A Very Basic Space Program | RSS/RO/RP-1

[seyMonsters]

A Very Basic Space Program | Episode 122 | KSP RSS/RO/RP-1

 

[jimmymcgoochie]

Your philosophy on vessel modification concerns me- making tanks wider costs a lot more in tooling than making them longer (or just using a second identical tank), while those truss decouplers are just overly heavy and somewhat glitch-prone (due to the larger collision area and likelihood of clipping into engines etc.) compared to a ring decoupler or a nice thin hollow cylinder procedural decoupler. I’m sure there are better engines than the KTDU-425 for interplanetary probes too, at that distance from the Sun you could possibly get away with kerolox and a lot of MLI and small radiators.

My efforts for a reusable lander usually end up with a lander that uses loads of generic thrusters and needs a tanker significantly heavier than the lander itself to ship the fuel out for each landing, though economies of scale can kick in with a really big tanker. An engine like the AJ-10 Transtar would be great for a reusable lander due to its extremely long burn time and high reliability, with some sizeable RCS thrusters to provide some throttleable thrust for landing, but that’s much further along the tech tree.

[seyMonsters]

A Very Basic Space Program | Episode 123 | KSP RSS/RO/RP-1

 

[jimmymcgoochie]

Why would you land with one of the crew inside the Hitchhiker instead of the ascent stage? ESPECIALLY after an engine failed!

Try adv > sun > up, it’ll hold the spacecraft pointing directly away from the sun which maximises solar panel output and also shields the crew from radiation (at least in theory, Kerbalism’s radiation system is buggy though).

Never use stock SAS in RO/RP-1, it just doesn’t work properly.

[seyMonsters]

A Very Basic Space Program | Episode 124 | KSP RSS/RO/RP-1

 

[jimmymcgoochie]

Polar orbits are better for science, you’ll cover more biomes that way for any biome-specific experiments and also orbital perturbation needs high inclination.

By my calculations, 1477m/s over 17.1 minutes gives an average acceleration of 1.44m/s² on the upper stage, which against Ganymede’s gravity of 1.43m/s² isn’t going to cut it.

Suggestion for the D-Curie: smaller solar panels. It was still at perpetual power with only one of them open so you can save some weight by making them smaller. You could also do with a bigger water tank if you’re going for solar power, but I’d still keep at least one fuel cell as a backup.

That re-entry would have been salvageable on the first pass if you had rolled inverted so descent mode pushed the capsule down rather than up, you’re lucky that the crew didn’t suffocate before they landed.

Edited May 19, 2023 by jimmymcgoochie

[Mark L]

These are excellent for getting started in RP1, it can be confusing at first. I'm just watching the first ones now. Thanks for making these videos.

[seyMonsters]

A Very Basic Space Program | Episode 125 | KSP RSS/RO/RP-1

 

 

[jimmymcgoochie]

Kerbalism automation isn’t 100% reliable, if it happened to skip the exact moment that the Ceres probe hit the high power threshold then it would never turn the science back on. I tend to turn off data transmission over experiments so that the data gets gathered first and can be transmitted back eventually.

The lunar sample return craft seems to have some kind of weight imbalance as it’s applying a significant yaw input whenever the engine is running. The weirdness on liftoff could be down to the limited engine gimbal bring unable to counter this and an asymmetric thrust from the solid rockets at the same time, but with the help of the RCS it recovered to point the right way (east).

[seyMonsters]

A Very Basic Space Program | Episode 126 | KSP RSS/RO/RP-1

 

[jimmymcgoochie]

Fun fact: you can type times in with the format “1y 2d 3h 4m 5s” for MechJeb’s “after a fixed time” mode. No need to calculate how many seconds, just type it as you see it.

I would just leave the Ganymede probe in that high orbit, it’ll take many years to get all the data whatever you do so no need to faff around with it too much. It’s probably a good idea to delete those multi-gigabyte data sets to get more valuable data sent back instead; with the later experiments data size becomes an important consideration and taking a high value experiment with a huge amount of data generation can sometimes be less effective than the lower tech version with a much smaller amount of data to transmit. Putting a dish with more transmitter power would also help, 25dB at Jupiter is very low.

[seyMonsters]

A Very Basic Space Program | Episode 127 | KSP RSS/RO/RP-1

 

[jimmymcgoochie]

The initial 260x260km would have been fine. The second stage actually did get to orbit, it stopped at 250x200ish.

Kerbalism has a known issue where automation doesn’t work at high time warps, so setting things to turn on at high power levels is prone to missing the trigger and so not turning on. It only fires when power goes above 80% and doesn’t check continuously as far as I can tell.
Just turn them on full time and turn off the power warnings instead, or set another trigger e.g. daylight to turn them on as well to double your chances.

[seyMonsters]

A Very Basic Space Program | Episode 128 | KSP RSS/RO/RP-1

 

[jimmymcgoochie]

At some point you’ll realise, as I did, that launching into the plane of the Moon is almost never the right choice for interplanetary missions. The Transfer Window Planner fork provides a much better LAN to launch to that eliminates most of the normal/antinormal part of the departure burn without adding any additional delta-V requirements to the launch itself.

Long-running saves are prone to freezing on saves because the save file is large, try deleting some unwanted vessels. For transfer burns, it’s almost never going to be accurate so assume a course correction will be needed every time.

[seyMonsters]

A Very Basic Space Program | Episode 129 | KSP RSS/RO/RP-1

 

[seyMonsters]

A Very Basic Space Program | Episode 130 | KSP RSS/RO/RP-1

 

[jimmymcgoochie]

Obligatory “pathfinder C1 is coming in retrograde” warning. Isn’t that meant to be going to Ceres anyway?

I don’t know how you managed to get a whole hour out of one Moon lander that glitched and a whole lot of faffing about with Jupiter encounters, but it definitely didn’t need to be an hour- most of that could have been cut.

That Moon mission was no great loss anyway, the Astris is a truly awful engine.

And remember to turn off your RCS before setting up nodes far in the future!

[seyMonsters]

A Very Basic Space Program | Episode 131 | KSP RSS/RO/RP-1

 

[jimmymcgoochie]

“Quirky” isn’t the word I would use to describe sticking ancient sounding rocket kick stages on the bottom of a rocket and then dragging them along for the duration of the first stage burn. 

The button for LH2O fuel cells is a hangover from Kerbalism’s compatibility with Cryo Tanks which wasn’t patched out in older versions of the RO mods, I believe it’s fixed in the current versions.

[seyMonsters]

A Very Basic Space Program | Episode 132 | KSP RSS/RO/RP-1

 

[jimmymcgoochie]

I would have had one of the two dishes as X-band and the other as S-band to cover more frequencies, and a much higher orbit to minimise occlusion by the Moon and maximise line of sight.

If you open the experiment panel and then click the little i icon in the top left, that opens the experiment information screen which tells you where it’ll run, how much power it needs and how much data it produces. It’s always worth checking how much power and data an experiment generates as some can be very power-hungry or produce a lot of data which will take a long time to transmit, often for little science and using more power in the process.

Edited July 13, 2023 by jimmymcgoochie

[seyMonsters]

A Very Basic Space Program | Episode 133 | KSP RSS/RO/RP-1

 

[seyMonsters]

A Very Basic Space Program | Episode 134 | KSP RSS/RO/RP-1

 

[jimmymcgoochie]

Parachutes don’t like Venus because it’s extremely hot and extremely high pressure, but the good news is you often don’t need parachutes at all or else they’ll be tiny little cocktail umbrellas.

I’d say the phantom forces were due to a combination of the heatshield crashing into the landing stage and the general weirdness of Venus’ surface.

Why did you send the second rover at 110km instead of just repeating what the first one did?