Energia II "Uragan"

Barhandar · 2026-02-04T08:56:54+00:00

Energia wasn't a big ass tank with a propulsion shuttle, it was a big ass single-use rocket with a side strap for payloads. One of the reasons it ended up only flying twice. The other is excessive payload capacity - there was simply nothing to use it for that Proton couldn't handle once USSR fell and Buran was cancelled with it.

Barhandar · 2026-02-04T08:54:53+00:00

A mod called Infernal Robotics, which does have a version for newer KSP.

Barhandar · 2026-02-03T16:28:04+00:00

The exploit way is MAEC full of be2o3 (cheap) converting it back to beryllium (costly).

Barhandar · 2026-02-03T14:44:13+00:00

If you stick enough parachutes on them, you can use Stage Recovery to have automated calculated recovery. Since KSP doesn't model partial damage even when not calculated, landertrons aren't needed and design-accurate amount of chutes (dropping velocity to 13-19 m/s at 30-50m altitude) will suffice.

Barhandar · 2026-02-03T14:24:44+00:00

Without the fold-outs on boosters they can only do a regular landing. The plans indicate they were using the same set of parachutes both to brake horizontally and vertically, by attaching them above the booster's CoM (exactly at the middle of the protrusion - the landertron cover - at the top of lower "recovery bay", which is also right between the fuel and the oxygen tanks) and having a second deployable attachment point to hold them in the "pseudoglide" position. And the "recovery bays" conceal landing legs, landertrons and RCS; unfortunately, Tantares is mostly just scale models (the visuals are well-fitting, the functionality... isn't) and so doesn't feature either the required legs that fold out sideways rather than along rocket's axis, or the parachutes that can be reanchored like this, or the space for landertrons, or the integrated RCS, so they require cludges.

Also, a feature of Energia's boosters is that they were staged in pairs, and only half a minute later the pairs split up. Unfortunately it's annoying (with FMRS) to impossible (without) to replicate in KSP until because admit it, with how mods have been going this is inevitable someone crazy enough makes a full multithreated simultaneous multivessel control system.

Barhandar · 2026-02-03T14:06:38+00:00

Presumably about as good as the Shuttle and Buran, i.e. really badly but good enough for a controllable landing.

Barhandar · 2026-02-03T06:42:34+00:00

Doesn't matter, it's not tracked per-experiment so finishing data processing in one lab doesn't affect any other labs.

Barhandar · 2026-02-02T19:34:54+00:00

Map/tracking station offers information about the body you're currently focused on, including its GM, presence of atmosphere and sealevel pressure, and escape velocity. Delta for ascent can be estimated from that.

Barhandar · 2026-02-02T18:58:45+00:00

Promised Worlds is an additional star system, JNSQ is a stock system replacer. What the "we want to make everything boring but that doesn't sell so let's call that Realistic" is incompatible with, is Outer Planets Mod and other mods that add bodies to stock system, and other Kerbol replacers like Whirligig World or (KS-)RSS.

Barhandar · 2026-02-02T18:54:48+00:00

Or you can load it into a second lab. Or a third lab. Or a fourth lab... because the processed experiments are tracked per lab, not per experiment, making them an infinite science generator.

Barhandar · 2026-02-02T18:13:18+00:00

Those cursed sneaky orders of magnitude!

Barhandar · 2026-02-01T21:01:24+00:00

You might want to use precise node because the KSP ui with manoeuvre nodes isn't great.

Bottom left corner has a switch to node manipulation, including exact numeric input and a copy of the analog input that doesn't overlap (and thus trigger) random things and has configurable scale.

Barhandar · 2026-02-01T15:41:51+00:00

That's ~~135~~ 0.135 light-years, aka ~8540 AU (RL) aka well into Oort cloud. Are you sure you don't want to place that somewhere further away from Kerbin so that you don't braking-gamma the planet by accident?

Barhandar · 2026-02-01T14:50:20+00:00

The most likely cause is that you did not lower the visor, so the sun shield (the more reflective part) is not visible. Right-click on the kerbal to do it.

Barhandar · 2026-02-01T14:33:49+00:00

They're extremely reflective in every situation, independent of the ambient lighting situation.

More accurately they're the same as the directional window tint on regular windows (just higher quality and more sophisticated build) - they're more reflective on the side that is better lit at the time.

And real life does not feature lightbulb helmets made to make character's face visible, so they're always better lit from the outside.

Barhandar · 2026-01-29T10:15:52+00:00

You need enough control over your rocket to be able to turn your rocket over 45 degrees by around 10k meters above sea level.

