Norcalplanner

Kerbal Administration for Big Overpowered Orbital Machines - 1955 Hello there, Kerolox!

Kerbal Administration for Big Overpowered Orbital Machines - 1954 Batting .500 would be great in baseball...

Feel free to indicate your preference in lieu of a like...

So 1954 is done, and I can't decide what phrase to use as a synopsis in the writeup. Current contenders are: Curse you, Agathorn! My kingdom for a reliable engine... Batting .500 would be great in baseball... Push the button, range safety officer...

Kerbal Administration for Big Overpowered Orbital Machines - 1953 One big milestone completed...

Kerbal Administration for Big Overpowered Orbital Machines - 1952 Making progress...

I'm thinking it would be an option, not a requirement. Far be it from me to take away someone else's grindy fun!

Don't know if this has been brought up before, but I'd be supportive of being able to start in different eras in career. If you've already unlocked the whole tree and/or achieved a designated level of success, it would be nice to start in the Kerbal equivalent of 1970, or 1990, or 2010 in terms of infrastructure and available parts. Having to start from the very beginning every time gets a little old.

1952 was completed last night, and it should be Thursday or Friday when I get the report up - trying to do things with a phone while on the road is a bit too much challenge for my brain at the moment.

@KerbalKore I make no promises. The crazy thing is, I've never actually put boots on the Moon and returned in RP-1. The closest I got in a previous race was a manned lunar flyby with a Gemini capsule, and I was still years behind the front runner in completing that particular contract.

That's why I put that disclaimer up top.

Kerbal Administration for Big Overpowered Orbital Machines - 1951 A busy first year...

Some time was freed up this weekend, so I was able to start yesterday. Hopefully I'll have 1951 up in the next few hours.

@Ultimate Steve Are you still accepting new entrants? I feel like my KSP burnout/hiatus is going to end soon, and this looks like fun. I'd likely be starting in earnest sometime around the 22nd.

It makes me happy that people are linking to the wiki.

@Tekaoh You might want to check out this mod: It operates pretty much how you were describing.

Munar Station Assembly Just a few images of a station put up in one launch, then assembled by a tug in orbit of Mun... Little tug is at the top. First arm being moved into position Arm number two... Time to launch a crew so we can inflate and start the centrifuge! Done for the moment, with both the tug and the six person crew shuttle docked. This station isn't growing on me like I thought it would - the part count is already too high, and there's too much yellow clock before we've even added any of the mining and EL manufacturing components. We may end up abandoning it and launching a smaller, more compact design. Sure looks pretty, though!

Talking about Mun/Minmus reentry, I've generally been doing 31 to 32 km with some success. I don't have deadly reentry installed, so the only downside to pulling higher Gs is that the crew will pass out for a few seconds. Since all of my craft have a probe core in there somewhere, it's always able to hold retrograde without a problem. The other thing I'll do is set up a maneuver node close to atmospheric reentry and use a combination of retrograde and radial out to burn off any remaining fuel and fine tune the reentry Pe. Because heating is a cube function, scrubbing off 200-300 m/s will have a noticeable effect.

If Anomaly Surveyor is working, then I need to add it to my install. I've spent much more time exploring the Mun and Minmus than Kerbin, and haven't built a single plane yet. :-)

@Zorg @hieywiey There are some stats for the M-1, including a sea level variant, packaged as part of the RO engine configs: https://github.com/KSP-RO/RealismOverhaul/blob/master/GameData/RealismOverhaul/Engine_Configs/M1_Config.cfg

The Anomaly Surveyor Contract Pack was never updated for any version of KSP past 1.4.x. It hasn't been updated for 15 months, and I've never gotten it to work correctly on anything other than a stock scale Kerbin. Part of the confusion may be that the last mod version was 1.7.1, back from a time when many mod versioning schemes had no correlation to a version of KSP. Might be best to simply mark Anomaly Surveyor as incompatible with JNSQ for now. @5thHorseman @vossiewulf It's difficult, but not impossible, to find the smaller ROC items by eye, especially if you have lights on your rover. That said, the newest version of SCANSat now has the BTDT surface scanner detect these new objects, so there's a way to find them more easily in the game. It's also a late tech tree part, so there's still some challenge.

Asteroid PSA Just a friendly out-of-sequence heads up that asteroids in JNSQ are a bit larger than stock. I launched this lovely nuclear powered craft to try and grab a C class asteroid which was coming within 10,000 km of Kerbin: Kerbal Atomics engine with 925 Isp, 5 meter tank, two drills and a convert-o-tron to mine the asteroid for fuel to help capture it. 5 km/s on tap with 310 kN of thrust. How hard can it be? Ummmmm...... That's a big negatory on asteroid redirect. This C class asteroid massed over 528 thousand tons. Acceleration was measured in micrometers per second. We'll go after an A next time and see what happens. E is right out.

I thought it would be fun, but it just turned out to be annoying for me. I don't think I'll use Research Bodies again.

More Advanced Probes and Boots on Minmus Next steps involved landing more advanced probes with better science gear, plus a manned landing on Minmus. Because I'm running Kerbal Health, keeping the crew alive and happy during the long transit time to Minmus required a bit of creativity. An advanced probe getting to orbit. This one is bound for Minmus. Definitely not the stock version of Minmus. While there are still large flat areas, they're more realistic and believable. Almost down. The wider stance from the larger diameter tanks definitely helps. A nearly identical probe went to Mun and did some biome hopping, mostly under low light conditions. Here's a shot of the lander probe leaving an Exotic Crater, one of the new Mun biomes in JNSQ. Also launched our first LKO station, titled Genesis Station (since it's the beginning of our habitation in space). We'll probably do an Exodus Station when it's time to leave Kerbin. Here's the architecture we landed on, as used in the second manned trip to Minmus. The two-man lander and hab module (I can't really call it a station, since it's uncontrolled and has no attitude thrusters or propulsion) launched first into Minmus orbit. A manned Mk 1-3 capsule with a Hitchhiker then rendezvoused with the stack in Minmus orbit, transferred crew, and then headed down. Flag on Minmus accomplished. With Strategia, Career Evolution, and some other contracts all offering payouts for various portions of the mission, this one was quite lucrative. Next time - Station additions, and rovers on Mun and Minmus!

Early Efforts Spent some time getting acquainted with the new system and launching some typical early craft around Kerbin, Mun, and Minmus. Definitely enjoying the new terrain around KSC and the implementation of various visual mods. A small probe in high orbit (possibly geosynchronous), and a good shot of Kerbin Mk 2. The terrain and biomes on Mun are redone and very much improved, IMHO. First probe that landed on Minmus, with Kerbin low over the horizon. These early probes always look a bit awkward and sometimes tippy with limited diameter parts available. Same goes for this early manned Mun lander. No style points for the craft, but still nice with the new textures and Kerbin low over the horizon. Next time - more interesting things! Really!