Goddess Bhavani

Yes, there is a type of orbit named after Buzz Aldrin of Apollo fame! The Aldrin Cycler orbit proposes placing a transit vehicle in an orbit that periodically encounters 2 or more bodies - potentially unstable due to being thrown off by successive gravity assists, a Cycler Orbit could nevertheless be setup to ferry crew, supplies, and taxi vehicles attached to a long endurance interplanetary vessel. Fascinated, I thought to repurpose an old Tech I "primitive orbital station" into a Kerbin - Minmus - Mun cycler tug only to realize it's not as efficient as I hoped; while it was certainly entertaining to catch the speeding tug as it passed Kerbin periapsis, I realized the ascending Minmus surface lab module required quite a lot of delta V to chase the racing tug swooping out beyond the Mun; the requirement to conduct a high speed orbital interception meant the same dV could be used to send the lab on a conventional or direct ascent trajectory to Minmus with equal or greater haste. In the end, sending the POS-1 orbital tug / habitation / lander carrier module directly from Mun to Minmus while the bodies are in the right phase would have 'cost' just 150m/s. Sending the POS-1 down to Minmus to pick up the OS-4 Minmus Lab cost 220m/s to exit Munar SOI, then another 220m/s (this time towing a 30 ton lab/tanker station!) to send the resulting gargantuan assembly to Minmus transfer. Still, with plenty of fuel to waste from no less than 2 20 ton tanker flights in LKO and 1 to POS-1 while it was attached to the OS-3 Munar Orbital Lab, it was very welcome mission experience for multi-vessel interplanetary operations that no doubt I will greatly enjoy being utterly inefficient at. The decision to launch POS-1 on a cycler orbit from the Mun was due to the fact I would have waited a long time for Mun and Minmus to be in the correct position for a conventional transfer, and thought a gravity assist from Kerbin would be a fun thing to try. Then I thought - hey, why not pick up a new station module? The result is this rather graceful and relaxing 4 minute video depicting the SpaceSheep and the tiny POS-1 shepherding it to Minmus. Try not to fall asleep! In the end, I concluded the only plausible utility of setting up the cycler orbit system was that it certainly gave a purpose to an obsolete orbital module and the fuel and veteran crew it carried; Jeb, Bill, Bob and Val easily kept the 50-ton POS-1 / OS-4 assembly under tight control from rendezvous, reboost and Minmus orbital insertion; and if their trajectory was unchanged, they can drop off OS-4 in Minmus SOI and continue onwards on their cycler orbit to encounter Mun and return to LKO in 30 days with no further dV expenditure. All in all, pretty good re-cycling (no pun intended) of an old 10 ton Primitive Orbital Station! The crew of the OS-4 mission was actually drawn from one of the major Facebook KSP groups, giving new life to my Primitive Orbital Station series that sat long dormant while I messed with huge, impractical rotary-winged flying machines! ps. Spacesheep!

I don't use sepatrons, I just offset the boosters so the decoupler is above the empty booster CoM. This way the separation force will peel them outwards like a banana skin and aerodynamic forces do the rest. Banana peel staging?

Lol! I just realized Kawaii starts with a K

Oh dear, my average recent videos views will probably get skewed in the meantime. I'm about to release a craft and Primitive Orbital Station EP. 5 over the next few days.

Bacon Space Program at your service, sir! Glad to see, as promised, the applications are open to the smaller YouTube producers amongst us too!

The screenshots are stock; no photoshop required. I have Ambient Light Adjustment and increasing the gamma slightly makes white parts look cleaner and brighter. Alt + mousewheel also allows you to decrease the camera FOV for nicer perspectives that make the subject stand out. Scatterer is installed but not running any extreme postprocessing effects, so it's mainly FOV and Ambient Light mod.

I like your design more! Very simple, practical and looks like a da Vinci drawing! Mine are all sorts of massive and industrial and run into the limits of what KSP could possibly support. Rotor disk loading is a huge problem especially when translating to forward flight. I'm curious to see a pic of that!

At first I named the whole crew "correctly" based on Facebook names or requests, but I realized later, everyone was assigned as Engineers with no way to change the profession in Persistence file. Without resorting to complete overhaul mods for the Astronaut Complex, I took "creative liberties". Speaking of creative liberties, I just secured a voice actor for Primitive Orbital Station Episode 5: Cycler Orbit to Minmus! POS-1 with its surrogate mini landers swing back to Kerbin for a gravity assist, and pick up the OS-4 Minmus Surface Laboratory facility just before reboosting for Minmus intercept. It is manned by Alfonso, James, and Tommy. Tommy was supposed to be a pilot, but alas his name hash led to a change of career. This is my first ever ship that looks like a sci fi spaceship and I promtly named it Space Sheep It's also modeled after the shape of one of my little taxidermy sheep!

