BechMeister

Here is my step by step guide on how to Rendevous: First some context - I am currently updating parts to my station that has glitched. I am flying an docking arm for fuel tanks to my station. Now Step by step with pictures and Gifs: Get your rocket into space and set the vehicle you want to rendezvous with as target: Make a Orbit slightly higher than your target orbit - to ensure you will cross your targets path at some point.. and not just endlessly chase each other. Adjust for inclination - This is done by going Normal/Anti-Normal on the AN point (the place you can see your inclination error) Wait for an optimal window where I:a and I:b is close. Use a maneuver node to figure where to Raidal In / Out: Once at the point close the maneuver node (the game is not that precise now.. so its better to do it manual) - hold your mouse over the 1:A while burning Radial out/in - Burn until your 1000 ish m from target. Set your speedometer to "Target" by pressing on it and press on "Go retrograde" - In target, your prograde/retrograde is your movement in relation to the target. Kill your relative speed by burning retrograde when your near your target - REMEMBER TO PRESS THE LOCK (Stability on) ONCE THE VEHICLE POINTS RETROGRADE - This locks your current direction. In my experience if you burn retrograde while in target, your rocket will chase it and start spinning. - Stop boosting when your relative speed is 0-10 m/s Use a combination of RCS thrusters and main engine to get your prograde ontop of target and move the last bit of way to target: Here you can see the prograde is 40° off. Now its corrected - take not of the time it takes to accelerate to the relative speed to target on approach - It takes the same time (depending on how you make your crafts) to de-accelerate. Hotkeys for RCS thrusters: A: Jaw left S: Pitch Down D: Jaw Right A: Pitch Up Q: Roll counter clock E: Roll clockwise H: Move forward N: Move Backwards J: Move Left K: Move Down L: Move Right O: Move up Make sure the docking port you want to dock with is the point your controling the craft from: And the specific docking port you want to dock at is target: Position your craft so it can reach the docking port, and burn towards it: Here I have moved my craft down so its outside the docking port I want to dock at - and I have killed all relative speed. I turn off the RCS thrusters and click "Point at target" - The reason I turn of the RCS thrusters is that I find that the craft start dancing around because it keeps adjusting to point at target - which means it just spirals into a spin/dance around target. - So I always have RCS off when pointing at target. I then click the lock and turns on "Stability" and then i make sure my local prograde is on target. Now the angle may be off, So the closer you get to target your vehicle will start moving up down, left right. You correct this by putting your prograde uppersit the target like this: Your prograde location will drag your vehicle in that direction - So by making sure your prograde is uppersit the target, you will drag your vehicle on top of it. The distance to the target translate to the speed. If your prograde is on target, your vehicle will not get closer.. if its far away it will be dragged into your vehicle quick, but you may not have time to get the prograde on target - and will have to reverse. It will most likely end up looking like this: If you do it correct - the two docking ports will meet and you are docked. I hope this helps you mate.

/////////// MISSION UPDATE \\\\\\\\\\ A very revealing image of K.G.01 main problem. Lets Address the elephant in the Room: Some of you may have noticed that something were wrong with K.G.01, I have alway taken images of the stations good angle. However. At some early in K.G.01 deployment - one of the main docking arms "warped". On this image you can kind of see how the docking socket is not sitting correctly on the station. As well as a clear shot of the bugged fuel lines. This means that the station is curved. It has not really been an issue until now were I wanted to get a precise inclination at 0° But the station cannot hold its course when boosting... So I need to fix it if I want to be able to precise control its path. 2 birds with one stone: I have decided to swap the docking arms and hydrogen tanks. The Hydrogen tanks are mainly to get rid of the fuel lines which bugs out (at one point I was wondering if it was actually the fuel lines causing the issue - pulling the station) Instead I will install these slightly longer arms I designed. They are less heavy since they dont pack quite as much monopropellant. But its fine because K.G.01 has more mono proppelant than it ever needed. After reading a bit about the ISS manouver system I decided to try give the station its own propulsion system by adding 2 different kinds of arms - one pushing and one pulling. We will see if it will be able to do orbital adjustments with that. Other changes: I decided that instead of 10 larged sized 8t tanks I will install 4 xl 20t tanks - the K.G.02 tanks - "vertical", and then have space for 8 methalox tanks rather than 4 "horizontal" - Since I wanna refuel the Tug Drone at K.G.01 it makes sense to have more methalox fuel tanks. I will then just move 1 hydrogen tank at the time, reserving the "4 finger" mount for only the methalox tanks. The tug will then be hauling 20t fuel instead of 32t. - making it easier to go there and back again. 20t tank vs 8t tank. Once that is done its back to refueling - Stay tuned for more!

