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dire

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Everything posted by dire

  1. Since the Kerbal joins your team before the contract is complete, you can just nab him and let the contract lapse. It is very cheap to return from Munar orbit, though, and I would bet your kolonists would appreciate a way to get home in case of emergency. Technically you could go into the save file and edit the contract there, I guess, but unless you're building a mod that has missions to visit and conquer random colonies it's easier just to use the cheat menu.
  2. Welcome to the forum Kerman! I think my first post ever (or at least one of them) was about rescuing the rescue craft for the rescue craft for the tourists I sent with Jeb to the Mun...my advice is bring more fuel than you think you'll need for rescue. A lot more xD Or check out the Victor Terra Phlogistonic Lab over in crafts and grab a Heimdall for the rescue if you've got the 160-point science tier unlocked - the next craft down on my list, the Minty Thrush, doesn't have enough delta-V for it, sadly.
  3. https://kerbalx.com/direstorm/Heimdall-17-RM-1-Muninn For those who have mastered everything the Thrush has to offer and are looking for a mid-career heavy-lift workhorse, VTphL is pleased to offer the Heimdall Reusable heavy lift rocket. In its stock configuration it's designed for munar biome science expeditions with an orbital mothership. Crew safety is paramount with a 3.5-G full envelop launch abort system capable of returning all crew in the primary capsule safely to the KSC from as far away as Duna. This is a large, heavy-lift rocket with a 40+ ton payload to LKO, and although the initial investment is steep the great majority of the hardware is recoverable. The stock payload features two relay satellites, an orbital mothership, a munar descent module and a munar ascent module and is rated for three crew total (launch with two empty seats). Recommended itinerary is to launch to LKO, land the primary stage for recovery, jettison fairing and nose cone, then engage the transfer stage to a lunar impact. While en route, decouple the lander and return capsule and dock them, then adjust orbit to a very low munar orbit. Launch relay satellites and adjust relay satellites to a high munar orbit. Extend solar panels and communicator dishes. Transfer crew to lander, choose landing site, and initiate landing procedures. Once landed, the landing module will serve as a ground relay and science station out to a range of about 3.6 GM. Collect science into one of the science receptacles on the ascent module, wait for orbital rendesvous, and launch to encounter the return capsule. Dock with return capsule and transfer crew and science, then jettison lunar ascent module. Once jettisoned in orbit, the lunar ascent module will serve as an additional relay satellite and emergency orbital supply facility for life support and fuel. With all crew and science safely aboard the return capsule, adjust your apoapsis out away from the Mun's direction of travel until you reach munar escape (This is called a free return trajectory), and then continue adjusting your Kerbin periapse down until you reach about 30km altitude about a hundred KM past the KSC. This is a hot re-entry, but your heat shield should easily be able to handle it. Once touched safely down, congratulations! You have been to the Mun and back again. The primary lift stage is extremely powerful and it can be difficult for a novice to achieve an efficient orbit with the primary stage. Throttling down after 12km can improve your gravity turn significantly and it's not recommended to allow your apoapsis to creep past 75 seconds ETA. When in doubt, aim for an apoapsis of at least 100 km to give yourself time to circularize the upper stages before engaging boost-back burn on the primary stage. Every stage of the rocket has a generous margin of error in its delta-V available for a munar landing mission, allowing novices the luxury of practicing their descent without necessarily splattering their lander the first time they attempt a suicide burn. You may have enough fuel remaining in your transfer stage to attempt a landing. Do so at your own risk, however, as the most likely result is that you will run out of fuel prior to touchdown and you may wind up being forced to jettison the lunar descent module without being able to use it as a ground station. You may have enough fuel to visit several munar biomes and get far more science with short sub-orbital hops, but again please do so at your own risk. A scientist can reset the Mystery Goo and Science Jr. experiments. VTphL hopes you enjoy this intermediate-level stock craft. Once you've mastered the Mun, you should be able to take it to Duna, although the Duna Express is perhaps a better choice for those more advanced missions.
