king of nowhere

i'm not sure, but i think you have to go in the tracking station, select the unidentified object spotted, and manually click to track it

by the way, there's also something profundly wrong with the way the game counts stress. i have this luxury palace of a spaceship, with gravity rings, hitchhiker containers, greenhouses, cupolas, and twice as much living space as needed, and according to the VAB editor, stress should be under control for 20 years. yet after less than 1 year on mission, everyone in the crew is well above 50%. after 200 days of mission i split a ship from that, and this second ship is nowhere near as luxurious as the first, though still decently comfortable. kerbonauts in that ship has been in space for just as long as the first crew. and yet they have stress between 20 and 30%. and that, they accumulated while they were in the first ship. it's clearly not how things are supposed to work

ok, i did a quick trial. and by quick, i really mean "i can't be bothered to do things properly", and i spent much more than i could have. but i still needed 500 m/s less than your trajectory this is my "probe", very simple. I deactivated commnet to not bother about antennas and planetary occultations. the important part is the vacuum deltaV, 3643 m, to judge how much i spent start: i cheated the probe in ike orbit. from there, without too much hassle i find an intercept with kerbin for less than 700 m/s. that's cheaper than going to duna orbit first. Do notice that it's year 1, day 259: i am well outside of an optimal transfer window. the graph underneath shows that i could save 500 m/s launching at a more favorable time. but i didn't want to wait two years; i had this old save that was mostly empty and had the right time, so i used it. Anyway, I overdid the burn. now i will need a course correction I am waiting until i am in kerbin's SoI to make the course correction, even though it would be better to make course corrections earlier. I spend 60 m/s for it, when i could have gotten away with less than 10. but it was easier doing it this way. I also fix my orbital plane to come in close to minmus plane. This far from a planet, plane changes should really be cheap also notice my periapsis, 45 km. i eyeballed this as a good altitude for aerobraking. my intercept speed is 500 m/s, i will need to lose some of it. remember, if i had launched in a proper transfer window, i wouldn't have to spend so much for capture At periapsis I almost burned up, which means my periapsis was quite good. I aerobraked some 100 m/s, i need to use the rocket to provide the rest 400 m/s of additional burn see me in an elliptic orbit apoapsis is quite right for minmus intercept. i just need a small nudge to get away from kerbin's atmosphere now, since i've done a good job picking my entry trajectory, i only need a very small burn to fix my plane. though you can get to minmus with a wrong orbital plane if needed. minmus is on the opposite side of the orbit, i just need to wait some orbits to catch up here i come close. actually i am a bit late, which is bad. I can delay my craft easily by raising my apoapsis, but i cannot speed it up. now, the proper thing to do would be wait another minmus orbit until i can get a better intercept. or go back one orbit, lower my apoapsis (when apoapsis is so high, you can easily increase/decrease your orbital time by one day with a few m/s), and increase it the next orbit. I didn't want to be bothered, but i could have saved fuel there too So I make a radial burn. You normally want to avoid them, cause they are expensive, but when your orbit is so high and slow, they become quite cheap, and they are convenient ways to grab moons in eccentric orbits. 100 m/s for intercept, 250 for capture. then it's a normal landing landed with 1943 m/s. i started with 3643, so i spend 1700 m/s exactly. and that was on a hasty attempt, outside of an optimal launch window, and making course corrections in a very suboptimal way. I bet it would be possible to do it with less than 1000 m/s for a challenge. I really have no idea what you did wrong to get such a high consumption

you could have optimized much better 1-2 those burns made things a bit easier to plan, but they were absolutely not needed, and indeed they were even detrimental. you gain absolutely nothing on going from ike to high duna orbit, and in fact you lose some obert effect. 3 600 m/s looks just about right for a duna-kerbin intercept 4 huh? this looks completely wrong. you should need very few deltaV to get captured in orbit around kerbin, unless you were coming in from a bad transfer manuever. 5 again, this looks way too much. i am reluctant to try it because the kerbalism mod makes a simple test like that much harder, but maybe i'll give it a try