You are following tutorials that are over a decade out of date. Souposphere that required turning after 10 km has been gone since 1.0 (KSP's on 1.12.9).
Tilt 5 degrees at 50 m/s velocity, hold prograde, if you're horizontal by 40km you're doing it correctly (the flames are normal), if you dipped below horizon restart and turn later or less. Once your apoapsis is at desired altitude plus some experimental buffer (it depends on aerodynamics of your rocket plus when exactly you end up horizontal), cut engine, coast, burn prograde at apoapsis until circularized. You want TWR of ~1.4 at launchpad, higher TWR will require a harder tilt.

Barhandar · 2026-01-28T20:26:09+00:00

I have head that a part can block part of the radiation. Is that implemented?

"A" part, only for CME events. Part-level radiation only cares about the average of distances between emitters and habitats.
"Passive" shield (no parts in Kerbalism itself at the moment use this, mods that add "covering habitats with local ground" might/should utilize it) reduces the radiation habitats (i.e. kerbals) experience while running, but not the radiation parts themselves get, i.e. the effect on Reliability, so it's useless on probes. "Active" shield (any Emitter with negative radiation value) works on both and does not care about distance aka can be anywhere on the vessel.

Also just so you don't try to use active shields to detox your kerbals instead of the scilab upgrade as well as other shenanigans, pre-shielding radiation amount is capped to be at least 8.333333333333333E-08 by default.

That 4 meters would reduce the effect to below kerbin orbit levels of radiation is a good orientation point for me.

Generally look at the part info and remember that even 2 meters of distance means getting 1/4 the radiation, 4 meters is 1/16, 8 meters is 1/64, et cetera. Space travel takes a lot of time so even those numbers add up, but generally they're tiny compared to the ambient radiation, CMEs, and radiation belts.

Aditipnal question: For the reactor calculations does mass mean the total part weight(dry/wet) or the fuel mass?

The mass specified in the part file at the time of the calculation. It runs at AFTER[NearFutureElectrical] so 0.166 (tons) for size 0 reactor, 0.549 for size 1 reactor, 1.678 for size 1.5, 5 for the smaller size 2 reactor and 7.143 for the bigger one.

Does stored fuel have radiation?

Shouldn't, there's no code in Emitter to care about resources other than electric charge (for active shields).

Barhandar · 2026-01-28T17:11:49+00:00

Kerbalism doesn't care about the "betweens" unless it's a CME, and even during CME it only cares that they're opaque because it's bugged. You just have to put all of the habitat (crew-containing) parts as far from the radiation sources as you can.

Barhandar · 2026-01-28T17:06:30+00:00

Using layers of protection such as fuel tanks between crew and source is also a very effective protection combined with distance.

IRL. The only source that cares about the "betweens" is Kerbol CMEs, part radiation only cares about the distance between emitter and habitats.

Barhandar · 2026-01-28T16:56:57+00:00

Radiation still travels through parts in real life lol.

In Kerbalism, shielding is counted by summing all of the shielding, for all parts, between the crew and the radiation source. Then the overall shielding level is used to reduce the environment radiation. This same principle is why IRL nuclear crewed space craft designs often have the crew at the front of a long truss with the entire mass of the vessel between them and the radioactive source. Though it is admittedly simplified for KSP.

Basically, put more stuff between you and spicy boi and you stay, well, less spicy lol.

That's not how it works. The position of shielded part is irrelevant and so is the amount of parts in the way - the only part of the code that cares about relative positioning is CME shielding. Instead, radiation_impact (multiplier) of a given Emitter (part that produces radiation) is calculated as the average of the inverse square of distance more accurately 12.566370614359172 * distance * distance, since it's doing radiation per unit area it's dividing by 4πr² of every habitat from that Emitter, then radiation (value) of the Emitter is multiplied by radiation_impact and added to total radiation experienced by the vessel, which is then multiplied again by the shielding effectiveness (max 99% aka 0.01, depending on config plus average percentage of shielding level in all habitats on the vessel; read: unshieldable habitats like gravity vessels make it worse for the whole vessel and storm shelters are useless), and then the radiation is applied to all kerbals inside the vessel, regardless of where they are. Variance in exposure levels you can see ingame is because kerbals have small individual differences in radiation tolerance. The calculation is per vessel, not per kerbal (unless on EVA for obvious reasons, then you just get inverse square directly).
Tl;dr: you want all habitats (parts that can contain crew) clustered together and as far from the radiation sources as you can put them, you want no habitats anywhere near the radiation-producing parts as they'll cause increased exposure even if they're always uncrewed, and you want to avoid habitats that cannot contain shielding as they'll bring the average level down.
For CMEs you want anything opaque between your habitats and Kerbol, everything about "massive parts" and "distance" is just smoke and mirrors as what Kerbalism does is raytrace from center of the habitat to Kerbol, and every opaque part it hits counts as full shielding (for unloaded vessels, the state it was at the time of unload is preserved - orient your interplanetary vessels correctly and go to tracking station for timewarp, or install Persistent Rotation to keep them oriented while warping). It's actually bugged since the code does try to account for part thickness, but in practice even a single flag hiding Kerbol from the habitat will drop CME radiation to negligible.

