Bornholio

akron I really like the parts pack, enjoy the detail.

Rhea & Cronos went to Mars, I know mixing mythology, the automated Cronos, fully stocked with life support and emergency fuel along with 2 landers (Hades and Hestia). arrived at Deimos. Docked and transferred the landers and fuel, Cronos likely is now a orbital station. The 6 person crew of the Rhea begins surveying Deimos tonight. Rhea doesn't have the original spun habitat but the shorter trip time of 123days makes up for the lack of gravity. 2.3 million EC was not enough. The way back is gonna suck with hour long burns. Launch album http://imgur.com/a/azsZE

Space planes, still not sold, but i needed to do STS-30 mission for the monies. Space Buff "Balls Eight" Releasing Magellan into the void https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balls_8 Bleeding off way to much velocity for landing. Rare successful runway landing, deployed all my chutes to slow it down though. (Cape Canaveral) Nose needs more cooling, just about blew up on re-entry from 350x348km orbit. 300dv to correct for orbital rotation and 700dv spent landing, left me 1500dv fuel. RCS balance aid is a life saver for these builds. The dry center of mass indicator should be stock.

Launched parts of my manned mission to mars survey ship "Rhea" 10 trips, after 8 the ship part count started to be a bit high for my computer, 480 parts. got very hard to dock the ninth module. 3.2m Funds and i may start over to reduce the part count. Try to make it in 5 pieces, and eliminated some duplication of RCS, batteries, control and other things. http://imgur.com/a/AcNaT

Yes, but very seldom. I'd guess a dozen or more times I've had it do this or suddenly add thousands of dV and then be way off course. I always save before letting MJ execute a task. This is posted as a known issue inside Realism Overhaul Mod, are you using the 1.2.2 dev version of that? actually ( Using Dev Build, can't figure out why it's executing the next manuver node immediatly. ) is the listed problem. Outside of that case, did you change targets during the burn. I find that messes up MJ pretty often.

I felt bad about that poor mechjeb. So using [Descent Data], I started designing an ascent sample return vehicle. Has a retro thruster stage with 1500m/s dV for de-orbit into aerocapture. Then a heatshield plus aeroshell. Inside is the science package and power needed for the down trip. Everything is in an actively cooled cargo compartment. This needs to be opened for the atmospheric sampler. Attached to this from the top is a coupler and nuclear drive. Guessing that i need 10k+dV so the design gets 15k, collect all to the probe core in it, coms, power and minimal rcs along with a docking port so it can transfer its sample or be refueled. on Top is a balloon package ready to be inflated and tuned to 14km buoyancy on Earth. Attempt One: starting from a 3200x1590km orbit the system enters shallow, I'm aiming for the Great red dot in all these tests because it is a tighter target and tests control too. Missing a capture ruins the aim. Evidently needs a lower AP to get longer in high drag mode. A bit after PE i start using the last of the fuel to get the AP down and slightly reduce the PE to 780km, an hour later I start getting the first heavy thermal, my ablator is long gone from the capture. Shedding De-orbit tanks Chart 3.75m Heat sheild 1460km Full, Orbital Velocity 42km/s 1100km 850kg Ablator 1000km 790kg Ablator 900km 620kg Ablator 850km 425kg Ablator 800km 200kg Ablator 765km 0kg Ablator After this point it looked good then in full thermal heating I flipped the fairing burned up and a cascade of explosions. Heating Up over the course of 6 hourse i crashed three more designs. Final design, on target and ready to start the dive. Final design re-entry main heating phase

They survived Low Jupiter Orbit Re-entry Middle of main heating phase. Final design 6 hours of reentry testing... Coming in backwards More pics in my summary

wonder what mod changes mine. Do they increase x4 ablator with re-scale factor in tweak or x8? I'm thinking of using some 400% ones to cover my balloon housing instead of just aeroshell. If they are x8 scale factor then I'll be carrying more ablator than ship.

My comment is it appears to have about the same frontal area as a 1.25m Heat shield. They have 100 ablator. A tweak scale double size AB would have 1.6 tons of ablator on it! If I'm interpreting the ablator module stats it looks like it burns off a bit faster also. I think I'll slam some into Jupiter tonight.

