Benno

I just ran in to the bug with career/mission progress not saving. I was doing one of those 'fly to Jeb's passage and take a crew report' missions around KSC, in a rocket powered plane. Only staging present (and activated) was parachutes (so 2 stages total, engine and chutes). I had two such missions running that required visiting 3 sites each. I'd partially completed both missions in this one flight and had landed with chutes. The mission-sub-items were ticked, with appropriate messages saying I'd achieved them. However, after hitting recover (top of screen, not space centre) once I landed, despite the messages still being there I had no recorded progress against the items in the mission-control, and no reward for any of the achievements (should have been 3 lots of about 9000cr). FMRS was armed and active, but there were no stages to trigger it. I have quite a few mods running, including KCT and StageRecovery, but I've only noticed this career issue since installing FMRS. KSP .90x32, log file below (I think it's been running since I accepted the missions): https://www.dropbox.com/s/jlln3qhuit83lkr/output_log.zip?dl=0

I've seen a lot of people talking about chutes being ripped off, and struggled with it myself quite a bit. Mine don't seem to stay on unless I'm moving below about 250 m/s. A couple of points though for those who are struggling: - I suspect for a lot of people, the problem lies in having either FAR or NEAR installed at the same time. Whilst it's not a technical conflict as such, these mods will generally reduce your drag, which you means you are moving faster for longer. As such, even if going straight up 30,000m and falling straight back down, it's quite likely that you will hit the ground at around 300 m/s. Goodbye chutes. - Just how fast you will fall, depends a lot on how heavy your craft is. A one man pod will probably slow down enough to deploy at around 3000m. A 3 man pod with, say, some goo containers, a half full fuel tank and an engine, etc., has a lot more momentum. Hence, it will still be moving pretty quick long after a smaller craft would have slowed down. - What worked for me with somewhat heavier craft, was attaching more chutes and having them semi deploy as high as I could get away with (takes some testing). Don't rely on just one, you'll need several to slow you down enough for the chutes to survive full deployment. I'm still not quite sure what a drogue chute is. Is that equivalent to semi-deployed, or people grabbing these as non-stock parts from somewhere? Anyhow, just my 2 cents worth.

Ditto. What could be more rewarding than sending your starship to land on Laythe with just enough fuel, water, oxygen, scanning satellites, communications arrays and robotic miners to safely bring them seven kerbals home again? Knowing that you did it the hard way, that you discovered the necessary research, and now that you worked hard and saved up enough moolah to build that starship in orbit. I couldn't resist a snappy of the Joolian:

Me too. Chutes get cut without overheating.

Aside from some precalculated charts of various circular orbits around Kerbin, there's no easy way (AFAIK) to predict where you will land on a body with atmosphere (particularly if you're using FAR), unless you are happy to burn an insane amount of fuel and do a vertical drop. But... Note your longitude before starting your descent burn and again after you land. With the help of a quick save, you can then reload and apply this difference to get reasonably close to your target. Some would call it cheating, but NASA seem to have some pretty accurate models for predicting landing sites, so I'm cool with it.

You will spend far more time building spaceships than actually flying them.

Abort system? Do people actually use this? What's it good for?

Thanks Freefall, I really enjoyed your post. I'm going to have to try that lightspeed in to the sun thing! Also, #10, brilliant comment, learn to play the game without mechjeb by using mechjeb. A nice icing on the cake to the whole mechjeb flame thing that happened a little while back (myself included) in this thread. So, can't post without contributing something useful.... I just realised that when you set a target and see the 'time to encounter, distance from target' nodes, if you then subsequently add a maneuver node, the target encounter nodes update accordingly! So, I can get to within a couple of kms of my target within one orbit, rather than warping for a dozen orbits until they start to line up.... I now feel a bit dumb for not realising this a long time ago. It just never occured to me to try it.

Sorry Kvick, did you already post this? I did read the thread again but must have missed it.

So you miscalculated your dV, accidentally jettisoned a crucial stage, or forgot to drain the rover before leaving the Mun? And now you find yourself stuck in orbit and out of fuel with a bunch of anxious Kerbals and hard won science data on board.... Get out and push! A kerbal or two on EVA, using RCS to give the command capsule a bit of a nudge at apoapsis, can bring your periapsis down far enough to aerobrake and land. It's a bit time consuming, but I've rescued a few missions this way.

True, but it's close enough for my purposes, e.g. rather than trying to get Ap and Pe at exactly 2868, I can just go to the nearest 100km or so. It will wobble around a little bit over my target, but on average it will stay over that position. Perhaps more importantly though, it won't slowly catch up to the next satellite that's 90 degrees away.

