Zosma Procyon

For my Laythe missions I generally use multiple craft. One for landing personnel (generally a base), one for lifting them off the moon into orbit, and another to bring them home. If I were to do a single craft to land and pick up data, rather than process it in a base on the surface, I'd go in the direction of overkill. If you've unlocked the vector engine, that if your best bet. It has the highest in atm to vac ISP ratio. One or two of those pushing a jumbo orange tank with a one person capsule on top should do the trick nicely.

Does this fix the asteroid shape change glitch?

Only by accident and I reset to the last save after it happen. I had a 16 Kerbals packed like sardines in a 2.5 meter cargo bay, on a rocket taking them home from Eeloo, when it encountered a kraken. The rocket started vibrating and flew apart, scattering kerbals in every direction at what had to be a measurable percent of the speed of light in every conceivable direction. I didn't get a screenshot of the incident because I found it more annoying than funny. I eventually figured out that I had messed up the structs so the outboard engine pods had too much lateral freedom of movement, and this was either before autostructing and rigid connecting were introduced or before I discovered them. I had to limit the 8 NERV engines to 10% thrust to stop it from wigging out. Those were the longest burns I did before I launched a space station to chase an asteroid with a 40 year period.

A brand new MacBook pro with a 3.1 GHz processor and 16 GB of ram. It isn't a dedicated gaming machine and large rockets still run slowly, but it's better than my last MacBook Pro which had a failed cooling system. Couldn't play the game for more than 10 minutes before it overheated and crashed.

Here is an update to the update: My landing site was actually 74 km from the rendezvous site. And driving on planets in game is B-O-R-I-N-G. Especially in the Eve highlands. Once I pick up the three Kerbals previously on the surface and offload most of the Crawler crew back into orbit, I'm going to drive down to the wet side of the planet and explore there.

In my previous report I covered the launch of my multiple craft mission to Eve. Here is an update. All the craft arrived in Eve orbit without incident. Here are a few pictures of some of the highlights. Here is the return tug performing its parking burn. Although it is the last craft of this mission to be used, it was the first to arrive. Here is one of my orbital transfer scooters parking. And here is the Crawler parking. This stage had just 50 m/s of Delta-V left at the completion of the burn. Here is one of the tankers for refueling the Eve Liftoff vehicle landed on Gilly to refuel itself. Gwendin Kerman was marooned in a high orbit of Eve by her previous employer. Here she is riding a scooter down to a rendezvous with the Crawler. Same story with Wehrmy here. They had to spacewalk between their scooters and the Crawler. And once they were onboard, the next step was to land the Crawler. The last 50 m/s in the interplanetary transfer stage didn't last long. The initial altitude before the deorbit burn was 264 km. Initial velocity about 3400 m/s. I'm kind of proud of how I rigged this booster to the crawler. Open the ramp halfway, and clipped the decoupler to the base of the ramp. Here is the booster being jettisoned. Next 6 vector engines and 8 orange jumbo tanks of fuel slowed the Crawler to a relative crawl. At burnout it was moving at a mere 86 m/s at an altitude of 140 km. Of course with Eve's ridiculous gravity it accelerated back up to about 1000 m/s before atmospheric interface. Still that was plenty low enough for a safe entry. Once the fuel was depleted the Vectors were no longer necessary. They were jettisoned and the heat shields were inflated. It did get a little hot during entry. And it wasn't very stable. Lets just say its a good thing that Kerbals don't have stomaches. But it didn't break up or explode. Below 20,000 m I deployed the drogue chutes. The Crawler spent most of the descent upside down. I deployed the main chutes almost immediately thereafter, since it was falling under 100 m/s already. A bit of a realism fail, but a fun shot. The view from inside the Crawler's cockpit. Eventually the drogues opened and righted the Crawler. And then the main chutes opened. Their purpose fulfilled, the heat shields were jettisoned. I learned the hard way during my Eve Lifter testing program that you generally have to wait until your craft is descending at under 20 m/s to jettison those heat shields, or they will be pushed back up and smash into your vehicle. Goodbye heat shields. After this was the longest and most boring phase of the descent. 5.3 m/s for 2600 m. Almost down! Touch down! I was worried it would come down on top of those heat shields, but thankfully it missed. The last step was to jettison the outboard tanks. Easily down. I-Breams sticking out of the inside surface ensure that when jettisoned the tank simply role away. The landing site is 34 km from my first Eve Rover and another marooned Kerbin. Just a bit of a drive. End of report.

I'm trying to expand a surface base for the first time, I've never done it because of the airlock problems with surface installations. I've decided to just use klaws. If docking via airlocks is nearly impossible on the ground, why do surface bases have to have airlocks at all? Also. do both craft in an airlock docking have to have power?

A contract just popped up calling for me to expand my newest base on Duna. The problem is this base looks like this: The only way I could add to it is if I connected a smaller mobile base via an airlock, or more likely a klaw. The end result would be like a train. So has anyone ever done that?

Today after about a month and a half of preparation and experimentation, most of that on spent on one of six types of craft involved, I launched my most complicated mission to date to the purple planet, Eve. This mission has four primary goals. (1) Land a large mobile base on the surface of Eve. (2) Rescue three new Kerbals from Eve for contracts. (3) Rescue Bob and Bill who have been marooned on Eve in my first tiny rover for over three in game years. (4) Get 16 of the Kerbals off Eve and back to Kerbin. This has proven to be the most difficult step to prepare for. Most of my prototype liftoff craft either could not make it to the surface of Eve in one, or even 10, pieces, or could not make it back into orbit. The rocket I eventually developed is massive, and will have required 4 large tankers to refuel it for different stages of its part in the mission. Here are the vehicles that will perform this mission. First my mobile base, technical designation "Base Crawler Type 4-B", current designation "Eve Crawler". When it arrives on Eve's surface, probably near the shores of one of the equatorial bodies of "water", it will be given a name in line my with in game convention, which is naming bases and stations after the proper names of naked eye stars visible from Earth. It is designated the Type 4-B because a smaller version, the Type 4, is already on a mission to Tylo. Ironically the 4-B will arrive at its designation before its older sibling. Here the Base Crawler Type 4-B GT (Ground Test) is just sitting on the launch pad. And here is is with the bay doors open, and all of the various types of panels and the drills deployed. And a top view clearly showing the three on board science labs and the ISRU converter (covered in radiators). And the rear view. The Type 4 and 4-B are actually the first time I've ever used the cargo ramp as a ramp. Normally I just use it as a mouth to collect marooned pods that contracts require me to retrieve. In both Base Crawler models, the ramps are used because the vehicles' destinations have too high gravity to use the jet packs to boost up to a hatch, and it's of course cool to have a back door. You'll notice the entry way to the craft here is in fact a Hitchhiker pod recessed into a fuel tank bulkhead head. It works, and it looks cool. Here is the 4-BGT next to the GT model of my first Eve Rover. The Eve rover currently on the purple planet has traveled over 1000 km, across 4 different biomes, and collected a metric f*ckton of data, which is stored in those new(ish) lunch boxes. This data, and Bill and Bod who have been stuck in the thing for years, will be transfered to the Eve Crawler when they eventually rendezvous. And here is why I have Klaws mounted on the front. This is also how I will transfer crew from the Crawler to the Liftoff vehicle. Here you see the Eve Crawler mounted on its obscenely powerful and expensive (8-10 million credits) launch vehicle. I used a combination of autostructing, rigid joints, and structs, so I didn't even have to use cheats to get it to hold together during launch. Interestingly this is actually a much older design compared to the other launch vehicles used in this mission. I settled on it before spending a solid month trying to get a liftoff vehicle to work, and in that time discovered the wondrous technique of tightly clustering Vector engines, which the other large launch vehicles built for this mission use. But the Eve Crawler launcher wasn't broken, and didn't need fixing. Needless to say the massive part count slowed the launch to about 1 fps, so it took over a half hour to actually get into a holding orbit around Kerbin. It also had far more Delta-V than was required for an Eve landing. I found the best way to get this thing down was too burn about 2500 m/s of Delta-V before atmospheric insertion, and use four inflatable heat shields (two fore and two aft), and essentially let is gently waft down through Eve's annoyingly thick atmosphere until it falls to around 10 km and then deploy parachutes. I also discovered in testing that this design is not a good boat. Here the Eve Crawler is in its holding orbit. And