Sharpy

Correct for docking!

Overthinking that a bit. Close again, but still not quite it. Okay. Got a contract. Build a surface outpost on Ceti. Has antenna, docking port and can generate power. At least 7 kerbals. Cupola. I decided to build a biome-hopper/rover mobile base. And then I botched the suicide burn. Not by a little. By goddamned 160m/s! I thought they are all done for! But somehow, the transfer module with 3 NERVs (which still had better TWR than the two NERVs on the biome-hopper) took the brunt of the impact. Nothing remained of it. But the base survived almost intact! ...almost. See something missing in the above picture? And so came the repair/rescue mission: After installing one engine, the rescue vessel has to drive around the base on two wheels and attach the second engine on the other side. That's why the tests - to check if this mode of transportation is possible at all. Well, guess it is. I changed my mind about the wheels. Instead of dumping them, I rotated them 90 degrees. That reduces the risk of the 'nacelles' hitting the terrain when driving. The central module of the replacement parts got a thermometer and became a stationary science outpost for 'science from surface of Ceti' contracts. And the biome hopper? Performs great! Got one more kerbal to rescue from the surface, two more biomes to visit, then back into orbit and into return/reentry pods! ...all that despite taking a 160m/s vertical landing on hardcore.

Close! Very close!

This is the thing before separation. (but still not packed onto the launcher that will deliver it to the destination)

Nope. Next hint: the wheels will be removed. This has a very practical purpose. The weirdness is a byproduct, not a goal by itself.

Make yourself a dinghy. Dinghies are sweet.

Nope. Hint: This is merely a test run to determine if the construct is drivable in the current form. Disregard the current environment; it's to be used on a distant moon.

Eh, had an adventure today... and trying to solve the conundrum I found myself in, I came up with a solution. And in the course of testing it, I just saw how crazy my solution looks. Who can guess, what is this device and what purpose is it to serve? Hints: - It's not damaged. But it's partially staged. - It's not just a random mix of things. It's meant for a very definite practical purpose. Enough hints for now. If you can't guess, I'll post more hints later.

Yes. See my last paragraph.

Landed the same rover at Ceti. That mission was poorly thought out. First, I didn't pick any extra science instruments I had developed until then. Next, I landed near the pole, so it was daaark. On my visit to Ceti Station, I didn't pick up any scientists, so I could perform the experiments that can be 'restored' by a scientist only once. Then I landed on Plateaus and really didn't expect them to end THAT way: There's no driving up that slope. A return to the propulsion module, a suborbital jump, and I could access three remaining biomes. Then I went back to Ceti station where I offloaded all the gathered science for the lab to process (and thank Kraken for that or it would have been a total disaster). Then I decided to bring Galileo Galean, the GPP Jeb counterpart, back to GSC - he'd driven the station to its destination and was currently stuck there. Plus he'd deliver the dingies, or something... And I decided to reduce my orbit some by aerobraking before burning the remaining fuel for slow-down for reentry. That turned out to be a mistake. This is all that remained from the Buffalo. I could hear parts popping all around, but the cabin Galileo was in was first to go. RIP Galileo Galean. At least the other two survived, able to pop that single parachute on the cockpit. And the station has a couple years worth of experiments to provide data.

SSTO spaceplanes are not money-savers. They are money-savers per Kerbin hour, but with the time compression at hand's reach that means very little. They are definitely not money-savers per player's hour. Say, your average contract done the 'disposable' way will take, say, an hour to complete, and yield 70% of the offered profit. It will also take about 5 Kerbin hours. The same contract done SSTO way will yield 98% profit (providing you don't crash), take maybe 6 Kerbin hours (return flight home!), but in real time it will take 2-4 hours of your attention. You could do 2-4 contracts "the disposable way" in that time. That being said, SSTO launchers - rockets - are a money-saver. Launch goes the same, landing them takes maybe 5 minutes, and you get ~90% ROI (you won't land them at KSC, but you'll get >70% recovery value). Make no mistake, FMRS and similar stage-recovery techniques are not money savers for the same reason SSTO spaceplanes aren't. In the time it takes you to safely land and recover all the boosters you could've flown half of another contract. BUT SSTO spaceplanes are fun and challenging! Do you need more reason than that to build them?

You let the center of mass be where it happens to be, preferably close to the middle. You make the center of lift slightly behind the center of mass (blue ball should not touch the middle of the yellow ball, but should be somewhere between contained within the rear half of the yellow ball and touching it. If its center is intersected by the yellow ball, you have it about right. Make sure it is so both with fuel full + payload and with everything empty/depleted.

