DennisB

Circumnavigate Mesbin on foot.

I beated Laythe for the third time. The first one was of course on my Jool 5 mission, the second one was in December during the preparation for my next mission, but unfortunately, that vessel wasn't capable to complete the whole mission, so I had to change the mission plan and almost completely redesign the spacecraft. I hope, this one will be better, because I spent too much time on Laythe everytime.

Did you set the gliding coefficient in the cheat menu to 1 during the tests? The best way to eliminate this type of issue is, to start the test flight from orbit, but it takes longer. But there will be always a risk of undetected structural issues, if you change the structure of your vessels during the mission.

Does anybody know, what happened in the last few hours? The view counter of some (or every?) topics increased massively.

Will you tell us the details, how you collect the 4 copies? I'm curious.

I officially reached 1000 hours. In fact I'm already over it, because last year I played sometimes offline, because I didn't get the mail from Steam with the security code for login sometimes.

I assume, the blades were only deployed in the atmosphere. I had also trouble with the helicopter blades, as I experimented with a quadrocopter lifter. The first issue was flexing, but that's not the issue with your construction. Try to watch the aero forces at testing (F12), maybe you can see the problem earlier, like the lift forces start to oscillate more and more. The reason could be too high rpm paired with too high propeller angle. Try to adjust the angle during the flight, to get better lift, and try to avoid too high rpm. Another idea, I reduced the number of blades per propeller, because I think, I had much less trouble with 6 and 4 blades than with 8.

I'd like to have tilted axis of at least some celestial bodies. Not all, to have different difficulty levels. And I'd like to have wind in the atmospheres, to make things interesting. Another thing, maybe as a difficulty setting, would be less precise course projections. It could be exact at easy level, but with an error band on hard level, which increases as further into the future you predict your trajectory. Maybe it could be dependent on the level of the tracking station. Similar to this, the kerbals could have problems with pointing exactly to the desired vector, depending on experience level, and the probe cores depending on tech level.

Where are the pictures gone? Luckily, I was able to see them earlier. This ship is really massive. I've got to hear, that my spaceships were huge, but this one has more mass in Kerbin orbit, than mine on the launchpad. I wish you good luck for the mission, and enough patience to deal with the lag .

Yes.

Oh, a new record breaking attempt . I'm curious to read the report, and also, how long it will take for you. (I know, I'm really slow)

Yes, the Wiki is a good starting point. There is everything about the science experiments and the calculation of the science points. With that, you "only" have to know, how many biomes each celestial body has, and where you can get landed or splashed science, and where you are in an atmosphere or in vacuum. I never visited asteroids or comets, so I don't know about the science there. It should be possible to collect every distinct science report, but not all the science points, because some science reports and the science points for the vessel recovery don't give you the full science points at once, you have to repeat them multiple times to get close to the maximum. I don't know, how the science scores are rounded in the game, so you would need many repetitions. I did the calculation for Jool and its moons for a challenge. There are 721 science reports and 158437,4 recoverable science points, including the science experiments and the vessel recovery. In addition to that, you can collect science when you do a resource scan of a planet or moon, and you can get a lot more science, if you use the mobile science lab, and process all the science there too. Here is my Jool 5 mission, where I collected over 90% of the recoverable science, so you can probably imagine, how much effort it would take to do this for the whole solar system.

I've installed my first mods. Hangar extender, because I will need it soon, and CKAN, to install the other one.

Especially these first few pictures remind me on my tour through Norway.

My plan for the holidays was, to work on (and maybe finish) my new spacecraft for my next large mission. Unfortunately, because of lumbago I wasn't able to sit for more than a few minutes during the last 5 days without making it worse. So I was limited to watch KSP videos only. And I've found some cool videos.

20 tons of fuel for minor corrections?? What kind of payload should be transported? With a small payload you can do the whole transfer without any gravity assists with 20 tons.

The fuel priority depends mainly on your staging order. If you want something different, or you have a very complex spacecraft, you can modify it for each tank manually, you have to activate "advanced tweakables" in the options for it.

Go to the SPH and open your craft folder. If you didn't launch other things since then, there must be an auto-save of your last launched craft.

Congratulations to this achievement. How did you managed to land on landing legs? I tried several constructions, but my rocket was always unstable on the ground. At the end, I had to land on fuel tanks.

It should be one of the following issues. 1. Fuel flow issue. The crossfeed on one or more decouplers is inactive, or there is another part between the fuel tank and the engine, which blocks fuel flow. 2. Wrong staging. It's possible, that you discard the full tank before you use the fuel, because the decoupler or the consumer engine is in the wrong place in the staging order.

I'm still in the preparation for my next large mission. In the past weeks I practiced gravity assists a lot, because I really have to improve my skills for this mission. I'm still not really good, but I think, I made real progress in this week. Sometimes I think, now I can do it, but get myself later in situations, where it's obvious, that it's not the case. Once I've finished this part of the mission test, then the really fun part will begin.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts about this. I'm happy to hear, that you think, the dV budgets are adequate to complete the missions. That's the point of the challenge. Not to find the most fuel efficient way, like you do normally, but to use the additional fuel to finish faster. I thought about this too, and that's the reason, why I decided to use the universal time and not the mission time for the results. Using all the available fuel should make it possible to finish the mission before the perfect constellation even occurs.

After my first challenge didn't get much resonance, here is the next one. It took so long, because I was busy with my Jool mission. Since I play KSP, I saw many brilliant players, who did incredible gravity assist maneuvers. In most cases, the goal was fuel saving. I thought about a different challenge, which could be challenging even for them. That means, completing the mission with a vessel, which is far from ideal, with a fairly tight fuel budget, in the shortest time. The vessel for the challenge is called the Dumb Probe. It's a ridiculous machine, I don't know, what the kerbal engineering team had in mind during the construction. Maybe... to make your life more difficult? It is powered by one RTG and one ion engine, has a huge amount of useless liquid fuel as ballast, and a probe core, which can't follow maneuver nodes. It has a total dV of 2247m/s, it can sustain maximum thrust for 126s with an acceleration of 0,49-0,52m/s² (61,9-65,1m/s), or 0,04m/s² with persistent thrust. There are two different missions available. Mission 1: Get the Dumb Probe to an escape trajectory from the solar system, with reduced fuel (empty one of the Xe-tanks, so you have only 1512m/s dV). Mission 2: Do a Grand Tour, and visit the SOI of all celestial bodies of the solar system. The date (not the mission time), when the mission is completed, will determine the ranking. In mission 1, it is the date, when the probe is on an escape trajectory, and it isn't within and won't cross the SOI of any of the planets or moons. In mission 2, it is the date, when the probe reaches the final SOI and isn't on a collision course with a celestial body. To start the mission, download the Dumb Probe from KerbalX (https://kerbalx.com/DennisB/Dumb-Probe). Start a new game with CommNet switched off, because the probe doesn't have an antenna. If you try mission 1, empty one of the Xe-tanks. Except this, there are no further changes on the vessel allowed. Cheat the Dumb Probe into Kerbin orbit with Alt+F12. Both your PE and AP must be within 80-100km, within this range, you can set the orbital parameters, like you want. Switch the clock to Universal Time, and go. Don't forget to document your route and your maneuvers to show afterwards. You can use visual and information mods, but no flight assistant mods, because it's part of the challenge, to execute the maneuvers manually.

I've just found this post from 2020. I was definitely not the first one, who did this. Like in my case, that discovery happened by "accident" too, like some real life discoveries.

It's in the post above the other one.