Hotaru

@kerbalyeeter40 I used a Module Manager patch (included below) to edit the tech tree myself. The idea was to incentivize using early-game engines like the Spark and Swivel further into the game, and keep both science and funds relevant longer into the late game than in vanilla. Be aware that I did all this a long time ago. I myself never played with this mod any further than I did in this career. I make no guarantees that this will even work, let alone that it will be any fun to play with, but here it is: To install, copy contents of the above spoiler into a text file with extension .cfg and install in a sub-folder of your KSP GameData folder (...\Kerbal Space Program\GameData\HotaruTechTree\HotaruTechTree.cfg). The part you asked about is, if I recall, a 1.25m life support container from Kerbalism (actually a stack of two of them). A stack of 3 of the 2.5m version can be seen on the Vyzov service module, between the Hitchhiker and the service bay. @AtomicTech (and anyone else who digs this up after all these years) I think I left this log at a good stopping point, so I think we can declare it finished for the time being. The mod combination ended up being more trouble than it was worth. Kerbalism and Kerbal Construction Time in particular didn't get along, which caused some of the "haunted rocket" incidents. In the unlikely event I were to ever do a new career log, it would probably either be a sequel to Hotaru's Space Program or a totally new save. For now, I've mostly moved on from KSP, but I still fire it up sometimes for old times' sake. We will see.

Incredible. I can't believe they actually launched it--and after all those delays, leaks, waivers, etc. it actually worked! I honestly thought it would never fly--just have one failure after another till it ended up in a museum. Didn't even know it was going up today, just signed on at T-7 minutes by complete accident. Bizarre. It's kind of a stupid rocket, but if it gets us to the Moon I'll never say another word against it. Hoping ICPS and the service module work as well as the SLS core did!

@AtomicTech I like cats and beetles. Not so much games, but I'll play along just this once.

Glad you liked it! Making it was quite the experience. Sorry to say, future works are unlikely. I've moved on. These days only visit the forum to check Science & Spaceflight. Still start up KSP once in a while for old times' sake, though. Maybe someday. We will see.

Blueberries are one of the collectable surface features on Duna, added by the Breaking Ground DLC.

Yes, in fact: I set the parachutes to open at high altitude, which gave Byldo (who inexplicably had a stock parachute this time... guess it was just a glitch that Venlana was missing hers before) plenty of time to collect the science before letting go of the capsule. Not that there was much science to save: Vyzov 1 had no instruments (the sample-return missions already got a lot of the same data) and EVA and crew reports are 100% transmittable, so all that was left in the capsule at that point was a surface sample and some blueberries. While Vyzov 1 was good for PR, it had hardly any scientific value compared to the space stations, and future "flags and footprints" missions like it will have even less. Right now (assuming I do carry on with this career rather than starting over) I'm thinking of only two or three more baseline Vyzov missions--to Gilly, Ike, and possibly one more to Duna--and then move on to a larger version with a three-kerman crew and a lab, launched by two Sterzhens.

Last update for a while--call it the end of chapter 1. I'll be back when I'm back, hopefully with chapter 2, although Kerbalism is being increasingly difficult so I might start another log instead. We will see. @RocketMan-Explorer I'm pleased to say I knew the original without clicking the link. (Unsurprisingly, given one of the HSP's ships was named after another song by the same duo.) Dzhedasyn lifts off from the surface of Duna in the Vyzov 1 lander. Moho and MN-1: interplanetary probes. Terpeniye 3 and 4: station ops. Vyzov 1: return from Duna.

That is bizarre. Set up exactly as you have it, I saw the same behavior. I was able to get it to drain symetrically by connecting the fuel lines from the tanks above the Twin-Boars rather than from the Twin-Boars themselves. That causes the top tanks to drain first, then the Twin-Boars, then the middle tank. In that setup, the top tanks default to flow priority 20 and the Twin-Boars are priority 10. By increasing the priority of the Twin-Boars to match that of the top tanks (20), I was able to get them all to drain at once, and symetrically (i. e. the way I would have expected the your setup to behave in the first place). The resulting setup looked like this: Hope this helps!

