Kerbal Space Program

[Thorgalaeg]

I got KSP full version a few days ago and am still learning with every flight.
My current Ship:

Spoiler :

The spaceship consists of a conventional rocket to get into a stable orbit and an ion engine feeded by 4 solar arrays and a couple of thermo electrical generators for backup.

Welcome to ksp! There are lots of things to learn here, dont doubt about asking anything and we´ll try to help.
Also welcome to the ion engine fan club!

 

[warpus]

Samez, welcome!


Thorgalaeg, There's gotta be *something* at that anomaly spot! The ones at the poles are harder to get to because the map view is a bit. off.. If you switch between the polar and "regular" view (it has a different name, I forget now), you'll notice that you're either really close to the anomaly.. or quite far away. That's a result of the "regular" map view being distorted. This screwed me up a bit when getting to the anomaly on the Mun that's basically right at the north pole (or very close to it).. I will be mapping and exploring Duna's anomalies after I'm done with the Mun and Minmus, we'll see if I find anything other than sand

 

[Thorgalaeg]

New ludicrous balloon powered artifact, this time it is a floating launching platform. It is a large superstructure with six huge balloons. It will take the rocket to 10-15000 meters depending of mass and from there it can "take off" without having to deal with all that thick air and with 15 km less ahead. I know i would get the same result with a first stage with boosters and such but that would be not crazy enough, you know.

Spoiler :

 

[warpus]

Could you use this sort of system on an Eve return mission?

By the way, I just realized that none of my radial RCS fuel tanks are being used. I have no idea if that's been happening for a while or if it started with the new update.. or what.. but they are definitely not being used. It's fully possible that it's been happening all along and I haven't noticed - but I doubt it. Is anyone else experiencing this? What could be causing it?

Also, anyone else having spinning issues with 18.4? I have been using pretty much the same launch/return Mun system for the last 4-5 missions and for the last 2 I got a lot of random spinny action.. It's been happening ever since I visited that strange anti-gravity anomaly on the Mun, which probably has nothing to do with it, but...

 

[warpus]

Well, I just had a very interesting mission. I landed by anomaly #5 and it turned out to be another munarc. I've been getting better at flying around and getting to specific places, so I flew to another nearby anomaly that I've never been to, estimating that I should have enough fuel to get home afterwards.

The problem was that.. There happened to be a Kerbin eclipse at the time, but I did not notice it until after taking off towards the other anomaly and quicksaving in mid-flight, at the beginning of the descent. So.. The landing took at least 6 tries. It was a hollywood-plot-like situation, where my energy reserves were running out at a specific rate, and I had to time the usage of my engines so that I wouldn't run out of energy before I hit the ground, because the sun was nowhere near in sight. I must have just taken off riiight after the sun disappeared - thanks a lot mission control! Everything looked fine on the ground - I couldn't tell that it was "dark", nothing really changed in terms of brightness. I only figured out WTH was happening after I started looking around for the sun and then had a big "oh" moment when I realized what was up

The trick was to start burning at the last minute possible, so that I didn't have to waste too much energy running my engines, but it also meant that I couldn't use landing lights, which made landing a bit more difficult still.. Either way I was able to land and I found the monolith! with just barely any juice left. It's in an area where the ground is slightly discoloured -the same sort of thing as at the "weird" anomaly, just not nearly as pronounced.. I thought that was all there was to the anomaly until I found the monolith after driving about for a bit..

So maybe there is something else in one of those deep holes at the "weird" anomaly? There were 3 of them, IIRC, and the one I fell into didn't have anything at the bottom, but maybe one of the other two did? I am going to have to go back. It's a !$^! to land there, but the last 2 (3?) undiscovered anomalies for me are near the poles, so landing is going to be tougher than usual anyway.. Maybe I'll get used to it.

Next mission: batteries included

 

[Thorgalaeg]

In this game as in real life, if anyhting can go wrong, will go wrong. You must have so many things in mind when planning missions it is impossible to predict everything, imagine how nightmarish must be in real life. I hope they add some sort of dearkening for eclipses in next releases it would add a lot immersion to the game.

About balloons they could be very useful to return from Eve which as i understand has the densest atmosphere of all, bar jool. However not the huge balloons used in the launching platform which are rigid zeppelins and cant be carried anywhere but the retractable kind used in my tricopter. One could be added at the top of any lander. The only problem is the docking port should be placed somewhere else.

 

[warpus]

I think I will have to try out that mod when I start investigating anomalies on Eve, as I prefer that my astronauts return home. It just feels more realistic.

You are totally right though - this game makes me appreciate the hell that planning a REAL mission like this must be. Sort of.. I mean, I am only getting glimpses of the process here. That presentation I saw yesterday was so much better now that I understand some of the problems with making all that happen or at least trying to. The planning must be incredibly complex - the people who manage to pull it off without killing anyone are amazing.

 

[warpus]

Found another artifact on the Mun, something I don't think I've seen anyone talk about.. at least I haven't heard of it. I have no idea if it's new or if I should even post a spoilered screenshot. Might ruin the fun for some people. One left to explore! And then I'm back to the weird "antigravity holes" to see if there's anything else there.

Also figured out that I can get into orbit just fine, as long as I don't use mechjeb, which causes me to steer off course. I also have weird suspicions that my spinning might be the result of the solar panels adjusting to the movement of the sun across the sky, which seems proposterous, but I'm testing it out anyway, cause I have no idea what else it could be.

 

[cardgame]

Oh I know the one. Yes, it's quite nice. Has been discussed before but briefly.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

I must go to Mum some day. It seems the most interesting place and i have overlooked it completely.

Well, meawhile, after the duna anomaly deception (i am looking forward for warpus reaching the place to see if he can find it) i am now working to mastering the art of launching and docking. I have built a launcher which works using my zeppelin launching platform and can place in LEO 120 tons of spare parts (i am using the orbital construction mod) and dock with my gas-station-plus-orbital-shipyard without a problem. I can even leave mechjeb do all launching work, that is relax. Just did three consecutive succesful launches to fill the warehouse so i can build in orbit any big vessel i want.

Here you can see the shipyard lighted up by the approaching chargo module.

Spoiler :

Once its work is done, empty modules weight almost nothing and since they are nuclear engine powered there is fuel enough left to reach Eve or Duna. So, since leaving nuclear engines orbiting kerbing is obviously unsafe i decided to play darts and tried to reach some planet with my empty modules. After two failed attempts which left a couple of dead modules orbiting the sun i hit the target with the third one (the last corrections were made with the RCS since the main fuel became empty just with 60m/s delta-v to go). So i made my entering in Eve in a not very ecological way.

Spoiler :

 

[warpus]

- All Mun-based anomalies have been visited!

- I went back to the "weird holes" one, and there was indeed something else there. I landed a lot closer than last time (getting better at that), and drove my rover around until I finally found it. Man.. some of these things aren't easy to locate and/or see from a distance! The munarcs can be spotted from 100km orbit. Some of the other stuff? You have to get real close before you can even see any of it. I wish you could transfer the mapsat's data onto your map, that would make things a lot easier.

- My spinning problems were caused by the gigantor solar panels moving around trying to point themselves at the sun. Once I took them off my spinning issues completely went away. That's annoying, because I like those solar panels! For now I'm sticking to the "sticker" ones, even though that means my ships won't look as cool.

- My mechjeb still doesn't know how to get into orbit. I have no idea what happened to it, but at 10,000km it just starts going in the wrong direction. No big deal, getting into orbit is pretty easy (now), it's just.. strange.

- Has anyone had issues with not being able to use space to advance to the next stage? (decouple, turn on engines, etc.), as well as randomly not being able to use action group keys, or even U to turn on/off lights, G for gear, etc.? This happened to me on my last mission and I had to manually right-click everything to decouple, turn on engines 1 by 1, etc. I had juice so that wasn't the issue. The problem seemed to fix itself once, when I EVA'd and then re-entered my main pod, but the next time it happened that didn't work anymore.

- I also ran into a weird issue where nothing worked anymore, not even right-clicking on things, after a rather strange Mun encounter on my way home from the Mun. When I looked at my map my ship wasn't even on the orbit/trajectory/blue thing, it was a bit away from it, travelling in its own happy little trajectory. I reloaded, and time after time, ran into the issue, right after the unwanted Mun encounter. Bug? I had full juice so it must be. I was able to get around the problem by entering in a polar orbit around Kerbin instead and avoiding that Mun encounter on my way home. But that was annoying.. I cared because I had a lot of fuel left and wanted to land on Kerbin without chutes - which almost worked, even after I had to use up a bunch of fuel to get into that polar orbit.

The mapping of Minmus is next! I haven't been there in a while, and I'm a bit sick of the Mun now, so I'm looking forward to it. I am guessing that the Mun has the most anomalies, but I am not looking any of this up online to find out. Either way, Minmus shouldn't take as long as the Mun.. Then I can move onto Duna, which I'm looking forward to even more.. But Minmus is going to get explored first

Oh I know the one. Yes, it's quite nice. Has been discussed before but briefly.

