herbal space program

I've tried to scan three different rocks on the Mun so far and it didn't recognize any of them as scannable objects. Do I just need to try a bunch more rocks or am I doing it wrong? My scanner was mounted directly to the bottom of a lander, so looking at a bunch of them was not really possible. Rover-mounted version is in LKO as of last night....

This could be an interesting challenge, but I've got few questions: Main mission: Any particular requirements for what constitutes a base? I assume we're talking about having enough habitation modules and power, but do we also need antennas, resource extraction/conversion capability, science modules, etc? Based on your back-story, that seems like a reasonable requirement. Bonuses 1/2: Do we actually need to deliver all the surface samples to the base or just collect them before going there? Another general question: Any limitation on the number of separate launches/LKO departures allowed to do all of this?

It will show you leaving whatever SOI you are in only when you have exceeded the escape velocity with no SOI boundary or other bodies taken into account. That is why it shows you entering and leaving again when you first have your Munar encounter, but not later, when you may have lowered yourself to an AP that crosses the SOI boundary but would remain bound to the Mun otherwise. Presumably that will be true for Kerbin too, but I haven't tried. And that is the part that I find unfair and deceptive. After the first-level upgrade, you get to see everything, including times, speeds, intersects, maneuver nodes, and what your trajectory will be after you leave your current SOI. I guess what I'm suggesting is that it would be much more fair to the player if they did still show the SOI boundary at Level 1, but none of the other stuff. SOI's are indeed part of the patched conics system, but the patched conics themselves are the trajectories that are spliced together, not the (arbitrary) SOI boundary itself. So just not showing you those or any of the other useful information still seems both reasonable and consistent to me with the statement "patched conics not visible" for the Level 1 station. Anyway, for my own part I've obviously played way past that particular annoyance in my game and will never fall victim to it again, but I still feel like what I said would be a better way to do it in terms of game play than the way it works now.

Is that what it costs in easy mode? In my current game it costs $300,000, but that's beside the point as well. Like I said, it's fine for the game to withhold whatever information they deem appropriate at whatever level of the tracking station. The idea of just giving you wrong information however totally rubs me the wrong way. It's a pointless, essentially unavoidable frustration trap, and I don't think I've ever actually seen it done on purpose anywhere else in the game.

It's actually considerably narrower than that for me. I don't think there's any problem with the tracking station not giving you whatever information early on, I just think that it's unfair for it to actually give you false information before you have unlocked patched conics. Your trajectory ending at the edge of the SOI and you don't know what happens next is just fine as far as I'm concerned, but having it show you outright wrong trajectories in that situation is no good.

At what radius it occurs may be systematic, but at what radius/mass it occurs is still arbitrary. All I'm actually saying is that the level 1 station should show you only what happens in your current SOI, but at least have the decency to tell you if you're going to leave that SOI rather than pretending it's infinite and you're going to stay there when you aren't. It actually does so in cases when you're outside the infinite SOI escape velocity, so it only shows you wrong stuff when you're in between that and the arbitrary SOI apoapsis, where it maddeningly tells you you are in orbit before you actually are. Are early players really supposed to be able to figure all that out? Well the contracts system was giving me over 50% Mun-related contracts at that point, including every last one of the good ones, so if I was not supposed to go there yet the game did a pretty bad job of telling me that. Well at least on that I agree with you without any qualification.

Well I'm sorry, but I found the remark about if I think N-body will make it easier I have another think coming gratuitous, beside the point, and a bit insulting, considering how long I have been posting on this forum and all of the genuinely difficult challenges I've successfully participated in over the years. This, as I'm sure you know, is not about me not being able to get into Munar orbit. It's about the supposed navigational aids in early career making it excessively, unfairly difficult to do so by actually showing you false information about your trajectory in the map view. Lots of people have explained to me now how it is the game does that, which I understand now, thank you, but nobody has come close to explaining to me why it was a good idea for the developers to have made it thus in the first place. If somebody like me messes up two missions in a row and gets annoyed enough to make a forum post about it because the map view lied to them, the consternation that "feature" causes could easily make somebody in their first 100 hours of game play to just throw the game against the wall and never play it again. That is the point I was trying to make. I've actually played through this stage of career probably half a dozen times now and somehow never encountered this, so it's new to me in spite of all that. No, those are the orbits that would occur if there were no arbitrary SOI boundary. If Kerbin didn't exist, then you would still transition to the Kerbol SOI. Either way, concealing that boundary from you at any stage of the game, particularly early in the campaign mode, is unfair, precisely because it is so arbitrary. And you're saying you disagree with me saying that they really shouldn't do something so dastardly to players who are just starting out? I'd like to know why you think it is appropriate to treat beginners that way. Honestly, I think this statement says it all. Career still has the wrong end pointed towards space after all these version updates. I mean, I agree the only reason I'm tempted to play it is because some of the early missions that reach beyond your tech level are so challenging, like rescuing stranded Kerbals with no maneuver node or information about future encounters available. But that is truly, really not the way it ought to be.

