Kerbals_of_Steel

Bill and Jeb had an awesome adventure today. They landed with Bob at the North Rim outpost and quickly brought the new life support systems online, then jumped in the Watney MK I rover and started the 15km trek down to the main base in the East Crater: Crawling down one of the more accessible portions of the North Rim: They first stopped by the refinery site and added life support to the Mobile Mining Command module, here Jeb is using the rover's winch to pull an nearby drop ship a little closer to the worksite for Bill: And doing the same thing over at the main base, dragging parts closer to the Science Lab: That used up much of the available daylight, but Bill had time for one more rover ride, taking his flatbed rover on a salvage mission to the crash site of one errant dropship: As he and Jeb were settling in for an all-night pinochle tournament, bad news struck. Bob reported an unprovoked Kraken attack on the North Rim outpost. Details are still coming in...

Must have KIS/KAS and MechJeb, KAC is super useful as well. I'm getting to the point where I don't need MechJeb to help with my piloting, I made my first landings, dockings, ect all before I installed it. MechJeb is still vital to getting the most out of my playing time, though. How many times do I need to launch identical supply or crew rockets??? Much better to automate that part of things. I still prefer to pilot the first flights and unusual payloads myself. The more complex the in-game world gets, the more useful KAC becomes, it's no big deal to keep track of ten or twenty flights, but 40-50 is my limit. KIS/KAS changes the very nature of the game. Without it, it's a game about rockets, and the Kerbals are there to support them. With it, it's a game about Kerbals, and the rockets are just vehicles for them and their explorations.

Thank you. I'm quite proud of it myself. I can't say I had any real inspiration with that one, except that I always try to keep the A-4 Skyhawk in mind. Not so much visually, but in how the designer managed to achieve a negative growth loop. A smaller engine meant less fuel, so less weight. That led to needing a smaller wing, which meant no heavy wing folding mechanisms, which meant less weight still, which (ect, ect, ect). I realize I might be committing some form of sacrilege against the Kerbin gods and their need for booster sacrifices, but I quite enjoy making very compact, very capable, craft. I made Jeb a rocket car capable of de-and re-orbiting on the Mun and Minmus: A small earth sciences/survey jet for Kerbin: And of course, the water heater rocket from up thread a few days: I think that one is really cool just for the weight vs. payload aspect. Yes, a one way landing on the Mun is probably the single simplest thing you can build a rocket for, but for a total weight of ~1.5 tons, a full ton of that was payload. Pretty nice mass fraction, even if I do say it myself. All that brings me back to what I actually did do in KSP today. While I've got outposts and rovers all over portions of the Mun, none of them are really optimized for prospecting and the ruthless exploitation peaceful colonization of the Mun. I needed something that specialized in surface science and mining surveillance that was small and inexpensive enough to carpet bomb likely sites with them. Enter the Miniature Surface Explorer, 6th Edition (MSE-6): Equipped with a Surface Scanner Module and a light scanning arm, it has room for further experiments inside the rear space frame, or even an RTG. This version is capable of landing itself from Munar orbit, and four of them fit comfortably in a 3.7m profile: A 5m engine plate could host between 6 and 8 of them if needed. It also fits nicely into the short MK 2 cargo bay: Operations hasn't said what they will do with this capability, but the last time anyone saw Gene, he was rummaging through his desk looking for a calendar and muttering to himself about "transferring hoomans". Nobody seems to know what that's about...

The claw is actually kind of finicky about how it grabs. Something has to hit the center just about dead on and straight before it locks.

I made, flew, and landed (ok, ditched) my first space plane, the Kerbal Reusable Vehicle: I need something capable of moving larger groups of Kerbals than my Aeronought 2 lander, and while my previous space bus had served yeoman's duty when I evacuated everyone back to Kerbin, it was obviously showing it's age and it was just not cost effective to add life support to something so obviously thrown together in a hurry in Jebs backyard: The new KRV seats 6, carries sufficient life support for a round trip to the Mun, and is VASTLY more maneuverable than it's predecessor, which frankly, flew like a bus. The cargo bay has reaction wheels, batteries, RCS, solar panels and a Universal Storage core for mounting life support, fuel cells and an optional probe core when a pilot is unavailable. I straight up stole most of the cargo bay arrangement from one of the spaceplane tutorials here, but now I can't find the original thread for credit, so thank you, whomever you were. By loading only oxidizer into the forward MK2/1.5m adapter, and putting the liquid fuel in the wings, it stays well balanced whatever amount of fuel is in the tanks, and I don't feel too bad about the crew crawling through a fuel tank for docking. The prototype (with a controversial butterfly tail) was chucked up on an absurdly oversized booster and taken for a test flight. With a slingshot around the Mun and a burn towards the planet, Trarey achieve some stupendously stupid amounts of velocity for the worst-case reentry, but with some judicious skipping into the upper atmosphere, he managed to bring it down in one piece, achieving a parachute recovery a few hundred KM away from KSP. The production version, with a conventional tail and a much more affordable booster: It's still got enough Dv to achieve Munar orbit and refuel at the station there, and the per-seat cost is cheaper than even the Aeronought capsule, which is ~10K Kerbucks per seat. This version had a demo flight and achieved my first non-parachute recovery. Well, it was more of an aquatic crashlanding, but everyone survived and we now know what NOT to do. All in all, a successful program, and perhaps a stepping stone towards a more traditional spaceplane in the future.

