Muetdhiver

But sandboxing is fine right ? Damn. I should have made a spreadsheet like for the transfers corrections to keep things clean. Unrelated question : does anyone know how to do a somewhat accurate grav braking/assist caveman style ? It would help a lot for a jool mission.

Ker was used in the sandbox save because computing the rocket equation for each tests is a bit too crazy. For the caveman save wet over dry and logs where used. The place where ker would really be an issue is in flight. It's as good as having patched comics as far as encounters go if you know the maths.

Part 8 : Gilly and delicious greenolith After getting into eve orbit, I use the remaining fuel from the third tank to get a gilly encounter. The science Jr's and empty tanks are dropped, and we start using fuel from tank number two for Gilly orbit. This tank is parked into Gilly orbit while the RCS equiped part of the Exploration vessel goes to the surface for a bit of biome farming. I get lucky and locate the Greenolith. I get the precision engineering tech, which is nice but not overly usefull. After collecting all the science, I prepare for the return by circularizing at 55'000 km above Eve. Burn is done with angle ruler and fingers crossed. I'm quite sure I'll have to do several orbits around Kerbol to get back home. And... In the end it takes three years with four orbits. First correction is completly wrong due to a misscalculation, but corrections #2 and #3 are done much better and allow to compensate for the initial mistakes. The kerbin encounter is at 4000 km PE, which is beautifull for such a method. 800 m/s of DV left upon re-entry. Correcting over several kerbol orbit is much more fuel efficient than correcting with massive burns near the encounter point using the eyeball. Slower, but who cares... aside from Valentina that aged 10 years on this mission. And there we are : Valentina is back home. Jeb is still enjoying the view near Duna, and all T5 nodes are done. It was tough, fun and very instructive. To note : I failed my first two tries at diamond by running out of money before the terrier. Once the terrier is there, things are mostly "done" in the sense that one can access to loads of science and credits with Mun and Minmus. Going interplanetary is much more fun than Minmus/Mun strip mining IMO. Duna is quite doable with eye, rulers and simple vessels. OTOH I don't think Eve can be reliably done with a direct encounter (Was not able to in the sandbox testings). My advice to anyone looking to do this is : Correcting the vessel orbit with small correction burns to adjust the orbital period is the safe and economical way of doing it. Doing Jool is... tantalizing... Dangerous too. All those big moons are a big hazard without patched conics. It would be fun to get to Pol and Bop Greenoliths for T6 science nodes. Aerobraking in Jool with caveman tech is a fun thought XD And the most "Caveman" rocket part is the 1.25 service bay... Thermal shield, aerobrake and protects your science, all for 0.1T

Part Seven : Eve capture. I start with adding an extra 2T of fuel to the Deep Purple Explorer. That should ensure security. Also, I'm feeling iffy about aerocapture at Eve, as the vessel will go quite fast. Braking should be possible to some extent though. The bigger issue is getting there in the first place. The burn will be 3minute long. The ejection angle should be about 155° to retrograde. I do about 15° in 90s and so decide to start the burn at 170° to retrograde pointing 10° below prograde to account for the trajectory curvature. Not 15° below prograde since the orbit will openup with the burn. The burn is okay, 2-3° degrees off using the good old mk1 eyeball. So, no encounter most likely. The vessel orbit PE has to be lowered a bit to reach eve orbit. By eye it's clear that an encounter will not happen. Valentina will miss it by days. It's fine, I planned for this. First step to remediate to the issue is change the inclination to be CoPlanar. Not an absolute necessity, but it will make things easier and allow for some amount of sloppyness. This finish draining the drop tank n°2. I measure how late we are with eve at our PE. 86 days... ouch, thats really not great. Or is it ? The vessel does it's orbit in 338 days (taking the departure date for the AP and using maths). We will gain back 76 days on each orbit. This means that after two more orbits, we'll be 238 days late on eve, or 34 days too early. I correct the orbit AP to be there on the right time, and go a fine correction on the second orbit, accounting for hours and minutes (you have to). Spreadsheets for the win. And there we are, after about three years : There we are, finally in Eve orbit with the right inclination for Gilly !

