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Blind Dead McJones

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Posts posted by Blind Dead McJones

  1. I can confirm that there definitely is a monolith in one of the deep craters near the south pole of the Mun. Since it's at the poles, it's always in shadow. Bring a rover with lights (or Kerbals) and be sure to check in the air or even clipping underground, because that can happen sometimes depending on your graphics settings.

  2. Reputation changes the kind of contracts you can get. If you have good reputation, you'll get the nice three-star ones that have good rewards for more challenging requirements. If you get bad reputation, you'll dig yourself into a hole that you have to climb out of, doing less prestigious contracts until you get back to the point that the game will generate better contracts for you. It's also a way to make sure you don't go around killing Kerbals or blowing up buildings, because either of those things are a huge hit to your reputation.

    In short, having good reputation makes it easier to get more science and funds.

  3. There are quite a few problems with this statement, not least of which is the fact that the video isn't silent, as anyone who actually watched it would know. Which is a shame, because I'd like to explain why every single thing you've said is wrong.

    I swear I watched the whole video twice earlier and heard nothing. I checked everything too. It seems to be working now.

  4. That is kinda silly and hopefully they'll make it a little more robust, but remember that it probably wasn't designed to have a 300t rocket land on it. Your best option is probably to land in the ocean right off the coast and accept 98% recovery. Alternatively, don't make rockets that big.

    Also, minor point, but please don't make silent videos. It just seems really lazy and amateurish. If you don't have the sound from the game, at least add narration or music or something.

  5. I always assumed that the reason there's nobody around is because technically any time you are doing something around KSC, it's because you're supposed to be launching a rocket. In real life, all the area around the launchpad is blocked off for quite some distance.

  6. My career save is called KASA because I wasn't feeling particularly creative the day I started that save :P

    As for individual programs, I originally tried to have Norse mythology names, thus Asgard (Kerbin station), Valhalla (Mun base), Valkyrie (lander series, also the program for landing on new planets) etc. Then I kinda forgot about that and in career I also have Magellan (Mun exploration) and Kopernikus (Minmus exploration).

    I currently have no custom flags, however. This is a new computer and I haven't got around to installing Photoshop or anything like that yet.

  7. I put myself at 3 for the following reasons:

    1. I've been experimenting with spaceplanes and I've achieved orbit with some designs, but I haven't yet been able to use them for any real missions.

    2. I try to land at the KSC if I can, but with dV budgets and timing sometimes there's only so much you can do. Example: I usually do a return from the Mun on a direct-into-atmosphere trajectory because it saves fuel at the Mun. But if I don't put myself near KSC with that, it often takes a lot of dV to correct, not to mention time (in the game universe, anyway).

    3. I don't like to make massive rockets just for the sake of massive rockets. I recently redesigned my main Mun lander to be about 2/3 the size of the previous design, both for efficiency and aesthetic appeal.

  8. That moment when you mission ends, and everything went wrong for your mission. You barely achieved orbit. You forgot extra batteries. You miscalculated your entry and had to use more dV than you wanted. You come down in a bad area and have to make a split second, improvised burn. You aren't sure you can make it back to Kerbin with the fuel you have.

    And then you land, with your Kerbalnauts unharmed. Everything you did wrong, none of that matters, because your crew survived. The Apollo 13 moment. Sometimes it feels better than a mission where everything went perfectly.

  9. The Kopernikus program was the much anticipated Minmus exploration program designed as a follow-up of the successful Magellan series of Mun Landings. The Magellan program was a Kerbal landmark in that it was the first manned exploration of the surface of another world. It was decided after nine landings that it was a good time to think of making the next step to Minmus, not the least of which being that Magellan landings had become almost routine at this point and even Kerbals at KSC were beginning to grow bored with it.

    In addition to creating a new distance record from Kerbin, the Kopernikus program was also designed to reach another milestone in space exploration: the establishment of the first long-term habitat for Kerbals in outer space, a concept quickly named the "space base". The finished design had living space for four Kerbalnauts and also had a science lab that would allow for greater experimentation on site.

    The Kerbalnauts Kirk Kerman, Shelsby Kerman, and Adbree Kerman were selected for the first crew of the project and became the first Kerbals to walk on Minmus. The base, along with a rover containing the experiments to be done in the field, were launched and successfully landed in the Greater Flats region of Minmus.

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    NIEqG18.png

    It was here that we encountered the first problem. The rover and the lab were designed to form a connection which allows the lab workers to extract the scientific information and reset the experiments contained within. The design worked in ground tests, but someone forgot to include the winch on the base which allows the rover to connect through the front mounted port. Jebediah Kerman was assigned to fly a tiny, hastily built lander carrying a pipe system to the base, and the lead engineer in charge of the base build team was sacked.

    It should be noted that the initial investment of the base was over 150,000 funds, with the rover costing another 20k. The emergency servicing of the base cost an additional 20k funds, delayed the start of the exploration for a week, and even delayed Magellan 10 to which Jebediah was assigned. The hopes that the Kopernikus Program would be less expensive than the Magellan Program were beginning to look like a fool's hope. The lead accountant was sacked.

