icekatze

hi hi After more than two (in-game) years, I'm happy to announce that our space program has completed its rescue operations on the planet Dres, and all of the surviving Dresonauts have been returned safely to Kerbin. Um... no, there weren't any problems along the way, why do you ask? You read about it in the paper? Who told them!? ... Er, I mean... Look over there! ... It looks like the flight director left some laundry on the stove, so I will attempt to conclude the presentation and answer any questions you may or may not have. As was already stated, we didn't have the budget, or the motivation, to build a rocket that could go both ways on a single tank of propellant. So that meant taking the mining rig down without scouting out a flat landing site. As you will see, missing that crucial step did indeed come back to haunt us. In the above picture, you can see that we had a relatively good idea of where the necessary ore was from our orbiting probes, but the terrain was a total mystery. Also, the mining rig handles like a giant... non-handling... thing... Look, the point is it's really hard to control. Also also, the mission scientist was running some experiments to see how snacks behave in freefall, and managed to spill soda on the guidance console. So after the de-orbit burn, we had to set the rig down without any maneuver nodes. As you can see above, the randomly picked landing spot was... horizontally challenged. Now, I don't want to alarm anyone, so look away if you are easily frightened. But while in the process of landing the mining equipment and launching the refueling craft, we captured multiple images of the Space Kraken. As you can see, it is his holding some of the lander debris aloft, and it is scaly and gross. What is that? No, our top scientists have assured me that only the smartest people can actually see the Kraken in the photos, and I am a smart person. In any case, Dres mission command finished setting up the refueling station, and they even managed to recover one of the tanker trucks that had been flung into the air by the Kraken. I don't know what they used to repair the wheels, or why they call it the air when there isn't actually any air, but it worked out in the end. The mood in mission control was up beat. The Space Kraken was throwing everything it had at us, and we were still alive and kicking somehow. Mining on the hillside proved to be even more difficult and dangerous than we originally thought, but somehow we were still able to move forward. Well, unless we had a tanker full of fuel aimed uphill. As you can see above, with a full load of fuel, our tanker truck has accelerated to 12 meters per second with the brakes on, going downhill. Even craft without wheels found themselves sliding in the regolith. The refueling lander also slid downhill for several minutes before finally coming to a halt, after returning from space. Even through all of that, we were able to get the fuel where it needed to be. Sure, the refueling truck's automated grabbing arm failed, and wouldn't latch on to the DEV, until we pushed it about 100 meters up onto an incline so that the angle was better. Thankfully, the landing legs were able to handle the strain. With everything squared away in orbit, it was time to pack up and leave the mining facility behind. We had everyone double and triple check to make sure there were no stowaways hiding in one of the snack bins, then Hilayne Kerman shut down the mining gear, folded up the solar panels and radiators, and turned out the lights one last time, before making the long walk to the Dres Escape Vehicle herself. It was a textbook liftoff, rendezvous, and docking; even though the engineers forgot to put any way for the DEV to generate electricity, and the SAS system was out of electricity the entire time. (Or maybe because of that, it was a textbook liftoff, considering the way the rest of this mission went.) As you can see above, the DEV is coming in for docking with no electricity, but still some monopropellant to spare. Now that we had some assurance that we could actually refuel on arrival, I called in the mission planners to start talking about launch windows. We still had about a year to design and build the rescue craft. But there was one hitch in the plans. Our best calculations showed that we would need to leave on Year 15, day 266, and leave on Year 17, day 44. The problem was, most of our attempts at plotting a course left us arriving on or after the 44/17. We knew that the margin of error in our burns would be much smaller than we were used to, even though the rescue craft was as over-engineered as we could afford to make it. Enter the rescue craft! Since we were on a budget, the entire first stage ended up being solid rocket boosters. That made it difficult to get an ideal ascent profile, but we wanted to be as high as we could before the skippers kicked in anyways. The skippers were also chosen because we were on a budget. As you can see, the gravity turn didn't work out terribly smoothly by the time the first stage was ready to separate. But good ol' Staxie Kerman wasn't about to complain. Those skippers worked like a charm too. Not even a single one of them failed to light! Also, since this is an environmentally friendly space program, we always try to clean up our debris. With what little DeltaV we had left in the second stage, we were able to send them all back to Kerbin. What is that? No, I'm sure they didn't land on anything important. Above, you can see the rescue craft plotting its mid course plane change maneuver. Considering that we were eyeballing the ejection angle, fudged the ejection angle to narrowly avoid a Mun encounter, and then didn't quite pull off the main burn correctly, I'd say we did pretty well on the Delta V budget overall. Sure, the rescue craft had about 1.8 times the suggested propellant that all the interplanetary maps suggested, but we probably could have gotten away with 1.5 if someone made tanks in that size. As you can see above, the rescue crew is thrilled to be arriving at Dres, and they even managed to get there a few days ahead of schedule. Of course, considering their velocity, they were even more thrilled to discover that the rescue ship had enough thrust to achieve capture before they escaped Dres' sphere of influence on the other side. For once, things went according to plan. Docking with the Dres orbital station went smoothly. We did another double, triple, and quadruple check of all the spare compartments to make sure there were no extra kerbals or space squirrels hiding in them, before folding up the extra panels, refueling, and blasting off for home again. What did you say? No, I cannot confirm or deny the existence of space squirrels. All I can say is that getting the ejection angle right is easier around Dres than it is around Kerbin, at least when you're burning on a single nuclear booster. Also, it is still easier, even when one of the pilots does a repeat performance of the freefall snack experiment, and all maneuver nodes get knocked out in the middle of the burn. Thankfully, we still had enough Delta V to eyeball it. And so, after a long, long, long, long period of waiting, both the rescue crew and the surviving members of the Dres mining expedition have returned to Kerbin Orbital Space Port, where they will either ride a shuttle down to the surface, or be sent back out on another mission. Thank you for your time and support!

