DaveyJ576

I see you swiped a bottle of rocket fuel and some solid propellant. Nice!

Better yet... Pioneer 3/4 with the Jupiter booster. I believe that this mission is impossible with KSP/BDB, but I would love to be proved wrong!

I finally completed a successful Ranger 5 Rough Lander mission! Your suggestions were a big help. I backed off the thrust on the BE-3 solid to 24. That gave me a much smoother burn and for a longer period. My landing velocity was just under 140 m/s with the motor burning out at about 300 m altitude. I was probably at the limits of the lander to survive, but it did. Success! Ranger 5 took seismometer readings and transmitted them back to JPL. I may have just got lucky here, but it seems like a good result. This will remain a very tough mission to accomplish.

@slyfox023, I went back and did a quick Hyperedit of a RCML with a CSM in orbit to grab some screenshots. This is just one of literally hundreds of configurations that you could do. Just add some science components. There is a node on the bottom of the RCML so you can even use it as the first component of a larger station while building in the VAB.

Right, that is the CM (Command Module) Lab that I referred to earlier. It really has the same function as the LM lab. You can do just about anything with it that you want. Attach some science parts, solar panels, sensors, the Goo Lab, etc. The possibilities are endless. Put it in the SLA adapter atop a Saturn and launch it. Do a transposition and docking maneuver with the CSM and take it out for a few trips around the planet while gathering some useful science. Note: A standard Saturn IB will probably not lift the RCML along with a CSM. You will need to use a Saturn V (huge overkill), upgrade the Saturn IB, use the Saturn INT-20, or any other of the upgraded Saturn concepts. You could also do a dual launch, with one Saturn IB launching the RCML and one launching the CSM. I have only flown the RCML once and I did not take any screenshots. For uploading pictures, you have to first upload them to a picture sharing service like Imgur. Then you use the "Insert image from URL" function in the lower right of the box when you are typing here. Go to Imgur, right click the photo and "copy image link". Paste the image link into the box that pops up on this page.

Here is another variation. This is the original design of the Apollo Telescope Mount for the early Apollo Applications Program wet workshop concept (never flown). The ATM that actually flew on Skylab was a purpose built unit that did not use any legacy LM components.

The CM and LM labs were never flown in real life as they were part of proposals submitted to NASA for early Apollo flights that didn't fly, or for later extensions for the program that were never funded. Therefore, there isn't a lot of guidance on how they would be used. Accordingly, that carries over to BDB and that is not really a bad thing. The dev team put them into the mod with the idea that the user could kitbash them into whatever configuration that pleased them. That gives you a lot of leeway. Here is something I cooked up a while back: The CM lab could be used in a similar fashion. Put some science greebles on it, some power, and voila! Whether or not the Wiki will be updated to reflect this I do not know. I can tell that you are new to KSP or at least new to the forums. With a mod as large as BDB it is really helpful if you get VERY specific when you have a question. It helps the experienced players by enabling them to provide you with better and more precise answers. Have fun! Show us some of your creations when you can, if you can get around the damnable 502 Gateway errors that seem to be the bane of our existence on the forums of late.

Ok, so it is possible then. Question... how much fuel do you have in your BE-3 solid motor? Mine shows 1.8 in the VAB and it seems to burn out faster than yours did.

LEO first, but from there directly to landing without lunar orbit. I use MechJeb. I flew two missions, Ranger 3 and 4, with a different lunar approach vector for each. Both trajectories were quite steep, probably 65 to 70 degrees. I did a game save at about 100k altitude and did multiple resets trying different altitudes for retro fire. BTW, my booster was a three stage Atlas Vega! A bit overpowered for this mission, but I wanted to try something different. Let me know if you need anything else. Thanks for the effort!

I actually do quite well with Surveyor, even the Coatl version. For the record, I actually did succeed once with the Ranger Rough Lander sphere, but that was several years ago when I was still playing a Stock solar system. There is a video on YouTube of one guy making it, but again it was on a Stock system. His approach speed was around 880 m/s. On KSRSS I am maxing out at 1183 m/s on a direct approach landing. Unless I am somehow gooning this up, I am thinking that the Ranger with the BE-3 solid just doesn’t have enough delta-v. But perhaps that is the challenge that the dev team has laid down for us! Improvise, adapt, overcome!

