azazel1024

Mars' ice caps are composed of both water and dry ice. The northern cap is primarily water ice with a layer up to 1m thick of frozen CO2 in the winter time ONLY. The southern cap is also mostly water ice, but it has a permenant layer 8m thick of frozen CO2 covering it. So most of what you find, if you scrape down a bit is drinkable water (watch out for the martian viruses ). During each hemispheres winter time approximately a 1m layer of dry ice is deposited consisting of about 20-30% of the entire atmosphere's content of CO2. In the spring time, it melts over a period of a few days generating enormous wind storms (400+km/hr) and massive, often times global, dust storms. One thing to keep in mind though, 400+km/hr is frightening still, but with the atmosphere being only 1% as dense, the wind force is actually only equivelent to about 15km/hr on Earth at sea level. However, very light particles can still be transported at enormous velocities. That means you are going to get lots of etching on things like exposed plastics and stuff.

Anyone else just have a night filled with fail when it comes to a project? After launching a few of space stations now (two in Kerbin orbit, one of them fairly small, one medium sized and one in Eve orbit, smallish) as well as performing an orbital rendezvous with the bigger one (Freedom Station I) and loading up the crew tank I decided to build a real Mun base and land the sucker. Previously I placed a small little "fake base" that consisted of a decorative 1m fusealage, some legs, satellite dish, ladder and lights. When I dropped it off my lander it tipped over and took about 15 minutes to right with some EVA work (fortunately it is very light and low gravity). It did take the like of one poor Sherman Kerman in the process though. So, I built a Mun base roughly the size of Freedom Station I and a new launcher to get the extra delta V I'd need. A couple of nights ago I built the thing and had maybe 15 minutes of test and tune on the launcher design before I figured I had roughly enough delta V, but it wasn't controllable. So, fast forward to tonight. I sit do to REALLY get this sucker launched and landed. First launch after a few tweaks, I get it up there after adding more struts to stabalize the torquing of the base on top of the rocket. This helps, but with the NERVA Mun intercept stage, I couldn't boost more than 30% before the thrust would shove it out of control. Stupid me decided to try landing with this handicap anyway. 45 minutes of nudging it along and I get it to Munar orbit and start braking to place it nearish my previous landing site (I figure if I don't manage to get it close enough, I'll rover over my 3 Kerbonauts from Serenity base (Tranquility's Munar counterpart). Well, I brake to around 300m/sec, burn through the last of my fuel in my NERVA stage and kick in my landing rockets on my Mun base. HOLY FAIL BATMAN! The thing starts spinning like mad at only 40% thrust, no way to stablize, so I dettach my capsule and return rocket, get it stablized and boost back up to Munar orbit and return to Kerbin (I have still never landed and returned anyone, so I wanted to try it out with the Mun base). So my Kerbonaut made it...the Mun base impacted spinning like a top at 400+m/sec, maybe 200m from my Kerbonauts at Serenity base. I wish I had a screen cap of it...I think some space suits need cleaning out now. Then I realized...oh crap, I bet my center of gravity is off. I hadn't bothered to check it before. So I pull up the handy .17 feature (Thank you Squad!!!), yup. It is off to port by a resonable enough amount even though the space station appears fairly symetrical. I stack 2 small RCS tanks and a decoupler on the light end of the base to dettach after landing (to make the thing appear my symetrical and not so odd with a wart off the end). Launch goes better, more stable, nice and smooth Dettach SRBs, dettach first LOX stage (6 main sails, 4 tanks each), ignite upper LOX stage, smooth as a babies bottom. Orbiting at 90 to 320km, swing around to opposition to Munar intercept, punch in the upper LOX stage again to burn out, almost exactly the right Delta V for Munar capture on the first pass. Get out to the Mun, kick in the NERVA stage (with a little fuel added as I felt like I had run out early before), get in to captured orbit. Circularize at 120km, change orbital inclination to pass over Serenity base, kick in the NEVRA stage to decellerate to brake orbit and land. All going smooth as butter. Kill horizontal velocity to get within 1km of Serenity base, but the NERVA stage isn't sufficient to slow down much dropping vertically, so I dettach it and kick in the base landing rockets...CRAP, the little rockets I put on it are no where near powerful enough. Commence plowing in to the Mun 500m away from Serenity base with around 200m/sec of Delta V (I rode it all the way down this time). 35 minutes wasted this time. Not enough power in the descent/Mun Station stage. Okay, swap out the mini-orbital rockets with aerospikes. That should be PLENTY of thrust, still high impulse and it had looked like I had plenty of fuel for the landing (2 full size 1m tanks and 2 crew tanks to feed the two rockets). Repeat next mission, fast forward to NERVA stage seperation at 25km altitude, hit space bar to engage aerospikes...hmm, space didn't do anything. Hit space again and aerospikes fire up!!! OH CRAP!!! THE ADD ON RCS TANK DECOUPLER ACTIVATED TOO AND DROPPED THE TANK! Proceed to even faster death spiral as the center of mass suddenly goes from being centered to badly off center again, with full thrust from 2 aerospikes shoving not through the center of mass. The Munar station disintegrated from the rapid spin before impacting the surface. One of the crew tanks landed within 20m of my rover with a Kerbonaut in it. This time the space suit is simply a right off. A new one will need to be brought for Phil Kerman on the next mission. 40 minutes wasted. Last act of the night, going back in to the VAB and shuffling my staging so that it will NOT happen again. So, a good 3 hours or so of fail after fail after spectacular fail...but I think the design is now finished. Lets hope tonight I can actually stick the landing. I guess it wasn't entirely a wasted night. Freedom Station I rendezvous [ATTACH=CONFIG]35007[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=CONFIG]35008[/ATTACH] Mun base in orbit around the Mun [ATTACH=CONFIG]35009[/ATTACH] And the launcher with Mun Base I (sub model 5) after being finally, I think, perfected. T-minus 9hrs, 45mins till real world blast off. [ATTACH=CONFIG]35010[/ATTACH]

