king of nowhere

why would you? unless you get bored easily, you don't need higher thrust. You may need more fuel, though. But the most efficient way to bring your asteroid to equatorial orbit is to wait until apoapsis, and then lower your periapsis inside the atmosphere - from apoapsis it should not be particularly expensive, maybe 100 m/s. from there, aerobrake. Aerobrake gradually, don't get too low in the atmosphere, you don't want to stop completely the first time. Then, when your apoapsis is lowered to 200 km, raise periapsis, and you can get your 180x180 orbit with maybe 300 m/s. and a bit of patience. if you have no patience, only then you need to send up more fuel tanks and more engines.

I was at a restaurant and someone hit a wine bottle, spilling it. I hence looked at the bottle, which was tall and narrow, and concluded it was a really bad lander, and should have used some lateral tanks, or at least some properly placed landing legs. Those people making bottles have no idea what they are doing.

Part 12: How to catch an asteroid Bolt goes to a near-Kerbin asteroid. Not much to do there. The whole experience is quite underwhelming. Comets, instead, can't be reached with Bolt's resources. 12.1) Finding a target 12.2) Getting there Bolt is down to 450 tons of total mass, 250 tons of fuel. Enough for perhaps 7-8000 m/s, counting the drop tanks. it's enough to still go almost everywhere, but definitely not enough for a comet. It's year 20 and it's time to finally bring the kerbonauts home.

this means you have over 2000 m/s of deltaV. but this approach is not good. you stop the orbit, then the asteroid is in free fall, and it has a lot of time to pick up speed. If you make a normal 40 km reentry, and then you start burning the rockets to slow down, you should be able to slow it enough to open the parachutes. without need to send more stuff in orbit.

problems on the runway are often caused by wheel drag: wheels cause drag, and if the front wheel(s) is causing more drag than the rear ones, then the plane tends to flip on the runway. you can fix that by manually changing the friction for all wheels

can't you gradually aerobrake your lander? i found a 75 km periapsis is generally good for it yes, but still worth it. With Bolt I solved it with gravity assists, I got cheap trajectories. with the Dream Big I solved the problem by a large correction burn in interplanetary space, it was more expensive but still much cheaper than trying to circularize around Eve and then getting away. You also have the option of going around Gilly. From Gilly you can eject with the standard manuever of falling towards the planet first to get Oberth effect; it costs 500 m/s to reach Gilly and 400 to get away from it, but you can then leave Eve from an elliptic orbit pointed however you like.

did... did you really... did you really CIRCULARIZE ON EVE?? that's horrible. you never want to circularize a mothership around eve. it's a large fraction of your total fuel thrown away. I'd never have completed any of my missions if I tried circularizing around eve. what you want to do is to send in the lander, possibly with aerobraking, and to circularize with a smaller ship, that's just large enough to grab the lander once it returns up from Eve. Heck, I had to scrap my mission and start it again specifically because I lacked such a ship. your previous grand tour would have reached the end if you had saved those 2800 m/s. the mothership wants to always stay in elliptic orbit. cheaper to get there because you don't need to circularize, cheaper to get away because you're already close to the edge of the SoI. The lander wants to start and stop from low orbit, because the lander must be light to have high thrust, you don't want to load extra fuel in it. And you use a support ship - one that's basically a glorified fuel tank - to ferry the lander from the mothership to low orbit. Your landers consume very little compared to the mothership. So you want to move the mothership as little as possible. it's cheaper to burn 1000 m/s on a shuttle than 50 m/s on the mothership. then again, you have 50 km/s. You'll be fine.

Part 11: Dres exhists - and it still sucks Went to Dres, found the monolith. Again, no particular problems. This time I have a rover adapted for low gravity worlds, and a lot of experience driving everywhere. I can thusly confirm that no, the problem is not inadequate rover or driving skill, the problem is Dres. 11.1) The first step is getting there 11.2) No more tears (actually, they were spilled motor oil) 11.3) I keep hating Dres 11.4) Ship status Having fuel left, I'm thinking to take a longer detour and go visit an asteroid too. Perhaps get an A class and tow it back to Kerbin. Let's see I'd like a comet too, but rendez-vous with a comet close to Kerbol would be too expensive, and far from Kerbol would require too much time.

somebody made a completely reusable grand tour (used the approach of landing on the highest mountain on eve). of course, that required isru. in the relaxed kerbalism rules of using regular isru, then it's certainly possible, though risky - to cut weight and make everything reusable, one would have to sacrifice reliability. but one may get lucky and break nothing anyway. with the full kerbalism rules, including isru... well, technically possible to run a mission lasting centuries without breaking anything. but highly unlikely.