This update is a little delayed because I've been messing around in sandbox and also started working on a casual "just playing the damn game" mostly-stock career--which turned out to be for the best, since I got a lot of debugging done that now won't have a chance to foul things up in the Kerbalist Union save. Also got to try out 1.7.1 in VR, which was in no way productive but still extremely cool. May take a break after I get back from Duna; got a lot of other stuff I'd like to be working on (kerbal and otherwise) although I'm also very much looking forward to getting the kerbo-Buran going. We will see. @Kerballing (Got Dunked On) "Aqualung" (after the Jethro Tull song) has been the name of my tanker ships in every save ever since my very first one back in 2014. No reason to stop just because this one's in Russian. @SBKerman We'll see how it turns out. In my experience reusable systems are fun to set up but tedious to operate in practice. On the other hand, MechJeb really smooths things over, and the Sterzhen-MN is my first one that is stable through reentry without airbrakes. Back in 1.0.2, the last time I used reusable rockets, the best I could do was get within 20km or so because the airbrakes screwed up the targeting, which meant they always had to land short to avoid dropping in the ocean. Without airbrakes, I think I will be able to consistently get the Sterzhen-MN within a couple kilometers of the launch pad. The trick is to have the fuel drain top-to-bottom with a relatively short tank at the bottom emptying last, so between that and losing the payload it's very tail-heavy during reentry, which keeps it stable. I worked that out a while back while making a New Shepard-type suborbital rocket for a challenge. And I really like the design you've come up with; using Atlas V style strap-on booster configurations makes your Phoenix system a lot more flexible than my Sterzhen-MN. (And I see we both independently ended up using the Kerbal Reusability Expansion Dragon trunk fins as New Glenn style descent fins.) Boring stuff: TL;DR: messed with the tech tree. Vyzov 1 approaching Duna. Terpeniye program: keeping the Mun and Minmus stations running. Vyzov 1: Objective--Duna!

So we're getting into that boring period of the mid-game between the first Mun and Minmus landings and going interplanetary where there's not much happening besides space station missions and contractsats. There's been more than 20 launches since the last update of which only about half a dozen were at all interesting; all the rest were routine contractsats, station resupplies, etc. Fortunately, though, MechJeb makes the routine stuff go by pretty fast, and in the meantime I'm making good progress on developing both the Duna mission and the kerbo-Buran (see this post for a preview); the latter needs a bunch of stuff I'm not going to have for a while, but the former should be ready to go at the next launch window (i. e. in the next update). @RocketMan-Explorer That was all the space stations (I'm impressed you remember them!), but the time I had six crew rotations at once also included two surface bases, Constancy on the Mun and Tenacity on Minmus. By that time, Patience II and Endurance had been replaced by Immutability and Persistence, respectively. Boring stuff: TL;DR: KRASH (simulated test flights). Space station Terpeniye 4 in Munar orbit, with supply module Prikhvosten T-3 and crew shuttle Morzh Ch-2 docked. Interplanetary probes. Loonik 8 and Sterzhen MN-1: a reusable rocket. Terpeniye 3 and 4: Mun and Minmus stations.

Made my first Buran: Well, mostly. The orbiter is a non-landable boilerplate; I was only really interested in getting it balanced during the ascent. Unfortunately, due to limitations in the career I'm developing it for, I couldn't use Vectors, so it has eight Mainsails instead and has to steer and maintain balance by throttling the engines in the core. And it costs something like 300,000 funds per flight of which only 40 some thousand are recovered--the downside of putting the engines on the expendable booster rather than recovering them with the orbiter. On the other hand it makes orbit with enough fuel left to easily orbit the Mun, and it can carry up to a Jumbo tank in the payload bay (or a lot more Polyus style, in place of the orbiter).

Boring stuff: TL;DR: Added some cosmetic and QOL mods, flight logs and spreadsheet added to OP. The Sterzhen second stage ignites on Mun mission Morzh 3. Dyuna, Yeva, and Zhabry: interplanetary probes. Terpeniye 2: longer-term spaceflight. Morzh 3 Kerbal 62: a unexpected completely normal and planned "first." Morzh 3 and 4: exploring the Mun and Minmus.

