Shmauck

I take "as real as possible" part even further, probably because I am a real-life project/program manager I try to plan out a whole sequence of missions in advance, not only to get somewhere but also to operate and maintain my outposts regularly. I end up retroplanning backwards from what I want to achieve in the end and then derive all the steps required to get there. This results in long chains of dependent missions and tasks which are interlinked. That way, I tend to be constantly busy in KSP and never have to think about what I want to do next. Current example: Goal: Put my most experienced crew on a mission to orbit and land on Duna Build parts Science lab and station Lander Transfer stage Launch parts and assemble on orbit Ummm.... three launches? Could we use an SSTO to save some money on bringing the stuff into LKO? Yes, we could, so Design an SSTO launcher Test fly Carry out three launches to put stuff in orbit Move the crew from Minmus Upgrade all crew members to "plant flag on Minmus" Build a transport to collect them at Minmus and bring them to LKO to meet their new station Oh wait, who is going to occupy Minmus then? Move the crew from Mun to Minmus Upgrade all crew members to "plant flag on Mun" Build a transport to collect them at Mun and bring them to Minmus Oh wait, who is going to occupy Mun then? Move a fresh crew from Kerbin to Mun Build a transport... Oh wait, why not use the same transport to bring one crew from Kerbin to Mun, then the other crew from Mun to Minmus, then the Minmus crew back to LKO? Ok, let's do that and Rather build a transport to make the round trip Hire or rescue a fresh crew. Oh wait, rescue... Acquire rescue contracts and pick some Kerbals from LKO Work through the list from 6 down to 3 Transfer the station and its new crew to Duna Land, collect science Resupply the Duna station Build a tanker Build the transfer stage for the tanker Why not rotate the crew again? Hire fresh crew Move fresh crew to Mun Move Mun crew to Minmus Move Minmus crew to LKO Transfer crew to Duna together with the tanker and bring back the Duna crew to maybe go to... Eve? Restart the list at point 1. You get the idea. That's what the word "program" in Kerbal Space Program means for me. If you want to follow along, I post in the Mission Reports forum: Mission Reports

Crew management (Y2 D260-D294) One of our important milestones for the upcoming Duna mission was to reassign the crews of our manned / womanned outposts to new jobs and habitats. Just like Bill originally suggested we planned to let all crew members in Mun and Minmus labs perform a landing on their moon before moving them to their next destination. This practice would help maximize their experience levels. Only after that we would rotate the crews: ferry a fresh crew to Munlab Alpha transfer the crew of Munlab Alpha to Minmuslab Beta transfer the crew of Minmuslab Beta back to Kerbin to board Dunalab Gamma, now in LKO Mun, D260 First in the row was Bob Kerman of our original founding team. He was yet to perform his first Mun landing and we had assigned to a descent heading for Mun's twin craters. His destination happened to be on the dark side of the Mun so we could make great use of our upgraded altimeter which now featured AGL readouts. Bob perfectly mastered all the navigational and piloting challenges of this trip, including the necessary plane changes before and after the landing. We here at mission control are quite happy about all the experience we gathered so far which is freely shared among all our staff. Also, we really embrace the altimeter upgrade. Unfortunately the dark side of Mun is really really dark so we didn't manage to shoot any decent photos of Bob's success. But he left a nice flag on the landing site with our logo and his name on it for future proof how well he did. Minmus, D265 Next up was Reiritz Kerman. He was the last member of the current Minmuslab crew who had not smashed a flag into slushy mint ice cream yet. Reiritz was interested to visit two or possibly three biomes with just one landing so we tried to bring him close the edge of Minmus' flats where he would have also slopes and lowlands within walking distance from the landing site. Theoretically, that is. Reiritz nailed the spot really well, got out of his lander and walked or hovered his way around the lander. He discovered not only the flats and lowlands biomes of Minmus but also that messing up the touchdown on a slope after a jetpack flight on the surface of Minmus may end in a ten-minute downhill slide. Mentioning slopes, he didn't find the slopes biome despite sliding down a slope for ten minutes. Mun, D265 This day was a busy day here at mission control. Mun lander was refueled and restocked with popcorn after Bob's excursion and ready for the last member of the Munlab crew to head for the surface: Norlen. We felt safe to assign