Cavscout74

It's been a busy two days for my career - the Laythe ocean base splashed down safely, the Lynx-Laythe 6x6 amphibious rover landed as well, my Eve crew started their trip home, both my Jool & Eeloo com relays entered their intended orbits and then a whole pile of course correction maneuvers from my Jool fleet. Laythe ocean base ready for entry Chutes deployed. It's in the water ~60 km from where the Laythe Explorer drone landed Splashed down with Jool peaking over the horizon. Lynx-Laythe rover descending - the Laythe Explorer is about 6.5 km away, on the other side of the hill in the background There's that geyser. I also passed a boulder on the driver over, but I don't have an active contract to scan a boulder, so I let it be for now. Scan in progress. Laythe Explorer is visible in the background. Eve crew getting ready to depart. The Eve Lander is docked to the nose for the return trip Last sunset on Eve I also popped in to check on my Duna crew and caught a rare evening without a dust storm. The SAFER reactor is humming away, providing all necessary power, so all the solar panels have been stowed for safety.

For horizontal landing on any vacuum body, you normally burn off most of your speed until close to the surface & flip horizontal for the touchdown. Even 60 m/s seems higher than it needs to be. With Minmus' low gravity, wheel brakes aren't going to do much. Now if you are just trying to challenge yourself to see how fast you can land, I'd advise you bring a lot of Monoprop, because your RCS is probably going to be more effective for braking than your actual brakes are.

Amazing work, @XLjedi !!! Thanks for sharing this

I had some time this morning, so I fast-forwarded a month & got Jeb and the rest of the vets going to Jool. ETA is just 397 days to a Tylo intercept - which only required a small correction burn (<70 m/s) immediately after leaving Kerbin SoI. No mid-course correction needed, and I don't even think it'll need any in-system correction before intercepting Tylo - Pe is pretty low as-is and the intercept is right where it needs to be, near the craft's Jool Pe. And I still have 67000 m/s dV remaining for the capture and any in-system maneuvers. Docking to transfer crew. The nose segment will get transferred to DSV-01 Alderaan and make the round trip to Jool & back so I have a ready made "return to Kerbin from...." craft that is light enough not to seriously impact the DSV's dV. Starting 3800 m/s Jool transfer maneuver. Even with the fusion drive, it only accelerates at <0.6 g, so it take a few minutes. This smaller fusion drive is kept cool by the 4 large thermal control system panels - they maxed out & the engine heated up to something like 835 K within maybe two minutes & stayed steady for the rest of the maneuver. Maneuver complete, it will take just over 4 hours to clear Kerbin's Soi I also had a minor problem and 2 random part testing on Kerbin contracts, so I made a solution to all 3 and ended up with a nice little light launch vehicle by accident. The problem was I have a contract to "return to Kerbin from the surface of Eve" and my Eve lander has no provisions for reentry or landing - it was supposed to return the single crewman to Eve station then get sent to crash back into Eve. Happily, I have KIS & KAS, so attaching the crew capsule to the crew cycler for the trip home is no problem, but getting the pod to actually land intact needs some work. So I launched a probe with docking port, RCS, parachutes & heatshield. The 2 part test contracts were for a "Cub" vernier engine & a Boostertron I SRB (from a mod, made for giving a small boost for 30 seconds). So I built what is now the Steamglider launch vehicle - two 1.875m long tanks, a Kodiak engine with 4 Cub's, the 4 Boostertron I SRB's on radial decouplers. Lifted my Eve lander fixer thing up to a 135km Ap, and still had around 80-90 m/s dV remaining, but I went ahead & dumped it since the upper stage had around 1700 on its own. With 4 Cubs for steering on a relatively light vehicle, that thing handled like a sports car. As soon as the payload was in orbit, I went back to the VAB & saved the first stage as a subassembly for future use. Finally, my Laythe ocean base was arriving at Tylo a day after Alderaan left Kerbin, so I went ahead and did that gravity assist with 2 small correction maneuvers that put it going straight into a Laythe intercept with ~120 km Pe. Next step is putting it down safely, but the Laythe Explorer drone (which is my target) is on the night side so it'll have to wait

