BechMeister

Thank you for taking your time to leave a reply @Jantee I am glad I could inspire and my mistakes etc. Could help you with your own projects ^^

interesting. I've had no issues on my Minmus mission.. and that was crashing my game left and right.. because I dont know when to stop putting parts, engines and docking ports xD

It seems to me that they have fixed all the bugs? The shielded and inline parts no longer break when load the game. Yeah - there are quite a few views.. but I wonder how many of them are just me looking and updating xD

I love the aerospike engine too.. I had a lot of early designs where that was the only engine i used xD But i found out it was easier to balance the craft with other engines. I have no experience with Eve. Im a KSP noob, only just leaving Kerbin SOI - so dont take my advice too seriously. See it more as me thinking out loud

The legs were because I anticiapte that I might land on a uneven surface, and I dont want it to tumble over x) But anyway.. that rover chase sounds like something worthy of Mad Max xD We'll see.. first things first. I am going to make a lot of smaller missions before sending Kerbals to Duna - Im doing the Duna Mastery Challenge atm

Ah yes... for some reason my VAB wont tell me anything, just say 0 to everything.. so I have gotten the habit of testing vehicles with the cheat tool now.. To see what Δv levels I have on the different stages.. So.. thats why the angle is extreme. I tried to "simulate" coming directly from Kerbin to Duna. I just wanted to see if it could handle the worst? if that makes sense. But im only going to do my second tour to Duna now.. doing it efficient is a lot harder than I thought it would be

Man I cant stop thinking about the forces of compression or stretch that 90° bend will have to survive xD Cool plane though. But that's a lot of aerospikes.. is that the best engine for this craft? I often think that adding multiple aerospikes add a lot of mass and makes the plane hard to balance out.

Okay thx. I only have one docking port though. Thats the one on the nose of the capsule

I had this tiny lander craft I was landing on Duna. It consist of 3 stages - 1 stage for landing (stage 0) and 2 stages to get into space. When I re-enter through Dunas atmosphere the internal modules take heat damage - I cannot understand why. The lander looks like this: As you can see the Terrier engine is taking heat even if its fully obscured by the heatshield. Is it because I have landing legs sticking out of the side that can transfer heat to the body of the craft? is it because I stuck tiny engines out of the heatshield that can transfer heat? - or is it just a bug? thx in advance.

Great! @OJT I was considering making a post about my process in the "Mission Repport" section. Where I can go more into detail about my successes and failures. but I wanted to ask permission first, since I could understand if it would be considered "bad taste" - because it would "split attention" from the actual challenge. I just want to keep my posts in here to the point. Compared to the more detailed format I use in my mission reports

