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digtron

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    KIS Chief Engineer
  1. After ending an account i've used since I first started playing KSP, i decided to start a new game in which I would try to recreate a real space organization. As such, I've decided to extensively document each of my missions, giving reason for each mission and writing up reports for them as well to document it. These are going to be quite long, they are in a big font so it's not as much reading as you may expect and there will be quite a few pictures which will decrease the amount of reading even more if you're daunted by the number of pages it is. (I've created it as a word document to make it easier to create, format, and attach images so to share it i've uploaded it as a google document so you won't have to download anything to view it. The picture quality was dramatically reduced so if you'd like to see any of the pictures in full quality let me know and I can upload that to photobucket.) KIS Mission Report Note: I've decided to make up a few words for fun, so if you see a word you've never heard of, either I typed it under hypnosis or it's a word I made up and I've listed what it means in the Appendix at the end of the document. The first section explains the background and other information about KIS, the name i decided to give to my space organization which is an acronym for "Kerbals in Space". The second section of the document is an extensive report of the first mission with the rocket which I named Firehawk I. If you enjoy this or have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please let me know. I really enjoyed making this but I'm really hoping to make these so that other people can enjoy them as well. Thank you if you take your time to look at it!
  2. After experimenting with the 30 second challenge (whose difficulty I drastically underestimated), I found out that I had created a compact rocket that could easily get me on an orbit with the sun. This design however ran out of fuel soon after achieving that orbit so I made a few modifications to allow it to travel much farther. I have a final picture of the rocket below with a basic explanation on how it's staged. After adding a few more fuel tanks to the original design, as well as a final stage with an atomic rocket motor, I had a complete rocket to reach far away planets. Seeing as this was my second real attempt to get to another planet, after my first manned Duna mission ended up with me having to strand a Kerbal in space while the other one went onto Duna to finish the mission, I decided to go with a robotic mission to test my new design. I quickly came up with a small rover that I attached atop the atomic rocket complete with all science equipment and a parachute for my descent. I didn't know whether or not the atomic rocket would be powerful enough to land the rover by itself on another planet so I decided to set my destination as Eve so that the thick atmosphere could be used in tandem with the parachute on my rover to ensure a successful landing if I were able to reach the planet. After finally launching, I found that my new design had worked better than I could have imagined, and as a result, I still had a lot of fuel left after getting an orbit around the sun. It took a lot of experimenting but I finally managed to create a flight plan that got me an encounter with Eve. Finally after a long journey of mainly waiting to get to the right point for the maneuver to get the encounter with eve, I managed to get trapped by the gravity and atmosphere of Eve which slowed me down most of the way, from a fast 4k m/s to a nice 250 m/s. The parachute worked like a charm and I landed on Eve without a hitch, rover fully intact and ready to explore with all of it's scientific instruments and nicely parked next to a large body of whatever liquid exists on Eve. A picture of the rocket setup that got my robotic rover to Eve, and then some. The rocket has 5 main stages, 2 of which are used up very quickly in the takeoff process. When the rocket first takes off, the 9 main engines at the bottom of the rocket (might be hard to see but it's 9, 3x3) are all activated at the same time. The way the rocket works is that the corner rockets are attached to the ones on the sides which are attached to the one in the middle. In that same order, there are fuel lines attaching each rocket to each other. With this, the engines on the corners are quickly used up when taking off because all of the fuel is being fed into the middle side engines which then feed it into the middle one. This makes it so that when the amount of fuel used up in total in the rocket is equal to that of the corner tanks, they are empty so that I can decouple the engines and shed the weight of the empty engines which would otherwise still exist if not setup in this fashion. A bit later, but still pretty quickly, the engines on the sides of the middle engine are used up as well so that I can then detach those whereupon I am left with a single large engine in the middle that is fully fueled. At this stage I have a trajectory that will take me to the Mun, and since it doesn't take a lot of fuel to get past this, the last middle engine can easily and shortly be used to get me the rest of the way out of the influence of Kerbin. I then planned a maneuver that would get me an encounter with Eve, it ended up being about 1 million km away but that's good enough at that point. I used the rest of the fuel in the middle rocket to get on that encounter. I then detached this stage which brought me to my second to last stage which is the atomic rocket that is above below the rcs ports and rcs fuel tanks. The atomic rocket was amazing, and I think I could have used this to land on any other planet, atmosphere or not, but I'll have to test that for myself. Once I got to the point of encounter with Eve, I did a 5 minute retrograde burn to get me to an orbit around Eve with a periapsis of 50k km. This distance from Eve was enough to get me into the atmosphere and slow me down from 4k to 250 m/s. I then detached from the atomic rocket into my last stage which is just my rover and a parachute which I used to softly land me on the surface of Eve. The descent with the parachute was a bit annoying because the atmosphere is 3x thicket on Eve so that it slowed me down all the way to 2m/s on the last 400m of the descent, but I can't complain, it did it's job perfectly! A picture of the final stage of my rocket rapidly slowing down as it enters the thick atmosphere of eve (over 3x as thick as on Kerbin which works charms with the parachute) A picture of the rover after detaching from the final rocket stage and waiting for the parachute to fully deploy. (I could have slowed down with the final stage since I was only going about 40m/s but I had no need to and it might have only interfered with the rover deploying onto the surface). My tiny robotic rover standing proudly on the surface of Eve. Just recently also had a very similar and successful mission to Moho using the same craft and nearly all of the same techniques. The main difference with this mission was that I had to use the second to last stage with the engines attached to the rover to land on the planet because there is no atmosphere to slow down the rover with the parachute. I felt this mission didn't need another post because it would mainly be a lot of repeat stuff. I might add a picture a bit later.
