Ace in Space

Find the URL of the image itself (not the page it's on). How to do this varies by browser but generally if you right click it you should be able to copy its address or view its properties (which will contain its address). You can use the Insert Other Media button in the lower right to insert from the URL you just got. Or just paste directly into the post and if it's a valid image URL it'll automagically resolve itself. Today I didn't do a whole lot. Just fuel runs for Onyx Station. It's funny how some tasks can be agonizingly tedious some days and relaxingly zen on others. Also, saw this in the control center: And to make things worse for this poor kerbal, Hairy is apparently a girl. I think her parents hated her. I have not taken the contract, because frankly, I am not sure I want a kerbal named Hairy.

... You know, it does look like a shrimp. Also, holy high contrast screenshots batman! Well, after my earlier post covering my frightening excursion into the Shadow Realm, I haven't got a whole lot else to report. Ruby has departed from Onyx Station and is on its way back to Kerbin. Val and Jeb got to test a boat I built on a whim. It works pretty well. Turns nicely, nearly impossible to capsize. Not as fast as they'd probably hoped, but what is? Got to see a nice enough sunrise, too, I guess. Stock atmospheric lighting effects could use some improvement a lot of improvement. And, most importantly, the test asteroid drill/station hub reached its target and successfully latched on! And it did fulfill the requirements of the "dock around the sun" contract, just as I'd hoped.

Well, folks, normally I write my updates at night, but today I'm gonna post early. I may or may not post a second update tonight. The reason being, I want to write this down while the insanity of what just happened is fresh in my memory. Everything started normally enough - there was a bit of excitement that I knew would make it into the report, but it was still fairly normal stuff. I did a standard fuel lifter run for Onyx Station, and sent Ruby down for another Duna landing. Due to the landing site being very close to another biome, I decided to push my luck and hop over to the other one for extra science. After that, it was time to lift off and return to the station. But Ruby has a fairly tight fuel budget, so even this small hop pushed things dangerously close to running out. And that would have been a major problem, I realized, for several reasons. First, while Ruby has plenty of monoprop, as I've mentioned earlier it lacks vertical RCS ports. This would make maneuvering only on RCS extremely challenging. Secondly, it uses a small docking port, which the station tank is designed to accommodate - but since the fuel lifter wasn't designed to be a rescue vehicle, it only has a regular docking port. Which means it wouldn't be able to rescue a stranded Ruby. Thankfully, disaster was just barely averted. Using what little fuel I had left, I was able to intercept Onyx Station and zero the relative velocity, with a small amount of fuel left over. After orienting the craft, I used the RCS to line Ruby up with the docking port on the fuel tank, and lightly tapped the throttle for a moment to get some vertical velocity. Then it was just a matter of using the RCS to keep the craft from drifting out of alignment. Ruby 4.1 has several annoyances in its design that I've noticed during its run here, including a lack of kerbnet that makes biome finding difficult, no flat solar panels to provide power when the folding ones are tucked away for safety, and no means of righting itself should it flip over (which I may have discovered the hard way and then quickloaded out of). But this episode took the lack of vertical RCS thrusters from "annoyance" to "critical design flaw," and I've decided that Ruby should head back to Kerbin as soon as possible. I am also considering adding a small docking port to the underside of future fuel lifters, just in case. At any rate, I saved the game after docking and refueling Ruby. This turned out to be a very wise decision, because this is where things got weird. Since I hadn't seen any new asteroids pop up around Dres in a while, I decided to check on the probe and make sure it was still mapping the area. As far as I can explain it, the reason the probe wasn't picking up new asteroids anymore was that it had apparently entered the shadow realm. Because when I went to fly it, I saw nothing. My altitude was red zeros. My velocity was NaN m/s. The craft was just gone - as was everything else. No probe. No asteroids. No Dres. No sun. Just stars. Unfortunately I was too dumbstruck to take a screenshot. I tried going to the tracking station, only to see the same empty void. Clicking my crafts on the sidebar did nothing. Zooming did nothing. Again, only stars. Exiting the tracking station took me to what I can only describe as a nightmare realm Shadow Space Center. The ground was completely black. The atmosphere was missing. There was no Mun. The shadowed portions of the buildings were pitch black, except when they were holes in space; from certain angles, the starry skybox showed through them. The screenshot does not do the trippiness of the place justice. It was really quite unsettling to look at. Naturally I quit the game and started it back up. To my relief, KSC looked normal again. I went to the tracking station and confirmed that the solar system did, in fact, still exist. Everything was normal... with one glaring exception. The probe was gone. Alarmed, I went through the list of tracked objects to verify that nothing else was missing, but everything else was where it should have been. So my only explanation is that the probe did, indeed, leave this reality and enter a shadow realm, and when I tried to pilot it, I was dragged in with it. But there is good news. Remember how I saved right after docking, before I tried to fly the probe? I loaded that save and checked the tracking station. Sure enough, the probe was right where it had been. Confident that reloading this save file could restore everything if things hit the fan, I decided that I would try to fly the probe again - if the same thing happened, I could get a screenshot of the NaN weirdness, then reload and simply terminate the probe to rid the Kerbol system of its curse once and for all. But, somewhat to my surprise, it didn't happen again. I was able to fly the probe without incident. And yes, it was still tracking Dres. Man, and I thought what happened on Ike was weird.

Case in point: While my Dres scouter probe has not yet revealed any promising asteroids, I'm going forward for the time being on the assumption that an asteroid-anchored station is a viable plan for setting up an infrastructure there. Which means designing a new hub for the station, one which can latch onto and mine directly from the asteroid. What you see here is that hub component, still attached to its launcher rockets. See, there's a radiator tucked away on the bottom, so I couldn't attach anything down there. And the awkward size and shape of the craft meant I wasn't getting away with shoving it into any kind of cargo bay either. So I just attached the rockets, which make use of a few new MH parts, directly to the hub arms. They will decouple from them after the hub is in place, leaving the docking ports open for standard station modules to attach. This particular station will need a habitation module and a converter module, unlike a normal station, because it won't have an associated ground base, and this hub design doesn't include living space for kerbals, since it has to accommodate a mining rig instead. I believe I already have a habitation module design tucked away unless I deleted it for some reason, and the fuel and science modules that already exist will work just fine here. I love modular design! But this one is not on its way to Dres. This is just a test craft, and it's headed to one of the asteroids recently sighted near Kerbin, selected by mission control after several rounds of throwing darts at a list. The idea is to intercept and grab it while in solar orbit, after which we don't much care what happens to the test craft and its asteroid. Hopefully, this will satisfy the terms of the World First contract demanding I dock something in orbit of the sun. It took several carefully calculated burns, the last few of which had to be performed with such precision that I limited the engines to 0.5 strength, I managed to whittle down the minimum distance to 0.1km, which I'm quite proud of. Then it just has to latch on as a proof of concept for an asteroid station. In the mean time I also did a science landing on Ike and transferred the data over to Ruby's science box for a contract, and intend to keep doing Duna landings for a while before sending Ruby back home.

*Sister. The rockets are still less haphazard than some of the things I've launched, though.

As I've said before, I'm the computer equivalent of the person who keeps driving a rustbucket that could fall apart any day just because they've been driving it since '78. I know it's terrible, I admit it's terrible, but I keep using it out of pure familiarity. And keep chrome on standby for when it fails.

Okay, yeah, I just tested, and I can confirm that it looks very different in Internet Explorer (yes, yes, I know, it's terrible, but I'm used to it) than in Chrome. In Chrome it loads as a line of small thumbnails that can be clicked through. On IE it loads at full size and gets pushed offscreen, and clicking does nothing, so there's no way to view the rest of the images.

