[1.8.X] Progressive Union of Neo Kerbals

[Okhin]

Moar tourists!

Going a bit low on cash, Mission Control decided to grab a bunch of easy made kerbucks and send tourists out there, mainly around Kerbin. Lots of similar launches since PUNK now have a good enough spaceship design which can reach a lot of places with 7 kerbals in it (probably still a bit short to actually get anywhere into Kerbin SOI, but that could be fixed with one or two more boosters).

So, this is it, first launch of this campaign. I'll spare you the details of all of them, but here goes the first one.

Uneventful flight, except that I needed to do a big plane change to get suborbital above the Southern mountain of Kerbin, just after being equatorial. You can see the ship I'm using a lot those days here. And yes, there's an issue with it, there's no way of getting rid of that fairing, which is completely in the way of the exhaust of my maneuvering engines.

So, we're going for hot air plasma powered stage separation and explosions to get rid of the empty liquid hydrogen fuel tanks and engines. The fairing did blow up a little bit after that (they're kind of tough those fairing).

And everything went right on landing. Including going ballistics. But that's why the four droves chutes opens themselves on risky mode, to put the ship back in a more aero-breaking situations. And there's also four regular chutes. So, everyone landed safely, including the tourists.

One of our tourist pool wanted to go visit one of our space station. The Muncncat in orbit of the Mun to be precise. And since I had to do some pressure reading docked to the station, well I grab a Pea reentry module, stacked it up on some way oversized boosters, engines and fuel tanks, and launched it to the Mun.

The asparagus staging was kind of overkill.

Everything is going fine, including getting some atmospheric readings from low altitude.

And docking to the Muncncat is done. The two 1.875 fuel tanks still contains some delta-v and I didn't even used the cryo engines or the pod small engines. When I overdo stuff, I mean it (I was hitting for a delta-V to land and back to the Mun, totally forgot that docking to a space station does not needs landing).

Space Camp, Year 2 edition

It's been a while, and the space camp space station, now in keostationnary orbit, have been empty for a while now. And with our program getting bigger, there's a need for more crew. So mission control launched a second edition of the space camp, in order to gain awareness, funds and crew members all at once.

So, early in the morning, Jeb took some applicant with him, and aimed for the Feletary Dwine.

The empty space station, filled with space dust, is now in sight. The same spaceship used for tourists is being used to do some crew rotation, three of them will be needed to send everyone up there.

First ship docked. Air is staled, and there's a lot of rotten snacks being thrown into the soil recycler. But besides that, everything is OK. Having to rendezvous with a synchronous station makes all the travels way easier, and allow to cut down some fuel. The ship have a little bit more over 1000m.s delta-v, which should be more than enough to get back into kerbin atmospheres in forty days.

Second ship docked. The Feletary Dwine starts to relive again.

And, third one done. This one received a probe core to allow for pilot less flight. Everyone is now happy and is having fun observing stuff from space and listening at Jeb's stories about space. See you in forty days peeps, have fun.

Selfie

While the space camp was assembled, our sun telescope escaped Kerbin SOI to enter Sun sphere of Influence.

Lowering its periapsis down, it started a long burn, avoiding doing a Kerbin slingshot, and aiming for a better position for its Infrared Sentinel to be able to track down asteroids, which would be helpful for the space casino, but also to preserve kerbalkind and avoiding being erased from the cosoms by a big space potato.

Being out of Kerbin SOI also meant that the space telescop could take pictures of our beloved ball of rock and water, which leads to compensating a lot of woblliness to properly aim at Kerbin and have a nice picture of it, for science point.

The next time we'll go on this space telescope is setup in 90 days, when it will have reached its periapsis, to do another burn to position itself in a perfect solar orbit.

What's next ?

Well, we totally messed up the Minmus space station contracts, so we'll start building one soon (I did scan Minmus too early, so now I cannot do the space base contract). There's a scientists who needs our help to run some experiment on Mun, which will be a good occasion to add Hydroponics to the Felick Dagon.

However, what keeps everyone on its toes is that there's an Eve window opening soon : in sixty days. Which will allow us to start scouting there. The Feketary Dwine will be used as a launch platform for this first interplanetary mission which will, surely, push Kerbalkind upward.

[Okhin]

To Eve !

Well, not exactly. But soonish. Soon enough that sending the unkerbaled mission in an ecliptic orbit was needed to be done. So, here we are, on the laumchpad.

The MK3 parts are mostly liquid fuel and fuselage to host four NERV. The big jumbo and the four thoroughbread are now more or less our standard LKO vehicle.

Nothing crazy on the launch. A bit steep maybe, but it's enough to get there with roughly 4k of delta-V, which should be more than enough to bring me to Eve in 60 days. The big antennae is protected by a heat shield (simulation result show that on aerocapture the antenna was a bit too close to blowing up), since the craft will also double as a relay. In the four orange shells, there's four probes with science to be landed on Eve. I need three different biomes, but a fourth one seems like a good idea, just in case Mission Control mess up the landing synchronisation. Or in case one blew up during atmospheric entry.

The craft is now on a 600k x 90k kerbin orbit. Planning on using a lot of Oberth (and, ideally a mun and/or minmus assist) to escape Kerbin gravity when the window will be due.

And that's all for today. Not a lot going on, I know, but soon PUNK will be an interplanetary space program

Edited February 27, 2020 by Okhin

[Okhin]

And damned save / upgrades. I somehow messed up some of my orbital infrastructure, and my Mun base is now unable to load, and with it the crew in it. Great. I'm too frustrated right now to try to find what the love happened and I'll probably stop this career for now (I'll probably go back on a fresh install, not sure if I'm gonna start a carreer or not).

In the meantime, this is the end of this mission report.

[Vagrant203]

RIP

[KerballingSmasher]

oh no! RIP P.U.N.K.

[Okhin]

Yep And not sure if I want to start another carreer over. I've never managed to get out of Kerbin SOI (last time, 1.8 got released, so needed to reboot) yet, so it's a bit frustrating.

[Vagrant203]

I've had to start over a few times. Combination of ragequit or broken saves. It seems like it gets easier every time.

Are you on Steam? There's a guide/craft collection you can use to blitz a lot of the early stuff, saves time on craft design.

[Okhin]

But I like craft design

What I do not is getting stuck in Kerbin SOI after 700h of time (I spend to much time in the VAB. Or cheating prototypes in orbit to see if they collapse. Also funky ascent path involving loops and unplanned rapid disassembly.). Hence I'll have some fun in sand box. I'll also try some other mod config (I do not know yet if I pull the whole USI constellations. The rovers are cute. the logistics too. But there's way too many engines, especially when running with Near Future Tech. I'll be stuck forever in the VAB.)