Missing my target, 4km, inclined launch sites... (Cape Canaveral) One man orbital SSTO 10.7kdV for crew pickup and return. (Not a space plane, they are harder for me on earth.) Add boosters and it can do free return lunar pick up too. Pod can separate and stay in orbit with 15 days life support. Has crew safety jettison using a pair of ullage motors.Costs 99k funds but most of it is refunded with a descent landing.

I manually fixed this mod for myself by making two new config files SerCom1mFix.cfg and SerCom2mFix.cfg. Feel free to use the code if you wish. It is just an attempt to make it match the standard stock ones. Kept the lower price and EVA open only, changes the thermal to Stock , adds two cargo protection modules, places all 4 attachment nodes. was going to add tweakscale code but it is not yet in these. Also these really should show up in Payload tab not structural.

To the hellish depths of Jupiter. My delivery stage did anyways, took 75 minutes of somewhat boredom, part fascination, smidge of OCD. Worse yet i wrote a mission data page and a mission log RSS Jupiter Mission. Very dark down there. I left mechjeb down there too. I'm making a personal task of recovering material data and goo from flying Low, where it is at least 275 atmospheres pressure and pretty hot also. Not sure that I'll send manned mission. Too much 26G aerobraking.

RSS Mission to Jupiter & Moons. By Jove its a lot of work. Flyby mission, in my first year of operations I sent a flyby mission, basically minimal dV to get a probe into Jupiter SOI, several years later it passed in while I was doing my mars landers (unmanned yet). I next sent a deep system Commsat with a 10T antenna to Saturn along with four more missions. Out went a wave of heavy “Science Orbiters”, large nuclear drive and massive fuel tank pushing a full space science package and SCANsat gear. They included drop tanks, deploy-able probe for the main planet and a return package. Uranus, Saturn and Jupiter all had one fired at them. Additionally the First SCANsats went towards Jupiter. At this point I decided to clean up my craft on rails. Performance was dropping since there was so much relatively high part count hardware. SCANsats of venus, mercury and mars, Landers on venus and mars. Wreckage of manned Venus missions that awaited the final two missions. Lunar mission debris like fuel stations, comnet, scansat, spent stages, landers, rovers and miscellaneous objects. Everything in earth orbit except a set of comsats and planetary band timing satellite was de-orbited and many other things either de-orbited or terminated at cost. I charged my operation 30k funds for venus tonnage, and 40k for mars tonnage. The scansats terminated at no cost if they had 100% and left the rest. I order to get the other things off the map I needed to allow it to complete missions. So my mars sample returns came to earth, the saturn comsat was coasted out and my Jupiter science orbiter was run into SOI. Other things had several years of coasting left on KAC. As the space science mission came into soi, aligned pretty well with a ganymede intercept, i swepth in and used it as a starting place to make an orbit. This allowed me to dip into its near surface space. I used this orbit to tune into Europa and Io. Finally lowering my PE into about 1450km of Jupiter. At this point i did a flyby discovering that my research on RSS Space High/Low and atmosphere was in error. It was not at 1400km it was at 1550km. Thankfully this onyl slightly lowered my AP and did no damage. My main transit bus was down to only 230m/s of fuel left and not worth using as it was burning into carried craft RCS reserves. I dumped it at AP and lowered the PE down using the now slightly large dV that remained. As with all my stages it had Pressure, Accel, Temp and Gravity sensors aboard. Probe core, and power generations along with basic communications allowed it to be controlled as long as the main orbiter was in LOS. No RCS remained and only a small amount of SAS for control. I tested Aerocapture with it and found my solar panels burned off vary fast. after several loops through I got a very hard full capture at ~800km PE. The G-meter peaked at 26.3. I loaded and re-tried this a few times and could not get a lower capture load force without burning up. My mission notebook has a page of reading from this fun. (Dwarf fortress kind of FUN) Thermal shock heating really started at 775km and I started a 75 minute descent (real time) at x4 physical time warp. Altitude(km ASL) Notes 800km Full Aerocapture 775km Thermal Shock 670 Pressure 0.001atmospheres (atm) 570 Mach effects 536 1 atm 500 330m/s Terminal Velocity (TVel) 460 10 atm 418 200 TVel 360 150 TVel 350 50 atm 298 100 atm 272 100 TVel 257 150 atm 240 Overheat warning on parts starts again 228 200 atm 214 80 TVel 202 250 atm 186 now flying low (no coms to send out science though) 180 300 atm 169 70 TVel 161 350 atm 145~ 400 atm, 65 TVel (needed a break, got some tea) 126 450 atm 112 500 atm 110 60 TVel 84 600 atm 75 55 TVel 67 666 atm (Kinda hellish down here) 54 Temp readouts in high red, 1150K 49 750 atm 38 800 atm 33 1200K temp (things burn up and control is lost except for that darn Mechjeb) 28 Blackness, most of the screen turns black but some effect is below me. 18 900 atm 11 More thermal on tougher parts, not sure of temp since that burned up already. 0 1000 atm (This is peak and stays constant farther down) 0 All black except for craft and GUI, 48.4 TVel, followed down until -115 Flight end Terminated flight using object thrower. Could not leave since it was in atmospheric flight and didn't wat to wait 500+ more km at 50m/s. Somewhere in the deep solid hydrogen waits a sentient mechjeb case plotting its rise! I mean literally plotting its rise ascent guidance was running as it vanished. To be continued... (SAMPLE RETURN!)