My Jool fleet departed today. So much fun - ~2200 m/s maneuver nodes, one after the other. All 13 of them. The Laythe heavy fuel station - being moved by a fusion tug - was the worst. First, it defaulted to the wrong control point, so it immediately started spinning in circles when thrust was applied. Very, very fast circles. Made it nearly impossible to get the correct control point selected, then it took a while to actually get the spinning stopped. Once I got that under control & started thrusting again, the engine gimbal was high enough that it was threatening to shake the craft apart. I had to turn it down to 10% to get it stable enough to finish the maneuver. The 6 large thermal control system panels plus 4 large flat radiators were barely enough to keep the engine from overtemping - this was only maybe 2 minutes into the maneuver. At least Jeb & company have a month before their fusion-powered craft is due to go. And once it departs Kerbin, it will have just under a 1 year trip before reaching Jool. A crew of newbies, however, is taking the slow boat to Jool. One of the 13 that headed out today. Pictured here with a Lightning spaceplane bringing the crew up to transfer to the Calypso before heading on their way. The brightest spot of my day - my Eeloo Voyager arrived at Eeloo & entered orbit. At least it was less then a 2000 m/s maneuver for a change

This is limited by KSP itself. Look in the "Gamedata/Squad/Contracts/Contracts.cfg" and there is a line "AverageAvailableContracts = ##" You can edit that value (or write a MM patch) to increase it. 20-25 is usually a good figure. The number of contracts of a given star rating is limited by a combination of reputation & Mission Control level. The higher your reputation, the more contracts of each star rating you can have, with the total limited by mission control level. I learned this when I smashed a load of tourists into the Mun & even with a level 3 mission control, I could only take like 3 each 1 & 2 star & two 3-star contracts or something like that. Once my rep started getting out of the negative, the number of allowed contracts started to increase as well.

Stormy launch The actual launch was a complete failure, flipped in pitch nearing 10 km. Very disappointing, haven't had that happen in a long time. It wasn't even a new design, but it had a few changes and apparently one or more of them messed up the handling. Other than that, I continued with my pre-Jool launches. I'm basically done - this was a not-entirely-necessary crew shuttle to run between moons, and I already have well over a dozen other craft to transfer to Jool starting in 27 days, so I'm probably not going to bother with it. I just want to get Jeb & other vets to Laythe again. I haven't been in a while - with the frequent KSP updates, I usually start a new career with each new version.

In addition to testing escape pods & tinkering with a new KSP build, I took on an engine testing contract in between Jool mission launches in my existing career. This was for the Mk2 Expansion "Rontgen" atomic jet. So I built a new test aircraft to go with it, and it turned out to be quite fun to fly. First take-off. It doesn't need fuel, but it DOES need a little ballast in the nose, so the tank behind the air intake was reconfigured to hold lead, although it's only ~10% full to get the CoM where it's needed. And yes, it uses Big-S tails for wings. While this little jet will break mach 1 near the surface and doesn't need fuel, it does have one slight problem - not only is it cooking the drone core, it's even got the cockpit starting to overheat Version 2 with added radiators & airbrake. There is a significant drag increase with the radiators, and it can't break mach 1 down low any more. But it doesn't cook the cockpit either After landing, it's actually safe to get out without having to worry about the pilot spontaneously combusting. A final change (no screenshots of that one) replaced the twin side mounted radiators with a single one mounted underneath, which made enough difference that it can get just over mach 1 down low and still not melt the pilot

I made a 4-kerbal escape pod from the MH expanding airlocks. First version used some mod parts & a 10m heatshield tweak-scaled down to fit a 1.25m stack. Second version went with almost all stock parts, but I didn't like the way the airlocks were exposed during reentry. Third version mounted everything to an 2.5m engine plate and was the cleanest design of the group. Version 1 - smallest width design, 4 inflatable airlocks mounted radially on a 1.25m stack. Version 3 - shortest version & pure stock. Also easiest to mount to an existing station since the engine plate decoupler can be used to disconnect whatever vessel is used to bring it up to the station. Although it has a pair of liner RCS ports for limited maneuvering, it works best if it is pointed retrograde before decoupling from a station - four sepratrons around the docking port provide enough dV to drop it from a 125km circular orbit to a Pe of just under 50km. The parachute is a little too small (8.2 m/s descent rate when fully deployed) but it was a survivable landing with no explosions.