a front view. And a dorsal view during the transfer burn to Eve. Notice the small radially mounted ore containers. The base contract this mission is meant to satisfy requires 2500 ore be onboard. The Eve Crawler has a capacity of 3500. I just took this picture because I thought it was a cool image. Second, the rocket that took me a month to "perfect", the Liftoff vehicle, or Eve Lifter. This will land the hot and dirty way on Eve, to conserve fuel. I eventually got a design that I not only liked, but survived Eve atmospheric entry almost 75% of the time. In vacuum, it has about 8300 m/s of Delta-V. This gives it more than enough speed and power to reach a low orbit around Eve if launched from anywhere above 1.3 km ASL. My target area in the equatorial highlands averages around 3 km ASL. Here it is during launch. The actually Lifter lander launched with empty tanks, and will not be fueled until it arrives in Eve orbit. I do realize that I could land it empty and use the ISRU converter and klaw on the Eve Crawler to fuel it before launch from Eve's surface, but I don't want to do it that way. Because I don't, that's why! Here it is in the holding orbit. To save credits (a bit), but mostly to allow the launch to progress at above 1 FPS, I decided to refuel the orbit acquisition boosters (the stacks of the black and white tanks) in orbit and use them for the Eve transfer burn and for stopping in Eve orbit. The weird hat thing with the giant airlock sticking our of the top is for refueling. Here it is about to dock with the third craft used in this mission, my Kerbin Orbit Tanker. There was nothing really special about it, just a bunch of the biggest fuel tanks launched using a crazy amount of fuel and vector engines. Launching it cost about 8 million credits. Thankfully I built up a massive reserve of credits through contracts and selling science. Once the Lifter was refueled for its transfer and eventual parking burns, I dropped the tanker into the atmosphere and let it burn up. It was built to be expendable. This is was taken use a few moments before it started to explode. I have the more spectacular reentry effects turned off to take some of the load off my laptop's graphics card. And here the Lifter Lander is during its transfer burn. Now, when the lifter lander arrives at an Eve holding orbit, it needs to be fueled. For that I built the forth craft involved in this mission. My Eve Tanker. Here one of the three I dispatched to Eve is boosting out of Kerbin Orbit. Unlike any previous tanker I've ever built, these are designed to land on a body, Gilly in this case, and refuel themselves after arriving at their destination. It should only take two of these tankers to fuel the lifter, but you never know: math is hard. The fifth craft is a scooter intended to pick up some new Kerbals currently stranded in Eve Orbit, and bring them to the Eve Crawler before it descends through hell to the surface. Why shouldn't they get to see the planet their previous employers sent them to see? Two of these scooters have been dispatched. Their delivery vehicles are run of the mill rockets using older stock parts, and I didn't really see the point in showcasing them. This picture was taken during the Kerbin orbit test flight. I wanted to use those new(ish) RCS fueled engines, and four looked the best. So I ended up with a scooter that pulls acceleration of over 50 m/s/s and turns on a penny. Obviously I had to test it to make sure that a Kerbal would not be ejected by the acceleration. This is Joroly Kerman, my test dummy. Despite being one of the first Kerbals I ever rescued he somehow got knocked down to a one star pilot. Rather than let him regain his lost ranks, I frequently kill him during tests. He was not ejected by the acceleration of this scooter. The sixth and final type of craft for this mission is the tug that will return the crew capsule of the Eve Lifter to Kerbin. I'm not going to go into much detail on the operation of the Lifter, but it starts on Eve's surface as a 1186 ton, 116 m tall behemoth, but ends in orbit as this. Using my "sardine packing" method of Kerbal storage, that container can transport 16 Kerbals. And since in the stock game they don't require life support, they can stay in there for the entire return journey to Kerbin. This is the tug sitting in its holding orbit. It's inside the cowl. The small space probe at the front is the tug. Propelled by a cluster of 9 ion engines, it will dock with the shielded airlock on top of the crew container, and gently push them back home. The mission craft will begin arriving in Eve orbit in 160 in game days, over a period of about 30 days. I will submit another report after the Eve Crawler has landed on the surface, maybe, if I feel like it. End of report.