I don;t understand why people need to get all haughty about this. The game is not concealing something from you, it is actually giving you false information about where you are going. Not the same thing. And no, I don't want multi-body physics. I want the game to be fair to the player and reveal that you are going to leave the soi when that is what is going to happen rather than pretending you are going to stay in orbit just so you can feel cheated when you don;t. And it's not like that is ever going to happen to me again anyway. I'm just commenting on what shoddy gameplay design this is. I've played this game for over 2,000 hours and still I got fooled twice by that stupid "feature" of early career. YMMV, but to my mind that is no way to design a game campaign.

Which I am saying is just a really stupid idea from the point of game play. These things after all are not ordained by some deity, they represent actual decisions made by the game developers. And you know it does show you going in and out of the Mun's SOI at the beginning and then around it after supposed orbital insertion, so it's not just refusing to tell you if you're in orbit or not, it's actually lying to you about it. I mean, I can live with having to upgrade the station to see the patched conics and all that, but stuff like this is really going to turn people off, and I don't actually think it was like this before, because I never remember this happening in prior career games. Just the one. It was like mission number 6 in a hard career game, ferrying 2 tourists to a Munar flyby and satisfying a contract to orbit the Mun. And I haven't played a whole lot of Career, but I have played it for at least 200 hours or so, and I don't ever remember anything like this except for edge cases.

It was pretty high, not sure exactly how high. But what you're saying means it's deliberate, to which I say Boo! How are early players supposed to know about SOI's? After all they are not a real thing, but rather a kludge that the devs use because they can't really model multi-body physics. Punishing players for not knowing that yet by lying to them about whether or not they are actually in orbit around a particular body is just plain stupid. If they don't fix dumb ideas like this for KSP2, they are going to turn off a lot of players right out of the gate.

This is more of a bug (I think) report than a suggestion, but it doesn't really belong in the support forum either. Twice now in an early career game I've put my craft in Munar orbit according to the map view, only to find that I was suddenly back in Kerbin orbit as I approached my Ap. The second time I actually lowered it by half at least from the altitude of its initial appearance before hitting timewarp, and yet still I escaped the Mun instead of staying in orbit. Rather infuriating really. What gives? Is this just some kind of deliberate early career crappiness or is there something wrong with how that level of the tracking station is implemented? I don't think this has ever happened to me in Sandbox. Anybody else had the same problem?

It also looks a whole lot nicer, lets you ship an engineer in your cockpit, and has inline docking ports. But if you're trying to squeeze every last bit of performance out of a low-TWR situation, Mk1 just lets you go higher and faster pretty much every time. Mk3 can be better still, because more mass/surface area, but OP does not have that yet. Actually, I think the space plane with a detachable/bay-enclosed Munar excursion module that @Laie posted is the most cost-efficient solution. Those Panther engines really do get you going pretty fast and pretty high for next to no fuel, and if you ditch the whole plane and just orbit the Mun with a minimal module, you are basically doing that as cheaply as it can possibly be done from LKO. You just have to land the two components separately with that solution, which increases the grind factor. Given that we're talking maybe a few hundred more to fly the whole plane there, in terms of player time/effort I think the one-craft space plane solution is by far the most efficient.

