JAFO

Due to ongoing issues with my box.com bandwidth (for some reason, it hasn't re-set), I'm providing an alternate Dropbox link for anyone who needs it. If the original link isn't working, try this one: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ygfv4tlc6lus2ni/KSP%20Science%20Checklists.zip?dl=0

So long as you are careful to observe the limitations (mostly, if you weld more than one of the same 'type' of any 'action' item, they won't work correctly), it works really well.. such as in the DDV wreckage and the Hab interior I sent you.

How about, once I have it set up correctly, I send you the persistence file? You could then paste in the Hermes crew you want to use instead of Jeb, Bill and Bob, and use it as the template for making new savefiles.

After a couple of days boning up on Orbital Mechanics, becoming familiar with the terminology involved, getting to grips with the more arcane aspects of PreciseNode, with the assistance of Red Iron Crown's incredibly helpful Precomputed Low-TWR Interplanetary Transfer Burns, this individual, who until now has never even successfully completed a Duna mission, actually managed to send Hermes on a close-approach, free-return-trajectory flyby of Duna before returning to Kerbin! While the Hermes itself did not perform entirely up to spec, the various tools I mentioned in an earlier post proved their worth, and the flyby itself went well, so it looks like things are go for doing a proper flyby, rather than having Hermes just sitting in orbit around Duna. A full report has been sent to selfish_meme, and a slightly modified Hermes will undertake another flyby mission tomorrow.

Damn.. looks like my box.com bandwidth hasn't reset yet.. sorry about that. Here, use this link instead. https://www.dropbox.com/s/zrtg1vu36kom7h1/Part%20Reduction%20Project.zip?dl=0

I like.. it does make me wonder, though. How does it get landed? Sure, the DAV is not too hard to land, but how does the ISRU module get to the surface? While those triple legs look very cool, it would probably be a lot more stable if they were all perpendicular, instead of some being angled. Re the Hermes, I'll do some testing to see what sort of part-count-ship my machine can cope with. From memory, around 200-250 parts is probably manageable..

Not bad at all.. How's it handle on Duna? - - - Updated - - - Ok.. I have a detailed flyby solution from KSP TOT. But since it's 4am here, I think I'll test it out tomorrow. For anyone else masochistic enough to give it a shot, here's all the data:

I seem to recall from some of your Reddit posts that you're mainly using Linux? If so, the Flyby tool runs perfectly on Wine 1.6.2. I've just tested it on my Mint 17 install.. (yes, I prefer Linux too, and only run KSP on Win7 because no matter what I do, I cannot get KSP to run properly on Linux. And yes, I've been and carefully checked that I've done everything I'm supposed to to get it to work.) Well, free-return trajectories to Duna don't come around as often as ordinary launch windows.. you kind of have to take what you can get. The starting altitude at Kerbin makes only a tiny difference to the numbers.. Starting at 100km instead of 75km adds just 22m/s of delta-V difference, all told. Now, if you want a lower Pe at Duna, orbital mechanics being what they are, to some extent you get whatever you get, but there is a second possible course, also starting on day 520, requiring a slightly different equatorial z velocity. It gets there 40 days later than the first route, but passes Duna at just 57km up. The other downside is that the Hermes will be moving about 300m/s faster at encounter, and the return trip Duna-Kerbin takes an extra 31 days. My next plan is to take both of those trajectories and plug them in to KSP TOT to fine-tune and tighten up the numbers, so that we have something that can be plugged into MechJeb or PreciseNode. - - - Updated - - - Looks good.. what's its' delta V? By the looks of things, it's going to need 4500-5000 m/s to rendezvous with the Hermes flyby.

A Duna/Kerbin free return trajectory? Hmm, I've never plotted one myself but how hard can it be? You just have to find out the perfect time to reach Duna. There must be information here about this kind of maneuver.Woohoo! I just found the perfect tool for the job! [WIN] Flyby Finder V0.82 [KSP1.04] Here's what I got when I plugged in a basic Duna flyby with return to Kerbin. That first entry looks like it would do nicely.. with a Duna flyby altitude of almost 1300km, it would present a nice challenge, on a par with what Watney faced, in having to fully escape Mars gravity to rendezvous with Hermes: Double-clicking on an entry brings up specific details. In the case of the first trip beginning on day 520, we get: So at Duna encounter, Hermes will be moving a little less than 3100m/s. Good to know, since it helps us to calculate the required delta-V for the DAV.

Yeah, those look pretty good.. reminiscent of the rovers in the movie, too. Looks good.. I can turn that into a single part if you like.

Well, it probably won't be necessary for you to mess with the Hab.. I've done it for you. I've had a fun and productive day learning about part welding and its' limitations. I wasn't able to do some of what I wanted, but made good progress overall. The Duna Descent Vehicle, I reduced to the way it appears on Duna, since it doesn't need the fairing etc.. I turned the whole thing into a single part, down from the original 23 parts. The Comms Tower you already know about.. a reduction of 34 parts. The Hab gave me some trouble.. I was hoping to be able to lose another 20 or so parts by welding the underlying frame and the frame of the Solar Array, but even with the 'special' parts stripped off, those bits just would not weld correctly.. the part .cfg files were full of NaN, and they wouldn't display. However, I was able to turn the entire interior of the Hab into a single part, and rebuild the rest of the Hab around it, so that it looks and functions exactly the same as before, but instead of being 132 parts, its' now just 73 parts! All told, those three items result in a combined reduction of 115 parts. The part-reduced craft can be downloaded here. I would have done the debris from the Ares 3 Duna Ascent Vehicle as well, but I'm having some trouble getting the welded parts re-attached to the core ship, so they can be dumped on the ground realistically.. if I can get that sorted out, it will result in another 40-45 less parts onsite. - - - Updated - - - Yes.. See the OP on page 1 for all the things that have been done so far. Well, that's a bit outside the scope of this project..

