CatastrophicFailure

Sound like someone didn't... heed the lock...

This. Curse you, obnoxiously catchy pop music!

THIS JUST IN: MAN ARGUES WITH BRICK WALL, WINS! In related news, Hell predicting best ski season in millennia.

Glad I can be of service. You keep a mind on your head tho, infections + fever sound like bad news! Nah. Entry speed past Rald is about on par with stock Kerbin, so I could probably get away with no heat shield at all getting there. And it's looking like I might have to.

I don't think the trunk can hold that much. Probably even less for a manned flight, for safety. The point of the D2 is crew delivery, after all, cargo is secondary.

So... moderators are imbued with special powers and great responsibility while being completely separate from the actual authority and instead operating with its tacit approval while it takes no actions on its own, hmm... so mods are superheroes?

Hmm... IIRC, that shows up in the relevant experiment part, "solar something something yadda yadda experiment." You'd need the big antenna looking thingy, that experiment, and either a staffed lab or the automated LDEF thing. It's all pretty complicated, I still haven't figured most of it out myself. Tho I think Kerbalism is messing with it, too.

Is that the solar experiment thingy from MOLE? It'll work in Gael orbit, but it generates "solar reports" to be used by one of the LDEF experiments.

With all those lifting surfaces, how far can it fly?

OK, dumb queston here that's probably been answered before: Does SSTU support SmokeScreen? I've got it installed along with RealPlume, I get the pretty flame effects, but no smoke trails in atmo. Is there a config somewhere I missed?

Situation update: Year 7, Day 190... Despite the initial jubilation that we were not about to receive three softly glowing radioactive corpses back on Gael, the situation remains dire. Lodvin, Haylotte, and Jencine are alive and breathing, for the moment, after becoming the first Kerbals to walk on Rald. At least as far as we know. Rald's own magnetic fields are strong enough to protect the crew from any further radiation exposure, but it remains uncertain whether the dosages they have received will naturally convalesce without returning home. And here in, lies the problem. At the moment, we simply do not have the technology to do so. Lifting off from the small planet would first require a lander an order of magnitude heavier than anything we've yet built. And simply getting such a construction to the surface, intact, with any shred of landing accuracy will be a great challenge. The crew has sent back this shot of planting flags around their new temporary (we hope) home. This is no great act of patriotism, come to think of it, I can't even remember the last time we had a rousing round of the National Anthem around here... but anyways... it seems the surface of Rald is every bit as slimy as it looks from space. the NewShip has picked up a disturbing habit of trying to slide away. Hopefully the flags will keep it from going too far. And they've made it through their first night ok, too. With all the life support systems shut down, the on-board batteries provide plenty of power to run a few essential systems through the night. Unfortunately, while it would technically still work, the space toilet is in exactly the wrong position for any practical use, and the crew has already begun contaminating the pristine planet, with Mission Control's blesssing, oddly enough. And this is an interesting development... The crew have said they don't see anything that looks like a settlement, but now that I've gone over them again, our own bome maps of Rald are considerably lacking and not even complete. This, too, will need to be addressed, but our first and foremost concen is a very simple one: We have 15 days to get them food and water before an entirely different call of nature begins. 15 days to design, test, build, and launch a rocket, that will need to land its cargo with pinpoint accuracy to be of any use to the crew. Which is going about as well as you might expect: I'll close this report now and get back to the drafting table, it's been rambling on long enough.

What's taking a hunk out of Kerbin, there? Are those the old-style KAS containers? New skin? Details, man!

Today, I made a stockish helicopter! Absolutely meant to!

I'll get you for that.

Dedicated to @Just Jim so I don't clog up his thread, and most of his neighborhood by the look of it, too. well, except for that one tree...

What're all those bright floaty bits?

Diode. Great news, @Just Jim!

Year 7, Day 186... Mission day 32. Alarm bells ring out in the cabin, rousing the crew from the first proper sleep they've had the whole trip (after stuffing Lodvin into the hab module airlock). There's a solar storm incoming, and it's a big one. ETA is five days. That's not much, but it might just be enough time. Mission Control orders an immediate abort. The food container and hab module are jettisoned... Well, this is another fine mess you've gotten us into. I feel funny... There's something alive down here...

That's the thing, they'll show this great, epic (and oh so amusing) pile of fail, but they won't show the dramatic victory-from-the-jaws-of-defeat moment BulgariaSat supposedly was.

And yet they won't show the BulgariaSat footage.

Since the parachute is in the bottom of that module, I'm guessing maybe it gets released when the upper module is jettisoned after reentry?

Irony that this was posted on a Kerbal forum and the models were found by Kraken Sonar Systems...

This. It's not a technical issue, it's a bureaucracy issue. That makes it not worth pursuing at the moment. Once Dragon 2 (and FH) are fully operational and mini-ITS exists on more than just paper, I think we'll see a return to propulsive Dragon landings, specifically if customers appear wanting to land stuff on the moon. As I hear it, the guy likely to take over the helm at NASA is a big proponent of both commercial spaceflight and returning to the moon, which just might be where some of those payloads come from. Maybe once there's a few Dragons on the moon, NASA will start to reconsider the practicality of such landings on earth. And non-NASA manned flights might have a different set of standards entirely.

Man, that sucks. I start carping when it's in the mid-70's even with AC.

Just wiki'd this, thanx. Interesting read (and a damn shame), have a link to the story on the recovery?