Brotoro

Minmus is a Small Kerbol System Body that was captured early on by the planet Kerbin. It is composed primarily of water ice surrounding a small core of unknown extremely dense matter. When Minmus was young, and its crust was still in a liquid state and before it lost its thin carbon dioxide atmosphere, a species of microorganism thrived in its oceans. This microorganism secreted copious quantities of lipids, hexahydrothymol, chlorophyll, and resins which remain in the crust of Minmus today. This theory explains why Minmus can exist as close as it does to Kerbol: As the ice of Minmus's crust sublimes in the vacuum of space, the resin is left behind and forms a barrier to further sublimation. This theory would also explain why the crust of Minmus tastes like mint ice cream, and why it is such a popular destination for spacefaring kerbals who are running low on snacks.

It seems like you are asking us if we want: Option 1 - fewer features with better polish...or Option 2 - more features with continued bugginess. Much as I will be sad to see certain announced features delayed, it seems to me that the only professional choice for something called "Version 1.0" is Option 1. Apparently my preferred choice of Option 3 (Take more time...to do more features, all debugged and polished...by popping out a couple intermediate updates, before you annoint it "1.0") is off the table. If you decide to go with Option 1, you could lessen the pain by letting us know as soon as possible which items will be delayed until "1.1".

Pilots can use Goo canisters??

That's a better picture than the cover scan I worked from. I considered basing my cover on one of the more modern Warlord covers...but I didn't want to get anybody's knickers in a twist.

...because it would be too difficult to train a pilot astronaut to hook up a hose?

Kerbal Addiction Is Like Orbital Mechanics... ...because the closer you are to it, the faster it makes you want to go? ...because the game is the one focus that controls all your motions? ...because p2 = a3 (the length of your playing period squared is proportional to the number of accidents cubed)? ...because it's not easy to change your inclinations without a lot of effort? ...because trying to solve the n-body problem of playing with too many other games at the same time is too difficult? ...because.....ah, that's enough torturing you guys.

Arrgh. I re-read these things and find typos. All. The. Time. Arrgh.

I must cook my pancakes differently than other people...because I can't understand why anyone would want to build a "pancake shaped rocket."

Hose for surface refueling.

I posted Part 3 of my Developing Duna adventure.

