Stratzenblitz75

I don't really "hate" any of the planets. That said, there are a few that I find lackluster or poorly designed. For example, I've come to dislike Duna for its boring, featureless surface. Seriously, everytime I go there, I'm always greeted by the same expanse of rolling hills. It doesn't seem to matter where I land either. Land in the lowlands: samey hills in all directions. Land in the highlands; samey hills in every direction. Land somewhere in between; samey samey hills as far as the eye can see. It wasn't always like this either; the old Duna terrain had WAY more notable features: (Images by @GregroxMun) I also don't like the Mun. Honestly, I think its procedural craters look like a complete mess. Once again, I prefer the old Mun terrain.

I have tried it without kopernicus. The flare works completely fine without kopernicus installed. I use stock visual terrain with kopernicus. However, while trying to find the cause of the sun-flare incompatibility, I uninstalled stock visual terrain. This mish-mash of the stock sun-flare and the scatterer sun-flare happens with just scatterer and kopernicus installed.

I think I have another first (In stock KSP, at least). A completely reusable Eve mission:

Personally, I love creating "odd" challenges for myself. For example, can you go to Duna only using NERVAs? Or how about stuffing a Tylo mission into a mkII cargo bay? Or a 70 cm tall Moho mission? That's what I like the most about KSP; it allows me to explore such bizzare challenges and come up with interesting solutions to them. I'm not sure one would call that an "area" or "field" of KSP, but I enjoy it nonetheless.

I've also experienced the "stock flare combined scatterer flare". I'm positive it is a result of having both Kopernicus and scatterer installed at the same time. (A stock 1.1.3 install with only scatterer has the correct sun-flare. Kopernicus plus scatterer creates a mish-mash of the two flares). Here's what it looks like: From this distance, it doesn't look that bad. However, when you get closer to the sun, the stock-flare becomes extremely large and completely overpowers the scatterer flare. I've already notified the Kopernicus devs of this and am awaiting their response.

While your SRB SSTO is an impressive achievement, sorry to say, it was not the first. There was a reddit challenge about 4 months ago and several people submitted SRB SSTO space planes. Its quite interesting to see what they came up with: https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/47usil/weekly_challenge_week_119_unstoppable_ii/

Recently, I've come across a sun-flare compatibility issue while running Kopernicus and Scatterer. Running stock 1.1.3 KSP with only the latest scatterer installed, the scatterer sun-flare works fine. However, after adding Kopernicus, the stock sun-flare is rendered along with the scatterer sunflare, creating a mish-mash of the two: I haven't seen this conflict in previous versions of KSP, even with both scatterer and Kopernicus installed. Has anyone else experienced this?

There's a bit of "ghost" terrain that bridges the canyon. Its not visible from below or above; only when you look down the length of the canyon. Sorry for not specifying. Also, Dres is awesome!

Excellent work with these textures! They look so much cleaner than the stock textures. That said, I've experienced a bug with this mod. When you look at Dres' infamous canyon, you can see these strange artifacts: The only mods I have installed are MechJeb, RCSbuildaid, and other informational mods. No other visual mods are installed. Is it just me, or has anyone else experienced this bug?

I think you might be looking for Shurnir's awe-inspiring KSP Mikro. Really an incredible feat of engineering!

To start off July, I head to Eve again. But this time, I bring everything back!

Today, I sent a mission to Eve and back... And recovered all the parts back at KSC!

At 24,430 Tons and 1373 parts, my Duna3 mission is by far the largest thing I've launched in stock KSP. (Stock physics as well... It was a real pain to get this to work without KJR)

And, on top of all of this, the heat tolerance of the service bay is ridiculously high (2900 K), and thus, you can use it as a heatsheild! Seriously, I use 1.25m service bays to re-enter all my mk1 command pods. They even work on interplanetary reentries (from Duna, at least. I suspect they won't survive a reentry from a Jool->Kerbin reentry). I never realized how useful the service bay actually was until I gave it a try. From now on, my mk1 capsules won't leave home without it.

Ever since 1.1 came out, I've avoided using landing gear for fear of the bugs they induce. Instead, I've adapted a more unconventional landing strategy: I don't put any landing gear on and simply let the lander fall over on touchdown. Then, when I'm ready to launch, I ignite a seperatron hidden in the service bay which pushes the rocket upright, allowing it to take off: In my opinion, this landing technique is a lot better than using landing gear (for small, one use only landers, at least). It is much lighter, its 100% reliable and it produces much less drag.

That's actually pretty interesting! How does it work though? Do you have a video of it in action?

