Kerbal Space Program

[DQuaN]

I've forgotten everything I knew. Not that that was much, but I was at least able to orbit Mun/land on Minmus and come back again... Now I use most of my fuel just getting into a low orbit around Kerbin. Does anyone have any up to date-ish tutorials I could take a look at?

Also yeah, let's test multiplayer... How?

I'll set up a server.

Information to connect will follow.

 

[Swagger897]

So now somehow the Saturn V doesn't have enough liquid fuel to make a successful burn to get to the moon/mun...

ahhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!

Edit: so I've finally gotten to the Mun, twice now. My latest attempt I crossed over one of the moon arches and eva'd all the way over to it.. Lost a Kerbal on the way back because he was doing about 20 m/s into the ground...

Next moon here I come.

 

[sk8er913]

The new update 0.90 is amazing. I played it a lot today: I landed on minimus, and returned #Jebediah then I landed on the mun and Jeb planted a flag after doing some science. The flags title was "this is my final transmission." :'( not enough fuel to get home and I'm not using any hacks


That's all cool and all; very standard career mode. But then I accepted a survey mission on kerbin. I made an awesome plane; it resembles a Christmas tree(unintentionally) for long distance flight. I did my mission: it was wonderful; I flew a plane on Kerbin at about 450m/s for 30 minutes (10 min real time) then I took a crew report.... Flew another 5 minutes towards the other sites. Landed my plane on a semi flat grassland and used my plane as a 30m/s rover for 15 minutes. Collecting valuable data for Mission Control: found a nice hill to launch off of and flew back home (80 minute flight) ... 40ish real time.

 

[sesselpupser]

I made a really nice Kerbin explorer plane once, it took off so nicely and flew really well... It wasn't until I wanted to land that I realised that because the engines were ever so slightly canted I couldn't come off the throttle much at all without the nose immediately plummeting. This was something of a problem because I also forgot to add emergency parachutes. So I tried to land, but I had to keep it at about 50-60% throttle, the result was a very high speed landing, I skipped off a tiny bump in the ground after killing the throttle and landed nose-first into another gentle incline while going entirely too fast to survive. I revised the design by adding parachutes to turn it into a sort-of VTOL, which actually worked out alright.

That is until I left the cockpit and couldn't get back in, of course, but returning home was only ever going to be a bonus anyway.

 

[sk8er913]

So now somehow the Saturn V doesn't have enough liquid fuel to make a successful burn to get to the moon/mun...

ahhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!

Edit: so I've finally gotten to the Mun, twice now. My latest attempt I crossed over one of the moon arches and eva'd all the way over to it.. Lost a Kerbal on the way back because he was doing about 20 m/s into the ground...

Next moon here I come.

Minimus is easier to land on the hardest thing to land on is Duna imo. Then if u land on a hill and tip over too bad ... I'm not very good at making heavy landers.

 

[Swagger897]

Minimus is easier to land on the hardest thing to land on is Duna imo. Then if u land on a hill and tip over too bad ... I'm not very good at making heavy landers.

I just have to make it to there... All of my rockets are too heavy, or not enough fuel

 

[Man of Mister]

Welp. Two nights ago, I sent one of my rockets on a Kerbin escape route. What's more, I left the game running to see how far I'd get in a fortnight while burning all of my fuel.

104393G (Whatever that means... Gigametres? Anyway, just very far away to where there is no sun.)

And then my game crashed. It's times like these where I wish KSP was less RAM-hungry...

 

[Swagger897]

Welp. Two nights ago, I sent one of my rockets on a Kerbin escape route. What's more, I left the game running to see how far I'd get in a fortnight while burning all of my fuel.

104393G (Whatever that means... Gigametres? Anyway, just very far away to where there is no sun.)

And then my game crashed. It's times like these where I wish KSP was less RAM-hungry...

I haven't updated to .90 yet but I probably should since some people who are running the 32-bit say it uses less memory than .25...

But in other news (and I wish I have a screenshot of it) I have been building my own space station since the ISS is too buggy to use with the CSS and last night I added two large orange fuel tanks with two more RCS tanks... It takes about a minute for my game to play after it pauses to load it.

 

[Submerged]

Wow, the thread is still going! Awesome.

Still got the game, on Steam now and think I will try to keep playing it. Haven't actually touched it for a while, so will have to play with it and fiddle about to see how to get it to be on orbit and all.

