king of nowhere

The elcano mission of @Jack Joseph Kerman inspired me to take one of my own. Again, with a huge rover made mostly for show. I decided to do it on OPM Slate. Slate is tylo-sized, but it has a very varied topography with mountain ranges, valleys, canyons. quite the beautiful planet, but very hard to travel. And this is my rover, the Tamarromobile (roughly translatable as pimpmobile). I gave it 3 different drive cabins, all with good IVA views, to try and keep things varied. the cupola on top is mounted on a rotating servo so it can get 360° views, if i want to better appreciate the landscape. all those crew cabins are angled slightly downward, so that they have a better view of the ground. the 45-ton rover has 36 wheels, which give it a decent power to climb slopes. It can climb up to 15° on slate. Power is supplies by 16 advanced RTG, each one worth 4 regular ones. the extremely large base give it good stability even at high speed. unfortunately, slate is very rough on rovers, the terrain is full of sharp angles that will explode the wheels completely fitting and removing the descent stage was... unconventional. but that cupola prevented a normal sky crane, so I had to use two asymmetric ones. and then they could no longer fly straight up. an inside view when I opened the payload fairing. which, alone, was heavier than the rover. view from the cupola view from the cockpit

I need to remove a docking port. Unfortunately, after decoupling the ship, the docking port was made to be the root part, and it can't be manipulated by eva construction. Is there some way around it, or am I stuck with the part being unmovable?

the spaceship gains or loses energy compared to the star, and to other planets. it doesn't gain anything compared to the planet it's using for the current assist.

A question regarding the orbit: lucy is supposed to leave earth for an orbit, then come back for a gravity assist. however, from what i know of gravity assists, your speed and energy compared to the planet remains constant. you can change your direction, but not your speed. gravity assists are useful when there are three bodies involved, because you can use one of them to gain or lose speed compared to the other. But in this case? Probe leaves earth in direction X, at a certain speed. then it gets a gravity assist, and it leaves earth at the same speed, but in a different direction Y. couldn't they just launch the probe in direction Y the first time, at exactly the same cost? Unless maybe it's because they launch with 28 degrees inclination, and this gravity assist allows removing inclination and going equatorial for free?

first, the bug with stuff randomly exploding can easily be fixed by saving the game before performing eva construction. i believe even the more purists of "play it as it goes" would agree that reverting a bug is a legitimate use of the reload function. second, i often forget to add some minor details. parachutes, solar panels, those kind of things. eva construction allows fixing that without having to launch the whole big ship again. third, eva construction allows overcoming limitations. There's a guy who went to eve cavemen style, with 30 part limit on every launch, and he was able to do it by eva construction. it can also be useful to add parts that would create aerodinamic problems during launch, like a big antenna that would stick out of the fairing. It enables multipurposing your vehicles on the spot. There was a time i sent a spaceplane to land on atmospheric planets, and then i realized I could also fly in the atmosphere of neidon; I wouldn't land, and so I removed the wheels. I had tight margins on that mission, removing 750 kg made a difference. the major bonus of eva construction, though, is when coupled with kerbalism or other mods with part breaking. because it allows fixing malfunctions along the way. The first large mission i played with kerbalism, months before that new release, i had to make sure to have multiple redundant wheels and engines on everything. After eva construction, I could get away with just two, and if a part breaks i can easily swap it; it saves hassle and complexity. and it feels very good to be able to fix stuff. also, i can discard the broken parts, reducing weight. I can also keep parts protected from malfunctions in inventory; instead of bringing 6 parachutes for the reentry capsule because some may get broken along the way, pack just one, inside the inventory, where it is protected from aging. Only install it as you approach atmosphere. Finally, I can move around docking ports and dock my ships in ways I didn't think to enable originally. This actually saved my first kerbalims mission, because at some point I realized i needed to protect myself from radiation by moving a shuttle in front of a cupola, and it was only possible because i could move a docking port in front of said cupola. There's a lot of the more complex stuff I do that wouldn't be possible without eva construction. eva construction simply doesn't fit your playstyle, but it's extremely useful

I may indeed have a "small moon" to refuel, but the weight of the industrial machinery is still a pain. doesn't matter the size, an ensemble of chemical plants + drills to make liquid fuel will need a couple of years to produce its own mass in liquid fuel, provided it can work 24/7 with full power (except on duna, where it can get CO2 from the atmosphere). with solar panels working 50% of the times, it's 4 years. when you launch a mining station, you commit it to staying in place at least 5 years, else it's cheaper to just send an equivalent mass of fuel. So, I'd still call it a heroic proposition

Actually, driving in the mountains is not so bad with the right rover. you just need a higher wheels/mass ratio. I wouldn't mind doing a slate circumnavigation with this rover: it can climb uphill very well, it's almost indestructible all the way to 40 m/s, and it does have an even better cockpit perspective than a cupola. Granted, it's not as beautiful, it doesn't pretend to have living space. If I were to try a slate circumnavigation, I'd try a more elaborate model with that kind of frame, and more beautification. Maybe I'll start giving it a try right now

I've tackled kerbalism isru with nuclear power plants, and i still need 5-15 years to refuel my ship. trying it with regular solar panels... you're a HERO!|

In the previous week I went from Ike to Moho using six gravity assists - plus 3 major manuevers in the end. It took 25 years, but I only spent 2500 m/s. It's the first time I manage to get to Moho reasonably cheap, and it's the first time I tried the recursive gravity assist strategy. I learned a lot of things. I think I could have saved an additional 500-700 m/s had I been more practiced with it; I went to Eve with insufficient speed to reach all the way down to Moho periapsis

I like that rover. It's the kind of overengineered stuff that I like to make. It reminds me my own drive around Tylo, though I stopped at half and didn't make a full Elcano. My rover had similar (lack of) climbing capacity, and it also had a front cupola. Though my rovers had rear-pointing rockets that could help it upslope. You make me want to try another long trek myself again. Regarding difficulty of driving, though, I found Moho to be worse, as it has a much more irregular terrain. Tylo has high gravity, but it's smooth. The most hellish place to drive, though, is without doubt Slate, from OPM. It has as much gravity as Tylo, but it has a much more rugged surface. Everywhere it's hills, except when it's bigger mountains. Took me hours to run 20 km, and that's with a more capable rover. Slate also has some of the most spectacular views, it's got a past hystory of being shaped by water and it's all valleys and canyons. Not to mention, there's Sarnus with its rings in the sky. If you still want to make another Elcano after Tylo, I definitely recommend going there.

that's some seriously oversized rover there. do you use the internal perspective from the cupola when driving? my long distance rovers all include a good cockpit view, because shifting from internal to external perspective helps keeping things fresh.

Part 16: Planet innermost, greater fuel cost A'Tuin reaches Moho in 25 years with a long, convoluted sequence of gravity assists. Along the way I learned some more things about gravity assists and planetary rendez-vous, and I was able to reach Moho with less fuel than planned. The strange inclination of kerbal and flag is because they are standing on a slope, but it's not evident in IVA perspective 16.1) Let the flybys begin 16.2) The difference between apoapsis and periapsis intercept 16.3) Moar gravity assists! 16.4) The innermost planet

I would like to know it too, if there is an answer. But I tried many times, and failed; I am afraid there is no way

@Streetwind has it right for what you should have done. But now that you already transferred fuel unevenly, the only thing you can do is manually transfer fuel between tanks to try and equalize the weight distribution (you do know you can stop a fuel transfer before a tank is full/empty, right?). And learn to transfer fuel symmetrically for the next time By the way, this is the reason whenever I have a tanker ship (i.e. pretty often in my missions), I make sure to give it plenty of reaction wheels, so that it won't spin out of control even if the thrust is a bit off-center.

every part has written a maximum temperature in its description. if it's below 2000, the plane is gonna burn. ideally, every external part should be above 2000.

which, by the way, would make its own good addition to the discussion, if it was more discussed. i think the whole mod is underrated, but especially neidon and the moons and rings of sarnus

objection: vall has real mountains. minmus has just sloping terrain. and let us not forget the cryovolcanoes and the view in the sky

alternatively, it is possible your pilot is not in a control module. There are some crew modules, like the hitchhicker container and the lab, that have no control of the ship. you can put crew in those, but the ship will still be without control. if that's what happened, just transfer your pilot to a proper command module will give you control back

If you fly by a planet, and the trajectory goes onward, and then you place a new manuever node, you will see your ascending and descending nodes in the new orbit. You'll see close approaches after the last manuever node. Indeed, up until two days ago that's what happened for me. No more. Now placing future manuever will show the nodes before the manuever, and there's no way to see them after. This is the initial situation. The asccending node is clearly shown as referring to the purple orbit, i.e. the one that will be taken after the eve flyby but as i place a new manuever node there (you can see from the time tag, it is in the right place) suddenly i get a new ascending node. This one clearly referring to my current orbit. And manipulating the manuever node (here you can see i'm trying a 400 m/s normal burn just to show the lack of effect) won't have any effect on ascending node I am trying to set up the first gravity assist so that I can get a second gravity assist a few orbits later, but if I can't see inclination and close approach (another thing that disappeared) then I have no hope. I did not touch anything in the settings and I had no updates or new mods. I tried closing and restarting the game, didn't work. what the hell happened and how can I revert it? EDIT: after I passed Eve, everything went back to normal. But I alredy planned multiple gravity assists before, just a few days ago, and everything worked fine. now that i see it, i never had the same planet i was using for the flyby set as the target. perhaps that's what caused the system to behave oddly

oh, my. first i confuse apoapsis and periapsis, and then i confuse above and below. shame on me, i must be tired. anyway, my general point stands; for the kind of rendez-vous i run usually, which entail ellptic orbits and other elliptic orbits with wildly different orientations, meeting at apoapsis with nonstandard manuevers is the best. i mistakenly applied this general principle also to this specific rendez-vous, which instead would obey different rules. by the way, i tried reloading a few saves and trying some more gravity assists, but i can't intercept eve on the correct point. I either reload back 20 years - 20 years where i have to regularly harvest food from greenhouses and inspect the ship against malfunctions - or I keep with the current trajectory of intercepting moho's apoapsis. By all projections I have enough fuel to do it, so I'll take the inefficient transfer. Though it makes me cringe

yeah, ok, but I'm talking about rendez-vous on very elliptical orbits from uncomforable positions. The kind of rendez-vous I'm used to make are between a mothership in a highly elliptical orbit around a planet (it stopped elliptic because it's cheaper to leave afterwards) and a shuttle rejoining it from a different elliptical orbit (it's elliptic because it just got captured). Something like those And in this case, the angle of the ellipses and the plane will never match exactly, you will need a radial and normal component to the burn, and those are cheaper at apoapsis. Plus, circularizing the shuttle in elliptic orbit and then raising the ellipse again would just be wasteful. In the last year, I've done nothing but extended grand tours with motherships. Your scenario, where you rendez-vous to an ellipse from below? never encountered it. I suppose it happens when you launch from kerbin towards a space station in elliptic orbit, but I stopped running those kind of missions long ago. My implicit assumption of a "standard" mission differs from most. And by the way, your scenario is not a good description of how you perform a rendez-vous at apoapsis. Why would I want to circularize in the higher orbit, only to lower periapsis immediately after? You are also ignoring the normal component, assuming the rendez-vous happens from coplanar orbits, which is only the case if you launch from the same planetary body and use mechjeb. No, the kind of rendez-vous I'm used to make are those with large differences of plane and shape between the orbits. And in those "ugly" transfers, your best bet is generally to start from your apoapsis and find a combination of prograde, normal and radial component that will get you to the target apoapsis at the same time as the target ship. Matching planes and circularizing orbits would be much more expensive. It's interesting how one makes a certain kind of missions for a long time, and he unthinkingly starts to apply the same kind of solutions that worked for those specific missions also to other missions that would be better done differently. I've done that when i decided to meet moho at apoapsis. It also took me a while, after installing OPM, to realize that each gas giant has a different best way to enter orbit around it, breaking the habit of trying a gravity assist on a moon which only works well for jool. And you've done it in assuming that for a rendez-vous at apoapsis you'd want to circularize first

I spent the best part of two days taking a series of convoluted gravity assists to go from Ike to Moho. After 18 years of gravity assists, I finally lined up everything to intercept Moho at its apoapsis. I lined up the perfect transfer, all with gravity assists, and I managed to eyeball moho's apoapsis within a few degrees. Then I discovered it would have been more convenient to do it at periapsis. 1000 m/s more convenient. I am awfully conflicted between reloading to a few flybys before, or playing as it is. i should have enough fuel to finish the mission, but if i took 18 years and a half dozen flybys to get to moho cheap, I want to do a good job of it.

damn! I misread that part! I thought it would be cheaper to intercept at apoapsis, because normal rendez-vous are. Not sure what changes for a planetary transfer, maybe starting from eve getting to moho's periapsis is cheaper because you get lots of oberth. but I can see, in retrospect, i have to move my orbit much less if I meet eve at periapsis. Unfortunately, doing so requires reloading back to my last kerbin flyby. perhaps even earlier.

and yet... I took all the long sequence of gravity assists. Here I got as best as I could with eve. Almost as best; i still have, like, 4° inclination, but I couldn't find a way to get rid of them. I'll try again tomorrow, but it shouldn't make a huge difference. As you can see, I matched periapsis with Moho's apoapsis almost perfectly. Mohoìs apoapsis is give as 6,315 Gm in the wiki, but the game subtracts the sun's radius of 261 Mm, giving a final figure of 6,064 Gm. My solar periapsis is 6,037, very close - especially considering that I eyeballed eve's insertion point. the orbit is touching moho's very lightly, a great hohmann transfer. But despite that, I still get 2300 m/s to capture. despite getting a close periapsis to the planet to get oberth effect (in practice, with a 30 minute burn time, I will be much less efficient). when you subtract oberth, it becomes much less efficient than your calculations. And alexmoon planner keeps telling me of ideal transfers with as little as 1250 m/s capture burn. From a 100 km periapsis. Including circularization. And without matching orbital planes. I have done all I could conceive to lower intercept speed, and still I get much worse results than what calculations dictate. I am trying to figure out what I'm missing.

this is exactly the kind of technical answer I was looking for. I hope I'm not bothering you if I ask some additional questions, since you are apparently very knowledgeable about this: why use expensive helium instead of cheap nitrogen? or why not use an electric turbine? why not have the methane tank pressurized by evaporated gaseous methane? ok, I know the raptor is supposed to be fueled by supercooled methane, so not much will evaporate, but what's to be gained there? On second thought, the answer is probably above my ability to comprehend. But why use nitrogen here and helium for the turbines? why not have a single nitrogen (or helium) tank feeding both the tanks and the turbines? again, why not use electric control valves? I had a whole university exam on industrial chemical establishments, which included a lot of piping and valves, and I don't remember any mention of valves controlled by external fluids. unless we count no-return valves, of course