DDE

Hello guys, I'm looking to make very specific use of the mod for now. I have a lander topped with a Mk 2 can, and an inline KAS container holding already completely manufactured parts for a rover, along with the mallet and the stakes. What I want is the engineer onboard to assemble the rover at the stake outside. What module do I need to add the Mk 2 lander can via ModuleManager so that it becomes a (poor) workshop in itself?

Suppose I'm strapping together a rover in the field using a pylon, anchored to the ground, as a foundation. How do I change the root part in order to pull out the pylon?

So ultimately, @Diche Bach, hydrogen - like antimatter - is just a form of energy storage and is not available in pure form in any significant amount. At least at this point in our astrographic development. And yeah, energy per volume is a huge problem that sometimes makes it a worse choice.

For those who do not frequent /r/kerbalspaceprogram, I've ran into something that would have been horrendously appropriate for Chapter 19. Props to /u/alltherobots. Also, an admission: the IVA for Inline Mk2 clips into the 1.25m-to-Mk2 long tank, and doesn't have RPM support in whatever version I'll stick to, so yo won't be seeing any IVA porn from the Carrack.

Yeah, but not in lower stages and in such quantities. This caused huge political pressure from Kazakhstan, even disregarding the series of crashes. Visiting a crash site basically killed the previous head of Roscosmos.

It's NASA's 2017 budget, it includes a strategic goal of a manned Mars mission within the quarter-century, and allocated $1.4 of the annual budget to that goal.

Whatever is happening to this thread, I think it's a passable impression of what's going to happen with that $1.4 billion.

Any hydrocarbon fuel can be synthesized from basic organics with enough effort. For instance, the Soviets managed to cook up Syntin, 1-Methyl-1,2-dicyclopropylcyclopropane, as a drop-in superior alternative to RG-1/RP-1. So no, I don't think there is going to be any trouble producing rocket biofuel when and if we want it.

I thought they were supposed to make use of SLS and not GMAT and Powerpoint. Given that the bill only outlines the budget for 2017, including a measly $1.4 billion for yet another series of mostly conceptual studies, one can simply fail to mention anything long these lines in the 2018 budget. And even this budget can get blocked by Obama.

Chapter 20: To Infinity and Beyond “Simple heating is still less efficient than electrostatic,” Bill retorted, launching his notebook towards Jeb. Jeb looked up from Fundamentals of Astrodynamics and Applications, spotted the notebook – with the pen naturally attached to it using a safety line – and then made a clumsy attempt to grab the pen and slingshot the notebook back at Bill, instead virtually stopping it mid-air. “Yeah, good luck scavenging enough solar power to ionise and then expel, without lugging around a nuclear reactor suitable for direct heating,” he grumbled, “And besides, how long did it took your prototype to burn through the anode?” Bill was supposedly too busy digging through a reference table binder to respond. It was mission day 170. All systems were holding fast. The space program had fully entered the long haul stage. The second Trailblazer landing at Minmus’s north pole revealed nothing particularly interesting. The darker surface had more hydrated silicates than chlorinates, that was it. ---------- Kath barely dodged Allock as the two eggheads, as homesick as she was, ping-ponged between equipment racks. “Alpha-1, Flight, we need a confirmation for cast-off.” “30 seconds, Flight,” she muttered, pulling off a checklist clipboard hanging next to the hatch of the tiny airlock. “LOC, pressure seal released, flight computer up, you have the stick.” She knew that outside, the Intern’s science bay doors were being welded shut as it thrusted clear of the station. The retroburn would then send the upper half of it back to Kerbin for groundside inspection. Other samples, most notable the lettuce, would remain on-board, which had Jesla the plant girl going bananas. It didn’t quite cross Kath’s mind that this was still the first real mission of a Mk 2 Hermes; space was getting oddly routine. ---------- For Valentina Kerman, though, spaceflight was anything but ordinary. “Booster?” “Go.” “Network?” “Go.” “Eecom?” “Clear to go, Flight.” “Surgeon?” There was a long yawn. “…Go.” “Carrack, Flight, you’re clear to go. Ignition in thirty.” The plane-rocket hybrid blasted off without an issue. As previously, the Bollard completed the ascent and began the downrange acceleration. The first stage cut off. With a bump, the stage and the abort rocket separated. And then the new aerospike fired. Val watched the m/s on the surface velocity indicator climb as Carrack’s motor worked furiously to achieve orbit. It cut off in less than a minute. “Flight, first burn complete, on trajectory to circularization, beginning system checks.” With solar power replaced by RTGs, the Carrack had little in the way of hull clutter. The whip antenna extended, and the attitude jet clusters popped out. And Val could clearly see one of the petals of the docking port shield open up in front of her. They proceeded with the Hohmann, from an unusually low staging orbit of 200 km to Piraeus’s 300. Val brought the ship in for docking; manoeuvring it gave her no trouble, and visibility was quite improved. The docking ports clamped together and locked. “Yarr, ye scurvy space rats, prepare to be boarded!” Val shouted as Terigh unbuckled and began to float down the tunnel. She returned two minutes later with a bunch of plastic plant pots. Val checked the hatch light and immediately initiated decoupling. “You know,” Terigh suddenly piped up, “This in no way looks like lettuce. It’s more like…” “Yeah?” Val echoed, cautiously withdrawing her hands from the controls. “Salad rocket.” ---------- “Alright, Flight, we’re twenty seconds to atmo interface. Attitude nominal, oxidizer dumped, expendable cooling valves open. Over and out.” Val watched the tongues of plasma lick at the edges of the airframe. As deceleration began and heating mounted, the leftover fuel was forced towards the bottom of the tanks, where it absorbed the heat from the ceramic underbody, boiled, and escaped out of the craft. That helped cope without an ablative heatshield. They passed max Q, and the descent remained within acceptable parameters. “Val, we’ve got an undershoot of about ten klicks,” Terigh announced from behind her. “Copy that, will glide from twenty, stand by with jets.” There were still plasma trails when she dropped the pitch hold, but they were soon replaced as the Carrack entered regular supersonic flight. Val flew over the mountain ridge with the remaining velocity, and the jets coughed to life just in time to take her over the plains of KSC’s Exclusion Zone. The brakes on the wheels screeched as the Carrack ground to a halt less than a hundred meters into the landing strip. So, Val had just chaperoned a happy wedding between a rocket and a plane. ---------- There were reasons why Piraeus Expedition 1 ended slightly short of the 100-day mark – Gene wanted to minimize workload for the launch team, as he needed to scavenge a full three shifts for FMC-U. Flagship Mission Control – Unmanned. Orion was – hopefully – going to be their next big win, aimed for Duna and Eve; the amount of stages involved, though, explained why it was developed alongside a new, medium-class booster. Unsatisfied with a mere flyby, Jeb and Gene wanted to insert a probe into low orbit. That required an upper stage capable of being fired after a year in space, and ballooned the rest of the vehicle. The second stage had to use a Poodle for the second half of the ascent, the circularization and the transjection. An additional compact version of Chelyabinsk was on the drawing boards should a four-stage design be required. Gene’s new crew watched as SGC controllers guided the first probe into orbit. The hand-over occurred immediately after the second burn and confirmation of successful insertion from FIDO-SGC. “Alright, she’s ours now, thirteen minutes to TDE. Run the checks!” “Jets, upper stage within nominal, retro stage in the green.” “Guido, beginning star acquisition, guidance nominal.” “PME here, checklist underway.” “INCO, pinging Beacons via medium and high-gain, so far so good.” “FIDO, please confirm transfer trajectory. Five minutes.” “Flight, Jets, burn initiated, confirming thrust at nominal.” “Roger that, guidance acquisition holding steady.” “Thrust cut-out confirmed. FIDO? “Stand by… confirming hyperbolic trajectory, predicted arrival into Duna SOI, closest approach at fifty thousand k.” “Jets, Flight, dump the booster.” “Proceeding.” With the booster jettisoned, Orion 1 began its five-day cruise out of Kerbin’s sphere of influence. ---------- The Spacecraft Assembly and Testing was by then a dozen of separate clean rooms. Gene was strolling through it, surveying his realm. With Orion 2, he was already developing an augmented mission plan to swing behind Ike if Orion 1 attained the primary objectives. “What is this rubbish?” he asked a bunch of Academy kids hauling what looked like a refitted metal detector. “Electrostatic Munar dust remover,” grumbled one of them, seemingly not recognizing his boss. Gene did not respond. The dust was a problem they’ve just been overlooking, but it wasn’t possible to overlook it on longer-term missions. Longer-term mission… multi-use laboratory… Mun orbital station? “Gene!” he heard someone exclaim behind him. It was Yaroslav Kermanov, who had previously locked himself up in his office labouring on a doctoral thesis. “Good thing I could grab a hold of you,” he continued, “I’ve got a proposal to augment Hornet 4. 3’s the first mission with surface hab, right? But 4 is largely a backup in case not enough data is generated.” “…for Munside fuel production. Your point?” “Reroute 4 to the North Pole.” “Not even with Hornet’s high margins.” “True, probably not enough even if you use a very high orbit as a starting point, but we can always go back to Mun Surface Rendezvous. You’re going to need precision landing and EVA fuel handling for Hornet 5 anyway.” Gene merely hemmed in response. ---------- Three days later, Orion 1 crossed the somewhat imaginary boundary of Kerbin’s SOI. “INCO, you ready?” “Ready, Flight.” “Alright, initiate Flight Mode 2.” Orions came equipped with both an interplanetary dish matching those of Beacons as well a medium-gain dish strapped to the retro stage, just for the first five days. The procedure required the probe to flip over and switch between the two systems, losing connection to Kerbin in the process. “INCO?” “…got ping, connection established.” “PME, panels?” “Stand by… reorienting themselves as they should.” “Alright, Science, your move.” “PME, SOF, deploy the RPWS.” While the planetary science packages had to wait, the tripod antenna that could detect planetary magnetic fields through their interaction with the solar wind could start its work right away. Orion 2 followed hours later. ---------- “So, Lis, what exactly did the test for the ‘Quartermaster’ qualification entail?” Stelemma sneered as Gus’s gantry team was strapping them in. “Careful there, Glasses, your fancy optical gear might get smeared just at the moment we run out of tissues,” the pilot fired back. “All science is either physics or stamp collecting,” muterred Sidhat, the second scientist on Piraeus Expedition 2.