Again, have to ask for tips and hints. I'm going to use the sandbox thing first, as I suppose its better than the career mode at first.

Last time I played it, it was way before the career mode thing and all!

Multiplayer mode wasn't even available. I assume with Multiplayer, its an attempt to make an ISS style stuff?

 

[Swagger897]

Wow, the thread is still going! Awesome.

Still got the game, on Steam now and think I will try to keep playing it. Haven't actually touched it for a while, so will have to play with it and fiddle about to see how to get it to be on orbit and all.

Again, have to ask for tips and hints. I'm going to use the sandbox thing first, as I suppose its better than the career mode at first.

Last time I played it, it was way before the career mode thing and all!

Multiplayer mode wasn't even available. I assume with Multiplayer, its an attempt to make an ISS style stuff?

Just about...

I use sandbox too for all of my work and try to come up with my own missions. The career just doesn't keep me in long enough.

I also really need to take a shot of my station and brag about it here. Maybe Monday (as I only have Internet access now at my college) I'll get it on here.


All I can say when building a space station:
STRUTS, STRUTS, STRUTS,
and
PORTS, PORTS, PORTS. I probably have 15 docking ports on my station right now. I used solar panels from the ISS but only have one side finished. They extend out way too much and look good but shake like crazy when I dock or if anything touches it...

I made two ports.... well, I guess I need a picture first and then it'll all make sense.
but yeah, my two cents

 

[Submerged]

@Swagger897, got any pictures of the docking station you have running?

Recently, not been on the game as I'm having a bit of a time trying to figure out if I want to buy a PC or not.

It still works on the laptop, just know that it will run smoother away from the laptop.

 

[F1 fan]

Picked this up in late January and I've been having a lot of fun with it during the little playtime I have. Been working on my own space station, and have various modules in orbit as we speak. After adding a decent habitat for my station dwellers, I realized my station's expansion was slowed by the fact that each module only had one docking port on each end, leaving only two available. I decided to build a large docking station. Imagine a dogbone, with one of the rockomax six way adapters on each end and you have a good idea.

The launch went well and the rendezvous was perfect, but alas, I'd made a terrible mistake. I hadn't used the rockomax adapter before and just assumed it was a multi-angled docking adapter... I didn't realize that it didn't come with docking ports as standard. Unfortunately, I realized this after I had jettisoned the fuel tank and the engine. I spent a good thirty minutes trying to dock the docking station and used up most of the monopropellant before it dawned on me.

Currently, the docking station is in a similar orbit to the rest of the station, but it is slowly drifting behind. It was a few kilometers behind the last time I checked. I'm leaving it in orbit in the hopes that one day, the game will be updated to allow kerbals to do more advanced things on eva; Such as attaching docking ports.

In other kerbal related news, my first moon landing ended bizarrely, stranding two kerbals on the surface of the mun as their lander tipped over while they were on EVA. I sent up some other kerbals to rescue them, but I miscalculated the deorbit burn and they landed too far away. I ended up using the remaining fuel to bring them back to kerbin.

I then decided to design a new mun rocket/lander and managed to land near my stranded kerbals, only for the lander to tip over and break into several pieces... The pilot in the orbiting command module had no choice but to return home alone. Initially, I decided "what the hell?" and named the site "mun base". I've since had a change of heart and have decided to mount a rescue operation... Afterall, Jeb is on the moon and I want him to be on my upcoming Minmus mission. As I have four kerbals on the surface of the mun, I'll need to land/rendezvous twice on the same mission, which will require a lot of fuel. I put a large orange fuel tank with two docking ports in orbit above Kerbin and I'm planning to dock the command and landing modules at each end.

Getting the large fuel tank into orbit was quite a challenge, and I'm still working on the design of the large lifter. While I managed to achieve orbit, the flight was tricky and the orbit is almost a polar one. Anyone have any good designs that will make things easier?

 

[Swagger897]

@Submerged Here is all the shots. I've linked them in a spoiler..

Spoiler: click right here

Main shot

Original solar panels

Linkage between all ports and solar panels

More linkage pics

At the end highlighted is the shell mod (I forgot what it's actually called but the thing that splits apart once in space) that I put on wrong. Thank god it didn't rip the panel apart.

Docking ports. Docking Ports everywhere. Once you put something up you wont want to delete it. This shot also shows where I dock my Shuttles on either side (the CSS [community space shuttle]) but I should've enfocred them a bit more as they are severly unstable at times..