I did not realize that a Duna landing had not been done before. Glad to do a first I'll wear that Trilobite badge proudly. As for the Eve mission : I did quite a lot of math on it, and it's going to be really tough. For a start, the fact that Eve has a non negligible orbital inclination difference w.r.t kerbin will complicate things. The risk of missing Eve completly is quite real, since correcting for the inclination at AN/DN will change AP/PE and so likely mess up the encounter badly. To make matter worse, doing a precise enough burn "caveman style" is fine for duna where the TWR is okay, but for my Eve/Gilly vessel, the burn will be 2-3 minutes long, i.e. a crapshot without manoeuvres. Sandbox testing shows that getting it right is going to be a lotery. Which means that I have to plan for failure, i.e. miss Eve, and correct the orbit to catch it on a later pass with near fractional periods. Which means (a lot) more fuel. Plus spare for the multiple cockups that will happen (if the duna landing is anything to go by). And then there is getting to Gilly... So far the vessel is 11t with about 8t of fuel, but I might add an extra 2t of fuel for safety (be I'm getting in the seriously diminishing return region of the rocket equation, i.e. 2T extra for a bit under 300 m/s). I plan to pack at least 1300 m/s of spare fuel. I must say that those 3x science Jr's are quite a pain in term of dry mass (costing me about 530 m/s).

Sixth Part : Duna Landing Exploration society wants us to go there. This will require a much larger ship, docking in space and so on. Nothing too hard. The duna transfer is pretty much nailed, only thing is... Valentina only did easy landings, and we don't have the landing leg tech. So, in order to do the prep work for duna, starting with a classical mun landing souds like a good plan. The mission was a near disaster, but the science is yummy. I decide to do a quick minmus science expedition with science Jr. Very tasty, but very costly those... funds are starting to run low again... time to go back to duna. The vessel is an mashup of the minmus science vessel and the mun one. It should have more than enough DV (800 spare at least). Ejection burn goes well, calculation are mostly correct, but the Duna intercept is pretty bad, at 21000 km. Lots of wasted fuel but we should have enough. Science Jr's are used high, low and in upper atmosphere. The 26km capture goes okay, a little burn to be sure to not escape. However, before the second aerobraking pass I get a Ike (damn piece of space rubble) encounter that kicks the Pe to 1900 km and the Pa to the limit of duna SOI. More science, but more fuel wasted. It starts to look a bit grim. 30km final capture with the idea of landing as close as possible to Duna's equator. It's at this point that I reallize that while I packed two chutes for duna, I did not plan for the Kerbin landing XD. So used to repacking them... well... we'll do a half powered landing. Duna does provide quite a bit of science, and a truckload of credits, especially with the science from duna surface mission and the exploration society one. This mission was way too close. If I had not packed nearly a full FL-400 worth of spare fuel, it would have been night impossible. I still need 315 science, which is a lot ? This can be farmed from mun and what remains of minmus, but that's going to be tedious. Also, I got spare cash. If I cock up, I can recover and with the OCTO's, even Bill can drive to Mun to finish the job. So, to finish the serie, I'll try an Eve aerocapture, science Jr low/high/upper atm and sampling the three biomes of Gilly. The RCS thrusters are unlocked Lessons have been learned, I will pack a lot of extra fuel. Maybe two tanks this time. It should suffice. And the backup plan is farming with Bill, which is still recovering from the ladder ride... Operation Deep Purple is green lit by the tribe.

Fifth part : Bloody Mary Explorer. After burning some cash by crashing a rocket filled with science Jr due to an epic fubar, I decide to go back to regular piloted rockets. A duna rocket is built from the Mojito Exlporer frame. Essentially the same save for : science box makes thermometers and barometers reusable, and the goo are mounted on the exterior. Why ? Simply but, I plan to use the well know method of aerodecoupling during the aerocapture. Boffin's calculations with the abbacus show a gain of 70 m/s of DV if the 150kg of goo are "detached" after use. Ejection angle and timing are approximatly known from the trusted method of using an angle ruler on top of the screen. DV calculation with mass ratios and ISP show 2050m/s in LKO, which is good. Burn goes smothly, and as I computed a DV table to follow the tank gauge, this time the LKO ejection burn is close to perfect (minmal waste in kerbol orbit correction burns). Then... looking at the AP of my orbit, it seems not far enough for a good encounter. But I'm really not sure, and I decide to do a save backup because it could go very wrong. And it does. I got a 24'000 km duna encounter, which I can correct, at the price of no return. Simply put the orbit crossing point was too close, and I missed. Given the budget, I cannot correct more than 10'000 km. So I did the sensible thing and did a rollback. Yeah, that really sucks. I do a 5m/s prograde correction burn to push the crossing back. Goes like a charm. Most likely : slighty wrong angle at ejection. Much painfull. Now we just have to get Valentina back. Hopefully without messing the ejection up this time...

Fourth part : Mojito Explorer. Now that I have access to the fancy terrier 909, I can improve the red boulder design to reach much higher delta-V. Estimations are in the 2.2 to 2.3K DV once in orbit. Enough for a duna return trip or a minmus landing. Since this is a new design, but rather similar in concept to the previous one, so I only do on dry run in the sandbox and then go to minmus. Easy as cake. Orbit is done directly to the minmus inclination using the mk1 eyeball. Plenty of credits, and after a second two-biome minmus landing, enough science for the science jr, and enough for electrics or Propulsion systems. We also have a nice Duna exploration contract to fullfill. Decisions...

Third Part : Red boulder and Mun. My next step is Duna using a reliant only rocket. The core idea is a minmal core stack with massive side tanks that are dropped bits by bits during the ascent. The DV in the sandbox is about 5.3K dv for the stack, but the side tanks have horrible drag, making the kerbin orbit much more costly than 3.4K. In fact it shoots up to 3.9-4.1K, leaving about 1.3K for the Duna trip, which means not much room for correction manoeuvres, and also implies aerocapture for orbit. I had to test the rocket a few time in the sandbox to see how to best get it to space with as much DV left as possible and check the DV budget when flying with no node (but patched conics). I do a few last check in a sandbox w.o patched conics to learn how to deal with the final duna approach. I find that you simply need to get the orbits crossing at half the distance when duna catches up. Don't get it wrong it's not easy and at this stage it feels iffy. Still, I go ahead and launch. The Duna mission gives us minimal science (no transmission, nor return on this tech level), but good credits from world firsts. Now, same rocket with a tad of tweaking will make short work of MUN. Mun provides a Science & Credit bonzana, allowing to unlock the terrier node. Now, we can really start working, and things should get easier ?

Second part : Orbit, Ladder ride & Red boulder project. The next step is obviously orbit and recovers with their associated missions. Here is the summary, pics in the spoiler part. I start with a simple orbital rocket with the truster hammer / swivel combo. Nothing fancy, mission goes like a charm. Banks is just shy of 30K and I get the reliant, which enables a lot of stuff. After getting to orbit, I do a high altitude sounding rocket for more science, and then.... Since I never did it before, I decided to start with Bill riding the ladder to polar orbit. Good science, but after orbit we are short on fuel for the retro-burn, so bill has to push the re-entry module a bit. A classic manoeuvre. Because I never did it before, I did some sandbox testing and flying till I nailed the ascent profile to not loose or cook Bill en route For the next step, I decided to do something that I haven't seen done before : duna on reliant tech only. The rocket and transfer is being tested in a sandbox save because eyeballing duna transfers is a new thing to me. The delta-V for the rocket is a bit above 5K, but has truely atrocious aerodynamics

Well, here we go. Vanilla & removed making history stuff. This is going to be fun and interesting. I toyed a bit with a sandbox save to experiment with builds, and I found that in theory one can do minmus orbit with pure tier 3 tech. Anyway. Diamond attempt from the get go. We'll see how that pans out.

I might attempt it vanilla later on. Does no mods include 3.2x rescale XD ? For now I will post it as a caveman evolved in the appropriate topic. It's been quite instructive so far. Sorry for messing up the thread a bit.