Over past week I began my 1.5 hardcore playthrough with Galileo. Got through the initial flights, orbiting Iota etc, finally got to land. Not a common lander too, but a neat Buffalo based rover with dockable propulsion module. Then I got a contract for a station around Iota. A station means a dinghy. Another playthrough, so a new dinghy design! So I designed a dinghy. Gotta send a pair to the station later. Also, going back to the roots with dockable dinghy modules, this time I made an airplane module! (yeah, these are two Twin Boars, tweakscaled to 32cm diameter.) And finally the station...

I had a problem with using the Buffalo landing legs module as a docking port. Their magnets rotationally align to... something, and that something is not always the direction the landing legs point. I made a station, using the legs as docking ports around the central hub. I put them in orientation matching the hub. I made the base module based on buffalo parts and tried to dock it. As soon as the magnet engaged, my module got pivoted 180 degrees, and then just kept wiggling, unable to dock. After many tries, breaking off the magnet power, trying to redock, etc, I managed to force the module to turn 180 degrees and used 'force dock' and it caught. This is the current state: If I undocked now, and tried to redock, the module would flip upside-down and then fail to dock, "force dock" saying parts are too far apart. BTW, 'control from here' on these definitely doesn't look 'out of the docking port, towards the target' either, so standard navball docking is pretty hard too - I had to "drive backwards" to manage this (with control from a docking port on the opposite end of the module).

Minor/trivial bug report: Bison Stabilizer Legs are in the "Coupling" category despite not having the docking port etc property. It's Buffalo Ground Stabilizer (Buffalo legs) that are a docking port. (They are currently in Control, which is reasonable as they have a reaction wheel too).

A heavy interplanetary ship, some 250 tons on the launchpad. Recalled I forgot something around the engines, a minor thing. Revert to VAB from launchpad. To access the bottom of the ship, I flip it upside down, introduce the modification, 'save', 'launch'. The 250 ton ship spawns on the launchpad suspended on launch clamps, engines up, pointy end towards the ground. Edit: Found the screenshot.

Yesterday, I explored the Valentine system. Unfortunately the warp drive slows the game down to a crawl after use. Finished the contract to 'explore Valentine', that's the end of my 1.4.4 playthrough. I'm not installing the KSPI or 'Near Future Energy' ever again. The way the nuclear reactors are nerfed is horrible, and I never got the beamed power and ISRU to work. Seriously, couldn't it use like 4 bands - microwave, infrared, visible, UV, X, and instead go into 5-6 sub-bands and a disparate part set for each? And the propellant system, like 20 different propellants that just differ with parameters, availability, and parts. Maybe some people like this. Not me.

Poof. I took a dozen landers - some optimized for atmosphere, some for light vacuum landing, a couple for heavyweight (Tylo-like). Managed to send some science from "flying low" on Heba too, the Oversize Signals Intelligence Satellite can reach a similar one in Kerbin orbit from Valentine (at single bar of signal strength though!)

Goddammit. I built the landers, went there, and tried landing one. More than 5km deep into Heba atmosphere everything exploded from overheating, including the heat shields. I tried only 2km... and the game edited the orbit to be above the atmosphere. Obviously the engine was long blown into vapors of Heba upper atmosphere. The Built-in orbit editor doesn't allow reentry trajectories, "helpfully" increasing the semi-major axis. Currently loading the game with Hyperedit. Update: Yep, Heba is a gas giant.

Extrasolar and OPM. And already planning next playthrough with Galileo. Currently targetting Heba and pondering "Is it landable?"

No EVE and scatterer means Duna looks far less impressive. No dust storms. No methane lakes. No oppressive eclipses. These are things you're gonna miss.Also, if E.E is indeed based on 1.2.2, AFAIR 1.2.x had the worst, most broken wheels in history.

In my current playthrough the game decided to play mean and made the Peaks biome devoid of any resources. So no ISRU off the tallest peak for me.

Actually, isn't there a monolith somewhere over the surface of Jool... and you can land on that monolith?

Must-have mods: EVE and Scatterer, ScanSat RasterProp Monitors (and pick a cockpit that gives you a good view for IVA driving and at least two of the monitors. Also use the camera RasterProp provides, for a 'rear mirror'). KIS and KAS (and take a crate of spare parts. Things *will* break. Never mind I took a hopelessly bad antenna and scavenged a better one from a lander/flyer that went to Duna before that run.) And make sure your rover is robust, fast, rather durable and fun to drive. Before going to Duna test if you can use it to cross the mountain range west from KSC, through the mountain pass there. If you can, reliably and without extreme caution, you're ready for Duna.

*shrug* a couple days ago I picked the newest Community Tech Tree off Curse; it was tagged as compatible with 1.4.5, as I needed. No 1.5 version in sight. Upon startup it displays 'Wrong version, use 1.5' Seems like Curse was simply slow to update their own game version list and the mod maintainer had to release a 1.5 release as 1.4.5 because that's what was available to pick.