Kerbal(ism) Space Program

[jimmymcgoochie]

First of all- for anyone who has read Audacity, don't worry- I'm not remotely done with that yet! (And for anyone who hasn't read Audacity yet, check out the link in my signature )

This is my first game using Kerbalism in all its forms: life support, radiation, science- the works! While there have been a few (ahem) mishaps along the way, none have been insurmountable using save file hacking determination and ingenuity.

Mods:

Spoiler

Installed via CKAN- not all of these are 'compatible' but everything works fine:

4kSP - Scaled map icons and text (4kSP 0.1b)
6 Seat Mk3 Cockpit (SixSeatMk3cockpit 1.1)
Astrogator (Astrogator v0.10.1)
B9 Part Switch (B9PartSwitch v2.16.0)
Better SR Bs (BetterSRBs 1.2.3)
BonVoyage (BonVoyage 1:1.1.1)
Breaking Ground (BreakingGround-DLC 1.4.1)
ClickThrough Blocker (ClickThroughBlocker 1:0.1.10.11)
CommNet Antennas Extension (CommNetAntennasExtension 2.1.3)
Community Category Kit (CommunityCategoryKit 5.1.0.0)
Community Resource Pack (CommunityResourcePack 1.3.0.0)
Contract Configurator (ContractConfigurator 1.30.2)
Critical Temperature Gauge (CriticalTemperatureGauge 1.10.0.0)
Custom Barn Kit (CustomBarnKit 1.1.21.0)
DeployableBatteries (DeployableBatteries 0.2.0.7)
Distant Object Enhancement Continued (DistantObject v2.0.0.2)
Distant Object Enhancement Continued default config (DistantObject-default v2.0.0.2)
Environmental Visual Enhancements (EnvironmentalVisualEnhancements 3:1.10.1-2)
Grannus Expansion Pack (GrannusExpansionPack 1.2.1)
GravityTurn Continued (GravityTurnContinued 3:1.8.1)
Hide Empty Tech Tree Nodes (HideEmptyTechNodes 1.1.2)
IndicatorLights (IndicatorLights 1.7)
IndicatorLights Community Extensions (IndicatorLightsCommunityExtensions 1.6.2)
Kerbal Alarm Clock (KerbalAlarmClock v3.13.0.0)
Kerbal Attachment System (KAS 1.7)
Kerbal Inventory System (KIS 1.26)
Kerbal Inventory System - No Fun (KerbalInventorySystemNoFun v1.4.2)
Kerbal Occupation Colors (KerbalOccupationColors v1.2.0.1)
Kerbal Space Transport System (KSTS 2.0.1.6)
Kerbalism (Kerbalism 3.11)
Kerbalism - Default Config (Kerbalism-Config-Default 3.11)
Kopernicus Planetary System Modifier (Kopernicus 2:release-1.9.1-2)
KSP GroundEffect (GroundEffect v1.1.0-catalpa)
Making History (MakingHistory-DLC 1.9.1)
ManeuverNodeSplitter (NodeSplitter 1.8.0.2)
MechJeb 2 (MechJeb2 2.9.2.0)
Mini Airbrakes (MiniAirbrakes 1.1)
Module Manager (ModuleManager 4.1.4)
MSP-3000 Material Science Pod (MSP3000 v1.1)
Near Future IVA Props (NearFutureProps 1:0.6.3)
PlanetShine (PlanetShine 0.2.6.3)
PlanetShine - Default configuration (PlanetShine-Config-Default 0.2.6.3)
Real Time Clock 2 (RealTimeClock2 v1.11.2)
ReCoupler (ReCoupler 1:1.3.4)
Recycled Parts Mk2 Solar Batteries (RecycledPartsMk2SolarBatteries 0.2.0.1)
Reentry Particle Effect Renewed (ReentryParticleEffect 1.9.1.1)
RemoteTech Redev Antennas (RemoteTechRedevAntennas 0.1.1)
ReStock (ReStock 1.1.2)
ReStock+ (ReStockPlus 1.1.2)
SCANsat (SCANsat v20.4)
scatterer (Scatterer 3:v0.0610)
Scatterer Default Config (Scatterer-config 3:v0.0610)
Scatterer Sunflare (Scatterer-sunflare 3:v0.0610)
Show FPS (ShowFPS 1:0.2.3)
SpaceTux Library (SpaceTuxLibrary 0.0.3.9)
Special Delivery - Stockalike Cygnus (SpecialDelivery 1.1)
Spectra (Spectra v1.4.0)
StageRecovery (StageRecovery 1.9.2.2)
Stockalike Station Parts Expansion Redux (StationPartsExpansionRedux 1.3.6)
Strategia (Strategia 1.8.0)
TextureReplacer (TextureReplacer v4.1.3)
Timekeeper (Timekeeper v1.0.2)
Toolbar Controller (ToolbarController 1:0.1.9.4)
Tracking Lights (TrackingLights 1:0.0.2.1)
Tracking Station Evolved (TrackingStationEvolved 6.0)
Waypoint Manager (WaypointManager 2.8.2.6)
Where Can I Go (WhereCanIGo 2.1)
Zero MiniAVC (ZeroMiniAVC 1:1.1.0.1)
Installed manually:
Near Future Exploration 1.0.8 (only the fuel tanks and probe buses, not the antenna stuff or the new probes)
Missing History- the patch to turn the FL-A10 adapter into a fuel tank and the 2.5m-1.875m short adapter with a custom patch to use the Restock art.
A custom patch for Grannus to add or update the radiation configs for Kerbalism, still a work in progress!

While it's customary to start these reports at the beginning, it's taken several months to get as far as I have and I'm not about to start again as it was a real grind getting this far; with that in mind, we begin on Year 3, Day 325. All facilities are level 2, with the exception of the Tracking Station which is level 3 because a mod that was supposed to add a level 4 upgrade option also seems to upgrade it to level 3 for free, and I can't find the line in the save file to change it back (what a shame ).

The R&D Department have unlocked the first 6 tiers of the Tech Tree in their entirety and have also researched all but two tier 7 nodes, however some of the technologies are too expensive to purchase.

Due to some technical difficulties (installing Community Tech Tree), three bases that were previously parked around Kerbin slowly gathering science data suddenly lost their science experiments. Despite attempts to fix the problem (uninstalling Community Tech Tree), ultimately the bases could not be fixed and were recovered- a healthy cash injection from the refunds was the only upside.

Another tier 7 node was unlocked with the fresh science gathered by the recently deployed Mobile Mun Base. The parts were not purchased yet as the current cash situation will allow either purchasing new parts or building a crewed mission, but not both; there are also expensive facility upgrades to consider.

And some gratuitous shots of our current flagship missions:

Space Lab Two

Mobile Mun Base 1

Minmus Base, with a small crew rover in the foreground and the deployed science site in the background.

Future plans are not yet finalised, but there are three main contenders:

• Re-occupy the base and station at Minmus and continue to gather science from a position that's within easy reach of Kerbin and can be evacuated easily in case of solar storms, which is the cheapest but least ambitious plan;
• Send a crewed expedition out to Gilly, taking advantage of the frequent transfer windows and greater solar panel power to gather science but also risking greater radiation exposure and without the ability to return to Kerbin. A prototype has already been designed for this mission and would allow a considerable science income from crew and lab experiments for potentially several years;
• Send a crewed expedition to Duna and/or Ike, requiring either a large vessel that can land or a dedicated surface base and station to be sent at considerable cost and with considerably less solar power but less radiation. Again, limited return opportunities if something goes wrong and a mission could take decades to gather even a small part of the science from all those crew and lab experiments that could be done.

