Robin Patenall

For the last week or so, I have been driving Bill and Bob out of Moho's Northern region, and have eventually managed to do so. I made the mistake of thinking I could rove to all the Moho biomes and made my way to the North Sinkhole (not the Mohole) and realised a bit too late that my planned route (a) was a steep slope down to the sink hole and (b) it was in shadow. This meant that I couldn't drive out the same way I drove in with my solar powered rover and had to find a way out that was in sunshine (or wait until it was). Things to note when roving on Moho: The North is very hilly, with steep slopes Take some RTGs. It sounds odd but if the route you need to take is in shadow, it's going to be in shadow for a long time, possibly (at high latitudes) forever.

My "Hot Shots" mission has landed on Moho. The science rover (left) and the main lander (middle) both have (with some transfer of fuel) about 1450m/s which should get them back to the orbital elements of the mission. In an emergency there's a rescue craft (an ion powered lawn chair) that should have enough Xenon to get everybody off the surface if needed. Bill (left) and Bob (middle) have gone off with the rover to do Science! from different locations while Jeb has stayed behind to make sure that nobody makes off with their ride.

I've got a couple of Kerbals that might have been given the grand opportunity to be the first Kerbals to set foot on Plock when they decided to stow away on a rescue craft and required the poor Kerbal being rescued to hang on to the ladder on the outside for several orbits until I could rendezvous with one of my space stations. Luckily for them, I can't remember which ones they were any more.

Finally, the year 3 day 310 transfer window from Kerbin to Duna opened and I've managed to get all the hardware I had ready in Munar and Kerbin orbit sent on its way. The first element is Duna Station, which has been on a fitting out cruise about the Mun and will end up in Duna equatorial orbit. Pictured here is the core, a couple of tug components and the reusable propulsion systems. Currently, the core is actually docked backwards and once it gets to Duna, there will need to have some rearrangement to put the orbital adjustment engines on the right end. Connected to the core station is a large fuel tank, a lander and an intra-system mover (under the gold fairing). If you are wondering why the intra-system mover is using Puff engines and mono-propellant , I had a "upgrade this station" contract and needed a lot more mono-prop to complete it. The next component is the Rover / ISRU system. The rover was originally used to gather science from the Mun which has been, and continues to be, processed in the lab aboard Duna station and will give the scientists something to do on their long trip. With its auxiliary stage, it has enough dV to land on Duna from orbit and will gather science, either under remote control or possibly with a crew, delivered by the station lander, aboard. The rover is being transported on top of the ISRU system that is going to be landing on Ike and consists of a Kerbaled ore harvester / fuel converter and two large transfer tanks which will haul the fuel to orbit. This was also undergoing testing on the Mun and a similar system has been tested on Minmus. The last large component is the Ike station core, which was added to act as an anchor in orbit to allow the ISRU tankers and the main nuclear propulsion units, used to push Duna station, to have somewhere to dock and transfer fuel between themselves. In addition, there is a small facility for Kerbals and in an emergency explosives will destroy the central corridor and then the crew can use the fordecks as a lifeboat, with either the propulsion module, one of the ISRU tankers or a nuclear propulsion units to get them back to Duna station or Kerbin. Two sets of additional satellites were also sent, one for an equatorial orbit about Ike to give almost full coverage for the ISRU system and one set for polar orbit about Duna to augment the existing equatorial set that was placed in the last transfer window. Each set consists of three small relay satellites and a bigger relay on the carrier vessel. (The KSC PR department apologises for another picture of this particular satellite deployment system that fails to show the mounting point that joins the small satellites to the main carrier craft. We understand that our followers are interested in the construction of our space infrastructure and we would like to say that all the rumours that the mounting system is "nothing" or "magic" that keep cropping up with regard to this particular system are completely untrue)

Kerbal's can get their stars from new experiences without returning to the KSC by visiting a vessel with a Mobile Processing Laboratory on it and using the Level Up Crew option from the MPL Paw menu.

