DunaRocketeer

I LOVE your T-50 plane

I bought my crew safely home from Duna this morning, which validated my new vehicle design. I've just started another mission with a similar spacecraft/launcher, but with a few mass optimisations and a bit more living space for my Kerbals during the long trip out. It has orbital and ground based scanners to help me decide on a good location for the colony that's coming soon.

Great looking ships

Awaiting a launch window for a mission to find resources.

This. Create a colony that can support exploration of the outer planets.

Niiice

Like picking my favourite song, my favourite engine changes over time. Right now, I'm a fan of the mainsail: cluster 5 common booster cores at the bottom of the rocket with a mainsail per core. Simple, strong and all the lift capability I need.

The 'rover bay' is just made out of stock parts (I-Beams, struts and wing segments) I'm thinking of completely enclosing the bay with wing segments next time, and use Kerbal attachment system to take a couple of segments off at the landing site and use them as ramps for the rover. Hope that helps

I finally got back into my 1.0 game and added a couple of mods. First off; Kerbal Joint Reenforcement, where have you been all my life??? Secondly, I installed Kronal Vessel Viewer, and made some diagrams of my latest creation: ...And a screenshot of where the mission is at now, off to Ike next.

You can't see it in the image, but there's actually a gap in the truss of struts around the rover that allows me to drive the rover off of the Clampotron Sr 'platform', so no jetison of the docking port is required. My thinking is that I'll need to create a Heatshield/Clampotron Sr combo between the tug and the lander. It'll stay in Duna orbit with the tug, but will accompany the lander on Kerbin reentry. I'll also need more chutes -not too many though because I think it's a little cheaty

I created an explorer craft whilst I'm stuck in ksp 0.90, although I think it can be adapted when my main pc is back up. It's using a new idea (for me, at least) for carrying a small rover - encase it within a truss of struts and a docking adapter at the base of the lander. It makes the overall vehicle a lot neater (it bugs me when I have to fly a spacecraft with wheels sticking out, doesn't look right). I've flight tested it in Kerbin orbit and seems rugged enough. Time to give it some missions! Also whilst I'm here posting things, I just want to say that I think this is the best thread on the site: It's really interesting to see the diverse ways of doing missions that's on display here.

My monitor broke on my main PC, so while I wait for the replacement, I'm playing .90 on my laptop. It was a pretty fun though - I did an interplanetary mission that didn' use LV-N's for the first time.

Thrust oscillation attitude control issues due to massive sail area frustum buckling because of vehicle length inability to airstart the SSME causing a wasteful J2 engine upgrade 4seg SRB underperformance leading to wasteful 5seg design... It's all a massive hangover that NASA still hasn't recovered from. Best leave it in the past.

First time back in KSP for a while, and I'm getting used to Duna's new atmosphere (drogues don't slow stuff down early as effectively as they used to). It's going to be interesting trying to take an old design down to the surface and back up again.

I agree with you that we could use the technology to build a space colonies to survive catasrophe's on earth, but I don't like the idea that our technological civilization can be sustained long enough to maintain such a capability, especially in our increasingly globalized world. Better to spread technological civization about, especially on the Moon and Mars where a high technology civilisation is necessary for survival. I don't agree with your assertion that humanity is insignificant. We are the only self aware species on the planet, and the same hopefully goes for whatever we evolve into. That's precious, and it should be protected.

How so?

The justification is human survival; not putting all our eggs in one basket yadda yadda yadda... The cost of human spaceflight is well within the budgetary capabilities of the richest nations, but because we don't live in an ideal world, we spend it on cosmetics, movies/games, military and banks, all of which imho ranks lower than a civilisation-ending asteroid in our list of priorities. It makes me so angry that things are skewed in this way. And yet we hear about such grand plans from the likes of NASA, when everyone knows they don't have the money for it. Bottom line, we should be doing much more, or none at all, because this half assed approach has gotten old.

That looks lovely I like complicated smaller scale missions.

Completely messed up my ascent stage design for takeoff from Duna - not enough Delta-V. Fortunately with KIS, I canibalised the descent stage parts and made it to orbit. I feel like Mark Watney from the Martian! I'm going to do that book's scenario next...

Aanker, it most definitely isn't hysterical to talk about meteor impacts. You are of course correct in that we aren't likely to see one in our life times, but it will happen someday, and there really is no better countermeasure to it than have humanity as a multiplanetary species. If that scares away contributors, that is their problem. Oh ffs I just give up.

Launch vehicle reliability varies but typical figures fall between 90-98%. Are you seriously telling me that I have that likelyhood of encountering a serious failure if I pick up a smartphone today? Oh, and before you accuse me of equating smartphones with rockets, I am well aware that one is more complex than the other. Please consider the point I made in a previous post about the investment we're making in rocketry. That is what I'm angry about. We may not get to be 100% reliable, but we can do better, much much better. We just need to wake up to the situation now.

The point I am making is that for some reason, the human race understood that fancy TV's were a good thing, and kept buying them by the million until their reliability was acceptable. The same is not true for spaceflight. You could make an argument that I'm being unrealistic expecting equivalent reliability in spaceflight, and if you look accept our current expenditure in spaceflight, that is true. However, what I'm really saying is that we aren't willing to invest to the point where we can attain high reliability. That last 5% really isn't that hard, especially when we're talking about the one thing that can guarantee the future of the human race. We live on a planet that has suffered huge meteor impacts, ice ages, super volcanoes, and technological civilization can concievably be ended by these things, as well as world war, resource scarcity and disease. We're not making enough rockets (and achieve the associated reliabilty) to make the human race secure. That is why I am angry.

Blind optimism and flawed analogies. That's what we've been reduced to. But we've got really good smart phones and flatscreen TV's so we should be thankful that, eh? The human race is investing in the wrrong things for its future survival. The last 5% IS NOT THAT HARD

SpaceX hoodwinked a lot of people with their sales pitch, but this is just Faster, Better, Cheaper (pick any two) all over again. They're kidding themselves by talking about Mars when they can't get LEO done reliably. Words cannot describe how disgusted I am at this sort farcical thing happening 60 years into the so called space age. Progress, Cygnus and Dragon down, ATV and Shuttle retired. Just abandon the ISS already and start over when we're serious about doing space properly! Addendum, but hey it's ok, the human race can just play Kerbal Space Program, it's the same thing really - rockets blowing up is funny, no really, we should be laughing: MOAR BOOSTES, right?

Hoovering up kerbin biome science with my rugged little bush plane: