BadOaks

Getting back into KSP with a new JNSQ/Kerbalism career and spent most of today doing suborbital hops. The early-game is normally a bit of a grind but Kerbalism combined with JNSQ's 6 km/s to reach orbit meant I had to scrounge for every last bit of science. The Z-2 (Zenith 2-5) and Z-3 (Zenith 6-10) have been my space program's major workhorses so far. I was finally able to unlock bigger tanks after grinding barometer data. Val flying on Zenith 11 became the first pilot to reach orbit. After that I started unlocking probe parts, and the AKPOS 1's MITE experiment turned out to be a major science windfall. I'm now looking at doing some unmanned munar missions using the Z-4 as a launch vehicle.

That sounds really frustrating. The only thing I can think of is the "insert" key. Is it possible you're pressing that? Or otherwise turning off staging mode (the staging icons go away)?

I built the artificial gravity station MOS Bastille to serve as a science outpost around Moho. Transfer vehicle Sunbeam towed the Bastille out of LKO over to Minmus, where the mining vessel Rockhound is now running trips to Minmus' surface in order to fuel up the Sunbeam. If all goes well, the mission should depart for Moho in about two weeks.

KDSS Sunbeam returned home from a two year mission in which Mundon and Thompsey Kerman became the first kerbals to land on Eve. An orbital shuttle carried the mission's six crew, headed by Commander Valentina Kerman, down to the surface. Financing the mission has left my space program a bit short on funds, so I'll be sending up a fresh crew to depart for Moho in a month for some contract work. As the most capable ship in my fleet, I'm going to be keeping the Sunbeam pretty busy for the foreseeable future. It was expensive to build, and its sister ship will be even more so.

I've been trying to improve the centrifuge designs I use for artificial gravity on long missions. My old designs have two motorized rotors - one connected to the habitat arm and a counter-rotor with fuel tanks mounted on pistons. Because both rotors were exerting a torque on the space craft, I had to fiddle with the pistons and tanks to try to get the moment of inertia of the counter rotor to be calibrated to that of the habitat arm according to the relative rpm's of each rotor and ensure both rotors reached their maximum rpm in the same amount of time. If the system is off by a little bit, there would be net torque on the vessel every time it came out of time warp. Even with extensive tweaking and balancing, there's still a small twitch. The KDSS Morning (IPCV 320) used this system: The new design that I'm working on uses one motorized rotor between the habitat arm and the counter rotor, and an *un*motorized rotor connecting the assembly to the rest of the ship. The benefit is that the free rotor never transmits any torque to the rest of the vessel. I built the IPCV 330 design around this type of centrifuge, which seems to work pretty well: Today I was trying to improve on it by making the counter rotating mass an internal flywheel rather than using external tanks which would have to be docked. The flywheel would have a smaller moment of inertia and so would have to rotate faster, but this wouldn't be as much of a problem (that is, alarming) because it would be contained within the structure of the ship. Weirdly, I noticed that the habitat arm of the new design would slowly speed up its rotation. In the above picture, the rpm of the rotor on the left was a steady 39.9 and the rotor on the right increased by 0.1 rpm every few seconds (I reverted after it reached 6 rpm, but it wasn't slowing down). Since no torque was being applied to the rest of the vessel, this was violating conservation of momentum. The major difference between this one and the IPCV 330's centrifuge is that the attachment order goes Ship -> Habitat Arm -> Counter Rotor, whereas for the IPCV 330 the order is Ship -> Counter Rotor -> Habitat Arm. WHAT I FOUND: After some testing, the best predictor of stable RPM seems to be that the two rotors should have similar RPM values when running - that is, the attachment order should be Ship -> small inertial moment -> big inertial moment. If the sections are reversed, you'd see the RPM of the rotor connecting the ship to the habitat arm slowly increase indefinitely while the RPM of the other rotor remains steady.

I took a break from the complexity of manned missions and just did a simple, no-frills comsat to Moho using an old design with minor modifications. It was nice getting something done in less than an hour.

Ironic that the comm dish is the only thing not inside the radome Seriously though, awesome design! It looks beautiful.

Orbital shuttle piloted by Hayney Kerman approaching the interplanetary crew vehicle KDSS Morning, which has spent the last 6 years in space on missions to Eve and Moho. The Morning's 5 crew members returned to Kerbin for some well deserved rest.

