Titler

Regarding the lines in the scan, are you guys running faster than 3x again? Because I have just reinstalled ISA and found that running at 4x puts gaps in the resulting scan, but lower than that it's solid. Now I need to find out why I can only do a few minutes (real time) scan before KSP fatally crashes unfortunately for me

Thanks for the clear instructions! I didn't think the lasers would be on the helmet of the kerbals. It took a bit of saving and quickloading, but finally Hydrojeb was located, skulking around my structures and causing trouble, but righteously burnt off my station! Lazor is a lovely mod I have to say, I was delighted by the inside-the-helmet-view, and the list of achievements and records of kerbals lost, one can only hope that the eventual campaign mode involves similar designs. Unfortunately, even with all the optimisation so far, KSP is still a bit of a memory hog, so I'll have to take it back out for now it's helped get me back to almost-pure stock. But I hope to come back to it later!

Hurrah for the new optimisation! It allowed me to not only include the Soviet Pack now, but I had enough CPU cycles left to squeeze in the Lazor set; it was still extremely choppy around the station, but where save editing fails, and hydrojeb frustrates, Seelin Kerman with the help of red lasers will succeed! Seelin arrives on-site with a quick and nasty ship using the new default cockpit... I love the helmet view on Lazor; Now where are those naughty parts hiding? Ahah! THERE you are, hydrojeb. Time to get Kerpew-pewed! I'd quick save after each one because unless you're right on top of them, the slightest movement could put the laser onto one of the structure tanks instead and ruin all your work; but I could quick load and go back to it. Once I'd found them all, deleting each in turn as even if it's mirrored the other sides will stay on until popped too, I exited the game so it would be in both the Persistent and Quicksave file, then searched them all for "Hydro" text. Ahah, all gone. Restart, and... FINALLY! Success! Back to a largely stock station (Bar for Mechjeb). So if you have the ability to add one more mod, and want to save your older vehicles, consider using Lazor!

In the end, I saved the station by leaving the offending mod in, and using the Lazor mod instead to allow me to use pew pew red lasers and blow up the offending parts in game... if you can run both the troublesome mod and Lazor at the same time, I'd recommend that as a last desperate mission for your Kerpeople!

This happens for me too; the problem is it's not plotting the actual interception, as you can rotate the craft around manually and see that there's no blue target on the navball. There's a short term fix; open up the "Rendezvous Planner" and click "Match velocities at closest approach" and it'll skip to that part correctly, and from there complete the rest of the flight under autopilot correct.

Thank you; there doesn't seem to be any information on cutting and welding in the original post, can you explain how it's done in Lazor please? Do I need a particular colour lazor mounted on my ship?

Hey all; I've heard this mod is a way to remove unwanted parts from your stations by burning them off with Lasers... but I can't see the Sunburn part which presumably does this? I've unzipped the folders into the root KSP directory, and I can see the Lazor systems under Utilities in the VAB, but what do I need to do afterwards? And is it possible to target very small units with it, so I can make them go POP...?

Hey there; I tried this mod but didn't get it to work to my satisfaction; the parts I'd tested remained on my station, until now in .20 I can't load the station as one of the parts is failing under this version. Will there be updates for compatibility, or do you know any way I can remove the parts or convert them to allow me back to my beloved Mun-Home please?

Here's mine, inspired by another game; cows are just the best where ever you find them! I'm debating between the simple and the one with a lotta bottle I quickly knocked out though...

If you can get this working, please let us know how. I've tried to do so myself, and even though the part isn't between two things, it removes the entire vehicle once a part is deleted out. I've also tried renaming it and copying the Resources tab to turn the part into a default part whilst leaving it's ID No. and orientation etc and that hasn't worked either...

It's a 6 ship, maybe 500 part station 1000 parts would melt my computer I suspect... Will settle in tonight and see about fixing it again... for science!

Well, I desperately needed a solution now, as the latest patch won't load one of those cursed Hydrojeb parts and deletes the entire station! To show you what I mean about having difficulty, the parts I wanted to kill are circled in the image below, but each docking module is a separate flight/craft, so resending would be slow on the old patch (4 hour flight time to docking for each section!) and I couldn't easily get at the parts once it was up. I've yet to find a solution which will allow me to just save my own station, maybe tomorrow I'll discover the game runs well enough to just manually replace it all; However! I did find some potential solutions for others struggling... This online editor seems to read the file correctly, but when I downloaded the modified file it was a whopping 10.7mb, which throttled Notepad and wouldn't open into KSP. Maybe it works for you though? http://ksp.jbsdev.com/ I also found this small editing program, but it's not WinXP compatible unfortunately. Again though, maybe for you guys? https://github.com/wfraser/KSPSaveEdit

Thanks for the answers so far; lasers are out as the game is too poorly optimised under WindowsXP (even with maximal accessible RAM which I have) to add any more mods, which is why I was hoping to remove ones that didn't work. At present there's only Mechjeb, the Muon Detector, Mapsat and then HydroJeb on a few station parts, which as mentioned is the one love to take off to reduce the choking hazard. Using small probes to bash them off is impossible as they're the docking parts in Hydrojeb (I was testing it before I worked out how to use Mechjeb's Smart ASS), and thus near the ports and hidden deep inside the craft's joints now. If I can't work out the linking parts of the text I may just have to leave them attached for now, as it only adds a few more models and slows down initial loading only a little. Having Kerbals be able to do a Spacewalk and remove individual parts might be a nice idea for future content though...

I've not yet found a clear guide to doing this; I have a station orbiting Mun I'd like to remove Hydrojeb parts from, as in the end it didn't prove very useful to me personally. I opened the Persistence file and from what I can understand, the text devoted to such a part looks like this.... However deleting all the lines between there with Hydrojeb in left the Station with just two probe cores visible when I reloaded the save. I made a backup of course, so nothing ultimately lost! But is there something else i need to do to remove those parts? I'd just like to have the game back to Stock really, without losing the station already built... Thanks!

Well, the idea is to learn by challenging tasks; copying Apollo landers may be historical but I'm more interested in learning to do something new for myself, or at least discover the limitations of space travel by pushing at the boundaries... my goal then is a reusable lander, as part of an imagined permanent future Kerbal Colony around Mun, before Chinese Kerman gets there first! I don't think Munbase Gamma is going to be used beyond that though; I'd hoped to maybe move it from planet to planet with future upgrades, but attempting to change the orbital height down from 100km to 30km above Mun with the Mainsail engines I'd left aboard proved to be rather disastrous, with the G-forces just tearing it apart even with a tiny 27m/s burn... Fortunately there were a range of small little cute wee orange engines aboard that I'd placed to make a small escape pod, and even though the whole station still concertinaed so alarmingly I had to pull all my solar panels in to avoid them smashing off against it's own hull, I was able to drop it to the required height (although it's a degree off elliptical now due to the incredibly poor station handling, I'll send one last part up to try and balance it before that final burn). I think the main hurdle, looking at it the overall setting tonight is that Mechjeb (currently the 2.0.7 pre-release) wants to launch in the opposite orbital motion to the space station; leaving Kerbal you go East, then exit to Mun orbit from the West side, which means you are captured on the opposite of the figure 8 at Mun, which puts you in a West spinning orbit around Mun. But Mechjeb wants to launch East from the Mun's surface still, using default launch profile, thus the next burn has to completely reverse the lander's orbit to catch the Station, which it doesn't have the fuel for of course. The solution was to use 180 degrees as the Orbit Inclination when launching. You'll still need a corrective burn as East/West will be tilted depending on how far North/South you've gone (You're pointing straight up from the surface of a ball of course) but the corrections are now into single seconds as you're in the right frame of motion.... And finally, Success! Billy-Bobfrey Kerman, who is best dodgy named Kerman, gets his crew back to the station from landing and returning at 10 degrees or so off equator with 505m/s of Delta V left! With a manual, more careful launch that may be enough to get anywhere on Mun without needing further lander designs; all I did in the end was change the engines and add the small round fuel tanks. Interesting; I wonder if I can get the original back to the station with it's worse fuel load, or if it's Thrust/Weight ratio is too poor? But now the basic lander and flight plan is solved, dropping from the sky onto Munoliths proceeds! After one last shot of Billy-Bobfrey's triumphant return to his Munar Home...

