Norcalplanner

Playing around with math and launch vehicle payloads... 632 and even fractions thereof are becoming my new favorite numbers. 158 looks appealing.

It's been awhile since I've played RSS, but I remember that Mercury was a bear. So is this a flyby? Or did you abuse Earth and/or Venus with gravity-assist-fu?

High tech engines, multiple gravity assists, or a truly massive rocket? Or some combination thereof?

Interlude - A Few Observations and Thoughts About GEP Primary Having played this for a few weeks now, I think I can make some assessments and offer some opinions on what it's like to play GEP Primary. Hopefully this will help others know what to expect and give them a leg up should they try this mod. 1. It looks alien. There's definitely a different aesthetic to this mod. The sun is red, the sky is a light gray/blue, and the only trees I've found so far are some lavender palms. There's only one moon in the sky, and no analogs for Mars or Venus in the solar system. 2. Launching rockets is different. The KSC is inland at 4 km altitude, with the nearest ocean perhaps 20 km away to the east. This is needed because the sea level atmospheric pressure is 2x that of Kerbin or Gael. The gravity is also a bit higher at 1.1 G. It took me a while to recalibrate my launches to consistently be successful on this planet; for a time, I was consistently doing my gravity turns too early and/or aggressive and had to use significant pitch correction later in the ascent to make orbit. 3. Orbital mechanics are more difficult. Not only does it take more delta V to get to orbit because of the higher gravity, but LNO is a few hundred m/s faster as well. And the KSC is more than 10 degrees off the equator, so plane change burns are frequent. Because Belisama is inclined also, it's quite possible to end up in orbit 20 or more degrees off from the ideal for a Hohmann transfer to the moon. And with gravity similar to Duna, landing on Belisama is a somewhat more involved and less forgiving exercise compared to Mun. 4. Days are loooooooooooong. Nodens and Belisama are tidally locked, similar to Duna and Ike, so one day is 90 hours. Warping to morning will frequently add 4 or 5 standard Kerbal days to the mission clock, and it means that you have to be very patient to wait for a correct launch window. And because Nodens is fairly low over Grannus (it's lower than Icarus is above Ciro), it's whipping around in orbit quickly. A year is only 360 hours long. Which means that 1 year = 4 seasons = 4 months = 4 days. On the plus side, it means that you never have to wait more than a few weeks for a transfer window. 5. I like it. I've been playing since 0.23.5, and the stock Kerbol system is a bit old hat. This system feels new and fresh. It's also fairly small, so I feel like I have a better chance of exploring it more completely than GPP. If you're looking for a new system with a different feel and not too many celestial bodies, GEP may be just what you're looking for. If anyone has any questions or would like additional photographs of particular aspects of this system, please post a message and I'll do my best to help you out.

@Laie Buffalo is a good rover that integrates nicely with Pathfinder, which is great for surface bases, and has great cargo capacity. They're large and pressurized, though, so it may not be what you're looking for. In other news, I started working on craft for this challenge. Commsats are largely done (some minor packaging tweaks may still be needed) and the current task is tweaking the reusable Skycrane for bringing base modules down to the surface.

Played around with reusable Duna Skycrane designs for my upcoming DOMA challenge entry. It's still a bit too large and overpowered - it was able to drop off a 12-ton 3.75m surface module, return to Duna orbit, go land on Ike, come back to LDO orbit again, and still have 400 m/s left over.

@Death Engineering One more question came up. Does the Duna - Ike space bus have to be a single vehicle? Or could it consist of an atmospheric craft to go from the surface of Duna to the Duna space station, then a vacuum optimized craft to go from the station back and forth to Ike? Happy to do it either way, just want to know how to plan.

The only thing I've done so far for this challenge is to think, write, and visualize. Haven't even fired up a spreadsheet or KSP for this yet, and I'm already having a blast. That said, my current mission report (link in sig) is taking up most of my KSP time right now, so this may continue to be coffee break and commute time musings until after 1.4.5 drops.

