Terran(ism) Space Program (finished!)

[The Destroyer]

Hmm, that design definitely looks familiar!

Having rear-facing thruster pods instead of forward-facing ones makes all the difference though.

Glad it's still working quite well in its reverse engineered variant.

[jimmymcgoochie]

12 minutes ago, The Destroyer said:

Hmm, that design definitely looks familiar!

Having rear-facing thruster pods instead of forward-facing ones makes all the difference though.

Glad it's still working quite well in its reverse engineered variant.

Those rear-facing thrusters came in handy during one sim when I started the final braking burn a little bit too late. I’m also not a fan of engines pointing backwards as a rule.

But I painted it a different colour so obviously it’s completely unrelated in any way… 

[jimmymcgoochie]

As it turns out, the water supplies stolen from the Moon rover aren't enough for a year on the base- in fact they're good for about two months. Blue Counter 2 was dispatched to resolve that situation and landed a few days later, but a bit off course.

It'll spend some time driving over to the base, during which the liquid hydrogen will mysteriously boil off in its entirety (again! what's with that?).

Next up, a post-sunset launch of the Mars ship's main section containing the crew quarters, life support and supplies and the Earth return stage. The rocket got a second sunset during the descent, which was very picturesque; however fairing separation turned into a nightmare...

Let's just say that it took repeated attempts to launch this rocket, with frequent explosions and game crashes, before it eventually made it to orbit intact.

Smash cut to White Tombaugh for a course correction that will send it hurtling past Pluto at a distance of under 150km, with a relative speed of 30km/s, in about 4 years. There's room to fiddle with it further, possibly even to graze its atmosphere and/or get a flyby of Charon that would last about two seconds, but zero chance of capturing into orbit.

Back to the Moon and the Blue Counter 2 arrived at the Moon base, topped up the food, water and lox tanks (no liquid hydrogen left at this point or it would have topped that up too), put the rest of the supplies into the crew rover and then made a rather misguided attempt to pick up the crew's lander and move it closer to the base, which failed miserably.

With that done, the rover was driven away a bit and range safety was fired to destroy it.

Still on the topic of rovers, look who's finally arrived!

Many thousands of kilometres later (at a blistering 80cm/s cruise speed) the Orange Island rover found the Blue Pawn sample return craft and transferred its collection of samples over. Or at least, it tried to. As it turned out, it was simply impossible to get all the samples over to the two avionics units in the ascent craft and instead they'd just move four over to one of them, then move those four between the two avionics while leaving two samples on the rover. It took a lot of save file digging before I finally found where the sample storage stuff is hidden, then applied a bit of hacking to make one avionics on the Blue Pawn have enough storage space for all the samples.

Spoiler

There's just no way to transfer specific samples to a specific part with Kerbalism even when there's plenty space available, but I didn't feel like trying to edit the save to move the samples themselves around as that would probably break everything...

With its primary objective complete, the Orange Island drove off towards the Mariner Valley to continue its secondary science mission. It's still collecting samples and might end up taking them to the crewed lander if it's close enough.

The next major launch is possibly the heaviest payload I've ever launched, with the possible exception of the Black Galileo mission to Mercury- the Mars ship's core booster. 650 tons in total, its purpose is to capture into Mars orbit and adjust the orbit as necessary after that- maybe swing by Phobos at some point to do a landing there. This is the first real launch of the Black Empress launch rocket, with the two boosters for the Mars ship due to launch on the same design- I may make some further tweaks to those based on what happened to this one.

A slightly unusual combination of 2x F-1A and 1x E-1A(KS) on each booster and 7x M-1U on the core, the boosters also have large hydrolox tanks that feed into the core while the boosters are attached; the fuel for the booster engines runs out a bit earlier than the fuel for the core engines so there's a short stretch where the boosters are still attached but not burning, something that I may address by shutting down the E-1s earlier or via design tweaks.

The White Hubble space tug prepared to rendezvous, but during the wait for its first burn another mission needed attention:

Blue Bishop Ceres arrived at the asteroid belt's largest dwarf planet, once again with the magic disappearing hydrogen that seems to be plaguing this install lately- at this point I have no qualms about save file hacking to put it back because I know it's a bug and shouldn't be happening.

Orbital insertion was completed without incident and the probe settled into an orbit that hits space low and high to rake in the science. There's plenty of fuel left for a landing attempt, but after the instability issues with the identical Blue Bishop Vesta that's an objective that will only be attempted once all the orbital science is done.

Still on the topic of Ceres- the transfer window is currently open, though it's a pretty terrible one (either that or a MechJeb update has made it spit out some really weird transfers). It's so bad that if I wait a year for the next window it's 4km/s cheaper and will still arrive at the same time. Of course I still launched stuff at Ceres though, it's still worth a try even if they might not succeed, right? First up was the White Ptolemy scanning probe:

Followed within an hour by the Blue Draughtsman orbital science probe:

Will either of them have enough fuel to capture into Ceres orbit? I honestly don't know, but right now it doesn't look particularly good. On the flip side, I just noticed that I accidentally put two radar scanners and no SAR scanners on there so I can correct that for the Vesta mission and send a corrected version out to Ceres next year in the cheap window.

A few more minor events:

Orange Hill 2 arrived at the Moon base, transferred samples from crew rover to base. That's all this rover is for, but since it can't be done any other way and I plan to do more Moon exploration with the crew rover it's worth having.

Course corrections for the two Blue Bungalow Mk2 orbiter/rover missions to Venus- one's staying in the ecliptic plane while the other goes polar.

And after all that, it was finally time for the White Hubble to grab the Mars ship core booster to tow it over to the Mars ship main hull. Things didn't go entirely to plan at first:

Even KJR can't hold this thing straight! Let's try again, but grabbing the booster right in the middle instead of by one engine.

That looks more stable, at least. I haven't fired the nuclear engines up yet as the game crashed just after this; if it turns out the klaw simply isn't up to the task I'll need to add avionics and proper RCS to the two side boosters so they can all fly their own rendezvous and docking instead of using the NST for that.

No final scores this time due to game crash, but things are ticking along nicely- KCT points keep coming in all over the place, the remaining parts of the Mars mission are being built and White Huygens is on the launchpad waiting for the perfect time to launch to Saturn.

Spoiler

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

Coming up next time: Is the Space Tug a viable option for orbital assembly?

[jimmymcgoochie]

Coming back to some missions I launched a while ago but which are now about to do what they were originally made for, the Blue King orbiter/lander combination mission reunites over Phobos, its cargo of surface samples safely stored for transport.

The original idea was to go to Deimos too, but there's simply not enough fuel left for that- just getting down to the Blue Queen return craft in low Mars orbit will be cutting it very finely indeed.

Double docking done, all remaining fuel from the Blue King is transferred to the Blue Queen and the samples have also been handed over. The Blue King orbiter and lander are now adrift in Mars orbit, completely out of propellant but otherwise still functional and able to scrape up some orbital science.

Next, the Vesta transfer window opened. Cue two launches- first the orbital science probe Blue Draughtsman Vesta:

And then the heavy scanning probe White Ptolemy V:

Hopefully they'll both have the fuel to capture into useful orbits; the alignment for Vesta is a lot better than the Ceres one was and the White Ptolemy got some minor tweaks to make it more capable and boost its range a little bit after what happened to the Ceres one- which I reckon will be some way short of capturing into orbit, but oh well.

Over to Venus where the pair of Blue Bungalow Mk2 rovers arrive, capture into elliptical orbits, drop their periapses, drop their rovers off and then boost back into orbit. One stayed in the plane of Venus' orbit around the sun, the other went polar.

The orbiters were soon joined by the Blue Draughtsman Venus, parking into a 90 degree inclination, relatively low altitude orbit by burning its upper stage to depletion. The probe itself has about 1500m/s of fuel in it, enough to boost its apoapsis up to space high pretty much anywhere it wants, but there's loads of space low science to be had first.

And last, but definitely not least, the first of two side boosters for the Mars ship was launched. A convenient orbital alignment meant it could rendezvous directly with the ship instead of needing the Nuclear Space Tug's help, using its second stage to set up the rendezvous and match velocities after making orbit. (The addition of some RCS on that second stage was a great idea and overall I'm really pleased with how well this rocket is performing- lobbing 650 ton payloads into LEO is practically routine now!)

Note the red X on the side- that was added so the NST has something to aim at while grabbing it, it's right over the centre of mass so should make things a bit more stable.

Firing pairs of engines on the second stage at low throttle- the NK-15-VM can throttle down to 52%- was plenty for the rendezvous and speed matching burns, though time warp related teleportation was an issue and forced a second rendezvous after the ship suddenly went from 500m to 5km away. Despite the lack of MLI, the sheer size of the tank plus that big radiator meant that boiloff wasn't too bad for the few hours of operation the second stage had, plus there was fuel left to deorbit it afterwards.

As you might expect, docking two very large, very heavy objects together took a very long time- so long, in fact, that while rendezvousing was completed in daylight, docking would take place in the dark.

Spoiler

As is right and proper.

A few almost dockings later and it finally held.

Now all I need to do is repeat that process with even lower FPS, and add the lander. The lander is already built and could be launched now, but I'm still debating whether I should send the crew up in the lander or retrofit an androgynous Apollo docking port to a Yellow Croissant and use that instead.

No final scores screenshot this time because I forgot, but due to a massive influx of science the free KCT points keep stacking up. The next Jupiter mission will be ready a few days before the optimal transfer window and then there are some course corrections to be done for a bunch of active missions.

