Freshmeat

I made a double Minmus rescue. Nothing to write home about normally, but the vessels where orbiting in opposite directions. However, this is Minmus, so orbital speed for the craft furthest out is 110 m/s. Quick back of the envelope calculations says that if I EVA the kerbonaut I can cancel out the relative speed of a craft going in the opposite direction in something like 8 km, so why not do an Iron Man? Five tries later the maneuver is perfectly executed and the kerbonaut is saved, and I turn to OBS to watch the screencast and edit a short video. Turns out a freak checkmark has downscaled to a quarter of the screen size, making the video unreadable. No pics this time :-(

@funkheld There is a maximum port number, I think it is 9, but I am not certain. It is somewhere in the thread, but you will have to trawl it yourself or experiment.

The plugin autodetects the com port. If that fails, change the "Default port" in \GameData\KSPSerialIO\PluginData\KSPSerialIO\config.xml

Take your time, several other mods are missing as well.

IIRC you don't have radial decouplers in the demo. That is what my advice is based on.

The demo hampers your part inventory severely. I tried to do it, and found that I could only make a flyby, not a landing. The trick is to side attach more fuel tanks and engines so you can drop the entire bottom as a single spent stage. Get to Kerbal orbit by turning slowly sideways shortly after you start, keeping more or less within the prograde circle. After that, follow what @Wanderfound said. Mind that it will take some practice, I can get to the Mun in my sleep in stock, but the lack of parts in the demo make it a real engineering challenge.

Hi Peter, and welcome. I am not exactly sure what you are asking, but the arduino code zitronen has provided creates a struct with several data fields as shown on first page of the thread. I think everyone around here has started downloading that code and modified from there. As for how to exactly proceed, it depends a lot on what hardware you plan to connect in the other end. A few LEDs and gauges is simple enough, but the different displays run a multitude of different libraries. Further, I have not heard from zitronen since 1.3 came out, so I am not certain if the plugin works with that version.

T -46. Node is set. Thanks for the kind words and advice, guys. I have another All-father class ship in orbit of Vall, and each carry almost enough fuel for a roundtrip. If push came to shove, I could probably dock them together and transfer fuel enough for the return of one ship. I carry food for just shy of seven years on a five year mission, with the ability to grow food on site. Both the lander and an independent vessel carry ISRU equipment, and the refueler is active already. Every calculation is done. Now all I need is to throttle up, and here we go. T -34 and counting, all systems are go.

As I am writing this, I am putting off starting KSP. Since roughly January, I have been working on a crewed mission to Vall. Selecting a target, getting a refuel station on Minmus, building probes, lander with habs for the stay, two large space tugs, comms network, the works. Now I have the crew in orbit around Minmus in the transfer module, the tug is fully fueled, lander already waiting at Vall, two ingame days before it is time to break orbit for a deep periapsis at Kerbin giving a good Oberth effect for the interplanetary transfer. The preparations has been done since late March or early April, but I am stalling. I play other games, or just sit at the computer browsing humor sites. I am afraid. This is my first crewed trans-Duna mission, despite having played for three years and stopped counting at a thousand hours of playtime. What if my life support calculations are wrong? What if I have misestimated the amount of EC my hab requires? What if my Vall ascender is build poorly, and I strand the four brave Karbonauts? It will take years to get a rescue mission, and they will run out of supplies before that. I know I can revert to my stack of quicksaves, but if the problem is due to poor mission planning, I have to revert to my game as of early March or take a huge funds hit, and push the mission several years. Then I will need to divert additional time to base keeping in the Kerbin system. I am just taking a game far to serious, or does other feel the same way undertaking a big mission?

I wonder if it is possible to get the longitude of a maneuver node, or postburn longitude of periapsis and/or the Kepler elements? While angle to prograde/retrograde is intuitively easy to understand, it makes fixing an orbit for proper periapsis kicking cumbersome. My preferred method of going interplanetary is refuel at Minmus and leave for Kerbin SOI when Minmus is opposite the eventual takeoff longitude, but since your velocity coming of Minmus is not always purely tangential to Kerbin, cleanup is needed. The longitude of current periapsis is really helpful, but the rest would make my life much, much easier.

I found life support sets a limit on how carelessly you abandon a project. Once I have a crew en route to somewhere, they will die if I don't ensure they return at the proper transfer window.

Take your time. Most people who use your mod will need a working KIS anyway.

@Angel-125 Thanks, that was all I needed.

First of all, really cool video. I like your way of building. To counter your point, I have switched between fuel, LO2, ore, and iirc equipment in the same tank. And I could conceivably change to food afterwards, if I wanted to. Or dirt or fertilizer, for that matter, which might lead to fun stuff if you add LO2 to an unclean tank.

Regarding the tanks, will you add a 2.5 m 800 unit tank now that you have retired the Titan II 800 unit tank? I found it had a lot of uses. Another thought, gameplay related: Right now, tank layout can be changed on the fly. It is extremely convenient when doing refuel vessels, to the point that I feel it might be abusive. I know I can just elect to set it as a rule for myself, but I feel an engineer should be present to switch tank layout.

Probes before crew to any location. Ample living space for kerbals in space for more than a week, to the tune of 1t hab module for each in addition to work compartment.

Would there be interest in me uploading a small Excel sheet where you enter your current date and get next asceding and decending launch time?

I had a problem with side mounted boosters. If they are not strutted and rigidly connected, their thrust can be be ever so slightly off center. Try placing two struts on the very bottom of the booster tanks and see if that helps.

I find career fun in all its aspects, from the early wonder and struggle to the late base construction and interplanetary tugs. The point in not going sandbox is that I get the additional complication of watching my funds instead of just throwing bigger boosters at the problem. It makes for another challenge. The contract system itself is a so-so thing, and I tend to end up doing routine stuff to get the money, but the boredom of these missions makes me sharper on my fun projects, in order to get as efficient as possible while still getting decent living standards for my multiyear missions.

I don't think you really got enough praise on this one. It is well thought out and the artistic execution is very good as well. Props to you.

I used to have a fully recoverable SSTO system for for crew and light payloads, but in the end it was more of a bother than I wanted to do for the money I recovered.

I am not a MechJeb user myself, so take this with a grain of salt. To answer your question, my guess would be that MJ tries to circularize with respect to Kerbin, not Minmus. Do you give the command in Kerbins SOI, or Minmus'? Again, I have no actual knowledge of MJ, but it might be worth a shot until someone shows up with a real answer. Don't worry. MechJeb is like any other mod, use it if it is more fun to you. I used to go total godmode in DooM2.

It is a bug, I have experienced it myself in slightly different circumstances. My advice would be to mark it as completed in the debug menu.

I have a scientist named Randall.

DayK. Getting whatever gear you can and set your own adventure. And lots of death.