king of nowhere

problem disappeared a few days later, just as mysteriously as it appeared. if what you say works for all, it is possible that after i got tired of building the spaceplace, i got back to the other flights, i untagged unbreakable, and this may have reverted the bug.

i checked, they are not. closing and reopening the cargo bay also does not work. i found out, though, that closing the bay, saving the game and reloading it, that works. not ideal, as reloading a game with the airplane in midair will make it lose some momentum but, lacking anything better, it can be dealt with. my purpose is to invent an eve ssto. if i just wanted to use one, i'd go on kerbalx and look for it. if i was doing this for a job, that would be the best solution, but in this case "fun" requires me to figure stuff out.

actually, once you get past a few minutes, the lenght of the burn is indifferent. 5 minutes, 20, 3 hours, in any case you are not going to stay there all the time watching it. you set your attitude control to hold the direction (without those advanced probe cores, i would never try it), you press alt-tab, and you do something else while the game runs in background. in my case, i wanted to make a solar probe to reach the inner solar atmosphere, for that i needed 8 km/s of deltaV (actually i managed to save some withh an eve gravity assist), and once i was there i needed at least the 1.5 ton inflatable heat shield as payload, plus all the science instruments. ion propulsion was the only practical alternative to making a ridiculously huge rocket.

when i started this game i did the same. unfortunately, there's no other way to learn. the first times i was using the jetpacks, i didn't knew i could go up and down with shift and ctrl. mentioning it in case you also missed it.

my rover has 4 terrier engines attached on G-01L alligator hinges that it can point downwards to fly. two of them are further mounter on G-00 hinges that can turn them backwards, to help push the rover on steep slopes. I also made an add-on to land on tylo that has 4 additional terriers on 1P4 telescopic pistons. so, yes, they work, though there is some shaking. i can get away with it because the terrier is a fairly low powered engine. i certainly could not do it with a vector or mainsail.

yeah, i'm going to install those mods as soon as i finish squeezing what few objectives i miss. and even with those, it's still easy compared to reality. personally, it makes me appreciate more how difficult is space exploration. i did. still, they create lots of problems. i never cared much for aerodinamics, until i tried to make things fly on eve.

i tried putting the propellers of my space plane inside cargo bays so that when i close the cargo bay, they would not screw up aerodynamics. i've seen it done on a youtube video, and while i feel bad copying ideas, my eve ssto project was going nowhere and i decided to make an exception. except, it does not stop aerodynamics from affecting my propellers. aerodinamic overlay shows no difference with closing the cargo bays experimenting with it, i confirmed the lack of difference by flying with the cargo bays closed. it keeps flying, propelled by the propellers https://imgur.com/ja85Sjz i discovered that the way to keep aerodinamics out of the cargo bay is to keep it closed before starting. in this last experiment, i closed the cargo bays before moving the plane, then i used rocket propulsion. the cargo bay, is, correctly, isolated from aerodinamic disturbances https://imgur.com/tU2804y unfortunately, this does not solve my issue, as i need to use both the propellers and the rockets in the same flight. is this a bug? what can i do about it?

my longest burn had been 3 hours. if i recall correctly, i spent most of that reading a book

a common misconception. sulfuric acid does not get anywhere close to the surface, because it has a boiling point somewhere above 300 °C, which is well below the surface temperature. there is some sulfuric acid rain in the high atmosphere, but any droplet evaporates again much before reaching the surface. that means there's still sulfuric acid vapors all along, though. still, in the list of reasons venus is awfully hard to explore, sulfuric acid rain doesn't come near the top ten.

i have no ideas for a solution, but i can say that i also had things that always worked suddenly stop working. like a docking port connected to a robotic arm that always connected nicely, until at some point it caused bugs every single time it attached. or a plane that flew straight, then i try it again one week later and it tilt to the side almost immediately. actually, i have a suggestion: reinstall the game. this game sometimes pick up glitches, and some of them can be fixed this way. my docking port bug got fixed like this. my plane, unfortunately, not.

make sure that the order of decoupling is set up properly in the VAB. often i make a craft perfectly calibrated, then i decide to add one piece, and that piece always get shuffled in the wrong place, and can cause funny moments if i don't remember to fix it.