Chapter 5 - Station Time, and Other Eventful Moments Let's check in on our professional, well-trained workforce, shall we? What the.... Is there a research node for improved snacks?!? After much deliberation, it's decided that it's finally time for our first station. The original idea was to make it primarily out of MOLE parts, but unfortunately MOLE and Kerbal Health don't play nicely, particularly in the radiation shielding department. Out of an abundance of caution for the health of our intrepid explorers, a station is made using a combination of stock and MOLE parts. Hopefully we'll be able to get some labtime with the stock science lab. Heading up. I think that this is the last craft where I misspelled "Belisama." Shortly after making a mid-course correction en route to our nearest celestial neighbor. We had separate contracts for a Nodens station and a Belisama station. Being both crafty and thrifty, we fulfilled both contracts with the one vessel. And we're there! You can see solar panels from both MOLE and SSTU. (Side note: I've really gotten used to playing in larger scaled systems - the lifter to launch this station and the upper stage to take it to Belisama seemed way too small to my eye.) The Wren II is built and launched with four crew members for the station. A revised design using a LFO core with two good-sized SRBs, this lifter has plenty of delta V to get the crew (plus lots of snacks!) to Belisama and back. And BARIS tried to make something fail just to let us know he's still around and still cares about making things interesting. Good SRB sep. Good transfer to Belisama and rendezvous with the station. And now we're docked. The station has been collecting science from as many biomes as possible on its journey to Belisama, so that the two scientists that are part of the crew can have some data to work with. Over 40 experiment results are waiting in the science container on top of the station. Let the research commence! Hi! It's BARIS over here! I just made things more expensive! Don't forget about me! A shorter range version of the Wren II is created, with a greater emphasis on recovery. Using Stage Recovery and stock settings, the SRBs are recovered for over 95% of their value, while the central core is recovered for more than 80% of its value. Burnin' to orbit and lookin' good! Welcome to the program, Trilin. Try not to get too much space dust on the three tourists who are also in the craft. BARIS keeps trying to make things fail. I think he didn't get enough attention as a child. Checking in on the station, it's clear that the accommodations leave a bit to be desired. Everyone is at less than 80% health. We might not be able to stay as long as we thought. It looks like the WBI cupola isn't recognized as such by Kerbal Health, so the station isn't as comfortable for long-term visits as was intended. We'll make unlocking the standard cupola a priority. Hello, it's BARIS! B... A... R... I... S... Remember me? I'm still over here with a bunch of these event card things. I also have a gross of monkey wrenches and a good throwing arm. (This one was an honest to goodness LOL moment.) How long will the crew be able to stay at the station? Find out... in the next chapter.

Truer words have rarely been spoken. And just like planning a long vacation trip, the thinking and planning are half the fun.

@Death Engineering I think its pretty clear that all hardware, and any resource which eventually becomes hardware (such as MaterialKits or Equipment to expand inflatable habitats) needs to come from Kerbin as part of the NPM. A question on life support - if one were to use USI-LS, would we be allowed to mine ore or gypsum to convert it into fertilizer to supply greenhouses to create new supplies? Doing so would allow a base on Duna to become self-sufficient in the LS department, at least up to whatever the capacity is of the greenhouses and recyclers that have been shipped from Kerbin and successfully landed on Duna.

I think the intent is that any part which achieves an orbit with an Ap greater than 180km above Kerbin is part of the NPM.

Chapter 4 - Smashy McSmashface and The Inadequate One It's not too complicated to figure out how to make a better impact probe. Rearrange the upper stage so it weighs more on impact, and... ADD MOAR BOOSTERS! Sisyphus II, aka "Smashy McSmashface" takes to the sky. Speeding towards fate. Stay on target... GOAL!!! Over 6 km/s combined with a higher mass means that we exceeded our target of 4.79 GJ. Time to do something else. Walking off the job wasn't quite what I had in mind. At least you can see that the funds situation is improving, and we've been upgrading some facilities. Another quick tourist flight with the Wren I. No catastrophic failures this time. But this is fairly mundane. We need something more interesting... That's more like it. Our first craft designed to exit Nodens' SOI. We'll try going inward first, just to see how close we can get to Taranis. And find out of the craft is going to melt. It's a four stage probe, featuring the Hemi Cuda from MOLE. I'm really liking the Cuda and the Corvette, especially with some additional tech upgrades. A bit OP, but I don't mind. Leaving Nodens pretty quickly at this point. Much science as we approach Grannus, the red dwarf at the middle of this system. Heat levels seem OK so far. Pretty! In a bit of an anti-climax, nothing happened. Maybe we should rename this probe "Meh". We didn't have enough delta V to make it to Taranis, we didn't experience any overheating problems, and we didn't make it to "Low in Space above Grannus" even though Pe was just 280,000 km. It's easy to forget that Nodens is much closer to Grannus than Moho is to Kerbol, and Taranis is insanely close to Grannus. That's it for this chapter, but better things are in the next one... like our first station!

