M5000

Okay, so we're allowed to do map view... Can we use maneuvers? Cause... This whole thing could be... Aww yeeeah.

As long as KSP doesn't become a bunch of socially awkward kids building giant block pixel art statues of ponies, I think we can just count that as a win. ...We can count it as a victory if it becomes a bunch of socially awkward kids building giant space stations shaped like body parts. Why? Because we can, that's why.

Many of these could apply to other planets, but I may reserve the full discussion for another thread later. For Kerbin... Natural features: -Volcanoes -Canyons -At least one huge impact crater -Archipelagos -Islands in general -Weather such as rain, snow at times, storms, things that may or may not affect communication -Icebergs -Aurora Borealis -Rainforests -Deciduous forests -Cliffs -Rivers/streams -Valleys Vehicular activity: -Planes that fly through the sky. With lights, of course, for nighttime. Be careful not to hit any, though KSC should be a relative no-fly zone. -Boats in the water every so often (maybe even in career mode have a recovery boat to get splashed-down modules). -Cars on roads. -Trains on tracks maybe. -In career mode, have other space agencies doing their own things so that you have to be mindful of other activities and not destroy other projects, else you may lose "rep" or something. Manmade things: -Radio towers with gently droning red lights on them. -Radio towers with quick flashing white lights on them. These will make near-storm weather look 400% worse than it is, for some reason. I've noticed this in real life.. -Make sure all the radio towers contain big microwave radomes and cones and all kinds of ominous-looking communication equipment. Also, in career mode, if communication is necessary, you could be able to rent space on a tower to put your own communication array, or possibly buy/erect your own, so that KSC isn't the only point on Kerbin you have to communicate from. -Tornado/warning siren towers placed in strategic places. -Observatories on tops of some hills. -Solar/Wind farms. -Nuclear power plants/Hydroelectric power plants. -Cities, obviously. -Big radio telescopes, some larger than others, some being so large they have to be built into a hillside or something. God that would be cool... I would love all of that stuff in-game, but I understand it would be a lot of extra coding to do, but eh.

I put my stations in an 80Km orbit. It's low enough that the delta-V requirements are minimal, but high enough to allow things to orbit lower than it, therefore catching up to it. Most of my stuff in Kerbin orbit is somewhere between 70Km and 100Km, but I like 80 for stations.

Dat beautiful, KW, non-stock rocket.

My favorite is the Betelgeuse-1 Heavy which I built myself.. OH you mean REAL life.. First is Falcon-9 and the whole system they have with Dragon. It's a modern system, and if they get the Grasshopper system working, any rocket that utilizes it will be pretty much 100% reusable. Also, the capsule is named Dragon, my favorite of all mythical creatures, or creatures in general: Second favorite would probably have to be the Soyuz, because it's just so cool looking, and I love how the OTVs look: Third would have to probably be the N1. It's so much like everything I build in KSP..I get this big idea, this dream in my head of a huge, amazing rocket, I get all excited and ready to go, and I put it on the pad and there's a failure within the first 5 seconds: Right after that, it's pretty much a tie between the Titan-II (specifically the later ones used in Gemini) and Saturn V. I like them because of the classic look of both of them. Titan-II is so elegantly simple, and Saturn-V is just such a massive rocket it's hard to dislike. If you don't know which is which, shame on you and get out:

Did an almost-Apollo-style Mun landing and return today... Actually, in all honesty my first Kerbals on another world period. Also my first Kerbals on another world alive. All of my other missions thus far have either been in Kerbin orbit, or have been unmanned, because I honestly don't see the need for manned missions at this point and time, makes my subconscious actually care about leaving a craft adrift for several years while I work on something else.. Anyhow, here's the best pictures I got, the rest are just thrown into my imgur album and may be near-duplicates or not even worth looking at: The mission was performed by the three brave Kerbonauts Kirk, Erfel, and Lozon Kerman. Kirk and Lozon actually went to the surface, while Erfel dutifully manned the Unity One while they were on the surface. Here's where I started really taking pictures, right as I finished doing the docking of the Unity One to the Wyvern, at this point the large final lifter stage has a slurp of fuel left in it, which was used to perform most of the injection burn, but I knew it would likely burn out in the middle of the burn, so I re-hashed my staging order and did my docking before the burn, so I would actually use the lander's descent engine to perform about 20% of the burn. Observe the fairing to the left of the ship that used to be covering the Unity One's engine: This picture is after the injection burn for the Mun, which took all of the delta-V left in the launcher's final stage, and about half from the lander's descent fuel tank, as I used the small KW SPS to complete the burn, as I had to stage in the middle of it, so I did my docking first and THEN the burn. Part one of several of why this is not exactly like Apollo. After our encounter, the crew performed a standard retroburn to slow down into a highly eccentric but stable orbit. I opted to use a NERVA-style engine (specifically, the LV-NB from KSPX for all you technical people) instead of a KW SPS engine. The burn times were a bit longer and the engine runs a LOT hotter, but ultimately I just under doubled my delta-V by doing this. Wasn't too much extra trouble to launch, either. Reason two of several why this isn't perfectly an Apollo style mission. After Lozon and Kirk EVA'd over to the Wyvern, it decoupled and began its ascent trajectory. The fact that the crew EVA'd over to the Wyvern rather than just transferred internally is reason three of several why this is not perfectly an Apollo style mission. Actually, it's more like the Soviet LK lander, but whatever. Lozon and Kirk have touched down on the Mun and have a gaze at Kerbin from further away than any Kerbal has seen before. They did not, however, plant a flag in the ground. Reason four of several why this is not exactly an Apollo mission. Lozon is very excited about the docking port on top of the Wyvern: While Kirk seems to have more interest in this fairly large rock: Lozon and Kirk sit atop the MEM to watch the Knievel-I ULOP (ultra-low-orbit-probe) pass overhead. The landing site was equatorial (reason five of several why this is not a perfect Apollo mission) so they were able to see the Knievel-I pass actually within render distance to the Wyvern MEM crew, since they were elevated about 1200 meters ASL altitude, and the probe was about 3800 ASL, it passed within rendering distance very shortly. The Knievel-I actually passed over three times while the crew was on the ground, and I actually attempted to get a Kerbal to jetpack up much closer to the probe moving at about 570m/s. Guys... 570m/s is FAST. The landing crew take off, leaving the base of the lander to stay forever as a marker where the first Kerbal on another world stood. (I stuck a probe body in it on purpose so that it would stick around). Meeting up with Erfel on the Unity One CSM: After a bit of orbital shenaniganing and before I did my return burn, I realized I had left off a decoupler and parachute for the command pod. I had to think quickly what could be done to save our brave Kerbonauts. I debated attempting a powered landing on Kerbin instead of by parachute, but since I had a heavy, low thrust NERVA engine, I decided not to put our crew in jeopardy and instead opted to simply meet up and dock with my station, Stability-9 and have a pickup mission later as the Kerbonauts tell their story around a station fire to the Stability-9 crew of Jeb, Bob, and Bill, and some others. Reason six of six why this is not a perfect Apollo replication. Unity One is docked on the farther end of Stability-9 with its panels all stowed and engine deactivated. The other two craft docked to Stability-9 are its own native manned OTV and unmanned tug for assisting scheduled incoming vessels: And that's what I accomplished today.

Is the pod EVA capable?

I would never use the ant unless your plan on sending up a lot of fuel. The ISP is pretty much the worst of any engine in the game, worse than the Mainsail I think, even. I think the only thing that's worse with ISP is the SRBs... They produce no more thrust than an ion engine yet have a horrible ISP.

Oh god I entirely forgot about Google Hangouts..

You know, that is part of the Firespitter pack, you could totally replace the props with the electric ones and slap on a few big ass battery banks and make that thing SSTO-on-any-planet-except-Jool-and-maybe-Eve capable, I bet.

Yes, I was just reading about this the other day.

If only that could work... Unfortunately, with the game's current gravitation model, only the gravity from one body at a time is simulated, so you wouldn't be able to detect gravity from another planet unless you had another variable that appeared like gravity but was more like a "Distance to a planet that is not your current planet of influence meter" or something. I dunno.

Sit on down, It's story time with M5000 and some advice for a probe to Jool mission.. I actually did a Jool mission a while ago with the Iasillo-I probe.. It was supposed to be a mapping mission so I sent out a probe with like 4 or 5 of the larger KSPX Xenon tanks and then like 8 of the smaller 500-unit KSPX Xenon tanks, had something in the neighborhood of like 16Km/s of Delta-V... The probe itself was absolutely loaded with sciency stuff and mapping equipment and all kinds of bells and whistles, so had the mission gone better, I'd have all of the Jool system charted out.. Yeah but about that solar power far out at Jool.... Many problems occurred.. I used the KSPX larger ion engine which takes more electricity... So... I didn't have enough solar power to be able to run my ion engines at full throttle no matter where I was, it would ALWAYS drain from the battery by some amount. (PUT A LOT OF SOLAR PANELS ON THERE. You are further out and it will have less sunlight to get to the probe.. So... I had to run my ion engine at no more than 20% throttle at any given point, or the battery would begin to drain. I could run it in full-throttle bursts, but most of the burn had to be done at 20% throttle... So.... The burn times for even a small burn took about 4 in-game hours, no lie. About an hour or so on X4 physwarp. So.... Obviously I'm not gonna be making any quick corrections if something goes awry, of course in Kerbal spirit, that's exactly what happened. I found out I was going the wrong way in orbit around Jool AFTER I had already slowed down from my injection burn and obtained some form of a stable orbit. Reversing the direction would have taken pretty much all of my delta-V and a huge burn time, so I decided to try and roll with it, maybe slingshot around one of the planets and fix my direction... So.... As I come up on Pol, the first target, I'm going much faster than I ever thought I could. My encounter time was about 15 minutes as opposed to the normal 1-3 hours or so. A single ion engine at 20% or less throttle with a heavy, fuel and battery loaded probe armed to the teeth with science stuff being able to slow down from twice of Joolian orbital velocity down to Pol orbital velocity in 15 minutes? Not gonna happen. I flew right on by.. So.... I kept going, passed up Bop and had some fun, took some pictures to send back home via a tacky postcard saying "Wish you were here....No really, someone needs to come here and help me reverse my orbital direction, your insertion burn sucked!" So.... I went to my current favorite planet that I've only touched once, Vall. So I've got my beautiful encounter lined up and then I get this: Oh.. Looks like I was just a tiny bit too precise with my maneuvers.. So... This happened.. Then this happened: And now I have a lovely desktop background... The moral of the story is: Do your insertion burn correctly, and put more solar panels on your ion probes and spacecraft, because ion engines are hungry and greedy bastards. Like, whatever you think is going to be enough, solar panels, you probably need like twice as many.

...Docking with a module to be moved from the BOTTOM... Genius! As long as they're all the same diameter and have the legs positioned the same way, there should be an easy and consistent way to do this! Excellent.. Until now, all my base building had taken place with two rovers basically parallel parking a module into position.. Ugh.. Though, the modifications I'll make to that specific design will likely include replacing the vanilla port with a CBM one (much stronger/less wobbly docking force and it auto-aligns to 90 degrees), and put the ports actually on the modules, so that I don't have to have an end-node to place them, thus slightly reducing part count on each module (but on the long run, being able to shave off a LOT of parts total which means a bigger base.) Also my rover might need to be a bit wider/longer. I'm thinking of putting orange tanks on my base, and those are much harder to move. Excellent base though. Also also, I'd just like to say that I think your base is beautifully designed and actually my favorite one I've seen in a long time, the reason being that you DIDN'T spam it with a bunch of useless solar panels that there are no need for as of 19.1 The amount of solar panels used on that base looks about right for what its actual power demands are. Good job. That's not to say we might need bigger arrays in future updates as the game gets more complex, but right now, the only things that ever take power are probe cores, science packs, lights, rover wheels, and ion engines. All very basic things, and the base looks well-suited for what it is.

