FAQ

What would you recommend as a first launch?

Great question! We have a Getting Started Tutorial that can help you get flying in no time.

How do I rescale my parachutes?

Go to the action groups screen, select the parachute, and choose "next/prev size".

Why is it so dark?

Because it's night, and the sun is occluded by Earth. Either warp forward ~8 hrs, or launch something into orbit to get to the sunny side.

I'm on the launchpad, but my electric charge goes down. How do I fix this?

Use a launch clamp. It'll keep your charge fresh until launch.

How do I get those sweet interstages like NathanKell?

1. Build stage
2. Select "interstage fairing adapter" or whatever it's called (next to the other fairing bases)
3. Place its floating node on the node you want to decouple from (the bottom of your engine or, if a cluster, the bottom of the tank)
4. Right-click the base and tweak as desired. Set top diameter to the diameter of your stage, set base diameter to the diameter of the stage you will be building below, set height as desired. If attached to the bottom of the engine, set extra height so the engine is covered
5. Add fairing sides
6. Move the staging order as desired, noting that if you're not using KJR the decoupler built into the base does nothing, the thing will only decouple when all fairings have.

Note that it's the fairings themselves which are holding the upper stage in place. When you decouple them, the joints disappear, and everything separates as intended.

My antenna says it has a range of 200km but I can connect farther than that! Why?

RP-0 uses the so-called "root model" for antenna ranges. Basically, an excellent transmitter/receiver on one end (like, a ground station) can connect to a puny radio over a distance that vastly exceeds the small radio's nominal range. The Remotetech wiki has a brief paragraph (https://remotetechnologiesgroup.github.io/RemoteTech/guide/settings/#alternative-rules).

RO includes a lot of groundstations for Earth, with varying ranges. Check GameData/RealSolarSystem/RemoteTech_Settings.cfg for details; for (almost) all practical purposes, the number that matters most is that the "big three" Deep Space Network stations in Goldstone, Madrid and Canberra each have the tremeduous range of 1.14e14 meters.

The three DSN stations are placed in such a fashion that once you're more than 10-20,000km from Earth and anywhere between +-55° of Earth's equator (or anywhere near the ecliptic), you will always be in view of at least one of them. This is not an accident.

Rules of Thumb:

• You can assume that every omnidirectional antenna will have 100x it's nominal range when trying to connect to earth. In other words: The Sputnik whip antenna is good for geostationary, and the Communotron-16 (the stock starting antenna) can talk back to earth from the moon. If you lose connection during ascent or in low earth orbit, it's usually not due to a lack of antenna range, but because all ground stations are behind the horizon.

• Two equal antennae will have their ranges doubled when talking to each other, that is, two Communotron-16 can still talk to each other from 8Mm apart. They are entirely suitable to build an early comm network.

The actual calculation:

1. Determine the ranges of the two nodes. If they are communicating by dish, that's merely the maximum dish ranges of the two nodes. If a node is using omni antennae, however, the range is the sum of the omni ranges (so 4x 4,000km omnis = 16,000km).
2. Determine which of the two nodes has a smaller range.
3. The range between the nodes now is: (the smaller range) + SQRT(range1 * range2), capped at a maximum of 100x the smaller omni range, or 1000x the smaller dish range.

For example, a 200km sounding rocket core can talk to a 75,000km ground station (all launch sites and MSTN sites) at a maximum range of:

Min(200 ; 75,000) + Sqrt(200 x 75,000) which becomes

200 + Sqrt(15,000,000)) which becomes

200 + 3,873

So talking to that ground station, it has a maximum range of 4,073km.

However, RO also includes three Deep Space Network stations, with ranges of 114,000,000,000km. The comm range between a DSN station and a 200km probe core is 20,000km: the formula resolves to a much larger number, but omnis are limited to 100x their nominal range (actually, the DSN so far overpowers all omnis in the game that you can always assume the 100x value for omnis when talking to earth -- communication between vessels is another matter, of course).

Why can't my Kerbal plant a flag when our Astronaut Complex is level 2 and clearly says "Kerbals can place Flags"?

Due to a stock bug RP-0 doesn't allow this until level 3. Sorry kids.

How do I hide all non-RO/RP0 parts?

Create a folder in GameData called NoNonRp0. Delete your GameData/ModuleManager.ConfigCache file and then restart KSP. There are hooks in the RP0 ModuleManager config that will see that directory and assign the parts to an invalid node in the tech tree. See the code here

Note that this will still load the parts, but they will be inaccessible via the tech tree and removed from the editor menu.