So far we're making progress at much better pace than HSP was at the same point, due partly to MechJeb, partly to the early stuff being pretty routine (even with Kerbalism), and partly to me having more free time on my hands. I'm already thinking about the mission architecture for a kermanned Duna landing--which will be the first real challenge provided by Kerbalism, since sanity and radiation only start to be an issue on multi-year missions. Right now the USKR is about where the USSR was in the mid-70s (with the obvious exception that my Mun rocket actually worked); Russia hasn't really developed much in the way of new launch vehicles since then, except some little ones and the abortive Energia, and I've already got an R-7 (Iskra-K), an N-1 (Sterzhen), a Proton (which should appear in the next update), and the basic Iskra to cover all the little ones. It will be interesting to see how far we can get with just four rockets powered by two engines before I have to start developing something heavier, especially given that the Sterzhen is a lot smaller than the old Frumious series that got the HSP to Duna. @RobFalcon I'm looking forward to robotic parts too. I was really hoping to use them on small probes but unfortunately they're all way too big. So far all I've done with them is make a deployable version of that damn Bravado antenna from HSP. Not sure if it actually has any benefit (i. e. if the antenna actually counts as stowed when it's retracted inside a service bay) but it definitely looks nifty. I do have some ideas for using robotic parts to deploy stuff from shuttle payload bays, which may come up if we ever get a kerbo-Buran type thing going, not to mention the obvious potential for Eve helicopters and so forth. And of course the temptation to build walkers is always hard to resist. We will see. Boring(er) stuff: TL;DR: messed with Kerbalism, added a couple mods, considered ramifications Dzhassya salutes the flag of the Kerbalist Union in the flats of Minmus. Dyuna, Malyy, Yeva, and Duayt: (mostly) interplanetary probes. Terpeniye 1: long-term spaceflight. Morzh 2: first kermen on Minmus!

@RocketMan-Explorer Very nice! At some point I'll get a flight log up in the OP which will help you with the one thing you can't work out from my posts: the order of the flights, which is often different to how I post them since I tend to group them in spoilers by program, not chronologically. (Not sure if I'll cover all the unkermanned missions though or just the kermanned ones, as in HSP). @Kerballing (Got Dunked On) Calling HSP "one of the classic threads" a little optimistic, I think, but I hope you enjoy it anyway! It was... quite an experience. @SBKerman Thanks! I did consider using the green/orange textures but (even with TweakScale) I had a hard time getting them to look good so I'm sticking with the plain-white look for now. Works better for painting "CCKP" on everything, too. Boring stuff: TL;DR: Liking my career edits so far, photos are jpgs now. A Sterzhen mun rocket on the launch pad. Kerbal 30, Loonik 7, Tyazhelaya Zvezda: surveyors & materials science. Otvazhnyy and Otvazhnyy-S: kermanned spaceflight experiments. Dyuna and Yeva: interplanetary probes. Morzh 1: objective Mun!

Thanks for the welcome back, everybody! I'm glad to be back, it's nice to have had a long break and really be able to get excited about KSP again. I'm already looking forward to getting through the repetitive early game and on to kermanned Mun/Minmus missions and interplanetary probes (both of which should be starting in the next update), and I have a lot of ideas about how things are going to look beyond that, too. @RobFalcon Kerbalism is a very cool mod and quite polished, even more so now than when I last played with it around 1.5 or so. I highly recommend it once stock challenges start getting old (or just if you want a more realistic experience). @RocketMan-Explorer Wow, that's impressive. I'm glad you had fun putting it together! Honestly at this point you've got more detailed notes on HSP than I do, I mostly just reverse-engineered everything from my screenshots. PM me if you want to discuss it further, I could probably fill in a few gaps for you where flights weren't mentioned in the thread (mostly Aqualungs). And New Star (in English) was the name of my first probes in my very first career save, back in 0.90. @scottadges Tantares is an excellent mod and I've used it in sandbox in the past, but for one thing I'm trying to keep my parts catalog uncluttered (probably a losing battle, to be fair) and for another I prefer "lego brick" parts like the stock ones to "plastic model kits" like Tantares, BDB, etc. I'm not really going for replicas in this save, more like "inspired by" while still being my own creations. Boring stuff: TL;DR: Added ScanSat, messed with my MM patch. Dzhedasyn's view of Kerbin and the far side of the Mun during the circummunar mission Derzost 3. Loonik & Malyy: probes to the Mun and Minmus. Derzost 2 & 3: around the Mun. Otvazhnyy: long-term spaceflight. Also: satellites Novaya Zvezda 7, 8, and 9 were launched on Iskra rockets into various high orbits of Kerbin.