I managed to successfully land & dock the mining & reactor add-ons to my Duna-Cavalier base, then landed the new Duna crew & set up surface experiments. The reactor was landed first - and a pretty nice landing it was, within sight of the base Then came the mining add-on. Not as close - around 2km, but hey, that's why I put them on wheels. After a short drive, it was time to dock with the base. The mining was docked first, to give a little extra distance between the living & work spaces & the reactor. The Universal Storage II 1.25m shroud cargo variant makes a nice little "containment building" At least when it's closed. Once that was done, then it was time for the crew to head down: Setting up experiments before heading in to get the base up & running. Somewhere in all the docking, KSP decided that the new base wasn't actually a new base - despite the fact that I designed all 3 components after taking the contract. I wasn't going to lose out on 185k funds so it was alt-F12 time. My other experimental KSP build is proving to be a failure, so now I'm trying a copy of my existing build but changing out some things to reduce the load on my system. First off was removing Community Tech Tree - nearly half the nodes it adds were empty despite the number of mods I have, so it's not really worth it. I might add a few extra nodes to the stock tech tree - the Wild Blue mods already add a handful, so I'm thinking of adding 2 or 3 more - one for nuclear power (so power reactors aren't lumped in with the NERV) and one or two to split off the planetary base & life support parts a little more.

That comes as a rude awakening the first time it happens. I've had my best luck adding ISRU to the capture vehicle so it can refuel itself from the asteroid - which also reduces the asteroid mass. As long as you have enough dV to get a stable Kerbin orbit - no matter how crazy an orbit - then it becomes just a matter of time. In my career, I managed to get my Duna Flyer landed on Duna. The first LZ had a good ore concentration, but was pretty rough terrain & kinda high altitude (~3600m) that even Duna Flyer was having issues with takeoff & landing. So I buzzed over to the Eastern Canyon and found a slightly higher ore concentration, smoother terrain & due to the lower altitude, no trouble landing. After that, it was time to set down the Cavalier base core. Duna Flyer entering Duna's atmosphere, transfer stage is visible in the background This just does not look inviting as a base location Flying to the eastern canyon in a dust storm Safely landed near the western mouth of the Eastern Canyon. Just a few km west it switches to Highlands, so there is plenty of science to be had around here Cavalier-Duna base core landed safely just a few hundred meters from Duna Flyer, still within the nearly 12% ore concentration. Now I have to land the mining segment & reactor segment close & get them docked. For added fun, I discovered one of the existing core arms does NOT have a docking port. It's the hab module, so I'm not going to attach the reactor or mining segments there anyway, but it limits the options for expanding the base in the future. Another thing I realized, I didn't launch a new rover for this base, so unless I plan on driving the old rover half-way around Duna (hint: I don't), the crew will be stuck with just the Duna Flyer for exploration work - which is great for long distances, but it's a delicate little plane & requires much care on landing. Lastly, the new Duna crew just entered Duna's SoI & will be entering orbit in about two days.