Well those Panther engines can get you to Mach 2.5 and almost 20 km on 10 times less propellant than any other solution available at that tech level, so even if I were to use a more conventional rocket with a recoverable booster, I'd consider making the booster out of those. As to the overall cost of the SSTO, the one I made above is ~53,000 to build and ships ~3,500 worth of fuel, which would represent the total non-recoverable mission cost. Of that, only ~860 is required to do the Munar orbit leg from LKO with 6 passengers, which is less than even the most trivial early contracts pay in hard career mode. There is also the matter of the easy complete recovery of non-fuel costs that the ability to fly your plane right back to the runway affords you. Even a recoverable booster is generally going to get recovered somewhere downrange, which will incur a significant penalty. And splashing down any separate Munar excursion module will similarly require a tedious level of precision aerobraking to get you splashed down right next to the KSC. Either that or you have to do even more precise aerobraking and/or burn a whole bunch of propellant to re-rendezvous with the shuttle on LKO. Of course in principle what @Laie said about a shuttle system being the most cost-effective way is true, but unless cost efficiency is the single most important objective, you have to weigh that fact against the ease and convenience of taking the whole show off from the runway and landing it there again.

1. Yes, you are right. I actually meant dry mode when I said "wet mode". 2. Because the weight and drag of all the wings is offset by the extra lift that allows you fly near your prograde vector, especially up high where the air is thin. Having a really high AoA with all your fuselages will just kill you with drag that does not produce any lift. Hence the pitched-up placement of the wings also, to allow them to have a positive AoA while all the fuselages are pointed prograde. I have built planes that way since at least 1.2 or so. Just keep adding wings to your own design and see what happens! 3. A fair point, although Swivels actually have a slightly better vacuum ISP than Reliants (320 v. 310). This small difference may be mostly offset by the added weight, but the gimbals do come in handy so long as you have enough TWR. Could go either way for what I have, but for anything larger, I agree the better TWR of the Reliants will become critical. In fact, I noted tardily that I only had room for 4 passengers when 5-6 were required, so I may try them on a version with an extra crew cabin. 4. Drag is always a key consideration whenever you are trying to fly something into LKO at a low TWR. The fairings only weigh like 0.2 tons and reduce the overall drag of the engines by more than half, so they are often worth it. The Swivels in particular had awful drag, so I covered them first, but then I saw better performance when I covered the Panthers also. As to clipping stuff, I think that will only cheat the drag model if you then put all the clipped-together parts inside a fairing. Not really Cricket in my book, but YMMV. Anyway, I look forward to seeing what you come up with! ...As an update, When I switched to the Reliants I was indeed able to get better overall performance, getting roughly the same dV on orbit as before, despite an added passenger module for a total capacity of 6. The gimbals were definitely missed though!

Here it is in the SPH. Total mass is 56.8t, vacuum dV of the rocket stages is 2879 m/s. It has two MK1 passenger modules, at the front of the stacks left and right of the cockpit, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't have any parts you haven't unlocked yet. It has 3 Panther and 2 Swivel engines, each with a backwards-facing fairing in front of it to reduce otherwise severe back-end drag. The substantial wings are pitched up a couple of degrees relative to the fuselages, to generate lift even when the fuselages have an AoA of zero. I also have 5 intakes for 3 engines, which is a good idea if you're going to go as high as you can on them. Since you presumably don't have the Z-1000 battery yet, I put a couple of draggy z-400 ones in the service bay in the center stack. If I were building this in Sandbox, I'd have definitely used wet wings to lower overall drag even more, but I'm assuming you don't have those yet. In terms of flight profile, I started off at a low rate of climb and built speed low in the atmosphere, in dry mode. With this plane, I was never quite able to break the sound barrier in dry mode, but I could get very close to Mach 1. Turning on the afterburners would then push it across fairly quickly, after which I could then switch back to dry mode and only slowly lose velocity while climbing further at about 10 degrees of pitch. Although I never really got above Mach 2.5, I found that I was able to maintain that speed almost all the way to 20 km on the Panthers alone. I would start to lose speed at around 18.5 km, at which point I would pitch up to 20 degrees and fire up the Swivels. The Panthers would typically flame out at ~23 km, and the rest of the ride to orbit was pretty straightforward: I always ended up with quite a bit of extra LF in the tank as well, so there is plenty left to land under power. Rather too much in fact, which represents a point of potential improvement. And although I think you have plenty of dV to orbit the Mun with this craft, I'm sure it would tolerate a couple more small tanks to add another 100-200 m/s. I'm pretty sure you could land it on Minmus then as well!

So I came up with one this evening that makes LKO with around 1,100 m/s. Do you want to see it?

If nukes are allowed then I'm absolutely sure it's possible. One thing I'm noticing about your design is it has very little wing area for its mass, which makes flying up high much harder due to the drag incurred by the high AoA you need. Also, are your wings tilted slightly up relative to your fuselage? That angle of incidence will help you fly witha lower overall AoA and therefore go faster. Wet wings are also really helpful in increasing efficiency, since you get the fuel they hold for free in terms of drag, but I guess you haven't reached that tech level yet. Also I concur with @Cavscout74 that Mk1 is much more drag-efficient than Mk2, so definitely switch to that. I'm not sure if it's allowed in career mode, but you can use f12 to look at your aero characteristics and also alt-F12 to enable displaying part-specific drag in the PAW, which can really help in rooting out drag issues.

This seems doable to me, but unfortunately your image link appears to be broken. What rocket engines besides the Reliant do you currently have available? Do you have everything up through the 160 science tier? Since the Panther should easily be able to get you above 20km, I would think the Terrier or Poodle engine would actually be your best bet for the rocket part since they have much better vacuum ISP than the Reliant. I may give this a try later myself...

Your problem is that you did such a good job on this challenge yourself that nobody else wants to try to beat you!

I took a look at your SSTO, and while it incorporates a number of really good ideas like mounting your props in service bays and putting a bunch of stuff behind fairings, to me the degree of part clipping involved is disqualifying , because you're basically just cheating the drag model. For the most part, challenge issuers for this sort of thing (including me) allow part clipping only if it does not put solid, massive parts substantially inside each other. So for example if you want to mount multiple engines with large bells into less space than they really fit, moderately clipping just the bells into each other might be considered OK, but not mashing all the engine bodies together, as you surely must have done with all those Nervs. When I went to the SPH to try to imitate what you had,I found that while you apparently used 2.5m fairings to house your tanks, etc., not even 5m fairings of that shape would actually fit all that stuff inside without a lot of clipping. To me that's pretty egregious, especially if we're talking about Mk1 LF fuselages, which already have quite a high mass/drag ratio. So although I'm definitely impressed, I would not consider that craft as really demonstrating that a Jool SSTO is possible without doing something that's generally considered cheating.

The Wolfhound from MH has an ISP of 380, so that would technically be high enough, although its TWR is nothing to write home about. My prior statement about Nervs however was based on an inaccurate idea of how strong Jool's gravity field is. They would definitely have enough TWR to be useful at only 7.85 m/s2 of downward acceleration. And as I just went there with my plane using HyperEdit and saw that a 200 km circular orbit is like 5.6 km/s, I don't doubt that it actually takes close to 8 km/s of dV to make orbit. Those props are great for lifting you out of the worst of the soup, but they don't get you going very fast.

I was going to protest that must be impossible, but then I looked at the Wiki for Jool and saw that its "surface" gravity is only 7.85 m/s2, like Laythe's, in spite of having an orbital velocity of >3 km/s. I'll have to give it a try with my current plane, as I think it'll probably be about the same as Kerbin to get off of between the higher OV and the lower gravity. Eve is a different movie though. It has more than twice that surface gravity at 16.7 m/s2, which means you need a whole lot of TWR to avoid plunging back into the soup. In that gravity, the Nerv engines alone only have a TWR of 1.2, so I never found them so helpful in making orbit. I still think it's totally doable though!

The nukes are great on Kerbin or Duna, but I've found that in Eve's high gravity TWR is so critical they're generally not that helpful in making orbit. Since this ship makes Kerbin orbit with >2km/sec, I'll still have >1km/sec left if I swap them for aerospikes and replace the extra weight with fuel. Bare Wolfhounds might represent a good compromise in that regard as well, which I have not yet investigated. Also, out of curiosity, how do you define SSTO-ing on Jool?

It certainly looks like it was slapped together by my drunken chimpanzee avatar if that's what you mean! I actually started over completely 5 times in this process. Each time I told myself I'll make it look good this time, but then each time, after like 30 test flights and trips back to the SPH, I ended up in about the same dorky place appearance-wise. Once I really get it flying the way I want it to, I'll probably set about remedying the fact that it looks like a flying exploded diagram. There's just a lot to consider, and having all the engines assymetrical makes moving some things around a real pain in the end that should not point towards space.

Good post! It's great to see people investigating the awesome potential of the BG rotor parts to make getting off Eve something other than a booster-spamming contest. For my part, I'm working on a prop-powered Eve sea-level SSTO: It makes Kerbin orbit with >2km/s using nukes: And flies pretty well on Duna too: I'll need to create a non-nuke version for Eve, but with that much dV on Kerbin orbit, I'm pretty optimistic it will work!