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/y65d4Ng

Coming up next time: Final assembly of the Mars ship, which probably needs a proper name (suggestions anyone?), and I also need to pick the crew for this mission. Everyone is getting Apollo mission training (except Dan and Arkady who are on the Moon right now) so they'll all be eligible. Decisions, decisions...

[jimmymcgoochie]

This is the 100th post in this series. That can only mean one thing...

Spoiler

MONTAGE!

First launch of update 100 itself is a rather ambitious quadruple rover mission to Jupiter, aiming to put one rover on each of the four Galilean moons. A single stage will perform the Jupiter transfer burn and then capture into some kind of orbit at the other end, in the plane of the moons, so the rovers can then make their own way to their targets. Hopefully.

After accidentally rendezvousing with the wrong thing, Blue Pawn finally met up with Blue Queen in Mars orbit to hand over its cache of surface samples.

A few calculations revealed that it's possible to get this thing back to Earth, but only by using the remaining fuel in the Blue Pawn first then discarding it, burning the engines on the Blue Queen until it goes below 1.2t weight then ditching the top avionics and fairings to lighten it, relying solely on the return capsule's avionics for control after that. I also realised that the return capsule itself has RCS thrusters, but no fuel for them...

The final superheavy launch rocket for a while, a Black Empress carried up the second side booster to the Mars ship in orbit. Again, convenient orbital timings meant a rendezvous was easy in a couple of orbits without the need for the nuclear space tug.

Only two components left now- the Mars lander and the crew. First to launch was the crew- mission commander and pilot Tim (Timothy Sullivan, one of my original four!), scientist Terri (Powell) and engineer Vikky (Viktoriya Oprinchuka) were chosen for this mission, with pilots Diana (another original four) and Vicky flying up with them just to get the "five crew in space" thing and the bonus funds that come with it.

Three crew transferred over to their new home for the next few years, along with all the life support resources and RCS propellant that the Yellow Croissant had to spare, before Diana and Vicky said their goodbyes and headed back down.

A little while later the Mars lander was launched. By this point the orbit of the Mars ship was a bit out of alignment- while earlier launches occurred when the ship was coming over the horizon and so were able to launch almost to a direct rendezvous, this one was launching after the ship had passed overhead and had to fly in a low orbit for a while to catch up.

 

Using the little hypergolic thrusters that will also perform the deorbit burn around Mars, the lander had no trouble flying over and docking to the ship.

A course has been plotted to Mars in just under 50 days, requiring about 5.5km/s delta-V in total to get from LEO to LMO (with a bit more to match the plane of Phobos and any course corrections), which is well within the 6.5km/s currently available from the main and side boosters. Cutting down on the shielding for the crew modules was more than enough to offset the weight of the lander; the crew will be well protected from radiation by putting those big fuel tanks between the sun and the crew section. 

Final scores:

Spoiler

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

Coming up next time: There's a crew flight in LEO going on right now for contracts, and I still need to send a new crew to the Moon station; the original contract for that timed out, so I had to accept it again (oops...) and will dispatch a crew in due course. There are also a lot of course correction burns for various missions coming up and the departure of the Blue Queen back to Earth, as well as the Mars ship heading off from Earth to Mars shortly afterwards.

Edited December 4, 2021 by jimmymcgoochie

[jimmymcgoochie]

Sadly, no Mars ship departure yet. Instead I went and spent four days making a geostationary contract sat launcher. But first, I made this:

It's a Mercury rover which should^{[citation needed]} have the delta-V to make it down to Mercury, then down to the surface. It's also the first time I've tried a six-booster version of the White Cloud rocket, which I'm calling White Cumulus; at just over 4 kilotons it's about as far as I can push this design, there's no room for more boosters around the core.

Now back to the geostationary rockets, which took so long because I painstakingly compared all the available options for the upper stage and second stage to find the best combination for each- comparisons were made between build cost and time, overall delta-V and burn time, mass, reliability and ignition count. The winning combination was an upper stage powered by the Agena 2000 and a second stage powered by the RD-57M; the Agena 2000 is pretty reliable and offered the best delta-V of any available hypergolic upper stage whilst maintaining a reasonable TWR and burn time, while the RD-57M offers better performance at a lower build cost and time than the other engines I tested for that role and 11 ignitions- but with a frankly terrible 14% ignition failure rate! With 5000 units of payload on board the F-1A first stage is a bit overpowered, producing a TWR of over 2 at full throttle and about 1.7 when operating at minimum throttle (about 85%), but with 10,000 units of payload the greater fuel requirements bring it down to a more reasonable 1.5 at full thrust.

Testing concluded that geostationary contracts were feasible so the tanks were tooled up and two different rockets were made- Blue Chit holds 5k of payload, while its big brother Blue Chip holds 10k. That's all well and good, but that 14% failure rate is worryingly high and could really use some improving.

Enter the Blue Meeple, a hasty conversion of the Blue Chit into a lunar orbit science probe with the best experiments money can buy. The reduced payload mass meant it could be launched on a first stage using two E-1As as an F-1A stage was stupidly overpowered, while the RD-57M on the second stage had extra telemetry to improve reliability as much as possible. Sure enough, the first ignition was a failure and once TLI was completed the remaining ignitions were used up to try and induce more failures; across the two Blue Meeple probes there were a total of three failures which improved the ignition failure rate from 14% to just 2.5%, which is much better.

At the same time as those missions, I also launched a crew up to the Moon to fulfil that "crew the Moon station" contract that timed out a little while ago, as well as a crewed lunar orbit contract. Of course, this being me I didn't realise until they docked to the station that the lunar orbit contract required a higher orbit than the station was in so they'll need to do that before they go home...

And while all that was going on, a crew were sitting in LEO for a couple of weeks for two more crewed orbit contracts. At this point I started experimenting with TUFX profiles- when I tried this before I got annoying circular artifacts on any planet or moon, but now that seems to have been resolved and it looks rather good.

Before TUFX:

After applying EVO 0.3's TUFX profile:

Looks nice, right?

And finally, the first real launch of a Blue Chit geostationary contract sat, which went totally according to plan with no-

Oh, who am I kidding? It was terrible! First the gimbal on the F-1A was limited too far so it kept flipping out before it reached max Q, then the upper stage avionics were insufficient for the weight of the craft and it had to burn a load of fuel to regain control (while tumbling slowly and pointing retrograde for some of it!), then I messed up the calculation for the timing of the resonant orbit to get above the point on the surface that the contract wanted and did it backwards; fortunately for me I was doing it backwards to begin with, so the two backwards-es cancelled out and it ended up right where it was meant to go in one orbit.

And once again, my contract curse struck: completing the geostationary weather sat contract meant that second-gen weather sat contracts are no longer offered, which removes the majority of the income for each Green Condor rocket launch. While I can still build them in just over a day and they have a large profit margin even with just sun-synchronous contracts, I feel like it's time to call a halt on that. After many years and close to a hundred successful launches across the various iterations of this design, this is the last launch of a 60 ton contract sat.

Spoiler

At least, it is until I get bored and throw one on the build queue just to keep the VAB crews occupied...

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/1COdWQb

Coming up next time: Mars ship departure? It might actually happen this time, but there's still more stuff I can do. There's a Mercury window about to open and a third White Galileo probe standing by to launch for it- this one uses a nuclear engine because why not; the Mercury rover won't be ready in time so will have to wait for the next one.

[jimmymcgoochie]

Short update with Important Things^TM in it.

First, White Galileo 3 departs for Mercury without even needing to turn on the nuclear engine.

At this point I decided to turn off the TUFX filter in flight view as it makes things a bit too blue in atmosphere. I'm keeping it on in map view though, it looks better there.

Over to Mars as the Blue Queen sample return craft makes a rather complicated return burn to Earth. First, the remaining fuel in the Blue Pawn lander was burnt to give it a little kick:

Then that got discarded and the craft turned 180 degrees to use its own engines, burning until it weighed 1.22 tons. Once it reached that weight, the upper avionics (with the magnetometer on it) was decoupled and the avionics on the sample return capsule took over; that avionics can only handle 1 ton of mass and the upper avionics weighs 220kg, hence the wait for the weight. Once the avionics was decoupled, the remainder of the craft scooted sideways a bit before completing the burn:

Not sideways enough- the magnetometer broke a solar panel, but at this point it only needs one panel anyway as the power demands are much lower without any experiments to run or data to transmit. A small course correction will put it on course for a pretty aggressive Earth re-entry, which I'm hoping will work due to the whole "no RCS fuel on the return capsule" thing...

Also at Mars, the Orange Island rover has made its way over to the Valles Marineris:

That isn't the edge of the valley over on the left, that's a strange cloud layer (that might be a bug in EVO 0.3); those cliffs go up even further than that.

Now to launch some stuff towards Mars instead of away from it, starting with a Blue Draughtsman science probe:

(Zoom in close on that image and you'll see a tiny orange speck just above the rocket; that's Mars)

This launch was followed by (at last!) the departure of the Mars ship:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, stability on those boosters was a bit of an issue when physics warp was applied- having two 600+ ton boosters with ~6MN of thrust each attached solely by a single docking port half way up will do that- and then the docking ports didn't release via staging or action groups so I had to drop the boosters by hand, hence the staggered decoupling. Other than the sheer length of the burn (~8 minutes at ~1/3 real speed) there were no real issues, and a course correction burn has been plotted to get a good Martian periapsis with another due later to get into the plane of Phobos.

