Pod
1723
Congratulations on landing on something other than Kerbin! First time?
Bring an engineer to deploy the solar panels—a panel deployed by a level 0 engineer generates 2 power instead of 1. (Also, bring a scientist to deploy the experiments. In both cases, the higher the rank, the better.)
@Fishbreath - could you explain on that chart where I find the delta V to take off from the Mun and to create an orbit around it? I’m confused how you use it to determine each step. Like Kerbin orbit, then transfer to Mun, then Mun orbit. Mun landing (if it does that), and Mun take-off to Mun orbit, then Mun orbit transfer to Kerbin. Can it even be used this way?
meeper
1726
@jpinard 580m/s
For bodies without an atmosphere, it takes the same amount of energy to safely land as it does to get into orbit. The arrows indicate that aerobraking is possible in a given direction, potentially reducing the amount of dV required.
Oh that’s good to know. I raged quit my last game after hitting the Z key while landing on the Mun, sorry Jeb. But that does give you an incentive to bring a good mix of scientist and engineers along. I pretty much only do solo missions around both Mun, and Min. I still have not successfully landed on Duna yet. But now in honor of the 50th tempted to started another career, and maybe this time start using 2 or 3 man space vehicles.
Just minutes ago, I hit the space key by accident while on a trans-Munar trajectory, separating my lander from the command module prior to arrival. Oops.
Matt_W
1729
I just started my who-knows-how-many-th career. I had intentions of going unmodded, but that didn’t work out. I’m mostly using ProbesBeforeCrew, Strategia, and OPM plus some cosmetic mods. And I used ContractConfiguration to turn off parts test, tourism, and survey contracts, which are grindy and I hate. Enjoying it so far.
Pod
1730
BTSM was a great mod. Is ProbesBeforeCrew the spiritual sequel?
Matt_W
1731
I was a huge fan of BTSM (and I have an archived copy of a KSP installation with one of BTSM’s most final versions on my PC.) PBC actually works reasonably well to deliver a similar experience. It’s tighter, with a more logical progression. Each milestone is the right amount of difficult-to-achieve. It’s really just a tech-tree and contract mod, but seems to work pretty well so far.
Mun trip pictures!
Here’s the Munulator, a decent way to get 20 tons to LKO.
Or 15 tons, in this case, of Munar Mission Module. It’s a classic command-module-and-lander setup. I made the science detachable, but it turns out that the LV909 engine doesn’t make power, and therefore I needed the batteries in the service bay to make my reaction wheels work for long enough to rendezvous after taking off.
We’ll land in…
that crater.
Guess I needed taller landing legs.
I do not recommend this kind of rendezvous.
Absent any plans (or indeed means) to dock the lander to the service module, I elected to EVA across. Jeb took the data from the lander with him.
Reentering into the rising sun.
492.4 science earned, plus the extra I got from planting a flag on the Mun and recovering a Munstone (per contracts).
So awesome! Some beautiful pics! I wish I understood how to use Kerbal Alarm Clock. It has so many settings, and buttons and things to put in, I am half afraid to click anything as I might not get it back to default. What is that flight engineer? Is that part of KER? I haven’t seen that myself.
Is that a Main Sail or Poodle for your big liquid engine?
Kerbal Alarm Clock is complicated if you want it to be, but easy for the basics. All you really need is the add button—it senses context, so if you have a maneuver planned, it’ll go for that. If you have no maneuver but do have an SOI change, it’ll alarm that instead. The Transfer Window Planner plugin integrates with it, too, which is how I got the entries in for the Duna, Eve, and Dres windows.
The flight engineer window shows up if you put one of the KER flight control computer parts (either the spinny-tape one or the printed circuit board one; they’re under Science) on a rocket.
The big engine is actually the Rockomax-size part in between the Mainsail and the Poodle. I think it’s called the Skipper. It has better vacuum specific impulse than the Mainsail, but isn’t powerful enough to lift the rocket on its own, hence the SRBs. The Skipper is for steering while the SRBs do the heavy lifting at first, and by the time the SRBs are empty, the Skipper has burned enough fuel so that TWR is greater than 1.