On my laptop they display at full size and get clipped off rather than stretching the page. Means I can't see the whole thing, though, so it's still a problem. Yeah, but on some browsers we just can't see them at all. Just saw your explanation of how to view them. I had no idea you could do that, and I'm probably not alone. Consider putting them inside spoiler tags instead? Today I finally got around to testing the Gilly mining lander's feasibility as a resource shuttlecraft. Having mined a full tank of ore and waited for Gilly to be in position such that I actually had a connection, it was time to see if the monoprop-based system was capable of lifting the payload into orbit. And it was, with plenty of fuel to spare (despite having spent it like a millionaire spends money during the awkward and painfully long landing). Unfortunately I still think I'm going to need to launch a replacement, because it occurs to me that with my preoccupation with the main monoprop thrusters, I forgot to add actual RCS ports, which are kind of important considering that this is a craft meant to repeatedly dock to a station. I sure hope I recreated that rocket accurately. Once I had the lander in orbit, I jettisoned the antenna, as I don't intend to pilot this particular lander again, and will need to have its docking port open when I eventually come back to build the rest of the station. The plan is to use the new lander to pick up the ore from this one rather than just discarding it, as it will allow the station to begin working immediately after construction. But that's not for a while yet. Did some standard maintenance on Onyx Station, shuttling fuel and whatnot. Got a chance to see the headlight on the new truck in action. It's great! I think I'm going to put lights on more things in the future. I don't know how I got this far without them. And finally, docked next to a craft with extended solar panels, because I like to live dangerously.

I'm.... not sure what I'm looking at here. It looks like a flying anchor. I'm not sure if that makes it awesome or stupid. Awesomely stupid? Stupidly awesome? I didn't do a whole lot today. The scouter probe has discovered an asteroid that is actually near-ish to Dres, so things are looking up on that front. Meanwhile, it was the moment of truth for Ruby - could it land on Duna and then return to Onyx Station? Landing was a bit rough. I misjudged the distance to the ground, and ended up deploying the parachutes rather late. A strong retroburn rectified the situation and Ruby made a clumsy and rough landing but came out in one piece, so it's all good. Hey, Dudfal's not Jebediah, alright? After resetting the experiments and repacking the parachutes, it was time to leave. I have noted that Duna's atmosphere is too thin to help much coming in, but thick enough to be a mild annoyance going back out. Still, it made it back to base. Barely, meaning that Ruby can't biome-hop and only gets to make one landing per trip, but as long as it keeps going back to Onyx Station to refuel, it can theoretically go back and forth as many times as I please. With those fuel margins, I don't think it'll be making any kind of polar landings, though.

The scout probe has reached its destination, passed through a short flyby of Dres, and is now following the dwarf planet carefully - and I've made absolutely sure that it's actually tracking asteroids around Dres. It's ultimately on a collision course with the dwarf planet but it'll follow it around for a little while before it slams into the surface. So far, I'm seeing very few asteroids, and most of them are quite far away from Dres. I'm not sure if I've done something wrong, or if using an asteroid base really isn't a viable scheme for a Dres mission. I'll see what comes up. Meanwhile, the Duna followup mission is proceeding as planned. Ruby docked to Onyx Station and picked up the scientists. I've discovered that the RCS ports on the new command module only include sideways translation, and no up/down translation. Later models of Ruby will have up/down ports added. On the surface of Ike, it was out with the old... ...and in with the new! I make it sound so simple, but replacing the central module of the base was actually a long, tedious, laborious process of very carefully sliding the old one out, very carefully sliding the new one in, and very carefully nudging the rest of the modules so that they clicked back into place. It took a while. In typical Ike fashion, at one point the haulerbot simply exploded for no reason while under the central module, sending the entire base flying in more pieces than it started as. Hooray for quicksave and quickload. Once I was done with the base, it was time to bring in the new fuel truck. First, I had to give it a little more fuel so it could safely land, so I sent the refueler from Onyx Station. After encountering a monoprop shortage when re-docking the lifter to the station, I decided enough was enough. Running out of monoprop has been a long standing problem for this craft, and I thought maybe as I got better at docking it wouldn't be so much of a problem. Turns out, it is still a problem. I can usually still dock anyway, but it's so much more of a hassle than it needs to be. Future models of the fuel lifter will have the new tiny spherical monoprop tanks from MH to rectify this. Then it was time to land the fuel truck. The way this is landed is, bring vertical velocity to zero just above the ground, then stage the separator to drop the fuel truck, and finally tip the "snowflake" (the crane) away from anything important and let it use up the last few drops of its fuel, as it's effectively debris at this point. Well, the separator gave me some issues. First, after decoupling, it slid slowly down the side of the craft, which for some reason took out all the solar panels on that side of the truck (despite them being packed up at the time and the separator moving at a snail's pace). The next time, the separator slid down the side of the truck, hit the wheel, slid slowly off of that, and plonked gently onto the ground, where it then exploded, sending the fuel truck flying. This seems to be becoming a regular occurrence on Ike. Anyway, I've decided that future versions of the fuel truck will have upside-down decouplers rather than separators - I'm not sure why I used separators in the first place, to be honest. Amazingly, the discarded snowflake crane wasn't entirely destroyed when it hit the ground. Left me quite a mess to clean up. Finally, the Gilly lander is full of ore now, so it's ready to test whether it can lift off effectively while carrying a full cargo. But not tonight.

