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DOMA Arigato, Duna!


dire

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Still Y4 D13, we got 49 experiments turned in for 2747 science, we got Early Mission Prestige +2 for Arhat and Bob plus an Ike sample, we got 3/5 Duna samples For Science! and we rescued Peggy Kerman to the surface of Kerbin from Ike Orbit. Next trip I'll have to bring her station hub and some polar samples to Catch em All, but that's probably a couple years off.

And there was a minimum of regurgitated pizza.

Worth noting is that Arhat continued to have a death grip on his screwdriver, so I'll need to send another one (or two, or three) up with SLV-8. The doctors assure everyone that if amputation must occur, it will occur on the drill end of the fusion and not the hand end of the fusion. 

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Got most of the way through the transfer burn moving Artemis + SLV-7 to Minmus and started thinking I might have a dV problem. I had 250 m/s left on my transfer burn and about 550 m/s left in the tank. For a Minmus transfer, that's 30 m/s for final intercept corrections, 180 to circularize, 180 to land, plus 250 to finish my burn. So that's a total of about 650 dV bare minimum, which obviously I did not have.

My first reaction was to just leave SLV-7 in a high, 3.5-million apo LKO. Sure, it would suck for SLV 7 and it'd be a pain to rendezvous later, but it'd guarantee that Artemis at least could refuel, then re-dock and finish getting SLV-7 to Minmus with a full tank. I actually got as far as undocking Artemis and finishing the burn, but then I noticed that Artemis, weighing 20 tons, more than doubles its dV when it undocks from the 31-ton SLV-7 rover. Hmm.

So I actually quickloaded,  finished the burn with both Artemis and SLV-7, and left SLV-7 in a 350/550km Minmus orbit while Artemis went for a landing. This would be much less painful and much faster to meet up again later, but the problem is, it didn't quite work. Artemis, after burning to a 12-km periapsis, was going 200 meters per second and had 160 dV left, meaning really I'd need at least 250 or 300 dV to land (And apparently the dV chart I was looking at was either wrong or misleading, because no way could I go from intercept to landing on 360 dV total; I needed 160 for a 350/550km high orbit and probably 300 for a comfortable landing).

So what do you do when your 20-ton vessel is juuust a bit short on dV to actually make the landing? Abort? Wait for help? Nope. You send your engineer out the airlock to give it a push. Sorry Linrie, hope you ate your wheaties today. Should only take about ten EVA's. Protip: Send your engineer out during the transfer orbits, rather than waiting until you're about to hit the ground and finding out oops, you ran out of fuel for that last 100 m/s of impact. Likewise, since EVA has so little TWR it's easy to accidentally send your periapsis into a lithobrake if you're not careful.

Since I'm using KAS I could actually have Linrie start popping off pieces of my spaceship and reduce the spaceship mass that way, but really Artemis is already about as slimmed down as she can get. The biggest deadweight is her giant battery/solar panel array, which is only like 4 tons. For one, I need those batteries to fuel the engines; it wouldn't add enough dV if I did get rid of them, and they're in the middle of the craft, so I'd have to rip the whole ship apart to get them out.

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Well, Linri's been pushing that 20 ton spaceship uphill all day, and boy, are her arms tired! It worked though; she pushed it from a 350-apo orbit to an 18/6 km orbit.

I did eventually ditch a broken radiator and the ranger communications pod where Bob spent more than two solid years analyzing data. Everything in there smelled like Bob anyway, it needed to be burned. And that dropped me into the 17-ton range, which added a whopping ten dV from 159 to 169! Turns out I needed that little boost though, because even after all Linri's pushing my suicide burn landed hard at 9 m/s on the stabilizers (which are rated up to 50 m/s, anyhow) and immediately toppled and rolled. No modules lost, although I had to pull the radiators in, causing my reactor to temporarily overheat and lose a permanent 11% health and efficiency. Bounced twice.

While I apparently don't have forward RCS thrusters on this ship, I do have pretty good lateral RCS and I was able to stand Artemis back on her feet with no problems. Let the drilling commence!

38 days remaining to SLV-8 launch, and I've got some ideas for a tug based on just the bottom modules of Artemis without the big batteries and long-term hab modules. Basically another reboot of the Prospector, and I'm thinking about naming SLV-7 something else to avoid confusion. Miller? Sutter? Digger? Maybe call it the Boring Rover.

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Y4 D64 After the first 1300 Lithium fuel took so much time and effort to acquire, the docking with SLV-07 went very smoothly and almost without incident, although I think I accidentally knocked a Big Drill off of it during docking. 

The pair had plenty of dV to land back on Minmus and have spent the last 30 days collecting various kinds of fuel and growing Snacks.

SLV-08 has a reduced mission profile compared to other launches. First, it's not a rover, and it's also not intended as an interplanetary hauler, although it could do in a pinch. It only has 12 seats rather than the 40+ I've fit onto other rovers, and with no wheels it wouldn't do very well as a colonization hub. 

What it does offer is my first fusion reactor, and it also has two Big Drills and the larger, 2.5-meter ISRU. Finally, it has a trio of science and communications probes. SLV-08 is an exploration vessel for planets other than Duna, and its designation is "Gullinkambi", the heavenly rooster who announces Ragnarok to the angels. It has the distinction, I do believe, of being the first payload since SLV-01 Aries to fit into the standard launch fairing with no bits sticking out.

Docked to Prospector with plenty of dV left in the booster stage, and made a textbook-perfect water landing a few KM off the KSC for 90% recovery.

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When I tried to burn off some of the Artemis+Boring Rover orbital speed by skimming Kerbin's atmo, I accidentally wound up also burning off a good chunk of the Boring Rover. So I actually wound up reverting to a hard save just after they landed on Minmus, meaning prior to Gullinkambi's launch (I currently have 166 unique save points on this career, most of them named something like Y4 D33 Artemis On Minmus). If anyone thinks I faked all this I can literally send them a save point for every major milestone I've completed.

So I took the opportunity to adjust Gullinkambi a bit before relaunching. The two tiny probes turned into a pair of lifeboat rovers like the ones Aries landed with; it now has escape pods and wheels for all 12 of its rated crew, although I think I used the Malamute crew cabin instead of the Wild Blue long cab. Same difference, the long cab has a built-in solar panel, is a tiny bit lighter and can recycle snack soil, but is a lot less heat tolerant, and I'm kind of thinking of dumping the Wild Blue stuff in the future to reduce RAM and improve performance, so I want to get away from using it. Wild Blue has a ton of parts but I feel like I only use a tiny fraction of what it offers and the rest just clutters stuff up. I upped the relay on the larger probe to the 0.65 ton relay, and I'll see if I can't send that to Eve; it can probably bounce from Eve to Duna to Kerbin so that'll actually improve my Duna comms if it can.

Left Boring Rover full of fuel in orbit of Minmus and flew Artemis to dock to Prospector. Docked Gullinkambi to those two; I have a mission to "return a vessel from Minmus" and I think I might use that excuse to part out and retire Prospector. Gullinkambi should do everything Prospector does, but more efficient, faster, and with better margins. Prospector was very handy but I think Gullinkambi can completely replace it.

Y4 D91 - Landed DSV02 Leviathan (previously Space Truck, AKA "HMS Sunk Cost") on Ike. I think I'm going to use the cheat menu to complete my "Build a station on Ike" contract because I completed all the terms for it, but apparently the  Karibou wheels don't count as "motorized wheels" for completing the contract. And everything I've got uses Karibou wheels at the moment.

Other terms of the contract - Science Facility, Two Pilots, Eight Seats, generates power blah blah -- were all completed when I detached my Rover Hotel from Leviathan. So the contract SHOULD be completed. And yes, Leviathan tilted over when I undocked Rover Hotel. That's as far as it's gonna tip. It's fine.

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So...it turns out the two rover hotels, after Leviathan lifted into orbit, had a TWR on Ike of like 0.95 with full tanks. Which is...not amazing. Fortunately I can just send Aries to get them back into orbit and down to Duna! What could possibly go wrong.

Y4 D95 Left a trio of colonists on Duna and lifted off with Aries. Docked the science lab to Ezekiel and assembled it. In the interests of making Leviathan less noodly, I moved some snack tins to radial mounts. If I recall, Peggy Kerman's Craft is actually the station hub that was bolted to Ezekiel, so I swapped that with the station hub on Leviathan and I can complete the "Return Peggy Kerman's Craft" portion of Peggy's quest when Leviathan comes home.

Y4 D97 Finally have a complete wave 2 colony with 46 kerbals...on Ike. Once refueling is complete, the whole train will meet with Ezekiel so the tourists can do some touring, and I'll probably land one rover hotel while they do their thing. Then with the 3 still on Duna I'll have a total of 49 kerbals prior to y5 d1 for double points. One of the rover hotels (the one without the science facility) should also qualify as a Backup Plan to Aries' Ascent Shuttle, meaning I won't have to worry about people getting homesick.

Y4 D99 Everyone is all linked up at Ezekiel. I should probably shuffle some drills and radiators around, maybe a solar panel or two to make sure all the redundancies are evenly distributed. Unfortunately it looks like one of the rover hotels and the space truck don't have ISRU refiners, and I didn't bring spares, so that causes some logistical complications, but nothing I can't fix with Wave 3.

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Y4 Day 100 Decided to name this rover hotel "Bacchus," landed it and docked Aries to it to refuel (it doesn't have an ISRU, unfortunately). With it refueling I think it now counts as a "Backup Plan" -- double checking in VAB it's got a TWR of 1.5 and 1000 dV on the surface of Duna, meaning it should have no trouble getting back to orbit (Full lithium tanks give it another 2000 dV but the average TWR on unicorn drives is so bad that they aren't generally useful contributors to most launch dV), and that means my "Contingency plans" are complete! The longest any kerbal spent from launch to Contingencies Operational was 3 years 60 days so I think I'm good on that front. I also netted an extra 3 million credits from tourists touring already, with more on the way.

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10 hours ago, Speeding Mullet said:

Jeez you really are doing the DOMA here!  

SM

I am doing DOMA in career mode (although I started myself with 10 million funds and like 5k science, just because early mission grinding is boring and with the DOMA LKO rules it's a bit problematic to hit munar and minmal science early on). I'm using Snacks! for my life support which is much simpler and easier to handle than other life support mods but still almost got my first wave killed because I am sort of a newbie at this kind of thing. For example...

Y4 D106 returned the parachute hopper to orbit and docked to the orbital Rover Hotel, but even with the spare fuel from the hopper it turns out the Rover Hotel only has 89 dV left, which is not enough to deorbit and land safely. So it's stuck there  in orbit until Aries refuels and can swing by to give it a push. The hopper has one pillot, reducing the kolonists on Duna by 1.

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  • 1 month later...

Y4 D116 - Figured out a workaround for the low fuel situation. SLV-5 Space Truck still had a bit of LFO in its main tanks, not a ton of dV for the behemoth but plenty to fill up the landing capsule and deorbit the Rover Hotel. I was really worried that the descent pair would crater because the Rover didn't have any secondary chutes and could only use the two small engines on bottom, but actually the chutes slowed it down to about 12 m/s just above impact and the engines brought it down to about 9, and I wound up with a lot more fuel than I expected left over. A little rough (about like falling off a one-story building) but very survivable. With a full-featured science lab on Ezekiel and another one on the ground, this completes the Science! objective and brings the number of colonists on the ground to 45. Could have had a couple more but I got careless with the kolonist transfer.

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And yes, I decided to rename the science rover "Mars Technica".

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