Been working on my next megaship project. I wanted it to be able to land on small celestial bodies and extract resources, which should take a couple decades with kerbalism slow mechanics. in that time, the vehicle will be exposed to solar storms, so i protected the crew by building the tanks outside and the crew inside. Here's what came out it weights over 5000 tons; being able to land on mun, it's by far the heaviest thing i ever landed. well, almost landed; a fuel tank detached. but the game is so slow with this thing, i decided to slap on some struts and consider the test passed.by the way, the rearward-pointing cupola is merely to enjoy watching the rocket exhausts. From my Dream Big mission, it's mass well spent. side view; it has 12 nuclear reactors to power up resource extraction. it won't need all of them, but i included extras for safety. also, to get a decent rate of resource extraction, i needed, like, 400 tons of convert-o-trons. not wanting to add 100 parts, i tampered with the convert-o-tron files to get a 3.75 meter one, perfectly up to scale - including mass, of course, i wanted to reduce part count, not cheating. then i had to include a spaceplane, to visit atmospheric planets. but where to store it? I can dock a small lander in the shade of those convert-o-trons, but there's no way a 50-ton plane can be on top of this ship and stay shielded. Today I had a breakthrough, trimmed a bit the wings, rearranged the setup of greenhouses, habitation modules and science labs i have inside, then I managed to also fit the plane inside now i will also try to stick a rover underneath the plane. I need ore, water, nitrogen, uranium, it's hard to find all those together. assume i can't find a biome with all resources, i land somewhere with just ore and nitrogen and i send the rover to dig water and uranium, of which i need much less. figuring out how to fit the rover underneath the whole thing, while also leaving it able to move in and out, was part of today's breakthrough. I'm trying to test the rover docking. too bad the game keep crashing. this is lagging much worse than the Dream Big, even though it has less parts. As ludicrously overgrown and overengineered, this project started off even worse! my first project was optimistically trying to tackle solar storms by the addition of 800 tons of active shields, which would provide enough radiation protection to navigate not only solar storms, but also Jool's outer radiation belt. Then i'd need much more fuel to move the ship. and convert-o-trons need 3 years to produce their own weight in fuel, so i'd have needed also many more convert-o-trons. requiring more engines, more fuel, and so on. I reached 10000 tons before realizing i would never be able to make it work. it looked really cool, though

yes, i had similar problems with ion-powered Nail. I had to turn it into nuclear-powered Bolt. persistent thrust is seriously bugged when it comes to large ships. Still, with 0.07 twr it should not take days for burns, merely one or two hours. Unless you are actually trying to use that solar retrograde trajectory...

<snip> and by the way, those solar panels look absolutely identical to other circular panels available in mods. so, not a big change

Boyan Slat, presenting the first realistic project for cleaning oceans from plastics This is progress. This is what progress is about. And I got thinking on that quote many times in this community, upon seeing how things that were previously assumed impossible were eventually done, and are now considered commonplace - or, at least, hard but feasible by anyone skilled. So, I'd like to collect a bunch of achievements that were previously assumed impossible - including quotes from skilled people claiming it was impossible - until someone managed them. As a testament to this community, its members, and their inventiveness. extremely low-cost interplanetary transfers with gravity assists you can go places cheap. but to the point of going all the way to Jool with less fuel cost than a normal intercept with Mun? Eve ssto A bit harder here to find quotes claiming it's impossible, because it's the kind of thing people generally brag about on youtube. Still, when I asked about it a year ago, some people straight up told me it was impossible. then they deleted their comments after youtube videos disproved them. Nowadays the "standard" approach - propellers and wings until 15 km, vectors to get out of the atmosphere, nervs to circularize - is widely known. additionally, someone managed not just to make an ssto, but to make a purely rocket-based ssto (admittedly, it launches from the highest point on eve) with enough payload to return to kerbin on ion engines kerbalism grand tour One of the most well-known mods, kerbalism ramps up the difficulty with all manners of realistic inconveniences like life support, malfunctions, radiations. And many people assumed you couldn't do anything too fancy with it. after the first successful attempt, people interested in the challenge know you can survive parts breaking up with a redundant design and you can survive radiations with a mixture of proper design and careful trajectories. nowadays there are a half dozen "kerbalism grand tours" among the mission reports. lithobraking from mun orbit Nobody doubted that it would be possible to come to a full stop from minmus orbit without using rockets, just by slamming into the terrain with some heavy landing gear. Those who tried it and survived generally assumed that the 150 m/s is the top of what landing gear can survive. Not many people would have guessed it would be possible to do it on the Mun, going four times faster... I call for everyone to contribute to this list of things that were generally assumed impossible - possibly including quotes from people saying it's impossible - and then being done.

