Zosma Procyon

In my limited free time in the last two weeks, between school and car shopping (I totaled my beloved 2009 Honda Element EX AWD late last month, which I loved more than my entire immediate family combined. Took the insurance company almost a month to declare it totaled, and then while car shopping I discovered my 6ish foot height and very broad frame doesn't fit in most midsize SUV's of the last two generations. Settled on a 2013 Toyota Highlander 4x4. It's good enough, but I don't think I'll ever love another car or person as much as my Element. The closest Element to me with low mileage is a thousand miles a way), I've been preparing another mission blitz launch out to Jool. So far the fleet will consist of two large space stations to be mated to asteroids on arrival, a two part tower base for Pol (which includes an 80m ring), a massive (close two 1000 tonnes fully fueled and ored) dome-cage base I'm going to land around the dead Deep Space Kraken, 5 rescue and retrieval rockets, and 6 new satellites/relays. Probably 40 million kredits, which I did much science and ferried many tourists to earn. Depending on homework load, I should deploy the fleet from their holding orbits around Kerbin sometime this weekend. I still haven't designed one of the stations. I think I want to attach a cage-like station around the D-class asteroid the contract requires; speaking of which... Does anyone know the average diameter of a D-Class asteroid?

I successfully rescued a Kerbal and his shipwreck off of Minmus's surface. It took about 20 minutes of fiddling with RCS to get the klaw to actually grab the wreck.

I added the 6th segment to my Spindle Station, making it over 130 meters long, I think. I actually hit the kraken limit this time because I was using the wrong autostructing. So I had to go through the station switching the whole thing to grandparent autostructing, and it held together.

Grandparenting did the trick.

Oh. Okay. *takes a long hard look at own life*. What about rigid connection? Does it cause any problems?

I've been trying to get this base, and a few minor variants of it, to work. But every time I put in zero g, it summons the kraken and explodes. I'm actually planning to land something like this on top of the dead kraken on Bop. The problem seems to be that the lower ring is too far from the core and somehow ends up swinging. Or the problem might be with 8 sided symmetry since I've never really gotten that to work in space stations. Has anyone ever gotten a base like this to work? Craft file? In this current incarnation the vertical arches are actually built off of 4 crew cabins down, which have been offset from the core. And as with all of my rings and arches, the ring segments are held together by concealed pairs of docking ports.

I have a small single launch space station attached to a D-class asteroid. Why is this a great achievement? Because the asteroid has a period of roughly 80 years, and it was already about twice as far out as Eeloo when the station rendezvoused with it. When it launched the largest engine in game was the Mammoth and I had not yet discovered the trick of clustering the smaller area Vector engines. It was the largest, heaviest, most expensive, and most powerful rocket I'd built up to that point; and was the first rocket I ever built with more thrust at liftoff than the Sea Dragon (350 meganewtons).

Wow, that is larger than anything I've ever built. Very funny. Go back to your grave! I do actually have a lander stationed at my Bop orbital station. Might as well take a look.

Are versions of Bon Voyage and World Stabilizer updated for KSP 1.6 in the works? The 1.5.whatever versions still work on load, but when I last tried to use BV my rover ended up so banged up it couldn't sit still.

Does the Scatterer addon have an adverse effect on the performance of KSP when it is running on a Mac? Does it slow the game down?

It's a lunar lander command module without any fuel (If I've interpreted the size and mass characteristics listed in the contract correctly), massing 1.6 tons I think. I'm away from my computer atm so I can't check the contract.

I have never successfully recovered a shipwreck from a planetary surface, and just accepted a contract to do so on Moho. I think the best way to do it to land right on top of it with a klaw on the bottom of the rocket, Mechjeb will make that easy enough. Anyone have good craft designs?

How big is the dead kraken on Bop? I feel like building a base around it. Roughly what diameter should my base have at the bottom.

This. I think I'm going to send it to Dres and stick it on an asteroid.

Never heard of such a publication. I am a real aerospace engineer, though.

Toxic exhaust is another reason why tripropellant rockets would be in the game. As far as the real world, the environment is already f*cked beyond all hope, so we might as well use them.

I just suggested a tripropellant engine that would use ore as one of its resources, and I just remembered one of my favorite exotic propulsion methods: Mass drivers. Want to move an asteroid on the cheap?Land a robotic probe with a mining drill, and what amounts to a big coil gun on it. Drill up rock and use the coil gun to throw it in whatever direction, and Newton's First Law pushes the asteroid in the other direction. Why not write this into the game? The resources would be electricity and ore, and the engine would probably look a hoop skirt attached to a box or cylinder. It would produce low thrust like the ion engines and Nerv, but also like them would have very high efficiency and burn time. They'd also be large and heavy. The animation for the "drive flame" would probably be a similar to the dust clouds that the drills make when in use.

I have a number of transports heading in system from Jool and Eeloo carrying the better part of 50 kerbals, including 6 brand new rescues and their shipwrecks (free money from salvage). Unusually for be given my frequent problems with estimating fuel consumption for down-well travel, they all have more than enough Delta-V to make safe low parking orbits around Kerbin when they get there. But as they were all launched on high efficiency return orbits, they're all going to take in game YEARS to get home. And given that thanks to KerbalAlarmClock I have to stop fast forwarding every few days to transmit science, getting them home could take weeks or months real time (I'm also in school again so don't have much free time). Simply put I'm tired of waiting and want to redeploy those crew on new missions. I'm considering using the Set Orbit cheat to warp them all into Kerbin orbit and just be done with it, but I always feel bad about cheating. What you you do: Wait or cheat?

In the real world, tripropellant rockets are the only real avenue left for advancement in chemical fueled rocket technology; the technology and science thereof reached its pinnacle over 50 years ago with the Saturn V and N-1 rockets. Tripropellant rockets, as the name suggests, burn three chemicals rather than the usual two. Rocketdyne built one back in the 60's that burned molten lithium, fluorine, and hydrogen; and produce insane performance. I don't see any reason why a tripropellant motor could be added to the stock game, using existing in-game resources. Ore could stand in for the lithium, liquid fuel for hydrogen, and oxidizer or monopropellant for the fluorine. I'd probably go with monopropellant standing in for fluorine to make things more interesting. Imagine build SSTO rockets that burn ore, monopropellant, and liquid fuel. If I knew how to code, I'd make the flames and smoke different colored.

What I want most is the ability to destage engines.

That's what I do. I have more than a dozen ring stations. Have you used structural tubing for the spokes? I think that also might be a problem; maybe they're too light? I think I'm just going to try a double ring attached to an asteroid for this contract.

I've been trying to build ring stations wider than the standard 43 meters. I couldn't get 8 spoke stations to work without summoning the kraken. I thought I was going to get a 4 spoke 80m station to work today, before I finished the ring only to discover that one side was somehow a meter lower than the other in the VAB. I think the problem with the 8 spoke stations might be autostucting.

Can mechjeb handle docking maneuvers in low gravity, for instance on the tiny moons of Jool and Eve? I have a plan to build multipart tower bases on Pol and Bop to fulfill exploration contracts. And as I am on the spectrum, my peripheral nervous system was wired by someone with a degree in business, and my hand eye coordination is crap. If it can't I'll dock the segments in low orbit and then land them.

I added the 5th segment to my Spindle Station. It is now about 110 meters long. Here is the segment moving in to position, controlled by Mechjeb of course. Spindle Station is really living up to its name.

I added the fourth installment to my Spindle Station orbiting Minmus. It is now 96.3ish meters long. Also it received the first long term crew, since I'm sending a science retrieval lander to the station for some contracts. The new segment is the bottom most, about 15 m long.