Just the pod, if at all possible. But, it would be nice to see it with its own IVA (MAKE IT WORK!!! lol) and an EVA hatch of some sort...

It ended after the CSM and the LEM docked together after the injection burn! MOAR!! D:

ROBOT ROLL CALL!!! Cambot! Gypsy! Tom Servo! CROOOOOOW!

I would love to do an ion plane, but the problem with one on Eve is that the wings would simply be too much mass for the tiny thrust of the ion engines... And any significant speed in Eve's thick atmosphere would rip any serious solar arrays right apart, so the STATs are the only ones you could use, but to provide a proper structure and power for an ion engine enough to actually get to orbit, it'd be impossible, I think.

I really like how it looks. It actually looks like a station, rather than a large cylinder of several modules with a big solar array at the end, like mine do. However, I think the part count could be greatly reduced in some areas, here's some pointers if you care to think about it: -Those ladders, you're using the small three-rung ladders. Why not do the job of several small ladders with one big ladder, especially for walking out on long trusses? You could probably eliminate several good groups of parts in that manner. If you have a module that you know is going to extend onto another module, try to plan and use a ladder that will just reach to the next one. Try using as big of a ladder as possible to go between two points, it's less parts! -The way you have your solar panel arrays put on there looks to be several of the structural fuselages concatenated into a long tube via docking ports. Why not just use a single, very long structural truss (maybe two or more if you need that many panels) and place the panels on there in the VAB. When you dock several ports like that, you're using many parts you might not actually need, like the docking ports, and the use of many connections between all the ports means more wobble when doing any kind of maneuver. The ports also do not auto-align when you dock, so they're probably out-of-rotation a bit. Send a whole array up in one launch, they're very light to handle so it shouldn't be a big issue. Less launches and more structural integrity! -Those small RCS tanks really aren't necessary, as they're small capacity and their total capacity could be accomplished by a single large tank. This gives you similar capacity for less parts. More "bang for the buck." Really, those RCS tanks only belong on very small craft where other larger tanks simply won't fit. -The small OX-STAT panels are probably not needed, as you have a LOT of them. Yes, I understand that having more panels will give you a bit of extra power when you're leaving peak output hours and descending into the dark, but ultimately there will be a period where you will not have sunlight. The panels will really only add an extra minute or two of actual charge time over a small, conservative array. I guess you could say the OX-Stats are a good alternative in case a main array were to break for some reason, but really, why not just send up another array at that point? Basically, a small, well placed array of the Gigantor-XL's would be sufficient for a station that size and likely much much larger. -You have a lot of docking ports where you don't really need them, basically, aim to send up as big of modules as possible, in as few of launches as possible. Docking ports should really only be used to connect major modules, do as much construction in the VAB as possible. I think it's a great station, though, and I quite like it, but there's a lot of places where you could shave off parts from your part count to make it much larger!

Ahem, cough cough.. Ahem... It's really not all that great. Has the Mk 1-2 pod IVA, and no EVA capability because there are no hatches. I like it just because it brings back memories to the 13.3 trial.

How do you get to Minmus if you're not in Kerbin's SOI?

This thread is actually spawning a world of different reactions I never even thought of.. Flowchart.. Brilliant...