hi hi Here is my settings config file: http://knhauber.phpwebhosting.com/games/kerbal/settings3.zip I've played my save a little bit more and I had another rocket part hoisted into the sky, and I found that as long as I don't cycle to it, it will remain stuck in midair as though it were resting on the ground.

hi hi I found a highly reproducible bug in one of my save games. I'm currently on Windows 7, 64bit, running version 1.2.2.1622 in 64 bit mode. My save file is here: http://knhauber.phpwebhosting.com/games/kerbal/Simulator3.zip My output log is here: http://knhauber.phpwebhosting.com/games/kerbal/output_log3.txt When I fly the craft "Dres Twinrover Module Probe" on the surface of Dres, activate the next stage (decoupling the rockets from the rover) and use the "]" key to cycle through nearby craft; when I cycle back to the rover, it gets lifted off the ground to an altitude about 2794 meters and starts falling. I can work around the bug myself, but I figured you might like to know regardless. Any chance this is useful to you?

hi hi I wasn't sure I would ever be able to drum up public support for a rescue mission to bring home the remaining Dres mining crew. But it would seem the project got a second lease on life just now. Or at least a one point five~th lease on life. In order to build a ship under budget, I'm going to have to take the ore refinery and support equipment down blind since the survey rover was destroyed, and use that to refuel the rescue craft once it reaches Dres orbit. Oh, and also bring everyone up safe and sound. That rescue mission is underway, and I hope to have some screenshots sometime in the relatively near future. But there is something I can report on to the committee for the identification and elimination of dangerous extradimensional beings, I believe I may have found the culprit for Gralyn's mysterious death. It seems there is a rather mischievous space kraken around Dres that likes to toss objects into the sky when you're not looking. Already it has tried to toss some debris and one of my refueling trucks into the sky. Here is photographic evidence recovered by our brave Dresonauts. Above, we can see the Dres Escape Vehicle on final approach to Gaspump Crater. (The long lens on the orbital station is really something else.) There is still enough Delta V in the Dres Insertion Booster to take the DEV all the way to the surface, and so I used that for the majority of the landing just in case the refueling station fails. (The DEV has enough propellant for a one way trip, and would otherwise need to be refueled on the ground before it could rescue anyone.) Above you can see the DEV has safely touched down after jettisoning the main booster. The booster was separated at an altitude of about 100 meters, and had a semi-soft landing nearby, prior to the DEV touching down. (Semi-soft, in that only 3/4ths of the booster was destroyed.) But after only a short time of busying themselves with rummaging through the snack drawer, when the on site commander checked the navigational display, the main booster had been tossed almost exactly 3000 meters straight up. Where it promptly began falling to the ground a second time. We weren't able to get any photographs of the Kraken itself, but our top scientists assure me that it is both scaly and gross.

