Going Mostlywhere

[NewtSoup]

Having Invented the Mostlyversal Lander ( with some help )  I have now created a craft capable of pushing it ( I hope ) Mostlywhere.  It's not Everywhere because I won't be visiting Eve, not the surface anyway.  But pretty much everywhere else, the plan is to find all the anomalies and this is the first launch of the series.

So, I'd like to introduce the Heart of Kerbin.  It has space for 40 Kerbals in total ( I use the 6 Kerbal Science Lab ) and although not full houses every Kerbal I have currently at the space centre.  The first stops will be the Mün and Minmus for practice in flying and landing the Mostlyversal Lander.

The H.O.K has achieved a stable 106km orbit around Kerbin and is awaiting a change of engines from Mammoths to Wolfhound clusters.  The engines are held on by docking port.  The whole ship fully fuelled weighs around 590 tons.

[NewtSoup]

Seeing as the Mostlyversal-Lander  (MVL ) was available and built - I sent that up next @bewingsays it can be flown to LKO if you fly it Perfectly.  Well I'm not perfect.  So what I did was put MOAR boosters on it, attached via the aft docking port..  Five kickbacks cured it's Orbital Shyness taking it up to around 14km and over 600m/s before they were ditched and the aerospikes took over.  It flew surprisingly well on it's tower of boosters. Once rendezvous in orbit was achieved the two ships spooned up together very, very carefully because neither has any RCS controls.

So it's goodnight for now.  The interplanetary engine clusters will be attached tomorrow.  If I'm feeling REALLY tidy I may even de-orbit the mamoths rather than leave them in LKO.

Edited June 16, 2018 by NewtSoup

[NewtSoup]

Well, here we are again.  The orange bar says "This thread is quite old.  Please consider stating a new thread rather than reviving this one".  Well, I have and after due consideration I figured it's my thread and it's been in a coma due to illness.  This is not necromancy merely recovery :).

I lost the video I'd made of changing an engine cluster over but not to worry.  I can make do with a couple of screenshots.

Here's the rather oddly shaped lifter that takes the Inter Planetary Engine cluster into orbit:

 

And here is the "Heart Of Kerbin" with both her engine clusters swapped over.  She has six wolfhounds.  I went with those because of the high ISP and good thrust.  I absolutely did not want to be using NERVS and worrying about overheating and multiple burns at PE and so on.  I the words of Jeremy Clarkson "POWERRRRRRRRRR".  She has a total mas with almost empty fuel of 256,452kg and a TWR of 1.22.  

Next Stop - Minmus for a refuelling and anomaly scanning session.  Also it will be the first live test of the MVL

[NewtSoup]

Hummm.. the MVL can barely refuel itself on the high ore section of Minmus let alone the HOK.  I think there is need for a redesign.  It's strange though because it refueled on Tylo  just fine in a cheat test.  I guess Tylo must have very high ore levels.

Unless of course 1.45 changed something.

Edited September 25, 2018 by NewtSoup

[SiriusRocketry]

The H.O.K looks awesome, sort of like the Messiah spacecraft from Deep Impact!

What's the dV? 

 

Edited September 25, 2018 by SiriusRocketry

[NewtSoup]

3 hours ago, SiriusRocketry said:

The H.O.K looks awesome, sort of like the Messiah spacecraft from Deep Impact!

What's the dV? 

 

Thank you  

Fully fuelled?  Not entirely sure.  Somewhere around 7.5k  Very comfortable and over engineered.  The TWR as I say in the post above is about 1.22

Edited September 25, 2018 by NewtSoup

[NewtSoup]

Introducing the MostlyVeral Lander Mk II

Total Mass (fuelled): 51,761kg
TWR: 4.61 ( in a vacuum )
Engines: 4 Aeropike "Dart" engines
Crew Capacity: 2
DV: 3,932 m/s

This has a single fuel cell bank supported by solar panels. It has a Convertotron 125  and a Standard Drill'O'Matic in place of the two juniors. 
This one CAN refuel itself.
It CAN perform a powered landing on Kerbin with aroun 800m/s dV
The AIRBRAKES provide enough drag ( deploy when only supersonic rather than hypersonic ) to keep the craft stable.

Pushed into orbit with the same lifter as the MVL Mk I,  the Mk II it to Minmus and Picked up Kermal Kerman.  

Edited September 26, 2018 by NewtSoup

[NewtSoup]

I think KER is miscalculating DV,  It currently says the H.O.K. has a thrust to weight ratio of 187.