I almost never use RCS for actual orientation changes. I use SAS or the capsules built in SAS for orientation changes (that or gimballing engines under thrust when doing big orbit changes sometimes, for my heavier ships). I only use RCS systems for linear translations and/or stability on landing to help keep the lander upright. I did my first orbital rendezvous last night. I don't have the screen caps of it, but I do of the space station in question (Freedom Station I). The sucker is orbiting at 320-322km above Kerbin. It took me roughly 45 minutes from the time I had a succesful orbital rendezvous ship put together and tested to the time I was within transfer distance of the space station. I don't have any of the docking mods installed (though I'll probably be giving them a try soon). It took me around a day and a half of in game time to match the orbits and orbital planes up to get to 1.8km out from the space station and then I used used RCS for linear translations to park the space ship within 15m of the space station. I transfered a pair of Kerbals over and in the 5 minutes between that, doing some screen caps and some monkeying around (I got a really bad lag spike at one point so I had to get one of my Kerbals back after he had floated maybe 80m out or so. The other transfer was flawless) the ship and the station had maybe floated all of an extra 10-15m further apart. So relative motion was well under .1m/sec. Anyway, it was my first time for any rendezvous. Next mission, placing a full up Mun base on the Mun. I have a little tiny one composed of a cosmetic radio dish, a since empty 1m module, some landing legs and a couple of lights that I managed to place there (it took shoving with a kerbal for about 15 minutes to get it righted though...thankfully it is light). This time I am going to get a real station placed there. It is roughly the size of Freedom Station I and I have the launcher built that should be able to manage the task, though I have to tweak the design since in testing after the SRBs had seperated and then the 1st stage dropped (cluster of 6 main sails with 4 tanks per engine) the 2nd stage was uncontrollable up around 60km. Not enough torque with no SAS modules added to prevent the left Yaw. Just barely enough to keep it from accelerating, but not enough to reverse it. So I need to go back and add a SAS module or two to add some extra torque, and add it closer to the center of mass. As mentioned, don't manuever the big ship to a smaller one, do it the other way. I'd also rely on SAS and just take it slow. Plan well in advance for any attitude changes for manuevering.[ATTACH=CONFIG]34974[/ATTACH]

Hey, speaking of cities, which could be neat, anyone know if landing lights are visible from orbit on the night side of planets? I never thought about it until I read this thread and it got me thinking how cool it would be, at least for Kerbal, to have a couple of cities so you can see slights on the planet on the night side. Or at the very least, lights from the kerbal space center on the night side. Now I need to to strap a bunch of lights to a capsule, blast it suborbital, parachute it down and turn the lights on and look down from orbit to see if I can see them or not.