Greetings all! Two weeks ago, I decided it would be a fun challenge to build a Duna2 mission. The goal, of course, was to go to Duna, come back to Kerbin, then go off to Duna again, then come back home again. All with one rocket on a direct descent mission (No docking or refueling). However, after building this rocket, I realized there was a crippling flaw: Do you see it? Its only 1672 tons and only 168 parts! And thats with a heavy Mk1-2 capsule on top! That's way too small! Not even worth my time to try! Suddenly, a crazy thought entered my mind: what if I added another phase to it? What if I transformed this into a Duna3 mission? After running some calculations, I realized a Duna^3 rocket could be created with a mass of less than 30,000 tons. Surely, a 30,000 ton rocket was possible, right? With 1.1 and proper application of more boosters and more struts, anything is possible. Well, turns out, it wasn't that simple. --- Building Big --- For designing the mission, I broke it down into three phases. Each phase represents a full mission from Kerbin to Duna and back. Breaking the mission into pieces like this helped me focus and prevent the mission from growing into a convoluted, unmanageable mess. Building the last phase was one of the most important steps of designing the mission. The mass of it single-handily determines how massive the final rocket is. If I built it too large, then the rocket carrying that phase would be larger, and the rocket that would carry that rocket would be even larger. It exponentially grows out of control. Keeping this in mind, I arrived at this design: It uses an aerospike coupled with 3 boosters, each running a 5x cluster of "spark" engines. While an aerospike with just 2 boosters would be more efficient, the three booster setup allows me to land safely and (somewhat) reliably. A service bay is used as a heat shield for the final reentry (it has the same mass as a heat shield with no ablator, plus, you can put batteries and other draggy parts inside of it.) Notice the lack of landing gear on the Duna lander as well. Turns out, its more mass-efficient to simply let the lander fall over and use a separation to push the vessel upright for launch. It also produces far less drag, which is very important for a rocket this small. The second phase was more straight forward. It didn't have to be as efficient, so I didn't focus much on optimal engine configurations or anything like that. I only ensured that it stayed within the mass requirements that I determined during my calculations. Instead, I focused my time into making it as tough and reliable as possible. After all, it needed to survive a Kerbin reentry from interplanetary speeds, and land safely afterward. The inflatable heat shields were a god-send here: they produce a ton of drag when deployed, and are much lighter than the other heat shields per square meter. For the landing system, I used a combination of parachutes and engines to perform a powered landing. To take the impact of landing, I used the MK3 to 3.75m adaptor. It holds fuel and has an impact tolerance of 20 m/s, making it perfect for the job. The first phase was by far the most interesting. The Duna lander of the third stage had to safely land over 2000 tons of lander onto the Dunatian surface. Naively, I took the same approach to building the second stage: more boosters, and more struts when it breaks apart. However, KSP had other plans: I added more struts, same thing happened. Even more struts. Same thing. No matter how many struts I applied, the rocket would not stay together. It always broke apart. Clearly, the ole saying of "more struts" wasn't working. I needed something different. So, I scrapped the design and thought about the problem. Perhaps the issue was in the way the craft was built. After all, the craft always seemed to fall apart at the same failure points: the boosters furthermost from the core would break first, causing rapid dissassembly of the entire rocket. Perhaps, if I attached all the landing boosters directly to the center stack, then they would be stronger. It would result in a smaller landing base, but the COM was low enough that I didn't think it would be a problem. It worked. In fact, it worked so well I almost couldn't believe what I was seeing. In all of my play time of KSP, I've never seen a rocket that massive survive a 5 m/s impact. Yet, here it was, taking the impact like it was nothing. I checked the alt-12 menu. Nope, no cheats, it was actually working under stock physics. The mission was almost done. All that was left was to build the first stage. The rocket that would carry the entire mission off the ground. The 30,000 behemoth that I thought I could build so easily with "more boosters, more struts". I figured that since this stage wasn't supposed to withstand the stress of landing, I went back to this more boosters, more struts philosophy. It didn't work: After adding more struts again, and watching it fail again, I realized that I was running into the same problem as my Duna lander. The answer does not lie in more struts. Its how you build the craft! So, scrapped the design and moved from the "booster block" design: To one that more resembles a sky scraper, with the boosters branching off from the core boosters: After some tweaking the fuel lines and struts, I arrived at my final design: the Duna3 mission. At 1373 parts and over 20,000 tons, it is the largest and most complicated rocket I've ever launched in KSP: I Hope you all enjoy seeing it in action! Signing off, -Stratzenblitz75

While this is more of a mission report, I think it still contains many elements of a cinematic. I present to you, Duna3: I'm trying to improve my camera work and pacing of my videos so any suggestions here would be greatly appreciated!

I don't think anyone has attempted a Duna3 mission in 1.1.2:

For June, I decide to go to Duna and back. Three times. With one rocket.

Today I finished one of the most ambitious missions I've ever attempted: Duna3 - Direct descent mission to Duna and back THREE times - no refueling

I didn't do it with Demo parts, but at least I didn't use parachutes! Eve and back with SRBs:

Today, I went to Moho... In a 70 cm tall pancake...

After over a month of inactivity, I've finally released another video! This time, I see how short I can make a Moho mission. Turns out, its about 70 cm.