Before playing any time I had watched Manley tutorials and that sold me on the game, Started with a career and really didn't hit a wall until docking, learning RCS balance was the solution. But i feel like the real I got it time was when I stopped putting fins&SAS&RCS on rockets because they actually fly right. (they still might for orbital work need SAS or RCS just in very small amounts compared to my old designs). My 5m 8k dV ascent stages might have a set of airbrakes, a few RCS (105's) and a small SETI reduced SAS (1kN). Laughing at the days when rockets flipped if i didn't fly carefully. Of course this weekend I pancaked 11 of 12 landing probes sent to Mars. Struggle bus never stops does it.

As Galileo & OP stated it is garbage collection and one of the few fixes (not a panacea or perfect fix either) is the Mod Memgraph, however if you use it with a large mod pool you should also turn up the padheap setting to a larger limit allowed by installed memory. First run KSP with it installed, increase the resolution (Alt+) load a heavy part count ship, and check your number for max, it will climb the longer the game is on. and the stutters will be graphed as red lines spikes. This red line is the garbage collection. Likely with your list your above 2gig even at start. Now exit and edit the padheap.cfg at [...\Kerbal Space Program\GameData\MemGraph\PluginData\MemGraph\padheap.cfg] The padheap.cfg last line [total : 2048] to a larger but within your RAM limit number, for instance if you have 8gig, you might set this number to 4096, since OS operation and other programs are likely to stay less than 4gig. As a note [ALT * ] turns off the memgraph display, but not its functions. You may still have some stutter but duration and frequency will go down.

Started up my game and ran a rocket that is about the 20th of that basic design for ascent stage up. Never noticed it to much before but now in Ascent it was all over the place, had to turn the gimbal down to 2% on the rocket and turn off rcs to stop it from slewing all over. Then i get it burning to mars, do the node myself and tune it with rcs, get to mars, and lower my PE in to LMO. Man Plan a circularize at PE, it swings straight past PE to about 30+deg MNA and starts burning, node is still there just no where near burn point, tried it 3 more times. each time it would time warp way past and start. stop/started it a few times to make it closer and it may have actually times it right, Either way not usable in that state. Is there a good way to check file integrity. I have it installed via CKAN and had not noticed it update. Mechjeb is saying 2.6.0.0 Restart didn't fix it. Uninstalled, deleted folders and re-installed (Via CKAN). Started working normally again. Wag/Slew on ascent is gone. Gah suck! now I have to set up my custom window settings again. Anyway, the short of it is I noticed in all of this confusion a setting available under {custom window settings-->misc--> "[o] RO/RSS Special Handling (WIP)"}. Any information available?

