Brotoro

I went back later and did more experiments with the save file from my Magic Boulder encounter. It turns out that the Magic Boulder does not disappear when you time warp...it just shifts position a certain distance in its orbit (which was putting it out of my view). I presume this has something to do with the calculations of its position not being as accurate under time warp.

And I would give even more for this correction. It's such a problem because I can't figure out WHY it happens, since it only happens some times and not others.

No, gimbaling engine control of roll is not possible with one engine, but it certainly should be possible with multiple engines (which does not currently happen). I would give a lot for this correction.

Trying to fly to a jovian with a ring would be difficult, assuming you had to be careful to NOT hit the ring. You could only aerobrake if you come in on a sufficiently inclined trajectory.

I tried to fly a SSTO spaceplane to orbit for the first time today. I didn't make it to orbit, but I got into a trajectory that reached 75,000 meters and arced almost halfway around the planet. Then I landed in the ocean and broke my plane. But "Any landing you can swim away from..."

It took several hours one night. But a lot of it was sitting and watching the screen trying to spot the Magic Boulder...and that wasn't so bad because I was listening to an audiobook at the time.

No. But as it said at the beginning of the post, this is a repost of one of my favorite threads that vanished in the Great Forum Crash. So this is an older mission that was indeed flown in version 0.18

Here is the link for the Mark Twain MB craft file. I think I fixed the problem with the little nose probes not separating in this version.