The Atlas portion has been updated, and @Friznit has a list he is working on. Was there something specific that you were looking for?

Okay, so who has the ultra double top secret procedure for SUCCESSFULLY landing the Ranger Block 2 Rough Lander sphere on the moon (KSRSS 2.7x)? The best I have achieved has been slowing it to about 90 m/s at about 1300 m. At that point the BE-3 motor burns out and the probe re-accelerates to an unsustainable speed before impacting and going kabloom. I started retro fire at 50k using the midcourse correction engine and RCS and fired them until they run out of fuel at about 10k. That slows me to about 940 m/s. I light the BE-3 solid between 4-5k. Any lower than that and it impacts the surface before the motor quits and without slowing down enough. 4k is to low and 5k is too high! Admittedly I was using a fairly steep approach vector, around 70 degrees. Do I need to shallow it out? Is it possible that in balancing the BE-3 motor the dev team made it too wimpy? Most likely I am gooning this up somehow.

The dev team has stated several times that they have no interest in doing so. However, if you look back through the thread, there have been several posters that have created a reasonable facsimile of the C-8 using parts from other mods.

I am long overdue in paying my screenshot tax, so here it goes: ATLAS ABLE PIONEER On September 24, 1959 NASA was taking Atlas Able 9C through a Flight Readiness Firing at LC-12 at Cape Canaveral. Just prior to ignition a configuration error was noted for the sustainer engine. The countdown was halted and the error corrected. The FRF went off without a hitch, clearing the path for launch. Two days later, sheepish NASA technicians revealed that they had forgot to include a system for equalizing the atmospheric pressure inside the payload fairing. Quick rework corrected the problem. On October 15, 1959 the last Atlas C lifted the Able/Pioneer stack cleanly through the sky in a highly successful liftoff. Staging occurred as planned and the Able pushed the Pioneer P-1 out towards the Moon. Spacecraft separation occurred normally, with the spin decoupler spinning up the spacecraft for the Altair firing. With the propulsive stage over, the newly renamed Pioneer 5 headed out into interplanetary space. The cruise to the moon went well, with the monopropellent motor making one mid-course correction. As the spacecraft approached the moon, she lined up to adjust her periapsis, made that burn successfully, and slid in behind her target. Pioneer 5 easily performed the circularization burn and became the first man-made object to orbit the moon. Her science program yielded a lot of valuable data concerning our nearest neighbor, and set the stage for more ambitious missions to come. Real life result: a misconfigured valve during the FRF sent helium into the propellant line for the sustainer engine at ignition. The engines shut down, but shortly after the rocket suffered a catastrophic RUD and it exploded on the pad in the biggest explosion at the Cape to date. NASA shifted to the Atlas D booster for subsequent missions, but a variety of errors lead to a 100% mission failure rate. The 2nd mission failed because NASA neglected to provide a means to equalize the pressure within the payload shroud during ascent. Atlas Able was developed only because NASA was initially unaware of the Air Force's work on Agena. The much greater power and versatility of Agena relegated Atlas Able to interim status and it was quickly discontinued once Agena came on line. It really was a stopgap rocket to get decent size payloads out to the moon quickly. It was a mismatch really, with a powerful booster matched with a skinny and somewhat underpowered upper stage. Atlas Agena made much more sense from a capability standpoint. Thor Able (and later Thor Delta) was a better capability match. I made one little fudge on this flight... I configured the Able stage with the Stock amount of fuel and therefore the use of the Altair solid third stage was unnecessary. I included the Altair for looks only and did not light it. The Able got Pioneer all the way to the moon with a little fuel to spare! I have found that going to the moon is really hard using solid upper stages. They are not precise enough. BTW, the new visual configs look absolutely amazing!

