rogu3ish

Finished reinforcing the Jool mission mothership. Spent about 2 hours adding struts while in orbit - about 40 additional struts in all. Before: After: At this point it looks more like a sailing ship than a space ship. Stability tests show that adding the struts vastly improved performance; it wiggles around a bit while turning, but under power it flies straight as an arrow with no oscillation.

Got the last two bits of my Jool Explorer ship into orbit, and the whole thing assembled. It has definitely suffered from scope creep, and I'm a bit worried now that I won't have enough dV to do what I want to do. I also did a preliminary test to see how stable it is under full acceleration, to determine whether or not I really need to add struts via KAS. The thing shook itself apart within about 30 seconds - even with KJR the small docking clamps (the only size I can currently access) just aren't rigid enough. So tomorrow will probably be a tedious hour or so of EVA applying struts in orbit. Yay!

Managed to design and test a pretty efficient orbital fuel tanker. My previous design the day before was a complete disaster. I managed to get about 6000 kg of fuel into LKO with it, but it proved nearly impossible to steer and thus rendezvous. The new design flies like a dream, and can deliver a bit over 3000 kg of fuel, depending on the height of the target's orbit. I managed to fuel up the first stage of my Jool probe and do a bit more in-orbit assembly. With over 35 days left until the launch window, I should now have time to add a bit more to it so I can harvest more science. Here's the fueling in action. KAS is great for refueling (so long as SAS doesn't shake your ships to pieces) The first stage mostly assembled, just a bit of rearranging to do: After fueling up the first stage (with fuel and monopropellant) there was just enough left in the tanker to de-orbit and tidy things up

I manged to build out my Kethane mining rig on the exact spot I had scouted with my Munar rover. The rig shipped in two pieces, and involved two extremely sketchy landings. I had to land the first half of the rig with only the tiny Rockomax engines and no RCS - and the CoT was off center with the CoM so the thing kept rolling over on me. I somehow managed to land it without damaging a single tire no less. The second part of the rig was attached via a small docking port (the only docking tech I have unlocked atm) to a 3-kerbal capsule with attached storage container. RCS ended up being about worthless in that case too, so I had to bring it down gently via the poodle, land it on the poodle, unclamp the port, and get the habitat module out of the way. Unfortunately that landing took place about 500m from the first part of the rig, and the RCS I had left on the hab module wasn't enough to get it to lift off the surface. I tried hauling it over with my rover, but the rover just didn't have enough pull to drag the thing over. It was a fun exercise, though! Next is to bring out a new hab module that can actually move around, including the ability to rescue two lonely Kerbals about 22km away from the base, sitting on several hundred kg of liquid fuel with no electrical charge to power their SAS to steer over to the base. Edit: Oh yeah, the best part was after landing this beast my kethane drills were upside down, so I had to edit a save file to flip them over. That led to learning about quaternions... Overall an interesting experience.

Today I drove my Munar rover about 22km from its original landing site to scout out a good location for my first Munar base / Kethane extractor.