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Flying for real – career mode with realism overhaul (FINISHED)


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Off-world operations – Thinking Tomorrow, Launching Today!

This is the tale of Off-world Operations, or Oops for short, the operative branch of the most notable (and only) space agency in existence. It's goal is no more or less than to develop space faring technology and unravel the mysteries of the solar system.

It's also a tale of my goofing around with Realism Overhaul mod coupled with Realistic Progression -tech tree. I already started a career playthrough once, but then NathanKell and Medieval Nerd blindsided me with a major update so I figured it's best to start over since I didn't really get too far.

Contents

Part 0: Installation

Part 1: Aiming for orbit

Breaching the line

Indubitably Orbitable

A normal lifter for normal kerbals

Pondering pathing

New designs

Communications Constellation

Recovery Research

New Frontiers

Part 2: Kerbal, Ascended

Kerbury One

Kerbury Two

Kerbury Three

Dreaming of Moon Adventures

Moonwalking

I'll start from the beginning.

"Wow," Bob said as he stepped through the cargo door and entered the main construction hall of the vehicle assembly building. "It's bigger than last time."

"It sure is," Bill replied under his breath. He was standing in front of a giant wooden crate that was at least four times his height and looked big enough to contain several medium-sized, yet spacious and tastefully decorated kerbal dwellings. He was holding a crowbar and trying to find a nice spot from which to pry the front panel open.

Bob found a small delivery note dangling on the side and examined it more closely. "Custom built by Southern Kerbin's Fireworks and Aviation" he read aloud. "I thought we ordered the "Basic Rockets for Basic People" -multipack?"

Bill shoved his crowbar in a crack between the boarding and yanked hard. The front panel gave a promising creaking sound. "Nah," Bill said while gathering his posture for another yank. "That's really just the engineering branch who made these. They have their own company for now. Firework arrangements mostly."

Bob was about to retort with a suspicious comment but Bill had lifted his feet up against the box and gave the box every bit of strength his kerbal body could muster, sending the entire front panel crashing to the floor with a loud bang.

Bob fell silent and just stared, mouth frozen somewhere mid-sentence. Bill gathered himself from the floor where he had tumbled and when he saw what was inside the box, a wide grin rose on his face.

"Well that is something else," Bill said and poked Bob in the back of his head to wake him from a rocketry-induced stupor.

Suddenly a familiar voice behind them boomed with laughter. "What are you waiting for guys? These rockets aren't launching themselves!" Jebediah said as he stormed inside the crate and started tearing the bubblewraps from the brand new rocket engines.

Edited by Creature
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Part 0: Installation

Just wanted to gather this in one place before I even begin the actual playing. Installing this is a bit of a hurdle, so here's what I did.

The two major components are Realism Overhaul and Realistic Progression LITE that will define the overall gameplay. Both of these have a certain set of mods that are listed as essentials, but I'm not going to install each and every one of them and I hope I don't break anything by doing so.

These two also have some overlaps and RO has support for ECLSS life support only (changing to TAC at some point according to NathanKell) but RPL lists both as essentials. I'm gonna just skip TAC at this point as it's not supported yet by RO.

Let's start the project with just installing the essentials as instructed by just adding them like any other mod.

For Realism Overhaul I'm installing these (along with the Realism Overhaul pack itself of course):

Real Fuels

Stretchy SRB

Deadly Reentry

FAR

Real Chutes

Engine Ignitor

ModuleRCSFX

Advanced Jet engine

Next up is the big thing, Real Solar System. For this I'm gonna need to do some extra tweaking. First I install the actual mod as normal. Then I'll find the folder RealSolarSystem\Plugins\PluginData that holds some images of Earth and Moon. Then I'll replace the existing EarthNRM.png and EarthColor.png with the high res images provided (just using save picture from browser).

That's not all, to get biomes working, I need Custom Biomes. After that I'll take these two files and copy them to CustomBiomes\PluginData\CustomBiomes\Basic -folder.

Finally I need an engine pack and since I plan on using RPL so the only choise is to install RftS engine pack and latest version of ExsurgentEngineering and making a folder for it as instructed.

Now let's get back to Realistic Progression mod. I'm installing all the mods from the essentials list first:

KJR

ECLSS

KW Rocketry

NovaPunch

Soviet Engines pack

FASA

AIES

Procedural Wing

Procedural fairings

Remote tech (along with the hotfix)

NOTE: Something I'm doing with Remote Tech is that I'm adding another tracking station. For me having only one (well the tweaked version adds an extra station in Guyana as well) location just feels like added tediousness. If the comms network drifts a bit too much, you'll get into trouble because that single location falls out of view. So adding one on the other side of the globe does make things a lot easier, but I feel it's something I want and also I don't think it's even that realistic to have a single tracking station anyway. So, I'm going to RT2 folder and opening a file RemoteTech_Settings.cfg. There's two stations marked, so I'll copy one block. I'm changing the latitude to -30.0 and longitude to 123.0. This will add another station on the Australian continent. I'm naming it Down Under Comms and BBQ Station. The Guid part needs to be changed for the last station, the two last digits showing 89 need to be changed to 90.

Other notable thing is that I'm playing without signal delay as I find that the flight computer isn't versatile enough to do the things I want. Also I like flying a lot, so I don't want a mod to take it away from me. I'm still getting the important stuff from RT2 I want, such as having a meaningful comms system on my probes as well as I need to retain line of sight to Earth.

Then I'll add some extras I want to use:

MechJeb

KAS

Kethane

KSP Interstellar

Habitat Pack

Chatterer

OK so at this point my gamedata folder is sitting at a hefty 2,05 GB. I'm adding Active texture management (aggressive)

Now I can add Environmental Visual Enhancements as well.

Finally I can installTreeloader and the RPL tweak pack and moving the remote tech config as instructed. There's also an extra modulemanager file I need to remove, having two different versions made realfuels at least break.

That should be it then. Now it's time to go dig around the gamedata folders. I'll have to delete lots of parts. I'll just toss out most fuel tanks and fairings and such that I can replace with procedural versions.

It's gonna be interesting to see how this will work :D

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Part 1: Aiming for orbit

Breaching the line

A high-pitched beep emanated from somewhere deep within the probe core. It had a metallic, happy sound to it, Bob thought. A gentle wind was ruffling his hair as he stood on the launch pad, making sure all the probe's connections were in place. Bill and Jeb were already in the command center and all prepped up and waiting for an OK from Bob.

The probe core chirped another happy beep. It sounded like it was as anxious as Bob was to get the rocket launched. But everything had to be just perfect. Bob flicked a switch and the core was all set up.

Another beep. Bob straightened up and gathered his toolbox. He stared at the rocket. It was magnificient.

It beeped again. Bob couldn't resist. "Beep!" he replied to it and rush of excitement rumbled in his stomach. Instantly a burst of laughter crackled from his headset. He felt a blush rising on his cheeks. Bob had forgotten his headset and microfone on. "Sorry," he said to his mic, "Dubious One is set to go. I'm clearing the launchpad now. Begin countdown."

With the RPL mod, the first thing to do is unlocking several free nodes from the tech tree that hold the beginning parts. Before I set foot in the VAB, this is what the tech tree looks like.

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It looks more scary than it is. It's organized into well defined branches so you can decide where you want to progress next.

