zeppelinmage

Haha, very nice! Great minds think alike, eh?

With these new Kerbodyne parts, I decided to fly an Apollo-like mission. It isn't a perfect representation... the rocket isn't a perfect Saturn-V, and my Munar insertion didn't come in retrograde. But still, a solid proof of concept. Completely stock, save for KER for Delta-V calculations. Overall, the construction was somewhat simplistic; the entire rocket has a whole 62 parts. Here's some mission pics. Enjoy!

Launched an Apollo-like mission. Mission Report pending.

Just a Class-A to get myself on the board. I plan to grab a larger one later. (Fully stock, 5.35 tonnes.)

Yes. Compare the KER output between these two images:

KSC has a new lawn ornament.

9k delta-v with a burn time of 300 days?

Ran out of fuel just capturing a Class-A, so I had to send up a fuel barge:

Looks to be working on my side. Nice work!

Caught a career asteroid... a Class A that had an impact trajectory. Brought it into a stable 160km polar orbit. This ship isn't designed with re-entry in mind, so I'll probably launch a "lander" for it later.

Tonight I was playing around with the new ARM patch and the Kerbodyne large rocket parts. I built an asteroid encounter craft and a way over-engineered lifter. I found a small issue with KER displaying delta-V values for all my stages. I was able to fly the craft fine, and the delta-V value for "stage 5" read properly as it launched, with a final in-orbit delta-V that made sense. Pic in the VAB, displaying delta-v values as expected: Pic on the launch pad, only displaying delta-v for stages 5 and 1. The numbers look like it's not "asparagusing" the stages properly. It should read ~5000 (atmospheric) delta-V if it was adding them up into one stage. And for completeness, here's my craft. (Also, I'm pretty sure I'm about a version behind on these updates... but this behavior is definitely just since 0.23.5.)

Found out that heavy lifters are now WAY easier with the new parts. I designed an asteroid encounter craft that clocked in at 56t. I used one of my typical 4-booster asparagus designs, and ended up way over-engineering it. I could have done it without the second tall tank in the center stack entirely. After a quick VAB visit, the same basic design at 6x boosters would lift 200t easy. Holy crap!

Installed ARM and loaded the rendezvous tutorial. I caught me an asteroid!

Had a busy morning. - Returned a manned mission from Dres to Kerbin: - Landed on Ike, and returned to Kerbin: - Tried to return from Moho, but I'm shy about 50 DV. There's another window in about a year that theoretically costs less, so hopefully that'll work. That makes every body landed on. Every one but Eve with Kerbals.

Drove my rover to one of Eve's oceans for SCIENCE. 42 km drive, took a couple days to complete at 20 m/s.

Landed a robotic rover and lander on Eve. For SCIENCE. I feel rather accomplished, given how ungainly and unbalanced the delivery system was. Managed to touch them down within meters of each other. Even had to drive the rover a little bit just to make sure the lander didn't land on top of it. lol.

So my unmanned Eve lander/rover mission may be a little unbalanced....

Got the first set of 4 up and aligned. A far better setup than my last attempt at a kerbistationary constellation. The other four will get done later tonight.

Lifted a constellation of 8 CommSats to LKO. Now to separate each one and transfer them to kerbistationary orbit.

I built an F-15. Looks good, and flies... but not very well. Of course, that may very well be due to operator error. Completely bone-stock, just with a little part clipping. I wanted to just have the horizontal stabilizers as the sole control surfaces for aesthetics, but that was definitely way too little. Also, the standard jet engine looks closer to the real thing, it's just way underpowered.

Built my first glitch-powered craft, an infiniglider. These things are hard to fly. O.O

I landed on Moho. Lifted off again, and have barely enough fuel for a Kerbin return (2112 Delta-V? Geddy Lee approves). Now to wait nearly a year for the right window...

Not exactly a speech, but a perfect response to someone who doubts Mr. Buzz Aldrin we landed on the moon.