There should have been another launch to send the Yellow Pie crew rover out to Mars too, but that thing was cursed.

No, really, it was cursed- trying to launch it via KCT just sent me back to the Space Centre without spawning it in on the launchpad, along with half a dozen random extra buttons on the toolbar (duplicates of a few including KSPedia as well as the mission scoreboard button that should never appear in career mode!); opening the craft in the editor didn't help as it was uneditable and wouldn't disappear when I clicked the new craft button either; reloading the game didn't fix either problem and eventually I had to abandon the idea entirely. I may be able to scrape together a new version by modifying the design used on the Moon rover (which ironically was adapted from the original design for the Mars rover) and building that without KCT to make up for the cursed version.

And finally, Blue Bishop Jupiter arrived at its destination and braked into orbit.

The capture burn was plotted to get a nice intercept of Callisto pretty much at apoapsis, giving a nice little gravity assist to raise its periapsis a bit and (hopefully) make encountering the other moons easier in the future- and get some easy contract money for four flybys on top of the Jupiter orbiter contract it already completed.

I've also been tweaking the new geostationary contract rocket a bit, switching from a 1:1 ratio of weather and communications payloads to 1:9 as commsat contracts need a lot more payload. The interstage between stage two and the upper stage has been changed from a solid fairing piece to a deployable one as stage separation was inducing a spin due to the engine bell hitting the fairing; the Agena engine seems to start up with the gimbal cranked all the way over for some odd reason and even without the fairing present it still lurches to one side before correcting. Completing two contracts at once is a good way to net over 600k per flight, not including advances, though it feels a little bit cheaty as the commsat contracts take 2 minutes to complete after the orbit is reached whereas weathersat contracts require 6 hours, so I have to engage some fairly aggressive time warping to get them both done before the craft blinks out of existence.

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/h8BVKV5

Coming up next time: I've begun to work on a Venus ship, which looks almost identical to the Mars ship but instead of a lander it carries an Apollo Block 4 mission module and a Yellow Pain-au-chocolat (which may or may not make the final version) and all the crew science experiments you can do somewhere other than low Earth orbit.

[jimmymcgoochie]

Despite the many hours of KSP that have happened since the last update, there's not a whole lot to show for it. Most of that is for one reason and one reason alone- GPS network contract.

But first...

Geostationary communications network contract wants four satellites in GEO with 1750 units of commsat payload each? No problem- stick four of these little box-sats on the first two stages of a Blue Chip rocket and it can easily put them into a resonant orbit to deploy nicely in geostationary orbits.

That contract unlocked the GPS and GLONASS contracts; I picked GPS because the failure cost was much lower, the two contracts pay the same overall and require the same number of identical satellites either way. Minor tweaks to the probes from the GEO network and the Blue Chit rocket and the Blue Token GPS was ready to go.

Launch four probes in one go to each orbit, position in a 3/4 resonant orbit then circularise one on each of the four subsequent orbits. Not difficult, but time-consuming as each circularisation burn takes over 10 minutes (0.06TWR ) and having to stop and do a burn every 8 hours or so means not much time progression- and of course having more than one set of probes on the go at once just makes that worse.

Little dinky solar panels cost about 1 fund each and weigh a few hundred grams, but are enough to keep the probes powered as long as the avionics are off; with the avionics on they last a few days in total.

Sloooooooooow burns with these things, but at 10x physics warp it's not so bad. Normally the RCS systems will go nuts at 10x physics warp and repeatedly overcorrect as they can't seem to react quickly enough, but that little generic engine from ProbesPlus has thrust vanes which act like a gimbal- no RCS panic, just smooth flying.

In between all that, Blue Bishop Jupiter was busy playing gravity pinball as it visited three of Jupiter's major moons in less than two orbits of Jupiter:

Each encounter provided a small gravity assist, then a burn of about 500m/s set an intercept course with the next one. Unfortunately Ganymede doesn't want to play- it's in the completely wrong place to get a flyby within the next orbit, or the one after that either. There's still about 2500m/s of fuel left in the tanks overall though so reaching it won't be too difficult, however capturing into orbit of a moon will probably need more gravity assists to reduce the relative velocity.

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/bLJ8yLM

Coming up next time: More GPS tedium, but there's also a Mercury window due to open and a Mercury rover waiting for it, plus a few other missions doing course corrections (including the four White Herschel S probes going to explore the moons of Saturn) and that Ganymede flyby.

[jimmymcgoochie]

Brief update: I’m currently AFKSP (away from KSP) due to travelling home for Christmas- and to a potato laptop that can’t even run stock KSP- but I plan to be back in another 10 days (travel restrictions dependent!) and will pick this series up again when I get back.

On a sort of related note- I made an actual contribution to RP-1! It’s not a huge one, granted- just fiddling with the prices on the ProbesPlus dishes to bring them in line with stock/ReStock instead of being pointlessly overpriced- but still…

[jimmymcgoochie]

It's a new year, I've come back after a few weeks AFKSP and forgotten most of what I was doing. Time to take stock and check what's what and going where.

But first, a couple of stragglers from before Christmas:

Six pretty tedious launches and a whole lot of KAC alarms later the GPS network is up and running. Having two dozen satellites in Earth orbit won't help much with save file bloat, loading times or general game performance, but they function as a communications network that covers almost the entire planet so I'm reluctant to delete them.

A big launch as the core of the Venus ship heads to LEO. It's not too different from the core of the Mars ship and the rest of the parts are pretty similar too; the differences are mostly smaller solar panels, more radiators- and the distinct lack of a lander! It'll be replaced by an Apollo block 4 mission module to allow more crew science to be brought along for the trip.

 

Now for some rocket stock-taking:

Green Condor Mk4, a 60 ton sun-synchronous weather sat launcher that launched dozens of times with almost no issues, completing second generation and sun-synchronous weather sat contracts for considerable profit, but now retired since geostationary contracts are more lucrative. The design has come a long way from its first iteration as the Green Starling:

Reading back through my own reports, I was surprised to discover that the Green Condor started out doing Molniya orbit contracts, before eventually the payload requirements got too high and I repurposed it solely for weather satellites. There was a brief period where Molniya orbit contracts were done with a 150 ton rocket called Grey Torus, however the payload requirements soon exceeded its capabilities too so a new rocket was needed. Enter the Orange Cliff:

A distant relative of the Green Condor that used some of the same toolings and engines, and originally using a hydrolox second stage before switching to kerolox, it's had a few iterations since then culminating with the Orange Cliff Mk5 above. Putting 3000 units of payload into a retrograde tundra orbit isn't easy, but this thing can just do it; or complete prograde tundra and any Molniya orbit with ease. And no, I didn't design it to be like the R-7, that just happened. The Orange Cliff was retired at the same time as the Green Condor, making way for geostationary contracts instead.

When it came time to design a cheap crewed LEO ship, the Orange Cliff rocket found another use launching the Yellow Croissant:

It might look a little bit ridiculous, plonking a 4m wide pod onto a 2.5m wide rocket, but it's cheap, effective, reliable and still fits on the 350 ton pad. It can also put the crew bit- an Apollo Block 3 capsule with a custom service module and the Apollo Block 4's engine- into a good orbit (up to 400km) without using any fuel from the craft itself, leaving the crew free to use all their propellant for contract chasing. Currently on its third iteration (Mk3).

While the Green Condor and Orange Cliff both worked well as contract sat launchers and for getting loads of data units for engines that were later used elsewhere (RL-10 and RD-58 configs that were later used for crewed lunar flights, for example), a time came when all those little rockets started slowing things down too much (Green Condor Mk4 was building in 27 hours!) for relatively modest payouts. It took several days and several pages of A4 paper, but in the end I made these:

The Blue Chit (above) and Blue Chip (below) are both geostationary satellite launchers; the Blue Chit carries a total of 5000 units of payload (500 weather, 4500 comms) while the larger Blue Chip carries 10,000 payload (1000 weather, 9000 comms). Both use the same upper stage- the Agena-2000 config of the Agena-8096C- with a hydrolox second stage (RD-57 for the Blue Chit, NK-15-VM for the Blue Chip) and an F-1A first stage that's 10m longer on the Blue Chip. Despite their size, they build extremely quickly- a little over 4 days for the Blue Chit and barely a day more for the Blue Chip. The first stage was borrowed from an existing rocket, previously seen launching a variety of Blue Chess-class missions including to Mars, Venus, Ceres, Vesta and even out to the gas giants. The F-1A's combination of high thrust at a low price, high reliability and long burn time is hard to beat.

And finally, the Yellow Pain-au-Chocolat (currently at Mk5) lunar crew ship:

Originally adapted from the Yellow Croissant, the Yellow Pain-au-chocolat packs more supplies, more life support and a lot more delta-V thanks to its twin RD-58 propulsion. The design initially used a four booster White Stratus rocket, however this was overkill and a smaller two-booster variant is more than enough to send it on its way to the Moon. Total mass on the launchpad is about 750 tons, slightly too heavy for the 700 ton pad but much lighter than the 1200 ton monstrosity I used to send Gemini pods out to the Moon only a few game years ago.

Spoiler

And just for fun, behold! The largest and heaviest rocket I've ever launched! (Simulations excluded)

Kerbal for scale.