I enjoyed this greatly. Especially since I just ran a large effort to launch manned missions to Venus in KSP(RSS Mod) and had to use balloons to do it.

Why is the entire KCS not bonded to a larger target object. This would avoid some problems with scaling planets and jagged separation lines. (answer is, probably, 'cause unity) Why is a runway elevated from the ground around it, unlike virtually every runway not in the third world or having some special circumstance (ie in a marsh 'cause NIMBY). I mean I watched shuttle landings at Edwards, and if they messed up landing by coming in early big woop just more dry lake, replace/rebuild the landing gear just like they did anyway. Can't tell you how many craft I've carefully driven off the berm and take off from the KSC flat area grass. Yes I know KSC(Cape Canaveral) is elevated in a marsh, has water around it and all together is a disaster if you aren't on it. I've heard landing managers complain about it too. Only reason I think its worth having is as a single orbit abort landing strip. Plenty of big military landing fields that don't need ponds to keep wild hogs off the tarmac. (just visualized a herd of wild Kerbeast wandering on to the runway as a Mk3 Shuttle lumbers in...) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle_Landing_Facility#/media/File:Shuttle_Landing_Facility.jpg Richard Merritt/Landing Support Manager: podcast talking about the runway and why it took so long to start using it. (spoiler 'cause Edwards isn't elevated in a marsh/woods and alligators) https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/podcasting/landingsites.html Grognard childhood memory time: Location: Edwards. The sonic booms from the shuttle are amazing. Sitting in the car waiting for it to come down it sounded like someone slammed a baseball bat into the hood of the car a couple times. This speck appeared a long while later and fell like a brick. Then it fell slightly less like a brick and landed. My family was moving cross country that day and I watched from the top of our rented u-haul truck. Crowd was huge. We didn't even know it was happening that day and as we drove up decided to add to the crowd. I don't think we could see it making descent curves. Think it was STS-1 but i might be mistaken.

Unless you RSS! i was sending sats to Stock altitudes using the KSPedia information when the Information in VAB was basically x10ish the listed altitudes. all the while wondering when it gave me tiny strips of land and said sub-optimal.

Not really, SR gives you a pretty reasonable amount back for settings up a proper recovery on the stages. My main stages and upper ascent stages always include probe cores batteries and coms, leave some fuel in them and they will even attempt to slow their burn-up and final landing speeds. Only part that isn't really included is compensation for adding landing gear and Aero control like grid fins to benefit increase landing speed tolerance. If you are back on 1.1.3 and use KCT you can even fully recover craft and re-use them or their parts using SR. (1.2+ version is not release yet)

Oh this is something I think is great, easy peasy in stock too. Assuming LKO, As you close back on KSC Africa looking shapes coast, get your orbital velocity down to 1900, which puts your trajectory line in the middle of the ocean past KSC, as you approach keep making half the arc of the line from your craft to ksc and from ksc to impact the same length. If you have the fuel to do it drop your velocity to 1500 just as you pass directly over the mountains. I get more accurate landings than mechjeb for less fuel doing this. Just a little maneuvering and open chutes over the runway. 100% funds back to make early career mode earning a lot better. You can? everything I've ever tried burned up before getting there. Even worse in RSS. No Temperature report in space near Kerbol for me. Never mind redonkulous dV needed. Heat shields, Active cooling and all that. Think Manley has a video though. probably ancient.

I get this also, assumed it was one final attempt to correct inclination before circulization. Can really mess up a close to atmosphere burn. Two lost rockets because the off axis thrust made it fail to push the apoapsis soon enough up to target height and then the rocket took too long re-orienting for circulization burn and began descent while circ and dropped back into atmosphere. Had to stop the unattended launches to 250x250 refueling band I was using. Moved it all up to my 1000x1000 planetary transfer band and bumped the final angle up to 3deg. (RSS)

I have a question on default settings for Ascent, specifically the Stage Fairings when --> Altitude > [50]km what can i change to make this default to 100km. I'm running RSS and have a bunch of venus missions with large draggy payloads going to earth orbit. I forget to change it. not a huge problem but i want to make a change and could not find a relevant settings in the configs i browsed through. Second I have a question about my ascents inclination. I have a balloon lifted Venus lander dropping from the balloon with inclination set to 0 i get a 180deg final inclination, but if i enter -180 i get a final inclination of 0. Is this an artifact of starting the ascent with a negative vertical velocity? I've been getting similar problems using launch to rendezvous giving me the opposite angle plane instead of the targets plane.

