Jose Tortola

Reported Version: v0.2.1 (latest) | Mods: none | Can replicate without mods? Yes OS: Windows 11 | CPU: Ryzen 9 5900X | GPU: NVIDIA RTX 3090 | RAM: 32Gb Title: As the post's title hints, thermal shield HS-I does not shields against thermals on reentry. Severity: med. Frequency: high. It has happened to me in two out of two re-entries while playing today, one on Eve and one on Kerbin. Description: After building a rocket with more than 8450 dV and weighing about 300 tons (fully loaded) and getting it to Eve's orbit, when trying to aerobraking to slow down the orbital velocity (quasi-circular orbit of about 110km Ap and Pe) and landing, the rocket, protected with two inflated HS-I heat shields, is destroyed due to the failure of the HS-I heat shield itself by overheating. I've never tried it before today, so before guessing if it's related to the heat modification on re-entry from the last patch, I decide to test if it was simply a kracken attack. So I try to repeat it but having the same rocket try to re-enter Kerbin from a quasi-circular orbit of about 120km altitude. In this case the inflatable heat shield did not fail, but it did show the visual warning of overheating. I took the attached screenshot of the moment (I didn't take it when it failed on Eve, I was too shocked to react). Included Attachments: EveLander03.json .ipsImage { width: 900px !important; }

You're right. Despite of the "autodestruction message", if I go back to Kerbal Space Center and then to the tracking station, I can select the combined vessel and control it. The message appears allways when the ship is a combined ship, once undocked each individual ship can use its own decouplers as intended.

KSP Version: v0.1.1.0.21572 Operating System: Windows 11 CPU and GPU models: AMD 5900X - NVIDIA RTX 3090 Description of the bug: As the title goes, once I've docked two or more ships in orbit, I cannot use any decoupler at all because that invokes the Kracken for an instant ritual destruction of the ship. I've found this after taking this ship to Duna's low orbit (200km): Everything worked well during all the trip. Every decoupler (SRBs and previous stages) worked as intended. But there I want to decouple both auxiliary ships (a lander and a returner) to dock them to the main ship's docking ports. And their TD-25 decouplers work. Once I've decoupled any of those ships and docked with the main ship, any other decoupler from any of the individual ships now combined won't work. Trying to separate the mid-stage (TD-37) or the side stages (AD-25) destroys the ship. With the main vehicle, I can continue activating every single decoupler if no other ship until when any other ship is docked. In another try, I decoupled both ships before docking them to the main one Then I can undock again the ships (via part's manager docking port's "decouple" action) and everything's fine. But every single time I have a "combined ship", if I try to activate any decoupler via staging or via part's manager this happens: And then the ship and the undocked parts start to sink down like lead into the planet, as if they suddenly had zero orbital velocity. But if you look close to the falling wreck, it seems like the decoupling happened. I mean, decouplers work, but they just destroy every single part (coupled or decoupled) after doing their job. Fixes / Workarounds: None (as far as I know) A list of ALL mods: None. Other Notes / Screenshots : Included in the description. Iguess the Kracken wants his toll. But that results in missions that require on-orbit redocking may be unfeasible.

Just upgraded this station with a passenger terminal and some science devices. There's absolutely no available purpose to justify going on making thighs bigger. But I'm just enjoying building and docking

If social distancing cannot be kept, remember to wear you facemask. I'm sure even kerbals will do if they could.

A couple of days ago while playing fully stock career mode, I found that a E-class asteroid was already captured on a extremely big and elliptical orbit around Kerbin. Don't know how or when it happened, it just where there. So I spent a lot of time, crafts and fuel to park it on a closer and circle-ish kerbin orbit. Once parked, there were still some mineral left on the asteroid, so I decided to try to build some kind of refueling space station on it. Building different parts of it and assembling them up there. This was the begining of the assembly. Main core´s transport vehicle (left) approaching to dock on the mining complex of the asteroid while other ship scavenges the fuel left. Main core and docking wing assembled And this his how it's going so far. A fueling craft reloading after launch on his way to refuel another space station around Minmus. Refueling station with habitation module already assembled: The build is still in progress. I have planed some more expansions. The asteroid will run out of mineral in some near future, probably not as fast as I almost ran out of funds while constructing this on a career game, but I'm completing some other contracts to recover the economy and I hope I can use this station to reduce wheight and costs in order to launch some interplanetary fleet to visit as much as I can of the Kerbol system. And, to be honest, probably this won't be an economic profitable project, but I'm having a lot of fun

