Ultimate Steve

Speaking of, what's the plan if the rover dies? And how did Apollo manage this? For contingency you would have to remain within walking distance on one tank of oxygen (or whatever else the limiting factor is on those suits) anyway. Seems like you would want two self driving rovers or a simple backup apollo style rover strapped to the main rover.

I'm reading "A future Starship" as, like, a Starship, the only similarity to Starship-Superheavy being the name. To me this doesn't read like "We are going to send Starship to colonize Alpha Centauri", instead reading like "If everything goes well, eventually we might be able to go interstellar with a different design ." Which is still more than a little crazy, but I kind of admire that they don't plan on stopping at Starship. I've said it before and I'll say it again. They could have stopped at Falcon 9 and made bank and be remembered as heroes. Instead they are working on a Mars colonization rocket. That sounded almost as crazy back in 2016 when they announced it. Granted, they aren't gonna get there on chemical fuels, so unless Musk has a stealth fusion startup we don't know about yet...

I'm hoping for interstellar to offer some new worlds with new navigational, piloting, and design challenges. Eve used to be the final boss of KSP, with Eve, Tylo, and Moho perfectly representing the design, piloting, and navigation triad, but after enough times going there and back it kinda doesn't feel that challenging any more. I forget what it was called, but I'm looking forwards to that new super Tylo they have teased, and that binary system. I am a little bit worried that all the sci-fi technology they are going to add may remove a lot of what would have been a challenge, but inevitably I'll fall back into going for the low mass records and it won't be mass optimal to use any of the super heavy advanced engines. The grand tour record in KSP 1 is under 8 tons at this point, and there's been talk of pushing it low enough that we might not even need the Rapier any more. Speaking of which, when KSP 2 gets stable and polished enough for the low mass leaderboards to take off, the meta is going to be interesting. The ion engine was nerfed a LOT in KSP 2, you can't really use it to land on most of the small bodies like you could in KSP 1. Without a high tech lightweight replacement, we're going to see a lot of ultralight liquid fuel craft with opportunities for per body customization (although without EVA construction, this is docking port constrained), which should hopefully lead to a more interesting design than "Use the same ion lander for everything except Duna, Laythe, Tylo, and Eve."

Some thoughts. Booster: I think Exoscientist is referring to the downcomer crushing issues they were having a few years back? It is possible that the tail end of the boostback burn produced high enough acceleration to crush something and cause a leak or loss of pressure. It was more or less confirmed that IFT2 Booster RUD was caused by Raptor LOX starvation. There was one Raptor ignition failure on boostback, which we don't have the specifics behind, but was probably a Raptor issue. It looks like they were planning on starting all 13 for landing, which is bonkers, but only 3 ever lit up I think? Going from memory. My read on this is that there was a grid fin control issue (either software or hardware) that caused extreme oscillations leading to bad startup conditions for Raptor. Neither of those hypotheses are Raptor's fault, though. It is possible that Raptor doesn't play nice with impinging transonic airflow. That's the only "Raptor's fault" scenario I can come up with. Ship: Upper stage was near constantly venting/RCSing. Two possibilities, one, it was trying to dump as much lox as possible, two, something wonky was going on with controls. I am guessing that they were experiencing severe control issues immediately following SECO. The orientation never seemed to stabilize, not for payload door stuff, or maybe the engine stuff, and definitely not entry. We didn't see what Starship was doing when it was supposed to be firing its engine, but being in an uncontrolled spin is probably on the list of "Do not fire the engine" criteria and is a possible reason why that burn was skipped. Interestingly enough we see no RCS whatsoever after the camera feed was recovered for re entry. This could be because they don't want to fire hot oxygen into the airstream or something, but it is also possible that the main tank was fully depressurized at that stage - maybe there was a leak (would explain control issues if said leak produced torque), or maybe they used up so much trying to steer that the main tank pressure dropped to zero. I'm not completely sure that Starships's RCS is just vents but that's what I seem to recall it being. But in any case, something caused them to not have attitude control at some point in the coast, possibly the entire coast. I cannot imagine that it is normal to enter the atmosphere in a tumble. I am very delightfully surprised that they managed to get live video of the plasma regime! Also no explicit confirmation of successful payload door closing, there was a twang and vibration on the door then the camera cut away for the rest of the flight.

