Eriksonn

Recently i posted in this thread: Where my entry was the Kerberos ship i sent to Dres as a submission for this thread a while ago. Now i got abit inspired by this and(after getting some new shiny mods for station parts and radiators) decided to make an even larger version to send to explore the new solar system setup i have. This means that i hope that i will atleast swingby every body in the solar system(and plop down a manned lander on an many as i can, and that includes Moho and Eeloo). But as i had planned(and as the transfer window was nicely lined up as a bonus) I will go to Dres and its new friend Rega for the first stop. With 1600 tons on the pad and 260 tons in orbit, Kerberos 2.0 is even bigger than its predecessor with the one to two sizes wider(3.75 and 5 meters compared to 2.5 for the old one) core section. It has less "companions" in terms of relays and rovers and such. But it still carries a manned lander, a somewhat large miner, and 2 small survey sattelites. Actually took a picture of the launch this time. Sucessful deployment into orbit. Transfer to Dres went well(split the burn in 2 parts for this), forgot to take a picture of the hud becauce i was so busy getting everything to work, but it was basically the same as the previous mission so you can go look at that if you want Almost twice as many engines this time(and all of them worked due to proper radiators as opposed to Kerberos 1) Transfer burn completed to Dres, and here you can see the resources hud for the first time(i am horrible at documenting that aren't I...) To be continued once I arrive at Dres...

A while ago i did this: i dont have the save anymore but i threw together a similar mock up and i would guess about 100 tons on it(on the large core module, the whole thing would be 150 tons maybe). I usually dont do much heavy lifting as i tend to focus more on ion powered probes and gravity assists and smaller rockets.

that is becauce by default principia uses the maneouver as if it is constantly aligned with the navball during the whole duration of the maeeuver. Unlike stock where the maneouver i aligned as the orbit was at the start of the burn. The difference can be summed up like this: if the maneuver is set to a pure binormal burn the stock maneuver is like pointing the ship to binormal, setting the sas to stability assist and burning, the princimpia version is to setting the sas to hold binormal and burn. So if you make a plan to go retrograde with the principia maneuver system, when the orbit flips, the maneuver flips too(just as it might happen if you want to land on the mun and forget to turn off retrograde hold and the ship flips over and crashes becauce the retrograde direction flips). So then the maneouver retrograde is facing in the direction that was previously prograde, and then it flips back becauce you are still dragging the slider, and then it flips back again and so on and freaks out. Luckely there is a Little button that says something along the lines of "inertial maneouver frame" or something similar, pressing it will toggle to the "stock" behaviour of the maneouver directions being static to the start of the burn.

I have found that the densities of many of the objects(rega in particular) are much higher than many of the stock planets of the same type. in g/cm^3: dres=29 kerbin=58 mun=29 minmus=29 duna=33 rega=122 harvest=65 keelon=118 the reason that i found it was that the surface gravity for rega is smaller than the surface gravity for dres, which seems strange considering how much smaller it is. Also considering how both rega and dres are dwarf planets and should share the same composition/density.

We have succeded in making Dres less lonely

I recently got the Kerbol origins mod and as usual i mucked around with the configs and now my Dres also has a moon: The moon is Rega, and in the default Kerbol origins setup, rega was supposed to be its own dwarf planet with rings but as i needed the space i moved it into orbit of dres and moved the rings to dres itself. It actually happend that the orbit i placed it in(just outside the rings) had almost the same period as the rotation rate of dres, so i simply nudged those to be the same so now the Dres-Rega system behaves very similar to the Duna Ike system in that way. (And the mass ratio happend to be similar to the duna system aswell, Dres/Rega=9.79,Duna/Dres=16.22)

I tend to favor the swivel over the relient, even as a first stage engine, as my staging setup usually means that the center stage persists quite far into the flight, maybe even into space. And as the swivel overtakes the relient fairly early in terms of isp it tends to win out over the whole flight. And as i almost always use solid boosters the high thrust of the relient as main engine gets nullified as in the low parts of the atmoshpere the boosters produce so much thrust that i throttle down the main engine, and in the high parts of the atmosphere the ship is so light that i again throttle down the main engine. The only time i can see use in its higher thrust is to prevent a heavy ship from loosing speed just when decoupling the boosters at 10km altititude or so.

The reason i made these changes(i did similar changes to OPM too) is that even with stock max time warp principia gets really slow and chuggy(that means that max time warp is about half of the speed it should be at, but i bet that depends on the computer you are using). So by compacting the planets less timewarp is needed, and i also prefer to not need 100 years of warp to get to a faraway rock and back. Edit: this is apparently my 100th post, so i have 3 dots on my profile now

Ok, then i will share them(if you somehow make that an option for the regular mod that will be so cool as that will be the first time i have participated in a mod for any game whatsoever ) Here is a link to the github page with all the files: https://github.com/Eriksonnaren/Kerbol-Origins-Config-Files The "Jool and Dres fix" should go in the Kopernicus/Config folder and the rest should overwrite their respective files in KerbolOrigins. the Jool part in the "Jool and Dres fix" are small changes(that includes making bop retrograde) to make the Jool system stable if principia is used, even though principia is not updated for the current version of ksp and i might update these configs when that happens if something goes unstable but i will leave this here in any case. (Becauce having bop being retrograde makes sense becauce it is a captured asteroid so close to Tylo) If there is a problem with the files or if i missed one tell me about it and i will try to fix it.