I wrapped up my mission to Eve today. Mundon and Thompsy planted a flag at the landing site and posed for a few pictures with their vehicles. They then set about configuring the ascent vehicle for launch. First the ladder segment attached to the EAV's fairing was jettisoned, then the ISRU equipment panels were as well. With a clean aerodynamic profile, the EAV is now ready for launch. Launch. Retract gears and align to vertical. At 140 m/s reduce thrust to 70%. Roll to align vehicle with mothership's orbital plane. Passing 8,000 meters. Perform 5° gravity turn pitch maneuver and begin zero-lift trajectory. Increase to full thrust in preparation for stage separation. Stage separation. Passing 34,000 meters at 955 m/s. Booster separation. Without boosters the upper stage has relatively low acceleration, allowing the ascent vehicle's trajectory to flatten as it nears the top of the atmosphere. Passing 90,000 meters at 1430 m/s. The EAV is now in space, but well short of orbital velocity. Stage separation The orbital stage finished its insertion burn at an altitude of 124,000 meters and 3,150 m/s. The orbit plane was off by a little bit, but that's okay because I'd given the EAV a healthy margin of dV in case something went wrong. Mundon and Thompsy have 900 m/s left to make a rendezvous. I was able to get a rendezvous at the ascending node before the EAV had completed its first orbit.150 m/s intercept burn and 650 m/s to match velocities. Mundon and Thompsy transferred to the Sunbeam's airlock. The Sunbeam used thrusters to pull away from the EAV's orbital stage, then raised its orbit to 150 km where it will wait for the next transfer window to Kerbin. I'm really, really enjoying this career so far, as it's given me the opportunity to progress farther than I have in the past to the point that things like manned Eve missions are possible. I'm excited for when I finally get to the Jool system. Gratuitously large album:

If you go into the save folder there should be backup persistent saves named something like: zKACBACKUP20200619195021-persistent, with both .loadmeta and .sfs types. Pick the most recent pair and rename them to persistent.loadmeta and persistent.sfs, that should hopefully recover your save. I fail at reading comprehension and missed that you were on console, sorry.

Third and final planned flight of my Eve landing mission. Mundon flew out to get surface reports for a couple of biomes the earlier expeditions had missed, one of which I didn't even know was nearby. On the previous flight, I noticed the unique Olympus biome was only 70 km away from the landing site, so I flew over to pay a visit. I'd always wondered but never tested how well the ASEV would handle a water landing, so I decided to try it on the way back. The rotors are even low enough that it can propel itself at a blistering 13 m/s. The ASEV might actually be water craft! Note to self - "the ASEV is not a water craft." After an embarrassing attempt to turn around, I save-scummed and tried to take off vertically. Weirdly, the rotors seemed to be having some sort of friction losses after being submerged. At full power it barely took off, and in horizontal flight the rotor RPM was less than half what it should have been. The ASEV limped back to the landing site at 50 m/s, but fortunately had enough power to make a controlled landing. Still, that was a weird outcome I wasn't expecting. With surface explorations completed, now Mundon and Thompsy just need to wait for the ISRU systems to finish filling the tanks. At the current rate it should only be a few days.

Mundon completed a survey contract 270 km to the southeast of the landing site today. I turned on Atmospheric Autopilot's cruise feature and spent most of the time listening to music and writing an email, but on the way back I took some screenshots to make a short time lapse of cruise and initial descent.

Steal away! In fact, if you or anyone else is interested I just uploaded it KerbalX: https://kerbalx.com/BadOaks/Airborne-Surface-Exploration-Vehicle-ASEV

Day-one expedition of the first Eve landing. While Thompsy fired up the ISRU equipment to re-fuel the ascent vehicle, I had Mundon climb into the ASEV and begin exploring. I began by doing a low altitude survey of the biomes immediately surrounding the landing site (explodium sea, shallows, lowlands, midlands, highlands, peaks) and then climbed to 20km so the on-board KerbNet scanner could cover a wider area. From there, the ASEV tracked westward across the bay over to a local mountain, then set down on the peak and I took some pictures of Mundon looking dramatic. Mundon then did some biome-hopping, collecting surface reports from Eve's peaks, foothills, and highlands. Here he is picking up a volcanic rock sample. When the sun started getting low enough that shadows were obscuring surface visibility I had the ASEV turn and head back to the ascent vehicle. It was actually very lucky I headed back when I did, as the solar panels were no longer producing enough electricity to run the motors. On reaching the ascent vehicle I had to make a somewhat panicked landing when I realized there was only a few seconds worth of juice left. Once safely on the ground, Mundon collected 54 reports from the ASEV and boarded the EAV to spend the night. In the morning he'll be heading out again to fulfill a survey contract 200 km to the east. Full Album:

No problem, and cheers!