him to a landing in Mun's highlands because we had so successfully run the new altimeter on Bob's landing. Off he went. You will see in the picture that we have meanwhile upgraded our Munlab station. It now features a separate crew compartment with additional docking ports, much like the Minmus station. This will certainly help the crew rotation activities ahead. We experienced that highlands can quite a tricky place to land, exactly how we had expected. Norlen brought down the lander on a rather steep slope and feared that the entire thing would fall over. Two of the four landing legs did not touch the ground at all. We decided to let him take off again and to slowly direct the lander to another spot, further down the hill. He bravely maneuvered his ship to a place less steep and touched down for a second time. Even here the ground was not horizontal and two landing legs barely stood on the surface at first. A little kick from the RCS thrusters corrected that issue but Norlen was reluctant to unfold the solar panels on the downhill side to avoid moving the center of mass in the fatal direction. Kerbin, D266 We allowed our mission control crew a night of well-deserved rest before we launched our round trip to the two moons and back. Yes, we would go for a single launch with our crew ferry to visit Mun, Minmus and come back to Kerbin. For that purpose we had redesigned our crew ferry, now called CF3. The upgraded ship featured the nuclear engine we first employed on the Sentinel mission, together with some additional fuel capacity. We tried pumping the liquid fuel in the oxidizer part of the tanks to use that empty space for fuel but that didn't work so well. Thus we now have a CF1 and a CF3, but no CF2. With this new ship already on the pad, our Mun replacement crew Danlan, Dave and Jonley were eagerly awaiting to take her on her maiden flight. As always, we had significantly overdone the launch stage and hauled way too much fuel to orbit. This time, it came in handy at the end of the mission. For now, we decided to let the launch stage burn for the transfer orbit and the Mun orbit insertion. Docking the huge cigar to the Munlab station was quite a task due to RCS maneuvering thrusters are only attached to the CF3 itself and not available at the launch stage. Danlan managed to carefully bring his large ship close enough to the docking port on the station when he found out that the port on the CF3 would not engage. He scratched the paint and gave the station a bump which pushed the CF3 backwards. We told him to park the ship fifty meters away from the station and hold while we undocked the little tug from the station. We flew the tug out to the CF3 and tried to dock, just to be 100% sure that the problem was on the CF3 and not on the station. As the tug also failed to engage the ship's docking port, we called our emergency engineers into mission control. Something must have gone terribly wrong during the redesign of the crew ferry. We usually place a control unit right below the nose docking port of our ships because that is just such a convenient spot for these devices. Our engineers refused to say who was to blame for it but they suspected that a later adjustment could have lead to an interference between the control unit and the port. As this is an area of the capsule which cannot be reached while the docking port is closed, we were stuck without hope of repair. Our only chance would be to bring ship and crew back to Kerbin, rebuild the ship and restart the mission, not without beating up everybody on the engineering team. Then suddenly the comm lines crackled and our junior scientist Dave aboard CF3 voiced an idea. While examining the docking port he had found a hidden lever near the docking port saying "decouple node". Engineering shrugged and agreed it could be worth trying, so Dave yanked the lever. The whole ship began to shake, RCS and other gases escaped into space, whizzing loudly inside the cabin. And then, suddenly, a loud bang and everything was calm again. Bob, who had watched excitedly from aboard Munlab Alpha, spotted a dark object fly away from the nose of the crew ferry. Was this the probe core that had been spat out by the docking port? And if so, was the port still intact and sealed? Was the crew aboard CF3 still alive? With worried faces we turned to the CAPCOM desk. Benten Kerman, the astronaut on duty, moved his microphone close and slowly pushed the talk button on his console, calling out to CF3 for a status. After awfully long seconds of silence Daves voice came through, telling us about the loud bang resulting in explosive decoupling of the control unit. The port looked perfectly fine from the inside, so we gave it a try and again brought the tug up in front of the ferry. This time, the ports engaged! Danlan repeated the procedure to move the ferry and its launch stage towards