  4. https://kerbalx.com/direstorm/Minty-Thrush VTphL is proud to introduce our latest offering for the amateur bottle-rocket crowd, a simple design capable of flying three kerbals to Minmus, deploying a research satellite, landing for flags, footprints and soil samples, and returning all three Kerbals safely to the KSC. Note that because there is no heat shield, multiple reentry orbits will likelyl be required. Don't forget to collect science into the handy dandy science collector after every stop in your journey; while there is a high likelihood of each capsule surviving the same cannot be said of the delicate instrumentation on the exterior of the rocket. Due to regulations surrounding the Duna Outpost Mission Architecture, VTphL was unable to test a complete Minmus run. However, our expert pilots were capable of docking an alternate pizza-and-snacks payload to our brave Duna kolonists waiting patiently in LKO for a transfer window, using a cargo delivery configuration with identical mass and worse aerodynamics. Remember, bottle rocketeers, start turning no later than 6 km in altitude and have an offset from vertical of at least 45 degrees by 12 to 15 km altitude; otherwise your Minty Thrush will be doomed to cut its glorious flight short with only sub-orbital science. Curious about the other three ships in this picture? From left to right, those are SLV-2 "Artemis", SLV-3 "Prospector" and SLV-8 "Gullinkambi". Check out a full recounting of the DOMA Arigato kolonization effort, with links to ship downloads and tons of screenshots -
  5. KAS/KIS and MKS both have solutions for attaching craft to the surface. KAS has, if I recall, a concrete pad you nail to the ground, and then you run a pipe from that to your craft to lock it in place. Or MKS Kolonization has a part called the Landing Stabilizer which is a landing leg with a toggle to attach craft to the ground, which more or less turns it into a piece of terrain. There are multiple parts in MKS that do this, but I always try to include a couple landing stabilizer legs so I don't forget to bring that ability along, and they also make pretty decent, wide landing legs even without that ability. I generally use wings instead of spring-based landing gear, simply because I've had more than one craft clip through the ground and explode when I load them, which makes it very hard to do mining bases. They hardly ever do that if they're tethered, though.
  6. A sat with a single rated antenna has the power listed for the antenna. Two satellites with a single 100g relay dish each can always talk from Jool to Kerbin, and a probe with a 100g direct link can always talk to KSC if it has line of sight. 2 identical dishes have a power of 1.68 times a single dish, and 4 dishes have a power of 2.8 times a single dish. So four 15G communication dishes on one sat have a range of 42 gm, which if I recall covers everything but Jool and Eeloo. With 20 x 100GM satellites, you'd have a power of 945 GM and you'd be able to talk to a level 3 tracking station from 486 GM or to a probe with NO antenna and only the 5k onboard from about 68 MM - within the kerbin SOI, for example. Note that "What you can talk to" depends on the power of BOTH vessels (or the vessel and the tracking station), so if both vessels have the same power, the rated power is the range they can talk. It's reasonably accurate over close-ish values to take the average, but the actual math is the square root of (the first vessel's power x the second vessel's power).
  7. Really like the design of your quad-probe. It looks more or less stock to me, although on close inspection it has some fiddly bits I can't quite identify. I thought the gold bit was a probe core, but it's the wrong shape. Although I am checking in version 1.5, so they might have new skins in later versions. Your second probe might have some visual mods, or maybe some custom dish parts because I don't see a stock dish that looks exactly like those dishes do Ditto your forward solar panels; they either look like custom textures for the 3x2 stock panel, or custom parts. The large solar panels sort of look like Gigantor arrays maybe on pipes or actuators? Anyway, worth mentioning is that this is a very inefficient way to do a relay satellite. Each additional dish adds less power than previous dishes, so if those are all RA-2 dishes for example with a range of 2 GM each, you could replace all of them with one RA-15 relay antenna with a range of 15 gm and probably wind up with a very comparable probe that has 1/10th the payload mass. My rule of thumb is generally, one dish is good, two is better, if I have to do more than 4 I might want to look at sending up two probes instead. Also one RA-2 can reach anywhere in kerbin's SOI that it has line of sight to, at least out to Minmus orbit. So unless you are talking to Dres that is probably overkill, and depending on what dish those are they might not reach out to Jool. When I first looked at it I initially thought that was actually a carrier for like 6 individual relay sats, and that would be very cool.
