Creature

It's a huge particle (a helium nucleus) and can only travel a few centimeters in air. On skin it's mostly absorbed by the outer (dead) layer of the skin so it's very safe in that regard. The only problem is if you're exposed to an alpha active substance so that it gets inside your body, the high energy in the particles will cause massive damage to your DNA. This is usually the real danger when working with any radioactive substances. So to answer your question, it's safe as long as it's kept inside the casing. On a planetary scale a single RTG isn't an environmental hazard but the plutonium inside is a terrible poison if it gets into contact with anything living.

This is a pretty cool idea. I still think you should go for a simpler rocket powered lander and forget the sky crane for now. It would give you a ton of error margin to work with and you'd still have fairly awesome eggmachine. Add in a robotic arm to lower the egg gently on the ground for dramatic effect. If you go for the crane, you could cheat a little and give the egg a small rover-like cradle to land with. This would add a lot to your shock absorption without looking out of place. But a simple lander is already really cool. You could name it Dragon's Egg.

Always a happy occasion After a year and a half of owning an SSD I'm still amazed that my computer just switches on and is almost immediately ready when I press the power button.

It's very hard to look at a plane and guess it's altitude. Basically anything above a kilometer is almost impossible unless you have a trained eye. My guess would be a small jet approaching the airfield. Low throttle so it's quiet but still high enough to muffle the sounds and look like a distant dot. If there's anything floating above the runway or even close to it I'm guessing the control would call the police in a heartbeat to find out who's launching them.

Having a BsC in biotechnology (essentially biochemistry with a different focus) and about to start my master's thesis this fall I just have to comment on this. I see zero relevance of studying geology when it comes to biochem as a major. Inorganic chemistry is something you need to know the basics of so that when you collaborate with the chemists you know what they talk about and can study whatever you need to on your own. We don't even need that much organic chemistry honestly, at least our work on biotech starts on the macromolecule level with DNA and proteins. You obviously need to know about stuff that's relevant to what you're working with at the moment, but we're not chemists. As for the topic itself, first thing you need is a molecule able to carry information. This is something you could come up with silicon easily. Essentially just like DNA is structurally a fairly simple molecule and we can construct all kinds of alternatives to DNA by replacing the backbone or using different base pairs, similarly we could device all kinds of structures that hold at least a limited amount of information with arbitrary coding mechanism using a different chemistry. But then you need another type of molecules to decode, encode and replicate this information. And this is something where all the actual science about non-carbon based life essentially ends. You'd need something that's functionally about as complex as a protein but we don't have enough computing power or smart enough algorithms to even begin constructing a model for it. But in theory if you have the information carrier and the replicator system, then you'd be closer to being able to call it life. I haven't heard of any proposals of inorganic protein-like molecules but in theory you might be able to construct some kind of nanoparticles with complex functions. If someone's encoutered something more substantial then "silicon is versatile" then it would bring something to discuss about to the table. But jumping from a "versatile atom" to life is a pretty huge leap. Unless we go in the realm of self-replicating robots and stuff like that where obviously we could build a robot that's able to build other robots. But it's not something that can develop on it's own.

Titan should be taken seriously. It's the home of The Kraken after all.

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. 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. 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. Planet rolls above Bill and Jeb while they're burning to leave home. The craft approaching Moon. 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. Jeb hops into the lander and undocks from the Adventurer. After the first breaking burn the landing trajectory looks like this. 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. Touchdown from inside the lander. After taking this shot Jeb hits the thrusters and spins the craft around for other pictures to be taken. Jeb stands on lunar surface at last, watching the Earth hang above the horizon. It's so barren in here. Well that was it, time to head home. Jeb waits for the orbiting craft to pass over him and fires up the engines. 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. The approach goes fine and Jeb closes in on the front docking port of the Adventurer. 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. 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. Time to go home. I'm leaving the periapsis a bit high because the decoupling events will push it further down. 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. 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 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 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.

For anything long-term I think there should be a maximum level of housekeeping you need to do. I could see a research base work where for example you build the base that has a certain research module, bring in crew, they work there for a year and then you bring them back home and that's it. If you unlock a new research module later, you can then come back to the existing infrastructure and use it for the new stuff. Something like what Station Science mod does. What I don't want to do is keep babysitting bases or relay networks. That's one reason why I usually don't play with RT2 because you can never get the orbits perfectly and while adjusting them every now and then is easy, it's just something that I'd rather not do because it's tedious. Same goes for life support. In theory it's nice and you can have greenhouses and whatnot and it's great if done correctly but what I don't want to do is keep hauling resupply missions to every manned base once a year. The first resupply mission is pretty fun, but the second is just the same thing over and after that it's grinding. I think they have a good concept with the comms systems right now, but a barebones range requirement would be nice (I think there's an antennarange mod that does this). Just something simple like make one antenna for ground - orbit comms, once for planet SOI comms and a big dish for interplanetary comms. Relay would just check if for example the rover has antenna range to reach the orbiting satellite that in turn has the big dish to reach home. Or go simple and slap the dish on the rover but if you're planning multiple missions then the relay satellite would be useful. Most definitely no LoS requirements and no loss of control. These are way too frustrating to have in stock game.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. I spot another asteroid on my way! Oh no! I hope it doesn't hit my favourite snack bar 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 :/ 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. And the inevitable conclusion. It's technically still a landing... At least it's the first kerbal-made object to reach the surface! 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. Jeb was a bit bummed about botching the landing as well so he was happy when Earth rolled in view. In the final phase of the mission the cabin detaches from the return module and prepares for re-entry. 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. A succesful landing on the savanna! Jeb and Bill pop out to stretch their legs. I hope there aren't any lions afoot D: And the science report for the mission. Not bad at all and this doesn't even include the stuff I sent with the probe. 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.

