DMagic

Where can I find more information about subject X, Y, or Z? - Your first stop should be Specialist290’s tutorial collection found here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/28352-The-Drawing-Board-A-library-of-tutorials-and-other-useful-information. This contains a range of tutorials on most subjects relevant to KSP. They come in a variety of forms, video, written, in-game, and some link to other websites. Some of it is out of date (or only pertains to older versions of KSP), but it’s a good bet that what you’re looking for can be found there. - You can also check the tutorial subsection of this forum. It has a number of newer threads, and other tutorials not found on Specialist290’s list. - This tips thread also has some useful, and sometimes not very obvious, advice: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/58260-Tips-and-tricks-you-found-out-yourself - The numbers at the end of questions below are links to threads or tutorials with more details about the subject. How can I get into orbit? - Put command pod on fuel tank, put fuel tank on engine, make engine go. Ok, it’s not always that easy, but there are a few steps that can help you learn. (1,2) - Start out small and simple. Many complications can arise on bigger and more complicated designs, sticking to a smaller rocket can save a lot trouble early on and allow you to learn the controls and interface. (1) - Career mode is a good place to start because it limits you to a few basic parts until you can get the hang of things. (1) - Another option is to load the Kerbal X rocket in sandbox mode. This is easily capable of reaching orbit and should help you learn the basics. - Just remember to throttle up using the "shift" key and push "space" to activate the engines in the bottom stage (that orange column that’s on the right side while building your craft, but the left side while flying it). Help, why did my probe stop working? - First thing to check is the batteries, click on the "resources" button on the top-right of your screen. Probes require electricity to function, and if you don’t have any solar panels or generators, or you forgot to deploy the panels, you will eventually run out of juice. - A good idea is to slap a few OX-STAT panels (the flat ones that you don’t have to deploy) on every craft you make. Just remember that these have to face the sun to get power, if you time-warp for too long, or at the wrong time, you’ll end up with your panels in the shade and no power. - A single RTG can be a good idea if you continue having this problem; it will never run out of power. How can I keep my rover from turning over? - Step one: slow down. 20 m/s may not sound terribly fast, but it is actually 72kph (45mph). This is extraordinarily fast for a rover, much faster than any real life design. - The second step is to build your rover low and wide. Keeping the center of mass close to the ground helps prevent tip-overs, and making the wheel base very wide makes the rover more stable. (1, 2) - Other options include: putting ion engines on top of your rover facing up, this will push it into the ground, something like how a spoiler works on a car, or using RCS thrusters for the same purpose. Use docking mode controls when driving a rover (activated by clicking on a button in the lower left-hand corner. These help minimize tilting movements caused by using the default controls. - On very low gravity moons (Minmus, Gilly, etc…) rovers will always be difficult, there simply isn’t enough gravity to hold a reasonably sized rover on the surface. Why can’t my docking ports just get along? - Docking is tricky and takes some effort to learn, but the first step is to make sure that your docking ports have been put on in the correct orientation. - One end of the port is supposed to attach to your craft, the other end is meant to dock to another craft. For the Clamp-o-tron and Clam-o-tron junior the correct end is fairly self-evident; the somewhat rough looking end attaches to your craft, the end with the protruding ring docks to another craft. - For the Clamp-o-tron senior it’s a little bit trickier. The docking end (the end that should face out from your craft) has raised lines and a ring coming out from the center, while the other end is flat. - Make sure that both crafts have docking ports of the same size and both in the correct orientation. - Rendezvous and docking are a little outside of the scope of this short FAQ, there are many great tutorials on that subject in the tutorial list linked to above. blizzy78 has some especially good tutorials: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/35988-Launch-rendezvous-and-docking - There are two common docking bugs that tend to pop up a lot. One is that your docking ports won’t connect despite being properly oriented and aligned; this could be due to the “docking port state†bug, see here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/50141-Why-these-things-won-t-dock?p=652549&viewfull=1#post652549[/url. The other is the stuck docking ports, where you can’t undock, see here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/47768-Locked-Docking-Ports. What is this Delta-V and where can I get some? - The simple answer is that it is a measure of your crafts total mileage, how far it can go. Space travel is a bit different from driving a car, but this value basically tells you where you can theoretically fly to/land/orbit. - There are many "delta-v maps" floating around the forums, or a quick google search away; these will give you an estimate for how much delta-v you need to get to any given planet/moon. (1) - There are a few mods that will tell you how much delta-v your craft has. Kerbal Engineer Redux provides this and some other basic information. MechJeb gives you this and many other things, including some limited autopilot capabilities. - You can also calculate this yourself using some fairly simple equations and the information provided in-game. Why won’t my rocket/plane fly straight? - Welcome to the SAS system. This will at least attempt to keep you on a steady heading and prevent you from losing control. Turn it on by pushing "T", the little blue "SAS" light will come on above your Navball. Push or hold "F" to temporarily activate or deactivate the system (or to reset the system’s heading). (1) - You need something for the SAS system to use for controlling your craft. The main source of control is reaction wheels, which are part of every command pod and probe core, more can be added by putting inline reaction wheels on your craft. You can also put on tail fins, vectoring engines (that make small adjustments to the direction they point) or RCS thrusters. - The system is limited though, very large crafts can be hard to control and some aspects of the system need improvement. It is also possible to add too much control. When this happens your craft might start shaking around a lot. Saturn V, more like Limp Noodle 7, why does this thing flop around so much? - One word, struts. Use lots of these things. - If you have radial engines put one end of a strut on the radial fuel tank and connect the other to the central tank, you can also strut radial fuel tanks to each other. - Strut the bottom section of your rocket to the top section. If these two parts are the same size you can put some small cubic octagonal struts (the little cube shaped truss parts) near the top of your bottom section, and add struts going from these to the top section. - If you have a big payload on top of your rocket put lots of struts coming from the center of the rocket out to the payload. - Also keep in mind that parts can only be attached from a single point; you can’t connect a radial fuel tank to two radial decouplers. Struts are your only option for adding more connection points. - Struts won’t solve everything. If you build a rocket long enough it will just about always wobble around. There are limitations to the game that make it difficult to build certain designs without having stability issues. How can I add a mod, copy a craft/savefile, or otherwise access KSP files? - For most systems KSP can probably found in: Program Files (x86)\Kerbal Space Program\ - For Steam: Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Kerbal Space Program\ - Mods go in the Gamedata folder. Screenshots (taken with F1) are in the Screenshots folder. Save files and craft files are in the saves folder. Each save has an individual folder with the persistence file (your primary savefile), the quicksave file and folders for VAB and SPH crafts. There are also default VAB and SPH folders that contain the stock crafts. Save files, craft files and mods are cross compatible with any operating system (some mods might have issues). KSP went from a hare to a tortoise when I added the 47th component of my space station/Death Star tribute, what’s the deal? - KSP is a very physics heavy game and every part adds to the amount of physics calculations necessary. This is very dependent on the speed of your computer’s CPU. Not having a shiny new CPU lying around, the only option for most people is to use fewer parts in your craft designs. This means that your mass relay recreation might not look as grand, but you can still make some very large, very complex designs while not blowing your part-count budget. - A better CPU helps here, but everyone hits a limit somewhere. Some people can run with 500 parts without really slowing down, but pretty much everyone will have problems with 1000 or more parts. (1) - The one option that can help here is the “Physics delta per frame†slider found on the first tab of the settings page. Pushing this all the way to the right can improve your framerate a bit, but will also slow down in-game time when things start to get hairy. - KSP can also be a RAM hungry game. Adding mod parts takes up even more RAM and you will eventually hit a limit at around 3.5GB, there is not much you can do about this other than using fewer mod parts, or installing versions that use less RAM. ------------ I'm open to suggestions about how to add to this or what the best format is for this kind of thing. Having one question and answer per post might be the best way of keeping this thread visible without being overwhelming. Though my thinking is that we should keep this to 15 or 20 questions. A thorough guide compilation for KSP already exists and there is no need to rehash that in another thread. Limiting this to the 20 or so of the most common issues asked here or in the support forum seems like a reasonable way to keep this from getting bloated or competing with Specialist920's thread.

That's an interesting design, but my guess is that it will tip over easily on Duna. It looks to have a fairly high center of mass and isn't very wide. Duna's gravity is pretty low, so even if it's stable on Kerbin it might not be on Duna. It will probably be better on Eve, though. You can always use parachutes to land it, you can use some kind of separate modules if you don't want to keep the used parachute parts on the rover itself.

Yeah, it's too much control available. You can do the same thing with reaction wheels, or at least you could in 0.21.1, even a one-seat command pod would get these kind of shakes when it was by itself with SAS on. They fixed the command pod, but any time you have enough torque or control surfaces with a small mass you can get this kind of thing happening.

This has also happened to me, I've found that going into the control panel and changing the number of lines per click of the scroll wheel fixes the problem. Edit: Bah, I guess four months isn't too much of a necro post...

All of the components, there were eight in total, were landed with extendable wheels attached. I used Infernal Robotics to raise and lower the wheels to allow for easy docking to the core component. Then I separated the wheels and the landing rockets and fired them off to let them crash into the surface somewhere else.

I really like this way of docking things together. It's a great use of Infernal Robotics parts and a big improvement on the regular way of using rovers to cart things around. It also looks like something that would scale up nicely. Edit: I would give you more rep, but apparently it's too soon.

It's all in your KSP save directory: Kerbal Space Program\Saves\*your save file*\ (On Steam it should be something like: Program Files (x86)\Steam\Steamapps\Common\Kerbal Space Program...) It should have the persistence file (this is the important one, the file that stores all of your missions in-progress, science record, career mode progress etc...), the quicksave file, and the VAB and SPH folders with the crafts you've made with that save. There is also another set of VAB/SPH folders that contain the stock crafts, you don't need to copy those, just the ones inside your save folder.

Put the final touches on my new Mun Arch base.

The Mun Arch Kethane Refinery.

Lander, fuel tanker, space station, absurd part-count offender; all of the above. From my new Mun base mission.

My new Mun base and fuel tanker.