Play completely unmodded KSP. Downloaded Ckan before KSP finished downloading, Put KER on. many mods later now i can't even try playing without RSS. I can blame Manley, he made me buy it and showed me the mods.

Venus she's easy! or maybe not. She's hot, and has great tracts of land. Not that its a high pressure arrangement to sample her wonderful science. It will take more time to float to her surface than to do three full moon missions. Playing a Career mode game (Hard setting except for load/save allowed) using RSS as my baseline mod. This is a 1.2.2 game so I’m using SMURFF, SpaceY and other mods to get to an acceptable power to weight ratio for launches, Using tweakscale and procedural fairings, SXTcontinued and near future mods for extended tech tree parts, community tech tree and SETI for an unmanned first push, TACLS for life support and I'm full enforcing a cleaned up orbit ( If i have to delete space junk it costs me 100k funds) and use Stage Recovery to get funds back (Set 7k Burnup Speed and 7-14m/s Landing, otherwise default) I tested various re-entries to make sure the 7k Re-entry speed was actually survivable for my designs. SCANsat and CactEye pad out the game but I’m using Comnet with only KSC ground station instead of RemoteTech for communications. Um oh and 104 mods in my CKAN installed list total... I have Saturn Second stage Nuclear and Timberwind nuclear engines in custom modded items, generally don't use them, specifically only on missions leaving from above 500km orbit. None of the designs is dangerous outside of the basic nukes in space argument. I use a minimum of 12m from crew compartments as a design requirement for nukes. Some of the more extreme nuclear engine design would warrant more though. If I’m using a Timberwind 450 the engine is likely 30m+ back just because of the amount of tank it needs to be useful. Regardless once i get the SSME available it was all that for main and second stages. I use Solids only if really needed or its a real simple mission. After Luna I started deciding what to do next, mars window was way out and I started to investigate Venus first. Time to set up comms. I probably could have got away without the comnet first but I believe its the first step given how many missions have failed because communications are crap. It also eliminated the need for huge antenna on the landers and probes. COMSATS Venus Comsat Network, sent 4 relays in an array planned aero-braking to drop dV, middle of aero-brake maneuver, deflated heat shield, and ejected compacted relay sats, barely staying out of atmosphere, each sat had barely enough maneuver 680m/s to get circular in a reasonable Eq. orbit. in trying to switch craft during the near disaster, got locked onto the structural frame that the relay sats coupled to during transit, (just some pipe sections a de-orbit motor and small probecore, mechjeb, antenna and batteries, one small solar panel). nothing burned up, very close but high drag really slowed it down fast. followed to ground, it litho-braked with the sacrifice of one of the spent couplers and I got my first Venusian data (telemetry & temperature). The Comsats got me a few more experiments and squarish 1200km orbit network (Intended to be 3000km). SCANSATS Scansat probes went out next, didn't have SAR yet. Radar altimetry, Biome scanner and Survey scanners along with High orbit and Low Orbit Science Sats, discovered that venusian day is longer than its year! Very long scan time, skipped two useful transfer windows. As the last of my Apollo moon missions finished scienceing the crap out of the moon I sent a second science/Scansat wave. SAR high altitude, recon and Survey detail sats along with my missing space science. Took a while to get all the gravity scans. Kerbal Alarm Clock estimates took front stage. My first comsats & scansats went to mars during this time so it was hectic. Descent to the surface! Originally I had intended to ignore Venus landings unless the were historical missions from RSS Historical missions pack. However the ease of landing space junk on the surface made me prioritize it given the shorter transfer and delay times for manned missions and sample return. Venera Missions, first two missions sent using my best guesses and did not include all the instruments since I did not have all at this point, using DMagic's instruments also. Midlands for the win. Stopped using the Inflatable shield because it was to