Ultimate Steve

In an effort to increase my position on the graph, I decided to do some research into the propellant. I found out that people use HP in jetpacks and rocket cars and stuff. I also found out that many sites I visited made HP out to be a vastly more dangerous substance than I thought it was, especially in high concentrations (and in order to work as an effective monopropellant the concentration needs to be quite high). I thought to myself "woah, that's dangerous." and then found one site where this guy (totally credible source) talks about how when he made giant rocket cars he kept drums of the high concentration stuff in his garage (so it can't be that dangerous as long as you don't have any impurities, right?) but then I tried to look up where you can get highly concentrated HP... as it turns out, the smallest available shipment of 90% HP is one metric ton. I was thinking more like <1kg for initial tests of a small motor... And the vehicle I'm designing the engine for will actually mass <5kg total, so I'd really never be able to use a metric ton (and I wouldn't want a literal ton of that anywhere near my house anyway). So that's out. Presumably they don't make it easier because of the amount people who want that concentration of HP, 95% of them want to build a bomb and 5% are people like me who just want to build a rocket engine... So, I can't buy any. If they sold it in small amounts, I'd be good, but if I bought a ton of the stuff, I'd have the government on my doorstep pretty quickly, I'd imagine. So then I looked at purification methods for the 30-35% HP they do sell. As it turns out, these are also pretty scary. You can freeze the water and not the HP, but the freezing points are so similar that there's really no room for error. You can boil them, but H2O2 tends to explode right above that temperature, and I don't wish to get my face blown off. There's also the issue that if HP comes into contact with basically anything other than aluminum, air, water, and a few other things, it decomposes exothermically and explodes. I mean, this would be workable if I could buy it at high concentration in a safe container, but if I have to purify it myself, the risk of exposure to impurities during purification is way too high. So, yeah, if I end up actually doing this it's probably going to be an even smaller test motor which will make use of the 30% stuff, unless I can come up with a vastly safer solution than purifying H2O2 myself. And this was the safest monopropellant I could find, believe it or not! If I'd chosen any other monopropellant *cough* *Hydrazine* *cough* I'd have stopped long before I got to this point.

Yesterday I took a fast plane and flew it through a river. Very few things beat the feeling of going 1200m/s just above a river.

Okay, thanks. I guess I don't know as much as I thought I knew... wait... You know, maybe I shouldn't be building this after all...

The main problem with that is that I was going to use a Hydrogen Peroxide monopropellant thruster (for reasons) and even though HP isn't nearly as bad as (God forbid) hydrazine, I don't think any farmers would like having me spill it onto a field (where crops would grow and people would end up eating HP). Although I'll be using a hundred mL at best (unless I actually develop the proposed spacecraft, then it's about 3kg, but that will never happen). Most of "nowhere" in Iowa is taken up by fields. I'd need the farmer's permission (and who on Earth would let a 15 year old lunatic test fire a rocket engine on their property?).

They made it into computer animation... My childhood is ruined...

The first measure.

Last night I went outside alone to watch the ISS fly over, but due to the angle I had to go all the way to the corn field and into the neighbor's yard to see it well. It was a bit spooky, there were sounds coming from the corn and then I saw this four legged animal running at me. I jumped and ran, but then I realized that it was my cat.

I mean, seriously? It's supposed to be Bob the builder and Bill the science guy! Not Bill the builder and Bob the science guy!

Those are the inline RCS thrusters. Might be useful for a tiny VTOL plane, but not much else. They are pretty small and have pretty bad sea level isp.

Thinking I *might* consider trying this for myself, do you think the rules would be any different in Iowa? Or if I'm using a small hydrogen peroxide monopropellant thruster instead of an oxygen+fuel combo?

Hi, sorry, this post is somewhat rushed and will not include logs and stuff, but if they are needed I will provide them. My issue is, in a RSS/RP-0/RO 1.1.3 install (yeah, I know, antique) I have one specific rocket that will not work because the game thinks I don't have a valid communications link. Picture of the issue. I can pitch, yaw, roll, and manage throttle as usual, but if I try to stage, toggle SAS, or do anything via the right click menu, it will say that there is no connection to send the command on. I have a valid connection to the KSC groundstation, as shown by the line in map view. The upper left menu shows the fact that I have a connection with 0-ish signal delay. I have several antennas on board the ship. I have several probe cores on the ship. I have a boatload of electric charge on the ship. But if you look in the flight computer window, it will say that it is out of power. I launched another ship and it worked. The status was "nominal" or something to that extent. However, this ship is being weird. I tried quickoading, re-rolling out to the launch pad, editing the craft, restarting the game, and disassembling the craft and building it again. I have yet to try building it from scratch, but that is what I'm going to try next. Does anyone have any idea what's going on here? Daytime picture:

Finally, after days of business, I got back to LagFest (also known as RP-0). Now with extra lag! Before today, I don't remember if I showed this or not, but Emerald Station is in the sky. Because you either forgot or haven't been following my endeavors, you're probably wondering what it's for. Quite simply put, it is my savior - after a year in space I'll get eight million funds. That is huge - at the moment, I'm running dangerously low on money, at 600,000. Just in the near term, I have 500,000 funds worth of missions planned. Emerald Station is my fifth space station, after Ruby Station (really tiny, like 3 Mercury pod sized), Sapphire Station (about half the size of Emerald), Avalon Station (slightly smaller than the ISS), and Eclipse Station (LLO, 80t so far). It also contains one of the three crews I hired in Astronaut Class 3 (total of 9 people). After the year in space is up, a crew vehicle, probably Melody, will come and return the crew. Oh, did I mention Emerald is actually spinning to create artificial gravity? Now, for today. Today was mostly design. I built Venus and Mars landers for the upcoming window. The first launch I did was the final module of Avalon Station on a Neutron III. Except, due to the nature of the module, the fairing was wide. Coupled with the insane TWR of N3 late in the first stage burn, meant I had to launch 5 of them in order to actually have success. Eventually, it made it. This module, Module 18, is called LASER, and its purpose is to test out inflatable space habitats, much like its real counterpart BEAM. And here is the completed Avalon Station, in all of its glory, comprising of eighteen modules, two crewed vehicles, two resupply ships, and one RCS tug! Current future plans for the station involve a minimum of three years of research (and those are just the LEO experiments!), visitation by 27 more crew (3 crews of 3 per year for 3 years) (I'm going to need to hire a lot more astronauts) as well as possible visits from a partially reusable crew vehicle. Final mass is about 350 tons, compared to the ISS's 420 tons. Final part count is nearly 400... I need to do something about that... ...And so I launched the third Illectro/Skye combination. But first I had to undock and de-orbit Melody 3, as it was time for another crew launch anyway. Anyway, Skye/Illectro 3. I have stated in the past that it was an overly expensive piece of junk. It is expensive, and slightly junky (low TWR on S3 and the SM) but necessary for some jobs, such as removing 20-30 RCS ports from the station (it has a KAS/KIS bay in the SM). It was at this point that I realized - Skye/Illectro is a very picturesque rocket. This led to three or four five minute EVA's to remove the excess RCS ports and fit them into Skye's payload bay. However, since their volume is too big, Kerbals can only carry one at a time, meaning I have to fly back and forth to every RCS port with the jetpack... at 3 FPS... Fun! One or two hours later in IRL, I had most of the ports removed, but unfortunately Skye's bay wasn't quite big enough. I still have at least 3 (probably more I'm missing) ports on the station. So, who knows, maybe I'll send them down 3 at a time on Melodies, or I'll build another Skye and send 20 down, although that might be overkill... Hopefully coming up in a few days are the Venus and Mars windows. I plan to send a 4 sat comm network to both Mars and Venus, send two Mars landers, one Venus lander, and a Phobos (or Deimos) lander. Hopefully contracts from these landings will tide me over until I get the 8 million from Emerald Station. Here's what I plan to do with my remaining 600k: 150k - Eclipse Station M5 (or is it M4? I forget). 150k - Eclipse Station M6 (or M5, IDK). 100k - Lunar Rover. 100k - Venus Comm network (the only flotilla ship not yet built) 100k - Lunar Rover. If I can scrounge up another 100k, I'll send a crew to Eclipse Station.

"Mountain." -Elon Musk, IAC 2017.

Elon: Alright, we need to design something complicated to cut the rocket in half, any ideas? Random dude: Right click, decouple node.

Oh, okay. The only times that happens for me is when they are cropdusting. *Puts on detective hat* Not three words you want to hear next to each other. More words you don't want to hear together... Must be an interesting neighborhood. I'm imagining a movie playing inside my head in which a criminal motorbike club with guns steals a helicopter and then a nuclear bomb but then NSEP attacks them and disarms the bomb a second before it's going to go off. Man, my life is boring...

*sniff* I was trying to have a somewhat emotional evening, so I decided to go through the oldest screenshots I have on this computer. There are older ones (on the brick and the potato, respectively) so I didn't expect to see anything tear jerking. I was wrong. I just got - it's been so long since I've actually played KSP. I mean, recently I've done RO/RP-0, which is fun... Before that I got sucked up into writing, which means playing to follow a story in a specific direction. It also limits you because if you get too far ahead in gameplay then you don't remember how to make the story... It's been several months, if not a year. Man. In this album of screenshots I found screenshot number 326. This screenshot, for me, represents future memories and lost dreams simultaneously. I'm ashamed I can't even remember the order of my early crewed planetary expeditions. Before this came Dunarian IVB, another Duna mission, an Orion style Eve flyby, a Jool flyby maybe... And I'm 90% sure this was before I tried to recreate Kusster's Eve story in my own save... Anyways, this was the launch of - oh. I forgot its name. Silly me. This was one of my first 5 or so manned interplanetary expeditions, way back in 1.0.5. I remember it was a very special occasion, particularly because it was my first manned interplanetary voyage in career mode. All earlier attempts were in sandbox. I remember I went all out - I built giant fireworks, I downloaded someone's crew transport bus and spelled "EVE" on the back using linear RCS ports... I made the epic looking launch tower which included an interior ladder, an upper observation deck, and an almost functional (those fairings) crew boarding arm. The six souls onboard became, if I recall correctly, the first Kerbals to land on Gilly for me, ever. In fact, one Kerbal, I forget who, became the first part to touch Gilly, before even the landing legs. The return mission nearly ended in disaster, however, due to a low fuel margin and a terribly built spaceplane... Okay, I admit, I may have used ignore max temperature... The point is, I kept looking through my screenshots... I found so much unfinished business... my first Mun and Minmus bases, several careers, two pre Project-Intrepid Intrepid prototypes, an asteroid station, and the big one: Jool Expedition Two. Jool Expedition Two was supposed to be a follow up to Jool Expedition One, a flotilla that sent ten or so ships to Jool (and landed Kerbals on Bop, Pol, Tylo, and Laythe, but not Vall). It left the mothership behind due to a lack of fuel where it became Vall Station Petersen. The Laythe plane is still on Laythe, the SSTO still in orbit... the ScanSat still orbiting Pol... waiting for years to be used... And there was that one way Laythe base... *sigh* If only I had an infinite amount of time on my hands... EDIT: Another relatable but non KSP gif: All I know about this picture is that I have seen it around and it's from an anime somewhere, but it looks really cool... man, I wish we made rockets like that...

And then one criminal dude would manage to blow up a hole in the thing, killing everyone... which, considering they're super dangerous criminals wouldn't be too much of a loss... Also, I realized that if point to point works out (somewhat dubious, I give it 40/60 near term, 70/30 medium term) then half of the people would just use the system to experience space... It's a perfectly functional orbital rocket doing suborbital trips, so why not just send it to orbit and make a space hotel or something? I could see that being pretty profitable.

I understand that BFR is all the rage right now, and it's sort of a bad time, but I found this cool graph: Now, we just need one of those lines to intersect...

Okay, watched the whole thing at 1.5x speed and I'm probably going to be almost late for school again, so I'll try to keep it short. This proposal looks more realistic than last year's. I'm skeptical on the landing legs. I know you can't have actual redundancy without 5 or 6, but the short horizontal distance they protrude out is fairly concerning. Still don't know how they are going to manage that flip around in the atmosphere. We've got video of the carbon tank exploding! Shutting down F9 lines? That's a risky business move, Elon. I'd keep some facilities open if I were you, at least the second stage production lines. What if your storage hangar goes down in a hurricane before BFR is flying? And I seriously hope you give it a better name. You said BFR is the code-name and not the real name, and I hope you're right. WOOOOHOOO SPACE! 2024 is a bit optimistic for humans on Mars. I think 2028 might be better, but that's still great! Point to point, I'm really skeptical of. Like, extremely. With these things it's not about if one of them will explode with 100 passengers, it's when. Nothing about estimated cost. Refueling looks more realistic now. Yay! Mars! I'm out of time, more I'd like to say, but school starts in 5 minutes.

Sorry, guys. Dad's insisting that I get to bed at a decent hour tonight because I've been late to school this entire week and making stupid mistakes like forgetting to turn something in. I've been waiting several months... Oh, look, it's past me. Sorry, dude, I let you down.

Welcome to the club! Because I missed last year's (of all things, it had to be an eye doctor appointment) I'd basically do anything to see this one. *goes to grab chex mix* *realizes I don't have chex mix* *considers grabbing popcorn* *waits for 11:20 to make popcorn* Here's to staying up late!

172340 no clue

Lucky you... I'd be willing to bet I'm the only person in my town of 3200 people that's this interested in space. If only I had a friend who was as interested in space as I was... Does she play KSP?

Makes you wonder when someone will make a mod for KSP RSS/RO which syncs the animation to input parameters... Methinks it would look much, much nicer than what I remember the Proton launch streams being like.

Yes, none of them work. The YouTube one shows up but it won't let me play it, but clicking on the other two buttons do not bring up a video. Also, liftoff! Although I can't see anything!