But time to go see what the guys have assembled in the VAB!

Ah, the famous "Untitled Spacecraft" is already finished! There's only one probe core available, so not much choise in it. It holds two experiments in it and a data recorder that can be only activated once reaching high atmosphere. The first experiment is also doable only in the upper atmo and the second one needs to be in low space. The idea is that once in the correct situation, you can engage the data recorder which starts gathering data and once enough data is collected, the experiment can be completed if you're still in the correct situation.

The booster is just a single piece of SRB, made from stretcy SRB, with an empty stretchy conic fuel tank to act as adapter. It was easy to tweak the burn time, dV and thrust with the stretchies and as you can see, with real sized planet, you need a lot of dV just to get into space, let alone orbit. The control surfaces are a bit bulky and they're made from pWing. I added a triplet of thermometers and gravioli detectors as well as antennas to keep in touch with the base. This because I didn't want to transmit anything while flying through atmosphere, so I could store the experiments from lower and upper atmosphere and also they keep the rocket nicely balanced.

I think I'm naming it Dubious One. Let's take it outside and launch!

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There's not much to set up. I'm taking the thermal readings from pad and transmitting them for a few points of science and also the gravioli detector picks up something. Everything is nominal, so Bill pushes the big red button and the rocket rumbles to life.

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I'm taking thermal readings as I fly. The custome biome says I'm over water, but the author has mentioned it's not 100% accurate, which is fine. After hitting 18 km, I'm able to start the data recording and soon the fuel runs out. The rocket was so stable that getting a good apoapsis well above the atmosphere was much easier than I thought.

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I'm doing the atmospheric readings -experiment and begin transmitting it for 100 science, also transmitting the collected thermal readings. It looks like the transmitting doesn't use up much electric charge, it barely makes a dent in the batteries. After the rocket rises above 180 km, I can make the radiation experiment as I'm officially now in low space. I'm sending it to KSC too for 200 science and taking more temp and gravioli readings. At this point I'm a bit unsure as to the antenna ranges, I'll have to check somewhere if the probe has an integrated one. Because the antennas I'm packing aren't extended and honestly I didn't even think about the connection requirements until at this point.

All in all, the mission was a great success! Much easier than I thought it would be though.

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The mission earned me a total of 350 science, which I distribute pretty evenly to all beginning nodes, which range from 10 to 50 points each. There's also a long line of antenna-tech nodes which have nothing in them and cost 0 so I'll unlock them just to get them cleared. There's a lot of nodes now and this is how the tree looks like after I'm done.

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Indubitably orbitable

The next rocket had to be wildly different if it was ever going to make orbit. I still think that strapping explosives on your rocket to cleave it in pieces mid-flight sounds like an excellent plan. For now I'm not even looking at engine setups or fuel choices in any detail, instead I'm just building enough marginal into the probe. A total of 11 km/s of vacuum dV on the rocket will ensure I have enough. The rocket has three stages, the lower and upper run on kerbal juice (also known as kerosene) and the probe is hypergolics. I love kerosene. Because my payload is delicate and unaerodynamic like birthday cake, I'll hide it inside fairings.

See, my problem is that I'll have connection to the rocket only while it's in LOS of the KSC command center, so I'll have to do my entire orbit burn there. I can't just count on coasting to apoapis and circularizing, if I push it too far, I'll just lose connection and tumble down probably somewhere in Africa or the Atlantic Ocean.

The rocket will be called Dubious Two. The core has experiments for high atmosphere and low orbit and it's also packing a gravioli detector and a goo experiment from FASA pack.

Oh right, at this point I want to say that I'm personally not a fan of the extra science bits coming with FASA. There's a part that can make crew reports with probes and another that can take ground samples without a kerbal. I don't like this as it just takes away reasons to launch manned missions. Now the goo was named as radiation experiment, so I thought it would be a new kind of experiment. But it turns out it's just the goo. I think the point with the stock goo is that it's clumsy and big so it's also hard to use. This one however is tiny and light. So I'm going to delete all three FASA parts because I don't feel comfortable using them. If anyone wants to, I'm not judging though :D But it's just my personal preference.

I still have no idea how to do the most efficient gravity turn so I'm just winging it.

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Gravity turn isn't going perfectly, apoapsis is already well above the atmosphere but prograde is pointing heavily upwards. I'm burning almost horizontally to get enough speed before I lose connection with ground station. I could probably eject the fairings sometime after 100 km, but I'm a bit paranoid so I'll wait until 180 km to drop them. The effect is very small on the dV so it doesn't really matter. However if this was actually carrying something big, it would be a different story.

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Dubious Two posing over the dark skies. A single antenna is extended (probably wouldn't need it. I still haven't checked the distance of the omni antenna built in the probe because the Stayputnik model just HAS to have the four antennas.)

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The probe separates from the upper stage. It's almost in orbit, traveling at 6,8 km/s. Apoapsis is however at 360 km so what I'm doing is I'm pointing the probe below the horizon, first a bit but finally almost directly downwards. This will give me velocity in the correct direction to raise the periapsis from the ground. At this point I've managed to do only the orbital experiment as the probe was inside the fairings while in atmo.

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And we have an orbit! Extra round of Uncle Kerman's Strangely Flavoured Fudge for all!

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Another pose for the fans, showing off all antennas shamelessly with no regard to power consumption. Such vanity.

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After orbiting half the planet, the probe now comes in view of the Down Under BBQ and Tracking Station. I'm collection tons of gravioli readings from the diverse Australian continent, hitting almost every biome available apart from tundra and ice caps. To get the atmospheric reading, I'm twisting and fiddling with the maneuver node to bring my periapsis into atmosphere above the KSC so that I can have a connection, do the experiment, send it down to KSC and finally the guys and gals at the space center can enjoy the fireworks as the probe burns in the atmosphere.

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The smarter ones can already see where I went wrong. I'm not really used to the size of the planet. The orbit is surprisingly low and even though the periapsis is still way above the thick part of atmosphere, the end result is that the probe hits atmo somewhere in the middle of the Pacific and burns up long before it even comes close to getting a connection.

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Oh well, good thing we had insurance. Another rocket just like Dubious Two is shipped by the now-bankrupt insurance company and I launch it just to get the final atmosphere experiment and collect the remaining bit of science.

At this point I'm tempted to spend the science, but I decide to hold on to it as there's plenty more probes to launch and Bill seems to be waving at me with a formal looking envelope that's marked "Project Greenlight - Top Secret"

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A normal lifter for normal kerbals

We here at Oops like to think about the future. For example right now I'm thinking about the lasagne that's for lunch today. With that in mind we decided that it might be a good idea to design a lifter that could be standardised and used for all consecutive probing missions. It's also quite a hassle to construct a new lifter every time. Additionally I will soon need to set up some kind of orbital relay network, because I'd prefer if my probes had a constant connection to mission control. So, the project Greenlight was begun!

First decision was the payload. With the low tech engines and the generally tiny nature of probes, two tons seemed like a nice, round figure. I'm also not overly concerned about efficiency so the total mass of the rocket should fall somewhere in the 150-200 tons range but to show some restraint, I decided to keep it under 200 tons. This won't get me to the Moon though but it should be enough for getting a high orbit but probably not enough for an actual geostationary orbit.

