Kerbal Space Program

[Antilogic]

First of all, Thanks for all the advice everyone! I'm going to try to bring him home in the next hour


I don't understand how to determine where Kerbin rises or sets on the Horizon from the map screen. Perhaps this is one of those oh-so-elementary things that newbies have to be walked through??

It's a skill that was required for navigation back in the good old days before maneuver nodes. If you point your ship in the direction of motion, simply watch on the regular screen until you see the planet rise on the horizon. Then switch over to your map mode and start firing your engines until you get a right-looking intercept. So if you were going from Kerbin to the Mun, you would start burning at Mun-rise until you got an intercept.

Going back home, it matters whether you are in a prograde or retrograde orbit. If you are in a prograde (90°) orbit, you burn at Kerbin-rise. I think if you are in a retrograde (270°) orbit, you burn at Kerbin-set. I don't know for sure, I don't remember taking that route when we didn't have maneuver nodes.



Good job on your first long-distance mission! Sounds like you were using a Mercury-style pod, now you gotta build bigger.

 

[peter grimes]

Good job on your first long-distance mission! Sounds like you were using a Mercury-style pod, now you gotta build bigger.

I'm doing career mode, so I have to harvest more science before I can build bigger.

I've got access to SRBs, and used 4 of them to get above the atmosphere, then liquid fuel to get to a parking orbit. Then it was just my little capsule and a small motor to get out and back.

I'm sure I could have done it with more fuel for the return trip had I not made so many course corrections. My first intercept orbit placed me pretty far from Minmus at periapsis, so I made 2 or three adjustments on the trip out in order to drop down and loop around it. And both of those adjustments involved a retrograde component - so I think I could have done better.

The hardest part was setting up the intercept in the first place - every time I got the orbit extended far enough it would turn out that Minmus was nowhere nearby. So I'd drag my maneuver node around a bit, and then my intercept orbit wasn't reaching far enough. I suspect this is because I didn't circularize my parking orbit first. So as I dragged the node from one section of the orbit to another, the intercept orbit would be adjusted. Live and learn, I guess.

I was really only able to get this much done because my little girl took a nearly 3 hour nap (crazy). I don't have high hopes that will happen today....

 

[Thorgalaeg]

It can be too because your target orbit and yours were not totally coplanar. I miss a way to see relative orbit inclination with precision, AFAIK the only way to do it is guessing at first glance from the map. Some kind of indicator would be nice.

BTW when is 0.24 going to be launched? I cant wait much more...

 

[Fr8monkey]

Soon... As squad would say.

 

[peter grimes]

What mods to you guys use? I installed VOID and I think it was helpful - especially knowing my deltaV budget.

I think Antilogic has a graphics pack installed (it's gorgeous!). I don't know if my computer could handle much more graphics. I've turned anti-aliasing down to 2 and set the frame rate to 60 max. Runs smoothly, as long as I'm not watching a video at the same time the game is trying to render a lot of ground.

 

[Antilogic]

I used to be all-stock, but I have been experimenting with several:

Cosmetic/Atmospheric:

1. Better Atmospheres: this makes Kerbin look beautiful, although the Mun texture is surprisingly bad.
2. Chatterer: this mod adds SSTV signals and garbled Kerbal speak on radios, I love it.
3. Crew Transfer: this allows you to move kerbals between different pods in flight by right-clicking, very helpful for Apollo-style missions and docking because otherwise you have to spacewalk everyone.
4. Environmental Visual Effects: required for the BA mod, creates clouds on Kerbin and Laythe, dust storms on Duna, and stuff like that.
5. Kerbal Engineer: just started looking at this to figure out deltaV budgets myself, haven't played with it too much yet.
6. Tweakable Everything: I think this is the mod that lets you activate stuff in the VAB (i.e., put down the landing legs and ladders to see if they reach past the engines and get to the ground, or the solar panels to see if they clip anything). Very useful.