Indeed i could! Good thinking I have an inclination error of 3.5° I need to fix

//////////MISSION UPDATE\\\\\\\\\\ - Refueling K.G.01 - All about Gliders - Back to basics - launching the refueling gliders to K.G.01 Foreword: This update is mostly for me. Its been a while since I flew my gliders, and I have to be honest, I had forgotten a lot of their quirks and how to fly them. I tried to go back to the section of the update on their development - but it left very little info on how they were operated. So I decided to write it down, so I can look it up in the future. Mission Task: Standardize launch procedure for ease of operation Lessons Learned; Lessons Identified: There were a few things about the gliders I had forgotten. It took me a lot of launchers were I simply could not get the second stage into orbit, before remembering the quick were I have to transfer fuel from the fuel tank Infront of the cargo fuel tank, to the back one. To make sure this didnt happen again, I connected the two tanks via. fuel lines that I "hid" inside the craft. Crossing fingers they wont break. Any way - I figured out the Ideal, reproductive way to launch the vehicle: Launch craft. At 2km toggle "burn prograde" - the rocket will gravity turn itself until around 45° Stage seperate at 1.500 Δv to give the first stage enough fuel to return to KSC. Burn into orbit and rendezvous with K.G.01 - unload fuel and spare fuel so you have around 300 Δv remaining. De-orbit burn. Dont worry too much about inclination - past trials show the ability to correct up to 4° error. (mind you though doing corrections vastly shorten glide distance) Glide so you are as close to be above the runway as possible when you hit the lower 1/3 of the atmosphere - allow the glider to drop at a 45° and reach terminal velocity at around 130 m/s to have enough energy to convert to horizontal movement in the thicker atmosphere. "HOLD! HOLD! NOW!" this is the unpleasant part. Hold the angle of descent until 400-500m from the ground - then flair up and put down landing gear last moment touch down. Follow this procedure - At least until next patch were a lot of the plane aerodynamics are being fixed. Moving Forward: I found out when refueling K.G.01 that past BechMeister had set the docking ports on the methalox fuel tanks to not allow cross fueling on 3/4 tanks. I presume this was done because the first tank installed probably was allowing fuel transfer and was not docked with full tank as some of the fuel was spend getting the tank there. The + side is - K.G.01 can fix decaying orbits with the fuel only in the Tug Drone. This was a pleasant surprise. instead of having to do 11 tours to fuel the 4 tanks and large drone on K.G.01 I only have to fill 1 and the tug drone so - around 3. I am contemplating fixing the Inclination error K.G.01 has. How ever.. I cant make the game show the point where I cross the 0° Inclination point on Kerbin. I may have found a solution though... If i Park a vehicle on KSC (which I gather is on 0° Inclination) and say "set as target" I may bet the cross point. Also fun little side note. I had fraps running at one point playing, and it has a FPS counter. I thought i ran the game at 15 fps around K.G.01 - In reality its 5 FPS xD

I had a lot of trouble doing rendezvous until I found out you can click the velocity meter and change it from Orbit/Ground/Target - Once in target it shows you the relativly velocity to your target... and you get a "local" prograde and retrograde that shows you direction in relation to the target. - I remember not knowing this.. and not knowing your relative speed to the target makes docking really hard... since you have to eye ball it all. Any way... once you setup your 1A and your 1B to intersect close enough (I usually aim for <1000m) you just point to your target retrograde and burn until your relative velocity is around 0. - then you use the RCS thrusters to go the final distance If you want I can try make a simple picture guide in KSP2 on my next run? - The guide Fulgur sendt is very good.. but I myself has found the UI differences can make it a little difficult to translate when you're already going through figuring it out.

thank you for the tip - it was very easy indeed x) How ever, I dont have the forum stamina as you to make the post look super designed - this post already took like an hour to get right. with all the images etc xD