I'm more of a rocket's guy, but few days ago I started with SSTOs. Yes, I know, it is so inefficient giant for a small satellite. I should have started with "small" SSTO, but I tryed to build one that can go interplanetary to Duna, where there's a small station in orbit with a reusable lander, so the SSTO could be used as a "taxi" to that station and back to Kerbin without refueling. I'm still far away of finishing this project, this is just one of the first prototypes, tested by doing something simillar but to Minmus. There's a huge room for efficiency, TWR and ISP improvements, and that's the way I'm trying to evolve the next prototypes. This one at least was enough to start testing another thing: the reentry and landing profile. And I think I achieved a kerbal's very standard landing profile: No kerbal were injured, the front part of the SSTO was the less damaged one.

Using filters in all the case's air intakes (and cleaning them regullary) use to do a good job on that. Also trying to have positive pressure inside the case (more fans as outside air intake than fans exhausting air from the case), as almost every case has a lot of small unfiltered holes, so air excess goes out from there preventing outside dust or pet fur to entering.

Well, maybe even loading previous savedgames to modify the craft and try again could be considered "cheats" for some people. It's ok, they can play as they want, I personally prefer to do this. And I had to do it a lot with this mission, loosing other missions acomplished during the travel time of this one when reverting to pre-launch, having to do it all again. So maybe I'm not playing on the most clever way, but I don't consider myself to be cheating because reverting, I'm playing as I have most fun. Thanks! I used a radial decoupler and built an structure with M-Beams to place the upper thermalshield above the cone. But it was also a point of failure until I discovered the sweet point to release it, on all the previous attemps the M-Beam collided with the capsule and separated it from the rest of the lander with some beautifull explosions. I've allways been kinda wordy

Check your CPU cooler. Unmount it, clean it (remove all the dust in the fans and inside the fins), renew the thermal compound and install it again double checking it is correctly attached. This game is a real CPU burner.

Wellcome aboard. I'm new here too, but also a kraken's friend frome some time ago. Releasing heat shields on Eve's atmosphere made me "F9" a lot of times by insta-killing my lander tearing it into pieces. I found really hard to find the sweet spot into the atmosphere to release them without some phisics going mad.

I really wouldn't mind to quit my job to work on rockets. Flying in the atmosphere is great, but flying above the atmosphere should be marvellous

There are a lot of things that I've never done in this game yet. Duna and Eve are the only planets I've visited by now, I have some unmaned rovers and satellites currently flying to Jool, Eeloo and Moho, and I missed the interplanetary intercept window to Dress. I'm sure that there will be further challenges, maybe harder ones, but Eve really represented "a good enemy" for me in this game. I love it. This is the most expensive ship I've launched in this game by now. It almost left me in bankrupt. I don't think I did a great job on the economics part of the design, I'm sure it can be done with more eficiency. I started testing this in my career game. First failures were during the launch and while planning the transfer maneuver nodes, so it was easy to revert to a pre-launch savegame and not loosing much advance in other parallel missions. The largest part of failures came with the entry on Eve and back to orbit there, and those fails where pills really hard to shallow as they occured more than 100 days after launch, so reverting made me lost a lot of advances in other missions. But also it gave me the opportunity to test some other missions as well and design it better. So finally, when I managed to return the lander module to the Space Station, I was really happy, returning to Kerbin seemed really easy then. But to be true, I didn't really breathe normally until they entered on Kerbin atmosphere... about 320 days after departing XD Maybe starting a sandbox to test it all is a really good idea. I wish I thought about it then

I guess those deleted files are not in the recycle bin. Do you have some kind of backup in your PC?. If you are playing on Steam, maybe cloud savefiles can have still a copy. If you haven't closed KSP yet, just umplug your Internet cable, delete all your savedgames folder (or better cut them to another backup folder), hard-close KSP and Steam, connect again to Internet and try to open Steam and KSP... maybe you're lucky enough to see a promt message telling you that your saved data in your PC doesn't match the cloud's saved data and you can revert it from the cloud. I'm sorry this happened to you and I hope there's a way to have your game back, but thank you very much for sharing it, this is a heads-up call for every one of us.

