Bornholio

Venus she's easy! or maybe not. She's hot, and has great tracts of land. Not that its a high pressure arrangement to sample her wonderful science. It will take more time to float to her surface than to do three full moon missions. Playing a Career mode game (Hard setting except for load/save allowed) using RSS as my baseline mod. This is a 1.2.2 game so I’m using SMURFF, SpaceY and other mods to get to an acceptable power to weight ratio for launches, Using tweakscale and procedural fairings, SXTcontinued and near future mods for extended tech tree parts, community tech tree and SETI for an unmanned first push, TACLS for life support and I'm full enforcing a cleaned up orbit ( If i have to delete space junk it costs me 100k funds) and use Stage Recovery to get funds back (Set 7k Burnup Speed and 7-14m/s Landing, otherwise default) I tested various re-entries to make sure the 7k Re-entry speed was actually survivable for my designs. SCANsat and CactEye pad out the game but I’m using Comnet with only KSC ground station instead of RemoteTech for communications. Um oh and 104 mods in my CKAN installed list total... I have Saturn Second stage Nuclear and Timberwind nuclear engines in custom modded items, generally don't use them, specifically only on missions leaving from above 500km orbit. None of the designs is dangerous outside of the basic nukes in space argument. I use a minimum of 12m from crew compartments as a design requirement for nukes. Some of the more extreme nuclear engine design would warrant more though. If I’m using a Timberwind 450 the engine is likely 30m+ back just because of the amount of tank it needs to be useful. Regardless once i get the SSME available it was all that for main and second stages. I use Solids only if really needed or its a real simple mission. After Luna I started deciding what to do next, mars window was way out and I started to investigate Venus first. Time to set up comms. I probably could have got away without the comnet first but I believe its the first step given how many missions have failed because communications are crap. It also eliminated the need for huge antenna on the landers and probes. COMSATS Venus Comsat Network, sent 4 relays in an array planned aero-braking to drop dV, middle of aero-brake maneuver, deflated heat shield, and ejected compacted relay sats, barely staying out of atmosphere, each sat had barely enough maneuver 680m/s to get circular in a reasonable Eq. orbit. in trying to switch craft during the near disaster, got locked onto the structural frame that the relay sats coupled to during transit, (just some pipe sections a de-orbit motor and small probecore, mechjeb, antenna and batteries, one small solar panel). nothing burned up, very close but high drag really slowed it down fast. followed to ground, it litho-braked with the sacrifice of one of the spent couplers and I got my first Venusian data (telemetry & temperature). The Comsats got me a few more experiments and squarish 1200km orbit network (Intended to be 3000km). SCANSATS Scansat probes went out next, didn't have SAR yet. Radar altimetry, Biome scanner and Survey scanners along with High orbit and Low Orbit Science Sats, discovered that venusian day is longer than its year! Very long scan time, skipped two useful transfer windows. As the last of my Apollo moon missions finished scienceing the crap out of the moon I sent a second science/Scansat wave. SAR high altitude, recon and Survey detail sats along with my missing space science. Took a while to get all the gravity scans. Kerbal Alarm Clock estimates took front stage. My first comsats & scansats went to mars during this time so it was hectic. Descent to the surface! Originally I had intended to ignore Venus landings unless the were historical missions from RSS Historical missions pack. However the ease of landing space junk on the surface made me prioritize it given the shorter transfer and delay times for manned missions and sample return. Venera Missions, first two missions sent using my best guesses and did not include all the instruments since I did not have all at this point, using DMagic's instruments also. Midlands for the win. Stopped using the Inflatable shield because it was to hard to control drag, and it flipped on my first mission, lucky that a couple of solar panels was all that was lost. Landers overbuilt soviet style. Found out parachutes won't deploy at 12m/s in 70atm. drogue shoots in pre-deploy would not stop spinning, but full deploy brought the landers down straight. Any lifting surface is detrimental to landing except maybe airbrakes/gridfins. Reality is that they probably melted on the way down since they didn't include temperature control of any kind. past initial re-entry anything that is dropped will make it to surface probably with a safe speed (kinda 12m/s seems like max on higher terrain). Major Probe Volley! After re-design of the probes, left me with R2D2 looking canisters filled with science I tried sending two for testing. Mainly finding more accurate landing position. The agonizing wait during the drop! don't like x4 physical landings regardless of speed, read a book, made some tea. Determined that below 50k altitude ASL engines are indeed totally useless. Determined total batteries i could get away with. Solar is great assuming they survive re-rentry heat. Next eight came in as a docked cluster. Horrible experience with all eight lagging my computer. They consisted of unmanned landers, transmit only, everything possible to fully transmit, all biomes. Still very slow descent, probes hit 11m/2 without drogues, tiny landing gear, set of small airbrakes. Temperature was not an issue, though activated thermal panels cooled the pods. Even at 4xphysical time warp the descent was horribly long, cheated gravity to x10 for the 4th and later probes just to lessen the real time spent on the mission, took over 4 real hours to get all biomes sampled. Noticed during the first and second mission that engines and RCS became useless for anything except re-entry phase, determined 300-800 m/s of retro and 40-50 RCS got a good accurate landing, both mechjeb and trajectories projected over shot landings. Rovers might be faster than planes on venus. Trajectories as usual seemed more accurate. Sample return! Attempt one consisted of a real simple pod, stack of ascent rockets, stack of batteries and eight ducted fans. ran out of batteries at 20km, drag was to high for the system to get up. Second try replaced most of the batteries with capacitors and almost made it. The ducted fans didn't have enough thrust to get me above the point I needed for thrust on my bottom stage (4xlarge Ullage motors with flat ISP). floated back down. Third try, nukes, capacitors in drop pods, more ducted fans (too many). the ducted fans started crashing the computer with some bad interaction of mechjeb's dV calculation. Think it had something to do with staged capacitors, the ducted fans and some kind of circular calculation. After 12 program restarts including one full on computer freeze I gave up on the ducted fans. I think it can work. Fourth try, Balloons! Used the HL inflatable parachute. Made it too small. I didn't see the dirigible icon in VAB so I undersized the balloon and it wasn't enough to get me up to 50km. Also discovered the kraken hates unbalanced balloon lifted craft, spinning it until my probe core sped off at Sol escape velocity. Try Five. Bigger balloon, used RoverDude's control pod. was great but in dropping from the balloon frame I clipped a tank and blew up. Try Six. made it to orbit. Barely 165x147km Orbit and forgot a docking port. Using a Timberwind 45 design basis Nuclear rocket for everything except initial separation and orientation. Tumbled a lot, need cleaner separation and deploy-able control surfaces. Spinning and very slow ascent to be safe enough. Agonizing pain of slowly changing inflation of the balloon as the velocity dropped below 10m/s. Going above 30 resulted in explosive spin (actually five iterations of this design blew up on ascent) because I got impatient and inflated too fast. Try Seven. Changed balloon “Cirrus” real lift variant, started including life support (TACL) and more support in general. (return vehicle prepositioned in 350x350km EQ orbit). Lift vehicles started passing 500k for the missions, plus one 180k refueling mission in my planetary band parking orbit. Determined need for 140+ days on orbit life support and ~100days transit (3500m/s dV transit + 3000dv to bring it into parking orbit for re-use). So generally needing 13k dV for fast missions. Total life support of near a year. Loaded Solyent Green/Red life support mod for TACL. Tested 5 iterations most problems were hard to control on drop, re-entry. Had one burn up too bad for use, two had hard landings as they came in at an angle and fell over. Try eight. After a successful orbit and rendezvous and realizing my rcs balance and SAS sucked on the final manned return pod, removed all but 5days LS from pod. Pod is located inside a set of cargo-bay modules, Three cooling stages are included, larger amount of RCS. Has about 1200dV to spare for any orbital maneuvers. First unmanned test, drop from balloon at 0.35atm, drop first stage tanks, drop second stage tanks, drop third on way to circ burn, mechjeb ascent.... takes me in 180deg counter orbit. 