As far as I'm aware, stock KSP's aero model isn't very sophisticated and doesn't simulate phenomena like boundary layers or shock cones that make different wing geometries optimal for different flight regimes. So swing wings would mostly just be aesthetic, with the only effect being to shift the distribution of mass/lift/drag. There is a mod called Ferram's Aerospace Research (FAR) which creates a much more accurate aero model, and I definitely recommend it if you're interested in that sort of thing!

Thanks! Something like that would be awesome. Early on I tried putting some unfolding propeller arms on the ascent vehicle's first stage. Like you, I found that it didn't fly very well, and occasionally developed resonances that violently wobbled it to death . If you get it working make sure to @ me.

After a long time of being too busy to play KSP, I finally got a chance to resume my Eve mission. KDSS Sunbeam arrived in low orbit around Eve in a two-part burn. Mundon and Thompsey Kerman piled into the lander/ascent vehicle and deorbited. The timing of this shot was completely accidental but I love it! EDL went pretty well. I got lucky in coming down in a coastal area... lots of biomes nearby and it didn't land in the water. The weird looking top part of the lander is meant to provide aerodynamic stability until the parachutes can deploy. It jettisons after it's no longer needed. The heat shield decouples once the main chutes reached full deployment, and with the main engines freed I was able to make a soft landing. It's a bit sideways, but oh well. Mundon and Thompsey are now the first Kerbals to land on Eve! I also sent an Airborne Surface Exploration Vehicle (ASEV) to give my kerbals some mobility. The ASEV is a VTOL-capable electric aircraft that can be stowed inside a 3.75m fairing. The transfer stage braked into the atmosphere and a parachute pulled the ASEV clear, allowing its wings to unfold. The ASEV flew about 50 km over to the lander and switched to VTOL/hover mode before setting down. Landing operations complete! Time to start exploring. Mission album:

I finally got some time to play KSP today, and used it to finish preparations for an Eve landing mission. The massive ascent vehicle got sent up and docked with the Sunbeam over the terminator. Since the Sunbeam by itself has a TWR of less than 0.2 g's, I also sent up some Low Kerbin Escape Boosters (LKEBs) to help it take better advantage of the Oberth effect. In the future I'll probably just launch outbound missions from a higher orbit to avoid the hassle. Having piloted the ascent vehicle to orbit, Jebediah and Hayney took the shuttle back down to the desert airfield. I then plotted a transfer trajectory to get the Sunbeam to Eve. The two LKEBs made the burn *much* more bearable, boosting the acceleration from 0.2 g to ~0.6 g for the first few minutes. The Sunbeam made an initial 4 minute burn of 600 m/s, and then 3 hours later came around and did a second 400 m/s burn to reach escape velocity. LKEB separation. Outbound for Eve. Mission album:

But you did it with a cool looking lander, so there's that! How long did it take re-fuel? Does have any power sources besides the solar panels?

After making some tweaks, my new shuttle system officially entered service by delivering the crew of the Sunbeam into orbit. I still need to send up the ascent vehicle before the Sunbeam departs, but if all goes well Valentina and Thompsy will be the first Kerbals to set foot on Eve (and return... hopefully). Mission album:

Just curious, you're calling it a Buran but the aft section is much closer to the American shuttle's than the Buran's. Is there a reason for that? Regardless, awesome work!

Thank you!

Did some flight testing of an air-launched two stage shuttle system. Also got the first pair of radial tanks docked to the DSS Sunbeam. Each tank has it's own expendable docking tug. After I've made sure that both docking ports have a good connection, the tug detaches and de-orbits itself.

I made some progress on constructing the Sunbeam, a transfer vehicle that will be operating missions to Eve, and possibly Moho. It looks a little awkward right now because the radial tanks haven't been attached yet. The IPCV 330 design it's built from includes a centrifuge arm, but since the Sunbeam won't need to go any further than Kerbin's orbit I'm saving that for the next few ships.