Replacing one of my favorite threads that vanished in the Great Forum Disaster: SPOILER WARNING: This thread contains information about a KSP easter egg. If ye do not wish to be spoiled, go nae further! NOTE: Magic Boulder apparently disappeared from the game in version 0.19, and has not yet returned (as of version 0.90). I am sad. Mission: Bothering Magic Boulder It is said that one should never taunt Magic Boulder. But I think it's one of the coolest looking easter eggs in Kerbal Space Program, so I couldn't resist trying to poke it a little. I'm not sure if this constitutes "taunting," but I wouldn't be surprised if Magic Boulder is bothered by my mission. Magic Boulder is a mysterious object orbiting around Duna's moon Ike. It does not appear in Map mode, so it is difficult to locate. I've seen the YouTube video where Scott Manley visits Magic Boulder, but I've also seen videos that show what appear to be hours and hours of searching for Magic Boulder (from the surface and from a hovering station). So I was keen to see if I could locate it. Rather than go back and review the videos, I'd see if I could find it myself... although I did know it was "in a 15 km polar obit around Ike"... that much I remembered. The crew for this mission was Commander Kurt Kerman, Lewis Lander pilot Adly Kerman (the guy who spent years stranded in in Kerbol orbit when his ship overshot Moho), and Clark Lander pilot Rondorf Kerman. They would be flying a late-model Mark Twain ship (very close to the design used for the Eeloo mission). There were some extra sacrificial mini-landers added to the Lewis and Clark Landers, since data on hand indicate that coming in contact with Magic Boulder can destroy your ship. Because the ship was only going to Duna, and because the design has evolved to be lighter over the years, and because I have learned to use aerobraking, there would be no worries about fuel consumption on this mission. There would be no need to use the Interplanetary Booster that was used to send off the Eeloo mission. The Mark Twain's rocket managed to put it into a 120 km parking orbit with one its orange tanks still half full of fuel. Setting up the trans-Duna injection maneuver seemed like child's play compared to recent maneuvers between Joolian moons, or the flight to Eeloo. Then again, I did have some difficulty when the burn did not result in the encounter that was originally indicated...and I don't know why. But a correction burn fixed that. After the injection and correction burns, the Mark Twain still had its rear fuel tank attached, which was still 39% full. Niiice. The sustainer stage of the rocket was used to start the trans-Duna injection. It did not reach escape velocity, but it did give the Mark Twain Ike an nice push. A little fuel was left in the sustainer so that it could do a deorbit burn once it reached apoapsis (it is equipped with a QBE probe body mounted on a strut bracket on the side for this purpose). Wow. It's been a long time since I've been to Duna. I should land there again some day. But our target is 'round the back there. The last time I visited Duna, I was not wise in the ways of aerobraking. But the ship would use aerobraking this mission, which would save even more fuel. I was a bit disappointed that the 500 km periapsis indicated after my correction burn became a 7,730 km periapsis when I entered Duna's sphere of influence, so another burn was required to get the periapsis aimed at 15 km (leaving the rear tank 29% full). Also, the 15 km target somehow crept down to around 12 km on the way in, so I ended up having to flip and do a posigrade burn to keep the ship's apoapsis out beyond Ike's orbit. An encounter with Ike came up immediately after the aerobraking, which was nice. But then again, it's hard to swing a cat around in the Duna system without getting an Ike encounter because of the relatively large size of its sphere of influence. This put the ship into a 8000 km orbit near the equator (19% fuel left in the rear tank), which then had to be plane-shifted to a 90-degree polar orbit (10% fuel left in the rear tank -- and this is a tank that earlier missions used to drop in Kerbin orbit before reaching escape velocity!). Below we see the Mark Twain high above the north pole of Ike...and we can see a potential problem: There appeared to be a rather sharp mountain right at the north pole of the moon. This is a problem because one of the methods recommended for locating Magic Bolder is to land a ship at the pole and watch for the polar-orbiting Magic Boulder to pass overhead. Adly Kerman took the Lewis lander down into a low orbit to scout out the situation. The poor lighting at the pole made it hard to see, but there did indeed appear to be a steep mountain at the pole. There was a large flat area some distance away, but there was also a saddle in a ridge coming out from the polar mountain that was the closest flat spot to the pole, so that's where Adly landed. The landing site was a 2 km south of the pole (well, of course, any site would be south of the pole), but it was specifically south of the pole in the direction that faces away from Duna, so Duna was not visible from the landing site (the polar mountain ridge blocked the view). So, first Adly got out to do some of those normal Kerbal activities, like standing on top of his ship. This was somewhat higher than normal because of the mini-lander probe on top. But for the ultimate in standing on top of things, Adly used his rocket pack to fly the 2 kilometers to the top of the polar mountain ridge. Look, Ma, I'm on top of the world! And you can see Duna from here! Below, Adly's helmet lights illuminate the sharp peak of the polar ridge. The angle is not bad forward and backward, but the ground drops off sharply to the Adly's right and left. Adly flew back and set up one of the science packages from under the Lewis's side tanks to mark the historic landing location. The poor little solar-powered probe would be unusable much of the time when Kerbol was behind one of the mountains on the horizon. Science data from the probe: Gravity: 01.04 m/s^2, 00.11g -- Pressure: Vacuum -- Temperature: -055.23 whatevers. But let's get to the main work here! Adly (who had spent years patiently observing Kerbol from close distance) was the perfect choice for the job of sitting at the north pole and watching for something to pass overhead. But to give him an idea of exactly WHAT to look for, Rondorf took the Clark lander down from the Mark Twain and parked it into a polar orbit at 15 km altitude. Below we see that Clark making a pass over the Lewis lander. The indicator makes it easy to see where the Clark is... but Magic Boulder has no such indicator. So here is the view straight up overhead. Or actually this is cropped to the central part of the view (which was about twice this wide). This is the view from below the ground, looking up at the bottom of the Lewis lander (and the science package sitting on the ground near it). I stared at this view for a long time...in a dark room. I had to clean my computer screen and glasses to see it better. The Clark's icon would regularly pass overhead (well...almost overhead, since it was in a polar orbit inclined 90 degrees, and the Lewis was a couple kilometers from the pole), coming across at a slightly different angle each time as Ike rotated under its orbit (yes, Ike rotates: In order to keep the same face toward Duna all the time, it must rotate on its axis once for every revolution it makes around the planet). You can see the indicator for the Clark passing overhead in the image below (it is closer than 15 km because the landing site's elevation is a few thousand meters above the datum). I was running at 5x time warp, and every time the Clark came overhead, I shifted my concentration to a different part of the screen (top, right, bottom, left, each corner in turn), looking for a telltale flickering pixel crossing the screen. This may sound very boring, but I was happily listening to an audiobook at the time, so it wasn't too bad. But what WAS bad was that I never saw any interesting flickering pixels pass overhead. Bugger all. Hmmm. Ah. Maybe when people said, "Magic Boulder is in a polar orbit around Ike," what they really meant was that it was in a mostly-polar orbit. Like when they said the UFO easter egg on Kerbin is located "at the north pole." Because there is a big difference between a polar orbit and a mostly-polar orbit, especially when you are talking about such a low orbit. Even if Magic Boulder's orbit was only, say, 10 degrees from polar, that would put it quite a ways off from vertical as seen from the polar viewing site...and it would be outside your field of view as you look straight up. So I shifted my search to looking off to the sides, preparing to spend several more chapters staring at the screen in a dark room looking for a flickering pixel. So you can imagine my glee when I spotted it in the first direction I looked. The image below is a composite of a half-dozen images I took as Magic Boulder was passing (I pressed the screenshot key every few seconds, but the points are irregularly spaced because the other pictures did not catch the flickering pixel when it was on). Adly looks like he's pleased by the observations. All right! Now we're cooking. I measured some angles and did some calculating, and it appeared that Magic Boulder was in an orbit with an inclination of 80 degrees, give or take. So the plan was to have Rondorf shift the orbit of the Clark and see if it could be made to match the orbit of Magic Boulder. But there was a problem: Rondorf's orbit was almost 180 degrees away from Magic Boulder's orbit, so that was going to take a lot of plane shifting, which meant a lot of fuel consumption. Because not just any old 80-degree orbit would do...it had to have the same Longitude of Ascending Node as Magic Boulder's orbit, and all that jazz. Anyway, I got it pretty close before Rondorf ran desperately low on fuel. By observing the height of the Clark as it passed by in an 80-degree orbit, it was confirmed that Magic Boulder was in such an orbit. And from the matching orbital periods, it was confirmed that Magic Boulder was in a 15 km orbit (but that was a given all along). Anyway. Adly got tired of all this lollygagging around, and HIS lander had lots of fuel in it, so he decided to chase down Magic Boulder. The plan was: wait until it appears over the horizon, then boost at an angle toward its orbit, and then circularize and plane shift at the correct spot. Well...Easier said than done. Thank goodness for the F5/F9 keys that allowed me to try this multiple times. Because my first attempt was dismal...having to switch to Map mode to judge maneuvers (not to mention the program switching camera view modes at inconvenient times...grrrr) made it very hard to keep track of the tiny flickering pixel that was the far-off Magic Boulder. In the end I found MechJeb's data displays to be invaluable. And its Circularize button was a real help. And the Align orbits button in its Rendezvous panel (I could not set Magic Boulder as a target, of course, but I was able to select the Clark's orbit as a target to get me to about the right plane when the time came...even though the Clark was around on the other side of the moon at the time). So, Adly got into a 14 km orbit in about the same plane as Magic Boulder, and I spent what seemed like ages squinting at the little flickering pixel ahead in the distance as it oscillated from side to side (until lateral burns got the ship into the correct plane). I didn't want to make any big maneuvers...the slightly faster speed of the 14 km orbit would eventually catch the Lewis up with Magic Boulder. Patience paid off, and eventually the flickering pixel became a speck, and then a dot, and then a rock. A rock with weird glowing inclusions. A rock rumored to be suddenly deadly to any kerbal who gets too close. Adly looks a bit concerned about this. Rendezvousing with Magic Boulder was like the Bad Old Days before we had the nice navball indicators of version 0.18...thrust toward the rock...wait until you are passing it, then burn opposite the motion...then burn toward it again...wait until you pass closest point and cancel velocity...lather, rinse, repeat. OK! Adly made rendezvous and started stationkeeping with Magic Boulder. Indeed: 15 km altitude, 80 degree inclination, Longitude of Ascending Node wobbling about zero. Longitude of Perihelion also wobbling around wildly as he made small maneuvers...I assume because the orbit of Magic Boulder is perfectly circular. First order of business was to drop the second science package from the bottom of the lander to mark the orbit for future reference in case Adly died from some mysterious force. The package pops off of the docking port with a little velocity, so Adly nudged the Lewis faster by about that much before releasing the probe to cancel out the effect. The package was dropped while pointing prograde so that any error caused by this wouldn't disturb the orbital plane of the science package, since that's what I cared most about marking. In the picture below, the little object on the left is the science package, and Adly has moved off to investigate Magic Boulder. Below we see that the landing area illuminators on the bottom of the Lewis light up the dark side of Magic Boulder nicely. Hopefully Magic Boulder does not consider pointing your rear end at it to be a form of taunting. Second order of business was to release the Mini-Lander from the nose of the Lewis so that it could go in and see what happens when something comes in contact with Magic Boulder, while Adly remained at a safe distance. ...BUT DAMN IT! The Mini-Lander wouldn't separate! Right-clicking on the docking coupler showed only the "Clamp-a-tron Jr.: Control From Here" choice. There was no "Decouple Node" option. What the hell? I *know* I tested this on the launch pad at some point. But apparently in the process of tweaking the Mini-Lander (which involved pulling it off the top of the side-mounted lander and setting it temporarily on the Twain's top docking port where it could be worked on in full symmetry), when I reattached it to the lander, its RTG must have somehow fused to the capsule instead of the docking port. Or some other buggy thing. Grr. So...what now? Mission fail? Bugger that, said Adly, and he decided to probe the surface of Magic Boulder by slowly sliding up and poking it with the Mini-Lander still mounted on his ship's nose. I don't know...this seems dangerously close to 'taunting' to me. So he slid on by the Magic Boulder. In fact, in the picture below he got a bit closer than intended in one slide-by...but the Lewis's shadow on Magic Boulder does give an excellent perspective of its size (which is hard to judge when you can't tell how far the ship is from it). Below we see Poking Experiment #1. Adly was quite surprised when easing the probe up against Magic Boulder that it did not result in an immediate stroke of lighting or anything...the top of the probe just slid inside. Well! This is easy! But a moment later, the Lewis was kicked backwards and sent spinning away from Magic Boulder. In the picture below, it had already rotated around once and was heading off screen, stage right. And the RCS tank that was on top of the Mini-Lander probe had vanished. Hmmm. I guess Adly should have transferred that fuel to his lander's tank before starting this procedure. But no use crying over spilled monopropellant. He got the lander under control and moved back toward Magic Boulder. CAREFULLY. Here's Poking Experiment #2, into the outcrop below the monolith. Adly found that he could poke the whole Mini-Lander into the 'rock' at this point with no violent reaction. Magic Boulder is apparently less sensitive in some places than in others. Perhaps the most deadly area around Magic Boulder was the side with the monolith (the leading side of the object as it orbits Ike). Below we see Adly sliding in with the remains of the probe leading the way. But before he even got close to the surface, the leading component of the probe exploded, and a cloud of expanding plasma streaked off in the opposite direction that Magic Boulder was moving. This shocking occurrence was followed by several more rapid-fire explosions (well...the sound was more like a "PFFFT!") and streaming-away clouds as the Mini-Lander's components were nibbled away. RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY! But before the surprised Adley could hit the correct keys to back the ship away, all of the Mini-Lander's components except for the bottom RTG had been flashed into clouds of cheery plasma that went shooting off screen. And Adly was lucky his capsule didn't get vaporized, too. Sneaky, having the kill zone so far from the surface here. Undaunted, but perhaps after a change of underwear, Adly probed other areas of the surface with the RTG that was still stuck to the docking port. After all, if that remained stuck there, he wouldn't be able to dock with the Mark Twain when he returned there. IF he returned there. Below: Kerbalkind's first landing on Magic Boulder? No...but it was a large area that Adly found where Magic Boulder is tolerant of being touched, so he moved his lander backwards there for this picture. And anyway...the landing legs were expendable at that point in the mission. On another experiment poking the underside of Magic Boulder, Adly started the lander slowly moving in with the RTG leading the way. But when he tried to nudge a little sideways...there was no response! Oh, crap! Out of RCS fuel. And sliding slowly toward this grinning rock of death. So he flipped the lander around to blast away with the main engine, but not before one of his landing legs flashed into a cloud of plasma. OK... enough of this nonsense. This game could benefit from audible warning alarms: "RCS fuel: 5%" ..."RCS fuel: 1%" ..."RCS fuel: Exhausted." It would be fine with me if the warnings were in Kerbalese...at least I'd know something needed attention. The final picture below was taken to get a good view of the monolith, since I hadn't done that yet. But it was a dangerous area to approach with no RCS. Oh...and if you don't want to have to get a change of underwear, I recommend NOT time-warping in the vicinity of Magic Boulder. When you time warp, Magic Boulder vanishes, appearing to suddenly shoot off screen. Argh! Where is it? Where is it?? And when you stop the time warp, it suddenly flashes back into frame. A rather disconcerting thing for a deadly rock to be doing. In fact, Magic Boulder is disconcerting in other ways. There are places where its surface sort of shimmers as if pieces don't match together properly. And the Magic Boulder flickers out of existence for brief instants. It is not, to sum up, your typical, mundane rock. Allright, everybody come home! Mission accomplished. But there was the problem that both the Lewis and Clark were in orbits that were almost 180 degrees opposite to the orbit of the Mark Twain mothership. Since the Twain was out in the really big orbit, and since it had boatloads of fuel, the Twain did the giant plane shift maneuver to reverse its orbital direction. This took quite a lot of fuel, and the rear tank was emptied and the front tank was tapped into. Then the Clark boosted up to meet the Twain. Or tried to, until it ran out of fuel. But it was able to go the rest of the way using RCS for orbital maneuvers. And because the stupid Mini-Lander probe would not jettison from the nose, it could not dock... so Rondorf just rendezvoused and did the EVA over to the Mark Twain. After that, the Twain did a small plane shift to match that of the Lewis (the plane of Magic Boulder's orbit). Then the Lewis boosted up to meet it and made rendezvous (with no RCS...not as easy, but not too hard). Adly abandoned the Lewis and EVA'd over to the Twain. Then the twain jettisoned its empty rear fuel tank to also serve as a marker for the orbital plane of Magic Boulder, albeit from a high altitude. To head home, Cap'n Kurt first boosted away from Ike into a somewhat inclined orbit around Duna. Then the crew awaited the correct alignment of the planets so they could boost home (watching for the danger of an unexpected encounter with Ike). The ship boosted out of Duna orbit on time and headed back toward Kerbin (with a rather sloppy predicted periapsis of 16 million km showing on the plot). And then I encountered a problem on the way back: I could not click on the ship's orbit to get a maneuver node to show up. Click, click, click. Nothing. I tried several times along the trip back. This could have had deadly consequences except for the facts that: a) the ship had loads of RCS fuel that I was able to burn to get a much better encounter periapsis, and the ship still had over half its forward fuel tank full of propellant so that it could have waited until after it entered Kerbin's SOI to correct its encounter periapsis. But, still...very annoying. Below we see the Mark Twain falling in toward Kerbin. No exciting speeds to report. The ship was targeted for an aerobraking altitude of just under 40 km, and the engines were fired to add to the aerobraking's deceleration (but mostly to burn off the large amount of excess fuel). All this captured the Twain into a low retrograde nearly-equatorial orbit. Less than one orbit later, MechJeb was called into play to target the ship in for a landing at KSC. It dropped the ship in nicely over the facility, and I took over and popped out the chutes and burned full blast to slow the ship to under 90 m/s by the time it reached 500 meters altitude where the chutes fully opened. Then I burned to slow the ship below 10 m/s for a touchdown on the crawlerway between the VAB and the launch pad...on its landing gear! Yes, a new feature for our now-reusable Mark Twain mothership. And there's no embarrassing waiting for the crane to retrieve the crew if you have added some handy ladders. The moral of this story: Be careful where you poke Magic Boulder. Brotoro's Kerbal Space Program Web pages

