Qumefox

Yay, people got to eve and back letting someone else drive.. Now someone needs to man up and accomplish it WITHOUT mechjeb.

Are those with stock parts? If so, how the hell? I'm being hard pressed to get 100t into LKO with stock parts.

Yes, since well, the spacecraft exchange is about... exchanging spacecraft.. heh.

Launch retrograde (270 instead of 90) circularize the same diameter as minmus's orbit and match inclinations. Then catching minmus won't be an issue. (**note** Not being serious.. though with enough fuel, it'd still work.).

Been there, done that. 'Home built rocket motor' generally translates to 'bomb' in my past experiences. heh.

Plus if he hadn't been stuck, he probably wouldn't be on the forums asking how to do stuff. From what he said in the OP, he obviously has tried building stuff without much success. For people who have limited experience dealing with engineering problems and problem solving.. KSP can be very, very frustrating.. And while things blowing up is entertaining.. its not long-term type entertainment. The ship I linked is a basic no frills design that works, but will still require modification to do much more than just orbit things. Plus it still requires someone to actually fly it themselves.

Knowing Jeb, it should be 'Highest Cannonball' because you KNOW there's a pool at the bottom, and that Jeb dislikes parachutes.

Lots of debris floating around certainly won't help anything, but it shouldn't hurt much either until you get close to any of it. Easiest way to clear debris is to go in the settings on the main game load screen. change the 'max persistent debris' slider to zero.. apply and accept, then quit KSP and relaunch it. when you open your save after you relaunch it, all the debris should be gone. You apparently have to restart the game any time you change the debris slider for the change to take effect.

That will probably get you in a circular orbit. You need to work on your launch though You should try starting your gravity turn at 10000m instead of just burning straight up the whole way. when you get to 10000m in altitude, roll your ship east along the 90 line to about a 45 degree angle. then switch to map mode. also click the ^ on the bottom to bring up the navball, so you can keep an eye on and adjust your orientation without having to physically watch your ship. You need to do this so you can watch what altitude your apoapsis is at.. 70km is out of the atmosphere, so anything past that is ok. Since this ship appears to be marginal on it's orbit capabilities, You probably shouldn't shoot for much past 80km. When your apoapsis hits 80km, hit X to cut your engines, and coast the rest of the way till apoapsis.. since your ship has a lot of mass and no RCS, you'll probably want to pre-rotate to point towards the horizion on the 90 line on the navball, the rotation will probably take a while. Since the mainsail engine is gimballed, you can give it a little thrust to help turn faster, but remember your eating fuel when you do this, When your roughly 20 seconds away from apoapsis and pointed towards the horizon on the 90 line on the navball, do a 100% burn, and hopefully you have enough fuel left to circularize your orbit.

The lag mostly isn't due to graphics. The problem is that as part count goes up, so does the processing power required. You have to remember that KSP models physics for each and every part on the ship, to be able to keep up with structural stress, collisions, etc. You almost have to think about it like this.. Your not launching one ship. Your launching 360 little ships all ducttaped together. Design optimization is crucial when dealing with large ships to try and get the job done with the fewest parts possible. It sounds like you were borderline to begin with, but when you added the other mods, the extra CPU time needed to run the code in the added plugins pushed you over the edge and the simulation started falling apart. The faster the processor you have, (and possibly video card, not sure if the game uses physx and offloads some workload to the GPU or not for nvidia gpu's) the larger and more complicated ships you can get away with building before running into problems.

Wait, Which white dots are you referring to, the one big one on the left with the lines and the three on the right, or the six little ones beside the red line?

I learned something useful tonight about dealing with tumbling ships.. Using it is really a 'cheat' but.. time warping stops all ship rotations. if you tap . then , to go to 5x then 1x, your ship will automagically stop tumbling.

Ok I have to ask.. what's up with those time stamps in the log?

I've only noticed it with really long stacks of things attached radially to a central body myself. Though it always seemed to happen after time warps for me (and other people have reported similar issues)

He most likely has most of the graphics settings at their bare minimums.

It's happened to me before as well during a solar orbit rescue.. the rescue ship almost needed to be rescued due to two of the outer fuel/engine stacks just decided to fall off in mid mission (they were normal LFE's not NERVA's though) leaving the two remaining on one side.. I managed to get a kerbin intercept and them back to the surface but like you said, it wasn't fast, or fun.. luckily though I had LOTS of RCS fuel and thrusters.. so I could manage to compensate for higher asymmetric thrusts for most of the trip back than you were managing.

You should definitely experiment and modify that ship to see what works, and doesn't. (that's the point isn't it? Kerbals are replaceable after all. ) Though that's my usual orbit method for pretty much anything I launch vertically.. It may not be the most fuel efficient method, but if things are capable of making it to orbit, that procedure will generally get them there.

Er, if it uses any mods or edited parts whatsoever, it's not stock..

No. It's several stages. 8 in totally actually, orbiter drop tanks and capsule decouplers included. I reworded the description a bit, but it's still able to get to orbit with 1900L left in the bottom stage. I don't see how it could be called SSTO though since it sheds the SRB's and outer four 3200L droptanks/engines on the way up. I have done SSTO before, both with a spaceplane and a rocket.. though to be honest, SSTO with a rocket isn't really that difficult using aerospikes and a minimalist design.