I mean, I haven't actually played the premade missions yet, but this sounds less like a problem with hidden objectives and more like a problem with bad mission design. If used well, hidden objectives can be used to trigger minor events (such as mission control commenting on a particularly impressive landing that the player would have to go out of their way to pull off) or for plot twists (see Apollo 13). If it's used for moving the goalposts or obscuring real objectives without plot-related cause, that's just the creator being a jerk. Honestly, though, if that kind of problem exists in the pre-made missions, I'll be very disappointed. That's the kind of bad design I expect from a 12 year old making their first mission.

Well, today had its ups and downs. The Gilly test lander arrived at its destination, but due to not having any relay constellations in the area, when it passed behind Gilly, it lost connection and I only had partial control of the craft. That is, no manual steering or throttle, but I could switch the SAS modes and turn the throttle on at full power and back off again. Already being on a ground-ward trajectory, I had no choice but to try to land it with this pitiful setup. Thankfully, Gilly's extremely low gravity is very, very forgiving - even at full free-fall I don't think I ever exceeded 15 m/s. I must have spent at least an hour trying to land the stupid thing. Mostly because if it hit the ground at more than 1.5 m/s, it would bounce back off like a tennis ball. Even with a craft powered entirely by puff engines, it's very difficult to slow descent just before landing when you can only throttle in "all or nothing" mode; most of the time even my fastest attempts to hit z-x resulted in over-throttling and shooting back up into the sky yet again, before coming back down for another bounce. Due to the bumpy terrain, it would often bounce at a weird angle. Correcting for angle when you can only use SAS modes and no manual steering is also exceptionally difficult. Several times I ended up overcorrecting for something while trying to cancel sideways velocity and ended up flinging myself into another high arc. At one point I actually flipped the craft over entirely just barely above the ground, but by some miracle no solar panels clipped the ground, leaving the lander entirely unharmed. And with the "no time warp below X altitude" rule in place, falling was painfully slow. I mean, I knew Gilly's gravity was low. But it didn't really sink in just how low it was until I actually saw it. Like, stuff falls so slowly it seems to just hang in place. I took advantage of my lack of functional shift key to shift-tab into steam overlay and chat with a friend while waiting for my craft to fall some 10 meters after a particularly bad bounce. Oh, and it was on the dark side of Gilly, of course. But ultimately, I did land it, and proceeded with basic functionality test. Extending the drill nearly flipped the craft over again, but ultimately it stayed steady. After all that madness and still having a ridiculous amount of monoprop left, I've concluded that the lander design itself is definitely viable. We'll see how well the mining portion works. And I really, really, really hope it works, because, uh... I had this craft saved as both a standalone lander and a version mounted to a rocket. And I wanted to delete the standalone lander craft. And I, uh... deleted the wrong one. So I had to redesign the rocket from memory. In other news, the crafts I sent to Duna have arrived and achieved Ike orbit, including Ruby 4.1, the kerballed craft I forgot to refuel and was worried about! If any of them are short on fuel, it's the new truck, but that's alright, because I can just send the fuel lifter from the station to provide a little more fuel for landing. It's nice having infrastructure already in place! Ruby will dock to the station and wait there for a time while I swap the old fuel tower out for the new one and get fuel production going. After there's a significant amount of fuel, it'll be make or break for Ruby, to see whether it can go from Ike orbit to Duna's surface and back again with only its three fuel towers. Oh, and the Dres scouting probe is almost at its destination, so we'll get to see how that one pans out too. But I've got a meeting early tomorrow morning, so this will all have to wait, because I need sleep.