Ok, I think I've made a bit of progress; I was able to get the tonnage down, and design a rover along similar lines to the ones shown here, but using my very first chassis as the basis. Who knows if it drives well, right now I'm just trying to solve the fuel problem! I left quite a graveyard of abandoned Kerbals on Mun, and discovered an interesting bug where if KSP selects the same crew again, one half of them disappears when they get too close to each other, and I ended up with 1 Kerbal of 3 in my landing craft, and 2 of 3 in the nearby previous lander, how odd! As you can see, I arrive on Mun now with 1573 m/s Delta V for the return. But here's where it gets hard again. That's enough to put me into a Munar orbit, but I can't get back to the station. Although the station is orbiting around the equator at 100km height, and I've tried setting it as a rendezvous target and launching into it's alignment with the Ascent Guidance, it then tries to do an hour+ burn to align, which obviously is just not going to happen on that fuel. So... what's the next trick please, what is it I'm doing wrong and how can I get back to a meeting with the station? Dropping the station to a lower height, or changing inclination won't be a problem (I think!) as I have enormous fuel and rcs reserves (assuming it doesn't rip apart moving!) aboard that...

I've not read the entire thread, so apologies if this has been mentioned, but one thing that may make you think you're bad at docking, but is in fact a flaw with the game as it currently is, is that you can place a docking port and it not actually be valid. When you arrive to dock, if you find that you approach at a slow speed, but the arrival bounces back and needs RCS to keep shoving it back, or it swings off target after contact more than the length of the docking port as a very rough guide, the port isn't valid. What should happen is that the magnets engage and hold you in place whilst it lines up, and then grabs it's target... if you're not being held, drifting wildly off target or backwards... it's broken. The way to ensure you've fitted it correctly is, when building your ship, keep mousing gently over the target spot. You'll see a small "leap" as it nudges into position with Angle Snap engaged, and then it's in the right spot. If you click it manually, even if you line it up perfectly, it won't necessarily be working. Angle Snap it into place to be sure. Others may have mentioned a MechJeb approach. I just arrive, use [ and ] keys to swap between vessels, set both to control from the docking ports I want to use, set them to Target the opposite por, and then set them both on TGT+ to aim at the other port. Then I turn on the Docking Computer (Default, bottom left options) and swap to the second INS controls, and then just push W key to slowly travel forward aimed at the port. Let the magnets take over after a gentle kiss, and we're docked!

Orange Tanks to White Tanks will pancake if using mainsails; the game seems to have differing structural values for the two, and when under enormous thrust as when using a mainsail engine, it sees it as stronger tank pushing into weaker and collapses at the connecting points of the white tanks. So if possible mass struts around the white tanks, or use girders at 90 degrees from the white tanks and then struts to the girder each side, to make a kind of "kite" design around it, thus taking strain off the connection points. My own design now uses white only as the booster connection due to the difficulty of placing oranges radially at first; it currently looks like this, with a few struts placed flush between tanks for added security. This will arrive around Mun with a 17-30t lander stage and half an orange tank and nearly all the RCS intact... The important thing though is because there's no white tanks on the centre of thrust, it avoids the Accordion Of Doom effect, at least in the last 10 launches or so!