I got very excited when I was driving my rover towards it and finally saw enough of it and realized that it was neither a munarc or a monolith or any of the things I found earlier.

I must go to Mum some day. It seems the most interesting place and i have overlooked it completely.

It's interesting enough, and one good thing about it is that it's so incredibly close and easy to get to. It makes for a good place to practice stuff on, like precision landings, or whatever. I started doing these "Let's map the Mun and check out its anomalies" missions because they each last 1-2 hours. It's far more manageable than the crazy 10 hour long missions to other planets I was doing before that.

I seem to have gotten a lot better at a couple aspects of the game after all this precision landing and finding the anomalies.. That, and it gave me more of a .. purpose in the game, in terms of objectives. Sandbox is fun, but I guess more specific goals can help you immerse yourself in the game a bit more - at least that's what I found.

i am using the orbital construction mod

How is that? Does it make it a lot easier to construct interplanetary ships? Do you resupply your orbital construction yard (or whatever they call it) with the exact parts you need, or how exactly does it work?

 

[Thorgalaeg]

No specific parts, that would be cool but also a bit nightmarish. You must carry to the construction yard a certain amount of tons of "spare parts". The proccess in detail is this:

First you must place in orbit the shipyard, which consist of a warehouse and a little part which identify the ship as a shipyard. Next you must launch the spare parts to supply the shipyard´s warehouse (the big warehouse is simply an empty orange jumbo tank which can be loaded with spare part to a max of 400 tons). Once you have your shipard loaded with a certain amount of spare parts, lets say 200 tons, you can build your ship in the VAB (of course of 200 tons or less) and place on it a second little part which identify it as "space constructed". Next go to launch pad and you will see a new window where you can choose the available shipyards and "teleport" you ship to orbit.

Only problem is that most of the time the ship explodes while teleporting, i dont know why. Maybe the mod requires an actualization to the new game version.

 

[warpus]

That seems very gimmicky, but that's just my first impression. I wonder what sort of orbital construction functionality we'll see in the vanilla game, if any.

 

[Samez]

Can someone tell me what is the use of the nuclear engine? It consumes standard liquid fuel at about the same rate as a standard liquid engine and does not produce more impulse. Is this a bug or is there some hidden feature?

 

[warpus]

It should be consuming fuel a looot slower than regular engines, giving you more push overall.. "more bang for your buck", just slower.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Yep, particularly in vacuum. If you look at the characteristics you will see isp (specific imuplse) in vacuum is around 800 while chemical engines are around 300-400.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

Exactly.

In general I use mainsail engines for liftoff, nuclear engines for interplanetary transfer and LVN/Poodle (the round ones) for landing. Nuclear engines are pretty much mandatory once you leave the gravity well for Kerbal (unless you have an excellent window or know how to get an amazing slingshot - which is both way past my skills ).

 

[Dreadnought]

Just got to Eeloo the other day! It wasn't nearly as tough as I thought it'd be. It was a two pronged operation, with the crew launching a week before the fuel tanker launched to rendezvous with them in Eeloo orbit.

It was pretty funny, because although the fuel tanker launched a week after the kerbonauts did, it arrived at Eeloo a month before them.

Getting an encounter with Eeloo is not tough. It's much tougher doing so while maintaining enough fuel to get back, but my tanker solved that issue. It was a very fun trip overall!

 

[warpus]

Nice, I haven't been there yet.

My mapsat mod isn't working anymore and I can't figure out why. I got weird rainbowy maps and now they're just black. Boo..

 

[warpus]

I've had a survey ship in Kerbin orbit ready to go for a couple days, but its mapsat was all messed up. The maps were gone and it wouldn't scan. Whenever I loaded the ship, the maps were like that, except for last night. For some reason last night it was all fine - so I mapped Kerbin and Minmus, and then landed on Minmus to investigate an anomaly. I came down real smooth and landed on 2 legs out of 3. My lander wobbled around for a bit but then it got stuck like this:

Accidental perfect balance

Spoiler :

The anomaly on Minmus is... interesting. I ended up at the exact spot where it was supposed to be and drove my rover around for what was probably at least an hour.. and it was nowhere to be seen.. I had to google it and I don't want to give anything away, but it's sort of inaccessible. Well, you can get to it if you're lucky, but I wasn't so lucky. Eventually I had to return and go home. Then this happened:

I forget exactly what happened but I like the resulting screenshot. I ended up making it home just fine

Spoiler :

Next up are the anomalies on Kerbin. I'm not sure how I'm going to get to them though - a lander seems like overkill. Maybe I'll fly to them with a plane or something.. not sure what'll be easier