You can go to Gilly first and refuel there. Once you are on Gilly, doing Gilly-Moho with 4 km/s - with an additional km/s for landing on moho and refueling again - is not hard. Same for going away from Moho. That said, if you are set on needing a transfer stage, streetwind said it all

Part 10: Eeloo promises but does not deliver The most complicated part about getting to Eeloo is the orbit, especially with the additional time pressure. But Bolt has still plenty of fuel to take care of those. I was especially looking forward to driving a rover on Eeloo, a planet I always liked but I never got a chance to visit for long. Now I did, and it's nowhere near as good as I was hoping. 10.1) Hohmann transfers, supplies, and other inconveniences 10.2) The trail of tears (actually, it's spilled motor oil) 10.3) Eeloo's motorways So here I am, back to orbit and looking for an unconventional Dres transfer. Bolt is currently weighting 1390 tons, with 1020 tons of fuel. Even discouting the dropping of tanks, that's 10500 m/s. I still have food for 16 years, water and oxygen almost forever thanks to recycling. I lost many reaction wheels, and I will lose more, but I also have lots of them, there should not be huge problems there. The main worry still left is that the Kerbin plane, after being in space so long, may lose its second solar panel and become unusable. In which case I may have to actually try to land Stool to find the Kerbin monolith. And hope I don't have to carry it across water. Better to patch up the Kerbin plane with solar panels salvaged from the service probes. The mission looks like it will be an easy success at this point.

After I became able to do everything in the stock game I set my sights on kerbalism, specifically long missions with kerbalism. Every part must fail, so indeed, I must also design a backup for everything. I am not familiar with your mods, but i guess they do something similar. So I design everything with that principle in mind. The lander would have been sound with a single terrier, but i put 8 radially mounted engines because it can take failures, even though it hurts deltaV. The shuttle bringing the lander from the mothership to low orbit started with 4 engines, but it could keep working even after losing 3, and if that happens, I can dock it to a drop tank with additional engines. In my previous mission I had my Diggers tasked with resupplying at Duna, each one was made to be able to orbit with a broken engine, and I brought 4 of those vehicles as backup. And I lost count of how many redundant life supports and communications I have. And I like designing stuff that way. And indeed, when things go wrong, they get interesting. Some of my finest moments happened when the original plan didn't work and I had to figure out something else to do with my resources. But that's part of the difficulty I did choose. I am never tempted to cheat to revert an annoying malfunction. Doing it would be admitting failure. On the other hand, real space agencies can calculate exactly when to start the suicide burn to be more efficient. And they can calculate exactly where they land. I cannot. So perhaps I start the burn too late, and I crash on the ground. Or maybe time warp is no longer allowed below 25 km, I won't start braking until I reach 10 km, it will take many minutes, so while I wait I go do something else, then i get distracted, and I am reminded of ksp only by the sound of explosions. or perhaps I manage to land on a steep slope where I fall down. Or, I turn around my ship so that the fuel tanks protect the crew from the solar storms and their radiation, then I time warp. But as the ship moves around the sun, it gets turned around, the crew is no longer shielded, and at high time warp everyone dies before I even get the first danger message. those are not fun ways to lose in fact, those are all things that would never happen if there was a real mission control and real pilots to take care of gritty details. I like designing and planning around part failures, radiation belts, and such. Those are the obstacles I want to overcome. My own attention span, on the other hand, is not. And I want to be able to revert any mistake caused by that. I also want to be able to experiment. Would that ship survive a steep aerobraking? how long can I stay inside the radiation belt before it gets really dangerous? well, in real life they'd do all the complicated calculations. I can't do that, so I eyeball it and try; if I explode, I try a higher periapsis, until I find out what is safe.

No, I don't. My way of playing hardcore ksp is to set very lofty goals, and keep pushing them. I certainly do not want my super elaborate mega mission - which required months in real life - to fail because i get distracted during a landing and activate the engine too late. Or because I forgot to set "control from here" on the right part before the manuever. Nor do I want to always drive my rovers at safe speeds, that would be super boring. And I want even less to lose because of kraken attacks. In fact, I tried once a challenge with saves disabled, and i could not do it. not much because i can't adapt to it, but because i don't want to adapt. If I can't push the limits of my skills with stuff that has a high chance of failing and that will definitely require me to save and reload a few times, then the stuff i'm doing is too easy. and then it's boring. The whole "it's fairly easy and you do it routinely, but if you occasionally screw up is a big deal" is what we do in real life. In games I want to push those limits, try what could be achieved if there was no need to play it safe i wish you luck in your endeavor, but your playstyle is so diametrically opposite to mine, i can't figure out the appeal of doing it, even with you explaining.

this man has figured out the secret quick question, how did you manage to build this kind of image? I'd like to replicate it

not sure, but it's fully possible that they don't. this is a game, uses a bunch of algorithm instructions, and those for fuel transfer and fuel production may well be different.

you know, i really can't figure this out. it's really not relevant here. You will need 2 docking ports on your arms: one to dock the ships, and one to dock to the station, because now you will need to dock them to the station. So, you have the arms with clamp-o-trons on both sides. And sticking clamp-o-trons to each other is not difficult at all. Did you actually try to send up the arms? can you post pictures of how you tried to launch them? I've launched stacks of docked parts many times without ever having problems with decoupling them. You can also put a radial decoupler on the sides of the arms, so it won't matter if it stays attached.

beautiful! I would not want to try and send it to orbit, thought...

i did send off individual shuttles to some of the planets, though. the main ship only orbited eve, duna and jool.

The mention of fitting inside a cargo bay has reminded me of an ancient failed project i mostly forgot about: the helicopterover + helicopterocket Helicopterover was basically an helicopter designed for eve, except it also had wheels because i would never be able to pilot it with the required precision to scan surface features or, worse, put it into the cargo bay. Because helicopterover was meant to be loaded in a cargo bay, by a fully automated robotic arm, and then carried on and off from the surface of Eve. The whole project failed because helicopterocket was supposed to be an Eve ssto, which I never came close to achieving. And in fact, even though it reaches over 15 km of altitude with the rotors, Eve's atmosphere is still thick enough to make those helicopter blades a losing proposition. Not to mention, 6 tons of payload between helicopterover and cargo bay would have been way too much, for any reasonable eve rocket. The last nail in the coffin came when I actually learned to pilot planes, and i saw them much easier than helicopters. I never figured how to land helicopters, preferring instead to just use parachutes. But I have this video of the robotic arm left as a reminder

Part 9: Jool's remaining 4 After the Laythe scare, and taking advantage of what was learned from it, the other four moons of Jool are visited without too many unplanned problems. Nothing that could not be fixed with some mild swearing, a small amount of resources, and a couple hours of fiddling around, certainly. 9.1) In the meantime 9.2) Crashing on Tylo 9.3) Make Vall great again! 9.4) Pol does not cooperate 9.5) The Bop redemption And that's it. All the moons of Jool are done. After one year of game time, and a few real life weeks - made longer by real life giving me less time for this game - I'm ready to leave the gas giant, heading for the ice dwarf. 10 monoliths found, 5 to go, including Kerbin. None of the remaining worlds present particular difficulties, though orbital mechanics and food supply will give some problems. The ship lost some pieces, but it's overall healty. Food and fuel are good, everything else is plentyful. I'd actually vent some water and oxygen, but they weight very little. And I'm fairly sure the Kerbin plane won't work; just like the other planes I brought, the alignment bug is a real killed for propellers. But just like the others, the challenge is not to fly it (well, on Laythe it was) but in bringing it to the planet after the long interplanetary trip with enough functional parts. Worst scenario, I will use the cheat menu to get a fixed one, again. I don't expect any significant obstacle to completing this tour. But this game has surprised me in the past, and it may do so in the future as well.

on the other hand, it's not particularly elegant to split the ship too much. At some point it becomes just a bunch of separate missions that just happened to have a common start. In my first mission I did it because i couldn't manage otherwise (well, actually, with the experience I have now, I could have done it; I know the ship could have lasted 20 more years. But when the first stuff started breaking up, I sort of panicked and cut it short). My current mission has the mothership orbit all planets - though it left behind the fuel tanks before going to Moho. And in the next mission, I will even attempt to land the mothership on most planets. But every mission is a learning experience. Congratulations, and welcome to the world of big convoluted ships. By the way, it took me three months, and roughly 300 in-game hours, to complete my tour. And now it's taking a couple months to complete my second mission. How did you manage in just a couple weeks?