NCommander

Don't have enough content for an update today and tomorrow is iffy. I finally got my Luna Lander working with what I would considerable an acceptable (though still thin) margins (with the added bonus it can reach Minnus now). HS Duna set a new speed record for me personally as I sent it shooting out of Kerbin's SoI after a 4700 m/s ejection burn (though total fuel usage was somewhat higher because the very long burn meant Mr. Orbeth wasn't helping as much, I was already screaming into high orbit when I reached the end of the burn). I had the first kraken strike of this series during the first attempt on ejection; decoupler failed to actually detach the booster tanks so I had to do the rather painful 10 minute burn twice plus the transfer to Ejection Transfer Orbit. The staging was correct, and it worked on the second try so "meh" after the quickload. Went right down the center. Just need a 17 m/s burn are perihelon to get it trimmed for close approach. It looks like Bob and one of the whitesuits are our lucky volunteers for the first Mun landing and ten day stay. I intended to send Val and Bill, but I need to get their plot moving a bit more before I can risk killing them in space. I did have the next "plot" chapter planned out, and after Mun and Minnus, I'm going to have to grind some contracts for cash. The space program has about 300k in the bank, but I really want a lot more. Launchpad 3, and possibly Admin 2. Val has a decent chance of the first manned Minnus mission of any sort though and I may have her lead the next stage of munar exploration.

Screenshots look like they got eaten by the forums software. Only the Dust Clouds image is showing.

Yeah, there was a fair bit of debate on nerfing the ionizing radiation in the Kerbalism thread, but unless you've got a kilometer long spaceship, you're never going to completely null out the nuke's radiation. It's basically living right next to a nuclear pile. Nukes for me are probably going to be used to just get a ship started, and to send fuel depots across the solar system (which can be recovered for spare engines). Critical part failures are going to be fun when I start looking at Duna, but given the size of KSP, it's actually surprisingly reasonable to get a non-trivial payload screaming across the solar system despite launch windows. I just send an Ike orbiter screaming with a 5 km/s ejection burn out of Kerbin's SoI, and it will spend another 2k trying to hit the brakes when it reaches Duna without using the nuke (haven't unlocked it yet). An asparagus staged NERV can *seriously* get some impressive dV numbers. The fuel cell array actually puts out enough gas that it can power roughly two ion engines a pop at full tilt though you very much hit diminishing returns with the ion drive, and they're stupidly expensive in career mode. Eve mission looks impressive. My biggest fear is I'm going to send the return vechile, and an engine fails before departure. You *really* don't get much of a margin when trying to punch out of Eve's atmosphere.

I've been screwing around with a Duna mission in sandbox mode somewhat. What I've discovered is the biggest problem is the nuclear engines. After a fair bit of testing, what I discovered is that if you send up a Lab with full shielding, two hitchhikers, and the culpa with two shielding generators, you get six years of protection and the planner says it should survive one or two CMEs esp if you combine it with the convert-o-tron 250 to make more shielding. However, if you put two nukes on that bad boy, it suddenly plummets. The nukes generate a constant source of radiation even when deactivated, and it shaves the radiation meter to a 1/6th of what it was. RTGs are almost as bad. It looks like I'm going to be sending a manned Duna mission on chemical rockets, or suck up the cost and time to embrace ions. Alternatively, I might simply make the nukes dockable, and detach them and let them catch up to the rest of the space craft in LDO. I'll still have to do the braking burns with chemical rockets, or dock with the nuclear stack before it enters Duna SoI.

No pictures for this update, but I needed to move the plot along to setup 6.2 or 7.1. I also suck at building sets, so some imagination is going to be required for this update. I've been fairly swamped at work, so this is mostly what I've managed to get down on paper during moments of air. Chapter 6.1 - Forgotten Archives ---

I've used Strategia before, it sucks the difficulty out of career mode. It's fairly trivial to break the game in half because I ended up with a SSTO that counted as a heavy weight launcher and BAM, money. I also dislike being forced onto one specific path. If I took Mun program, I would never bother sending missions to Eve or Duna until I completed it. The unmanned missions are also annoying since it requires three separate landings; not a trivial thing when you're forcing delays between launches like I am or using Kerbal Construction Time. Pilot Focus II or III can make a stupid amount of money since it's pretty trivial to build something that can ship tourists to a moon relatively easy. When combined with heavy launches ... well ... It also doesn't help that the penalties for ending a program are really high.