the station and after separating the tug from the ferry he managed to dock with ease. After some handshaking and hugging through the docking tunnel, the pilot and his two-man science crew debarked their ferry and made themselves comfortable inside the crew module of Munlab Alpha, their new home for the next months. Norzenz, Bob and Norlen, our current Munlab crew finished the lunch for three they had begun and packed their stuff to take over CF3 and make their way out to Minmuslab. Before they left, they pumped the remainder of the fuel in the launch stage of CF3 into the station's tanks and prepared to abandon the stage after undocking. Now finally on the nuclear engine, these three were the first manned crew ever propelled by nuclear power and also the first crew to do a direct Mun-Minmus-transfer. Norzenz got his calculations right for an efficient transfer inside the Kerbin-Mun-Minmus system. Twenty-one days after undocking from Munlab Alpha they arrived in a rendezvous orbit around Minmus to dock with their new home. We took a nice picture showing the nuclear-powered CF3 approaching Minmuslab Beta, backdropped by Kerbin and the Mun. This time, docking went without notable incident. Valentina, Reiritz and Urslev greeted the newly arrived Minmuslab crew and showed their colleagues around. Everything looked very familiar, much like the Mun station except that extra tunnel between science lab and crew habitat which immediately gave Norlen an opportunity to bump his head. All six crew members spent an evening aboard Minmuslab, playing cards and dice and having a couple of beers. After a good sleep, Val, Reiritz and Urslev took their baggage to the ferry, boarded and undocked to head back to Kerbin. Leaving Minmus' gravity field after so many days on orbit weighed heavy on them but the blue homeworld ahead of them made up for that. Excited as Valentina was, she overlooked some strange results of the onboard navigational computations and by the time the ferry was supposed to cross the Mun trajectory she noticed she would have an encounter, but not a romantic one. Zooming past Mun, the ferry deviated from the return course significantly and now was the time to embrace all the extra fuel the vehicle had originally lifted at the beginning of its journey. Valentina corrected the course to enter a suitable orbit around Kerbin and meet what was supposed to be her next exciting adventure: Dunalab Gamma. She docked her ship to the empty lab and together with her two scientist colleagues brought the station to life from its post-launch hibernation. Our crew ferry had spent all its fuel reserves during the approach. Surprised by the situation and in a reflex we decided to let go of the fuel tank and engine and keep the capsule docked to Dunalab as some kind of crew return vehicle. Had we thought a bit more we would have noticed that a capsule without any propulsion system would not be able to deorbit from LKO, but hey, we hadn't. For the trip to Duna we will undock the capsule anyway and dump it. For now, Val and her crew can use the extra space for leisure.

Prepare for Duna (Y2 D256) Having learned that Duna transfer windows are not appearing every day, we want to be prepared for the next one that opens. Not only will we have to bring back our Duna orbiter crew during that window, we also have collected a number of contracts to perform several steps out there on the red planet. Planting a flag on Duna is always a good start and it serves our owner's desire for being on magazine titles very well. Collecting science on the surface of Duna happens naturally to us when we're there. Another partner wants us to build a Duna surface outpost and yet another one asks to put a satellite on Duna orbit. Whew, that transfer window will be packed. To add our own little extra, we would like to have a science station on orbit of Duna. The value of our stations in orbits of Mun and Minmus cannot be overestimated and we believe that we should replicate that same concept also around Duna. And that last bit is an excellent point to start our preparations. We grabbed the blueprints of the Minmus station and tweaked that design to include some of the recent discoveries of our engineering crew. A set of four large solar arrays to provide all the necessary power and to replace the many tiny 1x6 panels we used on the Minmus lab. Those things were always in the way while docking and made some of the docking operations rather complicated. We added a service bay to accommodate an OKTO2 control unit and a pile of batteries. We equipped a large ring of reaction wheels for autonomous control and a large Communotron HG-55 antenna for more bandwidth. With all our crews still out there in space, we shot the unmanned core component of our combined Duna mission to an 80km orbit and put it to sleep there, ready to be woken up by its crew at a later day.