In order to keep two satellites the same distance apart, they don't need to be on exactly the same orbit, you just need to set their orbital periods to be equal, which is much easier. And, if you set the orbital period to be the same as the planet's rotation, they will be geostationary. Very handy if using the Remotetech mod.

It's not necessarily the best engine to use for interplanetary travel though. The nuclear engines have great ISP, but they are also extremely heavy. For the same amount of weight, you could have an engine with less ISP but take along more fuel. For a big ship or a long journey, nuclear will almost always be the better option. However, with a small ship or a short interplanetary trip, you might still be better off with a good conventional eninge (say an orbital achievement device, which has around half the ISP of a nuclear engine but has about 1/4 of the mass). E.g. A small 5.6 ton ship with a nuclear engine can get to Duna orbit and back to Kerbin Orbit with a little fuel to spare (3450 delta-V). A 5.1 ton ship with an orbital achievement engine but carrying more fuel can do the same trip with slightly more to spare (3516 delta-V).

Yes, I think this is the essence of it. You don't need to do most of the 860 to go from Mun Intercept to LKO unless you plan to circularise. So (ignoring the 4550 because aerobraking takes care of that) that just leaves the 210 to go from Low Mun Orbit to to the Mun intercept/escape, plus a little bit more to bring your periapsis down in to Kerbin's atmosphere.

I think it does matter (correct me if I'm wrong), because wouldn't you always want to burn on the far side of the Mun (relative to Kerbin)? If you burn on the near side, once you escape the Mun you will be further out from Kerbin than had you burned on the far side? Edit: Actually, you might be right. Looking at the tragectory on my image, it's not like there is much of an arc before you escape. If I flipped the burn to the other side of the Mun, the exit point would be pretty similar.

So here's the thing. I was building a 3-crew Mun lander to collect a big packet of science (well more of a Mun hopper really), and after doing all my dV calcs etc, realised I'd neglected to plan for any means of getting my three intrepid explorers back to Kerbin. Whilst my Mun hopper should have arrived at it's destination with a healthy 3500 odd dV to go exploring with, a quick look at WAC's excellent dV map suggested I was going to lose a good portion of this trying get back home. So, I was debating whether to place some sort of station in low Mun orbit that could manage the return trip, or accept that my Mun hopper was going to have a somewhat shortened trip. Looking at the chart, we can see that (from Kerbin take-off to Mun landing), it requires around 6260 dV, which is about right. Now common wisdom would have it that getting home would take about the same, less some of the 4550 dV required for the ascent from Kerbin. That leaves around say 1710 dV, which is quite a bit still. As I was considering docking with a station anyhow though, let's just look at the dV to get home from a low Mun orbit (14km). According to the chart (860 + 210), that's still 1070 dV, and probably a little more to deorbit from Kerbin. Another chart I looked at gave a similar estimate of around 1100 - 1200 dV. So, that's around 1/3 of my dV. Admittedly I wouldn't need to take the whole lander back, but it was definately a bit of a downer and causing me to lean towards putting a transfer station in orbit around the Mun. But, 1100 to 1200 just didn't feel right, so I did a little experiment and came up with this: Yup, that's right, you can get back to the surface of Kerbin from a 14km Mun orbit using just 276 dV! Incidentally, for a basic 3-person capsule and 410 ISP engine, that's just 45 units of liquid fuel! Or, from the Mun's surface, that would be 916 dV. Where did all the free fuely goodness come from? I think there are two main factors that aren't obvious in the charts: 1) There's no need to circularise your orbit around Kerbin. You may be able to a direct descent (although I exploded from either heat or g-forces as I entered at around 3.5Km/s), but at the very least you can come in with a roughly 35km periapsis and do around 3 (automatic) aerobraking orbits before landing. 2) Launching from the Mun so that you are in a clockwise orbit around the Mun (remember, the Mun is orbiting counterclockwise around Kerbin, so when you do your Mun exit burn you want to be burning opposite to the direction of the Mun's orbit). Needless to say, I'm now reconsidering my need to launch a transfer station prior to the main mission (although there would be other benefits too). Does anyone have any similar revelations?

I see a lot of people advising against mods, particularly early on. Just a word to any newbies reading throught this, that I think most of these people are referring to mods that make the game easier, like mechjeb. There are some absolutely brilliant mods that actually make the game harder and more realistic, or just add a significant level of depth to the game. Mods like remotetech, FAR, various life support mods, Kethane, etc. KSP was built for modding, and to be honest I don't think I'd really enjoy the game much anymore without some of these mods that I consider 'core' now.

