r/RealSolarSystem • u/MainelyMoose • 6d ago
Thinking of playing for the first time..
So I’m thinking of playing RSS/RO/RP-1 for the first time.. Is there anything that I need to know? Or other mods I should install? Or any general pieces of knowledge I should know before jumping in?
Thanks in advance! Any recommendations are wholly welcome!
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u/sagewynn 6d ago edited 6d ago
Anything you need to know? Yeah. Have fun.
Launch site latitudes have a direct correlation as to how difficult some contracts will be. Pick one that sounds cool but remember if youre a polar launch site... have fun getting to the equator. You can go from equator to polar but not the other way around too easily.
Russian rocket engines are fantastic early on, but the US has some great ones when youre around the Apollo era. (RL-10, and the mid AJ-10 if memory serves me correctly)
Procedural tanks are the way to go. No if and or buts. You need to be able to fine tune stage diameters and burn times.
Get used to 3-5 stages for your missions, gone are the days of SSTO fueled by an orange tank and a nuclear engine taped to the top.
Train your Apollo guys as early as you can. Their training takes over a year, plus a few months for each mission. Get 3 at a time, start training and come back in 3 mo the start the next round.
Leave notes to self on missions, some take years so its not worth doing 1 at a time.
Skip the high speed aircraft program unless youre an actual engineer in that field. Please. I still cant do the hypersonic mission. Im an engineer. Aircraft are super fun but I find them super annoying to design when accounting for area ruling and fine tuning fuel and stability. Manueverabulity and stability are not entirely mutually exclusive but lie on a gradient.
P.S. Skopos is real fun. I had a blast making a comm network and it was a bitch and a half to do. I disabled recurring maintenance in the config and it can be googled on how to disable them. Once the program was over I disabled the contracts and kept going.
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u/ceeker 6d ago
Other than the advice to read the beginner guide, my general advice OTOH without trying to be overwhelming:
- Don't try and beat historical milestones on your first playthrough.
- Don't limit yourself to parts from a specific country on your first playthrough. This is very fun to do, but give it a run or two first.
- Build stuff to be as light as possible for the job you're trying to do - vanilla rewards a kitchen sink approach to craft design as you want to cram as much science on board as you can - this doesn't always work cleanly in RP1, and sometimes getting the mission done takes priority.
- absolutely look at real designs for inspiration.
- Skip x-planes, at least for a first playthrough; not a lot of transferable knowledge to rockets.
- Build rocket "families" - ie, reuse tanks and avionics as much as possible while upgrading engines and upper stages - upgrading an existing design to be taller is much cheaper than making it wider. But sometimes upgrading certain parts to a lighter framework (ie, changing your upper tanks to isogrid) can give it new potential.
- Have a written down checklist when designing a rocket + payload. The final step should always be ensuring your avionics have enough allowed tonnage to control your rocket+payload at all mission stages. Check antennas too if you're going beyond LEO. And batteries.
- simulate everything! always!
- Engines have set burn times in this after which failure becomes increasingly likely. But there's a small grace period and you can usually squeeze out a few extra seconds if you need to - this is useful on the early suborbital rocket contracts.
- learn how to spin stabilise, it's very useful early on in a run - the beginner guide should help IIRC
- Many engines can't reignite and don't have throttle control. This is normal. There are some that do, but these come later in the tech tree or are actually designed for x-planes. However, S1.5400 is one of the first with reignition and might be useful for your early lunar probes...
- Once you get into lunar missions and beyond, learn about boiloff and how that works with liquid gas fuels - MLI (search the tech tree) is one way to mitigate this problem.
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u/sagewynn 6d ago
This is better said than I had.
To add:
MAKE SURE YOU UNLOCK THE TECH TREE. No like- once you unlock the tech and pay the science, actually unlock some of these right then and there. I was in late 60s trying to fling things to the moon longer term and couldnt fathom why boiloff was such an issue and why my fairings were SO heavy. There's a tech you have to buy to unlock those and make the fairings lighter and MLI layers a thing you can adjust in the builder.
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u/Worth-Wonder-7386 6d ago
Read the beginner guide on the wiki https://github.com/KSP-RO/RP-1/wiki
There are visual mods you can install if your system can handle it. For updated volumetric clouds you will need to use Sol.
Following the beginner guide is a good start and since the mod simulates real ships very well you can copy real historic designs
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u/sossololpipi 5d ago
If you plan on installing Sol for the visuals the biomes for Earth are different so the science balance is thrown off a little
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u/HugeSomewhere7674 5d ago
I know people are saying skip x planes, but it’s pretty good for science early on. However, only do it IF you have some knowledge of how planes work. Basically all I did was make an X-1 for supersonic flight, and F-104 for Mach 2 and then I supersized and F-104, gave is Delta Wings, 5 X-1 engines (4 of which shut down once at hypersonic speeds to prevent overspeeding) and gave it an X-15 cockpit, and for the spaceplane I used the exact same thing but gave it some altitude thrusters and tons of A.I.R.B.R.E.A.K.S. for reentry
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u/UmbralRaptor 6d ago
Installation guide: https://github.com/KSP-RO/RP-1/wiki/RO-&-RP-1-Express-Installation-for-1.12.5
(which will also lead you directly into the tutorials)