James_Eh

I hate the Jool-5 challenge. Just watched my Laythe lander "walk" a few dozen steps and then explode. I continued the mission, acknowledged as a failure, to Tylo for lander testing purposes. Slammed into Tylo at >200 m/s. Meanwhile, the BPV lander that I had to temporarily leave back at Laythe seems to be clipping the atmosphere and will undoubtedly careen into the moon before I can get back there. I hate the Jool-5 challenge. I hate that I am supposed to have an Easter dinner for 12 ready on Sunday afternoon and instead will be playing KSP.

Heh, yah I laughed at that post also. A while back I posted about a ludicrous experience whereby I had thought that I had left myself in great shape for the morning, only to discover the next day that my awesome Eve aerobrake had been at Jool. (Oops) Wish I could easily link to that but it seems like older post references in your profile no longer show up.

And that would make two bonehead questions to the forum in two days. Next I will be asking why parachutes don't work on Tylo. Maybe I should lay off the beer.

Sigh. Went back and put the same ship on launchpad. Fuel = 68544/72000. Oxidizer = 79522/88000. Move along. Nothing to see here. (* facepalm *) I jumped straight from 22 to 23.5. Tweakables still a bit of a mystery to me... Thanks !!!!!

So I would swear that any rocket I have ever launched (playing since .18) consumes fuel and oxidizer in the same ratio and they hit zero at the same time. Complexity of rocket didn't matter. Asparagus didn't matter. So long as there were only rocket nozzles on the ship, they marched together towards zero. I noticed while launching a massive Jool-5 drive section the other day (10 orange tanks) that at the end of the launch, I had significantly more fuel left than oxidizer. I switched it to 4-sym (20 tanks) and watched in fascination as some tanks ran dry of oxidizer and the ship went into a spin. When I finally managed to make orbit, I had something like 200 units of oxidizer left and 4000 fuel. The disproportionate consumption seems to be essentially symmetrical. My spin was caused by the slight timing differences in when the rockets kicked out, but honestly we're talking fractions of % here which I put down as floating point errors. This is a 20-orange tank assembly with 20 skippers. It drains fuel to the skippers from the main tanks. It is designed to hit 120 KM aP, then I transfer around fuel, blow off the skippers, and use the 20 LV-N's to circularize with basically no fuel left. Then I send hundreds of refuel missions. The point is, up until the last 2 launches, which are the first 2 I have done in 23.5, I have never seen the fuel and oxidizer ratio get out of balance. Can supply pix if needed but this is a more basic question. Did I miss a change? (Also what's up with the auto-correct stubbornly changing the word "ratio" to "ration"? I had go edit each one!)

No, the thing would instantly blow to bits. Made for long long burns. (Hence MJ.) However I calmed down and disabled a bunch of the ASAS wheels and that seemed to do the trick. Still a mystery to me though - I had the whole ship fail a couple of times where competing ASAS torque literally ripped it in half, and I can understand that. But these failures happened when the pitch, yaw, and roll sliders seemed perfectly steady. Anyway, I got the monster to Jool.

Aren't a HH and a 2-Kerbal capsule the same weight? I think that's why I always use HH on any 2.5 m vessel. Plus the leg room.

* facepalm * I was so locked into the usual way that I make small changes to inclinations (at the equatorial nodes) that I gave zero thought to the fact that I could wait until apoapsis and just stop dead and restart. Funny thing is, I knew that I wanted a very eccentric orbit to make the manouver cheap - then I proceeded to try to set it up in the most expensive way possible. Thanks to all for pointing out what should have been blazingly obvious.

To try to put it as succinctly as possible: Approaching Jool with a massive craft intending to carry out the Jool 5 challenge. I fooled about with approaches for the longest time, and finally found what I was looking for: a direct encounter with Laythe. It is critical to the mission that the first orbit I establish is around Laythe so that I can shed the weight of that lander, and possibly use the returning part of it to help with the Tylo mission. I don't have the dV to lug all 3 landers (Laythe, Tylo, other 3) from orbit to orbit. So I was happy to be able to skip the Jool aerobrake and head right to Laythe. All went well except just as I entered the Laythe SOI, I realized that I was heading for a retrograde aerobrake. I wanted to change that prior to the event but it seemed it was going to cost me well over 1000 m/s. I assume that was because the window of encounter at Laythe is small when you are screaming in at interplanetary speeds. So I went ahead with the aerobrake thinking that as long as I created a highly elliptical orbit, the inclination change would be relatively cheap. Boy was that wrong. I am in a 2000x30 km orbit and it seems that it will cost me upwards of 3000 m/s to correct. Does this not seem excessive? So now I am wrestling with choices: 1) do everything at Laythe retrograde. This would be initially cheapest, but the next burn to Tylo would cost more. 2) drop the massive Tylo lander and smaller lander, do the inclination change with just the drive and the Laythe lander, land and return, then find the cheapest way to re-dock everything. Same dV but far less fuel consumption. It seems to me that this would only be the best option if it all wound up prograde at the end. 3) abandon orbit! Accelerate at Laythe peri to leave Laythe SOI, then set up another encounter. I tend to favor this one... 4) is there some kind of cheap orbital change I can make from my current highly elliptical orbit to wind up with a lower net dV requirement to switch to prograde?? Any other options? Or advice?

I have just spent the last 2 hours waiting for my ship to explode. Frankly I had just about had it with KSP for a bit. I was out of ideas and the asteroid thing seemed amusing but from a short-term perspective only. I had it in my head that once I finished the Jool 5 chellange I was going to take a break. Been playing about a year, but far more dedicated since about November 2013, which frankly puts this into the top echelon of computer-based things I have gotten hooked on. I then spent the next approx 15 days (most of my free time sadly - luckily I have no yard work to do yet what with the snow and ice still melting and such) trying this over and over. I had more vessels spontaneously dis-assemble than I would like to count. Didn't matter whether I used MJ, didn't use it, tried many different drive designs, some good, some stupid. Somewhere around 35-40Gm my ship would always blow itself apart. Usually because a lander tank would spontaneously detach from its decoupler, leaving me completely unable to complete the mission. I actually posted to this effect, claiming that crossing the orbit of Dres somehow wrecked your ship. Then somebody necro'd the thread about your discussion with ASAS and I started to realize that maybe the flaw was at least partly my fault. (Oh and also I still can't stop laughing, it's hard to drive a spaceship with the giggles.) I had too much ASAS on the ship associated with all of the landers and such. I turned off a bunch of them. And: LOOK! I think I have this bad boy nailed!!!!! I have gotten past all of the previous failure points and am now computing my Jool-Laythe encounter. I managed to get through dropping 6/10 of the big orange tanks without once having a lander tank just fall off. Sadly I failed at the research aspect (not the Science aspect - I play in Sandbox - but the "don't-change-more-variables-in-an-experiment-than-you-can-account-for-or-keep-track-of " aspect got lost during a fit of rage) - I changed many many variables at once. Added struts, removed ASAS here and there, added mass to the bottom of the vessel, upgraded to 23.5... But yay!!!

This is turning into a farce. After my debacle from a couple of days ago I completely redesigned my ship and headed out again. Everything went perfectly well, until once again, around the point where my projected orbit hit 39Gm (Dres orbit), a tank fell off of the lander. This time it SHOULD have crashed into the tank behind it, but instead I watched in fascination as it just slid through unharmed. I really feel that SOMETHING in the code is causing this. Grrr.

Yah, one of these days I will do the upgrade... The funny thing is I have only seen this issue crop up en route to Jool. This is the third time (at least) that I have had a tank just plain and simple fall off. It only happens at about the 7/8 mark of the burn. (i.e. around Dres orbit) Although this particular ship was a bit of a personal embarrassment as far as the design went, and I was dumbfounded that it held together as long as it did, the other two ships that suffered spontaneous disassembly were much more reasonable. I'm pretty sure clipping wasn't the issue, but I will absolutely triple-check my next vessel prior to Kerbin escape. (I have hopes that this one will be so well balanced that I can leave MJ to do the big burn!)

Well, nuts. My first attempt at this (still using .22, haven't worked up the enthusiasm for .23 or .23.5 yet) was going somewhat well. I hated my ship frankly but it seemed to be getting the job done. I spent the most tortuous 75 minutes I have ever had in this game during the transfer burn what with my (poor structural design) limitation of about 0.08G... I had hoped to use MechJeb for the burn, but it was useless at controlling this thing so I had to do it myself. Then, shortly after my projected orbit crossed the Dres orbit, a significant piece fell off. Back to the drawing board!

Make the container out of frozen fuel that sublimates into the emptying tank as the pressure drops. (And use magic to stop the outside from sublimating to space. Or foil.)

I make a lot of graphs in Excel... It's the only KSP-related thing I do at work, but when people walk by and see Excel on the screen they automatically assume you are doing your job... (Well unless you have one of those awful jobs where they don't let you use Excel...)

Yep, I was a little uninspired in KSP recently but decided to try this challenge before the asteroid foolishness starts. Initial testing went about as well as I could have hoped (http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/32027-You-Will-Not-Go-To-Space-Today-Post-your-fails-here!/page111), and I have now pencilled in the next 500 hrs for this challenge. Thanks for the challenge, and for indirectly putting the final nail into my poor computer's coffin.

Just the simplest of test runs. Making sure my main drive was capable of the Jool-5 challenge I was about to undertake. We headed to Dres with a couple of teeny rovers to test the drive's stability over long burns. Landed on Dres and released the rovers, no issues. Jeb and Bob jumped down from the lander and headed over to get into the rover seats. Jeb took the closest one. Wanna bet that the seat on the distant rover also points up ?!?!?

I landed a fairly large lander on Minmus which had a rover attached to one side with docking clamps. Undocked and tried to drive away. The rover was horribly designed for Minmus and I started noticing things. Primary among them was the fact that no matter what I did I couldn't seem to get out of the vicinity of the ship. It felt like trying to acheive escape velocity from LKO with an ion drive. My rover was in essence "orbiting" the ship. Ultimately I decided it was the magnetic attraction between the docking ports overcoming the pathetically low amount of traction the rover had. Once I increased the "orbit" to around 40 m, suddenly I was able to drive in a straight line. Took something like 10 laps around the ship though. Might have to try to recreate that someday...

Walking the streets of Budapest and this jumped out at me like a bolt of lightning. Any other examples of secret, disguised Earthian Kerbal outposts?

Right-click on a bit of your ship that points in the desired direction of travel (docking ring, command pod, etc) and select "Control from here".

Update - this is the LAST time I will take a vehicle out to Eve to rescue the rescued Kerbins. If this doesn't work, I give up. The ship heads out of Kerbal orbit on its way to Eve. Asking a lot from the standard 3-orange-tank tri-N. Close up of where the poor slobs have to sit during Eve ascent until they can get to their 2 HH capsules.

Oohh oohh are we doing "What If" favorites?? BB Gun and Model Rockets for me. ("At a certain point, they stop being model rocket engines, and just become rocket engines.")

1) Thanks, I will fiddle with those mods 2) I'll bet that if I go back to my searches and use the phrase "action group" instead of "control group" I would have more success, so thanks again... In my head I have always thought of them as "control groups" which is fine until you post on a forum...

I'm 99% sure (based on my repeated failures and my Google site searches) I have to kill the lander and send the drive stage home to pick up a duplicate lander which has a 4th control group defined. Was just curious about whether there is any way to fix this "on the fly", as it were. When I undock from the main drive, I use the little tanks/engines to deorbit, then separate them. I have control groups set up for them, for the 6 ramjets, and for the center rocket (which is kind of obscured in this picture). What I forgot was a 4th control group for the 6 engines which get uncovered when the first 6 deorbit tanks have served their purpose. I am certain that I can not solve this issue with staging changes. Don't suppose anybody has a secret key combo out there which can somehow define a new control group, do they? (Yes, it's not an attractive craft. Yes, I know jet engines don't work on Eve. I am cheating.)

Wow, I must be doing something wrong in my trips to Moho. Not disputing the dV part, but rather the time-while-you-are-encountering Moho part i.e. unless I had 40+ ion engines "blazing" from the moment of encounter, I would blow right through to the escape. I guess you could start the burn way before SOI change?