14kdv to get plane change. /sigh Second test I get to balloon separation and drop, launch and start up, run into balloon and explode. Load and try again, manually pilot, then beginning the ascent guidance to nice clean 350k orbit. Try Nine. new design includes sepatron to get balloon spun away from vertical. Full flight plan unmanned test including return using a large nuke powered 5m transit bus. Optimized the balloon to get a stable point of 100m on earth, gave me >1atm on venus lift final so ascent using my normal motors is possible, Used timberwind 45 again as ascent motor and staged the tanks on layered side pods. Transit bus includes LS reprocessing, cargo bay with supplies and excess life support equipment space for 3 crew (Intended for one man missions) that includes an earth orbit return pod. Is 10tons of Fairing excessive? 750k funds to orbit, a refueling and off it went. Mission went great, max inflated to balloon from ground level, it goes supersonic immediately and starts climbing fast (150m/s peak), drop the science and landing gear stage just as take off happens. Nice stable verticle ascent with a little wobble. Fins might help be they are hard to include. Ballon shot clear and spun off to the side, ascent arced nicely past it and almost all my spare dV went unused. Docking went a little rough, not sure if its the Covered Jr. docking ports I used. So now I have an extra emergency return vehicle in orbit. 5million Funds well spent. Time for Real Manned Mission(tm). Manned (Womaned) Mission! Valentina did the first mission solo 144days of waiting, 96d+102d transit, 5 seconds of EVA (hot hot hot), and many minutes of up and down above venus. Now for 7 more times, all in transit, Valentina sits in the abort return vessel. A spare lander is coming along also. Rescue mission at worst case or if I miss a biome target. Best case 1.2m worth of orbiting space junk. Thought about exploring using a rover or folding aircraft, but its way to slow unless I’m right on a boundary even then its a serious mission to get one and also have the balloon launched rocket in the same place. I kinda doubt i could even get close enough for a rescue mission to actually work. Should have positioned a grapple rover to avoid to EVA problems (fire clad space suits). Now on to more missions, to places like the canyons (looked kinda dunish to me) as harley kerman plants his flag...too hot, oh well maybe just the EVA report. I wonder why he had that red bar over him during his EVA. I think I heard him swear at the ground control. Glad I installed chatterer also glad I didn't waste weight on the ladders. Kerbals must be highly compressible mushrooms! Manned mission ascents on venus involved, SAS set to radial out, gridfins retracted, set balloon inflation to 100%, drop landing stage and speed off into the sky. Final peak ascent speed 192.5m/s at 12-15km. Crossed 50km at 150m/s and dropping rapidly. oscillated at 0.80-0.63atm ~55-56km. Set mechjeb for ascent 350km -180deg Inclination (because 0=180deg on Venus for no apparent reason), Ascent path numbers [60km, 100m/s, 250km, 1deg, 35%] Let go of balloon, fire engines, active autopilot. Orbit 350x349km with 1600-1800m/s maneuver fuel, meet up with transit bus at 300km orbit. Off equator I had the bus maneuver a bit for plane changes. In those cases I had left it in a higher 500km orbit and it performed most of the plane maneuvers. Venus Rotates so slow that I didn't ever spend more than 500m/s to get co-planar even considering the lack of control over launch window. Only needed 100-300m/s to compensate for any bad timing in the Hohmann transfers. That said I’m pretty sloppy with rendezvous maneuvers. Really want RP-0 1.2.2 now, need to try this again. (Am i a masochist?)

