BechMeister

This comment made me chuckle xD - I guess I am not yet deep enough into the Kerbal hole x) But yeah.. solo missions seems cruel. UH! your usage of Clamp-O-Tron on the "jet pack" is very smart! Definetly going to borrow that for my future missions - also your light layout on the rover looks nice. I think it can be hard to get headlights to look good.

The production quality of this is Insane! Nice narration x) Kerbals sure are made of sturdy stuff - I would go nuts in such a confined space for that long. Could you share some screenshots of the lander/rover you just put down?

MISSION_UPDATE - Tour de Minmus - Johndin and Podcal looking on the ancient relic found in the mysterious crater on Minmus. While Poduki relays their findings to KSC FOREWORD: Before we start - I would like to say that this post became a lot longer than I anticipated. I would very much like some honest feedback on weather I should dial it down a notch and be less detailed. Or cut it into more edible pieces. or if its just all good and fun. Before we start - I would like to thank all who indulge in my increasingly longer forum posts. Any way.. Funny story! A mistake was made by my internet provider and I was without internet this weekend! It was an odd experience.. I mean I grew up without internet.. but I realized how much of my home is setup to use internet.. I hear my radio through my Sonos and see TV through my Chromecast. At least when I was a child we had antenna tv and FM radio. It actually made my wife and I talk about getting a low tech FM radio - Just incase the political climate deteriorate even further in Europe.. and we need to be able to get news from the government. But before we go all doom and gloom... let's keep on topic... Without internet, the only game I could play was KSP - the others required internet in varying degree. So I managed to get the rover the last stretch to the mysterious crater in record time. Before being offgrid for an weekend, I was only driving the rover, half attentive, while listening to Audio Books or Podcasts with my wife. This weekend, the journey was done with plenty of whiskey in the glass and vinyls on the record player. You may be thinking, why plenty of whiskey? is Rovers that bad? well no... whiskey is a nice drink of course.. but also yes.. let's talk about Rovers.. and how much I dislike the Rover Game Mechanics. MISSION TASKS: A. Test the Rovers functionality and maneuverability - Success B. Drive an expedition to explore the North of Minmus - Success C. Drive the Rover back to Base Camp One C. Recover Rover via Dropship and return it to base- Success D. Return Dropship to ICV Explorer - Success LESSONS LEARNED; LESSONS IDENTIFIED: Section A: The Rover has left the Sheet Ice of the frozen lake and drive in the Snowdrifts that cover most of the little moon. Let's talk about rovers: I... HATE the way rovers drive in this game. It is not that I expected it to be Snow Runners, with the game simulating every minute physics detail of sand, snow and mud.. But man It would be nice if rovers at least drove like a car... and not a shopping trolley... It would be so nice if the wheels had just an inch of traction.. Speaking of traction.. What does the traction slider even do? It seems very backwards. If I turn traction up, the engines cannot turn the wheels, it feels like the engines are terrible underpowered (are they that weak?). But if you keep the tracktion down, you'll be wheel spinning like mad.. but unlike in our world, were the vehicle would dig it self down.. In the solar system of Kerbol the vehicle will gain momentum... a lot of momentum. I found I could get my rover to ~10 m/s on rough terrain (the only limiting factor being that it's hard to gain speed when the wheels dont have a lot of contact with the ground from all the jumps) and I never reached the limit on the flats of the Sheet Ice lakes.. the rover hit a small bump and tumbled. The science junior on the front broke off. - It was a bloody miracle the antenna didn't break off or the vehicle exploded.. So Johndin had to pick up sample and take readings by hand after that. The rest of the journey was done with the antenna folded down... and then only folded up to send situation reports to Kerbin, or the ICV when it passed by. After realizing this was how it was going to be - the only thing left to do was to strap in hit the speeder and tune the radio in on: And Start drift.. I mean driving. I found that the only reliable way to turn was to create a custom made Action Group for turning the Reaction Wheels ON - do the course correction and then press another custom made Action Group turning OFF all reaction wheels (to avoid the rover doing flips from the torque power when pressing forward). Because of course the "Only online when SAS is on" is bugged. The rest of the lessons learned Lessons identified I've put in spoiler sections for those interested to keep a bloated post more streamlined: 1. Axle configuration and angle of climb: 3. Thrusters: 4. Lights: 5. Power and Recharging: Section B: The rover - stopped in the snowdrifts - to enable Johndin to take samples and readings - While a cresended Kerbin is setting in the horizon. The Expedition to the Northern parts of Minmus was divided into 5 legs: Leg 1: Contained the initial testing of the Rover on the Sheet Ice Flats of (what I have Identified to be?) The Greater Flats that Base Camp One was established on. After that it took a sharp turn North East to get to new terrain that was found to be snowdrifts. This was done in the hopes that the reason the rover drove like a elephant on ice skates was because of the sheet ice - and not game mechanics.. Unfortunately I was to be disappointed. The rest of the leg consisted of the traversal of the Sheet Ice by night - Heading North West. Leg 2 + 3: Would be traversal of the hardest terrain the Rover forced. It was the heavy cratered mountains North of The Greater Flats. Leg 4: Would be the traversal of the less demanding rolling hils on the path North West - Dont let the map fool you - it looks way more smooth than it is. I thought it would be quickly traversed at high speeds. But the low gravity and rolling hills meant that as soon as the rover exceeded 10 m/s - it would spend the same time in the air (between jumps) as it did on ground. Making it impossible to really pick up more momentum. Leg 4 ended shortly before the destination. (My kids wanted to see what was in the crater, and were sleeping at the time) Leg 5: would be the last short stretch to the edge of the crater with the mysterious lightsource. (My daughter was so impressed by the monument that she had to call my wife so she could see it) Bellow a Map showing the approximated route with legs marked: From Right to Left: Leg 1, Leg 2, Leg 3, Leg 4 and Leg 5 Bellow in the spoiler section you can see a detailed walkthrough of the Journey: The Minmus Monument: Here, at the end of the journey I was presented with a choice - Call the mission done and drive home. Or, in the true spirit of the great kerbalnaut Jebidiah, drive down the cliff side and study the monument up close - though with the chance of not being able to get up again... or worse.. crash and burn The Rover had shown itself