Fuel (unless you use the cheats). I also put some RCS tanks on it to fill up the station.

The white solar panels do absolutely nothing, and only cause the station to shake like crazy so I probably should've done without them. The only reason the other side isn't done is because I'm debating whether or not to remove the panels on the left and redo them both without the white panels... The Canadarm II, the white thing on the left, is also pretty useful to dock some things when they seem to be drifting around.

Some general information when building a station:
1.) Solar panels. Find the most efficient ones out there for the space they take up if you want to do things right in a career mode or what not. I do all my stuff in sandbox for fun, not really into the other things.
2.) Batteries... Solar panels are worthless in the dark, and starting out you wont have much power stored...
3.) Rotating bearing things..... SAS i think it is (I haven't played for a while if you've caught on). RCS is good but it's too powerful, and will twist things apart if you're not careful...
4.) Docking ports... You'll want just as many of those as you will batteries, because there's always stuff to attach stuff to to hold stuff you just might not need. But really, you'll want docking ports to extend docking ports like I did.
5.) Struts. Strut everything if you haven't heard that already.
6.) Put lights on everything and in front of every docking port.

 

[Man of Mister]

So, today, April 27, 2015, marks the full release of Kerbal Space Program 1.0!

Any thoughts?

 

[DQuaN]

Haven't tried yet. I assume everyone that owned the beta automatically get the full version for free?

 

[Man of Mister]

Haven't tried yet. I assume everyone that owned the beta automatically get the full version for free?

That's correct!

 

[sesselpupser]

To be honest, I'm waiting for some 1.0 tutorial videos... I played KSP a lot a long time ago, took a long break, found they'd reset saves, tried to do what I did before but none of my rockets had enough fuel to even reliably orbit Kerbin. I was following Scott Manley's guides, too - I just kept running out of fuel. The biggest problem I have with KSP, though, is that there doesn't seem to be half-way guide; it's either a step-by-step idiot's guide to getting a small rocket into orbit or it's highly technical, talking about delta V and all kinds of stuff I don't understand. I haven't found a guide that bridges that gap yet...

 

[Swagger897]

To be honest, I'm waiting for some 1.0 tutorial videos... I played KSP a lot a long time ago, took a long break, found they'd reset saves, tried to do what I did before but none of my rockets had enough fuel to even reliably orbit Kerbin. I was following Scott Manley's guides, too - I just kept running out of fuel. The biggest problem I have with KSP, though, is that there doesn't seem to be half-way guide; it's either a step-by-step idiot's guide to getting a small rocket into orbit or it's highly technical, talking about delta V and all kinds of stuff I don't understand. I haven't found a guide that bridges that gap yet...

That was mainly my problem with it.

I end up making things too large that wreck the launch pad or too small that can't fully reach my targets...

That's correct!

um... is there a code I'm supposed to get to get it for free or do I use the updater?

 

[Man of Mister]

That was mainly my problem with it.

I end up making things too large that wreck the launch pad or too small that can't fully reach my targets...


um... is there a code I'm supposed to get to get it for free or do I use the updater?

Use the regular updater.

 

[Swagger897]

Use the regular updater.

right, I probably can't do it at my school because I need a proxy to get around a few sites... Thanks though.

 

[JR98]

Decided to try the demo. Built the biggest spaceship I could with all of the rockets because reasons of possible insanity and it blew up on the launch pad and all of the little Kerbals died.

 

[Man of Mister]

Decided to try the demo. Built the biggest spaceship I could with all of the rockets because reasons of possible insanity and it blew up on the launch pad and all of the little Kerbals died.

KSP in a nutshell.

 

[Swagger897]

Decided to try the demo. Built the biggest spaceship I could with all of the rockets because reasons of possible insanity and it blew up on the launch pad and all of the little Kerbals died.

yup... I'm sure we all wanted to align the moon directly above the pad and see if we could hit it with the biggest ship imaginable...

edit:

Then you'll have watched so many YT vids on KSP, you'll be saying...

"Hellooo, it's Scott Manley here"

 

[sesselpupser]

So... Earlier on I decided to orbit Minmus for the first time in over a year. I got there, orbited and maybe cut it a little too fine trying to get home again - I ran out of fuel with a periapsis of something like 100km, but an apoapsis of, well, quite far beyond Minmus. That orbit kept intercepting both Mun and Minmus so I got thrown about quite a lot but I figured I'd just let it keep simulating to see where I ended up.

