[The Third Great Number War: The Long Haul!]

P -17

[Ask a stupid question, Get a stupid answer back.]

No, they're the last swallows of air, by which I mean the bird, of course.

Do swallows dream of swallow's nest sheep?

[Build a Sentence... One Word at a Time!]

It's amazing how Eve is somehow rotating apples faster than the Adamantium onesie

[Make a wish... and have it horribly corrupted!]

Granted. Instead, the mouse invites the lizard into the house.

I wish I wouldn't hear that weird crackle that comes up in my headphones every so often, infrequently enough to be an actual problem, but frequently enough that it's sort of kind of annoying when it does indeed inevitably come back up.

[Guess Who Will Reply Next?]

I'm not sure I'd consider myself very much of a royal - but I do know one man of Kerbin, alive at this hour? @Mr. Kerbin?

[The Third Great Number War: The Long Haul!]

P -13

I believe I hath returned, to join my positive brethren! (or something like that, I dunno)

[LETS COUNT! (Lets see if we can reach 100,000 Posts!)]

7843

[How famous are you?]

0/10

I'm very sorry, but I believe I've literally never spotted you around before - but then again, I know for certain I haven't participated in too many forum games recently, so I digress. Hopefully, with time, that does flip to the contrary!

[What did you do in KSP1 today?]

Here's something which I suppose counts most certainly as much more 'mundane' than my usual fare, whatever that is supposed to be - although, really, I'm not necessarily sure I can say that in complete good faith, as, to yours truly, a self-professed dweller of the editor, I do believe trials and tribulations such as these do quite definitely compose of the meat and potatoes of my personal KSP experience.

*whew*, try reading all of that in one breath 

Anyway, what I was trying to say was - although I may have professed a supposed return to KSP and all, which I do most certainly believe is the case, it appears that my most copious amounts of time just seem to be entirely consumed by the various eldritch machinations of [real life] - that, and I've also been picking back up on my hobby of absolutely scouring through the KSP forums, which I do consider most certainly quite enjoyable - I've been able to read some absolutely amazing stuff recently. But not only does that run my ailing balance of rep completely dry every day, I am also most definitely not putting off much any sort of resumed effort on my personal writing in lieu of gathering 'inspiration' whatsoever, no, not in the slightest...

Maybe someone should start appending some sort of extraneous word limiter to my posts or something haha - all that aside, what I was trying to say through all of that was: me no have time, so not get to do too much really, per se. 

Spoiler

I must confess, I believe I have in many a sense engineered myself into an absolute corner - albeit, with a couple of clear options out that I, of course, in my all-infinite wisdom refuse to consider. The prevailing problem is this: I want to design a decent, performant 2.5m lifter that also maintains a clear aesthetic appeal. Cost certainly isn't a leading concern, given my continued preference for Sandbox mode above all else, but technological level I would definitely say is - given my self-imposed technological restrictions and all, I want to maintain at least some veneer of 'realism' - so no nuclear saltwater spewing back onto the pad and all, as gorgeous as those Waterfall plumes may look...

Anyway, one might suggest, such isn't necessarily very much of a problem - almost a trivial task, really - especially when having in one's possession all of the beautiful parts both ReStock and the Near Future suite have to offer, how could one even begin to be at a loss? And there I'd wholeheartedly agree (here comes the caveat) - except for the fact that I already do, in fact, possess a 2.5m lifter that is decent, performant, and maintains a clear aesthetic appeal. If anyone has ever read Starbound (I swear, this is the only time I'll plug it this time around), you'll know her - meet the Vanguard:

I feel like on at least a partial level I do have a mixed relationship with the Vanguard. On one hand, I most certainly consider it my workhorse launcher as of current, and also, the fact does remain that I do believe the Vanguard was, at least in this save, one of my first major design successes. On the other hand, however - well, a couple of reasons: for some reason, I can't help but shake the feeling of the Vanguard being just a tad dated in appearance, at least in contrast with my current 'evolved' building technique (which amounts to, really - clipping random extraneous parts everywhere to break up perfectly normal shapes perceived as boring, and slapping Conformal Decals everywhere. Have I mentioned Conformal Decals? Thank SQUAD (in this case, I suppose, not literally) for Conformal Decals). My other reason is this:

Mild spoilers for those couple of you interested, but behold: bathe in the absolute glory of 'Spacelab 2 mockup alt' (I swear everything in the actual Starbound save is nicely named and organized, but in this testing save, I cannot neither confirm or deny that I have crafts named 'chungus', 'mungus', 'balls', and 'fsain'). Anyway, this whole debacle stemmed not only for those above reasons, which are most definitely just a tad superficial, but from this all. For whatever reason, I had the perception that a single Vanguard would be unable to lift the core module of Spacelab 2. However, I realized this only much later down the line (we'll get there) - but, there on the leftmost side is basically an identical copy of Spacelab proper, which was lifted perfectly on a singular Vanguard lifter without issue - to its immediate right, with the trisolar arrangement, is the core module. Clearly I was too blinded by my genius to notice much further.

So I created this design, which dates back to over a year ago now. I thought it most certainly looked nice at the time, and I still do - especially those boosters, which I definitely plan on reusing in a future design. I thought this would be enough to solve all my problems - indeed, for whatever reason I either didn't test this thing or had some sort of fluke in flight testing, and didn't bother to further verify - thus, I went as far as to build this prototype a proper launch stand and all (funnily enough, not pictured here) which I only typically do for my completed designs. 

But let me introduce to you now, the problem. If you compare this to the previous pictured Vanguard, you may notice that there's been a slightly stretched upper stage - indeed, that fairing here is hiding not just a stretched upper stage, but a dual-engine setup as well, among other things.

(I was, here, going to attempt to showcase a side-by-side gallery of launcher CoMs, but then after looking at such realized it was rather undemonstrative, so I'll just proceed with a textual explanation).

The issue with this setup is mostly this, which some of you may have already been able to guess - that is, that after booster staging, the core assembly then quite enjoys doing the ol' flippity-doo (the center of mass migrates upwards, and flips the whole assembly over, every. single. time. without fail). That, partially, was what really pushed me to finally consider a design alternative beyond strapping boosters onto a tried-and-true Vanguard.

I swear, this all looks so much better in flight - or maybe some of you enjoy the lankier look, you freaks. Personally I still don't believe I can count myself very much used to such, but then again I ended up realizing that the Vanguard is actually an outlier, and its stubby look contrasts with the profile of 'real' rockets (well, besides the ETS Saturn 1C my beloved), so - perhaps my eyes just need some time to adjust.

Anyway, I digress - I believe it is quite apparent here the extent of modifications made, to the point that I'd say it's really an entirely novel design in its own right, borrowing perhaps only the name, general styling cues, the engine... well, okay, it does still exhibit quite a bit of that Vanguard lineage, although I don't certainly think it revolutionary much to notice the swathe of differences between it and its predecessor. 

I think that description there underscores to quite a degree just the amount of perspiration I ultimately did end up dumping into this design. I feel like I was ultimately pushed out of my comfort zone a good amount, actually, which is most certainly a good thing - I had to incorporate what are to me at least some rather 'radical' design decisions, such as the perhaps excessive amount of tank clipping, for instance, all in an attempt to differentiate itself from the Vanguard. I think the prevailing problem does stand rather abundantly clear - ultimately, I took great pains to avoid recreating simply a Rockomax Jumbo-64 with an engine stuck on the bottom, as I've perhaps done in the past. I know in this instance I most certainly could have benefitted from resorting to, say, the beautiful variety and selection of parts that BDB, Tantares, Knes, and co. have to offer, and I very much did almost consider such. But here we are now, out on the other side with manually-added greebling to boot - I'm sure this thought process is at least partially what builders much more skilled than I go through when deciding to commit to just stock, or the like - when people recreate complex things out of Legos or Minecraft blocks instead of, say, just 3D printing/modeling something in its stead, it is the limited palette which adds to part of the challenge.

Okay, that was a lot more philosophical espousing than engineering description. I believe I did in many an aspect engineer myself into a corner with the Vanguard, primarily in its pure simplicity, but especially in terms of the engine. I wasn't necessarily paying attention at the time when I selected the Porpoise from NFLV as the Vanguard's primary lifter engine. Of course, such an engine has served as an absolutely excellent lifter engine, but in terms of progression... I didn't nearly put as much thought into such back then, or well, I did, but not with the right approach: the Porpoise is an absolutely excellent engine, and that is the problem. Any other sort of engine - the Boar, the Mastodon, the Mainsail offer at best an inconceivably minor boost with other drawbacks (Mainsail), or, more likely, are just worse across the board overall. That selection is discounting the entire selection of Cryogenic engines within the Near Future (plus post-patched onto stock) suite, but I had an additional self-imposed limitation in the fact that I really didn't want to deal with such just yet. Thus, we resulted in a continuing such pickle.

I wanted greater performance across the board, however marginal, for a successor to the Vanguard. So, for greater TWR, the only solution I could really think of was to double up on the Porpoises (Porpii?). However, a dual-engined setup of course features a greater fuel draw across the board, which actually seemed to lower the projected Delta-V - but all of those clipped tanks did do quite a bit to compensate. Ultimately though, by the time we achieved energy parity with the Vanguard, we were left with only a minor increase in TWR over its predecessor. Tsiokovsky and his rocket equation, man...

I don't even want to get started regarding the upper stage - suffice to say, I encountered much of the same thing, if perhaps with even greater difficulty. Anyway, that I'm sure was quite a significant volume of words - TL;DR, I experienced an amount of self-initiated engineering design struggles, so now I'm going to proceed with trialing three separate variants all with the same payload of the Spacelab 2 core module - Vanguard II with the original upper stage, Vanguard II with an uprated upper stage (this above pictured long boi), and, after emerging out of my hubris quite a bit, the stock standard Vanguard.

(Apropos to anyone who actually managed to get through such - truly I am utilizing the WDYDIKSPT thread in the most appropriate fashion).

And so we at first set forth with the Vanguard II with the original Vanguard upper stage (I'm sure that also confused absolutely nobody):

That certainly wasn't a most excessive amount of screenies of candlestick going boom boom in the slightest, of course not. Anyway, as much as this was a maiden test flight of a new launcher, I really didn't experience much anything novel at all - in fact, it flew astonishingly similar to a normal Vanguard launch, which, I suppose with all of that prior explanation is really quite expected. The first stage performed almost exactly the same, just with a greater amount of initial thrust (so we did indeed manage to get out of the soup quicker, and that most certainly did contribute increased performance afterwards), and the second stage was literally the exact same, so the same lofting-esque low TWR orbital insertion was performed as usual.

I am realizing just now that I apparently accidentally launched Spacelab on this first flight instead of its aforementioned successor. I will proceed now to wallow in utter embarassment - and proceed as if nothing of the sort happened. Anyway, we proceed now with the uprated upper stage atop a Vanguard II, with an actual Spacelab II core module this time.

I swear, this thing does look just leaps and bounds better in flight, does it not..?

You know all of those YouTube videos with faux VHS effects? Well, here's where I'd jam down the pause button - adding to the existing string of embarrassments, it was here where I realized that I actually staged everything else with the fairing, instead of being able to discard such separately as usual - so, of course, left on a suborbital trajectory and all, we proceeded to impact back into the ocean. Truly an immaculate success.

So, I went back and fixed the staging - take two (haha, Take Two Interactive, haha, Private Division something something, although to be fair considering the circumstances and what they did is it funny really, I dunno, hahahaa?)

behold, those dual poodles burning in their full unadultered glory! I'm also really quite proud of what I managed to accomplish with that adapter there, however much mass was added to the overall design...

Are you feeling it yet?

Anyway, this UI screenshot is most definitely presented in chronological order, because I am just a master of timelines or something like that. Infinity stones or something, I dunno. Excuse the brief throttle-up there - for whatever reason, after I enabled super-sampling the UI seems to want to hide every time I take a screenshot, so I've been taking screenshots, UI included, separately via MacOS's Cmd + shift + 3. Of course, shift also nudges the throttle, so we get the following effect.