SPACE SHEEP! ... oh, I mean, ship

10/10 will feel the need for speed.

To revive my long dormant 1.0.4 career (-1000 rep, 0.6 funds, 0.6 science proletarian revolutionary space program mode), I embarked on a crew replacement programme, by recruiting a dozen astronauts from one of the major KSP facebook groups. Response was stellar and I renamed everyone still on Kerbin to the names of the volunteer astronauts. Jeb's contingent on an orbital station around the Mun retain their original names, creating two successive teams of crews I can rotate for future missions. Full mission report for CCRV-4 here. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/130142-A-lady-friend-helping-me-with-depression-asked-me-What-s-the-point-of-KSP-and-heres-my-answer-%29?p=2192593&viewfull=1#post2192593

The career save with the primitive orbital station had languished for some time while I indulged in a sort of Kerbal Automotive Program. This changed when yesterday I discovered the name of a Facebook KSP group member in the persistence file itself, and posting about this on FB sparked a near-revolution in my Kerbal career. The names of the original crew on board the munar orbital laboratory complex were retained as "Jeb's Contingent", while the crew that stayed back at KSP to develop future aerospace craft were all renamed after I took "applications" for the kitten space program :3 We ran into difficulties as I ended up with the majority of people becoming Engineers due to the hard-coded Kerbal jobs (jobs are assigned based on the hash of the names!) so I took some creative liberties with a handful of folk - changing male names to female names, or naming the characters after the English translation of a Celtic name for instance, ended up giving me a near equal mix of pilots, grease monkeys and boffins, which I was happy with since I could now tag people when I flew them out on missions! <3 Yesterday night, Lemlur, chief of engineer and creator of awesome automotive wheels in the mod forum, piloted mission CCRV-4 atop the new R-8 rocket powered by a Twin Boar liquid booster at its core. Onboard are two scientists, Kyle (as Kylie Kerman) and Callum (as Dove Kerman) who will augment the munar orbital laboratory i.e. force it to spit out science faster. They will also perform medical evacuation of a sick crew member (Useful Space Stations contract pack), conduct station maintenance and augment the lab module's life support supplies, then complete refuelling of Primitive Orbital Station - Module 1 and send it along with Jeb's Contingent to Minmus! Once they arrived at the station, it was found to be suffering from intermittent power failures due to high current draw from the lab module; being launched with Tech Level 1, the Primitive Orbital Station was ill equipped to power a lab! Lemlur overhauled the entire station power infrastructure using the magic of Kerbal Attachment System / KIS hopefully providing a temporary fix to the issue by cramming the lab full of solar panels plus cannabalizing spares from POS-1 and the Crewed Cargo Return Vehicle itself (CCRV).

Lol where did dearie toons come from! Someone should draw them. Like anime girl portraits lol!

Beware, ye foul space monsters, for I shall unleash upon thee the mighty Space Frying Pan of Doom +5! - famous last words from Anti Kraken Expedition XVIII

I miss buying physical boxes with game disks and -huge- manuals with them. I might give this a try soon

Yeah good point re: tweakscale. I do like releasing the basic airframe as stock, by unmounting the tweakscale missiles just before release. For this craft I thought leaving the drop tanks in looked cool and they work well to simulate a more realistic fuel load distribution too. Although all 3 fuselage sections are tanks, for realism I left the front and back ones empty and just retain them to manage center of mass. ps, I understand your experience with plane appearance too, 6 months ago all I could make was passing resemblances to 1960s jet fighters. Designs like MiG-15/17/19/21, F-86 Sabre, F-80 Shooting Star and Mirage series are good places to start because their wing planform nearly exactly matches that provided by simple plane parts and swept wings. They will teach you how to offset the wings and tail surfaces for realistic positioning, dial in anhedral or dihedral as required, and these are fundamental skills for all your future advanced aircraft projects

I did actually build the Mil V-12 for the sole purpose of house moving!