This thread was originally made in April 2013 to replace an older version of the thread that had been lost in the Great Forum Disaster. The March 2015 UPDATE POST can be found by clicking THIS LINK. Exiting Eve This Eve landing/return mission is dedicated to George Gassaway, a fine rocketeer, for his assistance and encouragement. Exiting Eve? So are the Kerbal Space Center mission planners finally going to retrieve Desdin from the surface of Eve? Well...no. Although the Kerbal Press occasionally runs stories abou the "poor astronaut left stranded on an alien world," the KSC administrators just roll out one of the interviews where Desdin explains that he is quite happy living the life of an interplanetary hermit, especially on a planet free of nosy reporters. And when the Press ran articles suggesting that KSC planners and engineers are simply incapable of building a ship that could escape from Eve, they shrugged those off as well. But what DID get the KSC mission planners' attention were some measurements by Desdin that showed that the thick soup in Eve's seas is unusually rich in the fissile element blutonium, which is necessary for making nuclear rocket engines. Apparently, simple chemical extraction processes can separate the blutonium from the sea "water." Happily, the seas are also rich in cadmiumium and boronate (known neutron absorbers), so there is no danger of the seas becoming natural nuclear bombs. Below we see Desdin, our happy colonist on Eve, with the base habitat that was dropped to him in an earlier mission. Not everyone is convinced by Desdin's reports, of course... Kerbal scientists are still hotly debating Desdin's claims that the purple chemical staining the surface of Eve is an organic compound that he says must have been deposited as tiny particles excreted from microbes inhabiting an upper region of Eve's atmosphere. But KSC officials ARE convinced about the blutonium resource, so the mission to build an Eve ascent vehicle was approved. I've seen Scott Manley's video where he flew a vehicle that landed on Eve and returned to orbit. But his ship depended on launching from a high elevation, and the 10,000-meter plateau he used no longer exists. And, anyway, Desdin and all those seas full of valuable blutonium are at sea level. So I wanted to build a vehicle that could ascend from low elevations...but I also wanted to keep it to a reasonable size (say 100 tons or so) to make it manageable to launch and fly to Eve. But I did use the concept of a massively-asparagused rocket. My basic lander design is shown below (after one of many suborbital test flights over the KSC). It is a stock ship (other than a little MechJeb controller on board), many asparagus stages, and uses mainly aerospike engines. I had not used aerospikes much before because I only started playing KSP after the Great Nerfing Of The Aerospikes. But if you want an engine that can perform well from pressures of five atmospheres to vacuum, the aerospike is a natural choice. More practically, in KSP the aerospikes have lower drag than other engines. The picture below is another test prototype. The side pod (and another on the opposite side) is where all the parachutes are mounted, and one set of landing gear. I intended the fuel in those side tanks to be used for final landing targeting and final braking just before touchdown--and they could be discarded just after liftoff from Eve (or even before if they have no fuel left...the lander can stand on its four remaining legs if it is on a fairly level surface). Dilger Kerman is testing out the ladder system, which requires some tricky navigation, such as using the d key to flip the kerbal's direction, and having to let go in a couple places so the kerbal can walk on the rungs a little before grabbing another part of the ladder. But none of the ladder parts are connected to the central core stages, where I wanted to minimize weight. I ran some "computer simulations" of landing and launching my lander from Eve sea level, only to find out that it was dismally far from being able to make orbit. And then I fell victim to one of the classic blunders (the most famous of which is "never get involved in a land war in Kasia") of just adding MOAR FUEL, which just made the ship heavier and improved the performance not at all. So by the time I finally gave up on launching from sea level and tried higher launch sites, I was still failing and getting frustrated. The stock aerospike engine really shouldn't be asked to lift much more than a stack of about 1200 liters of propellant above it. But it turned out that if I went back to my basic design and launched from 4,000 meters elevation, the capsule could reach low Eve orbit. So I needed a 4K-meter launch site. Well, it just so happened that my friend George Gassaway was working on an Eve-return mission, and the lakeshore landing site he chose (with nearby high elevation) happened to be on the opposite shore of the small lake that I had landed Desdin by long ago. So I didn't even have to scout out a good landing/liftoff site. The highland site is 56 km from Desdin, so we're not getting him at this time... but KSC Engineering Group Alpha 19 assures mission planners that they will soon have rovers in stock that can easily travel that distance on Eve. So the current mission will just be to test the Eve lander-ascent ship, and to also resupply Desdin with some more consumables, equipment, and an experimental blutonium extraction apparatus. The images below show two different views of the area around Desdin's base on Eve: In addition to the computer simulations of Eve landings/liftoffs, the KSC planners flew several missions of prototype Eve landers above the KSC to be sure that the parachute system was strong enough -- these involved Milski and Dilger and Rodmy flying suborbital hops with boosted-landers, then ramming them back downward fast and opening the chutes at high speeds in the thick air at 500 meters. Surprisingly, the parachute systems worked perfectly, although we did find out that landing in the ocean is a Bad Thing, since even a ship that lands safely on land can disintegrate when landing in water (although the pilot can survive). It was also determined that the ship gets unstable quickly at even moderate angles of attack. The lack of thrust vectoring on the aerospikes is the problem. The central aerospike was replaced with an LV-T45 engine to give minimal thrust vectoring control, and detachable fins were added to help control the ship during intial boost phase on Kerbin (but it's still necessary to make the gravity turn VERY gradually or the ship can tumble out of control). The plan was to boost the lander into Kerbin orbit under its own power, then refuel it and push it to Eve...so it had to be stable on boost from Kerbin. I was hoping that boosting from Eve would not have the same control problem because by the time the ship reached turnover altitude at Eve, it would have lost most of it aparagus stalks and would be controllable using the vectoring LV-T45. As we will see, this is not QUITE the case. Next, tests were conducted in Kerbin orbit to see if the fully-fueled lander could be pushed by the interplanetary transfer stage with just the small Junior docking port connecting them. As you see from the GIF below, the results were not pretty. I suppose it COULD have been done, but the constant coning and wobbling was certainly not fuel efficient. Pushing was also tested with the lander empty...but the results were about the same. A stronger connection was needed...so a tricoupler with three full-sized docking ports would be used to link the lander to the transfer stage. (KSP could greatly benefit from a large Rockomax-sized docking ring for connecting large spacecraft pieces in space.) OK! With all the final equipment assembled, it was time to start the official mission flights. The "Sacagawea Eve" lander would be boosted into Kerbin orbit with the help of some some jettisonable fins and small aerospike booster stages. As the fuel was used up in each of the asparagas stages, they would NOT be dropped, of course, but would be carried intact to orbit for refueling. The intrepid Milski Kerman was chosen as the pilot for the Sacagawea Eve lander, and below we see the liftoff... ...and then we see the ship tumbling out of control (after the boosters have separated, and the turnover was started at about 10 kilometers. Milski could not regain control of the ship, and it looked like he was going to drop it into the drink, but by firing the engines only when the tumbling/spinning ship was oriented with its nose toward land, Milski managed to get the ship back over kerba firma before popping out all the chutes at low altitude, and landed it on the beach, so it could potentially be refurbished for a future mission. Possibly the addition of the tricoupler docking adapter made the ship more unstable than the earlier test vehicles. Or possibly I just turned too fast even after going on about how important it was NOT to. So it fell to Adly Kerman to pilot the backup Sacagawea Eve 2 lander on this historic mission. Below we see it boosting on its glowing-hot aerospikes (including the six booster stage aerospikes). I suppose standard SRBs would be cheaper for this purpose, but the KSC engineers got a great deal on a bulk order of aerospikes. And some of the engineers just really LIKED how the aerospikes looked. After the small booster stages we empty, they were jettisoned. Once the Sacagawea Eve 2 got above most of the atmosphere, the fins were jettisoned as well. By this time only three of the engines (two aerospikes and the LV-T45) were still firing. The Sacagawea has an ASAS unit attached to the top of one of its tank stacks by a decoupler, since I thought it would help control the fins during the boost, and it can be jettisoned along with its coupler after this point as well...but I didn't remember to do this until later. The ship easily made it into a 120 km orbit with most of the fuel of the central core stage left. Look at those nice, shiny aerospikes. Very nice. Very shiny. Very spiky. Next up, we need the Mark Zero Interpanetary Transfer Stage (or "IPTS" for short), which will have the job of pushing the massive (once it's refueled) Sacagawea E2 to the planet Eve. The ship is made of four nuclear engine side-pods and lots of tanks. There is also a two-kerbal cabin to give Adly a more spacious place to stay during his trip to Eve (assume he moves back and forth between the Sacagawea capsule and the cabin if it alleviates any claustrophobic feelings you have). It will also serve as an emergency backup vehicle for returning Adly to Kerbin orbit, but that is not its intended future disposition. Below, the IPTS is being launched on my standard Mark Twain launch vehicle (since it is debugged and doesn't explode--although I have come to realize that it is not the most efficient launcher possible...but what did I know a couple months ago when I first designed it?). Then came the triple-port docking. I had never done one of those before, but I had seen videos where people described how difficult it was to do because often all three of the ports will not latch on at the same time, so even though it looks like you have a good triple-docking, one or more of the ports will NOT have latched on. So I made this docking VERY carefully. I aligned the Sacagawea to point its docking ports straight north so that I could align the IPTS pointing straight south. I switched back and forth as needed to get the ships rotated around their longitudinal axes to exactly the same angle. I very slowly nudged the IPTS left, right, up, and down a short distance away