captainb

I know I'm late to the party but I just found this thread and I must say I love your design aesthetic! I may steal some ideas from you such as the Jr-Sr-Jr clamp-o-tron docking port arrangement and the Constellation style trusses.

I started working on a small powered glider for Duna loosely based on NASA's ARES mission concept. http://imgur.com/a/9Fspx My original plan was to use the underslung booster to get the glider up to speed (~500m/s), then jettison it for better glide performance. However initial testing at Duna showed that the glider was not aerodynamically stable above about 150m/s without the booster attached. The glider flies just fine on Kerbin up to about 400m/s at 10 km, but when I jettison the booster on Duna, the nose begins processing about the prograde vector until it loses all of its speed. I'm finding Duna aerodynamics to be very strange and sluggish. I'm going to try to keep working on it tho.

Immediately following confirmation of a good orbit of the Trinidad core, the two sets of saddle tanks were launched to rendezvous and dock. The launch vehicle for the saddle tanks is a modified Magellan large booster with stretched side tanks to provide the necessary delta-V to reach orbit. The TWR on the pad is closer to 1.85 instead of 1.95, but it quickly climbs past 2 with the thirsty fuel consumption of the twin boar engines. http://imgur.com/a/9OE4L It was discovered that the booster cores of the saddle tank LV - ostensibly designed for recovery - have insufficient fuel reserves for a safe touchdown. One booster will be stranded in orbit on fumes and another has enough delta-V for a de-orbit burn but not enough to avoid overheating on re-entry. Oh well... The main mission is in good shape though, with a interplanetary vessel full of fuel and ready to depart for Jool as soon as her crew arrives.

Richbro Kerman is one of my engineers

Today I launched the core section of a vehicle which will take 4 Kerbals to explore the Jool system in my 1.2.2 career save. The Trinidad is the flagship vessel of the Magellan mission to Jool. Her cargo bay houses an uncrewed Tylo probe lander and a crewed Vall/Pol/Bop lander. She also carries a 1-man Laythe SSTO on her back. Two sets of saddle tanks containing 10,000 units of Lf each will be added on in LKO to supply the delta-V necessary for the mission.

With 6 days remaining before the Jool transfer window, and all crews returned from Minmus, it's time to begin launching mission hardware to LKO. The Trinidad Core stage is first to go up. It's the most expensive vehicle I've launched to date, costing 429,000 funds. Some of those funds can be refunded if the core booster can land back close to the KSC, but for now all eyes are focused on the launch of the Trinidad core stage which will be home to 4 Kerbonauts for several years. Fortunately, the launch is a resounding success as the Trinidad is placed into a nearly circular 120 km equatorial orbit! She now awaits the arrival of 2 sets of saddle tanks to complete the vehicle.

Do the engine plumes look like that out of the box or do you need Real Plume?

I'm going to be recording some gameplay videos of my career save and would like to incorporate some cinematic shots during launch with the HUD (navball, stage indicator etc.) hidden. Off the top of my head I can think of 2 solutions, neither of which are acceptable to me. Option 1: MechJeb. - I could setup MJ and have it fly the launches to the desired orbit on autopilot and focus on recording the gameplay sans HUD. However, I've never had MJ installed and want to fly my missions manually. Option 2: Separate Takes - By this I mean I would first record the launch footage on a 'dummy' launch without the HUD not caring if I ended up in the right orbit, then revert the flight and fly the mission 'for real' with HUD on. I could then potentially splice footage of both launches together to create something that looked believable. However this approach seems disingenuous to me and I would like to avoid doing it. Are there other ways of going about this besides these above options? If so, do I need additional video/camera mods or other software? I know I have seen videos of launches without the HUD active (ie shuttle recreations, cupcake lander) but I can't find any atm and don't know if any are for missions where the outcome mattered. TL;DR Is there a way to fly a 'real mission' to a 100km orbit without having the HUD show up in the video footage? Thanks for the feedback guys. In the end I wasn't confident enough in my piloting skills to fly w/o the HUD as my launch vehicle has a nasty tendency to flip out and RUD if the nose gets too far from prograde. I ended up just recording with the HUD on and used the Hullcam VDS Continued mod to get some cool camera angles. If you're interested you can find the video in my mission report here.

Its making me nervous just looking at the steep slopes in your screenshots!