Spent nearly 12 hours learning how to safely conduct helicopter sling load operations while dealing with 20+ keyboard commands needed to operate the largest helicopter ever built in real life. Also did house moving! Craft Release Thread: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/134053-Release-Thread-Greatest-Helicopter-that-Never-Was-Mi-12-Homer-1967-analog-controls-20-keys%21?p=2190892#post2190892

Mil Moscow Helicopter Plant Mi-12 "Homer" Replica of the largest helicopter ever built in real life! Download Cinematic .craft file at KerbalX, This uses Infernal Robotics Rework, AviationLights, KIS, KAS, HullCamVDS and TweakScale (needed by IR Rework) or the Basic version requiring just Infernal Robotics Rework & TweakScale Background: First flown in 1967, the Mi-12 broke various payload to altitude records in 1969, lifting up to 25 tons. This KSP re-imagining of the transverse rotor heavy lift helicopter has similar lift performance, although the size and speed of the rotor disks are very close to what I term "The Edge of Practicality". Still, thanks to 2 KSP community veterans on IRC, I managed to figure out how to implement independent rotor control and with that, went on to break my personal best records for rotary winged sling load operations, ferrying two Volkswagen bus replicas on one flight, and an entire two storey house with another! Production Notes: Many control-related changes were implemented during the week long craft development process, involving differential collective (IKOL keys) and differential cyclic (roll control, fully integrated to standard keys). More than 12 hours real time was spent learning and recording the vertical lift footage shown in the video, with 6 hours on the "house moving" scenes due to malfunction between keyboard and chair - wanting to do things fast doesn't work on a copter of OMG scale - need to think ahead and move methodically! Flight Controls: 1: Toggle Main Rotor Drive & Fuel Cells 2: Center Roll (Cyclic) Trim 3: Center Pitch (Cyclic) Trim 5: Lock Rotor (Cyclic) Trim 6: Reduce Collective Pitch (Use for parking only) 7: Increase Collective Pitch (Use for transitioning to takeoff trim only. Use manual collective override for flight) I/K, O/L: Increase and Decrease Collective for Left and Right Rotors respectively (Primary roll control!) W/S/A/D/Q/E: Actuates Rotor Trim. Required for maintaining correct flight attitude. Lock/Disable with Action Group 5 (to use SAS or aerodynamic control). Excessive roll input will activate differential cyclic for stability. Action Group 2 to reset cyclic roll trim. Important! Warranty void if exceeding 20m/s airspeed. Cargo Handling: 8: Toggle Winch Magnets (if present) 9: Toggle Lift Arm Electromagnets & Lights 0: Toggle Cargo Bay Doors Y/H: Raise / Lower Lift Arm N/J: Rotate Lift Arm Magnetic Graspers Why so many keys? This is 1967! Don't worry Komrade, if you get anything wrong, you will be rewarded with glorious explosions and the most epic of crashes! It is only Kerbal Special Credits: The nuances of fine helicopter control that make this craft release possible are solely thanks to real world knowledge provided by Red Iron Crown and space_is_hard, with whom I discussed the Mi-12 and other multi rotor helicopters on the KSP IRC channel 2 days ago. The Wings Over Russia style narrative was provided courtesy of forumer GarrisonChisholm, who commissioned some of my recent craft projects like the TXR-3 strike/reconnaisance bomber.

Can't unsee this. Rename to Valentino Kerman Me. Possibly due to installing a contract pack mod. I'm about to change some Kerbals manually via persistence or would anyone here like to help me create a handmade kerbelle space program?

Sweet list! I love that jet engine and the Stock Helicopter by Azimech. I'll have to share some notes with him sometime, my 20+ ton VTOL solution looks remarkably industrial and ultra complex, yet Azi's stock helicopter looks like something from the musing of Da Vinci and has similar lift capacity and possibly much better stability. Mi-12 craft release just missed this week's SF by a day because after a conversation with 2 veteran KSPers on IRC on the nuances of differential collective and cyclic concepts in twin rotor helicopter control, I took a full day plus a surprise public holiday today to actually learn how to use it and sling load heavy objects in KSP; the house weighs 19 tons and the vans each weigh 8.4 tons in the below video! House scene took 7 hours by itself due to pilot error (forgetting the procedure to transition to "precision auto hover" mode) and re learning it lol. I'll make a fresh craft thread for this one; while I already have a Mi-12 testing thread on the Exchange, it doesn't cover the effort needed to re-evaluate the entire control system setup and over 20 key commands needed to operate the production, heavy lift capable Mi-12 and use it to actually move more than its own weight around. Edit, done, view the ridiculousness here

I'm looking for more epic choral music like this to fuel my massive helicopter construction project to completion. With 70 tons of parts going round and round the screen suspended by 2 Big-S ceiling fans hanging on 2 stacks of Size 0 articulated joints, no other music is epic enough!

The trees are KSC++. You can find it in the LackLusterLabs thread. I don't use the stock generated trees either, they crashed my game to 1 FPS while re-entering over a mountain range filled with zillions of pine trees!

If you clip a ram air intake into the underside of a Mk1 cockpit, you get a pretty convincing Diverterless Supersonic Intake!

Oh yesh. I took a break from endless nights of huge helicopter testing and built a Chinese J-10 fighter. Really fun to mess around with it especially after this close call and living to tell the tale!