as high as possible with propellers, to point mostly upwards. A good spaceplane accelerates mostly in the atmosphere, this one cannot. The bad news is that I need all four darts for this. as i mentioned, under kerbalism engines can have mechanical failures; I'm not going to risk the mission of the chance of mechanical failure if i can help it, therefore i added two engines. they are unnecessary, redundant, they reduce performance overall. but they are my guarantee if an engine breaks. I considered putting an extra dart into a seq container, but they are too heavy to be handled on a surface. Anyway, they are necessary. So here is the final look of the plane it needs a bit higer speed to land and take off, but i tested it on laythe and it works. it has fairly good manueverability with propellers, though not as much as i'd like. Its predecessor could land obliquely on the side of a hill, i'm not sure this one can. it is very stable, though. it is pretty poor as spaceplane, but it still reaches laythe orbit easily with 4 engines. i haven't tried it on tekto, i haven't yet installed the outer planet because i'm afrait it will mess up with my current missions, but tekto has lower gravity and thicker atmosphere, should be even easier. i failed to bring it in kerbin's orbit, but that's not a required mission parameter. the cargo bay is quite crowded with science and life support. You can see why i wanted to use the Mk2. the bigger rtg are from near future electrics, they provide adequate power. it has food and air for 100 days. there is also an ion engine, one of those tanks has 350 kg of xenon. it's worth 700 m/s in orbit. it's too low a thrust to finish circularization, but i can use it for some orbital manuevers to rejoin the mothership. and the whole setup is less than 600 kg the rover arm is fully functional. i'm not 100% happy about this plane. at best, it's a jack of all trades. but i reached the point where i mostly gave up on improving it. it is adequate on all mission requirements, and touching anything is likely to screw up some other characteristic. As for Eve, i am coming to believe it's best to use a regular rocket. while this plane could work as a last stage, it weights 50 tons for 3000 m/s of vacuum deltaV. To bring this to eve's orbit, i'd need at least 2000 extra m/s, even assuming a good flight capability. and that would require a very heavy ascent stage. a smaller rocket for orbit, together with a small, lightweight, disposable plane for exploring the surface (i recently used one that was just 2.5 tons) is probably going to be cheaper. It's quite the paradox: i started the project with the mk2 because i needed the heat tolerance for eve, i ended up with a functional project, and then i decided to not use it at eve after all. but i'm still keeping the design, especially the despised Mk2, for reasons of cargo bay and crew comfort. I want to also use it as rover on tylo and slate (because i'm not carrying around 50 tons of spaceplane without trying to reuse it as much as possible); but that requires rover wheels, which have bad aerodinamics and bad heat tolerance. i can install them with eva construction before the aforementoned landings, and remove them afterwards.

besides that thing with the control point, there are a couple more points to make here: 1) 18 minutes burn time is a lot. and starting at +9 is horribly inefficient. To make this relatively simple: look at the navsphere, the manuever marker in there. look at the prograde marker. the more distant they are, the less efficient the burn. efficiency is roughly equal to the cosine of the angle between them. at t-9, your prograde is roughly 90 degrees away from the manuever node, meaning a burn there is practically wasted. 1b) you can mitigate this by splitting the burn into several smaller burns. the first orbit you burn from +2 minutes to -2 minutes, you raise your apoapsis a bit in this way, but not enough to escape. that's good, because on the next orbit you repeat the manuever, this time you're already going faster, so you will burn some more and raise apoapsis even better. repeat for how many orbits it takes. it's much more efficient. unfortunately, this meddles with the manuever node. ideally, you should make a new manuever node at every new orbit. keeping aligned for the gravity assist is going to be nigh impossible, but fortunately you can wait 6 days for mun to be in the right place again; jool transfer windows are generally long. you could also add more engines to your contraption; it would probably be more efficient, and easier. 2) your idea of going in solar orbit first, and then raising apoapsis from there, is horribly inefficient. you miss on all the oberth effect, and you may end up paying over twice the deltaV you'd need otherwise. the most efficient point to make the manuever is in kerbin low orbit, a single big burn for 2000 m/s will get you directly to jool. of course, you already have problems with burn time, this will exacerbate them. i tell you, it is quite possible to make such a long burn in an efficient manner. but it takes practice. on the plus side, even if your burn is inefficient, it's still going to be better than the same burn in solar orbit

i made a return capsule with 15 km/s, but it uses ion engines, which have even worse thrust than nuclear. as for the rest, @jimmymcgoochie already explained the rocket equation, and why this stops you from having too much deltaV without a ridiculous mass. basically, if you want to run more complex missions, you must learn to be less wasteful.

my current laythe plane, which i failed to test before using, basically can't take off. it reaches 40 m/s on the ground, and it can barely turn up in the air. but it loses speed in doing so, and it cannot sustain flight at less than 60 m/s. basically, i can take long jumps, but to actually fly i must launch from the top of a mountain. it also doesn't have enough energy to sustain its science experiments.

try to turn on the engines and take a pictures. if you see the effect with the sort of halo of light like in the first picture i posted, it is blocking. if you don't see the effect, it's all ok. also, what is the mass of your ship? do you have just those 4 nervs, or more that we can't see? 4 nervs are pushing for 240 kN, if we know the mass of the ship it is easy to make a rough estimate of how long the burn should actually take, and then we can diagnose if there is something wrong with the burn indicator

so, the burn time went off, by much more than was planned. that's not uncommon. I often have cases when nerv engines have miscalculated burn times. there is also another option, though; maybe the bottom of your ship is blocking the exhaust, making you lose power? does your ship look like this? the above image is wrong engine mounting; engines are getting blocked the above image is normal everything seems a regular case of low twr. your burn ended 10 minutes after the node, the node was at periapsis, when you move away from periapsis you lose speed, the speed that was "removed" is just that. You also have lots of inefficiency, your burn is not going to be very effective because it is so long, there are ways to reduce this problem but too long to explain right now.

Part 8: the Laythe horror picture show (alternative title Laythepollo 13) "Kerbin, we've got a dozen problems!" Jeb, to flight control room The trip to Jool seem to go fine up until reaching Laythe. There, a combination of kraken attacks, insufficient foresight, and plain bad luck quickly turn the mission into a survival horror where the poor kerbonauts got alternatively fried with radiations, stuck on Laythe, fried with radiations, doomed to float in space until starvation (after spending all their fuel to escape radiations), can't find a way to reunite with the mothership before their food supplied run out, got fried with radiations, reunite with the mothership only to find Jeb dead there, got fried with radiation. They also have to fly a plane that can't take off. Oh, and they get fried with radiations. Only after extreme hardship - and a lot of swearing - this obstacle is overcome, with the barest of margins 8.1) Leaving Duna 8.2) It's not such a long way to Jool after all 8.3) Approaching Laythe 8.4) Flying on Laythe - the first time 8.5) Trying to get away from Laythe 8.6) Flying on Laythe - again 8.7) The Jool Radiation Massacre 8.8) Escape from Laythe's islands

well, you can definitely get away with something smaller. when i made the dream big, i had no idea exactly how bad would have been the various component breakdown. i only knew i'd need redundancies, and i decided to err on the side of exaggeration safety. you should definitely plan to have multiple copies of anything vital, but you don't need a dozen.

very well made video. generally when people make videos you only see a blur and the occasional flag being planted, and you have no idea what they did in the meanwhile. you explained the mission well.

hey, that's nice! i practically started a new fashion, and gave a new long term challenge for those people skilled enough to do practically everything in the stock game...

if that's the case, how many rovers did we lose because of the regolith? that's right, none. not one came ever close to be destroied by it. they all died for other reasons, and those reasons were either related to time, or to terrain traps. the closer to it is curiosity's wheels, which, as i mentioned before, could easily have been fixed by making those wheels thicker, at an extra weight. i reinstate, there is absolutely no reason we could not make a manned rover for longer distances, except convenience. in ksp you've got to fish around for biomes. on real planets, you get enough stuff to explore close to you, there's really no reason to move too much. and a rover capable of it would be too heavy for our current budgets. and consider this: we can launch a rocket through space and land it on another planet with a rover. do you think we couldn't make a vehicle capable of withstanding sharp sand for more than 40 kilometers if we really wanted?

i know that. still, what i said stands. our rovers last decades on mars, and that's how long they can last. if in those decades they only move a few tens of km, it's because of other constrains caused by weight, money, and mission profile. regolith is bad, but it's not some kind of magic superacid eating rovers. as for the sharp, unpolished stones, that's exactly why i brought our deserts into the equations; they also have very sharp stones, and we drive over them at greater speed, and we drive over them with greater gravity, and they eventually wear down our tires, but we are not limited to 40 km also, while regolith is often electrostatically charged and tends to stick to surfaces, it's again not as bad as you make it. martian wind can remove regolith, it can't be stuck that hard on the solar panels.

i've never noticed anything like that. in fact, i use those same LT-2 landing legs as armor for my rover to cushion impact, and i've never seen one break. can you post a picture of your lander?

no. i don't care how bad regolith is, we can move on rocky deserts on far greater distances. you are failing to take into account several factors here: 1) as we have limited funding, our rovers must be light. very light. this means thin wheels. if they made curiosity's wheels 1 cm thick instead of paper-thin to save weight, they would be barely scratched. of course, the rover would be unable to move for the weight. which brings us to 2) we have limited power, again because we can't afford many power sources. so we also have to make things light, and frail. 3) those missions lasted years with no maintenance. Seriously, this must be stressed. leave your car out, see how long it takes before it stops working. i guarantee, it will last much less than the mars rovers. and yet, you can stretch the operational life of your car well above 15 years with regular maintenance. We lost many rovers because they got dust on their solar panels, this would have been easily fixed by a a crew member with a broom. 4) those rovers moved very slowly. their top speeds were on the order of 100 m/day. not because they could not go faster, but because they were piloted remotely. which means that mission control instructs the rover to move forward 10 meters, the data is sent through the deep space network, then the rover moves, snaps some pictures, send them back to mission control. mission control looks at the pictures, run a risk assessment, then plan a new trajectory for the next 10 meters, which is as far as they can accurately see obstacles based on the pictures. and the process is slow. a pilot there would be able to drive as long as there is battery. also, mission control is driving a rover costing billions of dollars, so they have to be more careful than we are. 5) those rovers are not supposed to run, but to perform science. and performing science takes time, and causes them to stop for months in the same location. in ksp we don't have those same requirements, as science is done istantaneously. kerbalism changes that, and you'd need to stand still 90 days in the same biome to finish the measurements. i don't even try. 6) because of factors 5 and 4, those rovers are not going to move around much. so they will take several years to run a few km. and then they will stop working for other reasons. so, there's no need for big, sturdy wheels, and we can make them lighter. see again 1 there is absolutely no reason a large rover with a pilot able to run maintenance and a decent power supply could not cover thousands of kilometers. indeed, it's exactly what happens in the martian, and i've seen a lot of science reviews about that book, with detailed analysis of what can and cannot be done, nitpicking pretty much everything, and yet nobody among the many reviewers - all people with solid science credentials - ever raised any problem about the capacity of a rover to last that long.

So what? That's just what we've done so far irl. irl we have limited money, building a rocket takes years, and we can't risk the lives of our astronauts and reload the game if something goes wrong. irl we never sent people past the moon, and even that was a titanic accomplishment that required a significant fraction of the gdp of a major nation. in this game we routinely send crews to the farthest reaches of the system. I don't see why we can't have crewed rovers going around a planet.

heh. A reusable eve launcher based on the concept of propellers up until 15 km and then rockets is potentially feasible, some people did it, but it's extremely hard (without kraken aerodinamics). if i had to rate the hardest challenge of this game, i'd put that one first, without doubt. i tried it in the past, i spent weeks working on several projects, but i never came close. i have also seen a pure rocket that can go ssto on eve on rocket power alone, if it lands on the highest plateau. barring that, you can use a regular big rocket. my first eve ascent vehicle was 400 tons and barely functional, but my second one was 250 tons, had a crew of 3, and its last stage could also be recycled as a laythe lander (rocket, not plane). if you want to try a plane, without the huge challenge of making it ssto, then propellers + staging is probably the way to go. one of my project was an helicopter rotor strapped on a rocket, it failed to come anywhere close to ssto, but it did reach 15 km, so if you could then eject the rotors and go up as normal two-stage rocket, it would save a lot of weight on the first stage. that, or a staged plane like not!Albatross if you want to make it a pure eve ssto, good luck with that. at least you know aerodinamics and ascent profiles better than i do, you've got a better chance.

first, i managed to take off from kerbin at 50 m/s, which means around 70 on laythe. good enough. getting barely to orbit on kerbin is fine, if i can do that i can also get to orbit comfortably on laythe. by the way, since i had a bit of space in the cargo bay, i added a dawn engine and a bit of xenon in it; it's got a few hundred m/s on xenon, which is enough for some orbital manuevers if i need an extra. it can also help me circularize. regarding the ascent stage, it works twofold; on tylo (and slate, which is similar) the ascent stage would be a normal rocket. the rocket part would have enough deltaV to take care of descent. the plane would land like a rocket, though it would turn 90 degrees just before landing, to hit the ground with the wheels. then, for take off, i'll just start by accelerating on the ground. I'll start flying the moment i hit a bump at sufficiently high speed. on eve, the ascent stage would have wings and additional propellers, so it could keep working as a regular plane. I did something similar with the Absolutely NOT Albatross - Jool stage at 8 minutes the climb starts, shedding empty tanks from behind. in fact, my new design is directly derived from this old one, adapted a bit for kerbalism and slightly different targets. but i envision the eve ascent stage as something similar, where i reach some altitude with propellers, then i turn on rockets, then i discard some empty tanks along the way. incidentally, i did try the not!Albatross on Eve, and it can't reach orbit. it couldn't even reach space, despite making it to 8 km on propellers before turning on the rockets with 3000 m/s of deltaV. but then, not!Albatross was quite unstable in the high atmosphere, and it had low thrust. its major selling point was that it could take off from water on propellers alone, and it was plenty of fun on Laythe for this reason, but I had to sacrifice a lot of aerodinamics to make that possible. Also, not!Albatross can't land on eve because it explodes for the heat, which is one of the reasons i'm using the heat resistant Mk2 this time. with this new model i sacrifice water take-off, in exchange for heat and aerodinamic improvements - well, mostly center of mass which was very tilted backwards, it made the whole plane very unstable the eve ascent stage will need working on, though. if i can't make it work, i can make a dedicated lander just for eve, though recycling landers is more elegant. but all this is a long term project on which i'm working saltuarily, my plate is full at the moment

have you considered looking up the kerbalism mod? among other things, it adds radiations, and those panels would indeed protect your rover from solar storms. though moho has a magnetic field that does the job. other places lack it

the qeustion then becomes, if there are quite a bunch of people liking rover and surface exploration, why don't i see more of that in missions and spacecrafts?