Angelo Kerman

Oh neat, I can install GPP Blackrack’s Volumetric EVE, and your mod to bring GPP up to date? Has your mod been tried in conjunction with KSS2? Apparently KSS2 needs Parallax 2, and ParallaxC is only minimally supported. I'm also curious to know how you used Gemini to help with your mod. I'd love to update GEP to use Volumetric EVE, but I haven't the faintest idea on how to do that.

Chapter 7 Per International Space Consortium policy, no single company received all the contracts needed for any given project. So, when they needed a new münbase to study the Arch, they hired Orbital Dynamics to build the temporary shelter out of their proven Buffalo 2 modular spacecraft system and contracted with the Arrow Space Corporation to build more permanent dwellings via their Sandcaster robotic 3D printer. Orbital Dynamics launched the temporary shelter’s components via their Mk33 spacecraft and delivered them to Sky Reef space station over the course of two weeks. They arrived with little fanfare, but they proved to be the final orbital flights of the Mk33 v1.1 SSTO. An evolution of the v1.0 design, the v1.1 model sported a beefier airframe and an additional set of landing gear to handle horizontal takeoffs while being fully loaded. The design was successful and the v1.0 models were given the v1.1 refit. But with the delivery of the last temporary module, Orbital Dynamics announced the early retirement of their fleet of Mk33 v1.1 spacecraft. In the same press conference, they announced their plans to introduce their new Mk33 Grav Thrust model. As its name implied, the new Mk33 was powered by gravitic engines, and it had the potential to fly from Kerbin to Minmus in a matter of hours. Best of all, the space formerly taken by the SSTO’s cavernous propellium and oxidizer tanks left plenty of room for future upgrades. With all the temporary shelter’s components staged at Sky Reef, the station crew got to work repositioning the Newton so that they could fit the components to the front docking port. Then they assembled the shelter into its transport configuration, and finally, the reconfigured Shuttlepod 1. Some engineers at Orbital Dynamics watched the process as it happened, and they started thinking about what containerized shipping would look like in space… A couple of days later, the ship’s crew arrived- four scientists, an engineer, and a pilot- and they departed Sky Reef in the Newton and headed for the Mün. During Newton’s three-day trip, the ISC launched a modified Drop Pod into orbit via a Drax Aerospace Jool Heavy- still the heaviest lift launch vehicle in the inventory. The Jool Heavy delivered the Drop Pod and its cargo, a Sandcastle 3D printer, into an LKO parking orbit before heading over to the Space Operations Center, unloading the Drop Pod, and then deorbiting. The SOC station crew then linked the pod up with MoS Tug 2- one of the few Ministry of Space Tugs that returned from Duna Expedition 3- which had been waiting for months for a new mission. After a boring three-day trip, Sandcaster arrived in münar orbit before the Newton thanks to orbital mechanics. Since it lacked the delta-v needed to adjust its inclination to pass over the Arch, Orbital Dynamics sent its only available OCTV from Oasis to refuel the tug. By contrast, the Newton had no trouble adjusting its orbit thanks to its gravitic engines. But once refueled, Sandcaster matched planes with Newton in preparation for landing. With that maneuver completed, the Drop Pod separated from the MoS 2 tug and landed safely near the Arch. It easily drove the two kilometers to the Arch and parked there to await the rest of the expedition… With the Sandcastle safely on the ground, Newton’s crew got to work. Using the PMV that they borrowed from Sky Reef, the crew pulled the Buffalo Shelter Hub from its storage position and docked it to the back of Shuttlepod 1’s command module. With the overhead truss, it had plenty of room to handle the module. A quick EVA by the ship's pilot and engineer later, and Shuttlepod 1 was on her way to the ground. Shuttlepod 1’s gravitic engine made landing on the Mün trivial- almost to the point where the astronauts missed the “old” days of blasting into orbit atop giant rockets. Nonetheless, they dropped off the hub and boosted back to orbit. Each orbital pass they dropped off another module until all of them were on the surface. After the final trip, the crew boarded the “School Bus” for the trip to the surface. They left the Newton on automatic, which was standard procedure for an ISC expedition to another planet, but for Kerbin and her müns, however, that left DSX-01 unavailable for another mission. The Exploration Council made a note to review their procedures later, and possibly commission some kind of runabout… Once on the ground, the crew got to work activating the Sophisticated Lightweight Optimized Transportation Helper (SLOTH) docked to the underside of the B2 Hub Module. With the outpost’s components scattered around the landing zone, Sloth picked up each one and brought them together. Once the crew entered the Münar Arch Base, they turned on the lights, unpacked the RTGs, and got to work setting up the base and its science station. A week later, a second Drop Pod arrived with additions to the base that were forgotten added at the last minute, including a workshop, a sickbay, and a Buffalo rover. The expedition team quickly added the new additions while the Sandcaster continued to print the tools that it needed to build larger accommodations. Within a few months, they’d have their permanent research facility… * As Karbal watched the news reports of the Münar Arch Expedition 1 unfold, he had to admit that his readership had dropped- real life was proving much more interesting! Plus, in just a few weeks, the Nautilus would return from her historic mission to Jool, and the Heroes of Duna would be returning a couple of months after Nautilus. He decided that he needed to wrap up his alternate history. But how would that play out? KSP Insider gave him the Race to Eve idea, and that seemed like the best way to finish his alternate history story. He began to write once more… (ALT) Keep Looking Up Part 6 – Lofty Ambitions Eve. Why did the vonKerman challenge have to be Eve? Of all the planets! The next logical destination after Minmus should have been Duna. Even though Laythe, with its liquid water and oxygenated atmosphere, looked much more enticing than the rusty, dusty planet, current technology made it almost out of reach. But Eve? It had even more challenges. It was closer to Kerbol, which meant heat would be a problem. Its atmosphere was much thicker than Kerbin’s and corrosive as well, which ruled out landing there. And Eve needed roughly 60% more delta-v to reach than the delta-v needed for Duna. Eve. Why did it have to be Eve? Including safety margins, an interplanetary craft needed a whopping 5,000 m/sec of delta-v to reach the Purple Planet- double that to return to Kerbin. Such a feat required innovation. Fortunately, some theoretical technology was up to the task: nuclear thermal propulsion, also known as atomic rockets. By using a nuclear reactor to heat up propellium and expel it, atomic rockets could achieve much higher efficiency compared to conventional rockets. But there was a problem: as part of the terms to end The Last War, kerbals banned all nuclear technology except for use in terrestrial power plants. Development of a nuclear thermal propulsion rocket engine would require amendments to international treaties- something that the vonKermans and mcKermans opposed. That meant that any spacecraft headed to Eve could only use non-nuclear technology. With that in mind, KSP engineers investigated two propulsion options for their interplanetary transport: conventional liquid fuel/oxidizer engines, and propellium/oxidizer engines burning cryogenic fuel. Engineering studies from both competitors realized that neither solution would provide adequate delta-v without considerable cost, so they both called for a summit to discuss the peaceful uses of nuclear technology in outer space. The mcKerman Kingdom outright refused to attend the summit until some backdoor negotiations finally brought them to the table. In the end, careful deliberations resulted in a new treaty that allowed all three nations to develop atomic rockets if they had independent oversight to ensure that nobody created nuclear weapons as well. The three nations were ready to sign the treaty until the mcKermans suddenly threatened to withdraw from the negotiations unless one further concession was made: the nations would be allowed to build nuclear reactors in space as well. Eager to continue their race to Eve, the Kerman States and the vonKerman Republic quickly agreed to the amendment. Both nations immediately began designing nuclear engines to power their interplanetary spacecraft and designing and redesigning their best possible solution to reach Eve. To ensure that the race remained a friendly one, both nations also jointly developed cryogenic hibernation technology when it became evident that their ships would need an exorbitant amount of life support to reach Eve and return. As a contingency, they agreed to ensure that each ship had enough cryogenic hibernation pods for both crews. It was a favorable start to what was shaping up to be a fantastic race. Thanks to a massive budget infusion not seen since Project Münflight, the Kerman States was the first nation to field an atomic rocket in the form of their Nuclear Shuttle. Starting from a Lindor-L2 upper stage, engineers heavily modified it to include docking port along its flanks as well as one up top. In addition, the Nuclear Shuttle was also equipped with 5-way Mk3 RCS Blocks. But the star of the show was the NV-GE Liberator atomic rocket engine. The Liberator delivered an impressive 820 kN of thrust with a 1,625 second ISP thanks to its advanced, gas core design (its nuclear core was heated to a plasma). It was so advanced, in fact, that some wondered how the Kerman States could build such an impressive design so quickly… The Nuclear Shuttle lifted off one sunny morning atop a fully reusable Lindor 9R launch vehicle. The first stage separated from the vehicle cleanly but sadly met a destructive end when it landed too quickly. The upper stage did its job boosting the Nuclear Shuttle nearly to orbital velocity, but it also landed too fast and was destroyed. At least the Nuclear Shuttle fared better; it attained a 150km parking orbit, but not without problems. KSP had hoped to use the vehicle to transport a station to the Mün, but a programming error caused it to jettison its docking adapter along with its nosecone. At least radiation sensors confirmed that the Nuclear Shuttle’s shadow shield- designed to shield the vessel from lethal radiation- was working. The craft would have to wait until KSP engineers could find a solution. * Meanwhile, after returning from space, the Ministry of Space’s Newton space plane underwent a refit to the new Block 2 standard while her sister ship, the Odyssey, took over spaceflight operations. Learning lessons from Newton, Odyssey sported redesigned jet engine pods along that were mounted to reinforced thermal panels. The panels replaced the aft crew cabin windows, which developed cracks during launch. Additionally, the spacecraft gained dorsal and ventral escape rockets to address astronaut concerns about fleeing from a malfunctioning launch vehicle. In the event of a catastrophic failure, the Odyssey could jettison its service module and ignite its escape rockets to get away. The motors were powerful enough to boost a Block 2 space plane away from a booster still on the launchpad. Once the motors were spent, they were jettisoned to lighten the craft for landing. In a normal ascent, the escape rockets provided an extra boost during the orbital circularization burn and were discarded after expending their propellant. The launch went well except for when the escape boosters fired; they experienced a rapid unplanned disassembly! Fortunately, Odyssey suffered no ill effects and continued her climb into orbit. Four and a half hours after launch, the new space plane arrived at Sir Arthur mcKerman Memorial Space Station, and her crew began to move into their new temporary home.

