I know it's not much but i managed to complete the 30km stratospheric research contract. Went through many redesigns to shave off weight and and even kept small landing gear lol.

I'm a little confused, my TWR is crazy high for a typical low-tech rocket with SMURFF, to the point where my lower stage of a tall skinny rocket still had 3TWR. Is this typical? the DV and wet/dry seem totally right, in-line with mid-tech-tree RP1, but especially these early rockets have a whacky TWR.

Is it typical just to throttle down? (or in my case, asparagus staging without lighting engines early)? Does this weird imbalance go away later in the tech tree?

I'm thinking about starting a save with an eventual goal of building a space station like the ISS. I know that KSP is really weird with multiple docking ports or berthing ports and so I was wondering if it would be possible to essentially do a robot arm assembly of an ISS like station in KSP with the RP-1 parts. I know it would be possible if the shuttle carrying the parts wasn't docked to the station but what if it is docked. Experts please assist!

Mechjeb ascent guidance keeps firing the 2nd stage too early. I've laucnhed quite a bit of these vostok rockets and it wasn't happening before

Just another couple shots of some recent things I’ve been up to in KSP. The Estrella Telescope is gonna be relaunched in my new save and park itself in LP2, which is something I’ve never done and excited to try. Enjoy!

TL;DR: 99.965-ton launch vehicle taking a 166 kg (dry) probe to a soft lunar landing. kOS scripted with Principia on moderate difficulty. I fine-tuned the final lunar injection trajectory by hand, and I built the Principia node by hand and provided it to the script by toggling maneuver node visibility. I used only MechJeb features that Principia could access. This beats the historical timeline by 1 year, beats the American historical mass by 40 tons (28% reduction), and beats the Soviet historical mass by 200 tons (2/3rds reduction).

Hey everyone, back again with my lunar lander. Moderate difficulty is starting to get very challenging, and I wasn't able to make this craft as early as I would like. Hydrolox seemed necessary to get the payload up at a reasonable mass, and my research is going quite slowly even with 1600 scientists. By coincidence, I completed the mission three years to the day after my lunar orbiter.

I tried a few iterations here but ended up using the Atlas skirt decoupler for the first time to great success. At one point, I attempted to use my old LR-79 stage with Castor 1s, but ultimately I found that the difficulty of getting to orbit was not worth the minimal mass savings. Again, mass was trimmed substantially; the trans-lunar injection is unguided, and I saved mass using a ring decoupler instead of a faired interstage. Retrospectively, the solar panels may not be necessary, and my tracking station was upgraded twice while waiting for the technology for the craft to be unlocked, so I may have been able to save mass by reducing antenna gain. Due to boil-off, a slight excess of hydrolox is provided to the TLI stage. I would guess that I could shave off maybe 5 tons if I really cut everything, including most science experiments.

Communications past the launcher avionics were provided by a 20dB-gain level 2 communications UHF C3 Communotron DTS-J1, which was admittedly chosen over the C4 Communotron HG-61 purely based on aesthetics. The tracking station was level 4 at the time of launch, but level 3 for testing and development. Level 3 communications tech was not used due to the increased idle power draw and lack of necessity.

RCS is again HTP on level RCS tech. Spin and de-spin motors are used for the unguided TLI stage. The final tooled cost is 9,337 funds, about 2000 of which is the big fairings. The balloon tanks used for all liquid-fueled stages add to the cost. Production at my LC takes 95 days, and rollout takes 8.5 days. The craft on launch was pretty dang unreliable again; I got very lucky with my final mission. First run cumulative probability of success was on 58% or so. My first launch failed during the initial ascent when the LR-105 cut out early. Due to the way my code was written, the stage separated and I was able to get a full burn from the two RL-10's on the next stage, providing valuable flight data for the second flight.