Developing Duna - Part 3 Departing for Duna It has been a busy few weeks at the KSC. Jebediah's mission to Eve to pick up Desdin Kerman left Kerbin orbit two weeks ago, and the final checkout of the five Duna ships in orbit around Kerbin has been completed. Now it's time to send off our brave explorers to the Red Planet! Below is the trajectory the ships will be following, with a trans-Duna-injection maneuver of about 1074 m/s required to send the craft off to Duna. Duna was relatively close to its orbital node with Kerbin (and its orbit is not too highly inclined) so Duna encounters were showing up with one maneuver. The second maneuver node on the trajectory is located at the Descending Node where a small burn of 10 to 11 m/s will be made to match Duna's orbital plane. The burns to Duna would take between 11 and 13 minutes for the various ships in the armada. These could be done with single burns, but for longer burns I prefer the two-burn method because it is more efficient. By spending more time firing the engines when the ship is closer to the planet and moving faster, less fuel is needed to get the same delta-V (because of the Oberth effect that we all know and love). The first ship sent off was the BANT D1 Tug with the Duna Base payload. A little over half of the injection burn was made, then the engines were cut. The intermediate orbit had an apoapsis of around 2000 km, so there was no problem with encountering the Mün. The next ship up was the BANT D2 & D3 Double Tug carrying our eight heroes. Thompbles: "How's everything looking, Kurt?" Kurt: "KSC reports that the Base ship's first burn was good. All of our systems are fine." Aldner: "Well, since they went through all the trouble of sending off a Base for us, I guess we should chase it." Thompbles: "OK. Duna Explorer to KSC. We are ready for TDI-one." Ludger (KSC CAPCOM): "Roger, Duna Explorer, you are go for TDI-one. Have a good trip. Bring me back a present." The first burns for the BANT D4 & D5 ship carrying the Fuel Fidos and Fuel Stations, the BANT D6 ship bringing the Fido rovers, and the SP Tug A ship with the DunaDog planes also went well. Well, I say that in one sentence, but it still represents a couple hours of work. Sure, the burns were only about six minutes each, but some of the payloads (especially the crew ship, fuel ship, and rover ship) are very laggy...so one second in game time was up to three seconds in real life. Also, some of the ships did not tolerate physical time warp well at all, wobbling around above 1x. Other ships could tolerate the warp, but too much warp caused the nuke nacelles to splay outward, wasting fuel with angled thrust. So things took a while. I only mention this so you'll feel sorry for me and tell me that I deserve ice cream for doing this. You can see the preliminary orbits after the first parts of the TDI maneuvers below, with the five payloads spaced out nicely along their ellipses. Thompbles: "Take a good look at the planet, boys and girls. This is the last good view of Kerbin we're going to get for several years." Nelemy: "Dude, won't we see it as we head off to Duna?" Hellou: "No, Nelemy. We'll be heading outward from the dark side, so we'll only see it as a crescent as it gets smaller. It's such a beautiful world. If only the rocks out in space weren't calling me so insistently." Kelby: "I can agree with that. Hmmm...I don't recall that the clouds looked this impressive when I left for my first Duna mission. I guess that's because we did a one-burn TDI back then." Approximately two game-hours after their first burns, each ship came back to periapsis for the second part of their TDI burn...an example trajectory plot is below. It's easier to plot these because you just put the maneuver node at the periapsis point. You can see that an intercept was showing up even without the plane shift figured in. The second part of each burn went fine (if somewhat slowly for the laggy ships). You can see the burns below in the ever-popular artsy backlit motif. Here is where I sing the praises of the Kerbal Alarm Clock mod. When I sent my first armada of ships out to Jool, I didn't have KAC, and keeping track of all the things happening at once was nerve-frazzling. Also, I recently began using the KAC feature where it will automatically set an alarm for any and all ships that are going to be crossing a Sphere of Influence boundary, and I highly recommend this (because carefully-planned trajectories can get messed up (sometimes wildly messed up) if a ship crosses an SOI boundary at high time warp. The plot below shows all five ships heading away from Kerbin on hyperbolic trajectories...with those wonderful automatic SOI-Change Alarms set. You can also see that I was following the two ships of Jeb's Eve mission at the same time. As each alarm went off for a ship leaving Kerbin's SOI, I clicked the Jump to Ship button and then carefully nursed each ship across the SOI boundary at 1x speed. Once each ship passed out into interplanetary space, I had KAC set an alarm to warn me when the ship would approach the Descending Node of its trajectory relative to Duna's orbit. KAC is my friend. At the Descending Node, a maneuver was plotted that would not only match planes with Duna (which typically took 10 to 11 m/s of delta-V), but the fine targeting of the Duna intercept was also done by tweaking the prograde and radial components of the burn as needed. Below we see my important tools of the trade for doing this: I use the Precise Node mod to allow fine tweaking of the burn. I also would get MASSIVELY frustrated without Precise Node's feature of being able to reopen collapsed maneuver nodes by pressing the "o" key (since the damn things always collapse on me at the most inopportune times). I REALLY hope SQUAD makes this a standard keystroke in the game. I