Been playing with a full set of realism mods and a rule to never load or revert... I've lost no kerbals in spacecraft yet but two in plane accidents. Even had a Mun flyby that I had to abort AFTER the transfer burn.
At this point I think I'm gonna get the EVA parachute just so I can bail out the window if I pull my wings off again. On the upside, I visited 12 aerial surveillance locations in one flight, with less than 200 units of fuel used... High altitude turbojets are crazy efficient.
I've taken to making ejection pods with seperatrons + radial parachutes. Detach the pod with a decoupler, hit the sepratrons, then hit the parachute once you're clear.
You can even set the decouple+seperatrons ('cause I'd make them a single event) to the abort button by the altimeter using action groups so you don't have to go through all the stages to get to the abort stage.
Had a mission to test a solid booster at about 3400m
I strapped a probe core on top, put a liquid stage under it, then fired it at the right height.
It accelerated to over 4km/sec, the booster burned up on takeoff, and now the lonely probe core sans battery is in an orbit that goes out past Duna.
It's the ball-shaped core, too. Gooooaaaaallllll
Had a mission to test a solid booster at about 3400m
I strapped a probe core on top, put a liquid stage under it, then fired it at the right height.
It accelerated to over 4km/sec, the booster burned up on takeoff, and now the lonely probe core sans battery is in an orbit that goes out past Duna.
It's the ball-shaped core, too. Gooooaaaaallllll
Hah that's pretty awesome, but I think you don't have to take the full load of fuel up there, even on a solid booster. But hey, as long as you got your contract completed, it doesn't matter at all!
Hah that's pretty awesome, but I think you don't have to take the full load of fuel up there, even on a solid booster. But hey, as long as you got your contract completed, it doesn't matter at all!
Test complete, all parts disposed of with no risk to personnel on the ground. I'd call that a success.
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
Now at least we can put an end to the endless litany of "OMG where'd you get that cockpit!!!"
According to Devnote Tuesday they are also adding Enhanced Navball and some limited version of Crew Manifest (allowing transfer between modules without EVA)
Made a rather useful ship earlier that can carry ComSats and other probes in increments of 6 to Kerbal orbit quite easily with a single stage to a 500km circular orbit and 500m/s delta-v to get the periapsis low enough to make it a true single stage to orbit and back to the KSC
In the VAB for it's stats. Yes, that is 4 mainsails powering it all.
Liftoff as seen from the Mission Center's roof
Glamour shots
And the payload
Satellite launch successful
Unfortunately, they didn't all deploy perfectly, At least one panel survived so it's not a total loss
As it was the first launch of the newly designed ComSat network, someone mixed up the order of operations and decided to shut the old network down first. This led to issues communicating with the ComSats on the back side of Kerbin as the ship wasn't equipped to act as a network controller as it was expecting the old network to be operational.
Thankfully, within a minute of the signal going dark at the KSC from the delivery ship flight director Gene Kerbz realized the mistake and managed to keep the ComSat launches going as planned. The plan was to take the delivery ship to an orbit of 500km and then launch the satellites one at a time to a final orbit of 3500km. At 500km it takes about 66 minutes to do a full orbit, so for 6 satellites that is one launch and burn every 11 minutes to keep them in a rough hexagonal design in their final orbits. To keep this from falling apart, flight director Kerbz had 2 rockets assembled and launched in record time, one straight up and another at a 90 degree heading with a 10 degree pitch. This allowed the first satellite to get in contact with KSC and relay it to the delivery ship and the remaining satellites.
Phase 2 of the new network, 12 ComSats at 8000km which will give 100% coverage from the Mun's surface to Kerbin's surface. Phase 3 is a combination of 4 relay dish ComSats molinya polar orbits for the Mun (2 in the same orbit but on the opposite ends, and the other 2 doing the same thing but orthogonal to the other two) and a set of radio relay ComSats in an equatorial orbit around the Mun. This should end up with essentially perfect coverage throughout the kerbol system.
Cookie to whoever gets the name reference without google/wiki help
Launched the Jool Vanguard components this morning.
The Tanker Module (aka the Joolian Karbonite Slug) takes up the entire length and girth of a KW extended 5m fairing. It weighs 57 tons dry and 250 wet, and the real annoyance was getting all the parts attached and balanced properly so the COM was dead-center across two different axes, since it lands on its belly. Two LV-909s will give it a wet TWR of a whopping 1.09 on Pol.
I really need to expand my modular reusable booster family to 5m sizes, I'm doing a lot of these launches lately due to extremely bulky payloads.
The new series of ITV, the Mark II is optimized for deep space operations. They feature RTG power sources and low-profile RCS tanks for post-launch stacking.
Their engines are also mounted on IR extendatrons for enhanced clearance around wide-body modules like the tanker, making them true pusher/puller drive sections. Here we are lining up on the orbital fuel depot.
Tempting the kraken by attempting to dock piston-to-piston.
Crossed the streams and nothing happened!
(Actually, something happened. The tanker's piston graphic got stuck in extended mode, which turned out to block the exhaust of one of the ITV's engines, causing it to pull in one direction. Undocking and rotating the ITV 45 degrees solved the issue, though it's kind of unsightly at least the ship isn't unbalanced.)
A shot of the whole formation. One ITV was tasked with bringing up the empty fuel tanks and docking them to the two Vanguard ships. In the background is the lander module/electric probe. Both ships are loaded up with about 5800 delta-V so they should easily be able to cruise around Jool to get into position for the next phase of the mission.