@Alpha 360 It's mostly the amount of weight on the launchpad to get it within 140 tons of rocket hardware, the tier 2 launchpad is something of a drag that way. I have no problems building heavy payloads, I just don't have the cash in game to upgrade the launchpad to the final tier, the R&D upgrade is already a bank breaker. Once I have the Tier 3 Launchpad, I'll have no trouble sending a payload to Minnus with the necessary life support bits. As for Mainsaill vs. Reliant, your calculations also don't take in fuel efficiency. The mainsail guzzles fuel at 98.55 units of LF vs each reliant at 15.77 which comes to 126, and eight reliants also weigh about double a single mailsail which gets you that much closer to the all important T2 Launchpad weight limit. For very light payloads, I will still send them up on 1.25m parts, even after finishing the tech tree just because they're really cheap. I do use Poodle second stages a fair bit (the Duna HS went up with one, and I think I had at least other one payload that used it), but my payloads are generally light enough that I can launch on a single stack which reduces costs, and complexity. I generally been launching on the skippers, the Duna HS is the only thing I sent into space on a Mainsail simply because I didn't have it up until that point. Generally the skipper with an orange tank will send 18-20 tons SSTO if it can get going. Thumpers or kickbacks can get the payload going and give a TWR <1 all the way to orbit.The problem with the Poodle is it rather low TWR, and thus it can actually be a net negative because it may take too long to get out of the atmosphere. Basically, to actually get to orbit for 3400 m/s, you need to be blitzing through atmo, and then immediately circularize; Gravity Turn's stats page is actually quite enlightening and shows you how much you lost in dV because you hadn't reached +70, or conversely, how much you lost because your ascent trajectory was too steep.

As a follow up to this, I was skimming the Kerbalism thread, and it looks like it may track debris. You might want to go through the flight center and clean out the kesslar syndrome. It might get your active vessel count up. I also wonder if it's having a bad interaction with the 6.4x scaled planets. I've currently got about 15 active flights in my playthrough and I'm not hitting unusual lag, but my gaming rig is beefy (abiet slightly dated at this point)

@MacLuky 400 per active module or total? On my career play-through of Kerbalism, I'm eyeing a manned Eve or Moho flyby as the first interstellar mission. I've been told Duna is harder than a Jool-5 when you have Kerbalism due to the travel times alone, and testing in sandbox shows that Jool is very good at irradiating crews. It's been awhile since I did the math, but the dV totals for making the burns in solar orbit to return within a year aren't terrible, but until I have all the necessary tech, I'm not quite ready to send anything there (getting a two man can to Minnus with enough life support on a T2 launchpad is proving close to impossible).

So I'm going to do plot in the .1 chapters, and regular play in main chapters. My KSP time over the weekend was primarily getting a lunar lander design that I was happy with that could work within the 140t limit of the L2 launchpad (I was going to go Apollo style, but I can't justify the cost and I couldn't work out a design that could actually get into orbit and go to the mun within 140 tons. LEM 1 (design name) though is at least constructed and undergoing simulations at the moment to see if it's actually ready for duty. The real downside to career mode is I can't reproduce the entire set of Apollo missions. As per usual, for mission chapters, we'll group them by sets, and not chronically. Chapter 6 - The Sudden Stop At The End

How are they handling the radiation? I'm working through a Kerbalism career in another thread and I've noticed skimming the kerbalism thread that radiation more than anything else seems to be the common killer.

I utterly lost it with the space-ship. Here I was thinking batexcrements insane builds only happened when the planets were tiny. Then again, you retrofitted your base into a rove,r into a ship and god knows what else. I'm not sure how 6.4x GPP compares to RSS but if they're remotely similar, serious props for sending that thing to Rald without engineer readouts.

I've got the opposite problem. I design one mission and I somehow end up with it exceeding my performance requirements by a stupid margin; I blame playing RSS. I decided I wanted to send a probe Duna despite not having a launch window. The "best" possible launch would require ~5000 m/s just to get there. I was trying to work out if I could reasonably aerobrake at those velocities, and then suddenly, a few clicks later, I end up with a probe that has 8000 m/s in orbit. That sucker can go to Moho and back (which I'll probably end up doing). It should be noted that I did this was the basic R&D Level 1 parts NOT the LV-N. My designs get stupid when I have those because I end up with absurd amounts of fuel in orbit (I've sent probes on interstellar trajectories before)

Chapter 5.1 - DIL/Skipper ---

Chapter 5 - Dancing in Light Missions with a * in the tile notes that quicksaves were used in the mission. Quicksaves are only used for plane missions.