hard to control drag, and it flipped on my first mission, lucky that a couple of solar panels was all that was lost. Landers overbuilt soviet style. Found out parachutes won't deploy at 12m/s in 70atm. drogue shoots in pre-deploy would not stop spinning, but full deploy brought the landers down straight. Any lifting surface is detrimental to landing except maybe airbrakes/gridfins. Reality is that they probably melted on the way down since they didn't include temperature control of any kind. past initial re-entry anything that is dropped will make it to surface probably with a safe speed (kinda 12m/s seems like max on higher terrain). Major Probe Volley! After re-design of the probes, left me with R2D2 looking canisters filled with science I tried sending two for testing. Mainly finding more accurate landing position. The agonizing wait during the drop! don't like x4 physical landings regardless of speed, read a book, made some tea. Determined that below 50k altitude ASL engines are indeed totally useless. Determined total batteries i could get away with. Solar is great assuming they survive re-rentry heat. Next eight came in as a docked cluster. Horrible experience with all eight lagging my computer. They consisted of unmanned landers, transmit only, everything possible to fully transmit, all biomes. Still very slow descent, probes hit 11m/2 without drogues, tiny landing gear, set of small airbrakes. Temperature was not an issue, though activated thermal panels cooled the pods. Even at 4xphysical time warp the descent was horribly long, cheated gravity to x10 for the 4th and later probes just to lessen the real time spent on the mission, took over 4 real hours to get all biomes sampled. Noticed during the first and second mission that engines and RCS became useless for anything except re-entry phase, determined 300-800 m/s of retro and 40-50 RCS got a good accurate landing, both mechjeb and trajectories projected over shot landings. Rovers might be faster than planes on venus. Trajectories as usual seemed more accurate. Sample return! Attempt one consisted of a real simple pod, stack of ascent rockets, stack of batteries and eight ducted fans. ran out of batteries at 20km, drag was to high for the system to get up. Second try replaced most of the batteries with capacitors and almost made it. The ducted fans didn't have enough thrust to get me above the point I needed for thrust on my bottom stage (4xlarge Ullage motors with flat ISP). floated back down. Third try, nukes, capacitors in drop pods, more ducted fans (too many). the ducted fans started crashing the computer with some bad interaction of mechjeb's dV calculation. Think it had something to do with staged capacitors, the ducted fans and some kind of circular calculation. After 12 program restarts including one full on computer freeze I gave up on the ducted fans. I think it can work. Fourth try, Balloons! Used the HL inflatable parachute. Made it too small. I didn't see the dirigible icon in VAB so I undersized the balloon and it wasn't enough to get me up to 50km. Also discovered the kraken hates unbalanced balloon lifted craft, spinning it until my probe core sped off at Sol escape velocity. Try Five. Bigger balloon, used RoverDude's control pod. was great but in dropping from the balloon frame I clipped a tank and blew up. Try Six. made it to orbit. Barely 165x147km Orbit and forgot a docking port. Using a Timberwind 45 design basis Nuclear rocket for everything except initial separation and orientation. Tumbled a lot, need cleaner separation and deploy-able control surfaces. Spinning and very slow ascent to be safe enough. Agonizing pain of slowly changing inflation of the balloon as the velocity dropped below 10m/s. Going above 30 resulted in explosive spin (actually five iterations of this design blew up on ascent) because I got impatient and inflated too fast. Try Seven. Changed balloon “Cirrus” real lift variant, started including life support (TACL) and more support in general. (return vehicle prepositioned in 350x350km EQ orbit). Lift vehicles started passing 500k for the missions, plus one 180k refueling mission in my planetary band parking orbit. Determined need for 140+ days on orbit life support and ~100days transit (3500m/s dV transit + 3000dv to bring it into parking orbit for re-use). So generally needing 13k dV for fast missions. Total life support of near a year. Loaded Solyent Green/Red life support