Cavscout74

Yesterday was rather boring - double rescue in Kerbin orbit followed by a training flight to Mun - but today is a little more interesting so far. I tested an Atlas-ish launcher. First flight was unremarkable, second took a Mk 1 pod to orbit & the "big" test was to launch a Probes Plus Surveyor lander with small NERV transfer stage to orbit in preparation for a Dres window. I was pleased with the lack of explosions. The booster section still needs work for looks, but functioning is quite good. Atlas-Surveyor liftoff: Sustainer pushing on to orbit: Surveyor in orbit - it was short of dV in the launcher, but I had over 6k in the transfer stage, so no problem:

I managed to strand Jeb & Kelrik near the Munar north pole after I mistakenly thought I had plenty of dV in their lander to hit 2 anomalies. Ended up landed near the second one with only ~200 m/s remaining so I launched a small rover with extra fuel to recover them. As it turns out, it just barely was enough. Circularized at ~9000m, then my return burn left me only 80 m/s & heading for a 900x1300km Kerbin orbit. Lowering Pe to <30km left me with a whopping 11 m/s. I burned it just after reentering the atmosphere, then let the lower stage lose a few parts to heat before staging & subjecting the heat shield to the excessively fast reentry. Happily, everything worked out ok, although landing was just about as far from KSC as possible. Kelrik waiting for the refuel lander, gazing longingly back at Kerbin: Refuelling rover just before it's final burn: Coming around the south pole in VERY low Mun orbit:

@Triop Reminds me a little of the French Leduc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leduc_0.22

I spent a little time experimenting with low to mid-tech SSTO designs. The least unsuccessful one looked pretty cool, flew pretty nice, but is about 1000 m/s shy of the "O" part. Then I launched a few satellites for contracts & followed up with a Mun rover landing. Ended the day with sending off my first round of Duna probes for this career. The "least unsuccessful" SSTO attempt: 0.625m LFO sounding rocket boosting a small satellite to orbit: And finally the Mun remote rover landed at Twin Craters:

What, there's something wrong with that!?!?!? I figured the glowing surface just made it easier to find when coming back from Jool.

I'm going to have to mess with planes more in my current career since I decided to impose launch time restrictions on myself. One day wait between launches that can go from a level 1 pad, 10 days for level 2 & 20 days for level 3. No restrictions on runways though. Hmm, I wonder how an air-dropped sub would work....

@Triop Well that looks interesting, going to have to check this out. I went back & launched my little folding-wing rocket plane from the runway just for fun and, well, Jeb says "Thank you!" for the cockpit ejection system, because this thing is pretty much uncontrollable taking off from the runway. I know the fuel weight is a factor, but I tried again with it almost empty & it wasn't much better. Now I'm really amazed it flew so nice to landing after vertical launch & reentry.

I had a contract to visit the anomaly around the arctic, so I cobbled together a rocket plane with folding wings & stuck it on top of a 1.25m launcher. Stuck Jeb in the cockpit & pushed it out to the Woomerang launch site. By some miracle - or perhaps the kraken was away, busy trying to kill kerbals after falling off a ladder <1m above the surface of Mun - this thing flew wonderfully!!! Got up to ~85k Ap, then glided down, circled back due to overshooting the anomaly, which also put me in good shape for a landing on the ice sheet before using the last 60 m/s dV to taxi into the hills where the anomaly is. Once I stopped, it of course promptly fell over since the gear are mounted so close together. But still - mission accomplished!! Then I went on to test a new Mun/Minmus lander design with another Mun arch landing. Sufficient dV to bring a pair of kerbals from KSC to a Mun landing & return. The bonus is the lower stage of the lander carries most of the batteries & science gear, plus a simple probe core & solar panels, so it becomes a ground station to complete future "collect science" contracts. And that all came off perfectly as well. I'm about due to lose a few kerbals now.

Had my first intentional Mun arch visit this morning, then got my first manned mission to Minmus launched. While they are in transmit, I spent most of my time catching up missions from the Historical Mission pack now that I updated Contract Configurator. Since the beginning ones are all "flying" or "sub-orbital" I just slapped together a simple, cheap solid rocket with fins & probe core & fired it off a bunch of times, but now I'm up to "launch a SM-65A Atlas" & I think I'm going to try my hand at building an Atlas-ish launcher. Update: So much for the Atlas contract - launched something else not thinking about it, & it completed the parameters for the Atlas contract instead of me actually building an Atlas & launching Mun arch flag-planting: Titan MPV headed for Minmus to rendezvous with the lander:

Stage Recovery & Flight Manager for Reusable Stages (FMRS) are the main two I'm aware of, but I haven't used either. If I understand correctly, Stage Recovery just recovers funds, science & crew from any dropped stage that has sufficient parachutes and/or sufficient fuel for a powered stage. FMRS jumps you back & forth in time to manually recover the dropped stages, then jump back to the core ship to continue the mission. Stage Recovery thread: FMRS thread:

Most of my unmanned stuff - survey, comm relay & science sats - are made to go anywhere, so they typically have some solar & a small RTG or two. I can't remember which mod it's from, but I have a small, low-cost & mass RTG that puts out ~0.1 ec/s, looks kinda like somebody cut a slice off the top of a stock RTG. I stick them on just about everything once they're available, but still hang on to at least a pair of 1x6 panels. Now once I start getting into ISRU, I tend to build for wherever they're going, and don't waste mass on solar if they're going far too far out. I'll just stick with RTG's for routine power & fuel cells or nuclear/fusion reactors for the drills & convertors.