  8. @TheJoolianHappy birthday! I haven't had a chance to test this ship, and I'm not sure where you are on the tech tree, but this Minty Thrush should be quite capable for Minmus and Mun flags and science. https://kerbalx.com/direstorm/Minty-Thrush If your tech tree is a bit further along you might also enjoy my Dream Katcher and Duna Express Shuttle:
  9. This is fine. Everything is normal. Working as intended. Situation nominal.
  10. When I tried to burn off some of the Artemis+Boring Rover orbital speed by skimming Kerbin's atmo, I accidentally wound up also burning off a good chunk of the Boring Rover. So I actually wound up reverting to a hard save just after they landed on Minmus, meaning prior to Gullinkambi's launch (I currently have 166 unique save points on this career, most of them named something like Y4 D33 Artemis On Minmus). If anyone thinks I faked all this I can literally send them a save point for every major milestone I've completed. So I took the opportunity to adjust Gullinkambi a bit before relaunching. The two tiny probes turned into a pair of lifeboat rovers like the ones Aries landed with; it now has escape pods and wheels for all 12 of its rated crew, although I think I used the Malamute crew cabin instead of the Wild Blue long cab. Same difference, the long cab has a built-in solar panel, is a tiny bit lighter and can recycle snack soil, but is a lot less heat tolerant, and I'm kind of thinking of dumping the Wild Blue stuff in the future to reduce RAM and improve performance, so I want to get away from using it. Wild Blue has a ton of parts but I feel like I only use a tiny fraction of what it offers and the rest just clutters stuff up. I upped the relay on the larger probe to the 0.65 ton relay, and I'll see if I can't send that to Eve; it can probably bounce from Eve to Duna to Kerbin so that'll actually improve my Duna comms if it can. Left Boring Rover full of fuel in orbit of Minmus and flew Artemis to dock to Prospector. Docked Gullinkambi to those two; I have a mission to "return a vessel from Minmus" and I think I might use that excuse to part out and retire Prospector. Gullinkambi should do everything Prospector does, but more efficient, faster, and with better margins. Prospector was very handy but I think Gullinkambi can completely replace it. Y4 D91 - Landed DSV02 Leviathan (previously Space Truck, AKA "HMS Sunk Cost") on Ike. I think I'm going to use the cheat menu to complete my "Build a station on Ike" contract because I completed all the terms for it, but apparently the Karibou wheels don't count as "motorized wheels" for completing the contract. And everything I've got uses Karibou wheels at the moment. Other terms of the contract - Science Facility, Two Pilots, Eight Seats, generates power blah blah -- were all completed when I detached my Rover Hotel from Leviathan. So the contract SHOULD be completed. And yes, Leviathan tilted over when I undocked Rover Hotel. That's as far as it's gonna tip. It's fine.
  11. [snip] Try this video where Scott Manley goes through it step by step. If you want a wall of text I can type something up, but try the video first.
  12. [snip] It's easy to feel overwhelmed by all the numbers and stuff. This is rocket science; it's a little bit difficult. My advice would be to take it a step at a time. Launch your satellite and see what happens! It will have gaps in coverage.That's OK. You may lose probes if they go dark during a critical maneuver. That's also OK. As you launch more satellites and build better stuff you can come back to these topics several times and learn more each time. One of the things VoidSquid's picture is trying to say is that generally it's better to have several small, cheap relay satellites than one big one, all in different orbits. The reason why this is, is complicated, but try it out and see what happens.