Lander and probe delivery vehicle, ready for departure!
Fuel tanker, ready for departure!
Okay guys, now you get to wait 70 more days since Mechjeb and Kerbal Alarm Clock couldn't agree on the transfer window before, and now they can and it's next month. In the meantime we have midcourse burns for Eve Express and maybe a Class-E asteroid encounter.
All told those Jool launches put me about 1.5 million Kerbucks in the hole. Setting up a reusable infrastructure is expensive! I have some ideas on how to get some funds without the tedium of running dozens of contracts, though.
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKERS
All told those Jool launches put me about 1.5 million Kerbucks in the hole. Setting up a reusable infrastructure is expensive! I have some ideas on how to get some funds without the tedium of running dozens of contracts, though.
Governmental cash infusion to shore up the budget.
All told those Jool launches put me about 1.5 million Kerbucks in the hole. Setting up a reusable infrastructure is expensive! I have some ideas on how to get some funds without the tedium of running dozens of contracts, though.
Governmental cash infusion to shore up the budget.
aka edit the persistent.cfg file in the save.
Nope
Sending up a vertical SSTO tanker that fills up on cheap Minmus Karbonite rocket fuel and lands it back at KSC to sell
Might need to change my flag to an Exxon logo though
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKERS
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ShogunHair long; money long; me and broke wizards we don't get alongRegistered Userregular
God damn it Infernal Robotics what did you do to my asteroid interceptor...!!!
Before:
After loading at a midcourse burn, at which point things were so whacked I couldn't even rotate the ship because of phantom forces holding it in place like marionette strings:
Select your pistol, and then, select your rocket.
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKERS
I built a self-sufficient(ish) interplanetary arkship with Orbital Kolonization System.
Front to back, you've got the command and control module, the habitat ring, a science lab and repair facility sticking off to one side, a lander and spare fuel tank to the other side, then the greenhouse and finally the propulsion module.
I forgot about storage for the intermediate resources that OKS uses, so I bolted on a couple of tin cans full of them to the only remaining docking port. So, not as elegant now.
I also don't think that the repair bay actually did anything, and the terraformer module will be obsolete next version. But whatever! Off to Duna!
This is the wobbliest goddamn ship I've ever flown. I burned up so much monopropellant trying to keep it on target. Yes, those are 5m diameter liquid hydrogen tanks, thanks to TweakScale.
The solar panels produce juuuust enough power to keep this whole mess going. But when it is working, I'm at a net positive production on food, clean water, and breathable air.
With the help of the science lab and spare fuel tank, I can reuse the lander for Duna and Ike both.
It's not bad for a first attempt, but I need to figure out how to get all of the OKS modules I need without having the ship wobble like crazy on every burn.
Wobble like flex, or pull to the right? Because those lateral modules up front look rather unbalanced. To fix flexing, use bigger docking ports (the Near Future Construction octo-girder docking ports are stronger than Seniors), shorten the length of the ship (maybe mount the OKS/science modules radially around a center stack, or radially mount the hydrogen tanks/engines), and strut more. If you're doing orbital assembly you can attach struts in flight using KAS, or build a crazy lifter to put the whole thing up in one go.
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKERS
The side bays are pretty closely balanced, actually, the fuel tank is just denser than the science lab. There's also four KAS struts already in place, but they're hard to see in the screenshot. I guess I just need to stop using the 1.25m docking ports entirely for large structures. Which means I won't be able to really reuse any of these modules, of course.
It's not bad for a first attempt, but I need to figure out how to get all of the OKS modules I need without having the ship wobble like crazy on every burn.
Is that a Near Future Construction tri-adapter I see for the engines? If so, take the quad adapter, blow it up to a 5m -> 2.5m adapter (what I used for the mainsails on the buttplugship I posted) and make the body of the ship where all the 2.5m OKS modules, science lab, and extra fuel tanks can sit in 4 different stacks. Then on the bottom use the 5m-2.5m quad adapter flipped over to go back into a single stack for the engine and it's fuel tanks. Careful with that second adapter though, it may look like it attached to all 4 stacks, but it really is only attached to one so you'll need some struts to hold everything steady.
The wobble is a direct result of a ship being too long without enough joint stiffness between each part. Make it shorter and the wobble will go away, or add struts between each part, or a couple mods that may help (welding and/or joint stiffness). There's not many other solutions unfortunately.
Also you can do a multi docking port arrangement where you have, say a central core with adapter that connects modules radially. On the opposite end of the core is a flipped adapter with docking ports facing up. The radial modules have docking ports facing down and positioned a hair apart. They won't be connected in the VAB but as soon as the craft loads and physics kicks in, the ports will do a proximity check and auto-dock, giving you a nice rigid structure.
Try positioning the engines toward the midsection of the craft, so they're not pushing the entire stack too.
DivideByZero on
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKERS
Also you can do a multi docking port arrangement where you have, say a central core with adapter that connects modules radially. On the opposite end of the core is a flipped adapter with docking ports facing up. The radial modules have docking ports facing down and positioned a hair apart. They won't be connected in the VAB but as soon as the craft loads and physics kicks in, the ports will do a proximity check and auto-dock, giving you a nice rigid structure.
Try positioning the engines toward the midsection of the craft, so they're not pushing the entire stack too.
Hmmm, never thought of the dock idea, would putting docks on the bottom quad stack and the bottom of the 4 stocks have the same effect without doing the radial part?
So it would go, say, Quad adapter -> 4 fuel tanks each connected to the adapter -> docking ports -> quad adapter with additional docking ports between the stack and the adapter.
On another note, executing Jool burns is annoying as hell with only 4 LV-Ns pushing a 100+ ton craft. The Jool intercept is twice as much DV as Kerbin escape, leading to burns that require up to half an orbit or even longer. Doing it in one go wastes tremendous amounts of energy in the wrong direction, requiring huge course corrections. Burning to escape and then intercepting Jool from Kerbol SOI requires oodles of DV (I guess because of the Oberth effect?). Going to try splitting them up into a series two-minute burns and see if that works any better.
edit: intercepts get! They are ugly as hell and probably not very efficient, but oh well. If I can just land this tanker on Pol I'll have unlimited fuel in the Jool system.
DivideByZero on
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKERS
When last we left our intrepid crew of pioneering Kerbals, they were en route to 'ol Purple, Eve. The payload module had burned out first, followed by the hab module one orbit/28 minutes later. We'd soon learn how how much that difference meant at interplanetary distances.
The hab module arrived first, even though it left second, and on the wrong side of Eve. Without checking the payload module's trajectory, we assumed it was also coming in on a retrograde approach since both ships had executed identical MechJeb-plotted transfer burns. Nope!
The hab module performs an aggressive aerobraking maneuver at 60km altitude. Any higher and we'd fail to capture; any lower and we'd crash.
When the payload module arrives in-system we discover it was coming in on the correct side of the planet after all, so a quick burn placed it into a similar retrograde orbit to the Kerbals. This turned out to be pointless and counter-productive, but oh well. We learn by failing.
Payload aerobrake at 58km.
The Eve Express had performed all its orbital science experiments on initial approach to Eve, so there's no need to hang around. A course is plotted to intercept Gilly, which involved a 900-DV inclination change (folks, retrograde orbits are bad, mmmkay?) Hitting Gilly ASAP was why we didn't aerobrake all the way down to Eve.
Gilly is a pain in the ass to intercept. It's the smallest moon in the game, virtually no gravity and a teeny-tiny 126km sphere of influence. Miniscule variations in your orbit are the difference between getting an encounter and missing it entirely. Once you get one it's probably best to time warp right into its SOI as that freezes your orbit and it won't be wobbling all over the place.
In another major annoyance, the "low space" situation for Gilly has a 6km ceiling, and you can't time warp at all under 8km. Wheee!
Here the crew is performing some science as the Eve Express lines up for its circularization burn.
Meanwhile, the payload module is still in a highly eccentric orbit around Eve, and drops off the lander probe at apoapsis before circularizing itself and heading for Gilly.
The automated lander dips into the atmosphere at 80km and performs an interminable series of gradual aerobraking maneuvers. On the way, it performs the experiments that the Eve Express didn't carry. When that science is exhausted, it aims for the landing site and deorbits.
Is there a probe in there somewhere?
Final approach to the surface. This lander was equipped with static solar panels because Eve's thick atmosphere has the tendency to rip off deployable panels at unexpectedly low velocities. The trick is getting all the massive atmosphere scans transmitted before the probe hits the ground. Because it got all the high altitude scans out of the way during its many aerobrakes, it's a simple matter to transmit everything at low altitude.
Down on the deck, and doin' more science.
Next up: Gilly!
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKERS
Shepbald and Lucas, back in dark blue kerbonaut coveralls for the first time in weeks, sat at ease in their chairs as the briefing officer poked at his laptop. They didn't recognize the kerbal, but that wasn't too surprising; they'd both just returned from almost three years on Mun Station 1, where they'd been responsible - as that outpost's dedicated shuttle crew - for intercepting the components of what would become Mun Base and ferrying them down to the site, along with additional personnel for the base and literally dozens of fuel tanks and supply cans to keep base and station topped up. Not only had the pair clocked more time off Kerbin than half the program, they both had more actual flight hours - measured in trips from munar orbit to surface and back again - than anyone who wasn't currently on Duna or on their way to Jool with the legendary Jeb. "Shep" Kerman was now an experienced pilot, and Lucas an expert jetpack operator and "strut monkey".
The kerbal in the grey suit finished whatever he was doing with his laptop and turned back to them. "As I was saying, you've done fine work on the Mun, and we're all very pleased and impressed. Now, we have another mission in the planning stages, and we hope you're up for it. How do you feel about catching and grabbing something... bigger?"
The two veteran kerbonauts shared a glance, and then Shepbald spoke for both of them. "Like what? Landing a prefab base on Minmus or something?"
For answer, the briefing officer tapped a key. The wall screens behind him lit up: a chart of Kerbin and the other inner planets with a new set of thin braided lines drawn over the familiar orbits, blurry magnified photos of lumpy space rocks with license plates for names, and schematics of some sort of mechanical claw.
...okay maybe not high exactly. "High enough that you only need to duck your head if you're standing on a mountaintop" perhaps.
After a long series of burns both the Eve Express and its payload carrier are finally side by side again for the first time since they departed Kerbin months ago.
Mission commander and all-around badass Chuck Kerman EVAs over to the payload carrier where the Minmax lander has been deployed from the cargo bay. The lander is mounted on a robotic hinge that pivots 90 degrees for ease of docking.
Chuck climbs aboard and sets off for the surface of Gilly.
Yeah, sure, that looks like a good spot.
