jimmymcgoochie

The details of each mission a Kerbal goes on are recorded in the save files, though it only records changes in situation e.g. atmospheric flight, orbit, landing etc. for each body visited.

Sometimes it helps to read the whole contract before accepting it. Part recovery contracts always give the size and weight of said part which makes it easier to tell what it is- 3.8m x 3.8m x 2m is obviously going to be a 3.75m fuel tank, or possibly a 3.75m structural part, though I think the weight said a little over 2 tons which is more in line with fuel tank than anything else.

I keep accepting contracts to get more money, without really thinking about when the contracts are going to be due, how to complete them or how long it'll take to make the vessels to complete the contracts. I'm expecting to end up in a situation where I have to deliberately let some contracts fail in order to fulfil the rest, which is far from ideal. But anyway... Green Guava is a set of three relays heading to the Moon in order to provide communications coverage to the far side. There are contracts for far side lunar landings and the first lunar rover contract I picked up has its target sites on the far side too, so this launch will help to support future missions. Each relay also carries some science experiments to get as much science as possible from a polar lunar orbit. Polar orbit also gives some nice Earth/Moon shots. Not the neatest probe decoupling ever, but so what? After braking into a 2/3 resonant orbit, the upper stage is deorbited using RCS, since all three ignitions on the Juno 6k have already been used, while the relays themselves set up for circularisation burns at successive apoapses. Unlike the relays in Earth orbit, I went to the effort of fixing the Green Guava relays' orbital periods to be almost exactly the same- 9 hours, 30 minutes and within a hundredth of a second of each other. The orbits aren't perfectly circular, but a nice neat orbital period was more appealing (and easier to remember) and the relays can all talk to each other. A little while later, Green Banana Mars arrives at its destination: A quick jaunt over to Mission Control later... The orbit is well off the plane of Phobos' orbit, however the ascending node is almost directly on top of said orbit and it should be possible to get a flyby relatively cheaply in the future even with Phobos' tiny SOI. No capture burn though, the gravity is just too weak and orbital velocity is about 6m/s. More interplanetary missions have yet to be launched. First up, Green Banana Vesta: Despite having to sort through eighty screenshots for this update, there aren't any of the transfer burn. It worked reasonably well, if a little bit inaccurate, and a small course correction in about half a year will send it hurtling past Vesta at considerable speed. At last, newbies Robin and Patrick are ready for their first mission! Yellow Gong A4 (or should it be A3?) will complete the low Earth orbit crew science experiments and go for a 14-day endurance record, simulating a lunar flight. Another flawless launch thanks to incredibly reliable Soviet engines all around. Robin and Patrick headed out for an EVA and photo op before settling in for the two week mission. Gemini capsules aren't exactly spacious, though, and by the time the 14 days were up both crew were getting very stressed. Time to come home. Mission accomplished, loads of funds gained and a significant amount of science transmitted too. Robin and Patrick clearly enjoyed that mission, since they've both decided to stick around for another three years: And now for the debut of the new Blue String class 700 ton rocket. This first mission is Blue Violin 1, a lunar sample return mission. As with most designs using brand new engines, not everything went entirely to plan: The failure happened about ten seconds before MECO though and made no real difference, but gained some reliability data for the RD-253 which is good. The second stage engine- an RL-200- worked perfectly for the rest of the ascent. And then promptly failed to ignite for the TLI burn despite a 95% ignition chance. Almost 2500m/s of delta-V remaining in that second stage is now gone and lunar return is gone with it. However, it might still be possible to land the lander on the Moon and get some science out of it. Using the braking stage to start the TLI and draining the return section's fuel to run the lander's engines to finish it got the job