MaverickSawyer

Heh. I've never heard of anyone successfully reaching any appreciable fraction of c before... But I have reached NaN speed in early versions of the game, which usually was an eye-poppingly fast speed caused by a physics engine glitch. If you really want to go that fast, I second the call for KSPIE. I've never used it myself, but it's a fairly popular mod.

The what now??? Okay, this bears investigation.

Looks like Syncom would be easy enough to kitbash together with existing parts, but the relay antenna is a bit of a problem. Telstar, on the other hand, is the other way 'round... We've got the antenna, which is already a relay, but the spaceframe isn't there. I guess I need to see just how fugly a kitbash of the two designs would be. EDIT: Not bad. Looks much more like Syncom, but... 1600+ m/s dV with the Star 10 motor. Good lord. I may need to look into throwing some of the ion RCS and a little bit of xenon aboard for orbital trimming and precision maneuvers.

Eh. I've been using the "node" style for some time now... I haven't used a standoff spar for docking in, like, 4 years or so... and that eas just so that the spaceplane I was flying didn't smack its vertical fin into the station.

Had a busy day... Got started on my ore drilling rig for my Minmus base... Maucal was quite proud of the rig, even though it's not fully completed yet. Bringing over another ore tank from the cargo lander... There's the rig... "... what the... I swear I had those bolted down..." Turns out, the Kraken took a liking to it, proceeded to smash it into the terrain, then absconded with it entirely upon reloading the last quicksave. So, I have to launch another cargo mission. This time, I'm putting it near the base; lower ore concentrations are not as big of a problem as the rig vanishing. Maucal and Val decided to end their surface stay after the incident with the rig, and they returned to the station to await the crew swap... There is a total of 5 seats on that TKS-Lite... three in the capsule and two in the orbital module. It took some shuffling in the crew compartment, but everyone swapped between the crew transfer vehicle and the station in two round trips and about a third of an orbit. Less than 20 m/s of RCS dV was burned in total, which, given the ranges involved, I'm quite happy with. And, the transfer was completed just in time... All told, the CTV spent less than 2 hours in orbit around Minmus, due to some fortuitous orbital alignments and some skilled transfer burns. Mighty fast work, if I do say so myself. Now, the returning crew has a fairly standard 8 day coast home, only interrupted by a mid-course plane change burn to bring the ship into an equatorial orbit for much less dV than would be normally used.. After that, the crew capsules that the outbound crew left loitering on orbit will come and pick up the homebound crew, and they'll be returning to Kerbin with quite a bit of experience... all 6 are now 2-star ranked.

It ran perfectly fine, actually. I ran the numbers before I launched the supply mission with the parts in it, and it wasn't running out of juice or anything. I did check the core heat rejection requirements of the drills against the radiators... it was more than adequate with one, but I ran a second one, because Murphy. They're fixed units, but I made sure to orient them to be parallel to the sun's path. Being on the equator on a body with no axial tilt makes this quite easy. Aha! So THAT's what happened. Good to know. I parked it far enough away to be outside of physics range,, but close enough to be a few minutes drive via rover... but also for an extra 1% of ore concentration. I don't think it's worth it, so I'll be setting up the new one much closer to the base, so I can keep a closer eye on it... and to keep the Kraken at bay. He smashed the rig I had been working on, and upon reloading the quicksave, it was completely and utterly gone. Darnedest thing I've seen in a long time...

Spent over an hour building an ore drilling rig for my Minmus base... only for it to explode during a brief bit of physics weirdness while changing vessels. Normal enough, so I go to the backup... It vanished. Straight up no longer existed. I checked the timestamp, and yeah, it should have been assembled and happily chugging away, but it was utterly gone. Maucal Kerman was VERY unhappy that the Kraken spirited away her hard work.

Alright, I have a confession to make... I have been playing KSP for a touch over 7 years now, and there are few things that are able to make me sit back and go, "Wait... how... WHUH??" In-Situ Resource Utilization is one near the top of the list. I mean, I understand how to get the drills to work and gathering ore, and that you feed that into the converter to get fuel, oxidizer, and monoprop. I just... I have never been able to make heads or tails of the idiosyncrasies of the systems. Here, an example... That's two stock mini drills, three stock RTGs, and a pair of radiators from ProbesPlus to keep the drills cool, btw. But, I set this up just outside physics range of the base. I started the drills with the first tank in place, drove off to go get more parts, came back, and everything had quit. Is that normal? Should I have built the rig inside the physics bubble of the base? Also, I'm currently babysitting that rig with my engineer, and the radiators, at startup, spiked to nearly 60% cooling, and are now closing in on 50% and still going down, albeit slowly. Is that also normal? Basically, I need some advice from people with some experience running ISRU. I'm very confused.