  13. Hello, and welcome to the grand tour of the Phlogistonic Labs! Please pay no attention to the occasional explosions; those are working as intended although we DO ask that you stay away from the large, open-topped cement bunker titled "DANGER HIGHLY EXPERIMENTAL". You can find the minimum safe distance by looking at the scorch marks. Do not proceed inside any blast craters as some of them are in active use. For our first showing, an all-stock craft, the Dream Katcher! This custom design is intended to capture the imagination and deliver a small payload of kerbonauts and science potentially as far as Ike. Proceed to Duna at your own risk, as while VtphL is confident you will be able to descend safely we make no guarantees about your ability to return home. If your aspirations are a bit more modest you can replace the long-range drop tanks with a crew cabin and cargo bay and should be able to deliver up to six kerbals and supplies to anywhere in the Kerbin sphere of influence. We hope you enjoy, https://kerbalx.com/direstorm/Dream-Katcher When you do strand your Dream Katcher in low Dunar orbit, we offer a very competitive package on the Duna Express Rescue Shuttle for your long-distance immediate retrieval needs. Although equipped with a stock 2-kerbal lander, the Duna Express can be retrofitted for dreamkatcher compatibility at a minimum of effort and expense, allowing you to return your stranded vessel with all science and crew fully intact to Kerbin. Please remember to leave the mothership in orbit as it is not intended for landing on Duna. Also remember to check your staging as over-eager lander pilots have been known to experience premature engine ignition and explode in the cargo bay. If ignition lasts more than eight hours please consult your flight engineer. https://kerbalx.com/direstorm/Duna-Express
  14. I think Scott Manley has a youtube vid where he did this, but he had to add a little cubic octagonal to the base of the ladder so the kerbal didn't fall off. Edit:
  15. Y4 D64 After the first 1300 Lithium fuel took so much time and effort to acquire, the docking with SLV-07 went very smoothly and almost without incident, although I think I accidentally knocked a Big Drill off of it during docking. The pair had plenty of dV to land back on Minmus and have spent the last 30 days collecting various kinds of fuel and growing Snacks. SLV-08 has a reduced mission profile compared to other launches. First, it's not a rover, and it's also not intended as an interplanetary hauler, although it could do in a pinch. It only has 12 seats rather than the 40+ I've fit onto other rovers, and with no wheels it wouldn't do very well as a colonization hub. What it does offer is my first fusion reactor, and it also has two Big Drills and the larger, 2.5-meter ISRU. Finally, it has a trio of science and communications probes. SLV-08 is an exploration vessel for planets other than Duna, and its designation is "Gullinkambi", the heavenly rooster who announces Ragnarok to the angels. It has the distinction, I do believe, of being the first payload since SLV-01 Aries to fit into the standard launch fairing with no bits sticking out. Docked to Prospector with plenty of dV left in the booster stage, and made a textbook-perfect water landing a few KM off the KSC for 90% recovery.
  16. Well, Linri's been pushing that 20 ton spaceship uphill all day, and boy, are her arms tired! It worked though; she pushed it from a 350-apo orbit to an 18/6 km orbit. I did eventually ditch a broken radiator and the ranger communications pod where Bob spent more than two solid years analyzing data. Everything in there smelled like Bob anyway, it needed to be burned. And that dropped me into the 17-ton range, which added a whopping ten dV from 159 to 169! Turns out I needed that little boost though, because even after all Linri's pushing my suicide burn landed hard at 9 m/s on the stabilizers (which are rated up to 50 m/s, anyhow) and immediately toppled and rolled. No modules lost, although I had to pull the radiators in, causing my reactor to temporarily overheat and lose a permanent 11% health and efficiency. Bounced twice. While I apparently don't have forward RCS thrusters on this ship, I do have pretty good lateral RCS and I was able to stand Artemis back on her feet with no problems. Let the drilling commence! 38 days remaining to SLV-8 launch, and I've got some ideas for a tug based on just the bottom modules of Artemis without the big batteries and long-term hab modules. Basically another reboot of the Prospector, and I'm thinking about naming SLV-7 something else to avoid confusion. Miller? Sutter? Digger? Maybe call it the Boring Rover.
  17. @BrightBritches how is your fuel getting off Minmus? Are those tiny reaction wheels enough to flip the whole thing when it's full?
