You unlock them with the building upgrades. I think the maneuver nodes unlock with the Mission Control building (a little counterintuitive since the building is otherwise just used for contracts).
You have to right-click on the Tracking Station and pay money to upgrade it once.
Is it even worth putting a parachute on a SRB? I never seem to get recovery credit for those things.
Excellent question. The big ones I think are too heavy for just one each, but even with the small ones I feel that I am easily over 25km away (when they are deleted) before they hit the ground. If you add a probe core with the parachute I think it works better, but honestly I can’t tell if it’s worth it. Cash flow doesn’t seem to be a problem in career mode. In any case, I’ve not been able to make it work.
If you want to do it for the challenge, I’d suggest adding probe cores and experimenting with how many parachutes you actually need.
I’m still messing around at the early levels of career mode so I don’t get too far down range before I drop my boosters. I put a MK2-R chute on two RT10 SRBs. When the flight ended they were still right at the launch pad and I was able to recover them. It took a few attempts before I realized that I seemed to be getting 100 credits for each SRB and parachute recovered. I still need to see the range on it.
Ah, cool. Yeah, the RT-10s are pretty small and I can see that working, since they burn out quickly. Only 100 funds each is pretty little, though—I guess the main cost is the fuel?
I just checked and the fuel is worth 180 funds, the casing+engine 400. The parachute is 400. So out of a cost of 800 you’re getting 100 back? Seems hardly worthwhile.
Woo–just made a cool $1.3M by mining a bunch of ore on Gilly and moving it to Eve’s orbit. Took a while to mine all that ore (next time, I will add more batteries and solar panels so that the drills can run longer in the dark), but beyond that it wasn’t all that hard. Helped greatly that Gilly has such a low escape velocity–despite a tiny fuel tank and almost 30 tons of ore onboard, I still had plenty of delta-V for leaving the moon and getting into Eve orbit.
I need to really ramp up my research program to unlock some of the last stages in the tree. Unmanned one-way probes have gone a long way, but I think I need to up my game and land a big manned rover somewhere so that I can bring a bunch of samples home.
Are you sure those are the boosters and not just launch clamps? Launch clamps are worth 100 credits each.
If anyone’s interested, I just published my first mod. In order to give tourists a bit more character, I made them a new spacesuit. I give you:
I am not sure. It is something that appears as recoverable from the screen so I recover them.
I will down load that mod once I get my computer back…it is in the shop again.
I hope you like it. I’ve uploaded a new 1.1 version with five different colours of shirt. I have confirmed that TextureReplacer does allow randomisation of suit styles, so you can just list each suit variant you want to use and the tourists will be assigned various Hawaiian shirts at random.
I’ve started over with a new, leaner space program using USI Life Support and built on the work of the last one, and here’s my first ship, a 31,000 dollar orbiter. The entire top half of the rocket is recovered - between the lifting body and the airbrakes, it only needs three parachutes to bring it down safely.
Nice , I’ve been thinking about something similar , all my space planes tend to suck but I like the style of the parts .
I’ve been having a hoot with the latest Kerbal Space Program. However, I’m noticing quite a few bugs. Landing on Pol results in an explosion in space unless you land at the poles - I think the ground detection algorithm can’t handle the huge variations in surface height on that moon, so you have to land on the highest ground or you’ll blow up thousands of meters above the surface.
Also, I’m having ships vanish. This is extremely frustrating - I had a contract to recover a Kerbal and her wreckage from Jool, and it’s been a laborious process of using a grabber to catch her, then ion engines to slowly drop her down into Kerbin orbit. Those things require hours to burn sometimes, so I’ve been playing that scenario over days - starting a long burn before I go to bed, etc.
Well today, that ship is simply gone. Not in the tracking station, nowhere. The contract is still active, but there’s no way to complete it. I’ve also lost another contract when a ship that needed rescuing vanished around another moon.
Also, the game has memory leaks. I can play for anywhere between a half hour and an hour before it crashes. I think they rushed out a lot of new features to justify the 1.0 release without properly beta testing them, and it shows.
Still, it’s one of the greatest games ever. I have hundreds of hours logged playing it, and it never gets old. You can always devise some new complex mission and try to achieve it.
I haven’t tried landing on Pol yet, and haven’t had any ships vanish or game crashes (except one caused by a memory-intensive mod that I’ve since removed).
Do you have any mods installed? There are two files that might help diagnose your problems - your KSP.log file (rewritten every time you start the game, and should give an indication of what causes the crash) and your persistent.sfs file (your savegame, which might explain where your missing Kerbal went to). Posting on the KSP forum might resolve at least some of your problems.
The bugs I’m seeing are already known and posted in their bug database. The Pol bug has actually been known since something like v.28, and keeps recurring.
The only mod I have installed is Mechjeb, and I see there’s a new version. I’ll give that a try and see if it fixes any of the other issues.
Update 1.05 is available.
Water imported from GTA San Andreas: No longer automatically lethal!
New thermal system with core and skin temperature.
New parts:
The Mk1 cockpit gives good vision.
KS-25 rocket engine has high vectoring range. Excellent for take-off.
Jet engines: Many new choices, including a turbofan with the option of arfterburning.
Tiny J-20 jet engine.
Jumbo jet engines.
Better ramjet engine.
A pretty practical supersonic air intake/fuel tank.
How does one get the update?
If you have the Steam version, just log in to Steam.
Damn. No, I bought it from the website a couple months ago. I can’t find the update on there.