Ok, so I have this big ship with over 1000 parts, and that may helping the problems. the thing is, it seems some fuel tanks are detached from the ship Here is the ship, minus the docked shuttles while huge, it's nothing particularly strange.. there is a central body, and 4 S4 tanks attached to it, and two of those have another S4 tank. the tanks are attached laterally to each other. Here, though, you see that when you select the top tank, there is no fuel transfer option available. indeed, there is no fuel transfer between that and the rest of the ship. not even if i select the option to ignore crossfeed rules Indeed, after fuel runs out in the top tank, the engines attached to it stop working (they are active and they had been working until a moment ago) reloading back some saves, i discovered this bug was there since ship assembly (EDIT: but when i launched back the central body, it works. it was introduced sometimes during docking of the other subunits).any suggestion on how to fix this?

1) that's the best way to make long burns, because you take advantage of oberth effect. Duna to Kerbin, though, is only a small nudge, so you probably are better off not going for the assist 2) yes. aerobrake as much as you can, again, a duna-kerbin transfer shouldn't have a huge intercept. according to the launch planner, it would be 100 m/s to enter an elliptic orbit around kerbin 3) you can, but no real need. when minmus is generally in the right position, and you are in the high part of your ellipse, make a straight path to minmus. you will be going slowly in the high part of your orbit, so the manuever should be cheap. your plan would still work fine, though In general, you may even spend less than 1050.

Part 5: Landing on the inner Kerbol system In the first leg of this trip, the DREAM BIG settles in orbit around Eve, while the various shuttles are sent to land on Eve, Gilly, Moho. Solar storms are no longer an issue. There were many unplanned obstacles, but everything worked out, barely. This bug with flags is ruining my snapshots 5.1) E unum, pluribus 5.2) Landing in no particular order Gilly landing Eve landing Moho landing

i agree that this game gives too little information. i was very knowledgeable in astrophysics before, and yet i hit several walls upon playing and had to rely on this forum and spam questions for a few weeks to work out stuff that i knew was possible, but i just had no idea how to make in the game. the one mitigating factor they have, though, is that space is so complex that there is no way to convey all the informations needed in a succint manner. and too much information can be even worse than not enough information. already the tutorials give you a ton of information, and there's no way you can remember it all at once. And have you looked at the control interface menu? there are so many options, i'm not even sure what half of those do! i just don't see much chances to fix this game's steep learning curve. no wait, i see one perfectly good way: whenever you have a doubt, go ask some expert. which is basically what the forum is for. but besides having the forum to ask, i see no other way to make the game easier to learn.

I didn't realize it at first, but I actually performed a successful lithobraking! see, i was landing this thing on eve according to the plan, once the chutes are deployed, i would get rid of the thermal shields. the process, however, is hazardous, because those thermal shields float as well as a rocket descending on a chute. they fly around close to the rocket, just fast enough to cause critical damage if they hit (as the rocket must leave eve, any kind of damage is critical). if i survived, i would complete the landing with some rocket braking. i don't want to land on the thermal shields because i am worried about them causing problems when i launch again. but i thought, 18 m/s is not very fast. i can survive, with some cushioning. and here i have 4 large thermal shields that i want to get rid of anyway... with some luck, they will explode and cushion the rest of the ship. i didn't snap pictures of the event. i didn't really think it would work. but hey, it actually did! i lost the shields, and nothing else. so there it is, intentional successful lithobraking. I ended up not needing the engine after all. I also learned that when departing from eve, one should never have some lateral boosters in the first stage. once released, they kept colliding with the main body and destroying the ship. to prevent that, i had to stop the engines and slow down. eve's atmosphere is really a major pain in the ass. if there is a next time (bad planet! I hate you!) I will pile up the second stage directly on top of the first, so there should be no risk for spent tanks to crash into my rocket. also, no matter how attractive the idea of recling looks, i won't ever use the laythe lander as last stage of the eve lander. those lateral tanks on top are intended to provide a wide base for landing at laythe, and they work for the task, but they create a lot of aerodinamic instability while on eve. as for the saving, the laythe stage totals 11 tons, and it's bigger than needed for eve. i could use a smaller stage for eve, and it would let me save much more than that in the total mass of the lander.

