Cavscout74

SciFi Visual Enhancements. Most of the other planets/moons do as well - Duna has dust storms, Laythe has rain storms, Eelee has ice crystals, Moho has fire whirls plus some others. Duna & Minmus are my favorites, I deleted most of the others to improve performance Another view from the sruface:

I continued to not get a lot done today, just 3 launches plus my second Moho Pioneer probe arrived and made orbit this time. First up was the final major component for my Minmus Station - the greenhouse module. Catching the light of the rising sun at launch Docking with the station. Happily no slowdown in the game today Next launch was a combined relay & lander for Gilly. The last Eve window, I skipped trying to get anything to Gilly due to time & budget limitations. Finally, the Moho Pioneer safely in orbit. This one added a graviolli detector to the original design, and was able to send back additional low & high orbit science

I had always thought that was Laythe, with Jool getting rings & a facelift. Just seemed odd to me to have 2 inner moons around a gas giant having an atmosphere & substantial liquid oceans.

I didn't make a lot of progress in my career, but I did get a few worthwhile screenshots. Although not useless, Kerbinport Station had fulfilled its intended mission and hadn't been manned for well over a year, so the decision was made to deorbit it. Last image before reentry: And last image before parts started exploding - after getting a suborbital trajectory, most of the remaining fuel was spent aiming radial in to increase velocity & ensure plenty of explosions during reentry It was also finally time to replace the Minmus station crew. One scientist was left on the station, mostly due to there being only 3 seats on the crew vehicle. The new crew arrived at night (of course) during something strange going on with KSP - the 42-part crew vehicle was experiencing horrible lag on its own, and when it came within range of the station to dock, it turned into a a slide show. I still managed to safely dock - somehow - but a restart was required before I could transfer crew to the station. The old crew returned to Kerbin safely - and a well timed screenshot captured the spent orbital stage exploding behind the crew capsule during reentry

For whatever reason, it looks like KSP isn't recognizing the Flea. My best guess is it's asking for the older version of the Flea - the parts that have been updated the last few versions are still hidden in the game files to prevent breaking existing saves, but they aren't available in the VAB/SPH. When I have a contract that I have completed and it's just a game glitch, I'll go into the alt-F12 menu & complete it there. You could try a new rocket just to see if it recognizes the Flea

Now that my manned Duna mission is on its way, it was time to catch up on fully establishing my Minmus mining base. The mining/hab facility has been in place for a while but there's been no rover for local exploration and no fuel tanker to move fuel up to the station in orbit, so it was time to fix that. First up was a Lynx rover with large scanning arm. Somehow, I forgot to update the design with a graviolli detector, but it had every other piece of scientific equipment available. After landing it safely at the base, the resident engineer & scientist took it up into the hills to finally complete a contract for a complex scan of an olivine formation. Nice view of Kerbin & Mun overhead Mission accomplished I think this is the largest greenstone I've ever seen. I brought one home long ago, but maybe the lab in the mining base can get some more info out of it Finally, the fuel tanker landed & is getting filled up at the base. Also the first use I've gotten out of the extendable fuel arm.

A simple fix for future rovers rather than a complete redesign would be to slap a clamp-o-tron jr on the front of the rover & use that as your control point once you are on the ground. if it ends up covered by that front solar panel, maybe set an action group to "control from here"

You may have found this out already, but you need an engineer to install stuff with KIS/KAS. I got my career first manned Duna mission on the way yesterday, along with all the infrastructure. I started with the launch of my crew from KSC. Starting with an early morning launch, they made orbit easily and set up to rendezvous with the Duna lander for a quick adjustment before docking with the Duna transfer vehicle. Kelrik the engineer testing out his new suit on an EVA and swapping out the surface experiment load on the Duna lander. A sharp eyed accountant at KSC noticed an error on the Duna lander - instead of a weather monitor, it was loaded with an ionographer surface experiment just like the Ike lander. The Duna crew vehicle was fitted with a small experiment container & carried up a weather monitor for use on Duna in place of the Ionographer. Duna crew vehicle with transfer stage preparing to make an inclination adjustment to rendezvous with the Duna transfer vehicle Docking the crew & transfer vehicles for the trip to Duna: Once docked, a transfer maneuver was plotted & executed Next up was a small probe designed to complete two fly-by contracts, named the Duna Rally Probe Then came all the rest - Duna lander, Ike lander, Duna outpost, Ike mining base, Duna rover, Ike rover, Duna crew station (almost forgotten as I hadn't saved its maneuver on Kerbal Alarm Clock), and two tankers that will dock with & expand the station Ike Lander performing transfer burn as Kerbol sets Ike Miner coasting out of Kerbin's SoI Duna tanker leaving Kerbin's SoI

Glad that worked for you!