@ selfish_meme, here's a welded version of the Ares 3 Radio Tower. It's identical with the original, and still fully functional, but reduced from 42 parts to 8. https://app.box.com/s/5ormo16ck0tmr911fgx3kr33qtzzy18p If you like it, I can do the same for the rest of the debris type items.

I quite like the present Comms Tower.. there's nothing wrong with it that some part-welding wouldn't fix. - - - Updated - - - Heh.. you should try it on a low-end machine.. I really do think some part-welding might be the way to go here.. turn all that debris around the site into single pieces, as much as possible. Some reading suggests that while the mod currently has some issues for flying craft (not game-killers, but you need to be careful about what you do and don't weld), for items that are just intended to be used as scenery, it should work just fine. [1.0.4] UbioZur Welding Ltd. Continued 2.2.0 (2015-08-27) There's a good youtube tutorial available for it, too.

I've just got home from seeing it, and in addition to the bit mentioned above, the main thing that disappointed me was that they cut out the big dust storm and rover accident before he gets to Schiaparelli. Other than that, I liked it a lot..

Brief report on the movie.. They altered a few things that surprised me, but still less than is usual in book adaptions. Overall, I very much enjoyed it. Definitely good value. - - - Updated - - - We may just have to take it as read that he's already collected the RTG before the scenario begins.. sucks, but what else can we do?

On my way out the door to see it now! - - - Updated - - - Me too.. in fact, I did just that. Yes.. black screens.

Yeah, I see what you mean..Awesome job you've done on the DDV debris.. a pity I had to remove it to get a reasonable framerate.. with my crappy old 1.73GHz Core 2 Duo laptop, each single step my Kerbal made to get to the rover took 12 seconds! I terminated the 5 items of debris, and it was back to my usual about 3 seconds. The real bummer is, the black-screen Kraken got me while I was only halfway to the RTG pickup.

For anyone trying to work on the Hermes flight plan, here's an animation made with the software Andy Weir wrote to figure out the course/dates/transmission delay times, etc..: http://www.galactanet.com/martian/hermes.mp4 Not do-able in KSP, of course, but pretty cool all the same. - - - Updated - - - I'm about to try that now.. Sounds like a good reason to not place any weather stations around the Hab site, then. In which case, even more reason to put one at the Ares 4 DAV site.

Ok.. I figured out what I was doing wrong.. I had the numbers right, but didn't realise I could force a landing directly from the KSC launchpad by clicking on the 'Landing' light. The 'Land' button was refusing to land on Duna directly from Kerbin, so I was setting it to orbit Duna first, as an intermediate step, but then the orbital position was over-riding the set lat/long coordinates. Yep.. sure thing. Stock KSP doesn't have much that works as a camera lookalike, but I upended a Surface Scanning Module and embedded it in the QBE. The result is what I call a 360° Panoramic Scanning Camera on top of the weather station. I've uploaded the new version, download link is the same as before.

Since you've been busy working on the main components, I thought I'd throw a Duna Weather Station together for you. It consists of a Probodobodyne QBE, thermometer, barometer, atmosphere analysis unit, Z-200 battery, Communotron 16, a pair of SP-W 2x3 solar panels, and a small reaction wheel to assist with positioning, all on a Modular Girder Adapter base. You can download the .craft file here: https://app.box.com/s/kqafhz0exk85cy8lppoe5v2glld1v1xb While I'm at it, do you have any tips for placing objects on the surface with hyperedit? The handful of so-called "tutorials" and "how-to's" on youtube are pretty useless. Whenever I tried to put the weather station on Duna for pics, even though I had the lat/long correct, it kept placing the station hundreds of km away from where it was supposed to go.

No.. that's one of the things nobody presently involved with the project is particularly good at. If you're willing to take a crack at it, that would be great.

There has to be something more to it than that.. loads of people have been using docking ports for roughly this kind of thing for a long time now, without problems.

That's disconcerting.. Think I might try a bit of persistence file editing.. insert Mark into the new save in place of Merbly, and see what happens.

That happened to me with the first crash I had.. the Kraken ate Mark and the rovers. So I deleted the entire game save and restored it from your zip.

Yep.. just what we need!However.. sorry.. I deleted the post, due to vBulletin acting totally stupid with the links. Will try again. I think this is the one you had in mind. Works on gravity and atmosphere, but hasn't been updated since 0.23.5 http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/78857-0-23-5-Planitron-Reloaded However, I did find this. http://kerbal.curseforge.com/ksp-mods/231414-rover-anti-gravity-system It's a module that you add to a rover, after which you can set gravity to match any planet you like. Doesn't affect atmosphere though, so not suitable for other craft. - - - Updated - - - @ selfish_meme, did you try this yet, to see if it fixes the black screen/crash issue?