mod for TACL. Tested 5 iterations most problems were hard to control on drop, re-entry. Had one burn up too bad for use, two had hard landings as they came in at an angle and fell over. Try eight. After a successful orbit and rendezvous and realizing my rcs balance and SAS sucked on the final manned return pod, removed all but 5days LS from pod. Pod is located inside a set of cargo-bay modules, Three cooling stages are included, larger amount of RCS. Has about 1200dV to spare for any orbital maneuvers. First unmanned test, drop from balloon at 0.35atm, drop first stage tanks, drop second stage tanks, drop third on way to circ burn, mechjeb ascent.... takes me in 180deg counter orbit. 14kdv to get plane change. /sigh Second test I get to balloon separation and drop, launch and start up, run into balloon and explode. Load and try again, manually pilot, then beginning the ascent guidance to nice clean 350k orbit. Try Nine. new design includes sepatron to get balloon spun away from vertical. Full flight plan unmanned test including return using a large nuke powered 5m transit bus. Optimized the balloon to get a stable point of 100m on earth, gave me >1atm on venus lift final so ascent using my normal motors is possible, Used timberwind 45 again as ascent motor and staged the tanks on layered side pods. Transit bus includes LS reprocessing, cargo bay with supplies and excess life support equipment space for 3 crew (Intended for one man missions) that includes an earth orbit return pod. Is 10tons of Fairing excessive? 750k funds to orbit, a refueling and off it went. Mission went great, max inflated to balloon from ground level, it goes supersonic immediately and starts climbing fast (150m/s peak), drop the science and landing gear stage just as take off happens. Nice stable verticle ascent with a little wobble. Fins might help be they are hard to include. Ballon shot clear and spun off to the side, ascent arced nicely past it and almost all my spare dV went unused. Docking went a little rough, not sure if its the Covered Jr. docking ports I used. So now I have an extra emergency return vehicle in orbit. 5million Funds well spent. Time for Real Manned Mission(tm). Manned (Womaned) Mission! Valentina did the first mission solo 144days of waiting, 96d+102d transit, 5 seconds of EVA (hot hot hot), and many minutes of up and down above venus. Now for 7 more times, all in transit, Valentina sits in the abort return vessel. A spare lander is coming along also. Rescue mission at worst case or if I miss a biome target. Best case 1.2m worth of orbiting space junk. Thought about exploring using a rover or folding aircraft, but its way to slow unless I’m right on a boundary even then its a serious mission to get one and also have the balloon launched rocket in the same place. I kinda doubt i could even get close enough for a rescue mission to actually work. Should have positioned a grapple rover to avoid to EVA problems (fire clad space suits). Now on to more missions, to places like the canyons (looked kinda dunish to me) as harley kerman plants his flag...too hot, oh well maybe just the EVA report. I wonder why he had that red bar over him during his EVA. I think I heard him swear at the ground control. Glad I installed chatterer also glad I didn't waste weight on the ladders. Kerbals must be highly compressible mushrooms! Manned mission ascents on venus involved, SAS set to radial out, gridfins retracted, set balloon inflation to 100%, drop landing stage and speed off into the sky. Final peak ascent speed 192.5m/s at 12-15km. Crossed 50km at 150m/s and dropping rapidly. oscillated at 0.80-0.63atm ~55-56km. Set mechjeb for ascent 350km -180deg Inclination (because 0=180deg on Venus for no apparent reason), Ascent path numbers [60km, 100m/s, 250km, 1deg, 35%] Let go of balloon, fire engines, active autopilot. Orbit 350x349km with 1600-1800m/s maneuver fuel, meet up with transit bus at 300km orbit. Off equator I had the bus maneuver a bit for plane changes. In those cases I had left it in a higher 500km orbit and it performed most of the plane maneuvers. Venus Rotates so slow that I didn't ever spend more than 500m/s to get co-planar even considering the lack of control over launch window. Only needed 100-300m/s to compensate for any bad timing in the Hohmann transfers. That said I’m pretty sloppy with rendezvous maneuvers. Really want RP-0 1.2.2 now, need to try this again. (Am i a masochist?)