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Kerbal Space Program

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I definitely agree that escorting 4 Kerbals to certain spots on the planet or the whole 'do this science thing below 17,000 meters at this spot on Kerbin' are the absolute worst (unless you are good at designing and flying planes, which I'm just not interested in at the moment). I did exactly one of those and have never touched those contracts again. Luckily I have had plenty of other interesting contracts since then and have been able to ignore those entirely.

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I wonder if I'm just building really expensive rockets or have bad luck on missions, but the only ones I get that turn me a profit are those zone specific ones. *shrug* No worries, the designers thoughtfully included a fix for that :)

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Another random thing I forgot to bring up: are you guys able to run this at max graphics settings and still get good framerates? My PC is far beyond the recommended specs and yet I constantly see dips as low as 12 FPS in certain areas. It doesn't strike me as a very graphically intensive game so it's been a little surprising to see it run so poorly.

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Another random thing I forgot to bring up: are you guys able to run this at max graphics settings and still get good framerates? My PC is far beyond the recommended specs and yet I constantly see dips as low as 12 FPS in certain areas. It doesn't strike me as a very graphically intensive game so it's been a little surprising to see it run so poorly.

High part counts eat memory pretty fast, its not really a graphics issue. I haven't played since i upgraded my ram and GPU so not sure how it runs for me now.

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Well maybe my impending upgrade from a 1.5 GB card to a 6 GB card with my new build will help smooth that out. It hasn't bothered me too much overall but some of those dips do get really atrocious, especially when I first load my rocket onto the pad.

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So another quick question: for those missions that involve setting up a base on Mun/Minmus/Duna/etc. with X amount of fuel (the one I have requires 4000 units of fuel on my Minmus surface outpost) and a bunch of other junk, how do you guys go about getting such large amounts of fuel successfully attached to your surface outposts? Do you send an initial outpost with all of the other components and then send a separate rocket with all of the fuel and some docking ports to dock to your existing outpost? Or do you go piece by piece and relay smaller amounts of fuel between space stations?

 

I'm just starting to dig into some of these contracts and I have one for Minmus and one for Duna. So far I have landed a basic science outpost on each one (although I ended up misjudging the thin atmosphere of Duna and destroyed all of my outpost rover wheels upon landing and have no engineer to fix it) and have started tinkering around with different rocket designs to try to figure out the best way to get so much damn fuel out to those outposts. The problem is that that quantity of fuel makes my final stage so damn heavy which cascades down and requires more thrust on the lower stages which adds even more weight which ends up resulting in a pretty unwieldy rocket that eats up about $300k of my funds. I could go through and figure out the delta V's of each stage and optimize it that way to get the best results but for now I'm still at a point where I'd prefer to just experiment and see if I can cook up something that does the job on my own.

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I usually land base parts separately then attach them on the surface, most of my bases are like a linked up convoy of wheeled vehicles. The other way is to have fuel ships in orbit to refuel your base before landing.

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I usually land base parts separately then attach them on the surface, most of my bases are like a linked up convoy of wheeled vehicles. The other way is to have fuel ships in orbit to refuel your base before landing.

 

As I think about it more I think I'm leaning towards the orbiting fuel ships to refuel my bases before landing. One, it kind of makes the whole thing a little more intricate and exciting. And two, it will most likely serve me really well in future missions if I get that infrastructure in place now.

 

So I think my tentative plan is to build out my shitty little Kerbin space station a bit more to give it some kind of refueling bay, and then assemble similar space stations to orbit the Mun, Minmus, and eventually Duna so I have a series of refueling checkpoints that can get me around these areas a little easier without needing massive, unwieldy rockets to go straight from Kerbin to my destination. Then I guess phase two of my plan will be to start assembling and landing additional outpost components in each location.

 

Man, I'm really excited for the next few dozen hours this is most likely going to end up taking. I fucking love this game.

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I ended up putting together a decent rocket design last night that quite easily gets one of those big ass orange fuel tanks up to my Kerbin space station. So I launched the first of four that will comprise my fuel bay, managed to get it successfully docked, and then watched in horror as my space station started trying to violently rip itself apart. At first it was a small sway but after about a minute the whole thing was bending and twisting in every direction and just as the pieces looked like they were going to break off, I realized it was the fucking SAS over-correcting and amplifying every little rattle. So I turned that off just in time and everything settled down.