making an electric plane or helicopter that can fly on eve is not too difficult. it took me several weeks to manage one, but mostly because i had no experience with atmospheric flight. reaching orbit as ssto, though, is extremely difficult. turns out, just because i can reach 20 km of height with propellers and have 3500 m/s of rocket fuel, that's still a far cry from getting to orbit. atmosphere is still dense enough to give problems up to 50 km, and the propellers are now causing huge aerodinamic problems. and 3.5 km/s are not enough to reach orbit. and of course i can't load more fuel without needing more propellers, which would be heavier, negating the advantage of more fuel. the worst thing, though, is that now i'm facing a lot of problems i'm sure are glitches. i'm sure of that because previous models, which i tested many times and had good atmospheric flight, are also suddenly giving problems. i've seen a youtube video of a guy who made it with a plane, it got to 15 km with propellers, then it had 3.5 km/s with rockets, and it finished circularizing with nuclear engines. still, he had almost no payload (it's one of the first result if you search "ksp eve ssto"). on the other hand, if you don't need to make an ssto, then using propeller power is a good alternative to a first stage. in fact, it's probably cheaper and lighter to lift up to 15-20 km that way than with a rocket, then detach that first stage and have two more rocket stages. Still not easy, but if one has good knowledge on how to make an helicopter in this game, it's not too complicated either. also, making a small helicopter as rover for eve is not difficult. i managed one within a week, while it took me three weeks to make my big rocket fly with helicopter propellers, and one more week to accept that the design would never get close to reaching orbital speed. finally, a little precisation, atmospheric pressure on eve at 20 km is a bit less than 0.5 atmospheres. 1 atmosphere is a bit above 14 km. still, as i said, the atmosphere is dense enough to give problems all the way to 50 km.

about 100 i haven't modified them. ease to ground is active, and ease multiplier is 0.1 i have no idea what hyperedit would be

now with indestructibility i am again able to drop planes on eve. no idea why it stopped working, and why it started working again. i tested it, again, on the very same models, and i changed nothing in between.

incidentally, with those cheats active, after taking off i managed to fly a bit before crashing on a hill, and i took no damage there. i only take damage when i am dropped on eve surface. makes no sense.

nope if that was the case, why my earlier models had never, ever crashed when dropped on eve, and suddenly they started exploding too? same model, same altitude, same exact location, nothing changed whatsoever. one week ago it just settled on the ground, now it loses pieces. that's why i'm sure it's a bug of some sort

i tried that on and off. anyway, with cheats on, things should not break in the first place. yes. i tried also the other autostrut options. perhaps you misunderstood, i did not "land" normally after a flight. i was testing the plane, so i was using cheats to pop it on eve surface. i drop it at 4 meters of elevation. if i pop it at 3 meters, it sticks into the ground, so the plane starts from immobile at less than 1 meter from the ground, with physical facilitation (i tried deactivating that too). without facilitation, doing some quick calculation (s=0.5*a*t^2, with s=1 m of free fall, and V=a*t) the vehicle should touch the ground at 4 m/s. there should be nothing that can break at that speed. and physical faciliatation makes it float down slowly and land even more gently.

good try, i learned a new way to place parts. but not working. i placed them attached to the central body and i moved them so they look like they are under the wings. i made a try with rigid attachment, and it exploded. it said structural failure in the connection between the landing gear and the fuel tank. then i made another try without rigid attchment, this time the message said the landing gear crashed into the wing EDIT: i decided to activate "no collision damage" from the cheat menu, and when the plane hit the ground, a wing detached. it was autostrutted. EDIT: i also checked unbreakable joints, and it worked. what the hell. i've been flying for a week planes bigger and heavier than that. EDIT2: after a few working attempts, now even with unbreakable joints and no damage, the plane disassembles as soon as it touches the ground of eve, after being dropped by 4 meters. it really is a crazy bug.

tl:dr airplane wheels are supposed to be able to take strong impact, yet suddenly my airplanes are destroied by very mild landings. i'm fairly sure it's some kind of bug let's go from the start. i'm trying to make an eve spaceplane. to test it, i found a place that's fairly flat, so i can use the cheat to drop the plane there from a low altitude and experiment takeoff. i've been doing this for a while now. the planes are fairly big, at around 200 tons, because they must also have fuel for orbiting. i use several big-S delta wings. the wheels are LY-60, though i experimented with other models. i attach the wheels to NCS adapters on the wings, but i also tried attaching them to the wings themselves. i've been doing this for a while, dropping the planes at the chosen spot from 5 meters of altitude, then accelerating and taking off. some worked, some didn't, but i never had any problem with the drop-off part. i could drop them from 10 meters too, and they'd still stay in one piece. the latest model exploded when i dropped it on eve. i even tried lowering the altitude to 3.5 meters (less than that it sticks into the ground), and still it explodes, from a very small bounce. i tried several different configurations of autostrutting and fixed attachment, i tried to attach the hweels and wings in different ways, it always explodes when i drop it. i couldn't figure out what was wrong with my new model, until i had a realization, and i made a test with one of the older models. the ones that i tried and tested over and over and have always worked (well, except that they failed to reach orbit on powered flight, hence why i'm trying new models. but they never exploded on being dropped off on eve surface, and they can even take off and fly well). and they exploded too. this looks to me like some kind of bug. the game behaved one way until a few days ago, until suddenly it behaved differently. i also had a similar bug with docking ports attached to robotic parts, where they always worked in the past, until at some point they always crashed. today i tried reinstalling the game. the docking port bug disappeared, so reinstalling at least worked there. but my planes keep exploding as i drop them on eve. and yes, physical facilitation is active during the drop. i don't know what to do to try and fix this. onnly thing i can think off is to active the "indestructibility" cheat, but that seems a bit extreme

there is no reason you can't explore the planets in a different order than what the game suggests. @jimmymcgoochie gives some good reasons why eve is a good target for your first interplanetary missions. on the downside, eve is also rather difficult to land; i never needed a heat shield while landing on kerbin, but i definitely need one - or rocket braking - for eve. and it is, by far, the most difficult planet to get away from. not only it has a huge gravity, its dense atmosphere make rockets ineffective in it. so, while orbiting eve, and sending some disposable landers, is an easy target, bringing back something from eve surface is one of the most difficult achievements in the game. for that, you should definitely go to duna first

yes and no. by default they cannot be used to refuel, but they can be enabled. if i got it correctly, you are not supposed to use claws for refueling and it is considered a mild cheat by most.

[snip] now, if your point is that this game has a very steep learning curve and the tutorials are inadequate, i fully agree. there are so many things that are not clear to anyone who is not already an experienced player. making sure your ship has enough deltaV for an interplanetary mission, that its solar panels/cooling are adequate for the place it's going, that its rockets have the right TWR for the new environment, and in all this, the slightest mistake can cause the rocket to malfunction and make the mission fail. but in all those difficulties, finding a hohmann transfer window is one of the easiest to overcome. unless you are going for moho or eeloo, that have very small SoI and you have to manuever carefully to find them. furthermore, people who have an interest for space - as i assume would anyone who keeps playing this game long enough to get out of kerbin SoI - are generally knowledgeable enough to either know the basics of transfer windows, or to be able to get the concept from wikipedia. which is not the case for evetything else.

nah, figuring out a hohmann transfer is not difficult. simulate your prograde burn with a manuever node until your orbit intersects that of the other planet. this will tell you the position of the other planet when your ship would be there. if it's not in the rigth place, you just have to wait for the planets to align, taking into account that the inner planet moves faster. for example, i was trying to go to jool, i simulated the manuever node, and i saw that that i would end up behind jool. so i had to wait for kerbin to catch up, i figured the launch window would be in the near future. on the other hand, i got the same for an eve launch, but since eve moves faster than kerbin, it would mean eve needed to go all the way around the sun before a launch window would happen. by the way, what you describe as entering solar orbit and then making a prograde burn is horribly inefficient. you lose all oberth effect.

slow down the flow of consciousness, your post would be much more readable with a few dots and commas. so, if i get it right, you have a ship stuck to the surface of duna without enough fuel to come back, and you want to send a rover to refuel it. i assume you have docking ports on your ship, by the way, as those are needed for refueling. in fact, the first, most difficult part about doing a refuleling by rover is that you must be able to match the docking ports. in space that's no problem because the ships can turn around, but on the ground, if you put the ports at different elevations, or different inclinations, there's no way you can dock. for this reason, if you have the breaking ground expansion, i suggest putting the docking port on top of some robotic parts that can move it up and down. you can skip the problem using the claw, but it does not allow refueling normally. that said, making a rover is not difficult, as you can do what you do for rockets. what i suggest for a simple mining rover is the following - go in the spaceplane hangar - put a fuel tank, a convert-o-tron, and another fuel tank behind it, so the convert-o-tron is between the two tanks - place a pair of ruggedized wheels on each fuel tank, using mirror simmetry - place a command module on one end of the thing you built, some batteries, an antenna. sprinkle some solar panels on top, and a couple radiators. reaction wheels if they aren't already included in the command module. - put a drill on the same end - put a rocket on the other end of the rocket. it must be powerful enough to lift it in duna's atmosphere. - put a parachute on top of the rover, on the opposite side of the rocket. - put your docking port somewhere that will allow you to resupply your craft. now you just need to launch it into orbit. since it already needs a fuel tank to act as refueler, and it needs rockets to land on duna, you may as well use those rockets also for interplanetary travel. you don't need anything else. when landing on duna, your parachute will deploy and slow you down, and if you placed it correctly, it will also point your rocket backwards at an angle. fire it to slow down your descent, then you should land with the rear wheels first, and fall down upright. try to land not too far from your other ship, driving a few km on th surface is no problem but crossing the whole planet is another endeavor entirely. of ncourse you can do a much better rover than this. i just suggested the simplest thing that could work

if by "alternative to rover" you mean something moving without wheels, then i have no submissions. but maybe a big fuel tank on wheels with rockets on robotic parts that can be pointed downwards to reach other planets, or backwards to go faster - ur just up steep slopes - is enough to count as "better than a rover". and pehaps having landing struts strapped on the top and sides to survive crashing around at high speed makes it more kerbal. and having a cupola module as driving place to use it in first person perspective can make it more funny. if those traits are enough to qualify, I submit my dancing porcupine rover. i've certainly never seen another rover that can accomplish successfully so many different tasks