If you turn on the advanced tweakables option, you can set fuel drain priority to do the same thing. I ought to try that sometime. My relay satellites are light enough that they don’t provide much of a shuttlecock effect.
What’s the rover for if it has no science? You hoping to land near the edge of a biome.and get crew and rocks from both?
It has a medium size arm sampler. I was able to study a moon rock and a moon crater with it :)
PSA: If you’re running the most recent KSP release 1.7.3., you might want to hold off on using deployed science from the Breaking Ground DLC. Those experiments will spam your screen with “Deployed Goo experiment returned 0.0003 science” messages up on your screen every minute or so, so when you warp anywhere, you’ll have several hundred notifications in your message queue that you have to delete one by one.
https://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/23172
https://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/22757
I hope they fix this soon. It is ridiculously annoying.
Speaking of rovers. I’ve never been able to really deploy them before, and I so stop trying a while ago.
But I’ve got a mission that basically needs to use the new scanner device on a rover in breaking ground.
So what is the secret for landing rovers? I’ve tried dropping them which didn’t go well. There seems to be some cool hinge parts which might let you off-load the rover similar to how it was done on Apollo 15.
In the past, I always secured mine underneath the lander, high enough that the lander’s legs kept it suspended above the ground. After landing, I’d just decouple the rover and drive it out from between the lander legs. I bet those robotic parts can make it pretty cool though.
The folding wheels from the Making History pack (I think) are a big help, too.
After I deployed them on the moon it absolutely destroyed my frame rate. At least I hope it was just that. Will I be able to go in and remove them without a trip back to the moon? Like from the tracking station?
It’s a little wimpy in my opinion, yeah. I got completion bonuses of √80,000 just recently for a similar mission.
How are people getting multiple smaller engines under a single fuel tank? Are they using an engine plate? Which leads to my next question. What is an engine plate for and how do you use it?
Also, what would you unlock next if you had these points?
None of those things. I would unlock nuclear engines.
EDIT: To add to that, the ISP on the nuclear engines is massive compared to everything else up until now and I think the only engines that beat it in certain circumstances are the ion engine and the rapier. It is horrible in atmo, but once in a vacuum you will use it everywhere.
Try it out in sandbox mode? :) (and a quick google shows that yes, they’re for using multiple smaller engines on a single tank. Back in the day we had to mess about with struts to get lots on there)
I’d been messing with it for hours lol. But… someone gave me a clue about a widget thingie? So I looked at all the items on the right-click menu and I had passed right over something about “add node”. Clicked that and now I got those options!
I can unlock that too! So I will grab it. Wow, I did not have any idea their vacuum ISP was so amazing. So do people then launch their rocket into orbit, then switch to nuke engines from there to go to the moon and other places?
But why is a nuclear engine using liquid fuel?
Exactly!
The NERV’s real-life analog, the NERVA, heated hydrogen fuel for exhaust using a uranium-based reactor (there was no chemical reaction).
Yeah, in the nuclear engine the tank provides the propellant, whereas in the normal rocket engines it’s both fuel and propellant.
So do you use normal rocket fuel for the nuke engine then? Or the fuel you use for jet engines? or monopropellant? Or do you use rocket fuel and remove the oxidizer? Sorry that sounds dumb, just trying to figure out what you meant?
Liquid fuel is the same across jet engines and rocket engines. You can use the Liquid Fuel fuselages, or use rocket fuel tanks and drain all the oxidizer.
Engine plates are a modular way to mount a few engines to one fuel tank as part of a rocket stack. You pick the number of attachment nodes and connect the engines, and the plate makes a single, centered attachment node below all the engines so you can keep building beneath them.
So before I go mess up a launch - when using the nuke engine I can build using a rocket fuel tank, drain the oxidizer and the nuclear engine will run just fine as it only needs the fuel, no oxidizer?
I bet I could have used a large engine plate to help carry my rover by using a small landing engine, but having another node to connect the rover to.
Yup! That’s what I do for the upper stage of the Duna Clipper I posted.