Ace in Space

Today I finally cleaned up the rest of my mess. The first Ohana arrived at Eve and hauled Eridin back to Tiger's Eye station without a problem. That little speck under the sun is the Ohana, floating off in the distance since it's no longer needed and, having no traditional docking port, awkward to keep attached to the station. Shortly afterwards, the second Ohana arrived at Dres. Good lord, what a mess. Pretty much everything was almost out of fuel, except the converter, which as you may remember, used up all its fuel and had to ditch the engine and push itself the rest of the way to orbit with monopropellant. I decided the best place to start would be the Hub/Drill, since without it there is no station. I gave it a small portion of Ohana's fuel, undocked again, and sent it to intercept RQT-056, a class E asteroid that I later renamed Quartz I. Looking at the fuel reserves on Ohana, I wasn't sure I'd have enough to salvage everything in one go, so I decided to tow the converter module over next, so that I could dock Ohana to the thing and produce fuel for it if needed. This turned out to be unnecessary, as Ohana proved to be pretty efficient and was able to get the tank and habitat modules attached before I even needed to consider fuel. I may have even had enough to do everything in one go, but I decided to play it safe and refuel before retrieving the science module, which ended up being the only time I refueled the Ohana at all. After all the modules were assembled, I needed to bring in the Dres Rover, which turned out to have enough juice left in it to rendezvous and dock on its own, so that was nice. After that I parked Ohana in orbit and set about organizing the comm sats into a sensible constellation rather than a rat's nest. They didn't have much fuel left but they didn't need very much to make the adjustments so that all worked out just fine. Everything went better than expected! So there you have it. All irons out of the fire. I'll be taking a break from KSP for a while, I think.

So I think at this point we can conclude that everybody has their own style of docking - try out a lot of methods and stick to whatever feels best for you.

I'm going to assume you know how to rendezvous to within a kilometer. Here is how I dock. It is probably not the best way, but it works for me: When constructing the ship, temporarily remove all the parts that won't be there during docking (e.g. ascent stages, etc). Turn on the center of gravity marker. Place the multi-directional RCS ports in triangle or square configuration at both ends of the ship, at equal distance from the center of gravity! This is what ensures that you can actually use your RCS to move without spinning. Rendezvous with target to within 1 km (I generally aim for .5 or less, but whatever). Burn (with navball in "target" mode) to bring velocity to 0. This more or less "parks" you relative to your target. Burn toward the marker, then go ahead and flip the ship toward again and drift toward the target until you're within like a hundred meters or so. Burn until relative velocity is 0. Switch to target ship and rotate it so that the docking port is facing the incoming ship. Switch back to the incoming ship. Set the docking port on the target vessel as your target by right clicking it. Face in approximately the direction you'll need to be pointing when you dock. This may not necessarily be directly at the marker: Using RCS (I never use docking mode, just the HNJIKL keys), give the "forward" key just a tap or two - you don't want to move too fast just yet. Moving the camera to each dimension (e.g. looking straight down at the craft), adjust one dimension at a time using RCS. You can definitely use more than one tap of a key for this part. Once it lines up with the docking port in this dimension, cancel the velocity by RCS thrusting the opposite direction. So first you make sure you're aligned up and down, then you make sure you're aligned left and right. Turn off RCS and make any necessary adjustments to the rotation of the craft. Turn RCS back on and tap your forward key a few more times - don't approach too fast, but you can speed up a bit now that you're mostly in the right place. As you approach, keep moving your camera back and forth between side and top view so you can check that you're not drifting out of alignment in either dimension. Since you're aligned by this point, and you shouldn't be moving relative to the target in either direction, your should be lined up with your . You can use this fact to help make sure you don't drift. If you start to drift, tap your RCS a couple times to cancel out the unwanted movement, then tap once in the opposite direction to cancel velocity once you're lined up again - this should line the markers up again. Keep doing this until you dock.