Unmanned satellite operations (Y2 D60 - D70) As most of our crews were deployed to our remote vessels, stations and the Minmus base, we began wondering what to do with those satellite contracts we had been offered. We started off with a very simple test probe which we launched into a highly eccentric polar orbit around Kerbin, almost as far out as Mun's orbit. Accidentally, that first satellite encountered Mun's gravity field during our Sentinel mission and got catapulted deep into our solar system. We abandoned the craft and remotely terminated the mission to avoid further problems. Next up we were asked to put a surface scanner in a Kerbin orbit. Once we reached that orbit, the requirements proved to be entirely wrong and the surface scanner refused to work. We received payments nonetheless. Based on our experience with the test probe we took the money and then immediately adjusted the orbit to the scanner's profile. We now have a nice little map of Kerbin's ore concentrations as a bonus from that contract and our satellite is happily revolving high above our home world. When we announced our recent success in satellite operations on a press conference, Gene Kerman was approached by a Kerbal in a beige trench coat, a hat and dark sunglasses. The stranger pulled Gene over to a remote corner in the hall and informed him that Kerbin was in danger. He claimed to have evidence that asteroids may someday get close to our home world and potentially hit it with catastrophic results. Then he left without a trace. We organized a cosmic video call to involve all our science crews in a discussion about how realistic such a scenario could be. It turned out that many of our staff had seen a movie called "Kermageddon" a couple of years ago and were therefore concerned that such a scenario could become real. At the same time they offered to volunteer for a manned mission to blow up an asteroid once we found one. Only recently our engineering team had invented an infrared telescope. The scientists agreed that this device could be helpful when searching for incoming space objects. We built a mission around this telescope which they called "Sentinel". Putting the device in an orbit around Kerbin seemed a bit useless because it would leave us with almost no warning time if the Sentinel actually found a dangerous object. We thought that an orbit around the sun, just outside of Eve's orbit, would be the best place to look out into the solar system. Such an interplanetary trajectory would also allow us to test drive the recently developed nuclear engine which we want to use during our next Duna mission. Engineers came up with a vehicle design to combine a nuclear engine with the Sentinel telescope and a new and powerful antenna.

A surface outpost on Minmus - Da Vinci base (launched Y2 D55) Our agency was offered a contract to land a surface outpost on Minmus! We were thrilled by that opportunity, quickly accepted the contract and got to work. It turned out that our business partner had ideas similar to what we had just recently brought to Minmus' orbit. Instead of creating everything from scratch, Bill pulled out the plans of our Minmuslab and adapted them to the mission's requirements. He reused the core piece of science lab and crew compartment, removed the additional docking ports and drastically increased the battery capacity to keep the base operational during extended Minmus nights. He also increased the number of solar panels which later proved a bit useless. And of course he added a chemical engine, a fuel tank and RCS capability for both autonomous landing and docking. He didn't forget the antenna this time and also managed to attach landing struts. As a special reward for Bill, we decided to reserve a seat on the Minmus outpost for our meritorious engineer and finally give him his first spaceflight experience. Bill wasn't so sure if this actually was a reward as we didn't put any explicit end date to the mission. He soon regretted to equip the outpost with just one small docking port on its top. As it seems he felt we gave him a one way ticket. Funny how engineer's minds work. To make up for his suspicion we named the base after his favorite engineer Leonardo Da Vinci. We brought Da Vinci out to Minmus, manned by Bill and Lendon, one of our new employees and remotely controlled from the Shmauck Space Center. The outpost docked with the Minmuslab Alpha to be resupplied with fuel and to undergo the final preparations and checkouts for landing. Bill and Lendon spent a few happy days with the Minmuslab crew of Val, Urslev and Reiritz before they finally waved goodbye, slammed the hatch of the docking port and released the clamps. Our preferred landing spot turned out to be on the dark side of Minmus very soon after inexperienced Lendon had prematurely slammed the docking port and the descent had begun. Back then we didn't have radar altimeters available for an AGL readout on the command station in SSC. That's how we ended up in a very slow powered descent towards the surface of Minmus, not exactly knowing how low we needed to go. It could easily have cost our two inexperienced colleagues their return ticket to a Minmus orbit as we have used way more fuel than we originally planned. Obviously Bill had planned for an extra reserve and it seems we still have the option to bring the two guys back. The outpost landed on day 55 of our second year of operation and is happily researching during daylight. Bill has underestimated the length of the Minmus nights. While we have more than enough solar panels, we don't have enough batteries on the Da Vinci base. We are just glad we put a fax machine and candles on the outpost so that Bill can continue designing our next ships during those extensive nights while Lendon is cleaning the research and science equipment and washing the dishes aboard.