Today, Jeb, Bill and Bob arrived in the second half of my Moho mission "Hot Shots" and docked with the first part. We have the rover component with the tiny pathfinder rover on the top and the main science roved beneath. The science rover supports two and with the orange and grey long range tank has a total of 3260m/s deltaV (1700m/s in the long range tank for going down and 1560m/s in the rovers booster packs for going up). It will definitely get down but I'm not going to rely on its ability to get back into orbit on its own. The lander supports three and has 2160m/s of deltaV, which is enough to get it down once and return. It includes storage with a set of surface experiments. This will probably not initially be landed as if the rover breaks down or gets stuck, the lander can go and retrieve the Kerbals on the surface. Of the three nuclear pushers, two are empty (of fuel, they has some mono-prop) and Pusher 7, the hitchhiker storage container and the MK1-3 command pod form the return stage with about 6500m/s of deltaV which should be enough to get the Kerbals back without aerobreaking. That deltaV is the minimum as there is quite a lot in storage, including parts for an ion powered lawn chair that should be able to get two Kerbals back into orbit from the surface. In the case of a serious system failure, in about 100 days a rescue ship should arrive which would allow the Kerbals to be rescues and returned to Kerbin, having over 7000m/s once in orbit of Moho, as long as they don't mind being rather cramped. It should have arrived already (before the Kerbals) but there was a slight issue with transfer window timing (If you put a vessel outside Kerbin's SOI, the transfer window moves by a few days and, in the case of Moho, that makes a lot of difference)

They said they wanted a small asteroid to study. but they didn't give a delivery address.

Hi @linuxgurugamer, The other day, I turned on the "Process manipulatable-only parts" feature and it got stuck in a loop, complaining that new parts had been detected every launch. I think I've identified the issue through. What happened was every time KSP started, the mod would extend the partVolumes-v3.cfg file entries for each of the the manipulatable-only parts, like it wasn't noticing that it had already fixed them. Each part gave an entry like: // SquadExpansion/Serenity/Parts/Robotics/RotorEngine_02/RotorEngine_02 // Dimensions: x: 1.26, y: 0.88, z: 1.25 // Bounding Box Size: 1381.887 liters // Volume adjustment: 10% // @PART[RotorEngine_02]:HAS[@MODULE[ModuleCargoPart]]:Final { @MODULE[ModuleCargoPart] { packedVolume = 1521 KSP_PartVolume = true } } This edits the existing ModuleCargoPart module, but I'm pretty sure that it adds a new packedVolume value to the module, so there are two and when the mod looks it gets the the original -1 value and thinks that it hasn't been processed. Changing it to: @PART[RotorEngine_02]:HAS[@MODULE[ModuleCargoPart]]:Final { @MODULE[ModuleCargoPart] { %packedVolume = 1521 %KSP_PartVolume = true } } with the leading %, to make MM edit or create the values (rather than add) seems to fix the issue when I edited my partVolumes-v3.cfg file. It looks like a couple of changes around PartVolume.cs@347-367 would fix the issue but I haven't tested this as I don't have an environment set up to compile and I was having some issues following the code generating the popup (the call seems commented out on PartVolume.cs@461 and the text of the pop up is different, is master the correct branch?)

Hi @Angel-125, I noticed today that I couldn't manipulate the Printshops and Cargo containers while in EVA construction mode. It looks like it is intended that you should be able to this, as those parts have a ModuleCargoPart with packedVolume=-1 but that module needs to come before the ModuleInventoryPart one for it to work. I made the changes to the 2 printshops and 3 cargo containers and tested it and it all seems to work. I'm pretty sure that I've managed to submit a pull request with the fix on github, but it is the first time that I've done one.

Let me introduce the KPS Glom of Nit (Yes, KPS, the Kerbal Post Service). Used for when your Gilly mission is missing a small but vital part, and your engineer has a Kamazon Super Platinum Hyper Prime subscription. The part was missed because almost all of the Gilly mission was recycled from older missions and right at the moment a Kerbin to Eve transfer is about 5.5km/s of deltaV so I had to build a rocket with about 10.6km/s on the launchpad for sending a 50kg part. I over built a bit as I'm going to have about 2000m/s to rendezvous with and land on Gilly after a loose capture about Eve.

I wish I could have seen this a week or two ago before I went on my Minmus circumnavigation road trip. I think I got the wheels configured okay, but his would have made me more confident in the settings I used and had some tips that I might have implemented (different friction front and back). With any luck KSP2 will have better documentation.

Our weary travellers. They even got tired of Mint Ice-cream after a while (they will have a discussion with Jeb about the proper selection of supplies for a Minmus mission when they return. Luckily for Jeb, he has scheduled their pickup by the Mun / Minmus / Kerbol XP gaining mission and it will take them some time to get back) Hopefully, I've done enough to qualify for completing the challenge (Modded) on Minmus. I even managed to visit every biome to record science for a future Mobile Processing Lab to analysis, which is why I initially landed at the South Pole (and saw the strangeness that lies there). I recorded most of it on video, there's about 3 degrees of longitude that I lost, but it was a very boring zigzag up a hill to reach the Highland biome and I cut out most of the times I crashed and reverted (there weren't that many times). Hopefully this is judged as acceptable. A full playlist Launching and getting to the equator (13m03s) Part 1 : Longitude 15W to 165E (13m16s) Part 2 : Longitude 165E to 15W (14m49s) This is a Modded attempt as I used the KER, Scansat and NavHud Renewed for helping me navigate and I have Restock and Restock Plus of which I believe I only used one part (a longer 0.625m fuel tank than the Oscar B) and the KER chip part, but as I was testing the rover for use on a future Duna / Ike mission in my current career mode game, I wasn't going to change it (which is why it has parachutes and an atmospheric analyser if anybody was wondering). I added waypoints after the fact to make the route clearer on the map view as the flags where a bit difficult to see. Things I learnt: The poles are to be avoided Minmus's lowlands aren't (low that is, in fact they're quite high) KSP wheels have no traction on low gravity worlds. Parallax 2 scatter colliders are not a good idea when using a rover for long distances, or medium distances, or even short distances. As I found from my long drive on the Mun, the Scansat, KER and NavHud Renewed mods are really helpful for navigation and not ending up tumbling down a hill at break neck (and break rover) speeds. I might just have forgotten how time consuming this is by the time that the Duna transfer window opens and I get the rover there.

Does anybody know / can confirm if enabling collisions is safe on an existing save? I don't currently have much landed that I care about (mostly spent stages and surface science that has completed) but there are a couple of things that I'd prefer not to explode after being telefragged by a new rock. Right at the moment I could probably get everything I care about into orbit and update to this and land everything again, but I probably need to do it now, rather than later.

Hi @Geonovast, Just tracked down an issue I was having to the latest release of this. I was suddenly unable to surface attach light strips, I could node attach them and drop them in containers but not surface attach them. It was most confusing. It looks like the parsing of the attachRules is not well coded as changing all the lines in SN_utility.cfg that read: @attachRules = 1, 1, 0, 0, 1 to (note the lack of spaces after the commas) @attachRules = 1,1,0,0,1 seems to have fixed the issue for the lights I was having it with. You might also want to quickly check if you've made the same misstep elsewhere

Anybody capable of creating a "string vest" suit option for the Kerbals? My memory is a bit hazy on UFO, but I remember that bit of costume design very clearly. Not that it would be quite as good on the Kerbals as it was on the original cast.

I've never played with USI, but isn't that a life support mod? Did your Kerbals run out of supplies?

The West side of the East Farside Crater Part textures / overhaul is ReStock and ReStock+. The terrain is, I believe, Parallax and Parallax Stock Planet Textures, with most of the graphics setting turned right up. But I also have the following visual stuff: Community Terrain Texture Pack (A dependency of something) Environmental Visual Enhancements Redux Scatterer + Scatterer Default Config + Scatterer Sunflare Astronomer's Visual Pack (2k textures) TUFX It's been a time since I set up all the mods, so I'm not exactly sure which does what without research.

I have, after far too much time, finished my "visit all the Mun biomes (except that one which is inconveniently placed) in a rover" project. I blame all the "visit the South pole of Kerbin" posts. There was originally a large scanner arm which got removed after I'd scanned everything and the lander engines were originally to be decoupled once I landed. I'm glad I left them on, even if it meant moving the solar panels. All science, except the material science bay (which is inconveniently big for a rover) collected for future MPL processing from every biome except the Southwest Crater. And a Mun Stone, Mun Crater and Mun Large Crater scanned with a large scanning arm. I thought I'd note down some brief tips for anybody who wants to do the same thing: Don't Driving a rover on the Mun takes practice, you will crash (a lot) As you will crash (a lot), set up a timer for 10 minutes and when it goes off, stop the rover and quick save. You can't go that fast, if you do then any bump will send you rover tumbling and explode. The fastest I managed (without crashing) was about 20m/s and I was desperately trying to brake, I tried to keep it at about 10m/s and used physics wrap x 2 (or x 3 when it was really flat) At high speed repeatably tapping the brake is better than holding it down (think abs) I found the following mods helpful: NavHud Renewed This was really helpful in showing an artificial horizon and showing if you were going up (get ready to hit W), you were going down (spam the B key) or sliding (prograde and attitude don't match). It also made it easier to follow the contours of the Mun (begin on a slope and adjusting your direction so that you aren't going up or down and picking up uncontrollable speed) ScanSat a zoomed in, high resolution, altimetry window was the best I could find for navigation. Lock it to the current vessel so you don't have to play with it as you move. Waypoint Manager Craters suck, if you can see it from orbit or on the ScanSat altitude map then it's going to be difficult to get into in one piece (getting out is slightly easier) Craters suck, the maps don't show the small ones, but a 5m fall into one will still destroy your rover. To do the highland crater I picked out, I had to use my lander engines to jump in and out. Other highland craters may be easier, but probably won't be. Near the poles suck, there are lots of steep slopes and rucked terrain. I used my lander engines a couple of times rather than make huge detours. You need to plan your route significantly in advance otherwise you'll have to make huge detours. Every time you stop to do a quick save, zoom out and check where you're going Don't swerve around ground scatter objects, you can pass through it and you're more likely to tip over if you swerve late. Do swerve around Breaking Ground objects as you'll just launch yourself into the air and explode if you hit them. You can tell the difference between these as ground scatter objects are grey and Breaking Ground objects are gray. Yes, I cheated and landed more fuel for my lander engines to go from the Polar Lowland at the top of the Polar Crater to the Northern Basin. The poles suck. Pick a better path than I did. But mostly, don't

Due to a quirk of timing, I had to work with two vessel going to both of the extremes of the solar system today. The first was performing the inclination burn for my Moho science / SCANSat satellite, the "Hi-Ho Mo-Ho". I had launched it at 'a' Moho transfer window, but not a great one, and doing so from Kerbin polar orbit where it was finishing off doing a Hi-Res resource scan was an exercise in planning. I had to do a burn of >1000m/s anti-normal with a single Dawn Ion engine followed by setting maneuver nodes so that I can do most of the >3000m/s capture burn outside Moho's SOI and not pretending to be a bullet when I reach it. The second was sending my common Commnet relay / Science / SCANSat satellite off to Plock / Karen, something made difficult by the pusher stage only having a single Nerv. Doing a 13min burn (I'd even already done 750m/s during periapsis kicks) made significant errors in the orbit at >600GM. I had to add a load of radial out to get everything to line up with the projected orbit. Now I just have to wait 71 years for it to arrive. Next on my list to do is to send off my multipart Eve / Gilly mission.

Just as an "is it possible" question. I've recently noticed that Engine Plates have a huge, fixed, volume. I assume that this is based on the maximum dimension of the difference variant lengths but it is a bit annoying that I can't fit a short EP-18 engine plate into a cargo inventory slot that I can fit a whole Bobcat engine into (I'm using Sandcastle, which has some large Cargo Storage Units, to recycle spent hardware in orbit). Is there anyway that the difference variants can have different volumes? or is that something that just is not possible?

Hi @Angel-125 I've just started actually using this in my game but I've noticed some issues with the Recycler UI: It looks like the part selection menu, when there's nothing in the queue, jumps back to the top every few seconds. I have lots of parts in cargo storage and it's difficult to select parts that are at the bottom as when I scroll down, the scroll resets quickly to the top of the window. Several times I've recycled the wrong part because the window jumped just before I clicked on the part. I'm assuming that this is some sort of periodic refresh. Steps to reproduce: Have a vessel with a print shop (the large one) and a SEQ-24 cargo container. Have parts in the cargo containers, enough to make the recycler part selection window have a scrollbar (24 EAS-4 struts + 24 OX-STAT Photovoltaic Panels) Open the recycler UI Have nothing in the recycler queue Scroll the parts window to the bottom After a couple of seconds, the window's scroll will jump to the top It is sometimes very difficult to identify which part is which (i,e. which of the 20 EAS-4 Struct Connectors in the window are which). I suppose that this isn't a major problem but I'd prefer to recycle the parts I've just pulled off the spent stage I've docked rather than from my neatly arranged stores. Ideally, the parts window would be split up by container, but if that is difficult, could I suggest putting the parts in the inventory slots of the print shop(s) at the top of the parts list and have the rest visually separated from them? In this case possibly having the options to only show parts that are in the print shop inventory slots, and hiding the rest, might be good idea. This would also help with the window scroll reset as you could just put things you want to recycle in the print shop, which would always be at the top.

I have officially reached where I was before I left off my last save, having sent stuff to Duna (this time at the beginning of the transfer window, rather than a week after the end) and having completed the ridiculous contract I was working on to build a 7.2Tm relay satellite in KEO (it's a combination of a number of mods interacting). I, at least , now have the capability to reach Plock with only a Communotron 88-88 on the vessel, but I'll probably move the relay into a maximal SOI grazing orbit (80Gm or so) rather than leave it in KEO. (If anybody else has this contract, yes I patched it to increase the amount of money a bit when it increased the power, it was ridiculous otherwise ) Unlike the last time, I build the relay in LKO and transferred it to KEO once complete. It took 10 launches (a core, a construction shack for the engineer and 8 x antenna modules) to complete, and here is it showing off all 16 of the beautiful JX2 Large Deployable Antennas it has from the JX2Antenna mod. I still have a contract to send a duplicate to 60-120 degrees ahead / behind Kerbin but I think I need a better pusher stage. A single Wolfhound took far to long to raise the orbit in one go and I had to spilt the maneuverer up.