until I had cancelled all relative motion. And then I slowly slid the ships together. Very slowly. Then they clicked together with nary a wobble. "Like a glove!" as kurtjmac would say...assuming you have three fingers. And all three of the ports had solid dockings (you can tell by right-clicking on the ports to see if they have the "undock" option available). Whew. I did use over half of the RCS fuel in the Interplanetary Transfer Stage to do this docking... I probably should have given it a bigger RCS load, but that would not be a problem because of the next step. Next we need to refuel the Sacagawea. I had recently built an improved asparagus-staged tanker rocket (my previous tankers had used the not-very-efficient Mark Twain launcher). Each of these "Tanker 7" ships carries 8000 liters of fuel/oxidizer, and 1500 liters of monopropellant. I had intended smaller ships to rendezvous and dock with the Tanker, but in this case the Tankers were the smaller ships, so they did the rendezvous and docking. Each Tanker has four Rockomax 24-77 radial engines to nudge it around in orbit, and the central core of its booster rocket typically has fuel left to do the preliminary rendezvous maneuvers. It took two Tanker 7 ships to refuel the very thirsty Sacagawea E2 ship, and the fuel tanks and RCS tanks of the IPTS were also topped off (but a lot of unused RCS fuel was wasted when I deorbited the expended Tankers). The final ship for this mission was the Mark Twain Eve 2, a modified version of my standard interplanetary exploration spacecraft. On board are Commander Kurt Kerman, Lewis Lander pilot Rodmy Kerman, and placeholder Rondorf Kerman. This version of the Mark Twain had two nuclear side-pods, and carried only one standard lander (the Lewis lander on the right side in the picture below). It also carried a non-standard lander (on the left below) that would be dropped to Desdin on Eve. This "Eve Base 2" lander contained (or so I imagine) more consumables and replacement parts for Desdin's Eve Base environmenal recycling systems, as well as a prototype blutonium separation apparatus. There was also a greater variety of seeds for Desdin's small hydroponic garden since the only things that grew well from his first batch of seeds were the beans and onions, and he was getting tired of those being a major portion of his diet. (When asked by reporters why he would not be visiting Desdin on Eve, Adly pointed out that while Eve's atmosphere may or may not be toxic, he was pretty sure that the air inside Desdin's habitat was unbreathable by now because of his diet.) You may have noticed the goofy-looking single-kerbal capsule sitting on top of the Mark Twain's docking port. Sadly, this had to be included because of the odd astronauts' union rules that require that all kerballed 3-kerbal capsules MUST be launched with a full crew compliment. Hopefully this rule will be changed in the future. I suppose it's there to ensure that the kerbalnauts get more mission time. Anyway...below we see Rondorf transferring from the main capsule of the Mark Twain to the small capsule on top...once he got done playing around flying his rocket pack all over, that is. Come on, guy, we have a mission to do here. Once on board the single-kerbal capsule, Rondorf separated the capsule and used the RCS system to do a retrograde burn to deorbit the capsule and return to Kerbin, thereby enhancing the mission by his lack of presence, leaving an empty seat for Adly to be carried home in. There *is* a station in orbit with single-kerbal return capsules that could have been used to return Rondorf, but I was lazy and wanted to avoid another rendezvous and docking, so I used the little add-on escape capsule of the front of the Mark Twain instead. But let's get cracking here! Below is the Eve-transfer orbit I plotted for the Sacagawea/IPTS. Don't be concerned about the lack of an Eve encounter on the left side of the plot -- this is because of the difference in orbital inclinations of Kerbin and Eve. Even with four nukes pushing the massive collection of fuel, tanks, and engines, the trans-Eve injection burn (requiring a 994 m/s change in velocity) took a little over 13 minutes. But the triple-docking connection was nice and steady. Steady like a glove! Or whatever. In the picture below, the IPTS has already expended and dropped its rear fuel tank. Oh, and here's an important point I learned in the early orbital tests of the prototype landers: Remember to deactivate all of the engines on the Sacagawea before you start this burn. If you are smart, you'll set up an action group to toggle all of those engines on and off. If you are like me and really meant to get around to doing that, but never quite remembered to do so when you were in the VAB, you can right-click on all of the motors individually to deactivate them. Because it's more fun that way. Yeah...that's my excuse. In addition to depleting the fuel in the rear tank, the IPTS also used 71% of the fuel in the two X200-16 side tanks. It takes a lot of fuel to move around all that fuel in the Sacagawea. Rather than waiting a couple days before sending off the Mark Twain, I performed its trans-Eve injection almost immediately, trusting to the likelihood that differences in trajectory would result in them arriving at Eve a couple days apart. The Mark Twain had only two nukes, but because of its considerably lower mass its 998 m/s burn took only 9 minutes 30 seconds, and only used up 60% of the fuel in its rear tank. The slightly faster trajectory of the Mark Twain meant that it reached the descending node of its orbit (relative to Eve's) first, and below we see the midcourse plane-shift/correction burn that Commander Kurt plotted. And, with a little help from the RCS afterwards, Kurt adjusted the Eve encounter for a perfectly fitting 69 km periapsis. Like a glove. The burn required 371 m/s of delta-V and took just over 3 minutes, leaving the rear tank 23% full. An interesting thing to note about this plot is the dotted line showing the trajectory that the Mark Twain would follow if it did not brake at Eve, which passes quite close to Moho's orbit. But timing such a gravity assist to arrive when Moho was actually there would be tricky. The midcourse correction for the Sacagawea/IPTS was similar (370 m/s, taking a little over 4 minutes, and expending the remaining fuel in the two side tanks and 18% of the fuel in the main tank). By very sneakily sneaking up on the Sphere of Influence change point as I entered the Eve system, and sneaking across the boundary at 1x time warp, the 69 km periapsis point remained intact. A small burn was required to make the incoming trajectory within a couple degrees of equatorial. The aerobraking at 69 km captured the Mark Twain into an orbit with apoapsis of around 6,500 km. Once the Twain got out to that apoapsis, Kurt did a little burn to raise the periapsis to 110 km, out of Eve's atmosphere. The Sacagawea/IPTS entered the Eve system 18 days later, and was coming in retrograde, so a burn was required to shift that to a prograde equatorial trajectory. I wishthere was an easy way to see if an encounter is going to result in a prograde, retrograde, or whatever inclination, from far out. I often can't tell by looking at the plot.Anyway, that burn used another 19% of the fuel in the IPTS's main tank. The first aerobraking pass captured the Sacagawea/IPTS into an orbit with apoapsis of 6,800km. A second aerobraking pass resulted in an apoapsis of 1,700 km. A third pass gave 375 km. After a final aerobraking pass and an engine burn, the Sacagawea/IPTSwas in a 130 km x 110 km low Eve orbit, with 57% of the fuel remaining in the main tank of the IPTS. Things were looking good. Once the Sacagawea was safely in orbit, the Eve Base 2 lander was separated from the Mark Twain. Below we see the lander being separated during a near pass to Eve, and Kurt firing the RCS to back away quickly because the imbalance of the lander on the decoupler threatened to rotate its front into the the side of the Mark Twain's capsule. A couple aerobrakings were used to drop the lander into low Eve orbit, and then it was deorbited to come in over Desdin's base area. The deorbit targeting resulted in the base lander coming in about a kilometer offshore in the lake, but there was still fuel left in the deorbiting stage, so a quick sideways burn at 12 km shifted its landing point to dry land. Then the deorbit stage was jettisoned so the chutes could be opened (rather later in the game than planned). The four chutes came out reefed and slowed the lander down rapidly, and then they opened fully at 500 meters. They lowered the resupply base module full of consumables, parts, experimental equipment, and non-onion and non-leguminous plant seeds to the surface at about 3 m/s. Desdin, always happy to receive presents, sprinted the 2.3 kilometers to the new base module to check it out. It might have been handier if the base module could have been landed closer to his main base, but it did land only 320 meters from the shore of the lake, wich should make it handier to get the sea soup needed to run the blutomium extraction experiments. Here we see Desdin getting a sample of Eve soup to pour into the experimental separation apparatus back in the base (I'm sure he has a bucket where you can't see it under the surface). The base module is only powered by an RTG, so the separation will be slow...but it should prove or disprove the concept. Now for the main show. I was originally going to use the Interplanetary Transfer Stage to deorbit the Sacagawea and put it on a course to land (I figured nobody would mind if I dropped nuclear engines onto a planet with radioactive seas), but instead I added a tank to the design that could be used to hold the necessary deorbiting fuel. Below we see that the Sacagawea has separated from the central standard docking port of the IPTS, taking the tricoupler docking nodes and the retro-burn fuel tank with it. And vanishing all of the struts that braced the IPTS main body to the docking node and tank. Below is the deorbiting burn. The retro-burn fuel tank is not actually feeding the engines (which were all methodically activated one-by-one before the start of the burn, because action groups are for lazy people...right), but after the retro burn and landing trajectory tweaking, the fuel from the tank was transferred into the two FL-T800 side-pod tanks of the Sacagawea (which had nearly been depleted by the burns). Then the docking node and retro-fuel tank were discarded, and the Sacagawea was ready for landing. At this point the mass of the lander is 105.3 tons. Adly first deployed the Sacagawea's two drogue chutes. These overly-large-and-massive-considering-what-they-do parts are mounted on the tops of the side pods. Then he deployed a couple pairs of standard chutes in reefed configuration to help slow the ship down more. You can see the markers of the Eve Base vehicles on the far side of the lake in the picture below. After the drogue chutes deployed fully at 2,500 meters AGL, the ship settled nicely into a vertical descent, and Adly deployed the six heavy-duty landing legs. After the main chutes opened fully at 500 meters AGL, Adly then deployed all the rest of the chutes. There are 16 regular chutes in addition to the two drogue chutes. The chutes are arranged to be deployed in pairs in stages to minimize the opening shock, and the side pods that the chutes are mounted on are heavily-strutted to the adjoining fuel tanks to withstand the shocks. No engine firings were used to brake the ship before the parachute openings. At sea level, this many chutes will safely land the fully-fueled