Wow, I didn’t appreciate how much I missed the forums until they were gone… Anyway, has anyone ever successfully used the Juno II to launch the Pioneer 4 probe on a trans-lunar trajectory at 2.5x scale? There just doesn’t seem to be enough delta-v. I can get it to about 1.6 m km but no further. It gives you an appreciation for von Braun and his team that they pulled it off in the real world.

@CobaltWolf, @Zorg, @Invaderchaos, @Rodger, and all who contributed… you should feel very proud of your creation. It is monumental work that adds a tremendous level of immersion to KSP. Thank you for all of the long hours without pay. Players like me really appreciate it.

My kitbash of the platform obviously has some significant differences from the proposed configuration. It is hard to create triangular truss structures, so I kept it to square ones using Stock parts. The pressurized section is just a Mercury pod with a LM docking port! All in all I think it is a reasonable recreation. The Saturn IB uses my patches that lower the weight of the S-1 tanks and the engine mount. Even with that it struggled to get the stack to a 85x105 orbit at a 33 deg inclination. I circularized at 105 km using the SM SPS.

I recently completed a completely new build of KSP, including the latest versions of KSRSS and Parallax. The visuals involved are nothing less than fantastic. I flew my AAP-1A mission again and was amazed by how great Earth looks. I am also now using Katniss Cape Canaveral because it is compatible with KSRSS Reborn. In the past I used the Cape Kanaveral mod but it is not compatible with the most recent KSRSS. One note... with the new PBR shaders the pre-launch scenes on the launch pads are VERY bright. I tried several different TUFX profiles and it goes from completely washed out to tolerable. These were all taken with the Default settings on TUFX as it seemed to be the best. Is there a way of adjusting the brightness? The coast of California looking north. Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Vandenberg, and the Channel Islands can clearly be seen. I overflew the launch site while conducting my orbital survey. Pretty amazing detail. The spoiler has some details of the AAP-1A scanning platform. Yes it was a real thing... almost! It was a proposal that never flew

As always, superlative work. You are bordering on photo realism, and that is a good thing!

Fun fact: the Mercury spacecraft went uphill on its booster upside down. The tapered section that led to the parachute canister was called the “afterbody”, and the blunt end with the heatshield was the “forebody”. That is why on nearly all of the flights the spacecraft performed a flip maneuver immediately after separation from the booster. As I understand it, the avionics and control systems were set up to control the spacecraft with the blunt end facing the direction of flight. That design rationale changed quickly with Gemini, as the craft needed to be able to dock with the narrow end, and that was also the best location for radar.

So, one thing that I am not entirely clear on... what mods (if any) do we need to have installed in order to take full advantage of the new PBR textures that @Zorg and @Invaderchaos and others have been working so diligently on?

Hello! I am new to KSRSS Reborn and I have a question: when you have Reborn with Parallax, which mod generates the rocks on the Moon's surface, KSRSS or Parallax? 1. If it is KSRSS, is it possible to reduce the amount of non-collider rocks on the surface and if so how? 2. If it is Parallax I will ask in that thread. Thanks!

MAN IN SPACE SOONEST It is 1958, and President Dwight Eisenhower is very alarmed at the recent Soviet space successes. He feels that we have been made to look like fools and genuinely fears the seemingly ever growing technological gap between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. He succumbs to pressure exerted by the Department of Defense and orders them to "put a man into space at the earliest possible date. I don't care what it takes, just get it done NOW!" The Air Force's Project 7969, aka Man In Space Soonest (MISS) is put into full swing. Fully funded and with the full backing of every resource available in the United States, the project rapidly moves forward. With the DoD leading the way, very little about the project was released to the public, with many details classified. Wanting to keep it as simple as possible, the Goodyear Aircraft Company was chosen as the prime contractor for the spacecraft. Goodyear's design was a simple spherical ball with an RCS module and parachute canister on top. To help slow the spacecraft after reentry four air brakes would deploy to slow and stabilize until the spacecraft reached the lower atmosphere, where a parachute would safely lower it to a splashdown in the ocean. After a rancorous debate, the Air Force's still-in-development Titan ICBM was chosen as the launch vehicle. This would prove to be the long pole in the program's development, with delays in the booster resulting in the program missing its early 1960 launch date by several months. Meanwhile, Goodyear surged forward with spacecraft development and enjoyed a comparatively benign build and test regimen. On July 4, 1960 President Eisenhower ordered a name change for the program, always of the mind that MISS was a tad on the silly side. The whole effort was now known as Project Liberty. On September 28, 1960 they were finally ready. A Titan I missile with a mysterious fairing at the top had been erected at LC-19 at Cape Canaveral. It was all very hush-hush, with no announcements or information made public. At dawn on the 28th the weather from Hurricane Donna had finally cleared. The gantry was lowered and the countdown entered into its final phase. Unbeknownst to everyone outside the program, young Air Force Lieutenant Michael Alfred Robert Sampson was strapped into his seat inside Liberty 3, itself hidden from view by the fairing. Liberty 3 launched exactly on time, with the climb out and ride uphill going quite smoothly. For once, the mighty Titan flew straight as an arrow. Sampson and his brand new spacecraft made it to a 30 degree, 120x105 km orbit in fine shape. He deployed antennas and made his first report to a Navy tracking ship in the southeastern Atlantic, just as he crossed the coast of Africa. His first of two orbits took him nearly directly over the Cape Canaveral launch site. Several hundred miles west of Baja California, the three solid retro motors lighted in succession to lower the orbit back into the atmosphere. The maneuver was successful and at 90 km he jettisoned his battery and retro pack. His firey ride through the atmosphere brought on a heavy 6 G's, but Sampson took it well and opened the air brakes at 40 km. Stabilized and rapidly slowing, the parachute deployed at 3000 meters and he gracefully dropped into the Atlantic Ocean 350 km northwest of Puerto Rico. The mission was a complete success. The President could now trumpet that the United States was the first nation on Earth to send a man into space! This was a long and sometimes tedious kitbash. The Tweakscaled down KV-1 "Onion" Stock pod had to be patched to add basic functionality to it like additional ablator and EC, reaction wheels, and monoprop (thanks @Rodger for your assistance with the patch!) I went through several versions before I got something light enough to be put into a stable orbit by a BDB Titan I. I was inspired by the image below of the Goodyear proposal for Project 7969. It struck me as cool looking and a fun KSP kitbash so I dove into it. The air brakes work rather well, but it is not as stable as I thought. I had to leave SAS on the whole time in order to keep it flying properly retrograde. As it slowed down it had the tendency to go heavy end first, i.e. with the parachute canister facing down and the air brakes pointed the wrong way. The RCS unit at the top is the BDB Athena module (Tweakscaled). Please, do not refer to it as an "American Vostok". Rather, I prefer to think of the Soviet craft as a "Russian MISS"! LOL By the way, this is the first manned mission of my new KSP build, incorporating KSRSS Reborn. The views of Earth are nothing short of amazing! Very realistic.

Is anyone else suddenly having trouble with Imgur? Within the past week I can no longer access any of my KSP albums. They show up, but I can view the album. I also can not post any new images. I can upload images, but when I go to make the post I get a "share post failed" message. Is this a problem with my browser (I use either Edge or Firefox) or is it a Imgur problem? Thank you.

For the newer players of Bluedog Design Bureau, you should take into account that BDB is one of the most highly tested and developed mods for KSP. The development team is quite professional and has been working on this mod for over nine (9) years! While there certainly is a possibility that you might stumble across a previously unknown bug, it is actually far more likely that your unfamiliarity with the mod and with KSP in general is much more the likely culprit of your issue(s). Installation problems being the next most likely. Everyone here is more than happy to help. I have been playing for five years and I am still learning things all the time. It would pay you large dividends to make sure that your installation is good, and that you understand the basic mechanics of the game first. There are other forums on this site that can answer those questions. Another big help is searching within this thread before you post. You may very well be able to answer your question before having to make a new post. So do some research first, read through the other threads, check out the various Wiki's available, and if you are still stumped then ask away! The dev team and the other experienced players will bend over backwards to assist. This is one of the best mods available for KSP. Enjoy!