[1.2.2] Realistic Progression Zero (RP-0) - Lightweight RealismOverhaul career v0.53 June 12

[Laie]

first moon range dish

Beware: in RP-0 the antenna range calcualtions are a bit more involved. Simply put, a good antenna on one end can make up for a bad antenna on the other. Two rules to keep in mind: two similar devices can talk to each other at twice their stated range, and the early omnis will be able to connect to earth at 100x their stated range.

In other words: the first extendable is good for the Moon.

More here: https://github.com/KSP-RO/RP-0/wiki/FAQ

[MatterBeam]

Apparently, I am not generating any more RP-0 contracts. No Sounding rockets contracts, speed limits or anything. All I have is stock contracts, I declined a few dozen, but only part test, site visit ect. contracts were being created.

I went to the Contracts setting file in squad and modified 'maximum available' for all but two of them to 0. All I get now is those two types of contract (site visit and science gathering).

I tried installing RemoteTech and Rover contract packs. No contracts is being generated by them.

What can I do?

[Herrkurt]

Laie- Well that's interesting because that is clearly not how it worked for me. Their given range is 4Mm. When talking to ground stations they work out to about 28,000km, a seven fold increase. I watched for the switch fairly closely because I was hoping to transmit high orbit data on my way to the moon. I'd say maybe it was a probe core with a 300km range expanded 100 fold to 30,000km except I know those don't work for me above 600km or so. Have I messed up and missed something obvious again? Nathan can you confirm the ground station boost is 100x?

[Laie]

See GameData/RealismOverhaul/RemoteTech_Settings.cfg for ground station ranges and the RemoteTech wiki for the calculations. The key phrase is "root model".

With a 4Mm omni you should lose most ground stations at ~21Mm. However, once you're so far from earth, at any given time one of the big three groundstations will have line of sight. Unless if your orbit is heavily inclined, but you said you were on the way to the Moon?

[Trolllception]

I'm not sure what you mean with proper ASAS... as in the stock game, the ability to toggle SAS (and which modes are available) depends on pilot skill, or probe core capabilities. If no core on your vessel has SAS, you can't toggle it. The "Early Controllable Core" can do everything but maneuver nodes; the Ranger Block III can only do Pro/Retrograde. I presume that these are the capabilities of the stock cores they're based on which haven't been touched for RO.

Laie/NathanKell: I should have clarified better. I have a habit of writing out posts with terrible grammar and incomplete information, need to be better about that. My issue with the ASAS is that in my installation when I activate ASAS and select a marker for it to track the ship will not rotate to the appropriate heading. For example if I am pointing retrograde and I enable ASAS and select the prograde marker my ship will stay facing retrograde, no change in heading. I reinstalled my game last night and all the mods but still have this strange issue. The spacecraft I am using is a FASA Gemini capsule with a level 1 pilot onboard. This has occurred from day 1 on my RSS/RO/RP-0 career.

[Herrkurt]

Laie- Ok there is a big three. Thanks for all this info. I did not know that ground station capability was varied too. This should be a major help. I'll test it out while working on the GEO contract (yes sim funds are off for now, Imagine simulating the time to apo with costs). I can use the directed dish to stay in contact and make a burn until I'm only slightly out of sync and then clean it up when I'm over one of the big three (assuming I don't end up over one without trying).

[Laie]

Laie- Ok there is a big three. I did not know that ground station capability was varied too.

Most ground stations have pretty decent range, and then there's the Deep Space Network (DSN), three stations of tremendous range. Even the standard stations can keep track of a puny sounding rocket core (200km nominal range) up to ~4000km away. If you lose connection in low earth orbit, that's usually because you have no line of sight to any station (the Pacific is wide... and if you're only 200km high, both Australia and the Americas will be below the horizon).

The big three are in Australia, South Africa, and California. They're as close to 120 degrees apart as geography and politics would allow in the 1960s. Once you're higher than a certain altitude (don't know, really, but it's a lot less than GEO, maybe as low as 10Mm) and between +-50° inclination, you will always be in sight of at least one of them.

With the 4Mm Communotron-16, this doesn't matter anymore. By the time you lose connection to the standard stations, you're high enough to receive full DSN coverage (which will last a little past the Moon).

The only times when you should lose connection with the Comm16:

a) too low and no station in sight

on the far side of the Moon

c) well past the lunar orbit

[NathanKell]

Krakenfour: Hit Alt-F10 (or was it F11? I think it's F10) to bring up the Contract Configurator window. Make sure everything's green.

Trollception: Yep, that's what I was saying, the modes other than 'Hold heading' for stock SAS/ASAS are basically broken, even in the stock game.

In other news: Made orbit from the starting node in RP-0.

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[GigaG]

^Wow.

What is the downside to balloon tanks? I'm going to fly a mission using a Centaur upper stage, and I was wondering if balloon tanks are OP or if they have downsides such as weakness, etc.

[Herrkurt]

So Vandenberg, The South Africa station whose name I forget, and Woomera. Should always be able to see on from a decent altitude? I don't know, I was testing the omni at the moon and on the return trip last week. I'll try again with the GEO sat.

Nice launch Nathan. Uh that little thing is jumping over the moon ain't it, like way higher.

- - - Updated - - -

GigaG- I imagine they are structurally weak and you wouldn't want to have a lot of weight on them in a landed vehicle. Just a guess. No highly pressurized fuel I guess.

Edited September 25, 2015 by Herrkurt

[NathanKell]

I should note that that's merely a side-project (because I got tired of failure on my real project). I'm very close to being able to do it unguided using only Aerobee sustainers (i.e. the old tier 0, sans Taerobee).