MISSION_UPDATE - DESTINATION MINMUS - ICV - Explorer performing circulation burn around Minmus. Foreword: I have encountered quite a few glitches I need to make the appropriate bug reports for, while doing this mission. It's been truly interesting seeing some of the bizar glitches that comes from the game when it's under this much pressure. I think I spend close to an hour terminating the game and rebooting it - or quick loading a save. trying to get a single inclination correction done. Getting the ship to Minmus took a lot of time. Once the drop ship separated from the main craft and started their decent, the frame rate improved a lot and the glitches got manageable . Minmus is a interesting body to land on. The gravity is so weak that I actually thinks in some way it gives a false sense of confidence. It was utterly easy to land things close to each other etc. The question is if I would have been able to do the same precision on a mission to The Mun.. or other atmosphere free bodies around Kerbol. Which moon has the strongest gravity in the Kerbol System? Any way - after countless quick saves and loads - I managed to get the base set up on Minmus. Enjoy the following rundown: MISSION TASKS: A. Get the ICV into a Minmus Orbit at ~20km altitude - Success B. Undock the dropships and land the base modules at a suitable flat terrain - Success C. Assemble base - Success D. Get the Dropships into a MLO (minmus Low Orbit), rendez-vous with ICV - Explorer and dock - Success E. Land 2/3 Crew shuttles at base and get it operational. - Success Lessons Learned; Lessons Identified: A. ICV - Explorer performing capture burn to Minmus. First things first - I've named the ship ICV (Inter Celestial Vehicle) Explorer. And then to the lessons learned. This was the hardest part on my pc. I quickly found out there was a rhythm to how to play to keep the Kraken at bay. For some reason, when I went to map mode to plan the node, the vehicle would start to warp while I didn't look at it and eventually blow up. It took a while to figure what happened, and the only solution was bursts of Time Warp to stop the glitching. I later found out that in general once I loaded in the vehicle, it would start ocellate until the point were it did truly weird things. It meant that I had to start every load in with a 3x time warp to make sure it would remain stable - before doing anything else. See spoiler for glitches: Besides the glitches the operation went without incident. For detailed task walkthrough see spoiler section bellow: B. The four dropships has detached the ICV and are performing their deorbit burn to land at one of the flat ice plains of the tiny moon. To avoid having to perform inclination burns and wait 1 orbital period pr. launch I tried to de-orbit and land all 4 crafts together. Building K.G.02 I have gotten quite the experience juggling multiple vehicles flying in tandem at the same time. How ever - I did not anticipate the issue of the game despawning the un active vehicles as they get closer to the ground. I had timing the burns to space them out with about 1km between them in altitude, to give me time to give them seperate landing maneuvers. But once they started to get close to the ground. they would just despawn. A picture of the spaced de orbit burns of the 4 drop ship - notice that the ICV at this point has yet to enter its circular 20km orbit. So even if it made a lot of sense (especially with how easy it is not to crash into Minmus) I had to do it the "long way." Meaning individual launches. Bit of a tangent: Because the ICV was so heavy on my system.(or at least I think that the reason) It meant that I had a lot of trouble "leaving" the vehicle. If I pressed escape and loaded into KSC or the Tracking Station I would still have the navball and ICV loaded. Even if I took control of another vehicle I would not lose control of the ICV.. If i tried to load into the VAB the game would crash... And I really wanted to load KSC so I could take advantage of more then 3x speed. In the end the method to escape the ICV was to load another craft. Like the little rovers Ive placed around KSC as "aiming markers" . Then I could go into the VAB without the gaming crashing... and once in the VAB, The ICV would finaly have losned its tight grip on the controls. And finally I could timewarp at 6x or 7x speed and get the craft around the little moon in quick fashion. Then It was just a matter of undocking, correct inclination and land. Since the vehicles were made to be able to land on The Mun - they had plenty of fuel to do expensive maneuvers around the weak gravity of the tiny moon. For detailed task rundown - See spoiler section bellow: C. Base Camp One being assembled on the a Ice Plane of Minmus. Okay - I picked the dark icefields because they would provide a really flat terrain, which I think is really nice for the base modules - as they will on leveled ground. But I dont know if its because of the body's low gravity.. or they really do simulate low tracktion of ice.. because getting the base modules into position felt like trying to push an elephant