Nearly 140 metres tall, weighing over 11300 tons including the payload (of 650 tons) and able to put that payload into orbit with enough fuel to do orbital rendezvous with the upper stage afterwards. The rocket is the Black Empress, while the payload is the core stage for the Interplanetary Ships going to Mars and soon Venus.

Now to trawl through all the active vessels to see what they are and what they're doing... This might be easier sorting by planetary body, so here goes:

Earth:

• White Hubble NST, the nuclear space tug originally intended to assemble the Mars ship in orbit; turned out to be largely unnecessary as the upper stages of the launch rockets could do the rendezvouses.
• Three Blue Backgammon orbital imagery satellites, running that 20 year, 10,000 science digital imaging experiment as fast as they can.
• Four Grey Kebabs, also running the digital imaging experiment.
• Three Super Relays, providing the high-bandwidth communications needed to dump all that digital imaging data down to the DSN stations as fast as possible.
• Two Grey Tokamak probes, running various science experiments in polar orbits. One is in space high, the other in space low, both continue to send back data at a slow but steady rate.
• Green Stork, an old science probe launched to the plane of the Moon to spot transfer windows. Science experiments are finished now.
• Four Orange Beach relays in a medium (5Mm) polar Earth orbit, providing communications coverage across both poles and for most of the rest of the planet too.
• Twenty four GPS satellites...
• One Blue Chip GEO contract sat, just need to run the timers down on the contracts and that'll disappear.
• And White Lagrange, just launched on its way to Mercury but still in Earth's SOI right now.

Moon:

• Two Blue Meeple science probes in polar orbits, plenty of science still to be run.
• Grey Tokamak M, also in polar orbit. Most of its science is done but the orbital perturbation experiment still has 7 years left to run.
• Yellow Profiterole, the Moon station in retrograde orbit roughly in the plane of the Moon's orbit of Earth. Three crew currently aboard, two of which will be heading down to the surface soon. Two Yellow Pain-au-chocolats docked, one Yellow Muffin reusable Moon lander docked, one White Planck fuel tanker docked.
• Yellow Yum-yum, Moon base in Mare Nectaris. Two crew currently aboard, though stress and radiation exposure are building and they'll be returning to the station and then back to Earth the next time the station's orbit passes overhead. One Blue Counter resupply rover attached via klaw, Orange Hill 2 rover also attached via klaw for sample storage and transfer.
• Yellow Baklava, crewed Moon rover parked beside the Yellow Yum-yum.
• Yellow Muffin, crew lander on the Moon's surface about 3km from Yellow Yum-yum.
• Four Orange Dish relays in highly inclined orbits giving near-total coverage of the Moon's surface and orbit.

Sun:

• Four White Herschel S orbiter probes heading to Saturn, exact targets TBD. Landing attempts may be made depending on delta-V.
• Four White Herschel J orbiter probes heading to Jupiter, each targeting one of the Galilean moons. Landing attempts may be made depending on delta-V.
• White Galileo 3, Mercury orbital science probe with nuclear engine heading to Mercury.
• Blue Queen, Mars sample return probe carrying samples back to Earth.
• Three Blue Bishop science probes heading to Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
• Three Blue Draughtsman probes heading to Mars, Vesta and Ceres. Ceres mission may fail due to poor transfer window, a replacement has been built for the next one.
• White Euclid, cluster rover mission heading to Jupiter, currently aiming to land on all four Galilean moons.
• White Huygens, orbiter and lander cluster mission heading to Titan.
• Two White Ptolemy heavy scanning probes heading for Ceres and Vesta. Ceres mission may fail due to poor transfer window, a replacement has been built for the next one.
• White Tombaugh, high-speed mission to Pluto to arrive within 5 years of launch.
• Mars ship, carrying crew of 3 to Mars.
•  

Mercury:

• White Galileo, science experiments largely completed but still has lots of data to send back.
• Black Galileo, extreme overkill lander mission that managed to land and then fly about 70km to another biome. No signal to check experiment status.

Venus:

• Blue Knight Venus, scanning and scientific probe in polar orbit. Scans nearly complete, still plenty of science to gather.
• Three Blue Bungalow orbiters in varying orbits. Science largely complete in space high, orbits don't spend much time in space low.
• Three Blue Bungalow rovers on the surface. Some science left to gather but heavily constrained by available power.
• Blue Draughtsman Venus, science probe in polar orbit. science mostly complete but still gathering orbital perturbation data.

Mars:

• Orange Island, sample gathering rover currently moving through Valles Marineris towards Olympus Mons gathering samples and science data as it goes.
• Orange Canyon 1 lander, the first lander on Mars. Barely functional due to solar panel degradation, no signal to check science status.
• Blue Knight Mars, scanning and science probe in high polar orbit. Scans complete, science ongoing.
• Blue King orbiter and lander, defunct craft that previously gathered surface samples from Mars and its moons and brought them to Blue Queen to be returned to Earth.

Phobos:

• Orange Valley P orbiter, science probe in orbit. Most science complete, orbital perturbation ongoing.
• Orange Valley P lander, science lander on the surface. Science complete.

Deimos:

• Orange Valley D orbiter, science probe in orbit. Most science complete, orbital perturbation ongoing.
• Orange Valley D lander, science lander on the surface. Science complete.

Vesta:

• Blue Bishop Vesta, science orbiter in elliptical polar orbit. Some science remaining, attempting biome scans.

Ceres:

• Blue Bishop Ceres, science orbiter in inclined polar orbit. Some science remaining, attempting biome scans.

Jupiter:

• Blue Bishop Jupiter, science orbiter orbiting in plane with the Galilean moons. Flybys of Io, Europa and Callisto completed, flyby of Ganymede will be conducted when orbits allow. Remaining fuel may allow further flybys and capturing into orbit of one of the moons.

There's still some way to go in this save, however I won't be launching too many new vessels as I want to complete the crewed Mars mission (and Venus too) and then let time run by until all the active missions have completed their goals; Blue Bishop Uranus is about 19 years away from arriving, but everything else will be done much sooner.

[jimmymcgoochie]

The crew of the Yellow Yum-yum Moon base are getting stressed out and irradiated, so it's time for Danny and Arkady to come home. A short drive in the rover to take them back to their lander and then it was time to launch. Due south, obviously, of course that's what I wanted you to do, MechJeb...

The trip up to lunar orbit was uneventful, however when they arrived at the Yellow Profiterole station they discovered a problem: no docking ports to dock to. The landers have drogue ports on them so need to dock to a probe port, but one is occupied by the other lander and the other by a fuel tanker.

Simple solution- send the next crew down to the surface in the other lander to free up that port. Problem- the other lander is too heavy for its avionics (probably a life support related glitch, I definitely set them to have a single life support function per ECLSS module but now they have four, and water recyclers are half a ton each!) and so has no control beyond fore/aft RCS. I managed to dock that one back to the station, however this means that the fuel tanker docked to the other port needs to be moved and that means one of the two Yellow Pain-au-chocolats needs to be undocked.

Solution- undock one of them and have it dock to the lander that's currently station keeping near the station, transfer the crew over to the Apollo pod and send that home while the tanker moves to free up the port for the lander. A slow orbital ballet played out at painfully low FPS and at a fraction of real time as several different vessels moved towards each other and docked.

The tanker undocked, definitely didn't smash a solar panel due to it being rotated so that it clipped inside the tanker when I hit the button to undock, and moved around to the rear drogue docking port of the station which had just been freed up by Gloria in the Yellow Pain-au-chocolat, who approached the lander and docked, allowing Danny and Arkady to move over and join her before they undocked from the lander and headed up to a higher orbit; there's a crewed lunar orbit contract with an inclination that matches the station but with a minimum periapsis a bit above its orbit, so they boosted up to a 100km circular orbit for three days before heading home. The lander was then remotely guided in by the remaining crew of the station and docked to the now available docking port to be refuelled and resupplied.

As if that wasn't enough drama for one mission, during re-entry the heatshield was mysteriously unable to shield the Apollo pod from heating and it would have exploded if not for the ignore max temperatures cheat. Not the first time that's happened, but I thought using the generic 4m shield instead of the proper Apollo one would solve that issue; apparently not. The pod thought it was on fire all the way to the ground and the oceans were invisible, much like other occasions where this has happened.

Despite the glitches, the mission was a success, grabbing a load of science data from crew orbital photography experiments and bringing the films back home to be developed. Danny's first Moon landing clearly made a big impression:

Over five years added to Danny's retirement date, almost 3 to Arkady (I'm guessing he's landed on the Moon before but not stayed for so long) and a measly 270 days for Gloria, who just stayed in orbit for a while then went home again.

While that was happening, another crewed mission was underway, this time in low Earth orbit:

Two weeks later they came back and netted a nice half million or so from two crewed LEO contracts.

Interspersed through all that crew shenanigans were five course corrections- all four White Herschel S probes brought their periapses over Saturn down to more manageable levels suitable for orbital capture (though two suffered from the mysterious boiloff bug and had to be corrected in the save file) and Blue Bishop Neptune also made a course correction, and also had the boiloff bug and had to be save hacked back into action.

Spoiler

That boiloff bug is a real pain, it seems to strike at random, causes all the liquid hydrogen or oxygen to boil off from a tank for no reason and despite maximum MLI on said tank and has to be cured with a save file hack to restore the missing propellant. I don't think radiators help with this, and besides those are either too big and expensive to be practical or else are too puny to make any real difference.

