[The Ultimate Jool 5 Challenge Continued]

Though I'd find it a lot more amazing if the spaceplane with a flat front flying without drag or the basic fins surviving an exposed descent into laythe's atmosphere didn't scream "aerodinamic bug exploiting".

Mind you, it still requires a huge skill to build those kind of contraptions - not to mention all the other parts about optimizing trajectories - but I think those designs that exploit ways to make parts frictionless should go into another category, or should at least come with an asteric attached.

[Lucy in the sky with deadly radiation 5: strangest sky ever!]

Part 3: If Laythe was 12 times more massive, it would be Valyr

Boundless sets to explore the Valyr system, and refuels on Oshan.

The position of Valyr in the Kaywell system, and the moons of Valyr. Not shown is Didd, the diminutive submoon of Manonam

3.1) No gravity assist needed

Spoiler

I choose the parking orbit around Kerbmun because it was very convenient to launch for interplanetary. Indeed, it turns out there's not even need for a gravity assist from Derbin.

Trajectory to Valyr

160 m/s to leave Kerbmun, coupled with Oberth effect from the big moon and from Mesbin, and adding the rotation of the moon itself, are enough to raise apoapsis to Valyr. I won't be meeting Valyr immediately, though; the downside of launching from an elliptic orbit is that you cannot choose the time of launch, so you often have to launch outside of an optimal transfer window and make multiple orbits to meet your target. The red maneuver is for that. Afterwards, it takes 9 years to reach Valyr; I said Boundless would have 50 years worth of life support, so it's fine.

Last view of Kerbmun before departing

Arrival at Valyr with aerocapture on Oshan, the major moon

Valyr is a superearth-type planet, or superkerbin, or however you want to call them. It's very close in size to Derbin, and my main reason for going there first is that I can drop the second Phoenix and have a symmetrical mothership again (for this trip, I managed the asymmetry by shutting down a few engines). Though it's also, surprisingly, a good position to go to the inner planets, which will be my next target. But I'm putting the cart in front of the horse; first Valyr.

Valyr has a smattering of small moons, and one major moon, Oshan, which is suspiciously similar to Duna. It's one of the places where I'm allowed to refuel by my own rules, and the atmosphere, gravity and position make it a perfect place to park Boundless while I explore the Valyr system.

Approaching Valyr and Oshan

Oshan terrain is a mixture of Duna and Eeloo

Aerobraking

The low gravity and low intercept speed made this a very simple aerobraking. I probably wouldn't even need to bother closing the cargo bays. The only unexpected issue is that, despite Oshan atmosphere reaching up to 94 km, it is extremely thin even at lower altitudes. I had to go down as low as 30 km before I could get some significant braking.

3.2) The last flight of the Phoenix

Spoiler

First item of business is dropping the Phoenix. While lag is nowhere near comparable to what I had to deal with in my kerbalism grand tours, Boundless still slows the game noticeably. While I will miss Phoenix and the unique exploration opportunities they give, I am looking forward to reducing part count by another hundred.

It's surprisingly cheap to get inside Valyr's atmosphere from Oshan. On Derminmus it took 800 m/s to get in the same place. Thanks to Oberth effect and higher orbit

Phoenix commences aerobraking

Valyr is very similar to Derbin, but it has a major difference; it spins very fast. Not as fast as Mesbin, but the surface is moving at 600 m/s, so achieving orbit is much cheaper compared to Derbin. It also means that what is reported as surface speed in the screenshot above is actually 6600 m/s of orbital speed.

A beautiful sunset over Valyr

Flying over an archipelago

Valyr is an ocean world scattered with islands, much like Laythe. It's also significantly warmer than its distance from its star would suggest, also similarly to Laythe. Though in this case the heating is from greenhouse effect, while on Laythe gravitational heating is responsible.

Landing is a lot easier on Valyr, because while it has 20% less atmospheric pressure, it also has many less plateaus. On Derbin I had to land over a continental mass that was, on average, 9 km above the datum level. On Valyr I can land over the sea, where flying is a lot easier.

Dropping the first heat shield. I won't repeat the full sequence

And trying to reach the closest island before the battery runs out

While Valyr is easier than Derbin in many aspects, one significant disadvantage it has is its fast rotation and distance from the sun. Because Phoenix is solar powered; it can barely sustain flight with the sun overhead, and with the fast rotation it means it only has an hour or so of optimal conditions where it can sustain fligh. Otherwise it's limited by battery power.

I didn't have enough battery to land on the island, so I was forced to splash-land

Envisioning such a scenario, I made sure that Phoenix was fully capable of splash landing, no issue here.

Underwater view. Looks pretty nice

Looks like there's life in the water of Valyr too

It's also possible to play golf underwater

The problem with splash landing is that Phoenix cannot take off from the sea; that requires way more power than it has. So I will have to slowly reach the island at low speed before I can take off again

The moment when the wheel touches land is potentially dangerous; in this gravity breaking a wheel is easy

Planting a flag, and atmospheric composition

I definitely like Valyr. I'll be staying and exploring a while before returning to orbit.

Flying towards the sunset

Some of you may remember what I said about flying on Valyr and electricity. So I found myself stuck mid-air with no land in sight. I had a few options:

1) Reload, and pick a better time to leave

2) Splash land, and prepare for a very long trip at snail speed the next day towards the nearest land

3) Cheat infinite electricity

Both 1 and 2 would entail losing a lot of time, while 3 wouldn't have any practical effect on the grand tour itself, so I picked it.

Here I look closer and finally discover that Phoenix was asymmetrical all along

Damnit. I wanted to make a symmetrical vehicle, but in the spaceplane hangar I clicked the lateral boosters just slightly offset, and didn't realize it. So all this time the propellers were misaligned with the center of mass, and the first stage of the rocket was also misaligned. No wonder I had problems making it fly straight. It's a minor miracle I brought its twin to orbit in the first place.

Since the other Phoenix managed to perform well on Derbin despite this flaw, I decide to not try to fix it.

My target was a bigger island where I may find more biomes and more variety.

Indeed, there's a fairly large mountain

Just some nice flying around

I accidentally dropped Val out of the plane. Fortunately I was able to land her and Phoenix safely without going out of physical range

How do one "accidentally" drop a kerbal out of a plane? I have to explain how I've been taking EVA reports while in flight. Which itself begs the question of why I'm trying to take EVA reports while flying when it's clearly dangerous and there are no benefits, but humor me, I like taking science reports.

At the speed and atmospheric density of Phoenix flight, a kerbal cannot hang on the ladder, it gets pushed by the wind. However, Phoenix has a long crew section with an unbroken ladder on top. I theorized that if I send Val out from the crew pod - the first in the line - then wind would push her back over the hitchhicker container and the lab, and once on the lab I could press B and get her inside again. And in the meanwhile I would have a few precious seconds to get the crew report. Indeed, it works. I've been collecting reports this way on Derbin too.

What went wrong here is that I forgot to move Val from the lab back to the crew pod after the previous time I sent her out. So she went out on the back of the plane, and she had no more chances to get back in. Fortunately, I also forgot to remove the parachutes from the crew equipment when I started the flight (I mean, what would you need a parachute for in a grand tour? Unless you accidentally dropped one of your crewmembers out of your lander in midair on one of the few planes where parachutes work, that is). So I was able to recover from this mistake. Good thing, because I hadn't saved in a while.

Landing on top of a 6000 m mountain

Actually, Valyr atmosphere being significantly thinner than Derbin, 6000 m is already higher than where I can land. I landed at a lower elevation, and went up as a rover.

And a final shoot from the cupola

A map of the explored region

I've covered quite some ground. While Valyr is really pretty, it's also very big, and I'm not interested enough to go on some of the islands on the polar regions.

Now, before going to orbit, I must make sure Traveler is in place. I'm still pretending kerbals cannot live long with just a spacesuit, meaning I can't send them to orbit and leave them there waiting.

While lowering orbit, Traveler came close to the minor moon Denna

Phoenix takes off for its last flight. Here it drops the front wheel, crossing the point of no return

This time I was careful to protect the propellers, so Phoenix can work as intended, drop the habitat section and gain a few more km of elevation

Here pressure is 0.5 atmospheres. Phoenix could keep climbing, but it's losing speed; it's more efficient to start the rocket now

Rocket ascent started. Thankfully the vector engine has a large gimbaling, so it can compensate for all the aerodinamic and center of mass issues

Second stage, keeps on climbing

And third stage

Here I had another unplanned issue: this stage veered to the side. It's not normal, I checked; this final part of Phoenix is perfectly symmetrical. However, for unknown reasons, this one acted like it wasn't, and pulled on a side. I had to reduce thrust to the level where the reaction wheel could compensate. Which was a significant problem when trying to leave a planet with 2.17 gees of gravity, but after some trial and error Phoenix made it.

Dropping the nose. I'm pointing above prograde to compensate for low thrust

Finally, the last stage. I managed to raise apoapsis enough that it could finish circularizing

For a moment, I thought I spotted the asymmetry in that seismometer attached to the side, but I just checked, it wasn't enough to cause any issue. I also checked that fuel was being drained by the round tanks evenly. So, whatever happened to imbalance Phoenix was likely a bug.

Still, Phoenix made it. It completed its last flight despite the game trying to kill it. It was a very nice vehicle for a very difficult task. I will miss flying Phoenix over some giant world, sending out Val to take crew reports. If I ever need something similar again, I may end up recycling the design.

3.3) Small moons

Spoiler

The reason I took that seismometer from Phoenix and saved it is that I realized the two innermost moons of Valyr are very tiny. Instead of returning to Boundless and fetching Cigar to land, I may as well land with Traveler directly. Traveler has a full science suite, except for a seismometer, because it wasn't supposed to ever land anywhere. But the Kaywell system is full of those tiny rocks. No point carrying around Cigar needlessly, and especially no point making an extra trip.

Trajectory for Denna. 850 m/s to raise apoapsis to intercept, because Phoenix still had some deltaV left and I didn't need to fully circularize Traveler

And 900 m/s to capture, split in two burns, because a moon this small has no Oberth effect

Denna looks like a green potato

A green potato with craters

I have many pictures of Valyr from up close or from afar, but none from a middling distance. I compensate with this view of the planet from the surface of Denna

A very poignant science report

Denna to Plaph. Less than 400 m/s, because the gravity of Valyr is weak at this distance

Plaph looks like a giant rock. Or maybe just a differently shaped potato

Landed on Plaph

Plaph to Oshan. 400 m/s, then aerocapture

As Traveler has almost 3 km/s left, there's not much point showing the return to Boundless. I'm trying to make those reports shorter, and I already posted enough pics of my mothership.

3.4) Manonam and Didd

Spoiler

Next target is Manonam, roughly the size of Ike, with its submoon Didd. For this I need Cigar.

Traveler picks up Cigar

Only 11 m/s to eject to Manonam, and 17 m/s for a plane change

We are far enough from Valyr that moving between orbits is practically free. So for this section I'll stop posting the trajectories, the whole trip costed less than 1000 m/s.

Arriving at Manonam, I go first for Didd. The main difficulty is finding it.

1.8 km of closer distance, and still I'm not inside its sphere of influence! Didd is truly the tiniest object

Indeed, with a nominal radius of 0 km, a SoI of 1.5 km, and less than 2 m/s escape velocity, Didd is barely bigger than randomly spawned asteroids

First look at Didd, on the right of the image. The black ball covering the "milky way"

Didd is completely black, even though I am using 100% light amplification here. Turns out it's a bug; Didd itself is nowhere near that dark, once you get inside the sphere of influence.

It's kinda ugly

A very significant science report

Didd feels kinda pointless. I could have circumnavigated it since I was there, it would have taken maybe half an hour. No, wait, I could have maybe achieved escape velocity with wheels alone. Whatever. Those tiny rocks are getting repetitive. Without further delays, I go to Manonam.

Cigar prepared to land on Manonam

Look in the distance, I found an arc!

I wasn't going to drive here. This world is dull, and it only has two biomes (one equatorial, one polar). But since I have an arc in my sight, I may as well go there.

I got this chance to showcase the light informing me that reaction wheels are off. I introduced it on Dancing Porcupine 2, here I improved the design by making it visible in IVA view

The arc looks quite impressive from within the rover

I made a point to fly inside the arc to return to orbit

Back to Boundless, now reduced to 793 parts. And it will stay 793 parts until the end

3.5) Oshan to explore and Oshan to drill

Spoiler

Finally I have to explore Oshan with Arrowhead before refueling.

If I just wanted to plant a flag, I could just send down Ice Cream Cone. But Arrowhead has the full science suite, and it has the capacity to move on the ground.

Of course, Arrowhead cannot fly on Oshan. The atmosphere is too thin. It will land with rockets, assisted by a parachute that I'll lend from Ice Cream Cone.

Taking a parachute from Ice Cream Cone to strap on Arrowhead

Arrowhead, descending on Oshan, with a parachute strapped on top

The parachute helps to keep the plane pointed with the engine towards the ground

It's an uncomfortable landing, but feasible

A bunch of interesting science reports from the surface

I have to say, there's too much life around here. On Kerbmun, life. On Valyr, life. On Oshan, life too. Multicellular life. Seems a bit too much.

Oshan, like Derbin, has continents and seas; in this case the seas are ice plains, almost perfectly flat, criscrossed by cracks. I landed just in the middle of the bigger sea, too far from a continent to want to go there. But I'm close enough to a crack to go scouting.

Driving Arrowhead on the ice plains

There's not enough air to fly, and the propellers have low power, but there's nothing to stop Arrowhead from building up speed.

The cracks. Was it worth going this far to see them? Probably not

Back to Boundless, the RCS already in place for docking

Now it's time to refuel. I'll finally see how well Ice Cream Cone performs.

Detaching. Of course, I put the parachute back in place

I gave Ice Cream Cone a strong RCS system because I'll have to perform a lot of docking, may as well make them comfortable.

I also put a cupola on its back, because it was cool

Here in the final part of the descent, opening the parachutes

I made Ice Cream Cone in its shape because I wanted it to have a pointy part, to minimize drag during ascent, but I also wanted a flat back, to maximize drag during descent. As far as I know, a flat back doesn't make too much of an impact on drag at high speed, so it will help descent and be of minimal problem on ascent. The only problem is that Ice Cream Cone may get turned around by aerodinamic forces, in this case it will be too fast to open the parachutes and it will crash on the ground. Here it's not a problem, in the worst case I'd have to provide some rocket braking to stay below the point where aerodinamic forces can turn the lander around.

Terminal velocity on parachutes is 60 m/s, need to use the rockets a bit

Though Ice Cream Cone has high thrust (1.3 fully loaded), so it can activate the rockets at less than 100 meters from the ground. That's actually overkill; it's supposed to be able to take off from Lito, but let's face it, I'll never go there. Lito is as big as Tylo, and the atmosphere is thin enough that I would need rockets to slow descent before opening the parachutes. I wouldn't be able to carry much useful cargo. And orbiting the same gas giant is Totooa, which is a much better refueling spot. So, I could have gone for less thrust and saved some mass.

In fact, thinking back, I'm not happy of Ice Cream Cone propulsion. Eight wolfhounds are overkill for a Duna-like planet. At the same time, they are whoefully inadequate where there is a thicker atmosphere. And wasteful if I have to reach a ship in elliptic orbit. If I could go back to the drawing board, I would give Ice Cream Cone maybe 2 skipper engines, 2 wolfhounds, 2 nervs. Or something like that.

As it is, Ice Cream Cone will not work on Egad, except maybe if there is some high plateau. It will probably work on Totooa, but only because the planet is fairly small and the wolfhounds will be enough to lift the ship even with a fourth of their optimal thrust; in any case, it will be very wasteful. It will not work on Gannovar. There, with one design mistake I halved my already small selection of refueling places. Then again, Oshan and Ollym alone would already be enough; it's not a critical issue.

Ice Cream Cone has a solar array to maximize the sunlight received. Except when the sun is straight overhead

View from the crew cabin. I wish I had used only 6 engines and left a better view

It also has a ladder to go and plant a flag. Not really needed, jumping works

Ice Cream Cone fuel tanks hold 125 tons of liquid fuel, 38 tons of oxidizer, and 1.5 tons of ore. It takes a couple days to fill them.

Something went wrong with this takeoff, some engines remained on the ground...

Ascent, at a low angle

I run some experiments, and determined that a low angle works better. Though it takes several minutes to clear the atmosphere, drag losses are still lower than gravity losses.

View from the rearward cupola during ascent

Unfortunately I cannot use the rearward view more often during ascent, because whenever I do the ship believes that back is front and tries to flip around. Even with SAS deactivated.

And a view of Oshan with the thin atmosphere emphasized

As I left Boundless parked in elliptic orbit, Ice Cream Cone still has some deltaV to spend - though I lowered the mothership a bit to make things more comfortable. Here's where a couple nuclear engines would come in handy. Also, I am unhappy with the fuel tanks. I spend all the oxidizer going up, and use the ore left to make more oxidizer, and this way I barely reach Boundless. It's good because I'm only refilling on liquid fuel. But if I wanted to carry up oxidizer, I would only be able to carry a small amount. I wish I had used less fuel tanks and more ore tanks, so that I could choose to make oxidizer or liquid fuel.

This spacewalk is to pack the parachutes. They are too high on the body of the rocket to pack them while it's landed

And finally, I wish I had put the crew cabin in the middle of the rocket, where I could send out an engineer and pack the parachutes without needing to spacewalk. Having to fly around every time is annoying.

At every mission, Ice Cream Cone could bring up 95 tons of liquid fuel. With eleven refueling missions, it topped the fuel tanks of Boundless.

Status of Boundless after the refueling

This also marked the moment where I started writing this report; this refueling confirmed that everything works well enough.

So far I could get away with relatively cheap transfers, but this time I filled the tanks completely because the next target is a lot more expensive. I'm going for the inner planets.

[Show off your awesome KSP pictures!]

Mothership Boundless approaching Imterril, moon of the gas giant Tyepolbinar, with a comet in background.

If you look closely, you can also see the planet Shol near the twin suns of the kaywell system (not to be confused with the flange from the eva experiment seen in the last picture.

planetary pack is whirligig world

[How do I find the duration of a year?]

I'm facing a very unusual problem: I can't find how to determine the duration of a year on a planet.

The game give me a window of information on the planet

and that contains a lot of informations, almost all of them useless. but it does not tell me the time of revolution of the planet.

this has never been a problem before, because i used to play with the stock system, or the outer planet mod, or the real solar system, and in all those cases you can find the year lenght by a quick internet search. here i'm using another mod, i would like to know how long is a year on certain planets for the purpose of planning orbits, and I can't find this information.

I suppose, worst case scenario, I could alt-f12 a ship on a similar orbit, and this would give me at least an approximate result. I was hoping there would be a better way.

[Mk2 inline docking port is really weak]

the general solution for all structural stability problems is autostrutting parts. activate autostruts on all the parts in the central shaft of the ship, and there will be no floppiness.

 

P.S. that plane looks cool, but it does seem like it has too many engines

[What did you do in KSP1 today?]

I went as close to a star as I ever did.

Actually, I went close to two stars, as whirligig world features a binary system

This is the planet shol, a hot super-jupiter. the star is kaywell, while the second star, limnel, is covered at the moment.

A comet is passing nearby. The presence of shol and limnel causes most comets to end up getting gravity captured by of of those bodies. they then wander the inner system for a while, until they hit shol or they get ejected out of the solar sytem entirely. the game then spawns a new comet. this mechanism ensures that there's a visible comet most of the time in the kaywell system.

this is as close as i managed to go to kaywell before burning up. I wanted to see if I could orbit limnel (here visible, by the way) but the answer is no. With some better management I can probably reach 500k km, and limnel is in a 300k km orbit. going there would require a more dedicated ship. in the end i settled into a safer orbit, with the objective of reaching a minor body nearby

this is just to show the position of limnel and my orbit

the nose cone cargo bay is red hot. I can afford a quick glance before having to close it again to protect the cupola

[Lucy in the sky with deadly radiation 5: strangest sky ever!]

Part 2: That's no moon (it technically is, but it's bigger than Eve)

Landers are sent to the outer moons of Mesbin; those include Kerbmun, which is slightly bigger than Kerbin, and Dermun, which is significantly bigger than Eve.

The relative positions of the outer moons of Mesbin. The inset in the lower left corner shows the sub-moons of Derbin. I wonder if there would be some way to make it stable in reality

2.1) That's no Kerbin

Spoiler

With Boundless in stable orbit around Kerbmun, the first thing to do is send Arrowhead to explore the surface.