I love how, given any sandbox or open world game, players will inevitably use it for something completely different than the original theme. I took a fantasy game about slaying dragons and turned it into an interior decorating sim. You've taken a game about space exploration and turned it into a car-building sim.

Is it bad that my first thought on seeing this was this old thing? As for what I did today, let's begin with a recap, since I, as always, had altogether too many irons in the fire: I was on a science binge on the Mun using a lander-orbiter combo Another Ruby mission was on its way to Duna to pick up a stranded Kerbal Wrong-Way Eridin in the Tiger's Eye Mining Lander was stuck in orbit around Eve and unable to reach Gilly The whole Dres mission was a hot mess I designed the vacuum-faring parts of a high-delta-v rescue craft called Ohana 1 I started my day with the Mun mission. There were a couple anomalies within biomes I needed to stop at, so I made a point to try to land near them. For a certain value of "near." I didn't land too close to this one because it was at the top of the crater's edge and outside the biome I needed. Better to land in a flat-ish area inside the biome and go over to the arch on EVA. Of course, because of the steep cliff and the presence of a smaller (but still huge) crater between the landing site and the arch, this meant jetpacking over. The arch was bigger than I expected. And I may have been a bit too liberal with the jetpack on the way over. Still, I figured I could make it, since I was going down instead of up and would therefore need less fuel. Bardard's jetpack got him all the way to the edge of the smaller crater when I decided the fuel levels were critically low and I needed to use the rest of it to brake. I underestimated how long it would take to slow down, and Bardard ended up smacking into the cliff wall at high speed - but not lethally, and kerbals are made of tough stuff, so he just bounced right off toward the interior of the crater, and used the rest of his propellant to stop his fall and get back up onto the plateau. This time there wasn't enough left to brake, but the speed was low enough that Bardard could just take the impact - he bounced a good distance, too. Since the ground was more or less flat from that point on, he could walk the rest of the way. But it was gonna be a looooooong walk. After a few minutes of holding the W key, I decided I had better things to do. I then went to do the laundry and make hot dogs. Bardard finally got back to the lander and rendezvoused with the orbiter, transferred the science, reset the experiments, refilled the fuel tanks, and then it was off to the next biome. This time, I wanted to land near the Armstrong memorial. Despite having the coordinates, I was having some trouble locating the memorial (as I've said, I'm really bad at navigation), and ultimately I decided to just go ahead and land anyway, memorial or no memorial. As luck would have it... With that, I wrapped up my shenanigans on the Mun. I probably could have gotten the last couple biomes, since I actually had plenty of fuel left, but I'd decided enough was enough. I could come back some other time for the last two. Next, the launch window for Dres came up, so after some tinkering, I launched the rescue craft (Ohana 1.11 after I was done fiddling with ascent stage designs) - as you may recall, it was a rather large craft. So it needed a large ascent stage. Which led to this monstrosity: It is much more stable than it looks, and got nearly into orbit on the power of the SRBs and bottom stage alone - though I did need to tap into the first pair of asparagus tanks to circularize. It was all fairly standard - orbit, slingshot off the Mun, burn to intercept planet. Since it's been a little while, I'd admittedly forgotten about Ruby entirely, so I initially just timewarped straight from burn to flyby, only to realize that Ruby was now at T+200ish from its scheduled maneuver. I reloaded a save from just after Ohana's burns and corrected this mistake. Then the Eve launch window came up and I sent out a second Ohana, completed its burns, and then went back to Ruby to dock it to Onyx Station to top off the fuel tanks. So that's where we are now: rescue crafts are en route to Eve and Dres, Munstone came home after a productive journey, and Ruby is orbiting Ike and ready for its mission.

(Also ostriches don't actually put their heads in the sand, just for the record. It's just a myth.)

