Enture

Jeb, Bill and Bob were onboard my very first flight in 0.17; it was a routine LKO flight to test out the new parts, check the engine rebalance and test IVAs... routine, yet GORGEOUS. Now, they are training on the ground at KSC, in anticipation of Kerbalkind's first crewed interplanetary flight: an orbital mission to Eve or a Dunian landing, I haven't decided yet.

Plans for my first mission to the Joolian system are finally ready! The JoSE probe (Jool System Explorer) will spend several months orbiting between Jool and its moons, and carries with her 5 tiny impactors, designed to be dropped in collision trajectories with Vall, Laythe, Tylo, Bop and Jool's upper atmosphere. If the probe has enough ∆v, that is. Energy for the onboard instrumentation will be provided by very large solar panels, to compensate for Kerbol's great distance. •Staging and engine tests at KSC. Three impactors can clearly be seen. •Test flight to LKO, carrying a mock-up of the actual probe. (its crazy how less heavy and more elegant the rockets are, since addition of the new parts and engines rebalance!)

His profile actually says he's a 13-year-old. So yeah...

Can't wait Did you actually stitch several screenshots together (as the edges suggest), or is it just one picture that you cut like this to make it look more realistic? Also, what kind of effects did you use, exactly? It'd be nice to know, so I'd have a basis for the day I'll start and mess around myself with my (numerous) screenshots.

You seem to be one hell of a mythomaniac, don't you?... Or was it to be understood that it was a joke? Anyway, back on topic: it IS awesome, but it isn't new to me: if you want to get great insights in the US space program plans, be sure to check out NasaSpaceFlight on a regular basis: they know a lot of people at NASA and have access to a lot of docs and infos the other media haven't! It's there that I get all the updates about the CRS and CCDev programs, and the SLS launcher and Orion spacecraft. The Orbital Outpost on the Lagrangian point on the far side of the Moon has been the subject of at least 3 or 4 articles in the last few months EDIT: maybe this topic should go in "Off-Topic"...

Kudos on the after-effects used here, it's a beautiful picture!

It would be really nice if people posting here would care to follow the discussion and read the previous posts, so we don't have somebody exclaiming "Hey, I just thought of an explanation nobody has thought of yet!", when actually somebody -or even several persons- has 1 or 2 pages before...

My turn, I guess... here we go! Help KSC scientists decipher the latest transmission of my Eve Reconnaissance Orbiter.

I give you... the proud Expedition-1 crew of the Mun Arch Research Station (MARS, for short), posing in front of their MunHab and Munfrog rover! From left to right: Bargas, Neltrey & Boblorf Kerman (they arrived first with a regular lander), and Camfred+Wehrrick Kerman (they brought the Hab & rover).

Well, I've been messing around with the slant, and with sync also, but that's the best picture I can get in Robot 36, I swear. The program just won't allow for more correction.

Wow, those are tough ones! I tried all the modes (about 30 or so?) of the MultiMode program, and the "least bad" results I managed to obtain were with Martin M1 and M3: Maybe we have to mess around a bit with the signal first?...

So, my objective today was to put... ...on the Mün, near the (one of the?) Mün Arch. Let's se how it went... By chance, my münar orbit insertion trajectory flew almost directly over the desired landing spot... so I skipped the orbital insertion, going straight to descent and landing; the Rána-1 arrived 2 weeks before, preparing the MunHab's arrival, and Boblorf Kerman went on EVA to help the landing: ...and thus, with the landing of the Mun Arch Research Station, begins a permanent Kerbal presence on the Mün! By the way, did you notice that the Mun Arch is perfectly aligned with the ecliptic?

Very, very nice design and story here! Keep it up

Very nice! Is this fom a mod, or something you're working on yourself? EDIT: Nevermind, found the mod

Oh, Ike and Duna have synchronous orbits? Now THAT's cool :-) Although not surprising, given the moon's enormous diameter with respect to Duna's, and their relative proximity: Pluto and Charon share the same characteristic... actually, I it could well be that the Ike-Duna system's barycenter isn't in Duna's sphere, but somewhere between Ike and Duna.... let me check this! Anyway, this synchronicity really speaks for some sort of link between Duna and Ike, on the SSTV image... I guess we'll have to wait till the next update, if Nova says the following pieces of the puzzles haven't been added yet.

Well, that's a thing that suddenly started to bug me yesterday: basically, a NERVA is a nuclear reactor opened at one end (correct me if I'm wrong!), ejecting a highly radioactive hydrogen flow... in orbit, it's fine. But 1) Doesn't using them on a landing stage mean lethally irradiating your landing site? and 2) what happens after the spent engine burns up upon reentry, or crashes on the surface? Again, dispersing radioactive materials everywhere, isn't it? Great tip, thanks!

Yep, well done! I had the chance to have a couple of filters and a good zoom with me, that day, so I took some pictures!...

There were sunspots on the original shot, yeah, but the encoding and demodulating sort of erased them (although, I can still recognize two, near the center, when I decode it). Nope, it's not a sunspot

Well, I make sure nobody's around (so I don't make a fool of myself, measuring angles on a computer display), go to the map view, center my view on the north pole of the body around which I want to measure an angle, and use my transparent protractor (un rapporteur, en français) If it seems too rustic to you, I believe there are a few plugins out there that can do the measuring for you... just look them up.

Hehe, that's a nice shot! Is that the Kosmos pack? Looks like your track is set on "private" on Soundcloud, so we can't access it. You can change it in the track's settings. But the point here is that you only post your track, and we discover the picture, so don't post the pic right away And hasn't any of you identified what my last transmission represented, exactly? Come on, it's not that hard...

Awesome! I finally visited a Mun Arch, for the first time! Really fun so far, with the .17 parts and features; the landing, especially, has been most interesting. I'll let you judge: They're a bit low on fuel now, but it's fine, since they are preparing the establishment of a little Munbase here... I'm still amazed the lander didn't tip over! Bonus pics:

«In orbit between Duna and Jool»?Russell's Teapot? We talked about it a while ago, on the .17 pre-release thread!... Although the debut log doesn't seem to list the started orbit by growing distances from Kerbol, so this Magic Boulder could be anywhere, really. But I definitely like Ike's pyramidal pole!

I basically have the same problem (I guess all of us who started to play around with the NERVA have it...), although I hadn't measured the angle covered during the burn... 40°, you say? Well, since the ship's mass changes during the burn, the burn itself is actually more and more efficient, meaning the change of velocity gets exponentially quicker. So to do things right, you'd have to burn more than 20° before the theoretic burn point; exactly where could be told us by a bit of messing around with expoenential/logarithmic equations, but yeah, I guess burning 20° before the theoretic burn point should be a good correction already.

Right, but with something special... What is it? @pisabh, the modulated sound you obtain *is* the riddle you have to post here. We then decode it into your original image. So you have to record this modulated sound, one way or the other (Audacity, or whatever)

Yay, the game continues! You got both right (the first one was a separation, between orbiter and lander probes launched together), and I just decoded your rover's latest transmission: •That's a nice, large lander stage! You landed on the icecap, right? A small digression from KSP, but it's definitely space-related! Will you recognize it?