Ultimate Steve

Well, no matter how bad you think the aero is today, it's infinitely better than what we started out with. (Oh, the days of intake spamming, 10km gravity turns, and infinigliding...)

So, it's basically the IYSS Mk3? THE HYPE IS REAL!!! Man, I wish I could contribute to one of these sometime.

Unfortunately, we won't get rid of all of them. Maybe 90%. Which is still a lot. But not enough! When we land someone on the Moon again/Mars, we'll get rid of another 90% of that 10%. So, 1% will be left. Until we have a regular one month NTR powered Earth-Mars taxi service, we won't be rid of them. Or maybe... If we sent naturehacker to the moon, would he believe?

I don't have the pictures with me right now, but there are several milestones that each KSP player reaches (Well, not all of them) that open new gateways. First orbit: I'm getting the hang of this game! (Me: Toddler Steps III or something like that, back in 0.19.) First Mun/Minmus landing: I can actually enjoy this game! (Me: I forget the name, but it was a super overbuilt manned Minmus landing, with two Mun probes as my only previous experience at landing on airless bodies.) First docking: Opens up new possibilities, like giant spaceships and stations and other cool things! (Me: Docker A and Docker B. Took forever. At first I though "Oh, cool!" But my real "I can dock!" moment was the first additional module of Space Station Epic. I swear, it took me two hours to dock it! I felt so awesome afterward! And now, I'm up to Space Station Epic V, which is about a hundred meters across!) First precision landing: Woohoo! I can build bases now! (Me: I don't remember, probably Minmus Base Python?) First manned Duna landing and return: Woah, I can do anything in this game now! (Yeah, this is true! After Duna, you can basically go anywhere!) (Me: I forget the name, but it was a two part ascent module and lander. I felt so cool climbing Jeb dramatically down the ladder!) First ascent from Eve: Woah. I have truly mastered this game! (WOOOHOOO! If you need more info, I think it's in part 29(?) of Project Intrepid. It was a huge, five man ship that was brought to Eve by a 100 meter long mothership.) Do a minor impossible thing: Oh, cool! I got a dozen likes on one post! (I've done three. One being a working ion plane in 1.1, two, I built a steampunk Mun base using only solid rocket boosters (Yes, you heard me!) and three, sending 916 Kerbals to Minmus in one launch!) Do a major impossible thing: Why did my like counter suddenly jump 200 points? (I have never done one of these. But to list a few: the first stock helicopter. The Rubik's cube. That first guy to do a Jool ascent. The EVA grand tour. The guy who went to Eve and back twice with no refueling and the same ship. If you achieve one of these, you basically have become one of the few overlords of KSP. Cherish it! Now, whatever can I do to get into this group...)

Post number four of "Steampunk Space Program." Due to my future plans, I need more escape capacity. Cue Britannia VI. That is 55 Kickbacks on the first stage. And I actually had to use some of the second stage to get my apoapsis in space. From there, the mission preceded nominally (Well, as nominally as a precision landing solid fueled Mun lander can be) until I began the landing burn. Note: This is not the landing burn. This is the plane change burn. The landing burn was eventful! First off, the three motors I used for the landing burn were mounted off center, so there was an uncontrollable roll. However, you can edit autostruts in flight (hooray!) so a quick quickload fixed that problem. Now, the second problem: The landing motors had twice the amount of Delta V I needed. So I had to spin it really fast so the motors would cancel themselves out... By that point I was a bit off course and only had 24 separatrons left, providing barely 60m/s of Delta V. I used 12 of them to realign my landing site, and the last twelve to brake. I hit the surface at around 30m/s. Luckily, that batch of de-orbit motors that I forgot to put on a decoupler absorbed most of the shock of impact... This picture shows the entire base. Left: Most of the base. Middle distance: American Ascent Vehicle. Right: Britannia II. Foreground: Britannia VI. So, now I have ascent capability for 20 more Kerbals! That's 29 total I have now. The base currently supports either 11 or 12, so I have room for up to 18 more flights (If I have 1 Kerbal each on them - which I probably will not, so more like 8 flights) before I have to launch another one. I have plans for an American habitation module, a medical center, a few more train cars (Fuel tank cars, mostly, so I can maybe drive to the crashed UFO site), a British train (maybe), a skyscraper of some sort, a castle (Hey, this is 1890 Britain), and eventually a Duna mission. Now, I wonder... can I use the train to drop the train car down a large hill and have the crew in the train car survive? I probably won't be able to work the brakes, but it's worth a shot...

If the module is a vertical cylinder with legs on the bottom, launch it normally and use a skycrane or retro pack. If it is a horizontal cylinder with legs along the length, you have two options: Launch it straight up and down with a skycrane/retropack like mentioned earlier and then tilt it over so the legs face down a few seconds before touchdown (Or on the surface). The second option is being totally awesome and designing a super cool futuristic dropship with a cargo bay that hovers five meters above the surface, drops the module out of a cargo bay, and flies away.

Slight correction: The stock xenon engine will not lift any planes off the ground of Kerbin from runway level, no matter how light. Actually, there was a challenge a while back, the Ion Plane Research Challenge. It is practically impossible to get an ion powered plane off of the runway. The lowest anyone managed to get was around 4000m or 1500m, I forget. I had one of the most promising designs for higher altitude takeoff - taking off from 6000m and I think I managed to get to 22km on one flight. There are a few simple reasons why this is not possible from sea level: 1. Ion engines already generate low thrust in a vacuum. They generate <0.1kn at sea level and have an isp of around 70. 2. Wings generate lots of drag and add more mass. Someone from the IPRC calculated he could get his plane off the runway if he got it to 18m/s. He turned on infinite electricity, not worrying about the mass of power generation systems, and managed to get to 14m/s before the end of the runway with a nearly ideal plane. 3. Power. I launched from a tall mountain at a high latitude, so solar panels would have to be angled, and therefore would produce drag. So I used bulky, draggy fuel cells. All of these problems are multiplied if you want to get to space or orbit. 1. Lifting any orbit capable ship would require hundreds of low thrust engines, melting your computer. 2. It would be heavy, which means more wings, which means it's heavier and draggier, needing more engines and wings... If you want to get to orbit from sea level, this is probably a positive feedback loop. 3. Solar panels are (I think) the most mass efficient power generator on Kerbin. If you managed to take off so they don't need to be angled, you still have to have the sun out. My flight to 22Km took half an hour. A day on Kerbin is 6 hours, 3 of that being sunlight. You'd need the movable solar panels to get any kind of power throughout the day, and those tend to break. That being said, it might* be possible of you took off from the mountains just west of the KSC.

Third post of my "Steampunk Space Program." That moment when you decide that you're going to launch a train to your Mun base using only solid rocket boosters. Keeping with Steampunk, it is a steam train. The fuel is finite, however, as it is "fuel cell" powered. (Canon: burnable fuel and water that leaks out is the LF and O that drives the fuel cells.) I'm going to see if it's strong enough to move the ascent vehicles closer to the base.

The fully SRB powered space program is continuing. Britannia V was a science lab. New Britain/New America is now up to the 9/9 return seat capacity. Oh, yeah, I also got the whole "Sepratron powered precision landing" thing up to a whole new level: No rover wheels. No prior touchdown. No ions, RCS, or LFO. Just pure solid fuel, dropped from orbit!

I present to you: the biggest (practical) craft I have ever built (I built it for my mission report): The Intrepid Test Vehicle 020 Philosopher of Time! It is about twice as big at launch from Kerbin: The booster stage is dropped before it reaches orbit, but when you're in orbit, you can probably do a one way trip to Moho if you refill oxidizer on Minmus, go to Eve orbit and Gilly, Mun orbit, Minmus, Duna orbit and maybe Ike, Bop and Pol, Low orbit of Jool's moons, and maybe Eeloo. It is fully equipped with mining equipment, several Nerv and Vector engines, 18 gigantor panels, radiators, the biggest relay antenna, scanning equipment, and probe control. It is nearly 100 meters tall, has a few docking ports, is bigger than my previous biggest lifter which got 1500 tons of supplies to Minmus, and accelerates like a snail. Oh, yeah, and it can carry 916 Kerbals. *dabs* It would only take three and a half of them to evacuate my entire town to space. (If we lived on Kerbin.) And if I ever actually get back into my mission report, I literally have a plan for a ten thousand Kerbal starship.

Mine doesn't freeze at that point, it just pauses. Because that item on the loading bar is, like, 100 actual items. You can open the debug menu and see if it is indeed frozen or just taking a long time. Easily 2/3 of my average load time is spent on bundle definitions.