Gameplay + Parts:

1. Deadly Reentry Continued: this mod introduces a model for heating up individual parts during reentry, and parts will explode and burn up in the atmosphere if you do not have a heat shield installed. And if the G-forces get into the red, you might kill your crew anyway. You have to worry more about your reentry trajectory, especially for planes.
2. Procedural Fairings: I love this thing, you put down a base part, and then you attach a bunch of radial fairing parts that automatically resize and cover your payload. It looks more realistic, and if you have a second fairing base further up, it counts as a big strut that keeps your payload from bouncing around. So it's more stable during launch.
3. Procedural [Stuff]: there are a bunch of these and some mod-mods, and I don't know how many I have installed now. There is one for wings, fuel tanks, and other parts. Basically, you put down a fuel tank, and then you can right-click it and change its size (whether it's a cone, a cylinder, the height and width, etc.). If you need a little more fuel, you just extend one big tank instead of stacking a bunch of tiny tanks. You can also pick from a bunch of textures and there are more texture packs you can download. This greatly reduces my part-count and makes the game run more smoothly.
4. Real Chutes: this is a requirement for my space program ever since I lost a couple pods when my parachutes snapped. It causes parachutes to be deployed over 6 seconds or so instead of instantaneously, reducing the G-forces and preventing death (from DRE) as well as strain on the rocket parts (important for me because I put stuff above the pod, so I need the smooth-firing stack parachutes or my craft get destroyed). If you look at my CSM in the last picture, there are two stack parachutes between the pod and the ASAS/docking port.

Extra Parts:

1. KSPX: Kerbal Stock Part Expansion - the guy who made this started making more stock parts for KSP in regular patches, and many of his parts you now have. That being said, he has a few more that haven't made it into stock yet, like the 2m-wide nuclear engine.
2. XanderTek Landertron (+dependencies) - this is basically easy mode, but they make sense for a very modern/futuristic lander. They are small solid-fuel boosters like separatrons that automatically fire when your pod is close to landing, and it reduces your velocity to near-zero at the surface. Would have made the Duna landing much easier.
3. KW Rocketry: this is a huge part pack with 9 new engines, a bunch of new tanks, new battery packs (on my lander), and all kinds of stuff. Just installed it and started playing with it. I like the aesthetics of the new engines and parts more than the AIES Aerospace engines, but there are a couple big parts packs like these.
4. Squad Re-Texture Project: this is a tiny one, and all it does is reskin the stock KSP engines to look more like KW Rocketry engines. I like the uniformity.

The big mods I haven't used yet are MechJeb (for piloting assistance and navigation), RemoteTech (for building networks of communication satellites, and probes will have a communication delay based on distance), Kerbal Alarm Clock (very helpful for simultaneous missions, but I do things one at a time so it's not that important, I think I'm around year 60 or so), and TAC Life Support (adds parts with food, water, and oxygen, and you have to keep your kerbals alive with all three, only reason I haven't done this is because I have a bunch of heavily-crewed space stations and none of them have the modules now, so I don't want to lose them all). I like the looks of Final Frontier (it tracks the amount of time kerbals spend in space and gives them ribbons for successful missions), I'll probably install that for my next game.

 

[J-man]

I recommend hot rockets. Makes rocket exhaust prettier and different for each rocket engine. Pretty cool mod

 

[cardgame]

reduces fps significantly however.

 

[Daedwartin]

yeah. as a rule, if doing modes, graphics only are done last, once you know you can actually run the stuff your using for content or changing how things work.

 

[Antilogic]

Can't believe I forgot to list Ferram Aerospace, but that's a big one too. Fixes aerodynamics, drag calculations, and such.

 

[peter grimes]

well this is very frustrating!

I decided to download the better atmosphere and environmental visual effects (EVE) mods. No problemo. But I've spent the better part of an hour (that I could have been flying / crashing!!) trying to hunt down a link to StretchyTanks and Procedural Fairings. No dice. I find the discussion thread, which links to the main KSP portal of Curse. NOT to the specific download page.

Search all you want on Curse and you'll get no results. As I said, very frustrating indeed.

Does anyone have a link to these two mod downloads?? If not, can these be zipped, uploaded to mediafire (or googledrive or dropbox) and then unzipped by me?

 

[Antilogic]

Here's a link to the procedural fairings thread over on the KSP forums. I prefer the procedural parts variation on stretchy tanks because of the menu interface, but both of those links will take you to the threads where you can download the mods. I don't think stretchy tanks has been updated recently, but the 0.21 version might work.

I either look around the KSP forums in the add-ons section, or search for the mod name + ksp in google and a link to the KSP forum with the download comes up pretty quickly.

 

[peter grimes]

This is one of those times I'm feeling old and out of it. I have no idea how you were able to find those pages (which had good download links, btw ) while I was doing essentially the same thing as you.

I'll plop these in and see what happens. Little girl is still napping so I still have a chance of getting into orbit today!

 

[Antilogic]

Just wait 'til your kid finds out about this game. She will be addicted.

 

[peter grimes]

I'm a little confused about how to read the delta-V maps like this one:

Spoiler :

When figuring out how to get to Mun and back, do I effectively have to double all the numbers past the Kerbal Intercept transfer? so, 4550 + 2(860 + 210 + 640)?

Last night I basically gave myself another opportunity to attempt a rescue mission

 

[Antilogic]

That is 4550 + 2(860 + 210 + 640), correct?

If so, then yes, that will be the total required delta_V according to that map. The map shows you an estimated cost to travel between the two labeled locations in terms of delta_V (i.e. to go from low Mun orbit to landing on the Mun, it will cost you an estimated 640 m/s, and to take off and get into low orbit, it will cost you approximately the same), so if you carry out each of those mission steps, that is what you will need to design your rocket for.

However, you can shortcut your return delta_V by not going into orbit around Kerbin. Instead, when you burn out of the Mun's orbit, make sure you aim for a periapsis around 30,000 m in Kerbin's atmosphere. Then the atmosphere handles the rest (those little aerobraking arrows show you where you can do this and reduce the delta_V).

So, I would say you need a minimum of 4,550 m/s to get into orbit, 860 m/s to get a Munar intercept, 210 m/s to get into the Mun's orbit, 640 m/s to land, 640 m/s to get back into orbit, and then probably ~250 m/s to get a Kerbin intercept into the atmosphere. That puts the total requirement around 7,150 m/s.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Cant wait anymore to 0.24 so i just resumed my career game, which i left some months ago with Jebediah lost on Mun surface without enough fuel left to return home.

After building a not very fortunated automatic hybrid rocket-surface vehicle design which used RCS thrusters to move over Mun surface, it was send to mun and managed to land few kilometers aways from Jebediah landing site. After taxiing to the exact place and embark Jebediah, he discovered with horror that there was not enough fuel left there either.

So another automatic rescue vessel, this one a more conventional ship, was sent which landed 18 km away, and Jebediah had to drive a tricky journey trough mum slopes and craters including a steep sloope which Jebediah's weird RCS powered vehicle had not enough power to climb, with less than 4 kilometers left until his final goal, he had to fire the main rockets and the journey ended in a semicontrolled crash landing only 300 meters away of the rescue ship. After a nice walk, Jebediah boarded the rescue ship and returned home without more issues.

So a challenging and time consumming rescue mission, including some errors and a very risky journey trough difficult terrain with an unstable vehicle and a literally explosive final.

 

[Antilogic]

Screenies? That RCS vehicle sounds very kerbal.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Screenies? That RCS vehicle sounds very kerbal.

It s a horrible design, with all the weight in the top, so it tends to tilt dangerously if you keep the rockets, which you must if you want to use the RCS thrusters to move, since they are placed in the top of the rockets... No very clever indeed.

I had my share of funny crashes and explosions while was going around Mun surface, which is a difficult place to drive btw, specially if it is dark as it was, since lights are not very powerful and yo wont see a step slope in front until you are going downhill with not way to brake since the RCS are not powerful enough to stop and to use the brakes which are on/off only means a graceful somersault and a nice explosion. Some adjustable brakes are needed ASAP!

BTW is there away to post your steam library images directly?

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Well thanks to an ugly but succesful heavy launcher design, i managed to go to Duna and Ike and returned with some samples, all resulting in some serious science. So, new rockets are now available for me, and pretty bigs ones btw, of the Saturn V style. It seems the mainsail is not the biggest thing there anymore!

So with all this power at hand now i am thinking on what to do next. Is there any specially interesting destination or something new to do in 0.23 version which will give you lots of science?