Three easy ways Console-->cheats--->[o] Biomes Visible SCANSat, scan the planets, use results to view biomes Best way but most effort \Kerbal Space Program\GameData\RSS-Textures\PluginData\ Biome maps as mentioned above are flipped. Lastly, you can use Mechjeb-->Landing-->Pick landing spot this will let you hover over various places viewing the biome at that spot. using [x] Science mod will give you nice searchable lists of the biomes and tabulate what you have collected for each science result.

Right now the SR system looks for parts and has ablator as one value so maybe your idea would work. Like a lot of things in the game if someone is "cheating" they can take advantage of the system. The user really is the one who should tune the DRMaxVel since they may have re-entry heating turned up, a heating mod, modded thermal parts. Like you say proper placement of the heat shield and aero can make a big difference also. Without too much analysis the SR system can only assume the user built the craft in a legal way and didn't tuck a heat shield inside the tank, but even this can just represent adding mass to the tank with a cork/epoxy ablative coating. What that leads to is his comment to me. " As always, if it's something you truly care about recovering, do it manually." For first missions on my rockets, save at launchpad and follow spent stages into the surface. Settings are based on the facts of using airbrakes/gridfins, parachutes, properly placed heat shields, good aero, probe cores, rcs, batteries, communications, sometimes landing gear. Once this is done for each recovered stage, ignoring ground level solid boosters since they don't go high enough normally, if the stage is recovered by SR then I accept it. I'm running a career that has a personal requirement of recoverable stages and have set my DRMaxVel to 7000. But it would not be appropriate to do this unless I'm sure they actually survive. The base 2000m/s number is actually a pretty good number all things considered. Shuttle SRB's one of the fastest and highest boosters reach a max speed of 1400m/s and needed significant mass fraction devoted to recovery (Aero, Parachutes(3t), Drogues (.5t), transponders, landing reinforcement, junk removal, gyros, computers, sensors). They are an example of a time when landing velocity should be turned up (23m/s) or better yet add a engine and fuel, probe core, sas, and let SR use it to reduce velocity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Solid_Rocket_Booster

In RSS if you get any planetary moon or Pluto contract it can't be done from earth orbit as is. Max magnification gets zip science on them and so the only way to complete them is send a telescope out farther. I'd assume the same for any scale up and outer planet mods. Obviously whatever gets changed is relevant, not the old system. As a comparison to real life Nasa received the "Make Wide Field Observations of Pluto" mission and used Hubbleye to get these fuzzy images, Cacteye gets about the same quality Then more fuzzy blobs, err moons in 2012! https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/pluto-20100204.html Whats important was the early discovery of the other moons so new horizon could be directed to get other images that would not have even tried to get. and with the time delay we could not have reacted to soon enough to get the craft pointed correctly. Humanity was blessed that New Horizons made it in one piece on no backup comps, low grade hand me down RTG's and 40 AU of signal degradation. Nine years of agonizing wait and one hell of an oh crap night the morning before arrival. Can't wait for the James Webb to get up, no wait to long, no budget to strong...but damn that thing is pretty.

You will never complete Imaging Pluto/Charon and many other moons in RSS unless you magically teleport out the telescope of for some reason have pre-placed the scopes. New horizons had a small window to happen and almost didn't. Sure if poor long suffering Icedown wants to fine tune the contract system for RSS and outer planet mod packs it can work. I think is a waste of effort not "More Hard", more hard is actually running the mission itself. mission timers for these missions would need to be decades in some cases. As it is right now, any mission (RSS) I have not already done ( all major planets) is impossible to complete unless i cheat. And the consequence for failure is - big reputation (Basically reset to near 0) my reputation and a couple hundred k funds. Time allowed for the mission 2.5 years. Maybe Mars (Deimos/Phobos) if the window is close but no Outer Planet Mission is going to hit that even with a good window. Alternatively he can make long deadlines. The gather science from X space/surface are anywhere fro 5-50 years. but at what point is the deadline meaningless and just one more chore for both modder and player. If the Fungeye are to become local system imaging then they also will need decade long timers in certain cases. And its not "oh your to dumb, and picked an impossible one", its relegating the couple of active Telescope missions to the scrap heap for how ever long the acceptance timers are over and over. i have Image Pluto and Image Mimas (moon of Saturn) idling in my mission box, both impossible to finish. Gimme my 295 rep back for missing phobos! stinking 800k worth of cacteye hurled at friggin flyby velocity couldn't make it in time with a decent window. Apologize for the tirade but its stone walled my enjoyment in my current game. I heartily await the update though. This and SCANsat really add an interesting level to the game.