hi hi Silence. It wasn't only because the command center was nearly empty, late at night as it was, but a hushed silence fell over those who were present. They had been watching the fuel gauges on the Surface-to-Orbit tanker, returning to the mining station after it's first delivery of liquid fuel to Mun Station One. The first stage in a fueling station chain for interplanetary missions. At length, assistant mission director Karlos Kerman turned to the flight controller. "Did we touch down gently, or not?" "Telemetry confirms a soft touch down. 19.24 units of liquid fuel remaining!" And then, cheers. It was a very close call. ((Nothing super fancy here, just a remarkably close brush with failure that I just had to share. I tried to build a sufficient margin of error into my propellant tanks, but since I fly by the seat of my pants, it would seem I didn't quite give myself as comfortable a margin as I would have liked...))

hi hi In honor of the Juno spacecraft's upcoming flyby of Jupiter, I thought up the notion of doing a flyby of Jool. Jeb and Valentina were all for it too, but since we were in a bit of a time crunch to get things done before the big day, we weren't going to be able to do things the easy way. Oh no, Jeb and Valentina didn't want to wait, they wanted to go fast, and that means making a giant, oversized, inefficient rocket that could leave right now. And I ain't never heard of this Hohmann fellow. Above you can see the space ship on the launch pad. Everyone is excited and ready to go. Even Bob, who lost a bet to Bill during a game of Go Fish, is strapped in and apparently ready to get things over with. It was a pretty straight forward launch. And by straight forward, I mean straight up, since this monstrosity was way too unwieldy to try pitching prior to SRB separation, which also thankfully happened around 20,000 meters where the atmosphere is thinner. You can see Valentina is eagerly awaiting the fireworks display that is about to happen when all the SRB's hit the rest of the exhaust, and each other. Here you can see the stage 1.5 separation, as stage 2 kicks into high gear. Honestly, getting this beast into orbit without a refueling mission was one of the hardest parts about this mission. Not the hardest part, I'd wager, but certainly in the top three. And finally the main engines kick in for the 3km/s+ orbital ejection burn. It is really hard to get orbital angles correct without any kind of instrumentation. The folks down at the labs have come up with a handy "old envelopes pressed against the monitors," technique of estimating angles, but I think I ended up burning too much propellant anyway. Patching conics... Wow, I really messed up my ejection angle, but nothing a bit a lot more delta V can't solve. And here we see our intrepid dare devils, perhaps only a mote in Jool's Eye. Back at mission control, we were a little bit worried about whether we'd have enough delta V to get back to Kerbin. We didn't have any tools to estimate the departure window for a flyby pass, not that we arrived when we were expecting to anyways. We were all just crossing our fingers and hoping that the engineers had overdone it again. Actually... and this is kind of embarrassing to admit, but we almost sent the ship off into interstellar space, but we realized the mistake and changed the flyby trajectory from being retrograde to prograde, or was it the other way around? Anyway, we just needed a little bit of a kick to put the ship back on an intercept course with Kerbin. So, in the end, it took more than 4 years to get back. I guess that's what happens when you shoot from the hip and fly by the seat of your spacesuit. Everyone looks real excited to finally be coming home so that I can stick them in another rocket and shoot them into space again. Since I wanted to leave the nuclear powered cruiser in orbit (something about nuclear engines exploding in the atmosphere, etc, etc.) just in case I wanted to use it again, I undocked the command module and fired up the de-orbiting rockets. I was a little bit nervous about whether the ablative docking port technology would hold out, but it didn't explode. And in the end, isn't that what really matters? Cheers!

hi hi Do you launch the Infinity while it is fully fueled? When I have interplanetary ships that start to get cumbersome on liftoff, I try to launch them with empty fuel tanks, then send a mission or two to fill them up before I make my ejection burn. Or at least, I empty the fuel tanks enough that I can get them into a stable parking orbit, then send in the tankers. Although, to be fair, my tankers usually only carry 300 tons of fuel a piece, so a 7000 ton vessel might require more than a couple. I'm not quite sure how to make them much larger before they start to get cumbersome to dock.