Interplanetary missions may be hampered by radiation and the lack of countermeasures beyond radiation shielding- in future we hope to develop active radiation shields or treatments to reduce the effects of radiation on Kerbal biology, but until we do any long-term crewed mission beyond Kerbin's SOI is a high risk proposition so the most likely course of action is to reboot the Minmus missions with crews that were previously involved with the Kerbin science efforts.

Full album (and more details) here: https://imgur.com/a/2JIF31o

[jimmymcgoochie]

After a great deal of deliberation, involving consuming copious quantities of snacks and caffeinated beverages, at last a decision was reached as to our next steps. Send Kerbals to Minmus, or to Gilly, or to Duna and Ike?

Nah, let's send some nuclear-propelled probes to Jool instead. Three probes were launched and will eventually arrive at Pol, Tylo and Laythe- Tylo and Pol were conveniently positioned for direct captures but Laythe will require a capture around Jool and a much later intercept of Laythe when their orbits cross paths.

Jool's formidable radiation belts pose a considerable hazard and while Vall orbits entirely inside Jool's outer belt, Tylo dips in and out as it orbits as the belt is distorted by the solar wind and just clips Tylo's orbit. Laythe is safely between the inner and outer radiation belts and both Pol and Bop are outside them. Nuclear engines were used for their considerable delta-V, and drop tanks were added to give extra range while also having the ability to drop excess dead weight.

Oh, fine, we'll send some crews to Minmus too... Boooooring! (So boring, in fact, that there are no screenshots of them )

The first two Jool probes are hurtling towards Jool in the above image as the two crew ships (Minmus evac ship v3 and v4- identical except that v4 has landing legs and a smidge more fuel to compensate) head to Minmus, and the third Jool probe was sent on its way shortly afterwards.

And a refit of the Mobile Mun Base occurred using some bits salvaged from the tax writeoff contract specified Mun Base One; the Kraken was lurking nearby and on several occasions tried (with some success) to destroy the mobile base, so eventually I let it take the little viewing cupola I was trying to attach to the roof and made do with a small and not particularly useful 'Pier' station hub tacked on the back with a pair of old wheels stolen from a rover stapled to the sides to avoid tail strikes. Mission engineer Zeldrin did most of the work, but the 'Pier' station core module was simply too heavy for her to handle by herself so scientist Tiely headed out to lend a helping hand and between them they managed to heave the module into place.

Mun Base One, now a bit lighter, was dispatched to Mun orbit and will eventually be sent back to Kerbin orbit to be recovered and some costs recouped to help fund facility upgrades and/or future crewed missions. And if you think that's a bad base for a contract, just wait until you see the crazy contraption we put together to complete a base contract on Eve!

Our next steps are simple- keep an eye on the transfer windows (those Jool probes actually missed their window a bit and managed to squeak through as it was closing) to see if we can throw some more probes out there; make more money, to upgrade facilities (some crew experiments on the Mobile Mun Base actually need facility upgrades to work, which I only realised after it had got there ) and fund future crewed missions; and figure out where the first crew to leave Kerbin's SOI will be heading, if anywhere at all- there's plenty of long-term science we could do in a solar orbit just beyond Kerbin instead, even if it doesn't have the flags-and-footprints appeal of actually going somewhere. Oh, and keep the Mobile Mun Base in daylight! It'll need to move every 10-12 hours or so to avoid running out of power and cutting off the supply of science- and killing the crew too, I suppose...

More pictures and information here: https://imgur.com/a/7RfwJE5

[Misguided Kerbal]

This looks cool! I'm surprised I'm the only follow so far. Especially that you're doing this with Kerbalism.

[jimmymcgoochie]

That glitch with CTT was far worse than I initially realised- every lab module had its science experiment removed and most of the crew science was missing from the Hitchhikers and Hostel (from SSPXr) modules too. Some save editing was deployed and Mobile Mun Lab was restored, the station in Minmus orbit still had its crew experiment but the Minmus base has lost all its science abilities and will probably be abandoned for good. Kerbalism modules in save files are really complicated!

Another weird thing happened today- EVA suit scrubbers stopped working properly resulting in dangerous levels of CO2 inside the suits, but earlier the same day the same Kerbals did an EVA from the same base without any problems at all. MechJeb was on bad form too, bungling several landings resulting in one probe running out of fuel about 50m above the Mun's surface and a crewed rocket landing some distance away from its target site and falling over to boot.

Here's how it started out:

The defunct Mun Base One was captured into LKO with a little aerobraking, then brought down by a part recovery probe that was never designed to handle an entire base and so lacked the parachutes to fully slow it down. Some parts were destroyed on splashdown, but the majority of it survived intact and was recovered.

The mission made a net profit of around 5k funds, once the costs of launching the grabber probe are included. Not bad, but not as much as I was hoping for.

Two upgrades were sent out for the Mobile Mun Base- a module with hydrogen fuel cells to make it possible to survive the night, and some extra tanks full of nitrogen to replenish the internal atmosphere after doing EVAs; even using airlocks to go in and out, the nitrogen reserves it was built with didn't last nearly as long as the estimates said.

Cardboard boxes are a vital part of any space mission!

After driving around on the Mun for a while, biome hopping and chasing the sun, a strange sensor reading was noticed.

Someone got a bit enthusiastic with their right foot while trying to track it down:

And then everyone posed for a team photo on the newly discovered Armstrong Memorial:

Then all the suit scrubbers failed and everyone started getting CO2 poisoning so they rushed back to the base before any more photos could be taken.

The crews arrived at Minmus and successfully (after a lot of furious button bashing) docked to Space Station One, bringing it back online and rebooting some crew experiments that had survived the Great Science Disappearance. Unfortunately the base on the surface wasn't so lucky- no experiments left at all, plus MechJeb's landing system failed again and dropped the rocket some distance from its target, where it immediately fell over. Some creative thinking was deployed, along with ripping some wheels off an old rover and using some spare parts stored in a cardboard box (I told you they were important!) to tow the rocket over to the base using a crew rover as the tractor.

Bill's suit scrubber didn't work either, but he was never more than a few metres from a pod so it was never really an issue. How exactly that rocket is meant to take off again remains to be seen...

Science from the Mobile Mun Lab has been trickling in, as well as data from far-flung probes and landers. So much science, in fact, that the last available tech tree node was unlocked, completing tier 7 and all the nodes unlockable with a level 2 R&D facility.

At a cost of over 4 million, upgrading the R&D buildings is a long way down the to-do list, but there should be plenty of science waiting to unlock stuff once it's done.

Right now, it's just a waiting game- several contracts are waiting on planetary scans using SCANsat sensors or the missions that will complete those contracts are waiting for their maneuvers to happen. More work can be done on the Mun base and the Minmus station, and attempts may be made to salvage and return parts of the Minmus surface base as there's some valuable stuff up there that could fund some facility upgrades or new missions. There's also plenty of science still to be collected from Kerbin itself, much of it requiring long-duration aircraft flights or either ground-based or underwater labs to complete, which are expensive and will take a long time but yield fairly low science gains. What's next? I have no idea...

Full album and some more details here: https://imgur.com/a/nGddjFl

[jimmymcgoochie]

It was all going so well...

Funds, rep and science were all good...

Rovers were roving...

Space Station One was on its way to the Mun...

Dramatic and contemplative photos were being taken on the Mun... Spot the difference on the base!

Spoiler

The little solar panels on the back have moved- I put them vertical when I parked up at the north pole to improve their sun tracking.

Ah, yes. The Minmus Base, a great deal of funds locked up in a defunct cluster of parts. But not for long! Since it has no science in it, there's no point keeping it; deploy the deconstruction team!

One crew ship and one cargo ship deployed, at a cost of just under 100k funds. The cargo ship has ample storage to carry everything bar the very biggest parts like the lab, greenhouse or crew cabin, and the crew ship is carrying two engineers plus a pilot who was only 1 star and needed to plant a flag to level up. She also helped out with some heavy lifting, but may have eaten more than her fair share of snacks along the way...

The team got to work, ripping the greenhouse module apart to its individual components (unfortunately, Obdas here was a little bit too enthusiastic about that part, and broke some solar panels down to their individual components too; but hey, full value for just the stubby hinge bit, so let's just pretend that he went around chasing every single panel and collecting them up...) and stashing it all in the cargo ship, or in some cardboard boxes which then went inside the cargo ship's holds, or other cardboard boxes... A box inside a box takes up 3 litres of space but can hold 750 litres of stuff inside it- box-ception !

The fully loaded droneship was unwieldy and slow, but by scrounging the last dregs of fuel from the hab module of the old base it had just enough delta-V to make it back to Kerbin.

That ship is worth over 100k funds, enough to pay for the whole mission with a nice profit on top, so let's hope it landed near the KSC-

 

Net loss over 20k funds because both engines failed and the re-entry was in the totally wrong place. Both the crew that were supposed to re-boot the base and the crew sent to dismantle it were safely recovered though and now all that's left on Minmus is the defunct hab/lab module and the deployed science array.

Space Station One is safely in Mun orbit gathering science and Mobile Mun Lab is slowly digesting its surface samples and sending data home while gathering the 2 1/4 year long TRAPPED experiment's samples and enjoying epic views of Kerbin out the windows, which is better than my real view of my neighbour's bin shed when I'm working from home...

Next steps: First of all- acronyms for the stations and bases, because I'm lazy. Secondly, hmm... A fuel tanker could go out to Minmus with some spare parachutes and an engineer to get the hab section of Minmus base back to Kerbin, but that would be fairly expensive and as the last mission showed, not guaranteed to make back the costs. The Eve 'base' for a contract is due to depart in 45 days, so plenty time to do something else before then; with MMB (Mobile Mun Base) parked up in permanent sunshine, SSO (Space Station One) parked in Mun orbit and SLT (Space Lab Two) happily orbiting Kerbin doing even more science, the crewed missions are all under control and the other Kerbonauts have nothing to do, so maybe a second attempt at those long-term science bases on Kerbin could be made? Expensive, low returns, but it's something to do and science is still science!

The EVA scrubber issues haven't reappeared, but today there was a weird bug with SSO where it would shift its entire orbit when entering or exiting timewarp- and I mean it moved the LAN by about 30-45 degrees around the Mun, not a slight twitch of the apses. Restarting the game fixed it. The Kraken was fed with some old landing legs and rover wheels, with some RCS thrusters added for good measure, but at one point it scoffed a  C7 2.5m-1.25m fuel tank which is unusually large for something like this.

Full album with more details is here: https://imgur.com/a/9gKa9qZ

[jimmymcgoochie]

Today was a loooong day. That tends to happen when you launch extremely long duration aircraft flights.

This ugly contraption is the Flying Lab 2. Compared to the previous design, it has two key differences: the modular wing design has been replaced by a single FAT-455 wing (which cost almost 40k funds to unlock, hence the dent in the budget compared to the last report), and the old Panther engines have been swapped for Wheesleys mounted under the wings. These changes really hit its maximum speed (less than 300m/s at best) but its flight range was phenomenal- it flew non-stop for over 5 hours and still had fuel left when it landed.

The lab was configured for a BIRDIE experiment, run in different biomes while in flight over Kerbin. At half an hour per biome, though, it took a looong time...

Spot the Dessert Airfield runway!

Spoiler

If you look just in front of the plane's nose, that near vertical stripe on the ground is the runway

There was mild panic in Mission Control when it was realised that the recently launched Duna Scanner was missing a high-resolution resource scanner, which was a problem because the contract specifically stated that it required a high-resolution resource scan of Duna. Cue a quick design and a hurried launch to squeeze through a rapidly closing transfer window, as the next one is over two years away. That'll eat into the contract profits, but better than failing the contract altogether!

After that, Flying Lab 2 was sent out again and flew east this time, gathering data from the Badlands and surrounding biomes which were only partially completed by previous flights. Only the Southern ice shelf remains un-BIRDIE-d, as the plane had fuel to go there or go back to KSC, but not both.

All in all, a good day's sciencing- around 40 science points gained, full parts refunds for the plane and a relatively low expenditure on fuel. There's still a lot of time to go before space missions start doing stuff and contracts start getting completed, so some long-term Kerbin science is probably the next step.

Full album and extra details here: https://imgur.com/a/pKQ5ZNW

OOC: the next update will probably be next week, as I won't be doing much KSP-ing for the rest of this week.

[jimmymcgoochie]

And we're back! Today was probably a record for time elapsed, and definitely a record for funds gained! There was some good news straight away as I hacked the save file again Mission Control pushed a software update to re-enable the lost lab experiments on both Space Station One in Mun orbit and Space Lab 2 in LKO. Although I've just realised that all the Atmospheric Fluid Spectro-Variometers have lost their experiment configs too- with Kerbalism the AFSV can host one of a number of atmospheric science experiments, or one of a number of oceanic science experiments, or be configured to extract resources like nitrogen or oxygen from the local atmosphere. Looks like another save file hacking software update is in order!

Two missions were dispatched to Eve; unfortunately there are no screenshots of the first (the Eve 'base') because I forgot I was doing this  but here's one of the second mission, the triple landers for Eve, making their transfer burn.

The crew of Space Station One were alarmed to get a component failure message, but it turned out to be a searchlight and thus not mission critical in the slightest. A few other bits were showing their age after a few years in space, so Deblin headed out for some (percussive) maintenance.

For the record: Eve is weird...

But all three probes were landed, netting a large quantity of free funds for some world first achievements and some jaw-droppingly easy contracts (enter Eve's atmosphere? Science data from Eve's surface? ) which combined with a quick but profitable rescue mission in LKO which landed unusually close to the KSC and a few more contract advances for easy contracts (science from Moho surface- got a rover there now; deployed seismic sensor data from the Mun- already deployed and waiting for some stuff to be crashed into the Mun) were more than sufficient to fund some facility upgrades.

First, Mission Control:

Which unlocked more contract slots to fill up with more contracts, many of which will be completed with existing or planned future missions and which gained back a sizeable percentage of the upgrade costs in advances.

Next up- the Astronaut Complex:

Why that, and not the Launchpad? One reason- SCIENCE! Upgrading the AC allows both the previously unusable crew experiments on the Mobile Mun lab (which is actually called Mobile Mun Base 1, but I might change that to Mobile Mun lab instead because I've been calling it that anyway- but I digress ) to be run; or it would, but one requires a level 3 engineer too. Still, more science is always good and there's enough left over to upgrade the launchpad, or to begin constructing the Gilly base in LKO with enough left over to fuel it up and send it on its way at the end.

All of that took over 200 game days, so there was a lot of waiting around. And during all that waiting around, someone got bored and decided that what the Space Program needed more than anything else was a gyrocopter with jet engines on its rotor tips. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this didn't go too well...

Full album with more details here: https://imgur.com/a/rlcu34D

What's next? Probably that long-awaited Gilly mission, given that we have the funds and the facilities to extract maximum science value out of it. With no realistic prospect of a rescue mission, this will be a significant undertaking and there will probably be a few backup supply missions sent out there to ensure that there's enough food, water and oxygen to last the duration of the mission. And when ISRUs and drills eventually become available, maybe a mining rig will also be sent to refuel it and/or start up a fuel depot. Oh, and a lander for Ike, because there are some contracts for that and nothing currently in Duna's SOI can do them.

