DunaRocketeer

Last night I lost a booster on landing, first time I failed to recover both boosters on my current heavy lifter. Regardless, the Munar seismic survey mission continued onwards to a rather scary landing (quite enjoying suicide burns in a lander that has only a so-so TWR). Collected all the contract data and am now part way through a second rover sortee to collect science from a nearby crater biome. All very standard and yet very satisfying. Finally, I spent a little time making sure my Mini Shuttle has an effective Abort action group - it's only a matter of time before the Launch Failure mod strikes...

I for one, love the beginning of a new game. Strapping Kerbals to glorified fireworks and launching them into the sky, learning the fundamentals and expanding your capabilities. I love the whole game of course, but the beginning has a great appeal.

Compared to my usual rockets, I'd consider your Nova II to be an absolute monster, and yet the N1 and Saturn V dwarf it. It gives a nice sense of perspective, thanks for doing this

Val is checking out her vehicle during rollout to the pad, prior to a surveying mission on the Mun:

Hotaru, your vehicles always never fail to impress :)

Well, let me preface this by saying it's wild speculation. If I had to guess they'd continue ISS assembly, while the Orbital Space Plane program (a sort of shuttle replacement) trundles along in the background. Probably starved of funding and with no progress made, it would have been cancelled and consigned to the same scrapheap as Shuttle-Saturn, Shuttle-C, X-30, and X-33/VentureStar. Then the inevitable accident happens. It occurs at a later date than the loss of Columbia, so any hypothetical subsequent NASA Commercial Services program (if they decide to go that route in the first place) would happen too late to save SpaceX, which would go bust before Falcon 9 1.0 even gets off the pad. Blue Origin wouldn't be very far along either, because they wouldn't have a funding boost from ULA for the BE-4 engine: ULA wouldn't feel the need to create the BE-4 powered Vulcan, what with no Falcon 9 eating into their defence missions. What happens next is tricky, but I'm going to guess that there will be strong parallels to our reality. Constellation was spearheaded by Bush, and I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the shuttle accident happens during the Obama administration. He advocates that NASA reduces its scope down to a more modest research oriented agency with a small capsule program and cargo services from EELV's. This faces opposition in Congress who push for a big shuttle derived launcher and a return to the moon (not shuttle-C though, because that would be relatively cheap and make too much sense - at NASA, they still haven't learned that 'perfect' is the enemy of 'good enough') . A lot of in-fighting between the EELV camp who claim they can get the same mission done with fuel depots for cheaper (starting to sound familiar?) and the congressionally backed MSFC super booster which has some political support, but not enough money. So it's 2015, and in this alternate reality we have NASA's human spaceflight program in just as great a shambles. The crucial difference is no SpaceX, which despite the funding mountain they have to climb to finance their Mars campaign, are the only outfit going that's worth a damn.

I tend to create launcher families that are useful throughout a game, then create a new design family in the next game. Nevertheless, there are a few vehicles that survive from game to game. I love flying a design using a BACC srb and Reliant upper stage early in the game. For some reason, I get a real 'The Right Stuff' vibe from it. What vehicles do you use over and over?

I believe this [I]might[/I] have happened to me once, is it a regular occurrence for other players?

^ what the....

Good going! It's a great feeling to fly SSTO's, refueling them and sending them up again.

Made some improvements to my vehicles to add a few more tons payload to orbit - exended the centre tank so I can use the centre engines during first stage flight. Boosts the vehicles capability up to 23 tons at approx 100x100km orbit. Good enough for me. [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/K8bFsbf.png[/IMG] [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/JClmkzX.png[/IMG]

Try to get into the roleplaying aspect of ion propulsion - My first interplanetary mission is usually a mission to Gilly, which is propelled by 4x ion engines. It's a lot of fun planning your burns well in advance to avoid planet shadow and to take advantage of perigee kicks. Plus it can be an enjoyable challenge plotting all the course corrections you need to efficiently get to Gilly using ions. Spaceflight should be more 2001 than Star Wars :cool:

I had an eventful KSP session on Saturday. My Minmus expedition returned, which yeilded a ton of Science points to unlock further tech tree nodes, most important of which were the Burn Together unit, and the high performance Turbojets. The former allowed me to create my dual-booster-recovery cargo launcher, and the latter allowed me to create a small SSTO for satellite contracts. Interestingly, the inaugural operational flight of my cargo rocket was victim to the first occurrence of the Launch Failure Mod. It was pretty exciting, the thing pitched over and before I knew what was happening one of the boosters exploded. It occured too early in flight to save the second stage and cargo, so all I could do was to detatch the surving booster and fly it back to the runway. It's a small mod, but what a difference it makes to gameplay!

^ I'm sorry that the ship krakened out, but at least you have a pretty debris cloud, there :sticktongue: I don't get collossal failures, just an endless stream of little errors that I never, ever learn from...

Sent up a payload to minums on this fly-back booster. [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/GJFnc9B.png[/IMG] When it returns, I'll have enough Science to unlock the Burn Together module, so I can finish development of its bigger brother: [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/qC9Z58H.png[/IMG]

Not doing anything right now, but I did have an idea: I want to take my winged fly-back booster (see upthread) and strap 2 of them onto a much larger rocket. Then use the Burn Together mod to return both of them to KSC. No idea if it'll work, will report back the results.

Freaking Sweet! Borg Cube next! (What do you mean, part count?)

I finally got some time to play KSP again. I spent most of it perfecting my reuseable TSTO. The booster can now do a runway recovery rather than parachuting into the ocean as before. I also made a cargo variant. [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/qb2nIPx.png[/IMG] [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/71wBWlg.png[/IMG] [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/Jejiie0.png[/IMG] [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/62fZ0yy.png[/IMG]

I've though about take-off assist, but I usually solve these sorts of problems with canards and/or making the nose gear a little taller than the rear landing gear. Also move the main landing gear forward (provided it's not in front of the COM) also helps rotate the plane on the runway.

I stand corrected

Proton, Soyuz/Progress, Falcon 9, Antares. With the exception of Proton, these vehicles needed to be in the upper bracket of reliability because of to the ISS. All failed within a year of each other due to inadequacies in their respective companies. I think that's more than the average for a class of vehicles that need to be reliable due to human spaceflight support.

Yet another rocket failure. Can't say I'm surprised, unless your rocket is operated by ULA, CSA or ESA, failure seems to be in vogue. Is it just me, or did we used to be better at this? I feel like we're back in the late 50's.

It's too early in my current career to do SSTO's, but a nice TSTO is certainly worth the effort:

I like using the type-B to cap off the similarly tapered Mk3 fuel tanks.

My next Duna mission landed at the red planet last night and began setting up for its mission to find good ore deposits. Its job is to find a good place for the colony I am designing.