the Kerbal Space Program thread

I know some of you play it, what are you building?

In career mode I haven't gotten past Minmus, unless you count accidentally throwing jeb, bob, and bill out towards the sun accidentally

Here's something I just finished:

built in 3 parts, assembled at a space station in orbit. I meant to use it to travel between planets and carry landers/probes, but there are too many parts so the lag is highly annoying. Lots of ion engines, some nuclear rockets, and lots of fuel for landers and stuff. It can carry 6 people I think. I'm going to try to make one much simpler so there isn't as much lag.

I would like to store a bunch of fuel tanks in orbit, but so far I have only had one successful orbital docking (no cheats). It's quite a challenge. It would make those interplanetary trips (and maybe a return trip) a LOT easier if I could bring more fuel. Only so much you can get into orbit on one rocket.

I'm a kerbal newbie. Still working on sorting out getting into orbit and back reliably. I'm doing it with as few aids as possible, but I think I've got it now. Big crazy interplanetary space stations will come.

there are cheats for this game? I know there are mods but i haven't looked into those. An unlimited fuel cheat would make this much easier lol

orbital docking is a real pain, i've done it a bunch of times and it gets easier, but never easy. as it gets easier, it doesn't get any less tedious, though.

Don't bother with big, cool looking stuff. Go with utility and the least number of parts. Lag makes everything more difficult

Yes, I was talking about the mods. I know one of them helps a lot with docking (engineering mod?). One of the other mods is pretty interesting in that it allows you to mine fuel out of other planets.

I don't know if you heard that NASA is apparently designing missions for Kerbal. They probably should since it will likely create in at least a few future NASA engineers.

You could always try this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BC0DpPy6cro

And no, I have no idea how he did that without an insane amount of trial and error.

that is crazy. Amazing, but crazy.

I head NASA is getting involved a bit, that's pretty awesome. I hope this drums up some interest in the space program. I know it has for me. On the other hand, I now know exactly why I should NEVER go into space on a rocket I design myself.

Ok i built another big ship, but this time not 3 large pieces assembled in orbit, just needed a buttload of rockets and some witchcraft to get into orbit. I also needed to use about a quarter of this ship's own fuel transferred into the booster rockets to get it into orbit:

FAR less parts than my last one, this one isn't a lag monster. I think it's less than 200 parts, actually. the last one had so many parts in the rear engine assembly it lagged a little without the rest of the ship! Also, far less fuel capacity of all kinds, except more solar panels compared to the number of ion engines. The other ship couldn't leave ion engines on full blast or it would drain the batteries. Not so with this one.

That's the rear. 12 ion engines for interplanetary travel, as they are FAR more efficient, 3 nuclear rockets for thrust and 3 more for retroburn, as this thing doesn't flip end to end very fast.

Since it's all one ship with no docking ports in between sections, I don't have any wobble when doing stuff. 6 docking ports for add ons like landers or rovers. It's kindof a long slow process fixing the orbit with ion engines only, but rocket fuel gets used up so quickly i'm not using them if I don't need to. All the solar panels are for ion engines, you don't need that many for normal stuff.

I just did the math, I have enough xenon to leave the ion engines running for 5-6 hours or so, and enough to leave the rockets on for 1.5 hours. That's kindof an unreal number, though, since nuclear rockets overheat at full throttle. I'm thinking I have plenty of rocket fuel with this, maybe not enough xenon. Anybody else try the ion engines?

so, that ship randomly exploded. There's a glitch in the game where that occasionally happens. The read out it gives you said that there was failure between a solar panel and a gas tank, which I guess was enough to cause a chain reaction glitch in the physics engine. It's probably for the best.

I have not messed with the ion engines.

How do you deal with the crazy long burn times? As far as I know you cannot speed up time while burning. Doing an hour long burn would be pretty harsh.

Do you just let it run and do something else?

I am more of an "occasionally mess with it" kind of guy. I try not to make it too much of a time suck.

if you hit alt and . you can engage a speed-up physics mode, up to 4x while throttled up. The downside is the physics get kinda harsh, so it can obliterate ships that otherwise would hold up. If you land in 4x mode, even with parachutes, your capsule will blow up or the chutes rip off, but it's just fine for ion engine acceleration. Even 4X the burn time can be half an hour, so yes I set it to run and I do something else. If you need more acceleration, just use more engines, but the additional parts can cause lag. I had one ship with 27 ion engines, it almost accelerated well enough for me not to get impatient. Almost.

Also the glitch went away with a restart and reloading autosave, so I have the ship back, but the glitch remains to rear it's ugly head at some point in the future.

I'm all about time suck at this point. I can't do much else while holding a sleeping baby, plus my semester just ended yesterday, so i've been celebrating with some relax time. In career mode I don't have anything near as spectacular, mainly just a couple of automated probes for collecting science.

There's gotta be a way to share ships in this game, anybody know how?

OK i have a space station that I had for a while, it's just a bunch of docking ports with a control module on one side, some thrusters and some ion engines for minor orbit adjustments. I finally have a system to reliably meet, dock, and fuel up the tanks that are there.

that's the station, with the fuel tanks and a small rcs powered tug for moving stuff around that doesn't have it's own power. I meant to use it to build the station further, but it ended up being kinda useless. Plus it's like 50 parts and at one point I had 4 of them u there. Those plus the station plus whatever I was trying to doc added exponentially to the lag.

I also have a way to get those big ships into orbit reliably, but it requires docking at a station to refuel, as it burns much of its own rocket fuel storage to get into orbit.

Both use asparagus staging which I didn't want to do originally, but it works better than anything else I've tried so far.

That's really what I need in my career mode game, an orbital refueling station.

I have gotten probes to Eve and Duna, and their moons. I could probably send a Kerbal to those, but it would certainly be a one way trip. Landing on Ike (I think it was) was interesting since it's orbit is way out of plane to the system.

I want to get back into it, but I am worried about the time suck.

You're farther than me in career, then, i haven't gotten farther than minmus yet, but I do have a manned science rover on the Mun. It's basically a mobile processing lab on wheels with instruments. It works alright, but it flips easily and doesn't have enough solar panels.

All of my coolest stuff is in sandbox, and unfortunately I can't use a lot of the designs in career yet because I don't have the science, so I have to improvise. OTOH, I haven't landed on anything in sandbox, because I don't care about getting science lol

I found a problem with ion powered large ships. It's not the low thrust, is the fuel capacity. Ion engines have insanely high efficiency, but the game only has tiny tanks, and slightly less tiny tanks. You need a lot of them, which raises part counts and lags everything. Try to use less of them, and you may only have 10 hours of fuel, which would be plenty for any other engine, but not when using these small ones pushing a giant ship. If they had an ion tank the size of, say, the largest RCS fuel tank, I could use 3 of them instead of 50, and carry more fuel with less game lag. D'oh.

At least the ship in question is made up of 2/3 rocket fuel tanks, so there's plenty of fuel for the other engines...

Latest screenshot:

I made one of those bigger ships in career mode, with some alterations since I don't have everything unlocked. Also it's outfitted for science stuff. Unfortunately, even nuclear rockets and ion engines combined can't decelerate fast enough if you ignore the whole 'launch window' thing and just blast to a planet whenever and come in at high speed. Fortunately, aerobraking doesn't burn things off since they haven't added that to the game yet.

So... what is this career thing people keep talking about? I keep hearing that there's a career mode, while some folks insist that there is only sandbox mode. I ACTUALLY HAVE the game and I can't figure it out. Is it "scenarios" mode that you're using?

Here's a picture of a happy Kerbalnaut bouncing around on the Mun for fun.

(I wanted to see if I could land the main ship and somehow take off again. You can't. Not like that anyway.)

To address lagging concerns, try turning the graphics down. I had mine absolutely bottomed out to address lag and I still enjoyed the game. Then I found out which things I could turn on without blowing my weak little CPU apart to find a happy medium.

I figured out how to use Career mode. I must have seen it and skipped it when I created my first game a couple months ago.

Anyway, I thought I'd show off my shiny new space station while I'm here. It's mostly for fueling interplanetary ships....

Like the one that got me to Laythe!

confuZion3 wrote: (I wanted to see if I could land the main ship and somehow take off again. You can't. Not like that anyway.)

I've successfully done that on the flats on minmus, there the gravity is so low SAS can keep the thing upright even if your landing isn't perfect (mine never are).

I'll try turning down the graphics and see what happens. Last night I had 2 big ships docked at the space station and a big refueler and it ended up lagging so bad I had to send one of the big ships away. There STILL wasn't enough fuel to fill the station and 1 remaining ship. One of them made it to jool,laythe, vall, and tylo and back to kerbin orbit and docked with the station without running out of fuel, though it was very low. It's taking forever to fill up all the little xenon tanks one at a time...

I am disappointed in this work computer... It won't load the pictures that I put up (but it loads everything else), so I can't show my coworkers the crap I did.

Have you guys messed with the airplanes?

For science purposes, they are somewhat limited, not much to gather. I did discover that having the stability (not RCS, the other one) on makes them MUCH easier to fly.

I guess making a space plane, or at least a shuttle type lander is one goal.

If you want to go extreme with the game, you can build planes to go pick up the Kerbals from there landing / splash downs.

I built one like the Spaceship 1/Spaceship 2 pair. They don't look that much alike (the rocket part is just a simple tube-shaped rocket), but the idea works. It's pretty neat.

I haven't messed with the planes yet. I suppose i'll get to that at some point. So far I'm still trying to get these interplanetary ships right. Here's the one over Jool:

I got to Jool and 3 of it's moons for far and near orbital science. Then I got bored, did some other stuff, and while I was away it had an encounter with a moon and got thrown away from Jool. It still had enough fuel to make it back to kerbin orbit and dock for refueling:

Launching a huge tanker proved to be difficult:

re-entry made for some cool pictures, though

I also sent out some rovers, though I think I haven't figured those out yet. Here's getting air on duna:

Here's after the first bounce:

And then this happened:

Thank you quicksave!

I did come up with a successful tanker, but I forgot to add batteries. Since it's unmanned, I had to run the rockets on very low to keep the battery charged (thus keeping control in the dark) and run thrusters backwards so I didn't run into the station

I came up with a new and improved interplanetary ship:

Increased fuel, increased crew capacity (total 7) 12 ion engines instead of 9 with extra solar panels to keep up with the power needs, also more giant batteries. The front 3 docking ports have detachable xenon tanks. This way, I have more xenon capacity than any other ship I've made so far, and once the tanks are empty, I just detach them and move on with less lag. Also, I never have to refuel 52 xenon tanks one at a time anymore like the jool mission ship. This ship only has 12 on board xenon tanks.

I turned the graphics way down and that helped a bit but things still aren't great. I read they don't have 64 bit support yet, and I'm sure my old video card isn't up to the task, but the reduced lag makes refuelling a lot less infuriating.