  3. Added a picture of it as well as a basic description of the staging.
  4. I started off my mission to get a rover on the Mun by first just trying to get a rover that worked well, so i made a spaceship with which I could easily detach the rover and hop onto it so I could drive it around to see how fast it could go, how well it could turn, and how easily it flipped over. After many failed attempts I finally came up with a design I was happy with (picture of it at the end). I then loaded my normal Mun lander ship and made a few adjustments that included taking off the lander and a few other unnecessary parts, and then attaching the rover to the top. This is the part where I messed up a lot and could have avoided a lot of failures with some simple testing. For my first attempt I did a sky crane type approach with 6 of the smallest orange engines. Unfortunately this ended up with my rover smashing into the Mun at 600 m/s as they were not nearly powerful enough and I didn't have nearly enough fuel. After a couple more failed attempts to land the rover (after each time having flown to the Mun to find out they didn't work rather than just first testing them on Kerbin), I finally came up with and successfully tested a sky crane for my rover on Kerbin. I set off with this new design and landed on the Mun with minimal fuel to spare. I had no intention for this mission to include any return trips so the lack of fuel was a bit concerning when landing, but after landing it didn't matter to me. The second part of my mission was to meet up with my first Mun landing which had yet to make it's return trip to Kerbin as it was intended to do (this isn't actually my first Mun landing but it was on this game save). My recently landed Kerbal, Edvin, boarded the rover and set off to drive the 20km that separated him from his brother, Bob Kerman. Unfortunately, after only about 300m, Edvin flipped the rover after getting a lit too happy with his driving experience, he had hit a bump and it sent the speeding vehicle into a barrel roll which ended up in the rover being overturned. Fortunately, despite Kerbals evolutionary disadvantage due to short stubby hands that rendered the option of overturning the vehicle by hand useless, he managed to wedge himself under the vehicle to flip it upright again. From there Edvin took precautions by limiting his speed to around 10 m/s and after about 45 minutes, finally arrived met up with Bob at the site of the first Mun landing. Together at last, they celebrated. A picture of the final setup for the rocket that got the rover to the Mun. (Explanation of setup below picture) This rocket has 4 primary stages. The first stage which gets the rocket out of the Earth's atmosphere are the 6 engines around the middle of the rocket which each have 3 fuel tanks. After that burns out I am just getting out of the atmosphere so I decouple the first stage and the start at a 45 degree angle with the second stage which is the single engine in the middle of the rocket with 4 engines. This part of the rocket gets me into a stable orbit around Kerbin and then some, but the third stage is what really gets me there. The second stage decouples and then the third stage powers on which consists of the two smaller engines at the top sides of the rocket attached to the rover. This will help me to finish off getting a trajectory to the Mun and then also slow me down enough to safely land. The fourth stage of the rocket is the sky crane type part which is where the third stage of the rocket hovers just over the ground with enough thrust to just keep the height. I then activate the fourth stage which decouples the third stage rockets where upon the rover falls softly to the surface of the Mun and the two engines, now with a lot less weight to carry, blast off into the air to crash land elsewhere on the surface of the Mun. A picture of Bob Kerman standing proudly atop the First Mun Lander which he piloted. A side picture of Edvin driving the Rover and a steady pace across the Mun. A picture of Edvin Kerman recklessly driving the Rover.
  5. This is really awesome. Also just as a note, when I first saw this it reminded me of a Kerbal in one of the space simulators that prepares astronauts for the massive g force they experience at takeoff because of the way the lighting goes around repeatedly (even though I know it has to since it has to loop sometime).
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