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IncongruousGoat

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Everything posted by IncongruousGoat

  1. So this is what expedited progress looks like. Both the general (ion) lander and the Vall-Duna lander are done. The former masses in at .971 t, and the latter at .895 t. Erm... yeah. Nothing more to say, really. Looking back, starting this mission report during vehicle development wasn't perhaps the best choice. Ah well; the actual mission should be coming along soon, since all that remains is to build transfer vehicles and hash out the profile.
  2. Laythe's efforts to foil my plans have been defeated-a lander has been designed. Massing in at 3.475 t, it weighs nearly 1 ton more than my Tylo lander-more points in favor of my pro-Tylo stance. The weight disparity is also going to make the already large problem of balancing the end vehicle even worse. The remaining landers should be much easier to build, and as such progress should be expedited. Maybe.
  3. The Tylo lander is complete! Massing in at 2.575 t, it's the lightest such lander I've built by a fair margin-and as such has a much tighter fuel margin and a more complicated descent than my prior 5 or 10 ton landers. Descent starts from a 14x14 km orbit Work on the Laythe lander has ground to a halt, due to problems with Laythe's souposphere *ahem* atmosphere. To be honest, I prefer Tylo over Laythe. Laythe's thick atmosphere and lack of significant land mass make it hard to land on and hard to take off from without building a spaceplane-which I'm not going to do because A) it would be too heavy and B) I can't build spaceplanes.
  4. Hello all, and welcome to Project Wayfarer! This is a ongoing thread for my (completed) attempt at the Ultimate Challenge (also known as a Grand Tour). The aim here is to document the entire mission, from planning to execution, as various bits occur. No guarantees on how quickly things will get updated, what with unforeseen difficulties and real life. Things will get posted to this thread as they happen, with updates to the OP as progress gets made. All comments, suggestions, criticism, etc. are welcome. Oh, and there's going to be no ISRU. Mission album is here: http://imgur.com/a/SFUuC Mods I'm using: KER, KAC, Transfer Window Planner, Scatterer, Distant Object Enhancement, Planetshine Progress so far: Things designed: Vessel designed General lander: Done Eve lander: Done Laythe lander: Done Tylo lander: Done Duna/Vall lander: Done Transfer stages: Done Concrete mission profile: Done Bodies visited: Moho: Yes Eve: Yes Gilly: Yes Mun: Yes Minmus: Yes Duna: Yes Ike: Yes Dres: Yes Laythe: Yes Vall: Yes Tylo: Yes Bop: Yes Pol:Yes Eeloo: Yes The Eve lander: This was the first thing I designed, since it's been the biggest stopping point to my attempts in the past. It masses in at 24.418 t. I realize that this is about twice as much as is strictly necessary for a lander using just rockets, and four times as much as is necessary if using a stock electric propeller. However! Building propellers is something I don't really know how to do-I tried a few but they didn't turn out functional. Furthermore, a lighter Eve lander would require that A: I built my vehicle as a plane (i.e. a thing I'm awful at building) and B: that the ascent be down to the wire, even potentially using the EVA pack. I like neither of these things, so I overbuilt the Eve lander-I like efficiency as much as the next guy, but the darn thing has to be fun for me to fly. The flight profile is as follows: Starting initial descent behind the (emptied of ablator) heatshield, stabilized by airbrakes. Once velocity has reached ~400 m/s detach airbrakes and heatshield and glide until above landing site. Then decouple wings and deploy chutes, landing gear, and ladders. Once landed, detach chutes and ladders (once flag is planted). Launch then proceeds as normal. Or however normal launching from Eve can be. Target is the highest point on Eve.
  5. Never mind on the propeller thing-I've found them much harder than anticipated to build. Also, I take it it's fine to do this in sandbox. Right?
  6. Right-I've been staring at this challenge for a while now, and I think I'm finally getting to the point where I'm ready to give it a go. Before I start, I just want to clarify a few things- First, clearly the vessel has to start as a unified whole in LKO. Beyond that starting point, is there a limit to how much we can split it up? I have an... unusual profile in mind that relies on fragmenting my vessel. Second, is it okay if I use a stock electric propeller? It would make Eve so much easier, but it requires part clipping.
  7. I would argue that bringing an ISRU rig along in the first place is unnecessary. The thing is, the rig is heavy, power-hungry, and difficult to use correctly. It's probably less mass to just build a ship with enough delta-V to do the mission. I mean, it's Duna, so even without aerobraking or gravity assists the delta-V cost LKO-LDO is only ~1800 m/s. Return is only going to cost 700-800 m/s, since (I assume) you're aerobraking at Kerbin. Then you just need a couple of small landers for Duna and Ike (and yes, the Ike lander can start in low Duna orbit). With nuclear engines, those transfer delta-V numbers aren't particularly big. Trying to use ISRU here just seems like over-complicating things, especially if this is your first interplanetary voyage.
  8. I get myself some cookie dough, some chocolate chips, and an oven. I pre-heat the oven. I mix the chips in with the dough, put blobs of dough-chip mixture on a baking tray, then put the tray in the oven. Several minutes later, I take the cookies out of the oven and eat all but one. My cookie.
  9. Yep, that sounds like the Kraken. It's what I would expect to happen, dropping an indestructible ship into Jool, at 4x physics warp no less. Jool's core is supposed to destroy any parts that get that far down, presumably from the extreme pressure. With unbreakable parts, and the physics errors inherent with 4x time warp... well, let's just say it's no surprise the Kraken reared its ugly head. Oh, and the answer is no, you can't penetrate Jool's surface. It doesn't have a surface in the proper sense, what with being a gas giant and all. There is an altitude zero, but all it marks is the altitude 250 m above the altitude of certain death. The used to be a surface, back before v0.23, but that was years ago.
  10. Minmus, but only because of the caveman challenge, since it's so much easier to build a rover/science return capsule thingy for Minmus within the part and mass constraints. Beyond that, their differences might as well be so much Swiss cheese. My goals are in interplanetary space and I like one-off launches, never having been one for orbital assembly or fuel depots or mining bases. Minmus's smoother terrain is nice, though.
  11. I use time warp rotation kill on just about every craft I fly, because I can't be bothered to properly fly things with the attitude control abilities of an inebriated whale. I've sent far too many Kerbals on years-long missions in cramped command pods. I go to extreme lengths to never lose or strand a Kerbal, even going as far as save editing, because A: I don't like rescue missions and B: I can't stand losing any member of my crew. I get too attached. I obsessively make named quicksaves in order no not lose anything to my own stupidity. ...I think that's it.
  12. Hm. Your design is quite good for someone so new to the game, to be honest. However, a couple of things jump out at me. First of all, you don't need RCS. At all. The reaction wheel will be more than sufficient. I would call even the big reaction wheel overkill, but that's just me. Also, you used the Rockomax adapter. Don't use that part under any circumstances. It's heavier than the alternative. Just mount your tanks radially around a center one and put an individual nosecone on each tank. Finally, you should have stuck with the LV-T30's. Thuds have too low a TWR for anything other than niche use.
  13. Erm... any lander with some parachutes, sufficient TWR and, say, 3 km/s dV to be safe (although you could probably get away with 2) should work. Duna's atmosphere is thick enough for parachutes to be effective but not so thick that the aerodynamics of your lander should matter at all. They're honestly not that hard to build. Just remember you can use the debug menu to teleport your lander to Duna orbit and test it that way.
  14. Not in the foreseeable future (i.e. never). Due to the way planets are modeled, they can't have any axial tilt other than zero. It turns out to be surprisingly hard to code, and would require rewrites of some pretty deep parts of the code base. I can't give more details than that, not being familiar with the internals of KSP's code base. This idea has been around for, well, as long as anyone can remember, and every time the response is the same. Sorry to disappoint.
  15. Here's a counter-counter-argument: We've had trans- and inter-continental communication via wired connection for going on a century and a half now, ever since the days of long-range telegraph networks. You don't need a satellite to achieve long-distance communication-you just need the satellite to transmit from an arbitrary location to an arbitrary location-the which is not necessary, since those relay stations aren't exactly going anywhere. You shouldn't need high-bandwidth communication for a satellite, because all you're sending are attitudes and burn times, and all the satellite is sending back is its telemetry. You're tossing numbers back and forth, not sending anything so complicated as, say, audio or video. Of course, if I'm wrong, anyone feel free to correct me. I'm no telecommunications expert.
  16. You might want to add Transfer Window Planner, for all your porkchop plotting, transfer optimizing needs. That, and KSC++ (subset of Kerbal Konstructs) for making the KSC look more like a space center with actual infrastructure and less like a bunch of magic funds->rockets, science->parts for rockets, rep->something? buildings.
  17. Part of your problem might be that you're trying to match orbits using engines better suited to big transfer burns. I would advise mounting some RCS on your satellites and using that to match speeds as best as possible. Realistically speaking, though, you're not going to be able to match speeds perfectly and the satellites will drift over time. My best advice for a communications network is simply to throw a whole bunch of satellites into a whole bunch of different orbits and let the laws of probability, combined with some powerful antennae, ensure that at least one is always in range. Although, wait... are you playing with the stock CommNet or RemoteTech? Because you have to treat communications quite differently, depending on which you're using.
  18. Ah, so we're talking about the weather, are we? Well... here in upstate NY two days ago we got something like 3 inches of snow (so nowhere near the usual amount for a proper winter snowfall). Everything was all nice and powdery, and then the very next day the temperature spiked up to 45° f, and it rained. Snow almost gone. No hopes for a white Christmas, but with some luck the temperature will drop after Christmas to a rather reasonable 15-20° f, we'll get a foot of snow, and everything will be right in the world.
  19. Because you forgot to autostrut the wheels to their grandparent part. Why am I so tired all of a sudden?
  20. To be completely honest, it depends entirely on what sort of thing you're planning, and how you build rockets, and what sorts of mission architectures you like. There are a lot of mods out there, all good and all balanced towards different sorts of end goals. The trick is to survey them all and pick the ones that best fit whatever it is you're trying to do. An objective definition of "good" is a hard thing to nail down, because basically every mod out there can be considered inappropriate for a specific situation. Well, okay, perhaps not Real Plume. But you get the point. Sorry I can't be more concrete, but without an idea of what sort of multiplayer thing you're trying to do I can't be anything but vague without imposing my own preferences on you (which would be counterproductive).
  21. I don't have the files, but what I'm wondering is what in the world could have caused a performance drop between .90, of all things, and 1.2? 1.1 and 1.2 were, in large part, performance and optimization updates. Everyone, myself included, saw improvements across the board for both these updates. Going further back, 1.0 didn't cause a significant performance drop (as far as I remember). It seems like something very, very odd is going on on your end. You should not have better performance in .90 than in 1.2.
  22. Hey all! I've been playing around with GPP in career for a while now, and I've noticed something interesting about the Gael system. It turns out to be really easy to set up Iota and Ceti encounters whose associated gravity assists put you on orbits that are semisynchronous with the body you just flew past... and lead you straight into another flyby. Perhaps someone whose gravity assist fu is better than mine can exploit this for cheap escape burns.
  23. I don't let Kerbals die, ever. Neither do I strand them, deliberately or otherwise. Furthermore, I've started trying to make sure I never stick them alone in a cramped pod for any length of time, and that any manned mission I do is done properly-huge mothership with big hab modules, spacious surface hab, so on and so forth. I also don't build planes, but that's only because I have a much firmer grasp of orbital mechanics than I do aerodynamics.
  24. Because optimistic people (like myself) tend not to be so vocal. Saying that development is going to get back on track and that everything is, all things considered, going to be just peachy isn't a particularly interesting position. This whole thing actually puts me in mind of Nixon's Great Silent Majority-although that's probably not a good parallel to draw, considering how Nixon's presidency ended. @foamyesque Produce delta-V / TWR readout code that is efficient and reliable (which neither KER or Mechjeb is) and we can talk about adding it to the game. Until then, it's just not feasible because it can't be made nearly reliable enough.
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