ship, but at the 4,000-meter elevation of this landing site, a short blast from the engines was needed just before touchdown to slow the Sacagawea to a landing speed of a couple meters per second. I was a bit worried about Adly being able to navigate the ladder system (since even a short fall under Eve's 1.7g gravity could be fatal), but he managed them well. Notice that the landing leg on the near side-pod was wrenched at an angle during landing...which apparently was not a gentle as hoped for. Adly Kerman, who spent years stranded in Kerbol orbit during the first Moho mission, and most recently became famous for his visit to Magic Boulder, stands upon the purple surface of Eve. Here is the Sacagawea's landing site on the map. It is at -1.230668° N and 151.727766° E (according to MechJeb's readouts), at an elevation of 4,107 meters above sea level. This places it 55.6 kilometers from Desdin's Eve Base. I suppose I could have had Adly walk that distance to visit Desdin if I wanted to kill some hours in tedium, but any such visits will have to wait until we have proper stock rovers (my RCS-powered Fidos would be woefully inadequate for the task in Eve's high gravity). You may have noticed that the Sacagawea has a QBE probe body mounted on top of one of its fuel tanks. This was included so that the lander could be sent down without a pilot to be able to retrieve a kerbal from the surface. It would not be needed, and would be useless weight during the liftoff, so it was separated from the Sacagawea. The little decoupler did not have enough force to actually blow the probe body away from the ship, but I switched to the probe and used its torque to 'walk' and roll it to the edge of the tank so it could fall to the surface. I expected it to explode upon hitting the surface, but it managed to survive. It will remain operational (during the day time) to mark the landing spot. Adly inspects the aerospike engines that he is trusting will return him safely to orbit. Very shiny. Very spiky. Not that there is anything he could do about any problems he notices now (other than just not boost, and go live with Desdin), but a pilot likes to do a walkaround and kick the landeing legs. After a couple days on the surface (Adly just HAD to watch a Kerbolset and Kerbolrise from Eve), and with samples safely stowed aboard, Adly ascends the dangerous ladder system for the final time and prepares for liftoff. The two side-pod tanks were still mostly full, so they were not jettisoned before liftoff. Liftoff with the side-pods (which have no engines) is quite slow, and the first order of business is to make sure the ship is pointed straight up, because you don't want to start an accidental gravity turn too low in Eve's thick atmosphere. Sadly, I was unable to fly the ascent without help from MechJeb because I could not react fast enough to keep the ship pointed straight upward while also watching the staging to be sure that the asparagus stages get dropped immediately as they burn out. But with MechJeb's "Kill Rotation" function to keep the ship steady (once I got it pointed upward), I was able to fly the ascent. I'm not sure why MechJeb has such an easy job controlling the ship on ascent than I can manage. I understand that it can react faster and anticipate and correct for deviations faster than I can... but it also seems to be able to tap into some hidden wellspring of control authority that I can't (the ship simply does not respond as quickly for me). In a shockingly brief time the voracious cluster of aerospikes and central engine have sucked the side-pod tanks dry, and the side pods (with the deadweight of all the parachutes and a couple landing legs) are dropped. If I really cared about drag, I would also have retracted the ladders and the landing legs here. None of the parts survived the fall from even this relatively low altitude. It also isn't long before the first set of aerospike tank-stacks are dropped, removing some additional landing leg dead weight. And a while after that, the other set of outer tanks is dropped with the last of the legs. We are now down to a vehicle with six aerospikes and the central core, and only some remaining ladder parts as dead weight. Each of the asparagus stages are lasting longer and longer as fewer engines remain to suck fuel from the tanks. Below, two more stagings and we get to what I call the "Titan IIIC" configuration, and the stages are starting to burn for a reassuringly long time. The last two aerospikes are dropped at around 31,000 meters. Now that we have only the central core remaining with its thrust-vectoring LV-T45 engine, it's safe to turn over without worrying about tumbling out of control at higher angles of attack. The gradual gravity turn begins at 36 kilometers. Adly looks concerned but not terrified. Final staging occurred at around 81,000 meters, and the efficient little LV-909 engine lights up to push Adly and the capsule and the valuable surface samples to orbital velocity. MechJeb was able to get the ship into a 110 km orbit with 16 liters of fuel left if it controled the whole ascent. The best boost I was able to do (assisted by just MechJeb's Kill Rot function) resulted in 9 liters of fuel remaining. But this was enough fuel to let me raise the Sacagawea capsule up to a 125 km orbit so that Adly could then await pickup. Adly is very experienced at awaiting pickup. And besides...the scenery was magnificent. The primary plan was to have the IPTS core rendezvous and dock with the Sacagawea capsule to retrieve Adly. As a backup, Rodmy was ready to come down with the Lewis Lander from the Mark Twain to rescue Adly if needed (he would dock to the capsule and push it back up to the Twain). As it turned out, the IPTS was able to easily rendezvous with the capsule, although Adly insisted on doing the final docking with the tiny amount of fuel (and no RCS) left in the Sacagawea... which took a little longer than expected, and involved a little unplanned bumping, but which he managed to do in the end. Adly transferred from the Sacagawea capsule to the IPTS cabin, and cast off the Sacagewea to remain in it low Eve orbit. He piloted the IPTS to match the highly elliptical orbit of the Mark Twain (where it had remained to save fuel), and docked and transferred over to be with Kurt and Rodmy. The IPTS probably had enough fuel to return to Kerbin at this point, and certainly would have had enough fuel if Adly docked with one of the two fuel tanks left in an 8,000 km orbit by an earlier Retriever mission... but it would be better to go home with the guys. The Mark Twain still had plenty of fuel at this point (it even still had fuel in its rear drop tank), so some of that fuel was transferred to the IPTS, which would remain in Eve orbit as a general-purpose space tug. Below we see the Twain separated from the IPTS and jettisoning its now-empty rear fuel tank. As long as they were in the neighborhood, and since the Lewis Lander hadn't been required for its role as backup rescue ship, the boys decided to visit Gilly. In the orbit plot below, the innermost ellipse is the 110 x 6,500 km orbit that the Mark Twain came from (and where the IPTS Eve Tug remains for now). The roughly circular orbit tangential to that inner ellipse is the 6,500 x 7,500 km orbit that Kurt put the Twain into so that he could do a plane shift maneuver (which take much less fuel when done from a large orbit). The circular orbit beyond that is the 8,000 km orbit where the two fuel tanks were deposited by the earlier Retriever mission. The dashed line shows the Gilly trasfer orbit, requiring 307.3 m/s of delta-V. All of this delta-V goes toward getting the Mark Twain away from Eve in preparation for its return to Kerbin, so this isn't just fuel wasted on a side junket. Once the Twain got into a 48 km circular orbit around Gilly, it still had 61% of its main tank fuel remaining. We probably should have left even more with the IPTS tug. With only the Lewis Lander attached to one side (and out on the longer-than-normal decoupler that was required to balance the Eve Base 2 Lander's attachment), the Mark Twain can only thrust at half power as it burns for Gilly. Rodmy hopped into the Lewis Lander to take a trip down to Gilly's surface. And it was at this point that I remembered how much I dislike working around Gilly. Things move SOOO SLOWLY in its weak gravity, and you wait forever at low altitudes where you can't time warp. You even have to thrust downwards to get your lander to the surface in any reasonable amount of time...which just feels wrong. Anyway...below we see that Rodmy has descended the ladder and makes his historic speech that was reported in the press: "That's one small step for kerbal, one..whoah! What the hell? Whoah!" as his small step turned into a giant leap in Gilly's low gravity. The picture below shows Rodmy one step from the lander. When Rodmy returned to the Mark Twain, he had used hardly any fuel (despite having put himself on a Gilly escape trajectory twice during his impatient orbital maneuvers). So Adly decided to hop into the Lewis Lander and go down to the surface, in a rather more leisurely trip than he had experienced landing and returning from Eve. Here we see him posing on top of the Lewis on the surface of Gilly. He also made some measurements: Surface gravity 00.03 m/s^2...so low it doesn't even register on the other g meter...temperature -071.84, and, of course, no atmospheric pressure. Below, Adly returns and docks the Lewis to the Mark Twain so that it can be refueled (especially with RCS monopropellant) before being left in Gilly orbit. Unlike many of the interplanetary project's earlier abandoned landers, the Lewis Gilly 2 has a probe body (three of them, actually, if you include the detachable science packages) that will allow it to be used to remotely explore the surface of Gilly after the Mark Twain has left. Time to go home. Or time to boost away from Gilly orbit and wait in a high Eve orbit for the planets to align for a return to Kerbin. The return trajectory plot is shown below. Again, the lack of encounter showing is due to the orbital inclinations. The 392 m/s initial burn was supplemented with a burn at the descending node (438 m/s) to put the Twain on a course to a 40 km periapsis at Kerbin. The Mark Twain burns for home on twin tails of fission-heated gas. The Mark Twain, after again sneaking across the SOI change boundary at 1x time warp, stayed on course for its 40 km aerobraking. The ship had 41% of the fuel remaining in its main tank, along with the fuel in the nuke-pod side tanks. One aerobraking and a couple small engine burns later, the Mark Twain was descending over the KSC, a bit farther north than planned (the target was the runway). Because the Twain was heavier than normal, Commander Kurt had to burn hard before reaching 500 meters to get the speed below 90 m/s so nothing would get ripped apart when the chutes fully deployed. Also, the extra weight required that the final braking burn was done carefully to land the ship as slowly as possible, and Commander Kurt set it down perfectly. Like a piece of form-fitting handwear. Ah. And I see that somebody forgot to include ladders on the side of the ship so that the crew could exit. So instead we get another embarrassing wait for the crane truck to arrive to extract the crew. I guess this must have been the Twain ship recycled from the Eeloo mission, and nobody noticed the lack of ladders. And, having landed on and returned from every body in the Kerbol system where that's possible to do, my initial interplanetary exploration program comes to an end. Brotoro's Kerbal Space Program Web Pages