The last launch of 1964 is the main body of the Venus ship, which will be making the trip to Earth's closest neighbour in the near future. Largely identical to the Mars ship except for smaller solar panels and more radiators to combat the greater heat closer to the Sun, it used the same launch rocket as before. Something clearly didn't work right this time though, because when the solid boosters separated one of them came back and:

Oops... Still, no real harm done as the rocket kept flying, no control issues from the asymmetric thrust and it made it to orbit with plenty of fuel to spare.

I should probably have sent this thing into a higher orbit than 150x150km but too late now. I might try bringing the White Hubble nuclear space tug over and using that to push this thing higher, however the previous stability issues when using the NST make that a potentially risky move.

And with mere hours to go until the end of the year, a final task for 1964- circularise a geostationary satellite. The axial tilt is really obvious in this image, even if it's just simulated by tilting the entire solar system.

And now it's 1965!

This is the year I (hopefully!) put flags and footprints on Mars, but there's plenty more to do besides that: loads of probes going everywhere from Mercury to Pluto to look after, rovers to monitor, crew to keep an eye on, the Mars sample return mission is a few months from Earth and the final trial by fire to make or break the mission.

Oh, and I somehow managed to blow about 8 million funds on part unlocks today

Spoiler

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

Coming up next time: I may need to launch a new reusable Moon lander to replace the two that are possibly broken. I also took a look at making a water miner for the Moon, which is just feasible with a water content of 0.98% around the base, however production of hydrolox for fuel cells would be slow and power-intensive so that idea probably won't be going much further than the prototypes I simulated.

[jimmymcgoochie]

With the core of the Venus ship now in orbit, the White Hubble nuclear space tug was sent over to grab onto it. It might yet be useful for orbital assembly.

Staying with a nuclear theme, White Galileo 3 arrived at Mercury and expended its nuclear stage to brake into orbit with a half hour long burn, split in two when the periapsis dropped too low to the surface.

Due to a design oversight, the probe is equipped with an X-band antenna rather than Ka-band, meaning much slower transmission rates than I'd like and a huge backlog of data building up that will take literally years to be sent back. I looked into sending some powerful relays out there, but this probe doesn't have a secondary antenna so it wouldn't work.

Back to orbital assembly of the Venus ship as the core booster gets launched on a Black Empress rocket, all 11,300 tons of it lumbering off the pad under the power of no less than 25 engines- seven M-1s, twelve F-1As and six kerosene-burning LR-87s that are mostly there for the initial boost off the pad and to balance the consumption rates of hydrogen and kerosene in the boosters.

One second stage orbital rendezvous later...

And one painfully slow docking at a fraction of a metre per second and about 3FPS...

And I'd assembled the single largest object I've ever built in orbit in KSP, possibly ever. While the overall mass isn't as high as the Mars ship was and this thing will eventually be, it's easily 150 metres long end to end- which is taller than the Black Empress rocket that launched the core booster.

Spoiler

Outtake where the second stage fuel tank decided to disintegrate for literally no reason at all:

At some point I looked over to the Moon station and realised that there was hardly any liquid oxygen left out there, which is a problem as the crew need that to get home. Dave and Arkady were meant to be going to the surface, but instead they went home after stealing every last drop of lox out of the entire station.

When they separated from the service module I sent it to burn straight down; it lasted barely five seconds before running out of lox, so the margins were a bit too close for comfort.

Aside from the usual heat related issues and scatterer glitches, the crew returned safely home.

For the first time in a long time, there's nobody on or around the Moon.  

In other news, I swapped the F-1A engines on the Blue Chip and Blue Chit rockets for the F-1B, a move which shaved a bit off the launch costs for both rockets, though the Blue Chip had to have its second stage utilisation increased to maintain the delta-V needed for GEO, which reduced the effects a bit. Each launch can net half a million in rewards and about half that in advances so I'll probably keep doing those just for more KCT point money.

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/U4UJwws

Coming up next time: I finally run out of rockets to build!

[jimmymcgoochie]

Preparations for the Venus mission continue with the launch of two side boosters for the Venus ship:

And then this happened...

So I reloaded to a point before the rendezvous, and this happened...

In both images, the parts that are floating are actually still attached to the vessel; the nuclear space tug was swinging around wildly and managed to deliver a baseball bat-like hit to the free-floating booster, sending it flying at a speed that belied its 650 ton mass. So obviously I closed down KSP for the day and came back the next day with some extra cans of Kraken repellent, and docked it all together without any further trouble. The NST was released to fly away, increasing the FPS by approximately 0.3; the game is really, really slow at this point even with a relatively small craft.

Meanwhile, the production lines in the VAB fell silent as there was nothing to build:

And aside from the occasional GEO sat to keep the funds balance healthy, I won't be adding anything else to this list unless I need to fulfil a contract.

Course corrections were made by the Blue Queen going from Mars to Earth, and by the Mars ship going from Earth to Mars.

And then White Lagrange arrived at Mercury with a serious lack of delta-V for some unknown reason. The capture stage burned to depletion and the craft ended up suborbital, then its braking stage of two SRBs and landing stage of generic hypergolic thrusters brought it down to the surface.

Spoiler

And about 2km/s of delta-V was acquired using infinite propellant, because at this stage I'm not in the mood for repeating missions due to weird glitches and my Mercury missions have been plagued with those ever since the first flyby mission ended up way off on its inclination between transfer burn and arrival.

Blue Draughtsman Mars then arrived at Mars and captured into orbit, netting contract funds and more science.

And a little while later, Blue Queen arrived back at Earth from Mars- and somehow, inexplicably, it now has RCS fuel in the return capsule!? I'm sure that was missing before, but in any case it wasn't really needed as the upper stage pointed it in the right direction and spun it up before separation.

An extremely long re-entry ensued with the capsule screaming through the sky over... I don't really know where, but I'd guess Indonesia? I was a bit worried that the heatshield ablator would run out, but just in time the capsule slowed down and then splashed down safely into the ocean with its samples intact.

The Mars and Phobos sample return contracts completed a while ago due to a contract glitch, but now they're actually completed properly. A large amount of data that wasn't transmitted home also came back in the return capsule, making for a rather crowded experiment summary:

In between all this I also launched the Blue Draughtsman Ceres 2 and the White Ptolemy C2 to Ceres, but I forgot the screenshots of those.

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/TF8iT7V

Coming up next time: Three (not so) little words:

CREWED MARS LANDING!

[jimmymcgoochie]

It's time.

Spoiler

And then...

Tim: OK people, time to do the flag-planting ceremony. You two stand there and I'll plant the flag-

Brian: I thought I was planting the flag?

Terri: No, I was!

Tim: OK, we've all planted flags. Now can we do it properly this time?

Brian: ...fine.

Terri: Spoilsport.

It's been a long time coming, but at last: CREWED MARS LANDING COMPLETE!!! 

The crew did some reports, gathered some samples and did other science-y things for thirty days, before gathering everything they could into the upper compartment and preparing for liftoff. (For redundancy reasons the lander carried 60 days' worth of food, however the majority of that was stored in the habitation module and service module on top of that, both of which were left behind on the surface. Oops...)

Returning to orbit was pretty easy, but rendezvousing took time as the Mars ship was at pretty much the exact opposite side of Mars at the time the lander circularised. Two days later they finally got there.

With most of the fuel gone and minus the heavy hab/service modules, the lander turned out to be pretty agile and with a decent amount of delta-V just from its RCS thrusters- information that will be very handy for the Phobos leg of this mission. Docking was a pretty simple process and soon enough the crew were back aboard their ship, along with the precious surface samples that Terri immediately dragged down to the lab for analysis.

The trans-Phobos burn was performed with the core booster, however there wasn't enough fuel left in that to do the capture burn too so the remaining fuel was siphoned into the lander and the booster was discarded, sent onto a collision course with the little space photato.

Spoiler

During the series of burns to capture into Mars orbit- initial capture, plane alignment with Phobos, lowering periapsis to 250km and circularisation- the final circularisation burn almost ran into trouble when the two engines performing that burn exceeded their rated burn times and the mean time between failure started dropping precipitously- from hours to less than two minutes! Fortunately the burn completed before either engine failed and by then they were out of ignitions, so the other pair of engines were engaged for the trans-Phobos burn.

The ship's own pair of engines were used to capture at Phobos, braking to a frankly ridiculous 6m/s orbital velocity. That leaves four ignitions to get back to Earth with- getting out of Phobos orbit could feasibly be done with RCS, then trans-Earth burn, course correction (which will probably be needed) and capture burn, with a spare pair of ignitions in case of failures.

'Landing' on Phobos is a relative term: the Kerbals' EVA jetpacks are more than enough to do that, however the contract requires 2 crew and a 12 hour stay so the lander is required. Fortunately, the puny gravity is no match for its RCS thrusters, which have oodles of delta-V for the task, and with a relative velocity of less than 5m/s compared to the surface it's not like it'll use much fuel.

The landing site was on the eastern edge of Stickney Crater; fortunately there are plenty of those strange ridges with the nice flat bits in between (probably due to low-resolution terrain mapping from real-life missions, I suspect the real terrain would be smooth), but unfortunately this landing site is on the outer side of Phobos and so will never face towards Mars for some scenic shots. Oh well, I can always do another landing later...

Due to the design of the lander, the crew hatch faces vertically up making boarding a little tricky. Not everyone got in on their first attempt...

With the flag planted and science gathered, the crew returned to orbit moving at speeds of up to 7 metres per second! Wow!

