Kerbal Space Program

I'm using Kerbal Joint Reinforcement, a mod that is basically a necessity with RSS. Otherwise you will have to use so many struts that lag is guaranteed.

It still has a couple of glitches but it seems to be stable enough. I'm using it on a separate install anyway. I had a large rocket stick to the launch pad once and had to put decouplers under the engines to fix it. Nothing too bad so far. You can just copy your install folder and drop RSS in GameData and give it a whirl. I strongly recommend to add Kerbal Joint Reinforcement, Ferram Aerospace Research and Deadly Reentry (DRE is optional). I advise against Remote Tech because Scott Manley said it was buggy atm.

The developers stated that they don't want this. They want to keep KSP semi-realistic (Lol, fix your aerodynamics, HarvesteR!!!) and another solar system would require insane travel times. Personally I suspect that the real reason is that the engine can't handle it. All those little floating point errors become increasingly prominent the farther you are away from the sun. The Kraken is waiting beyond Eeeloo and it is hungry! The empty space outside of Eeloo's orbit is it's hunting ground and it gets stronger with every AU you travel. ;P

I would really love a comet on a highly elliptical and inclined orbit, too. It would be a nice test for piloting skills to rendezvous with it.

Yeah, in-system space debris would be neat, highly-elliptical ones too, and I said another star system because, while actually possible if scaled with in-game scaling as is, there are confirmed galaxies close enough to pretty much be within the range of 4 plutos of distance. The travel time was mentioned as insane and really incredible. The engine miiiight be able to handle it even. Either way, it is interesting if assanine.

If that was to work, it would also be interesting, and I have seen partial mods around this idea, but to make a launching pad on other planets, in case you want to assemble a spaceship there and start off instead of always assembling on Kerbal. Would really be easy mode, considering you can chunk spaceship parts you need anywhere you want them and reassemble them there for the spaceship you want to assemble there, besides it being really time consuming and difficult.

Erm, the closest solar system is Alpha Centauri. You would have to travel 4 year if you would move with lightspeed. Now, it is not impossible to reach lightspeed in KSP with cheating and everything is 10 times smaller. But you might want to watch Scott Manley's video on speed of light in KSP, he can explain it better:



There is no way to travel a distance of 4.8 lightmonths with any semi-realistic engine and payload. Make a test: Load up KSP and build a rocket with as much delta-v as possible with the 800 Isp nuclear engine. I bet you cannot build a stage with more than 17,250m/s delta-v with stock parts. Try it. TWR doesn't matter. Take a NERVA and stack orange tanks on it until you go blue in the face. The rocket equation doesn't allow for it.

Now take your best stage and set up an asparagus staging and stack 3 on top of each other with decouplers. If you would burn all that fuel, even if it would take hours or possibly days, you would be nowhere near lightspeed. I would be impressed if you manage to get to 1% of lightspeed. It would still take decades to go to the nearest solar system and when you arrive you need roughly the same amount of delta-v to slow down again!

Next idea: ion drives. The VASIMR maybe? It's extremely efficient. It trades thrust for that efficiency unfortunately. And you can't rely on solar power because you are moving in interstellar space. Not much usable sun light between stars... Even if you would overcome all those problems I still don't want to burn for several hours.

So it's either Alcubierre drive (commonly known as warp drive) or wormholes. Both of them are highly theoretical and might turn out to be impossible to control.

Last but not least: How do you set up the encounter? Getting an encounter with Dres is often a pain in the butt and that's right around the corner. I wouldn't want to hit a pinhead at 4 light years distance with KSPs maneuver nodes.

Meh, I was thinking possibly gravity slingshot off of planets like you do moons, but never tried it. Either way, I was figuring if real probes leave this star system, then its possible for them to ingame. Maybe not.

4.5 is those star's distance from earth, isn't it? I am talking about their distance each other. They are technically binary, just not contact binaries or with shared orbitals. They are very distant binaries that are still binaries, with loose gravity links in the center.

While gravitational assist might be nice they don't give you that much of a push. You often have to get several assist just to bump your orbit up to the next planet. Your best bet is Jool and you can get a nice push from its high gravity well. Still, you are going a couple of dozen kilometers per second and while you are going to your apoapsis you are slowing down.

Let's say you can get the necessary speed to go to the next solar system in KSP. That's 0.4 light years away maybe 10% of Alpha Centauri. That would be 0.4*9.46*1015m=3.78*10^15m. For comparison, Jool's distance to the sun is only 6,54*10^10m and it takes 300 days to get to Jool from Kerbin.

