Creature

New Frontiers This is Dubious Five. It's going places. 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. Here's the craft approaching the Moon. It's pretty exciting Encounter! 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. 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. Night on Earth. I wonder if little kerbals are staring at the Moon right now. 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. After the final adjustment, my orbit looks like this. Plenty of fuel left, too! 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. Separation of the descent stage. It's coming down over the beautiful middle east deserts. 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. 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. 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 And the rewards from the mission. 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.

There are some movies that can be just covered with a blanket statement "it sucks" but any movie that's regarded as a classic surely does deserve a bit more than that. It's one thing not to like them. Godfather movies were a great example, personally I'm bored to tears with them. It doesn't mean they're not great movies though, it's just me not connecting with the art. I don't really get how 2001 doesn't have a plot though. It has lots of plot. What it's missing is the standard, all-pervasive Hollywood 3-act structure where in act one groundwork is laid for the story, protagonist is introduced along with his list of Trait A, Trait B, Strenght X, Weakness Y, Quirky Habit Z and Personal Challenge To Overcome, in the end PLOT TWIST! to act two, where everything goes badly for protagonist, ending in PLOT TWIST!!, followed by act three where protagonist pulls trough, wins his Personal Challenge and if the movie is Deep or Dramatic, the protagonist dies or someone close to him suffers. We've been seriously brainwashed to expect this structure from movies and of course it works really well in keeping viewers attention and it's not a bad structure in itself. But it does condition us to react badly to different kinds of movies. For example 2001 moves in a completely different pacing. It concentrates much more on imagery, thoughts and ideas. Many things in the plot are left unknown and I mean properly unknown and mysterious, not the "The butler was the killer. OR WAS HE?!" type where the viewers task is to speculate on some possible outcomes that can be deducted directly from the movie but which are left slightly obscure. The characters are a bit boring because they're fairly normal, realistic people. And the final boss battle isn't an epic struggle where personal conflicts clash with the urgency of saving the world and conquering the objectified female reward. It's more about making a decision, pondering it's consequences and justification and acting on it.

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: 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. 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. 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. Launch goes smoothly again. Dubious Four is on it's way! 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. Everything looks so small from up here D: 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Probe hits the ground and surprisingly nothing breaks. Massive success! First recovered flight from orbit! I can see great things ahead for Oops.

But the huge majority of people have an above average number of legs. This has to count for something.

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

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.

From what little experience I have with RO, I'd say that conceptually it doesn't matter whether you're designing a rocket for stock or RO and I think this is where the KSP really has hit the mark. With RO you need more dV but it's also easier to come by. The engines are way stronger when it comes to thrust and generally you need a lot bigger rockets but the parts are very different as well. When you have the ability to freely stretch the tanks to any size, the only thing limiting you is what kind of engines you have available. If you upscale the engines, you can upscale the payload similarly both in RO and stock. However in stock KSP you're also heavily limited by the tanks and this is at least in my opinion very very well balanced. Unrealistic if you start to factor in densities and stuff, but leads to a good simulation. Everything else is just numbers on a screen. But none of this has any meaning towards real life engineering where things are difficult, expensive and very often involve hundreds/thousands of hours of boring, hard work. Also in real life we're not artificially limited, in KSP you can only do things that the programmers allow you to. So in short, you can't compare real life to computer games.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. It's time to fly! I just love the night launches 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. The Sun starts to creep above the horizon as the rocket flies towards dawn. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

You're not wrong at all, it's just I've never seen a good implementation on film. It works in books, but as I said, science or operating complicated processes is usually very very boring to watch even though it can be interesting in itself. From what little I know of it, modern day high-tech combat is already just a bunch of guys watching screens or going over data and I'd say it gets only more automated and complicated in space with more advanced, stealthy, faster and more powerful weaponry. And this I think is why film makers just blatantly ignore lots of stuff. It gets in the way of the visual storytelling. Of course they'll speak to us in english usually even when they're "speaking another language", that's just a suspension of disbelief. I'm more talking about the within-setting cultural unity which is based on western culture and values and those alone, even when the civilization is not even Earth-based (from the top of my head Battlestar Galactica - I love it but it's essentially a western democracy through and through, all pretty homogenous throughout 12 planets).

So many levels to this. I hate it when a plot revolves around some scientific thing which is just wrong or completely made up so the plot has no real traction. This is especially a thing in japanese manga/anime stuff, which is the reason I don't watch it. But then there's things that are there for the looks and story, like everything in Star Wars for example which I think is 100% fine. If you're starting to pick all the things that aren't scientifically plausible, you're missing the point of the movie. Then there's the already mentioned One Culture, which also with humans incidentally just happens to be white, mostly male and english-speaking with the token other ethnics and an european/asian accent. Next one is more a thing with books as they don't make nearly enough scifi/space television, but I just hate it when an author is so focused on making everything scientifically correct and "hard scifi" that they completely forget they're writing fiction which should have at least some character developement or generally a plot that's not "spaceships aren't jet fighters." I mean I love a good setting, but there should still be a story there. I think Alastair Reynolds does it right. One thing to remember with real life science in general is that it's super boring to watch most of the time. Imagine a a realistic scifi space battle. There's just some dude with a supercomputer getting some data and then he reports back to his superior officer about what the drone fleet did during the seven milliseconds the entire engagement lasted. They now control the local space around planet X.