The Duna orbiter (launched Y1 D157) With two science labs orbiting our moons we achieved a constant flow of scientific research and managed to develop better technology with those results. We soon felt ready to reach beyond Kerbin's sphere of influence and Duna glowed red in the distant space. On Day 114 of our first year we accepted the challenge of the record-keeping society and signed a contract to explore Duna. We pulled out some of our old maths books and tried to make up our minds about what would be required to enter interplanetary space. Apparently the task at hand would result in a long journey through space so we decided that a crew of three would be the minimum if they were to sanely survive this trip. Our chief male pilot Jedediah was clearly our first choice for commanding the mission. As the contract required only a flyby and gathering some scientific data, we asked our engineering department to come up with a design for the mission. Logically they based their design on a Mk1-3 command pod and added the necessary components to bring craft and crew safely back to Kerbin. Their usual approach of throwing some science experiments to the outside hull of the craft seemed not fitting. We also wanted some extra batteries on the vessel just in case Duna would have a dark side which we would have to fly over. Bill Kerman, our lead engineer, suggested to add a service bay to the capsule which would also reenter Kerbin's atmosphere. This way the science experiments would be in a protected compartment which could be opened when in situ. Yes, we also learned some latin while preparing our journey. And we crammed some batteries into the service bay. The final design also featured solar panels attached to upper stage fuel tank and engine module, an antenna completed the package. As we didn't plan to dock or maneuver, we spared all RCS and docking equipment. Weighing a bit more than 16 tons, we put our Duna orbiter on top of what was the heaviest launcher we ever built. We ended up with a 263-ton-ship that required us to add some concrete to our launchpad. Our first stage consisted of five Skipper engines for combined 2.845 kN of thrust at sea level, barely enough to get us off the pad. Another Skipper with a X200-32 tank should propel us out of Kerbin's sphere of influence into interplanetary space. A third stage consisting of a Poodle engine pair and a X200-16 tank would then allow us to enter Duna's sphere of influence. The upper stage with yet another Poodle and X200-16 should be enough to bring us back to Kerbin. Here is an image of our ship in the early morning sunrise. So much for our calculations. Well, the good news first: the craft really made it to Duna and managed to enter a stable orbit roughly 84km above Duna. The bad news is that mission control failed to establish an encounter with Duna when leaving Kerbin's SOI. As this was our first time to enter interplanetary space we were all very surprised with what happened on our screens here at SSC. It took us quite a while to figure out what we had to do and when we finally found the answers we were already half-way to Duna. Our crew complained that they didn't like the idea of playing Scrabble in zero gravity but at least it kept them busy for most of the flight. The bottom line is that we used all of our third stage and one third of our last stage fuel to achieve the encounter and the resulting orbit. We have 1848m/s of dV left in the last tank and we figure that should be enough to leave Duna's SOI and return to Kerbin, potentially exercising some aerobraking at home. Phew, that will be another first once we are there. Jebediah, as well as our science duo Orburry and Meldon, are having quite a boring time up there in Duna orbit. It is one long wait for the return window to come up. With our limited fuel we don't even think about adjusting the orbit to collect more science data as we did by now. So far, our crew ran our materials and goo experiments, temperature and barometer reads in solar orbit, high above Duna and in low orbit. They also took EVA reports over seven of Duna's biomes. Here you see Orburry inspecting space around the orbiter in search of the "X" desperately missing in the crew's Scrabble game. We'll update you as soon as we have reached the return window.