Cobalt, any chance you could keep the probe core from the Diamante set? It's a fantastically useful little relay in early game.

I'm in the greater Seattle region, though to the southeast by about an hour's drive... It got to -12.8*C last night. A couple of notes on this.... -That is the COLDEST temperature I've ever personally seen outside of the OAT readings on airliners at cruise altitude! -Basically all of Seattle is shut down right now. We got 8 cm of snow Sunday night and well into yesterday, and with these temperatures and the hilly terrain in the region... yeah. stuff like this: has become a common scene throughout Seattle. -Okay, I've NEVER seen I-5 this empty before, even at the northern edge of King County... Pics are courtesy of this gallery of The Seattle Times.

Fresh one from today... A picture is worth a thousand words, isn't it.

Landed the advance party for my Minmus base, then started landing the modules. They've been orbiting in a holding pattern for a while, waiting for the little shuttle I use to go from the station to the surface and back to be refuelled, but now... Now I'm just waiting on the support rovers I launched to get there, and I can set up a mining rig on a nearby lowlands area and start making fuel for the shuttle... and for science return capsules, and biome hoppers, and... well, you get the idea.

One final report from Phase 0... Put the finalized design on the launchpad and drove Ello Kerman over to test the disassembly process... I then followed that with testing out the fit of the rover with the bulkiest parts (tower segments) into the Mallard II. I'm at a point where I know it'll work in the field now, so I copied all the craft files over to the science save... only to find out I need to unlock two more tech tree nodes to make it happen. So, I need to rack up 1100 science points to open up Experimental Aerodynamics and... Nanolathing? I think that's the one I need to unlock. Fortunately, I have a pretty capable team of Kerbals around Minmus, and 400 science points on their way back from Minmus already in a return capsule. I also transmitted ~150 science from crew reports and such at the location of my new surface base, and the team there has another 400 science points queued up for return. They'll bring that back with the crew rotation in a few days.

The camouflage, of course. Drag is reduced if the air molecules can't see you, right?

Welp, my college classes got cancelled today due to the ~8 cm of snow that fell across the Puget Sound region last night and this morning, so I got an early start on some testing of potential airlifters... I added a pair of underwing tanks to the Herc and shipped out for the Dessert Airstrip in a test flight, both of the plane's endurance and my ability to navigate to the remote site. Jeb was not terribly impressed with the plane's top speed. Even at wide open throttle, the plane topped out at 156 m/s. However, it was only burning 0.12 LF per second, which was quite reasonable. Noted some shallows near the Western Desert. Something worth investigating in the future... if they're sufficiently shallow, I might try to build something there. Field in sight, after nearly an hour and a half. Missions like this are a big part of why I have Atmospheric Autopilot installed. Lining up on final approach... in more ways than one. Shortly after touchdown and the application of brakes and reverse thrust, the plane veered hard right in a sort of reverse ground loop the likes of which I haven't encountered in this plane before. The turn was hard enough that the left wingtip hit the runway at better than 30 m/s and promptly detonated, scattering fuel tanks, engines, and control surfaces everywhere. The plane then rolled to the right, veered left, and wound upon her right side external tank and wingtip before skidding to a stop... Needless to say, the boys decided to get a ride home... and a fresh set of undergarments. During the Accident Investigation Board, Jeb flat out refused to fly in one of these ever again, stormed out of the administrative complex, and vanished into the Hangar. A few hours later, he presented this: It's basically a stock Mallard with Panther engines in place of the Wheesleys, and shock ramp inlets in place of the basic ones. He, Val, Bill, and Ello promptly saddled up and took off for the Dessert airstrip for a second crack at the test mission... Jeb was disappointed he couldn't push it up to Mach 3, but the performance was nonetheless a significant improvement... more than 5 times faster, with only 4 times the fuel burn rate at cruise! Landing was a relatively straight forward affair, and the plane taxiied off the runway and shut down in one piece. Then, the gang turned around and flew back home. There was some tinkering with ascent profiles and cruise parameters on the way home, and it was found that by climbing up to 17 km altitude while cruising, they'd shave off ~25% of the fuel burn rate. Jeb wants to take it higher still and see if he can't coax some more speed out of it, but I've told him that 800 m/s is more than adequate. After all, the round trip was completed in less time than it would have taken to fly to the "feet dry" point on the route, let alone to the base... Needless to say, I think we've got us a winner, though my computer didn't like the long duration of flight ops and promptly CTD'd, then BSOD'd when I tried to restart KSP. But, I'm back up now, and about to restart KSP for a second swing at the experimentation... Next up, figuring out how the new towbar from KAS works, redoing the logistics of the airlift to accommodate the much larger cargo hold, and sorting the refueling operation at the KSC end of the operation. Then, it'll be time to shunt everything over to the science save and get on with Phase 1: launching the satellite.