I don't have a picture of my lifter handy, but I got this bad boy (okay, it isn't that huge) in to LKO. Freedom Station I. I lofted it last night and I plan to do an orbital rendevous tonight (my first, hold me, I'm scared) to transfer over another couple of Kerbals to it. Total mass is around 25t. I know that is below your limit, but I had tons of fuel left over. Litterally. My final ascent stage had two large fuel tanks and I had barely used one of them before I got to a nice circular 320km orbit above Kerbin and jettisoned it. My rocket was a simple 3 stage affair. 6x6x1 arrangement with no SRBs (6 lower, 6 upper and a single center upper rocket motor, jettisoning as they ran out of fuel). If I had used SRBs and burned through all of the fuel in my final ascent/orbital stage I could likely have lofted at least 35t. If my final stage had used a cluster of nuclear rockets instead, I probably could have gotten at least 40t in to LKO. That said, I currently suck at really good heavy lift designs. Much more complex/bigger than what I have currently built tend to blow-up on launch, disintegrate and/or are uncontrollable. I am still playing around with it though. The hardest for me though are lofting big stations as it is hard to get a really nice symetrical design (both center of mass and drag) that allows the launch vehicle to be controllable. I am really looking forward to docking, though I am about at the point of trying out some of the docking mods as well as the remote tech mod (interplanetary probes, check!).[ATTACH=CONFIG]34882[/ATTACH]

Just don't forget, to speed up to your space station, deccelerate away from it. This lowers your orbit and actually makes you go faster. It'll take a little while to catch up, but once you do, accelerate then to slow your orbit and match velocity. Once you are within about a km, you can just use your RCS system to directly jet over (more or less). Not the easiest of things to do and I am in need of a lot of practice. My only space station so far is this puppy. Not even any solar panels yet and only a single resident. I am working on the Olympus II which should have some solar panels as well as a command pod as an escape vessel. The Olympus I currently orbits at around 180km. I am thinking I might send the Olympus II to Eve orbit. I have a tiny colony on the Mun and on Duna going. The Mun has a very small outpost/base that is not habitable as well as a rover and a 3 Kerbals from 2 missions (don't ask about the 4th Kerbal, RIP little buddy). Duna has two Kerbals and a rover on it (two missions) and one lander with some fuel left, but not enough for an orbit. The second lander crashed releasing the rover, fortunately with a Kerbal safe inside. I don't plan on trying to land on Eve any time soon, but I'd like to visit it and map it. I figure this is a good way. Plus it'll give my Kerbals a safe place if I decide to land later and I am able to get a lander with sufficient delta V to get it at least back up to orbit. [ATTACH=CONFIG]34591[/ATTACH]

Yeah, I had one of my Kerbals bounce the other day. He stepped out of his space station that didn't quite make orbit (80km apogee on that launch). He hit with something like 100m/sec of velocity still and BOUNCED (about 600m high). He did not survive landing the bounce though.

Overall good. I am looking forward to a future source method of easier rendevous and interplanetary transfers (and docking/refueling!) though. My big nit is serious game slow down. I'd get a bit on my laptop before (3517u w/ 8GB of memory), but now I get some BAD lag, especially in planetary landings and EVAs. I had the occasional little lag spike before, but occasionally it is bad enough that I have to quit the game and restart. Usually hitting esc and bringing up the menu to stop the lag and I can just resume right away. Othertimes the lag is back within seconds. It varies from 2-3 seconds of extreme lag where it is maybe 1-2FPS all the way through 20-30 seconds of 1-3FPS action before it smooths out again. Also it ranges form a short to long lag spike every few minutes of game play to 2-5 lag spikes per minute. It isn't quite at the unplayable level, but it is relatively close. On my full up i5 3570 desktop running at 4Ghz and with 8GB of memory (and 5570 video card) the lag issues aren't nearly as bad, but it DOES occur a little occasionally, which is not something I noticed under .13 demo or .16 (when I bought in) on my desktop before. I know, I know it is a unity issue, but I really wish real multithreading was present. The laptop could bring 2+ times more computing power to bear (2+2 hyperthreading) and the desktop 4x (quad core, no hyperthreading).

Just so much promise. I like the idea of science stations as well once campaign/research/progession is added in. Maybe new propulsion technologies are unlocked this way or something. I missed that it was a planned feature. That is nice to know that they have at least considered it and think it might be workable eventually. Best I have done. No crew tank/module, so you can't enter it, but its got a couple of lights (hard to see in the daytime) and asthetic satellite dish. A couple of small modules and a ladder to climb. If/when I do the remote tech mod, something like this could be more usable. Err, hmmm, picture might have to wait till later. Uploading isn't working from my work computer for some reason. Anyway, a little thing with legs that took me a good 15 minutes to flip upright when it landed on its side off my crew capsule when getting to the Mun.