use Conics Mode 3 (which is happily the default nowadays) and focus on the target (using the Tab key repeatedly) to zoom in and see in detail what the trajectory is doing there. In the plot below you can see that I've shifted the original trajectory (that orange line in the bottom-right corner...I think it's orange) over close to Duna. My other vital tool when I'm targeting planets with atmospheres where I want to aerocapture is MechJeb's "Show landing predictions" setting of its Landing Guidance feature (part of that dialog box is shown in the image below). In the bad old days I'd have to use F5 and F9 and multiple tries to get a desired aerocapture -- this is SO much nicer. Below, the plane-shift and fine-targeting burn of the Duna Explorer. Adly: "Kurt, how was the burn?" Kurt: "A little bit off...but that's to be expected from this distance. A tiny bit of delta-V makes a big change at the target. I'm fixing the trajectory with small bursts from the RCS thrusters now." Adly: "We didn't have these fancy aerocapture computer predictions back when I last made an interplanetary voyage." Kurt: "You gotta move with the times, Adly. Argh...too high. Too low. At this distance, even the tiniest burts of RCS thrust cause too big of a change. Ah ha! A 547 kilometer apoapsis after aerocapture..that's close enough for now." Three of the ships in the armada were targeted for capture into equatorial orbits at Duna, but two of the ships (the Fuel Fido/Fuel Station payload, and the Fido rovers/Small Science Landers payload) were targeted for capture into polar orbits. The maneuvers of the unkerballed ships of the armada would be handled by Kurt as well (since the final RCS tweaking is easier without lightspeed delays from the KSC). After the plane-shift/targeting maneuvers, the plot below showed all five ships on target for Duna in a tight pattern. Nice shootin', Tex! (And we can see from the Kerbal Alarm Clock list that the next thing I had to take care of was Jeb's mission arriving at Eve...but I've already posted that little adventure in the update to my Exiting Eve thread.) OK! That gave us five ships on optimal trajectories for Duna. Now the crew had nothing to do but wait as they coasted through interplanetary space. Nelemy: "Bored now." Aldner: "Already? We've only been out a couple weeks." Nelemy: "A couple BORING weeks, Dude. Hey, Hellou-Dude...did you bring along a book that I could read?" Hellou: "I have lots of books on my Kindle." Nelemy: "Nah, Dude...I like to hold real books. And I'm boycotting companies that give all their products names starting with 'K'...I mean, enough of that already! I hate names starting with K." Aldner: "I'll let Kurt know that." Nelemy: "No, Dude... Anyway...did you bring a book, Hellou?" Hellou: "As a matter of fact, I did. I have it here in my personal effects bag. Here you go: Herbert Kerman's Duna. A classic novel." Nelemy: "Whoa, cool! Um...Is that thing on the cover what I think it is?" Hellou: "Do you think it's a giant sandworm?" Nelemy: "Um...no." Hellou: "Then, no. It's a great book. I think you'll like it." Aldner: "I brought along a book, too." Nelemy: "Dude! Really? Can I read it?" Aldner: "Sure. Here it is: Erb Kerman's Karter Kerman, Warlord of Duna." Aldner: "Just be careful with it...I don't want you to ruin its collectable value." Hellou: "Did you just bring it along so you could sell it later? That's against the rules, you know." Aldner: "Ah, but it's not against the rules to GIVE it away for...personal considerations." Hellou: "Is this your way around the rule about you not naming any landmarks on Duna after your female kerbal friends?" Nelemy: "Dude...Why is this book printed on such crappy paper?" Hellou: "Huh? Oh, WOW! You have one of the pulp first editions! Those are really rare! I figured you'd buy one of the newer editions with the smutty cover art. But this copy is awesome!" Aldner: "Don't drool on it, geek girl. I have big plans for that book." Dropping in to Duna Fifty-two days later, the ships of the armada started dropping into the Duna system. I hadn't planned it deliberately, but the arrivals were all spaced out nicely a day or two apart, so there wouldn't be any hectic handling of multiple ships at once. Lucky! The first of the ships to reach Duna was the ship carrying the Duna Base payload, targeted for an equatorial orbit. After sneaking it across the SOI at 1x, the targeting was still intact for an aerocapture that would leave the ship in an elliptical orbit with a 1000 km apoapsis. Below is a picture of the aerocapture pass. If you were expecting exciting flames, you'll be disappointed -- the thin atmosphere of Duna simply doesn't perform in a flaming way with the trajectories used in this mission. Once the ship left Duna's atmosphere after the aerocapture, MechJeb's aerobraking prediction showed that it would enter and land on the next pass. This was not desired, of course, so at apoapsis a small 1.34 m/s prograde burn was made to raise the periapsis a little so that the post-aerobraking orbit would have a 120 km altitude (see below). The ships were initially captured into elliptical orbits with high apoapses in order that: 1) aerocapture heating would be minimized (good practice for KSP 1.0), and 2) if an orbital plane shift is needed, it's cheapest to do far from the planet. As it happened, this first ship was close enough to equatorial that a plane-shift burn wasn't needed. After the second pass through Duna's atmosphere, the aerobraking prediction again showed a landing for the next orbit...but a 54 m/s burn at apoapsis put the ship safely into a nearly circular parking orbit. That's one ship done! The second ship into the Duna system happened to be the last ship sent out from Kerbin (the transfer trajectories varied in duration), the DunaDogs payload. It got the same