DDE

OK, I really want to violate forum rules and politely poke @blizzy78 for an ETA on update/confirmation of functionality.

The carbon aqueous biochemical chauvinism runs thick in this thread. Pun intended.

Ultimately it's because of horrible visibility on a tail-lander that's throwing up dust. Otherwise you have no idea where your legs are at. Von Braun kitted his fictional ships with "touch-down shoes" in Collier's Man Will Conquer Space Soon! back in 1952.

Chapter 12: Nous voila, Kerbayette! “Darter, please proceed with engine activation,” Jeb said softly, lowering his binoculars. “Copy that, Tower,” Val responded, and flipped the switch in the cockpit. Behind her, the experimental Whiplash turboramjet sparked to life. “Got ignition, thrusting up.” The whine built up and strong vibration appeared. “Tower, I’m being pushed ahead despite full breaks!” she laughed. “Give her a full spin!” She dropped the brakes and felt crushed into the seat as the Darter blasted down the runway. She pulled back the stick, and slowly the plane left the runway. She immediately retracted the gear. In a few seconds, she broke the sound barrier. She kept the engine at full throttle until she reached hypersonic at near-sealevel. Then she pulled the stick again. The g’s were devastating, the world grew dark around her, but the plane kept ascending like a rocket. The altimeter flickered like mad. Maybe a few seconds per kilometre of vertical velocity. Before she dropped the stick, she already had crossed the 18 km mark. She maintained full thrust. 20 km… 25 km… The master alarm wailed at her. Her engine had died. The g’s also disappeared. She was still moving at 1 km/s total velocity. She shoved the stick again in an effort to orient the craft for… re-entry. That sounded pretty reasonable, as the barometric altimeter was off the scale, and the radar one indicated a full 35 km. But the control surfaces weren’t responding too well. Val kept tracking the situation, and final remembered she had Jeb on the other end. “Tower, are you seeing this?” “Yep, it’s a nice engine.” “Have you noticed that I’ve pretty much done a loft of a Mainsail? Think we can loft upper stages on aircraft.” “…Umh… we have other cost-cutting measures underway.” She was descending pretty rapidly. Finally, the barometric altimeter came to, and Val tried to restart the engine. It coughed back to life, and she felt the thrust build up again. And she had regained control. She immediately began a slow, wide turn back west towards the KSC. It took her a few minutes. She had levelled out at 10 km, and gunned the throttle again. She reached 1 km/s. Except that now the plane sported a plasma sheath! “Val!” the call came through the radio interference. “OK, OK!” she answered cheerfully, cutting the trust and engaging the airbrakes, which almost tore her out of her seat. She played the remaining three dozen kilometres safe, not going beyond 700 m/s. The runway was clearly visible and quite sufficient. However, Val had to flare and brake after realizing she was still hauling it at almost 200 m/s. Finally, she brought the jumpy, considerably oversteering plane onto the runway. It wasn’t anywhere near a perfect three-point landing, and when she kicked in the weak brakes, the ride became pretty bumpy. Suddenly the plane swerved around. Val swore profusely. She had almost had her head ripped off by the lateral acceleration. ---------- “There’s plenty of potential to go about…” Val started at the base of the control tower. “No time, no money, no personnel,” Jeb cut her off. “…we just need to fix the damned wheels!” “We have other priorities at the time.” “You mean Hermes-B?” “If only!” Jeb remarked. Behind him, a ground crew rolled out a bizarre contraption. “…Is that what I think it is?” Val asked, as one of the rookies climbed into a tiny cockpit. “Sort of.” The contraption’s clusters of rocket engines sparked to life. It took off and began to hover precociously above the field beyond the training complex. Then it landed. All in less than two minutes. “It’s just a training vehicle,” Jeb explained. “Training vehicle for what?” He simply led her into one of VAB’s secondary bays. There was a whole bunch of component storage cases – tagged LV-T30. “Reliants!? They’re back!?” “Yeah, we’ve found a way to reuse them, so the cost isn’t much of an issue.” “We won’t be able to use them in the first Hermes-B. Will have to make do with Kerbodyne,” Jeb added. Val was no longer fixated on the boxes. She was staring on a full-scale mock-up in the corner. “Yes, it’s what it looks like,” Jeb smiled, looking at the small spidery lander. Val blasted off towards it even faster than the Darter. Instead, the master of the VAB came into sight. “Jeb, about yesterday…” Bill began, as Val tore off the wooden door of the mock-up. “No!” Jeb snarled. “But what exactly is the problem?” Bill asked, unperturbed. “Are you crazy!? Assuming it doesn’t explode or thrust out of control, think of the logistics! You have to cast the fuel in the VAB, then mate it to the rest of the vehicle, and then move the whole thing onto the pad.” “Oh, we’ve handled a Sarnus with a nuclear reactor. Have thee a little faith!” ---------- Hermes-B blasted off slightly past midday. The upper stage had had to be stretched, and four solid boosters had to be added for the extra initial oompf. Jeb was hardly happy. He hated the Kerbodyne outfit. He’d had to pull a lot of strings to prevent them from intervening into the Sarnus program. But he had to admit – they were pretty powerful. The boosters also carried the aero surfaces, so the grid fins were kept stowed until the SRBs burnt out. The Mainsail, clocked down to 75% thrust, continued onward, replaced by the Tunguska in the upper atmosphere. After the circularization burn, the ship remained enshrouded. A small antenna at the bottom of the hydrogen stage maintained the datalink. The ship drifted into the shadow. And then it performed the Trans-Munar Injection, firing the engine again for another minute. “FIDO, please confirm trajectory,” Jeb requested, before looking upwards at Bill and Bob’s seats above. The ship came into sunlight faster than normal. “Hermes, FIDO, you’re good until Mun SOI.” “Flight here, you’re clear for TDE,” Gene confirmed. “Alright. Bill, your lead!” “Acknowledged. Fairing separation.” “Stand by for separation, in two, one…” The ship moved with a bump as it separated. Jeb quickly gave it a quick blast of RCS thrusters. “Deploying power and comms. Datalink with KSC regained,” Bill kept droning on. “Transposing,” Jeb responded, and flipped the ship over. “Permission to jettison adapter?” “Go ahead.” The pyrobolts holding the ring around the Terrier fired, sending it and the ship flying in opposite directions. Jeb quickly added to that, aiming for the docking ring on top of the stage floating nearby. He noticed that, with no source of power and the guidance package computer dead, the upper stage was slightly tumbling. He quickly compensated for that. The whole deft docking took a mere ten seconds. The docking locks pulled the two parts of the craft back together. “Preparing to extract!” Bill barked, spooking Jeb, even though the last operation was quite routine. The separation motors flashed in front of them as the stage was pushed away from them, leaving a closet-sized extension module atop Hermes’s docking port. It wasn’t just an exact copy of Athens’ airlock. It also carried an RPWS tripod and a magnetometer boom. Jeb and his crew settled down for the trip. The Mun was about to be examined and carefully listened to. Behind them, Athens proper drifted undisturbed in its orbit, 50 km above the staging echelon that Hermes-B had departed from. Kerbalov listened to the vacuum pumps slowly grow silent as the pulled the air out of the airlock. Finally, he saw the indicator go green, and unlatched the outer hatch. The hatch was on the dark side of the station. He switched on the helmet lamps, and began to climb “up” the ladder along the body of the laboratory, in between the radiator panels. They’d glued the leaky one shut, but the repairs had to be left for the next expedition. He finally reached the conical section, where the ladder ended in an attitude jet nozzle on top of the docking collar. He carefully checked his target to his left – a material science sample container, with purple goo in transparent tubes, only slightly out of reach. Just in case, he readied the jetpack for a semi-tethered manoeuvre, as he pulled them out of their casing. Finally, he drifted back for a nice general shot. ---------- “Flight, Hermes, hourly report. Power nominal, EECOM nominal, engine ready, crewmates relatively sane, comms… I’ll leave you to judge. Thirty minutes until Mun SOI.” Jeb lowered his head as Bill backed out of the airlock feet-first. They’d moved the sanitation system rack from the main cabin into the small, closet-sized compartment behind the bulkhead hatch. Bob had remained at his station for two hours straight. According to the checklist, he was supposed to begin preparing the photo camera, and that got Jeb worried. Bob wasn’t one to ignore his own schedules. “Bob?” Jeb finally called. “Jeb, could you handle the cameras? I’ve got something weird here.” “A’ight,” Jeb responded as he started to fetch the gear out of the storage racks. An entire hour passed. Bob remained in his seat, and was beginning to mutter quietly in between repeated clicks of console buttons. “What is it, Bob?” Jeb finally asked insistently. “The magnetometer. I’ve got readings above nominal.” “Interference from the ship?” “No, the halfway platform is registering the same, so it’s not us. I’m also beginning to see supporting data from the RPWS.” “Wasn’t the Mun too dead to have a dynamo?” Jeb idly wondered. Bob only sighed in response. Science time. They slipped into the Mun’s radio shadow, but the other side was brightly lit, its pockmarked surface spinning noticeably beneath them. “Bill, give me a stay or no-stay,” Jeb requested. There were a few more switch flips. “Stay.” And so they performed the orbital insertion burn. “Alright, waiting on Kerbin to give us full telemetry,” Jeb remarked, unstrapping himself from his seat as Bill began undertaking astrogation measurements. The sight from the starboard window was slightly spoiled by the magnetometer boom that was giving Bob a headache. Oh, and by the way… “Bob, how’s our phantom field doing?” “It’s pretty damned elusive. Looks like it’s a bunch of local anomalies. They’re barely stopping the solar wind, and I’m also getting peculiar readings across the radio spectrum.” “Flight, Hermes, do you copy?” the regular radio came to life. The Beacons were coming into sight. “Yeah, we copy, we’ve got results, stand by for data traffic. Kerbin itself soon followed. A few minutes later, the entered the shade, but Kerbin still glittered millions of miles away. Jeb was suiting up for an EVA. As the ship came to a 3/4th orbit point, Jeb locked himself in the airlock, and began to depressurize it. They were passing just above Pathfinder 1’s resting place. It wasn’t his first zero-G EVA, although the first with a jetpack. He gave it a few test bursts, and simply dropped free of the airlock without a care. He finally fired up the orientation autopilot, and gently did a full spin. Behind him was the pockmarked Mun. On the one side, was his home, brightly lit, clouds swirling above the glistening oceans. On his other side was his only lifeline, the miracle of technology that had brought him there. The sun glare was obviously blinding. Inside the ship, Bob glanced up at the forward window, and Jeb flashed his helmet light as he moved into sight. Jeb floated about for a few more minutes, and that was enough for Kerbin to slip out of sight. He concluded the EVA at that point, and went off the clock, napping in his seat for another whole orbit. The orbit departure burn was pretty mundane by comparison. Bob was all too distracted by his data. An hour afterwards, Hermes performed a brief correctional burn to target its atmospheric re-entry. ---------- This time, Gene was operating without Jeb. On the menu was one dusty appetizer – Pathfinder 3. The launch was downright boring. The Trans-Munar Injection was performed rather hastily, seconds after the circularization burn. But for the Mission Control, that was a reason to put their game faces on and have a few thrilling minutes. An hour later, Pathfinder 3 deviated from Pathfinder 1’s flight plan, its engines delivering a 40 m/s burn along the normal vector, sending it out of the equatorial plane. This timetable lead to considerable excitement a day later. Just as Pathfinder was entering Mun’s SOI… …The Hermes began the entry procedure. Except for jettisoning the airlock, which jerked away as air leaked out of the detached docking port without the door shut, and the SM entering dangerously close to the CM, the return was routine. Meanwhile, the Pathfinder slipped into a near-perfect polar orbit. “Flight, FIDO, red alert!” Bobak announced. Pathfinder 3 was in perfect position to observe Kerbin transiting and eclipsing the sun over the course of a few hours. While it was not specifically kitted for it, the science team was going to make the most out of it, while the techies needed to keep the batteries from dying. It was a bit tense, and the orbital alignment meant the Pathfinder had constant comms with Kerbin, so Mission Control stood down for an entire hour before beginning the descent. Their target was near the south pole. That was troublesome. Their maps of that area were lacklustre, the area permanently poorly lit and at an oblique angle. And while the terrain was rugged, it was still rather even compared to the other pole. But as they saw on the cameras, they were cutting it pretty close, coming down near an imposing cliff of a crater inside a larger crater. But that didn’t prevent the autopilot from doing its job a quarter-light-second away from home, the braking manoeuvre had been executed perfectly, and Pathfinder touched down on the dark surface. That darkness and perennial shade were the reasons they brought the probe there. “DAN data!?” Jeb huffed as he entered the amphitheatre. “Stand by,” Linus’s lowly intern responded, “Reading high hydrogen concentrations directly under the surface.” The coveted Munar polar ice. The mission control crew erupted. PSA begins below, can't post without merging. Chapter 13 1.1.3... Yeah, I got hit with the update. This means this thread is suspended until the mod updates come through - it seems like my last-second 1.1.2 backup is partially non-functional. The good news is that I've scraped and cheated through the finals, so once I do get a working install, I'll do the actual Chapter 13.

Only if your rocket is an American-made wimp. The Buran launched in the middle of a full-fledged blizzard with no issues.

Uhm, the original Pegasus is a total wimp, we can go bigger if needed with merely off-the-shelf equipment.

Because "Moar boosters!" is not cost-effective.

Technically it has separate configs to work with Blizzy's toolbar and with RPM also listed in CKAN.

I'm afraid that any active sensor would have prohibitively high power requirements. I'm also somewhat concerned with your choice of X-ray/gamma detector. Especially as it likely misses a fairly handy alpha-beta detection capability.

Got any good source? Russianspaceweb told me there was a dedicated backup thruster and I ended up trawling through a 2013 thread in some dank Russian forum.

I was surprised, seeing as there is a very engine-like hole at the back, along with a protective shroud animated in Tantares mods, and so I dug. So what we got on modern-series Soyuz is a KTDU-80/S5.80 common-fuel system with 14 x 11D428 coarse RCS (14 kgf), 12 x S5.142 fine RCS (2.5 kgf) and a main thruster with four throttling valves for up to 300 kgf. Otherwise it's a horrible mess of lackluster documentation and several dozen variants of spacecraft.

While I dunno about the proposed late short-SM Apollo I've seen mentioned, we have the Venus fly-by project, with an equipment container for the S-IV workshop in place of the LM requiring using a shorter dumbbell, leading to two LM engines proposed. The oomph however allowed the CSM to fully reverse its trajectory on the way to the Moon. By comparison, the Soyuz lunar mission stack had an entire fifth stage - the now-famous Block D - dedicated to lunar orbit insertion.

Yeah, but isn't it reaction mass-insensitive? Anything can be heated, but the Isp would plummet. I still thought we're talking about primary motors here...

See http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist.php#id--Electrothermal--Resistojet ; seems like you're on the money.

Feedback: it seems to work, but the wireframes seem quite dense, and there is pronounced lag restricted to IVA with VV screen on. Could be Ven's fancy part meshes.

Agent Kirrim will return in Munraker.

Chapter 11: All Your Base Yaroslav Kerbalov stepped off the SAR plane, water dripping from his suit. The rest of the crew crawled out, looking as enthusiastic as a wet newspaper; Slava’s eyes kept gleaming under the steamed-up helmet. “How long till next try?” he puffed in the direction of Jeb and his staff. “A week, tops,” Bill responded, “I’ve got plenty of data to fix the structural faults. We’re going to have to switch to your Kerbotserkovsky drag fins instead normal tail fins to maintain total mass, but this shouldn’t become a problem.” “There’s no way we’re going back there!” Lisgrid butted in. “Say that again, Pilot,” Jeb uttered, pinning her down with a withering glare. ---------- This time the launch occurred without a hunch. Hermes headed off towards a third Tunguska burn in the shadow of the planet. Another half-hour and half-orbit later, the final approach began. The Terrier engine sizzled as the relative velocity clocked down. According to their electronics, they were now in station less than one kilometre away from the station. Lisgrid returned the vehicle to manual control, and carefully spun it around. On the “upper deck”, Yaroslav and Roszie peered into the narrow forward windows. The station was barely visible, a tiny sliver of white in the distance. Lisgrid fired the Terrier briefly, and then spun the ship around. A minute later, she performed the counterburn. She inhaled deeply, and flipped the automated docking system switch. A fully kitted Hermes-A had 8 RCS jets around the base of the pod, 4 retrograde jets on the sides of the SM, and 8 more sideways translation and prograde jets around the Terrier engine, for a total of 20. Of them, the autopilot fired a full half at once. The autopilot aligned them parallel to the docking axis, and besides, the windows had a massive dead zone from their pretty low seating. Instead, they watched as the shadow of a solar panel, and finally the docking port itself, appeared on the docking port visor screen. The ship kept translating at 2 m/s until the docking port was in the crosshairs. The decelerating along the port-starboard axis was barely noticeable, the RCS thruster valves clicking softly. Finally, they gave it a good push forward. Twenty meters. Five meters. Three meters… The outer collars clicked together. There was a thud and a series of groans and clicks as the two ports achieved a hard dock. “Alright, I have the lead,” Roszie announced, and then paused awkwardly, before suggesting, “Helmets on.” “We don’t want to get hit by any metal shavings or whatever debris’s floated up in zero-G before we kick in the vents,” Kerbalov narrated, as he plopped on his camera-equipped helmet. The ship’s hatch was finally opened, and the exterior of the station’s matching hatch was exposed. It opened with some slight coaxing on behalf of a wrench. “The Athens station is composed of the forward interface section, the main vehicle body, and the aft power section,” Yaroslav continued, as he floated past the empty laboratory gear racks. “The front is a conical section housing radios, attitude jet fuel and a tunnel leading to the forward docking port. The central cylinder forms the core habitable volume, with three pseudo-decks and three portholes on either side. There are emergency access hatches, but those are forced shut by interior pressure. The actual hatch for regular spacewalks is housed in the aft compartment near the second docking port, behind an airlock system to avoid having to vent the whole craft. Opposite of it is the viewing cupola for surface and astronomic observations, although let’s be fair, it’s mostly for recreation because it’s just so bloody cool! “The station is powered by two oversized solar panel arrays, producing enough waste heat to necessitate coating half the station in radiators, and we expect to wear out at least one set of batteries, which is why the compartments holding them are also accessible.” ---------- “Alright, Orbit 3, biosig check in 10 minutes.” “Ros, I’ve got a package I don’t recognize, marked THX dash three-nought. Mind checking the manifest?” Lis being a pilot gave her a great excuse to slack off in the cupola while her crewmates unloaded the packages occupying every square centimetre of the Hermes’s interior. Above her, the Great Desert stretched across half of the visible hemisphere. She noticed a small spark. It wasn’t like any atmospheric phenomena she’d been taught of. “CAPCOM, Athens,” she called out. “Good copy, send traffic,” Jeb responded, sipping koffee. “I’ve got an unexplained flash streaking across the desert, around 10° north of equator, please advise.” “We copy,” Jeb answered, and picked up the phone, “Linus, Athens are calling in an anomaly over the desert, give me real-time data from Thor and prep Odin to lock on. In a few minutes, Athens’ radio came to life. “Athens, CAPCOM, we’ve got a major situation here,” Jeb sighed. “You’ve got an unknown craft on intercept trajectory. Expect visual contact in four minutes tops.” “You’re not going to evacuate?” Gene asked back on Kerbin. “They aren’t really safer in a smaller ship, and four minutes… Nope.” “Flight, target started deceleration burn!” They watched the flared-up infrared signature slow down near the small blot of the station. “CAPCOM, you see them?” Lis asked, scanning the blackness. “Odin’s in range, target is behind the Hermes at five hundred meters, closing in slowly.” Lis paused and squinted. “CAPCOM, I have visual.” She peered at the intruder. The top looked like a regular Mk 1 pod, but it rode atop a small cargo bay, followed by a flared, aerodynamic propulsion stage, with a trio of solar panels sticking out from behind it. The ship was moving towards her, in between the station and the planet. Its manoeuvring jets fired occasionally. It wasn’t just doing a careful fly-around. It was – rather sloppily – trying to take a position alongside the station. Slowly it edged into range, and closed in to below fifty meters, clearly in sight from Lis’s tiny borosilicate bubble. And then, it ran out of daylight. ---------- “Ros, can you scan the radio waves to see if it’s still around?” Yaroslav proposed. They’d killed all unneeded lights on-board. “I’m not seeing any interference that a docking radar would cause. He’s down to eyeballing it.” “Lis?” “I think I may see his window, dunno…” “No spotlight?” “Nope.” “Then he’s down to drifting near us, getting slightly ahead of us.” Ten minutes later, the sun began to break through Kerbin’s atmosphere. Lis pulled on the protective goggles, and quickly caught the bogie, two hundred meters away. It had its payload bay doors open, although she had no idea what was inside. It quickly began to pull back alongside the station. It briefly eclipsed the sun, and then began translating towards the station, aiming the cargo bay right at them, the pitch-black shadow concealing its contents. There was a sharp strike on the exterior. And then the bogie gunned its throttle, rapidly accelerating away. “I’ve got a coolant leak in panel 3!” Ros barked. “Lis! Anything!?” Jeb called out. “I think it had a cable trailing…” “Tow bomb!” Yaroslav growled, launching himself towards the airlock. They heard the hatch shut down, and then the alarm for an emergency vent of the airlock fired. Outside, Yaroslav quickly moved over to the opposite side of the cylinder. And sure, there was a first-sized chunk of radiator missing, a trail of glycol leaking from it. “Flight! We’re clear! He’s got a no-joy! The harpoon has not connected.” Behind him, there was a slight flash of an explosion in vacuum. ---------- Jeb leaned back in his chair, and exhaled for the first time in several hours. The bogie had slipped out of Odin’s vision before re-entering. That huge stage seen in Lis’s grainy shots would give it a lot of Δv leeway for confusion and concealment measures. “Walt,” he finally called out. “Yeah, boss?” “I’ve got a new job assignment for you. Covert B2G.” ---------- With no fanfare, Loki blasted off with its bizarrely-shaped fairing, and pushed into an inclined orbit. Jeb watched the launch from Walt’s new, secure station. An extra staff of three were also there, waiting for a chance to start doing their jobs. Above in orbit, the secondary payload fairing cracked open, and a colossal antenna spread open. The intercepted radio signals flowed in as a torrent that needed filtering and interpretation. The interns dropped their crosswords. “Just one more squeak, Fitz,” Jeb muttered, “One more stunt, and I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to endanger and destroy my brothers and my sisters. And you will know the heavens belong to us when I lay my vengeance upon thee.”

Guys, a very dumb, very flamebaity question: What, in your opinion, is going to happen to ESA and BSA in case of Brexit?

They say the basic NERVA had an unusable TWR from the start; they need more liberty on the core design to be able to push it into surface launch class. Generally the preferred reaction mass was ammonia. Not as difficult to store, and dissociates from the heat. ISRU water could be a low-efficiency alternative.

http://www.gazeta.ru/science/2010/02/22_a_3328272.shtml http://www.mk.ru/science/2015/10/30/aura-kolbasy-i-gravicapa-na-sputnike-samye-gromkie-nauchnye-falshivki-v-rossii.html If references to the liquided-off head of the Russian Academy of Sciences and is Commission on Anti-science are insufficient for you, go hug a gator yourself!

Sadly, from what I heard, the NERVA would quickly burn through its fuel rods. Almost as quickly as one long burn.

You first. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yubileiny

Well, we don't really know about China, do we? Plus developing indigenous technology and buying the Buran wreckage is more expensive than just grabbing relatively off-the-shelf tech.

It looks like the S-N stage. It doesn't seem to have been given any serious thought, though. An interesting Apollo-esque interplanetary vessel, however. And I love the pre-Mariner canali-adorned Mars. But I also think I'm beginning to understand the Isp measurement unit. Finally.

Well, duh! The best anti-hackers are the White Hat hackers, the best safe makers know their way around a lockpick, at cetera ad infinitum. And they should be on the list, of course.