It's a dead superheated excrementshole. Who cares what I do with it?

After about a month of frustration, I have arrived at what will likely be my first fully deployed rocket for getting Kerbals off of that purple pain in the a$$. I have developed a vehicle that survives entry almost 50% of the time in tests. Getting through the heat and hard deceleration is the easy part, but it likes to randomly fall apart during the latter stages. Honestly because of the number of bizarre random disintegrations I've seen I now have no problem cheating on the 4th or 5th test in a series. And if the landing site is sufficiently flat and above 1.2 km ASL, it has enough Delta-V to get into a stable orbit above 100 km with dry tanks, where it will rendezvous with a tanker and/or a larger craft built specially to bring it back to Kerbin. BEHOLD! Note this is still a test article. To test it I hyper edit it into a low orbit over Eve, and use the lower stage to put it onto an entry trajectory. The final craft will be absolutely massive. The actually lander and liftoff stage will be launched from Kerbin with empty tanks, cutting it's mass by over 2/3. It will be fueled either in Eve orbit just before landing on Eve, or maybe landed dry and fueled by the mobile base it is intended to rendezvous with on Eve surface. I just happened to remember that the mobile base has an ore capacity of 3500, 4 big drills, and an ISRU converter. I also designed it to "dock" with the Eve Lifter via a nose mounted Klaw. Turn on crossfeed and the base should be able to fuel the Lifter in a few in game weeks, months, or years, depending on how much attention I pay to it after they're both on the ground. The Klaw is also how I plan to transfer Kerbals between the craft. Here you see the lifter in the launch ready mode on Eve. Note the large amount of debris already let behind. Shortly after launch all of the legs and the lander pod are jettisoned. I like leaving a lot of garbage behind. Now how many Kerbals do you think this behemoth is designed to carry? 1? 2? Surely no more than 4? Nope. This baby has a capacity of 16 Kerbals, packed in like sardines. Over a year ago I discovered a method of storing Kerbals at high densities inside the 2.5m storage container, using external command chairs and the offset tool. One ring of 8 seats on the bottom, and one ring of 8 seats on the top. All the Kerbals have to do is physically get into the storage container, and they can board any seat, even the one on the opposite side upside down from them. Here is an older picture of an earlier use of this method. This particular vessel carried 40 Kerbals back from several space stations and bases in the Joolian system. The only issue with this method is you cannot use the "Transfer Crew" utility to move a Kerbal from any sort of cabin to an external command chair, and that is why I affixed the lander pod. Once all 16 crew are transferred and the rocket is fueled, time to blast off. I'm still looking for the right arrangement of fins to get the best chance of a successful takeoff. Most of my tests still end up in flips. The rocket works, and can make it to orbit, but I'm just not a good pilot. I might try MechJeb's ascent guidance function. All in all I'm both happy with this design and tired of experimenting. If I have to cheat to get it down, I will. Cheers.

I also tested the ballute mod. And I greatly underestimated the size. This rocket is over 100m tall.

I almost had a successful test of my Eve Lifter, but the landing site was sh!t. It isn't supposed to be going that way. And that 2.5m cargo container at the top...that's the 16 seat crew compartment.

I did a drop test to see if the latest version of my Eve Lifter could survive a moderately hard landing, and this happened. The rocket did not break on impact, so I call it a success, but the runway did not share that impression. The speed at impact was about 5.9 m/s, which is what I'm usually getting with parachute landings on Eve.

I have yet to accomplish an Eve surface return. I'm starting to think that a converter might be the best way.

I've been experimenting with different designs for an Eve lander and liftoff vehicle, and keep having the same problem: structural failure between C-7 adapters and what ever they're attached to. They aren't overheating and exploding, they're frequently breaking off and smashing into the heat shield arrays I mount behind them, but are not directly attached to them. Has any else had and solved this problem?

What is the flattest place with an elevation above 1km on Eve? I had three almost successful test landings and launches ruined because of uneven terrain today. I'm also trying to figure out semi-precision landing for the purple pain in my cheeks.

I got it down, but it did not have enough thrust to get back up again. I'll add more engines, but I think I'll experiment with 6 pylons, and my cargo pod concept. I thought 22.5 m/s/s would enough. Nope.

Well I finally built a behemoth that can get through Eve's atmosphere, and should have had enough Delta-V to enter orbit, but I didn't position parachutes properly, and this happened.

I actually know a way to move 16 kerbals with almost no mass. You put them in the 2.5 meter cargo pods, with 16 external command chairs arranged radially on the top and bottom. I used this trick extensively in the past, but haven't recently because it shoots up the part count and that slows down computers. I'm leaning toward resurrecting it. The annoying thing you can't use the transfer crew function with external command chairs.

I prefer Vectors. 1 MN of thrust packed into a small surface area easily clustered.

I need help designing a rocket to get kerbals off Eve. My attempts either don't have enough Delta-V to enter orbit after liftoff, or keep breaking up on the way down. My only stimulations are I don't like space planes, and would like it to have a capacity of 16 or more kerbals.

I'm just going to start over from scratch again.

I was parachuting a huge lander through Eve's atmosphere, when it suddenly accelerated at over 100,000 Gs and flew apart. I've encountered this kraken several times. Is there a ix for it? Here is what the flight events panel said. I'm running on a brand new Macbook Pro, 3.1 Ghz processor, playing the most recent version of the game (I think), and my only mod is MechJob2.

Well I almost just had a successful test, but struct a kraken. My main chutes were deployed and an fully opening, then for no reason it briefly accelerated to a sixth the speed of light and flew apart. This has actually happened a few times. I'm going to open a thread to report this kraken.