Landing on Gilly is a... delicate maneuver. The gravity is so slight, and orbital velocity so slow (like, 25 m/s slow) that you can cough and go flying in another direction. Killing horizontal velocity is more of a chore than ever, but not dangerous at all since while you're doing that you're only plummeting groundwards at a blistering... 1.3 meters per second? Yeah, okay we've got time to enjoy the ride.
Chuck puts it down like a pro and hops out of the capsule. "That's one small step for- shitshitshiiiiiiiiiit...!"
Yeah you can forget walking around here. Every step send you flying 50 meters. And holy fuck, do not fart on Gilly.
Before it departs, the lander leaves behind a care package in the form of one of my Mk I Frisbee Sats - a super lightweight science transmission machine designed to easily complete those random contracts to "send science data from the surface of XYZ."
Chuck floors the throttle, and before he's even over the nearby hill his trajectory is already hyperbolic. Fuck you, Gilly. Fortunately the Minmax lander is designed for operations in much larger gravity wells and has plenty of fuel for its dual monoprop engines. Chuck brings it up and docks with the Eve Express to offload the science data and clean the experiment bays.
The payload bay had drifted quite a distance since we left, so Chuck has a long EVA trip back after returning the lander to its dock.
Before leaving the moon, the payload module releases another Frisbee Sat. That wee little stack separator blew the probe up fifteen degrees of inclination and raised its apoapsis by 1,000 meters.
Both ships return to Eve and perform a long series of aerobrakes to reduce their orbits. The payload module needs to get under 400km to release this Frisbee Sat so its thermometer will work, and then assumes a parking orbit. Eve Express moves to a lower orbit and awaits its return window some months off.
All told this mission raked in something like 4,300 science and we haven't even brought back the surface samples and hard experiments. That's good for a bunch of Near Future tech tree unlocks! Need us some dubstep engines!
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKERS
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ShogunHair long; money long; me and broke wizards we don't get alongRegistered Userregular
I always land on gilly on whatever side I happen to be facing with my craft. You can land on your side on Gilly and it makes essentially no difference.
An Eeloo window opened, so we tossed a Near Future argon-fueled probe + lander through it.
It featured a novel staging geometry to get around the long, thin argon tanks needed.
The fairing base is part of the probe itself and won't be jettisoned. The upper stage helps push it to a high orbit and circularize, then sticks around to boost the probe out of Kerbin's SOI.
The argon fueled Hall thrusters suck down a lot of juice, so the probe runs on a 1.25m fission reactor. It takes a few minutes to spool up to full capacity, but the variable power output means we only need to run it when the engines are firing. At idle it will last something like 60 years, or 6 years at full power. The NF radiator panels are ingeniously coded to use solar panel logic to turn edge-on to the sun for maximum efficiency.
This is an awful shot because the transfer burn to all outer planets is on the the night side of Kerbin, but when the liquid fuel is expended the outer ring of .625m fuel tanks drops away, allowing the core of argon tanks to slide free.
This thing was way overengineered as it turns out. The liquid booster performed almost the entire transfer by itself, leaving only a tiny bit to be finished by the argon thrusters.
Midcourse correction coming up in... 1 year, 396 days, yeesh.
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKERS
Averted an extinction level event when a Class-E impactor was diverted to a stable orbit.
Here the Asteroid Interceptor Mk II has grappled onto the rock with one of its three claws and deployed a trio of probes with auxiliary RCS thrusters.
The Mk II replaces the Mk I which you'll see upthread had to be put down due to a robotics malfunction. It incorporates technology from the Asteroid Cities mod, namely the refinery unit that allows the ship to electrolyze water into LFO, and the probe-sized claws that detect water (read: convert asteroid mass) on asteroids. The idea is to bring along just enough fuel to make the intercept, grapple the roid, and use the resources it contains to move it around.
Since asteroids are big and unwieldy (and at 2,000 tons this was one real big) the Interceptor is equipped with a battery of SAS units at its nose (3x 2.5m units covered by 2x KW strap-on units). It turns quite slowly, but not interminably so, making the probe-distributed RCS rather redundant. (Protip: reaction wheels are more effective the closer they are to the center-of-mass. RCS is the opposite.)
A little nudge brought the behemoth into an atmosphere skimming orbit for aerocapture. It was probably a little too much, as the apoapsis wound up inside the orbit of the Mun, but at least Kerbin was saved. Now to make this thing useful.
It was at this point that the game glitched out and the ship was corrupted somehow. I was trying to properly align to COM/COT for an inclination change and discovered it wouldn't allow me to detach the claws and reposition, it kept hitting an invisible wall. Couldn't even HyperEdit it away from the asteroid. I had to terminate the ship from the tracking station and send up a replacement that incorporated new features building off of what we learned with this interception. Just as well, because the ship had a tendency to either explode randomly or disassemble itself when time warping. Fucking Krakens, how do they work?
The Mk III ditches the unstable triple-claw design for a large 2.5m claw from Asteroid Cities. Its probes also aren't there to serve as RCS points, but rather to distribute Near Future solar panels around the asteroid so at least two of them get sunlight no matter which way we need to point this thing. All those reaction wheels drain a lot of juice while holding a maneuver node, and the fuel refinery uses a lot too (though "a lot" is really pitiful compared to the Near Future solar/electrical equipment). It can also recover all its probes using docking ports, making the ship completely reusable for future operations.
The refinery is also slow, producing about 1 unit of LFO per second, which is not nearly enough to keep up with six hungry LV-Ns. I could have saved a lot of fuel/water by only running two engines at a time, but the burns were already taking 20+ minutes with all six running and fuck that noise.
Note the Mechjeb readouts here: TWR 0.02, max acceleration 178 millimeters per second, and 44 m/s DV with half full tanks. Yeah, this was a fucking chore. I wanted to bring the rock down into an equatorial orbit for use as a fuel station, and it was starting from about 70 degrees of inclination. I could just about swing 90-DV burns before running out of fuel so this took a while. Remember when I regretted aerobraking too much? Inclination changes cost less DV the further you are from a gravity well. If I could have kept this thing out around Minmus these maneuvers would take a lot less time and energy. As it was I had to burn off about 15 degrees at a time, then raise the periapsis back out of the atmosphere and repeat. Five or six times. This process used up a staggering amount of fuel. The asteroid scanner generates about 100 units of water per ton of mass, and by the time these burns were done I'd used almost a third of the 196,000 units this rock held.
Next up was the laborious process of aerobraking into a roughly circular orbit. TL;DR: it sucked, would not do again. The only grace was that the Mk III was a much sturdier design than the Mk II and I could go all the way up to max physics warp during the atmospheric passes without the ship shaking itself apart or just exploding for no reason. Once it was over I raised the periapsis up with another series of burns that dropped the asteroid's water reserves to half. It's 200 tons lighter now. So much for making a useful fuel station. If I go through route I'm gotta be honest, I'll probably HyperEdit its water back because Holy Shit Never Again.
But now we have a sweet asteroid base to work on! Gonna go all Bond villain on this crib!
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKERS
Dove back into this again the past week. Last night the plan was to test the latest design with trips to the Mun and Minmus while drinking the last half of a six pack before strapping on more rockets today to make a first ever Duna attempt. Both moon trips were successful with plenty of fuel to spare and I was still hella awake so I decided to hit the store for another sixer and take things from buzzed to full blown drunk while seeing if this ugly beast could make Duna. And occasionally I remembered to take pics.
Dumping the first stage leaving Kerbin
Gravity turn
Circularizing upon Duna arrival
Descent
Almost there
The Best on Duna!
Let's gloss over the tragic return with not enough fuel to course correct. The important thing is that he made it back to the surface in one form or another. Hey look, some different landing shots from earlier!
Not necessarily stable, breaks craft built with older versions of B9, several known issues outstanding, but it got leaked on reddit and the authors put it out there for everyone to test.
Highlights:
HX fuselage system for building, iunno, death stars or space docks or some shit
Gigantic multimode engines to propel those things in atmo and space; space version has crazy ISP but sucks crazy power
Gigantic fuckoff reactors that generate said crazy power
Cargo bays for days and days
All fuselage sections and some wings condensed into one part per shape, with tweakables to set it to fuel/LFO/monoprop; this includes fuel embedded in cargo bays and some wings
New HL cockpit
Baller as fuck IVAs
Ehrrmahgerrrrrrddd
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKERS
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You can even set the decouple+seperatrons ('cause I'd make them a single event) to the abort button by the altimeter using action groups so you don't have to go through all the stages to get to the abort stage.
I strapped a probe core on top, put a liquid stage under it, then fired it at the right height.
It accelerated to over 4km/sec, the booster burned up on takeoff, and now the lonely probe core sans battery is in an orbit that goes out past Duna.
It's the ball-shaped core, too. Gooooaaaaallllll
I love KSP.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
Test complete, all parts disposed of with no risk to personnel on the ground. I'd call that a success.
According to Devnote Tuesday they are also adding Enhanced Navball and some limited version of Crew Manifest (allowing transfer between modules without EVA)
In the VAB for it's stats. Yes, that is 4 mainsails powering it all.
Liftoff as seen from the Mission Center's roof
Glamour shots
And the payload
Satellite launch successful
Unfortunately, they didn't all deploy perfectly, At least one panel survived so it's not a total loss
Thankfully, within a minute of the signal going dark at the KSC from the delivery ship flight director Gene Kerbz realized the mistake and managed to keep the ComSat launches going as planned. The plan was to take the delivery ship to an orbit of 500km and then launch the satellites one at a time to a final orbit of 3500km. At 500km it takes about 66 minutes to do a full orbit, so for 6 satellites that is one launch and burn every 11 minutes to keep them in a rough hexagonal design in their final orbits. To keep this from falling apart, flight director Kerbz had 2 rockets assembled and launched in record time, one straight up and another at a 90 degree heading with a 10 degree pitch. This allowed the first satellite to get in contact with KSC and relay it to the delivery ship and the remaining satellites.
Phase 2 of the new network, 12 ComSats at 8000km which will give 100% coverage from the Mun's surface to Kerbin's surface. Phase 3 is a combination of 4 relay dish ComSats molinya polar orbits for the Mun (2 in the same orbit but on the opposite ends, and the other 2 doing the same thing but orthogonal to the other two) and a set of radio relay ComSats in an equatorial orbit around the Mun. This should end up with essentially perfect coverage throughout the kerbol system.
Buttplugs are quite elegant, yes.
I nominate this rocket to be named the KSS Corsage.
The Tanker Module (aka the Joolian Karbonite Slug) takes up the entire length and girth of a KW extended 5m fairing. It weighs 57 tons dry and 250 wet, and the real annoyance was getting all the parts attached and balanced properly so the COM was dead-center across two different axes, since it lands on its belly. Two LV-909s will give it a wet TWR of a whopping 1.09 on Pol.
