Starman4308

They're spelled "bureaucracy" and "Boeing", respectively. Also, blaming everything on bureaucracy is taking a hideously oversimplified view of why NASA has had difficulty accomplishing anything impressive since the Apollo era. It is a non-argument based on a reflexive dislike of bureaucracy rather than any understanding of actual issues NASA might face.

A few things: First, NYAN. Also, maybe my Module Manager isn't super-current, because I'm not getting nyancats. Second, I forgot to take the Mercury Flyby and sounding rocket contracts before launching a probe to Mercury... but that was a bit of a mercy, since I didn't quite have the delta-V. Sure, that the E1 first-stage engine cut out a couple seconds early didn't help, but the margins were just too slim. As a consequence, I'm upgrading the launch vehicle to Soyuz 1.2 and trying again at a later window. Third, put Pioneer I into orbit around Mars with the goal of obtaining altimetry maps, with the four giants visible in the background (it's been only 6 years since the Grand Tour window, so they're still reasonably aligned). While I got about 40% of Mars's surface scanned at high-resolution while babysitting the electricity usage*, after that point I just left it on, returned to the KSC scene, and warped forwards about two months until I got 95% of the high-res map. The way I entered Mars's SOI, I had a low periapsis, and I didn't want to waste limited delta-V circularizing to the 7.5-8 km orbit SAR functions best at, so the stripes I got near the north pole were very, very narrow. *Pioneer 1 has enough solar panels to sustain the 1.5 kW SAR scanner... at Earth. At Mars, I was only able to get about 1 kW of solar power, meaning I had scan for a couple orbits, shut it off, regenerate, turn it back on, etc. Time-consuming micromanagement got unfun after a bit. EDIT: 980 science from the SAR and radar scans. Wow. I am not used to that sort of return... possibly in part because the last couple GPP plays I've had, I've reduced the science gain significantly.

To be fair, Congress is a past master of building bridges to nowhere. And, more seriously, this is one of my three primary issues with the SLS. It's a bridge to nowhere. It doesn't really open up much in the way of capabilities: it doesn't permit any groundbreaking single-stack manned missions, it's hugely overkill for 99% of unmanned missions, and its launch cadence isn't very suitable for multi-launch missions. The other two are just its extreme expense and that it goes back on the US government saying "we should never again mix cargo and astronauts", literally using the exact same hardware that inspired the government to make that declaration in the first place.

NASA wasn't the one to scrap these plans. You can thank Congress for that. Continued funding for SLS, by the way, isn't guaranteed: only EM-1 and EM-2 have been funded by Congress. Furthermore, I can't really think of anything that needs SLS, save maybe Europa Clipper. It might be a different story if it could perform a standalone lunar landing mission, but it can't. Because of that, you'd need multiple launches. The issues with using multiple SLS launches are manifold. First, there's the interval between flights. Right now, they're looking at 2-year intervals, maybe 1 year if they push it. That means that whatever half-of-a-mission you send up, it has to use strictly storable propellants and survive a year in perfect working order in LEO: no damage from MMOD, etc. Second, if you're going to need to assemble it anyways... why not use commercial HLVs/SHLVs? Delta IV Heavy and Falcon Heavy are proven. New Glenn and Vulcan are likely to fly. The BFR... maaaaaaaybe though I'm kinda skeptical. That's because SLS is Constellation with a new coat of paint. It's conceptually the same thing: an expendable SHLV using legacy technology and legacy contractors. Nothing addressed the key flaws that killed Constellation in the first place. Nothing addresses the fact that any sort of ambitious manned space program using Shuttle-legacy technology on an expendable launch vehicle would need far more money thrown at it than Congress is willing to spend. The only reason SLS got this far in the first place is pure and utter porkbarrel, and that only goes so far.

Please note that there is no good reason for astronauts to fly on either the BFR or SLS. SHLVs should be used for cargo, with astronauts carried separately on a conservatively built taxicab spacecraft like the CST-100 or Crew Dragon. Once you remove astronauts from the equation, its about which lift vehicle is more economical, in both cost and reliability.

It's the Japanese Cat Day, thus the nyancat invasion.

Real viruses will not put Nyancats over your KSP loading screen; they will silently steal your passwords, mine crypto or crack other passwords, and use your Internet to send out spam emails. Also, it would not occur with an unmodded install of KSP, because this is Sarbian's stress relief valve, to unleash murders of Nyancats upon the world.

So: how much delta-V do the springs impart on PAZ? I'm pretty sure typical SSO satellites orbit above the current 515 km altitude (closer to 1000 km IIRC from Realism Overhaul), so PAZ will probably need to run its own engines a bit. Also, good payload sep and webcast is finishing.

An absolutely beautiful day with extremely clear views of the plume: you could clearly see things like the transition to a smoky, mostly-black/grey plume. Second stage is running well at this point.

What I prefer to do is not a true suicide burn, but rather a constant-altitude descent, which has been shown to be more efficient, particularly for low-TWR landers. It also makes for a relatively simple simulation: just set the pitch high enough to maintain 0 vertical velocity at each timestep, and run until horizontal velocity is zero. In practice, because airless bodies tend not to be perfectly smooth spheres, I run an approximately-constant-vertical-velocity descent, managing pitch to maintain a velocity setpoint, adjusting if I think I'm descending too fast or too slow.

The other major issue with the RS-25 is that it's even less fit for expendable use. The magnificent performance obtained by the RS-25 came at the cost of being one of the most complicated engines ever produced. Not really economical to refurbish, comically expensive to just throw away like the SLS plans to. I dunno. The Merlin engine just sent something to a Mars-crossing orbit. While technically speaking the Shuttle was used for missions like Galileo, that was all with the assistance of the IUS: the RS-25 itself never left LEO. Historically, then, the record seems to be in favor of the company you seem to rag on so much.

It's still just Test Flight. At least with the RO configs, there's a rated burn time: if you keep burning longer than that, failure chance starts to go way up. Quite often, I run stages for every second of this rated burn time and wish I could run them longer. By shutting it off early, I restored stage specific impulse back to 404 seconds. However, this meant running the other engine well past its rated burn time, running the risk of having it shut down before the tank was empty... and, as usual, the last seconds of a stage are its most productive. I wound up watching the failure rate update on the Test Flight panel, and it was just going up and up and up as I approached burnout. Next time, I might try to hang onto an underperforming LR-87 until 20 seconds prior to stage burnout.

That is not the Kerbal way. The Kerbal way is "why not?" For example, why not stick a space shuttle on top of a giant aircraft? Launched Pioneer I to Mars, with the goal of getting low-res radar and high-res SAR maps of the planet. I was both lucky and unlucky with it: unlucky because one of the LR-87 engines suffered a performance loss, and lucky because it didn't happen when sending something on the more demanding trip to Venus. With about 35 seconds of hydrolox remaining in the sustainer stage, I shut down the underperforming LR-87. This was something of a risk, since that meant the other engine had to run approximately 35 seconds past its rated burn time. Even with this gamble paying off, it meant the Centaur stage had to do more work than was originally planned to bring it the its LEO parking orbit, putting me about 300 m/sec short for Mars transfer. This meant making up the shortfall on the probe itself: fortunately, it's easier to circularize around Mars than Venus by a substantial margin. I also completed my Apollo launch abort test, which used a single Minuteman to boost the capsule up to high dynamic pressure. The time it took to go up to full thrust was somewhat disappointing; it took a full second to get itself clear of the still-burning Minuteman. The LEO-variant of Apollo will be launching on a truncated Gimel-2 stack, effectively replacing the Centaur upper stage with the Apollo service module. This permits some degree of flexibility with the mission, since if more delta-V is required, the Gimel-2 launcher can be replaced by the 4- or 6-booster variants, and I can potentially add the Centaur upper stage back in. I also did some testing of the C/SM in a sandbox save, mostly just to figure out if the fuel cell LH2/LOX would boil (it doesn't seem to), and otherwise to figure out the Apollo service module's... quirks. I think I have a handle on it now: fuel cells generate H2O and power for 14 days, and a little bit of spare LOX is used to generate O2, for an overall mission endurance of 14 days.