Hmmm... Yes, I'm trying to use only Stock parts as KSP is appallingly optimised under Windows XP and just adding the Space 1999 Eagle mod has choked it to the point of death; I crash after trying to launch a second craft as it is unfortunately... Regarding a target goal, the goal is a fully re-usable Munar Landar, that can carry at least 1 kerbal, either automated and to pick up 1, or flown by 1 to total 2 or more; It's both a team visit to Munoliths, or a rescuer of Kerbals I don't feel like abandoning. It has to get to the surface and back to station orbit above Kerbal, leaving nothing behind. At the moment the station is at 100km, but can be dropped lower. It's carrying 3636 fuel at the moment, storage space for 9720 (and 6750 monoprop), has 6 crew in various compartments looking out of windows for nice screenshots or to take over a shift on Mun, and has docking ports ready for a lander arriving on site and refuelling from Kerbil at the same time. The problem I have is that KSP takes about 2 hours to get from Kerbil to the station, where it chokes again and drops to single figure frames per second due to horrible engine optimisation, and then a few minutes away from the item count to surface and decent performance again. I am hoping in the long run this will be fixed, because I like to build the support framework before missions in general, rather than an Apollo style "First!" achievement then advancement dead end. Thus the station, which I will later try and fling from Mun to Minimus orbit... where it can pick up newer rovers for that environment. But I don't understand yet how to predict Mun-performance before I get there. That's what I'm trying to tease out, how to get a sense of the hidden thrust-to-weight which is eating ability to return to orbit... for instance my last rover, using fuel tanks as superstructure actually beats by a fair way the Vacuum Time given for Magnemoe's rover, but it performs much much worse in practice it seems? I'm trying to figure out why... and why the one which is 3 tonnes smaller than all of them (17t, the first) actually had the worst fuel-time of all.

Thank you for the comments so far, I've experimented with the nuclear engines, and they may be part of the solution, but I'm not quite there yet I think. Here's the Mark VII docking at Munbase Gamma to transfer the remaining insertion fuel and RCS, with what I thought would be a nice all round idea... the engines can also be used on the surface if I'm feeling crazy! And the Monoprop tanks etc moved to the front rebalanced it correctly. The lander legs were to point it at roughly 45 degrees and give it a low, flat rise to a low Mun orbit... BUT! Mechjeb found this impossible to fly, and locked into a series of strange sweeps after the decouple burn, off target along the vertical at first, and then trying to correct this ended up sweeping way beyond the target again and back into a circular orbit...? So I decided to place the craft vertical, to see if he was confused about an off centre-line centre of thrust, and use lander legs to slowly come down from, and re-raise the lander into the Vertical. However... whilst working on that (it's still in the "Bouncing up and down at the landing pad to test the wheel-survivability" stage!) I had a look at what Mechjeb reported for all the previous versions; and the information on Delta-V was interesting, and brings me to what may be the issue? The Mk 1, the one on the left of the first image; That's even lower than your estimate, so no wonder if floundered on the surface. However Delta V clearly isn't the solution by itself, as when I looked at an alternative lander I'd experimented with... ... it has 2357m/s Delta-V if I'm reading that correctly? Much more than the 1500m/s which should be able to get to orbit as suggested by Mr Patterson; but even this failed to do so. So I'm wondering if it's the mentioned Thrust To Weight problem, which would eat up the fuel? In this case, it's hard to see how I can estimate that, and what I should be aiming for... I'll have a look in the ISS Mapsat and Mechjeb mods to try and find more information, but is there any way to see an efficiency rating for vacuum flight in the hanger? Because I've yet to find one...

Hello all, A little description of what I'm trying to do; I have a large station in orbit around Mun to refuel landers on the surface, and I can get designs down and drive around with them... but what I can't do is ever seem to get enough fuel down to return the lander with wheels to the same orbit again, much less refuel and re-use it. To give you an idea of the kind of designs I've been using, here's a screenshot... You should be able to see I've used a single tank of fuel, and the two radials on the first ever design, and the tiny engines and larger fuel loads as my latest, but no matter what I seem to do I can't get enough fuel to the surface to allow me to return to the station; Is there a trick to the descent/ascent I need to start using, do I have to give up and use even smaller, single Kerbal crewed vessels, or something else? Are rovers expected to be abandoned, and crewed landers to be stationary on the surface... some design tips if not would be desperately appreciated, thanks!

Thank you all for the answers; I'll try some Munar landings to see if I've got the translations down for now, but those future features sound lovely for my old-man-maths-bad head!

