PT

Kredits

Random people randomly talking about it in random online game so I randomly decided to google out what KSP stands for to get a grip on context. Fast forward few years and here I am.

Continuing from yesterday.... I grabbed a thing... ..reentered that thing... ... and finally splashed this thing... Gotta work on those grabbing skills as thrust had to be limited to 30% for differential throttling to keep up with torque on such stubby ship. In meantime on Aptur... ...certain cargo has been launched vertically up because MJ decided 20km orbit does not require any smart piloting... ...after some coasting... ...a planet has been encountered... ... and used to ablate spare solar panels ... ... due to fragile nature of cargo and suspicious atmospheric readings a mixed mode landing was employed ... ... after which I lost contact due movement of heavenly bodies and lack of relay capabilities in budget satellite orbiting Serran ... ... a seemingly simple solution has been chosen to send biggest relay antenna I can ... ... a quartet of parasite relays has been deployed in orbit resonant 5 to 4 to polar target orbit... ... while parasites were circularizing in turns, motherdrone switched to perpendicular, and much higher, orbit for long range transfer ... ... a small issue with timing has occurred as decoupler blast disturbed parasite relays orbits, but redundant connection has been secured ... ... and provided better connection to my solar orbiter... ... after which I noticed I sent relays to wrong planet! At least movement of heavenly bodies gave me temporary weak connection to lander ... ... so I returned to my almost failed lander to finally click a button ... ... which unpacked my ground breaking lander! It was made out of science, and it did a lot of science.

YARLY! However, you need to accept contract first. So no preview of chocolate until purchase. As my current carrer os based on ISRU and EL, Engineers are most wanted chockos currently You can make EVA transfer much easier if you target your craft (just double click it). You'll get relative velocity and approach vector displayed on NavBall, just like with docking.

Today I accidentally learned you can preview class and vessel of rescue Kerb: My spysat network have identified what wreck Tralo Kerman is orbiting in. Considering it is Kerb+Part recovery mission this intel will be of noticeable use... after I check what kind of pod it is in VAB, that is. So I quickly designed basic grabbing and deorbiting unit, and built it in my Aptur Space Yard. Mr Grabby 1 was quickly followed by revision 1b which revolutionized design by adding antennas. After discarding ascent booster and switch to Terriers for transfer... ... a hidden retrograde antenna has been deployed! As Mr Grabby coasts to toward Mun, I decided to find out better spot for my mining operation by actually scanning Aptur... ...and discovered that I simple have been lucky with my landing spot. I also suffer from too much resource types. Gotta mod a mod to remove unused ones, having two types of metal ore with different veins is not helping my efforts... RETURN OF SPACE DONGLE! Sadly, Biome with most ISRU ore is different from one with Metal Ore for EL parts. I lucked out by landing on border of those biomes. Once some mapping has been done I deployed a rover to find some nice flat spot with decent ore. Flatness being more important than ore quantity. Oh my. I gotta limit thrust on jump engines... I also gotta add vertical control point, eyeballing landing after jumping too high (and far) with faulty instruments is hard! But at 0.1g even I could make it Then I used some monoprop to repeatedly flip it back on wheels until I figured out wheel settings that works in low-g. Turns out secret is FWD and high traction control. Space Pug features ore sniffer and antennas, mounted on big battery with solar roof coupled with overpowered RCS in case of emergency. Simple and sturdy. AND WORKING EARS/EYLIDS COMBO! Twice as much battery than monoprop, and that's a LOT of monoprop! A buttload of monoprop, you could say. Off to find flatter pastures, thats gonna take a while!

It wörks! Took few weeks to build and refuel. There were some issues with center of mass and ground slope... So rapid departure was in order. In meantime... 82 minute burn, followed by 52 minute course correction. I'm gonna let MJ take care of it while I bake a cake...

I landed on moon... ..launching from another moon! Current goals: get some credits as unlocking science parts bankrupted me again build random stuff to finish backlog of missions that block me from getting new ones

I gave up on my adventures with space rocks... ... so I sent Boat to gather up Kerbs from all over Sonnah system... ...which made a dent even in 5k of nuclear deltaV so some aerobraking was employed... ...thankfully funds gathered from crew transfer milestones allowed me to refuel... ...and finally deliver all my stranded Kerbs to monstrosity I spent all my funds on... ...once engineers were delivered, my contraption upgraded itself with a mining/smelting module out of parts it carried up to space... ...turned out drills collided with terrain and had to be relocated, but with a horde of engineers it was not much of a problem... ...the problem turned out to be drills. Augers didn't work on asteroid, but ISRU drills mined Metal out of filthy space rocks so I thought the same will be true for planets. Nope. Thankfully I had some spare parts and few spare construction pads... ...after confirming that drill works, Bill swiftly mounted all of them in place... ..which worked perfectly until I ran out of electricity in daytime... ...thankfully it was just an unexpected eclipse... ...but otherwise I got myself self sustainable, and self upgradable, shipyard on a ugly planet with 0.1G at surface. Only limitation is propellant for built ships being limited to Lf/Ox and Lithium. Which simply means I gotta unlock more fancier engines.

I learned how to produce Parts from Metal, which highlighted lack of part production capability in my asteroid base seed... ... so I had to send first shipment of parts to build Part manufacturing capability on site. Currently it is performing 25 minute Ion burn... Predicting high amount of Ion's flying around I started watching DS9. Way too much time later... ...big E class asteroid I found in perfect orbit suddenly got infected with Kraken Syndrome. I think I'll give up on space rocks...