This looks interesting, but the OCD part of me wants to know if there is some sort of consensus regarding what is considered a "balanced mod". Is there any whitelist or blacklist? I would be particularly interested in thoughts regarding the following: Ven's Stock Revamp Bluedog Design Bureau SSTU The WBI suite (Pathfinder, MOLE, and possibly DSEV) USI-Core (particularly the reactors) The Near Future suite (Propulsion would likely be off the table, but what about the rest?) Any info would be welcome.

Chapter 3 - Killing Three and a Half Birds With One Stone With the need to finish off the Belisama Probes strategy, another lander probe is needed. But with the cost of new designs continuing to increase due to Test Bench time, the need to complete multiple missions with a single craft becomes even more urgent. In a flash of inspiration, several additional contracts are accepted and a new unorthodox probe is fabricated. Just before it's rolled out to the pad, yet another BARIS event card appears: You win some, you lose some. Back to the probe, shown here burning for a polar orbit: Yep, the new probe designed for landing is outfitted with both a low-res terrain radar (courtesy of SCANsat) and a ground seismometer (courtesy of Impact!). The probe completes a terrain scan of Nodens, then heads for Belisama at the opportune moment. After completing an orbital terrain scan of Belisama (two contracts checked off) the probe heads down for a darker spot. As we get closer it looks flat. I mean, really flat. Could it be...? Hallelujah! For the first time since Minmus, an absolutely flat biome (even called the "Flats") is found. It's almost like this moon wants, nay, needs to have a sprawling base built on it. Not too bad in the view department either - since the planet and moon are tidally locked, Nodens will always be low in the sky. And this was the third biome, so Belisama Probes is in the books. Next, it's time to do multiple missions, but with some Kerbals. The science and funds generated from the Scansat probe's contracts proved large enough to make a somewhat reliable crew launcher. But since one of the missions involves docking, we need something to dock to. This docking target is huge! And by huge, I mean less than a quarter of a ton. Time for the inaugural flight of the Wren I. With a solid booster stage! And Val and Bill in their first orbital flight! The craft got to orbit OK, despite some minor malfunctions which were solved on the fly by switching to backup systems. Bill mutters something about "setting SCE to Aux". First up is docking... Followed by three rescues of Kerbals stranded in low equatorial orbits. Welcome to the space program, Elgar, Serena and Enger! Time to land this puppy. After turning retrograde and burning to lower the Pe, everything appears fine. BOOM! The upper stage fuel tank decided to blow itself up. Amazingly, the engine and solar panels stay in formation briefly before drifting away. The new recruits look at each other, laugh nervously, and wonder what sort of slipshod operation they just joined. A quick glance at the One Window readout shows what happened - cascading problems in the tank culminating in a catastrophic failure. Thankfully, everyone made it down OK. Docking and three rescues with a single craft. Not too bad, apart from the need for everyone to change their underwear due to the whole tank-exploding event. Back to Belisama - in order to finish the last probe contract and put that seismometer to use, a small impactor craft is launched. Sisyphus I is a four stage unmanned probe designed for one thing - to slam into Belisama at high speed. The craft looks vaguely impressive, in part due to some forced perspective, before one notices that the darn thing is only 0.625m in diameter. The craft comes zipping into Belisama and impacts at over 5 km/s, but the low mass of the craft means that the goal of 4.79 GJ isn't reached. We'll need to try again, in the next chapter...