While hardly the worst thing I've done, I haven't done this in a while: Launching a small remote rover to Eve - which is to replace the first attempt that burned up during atmospheric entry - and I forgot to set the control point to the transfer stage instead of the (horizontally mounted) rover. The REALLY bad part is I have action groups set for the control points to easily switch. Surprisingly, the entire rocket flipped & slammed into the ground clear of the pad and the rover inside the fairing survived intact. The next attempt was successful, but I'm beginning to think my contract to land a rover on Eve might be cursed.

Yesterday, I got three launches in for the Jool window, which were more than expected as the Duna window a few days later was my big mission. First up was the Val Lander/Relay, launching from the Desert launch pad. It is based on the idea of my usual combined orbital relay & lander, but has been completely redesigned and reduced in size & mass. Lifting off from the desert pad, using just a single Mastodon with Cub verniers. The first stage is enough to get an Ap between 90-100 km before burning out After separation, the Poodle-powered second stage raises Ap the rest of the way and circularizes the orbit - I park most of my interplanetary flights between 130 & 139km orbits just to keep them out of the way until they depart. At that point, the second stage still has about 1900 m/s dV remaining - enough for most of the transfer to Jool. Once the poodle-stage was exhausted & staged away, the relay stage has a FTmN-40 nuclear rocket with ~2800 m/s dV for course corrections & entering orbit at the destination. Finally, once the Jool window arrived, the Vall Lander/Relay performed its transfer & is pictured here leaving Kerbin behind. The front section is the lander, and will be staged off to land once a stable orbit has been established around Vall. I also squeezed in two more of these - for Bop & Pol. The lander isn't Tylo-capable, and I didn't have time to build another one before the window anyway. Next up will be the career-first Duna mission departing for the red planet.

I got a few launches in for the upcoming Duna transfer in my career. Due to improvements in the launch industry, build times have dropped to mostly be in the 10-20 day range - they were running 20-30 days or more for the first few Duna craft. As a result, I will definitely be able to get all my desired craft launched before the window. There is a Jool window roughly the same time and I expect to be able to get a few craft launched for Jool as well due to the build time reductions. First up was the Duna Express transfer stage. The crew section will launch separately when the Duna window is opening and dock with the transfer stage, and will be just living quarters, 'chutes, heatshield & small engines for maneuvering & docking. This set up will allow me to complete the "and return to Kerbin" portion of exploration contracts without having to burn up a nuclear engine in Kerbin's atmosphere. I know there are no game effects, but I still avoid it whenever possible. Next came a Duna outpost. It's a little cramped - especially for long stays - but it provides quarters, limited snack production and a minimal ISRU capability on Duna's surface. There was also a Duna rover that I didn't grab screenshots of. The last launch was only headed for Minmus, but it was a test of the satellite bus for a potential Laythe mission. Ok, really I was bored building another contract satellite to send to Minmus, so I built the Probe Plus mod "Meridani" probe which is that mod's version of Cassini. It does give Minmus a phenomenal relay in polar orbit. I didn't add the Draco (aka Huygens) lander for what should be obvious reasons

Are you sure you got the latest version of Probes Plus? That happened to pretty much everything when the Unity engine was upgraded with 1.4 - so pretty much anything pre-1.4 has that problem. There is a fix for this a few pages quite a few pages back, there was a missing or corrupted file, I can't remember the details. There's a link for downloading the file.

I got my Minmus heavy mining based landed safely and Val, Kelrik & Ambera arrived to get it into operation. Approach to landing on a nice 13.28% ore concentration After landing, I transferred most of the fuel in the landing engine pods back to the mining base, then one at a time carefully throttled them up slightly & jettisoned each one. Three of them crashed into the mountains west of the base as intended, one somehow ended up in an escape trajectory out of Kerbin's SoI. The crew arrived - coming in a little lower than was prudent, but they missed the peak so all is good. I was actually doing most of the approach in map view, so it was quite a shock when I came back to the regular view & saw a peak rising above the lander Once landed, they crew transferred over to get the base up & running. One thing I found early on - the drills were mounted too low, lifting the base slightly & causing it to rock. To fix that, Kelrik & Val went out to reposition the drills a little higher - once again, thank you KAS!! Once that was accomplished and the base was sitting still, it was time to set out the surface experiments then let the drills & converter do their job.

After getting my Dres relay & landers sent on their way, I had three significant launches: First up was the Duna Quad Lander - basically the same as the Ike Quad Lander, but with a shielded docking port, some parachutes & different engines Then came the first Duna tanker Finally, my Minmus heavy mining facility was launched & headed for the minty moon. Pictured here after staging away the 4 Mastodons and tanks. My sandbox testing had one little flaw - I didn't have the landing engines & associated fuel tanks added yet for the tests. Their extra mass meant I didn't have enough fuel on the transfer stage to complete the Minmus transfer. Happily, I did have a some fuel in the the mining facility's tanks (partially to shift the CoM up a little at launch and partially because the only time you can have too much fuel is if you're on fire), so I transferred some over to make up the difference. Shortly before it gets to Minmus, a crew will be launching to bring the facility online.

