Starman4308

The 4-man capsule of interest is from @NecroBones's wonderful* Lithobrake Technologies mod. *As is the overwhelming majority of his stuff. I use that capsule as well.

Landed sixteen Kerbals on the Mun in a single go. IVA view from the approach. I didn't realize until I started EVAing Kerbals just how huge a 3.75m lander was. All 13 crew (three tourists not shown). Ascent image. To the left can be seen the slope I originally landed on, and spent an embarassing amount of dV launching off so I could land somewhere flatter.

Sadly, plotting an abort trajectory for Jendi, Megan, Maldom, and Tatiana Kerman, whose Minmus transit was misplotted, resulting in large waste of propellant, and do not have the dV to safely rendezvous with their Minmus lander. They'll get to Minmus, just not today.

That's not really the best comparison to be making; lead-acid batteries have poor energy-to-mass ratios. The sort of batteries you'd be seeing on spacecraft have a much better energy-to-mass ratio; lithium batteries can push to over 150 Wh/kg.

An excellent video. Not sure if the KSP bit was either "oops, forgot I needed a segment for this, I'll just slap something together in KSP", or a deliberate bit of bait for KSP players. I do appreciate the increased simulation efforts in design; that sort of approach can sort through a lot of obviously bad ideas and help narrow in on the final parameters at much reduced cost compared to running a bunch of experiments. I suspect part of the reason why they still do a few buckling experiments is just in case there's some phenomenon that hasn't been described before and is not modeled by the simulation; the chances of that are fairly small at this point in time, but when you're designing hugely expensive rockets, it pays to be careful.

So, I have a couple images of an unmanned test flight's completion: Rumors that the first manned flight had been sitting on the pad for days waiting for the clear-to-go signal are absolutely founded in fact. Random ascent image that is now my desktop background:

I think his point is that rocket ascent parameters exist in a very high-dimensional space (as in: many, many, many variables), and that trying to optimize just one parameter is an exercise in futility, and leads one to draw misleading conclusions, as the optimal value of any given variable is dependent on every other variable. You can crack one problem easily holding all others fixed... and then you move on to the next parameter, and the next, and the next, and return to TWR, and find you've got to reoptimize it because now you've changed everything else that led to the initial conclusion!

The external insulation thing isn't a huge deal; it's much cheaper and easier just to top the rocket off just before launch and retract the fuel pumps at the last possible moment. During flight, well, some cryogenics can last through a flight with trivial boiloff without much insulation, but as others have mentioned: try to fly with liquid hydrogen and no insulation, and your rocket will swiftly have neither insulation nor liquid hydrogen.

First: separate the service module before hitting atmosphere. That makes sure you are properly in descent configuration before aerodynamic stress is applied. Second: reentry vehicle is too long and skinny; I'd flatten her out, put it on a 2.5 m heatshield, and arrange things more laterally. There's a reason many reentry vehicles look like blunt cones; that provides a lot of drag and an aerodynamically stable vehicle. Take a look at Soyuz (the middle part is the reentry vehicle), Apollo, Gemini, the stock command vehicles; most are shorter than they are wide. Your reentry vehicle... didn't really stand a chance. Third, if all else fails, consider sending a Kerbal along to take all the science off the vehicle and into his/her command pod. That said, it was a very good-looking probe, and it's a shame it burned up like that.

You are not alone in that mission profile, I assure you. One gag from a recent attempt to send a lander to Minmus: "Alright, who put the Mun there, and what genius used the autopilot to generate a Minmus transfer trajectory without ever once looking at it!". Comrade CatastrophicFailure, are there any tickets to Kerberia available?

The way I play it, probably "Probe Core Space Program"; I tend to be over-cautious with Kerbals.