It's not slander if she actually beat him. He came down in the ocean roughly halfway between KSC & the Desert space center. Until that time arrives, my career continued marching on. A few more craft arrived in Duna orbit for my second round of crewed explorations. My Laythe Explorer drone also arrived & successfully entered Laythe's atmosphere, flew around for a little while, then landed at the first possible base location, which turned out to have a 12.6% ore concentration. I did have one strange thing happen - before bringing the Laythe Explorer out of orbit, i switched to my survey sat to bring up an ore overlay to see where a good place to look for a base location would be. But when I turned the overlay off, the clouds weren't drawn in where the overlay was. Tried going back to KSC & loading the Laythe Explorer again, no change. Exited to main menu & reloaded the save, no change. I finally had to exit the game & restart it to get the clouds to look normal. The Laythe Explorer is basically a cruise missile with landing gear & scientific instruments in place of a warhead. I overshot my target, and had to fly back for a while. Happily, it cruises around 550 m/s so it wasn't too long of a flight On approach to land I spotted a geyser, so after getting safely landed, I taxied back to find it This area isn't too bad for a base - a little more sloped & bumpy than I like for landing spaceplanes, but it's just south of the equator & has a nice ore concentration for refueling. It also doesn't look like too bad of a trek to the coast for when I get the floating base in position, so my amphibious rover shouldn't have any issues going back and forth. This is actually the first career I've managed to find a good base location with the Laythe Explorer - previous times I tried, I either never found a good location before crashing it on landing somewhere or never found a good location before I gave up looking because nothing close to where it landed was suitable and I didn't feel like flying to the other side of Laythe.

I've noticed this too. I've been using a decoupler Tweakscaled to match the sounding rocket size mounted underneath the truss with decoupler staging turned off as a work-around. This isn't the only mod I've encountered this behavior in either - ProbesPlus has a lander based on the Soviet Venera landers. Their listed impact tolerance is 50 m/s IIRC but I've had them explode on landing with <5 m/s as well. And I've used basically the same work-around for that one too.

I held on to 1.3.1 for a while (and I still have it saved) but once 1.4.5 fixed most of the 1.4 bugs, I switched and have steadily updated since. Typically, I will wait a few weeks after a new version to let mods update or at least figure out if they work ok, but then I'll switch. But generally the game has improved and I like most of the new stuff - Kerbal parachutes, a new & improved Mk 2 lander can that I actually use and now robotics that I've barely scratched the surface on.

It's a busy time in my career - the second batch of Duna personnel are about to arrive while a new Jool transfer window is fast approaching. Already, I've orbited a Bop lander (of my somewhat standard design) and a new Pol folding crew lander (inspired my by other folding landers, now slightly bigger & with crew seats). I also sent a second Lightning II spaceplane to orbit for a transfer to Jool to act as backup to the first one already enroute. It also allowed Val to brush up on her spaceplane skills, then show up Jeb by landing the pilot reentry vehicle (PRV) on the grass just a few km's west of KSC. My plan is for a small crew of less experienced kerbonauts to take the PCC-03C Calypso to Jool during the transfer window for the nearly 3 year journey. Then about 45 days later, Jeb & the other vets will load up on the DSV-01B Alderaan & perform a ~5000 m/s transfer burn to put them around Jool in just under a year, which will require another 5000 m/s burn unless I catch Tylo for a gravity assist. Since Alderaan has around 50 km/s dV with her fusion drive, the gravity assist really is optional. The intent is to leave Calypso at Jool as an emergency Kerbin-return vehicle, while Alderaan has plenty of living space (12 in the gravity ring vs 4 in the Calypso's single Hitchhiker can) to bring both crews home at the end of their mission. I still need a Val station & ground base plus a Tylo crew lander, and a fuel tanker or two, but most of the rest of my Jool infrastructure is already on the way. I still debating what I want to do for in-system refueling - the Laythe base can handle the spaceplanes, but I'd like to set up something larger to keep the crew cyclers & DSV's topped off. I've done Vall, Pol & Bop at various times in the past, but I'm not sure which I feel like for this career. Pol lander launching from KSC. For its size, it was surprisingly heavy. I decided to use a new design - a triple-core Dawngrazer 1.875m launcher. Even then, I needed a pair of small SRB's getting off the pad. Circularizing orbit - the transfer stage actually had to finish getting it out of the atmosphere on its own, so for the future I need a better launch vehicle. The lander is still folded, but it will unfold into the "X" pattern of my other folding landers, just with crew seats now. The one thing I forget was a good antenna for the transfer - I only have a short range antenna on the lander itself, but nothing for the transfer. I'm hoping it stays close enough to some of the other craft that will be carrying good-sized relay antennas that it won't be an issue. If there was OSHA oversight of my space program, this design probably wouldn't be allowed since the seats end up between the 4 engines exhausts. Val taking off from KSC In orbit, Val just staged the PRV away from the Lightning, which will climb to a higher orbit to top off its fuel for the Jool transfer while Val reenters & gets ready for the upcoming mission Ready for reentry Take that Jeb, Val could actually walk back to base instead of swimming Last but not least, the new Pegasus base arrives in Duna orbit. The new crew are still just over a week out, so there is plenty of time to find a suitable location & get this landed. Then the mining & reactor wings will have to be landed as well.