Arrowhead starting atmospheric reentry

Even through all the flames, you can still see the stars of the Kaywell system. The small red dot is the red dwarf Gememma, with its own subsystem

And a pretty Mesbinrise

What is that strange figure in the sea? I took the coordinates, will want to investigate later

Landed, with no particular problem. 5% oxygen, you could take off your helmet for a while but you wouldn't survive forever unless you were a trained climber

Once landed, I wanted to spend some time exploring the place and gathering science from the various biomes. Arrowhead is a nice plane to fly around, and I want to use this opportunity; many planets in the Kaywell system have an atmosphere, but in most cases it's too thin to fly.

Some science reports are poignant and meaningful. Others are just funny

Nearing some mountains

And passing to the side of a majestic cliff

More mountains on the other side

Unfortunately, Arrowhead has a striking flaw. When I designed it, I wanted a spaceplane capable of propeller flight on Laythe, and capable of ssto on Kerbin, without relying on air-breathing engines, and I wanted a Mk2 crew cabin for various reasons (both practical and aesthetical), and I wanted a cargo bay with all available science instruments, and I wanted the whole plane to be small enough to fit underneath A'Tuin. And as usual, when you have many requirements you have to sacrifice something. In this case, while Arrowhead is capable of propeller flight on Laythe, it is so only by the slightest margin. At high altitude, with less air density, the plane becomes a lot less maneuverable, it's barely able to climb, and it has some serious problems landing. Hence why I passed on the side of the mountain, even though I would have rather swooped over the top. On this planet I can barely surpass 5000 m of elevation; landing is very difficult above 3000 m (meaning I have to save the game first, and go through multiple trial and error), and virtually impossible above 4000.

Going over a stretch of sea, to get a different mountain biome

As I mentioned landing is difficult, here's a failed attempt

To get that last mountain biome I had to land at a lower altitude and then go upwards on the ground. Not really worth it. The terrain was very irregular and I kept breaking the wings.

Finally I'm ready to return to orbit, moving back to the equator first because I don't want to waste deltaV on orbital inclination.

A map of the landed biomes; I forgot a flag on the white biome just south of Arrowhead. All in all I flew quite some distance

But all those landings took a toll on the propellers

Yes, the old propeller misalignment bug struck again. While I've been very careful to avoid moving the propellers in space - by always keeping the rotors deactivated and locked - there is another thing that can trigger the bug: saving and reloading the game with the propellers moving. Which I did a bunch of time to try the landings.

Since this is an issue caused by a bug, I am free to fix it with alt-f12. In this case, I directly brought in a replacement plane.

For the future I vow, if I have to save in midair, I will stop the rotors first. This will complicate flight, but it should avoid damage.

Preparing to go orbital, Arrowhead flies as high as it can on propellers. Which is not as high as I'd like. I should probably add more wings, but they don't fit with the size limit

Then closing the propeller bays and activating the rockets

The oblate Mesbin above me, flames from high speed air drag around me

In orbit with 200 m/s

That's not enough to rendez-vous with Boundless, so Traveler has to go get Arrowhead.

Traveler can aerobrake, but at those orbital speeds it cannot dip much into the atmosphere. Plus it has low drag, even with the cargo bay open. It took a dozen passages to circularize. And when it finally reached Arrowhead...

Traveler rendez-vous with Arrowhead

Dang! Can't dock because the shield of the docking port gets in the way

I had this problem docking Arrowhead and Ice Cream Cone to Boundless, and I solved it during testing. But I completely forgot that I'd have the same issue docking Arrowhead with Traveler. But ok, I have an idea to fix this with EVA construction.

Back to the mothership - which I'll take as an excuse to post this image of the solar panels unfolding

I placed two tiny fuel tanks to act as spacer. Under Ice Cream Cone it's needed, but not under the heavy stage of Traveler, so I can borrow it

However, while taking a spare fuel tank to act as spacer is easy, inserting it underneat the docking port is not. Because when Traveler is detached from Boundless, the docking port becomes the root part. And you can't manipulate the root part in EVA construction.

So I have to change the root part. And to do so, I have to grab a spare docking port (the one that usually holds Arrowhead, since it's temporarily free), attack it somewhere on Traveler, and dock the taxi on that docking port. This will allow me free access to the regular docking port.

I put the docking port on an engine, as it's the most convenient place

Yet another different angle to show the mothership

Traveler is docked by the new docking port. Now I can modify the old one

I place the fuel tank

And now I have to return the docking port from the engine to its original position. But I can't manipulate while it's root part, so I have to turn around Traveler again

Finally I can remove the extra docking port and put it back in its place

Then, after another long sequence of aerobraking, I can finally grab Arrowhead and tow it home

But wait, I totally forgot to investigate that strange anomaly I saw during descent! I also forgot to land on the sea, for that matter. Since I only want to see what's there and take some pictures, I can use alt-f12.

Huh. It seems there are different water textures, and they are not lined up properly

Here going from one to the other

Though it seems like there's a different elevation, it's only a texture

Also, it seems like there's pluricellular life in the water, but not on land. Which is more or less what Earth was like a billion years ago

Finally, I just wanted to show the RCS system on Arrowhead. I didn't want to ruin the spaceplane's profile, but it is very difficult to dock backwards otherwise

Rejoining Boundless

2.2) You can have trojans in ksp

Spoiler

Trojmin is a small moonlet in the L4 lagrangian point of Kerbmun. At 7 km equatorial radius it's bigger than Statmun or Thresomin, but still much smaller than Gilly. Being in a trojan orbit, it's fairly cheap to get there. The main difficulty is not getting accidentally captured by Kerbmun's gravity again.

The trajectory for Troymin. Basically, leave Kerbmun on a smaller orbit until I overtake the moonlet. Less than 500 m/s to get there

I could have used Cigar alone, now that I think about it. Then again, I'm still holding to the fiction that the small landers have food for 30 days or so.

First glimpse of Troymin from a distance

Looking at Derbin through a window. Also visible the submoons Dermun, high above Derbin, and Derminmus, halfway between Dermun and Derbin, barely visible as a few pixels

Arriving at Troymin, with all the major celestial bodies visible in the sky

I am posting a lot of pictures of the sky. Troymin itself is really all not that interesting.

Landing. The surface is heavily cratered

And planting a flag

I didn't explore this celestial body. I already got my share of glorified asteroids, so I immediately returned to Boundless.

The trajectory back. I managed to do it more cheaply than on the outbound trip

And the rendez-vous with Boundless, for the sake of thoroughness. I managed to match periapsis, so it was relatively cheap

2.3) The most challenging landing

Spoiler

Now it's time to tackle the most difficult planet: Derbin. Technically, Derbin is not even a planet, but a moon of Mesbin; however, it's significantly bigger than Eve, it's got 2.17 g of surface gravity, and orbital speed for a low orbit is 5 km/s. Surface atmospheric pressure is 7 atmospheres. It took me a lot of trial and error to build the Phoenix landers for this planet - especially because I didn't want just a lander, but something more elaborate. However, now that I have those tried and true vehicles, I feel safe.

Detaching one of the Phoenix. For the docking part, I regret removing the RCS system in a late redesign

One more unexpected issue here: the Phoenix landers use the normal sized clamp-o-trons, while the rest of my shuttles were redesigned to use the small docking port. I didn't think about it, and now Phoenix can't be attached to Traveler. Fortunately there is an additional docking port where Phoenix was docked, and I could recyle that.

A medium docking port stuck over a small docking port. Not the most elegant solution, but it works

And the trajectory to Derbin. Extremely cheap; Boundless is in an elliptic orbit, a small push is enough to leave, and Oberth effect ensures going to Derbin is easy. Oberth effect also means cheap capture

Meanwhile, I decide to also make use of a Redentor probe.

I took a bunch of nice pictures with the Redentor,  but I'm probably already going over 100 images for this chapter alone, I have to cut somewhere. I mean, I took over 1300 screenshots for this mission, I can't post them all.

The docking of Traveler and Phoenix is not perfectly aligned with the center of mass. I compensate by shutting down an engine

Getting closer to Derbin, here a spectacular double passage of Dermun and Derminmus

Here the two submoons are well visible as Phoenix approaches Derbin; At least Dermun is well visible, Derminmus is darker and harder to make out

For capture I use a rocket burn; Traveler is moderately reinforced for aerobraking, but nowhere near sturdy enough to survive an atmosphere at 7 km/s. Even Phoenix can only take a shallow passage at that speed. So I get captured in elliptic orbit, then at apoapsis release Phoenix to aerobrake.

Phoenix is released

Jettisoning its docking port, Phoenix has a small engine and a bit of fuel. Just enough for deorbiting maneuvers

The thermal shields are deployed. Here one is completely covering the cupola. It will glow red in the atmosphere

First aerobraking. The atmosphere of Derbin starts at 58 km, this is a shallow passage. I determined that at 49 km Phoenix explodes

Coming back, Phoenix passes very close to Derminmus

A view from the crew pod. You can see the thermal shield is glowing, so we're in the atmosphere. Those clouds completely cover the view. Also, this pic is in natural light; amplification makes the clouds glow

And here Phoenix passed close to Dermun; it still skipped its SoI, else a course correction would have been required

Just a funny science report

It took a bunch of aerobraking passages to go from elliptic orbit to circular orbit, Phoenix had to lose 2 km/s. But eventually it was ready to take the deeper plunge.

Phoenix is almost overheating during descent. I'd be very nervous, but I already tested this vehicle and know it will work

Deceleration reaches 10 g, Phoenix is losing speed fast in the middle atmosphere

Descent completed, we finally see the surface. Now I only have to landing

Oooops!

Something went wrong with staging here...

Almost made it. The crew survived, at least

Phoenix is quickly falling, and I have to remove all the layers that protected it from the high speed reentry, without the discarded thermal shields hitting the plane. Not very easy, considering that they are discarded both from the front and from the back. And then I have to land. To complicate matters, I arrived on one of the high areas of the planet, the ground here is at 10 km of altitude; Phoenix flies easily and is easy to control at lower altitudes, but here the minimum speed necessary to keep flying is dangerously close to the speed at which the landing gear will be destroied, no matter how soft the landing.

And sure, I already tested this vehicle and made it work. But that was months ago; there was a complex sequence involved, and I don't remember it.

So I had to discover it, by trial and error. A very frustrating process, the thing that kept me going was the certainty that I made it work once and therefore it had to be possible.

It turns out, the propellers are the key. Specifically, the first problem is removing the front thermal shield without it hitting the plane. For that, I have to activate the propellers and angle them to increase drag. The propellers are not enough to stop Phoenix midair, but they can greatly slow down the fall. Once released, the thermal shield will fall at roughly 40 m/s; if Phoenix is falling slower, it will be able to release the shield without being hit by its own debris.

Discarding the front thermal shield

Discarding the other thermal shields

At this point Phoenix must accelerate, because the other thermal shields are discarded from the back and they must go slower than the plane, else they hit it. But not too fast, else the lateral shields can destroy an elevon. First the central shield is removed, then the other two. Notice how the fairings that protected the propellers were discarded first, but they are still stuck in their place; that seems a bug, eventually they drop.

Achieving level flight

Then the next challenge is achieving level flight. As you can see, by the time I drop all the shields Phoenix is less than 2 km from the surface, and falling point first. At a high altitude where the atmosphere is less cooperative. So I have to accelerate Phoenix and try to achieve level flight before hitting the ground.

And all this must be achieved in a single sequence, without reloading, else it will damage the propeller.

At this point I can pick up some altitude, stop the propellers, and save before attempting to land. At this altitude, I need to land at 80 m/s. Risk of damage to the landing gear is high, but it is feasible.

The only thing I don't understand is how I could devise that complicated sequence the first time, without any knowledge of whether Phoenix would work, if I had so much troubles finding it later.

Finally landed!

Just the atmospheric analysis

This picture shows EVA experiments, but it also shows how kerbals are supposed to return inside Phoenix; the ladder on that laboratory is low enough for grabbing. Also, Gememma shines nicely

Finally, an image from the backward cupola. I included it for something

You may notice that the cupola is turned upside down, and I turned around the image to have the ground on the bottom. As I made Phoenix many months ago, I have no idea if I intentionally made the cupola this way to have a better view of the ground, or if it was a design mistake. However, putting the bulky control panel on top does give a better view of the ground, and the picture does look good when rotated 180°.

2.4) That's no monument valley (but a pretty good shot nonetheless)

Spoiler

Derbin is geologically unique. It has continents and mountains very similar to those of Earth - something rare in this game, where most mountains are just random lumps of elevated terrain. It also has a clear distinction between continental crust and oceanic crust. I really miss not being able to see the shape of the continents from up high, the clouds cover everything from above. I suppose the mod creator wanted to keep the terrain a mystery - a supposition corroborated by him defining the information that Imterril is a water planet "a spoiler". What can I say, it's completely unthinkable for me to launch a mission to a planet without knowing exactly what's there and without having tested the lander to make sure it works in those conditions, but I suppose there could be people who will launch a probe to that mystery cloudy planet without knowing what's underneath.

Anyway, despite being apparently a lifeless desert (I wonder what happened to the water, there's a lot of it in the atmosphere and the planet has enough gravity to avoid losing it) Derbin has some spectacular views and I spent several hours flying Phoenix around. I took hundreds of pictures in the process, here showing only the most significant.

The ground seen from the crew pod in flight. I made sure Phoenix would have multiple good spots for IVA views

View from the cupola, with Mesbin and Kerbmun in the sky

Derminmus is passing in front of Dermun. How is it that from the surface you can see space so clearly, but from space you don't see anything of the surface?

With some magnification you can also see Graymun

I mentioned continents; here's a continental shelf

We could see such shelves on our planet too, if we dried up the oceans. Well, the cliffs would not be so dramatic, but the continents are indeed raised platforms. This feature is not found on any other ksp world, and makes me curious. Unfortunately I cannot see the shapes of such shelves - or the presence of other major mountain chains - because the clouds prevent seeing the terrain when I zoom out.

Flying over the continental boundary

Seen from the pod

Seen from the cupola, looking backwards

The cliff marked a biome boundary, so I landed there, run some science, and returned back to aim for new biomes. In the lowlands flying, and especially landing, is much more easy; Phoenix can sustain flight at 50 m/s, making for a trivial landing.

Going back up the continental ridge

Flying past a curious rock pinnacle

Gememma and Dermun

A mesa, seen looking down from the pod

This high elevation rock amphiteater has two new biomes on top

Unfortunately, while Phoenix can barely fly up to that altitude, it definitely cannot land in those conditions - not that this prevented me from bashing my head against the wall of futile attempts. Since I wanted to get science from those biomes, I landed Phoenix and went up on the ground.

Phoenix used as rover; or perhaps just landed, seems too fast to be driving on the ground

Phoenix used as a rover. It will manage to climb up the cliffs

And here flying again towards the equator, in preparation for ascent

The milestones reached. Considering the size of the planet, that's probably 1000 km of flight

I left Phoenix parked on the ground. I gave it some large living room to simulate a mobile base that could stay on a planet for months.

2.5) Dermun and Derminmus

Spoiler

While Phoenix completed its ground exploration, Traveler is still waiting in high orbit. I realized, since Phoenix is completely discarded on ascent, that I could return to grab Cigar, and land on the submoons of Derbin, before going back with the whole crew.

Traveler returns to Boundless

Unless I can match periapsis, those rendez-vous around Kerbmun are uncomfortably expensive. They negate the other advantages of parking there

Traveler grabs Cigar

And the trip back to Derbin

With the trajectory for Dermun

Getting captured in low Derbin orbit makes for an extremely cheap capture, but then it's 200 m/s to lower apoapsis to Dermun and 500 m/s for capture. I wonder if it's better. to enter Derbin orbit level with Dermun; it will make for a more expensive capture, but intercept on Dermun will be much cheaper

Indeed, 100 m/s for Derbin capture but only 200 m/s for Dermun capture, and no need to lower Derbin apoapsis. Much better

Approaching Dermun. It doesn't really look like Mun; it's much less cratered

Commencing landing operations

Landed on Dermun

I spotted a mountain in the distance and I decided to climb it with the rover

It was a hard climb; this mountain has steep cliffs all around, and Cigar has a high center of mass. This prevents switchbacking, as the rover would roll laterally

Actually, it would be possible to switchback if I could detach the attitude controls with the wheel controls. This way I could keep applying a roll to the rover to counteract gravity, while pushing forward with the wheels. But I drive by turning the reaction wheels off when I use the regular wheels, a method that's easier to learn and practice, but not as efficient in a difficult spot like this one. The tiny light in front of Cigar pointing back at the crew cabin lights up when reaction wheels are off; I discovered that having a visual indicator of that is comfortable.

Despite the difficulties, Cigar made it to the top

A better view of the mountain. It's surprisingly low, but hard to climb nonetheless

Away, to Derminmus. I forgot to take pictues of the maneuvers involved, but total cost was probably around 400 m/s, mostly for Derminmus capture

Derminmus! It's not green like Minmus, except in some patches. Probably more realistic. Those could be salts pans left behind by quick water evaporation, colored green by copper carbonate

Derminmus is very flat, to the point Cigar could accelerate to high speed despite the low gravity. In that it resembles Minmus. I also wanted to show the fuel level on Cigar

I went to plant a flag on a salt pan before leaving. In this low gravity I don't even have to find a slope, using reaction wheels to point up is enough

Rejoined in orbit. 4500 m/s left on Traveler may seem like a lot of fuel, but it's actually pretty short for what it has to do next

I'm referring to the fact that now Traveler will have to pay 2 km/s to lower orbit around Derbin to a low circular orbit to grab the crew of the Phoenix. And then it will need 2 more km/s to leave Derbin. Not much deltaV to spare.

To lower Derbin periapsis, I'd need 800 m/s

Going outward, and using a gravity assist from Dermun, saves a little bit of fuel

The above trajectory is such: first 200 m/s from Derminmus to Dermun. At Dermun periapsis, 300 m/s to lower Derbin periapsis - in addition to a gravity assist from Dermun and Oberth effect, it's enough to reach the desired low periapsis. But the earlier trajectory would result in an apoapsis at the level of Derminmus, while the current trajectory would place apoapsis at Dermun; so to properly simulate which is cheaper I also need to include an additional cost to reduce apoapsis to Derminmus. Which is what the third maneuver (217 m/s) is. All in all, this stunt saved 50 m/s, it was probably not worth the effort.

Traveler approaches Derbin periapsis. Visible in the sky Mesbin, Dermin, Derminmus, and what could possibly be Graymun by magnification

I experimented with aerobraking, but Traveler is not sturdy enough. It can lose at most 1 m/s without exploding. Faced with the prospect of doing 1600 consecutive aerobraking passages, I decided to use the rockets. In retrospect, I should have loaded more fuel when leaving Boundless. But right now it's faster to salvage the mission as it is than to reload all the way back.

2.6) The most challenging ascent

Spoiler

Now it's again a difficult time: getting Phoenix back to orbit. At least in this case the sequence is easier to figure out, there's only one way staging can be performed. Not that it's going to be trivial. Especially because I did not follow exactly the safety procedures for propellers, and they ended up taking some damage.

As you can see, the rotors are bent out of place, probably by aerodinamic stresses. Autostrutting the rotors reduces the problem

For Arrowhead I got a replacement, but Phoenix is single use, so I decide I'll try to fly it anyway.

First step, transfer the crew to the front seats

Once over the fairing, they can jump on the external seats

Phoenix takes its last flight

Dropping the front wheel. Now there's no turning back

Dropping the habitat

The plan assumes to drop the habitat for reduced weight and keep climbing on propellers and battery power. But with the propellers bent out of shape as they are, Phoenix is unstable once it drops the habitat section. So I have to skip that part and hope I'm high enough. I managed to reach around 13 km of altitude before flying became too unstable.

Dropping also the wings, Phoenix ascends on a vector engine

This part of the flight is made difficult by the need to pull up the nose. Phoenix must not accelerate too much in the lower atmosphere, else it loses too much to drag. But pulling up the tip too much causes the rocket to become unstable.

Dropping the lateral boosters. No idea what exploded, but Phoenix is undamaged

Finally dropping the first stage, the next part of the ascent stage is a wedge powered by a dart engine

The first set of drop tank, comprising the tip, has run out and is discarded. Also the fairing, drag is negligible at this point

Phoenix, now much lighter, keeps climbing up on the dart. It must reach a relatively high apoapsis, because the next stage has low thrust

Dropping the last droppable tank, and also the dart engine. A smaller spark engine will propel what's left of Phoenix for circularization

The spark has low thrust, but there's enough time to apoapsis to make full use of the fuel on board

Orbit acheived, with 100 m/s left

After some maneuvering on both ships, Phoenix reaches Traveler

A treasure trove of science data is transfered. Yes, it's not relevant to the mission, but I'm still going out of my way to get as many experiments done as possible

The now discarded Phoenix is last seen floating in front of Traveler. Also, a comet

Now, to leave Derbin I need almost 2 km/s. Traveler barely has that much, though it won't leave enough for rendez-vous with Boundless

I could save a bit by gravity assists from Dermun, but I decided not to. It takes over 1600 m/s to raise apoapsis to Dermun, by that time there's very little to gain. I don't want a repeat of the long sequence I did on Graymun when it would only save a ton of fuel.