Prologue. Let me take you through this mission, what I felt as an epic journey, whit this after-action report / photolog. It is a long one. This wasn't easy, was my first time on Eve and just visited Mun, Minmus and Duna before. So let me tell you the whole history and a bit of the background. This is a long story, and English is not my first language, so please bear with me. I'm playing on career mode. All stock, vanilla game with Breaking Ground expansion, no mods. And I don't like to time-warp travel times between planets so I can use those intermediate times to send some other missions to other places and keep on collecting science points and completing contracts. But it has a downside: if the mission fails and I have to revert to a savegame pre-launch, I also loose a lot of missions done during it's travel time. So I must try to be as "not-so-bad" as I can. I try to take as much profit as I can when an planetary intercept window arrives. But also there will be some of them fliying at the same time to different destinations, so there will be a lot of maneuver nodes, landings, dockings... all at very close timings, so the fewer ships, the easier to control all them. That makes the start for this epic voyage. Chapter one: planning the mission. While I was conducting some other missions (satellites, maned missions to Mun and Minmus, completing contracts, etc.), Eve's interplanetary intercept window came. And I wanted to sent to it as much as I can. So planned to send all this: a space station with a science module. an exploration satellite. a lander to reach Eve's surface with two kebals, put an unmanned Rover, scientific experiments and return to low orbit. and a ship to return to Kerbin with 3 kerbals and all the science you can, being able to recover the low orbit lander before if necessary. Then I started the design phase, trying to accomplish it all with my current science tree, not fully unlocked by then, and also staying in my budget. As maybe you can assume by the ship's name, multiple, realy a lot of versions and variants of the ship were made. Until I finally opted for this one... after a lot of failures that made me go back to pre-launch savegame and loosing lots of other game advances. It's a somehow "frustrating/epic funny" process, if you know what I mean. On this ship, all modules except the return / rescue module have an unmanned control unit, so they don't need pilots. With all other missions going on at the same time, I didn't have much of them and new contracts would have made it all blow up out of my budget. Val will be the mission commander and only pilot onboard. The ship has configured a series of action keys to facilitate certain tasks (mainly, the collection of science data and saved in the correct module). Chapter two: Time to launch. And that was the mission, step by step (without all the "*return to control station*", manage some other missions to other destinations and back to this one parts, for the reader's mental sanity) The final shuttle weights about 4,000 tons, so I learned (by the hard way) that I had to put the ship on launch pad when I was goint to launch it. Due to its monstrous weight (about 4,000 tons), it does not hold long on the ramp without starting to loose parts, no more than 20 seconds. During the ascent phase in the Kerbin atmosphere, several stages had to be released. I had to drop them aiming perfectly prograde, failure on this make this ship the most expensive fireworks ever. Also learned by the hard way. Out of the atmosphere, used Val to release the return / rescue ship from the rocket and dock it to the Space Station module. Once docked to the Space Station, to give it more rigidity against accelerations, used the options menu of the capsule to add auto-struts. Deactivated it's nuclear engine so it won't start when tthrottling the engines of the whole ship. Once escaped Kerbin's sphere of influence, before reaching the descending node between the ship's orbit around the sun and Eve's orbit, released the satellite module and programed two maneuvers: one on the main ship to intercept Eve at the equator, and another on the exploration satellite to intercept Eve at the poles. It's easier (albeit slow) to modify the satellite's trajectory, so tryed to get Kerbin's escape maneuver node to get the whole shuttle as close to Eve's equator as possible. Both maneouvers, on the main shuttle and on the satellite, diverted them appart and made the satellite ETA to Eve's SOI some hours later than the main shuttle. And that was great, concurring on the same time will make it a bit of a dissaster of at least one of them. The X3-A5-2 Mission continued its journey. I used that time to continue and start some other missions. Until the day when they reach the awaited planet SOI. Excitement and fear, all combined in just one feeling. Chapter three: reaching Eve. When making the capture burn into Eve´s orbit with this configuration, the stage with interplanetary engines, the side ones, ran out of fuel and had to drop them and continue burning with the nuclear engines of the Space Station. By having the return / rescue ship docked sideways, this generated a twist on the shuttle. To make the ship controllable can do one of two things: wait to release the side tanks stage when you have finished the maneuver release the side tanks stage and rotate on the longitudinal axis quickly and constantly (by pressing "Q" or "E") while you finish the burn with the nuclear engines to cause a gyroscope effect so the return / rescue module docked doesn't produce lateral torque that impide you to maintaining stability. The second option allows to save more fuel from the Space Station's nuclear thrusters. I used both for half the maneuver each one (didn't realize the second one until then). One the main shuttle is on Eve's orbit, it's time to shift and perform the capture burn with the satellite module, so it remains in a stable polar orbit below 1,500 km high. And let him do his job. That was easy. Slow, really slow (thanks, Ion thrusters!), but easy. Now, let´s start with the hard part of the mission. Chapter four: the descent to Eve For the landing, I sent to the lander capsule a scientist and an engineer. That capsule doesn't need a pilot to have full control of the SAE as it has a module for unmanned flight. With the main spacecraft in orbit around Eve, on the apoapsis I made a retrograde ignition, it decreased the periapsis to approximately 70km, then released the lander so that it follows an atmospheric flight path, and accelerated prograde again with the remaining Space Station to recover a periapsis height of not less than 110 km to continue its orbit. The Space station can then use its nuclear engines more efficiently to modify its orbit. Shifted to the lander. During the descent towards an atmospheric flight path, inflated the two heat shields and used SAS to maintain retrograde orientation during entry into the atmosphere. When descending to Eve, if you depart from a good orbit you can entry into the atmosphere on the first descent and reach the planet's surface. If you departed from a very elliptical orbit, you may needed multiple orbits and aerobraking before reaching the surface of the planet. Anyway, once targeted 70km height on periapsis and released the lander module, it is on it's course to the surface. Just a matter of time... with all fingers crossed. During the descent, my kerbonauts seemed to be more worried than impressed , as you can se up there. In the descent flight over Eve, I had to wait to be fully vertical (approximately 10km above the surface) to detach the upper thermal shield just before pre-deploying the parachutes. A bad release of the upper heat shield would have caused the lander to break and the capsule with the kerbals to separate from the rest of the module and all of it, two brave kerbals included, would only be some kind of a crater on the surface. I had to wait until the parachutes were open (about 800 meters above Eve's surface) to release the lower heat shield. It gives stability and helps to stop the fall during the entire descent. Releasing it prematurely could cause it to impact the lander and destroy some parts. Learned through the hard way. Extended the landing gear after the lower heat shield was released. And went down about 7 m/s until gently touching the surface, without the need to start engines. If I would have needed to abort the landing on Eve (from descending into water, for example) I had a plan: advance the list of stages until the engines start and, with a pre-programmed action group, cut all the parachutes and try to get back to orbit. That would be a total failure, but with no casualties. But fortunately, the trajectory lead me to the surface. So, finally, we land on Eve's surface. Chapter Five: Time to work on the surface. After all, we weren't there for holidays. Before doing anything else, I released the stage with the upper parachute bindings. These were meant to cause a few explosions around the lander, so it was better to be done before deploying any kerbal or anything else over there. Then deployed the rover with its corresponding stage. After that, I extended all the stairs (it has a lot of them, all pre-programed on an action group). And finally a kerbal stepped on Eve's surface. The two kerbals went to the surface to plant the flag, take surface samples and make reports. On the lower cargo module, inside in a SEQ-9 module, there were some portable science modules (a control unit, communications, solar panels and science experiments) to be deployed on Eve's surface. That was the reason for taking to the surface a scientist (more science from the experiments) and an engineer (less solar panels required). Before leaving Eve's surface, when the kerbals went back up to the capsule, there was a storage unit next to the ladder so they can save all their reports. But this report won't be a report without the crew and the flag photo. After that, they went back to the module and started to get ready for take off. It was time to do one of the most difficult parts of the mission: beat again this level's boss, Eve's atmosphere, and return to Eve's low orbit. Chapter six: returning to orbit. For the takeoff, retracted all the ladders, closed the lower cargo module, made sure the rover was away and safe from the ship, and retracted all the solar panels from the lander. I didn't want to have any innecesary aerodynamic drag. Then, throttle to maximum and released the lower stage. Some explosions occurred below, as expected. Released the next stage (landing gear) a second later, when the lander was already climbing. And some more explosions down there. Just check their face. Mine was almost the same during this phase. During the climb, the stages were in aspargarus configuration, so I had to keep an eye on when a stage run out of fuel to release it and not cause unnecesary aerodynamic drag. Eve's atmosphere is dense as hell. Aimed completely vertical until passing 20 kilometers high, there I began a very smooth gravitational turn to reach 100 kilometers height low orbit on Eve. Not the best profile probably and you can be sure that wasn't the best execution, but I made it to orbit. Didlreda and Gregbruna were way to happier then. As it was a bad ascension, with the remaining fuel in the lander capsule I wasn't able to fully intercept the the Space Station. That was once of the contingencys expected. So Val took the return / rescue module from the space station, intercepted the lander module, docked to it and tow it to the space station. It could be done by simply taking the kerbals and the science of the lander module, but the return / rescue ship had delta-V enough to make it anyway. The lower part of the lander, the one that has a cargo bay, was left on Eve's surface. This is intended so it then is used as a base - communications repeater. Shifted to it and, with a pre-programed action group, it was time to open the cargo module doors, extend its solar panels, and unfold its antennas. Sorry, with all the emotions I didn't take any photo of it. Chapter seven: time to depart to Kerbin. Back at the Space Station, I reviewed what science and kerbals would remain on it and what I would go back to Kerbin. Some scientist would be left on the Space Station doing research with part of the science obtained to multiply the science points untill further missions to this planet. Half of the mission was accomplished by then, but in the career mode science points are more valuable than gold, didn't want to loose anything by transmitting them, so I thought that investigating with duplicates and take to Kerbin all the rest was the best option. Time to say goodbye to part of the crew, and continue different roads. Uncoupled the return module and departed to Kerbin. Chapter eight: back to Kerbin. The return module had fuel for its nuclear engine enough to return to Kerbin's sphere of influence and perform a retrograde burn to slow down the capsule before entering the atmosphere. It also could be done by aerobraking directly with the atmosphere, executing an intercept orbit that take it to less than 20 kilometers from the surface of Kerbin on the first approach. But there were a lot delta-V on this module, so I used it. The return capsule entered Kerbin's atmosphere, they were finally back at home. Deployed parachutes and wait until touched Kerbin's surface once again. It was a long trip, fulled with a lot of emotions. All the missions were acomplished but some were not finished yet. Eve was no longer out of our frontiers. Some heros and some equipment were still there, getting those valuable points, waiting further missions to come... all for the Science. Our history on Eve has just started. It is to be continued... Epilogue. I'm sure that a lot of you have done it before. And probably with better, more efficient and more beautifull ships. But this was a real challenge for me and my almost 250 hours of KSP by then, I felt very happy to achieve this. So I wanted to share it with all you. I also uploaded this whole Shuttle to Steam WorkShop, so anyone could use it if they want: X3-A5-2 Multi-mission launcher to Eve and back It's the same shuttle I used here, and it has pre-programmed this action groups: Extend intermediate solar panels (in side rocket interplanetary stage, for the trip to Eve) Inflate lander’s thermal shields. Cut lander’s parachutes Extend / retract lander’s ladders Execute robotic's action to extend panels and antennas in the base module on Eve Observe port material’s module and Mystery Goo. Observe starboard material’s module and Mystery Goo. Collect science from all resettable experiments in the lander / rover Store all the science of the ship in the container of the lander Store all the science of the ship in the container of the return module. For science pickup, you can use Action Key 8 on all stages of the flight: solar orbit, Eve's atmosphere entry, Eve surface, and in every single opportunity. You can also use action group 6 and 7 as much as you want ir the lander module is still connected to the Space Station, as you can take the data and reset the experiments from the Station Science Module. You can also use one of them (6 or 7) on when the lander is on Eve's atmospheric flight and the other one when you are landed on Eve. After executing anyone of these action groups, execute action 10 (or 9 if you are only with the lander) to save all the reports in the return module. You can also send the data you want to the research module if you have scientists to carry out an investigation. Before leaving the space station back for Kerbin, perform Action 10 to pass all of the science collected to the return module and take it back with you. I think I forget to do this on some stages of the flight, but anyway I get more than 2,400 science points returned to Kerbin, and many more being generated by investigation conducted in the Space Station. So, apart from the excitement of achieving all this, I think I can call it a great mission. Thanks for letting me share this with all of you. Hope to see you on every Kerbol System's planet.