Ruthgar

Been a while since I've posted something here. Didn't do much in KSP today, just started a new game with the usual dream team of kerbals that will be led by a new one, one JG Kerman, who will be the lead kerbanaut for this world. Appropriate I think for what happened today. "Thank you John Glenn for being a part of that first group of explorers to brave that which is beyond the limits of our world to show us a glimpse of what is beyond it. May you Rest In Peace."

One thing I've also found that does work when I can't place a node within the first 45-90 degrees of the orbital path that the craft is going to take, but I can place it farther on, is that you place the farther node then just drag it back to where you need it, afterwards the ability to place nodes anywhere is restored as well. If you can't place a node anywhere on the orbital path than yeah go back to the space center and go use the tracking station to fix the problem.

The more it shakes, rattles, burns, and generally gets closer to exploding, the more Jeb likes it.

Well, decided I would try to revisit an old experiment of mine from back in .7 or .8 of lifting a X shaped station whose arms were made of two giant orange tanks each. As I had reinstalled KSP to start a fresh career without any trace of the old mods that even though I had removed them from game data some of the info was still showing up in the game and causing a few bugs, this had left me with a career at a point that did not have all of the parts I needed (stock) to make this creation, so I started a new sandbox save. The only mods I used for this were kerbal engineer and hyperedit (used hyperedit to simulate the full proper asparugus staging I would need to get this thing into orbit by adding some fuel into the tanks during the lift as I was only doing this to prove it MIGHT be feasible to lift such a massive ungainly station) There was much discouragement at first Plus what looked like some wibly wobbly time stuff before the big explosions But after much frustration (see many many many repeats of the above pictures in various angles and lighting) I finally had a finalized prototype (didn't blow up, spin cycle, fold itself, or otherwise implode in the first 5-10k meters of flight) Due to building it in the spaceplane hanger there were some issues that did come about in the test flight were some of the fuel transfer lines not being properly hooked up, which led to a second hyperedit refueling rather than the original single one that was intended. Turns out had those fuel lines been connected, along with lines coming from the station tanks there might have been enough fuel to get the thing up to it's final parking orbit of 1 thousand km, definately enough fuel to have gotten it into a stable low orbit, provided I work out the stability issues the engines will develop from losing the empty tanks and there support lines. Anyways, here it is up in orbit ready for ships or more station modules to dock with it if this was my career save. You can't really see it clearly, but two of the engine mounts along with 1 set each of tanks and engine attached are still on the station (that's the extra rockomax hub at the top and bottom) I think I'll have to do one more test prior to setting this up in career as they're were a few flaws I noticed. Final engines on each rocket mount had no stability and liked to wobble everywhere during the burns (luckily I was in orbit by then and could afford to keep the engine speeds low. LIGHTS, need to place some lights by the docking ports. Finally need to do something about it's turn speed, damn thing took forever to make turns for orbital burns - - - Updated - - - Speaking of my career mission from my last post, Jeb and Val have come up with an interesting way of dealing with those tourists that I get in those career missions. Here you can see Val and Jeb after Val gets her pilot certification and makes an excellent drop of the tourist pods even if she didn't quite land hers quite right. And here's Jeb doing a solo run, he got his pod to land correctly, the tourist pods..........not so much. (You're seeing the mark 2 design of the Tourist Trap reentry system, the mark 1 design.....well the chutes of the 3 man pods kinda bumped with the 1 man command pod and the stack separator under it and when the separator and chutes would activate, well the 1 man command pod dissappeared or so I thought. Then I'm looking at the mission report and seeing a 500+ max g reported and finally go back to the space center and the tracking center. To find the 1 man pod has in under 2-3 minutes gone from an altitude of 3k over the surface of kerbin to almost out of Kerbin's SOI. Only did it one time tho, and I tested the design about a dozen times after wards with no repeats. Still redesigned the chute placements so they wouldn't touch the separator anymore.)

My biggest issue with the latest patch is the need for putting wings on your earliest rockets to keep them from going end over end. In real life I've spent over 20 years working on and around space lift systems, and I know for a fact that the primary means of steering of the rocket under thrust is the use of thrust vector control or gimballing of the thrust nozzles along the x/y axis. The main reason why you ever see a rocket start to spin end over end is usually because of a failure of one or more of the servo motor control systems of the nozzles and one or more of the nozzles being forced by the engine thrust itself to the furthest possible travel of the nozzle and locking into that position. Now requiring the use of wings/rcs to control the spin of the rocket LENGTHWISE is perfectly understandable, practical, and even applicable to real life. Glad I've got multiple versions of KSP saved because of wanting to continue various builds/campaigns under certain conditions, as I won't be playing the updated version until the end over end flipping for no real reason gets resolved. PS. that thrust vectoring I talked about has been on both liquid and solid rocket engines for space lift since the 50s at least in the US.

