McFarnsworth

Eve Return, featuring Featurebloat. "That launcher sure has some expensive engines, might as well try and bring those back" "That interplanetary stage might as well be a bit bigger and be expandable so it has some use later" "If I'm leaving all that useful gear behind on the surface, might as well put some wheels and a science arm on it" But so far I'm stuck here: My terrier keeps heating up and exploding, and I don't really know why. It's surrounded by parts that have the same temp. threshold or lower, but those don't heat up. It's behind the heatshield at all times. I tried a different rocket design where it was pretty close behind the heatshield, but that made no difference either. And I refuse to spam heatshields all over the thing until it works.

My brain, today: Oh look, there's a cheap launch window to Dres, and there are some asteroids already in a stable orbit. *don't build a giant mining vessel* *don't build a giant mining vessel* So I did:

After having quit for well over a year I fired up KSP again a few weeks ago. For the past few weeks I've been playing through career mode again. Now that I've unlocked everything again, I had some useless ... interesting hardware in Kerbin/Mun/Minmus orbit left over from various contracts. So today I tied pretty much everything that can hold fuel together and fashioned a ... well, this: One lander is still hidden behind the orange tanks, and another is still on its way to join this mess. Once complete I'm not sure where I'll send this heap to.

While I agree a dV and TWR readout is pretty much mandatory, I can understand why Squad won't put it in stock. Most of my craft cause Mechjeb and KER to give me wildly inaccurate numbers. Fine for a mod, and I know why it happens and can work around it, but that wouldn't be an option in a stock game. It would be a broken feature at best, and unless you severely limit construction options there's no real way to make it work reliably.

We have some Kerbals stuck in orbit, time to go recruit them in the Kerbal Orbital Recruitment Device! For some reason they always immediately sign up to our glorious space program. We just tell them "You can join us, or else ... " and they sign up then and there. Not once have had to finish that sentence with "..., or else we can just drop you off with your family" I didn't expect that to work honestly. That, was the roughest landing ever. The top fins exploded due to heat, it flipped twice during descent, the balance was way off due to the extra capsules, the kraken tried to eat me, had to land with engines running at 120m/s because I couldn't pull up otherwise, and luckily I put the kerbals in the cockpit because one of the pods exploded on touchdown.

Today, I'm sending a ship to Eeloo, ... or Jool. Depends on how accurate the burn will be. The difference is literally smaller than the game can tell me (<0,1m/s) If anyone so much as farts on the way there, they'll end up on the wrong planet.

Had a go at building a passenger plane. Turned out rather well if I do say so myself.

Testing continues, now with a prettier plane with more wing! More mining, more science! More mishaps! And ladders that we need more of...

Someone suggested I try a VTOL plane on Duna. Testing has commenced! Works reasonably well, but needs more wing to handle more like a plane. Currently I think I can remove all wings and just use it as an awkwardly constructed lander. Could do with mining and science gear as well to be of some use. She ain't pretty either.

I reverted my Eeloo launch, because I had an idea. Those always end well. Also, I sent Snuffles (that's his name apparently) back to the surface to keep the framerate at a sane level refuel. Afterwards Valentina docked with the station. My first docking in almost a year. Still got it ... still hate it. Since I'm skipping a Jool launch window I'm taking some of the crew home with the SSTO so the poor stand-up guys lucky souls can go to Eeloo instead. And so I can make some minor modifications to the SSTO (which is also supposed to go to Jool) 841 parts, I can manually count the fps, it's at least 4!

Cobbled together a launch vehicle, and put my Eeloo ship in orbit. That's not your screen that's dirty, that's Minmus. Oddly efficient launch, despite the unconventional payload.

