MaverickSawyer

Well, to be fair, that's not a stainless steel can... it's a stainless steel balloon.

Oh, the trim function? You're just finding that??!?

How about the fact that you seem to be running the old Mk 3 command pod... I haven't seen that thing in years!

Welp, went back after making sure to turn off the "Tidy up debris cluttering KSC" option, and sure enough, the cargo canister was still where I left it. Stigmun was quite happy with that, and proceeded to move the remaining 4 canisters over to the launch pad at the Desert airbase. The rover's missing back right wheel was only minor inconvenience at first. The partner of it on the left decided to join it shortly before unloading the canisters shown above... Stigmun realized that he could remove the damaged section of the cargo bed and swap it with the one ahead of it, and upon doing so, was able to finish moving the canisters to the launchpad without further issue. He then loaded the rover back aboard the Mallard. It was at this point that he now headed over to the operations office to buy some fuel for the Mallard's return trip... After several minutes of haggling, he managed to get a fair price for the 400 units of LF he needed to get Fredberry, Hamlin, and himself back to the KSC. Fredberry, the pilot of the team, wasn't terribly pleased with the quality of the fuel, which he proclaimed had to have been sitting in that fuel truck for several months. The Mallard didn't seem to care... LF is LF. After convincing Fredberry that everything was fine, Stigmun returned the rover to its parking spot, left a tip on the seat, and hurried back to the Mallard, ready to go back to the coastal cool breezes of the KSC. Hamlin took note of the location of some odd looking ruins on the climb out from the airstrip. She and Stigmun, who will form the ground team of the actual expedition, both agreed to visit the location during the journey. The cruise home was largely uneventful, aside from not being able to reach the target cruising altitude again, although it was much better than the trip over. Fredberry blames the "questionable" fuel. Hamlin blames the rover in the cargo hold. #CrewPortrait. - @Hamster_the_Scientist Home, sweet home... Fredberry was a little too fast on approach, so the landing was longer than expected. Nothing that a little taxi back up the runway can't fix, though. Returning to the parking spot, a welcome sight greeted the weary crew: The payload and first stage engine package survived! Huzzah for the new settings. The crew is now taking some down time before making their next flight, this time with the replacement tower... and a repaired rover. In the meantime, I experimented with the rover design for the expedition in the sandbox. Initial efforts focused on finding ways to make it submersible, but the weight and size penalties were excessive. So, that mission requirement was dropped almost as quickly as it was added. However, those experiments did turn up something useful... @Angel-125's excellent Buffalo rover pack includes a pair of pumpjet engines for water use. Two of the radial-mount ones, throttled back to 20% rated thrust, are able to push this 6.8 tonne rover to speeds of 10.2 m/s on water. I finalized the design, warped to sunrise, then set out on a test voyage to the Island Airfield... #whoneedsbridgesanyways? - @Jebman_the_Munatic Handling is excellent, and it has plenty of fuel for the fuel cell left over after making the crossing. And, due to the power of the all-wheel drive powertrain on land, it can match, or even exceed, the speeds of Triop's "Round Kerbind in 80 Days" buggy series on flat ground. All in all, quite happy with the progress for today. The rover has been ported over to the main save for compatibility checks, and hopefully will be able to get underway as soon as the biome map is finished. Field support has also been decided upon... I'm going to use either the Mallard (for long-range logisitcal support) or a modified Aeris 3S (Aeris 3 with a Panther) for refueling ops, as the rover only takes 30 LF in its basic form (the fuel cell uses intake air to react with the LF), and I can toss in another 50 in a Mk 0 Liquid Fuel Tank if I need more range, such as for large water crossings should I need to do so. I'm currently looking at this map for basic planning right now. I'll start sketching the route onto that as soon as I get the survey satellite up.

An amphibious rover design I was testing for my "visit every biome on Kerbin" mission. Works far better than I was expecting... just don't try to use the forward winch to go trolling while cruising; it tends to go boom, and that somehow shaves a full 20% off of the cruise speed.

