Haruspex

It is Year 48 of the Kerbal Space Age. After a 3-year long flight, The Fifth Interplanetary Expedition has finally reached Jool and is maneuvering to get a Pol encounter. ...Meanwhile, the Jool Atmospheric Probe separates from the mothership and begins its descent into the deadly depths of the giant planet... Derp, I accidentally the heatshield and it refuses to deflate back! Now it partially obscures the solar panels. It takes two passes and a brief Tylo flyby to enter a suborbital trajectory. Surprisingly, the magical heatshield held despite the insane speed of reentry. Deathly glow of metallic Kersplodium emanates from the depths of Jool. No living Kerbal had ever seen this terrifying landscape. The heat shield is away and the probe deploys chutes. Those data are invaluable. The stream of raw, yummy SCIENCE from the probe continues until the end. Finally, the fragile craft is squished by the immense pressure some 250 meters below the arbitrary line that marks the Joolian "surface". Mission accomplished!

Sorry for the necro, but it's better late than never: the mystery is solved. The problem is, that the vanilla system map currently shows ONLY ONE of the possible closest approaches. In my case, it's usually the first and the least convenient one, on the ascending part of the trajectory, while the second, much better potential intercept after the apoapsis remains hidden unless there's some voodoo magic, camera tweaking and sacrificed chicken involved (so the first closest approach is no longer recognized by the map as Teh Closest Approach). According to the 1.2 Dev notes, there's an incoming solution to this problem.

Scheme? Well, nothing interesting really. above that ISRU are two large ore tanks. On demand - when a ship docks at the depot to refuel - a simple automated mining rig (2x drill, 4x fuel tank, 4x ore tank, 4x Poodle) lauches from the Mun and delivers ore to the depot, where it is processed. I have those science and refueling stations both at Mun and Minmus.

Just a basic Munar orbital outpost. Also known as Bob's Bar and Grill.

Porcupine?

White Pawn (manned) White Pawn (unmanned) White Bishop Can refuel themselves. Also serve as long-range nuclear tugs. Usage on bodies with gravity higher than Munar not recommended. Atmospheric entry is possible if done carefully, but one-way only.

Oh, my campaign game it a true space junkyard full of vintage stuff! here's some: KSS Intrepid This ship was a part of my first successful (by pure chance) attempt to reach Duna. It was built back long before 1.0, so LV-Ns on it used LF+Ox and did not overheat. It also had no radioisotope generator and had to rely on solar panels for electricity. 40 ingame Kerbin years later, it still watches over Duna and the landers below. Intrepid Landers #1 and #2 KSS Intrepid carried two small landers that were the first Kerbal-made objects to reach the surface of Duna intact. There was no re-entry heat back then and no speed limit on parachutes in stock KSP, so one just had to deploy them like airbrakes at high altitude and glide down gently. Also note the cheap Stayputnik which later was made completely useless. Duna Explorer The first manned craft to reach the surface of Duna, this was actually my standard Mun lander of the time, with some chutes slapped on top. It used LV-Ns for orbital maneuvering and the re-entry burn and then landed just like the smaller Intrepid probes. Of course, there's the Stayputnik, complete lack of any atmospheric shielding and LF+Ox tank for the old LV-Ns. But it already was thermoelectric-powered: the science data from the Intrepid allowed to complete the research tree. The first Kerbal to step on the surface of Duna was Deslo Kerman. Unfortunately, he also the first to die there. Some 30 years later, when EVAing to complete yet another contract, he slipped on the ladder and fell right on the faceplate of his helmet. RIP Deslo Kerman; the grateful Kerbalkind named a class E asteroid after you. Deslo's flag still lies there, half-buried in the sand. It used to stand for four decades, but after a physics update it fell over. Ike Explorer On nearby Ike, yet another silent monument to Kerbal bravery looms: a Munar lander similar to the one on Duna. Dunrick Kerman spent some 25 years living in it. But his story had a happy end: he was rescued by the Third Interplanetary and became not only the first Kerbal to land on Ike, but also the first to return home from there with a backpack full of rocks! III Interplanetary Expedition Third Interplanetary Expedition was conceived after the ISRU technology became available, as the first attempt to not only reach the distant planets, but actually refuel there and return back. The main goal was to test the technology that would be later used for Jool, but also to rescue the crew of the Intrepid and the brave Dunrick. The expedition was a total success. The ship was kept in Kerbin orbit after the return and stays there ever since. Kerbin Orbital A partially dismantled core of the space station built for the challenge. I kept it as a reminder why I got that badge, but never found any actual use for it. IV Interplanetary Expedition Orbiter The science orbiter module - almost similar to the one that's part of the III IPE above - is all that's left of the ill-fated IV Interplanetary Expedition. Gilly's low gravity (and the bugs!) turned out to be much more treacherous than expected. The lander was unable to affix itself permanently to the surface of Gilly and kept sliding around as the asteroid rotated, overstressed landing legs wobbling dangerously. Refueling was a nightmare. EVA ended in disaster as Sanly Kerman fell on a lander's leg and it exploded, killing the poor kerbal. Luckily, the gravity was so low that the loss of one leg did not affect the lander much and it was still able to take off normally. I was happy to finally leave this potato of death behind forever... ...I am sure that the ongoing V Interplanetary Expedition to Jool will scatter even more junk across the system to tell stories about!