So, this is actually today and yesterday, since I didn't get to post last night. As you may recall, while waiting for a launch window to send rescue tugs to Dres and Eve, I've been trying to finish off my Mun checklist. My first attempt at a reusable lander didn't go so well, partly because it was unstable and partly because it couldn't generate Crew Reports. Well, I launched a second, updated attempt with a more traditionally-designed lander. With a can. One of the kerbals from the last mission (a pilot named Bardard) got to go on this one too, but the other two are on the ground. As the pilot, he's the one who's supposed to pilot the lander down to the surface, then shuttle it back up where it can be refueled and a scientist (in this case, Mimon, veteran of Onyx Station) can reset the experiments. The "down to the surface" part went as planned, but the lander didn't have enough fuel to get back up - once again, the trouble was in Twin Craters. There are cursed locations in the universe, and that is one of them. So I tweaked the lander design again, and launched it (remote-controlled, of course) on a specialized delivery vehicle - no need to launch another orbital capsule, since this is a replacement for the existing lander. The trouble with this was that due to the way I attached it to the launcher, I had to fly the thing butt-first the whole way. SAS, it turns out, doesn't much like having the thrust applied opposite the direction the craft is pointing. So I mostly ended up using SAS to get the craft steady, then turning it off and burning, while carefully compensating for drift (with controls reversed). It was difficult, to say the least. But I did at least get to pilot it the right way around for the actual landing, having ditched the backwards travel stage. Landed it pretty close to where Bardard was stranded, brought him over, collected the Crew Report, lifted off, and docked with the orbital module. Filled up the tanks, reset the experiments, and called it a night. I've got a few more landing sites picked out; some are biomes and some are anomalies I may or may not investigate. Hopefully they go more smoothly. After I clean up the Dres and Eve situations I think I may take a break of indeterminate length from KSP.

I'm probably in the minority of minorities but I'd probably not like that, considering how much the same effect used to bug me when playing World of Warcraft - the music would stop and then I'd get this nagging sense that something was missing until I figured out what it was. Incidentally, world of Warcraft has a "loop music continuously?" switch in the settings. This, I would support. Options are always good. Although, I could also get behind adding more tracks, since the same one over and over can get obnoxious - this was my main gripe with Elder Scrolls Online compared to WoW on the soundtrack front.

This is not the first time I've been told I don't exist... But as a generic playlist recommendation, the Fiechter brothers make some great music and they compile them into hour-long themed reels.

You've gone beyond the Shadow Realm. You have looked into the Abyss, and the Abyss looked back into you. No, see, you don't understand. I'm really bad at navigation. This, although in my case it's not that I forgot RCS, but rather that I didn't pack enough monoprop and ran out. Granted, it took my first 4 weeks of KSP to learn how to rendezvous and dock but now it's fairly routine. On the other hand, I was learning to rendezvous and dock in my first four weeks, when I was still figuring out orbiting... As for what I did today... In space... ... no one can hear you derp. I decided to try a sorta-Apollo-style lander - larger orbiting travel craft, with a smaller lander that docks to it. The idea was that the increased fuel efficiency of the tiny lander and the ability to refuel it from the larger craft would make it possible to hit multiple biomes. That was the plan anyway. Part of making the lander lightweight was that it didn't have a cabin - just a chair for a kerbal to ride it to the surface. So it was actually more Dr. Strangelove than Apollo Program. Although for all the misfortune it went through it could well have been Apollo 13... For starters, I'm not used to building crafts that don't have cabins. And therefore, don't have built-in reaction wheels. So once I got into orbit around the Mun I discovered that the lander couldn't actually maneuver without using its RCS, which was not really feasible because that system had been designed purely for docking. So I packed up and went back to Kerbin empty-handed. Having corrected the error, I set out again, and found that the weight of a kerbal sitting on the side unbalanced the craft and made it veer. I figured out that I could correct this by setting the two engines opposite the pilot to 80% thrust and leaving the one directly behind her at 100%. So then it was down to the surface for the first landing, which turned out to also be the last. I've got to admit that I don't regret doing this - it was worth doing once, even if it didn't pan out, just because... well, look at it! I touched down in the Twin Craters, exactly as planned. So far, so good, right? The craft seemed stable enough. I was glad I'd chosen the leg configuration I did, with the two legs on the kerbal side, which helped the lopsided weight. Until the pilot got out. And the craft, being vindictive, drew out the suspense by doing that circular wobbling thing that coins do, before finally falling over. Okay, fine, let's see if we can salvage this operation. Those RCS thrusters ended up being useful for more than just docking, as they were able to roll the lander over so the seat was on top. And from there, with manipulation of both the RCS and reaction wheel, I was able to tip the nose up enough to get back up off the surface. Okay, Brooke, you can keep your job. Gene's still not happy with you, though. The lander was never meant to return to Kerbin, so upon rendezvousing with the main craft, the science was transferred over along with Brooke, and the lander was ditched in Munar orbit. The fuel efficiency, at least, worked like a charm - I did indeed have more than enough fuel to perform several landings like this. But the tipping over wasn't the only reason I decided to go straight back home. Because, you see, upon collecting my science, I had remembered the other reason I always used command modules: external seats can't collect Crew Reports. So I have to come back here anyway. Derp.

I considered it but I knew I wouldn't be able to find/recognize the mountain. I'm really bad at navigation.

Uh... correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like your homework is to design the creature... and you want an artist to design the creature for you? That sounds... unethical.

Neither Eve nor Dres are in good positions to launch for right now, so I took a break from designing my lorge rescue craft to build a smol unkerballed mun lander. It's so tiny and cute! There was one biome that I'd previously visited, before I'd unlocked all the science parts, so I already had the surface sample, etc. I had no reason to send a Kerbal back, so I built a tiny probe to land there and grab the missing science.

Why doesn't that surprise me, given the expressions on their faces?

Oh dear.

I am 99.9% sure it's random. I seem to recall one time I wanted to hire any pilot and it was nothing but engineers and scientists all the way down. Random is random. No need to get worked up. Well, as for what I did today, I may have celebrated too soon with regards to the two wagon trains. I started by cleaning up the mess around Eve; got the comm network locked in and assembled Tiger's Eye Station around Gilly. This completed the contract that had been spamming me for so long - just in time for the patch that fixes the spam. At any rate, after all the annoyance it's caused me, seeing it completed and off my log was a sweet relief. Of course, the station still isn't operational... Because there's still one piece missing. Remember the lander that got stuck going the wrong way around Eve? Yeah, that craft was never designed to travel large distances once it dropped its travel stage (which was used up in the course of flipping the orbit to go the right way). It just doesn't have the monoprop to capture into Gilly orbit. It was only ever meant to de-orbit, and then go back up to rendezvous with the station. It's not even equipped with an antenna because it's not meant to go very far from the station. So Eridin is stuck, and there are no rescue crafts this time around. I briefly considered using the abandoned test lander already in orbit around Gilly; while I can use it in a pinch, I'd prefer to have an engineer operating it for maximum efficiency, and I don't want to leave Eridin stranded anyway. I also can't use the existing lander as a rescue vehicle because it's subject to the same limitations as the stranded one. The only option is to send a tug on the next launch window to pull her to the station. Incidentally, while I was checking when that would be, I noticed a world's first notification for suborbital spaceflight over Eve, and briefly panicked because I thought the lander was going to crash into the Purple People-Eater. But it had just been triggered during the orbit reversal. Heart attack averted. Quartz station is even worse off. None of the crafts have enough fuel to begin construction. When this happened around Duna, some of the crafts still had fuel, which I was able to reallocate so that the mission could recover itself. Not so here - tanks are just about empty all around, and all the orbits are so off-kilter and wide that my original Plan B of using RCS to move everything into place now seems wildly inadequate. While everything is safely in orbit and not in danger of drifting away, I'm a bit concerned that something's gonna smack into an asteroid - but the chances of that are fairly low... I hope. So now both of these missions need a rescue vehicle sent. I was also planning on launching Ruby 4.2, and decided before I started work on the rescue craft that I should check the planets' positions to get a sense of when my launch windows would open, and lo and behold, Duna was where I wanted, when I wanted. Imagine that. So that mission lifted off, short one kerbal so they can pick up a guy stranded in orbit for a contract. The plan for this one is to not only land on Duna but on Ike as well, because the WFS has apparently decided that landing on Ike and then returning the craft to Kerbin is what I'm going to do next. I originally considered sending Jeb, because he actually hasn't been to Ike yet and always gets the honor of leading the first science landings to new places, but I decided against it and sent some newbie pilot. Partly because there have already been science expeditions by the Onyx Station crew, so it's not really a "first," and partly because I wanted to send him to Dres along with the rescue tug - although now that I think about it that may be a bad idea; I don't know how long the cleanup effort will take or even whether it will work, and I do not want to strand him out there. Not that any of that matters to Jeb. Then I set about building my rescue vehicle. This is just the travel stage and the tug itself - I haven't yet designed an ascent stage, which I have no doubt will be a major pain for such a large craft. But if I've calculated my delta-V correctly, it will be so worth it. On a related note, this game will be the end of me... I haven't done this much math since I took calculus. I've got a notebook on my desk with calculations scrawled all over it.

Congratulations! Is that... sitting on the flagpole?! @PrvDancer85 To post pictures, you need the URL of the image itself, not the page it's hosted on. On most browsers if you right click the image you'll either get an option to copy the image url or to view the properties (which will contain the image url). This url will end in .jpg or .png or some other image extension. Pasting that in should automagically resolve to an image; if not, try using the Insert Other Media button on the bottom right (above the submit button) and insert from URL. For instance, instead of linking to https://imgur.com/4Mg3c3o you would link to https://i.imgur.com/4Mg3c3o.jpg

By any chance is this a contract to throw a ring into a smoking caldera at the top of it? One does not simply drive into Mordor.

Welcome to the Shadow Realm, buddy. Freaked me out something awful when it happened to me too. Might wanna double check that - when it happened to me it actually ate the craft that triggered it (but everything else was fine). I had to reload an earlier save to get my probe back.

You know things have gone terribly, horribly wrong when Jeb and Val have that look on their faces.

Has anyone else noticed that one of the default Soviet humans is named Valentina? I just think that was a really nice tribute from PLATOON to Valentina Kerman. I haven't found any tributes to Bob, Bill, or Jebediah, though...

Oh, for the love of- not this again. Does it help to know that Take Two uses the same EULA for all their products, including the parts that may not be relevant to that product, because it's easier to maintain one generic EULA? Just because it's in the EULA doesn't mean their going to do anything with it. Take the company I work for - I'm a licensing support agent (as one of the many facets of my job), so I know a fair bit about the licensing terms for the products we sell. There is an entire. freaking. chapter. in our EULA, which describes in great detail the usage policy for a license type that doesn't even exist. As far as I know, it never has, and we don't have any plans to ever implement it. It's not even in our licensing database at all. But it's in the EULA. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I know most EULAs don't necessarily specify how they're gathering data. But as far as I know, spyware (that is, trolling through your computer gathering files that have nothing to do with the product in question) is illegal. I'm no lawyer, but I suspect that a EULA cannot override the law. If they put in a clause that said they have the right to break into your house and take your stuff, and you signed the EULA, I'm pretty sure a judge in court would declare that contract invalid and say that they can't do that. As for the "sharing your info" bit, that's pretty standard stuff. Back when this issue first blew up, someone did some digging and found out exactly what was being sent where for KSP, and it was just standard engine report-home type stuff. I don't remember exactly what, but it was harmless. It has to be written in big scary terms like just about everything in a EULA, because legal texts have to cover everything in great detail so nobody can pick loopholes out of it, and also so that it can cover any game the company owns, or will create/acquire at some point in the future. A lot of the EULA is nothing more than "just in case" clauses to cover their butts in unforeseen circumstances. The vast majority of EULAs out there are just as draconian-sounding as this one, and have as many scary "we own you"-sounding clauses in there. Do you play other games? If so, why are you protesting this one specifically? I'll tell you why. It's because someone on the forums decided to scream "the sky is falling" and a lot of players looked at a EULA for the first time in their lives, and realized how scary legalese sounds. And now they're taking their panic and rage out on a game that doesn't deserve it. </rant> EDIT: Whoops, somehow missed that a second page existed - sorry for the delayed reaction here! I'm just so tired of the "KSP IS SPYWARE!" panic bandwagon.

Oh man, today was eventful. All them irons in the fire and whatnot. The first thing that happened was that I realized I'd forgotten to launch one last craft for Tiger's Eye Station - an orbital scanner to show me where the best mining spots are. Since the other crafts had just left and weren't even at the Mun yet, I just hastily launched a scanner that was equally-hastily constructed. I just took an Ugly Space Flower, ripped the comm dish off and replaced it with a scanner, then glued a collapsible non-relay antenna to the side. Seems to be working out just fine. The trip to Eve orbit was fairly uneventful. I plotted the intercept and plane change maneuvers before the crafts got past the Mun, which turned out to be important. The Mining Lander is flown by an engineer (Eridin Kerman), not a pilot - it has a probe core on it for SAS functionality, but it's not designed to operate remotely or very far from the Station. So it has no antenna except what's built into the lander can. Which means that once it got out of range, I lost the ability to plot maneuvers. With the ones I'd set up before leaving Kerbin's SOI, I was able to still get into roughly the right place, but ultimately wasn't as spot-on as I'd hoped, and overshot the planet slightly - not enough to leave its SOI, but enough to end up orbiting backwards, and fairly low. "Wrong Way Eridin" will never live it down. As always, the multitasking and sloppy burns have resulted in a mess. I started to clean it up somewhat, but wasn't able to do much beyond adjusting a couple comm sats, because time was up for Ruby 4.1, coming home from Duna. Re-entry was uneventful, but I got a particularly nice view on the way in. Immediately after this (as in, within a day or two), burns began on the Dres project. The moment of truth for my delta-v budgeting efforts. You may recall that my numbers were not looking good for three of my crafts. Drill Converter Com 5 Delta-V Left (as of last report) 1851+ 1834 ~2072 Delta-V Requirement for Capture 1897 1956 2207 The drill was potentially up to 46m/s short of the mark, but with an unknown amount of bonus delta-v from the ascent stage, while my numbers predicted that the converter would be 124m/s short. The fifth com sat was also expected to run about 200m/s short, but I waved this off as an acceptable loss. The first craft in was the drill, but just before it reached Dres's SOI, I started to have doubts about whether it could make it, and was struck with an idea. I transferred the fuel from two of its four tanks into the others, then manually decoupled them to reduce the craft's mass. It worked, and the drill successfully captured into orbit with a little fuel left to spare. After that, I pulled one craft after another into orbit, just as planned, though many of them are running dangerously low on fuel and I may not be able to get the comm sats into a nice, pretty configuration. But that can be solved by sending a claw-equipped refueler at the next launch window, when I'll be sending the first actual expedition to land on Dres. Comm Sat 5, as expected, didn't make it, and had to be terminated, but there's no great loss there, and in fact that's why I sent five - so I could afford to lose one. The fuel tank cut it surprisingly close - I knew I had less delta-v in it than calculated due to having used some of it during ascent, but I didn't realize just how much I'd used. But it, too, made it into orbit, albeit at a very strange angle. The real tension revolved around the converter unit. It's absolutely critical to the operation here, and there was no wiggle room to be had from leftover fuel or dropping excess mass. The numbers said it would run 124 m/s short, and its only hope would be to burn the rest of the way with RCS. My numbers turned out to be slightly off, but were still close enough to be oddly satisfying. But it was also worrying, because it meant that I would indeed need to fall back on monoprop, and I wasn't sure if I'd be able to pull it off. The RCS burn is slow, and not very powerful. I wasn't sure if I had enough fuel, or would be able to achieve the burn fast enough. All I could do was drop the engine, engage the RCS, and hold H. It may not have been the longest burn in seconds, but it felt like a tense eternity, until... So now Ruby has returned to Kerbin, and both the Gilly and Dres wagon trains have arrived at their destinations and are awaiting cleanup. Irons out of the fire and ready to be worked at a leisurely pace.

