Ultimate Steve

Successful landing! The results of the past three flights have been very good omens for the survivability of the ship once they put people on board. Not so good omens for the goal of a rapidly reusable heat shield, but hopefully that's something V2 will address. They put this ship through a very aggressive re-entry, with a decent chunk of the tiles missing, and other tiles testing various other things, and she made it through with less visible damage than the previous two flights. Lots of wonderful camera views!

Good relight it looks like.

Possible reason for catch abort:

Stream live and forum back up! T-9 minutes, showing off some new HLS renders and some windows. Pushing ship beyond limits in many respects to find exactly where the limits are, unlikely it will survive.

Oh, you know me, short bursts of intense writing and months long gaps of nothing.

I don't think that multiple passes would significantly reduce fuel usage unless I'm missing something. It depends on if you would ever hit terminal velocity during Mars descent. If no, then coming in from a lower trajectory would allow you to slightly reduce Mars landing burn fuel requirements. If yes then there is no difference unless for some reason you can't brake into Mars orbit via aero alone, which, should be possible unless you're absolutely screaming into the system on an accelerated transfer.

I could see it for bulk refueling. If they actually do get to the point of doing a Mars flotilla, they only get 1, maybe 2 shots at each orbital plane per day per launch site. If all of the Mars ships are in the same orbital plane for transfer and convenience reasons, doing only 1 launch per day would be effectively wasting half of their propellant throughput.

During the time the forum was dead, I watched a wonderful YouTube video about the rarest moves in Chess notation. That got me wondering what the rarest parts in KSP were, and I got the idea of making a Python script that would download every craft from KerbalX and add up all of the parts. Unfortunately, interfacing with another site and trying to not spam KerbalX scared me a little, so I scaled it back to just something that would look through craft files and tally up the stock parts. The hard parts involved figuring out which parts were stock, filtering out any craft included in the game, and the game using like 3 separate naming schemes and using underscores in some places and periods in other places. Eventually I found (hopefully) most of the bugs, and set it loose on my large collection of KSP save files spanning probably nearly 10 years of gameplay. The current implementation does not count DLC parts and it does not deal with repeats caused by copying over saves when copying over installations, so the methodology isn't perfect, but here are the results: Barring methodology errors and saves on other computers, the craft I have built in KSP total 996,968 parts, or very nearly a million! As for my most used parts: Unsurprisingly, the strut is the most common part with 73k uses, especially as many of these craft predate autostrut, and there are still some things autostrut can't do or can't do very well. The sepratron is in second with 42k uses. For an average player this seems very high, but this is likely because I do a lot of things with stock part combat. Each missile typically uses 2-8 sepratrons, each craft carries a LOT of missiles, and I built a lot of these craft, some of which got copied over through multiple installs and some of which had several revisions saved under different files. Add this on top of normal sepratron usage and sprinkle in a few meme craft with a few hundred sepratrons each, and you get a lot of them. The 2x2 structural panel occurred 20k times. This number is likely inflated by 2 atypical use cases. Firstly, it is armor for the stock combat ships. Secondly, I (used to) do a lot of mission reports involving building sets and taking screenshots of them, the 2x2 panel was a good part for that, in addition to the wing parts. Launch clamps have 19k uses. Not surprising, though also inflated by sets. Cubic octagonal struts have 17k uses. Not surprising, those things are handy. Small static solar panel 16k uses, also not surprising. Interestingly my most commonly used SRB besides the sepratron is the Thumper at 16k uses. It is a convenient form factor I guess. IDK what I expected but this tracks. The Vector engine I'm not surprised by with 15k uses, it is probably my favorite engine and I build a lot of very big ships that make use of clustered Vectors. To go along with it, the large 3.75m fuel tank has 14k uses. The fuel line is at 12k, unsurprising, especially as many of these craft predate the new fuel flow control system, and that can often be more clunky to use than the fuel lines so I still use them often. I'll stop listing every single one here, but some interesting ones: Most used aero piece: AV-R8 Winglet at almost 12k, just barely eclipsing one of the rectangular wing pieces Ion and Nuclear engine have 9k and 8k uses respectively Somehow I've used over 1000 fuel cells. Likely only for memes or as aesthetic parts, or from my experiments into ion planes back in like 1.1 or 1.2. Now for the least used parts: Four parts I've never used at all! Those are the ESA BepiColumbo probe parts and the 1x5 solar panel parts. I'm very surprised that I haven't used the probe parts as greebles at all, but I'm not surprised I never used them on a mission. And I'm very surprised I haven't used the 1x5 solar panels at all. I didn't think I'd use them often, but never once? The small fireworks launcher and one of the navigation lights have each been used once. Fireworks makes sense, if I'm gonna do them I'm gonna use the big ones. Nav light, generally when I use the lights it is so that I can see, and I gravitate overwhelmingly towards the original 2 lights in that case. The stack tri coupler I've only used 3 times. I'm very confused at this. That's a part that has been in the game since 0.7.3. It is the most classic "feels like KSP" part from that era. And I've only used it 3 times??? Granted it isn't a very convenient part to use for modern designs, as it was built for a time when you couldn't attach fuel tanks radially and long before 2.5m parts. But only 3 times???????? One of the EVA storage containers has only been used 5 times, unsurprising, I only ever use those to store tire repair kits and 90% of the time I just repair wheels with the debug menu anyway. Another new light at 9 uses, and the large fireworks at 9 uses - I haven't played around with the fireworks nearly enough. The reliant engine has only been used 13 times according to this list. This isn't that surprising as I just straight up use a swivel if I need an engine in that class. But it might be misleading as the engine did get redone in like 1.11 or something, I forget. The internal name may have changed, so this may not be counting it properly. There's other interesting stuff too, like how the Infrared Telescope has been used 19 times, but I can tell you that I've only actually used it for its intended purpose once if I remember right, the rest are because it looks cool. Or how I just don't use stack separators or n-couplers/n-stack adapters very often. Or how like somehow I've used the utterly useless avionics nose cone 79 times, more than several dozen other parts including the magnetometer. But you're welcome to go through the list and make some conclusions yourself! Just be aware that several parts have had new versions made, their internal IDs may have changed so this may not be a perfect list. I might also clean up the code and release it so you can run this on your own saves, or maybe you can send me your saves folder and I can run the analysis for you. Or maybe I'll get around to making the full version that can scrape every craft on KerbalX.