to be quite tough - It had survived landings with up to 20m/s - And no way in hell I was going to drive the rover all the way back again. No... going down would be a great excuse for a pick up via Dropshop and be flown back to Base Camp One, Johndin argued. So down the slope it was. Geronimo! - the rover going down the slope. While it is true the rover had survived traversing a chasm with the thrusters - and subsequently bounced in the rolling hills for several km going 20 m/s (it's hard to break when your wheels hardly touch the ground). Going down the cliff side quickly accelerated the rover to 40-50 m/s. and worse still, it was aiming directly for the statue. While I was positive that I could survive these speeds on uneven terrain as long as I kept the wheels leveled with the ground.. I was sure the suspension would not "tank" slamming into the statue at the center of the monument. In a last ditch maneuver Johndin, (who had pitched the idea of going down), managed to pull hard on the controls, pitch the rover up and break the rover with the thrusters. - a daring move! Having redeemed himself, he was given the honour of planting the flag.. and take another sample. KSC was still just visible over the ridge.. and the call for a taxi was relayed to ICV Explorer. While waiting for the dropship to arrive. Johndin, Podcal and Poduki had ample time to study the ancient ruin. Who was it depicting? How was it build? By Whom was it build.. answers I will likely only get once I've exhausted the sandbox experience - and try the campaign. Section C: Dropship arriving at The Minmus Monument - ready to pick up the Rover Crew. I had a feeling that by diverting the remaining fuel from the 3 Dropship to 1 - I would be able to complete the taxi mission. I was correct. It was strange to zoom past the terrain I had just spend the better of 4 evening to cross in meer minutes. Playing with audio on for once, I found that the Minmus Orbit Theme is really awesome - it made the tour back to Base Camp One felt like a final victory lap. I was to make one important Lesson Identified though: When correcting inclination - eyeball it - maneuver nodes are unreliable, as seen from the example bellow: The maneuver nodes are weird around extreme inclination burns - If I told the node just to burn Normal it would say that my craft would leave Minmus SOI before reaching the northern hemisphere. I had to adjust by also pulling on the retrograde node for the maneuver to stay in orbit. In the end the maneuver node did not work - and I ended up just burning Normal and eyeballing it. (without leaving the Minmus SOI) The result was this: Notice how much much further apart the two vehicles would be before the burn was complete. As well as the wrong fuel bars from image 1 to 2 (which had a quick load between them) For detailed walkthrough of the pick up - see spoiler section bellow: Plotting the course to Base Camp One: the next leg - getting the rover back to Base Camp One was a simple maneuver that did not require a lot of Δv - since there was no need for a expensive correction inclination burn. And the correct direction could be picked from the start, The maneuver wasn't even required to be orbital and a sub-orbital path was charted: The rest was just a final victory lap, were the achievement could be marveled at. - a few course correction had to be done as I forgot to take the rotation of Minmus into account. The last thing to do was to pluck the rover back into base for a refuel - I was a bit nervous about this since the rover tilted the base when I tested this feature on the runway of KSC - the alignment was slightly off. My fix to this was to give all the base elements landing legs - not only because I anticipated it would be nice on uneven terrain, but also because I thought it would fix the tipping issue spoiler alert - it did: As you can see it worked fine - but for a moment I had real fears that docking the rover to the base would cause it all to do flips in the low gravity. My fears were unjustified - The rover was refueled. Although not to full, as I didn't want to empty the G.P.U - the G.P.U was dropped only half full because of weight synergy between the base modules and the dropships performance window (around ~10t cargo each) - but I expect that I need to either downgrade the rover fuel levels (which is fine) or upgrade the fuel amount for the generator (which is harder to pull off). there are many things to consider for future base missions. In the spoiler section below you will find a detailed walkthrough of the tour. Section D: The dropship tacking off after waiting for ICV - Explorer to get into an optimal position for rendezvous. I thought i was smart and waited for the ICV - Explorer to get around Minmus, so I didn't have to play catch up - I did not wait enough though. After doing the initial sub orbital burn to get the right AP for a intercept orbit set, I realized that I was going to get ahead of the target... New plan had to be made. I had 2 options: A. Make a inclination correction burn and set an orbit 10km higher than target - wait for it to catch up and perform rendezvous maneuver. B. extend the AP and to meet target on the other side of the planet - making use of the approx 30° difference in path and correct inclination and make the path orbital at target. Option A. was the safest - but would use more Δv - something that was a bit on the low side (in hindsight it would not have been an issue) - option B used less fuel - but would need to perform both circulisation and inclination correction at the same time (this would also not be an issue due to the low orbit speeds around Minmus) I decided upon B and in the end the relatively speed to target was only 50 m/s opun arrival- an easy correction. the dropship safely docked back at ICV - Explorer. The Δv between the dropships are all but spend now - which means It will be hard to perform another pick up of the rover in the future. Although that being said - the Crew Shuttles have enough Δv to land and take off on the Mun from a 10km orbit. and the two that landed the crew at Base Camp One only spend 1/3 of their Δv - having 921 left - so Δv could be taken from the Crew Shuttle still docked to the ICV - as it only need enough to perform an emergency landing in case of catastrophic event. Now the only thing left - was to dock the dropship back at the mothership and call it the day.For detailed walkthrough see spoiler section bellow: Moving Forward: Where as I have done the long stretch from a bit south of the Minmus Equator - to the northern hemisphere. I only came across 2 different biomes. And can I truly call the expedition a success when so many more biomes are left to be explored? So much Science can be done? The Δv of the Dropships may be spend - I may have done enough Rover Driving on Minmus for 1 life - But.. there are two perfectly well functioning Crew Shuttles at Base Camp One - with ~920 Δv on them each. Maybe a few further excursions to the other flats - the south pole etc. can be done to gather more science with them? Am I done with Minmus, or should I explore further before closing down the Minmus Base for now and fly the Kerbals home. I need to ponder on this. Stay Tuned for More!

