jimmymcgoochie

Trying to balance on a hill by putting the magnetometer UP the hill will never work, the mass is all in the base and not the boom; put it DOWN the hill so it props it up.

It's time for Canopus Venus to deploy its atmosphere probe. Venus will still get in the way so the Canopus orbiter won't be able to relay the signal from the atmo-probe/lander, but adjusting Algol Venus' orbit using most of its remaining propellant would allow it to act as a relay instead. The timing had to be just right so Algol Venus was in position overhead. This proved trickier than initially thought as the two spacecraft were actually orbiting in a roughly similar plane but in opposite directions. The probe hurtled into the atmosphere at just under 8km/s, racing across the terminator which bathed the clouds in eerie blue light. Venus' atmosphere is a lot harsher than Earth's: at 100km Earth's atmosphere is barely noticeable, but at the same altitude on Venus the probe was pulling over 10 gees as it decelerated hard, coming to a near halt horizontally while it was still above 65km altitude and beginning a long, slow fall to the clouds below. The parachute was designed to be resilient to both temperature and aerodynamic forces, but the magnitude of both was too much for it to bear and it was torn to shreds when it deployed. The heatshield then crumpled on impact which cushioned the probe itself from what would have been terminal damage. The science experiments had been recording everything they could from the moment the probe separated from its orbiter and they painted a vivid picture of the conditions under the clouds of Earth's nearest neighbour. Hopes of finding a lush jungle planet, already shaken by the orbital data, were dashed for good: Venus was no tropical paradise, but a horrid nightmare of blistering heat, immense pressure and at least one layer of cloud that seemed to be made of pure sulphuric acid. The probe survived for just over two hours before succumbing to the inevitable, well before its batteries ran out but just long enough to transmit the critical data. It was, however, the first probe to enter another planet's atmosphere and land intact on its surface, yet again cementing Europe's lead in the Space Race. Somewhat less impressive was the discovery that a mistake in the blueprints for the Rigel lunar lander had resulted in the magnetometer being attached incorrectly. Instead of being bolted to the base of the lander, the magnetometer was instead bolted to the top of the decoupler underneath it and so was detached with the upper stage instead of staying with the lander down to the surface. An internal investigation has been opened to find out a) who's responsible for this blunder and b) why nobody spotted the mistake before two Rigels flew with their magnetometers incorrectly attached. In the meantime, Rigel 3 performed its descent and landed near the lunar north pole on the near side. The return stage had been redesigned slightly from previous Rigel missions, using smaller and lighter thrusters in an attempt to improve the tight delta-V margins. This ended up backfiring completely as the new thrusters were less powerful than the previous design and also had no gimbals or thrust vanes for steering and the use of near-constant RCS thrust to maintain control combined with the less efficient ascent trajectory caused by a lack of thrust more than made up for any small gains from the lighter thrusters. Rigel 3's return stage was running on fumes by the time its return trajectory was finalised, even more so than Rigel 1, but it still managed to return the capsule and its precious sample to splash down in the Pacific where a Royal Navy destroyer was waiting to collect it. Preparations are now well underway ahead of the planned missions that will lead up to a crewed Moon landing: a test of the new Penguin Mk2 in low Earth orbit, then a full dress rehearsal of the landing using the Penguin Mk2, the Europa lander, the Blitzar TLI booster and a Quasar-based refuel tanker, and finally the landing itself.

I started a new RP-1 run, got a year in on the first day and the very next day a big update changed the starting conditions so I started again,

Time to plan some lunar missions, starting with the lander. It will need to pack a sizeable fuel reserve to land and return to orbit plus any orbital manoeuvring, yet have enough finesse to make a controlled landing. The best engine for the job is the RZ.20 with its high ISP and ability to repeatedly relight, however it lacks the fine control necessary for a gentle touchdown; that problem could be solved by adding some partially throttleable hypergolic thrusters similar to those used on the Rigel landers, which have the versatility for a landing but not the efficiency for the descent and ascent. A mockup was created and tested mathematically using data from previous missions including Rigels and Quasars. The results were promising- healthy delta-V margins were predicted, while a heavy reliance on tried and tested hardware (the lander's fuel tanks and engine were heavily based on the Quasar) should mean relatively few complications will arise during the final design and construction phases. Now that engineers have a good idea of what the lander will look like, they can focus on getting it to the Moon along with the capsule that will transport the crew there and back again. A single launch mission was ruled out due to the time and cost required to build a huge new launchpad and associated infrastructure for the huge rocket it would require, while lunar orbit rendezvous would require two Constellation launches with at least a two week delay between them, making the rendezvous more difficult. Ultimately the mission planners settled on an Earth orbit rendezvous mission in three launches: first a large trans-lunar booster would launch into LEO on a Constellation- only partly fuelled due to mass constraints- followed by a top-up tanker based on the Quasar and launched on a Kronos to fill up the tanks, and then the combined Penguin-based capsule and lander would launch together on a second Constellation and join with the booster to be flung at the Moon. Re-using existing rockets and designs as much as possible and performing critical rendezvouses while still in low Earth orbit would minimise risk and allow an abort at more stages of the mission, while the Quasar tanker would also have the delta-V to launch itself to lunar orbit as a backup Earth return stage in case of engine failure on the capsule. While the lunar plans were taking shape, back on Earth it was time for science specialist Rene Sørenson to have his first orbital flight with veteran pilot Damien O'Reilly commanding Penguin 3's mission. The crew had a series of experiments to run for their week-long mission and there was even time to give Rene a taste of EVA action. The re-entry was targeted for Woomera and ended up less than twenty kilometres away, not a bad result after re-entering from an apoapsis of almost 1000km! The next mission to launch was Algol Ceres, intended to make the first visit to the largest body in the asteroid belt a permanent one by capturing into orbit and studying it in great detail. Everything was going so well... ...until it wasn't: Double engine failures on the HM-7 and Larch-1 killed the mission completely, leaving it drifting aimlessly out of Earth's gravity well. A hasty meeting was convened to make a decision: Algol Vesta was already built and the Vesta window was two months away, but if launched as soon as possible it might be able to visit Ceres instead, with a replacement able to be built just in time for the Vesta window. The next transfer windows for Ceres and Vesta are quite different- the Ceres window is a lot less favourable while the next Vesta window will be a lot better, so the decision was made to launch Algol Vesta to Ceres instead. A quick bit of spray-painting later... No engine failures this time! A course correction will be required in solar orbit but the mission is looking good so far. Lunar mission plans are almost finalised and key technologies are being prepared- improved MLI to further reduce hydrogen boiloff and an upgrade to the RZ.20 with an increased expansion ration to increase vacuum ISP- with an initial Earth orbit test flight of the Penguin Mk2 capsule planned with a science module of a similar mass to the lander.

You need to change the access permissions on that log you uploaded, I can't access it.

Yes. When exactly, I can't say, but it's a when rather than an if.

I don’t see any need to show every repeated sounding rocket launch, at least not at normal speed with commentary- a short speedy-uppy montage would suffice. Completely disagree on the bio/film capsule thing though, getting maximum science from each launch should be the top priority regardless of contracts.

Fun fact, the signal strength meter shows data speed in bits per second (bps), but Kerbalism shows data speed in bytes per second (B/s) and since there are 8 bits in a byte your 80kbps signal to the lunar relay would be at best 10kB/s, nowhere near the ~30kB/s required for that orbital imaging experiment. What you’re seeing is a relatively low-speed S-band signal bouncing off the lunar relay which isn’t going to have the bandwidth to send all that data. Dedicated S-, X- or K/Ka-band relays in medium Earth orbit are required to get the data transmitted. That rover was never going to land like that- maybe if you had deployed the ramps to act as airbrakes and tried to use a lifting re-entry to slow down more before you got too low it might have worked, or if you had drogue chutes to slow it subsonic before the main chutes deployed.

Rigel 2's landing had a couple of complications. One, it was supposed to be landing on one of the lunar Mare but instead found itself flying towards a series of hills. And two, the magnetometer fell off. The landing systems managed to compensate for these problems and a safe landing ensued on the far side of the Moon. The lander spent about an hour on the surface gathering data and that all-important surface sample before the return stage launched. A slightly more favourable landing site latitude meant a slightly more favourable return window, leaving a bit of extra fuel to fine-tune where the return capsule would re-enter the atmosphere. (It helped a lot that the return trajectory was going to be close to Australia anyway.) The next launch sent rookie astronaut Lynda Wilson into space for the first time, along with veteran Olga Martín. Penguin 2 has a series of longer-duration experiments for the crew, including some tests for engineer Lynda to perform using power tools to evaluate their utility in microgravity. After a week in orbit running experiments, Penguin 2 headed over to the docking target probe launched earlier and completed a textbook docking. As in, this docking will become the textbook example for all future flights since nobody has ever docked a crewed spacecraft to anything before. They remained in orbit for a few more days, beating duration and altitude records, before returning. They were supposed to perform EVAs, but Lynda suffered several bouts of spacesickness that put that plan on hold until her next flight on Penguin 4. (The orbital flight contract got confused by the docking and didn't complete because it insisted the vessel wasn't crewed when it clearly was.) And another Quasar launch to GEO for commercial profit. In a somewhat unusual development, a team had been looking at the feasibility of recovering used boosters for re-use, potentially reducing the cost of each launch by a sizeable margin. The best option they could think of involved adding wings and jet engines to the Kronos' first stage to allow it to fly back to Woomera after separation, however they couldn't quite get it to work as well as they'd hoped: the wings, jets and fuel added too much weight and adversely affected its performance as a rocket, while the heavy engines at the rear and unaerodynamic nose made its predicted flight performance marginal at best. Still, it looked pretty good in the sketches! They went as far as building a scale model and dropping it from a plane, but it flew just as badly as expected and crashed in the desert. The Constellation's twin side-mounted boosters preclude the addition of wings, since there would be too much risk of them colliding during separation, and smaller rockets just don't have the mass budget to add wings and jets and are both cheap enough and used rarely enough for it not to matter, so this idea will be put on hold for now. It's now February 1965, half way into the "five years to the Moon" period. On one hand, things are going well: multi-crew missions are ongoing, orbital rendezvous and docking have been demonstrated and the Rigel missions have shown that landing on the Moon and coming back is possible and that the heatshields can take the heat; but on the other, there's still no concrete plan for how to get the crew out to the Moon, to the surface, or back to Earth again.

Sorry to burst your bubble so early, but you can only do one early satellites program, they’re mutually exclusive. You should be launching film cameras and biological samples on the same rockets, regardless of contracts!

Obligatory Quasar GEO commercial sat launch to start, it's the same old same old so I'll skip to the contracts completing from now on. A few weeks of timewarping later and I remembered that the Moon is tidally locked so Rigel 1 will never be in a good position to launch. No time like the present, then: (It only occurred to me much later on that while the launch could be whenever, the resulting orbit would probably produce a more favourable return opportunity if I waited long enough.) The orbital misalignment resulted in a more difficult return burn which meant there was no fuel left to try and fine-tune where the return capsule would land when it got back to Earth- hopefully it'll land somewhere that the CIA or KGB can't get their hands on it! The capsule touched down in western Mexico and the recovery team had already flown in to be ready to move in as soon as its parachute opened. It took less than an hour for the capsule to be located and loaded onto a truck to be driven to the nearest airfield to be flown back to Australia and the team left Mexico with a token fine for littering, since the capsule had landed in a nature reserve. Once returned to Woomera, the capsule was carefully opened and its payload extracted and divided up to be sent out to all the various universities etc. who had managed to secure a precious gram or two of genuine Moon dust. EuROSTAR's on-site research facilities kept some for themselves, of course, but they were more interested in studying the capsule and its heatshield to find out how they had fared during the month-long mission. Demand for lunar samples vastly outstripped the supply, but those who hadn't been picked in the first lottery selection (chosen to avoid any accusations of favouritism) would automatically be entered into the next one when the next Rigel mission was launched. With the proof of concept completed, minor upgrades were made to the design- additional science instruments on the lander and directional solar panels to replace the side-mounted ones on the return stage, which proved to be only marginally able to keep the batteries charged. A month later the Mars transfer window was open and, just like the Venus window before it, a Canopus orbiter/lander and an Algol orbiter were ready to depart. Canopus Mars launched first, mostly because it took longer to prepare it for launch and so Algol Mars could follow it more quickly in the limited time before the transfer window became much less friendly. One of the four Vega-3 engines on the second stage failed to ignite, however the other three were able to compensate for the imbalanced thrust and burned for longer to make up the delta-V and the mission wasn't compromised. The probe departed for Mars and settled in for the long trip to the Red Planet. Algol Mars followed suit less than two weeks later with no engine problems but a slightly less favourable transfer that will result in a slightly longer trip to Mars because that's just how the transfer window lined up. Rocket watchers were then treated to something unexpected: the first, and possibly only, launch of a Goliath Mk5- RZ.3 first stage, Larch-2 second stage- carrying a small docking target probe for the upcoming Penguin 2 mission. The Nova Docker probe was positioned in a 250km circular orbit to await the crew's launch in a couple of months. Next to launch was Rigel 2, now with more science! The twin objectives are to land on the far side and return a sample to Earth, but the far side is mostly in darkness right now so it'll have to wait a while before landing. Unlike Rigel 1, Rigel 2 is in a prograde orbit aligned with the Moon's orbital plane and so shouldn't encounter the same alignment problems that Rigel 1 had when it's time to come home. Another launch of a Quasar to geostationary orbit, but this is no ordinary Quasar: Quasar Quad-Net is carrying four smaller relay satellites to form a geostationary network that will help to cover some signal gaps in low Earth orbit, with some additional profit from selling access to commercial operators and other space agencies. The Quasar stage boosted the four relays into a 3:4 resonant orbit so each satellite could circularise into a geostationary orbit on subsequent orbits. Once in position, the orbital periods of the satellites were carefully adjusted so that they would stay in place with minimal additional effort. A few days of calibration later and the network was officially switched on. As part of the big push to the Moon, longer duration missions will be required to find out if a crew can actually function in space for long enough to perform a lunar landing, and if they'll be healthy enough to come back again without their bones turning to jelly on re-entry. To that end, EuROSTAR has committed to launching a vessel into Earth orbit that can be visited by Penguin crews for longer periods of time- first one month, then two or three- although there's a fairly big argument going on about what exactly to call this vessel: space station, orbital harbour, astronaut hotel?

Why not make the tanks on the Atlatl bio return 1m wide? That would make the toolings much cheaper since there’s significant shared cost between normal and HP tanks of the same type (e.g. steel fuselage) if you tool similar sizes. And why not put bio sample capsules on those Dart return rockets to get a bit of free science? You could be building twice as many Darts and alternating between bio samples and sounding payload for contracts to get double the data units on the engines and extra science, and still timing the contracts nicely. (Update- and put a mass spectrometer on it too to get flying high and space low science from that.) The pink engine symbol at the 25 minute mark is because it has no ignitions left.

That was a completely legitimate cheat-complete, those contracts are pretty glitchy- I once had a Moon base contract fail because it decided my Moon station was the “base” and wanted me to land that instead- and you did everything it asked you to do. Scatterer/EVE disappearing isn’t uncommon either, I’ve had it happen lots of times but a quick save/reload often fixes it.

The Princess might be quite old and largely superseded by the Empress, but there are still some missions where it's the best rocket for the job. One of these missions is the new SuperAster, intended as both a test of a new heatshield designed to survive a re-entry from a direct lunar return and to see what effects said return would have on a large mammal ahead of sending humans out there. The launch sent the capsule and Nigel the macaque on a two day long trip once around the Earth, reaching over 120,000km altitude yet with its periapsis firmly inside the atmosphere so it would return to the ground and land close to Woomera again. The mission was a complete success: the heatshield handled the heat without any problems and Nigel suffered no ill effects of his trip to deep space or the rather harsh re-entry conditions- he was trained to sit in a little padded chair which ensured he wasn't harmed by the G-forces. With the heatshield now flight-proven as much as it can be without actually going to the Moon and back, the next launch was a big one: the first Rigel lunar lander was designed to land on the Moon, scrape up a sample of the surface material and then bring it back to Earth in a small return capsule. The first launch attempt was scrubbed after a booster engine failed to start due to parameters that were ever so slightly outside the maximum tolerances. (0.03% above failure, TestFlight? Not cool!) The rocket was rolled back for a full engine inspection, during which time Canopus Venus arrived and prepared for its capture burn. The mitigation systems had done their jobs and the HTP decomposition rate was negligible, an encouraging sign for future missions to other planets that could also use Larch-powered capture stages. The initial capture burn produced a fairly loose orbit, with ample fuel reserves to bring the apoapsis lower ahead of lander deployment. Confirmation of the orbit made news headlines around the world- the first time that a manmade object had orbited another planet. Barely a week later, Rigel 1 grabbed more headlines when it landed on the far side of the Moon after a flawless launch and transfer. A problem with the guidance system on the lander nearly spelt disaster late in the descent, causing the lander to start flying back the way it had come before the fault- caused by flying low over a hilltop and then towards lower lying terrain- was corrected by Mission Control via the Solaris relay network, working exactly as designed. The announcement of the far side landing also came with the revelation that Rigel 1 intended to return to Earth with a small amount of lunar material- only a few tens of grams from the top layers of the surface, maybe, but the EuROSTAR switchboards were soon jammed with calls from thousands of universities and research institutes all clamouring for even the tiniest sliver of Moon to study. The lander's two-part design also meant that the base would remain on the surface with its own scientific equipment, transmitter and solar panels to continue studying the landing site after the return stage had been deployed, though some damage due to engine exhaust was expected and would provide some valuable data of its own on solar panel damage and degradation by rocket exhaust and lunar dust. The furore was still going on as Algol Venus arrived, braking into orbit a month after Canopus Venus and positioning itself to gather as much scientific data as possible and to act as a backup relay for the atmospheric probe/lander when it was deployed. The positions of the planets and the spacecrafts' orbits weren't particularly conducive for that though, with Venus getting in the way of a signal in the projected landing zone. A more favourable alignment should occur in a few months, though with the caveat that the planets will be further apart by then and so the signal strength would probably be weaker and data transfer rates correspondingly slower. Rigel 1's guidance issue has resulted in a landing site that's further south than initially planned, meaning it'll launch into an inclined orbit that doesn't align with the Moon's orbit of Earth and increasing the delta-V cost of returning it- potentially beyond the delta-V it actually has. Even as the phones are ringing off their hooks from people wanting some of that lunar sample, mission planners and engineers are working feverishly to try and find a way to get the sample back to Earth at all.

It depends what the base is for: a science base to serve as a hub for surface exploration would be best placed with easy access to as many different biomes as possible, while a mining base needs the maximum abundance of ore you can find. Both will benefit from having flat land around both to serve as a landing site and to enable the base to be assembled more easily on the ground, however some good sites might be more awkward to get to/from due to their location e.g. near the poles, or have terrain around them that limits solar panel exposure- I once put a base on Minmus’ south(?) pole but had to move it because the pole is surrounded by low hills that block the sunlight for much of the time. If you’re using life support mods or mods with more detailed resource chains and mining systems (Kerbalism ticks both boxes) then there are more things to consider- it’s rare to find a good site that has ore and water in the same place and even rarer to get one with metal ore for something like Extraplanetary Launchpads in the same place too. SCANsat is a good mod for scouting base locations, you can get detailed terrain, biome and resource maps all in one place to find the best sites for a base and it can also detect anomalies to investigate- who wouldn’t want a mysterious alien monolith as the centrepiece of their base?

Completely wrong, otherwise RSSVE et al wouldn’t exist in the first place.

The race to get boots on the Moon is still only in its early stages- nobody has ventured beyond low Earth orbit or sent more than one astronaut into space in the same capsule, and nothing has ever gone to the Moon and come back in one piece- but it's already clear that a really big rocket will be needed. How big exactly depends on how the mission will take place: an all in one craft that flies to the Moon, lands and then returns to Earth, separate lander and capsule, single launch or several and if more than one launch is needed, Earth or lunar orbit rendezvous... There's a lot to think about! A design team were given the vague brief of creating something twice the size of the OR-4 Constellation with twice the payload capacity per launch. They quickly decided that using larger fuel tanks would be prohibitively expensive and so opted to reuse as much as possible from existing designs, including the newly developed booster crossfeed system from the Constellation Mk2 and a sustainer style version of the Epsilon. This was the result: If it looks a lot like an OR-4 with four oversized boosters, well, that's actually pretty accurate. Each booster uses a pair of Epsilons rather than RZ.3s and is four metres in diameter rather than three, while the core stage is lengthened and uses four sustainer Epsilons. There are some similarities with both the American Atlas and the Soviet R-7 and its derivatives, but neither of those is nearly as large as this 1500-ton heavyweight. The upper stage is exactly the same as the Constellation, the only change being uprated avionics systems, while the payload capacity was estimated at 50 tons using relatively conservative numbers, rising to 55 tons if more optimistic figures are used. That's enough to launch the entire Sagittarius rocket that put the first satellite into orbit, into orbit itself; yet it's still not enough to launch an entire Moon landing mission in one go unless said Moon landing mission was extremely lightweight and very cramped for what would almost certainly be the sole occupant for the two to three week journey. The design will be studied in more detail and refined where possible before a final decision is made regarding its production in the future. After a lot of hard work, the Canopus Venus mission is finally ready to launch. The first launch of the new Constellation Mk2 started out without any issues, however one of the core engines suffered a fault and lost thrust shortly before booster separation resulting in a flatter than expected trajectory. The rest of the burn until MECO was a tense time, but no further issues emerged and the guidance systems were able to recover from the deviation to put the payload into a parking orbit ready for departure. Canopus Venus is making use of some new anti-degradation systems that it's hoped will prevent the slow decomposition of HTP in the tanks, an issue that affected previous Venus-bound probes that had diminished RCS efficiency on arrival due to heat from the sun accelerating the breakdown. It's the first time a keroxide rocket has been sent to another planet and if things don't go well the orbiter and its transfer stage may be sacrificed to try and get the lander down on the surface, using Algol Venus to relay the signal instead. Another first launch occurred shortly afterwards with the first OR-5 Empress A launching the first Penguin crew capsule into low Earth orbit. A few people were worried about launching EuROSTAR's only active astronauts on an untested rocket- and those fears seemed to be justified as a guidance issue caused the avionics to reset and the launch to proceed on a less refined trajectory. Despite the early trouble, the launch was successful and Damien and Olga became the first two astronauts to fly into orbit in the same capsule. After a couple of small orbit corrections, it was time to begin the first ever extra-vehicular activity. But who would be the first to head outside? The audio from the capsule abruptly cut off for several minutes, leaving ground controllers frantic, before returning with a disappointed Damien revealing that he had lost the rock-paper-scissors-off and so Olga would be going out first. In her excitement, she forgot her safety tether! Good thing those nitrogen thruster packs work, otherwise Damien would have had to try and fly the capsule over to save her. Olga thoroughly enjoyed her time floating free in space, scooting around with the jetpack and taking plenty of pictures with a small camera before she accidentally pointed it too close to the Sun and broke it. After she returned to the capsule it was Damien's turn to head outside where he did much the same thing. Meanwhile, over at Mercury... A close flyby of Mercury's north pole, mostly in daylight, gave some spectacular close-up views of the terrain and some additional data to corroborate what had been gathered by its predecessor. Back around Earth, the shakedown tests continued on the Penguin including several more orbit changes, tests of the various systems (the fuel cells kept cutting out but the problem was solved by opening the water dump valve) and then a re-entry that was supposed to land them near Woomera but somehow dropped them well short, splashing down in the Indian Ocean. Sending a crew of two into orbit AND for almost a week AND doing the first EVA made worldwide headlines, further securing Europe's lead in the race to the Moon. The crew had also performed several science experiments that hadn't been possible with the much smaller Dawn capsule and its single occupant and the results would be studied closely to inform future missions. Those who studied them would soon be working in brand new, state of the art research facilities in Australia and across Europe as the member states' governments along with universities and research institutions began to realise that those grandiose dreams of European boots on the Moon began to seem more and more plausible. The reaction elsewhere in the world was more muted: the American public were once again outraged by the lack of progress in their own space program, still third place and somehow falling further behind in the Space Race, with a series of leaks from Rocketdyne revealing how similar the E-1 was to Europe's Epsilon apparently intended to drum up anti-European sentiment but instead highlighting the fact that America had had the same technology for years and yet had left it to gather dust on a shelf; things weren't going much better in the Soviet Union, with many eastern European nations growing increasingly dissatisfied with the disparity between themselves and their neighbours to the west in terms of standard of living, political and social freedoms and now in space too, an area which the Soviet leadership had hoped to dazzle the world with their technological superiority, leading to growing unrest and a number of brief uprisings which were brutally suppressed; elsewhere in the world, the goings on in space had next to no impact, but some still had cause to hope: if the same nations that just twenty years earlier had been busily blasting each other to bits could set aside their troubled shared past and work together towards a common goal, maybe other seemingly intractable issues could be solved after all...

Most rocketry enthusiasts have heard of the Gamma, the British kerosene-peroxide rocket engines that powered the world's first satellite launch and played a key role in the first probes to visit the Moon and Venus. What most of them don't know is that there was also a Delta engine under development with performance very similar to the LR-79 which was later license-built as the RZ.1; while Delta was ultimately cancelled, its legacy lived on in the upgraded RZ.2 and the knowledge gained from this independent kerolox project would soon play an important role in Project Enhance which produced the upgraded RZ.3 and the brand new Epsilon. Producing more than double the thrust of the RZ.2-Mk4 and with higher specific impulse from sea level to vacuum, Epsilon is expected to power the next generation of EuROSTAR's launch rockets. The Kronos Mk2 was already slated for production and now it was time for the Constellation to get the same upgrades. The design uses a novel propellant feed system: kerosene and liquid oxygen are pumped from the boosters to the core under pressure, driven by the booster engines; when the boosters are drained and the propellant flow decreases, pressure-sensitive valves automatically switch to allow the core stage tanks to take over. The system has been tested extensively on the ground to ensure that the changeover is as smooth as possible and that no bubbles can enter the engine feed lines and the team are confident that it'll work exactly as designed when the first launch occurs. This design change combined with the greater thrust of the quad Epsilon engines over the seven RZ.2s means only two engines are required per booster, allowing the old OR-2 Princess' first stages to be reused as boosters with the necessary modifications for the fuel crossfeed system. Another significant change is the removal of the second stage and its twin Viking-4B engines, as calculations showed it was no longer necessary with the new Epsilon engines and booster-to-core crossfeed system. The third stage with its quad Vega-Mk2 engines remains unchanged so the Constellation Mk2 is now entirely kerolox-powered, simplifying fuelling and reducing the risks to ground personnel by eliminating the toxic hypergolics used by the Viking engines. All these changes have resulted in a 15% increase in payload to orbit with a conservative margin- assuming that everything works of course! While the Epsilon will eventually be rolled out to the entire fleet, rockets that were already under construction or late in the planning phase will still use the old RZ.2-Mk4 engines, including this one- the first Kronos Quasar geostationary commercial satellite. The first real test of the RZ.20 hydrolox engine went without an issue, the engine lighting twice to park the satellite in the desired orbit. Following that success, all eyes turned towards Mercury as the audacious Algol Mercury probe neared its destination. The probe flew past at blistering speed, sensors and science equipment straining to extract as much data as possible for the relatively short encounter with the innermost planet. Mission planners were disappointed to realise that they'd made a mistake with the trajectory, sending the probe past on the dark side of the planet and meaning they'd get no close-up shots of Mercury's terrain, however the data returned was still fascinating. Neither the USA nor the USSR had a Mercury flyby mission anywhere on their radars, so the launch of Algol Mercury had caught them completely by surprise and its success marked yet another first for Europe, stretching the lead in the Space Race that little bit further. With all eyes still on Mercury, the second Algol Mercury probe that had missed the earlier transfer window now had its chance to fly sunwards. No changes had been made to the probe as it waited in storage for a few months, but the trajectory team will make extra-sure it flies past the daylight side this time! Closer to home, the prospect of studying the lunar far side up close has so far been stymied by a lack of communications back to Earth. Because, you know, it's the far side and thus the Moon itself blocks the signal back to Earth. Seeking to remedy this issue, a quartet of Solaris lunar orbit relays were launched to position themselves in a high polar orbit of the Moon, which should ensure that a signal can be sent back to Earth from virtually the entire surface. The launch had more than its share of engine troubles- first one of the usually reliable RZ.2s lost thrust early in the ascent causing a shallower than planned trajectory that the second stage struggled to recover from, then one of the usually reliable Vega-Mk2s failed at the start of the trans-lunar burn, however the other engine's gimbal was just able to keep it pointing straight until the fuel was depleted and the RZ.20 upper stage took over. Once again the new hydrolox engine worked as expected, igniting a total of four times to power the lunar transfer and capture burns and set the four relays in a resonant orbit to ensure even spacing before deorbiting itself. Over a period of just over a day the four relays performed their circularisation burns, establishing the relay network. The next day, news bulletins across Europe had a small segment about the Procyon Vesta probe, launched to the second-largest asteroid belt object the previous year and expected to fly past at close range that day. Unfortunately that was only a prediction, since communications with the probe had been lost some time before- a EuROSTAR representative assured reporters that this had been anticipated and that ongoing work to upgrade the joint US-European Deep Space Network sites in Goldstone, Madrid and Canberra would enable the big receiver dishes to reconnect with the probe as it began to fall back towards the inner solar system in the coming months. Its true fate wouldn't be known for some time, but if contact could be re-established and the flyby confirmed then it would be the furthest object reached by a probe so far and yet another first for the Europeans- and the second interplanetary flyby of 1964, and it's only February! (Artist's impression of Procyon Vesta approaching the dwarf planet 4 Vesta) Another Venus transfer window arrived, and with it another probe takes flight from Woomera to make the journey across interplanetary space- but this time it aims to reach orbit of Venus, allowing much more data to be gathered than from a brief flyby. Algol Venus is a sophisticated science probe carrying all the latest scientific instruments and was launched towards Earth's nearest neighbour by the first twin-RZ.20 stage. Following repeated delays as the design was endlessly reworked, another Venus mission is under construction to catch the tail end of the transfer window. Canopus Venus will be even more ambitious, carrying a small probe that will be dropped into the atmosphere and attempt to reach the surface- data from the flybys has largely quashed the myths of tropical jungles covering Venus' surface, but only by piercing the omnipresent clouds can this be truly verified one way or the other. In what might be the last launch of the original Kronos Mk1, a Sirius Mk2 lunar lander was dispatched to the Moon. A landing site was chosen which was just over the horizon, with a small ridge blocking line of sight to the Earth. This allowed the new relay network to be tested while still allowing a direct signal until the last moments of the landing. The lander's design is tried and tested and it didn't disappoint, touching down gently in the target area- a large crater with a relatively flat floor not dissimilar to the Mare that dominate the near side. And finally, a month after its predicted flyby, the upgraded DSN stations picked up a signal from Procyon Vesta and instructed it to begin transmitting its data. A veritable treasure-trove of scientific information came back, confirming that the probe had flown less than 100km over the daylight face of the dwarf planet and cementing its status as the first flyby of an asteroid belt object and the outermost body thus far visited by a probe. Some minor corruption was found in the data sent back by the probe, perhaps unsurprising since the data storage system wasn't designed to hold its data for such a long period before transmitting it and over a year of spaceflight had started to take its toll on the probe's systems, not to mention low level radiation from the twin RTGs. The data will be studied in detail to see what improvements can be made to the hardware and designs of future outer system missions. Teams continue to work overtime to get Canopus Venus ready for its launch window- the next one is nearly two years away (and there are contracts that'll expire before then!) so there's a lot of pressure to get the job done.

10 seconds of Googling says rescue a lost Kerbal, which I'm going to guess means accepting a rescue contract and then completing it.

Parachutes don’t like Venus because it’s extremely hot and extremely high pressure, but the good news is you often don’t need parachutes at all or else they’ll be tiny little cocktail umbrellas. I’d say the phantom forces were due to a combination of the heatshield crashing into the landing stage and the general weirdness of Venus’ surface. Why did you send the second rover at 110km instead of just repeating what the first one did?

Time to finish this report off with a nice visit to Phobos. Meanwhile, in a kill-two-birds-with-one-stone move, the Blue Guitar Deimos probe that has been sitting around Mars' other "moon" for some time now did a quick landing, grabbed a surface sample and then flew down to Phobos to rendezvous with the Mars ship. Klaus then headed out to grab that precious slice of Deimos and stow it safely onboard the ship. Contract completed and sample secured, a successful end to a successful mission. Next up was the Phobos landing, in a very generous use of the word "landing" since it was done entirely using RCS. The crew had a bit of time to faff around- er, gather surface samples and conduct other valuable science experiments regarding the extremely low gravity environment. Why else would they all plant flags? The stay on Phobos was relatively short and soon enough they returned to the mothership. A quick bit of resource shuffling later and the lander, now drained of anything useful and those precious samples, is cut loose in Phobos orbit. I tried to ditch the tug as well, but despite releasing and retracting the klaw it just wouldn't let go. The options are a) wait over a year for a proper transfer window and have the crew die of radiation poisoning before getting home, or b) burn nearly all the remaining fuel to leave RIGHT NOW and take a less efficient route that'll arrive sooner. Things kept getting even weirder- first the Mercury rover developed the ability to levitate: Then whatever this is, happened: And then at long last the journey home was almost over. Time to move those samples over to the return capsule, fill all the tanks as much as possible and then separate for the deceleration burn before re-entry. Re-entry was surprisingly benign considering the high-energy transfer, and also flew past Florida on the way down before landing in the Atlantic Ocean somewhere east of Bermuda. And the final final scores for this report: I might come back at some point and just time warp through all the active missions until they arrive- Neptune's still many years away- and see how long it takes to research everything, but not now. What next? In the short term, it's back to EuroStar to see if I can beat Apollo 11 to the Moon; I have some ideas for an all-American P&LC run (don't expect any detailed replicas of IRL rockets though) but I'd rather focus on one thing at a time instead of trying to keep track of two or three different saves and their respective copies of KSP with different mods in each.

It’s also dense enough to survive re-entry and come raining down out of the sky at potentially supersonic speeds like a giant cluster bomb of supersized anti-tank shells. Weather forecast, cloudy with a chance of trans-lunar MIRV. (Not to mention the obvious deliberate use of such a technology as a weapon…)

How about we start with putting people on the Moon for more than three days at a time and work from there, hmm? Earth has enough problems right now without "oops a hundred ton container of uranium burst after getting fired from a railgun on the Moon and is about to erase half a continent" joining the list.

Before getting into the Mars stuff, here's the Europa flyby to complete the set. Oh, and the Jupiter orbiter contract too. A mid-course correction for the Mars ship, carried out using the lander's upper stage because there's no point using one of the limited number of ignitions on the nuclear engines for 5m/s. More contract stuff also happened in the background- lunar base completed (forcibly, but the contract was convinced that the lunar station was the base in question) but the Mars rover contract timed out mere days before the one surviving rover managed to drive half way across Mars to reach the target site (I should have started it off sooner). And now on to the crewed Mars mission as it arrives at its destination, with a coincidental flyby of Phobos. The final orbit was about 1000x6500km, the apoapsis crossing Phobos' orbit to make getting there later more straightforward. The lander still has a good chunk of fuel in its upper stage to deorbit and slow down so it's no big deal. And that's when everything went wrong... The lander didn't work. AT ALL. Somewhere along the way it picked up some kind of phantom force or some parts got bent slightly out of shape because it was completely unable to point in the right direction during re-entry. All the simulations beforehand said that it was a bit finicky but would still hold retrograde the whole way down, but for some reason it just kept flipping "nose-up" to point prograde- even with a 4kN thruster pushing it "nose-down" along with the RCS! I did some more sims after that, dropping the lander and its upper stage into the same orbit as the Mars ship and flying the same re-entry profile, and it worked exactly as it had in every other sim- stable retrograde all the way down. So I cheated the lander stationary above the ground mid-descent and flew it the rest of the way to the surface. It took a lot of time and effort to build the ship in orbit and send it all the way out here and I'm not about to have the entire thing fail because of some KSP weirdness. The crew headed out, did some science, planted a flag for posterity (and a few more for fun) and wondered why the ground looked heavily pixelated. Like I said, KSP weirdness. This save and install date back to February last year and there have been many mod updates and changes in that time which probably haven't helped. A quick look over to Jupiter as another probe arrives. I poked around with TUFX profiles but while some look pretty good (see below) they often cause a lot of blurring in time warp so I don't usually use them. The Mars landing contract wants a 30 day stay on the surface, so the crew stayed for 30 days and nearly ran out of water several times, using up some of their rocket fuel to make up the shortfall via the fuel cells. This combined with boiloff meant that they struggled to make it back to orbit, ending up stuck in a low orbit at about 200km with no way to rendezvous with the ship. If only I had a small detachable vessel with loads of fuel and a grappling Klaw that I could send down from the ship to rescue the lander... See, I knew keeping that thing around was a good idea! Even so, getting to the lander and then towing it back used up nearly all the propellant on both the tug and the lander. What's left of the RCS propellants will need to be carefully rationed to make sure they don't run out. Well, that's the Mars landing done* (I landed the un-broken lander in the sims so that counts!), now all that's left is a quick trip to Phobos and then a return to Earth, preferably before the crew go mad from stress or die of radiation poisoning since using fuel tanks as shielding is once again not working with procedural parts. Next time: Phobos, then home to finish the series.

You can build a couple of rovers with a docking port on the end and “dock” those on the ground, much easier than in space. Landing on the pad- under parachutes, propulsively, in a plane? Shooting straight up in a rocket and then popping some parachutes seems like the easiest way to do it. Are there any clues as to what exactly “getting back from space” requires? It sounds simple enough but you’d have completed it if it was.