After some thinking by our chief up-goers boomsticks builder, A tentative mun lander is build. Alas, due to some over optimism for the DV budget and poor capture burn, the first two probes crash. Third time's the charm though, with some of trimming down, DV is now 9130 m/s, with 30 parts and 18T. Finally, a success : Landed : Getting to minmus and farming some biomes should now be rather easy in comparison...

Challenge accepted ! I was looking for a place for my modded caveman challenge. The landing/upgrade rule fits perfectly with what I'm looking for. 1.4.2 Making History base. Here is how I roll : 3.2x rescale <= that's the big difficulty boost Unmanned before manned + SETI contracts DMagic science mod & Contracts, ProbePlus ! (removing all non DMagic science parts), SCAN Sat & Scan Sat contracts All Near future mods (mostly irrelevant since it's all 550+ science), MRS Lite and Missing history parts All reaction wheels torque at 10% 30% science and reputation, 50% credits, 120% entry heat. No quicksaves / VAB restarts. Special rules : vessels going out of Kerin SOI need 3 times the seats than there are kerbal on board. As a life support approximation. Progress so far : The "Wyrd Sticks" Sounding rockets to 1500km for early science, and a bit of Space Center touring (no much actually) for some more. SETI contracts for early cash. With this I got to unlock the first science nodes and the 20 science rocketry node. To make both credits and science, the next step was a mun flyby. Since SETI has the Ant engine at rather low tech, and Missing history has a half-swivel with crap asl ISP, A mun flyby is just possible with the 7.4K dv budget. Next unlocks are the telescope and altimetry radar parts, allowing for a neat science package in polar orbit. Unfortunatly the first launch is a failure due to a missalignment between thrust and COM. Second time is the charm though, and we get enough science for a 45 node. Terrier and Pug (30KN lighter terrier with no gimbal and worse ISP) will get us those juicy keostationary contracts. Two keostat launches are enough cash for a mun telescope and a mun lander (One lauch is a partial failure and the orbit is not reached due to an appalingly bad gravity turn and loss of coms during the circularization burn, leading to DV loss to salvage the relay). More sounding rockets with material bays and a SETI "return after LKO" contract/science probe. Low cash buffer is fixed with a few part testing missions. The "Shaman Eye" Mun observatory mission is a succes, but the payload had to be trimmed to the extreme to fit in the DV budget of 8K. (200 spare for manœuvres due to mistakes and imperfections). However a lander with the current rocket is impossible, since the budget would have to be 9K or more for margin. Getting a lander on Mun with 9K DV, 30 parts and 18t is going to be a tall order. Pics will come for the second part.

Thanks for the challenge. It's a neat idea, loving it. I will not do it vanilla, as I use Missing history, the dmmagic science mod and the quetzal probe pack and unmaned before manned*... but I'm doing it at 3.2x rescale, 30% science, 50% funds. The 18t limit makes for an "interesting" challenge when one need 5.7K dv to get to orbit. It's bloody hard to be honest. Mun flyby so far. *Without unmanned before manned, the challenge is impossible in 3.2x. IMO.

Ok cool. thanks for the explanation it was clear enough. I'll keep using my workaround : no shrouds and using struts to build a soviet strut styled shroud when using such tanks ;p

The rescaled 3.75 grey/orange tanks looks great to me. Pretty happy with it and it allies for cool looking soviet styled rockets. Thx again for your work. I'm a bit surprised that they only released the 1.5 size truss decoupler for 1.85 but not any other size. Question to all : does anyone know of a way to change the color/style of the engine shrouds from the default white grey to something more fitting to dark grey / orange ?

This mod is a god send, especially the retextured 1.25m tanks in gray/orange, finally been able to build a rocket not looking to jaring ^^ In that line, how hard would it be to add the orange/gray textures for 2.5 / 3.75 / 5m parts ? I find it quite sad that there is no way to use the gray/orange color in an harmonious way past 1.85m rockets. I have no experience in modding ksp so maybe what I'm asking about is quite hard ? Oh, and big thy for the missing fuel connector