    Hoping that all our troubles were behind us, the team on Minmus began work. The experiments in Greater Flats, which were conducted nearby, went smoothly. However, soon it was necessary to drive farther. Adbree drove over to the nearby slopes, but the low gravity and the apparent lack of traction made driving even on flat ground surprisingly difficult even on flat ground (Adbree himself compared it to driving "some sort of hovercraft"). Worse still, when he reached the slopes his rover showed a tendency to flip end over end at the slightest provocation. On top of all this, some bright spark in the engineering team thought that a single RTG was adequate to power a four-wheel drive vehicle across the whole of the surface of Minmus. Adbree was forced to stop frequently to let the batteries recharge, and the engineer who designed the rover was thrown in a sack.

    Despite this hardship, Adbree succeeded in returning to base having completed a round of experiments to be processed by Kirk and Shelsby. This took almost and entire day despite the total distance driven being no more than 5 km. Mission control decided to continue with the program despite the slow pace. One engineer suggested that the problem might be with the rover, and that a better design with more power and maybe better traction provided with something like tank treads would make the mission more efficient and be able to cover ground faster. This was immediately rejected as being too much hassle and the engineer was sacked by the Kerbin Kowboys.

    The decision was made to press on. The next destination was the midlands, which took the rover even farther, and then to the lowlands which were farther still. This process took several days and led to some dangerous situations with the rover tumbling around on the slopes. Adbree began to complain that he felt this was too dangerous to continue, and crew morale plummeted. Since they were still in space and could not be sacked, their concerns were heard.

    After much deliberation, it was decided to write the whole program off as a loss. A high capacity lander was designed and built to bring the crew back to Kerbin, and any equipment that could be salvaged was returned as well. In the wake of the program's premature termination, a new program called the Kepler Program was hastily drawn up as a new Minmus exploration program. The Kepler lander's suspicious resemblance to the Magellan lander was entirely coincidental.

    The visionary of the Kopernikus program could not be sacked because he had tenure. Instead, he was promoted to management.

  10. I wanted to try using spaceplanes because I like the concept of an SSTO (even before First Contract). I never had good luck with the ones I made myself, so I decided to use the Aeris 4A not knowing how poorly it was designed. Amazingly, with Jebediah as my pilot I managed to barely achieve orbit with it, as well as have enough to deorbit. But once I did, the problems started to surface.

    I was low on electricity and not generating any more, and slowly using it up. I could generate electricity with the jets, but the fuel was super low as well. I had to alternate between firing the engines and gliding down towards the ground. Oh, and I was coming down on the night side of the planet, out of range of KSC.

    So I was gliding slowly down, constantly watching my electrical power, begging the Kerbal gods not to let me crash into a mountain. Of course, I saw a mountain coming up in the gear lights, and by the time I could see the ground it was too late to pull out of the dive. So I crashed into a hillside somewhere in the grasslands and destroyed every part... except the indestructible cockpit. Jebediah was alive! I didn't even care that I destroyed a plane and learned I couldn't fly one either.

    My other successful failure was my Apollo 13. What was supposed to be a Duna landing didn't happen, because in the upper atmosphere I accidentally jettisoned the landing gear. I got back into orbit but now had nothing to do but wait for the next transfer window. I was also afraid I wouldn't have enough dV to get back. But I did, and James, Chuck, and Jack were my first Kerbals to fly in another atmosphere at least (to make it up to them, they will be the first Kerbals on Dres).

  11. Rover wheels, particularly model M1, don't have that much traction. I get that most places have less gravity than Kerbin, but they also have dust and dirt and other stuff on the ground that should make my rovers not drive like hovercrafts.

  12. I had a Bilbo Kerman in my old sandbox save that I accidentally deleted. He was probably the one kerbal I've ever had who I was glad didn't have the BadS flag. I also had Luke, who had his own X-Wing (which wasn't that great of a design actually) and my kerbals without a cause, James and Dean Kerman who are always assigned together on missions.

  13. You'd need an absolutely absurd amount of delta-V to put something in retrograde orbit around Kerbol, probably about double what you need to fall into the sun in the first place. In fact, I can't imagine it even happening without cheating. With the physicsless parts you can get as much as 150 Gs of TWR, that's your best bet unless you want to watch it for hours.

  14. I chose "delete in tracking station" because I can only choose one, and this is what I do in sandbox which is what I play most of the time. Although now that we have contracts I've been playing Career more. Since sandbox is, to me, just messing around with rockets, I have no problem with deleting debris. In Career, I like to engineer stuff so the lifting stage has just slightly less than 4500 m/s of Delta-V, so it can't achieve orbit. Sometimes it doesn't work, because of the way Kerbal Engineer calculates dV (it assumes you're either always in a vacuum or always at 1 atm pressure), but my most used rocket is a Mun lander that does that perfectly.

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