Try this, it's something I threw together earlier today just for this purpose. http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/showthread.php/23955-0-17-Quickie-Mk-I-%28Generic-medium-lift-capacity-launcher-orbiter%29 It gets into orbit fairly easily with fuel to spare. A relatively easy way to get into orbit is this: (using the .craft posted in the above thread. put it in your KSP_win/saves/(whatever your save is called)/Ships/VAB directory ) 1) press T to turn on ASAS, throttle up to 100%, hit space to start the ride. 2) around 4000m or so altitude, the SRB's will burn out, press space again (once) to dump them 3) keep climbing vertically to 10000m, then when you get there, hold down the 'f' key (to temporarily turn off ASAS) and while you press the 'd' key as well to roll the rocket eastward along the 90 line until you hit the 45 degree intersect line.. The rocket will probably sway back and forth, due to ASAS. when you get used to controlling stuff, you can stop this sway manually, but for now, no harm in letting it settle down itself. 4) keep watching the rocket climb and keep an eye on the fuel levels. somewhere around 27000m altitude (roughly) the outer 4 tanks will empty and the outer engines will quit. when this happens, hit space again (once) to stage and dump these empty tanks. 5) press 'm' to switch to map mode. rotate the view around so you can see your orbit path and also click the ^ at the bottom center of the screen to bring up the navball. 6) Hover your mouse over the 'Ap' symbol as your rocket climbs, (still in map mode) and when your apoapsis hits 100000m, hit 'x' to shut off the engines 7) coast until your 1:20 or so away from apoapsis then (you can time warp if you want but you shouldn't have to wait long) 8)hold down F then D again to start rolling towards the horizion along the 90 line using the navball. This ship has a lot of mass and no RCS other than the pod, so it might not seem to do much at first, but it WILL turn eventually. Once it starts moving, let off the D key, but keep F pressed. when it gets to the 10 degree line or so let off on F, then when the horizion line passes through the dot in the V, tap F again to reset the point ASAS is trying to center to.. 9) by this time, you should be 25 seconds from apoapsis.. hold down shift to start your circularization burn how.. open it to 100% throttle. 10) while the burn is happening, hold down F once more and try to get the dot centered on the 90 line and the horizon line (that divides the blue/brown) using the WASD keys.. (turning will likely be more responsive under thrust since one of the first stage engines is gimbaled ) It's not super critical, close is really good enough for your first orbit 11)keep an eye on the planet while your burning, as soon as 'Pe' appears, mouse over it and be ready to hit X once again to kill the engines once it gets to 100000m as well. 11) Congratulations, if everything worked, and nothing exploded, you should be in a relatively circular orbit at 100km over Kerbin

Quickie Mk I Category : Interplanetary orbiter *Likely capable of also returning from most but this hasn't been tested* Maximum capacity into orbit : 30t into a 100km circular low Kerbin orbit A fairly typical asparagus staged lifter with a single NERVA powered orbiter. It's neither fancy nor unique, however, it is reliable. Brave souls can attempt and engine stand landing, though i'd recommend modifying the craft for landing capabilities if that is what's desired.

As the title says, I just threw this together this afternoon. Posting this as a reference for anyone who might be having problems getting things into orbit and beyond. It's a very basic but reliable launch platform.. The launch stages can put up to a 30t final stage into 100km LKO fairly easily. As built in the posted .craft file, the whole craft will make orbit with 1700 - 1900L left in the central launch stage depending on how efficient you are with your launch/gravity turn/orbit circularization. I generally average between 1800 and 1900L remaining with my method. Mechjeb might do better but I don't know since I don't use it. The remaining launch stage fuel will easily manage a mun intercept and orbit circularization or kerbin escape without having to use the final stage. The final stage orbiter has a delta-v somewhere around 8000m/s, so it should be able to make it into orbit around almost anything in the solar system, and back from most places. It can even land on most lower gravity moons and possibly Duna if your comfortable with standing it on it's engine. It's not extremely pretty, or unique, but it works. And like I said. Posting it as a reference design for anyone who might be having problems. Though I should note the lack of RCS, while making things simpler and saving weight, makes orbital attitude adjustments require a bit of pre planning until you dump the launch stage and it's mass. .craft file (you'll probably have to right click and 'save link as') Quickie Mk I **note** The Kerbal Engineer Redux plugin is show in use in the screenshots, but is NOT in the .craft file.. The .craft is 100% stock parts.

Your second hard drive likely isn't c:\Games\KSP KSP REALLY wants to be in C:\Games\KSP and odd things can/will happen when it's not.

The key to struts are WHERE they're placed more than just the sheer number of them.

it's the space cthulhu. (cousin of the space kraken) The problem is due to timewarping.. It's one of the things being worked on in .17.1 if you change timewarp increments in sequence (use , and . keys) instead of jumping around, (1x to 100000x back to 1x, etc by clicking the warp arrows at the top) the problem usually doesn't materialize.