Okay but that first part isn't a joke. I've encountered so many glitches there. Duna and Ike really do warp the fabric of reality - just not your comm signals.

Well that works too. I am just saying you don't have to WAIT for whatever you set it to before you deploy, so long as the icon isn't red.

Just so we're clear: the time the parachute opens (what the setting is for) is not the same as the time you deploy your chute (when you stage them). You get some slowdown just from deploying it, and then slow down more when it opens. Try deploying the chutes at like 5km and see if that helps.

You could try it. Sometimes you need multiple passes through the atmosphere but that really shouldn't be the case when you're coming back from Mun. When are you deploying your chutes (as in, speed and altitude)?

If you're aerobraking (dipping into the atmosphere and letting it slow you down) you should be able to slow down enough... you are using parachutes right?

This was the critical mistake I made at first that stranded Jeb. You don't burn in the direction of the thing you want to go to. To go down, you burn backwards. To go up (including to another planet), you burn forward. To get from mun to kerbin you want to go prograde (forward). And you don't necessarily want to do it on the side of the mun facing kerbin, as crazy as that sounds. I believe the way it's done is, if you're going counterclockwise around the mun's equator, you want to burn prograde when you're on the side facing kerbin. If you're going clockwise, you want to burn prograde on the side facing away from kerbin. Don't be alarmed if your apoapsis seems to be going away from Kerbin - once you escape the mun's sphere of influence it'll work out. Orbital physics is not intuitive.

@capt: scarlet You probably don't need relays on your probe. The difference between regular and relay is that relays can bounce the signal to other crafts, while regular antenna can grant connection to the craft they're on (that is, they can receive from kerbin or from relays) but they can't send it farther forward. In other words, relays don't have longer range than regular antennas by themselves, but if you have a second probe with a relay on it between you and kerbin, you'll be able to go farther, because your maximum distance before losing the signal depends on how far away from the relay you are, not how far from Kerbin you are. Of course, the relay has to also have connection to kerbin, otherwise there's nothing for it to relay. Also, it's worth pointing out that the distance your signal goes from a connection point is tied to two things: the strength of the antenna, and how much you've upgraded your tracking station. Try upgrading your tracking station and see if that helps.

@InterplanetJanet do... do you need a hug? Honestly, I can totally see where the "Linux is better" crowd is coming from. I still prefer Windows as my home environment, but I also fully admit that this is only because I was quite literally raised on it (been using computers since I was like... three?) and my attachment stems from pure familiarity. Like the person who still drives a beat-up old rustbucket car just because they've had it since 1978. Dang! If I hadn't already locked in a naming theme for my missions I'd totally steal that.