treatment as the first ship. The DunaDog ship did require a plane-shift burn to bring it closer to equatorial. This was done at the node furthest from the planet (and required 12.6 m/s of delta-V). The third ship in to Duna was the BANT D6 with the Fido rovers and small Science landers. This ship came in over the north pole of Duna. The ship was placed into a polar orbit so that its payloads could potentially be dropped at any latitude on Duna. The clouds of the Environmental and Visual Enhancement mod look a bit strange right over the pole. The next ship in, carrying the Fuel Fidos and Fuel Stations, was also captured into a polar orbit (since those fuel stores may need to be dropped anywhere on Duna in support of the surface exploration program). The second half of the image below shows the ship's orbit is still hyperbolic (before aerocapture). The final circularization burn of the Fuel ship was over one of Duna's polar caps: The last ship into Duna was the Duna Explorer carrying our heroic crew, seen with Duna and Ike in the background below. No, Ike is not that large compared to Duna...it just happens to be fairly close. Side Note: Maneuvering around into or out of the Duna system always carries with it the danger of unwanted encounters with Duna's moon Ike because Ike has such a large SOI relative to its distance from Duna. When plotting the ship trajectories into the Duna system, I avoided Ike encounters by adjusting the prograde and radial components of the targeting burn as needed to arrive at times when Ike was not in the way. Making small changes to those components simultaneously allows you adjust both the arrival time and the periapsis distance of your ship's trajectory. Hellou: "Hey, everybody... We're going to get an eclipse of Kerbol by Ike if you want to watch." Nelemy: "Cool." Kelby: "You'll get to see plenty of eclipses from the surface of Duna -- Ike is pretty big as seen from the surface. I saw one when I landed on Duna long ago." Nelemy: "Umm...but aren't Ike and Duna tidally locked, Dude?" Kelby: "Sure...So Ike will hang in the sky at about the same place all the time as seen from any particular point on Duna where it's visible...but our Base will be near the equator, so Kerbol will pass behind it every Duna-day." Hellou: "Don't rain on our parade...it's the first one for the rest of us." The aerocapture pass of the Duna Explorer was similarly lacking in exciting flames as the passes of the previous ships. The post-capture maneuvers for the Duna Explorer were different from the previous ships. First, as the ship was headed out to its 1500 km apoapsis, a tiny plane-shift burn was made to be sure its orbit was equatorial. Then, at apoapsis, a prograde burn of 9 m/s was made to raise the orbit's periapsis completely out of Duna's atmosphere. Kurt: "Burn complete...the periapsis it out of the atmosphere. But stay strapped in everybody...there's more maneuvers to come immediately." Nelemy: "Dude, I thought we were going to aerobrake to a lower orbit." Aldner: "You need to read the mission plan more carefully, Little Buddy. OK, Kurt. The four comsats are decoupled. Shake 'em loose." Kurt: "Roger. A little pitch...a little roll...and away they go." Aldner: "Extending solar panels and antennas. OK...all four read green on all deployments." Kurt: "Roger. Pointing retrograde. Are any of those things back in the retro direction?" Aldner: "Negative. You are free and clear to navigate, Mr. Kerman." Kurt: "Acceleration warning. Four second burn in one minute." So, with the comsats dropped off into non-decaying orbits, the Duna Explorer made a 7.8 m/s burn to dip its periapsis back into Duna's atmosphere for another non-flamey aerobraking pass, leaving its apoapsis near 100 km. Then a 48.6 m/s prograde burn circularized the orbit...and all five ships (and four comsats) were safe a sound in Duna orbits. When the first comsat came back around to its 1500 km apoapsis, a 172 m/s burn by its 48-7S engine circularized its orbit, and it took up station as Duna Comsat 1. The other three comsats were allowed to continue coursing along in their elliptical orbits until one of them reached apoapsis when Comsat 1 was about 120 degrees around the planet from there...and then that comsat circularized its orbit to take up station as Duna Comsat 2. Similarly, Duna Comsat 3 was placed in the same 1500 km circular orbit 120 degrees from the first two comsats. Voilá! A perfect three-point communication satellite arrangement. Well, it could be better if it was out at synchronous orbit distance, I suppose...but then I'd feel like I owed royalties to Arthur C. Clarke. The fourth comsat did a different maneuver: At apoapsis it both circularized and did a 90-degree plane shift maneuver (simultaneously to conserve fuel), and was placed into a polar orbit so that there would be better comsat coverage (at least occasionally) at the poles of Duna. This big maneuver nearly depleted the propellants from the comsat's four Oscar B tanks. Below is the completed Duna comsat constellation. There are several other orbits there that you might be wondering about -- those are ships and transfer stages from various previous missions to the Duna system (including Kelby's old Duna lander, and Adly's ship around Ike from the Magic Boulder mission). Also note: I don't employ any communications mods because that's a level of detail I don't want to bother with...but I like to have a realistic set of communications satellites in place. Down to Duna! Duna operations began with rearranging some of the components of the Duna Explorer ship into the basic structure of Duna Space Station. First, the RCS mini-Tug/docking port adapter (with a Senior port on one end and a Standard port on the other) was moved from the top of one of the Interplanetary Transfer Habitats and docked to one