This is quite surprising, since there's a huge push to retire the whole toxic family. It may be an interim design until the nativized, Proton-sized Zenit derivative takes over.

I wonder if that might get Lavockin's proposal out of the pie-in-the-sky category. A race between America and Russia for a Europa landing.

Chapter 19: There and Back Again, Sharpish The empty snack wrapper tumbled in the middle of the module, slowly drifting to its impending doom at the fan filters. The hatch to Athens was closed but not sealed; their next visit would be in two weeks, to run a battery of medical tests – ECG, blood work, et cetera. The Vulkan had half the habitable space of Athens alone, and had to run on a maritime eight-hour watch schedule because Mission Control would be on the wrong side of fifteen-minute lightspeed lag during the real mission; that meant the trunk would be noisy – Bob was hammering away on the bike at the time – but only one bunk would be needed, which is why the flight stations in the RV were partially dismantled to turn it into a common sleeping space. "Alpha Actual, come in, launch cleared, payload approaching in five," the radio speaker on the bulkhead suddenly spat out. ---------- "Copy that, Flight. Expedition 1 standing by to receive Intern-1." Piraeus was roughly 1/5 of a revolution ahead of Athens, so they both got a decent look of the Vector boosters briefly careening over the night side of Kerbin before being replaced by the invisible blast of a Chelyabinsk upper stage. "Flight, Alpha One here, tell Pad and Booster it's a good shoot, Intern is at 35 km and I can see the hydrogen venting from here." "Stand by for terminal approach, Alpha." It all took under a minute. Kath watched as the dot rapidly grew on the docking periscope until she snapped away. The small cylinder festooned with manoeuvring thrusters was racing in at over 100 m/s relative velocity, yet slipped into position with uncanny perfection. "Alpha, Flight, INCO confirms guidance lock, beginning docking approach." The cylinder lazily tumbled over and began to creep towards the station's ventral docking port. Excessive thruster power ensured it stuck to the letter of the standard approach pattern. It docked effortlessly, the contact barely sensible aboard the larger craft. "Jesla! Confirm!" Kath shouted down the hatch. "Hard dock!" she heard echo down from where the resident botanist was inspecting one of the fist-sized airlocks that allowed retrieving samples though a 0.625 m docking collar mounted atop the materials science package, which sat on a heat shield and interstage followed by an expendable propulsion pack. ---------- "This is still a very bad idea," Terigh complained as they stepped off the elevator. "I know, right!" snapped Val. She had to get it done anyway; Gene had pressured her into not only backing the Skipper for Hermes flights, but to also test the captured Kermerican engine, dubbed Bollard, on herself rather than as part of Gene's precious Orion probes. But it paid off handsomely. The Crocoduck hung beneath her, redubbed B8 Carrack and mated to its booster. It would have probably been possible to replace it with a mess of strap-ons and drop tanks, but there was beautiful simplicity in the design. The drag from the stubby-winged spaceplane was countered by the oversized grid fins retrofitted aftwards. The four-nozzle first stage engine was coupled with integrated verniers to grant even more control authority. However, this wasn't the first flight; the aerospike had not been upgraded to service standard yet. Gene had pressured Val into performing a "powered pitcharound" abort test before the proper orbital engine was provided. She followed Terigh down the tunnel in the nose, to the cockpit almost two storeys below. She knew why Gene was trying to stonewall her. Not only was he busy settling old grievances with several pieces of tech he and Jeb had disagreed on, but the Carrack risked rendering the Hermes obsolete if a bigger version could be built. The new engine worked marvellously, not exploding on start-up as one would expect from government hardware. The rocket bobbed slightly before the fins dropped open and the autopilot adjusted trim. A major issue with having a massive first stage is that as it empties, the acceleration mounts. The abort was to take place at 2.6 g and above 30 km. The first stage handled a large portion of the downrange acceleration. Val watched the seconds to staging click down, her arm hovering above the abort handle. Finally, seconds before the Bollard ran out of fuel, she pulled it. A Rabbit sounding rocket motor, recessed under the liquid oxygen tank fired, and as the spaceplane separated from the booster, the asymmetric thrust flipped it over. Val felt herself crushed into a slurry and pressed out of the cockpit through a tiny crack. Terigh's wail suggested a similar sensation. Slowly the senses came back, first of them the sound of the attitude control jets clacking as they kept the spaceplane level but backwards. Then she was almost knocked out again as the aerospike kicked in. Valentina finally managed to shake off the minor concussion, and focus on the airspeed indicator. The analog one was thoroughly busted due to the inverted position, but the telemetry furiously counted down the metres per second. The Crocoduck had enough onboard delta-vee to reverse the downrange velocity and get back to KSC. "Cut off in five, four, three, two, one... Engine out!" "Dumping fuel," growled the voice behind her. They did end up briefly passing the 69 km mark before falling back. The airframe groaned as they began a ballistic descent. The attitude controls got overwhelmed around 20 km, and Val broke through the cloud deck above the KSC at half a kilometer per second. "They definitely know we're alive now!" Val laughed as she levelled out the plane, "Tower, this is Carrack, I'm coming around for a second pass. Clear the strip, we're coming in hot. Terigh, kick in the jets." ---------- Heimdall became the second project to feel Gene's ire. The good news was that it got pushed to completion in record time. The bad news that it was being used to test the Skipper upper stage. The really bad news was that Gene had axed the station part of the Heimdall, so it was just a reactor core with a parachute, a propulsion bus, and a docking collar. Hence the record speed. Val watched the tall, all-white rocket blast off from a few kilometres away. The flagging MAXX didn't need the extra boosters for that mission. Nor were there any surprises in store while the SRB did its job. It wasn't that the Skipper was unreliable. But it was Dachshund's equally toxic big brother that got a bad rep during Val's years in KASA. Gene had good reasons to like it, though: Tunguska was an upper stage engine that couldn't haul a fully fuelled Hermes to orbit, and couldn't entirely carry the stage for first half a minute of the burn. This used to be tolerable back when the MAXX did its job of tossing properly. The Skipper, on the other hand, was a rugged hypergolic upper stage engine that had no trouble lifting itself, a payload and its much heavier fuel, if one could live with the unhealthily brownish exhaust trail, and could be stored fuelled and ready for firing for decades. The Skipper burnt almost all the way to the fumes before shutting down. Then the coast to high orbit circularization burn began, and the reactor test bed began deployment, stretching out its solid-state radiator petals. Team Heimdall got downgraded to manning an extra console with the LOC mission control team, but seemed horridly intent to get their job done right. "Reactor control drums to boost... Neutron flux increasing, power generation nominal." Should something go sideways, the spacecraft would eject the reactor core, equipped with a an aeroshield and a parachute package. Long and slender, it would stabilize itself upon entry, and produce enough drag to crash-land relatively safely even should the chutes malfunction. "Neutron flux at nominal, confirming criticality, control drums to steady, engage automatic controls. Heimdall is operational." Val let out a breath. She was not exactly looking forward to recovering that one. ---------- Gene was chewing methodically, staring into his food tray in the quietest and fanciest of KSC's three canteens, ferociously defended from both the pad crews and the academy cadets. Val smashed down her food tray in front of him, and began to eat while making an exaggerated effort not to notice his existence. "I'm not the enemy, Val," he finally muttered, annoyed. "Doesn't really sound like it from where I am," she began, "'Trailblazer's going to render y'all flyboys obsolete'?" "Linus's words, not mine." "But it's indicative of what your probe team thinks. You've axed Heimdall and you've just created an excuse to drag your heels on the Hornet." "Dammit, Val," Gene grimaced - for the first time in a month or so, "you think it's a giant conspiracy to 'axe' the manned program? "You're a hotshot, I've always known that. Even Jeb knows he can't make it to Duna on duct tape and guile, and even then anything the Vulkan can do a small probe like Orion can do much better. We need slow, incremental development, and with everything groundbreaking on Mun and Minmus done we can't just keep going around manned with mallets needlessly. Hornet, once done, will give us the ability to set up permanent camp, and Vulkan paves the way to other planets. Until then, we've got to cut costs and play it safe, so probes it is." Valentina's stare in response was withering. The next twenty seconds were only interrupted by munching sounds from other tables. "Guess I'll be a cost-cutting hotshot then," she chirped unexpectedly, pulled out a slightly crumpled sheet of paper, slapped it on the table, and stormed off with a half-full tray. Gene Kerman knew better than to touch the note on the table. He reached into the inner waistcoat pocket, and pulled out a mirror on a telescoping handle - a relic of his days in nuclear reactor testing. Using it as the next best thing to a hazmat suit, he spun the paper around. It was a launch sequence diagram. And it was distinct by the whole vehicle taking off an airstrip, and the first stage coming back from upper atmosphere. It was an airplane launch – right up Val's alley. ---------- The first of the heavy Trailblazer probes was destined for Mun’s northern basin in hopes of finding evidence of ancient volcanic activity on a strip of terrain not resurfaced by major impactors. It also tested hazard avoidance and lateral correction thrusters. Upon landing, the probe sprouted a magnetometer boom, while the drill dug into the ground to provide samples for the on-board spectroscope. It really could do more than a Gadfly.