I guess just something to keep in mind for later then

I'll be the first to admit I know nothing about mod development but, why would you reinvent the wheel when it's already been done before? If you were going to have a try at incorporating this feature, @cybutek already has already done it for KER, perhaps he would be willing to share parts of his code or give you some pointers?

Its been awhile since my last post, but I've finally gotten around to unlocking enough of the tech tree for the Trinidad and daughter vehicles! This means this post is the final installment of career progress before I get on to the actual Magellan Mission. You know the good stuff. So humor me for one final installment and then we will get on to the main attraction. In this installment of Career Progress (Part 3): The veteran crews active on missions at Minmus and the Mun are recalled to Kerbin in preparation for crew selection for the upcoming Jool transfer window. Since none of these vehicles are re-entry capable, the assorted vehicles are docked to Kepler Station which is in a 300 km Kerbin equatorial orbit. A Crew Recovery System (CRS) is devised last minute by KSC engineers that will carry 7 kerbals through re-entry to land back at Kerbin. The CRS is sent to the station to await Jeb, Val and two of the more experienced scientists en route from Minmus. Meanwhile the rookie kerbonauts rescued from Minmus orbit are taking the scenic route back to Kerbin with a load of Minmus science data. They stop off to orbit the Mun as a training exercise to advance their skills to lvl 2 before splashing down at Kerbin in dramatic fashion. http://imgur.com/a/XyOEt

Ship design looks sharp with the LH2 gold foil tanks and the tripple nuke engines, very Constellation-esque! Regarding radiation accumulation, could swap Jeb for Val halfway to Duna to keep individual rad exposure down?

Are the crew capsules from NFT? Also, have you tested the rovers extensively in Duna analog environment? Looks like they could be prone to tipping.

I have Konstruction on the list. I don't know what AYBABTU means.

I am considering starting a colonization/base-building save. This would be a new game folder with its own mods starting with the full tech-tree unlocked but a limited amount of funds too keep things interesting. The objective would be to established manned bases with 10+ Kerbals on each of the land-able bodies in the stock Kerbol system. Core mods would be: for the base modules, for constructing bases on-site, and most likely or similar for roving around once at the base. I would also use KAS/KIS and some form of life support mod. I'm debating between Kerbalism and TAC-LS. Kerbalism sounds cool because it has resource use in background, and minimum housing space/comfort requirements, but I'm nervous because a lot of things seem to break when using it from what I've heard. TAC-LS would be a simpler system and not as likely to break other things but wouldn't be as realistic from a living space perspective. So now to the questions: Has anyone tried something similar, and if so, how did it turn out? Does Kerbalism play nice with Kerbal Planetary Base Systems and long-term surface habitation? Is using life-support do-able with multiple colonies with or without in-situ life-support production? Am I insane for wanting to try this?

Because the Saturn V doesn't exist any more. None of the tooling, skilled tradesmen, insider knowledge exists any longer. Building a Saturn V today would cost the same or more than building the SLS is costing. And you'd be stuck with an ancient, decrepit, and heavy computer system actually the whole rocket.

Amazing. I wonder how many of those shots are false color/color enhanced? Or are parts of mars really blue?

as do I

@zanie420 I really like your SSTO spaceplanes. I've never made an SSTO spaceplane w/o using rapiers.

How are you getting the ring and hangar structures to form a closed loop? Also, what is the part count?

I prefer to fly casual myself

Your crewed lander looks like a wedding cake.

Is there a way to set the length of time spark sounds and effects are occurring? I'd like to have them fade out sooner as they seem to persist long after the collision is over. I looked in the settings and MMconfig file but didn't see anything relevant.

I'm now getting much closer to unlocking the remaining tech tree nodes required for the Magellan vehicle architecture. Halgun's driving has calmed down enough to reach the Midlands without further incident after about a 17km drive up from Tosche Station. Now they just need to make it back. In addition, a solar relay sat was launched to lead Kerbin in its orbit. This is 1 of 2 identical sats planned to give better comms coverage to interplanetary missions such as Magellan, when they are far from Kerbin. Lastly, Gilbart and the Asteroid Prospector successfully captured Rocky into Kerbin orbit. However, the orbit is far from ideal, since the asteroid began spinning wildly after the thrust vector was found to be mis-aligned from the asteroid CoM. Further efforts to refine the orbit were largely unsuccessful. For now the plan is to do a Mun flyby and then leave Rocky behind until a better asteroid maneuvering vehicle can be developed.