Thanks to an astute reader and the Wayback Machine, I've restored nearly all of the images. Flight of The Endeavour didn't fare as well, unfortunately, the latter half of its images are unrecoverable.

No clue what could be causing that. Try removing StockDroppablePart.cfg from the Patches folder. That's the only place where I mess with the jetpack.

Congrats on the new gig! I've been on a KSP hiatus myself, though I'm starting to gain some interest again. Sadly my latest JNSQ report lost a bunch of Imgur images so I'm building a new save. Glad to hear that you're keeping busy and most importantly, having fun!

Well shoot. While I thought I still had the images that have gone missing, it turns out that I don't. For whatever reason, the Imgur images are simply not there. It's strange because some of the images in this mission report are still around and still uploaded to Imgur, but the others that are missing just aren't there. Why, I don't know. So, I'm at an impasse: do I try to recreate the scenes, delete the dead links, or just close up shop with this mission report? Part of the reason this mission report stalled is because I ran into problems trying to spawn vessels on the ground with Sandcastle. It would work fine at KSC, but when I tried it elsewhere, the orientation of the craft was completely off. Extraplanetary Launchpads had the same problem, which is why I tried to make it work in Sandcastle in the first place. I still haven't figured out what the problem is, and it's another reason why I started losing interest in KSP. So, not sure what to do...

Well the good news is that Imgur still has the images. I would need to re-add them to the posts to get things back on track. That said I should think about wrapping up this mission report. It has been fun exploring an alt universe of my fictional universe and playing in JNSQ but I’m running out of things to do in this save. Plus, as much as I like JNSQ scale, it seems that there are more planet packs at stock scale.

If I get an interest in KSP again, maybe I'll do something with this (and start a new thread): The Deep Space Carrier program was not off to a good start. Voyager, DSC-01, was supposed to blast off from Kerbin in a manner romanticized in video games, reach orbit by shedding its boosters and cargo-bay mounted drop tanks, and go on a shakedown cruise to the Mun (pronounced "moon" by the inhabitants of Kerbin). The liftoff boosters did their job well, at least, and as soon as they completed their job, Voyager dropped them off to be recovered and reused. Then the ship aimed skyward and boosted for orbit. But when her side boosters finished their work, that's when the trouble began. The port side booster collided with the ship and ripped away several engines- not to mention part of the engine cowlings- as they separated from the craft. Realizing that the ship was a lost cause, Voyager's sole occupant scrambled to escape the stricken ship and perform a high-altitude bailout before he suffered the inevitable fate of DSC-01. As the ship plunged to its doom, the test pilot splashed down into the water and awaited retrieval by the space center. The Voyager-class Deep Space Carrier was designed as a transport that could haul cargo across interplanetary space. Its port and starboard cargo bays could hold a variety of different payloads ranging from satellites to stations, from resources to components for a base, and whatever else the kerbals could think of. Her modular design ensured that her various systems could be upgraded over time while retaining the overall hull- and the considerable investment in a Deep Space Carrier. New engines? Not a problem, just disconnect the obsolete ones. Need to self-refuel? Add an In-Situ Resource Unit (in development). And so on. The new Voyager-class had promise if engineers could work through its design problems. And she'd be needed in the coming decades. The Mystery Goo was consuming Kerbin's biosphere...