I think you hit the hammer on the nail right here. Its quite funny in a way... I stopped playing EA games because of the things you're mentioning. It was one of the reasons i broke my personal vows not to buy EA games. That the atmosphere around the game was that developer were seeking feedback and the benefits of EA. Don't get me wrong - I have actually not noticed there were any salt here on the forum before this post. Its mostly people making youtube rants etc. were I've seen the ranting. I was really pleasant surprised to see a "old school" forum this healthy in 2023. I joked about it to a few of my friends saying its probably because most people playing KSP and in this forum is from the time were this was the way you founded community around niché subjects. In fact - one of the reasons I have now clocked 350h in KPS2 since launch is the support, encouragement and engagement in my mission report... also its amazing how many bugs just surfaces when you play the game and do stuff... players always do things that is hard to simulate and or find because you many not think of trying it when you designed the tools. I've been a long time eve player - and if there is one thing that i really like about eve too, its how the community always finds ways to use the tools the developers makes that the developers never anticipated x) Any way... I only tuned in here because I found it interesting that others had such a different level of expectation than I. Especially when you consider that I was just a casual viewer of the IP before buying KSP2 - which to me would suggest that I should have had a lesser understanding of what the product would have been than some one who has been following it with keen interest for a long while.

Maybe - tbh I didn't know the forum before I started to bug report. I used to only engage casually with KSP1 - mostly just watching youtube videos of the game. How ever, I have been low key following the KSP2 since it was announced 3 years ago. But up until release I started to read what I could find about it and figured it would be like paying to Beta or Alpha test the game - I wanted to support the developers and bought it. It lived up to my expectations... and since release I have clocked 344h as of now - which i think is quite impressive giving im also juggling a full time study and being a father to 2 small children x) Maybe - but maybe its directed at the wrong place. Was it the devs that decided to launch now? was it the men in suits? - was it launched now because otherwise it would not get out? In my experience the people actually building the game are very passionate about their projects and want to release them in as good a state as possible. I dont know.. I've read quite a few posts from veteran KSP1 players who say that KSP1 also had a rocky start when it was in beta - sure you can talk about the price.. I guess its high - but its you who decide to buy or not. When I bought the game. I knew that it was buggy, had little to no features and was gonna be like beta testing the game - meaning its more about finding and reporting bugs and investigating bugs than playing. I knew the roadmap was without dates - I accepted that they didn't want to put dates because dates are seldom met any way (which is also my experience with previous early access games) and that was the foundation that I decided to do my purchase on.

@Sirad I have long had a personal rule that I did not buy early access games.. But that's because I had a lot of bad experiences with Early Access games that never got finished or was changed to something else due to - in my opinion - bad suggestions for balancing. How ever.. i made an exception for KSP2 - I was well aware of the state the game was in, and it lived up to my expectations... So its a bit interesting that you said it was not telegraphed well enough? (No shaming! I am genuine here) - in any case I have found great comradery in the bug finding and squashing. I don't know if its because im a long time eve player.. that i dont mind slow progress in bugy games.. or because I've played a lot of Bethesda games x) - I think I forgot what point I was going towards.. I guess I just want to say that it seems a lot of new players are in fact enjoying KSP2 - and its the KSP1 veterans that are most angry with the state of the game. (thats just my observation)