Ahh TWR varies wildly depending which planet your on so is always going to be changing but right now it can accelerate at 1g

 

Edited September 25, 2018 by NewtSoup

[NewtSoup]

Finally.  The Heart of Kerbin has been partially refuelled, it's time for a bit of exploration.
The MVL has both a Rover Probe Core and HECS2.   The Rover core has proved unexciting it was the HECS that picked up a ? on the Minmus surface.  The Rover, which is supposed to have a 100% detection rate once you're within 10km did nothing for me.  I really don't get how it works.  However no matter.  I went to the location tagged by the HECS, (incidentally what's the height needed to do a scan? I suspect I was way over at a 120km orbit) and once in the area I picked up my visual scanning (I zoomed out and waved the mouse around ).

Here is the MVL landed near the Black Monolith ( I have yet to find the green one )

And here are Kermal and Maudin by the Black Monolith.  This is the first Anomaly Flag of the Going Mostlywhere Mission.

[NewtSoup]

And there's the green Monolith   Minmus is officially Konquered.

[NewtSoup]

Well, this has been fun :).  Mun next I guess.  Up a bit on the gravity.  But that's for another day.  

Perhaps I should add a survey sat to the mission.

[NewtSoup]

I added two survey sats.  Nice thing about being in Kerbin's SOI.  Not a big hassle to change bit's of the mission as you encounter trouble.

[DualDesertEagle]

"mostlywhere"

 

Why didn't I ever think of that? 

[NewtSoup]

Here we go, finally fully fuelled.  Mostly, I couldn't be bothered refilling the MVL once the main tanks on the HOK were full.  I had a really nice intercept straight from Minmus launch too:


Topped up to almost brimming the HOK complete with lander has just over 6.2Km/s dV.  I don't think this is overkill either.  Because it's not going to be possible to refuel on every body visited and the MVL will need to refuel itself from the HOK on occasion.  Better to have too much than run out.

It's acceleration is ~4.5m/s total mass 657 tons.  A bit heavier than I thought it would be to be honest, I was pretty sure it would have a good 1g of acceleration.  Still,  0.5g is enough.

Here's a shot of the HOK doing a mid course correction on the way to the Mun.  I won't include too many burn shots as they'll quickly get boring as they all look the same.



The MVL has indeed been tweaked again, some vernor thrusters ahve been added to the nose and the ladder has been angled so that Kerbals don't get their helmets wedged between the slanted tanks when climbing down.  But as I say this is what the Mun and Minmus sections of the mission are for.  Learning and tweaking.

Slight confession.. after refuelling I overdid it on the mun intercept and hit the surface. When I hit the reload last autosave it did instead reload the last quick save ( controls in linux are slightly different to the manual  I think ) and it put me months back in the mission and on a previous version of the MVL.  And then it autosaved.  DOH.  So I ended up cheat-fuelling it and putting the correct MVL back on it's nose.  Which reminds me I've now left two Kerbals on the Surface of Minmus in the MVL Mk II.  Serves me right.   I'll have to send the MK II to the Mun too and intercept the HOK.

[NewtSoup]

The first Mün anomaly spotted.  I wonder what it is?.  Looking at that I suspect it's one of the Mün arches.

For anomaly spotting I'm choosing the lowest fastest orbit that can view the entire body on an equatorial orbit.

I don't know if that's the best way.   A lower level orbit would potentially give me greater accuracy on the waypoint placement, but then to cover the entire body I'd need to be in a polar orbit and do multiple passes to cover the whole body in one day before the detection chance resets ( HECS 2 has a 24% chance re-rolled at 00:00:00 each time )

Any scanning tips would be appreciated

[NewtSoup]

Incidentally, how many flags can a Kerbal Place on one body?

[RealKerbal3x]

3 hours ago, NewtSoup said:

Incidentally, how many flags can a Kerbal Place on one body?

IIRC, it's infinite, but the Kerbal needs to get back into their craft to grab a new flag.

Obviously the Kerbals' crew modules use the same technology as the TARDIS. I mean, how do they store those giant helmets, let alone infinite flags and EVA propellant?

[NewtSoup]

After is was pointed out to the design team that the Covertotron 125 worked badly on fuel cells in the outer reaches of the system the MVL was redesigned yet again.

The original design has been abandoned for something sleeker and heavier.  In fact the dry weight is only 3.5 tons more than the Mk III but the Wet Weight is more than 50% heavier.  That's the cost of getting the extra 3 tons  of ISRU into orbit!.

Behold, the MVL-Mk IV.  Attached to the nose of the HOK.  The MK III cast aside in the background like and old shoe.  A shoe made of rocket motors, fuel tanks and mining drills and probably quite uncomfortable which is why it was cast aside really.



It has not gone unremarked that if the Lander gets any bigger we may as well just redesign The Heart of Kerbin to land on Planets.  Those remarkees have been put on MRE Rations until their mouths are a little less smart.

Edited October 5, 2018 by NewtSoup