hi hi I would like to share with you what has been, for me, quite the learning experience. Not to mention a mission filled with plotting, thrills, and all the normal kinds of things that happen when you mess with things beyond mortal ken. It all started out as most of these crazy schemes do, with an over ambitious plan. My plan to land a mining platform on Ike and put refueling stations in Ike and Duna orbit was going along swimmingly, with a vast fleet of ships in Low Kerbin Orbit, when suddenly... without warning, the orbital trajectory planners down in the labs realized that the next window to launch a mission to Dres was going to happen before the next window for Duna, not afterwards. Our engineers immediately scrambled to start assembling a space craft, including some never before tested rover designs. (The winning design was the one that didn't explode, so I figured we were good.) Pictured above, the "Rocket Car," rover design passes it's final pre-flight test. Moments after cutting the main engine, about to safely land on Minmus. Pictured below, you can see the behemoth craft in orbit, ready to slooooowly boost the entire mining operation into Dres orbit. I thought docking all those modules together was a pretty impressive feat in its own right, considering the time pressure we were on to get everything out the door on time. Yes, we knew wobble would be an issue, but we planned to take it nice and slow. After all, why launch six ships once, when you can launch one ship in six orbits? Unfortunately, I apparently managed to find a magical resonant frequency, and the entire thing wobbled apart while mission planners looked on helplessly. After about 5 minutes of thrust, we noticed the first signs of wobbling, so we cut engines and planned to pick up again on the next orbit, but the wobbling didn't stop. So then we cut SAS and RCS too, thinking that might allow it to settle down, but the wobbling only got worse. After several more minutes, with no control inputs or thrusting of any kind, several of the modules on the extremities converted themselves from space ships into fireworks. Luckily, I was able to rescue the crew. And thanks to the good work by our legal department, their contracts still required them to go on the mission. Above, you can see the shotgun style approach used to send the hastily rebuilt fleet toward the mid-course plane change points. (I learned a very important skill during this mission: making very precise adjustments to my encounter trajectory with RCS thrusters while at the ascending/descending node, rather than during the initial burn. Also, estimating orbital angles by eyeball is hard.) Pictured below, you can see one of the surface-to-orbit fuel tankers making its capture burn into orbit around Dres. Of course, before the entirety of my Dres fleet had arrived at their destination, it was time to start launching my Duna/Ike mission. With my experience launching the Dres fleet, I was able to launch the eight vessel Duna/Ike fleet in less than two days. Pictured above is the surface refinery module for Ike, with detachable landing boosters, about to be launched with a big interplanetary nuclear booster. Once the second fleet was out the door though, I had to switch back and make sure the first fleet made it into orbit alright. Lucky for me, I had at the very least, two hours between intercept maneuvers. Most of them were a few days apart though, so it all worked out. You can see the Dres orbital refueling station here, just after it finished parking itself in a roughly circular orbit around 99,000 meters above Dres's equator. Still needs to have the refueling rig land before it can fill those tanks though. While Gralyn Kerman was conducting a low altitude (23,000 meter) survey scan of the equatorial region, in hopes of finding an ideal flat spot for the refinery, I noticed a little flag icon appear on the scanner. With curiosity at maximum, Gralyn (the tire repair expert) set the rocket car down to take a closer look. Driving approximately 3 kilometers from the touchdown spot to the point of interest, she managed to avoid flipping the rover even once. She might have made a good pilot as well as an engineer. (I still need to work on precision landing without the aid of targeting beacons from already landed craft.) Turns out, we had stumbled across the landing site of the very first mission to Dres I had made, all those years ago. The mood at mission control was celebratory, little did we know what waited in store for us. Instead, with this historic landing accomplished, the Ike crew wanted their shot at the spotlight. Also, we really needed to get some rocket fuel up to the orbiting tanker, because somewhere along the line, the Duna survey probes' engines turned on and they drained all their propellant. And since we had to drain some propellant out of the Duna lander's tanks to get the probes on their way, nobody in mission control was willing to send Jebediah and company down to the surface until the refueling mission was complete. Believe you me, Jeb was none too happy about having to wait. I think. It is really hard to tell, he always seems happy. Above, you can see the tanker trucks on final approach to the flattest spot I could find near Ike's equator. We all had a bit of a scare when one of the techs pointed out, "Hey, did anyone realize that one of the docking nodes never latched down properly? That's probably why it's dancing about so much." But we were able to set them down after only a couple false starts. Unfortunately, this is when disaster struck. When I focused back on the Dres mission, Grelyn's lander craft was nowhere to be seen! It had just vanished, possibly a victim of the once notorious Space Kraken. She was a brave Kerbal, and she will be missed. Now, it is up to me to see if I can find funding to continue the mission, or if the entire Dres Base will need a rescue craft to come and bring home the surviving crew.