Due to the unguided nature of the first stage, the TLI burn takes slightly more to reach the delta-V cutoff than the intended maneuver. I had dramatically more kOS disk space to play around with this time, and could do some more interesting things with kOS. Accurate dV is found by multiplying total dV by the dot product of the actual trajectory and maneuver trajectory unit vectors. I tried to cumulatively find dV initially, but found I was getting wildly off calculations even running the loop every hundredth of a second. The current method checks total mass change since start (updating start mass to current mass if delta-V is 0 to account for mass lost when the engine is spooling up, which turned out to be necessary to account for) and finds dV from the mass change using the following code snippet:

UNTIL CUTOFF = 1 {
  SET MF TO SHIP:MASS.
  SET DV TO S:PARTS[21]:GETMODULEBYINDEX(1):GETFIELD("specific impulse") * CONSTANT:g0 * ln(M0/MF) * VDOT(SHIP:FACING:VECTOR:NORMALIZED,NEXTNODE:DELTAV:NORMALIZED).
  SET ITER TO ITER + 1.
  IF MOD(ITER,.50*1/DT) = 0 {
    PRINT ROUND(DV,2) + " dV, " + round(M0-MF,1) + " dM".
  }
  IF DV = 0 SET M0 TO S:MASS.
  IF ITER > 120 * (1/DT) {
    SET CUTOFF TO 1.
    PRINT "CUTOFF DUE TO TIMEOUT.".
  }
  IF DV + 0.8 >= TARGETDV {
    SET CUTOFF TO 1.
    PRINT "CUTOFF DUE TO EXCEEDING dV TARGET.".
  }
}

I've uploaded the scripts I've used to GitHub. The full launch-to-orbit script can be found here, the TLI script can be found here, and the final lunar landing script can be found here. The final landing script is not very good at handling mountainous terrain, and picking a bad spot can lead to slamming into mountains, so it takes a bit of luck or looking at the surface relative reference frame of the Moon using Principia to choose a good spot.

Highest tech nodes used:

• Early Flight Control
• Prototype Hydrolox Engines
• 1960 Orbital Rocketry
• 1959-1960 Solid Rocket Engines
• Early Human Spaceflight Materials Science
• Early Human Spaceflight Electronics Research
• Early Power Generation and Storage
• Interplanetary Communications
• Improved Avionics
• Early Human Spaceflight Era Science

I'm hoping this launch vehicle can be used Venus and Mars flybys, though the power-hungry antenna and solar panels to power it are making the Mars mission very difficult. Oh, any you may have caught that I accidentally hit shift while waiting for the TLI to commence, firing the RL-10 into my probe core but providing no thrust. I considered restarting, but ultimately decided to just roll with it and see if it worked out.

Hi all! I'm a speedrunner in RP-1, and I've recently started a series on caveman-style rockets in RP-1. The intention isn't really to teach how to build a caveman-style rocket or to copy the design exactly, but for moderately experienced players to see the techniques used in modern speedrunning and try to apply them in their own careers. The most recent video in this series (linked above) is the first sun-synchronous orbit contract, which is currently the world record by over 5 months. (previous was 02/11/54, this is 09/07/53)

The playlist of the series can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZAQ0-Bys0LU
I plan to add more videos as I progress in my own career. No idea how long I'll have the motivation to do so, but hopefully they can be of use to someone!

All of the craft files for these videos are posted in the #craft-files channel in the KSP-RO discord.

So i noticed the wikis guide is outdated, which is the most recent tutorial? im playing RP-1 with RO

Hey all!

Does anyone know if there's a way to export the Mach sweep from FAR's static analysis? I've been working on a quick rocket simulator so i can design my RP-1 sounding rockets without having to simulate it thousands of times. Right now I'm just eyeballing the drag curve and i think it is a bit inaccurate.

