jimmymcgoochie

The Princess might be quite old and largely superseded by the Empress, but there are still some missions where it's the best rocket for the job.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.

With the Mars window rapidly approaching it's time to get rid of any other distractions. Nothing drastic, just bringing the crew home from their extended stay in the lunar station. For now... What started out as an unplanned and unwanted skip back out of the atmosphere became a fully guided lifting re-entry with the target refined from "somewhere near Florida" to "somewhere near the KSC" to "launchpad" to "VAB roof?" before running out of time and ending up half way between the launchpad and the VAB roof. It may have been completely unintended, but this is my most accurate re-entry ever in RP-1 and I couldn't replicate it if I tried. Why haven't I been using Trajectories until now!? I forgot that the lunar base contract was incorrectly pointing at the Yellow Vibraphone station so it didn't complete when it should have, I'll get to that later. Only one piece of the Mars puzzle remains- the lander. I'm reusing the same design that worked in Terranism Space Program, which in turn is a near replica of the design in Terminal Velocity. It worked just fine before, it worked just fine in the simulations, so it should work just fine now, right? A late change was made from using a Blue String class rocket to a larger Purple Geometry so that the lander would a) make it to orbit and b) make it to the ship without using any of its own propellants, which was accomplished by adding an upper stage. Said upper stage still has plenty of fuel in it so I can use it to deorbit the lander over Mars. And finally, the crew. Original Moon landers Klaus and Vera are going as pilot and scientist respectively, with Patricia filling the role of engineer in case that's ever necessary. They headed to orbit on a Yellow Tambourine, a basic capsule-only D-2 designed for simple station taxi work. The design hasn't flown before and it turned out to have a couple of flaws... That wasn't meant to happen! Turns out that decoupler with the RCS on it was attached to the top of the docking port which would prevent the port from being used. The problem has been corrected, but the mission proceeded with the capsule's RCS system active for docking. The crew settle in to their new home for the next few years while the capsule heads back to the surface. Another problem reared its head as the service/propulsion module didn't separate properly until the capsule was well inside the atmosphere, but it still made it to the ground in one piece. 38 days later it was time to go. The departure was split into three burns to break up the extremely long burn time- TWR is 0.09- and then they were off, the first Kerbals to leave Earth's gravity well and head for another planet. One set of drop tanks didn't make it beyond Earth's SOI, but the Green Feldspar space tug is coming along for the ride in case it comes in useful later. Meanwhile, over at Jupiter, a flotilla of probes are gradually arriving- one Green Banana, two Blue Mandolins and two Purple Cubes, launched years apart, are all turning up in close proximity to each other. Blue Mandolin Jupiter 1 set about doing All The Galilean Moon Flybys with close passes with Callisto, Ganymede and Io in rapid succession and a flyby of Europa planned in a few orbits' time. The Jupiter stuff will be secondary to the Mars mission if they ever clash, but that's unlikely. Next time: The Mars mission arrives.

Continuing where the last report left off, another Mars ship drop tank made its way to the ship and docked. Unlike the first one, this one and the other three to follow will be remaining docked for the Mars transfer and possibly capture burns. By this point I deeply regret the decision not to put avionics and RCS on the drop tanks themselves as trying to drag them around with the Space Tug is a real pain, especially for lateral movements (strafing left/right and up/down) since the thrusters almost cancel each other out leading to very sluggish handling and a lot of wasted propellant. With the engines now fixed, tank number three (formerly two) was lifted to join the party. One engine failed on the launch of the third "permanent" tank, but no need to halt the launch because of that. If you think this report is repetitive, I had to fly these missions with terrible frame rates at the ship itself and very cantankerous controls even with the help of the second docking port per tank to line the Space Tug up perfectly. To break up the monotony I went to check on the lunar station as there was a low water alert and I wanted to see if the samples had been processed yet. The water situation was resolved by retracting the solar panels, while there are 1 and a bit samples left to process and a couple of months left on the crewed lunar orbit contract that'll be done after they leave the station. They also set an endurance record of 180 days in space, a feat that the Mars mission will easily surpass. The final tank launch: The tank was docked but I forgot to screenshot it as I was distracted by a problem- one of the ship's core tanks was completely empty! A smaller top-up mission was prepared to fix that issue and also fill up the Space Tug's badly depleted propellant reserves, and the ship's, which had been heavily used up trying to help out with the last docking so the Space Tug didn't run out. Meanwhile, Green Banana Jupiter finally reached its periapsis and completed that flyby contract that timed out a few weeks earlier. The shadow belongs to Io, not the probe. A successful capture burn later and it's in orbit with fumes left in the tanks. Science is already flooding in as fast as the two little RTGs can top up the batteries, not that I actually need science any more because I just added the final node to the research queue. The Purple Chord emergency tanker lifted off with a big tank of hydrogen and some extra RCS propellants. An amalgamation of pre-tooled parts, it won't win any beauty contests but it'll do the job just fine. It's powered by a pair of nice reliable RD-58S-es which have a really high ignition chance- -so naturally this one failed on the first ignition. Fortunately the other engine could just gimbal enough to keep it flying straight and it flew in a permanent powerslide to meet up with the Mars ship. Again I forgot to screenshot the docking itself but the ship is now fully topped up and ready to go as soon as the lander and crew arrive. The lander might be a problem though- I tried launching it but it didn't even make it to orbit, spun out of control and then the game crashed. Next time: Launching the lander.

Throttling a large rocket engine isn’t a trivial process. A small pressure-fed RCS thruster producing tens or hundreds of Newtons can be easily modulated by changing the fuel flow rate and/or firing as discrete pulses, but a turbopumped rocket engine producing MegaNewtons of thrust is a much more complicated beast. Some large engines are throttleable now thanks to modern understandings of things like fluid dynamics and computerised design and modelling, some were throttleable in the past e.g. the NK-15s on the N-1 used differential throttle to steer since they had no gimbals, but the vast majority were either on or off with no middle ground. Suddenly stopping accelerating isn’t really a problem for humans flying on rockets, let alone for satellites or probes. Ullaging can be managed using solid separation motors between stages, by hot-staging before stage separation, using RCS in space or pushing propellant into the engines under pressure to start them up as for the Starship’s Raptors during landing, no need for fancy throttling on the previous stage in any of those cases. If you want your magic SSTO engines to throttle down to 0.001% thrust, just make them throttle down to 0.001% thrust with whatever handwavey excuse you like.

With the lunar night fast approaching, Achim and Elizaveta returned from their roving and waited by the lander for the launch window, then flew back up to the Yellow Vibraphone station where Liz could get to work crunching through those samples in the lab. No point dragging ~200kg of samples back in the capsule if they can be processed in lunar orbit instead. Meanwhile, over at Vesta, Blue Mandolin Vesta 1 touched down on the surface... ...Blue Mandolin Vesta 2 shifted into a polar orbit to maximise its orbital science returns... ...and the old flyby probe Green Banana Vesta flew past for the second time! I could have fiddled with a node to get a third flyby but I'm not sure I'll keep this save going after the Mars crew returns and besides, what's the point? All the science has already been done by the orbiters with their superior experiments. I decided not to do a course correction to get a second flyby on a Mercury probe for the same reason- a better orbiter has already arrived and done the science, and sadly Cool Points are not an RP-1 currency. Over to Mars for the arrival of two rovers (OK, I admit the second one required some cheating since it somehow managed to miss its encounter with Mars by a billion and a half kilometres despite a sub-200km periapsis after the course correction). The first landing was fine, rover touched down safely and in one piece, then I decoupled the skycrane and- Boom, no more rover. The little red speck in the bottom centre of that image is a secondary science core equipped with some experiments, a battery and a transmitter; it was supposed to be the control point for driving around on the surface, but instead it gathered some data and transmitted as much as it could before the battery was depleted, completing a contract in the process. Yay? The identical second rover arrived shortly afterwards, had an equally perfect descent and landing with no issues. So I quicksaved, then lifted it a couple of metres off the ground with the skycrane before decoupling- and it immediately yeeted the rover into the ground at close to 40m/s, smashing it to pieces just like the first one. Between that, the mysterious trajectory error and a litany of other bugs including Kerbalism's UI breaking when I try to toggle fuel cells, chronic frame rate issues going above 1000x warp and repeated instances of Kerbalism blocking timewarp above 1000x on the launchpad for no reason, I'm glad this career is nearing its end. Speaking of which... The Mars Ship core launch suffered one booster engine failure on the pad, but went ahead without any issues regardless. It arrived in orbit with some fuel left in its upper stage, quickly transferred into its main tanks. A bit of research queue tweaking ensured that it launched with the latest TL4 solar panels- now with sun tracking!- and the launch put it into the right orbit for its eventual departure, about a year away still. The second launch was the much smaller Green Feldspar orbital assembly tug. It might not be very fast, but it has plenty of fuel and oversized RCS plus a reaction wheel to haul those hundred-ton side tanks around and dock them to the ship. But first it "docked" itself to the ship to await the arrival of the first tank. The first tank launch was stressful- the little upper stage I added didn't have nearly enough RCS propellant so the tug had to chase after it, grab it and then try to manhandle it back to the ship despite having some serious imbalanced thrust issues that made it really hard to make it go in the right direction. Much keyboard mashing and a few awkward minutes of rubbing the docking ports together because they wouldn't connect... After that painful experience, I went and modified the other four tanks- the solar panel has moved to the top of the tank to make room for a second docking port so the tug can line itself up properly for balanced thrust and much easier dockings. This tank was used to fill up the ship's own hydrogen tanks and the excess added to the rocket stage before being undocked and thrown at the atmosphere by the tug which was then able to do a U-turn and come back without even leaving physics range. Rather annoying contract failure considering the probe to complete it is already flying past Jupiter, just not reaching its periapsis soon enough: And then it's on to the launch of the second fuel tank. Which was scrubbed after three simultaneous engine failures on the pad, with a fourth occurring when I accidentally double-clicked the button on MechJeb and restarted PVG briefly, causing it to reignite the engines. The previous launch had one failure out of 31, but this is 4 out of 19 on a supposedly reliable engine with a >98% ignition chance and full data units. While that rocket rolled back to have its engines fixed, another was ready at the other unlimited mass launchpad. No failures this time! A relatively quick encounter with the ship is on the cards, but that'll have to wait until the next report. Next time: Orbital assembly continued.