I made a rover delivery lander in a similar style, a few things I learned: 1: Thrust tweakable is your friend. Place the engines as far apart as possible, then use the tweaker to bring the thrust center and CoG into alignment. 2: Place multiple Veernor thrusters on the bottom at each end and activate them once you get to the vertical part of the flight. They use lots of fuel, but also let the SAS help stabilize the craft much faster, and by thrusting up, you aren't fighting both gravity and the conventional RCS system. 3: The trick that made it all work: Don't use a MK3 fuel tank. Mount 1.5m tanks on each side, low and long as possible. Think about pontoons on a boat. Then set them to draw evenly from each tank and each side. This vastly reduces CoG transfer as the fuel is burned.

I built my biggest rocket ever, the 5m "Thunderer" class booster: To land my smallest rocket ever on the Mun: I just integrated USI Life Support into my game, so I needed to preposition a bunch of supplies, recyclers, and greenhouses in preparation for the crews coming back to the Mun. Since I've got facilities scattered all over the East Crater, if I just made one BIG rocket and landed everything in one shot, I'd have to space truck major components 15-20KM, including up the 45 degree slope of the North Rim. Instead, the skilled technicians at Jeb's Junkyard converted a whole pile of old water heaters into rockets capable of landing a metric ton of supplies onto the surface from Munar orbit. Using a 9 point engine plate, they caught a ride with a new component headed to Munar Station: Dropping the transfer stage after the capture burn: Spinning up before release: And yeeting them out into orbit: The largest group of them landing near (VERY near) the workshop at the main base: Tipping over is a feature, not a bug, since it means that the batteries, tanks and fuel cells will be easier to cannibalize, and space constraints required one of the RT-500 recyclers to be mounted outside the storage container. Crews are launching as we speak to start integrating the new life support into the existing structures. I hope to lose as few as possible... Edit: BTW, can anyone help me get pictures embedded into the post? I thought it was just new member restrictions, but it's still not letting me use the "Insert Image from URL" button on the editor??? Edit to the Edit: MANY thanks to James_Kerman for helping me sort my Imgur issue!

I've been cleaning up my manned operations in preparation for adding the USI life support mod, so among other things, Bill had to return from his solo trek across the Mun in the Watney MK I rover and parts trailer: https://imgur.com/a/mifMVNy Bringing Jeb's rocket car from Minmus to the Mun: https://imgur.com/a/dMVAE3N https://imgur.com/a/aQNl9o3 And bringing Sigmund back to the main base from his duty supervising the automatic miners: https://imgur.com/a/yViT21G The Robo-Bowser drone fuel truck was never intended for crewed operations, so he had to improvise...

A recently discovered 4th rule of physics means that Kerbals will now need to eat, drink, breathe,and stuff... I am giving myself two weeks to wind up all crewed operations before initiating Operation Dunkirk and bringing them all home for the USI-lS upgrade, then it's time to send out the A-team to add life support to all my habitats. Given the house rules/ head canon I play with, I could probably spam out some automated supply ships and make the changes on the fly. It's probably better to just go systematically from station to base to outposts and upgrade them one by one. This will let me cycle them all through the Munar station for max hab time anyway.