Not necessarily tile loss, the thing appeared to enter the atmosphere in a tumble. There's been some speculation that there was minimal to no control after SECO, that roll may have been coincidental and not commanded, plasma on the silver side is not normal.

Engine relight demo has been skipped.

Prop transfer demo in a minute or two. Engine relight in 15-20. Splashdown in 40.

Looks to be some sort of oscillation on SH, possibly propellant slosh plus aero stuff that the computer didn't know how to deal with. Having taken two intro controls classes, that stuff is daunting. But ORBIT! Well... Not going into that debate, so NOMINAL SECO!

Under 2 minutes. Here we go...

T-5 minutes!

Boats, 32 minute delay. More boats, 8 minute delay

Launch targeted for half an hour into the window, currently in just over an hour from now. Probably gonna be pretty foggy.

Flight 1 had problems. Flight 3 they are trying hard to fix those problems and have individually tested every tile. We will see how it goes for them. Flight 2 they kinda gave up to focus on flight 3 and a LOT of the tiles fell off.

Chapter 55.5 - With All Further Ado (Status Update and Story Recap) Chapter 56 - The Final Countdown

Anyone have a picture of the fake tweet? All I've seen are people referencing it and not what it actually is.

So... Webcast starts at 7:30 (unless I'm blind and that's the launch time). No idea how long the window is but knowing how nerdy they are I wouldn't put it past them to be targeting 7:59:26 as a liftoff time (1:59:26 PM GMT) for maximum Pi day shenanigans. Edit: Never mind, webcast starts at 6:30 CST, I must have originally seen the time from a screenshot of someone in a different time zone.

I might be misunderstanding, but doesn't ICPS already do what this tug would do?

Update, after more closely reading the blog post it appears that a bunch of raptors shut down before one shut down explosively, so I retract my previous comment, although one engine RUD causing a booster RUD even not through an engine cascade is still alarming. People are discussing a few possible causes over on a Discord server. 1. They got "best part is no part" crazy and deleted the heat exchanger and are using pump exhaust directly as pressurant gas. This exhaust, which is partially water, froze and created ice. This wasn't a problem until the flip, which shook everything up and pinned a large chunk of ice against the LOX inlet. The new weld marks on the newest boosters are comically large filters. 2. Air bubbles in the propellant formed during the flip maneuver and caused chaos in the inlet. This isn't a blockage though. 3. Piece of baffle broke off during the flip and fluid hammer event and blocked the filter.

Hmm, filter clogging. If that engine failure cascade was as a result of one engine failure, then they must be far less isolated than I thought they would be. I guess I was wrong about it being one issue affecting multiple engines.

That makes sense! One thing in case you haven't thought of it already. This is a bit of a long shot. Did you happen to send Parkaboy the save file for the Plan Kappa crosover? By the looks of it probably not as by skimming it, it looks like not much was transferred, so it was probably done just by recreating situations. On the off chance that it was a full save file transfer, and you still have access to the DMs, maybe an early version of the save file still exists on whatever hosting site was used to share it?

The pages have returned!!! Have no qualms about remaining in the mission reports section - Voyage wasn't even trying to be a mission report for the second half and nobody has seemed to notice yet! I'm curious to know how the Maru set and the Humblebee escaped the hard drive before its untimely destruction!

Man, we all loved this universe so much that we're collectively resurrecting it! The uniform mods, the planet pack, and now all the craft files... I might take a stab at a few of those if they are needed. Welcome back, @Mister Dilsby! I still remember checking this story almost hourly for updates back in the day. I'll have to go back through it and reread the whole thing when I have time!

More on topic, Kimbal posted his view of the 2014 F9R Dev failure, gives a bit more context than the last few seconds of drone footage we had previously.

I think I'm missing something. Granted I'm not too great at looking at art much deeper than surface level right away, but could you explain what you find so objectionable? My understanding is: Each stainless steel model of the Moon is either a phase as seen from Earth, a phase as seen from somewhere in space, or an eclipse Each model is associated with an important person from history Each model has a larger version that's staying on Earth with a gemstone to mark the landing site Each model also has an NFT associated with it Perhaps I'm missing some context, but the last bullet point is the only one I have any particular objection to.

Not entirely sure what metal that is, but perhaps the idea was to make something that could survive a medium velocity crash?