Orbiting Moho, I am well outside of its radiation belt, yet I still find myself exposed to radiations as you can see from the orbit, i am staying clear of the belt, and well inside the magnetosphere to protect myself from storms. I even have an active shield on board, which is doing its duty. According to the data given, i should be exposed to 2 mrad/h, which the active shield should remove entirely. instead I am taking 128, which the shield is reducing to 88, whenever i am not in shade. Why? where is this radiation coming from? why is it not listed anywhere?

yeah, ok, but then it's no longer being used as a spaceplane. you get no advantage over a regular rocket, and a lot of useless mass

actually, having 2 pilot does help in some situations, because if you have them, you can control a probe that has no direct connection to the ksc but that is connected to your ship. say for example you are orbiting tylo with your manned ship, and you don't have a signal back to kerbin, but you have two pilots on board; with those, you can keep full control of, for example, a lander on tylo. but aside from this very niche situation, no, it does not give benefits. even for this special case, i'm not sure if it is normal or if it is something specific to the kerbalism mod

a spaceplane won't work without atmosphere, so don't try one of those on mun To show how to solve the verticailty problem, I will shamelessly plug some of my designs for how to do those things. first, this is a very simple rover do notice that it has a terrier on the bottom. basically, this is a lander with wheels in place of landing legs. this little thing doesn't look like much, but it can land and take off from duna this is a more elaborate rover. it also lands and take off on its own power; do notice the rockets attached to hinges to point in several directions, i don't recommend that specific design unless you have good reasons for it though. finally, those are proof of concept for a modular duna base. Do notice the rocket placement; in this case the rocket is indeed at the bottom, but the wheels are sturdy enough that you can land with the rear, then fall on the ground the last few meters without breaking anything. then the engine is jettisoned. see how the modules can then be moved around (something necessary, very few people have the precision required to land the modules exactly where they need to be) and used to assemble the base. To deal with the inevitable small differences in docking port height, i finely tuned the spring values on the suspensions. oh, in case you are wondering how to attach things laterally, the spaceplane hangar uses a lateral simmetry and it is more suited to make rovers. in general i switch from one to the other depending on where i need to attach the next piece You can also make a very small rocket with a sample container and send it back while the rover stays. With a sample container, a hecs probe core, a oscarB tank, and a couple ant engines, you can make a vehicle that's perfectly capable of bringing back science from the mun or minmus. you don't even need parachutes, you rocket brake and it saves some weight on a thing that small.

that's because of the additional weight on it, caused by eve's gravity. not sure if more wheels would fix it, though

On the other hand, "stick a pen in the comman panel" is not a valid option in ksp, while it did work in real life, so real life still gets the cake

thanks. the mighty kraken will be appeased by your offer dude, please don't mention that! there are italians on this forum that could remain thraumatized

when i saw the date on the first post and the necromancy i thought, this guy is already done with his community kids, he's not going to need ksp any longer, he probably forgot about it all completely. instead, you are still playing ksp. i wonder if by now there are also some more of your other kids here

I have never seen those markers, ever. in the navball, if i manually activated a target, but never otherwise. so, it's not much about disabling them, but figuring out what you did to activate them.

I can't be bothered to learn take off and landings properly. I find doing them slowly and safely too boring and not entertaining enough, so I always push things to the limit. And I crash often enough. I don't even conceive the idea of playing without saving the game often. I grossly overestimate what I can do with my deltaV budget. I also tend to be overly optimistic regarding deltaV savings on manuevers, aerobraking, gravity assists. And time spent. I am successful at managing such an economy just often enough that it reinforces the belief for all the other times when I cannot. I tend to put huge, heavy, superfluous things for the art, like extra labs or additional crew cabins. then I get all stingy trying to reduce mass for amenities like landing legs, ladders, attitude control, thrust, parachutes and thermal shields (those, i generally skip entirely). I hate spaceplanes. Yet I spent a lot of time designing them (i had a mission that needed a spaceplane design, unfortunately). I hate Dres, and I especially hate driving rovers on Dres. Yet I brough a rover to Dres on at least two separate occasions (then again, at least the first is justified because how would I learn that Dres is bad for rovers until I actually bring one there?)

It would be a good idea to take pictures of your ship when there is some ambient illumination. All I can see is a black screen with a blue exhaust on the bottom.

Part 4: Dream even bigger Brute force solves all problems. If you're failing to solve a problem with brute force, you're not using enough of it. Here I attempt to tackle the radiation problem by adding some 1200 tons and 150 parts to a ship that was already ludicrously big to start with, besides fixing several minor inconveniences. In the end, the new, improved DREAM BIG is ready for its voyage (again)

no different than how you get anything else. basically, strap some wheels on your lander and you have a rover. or, rather, build your space station module, attach a rocket to it (possibly in a sky crane fashion if you want to get rid of it later) and some wheels, and land it on the mun just like a regular lander.

and anyway it's 2.5 power per active shield, not 4. also, i checked the hitchhiker container, and it says nothing about tv or sick bay. it only mentions a threadmill

for the energy cost, I have 64 gigantors on the main ship alone. plus 4 fuel cells packs. plus additional fuel cells on all the shuttles. and I can shut down the greenhouses during the storms, and I only need to keep it up for a couple hours. perhaps i won't be able to sustain the shield around jool, but i will definitely be able to keep it up at least until dres. And then it will still cover me most of the way towards jool. only close to jool i may have to shut down a few of the units after a while, in which case the shield is still helping. and at jool i'll be proctected by the magnetosphere for the hitchicker, i have them, and i haven't seen any effect from them. i had one kerbal inside one of those, and i didn't notice anything different. also, greenhsouses should give bonus to morale with plants, but they don't. the game is still telling me i have no plants. so, not everything in the mod is flawless. it may be the mod malfunctioning. as for stress, i have 12 kerbonauts, so I am looking at 12 accidents. of those, more than half will be fixable. and aside from a critical failure of the engine of the FU Eve lander, there is absolutely nothing that will hinder me. i have 32 greenhouses, each one of them has pressure control, and a good dozen other habitats, each with life support, and all the shuttles with 2 to 4 redundant life supports. I have 64 solar panels. The new version has 22 engines (and if i somehow were to lose them all, i could couple a Digger in front and use its engines to push). I can take some pieces breaking. especially because, unless the hitchhiker somehow works, there's no way i can avoid it.

Do astronauts not get stressed if they are on the ground, even another planet? I don't know those fine nuances of kerbalism. anyway, cyclers won't help me with radiations. and finding a proper orbit for them would be a nightmare. and i'm not even sure how well they would survive space. i built enough redundancies on the DREAM BIG that i am confident it will last decades. but if i make cyclers, either i make each one of those as big and complex as the DREAM BIG, or i risk them breaking up after a while does turning a ship really helps against radiation? again, those fine nuances aren't written anywhere. since you guys seem to know stuff, i take the chance to ask: do anything drastic happens when stress reaches 100%? because if the only problem is some extra stuff breaking up, i may be able to make it. as for reducing the frequency of flares - and indeed, they are too frequent - it still would feel like watering down the challenge. anyway, i decided to tackle the radiation problem by brute force. a solar storm is on average 5 rad/h. an active shield prevents 0.04 rad/h. so some 120 active shields would negate a solar storm completely. they weight 300 tons, but I figured my ship was already 3600 tons, it wouldn't matter all that much.