In the end, I was left orbiting Kerbin with a periapsis of 250km and an apoapsis of 9Mm so I figured I'd try a rescue attempt. The ship I sent up was identical to the one that went to Minmus except all the science gear was replaced with an empty lander capsule. That, somehow, didn't have enough fuel to get into a rendezvous orbit, so I scrapped it, put a docking connector on, sent it up to a circular 200km orbit, sent another two copies of it up to top up the fuel tank - so far, so good.

Then I figured I had enough fuel for the rescue attempt, so I got started. I used Mechjeb (because at this point I was beyond caring about learning and just wanted it done) to plot the inclination adjustment, but just as it was about to complete the navball target started just rotating around the navball, my rocket was therefore just spinning around on an infinite loop. So I thought ok, fine, I'm 0.1 degree off so it's probably ok. Next step, the same thing happened - at the end of the burn, the target just went way off course and I had no idea where I was going, I ended up something like 200km away at the closest point. From there it pretty much just kept getting worse because the navball was basically broken, as far as I can tell, so I ended up in an almost identical orbit except shifted across and down by about 10km, and completely out of fuel.

I have no idea what I was doing wrong, in fact I'm pretty sure it wasn't me but I have no idea, maybe it was. I'm tempted to try again, this time assembling a huge ship in orbit that can't possibly run out of fuel... Or I could just abort both flights and try going to Minmus again with a slightly revised design.

 

[Swagger897]

So... Earlier on I decided to orbit Minmus for the first time in over a year. I got there, orbited and maybe cut it a little too fine trying to get home again - I ran out of fuel with a periapsis of something like 100km, but an apoapsis of, well, quite far beyond Minmus. That orbit kept intercepting both Mun and Minmus so I got thrown about quite a lot but I figured I'd just let it keep simulating to see where I ended up.

In the end, I was left orbiting Kerbin with a periapsis of 250km and an apoapsis of 9Mm so I figured I'd try a rescue attempt. The ship I sent up was identical to the one that went to Minmus except all the science gear was replaced with an empty lander capsule. That, somehow, didn't have enough fuel to get into a rendezvous orbit, so I scrapped it, put a docking connector on, sent it up to a circular 200km orbit, sent another two copies of it up to top up the fuel tank - so far, so good.

Then I figured I had enough fuel for the rescue attempt, so I got started. I used Mechjeb (because at this point I was beyond caring about learning and just wanted it done) to plot the inclination adjustment, but just as it was about to complete the navball target started just rotating around the navball, my rocket was therefore just spinning around on an infinite loop. So I thought ok, fine, I'm 0.1 degree off so it's probably ok. Next step, the same thing happened - at the end of the burn, the target just went way off course and I had no idea where I was going, I ended up something like 200km away at the closest point. From there it pretty much just kept getting worse because the navball was basically broken, as far as I can tell, so I ended up in an almost identical orbit except shifted across and down by about 10km, and completely out of fuel.

I have no idea what I was doing wrong, in fact I'm pretty sure it wasn't me but I have no idea, maybe it was. I'm tempted to try again, this time assembling a huge ship in orbit that can't possibly run out of fuel... Or I could just abort both flights and try going to Minmus again with a slightly revised design.

lol... I did the exact same thing when I returned from Minmus (that's when I went out to find an Apollo rocket with enough fuel to get me there and back) the first time.

I tried to figure it out manually, how to rendezvous that is, and it works a lot better than using mechjeb... once you are inline with the ports though I'll use mechjeb because it's basically fool-proof that program..

Scott probably does have a tutorial for this, I can't recall if he is the one I watched it from, but as soon as you understand how to rendezvous in ksp, it's the easiest skill in the world really.

 

[sesselpupser]

I just rage quit and uninstalled! I built an orbital fuel station because I still can't find a good guide that explains the rocket design process so I frequently had far less fuel than I wanted after getting into orbit around Kerbin, then sent a lander to Minmus but didn't have enough fuel to land and return, so I scrapped that idea and sent part of my fuel station off to orbit Minmus for a lander to RV with and top up for a landing. I used Mechjeb but it screwed up and put me on a collision course with Minmus instead after burning through all my fuel... Instead of trying to RV, I landed anyway then decided I'd try landing my fuel tank to dock with it on the ground. I hadn't realised Mechjeb had also burned through all my monopropellant, though. I managed to land the tank without breaking it, flew my lander over to meet it, laid the lander on its side (since the refueller only had ports on the sides) and tried to effectively mount the lander with the fuel tank and slowly get the ports to meet... That all went good. Bearing in mind at this point this whole plan had taken almost three hours.