done, but it wasn't pretty or efficient. This lander has a pretty low TWR and due to time warp bumping the lunar periapsis into the surface it's going to be a pretty steep direct descent trajectory, so this could go badly wrong- "Landing" speed of 200m/s was clearly unsurvivable and the avionics unit that broke off crashed a few kilometres away and was destroyed. If there's a silver lining, it's that the engine failures of this mission made the engines more reliable for the next attempt. Another Green Banana, this one headed to Jupiter. A recent update to RO or RP-1 has disabled the stock delta-V tool entirely, which has the unfortunate side-effect of making the stock 'warp to node' button warp to 1 minute before the node regardless of the real burn time, resulting in a lot of late burns and the inaccuracy that comes with it. Jupiter's SOI is so huge that it doesn't really matter, but the burn to Jupiter used up all of the RD-119 third stage, all of the Juno 6k upper stage and a significant part of the probe's own fuel. Clearly Saturn is out of reach with this design. The trajectory to Jupiter got a small tweak with a course correction just after leaving Earth's SOI, setting up a nice close pass over Jupiter itself that might allow an orbital capture, though the resulting orbit would take more than an Earth year and would deliver minimal additional science or opportunities to fly past one of the moons. Course corrections were also performed for the Ceres and Vesta missions, bringing their closest approaches down. And now for the first rover of this playthrough- Green Huckleberry 1, heading to the Moon's far side. A last minute upgrade added additional science experiments that had just been unlocked, though that also upset the weight balance a bit and made landing it a bit harder. The braking stage was enough to almost stop the rover dead over the surface of the Moon, but the unbalanced centre of mass combined with a relatively low TWR made the landing itself a bit dicey. I designed this rover to be able to recover from this, though, and sure enough... Back in business! No damage to the solar panel either. There's a lot of science that could be gathered from the landing site, but the contract is the top priority and science can wait until later. This landing also completed a lunar landing contract, though not the more lucrative far side landing- I didn't check where the rover sites were or I would have taken that one instead. Chasing all these contracts meant that I missed the optimal time for the Venus transfer window, so Green Ilama (not llama, ilama) is launching late and chasing an ever-narrowing opportunity. It might not be able to make it into an orbit that's usable for the radar altimetry and biome scans it's being sent out to do, but should still be able to gather a lot of science. The next transfer window is over a year away, so plenty of time to build another if this one doesn't work out. Over at the Moon, Green Huckleberry 1 arrives at its destination and makes a tidy profit: The last interplanetary probe for a little while is Green Banana Mercury, which I really hope avoids the glitch that ruined my first Mercury mission in my last RP-1 career. The combination of RD-107/RD-108, RD-0110 and RD-119 is so reliable now that the chance of engine failure is almost zero for the launch; the Juno 6k is still the weak link with just 93% ignition chance, a number that's unlikely to improve much more. A course correction shortly after departing from Earth sets up a nice close encounter with Mercury: Let's just say that this is definitely a flyby... And now for the final launch of this report- Blue Violin 2, aiming to succeed where its predecessor failed. There's just enough time to build a third one before the contract expires, but hopefully that won't be necessary. No failures this time! Lunar capture was complicated by yet more periapsis bumping whenever time warp was switched on, resulting in most of the upper stage's RCS propellant being used up repeatedly fixing its course, and then the warp to node button overshooting again. It took all the remaining ignitions on the upper stage just to capture into a 50km circular orbit, where the return probe detached and pointed its solar panels to the sun while the lander backed off and prepared to land. But the landing itself will have to wait until another time! Coming soon: Finishing the lunar sample return mission and maybe a crewed lunar flight in 1966?