I have RCS Build Aid installed, Skipper is *stable* during flight regardless of fuel load; it actually is quite land-phobic when the tanks are bone dry. Getting something stable in FAR is something of a trick; you actually have to understand the aerodynamic principles in play to get something that's remotely flyable let alone going supersonic. Stock is considerably easier, but if you expect reality, you can actually get rather confused (flying the stock SSTO with FAR is an exercise in hilarity). I actually went to the island airfield for plot reasons and discovered with the tanks mostly empty, it will actually go super-sonic. The problem was it's unstable landing with nothing short of full tanks or empty tanks. After a LOT of additional testing, I eventually worked out the root cause to be related to the landing gear and a bad interaction with Atmospheric Autopilot; specifically, I had steering on the front enabled with steering enabled. This was causing a hell of a lot of twitchiness when I had touchdown; atmospheric autopilot would try to correct to the original heading and *SPIN*. Landing with SAS on the other hand was quite a bit more stable. This might be because I haven't used AA in 1.3; I don't remember having the issue in 1.2. The forward trust actually was helping keeping the gear going; I couldn't see it in the dark but I suspect a lot of the landing crashes were due to landing and then flipping over; when I reproduced the flights during the day, that's what typically happened. The gear was also angled to provide a slight pitchup; this works wonders for getting off the runway, but the gear being offset made it quite a bit squarely at about 80 m/s. A brief redesign got it stable at much slower landing speeds and I've had a lot less issues (I lost the flaps and gave it spoilers since it's perfectly happy to fly, land and take off at flaps 0). I likely need to play with the friction sliders to see if I can get it to stick to the runway and not re-create Kerban Drift Program. It looks like 1.3 changed the 1.2 wheel physics slightly (though to be fair, I've had gear issues since 1.1 dropped). Flying with a keyboard also means control inputs are fairly heavy. And yeah, the actual landing was only with the gear landing lights. Skipper was exactly 30 parts with the three science experiments; I hadn't planned on a night return to the KSC. I did work out the range based on the little jaunt to the poles; I *drastically* overdesigned Skipper; it has enough fuel to go around the world twice if I did the math right. I might even just try that at some point. As far as where we are in the save, Stellar Wind just crossed into Eve's SoI, and I'm holding off launching a mission to try and hit the Duna intercept, though that's going to be tricky since it's going to need a massive rocket. I'm doing the write-up now. Next session will be pretty much Stellar Wind at Eve. CCD's Minnus mission failed to meet all it's objectives (which is becoming a theme). For the Duna mission, I need about 7-8k dV to actually get there and park it in the right orbit; I also have a contract to explore Ike so I might head there instead of mapping Duna per my original intentions.

No strong opinions on the presentation style, but I like the all in one launch to the Minnus analog. The last time I built a station there, I would haul the components up to LKO one by one, and then launch crews that would dock with a component and tow it (the station core was the exception, it got a dedicated booster since it was also the primarily fuel dump). I rotated the crews about one a month so each crew would go up, grab another piece of the station, and resupply the life support at the same time.

I need some advice. So, I had the day off, so I ended up on a KSP binge, and wanted to fly a plane. As I said before, planes are difficult at best in KSP when you're using the keyboard. I ended up building Skipper, the first jet of the KSC and kicking off some plot for this LP, but ran into problems. To prevent bankrupting my space agency, I designed the skipper in a seperate copy of the save with reverting on as it's notoriously difficult to build a plane in FAR that can land on rough terrain and be stable regardless of fuel levels and KRASH sets simulation costs in atmo at 300-400 per minute. This was to complete a mission to bring a tourist to the North Ice Shelf, land, do science, and hit recovery. I decided to penalize myself for building it in a spare save, I'd fly to the pole and bring it back. To my credit, I did actually make it all the way there, stuck the landing and back to the KSC with excess fuel to spare. The problem was I timed the North Pole departure rather ... poorly, and returned to the KSC in the dead of night. I've managed night landings before but only with a fully upgraded runway. It's *really* hard to even seen the ground. I also discovered Skipper had something of a small stability problem when landing with half-full tanks; it would be sluggish to pitch up and I kept bouncing or rolling over. As I found, Hard actually allows F5/F9 to work, so I ended up debugging the flight. To actually land, I had to cave and install an ILS mod and fly the entire approach via instruments. I eventually determined to keep the plane flyable, I had to come in at 1/3rd throttle; a problem I didn't have with nearly full tanks or empty ones when I tested. Once I figured out a slight bug with NavUtils (hint: don't have a waypoint called KSC 09), it only took three attempts to stick the landing on 27 mostly due to my in-familiarity with during a pure ILS mod (I couldn't see the runway until I was literially ontop of it). To be blunt, I'm not sure how best to handle this. Hard mode does allow F5/F9, so technically, I haven't violated the rules that KSP sets, but I also don't think I'm willing to risk any planes (space or otherwise) without some leyway; I'm not Scott Manley :). I also technically completed all the contract aside from hitting recover before I save/reloaded so there's that. Ultimately, this thread is for entertainment; I'm not trying to prove anything, so if people want to see pretty scatterer screenshots and allow me to F5/F9 on planes, they'll continue. Otherwise we'll be a rocket based program for the most part. I could also allow quicksaving to in-atmosphere flight with airplanes; i.e., if I'm flying a plane on Duna, I can F5/F9 and simulate it freely with hyperedit. I'll leave no revert for everything else because the failures are funny to look at in hindsight. I've also added a parashoot mod so I could have ditched (although in this case, I got determined to get the landing in the night despite teh cheating). So I'll let the jury decide. I'll have some time before the next update. I've only done two missions since I sank a few hours into getting a plane working