I mentioned before how, after running all of these successful tests, I fell out of my previous hubris (I'd say more accurately that my curiosity got the better of me) - so I decided ultimately to stick this payload onto a bog-standard Vanguard and measure the mileage.

I believe that above craft description more than summarizes my then thought process, although I most certainly don't regret any of this in retrospect, as:

You can see here some of that typical 'lofting' occurring, which was also the case in the first launch with this same upper stage. Here a part of Snark's BetterBurnTime (I believe) has become absolutely indispensable - my personal rule of thumb is to burn like this until time to reentry is estimated at 4 minutes, at which case I find it safe to proceed with creating a normal maneuver node at apoapsis and completing a nominal circularization. I've also of course just done a continuous burn from upper stage ignition before, but such is quite a bit more tedious in my opinion, so I find this method the preferred option when flying the Vanguard and all.

And, of course, what else can I say...

On top of a normal Vanguard, we made it to a perfectly nominal orbit, requiring only a bit of additional boosting that could easily be accomplished with a Leo and all. I don't know where to begin, so I'll just attempt to take consolation in the fact that, yippee, no matter the mixed feelings I may have regarding such - I have a new launcher regardless.

(It stings, truly, it stings, just a tad wee bit. But on the other hand, truly, I can proclaim myself an engineer.)

 

[So, we had some kind of technical problem.]

Haha, I was just about to post wondering if anyone else had managed to get back in yet - I was in the midst of writing a post when the forums went down last night, and upon a refresh was thus stricken with absolute terror, as my first hypothesis, upon seeing the corresponding error, was complete domain deletion or something like that...

Anyway I don't believe I can fully express my elation at the forum's return, since the mood was definitely of mourning around these parts.

 

[The Third Great Number War: The Long Haul!]

[snip]

[The Third Great Number War: The Long Haul!]

P -22

I'm working on it, I swear - but for now, I must keep the negative mercenaries at bay!

[The Third Great Number War: The Long Haul!]

P -22

[Really Really Really Tall Building]

Flare 5774: It is going.

[Guess Who Will Reply Next?]

No, but the house always wins.

Is @ColdJ freezing about?

[The Third Great Number War: The Long Haul!]

P -18

[What did you do in KSP1 today?]

I mean, really, where am I supposed to even begin? I suppose it's truly been quite a long time since I've last properly picked up KSP - in fact, my last WDYDIKSPT (I still am quite the fan of that but ever-so-unwieldy acronym) dates back to nearly two years ago at this point. Truly, a lot of time has passed since then, and a lot has changed - I'd go on and on furthermore, but of course I understand this is the WDYDIKSPT thread (haha, I found an excuse to say it again) and not one for more personal ramblings. 

My point is, regardless, my KSP itch is ever-so-present and perennial, and, despite my concerns in part of the current state of the KSP community and the future of the forums, I've decided to try and just make the best that I can out of it. Thus, we begin by revisiting a couple of old flames that I seem to just be entirely incapable of taking my mind off of  - although, considering the enjoyment I've managed to wring from such, perhaps that's really much for the better.

Spoiler

I suppose this is really trawling back especially deep. But, nonetheless, back then I did in fact list a number of upgrades I wanted to make to this horizontal lander concept sometime - I actually only remembered to link back to said post after the fact, but I suppose, even after three years or so, my thought processes overall remain relatively the same. You may notice, flipping back in comparison, that everything is noticeably a lot more crisper in these present screenshots - I'm truly not quite sure how it took me this long, but I finally scaled KSP up to my Macbook's native resolution (speaking of which - my hardware specs haven't changed at all, I'm still flying on my 2020 Macbook Pro), to the detriment of only a smidgen of FPS. I also did finally get around to actually supersampling my screenshots as well - I suppose I do still pay in the storage-side cost of things (~14-20 mb for a single screenshot!) but then again, I also do now end up with 5k screenshots, so... Really, I can't complain much in the slightest. I'm also quite acutely aware of just how related this is to my horizontal lander development, but, alas, I just wanted to but briefly gush about how beautiful my game has become.