Arriving on Kerbmun. By the wrong side, and with barely any fuel left

Aerobraking

The intercept speed was low enough that Traveler didn't even need rockets to get captured. It did need a bit to raise periapsis and enter a stable orbit.

Traveler in a stable orbit, with less than 50 m/s left

Now I need a rescue mission to grab the taxi. It takes almost 1 km/s to go from Boundless to Traveler, and then there's also the return trip. Unless I move the whole mothership, but of course it's too expensive if I have better options. Ice Cream Cone is made to carry liquid fuel but it only has chemical engines (in retrospect, I would swap two wolfhounds for two nervs), so it's unsuitable for a high deltaV mission. Arrowhead may be able to make it, but it's relatively small, I don't know if it would have enough deltaV with the added mass of Traveler.

However, Traveler has a heavy stage, which I haven't used so far, that's practically a glorified fuel tank with nuclear engines. It's perfect for the job. It lacks a probe core or antennas or power generation, but a Redentor probe can dock with it and form a new spacecraft. I keep being surprised by how often it turn out useful to have a small probe around.

The traveler heavy stage docked with a Redentor, ready to reach Traveler

And here they are, having completed the docking. There's no place for Redentor to dock here, but it's got enough fuel to return on its own

The maneuver required to go from Boundless to Traveler orbit

Raising periapsis in a circular orbit is about as expensive as circularizing in low orbit by aerobraking and then raising apoapsis, but aerobraking with those ships requires multiple passages, so we'll stay in high orbit.

This completes the innumerable moons of Mesbin. Boundless is ready for its next destination: the superearth Valyr, where it will drop the remaining Phoenix lander, so it will travel more lightly in the future.

Wow. This was a very long chapter. If I had realized it, I would have split the exploration of the Mesbin system in three chapters instead of two.

[What does every space station need?]

3 hours ago, Space Shuttle destroyer said:

I want to make a space station, not massive just a single launch, can anyone tell me what I need?

hard to say, because in this game there's no real reason to have a space station. except maybe in career mode to use a lab continuously, but science is never an issue anyway.

so, ask yourself what do you want your space station to do in the first place.

do you want it to be a refueling depot? you need fuel tanks. do you need it for science? put laboratories in there. do you want to make it just for show? make it good-looking, and who cares about what's actually in there.

what you actually need for a station is solar panels, batteries and reaction wheels, but that's not much mass. most of the station is up to you.

[Lucy in the sky with deadly radiation 5: strangest sky ever!]

Part 1: Climbing out of the gravity well

Orbiting Mesbin is cheap thanks to its rapid rotation, but raising orbit around Mesbin is very expensive. Boundless slowly gets out of this deep gravity well while visiting the inner moons of Mesbin.

The relative positions of the inner moons. Statmun and Thresomin are smaller than Gilly, while Graymun is Mun-sized

From low orbit it takes roughly 300 m/s to raise apoapsis to Statmun, an additional 1600 m/s to raise it to Thresomin, and finally 650 for Graymun

1.1) Launching Boundless

Spoiler

Mesbin is a truly massive planet. Orbital speed for a low orbit is over 10 km/s, a lot higher than Jool - Mesbin is slightly lighter than Jool, but a lot smaller, so a low orbit is much closer to the center of the planet. On the plus side, the rapid rotation of the planet means you already have 8.5 km/s of lateral speed even on the surface. You can see the rotation of the sky without time warping. Also, there is no atmosphere except on the polar regions. This makes orbiting Mesbin significantly easier than orbiting Kerbin, depite a 30% bigger surface gravity. Landing, on the other hand, is a grueling ordeal reminescent of Tylo. Good thing I'm not planning to land on Mesbin.

To save time on launches, I use the well-established procedure of launching the mothership with the shuttles already docked in place. All of them except for Ice Cream Cone and Arrowhead, because the shielded small docking port cannot be docked in the VAB.

Boundless on the launchpad

From one of the cupolas, looking at the VAB

From the opposite cupola, looking at the magnificent desolation of Mesbin. The reddish knob on the horizon is the geostationary moonlet Statmun

The rearward facing cupola, still enclosed in the nose cone cargo bay

View from one of the crew cabins in the middle, overlooking a Phoenix

And from Cigar

Yes, with Boundless I went a bit overboard in trying to get good IVA views. I'm no longer limited to cramming all my living space inside a shell of fuel tanks for radiation protection, I tried to build something that would look nice.

Ignition

Starting gravity turn immediately, and opening nose cones

As there is no atmosphere on Mesbin's equator, you can make a steep gravity turn and launch low. You also can use the NERVs immediately on the launchpad, but I preferred to only activate them later because the opening of the nose cones interfered with the launch stabilizers.

Views from the rearward cupola. Every space agency should get one. Well, Spacex has put a camera in that spot, so it counts

I had to use this weird asymmetric configuration for my boosters to fit into the space left by the opening nose cones

Detaching the boosters also caused a lateral section of Boundless to get detached. This turned out to be a tricky procedure; I basically had to detach each booster one by one to avoid overstressing the ship

Detaching the boosters, this time successfully

Boundless finishes circularization on its own power now, leaving behind the discarded boosters. A good view on Kerbmun from this cupola; the smaller dot on its right is probably Derbin

Now I have to launch and dock separately Ice Cream Cone and Arrowhead. Ice Cream Cone has low deltaV as a tanker, but as long as it carries only its own fuel it has way more than enough to orbit Mesbin.

Launching Ice Cream Cone

And docking it to Boundless

Docking is very comfortable with a powerful RCS system. I could have saved roughly one ton of mass by skipping it, but since I will have to make dozens of dockings with this thing, I decided to go for luxury. I regret not putting some floodlight in front.

As for Arrowhead, it has way more than enough deltaV to orbit, its problem is that its engines do not point up while on the ground. It's supposed to fly up and maneuver while in the air, but there's no air on Mesbin. The solution is to launch it from a ramp pointing up. But you've seen the surrounding of the kerbal space center are completely flat as far as the eye can see, where do I find an upward slope around here?

Here it is, problem solved

For a brief moment Arrowhead is jumping, and I use that opportunity to point up and ascend like a proper rocket

Arrowhead docked; actual picture from later in the mission, as I didn't take one after launch; that's why here Arrowhead is docking near Traveler, while in the pic underneath it's near Ice Cream Cone

I also gave Arrowhead a couple RCS thrusters; the thing is, docking backwards amid a jungle of other closely fitting shuttles is very difficult. Those thrusters can then be removed by EVA construction and stored inside Arrowhead's crew pod, to keep a better aerodinamic profile.

Also notice how the shield on the docking port extends past the docking port itself, creating some issues with docking. For Arrowhead, I solved it by putting its docking port on a side of a bigger part, so the shield can lean out. For Ice Cream Cone, I placed a small fuel tank under the docking port on Boundless to act as spacer. I had to scrap the first launch because I didn't consider this factor and couldn't dock those ships.

Boundless, fully assembled

Four shuttles are on top; from the left, Cigar, Traveler, Ice Cream Cone, Arrowhead. The Redentor probes are hanging laterally from the high towers supporting the solar array; it does not look good, but the lower thermal shields are protecting them from direct airflow during aerobraking. The two Phoenix are front and back, they are not protected during aerobraking because they are already made for high thermal resistance.

Status; of course without kerbalism to add life support resources there's not much point to show one. Here I wanted to show that I still got over 1000 parts

Just a minor note, Boundless was initially called Kalimba, and that's why it will be named thusly in this picture and others afterwards, until I decided I liked Boundless better. I'm not going to retroactively edit all the screenshots.

1.2) Statmun the bizarre

Spoiler

Quoted from the whirligig world page:

Quote

Statmun is extremely dense and nonetheless still below the roche limit. However, it's also a huge chunk of nearly monolithic iron, and spinning fast enough that its surface gravity across its equator is negative anyway, so that's hardly a problem. Statmun contains almost no volatiles, and thus can NOT BE MINED FOR ORE.

So, Statmun is a large asteroid (3 km radius) orbiting just a few hundred kilometers above the surface, and it spins so fast objects on the equator will be launched outward. Quite the interesting place. I would like to make a circumnavigation of it, using a robot with claws for feet, to grab the surface. But it would be extremely slow; maybe one day when I really have nothing better to do.

Statmun is close enough to low orbit that I can send Cigar alone.

Detaching Cigar from Boundless

I had already raised Boundless apoapsis to Statmun level, since I had to do it anyway. Cigar only needs to sincronyze orbits and pay the intercept deltaV.

For a total cost of 350 m/s

Leaving Boundless. You will forgive me for including as many scenical views of my mothership as possible

Approaching Statmun. Funny thing, I'm still outside of its sphere of influence, which has a 9 km radius above the surface.

Just inside the sphere of influence. Also, here you can better appreciate the twin stars Kaywell and Limnel

From this perspective it looks like Kerbmun is about to get crushed between Statmun and Mesbin

Landed near the equator! Notice how the engine is working at low power to counteract the centrifugal force

Yep, parking on Statmun equator is quite expensive. At least the engine stays on even when the kerbal is doing a spacewalk, so I can keep the lander parked in the time needed to collect science and take pictures.

Playing golf on the surface. Actually the ball should start floating and get lost in an escape trajectory without even being hit

A couple pic to show the centrifugal force. They are taken 12 seconds from each other, you can see how Cigar is picking up speed; also how it doesn't have an apoapsis, meaning it's in escape trajectory

And here I landed near the poles, where you can at least stay on the surface

The view is amazing. Mesbin is an intimidating wall in front of you, making you fully realize that you're suspended in the sky

I decide to take a drive to the nearest biome. Very slowly, of course, but I did travel one km by wheels on this tiny moonlet

More amazing shoots. Statmun is  breathtaking

Leaving Statmun

And returning to Boundless

1.3) Tiny Thresomin

Spoiler

Quoted from the whirligig world page:

Quote

Two of Mesbin's three minor moons, Thresomin and Troymin, are designed to exist as propellant mines for setting up infrastructure. Whirligig World rewards building infrastructure

That's exactly why I had to put a limitation on refueling only on atmospheric planets; with 9 km/s and the ability to refuel on every tiny rock, there would be no challenge. Also, a body that small wouldn't have many volatiles to make fuel either. Even if it had some residual water left, it would not last much once used regularly.

Anyway, Thresomin is just that; a tiny rock halfway between Statmun and Graymun, placed because it would make for convenient refueling.