Real life continues to kick my cheeks, and insomnia hasn't helped (I've slept maybe 10 hours in three days). Writing helps me unwind so ... Chapter 4 - Fender Bender

No proper update tonight, but that's due to an exceptionally long day at work, and nearly two hours trying to get the kinks out of StellarWind - this build simply wouldn't come together, and I've likely spent 40-50k in game simulating the kinks out, though we now have our first heavy lifter. The other other thing I did was complete Endurance/Atlas's mission and actually had a re-entry abort to avoid killing Bill, and some housekeeping on a few other probes to get them into new orbits. Here's a preview for the LS StellarWind mission which is taking a relatively easy Eve intercept. After much hoing and humming, I ended up upgrading the VAB; I'm going to likely have to have a grindfest to get R&D Tier 2; sending a probe to Eve though should increment the internal progress marker and I should start getting missions to the other planets. There's a *relatively* cheap window to Duna for 3k transfer coming up in about 10 in game weeks, and I'm likely going to take it so this launcher and possibly probe design will get reused. Let's talk about Stellar Wind and a bit about it's design. Longshot - Stellar Wind Originally, Stellar Wind was envisioned to simply strap the Luna 1 probe to a larger LV and call it good, but Longshot was fuming after vaporizing a probe from munar orbit, so it was decided to go big or go home. I'm *still* not sure why it vaporized; re-entry heating is at 100%. As such, Stellar Wind was redesigned to be an orbiter/lander combo. Before we get into the specifics, let's go over mission objectives. As far as I understand Kerbalism, my current comm setup SHOULD work to Eve and Duna, as well as Dres for part of it's orbit; Jeb's capsule just passed perihelion, and still has a downlink to the KSC with the high-gain antenna. If it turns out that I loose radio contact with the KSC, the mission will ditch the lander and instead be a high-speed flyby. Either way, SCIENCE! Components Stellar LV Eve Transfer Module Wind - Orbiter Leaf - Lander Stellar Wind - Primary Objectives First (intentional) heliocentric orbit Scientific data from high solar orbit Eve flyby/data capture Propulsive capture into elliptical polar Eve SCANSat altimetry telemetry for Eve Deploy the Leaf Lander Secondary Objectives Successfully land on Eve Explore Gilly The mission will be considered an overall success if we manage to get data back from Eve. Otherwise Longshot will score another point on the expensive hardware lob (Endurance and Longshot are tied ATM). As far as building, ugh, I actually had more issues with the LV than the probe/lander, which is unusual for me. The first problem was noodly rocket syndrome as the LV expended most of it's fuel (it's going to kick us out of Kerbin SoI, then the ETM takes over). That was (eventually) fixed by removing the probes from the fairing, welding a stack seperator between them, and then bolting a decoupler to the bottom the fairing. That fixed noodly rocket, Stellar then decided to develop a slight vaporization issue as it passed Max-Q once dumping the strap-on boosters. This one was eventually resolved by installing Ferram Aerospace to get more reliable rocket physics, strutting, and some fiddling with thrust limiters. I was kinda avoiding installing FAR because it makes building working planes fiddly as heck, but I'm too used to playing RO/RSS to go back to Kerbal physics. I've gotten usable SSTOs with FAR before, it just means the build time goes from 20 minutes to 2 hours to prevent supersonic shuttering from blowing up the LV. Planes tend to be a dangerous moneysink in career mode, but I do want to eventually upgrade the SPH/runway; I'll likely look at doing that after R&D upgrade, and launchpad L3. As for as launch schedule, here's what's planned. I'll likely wait for StellarWind to get to Eve before pushing up the next update but I'll post these type of messages regularly. StellarWind One or two rescue missions (finally got some contracts to show up, but I got ... two engineers. Ugh, persistance save file editing might follow) At least one if not two Commercial Mun Missions, with LMO return (I'm going to get this working) High-speed Duna mission Minnus is going to get some probe love Manned cismunar mission (Bob or Bill)

Well, this was an interesting round of missions. Instead of recapping missions in chronicle order, I'm going to group them by project for this update. Chapter 3: In Space, No One Can Hear You Explode

So Kerbalism life support aspect is pretty close to TAC in terms of complexity but less "tacked on"; then again, kerbalism adds a lot so it's hard to compare it to any other mods. It's mostly mechanics and only has a small handful of parts in that regard. Radiation shielding is added as a resource; for a short fieldtrip I probably don't need much.The Mk.1 capsule carries enough life support for 5d. Generally speaking, it usually a day each way to and from the mun so theorically, I could pull and touch and go landing without additional parts. The trick here is power and communication, though generally I hate touch and go missions. Right now, short of the leaning stack of batteries, the best power source I have is the fuel cell, which needs hydrogen and oxygen to run (and I get water out of it). So effectively 2-3 parts though the counter is with the way the fuel cell works in Kerbalism, I actually can skip the solar panels so it's net neutral or net negative since I can probably ditch anything beyond the capsule battery. I'm sorta debating NF Power, but I won't do that until after I finish the tech tree. I'm leaning for updating R&D because with docking, I can easily lob more hardware in two launches and just combine them in orbit; I can get a full lunar lander in 30 parts, its more getting those 30 bits to the mun without any other bits that gets tricky. '

Retrieving the Freeballer and safely landing it at Kerbin is a goal I have in mind for this series, but it will be quite a long time before I can pull that mission off. Solar intercepts are already annoyingly difficult, and the mun launched it's in a really awkward orbit to reach, I essentially got the full 500dV boost from the mun, and it was already close to escape velocity due to the earlier failure to the point Freeballer's orbit could actually intercept Eve if it wasn't for the phase angle. I'm likely going to have to manually work out the math to determine how to even get an intercept with it without a massive amount of overdesign. Roughly speaking, there should be a launch window to Freeballer's orbit once every two years or so, depending on where it is in the solar cycle. I won't know for sure until I do the math though. Then a few more orbits before I can get an intercept back to Kerbin. I'm not even going to bother working out the intercept math until I even have the necessary parts; specifically the grabber and the NERV or ions. As things stand though, it's going to be awhile before I have the cash to update the R&D facility+science. I'm eyeing a two probe mission to Duna to at least pay for the former, but the orbits desired are annoying awkward compared to the intercept angle I'll have at the next launch window (basically a 90 and 270 degree u-turn; Ike can sometimes be used to help there but it's going to be irritating no matter what, alternatively brake into an elliptical orbit and flip it, but again, Ike causes issues here). The next trick is then determining if I'm sending a manned mission or not; one of the quirks of Kerbalism is part failures are a thing, and I've already had a few with the orbiting probes. An engineer can SOMETIMES repair a part, sometimes not. Once I can intercept Freeballer, I need to bring it back to Kerbin's SoI without destroying it; I try to avoid excessive aerobraking on payloads not designed for it though I can probably use a few hundred m/s to change to to elliptical and then gently aerobrake. Then for the one real practical use for Shuttles; retrieving large downmass payloads. I have the craft file, I'm fairly sure it will fit in the Mk3 cargo bay, followed by a return to the KSC, and a winch to move it somewhere. It will be a rather interesting mission when I can pull it off. In other news, I've got two projects currently cooking. Endurance is our manned return to flight, and proving the technology to pull off a Mun landing. Endurance has seen the first long-duration mission to LKO, rendezvous, docking and EVA, and Bill's first launch. It also had our first launch abort when I loaded the wrong craft. The next milestone of endurance is to return an unmanned probe with science from munar orbit to Kerbin, followed up by a manned cislunar mission. Longshot is the exploration program; it's already sent a probe to Minnus and returned a bucketload of data. We've got an Eve launch window coming up which I'm going to use to lob something at the grape. I'm currently debating if I want to upgrade the VAB now, or save money for an R&D upgrade, R&D upgrade gets me resource transfer and surface sample which are extremely useful, but 30 parts is damn chafing at times. I can pull off a landing with the 30 part limit, though I'll likely send a dedicated lander to LMO and then catch up with it on a later launch.

Chapter 2 - Probe Wars and Hubris

Ah, Eve, the delta-v sink of the known universe. Only place that comes close as demanding is Tycho. Eve has the advantage that it's relatively easy to land. Going back up, now that's a trick. Course, then there was the crazy guy who send a rocket down to 0m on Jool and then brought it back up.