The Minmus adventures Our strategy proved quite well. We managed to receive a constant stream of science data from our newly establish Mun lab. This helped us a great deal in pushing our technology developments further. Soon the Mun was some kind of second home to our crew so thought we were ready for the next step: exploring Minmus! The early missions to our mint colored neighbor in space were carried out quite similar to what we had done around Mun. We reused our proven ship designs to first complete a Minmus flyby before we had our chief pilot Jedediah to first set his foot on what looked like delicious mint slush ice. After he splashed down in Kerbin's waters he stated in an interview that he was rather sad about Valentina not having the chance to be the first Kerbal on Minmus due to her ongoing mission around Mun. His statement spawned an idea. A science lab around Minmus - Minmuslab Alpha We held a three-day conference at Shmauck Space Center to sketch out our plan for the next Minmus missions, certainly enjoying mint slush ice as our dessert on all lunch and dinner breaks. Our lead scientist Bob came up with the idea to ferry a new and novice crew - including himself - to our Munlab Alpha and to bring back the current team of Valentina, Urslev and Reiritz. Our intention was to launch a new lab into the orbit of Minmus and to assign the experienced Mun crew to that Minmus mission. This would allow to further enlarge their experience in space. We had acquired enough personnel during a couple of rescue missions to support Bobs plan. Our veteran engineer Bill - personally lacking any spaceflight experience as of then - chimed in and suggested to let both Urslev and Reiritz carry out their own Mun landings before bringing them back to Kerbin. This would not only boost their own personal experience to the same level as Valentina was, it would also give us even more valuable data from the Mun to process and research. We put this idea into practice and completed three Mun landings before the crew was ready to leave the Munlab Alpha. It was again Bill who lead the design for a crew ferry which would serve as the launch vehicle for the new crew and as the return vessel for the current one. The following photo shows the ferry on the launchpad, ready to carry Norzenz as pilot and Bob and Norlen as scientists to the Mun. It proved a very wise decision to first complete the crew switch before we began construction work on our Minmus lab. As our Mun lab had very limited crew space without any spare seats and also did not offer an additional docking port, the crew exchange process appeared to be rather complicated. Each of the six astronauts involved had to perform EVAs one by one to travel from the ferry to the Munlab or vice versa. This cumbersome exercise helped us improve the design of the Minmus science station by a great margin. Bill ended up designing the following configuration to explore the farther of our two moons: The core science lab was now accompanied by a four-seated crew compartment to which we also added four additional sideways docking ports - two small ones and two normal ones. Should we decide to switch crews again we would definitely have a much smoother approach to that. It's really good to have people like Bill on our team! In the above picture you can see the lander docked to one of these sideways ports. To the bottom end (right side of picture) you see the original Minmus orbit insertion stage which brought the lab to its destination. At the top end (or left side) we docked an additional unmanned tanker vessel which we brought separately to Minmus. The tanker increases the onboard liquid fuel and monopropellant supplies and allows extensive research on repeated landing excursions to Minmus. The station was launched carrying a crew of three: Valentina, Urslev and Reiritz, our former Mun crew. We also had a small tug on the station but we learned another lesson. Minmus requires serious antennas to allow unmanned vehicles to be controlled from the Space Center back on Kerbin. Bad luck we didn't think of that in advance. We lost all control of the tug after undocking it so we could only watch it float away into the vast nothingness. We added that bit to our vehicle construction checklist within minutes after the loss. None at all. It's the stock game graphics.