  18. Got most of the way through the transfer burn moving Artemis + SLV-7 to Minmus and started thinking I might have a dV problem. I had 250 m/s left on my transfer burn and about 550 m/s left in the tank. For a Minmus transfer, that's 30 m/s for final intercept corrections, 180 to circularize, 180 to land, plus 250 to finish my burn. So that's a total of about 650 dV bare minimum, which obviously I did not have. My first reaction was to just leave SLV-7 in a high, 3.5-million apo LKO. Sure, it would suck for SLV 7 and it'd be a pain to rendezvous later, but it'd guarantee that Artemis at least could refuel, then re-dock and finish getting SLV-7 to Minmus with a full tank. I actually got as far as undocking Artemis and finishing the burn, but then I noticed that Artemis, weighing 20 tons, more than doubles its dV when it undocks from the 31-ton SLV-7 rover. Hmm. So I actually quickloaded, finished the burn with both Artemis and SLV-7, and left SLV-7 in a 350/550km Minmus orbit while Artemis went for a landing. This would be much less painful and much faster to meet up again later, but the problem is, it didn't quite work. Artemis, after burning to a 12-km periapsis, was going 200 meters per second and had 160 dV left, meaning really I'd need at least 250 or 300 dV to land (And apparently the dV chart I was looking at was either wrong or misleading, because no way could I go from intercept to landing on 360 dV total; I needed 160 for a 350/550km high orbit and probably 300 for a comfortable landing). So what do you do when your 20-ton vessel is juuust a bit short on dV to actually make the landing? Abort? Wait for help? Nope. You send your engineer out the airlock to give it a push. Sorry Linrie, hope you ate your wheaties today. Should only take about ten EVA's. Protip: Send your engineer out during the transfer orbits, rather than waiting until you're about to hit the ground and finding out oops, you ran out of fuel for that last 100 m/s of impact. Likewise, since EVA has so little TWR it's easy to accidentally send your periapsis into a lithobrake if you're not careful. Since I'm using KAS I could actually have Linrie start popping off pieces of my spaceship and reduce the spaceship mass that way, but really Artemis is already about as slimmed down as she can get. The biggest deadweight is her giant battery/solar panel array, which is only like 4 tons. For one, I need those batteries to fuel the engines; it wouldn't add enough dV if I did get rid of them, and they're in the middle of the craft, so I'd have to rip the whole ship apart to get them out.
  19. In stock you can shift-click to select the entire craft and then manually drag it to the floor. I havent seen a button tho.
  20. You can always lose the drop tanks and add a crew cabin and a cargo bay. The dreamchaser is supposed to deliver 7 crew to ISS and a bunch of supplies. That puts you firmly into Kerbin SOI-only territory and might put Mun landings out of your reach. So your ship would be able to deliver supplies to an orbital mun station, as well as an LKO station. Well, you've got what, two tons of plane wrapped under like five tons of fairing? That should give you a hint that things are out of whack. The big issue are the big, swoopy wings, which are perfect for taking off from the runway and traveling long distances, but less good when mounted on the nose of a rocket. The radius of the wings squared gives you a giant pancake nose, which you've already found tends to get ripped off at the slightest provocation. And they're kind of overkill for something whose job is basically to fall out of the sky. Regarding your mission profile, your ship seats one astronaut and has zero docking ports, which means you're going to have a hard time delivering crew and supplies which is the whole point of the ship. Things you did right: your ship has airbrakes and parachutes, which are perfect for a controlled descent whether your craft has wheels or not (it should have wheels too, but I can't tell). Your swoopy wings mean your center of lift is behind your center of mass even when your fuel tanks are empty, which means you'll have a controlled descent all the way down. You have SAS, a battery, a solar panel, and monoprop fuel (I assume that means you have RCS thrusters and they're balanced around COM, since you look like you know what you're doing in space). That means that if you do have a docking port that I can't see (maybe radially on the belly?) you'll have the easiest time possible docking. Well done. Things you could do to fix: Notice on my ship I have tiny, tiny wings around COM, and then big, angled tail fins to provide lots of drag and control. My ship fits under almost the tiniest fairing possible, although you could make the fins angle inwards instead of outwards and save a bit of space, but that's not how the actual Dreamcatcher does it. Add a mk1 crew cabin, a docking port and a cargo mod and you'll be able to accomplish your crew-and-resupply missions, and you should still have tons of dV for LKO. One advantange the mk2 form factor offers is actually that I've got fuel tanks on both ends of the craft, which means COM basically doesn't move around too much when the tanks are empty vs full. This compares favorably to having your CoL behind the engines, which does work but means you have more wing than you need. Anyway, it was actually faster for me to just build a craft to show you than it was for me to type all that and you to read it. Hope that helps!