I finally unlocked all science nodes up to 90 points with no upgrades in my hard career save. I have missed patched conics SOOOOO much. Had enough cash to upgrade the launch pad, mission control & tracking station once my science was unlocked. Thanks to Barquetta Comm/science sat with a telescope in Mun polar orbit, sent back loads of sweet, sweet science: Then I checked out some anomaly contracts that I just added. I never knew the island control tower was climbable. Then Jeb got sent out into the desert to check out another one. He's only a 1-star pilot, and apparently landing in the mountains was beyond his ability. Just had to make a "quick" 3km trek through the desert to get to the temple. After all that science & exploring, it was time to launch one of a pair of new Titan-1 MPVs (Multi-Purpose Vehicle) for a rendezvous & dock around Kerbin contract. Didn't have time to finish that today, though. But it was great getting back into 1.8m parts now that the 18 ton limit was gone. This was a redesign of an old standby, with some new parts added in. Both flew straight & true, so the first 4 Kerbonauts are all in orbit, waiting on the rendezvous maneuver.

In my un-upgraded hard career, I managed to get a comm relay/science probe in polar orbit of Minmus with just eyeballing burns on the first attempt somehow. That and landing a pair of Surveyor (thank you Probes Plus mod) landers on Mun earned me a load of science, down to two 90-point research nodes left & I have 50 points of science saved up. I think one more good Mun landing might snag me that last 130 science points. One of the Surveyors catching some rays:

Part Angle Display might be what you're looking for, at least for setting angles/rotation: https://spacedock.info/mod/1679/Part Angle Display Continued

Started a new 1.4.3 hard career and except for being modded, I've been playing it caveman-style so far. It's quite amazing what you can accomplish with just 18 tons & 30 parts. I've already gotten fly-by, orbit & landing on Mun contracts, plus put a comm relay in Mun orbit. Next up - Minmus. I have no clue how I'm going to eye-ball that rendezvous. Also up to almost half the 90-point science nodes unlocked. Haven't gotten much in the way of good screenshots though.

My criteria for buying the game after trying the demo was "If I can get a rocket into orbit in the demo, I'll buy the full game next pay day." That was over a year ago, and I haven't gotten bored yet.

I was getting that in 1.4.1 occasionally - mostly if I tabbed out while in a load screen. In my case, it was just the graphics resetting to maximum resolution & I had to go back to the main menu & reset to what I was using. I haven't had it happen yet in 1.4.3, but I only played for maybe 2 hours so far.

First I updated my main game to 1.4.3 & it looks promising but I don't want to give up my 1.3.1 game yet since I have Outer Planets installed & haven't even gotten to Sarnus yet, let alone anything further out. And apparently Kopernicus doesn't play nice with solar panels in 1.4.3 until it's updated, so I can't add that to 1.4.3 yet. In my 1.3.1 save, I finally got my Probes Plus Cassini into Laythe orbit & dropped the Huygens lander. Only downside is it fell in the ocean - but it does float. I also replaced my mostly stock 500km relays around Kerbin with Probes Plus Barquetta comsats. The entire launcher was only 29k with all 3 satellites, so now I'm going to have to investigate how low on the tech tree the parts become available. Cassini in Laythe orbit after lander separation: Lander around Laythe. Unfortunately the reentry & splashed down images didn't come out well. Barquetta comsat in orbit:

Almost ditto - mine was a tourist land on Mun contract. I didn't even see the arch till I was past it though, and didn't have an extra few hundred m/s to re-land to visit it properly.

From a thread on here by Poodmund. A few seconds off on lat/lon & showing a bit higher peak, but I suspect the same point as the wiki is referring to. LAT = 61° 35' 46" N LON = 46° 21' 36" E LAT = 61.596 LON = 46.36 ALT = 6768m

Dropped a modified Probes Plus Formalhauf lander onto Moho. The image makes it look big, but its really about the size of a kerbal.

Dear lord, another Angel-125 mod I'm going to have to install. I haven't even flown a decent DSEV in ages and now we're going to have saucers!?!?!

I'm looking forward to it too but after two patches that have progressively made things worse, I'm happy to wait for something to actually get fixed & play 1.3.1 until then.

IIRC they are from SXT - https://spacedock.info/mod/1030/SXTContinued

I have a laptop cooler, but my daughter taught him to play games on her phone as a kitten, and he apparently has grown up to play KSP now. He will sit on my lap as long as I let him watching & occasionally trying to play too. He's pulled keys out of my keyboard before also. I think he enjoys the explosions.