Not to mention they'd drown in SQUAD MAKE THIS AND THAT MOD STOCK OMG!!!!! threads if they openly started implementing mods. It's a slope too slippery to walk on. You may creep there in the dead of night when nobody's watching to grab a gem or two but don't wake up the wolves.

Yeah, I think we're on the same page. Mainly my point about the canards was that if you generally go very fast with so much control authority, it might be very hard to input any pitch controls without flipping the plane over and also at hypersonics there's some weird aerodynamic stuff going on with the taperings and such which I think has usually been my problem but like I said it's all magic land to me. But it's true that the engineering definitely isn't the issue here and the plane flies neatly until it breaks mach one so talking about the canards or control surfaces isn't actually relevant to the problem. Now I got a sudden urge to build some planes and see how much they can handle D:

Interesting to see how this turns out. Have you considered dabbling in the arcane arts of VTOL?

Well there's two issues, one is the wobbliness which is a SAS and control surface issue, but of course the disassembly is caused by the aerodynamic force. I've used canards sometimes successfully too, but sometimes I get backflips because of them and have no idea how to predict it so as a rule of thumb I'd say try losing them on a problematic craft and see if it helps. I might be wrong of course but from the video it looks like the SAS is overpredicting and would probably eventually push the plane to a spin anyway, at least in hypersonic speeds. I wouldn't fly a plane at mach 3 that wobbles like that and has half of wing surface area as control surfaces. But as a disclaimer I haven't had a plane break apart in-flight on me (mainly because I haven't flown planes much lately) so can't really say much about that but it's stated pretty clearly in the flight report that stuff breaks due to aerodynamic stress I'd imagine that the wobbliness doesn't help with that.

I use standardized lifters, usually for 5, 20, 40-50 and 100 tonnes. I don't standardize my spaceplanes but for some reason they always end up looking almost identical

On a glimpse it looks like the SAS contributes to the wobble as it overcorrects back and forth. Also as noted you're flying too low and fast so even the small wobble is a lot of stress on the craft. You should be able to fly without SAS anyway if the craft is stable. You can try going slow and get some more altitude before hitting max throttle but i agree that you should try losing the front canards.

I'm not always sure if people are talking about self-sufficience as in total independence of supply missions or as in closed-loop life support. The life support is something that's very much doable if enough money and effort is poured on it as it's just a technical matter, even though a complex one. Total independence would mean that they'll build everything in situ. Every machine to run the life support, every machine to build the life support system and every machine to mine the materials for everything plus of course the machines to build those machines et cetera. I don't see that possible without either a very, very long term project or a level of nanotechnology that we're a century away from. In both cases we're talking several decades at least.

I'm now picturing massive underground silicone deposits, wobbling about causing all kinds of tectonic anomalies. The manned mining mission will be paid by the plastic surgery business. And on Venus, of all the places. I can definitely see the marketing possibilities here.

That's not ambiguous, it's clues pointing to an existing answer. Where 2001 steps in is that it actually provides ambiguous situations and concepts for us to think about. There's not supposed to be "an answer" to figure out. If there was, it wouldn't be so thought provoking.

I'm not sure if you mean something else than ceramics in general, but there's plenty of older ceramics around. The earliest ceramics here in the northern periferia dates to about 5000 b.c making it roughly 7000 years old. This stuff is easily found in any stone age habitat in large quantities and it's preserved very well.

As a kind of an intellectual boomerang I'm gonna ask why do you feel that movies need to be made exclusively comprehensible on first or second time watching? You don't expect this from a painting, a poem, a song or a sculpture nor always from a book. You're expected to stare at Mona Lisa's smile after centuries and still ponder what it's really about or you can read a poem over and over and over, find new thoughts rising and new feelings. And not to mention authors like Sartre who can easily pour a lifetime of thoughts in a book. If a movie is not easily understood, why exactly is it not a good movie? I can agree that it's longwinded and difficult at times to watch and obviously the art of storytelling an conveying ideas through film has developed a lot in the last 40+ years. I can totally understand if someone doesn't like it. I don't like opera. It's incomprehensible, loud and boring with cliche stories. However saying that Kubrick failed or that there's no plot is something that I think is a bit of an oversimplification. Just as I can't really say Pavarotti is a bad singer because I haven't got a clue what he's yodling about now. 2001 is not a movie made for quick entertainment, it's more philosophy and art and exactly as was inteded by the director. If Kubrick had failed, there would be no 10 page discussion. You couldn't get two pages from Transformers unless you start posting pictures of Megan Fox. If you want to see a REALLY long winded and boring movie, go watch Stalker or any other Tarkovski movie.

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. Time to launch the mission! Bob soars through the clouds to the open skies. I added some O2 tanks to the instrument section. Bob has oxygen supply that will last him months! 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. As the burn finishes and Kerbury Three coasts in space over the seas, Bob watches the Moon slide across his small window. 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. 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. Bob watches vigilantly as half of the planet is fast asleep before him. Not a bad view. Greetings from space! 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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!

Playing with RSS + RO + a million mods:

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. The capsule is detached from the instrument and propulsion section and prepares for re-entry. The flames barely tickle the capsules heat shield, but then again it wasn't coming in even close to orbital speeds. 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. Splashdown! Against all odds Jeb survives the flight!

This is one awesome story! I could seriously just read chapter after chapter of nothing but the everyday life of kerbals building rockets, tending groves or just hanging around. The world you've build is really vivid and living. No matter what you do, never give up writing, you have talent.