Indeed! The forward section of the ship serves as the tug, miner, refinery and low-gravity non-atmospheric lander to refuel at all the smaller airless moons. Most of the fuel onboard is stored in the form of unrefined ore (the ore bays are full), but there are also about 6400 LF in the tanks as well for the ejection burn. Here's the shot showing what is where... ...and a close-up of the explorer module.

The Fifth Interplanetary Expedition is almost ready to leave for the moons of Jool!

Horror - no, doesn't fit the theme, but survival - hell yes. Supplies - snacks, oxygen, possibly water - must be in stock with an on/off option or a difficulty slider, like reentry heating. With the appropriate modules/tanks and the ability to mine/extract water and oxygen from the environment (i.e. ice on Minmus, ice and carbon dioxide on Duna, etc.)

Yes, looks like the small ISRU is the problem. A pity, I made some lovely landers (also functioning as tugs) based on it. Going to launch the big expedition anyway and see what happens.

Mining takes literally years now. Also, maybe it's just a bug in my save game (carried over from earlier versions), but, as i found out, in 1.1.2 under time warp the ore conversion rate becomes ridiculous, like 6 units of ore per unit of liquid fuel. I decided that it's a result of the smaller ISRU unit overheating. There are three moons that I can land on and return from with one lander - Vall, Bop and Pol, and each time the lander needed to be refueled. The orbiter module also needs to be refueled between the transfers from one moon to another, and that includes Laythe and Tylo, and then filled for the return trip. Now it'll take ten years. I planned to use something like that for the mission: Managed to build a small fleet of those things before 1.1 and got to Eve, Duna and back with them.

Well... I was confined to Mun/Minmus until a random probe I just fooled with accidentally hit the Duna SOI. After that, I started to seed the system with ridiculously overengineered ion probes, getting to every body by trial and error, wasting in-game decades in the process. Then I started to send one-way motherships which carried suicide landers - Duna and Eve expeditions hit, the ships staying in orbit as permanent stations; Eeloo expedition missed, Jool expedition did a flyby, but failed to brake due to insufficent fuel. Then they nerfed ions and nukes, terminating my Golden Age of Discovery. Then they introduced ISRU; with it (and web tools to determine the launch windows), I was finally able to send two-way expeditions that refuelled by mining at Ike and Gilly and rescued all the Kerbals stranded everywhere (but Eve surface). I was planning a massive Jool-5 colonization fleet to depart... when they nerfed ISRU. Back to ion probes, Mun and Minmus again, I guess. Pure stock, campaign mode with default settings. Manual docking in LKO is a horrible chore, by the way. I prefer to waste millions by launching 200-ton behemoths whole than to experience another hour of docking.

Went through some of my old plane designs trying to update them for 1.1, including a 400-ton monstrosity built to circumnavigate Kerbin multiple times. It actually flies! Has some trouble landing in one piece since 1.1 though.

lol, that must have been quite a bit of luck (and a lot of wasted fuel) involved. Weird. Anyway, time to start doing it properly I guess.

Navball is a bit too big now. Let's hope that 1.1.1. scales it back to what it was.

Probably a coincidence and totally unintended use, but it did work (to some degree), hehe. I discovered this by accident when making my first blindfolded steps in KSP (had no idea how to use maneuver nodes) and travelled to Mun, Minmus, Eve, Duna, Jool and basically everything else except Moho and Eeloo by just doing this.

Since upgrade to 1.1, weird things happen to all my attempts at interplanetary flight. In 1.0.5 and before, I'd just look up the transfer window in alexmoon.github.io/ksp/ , attain a 100x100 km orbit, wait until the prograde marker at the navball hits the target marker and burn to target. That "easy mode" burn usually ended up in an encounter or a convenient closest approach that was easily corrected mid-flight. Now, in 1.1, the same routine with the same ship inevitably ends up in a rather awkward 800 to 350 000 km closest approach with my ship's position on it falling behind the planet, be it Duna or Eve. It can be fixed with series of radial-in and prograde or retrograde burns, but those waste a LOT of fuel. No more easy mode :( So, what happened? - Is KSP Launch Window Planner outdated? - Was there a change to navball functionality, namely the behavior of the "target" marker? - Was there a change to orbital mechanics, orbital speeds or positions or Eve and Duna? - Can it be a result of old 1.0.5 save converted to 1.1? Could it somehow move planets a dozen degrees forward in their orbits than where they should be? Halp.

Also, Minmus makes for a great mining and refuelling stop for large interplanetary ships. A reusable mining lander paired with an orbital fuel processing and storage depot, along with minuscule gravity and negligible delta V for any orbital maneuvers near Minmus can save you millions and millions in (un)launched fuel (at the cost of time, though). It's so awesome that it *does* feel like mint icecream. I love Minmus!

Very interesting. But: The Pyramids, obviously ancient and disused structures. There's a statue - a head of a bearded Kerbal in a weird (ceremonial) headdress, sort of a Kerbal pharaoh, as a part of the anomaly complex. It means that the Pyramids were built by the Kerbals, and excludes the theory that their race is not native to Kerbin. Of course, it could mean that there was an ancient Kerbal civilization above ground, but because of an asteroid impact or some other cataclysm the planet recently lost it ozone layer. But Kerbin has diverse visible plant life, which should probably be quickly killed out if there was such a cataclysm.

"60% Off! Sun Suborbital Sightseeing Sale"

Kerbals and Commerce Being a peaceful, but competitive, race, Kerbals from the beginning of their civilization find great joy in trade, just as in inventing new stuff. The smartest always profits. If you can refurbish a piece of junk found at the side of the road into something useful and sell it to some hapless passer-by - do it and be praised for your cunning. Various merchant guilds and trading houses of the Age of Faith evolved into spawling business empires. The kerbal corporations are usually built around the founder's family group, with outsiders filling the lower ranks. "Wage slavery" and lifetime employment contracts are common. By the Space Age, Kerbin has a globally accepted bitcoin-like virtual currency, first introduced about 20 years ago by the Kerbin Scientific and Exploration Society. Its sign is derived from a mathematical symbol after an ancient Kerbal saying: "Money is the root of all." Kerbin Scientific and Exploration Society Founded over 150 years ago as a visible public branch of the legendary Order of the Source (that is considered extinct by now), Kerbin Scientific and Exploration Society functions as a charity organization, a school and university hub, a research institute and at the same time a huge business conglomerate with countless daughter corporations that deal with high-tech industry, pharmacy, aeronautics and spaceflight. It's a world in itself, with complex internal politics and layers upon layers of mystery and deceit surrounding its true goals and origins. It's Kerbals' Nobel Prize committee, Ivy League, NASA, Boeing, Microsoft and the hidden Illuminati world government in one. Its main assumed goal is technical and scientific advancement of the Kerbal race by any means necessary. The Space Program is one of the big projects of the Scientific and Exploraton Society. Kerbals and War In the ancient times, the primitive kerbals had to defend themselves from predatory animals, and thus, have no instinctive taboo on violence on other species. They can hunt to kill and eat, though this is considered extremely uncivlized. Sometimes, as it can happen with any sentient being, the instincts fail, and bloodthirsty madmen and maniacs appear; so there is still some negligible amount of kerbal-on-kerbal violence that is usually swiftly dealt with. The mass culture, of course, loves all kinds of horrors, so there's all kinds of fictional scenarios in the media that involve large-scale violence. For a Kerbal, "war" means approximately the same as "zombie apocalypse" to a human from Earth, and a "hired killer" or a "mass murderer" falls in the same category as "vampire" or "werewolf". Spaceships or aircraft armed with weapons of mass destruction are considered to be about as real as the Transformers or the Death Star. But never the less, "war", and especially "war with aliens", are scenarios that are present in the Kerbal mind, even if no-one is ready for this to become reality - just like your average american teenager is not ready for his neighbors and relatives to suddenly start murdering each other and eating brains. Kerbals and the Mystery Goo About 50 years ago, an expedition of the Society found a large meteorite frozen in the glacier near the South Pole. The rock was laced with weird green, glowing substance that turned out to be the first alien life discovered by the Kerbalkind. It is a jello consisting of billions of tiny luminescent bacteria that exhibit most unusual properties: they can survive in vacuum and extreme temperatures of space, draw energy from the radiation that could easily kill weaker life forms, and eat through iron and silicate rocks. Luckily, high gravity and thick atmosphere of Kerbin that stops most of the radiation impedes the Goo's reproductive cycle, so if it is even released in the wild, it won't be able to consume the planet. Kerbal scientists are fascinated by the Goo's properties and wasted decades searching for its origins within the Kerbol system, but with little luck so far. There are rumors that the first expeditions to Duna and Ike saw a large asteroid that, like the polar meteorite, was covered with thriving Mystery Goo, but this asteroid - nicknamed the "Magic Boulder" - so far eluded detection and proper study. Perhaps, the source of the Goo lies on one of the Joolian moons, or outside of the Kerbol system altogether?.. Who knows.

Kerbettes and their Tank Tops When a female kerbal is carrying a fertilized egg (up to three months), due to the hormonal shifts in her body she feels cold, sometimes even shivers. The natural reaction is to add more clothing. As centuries passed, traditional and even ritual clothing evolved to signal that a) the female is vulnerable, needs warmth, comfort and protection of the family group, "my mating season is over, you're late, sod off". Female kerbals dressed a certain way symbolized both fecundity and prudence. With the onset of mass and pop culture that simplified everything, the last remnant of that ritual clothing is... the Kerbette Tank Top. It's a cultural artifact that means that the wearer is "a good girl", otherwise, does nothing.

I have an ion probe with science stuff on it in polar orbit around Dres. Once in a while a contract for science from Dres comes along, so it's there to stay. But more than that? Meh.

http://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/