//////////MISSION UPDATE\\\\\\\\\\ - Installing Helium Tanks - Developing Kerbin/Lunar Tug Drone - Installing Methalox Tanks - K.G.02 with all the Helium Tanks, and half the methalox tanks installed and ready. Foreword So my exams are all but done - and I have been busy this past week continue the work on going through the goals for getting K.G.02 operational. I have a lot to show... Not only did i end up juggling 9 vehicles in lunar orbit, I also managed to develop, assemble and move methalox fuel tanks from Kerbin to the Mun with a new improved large drone - I also by chance saved K.G.01 that i found had entered a decaying orbit.. dipping down to 51 km - I spend all the Methalox boosting it back into a stable orbit! - But it also means I have to refuel K.G.01 before I can finish K.G.02. So it felt like as good a time to make an update. So strab in we have a lot to go through: Mission Tasks: A. Readjust K.G.01 orbit into a stable orbit. - Success B. Get the 8 Helium tank to Lunar orbit and dock them to K.G.02 - Success C. Develop a new heavy tug drone with more Δv - and a freight assembly for ferrying fuel tanks from K.G.01 to K.G.02 and vice versa - Failure Lessons Learned; Lessons Identified: A. The first model of Heavy Tug drone here doing its job pushing K.G.01 into a stable orbit. Yeah - While building K.G.02 - K.G.01 had apparently slowly drifted into a decaying orbit... I dont know if its a bug or i just did some too forceful dockings slowly pushing the station into a decaying orbit. But fortunatly i discovered when it was dipping into the low 50km mark - 51km or so... I dont think it would have been able to take many more tours down before it would have been irrecoverable. The 4 methalox fuel tanks and its own internal tank was just enough to push the station into a almost perfect 100km-100km orbit - vs the 152km -51km orbit it was in. Bit of a shock, ill make sure in the future to check in on K.G.01 while doing other stuff. Just to be sure the bugs have not moved the station into a decaying orbit. B. Large size Helium tank enroute to the mun. The large helium tanks were flown to K.G.02 empty to make installment and ferrying easier. In the beginning i had planned on moving 4 fuel canisters to K.G.02 on the new tug arrey for the heavy drone - but I found that the 2nd stage had enough fuel to make it to K.G.02 and decided to take a gamle on my skills in managing vehicles around a body. After getting two tanks into a rendezvous orbit around the Mun, I decided to send the last 6 in rapid succession: all the tanks enroute to the Mun or on intercept paths with K.G.02 I was lucky, by chance 5 of the tanks lined up to a perfect transfer window with K.G.02. Within a time span of 2ish h the 5 tanks would arrive at K.G.02 - I decided the way I would do it was to park the 5 tanks next to K.G.02 within a 150m and then have the next tank perform its link up. It was a success, the tightest window was around 4 min. I had to make a time table to the maneuver nodes - to make sure I didn't timewarp past a maneuver node. - D: 9 and 13 didnt hit the same path as 16, 27, 31 and 44 - so didn't hit the transfer window and therefor just had to match Inclination. D: 7 was already on a Lunar orbit, and had a rendezvous opportunity. D: 11 was the second fuel tank already in lunar orbit, and matched inclination but did not have a opportunity to rendezvous and needed a few more tours around the mun. It was all a success and the 5 tanks were installed - a few more orbits around the Mun ment that the 3 last tanks did manage to get docked before the methalox tanks were arriving at K.G.02 - even though at the time, the Tug Drone with the fuel tanks had entered a lunar orbit and was just waiting for the rendezvous to occur. The installation was a success, although I have discovered that K.G.02 has a weakness in its solar sail array - the bug that sometimes makes structure "vibrate" will at times break solar panels off - which caused me to perform the same docking a few times, as I had noticed that a panel had tore off and I had to load a previous save. Full Walkthrough of the assembly process with pictures will be in the spoiler section bellow: C. New Large Tug drone in orbit above Kerbin, with medium tug drone docked and 4 fully fueled methalox tanks on the new fuel tank mount. I decided to add an extra fuel tank to the Heavy Tug drone - when i discovered the old one only had enough fuel to get to Lunar orbit, not a tour re-tour. Boosting the fuel ammount also ment the vehicle would be able to move 4 tanks and 32t of fuel in one go. I was a bit worried about how much the 4 arms would bend and stress under acceleration - since its a push design and not a pull I was worried the tanks would snap off or shake enough to bring the vehicle out of course - But as you can see here: They hardly moved. The vehicle has a very gentle speed - taking almost 2 full minuts to get into a lunar insertion orbit. I managed to get the vehicle into lunar orbit, rendezvous with K.G.02 and install the 4 fuel tanks - Make a kerbin insertion orbit, but alas here the mission "failed". The vehicle ran out of fuel on a low kerbin orbit unable to fix inclination to K.G.01. How ever - I do not see any needs to redesign the vehicle to have more Δv - I decided to assemble the vehicle on a mirror orbit of K.G.01 - to have better frame rate to do so. Which meant the vehicle had to do 2 great inclination correction burns - One at the Mun: on 17.2° and another at Kerbin on 10° - I feel if I get both stations to a 0° inclination to the bodies they orbit I will have fuel enough to do a tour-retour with 32t fuel. If not - having it in a LKO means the methalox glider should be able to service it to get the fuel needed to get back to K.G.01 without needing to take from the fuel it delivered to K.G.02 The heavy tug back in a LKO - empty of fuel after a otherwise Mission Success. And the orbit the tug ended at. Full Walkthrough of the assembly process with pictures will be in the spoiler section bellow: Moving Forward: Next step - before I can fly the 4 next Methalox tanks to K.G.02 is going to refueling of K.G.01. Stay Tuned for More!

well - you will never run out of monopropellant i guess xD - But its always like this aint it? you think your done.. and then you find a new way to optimize. yeah i really like the look of the Aerospikes.. I wish we had a bigger one too - maybe modelled after the Venturestars aerospike? Its a bit funny - I found that the countdown in the previous version of KSP2 was better.. The "new" count down... I alway miss time. My brain just wants to turn the engines on when all dots turn green.. but yeah I can never seem to get the burn time fit with the "line" - maybe its also because its really bad at figuring out how much Δv there is actually in the craft? and therefor how much is needed? Anyway.. I find myself i use the maneuver node to see when and where I should burn. You can make a planned burn that will bring you into the orbit of the mun - and then just drag it along your orbit until you get a transfer... At that point I usually just burn. and only use the maneuver node as a guideline to see how much im off. Its interesting.. I've had to eyeball it a lot more around the Mun - it seems very "broken" in the low gravity. Luckily a mistake is not as punishing there.. since you can practically make maneuvers with your RCS thrusters alone x) I wonder what the crew must be thinking when they know that behind the walls of the - presumed - tight corridor they walk through is full of fuel xD It somehow reminds me when I was deployed to Iraq in 2019 - and the C-17 Globemaster we were flying in had missile tubes on the flatbed, and then us sitting on the seats of the wall. Which ment you could use the missile tubes as a "foot rest" - It was a bizarre experience. Im sure it was perfectly safe though - the flight crew knew what they were doing. Still bizarre though, sitting next to explosives and a rocket engine xD - the chrome metal parts does look really good though. Well - Enjoy your break! I still have a station to finish.. and two stations to refuel... Luckily I enjoy flying the gliders.. But yeah - running the risk of getting "burned out" building these behemoths x) - You talked a lot about some small tweaks and fixes - I look forward to see what comes of them.

I have 5/8 tanks that will do rendezvous with the station, spanning 3h19 min from first to last arrival.. and my plan is to park each stage next to K.G.02 with a 0 relative velocity until the last stage has arrived before starting the docking - at least that's the idea i have if you get me xD But yeah... with the methalox tanks i decided to dock them to my new large tug drone and move them like that - also providing a chance to test the new large tug drone. The bigger K.G02 tanks just didn't fit on the mount. But yeah... exciting times indeed.

yeah... until they make the fuel lines remember where they were supposed to go I would not bother with it. You can see here in my bug report what it was supposed to look like vs what it looks like xD - also an early version of K.G.01 But yeah... Also the fact that there are less parts help on optimization right? xD I hope to come with an update soon - its going to be a pretty big one... I decided to send up all the hydrogen tanks and half the methalox tanks in one go... So... It involves quite a few steps before its post-able. Any way - by next week im done with my exams which should free up time for KSP2

Your way of using the cargo bay doors and lights never seizes to amaze me. It looks really good! Also damn.. fully animated gifs now... I have tried to record gifs myself with my screen capture tool - but it keeps failing the upload because they are too big. Your blog design is really looking good now. How do you get the images and text to fit so snugly? looks like something that is tedious and takes a lot of time x) It was very "fun" to hear about your troubles of electric charge etc. I too in the past have had issues with test vehicles who ran out of charge.. I had a few of my gliders in the past run out of charge while waiting for a good line up to KSC - the internal batteries are just not that good... where i had to spend my precious Δv on burning in a random direction to get enough charge to point prograde and do the de-orbit burn with the now tiny amount of left over Δv xD I always find i either design a vehicle with too much electric charge.. or to little.. never seem to hit the sweet spot. Any way... It worries me a little that you had such bad luck with your multiple launches. Because.. this is where i am at right now: Yes this is the 8 hydrogen tanks enroute to K.G.02 This is the 8 tanks now in lunar orbit.. and this is me desperately making sure vehicles dont miss their maneuver nodes. Any way.. As always looks good! Looking forward to the next update.

That is also a really cool Idea, something I plan on doing to - I thought of going full "The Martian" and send the landers to the mission ahead of schedule autonomous and then send the crew there later with a simple lancer they ditch or something. Just for immersion.

its a really nice looking design using two moon landers as the crew compartment with the view ports. I also really like your big tug drone. It has a pretty nice design. Very big! It must be able to move things around rather easily. also i have to commend you on the layout with images and all. albeit it works best on a full screen browser on a pc x)

Thats interesting. So the game take it very litteral when you leave the SOI xD

//////////////////////Mission Update\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ Solar panel array ready for launch. Foreword: Small mission update - I managed to install the 3 solar panel arrays to the station. I could not find a elegant solution to get them up to K.G.02 that didn't involve shipping one at the time.. So I made my most KSP rocket to date. It felt very wrong to send the arrays into space like this x) - But it worked. Mission Tasks: A. Get solar panel array into space - Success B. Get array to K.G.02 and install them. - Success Lessons Learned; leasons Identified: A. Here a view from the front. The rocket obviously had some stability issues, but managed to get it into orbit by using a very inefficient high ark into the thin atmosphere and then burn sideways. Image slide show in spoiler section: B. The solar arrays installed and deployed. It is a bit overkill - but I like to think of them as a Sunshade, shielding the fuel cans. At the Mun it was pretty straight forward. I had fastened the arrays to the second stage with struts and used a decoupler to release it. The small drones fitted snugly between the two giga solar arrays and with a drone connected to both ends there were a good amount of controle. Something had gone wrong in the alterations though, From the first sneak peak and to now, there is a larger distance between the 3 struts than originally planned. Where they were pretty close to each other. - I wont bother fix it though Image slide show in spoiler section: We'll see when i have time for another update - Stay tuned for more!

Yeah, that i knew. The problem was i didn't know there was a difference between Mm and mm. I though Mm was just a typo and it meant millimeters... but I got more clever. Also the KSP wiki made the comnet component seem more advanced than what KSP2 showed. Which was why i asked to it. In the end I found out it was a bug that had caused the comnet to go offline, not a lack of satelites x) so I thought the system was more advanced than it was.. and that i lost comnet because my second stage decoupled outside the main dish range on KSC. I kind of think it would be cool if you had to make a relay network from KSC to LKO for communication to work.. maybe it will be so? as of now the whole comnet thing seems disabled. I was going to test all the antennas were working as relay antennas.. but when i flew to the dark side of the mun my drone still had connection to KSC - so it seems to me they resolved the Comnet bug by turning off the comnet requirement.? Any way.. long story short - the question was a result of a mix between misunderstanding a bug to be a feature.

I dont think i have two wayfarer modules on K.G.01 - but besides that it seems pretty close xD

@schlosrat That is some quality recommendations! - I will definitely look into your suggestions at a time were i have more free time at hand x) Oh dont get me wrong I for sure can see the application of the unit... I just thought it was silly that "mm" and "Mm" is so similar.. It begs for mistakes to be made. Even if common sense should prohibit it.

So maybe the ideal place to go once the colony feature goes life?

Oh no... *Sad Noises*

You can kind of see the setup here: There are 2 large reaction wheels, 1 large battery and then it has 8 of those small solar panels on the main body of the methalox assembly - this is a "dumb" module though - the drone part is on the crew compartment and I think that has a battery too. It does not provide a lot of power, but it does not make a lot of movement as of now. So it is enough to keep it recharged. That and both the tug drones have solar panels as well. I have not had it run out of battery... but I also find that its not in the dark very often. Once the big Hydrogen tanks has been installed I'll install the big solar panel screens I teased on the VIP image of the station. - I just didnt want to work in the shade. Now the docking tower for refueling has been installed, which has 4 big projectors that can illuminate the shadow part of the station, I could technically install the big solar panels... but I don't want them to get in the way of the hydrogen tanks ^^ I shall try remember this! Also, thanks for the kind words of the "odd bits" 2nd stage. Although I think I found if I should build this again in the future. I would need to redesign the 2nd stage, so it holds less cargo.. but does not invite the kraken... Or - Jettison the two inner most arms and catch them so the drone doesn't need to clip into the wall. Any way... its assembled now.. So i guess its a problem for a future.. if I ever go about making a 8 shape docking assembly again. We'll see x)

I know what you mean - Yeah I got the feeling that new readers would start to find it overwhelming to start read it.. call me selfish, but I'd like for as many as possible to read about my journey and shower me with praise xD - Jokes aside... It seemed like the right thing to do to go through it all and add headlines and a table of contents. //////////////////////Mission Update\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ K.G.02 Superstructure fully assembled. Forword: FYI I probably wont update with the same cadence as before, I am in the middle of a big school assignment that need my full attention. So I only play KSP when my brain is completely fried and cant do proper work any way - then I "relax" with KSP.. I say "relax" because lets be honest.. we the KSP players probably spend quite a bit of brain power on theory crafting, testing, mathing etc. So.. it aint always I have the brain juice to fight KSP2 as well. Any way, this update has been on its way for a while. I decided to wait with an update until a major step had been achieved, and having the basic super structure of K.G.02 done seemed like a good point. Mission Tasks: A. Install second half of the Methalox assembly. B. Install first half of the docking cones for crewed flight. C. Install second half of the docking cones for crewed flight. D. Install the docking tower for refueling crafts. Lessons Learned; Lessons Identified: A. ´Methalox Assembly fully assembled and ready for taking the fuel tanks. I don't know if this is Kraken striking, or my design for the 2nd stage carrier. Probably a bit of both. But I had some issues with this part and my small drones. They could only just fit within the walls of the cargo hold, and that being said.. maybe their monopropellant tanks clipped a tiny bit into the wall? That, together with the fact that I had a lot of bugs were once undocked, the part would not really undock. Which I usually resolve with a Quick Save/Quick Load. How ever, with the closeness of the parts, together with the fact that the save doesn't seem to save the precise speeds and orientation. It meant that every second quick load would result in a total vehicle loss... Or the drone being stuck inside the wall of the cargo hold and flipping about, tearing itself a part. BUT! If i quick saved quickly before the craft would flip itself apart... and then quick loaded the part was free, and could move. But the drones parts would start shift about, and for every time this happened.. the drone would move a little less predictable. To the point were it got almost impossible to finish the assembly. So once the docking assembly for the methalox tanks were done, I decided to load the two bend out of shape drones to the assembly carrier and crash them all into the surface of the moon... and bring up new un bugged drones up. The obvious fix to this is to lower the cargohold so it runs flush with the docking ports - meaning no clipping into the walls picking up the parts. How ever - this would mean 3 launches instead of 2 - as you would fly up the struts in two launches and then the cones in 1. Spoiler section is a detailed walkthrough of the build process: B. The docking cones for docking crewed crafts to K.G.02 - these will hold emergency pods and the M.L.E.O vehicles, as well as other possible future vehicles. Installation of the docking ports were pretty straight forward. They did not have any monopropellant, which meant the way I ended up navigating them was: drag them 1 axis until center mass-ish lined up with target. kill all relative speed turn of RCS with SAS turn the port to be pointed to target. Push with RCS and turn it off rotate with SAS and point at target to be sure it will be installed proper and then just wait. If it drifts, turn on RCS do quick adjustments. At this point I had returned the Large Tug drone to K.G.01, which meant that every second cone had to be jettisoned and then catch by the drone - this was how ever not an issue. Spoiler section is a detailed walkthrough of the build process: C. Drone chasing the jettisoned docking cone Just as B. this was also pretty straight forward and K.G.02 got its second drone back with this launch. Spoiler section is a detailed walkthrough of the build process: D. Docking tower for refueling enroute to K.G.02 This part was rather cumbersome to move - I was contemplating using both drones on the side ports to give it more stability when installing.. but I tried navigating it with one drone, using the same technique of pulling, stopping, aligning, pushing as I did with the cones.. and although this demanded a bit more finesse it turned to be a alright solution. Spoiler section is a detailed walkthrough of the build process: Moving Forward: So, when flying the big Tug Drone back towards K.G.01 I realized I only had enough Δv to get back to Kerbin orbit. Not enough to do the rendezvous and or fix the inclination issues - So i crashed it into Kerbin instead. Now It will probably have enough Δv to do a tour re-tour if/when I fix both K.G.01 and 02 inclination around their respective bodies - But I'd like to have a bigger margin. So I redesigned the big Tug Drone. The plus side is it now can ferry 4 tanks instead of 2 - meaning refueling K.G.02 a lot easier process... Aaand I wont be having to use K.G.02s precious methalox to get back - meaning it can be reserved for operations around the Mun. I also had time to fiddle with a possible escape vehicle design. In the beginning i tried to add a detachable break engine for the glider emergency vehicle for K.G.01... but it was big and cumbersome so i ditched that. It looks like this as of now: Deployed Undeployed. It may just become my standard vehicle for going to and from the Mun - it has the Δv for it - it also comes with parachutes and a heat shield.. so it can make for a safe landing on Kerbin as well. Enjoy! And Stay Tuned for More