Deadweasel

Amateurs.... Here's a motorcycle... driven by an engine originally designed to power a Bell helicopter. The MTT Turbine superbike aka "The Y2K"

Better than taking the time to take a massive lagship out to Duna to deliver rovers, go through the slow and careful process of attaching the dropship to one, extracting it from the cargo ship, then committing to the de-orbit and landing, only to discover... you put the damned delivery decouplers on backwards!!! >:/ That red ring on the bottom decoupler is supposed to be the other way around, so it detaches from the ROVER, not from the cargo ship. *facepalm*

[TABLE=width: 800] <tbody>[TR] [TD]Today marked the start of ground deployment procedures for the Duna Explorer mission. Two platforms are orbiting the red planet: IPEV Venture (carrying the Cardinal research station, Sherpa dropship and the three ground crew), and LRCV Bruin (carrying the rovers and two new Sherpa II dropships). The first stage of deployment began at Venture, with the dropship prepping for release of the Cardinal station by retrieving its tug adapter plate from the hull of Venture's vehicle bay. Once attached to the station's tug collar, Venture released Cardinal from her embrace The Sherpa then entered hover mode for best control stability, and performed the necessary burn to send the station on the trajectory to reach its intended deployment location. Burn completed, the station was released, and the dropship returned to a stable orbit until the next pass. Once the on-board systems had been verified, the automated deployment program took control and jettisoned the station's protective shell. The station's computers maintained the orientation necessary to allow the descent engines to slow its initial velocity and fine-tune its trajectory, fired the jets for a short burn, then deployed the chutes and ejected the docking ports and fairing frames. In Duna's thin atmosphere, the chutes finally opened at a relatively low altitude, but open they did, slowing the station's fall drastically and quickly. Near the ground, the jets fired again to halt the station's descent, then guided the facility to its actual target location. Once finally landed at the proper coordinates, the jets were shut down for the last time and discarded, while the communications array was powered up to establish a broadband link back to Venture and Bruin. The station's computers then entered standby mode to await the arrival of its first crew. As the original Sherpa design was not suited to carry the new rovers brought by the Bruin, Bob volunteered to stay with the ground mission to offer his ship's flight capability to the research team, should they need to travel farther than the Kurb Burner rovers could take them in a reasonable amount of time. Bob burned to de-orbit. The tug plate, no longer of use to the mission, was discarded to impact with the planet surface. Early during the descent phase, Bob discovered the Sherpa's flight control systems had been damaged somehow, and was unable to keep the little ship balanced properly while braking in hover mode. Now aware of a problem, he opted for a gentler approach, rather than the standard "suicide burn" the ship should have been able to normally perform. At a more sensible ground velocity, Bob noted the control authority returning to a more normal range, and he made his final approach to the station, guiding the Sherpa to the designated parking area, and heading inside for some much-needed rest. Though he couldn't resist hamming it up for the station cameras and waving to the envious ground crew, still waiting on Venture for their ride down. Meanwhile, at the Bruin, the crew had begun their portion of the deployment procedures. One of the new Sherpa II dropships disconnected from its berth, then joined with the first of the rovers to be deployed, beginning internal checks of the vehicles' systems while Sonfry readied for action in his own dropship. Cleared for departure, Sonfry disconnected, aligned himself, and burned for a rendezvous with Venture. Upon arrival, he docked with the shuttle pod, and to his dismay, discovered the designers had committed a massive screw-up when building it. The landing legs were on backward! The shuttle pod could not be safely landed and re-used for crew retrieval. Undeterred by the general shrugs and mumbled "Don't know what to tell ya"'s from Mission Kontrol, the ground crew opted to shuttle down one-by-one on the Sherpa's external topseat. They were assured that Duna's atmosphere was sufficiently thin for the maneuver to be relatively safe. The Sherpa II's control systems, being more refined and powerful than its predecessor's allowed Sonfry to bring the little ship into the atmosphere directly and under complete and stable control. The primary descent was performed flawlessly, bringing the ship in-line with the research station and on a rock-solid course. On final approach, Sonfry guided the ship into the landing pattern, giving Jebediah a nice bird's eye view of the facility and the surrounding area he and the others would be calling home for the next couple of years. Finally landed and parked in his assigned space, Sonfry powered down the engines and began re-charging the systems for his return trip to Venture, while Jeb bade him goodbye and joined Bob for some shut-eye in the station, and to await the arrival of the first of the mission's two rovers. [/TD] [/TR] </tbody>[/TABLE]

Wow. That's some astute strut work there. I would've expected the thing to be drooping like a shar pei's backside.

Huh, weird. Chrome must be auto-correcting it for me then. Right click the broken image anchor, open URL in new tab, and bam: right to the image. *shrug* At least one of us got it worked out for him.