Spoiler

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

Coming up next time: I could do landings in every biome on Phobos to get all the surface samples, try a precision landing beside the little lander currently parked on the western edge of Stickney or even jetpack down and back up, though that last option is a bit risky due to the limited supplies carried while on EVA. There's loads of science to be gathered out here and the transfer window home is over a year away.

[Spaceman.Spiff]

2 hours ago, jimmymcgoochie said:

It's time.

  Reveal hidden contents

And then...

Tim: OK people, time to do the flag-planting ceremony. You two stand there and I'll plant the flag-

Brian: I thought I was planting the flag?

Terri: No, I was!

Tim: OK, we've all planted flags. Now can we do it properly this time?

Brian: ...fine.

Terri: Spoilsport.

It's been a long time coming, but at last: CREWED MARS LANDING COMPLETE!!! 

The crew did some reports, gathered some samples and did other science-y things for thirty days, before gathering everything they could into the upper compartment and preparing for liftoff. (For redundancy reasons the lander carried 60 days' worth of food, however the majority of that was stored in the habitation module and service module on top of that, both of which were left behind on the surface. Oops...)

Returning to orbit was pretty easy, but rendezvousing took time as the Mars ship was at pretty much the exact opposite side of Mars at the time the lander circularised. Two days later they finally got there.

With most of the fuel gone and minus the heavy hab/service modules, the lander turned out to be pretty agile and with a decent amount of delta-V just from its RCS thrusters- information that will be very handy for the Phobos leg of this mission. Docking was a pretty simple process and soon enough the crew were back aboard their ship, along with the precious surface samples that Terri immediately dragged down to the lab for analysis.

The trans-Phobos burn was performed with the core booster, however there wasn't enough fuel left in that to do the capture burn too so the remaining fuel was siphoned into the lander and the booster was discarded, sent onto a collision course with the little space photato.

  Reveal hidden contents

During the series of burns to capture into Mars orbit- initial capture, plane alignment with Phobos, lowering periapsis to 250km and circularisation- the final circularisation burn almost ran into trouble when the two engines performing that burn exceeded their rated burn times and the mean time between failure started dropping precipitously- from hours to less than two minutes! Fortunately the burn completed before either engine failed and by then they were out of ignitions, so the other pair of engines were engaged for the trans-Phobos burn.

The ship's own pair of engines were used to capture at Phobos, braking to a frankly ridiculous 6m/s orbital velocity. That leaves four ignitions to get back to Earth with- getting out of Phobos orbit could feasibly be done with RCS, then trans-Earth burn, course correction (which will probably be needed) and capture burn, with a spare pair of ignitions in case of failures.

'Landing' on Phobos is a relative term: the Kerbals' EVA jetpacks are more than enough to do that, however the contract requires 2 crew and a 12 hour stay so the lander is required. Fortunately, the puny gravity is no match for its RCS thrusters, which have oodles of delta-V for the task, and with a relative velocity of less than 5m/s compared to the surface it's not like it'll use much fuel.

The landing site was on the eastern edge of Stickney Crater; fortunately there are plenty of those strange ridges with the nice flat bits in between (probably due to low-resolution terrain mapping from real-life missions, I suspect the real terrain would be smooth), but unfortunately this landing site is on the outer side of Phobos and so will never face towards Mars for some scenic shots. Oh well, I can always do another landing later...

Due to the design of the lander, the crew hatch faces vertically up making boarding a little tricky. Not everyone got in on their first attempt...

With the flag planted and science gathered, the crew returned to orbit moving at speeds of up to 7 metres per second! Wow!

  Reveal hidden contents

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

Coming up next time: I could do landings in every biome on Phobos to get all the surface samples, try a precision landing beside the little lander currently parked on the western edge of Stickney or even jetpack down and back up, though that last option is a bit risky due to the limited supplies carried while on EVA. There's loads of science to be gathered out here and the transfer window home is over a year away.

Hard to believe it's been over a year since this series started!

[jimmymcgoochie]

Phobos' puny gravity combined with the generous RCS propellant storage on the lander can mean only one thing- biome hopping!

That little white speck above the lander in both of the above images is the Mars Ship in orbit of Phobos- it's about 6km away so would probably be clearly visible if not for the 2.5km physics range.

Once the photo op was done, the trio split up- two jetted off to two nearby biomes while the third stayed by the lander, all gathering crew reports and surface samples from three different biomes before returning to the lander. The lander then relocated to a crater northwest of Stickney Crater putting three more biomes within reach, and the samples gathered there completed the set.

The crew then returned to the orbiting mothership and made a short burn using the lander's trio of RL-10 engines to push the whole ship out of Phobos orbit; the burn was about 4m/s in total and the lander's engines have plenty of ignitions to spare, no need to fire up the big engines on the ship itself if we don't have to.

The return window to Earth is in about 300 days, more than enough time to process those samples in the onboard lab and send the results back to Earth.

Staying with crewed interplanetary missions, the last piece of the Venus mission was launched to orbit and docked to the Venus Ship along with its crew. Which makes it sound so easy...

See, I stuck a couple of Apollo Block 4 mission modules together for the Venus Ship to get more films for the terrain and weather photography experiments, since putting duplicate experiments on the same module doesn't work. I figured the Yellow Croissant was up to the task of rendezvousing and docking since it had plenty of delta-V on its own.

What I hadn't considered was that when the mission modules were docked to the front of it, all the RCS was at one end. Whenever I tried to use the translation controls, it rotates and has to counterthrust in the other direction, making it incredibly unwieldy and often as not trying to move in one direction would actually make it go in the other direction as the RCS fought to keep it pointing straight.

When, at last, I managed to dock the thing to the Venus Ship, I moved the crew over, undocked the Apollo craft and prepared to deorbit- and then suddenly the whole thing was 50km under the ground and everything exploded! And I forgot to save after the docking was complete .

The second time I did it, I did so the sensible way- no MechJeb docking mode which was so utterly inept last time, just gently tiptoeing into position at barely 0.1m/s so the thrusters could balance out without the whole craft swerving drunkenly across the sky.

This time I saved it!

Alexei (pilot, and one of my original 4), Dave (scientist) and Gloria (engineer) moved over to their new home and made themselves comfortable, while pilot Victoria said her farewells and returned the Yellow Croissant to Earth.

I also took the time to check on my fleet of rovers, sending the White Lagrange and Orange Island to new biomes on Mercury and Mars respectively to gather more science. Mercury produces some frankly ridiculous science returns when landed, with some experiments generating several thousand science each over the course of 90 days, which combined with all the data coming back from the Mars mission, all the other probes orbiting various other planets and moons and those uber-cameras orbiting the Earth with that 20-year, 10,000 science experiment, has produced over a thousand KCT points recently, all of which have been poured into R&D. I've also put every science node up to the 2050-2099 nodes (the second last tier) onto the research queue and a few of the final tier as well, with just nine left to add.

Spoiler

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

Coming up next time: The Venus mission departs, some probes arrive at their destinations and some contracts get completed. And the Venus ship definitely doesn't get turned inside out by a Kraken attack caused by physics warping too fast during the departure burn...

[jimmymcgoochie]

Crewed interplanetary mission number 2 is underway as the Venus ship burns for Venus. Nearly all of the transfer burn was done using the side boosters, with the last couple of hundred metres per second done by the core booster.

And now for some probes doing some course corrections and capture burns, which will be happening A LOT in future. First up, White Ptolemy C2 gets a nice close periapsis over Ceres to capture and start mapping:

Next, Blue Draughtsman Vesta arrives at the asteroid belt's second largest member and captures into orbit.

Contract completed, science is gathering and there's more than enough fuel left on the probe to attempt a landing in the future as well.

Meanwhile on Mercury, the White Lagrange has made its way over to the rover waypoints and nets a great big payout from the Mercury rover contract, not to mention about ten thousand science per biome in total!

(I definitely need to do this earlier in my next RP-1 game!)

Upon arriving at Venus, a small problem raised its head- the radiators can't quite prevent hydrogen boiloff this close to the Sun. Fortunately, the capture burn occurred in the dark (as is right and proper) and by the time the ship re-emerged into the sunlight, the tanks were cool and the radiators could just keep them that way.

At this point I discovered something odd- the synoptic terrain and weather photography experiments, brought in triplicate aboard the main lab and those two mission modules, weren't using up any samples when they were being processed in the lab. In fact, processing the samples in a lab makes them regenerate faster than they're being used! I don't know if this is intended behaviour or not, but either way it means those mission modules were largely superfluous- though one of them does have some extra crew experiments so it's not totally pointless having them there.

With all the science coming back, I finally managed to complete the entire RP-1 tech tree:

Each of those end nodes will take about a month each to research at current rates so it'll be a few years yet before it's properly complete, but as of this point science points have no value any more.

And after a long journey out to Jupiter, the White Herschel quartet began their capture burns and a series of further burns to take them to their respective moons. First to arrive was the White Herschel Io, which by coincidence got a decent view of its target moon on the way past.

Spoiler

One problem with time-warping forwards to each successive node is that the operating costs for the KSC are still racking up without anything coming in to pay the bills. Long story short, I ran out of money and had to do a GEO contract sat to balance the books.

I've stuck a couple more Blue Chips on the build queue in case I need to do this again and have dismantled all but two launchpads- the 700 ton pad for these rockets and an unlimited mass pad which will be used to launch a couple of heavily modified Yellow Pain-au-chocolats to recover the Mars and Venus crews when they come back.

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/sRO5UKa

Coming up next time: A whole lotta fiddly orbital manoeuvres to get four probes in orbit of four different moons as efficiently as possible, and a glitch that eclipses even the first Mercury probe's 30 degree plane change in solar orbit...

[jimmymcgoochie]

So many probes, doing so many things, going to so many places... It's hard to keep track of what was where when.

First, up, the White Herschel probes began arriving at their targets, all aiming for polar orbits to maximise data gathering. This one is at Ganymede, I think?

Except for the Io probe, which decided it was going to do this:

Somehow, SOMEHOW, it has managed to reverse its course around Jupiter completely. And boost its periapsis from inside Io's orbit to outside Europa's. WHAT!?

Let me just load the last save to check...

Yes, a PROGRADE orbit of Jupiter! I suspect that Io encounter may have been involved, though for some reason the Europa probe was also on an escape trajectory out of Jupiter's SOI and had to be cheated back into place since it happened after I'd done this.

With the glitch recovered, the Io probe made it to orbit of Io- but only just!

More probes arrived at more moons- this one might be Callisto, or possibly Ganymede...

This one might be at Europa? I honestly can't tell any more, there have been too many of these identical probes doing too many burns lately.

And rather ironically, the Blue Bishop Jupiter completed its flybys with a pass over Ganymede, but only after the dedicated orbiter mission had already arrived. BBJ then captured into Ganymede orbit as well to augment the science gathering there.

A few other missions called for attention in between all this Jovian stuff- most importantly the Mars ship's departure burn to head back to Earth.

The lander is staying put because a) I can use the smaller engines to do course corrections more precisely, and b) it has enough delta-V to capture into Earth orbit, whereas the ship itself does not. It also holds all the samples, though the lab has processed them all by now so it no longer matters.

Over at Vesta, the first White Ptolemy to reach its destination parks itself in a nice polar orbit for optimal scanning, with a decent fuel reserve to change its altitude if necessary.

And just when I'm sick of looking at Jupiter, along comes the White Euclid mission to throw four more vessels into the mix, needing four more sets of nodes to somehow land on each of the Galilean moons. The upper stage captured into a pretty eccentric orbit that dipped below Io and above Callisto, then released the four rovers.

Once at a safe distance, the small relay was also deployed with its four X-band dishes pointed at the four Galilean moons and the larger Ka-band dish pointed at Earth. Each of the rovers has an X-band omni antenna on it, though their range is probably limited and the elliptical orbit of the relay will make it hard to get a good signal. But it's worth a try, right?

As it turns out, these rovers have some kind of problem with the delta-V readouts, which significantly overestimated how much delta-V they had. I found this out the hard way as the Ganymede rover approached Ganymede and the delta-V decreased far faster than it should have, ending up with a shortfall of about 2km/s compared to what had been promised. In addition, one of the two ventral RCS thrusters designed to give some throttle control during the final descent didn't work at all, while its symmetrical copy on the other side worked just fine.

Spoiler

OK, so I used infinite fuel here. That 2km/s that just disappeared from the readout made it impossible to land otherwise, and there's no good reason why that happened since these rovers use all storable hypergolics.

One bizarre wheel suspension glitch that launched the rover, with almost no fuel left at all, into the air at 30m/s upon landing, later and the rover was safely on the ground.

There's plenty of science to gather here before it sets off half way around the moon to reach the rover waypoints. Watch out for the falling mirrors, angry marines in mech suits and protomolecule monsters!

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/CQ7mJTF

Coming up next time: In a strange twist, the two copies of Blue Draughtsman and White Ptolemy sent to Ceres over a year apart are arriving within days of each other; but the second transfer window was so much better than the first that the second set will capture with fuel to spare while the first will be well short of making orbit. Things Stock KSP Doesn't Teach You #452- not all transfer windows are created equal, especially when everything orbits in noticeably different planes.

[Toasty Dyna-Soar]

Thanks for making this really cool series!

[jimmymcgoochie]

Blue Draughtsman C2 arrives at Ceres, brakes into orbit and ends up with over 1300m/s of fuel left over- plenty for a landing attempt once the orbital science is gathered.

Several days later, Blue Draughtsman C, which launched a whole year earlier, arrives, brakes as much as it can- and is still over 1km/s short of capturing into orbit.

The two probes are largely identical, so how did this happen?

The answer lies in Ceres' inclined orbit- both probes launched on the most efficient trajectory possible, minimising total delta-V for the transfer and capture burns combined. This meant that both were aiming to reach Ceres at the point where its orbit crosses Earth's, however the earlier window required the probe to fly out further towards Jupiter in order to let Ceres catch up whereas the second one could take a lower energy trajectory and still arrive at the same time.

A few days later, Blue Ptolemy C flew past Ceres, also unable to capture due to that poor transfer trajectory.

This was followed in short order by the White Ptolemy C2, which captured into orbit with over 2km/s of fuel remaining. This version did have a few upgrades over the older one, including bigger fuel tanks, but again the difference is stark.

Scanning Ceres took hardly any time at all, but covering 100% of the surface will take time due to the inclination keeping one pole in darkness.

Spoiler

Incidentally, that's one possible explanation for the mysterious black diamond on Ceres' south pole:

A quick look over to Jupiter as the White Euclid Io makes yet another pass over Io, bringing its apoapsis down steadily over time.

It took days of doing this to realise that instead of spending tens or hundreds of metres per second to enable a future flyby, I could spend tenths of a metre per second by changing the trajectory several orbits in advance. Io is definitely going to be a tricky one to land on, but with enough perseverance or cheating I'll get there eventually.

At the other end of the Galilean moons, White Euclid Callisto arrived for its landing attempt.

The same issue with the ventral RCS thrusters that affected the Ganymede landing struck again, even though I checked both thrusters while the upper stage was still attached and both worked fine; but decouple the upper stage and one stops working, odd. After a long and nervous braking burn, the rover touched down with a mere 3m/s of fuel left in the tanks- after pumping most of the propellant from the rover itself into the braking stage.

Two down, two to go...

I took some time to check on the other rovers scattered around the solar system and prodded many into going in search of new biomes. The science returns were considerable, resulting in the single biggest haul of free KCT points I've ever had.

Oh yeah, and it's 1967 already! I've been warping from node to node for quite some time and didn't even notice the calendar tick over.

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/KFTxo0C

Coming up next time: A really close up view of Saturn's rings, and three intrepid explorers return from the Red Planet and its innermost potato moonlet.

[jimmymcgoochie]

Blue Bishop Saturn arrived at Saturn after many years of travel, but somehow its periapsis increased by a billion kilometres between the last course correction and arriving; I used a bit of infinite propellant to put it back in vaguely the right place, though that also overburnt the engine so its MTBF is down to less than two minutes. Eek...

But the views were worth it!

The capture burn worked without any engine failures, resulting in an orbit that covers space high and low but is nowhere near any of the moons to get an encounter. The White Herschel S quartet will have to do those flyby contracts when they get there in a few years' time.

A few Io gravity assists came and went before I realised something that should have been obvious from the start- I'm doing this all wrong! Instead of making big course corrections, using tens or hundreds of m/s each time, I could make tiny corrections of tenths of a m/s several orbits in advance to get the same effect. Good to know for the next playthrough, I suppose...

Over at Venus, the crew chased any last snacks out of the two mission modules before undocking them, then pumped any remaining liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen out of the core booster before undocking that too. It's time for them to come home and lugging almost 20 tons of mission module back with them was a waste of delta-V that could instead be used to capture into some semblance of an Earth orbit when they got back.

A few days later, one of the crew of the Mars ship spotted something out the window...

They were home at last!

The capture burn used up the last of the fuel in the ship's main tanks:

Before the crew undocked in the Mars lander and completed the capture burn into a lower orbit:

The original plan was to capture into a nice circular orbit to make it really easy to rendezvous with it, however I left MechJeb to execute the burn and at some point one of the engines failed, resulting in it wasting the remaining ignitions with nearly 3km/s of fuel still in the tanks. Boo.

Cue the Yellow Pain-au-chocolat Mk6, hilariously overbuilt for this mission since it was originally intended to meet the Mars ship when the latter was on an escape trajectory. Diana was at the controls, grumbling a little about not getting an interplanetary mission of her own the whole time.

You already got our first ever flight, first crewed orbit AND first Moon landing, Diana, quit whining and let someone else have a turn!

A simple rendezvous ensued, barely troubling the second stage's fuel reserves, and soon enough they were ready to dock. Another annoying RCS issue popped up as the upper set of RCS thrusters on the Apollo craft refused to fire, so the lander did most of the docking.

An attempt was made to tow the lander onto a suborbital trajectory, but this failed because the twin RD-58s were blocked by the lander. They undocked, deorbited and exploded because I forgot about that stupid heating bug with the Apollo capsule enjoyed a nice fireworks display as their service module exploded below them.

At some point during this mission, the top cover of the Apollo capsule went missing; a little worrying as it could have meant the parachutes got cooked, but no harm done in the end.

After years in space, Tim, Brian and Terri are finally home. They've walked on Mars and "walked" on Phobos, taken a vast number of photographs and produced valuable scientific data, but who cares about that when you can have ALL THE CONTRACTS!

The trio also got multi-year additions to their retirement dates, which means nothing now since they won't be flying again, but it's a bump about as large as a rookie gets after their first Moon landing and these three had already done at least one Moon landing each.

