Ultimate Steve

Hopefully Nauka won't face any more delays, it was originally scheduled for 2007... I'd love to see it go up, especially since it may only have 5 years to be used, and with every delay that becomes shorter unless we get that 2028 extension, which IMO should happen. Maybe by that time we'll have a spacecraft which can return the modules to Earth (BFR, modified New Glenn, New Armstrong, etc.) in a cost effective way.

They certainly do not have to be Kerbin equivalent. I'm currently playing through Whirligig, where the homeworld has 6g gravity but rotates really fast so it bulges out at the equator, where the gravity is a bit over 1g. Orbital velocity is 8km/s but you start off with 4.5 from the rotation of the planet. There's only an atmosphere to fix the isp. So basically there's no atmosphere whatsoever.

Chapter 2 - No Return I think that's the first time I've sent a Kerbal into orbit with no way of returning on purpose. I know it's part of the goal, to evacuate Mesbin, but at the same time I can't help but feel a tad bit guilty.

Meanwhile I'm stuck over here with 8GB.... I need to get myself some more!

Yes. I tend to bounce between things fairly quickly. Timberwind's playstyle is different from Whirligig's playstyle, is different from Intrepid's playstyle, is different from Voyage's playstyle. I'll work on whatever I feel like working on, generally.

Well, you can try to descend as far into a gas giant as possible and make it out alive. I've only just started playing the whirligig pack. In that pack your homeworld is a super massive super spinny rock, which spun itself into basically a disc. Gravity is somewhere between 1 and 2g at the equator and over 6g at the poles. Orbital velocity is 8km/s but you're already going 4.5 at the equator due to the spin. Taking off from the poles and reaching orbit would be really, really, really hard. And no atmosphere to slow you down when you land. EDIT: Whirligig has been updated, it's only 2.5km/s to Mesbin orbit now, but at the poles it's now 13g. Mesbin is, however, binary with Derbin, which is basically a mega-Eve, a way thicker atmosphere, with more gravity, and a higher orbital velocity.

I probably should have asked first, but I did try to make it evident that that section is yours. The loose storyline was extrapolated pretty much entirely from those 4 paragraphs, so I didn't expect it to be fully correct, nor did I need it to be. As far as the prerelease goes, would it break active flight? And what all has been added? EDIT: How stable is it? Loving the mod so far, although I've only done one more mission than what I've reported above! Another edit: Once I've done more I can help write science report texts if you want help with that.

I've started a career mode mission report in this pack, just to let you know!

Conquering Whirligig Escape from Mesbin Two centuries ago, explorers from the far off planet Kerbin left their home to colonize other star systems. Preliminary transit data suggested the third planet of Kaywell's star had an oxygen atmosphere and water. It did not. Unable to correct their course due to piloting error, the U.S.C. Manifest Destiny crashed into the massive, 70 Kerbin Mass planet Mesbin. Luckily, Mesbin spins. Once every hour and twenty minutes it spins, and the centripetal effect pushes the equator outwards and negates some of the gravity. The 5 gees of gravity at the poles is reduced to a tad over 1 gee at the equator. The payload of the ship survived, but the engines and fuel tanks were reduced to a lot of metal rubble along the surface. Unable to find somewhere else to go, they buried themselves underground and set up a stable ecosystem and environment down there. Eventually the colony was sufficiently industrialized to start looking up again. Welcome to Mesbin. (It plays a bit like a more difficult Tylo Space Program, getting to and from orbit) -@GregroxMun, creator of the Whirligig mod Welcome. I should really stop starting stuff left and right... Don't expect this to go really far, it's just what I'm interested in now, and I'd like to share it with you! There will be minimal story, and quite possibly no character development, or dialogue even. For this one, I'm going to try my hardest to stick to "Mission report" instead of "Giant story with a beautifully complicated and lengthy plot" as to not interfere with anything else. As far as mods go, obviously I have GregroxMun's Whirligig system installed, as well as many other visual and informational mods, KAS/KIS, but no parts mods. If anyone wants to suggest parts mods, then go ahead! Enjoy! One of the most interesting things about this playthrough, I think, is the difficulty of returning things to Mesbin, meaning anything launched (including Kerbals) is probably up there for good! Chapter 1 - Breaking Free

I hate it when my bicycle chain slips off, especially if I accidentally sleep until 8:03 and school starts at 8:15. I made it this time, because my chain didn't slip. If my chain slips I have to turn the whole thing upside-down and get my fingers dirty putting it back on.

...Why am I only noticing this now? I sort of want to start a career in this and see how it goes! Maybe make a YouTube series out of it, but that would probably take too much time.