I can play the piano and violin to a reasonably high level, probably a few others to a pretty low level, but definitely not the cornet- the one time I've tried to play a cornet, I sat there for five minutes blowing raspberries down it and trying to stop laughing like the mature, sensible adult I am.

How not to launch a rocket…

Oology. Verisimilitude. Ululation. Phenolphthalein. Deuteranopia. Triskelion.

A few minor technical difficulties are holding up this report, but hopefully they'll all be fixed soon. However, a slightly bigger problem exists: Kerbalism's ISRU processes are painfully slow, plus the mining setup I just sent to Lua requires them to be loaded in physics range at all times otherwise Simple Logistics doesn't share the resources and everything stops. Making parts on-site isn't going to be much use if I can't make the fuel to go with them and I'm not (yet) prepared to stoop to the level of HyperEdit-ing the fuel into the tanks and handwaving away the production, though that might change if I can't find a way of bodging Kerbalism to boost production rates by a few orders of magnitude.

When you ask for help with a rocket design, it really does help to include pictures of said rocket- or even better, a video, or better yet the craft file- or else all we can do is guess at the problem. There's a big difference between a vertically and horizontally launched SSTO, between an SSTO rocket and an SSTO spaceplane and things like engine and payload placement can create vessels that handle in dramatically different ways. What speed do you reach before you start your gravity turn, what altitude are you at and how far do you pitch over? Starting your turn earlier (50-100m/s) and pitching only slightly (5-10 degrees) minimises the forces applied to the craft from aerodynamic drag and is less likely to cause the rocket to start flipping and tear itself apart, whereas waiting until you've built up a lot of speed and then aggressively turning causes a lot more stress on the craft and is more likely to cause things to break apart. Try to stay close to the prograde marker on the navball to minimise drag, throttle your engines back once your time to apoapsis reaches about 40-50 seconds and keep burning until you reach the desired apoapsis, then do a circularisation burn- if you do a gravity turn right, the final burn to enter orbit should be pretty small. SSTO rockets are hard. You need to build something with the thrust to lift off the ground, the delta-V to make it all the way to orbit and still carry a useful payload, then preferably return it to the surface in one piece. Atmosphere-optimised booster engines are inefficient in space, while vacuum-optimised engines don't work well (or at all) in the thick air near sea level; aerodynamic features are critical at low altitude, but dead weight in space; carrying extra weight reduces delta-V, requiring more fuel, meaning more weight, meaning more thrust is needed, meaning more engines, meaning yet more weight, and so on. It takes a lot of effort to make a functional SSTO rocket, never mind a good one, and there's a lot of trial and error involved. Don't give up

Hi there, You can't post links to files on your hard drive because other people can't access your PC to look at them (if they could, you'd have a much bigger problem!). You need to put them on a file sharing site and then post links here: use something like Imgur for images and Dropbox for log files. On that note, you'll also need to post your log files as they contain a lot more information than the error you see on the screen. Did you install RP-1 using the CKAN RP-1 express install option? It's the easiest way to install RP-1 and all its dependencies and is a lot less work than finding all the required mods yourself.

I’ve seen similar issues with Ad Astra, in the end I removed that and just used the visual configs included with JNSQ itself. You could also try downgrading to scatterer v0.07xx instead of 0.08xx, as newer versions of scatterer don’t work with older configs.

Huh. That gives me an idea though. Try changing the versions of all scatterer-related mods (scatterer itself, plus the default config and sunflare if you have those) to v0.072, I think this is related to scatterer v0.8 being incompatible with older configs.

Two launches within three hours, a new record. First up was Orange Alphorn DT, for Docking Target. Launch successful, the second stage deorbited itself while the docking target probe remained in orbit, waiting for the next launch. When the orbits lined up again, Yellow Gong B1 launched with Klaus and Vera on board (again). Due to the positions of the two crafts, they launched to a higher orbit to allow the docking target to catch up with them. The B variant has a docking port on the nose, a feature that the A variant does without to save money since docking ports are pretty pricey. Eight days of phasing orbits later, a small burn from the OMS was enough to set up a nice close rendezvous, passing just 100m from the docking target. Klaus took control of the craft and matched velocities, then began closing in while ground controllers instructed the docking target to turn and face the incoming Gemini spacecraft. Hard dock achieved. The crew headed out for a photo op, because any excuse for an EVA. After testing the feasibility of using a docked spacecraft for propulsion (worked, but the docking target's single thruster is too puny to move a Gemini with any kind of urgency) and propellant transfer (also worked, just don't ask about the plumbing...), and with their orbital experiments completed, Klaus and Vera prepared for re-entry. No mishaps this time, just a textbook deorbit burn and service module separation along with undocking the docking target to be destroyed in the atmosphere. And a safe splashdown in the Pacific. More science, more money, longer retirement dates and a confirmed orbital docking in May 1965. And now for something completely substantially different. Green Banana Ceres is the first of three probes that use only RTGs for power and which are heading out to the asteroid belt (Ceres and Vesta) or beyond (Jupiter). Some compromises were made on the science equipment due to the fact that this mission is only going to be a flyby; orbital capture needs about 2km/s more delta-V than this rocket can manage. Another flawless launch, followed by an interplanetary transfer burn that was close enough that a mere 10m/s correction burn in 200 days or so will set up a nice close encounter with Ceres. Any remaining fuel will be used to brake into Ceres' SOI to maximise science gains. The probes for Ceres, Vesta and Jupiter were all retrofitted with improved avionics to reduce their mass and power draw, the latter being the more useful part since RTGs provide a slow trickle of power and the transmitters needed to phone home from the asteroid belt require a lot of power. After the mishaps with the Venus probes, I've adopted a policy of equipping every probe with an antenna powerful enough to get a signal when the target body is at its furthest from Earth- good for getting science data, not so good for power consumption. An upgrade to the Tracking Station is underway which will allow future missions to use less powerful and power-hungry transmitters. Coming soon: Lunar relays and a Martian arrival.

That's a very broken set of visuals. The massive white halo? That's not meant to be there! I suspect you're missing a dependent mod or some configs, AVP requires several other mods and a texture set to function correctly. I recommend you use CKAN to install mods, since it will automatically install the dependencies and prompts you to pick a texture resolution when you install it.

Control points matter. The rocket part of that craft needs to have a control point facing vertically up, in line with the engine thrust; however the rover part needs to have a control point facing horizontally, in line with the direction that the wheels will turn. If you have the control point facing up but try to drive it horizontally, the wheels get confused because "forwards" for the craft is perpendicular to "forwards" for the wheels. You need a forwards-facing control point to drive it on the surface and a vertical one for flying the rocket, so either add a second probe core rotated so it points forwards or use a RoveMate, which has both vertical and horizontal control points specifically for use on rovers, though that one has no reaction wheels (no biggie, you already have one) and only basic SAS (which MechJeb doesn't care about).

Logs say there's some kind of loading exception. Try verifying the game files through Steam: Right click KSP in Steam, click Properties. Click Local files, then Verify integrity of game files. Steam should then do some work and download any files that are corrupted or missing. Run KSP after that's finished and see if it loads. If it doesn't load, you could try uninstalling and reinstalling. This will delete your save games, but you can back them up before you do so: Right click KSP in Steam, click Manage and then Browse local files. Open the saves folder, then copy the folders for your save games and paste them on the desktop. Uninstall KSP, reinstall KSP. Go back to the saves folder, put your save folders back.

I have an existing save file with some rudimentary EL production systems up and running using that mod's metal and metal ore resources in storages and Kerbalism-configured drills. If I update to this release and add RR-EL-CRP, will they still work or will I need to do some save hacking?

I've seen that before, but it was over a year ago in KSP 1.10 with a 3.5x rescale applied. Does anyone know if the ground scatters (e.g. the structures on Lua) are disabled by Parallax? So far I've only found a few trees on Lua despite flying the whole way around it in a plane recently, but I remember them being more prevalent and nearly crashing into one at one point before.

Rendezvous, docking and double EVA in low Earth orbit.

“But I just wanted to go to space! You never let me go to space!” - Bellein (probably).

Is “because they look really cool and sci-fi-ey” not enough of a reason? The inevitable life support mods will no doubt put them to use in more realistic ways, but I think everyone would agree that an interstellar spaceship with spinning habitat rings is better than the same ship without them.

The map screen weirdness was probably a rogue input lock, you can clear that in the debug menu (alt+F12 > input locks > clear input locks). Not a glitch under the terrain, those always result in explosions. There are no seismometer readings from “micrometeors”, it’s entirely due to real objects hitting the surface- possibly some debris from one of the previous vessels that managed to either miss the terrain or glitch through it and go around for another orbit before impacting. Also- when Moho arrival?