on ice skates into position. First things first though... I had to kill all reaction control torque. as the first module was about do flips from pure torque. (man the gravity on this moon is weak!) After that It was really just a question of Slow is smooth - Smooth is fast. Keep the speeds low and assemble the modules. I decided to assemble them a few 100m from each drop ship to avoid them being sprayed by ice and exhaust gasses on take off. (roleplaying) This step was pretty straight forward - once I had found that the surface was slippery, and taken the right precautions, it was "smooth sailing." See detailed task walkthrough bellow: D. Dropship 3/4 re docking with ICV - Explorer after end mission. The fact I had to do the dropship launches in 4 go's - which meant 4 orbits - meant that Base Camp One was seeing the sun set. Instead of doing night landings I decided it was better to just relaunch the dropships and dock back with the ICV while the base was on the night side of the moon. It turned out to be a good choice, as I just about managed to dock the last dropship as the second sun dawned on the newly assembled base. Because the moon had rotated so much, and I burned the dropships 90° east, It meant that the orbit of the ICV and Dropships had 20° to correct. Instead of having the dropships doing it all by themselves. I decided to spend some helium meeting the dropships halfway as seen here: I think it is super annoying that we cannot find the body we orbit's 0° inclination to the equator. But this was close enough. This maneuver also ensured that the dropships would not need to perform too insane inclination corrections to line up with the base again - which is further "south" than at the equator. Speaking of annoying. I found that I cannot timewarp near the base. If I timewarp the base will simply fall through the ground and be swallowed hole by the tiny moon. - So all maneuvers has to be done real time until I am far enough away from the base, that it is no longer being simulated. Once In space and in the right orbit to intercept the ICV I just had to wait.. How ever, when ever I wanted to time warp faster than 5x (if there were no mountains) or faster than 3x(when there were mountains) at 3 fps - I had to do the Tracking Station>Control another vehicle> VAB > Tracking station - look at minmus and then do the time warp maneuver. Any way I parked all the dropships as pearls on a necklace in a 10km orbit - catching up to the ICV. Once bellow I burned prograde for a rendezvous and docked. It matched up with each ship docking as the next ship was ready to perform its prograde burn to rendezvous. The docking went without incident. The fact that they had dropped their load and parts count significantly meant a surprisingly 3 fps and less glitches - compared to the 1 fps and constant glitches. It was a nice change of pace. The dropships on lower orbit to intercept ICV - Explorer For detailed task rundown see spoiler bellow: E. Crew Shuttle 01 - detaching from the ICV - enroute to Base Camp One. Landing 2/3 crew shuttles at the base - with the complement of 10 kerbalnauts was an easy task. The vehicles has been designed to be able to land and take off on The Mun from 10km altitude with a ~100Δv to spare. This means that they are ridiculously overpowered for Minmus. And since all weight shaved off now is more Δv for the tour home, I was very sloppy with my maneuvers - I did not save on the Δv - which means I could break off all speed at 8km altitude and just drop and control my decent straight down to the base. I wanted to land close, but not so close that the kick up of dust would be "damaging." - not that it matter.. but for roleplaying . The 10 kerbalnauts who will crew this base for the time being, holding a little ceremony at the flagpole In front of the C.C.C. building, I'm sure they had a few bottles of champaign afterwards. 3 crew members stay to crew the ICV - keeping a Comms link up between Base Camp One and KSC - They can pick up situation reports when flying over, and relay to kerbin, when the base is on the far side of the moon. 3 men means an 8h shift each, and enough company that I dont hope they will go nuts together. The last crew shuttle is their emergency vehicle - in case of accidents - they can evacuate to Minmus This part of the mission went smooth and without incidents (besides the ones that were already mentioned about timewarp etc.) For detailed task run down - see spoiler section bellow. Moving Foreward: From here on it's just a matter of testing the rover. I noticed when reloading and loading in the moon - that I saw glimpse of ancient statues - or something. I'm going to see if I can find them with my little rover. That being said.. even though the moon is little. It still takes quite some time to drive across it.. especially with how slippery the surface is. But a an excursion has to be made, before the ICV turns tack to LKO to finish the last step of the mission - proving I designed the craft so it could also return home after deploying the base. Base Camp One in all its glory. Stay Tuned For More

Imagine the force on those heat shields Nice mission. I have yet to go to Eve. With all the things I've heard I dread going there. How and when did the fuel tank vessel arrive?

I am very happy the effort is appreciated. It is probably no secret that it quickly end up taking a while to write each blog entry x) Thank you! It took quite a few different iterations to get it to "look right" - especially because it had to fit within the XL cargo bay... I wish it was one single item too - My pc is absolutely struggling with this mission xD But more on that bellow. MISSION_UPDATE: Minmus Mission Ship assembled and ready for the next leg of this mission. Foreword: This mission is really pushing my PC to the limit. I did not design any vehicle here with performance in mind. I indulged myself a lot in this mission... and my game is pushed to the limit. I've experienced more crashes than ever, and the game just starting to glitch out, probably from being unable to computate whats going on. The last part of this Mission Update was docking the two last crew shuttles to the main ship. It took 2 attempts as one of the docking glitched up by me doing time warp, and going out of time warp within the docking margins. The ship bugged out and docked in a "wrong" state and broke the ship.. I had to reload. in the end docking 2 vehicles less than 200m away from the ship took me 2h and 24min at on average 2 fps I foresee that the undocking and landing of the dropships on Minmus will cause trouble. I have come to the conclusion that It will probably be best to circular the orbit around Minmus at a planned 10km altitude. Then I'll detach the main engine and park it in a higher orbit. Removing a lot of parts that needs simulating. Then I hope that the dropships without the base in their cargo hold will give me a less glitchy 3 fps when I have to go back to Kerbin. We'll see. Without further ado, here are the mission objectives: MISSION TASKS: A. Get the Nuclear Space Tug into LKO. - Success B. Get the Crew Ship into LKO and dock with the Space Tug. - Success C. Get the dropships with Base Modules into LKO and dock with the crew ship - Success D. Get the 3 Crew Shuttles into a LKO and dock with the Crew Ship - Success Lessons Learned; Lessons Identified: A. Space Tug enroute to LKO. I do in general not like to fly "impossible" rockets into space. But I was afraid that If i build this in 5 pieces (as would be possible) - that the connections would either glitch out - or the added complexity would have been the final nail in the missions coffin. While I did go into full self-indulgence mode with this mission - I was also aware enough to know that this mission would be tough on my hardware, to launch this in one piece. Getting the rocket into LKO was not too difficult. The craft is stupidly overpowered when unloaded. that being said, I wanted to save fuel. I strapped 4 huge solid rocket boosters on it and got it into the vacuum no issues. Also the fuel tanks did survive the rapid ascension - I did not have to untoggle heat mechanics on this part of the mission. That came later - when I realized that farings does not shield the cargo from heat (which is annoying to say the least) See Detailed walkthrough of this leg in the spoiler section bellow: B. The tug doing final maneuvers before docking with the Crew Ship. Getting the crew ship into space proved to be more complicated than I had anticipated. The Idea was pretty straight forward - I just connected 4 L tanks with L docking ports to the crew ships. 2 with a engine optimized for atmospheric flight, which would be dumped once through the atmosphere. The second two were fitted with engines optimized for vacuum flight and would push the craft into orbit, to then deorbit themselves after stage separation. Easy enough you may think. How ever I found out that the ship did not have its center of mass and drag running through the center. Even though I did all in my power to get the angle of everything to be perfectly symmetrical - It isn't.. and therefore its not in perfect balance. It got into LKO with quite the inclination error something like 6° - unfortunately not in the same axis as Minmus - SO.. I have quite the inclination to correct in the future. It would probably have been smarter to get the ship into the correct inclination from the start - where it was less massious - but I did only think of that now. I should have a lot of Δv though, as I did my calculations fully loaded, and when the ship returns from Minmus, it will be significantly lighter. See Detailed walkthrough of this leg in the spoiler section bellow: C. The Dropships enroute to the Crew Ship. When ULA launched their Vulcan rocket - I read that they in the future think about making the engines re-usable by de-orbiting them on a inflatable heatshield that would also work as a float. The tank, which can be of a simple construction, would then burn up in the atmosphere. I decided I wanted to make a launch vehicle for the dropships and mission modules that copied that aspect. 2 problems makes it more of a hassle than it was worth... Problem 1: Make it fly straight: Engines are heavy - so its hard to get it to fly nose down. The 1st stage engine section will survive easily though - it does not reenter at to high a speed. And even if it does not follow the prograde down perfectly, its good enough: The 1st stage engine section re-entering As you can see from the screenshot it will re-enter and hold a AoA of ~15° - Its enough to protect the engines on the way down. But the 2nd stage section is a lot harder case. Even though it only has 3 engines instead of 6, it re-enters with about 500 Δv in its front tank AND has 6 grid fins instead of 4 - it will still only re-enter at an AoA 90° - It makes it quite hot.. but.. it will survive. I have contemplated to ditch the saving of the 2nd stage... I can't figure how to make it re-enter correct. Second stage re-entering. Notice that even with 6 grid fins it still tumbles once it reaches the thicker parts of the atmosphere. Problem 2: decouplers and fuel transfers: When you place a decoupler - which I have to do to be able to decouple the two parts and have room for the inflatable heatshields between two fuel tanks - they do not transfer fuel. I tried to connect them with fuel lines to bypass the decoupler. But it did not work. - I guess I could try make it work with docking ports? but then I can't figure how to attach the heatshield. Any way This means that I have to place a fuel tank on the engine section I can transfer fuel to while it flies up. Unfortunately you can't just set it to transfer fuel and it will keep doing it. It only ever transfers the amount of fuel that was missing in the tank when you started the transfer. This means that you need to pick a tank that is big enough that you can do the transfer cycle before it running dry. For my case it meant that I would be transferring fuel from a S4-25600 to a S4-6400 as seen here: The fact you have to do this for the novelty of being able to recover the engines vulcan style is NOT worth the extra hassle.. I guess i'm a masochist - because I went through with it - both in the design phase of the rocket. as well as the subsequent 5 launches to get the modules into space. In the end the 4 drop ships were successfully docked to the ship. Glitches: I do not have any images of it - but while docking the last of the 4 dropships. It would start to act like Anti-matter meeting matter when ever it got close to either of the 3 other docked dropships (notice i said got close, not touch). It would make this weird glitch were the XL cargo holds would just disappear and then the base modules within them would explode. I had to dock it at a off angle, So it would dock without getting to close and make the annihilation sequence. I then hoped that it would just snatch it into place... Which it did. It gives me a little worry on what will happen when I have to undock them again... But we'll see how that goes in the next update. Disable heat mechanics: It was also necessary to disable heat mechanics as the faring did not propper shield the dropships coming up - the large docking port would break from the heat getting into space... Annoying, but it is what it is. At least we can disable it on vehicles that uses farings. See Detailed walkthrough of this leg in the spoiler section bellow: D. The crew shuttles enroute to the ship. This part went really smooth except for the fact that my frame rate is crawling to a halt when I get near the ship now: As you can see my PC is absolutely tanking it. - It means it takes quite a while to get anything done.. and you have to be patient.. because interesting things can happen while in time warp. But it mostly went like this: I would pause the game - get 15 fps which made it possible to pick my camera angles, what part of the ship I wanted to control from - as the easiest way to get the ship to point in a direction was to say "control from here" and "point at target" - manual control at 0-2 fps is not feasible. - then I would unpause, do the RCS thrust maneuvers - rins and repeat. Moving Forward: The Spaceship has been assembled, crewed and is ready for the mission to Minmus. Because the game has a tendency to place blind passengers on ships that was not indented to be there - and I was not always good enough to check if a Kerbel had snug onboard when reverting launches.. the crew of this mission has become quite extensive: This is the crew that will go on this bold mission and set up permanent presence of Kerbals on Minmus. Any way - Stay tuned for the next leg: Destination Minmus.

That explains why I have yet to encounter it - Since I have only had 1 probe leave Kerbin SOI. And that one had a huge antenna just for looks x) I hope they will add a better CommNet system. It sounds like that the way its implemented now it might as well not have been there.

I'm advertising here: My next Mission Blog is up!

An Overengineered Mission to Minmus The Little Base™ - being tested on the runway at KSC. Foreword: After finishing my Mun - Kerbin connection I decided the next logical step was a mission to Minmus (getting Kerbin SOI squared off). In the beginning I thought it was going to be something pretty insignificant.. How ever.. What started with a rover and a "dropship", has now evolved into an over the top, over engineered base building mission. The documentation for the whole affair started to outgrow what was feasible to post. So I figured I would just start "blogging" now. Hopefully this will be a much shorter endeavour than the K.G.01 and 02 saga. Mission Planning: A. Design the base elements: A container housing unit (C.H.U.) A Generator for powering the base and rovers. A Command and Control Center (C.C.C.) A Rover Capable of exploring Minmus in detail. B. Design a dropship that can land elements of the base: C. Design a Crew Shuttle for the Kerbalnauts. D. Design a Vehicle that can "Carry" the mission elements from LKO to Minmus. A. Designing The Base Elements: When I designed all the different Base Modules I decided to give them all little rover wheels and "landing legs" - first of all to be able to cushion the drop from the cargo hold of the drop ship. Second to be able to dock the parts with each other, as well as eliminate any terrain differences that would flip them around. They are also all supplied with a little bit of Δv (except the generator which has quite a bit) for being able to "fly up" and catch the docking port in the belly of the dropship again - in case the base has to be moved. I've spend quite a few hours designing these little modules - I actually think it is very hard to make good looking base modules. But I think I somewhat succeeded... and the ones that are "ugly" are "ugly" in a cool way. (Talking about the CHU unit here) 1. Container Housing Unit: 2. Generator Power Unit (G.P.U.): 3. Command and Control Center (C.C.C.) 4. Mobile Lab and Rover: B. Designing a Dropship: Designing the dropship was actually the first element I went for. I recall seeing and very old KSP video where the player played on the real universe and made a long mission to Titan. He had 4 tubes connected to his space ship that housed the base modules etc. and I thought that was a brilliant way to use the stock cylindrical cargo bays. - I wish we had XL rounded box cargo bays - mostly because the circle is hard to fit base modules in. As you can see it's quite the drop for the rover... If we had parts that could crain them down etc. that would be nice. As you can see the ship is a tube with a separated cargohold - and two engine compartments that hold the fuel and landing legs. On its front it has a large CC375-D Docking port and on the back it has 4x 48-7s "Spark" engines -giving it 1618 Δv in a vacuum. These engines are meant to do a de-orbit burn. I also see a possibility of the carrier to perform the de-orbit burn. unload the dropship and boost back into orbit. Just to help the drop ship preserve Δv. For landing it uses 2x LV-909 "Terrier" giving it 1211 Δv on a full tank. Its a pretty versatile design. that can also work as a vehicle garage for rovers: Here is a better view of the interior - with floodlights and all. Now I'll be able to land all elements with out abrasive lunar dust getting kicked everywhere - and the modules can be shielded on the journey to and from the base destination. All elements are autonomous ofcourse - I see this landing by itself and base assembling by itself, and then the crew lands afterwards. C. Design Crew Shuttle: As you can see its literally just the rover design, but with legs instead of wheels and more Δv. It holds 3 Kerbals and has enough Δv to land from a 10km Mun Orbit, and get itself back into a 10km Mun Orbit. I know because I tested it with the cheat mo... *cough cough* I tested it in "simulation" D. Design Modular Interplanetary Spaceship: Now... I could have done something sensible - and flying the 4 dropships separately to Minmus and land them ahead of sending Kerbals... But this is where I decided to go overboard and over design the mission. I build a crew ship with a 4 way split, that the dropships can dock to. It can hold the Kerbals as well as mission essential modules. I loaded the craft with 4x MK3 JFT-10000 weighing 50t each to simulate the weight of the 4 fully loaded drop ships. Then I loaded it with 3x Crew Shuttles. With 2x LV-SW "Swerv" and 50t Hydrogen it gives me 3239 Δv - which if i calculated the Δv map correct - should give me enough and then some, for a tour-retour to Minmus... Yes.. its a ridicules craft for just going to Minmus... The whole vehicle also weighs 387t I opted for a "Space Tug" because I think it ISVs in Avatar is the coolest Sci-fi spaceship every put to film... and I think it's so clever exploiting tensile strength vs old boring compression. That being said - I dont think KSP gives any advantage to designing pull systems - unless you want something with a lot of drag into space. Its bit of a shame.. as it can be quite difficult to design a tug that looks decent. The Tug: I wanted the Tug to be modular. I contemplated building it in 3 pieces: the long center piece with docking tower and tether., the main fuel tanks with reactors the Main engine section. The vehicle would then consist of 2 engine pieces and 2 reactor pieces. But as I don't think the game likes parts that has 2 or more connecting docking ports - I decided to design it so it looked modular.. but testing the double connecting docking ports... To me it feels weird that we dont have to put reactors on the ships when you have nuclear engines on it. I roleplay it - So I decided to put on reactors to the ship. Also now I won't need to put on solar panels - So that's cool. I kind of whish we could remove the cylindrical gitter around the 10t ball tanks - or if we could get smaller spheres tanks.. because I think the double sphere looks great! Engines are off set a bit - to not fry the spaceship. (too much) The Crew Section: I see the crew section as the first part of a modular interplanetary vehicle. It will be the vehicle section of the future spaceship bringing Kerbals to and from bodies outside the Kerbin SOI. I already designed a second section for the ship - a Methalox Fuel load - allowing me to refuel the landers when they come back to the ship looking like this: It is carrying my Standard 9t Methalox Tank - also used on my space stations K.G.01 and K.G.02. - It will not be used on this mission though. As all the vehicles have enough fuel for the mission within them. For future missions I would like to have two gravity rings attached in front of this - or between this and the methalox section. I tried to make a gravity ring myself using wheels and empty space between sections.. but even if there is empty space between the turning section and the shaft.. it still acts as if they are bolded together. So that will have to wait until the Dev Team gives us "things" that allow us to make spinny bits. Or they release that gravity wheel they have been showing burning up in their atmosphere demos. Another thing I really miss is some easier way to attach things at an angle.. Would you believe me how hard it was to make those ~45° angle bits and have them be "straight" again for the docking port sections. Any way - I got it done.. and center of mass.. is somewhat in the middle. Moving Forward: Next step is going to get all this into space! Stay Tuned for More! P.S. If there are to many images in this blog - please say so, or you will have to expect this level of detail moving forward.

Are you absolutely sure Ice? because so far they have not had it on the roadmap that they would implement a CommNet system. Early in the game there were a bug were when every you had a probe core do a stage it would lose commnet. They fixed that somehow... But when I wanted to test of bodies obscured the antenna it did not.. and I have flown multiple probes without any antennas on it. I think that the way they resolved the CommNet bug by just "turn it off" CommNet - I have not seen any discussions on the CommNet as of yet.. But you read my "blog".. so you must have read what I am talking about when I tested if antennas did anything? all this being said. I have not done any Science as of yet. So I dont know if its then antennas are required there. But I can't imagine if its in that it's done in a way they had it planned. At least I know that the first thing I would get once out of Alpha is a mod that makes it necessary to build a propper CommNet etc. But until we get the game closer to done and stable, im playing without mods to make the bug reports have less variables for the devs to crunch bugs

AFAIK the whole comms system has not been implemented in the game yet - it is only there for flare atm. I have been told that In KSP1 you have 2-3 types of antennas - transmitters, receivers and antennas that do both So - we have yet to see what they are going to do with the antennas.. but right now you dont need antennas for anything This I have been missing too YES! This could be interesting too.

You're words a very kind Sylvi - I feel though that the more this blog got "bloated", the more it required of the readers to read it, the less actually payed attention? Judging from the likes of different characters etc. It seems that some people followed a long the first half, and then was exchanged by other people on the second half.. It would be interesting if there were tools to check for readership. - you have had a special kind of stamina keeping along the entire journey xD I only really knew if people were into what I was blogging, when they left a comment or a like. I mean... IceGRX making a profile to comment is like the most flattering thing I've experienced yet. But I think It was good that I did this for myself first, and viewership second.. if that makes sense? Or Maybe this is just the good old "Janteloven" suppressing me taking in the compliments x) As a fellow Scandinavian I am sure you know how we tend to act around compliments hahah. Any way.. thank you for the kind words x) - and Dont worry I intend to make a new blog. I am currently doing the Duna Mastery Challenge that OTJ started a year ago or so. I wanted to make a blog about going about with that... Just so I can continue the highly detailed format there, and not bloat the challenge site... How ever, I dont want to steal viewers for the challenge, So I have asked OTJ if it is okay for me to make a blog about that before I start. - I am currently waiting for him to answer. We'll see when he tune in to the forum again. Also after this - I am taking a little KSP2 break. In the end, I was kind of forcing myself through it.. and every updated that created a setback was very demotivating. Redesigning the glider over and over, demanded some soul searching for it to remain fun. I do like crunching problems though. So figuring out to use the aero breaks as body flaps was nice. but the lead up to that was pure tedium. Any way.. I could rant for ever. Long story short - This is not the end of my blogging. If you dont follow me, I will advertise the next blog in this one once it goes live x)

So - I am doing the Duna Mastery challnge. 1 of the steps ist to put 3 rellay statelites in orbit around Duna. I thought it would be obvious to try make a Molniya Orbit. But I have had a hard time wrapping my head around how to make that most feasible. I think I came up with this theory: Send a satelite stack and put them into a circular orbit with 120° between them. have them all burn to a ~60° inclination Boost them into the elliptical path, one at the time.. Hoping it wont take to many orbits to get the right timing. Is this a feasible way? or is there a better way?

Do you set the target docking port to target at your crafts docking port and ask it to point at target? If the target is moving - your relative speed will be moving too. which will make the prograde ocolate. I often find that the best thing you can do is, make it point at target, then hit the lock so it stops correcting itself and then I just fly closer to the target with RCS thrusters - once I am in a better position I kill the relative speed, hit "point at target" and then lock and rins and repeat. I find that if SAS is on and you set the craft to point at target.. the fact that It uses the RCS to fix the aiming means it often spirals its self out of control. I made a guide myself at some point to a similar question... I can try see if I can find it?

1. Destination Duna My Probe arriving at Duna I was suggested doing this challenge 8 months, on June 7th 2023 by @GalileOh-No - I just had to finish my LKO - to MUN fuel station build. Which turned out to take quite a while. How ever, that being done, It was time to leave the Kerbin SOI. (Yes.. I have about 800h in KSP2 and I never left the SOI) If you guys dont mind, I would like to make a seperate Mission Report where I document my process? Just so I dont clutter this threat to much. Any way: Here is the semi detailed mission in a spoiler section: KSP2 v.0.2.1.0

MISSION_ACOMPLISHED The last Hydrogen glider on reentry after a succesful refueling mission to K.G.01 Foreword: I embarked on this journey, with 80h of gametime under my belt little over a year ago. At the time I had only achieved 3 visits to the Mun (1 planned mission, one rescue mission and a rescue mission for the rescue mission) and the construction of K.G.01v1. I really hated getting rockets through the atmosphere due to its soupy nature, amplified by spaghettiness of the rockets. So I thought it would be easier just build two space "gas stations" I could do interplanetary missions from - thus bypassing the atmosphere... With the first iteration of K.G.01 done I suspected K.G.02 would have been finished soon after...Little did I know how wrong I would be. Never would I have expected. That, 775 recorded hours in the game later, would be when I finished the project. I guess it's a small consolation that Its 775 hours at, at most 15 fps - and at the lowest 5 fps. Meaning that no, it's not really 775h of active play. A lot of it was just drinking coffee, chatting with my kid while the game ran in the background doing its things. How ever.. Finally. After designing and redesigning, I have achieved what I set out to do the 27th of Match 2023. Build a LKO station, that would be the first stop of getting resources into space - and then a station in Mun orbit, that will serve as the gateway to the rest of the Kerbol system. As well as all the vehicles needed to service such stations. I would like to thank everyone who had the endurance to follow along on the process, as well as all the advice and encouragement. Without further ado. Lets get through the last triumphs. Mission Task: Refuel K.G.01 with Hydrogen. Refueling K.G.01 with the H.T.V.: Now even at this last stage - there would still be a few iterations to the vehicles. Namely the H.T.Vs. I had gone with a 3 leg 3 engine config on the 1st and 2nd stage for this vehicle. But with how tomblesome the LT-3 Wallaby Legs are I had to change the design a bit. Even though I carefully tried to land the 1st at less than 5m/s (which I find is really hard to do, since 1-2% of thrust means a lot.. and you end up spending a lot of time hovering over the pad.. wasting fuel) I would still experience this: That one leg simply boke off. It was frustrating.. and even if I liked the look of the 3 legs 3 engine symmetry. I knew I needed 4 legs to help it not lose legs or fall over so easily. I really wish we had some better large legs The final design ended up looking like this: It looks alright - It's just more busy. Any way it means that the rocket reaches 900 m/s a lot earlier than before - SO I also have a lot more Δv to land again. I could maybe push for a heavier methalox load? - or cut on the 1st stage fuel level even more? Not to mention.. I have not used this rocket since the update to v0.2.1 - and judging from the fact that my hydrogen glider uses 200 less Δv going through the atmosphere now - I suspect that I can tweek the heavy vehicle even more. But I won't have to do that before I've spend some of all the methalox and hydrogen I've now gotten into orbit. The State of K.G.01 Docking tower: As you can see - the deterioration of the docking tower has accelerated a bit. Vehicles can still dock with the station and not explode. So for now I wont change it.. I dont have to look at it if i rotate the station - but at some point I need to fix it... as it annoys me As I can understand - this was also a issue in KSP1. Where you would have vehicle warp over time. It's a thing I hope they can fix in KSP2 at some point. With kolonies etc. I suspect ships can have a really long life span.. but if they deteriorate like this, that's a serious issue in my opinion. Hitting the Mark: By taking a screenshot of "where" the 35km mark "is-ish" on the path down - I have been improving my "hit rate" of KSC - Now I land within the mountain range that KSC resides. Since I bleed of all the energy between 17 and 35km. Knowing when you hit this spot means a lot when guesstimating how much "lead" you need to have on KSC for it to land propper. If your curious its here: What I do now is decreasing my orbit to around 75km - This means that planet rotation will have as little influence as possible. Then I aim for the 37km mark to be a little behind KSC. With K.G.01 orbiting at 100km it means somewhere between 1/4th and 1/3rd from the ground and K.G.01s orbit path. Not a perfect system.. but its easier to use with how much variation I have in Δv and speed coming down again. I really wish that there were markers on the path or something to indicate when you hit the atmosphere of the body. Since the path is only "true" on bodies with no atmospheres. Any way It means I now land within the KSC complex.. Refueling the last 5t Hydrogen with the Hydrogen gliders: The revamped atmosphere had 2 positive effects. 1. The glider now produces reentry flames. And boy I think its satisfying to see them trailing off the rocket - Showing the AoA in all its glory and giving a sense of the direction. 2. as mentioned earlier. My rocket spends a lot less Δv getting into space? I had to use m/s as my staging mark now ~1100 m/s. which is around 1800 Δv Considering that before the patch I had gone from 1800 Δv to 1600 Δv with the mass added to fix the glider.. and now im back at 1800Δv again... using m/s seems like the right choice. For more re-entry flame pictures see spoiler section: Moving Forward: I think I'll be taking a short break from KSP2 now - After that a short tour to Minimus to square off Kerbin SOI, before venturing into out to other bodies in the Kerbol Sytem. I feel a bit ridiculous having almost 800h ingame.. and never leaving Kerbin SOI (Unless you count me graveyard parking a few empty stages in a Kerbol orbit.) Any way. Thank you for staying with me all the way. Bechmeister Signing Out.

I think with how much the path changes going through the atmosphere - not being able to see the landmarks is what keeps me away from landing on Kerbin at night. Call me a perfectionist.. but I want to touch down on the runway. The landing pads at KSC are especially hard to line up I think. Unless you spend a ridicules amount of Δv on your deorbit burn for a as steep as possible re-entry (where the path won't change a lot) I think if something like 3. was in the game. I would not need to see my landmarks, because then I wouldn't need landmarks to hit KSC x) I guess... in essence.. what I am missing. Is something to ensure consistent results when re-entering. Right now the path is not good enough, as it does not show how much the atmosphere affects you... But I don't think they will be able to propper program that into it without it taking a lot of computer power. Since.. depending on your pitch it would need to recalculate your path. Any way.. I digress. Does any of my ramblings make sense? This are also fantastic sugguestions. I actually think I like the coloured line with a dot, or line to indicate the change of atmosphere more than my original idea.. and it would be easier to implement.

Indeed. - I have a feelin that is easier said than done though x)