Sputnik here will be my two ton test subject payload both for the design process and the first test flight. It also has a scientific purpose so I'm not just launching bricks into space. The core is actually aerodynamic and could go without fairings, but the lifter will have integrated fairings on it, so Sput will be inside them in any case. The dV on the probe will be a separate thing and not counted towards the lifters capabilities.

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Actually here I'm still using an old dummy payload in designing the orbital insertion stage so don't mind that one. I'm adding the fairing base and a decoupler straight on the lifter so I can just snap it on any probe without having to fiddle with the fairings. The little green tank is an RCS fuel tank because I wanted to include an orbital maneuvering capability on the stage as well. The A9R engine is configured to run on hypergolic UDMH+N2O4 so that it's restartable in space. I'm naming this section Maneuverer. Some of the features aren't exactly necessary here, but this system will be a template for many future designs so I want to do it properly from the beginning.

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Next up is the actual upper stage. The Decurion engine is an optimal choise and it runs on kerbolox which is at the moment the most optimal fuel combination. To be honest I still haven't really found any reason to use anything else. But it's OK because I love kerosene. The entire upper part of the rocket weighs 21,4 tons with 5,5km/s of dV. Essentially all of this will be burned in vacuum so I can just ignore the poor atmospheric performance. Again with stretchies it's easy to change the tank size to give a nice TWR. I'm keeping it well above 1,0 because of the Maneuverer has a bit low TWR and a long burn time, which in turn means that I might want to keep apoapsis a few minutes ahead of me when the upper stage is burning. Higher TWR should help with correcting any problems with this.

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And finally the Big One. The upper stage of course needs to be lifted above atmosphere and that needs some serious thruster power. I'm also using a wider tank in the lower stage to keep the rocket nicely shaped and reduce wobble. The Miles engine is similar to Decurion, but way more powerful. It's not powerful enough though and I'm thinkin if I should use two of them, but then I'd get doubled fuel consumption and would probably have to make the main tank a lot bigger to compensate. I don't like the idea.

Instead I'll do it the fun way and instead of one engine, I'll add six! Yeah, six sounds good. That's what SRBs are for anyway, isn't it? I'm tweaking the burn time and thrust so that I'll get the beginning TWR a bit above one on launch and one by the time the boosters separate. I'm not sure this is the most efficient way to launch, the first kilometers will burn literally tons of fuel just getting the rocket up to speed, but for now it will have to do.

Without the payload's own dV I now have over 10 km/s of vacuum dV and on the lower stages the atmo and vac dV is pretty close to each other so I think this might get into orbit. A few winglets to help with stability and steering is added plus I'm already locking the gimbals on the SRBs.

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After changing the dummy payload back to good old Sput the Greelight One is transported to launchpad for a night launch. The mission objective is to deliver the probe to low space and attempt to attain a stable orbit without using the probe's own thrusters.

Greenlight One is sitting on launch pad and ready for liftoff! We're all very excited!

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It flies a bit wobbly. I'm finally turning SAS off because it can't really handle the gimbal, which seems to react a bit slowly and in a very wide movements. I have to control by tapping it fast and then wait a bit to see how the rocket reacts. In the future I might just want to disable it all together and steer with winglets while in atmosphere.

The dreaded SRB separation event! They don't really fly off the way I'd want to, rather the decouplers just drop them but everything goes smoothly despite that. However I'm not accelerating at this point at all (in fact for a second or two I'm decelerating a bit) so in theory this might be a problematic event.

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The upper stage separates at almost exactly 200 km's. The trajectory seems nice too, as I'm 1m 26s from apoapsis, which is only about 30 kilometers above the craft. The upper stage has the same laggy and over-sensitive gimbal so steering needs to be delicate and careful. SAS handles this a a bit better though, as long as I'm keeping a steady course. I eject fairings and perform the experiments and transmit while continuing the burn.

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Then this happens. I lose connection to ground station while mid burn. The engine shuts down and the probe is sent drifting dead in space. Although I don't think it would've made orbit. I don't know why, 10 km/s should be enough and even have some marginal for error too. Maybe it's the slow start or possibly the fact that apoapsis is at 257 km instead of barely above atmosphere. I'll have to test different ascent paths, I'm guessing the problem is a combination of burning too long in atmosphere and not doing gravity turn properly.

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Greenlight One is left to burn up and fall into the Atlantic. The lifter seems to be promising though and the main issue here was losing connection. Even if I can't make it to orbit purely on the lifter's own power the remaining dV is so small I don't worry about it. I'll just call it a feature that's meant to reduce orbital debris and raise the price of a launch by 5%.

At this point my main concern is the lack of cool lights on the rocket, it's very dark during the night time.

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Looking good!

BTW, does RSS cause any extra lag by itself? I have most of the "required" mods, so it's just a matter of making the leap.

It's hard to say, I haven't tried it on it's own at all. I do have somewhat more lag now than usual, but then again I've never used so many mods at once. From what I've played so far the lag starts to show somewhere between 200 and 300 parts but there's still a lot of unneccessary parts to remove from gamedata. Luckily with stretchies and KJR the part count doesn't have to get very high.

You are one brave kerbal! +Rep for the detailed explanations and the challenge of taking on a complete realism overhaul career save. I dont have the guts for that!

Thanks :) I do recommend trying RO, it's very different. The only downside is the installing which is still quite a hassle, but the authors are aware of it. Also everything's still a bit of a WIP so there's some bugs around so some patience is required.

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Pondering pathing

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This is Greenlight Two blasting off with the Explorer probe core. It's not a particularly interesting launch, the core has orbital experiments onboar, but as it turns out the data recorder is broken and can't hold any data so the experiments can't be run. My main goal anyway is to test the ascent profile in preparation for the next mission.

I'm starting the turn later and going more vertical to keep the probe in view longer. At upper stage separation apoapsis is alredy around 330 km. Now I'm sure I won't make it to orbit with just the Maneuverer "orbital insertion"stage but I might just accept this if I get close enough.

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At Maneuverer separation things are looking decent. The probe is still going up, now passed the 400 km mark and still in view. I can already see that I have almost the required dV for orbit, but not quite.

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Almost made it this time. With a little tweaking this might work, but it's so close to an orbit that I'm not making any changes to the rocket. Greenlight will be my designated workhorse for the next missions.

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Something of note right now is that ascent path matters much more in RSS than it does with stock. In stock you rarely end up wasting/saving more than 100-200 m/s with the ascent profile but with this setup the difference is much bigger. Firstly it's because the kerbolox engines are not restartable at least at this stage of career so the whole upper stage burn must be done in one go. You can't casually coast up and always do the optimal burn. It's also not throttleable so you're just blasting at full power so mistakes cumulate.

Secondly the speed is of course higher so while the percentage of wasted dV may be similar compared to stock, the actual number will be roughly doubled, which means exponentially more mass for the rocket that's there just to compensate bad flying. I've read that around 9,5 km/s is usually enough for reaching orbit so I know I'm wasting a lot somewhere with the design and flying.

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  • 2 weeks later...

New designs

It's been a while since the last mission and the good kerbals here at Oops are bursting with enthusiasm for some rocketry! Meanwhile two things have happened. Firstly RPL has gotten several small updates, effectively rendering all my previous ship designs unusable because some parts have changed location. Secondly there was a Greenlight Three mission which was totally successful, but I had it in the middle of a mission when the ship was broken by an update so the flight was terminated.

No matter since the Greenlight lifter wasn't performing as well as I'd hoped to so it was time to redesign it! The new design was named Greenlight IV and I also decided to upscale it a bit, raising the payload to 4 tons.

There's also a dire need for a proper communications network so I'm combining these two projects and I'll start with the comms satellite. It will be called KerbKom and since the lifter will be optimized for 4 tons, I'll design the satellite around that even if less would be enough.

First thing is of course the comms devices. I don't have many dishes available but the 400 Mm dish reaches the Moon nicely so I'm putting two of those on board. I'm not yet sure about what kind of orbits the satellites will be in but I reckon I won't need more than two. There's a nice extendable omni antenna with a 10 000 km range that I'm taking with me as well. The weight is balanced with a small science package. One initial possibility here is that I'll put these in 10 000 km orbits and use the omni to communicate with ground, one dish pointed at another satellite just in case it wanders out of the omni range and one dish for communicating outwards.

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Here's the main instrument assembly. I don't have sun tracking solar panels and the comms take a lot of power so this is my solution to it. Also there's so much weight I can use for the probe that clumsy system like this doesn't matter. For the core I'm using Vanguard – mostly because it's small and light but also because I need to do the science experiments on it.

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For the probe propulsion I'm using hypergolics for infinite restarting ability and also long term storage. Because the solar panels are so light, I'm coating the whole tank with them, just to be sure I get positive power generation. As for the engines, I chose the radial dual-nozzle E5R. Well, to be exact I'm using eight of them – that's sixteen nozzles! For fuel config the choise is simple as the UDMN+N2O4 is just better in every way. There's also a small RCS tank for orbital maneuvers as with RO there's really no reaction wheels. It seems I get a lot of dV with four tons.

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Next section, Maneuverer, is similar to the design on Greenlight I. One notable exception is that RCS has now vey small thrust. The most I can get is from these linear mercury RCS pods.

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For the thruster I'm doing something a bit different. I have at my disposal the very first hydrolox engine and obviously I need to use that! Not just because it's cool, but also it's infinitely restartable and very efficient. There's also a single nozzle version, but it's not powerful enough. I want a good TWR for reliability. Oh right, this one is also throttleable which will be useful for the final push to orbit and any kind of maneuvers afterwards.

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The actual upper stage is using a simple looking B7 engine that runs on kerbal juice. It's got pretty nice thrust and it's fuel efficient too. At this point you can see that I have around 6 km/s of dV on the lifter's stages so in theory I need only 4 km/s for the lower stage to lift this thing up. Also I think the weights of the stages scale nicely from 4t -> 13t -> 40t.

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For the lower stage I'm choosing another dual nozzle, the D4-2, which needs some help from the two solid boosters. Fiddling with burn times I get a nice TWR profile and a total of 4,4 km/s of dV which should be enough.

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It's time to fly! I just love the night launches :)

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I'm starting the gravity turn once I hit 100 m/s and the boosters run out at 17 km altitude. I'm a bit worried because they just fall down again, I probably should put some separatrons on them. All goes well anyways, the key here is to have a steady, level flight while separating. The core has burnt long enough to have a TWR of 1 at this point.

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The Sun starts to creep above the horizon as the rocket flies towards dawn.

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The upper stage separates at around 160 km altitude, the lower stage brougth the rocket all the way up here. I'm immediately ditching the fairings as well. The ascent path was a bit steep on purpose because I want to avoid the connection loss and I keep pushing apoapsis up.

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At 260 km altitude the upper stage burns out and the Maneuverer is lit up. I'm almost at orbital velocity no and with the good TWR and throttleable engine I can control my distance to apoapsis very well.

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I'm still keeping contact to KSC but it's starting to stretch a bit thin. I need to get this thing on orbit fast.

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And we have an orbit! A round of Papa Kermans Almost Kerosene Flavoured Party Drink for all! Literally ten seconds before losing connection, too. It's almost as if someone planned all this. Extra niceness is that I still have a lot of dV left on the Maneuverer stage.

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Once I get back in contact I test the RCS but sadly it seems that it's underpowered as well as placed too close to center of mass so it's essentially useless. I'm running the experiment on the core and start to raise the orbit.

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My plan for now is to get apoapsis to high orbit, then see from there. I'm aiming the dish back to KSC to keep in contact. But once I get to 36 000 km's high I notice something. The omni antenna works still. I'm not exactly sure how it works, but after a little digging it seems that the huge antenna at KSC is boosting the antenna on the probe so that I don't even need the dish. Also, in fact this works even while the antenna is redacted (it still has 1000 km range like that).

So I decide to leave the probe here for now and circularize the orbit. I'm tweaking the orbital period to 23 hours, 56 minutes (it's still not quite there yet on the picture). If I've understoond correctly this makes the orbit geosynchronous. It's not geostationary because the orbit is inclined, but the probe should stay above a spesific area and wobble around the sky a bit, but not drift too far out of sight.

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So I have no idea how the multiple antenna thing works, I've read something about it but I don't know the details. However I do know that I now have omni coverage from the probe so any launcher can take a dish that can reach the 36 000 km orbit and be in contact with the KerbKom I, which in turn relays back to KSC.

Overall the launch was a smashing success, the lifter was a breeze to fly and got the 4 ton payload to orbit and then some. Though I messed up the positioning a bit, it's not in a very good place so the next ones will need more thought in where I'm placing them.

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This is very well done! I am currently playing with RSS as well,but in the moment Career mode is too hard for me :D

Thanks :) I have to say this experience has forced me to unlearn so many things I picked up playing with normal Kerbin and stock-like parts and it's been fun trying to wrap my head around this new world.

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Communication Constellation

Lots of time spent for setting up an important thing can sometimes make for a short update.

My next task was to repeat the previous mission three more times to make a constellation of satellites on geosynchronous orbits. The rocket was the same with the only exeption that I moved the RCS ports on the Maneuverer to the bottom section and doubled their amount. This made the craft much more maneuverable.

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Except that KerbKom II had a pair of small passengers as extra cargo. The Explorer probe core was fixed in the update and they contained the experiments I still hadn't done so I packed two of them along (second one was for mass balance purposes). I added a small RCS tank to the core along with some batteries and a short range antenna, using KerbKom II as a relay.

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After getting the science I opened some small tech nodes for construction and electrics, on KerbKom III I tested the foldable solar panels but they left me a bit cold.

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But finally, after KerbKom IV reached it's target orbit, here is my constellation of four relay satellites:

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So as you can see, the orbits are inclined relative to each other and generally the placement of satellites is very haphazard. After spinning them around for a few orbits they seem to hold the pattern decently though, so at this point I don't really care about finesse :D

While using RT2 is fun in it's own way, this is one of the reasons I don't use it normally - I'm too impatient to set up those beautiful comms networks properly!

However at this point I want to mention that I didn't fail a single launch with the Greenlight IV lifter. Now that I'm only launching unmanned stuff there's been a couple of reverts previously that I haven't documented, mostly from just making stupid mistakes and since the only repercussion is that I just need to launch again, I haven't felt it to be worth mentioning. However when I'll hopefully get to manned missions later, I decided that on those missions there will be neither reverts nor quicksaves when kerbal lives are on the line. But with these four launches now, everything has been good on the very first launch, hadn't had to revert once so I'm very pleased with the lifter :)

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Recovery Research

With the comms relay network in place, I can focus on doing some proper scientific missions again. My next launch will be a probe abord the Greenlight IV lifter, very similar to the relay satellites. The core looks like this:

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The main difficulty here is that the core needs to be returned from orbit and land safely. In stock this would be easy like eating a whole Kerberry Pie, but right now I have to deal with aerodynamics, re-entry heat and possible communication loss because I can't have antennas or dishes extended while in atmosphere. Not to mention I have to slow down from a much much higher speed.

This here will be the chute bringing the core back down. Realchutes mod makes it a bit more intimidating, but overall it seems to work pretty much like the stock parachutes.

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The returning part will not be able to control itself, so I need to make sure it orients in the correct way aerodynamically and turns the heatsield towards the airstream. Simply put, CoM down, CoL up. You can see I added some science experiments but as it turns out, the accelerometer was useless (also Interstellar changes how it works) and I didn't even get a chance to use the barometer.

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And here is the final probe. The little boxes on the conic tank are batteries, then there's the RCS for the probe, heatshield with a separator and another RCS pack that I was hoping would help in orienting the probe during descent. I'll have to use the nav computer that comes with RT2 anyways for this, so the RCS is more of a test platform than an actually functional thing. The returning part weighs a whopping 600 kilograms but there's really not much I could shed, the core and parachute are forming most of that weight. Quite honestly, I haven't got a clue if the parachute will be big enough.

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Launch goes smoothly again. Dubious Four is on it's way!

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Target was to attain a very high apoapsis so that the experiment would have time to run in high orbit, without actually needing to circularize. Also this gives me a chance to test the re-entry procedure as if I'd be returning from lunar orbit. Here I'm just testing how high I can push it, but I'll be dropping apoapsis a bit lower for the actual mission. I don't need to hang around for so long.

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Everything looks so small from up here D:

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I spot an UFO when returning! You can see here I've lowered my periapsis to 80 kms. It's well in the atmosphere but still in the very thin part of it so I have no idea if it will be enough to slow down the probe for a re-entry.

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As I'm preparing for the re-entry, suddenly something happens - I lose all connection! It turns out I've lost LoS to the comms satellite my dish was aimed at. I'd grown so used to having the connection that I completely forgot the whole thing and didn't bother checking. The 1 Mm omni on the probe isn't enough to reach the relays flying at 36 Mm height.

I watch in horror as the probe hits the upper atmosphere, tumbles around a bit and then exits completely intact.

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At least I know two things now. 80 km is not low enough for a re-entry, but it is enough in case I ever want to aerobrake. If I were an actual scientist, I might want some pressure data to use for aerobrake maneuvers on other planets, but good thing we here at Oops don't bother with such silliness!

Let's try this again. This time periapsis to 50 km. I'm not coming so fast this time because of losing altitude so much from the last attempt, but high enough that there shouldn't be any major difference when compared to lunar return.

I've been dreading to open the RT2 flight computer for a long time, but now I don't have a choice. I'm setting the delay based on the time to reach periapsis for the events I need. The light decoupler will fire 5 minutes before reaching periapsis, soon followed by orienting the craft to surface retrograde and holding it for the rest of the flight. Parachute is manually armed so it doesn't need a staging event (I just right click the parachute and click arm -button), it should deploy based on altitude. Then 5 minutes after reaching the periapsis the heat shield will decouple in order to reduce weight on touchdown. I have no idea again how long my re-entry will last, but 5 minutes is a long time and I should be well beyond the entry heating at least.

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I'm incredibly nervous as the probe loses connection again. For some reason my heart is actually pounding a bit as I don't like giving up control to automation. First staging event goes as planned however, but this is the flight computer's idea of holding attitude: FIRE ALL THRUSTERS NOW NOW NOW! It's good to know that it doesn't really play well with low control authority. I think it's more configured to work with the stock reaction wheels.

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Probe enters atmosphere and the hot plasma represents the subtle hint that I might have enough deceleration this time to make a landing/spectacular crash.

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Just as I "planned" the probe orients correctly in the atmosphere. Poor flight computer keeps a valiant effort up and tries to help in orienting the craft with underpowered RCS pods against the force of a half ton steel cube surrounded by 1500 degrees hot plasma screaming through the thickening atmosphere at hypersonic speed. Good luck with that.

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Probe survives the re-entry with the heat shield in good condition. Parachute pops open as planned, but seconds before touchdown the heat shield is still attached. I slightly overestimated the time and the probe is coming in a bit hot.

Flight computer. You can stop now. Seriously.

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Probe hits the ground and surprisingly nothing breaks. Massive success! First recovered flight from orbit! I can see great things ahead for Oops.

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New Frontiers

This is Dubious Five. It's going places.

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Well, to the Moon, if you want to be precise about these things. And why wouldn't we?

The probe is almost an exact replica of Dubious Four, except for the solar panels which I unlocked from the science gathered by Dubious Four. These ones can track the sun so my power worries should be over. Also I ditched the extra RCS and the science instruments from the return section to save weight. The core has experiments for Moon orbit and needs to be returned to Earth, otherwise it's pretty much identical to the earlier one.

I started out with an idea of making a flyby with a free return trajectory. This proved to be a bit tricky with the maneuver nodes so I thought I'll just make the flyby and then burn the periapsis down back to Earth atmo as it seemed I had the dV to do it easily.

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Here's the craft approaching the Moon. It's pretty exciting :)

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Encounter!

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As I approach the Moon and start the data collector, it becomes clear that I just don't have enough time to get the experiments done on a flyby. A change of plans is required.

Getting a low orbit doesn't seem to take too much dV and it looks like I might be able to get an escape burn just barely afterwards. The mission is still go.

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I have a low orbit with 1 km/s of dV left. Everything seems OK for now. I'm making some tiny adjustments to get the apoapsis properly to low orbit.

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Night on Earth. I wonder if little kerbals are staring at the Moon right now.

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The science is easily collected, it's time to plan for the return trajectory. I could go for a better node at this point, but I'll make the escape first, then the final adjustment once I'm at Earth apoapsis. It would probably be more efficient to do it now, but it's surprisingly tricky to get it lined up properly, I should probably see what precise node mod does if it would help. In any case, it's gonna get close with the dV.

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After the final adjustment, my orbit looks like this. Plenty of fuel left, too!

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I'm preparing the parachute for deployment. It's really nice with the RealChutes mod, there's all kinds of interesting stuff in here. I'm also setting the heat shield to drop one minute earlier than before.

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Separation of the descent stage. It's coming down over the beautiful middle east deserts.

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Hitting the atmosphere from a properly high orbit. Heat shield holds up nicely again and the aerodynamic force keeps the probe oriented just as before.

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The black circle below the probe is the heat shield dropping at a perfect time :) Note that the altitude is sea level and I'm coming down on high ground, in this picture the parachute has already properly deployed. It's still coming in a bit fast even with the reduced weight. It's good to know that this chute shouldn't be used on this high mass. Maybe 400 kg would be the upper limit.

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The probe took the hit nicely though, only the mechjeb module got damaged when rolling on the ground. Maybe not a perfect landing, but still a landing :)

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And the rewards from the mission.