Really? I'm all for people playing the game however they see fit, but if you don't know how to do at least this yet then you're really missing out on a good bit of what the game has to offer. Aw shucks, here you go: 1) Put an engine under a fuel tank and launch. Does it go up really quickly? If so, add some more fuel. If not, use less fuel or a bigger engine. Did you run out of fuel? Try adding a second stage, and maybe some boosters. Did it wobble and explode? Add some struts. OR Install Kerbal Engineer and make sure your rocket has a TWR above about 1.5 or 2, and a delta V of at least 4500. If you've got those two right, you can orbit. 2) Turn over to 20 degrees at 5000m and 45 degrees at 10000m, higher if a big rocket, less if a small rocket. Feel free to keep turning as you get higher, or to smooth the whole turn out a bit rather than tip straight over. 3) Check your map. If you click on the little blue "Ap", it will keep displaying the apoapsis after you've moved the mouse away (there's my tip for the thread). Once your apoapsis is where you want it, kill the engines. 4) On your map, add a maneuver node right on your apoapsis. Use the little green thingy to drag it out until you have a circle. As above, left click on your proposed periapsis to have the number appear and stay there. Fiddle with the green thingy until the periapsis is where you want it (yes, it's a little fiddly but I can get pretty damn close to where I need to be, or install precise nodes if it really bugs you). 5) Look at your Nav Ball. See 'time to burn' and 'time to node'? Fire up your engines once your time to node is at half your time to burn. Watch your actual periapsis (click on it as above) and kill the engines when it's where you want it. 6) you're now in an almost perfectly circular orbit. 7) Add a maneuver node and drag the purple thingy until your inclination is where you want. Repeat step five. If you're not in a circular orbit, then make sure to place the maneuver node at the Ap, Pe, or halfway between the two depending on what inclination you want, or you will end up wonky. There you go, now you can save your Kerbals the next time MechJeb can't work out which one of your engines is supposed to be on and decides to send the top half of your rocket on a journey to the centre of Duna, and the bottom half on a tour of interstellar space. There are other benefits too, as there are many things you can do in the game that MechJeb cannot help you with, but I'll leave that for another day.

Paul, these changes are excellent. However, I noticed a mistake. The mass of the small tanks is too small by a factor of 10. According to your spreadsheet, the mass should be 31.08kg. However, in the config files it is set to 0.0031 tons (or around 1% the mass of the larger tank). I bumped it up accordingly. The following works fine for the 3 Day Supply: @PART[ECLSS_tankO2S] { @rescaleFactor = 0.625 @mass = 0.031 @RESOURCE[Oxygen] { @amount = 2209 @maxAmount = 2209 } } @PART[ECLSS_tankCO2S] { @rescaleFactor = 0.625 @mass = 0.031 @RESOURCE[CO2] { @amount = 0 @maxAmount = 1989 } } These tanks all make much more practical sense now with your changes. Even the recycler (weighing in at twice that of a large O2 tank), now starts becoming useful for long trips at the point where you have many Large O2 tanks (but not for short trips, which is ideal). I also added in the code posted earlier to add EVA propellant to all parts, and it seems to work well.

This looks awesome! You might already be aware but if not, a minor but somewhat annoying bug is the lights do not respect opaque objects, i.e. you can see the lights on Kerbin throught the dirt when landed on the far side of the Mun or Minmus. At first I thought I'd spotted an awesome anomally, but turns out it was just a Kerbin city shining through the bottom of a crater.

I like this. For me, Kethane was at first wonderfully attractive, the definitive 'must have' mod if ever there was one, and with quite a bit of 'professional polish' to boot. Refueling on distant shores? Awesome. But... it is just a little too easy isn't it? There is a mod that enables you to create a spaceship factory on other planets as well, and that's just going way too far IMHO. Seriously, can you imagine how many centuries in to the future it will be before we can manufacture a spacecraft on another planet from raw materials? We're really not that good at doing it on Earth yet. I know KSP isn't supposed to be overly analagous to the real world, but we're talking a long way off here. So, it was thoughts like that (and career mode forcing me to go without for a change) that made me start rethinking Kethane a little. A magical base compound that can somehow be converted in to just about anything I want? Solid fuel, liquid fuel, oxidizer... with a short skip many of us can also include oxygen, water, etc.... Sure, we can argue about the possible real world chemical composition of Kethane, but most of these discussions boil down to something along the lines of "well, if we have Carbon, Hydrogen, and Oxygen, we can make anything! So, as long as Kethane has those three elements, we're good to go". No, I don't think so. There's this little field of science called chemistry that would have us believe that it's actually not that easy to simply pull molecules apart in to their constituent atoms and recombine them in any way we see fit. My pint of beer has all of those elements in it, but can I turn it in to rocket fuel with just the help of a little converter (tequila doesn't count by the way)? When was the last time someone took a good long look at a fuel refinery, notice how big those things are, and how many different pieces of technology are involved? Not to mention the oil or gas platforms/mines/wells that supply them. But, somehow with Kethane we convince ourselves that all of that technology can, in the quite near future, be miniaturized in to a handy little drilling and converting kit that can be strapped on to any self respecting spacecraft and easily deployed over a convenient deposit. I know, I know, it's just a game. Look, I've loved Kethane as much as anyone, and better a Kethane mod than no Kethane mod. My main point is that I agree with this post, in that it should be a bit harder, and require at least a little more investment in ground-based infrastructure. Getting fuel from other worlds is a fantastic goal, but it should be balanced with a considerable level of effort invested to be able to pull it off. Requiring a second resource to be combined with Kethane sounds like a pretty good solution that's not overly complicated to implement (yes, easy for me to say), and would increase enjoyment at the same time. I suspect that having the resources geographically separated by any great distance could easily take a lot of the fun out of the concept, but surely there's a compromise to be had somewhere?

I use the remotetech plugin and have four geostationary comms satellites orbiting Kerbin. They need to stay relatively equidistant from each other to provide proper communications coverage across the whole surface of Kerbin and to the Mun. After a while they get a bit out of alignment and need to be adjusted, so ion engines come in really handy for achieving this. Also, the one ship drops off the four satellites and returns to LKO to complete the network. The satellites then use their ion engines to initially separate and get in to the right positioning. Trying to use any other type of engine would dramatically increase the size of the satellites (meaning I couldn't take all four up in one go) and dramatically reduce their lifespan/time-between-refuels. So, no, I wouldn't say that they are useless.

Hi Sandworm. I stil haven't been able to get this to work, i.e. kethane converters to produce oxygen (see previous post here:http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/26935-0-20-Ioncross-Crew-Support-Plugin?p=516144&viewfull=1#post516144 Do you have it working in the latest versions?

Wow. Thanks for all the tips everyone. There seemed to be a few common themes: 1) Move the CoM back a bit 2) Move the CoL closer to the CoM 3) Move the wheels closer to the CoM Yes, the pivoting makes perfect sense now that I think about it. My plane was definately too heavy at the front with that fuel filled fuselage, and the back was mostly likely trying to lift first and placing pressure on the front. So, I've taken on board all of your advice: and, tada! I'm airborne! And, it's even pretty stable. Managed to get it up to Mach 2.5 without flipping. Thanks everyone for the excellent advice. Now, getting it into orbit.... For some reason it insists on levelling out at 12-15km. But, that's another topic I think. Thanks again everybody. Benno

Hi all, Well, I'm not a complete noob at Kerbal (have landed some craft on the Mun, drove under a Mun Arch, put a rover on Duna, all selft built), but spaceplanes have been in my too hard basket for some time. But, I've made a few small ones and gotten them to fly, but never in to orbit and always somewhat unstable. But, I'm planning my first mission to Eve, and as part of that mission I wanted a craft capable of exploring Eve, landing and capturing some CO2 from the atmosphere, and bringing it back to orbit for conversion to oxygen so my little guys don't suffocate (I'm using ioncross lifesupport and Kethane). I figured a kethane powered space plane was the most viable option for doing this given Eve's gravity and atmosphere, but am happy to land it near a ground based fuelling station before heading back in to space. Anyhow, that's all a very long way off, because I'm yet to actually get my plane off the runway in less than 10 separate pieces, let alone assemble the mighty colony ship. The problem is that soon after firing up the engines, it starts pulling to one side (the left), rolls and crashes. SAS/ASAS helps a little, but not much. It crashed rather quickly when using the two kethane jets, but can sometimes make it to the runway when using the nuclear engine. I've been pulling my hair out for countless hours now trying to get off the ground, have tried different balancing of COM and COL, single sets of landing gear, doubled up sets, angled sets, multiple sets attached to wings or fuselage, putting the gear on backwards, tail fins, no tail fins, different flaps settings etc. No matter what I do, it always pulls off quite sharply after a little while, but it seems to be more reliable with less thrust or with the nuclear engine only, but of course then it doesn't go fast enough to get off the ground before the end of the runway. Below is my latest incarnation (i hope the steam links work) with lots of landing gear, which seems to help. Flaps are usually set to 1 as the problem seems worse at higher settings. The two kethane jets are stapped underneath the wings, as this seemed to work better than above the wings or on the wing tips. I should also mention that I'm using FAR, as that seemed to make things easier a while back. I'd love to be able to refine it so that it flies better and is stable at speed and altitude, but obviously I need to figure out how to get off the ground before that's even possible. Can anyone help? What am I doing wrong?