It was a productive day on the surface of the Mun. I had spent the previous night period stacking an entire Munar colony into a series of parking orbits over the East crater, and at dawn the drop ships started coming down in waves. First down was an Aeronaught crew lander with Jedford, Thedford, and Edselford Kerman, who quickly flagged out locations for the next major landings. Next came the new bunkhouse for the mining colony consisting of three MK3 passenger modules, a workshop with two MK3 KIS containers and a MK3 passenger module for working space, and a science lab with two lab modules and a Hitchhiker communication pod. Each of those large landers utilized Kerbodyne's patented Paul Bunyan landing technology, landing vertically before being intentionally toppled with a combination of independent landing gear and overpowered RCS. The minor landings included a two man Mun scooter rover for commuting between the new site and the existing automated ISRU site a km away, and a pair of Ore-Bot transfer ships to haul excess ore to the new orbital conversion site on the Munar station. Next up is the Munar Mining Command center, so Thedford can directly supervise ISRU operations, but right now he is too busy driving around the new colony with a huge sack of K4, blowing up the surplus fuel tanks and landing engines. In the span of just a couple hours, we have gone from an isolated robotic mining site to a fully functioning crewed colony. It looks exactly like a trailer park full of little green men, but everyone starts somewhere...

Finished my Munar communication constellation, with a stationary satellite 3 million km retrograde and another a 5 million km prograde (and slowly closing the gap, it is in a slightly higher phasing orbit as the Mun catches up). Those two cover all but a tiny sliver of the back side of the Mun constantly, and between the high polar survey sat and the LMO space station, comms are close enough to seamless for me. Also landed Rob0-Bowser, my automated resupply rover, to run between my ISRU base in the east crater and my science outpost on the Highlands rim above it. Next up is to get a trial ISRU set up on Munar Station and start running a few Ore-Bots between the mining colony and the orbital station, I'm currently mining more ore than I can convert on the surface.

