Cavscout74

Funniest moment was when I was trying to get a Voyager-like probe through all of Jool's moon's. I had a NERV stage to do most of the work then just RCS on the probe itself. While approaching Tylo, my daughter's cat decided to take an interest in my space bar, leaving me with just the RCS a few seconds before I was planning on a course correction with the NERV. Instead of a grand probe tour of every moon, I had enough monoprop to capture around Tylo

It is definitely worth a try. Very well done - and challenging - planet pack. Densities are lower due to larger planets, but Kerbin is still 1g/9.8 m/s2. The higher orbital velocities everywhere will throw off your instincts that you pick up playing stock KSP - the rocket that used to take you to Mun orbit & return with dV to spare will now barely make high Kerbin orbit. Duna's gravity is defined in the config files as 0.34g, which matches what an in game seismic sensor displays on the surface, and isn't much different than stock. Primarily just the size & atmosphere changed, with the atmosphere being a closer match to Mars rather than stock Duna. I just get all kinds of weird things going on when I try to land larger craft there, especially when I tried to deploy parachutes. As far as I can tell, my JNSQ Duna is bugged, or maybe some of my parts or something - at least, no one else encountered similar issues back when I was running an active career and asking questions. For added fun, I had modified every cockpit & probe with 1/10 strength reaction wheels, but left the dedicated reaction wheel parts alone, to force me to use RCS for most maneuvering, to give a little added realism. But it meant when something went haywire at low altitude, chances of recovery were about nil.

While my old JNSQ career appears to be lost (after searching two computers & a memory stick), I did still have a sandbox save that I was using to test some craft from that career - specifically after I ran into issues with landing craft on Duna's more realistically thin atmosphere in JNSQ. So out of boredom and wanting to solve that old problem I'd had, I slapped together a few different landers to try. Happily, none of them went haywire like my old lander design did, but there are still some odd things going on - spent fuel tanks floating with me after staging despite thrusting at ~1g for example, or picking up over 10 m/s descent rate in less than a second when I cut my throttle near the ground despite the supposed (and measured with seismic accelerometer) 0.34 g surface gravity. It feels more like landing on Tylo than Duna. The first new lander design: Three out of 4 landing gear survived, and it was short & wide enough to still be stable like that, so that's a win. The second/third lander had a similar basic layout but with some improvements. And again, 3 of 4 gear survived. But this one wanted to skid across the ground at 0.1 m/s until I gave up & retracted the gear and it finally stopped. The third version I dropped the ballute in place of regular drogue chutes, but edited the craft file to set the opening pressure much lower to make them actually useful on JNSQ Duna. That actually worked fairly well - actually decelerated the lander down to reasonable velocities (~160 m/s) once fully open. But it still tries to accelerate VERY fast at lower velocities during landing.

I fired up KSP after being away for a while and went back to an old career save (my Out of the Sands story). While launching an experimental Tylo lander, I managed to not go to orbit in a way I've never managed before - colliding into my own first stage during my orbital circularization burn. The remains of my lander, with orbital & transfer stages completely destroyed except the transfer engine And the spent first stage. I actually perfectly (and accidentally) synced my desired orbital altitude with dV of the first stage - I had about 3 m/s remaining in the first stage when I hit my target Ap, so I went ahead and staged it away after shutdown. BUT I had a pitch up rotation when I did that, and I think I put enough energy into the first stage to fling it out ahead of my orbiter. My wife thought I lost my mind when realized what happened & I started laughing about it. After all these years, and KSP still managed to surprise me.

Yeah, that is very frustrating and all too common. I had it happen to a Duna base that I was very proud of, after I committed the cardinal sin of docking a rover to it. I try to avoid cheats, but I do use them to correct stuff like this.

I've used some of the web name generators for special ships, typically my larger interplanetary vessels to haul crews back & forth to Jool. I tend to use fairly standard rocket designs, which also get named, but that is mostly just used for the subassemblies that I save. For regular missions, I just use codes with numbers for each launch. For example - OMV-1 is the first mission of an "Orbital Maneuver Vehicle" which is usually a one or two-man capsule with a small amount of dV & RCS. Enough to maybe reach high orbit, rendezvous & dock with another capsule or target craft, etc. My KSP equivalent to Gemini, basically. The MPV series (Multi-Purpose Vehicle) with assorted variants (MPV-LR-# for the long range version) is the Mk 1-3 pod with anywhere from a few hundred dV in orbit to a few thousand. OTV# is used for orbital tourist missions, with # being the passenger capacity.

Yep, I learned that one the hard way.

Yeah, I'm with you there.

@Henris One thing to double check is the direction of control. If the drone core or crew pod is oriented wrong, the rover won't operate correctly. It can be very easy to get drone cores pointing up instead of forward, for example. If you spawn your rover and the horizon is pointing straight up, the controls are set wrong. It should point straight forward For your second question- no, the stock rover wheels don't need any DLC to operate. They've had built in motors since long before any DLC. Only the aircraft landing gear are unpowered.