I got this mod a few days ago and i really like it. However, the placements of the bodies are (in my humble opinion) too far apart in most cases(as i cant timewarp more than in stock, and probably dont want to either). And wierd in other cases. So i decided to modify the config files to make it more suitable for me. And when principia(the mod that adds n-body gravity) updates to 1.7.1 i will probably tweak it some more to be compatible with that. So here is a list of the changes i made to the system orderd by distance from the sun in the original configs: Faz and Harvest are already quite good and hasent gotten any changes yet, although i am skeptical as to if Faz will be stable with n-body gravity but that is a fix for later days. Rega: Moved in orbit of Dres to make space for Keelon. Moved its rings to Dres while making them slightly smaller, Rega is now a shepard moon of the rings with a combined tidal lock to Dres similar to the Duna-Ike system. Sarvin: Most of the changes happend here. First i moved the whole Sarnus system to just outside Jools orbit in such a way that they are in a 5/3 resonance. Then i swapped Potatus and Shales orbits and made Shales orbit way less inclined, After that i made Potatus appear as a captured asteroid by making its orbit a bit more eccentric. I also explained its awkward shape by increasing its rotation rate to almost be the orbital period of something at the equator, this has the effect that if you are in very low orbit only a kilometer or two above the surface the surface velocity will be around 16 m/s. this leads to some very interesting coriolis forces and other fun stuff. Lastly i decreased the inclinations of all the bodies in the Sarvin system as it felt abit too chaotic. Only Potatus has its inclination unchanged(remember that it uses the inclination that Shale has in the default mod). Keelon: Moved to the pervious orbit of Rega, ie just inside Jool, but with less inclination. Corolet: Shrunk its apoapsis to be just outside of Sarvin. Imgur link: https://imgur.com/a/i6F0ZDV I can probably post the new config files if anyone is interested

Made this tiny helicopter thing, not the greatest battery life but can probably be improved. https://imgur.com/sSUfVta Also works on duna, although i needed to fiddle abit with the blade angle to get it to lift off correctly(it had just barely enough power to fight gravity) https://imgur.com/9xrSOlE Also, imgur doesnt seem to work with the BBCode thing for some reason so i have to use boring regular links instead, Why is that?

It is just OPM but i have moved things around abit so that everything is closer together as principia doesnt like high timewarp that much. One result of this is that dres is is orbit around urlum and urlum is almost where dres used to be. I didnt take many pictures of the transfer as i was busy getting the transfer to work in the first place, but i still use the same system even when that particular save is "gone"(ie i have new version and new mods, although i could probably recreate this mission, we will see...). So i can just show you some pictures of my current system instead(as it is the same) https://imgur.com/IbmjSoC https://imgur.com/lZ4s6pm If you want me to show you the transfer i can easily make another transfer there if you want Edit: Imgur has changed i think and now my embedded links arent working, so i had to use actual links instead...

or you can press the advanced button at the top left corner and then filter by cross section there

Here

it is stable in the sense that nothing collides or gets ejected but (as far as i can remember) both Ovok and Hale gets moved into eccentric orbits that takes them very close to sarnus itself, this leads to a huge lag spike whenever one of them gets too close to sarnus becauce principia doesnt like it when planets or moons gets too close to each other, and the orbits gets very wiggly when that happens. In short Eeloo is too close to ovok and when moving it out Slate gets in the way and it needs to move out too.

It almost does, but not quite. First off you have to re-modify the Jool system as principia doesnt do that automatically if the planets are not stock. (see the principia faq for that) Secondly i have noticed that the sarnus system is slightly unstable. I fixed it by going into the config files for opm and changing the sarnus system a little bit like this: Eeloo: semiMajorAxis = 21105978, Slate: semiMajorAxis = 46592946

In almost all cases with boosters bigger than the hammer i put sepatrons on the nosecones and the B one has higher slant for the sepatron so that it pushes away more, negating its tendency to fly into the core. And besides, it looks better too

I decided to downgrade my ksp to take some screenshots of my current progress of this challenge as I hadnt really "finished" it properly before i updated. And by that i mean that i handnt taken screenshots of my progress, so almost all of the screenshots here are all really recent, so i will fill in some of the intermediate steps by text instead. And i will also put my images in spoiler tags so that they dont fill up the whole page. Anyway, this is just when i had arrived at Dres, just after my Kerbin ejection in my previous post. Not much to say here as it was just your typical hohmann transfer, but with the slight twist of Dres being in orbit of Urlum instead(but Urlum is at almost the same place as dres used to be,so te actual travel time was the same) Then i started to set up a small ground base consisting of rovers, miners and a crewed lander. If i remember correctly the larger rover had an ion engine so it could make it back to the mothership if it needed to. By far the hardest part of it all was getting an asteroid(I call it Demtas) from Urlums rings to Dres, as i severly overestimated how much dv i would have after docking to the asteroid, The tug i had used a quite powerful ion engine, so the thrust was actually quite decent for my taste. I had expected my dv to become about 100 to 200 after docking, but i got 25... Luckely the asteroid was in Poltas L4 Point, and it was very "loosely" bound, so after i had used about 3 m/s to escape the L4 Point i immediatly got an encounter with Polta to swing myself out towards Dres, but my relative velocity was too high to do a regular capture, so i had to do more crazy gravity assist maneuvers to get a ballistic capture in a semi-stable retrograde orbit, and after undocking, refueling and coming back i tightend the orbit as much as i could with the little dv i had, and i think i have managed to get it stable. It sits just at the edge of the soi, and sometimes actually goes outside of it(but n-body physics dont care about soi anyway). Due to the loose orbit it wobbles around alot(even after a single orbit it is many degrees off from what it was earlier) Then i sent up some of my relay sattelites to various places. Most of them around Dres obviously, but some at other places too. I trid to put one in the L5 Point of Dres but that one wasnt stable so i moved it to Polta. I also put one around Tal. I still have 7 of them left on the mothership that i didnt bother to deploy.(Sorry Dres...) So i think that this concludes my first "attempt?" at this challenge. I will probably revisit it at some point once things start working better with the mods and stuff.

My mods are broken at the moment but i will probably come back to this challenge when most of them work again. I might post my current progress in the meantime...

That is the start of kessler syndome right there. I always make sure that any debris i make gets destroyed somehow(or sometimes recovered if i can). I also never terminate debris either. It has gotten to the point at which i get frustrated if the debris somehow survives in a stable orbit(sometimes i even revert flights for this reason alone). Like that time when i was doing an asteroid grab mission in my career save and i had planned on crashing the transfer stage into the asteroid but that didnt work as the asteroid died too. So i had to let it fly onto a wierd solar orbit and i got sad as that was the only debris in the entire save...

I made an Adeline type first stage, it is like the spacex recovery thing but instead of doing suicide burn with the whole first stage, only the engine turns into a small airplane and flies to an airport instead. I tried with the mainsail first but it handeled horrible due to its short length, so i switched to the twin boar to make it abit more airplane like so it would fly better. It is less like the real thing but it works much better(and the twin boar has more thrust also). I thought the rocket would be really awkward to fly with that many wings at strange places but it worked fine. If i had more fuel(and patience) i could maybe fly back to the ksc and land there but due to fuel priority problems more than half of my fuel ended up in the wrong tank and got staged off...(bring more fuel next time) The grass was abit bumpy but it worked quite nicely at the end. Conclusion: Not as cool looking as the spacex thing and needs pre building and testing in the sph but easier to land as one dont need flat ground and precise timing to do and can go down anywhere as you dont need to aim at something.

You obviously split the burn into many smaller burns. I do this all the time with ions(and other low twr craft such as with nukes sometimes). It also makes the oberth effect better as you are not burning far away from kerbin but make every burn close in. And when doing my "standard" gravity assists (especially with multiple assists chained after one another) the orbits far in the future get hyper sensitive to what you burn right now, so sometimes an ion engine at 0.5% limiter and minimum throttle is sometimes too much. Overall the ion engine is my all time favourite in the stock game, and i have recently discovered the mod near future propulsion among others wich adds many more ion Engines of different sizes and power requierments.(instantly became one of my favourite mods obviously)

On a related note with the gui hanging when planning too much; when i make a flightplan from lko out to the mun and do a bunch of gravity assistes with the mun over several days and then when i am done i delete the maneuver, the huge plan length remains and it hangs for several seconds while trying to compute hundreds of orbits in lko before i can click delete flight plan...

Reminds me of that time when i needed to do a gravity assist with ike and i missed it by like 10 meters:

That is perfect. The Mun has very stable L4 and L5 Points, as your large loop in the previous image was already quite stable by the looks of things. If you can get another sat to the other side of the mun you should have (almost)full connection on the whole mun at all times.(Not sure about how much the signals can go "through" the mun) Minmus also has these points but there it is slightly harder to get them stable as the mun is much larger than minmus and tend to mess things up a bit. By experience I have found that the Duna-Ike L4 and L5 Points are not stable due to Ike being too large. Gilly might be too small to have significant Largrange points and the Jool moons Might be possible but i am not sure as they are very close to each other and are rather big(but Tylo is the most hopeful i think)