I need to raise apoapsis all the way to Graymun, Thresomin is just a stop along the way.

It takes 1600 m/s to raise apoapsis from Statmun level to Thresomin level

Boundless has low thrust, so the apoapsis raising is done slowly over multiple orbits

More nice scenery

By complete chance, Boundless passed within a few km of Statmun during one such maneuvers

It took a while; a downside of fast orbits is that the time available to burn with small cosine losses is short, so I could push little more than 100 m/s at every orbit. But eventually I raised apoapsis to Thresomin.

Now, obviously there's no reason for Boundless to get captured on Thresomin. It would only entail an expensive periapsis-raising maneuver. But it's going to be cheaper to send Cigar from this orbit.

This time intrcept speed is high, over 1500 m/s - and just as much to return to Boundless afterwards. A downside of tiny moons is that they provide no Oberth effect. Cigar doesn't have enough fuel, it needs to be accompanied by Traveler.

Cigar docks with Traveler

Traveler fully deploys its solar array

The 1500 m/s of intercept, split that way to achieve the right orbital time to meet Thresomin. I only loaded half fuel in Traveler, it's more than adequate

Thresomin. At 2 km equatorial radius, it's even smaller than Statmun; I'm still outside of the SoI

First view from inside the sphere of influence. And from inside the ship too

Landed, and moving on the surface

Since Thresomin is so small, and relatively flat, the first time I landed here I decided to circumnavigate the moon.

That time I had a defective solar array on Boundless, and I was eventually forced to replay the mission from start. But the circumnavigation remains. The second time I just landed, planted a flag and left.

Everything is better with comets! So long as they're not hitting you, at least

The belt of flags planted around Thresomin

Traveler and Cigar rejoining Boundless, seen from one of Boundless cupolas

And this is seen from Cigar's cabin, with a striking detal on Mesbin surface

1.4) Aptly-named Greymun

Spoiler

Now Boundless has the final leg of apoapsis raising; the target is Greymun. Unlike the other moonlets, Graymun is slightly bigger than Mun, so it's big enough to provide gravity assists; I'm using it to push my orbit up to Kerbmun, where I'll make a temporary stop.

A last 650 m/s to reach a useful target

Boundless (still named Kalimba here) takes the first gravity assist; it has a minuscule effect on apoapsis, but it does raise periapsis significantly (red line)

According to how gravity assists work, you leave the target body at the same speed (relative to it) that you came. I'm now coming to Graymun on a perfect Hohmann trajectory, that minimizes my intercept deltaV. And I'm using Graymun to raise periapsis, because the biggest effect of any maneuver is on the opposite side of the orbit. But then, if my apoapsis stayed the same and periapsis increased, that would result in a lower intercept speed on Graymun - which cannot be, because intercept speed must remain the same. Hence this gravity assist also gives a slight apoapsis raising; just enough to put me out of an ideal Hohmann, keeping intercept speed the same. In general, I'm about to perform a long sequence of gravity assists on Graymun, slowly raising my orbit. Good thing Graymun has a fast orbit, so I don't have to worry about food supplies.

But what about landing? Since we established that in any flyby Boundless will have the same intercept speed, I'm also using those flybys to drop and pick up the lander.

Cigar and Traveler got detached from Boundless, they will get captured on Graymun for 1400 m/s. It's less than the capture speed on Thresomin because Graymun has some Oberth effect

Capture burn on Graymun

While Boundless is zipping past on its high speed intercept

With Cigar safely in orbit, first priority is making arrangements for Boundless next flyby. A small course correction at periapsis will fine-tune it, in 1 day 5 hours (red trajectory)

So I have 1 day 5 hours to land before Boundless will come back to pick up Cigar. It's a lot of time.

Cigar and Traveler in Graymun orbit

Little trivia: even though Kaywell and Limnel are two stars in a binary system, the game engine is not equipped to deal with that. So while both starts make light, only Kaywell can power up solar panels. When Limnel is passing in front of Kaywell, solar panels stop working. As I had to restart the mission, I took the chance to install bigger batteries to deal with the periodic blackout.

Cigar prepares to land

Cigar landing sequence looks a bit silly, but it does its job

I decided to drive around Graymun. I want to experience those celestial bodies, not just plant a flag on them as fast as possible

More driving on Graymun

Cigar is a decent rover, but not great. It's got a very narrow base, and even though it relies on reaction wheels to keep upright, it's not a perfect system. Therefore, it's significantly more fragile than other rovers I made. Well, it's small and light, can't pretend too much.

Just like Arrowhead, it has the engine in the back, aligned with the ground, so it must find a natural slope to launch. That's not a problem. What are the chances that I'm not going to find any eastward facing slope on a planet?

Cigar picking up speed on a slope to return to orbit

As I was flying to orbit, I spotted this arc. Looks like Graymun was made using Mun's model, so it has the same anomalies. Can't confirm with kerbnet because kerbnet does not work in this planetary pack

The planned flyby of Boundless

It may not be clear from the picture, but in this case Boundless will arrive to Graymun retrograde compared to Cigar. It would be very expensive to rendez-vous. Not a big deal, I'll wait the next.

Boundless prepares for its third flyby of Graymun. By now the effect on both periapsis and apoapsis is getting noticeable

The rockets seen from another crew cabin on Boundless

All is ready for the rendez-vous of Cigar on the next flyby

To rendez-vous from an escape trajectory, Cigar must pass near Boundless periapsis at the same time as Boundless. You can see I raised apoapsis a bit to syncronize orbits for this passage. It's still not a close passage (intersection 2, 156 km), but that's because it will be a very fast passage and Traveler has low thrust. So I made sure to put Cigar+Traveler well ahead of Boundless; this way they have a headstart and can accelerate gradually while Boundless catches up.

Indeed, here Boundless is coming, and Traveler is accelerating

And now the exit trajectories look similar

And finally here, both Traveler and Boundless are out of Graymun's SoI but close enough and on similar enough trajectories that it's easy to rendez-vous them in Mesbin orbit

Back to Boundless

1.5) Greymun is your friend: the route to Kerbmun

Spoiler

It would take another km/s to raise apoapsis from Graymun to Kerbmun, but I'm going to save that by gravity assist. Those assists from Graymun are invaluable not only for raising apoapsis, but for raising periapsis too, resulting in a more gentle intercept on Kerbmun. Kerbmun is very similar to Kerbin (just 6% more surface gravity), and while Boundless is reinforced for aerobraking, a high speed intercept on a Kerbin-like planet is beyond its capabilities. So, the mod builder placed Thresomin to refuel, and from Thresomin intercept I could land there with 1500 m/s. Instead, with just 650 m/s I got a Graymun intercept, from which I will be able to reach Kerbmun, where I can aerobrake - or take another gravity assist to anywhere. It's Greymun, and not Thresomin, that's the real conveniently placed moon.

Of course, if you are playing a career instead of a single challenge, I can totally see the attractiveness of just landing on Thresomin instead of spending an afternoon doing flybys.

Flyby 4; yet another slight raising of the orbit

Flyby 5; yet another slight raising of the orbit

Flyby 6; yet another slight raising of the orbit

Unlike what I did in other circumstances, this time I'm not trying to come out of a flyby in a resonant orbit. Those orbits are fast enough, an encounter with Graymun is all but guaranteed; instead I just make every flyby as close as possible, to maximize the effect; for that I aim at 15 km. Graymun is mostly flat, but most of its terrain is around 12 km of elevation. After a flyby, I explore future orbits for the next close passage; I always find one within a few days. Then at the next Mesbin apoapsis I make a small prograde or retrograde burn to refine that.

Flyby 7; yet another slight raising of the orbit. This time it took 12 days to find one because Boundless and Graymun have almost the same orbital time

Flyby 8; yet another slight raising of the orbit. Periapsis is now higher than Thresomin

Flyby 9; yet another slight raising of the orbit

Flyby 10; yet another slight raising of the orbit

Flyby 11; yet another slight raising of the orbit

Flyby 12; yet another slight raising of the orbit

Flyby 13; after that I'm high enough to cross Kerbmun's SoI

Encounter with Kerbmun!

Now I'm using the encounter with Kerbmun to eject in a resonant orbit to encounter Kerbmun again. The reason for this is that while I can use aerobraking to reduce my orbital velocity, I also reach Kerbmun with an inclination, and I would like to negate that before I start aerobraking.

Approaching Kerbmun

Aerobraking on Kerbmun

Getting captured by Derbin's gravity and flung away from Mesbin entirely. Ooops!

Derbin is a big moon, it's got a huge SoI reaching down almost to Kerbmun. It's easy to get captured accidentally. Ok, reload and let's try a different trajectory.

New trajectory after first Kerbmun encounter. Stay away from Derbin, and meet again Kerbmun in 35 days

The next Kerbmun encounter; inclination reduced to 2.5 degrees

42 m/s to zero inclination, then it's aerobraking time

I did draw a 60 m/s maneuver at periapsis because, by trial and error, I determined that's the most Boundless can aerobrake in a single passage. That's not enough for capture, and I wanted to see where that would lead - most important, I wanted to check it would not result in crossing Derbin again. Just like I did for Graymun, I'm not worrying about finding the next flyby; Kerbmun has a very large SoI, and those orbits are fast, so a new intercept will be found soon enough.

Closing everything in preparation for aerobraking

The nose cone closing in, seen from the rearward cupola

Aerobraking, at periapsis. Boundless is at the limit of what it can take; a couple km lower, and it would explode. 28 m/s are the speed lost so far

Boundless emerges, opening up again

It took 80 more days, but I got another flyby

Boundless approaches Kerbmun again

Once more, aerobraking to the limit

Once more, by the law of gravity assists, as long as I keep making Kerbmun flybys my intercept speed will remain the same. But if I aerobrake a bit at every passage, my speed relative to Kerbmun will keep decreasing, until I will get captured.

In this second flyby, after slowing 60 m/s in the first, I expect to be 60 m/s slower. But I realize I'm only 10 m/s slower.

I theorize it's because of the sphere of influence approximation. Sure, you leave the SoI at the same speed you came in, but it may be at different distances from the central body. This causes an approximation in how you respond to the gravity of the central body that may cause this irregularity. Just an hypothesis, but I see no other explanation.

Anyway, I didn't even try to predict how that would work. If this effect could randomly accelerate me compared to Kerbmun, it can also slow me down. So I just keep aerobraking until the math works in my favor.