Today, I ... Anyway, today I played with submarines a bit more, remembered that open cargo bays float better than closed ones, but discovered I'd need to build an entirely new sub to make use of it, so I didn't. Also today I tried building a Duna plane, but soon found out flying on Duna isn't all that fun, so I didn't. Then I spent some time pondering what I was going to do for an Eeloo launch window that was coming up. I tried to build a small, efficient ship/lander that would fit in my cargo SSTO, but that didn't seem very Kerbal to me, so I didn't. What I did do, was something much more Kerbal: If you're going to spend years floating in space towards a frozen ball, might as well do it in comfort.

Built a submarine. It works, but I don't really have the patience to use it for anything.

Today I did several things that make for very boring screenshots: - Spent half an hour refueling my Jool ship - Sent a probe with a camera on a solar orbit - Landed the Dres crew on Dres for what will probably be their final refueling - Sent my Moho ship towards Moho - And the Duna crew finally gets to go home: Also today, I wanted to bring an orange tank into a 100 x 100km orbit using only 4 rapiers. Turns out I can! And it only took a bajillion tries or so. Uhh .... shouldn't that go out the other way? The final design looks very slightly different, because this one couldn't get back from orbit due to balancing issues, but I forgot to take screenshots.

Well, she's in orbit. So halfway to anywhere? Didn't feel like being fancy with the transfer stage, so giant stick of boom it is. Stuck a claw on the side, rearranged the parachutes, and slapped a satellite on the front, but otherwise we're going ahead as planned. In other news, I got a contract to put a camera in space. No waiting for launch windows needed. Small payload, so SSTO it is. Since I just shot my last 3 Kerbals into space, and finding good recruits on such short notice is expensive, I had my first go at making a drone SSTO. Here she is on the runway for her first testflight. This is going entirely too well... I have to be forgetting something. Airbrakes, I forgot airbrakes. Overshot the runway by a quarter of a planet, but we made it home. Way too overpowered, way too much fuel, and forgot airbrakes. Needs some refinement, but since the testflight already achieved all the goals, that might take a while before I can be bothered.

True. The heathield and parachutes can also imply I intend to return from Moho. That said, I can't blame anyone for not immediately knowing what everything on my hideous mess of parts is for and if it's functional or not based on two crappy screenshots, so I was just trying to provide some context for it in my follow up post. But as was established earlier, the heatshield isn't entirely useless on Moho as it can be used as an umbrella, ... or a hat.

I plan to use the heat shield as a heat shield, and the parachutes as parachutes. The central part (nerva engines, crew compartments, most of the fuel, heatshields and chutes) can detach from the ... exoskeleton? (rover bits, science bay, mining stuff). Ditching the heavy parts gives it around 6000dv which should be enough to get me home. Still need to test aerobraking, reentry and landing though. The mining rover still works without the central section so can be reused by future expeditions. (will probably add a claw and/or extra docking port)

There's a launch window to Moho coming up soon, so in order to get the hang of this game again I built ... uh ... I built this ... thing: Should work, right?

I spent some time figuring out what past me was up to in my last career save from a year ago in the hopes of continuing my own work. And through a combination of old screenshots, old and current contracts, some notes, and my own hazy memory I think I got it figured out ... mostly. - There's a rather large, and rather very ugly mining ship on Gilly filled with rescued Kerbals. I'll need to bring that back to Kerbin. Easy. - Judging by the amount of accepted satellite contracts in the Duna system I was going to launch a lot them there. (or one giant monstrosity) Still easy. - There's a very old but well designed ship on Ike that needs to come back to Kerbin for contract reasons, but the heat shields are empty because of many repeated landings on Duna. Ok, so not that well designed. Might get tricky - There's a giant Jool 5 ship in two sections in the final stages of construction in Minmus orbit. I think I left them separated for now due to the part count reaching absurd levels. Will revisit this one later, too complicated for now. - A more advanced version of the Duna ship is orbiting Dres. It's clear it landed, did some science and refueled itself. No clue or recollection why I sent it there. Even less of a clue as to why it has parachutes, but no airbrakes or heatshields. No claw either so wasn't there for the Dresteroids. Did it end up there by accident? Were the Kerbals manning it exiled to Dres? - This thing sits unmanned, fully fueled, on the Mun, and no clue why: Now that looks like something you'd exile to Dres.