Today I give you the Mun Arch Kethane Refinery and Fuel Depot. While I have always liked my Minmus Kethane base, I also feel that it had a number of flaws and could be greatly improved upon. Not wanting to simply recreate a different version of that base, I decided to locate my new base on the Mun and I figured that near one of the anomalies was a good place to put it. You don’t get those perfectly flat lakes as you do on Minmus, and it’s a bit tougher to land on the Mun, but it worked out ok in the end. The mods used here are primarily Kosmos for the structural base components (those Balka crew tunnels are one of my favorite mod parts), the solar panel, and the cylindrical fuel tanks. udk_lethal_d0se’s large structural components for the habitation modules and spherical fuel tanks. And the Kethane parts, obviously. There are also a number of mods used for other parts. KW is used for some structural parts and the boosters. Alexustas’ stack inline lights are used in a number of places. The SCANsat parts are used on a number of crafts for mapping. Engineer was used for all of my craft/flight info needs. Infernal Robotics was extremely helpful for making a system to dock the components together on the ground. And a few more for parts and plugins here and there. Here’s a few more shots of the base in action and a breakdown of the components. I have some pictures from the base planning and construction as well. Here are some of the surveyor probes used to determine the best landing spot. The first is my ultra-low altitude scanner, circling the Mun at about 7.5km in an 85o orbit. I used a lander to scout out a few of the anomalies but was ultimately stymied by the rough terrain around one of the Mun arches. For the last arch I used a small rover to get a closer look at the surrounding area and find a suitable base site. The area just west of this arch is pretty flat and has enough space for a base before dropping off steeply into the nearby crater. And now we have the launch for all of the base components. There were eight launches in all, ranging from the totally-reasonable, about 30 tons to LKO for the science and comms stations, to the, “are you sure these boosters don’t need any struts?†launch of the habitation, kethane drills, and kethane depot modules at about 100 tons to LKO, and finally to the “oh god, just get it into space†launch of the core module at about 230 tons to LKO and the “I don’t care how heavy it is, just keep strapping on boosters†launch of the two identical fuel depots. Here are a few shots of the base construction. The core module was the first to launch, as it lacked any movement system on the ground. The kethane drill segment came next, using my top-mounted landing and extendable wheels system for putting it into place and docking. The landing system was then separated and blasted off to crash into the surface some distance away. After a few more segments the base starts to look interesting. If you look really closely you can see that the decouplers are still attached to the top of the kethane drills on the left. Because I was stupid and did very little testing I managed to put those on upside down. Not wanting to be left with the blight of unnecessary parts I undertook the painful process of deleting those parts from the persistence file. This requires renumbering every part that comes after the decouplers and ensuring that every part has the correct connection references. It was not fun, test things first people. The final two components are put into place. I got really good at precision landing with bulky, low TWR crafts doing all of this. I’m not very efficient about it, but at least I can do it now. With the base complete I sent out the crew transport vehicle with a rover strapped onto the bottom. Once they arrive, Jeb, Bill, Bob and some other guy set off to study the Mun arch. In answer to everyone’s question, yes the Mun arch does have kethane in it. Jeb takes the opportunity to jet up to the top of the arch and claim it as his own. Unfortunately a tragic accident took the life of the four Kerbals. They got a little carried away and flipped their rover, smashing all four of them and sending the rover on an improbable, ballistic trajectory into a nearby crater. They will be mourned. Here are a few detail shots of the completed base. But wait, dear readers, we aren’t done yet. Don’t think I would frontload this post with all of the good stuff. For what use is a base full of fuel if it’s stuck on the ground? We need something to get all that stuff back into orbit. For that I present the Nostromo (ok, I know the Nostromo was just the tug, and this thing doesn’t really look like that or the big refinery ship it was pulling, but that’s somehow what I had in mind when I came up with this). Coming in on the launchpad at just over 2900 tons it was powered by five of the largest, Griffon KW engines (there is a fifth booster hidden behind all of the flames in the center), sixteen of the low thrust, long duration Globe X5 SRBs and four of the high thrust, low duration Globe X5s for a total of around 900 parts. This was a take-a-break, find-something-else-to-do kind of launch, running at around 3 or 4 FPS. After some tricky separations maneuvers (those internal SRBs are a little scary when they come off and bump into each other) the four remaining engines push the tanker most of the way into orbit and drain it down to about 12000L of fuel. The main orbital engines push it the rest of the way, eventually getting into a stable, 300km orbit around Kerbin. Here are some detail shots, showing some of the six NERVAs used as orbital engines, and one of the four main landing engines. A network of forty RCS blocks provide control authority during flight, and help correct for any mass imbalance. Here the command tower is visible in the center. The six large spherical tanks are flanked by seventy-six of the cylindrical tanks of various sizes and twenty RCS tanks. The tanker holds a total of 77328L of fuel and 11020L of mono-propellant. Two of the docking and guidance towers are also visible here, cutoff on the bottom left and in the distance near the center. Here we can see the orbital pilot station and another of the guidance towers at the front of the tanker. The front-mounted fuel tanks are used to offset the mass of the NERVAs in the back. These use standard tri-couplers which don’t allow fuel crossfeed from the bottom, while all of the other tri-couplers have been modified to allow fuel flow. I tried to make the struts come out decent and symmetrical (I couldn’t use actual symmetry placement most of the time) to avoid that strut-spammed look. And most of the utilities parts are hidden away in the middle; there are around thirty or so reaction wheels, several batteries and RTGs, and some foldable landing legs made out of the standard, mid-sized truss pieces and Infernal Robotics hinges. After a three-burn transfer from Kerbin to the Mun the Nostromo begins its descent to the surface. By carefully coordinating the orbital engines, the main vertical thrust engines, and the RCS thrusters the tanker homes in on the Kethane refinery. Raycott Kerman gets a close view of the Mun arch from his perch at the rear guidance tower. The Nostromo comes in for a very gentle landing, fine tuning its position with RCS thrust, and running out of fuel less than one meter above the surface; talk about a close call. The landing blocks performed admirably though, absorbing the impact of the now 190 ton tanker at a little under 1m/s. With the tanker connected to the base through KAS pipes the refinery cranks up and begins producing fuel. The base is, unfortunately, not stable with a full load of fuel and kethane. It tends to develop a case of the death rattle and shakes itself apart after a minute or so. That’s no matter though, I can just start up everything and finish the fuel production and transfer during time-warp. TAC Fuel Balancer is supremely useful here, considering that I have seventy-six tanks to fill up. Now that the tanker is fully fueled the crew begins preparations for liftoff. After Seebin Kerman detaches the fuel pipe he watches as the lumbering tanker, now over 1000 tons, begins to slowly rise. Using a combination of the lift and orbital engines the tanker blasts off into a 50km orbit around the Mun. Around 25000L of fuel and 2000L of mono-propellant were used during liftoff, but there is still another 50000L of fuel remaining in the tanks, and around 9000L of mono. With the Nostromo in orbit I’ll end with one final shot of the Mun Arch Kethane Refinery, taken just as the sun is setting on the horizon.