That’s scary! So, a Kerbal can have all that data transferred to him? Or did you somehow take the science container with you?
Thanks for explaining above. I’ll be trying to rendezvous with my spacelab in a while so I’ll definitely need something to help me do that so it’s not too hard.
Matt_W
1736
This is actually a trick you need to get science. If your kerbal is in proximity to any science-producing part, you can right click on the part and choose “Take Science”. This is how you can recover multiple temperature experiments with a single thermometer or multiple crew reports. You exit your capsule, stand on the ladder, transfer all the data to the kerbal, then re-enter the ladder.
Pod
1737
Is the giant landing crosshair stock or a mod?
It’s part of Kerbal Engineer Redux.
I’m likely to turn it off once I add Trajectories, which has a landing crosshair which adjusts for atmosphere.
Uggh. A bit frustrated. This thread made me install and open the game again. I played a few years ago, enough to get a rover driving around Mun and Minmus in science mode. It is a great game.
I have some questions that may have been answered in this round of forum posts; sorry, but it’s hard to scroll up :).
Career mode came out when I was playing the game and I tried it but found it too grindy - eventually I found out how to edit a text file to give myself money to overcome some grinding parts like paying for a building. Has it changed much? Would you say the default should be career mode or science mode?
Is there an online article or guide to getting started in the game that is relevant to today’s version? The Scott Manley tutorial videos were aging back then (but still useful); I imagine they’re simply not too relevant now? I know that it’ll probably come back to me after another few hours (rather than 1 hour which is why I’m frustrated).
One of the reasons I stopped playing is that I started fiddling with graphics mods, but then had stability problems and crashes. Is this any better? I see reference to the Greaphics Enhancement Assembly mod above. I don’t need anything too crazy but something better than default that is easy and stable would be ideal. Also, should I use the old method of directly copying into folders, or register and use Twitch.
Thanks and sorry about dumb questions already partly or fully answered.
Kolbex
1740
Ooh, I installed EVE and Scatterer, but I’m gonna try GEA and see if it slows my game to a crawl.
Pod
1741
I’ve just been reading about PBC, and those mods, and now I really want to play KSP again :’( However I have to pack up all my stuff and move house in the next few weeks… not enough time!
Career mode sucked. It was an awful piece of game design. And instantly mods popped up to fix it, and from a quick look most of those mods still exist. And, judging by this:
and JP’s thoughts on career mode, I’d say career mode still sucks. And I haven’t even played the game since 1.0! ;)
Has anyone played Making History?
Too try and answer a bunch of your questions :)
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So if I were you I would just change the amount of money you get for each mission. If your game is already going go to Settings > Difficutly Options:Custom > and you can crank fund rewards all the way up to 1000%. Personally I find 140% quite nice :)
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Currently I like the tourism missions because they are easy money and exp. I also like testing parts. But that could change. But what I would definitely do if I restarted is install probes before crew and some other mod that offers more mission variety.
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Use CKAN! You will be way more stable and and it makes installing and pulling mods a breeze as it does all the dependancies and configs for you. Also, if you’re going to use many of the graphics mods you need to be running version 1.71 (you can set the version number in Steam if you have it there). Reason being is most graphics mods for planets seem to use Kopernicus which does a version check and will not run if you the version doesn’t match. The guy who updates it doesn’t want to update it til 1.73 is released. Astonomeer’s, Spectra, and Stock Visual Terrain use them. EVE does not use Kopernicus, neiither does Stock Visual Enhancement (not sure about GEA) so you can have weather effects at least if you want to run latest version while waiting for Kopernicus and KSP to update.
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I like career mode, so I think that should be the default. If you want it to be less grindy just tailor it to your tolerance level by changing the %'s and game options (which you can do at any time).