I didn't have much worth mentioning in my career except for a pair of VIP's got the real VIP treatment of being flown to LKO personally by Jeb in one of my two Falcon-B spaceplanes. They were treated to a night takeoff, with the sun peaking over the horizon about the time the airspeed indicator was breaking mach 2. After establishing orbit, Jeb did a brief EVA to wave at them through the cabin windows, then climbed back in to get ready for the deorbit burn. I don't think I could've performed it better - I dropped below mach 2 crossing the mountains west of KSC, almost perfectly lined up with the runway. No overshoot, no circling to lose altitude, no establishing a barely stable 25km high-speed cruise to reach the airfield. Just went straight from orbit to landing on the runway. \ Since it was just a quick orbit & return, Kelrik waited with the combo crew bus/fuel truck

I was watching something on youtube and after, one of the recommended videos was a Scott Manley "What KSP doesn't teach about...." video. It was something about rocket engines & looked interesting. And after watching one or two more of his videos, I wanted to know what this KSP thing was he kept referencing in his video titles. It looked interesting, so i downloaded the demo with the idea that if I could figure out how to get into orbit, I would buy the whole game. Two or three days later, I was installing the full version & making my wife hate my computer.

A pair of VIP's returning from an exclusive trip to orbit flown by Jeb

I ground out some more progress on my 20% science career. My Moho probe arrived and turned out to be a fly-by probe rather than staying in orbit. That was a little disappointing, but it did send a substantial amount of science before it departed Moho's SoI. A replacement is already in LKO waiting on a favorable transfer window - and now that NERV's are unlocked, there are no doubts that this one will enter orbit I also finally got around to testing my Mini-Min lander, taking 3 of the station crew down to the old Minmus base & back. I also started getting craft launched for my career-first manned interplanetary mission, starting with crew station core. The crew modules are being launched later to dock with the station, while the fuel modules will be sent to Duna separately as tankers. Then the redesigned Ike Quad Lander was sent up to wait for the transfer window. The Duna Quad Lander is still being redesigned, but should be ready to launch in another month Finally, I did some work on a heavy mining base in sandbox. It was designed in career, then tested in sandbox and eventually put into orbit. Surprisingly, after fixing a few stability problems, it made orbit without burning off any pieces, so now I need to get one built & launched in career.

Putting an Ike lander into orbit, I love the little details Restock adds

I got a lot done yesterday, but not a lot of screenshots to show for it. I just unlocked the graviolli detector in my 20% science career, so I launched a probe to gather as much science in Kerbin, Mun & Minmus orbits as I could. I used my 1.8m Steamglider launch vehicle as the probe is pretty light. The launcher was good for over 3000 m/s, easily enough to get the Ap I wanted. I didn't bother with a 2nd stage, just put bigger fuel tanks on the probe, which were good for just over another 3000 m/s, plenty for getting to Mun & Minmus orbit & returning. I spent a lot of time coasting with waiting for biome changes, so not much in the way of screenshots but it took most of my game time. My other major project was to finally satisfy two tourists that had been part of a 6 tourist contract. Everybody else was happy with Minmus or Mun, but these two just HAD to go into Kerbol orbit, so I built the Sunseeker - seats 2 in relative comfort (its a hab module rather than a pod), with enough dV to get it just out of Kerbin space & back again. I actually built it so it reenters nose first - a final burn gets performed just after entering the upper atmosphere, then the engine gets staged away, set SAS to prograde & wait till the chutes open Mission accomplished! Finally finishing that contract netted me over 200k funds and a nice little bump to reputation

Thank

Darn it, who stole my likes?!?!? I haven't even used one today & the forum is telling me I've used all of mine for today.

Didn't get much done in my career today, but I did get a few launches in and finished my tourist mission with the heavy lander. A Dres window is approaching, so I put a remote rover & Pioneer probe in LKO to wait for the transfer. The Heavy Lander-6 design was finally used to its full capabilities, taking a pilot & 5 tourists to a Minmus landing, then looped around Kerbin to a Mun landing before returning to splashdown at home. Here, the transfer stage is jettisoned after the deorbit burn over Minmus Arriving in Mun orbit with a nice view of home The landing tanks ran dry soon after liftoff and were jettisoned, leaving the core with "just" 1200 m/s to finish getting to low Mun orbit and return to Kerbin Dusk splashdown

I really don't know how I missed this series when you first started it, but I only noticed it after likes were disabled. And of course, after trying to catch up on likes elsewhere, I'm already out for today so I still can't give you some well deserved likes. Looking forward to more updates and I will really try to save you a few likes!