With no parts left, the KSC team had to get creative. Anything not absolutely necessary for continued operations was taken apart and repurposed for use on the three rovers designed to mine the resources of Lua and convert them into spacecraft on-site. No rockets could be built and the few that were still lying around the KSC were disassembled for spares, so the job for launching those rovers to Lua fell to the trusty Kronus spaceplane and Val piloting from Mission Control. This sort of flight is already becoming routine, but the views are still pretty special. The first rover is the miner, equipped with drills to dig up ore and metal ore which are both required for manufacturing parts and propellants, as well as storage for a variety of raw materials. It's the smallest and lightest of the three rovers and the Kronus could handle it with ease. "So let me get this straight- you want me to lower the periapsis to under 3km over Lua's surface, detach the rover and then boost back up onto a free return trajectory?" Val asked. "Okey dokey, one Tactical YeetTM coming right up!" And with that, a new phrase entered the KSC lexicon. Even if nobody could agree exactly how to pronounce TM. Lua is a strange place. How does it manage to retain its atmosphere when it seems too small to do so? Why is it oxygenated? And why can parachutes open so early and at such a high speed compared to anywhere else? Many thought that the mission was doomed when the chutes popped open at over 5km altitude and over 600m/s airspeed, but they handled it just fine. A safe, if rather rough, landing ensued and the rover's self-driving system was activated. There was no room for such fripperies as science experiments on this rover, only the basic utilities and enough cameras to navigate by rather than study the surroundings in detail, so as such nobody at the KSC spotted something just off to the right of the rover, partly hiding behind the terrain. Lua returns on a free return trajectory make for particularly toasty re-entries and the planetary alignment is never any good for a direct descent, but Val is getting to grips with this new atmosphere and her double-dip re-entry technique allows for a return to the KSC without using up too much fuel in the process. By the time the plane came back around Rhode and descended towards the KSC, night had fallen. With the night came cloud cover that partly obscured the KSC- and more worryingly, the mountains directly west of the KSC that Jeb landed on- so Val deliberately overshot and then landed westbound. Or at least, that's what she told everyone. In reality she just overshot, plain and simple. Another day, another rover dispatched to Lua. The larger size of this rover necessitated a larger, draggier fairing, which combined with the greater mass of the rover meant there was less of a fuel margin for this flight. Mining rover 2 features two large ISRU units that between them can perform every chemical process required to produce fuel, oxidiser and monopropellant as well as harvest various resources from the air, ground and even the ocean. Somebody took the 'ocean' readings from the prospector rover a bit too literally and added a water pump, though whoever was in charge of the other end of the rover put a more appropriate water drill on instead. Another Tactical YeetTM was performed... And a bit of misfortune with the trajectory resulted in a landing in some mountainous terrain, reducing parachute drag and also causing the rover to land at an angle. One of the landing legs crumpled on impact, but it absorbed most of the force of the landing in the process and no further damage was done. The second rover set a course for the ore prospector, siphoning gases out of the air the entire time, while Val brought the Kronus back home. Another night landing. Rhode's days last for just over 13 hours, something that's been playing havoc with the KSC team's sleep schedules since it's slightly more than two Kerbin days, however it also means that these flights technically happen on consecutive days even though they're two Kerbin days apart. Mining rovers 1 and 2 arrive at their destination within a few hours of each other and go looking for suitable places to park; there's plenty of ore at this site, about 3.5%, however there's no metal ore to make parts from; around 500 metres away there's a spot where the ore concentration is 2.5% and metal ore is 2.4%, so the first rover heads there while the second sniffs out subsurface water to dig up and keeps sucking in all the atmospheric gases it can. No ammonia here unfortunately, but nitrogen can be easily harvested and both oxygen and carbon dioxide are present, though the high altitude means they're not abundant enough for the harvesters to function effectively. "OK, who approved this!?" Wernher was aghast at what he saw in front of him. "This is an absolute travesty!" "I never said it was a good solution, but it should still work." Said Bill. "You can still fly this thing, right Val?" "If you stuck wings and a propeller to a shipping container, I'd make it fly," replied Val. Wernher sighed. He'd seen some crazy designs in his time- made some of them himself- but this... Mining rover 3 carried a Sandcaster robotic 3D printing arm, a prototype smelter system to refine metal ore and a big nuclear reactor to power the entire mining complex, along with big radiators to keep it cool. "Well, would you believe it- sticking a massive crane-like thing out of the fairing causes all sorts of aerodynamic issues. We're getting very low on fuel right now." Val sounded a bit less confident than usual. "You can still make this work though, right?" Gene asked. "Getting the rover down? Sure. Getting the plane back? Eh... maybe?" Another Tactical YeetTM... ("Is that nuclear engine meant to be glowing like that?" Linus asked, but as usual he was ignored.) The landing was pretty straightforward, right up until someone looked at one of the navigation camera feeds and realised there were TREES!!!! in the landing zone, but by then it was too late to do anything about it. The mossy terrain was one thing, but actual trees? On a moon this small, with air this thin? The scientists were baffled and immediately disappeared into the bowels of R&D to speculate and postulate as to how trees could exist on Lua. And why they seemed to be so similar to some trees they'd seen on Rhode; just not the purple ones that glowed in the dark. Despite the lack of fuel, Val still managed to get the Kronus back home. The final approach and landing was unusually slow due to the plane running completely out of fuel, but Val maintained her 100% successful landing rate- with this plane, at least. Nobody mention the Velociteze incident. All three mining rovers were now in place- the first dug up ore and metal ore, the second created propellants and the third produced metal and powered the whole party. Nobody was really sure how the resources could be shared between the rovers; ask a scientist about it and they'd start mumbling about quantum entanglement and Metaphase Omnidirectional Delivery Systems without ever giving a definitive answer. Still, the mining operations have now begun. The first Lua-made rockets should be ready in, uh... Wait- HOW LONG!?

The fifth of five return capsules, from Orange Trombone 4 (of 5), begins its descent into the atmosphere. A big low pressure system below means it's too cloudy to tell where it's going to end up; all I know is it's flying south-east over much of central Europe. Dropping through the winter storm, it eventually lands around 50km north-west of Stockholm, Sweden, and is quickly recovered. Now for a new rocket: Green Fig, a geostationary satellite system. If this prototype performs well enough I'll launch more of them in future for some pretty lucrative contracts. Well, it got to geostationary orbit, but the fuel margins were pretty thin and future contracts are going to need a lot more than 500 units of payload. Adding more boosters and a better upper stage might make up the difference, but that's a problem for the future. Contract money means KCT points, currently being split fairly evenly between VAB and R&D so that both build queues are going at the same speed while research keeps advancing. Significant upgrades have been made to the Yellow Gong since the first flight to considerably boost its available delta-V; no longer will the service module be required to just squeak into orbit! Orbit was established with a nice 400m/s or so in the second stage, more than enough to raise the apoapsis for the orbital flight contract even with a few days of boiloff. With the higher orbit reached, the upper stage was detached and deorbited while the capsule remained in orbit for another day. Contract parameters complete, the periapsis is over Florida right now and the capsule is about to reach said periapsis, so if I time warp around to apoapsis and burn retrograde a bit it should come back down nicely- why are there explosions!? Activating time warp somehow changed the periapsis from a safe 165km to a suicidal 75km, teleporting the pod deep into the atmosphere. Somehow the capsule survived, though it lost most of its RCS thrusters in the process, and parachuted to a safe splashdown in the Atlantic. It's not the first time I've almost lost a mission due to a glitch like this: in my last RP-1 career a probe orbiting Uranus lost its communications dish when its periapsis got bumped into the atmosphere and with it any further science; and less than half an hour before this I did a simulation of launching a lunar rover, only to have its trajectory go from skimming the surface of the Moon to not even reaching the Moon's SOI. Still, all's well that ends well and both Klaus and Vera had some suitably terrifying stories to tell to the two newbies currently in training, the science was gathered and the contract completed. In between these missions I've been accepting a perhaps reckless number of contracts, many focussed on lunar or interplanetary missions- lunar landing and sample return, lunar rover, do some scans of Venus, several flyby missions of other planets- and I've also modified the Green Banana interplanetary probe to launch a total of four in the next year: Ceres and Vesta were already on the build queue and have now been joined by Jupiter and Mercury; the former has a beefier antenna to phone home from that far away, while the latter is entirely solar-powered instead of relying on RTGs like the others. The final launch for today is a Green Cucumber 1.5k, launching into an unusual retrograde Molniya orbit with an inclination of 116.6 degrees. This resulted in some boosters being dropped on western Florida, but I'm sure that's how NASA operates, right? It seems RP-1 has been changed recently so that certain commercial satellite contracts are mutually exclusive- previously the Molniya, tundra and geostationary contracts blocked and cancelled each other, but now that seems to have been extended to weather satellites too. There's also a 60 day cooldown timer on at least some of those contracts now too, so no more launching rockets every few days to rake in contract cash. Coming soon: Docking in space and a visit to the Red Planet, hopefully to stay.