  21. Y4 D13, we got 49 experiments turned in for 2747 science, we got Early Mission Prestige +2 for Arhat and Bob plus an Ike sample, we got 3/5 Duna samples For Science! and we rescued Peggy Kerman to the surface of Kerbin from Ike Orbit. Next trip I'll have to bring her station hub and some polar samples to Catch em All, but that's probably a couple years off. And there was a minimum of regurgitated pizza. Worth noting is that Arhat continued to have a death grip on his screwdriver, so I'll need to send another one (or two, or three) up with SLV-8. The doctors assure everyone that if amputation must occur, it will occur on the drill end of the fusion and not the hand end of the fusion.
  22. Still Y4 D13, we got 49 experiments turned in for 2747 science, we got Early Mission Prestige +2 for Arhat and Bob plus an Ike sample, we got 3/5 Duna samples For Science! and we rescued Peggy Kerman to the surface of Kerbin from Ike Orbit. Next trip I'll have to bring her station hub and some polar samples to Catch em All, but that's probably a couple years off. And there was a minimum of regurgitated pizza. Worth noting is that Arhat continued to have a death grip on his screwdriver, so I'll need to send another one (or two, or three) up with SLV-8. The doctors assure everyone that if amputation must occur, it will occur on the drill end of the fusion and not the hand end of the fusion.
  23. The Artemis crew get their first fresh, hot pizza delivery in 30 months. In 30 minutes or less! This delivery boy has had his ship upgraded from four whiplash, two hemicuda engines to two whiplash, two RAPTOR engines. The tech base is a little steeper, but the overall performance of the craft benefits quite a bit. I think it's got a little bit more TWR and a little bit less delta-V on its orbital push, but I think I'm making the docking with about the same total delta-V remaining. Next the Artemis crew, including the rescuee, will all pile into the pizza boy's ship for delivery back to KSP. Also in 30 minutes or less, but they are packing extra vomit bags just in case. Maybe pizza BEFORE deorbiting wasn't such a great idea.
  24. I briefly considered an aerobrake capture for Artemis at Kerbin, but because Artemis has a completely unprotected, massive lithium tank in the middle of the ship with a skin max temp of 1100, I knew from experience with bringing Prospector home from the Mun that even a tiny aerobrake would be flirting with disaster. And we wanted exactly zero disasters on our triumphant return. So a munar G-brake for 300 dV, followed by a LKO G-Brake for 800 dV, then another munar g-brake for 200 dV that also switched our orbit to line up with everything else in LKO (as a 90-degree launch from KSP would give), then a final G-Brake at LKO for 800, and finally a rendesvous burn to dock with Prospector 7 for about 200. Maybe not the most efficient braking maneuver ever performed, but it did get me into precisely the orbit I wanted, and we should have enough dV left to land SLV-7 and Artemis on Minmus after dropping our passengers and soil samples For Science!
  25. If adding more air intakes and manually switching to wet mode doesn't help, try adding more reaction wheels. Also make sure your fuel is feeding evenly from both sides of your craft. If you launch the craft, and then recover and edit it, symmetry defaults to off and that can mess your craft up in a variety of subtle ways. If you want to post a craft file on kerbalx I'd be happy to take a look.
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