hi hi I was able to recreate the bug, or at least one that is very similar. Both times it looks like there is a Mun encounter somewhere far in the future, in this case 18 days in the future, but my current projected trajectory gets thrown off. This time, I made sure to grab the save file. Simulator2.zip

hi hi Unfortunately, I don't have a save that exists where the bug was happening, since I foolishly kept playing in an attempt to save my mission. For what it is worth though, you can find my save file at Simulator.zip. (My dropbox is full anyways.) I'll see if I can't recreate the bug, and if I do, I'll add that save file in as well.

hi hi Just checking, has anyone else seen this bug yet? I had a strange encounter on the way to Minmus today, where I had a Mun encounter even though I was well outside the Mun's sphere of influence, more than 10 million meters outside the Mun's sphere of influence. Needless to say, it put a rather significant snag in my mission. In case it is relevant, here are some of the other things I did around the time the bug happened: I made my initial burn to reach Minmus. I went back to the space center and checked on how long I had until I needed to start my asteroid intercept burn. I flew my Minmus mission again, and time accelerated until I was at the descending node for it and Minmus, to see if I could make any useful course corrections. I then I went to my Minmus base station and checked on its progress with filling its fuel tanks. When I returned to my Minmus mission once again, it was inside the folded segment of space-time. Here is a screencap of the phantom encounter:

hi hi Sampa: I hadn't seen the Project Gateway series, but that is some seriously impressive large scale stuff. I can't remember the first time I pulled a maneuver like that, but I think it was with a lander on some body that didn't have an atmosphere. I wasn't sure if I'd have enough delta v for the mission, so used the orbiter for the initial de-orbit burn. Tex_NL: That does sound impressive. I thought about trying to build a Fishbone of my own, but I'm not sure if there is any practical way to do it without mods. At least, I haven't figured out a way to do it yet.

hi hi The craft in the 4th picture is the debris collector's command pod, which doubles as an emergency re-entry pod. It is based around the Mk1-2 Command Pod. Once the command pod is decoupled from its housing, the Kerbonauts can trigger four Sepratron I's that have been attached radially to the hull. After entering the atmosphere, a pair of Mark2-R Radial-Mount Parachutes can be deployed for a soft landing. The four RV-105 RCS Thruster Blocks are leftovers from the debris craft's main RCS system, but they can potentially use some of the command pod's 30 units of monopropellant to quickly reach a retrograde orientation, but on the second debris collector model, the front RCS thrusters were moved onto the pod's housing instead of the pod itself.

hi hi I don't know if it is just me, but I like to keep my orbital space clean. It takes a bit of effort, and some rockets that are not as efficient as they could be, but I try to make sure that spent rocket stages and debris in general always falls back down to the ground. Sometimes, however, it is just not reasonable to do so. So, how do we remove debris from orbit? Well, we need to build a dedicated debris removal space ship. (Which may or may not have been inspired in some part by Planetes.) Using no mods of any kind, I quickly discovered how difficult is is to balance thrust on a non-symmetrical craft. Even with action groups for activating and deactivating trim thrusters, there were problems from the very start. I finally managed to get my first attempt into orbit, after many aborted launch attempts. But once there, I found that it was still a challenge to properly balance the thrust. I might get the thrust balanced, but within seconds of burning, the balance would shift against me again. The solution, of course, was obvious. If the space craft wasn't going to work properly, it was an excellent opportunity to test the emergency abort system! I may have generated some extra debris to clean up in the process, but the emergency de-orbiting system worked like a charm at least. I'm pleased to report that the escape pod saved the lives of the daring kerbonauts. All I had to do is make sure the boosters were pointed retrograde and it had more than enough delta-v to intersect my orbit with the atmosphere. I had to go back to the drawing board and stop worrying so much about making a cool looking ship, and worry about making a functional ship instead. Sure, it will mean a smaller budget of cool-points for the program, but having a ship that doesn't crash and burn on a regular basis is a must. The new ship worked like a charm though. Here's a picture of the first successful capture of orbital debris in the history of my own space program. You can see that everyone on-board is super excited about it. Tanzor Kerman goes EIVA (Extra-Inter-Vehicular-Activity) through a pressure hatch in the cargo bay to inspect the piece of debris and ensure that it is, in fact, debris. Mission control was a little bit worried that it was a coffee spill on their radar display. De-orbiting the debris turned out to be really simple. I just burned retrograde a few seconds, opened the cargo bay and used the RCS thrusters to push the debris out of the cargo bay, then I turned around and burned prograde for a few seconds. It didn't take much fuel, and I barely lost any altitude. Now all I need to do is establish some kind of orbital refueling infrastructure...