[jimmymcgoochie]

A fairly short update compared to the last one:

Some funds were spent to shuffle crew to Space Lab 2, which then allowed for the orbital construction of the Gilly base which will eventually go to Gilly and stay there for a few years. Although now that I think about it, it has about 500m/s delta-V so won't even get to the Mun and I forgot to add a docking port or something to attach the transfer stage to . Construction will be complete in a mere 18 days, so plenty time to send up a small vessel with some extra parts which can be attached to the base by those engineers using KIS tools, and to design the transfer stage that will take the base out to Gilly- over a year to the next transfer window though so there's plenty of time for that.

A new design was created for the old rolling lab concept, which aims to complete a long-ish term science experiment on Kerbin. The new design is considerably cheaper than the last one and didn't break all its wheels immediately upon spawning on the runway- win-win!

Yes, 10 Gigantors is a lot, but they're only generating half their nominal power output on the surface due to atmospheric scattering or some other Kerbalism sorcery. The last design really struggled because of this, so the solution was just add MOAR GIGANTORS!

The contract Eve 'base' arrived at Eve and made its descent:

Then a similar design was sent to the Mun for another contract:

As soon as that contract was completed, the base was fired upwards then crashed into the surface to get some deployed seismic sensor data, but nothing was registered. Closer examination of the deployed science cluster revealed a small problem:

404- seismic sensor not found

And the Moho rover fell into the Mohole a few times, broke local gravity and forced a game reboot and some save file editing to move it somewhere less glitchy and fix the antenna that mysteriously broke a few days ago.

Moar pictures and details here: https://imgur.com/a/tl55i8v

Next steps? A few contracts came up to do the full suite of SCANsat scans of Moho, so a probe was built that can get into Moho orbit with all the SCANsat components and will be launched in time for the next transfer window in 43 days. The Gilly Base will need some upgrades once it's completed, not to mention filled up with fuel, supplies and radiation shielding and a transfer stage that can take the ~100t completed base all the way from LKO to Gilly orbit. And a seismic sensor needs deployed to that Mun science cluster ASAP! Any further contracts will be completed as and when I can be bothered there's a gap in the launch schedule.

[jimmymcgoochie]

A short but fairly active day today with quite a few launches. We begin where we left off, with big funds and science reserves.

A contract came up to expand Space Lab Two by 5 Kerbal capacity, which conveniently is exactly the capacity of the Mini Shuttle that's already being used to ferry crew up and down to that same station.

One routine flight and one eclipse later, contract completed and two Kerbals took a ride home in order to fly on the next mission to deploy a seismic sensor on the Mun- and level up to 2 stars in the process.

Not quite how that landing was meant to go, but any closer and it would be on top of the deployed science cluster- much better than a few recent attempts by MechJeb's landing system which were hundreds of metres off target.

Let's see how that seismic sensor does with a little missile, hurled at over 4km/s straight at the Mun!

 less than 1.5%...

An evacuation ship was sent up to the Mobile Mun base in case the crew need to leave for some reason. This was built as a rover with the return vessel able to detach and fly away, Apollo lander style, and arrived at the Mobile Mun base with absolutely no use of the 'set position' cheat after I forgot to include a Bon Voyage autopilot so it couldn't drive there itself .

And finally, two more missions were launched- a grabber to rescue yet another stranded Kerbal from LKO and a scanner probe to do every possible SCANsat scan of Moho- and a new strategy was activated- Contract slot machine, which will randomly change contract rewards by -75% to +200%.

After all that, today was still a net profit. The Gilly base has completed construction in LKO and now awaits supplies, fuel, crew, radiation shielding, a transfer window to get it to Gilly and a transfer stage to propel it there. Science continues to be gathered from both space stations, the Mun base and the four Kerbin bases plus a trickle from the Eve landers. Both space stations and the Mun base still have enough supplies to last for years, however Space Station One's crew are beginning to show signs of excessive radiation exposure and may have to be replaced before all the science is gathered.

Full album and descriptions here: https://imgur.com/a/Wk2xN8G

What's next? The Moho transfer window approaches, followed by Dres. A design has been drawn up for a second mobile base, this time on Minmus, but there currently aren't enough Kerbonauts free to crew it so this might have to wait until after the Kerbin labs have gathered their data. At some point the launchpad will be upgraded to level 3 too and some new launch rockets built to carry much heavier payloads.

[jimmymcgoochie]

A quick update for a fairly short day:

A probe was launched carrying extra supplies and a small relay sat, destination: Gilly. It's cutting the transfer window quite a lot but had a fairly generous delta-V margin and will arrive well in advance of the crewed mission.

This mission also experimented with a core stage that would make it to orbit and then perform its own retrograde burn to return to the KSC. It worked better than expected, semi-gliding over the mountains before popping the chutes and landing barely a kilometre from the KSC.

Then I thought- there are loads of people playing KSP, surely someone has invented an SSTO using only tier 7 or less parts that can work with level 2 facilities? And I was right! Introducing: the Kronus.

A 20 ton SSTO powered by Panther jets and Reliant rockets (and a whole lotta fuel tank clipping under those twin boom fairings!). Using a dummy payload of fuel tanks, two runs were done using KSTS to record the flights for future use: the first was a deployment mission whereas the second is a transport mission suitable for transferring resources to orbiting craft such as Space Lab Two. Both flight profiles are extremely cheap- 4699 and 5027 funds respectively- and their cost per ton is drastically lower than any rocket previously recorded.

They also came with a nice surprise- due to their mass, both flights gained a 40k funds bonus from the 'massive scale launches' strategy as they were over 40 tons upon reaching orbit.

 Full album and details here: https://imgur.com/a/tSddCXw

What's next? A couple of SCANsat probes to Moho and Dres to complete contracts, an additional scanner probe arriving at Duna to complete resource mapping and another contract, and a few more missions to mop up. Designs for the Gilly Base's transfer stage are on the to-do list as well, but I'll need to check if the 2.5m docking port is unlocked or unlockable first as the regular sized one will probably be too flimsy with a hundred ton base on one side and a several hundred ton nuclear propulsion stage on the other.

[jimmymcgoochie]

Report number 10, into double figures. Pity it's a pretty boring one...

Today was pretty mundane, knocking some easy contracts out one after another. Stray parts and stray Kerbals were retrieved from LKO, one tourist was launched with a TWR of 12 to knock her out (and she paid good money for the privilege too!) and a Sepratron was tested on the pad. Not all space missions are exciting!

Gilly Base got hideously mangled somehow. The first few times I switched to it, it exploded considerably; when I finally got it loaded without exploding I was confronted with this:

It was promptly cheated back to the launchpad and recovered, before re-launching it and cheating it back into place. Bonus funds from massive scale launches refunded, there was no net gain or loss; it's like it never even happened...

Two rovers were sent out towards Eve- the first based on the Duna rover (but with a rover autopilot this time!) and the second including a scanning arm and a self-righting device, just in case.

Finally, a passenger variant of the Kronus SSTO was tested- 24 seats thanks to a load of Mk1 cabins as the payload, secured using ReCoupler to hold them all together with stack quad-adapters. The first flight went fine but overshot the KSC a bit and had to glide to the Island Airfield after running out of fuel. BUT- I forgot to save the flight in KSTS before recovering and it didn't save, so then I had to repeat it.

And then this happened:

At this point it's too late to do anything else, so I upgraded the launchpad and called it a day.