Good point... Most aerospace hoses are reinforced with fiber or wires to some degree. They're not as strong as a dedicated cable, sure, but they're strong enough to handle some surprisingly large loads. Re: electricity... Unless it's some sort of dual conductor cable, you'll need two cables for power.

Yesterday I posted this post in the "What did you do in KSP today?" thread... @Jacke then kindly suggested I turn this little project into a mission report, and that's actually not a bad idea. So, here we are. Basic premise is as stated above in the title... I want to visit every biome with a rover in one continuous mission in my science save. The reason I'm starting with a rocket launch is, well... I kinda don't have a biome map of Kerbin, or a listing of all the anomalies, in the science save I'm currently running, and that's kind of important for the mission. (How I managed to slip up on something that basic that is something that I'm still wondering about.) But, what's not done yet can easily be done, and what's easily done can certainly be made harder. I.e., I've been playing KSP for a touch over 7 years now. I can slap together a satellite for that mission and a rocket to launch it in under 10 minutes. There's no challenge to that. Hence, I'm building the rocket, in the field, along with the supporting tower, at the Dessert Airfield launch pad. Why? Because I can, and KIS is awesome. This is going to be phase 1 of the mission, and will begin soon...ish. Right now, I'm in phase 0... Experimenting and toying around with the processes and procedures needed to make this work. I've NEVER done anything remotely close to what I'm intending to do, and I need to make sure I have a solid plan moving forwards. So, to the sandbox! Last night's efforts were mainly focused on the first idea I had for building the rocket... The idea was to build the rocket horizontally, then use KAS to hoist it upright. It... kinda worked. I had no issue getting the rocket vertical... The issue was getting the darned Construction Ports from USI to work properly. They flat out refused to play nice, so that kinda scrapped that attempt to dock it to the base, then weld them and compress the rocket onto the decoupler holding it to the pad. So, back to the (mental) drawing board today while I was sitting around bored during the combination of Super Bowl LIII and the snowstorm currently striking Seattle, where I live, and I thought over the failure from last night. I concluded that I was overly complicating the construction process. I was already planning on handling the stages dry, and fueling once assembled on the pad, just like irl. So, I though over how I could emulate that approach. I came up with this: There are 6 discrete, easy-to-handle packages that come together to form the rocket... -Payload, encapsulated in the fairing -Upper stage fuel tank with fueling port -Upper stage engine with three retro motors and decoupler already attached, to ensure the shroud remains intact (and to "protect" the engine in transit... more on that later.) -Upper fuel tank of the lower stage, with fueling port -Lower tank of the lower stage, with holddown ports and stabilizer fins -Lower stage engine package, with decoupler and adapter to the launch base already attached. Each of these packages is well under a tonne (actually, every single part and/or subassembly for the whole shebang, pad included, fits that bill. I'm quite proud of that. ), meaning that an engineering-inclined Kerbal can easily move them around by themselves, no extra help required. Ello Kerman has been my gracious test engineer. Here, you can see how the first stage engine pack and the lower fuel tank have been installed, and the upper stage engine has been moved out of the way. (I kinda got ahead of myself on that...) The tower is essential, providing a work platform for both Kerbal and package being installed, as Ello demonstrates below... You'll notice that little black frustum on the bottom. That's deliberate. It's a solid piece attached to the bottom of the decoupler on the upper stage engine, and an identical unit caps off the bottom of the payload fairing. These are to seal out any FOD until the package above is ready to be mounted on the stack. (Not really needed, but hey, it adds a little realism.) The platforms and ladders are used to sequentially move the upper stage tank and payload to the upper levels, where Ello can install them. Here, you can see the packaging cap from the payload left behind on the work deck. The one atop the command pod is the one off the upper stage engine. Finished result of the build process on the prototype platform looks pretty good, imo, and I was largely happy with the results. It looks like a legit rocket on the pad, amirite? There were a few minor issues with the pad design that would be straightened out in the final version... The overhead crane boom and the ladder used to access it was eliminated for simplicity, and was replaced with a work light and an antenna, which is also a faux lightning rod. I also replaced the heavy duty battery at the base of the tower with a pair of smaller 400 EC capacity batteries along the sides, and added solar panels. The fuel tanks are not in their final homes... that's just where I parked them while checking quantities needed to fuel the whole stack. Two FL-T-400s and two Oscar-Bs, along with two of the little Monopropellant tanks. There will be a little LFO left over, and ~3/4 of the second monoprop tank if I opt to fuel the RCS on the upper stage. I may only do a partial RCS fuel load to improve performance. On the pad at Woomerang at night. If there's interest, I'll post the craft files to KerbalX so people can try this "kit built rocket" thing out for themselves. It's an absolute hoot. The rest of the night was spent doing logistical planning, like how many KIS containers I'm going to need to move the baseplates and assorted other bulky/fragile parts (it turns out I need ~8000 litres total capacity, or 5 of the new long 1.25 m diameter cargo containers from KIS), testing the fit of the components into the cargo hauler I'll be using to airlift the containers, packages, and pre-assembled tower sections out to the Dessert airfield. Turns out the tower sections just barely squeak into the cargo hold of the Hercules I built the other day, and the rest of the parts fit with plenty of room to spare. All told, it's going to take 3 flights for the tower, another 3 for the other pad components, two or three for the rocket proper, and one or two for the fuel load. And I still need to design a rover and trailer to haul the parts over from the pad to the runway at the KSC, and vice versa at the Dessert facility. I may need to build a larger transport in the Mk 3 format to haul the rover, tbh. Y'know, I will probably need that Mk 3 airlifter for the main rover mission for transporting the replacement rover, should it be needed. Might have to do that tomorrow. For now, though, it's 0100 local, and it's been a long day for me. Gonna have to call it a night here. Catch y'all on the flip side, folks.