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I didn't have any instruments on board so I didn't even touch the biomes for science. But I've now shown that this design can easily bring a 500 kg payload to lunar orbit and back so the future missions to study the biomes will benefit from this information.

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Part 2: Kerbal, Ascended

Kerbury One

A new age dawns. We're about to send the first kerbal into the darkness of space, to bring the light of civilization to the void. Three kerbals will fly the Kerbury spacecraft on three missions. First kerbal in space will be obviously be Jebediah Kerman. Get into the capsule and good luck Jeb!

P.S. We couldn't test the parachutes or the decouplers due to malfunctioning probe cores.

P.P.S. Launch escape system might not work so don't mess up. There's extra snacks in the glove compartment as an apology.

The spacecraft is a simple one kerbal capsule, with an instrument section sitting under it. On these flights there will be no science instruments on board, only solar panels, batteries and comms devices.

The propulsion unit is a smaller, one nozzle variant of the same engine used on the Maneuverer section and runs on hydrolox. For steering the small white section is filled with RCS fuel used by the four linear thrusters. I don't expect needing other than pitch and yaw maneuvers, but the capsule itself does have a single RCS port that can handle rolling in case it's needed.

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Now that we're transporting live kerbals, an abort sequence might be in order. The capsule sits on top of the well established Greenlight lifter. I'm setting the abort group so that it shuts down every engine and decouples the pod while starting the SRB. I'm also setting the radials on the big SRB boosters to decouple because somehow I'd imagine that it's safer if they blast off in random directions rather than push the rocket straight forward towards the pod.

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As a last minute idea I decide to give Jeb some extra parachutes just in case the one on the pod (it's hidden below the nose cone fairing) doesn't hold up for some reason.

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5...4...3...2...1...Ignition! Jebediah lifts off in his spacecraft, ready to make history. He certainly looks happy about it, wildly oblivious of the massive incompetence of his engineering crew. The first flight will be a very short suborbital hop, just enough to get out of the atmosphere and land. The objective is to test the return capsule and perform a systems check, because we obviously couldn't do it on the launch pad.

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Kerbury One reaches the limit of the atmosphere and Jeb becomes the first kerbal to reach space! All systems check out OK, solar panels and comms devices deploy as expected.

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What? Someone seems to have installed the seat on the capsule upside down. This picture is taken on the way up, the nose pointing upwards. Oh well, they'll manage.

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Jeb decides to pop outside for a quick look around. Fortunately he doesn't have EVA propellant on him, so he'll just have to hang on to the ladder and stay put while the capsule briefly stays outside the atmosphere. I think there must be monopropellant on board for the EVA RCS to work. The ones on the craft use HTP.

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The capsule is detached from the instrument and propulsion section and prepares for re-entry.

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The flames barely tickle the capsules heat shield, but then again it wasn't coming in even close to orbital speeds.

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The parachute opens just fine, exactly as planned. Seriously, we were confident even when the nose fairing didn't actually detach. While coasting through the tranquility of the low hanging clouds, Jeb looks longinly from the capsule window at the distant Moon.

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Splashdown! Against all odds Jeb survives the flight!

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Kerbury Two

Piloted by Bill Kerman, the Kerbury Two mission sets out to accomplish the next step – orbiting the planet. It's otherwise identical to Kerbury One, except that the radial parachutes are removed since the main parachute was proven to be more than adequate in bringing the capsule down unharmed.

Bill rides to the skies on a pillar of flame and smoke.

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The launch escape system is ejected in the same staging along with the upper stage separation. This time I managed to catch a nice picture from it, too.

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The capsule holds enough oxygen to last for 36 hours. Enough for a few spins on LEO, but not enough for anything long term. Bill looks content about having oxygen. Not ecstatic, but content.

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After reaching orbit easily, Bill pops out several times to collect the EVA reports above various biomes. I forgot to change the RCS fuel to monopropellant to test my EVA propellant theory.

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Bill orbits the planet once and prepares for a braking burn. KSC approaches a bit too quickly and being a kerbal of domestic tendencies, Bill brakes hard. Really hard.

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The fact that he's pulling a 12+ G deceleration doesn't consern him. He's a kerbal on a mission to get back home to enjoy his evening cookies. Physical discomfort is irrelevant.

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Mission Control informs Bill that his secret stash of cookies and chocolate bars was found inside an unused SRB booster. 12.8 Gees for nothing!

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Kerbury Three

Bob will be piloting this one. Objective for Kebury Three is to reach high orbit and drop down from there. From the last mission I learned that too hard braking is ill-adviced even when snacks are concerned. However with the probe missions I learned that setting periapsis to 50 km should be around 6-7 G's. Other than that Bob will mostly be indulging in his favourite hobby: taking pictures of himself.

So I haven't shown the tech tree in a while, mostly because I have hoarded the science and not used it on much else than the absolute necessities, such as new probe cores and comms systems and such. I'm still pondering if I should unlock the tech 3 engines, but then again there's much unused potential left in tech 2. It costs a whopping 500 science to upgrade so it's a big decision. However I do need to unlock more life support options. The single node contains some canisters and a CO2 recycler so I'm unlocking that one.

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Time to launch the mission! Bob soars through the clouds to the open skies.

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I added some O2 tanks to the instrument section. Bob has oxygen supply that will last him months!

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The Maneuverer had roughly 1 km/s dV left again after reaching orbit and after using that as initial kick, the Kerbury craft begins the burn towards high orbit.

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As the burn finishes and Kerbury Three coasts in space over the seas, Bob watches the Moon slide across his small window.

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The orbit will be a bit higher than the comms satellites so that Bob will have plenty of time to admire the scenery. There's not much else to do up there.

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He pops out for an EVA. My theory was correct (I think). Bob has plenty of EVA propellant left so he takes a little stroll around the spacecraft.

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Bob watches vigilantly as half of the planet is fast asleep before him. Not a bad view.

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Greetings from space!

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Bob returns to his craft and with a tiny correction burn lowers the periapsis to 50 kilometers for re-entry. This time the craft slows down at 9.0 G at maximum. Uncomfortable, but well within kerbal tolerances. Still the periapsis could've definitely been a bit higher for a more easier entry.

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While floating on parachutes, Bob happens to gaze a the same view Jebediah had from his capsule window in a similar situation. I think I need to take these guys to the Moon.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Dreaming of Moon Adventures

After the successfull Kerbury missions I was at the limits of what I can do with such a small lifter. I needed something bigger. For some reason I was bent on not raising my rocketry tech level but I did open the next pod node with the gemini cabin and some engines which proved to be just what I needed. After messing around in the VAB for quite some time I finally managed to build everything I needed for two bold and daring manned missions. This is the first: Adventurer One.

The new lifter for these missions is called Green Dreams. It's pretty similar in concept to Greenlight, with a lower stage, upper stage and orbital stage. There's no SRB boosters on this one though and I was limited with the tank diameter because of tech level so had to improvise a bit. The lifter can get 40 metric tons to LEO and has a bit more dV than strictly needed so I don't have to use snacks as reaction mass just to do the final circularization.

Here she is sitting on the launchpad, prepared for a night launch. The black section is the tank for orbital insertion, above it you can see the actual spacecraft, the Adventurer moon explorer craft. The whole assembly weighs a bit under 900 tons.

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The bottom section doesn't have any drop tanks, it's just a central tank with four tanks directly attached to it. This is just a work-around for the limited tank size, the smarter way would be of course just to make one wide tank. Each tank carries it's own thruster – a twin nozzle Aerojet LR-87. This engine is awesome! It has several configurationd, the LR87-7 I'm using on the lower stage is using Aerozine and N2O4 as propellants for maximum thrust but it can also use hydrolox for maximum ISP.

The crew for this mission is Bill and Jebediah Kerman who will be spending their mission time in the two-seater Gemini capsule. As with Kerbury, the safety of the crew is important and they have a launch escape system in case of emergencies. I tried to test it but it didn't really work out that well because the rocket had some other issues at that time, but I'm pretty confident it will step up and do it's job if it's ever REALLY needed.

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Here you can see the entire engine configuration. The outer engines burn out a bit before the central core after clearing the atmosphere. I could get a bit more dV by using decouplers but they always add up to the complexity and the increase would be so small that I decided against it.

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The second stage is sporting another Aerojet twin nozzle engine. I told you they're awesome! That's why I put six of them in this rocket. Something that I didn't figure out at the first time with this engine is that it actually requires a but of aerozine mixture in the tanks to ignite but the engine is configured to run on hydrolox. Luckily it's really easy to do with realfuels as I can just add a tiny amount of it inside the tank.

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I'm also detaching the fuselage fairings that protect the systems- and cargo bay which is essentially the heart of the craft. You can't see much what's inside due to being on the night side but there's all kinds of science instruments, including several goo canisters, batteries and solar panels plus a space for small cargo which in this case is a Luna 1 probe. More on that later.

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After the second stage burns out, the orbital stage is decoupled and at this point I'm also shooting the launch escape tower away but it could go just as well in the previous staging. The orbital stage is using hydrolox and a total of four LR-46 engines.

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The planned maneuver to get to the Moon. It's far from optimal though and I didn't bother checking how my orbital inclination was in relation to the Moon's so the intercept was a tough one to get. Next time I need to try and get a better grasp on this. It's so easy in stock when everything's always at the same plane and launch is equatorial so you never need to pay attention to it really.

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Burning towards the Moon, this time in proper light so you can see the systems bay a bit better. If you watch really closely you can see the clothespole for drying Bills dirty socks sticking out between the solar panels. It's also handy for magnetometric measurements. The blue striped tanks carry a lot of air. This thing has life support for more than two months.

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I spot another asteroid on my way! Oh no! I hope it doesn't hit my favourite snack bar :(

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Here's a close-up of the cabin. I wish you could see Bill and Jeb grinning in the cockpit when looking in from the outside :/

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I'm getting a very sloppy Moon encounter and will end up in a polar orbit. It doesn't really matter to be honest, but it would be nice to have some resemblance of control on the orbits my poor kerbals end up in.

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After getting an orbit, the probe Luna 1 is activated and undocks from the carbo bay. Jeb is on the joystick and mixes up the controls a bit so the probe bumps into the support beams and tumbles out in a rather ungraceful manner. Luckily nothing breaks.

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The probe has an omni antenna to keep contact to the craft, which in turn relays back to KSC. The Adventurer is on such high orbit that it will be in contact to the lander during the descent. The probe core has an experiment for flying under 7000 meters and it's supposed to be an impactor but my plan is to land it first for surface science, then lift off to do the experiment and then impact.

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Here's the probe on final descent phase. Everything seems to go smoothly, I have plenty dV left and about half of RCS for maneuvers and killing horizontal velocity.

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But when I try to move laterally, it suddenly gulps all of the monoprop in a few seconds. I don't understand what's happening there but in a blink of an eye I lose all control as there's no reaction wheels or torque in the probe like it has in stock. So I fire up the engines and try to scrape all the science I can. Luckily I manage to do the chemical trail impactor experiment and transmit it all back.

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And the inevitable conclusion. It's technically still a landing... At least it's the first kerbal-made object to reach the surface!

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Honestly I got a bit frustrated and didn't pause to get nice photos of Adventurer orbiting the Moon or Bill and Jeb popping out for EVAs which I regret a bit. But here's one where the craft slowly turns towards the maneuver node for a burn towards home.

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Jeb was a bit bummed about botching the landing as well so he was happy when Earth rolled in view.

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In the final phase of the mission the cabin detaches from the return module and prepares for re-entry.

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The craft hits the atmosphere above Africa. The annoyance from the partial failure is swept away by gorgeus view of the african mountains peaking above the fluffy clouds.

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A succesful landing on the savanna! Jeb and Bill pop out to stretch their legs. I hope there aren't any lions afoot D:

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And the science report for the mission. Not bad at all and this doesn't even include the stuff I sent with the probe.

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So overall a decently successful mission. I need to see what's up with the RCS before the next mission. I'm tempted to raise the rocket tech and just boost the performance on everything but since I have the next craft almost finished in the VAB I'm going to just sit on most of this science for a while now. I want to see if a manned moon landing is doable with the current rockets.

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Moonwalking

After botching the previous Moon landing Jeb and Bill had a lengthy discussion about what went wrong and how to fix it. They agreed that since a robotic lander failed to land, they should send a kerbal to do it instead.

So the Adventurer Two mission was put into motion.

The Green Dreams lifter was used again and the main ship was almost identical to Adventurer One, just with less science equipment and a different kind of cargo. Also one decoupler was left over, but since nobody knew where it was supposed to go, they decided to just scrap it.

Liftoff was planned more carefully this time in order to get the orbital plane roughly aligned with the Moon's so I used mechjeb to see when the orbits aligned. I ended up having less than one degree of relative inclination.

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The cargo bay holds a gemini lander module instead of a probe. The whole thing weighs roughly 4 tons and can hold only one kerbal. I was thinking for a long time how to carry the lander. I'm using the ship manifest mod to move kerbals around (couldn't get connected living spaces to work for some reason) and I could just place the lander anywhere and teleport/EVA the kerbal there or possibly do an apollo-style flip'n'dock maneuver. I wanted to place it in a semi-realistic manner so that it would at least have a docking port connection to the cabin. Right now it goes through the heat shield and the bottom of the lander pod so I don't know if that's realistic or not, but at least there's a direct connection so I'm happy with that.

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The orbital planes are aligned pretty nicely. I could've finetuned the burn a bit more but it was pretty tricky to adjust the maneuver node so precisely so I decided to just be happy with what I've got now.

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Planet rolls above Bill and Jeb while they're burning to leave home.

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The craft approaching Moon.

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This was the orbit I ended up with after breaking burn. When approaching the periapsis the game started lagging much more than usual for some reason so I ended up raising the altitude a bit afterwards. I don't know what the lag was about but raising the orbit helped with it. In retrospect it might have been my computer doing something else in the background or just a clitch with time warp.

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Jeb hops into the lander and undocks from the Adventurer.

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After the first breaking burn the landing trajectory looks like this.

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Here's a closeup of the lander on descent. All the fuel is actually stored inside the landing leg section and when I compared it to a procedural tank of the same volume there was a huge size difference. The side tanks hold air for the life support and weigh quite a lot though. I did some digging and it turns out that the gemini lander was designed to weigh about 4 tons and had these big side tanks so I thought it's appropriate to just keep the design as it's the correct weight and size even though the tank proportions are a bit off.