Today, it had been one year since I last booted up KSP. I blew the dust off the controls in the tracking station, fired up the tracking computers, and watched the big screen spring to life for the first time in a long time. Many weird and wonderful things were found all over the Kerbol system. Long forgotten satellites orbiting Kerbin, derelict rovers on Eve, missing probes aimlessly wandering around Kerbol, abandoned bases on the Mun, a station in orbit around ... Dres? ... and a lot of really bored Kerbals all over the place. And then, I stumbled upon this: Clearly, I was planning something Grand before quitting KSP.

Launched another hardware stack for assembly in Minmus orbit. (You can safely ignore the debris cloud in the background, I'm sure nothing of importance fell off) Nope, I should not have expected a single Poodle to be able to shove this thing into orbit. And docked in Minmus orbit. Time to move some bits around. Snuffles has returned with precious fuel. My laptop is beginning to dislike this many parts on one ship. It's a bit crap, but I am so happy I brought this little tug along. All done. Now where's Val with that damn spaceplane? On her way, but late. Instead of firing the nukes she ejected 4 Rapiers by accident. Funny, but not conductive to a successful mission. (And nobody tell her or the rest of the crew I haven't tested reentry with this plane, but I'm sure it'll be fine ... probably)

I spent days trying to make a spider, but it either looked like crap, lacked dV or carried too much dead weight. Then I tried to make something out of a fairing truss system, but I couldn't get it balanced properly. Finally I just made something functional that was vaguely in the right shape that it needed to be (flat and wide, mostly). Which I then spent some time on trying to make it look organic and alien by segmenting the fuel tanks and angling them. While experimenting with that I noticed that it did kind of look like a crab, so I tweaked it a bit to make it resemble one a bit more without sacrificing functionality or usability. ... and then I randomly slapped some more fuel on it. tl;dr No, but kinda yes

Yes and no. It's where I got my inspiration, but I had no clue anymore what they looked like and I didn't bother googling so this is what fell out of my brain. In the meantime I minimized my Vall, Bop and Pol lander to combat the feature bloat of my Jool mission. "Good Farns, good, you're learning" ... but then I decided I needed to bring a spare 50+ ton Tylo lander. "No, no, bad Farns, bad"

Feature creep has set in on my upcoming Jool mission, making it ever bigger and more complex. One massively overbuilt lander for the smaller moons. One massively overbuilt Laythe spaceplane that can do a Jool-4 mission on its own, and maybe with some tweaking even a Jool-5. Felt like I needed a regular plane for Laythe as well. And of course, then you need a rover that can refuel said plane. ... and since I had some room left in the spaceplane's cargo hold I stuffed one of these in there because of ... reasons.

Reverted my earlier launch and built a bigger launcher. This looks safe. I'm sure it'll be fine. Coasting to Ap. Nothing fell off so far, and it only took like 5 tries. Braking at Minmus. Balance isn't perfect, but surprisingly good. Before Snuffles can do his rovering business on the surface, he needs to be an orbital construction facility for a while. I have a Jool window coming up, but instead of doing the sane thing ... I noticed my ludicrously oversized space station actually has almost enough dV to serve as an interplanetary stage, and that it's also just a bit short on TWR for a Tylo landing. So, it's upgrade time. First we add two of these so it has a dozen or so RTGs because I hadn't unlocked those yet when I first launched the station. Next up we fix the TWR issue by stuffing two of these on the bottom. Then we add a large comsat to throw around Tylo or Laythe or wherever. And finally, some smaller sats to drop near the other moons, and to balance out the weight of the big sat. Next update, a dV upgrade by some unknown means that I have yet to figure out. And a Laythe spaceplane of course because it would hardly be worth the effort of going to Jool without one.