Thank you I found that out only later during the program.

The early days and the Mun chronicles Please allow me to introduce you to Shmauck's Space Program. To begin, let me give you a brief recap of what we have achieved so far. The early stages of the program were probably much like you would expect them. Suborbital excursions on solid rockets, first orbital excursions including a polar orbit to learn as much as possible about our mother Kerbin and to enjoy her in all her beauty. Unfortunately we were very poorly staffed and funded at that time. We somehow lost all picture documentary of those early days when we accidentally ran an engine test next to our head offices with the windows open. Nobody had thought of stowing those precious memories properly and we could not afford a fireproof safe. But our team of four was soon eager to explore beyond. Looking up at the sky in many beautiful starry nights we felt an urge to reach the Mun. At first, we sent a manned ship to a Mun flyby to see if we could reach orbit and bring ship and Kerbal safely back home with at least some useful science data to exploit. We then managed to bring our chief male pilot Jedediah safely to the surface of Mun to make him the first Kerbal who ever put a foot on another celestial body. In the absence of air it was quite quiet up there so we nicknamed our landing spot "Tranquility base". Soon after that we balanced the gendering by also bringing our chief female pilot Valentina to a different landing site we deemed interesting and we dubbed that spot our "Venus base". Luckily we preserved some of the imagery of those important milestones, but with our limited funds we could only equip our early missions with very cheap cameras as you can tell from the image quality. Thrilled with our recent success we not only expanded our technology rapidly but we also dared planning further ahead. Our next big milestone would be to bring a science lab to a stable Mun orbit, both as a way to leverage our science and technology expansion and as a permanent link to the surface of the Mun. We soon found out that we lacked the capability to bring our desired configuration to the Mun in a single launch. Also, without having trained to dock two vehicles in space we did not dare to continue. We therefore designed a mission to give our pilot couple the chance to train docking procedures in LKO. With these skills we also managed to help out other space exploration initiatives by rescuing stranded crews from LKO and bring them back home to the surface of Kerbin. Overwhelmed with the selfless support they had been receiving, many of them decided to join our organization. Finally we were able to expand our head count. Then came the time to launch the bits and pieces of our planned Munar laboratory space station into LKO. The first launch hauled the core science lab and its two-man scientist crew to LKO, coupled with a tiny little unmanned tug. The second launch brought the reusable Mun lander and docked it to the lab. While bringing the actual Mun orbit insertion vessel close to the lab, we discovered a major flaw in our planning which made it necessary to abort the mission before actually leaving the orbit of our home world. Back to the drawing boards was the motto of the time and hard work proved to be the best way to overcome our frustration. We redesigned the lander/orbit insertion configuration and decided to launch both in one go. Valentina and Jedediah had to ditch the first lander into Kerbin's atmosphere and watch it burn in flames before we docked the second lander and orbit insertion stage to our lab. Urslev and Reiritz, our brave scientists, patiently waited through this difficult time but managed to focus on processing some science data they gathered from EVAs during their extensive orbiting period. This configuration finally made its way to a stable Mun orbit on Y1 D90. It then underwent some reconfiguration to change the sequence of the modules and to free the lander for actual landing operations. Once all these steps were completed, Valentina undocked the lander and made her second visit to the surface of the dusty grey satellite.

Hi all, I am quite new to the forum and relatively new to KSP. I discovered the game in V1.5 and started my serious career mode tour of duty about 6 to 8 weeks ago in the unmodded stock game in V1.6. I grinded my way through the early game using some of the really valuable YouTube tutorials and am currently running my first Duna orbiter mission to fulfill the "Explore Duna" contract. Before heading to Duna I have put Science Lab stations in the orbits of Mun and Minmus to generate a constant flow of science points, especially during the time warped Duna transfer this really paid off. I am really hooked to the game at the moment, investing lots of hours. Happy to be here and to explore more valuable content for my Shmauck Space Program. Greetings!