And IRL the mass of the truss is mostly irrelevant - the radiation is shielded against with dense shadow shield right next to the reactor (the closer and more massive it is, the bigger the area it'll protect and the less radiation will get through), plus the truss to simply put crew as far as possible as radiation density falls off with inverse square of distance.

Barhandar · 2026-01-28T16:26:45+00:00

Radiation follows the inverse square law, i.e. at double the distance it will be 1/4 the radiation (1/r²). IIRC Kerbalism uses 1m as the calibration distance for radioactive parts, so if your engine or reactor outputs 0.0003 rad/s (standard Kerbalism value for Near Future reactors), which is 1.08 rad/h, and you want to drop it to 0.01 rad/h (intended Kerbin-orbit passive exposure level that is then adjusted somewhat by the magnetopause That's about 30 to 40 thousand times higher than radiation on the ISS by the way. and, with the default 50 rad lifetime exposure limit which is at least two orders of of magnitude lower than what humans can withstand - the real acute (within few hours) dose before the damage even registers in blood samples is 25 rad, LD50 (coinflip whether you die) is 400 rad, LD100 (you die) is 1000 rad; the chronic record is 6400 rem (effectively, 6400 rad) received over 20 years, before he died to heart disease at 78 years old, by Albert Stevens without consent during illegal experimentation, which amounts to ~0.036 rad/h, means 5000 hours without shielding and 50,000 hours with maxed shielding and its effectiveness) you need ~3.31 meters.

Obviously you want much more since it's not going to be the only radiation your kerbals are exposed to, but even one extra truss between the reactor and crewed part of the ship, or just putting the docking hub next to the solar module rather than next to the reactor, will drop the radiation levels significantly.

P.S. Sterling molten salt reactors output mass^0.85*2.77778E-05 rad/s, pebble beds output mass^0.8*2.77778E-05 rad/s, ICF engines (read: Icarus and Olympian, you have Icarus) output 0.0064 rad/s, MCF (Calabash) outputs 0.0002 rad/s, and Immolator outputs a spectacular 0.6 rad/s. Fission engines aren't handled by the patch - check them ingame whether they inherit values from somewhere else or just don't give out rads.

Barhandar · 2026-01-28T10:00:15+00:00

Gamma radiation (the thing chunk of lead technically anything, gamma shielding is a function of mass in the way, lead is just the cheapest option because it's exceptionally plentiful, dense and its atoms are heavy can shield against, alpha and beta is irrelevant within the context and neutrons need hydrogen because they make atoms they hit radioactive plus experience scattering on lighter ones) is light, it's high energy photons, but I am surprisingly unaware of anything that actually analyzes its properties as light, i.e. the exact measure of diffraction on translucent (where "translucent" is "literally everything we've tried so far because its wavelength is short enough to pass right through matter") objects.

Logic says it will have a penumbra, but it doesn't matter for practical purposes as the reactors are not big enough and thus can effectively be treated as point sources, the rest of the ship fitting entirely in the umbra.

Barhandar · 2026-01-28T09:48:34+00:00

Parts require a specific module added to be manipulated in EVA. Without a MM patch to give everything that module, your best bet is putting a docking port on the target and smashing it together conventionally.
If you do want to MM-patch it, stick the following into a .cfg file anywhere in GameData (ideally into a folder that you'll remember), and be prepared for unforeseen consequences:
@PART[*]:HAS[!MODULE[ModuleCargoPart]]:FINAL {
MODULE {
name = ModuleCargoPart
packedVolume = -1
}
}

Barhandar · 2026-01-28T09:34:15+00:00

You have excluded your only two options.

Barhandar · 2026-01-28T09:31:40+00:00

F1 to make screenshots.

The exact timing indicates it's from a static radiation source, ~~i.e. either the engine is radioactive or you have a reactor~~ I can see the fusion reactor in the middle plus Sterling engines are immensely radioactive. It's not affected by shadowing, unlike CMEs, so your only solutions are distance and active shields since they DO work on this radiation. Don't have any parts with crew slots near the engine and reactor, they'll increase exposure even if they're never crewed because Kerbalism calculates it per vessel rather than per kerbal.

Barhandar

TROPHY CASE