Started a new career in my 'BTSM' modded KSP copy folder (original purchased version is in a separate folder and is mostly vanilla aside from science alert, Kerbal Engineer, and mechjeb for precise node timing ( I like to do my own node calculations, just don't like sitting around for the precise initiation of them)) and my first trip out to jool, my probes get there and..... they only have the 100,000km transmitter........*sigh* time for a new mission and waiting for the next transfer window.

Usually read some fanfiction, after getting something to drink and changing my music/anime I've been listening/watching if necessary.

I have two of them. First I'll tell you about my trip to Eve with an ingeniously designed lander It was designed for a parachute/powered assist landing (final braking), then launch, link up to a set off fuel tanks left in orbit (4 sets of quad linked tanks that after transfering fuel from them to the lander I could jetison individual tanks), and the lander would then go back to kerbin. Here's a screenshot of the basic lander design I was using in that career, unfortunately not of the lander I'm specifically talking about, but it is the central 'core' of the lander that was used (it's missing the clamp o-tron, and additional ascent engines for EVE) The problem was something about the descent/landing/ascent from EVE broke something in the lander supports, and once out of EVE atmosphere any thrust over 35-40% would start the 'legs' gyroing around, actually they started gyroing at anything above 10-20%, but could stay on course until 35-40%. So Jeb took this crippled lander, and managed to get it back to Kerbin and landed it at the north pole. When it landed, only one of the four legs was still at a right angle to the central stack, one was twisted about 30% off center, and the other two were pushed up about 15%. Turns out I had not noticed that I had completely lost the struts on those 3 legs, and only the struts from the central stack to the 4th leg were intact. An examination of the mission log showed that jetisoning the Eve ascent packages after transfering the last of their fuel once I had reached the resupply tanks in orbit had somehow destroyed those missing struts. The second awesome moment I had was landing at a 45 degree angle as you can see in this picture. It's my firm belief from Jeb's normal lack of response, aside from being happy/excited, to all forms of 'exciting' incidents that there is something not right with him.

Did an actual apollo like mun mission (separate lander/command craft) for the first time ever using the BTSM mod. Have always done a massive lander that was capable of returning to kerbin itself before, usually with enough fuel left over for a partial powered descent. This one, barely had the fuel left to return to Kerbin on an intercept course. It was fun.

HAven't yet, between being sick and just having one of those days where I can't find the motivation to do/play anything.

Without editing my save file here are my never been there stats. Unmanned, haven't been to eeloo yet. Manned haven't done a Moho landing/stable orbit (did do a moho SOI slingshot), also haven't done manned landings of one of Jool's moons (need to check that career save)

This is somewhat incorrect as obviously the ISS gets resupplied all the time(food, life-support, thruster fuel, etc...), and when the shuttle was around part of the maintenance they did on the satellites they worked on in orbit (Hubble for example) was to resupply the onboard fuel (usually either tank swap, or transfering a pre-calculated amount). However the main reason why resupply missions aren't done to most satellites (aside from the shuttle being retired) is that currently it's cheaper/easier to just launch a new satellite when the old one de-orbits/goes offline.

Finished Phases 1, 2, and 3 of setting up my Minimus base in my "Better than Starting manned" mod save. Phase 1 was delivering my gantry crane for use in setting up the base, here's a screenshot of testing it on Kerbin Phase 2 was getting the initial base component there.....Had a slight issue with how close I landed them to the crane as you can see Phase 3 was getting everything disconnected from the ship and hooked up. Found a few flaws in my current design (no lights, not enough docking ports, etc...) all of which I can fix in the future. Here's how my Minimus base looks currently. Phase 4a will be a redesign/testing stage on Kerbin of both the manned lander system, and probe transport/lander system for carrying more base components, plus testing the design here on kerbin. Phase 4b will be the initial flight test/probe transport missions to minimus using a variety of payload sizes/weights Phase 5 will be transport of more base components Phase 6 will be transport of supplies Phase 7 will be a manned mission to assemble the base and evaluate if more components will be necessary (possible return to Kerbin if supplies are being used too fast) Phase 8 will be resupply transports, and more base components as necessary Phase 9 will be final assembly of base components for the initial science studies (with a manned mission if the one in Phase 7 returned to Kerbin) Phase 10 will be start of long term science studies at the base (looks life 5 years for one of the BTSM experiments), and multiple resupply missions as needed Phase 11 and beyond are currently undetermined as they will depend on future science discoveries, and the success/failure of my Minimus Base. Though current plans do include the possible replication of Minimus base both on the Mun and a variation of it up in orbit. One final plan is to capture a type E asteroid get it into stable Kerbin SOI and construct a base using it as the anchoring base.

You used a few too many landing legs, probly cost you a few dozen-few hundred in Delta-V

I was working on building my Minimus base in my "Better than Starting Manned"/"Deadly Reentry" mod career when I heard the news about Robin Williams. After that, I just couldn't find it in me to continue working on it.