I wouldn't trust the wiki for any really up to date information about part functions. In any event, the relevant .cfg file code is: MODULE { name = ModuleSAS } Anything with this listed in the .cfg file will provide the SAS function, and as I mentioned all of the command pods, probes, and reaction wheel parts have this line. Until they give the IAS a useful function I suspect this question will continue to be asked, since there is nothing in their in-game description to indicate what purpose the IAS has and why it should have a higher mass.

This is no longer correct. As of 0.21.1 every command pod, probe core, and reaction wheel part (inline reaction wheel, inline advanced stabilizer, and large ASAS) has the SAS function. If you want to know more about SAS you can go to the tutorial in my signature. As for the IAS, the others are correct, it provides exactly the same function as the IRW but weighs more; don't use it.

Two things; are you using fine control mode, activated with CAPS lock? And are you using docking mode for translation controls? Fine control mode should help at least a little by reducing thrust from some of the RCS blocks to compensate for any offset in the COM. And docking mode doesn't work right for RCS translation controls as wasmic said. When you switch to docking mode and use the WASD keys it will make SAS momentarily switch to damping mode (the orange arrows on the SAS indicator), which can really screw up your heading in some cases. The behavior of this isn't entirely predictable and sometimes thrusting in one direction will trigger damping mode while others won't. Only use the translation controls in staging mode and you should avoid this problem.

I think this is better than simply making experiments take time. You could make it so that experiments get canceled if change your situation. For example, you could be able to start recording acceleration or gravity data during a decent only once you go sub-orbital, and reestablishing orbit would cancel the experiment. Or temperature data would only be valid for the time spent in an atmosphere.