Imagine a picture where the entire solar system of KSP is represented by a single pixel. How far away would the solar system 2 pixel be? Roughly 50000 pixels. You would need 27 full HD monitors standing next to each other to display that picture. Which is the reason I decided not to post the actual picture here on the forum. And my graphic program told me to GTFO when I tried to make a picture of that size...

In other news:
I'm still playing my Real Solar System career and I think I made a major breakthrough, I unlocked docking ports! This is my tech tree atm:



I'm currently attempting to get a Moon lander into orbit but still have to iron out a few kinks. That thing controls like a drunken rhino on a skateboard:



Fun fact: You are looking at 97 engines burning simultaneously. I don't have Skippers or Mainsails yet.



I think I need to rework the entire design and switch to asparagus staging. Not for the delta-v but to get the part yount down as soon as possible. Oh, the lag...

Do docking ports work right yet? Such as crew transfer or fuel transfer or anything?

I was actually interested now in doing a gravity assist with a planet now. For some reason, in practice they are very conserving when using moons, you get clear out of the gravitational influence of the planet doing it. I want to try to calculate the best assistance I can get from one and then get it to see how much I get off of it. Moons are relatively close distance I guess and the gravity well of a planet isn't that big.

I was just thinking, by scale, there has to be some way to move between stars that are by ratio as far apart as planets are to each other. Using conventional technology. Not including "warp" drives or any suspected ways to exploit time, essentially slowing it's passage in realtime, it just doesn't work "like time travel" in the effect that it distorts it but never travels "ahead" or "backwards" just "resists moving or tries to hold in place".

...There are warp drives in kerbal though, my roommate uses them for lolz. He is actually the one that got me thinking about multiple stars, and I am actually the one that shared all those facts with him about distance. I told him there might be some theoretical distance where two stars won't affect the internal gravity of each other's planet system but are as close as possible otherwise, and that might make possible for space travel. Which is why I am here even thinking about this.

I am actually more interested in a mod adding the Kuiper Belt and Asteroid Belt and possibly comets highly elliptical in orbit. I know their system isn't exactly ours, but technically there is a reason for their formation that makes sense for their system (a "good neighbor" external giant planet, the existance of small space debris, and the star that pulls them together better closer and not so well in the weaker gravity area thus forming belts instead of pulled together mass into a single planet)

OK, I tried the RSS with deadly reentry and this is pretty much how it went:
1.) Removed deadly reentry as I got bored waiting for like 30 minutes for a vessel to descend safely
2.) Removed my RSS version of KSP completely because of these issues:

• Serious increase in system resources used preventing safe use of even x2 physical timewarp on my laptop
• Random crash on EVA
• Random vessel/EVA jumping on the surface preventing recovery
• Random kill of EVA kerbal when walking across the surface
• Random catapultation of a kerbal when going EVA
• And the worst one: vessel corruption when approaching Mun (altometer spinning like crazy and otherwise black screen)

So although the RSS mod makes it interesting and challenging I'd say it still needs some work or the game engine simply isn't built for something like that .

thetrophysystem: As for traveling really fast, its not really a problem of technology but of engineering. Lookup the Orion project. The main problem with really fast ships are micrometeorites and other small objects. Imagine you have a ship with Orion type pulse engine traveling at 100000km/s. Now imagine a micrometeorite heading directly against the ship also at 100000km/s. I believe that energy of impact is calculated like this: e = mv^2 (notice speed powered 2). I wouldn't like to be onboard that ship .

I believe there was a proposal of building a giant laser on the Moon. The beam would be directed at a probe with a solar sail. The beam would gradually accelerate the probe removing the problem with dimmer sunlight having lower and lower effect on the sail as the probe would be leaving the solar system. There are many other "less conventional" concepts like a massive railgun built in orbit which would shoot out the probe. But you don't really need this stuff for sending probes, rovers and other vehicles (I believe a submarine mission is on paper for Europa) for objects within our solar system.

PA players are better able to appreciate the value of cartoon-sized planets, I think.

Docking ports have always been used for fuel transfer, right from the first patch they were implemented in. Crew transfer, no, but kerbals are basically useless and EVA costs nothing so it doesn't really matter.

I got rid of Deadly Reentry as well. When I'm coming back from the Moon I have over 10km/s and aerobraking that to a safe 8km/s is just annoying after the second time. And you can't just slap on an extra heatshield and speed it up or your crew will be crushed by the g-force. I love the idea behind DRE but I'm really not patient enough to repeat the Ring around the Rosie with Kerbin for 20 minutes for every vehicle.

Your crashes might be related to running out of memory. I'm afraid there is no solution for that but finding a beefier PC unfortunately. The ground/water is a bit buggy and collision detection is off a bit. Took me 2 minutes to stabilize one of my probes enough to recover it... xD

I landed on the Moon three time so far. Here is Jeb making giant leaps for kerbalkind:
It took 4 refueling missions to get him down to the surface and back to Kerbin safely!