I think the last non-contract rescue mission I did was a routine "oops, I forgot the parachutes" in a career game - with no revert & permadeath. IIRC it was a load of tourists & a kerbonaut or two coming back from Mun and very luckily I realized my mistake before reentry. Like most craft in stock, it was overbuilt and had plenty of excess dV so I got the returning craft in a stable orbit around Kerbin. Tossed an engineer with a wrench and bag full of parachutes in another rocket and after a quick rendezvous, bolted the parachutes on the original craft and all was well. Since then - especially after I added life support - I have been much more careful on craft design. I had a much more exciting accident once, thanks to a part failure mod. But it wasn't in orbit and didn't require a rescue mission. Flying up to orbit in my favorite spaceplane with a full load of 6 kerbals (who thought they were going to Jool on another craft), one of the Rapier engines exploded and took half the spaceplane with it. I had the cockpit, passenger cabin, wing strakes and not much else. It was surprisingly stable, actually, and after slowing down I bailed out all 6 kerbals, opened their chutes and had to splash them down quickly before switching to the next one. All six survived. I was actually a little bummed out that I couldn't save the cockpit, but the drone core had been mounted further back & didn't survive the explosion. And it wasn't worth risking the pilot to try to save the cockpit section. I can't find any of the old pics of the disaster, but this is type of spaceplane that was used (minus the piggyback capsule on top & wing fuel tanks - those are for the interplanetary version). Everything behind the passenger cabin except the Big-S wing strakes was gone

I definitely agree with that. Some of the first mods I started using for KSP (and still use when I fire it up) were to get more/better ladder options.

True, this flight isn't putting lives at risk. The greater concern to me, though, is that the attitude seems to have made a comeback.

I hate to say this, but am I the only one who thinks some of what's coming out of NASA is reminiscent of Challenger? They are still wanting to try to launch in one breath, then say there's an 80% chance of unfavorable winds on the launch date.

A lot of times if I run into this issue, adding an empty stage between current & the next actual stage seems to fix the dV also. I don't know why it does, but usually does the trick for me.

That's basically the idea behind the Orion drive - pulsed nuclear detonations with a giant shock absorbing pusher plate. Isp significantly higher than chemical rockets and still producing high acceleration as well.

I made two attempts yesterday at something more like @BadOaks Eve lander. The second attempt at least resulted in Jeb reaching the surface in one piece. Of course he'd die after eating his 1 snack, but it is an improvement. Also good this was the sandbox testing save. Today, I went back to my career save and got my second manned Duna expedition in place. Here, the Duna Buzzer & the new Canyon Base landed safely. The crew is currently at Ankin Kerman Memorial Station in orbit, doing a little research before coming down to the surface

I think I did that, but I can't remember for sure now. Either way, the first failure involved a yaw to the left or right rather than going off in pitch that I would expect from forgetting to switch modes. The second might have started with a pitch excursion before progressing to a yaw excursion followed by lots of fireworks.

That looks quite interesting!! I didn't get a chance for any KSP today, but I may have to give that a try. Your whole lander design looks better constructed than the approach I was taking, too.

My biggest event was the return of my 1.8 career's first manned Duna mission. Here, the crew posed on the strake of the spaceplane that brought them back to KSC: Most of the rest of my time was several big launches for various planets - I have had back to back to back transfer windows this year: Dres, Duna, Moho, & Eve over a span of 2-3 months. I also switched over to sandbox to test a manned Eve Ascent Vehicle. That went poorly - even the largest ballute I could fit didn't add enough drag to keep it pointed retrograde on the landing. This was a later one, with added speed brakes & upper heat shield, and it still couldn't keep it's correct orientation.

My Dres mission got underway in my 1.8 career. A small orbital station, two surface bases, a rover, a lander and the EV-2 Babylon. The only pics worthwhile were bringing the crew up in a Lightning spaceplane: Landing the spaceplane back at KSC might have been the absolute best reentry and landing I've ever done. Once I did the deorbit burn with the NERV, I never touched the engines, and required no extreme maneuvers to shed altitude or airspeed. Ended up on a 090 heading <1km north of the runway once I was in visual range, so I had to do a little S-turn to line up, and was just a little high, so I popped my drag chutes early and came to a stop just past the SPH turn-off. I also realized there was an old contract to scan a tree on Kerbin with the large scan arm, so I sent a pair of experienced Kerbals out with the old prototype of the Duna rover to find one to scan. Started just before dawn And found one just 11km away

Started experimenting with a reusable booster in my 1.8 career. Long ago, I had a pretty nice one that became the workhorse of my space program till one day I had 10 boosters in orbit waiting to land after getting ready for a Jool mission. After landing all 10 (including 4 or 5 that made a nice row on the runway), I was over it. This was an attempt to rebuild that old booster and see if it still worked. Launch went nicely, with just a Mk 1-3 pod, orbital stage, a drone core and a load of ore for extra mass. No kerbals were used in the testing of this rocket. After attaining a 125km orbit, the pod was staged away and brought in for it's own landing. Then it was time to land the booster. Unfortunately, partway through reentry I thought I was going to badly overshoot KSC and made an extra burn to prevent that. I was actually looking at the wrong landmass, and ended up severely undershooting KSC & landing in the ocean. Four or five pieces of debris were recovered, not including the expensive Vectors or the drone core.