Pretty impressive stuff. But Imagine being Jeb sitting in a suit like that for 4 years xD - pretty inspirering stuff though. love the plane.

- UPDATE - The Mission Rover Enroute to the Minmus Monument. Hello! I would just like to give a small update. I am currently a little over half way to - what I presume is the Minmus monument - I dont know if its a glitch.. but I was allowed to infinitely zoom out while on Minmus.. and I noticed green lights in a crater to the North.. So I have been driving there. I now dread driving rovers in this game.. but more on that for the actual mission update. - I just wanted to proof that I am still slaving on this Mission. See spoiler section for example of infinite zoom:

Hello again Jantee! Apologies, but I am a bit unsure if this post was meant for another topic? It seems a bit off topic in relation to this - note that I am all for small talk.. Just confused me a bit x) Any way I did not know the Spirit of the Eagle ship. It looks quite awesome, reminds me of some of the Ron Cobb's early designs for Nostromo in Aliens. Looks like an cool build and yeah it looks like it will do best as a low gravity no atmosphere ship. Problem with VTOL is the weight of the extra engines imo. But yeah... that vehicle does not look like it would be able to make it off planet earth x) Though getting it to a AP of 136k - you should be able to get to LKO? Where you could refuel it. I wonder if an alien style dropship would have the Δv enough to get to orbit.. in my experience the rapier engines cant carry a lot. But I guess it could be worth exploring. I wish I could answer your question. I am flattered you think I have the answer. As of now I've only had tro probes leave Kerbin SOI - and they were both Duna Missions with the propper antennas to reach Kerbin. One of them was a failed attempt to get a CommNet constellation setup around Duna. I did not have enough Δv to hit my orbit to circularize my smaller satelites.. and crashed the vehicle into Duna insted. I have decided to put my Duna mission on hold until OJT has given me an Okay to do a mission report with my Duna Mastery Challenge progress. So unfortunatly I cannot give you a certain answer.. I can only say that it is my understanding that Bigger antennas relay to smaller antennas. And that planets dont obscure signals. So i would say that a big craft with signal stength to reach Kerbin can send a pro down the Mo-Hole

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)