Did quite a lot today. First, I adjusted the intercepts on all of the crafts en route to Dres, which only took 1 or 2 delta-v, and then set maneuver nodes to capture into an orbit. Not any particular orbit, just the minimum delta-v required to achieve an orbit of some sort. Park everything first and figure out where it all goes later, and hopefully nothing crashes into an asteroid. Two of the comm sats still have their stage 1 tank/engines, which means we know they have more than the delta-V budget of their final stages, at least. Some of the other numbers, however, are not looking good. Drill Tank Conv. Hab. Sci. Rover Com1 Com2 Com3 Com4 Com5 Delta-V Left 1851+ 2683- 1834 2643 2667 2614 ~2158 2331+ ~2378 2331+ ~2072 Delta-V Requirement 1897 1982 1956 2091 2081 2123 2010 1936 2020 1969 2207 It's no big deal if we lose comm sat 5; a four-sat constellation would work just fine. But the drill and the converter, obviously, are absolutely critical. The converter I may be able to salvage by decoupling it from the engine when its fuel supply runs out and using its vast supply of monoprop to finish the last hundred or so m/s change on RCS, and once it's in orbit it's just a matter of docking something else to it to refuel. It's a stretch, but worth a shot. It's the drill that has me really worried. It has no monoprop or RCS thrusters. It's only just shy of the requirement, and even that I'm not sure of because, as the plus denotes, it had some fuel left over from its ascent stage, so it has always had a little more delta-V than my calculations indicate. But I don't know how much more. And without the drill, everything else is useless. But maybe, just maybe, if I can just get it into orbit, I can still save this operation. A while back I stated that there's no way to refuel the drill, since its docking ports aren't accessible until it jettisons its engines. I had forgotten, however, that grabbing something with the claw counts as docking! Normally grabbing with a claw involves moving the thing that has the claw so it smacks into the object to be grabbed, but in theory, I should be able to simply arm the claw and then slam something else into it instead, which should allow me to transfer precious fuel. I am not above sacrificing a second comm sat for this if necessary. But this is all going to be a while, since the capture maneuver isn't scheduled for a year and some-odd days. Which is convenient, because the Eve launch window just opened up, and I launched another swarm of crafts for Gilly, to hopefully put a stop to the notification spam. Naturally, I started tracking delta-v for these as well, until I realized how pointless it would be. These crafts are mostly the same ones that are part of the Dres expedition. The handful that weren't, I went ahead and updated to have similar levels of delta-v (including modifying the ones I'd left the tanks empty on by mistake, so that they could now achieve LKO with the full tank as intended). Which means that everything here has delta-v budgets in the four or five thousands - way more than needed for Eve orbit and transfer to Gilly. At any rate, they all have their maneuver nodes for plane change and Eve intercept lined up and ready to go, with the first burn happening in ten or so days. Oh, and in about a hundred days, Ruby is scheduled to make its return burn on top of all of this. I may have too many irons in the fire at this point.

It's shaped like an hourglass. Chronos?