flyingshark

I'm super excited to launch vessels from my colonies and from orbit rather than having to launch them from the surface of Kerbin. I think that will really open up my options when building massive interstellar ships, which I suspect I will do a lot of once other star systems become available later in early access!

The true, true Kerbal way is to strap Jeb and a bunch of SRBs to it and fire them off! ... Okay, I'm gonna go do that now.

Today I launched the main section of a space station to Minmus. Total cost of the 8 launches and 7 failures was about 7-8 million funds. Yikes. Thankfully I'm in science mode. The successful rocket: The as-yet-uncrewed station in orbit of Minmus: One of the failures:

Today I sent a nuclear-powered shuttle to Minmus. I love flying low over celestial bodies at ridiculous speeds. This is only about 2 kilometers above the highlands. You can even see the shadow! Also, a cool Mun-rise gliding over Kerbin:

Ok, then I was wrong. Sorry.

"Persist kerbal inventory loadouts" is a thing in the difficulty settings. I think it's in the "advanced" section. AFAIK, it's from 1.11, not KIS.

Today I landed a rescue mission at my Mun "base." So now the kerbonauts there have a way to get back to Kerbin when they decide to. So basically, when the relief crew and larger surface modules arrive. Oh, and I decluttered the Mun's SOI by crashing stuff into the surface. Including a probably-very-expensive survey probe with an IR telescope. Recently I also finished the booster for the Archaeopteryx-type shuttle, and sent one shuttle to my Mun station.

Today I took a break from building Mun orbital infrastructure (already there's 1 survey sat and 1 commsat, with 2 more relays to follow, plus a station) to work on a spaceplane crew transfer vehicle. I call it the Archaeopteryx-type. (I hope that name isn't taken already) Anyway, it's supposed to work vaguely like a Dyna-soar (Get it? Dinosaur? Flying dinosaur? Archaeopteryx? It was funny to me.) and be the second stage of a pad-launched booster. Sorta like the space shuttle. Still working on that booster part, but the spaceplane is nice and stable, and has a Vector engine with ~1800 m/s of deltav in LKO, according to the VAB readouts. Once the first stage is finished I'll find out whether that's right. The slight dihedral made it nice and stable in all flight regimes, with nothing SAS couldn't handle. At low speed it wants to yaw and drop the nose without SAS, but that's at less than 100 m/s, and you wouldn't even know that was happening if you kept SAS on. At higher speeds, it should be fine. The main limitation is that the payload bay is full of fuel, so all it can do right now is carry 2 Kerbals up and dock with something. Guess I'll need to build something bigger if I want to make it carry satellites to LKO or whatever.

It's the large stock I-beams attached end to end, and then bent out a little. It's just a frame for me to strut the payload to, to help stabilize whatever I'm carrying. It's mounted below the final decoupler, so it gets discarded with the transfer stage.

Today I launched and docked together the two segments of a space station I'm sending to the Mun. Though if it doesn't make it out of LKO, I'll launch another to the Mun. The first launch consisted of the crew/science section and solar arm, but I don't have a screenshot of that on its own. It has the crew capacity for 13 Kerbals, (excluding the 8 mk1 fuselages in the docking arms) but I'm only sending seven, because that is the maximum that one the soon-to-be-launched Kerbin return vessels can carry. I'll try to have two of those docked at a time for safety reasons, and to make crew rotation easier. Also, seven allows a primary pilot/engineer/scientist set, a secondary set, and a spare pilot. Is that enough reasons? The second rocket launched the orange fuel tank, convert-a-tron, radiators and ore storage. Docking was uneventful, and the upper stage of the second rocket is (supposed) to take the entire thing to a low Mun orbit before detaching and deorbiting itself. This picture was totally not taken the first time I launched this payload, before it spaghettified. The nice thing about this design is that more fuel storage can be added in future expansions. Fully assembled:

Today I sent Bob on my first mission to Eve and Gilly, but I accidentally hit space and decoupled after I landed, stranding him there. So then I sent two more Kerbals to rescue him, and barely made it back to Kerbin with 2 m/s of deltav to spare. As if that wasn't enough, the chute I'd picked wasn't big enough, so I had to EVA all 3 crew and glide them down and recover them individually. Got 6400 science though! The original ship: "Hello, security? I seem to be missing an engine and some fuel tanks." The rescue craft on Gilly: Reentering at Kerbin:

Made some changes, added a nuclear engine transfer stage, and sent the standardized lander to Duna. Here it is on Duna's northern ice cap. I let Jeb parachute off a hill, then had to hop the lander 3km to get him back. That cost me enough fuel that I had to complete the ascent with RCS thrusters and use the transfer stage to rendezvous and dock. But everything was okay in the end, and all six (yes you're reading that right, 3 on the transfer/command/relay section, and 3 in the lander) made it safely back to Kerbin.

Today I tested a standardized non-atmospheric lander on the Mun. Just trying to make my set of craft a little simpler. This thing has ~3300 m/s of deltav in a vacuum, but only 920 in Kerbin's atmosphere because of the poodle engine. Thinking of upgrading that to an aerospike and adding another fuel tank to try and make it work nearly everywhere. For getting to places farther than the moons of Kerbin, it's meant to dock to a transfer stage/kerbin reentry capsule with the shielded docking port at the top. Anyway, here's the crew all on EVA admiring it in low Mun orbit: