[NOT A BUG] Surveyor failure

[Italianfan88]

I have updated the game to the latest patch (v 0.7.11).
In the last game I played, I tried multiple times to send a Surveyor probe to the Moon (which, together with the Luna 15, is critical to unlock the missions to the other planets); I tried in all seven times, and all of them failed. The first two was because of the Atlas-Centaur booster, the rest were failures either in the 'Moon approach' or the 'Landing' step. The last two times I took care in researching the probe to the maximum theoretical R&D I could, but it failed nonetheless.
Am I unlucky, or is there a glitch somewhere?

Thank you in advance.

[Arron69]

Unlucky mate.

Andi.

[Italianfan88]

Well, I tried for the 8th time, and it seems that I was just unlucky, because it worked properly.

Still, it made me think; and I realized I don't quite get why you have to wait to have a probe land on the Moon to send probes to the other planets. I mean, historically both the US and the URSS began sending probes towards Venus and then Mars pretty early, not too much after they had sent the first probes toward the Moon.

[woody4077]

yeah the way stuff is setup in sanbox does bother me a little bit and
the fact that even at max reliability it can take REPEATED attempts to get a mission to succeed
after all i posted about my jupiter missions in another post well i'm up to my 12th attempt
(running 5 missions concurrently) to get to jupiter and so far no success

[Sabratha]

yeah the way stuff is setup in sanbox does bother me a little bit and
the fact that even at max reliability it can take REPEATED attempts to get a mission to succeed
after all i posted about my jupiter missions in another post well i'm up to my 12th attempt
(running 5 missions concurrently) to get to jupiter and so far no success

Well, I think one thing taht feels to me wrong is that after a failure you often go "back to square 1". You bring a rocket up to ;et's say 81% reliability, it fails, drops to 59. You bring it back again to 81%, a failure brings it back down to 59% and back again you go.

I think the game is missing the "learn by your mistakes" part of the RL process. I think that repeated attempts to use some piece of hardware should perhaps make it easier and quicker to bring it back to max reliability after the 3rd attempt than after the 1st one.

[Nacho84]

I have updated the game to the latest patch (v 0.7.11).
In the last game I played, I tried multiple times to send a Surveyor probe to the Moon (which, together with the Luna 15, is critical to unlock the missions to the other planets); I tried in all seven times, and all of them failed. The first two was because of the Atlas-Centaur booster, the rest were failures either in the 'Moon approach' or the 'Landing' step. The last two times I took care in researching the probe to the maximum theoretical R&D I could, but it failed nonetheless.
Am I unlucky, or is there a glitch somewhere?

Thank you in advance.

Hello Italianfan,

I believe it's just bad luck, really. How skilled were the assigned flight controllers? Remember that their skills also play an important part in the mix.

Cheers,

[Italianfan88]

I have updated the game to the latest patch (v 0.7.11).
In the last game I played, I tried multiple times to send a Surveyor probe to the Moon (which, together with the Luna 15, is critical to unlock the missions to the other planets); I tried in all seven times, and all of them failed. The first two was because of the Atlas-Centaur booster, the rest were failures either in the 'Moon approach' or the 'Landing' step. The last two times I took care in researching the probe to the maximum theoretical R&D I could, but it failed nonetheless.
Am I unlucky, or is there a glitch somewhere?

Thank you in advance.

Hello Italianfan,

I believe it's just bad luck, really. How skilled were the assigned flight controllers? Remember that their skills also play an important part in the mix.

Cheers,

Well, they were the best I had. Almost, if not all of them, were 80+.

Now there is no problem, since I got through that, but I was kind of perplexed after seven consecutive failures.

[woody4077]

yeah the repeated failures can be a problem
i'm still trying to figure out how a countdown can fail

[Nacho84]

yeah the repeated failures can be a problem
i'm still trying to figure out how a countdown can fail

Notice that there's nothing wrong with getting the same failure in the same step after loading the savefile multiple times. The game stores the initial seed for pseudo-random number generator, along with the number of times it has been used, so if you reload a savegame and perform the same steps, you will get the same results. This allows me to debug the problems a lot quicker

In real-life, countdowns do fail when a problem is encountered before the launch takes place (e.g., a fuel leak, a crack, etc). Sometimes the failure includes a big explosion as well.

Cheers,

[jjknap]

Remember, the reality was that the first 6 Ranger probes failed.

[N_Molson]

Also, be careful with the numbers.

Probes like Surveyor should really be R&D to their maximum, which is only 85%. MCs should all be above 95, excepted the Flight Director that should be between 90 and 95. Using that kind of policy, I was able to perform most missions without trouble.