MythicalHeFF

Grape, because the rest all taste the same. Favorite type of asteroid?

Known for modding.

Ionic bond

Valve

3422

Cambrian explosion

I feel like a red dwarf or white dwarf system would have higher DV requirements, just because everything orbits so close in. With larger stars, everything is usually much farther out, to the point where orbital speeds are slower despite the star being much larger.

3407

Lake Michigan

3401 home depot

Tesla coil

PART 2.2: STATMUN & THRESOMIN EXPLORATION

Beautiful clouds. I can’t help but feel compelled to descend into them.

Scientific method

3386

Baned for spelling errors

Numeral system

Sheep

Not sure if a threat about this already exists somewhere, but as I’m sure you’re aware, docking in KSP can be pretty hard to do sometimes, especially if you’ve got docking ports at awkward angles or are docking two large craft, which tends to bring down frame rates. But what’s the most difficult docking maneuver you’ve ever done successfully (or at least attempted)? Share your stories here! As for me, the most difficult docking I’ve ever tried (and what gave me the idea for this thread to begin with), was just last night when I was attempting to attach a several hundred-ton booster to my 1,100-part mothership, the Kilonova, in low Mesbin orbit. Due to the combined part count of over 1300, I was experiencing frame rates of 2-3 FPS, and because the booster was so heavy, even trying to orient it the correct way took minutes, at which point the mothership would just start moving out of alignment again. This was about as close as I got before giving up and destroying the booster with Whack-A-Kerbal to ease my frustration (I’d already been trying for 20+ minutes) I don’t really remember what my most difficult successful docking was, but it was probably something pretty similar in scope, just actually made possible by me using a better computer.

PART 2.1: DO-OVER Things are most definitely not going according to plan. First off, I've had to redo the entire launch, because when I tried to decouple the heat shields, they ended up destroying the center docking port, making it so the booster is unable to dock with the Kilonova. Originally, I was considering just sending up new landers to replace the old ones, but, now that the docking port was gone, I was left with no choice but to bite the bullet and do the entire launch over again (this time without any unauthorized key pressing). Oh, I'm sorry, did I say do the launch over again? What I meant to say was do the launch over again, twice. During the first stage separation, the booster collided with the Kilonova's radiator panel system and destroyed it, as well as damaging one of the landers. While I may have been able to just get away fine with this, I didn't want to risk it, and decided not to do so. Third time's the charm, complete with better booster separation Once the Kilonova was finally back in orbit without inflated heatshields, I used the remainder of the second stage's fuel to get it up to an orbit that almost matches that of Mesbin's closest moon, Statmun, which is a tiny, metallic asteroid 6 kilometers across that orbits in an extremely close Mesbin-stationary orbit. This is only made possible by the fact that Mesbin rotates so quickly that the synchronous orbit altitude is actually quite close to the surface. Passing near Statmun (never entered its SOI) Everything seems to be going okay now, doesn't it? I thought so, too, until I attempted to attach the Kilonova's booster to it in orbit. Speaking of the booster, it's more or less a bunch of asparagus-staged Rhino engines attached to a central 3.75m core, that should give the Kilonova an extra 2,500 m/s or so of delta-V to use for escaping low Mesbin orbit. Here you can see the earlier version, which used Mammoth engines instead but this was deemed unnecessary Launch of the booster Coming in to dock with the Kilonova. This is the point at which things really took a turn for the worse, as while I had anticipated that docking would be difficult due to the very low framerates and high part counts (the combined part counts of both ships was around 1300), what I did not expect was for it to be essentially impossible. In fact, the lag was so bad that just turning the booster or the Kilonova to get the correct orientation took several minutes, at which point they would already be moving too fast relative to one another to dock thanks to Mesbin's gravity pulling them apart. Here's a GIF showing how low the framerates I was having to deal with were: Yes. I'm not kidding. This is what I experienced in real time. I don't think there was a single time that I was pulling more than 3 frames a second. And even if I did get the positions right, I'd still be rotating, which you'd think you'd be able to stop by just activating time warp. While I could do this, activating time warp also had the side effect of just straight up teleporting the other craft over 100 meters to the left or right, making the reorientation useless. In other words, there was just simply no way I was going to be able to dock the booster with the Kilonova, especially considering that, in order to do so, I'd have to slide the booster between the two landers, which, while certainly possible with good frame rates, was simply not going to happen. So I was forced to scrap the booster idea entirely, and instead rely on asteroid mining to get me to Derbin. Another thing that ended up going wrong was that I somehow got my ion landers confused. Here you can see one of the Hermes landers emerging from the cargo bay to do a test run to Statmun, but there's a problem: It only has 11,500 m/s of delta-V, a far cry from the 32-34,000 I thought it had. I could have sword I'd seen it with 30 km/s in the VAB, but I must have gotten it confused with another ion lander I made. The lander-in-question during a simulation test gauging how much delta-V I'd need to reach Ammenon and return, which turned out to be at least 30,000 m/s Unlike the previous problem with the booster, however, this issue isn't that big of deal, seeing as I can just slap a docking port onto the lander and attach it to the docking port on the Kilonova's front command pod, which, while docking will probably still be difficult, shouldn't be so bad as it's a pretty small and lightweight craft.

PART 2: THE LAUNCH OF KILONOVA III Video:

Finished setting up the preparations to start a mission that I've been wanting to do for quite some time now: a Whirligig World grand tour. I originally meant to do it a number of months ago, but ended up just getting sidetracked and doing a bunch of other things over the summer. Another thing I've been wanting to do for a while is write another full mission report, which I've started doing here: My craft of choice, the Kilonova III, in Mesbin orbit during a "simulation test". Its part count, stripped to the bare essentials without any of the landers and other nonsense, is around 450. The full launch-vehicle configuration has a part count of over 1,100, which is sure to make my laptop reconsider its existence. Fully loaded up, it has over 7 km/s of delta-V, which should be enough to reach most of the destinations in this planet pack. For those that are not reachable within said delta-V budget, I have two special ion landers, called the DV-30000 "Hermes", named that for their delta-V of 30,000 meters per second. The main lander, Workhorse, is nothing too special, really. It's quite similar to the old Talon lander that I used during my stock+OPM grand tour a couple years ago. The Other Landers:

Alrighty, I think I've now got everything in perfect working order and the Kilonova is pretty much go for launch, all that is left is to assemble an adequate booster. As it turns out, there were a few problems with actually getting the Brute lander down to the surface of Derbin in one piece, that mainly being because the heat shields didn't behave exactly as I had been counting on. As I later found out, it turns out that the fuel tank directly behind the four 3.75m heat shields was somehow not being considered as protected from the airflow by the game, and as such it kept exploding, causing the whole craft to break apart. In order to fix this, I had to give it its own entire 2.5m heat shield. Needy son of a gun. Once that was done, however, the Brute made it down to the surface of Derbin okay, and was able to ascend back into orbit nominally. The Brute landers are also now going to both be hauled up into Mesbin orbit with the Kilonova in accordance with the rules of the Ultimate Challenge, being mounted on two 2.5m docking ports at the rear end of the ship. Once Brute 1 is detached in its low Derbin parking orbit, Brute 2 will be moved over to a central docking port in order to keep the weight distribution balanced. Not looking forward to launching it, however, as the combined partcount of the ship, all the landers, and the booster is already over 1,100.

No idea who this guy was. Not that it matters, since he was predictably stranded on the Mun for eternity anyways. I know for a fact that he wasn’t Jeb, and am almost certain he wasn’t Bill or Bob either.