I stripped off all the rover parts, put the TurboJet back on, replaced one of the jet fuel tanks with a fuel/oxidizer tank, added four of the 24-77 rocket engines, and tried to fly the plane to space. I could get it up and flying at around 30K at around 1/4 throttle, but I couldn't seem to get it to keep going at a lower throttle unless I also kicked in the rocket engines. Once I got it up to 2,000 m/s over 30K, I throttled up to full on the rocket engines (and when the jet engines flamed out for the last time I shut them down and closed the air intakes). I didn't manage to make orbit, but I did get it into a trajectory that peaked a 75,000 meters and arced nearly halfway around the planet. But with all fuel gone, I came back down to a very flat area at night. A very flat, wet area with no land in sight. And without the weight of the rover wheels and batteries up front, and the weight of those little rocket engines in back, the plane wanted to pitch up out of control if I was not very vigilant. Just before landing I let my speed drop too low and the plane began pitching way up and oscillating back down. Splashdown ripped the plane apart, but the cockpit and front landing gear (and Corfrey Kerman) survived. You know what they say... "And landing you can swim away from..."

I had that problem for a while (one of my computers could access the reborn forums, but another kept going back to that maintenance page). I think the automatic pointing to the maintenance page was stuck in its DNS cache (not in the browser's cache). But the problem went away after a while.

