TrooperCooper

The real question is... is beeing woman while playing KSP considered cheating?

Bingo! @CatastrophicFailure

In my RSS / RO / RP-0 career I sent an unmanned lander to Mars...

IIRC I dont get the M700 survey scanner in my RP-0 campaign. And I certainly dont get resource survey contracts. Are you sure you installed it correctly? Reputation penalties for declining can be adjusted in the difficulty settings at the beginning of a career. When your career is already running, you can still change it by opening your persistent.sfs file in your saves folder, search for "RepLossDeclined" in career, pretty much at the top... and set it to 0 to disable it.

Manned missions to Mars are still a bit further down the road it seems. Since I will need more science, I decided to design a more modern setup for my manned Moon landings that incorporates the progress I made in the RP-0 techtree since my old CSM + Lander were created. I also wanted to be able to land more than just one person on the surface to train more than just the pilots within the Astronaut corps. More science experiments was also a focus. Below is the new more or less finished LEM design. I name it Altair, but its not really a replica. Most notably, aside from visual differences, It does not use cryogenic fuels to avoid boil off and only has a crew of 3 instead of 4 on the real Altair. Nonetheless, with about 130 parts its certainly a slightly more complex lander than what I usually use... and with its much higher weight I bet it will be fun to put down on the Moon.

Some fuels only go into certain tank types. Hydrazine for example needs to be in a Service Module classified tank iirc. Change tank type in the right-click menu on that tank. Beware though, that it has a much worse dry / wet ratio compared to other tanks.

Landed on the Moon again... Sent several unmanned fly-by probes... ...to Jupiter,... ...Saturn,... ...Neptune,... Uranus probe is still on the way. This one will actually become an orbiter. Also turned into a long-term experiment on fuel boil off... First launch of a Mars orbiter failed. The Merlin S lifter rocket got a stability upgrade after this loss... 2nd try on a Mars orbiter during the next transfer window was a success... Getting ready to start Ola. Who is Ola? I will show you in one of my next postings. Meanwhile Nancy is spending lots of time in the KCT simulator, performing studies on life support systems... trying to figure out what is needed for future manned Mars missions. Sometimes starving, sometimes suffocating. Here she is about to die of thirst. Still, she likes these simulations. She said it keeps her figure maintained...

Ah, cool thanks. Didnt see that.

Okay, I did another moonwalk and the exact same bug occured on both contracts again. Maybe some others can verify that its not my installation / mod conflicts etc.

Oh, sorry, wrong thread then. My bad. :-/ I will have to try that out then. I'm pretty sure it did not work as intended last time I did. I'll let you know. Yeah, they will prolly up the cost. But hopefully they cant rob me mine anymore. And yes, from now on every manned flight will have a rescue craft on standby for me. Would have been handy yesterday already...

Overlapping launch windows! Weeeeee! Finally I am able to do this! Thanks for the great update. I have a little suggestion. Not sure if this is possible, but... when you fly relatively large rockets, especially in RSS, part count seriously matters. I found myself not trying at all to do parachute-based recoveries, since I would need to spam loads and loads of chutes on stages I would like to recover. It would be nice if KCT would incorporate the procedural changes made to parachutes in the Real Chutes mod. Or does it do that nowadays? IIRC in earlier versions it did not. Tweakscale changes would also be nice. But from what I can tell that does not work together with Real Chutes. Anyway, as always... thanks for your great modding work!

Thanks. Those are procedural fairings, egg shaped type with the soyouz textures.

Wow! Simply wow!

Over the last few days... I sent an unammed fly-by probe to Mars. And launched my first RSS / RO / RP-0 Lunar landing mission in this career. My 2nd real moon mission ever...

Bingo! I got AIES installed. But even with that knowledge now I am still unable to find the related file within its folder, heh... Anyway, historically 650 - 700 kg seems appropriate. The satellites were 560 kg or 574 kg back then. In terms of game ballance I would say 10 tons though, considering the stats of the other probe cores at that tech level. Though its own mass should be increased as well,... here the 574 kg would seem reasonable from a game ballance point of view. If that sounds totally unreasonable, then all of the AIES probes should be re-ballanced again I guess...

I am sorry, I spent nearly an hour now trying to figure that out. I thought those would come with RP-0, but that was a false assumption heh. I have no idea where its coming from and even windows-search in my gamedata folder doesnt return me any results. Really strange. If it helps, here is a pic of it. Yes, that is one of the two. The other one was the Lunar landing, I guess this one, pic of it from my archives here. No problem with timers at the LEO contracts btw.

Ahoy! Been playing with this and the other realism mods for a while now and I am greatly enjoying it. A big thank you for all the modding work. A few minor issues that I noticed while playing. Not sure whether these are actual bugs of this mod or conflicts with others, since I have quite a lot installed... 1.) The HS-333 Satellite Bus seems unballanced. It does not have an avionics rating of XX tons. One can simply exploit it to control any craft regardless of its mass. The modules mass itself also seems a bit low... 2.) Satellite contracts often require specific parts to be on the object, but they do not list the parts name itself in the contract, making it nearly impossible to complete the objective. See screenshot. If I remember correctly though, I did complete one or two of them... probably randomly had the right parts on my vessel. 3.) Had minor issues with two Lunar contracts. The objective was to stay in a specific orbit with a 1-man ship for a set period of time (20 hours). I entered that orbit and the objectives were complete instantly (minus the return part). Same issue with the following Lunar landing-contract on the same flight. Was asked to stay for two and a half days but as soon as I landed, all objectives turned green except for the return to Earth. Dunno if it was just that one flight that was bugged or if its a general issue. I will do some more Moon flights soon and update this...

Been developing, launch-simulating and tweaking various gear for my upcoming Moon flights. Manned fly-by has already been completed. But since the RP-0 career seems to be asking for one-man landings first, I had to change plans and step back from the 3-man setup. Instead I am now going with a lightweight lander. Pics from KCT-simulator: The launcher thats going to carry everything into space is pretty much ready... Guess tomorrow is launch-day.

Yeah well, that is just (further) prove that George Lucas is an Alien from outer space...

RO / RSS / RP-0 career is coming along nicely. After completion of my Gemini program, the Apollo project is taking shape... Kourou spaceport before dawn. The crew of the first Apollo craft has boarded the new capsule atop a Merlin-Lifter. Their mission: to test the new equipment during a longer flight in low Earth orbit and verify that heatshield and chutes are working as expected during return... As the first sunrays reached the spaceport, the "Go!" for launch was given and the Merlin-Rocket cleared the pad... Leaving a cloud of dust behind... And turning eastwards... At 40 km altitude, the launch boosters came off... Shortly afterwards, the first spaceship with a crew of three Astronauts entered space... 3:20 minutes after take off at 170 km altitude: the first stage of the Merlin was empty. The connecting fairings were removed and seperation initiated. Simultaneously the aerodynamic shielding of the Apollo spacecraft was pulled off and the launch-escape-system was removed and shot ahead into space in a ball of fire... the process was quite a sight. A second later the unleashed cluster of five J-2 series engines of the upper stage kicked in to propell the vessel into orbit... Ten minutes after departure from Kourou, the actual spacecraft was released and the constant acceleration-forces stopped pushing. The crew could finally calm down... They spent nearly two weeks in orbit untill Mission Control called them to return to the surface, which led to much cheering on board... An hour later they were also able to report that heatshield and chutes seem to work all right.

Manned missions to Mars.

I'm considering to use the Test Flight mod... similar to Dang it! but with increasing reliability of parts the more you use them. Though I dont know how high the failure rate in general is... might still happen to often for my taste...

Kerbal Engineer can show you the time to equatorial AN / DN. Thats usually enough to do an appropriate inclination correction burn. If you want to optimize it, you can then just put a maneuver node on the timestamp and pull your inclination right. Kerbal Engineer will then show you when to start burning.

Thats not a moon... thats MY spacestation.

Launched an Icarus-Lifter from Kourou... Hauling a new kind of automated vessels into space. This probe will be the first of a series of "visitor-" named interplanetary exploration tools. In order to reduce costs, they are generally designed as fly-by vessels and not going to orbit their targets... But this first one was going for Venus, the easiest to reach of all interplanetary destinations... And thus the probes 4,000 m/s of dV were just enough to enter a highly excentric orbit around the Earth' inner neighbor and begin with continuous orbital observations... While the Venus-Visitor was on its way, I fired another tiny probe into space... Which became the first geostationary sattelite (fuel calculations almost spot-on), to strike that off the to-do list... While the Gemini Project has generally ended, in the background I have begun to develop the tools needed for the upcoming Apollo Project... most importantly an equivalent to the Saturn V lifter rocket. So far its all just theoretical work and numbers crunching. The so far most advanced and still unnamed concept is shown below with a demo-payload of 150 tons on top of it (golden tank). Hasnt flown yet, not even in a KCT-simulation... and I first would need to upgrade the launchpad anyway to be able to hold this behemoth. It is also still able to ruin me financially and the industry could use a few upgrades too to reduce production time... (using hangar extender, sorry for the out-of-scope background)... Wanna take a look below? Yep, thats 40 of them in clusters of 5 each... I can already see that thing making my neighbors scream when its taking off.