Well, okay, I swear this is all actually wholly and entirely related to the topic at hand - see, I really wanted to curate a new selection of personal desktop wallpapers, and I thought that more than an excessive number of shots of my horizontal lander on the Mun's surface would surely lead to some nice results

Anyway, let's finally get into the actual engineering side of things here - up top, you can see the ghostly outline of the former iteration of such design. Really, I'd say the overall changes made are relatively minor - a revised landing gear placement, some additional RCS, a proper service bay for storing cargo-esque things (and maybe a spare kerbal or two...), a proper docking port and control point on the back as mentioned prior, a wholesale ditching of the shielded Clamp-O-Tron Jr. with an option more befitting of vacuum, a wholly revised vernier engine section... 

Okay, perhaps the changes I've made to the overall design constitute just a tad bit more than what could be otherwise classified as just 'minor'... but, nonetheless, I do believe the overall spirit of the original design remains intact. The ship of Theseus embarks...

I feel like this particular deployment of things reminds me of some sort of avian mating ritual...

Anyway, we begin our campaign of testing here by cheating this thing to the Mun yet again, in lieu of actual perspiration - we're here to gauge the lander's overall munar performance, after all - something something direct to the source. My picturesque wallpapers...

I should add here that I do believe the work Benjee10 has done on their historical kerbal suit collection has turned out absolutely spectacularly - never before have we romped on the mun in such fashion and style, jetpacking into mun rocks with ten times the charisma as before!

Anyway, once everyone gets back in, we begin the initiation of actual flight testing. 

Just as expected, takeoff on the verniers and the transition to the poodle flight engine is just as smooth, if not moreso than it was before. However, the liftoff does leave me pondering - given the loading of, say, additional payload in the forward service module, and perhaps only a half-tank of fuel in the rear, how would vertical takeoff with an overall adjusted CoM still fare? Unfortunately, that wasn't necessarily something I thought of to test in the moment  - although I suppose that certainly leaves the future prospect of another future redesign. I'm picturing now perhaps a variant with the service module located directly in the center, sandwiched between the sets of verniers, or even an alteration with, say, a set of drills and an ore tank sandwiched in said space as well. I have to say, that is one of the things I truly do love about KSP, the fact that you can in fact do something like that. Anyway, I feel I'm getting just a tad too lost in thought here - coming up is our landing burn.

Our brief poodle thrust launched us on but a brief suborbital trajectory, so, as time move forwards, we begin falling back to the surface of the mun. I suppose I should mention here that it would perhaps be just a tad more intelligent to descend on the much more efficient poodle - alas, I most certainly didn't think of such at the time, but that'll probably be integrated into proper landing procedures going forwards, with more experience. I do plan on actually using this lander, of course, as I have done (or at least are attempting to do) with my other experimental designs, especially in my current ongoing playthrough (Starbound, a mission report of mine, which you can find sitting right down in my signature! Alright, I promise I'll stop the shameless self plug right here.)

And here might I bring up one of the particular detriments of this somewhat narrow-based landing gear configuration: great susceptibility to things such as roll. In this case, I must've landed just a tad bit too hard, along with contacting different portions of the landing gear on regolith at different times, leading to it all entirely flipping over.

...fortunately, my propensity of clipping but enormously overpowered sets of reaction wheels into spacecraft pays off quite well here - as you can see, we simply just flip back over without much of a hitch in the slightest. It seems our resulting lander emerges relatively quite unscathed - two of the baguette tanks on the rear are missing, along with the top docking port and the communications dish, but... I'm sure we didn't need any of that anyway 

 

 

Spoiler

Of course, how could I mess around so much with the horizontal lander without also considering another longstanding passion of mine, also last toyed with over two years ago as well? In those posts, at least, the former, I do believe I pretty much listed out the grievances of the design I arrived at there - noticeably, the various issues encountered with maneuverability, stability, and the like, the result of what I can guess as a number of specific reasons:

- The particular location of the CoL in relation to that of the CoM, being nearly entirely tied up in the paraglider generating the majority of the lift in the first place, placed high above the CoM and thus leading to:

- The distance of the CoM from the CoL, as well as the distance of any sort of control surfaces (for instance, the absolutely inane amount of reaction wheel power clipped into the lower capsule body, located far away from the paraglider) - this then causes what I can really otherwise only describe as a pendulum effect. At best, the capsule moves the entire rigid paraglider assemblage along with it - but, of course, this pivots strictly at the capsule itself, and the aerodynamic effects such causes are then, well, predictably just all over the place. It may perhaps make more sense here to imagine, instead of the wonderful paraglider from Knes, just a wing on top of a ton of I-beams in its stead - as such essentially is what the game treats this as. Thus, if you do imagine trying to fly such an imaginary craft then, I think it is relatively easy to extrapolate just the sheer difficulty of trying to perform any practical feats with such. TL;DR - while I do believe the paragliding gemini thing performs right wonderfully, it flies about as well as if it had a tower of I-beams and a singular wing on top in its stead.

Thus, to that effect, I have developed but a most elegant solution:

Not pictured here, but with this wonder we can bypass the need for a paraglider altogether, as everything simply extends, with the help of but many pistons, outwards! Does this not look like but just the most practically elegant capsule shape to your eyes, as it does to mine? I originally designed this wholly as a joke, but it actually flew much much better than I could've ever expected. I really don't know what else to say here - I'll spare your eyes from having to witness this, er, creation for any longer.

Okay, perhaps that's not it...

And here we can see my very original refinement of the design, which actually seems to have exactly nothing to do with my prior listed points in the slightest. Instead, all I seem to really have done here is just lengthening the fuselage, with the addition of that rear service bay. I'm not quite necessarily sure what I was thinking when I did this, actually - I think I may have had some thoughts of gaining greater control authority with a slightly more distributed array of control inputs (in that case, of course, even more reaction wheels) but that really doesn't seem to hold up to further scrutiny. Ultimately I think I may just have wanted to add a service bay purely for the sake of having one - perhaps occasionally ferrying cargo or science pallets or the like, I really don't know. Thank you, students, for attending this session of Forensics 101.

Actually, I suppose there is a bit more to the addition of the service bay than just that simple conclusion - as you can see here. I suppose I must have at least partly added said service bay to allow for the third rear kerbonaut to be able to effectively EVA, as shown here, which actually does make a lot more sense. Anyway, I have no further screenshots of this particular configuration - of course I performed further testing, but ultimately, this performed pretty much exactly the same as its predecessors, if not worse, bringing us right back to the drawing board...

And thus, behold, the conception of the next generation. I suppose it is really only inevitable that, with the continued advent of innovation, we stray but only further and further from the original baseline intent - that is, of course, the maintenance of a pure capsule shape. On one hand I view this particular development as a relative defeat, having finally crossed beyond one of my original design intents - but on the other hand, really, I'm actually quite proud of this design. It is certainly at least, I do believe, quite rather unique. 

As good engineers and proponents of the Engineering Design Process^TM, we must now subsequently trial this, er, craft and fully gauge its abilities.

I am sure those particular tires do quite enjoy the vacuum of space. Truly, I can proclaim this but a most sensible spacecraft design.

Here it is demonstrating some particular RCS port placement - I believe I abstained from sticking RCS ports directly on the top tip of the nose purely for aesthetic reasons, but the groundward tip of the nose has multiple lined up side by side, to assist in any sort of pitch maneuver.

Of course I suppose you can't really tell here by screenshot alone, but Pathfinder is currently indeed pointing retrograde, heat shield forwards. For whatever reason, I didn't think to take a screenshot of the craft fully engulfed in plasma - as predicted though, the wings all fully survived LKO reentry, which of course does provide quite a bit of subsequent relief.

And here, the paraglider deploys while the drogue is still active, in the upper atmosphere - the drogue itself is cut shortly after.

Just look at our now dramatically increased maneuverability! Seriously, the addition of additional lifting surfaces has rendered this just so much more of a joy to fly. 