"Kerman will not always stay on Kerbin; the pursuit of light and space will lead him to penetrate the bounds of the atmosphere, timidly at first, but in the end to conquer the whole of kerbolar space." --Konstanty Kerman, Beyond the Planet Kerbin С С К Р Space Program of the Kerbalist Union Current objective: Duna! Completed objectives: Mun & Minmus Flight log (kermanned missions): Flight log (unkermanned missions): See also this spreadsheet by @RocketMan-Explorer. Boring stuff: TL;DR: Soviet-style career with Kerbalism, KCT, KR&D, stock system, limited part mods, custom career edits: super-expensive mid/late game tech and engine R&D costs. Kerbal names from Russian localization. Further boring stuff (mod list): Boring stuff addendum (F5/F9 rules): The first three cosmonauts: Zelyz, Dzhedasyn, and Valentina. Gagarka: sounding rockets. Novaya Zvezda: satellites. Loonik: Munar probes. Derzost: kermanned spaceflight.

Kerbalism. Very cool mod--not a huge difference for probes, but it makes kermanned exploration beyond Minmus a much more daunting (and therefore interesting) prospect.

Sent up yet another station with lessons learned from the first two... it turned out the gravity ring was the main source of the second one's problems--it eats up lots of nitrogen and electricity and it drags the average rad shielding level down for the whole station--so I ditched it in favor of lots of batteries, extra food storage, bigger oxygen cylinders, and lots and lots of radiation shielding. It can hold enough food and air to keep its three-kerman crew alive for a full year without resupply. Sure enough, the crew came back from their year-long mission only about 10% radioactive. (And 43% insane after a year in cramped quarters with no gravity ring, but the experiment was about radiation, not sanity.) Thanks! The most obviously visible ones are Tantares (+ now in Colors!) for the crew modules and reentry vehicle, Stockalike Station Parts for the gravity ring, Near Future Solar for the solar panels, RLA for the crew shuttle and cargo ship engines, KW for a couple of fuel tanks, Kerbalism itself for the supply containers, and a certain amount of TweakScale abuse to get everything to fit together.

Since my first little Kerbalist space station worked out so well, I sent up a bigger one to experiment with longer stays in orbit. Turns out keeping 3 kermen alive and sane for a year is quite a bit harder than 2 for 100 days. First the station didn't have enough nitrogen to inflate the gravity ring, then it turned out not to have enough batteries to get through the night (requiring all the resupply ships to be fitted with huge battery banks), then it ran low on oxygen, nitrogen, food, and monoprop, each time requiring a new supply ship, and finally the reaction wheels failed on the reentry vehicle and it had to make do with four little thrusters that were only supposed to be there for fine-tuning the trajectory. It ended up taking 6 resupply ships to keep the station running for a full year, but in the end the crew came back alive, well, and 92% sane. And 33% radioactive. Clearly I still have R&D to do.

I wonder if it would be possible to have a "simplified connection physics" mode where all connections are treated as perfectly rigid, as if the whole ship was welded. It might remove a little of the challenge--you could build any old ridiculous contraption and have it be perfectly solid--but on machines that have trouble with part counts it'd absolutely be worth it. If my experience with welded torus stations is anything to go on, such a mode would make a huge difference in playability.

That's pretty much my thinking as well, although I am a little concerned that Soviet part packs like Tantares tend to be more on the "plastic model" side than the "lego brick" side, and I don't want to just end up with Vostok, Soyuz, and Salyut clones. Same, although I haven't actually been between playthroughs for a year and a half now. Whatever I do next, if anything, I don't anticipate actually starting for a little while yet. In fact I may even do a whole other career save first, just for a break and to try out some mods, before I start another mission log. I might post a "highlights reel" of such a career but I wouldn't be keeping a full log like HSP. I have to admit I'm thinking about it. Pros: would be extremely cool. Cons: would be a massive pain in the rear end to keep the two separate saves coordinated, and I suspect once the novelty wore off it might get very tiresome very fast. I do like the idea though; maybe I'll give it a shot but only commit to going as far as the Mun. We will see. This is pretty much a given; ever since my old 1.0.2 save I've generally just saved launch vehicles as sub-assemblies rather than building new ones for every flight. In fact, in my 1.4.3 setup I've actually implemented a couple ideas to give standardized rockets an actual gameplay justification: first, in addition to Kerbalism I'm using Oh, Scrap! which makes new, untested parts much less reliable, and second, I've got a custom Module Manager patch which (among many other things) increases the fund cost of developing new engines a hundredfold. Both of those things, combined with Monthly Budgets hopefully keeping funding relevant, should make development of a new launch vehicle non-trivial even in the late game. @Moss Thanks! And I haven't forgotten your request for a PDF of the whole thread. As I said, it'd be a bit of a project and I'm not up to it at the moment--still just enjoying being done!--but I am planning to do it eventually.

@Nivee~That was totally on purpose and absolutely not just a random Beatles song that I thought had a pretty name. @DunaRocketeer @SiriusRocketry Wow, thanks! I'm really glad a few people enjoyed HSP at least as much as I did. Honestly, I'd just about talked myself out of doing another career log, but you guys are in danger of talking me back into it. I had the distinct impression that there wasn't all that much interest in HSP, especially towards the end when things started to get pretty repetitive, but maybe I was wrong. I'm not so much bothered whether five people are following the thread or five thousand, if somebody out there besides me is enjoying it then it's worth the effort. @The Minmus Derp Sorry to disappoint, but Kerbol Origins isn't one I'm looking at right now. There are lots of spectacular planet packs out there--Kerbol Origins, Galileo, New Horizons, Alternis Kerbol if that's still around, Before/After Kerbin, stock-size RSS, the list goes on--and I'd love to explore all of them some day, but for the moment I'm really only considering the three I've mentioned above: Snarkiverse, Gameslinx's Overhaul, and Outer Planets. However, if I ever do a third career log--and that's a very big "if," given I'm not even committed to the second one yet--Kerbol Origins will definitely be on the list of options. I've learned a lot of lessons from HSP, the most valuable being never commit to a big project under stock limitations! I'm kind of glad I did it once but you won't catch me doing it again. Stock limitations drive me absolutely up the wall--particular emphasis on lack of fuel hoses and large landing legs, although the full list is quite extensive. With retrospect, of course, I should've just done the stock-footprints-everywhere thing quick and dirty by myself and then started a modded career log, which is what I really wanted to do in the first place--but I figured I'd zip through HSP in a couple weeks, maybe a month or two, and then move on. I was so sure that I didn't even bother to give it a proper name or flag or anything! Lesson learned, I guess. So while I'm still not promising anything, here's what I'm tentatively thinking for the next save: 2.5 scale, [Snarkiverse or GPO] + OPM, Kerbalism, KCT, Monthly Budgets, KR&D, all the same utilities as HSP, probably a fair amount of TweakScale abuse, and every part mod ever made. (That last one, maybe not quite literally.) Also thinking of going for more of a kerbo-Soviet style this time, just for something different. I've been testing out this setup in 1.4.3 sandbox and right now it's looking very promising, not to mention that 1.4.3 runs much, much smoother than 1.2.2 ever did. What do you think?

Built a little space station in sandbox to try out Kerbalism; it keeps 2 kerbals alive and 78% sane for a 100-day mission. Hoping to improve on the sanity figure, I added a centrifuge module. 100 days into their mission and the current crew is still 94% sane. Definitely an improvement.

Daring 10 orbiter Don't Let Me Down during a flyby of Laythe, on its way out of the Jool system. Daring 10: return from Jool. *** Well, here we are. HSP is finally over. I set out to land and return everywhere in the stock system with stock parts, and now I've done it. I ended up compromising to varying degrees on practically all the conditions I originally laid out, but on the other hand I also ended up doing the whole project without ISRU and mostly without refueling, which I'm kind of pleased with even if it wasn't really on purpose. HSP was just supposed to be a fun, quick-and-dirty little project, not a year-and-a-half odyssey, but these things happen. It's been an interesting experience. I've learned an enormous amount about KSP and I have no doubt I'm a much better imaginary rocket scientist for it. But now I'm done, and it's time for a break. I don't know what I'm going to do next. I have a lot of interesting ideas, but I'm not quite sure yet what I want to do with them. We will see.

Try to fly more of a real gravity turn: go strait up till you're going about 100 meters per second, tilt about 10 degrees downrange, and then just set SAS to prograde () and the rocket will practically fly itself the rest of the way up. Keep an eye on the throttle--adjust it to keep the G-meter somewhere between 1 and 2 Gs--stop the engine when you hit your intended apoapsis, coast, and burn to circularize the same way you always do. An added benefit to this is that, because the rocket spends most of the flight at zero angle of attack, it's much less likely to flip even if it's not all that aerodynamically stable. Just make sure you have enough control authority--tail fins, gimballing engines, or reaction wheels--and you should be OK as long as your rocket is reasonably rocket-shaped.