Yeah it looks like Imgur broke nearly all the picture links! Well, that really bites. But to be honest I lost a lot of interest in KSP when KSP 2 tanked, and my efforts to spawn craft on the ground via Sandcastle flat out broke due to the KSP 1 game engine. Not sure what to do here since it would take a lot to rebuild all the images in this story. My JNSQ play through was largely done though; I had completed my mission to Laythe, had a side story with Duna, and such. For The Last Munflight, I was going with an alternate history approach to explore more uses for my Lindor rocket, but I was running out of ideas for it.

Many years ago I did very much the same thing for my Kerbin Elcano Exploration Program (K.E.E.P.) mission report. That report was the reason why I built the Heisenberg mod. I didn't want to slow boat around Kerbin, especially given that ships are much slower than aircraft. Anyway, I appreciate the sentiment. If I had more time, I would renovate the parts- especially the gondola parts- to leverage the experience that I gained from making the Buffalo 2. That, and take another crack at the part module that I built to sever the mod's dependency on Hooligan Labs.

They were built to fly an airship around the world. I wasn't going to take months to do that. But if they bother you, you can: 1) use thrust limiter 2) write a Module Manager patch to reduce their thrust

Thank you for the typo fix. Development is on hiatus as I struggle through the last major piece of functionality for the current release: printing vessels on the ground. I'm finding that the craft are oriented wrong- NOT sharing the same orientation as the printer vessel- and that causes the craft to collide into the ground and explode. It happens with EPL too, and it's VERY frustrating. It's so frustrating that I've stopped working on the problem for now, and by extension, stopped playing KSP since I need that functionality in my own game. Anyway: Sandcastle 1.2.6 is now available: Changes IN DEVELOPMENT IMPORTANT NOTE: Currently, printing vessels on the ground is resulting in their orientations NOT matching the orientation of the printer, and result in the spawned vessel crashing into the ground. You won't likely see this at the space center, but it definitely happens on other planets. This is a source of major frustration for me right now. - The Sandcaster's printers will now only be available when the printer arm has been deployed. - Upon completion of printing, if a vessel is printed on the ground, then the printers will draw a movable box depicting where the vessel will spawn. Simply use the movement arrows to place the box in the desired position before pressing the Finalize Printing button. - The MATERIALS_LIST and TECH_NODE_MATERIALS config nodes now allow you to add REQUIRED_COMPONENT config nodes that specify what parts are required to complete parts in the part category and/or tech node, respectively. - You can now specify a MATERIALS_LIST for a Community Category. NOTE: For a part to make use of a Community Category materials list, the part's "category" field must be set to "none" and you must properly define a Community Category in the part's "tag" field. NOTE: The FIRST Community Category found in the part's config will be used as the part's category for the purposes of determining its MATERIALS_LIST. - Added Sandcastle support to the Mk1 Drydock and Mk3-75 Drydock from the Mark One Laboratory Extensions mod. NOTE: If you see the drydock parts in the MOLE category tab, DO NOT USE THEM! They will have "Deprecated" in their title. Use the drydock parts found under the Sandcastle category tab instead. - SCShipwright have new configurable fields: // Alternate transforms- these are used in place of spawnTransformName to help orient vessels properly. spawnTransformVABName = VesselSpawnPointVAB spawnTransformSPHName = VesselSpawnPointSPH // Maximum possible craft size that can be printed: Height (X) Width (Y) Length (Z). E.G. 5,5,5 // Leave commented out for unlimited printing dimensions. maxCraftDimensions = 11,11,20 // Flag to indicate if the printer should offset the printed vessel to avoid colliding with the printer upon spawning. Recommended to set to FALSE for printers with enclosed printing spaces. repositionCraftBeforeSpawning = false - WBIPrintShop has new configurable fields: // Maximum possible craft size that can be printed: Height (X) Width (Y) Length (Z). E.G. 5,5,5 // Leave commented out for unlimited printing dimensions. maxCraftDimensions = 11,11,20 // Flag to indicate if the printer should offset the printed vessel to avoid colliding with the printer upon spawning. Recommended to set to FALSE for printers with enclosed printing spaces. repositionCraftBeforeSpawning = false Bug Fixes - Fixed issue where Shipbreaker would get stuck if it had no storage capacity for a resource that it was trying to drain from the part being recycled. - Fixed issue where Shipbreaker would get stuck if the recycled part's dry mass or variant mass is negative. - Fixed issue where Shipbreaker wasn't emptying the inventory of stored parts from the ship being recycled. - Fixed issue where Shipbreaker would store recycled parts in the vessel that it was recycling. - Fixed issue where Shipbreaker's UI wasn't reflecting the parts that had been recycled. - Fixed issue with duplicated parts being added to the Shipbreaker's recycling queue.