I really need to expand my modular reusable booster family to 5m sizes, I'm doing a lot of these launches lately due to extremely bulky payloads.
The new series of ITV, the Mark II is optimized for deep space operations. They feature RTG power sources and low-profile RCS tanks for post-launch stacking.
Their engines are also mounted on IR extendatrons for enhanced clearance around wide-body modules like the tanker, making them true pusher/puller drive sections. Here we are lining up on the orbital fuel depot.
Tempting the kraken by attempting to dock piston-to-piston.
Crossed the streams and nothing happened!
(Actually, something happened. The tanker's piston graphic got stuck in extended mode, which turned out to block the exhaust of one of the ITV's engines, causing it to pull in one direction. Undocking and rotating the ITV 45 degrees solved the issue, though it's kind of unsightly at least the ship isn't unbalanced.)
A shot of the whole formation. One ITV was tasked with bringing up the empty fuel tanks and docking them to the two Vanguard ships. In the background is the lander module/electric probe. Both ships are loaded up with about 5800 delta-V so they should easily be able to cruise around Jool to get into position for the next phase of the mission.
Lander and probe delivery vehicle, ready for departure!
Fuel tanker, ready for departure!
Okay guys, now you get to wait 70 more days since Mechjeb and Kerbal Alarm Clock couldn't agree on the transfer window before, and now they can and it's next month. In the meantime we have midcourse burns for Eve Express and maybe a Class-E asteroid encounter.
All told those Jool launches put me about 1.5 million Kerbucks in the hole. Setting up a reusable infrastructure is expensive! I have some ideas on how to get some funds without the tedium of running dozens of contracts, though.
Governmental cash infusion to shore up the budget.
aka edit the persistent.cfg file in the save.
Nope
Sending up a vertical SSTO tanker that fills up on cheap Minmus Karbonite rocket fuel and lands it back at KSC to sell
Might need to change my flag to an Exxon logo though
(DBZ we're all looking at you)
Shogun Streams Vidya
Before:
After loading at a midcourse burn, at which point things were so whacked I couldn't even rotate the ship because of phantom forces holding it in place like marionette strings:
Select your pistol, and then, select your rocket.
Front to back, you've got the command and control module, the habitat ring, a science lab and repair facility sticking off to one side, a lander and spare fuel tank to the other side, then the greenhouse and finally the propulsion module.
I forgot about storage for the intermediate resources that OKS uses, so I bolted on a couple of tin cans full of them to the only remaining docking port. So, not as elegant now.
I also don't think that the repair bay actually did anything, and the terraformer module will be obsolete next version. But whatever! Off to Duna!
This is the wobbliest goddamn ship I've ever flown. I burned up so much monopropellant trying to keep it on target. Yes, those are 5m diameter liquid hydrogen tanks, thanks to TweakScale.
The solar panels produce juuuust enough power to keep this whole mess going. But when it is working, I'm at a net positive production on food, clean water, and breathable air.
It's not bad for a first attempt, but I need to figure out how to get all of the OKS modules I need without having the ship wobble like crazy on every burn.
Is that a Near Future Construction tri-adapter I see for the engines? If so, take the quad adapter, blow it up to a 5m -> 2.5m adapter (what I used for the mainsails on the buttplugship I posted) and make the body of the ship where all the 2.5m OKS modules, science lab, and extra fuel tanks can sit in 4 different stacks. Then on the bottom use the 5m-2.5m quad adapter flipped over to go back into a single stack for the engine and it's fuel tanks. Careful with that second adapter though, it may look like it attached to all 4 stacks, but it really is only attached to one so you'll need some struts to hold everything steady.
The wobble is a direct result of a ship being too long without enough joint stiffness between each part. Make it shorter and the wobble will go away, or add struts between each part, or a couple mods that may help (welding and/or joint stiffness). There's not many other solutions unfortunately.
Try positioning the engines toward the midsection of the craft, so they're not pushing the entire stack too.
Hmmm, never thought of the dock idea, would putting docks on the bottom quad stack and the bottom of the 4 stocks have the same effect without doing the radial part?
So it would go, say, Quad adapter -> 4 fuel tanks each connected to the adapter -> docking ports -> quad adapter with additional docking ports between the stack and the adapter.
On another note, executing Jool burns is annoying as hell with only 4 LV-Ns pushing a 100+ ton craft. The Jool intercept is twice as much DV as Kerbin escape, leading to burns that require up to half an orbit or even longer. Doing it in one go wastes tremendous amounts of energy in the wrong direction, requiring huge course corrections. Burning to escape and then intercepting Jool from Kerbol SOI requires oodles of DV (I guess because of the Oberth effect?). Going to try splitting them up into a series two-minute burns and see if that works any better.
edit: intercepts get! They are ugly as hell and probably not very efficient, but oh well. If I can just land this tanker on Pol I'll have unlimited fuel in the Jool system.
When last we left our intrepid crew of pioneering Kerbals, they were en route to 'ol Purple, Eve. The payload module had burned out first, followed by the hab module one orbit/28 minutes later. We'd soon learn how how much that difference meant at interplanetary distances.
The hab module arrived first, even though it left second, and on the wrong side of Eve. Without checking the payload module's trajectory, we assumed it was also coming in on a retrograde approach since both ships had executed identical MechJeb-plotted transfer burns. Nope!
The hab module performs an aggressive aerobraking maneuver at 60km altitude. Any higher and we'd fail to capture; any lower and we'd crash.
When the payload module arrives in-system we discover it was coming in on the correct side of the planet after all, so a quick burn placed it into a similar retrograde orbit to the Kerbals. This turned out to be pointless and counter-productive, but oh well. We learn by failing.
Payload aerobrake at 58km.
The Eve Express had performed all its orbital science experiments on initial approach to Eve, so there's no need to hang around. A course is plotted to intercept Gilly, which involved a 900-DV inclination change (folks, retrograde orbits are bad, mmmkay?) Hitting Gilly ASAP was why we didn't aerobrake all the way down to Eve.
Gilly is a pain in the ass to intercept. It's the smallest moon in the game, virtually no gravity and a teeny-tiny 126km sphere of influence. Miniscule variations in your orbit are the difference between getting an encounter and missing it entirely. Once you get one it's probably best to time warp right into its SOI as that freezes your orbit and it won't be wobbling all over the place.
In another major annoyance, the "low space" situation for Gilly has a 6km ceiling, and you can't time warp at all under 8km. Wheee!
Here the crew is performing some science as the Eve Express lines up for its circularization burn.
Meanwhile, the payload module is still in a highly eccentric orbit around Eve, and drops off the lander probe at apoapsis before circularizing itself and heading for Gilly.
The automated lander dips into the atmosphere at 80km and performs an interminable series of gradual aerobraking maneuvers. On the way, it performs the experiments that the Eve Express didn't carry. When that science is exhausted, it aims for the landing site and deorbits.
Is there a probe in there somewhere?
Final approach to the surface. This lander was equipped with static solar panels because Eve's thick atmosphere has the tendency to rip off deployable panels at unexpectedly low velocities. The trick is getting all the massive atmosphere scans transmitted before the probe hits the ground. Because it got all the high altitude scans out of the way during its many aerobrakes, it's a simple matter to transmit everything at low altitude.
Down on the deck, and doin' more science.
Next up: Gilly!
PSN - CardboardNine
Be careful @temperature!
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
Honestly, this is my experience with Kerbal and needs:
Oxygen: Easy.
Food: Occasionally problematic, mostly easy.
Sleep: Wait, why is it already 4am?
The kerbal in the grey suit finished whatever he was doing with his laptop and turned back to them. "As I was saying, you've done fine work on the Mun, and we're all very pleased and impressed. Now, we have another mission in the planning stages, and we hope you're up for it. How do you feel about catching and grabbing something... bigger?"
The two veteran kerbonauts shared a glance, and then Shepbald spoke for both of them. "Like what? Landing a prefab base on Minmus or something?"
For answer, the briefing officer tapped a key. The wall screens behind him lit up: a chart of Kerbin and the other inner planets with a new set of thin braided lines drawn over the familiar orbits, blurry magnified photos of lumpy space rocks with license plates for names, and schematics of some sort of mechanical claw.
"Bigger."
...okay maybe not high exactly. "High enough that you only need to duck your head if you're standing on a mountaintop" perhaps.
After a long series of burns both the Eve Express and its payload carrier are finally side by side again for the first time since they departed Kerbin months ago.
Mission commander and all-around badass Chuck Kerman EVAs over to the payload carrier where the Minmax lander has been deployed from the cargo bay. The lander is mounted on a robotic hinge that pivots 90 degrees for ease of docking.
Chuck climbs aboard and sets off for the surface of Gilly.
Yeah, sure, that looks like a good spot.
Landing on Gilly is a... delicate maneuver. The gravity is so slight, and orbital velocity so slow (like, 25 m/s slow) that you can cough and go flying in another direction. Killing horizontal velocity is more of a chore than ever, but not dangerous at all since while you're doing that you're only plummeting groundwards at a blistering... 1.3 meters per second? Yeah, okay we've got time to enjoy the ride.
Chuck puts it down like a pro and hops out of the capsule. "That's one small step for- shitshitshiiiiiiiiiit...!"
Yeah you can forget walking around here. Every step send you flying 50 meters. And holy fuck, do not fart on Gilly.
Before it departs, the lander leaves behind a care package in the form of one of my Mk I Frisbee Sats - a super lightweight science transmission machine designed to easily complete those random contracts to "send science data from the surface of XYZ."
Chuck floors the throttle, and before he's even over the nearby hill his trajectory is already hyperbolic. Fuck you, Gilly. Fortunately the Minmax lander is designed for operations in much larger gravity wells and has plenty of fuel for its dual monoprop engines. Chuck brings it up and docks with the Eve Express to offload the science data and clean the experiment bays.
The payload bay had drifted quite a distance since we left, so Chuck has a long EVA trip back after returning the lander to its dock.
Before leaving the moon, the payload module releases another Frisbee Sat. That wee little stack separator blew the probe up fifteen degrees of inclination and raised its apoapsis by 1,000 meters.
Both ships return to Eve and perform a long series of aerobrakes to reduce their orbits. The payload module needs to get under 400km to release this Frisbee Sat so its thermometer will work, and then assumes a parking orbit. Eve Express moves to a lower orbit and awaits its return window some months off.
All told this mission raked in something like 4,300 science and we haven't even brought back the surface samples and hard experiments. That's good for a bunch of Near Future tech tree unlocks! Need us some dubstep engines!
Shogun Streams Vidya
I don't know. I find that I have to tell myself to breath while trying to land spaceplanes.
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
It featured a novel staging geometry to get around the long, thin argon tanks needed.