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/AFmDlKV

What's next? Another attempt at the passenger version of the Kronus, which will cost considerably less than the current crew shuttle but carry several times more crew; transfer burn for the second Eve rover; provisioning the Gilly Base and (eventually!) designing the transfer stage for it; and in around 30 days there's a probe arriving at Duna. There's a bit of a lull in operations right noq, however Space Station One might need a new crew sent out soon as the current crew have been exposed to quite a bit of radiation. 

[jimmymcgoochie]

This one's a particularly long update as it contains the combined efforts of 3 days- the first two days were short stints and I didn't have time to write them up, so they're lumped in with today.

Some part grabbers were launched in bulk for future use:

A Kerbal was recovered from LKO, inside an inflatable centrifuge with no crew capacity when deflated, and which had some very odd aerodynamic effects in the lower atmosphere which actually caused it to glide towards the Whoopstooshort Mountains west of the KSC (I believe that's their official name ) before rolling downhill for a while until I ditched the engines and heat shield and it eventually stopped.

.

A probe entered Duna orbit and began high-res resource scans to complete the last part of a contract.

A new version of the Kronus SSTO was created which successfully reached orbit and returned to the KSC. The flight was recorded with KSTS allowing up to 24 Kerbals to be shuttled up and down for the bargain price of 5000 funds per flight (the previous passenger flights used a rocket shuttle that cost over 13k funds and carried only 4 Kerbals so this is a HUGE improvement!).

After saying several times that I would build the propulsion system for the Gilly base, I finally went and did it. On-orbit construction followed by some light surgery to the base itself (adding a docking port and some KAS attachment sockets) and the Gilly expedition was fully assembled.

The crew of Space Station One were showing some signs of radiation exposure, so a replacement crew were sent out. A minor mishap occurred when the old crew undocked from the station without checking their fuel reserves, which were too low to get back to Kerbin, however the incoming ship had fuel to spare so the two ships docked and transferred fuel; completely unplanned, this also fulfilled the 'orbital rendezvous', 'docking', 'build a station' and 'transfer crew' world firsts for the Mun before the old crew headed home and the new crew made themselves comfortable on the station.

A set of Sentinel telescope probes were launched into solar orbit, to be deployed over time. With some time to spare before anything else happened, Flying Lab 2 was upgraded with the recently unlocked Mk3 parts (used on the passenger version of the Kronus earlier) and new Panther engines to greatly improve its speed, and dispatched to the southern ice shelf to gather science.

 

But, not everything went according to plan:

Kronus has another 'everything collided into everything else' incident during its takeoff roll. The new design was supposed to fix this, but first time out it didn't even get off the ground...

And Flying Lab 3 turned out to be an absolute stinker to fly at low speed. Landing on the ice cap went fine, but landing on the shores beside the KSC (to then roll into the water and skim along to get an atmosphere analysis from the 'water' biome and complete the set) ended with a 70m/s nosedive into terrain and a lot of explosions. Expensive (the lab and several other pricey parts went boom) but not as bad as it could have been (a few km from KSC so the surviving parts were still worth almost all their value).

Final scores after this bumper update:

Funds are perilously low, barely enough for a single medium-sized mission; this isn't too much of a problem now that the Kronus flights have been recorded on KSTS and launches can be done on the cheap, plus several contracts are due to be completed with vessels that are already in flight. The four Rolling Labs currently parked around Kerbin are worth about half a million in total as well, so once they're done gathering science they can be recovered and then re-launched to visit more biomes.

Full album and more information here: https://imgur.com/a/eekHKWE

What's next? With limited funds there won't be any new missions particularly soon, however there are plenty of existing vessels that will be doing maneuvers and completing contracts so the next update will probably race towards year 5.

[Kerminator K-100]

This game seems very glitchy. Is it a problem with Kerbalism? I've been looking into getting it myself and don't want to have a massive game glitch.

[jimmymcgoochie]

1 hour ago, Kerminator1000 said:

This game seems very glitchy. Is it a problem with Kerbalism? I've been looking into getting it myself and don't want to have a massive game glitch.

I think most of it is just running the game for too long, I may need to close and reboot the game more often.

[jimmymcgoochie]

Taking the plunge and updating this game to 1.10.1, mods and all! Hopefully there aren't too many bugs to deal with...

EDIT: Got an unending wall of NullReferenceExceptions when I loaded up the save game. Oh well, looks like I'm sticking to 1.9.1 for the foreseeable future.

Edited October 5, 2020 by jimmymcgoochie
It didn't work :(

[jimmymcgoochie]

A very profitable few days at the 'Space' Program. "Why 'Space'?", I hear you ask. (Or maybe that's just my imagination; working from home since April is starting to take its toll )

That's why. Launching an amphibious submarine drone to dredge up some science from the water off the coast of the KSC, and putting the newly installed constructed KSC harbour to good use for the first time. Total gain around 10 science and all the funds (minus a dribble of jet fuel) were recovered- which is important, as the Program is one step away from raiding the vending machines and charity collection tins to keep paying the bills at this point.

A cheap mission was needed to gather science from space around Kerbin for a contract; an EVA report from Kerbin space high would fulfil it, and fill a gap in the science reports.

Contract completed, science acquired, the mission made a small profit but more importantly freed up a contract slot so more contracts would be offered. This turned out to be extremely lucrative! A series of part recovery and Kerbal rescue contracts kept spawning, using up all of the remaining part grabber probes in the set of 7 sent up last report. Several part test contracts also came up which required parts to be tested while splashed down- that new harbour was perfect for those.

And then, while preparing to test a large parachute at low altitude, the rickety old 'Science Plane 2' which is the earliest surviving plane design in this career, had a mishap on takeoff which removed the entire tail section- elevators, tail fin and main landing gear.

Oddly enough, this configuration is actually completely flyable and fairly stable to boot, but without the main gear the only option was to deploy that test parachute over the runway and hope for the best; it was either that or have the pilot bail out and let the plane crash, and we still needed the cash at this point.

Close enough! Nothing exploded on landing and the pilot was unharmed: the definition of a successful landing!

After accepting a few more contracts including one to do some more scans of Eve, the final numbers look like this:

Almost a million funds gained!  Not in a particularly exciting way, but still important as it will mean the interesting space missions can now be funded without resorting to raiding Jeb's piggy-bank, plus Mortimer has finally stopped hiding in the stationery cupboard, flicking his fingers over his lips and making bibble bibble noises. (He's now hiding under his desk and has to be coaxed out using chocolate, but it's an improvement!)

Full album and more details: https://imgur.com/a/n4QtA27

What's next? More contract farming, maybe- that 4.2 million funds R&D upgrade isn't going to pay for itself! The VAB and SPH both need over a million funds to upgrade those too, plus the runway and the admin building... 

The next maneuver nodes aren't for over a hundred days and the next transfer windows are still some time away too, so plenty of time to fully prepare the Gilly Base before it leaves Kerbin's SOI. That time will also allow more scanning to happen and more high value contracts to be completed.

[jimmymcgoochie]

Update 13, and a few things have changed: Grannus is gone (it's unnecessary, and I only added it because it would show the Sun's heliopause) but Deep Freeze is in (compatibility with Kerbalism is questionable, but if it saves a few years' worth of supplies on an interplanetary mission then I'm all for it) and some save file hacking software updates have restored the Mobile Mun Base's crew and lab experiments so it can now make more science!

A Super Scanner probe was launched, but then I remembered that it's for Eeloo and it has tiny solar panels; cue a quick bit of surgery by an engineer on EVA to replace them with some bigger panels, and to add some small reaction wheels to make it actually turn when it's told to. This operation was made a lot harder by the fact that neither the probe nor the crew pod had RCS thrusters (oops) so they kept drifting away from each other.

It's not necessarily the positions I would have chosen for those solar panels, but they'll do the job.

A second Mobile Base was built in orbit, destined for Minmus this time. At least, that was the plan until I switched to it for the first time and found this:

KSTS' orbital construction system has done this repeatedly. In future I'm going to check how much KSTS says it'll cost to build something in orbit, then launch it from the launchpad/runway, cheat it into orbit and deduct the difference with the funds cheats.

Once that mangled monstrosity had been recovered and a new one put in its place, it departed for Minmus with four crew on board. The science experiment configs were then copied to the Mobile Mun Base by copy and pasting in the save files a software update pushed from Mission Control, restoring the experiments that were lost due to installing Community Tech Tree a server crash in Mission Control. Despite leaving the deceleration burn before landing very late indeed (horizontal velocity was cancelled with barely 20m of altitude left), Mobile Minmus Base (MMiB, to distinguish it from Mobile Mun Base, MMuB) landed safely and made its way to the north pole, only to drive some distance away from it again as it turns out Minmus' north pole is in a weird hexagonal depression and never gets any sunlight. But at least it's flat, unlike the Mun's north pole!

Some part testing contracts came up which allowed a few experimental designs to be tried. First up- a heavy launch rocket using the Mastodon rocket.

Its 70 ton payload capacity was marred by the very high cost of using the launch profile again (over 40k funds!?) and the fact that the second stage's engine failed when it was engaged to soften the landing.

Next up was a contract for the Whiplash ramjet, which was put to good use on two planes: an upgraded Flying Lab 3 (imaginatively named Flying Lab 4) and an upgraded Kronus SSTO with a larger 25 ton payload.

Both flights suffered a similar fate- flew fine for most of it, completed their objectives, then had severe flight control issues during their descents that resulted in Flying Lab 4 ending up wingless on the grass beside the launchpad and Kronus Mk3 doing many, many backflips and having a rocket engine fail when they were engaged to try and drag it out of yet another tailspin. More crashes unplanned landings than I care to mention (and absolutely no sign of the unbreakable joints and no crash damage cheats ) it limped back to KSC but surprisingly ended up being a comparable price per ton to the original design but with 25% more payload capacity. Both designs were very unstable when the fuel ran low and neither will be flying again any time soon- and not just because I completed the contract and can't use the Whiplash any more!

An underwater lab was deployed in the ocean to the east of the KSC to gather some submarine science. A bit of trial and error produced a design that floats just above the sea bed, and with a little bit of effort it might be possible to make it touch the sea floor and get some seismic data while landed in the ocean.

Some small missiles were fired at the Mun and Minmus to get seismic science and to complete a contract for it on the Mun. There was a significant discrepancy between the science that was generated via Kerbalism and what was shown on the deployed seismic sensor- something similar also happened when doing surface feature scans using a scanning arm, so it seems Kerbalism and Breaking Ground aren't fully compatible. But anyway- impacts were logged, science and contract completed and a few new craters were added to both moons.

No images were captured of the impacts because they were going at up to 6km/s!

The Gilly Precursor arrived at Eve and braked into an elliptical orbit which will eventually intercept Gilly. It isn't the most efficient way of doing it, but it'll work.

And following the discovery that long-term science experiments are running far too slowly at high timewarp speeds, the four rolling labs around Kerbin were recalled and recovered, swelling the cash reserves by half a million funds in total.

With plenty of funds due to come in from high-paying contracts that are waiting for vessels to arrive and/or scans to complete, the coffers will soon be brimming with funds to do some facility upgrades. First to be upgraded will probably be the R&D department, in order to unlock some new science equipment, a radiation detox unit for some modules (useful for space stations) and even an active radiation shield, plus the biggest and best-est rockets and fuel tanks.

Full album and more details here: https://imgur.com/a/gcpqnct

What's next? There's a rover just over a day out from Eve; the first attempt at landing it resulted in considerable explosions due to overheating and over-gee caused by overzealous aerobraking, but then the game crashed (what a shame ) so I'll have to try again, only without the explosions. There are a few other nodes coming up for other missions including to Moho, Eeloo and Dres.

[jimmymcgoochie]

A few days since the last update and I've already forgotten what some of the screenshots were of!

First up- a new mod! PAPI lights for the KSC runway to guide planes in to land (or for the pilots to completely ignore as they slap their planes down wherever they can). They're present on both ends of the KSC runway, not sure about Dessert or Island airfields though.

The first Eve rover arrived at Eve and after expending all its fuel decelerating it plunged into the atmosphere at about 5km/s. Much heating occurred, some things exploded, but somehow (cough ignore max temperatures cough) the rover itself survived and parachuted to the surface. It will now trundle around gathering science over time, thanks to a Bon Voyage autopilot and landing on the eastern hemisphere of Eve which is mostly land.

The Moho scanner arrived at Moho and captured into a nice polar orbit for scanning.

A minor alert about Space Station One running a bit low on food resulted in a small resupply mission being sent out; once that got there, I discovered that the science configs had once again gone missing and this time they couldn't be recovered. After nearly 4 years in orbit, it's time to retire Space Station One and bring in a brand new station to replace it.

Meet Mun Station One.

Two labs, a greenhouse and four long-term experiments plus enough supplies to last for a decade; enough fuel to make it to orbit of the Mun or Minmus and with a good TWR thanks to quad Cheetah engines delivering 500kN of thrust; plenty of battery capacity and four Gigantor solar panels to charge them; and three docking ports to allow expansion or crew transport ships to dock. This thing was put in orbit by checking its construction cost using KSTS, then cheating it into orbit and subtracting the funds to pretend that KSTS did it, to avoid the issues that have occurred with other KSTS orbital construction projects (explosions, parts dropped off at the south pole with zero orbital velocity, more explosions...).

The crew of Space Station One were about to leave, but then someone looked out a window and realised that there was a Munar eclipse happening so their pod would run out of power long before it got back to Kerbin.

They waited for a while until they could leave and go home without running out of power and dying from either hypothermia or CO2 poisoning as the heaters and scrubbers cut out from lack of power.

In other news, Gilly Precursor arrived in orbit of Gilly where it serve as a relay for the foreseeable future. It has a substantial quantity of extra supplies on board, but these won't be necessary for several years as the Gilly Base hasn't even left Kerbin yet.

With a small Kerbin satellite contract completed, the bank balance is looking very healthy indeed. Science data continues to trickle in from the scanner satellites around many planets and moons as well as the surface bases on the Mun and Minmus. 

The next upgrade will probably be for R&D, but at over 4.2 million funds it's still a long way off.

Full album here: https://imgur.com/a/bwJgDP0

What's next? The next node is 40 days away, so plenty time for some Kerbin SOI shenanigans - Space Station One is worth quite a bit and has enough fuel to make it back to some semblance of a Kerbin orbit, though some aerobraking may be necessary. Once back in LKO it could be disassembled or have some parachutes and heat shields stuck on it before being deorbited and recovered. There's also plenty of money for a second new station to be deployed around Minmus.

[jimmymcgoochie]

It's a shame those 'recover xxx from orbit of yyy' don't give the orbital parameters of the targets. After accepting what I thought was a nice LKO rescue mission, I checked the tracking station and discovered the stranded Kerbal's pod drifting at over 4000km altitude, well beyond the range of the part grabbers in LKO. Cue the creation of a new part grabber (actually completely rebuilt, but it's still nearly identical to the old one- if it ain't broke...) and the deployment of a cluster of three to LKO before sending one out to complete the contract.

The next rescue contract was a nice easy one in LKO, using one of the regular part grabbers parked in orbit; the one after that was orbiting beyond the Mun... But still within range of the improved grabber which duly grabbed it and brought it home. Unfortuantely for the Kerbal inside it, it was accidentally grabbed upside down so the Kerbal ended up going head first for the whole re-entry.

And then this happened:

Aroint thee, Kraken! Begin Operation Hack-the-save-file! (But I'm keeping the two random extra resource canisters )

Much better!

The station made its capture and inclination change burns to wind up in a circular orbit with 0 inclination, then rotated so the engines were pointing towards the sun- apparently this orientation helps shield the crew from radiation, though its true effects remain to be seen.

With plenty of time to go until the next node, a satellite was deployed to scan Kerbin and find all the anomalies for a plane to go out and investigate.

The booster deorbited itself, but the engine overheated on re-entry and it ended up coming down somewhere vaguely near the KSC. After waiting a few days for the scanner to do its thing, a plane was sent out to find these anomalies and see what they are. A few easy ones to start with:

Then a ridiculously difficult to find one that was almost perfectly camouflaged against the side of a mountain:

Then there was this place, which is a bit bigger than it looks from a distance:

An old, abandoned launch site:

A strange monolith that somehow made the R&D team figure out how to make huge fuel tanks:

And a couple of DSN stations:

Then the fuel ran out and the plane had to land at Woomerang to be recovered. Val and newbie Nataski weren't too amused when they found out they had to walk back to the KSC... It also turns out that planting a flag on Kerbin is worth 0XP, boo.

All in all, a pretty good run from today's efforts- in fact those rescue missions netted a profit of over a million funds! Some of that was spent on unlocking new technologies- both from the newly unlocked node courtesy of the randolith and from the addition of RLA Reborn, which I added for the 1.25-0.625m multi-couplers then remembered it had some nice engines in it too.

Full album here: https://imgur.com/a/OBcVeuM

What's next? A second flight to find the rest of those anomalies, followed by deploying more anomaly-finding scanner satellites around the Mun and Minmus then dispatching some rovers or the mobile bases to go and find them. There's a node coming up for the cluster of four Sentinels that will be deployed into solar orbit covering an arc inside Kerbin's orbit, which would then allow asteroids to be spotted, captured, sampled, etc.

[jimmymcgoochie]

More anomaly hunting today! A few more DSN sites, two monoliths and a, er, thing...

The first flight went east and south, netting two DSN dishes and one monolith before returning to KSC.

After a quick refuel and change of crew, the plane was back in the air and went north to find the last few anomalies- a weird sculpture-type thing in the high arctic, a tracking dish with severe subsidence issues and a ridiculously inaccessible monolith, hiding in the shadows at the bottom of a deep mountain valley.

A couple of uninteresting recovery contracts, and then an easy one- test the 'Dart' aerospike in low altitude, low speed flight.

Two more anomaly scanners were sent up to the Mun and Minmus. Unfortunately I've already scrapped all the old Mun and Minmus rovers, so actually chasing them down will fall to either the mobile bases or brand new rovers, more likely the latter.

And then finishing with possibly the closest landing from orbit so far in this career:

Despite some profitable contracts, the costs of launching those new grabbers and scanners has eaten into the profit margins- the net gain is a little over 100k funds.

Moar pictures, you say? Here you go: https://imgur.com/a/cfavJmH

What's next? Probably more anomaly hunting, on the Mun and Minmus this time. With the Sentinels now tracking asteroids and set to move into evenly spaced circular orbits over the next few years, the next node is over 180 days away and an Eve window is around 200 days away, when the Gilly Base will finally head out to Gilly.

[jimmymcgoochie]

Not that much to report this time, but better to do it now while I can remember what I actually did.

An upgrade was performed to the Kronus SSTO to create this, the Kronus Mk4- a bit more fuel and some weight balancing gave it improved payload capacity and improved its flight handling during and after re-entry. One engine failed before it even started rolling on the runway, but the run was still a success and put almost 30 tons in orbit, beating the Mk3 (25 tons) and demolishing the Mk1 (20 tons to a much lower orbit).

A load of recovery/rescue contracts were completed, not really that interesting apart from the last one which landed perilously close to a big scary mountain.

A slightly different trajectory and that could have been ugly...

Anomaly hunting on the Mun and Minmus has begun, with the scanner sat arriving in Minmus orbit followed by deployment of rovers to both the Mun and Minmus armed with Bon Voyage autopilots to drive near an anomaly site and SCANsat BTDT sensors to chase it down at close range. It was only after both rovers had landed that I noticed I didn't put decouplers on their skycranes; oh well, maybe the ability to fly will come in handy as I seem to remember one Mun monolith (a Munolith?) is at the bottom of a big hole in the ground.

One anomaly was found- a randolith on Minmus. Unfortunately, no achievement with tech breakthrough appeared; maybe that requires a Kerbal to go there?

I also did some design work for a couple of future missions:

4 little landers and a relay for Ike, partly to fulfil a contract to send science data from Ike's surface but also because there's a wealth of as-yet untapped science out there to be gathered, and because this design could work for other moons like Bop, Pol or even Dres or Eeloo.

A small exploration ship for the Gilly expedition. This design has plenty of extra space in the lander can's payload bays for fuel, supplies, science experiments etc. and a docking port on the bottom.

Full album here: https://imgur.com/a/ugYr9Su

What's next? More anomaly hunting, using Bon Voyage to drive the rovers around the Mun and Minmus before chasing down the anomalies at close range. No more nodes or transfer windows for nearly 200 days, so plenty of time to kill.

[jimmymcgoochie]

From one extreme to the other in this report!

More boring part recovery contracts were completed- I'll skip those because they aren't exciting at all.

Except this one:

Dropped too short on re-entry and ended up coming down in the middle of the Whoopstooshort Mountains, but fortunately it landed on the only vaguely flat bit in the whole mountain range.

And then, finally(!):

R&D upgraded to level 3! 

Much science was then spent unlocking more science equipment, better communications equipment and better probe systems (RGUs and the HECS2) as well as mining/ISRU stuff.

Not all of it was bought due to cost, but some key purchases include the Gravmax gravity detector and the addition of a radiation detox unit to the Hitchhiker and mobile lab modules (new modules only, unfortunately, there's no way to retrofit them to existing crafts).

A plane went out to drop some gravity sensor probes around Kerbin; of the six probes to be dropped, only four remained intact though.

A pair of ships were sent up to the Mun and Minmus stations to provide them with a means of getting back to Kerbin. The Mun ship was fine and docked to the station without incident, but the Minmus one kept exploding as everything crashed into everything else and eventually it was resolved by docking to another port with the 'no damage' cheats on and repeated time warping to stop the station trying to turn itself inside out.

Then I sent a crew of 6 into solar orbit just in front of Kerbin, to level them up to level 3 and to get some science from solar orbit.

Something is up with the physics lately, as re-entering at escape velocity didn't cook a single part of the station (the solar panels did explode, but only because I forgot the 'no damage' cheats were still on and they should have broken off first) when I've seen plenty of explosions on similar parts returning from LKO before.

Of the 6 crew, only 4 made it to level 3- Bob and Gerald apparently didn't get enough XP as they haven't been to both the Mun and Minmus, but Jeb, Bill, Val and Jacas (who did the first solar orbit EVA) did.

A new version of the Kronus was deployed thanks to some newly unlocked parts- a linear aerospike engine that is both more powerful and more efficient than the Reliants that the Kronus Mk1-4 use and some ore tanks to increase payload mass to just over 33 tons. By filling the nacelles to full fuel (how did I not notice that before?) the Kronus Mk5 could not only carry a heavier payload than ever, but to a higher altitude than any other version. It would have managed an even heavier payload, but the runway can only support 140 tons right now.

No problems during re-entry, but the jets almost overheated when flying back to the KSC (overshot spectacularly and had to fly back), fortunately nothing actually exploded.

With funds now critically low, a low-budget mission was sent to the northern ice shelf to deploy a gravity sensor probe and get some surface samples from there, the ice caps and tundra biomes. The probe was fine, but the plane didn't land quite as planned...

That really hurt the finances- funds were down to less than 3000, requiring some pretty desperate measures (scrapping the three launchpad spotlights to get 2500 funds each) before easy science transmission contracts came up and the funds reserves were restored to nearly half a million.

A contract to expand Space Lab Two was the perfect time to add an escape ship and level up the newest newbie to level 1 at the same time; no screenshots of that though.

Full gallery here: https://imgur.com/a/x6nLrAz

What's next? The next node is closer than I thought as I hadn't set an alarm for one of the Jool relays launched ages ago, but with new science experiments to deploy around Kerbin/Mun/Minmus as well as anomaly hunting on the Mun (apparently I've found both the anomalies on Minmus and the one I was chasing after was a red herring) they'll still have to wait a while.

I will get to the Gilly expedition, really! The tedium of contract farming will eventually be over, but I'm waiting for a Kerbalism fix that will run science experiments at the right speed above 1000x and I don't know if/when that'll happen.

[jimmymcgoochie]

 

Update 19 and the most irritatingly futile mission I've done in a long time.

But first- a cluster of four comms relays using powerful (and expensive!) origami relay dishes were sent out to take up roughly evenly spaced positions between Kerbin and Duna.

Anomalies were found on Mun and Minmus:

(There's a monolith in there, really!)

And now for the futility bit.

Mobile Minmus Base (MMiB) lost its science configs again so the crew and lab experiments are non-functional once more. Save file bodging failed to resolve the situation, so this might call for a new base to be deployed (or for a more aggressive use of copy and paste) and in the meantime a probe was sent up to return the collected science samples to Kerbin.

Except that I mistakenly thought that the experiment deployed on MMiB was the one with a small number of really heavy samples, so built a probe that could reach Minmus then return to Kerbin carrying 17 tons of science samples in it; turns out it was actually a large number of small samples, so the return probe couldn't carry half of those and returned to Kerbin rather dejectedly.

The worst part of it all? Those hundred-plus samples were worth less than two science points. 

While messing around with MMiB chasing after monoliths (and unlocking the 'Aerospace Tech' node by finding the randolith, which unlocks the RAPIER engine, yay? not that useful right now) I noticed that the crew were getting abnormally stressed out and sent up a new crew to replace them, using a variant of the same ship that is currently docked to the Mun and Minmus stations (no docking port or RCS, but has landing legs). Then this happened:

Eventually an EVA  and some KAS magic fixed the landing legs, but not before the hemispherical fuel tank ended up flipped around the wrong way. Each time it loaded, the parts were misaligned in a different way, which didn't help at all.

With the expensive relays and that stupid sample return mission eating into the budget, we're left with not much in the way of funds and not enough science to unlock anything else yet.

Full album (and some boring part return contracts) here: https://imgur.com/a/bSNdLN0

What's next? More anomaly hunting, MMiB crew changeover, some nodes for Jool Relays One and Two and then- finally!!!- the Gilly Base will set off from Kerbin. I'm really hoping to unlock the tech tree node that gives active radiation shields before then, so I can retrofit one before leaving for Gilly; only trouble is it costs 1000 science.

[jimmymcgoochie]

I'll skip the boring part recovery contracts (last ones I'll ever do!) and start with something a bit more interesting:

A rocket plane to make two tourists pass out from G-forces. Despite the TWR of 5 on the pad and 8 mid-flight, they stayed stubbornly conscious only to finally succumb when it flipped backwards due to aero instability.

The surface exploration ship for Gilly, imaginatively named Gilly Explorer, was sent up to the Gilly Base and docked:

Please note that some parts- the engine section and the cupola on the front- are no longer attached correctly. This will be a recurring theme for this report, as it has been in the past with this design.

Since the engines were unusable (again) I cheated it down to the runway and recovered it, then created an upgraded version with some new parts and cheated that into the same orbit as the last one; improvements include a new RGU for the base (unlocking all the SAS modes) and better relay dishes on the pair of little relays attached to the propulsion section, plus a set of supply containers stuck to the other docking port.

And all in alignment!

Meanwhile, the Mun Anomaly Spotter was hard at work chasing down anomalies:

Spoiler

The  randolith didn't give a tech unlock, like the one on Minmus. Maybe a Kerbal will have to go out there to get it?

The first Jool Relay captured into orbit of Jool, followed a while later by the second which had an engine failure after capturing  and ended up in a pretty elliptical orbit.

Here's an odd one- when I reloaded the game and went back to the Mun Anomaly Spotter rover a while later, I got the tech node bonus! Strange.

This node unlocks the active radiation shield, which is literally the thing I said I wanted in the last update:

On 10/29/2020 at 7:37 PM, jimmymcgoochie said:

I'm really hoping to unlock the tech tree node that gives active radiation shields before then, so I can retrofit one before leaving for Gilly; only trouble is it costs 1000 science.

A pod was then sent up to attach a shield to the Gilly Base, with 3 engineers on board to handle its weight. By grabbing the front section with a Klaw then detaching it, the shield was inserted into the base's structure above some supply containers before the cupola bit was reattached on top of it.

The team of ten Kerbonauts selected for the mission were sent up to the base to make preparations before departure:

And then, predictably...

Cheat to runway, replace with a new design, cheat to orbit again. The new version has a different engine setup to try and avoid the issues that the old versions have had, along with more upgrades to the little relays- they now have resource scanners configured for orbital DING and BEEP science experiments.

Crew on board, supplies on board, everything pointing the right way- time to go! Due to a low TWR the transfer was split into two ~500m/s burns and the first of these was performed. There's a bit of a stability issue due to the lopsided design, but nothing the Vernors on the propulsion stage can't handle- I'm saving the monopropellant for when it's really needed.

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/GlmSCzn

What's next? Going to Gilly, that's what!

[jimmymcgoochie]

I tried to upgrade to KSP 1.10.1 again today. It didn't go well...

And so far I've managed to avoid being sucked into the giant whirlpool of unending chaos that is Imgur the day after the 2020 US Presidential election.

The first and most important thing that happened: Gilly Base finally left for Gilly! Dramatic solar eclipse image during the transfer burn:

Two flights were made using the Kronus SSTO (actually flying it, not using KSTS!) due to some unusual payloads. The first was a cluster of 4 separate missions, all hitching a ride on the same transfer stage to Duna, and which had to have an ugly fairing arrangement to make it fit:

The second flight took two rover/orbiter combos which headed to the Mun and Minmus to get gravity data from the surface and from orbit as well as some other orbital science:

And in other news, I made a heavy scanning satellite to go to Laythe as a very lucrative contract came up to do so. Of course, the game then became unusable and I had to reload it, and when I did said contract was gone; cue a long and boring loop of rejecting SCANsat contracts for Laythe and Vall until I got a reasonably good one for Laythe; not as good as the original, but still plenty profitable. The satellite has all 'high quality' parts to make it more resilient in the face of Jool's formidable radiation belts and it should be able to last for years or even decades; there are also two small landers on it to be lobbed at Laythe to get MOAR SCIENCE!

Final scores for this report:

Full album here: https://imgur.com/a/PZaQ1fl

What's next? A lot of waiting around for nodes, or possibly scraping up some extra science from Kerbin. A bunch of contracts should be completed within a year, but until then there's not much else I can do but wait, and since I can't time warp above 1000x without all the science experiments not running at proper speed, it's a looooooong wait!