"Again"? So today I derped. The Dres scout probe is on its way, the Duna Caravan 2 (Electric Boogaloo) is on its way, and I decided to launch yet another craft. Even though I don't have any plans to go to Eve any time soon, I do have a contract to build a station around Gilly - with a resource converter on board. And because Gilly's gravity is so low and its surface is lumpy, I've decided not to put a surface base on it at all. The only surface-based craft for this station will be a mining rig that shuttles ore up to the orbital station to be converted. So I went ahead and designed this lander. In such low gravity, I figured it would be interesting to try a monopropellant-fueled lander with puff engines. It has some solar panels, a battery, mining drills, an ore tank, some legs, a single-seat lander can (so an engineer can sit aboard for efficient mining), a probe core for SAS (because it's meant to be flown by an engineer, not a pilot), a couple radiators, and a docking port on top so it can dock to the station. I looked at it and said, "yeah, I bet this'll work in Gilly's low gravity." So I decided to launch it for a test. Since I don't intend to follow up with the rest of the station soon, the Spinel Station Lander set out unmanned. The Space Program is still accepting suggestions for gem names that are better than Spinel, by the way. Anyway, it achieved Kerbin orbit, and then got flung off into Kerbolar orbit by way of Munar slingshot. Where it promptly lost connection. I'd forgotten to put an antenna on it. I couldn't revert at this point, so I had to just terminate it. Mortimer had a few things to say about that. I made a few modifications before launching again, obviously. I added a decoupler with one of the new Making History panels on it, with an antenna mounted on that. The panel is bright yellow as a nonverbal cue for "hey, this thing isn't supposed to be here permanently" so I won't forget it's there and do something stupid like try to dock with it still on. If you've got mission name suggestions, I'm taking them. I'm kinda playing with the idea of using "Tiger's Eye" for Gilly because it sounds really cool, but, like... do they have tigers on Kerbin? I mean I guess I'm already naming planes after knights of the round table so the "no blatant earth references" idea is already shot. Anyway, the naming scheme as it currently exists is below.

Three new crafts are en route to Duna. It's a miniature Wagon Train, Part Deux. There's a new fuel truck with a headlight, a shiny new fuel tower with fuel cells and improved solar panel placement, and the Ruby 4.1 with a pilot and an engineer aboard, for a follow-up Duna landing. The craft is mostly the same as the previous one, but with the new MK1-3 module and new decouplers. Why only a pilot and an engineer, leaving two empty seats? Because Onyx Station is in the same situation as Jade Station was - it has two extra scientists on board for the science lab, which is no longer needed. The plan is to dock with Onyx Station, pick up the two scientists, then proceed to land on Duna and do some science. From there, it's back up to the station to refuel. There may be a bit of a snag here, since the previous Ruby landing, if I recall correctly, still had its secondary tank with some fuel left by the time it reached Duna, and didn't ditch it until partway through entering orbit around the planet. This time, the tank was ditched just before achieving intercept. Or I could just be misremembering. Mission Control's official transcript of the first landing was lost when someone spilled coffee on the documents, you see. Either way, I'll have less fuel to land with because stopping at the station first means the landing towers need to fuel not just landing and return to the station, but Ike-to-Duna transfer as well. But assuming that the tower fuel can get the lander from Onyx Station to Duna's surface and back again, Ruby may not immediately return to Kerbin. Having scientists and an engineer on board means the experiments and parachutes can both be reset, so if it can make the landing once, theoretically it can just go back and forth from the station to Duna as many times as I like. After that, it'll stop off for one last refueling, and then the two scientists will go home with Dudfal and Sara. Edit: Oh hey, now I remember why I dropped the tank later last time. Ruby 4.0 stopped at Jade Station to refuel before intercepting Duna. Which I neglected to do this time because I just used a Mun gravity assist to slingshot directly out of Kerbin's SOI. Welp. Hopefully the delta-V I saved by slingshotting makes up for the failure to refuel. Otherwise we have a problem.

Finished doing Minmus science today. I've also gotten to my Duna launch window but I've been tweaking a craft and it's half past midnight so launch can wait till tomorrow.

Wait, you're telling me Jeb used less power than he needed? Lies.

Good Terrier. Best engine.