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/HnTX9Uz

Coming up next time: The end of this report is getting nearer as missions complete their objectives. The last of the Jovian rovers make their landing attempts, the Venus crew return home and a bunch of contracts pay out to alleviate the whole "ran out of funds, again" thing.

[jimmymcgoochie]

After far too many gravity assists, it's finally time for the White Herschel Io to land.

The descent was dicey, right on the edge of running out of fuel, but in the end the rover landed- and fell over. So I lifted it off the ground a bit, levelled it out and landed again- and it fell over again. Eventually, after using the RCS on the rover and the descent stage together, it stayed on its wheels. As it turns out, I landed right on the side of a big hill (possibly a volcano) with a pretty steep slope.

(The blurry terrain in the foreground is because it was glitching a bit.)

This was followed in short order by the landing on Europa:

 

Spoiler

I know Europa's surface is covered with fractured ice, but I don't think this is quite the same thing!

A series of contracts began paying out- landing on each of the four moons as well as the rover contract for Callisto as that rover arrived first.

After a brief burst of time-warping, the Venus Ship is back home already!

It was able to capture into orbit of Earth, however said orbit wasn't very good. No matter- the Yellow Pain-au-chocolat Mk6A is more than up to the task- it was built to catch the ship on an escape trajectory after all. (The A suffix is due to adding more boosters on the first stage, not needed for the Mars crew since they had the lander and its 4km/s to play with.)

Rendezvousing was easy, but getting close enough to dock was incredibly slow because both physics and time warp made the two vessels move by a substantial distance relative to each other, making a close approach impossible. So I cheated and used set orbit waited a long, long time to get closer.

Docking was routine, the crew moved over, waved goodbye to their ship and headed back to Earth.

Re-entry was fine (except for the usual heating issue), drogues opened, mains opened, time to decouple the heatshield so it'll fly away from the- wait why is it coming back?!

All the way to Venus and back, and the last 500 metres nearly killed the crew because the heatshield flew around like a demented frisbee and came *this* close to clobbering the top of the pod at considerable speed.

No matter- a safe landing was had by all, the two crewed Venus contracts paid out nearly 3.5 million funds and the crew got 2-3 years added to their retirement dates.

And so concludes the crewed missions for this save! No more crew launches are happening- no launches of any kind, in fact- so pretty soon the Original Four of Diana, Alexei, Tim and Ann are going to start retiring.

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/0uBOXqA

Coming up next time: TITAN.

Spoiler

Oh, and while I remember- that Ceres orbiter that I was so proud of getting into orbit of Ceres with loads of fuel for a landing? Turns out I wasn't paying attention to the orbit it was in when I left it; I checked the screenshot I took of it with the UI on, which showed a periapsis of... 4km. RIP Blue Draughtsman C2, you "landed" on Ceres all right, just a bit faster and explodier than intended 

 

Edited January 30, 2022 by jimmymcgoochie

[jimmymcgoochie]

This report is nearing its end.  

But not before I noticed this flukey asteroid, which I presume managed to snag a gravity assist from the Moon to capture into Earth orbit five years ago without me being aware of its existence.

White Tombaugh completed its blisteringly fast transit to Pluto by flashing past at over 30km/s. An attempt was made to skim through its vanishingly thin atmosphere, but it turns out that even that miniscule amount of air will result in instant combustion at 30km/s...

A bit of rover poking finally got a good shot of one with Jupiter in the background:

And then I achieved a technology victory by completing every research node available.

As far as Civilisation 6 is concerned a crewed Mars mission is enough for a science victory and I already did that, but nevertheless- completing the entire tech tree before Apollo 11 launched isn't too shabby.

Shortly after this, while time-warping ahead to the White Huygens mission, three of my Original Four astronauts retired- Diana, Tim and Alexei in that order. Ann will follow soon enough, followed by the newer astronauts whose retirement dates are all in the mid to late 70s.

But back to the main event: TITAN.

Four relays were deployed, supposedly into a resonant orbit to ensure even spacing. This was partly successful- yes, they were pretty evenly spaced, but weirdly the first and fourth relays ended up in the same place  the fourth was dispatched to a very high orbit for science and to improve coverage, while the other three eventually got moved into elliptical orbits for science high and low.

The landers were deployed with very little ability to aim them, but despite that I managed to get 6 out of 7 biomes and two of the landers splashed down, earning splashed and landed science from those biomes.

Some of the landers nosedived straight down with a terminal velocity of over 50m/s, like the one above, whereas others spiralled at speeds of between 20-35m/s for no discernible reason. The parachutes were definitely misconfigured though- when partly opened they slowed each probe to under 5m/s, then when fully open they slowed down to less than 0.3m/s! Despite the slow fall, or maybe because of it, most of them didn't land the right way up.

There was no Titan landing contract, however there was an atmospheric probe contract which the first lander completed, on top of the contract for a Titan flyby; together they netted about 2.3 million funds.

The second lander made a beeline for a lake (most likely methane and/or ethane) and sank upon splashdown; but then I deployed the magnetometer and weirdly it then floated back to the surface.

Magnetometer retracted and it sinks, magnetometer deployed and it floats. This was later confirmed with another probe that landed in the "seas" biome and sank nearly 50 metres to the seabed, where it's properly dark.

But eventually one of them landed the right way up and was lit up by the strange blue twilight near the poles.

This mission has been spectacularly successful, grabbing a HUGE amount of science and (along with data being transmitted during the time-warping to its destination) has produced a massive quantity of KCT points.

They no longer matter, of course, since there's nothing to build or research, but still. Imagine what they could do in the early 50s...

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

Coming up next time: It'll probably be the final report of this series, aww... But I plan to start a new report of some kind soon, whether that's a new RP-1 game I have ready and waiting, or possibly GPP/GEP or Beyond Home, both of which can be rescaled to JNSQ scale (and GPP/GEP can be used with JNSQ now, apparently) or I might try JNSQ itself with a focus on more resource harvesting and colony building type play. Or probably that new RP-1 save.

Spoiler

This biome map looks a bit... suspicious...

 

[jimmymcgoochie]

All good things must come to an end, and this report is no exception- fourteen months after I started it (some of that was due to a dead GPU and doing another career report as a result), it's time to wrap up Terranism Space Program with the last missions arriving at their destinations.

First on the list are the four White Herschel S probes. Essentially identical to the four at Jupiter, only with beefy RTGs and slightly better dishes to cope with the longer range, these four won't be targeting any moon in particular, but rather will be aiming to get flybys of as many moons as possible- and Saturn really does spoil you for choice.

Flyby contracts for Mimas, Enceladus, Rhea, Tethys and Iapetus need completing, but with four probes available it should be easy enough to get all of them.

During these flybys I discovered how puny the SOIs of these moons are- I'm fairly sure that at least one of them has an SOI less than twice its radius meaning space high effectively doesn't exist.

The encounter with Iapetus was particularly fortuitous- that probe had the most delta-V remaining and the trajectory was favourable to attempt an orbital capture, something that it could just manage with its available fuel.

Not a very picturesque moon, mostly dark grey and barely visible against the backdrop of space even with ambient lighting boosted waaay up, but it'll yield a nice science bonus.

All this Saturnian action came at a cost though- during the long warp to these missions arriving, a number of the Astronaut Corps retired. The rest would retire while time-warping ahead to the Blue Bishop Neptune's arrival several years later.

The Neptune flyby contract was completed, then with a bit of trajectory fiddling an encounter with Triton netted a second flyby contract. That encounter wasn't easy to get since Triton orbits retrograde and the probe was orbiting prograde.

The last to arrive was Blue Bishop Uranus, which is where the Kraken made its last stand: first the "warp to node" stock button managed to overshoot by three hours, messing up the capture burn considerably and resulting in a negative periapsis.

After fixing the trajectory so the periapsis was a mere 10km inside the upper atmosphere, the probe did a successful atmospheric pass and gathered several minutes of flying high data.

And then I pressed timewarp, and-

Instant teleportation to 120km inside the atmosphere, causing the big relay dish to explode and cutting off any further gains from this probe. RIP Blue Bishop Uranus.

After several decades of time warp, where I discovered that at really high warp numbers data transmission is reduced significantly (probably the same Kerbalism bug that reduces science gathering at high time warp and which I've come across before in this report and elsewhere), a lot of data had come back- but yet the White Herschel probes had terabytes of data between them, Blue Draughtsman Mars had a few hundred gigabytes still and for some reason Blue Bishop Neptune was on its merry way right out of the solar system.

Ah well, time to land the Blue Draughtsman V on Vesta like I said I would.

A prominent crater near the north pole was chosen for the landing site and the probe made a flawless landing.

A bit more time-warping and then I decided that the report would end in the year 2000:

Final scores: Barely 1200 science short of 400k, how annoying, and over 27,000 KCT points in total including almost 3000 I didn't even spend.

Spoiler

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/XSUsx2g

This career has taken up a significant amount of my spare time for over a year. Now that it's over, I'll be moving on to something new- but I'll definitely be back for another RP-1 run in the near future. The mods have changed a lot since I started (pressurants, residuals, research speed tweaks and much more) and next time I won't be using easy mode settings so the margins will be a lot tighter all round

I'll probably come back and create a super-montage of all the best images from the 116(!) Imgur albums for this report, but to finish up, here's one that I'll definitely include in my loading screens in future:

END Terran(ism) Space Program

[jimmymcgoochie]

Montage can be found here: https://imgur.com/a/Q5CTX3d

Brand new RO/RP-1 career report can be found here: