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The Vandenberg Program, Chapter 1. It is January 1st, our office doors are open, and the Vandenberg Project has received its first funding check. These 5,000 funds (roughly $4,300,000 in 1951 cash), the 2,000 advance for our two first contracts (first flight and first launch), plus the 20,000 funds scraped & begged from the founders’ institutions, family, and friends, fill the Project’s coffers to a paltry 27,000 funds total. It is promptly spent on upgrading the VAB & SPH. We’ll need to be continuously pouring money into production improvements to produce more complex vehicles ever faster. What remains is spent building a small prop aircraft and the Program’s first sounding rocket. 3,290 funds remain. Figure 1.1: Budget report, first quarter 1951. The Whippersnapper I is based on a proven design. The WAC Corporal was a sounding rocket firing during the War by a group of Caltech enthusiasts that would, in another timeline, have become an institution known as JPL. It is a liquid fueled design powered by a hypergolic JATO motor the Navy was developing to help their overloaded aircraft take off. This motor, known as the 38ALDW-1500, burns inhibited red fuming nitric acid and an aniline-furfutyl alcohol. This combination is the best liquid propellant mixture known to the US right now. It doesn’t freeze in most operating conditions, but it’s still unstable, might turn its containing vessel into green sludge, and is horribly toxic to boot. But besides monstrous ethanol-powered motors derived from captured German designs, it’s all we’ve got right now. To keep the rocket pointing up, there are small fins on the base of the fuselage. However, these fins will not be enough to keep the flamey end down at low speeds. The Whippersnapper is unguided. Without an attitude control system, even small deviations from the vertical will result in excessive pitchover and likely destruction upon either premature impact with the ground or aerodynamic stresses borne by the steel frame. A Tiny Tim solid rocket motor derived from an air-to-ground rocket now out of manufacture will accelerate the liquid fueled stage to about two thirds the speed of sound in the span of 0.6 seconds. This rapid acceleration will get the rocket to the velocity required for fin-stabilization to be effective. These motors have been sitting in a warehouse for many years since they were first procured and subsequently abandoned by the Caltech group. The solid propellant jammed inside the thin casing will have degraded with time. Hopefully, the motors remain stable. The sounding rocket will stand about 8 meters high and mass slightly over half a metric ton. In its polished nosecone it will carry a few simple atmospheric experiments and the hopes of the program. Figure 1.2: Whippersnapper I design plan. Production specifications for the conical fuel tank, telemetry system (contained in the nosecone), liquid fueled sustainer, and solid rocket booster are detailed. Nearly two months later, the airplane finishes construction. That morning, it rolls out to the runway and the two test pilots with whom Vandenberg Program has agreed to put on payroll in exchange for risk of life & limb climb into the cockpit. The pair are Samuel Greene, a decorated RAF pilot who married a SoCal nurse and followed her back to the States, and Christine Freeman, a volunteer WASP who towed live-fire targets for anti-aircraft crew training. If she lives to 2009, she’ll be awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. But today, their mission is entirely routine. The plane, while over-powered for its role (it’s a high-wing powered by the same engine as the Spitfire Mk. VIII), was built to collect meteorological data prior to our launches. Today we will give it a shakedown flight, both to prove the ability of our aeronautical engineers and to make sure the thing doesn’t blow up. The plane gently lifts into the air and several minutes later just as gently touches down and rolls to a stop. What happened in between, our funders need not know. Figure 1.3: Rather than adhere to any reasonable sort of flight pattern, test pilots Greene and Freeman conspire to eschew common sense and Immelman roll their way to 5 km in altitude. The plane proven sound and first scientific data collected, the project is given the go-ahead to begin research into new liquid rocket engines and advanced materials for high-speed flight. Estimates predict first prototype will be ready for experimental use within the year. The plane rolls back into the hanger. The next day, her tail is lopped off as installation of a body-mounted camera begins. Somebody has the notion that imaging the nearby terrain & ocean from the air is worth doing, and our small but eager team of welders are more than happy to comply. Figure 1.4: The pilots photographed after what is sure to be the first of many perfectly happy landings at the VSC. This design would later be stolen by Cessna and marketed as the popular 152. Six days after that inaugural flight, the first Whippersnapper is erected above a clap constructed atop a mound of dirt, waiting to be fueled. It is a few hours past noon before the tanks are full and the ignition control primed. We wait. The propellant guys and the airframe engineers argue about the minimum distance acceptable from the pad. It’s go time. Figure 1.5: Whippersnapper I, officially VRP Sounding Rocket 1, awaits liftoff from the Vandenberg Space Center. The director nods, Freeman leans closer, and a lucky technician presses the big red button. The noise of an explosion rushes to echo off the distant mountains and an instant later, an insistent roar rises above the column of smoke. It worked. About six minutes later, the rocket hurtles back to earth. A fiery streak to the west terminates in a modest splash and the rocket is no more. A small group heads out on a pair of boats to see what can be recovered. A proper end to our first launch. Figure 1.6: VRP-SR 1 from a ground tracking station, shortly after breaking the sound barrier. Figure 1.7: VRP-SR 1 ascends towards the edge of space. Note the under-expansion of the exhaust; atmospheric pressure decreases with altitude but exit pressure does not. Figure 1.8: VRP-SR 1 approaches apogee of 160 km (estimated, UVF telemetry insufficient to determine precise altitude). Figure 1.9: VRP-SR 1 burns from atmospheric heating during re-entry. Recovered debris (or lack thereof) indicate the tailfins were either shorn off by aerodynamic load or had combusted entirely during the descent. The rocket builders are already at work on Sounding Rocket 2. Later that week, the science plane completes a couple more flights around the VSC and captures high resolution photos of the surrounding ocean, shores, and grasslands on film. After the last of several uneventful flights, it returns to the hanger, where something much, much faster is under construction… Figure 1.11: Final checks are completed before the first Vandenberg X-plane rolls out of what would become known as the “Spaceplane Hanger”. [Authors Note: There you go, my first stab at this wonderful invention you guys call a mission report. To my readers now and in the future, thanks. To all you other guys just glancing through for the screenshots, well, you won't see this anyways.]