 

It's kind of a bummer that I docked the first two pieces with a docking port junior because it seems like a pretty big weak point right now and seems much more susceptible to wobble. I'd rather not scrap it and start over so I'll need to think of some way to rearrange things to eliminate that weak point.

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I ended up putting together a decent rocket design last night that quite easily gets one of those big ass orange fuel tanks up to my Kerbin space station. So I launched the first of four that will comprise my fuel bay, managed to get it successfully docked, and then watched in horror as my space station started trying to violently rip itself apart. At first it was a small sway but after about a minute the whole thing was bending and twisting in every direction and just as the pieces looked like they were going to break off, I realized it was the fucking SAS over-correcting and amplifying every little rattle. So I turned that off just in time and everything settled down.

 

It's kind of a bummer that I docked the first two pieces with a docking port junior because it seems like a pretty big weak point right now and seems much more susceptible to wobble. I'd rather not scrap it and start over so I'll need to think of some way to rearrange things to eliminate that weak point.

 

Its actually surprising how weak the giant docking ports are. I have been trying to design a giant ship for long range missions that can deploy scout craft and a mining vessel while the main ship remains in orbit, the ship is very unstable unfortunately. I need to get back to designing it and see if i can find a better way to connect 6 smaller ships, one large one to a gigantic vessel that is more of a mobile space station than a ship.. 

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Its actually surprising how weak the giant docking ports are. I have been trying to design a giant ship for long range missions that can deploy scout craft and a mining vessel while the main ship remains in orbit, the ship is very unstable unfortunately. I need to get back to designing it and see if i can find a better way to connect 6 smaller ships, one large one to a gigantic vessel that is more of a mobile space station than a ship.. 

 

What if you go with two parallel docking ports on each end and try to get them to both dock simultaneously to give you a stronger connection? Not sure if KSP would actually support both of them fully docking and locking in but it seems like it might work.

 

And speaking of mining. I hear this game has it but that mechanic has yet to reveal itself to me, even though I'm 90 hours in. Am I missing something here?

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What if you go with two parallel docking ports on each end and try to get them to both dock simultaneously to give you a stronger connection? Not sure if KSP would actually support both of them fully docking and locking in but it seems like it might work.

 

And speaking of mining. I hear this game has it but that mechanic has yet to reveal itself to me, even though I'm 90 hours in. Am I missing something here?

It requires some very specific machinery, I don't remember where it is on the unlock tree.

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Its actually surprising how weak the giant docking ports are. I have been trying to design a giant ship for long range missions that can deploy scout craft and a mining vessel while the main ship remains in orbit, the ship is very unstable unfortunately. I need to get back to designing it and see if i can find a better way to connect 6 smaller ships, one large one to a gigantic vessel that is more of a mobile space station than a ship.. 

 

When you say unstable, do you mean that it's a wobbly hard-to-launch mess while in atmosphere? The solution is to not launch it docked together. Instead build the main ship, slap on docking ports, then connect the scout ships with rigid strut connectors and separator pieces. Once you're in space you can separate them and dock with the ports.

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I'm not so sure that fixes the issue as I understand it. Typically these pieces would all need to be launched separately and then docked together in space since getting the pre-assembled thing off the ground and into orbit would take a massive amount of thrust.

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I'm not so sure that fixes the issue as I understand it. Typically these pieces would all need to be launched separately and then docked together in space since getting the pre-assembled thing off the ground and into orbit would take a massive amount of thrust.

 

Depends how big these scout ships are. You can go from Kerbin grounded, to the Mun, and back on just a few tons, so I can imagine some pretty light scout ships, especially if they're launched from an orbital ship instead of the ground.

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When you say unstable, do you mean that it's a wobbly hard-to-launch mess while in atmosphere? The solution is to not launch it docked together. Instead build the main ship, slap on docking ports, then connect the scout ships with rigid strut connectors and separator pieces. Once you're in space you can separate them and dock with the ports.

 

 I launched all the ships separately and assembled in orbit, but while thrusting there is a lot of wobble in between the ships.