Anyone who puts a tube that may or may not contain concentrated nitric acid near their mouth should not be allowed anywhere near combustible materials. Not sure why they're using furfuryl alcohol and nitric acid though, when alternatives such as Coke and Mentos or barbecue gas and compressed air exist and are much safer to handle. Coke and Mentos is quite clearly hypergolic, since they react on contact, and they're both made largely of plant-based materials so they've got the green credentials to go with it. Win-win!

The great simulation session begins with a lunar rover, which proved to be pretty stable and hard to topple due to its 10m/s top speed and wide wheelbase. It took actively firing the RCS and doing some reckless braking/steering to even unbalance the thing, so as long as it doesn't end up belly up it should be fine. Staying at the Moon, sample return time: The lower section will land on the Moon, grab some samples and then return to orbit, while the upper section will take the sample and return it to Earth. A few tests were run and issues were found. First, docking: Lander had insufficient avionics, so I fixed that for the landing test: Chronic lack of thrust led to impacting the surface at over 700m/s, so a bigger engine was added. A successful landing (even if it hit the ground at 30m/s and bounced a bit) and still plenty of fuel left over. The combination of one large 2.3kN thruster, four ~550N thrusters with vectoring and four ~550N RCS thrusters with some throttling provides high thrust during the descent, precise speed control for the landing and attitude control without wasting propellant firing the RCS thrusters. Back to orbit: 280m/s is a good margin to have, allowing for a rendezvous and docking without the need to use the return stage's more limited fuel supplies. The engines used up quite a bit more MMH than NTO or helium in this sim, so if they use them in a more balanced way then it might have an even bigger reserve. With everything in order, the Blue Violin is ready for construction as the first in the Blue String series. A real launch interrupts the simulations as Green Banana Mars launches for its transfer window. Ignore the weird blueness on the boosters, I was messing with scatterer settings and clearly got something badly wrong... Second stage orbital insertion was followed by firing some solid retro-rockets to deorbit the spent stage, while the third stage prepared for the transfer burn to Mars. The RD-119 provided all of the necessary delta-V to get to Mars, or at least it would have if the transfer burn had been accurate; as it is, a 200m/s course correction will use one of the three ignitions on the Juno 6k upper stage, but that leaves two for the capture burn as well as the probe's own fuel reserves. Solar panels have been a bit finicky, refusing to work because parts are in the way even though they're clearly not, but I found an angle where the panels could catch the light without being blocked and left it in that position. Sun-tracking solar panels are in a later tech node, but I might have to prioritise that soon. And back to the Moon for more simulations, but this time it's a crewed lander! Stealing another idea from Terminal Velocity, this lander uses an RD-58 kerolox engine for most of the descent and ascent, while some generic hypergolic thrusters will cover the final descent and any on-orbit burns for rendezvousing etc. as necessary. An Astronaut Complex upgrade is required to plant flags, and it's a pricey one; the contract for first crewed lunar landing has a huge advance payment for that exact reason, but it's locked behind crewed lunar flyby and orbit contracts that need to be done first. All Vera can do in this simulation is pick up some rocks and then return to orbit. Good margins on both the main engine and the hypergolics for a rendezvous with the orbiting Gemini that will form the second half of this mission. With the designs proven, the lunar Gemini receives the name Yellow Glockenspiel while the lander is named Yellow Xylophone. Both will use the same Blue String-class launch rocket and a twin-RL-10 Centaur-esque upper stage to get out to the Moon, but the heavier lander needs slightly larger tanks on the second and third stages to get the necessary delta-V. This particular sim ended up about 100m/s short of a 50km circular orbit around the Moon, so some tanks were stretched to provide the missing fuel. Meanwhile in orbit, Orange Trombone 5 has finished its orbital photography and the return capsule is loaded up ready to be dropped back into the atmosphere. Too bad the capsule doesn't have a camera on it, because the views during re-entry were pretty great. The capsule ended up right in the middle of the rather misleadingly named Hudson Bay, Canada, which is more of an inland sea than a bay. A passing boat fished the capsule out and returned it to land. And that's the end of the orbital imaging program- -wait, what? Why do I only have 160 of the 200 science? Did I forget one? *checks list of active vessels* Orange Trombone 4, you say? Whoops, I skipped that one. It'll have to wait until next time. Coming soon: Gemini versus The Kraken: Round One!