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NewtSoup

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  1. NewtSoup
    If I'm reading this correctly - Will this burn of 19 m/s result in periapsis around Duna @ 174km and then one around Ike at 426km (or Vice Versa )? I mean I can't lose anything by trying it. I just want to know if my reading is correct.
  2. NewtSoup
    just over halfway through a 40 minute capture burn into Duna Orbit. I may try for Ike too.
  3. NewtSoup
    I made it to Minmus, captured, burned for a solar orbit and in 163 days I'll be making an 800m/s burn out to Duna. My first ever Duna trip! On 2 Ion Engines and a Command Chair!.
  4. NewtSoup
    I can check the effect in the VAB. Just reduce the fuel I have left and add the modifications. See what it does to the dV, It's how NASA would do it. ** Edit, 20 minute burn to capture @ 1000 km, I'd rather capture wide and be sure of doing it in a single burn than risk going closer and failing to get an orbit.
  5. NewtSoup
    Yeah I've just worked this out to start with my orbital period was just 34 minutes in orbit around Kerbin so I was stuck to 4 minute burns.. 2 mins either side of PE but as the orbit increased I was able to burn for longer. I think it took 5 burns in total to reach minmus orbital distance and by happy chance a 56m/s burn in 1 day's time will give me a minmus encounter at 1600km, so I will just capture there and decide what to do next then. The ship does actually have a docking port jr on the rear, so in theory it woulnd't be that hard to cart up a couple more engines, rendezvous in minmus orbit and attach them via the docking port. Running them at full power WILL overload the solar pannels and RTG's and drain the battery, but that's just part of the fun I guess the total dV shouldn't change that much for adding 2 more engines a docking port and enough metal work to hold them.
  6. NewtSoup
    dV is not a concern I have about 19km/s of it.. I do think however that I should have fitted more than 2 ion engines to a 12 ton vehicle - as I say, I was fooled by a miss read on the amount of power it actually had.
  7. NewtSoup
    I guess I shall just have to try it and see. Because the ship is such low power I'm having to make a number of 5 minute burns at periapsis. This means maneuver nodes are useless. My plan is to simply AP to ~Minmus orbit and then simply wait for an encounter and try to capture into minmus orbit from there.
  8. NewtSoup
    I have been away. Had an intense and torrid love affair with Elite Dangerous - which will only run in Windows. Most of my games are installed in Linux which meant I didn't play anything else but ED for a few months! Having had Windows force an update while I was playing ED ( and in combat no less, the digital rug was firmly pulled from under my feet) my system, set up as it is, defaulted to Linux on reboot so Here I am again! To get back into KSP I thought I'd try something in Sandbox before getting back into my proper career mode game and after killing Jeb on re-entry after a Mun Orbit or 3 using an example ship ( I really should have done some breaking maneuvers, I just didn't realise I had no heat shield ) I decided to see what ion thrusters were all about. They say they can go anywhere so I built the "Go Anywhere Seat". It has 19,600 m/s DV. Enough RTG's to run both ion engines at 50% power indefinitely the solar panels should make up the rest ( I hope ) even so the 1k battery can recharge off the RTG's in deep space if the sunlight is too little.. here it is in all it's glory with Valentina on the nose in the seat! Now, the thing is, it only has 4kn of thrust. I thought KER said 0.4 TWR when building which would have been fine and dandy. However it's only 0.04. Now I know this thing CAN fly anywhere. Just how to do it. For example a minmus transfer orbit is a 46 minute burn. So I know I'll need to do several burns to increase AP to the desired distance. What I want to know most though is how do I get encounters when navigating using multiple burns like that?
  9. NewtSoup
    Thanks, good to know they won't explode then. Absolutely fine. Rura Penthe is a cold, cold place.
  10. NewtSoup
    It's a glitch, and a reproducable one. When I turn on both drills and LfOx production on the convertotron I can run it on time warp for several days and the load on the TCS doesn't go over 25% ( with full fuel and ore tanks oddly ) However when I go back to "normal" time the heat ramps up very quickly to overheat levels.
  11. NewtSoup
    Feel free Minmus Station has a science lander. I was intending to do orbital drops to the various biomes then back up to the station to refuel before dropping on Rura Penthe to fill the lab. I will definitely be adding a refuel Rover, Minmus station is mostly fuel tank too but it's perfectly possible I'll have something that won't dock well with it. That design does indeed dock properly on all ports. I tested in on Kerbin grasslands first
  12. NewtSoup
    Given that I should have more than enough cooling I'm wondering if it was simply a glitch as I'd left it alone for hours before that. I belive having multiple engineers helps too? The presence of a second engineer stacking with the first? I've finished my going to minmus thread with a video of retreiving the final batch of ore from Rura Penthe and transferring it to Kerbin. Via Minmus station and the ore barg. 3050 was a huge amount to acquire. Incidentally - "Land your ore at kerbin" means LAND.. not splash down. First attempt splashed down in the ocean and didn't get the mission complete. I got all the ticks bar "Land your Ore"
  13. NewtSoup
    And that concludes Going to Minmus. Rura Penthe will of course be expanded. Kerbin Orbtial Tourists will be transferred to work on the drills and in ore processing. More LfOx and RCS tanks will be added. But for now the base is functional. Incidentally the VERY tall Orange Tank is a refuelling ship. It's built on the same basic block as the rest of the base but incorporates landing gear. Rather than using the power of the wheels to translate across the minmus surface it uses the RCS thrusters., That way it doesn't fall over splat into the base.