Kerbal Administration for Big Overpowered Orbital Machines. aka KABOOM Flag in my sig is courtesy of my artistically inclined daughter. She also made the badge I used back when I ran the Grand Orbital Space Station Challenge:

I understand and agree with the sentiment behind them requesting a 15332 infill exemption. But as a CEQA practitioner, they appear to be on very thin ice, seeing as how the unusual circumstances clause in 15300 can be used to invalidate the exemption. And given CEQA's extremely broad standing criteria, just about anyone can file suit to stop the project. A master programmatic EIR with focused EIRs for each segment in turn would appear to be the way to go. Either that, or build the thing in another state.

I was just reading the PDF with all the planet data bundled with GEP, and it looks like you previously determined that the solar constant at Nodens is 1,333 W/m2. I think I'll ratchet it down to this figure - 1,360 was seeming just a bit much.

Be forewarned - BARIS is not for the faint of heart. I'd recommend moving a few of the difficulty settings down a notch. And please read the manual - it has a lot of information on how the mod works. I'd also recommend using it with KCT, which is a bit more intuitive to me when it comes to vehicle integration.

Those are from BARIS, a mod by Angel-125. Part failures and the need to integrate craft to make them more reliable are the center of the mod, but there are also some other gameplay elements, such as the event cards, which spice things up a bit.

Chapter 2 - Making Orbit and Heading for Belisama After further effort, Jeb finally made orbit in yet another M3. Unfortunately, the photographer was nowhere to be found during this auspicious event. The only photographic evidence is the award ceremony after Jeb returned... The Nodens Space Program is currently recruiting for a new photographer. With other parts supporting manned flight not yet unlocked, and with both science and funds in short supply, it's decided to go unmanned for the next few launches. But first, a timely event card awards some bonus science: Belisima Probe Alpha is wheeled out to the pad and sent aloft on a solid booster, since that's better developed and cheaper at the moment. There may have been a revert or two in here - Gene's notes became indecipherable after a coffee-laden spit take. (And yes, I know I spelled Belisama incorrectly on these first few probes. We'll correct it in the future.) Sorry for the number of dark photos - Nodens is tidally locked with Belisama, so days and nights are each a week long. With a few key strategies enabled (such as "To Boldly Go"), Belisima Probe Alpha is a real cash and science bonanza. Many nodes are unlocked, along with a few facility upgrades. Of course, with the good comes the bad... With orbital science around Belisama taken care of, it's time to land. The Belisama Probes strategy is selected, and a new, larger probe is sent aloft - this time with landing struts. We also fulfilled a contract to place a satellite in a high equatorial orbit with this launch, so the departure from Nodens was rather picturesque. The probe entered orbit and headed down and hopped to a few different locations. Without any map of Belisama's biomes, our guesswork proved insufficient. The probe landed three times before running low on fuel, but only in two biomes. We'll need to send another probe to finish off the Belisama Probes contract... in the next chapter.

Took some tourists for a spin and rescued a new recruit in my GEP Primary career. Ended up landing in the mountains, but thankfully the chutes still worked well enough to avoid any major problems. And I started a mission report for this career, which can be found here:

Chapter 1 - Finding Our Feet (aka BARIS is a Harsh Mistress) After an obligatory fleahopper to start things off, the first LFO powered rocket is wheeled out to the pad. Since it's the second manned rocket and because I don't intend to use this design a lot long term, it's given the uncreative designation of M2 (manned rocket #2). On the pad: The M2 had a short, glorious, and undocumented career. Every one of the M2's four flights ended with Jeb or Val hitting the Abort button and rocketing away from a malfunctioning and/or disintegrating rocket less than ten seconds after launch. Mission control was so busy trying to keep the Kerbals alive that no in-flight photos were taken. Clearly, a new design was needed. Enter the M3: Because if your rocket is failing, it's a good idea to add SRBs and more staging events, RIGHT?!? Actually, the M3 benefitted from use of the Test Bench feature in BARIS. A few contracts were accepted purely for the funds so that mission control could keep the engineers and scientists working around the clock in an attempt to increase reliability. Some of the difficulty settings were also adjusted down a notch, such as reducing the odds of a catastrophic launch failure from 15% down to 10%. With more effort put into the M3 design, the results were better: This one flew under power for a bit more than thirty seconds before one of the SRBs exploded. When the remaining SRB was staged to even out the thrust and still try to limp upward, the still-functioning SRB slammed into the Swivel, tanking it out. ABORT! Thankfully Jeb made it down OK. Another M3 was cranked off the assembly line... Hmm, this one seemed not to go too well either. ABORT! At least this one landed on the runway, where we could grab a bit more science. Clearly, something different must be done. Or not. Another M3 is launched and fails. After a little more time on the test bench, yet another M3 is ordered. Prior to launch, however, BARIS serves up some bad news... We're less than 100K funds. Gulp. I hope this next one works. It ended up working better, I guess. At least the SRBs didn't explode before something went wrong... A valiant attempt at getting to orbit is made nonetheless, even with the premature loss of the booster stage a little more than a minute into the flight. Alas, orbit was not meant to be that day - the flight ended up being a suborbital hop to the next continent over. Somehow the act of staging the parachute jostled open the exterior supply loading hatch, resulting in a stream of snacks flying out of the capsule as it descended. The capsule ended up landing on another continent, beneath the shade of a lovely lavender palm tree. We'll figure this out sooner or later. Probably later. After spending more time at the test bench...

Nodens Space Program - A Career Far From Home It's time for something different. My last career ended with a thousand-ton colony ship arriving at Nodens, second planet from Grannus, having traveled there on a six-year journey from Gael in a 2.5x GPP/GEP install courtesy of the wonders of Karborundum. Obligatory photo of the colony ship: This new career will be starting out from Nodens, and in standard scale. (2.5x has issues at the moment in 1.4.3.) This mission report will be light on text, heavy on pictures, mainly as a way of showing all the hard work that @OhioBob has put in creating the Grannus Expansion Pack and providing new and interesting places to explore. Other features and key mods of this career include: Most of the WBI mods by @Angel-125, including Pathfinder, MOLE, DSEV, KFS, and.... [gulp] BARIS. Kerbal Health and Snacks to make keeping everyone alive and healthy a challenge Thor Tech by @JadeOfMaar for some high-powered late game engines and parts Portions of SSTU (mainly tanks, engines, and SRBs), BDB (mainly probe cores, experiments, and antennas), and Ven's Strategia and a few contract packs (Tourism Plus, Bases and Stations) Full funds, but only 50% science payout to make stations and surface bases more enticing Goals this time around include: More of a focus on bases and stations, particularly the WBI parts Exploring this new system as much as possible (including Taranis) Establishing significant infrastructure around and on at least one other planet or moon Not letting BARIS turn my flight director into a broken, quivering shadow of his former self Please note that this install's stability is suboptimal at the moment, so mods may come and go as I track down the source of my install's crashes. GPP secondary is not installed at this time, but I hope to add it (and maybe even scale the system up) after 1.4.5 drops and mods have had a chance to update. The ultimate endgame goal would be to get back to Gael in 2.5x using all the shiny new tech. A few more beauty shots, then let's get started! Chapters Chapter 1 - Finding Our Feet (aka BARIS is a Harsh Mistress) Chapter 2 - Making Orbit and Heading for Belisama Chapter 3 - Killing Three and a Half Birds With One Stone Chapter 4 - Smashy McSmashface and The Inadequate One Chapter 5 - Station Time, and Other Eventful Moments Interlude - A Few Observations and Thoughts About GEP Primary Chapter 6 - Quick Highlights Chapter 7 - Highs and Lows Chapter 8 - Sirona Sojourn Chapter 9 - Getting More Comfortable Away From Home

For what it's worth, I've read just about everything you've created having to do with BARIS, MOLE, and Pathfinder, and found them very helpful. While I acknowledge that I may be an outlier, please know that the time you spent on documentation was not all in vain. The mission report for my new GEP / WBI career should go live this weekend.