KFS 1.3.3 is now available: - Bug Fixes - Fix for Size 3 gravitic engine- Thanks JadeOfMaar! - Fix for Blueshift patch- Thanks OoglakKerman!

Not under active development, but it does get occasional bug fixes.

As I recall, the Flapjack landing struts were supposed to use it, but I may have disabled it for some reason. No Tweakscale support out of the box, sorry.

Gravity braking is where you warp so that you're headed away from the planet, but gravity pulls you towards it, thus slowing you down. That's currently in development. The idea is that it will negate about 95% of the planet's gravity, making it easier to get into orbit using other means like conventional rockets. @FATHER208 Sounds like something I need to investigate.

Duna Space Program | Test Flight | K.E.E.P. | When We Left Kerbin are my original mission reports, in that order. For JNSQ, in order: To the Mun! | Shuttle Launch System | Commercial Space Ventures | Flight of The Endeavour | The Last Mun Flight I'm on a break for The Last Mun Flight- I'm slowly working on some fixes for Sandcastle that I need to progress further. Thanks for reading!

CRP can be used. Just follow the examples in Snacks and FreshAir. The configs aren't tied to specific resources; you can specify a resource that you want to use, and set the configs to use that. Hydrazine does exactly that... For units, that depends on how often you want to consume resources. Generally Snacks is set up to assume 3 meals per day- and it adjusts its day based on the mods you're using.

Hopefully I provided enough comments in the existing configs to let people create their own life support resources. Water could be treated just like Snacks, for instance, so you could copy the Snacks config and modify it.

Sure thing, please post your questions and I'll do my best to answer them.

Nothing personal, but over the years, I've found that too many people skip the tutorials and then express frustration with not being able to figure out how things work. I figured out that I could skip the work involved with making tutorials and still get the frustrations. If you have something specific, I can try to answer your question.

Nicely done. The cargo bay has crew capacity because of the command seats. You can open the cargo bay doors and seat kerbals with their feet dangling over the side, like so:

Although I've had a bad case of work and Satisfactory, I have been working on several bugs found in Sandcastle. I've updated the pre-release with the latest set of fixes, listed below: Bug Fixes - Fixed issue where Shipbreaker would get stuck if it had no storage capacity for a resource that it was trying to drain from the part being recycled. - Fixed issue where Shipbreaker would get stuck if the recycled part's dry mass or variant mass is negative. On a totally unrelated note, I need to update Buffalo 2... - Fixed issue where Shipbreaker wasn't emptying the inventory of stored parts from the ship being recycled. - Fixed issue where Shipbreaker would store recycled parts in the vessel that it was recycling. - Fixed issue where Shipbreaker's UI wasn't reflecting the parts that had been recycled. - Fixed issue with duplicated parts being added to the Shipbreaker's recycling queue. There's still more to do, but it's getting there. One thing I'm not sure how to handle is how to reflect the way that the Shipbreaker recycles parts. It is working by design but how I'm showing the list make it look buggy. The Shipbreaker works by adding all the parts that don't have children into the queue ahead of those that do. The UI shows the list of parts that are being worked on, and the list of parts that have child-parts that need to be removed before they can be worked on. As a result, the UI can look like it pulls parts from the bottom of the list when a part with child-parts has had its last child-part removed. I'm not sure how to represent the parts waiting to be recycled- maybe a different color? The same goes for the root part. It is the last part that will be recycled.

The bounding box is appearing while in orbit? Hm, that's not supposed to happen. What should happen is that in orbit, the vessel should be lined up with the printer and coupled to the printing vessel. I should have another pre-release update this week given the progress I made.

Finally figured out why the Shipbreaker was stalling while trying to recycle a vessel: if a part's mass was negative due to the way it's mass was calculated without resources (sometimes part definitions are wrong), or if the part's variant mass makes the mass go negative (*cough* B2 Saddle Tank *cough*), then the recycler will fail. The shipbreaker would also stall if it tried to drain the resources out of a part and it had no storage capacity for the resources. Now that I have that straightened out, I can investigate why the part recycling list isn't being updated properly. I have another major issue to tackle as well: when on the ground, for some reason, the recycler isn't properly coupling the vessel being recycled. Meaning that the recycler doesn't treat itself and the vessel being recycled as a single craft...