Then, as the ports snapped into place, the fuel tank was sent 50 metres into the air, as it's too heavy to turn quickly it smashed back down and broke - the segment of the tank with all the fuel in it went skimming across the surface. All that work wasted due to a physics glitch.

 

[Exorcet]

I just rage quit and uninstalled! I built an orbital fuel station because I still can't find a good guide that explains the rocket design process so I frequently had far less fuel than I wanted after getting into orbit around Kerbin

Just use Kerbal Engineer Redux. Delta V and TWR will tell you a good bit about rocket performance. I had heard somewhere these calculations were supposed to be in 1.0, but it seems that was either not true, or they were cut.

Anyway, a 5000 delta V rocket should get you anywhere in the Kerbin system (ie Kerbin, Mun, Minmus).

 

[sesselpupser]

Just use Kerbal Engineer Redux. Delta V and TWR will tell you a good bit about rocket performance. I had heard somewhere these calculations were supposed to be in 1.0, but it seems that was either not true, or they were cut.

Anyway, a 5000 delta V rocket should get you anywhere in the Kerbin system (ie Kerbin, Mun, Minmus).

I have been using Kerbal Engineer, but I can't find anything that explains how much delta V you need to get to Minmus, land and come back, all I know is I'm always just a little short and when I add more fuel my rocket becomes less efficient, requiring more thrust to get into orbit before I run out of fuel but that in turn increases the drag, making it less efficient again...

 

[Exorcet]

I have been using Kerbal Engineer, but I can't find anything that explains how much delta V you need to get to Minmus, land and come back, all I know is I'm always just a little short and when I add more fuel my rocket becomes less efficient, requiring more thrust to get into orbit before I run out of fuel but that in turn increases the drag, making it less efficient again...

I don't have Engineer installed on my 1.0 yet, but I just built and used this attached rocket to do a roundtrip Kerbin > Minmus > Kerbin. If I had batteries and parachute I could have landed on Minmus and survived the Kerbin landing. Try using this as a benchmark.

I think it takes 3000 delta V to leave Kerbin and maybe 1000 to get to Minmus. Delta V from Minmus to Kerbin is basically nothing.

Adding more fuel shouldn't be an issue, it doesn't actually make the rocket overall less efficient. It will impact early stages, but you more than gain for it with late stages.


EDIT:

Some more test flying shows it's a bit harder to fly than I thought. First launch I was too aggressive with my gravity turn and tumbled over. The loss of speed cost fuel, but it also prevented the rocket from overheating and exploding.

If you want to launch without doing backflips, try to use 20-33% throttle with the Mainsail stage. Honestly it doesn't need Mainsail at all, might be best to replace with a Skipper or the LT45 gimbal engine (I forget the full name).

But yeah I put it together in 5 minutes, so it's not at all a refined design. I originally used Mainsail because it looked nicer.

 

[sesselpupser]

I don't have Engineer installed on my 1.0 yet, but I just built and used this attached rocket to do a roundtrip Kerbin > Minmus > Kerbin. If I had batteries and parachute I could have landed on Minmus and survived the Kerbin landing. Try using this as a benchmark.

I think it takes 3000 delta V to leave Kerbin and maybe 1000 to get to Minmus. Delta V from Minmus to Kerbin is basically nothing.

Adding more fuel shouldn't be an issue, it doesn't actually make the rocket overall less efficient. It will impact early stages, but you more than gain for it with late stages.

Well thanks, seeing as you're going to the effort of helping me out I'll reinstall the game and take a look, I've found KSP to be quite impenetrable in terms of actually learning about what you're doing; it's easy to follow guides that tell you exactly what parts to use but if you don't know why you're doing it, you become dependent on guides. Or at least I did. I'm sure something has to 'click' but it hasn't for me yet and it seems like everyone else I know who plays is just doing it by trial and error too. I hate that, I get frustrated that there's clearly a formula you can use to build a rocket so you don't have to fail repeatedly, I just haven't figured it out yet - or even how to establish a baseline so you know what relative success is, if you know what I mean.