I've been lurking here for a while and playing KSP for about a month, finally have something to add to the forums, a little thing called "A Tale of Two Kerbals." In the beginning of Kerbins first space programme, Elon Kerman, Head of Finance and Chief Empirical Officer, and his head of Off-Planetary Science, Dr. Zubrin Kerman, one day devised themselves a plan that should be the envy of any Kerman. Rather than bore everyone with little things like learning to achieve a proper orbit around Kerbin, KSP's first step into the void would be a giant one. They wanted a space station, on the MUN! Technically, AROUND the Mun, but everyone accepted that at least parts of the first orbiting station would end up on the surface anyhow. Accordingly, KSP's first serious launch was a Space Station core assembly perched precariously upon a truly asinine assemblage of solid boosters and a woefully overworked Poodle liquid engine. Several rapidly iterative attempts later, the hopes and dreams of Kerbal blasted succesfully into Munar orbit. Along with the entirety of KSP's 7 Kerbal astronaut core, except for Jeb, who had been joyriding a Mun rover around the SPH. (Seriously, not sure what happened there. I thought I had Valentina and Bob for a flight crew, and the next time I checked the barracks, everybody was just gone...) This left Elon and Dr. Zubrin in a bit of a quandary. 6/7ths of their entire manpower was now packed into a single tiny space station, stranded and snack deprived. The plans to slowly rotate the crew out in a 1 or 3 person pod was obviously out the window, but how do you rescue half a dozen stranded Kerbals simultaneously when your entire space program is now only hours old? The first step was obviously an unmanned resupply mission, just to make sure that we could actually find and dock to the darn thing, but how do we get the crew back??? While they hemmed and hawed, Jeb went out back and started doing what Jeb does best, besides eating snacks and engaging in near-suicidal hijinks. By stacking a standard pod on top of a tin can with life support and a hyuge inflatable heatshield, he created a 7 person spacecraft that resembled nothing else quite as much as the grain silo's on the farm Jeb grew up on. Festooned with every parachute he could fit, and stacked atop the same booster that had taken his friends to the Mun, Jeb was on a mission. It was 11,400 KM to the Mun, he had a full tank of gas, half a pack of snacks, it was dark out, and he was wearing sunglasses. Hit it! The mission was completely norminal through launch, TMI and Mun capture, and Jeb was astounded that after just a couple orbits, he had an intercept with the station. It had taken the unmanned probe many attempts and almost all of the consumables on board before it finally docked. Never send a machine to do a Kerbals' job. It seemed a near-perfect intercept, too, on the same plane and a measly 300 meters minimum seperation. He could jump that far, in orbit. There was just one LITTLE hangup. The station would have an overtake velocity of 180m/s... Oh well, Jeb always did like to drive fast. He idled along at the top of his orbit, waiting for the opportune moment, and when it came, he struck, putting the metal to the pedal, and the thingy to the floor. In exactly the wrong direction, whooops... Ok, time for a fresh start. This time he was pointed in the right direction, and managed to close the separation even further. He got so close, in fact, that one of the Gigantor solar arrays smacked the bottom of his ship as it blew past him at 100m/s. Third times a charm!?!?!??? The final attempt was in fact, final, because he managed to cut the velocity difference down to a manageable 10m/s before flipping his ship around and making connection. It had been ugly, with the Poodle wagging his ships tail all over the place and the tanks were nearly dry, but he was there, and he had just enough fuel to get back. Jeb, Valentina and Bill crowded into the command pod, stuffing the 3 new Kerbalnauts into the trunk of the craft that Valentina derisively called "Jeb's Bus". "You came here in THAT??? You are braver than I thought." A quick escape burn, and Jeb had a highly elliptical Kerbin orbit plotted when the overworked Poodle finally ran out of fuel. Still, it had held out long enough to drop periphrasis to 60-something kilometers, so they were going to come down, eventually. Eventually took 3 orbits and 4 increasingly rough rides through Kerbin's upper atmosphere, with Jeb and Valentina riding along stoically, and Bill just glad that the 3 rookies were in the other pod, where no one could hear them scream. Even with the ballistic co-efficient of a bouncy castle, those aerobraking passes had barely made a dent in the ships ludicrous speed, and the final decent was a roaring, shaking, plasma coated mess, but Jeb did in fact manage to get them on the ground in one piece, "single handedly saving the entire Kerbin Space Programme!" Jeb was justly (and incessantly) proud of that fact, too, much to Valentina's dismay, so when she heard that the next piece of the Munar Station was ready to launch, she silently slipped out of yet another press conference and climbed aboard the "Neil, Degrasse, and Tyson Memorial Munar Science and Communications Munificent and Benevolent Society Orbital Educational, Obervational and Elucidational Module, Brought to you by Rockomax and Integrated Integrals" Everybody around the VAB just called it the Labra-Poodle, after the combination of science lab and Poodle Upgraded Propulsion System service module. Better plotting and more experienced orbital mechanics meant that she took off in a much more subtle and sleeker booster than previous Munar missions had used, and no one even missed her until Jeb proudly paraded out to the launch pad and proceeded to ask the age old question "Dude, where's my ship?!?!??". The ship is question was already slipping the bonds of Kerbal on its way to the Mun and was entering Munar orbit by the time a suitably chastened Jeb made it to Mission Control for his substitute duty as the mission CapCom. An elegant mid-course correction meant that Valentina was able to slip into Munar orbit on plane, on time, and well under the fuel budget, and when she eyeballed a minor correction intended to match her periphrasis with that of the station, the news only got better. She had beat Jeb's record, and had an intercept on the first orbit. Two of them, actually, about 20 degrees apart, creating a multi-minute window where the range varied from 2.4 to 3.6 km, and the closing speed was a stately 20m/s, give or take a few m/s. (Seriously, all I wanted to do was match part of the orbit, and when I started going through the results and realized just how dead-on my simple retrograde burn had been, well, excited expletives ensued.) Valentina had plenty of time to enjoy the view from her command cupola as the station slowly, ever so slowly, drifted towards her, and not even Jeb's eager urging to "Stop flying like a kerbushka and DO something!" could ruin her contemplative mood as she slid the Labra-Poodle into its temporary berthing on the first try. (Ok, technically, I did reload. That was only because my 4 year old crawled into my lap while I was waiting and asked "Can I fly the space-boat, daddy???" When he asks like that, hell yes, he gets to fly the space-boat for a while. My first serious attempt was a complete success.) The first docking was only temporary, however, since the arrival of the first major module and a nearly fully fueled PUPS power unit started a complicated game of orbital musical chairs. First, the Foundation Franklin, the stations heavy orbital tug, had to remove the partially depleted Poodle/fuel tank combo that had boosted the station to orbit, then re-dock itself whilst carrying the old booster in its claw. Then, the probe core equipped PUPS unit detached from Valentina's Labra-Poodle to replace the old booster, the Franklin undocked and temporarily attached the old booster to a docking port on the side of the PUPS unit to drain the rest of the fuel, disposed of the old booster, and re docked to fuel its own tanks. Valentina then undocked the Lab unit (which had been nosed in to the main port on the command module side of the station), and swung it around to mount on the central node using the lower lab docking port. She managed to do that entirely without assistance from the tug, and only on the RCS fuel present in the command cupola, a maneuver that had Jeb whistling in appreciation and sending out that ultimate accolade, that "Valentina, you are a steely-eyed missile Kerbal!" This concludes part 1 of a (hopefully) multi-part series on the exploration of near Kerbin space in general, and the Mun in particular. Though long, I hope it was entertaining and educational.