That won’t help you- the vast majority of the cost to unlock any late 50s American engine is shared between all late 50s American engines, so the LR-79 and -89 will cost about the same to unlock and so will the RZ.1 since it’s essentially a copy of the LR-79. The problem is that unlocking British engines- Stentor and the Gammas- has its own, completely separate, unlock cost, in part because they use kerosene/HTP rather than kerosene/lox; you’ll run into a similar issue if you try to unlock the French Viking engines as well. Things have changed around how the unlock subsidy system works since I tried a European P&LC run in an in-development version so it might be less of an issue now.

A lot of SCAN contracts completed during this update but I won't post those here as they're not really that interesting. Lunar stations old and new were joined together, adding some useful extra supplies and a bit more room for the crew which should be good for stress. The crew rover on the Moon wasn't doing nearly so well- first the Kraken attacked, smashing solar panels until I had to ditch the skycrane, then it kept spawning in standing on its face instead of its wheels and on at least one occasion it clipped into terrain and exploded everywhere. Heading further afield, a Vesta-bound probe arrived and performed its capture burn. Orbital velocity is less than the stock Mun and gravity is considerably less, so that 3500m/s fuel reserve is ridiculous overkill and this mission will be able to perform several landings to cover all the biomes if I decide to do so. Back to the Moon with a test launch of the Purple Parallel lunar tanker. Five planets in one screenshot! The mission wasn't without its problems- the avionics is too small and needs to be bumped from 50 to 60 tons to handle the full weight, but by dumping some unneeded resources the weight came down to a manageable level. Then it was time for the first landing using the reusable Moon lander, attempting a targeted landing near the waiting lunar base. It went- -not so well. Slow acceleration combined with some frantic terrain avoiding action pushed the landing site nearly 70km from the base, but that's what the (mildly cursed) rover is for! Moon newbies Elizaveta and Achim posed for the obligatory flag planting before settling in to wait for their ride. Unfortunately the lunar base contract is broken and seems to think that the Yellow Vibraphone lunar station is actually the base. I still waited the full 30 days as required before sending the crew back to their lander, but by then their landing site was out of sync with the orbiting station- so there was plenty of time for a road trip! This install is getting really cantankerous- I was getting anywhere from 1-3 seconds per frame in the Tracking Station while the rover drove around on autopilot at 1000x time warp, Parallax keeps glitching with holes in the surface through to the void beneath (visual only) and Kerbalism broke when I tried to turn on a fuel cell on a vessel and then refused to work for any other vessels until the game eventually crashed. Regular quicksaving is important! On the plus side, that lander now has five deep surface samples from various biomes in it and space for even more, orbits and daylight dependent (Bon Voyage probably won't work at night as it's a bit picky with Kerbalism power sources and there's not enough hydrolox for the fuel cells for a full lunar night) before they head back to the station to either process the samples in the lab or pack them into their D-2 capsule for the trip back to Earth. Next time: Mars ship launches?