While poking around in the SAS system I discovered something about RCS translation controls that may be a bug. While in staging mode (the default flight mode), using the translation controls with the HNJKLI keys will not activate the SAS damping mode (the orange arrows on the SAS indicator). However, if you switch to docking mode and use the WASD keys for RCS translation, damping mode will activate. The behavior of this is not entirely predictable, and damping mode won't remain in effect as it will when using WASD in staging mode, but it could make docking more difficult. In fact, you can turn off RCS, enter docking mode, and using the WASD keys will still activate damping mode, even though there is no movement. The shift and control keys don't activate it though, even with RCS on. I suspect this is not intended and I'll submit a bug report when I get around to making some stock test crafts. But for now I would say that you should use the staging mode translation controls for docking as this unnecessary activation of damping mode could complicate things, especially for larger or more unbalanced crafts. This also affects rovers when you try to use docking mode to drive. These should be more stable if SAS consistently remains in locking mode.

That would be nice, having more RCS engines that use the regular engine staging and throttle systems can be really helpful.

It's hard to tell for sure, but I think I see two double rings of RCS thrusters, one at the back and one towards the middle. This won't be ideal for translation, but assuming you can get SAS working properly it should be doable. Using fine control mode (with CAPS lock) should almost completely alleviate any issues.

Joysticks are notorious for doing this, even if they are unplugged. You can try uninstalling the driver, that sometimes fixes this. The orange arrows indicated that SAS is in damping mode, which does provide some resistance to changes in heading, but its behavior is not really consistent, or it's at least hard to predict. Any input will briefly zero out all of the controls (which is why tapping the controls can cause an otherwise stable craft to start spinning out of control in some cases). Control should kick back in fairly quickly, but if the system is receiving some constant, random input from joystick drivers it will probably stay at zero-control indefinitely.

Another nice addition, keep up the good work.

For Gilly, definitely. I made a three-ion engine manned lander for Minmus and it worked great. For Gilly you could probably use only one or two engines with a single chair. Just make sure to take into account the mass of the Kerbal when designing the craft, they are about .093 tons. Ion engines are always a bit tricky for circularizing though, you have to start the burn much earlier than you might think.

It's hard to be sure, but I think the problem is that the decoupler is clipping into the engine and its shroud. It looks like the bottom node of the decoupler is bound to the bottom node of the engine. So it drops the segments below it, but can't detach from the engine, and the engine shroud can't detach from the engine, so everything gets stuck.

This isn't unique to rotating, any control input will zero out the controls on the other axes. This is definitely a problem and isn't working quite the way that it should (at least from what I understand about how damping mode is supposed to work). That said, this was an example of what happens when the control authority is maxed out. The imbalance in this example requires near-maximum input on the pitch or yaw axis, so any interruption in that control causes the craft to spin out of control. For a normal rocket, one not so severely unbalanced, this shouldn't be as much of an issue. It requires more manual input than it probably should, be it's still pretty easy to keep the craft on course, or make a gradual turn. Do you have any specific examples of how it's not working better. There are certainly cases where a craft designed for the system in 0.21 won't work as well in 0.22, but you can't expect anything made for the old system to work as well or better in the new one (some might, but not all). Of course, new craft designs can have problems too, but much of this can be mitigated by careful flying. In my opinion the system is better in 0.22 than it was in 0.21. There are some definite improvements, but there are some areas that require more careful design and flying. Overall yes, it does tend to oscillate more, and if flown the same way as in 0.21 a craft can spend a lot of time bouncing around and not settling down on a steady course. I've found that much of this can be alleviated with careful use of manual controls to slow or stop your movement and well timed use of the 'F' key to reset the locked heading. Electricity use is another matter and one that requires consideration when building your craft, though it shouldn't really be a problem during launch since most of the big engines generate electricity, but for large crafts in space it could be problem. And yes, it is supposed to be an explanation, and, I thought, a fairly objective one. It is mostly a list of changes made from 0.21 with a few examples of how some of the changes affect mass imbalances. I did write that it handles unbalanced crafts better, holds a heading better, and dampens roll better (though not in the manner described in response to KerbMav) and I think those are all true statements. There are issues, and I brought up some of them in the initial post, but I think overall it's a pretty good system.

Yes, this is definitely true. Lots of people tend to plaster their stations with these things without realizing how much of a performance impact they have.