Actually, that's exactly how it works. The "broken image" leads directly to it, but the boards won't display it unless it's enclosed in the img tags. And agreed, that has to look pretty crazy on the ground!

Or, alternatively, the night Kerbin passed through the tail of a rogue comet, Rhea-M. /too obscure?

Gotta use those tags or it won't show up here! (Imgur has a BBCode option you can copy, instead of just the link so you don't have to worry about the tags)

A million times THIS. LOVE this simple mod! Once you get the hang of how it works, you become a master of docking without the need to cam all over the place, or bite your tongue trying to see the velocity and target pippers in the lower half of the navball. It quickly results in more precision, almost perfect locks every single time, and no more bouncing and yo-yoing all over the place for five minutes before the docking actually happens.

Well, not quite that ludicrous, but one thing they didn't have before was a means to deal with their clean air supply running out. When away from the settlement, they're usually using the Diggers or the scout, both of which have air systems they can hook into. They don't often just go mooching around the land on foot, or if they do, they're usually within a very short walking distance of their vehicles. Because of that, they start running into situations they hadn't necessarily planned for. Remember, none of them are experienced with much more than the jobs they were performing in the Far Horizon, and whatever emergency procedures that were associated with those jobs. Jeb was an engine maintenance tech before promoting to engineering liaison on the bridge Bill was a docking controller Bob was an engineering tech Nelnie was a biology specialist, trained to continue her "mother's" work, and the closest the castaways have to a doctor (she's the reason they even know what's edible on Kerbin) Jinda took a slightly different path from her sister and was a full physician Krista worked in navigation and cartography, scanning and mapping potential hazards along Far Horizon's course Karnin is a religious scholar, but spent most of his time aboard in stasis as a "sleeper", meant to help keep cherished traditions alive by passing them on to students after landing Amarin was a bit of a radio nut, but what originally got him selected as a sleeper was his deep obsession with all things relating to the Kraken of Kajuum (the Breaker) So, none of them are particularly prepared for the hazards they might face on the ground, and especially so when they're forced to do anything outdoors in their vac suits. Put any real life astronaut in his space suit, then have him/her try to cope with trying to perform quick or drastic movements, or even so much as run without falling flat on his face. Now do the same to somebody who has only ever seen a space suit in-passing, and you might get a decent feel for why these little guys seem to run into problems with breaking their suits so relatively-often. Oh, and thanks for pointing out that spelling error. Fix'd!

Man I wish there was more action/comedy of that caliber these days. "Yes your honor, it's true. This man has no d**k." XD

Hehehe actually I might have thought that too, if they hadn't shown the automatic seat flipper thing actuating beforehand.

Which spells FEMA, and so does not exactly instill confidence in efficiency!

Don't take it personally; it was issued more out of envy, due to the fact I can't run the mod at all with my memory load running at the very edge of overflow. Hehehehe

Hahahaa It's meant to convey "Yooooouuuuu!!" as in: "You dirty cheater!" the was to make sure it's known I'm being light-hearted and facetious about it anyway.

Age 39 I like to build ships that are as flexible as possible, but still look good doing their job (aesthetic functionality). Pack-MULE heavy orbital delivery hauler Opossum exploration lander delivery HSTAC "Silverhawk" HSTAC "Banshee" IPEV "Venture", DV-102A "Sherpa" mover/dropship and Kurb Burner mobile research platform (rover) LRCV "Bruin" long range orbital delivery hauler

Well, it may be a little bit yet before it's done. I'm working on versions of it with and without the suit, and I'm currently having trouble with the rigging portion of it as well. From there, it's the nightmare of texturing that will keep me up late at night. :/

Isn't that kind of complimentary though? I mean Starmade was obviously inspired in part by Minecraft with the whole voxel building blocks system.

Ahh, but they just might, IF there just happened to be a handy-dandy fueling station loitering around at a totally coincidental altitude of 72,319 meters. ...just sayin'... >_>

Thinking on it, why not all three? It could work! Oooh, the possibilities! ("Oooh" is not spelled correctly, it seems...)

The way I understand this happening, it's not a span of time you actually have to WAIT through, but rather the game time is simply advanced by that amount when you go to launch, simulating the passage of time required to build and stage your vessel. So it's not really a forced wait period, so much as addressing the fact that you can currently spend as long as you want in the assembly buildings and see that nothing at all has happened in the meantime. I get the logic and it does make sense, it's just not one of those things I can say I've ever actually noticed as missing. The way it is now is kind of like how time just freezes if you're working on a layout in the Sims games, as an example.

Well... nuts. Looks like I'm going to have to ditch something because I definitely would love to check this pack out, but I'm already running right at the edge of memory limits. Thanks for the pointer!

I love how Egon's holding the Twinkie. XD (What about the Twinkie?)

Funny, I do have the book but never found time to read it. Now it's on the TODO for the month, thanks!