Unlocked the NERVA and the larger solar panels finally! No checking if my rocket has some solar panel in the sun anymore, yay! And I unlocked the seismic detector for more science points. My latest monstrosity has almost 20km/s and can get a Kerbal with full science package on the Moon and back without refueling. Time to look to Mars!

This is probably one of the more realistic ideas. The nice part is where you don't have to carry your fuel and can still accelerate for a very long time.

Railguns might be useful for some stuff but your payload needs to be able to survive the extreme acceleration. Might work for some experiments but not for anything large or fragile. Would probably be a nice and very cheap way to get resources to Mars!

Nice one Jessep! Now that I think of the crashes it could indeed be related to me using the 32bit binary as like 9 months ago when Unity3D support for Linux was highly questionable and use of 64bit binary wasn't recommended. Still given my relaxation style of gaming I probably won't be returning to RSS any time soon .

Also, how would I get such a crazy rover like this one to Moon or even Mars with RSS? That would have to be some insane rocket (and yes, the center of mass is fairly balanced):

That looks like a very nice heavy duty rover! And you would get it to the Moon with persistence and a rocket with its weight measured in megatons. I'll be honest, I'd rather send it to Mars because you could aerocapture it. I wouldn't want to add a skycrane with 1700m/s on top of the rover. ;P

Speaking of megaton rockets, the Uranus (Minmus) transfer window came up and nobody was more surprised than I that I have the capability to send a probe mission and maybe even a return mission!

Meet the Courageous Jaguar:

The delta-v display is off because it displays atmospheric Isp. This little kitten has almost 12km/s to burn once the NERVAs take over in orbit.


I'm sure it will be a giant leap for science when it returns in 3 decades. Oh well, you have to be patient when you play RSS... =3

Lol. 3 decades is a long time to wait. Wait, wasn't minimus the outer moon around Kerbal?

RSS reuses the planets/moons from KSP to recreate our solar system. And since KSP doesn't have enough bodies the RSS dev used Minmus to represent Uranus.

Quite a big rocket you have there Jessep. Why don't you just go to SpaceX and order one Falcon Heavy . I have to be quite conservative with the part count given my laptop's power. NovaPunch pack helps quite a lot with that.

I'm very tempted to install NovaPunch myself. KW looks nice but it suffers from similar part count problems as stock. And the rocket I posted controls as it looks. I only put a small number of reaction wheels on it and once you are out of the thick of the atmosphere it's bad, really bad.

However, my RSS career is on break for the moment. I have found a mod for Mount&Blade Warband that I really enjoy and I feel I'm at a good point to take a break. Or maybe I'll just go sandbox now. I have pretty much unlocked all the important nodes in the tech tree now. With NERVAs I can reach any target, even Pluto.

I might be going to my older brother's house to play some Kerbal. I want him to learn the game, play the tutorials (I have installed custom tutorials too), learn to build a rocket and maybe even alt-12 explore a bit.

KSP has been THE game I've played prior to getting PA Beta. I started with the 0.18 demo with my nephew as a challenge to see who would be the 1st to land on Mun and return safely to Kerbin. I WON!!! (which is rare since he usually kicks my a** in other games). I bought the full retail version over a year ago and have consumed more... I mean MOAR time than I can count. I've been strictly stock. Only after visiting every planet and moons (some became unintentional permanent residence ) I have been adding mods like Chatterer, MapSat, and SCANsat. Nothing that would make the game easier to play. More recently I've included Kerbal Alarm Clock, Kerbal Attachment System (anyone who has tried to dock 2 ships on uneven ground with stock dockng ports can appreciate this) and Kethane Pack since Squad put resources on the backburner. Here are a couple of my most memorable (and challenging) missions...
Mission to Duna
Moons of Jool Missions

My current mission, Jeb, Bill, and Bob are stranded on Moho with 3 more Kerbals stuck in orbit overhead. I sent a rescue team with double the fuel and emergency snacks. Now I have 12 Kerbals (6 in orbit and 6 on the surface). Using KAS, I have transfered enough fuel to get both landers back into orbit but I don't know if there's enough for them to return home. I was hoping of doing this without sending a kethane drilling rig but I'm preparing one just in case...

nothing as fancy, but I just built a moonworthy vessel with t2 tech. All went well till I forgot to save and avoided aerobreaking thus running out of fuel

without couplers, I'm just gotta put a duplicate vessel against its nose and push it until they both fall from orbit. Wish me luck. Think I'll save it...

Guys, I'm the best engineer here:



You can't beat that.

Needs more struts.

Ok.