With the much increased maneuverability afforded by these surfaces, of course, we manage to perfectly circle down and land on the sandy shores of... this remote, barren island. Of course, I'm sure our piloting Kerbonauts quite greatly enjoy such a thoughtful piloting position. Anyway, on the last picture here you can infact spot the bottom nosetip RCS ports I mentioned earlier.

After this, of course, I decided to do yet another testing run from orbit, albeit this time actually trying to aim for the KSC. 

Clearly, I haven't entirely lost my touch - well, except for that very final runway touchdown back there, where I overcompensated perhaps just a tad too much. Regardless, relying on gliding power alone, we pretty much made a perfectly straight approach into KSC from orbit. I suppose in the future I really ought to try some more challenging approaches, if just to shake things up, such as trying to fly into JNSQ's desert launch center - but I do believe this all serves as a relatively solid proof of concept.

Anyway, as one final hurdle of testing, I decided to stick this entire assemblage on an actual rocket and simulate an abort sequence. Why an abort sequence exactly? Well, of course, the shielded Clamp-O-Tron Jr. prevents the attachment of any real sort of LES tower, so that means this requires then a 'pusher' type of abort system integrated into the service module. I've been floating the idea of possibly swapping such out with just a normal Clamp-O-Tron Jr, and just eating the additional aero cost - but I suppose that really ought to wait for another day.

I also do, of course, want to test a hypothetical approach back to the KSC after such a maneuver, so, on top of a rocket it goes!

This particular rocket is definitely way overpowered for this sort of thing, but I've actually been meaning to trial this heavy lifter as well, so at least in part this mission knocks out two birds with one stone. That, and I think it seriously looks rather great, that as well.

Tell me that booster separation right there isn't just beautiful. Alright, now prepare for three more views of the exact same thing:

Anyway, now we finally initiate our abort sequence, which happened just a tad too quick for me to take a picture of, as well as necessitating my maneuvering of the capsule stack away from our accelerating rocket as well, of course.

Anyway, our drogue and subsequent paraglider are deployed, and we make a textbook approach and landing back at the KSC.

 

[[1.12.3] Spectra Visual Compilation 1.6.2 "Horizons" (26th July 2022)]

On 4/7/2024 at 11:51 PM, Publius Kerman said:

Sorry to necro your old post, but did this suggested solution work?

No worries! I believe I did end up getting Spectra working on JNSQ's Kerbin, just not entirely functional - I ended up just using JNSQ's default graphics in the end.

[That Other Space Race || A 2.5x Scale Modded Space Race]

I have to say, it's really been quite the while since I've been active on the forums in any real capacity (I have definitely not been neglecting updating any of my existing commitments on the forums. Entirely unrelated, my accrued time on Steam in other games has shot up dramatically for no reason).

Anyway, as the owner of aforementioned discord server and having been involved in discussions regarding this particular space race (as I'm sure Dres can confirm, I have been quite a vocal advocate regarding certain components of this modset), I'm ready to throw my hat back into the ring - presenting:

Spoiler

Ahem, drum roll please,

Spoiler

I have to say, I forgot how fun spoiler boxes were. Now, without any further ado:

Spoiler

Presenting, the renowned, the acclaimed (winner of multiple Ker-bell prizes in name recognition), The Kermanian Space and Aeronautics Agency (KSAA)!

[Insert: award winning, professionally-designed space agency logo which definitely would not be just a variation of the beloved worm]

The proud star-spangled banner (it just so happens to be July 4th, haha) flies proudly over the nation of Kermania, ready to take to the stars! (considering it features a literal constellation on itself already, I dunno, that was perhaps just a slightly redundant statement)

To everyone else participating in this space race - good luck, and see you on Laythe!

 

 

 

[The Third Great Number War: The Long Haul!]

P -48

[The Third Great Number War: The Long Haul!]

P -18

[The Third Great Number War: The Long Haul!]

P -21

[The Third Great Number War: The Long Haul!]

P -5

[The Third Great Number War: The Long Haul!]

P -17

[The Third Great Number War: The Long Haul!]

P -13