My highest aim is to a collection of lessons and anecdotes learned the hard way from exploring beyond the Mun. There's some humor along the way- I hope it's appreciated.
By now in my first career I've planted some flags, made some gravity turns, even scribbled some maths, but nothing could prepare me for the long journy of the Ike-razy..
In hindsight, it's over-engineered. I've been holding onto this idea of a re-usable lander for a while now. First I built a 10-ton Mk2 lander before I had the full-size docking port unlocked...First words of advice: Clamp-o-Tron Jr. is not a good option here unless you like maneuvering with a jelly noodle.
So anyway I'm headed to Ike with this new 4-ton lander and a good crew now that I have me some humility, and here's the thing about my new clever lander: Make sure your CoM is spot on when something's riding the nose of your rocket! I thought it was good enough...but it was only good enough to keep me drifting southward throughout my ascent...needless to say landing was a bundle of joy as well.
So Jeb is stranded in LKO at the moment and before I realized I was going on a three year trip, I figured he'd be fine. So I took Val, a scientist, and an engineer...or so I thought. Kerbals are tricksy creatures, always double check your crew manifest in between VAB edits. I'm not saying they pulled a switcheroo on me...but I'm not saying they didn't either. The end result was I took Val and two engineers to Ike and back, so much for that science grab...
I'll gloss over the nitty gritty, there's lots of tutorials for that...I hit my window, escaped Kerbin, I even made a sweet aerocapture around Duna that helped me return to Kerbin with 1000 dV (almost 3x my planned margin!)
So here I am in orbit of Ike...minus 1 RCS block and my lander's solar array...WOOPS!
Yeaaaaa...when you're planning an aerocapture, don't skimp on retractable solar panels!!! Or just don't extend them? I dunno...there's a lot of details here. Now, the real mistakes come out...Probably don't cut corners on RCS when you're planning some interplanetary docking business either. I may have decided I didn't need RCS on my lander to dock it which, strictly speaking, you don't. But, especially when you DO put monoprop on it...just add the thrusters. Your one pilot will thank you when they don't have to EVA several times to get the un-stabilized crafts situated before docking. So I docked this sucker with an empty lander floating through space and an asymmetric RCS arrangment.
I'm almost done, promise. Here I am on Ike, and then I have one thought to share about return.
Pretty snazzy low-tech lander right? Yea...it's gone now. To my friends comtemplating interplanetary adventures for the first time: Returning an object to a Kerbin orbit that you actually WANT it to be in from a Hohmann transfer without aerobraking...is hard. Even with the 1000dV I returned to the Kerbin SOI with, There was NO WAY I was putting that glass house into a reasonable orbit...I jettisoned it and let 'er burn!!
So, tl;dr, I like to learn things the hard way, and bite off more than I can chew. Learn from it, laugh at it. I thought I'd contribute something to the forum, it's been a huge help to my space program!
To anyone good reading for laffs, I'd love build and maneuvering advice!
That's a good looking Ike-machine. I just found out about that clever storage bay driver trick the other day! And I don't have ion-thrusters yet, but I've done all my Mun landings with a single satellite orbit-landing-return vehicle and the dV costs aren't significantly different for each mission. Great album too, I'm going to be better about documenting missions now that they're such a...well, mission.
