Zosma Procyon

The current version I'm working on has 14 inflatable heat shields (5 fore and 9 aft), around 100 parachutes, dozens of panel radiators, dozens of thermal control systems placed wherever they might be shielded from the entry air stream, 8 air breaks, 40 heavy duty landing legs, and a partridge in a pair tree. I want it to at least get to the point where it is descending slowly under all of those chutes so I can test the radiator dumping stage.

I'm trying to use as little Delta-V as possible to know it out of orbit. I will clarify what I've been doing. I have been performing this tests in a Sandbox saved game, and using the Set Orbit cheat to put the test articles (my big honking rockets) into initial orbits around 106-120 km around Eve, usually in Polar Orbits alligned to pass over the highlands. I want to use as little Delta-V as possible to knock it out of orbit so I eventually have to launch less rocket from Kerbin. Eventually think I may launch it with most of the lander's tanks empty, and fuel it in Eve orbit. The latest tests, all spectacular failures due to random parts of the rocket flying off even though they're rigidly connected and autostructed, have started with deorbit burns of less than 100 m/s, just enough to dip the periapsis below 86km. But from the feed back i'm getting here, I'll try deorbit burns of between 400-600 m/s, and go in steeper. That will make it easier to land where I want too. Had my last few failures succeeded, they would have landed in the ocean, or on the cliffs at the outskirts of the northern polar region. Not good locations for Eve surface launch tests.

Has anyone ever built a boat capable of moving on the explodium seas of Eve, using only stock parts? I recently discovered that a small manned rover I've had on Eve for about 4 in game years will bloat but not move, and the large mobile base I'm preparing prefers to role over and break apart.

The latest and largest version of my lander for getting kerbals off of Eve has run into new problems I can't really figure out the cause of, much less remedy. During entry, even a very slow entry that more than circumnavigates the planet before losing enough velocity to descend in the lower atmosphere, part of my rocket is overheating to the point of exploding, causing the rocket to disintegrate. As you can see in the pictures below, there are four inflatable heat shields in front, nine in back for stability. What you can't see is that a central cluster of seven Vector engines, each of which has the widest conventional heat shield attached to it. Also the rocket is covered in parachutes and radiators. I'm not sure if radiators actually do anything during atmospheric entry, but they seem to buy me more time before the thing explodes. Here the rocket is during early insertion. The heat shields are hot, but they don't get much hotter. This picture shows the trouble area. As you can see in the first picture, there is no way for hot air to get through to that point. I'll explain more what you see here with the following two pictures. The airstream shell is there to protect a vector engine, the final stage's power plant, from hot air that hot be getting through. I honestly don't now if they do that. I have no idea where the heat causing that section of my rocket is coming from, or even if it is really heating up or hat matter. The radiators on that section have never read above 15%. All of the radiators on this rocket are attached via radial decouplers, so they can be jettisoned once the parachutes are fully inflated at about 2300 meters. When the explosions start, they seem to start around there. They might also starting n the central Vector engine cluster, but I have no way to really know. In the flight events log, it usually lists structural failures between the adapter fuel tanks above the final Vector Engine, as well as and exploding Vector engine somewhere in the rocket. FYI: I'm using vector engines because they have the highest in atmosphere thrust percentage, and can be easily clustered. So if anyone has any ideas what is causing this problem, please say so. And does anyone know if radiators actually do anything during Eve entry? Also, if anyone has a design for a Eve liftoff vehicle that weighs less than 700 tons (my current design is over 1100) and can lift 16 or more kerbals off of Eve in one go, please share it.

Why didn't anyone tell me how easy it was to pull off atmospheric insertion on Eve. I'm my experimenting for a series of large launches to the the second planet, I've been experimenting with heat shield configuration to survive the heat of insertion, and trying to determine the amount of delta-v required for a deorbit burn. Anyone familiar with my recent posts will see that i got the heat shields figured out: four in front and a wider arrangement of nine in aft to maintain balance. But it turns out that I was massively overestimating the delta-v required to deorbit my behemoth lander, by a factor of 4 or 5, maybe 10. My first successful attempts used between 1800 and 2400 m/s from initial orbits of 186 km. Worked, but the crafts experienced worryingly high G-force. Then I tried a 1000 m/s burn from 100 km. This ended in failure due to one of my cats walking on the keyboard. I'm not sure what keys her pressed, but it put the well balanced lander in a flat spin which broke it up. Given the my lander masses more than 800 tons, you can imagine these attempts required a metric f*ckton of fuel. Several Saturn Vs worth. I was racking my brain on how to get the rocket off Kerbin and to Eve. But just now I tried a far smaller deorbit stage. Two of the largest stock tanks and seven vector thrusters. I also spammed the large panel radiators everywhere they would fit on the lander. The deorbit stage was rated at 430ish m/s, but I used less than half off that. My angle of insertion was very shallow. And the entry went flawlessly. G-force barely touched the red line, heat shields didn't go beyond yellow, it was over all a much safer operation. With all the talk of how hard it is to land on Eve, you'd think someone would mention how little you need to burn to get down.

After over a week of tinkering, and 4 days of testing in the sandbox, I finally got my 700 ton behemoth for returning Kerbals to Eve orbit safely down to the planet's surface, and almost back to orbit. Unfortunately I was about 300 m/s short, and the craft reentered the atmosphere, burned up, and the crew capsule splashed down. I'm going to add some more boosters, fuel, parachutes, and landing legs, but I think I've proven the concept works. Here are some highlight pictures. This is after atmospheric insertion, with the drogue chutes partially open. Sorry for how dark it is, my target landing site in the Eve Highlands was on the night side. And here the forward heat shield array, really only there to keep it from going end over end, has been jettisoned and the main chutes deployed. I don't actually know how many chutes I added, certainly more than 80. Still seems to need more. Here the chutes are fully open. Those heat shields feel uncomfortably close to the rocket. The dark made it hard to see how high the rocket still was. But some of those heat shields made it to the ground, and provided a reference, Touch Down! No explosions! Those come later. Fast forward to daybreak. Jettison the parachutes as they are no longer needed. I turned on the unbreakable joints and no crash damage cheats to stop this act of housecleaning from ruining this test. Liftoff! First drop tank depleted and jettisoned. External booster bank depleted and jettisoned. Good old Skippers. If it had enough delta-v, this would be put into a low orbit and eventually rendezvous with a longer range craft to take the Kerbals home. But it didn't have enough delta-v. Not bad for my first takeoff from Eve. In summary I need more delta-v, parachutes, and maybe legs.

Good call on testing it in the sandbox. It didn't even make it to the chute deploy phase before flipping around and breaking up. I think I may try landing with empty fuel tanks. But that means bringing the refining and mining equipment and a longer stay... work work work. That set orbit thing is trippy. One second it's on the pad the next in low orbit over Eve.

How many parachutes are needed to safety land a 700+ ton rocket on Eve. My current design has 44 of the MK16-XL chutes, and 4 of the inflatable heat shields (which will be jettisoned when the main chutes open). Is 44 enough?

I have a pair of the big fuel cells. Tests show they provide more than enough juice to power the base at full speed. I also have 8 NUKs.

This is my latest mobile base design, which I'm preparing for deployment to at least one of the Joolian moons, probably Tylo but maybe Vall too. Do you think it has enough solar panels? Here it is with the panels retracted. And here it is with all the panels deployed.

They know about the glitch, I'm just asking to ix it.

Hey Squad, Can you fix the asteroid shape changing glitch in a patch asap. I love playing with asteroids, and can't figure out how to use the utilities addon to fix it myself.

Yeah I used your strategy in my semi-final product. Still needs solar panels, radiators, fuel cells, NUKs, decent thusters, parachutes, and a massive rocket to carry it out to Duna. All easy stuff. Fun, fun, fun. Thank you everyone for your assistance in tackling this fastest kraken.