Well, you're going to think I'm crazy. The short version: I'm building a Mun base using only solid rockets. The long version: A few days ago I started thinking: What if Great Britain had decided to try to get a man to the moon in, say, 1890? Like, Steampunk/Jules Verne style. So, I built a rocket to try to get to orbit, Britannia I. It crashed. So I built a Mun rocket, Britannia II. It worked! It was supposed to be a one way mission, ala From the Earth to the Moon. But I felt a bit bad about leaving Jeb to die on the Moon. So I then told myself how hard it would be to build a solid fueled rescue mission that could get into a polar Mun orbit and touch down at the right time and place to rescue Jeb. And then I did it. At night. Those bottom sepatrons are empty, and they are on a stack decoupler. The others should be sufficient to return two Kerbals to Kerbin (One had to pilot it, this is before computers). So then, I'm like, what if Great Britain wanted to start a colonial outpost on the Mun? Now, that's a crazy rocket! Just to run you through my "standard" solid Mun profile, one set of boosters pushes the thing into space. The next set pushes it into orbit. There are a few that push it onto a transfer course, and one for orbital insertion. I need to be in a polar orbit because the base is like at 75 degrees Latitude. Then I wait for the base to pass below me, deorbit, and land. How do I do the burns accurately? I look at the KER value for the next stage and make a maneuver node with that exact amount of Delta V. The Mun base now has 4 Kerbals/Great Britain people. At this point, the Queen of England realized that this would not be a sustainable initiative, as their mines could not produce enough solid fuel to do the amount of missions necessary to fully colonise the Moon/Mun. So they brought the Americans in. America's first Mun lander. One man, and designed to fall from orbit and land at 200m/s using three landing gears. Wait a second! 5 people on the Mun and only 2 seats on the return vehicle? Because of this, the Americans launched a 7 Kerbal ascent module: Those 3 outer SRB's are empty, ignore them. Huh, maybe I'm actually the first person to have done that...

I, um.... I've been to Moho with a huge mothership. Sent stuff into the sun and out of the sun. I've built a small station out of an asteroid. Retuned from Eve. Bases on Mun/Min. Duna base. Ike landers. Jool-Sarnus 10. Jool expedition 1 with Vall station, Laythe SSTO, laythe plane, and lots of good stuff Not so dumb stuff: I've never been to the stock Eeloo, just the OPM Eeloo. Nor the stock Vall with crew (But I did do it with OPM installed, it hasn't changed). Simple-ish stuff I haven't done: a space station around Eve. Or Duna, for that matter. Pointless stuff I have done: Built roller coasters. Built space warships. And I am currently in the process of building a Mun base while only using SRB's. No LFO, no Monoprop. No Xenon. So far I've got to parts landed within 500m of each other! Not bad for solids!

Well, actually 916... Reason One: That cool picture. Reason Two: Experience. Reason Three: In my mission report the entire goal is to evacuate Kerbin. I thought I'd start with a giant 916 Kerbal spaceship... Thank you!

Yes. (Sorry in advance.) Mostly because it would make doing epic stuff like this: A lot easier.

Yeah, sorry, that sounded a bit harsh... I mean "Can I draw something with the same general idea with credit given but in color?"

And E's: Epic Fail.

0_0 Do you mind if I totally steal your idea?

I do about 37/50/13 KSP/Model Rockets/Other. Link is in my sig if anyone wants to check it out. Not to self advertise, or anything. There's a thread for it, so I'm contributing. I don't have much KSP stuff there now that I think about it. There's Reusable Space Program, which goes really slow with editing (I recorded the first 10 episodes in fall of 2016 and I'm only on episode 3). That's really my only KSP series. I have my recent Duna video, plus a bunch of funny clips in my "random clips" video. Oh, yeah, and my KSP music video of "The Final Countdown" that was blocked in Canada and Germany for copyright reasons and I had to unlist it. Still, the link is in my sig, if you want to. But beware, that is basically the first KSP video I ever made, so the quality may not be the best. I should redo it sometime...

But I clicked on this topic to post that! *NINJA* Yeah, that log was the true origin of KSP. The day of launches ended with Felipe walking away thinking he might base a game off of it some day. In 2012 Moach, Felipe's brother, posted the Kerbo Log to the forum. Felipe replied confirming the legitimacy of the log and stating that he didn't know it still existed. It must have been an interesting launch day, all of those failures... almost reminds me of my recent endeavors in rocketry.

You're also coming up soon! *goes to like your post*

999! Remember when I said I'd hit 1000 on a day when there was a rocket launch? CRS 10 launched a half hour ago! *DING* Oh, a ding? *checks other tab* @TheEpicSquared Thank you for my 1000th rep!

Except ion engines stink on Eve. If you're up to a challenge, the most efficient way to fly on Eve is to make a reaction wheel powered propeller plane. But those are notoriously difficult to make and fly.

I synced the theme from 2001: A space odyssey to the landing. Hmm, how long do you think it will be before we have a synced version of the two views from the technical cast?

YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! That was nice video!