The current version does have ram air intakes. What advantages would adding SAS give me? I have to admit that I haven't used SAS on any of my ships in a long time.

Very cool ship! It reminds me of a snow speeder. How hard is it to fly? Do you run into balance problems as fuel is used up?

Boosting BirdDog I finished testing the BirdDog plane/rover by launching it into orbit around Kerbin (with its refueling station) and then bringing them back down to the KSC. Below is the payload mounted on my Reusable Rocket launch vehicle. I thought at first I might mount the plane flat on its back on top to make the payload shorter, but that way lies death and destruction. So I mounted it pointing nose up with a radial decoupler and a girder and plate and several struts...and it was surprisingly stable. For this manned test flight, brave Aldner Kerman volunteered to fly the ship into orbit and back (but the plane does have a OKTO2 probe body mounted on the back of the Avionics package on the tail, so it can be flown unmanned). The Reusable Rocket deposited the 22-tone payload (off in the distance behind the sustainer) into orbit with lots of fuel to spare, then the sustainer stage went on its merry way (eventually to return to the KSC itself). For the Laythe mission, the BirdDog/RefuelingStation payload would be docked at this point to a Standard Nuclear Tug for the push out to Laythe (it will go unmanned, since the kerbels will be riding in their spacious Laythe space station). When the radial separator is fired, the two parts of the ship go tumbling apart. It looks a bit hairy, but they move apart fast enough that they are in no danger of collision. I handled the reentry of the Refueling Station first, while Aldner waited in orbit so he would know where to land if the station ended up far off target. But I was using MechJeb's landing point prediction to target the station to the KSC, so there was no problem. The Refueling station has seven tanks of jet fuel on board (enough to completely refuel the BirdDog three and a half times...assuming it lasts that long). It also has twelve of the gold torroidal tanks for the fuel/oxidizer for the retro rockets, which are six 24-77 radial engines. There was a tendency for the station to yaw during retro burn because it is not perfectly balanced (I have added a gigantor solar array to the next version as a counterweight for the girder). Reentry fire surrounds the Refueling Station as it drops in over KSC. In a perfect world, there would be a nice heat shield under those tanks, and the booms would fold upward, but I didn't feel like putting that much effort into the refueling station. Although having hinges on those refueling booms would potentially make them more adjustable...so maybe I'll add some Damed Robotics fun to this ship as well. Six parachutes bring the Refueling Station in at 7-point-something meters per second, which the lander gear handles fine. I considered different ways of mounting retro rockets onto the BirdDog, but since I had that nice docking port sitting at the CG, I attached a retro pack consisting of five gold torroidal tanks and an LV-909 engine. There is also a flat OKTO2 probe body in there, too, to make lining up the burn easier. After the retro burn and targeting, there were still two full tanks in the retro pack. But I like to have extra fuel more than I like having not enough fuel. I'm funny that way. Below the retro pack has been decoupled and Aldner has the BirdDog pointed nose to prograde. The plane has no RCS...but it's a small plane, and the torque of the cockpit is plenty strong to control it through reentry. The refueling station also has no RCS, and the probe body torque was just fine for controlling that as well. That's one hot BirdDog! I presume that there is some fine ablative material protecting the surface of the plane (there are what appear to nice heat shield tiles on the bottom of the cockpit part). But the rover wheels looked kind of vulnerable hanging out in the breeze, so I placed some token reentry shields in front of them. After the reentry effects abate, the rover wheel heat shield plates are jettisoned, and Aldner is free to fire up the jet engine. I replaced the TurboJet engine from my previous test flight version of the BirdDog with a regular jet engine because I think the regular jet engine will work fine at the lower altitudes I'll be mostly flying at on Laythe, but especially because it is shorter and therefore less likely to get damaged while roving across the surface. Below, Aldner has the jet engine running at half throttle as he does a 180 after overshooting the KSC. I'm sure he didn't deliberately blast overhead just to rattle all the windows with his sonic boom. I don't find the rudder particularly useful when flying this plane...I mostly just fly with the canards to bank and pull turns. Aldner lines up on the runway, thens sets the BirdDog down gently with no problems. I guess he has assured himself a seat on the upcoming Laythe mission. Raising the nose gear of the BirdDog lowers the rover wheels to the ground. Aldner then drove it over to the Refueling Station and tried docking with each of the three refueling ports. Once the ports look to be aligned, the nose gear is lowered, lifting up the plane a little to make contact between the docking ports. Because the Refueling Station was not perfectly level, some of the ports were easier to dock with than others, but Aldner managed to successfully dock with all three. The docking ports on the ends of the refueling booms are tilted one notch because the BirdDog has a slight nose-up attitude when its front landing gear is down. I had previous tested and tweaked the boom positions to be sure the BirdDog would fit correctly. Later, I used the retro engines on the Refueling Station to 'bump' the Station up and back down a little (a very tiny hop) to see if that could be done...and it worked well even in Kerbin's gravity. If none of the booms are lining up well, this is an option for jiggling their positions slightly (since the landing gear with shift a bit during the bump). Now I just need to launch another BirdDog (unmanned) and dock it to a Nuclear Tug... and then another ship will be ready for the Laythe fleet (as we have to wait about a Kerbin year for the next Jool launch window).

I think I may go that route, since the group of islands I'll be exploring aren't that far apart, and because the shorter jet engine will be less likely to get banged off the tail while roving around.

Link: Planning Planets

I don't think this plane will make a great rover (compared to the other one I'm sending), but I think I'll be able to get it places. I'll just have to be very careful about ground clearance for the plane when roving. I'll get back to you on whether its a sure thing or not.

I played without any ground clutter on for a long time, so ground clutter is still interesting to me. Note: I tried adding two more fuel tanks radially to mount the Ram Air Intakes on, but the made the BirdDog chubby and it steered like a cow...and it would always crash when I tried to land it. So too much weight for that wing area, I think.

I took the plane on a test flight that used all but 0.68 liters of its 300 liters fuel supply...I wanted a little left in case I needed a bit of thrust during landing. Flight time: 40 minutes 32 seconds. Total distance travelled: 2,165,528 meters (that about 69% of the circumference of Laythe. I think I'll get to my target islands and back ). Highest altitude: 25,917 meters (I had to see where it would flame out. It behaved well during flameout. Having only one jet engine is handy). Highest speed: 1,496 m/s (Almost 1.5 km/sec? Yeow! No wonder you guys can get to space using planes.). I flew 45-degrees from KSC up to the polar region, circled the perimeter of the ice cap, and then headed south toward the Great Desert (didn't quite make it there). Landed safely in some brown terrain. Then, of course, since this is a rover ROVER as well as a plane, I drove around a wile looking at the native clumps of grass. Edit: Note...This version had two ram air intakes instead of the air scoops.

Indeed. The nose cone on the back makes it look cool. I suppose in the current game it actually ADDS weight and drag, but it certainly cuts down on the ugliness drag, which is always important.

What is the best way to mount the ram intakes on such a plane? Cubic strut angle brackets on the tops of the wings (or the fuselage where the scoops are) and mount the ram intakes on there? I initially had some of those connected to cubic struts in the wings (with the ram intakes clipping through the wings), but the scoops allowed be not to worry about the ground clearance of the ram intakes (but if I can mount them higher, that won't be an issue).

OK, the refueling station works great. Drive under the port (the magnetic attraction even tries to help line it up), and ten extend the nose gear to lift the BirdDog off of its rover wheels. Click! I think I'll put ports out on four arms so that if the refueling station is not on level ground, the plane can still hopefully find a port that is at the right height.

Eve has no oxygen in its atmosphere, as I'm sure you know, so you'll want to replace the jet engine with an aerospike, and use normal tanks with fuel and oxidizer.

The kerbals will be riding to Laythe in the spacious accommodations of what will become the Laythe Space Station. So I was going to send the plane along separately and land it unmanned by the base they will set up on the surface (the base and rover will get sent and dropped as a separate ship). Then one of the hotshot pilots can get on board and do some exploring. Since this plane only masses 7 tons (the the interplanetary nuclear tugs should be able to handle 21 ton payloads), I'll probably try to design a refueling station that can be taken along on the same tug and dropped onto the base area by parachute. I think I'll have the refueling station have a docking port out on the end of an arm, with the port pointing downward. The plane can drive under the arm in rover mode, gets its port lined up, the lower its nose gear to prop the plane up to make contact between the ports. Experimenting now...