Crew-10 in February is using a brand new Dragon, likely the last one they will build unless Starship encounters insurmountable problems, so we will get a new spacecraft name in a few months.

I guess being unemployed and not in education has its benefits. Watch party it is.

Nah, Soyuz is gonna be around forever. When we build the first warp drive ship, crew are going to launch to it on a Soyuz.

Generally the idea behind Artemis as it is now was that there wasn't the political will to do a proper moon program where everything is funded and planned out from the beginning. Artemis made the best of a bad situation and relied on gluing everyone's desires together to make the program as cancellation resistant as possible and slowly asking for more funding until they've glued together a landing program made out of whatever additional pieces were politically fundable at any given time. Cancelling Artemis would upset a lot of allied nations, a lot of old space contractors, a lot of senators from Alabama, and a lot of new space contractors, and a lot of other people. What they didn't anticipate is that private industry may soon be able to do a proper moon program pretty much by themselves that may reach the moon during a similar timeframe. I have mixed feelings about this. By all means sunk cost fallacy and all, but it must be really frustrating for the people working on SLS to get this close. That's about as far as I can go without getting into politics.

I am unsure about the structural differences between 5 and 6, but I do know that: They are testing removing a lot of tiles to make room for catch hardware on the ship They are trying the in space relight demo again They are doing a "simple fix" on the booster to try to prevent the nozzle warping we saw last time They are doing a higher AoA re-entry to figure out the limits of what the ship can handle They are adding nose art to the ship The ship for flight 7 is very different from the current ships as it is the first block 2/v2 ship. It has: Bigger fuel tanks on the ship A smaller payload bay A somewhat longer overall length The forward flaps are moved leeward for better protection I think the heat shielding has been upgraded even further but IDK Different downcomer arrangement Probably hundreds or thousands of other changes that haven't been publicly talked about. I don't know about any specific changes relating to lessons from flight 5 - From what I'm aware, they kind of anticipated the heat shield issues and that's why the flaps on block 2 are so different.

I think robots of some sort to pre-emptively set up the solar farm is a good idea, but the idea of arriving to Mars only to be greeted by a field of dead humanoid robots in the sand probably isn't reassuring and probably isn't an image SpaceX would want to send. But maybe this is just be being too emotional and not technical enough. I generally don't think the human factors stuff gets talked about enough.

You would need a LOT of hardware to do a manned Mars mission. Enough that SpaceX's plans back when they had the 12m ITS called for at least four ships during the window and a few presupply ships. The number is likely higher since the switch to smaller ships. Granted some of that can be alleviated by not sending as many people, but you get diminishing returns for every person you remove. If you used mini starship you would have to have a much larger ship to person ratio than you would with a larger ship.

I've written down some lyrics and I have a tune in my head. I'm really busy for a while so chances are it never actually gets made, but maybe.

Hmm, now I kind of want to actually make a Bob Kerman theme song.

If you are not already aware, you may be interested in the game Rocketwerkz is making right now, tentatively titled "Kitten Space Agency." They've hired a lot of the ex KSP1/KSP2 team including, I believe, HarvesteR himself, Blackrack, JPLRepo, and more. They are working on a Kerbal successor. It is in the very early stages of development, and I'm not gonna jump on the hype train just yet, but they do seem to be treating the concept with the respect it deserves. The game is using a custom engine built specifically for the job The studio has experience with financing marginally profitable niche engineering games (Stationeers) without resorting to microtransactions (Stationeers has a couple DLC species and a few small "support the devs" cosmetic items but that is it) They communicate really well (not that the bar was very high) Commitment to supporting modding - Even in the current pre alpha builds, stuff like the solar system is loaded as if it were a mod, there will probably be a Kerbol system mod within a day or two of it going public They did originally put in a bid to make KSP 2, but lost (the CEO believes this was because the other team had a lot of flashy pictures and their proposal was entirely technical) Again, I don't want to get too excited this early (we all know what happened last time) but they really do appear to have gotten off on the right foot. Actually trying to build a solid foundation that can support the long term vision of the game, hiring people who have prior experience making space games and want to make space games, commitmet to modding, a non-corporate studio, etc. I don't know if I am allowed to share the discord link, I'm not sure what the policy is on that, but there is a (semi-private?) discord server the devs made, and you can read through some of u/thedeanhall's comments on Reddit for some whispers about the game. This does seem to embody the idea of "A Kerbal-like (Kerbalike?) game to succeed KSP but actually done properly.

N -52

During the outage, I got curious as to what the least used part in KSP was, so I started a project to download every single craft file on KerbalX and count every part. However, that was fairly daunting, so I scaled it back (for now) to just the craft on my computer. It took a day's effort but I do have the results. Well, at home. I am on a road trip right now, when I get home (maybe tonight but probably tomorrow) I will post the results in their own thread. Unsurprisingly, if I remember right, my most used part was the strut, and there were a handful of parts I had never used. I might even clean up the code and put it on github if anyone else wants to have a go at it.

Testing Testing, is this thing on?

Last I checked they don't look as nice, but I believe Procedural Tanks is a vanilla compatible alternative to RO Tanks: It probably doesn't have the correct mass ratios for RSS scale rockets out of the box but it might be easier to reconfigure the mass ratios than to reconfigure RO Tanks to use the right fuels.

Front flap appears to be burning through.

Entry plasma has started!

Stream is back, 140km and falling