That it costs too much is exactly the point. The US would be better served spending that money on almost anything else. Unmanned probes. Cancer research. Defense concerns. Repairing infrastructure. Aid to foreign countries. Paying SpaceX, Blue Origin, and ULA to put up a space station for less money. Almost no government project can be divorced from discussions of cost, since it's the public's money. Kindly do not put words in my mouth or that of @tater. I can't speak for tater, but I certainly think SpaceX won't be flying men to Mars until 2030 at the absolute dead earliest. What I have been saying is that the SLS is an impractically expensive vehicle for manned beyond-Earth-orbit missions, and it, like Constellation before it, as well as the vast bulk of the Apollo Applications Program and the Space Transport System, are going to be cancelled. Maybe Congress will continue to pour tens of billions of dollars into a bad idea, but my guess is Congress will continue to pour tens of billions of meaningless platitudes into the bad idea and cancel it before they have to fund the really expensive things.

I'm not sure I agree. The billions of dollars spent on Constellation and SLS/Orion could have funded a lot of unmanned scientific missions launched on commercial vehicles. Even ULA at their most price-gougey weren't as bad as SLS. If the United States government isn't going to fund ambitious manned space programs properly, the least they can do is fund less-ambitious (and, really, more scientifically rewarding) unmanned missions for a fraction of the cost.

The inability to know beforehand what the cost and safety of a rocket will be is exactly why they're planning to use an only partially tested stack for the first launch of astronauts on SLS, right? The SLS has not been funded for any real exploration missions. Its absurd cost will almost certainly prevent it. Plans are a dime a dozen at NASA, money with which to carry them out is what is lacking. It's happened several times that an ambitious manned program has been planned, NASA spends billions on it, only to be cancelled at the point where it starts to cost tens of billions to actually carry it out. Even by the standards of conventional expendable launch vehicles, SLS is a hugely expensive pork barrel project rather than a practical vehicle for anything. Too big to waste on LEO, too big for unmanned missions, too little for a standalone lunar mission.

Settings > Vessel (button near the top) > Wheels.

In addition, consider rebinding your rover controls to different keys than your orientation controls.

In the specific case of RP-0 and the outer planets, they seem to be pegged to the duration of a Hohmann transfer, which means no fancy slingshot trajectories, you have to accept with the hardware ready, and if it fails? No real chance to try again at the next Hohmann transfer window.

Huh: never realized I was officially listed as an RO contributor. I kind of... never really finished the mod I was going to put in. Lots of talk, not much delivery on my end. Anyways, one thing I've noticed playing RP-0 is that some of the contract deadlines for other planets are very strict, to the point of potentially stifling some ways of completing them. For example, I'm planning to use the debug menu to complete my Saturn flyby contract early. I have a Voyager probe en route, but because of how I'm getting there (on the return leg from a slightly excessive Jovian slingshot), there's not enough time to get inside the official deadline. Similarly, I'm planning an EEJ Jupiter orbiter, which will add a couple years to travel time. Since the deadline seems to be based on a simple Hohmann transfer, that's going to have to be edited/cheated out. If it hasn't already been done on the development branch, then, it may be worthwhile to rebalance some of the contract deadlines; a quickish rule-of-thumb might be 1-2 synodic periods (to permit re-building failed missions and sending them at the next window), plus a full orbital period of the target planet.

This is why I've gotten in the habits of: Always testing unmanned first. Every manned craft has a probe core and antennae. Having backup craft either fully constructed or already on-site. Triple-checking my life support. Putting some extra margin into my manned craft. EDIT: And always having a tested LAS on the ascent vehicle, with a requisite pad abort test, launch abort test, reentry from LEO, and reentry from a lunar slingshot (if applicable), before I put a single Kerbal onboard.