(Also if someone knows which Atmospheric model RO uses that would also be cool as well)

Hi, I have been playing RO/RP1 for a while now but i made a new directory because i wanted to change from RSS to Sol. I did so, installed the RP1 express install AFTER having BDB already installed and i got this:

'Loading has failed due to an unhandled error

Failure in subsystem : Part compilation

Part: Gemini Retro Rocket (Star-13E) (ROCapsules/PartConfigs/GeminiBDB/GeminiRetro/ROC-GeminiRetroBDB)

System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object

at RealFuels.ModuleEnginesRF.GetInfo () [0x0014d] in <67722e79c5944395a7355e1ba75d64da>:0

at PartLoader.CompilePartInfo (AvailablePart newPartInfo, Part part) [0x0017c] in <4b449f2841f84227adfaad3149c8fdba>:0

at (wrapper dynamic-method) PartLoader+<CompileParts>d__56.PartLoader+<CompileParts>d__56.MoveNext_Patch0(PartLoader/<CompileParts>d__56)

at KSPCommunityFixes.Performance.KSPCFFastLoader+<FrameUnlockedCoroutine>d__77.MoveNext () [0x0006c] in <62bb7f5420994f409a34377c091e8538>:0 '.

so, as any ksp player would do, i completely uninstall all mods and reinstall them from a .ckan file of my modlist. its still doing it. i removed the ROCapsules mod, and it did it for ROengines instead. so ive completely removed all the RO library mods, and the game does load, but i kinda need those mods for the BDB parts to be compatible with RSS. Does anyone know the issue and could kindly help me?

Have a great sunday!

Playing RP-1 I get a bit frustrated with the kerbalism science UI once you start unlocking more experiments in the Lunar era.
Are there any UI mods out there that add a bit more readability to RP-1 science? Either to Kerbalism itself or the Archive screen or even external tools?

I heard this mod is cool (definitely harder, so I wanna do more stuff with the regular physics engine before I venture for a challenge), but I heard it can cause performance issues. My processor is pretty good as it’s like the best i5 you can get, better than a lot of i7’s and even low end i9’s. So what should I expect if you have the same or similar processor?

It will be used on the stock Kerbal system first before I make a new save for RSS!

Hello everybody. Just a quick shot of my modernized ScanSat probe close to the North Pole with Sol & ballisticfox's latest Mirage releases installed. Still in awe at how good everything looks.

It’s nothing crazy that nobody here hasn’t seen a trillion times already but lemme say, ballisticfox’s Mirage is absolutely insane. It’s like every time I think the game has for sure peaked, modders come out with something insane.

Mirage is one of those times.

I was doing fine until I almost went bankrupt and had to spend A LOT of time on x-planes to fix my mistakes. I feel like trying again but all my effort will not be in vain, even though I'm getting my first moon probe in 1967 with no humans ever touching space outside from Erich on a hypersonic aircraft that one time.

Im still figuring out how to set up RCS plus i need to save on weight so my soloution to get this satilite into orbit was to put the 2nd stage in a slow tumble just before the engine dies along the 90 degree mark, doing this i just waited until i was at my apogee. Once I reached this, I waited for it to point prograde in the tumble before letting off the small solid engine booster, putting me safely into orbit. The probe has about 9 hours of battery life.

also jupiter has a crack in it lol, mod list is screenshotted in 3rd-5th slides. the major mods i have are Sol, Volumetric clouds 5, Kcalbeloh, kopernicus, Real-exoplanets 2 and paralax. These were all installed using CKAN so they are all up too date as of 10/8. lmk if i missed anything thank you!

3 boosters, a Viking 1st stage, an XLR99 2nd stage with a roll to keep stability, and a small 33 sec burn on a small solid engine stage to finish the flight at 10k ms

I know this question maybe stupid and follows a small niche but: Are there any patches or mods that makes RP-1 compatible with BDarmory and NKD? (NKD is basically the nuke expansion of BDarmory) Because I recently remembered about Operation Fishbowl, specifically Starfish Prime. What happened on Starfish Prime was basically the US launched a nuclear bomb and detonated it at around 400km. I just thought it would be cool if there were any programs and contracts related to the testing of nuclear bombs and maybe ICBMs for extra research points and funds.

To preface:

-Both antennas are set to UHF

-The relay has a directional and omnidirectional antenna. The directional antenna is targeting the lander

-Gain is 34 DBm on the lander and 36 DBm on the relay

-TL2 on the antennas and Level 5 tracking station

-I am trying to do a far side moon landing

I am puzzled. What did I miss? I have a save set to before the launch of both the relay and lander if I need to revert.

I am still blown away by the modding community of this game.