A quick bit of rummaging in KER and I've found it- the tracking station KER window doesn't include orbital period by default but it's easy to add it in. Here's GPP's Otho: Using T = 2π √(a3 / GM) where a is 72718.700Mm according to KER and GM for the star Ciro is 1.275e18m3/s2 according to the Tracking Station, 6.283185 * √(3.845e32 / 1.275e18) = 6.283185 * 17,366,570 = 109,117,381 seconds, or 11.8585 Kerbin years which is 11 years, 365.7 days- within a day of KER's value and literally a rounding error.

If you remove Principia do the volumetric clouds reappear? Try reinstalling the volumetric clouds version of EVE and see if that helps? Did you install RO and RP-1 using the CKAN express install? What visual mod are you using e.g. RSSVE? If it still isn’t working, post the log files using this guide: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/topic/83212-how-to-get-support-read-first/

I believe KER can tell you that, for any modded planet pack.

You can land everywhere except Tylo, Laythe and Eve using a single, simple design: Mk1 lander can, FL-T400, Swivel with docking gubbins and power generation as needed. For Tylo that lander can serve as the ascent stage with a suitable descent stage, either a Poodle or Making History Cheetah will do, for Laythe an air-breathing SSTO spaceplane is an attractive option and for Eve you’ll need either some physics-exploiting plane shenanigans or just a lot of fuel and Vectors combined with a lot of patience and use of the F9 key. Moving that stuff around isn’t too difficult if you can refuel using ISRU on the smaller bodies- Minmus, Gilly, Pol, Bop and Ike are all relatively easy to land on for this purpose. I’d suggest keeping the ISRUs on the main mothership rather than doing some kind of detachable refuelling rig as that would just add complexity. Your Eve lander will (probably) be one of the heaviest parts of the mission so best to get that done first, while Tylo and Laythe require the most specialised hardware due to the higher delta-V requirements and Laythe’s atmosphere so should also be high on the list.

I would have had one of the two dishes as X-band and the other as S-band to cover more frequencies, and a much higher orbit to minimise occlusion by the Moon and maximise line of sight. If you open the experiment panel and then click the little i icon in the top left, that opens the experiment information screen which tells you where it’ll run, how much power it needs and how much data it produces. It’s always worth checking how much power and data an experiment generates as some can be very power-hungry or produce a lot of data which will take a long time to transmit, often for little science and using more power in the process.

So it turns out the next Mars transfer window is over 600 days away, meaning plenty of time for some filler- er, other missions. Money isn't an issue after accepting the crewed Mars missions (and crewed Phobos landing) and I only need two more research nodes before the Mars ship can be fully built ready for launch. Picking up where the last post left off, the Green Emerald lunar relays performed their burns and synchronised their orbits to within 0.001s, providing high-bandwidth coverage with the existing network of three relays in a different plane acting as a backup to make sure there are no blind spots. Staying in Earth's SOI, if only just, the asteroid chaser mission arrived at its destination and, eventually after some weirdness with the klaw, grabbed onto it to complete the contract. RSS asteroids are still stupidly big... Contract complete, now this multi-gigaton mini-moon has two tiny probes stuck to the surface! This is probably not what the contracts had in mind, but if an asteroid happens to get captured into Earth orbit then I'm not about to pass up the opportunity for easy money. Back on Earth, Green Basalt 3 rolled out to the pad to launch to the Moon, but things didn't go to plan: This was the first of several NK-33 failures today and forced a rollback, engine replacement and rollout before the second launch went ahead without any further issues. It'll stay here in Mare Serenitatis for three months before moving towards Mare Frigoris. A quick check in on the second Venus rover revealed an even bleaker situation than its sister craft: phantom boiloff had evaporated all the lox and the craft was on a collision course with Venus. Not even the news that the Mercury biome scan was complete could lift the mood in Mission Control as the second rover plunged to a fiery doom, and with it any chance of fulfilling that Venus rover contract since the deadline is in less than a year. Unlike the rovers, the larger orbiter mission arrived without incident and parked itself in a polar orbit for optimal mapping and science gathering. More rover-related action as the two Mars-bound rovers perform small course corrections... And then it's on to the big ticket event: Yellow Vibraphone, a modular lunar space station and future hub for lunar activities, or at least for one landing at that Moon base I still haven't visited for the contract yet. The core module was first to launch on a four kiloton Violet Element rocket; one of the few gimballing engines failed on the core, but this didn't cause any issues and the launch went smoothly. After capturing into orbit, the hydrolox upper stage was retained to aid future mobility in case one of the other modules had trouble rendezvousing. The core contains avionics, power generation, propellant storage for the reusable landers, hydrolox for fuel cells and life support consumables along with eight reaction wheels, which between them are more than enough to handle attitude control for the core (and indeed the entire assembled station) without the need for RCS. Next to launch were the propulsion and habitation modules, sharing a ride to the Moon as their combined weight was slightly less than the core module. An engine failed on the pad, but faced with a month-plus turnaround time to roll it back and replace it I decided to just launch and the rest of the engines worked properly. At first I thought I'd botched the design, but past me clearly knew better as neither module has their own avionics and there are small solar panels on the bottom of the upper stage to keep the batteries on its avionics topped up for the journey over to the Moon. Docking was pretty easy thanks to the substantial propellant reserves and powerful RCS, but the modules would need to be moved to their correct positions. The upper stage connected to the core was drained and decoupled before the core and hab modules disconnected from the propulsion module, pivoted 180 degrees and re-docked so the core was attached directly to the propulsion module. This does mean that the hab is technically upside down, but it's not something that can be fixed easily as the only avionics are on the station core and it doesn't really matter anyway. The last of the three launches is the lab module, using a lightweight version of the rocket that I'm calling Violet Particle- no boosters, no second stage, half the weight of the original. Unfortunately past me dropped the ball with this one- using a J-2S on the upper stage meant that it didn't have the engine ignitions to do the rendezvous. The lab's own RCS systems did most of the intercept burn, while the station itself had to perform the velocity matching burn and then dock. The station is now complete and ready for its first visitors. All that remains is to send a crew, a reusable lander and a supply tanker to prove that it's fully functional. None of which I've actually built yet, or even settled on the final designs for... Next time: Lunar station and base stuff.

Yes, thank you KSP forum, I know this thread is quite old- three months?! With RP-2 now released and several minor versions in (2.4.1 at time of writing), this old install is starting to show its age. Time to wrap things up in a suitable manner- with a crewed Mars landing! Well, the planning stages of it for now, but the landing itself will come soon(ish). So I dug out the old Mars lander I used before (still blatantly stolen from Terminal Velocity with minor tweaks) to see if it still worked. And the answer is... Yes, if flown correctly. It also gets back to orbit after landing with enough fuel left to do a rendezvous and docking. For the Mars ship itself I'm trying something different: nuclear propulsion. It'll make for some very long burn times and boiloff troubles, but it also means I can make the entire ship, with four drop tanks, weigh less than 700 tons including the lander; my last Mars ship was over 2000 tons fully assembled and required some ridiculously large rockets to get it there, but this one should be possible with merely huge rockets. I'm not sure if the fairing is longer than the whole rocket. It's needed to cover up the entire core section of the ship- nuclear engines, main fuel tank, crew habitat and the life support and consumables storage section- which can be launched in one go, but only with a half load of hydrogen in the tanks. The side tanks are much lighter and can be launched on a smaller rocket. I was surprised just how much I could cut out of the Violet Element design- first the second stage, then a booster, then all the boosters- and still make it to orbit with this payload. Only the first and third stages are left, cutting the gross launch weight by more than half. Each tank has a small propulsion stage on it to perform the rendezvous with the ship, but I'll need a separate assembly drone of some kind to dock everything together as the tanks have no control of their own. With the plan for Mars firmed up, it's back to the real launches as a Yellow Gong G sends up a crew to the Yellow Timpani station, bagging a couple of contracts. The supplies are more than adequate to attempt a 90 day stay to get a duration record. On to the next launch, the Green Emerald lunar communications network. The design borrows heavily from the Green Basalt lunar rovers including the odd conical upper stage. As is often the case in RP-1, several things were happening at once: while this mission travelled to the Moon there was a course correction for the asteroid chaser mission to set up its intercept, then over to Venus as the first of two rovers arrived. Everything looked good, until everything exploded because I was a cheapskate and skimped on ablator. RIP rover, and probably the second one arriving a week later. Back to the Moon for the resonant orbit shenanigans: They'll circularise one at a time into an evenly spaced orbit and their dishes have already been set up to point at each other to ensure a signal almost anywhere on the Moon's surface. Final scores, with a big glut of free KCT points arriving all at once: Next time: Five drop tanks for the Mars ship are on the build queue, but they'll need refitting once the radiators get researched. The ship is also waiting on research as the node with radiators is a prerequisite for the nuclear engines node too. In the meantime, there's a Moon station to launch and possibly send crew to.