Continuing from where Research Bodies suddenly got me bankrupt... I sent offending drone away. 100 days until it leaves SoI of Sonnah, and 116 to first course correction, so I got plenty of time to gather funds for few more pics before it will begin its dive to low solar orbit. Having in mind my dire monetary status I was forced to return to 1.5 meter parts.... ...with Ion twist. High cost of science parts forced me to limit it to mission parameters and only few cheapest experiments. Its a bit overpowered for its current payload, but my current career has constraint of standardized designs so I had to plan ahead. As circularizing with ions is not the best idea I had to perform cheap upgrade... I gathered enough funds to send crewed seed for asteroid base, I just had to borrow crew from failed starbase. KRAKEN ATTACK! Suddenly my ship just split for no reason, but I had an engineer and a screwdriver... After an hour of hard labor I managed to gather all pieces together. Smelter and ISRU required multi-kerb force. Now I just need to rebuild to workable shape...

A grey blob. With an eye. Took bunch of photos. Discovered some planets. Went bankrupt. Apparently taking photos of new bodies devours some credits, and taking lots of new pics devours a million of them. Off to new, greener, orbits! But first lets align solars to sunlight...got enough sails to sustain engine, but not so much with battery capacity. Great Credit Devourer parked itself at the edge of SoI pending funds for few more photos before heading out to deep space to burn even more credits by taking photos from another SoI's... gotta pump those commercial flights... With mere 2k credits in bank and mission limit long hit there was only one thing to do... Chunk random obsolete drone into random planetary body to finish random old contract! Kaching, +150k.

Not nearly enough if you want to move it. Rock size does not matter much. If you want to move it a lot then tyrany of rocket equation makes you burn most of it. I am tempted to try ion tug, but long burns are waste of dV...

Space dongle. Lucky launch window. Ion Drive slaved to RCS controls. Contact. Everything went according to plan. Mission failed. Liquid fuel, instead of Lf+Ox, tank has been built. ISRU can't provide Ox directly to smelter so smelting can't start. Two failed asteroid missions in a row caused two obsolete labships to go almost dry of science to squeeze out: An early failure which required visit from emergency bat-drone to be usable. And overly creative failure which, despite successful Aptur landing and rover deployment, ended up in a mess because you can't really drive without meaningful gravity...

KIS/KAS and strut yourself to that filthy rock! Claw is horrible structural element and long rocket will greatly compound any CoM/CoT offset. Thats why I went with stubby design with claw in its butt. Due to improvements in thrust occlusion I had to kerbhaul those engines to better spots, which gave me stable wide design (stable with MJ automatic differential thrust, that is). You could have it wihout mods, by delivering bunch of clawed engine pod drones.

Rock. It refused to move. Bob refused to let it refuse. Differential throttle was required. Heat! With some creative screwdriving Bob refused to let it overheat. ISRU consumed three quarters of rock to bring it back. Harvesting space rocks does not work that well in New Horizon. Ugh.

I came back after a year or so. Started little carer in New Horizons and went out to check out changes. After usual low tech struggle I build myself a reliable source of kredits and today I decided to cut costs on it. Turned out what I needed was speed. More of it, to be precise. It turned out that replacing overpowered tank+Mainsail+boosters for even more overpowered Boar+droptanks resulted in cost savings, and it only required removal of redundant emergency systems from cargo :]

Or just use equal and opposite force and worry not.

Today I forgot to take rover with me before igniting main engines, damaged nuclear reactor cores during warp, found out that living space can't be fully connected and docking ports I used have malfunctioning hatch and learned that both MJ and KER have no clue how to correctly calculate TwR for my beast thus screwing up burn times, forgot to bring additional scientists, forgot to refill up KIS container and found out that have I built in Kraken drive in my starship, as there is no way of controlling it I can't integrate engine modules with main fuselage (construction docking ports versus slightly clipped small octo grid...). Not bad for prototype first voyage.

How evil of you to make me less proud of my creation ';..;'

Launched cargo without tug, it reminded my all reasons why I kept sending new tug with each delivery... ... left cyclotron at 0m/s relative while low-g lander slowly and carefully docked itself, phantom forces accelerated it away, luckily my tugs are more than capable of chasing runaway cargo... ...of course this event took sizable bite out of their monoprop, but bow section of hive have 4x1200 supply of juice for worker drones Multi-year life support? ☑ Swarm of drones? ☑ Over 6k delta-V with full cargo? ☑ TWR > 0.2? ☑ Part Count < 200? ☑ (excluding drones and cargo hidden in Hangar) Reusable science lander? ☑ Rover? ☐ Station-Science modules? ☐ (3/4) Station-Science Experiments? ☐ bunch of orbital science stuff? ☐

Mounted some stuff to this big thing and designed some landers, rovers and sats to fit in cargo bay. Gotta start reusing those tugs instead of sending new ones...

From Collaboration Space Station, but beer can idea is much older (I think I saw usage of rescalled antennae as straw).

Built a thing!

Zapped laser at asteroid.. FOR SCIENCE! ...found air augmented rocket engine (?!?) while building second generation of pseudo shuttle which apparently needs to be kickstarted to few machs first, had to convince MJ that burning on ascent is exactly what I wanted this time... and then removed 160 parts from my space station, sending tug drone with each module makes docking easier but takes tool on FPS :]

Huge mass => need high delta V. Thrust will mostly affect time. With one huge engine cluster you are prone to toppling, and if you are going on low thrust big engine is just waste of mass. Consider something like this: Grab, decouple, grab decouple... And you have four engines on four side of that rock. Then you dock fifth piece to serve as "control from here". The wider the design, the easier it is to balance thrust. You can easily scale it to bigger tanks with Vector engines. I got bunch of contracts for class C rocks, so stay tuned for my contraptions