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[Sean Mirrsen]

Reflective Ambient Light

Pretty. Is it graphics intensive?

A little. It adds several (3 normally, but you can reduce it to 1) extra lights to the scene, but since they are without shadows the impact is not that big. It will be progressively more noticeable as what you're trying to display on the screen reaches the limit of what your machine can display normally - i.e. if you have several thousand parts on the screen, and graphics enhancement like Better Atmospheres running, then you're going to see serious slowdown.

[Rose]

Why is mechjeb required for rescuing jeb?

[nogoodnames]

I started a career game so I could get used to the new mods I'd be using for my mission to Mars. Real Solar System doesn't fool around. My first orbiter is bigger than most standard Mun mission rockets, and I'm still struggling to get it into orbit. It should have enough delta-v but it keeps falling back into the atmosphere before it makes the requisite 8 km/s. Jeb and Bill both died fiery deaths, and Bob is only alive because I pre-emptively aborted his mission and gave his capsule an extra heat shield.

If I'm serious about using RSS, I may need a mod that expands the VAB to make room for the massive rockets I'll need.

[puke]

I think that fuel weight may be exaggerated in stock?  I remember reading some guy's blog about landing on the Moon with the realistic solar system mod, and he also had tweaked some things about the rocket sizes and engines and fuel weights to match actual NASA numbers.  I could not find it on a quick web search, but there is some "realism overhaul" mod collection that might include things like this.

But if you're going to go that way, you might as well be playing Orbiter instead, yeah?

[TheBronzePickle]

But you can't exactly build your own rockets in Orbiter.

[puke]

well, no, not the same way.

You can, and there are even some tutorials for it.  But it's not like you can snap them together out of lego blocks like you can in KSP.  So, yeah, point taken.

[puke]

I started a career game so I could get used to the new mods I'd be using for my mission to Mars. Real Solar System doesn't fool around. My first orbiter is bigger than most standard Mun mission rockets, and I'm still struggling to get it into orbit. It should have enough delta-v but it keeps falling back into the atmosphere before it makes the requisite 8 km/s. Jeb and Bill both died fiery deaths, and Bob is only alive because I pre-emptively aborted his mission and gave his capsule an extra heat shield.

If I'm serious about using RSS, I may need a mod that expands the VAB to make room for the massive rockets I'll need.

Here, I think this is the one I was talking about.  Updates your fuel density and engines to their realistic counterparts, should work better on a realistically sized planet:  http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/64118

It is included in this larger overhaul thing:  http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/84689

[nogoodnames]

Yeah, kerbal rockets generally have worse performance than their real life counterparts. I think KW rockets are a bit more in line with the real thing, but I'm not sure. Can anyone confirm that?

I've looked at the Realism Overhaul and I'm a bit hesitant to use it because of some of its requirements. Namely the Engine Ignitor mod. Seems like it'd mostly just be a pain in the ass to manage. Could use real fuels but I don't think it is compatible with any of the mining mods. Also a bit more complicated than what I'm looking for.

Anyway, I got into orbit on the third try. It's wonky orbit with a 120km periapsis and a 600km apoapsis, but at least it's stable. In the future, I'll have to remember to have an engine with decent thrust for orbital insertion, a single lv-909 just doesn't cut it.

[BigD145]

All the numbers are very specifically chosen for parts and bodies and everything. It's all balanced to be slightly substandard. No one part is perfect for any one design. That's all intentional.

[nogoodnames]

I've had some more time to play around with the Mars mission mods in my test game. MKS seems pretty complicated but much better for building life support systems than the other mods I was looking at, so thanks for suggesting it.

Karbonite also seems to meet my fuel production needs quite well. It even has atmospheric scoops which can collect argon for use with the NFT engines, so I can refuel the mothership. It also has particle collectors which work anywhere in a planet's SOI. Unfortunately, I don't think the particle collectors apply any drag to the ship, which would make them too overpowered for my purposes. I'd have to limit myself to high-altitude gliders if I were to go in that direction. Or maybe I'll edit TAC lifesupport's water splitter to produce useable hydrogen and use a hydrogen fueled engine, we'll see.

Edit: Nevermind, apparently the particle collector only works very close to the planet's atmosphere (as it should) and because of some weirdness with how RSS extends the atmosphere, this puts it inside the physical time warp only range (but still seemingly in space). On Earth this leaves it with just a thin band of a few thousand meters between the atmosphere and "true" space where it actually works. It might not work at all on other planets, I don't know. Regardless, I probably won't use it.

So, I just have to wait for a few more mods to update and then I can get this mission underway.

[TwilightWalker]

I've had some more time to play around with the Mars mission mods in my test game. MKS seems pretty complicated but much better for building life support systems than the other mods I was looking at, so thanks for suggesting it.

Karbonite also seems to meet my fuel production needs quite well. It even has atmospheric scoops which can collect argon for use with the NFT engines, so I can refuel the mothership. It also has particle collectors which work anywhere in a planet's SOI. Unfortunately, I don't think the particle collectors apply any drag to the ship, which would make them too overpowered for my purposes. I'd have to limit myself to high-altitude gliders if I were to go in that direction. Or maybe I'll edit TAC lifesupport's water splitter to produce useable hydrogen and use a hydrogen fueled engine, we'll see.

Edit: Nevermind, apparently the particle collector only works very close to the planet's atmosphere (as it should) and because of some weirdness with how RSS extends the atmosphere, this puts it inside the physical time warp only range (but still seemingly in space). On Earth this leaves it with just a thin band of a few thousand meters between the atmosphere and "true" space where it actually works. It might not work at all on other planets, I don't know. Regardless, I probably won't use it.

So, I just have to wait for a few more mods to update and then I can get this mission underway.

Thanks, I'm glad you liked it. There was a reason I instantly jumped ship from Kethane to Karbonite, and I'm glad I'm not the only one that's done so either. Now just to wait for EPL to have support for Karbonite as well, and all is well.

[Putnam]

I've been using a karbonite engine for my lander module; it's worked very well so far. Just set it to 10% thrust and it's only slightly more powerful than an LV-909 (though half as efficient).

[nogoodnames]

Okay, my mission plan is gradually getting fleshed out. For the mothership I'll be using VASIMR plasma thrusters fueled by liquid hydrogen. Once it gets to Mars, I'll set up a small installation on Phobos which will extract hydrogen from ice to refuel the mothership.

There is one minor issue with that plan. When I tried to land a test craft on Phobos it clipped through the ground and then exploded quite spectacularly, despite the no crash damage and unbreakable joint cheats being active. Hopefully I can find a more stable landing site when it comes time to do it for real.

Right now I'm trying to balance out TAC life support's water splitter so it can be used to provide liquid hydrogen. Unfortunately, the life support resources are really not designed for the type of mass conversions required for fuels. Even with the conversion factor cranked up to 100, it would take several years to fill up one medium hydrogen tank using the default ratios. So I've had to fudge the hydrogen production by a few orders of magnitude. It was either that or completely rebalance the whole system. Lets just pretend its using some kind of heretofore unknown kind of ultra heavy water with 2000 hydrogen atoms.

[Dutchling]

Since when do manned pods use electricity? Just had a failed Munmission because I ran out.

This has never happened to me before. Stupid addition imo >.>. Why give me the mission to go to Mun without solar panels...

[Sean Mirrsen]

They always used electricity ever since reaction wheels were made non-magic. You can conserve electricity in flight by turning off the pod's reaction wheels until you actually need them.