Here's the current unguided version: it almost makes it, except the final stages precess their rotation, leading to steering losses, and it's hard to have a high enough initial apogee to clear the atmosphere. All stages except the blue one, and the white one which has only 1 engine, have the nozzles canted for spin-stabilization. Continuous burn to orbit, as you can see from the staging list. My best with a variant of this (so far) is 250x60km.

GigaG: Right now the only real disadvantage compared to Default is cost. RO doesn't model how weak they are in real life, nor how much more likely they are to suffer failure unless watched like a hawk.

[Herrkurt]

Ok I was doing something wrong before but these big three stations are working for me now. So does the 400Mm dish getting signal from the big three have the same boost to 40,000Mm, making it way more than Lunar range but too short for inner planet coverage?

[NathanKell]

Laie makes the calculation just a couple pages back.

[MatterBeam]

Krakenfour: Hit Alt-F10 (or was it F11? I think it's F10) to bring up the Contract Configurator window. Make sure everything's green.

I hadn't installed Contract Configurator correctly. Everything works now.

[tmikesecrist3]

I need to find a way to clan up my parts, as it stands now I have 3 X-1 engines and and extra baby Sargent

[Laie]

I need to find a way to clan up my parts, as it stands now I have 3 X-1 engines and and extra baby Sargent

Several of the "suggested" part packs bring redundant engines. Often they are designed such that they fit in with their respective part packs, so I don't think it's reasonable to even try to consolidate them.

I've made my own custom categories with only the engine models I use regularly. That's also a good way of weeding out the very early engines that you won't use later in the game.

--

I'm currently trying to make up new antenna stats. From a utility perspective there's only three ranges: moon, inner planets, everywhere. Anything else can only be weight and power savings.

If one wants to be historically correct, the inner planets should come rather late. Gameplay-wise, I think they should be possible as soon as one can build the first proper probes, in order to encourage shoe-string operations with a decent probability of failure.

Hmmm. "Early Probes" brings the agena and hydrazine. Taken together, these make interplanetary missions not only possible but rather easy. How about moving them up a bit, and the first dish way down? The idea is that you can't idle in LEO and have to be quick about doing the transfer burn, and that the probe can only hold enough monoprop for small course corrections. (assembling some probes) With NitrousOxide you can get a good 100m/s out of a Early Controllable Core, HTP brings this to 600m/s, with Hydrazine you can get nearly 1000m/s.

As a side note, I think some early deployable solar panels wouldn't be amiss. No tracking yet, but something that's compact during launch and can fold out later.

[Herrkurt]

Early fixed deployable panels would be nice. Not enough surface area on most probes I build to get enough power to charge from the early panels.

[Laie]

Not enough surface area on most probes

My problem exactly. Even the early Rangers had a hinge on their panels. Sadly, the panels in the game do not have a "tracking" module one could remove through ModuleManager, otherwise it would be easy to repurpose an existing panel.

As to antennas, I've now given them a workover. Basically only three ranges (Moon, inner planets, deep space) but different weights, sizes and power consumption. The idea was that early dishes are a lot larger and heavier for the same performance. I'm not 100% happy with the outcome: nearly all dishes are too damn large, a probe will be all dish and nothing else. This works well for deep space probes but seems out of place in the inner system.

Still waiting for feedback on the general idea. The problem I see is that we can't replicate the real reasons why early probes were difficult. Making early dishes heavy seems a bit arbitrary and may not be the best approach.

Edited September 27, 2015 by Laie

[Herrkurt]

How can I find out what I need to research/do to unlock the more advanced monoprop or engine options? I've been researching semi-blindly.

[tschieggm]

I tried installing this from CKAN on a fresh 1.04 install. Unfortunately the starting contracts appear to be broken and their conditions won't trigger. There are a couple yellow rows in the contract config debug menu.

The warnings all state - "Contract contains no contract types or child groups"

EDIT - Figured out the issue. Looks like the A-4 Guidance unit doesn't count as a Vessel for contracts.

Edited September 27, 2015 by tschieggm

[Trolllception]

Sadly, the panels in the game do not have a "tracking" module one could remove through ModuleManager, otherwise it would be easy to repurpose an existing panel.

What about the stock panel arrays that track the sun? ModuleDeployableSolarPanel, it has the sunTracking property to disable the animation for the flat panels.

[Laie]

        MODULE
        {
                name = ModuleDeployableSolarPanel
                animationName = solarpanels4
                resourceName = ElectricCharge
                chargeRate = 1.64
                retractable = false
        }

You mean, I could just add "sunTracking = false" and it's all good? (I was looking for a whole MODULE{} stanza to rip out.)

[Trolllception]

        MODULE
        {
                name = ModuleDeployableSolarPanel
                animationName = solarpanels4
                resourceName = ElectricCharge
                chargeRate = 1.64
                retractable = false
        }

You mean, I could just add "sunTracking = false" and it's all good? (I was looking for a whole MODULE{} stanza to rip out.)

Maybe? I'm pretty new to this as well. Just knew I saw that part of the solar panels. You will probably have to test to find out unless someone else knows the answer.

[Guest]

umm, does RP-0 Have a throttable, restartable engine intended for lunar descent/ascent? if so what is it and what node does it appear in, i cant find one. thank you

Edit:

found them, oddly, in heavy orbital rocketry.

Edited September 29, 2015 by Guest

[BevoLJ]

umm, does RP-0 Have a throttable, restartable engine intended for lunar descent/ascent? if so what is it and what node does it appear in, i cant find one. thank you

Edit:

found them, oddly, in heavy orbital rocketry.

Ya, I placed all the Apollo stuff a good while back. Wasn't sure where to put those (options were far more limited when I added Apollo) so I just went with what engine science node we had for the late 1960's science tier. If anyone has a better suggestions for the new science nodes we have today, I'd be happy to move them (keeping in same late '60 tiers).