Voyagers III and IV have passed perijove, with Voyager IV performing a 136 m/sec burn at perijove, passing a mere 5230 km above the edge of its atmosphere, traveling at nearly 58 km/sec. While it would have been more efficient to simply use a higher perijove so as to reduce the acceleration from the slingshot, arbitrary contract stipulations required a 20000 km pass and I wanted a backup to Voyager II's pass scientists wanted a really close approach. There are, of course, no possible ill effects from passing so close to Jupiter's enormous magnetic field. It might have benefited a bit from the Oberth effect traveling at 58 km/sec. Just a touch. One curious thing: I was timewarping fairly fast to perijove, much faster than previously, and the probe core almost burnt up. It's possible Voyager IV was only saved thanks to Science Alert dropping me out because it was the first time I'd passed low over the Great Red Spot. I'm also currently scrambling to figure out if I'll get Voyager III* to Saturn in time for my flyby Saturn contract. I slightly misread my flight path on Voyager II, to the tune of "the Saturn flyby isn't on the way out: it's on the way back in!". Because of that, Voyager II will be making its solar ejection burn near Neptune, and Voyager III is my only hope for the Saturn flyby contract. *Yes, I know I said Voyager IV would be the Saturn orbiter. At the last minute, though, I switched Voyagers III and IV, as I felt Saturn was higher-priority; thus, if the Voyager III launch failed, I wanted Voyager IV as a backup. EDIT: You know what? I'm just going to ignore these unpleasant contract deadlines in RP-0 from now on, and feel entirely free to use the debug menu. I think I previously had a mod that let me modify contracts as they came in automatically: if I can get that working, I'll try to increase contract duration so I no longer basically have to have a mission and its backup ready before I accept a contract. I've also designed Voyager V and its backup Voyager VI, cut-down versions of the Voyager I-IV probes. The original program is placing orbiters at the outermost three giants, but no orbiter for Jupiter. For the innermost of the giants, the Voyager V design: Has been strictly limited to 1-ton mass (using a 1-ton satellite bus with no supplementary custom avionics). Uses a weaker, 20 Gm antenna. Because of this lower-power antenna, needs only two MHW (Multi Hundred Watt) RTGs. Has strongly cut down on the battery reserve, down to a mere 2.4 MJ from the original 15.84 MJ. Will, instead of a direct Jupiter transfer, use an EEJ slingshot, cutting down ejection delta-V down to a mere 5.4 km/sec vs. the original 6.5 km/sec direct transfer. All of this permits use of the smaller Aleph-Centaur 442 and a cost reduction of 27.5% versus the original four launches. The primary downside is that, with a mere 2.4 km/sec on the probe itself, the orbit will be more elliptical than usual.

So, as you might have noticed, it's been a long time since I updated. I started playing some Elite: Dangerous, and by the time I returned to playing some KSP, I'd completely lost track of what I was doing in KSP. Since then, I've tried to get back into a different GPP 3.2x career, got a bit bored of it, and then tried some RP-0, which I'm having some fun with. If/when I return to upscaled GPP, I'll probably go for 6.4x-10x scale. With Real Fuels, 3.2x just seems... small. I'd probably also not run quite so many rescue-Kerbal missions, that got rather tedious. I don't think there will be any more updates to this series, though if I start any more mission reports, I'll see about editing links to them back into the OP and this post. As partial compensation: the final mission I ran in this campaign appeared to be some sort of... rover? In my second GPP 3.2x campaign, one of my favorite launch vehicles uses a pair of Kiwi methalox sustainer engines supplemented by a quartet of LV-T45 boosters. A good old-fashioned Gael-rise from Ceti: Zoomed-out night launches can produce some beautiful sights. From my new RP-0 campaign: The Bad Idea suborbital rocket. The pilot was... skeptical at landing. RP-0 Sputnik, launched on an unholy contraption of RD-100s, early AJ-10s, and Baby Sergeants could not have been more than 100 kg in orbit, of which just 12 kg was science payload. In Real Fuels-Stockalike/GPP, I've noticed I've used mostly reaction wheels on dinky little probe cores up on the payload for control. RP-0? My Voyager probes are the only spacecraft I've launched that have reaction wheels, period, and upper stages have been spacecraft in their own right, with RCS, batteries, antennae, avionics, etc. Finally, here's my current screensaver, of Voyager II approaching Jupiter:

Lots of dense SRBs and a Mainsail at the bottom are dragging CoM down. Fairly blunt fairing tip with a bulge lower down are helping drag center of pressure up. I'd remove the miscellaneous equipment like solar panels from the launch stage, attempt to make the payload a bit more compact, and use bigger fins on the SRBs. It doesn't help that SRBs do not have any gimbal. With only reaction wheels and small fins, you don't have much control authority to fight dynamic instability, so I would advise ensuring you have enough fin area for full dynamic stability.

Thinking about it some more: were you careful to hold the same orientation w.r.t. the Sun? You might be able to control for that a bit better by Hyperediting/cheating your vessel out to a distant heliocentric orbit so as to minimize solar flux.