You could have gone with "how bad the mainstream media is about talking about ______" and still been correct. As far as what I'm doing cool, trying to make a version with fewer mods than I normally use that will hopefully run better. BUT trying to keep a handful of parts that I really like & don't want to give up from mods I'm trying to cut. So far, it's mostly beating my head against my desk. And it's rapidly ballooning into nearly as big as my normal install. Which makes no sense because other than 4 or 5 parts, I've deleted 4 very large mods & 2 or 3 small ones. So maybe not so cool.

The really sad part is I still use the mods that should have been replaced because the mods still do it better (Better Burn Time for example). I think the only mod I've actually been able to delete was Take Command

There is this mod as well. I've tried it before, and it worked well at the time (1.4 or so) but I deleted it to cut down my mod list. For me, it just wasn't that necessary in the stock system except maybe Eve.

I wish they'd just hire the folks working on the Restock mod & replace everything stock with their work.

I've been offline for a few days, but my KSP career has continued to advance. First up - the first crewed Eve landing & return I've done in quite a while and the very first time I've done it in a craft of my own design. Stock TWR calculations were WAYYYYY off - I had to keep throttles under 50% almost the entire way, and frequently under 25% to keep my speed down in the atmosphere. For the future, I probably need to trade out two more Vectors for aerospikes. The all-important flag planting. That nearly ended up a failure - there was a narrow spot on my ladders that caused Ribdas to fail going down, then he was barely able (after about 2 minutes of trying) to squeeze through & climb back up. Remainder of pics in spoiler: Up next were the last two Jool system landers - Pol & Tylo. Pol was a piece of cake. Tylo went remarkably smoothly for me until the stupid windows "sticky keys" message popped up a few meters (<10 I think) before touchdown, just as I was giving a burst of full throttle to brake. By the time I got back in game, I had climbed back to 1200m & was down to 35 m/s dV remaining. It was over 200 m/s just before the sticky keys mess, so I turned on infinite fuel for the second landing. I don't mind doing that for real world glitches - usually I save before major events & only allow quickloads for game crashes & real world problems, but I hadn't this time so cheating infinite fuel was the only fix I had. Still kinda disappointing that I had to do that. I was so happy I didn't run out of fuel 2 seconds before landing for a change After these milestones, I attempted to make a somewhat unorthodox single-seat spaceplane to hopefully go to Dres (with enough life support) to satisfy a "Test Rapier in orbit of Dres" contract - which I only took to get access to the Rapier early. Early experiments were not terribly successful. Roswell Kerman is my most senior pilot still at KSC, and she was not amused: Finally, I launched the "C" model of my crew cycler which drops the part count down to 40-something, adds about 200 more days of snacks for a crew of 4 and (somehow) adds a few hundred m/s dV, bringing it up to ~9600. Then I topped it by launching a fusion-powered Deep Space Exploration Vehicle with something like 50,000 m/s dV. Pictured here before the orbital insertion stage was jettisoned. Edit: Also, almost anti-climactic with everything else - Jeb & the company returned from Duna to a safe splashdown just east of KSC. The NERV transfer stage burned back into orbit after dropping Jeb & company on a suborbital trajectory. After recovery was made - and I remembered with everything else going on - it performed a transfer to the Mun where it burned its remaining fuel straight into the Mun, impacted at over 3000 m/s & managed to get 102 science points from the seismic sensor on the other side of the Mun.

The KSP aerodynamic model isn't the greatest so that isn't very surprising. There is a mod that creates a more realistic aerodynamic model called FAR but I don't many details about it, so I can't say if it would make a difference there either.