So, it's coming time to pull my Kerbals back off my lunar space stations; 90 days is enough for a lunar mission, and they deserve rest, recuperation, and non-freeze-dried snacks. This does, however, raise the question of who will replace the first crews, as while I had a few unassigned 3-star Kerbals, it's not enough to man two stations designed for eight each. At first, I was just going to dust off the old Drake/Draco-series landers and crew transport vehicles, but those take an annoying amount of time. The solution is more boosters Kerbals boosters and Kerbals. An artist's rendering/KCT simulation of the new capsule on descent: The first unmanned test flight of the Ultra capsule, which will attempt to replicate the intended mission profile (transfer to Mun, rendezvous with lander, interlunar transfer to Minmus, rendezvous with lander, return) before I commit sixteen Kerbals to this thing. Vehicle Specs Also, Jeb doing a Minmus biome hop, expending about 140 m/sec to hop from Lowlands to Slopes. For all my mucking about with 64k, Real Fuels, and such, I've never really biome hopped before. A Kerbinrise: My first dead-perfect Minmus transfer: no correction burns necessary, just a single ascent (ending with relative inclination of 0.13 degrees), followed by Hohmann transfer right on the DN (letting me match planes concurrently with the transfer).

The Mun/Minmus science farm projects are in full swing; the only slightly disappointing thing is I haven't had an excuse to refuel the landers yet; the initial supply of LH2/LOX has held up, and it takes a long time for the labs to chew through the data I return. The science has been put to good use, though, delivering RTGs, ion engines, advanced rockets, and all sorts of other goodies. Most of what I'm doing now is just waiting for my Duna flotilla to reach Duna. I've designed my second-largest booster yet, the 550 tonne Sarnus V, replacing the 950 tonne Sarnus IV, both of which deliver approximately 25 tonnes to Kerbin escape. Improved RealFuels engine tech level explains part of it, but the biggest improvement is probably in the first stage, where I replaced an inelegant cluster of 5 Mainsails and 4 Linebacker SRBs with a single methane-powered Space-Y Moa cluster and two KW Rocketry X-10L "Thor II" SRBs. A big part of it is probably in the SRBs; the old ones had a poor 11:2 full:empty mass ratio, and had the sole advantage of being big and available, while the new ones have an 11:1 full:empty ratio. In one funny little incident, when deorbiting a spent booster into the Mun, I apparently ended up with 0.22 L of propellant left in a stage that initially carried over 100,000 L of propellant: http://i.imgur.com/x3iz4DZ.png There's also the first ion probe, which rendezvoused with a smallish asteroid before releasing an impactor. Rendezvous took a while, and annoyingly, the burn time was miscalculated because MechJeb thought I would stage off the impactor. Still, at over 300 Mm from Kerbin, it's not like I lacked for time to close back up the rendezvous I also rendezvoused a six-pack of small impactors with my Flashometer (Impact! mod) satellite so I can quickly punch in those contracts; it should have been an eight-pack, but I overloaded the booster just a little too far, and to ensure I had enough dV for the rendezvous, I used a couple of the impactor probes to get to the Flashometer satellite.

You know, I don't quite remember; it was back in 2014, and I really have no idea what precipitated getting the game. What I do remember is that my brother saw KSP, thought I'd like it, and found I already had it. That little Christmas gift idea did not work out.

What I liked, though, is that you did it with such limitations, whereas I tend to just say "okay, no Kerbals on the moon until I have a big enough booster".

So, if it helps, extended the ISRU configs to include stock ISRU stuff: I'm not 100% sure I'm happy with it relative to the Karbonite stuff; it produces significantly less for the vastly heavier stock ISRU converters, and I haven't figured out how to configure the drills so that engineers don't magically multiply output by 25x. A small increase might be reasonable; 25x is absurd. I might try to rebalance it in the future; I just wanted something working for a contract which asked for 1050 ore from the Mun. At that point, I kinda figured "if I'm mining ore, I may as well generate the propellant to get it to orbit in situ". https://www.dropbox.com/s/sm8nt0df10qbz86/StockISRU-RealFuels.cfg?dl=0 EDIT: In terms of your logs: still on page 5. Very impressed by your early Mun missions, though; I've always used heavier boosters for those, instead of using multiple lightweight launches, sending fully fueled crew capsules to meet fully fueled landers in orbit.