Alright, so I think I'm not alone when I say that I spend a lot of time thinking about what missions I want to do, and building/testing for them, and actually less time /doing/ them. I think there should be a thread where we do just that. So here. Let's talk about all the things we want to do/have done in attempts to formalize our missions. I'm not saying anyone is actually going to stick to what they post here, but I think it'll be interesting to see how people want to progress through the game. Maybe you have more scattered missions in these alpha versions, and want a more structured mission plan when 1.0 hits, I don't know, but I think it would be fun to design a basic outline for what you hope to accomplish, in an ideal world. So, I'll go to give you all ideas as to what I'm talking about, in chronological order. -Design a craft that can perform a sub-orbital flight. -Design a craft that can place a satellite in some type of orbit. -Design a craft that can place a Kerbal into sub-orbital trajectory and return the Kerbal safely. -Design a craft that can place a Kerbal into an orbit and land the Kerbal safely back on Kerbin. -Design a reliable launch vehicle that can be quickly built and launched for repeatable results of similar missions. -Design a reliable launch vehicle that can be quickly built and launched for repeatable manned missions. -Perform an orbital docking. -Perform an orbital rendezvous. -Send an unmanned probe into orbit of one of the local moons. -Send an unmanned lander onto the surface of one of the local moons. -Send an unmanned rover onto the surface of one of the local moons. -Send a manned orbital-only mission to one of the local moons. -Send a manned surface landing to one of the local moons, returning all Kerbals home safely. -Construct a set of launch vehicles capable of lofting payloads of varying mass to LKO. Use these basic "skeleton" launch vehicles for all relevant missions on out, making improvements as they are realized. -Send an unmanned probe on an escape trajectory of Kerbol. -Send an unmanned probe to every subsystem in the Kerbol system. -Design and construct an orbital station in LKO. -Maintain station in LKO. -Send an Ordan Industries Telescope into high orbit and gaze upon the stars and planets. -Design a very compact single-launch station outpost with long term self-orbit-keeping ability and place it in Kerbinsychronous orbit. -Send an unmanned lander to Duna. -Send a series of unmanned rovers to Duna. -Send a series of unmanned probes to the Eve system. -Send an unmanned lander to Eve. -Design a single-stage-to-orbit craft designed for re-use during crewed missions. -Design a single-stage-to-orbit spaceplane to cut costs. -Send an atmospheric probe to Jool. -Send a manned mission to land on Duna and return safely. -Begin preliminary intense surface study of Mun and Minmus. -Construct an orbital Mun station to act as a go-between for frequent Mun surface missions. -Construct a large fuel depot in LKO. -Send parallel unmanned missions to Duna to construct an orbital station relatively quickly. -Send an unmanned rover to Laythe. -Begin long-term habitation of the Duna station. -Construct a surface scientific base on the Mun. -Construct a surface scientific base on Minmus. -Begin mining/habitation operations of Mun. -Begin mining/habitation operations of Minmus. -Send parallel manned and unmanned missions to Duna to construct a scientific surface base, while also changing out the original station crew with new members. -Send parallel unmanned missions to the whole Jool system to scan for resources. -Construct a high-capacity LKO habitation station. -Construct a high-capacity fuel depot in very high Kerbin orbit to act as a refueling station for passing missions. -Send several more unmanned rovers, landers, and probes to Laythe. -Send parallel manned and unmanned missions to Laythe to construct an orbital station with a docked single-stage-to-orbit vessel. -Use the single-stage-to-orbit vehicle to perform a manned descent to the surface of Laythe. -Take off your space helmets and breathe alien air for the first time in Kerbal history. -Send an upscaled surface base to Laythe. -Send parallel missions to Duna to create a mining and habitation base. -Begin preparations for a Grand Tour of the Kerbol system. -Send an unmanned probe as close to Kerbol as possible. -Send parallel unmanned rover missions to Eve. -Scout Eve for the highest point possible in preparation for a manned landing. -Send a manned return mission to and from Eve. -At the highest point on Eve, construct a self-sustaining very large surface colony. -Perform regular missions to visit the Eve colony. -Design a non-atmospheric lander with mining capabilities that is able to land and take off from Tylo or Moho, in preparation for the Grand Tour. -Design a very efficient SSTO to couple on to the Grand Tour vessel in order to use on Laythe and possibly other very low gravity moons. From there.....? Who knows.. Maybe interstellar if that gets implemented... As you can see I have plans. I've already done half of that in a mismatched order, but I'd really like to follow a structure. So does anyone else have a wall of text they'd like to share?

Well there's your problem.