How do I SAR map Venus at a reasonable rate? Three sats up and i got to the 40% range mostly by inclination change. but enough fuel to do more is not happening. I'm going to send one more sat and call it good but before I send it I'm trying to figure out how to get a mapping orbit that works. Venus has a very minimal rotation (1.8m/s) so anything polar I set up does not seem to move. Is this a simple wait out the 243 day Venusian day?

I think It would be best to eliminate time limits on the missions, doesn't seem like they add anything except grief if you can't get a telescope into position in time to complete them. Is this release test-able with RSS and other mods, or should I make a fresh install to test it?

I second Star wasters comment of shallow descent, The shuttle (Max ~3G) did not have nearly the angle of other reentry systems, some of the Rus ones (~5G) have abort profiles of up to 20G! Friggin car crash is tame. I can reentry spent stages at low orbital velocity maybe loosing a minor surface feature pretty sure 100% is OK for RSS. (Darn airbrakes burn off in a jiffy) Reminder that if you are still fuel heavy or still carrying a payload you will retain more momentum and plunge deeper. G forces will be lower and peak heat higher. You can also bleed off 500-1000m/s using a skip, trajectories mod works great for this or in a pinch use Mechjeb landing prediction settings though it seems less accurate (No drag facing corrections). Zond used this and the Shuttle had it as a backup plan. Tweak scale a few small thermal panels and sink them into the offending burny bits can help also.

Careful not to break saves with those changes Wish List: Fine Control input indicator. Smaller size Cacteye body (1.25 and 0.625) Lower max magnifications. Nicer Textures, Mount Point on top of Fungeye for nosecone/sunblocker. Max magnifications higher limit (RSS and other large scale mods need it for contracts on outer planets/moons) even if jumpiness is not solvable., RSS Compats! My thought on why maybe some of us like this mod. Interaction. Unlike other science mods that are just another button mash for collect science in a biome this one requires setup, patience and work to get to the result. if your change to Fungeye makes it just another "Optical telescope" like DMagic's or CA Probes Plus it looses its charm, If its adding the {Science experiment} [Log Visual observations] function and lowering the max magnification, tweak the science I'm all for it. The science from the results is way overpowered unless you are using an extended tech tree and even then the contracts take it over the top assuming they can be completed (ie pluto contracts). One possible purpose for the Fungeye and another possible camera element is improved Kerbnet Access (See CA Probes Plus "Infra-Red Spectrometer" etc for a good example) or maybe SCANsat Integration Even if the mod stays as is I'm really enjoying using it in my RSS career.

Have all SAS and gyros except one turned off / disabled. Make sure RCS is off. Set last gyro control authority lower as you increase magnification. Lower Gyro Sensitivity as you increase mag also. Above 3/4 of the slider in magnification make sure you have {CAPS LOCK} on to reduce input sensitivity. Make sure you don't use target tracking in the higher magnification as its P.I.D. loop is sloppy. Target tracking does work fine at lower magnifications until you need to carefully fine tune the highest magnification. At max a carefully planned tap or two is the most you can use or you shoot off alignment. At this point you should be set to 0%~1% Gyro Sensitivity and 1-3% Authority. At this point you should be able to get anything except the smallest moons and the planet Pluto to focus with a Cacteye and level Wide Field Camera 2. Advice for Asteroids is beyond me. /shrug I only know that all I get is lag when I try.