Another alternative if you dislike the early game is to use the Sounding Rockets mod (unsure if it's up-to-date for 1.2); that gives some nice experiments, and it's kinda fun to mess around with lightweight rockets in the early game. The only thing I'd really frown on is not at least trying to make sure all your Kerbals get back home safe; I like the little green guys... it's probably part of why I use so many probes and obsessively test the manned missions with unmanned dry runs first.

NB, I've finally A, unlocked 5m engines, and B, had a reason to use them. My prior 25 tonnes-to-Kerbin-escape (6.4x scale) booster was an unholy contraption of seven Poodles, five Mainsails, and four 110t Linebacker SRBs. The new one is just one beautiful 5m stack with a double-Penguin, a Moa cluster (I was surprised a bit that I didn't need to use the multi-Ratite cluster), and a couple of KW's 70-tonne SRBs. This just makes me absurdly happy; it's a very clean design. And yes, I know there are SpaceY SRBs, but I haven't figured out why I'm not able to set their throttle in my current installation (good chance it's a RealFuels/RF-Stockalike thing), and usually I want my boosters running for about a minute.

It's at times like this that I thank myself for creating a vessel called "BasicSat" which consists of an OKTO probe core, antennae, batteries, and solar panels.

Everybody likes different parts of KSP. He's perfectly within his rights to say "I am bored by spending five minutes tweaking a maneuver node to fine-tune the intercept, manually aligning the craft, pressing z, waiting until the burn completes, and then pressing x"; he may have had far more fun designing the craft, roving around the Mun, optimizing his boosters, and just find some parts of the game tedious enough that he has MJ go do it while he makes himself a cup of coffee. To illustrate part of how this sort of thing can get tedious: imagine holding 14 degrees pitch for 6 minutes each time you want to launch a booster. Congratulations: you've successfully imagined my typical circularization above 6.4x Kerbin, with a hydrolox stage providing an initial 0.8G of acceleration to get me from roughly 2 km/sec (where my my first stage burns out) to 6 km/sec (LKO). If you're not seeing why I might not want to just press a button on Smart ASS to hold my heading while I start reading something to pass the time, well, I just don't know.

You mean especially with low TWR, right? I'd imagine most MJ users (like me) can do most of these maneuvers by hand, it's just tedious and not-very-fun for them, and we'd rather be posting on the KSP forums or something while MechJeb makes sure the burn cuts out at the right time, or keeps the rover wheels spinning, etc, etc.

Not necessarily; larger tank mass -> more fuel mass -> more sturdy tank needed, plus you still need pressurant, you need fuel lines for anything except monopropellant, etc. As to spaceplanes, well, I have a level 3 runway, a level 3 SPH, and a whole bunch of rovers queued up for it. Might do a bit more in the future, although 6.4x scale means 40x more territory to explore.

OPM does seem to work with the 6.4x system. Regardless, the conclusion that the outer planets don't take that much more dV to get to is probably pretty correct; as you go outwards into the solar system, you need less and less extra energy to go somewhere. It's not much dV difference between going to, say, the Kuiper belt, and going to the Oort cloud; both require you to very nearly escape the Sun's gravity. Where it gets interesting is if you have a good life support mod, and there starts to be a significant tradeoff between scrimping on fuel and getting there without needing so much life support supplies. I know that TAC Life Support + Kerbal Planetary Base Systems enforces a situation where you can only be 100% self-sufficient with a lot of effort put into it, and only if you're landed on certain planets with all the necessary resources.

It is not Regex's failure that your post was poorly phrased and incredibly easy to misinterpret. Also, for certain mods, CKAN does make it significantly easier, else you have shenanigans like multiple packaged MM installations, etc.

Gearing up to do that in what is, thankfully, a reasonably stable 6.4x career save. Unmanned probes en route to Duna, an Eve transfer window in 200 Earth days (sadly not a good conjunction to send something to Moho), Jool and its moons shouldn't be too hard, and after that, it's OPM, with its gas giants, moons, and repositioned Eeloo. I'm not forgetting any of the stock planets, right?