Question: I've read some way into this thread but I've not seen an answer, how does the co-ordinates of MapSat co-relate to the autoland co-ordinates of MechJeb? That is, if you mouse over the Map and see 62.1, -148.3 (chosen at random... there's nothing there... or IS there?) do you enter the .1 and .3 into the first, second or third window of MechJeb? Ideally it would be nice to have a "Click here on MapSat to click your cursor there on the main map" to allow Mechjeb and others to pick up where you'd like to aim for...

Well that's the million-kerdollar question; where the loop could be. The model accepts placement like this, and all the fuel is visible to the lander and in it's Resources tab. The two middle tanks, and the roundel tanks drain to the central, and the two horizontal on each side drain left tank first then right tank (when looked at by an observer) so I can see where the usage is going... what I can't see is why the rear mounted engine is running out of fuel quicker, because it doesn't, as far as can be traced, have access to more fuel than the other radial on the opposite side (both start with 2x 90), nor is the centre of gravity off enough to suggest it's trying to move more weight. Mounting the central to both horizontal tanks to try and balance out usage doesn't solve the issue either. I'd prefer to keep the tested chasis if possible of course, rather than start from scratch again... the bill may not have been presented yet, but Kerbal Accounting may not be quiet forever!

Well then, my Kerbals decided to go slow and steady on their way to the Mun; first they built an orbiting station with plenty of fuel storage space, a detachable crew compartment, with the windows nicely lined up so they could wave farewell to the brave Kerbals who would make that first trip down from the final docking attachment. No robotic probes first, every step would be manned! Which is why the docking ports have extending ladders (closed in the shot below) to catch Kerbals who might fall off the station... The first lander was tested heavily on Kerbil for stability and control; and although Mechjeb's mechanical brain was sometimes too precise, and crashed replacement crew right on top of of Munbase Alpha and Beta, eventually Jeb and his brave crew learned to pull Mechjeb's circuits out a little early, docked up with Munbase Gamma, and on the first try for the surface, made it into the history books inside Budgerigar 1 (Humans have Eagles, majestic soaring birds; Kerbals have small green Budgerigars!). Rolling a D6 dice on the surface for the honor, it turned out Bill would be the first Kerman on the Mun... but after pootling about quite effortlessly, they all stayed to enjoy watching the Sun rise over the horizon, before turning for home... Except! Disaster! They didn't have enough fuel to make a connecting orbit back to the station. And this is where my question comes in... The Munar lander was redesigned again and again, slowly getting heavier as it took on more fuel to try and get the complete unit back to the station, ready for redeployment, in the next stage of searching for Munoliths. But in the Marks 3 to the current 5, a problem with fuel balancing has arrived, and I can't work out where it is. I've uploaded the file for the current lander here. I've also taken a comparison shot on the Munar surface near the original lander to illustrate the new design. I may have to settle for abandoning the wheels to return the crew, but I'd like to understand what's happening with the tanks, because I can't solve the issue myself... A newer model is to the left; as you can see I've used a little overlapping to mount small tanks around the inner framework. 2 between the frames, 2 pushed into the central tank, and 2 small ring-tanks on the end of the central ones. On the original, the engines burn identically, and run out of fuel at the same time. In the current, the central tanks won't empty unless linked to the tanks mounted horizontally by the engines. Linking all of them up with mirrored fuel transfer drains them correctly, but the engine on the opposite side to the ladder runs out of fuel about 30 seconds before the other. As far as I can see both have access to equal fuel reserves, and I expected the central tank to fill both as they drained. They are mounted in identical positions, and the craft is correctly balanced for both thrust and centre-of-gravity. But that engine always burns out first, and sends the craft into a fatal spin. I've tried transferring fuel to the central tanks, and the central to the engines directly to try and force balancing that way but that hasn't helped. I've added a single engine central, under the lander to provide more thrust and hopefully change engine flow but again, the rear engine always drains too quickly, even though it should only be drawing from identical doubled tanks between the struts. So... does anyone know how to regulate the fuel flow to the engines in the above design? Please download the file, mess around with it on Kerbal, and tell me if so!