What if anything should i change the Settings to if I'm using Real solar system. (earth, ie x10 kerbin size 7500+ Orbital velocity). Generally my upper stage is coming back in the ~7k range and my main ascent stage is in the mid 4k range. I've slipped some small heat shields in to see if they make any difference but have not seen any. Need Moar? Either way I've rode stages back into earth at up to 6500m/s with some features burned off if they are faced wrong. then i get a nice clean descent and terminal in the 110-150 range. With a full size heat shield at 0-10% Ablative used I've found no orbital speed I don't survive.

Regardless they all look great, work good in my RSS/StageRecovery career game. Of course real world tank dry masses are lower but the game is balanced for Kerbin and easy dV to orbit so as they are is ok. I noticed and mentioned about the extreme temp rating which is possible but improbable. Hydrox Flame temp is only 3100K, so they could great at protecting something from cryogenic engine blast. /smirk.

I get somewhat better results from higher graphics settings specifically. Textures Set to full, detail to full, resolution full. If i don't do these i get sinking into the launchpad to serious to play in some cases even wrenching launch clamps into odd positions. https://github.com/NathanKell/RealSolarSystem/wiki/FAQ-and-Troubleshooting The troubleshooting also suggests using active texture management, however i'm not sure this is needed. No 1.2.2 version on CKAN anyway. If you use these settings you'll likely need to run using the 3dx11 or open GL command line switches. I got a bit of crash stability from also running MemGraph and setting the buffer to a larger amount 4GB since i have plenty of memory free. If you have the memory to spare this will help and somewhat eliminate stutters that happen from garbage collection.

Same Problem except i'm well inside my comsat network for even basic antenna, makes me want to disable the transmit functions of all the DMagic devices, even if they are successful now i have an unfolded antenna that is causing serious docking problems. Don't want to use it as a transmitter. Simple Fix?

Absolutely love the decouplers! They really help clean separations for stage recovery. Hand making spin separated decoupling systems with stock parts is a bore. Now the only staging mess i have to deal with is chutes.

I have a Sat failing a contract for SCANSat with CatEye Asteroid Camera 1 CactEye Wide Field Camera 1 SCAN Multispectral Sensor SCAN RADAR Altimetry Sensor A couple of DMagic sensors from his science mod and assorted hardware for a complete probe. including a couple GRU-1000 Gyro's Are the Asteroid and Wide field both counting towards the exactly 1 prohibition? Nevermind, Need to Use the FungEye.... and only one of the Asteroid/Wide Field.

in contracts With module: Cact Eye Optics, Count: Exactly 1 What part(s) is needed?

Question of the 1.25m Stack Decoupler (low profile no fuel transfer) vs the TR-18A. Is the weight so high because of the 3400K Temp rating (Made of tungsten)? its 5x the weight of the larger TR-18A. Very nice model for it. Makes me cry in RSS for lost dV. Suppose I should use it as a rocket blast diverter plate between stages with engine on immediately.

This seems to be consistently happening for me on EVA. Mechjeb_noclick in the current input locks each time it happens. 5 rescue/eva in a row had it happen. Had Man-Plan and Orbit Info windows up each time. My problem was having my orbit window over a kerbal and clicking through to the eva button. move window solved problem...

Is this the problem you had, did you resolve it? I've upgraded the runway to try and fix it but only get it to be hidden from some views, tears the gear right off my planes. Cannot land any normal landing roll on it. Gave up and had to resort to vertical take off and landings. hard to do with a hard game running. doing rescue missions to replace the lost pilots... Ran very similar planes on kerbin with no issues at all. Not using RO just RSS and texture pack 2048x1024, Mechjeb, KER, a couple rover part pack mods ectera. Nothing that should modify this

OP did you ever resolve this. Similar later post with no res also...

Poppy-1 Completion says requires altitude >95km, but actually needs PE above 95km. Thank the ghost of Gene Cernan for RCS.