The Vandenberg Program, Table of Contents. Chapter 1: The First Quarter Chapter 2: No Barrier in the Sky Chapter 3: Early Days of the Sounding Rocket Program Chapter 4: The River Styx Chapter 5: A Need for Speed What is this? The Vandenberg Program, founded in 1951 California, a consortium of steely pilots and starry-eyed dreamers who believe space is for humans, and rocketry the key. The Program stands apart from the submarine designers and warhead builders of the early Cold War. When the sabre rattlers on both sides of the Iron Curtain decided that nuclear artillery, delivered from turreted submarine and overgrown tank, was the key to winning the inevitable tactical battles that were expected to shortly follow, government spending turned away from aeronautics. Vandenberg Air Force Base is the home of the last stand of rocketry & aeronautics engineers, the only testing ground for those who seek to push the limits of speed and altitude. The goal? To increase the number of moons of the Earth by at least one, and to someday orbit a human as a living artificial satellite of our planet. But first they need to secure next year's funding, and to do that they are bound to the whims of their oversight committee. The road will be long, but their patience longer. The sun sets on January 1st over California. This is the Vandenberg Program, and these are their flight records. What is this? It's a super-realistic Realism Overhaul career using Realistic Progression One (RP-1), Principia, Kerbalism, RealAntennas, and NQB, a quarterly budgets/historical contract accuracy mod that I've been developing for RP-1 (learn more). It's me trying to get past the sounding rocket era of RP-1 again, finally. It's me trying to preach the good word of the KSP realism modding community and showcase their hard work. It's my first mission report. I open the Tracking Center for the first time. It's the Vandenberg Program, and I hope you enjoy.

Endless [DecouplerLight] Error onUpdate: Object reference not set to an instance of an object log spam in flight & editor. Version 1.7.2-1.6.1.1 sourced from GH release. Is there a workaround?

I believe it's the Apollo training. Displaying what training group a part is in would be an excellent UX improvement.

Following closely. Will be of great interest to a recent Future-parts oriented initiative that popped up over on the RO/RP-1 discord...

That's a lot of nukes! What engines does the Area V have?

@michaelbezos1 Hey, how's it going mate? I spent some time reading through that website you linked. Is it yours? You've got some really good notes there, are you trying to build a liquid fueld rocket? I saw the Estes one you're putting together. I've launched those a few times before and they're really fun. Let me know how the launch goes!

Be very careful of placing gear on wings. Much safer to place it on a known-perfectly-straight fuselage part and shift it out. Even very slight angle on the gear makes KSP crap the bed.

Blue Delta IV, I see. Lovely.

Let's go orange rocket!

Looks like the issue is that Spacedock is down again. SXT is hosted there and CKAN doesn't mirror it. I just rewrote the 1.7.3 instructions to get around the problem. Much more work but doesn't depend on Spacedock. Hopefully it's back soon.

@Nich@RoboRay If you're really focused on exploration but still want a tech tree, you can always a) disable KCT or b) cheat yourself enough funds to get a ton of KCT points. The new early game actually adheres to the Realistic part of the "Realistic Progression One" title. Kinda. Better than RP0!

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That is a service structure. It does not go into space today or any other day.

What other launchers have you used in this save?

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I could be wrong, but I believe I've heard the RL-60 was in development for the EUS and ACES and potentially heard mention of the M-1 being revived.

What's the story on using not-RL-10s on the EUS?

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It means you're out of sample material. If you want to do more experiments, pack more experiments Also, it looks like you're running RemoteTech with the latest Kerbalism. You ought to avoid that.

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Hey guys, I'm new to the forums but fairly experienced with KSP. I love the Realism Overhaul and Realistic Progression mods, and am super excited about how devoted modders have made KSP into a really quite realistic orbital rocketry simulator. It's fantastic and in learning from real-life missions to help complete my own, I've learned a MASSIVE amount about space history and details of historical rocketry--far more than I ever knew there was out there to learn! Fun fact: I've never actually played stock or even stock + non-RO mods. Looking forward to it someday!

I added several new images to the exhibition album. Shoutout to all the community members that took them (esp. Basilia, that dude has a knack for bases and stations).

@pap1723 @rsparkyc Will you be locking & redirecting this thread or will you leave it up for those still on RP-0?