Not sure if you have been doing it, but something that helps a lot with landings is an RCS module (with 4 manuever jets of course) and once you get close to landing, ensure you are vertical, engage SAS/ASAS with the RCS system turned on. Then when you land, even if you bounce a little, the RCS/ASAS will attempt to keep you upright. I find it generally works fine on most/all landings that are less than 10m/sec vertical and less than 4-6m/sec horizontal velocity and relatively flat. Add in much of a slope and it generally doesn't matter how slow you are going. Tipsville. Doing the same is also pretty good for killing horizontal velocity or manuevering over the surface. You get down near the surface, engage ASAS/RCS and then use the RCS system for horizontal thrusting to building up some sideways speed and then kill it before landing. It is how I generally get within a couple of hundred meters of my other landers. Of course you also need to be tweaking the main engine occasionally to keep at a hover (easier the lower the gravity as as your fuel will last a lot longer). Something I find that helps is adding in lights from one of the mods. Especially on the night side. In general though even daylight side you can see the lights on the ground somewhat. It helps you judge the real altitude better so you know when you are really close based on the spread of the lights.

I linked it over to the suggestions forum as I thought of that as soon as I hit post. Jay_em, I love that suggestion of something like a service pad or something to add/remove modules to a landed rocket as well. That could be pretty cool (even if it is just working with the modules "on hand"). yeah, I wouldn't think this would be a suggestion for added functionality for at least a few updates. I think docking would be needed first, which I am kind of hoping maybe they'll tackle in .18 (or latest .19?).

I am sure most of you vets (I sadly only have maybe 20hrs in KSP, a wife and 3 kids sucks up a lot of my time and I only found KSP about a month ago thanks to my brother-in-law) have "colonies". I am wondering what thoughts people have had for "colony modules". I have not tried out the Kethane mod, though I am seriously considering it at some point. In terms of future functionality added to the game itself, what would you like to see either as optional or not? First off, in the same vein as docking support added, I'd like to see a way to put together modules once they are landed. Something like a rover with a crane that can lift individual sections (so you can land one piece at a time or something) and then "put them together" either stacking or connecting to their sides to make colonies. I can think of a couple of things from mods that would be interesting to add. For example zoxygen and power plus lights. Each kerbal inhabitting the colony modules would use a certain amount of zoxygen, power would be used to create zoxygen and power would also be used to power any external lights once the planet/moon was in darkness (maybe with light sensor lights that automatically turned themselves on when it was local night time). Battery modules that would store power during darkness and solar cells to provide power during the day. Maybe even a nuclear reactor (found by the side of the road?) to give constant power if you wanted. I think it would also be interesting to have a fuel production module that produced fuel at a certain (very slow) rate using some power, and ONLY as part of a dirt side colony (not for use as a space station). You could refuel from the fuel production module, maybe either getting your rocket close enough to it or using something like a fuel truck/rover that could shuttle fuel back and forth. Maybe each module or number of modules requires a certain number of kerbals to operate. Like 1 kerbal per 5 colony modules or something like that. Those are the things I can think of that could make for some interesting colony building times (and incentives to build one, both from a "cool look at this", but also from an ability to refuel away from Kerbal or having to launch tons of rockets each carrying a little fuel out to your main one). A last thought, it might be interesting to allow you to either have a vehicle assembly building module, or the ability to combine a number of "VAB sub modules" together to make a big VAB module on other planets/moons. Maybe as an optional thing or something. That way you can build rockets from the get go away from Kerbin, once you have an established colony there, build the VAB and now you can launch rockets from your colony. Maybe the VAB's ability to build rockets is limited in part counts based on the number of modules you have assembled to build the VAB. Like say, a 10 module VAB on Duna is limited to only building rockets with 10 parts (but gets full fuel upon building, not using the fuel in your fuel generation modules in the colony). You also cannot add colony modules to rockets made in VABs that aren't located on Kerbin (so you can't build a VAB and then spam colony modules at that location). You could also easily put together rovers with it (since they don't take many parts), or small rockets. The big suckers would be limited...think of how many trips from Kerbin to Duna it would take to build a VAB large enough to make a 100 part rocket. YOUCH! Just some fun thoughts for the day. Anyway, some kind of colony building functionality (other than landing rockets and rovers like you can now) would be cool some time down the road.