This is what I arrived at. I remembered that bases had to had viewing cupola, so found a place to stick them. The CoM is a little further forward than I'd like, but I might add a fuel tank to the aft section. And it isn't fully kitted out yet. As is it will do 43 m/s in a dead sprint down the runway.

Thank You.

How do you "active" a the hatch of an MK1 inline Crew Cabin? I've been using them in my new and troublesome mobile bases, but when I try to EVA the occupants, I get a message on screen that says something like "Automatic EVA disabled, active a hatch". So how do I do that?

Through trial and error I seem to have found the problem. Excessive autostructing combined with maxing out the stats on the wheels. Now I'm going to test the theory.

I'm working on another version that only autostructs a few parts. No boom. Drove it around awhile, then tried to ram the VAB. It esploded. Killed the driver. Good thing you can reset.

The one that works has more parts that the one that keeps freaking out. Anyway I like having a bit more ground clearance. I'm actually trying to make one with the pontoons attacked at the end of short I-beams, of course they keep exploding. Anyway I will answer your points. None of the wheels, cabins, box girders, or I beams are radially attached. The crew cabins in the pontoons are connected via struts to both the box girders and the main body of the base. The ore tanks do not hold any weight in this. The top middle cockpit and are attached to the battery in front of them, offset upwards, The tanks are radially attached around a central I-Beam connecting the two halves, and are in no way load bearing parts. They are offset to be partially inside each half. That might be why the second version keeps exploding? On the other side of the drills are 4 of the materials science junior things, with round nose cones stuck to their underside. That isn't as much mass as the drills, but it's pretty close. I don't know if offseting the hitchiker cabin from the lab can actually get the distance I want. I'll try. But my method of connecting via an I-beam works in at least one vehicle. I wonder if I invented a new kraken. The second version does not develop either explody or shaky problems until all of the wheels are attached.

This is what happened when I moved the pontoons the wheels are mounted on apart one half notch. Notice it destroyed the pad. And this is what happens when i revert to launch without the unbreakable joints cheat enabled. I'm going to play around with my original mobile base, in which everything is autostructed and worked well enough I already tested it on the Mun. Worked great until I took a turn to tight and rolled with cheats turned off. BOOM. This is it landing. And here it is in the VAB. Other than the different command pod, the only substantive differences are the original has 12 front wheels instead of 20, and the internal (hidden from view) small storage tanks are attached differently. In the original the they are arranged radially around an I-beam that connects the two halves of the crawler, where as in the troubled new version that are attached to the battery at the nadir of the front half.

No joy. The wheels broke immediately.

I'm having a problem with my new mobile base. When loaded onto the launch pad or runway, it bounces/shimmies until the TR-2L ruggerized wheels break, or in a few cases the launch pad explodes. The base masses 46.5 tons, and there are 40 wheels in 4 banks of 10. Pictures below of the the base and the wheels. I have another similar mobile base with the same wheel arrangement that does not bounce until it explodes. All of the parts are autostruted to the heaviest part and rigidly connected, as they are on my base that does not self destruct. Does anyone have any ideas of what is wrong?

How do I get the mod to work? I'm not very good with computers. I put the files into the Game Data folder, but nothing happened.

Okay I'll give it a shot.

Yesterday one of my 1138 class asteroid tugs rendezvoused with an asteroid and deployed its RCS mounts around it. Today, it looks like this. The asteroid changed shape for some reason, and now the tug and about half the RCS mounts are partially or entirely enveloped in the asteroid. I've been having this problem a lot lately, since I updated to the latest version of KSP. Is there a fix for this? My only mod is Mechjeb. I am running KSP on a Macbook Pro with OSX High Sierra. I cannot try running without mechjeb because literally everything I have in the game has mechjeb, and will be instantly deleted if I remove the mod.