Oh ok so it's working as intended then. That's pretty much what I did to fix it, wasn't a big trouble except for eyeballing the correct nodes open. I thought it updates automatically because of the interstellar tree update prompt thingy. EDIT: ninja'd by Ratzap. Does it retain the collected science or do you need to edit it back in?

I don't know if it's just me, but after installing the 19c it doesn't update the tech tree on existing save. I made a workaround by starting a new save, editing in science and opening the correct nodes, then moving the tree file into my proper save folder. This was just a bit tricky as it's hard to compare the node costs and I don't know if I can see somewhere the total science I've accumulated? I did have the old free antenna nodes opened if that makes a difference.

Pondering pathing 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. 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. 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. 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.

Of course and that's how it should be Maybe my actual point was a bit unclear there, what I'm trying to say is that just like having things perfectly balanced isn't important right now, I'd say that neither is exact historical accuracy when it comes to things like the Vanguard being solar powered if that means it's so much out of line with all other parts in terms of gameplay. Again what I'm trying to say is that the part isn't exactly unbalanced, it's pretty much broken seeing as the suggested solution is not to use it when a two minute fix to .cfg will make it a working part again. But of course it's a minor issue in itself too, I'm just nitpicking here because I love the mod(s) and just flew a mission with the Vanguard and it's a pretty cute little thing

While I understand and agree with your basic idea, I think game balance is more important here than simulating exact historical specs. It's overpowered in every way, also because it weighs essentially nothing. I don't think anyone is going to watch their probe orbit over and over again so it really only needs to last a few orbits to simulate the original mission. Also to balance the tiny size I'd suggest you give it a power consumption that's at least 2-3 times bigger than the other probes, then add a big battery to last maybe 12 hours (that's 6 orbits on it's actual orbital period) to counter the fact that it's so small that there's no point in using other cores as command units in case you're building a non-replica flight, such as a comms relay. But it's a tricky one for sure

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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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! 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. 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. 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. 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.

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 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. 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. 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.) 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. And we have an orbit! Extra round of Uncle Kerman's Strangely Flavoured Fudge for all! Another pose for the fans, showing off all antennas shamelessly with no regard to power consumption. Such vanity. 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. 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. 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"

I did a reboot of my career mode play mission reports (link in my sig) and tried my best to document the whole installing process if someone wants a some kind of written recap. Everything seems to be working, but I just started so take it with a grain of salt. Something for the future releases, I think it might be a good idea to be more clear about the required mods and are they absolutely needed for the whole thing to work or are they something that you just "should" use to get the intended gameplay experience. For example, if I were to completely leave NovaPunch out, could I still play as usual, just missing a part or two or does the whole game implode? Because right now I'm swamped already with engines right at the beginning so I could probably do with less part packs. One problem I'm having with treeloader is that I installed Interstellar and even after loading the RPL tree, the loader keeps telling me there's an update on interstellar tree. I even updated it once before choosing the RPL tree, but at every restart the same prompt appears. Now the real problem is that if I now install the update even after playing a while, it overwrites my choises and installs the interstellar tree, wiping my current selection. I've never had this before and KSPI hasn't been updated in a month so was just wondering if it's a problem with RPL or treeloader or if it's happening to others?

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. 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! 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. 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. 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. 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.

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

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.

Can't put it in the part description for each part? I'm sorry if it's a silly question, I don't know much about modding it's just that some parts seem to have altered descriptions and some not. But yeah, like I said it's not a big deal. Other science doesn't have the info either, the probes are just so spesific it'd be nice. I'm sure you have a lot on your plate anyway right now, can focus on polishing later

I'm having the same problems than you, so either we're both noobing it up big time of there's something else going on. Anyways, wanted to say I'm loving these realism mods even though I'm far from proficient in KSP so just getting to orbit is a huge challenge Technical issues aside, one suggestion that I'd like to see at some point is a bit more informative VAB descriptions for the experiments. It's not a biggie, but it's a bit non-user friendly that you need to actually get outside to see what the experiments on a probe are and even then you're a bit unsure about the conditions.

That's a fair point and I agree that it would have to be good and not choke up easily. But if you present it in a simple manner, it should become intuitive that it's just one indicator and if you go very complex with docked parts and multiple engines and action groups, the indicator's reading isn't very accurate anymore. You could use the same argument against anything really and in a way you could say that maneuver nodes and apo/periapsis markers are already like this. They're good, but they do choke up when you have something as simple as a circular orbit, maneuver nodes can still be a pain sometimes and burn time indicator can give flat out false readings sometimes. I still wouldn't want to be without them.