king of nowhere

depends, really. if you are an experienced player, and you are mining your own fuel, then a jool 5 is nothing special. land on each moon, restock on fuel, move on. it becomes difficult if you add objectives. if you want to do it without carrying any mining equipment, only with the starting fuel, then it becomes harder, because you have to carry a lot more. as a rule of thumb for deltaV: - LKO to jool, 2000 m/s. You can save some with gravity assists, but it always results in convoluted trajectories and very long travel time. - jool intercept: free. you can get captured in the jool system by a gravity assist from either Laythe or Tylo, and it's easy and doesn't cost anything. - getting captured by any joolian moon: roughly 200 m/s of intercept speed. I suggest you start with Tylo: you need a big heavy lander for it (unless you take the minimalistic approach, but i prefer to use actual spacecrafts), if you start at tylo youi don't have to drag the heavy lander through the rest of the system - tylo: 800 m/s from capture to circularization. To leave tylo, you need the same 800 m/s, but after you leave tylo's SoI you can reach any other moon with no extra cost. So, 800 to get in, 800 to get out - Laythe: if you perform correctly the burn from tylo, you can have a negligible insertion deltaV. Laythe's atmosphere is not good for aerobraking, but you can aerobrake gradually, so you can reach a circular laythe orbit almost for free. leaving laythe is 600 m/s, again once you're out of the SoI you can reach vall for no extra cost - Vall: roughly 400 m/s for capture and circularization. - Vall-Bop: roughly 1000 m/s Bop-pol: roughly 1000 more m/s so, to sum it up: - 2000 from kerbin to jool - 1000 from jool intercept to low tylo orbit (drop tylo lander) - 800 from low tylo to low laythe (drop laythe lander) - 1000 from low laythe to low vall (drop lander) - 1000 from low vall to low bop (drop lander) - 1000 from low bop to low pol (drop lander) - 1000/1500 to return from pol to kerbin of course, you don't have to orbit all of those bodies with the mothership.

so, in the pic i see the "transfer crew" option, as expected. can't see the problem there. did you check that there is room for extra crew? did you try reloading the game?

if you return normally from low kerbin orbit, you should not burn any regular part. especially if you go engine-first. what parts are you using in your rocket? i believe the most likely explanation is that some parts of your rocket are heat sensitive.

You can move the ship around in the VAB, so you can center the bit you're working in and exclude the rest. I've been doing it for several 7000-ton ships, and i know for a fact someone built a bridge over the dres canyon with a ship 4 km long

I never considered trying to actually fly something in Duna's atmosphere, but I may give it a shot eventually. I never got the hang of actually landing an helicopter. i can't make it land without either crashing, or going up again. And after a while, I stopped making helicopters in favor of propeller planes; those, I can land

it produces more resources, it also consumes more resources. 6 sabatiers will run the sabatier process 6 times faster than 1 sabatier, that's it

what you are going to try is called a Jool 5, and it's one of the most iconic challenges in the game. The link goes to the related forum thread, there are dozens of submissions from various people. you can look at all kinds of designs if you are facing a creative block.

well, yes. they also changed the brick-o-sphere to a soup-o-sphere to a passably realistic aerodinamic model - though airplane enthusiasts will debate that. they made Isp dependent on pressure, just like it is in reality. and no, in reality you cannot run an airplane with an ion engine. and they also have fixed a few kraken drives, though a few others still work. If that broke some of your favourite toys, get on with it. Accusing people of "not understanding what deltaV is" is not helping your case.

when you right click on the fin, there should be a menu where it says to which controls are tied - including pitch, yaw, roll. so you can deactivate those and it should work. also, you may want to use a more informative thread title in the future

good job on self-improving. I remember when i had troubles docking. Now my most difficult docking has been in a kerbin hyperbolic escape trajectory, between a ship coming from Jool and directed to a series of gravity assist to eventually reach Duna, and another ship coming from Eeloo on a fast high energy trajectory, bound to escape the kerbol system altogether unless stopped. There were 3000 m/s of speed difference between the ships, and the small one - the one that could actually make the manuever - was running on low thrust ion engines, so it needed to start manuevering hours before.

Part 3: Feeding Nail to the kraken Before even leaving low Kerbin orbit, Nail is struck by a crippling kraken attack. The engine pack must be scrapped, and the ship rebuilt without ion engines This screenshot shows the engines throttled up, and active, and with plenty of xenon and electricity, yet not working 3.1) Did you get your tinfoil hat? 3.2) The kraken strikes again

Part 2: Assembling Nail The various components of Nail are launched and assembled 2.1) Launching Eve sucks 2.2) Launching the habitation module 2.3) launching the Tylo descent stage, plus a bunch of rovers 2.4) Launching the engine pack 2.5) Launching the rover base, probes, and various leftover. Assembly complete

actually, you can do it. unless the xbox version uses completely different algorithms, which i don't belive is the case. you enter mun SoI, then you make a new manuever node behind the mun, which you leave without any actual manuever. it will show the further prediction of your path, and changing the first manuever node is also going to reflect on this second one. actually, there are problems when you actually make the burn, because then the manuever node stays and keep thinking you are coming along on that exact predicted pathway. so, after you actually perform your first manuever, you have to delete the planned path and plan it again. expect to need some course correction, gravity assists always do for precision. A well-performed mun assist can save you 50-100 m/s on your way out, whatever is your destination.

there is an option you have to check when starting the sandbox: not really sure how it is in english, but it means "all parts upgrades are applied in sandbox mode" if you didn't check this option when starting the game, i'm afraid there is no workaround. alternatively, you can start in science mode, edit the file to give you a few tens of thousand science points, and tech everything manually.

i have explored Bop a bit, but I'm not aware of any real cliff. just a lot of up and down on that planet, and too little gravity to run a rover practically. The moon has two cool canyons, and both are pretty good racing circuits for rovers. Their sides are roughly 1 km high, maybe 2 in some points. As far as I know, those are the highest cliffs on the Mun, though not the steepest - there are some real killer ones in some of the craters near the poles. I forgot the mohole, yeah, that's impressive. But not really a cliff. Tylo has really high mountains, but despite driving half its circumference, i never found a spot that would strike me for its panorama. Duna and Ike have high mountains, but i never spent much time on either.

My previous kerbalism grand tour mission (Lucy in the sky with deadly radiations; incidentally, I will refer to that mission a lot, as this mission is its spiritual successor, and most of my design was directly influenced by that experience) wasn't yet done, and I was already looking for the next step. Ok, I made a grand tour with kerbalism, though I did allow some slightly relaxed rules for isru. What next? What could I do for a greater challenge? First thing to mind was to do a similar grand tour, without relaxed isru. Now, normal kerbalism isru is practically unmanageable. Except for duna, everywhere else it takes a large convert-o-tron and 100 electricity/second to produce 10 kg of fuel in a whole day. And in the meanwhile, your crew is still going to get stress and randomly smash components. The weight constraints of all that equipment make this virtually unmanageable. Still, I would like to try that some day, either by designing a ship that can keep together for a few decades while it refuels, or by designing a mission that's supposed to only refuel at Duna - well, my previous mission was supposed to only refuel at Duna, but it used separate shuttles to reach Moho, Dres and Eeloo. I took a shortcut there. I would like to orbit every planet with my mothership. And using the full kerbalism rules for mining at Duna is still going to be a major bother. But I don't feel ready for that mission. It's going to take a lot more adaptation for long term missions. I must also check if the resources needed are actually available; in particular water and nitrogen are very hard to find. The second idea was spurred by the success of the Dolphin return vehicle. 15 km/s of deltaV on ions, supplies for 3 kerbals for 3 years - those could be stretched easily, food is light - it returned from Eeloo in less than one year and it did drive a small lander on the moons of Kerbin. So I thought, hey, I could make a mission based on that! Instead of a huge gigantic spaceship with greenhouses and mining rigs, a small compact mission for a minimalistic grand tour. No more greenhouses, just a few tons of packed food. No more giant solar array, just a handful of rtg. no more 400-ton radiation shield, just a fuel tank to provide shade. Ion engines and a few small landers. And while I am there, I can run a geological survey and check if there are water and nitrogen in the right places for the next mission. Part 0: How the mission is planned 0.1) Picking up additional challenges Part 1: Projecting Nail To survive radiation storms, I must have the habitats shaded by something else. As I learned in the previous mission, it doesn't have to be all that big, but it has to cover everything. As I want to stick to a simple design, the plan calls for a thin, narrow, long ship, that can be covered by a single S4 fuel tank. No laterally attached crafts or habitats. The name of Nail reflects this simple shape, as well as how this mission is much more unassuming in design than its predecessor I also grew fond of the idea of a fully modular spaceship, where I would be able to rearrange around the various building blocks. I built with that criteria. 1.1) Habitation module 1.2) Engine module 1.3) Eve sucks Eve lander 1.4) Rover/lander platform (name to be determined) 1.5) Disposable planes 1.6) Tylo descent stage And that's all. No mining rig, no Moho stage, no escape capsules. I have a lot of objectives, but still I aim for a simple design.

oh, finally i can understand what you were asking. and the answer is simple: planets in ksp are smaller. they decided that full realism would be too time-intensive, with a single orbital launch taking many tens of minutes. there are mods to restore that, but most people would prefer to do things faster. so, they decided that the whole system would be 1/10th of real size. Kerbin has 600 km radius while earth has a bit more than 6000. in real life, 600 km radius would be barely enough for a rocky object to have a round shape. Kerbin orbits the sun at 13.4 million km, the earth is at 160 million km. everything in ksp is smaller, so that travel times are shorter. this, however, also reduces fuel consumption. it takes 11 km/s of deltaV to reach earth orbit. it takes 3.5 km/s to orbit kerbin. the requirements for interplanetary trips are also similarly smaller. so, what they did was nerf engines and fuel. real life engines are lighter and give more thrust than ksp engines. ksp fuel tanks have more dry mass than real life fuel tanks. all this to ensure that the rockets required to do stuff in ksp would be somewhat realistic. now, i'm not familiar with jet engines because that's a part of the game i don't use. but it makes sense that they would have lower efficiency. on earth, a range of 4000 km is a medium range international trip. if you're in the usa, it's maybe enough for a coast-to-coast. in ksp, it's enough for a full circumnavigation of the planet. i'm not even sure you can circumnavigate the earth at the equator with a jet plane without refueling. on ksp you can. in ksp, you can make an ssto easily. in real life, you cannot - technically you could, but not without any sizeable payload. so, fuel is actually more efficient in ksp than it is in real life; the numbers are a bit lower, but the requirements are much lower. oh, ninja'ed by @jimmymcgoochie

I just visited the highest mountain of Eve (25 S, 158.5 W); while most mountains in this game are really just lumps of random elevation that just happen to be a bit higher than other places, this one is actually impressive the mountain is 7536 m high (by the way, the wiki says the highest point on eve is 7525), and its north cliff reaches down all the way to the sea. A 7500 m drop in a very short space. going down there with a rover would be quite the experience. all that section of coast is impressive. there is also the south pole of eve, it's much smaller, but poles tend to have crazy terrain - and glitches. anyway, this has a 1.5 km practically vertical drop the south pole of vall also has a majestic mountain chain; long, thin, with very steep walls. i named it the mohawk range, because it looks like a mohawk crest on the planet. the top is 7500 m, the plains at the base of the mountain are some 5000 m lower. vall has several ravines, none of the others are so dramatic as this one, though. Do you know of any bigger cliffs? not just a big mountain, but something that looks like a mountain, with steep sides and a lot of verticality. Post pictures and places here

