captainb

Built a smallish SSTO to ferry crew to and from LKO. She has about 600m/s deltaV once she makes orbit

@SufficientAnonymity does that thing balance on only those 2 engines?

Working on a craft for my first Jool mission in my career save. Still have some kinks to iron out though. I'm only allowing myself testing around Kerbin.

Real Plume is what you're looking for.

Today begins the test program for the Magellan Mission architecture. For this we are running sims in the Testing save. Any improvements to the vehicle as a result of testing will eventually make their way into the final vehicle. Reuben is our main test pilot for now. He will be flying the sims and report back any issues to the engineers. The first two items on the test agenda are testing the Launch to LKO capabilities of the Launch Vehicle (TLB). Reuben will also test the Cockpit Egress/Ingress of the Laika while landed, to ensure science data can be collected from Laythe. All in all a good day of testing!

Hopefully this works. First attempt at embedding imgur album, and have heard that the functionality is broken or at least was at some point. So without further ado, presenting the Magellan Mission StarshipTM: This is the craft which has undergone several design iterations, and is probably close to the finalized design, although I plan to do some further testing in LKO. The full vessel is composed of a mothership the Trinidad, and 3 daughter craft (Santiago, Victoria and Laika). The Santiago is a low-gravity vacuum science lander for Vall, Pol and Bop. The Victoria is a compact science probe with enough dV and TWR to land on Tylo (but not return). The Laika is a small single crewed SSTO for Laythe. Excepting Laika, all vehicles are named after ships from Ferdinand Magellan's circumnavigation voyage. The Trinidad's namesake was Magellan's flagship - she set sail with a full crew of 55, but ultimately came to grief losing half of her crew to scurvy and finally being destroyed in a storm. Crossing my fingers that my mission does not end in similar catastrophe. I considered renaming the Laika to one of the last two ships from Magellan's flotilla, but ultimately I couldn't bring myself to do it. The name Laika is much more suited to the happy and brave little space puppy of an SSTO that I've designed, compared to either Conception or San Antonio. The initial design for the Laythe SSTO spaceplane was intended to fit inside a mk3 cargo bay along with the other daughter vehicles. Here is a picture of the initial design which was dubbed the Pixel. However, that design was abandoned after testing showed some serious issues with landing: namely a far-too narrow wheelbase which all but ensured tipping over on touchdown, and a low-speed glide-slope indistinguishable from that of a cinder block. These two issues combined virtually assured a RUD on landing. Here is one such ill-fated landing attempt. Whoops! The Laika is far more well behaved with a much wider wheelbase and a larger wing area which allows for a gentle touchdown on any semi-flat surface. As an added bonus, she comes fully equipped with science instrumentation and a comms antenna.

Yes, I made the patch myself. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out!

The time has come for Kerbal-kind to leave our small blue oasis on Kerbin and venture out into the great beyond - to the unknown worlds that beckon us from afar like silent lanterns adrift in the night. We are resolved to go to Jool! To unlock the secrets of the unknown, and hopefully also to come back! Prologue: What follows is my account of the planning, execution and aftermath of the Magellan mission to the Jool system in my career save. I have spend the majority of my time playing KSP within the Kerbin system visiting the Mun and Minmus ad nauseum, and unlocking most of the tech tree. Besides Duna, I have never visited any other body in a career save. My goal in this career is to send missions to visit all the celestial bodies in the Kerbol system. Some will be manned and some unmanned. With a Jool transfer window approaching in 41 days, I have decided to take a bold step towards this goal by sending a crew of valiant (or maybe daft) kerbals to this giant green world and her moons. Magellan Mission The Magellan mission will take after the great explorer Ferdinand Magellan in attempting a feat which has never before been done (by me). To send a manned mission to the Jool system, take science data on all the worlds therein and return to Kerbin. I'm calling this a Jool-4.5 mission because unlike the Jool-5 mission reports from challenges, there will be no flags or footprints on Tylo, instead I will have a probe land and report back with science data. But the rest of the moons will be visited by Kerbals. Here is the mission patch for the Magellan Mission : The patch shows the silhouettes of Jool, Laythe, Val and Tylo against a backdrop of stars and backlit by the sun as the spacecraft flies by. It is modeled after the STS-41 mission patch. The motto is latin for "To the stars through adversity", and was totally Magellan's rallying cry on his voyage something I thought sounded cool. This mission report is primarily for my own benefit, as something to look back on when this mission is over, but I hope others will find it enjoyable as well. I intend to chronicle my thinking as it relates to mission planning, vehicle design and testing and mission execution in a matter of fact way, and not to write a story or a novel. Right now, I'm not planning to do much if any roleplaying from a Kerbal standpoint, but who know maybe I will get carried away later on. Notes about my playstyle: At this stage, I have designed the vehicle and a rough sketch of the mission plan. I build and test all my vehicles in a sandbox save and then copy the craft files to my career save. For testing purposes, I am allowing myself cheats to get the vehicle into LKO, but no testing will be done in the Jool system. This will hopefully force me to think more carefully about what conditions I will encounter at Jool and will preserve the newness of the experience for me when I actually fly the mission in my career save. I do use quite a few mods, but no part mods (aside from SCANSAT). The mods that I use fall under one of three categories: (1) Visual enhancements (2) Sounds/Effects to increase immersion and (3) Gameplay tools (ie KER) What's Next: In the next posts I will be showcasing the design of the spacecraft, and possibly doing some on-orbit testing. Once I unlock all the parts I need in my career save we will get onto the meat of the mission.

To be clear, I'm not asking or expecting you to make improvements to performance. I understand that this visual pack is designed for higher-end rigs and it is dependent on a number of other mods. Just expressing my hope that eventually I'll be able to run it, since what it provides is very close to my ideal for a beautified ksp.

@Avera9eJoe Great project you have here. I especially love how you are working hard to make the terrain tiling invisible at all scales. Seeing tiling when landed on a planet detracts from the immersion of playing KSP imo. I tested on a clean install, and unfortunately I can't live with the hit my frame rate takes atm (GTX 960M on a 6th gen i7 laptop here). Hopefully some further optimization of scatterer/Kopernicus or other dependencies can help improve frame rate in the future.

@ferram4 I would like to edit the config file to reduce the wing strength while keeping the stack strengthening. I am able to pull 25Gs without the wings breaking off. I looked at the readme on github but I didn't see anything addressing wings.

Liking this a lot. Its nice to have extra chatter. There is at least one clip where it sounds like mission control talks over top of the the astronauts. Could you clarify if this is the intended behavior ie. as a result of the "translation", or if there is an issue with separate audio clips not being spaced out correctly when played?

I think the mission control thing would only work if there were an autopilot flying the ship for you. Maybe the mission control could be an additional (unlockable?) game mode where you only make high level executive decisions. Kind of like the franchise manager thing or whatever in Madden. (Although I hear any form of autopilot is off the table as far as the developers are concerned.) I'd also imagine it would be much more fun if parts could fail and you had to come up with a solution with limited information a la the Apollo 13 mission.

All I want for christmas are some UI improvements: 1) ability to TYPE A NUMBER into the gimbal/thrust limiter/deploy range/fuel amount sliders in VAB and SPH (so you're telling me I can get 59 or 61 but not 60? WHY?) 2) action group setup visible and configurable in flight and key presses give feedback of what the heck you just did (does 5 activate those engines or those engines?)

@pizzaoverhead Love this thread. Sound is something that gets very little love in stock KSP and a few well placed sounds make the game so much more immersive. Just a couple suggestions to flesh out your parts list some more, I've noticed that cargo/service bays have no sound when opening or closing.

Hmmm. That's pretty close to my worst case scenario estimate of 5500 m/s. I will have to give this some more thought. Is aerobraking at Jool/Laythe worthwhile or not really?

I'm planing a manned Jool mission for my career save. The focus will be on extracting as much sweet, sweet science as possible from the Jool system before returning home to Kerbin. I'm going to use a NERV powered main mothership with 3 daughter landers to cover all the moons. (The Tylo lander will be an unmanned one-way trip!) Since this will be my first visit to Jool, I'm not sure what to expect for dV requirements after I capture into the Jool SOI. For a conservative estimate, I could simply add up all the numbers from the KSP delta-V map to get intercepts with each moon including the plane change amounts. This assumes (1) that the parent body will be Jool every time (2) no gravity assists from the other moons and (3) no daughter vehicles. With this in mind, do people have a ballpark number for the delta-v requirements to encounter all Joolian moons? I'm looking for rough estimates as a gut-check for my planning purposes, preferably from those who have done similar missions. I should also mention that I'm not planning to do any resource extraction, but I might need to if the dV requirements are too high.

For those of you wondering if you can use this to help rendezvous with another ship/celestial object - the answer is YES! It also does not appear to hide waypoints, so it can be used for precision landing as well! Great work @knowbuddy!

Crewed rover pods in small med and large variants. Trusses ala Near Future Construction

Yeah I started to figure this out. Overwriting the Sunflare inside the scatterer folder did nothing so I overwrote the Sunflare folder of SVE instead. This worked but resulted in a gigantic freakin sun. I'm still playing with the flare and spike settings to get something that looks good for the stock Kerbol system.

My workaround for now is to edit the config to have showMenuOnStart = True and just remember not to hide the UI. Eventually I will take a closer look at gfexperience to see what key bindings I can change.

Is this going to be bundled with SVE at some point?

At some point, I hid the settings window on the start menu, and now I'm unable to pull it up again using the hotkeys. I've tried using Alt-F10 and Alt-F11. Alt-F11 is set to toggle to my Nvidia game overlay, so that's a no go. I've tried pulling up the UI in various scenes (Start menu, space center, in-flight). I've also tried uninstalling and reinstalling scatterer via CKAN. Nothing I've tried works so far. Any ideas? FWIW, my laptop requires the Fn key to access the function keys as instead of volume/brightness.

That would be pretty awesome!

NASA just released a bunch more audio clips on their soundcloud page. It'd be great to see some of these Kerbalized and added into the mod. Been using Chatterer for so long I pretty much have all the sound bytes memorized.