Yes, there's some rather nasty inventory bugs with Kerbals entering / leaving command pods. As far as I remember the inventory shown in the command pod's action window doesn't always synchronize with the Kerbal's actual inventory when they enter or leave the command pod. So when a Kerbal re-enters the command pod, the pod's copy of their inventory doesn't reflect any changes in the Kerbal's inventory while on EVA, so it is best to ensure that you re-enter the pod with the same equipment that you leave with otherwise you can, as you found out, duplicate items or even worse have items vanish. I believe that the KSP Community Fixes mod fixes this (among many other things), but I've not used it myself

I agree with everybody else, abort to orbit so long as you are certain that you can get back into a stable orbit. If you can't and you try, your pilot is going to have a Bad Day. Use any remaining fuel to circularise and reduce you inclination, in that order. A circular orbit which is a bit inclined will be easier to rendezvous with than a perfectly equatorial, but elliptical, orbit for a beginner. Assuming you don't have docking ports, grabbing units, RCS or resource transfer, but do that EVA, the quickest thing I can think of is: Strip anything you need to land out of your current ship design Add a couple of FL-T100 fuel tanks on the outside (radially attached with the top to you rocket's side and with nothing attached to them) and disable them. Have them near you capsule. Send it up with you other pilot and Bill Rendezvous with the stricken vessel in Munar orbit, as close as you can. Almost touching if possible. Have bill move the fuel tanks to the stricken vessel using EVA construction Have both ships return to Kerbin and have another go.

I've just rechecked this on my clean install to check that it still works. I have a few library mods, B9PartSwitch, CommunityResourcePack and the DLC (It did occur to me that ModuleGroundPart might be Breaking Ground only, but I tried it without SquadExpansion and it still works) Here's the relevant section of NSSC's KerbalInventorySystem.cfg: @PART[ELSurveyStake]:NEEDS[!KIS]:FOR[NotSoSimpleConstruction] { // Move the CoM to underground so the stake stays upright %CoMOffset = 0.0, -0.5, 0.0 -MODULE[ModuleKISItem] { } MODULE { name = ModuleGroundPart fxGroupDeploy = deploy // Name of the FXGroup to Play when the part is being deployed placementAllowXRotation = true // Determines if the Part can be rotated in the X Axis when in ground placement mode, before being placed on the ground. placementAllowYRotation = false // Determines if the Part can be rotated in the Y Axis when in ground placement mode, before being placed on the ground. placementAllowZRotation = true // Determines if the Part can be rotated in the Z Axis when in ground placement mode, before being placed on the ground. inventoryTooltip = "" packedVolume = 0 //f // The space this part occupies when packed inside an inventory container kinematicDelay = 3 // f // Delay before rivotiing, any value < 1 defaults to 3 // Make this large so that stake will always rivot placementMaxRivotVelocity = 1 // f // This is the velocity the part must be travelling less than before it will be rivoted to the ground. reinitResourcesOnStoreInVessel = false // Set to true when the parts resources should be "filled" magically when the part is stored in a vessel. stackableQuantity = 10 // The number of parts of the same kind and variant that can be stacked in a single inventory slot } } I did lower the palcementMaxRivotVelocity and I did try to remove the Y axis rotation during placement but this doesn't appear to work. To deploy the stake you use the same method that you use to deploy surface science. In my test I did the following: Launched Jeb in a Mk1-3 command pod to the Launchpad with 3 survey stakes in the pod's inventory I EVA'd Jeb to the launch pad Swapped Jeb's parachute with a survey stake Clicked the deploy button for the stake (bottom right of the inventory slot) Got the deploy UI ([Space]: to place the part, etc) Hit Space With out the above changes, the survey stake slowly falls over and rolls along the ground With the above changes, the survey stake stays upright and becomes riveted to the ground. I can even sometimes get a "[f] to climb" prompt and climb up it. The more obvious test is to rotate the survey stake slightly with H or N before placing he part so that it isn't vertical, with the above changes, it will wobble but not completely fall down (the further that it is away from upright, the more it is pulled vertical) and more obviously freeze after 3 seconds. I uploaded a demo of this working (hopefully this works) I did have some issues related to picking the stakes back up sometimes, but I do not think that this is related to the changes above.