The fairing base is part of the probe itself and won't be jettisoned. The upper stage helps push it to a high orbit and circularize, then sticks around to boost the probe out of Kerbin's SOI.
The argon fueled Hall thrusters suck down a lot of juice, so the probe runs on a 1.25m fission reactor. It takes a few minutes to spool up to full capacity, but the variable power output means we only need to run it when the engines are firing. At idle it will last something like 60 years, or 6 years at full power. The NF radiator panels are ingeniously coded to use solar panel logic to turn edge-on to the sun for maximum efficiency.
This is an awful shot because the transfer burn to all outer planets is on the the night side of Kerbin, but when the liquid fuel is expended the outer ring of .625m fuel tanks drops away, allowing the core of argon tanks to slide free.
This thing was way overengineered as it turns out. The liquid booster performed almost the entire transfer by itself, leaving only a tiny bit to be finished by the argon thrusters.
Midcourse correction coming up in... 1 year, 396 days, yeesh.
Averted an extinction level event when a Class-E impactor was diverted to a stable orbit.
Here the Asteroid Interceptor Mk II has grappled onto the rock with one of its three claws and deployed a trio of probes with auxiliary RCS thrusters.
The Mk II replaces the Mk I which you'll see upthread had to be put down due to a robotics malfunction. It incorporates technology from the Asteroid Cities mod, namely the refinery unit that allows the ship to electrolyze water into LFO, and the probe-sized claws that detect water (read: convert asteroid mass) on asteroids. The idea is to bring along just enough fuel to make the intercept, grapple the roid, and use the resources it contains to move it around.
Since asteroids are big and unwieldy (and at 2,000 tons this was one real big) the Interceptor is equipped with a battery of SAS units at its nose (3x 2.5m units covered by 2x KW strap-on units). It turns quite slowly, but not interminably so, making the probe-distributed RCS rather redundant. (Protip: reaction wheels are more effective the closer they are to the center-of-mass. RCS is the opposite.)
A little nudge brought the behemoth into an atmosphere skimming orbit for aerocapture. It was probably a little too much, as the apoapsis wound up inside the orbit of the Mun, but at least Kerbin was saved. Now to make this thing useful.
It was at this point that the game glitched out and the ship was corrupted somehow. I was trying to properly align to COM/COT for an inclination change and discovered it wouldn't allow me to detach the claws and reposition, it kept hitting an invisible wall. Couldn't even HyperEdit it away from the asteroid. I had to terminate the ship from the tracking station and send up a replacement that incorporated new features building off of what we learned with this interception. Just as well, because the ship had a tendency to either explode randomly or disassemble itself when time warping. Fucking Krakens, how do they work?
The Mk III ditches the unstable triple-claw design for a large 2.5m claw from Asteroid Cities. Its probes also aren't there to serve as RCS points, but rather to distribute Near Future solar panels around the asteroid so at least two of them get sunlight no matter which way we need to point this thing. All those reaction wheels drain a lot of juice while holding a maneuver node, and the fuel refinery uses a lot too (though "a lot" is really pitiful compared to the Near Future solar/electrical equipment). It can also recover all its probes using docking ports, making the ship completely reusable for future operations.
The refinery is also slow, producing about 1 unit of LFO per second, which is not nearly enough to keep up with six hungry LV-Ns. I could have saved a lot of fuel/water by only running two engines at a time, but the burns were already taking 20+ minutes with all six running and fuck that noise.
Note the Mechjeb readouts here: TWR 0.02, max acceleration 178 millimeters per second, and 44 m/s DV with half full tanks. Yeah, this was a fucking chore. I wanted to bring the rock down into an equatorial orbit for use as a fuel station, and it was starting from about 70 degrees of inclination. I could just about swing 90-DV burns before running out of fuel so this took a while. Remember when I regretted aerobraking too much? Inclination changes cost less DV the further you are from a gravity well. If I could have kept this thing out around Minmus these maneuvers would take a lot less time and energy. As it was I had to burn off about 15 degrees at a time, then raise the periapsis back out of the atmosphere and repeat. Five or six times. This process used up a staggering amount of fuel. The asteroid scanner generates about 100 units of water per ton of mass, and by the time these burns were done I'd used almost a third of the 196,000 units this rock held.
Next up was the laborious process of aerobraking into a roughly circular orbit. TL;DR: it sucked, would not do again. The only grace was that the Mk III was a much sturdier design than the Mk II and I could go all the way up to max physics warp during the atmospheric passes without the ship shaking itself apart or just exploding for no reason. Once it was over I raised the periapsis up with another series of burns that dropped the asteroid's water reserves to half. It's 200 tons lighter now. So much for making a useful fuel station. If I go through route I'm gotta be honest, I'll probably HyperEdit its water back because Holy Shit Never Again.
But now we have a sweet asteroid base to work on! Gonna go all Bond villain on this crib!
Dumping the first stage leaving Kerbin
Gravity turn
Circularizing upon Duna arrival
Descent
Almost there
The Best on Duna!
Let's gloss over the tragic return with not enough fuel to course correct. The important thing is that he made it back to the surface in one form or another. Hey look, some different landing shots from earlier!
Mun
Minmus
http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/73621-B9-5-0-pre-release-(with-download)
Not necessarily stable, breaks craft built with older versions of B9, several known issues outstanding, but it got leaked on reddit and the authors put it out there for everyone to test.
Highlights:
Ehrrmahgerrrrrrddd
Shit be at least as big as Duplos In Space