Great timing - my manned Eve mission is arriving at the purple monster now. Most of the craft are in orbit, with only 2 more still inbound. The Gilly-bound craft are still in high Eve orbits, waiting on me having time to get them moved to Gilly. Crew cycler arriving in Eve orbit. One of the vessels I'm still waiting on is my Eve crew station, so the crew are stuck on board here for a few more days. They've already gotten high & low orbit graviolli & EVA reports from everything around Eve's equator. The Eve-1 lander also arrived. I'm waiting for the crew station so my victim can at least be a level 3 pilot before trying to land on Eve. I attempted to land another emergency fuel station, and again it lost control despite the addition of controls that should have kept it straight. Next time, I'm just going to make a more compact version that will in between two inflated heatshields so it doesn't matter which end is which Getting ready for entry, which aft heatshield & gridfins deployed Remnants descending through Eve's clouds, looking remarkably similar to the first one that failed during entry. Currently I also have a heavy remote rover with advanced scanning arm waiting to land on Eve, plus a small mining base, lander, relay & remote lander waiting in high Eve orbit until I have time to get them moved to Gilly. I also just managed to kill a crew of 3 kerbals coming home from nearly a year on my Minmus mining base, including Elon Kerman. I can't believe it happened. I've only lost one pilot in this career until now, and he died testing an aircraft that was questionable at best. This was a routine transfer - in fact, they were the 6th crew just at the mining base, not counting other bases & random missions. The only difference was, I was a little low on my Pe (~24 km), and started heating up too much upon reentry. My lower stage mostly exploded, but by the time parts of it stopped exploding, I thought I was pretty safe & staged off the Pomegranate pod for landing. Only it wasn't safe & within 10 seconds of staging, it overheated & exploded. I think I sat there for several seconds staring at the reaction wheel & parachute flying through the air without the pod with my jaw just hanging open in shock. If I follow my normal naming protocol, then Eve, Duna & Laythe stations will now have names (Elon Kerman Memorial Station, etc). I was quite proud that only a single station had a name until now.

I wonder if the one in the video was mined of all its ore? I had one glitch & actually get to like -4% ore and it had negative mass. I couldn't even get it to land, it kept bouncing off the atmosphere & floating back to orbit. I finally had to delete it in the tracking center. I had another Laythe probe arrive, this one for a highly elliptical polar orbit to function as the primary comm relay for Laythe after it sends all its science back. Then I launched another probe to Eeloo - this one carrying 3 mini landers to gather science from multiple biomes I also got a new Duna base launched & headed to the red planet. Not pictured are the mining & reactor addon's which will be landed separately & dock on the surface (hopefully). Unfortunately, I still don't have the Planetary Base Systems science lab researched yet, so that addon will have to wait for the next transfer Finally, I launched a new crew for Duna on a slightly redesigned Lightning spaceplane - I added a structural fuselage & aerodynamic tail cone over the NERV to reduce drag. I'm not sure how much it helps (the Rapiers that trick helps a lot), but I like how it looks. Once in orbit, the crew docked with the PCC-02B Babylon, also redesigned with a new nose section. Originally, I used a cupola with docking port for the nose, but I really felt like any large craft is going to have 2 pilots, so I rebuilt it with the Palici pod from Missing History as the command pod. In theory it increases capacity of the crew cycler, but it's really not built for more than 4 or 5 for long missions. I also added more science gear so it can perform some science gathering on its own. I'm considering a further redesign that might reduce part count - it's not bad, only 50-something now, but the fewer parts the better when I have to dock with large stations.

I like planes & spaceplanes a lot, but I use rockets much more. Biggest use I have for spaceplanes is moving crews to orbit to transfer into whatever is going to take them further. The other big use is for Laythe interface between surface & orbiting stations. The rest of the time, its just quicker & easier for me to launch via rocket. I've used recoverable rockets also, but they get old quick, even in career where the cost is a factor.

One other thing I noticed - setting DELTAV_CALCULATIONS_ENABLED = False also kills the burn time indicator. Everything shows 0s burn time