  14. NewtSoup
    So here we are at the final leg of going to Minmus. With Rura Penthe Almost complete Empress Valentina has demanded that the final shipment of ore be transferred to Minmus station and the Ore Barge. This required a brief reconfiguration of the base so the Orange storage tank was detached from the base and redocked at the lab/ore tank intersection. The Sky Crane then took off, landed on the end ore tank module, refuelled and prepared to lift it to Minmus Station. Apologies for the pause in the video. Something odd happened during rendering. The only thing missing is the transfer burn from Minmus to Kerbin. Deceleration was done in several burns at Kerbin Periapsis, use was made of all the monopropellant too. The sharp eyed will notice a few explosions during re-entry - these were just the communotron 16 S antena burning off. Aside from that minor excitement the mission was a total success with a rather surprising landing.
  15. NewtSoup
    My Engineer at this base is only 2 star. I guess I'm still only early game having only been to the Mun and Minmus so far ( a couple of my Kerbals have been to a solar orbit, but only 2 scientists and a pilot ) and I still have a few boxes to go on the tech tree ( 3 of the 300's, most of the 550s and all the 1000's).. I hadn't realised they affected cooling as well as the rate of ore production and conversion. I can easily add more cooling if that's going to be the issue but basically I want this base to just run 24/7 with no interaction other than when I want to siphon off the fuel to another ship.
  16. NewtSoup
    On Rura Penthe I am running a convert-o-tron 250 which requires 200 KW of Cooling and a Max Cooling of 750 KW two Drill'o'matic excavators requiring 200 KW between them and a max of 200KW between each this seems to be a total of 400kw required my base has 4 x Medium Thermal Control System fins - each with a core heat xfer of 250 KW, max cooling of 19494 KW surely this would be more than enough to keep everything cool, so why are the fins glowing red hot, running at more than 100% ( keeps flickering to 100.5%) and sparking? I shut down the drills and ore processing ( the tanks were all full anyway) to stop explosions happening. The picture below shows my base layout. Is in fact happeneing because all the tanks got full?
  17. NewtSoup
    So basically I travel by butterfly. Oddly enough some of the best navigators in the world.
  18. NewtSoup
    The first one is moving at 280 m/s but is 2 days out so it will have slowed somewhat. The second one is just a few hours out from Kerbin and moving at over 900 m/s which is expected for a Minmus transfer ( relative velocities of course). But as you say, I shall put it out of my head. Dump the pair in orbit around Minmus, out of trouble, and deal with them in the order I need to once they're both there. Sometimes I get an idea of how something should work in my head and then worry when it doesn't even when it doesn't matter.
  19. NewtSoup
    I'm still building my Minmus base, Rura Penthe. I decided to run two missions at once. One to launch a triplet of ore tank modules and one to launch an orange fuel tank storage module. As you can see I launched the two missions pretty much two days apart with the idea of giving me two days grace to orbital maneuver and landing the Ore Tanks on Minmus etc. Both had the same dV requirements naturally and I set up maneuvers to capture into Minmus Orbit. However: Instead of two days grace I've ended up with two hours and indeed the second mission is arriving before the first ( taking two days and two hours less to arrive than the first mission!) I'm sure there's a logical explanation for this. Can someone tell me what's happened?
  20. NewtSoup
    We regret to announce that one of our astronauts, Commander Willoughby Crinkly-Bottom has died during an EVA mission. It would appear that he got drunk on coolant and removed his space suit while trying to get the Hubble Space Telescope to "Look at the Moon!"
  21. NewtSoup
    We have, it's just adding a few extra ingredients that chef forgot, sir. Waiter, there's a black hole in my soup!
  22. NewtSoup
    This is not the most efficient way of landing at a target. But it will certainly help you land accurately. I'm pretty sure had Scott kept burning on the retrograde marker it would have been fairly close to a suicide burn. The way he does it uses more fuel but affords you more control and more room for error. And does it with no mods at all. I don't know anything about MechJeb but I gather it can do the flying for you on a suicide burn. Either way I'm sure this short video will be instructive all the same.
  23. NewtSoup
    Granted: Whatever you turn it into is made of the same cardboard as the box and it goes "Boink" every 5 seconds, continuously. I wish for a Star Trek Runabout Class Starship and enough fuel to power it for 100 years.
  24. NewtSoup
    I would like that. I was trying to design a lander for Minmus that worked entirely on RCS and wanted to use the Puff Engines as main engines but couldn't work out how to tie them into RCS controls. As a side note I tend to use place anywhere RCS thrusters and set them up to JUST do forward, aft, left, right, up, down using the actuation toggles. All rotation is then controlled by reaction wheels. I've found that if you try to do everything on RCS it can get more squirly than it needs to be.
  25. NewtSoup
    There's been a lot of argument at Mission Control recently. Whether to complete the request for Ore using the Babylon K mining Vessel or whether to focus on the expansion or Rura Penthe. Given that the simple solution was to mine the ore with the K's Mobile Miner it was decided to focus on the expansion of Rura Penthe. This caused many more planning meetings and extra snacks had to be brought in from local cities. Arguments went back and forth as to whether to land the drills, holding tanks, fuel tanks, fuel cell arrays, solar power or ore processing first. This was finally settled when a contract came up to attach a Lab to the base. The Deputy Mission Director however still wanted to discuss further. Bob Kerman came to the rescue by putting him in a space suit and demonstrating first hand the principles of a Mass Relay. All arguments now agreed settled six scientists were rounded up, welded into a mobile lab and duly launched vaguely in the direction of Minmus. Eight days later the team, having managed to grind off the welds celebrated a safe landing and arrival at Rura Penthe. At least they wouldn't be doing the mining.
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