The engines on it were vastly overpowered. I had to just tap them on and off in the final descent and on the other hand the RCS wasn't powerful enough to cut the vertical velocity at all so the whole landing was like hopping on a pogo stick.

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Touchdown from inside the lander. After taking this shot Jeb hits the thrusters and spins the craft around for other pictures to be taken.

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Jeb stands on lunar surface at last, watching the Earth hang above the horizon. It's so barren in here.

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Well that was it, time to head home. Jeb waits for the orbiting craft to pass over him and fires up the engines.

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I had to maneuver a bit on both the lander and the orbiter in order to get a good approach. The orbit was a bit too low and the orbiter too far ahead so I couldn't lower the landers orbit enough for it to catch up within one orbit without it hitting the surface.

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The approach goes fine and Jeb closes in on the front docking port of the Adventurer.

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Bill's view of the lander just before it spins around for final approach. I really wish you could see through the windows like this, it would be fun to see Jeb grinning and maybe waving inside the lander module. They should make kerbals react to each other and do some silly stuff together like wave and high five and stuff.

HQVRWDI.png

And finally the docking. Jeb moves to the cabin through the docking ports. There's parachutes under the Adventurer front port but I imagine that the kerbals are able to squeeze through. From watching videos from the ISS it seems to be very claustrophobic there at times. I just hope Jebs head doesn't get stuck. The lander is undocked and left in orbit.

F6AWKqE.png

Time to go home. I'm leaving the periapsis a bit high because the decoupling events will push it further down.

7dZsZs3.png

Or WOULD push it if I hadn't forgotten the decoupler. Talk about a silly mistake. The I-beams were supposed to be attached to a large decoupled instead of directly to the pod but the craft I loaded was a previous test version, which was identical to the one I was supposed to use except for that decoupler. The thing that distracted me was that there is some kind of decoupler in the cabin itself, but I'm not quite sure what it decouples. It does the animation and sound though. Maybe it detaches just from the attachment node or something. Anyway, here I go blasting into the atmosphere with the entire craft. Good luck Bill and Jeb.

QpAMNqd.png

Luckily for me FAR has the aerodynamic stress implemented now. The force breaks the weak I-beam connections and detaches the pod from the rest of the craft. Seems to work nicely! Bill and Jeb seem happy despite the 8 gees crushing them against their seats. One of the rare cases when I'm really happy about the ship breaking apart :)

WIuB4Bx.png

And the great adventure comes to a happy ending. I managed a manned Moon landing and the first orbital rendezvous both on the same mission so couldn't be happier :)

SfmPrNs.png

With this milestone reached, it's time for me to end this mission report series though. I have two reasons. One is that I don't have that much time to play and planning and flying all these missions takes a lot longer than in stock and since .24 is hopefully not that far away I don't think I'd manage any big milestones before that. Also I'd like to have a little break from KSP before the patch rolls out.

Second and maybe the bigger reason is that now when the crafts have become bigger I've also encountered some serious lag problems. I have a pretty good gaming rig but as it is with KSP it's not much help here. So truthfully I'm not enjoying the missions that much when everything happens in slow motion :(

But overall it's been a nice experience and I'm happy I tried it :)

- - - Updated - - -

Conclusion and some thoughts

I wanted to sum up some of my feelings for the realism overhaul and all the assosiated mods. Overall it's been interesting and fun to play like this and I can only imagine the amount of work and background research that's been poured into these mods.

In some ways they change the game a lot but at the same time the basics remain the same. Most notably the bigger planet makes launches longer but I would definitely not say it makes them any harder though. The rockets do need more dV but it's also easier to come by and while the payloads are smaller, it's not really something I'd count as "difficult" as such. With the fuel mod and having a lot smaller dry mass for the tanks along with the stretchies getting over 9 km/s isn't as daunting as it sounds.

You do need to know the basics of rocket building farily well though but interestingly staging is not that big of an issue as it is in stock. You don't suffer nearly as much from lugging around emptied tanks and also because the rockets are much much heavier, also lugging around some extra engine weight is proportionally a much smaller penalty.

If you know how to do a gravity turn with FAR in stock, then you know how to do it in RSS too. It's maybe more important to have the trajectory spot on in RSS if you want precise orbits at launch, but I didn't find this to be any more difficult, you just need to relearn the details.

The main difficulty comes from the engine ignitor. When you have only one ignition and no throttle, you really need to design the whole rocket around that. Further you really need to have that ascent path correct. But here's where the size works in your favour because small mistakes are smaller and it doesn't matter if you burn a degree or two in the wrong direction for a short while.

I do wish that stock Kerbin was a bit bigger though, especially when playing with FAR. Mostly just because the launch process is so fast that you barely have enough time to sneeze before you're at the first staging event. But if it was the size of a real planet, I think it would be a bad idea. It's much easier to learn orbiting and launching on a smaller planet, you see the effects of different maneuvers faster and there's maybe more room for errors. However once you got that nailed down, adding to the size just means longer burns, longer distances and timeframes so it doesn't bring anything significantly different to the table. Further I did have a lot of fun with the longer launches, but I could see that becoming excessively boring after doing it a hundred or two hundred times.

With all the different fuel types and configurations my feeling was that it adds a lot of details but not very much in terms of raw gameplay. I don't mean it as a bad thing but the fact is that you're not going to pic an inferior fuel type for your engine in any situation. With the different fuels you have some options you might not have otherwise but essentially you're always gonna pick the one that suits your needs the best. In that respect I think Squad has made a smart decision in consolidating the fuels simply into liquid, solid and monopropellant. It does lose some detail but avoids a lot of extra micromanaging that would probably not be all that interesting to most players.

One thing I also want to mention is the magical reaction wheels in stock that are missing with RO. They're an awesome idea! Yes they're far from realistic but when playing without them you run into micromanagement issues again. If you're realism oriented this is of course something you want, but if you're just learning the ropes it would be incredibly frustrating if you'd have to finetune all the RCS placements and fuel flows correctly just in order to even steer your craft. With the magic reaction wheel you still need RCS for translation and fine tuning burns and stuff like that but the wheel cancels out most of the tiny placement errors very effectively.

So all in all I'd say that realism overhaul does it's job very nicely. It adds a lot of extra considerations into engineering, launching and planning the missions. Some things are more difficult, mostly it's just extra engineering required but you're using the same exact skillset you need when playing on stock. It's fun and interesting, definitely worth a try if you're into things like that and not as difficult as it sounds at first. Or rather I'd say that it's easy to do the basics but making something work smoothly and precisely requires a lot of thought and planning. Wether or not you count that as difficult is a matter of personal preference. I don't think it as difficulty but as depth and challenge.

I think Squad has done very good decisions on where to cut down on the detail and consolidate things for gameplay puposes as well as making the basics more approachable to the common gamer. It's fantastic that we have these mods for people who want to add to their game, but the decisions made for stock are clearly not made on a whim but there are some very good reasons behind them all.

I had a lot of fun with this mod and I hope the good people will keep developing it and maybe I'll come back to it at some point. Also I wish that reading this has been entertaining for people and if you have any comments/critisism you wanna post, feel free to express your thoughts :)

Here's a picture so sum up my feelings.

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