I seem to recall that it does, courtesy of someone attempting to reach the North Pole with a rover on solar power alone.

I'm not saying film cooling for the whole engine. I'm thinking it's more of a case of trying to manage the flow separation at the transition point. I'm not a fluid dynamics expert my any means, so my opinion is worth about as much as the electricity used for me to post this, but... eh. Just spitballing ideas here.

See, you should have jumped the pool, not driven through it.

@Tonka Crash can you share the legs? I've missed those something fierce.

Okay, I haven't used this mod in a long time, and I noticed you're talking about adding in new resources for the construction of parts. Is there a means of gathering/refining those resources included in the pack, or do I need to get some new dependencies?

Hmm... Hey, @blackheart612, if you're looking at parts to include in the next update... Can you introduce a side-opening passenger door/ramp unit for the Mk 3 format? I found myself wanting one really badly the other day...

I've already got RCSBuildAid and Correct CoL... they're absolute must-haves, imo. Didn't know about MechJeb natively supporting that function, though.

Making History Missing History (1.25m engine plate) Kerbal Inventory System Kerbal Attachment System Bluedog Design Bureau (launch vehicle minus first stage engine package and satellite batteries and instruments, tower antenna, rover antenna) Probes Plus! (Instruments, batteries on satellite and rover, rover torque wheels) Tweakscale Near Future Structural (tower truss sections, Tweakscaled to 1.25m) USI Construction (Akita Rover) Atmospheric Autopilot (for the Mallard II... makes flying it much easier) MechJeb for All (just a plugin that adds MechJeb to all probe cores and command pods)NavHud (for flying terminal approach in the Mallard) Kerbal Hacks (hats, sunglasses, etc.) Yep, that's the one I had in mind. I'm going to spawn in an Akita rover I made for refueling operations (before I ever thought of this mission, btw) and claim it was lurking in a hangar at the airstrip. It's got 300 units of LF, iirc. More than enough to provide me with the needed margin to make it back to the KSC with just the rover aboard. See the last entry in the mods listing. First time I've ever seen it happen. Part of why I decided to call it a night at that point.

Measure static pressure 180* out of phase with the detonation?

@MikeO89 you must have the "Decouple payload by staying" option enabled. Check the context menu of the petals adapter in the VAB to ensure it's off, then try again. Should work like you're expecting.

True. I know that deploying the docking ring on the active CADS while docked is a bad idea. But, it's able to soft dock extremely well, courtesy of the petals and the ring having colliders, and as you retractable the ring, the magnetic pull of the ports draws you in to dock. I think that whole soft docking with the ports physically aligning you is what Beale is unsure what modelers black magic you used.

I'm thinking, based off the pic Elon posted of the plume, that it's both. See how there's the core plume with the nest edges and clearly defined shock diamonds, and then the more ragged sheath that forms around it a few feet from the bell? If you look closely, there's a faint plume of unburned gas ahead of it... and there's a visible gap between the core plume and the edge of the engine bell. I wonder if they're injecting methane into the bell where the nozzle transitions from sea level optimization to the more vacuum optimized area. Could be to dampen any flow instability at the transition zone...

Okay... for how long, though? Just a few seconds, or for a mission-representative burn?

Phase 1 has begun! Stigmun finally got the last signoffs on the project, and he began to dismantle the pad and the rocket... It took some doing, but the panels were able to be tucked into the cargo pods. The plan was to stage the tower sections and rocket parts by the Mission Control complex, load up the pad base aboard the Mallard II, and fly over to the Desert Airfield and stage the cargo pods with the base there. Fly back to the KSC, pick up the tower sections, refuel, fly back to the airfield, unload and stage the tower, fly back to the KSC, pick up the rocket and the fuel it would need, refuel the Mallard again, then fly back to the airstrip and assemble everything. That was the plan, anyways. And, as any experienced KSP player knows, the more complex the plan, the more likely you are to summon the Kraken to ruin your day. I managed to summon him repeatedly. First, the tower sections vanished. How, I don't know. I assume that the janitorial staff thought they were for collection or something, but when I reopened KSP earlier this evening... they were gone. I'm not quite sure what to make of that, but I'll be replacing that with a freshly launched one tomorrow. It'll be joined by the entire upper stage, and the fuel tanks for the lower stage, which also vanished off the launch pad. This one, I blame on the automatic launch pad clean-up function. I'll be disabling that pronto for the future. That was actually the third kraken event. The engines for the first stage and the payload are safe, though... Stigmun made sure to link them all together at the KSC before departing to ensure they don't vanish as well. Second one was that, somehow, I managed to fling one of the base panels for the pad off into the distance... but after about three seconds, it just... froze. How, I don't know, but it just hung there some 40 meters up until I managed to coax the game to let me quicksave and reload, upon which time it appeared some 98 kilometers to the west. I'm still trying to wrap my head around that one. But, I did managed to get the rest of the parts into the containers, and from there, into the Mallard. From there, it was a fairly simple task to taxi to the end of the runway and take off... right? Cue fourth visit from our tentacled friend... I somehow, somehow managed to get the Mallard to explode about 90 seconds into flight by not properly securing the rover in the back of the cargo bay. Three times. Generally, the cockpit was the only part that survived. Thank god for having quicksaved on the runway. Stigmun finally traced it down to using the free-moving connector joint instead of the locked one. A quick swap of the part later, we managed to safely take off and start our climbout. Climbout and cruise were... less than ideal. I wound up being unable to push the Mallard to the planned cruising speed and altitude, so I burned through more than half my fuel on the trip over. But, good news is that, A. I made it there without crashing and/or exploding; B. I located the Desert Temple on my descent into the airstrip.; and C. they do offer a limited supply of liquid fuel suitable for feeding the Mallard at the airstrip, so I can top off enough to make it back to base with some margin. Having (mostly) succeeded so far, Stigmun offloaded one full canister of parts and drove it over to the launchpad for... testing. I'm not sure how well it'll take to being left out there alone and anchored to the ground, so we'll see what happens. If I have to replace it, it'll be a minor issue instead of a project ending catastrophe. All things considered, Stigmun's actually quite happy with the progress so far. There have been some serious setbacks, yes, but it's minor stuff. *muffled explosion* Aaaand the back right tire of the rover just spontaneously decided to go to NaN speed and destroy itself via collision into the ground. Joy. Well, that's why I have multiple wheels... Think I'm going to call it a night before the Kraken decides to eat the whole save.

I've always kept a copy of my stations, as they are at the present time, in the SPH to use for fit checks. That way, I can check in advance if there's going to be any interference or hazards during the docking approach. As for docking two larger vessels together... I try and avoid that if at all possible. My recent crew swap at my Minmus station used one of the attached "lifeboat" ships to shuttle crew back and forth... That way, I don't have to worry about docking two large, unwieldy, and somewhat fragile vessels together. I also have standardized my choice of docking ports for most missions, so I know that the station/mothership uses one (and only one) type of docking port, so all I have to worry about is making sure the port on the active half of the docking is aligned properly. Other ports are usually for special applications, such as making a multi-part, large-scale mothership for interplanetary missions.

"Say 'qiézi'!" (Chinese equivalent of "Cheese!")

Y'know... there might actually be a use for such a system. Backside of the Mun is a hard spot to reliably get data from a lander on the surface back to the KSC. A "store and forward" system would be perfect for such a situation. Beam it up to the passing satellite, and it the forwards the data upon restoring communications with the KSC as either a single burst transmission, or as the same discrete experiments. Not sure which would be better...

That particular antenna is not a relay antenna, which is why they aren't talking to each other.

That wasn't a relay in the sense of how KSP uses it. It was a "store and replay" system.

Huh. I know that the CADS ports from BDB have collision meshes on the petals, and it functions flawlessly. Perhaps CobaltWolf did something different to make it work?