What the Cyberman said. The second is an IS kamikaze sat, along with DoD's conceptual depiction of a non-kinetic ASAT.

TBH, I have no idea how syntin burns. I doubt the colour is too different from normal RG-1, since it's just another hydrocarbon.

That was Cuba's first manned spaceflight. I'm trying to understand why the flame is blue. I don't think this flight used Syntin.

That's the price of Pilyugin setting out to use a digital computer in a rocket.

* cough * Slate * cough * someone did something really Kerbal * cough *

You forgot these two puppies:

50 gigs? After several decades of collecting He3 for a single launch? Get real and have 10 gigs right away.

Err, nope. That dV includes drag from atmosphere. My map says 3400 m/s for Kerbin orbit but 2270 m/s for a - albeit much lower - Tylo orbit. The ability to assume a very low orbit around Tylo can be exploited to dramatically lower the thrust requirements for the uppermost stage. I would dare suggest a stage-and-a-half afterburning nuclear rocket for ascent. That's how a single-stage Tylo lander is doable in KSP, and if you don't fire up the reactor until launch there will be no problems with radiation during EVAs.

Yep, this is slightly concealed by the core stage being lopsided.

If you take a more detailed look, though, it's because the engine-eers behind N-1 had never built rocket engines. After Valentin Glushko told Korolev to either use the hypergolic RD-23x and RD-270 engines, or **** off; Korolev had to go to Nikolai Kuznetsov, a jet engine designer (not to be confused with Victor Kuznetsov, a telemetry expert), and have his people learn to make kerolox/Sintin-lOx motors from scratch; no surprise they went down the untrodden path and eventually produced the NK-33 with its unparalleled TWR. Glushko correctly predicted that he'd need twenty years of general R&D to create an equivalent to F-1s, which is the RD-170/171/180/190 family, based on Kuznetsov's work.

Yes, but once you detect the railgun firing - easily, the muzzle flash is going to be quite vivid - you can start dodging randomly, "drunkwalking"; almost any change in trajectory will be enough to foul up their firing solution. Any spacecraft easily detectable by infrared. Muzzle flash easily detectable on IR. Whoops.

Actually, if I remember it right, I've seen a breakdown by fields, which lead to a number of intersecting parabolic curves (lifecycles of disciplines) of different height intersecting; with IT entering the stagnation period biotech being on the rise now.