Great goob! I don't want to see anything further out until there is maybe a more efficient method of figuring out interplanetary transfers (without using something like Mechjab). As it stands I am lucky to manage Duna on the 3rd orbit (as in something like 300 odd days or so). So far since the release of .17 I've managed Duna 4 times now out of about 9 attempts. 2 attempts were sunk by the time warp destructo bug (one blew up my entire ship, one simply caused my NERVA engines to blow up leaving my ship intact). The other 3 simply never managed to make gravitational interaction with Duna after a couple of dozen orbits and tweaking my orbital trajectory to try to get it to match up before I just gave up because of low fuel. Of the 4 times I have gotten to Duna (all I am focusing on now) one I crashed in to the planet because I forgot to open my chute until I was too low with about 1,000m/sec of downward velocity (I was thinking the atmo would be thick enough with a chute open to really burn off the velocity a lot and use the retro rockets just to scrub the last bit, not so at those kinds of speeds). That was I think the 3rd time I got there. The 1st time I ran out of fuel in Duna orbit at about 600km (it is still there). The 2nd time I managed to land, but had a little too much horizontal velocity on a slight slope. My 3 guys are stranded now after the lander tipped and fell apart. The 3rd times was the splat landing. This last time I made it and I've mapped all of Ike and all of Duna using the ISA MapSat mod (Kerbin, Minimus and Mun already mapped awhile back in .16). I am prepared to try to land near my stranded guys to start up my Duna colony in earnest (with the eventual goal to try to return one or more Kerbals back to Kerbin. They miss their kerbal wives nagging them all the time). My current lander is setup with a rover on top (first use of a rover with the exception of driving one around on Kerbin to see how it works). I figure this way I can be a little less picky on landing spot as I can motor over to my stranded capsule/guys easily (well, easily-ish). With Mun and Minimus landings in .16 I've managed landings as close as 150m. The worst was 800m (4 landings on the Mun and 2 on Minimus with the landings on Minimus right by one of the big crater walls with a great view. Aided by ISA Mapsat to get a better idea of some nice terrain features to land on/by). I used a lot of fuel each time though hovering and cruising over to get closer. Otherwise most wouldn't have been within 5km of each other. Anyway, I feel like Duna is pretty hard. I want to try Jove and it's planets soon as well as the inner planets. However, until it is a little easier to figure out a matching orbit from the get go, it just takes too much time to match with planets further out than Duna (with the exception of making it a rare event traveling out that far). A comet would be cool as would some asteroids between Duna and Jove. I know it'll come eventually, but I'd really love to see docking. Also refueling.

Ahh, I see, I didn't have the very latest 3.3.0 installed. I'll have to do that when I get home tonight. Also the boost to 50x speed for mapping should help a HUGE amount. I think it took me around 2 1/2hrs to map Kerbin, about 2hrs for Mun and about 3hrs for Minimus (maybe it was more). x50 should drop that to well under an hour (I'd hope). I guess it is time for a reinstall and another mission out to Duna. Oh well. I need to rescue my stranded Kerbals anyway. And by rescue I mean probably just land another ship near them. And by land another ship near them, I mean probably crash it. And by probably crash it, I mean BOOM is fun! I kid. I also need to load up the rover mod and the remote mod. ISA map sat and a couple of parts mods are all that I am running right now. I wants me some real rovers and remote probes.

It worked well for me to get to Duna. I had a lot less fuel than I thought I'd need to make it there and it turns out I had just enough. Though I had to burn through my RCS tankage to get a close in orbit. An extra fuel tank for my 2nd stage should manage a 1 way trip and landing. I use three big'um fuel tanks stacked 3 high and rocket motors to achieve a ballistic launch from Kerbal, 2nd stage is NERVA with 2 fuel tanks which is enough to get a circular orbit around Kerbal, then achieve interplanetary escape velocity, eliptical orbit to Duna. Sadly I had to dump the NERVA after running dry and relying on my landing stage to actually decelerate enough to achieve Duna orbit, which burned through the half tank of fuel on the landing stage. Then the RCS thrusters had to be used to achieve a 1200km cicular polar orbit. So one more tank for the NERVA is probably enough. I'll find out tonight! PS I love the new A. SAS and RCS full size tanks to match the big capsule. Now if we can just have a big'um NERVA as well :-D

So, any ideas on when it might support the new planets and moons? Thanks!