Hmm... Traveling too fast taunts the Kraken, eh? Good thing my plans for a similarly challenging rover mission call for a lot slower top speed...

Ah, the ol' Stanley Steamer... How much damage does it deal to the VAB?

That is the plan, yes. But during the experimental phase I'm in right now, it's not nearly so entertaining.

If there's a kaboom, would we hear about it?

Well, while I was at work, I kept thinking about Triop's current attempts to circumnavigate Kerbin via rover and Kerbal Konstructs bridges, and how I could improve on that. It somehow morphed into me planning to drive a rover to every biome on Kerbin... and remembering that I haven't made a biome map this save with ScanSat. Ordinarily, that'd be a non-issue. Just slap together a rocket and probe in a few minutes, and park that sucker in orbit. But... I felt that was insufficiently challenging. So I decided I'm going to BUILD a rocket. Not just in the VAB. Oh, no. I'm going to "launch" from the VAB to the pad, dismantle it via KIS, either store the parts in KIS containers or mount them to a trailer, load them into an airlifter, fly them to the Dessert Airstrip, trailer them over to the pad, reassemble it, fuel it, light the fuse, and stand back. Now THAT's sufficiently challenging, right? Hoo boy. First plan was to do vehicle integration horizontally, then tip the rocket onto a base, dock it, and then fuel it and fly it. Test rig #01 I've... not used KAS winches in a while, and I'd never used the new struts, so there were some rude surprises in store. Hence why I was tinkering with this stand setup in sandbox. Easy does it... Turns out, the winching it vertical idea is... not the brightest. I had endless issues trying to get it to match up with the USI Construction Ports, and eventually just gave up. Tomorrow will likely be me attempting to stack the parts on the pad manually, in the launch orientation. Thankfully, the stack, when defueled, is actually light enough that, in a pinch, I could still do horizontal integration and then just toss it onto the pad with two kerbals. But that's not as challenging. So... I think it's going to be stacking it by stage, with the decoupler attached to the stage it's releasing, just so the shroud remains intact. But that'll have to wait until tomorrow evening, after work.

Yeah, the transition at the top of the ladders on the VAB is tricky... just gotta be patient.

You may want to take close look at the flagpole, @ansaman... As well as the VAB's southeast quarter.