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 I launched all the ships separately and assembled in orbit, but while thrusting there is a lot of wobble in between the ships.

:innocent:

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 I launched all the ships separately and assembled in orbit, but while thrusting there is a lot of wobble in between the ships.

 

Mmmmmm... wobble physics. Woof.

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Played in science mode a bunch this weekend. Got caught up to where I was in my full career mode game, then crashed into a 10,000m tall mountain when trying to land on the Mun in the dark.

 

Edit: Also learned that it's my high center of gravity that makes all my rockets start trying to tip over mid-launch, so now I'm considering how much my balance will be off if I only include one ladder, gel pod, barometer, etc on my rocket.

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Played in science mode a bunch this weekend. Got caught up to where I was in my full career mode game, then crashed into a 10,000m tall mountain when trying to land on the Mun in the dark.

 

Fun fact: If you switch to the cockpit view, you get an altimeter that accurately reports distance to ground, instead of the useless "distance to sea level" you get in the normal view.

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Played in science mode a bunch this weekend. Got caught up to where I was in my full career mode game, then crashed into a 10,000m tall mountain when trying to land on the Mun in the dark.

 

Edit: Also learned that it's my high center of gravity that makes all my rockets start trying to tip over mid-launch, so now I'm considering how much my balance will be off if I only include one ladder, gel pod, barometer, etc on my rocket.

 

You might try pumping some fuel from your upper stages to your lower stages during the ascent to keep your rocket from going top heavy. You shouldn't need fuel lines either, just alt-right click on each tank and manually transfer chunks of fuel down to your lower tanks as needed to keep the weight evenly distributed. It can be a bit much to manage but if you have your launches down to a science it isn't too difficult to pump that fuel around as needed. Depending on your fuel setup, you may also need to pump fuel back out of your lower stage and into your upper stage before breaking off that stage so you can fill your top tanks back up (top-heaviness shouldn't matter at this point since your rocket is about to get much shorter from losing its first stage).

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I had no idea that was even possible. Not sure if it's really practical really, I only have one tank above the first stage and I need every stitch of fuel there to get me to the moon and back. By the time I get through my asparagus staging down to the point that manually transferring fuel will do any good, I'm usually stable enough. It's just that turn at 10,000m that I have a tough time with

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I had no idea that was even possible. Not sure if it's really practical really, I only have one tank above the first stage and I need every stitch of fuel there to get me to the moon and back. By the time I get through my asparagus staging down to the point that manually transferring fuel will do any good, I'm usually stable enough. It's just that turn at 10,000m that I have a tough time with

 

Just pump it all to your lower tank temporarily until you get out of that danger zone and then pump it all back up to your top tank. As long as you have enough extra fuel and don't burn it all before then, you should just be able to pump it right back up without taking any kind of hit to fuel.

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Won't that mess up the asparagus though trying to pump fuel backwards?

 

Edit: Maybe I should just describe the ship I have.

 

 

Pod and science gear

---

Rockomax X200-8 Fuel Tank (shortest of the wide tanks) and regular (not wide) engine

---

Rockomax X200-32 Fuel Tank (biggest tank i have at the moment) with the biggest engine I have

and around that, FL-T800 Fuel Tank x8 with efficient engines, arranged asparagus with the final feed from each half going into the Rockomax tank.

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Yeah, not sure if my advice necessarily applies. But the basic idea behind it is that if you have say, a three stage rocket that is fairly top heavy, you can alt + right-click your first stage tank and your last stage tank and set it up to transfer all of your last stage fuel to your first stage tank (or split evenly between your first stage tanks that you plan to eject if you are doing asparagus staging). Then, once you get through to a decent altitude you can reverse the transfer to put the remaining fuel back into the last stage tank where it started so you have the fuel you need. Obviously you would need to time it so that your first stage doesn't burn it all before it gets transferred back.

You aren't necessarily using any more fuel in your first stage by doing this, it is just a technique to temporarily redistribute the weight of your ship to get you through difficult parts of the launch. I haven't had to do it for that purpose yet but I have had to transfer fuel out of my last stage to a previous stage to give it enough juice to get to a refueling ship since I needed to keep that stage to have enough delta v to get to my destination.

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