yes, exactly. unfortunately it also introduces some bugs, sometimes you can't time warp at all, sometimes your engines shut off even though they have plenty of fuel. My penchant for huge mothership doesn't help either For those kind of missions, i started to set up solar panes on trusses, so i can distance them more from the body of the spacecraft and they can all be exposed 100%. The Dream Big, my former mothership for that, had 64 gigantors exposed all the time, which could increase to 112 if i attached the shuttles in the right way. Of course, the Dream Big was 1500-4500 tons, i wouldn't try to use ionic propulsion for that. I needed all that energy to run greenhouses and feed my crew of 12. For smaller ships, i use EVA construction to move around the solar panels, so whichever direction i have to point to do the burn, i can still get full power out of all of them. fuel cells are a legitimate alternative. someone calculated that the fuel cell/ion engine system has Isp 1337, so still better than nuclear. the downside is that you still get the low thrust of ions. renewable power sources can't do much at eeloo in any case. the number of rtg it would take to feed ion engines would be unacceptably heavy after a while. But as i said, at eeloo your orbits are slow, so you can afford long burns. my 6 day burn went all right. you just need a persistent thrust mod. i uninstalled it for the bugs it was causing, but i still have it stashed on my hard disk, to reinstall for such an eventuality

I found the eve green monolith close to the south pole, and since i was there, i decided to check on it and see if it was any good. turns out there is this cliff that only exhist when seen on one side. so, i named it schroedinger's cliff there is also a floating boulder the scenery itself is quite dramatic. the south pole is a narrow cliff directly facing the sea. there is a 1500 m vertical drop there, in what must be one of the steepest places in the whole system next i tried to drive my plane through the cliff; it went in from the invisible side, but it exploded upon exiting on the other side. but i was able to find a way in at the base of the cliff it's like a door to the netherworld. i could move around as much as i wanted once inside, but for some reason i was slower than on the outside. i spent a few minutes there before going out again and resuming the mission.

well, here it is. but it's nothing fancy. just something i made to be cheap, to fit within a 30 parts limit in a challenge, and to be reusable on tylo afterwards. most of the cost was science instruments. the solar panels are retracted inside the cargo bay during ascent. well, there's those guys who compete for lowest mass to do anything, and they do entire missions on nothing but external seats.... well, those srb look like thumpers. 250 KN, 7.6 tons. for a similar weight you could use a reliant + FL-T800 fuel tank, it saves a couple of tons, it has the same thrust (actually a bit less, but compensated by being lighter), and it should burn longer. i can't make experiments right now, but as a rule of thumb liquid fuel is more efficient than solid fuel; solid fuel's advantage is that there is virtually no cost for the engine, while engines are the most expensive parts of a liquid fuel rocket

well, of course the mission is possible. you need to get the right gravity assist from duna to get into an eve intercept trajectory. now, the basics of gravity assists is that if you pass in front of the planet you decelerate, and if you pass behind the planet you accelerate. so, to get to eve, you want to lower your solar periapsis, you need to decelerate, you definitely want to pass in front of duna. to reach eve at the first orbit, though, requires special planetary alignment, and i'm not sure how much you'd have to wait for a chance like that

depends on what you're aiming at, really. my ssto laythe orbiter was around 13 tons, but it only had 1 passenger. there's people doing it with much less with a last stage consisting of a baguette tank, an external seat, and a single ant engine. i have to say, if you are looking for efficient, then those solid fuel boosters are not. solid fuel boosters are cost-efficient, but they are not weight efficient, and carring them all the way to laythe is not the best strategy. they only work well in the first stage from kerbin because then nothing has to lift them

no, those are liquid fuel fuselages, they hold only liquid fuel. there is also at least one mod that lets you store any fuel you choose in any tank, and it would be advantageous because those Mk3 fuselages have a fuel/weight ratio of 7 instead of 8 of the normal tanks. but i don't want to install any more mods than strictly necessary. at eeloo and jool a gigantor makes less than 1 electricity/second. it's real hard to use ions on a large ship. on the plus side, orbits are so slow, you can afford to have slow burns. i had a 6-days long burn on my return pod from eeloo, and it had 6 gigantors on a 15 ton ship (i.e. 10% of its total weight was solar panels). but the burn was efficient anyway. however, i'd nt be so crazy to try that long burn without the persistent thrust or a similar mod

3 years for a one-way trip, give or take. but it's just 5 minutes time warping, with a course correction halfway