My proposition was to place a satellite at only one of the L4/5 points and at L3. That would be one less satellite that you'd need than 3 at 120 degrees opposition. Its not really that big a deal, but just something I had been thinking of. Later with actual planets thrown in, I could also see how the L points could be useful for interplanetary travel. You could have them at, for example, the Murs/Kerbal L4 and L5 points for refueling, so if you were going further outsystem and were not planning on using gravity assist, you could potentially use stations there. The stations could (if added in) use a combination of ion engine station keeping drives to counter act the thrust of a railgun to accelerate fuel tanks with some RCS and stability control systems to outbound flights that would pass nearby for refueling. Murs could refuel and resupply the stations. It would increase, potentially, the time window for missions to the outer planets to enable resupply to them enroute for higher energy burns and more direct travel than having to use gravity assist for the extra velocity.

Depends. You would have larger lag, but you'd also have greater cost involved in placing those satellites. In the context of the game (with no current implemented cost/resource structure), at least additional time required to place them in combination with addional objects for the game to have to track and for the Remotetech mod, additional required antennas on the satellites. Current lag, with Remotetech mod at least, is low enough that a doubling of the lag is still on the order of being insignificant.

Well, outside of the boundries of the game, the advantages of using the L points would be to place a satellite at L3 and at L4 or L5 and with 2 satellites you could have LOS communications to all points of the Moon, I mean the Mun, with the exceptions of deep craters in a few spots and a few spots on the poles that might render the satellite below the local horizon also due to terrain features. For the unstable L points, yes they are unstable, but it also doesn't require a significant amount of station keeping. A low powered ion engine would work great for long term positioning on one of those L points. You'd basically either have LOS directly from the main body to the satellite or you'd have the L4/5 to L3 relay to the far side of the satellite. Anyway, thanks for answering my question on whether they existed in the game or not.

Anyone know if the L points exist in KSP and if so what the location/math for them is based on scale and gravity? Oh, and especially how you'd calculate them based on the impact of Minimums (which, pardon the pun, I assume would be minimal impact due to its much greater orbital diameter and smaller size/gravity compared to the Mun). Just thinking about in the future trying to setup a station and/or relay satellites in a few of the L points Thanks!

First I have to say, this game is addictive and is likely it will ruin my marriage. I started playing Saturday at the instance of my brother-in-law (see honey, it is your brother's fault, not mine!). A few hours on Saturday. A few hours on Sunday with my oldest son ridding shotgun building rockets (he is 4 1/2, so you can imagine the gleeful squeals of delight watching rockets blast off and occasionally blow up). Well last night I bought the full version and went to town. Over the weekend I managed to land on the Mun in the demo (maybe land isn't quite the right term. I think there is another term when you touch down with 1,560m/sec of V still). Last night within the first hour I managed to put together a launch vehicle to get a ship in to Mun orbit. Circular, 110km altitude. 1 Kerbal capsule, RCS, SAS, aSAS, now empty small fuel tank and the low power LF rocket engine composes the orbiter. Then it took me 3hrs, both finding a few mod parts and playing around with them (I still haven't installed a good solar panel/power mod, but I am sure I'll find one). Goal, build a satellite and insert it to a stable Kerbal orbit. I finally managed to. It took me about 45 mintues to play with some mod parts, maybe 45 minutes to figure out how to move parts around the logical "stages" in the VAB to properly control seperation and rocket ignition (and also to seperate the satellite from the top of the capsule before seperating the final stage from the capsule so that I can back off the final stage/capsule and do a deorbit burn). Then about an hour and a half to build a launch vehicle powerful enough to get it to orbit and stay intact. Final satellite was a high gain antenna, a pair of small satellite body modules, RCS and SAS. Not sure of the final weight, but I think it was around 4.5t. Its in circular equitorial orbit at around 170km. Went to bed at 1am. 5:50am wake up from my youngest son this morning was BRUTAL. Next goal. First, I believe that I will commit myself to achieving the goal, before this week is out, of landing a Kerbal on the Mun and returning him safely to Kerbal. We'll see if I manage it. I'll poke around the forums, but if anyone has any good suggestions on power mods I am all eyes. Also anyone know if/when there are plans for orbital docking/assembly (or mods)? I don't recall seeing it in future enhancement thread, though maybe I just overlooked it. I am sure me and everyone else wants it, but I really would love to be able to assemble things like space stations in orbit, launch rockets up to them to refuel the rocket in orbit and then shove off from there. Heck, being able to construct things like Mun bases and have my little kerbals running around on the Mun would be a lot of fun too (or other planets once that gets added in .17).