Indeed, at the next flyby Boundless is slower, it only takes 70 m/s to get captured

I don't remember if being slower allowed me to reduce periapsis or if I had to burn for 20 m/s, anyway, I got captured

Kerbmun is well placed to finish the exploration of the Mesbin system. It allows aerocapture, so I could stop there for free coming from Graymun; Traveler also will be able to get captured for free. In an elliptic orbit I can push away for a small cost, and if I time it right I can then get captured by Derbin, using its strong gravity assist to go anywhere. It will be my base of operation while Traveler brings various landers to the rest of the moons of Mesbin.

[Lucy in the sky with deadly radiation 5: strangest sky ever!]

Part 0: Introduction and ship

I was worried I'd run out of grand tour challenges to try after the real solar system, luckily the modding community is doing a good job.

One year ago I found mention of the whirligig world planetary system, which I found very intriguing.

Quote

Around 1300 years ago, explorers from the far off planet Kerbin left their home to colonize other star systems. One such ship embarked on a journey to Kerbmun, an oxygenated moon in the Kaywell star system. There was just one problem. They hadn't counted on Mesbin being much wider than expected.

Unable to correct their course due to piloting error, the U.S.C. Manifest Destiny crashed into the massive, 70 Kerbin Mass planet Mesbin. Luckily, Mesbin spins. Once every twenty eight minutes it completes a rotation, and the centripetal effect pushes the equator outwards and negates some of the gravity. The 13 gees of gravity at the poles is reduced to a tad under 1.3 gee at the equator.

The payload of the ship survived, but the engines and fuel tanks were reduced to a lot of metal rubble along the surface. Unable to find somewhere else to go, the survivors buried themselves underground and set up a stable ecosystem and environment. It took nearly two millenia, a few wars, and the re-invention of the steam engine, but eventually the colony was sufficiently industrialized to start looking up again.

Besides this unconventional starting planet, the whirligig system also includes a double star in close orbit, a hot Jupiter, sub-moons, trojan orbits, eccentric orbits. Seems a perfect next target for another grand tour, so I marked it on my to-do list for after I was done with the real solar system. Which I finished in january, so I took my time for this one.

Part of the difficulty was deciding exactly what I would do. Starting from the very premise of those missions: kerbalism is not compatible with this planetary pack.

Kerbalism has always been what added spice to a grand tour. With an isru ship, a grand tour is really no more difficult than a handful of individual missions. Not much of a challenge. Having your ship slowly breaking down while you're at it, that is what made things interesting. On the other hand, I gradually learned how to navigate the difficulties of kerbalism so that by the end they were mostly irrelevant - my last grand tour had no issues with reliability or life support supplies, and only once radiations really created suspence. On the plus side, lag would be a lot more manageable, so I'm not really unhappy for being unable to use kerbalism.

But this means I need to find some other challenge to add.

So I decided, despite the lack of kerbalism, I'm going to pretend I still have to take care of life support and hard isru. The most relevant decision is that I will only refuel on planets with an atmosphere; here I'm pretending I'm gathering CO₂ from the atmosphere to make new fuel. Otherwise, whirligig world has small moonlets scattered everywhere for a cheap refueling which would make it too easy. On the other hand, I'm not trying to build redundancies; I can enjoy some more freedom in design.

Initially, I also decided I wanted to try making this a fully reusable mission. However, there are two planets bigger than Eve; I spent some time trying to build a Eve ssto, and I got told that you need a bunch of exploits to make frictionless parts to make it work - which makes it bug exploiting in my book, so I basically lost interest in trying to make an Eve ssto. But even if I could make one, Derbin and Valyr have 30% more gravity and require an additional 2 km/s to orbit, so they'd be impossible to ssto anyway. So I changed the condition as "fully reusable except for the Derbin and Valyr landers".

0.1) Boundless mothership

Spoiler

Within a few weeks of playing ksp, I decided I wanted to make a magnificent mothership capable of going anywhere and doing anything. Fully reusable, with lots of deltaV, room for a massive crew, and a large array of shuttles for specialized tasks. And it would have been called Boundless.

I never built Boundless because the project included an Eve ssto, which I was never capable of building. But now that I gave up on ever trying, I feel free to use the name.

Boundless without its shuttles

I don't need a huge solar array, but I'm pretending I'm still using kerbalism, and I'm not using nuclear reactors this time, so I just put it there for the sake of pretending. And for beauty. Even though it doubles the ship's part count.

But I also decided I wanted a ship with strong aerobraking capabilities. Whirligig world has a lot of atmospheric planets, being able to aerobrake from high speed is important. Ok, not so much when your ship has 9 km/s, but I wanted it, and I wanted some excuse to add some piece of cool engineering to what would otherwise be nothing but a glorified fuel tank. So, the solar array can be retracted and enclosed inside cargo bays, the engines can be covered by nose cone bays (part of the near future pack) and all the shuttles are mounted on top, protected from airflow. Unfortunately, Boundless in this configuration has very low drag, and despite its survivability it was failing at the "braking" part of aerobraking. So I added some thermal shields mounted as parachutes to increase drag.

Boundless in aerobraking configuration

Sequence of the opening of the solar panels

An older version of the solar array. I played a few weeks with this, but I realized it was getting bent over time, so I reworked in favor of a more stable model

Boundless pushing its aerobraking to the limit on Kerbmun, a Kerbin-like world

I included a lot more living space than actually needed; as I'm pretending to be using kerbalism, I am using that in place of the heavy greenhouses and water tanks . It's still a lot lighter than actual greenhouses and water tank, so I made Boundless smaller than my previous motherships.

I was very indecisive on whether I'd use nuclear or chemical engines. The thing is, nuclear engines are way too overpowered for a stock-like system. Then again, whirligig world uses stock proportions - meaning you can get to most interplanetary destinations with 1 km/s - but it has a few planets and moons very close to their parent body, requiring huge amounts of deltaV to reach. The cake goes to Ammenon, a small planet orbiting close to a minor star orbiting the main star of the system; a Hohmann transfer from its closest neighboor requires 5 km/s for an intercept (which can possibly be avoided by gravity assist) and 10 km/s of intercept speed - which cannot be avoided. I decided I'd try to make a reusable mission to Ammenon, and it that makes Boundless overpowered for anyting else, so be it.

0.2) Cigar small lander

Spoiler

Next piece is a small lander for the minor planets.

Cigar lander, side view

Without kerbalism to force redundancy and heavy radiation plating, I decided to make something a lot smaller than usual, at only 4 tons. It doesn't have much thrust or deltaV, but it's enough for whirligig world; all planets significantly bigger than Mun have an atmosphere, so they will get a different lander. I also got to use the airplane crew pod, which has the best IVA view - can't be used in kerbalism, it would cause the whole ship to become depressurized. I also got to include RCS thrusters for easier docking, something I never did in kerbalism because of the additional issues of redundancy and part count.

I eventually removed the light from the front because it was blocking the view too much.

0.3) Arrowhead (stock version), atmospheric space plane

Spoiler

For the many atmospheric worlds I needed some kind of propeller plane. I decided to use the Arrowhead spaceplane, from the A'Tuin grand tour, because I liked that vehicle.

Without kerbalism, I made some rework to remove redundant parts, reducing its mass by 20%

Arrowhead, top view

Arrowhead, detail of the cargo bay and propellers bay

Arrowhead is fully capable of going ssto on Kerbin, making it adequate to orbit every planet in the whirligig world pack - except Derbin and Valyr.

Landing, on the other hand, was a bigger issue; some of those planets have too thin atmospheres, making Arrowhead incapable of flight. I solved that problem by temporarily strapping a few parachutes on the front of the plane, allowing it to land like a rocket.

I decided to make an exception and leave the RTGs in this case; solar panels would have marred the profile of the plane.

0.4) Traveler taxi

Spoiler

Having two landers of very different masses, I decided to keep a modular approach to the taxi: a core taxi module, relatively light, to carry around the small lander cheaply, and an additional fuel tank module, to carry the bigger lander.

Traveler, heavy configuration

Traveler, light configuration

Traveler is also optimized for aerobraking, though that was unnecessary.

It's surprising how little I have to say about ships when I don't have to discuss life support, redundancy and radiation protection.

0.5) Ice Cream Cone, refueling vehicle

Spoiler

I decided to use an architecture similar to the DREAM BIG mission, with a dedicated ship to land on atmospheric planets to make fuel. Since I have no issues with breakable parts, this time I don't need four, one suffices.

Ice Cream Cone in the VAB

Ice Cream Cone, fully deployed

On a Duna-like planet, it can carry up 100 tons of fuel per trip. Of course, on a bigger planet I can reduce the amount of liquit fuel to increase deltaV.

I probably gave Ice Cream Cone more thrust than it actually needed; I wanted it to be able to refuel also on some bigger planets, but I doubt I will have the patience to perform refueling operations when every trip only carries up 20 tons of fuel or so.

Notice the shielded small docking port; I don't even remember which expansion it comes from.

0.6) Phoenix heavy landers

Spoiler

For the two superEve planets, I needed something with propellers to clear the atmosphere, plus a lot of staging to provide the almost 7 km/s required after that.

I also decided I wanted to include something nice. Not just a descent/ascent vehicle, but something with a living space that could work as a mobile science base for a prolonged time. So, a plane with a crew habitat that could be dropped to get a lighter plane, that would then drop the wings to get the final rocket. With a relatively low mass.

The hardest part was balancing everything so that the center of mass and center of lift were correctly positioned at every step.  Protecting this baby from high speed atmospheric reentry at 5 km/s was also no small feat. I called it Phoenix for all the flames involved in the process.

Phoenix, with the thermal shields and umbilical connecting it to the mothership

Phoenix, as it lands on a planet, ready to fly around and explore

Phoenix, rocket part. TWR (RSP in my italian game) is relative to Derbin, roughly 2.17 g

0.7) Redentor small probes

Spoiler

As usual, I keep my tradition of carrying small exploration probes even though they are not necessary at all.

Boundless, fully assembled

Boundless, side view

Boundless, using the rockets

Boundless, seen from Cigar while docking near Graymun

As above, a bit closer

The solar array, seen by a spacewalking kerbal

The objective is to perform a grand tour of the whirligig world system, while refueling only on atmospheric planets, pretending to have to care about life support (as a rule of thumb I assume 50 years for the mothership, 1 year for the taxi, 30 days for landers). I will try to land everywhere except Derbin and Valyr in a reusable manner, though I'm not sure I can tackle Ammenon and its 30 km/s round trip. In that case, I confess I brought some xenon tanks; I hope I won't have to use them, but just in case...

A comprehensive map of the Kaywell system, highlighting the orbital relations and the general characteristics of the various celestial bodies

[Difficulty achieving designated orbit]

8 hours ago, wedesoft said:

I am trying to fulfill a contract to position a satellite in a polar orbit. As my screenshots show, the numbers are matching exactly but still the contract is not accepted.

Any ideas what the problem is?

Kind regards

Jan

it says "reach the orbit around Minmus".

You are still around kerbin.

it's easier to match those orbits if you check on map view where they are

[Stuck in sandbox mode]

On 7/1/2023 at 7:23 AM, alfrank said:

I've been playing career mode and went into sandbox mode to test a design. But I can't get back to career mode.  I click on start saved game but I end up back in sandbox. Any ideas?

did you accidentally overwrite the profile? if you did not change the profile name, the game will overwrite it. If it happened, there's no recovery. I lost a career this way too.

[[1.5 - 1.10] Kerbalism 3.11]

1 hour ago, Nori said:

Got a question on how MTBF's work. I have near future mods installed and use the reactors heavily. Some of them are rather expensive and for longer interplanetary trips, it isn't feasible to recover them on Kerbin. Without kerbalism, I would be confident that I could just refuel it and go on another trip. But with failures and such I am concerned about sending it on another multi year trip.

But then I got to wondering, Kerbals can service these part, but I don't know if that is preventative maint. or if it'll just fix a issue already in place.

So the question is, if I have a MTBF of 5 years and I'm at 5 years, is there some way to try and extend that outside of replacing the part? Some things are just not feasible to replace in place, like a reactor. I've tried using EVA repair kits to repair some items and it doesn't seem to work.

Edit: I should add, I always bring two reactors for redundancy so if one failed I should be able to proceed at half power. I also always have a lot of extra life support just in case...

nuclear reactors have the same rules of other kerbalism parts: you can inspect them, and service them if they are aging. if they break, there is a chance it can be fixed (they will be shown in yellow in that case).

 

however, nuclear reactors have a couple additional issues. in my latest grand tour, I faced three distinct bugs related to them:

15) Actual reliability time is different from what it should be. Just check more often the parts that get broken more often

And I have to point out that the nuclear reactors were the single most malfunctioning part.

actually, wait. the big 3000 Ec/s reactors did break easily. the small 60 Ec/s never had any problem

18) Some fission reactors are not working, even though they are not broken. Next time I actually break a reactor, I will revert the malfunction with a reload, and drop one of the nonfunctional ones

I noticed it happened with reactors that got a noncritical malfunction; they were fixed, but still they didn't work. Wasn't a big deal for me because I had 12, but it could be for you.

22) Sometimes, when the vessel is not in physical range, the nuclear reactors on Cylinder will stop for no reason. Load Cylinder into physical range and they restart

This one instead happened a few times only on the small reactors. No idea of what triggered it.

 

So, while nuclear reactors are nice, and they certainly can be used to fit your needs, I recommended bringing at least 2. Incindentally, the smaller model can be manipulated by eva construction, so if one breaks you can swap it for a good one without wasting the whole ship. and you can bring the broken one back to kerbin for recovery, you still get money back even if it's malfunctioning

[What did you do in KSP1 today?]

My exploration of the whirligig world planetary pack reached the first interplanetary destination: the superearth Valyr, and its main moon Oshan

Here the mothership Boundless is about to aerocapture on Oshan. Oshan is very similar to Duna on size, gravity and atmosphere. Valyr is the blue planet behind.

I gave Boundless enhanced aerobraking capabilities (nose cargo bays enclosing the engines and solar panels retractable inside cargo bays for thermal resistance, thermal shield used as parachutes for increased drag) because whirligig world has a lot of atmospheric bodies that can be used.

Following this piece of debris gave me the only close pictures of ohsan so far. it's dominated by ice plains (or seas?) with continents emerging from it.

A great sunset as the lander Phoenix (twin of the one I used on Derbin a week ago) is aerobraking on Valyr

Valyr is a superearth, some 25% bigger than Eve. It's kept warm by greenhouse effect, and it's mostly covered by oceans, with scattered islands. A bit like Laythe, but with triple gravity

Phoenix splash-landed, and found evidence of life on the planet.

Apparently, you can play golf underwater

Follows a bunch of images of flying over a few mountain islands, spoilered for brevity

Spoiler

At some point I accidentally ejected Val trying to get an Eva report while flying. Good thing I managed to land both her and the plane safely, I hadn't saved in a while

Oshan in the sky

I am not sure if I mounted the cupola upside down by accident, or intentionally because I wanted a better view of the terrain. But the picture does look a lot better if I put back the ground where it should be, on the bottom of the image. As long as one ignored the upside down writing.

 

 

 

[My rover does not pitch properly]

For a while I had the feeling that when I pitch up, it was less responsive, But now I noticed, it's really like that

In this first image, I am pitching up. You can see in the box in the bottom left corner, the gauge for pitch is barely moving; the rover is applying a lot less torque than it could.

Here instead I am pitching down, and it works normally.

Yaw and roll work normally.

I tried going in space, it still malfunctions.

i tried to launch a new copy of the rover, it works normally.

I verified by spinning around in space, the effect is real. pitching up is noticeably slower than pitching down.

So, there is some kind of bug where my rover is just not applying its full torque on the reaction wheels when turning in one specific direction. And it's a bug that happened at some point in time.

anyone has any idea what it could be, how it could have happened, and if I can fix it somehow (short of getting a new rover)?

thanks

[Simple way to isolate a fuel tank?]

I have no idea how that mod works. would docking port works? decouplers? parts that are not tanks?

i think you just have to experiment.

[The Ultimate Jool 5 Challenge Continued]

On 6/18/2023 at 12:35 AM, Geek25 said:

Hello! Being very inspired by this, I will be attempting a jool 5 myself soon. However a have a question about the rules:

is it ok that I use the near future parts such as cargo bays, pods, solar panels e.t.c? Obviously not NF propulsion, but more for aesthetics. I will to try a very cool looking mothership, and NF has very cool parts. If not, I understand.

 

turns out it was only two parts from NF used: the 7-kerbal 3.75 m pod, and the megalodor solar panels

though only @JacobJHC can give a final answer, if those are the only modded parts you used you should be fine.

[can't make a rendevous]

22 hours ago, alfrank said:

i"m getting he hang of setting up a close encounter. Two things though - once I do get within 5 km of stranded the tutorial doesn't give me a "next" button; and when I go to map view to see the target there's nothing there. No target ship in sight.

 

I suspect you need to hit f4. it highlights close targets, if it's toggled off you won't see the ship

[rapier exhaust]

21 hours ago, miklkit said:

I just noticed that over time the exhaust on my rapiers has changed from pretty basic to pretty neat back to meh.  Other engines still have nice exhausts.  I'm pretty sure it is a mod conflict but do not know which ones might be causing it or why.  Any ideas?

I do not know mods changing the exhaust, but in any case it would be a lot easier for someone else to answer if you post a list of mods you're using and some pictures of the exhaust

[What did you do in KSP1 today?]

Landed on derbin (whirligig worlds) and flew a plane around the place. wonderful!

I found a continental shelf with a massive cliff

to provide better viewing opportunities, I included a mk2 module facing downwards to look at the surface

i also included a cupola on the back of the plane. As I built this vehicle a couple months ago, I don't remember if I intentionally mounted it upside-down to get a better view of the terrain, or if it was just a mistake. I also forgot the exact sequence of dropping the thermal shields during reentry, which forced me to find it again by trial and error.

the dot in the center is the planet mesbin.

 

I can definitely recommend the whirligig world planetary pack, and bringing a plane to derbin. make it a fast one, though, because derbin is huge.

[can't make a rendevous]

the main thing to realize is that bodies in higher orbit move more slowly, and you can therefore changing your orbital time by making your orbit higher or lower.

so, you have your two ships in orbits touching each other. the one in the llower orbit will move faster, so it will gradually catch up with the other.

at some point it will overtake the other entirely; then you will need to raise its orbit to slow it down. or you can lower orbit for the ship in a faster orbit. in both cases you should see the markers converge and overlap.

be careful with the acceleration, a single m/s will throw you off by many km. sometimes it's better to manually reduce an engine's power.

[The Elcano Challenge: Ground-Based Circumnavigation (4th)]

that time I reached the green monolith on gilly I never could exceed 4 m/s. even then, I was just bouncing and not really driving.

then again, I had a rover that was optimized as multipurpose vehicle, and not purely to drive. but reaching 10 m/s on gilly seem weird. I did get those speeds on wheels on ovok, which is roughly the same size, but ovok is very flat. and when I got to 10 m/s, at the first jump I covered maybe a 10th of the planet before landing.

[Can't return from mun to save my life (or Valentinas)]

On 6/12/2023 at 6:55 AM, alfrank said:

well, after a couple of hours I'm still not getting anywhere. I think part of my confusion comes from where you state as your craft moves along the gold line. But my craft shows no signs of movement. I can time warp out to the escape point but that does nothing.  alos, sometimes I don't get a gold line, but a purple line. What does that mean.

I appreciate your patience, Scarecrow. I so dope to see and hear your video though. So far, your comments have been the most helpful I've received on this problem.

Great video Scarecrow. It clarified things a great deal.  Thank you.

what do you mean your craft does not show signs of movement? did you actually execute the maneuver?

it does not matter whether the line is gold or purple, the game just uses different colors.

[The Ultimate Jool 5 Challenge Continued]

31 minutes ago, Lyra said:

Hi, I'm about to attempt the challenge and am in the final stages of designing the craft. I have a very specific problem though - the RTG doesn't fully fit inside the 1.25m service bay when stowed vertically, and the top 1/3 or so clips outside of it, into a fuel tank. Would that be considered too much part clipping or am I good to go?

while only the challenge keeper can give an official answer, I had a similar problem three years ago and the answer was no. here pasting the quote so you can look up the whole conversation if you want

On 11/9/2020 at 9:41 PM, JacobJHC said:

The propellers are fine, although the science bay needs to have the clipped science parts and RTG moved. I also think the roverarm needs to be moved so it isn't clipping as well, although I am not sure what I would suggest you do with it.

 

 

on the plus side, I put three cargo bays lined up, and wrote that I'd pretend it was a single, longer cargo bay. so the rtgs would occupy one and a bit of a second. that was deemed acceptable

 

[[1.12.x] Whirligig World Planetary System: An Absurd Homeworld In An Alien Solar System. 0.13.0: Dermun! Ice worlds! Better Scatterer!]

kerbnet does not seem to be functional. whenever i try to open it, i get this

(notice that there is connection to ksc)