Back before I had quit KSP for a while, I was playing a JNSQ career and ran into an issue with my Duna lander going crazy when the drogue chutes deployed. Since I've been back playing some, I decided to build a completely new lander in a JNSQ sandbox save, put it in Duna orbit and try to land. And got this - which doesn't do justice to the 3-axis spinning at high rpm. I actually tried twice - first time trying to use the chutes to get some deceleration (so I was going 600+ m/s when deployed), second time I used mostly a propulsive descent, deploying chutes at <200 m/s and the results were identical, so apparently something in that entire install is glitched. Back in my 1.8 career, lots of stuff has been going on: Expanded the fuel station with monoprop, snacks, fertilizer & water, plus a small LFO tank. I also used the engineer I flew up to remove the cluster of monoprop tanks around the living area (after this pic) Almost every one of my launches the last few days was very large - using 5m cores, often with Clydesdale boosters. Sometimes using 8 vectors and a mainsail on the 5m core, just to maintain >1g acceleration after dropping the Clydesdales Of course, I was also launching things like a floating Laythe base: And a new, larger Duna base: There was also time to make & test an amphibious Buffalo rover for use on Laythe. I was able to get about 17 m/s in the water. Had a combined flight of bringing the next Duna crew up to the EV-1 Avalon and getting a Lightning II spaceplane launched to Laythe. More launches followed - this was one of the smaller ones, with a survey satellite for Laythe or Val. Built an octajet VTOL and attempted to land on the VAB "Attempted" being the key word Also "attempted" to send a crew to orbit and found an uncorrected staging mistake on one of my workhouse designs from earlier in this career. The LES worked, but revealed another fault - the abort function doesn't shut off the main engine on this one, either. The rocket only splashed down well after the chutes were deployed on the capsule Finally, one last launch and I think one of the prettiest launch screenshots I've ever gotten:

Thanks for the tip. It was in 1.8.1.

I got my Moho crew back home today and since the ship used for that mission was low on fuel, I went ahead and launched a hastily assembled fuel station. Currently featuring 44000 units of liquid fuel, a few hundred units of monoprop and space for 5 kerbals plus 5 docking positions. Probably was the heaviest launch I've made in a while. A 5m first stage with 5 mainsails was only giving a 0.7 twr so 4 of the mainsails were swapped out with 8 vectors plus 4 Clydesdale SRB's and 4 Thumper SRB's. The 2nd & 3rd stages used 4 then 2 Rhino's and I was left with a whole 70-some m/s dV remaining in a 200km orbit. Filling the EV-1 Avalon after getting the station up. Which took almost a quarter of the station's fuel and half it's monoprop. It also made me realize I need to add a section with snacks, fertilizer & water to the station as the Avalon needs refills on those as well. I also got my Pol lander & relay into position, but that actually required some cheating because, well, something happened. On my Tylo fly-by, I was able to get close to a Pol intercept but I couldn't quite get a good inclination from it, so after clearing Tylo I set up another maneuver node. I got to where the map showed an intercept, but it was hitting the edge of Pol's SoI and didn't want to get any closer. I figured I'll do this maneuver, then setup a later one to fine tune to the approach - except a third node, no matter which way I pulled the direction sliders, didn't change the Pol Pe. I knew something was up, but the map was still showing the intercept in like 5 days, so I set an alarm and went off to do other stuff for a few days. Came back a few hours before the alarm and found the probe nowhere near Pol, and just a few days from exiting Jool's SoI. At that point, I just cheated it into a Pol orbit and called it good. Apparently some form of kraken woke up and noticed this probe. I like this basic setup - the transfer stage stays in orbit with a good size relay antenna while the lander gets staged away to do it's thing.

This is from the last few days, but my Duna crew returned to orbit, then on to an Ike landing before returning to Duna orbit and waiting the last few weeks for the return window My Eve crew also safely returned to Kerbin - although they only orbited Eve rather than landing, designed as a low cost & (relatively) low risk mission to bring funds & prestige to the space program. Despite overshooting KSP by several hundred kilometers, there was plenty of fuel remaining in the Lightning II spaceplane to return to a safe landing. Plenty as in <500 m/s on the dV readout with the Rapiers set to airbreathing mode & the NERV shut down. My Moho crew also headed for home after their short trip to the surface. And a large remote rover with scanning arm was parachuted onto Laythe safely. "Large" may be a bit of an exaggeration, maybe "less small" would be more accurate. Finally, tested an electric aircraft for use on Duna and possibly Eve or Laythe. Low stall speed (~20 m/s), can cruise on 2 of the 4 engines to reduce power drain, top speed in excess of 140 m/s, seats two plus has a set of scientific gear (temp, press, seismic, grav & atmo). Wing solar panels plus a fuel cell keep the batteries charged. All I need now is to remember to add a probe core somewhere - because i forgot about that till just now.