...None in 53, so I'll assume you mean 52 and 54. And because I've always wanted someone to ask about the interiors, I'll do both! In 52, there was the astronaut complex main entrance: Which had an unused balcony, a lack of doors, and does not actually have a front side, it's open to the air. Then there was the "hangout" section of the Astronaut complex, which had one or two tables, a pile of parts, a science trainer, an engine being repaired, a random antenna/sculpture, a trainer science lab, a flight simulator, and probably a few more things I've forgotten about! Now, the underground tram... It took a lot of time to get to work correctly. This was the first version, but I think I increased the pipe diameter so I could use Mk2 parts, and I made upward facing wheels. This version was too small and finicky... Another version used the 1.25m form factor but that was impractical since it could only carry about 5 people. Once I had the diameter figured out, I built a test track. But the tram proved too unreliable to do the whole run in one craft without anything breaking, and the SPH does weird things if I have a craft this big. The actual station took many attempts to get right. I ended up taking Mk3 cargo bays and raising the bottom with structural plates. I made a temporary 1.3.1 save to build all of this, and transferred that save to 1.4.5. I haven't actually brought the main save over just yet, there's a lot of story I need to write before we get back to business as usual. And 1.5 will probably be out by then... Meh. I'll probably keep it in 1.4.5, unless 1.5 offers something useful. In this temporary save I ended up with 14 different tram craft files for the various scenes. This is the exterior of the one where I crash through the station barrier and go down to the underground museum. And the part where I have a tram interior? That's this thing, the whole set is inside the mk2 bay, and I just rolled the thing around on its supports to get those moments where Jeb is knocking Doodgun back and forth. And then there's the museum, everything referenced in the story is stuff I actually built, most of it just for the museum. And this part, where Jeb was floating in the void, was done with completely burned out heat shields, 6 of them. I had more pictures but they all had the parachute visible. All of the damage done to the Paladin G2M was *mostly* real. Initially I wanted to actually use the BDA AI and try to outrun the missiles and bombs myself, but the Paladin kept crashing, and the BDA AI doesn't know that I don't have guns... I'd get a short machine gun burst from each plane every 2 minutes or so. Not paced fast enough. So I attacked the vehicle myself, which led to lots of quickloads and a few inconsistencies. I never actually loaded in a new craft as a broken one, except for the interior of the plane, so all of the damage was actually done by BDA, although I may have had to respawn a few Kerbals. Some of it was me on purpose shooting some parts from up close. These explosion images were done using weavesilk.com, a cool art tool. This room is its own interior, as is the hallway with the guns... I think the gun hallway was the only one I launched from the pad instead of the runway, because the room set was already on the runway and I didn't want to reposition the Kerbals. And then, of course, the airplane interior, which we're going to see more of, so I won't spoil that just yet! So, basically, a lot. Probably by having stories so popular and well written that there's 23 replies and 2 chapters per page!

Maybe it has something to do with HTV-7 being delayed.

Ya, that's a big problem, and why I'm: 1. Trying to make the chapters shorter (and failing) 2. Making as many slightly unnecessary comments as possible to get the thread to the next page! Hmm, I wonder if there is a slightly hacky way to only load some posts...

In a PM from @kerbalstar, released with permission: All I can say is... Gotcha! Chapter 54 - Terms and Conditions @Earthlinger in particular may want to see this... @53miner53, @ZLM-Master, @qzgy, @Thor Wotansen, and @dundun92's crafts also get used. There will be another part where they get used as well.

Chapter 53 - The End.

SQUAD is not who we should ask any more, I think.

SLS and JWST are in a competition to see which can launch last...

Wasn't it sub-GTO? Elliptical but not all the way to GTO? Not much in terms of Delta-V, but enough to make a difference?

This is the opposite of what you asked for, but... I'm pretty sure most transfer planner mods are pretty light on RAM alone... I myself use Transfer Window Planner. Kerbal Alarm Clock will give you something close to the optimal date of the transfer but not a porkchop. Mechjeb also has a porkchop planner but doesn't provide as much help in plotting as TWP does (TWP will show you the angles) and there is another mod that will actually make the maneuver node for you but I'm not sure what it's called. TWP and KAC are both fairly light on RAM as far as I know, and if you already play with MJ then you already have porkchops.

Wow, that would be insanely cool! But I have no idea of how to do it. But I have something that might be useful: http://libnoise.sourceforge.net/examples/complexplanet/ That's the original source for Kerbin's terrain, at a higher resolution than in game. The game took this and mirrored it, they flipped East and West. But unfortunately it's the old terrain, which was replaced in 0.18 I think. But it's a start. Maybe there's some way to get the configs out using reverse-Copernicus? I'm not sure how that would work, but it might involve reverse engineering or decompiling KSP code, which is against the terms of service and potentially illegal, but don't quote me on that. Here is HarvestR's comment on that map:

I knew that, but it was poorly worded. Ah, okay, so it was built on pad 4 then. Still, it's a bit odd that we have 1, 2, and 4...

Yeah, 1 and 2 are, we saw the FH boosters land on them, I didn't think there was an LZ-3 there.

Landing Zone 4? What happened to 3?