of the four Standard ports in the top tier of docking ports of the Station core (just to get it out of the way). Then the two Duna Landers separated with the other interplanetary Hab and docked it to the top of the other Hab. These Habs will eventually be used to return crew members to Kerbin...but for now they are part of the long axis of Duna Station. Next, the two big Tugs were separated and docked butt-first to opposite Senior ports of the Station core's bottom tier of docking ports. When the Tugs eventually leave, their rear tanks will be left behind as part of Duna Station. This has the advantages of: 1) giving the Station lots of volume for storing propellant, and 2) providing Senior docking ports further out from the hub of the station to make docking easier (the tanks have docking ports at both ends). Also, these tanks have some Junior docking ports on their sides to accomodate craft with only Junior docking ports. There is the start of Duna Space Station. Other Tugs will drop off additional tanks and fuel before returning to Kerbin for re-use. One of the Tugs still has the Double-Tug-Adapter (currently empty) hanging off of it in an ugly way...but that adapter could be useful in tying Tugs together in the future. Also, there is still a Surface Fuel Station docked to the bottom of the Space Station that will be dropped to some handy location on Duna when needed in the future. But let's start the actual landings! First down will be the Duna Base. But before that, there is a rack of Small Science Landers on top of it that needs to be moved. These COULD be simply left floating free in equatorial orbit, but keeping them with the Tug would keep more options open. The rack of Science Landers was separated, and then the Tug flipped around and docked them to the rear end. All this freed up the Duna Base to separate and move away (well...the TUG moved away...the Base doesn't have RCS). Two 48-7S engines on the underside of the Base drew fuel from two FL-T100 tanks on the top to perform the retro burn, and the Base headed down. In the past I have included little heat shields to protect rover wheels on ships...but I decided to take the amazing temperature resistance numbers listed by SQUAD as given (and I expected entries at Duna to be mild anyway), so no heat shields were included. For you fans of flaming entries, I'm sorry to have to disappoint you again...but there were no entry flames visible during any of the Duna landings. Below, the eight parachutes deployed in the reefed state and the landing legs deployed after I figured any serious heating would be over. Then the chutes opened fully, and the Base descended gently with a little rocket engine braking before touchdown, depleting most of the remaining fuel. The landing legs are there to protect the wheels. I'm not used to landing on Duna, and I was kind of surprised how easy it was to land things because the atmosphere and parachutes do a lot of the work for you. Surprised, because I was thinking in terms of Mars, with its much thinner atmosphere. (I saw a video where a Mars entry and landing engineer was saying that Mars' atmosphere is the worst of both worlds: Too thick to ignore when dropping in at interplanetary speeds, but too thin to be useful in landing. NASA would LOVE to have Duna's atmosphere to work with.) Below: Duna Base, which can easily accomodate the whole expedition crew in its four slightly-overlapping Hitchhiker modules, safely down on Duna. The base has docking ports on the sides to allow for future expansion. The elevation of the Base landing site is 640 meters. I was aiming for 42° East longitude, just south of the equator...so not bad. Besides...it can be moved around, if desired. Next, the Fuel Fido 1 surface refueling rover was separated from the Tug and sent down to the Base site. It has two 24-7S engines on its bottom for the retro burn (those four other things tucked onto the underside are Xenon tanks, in case you didn't recognize them). Again, no flames as the Fuel Fido descended into the nice, 'thick' air of the lowlands. The Fuel Fido has six chutes to assist in landing. The Fuel Fido's tanks are fully loaded with propellants (or were when it separated from the Tug), so the two 48-7S engines had to do more work in slowing this payload down for a soft landing...but when you have the parachutes to get you heading down vertically, landing is a piece of cake. Mmmmm...cake. With ice cream. Mmmm. The rover landed 280 meters from the Base...but that credit goes to MechJeb's targeting during retro burn (MJ isn't used for the actual landing). The third item off the stack was the Surface Fuel Station, equipped with four 24-77 engines, eight parachutes, and a whole mess o' propellants. Again, this payload is pretty heavy, so the engines do important work in soft-landing it. The Fuel Stations will provide propellants for the Landers, hopper rovers, and DunaDogs. It is used in conjunction with the Fuel Fido rover that actually moves the propellant to the thirsty vehicles. And now for the kerbals! They would be my first kerbals to land on the sorely-ignored Duna in 25 game years (those are Earth years, since that's what we were using way back in the days of KSP 0.18 when I started this savegame). The expedition has two redundant teams...just in case...and each team would land in a separate lander. Gold Team in Duna Lander 1 consisted of Thompbles (commander), Aldner (piloting), Kurt (engineer/pilot), and Kelby (scientist/pilot). Duna Lander 1 separated from Duna Space Station and used its two Rockomax Mark 55 Radial Mount Liquid Engines to perform the retro burn. I used the long-ignored Mk 55 engines because they have recently gotten a buff...and I'm hoping they won't be hit as hard by the Nerf Hammer when KSP 1.0 rolls out. Aldner: "Oooo, the view out the window is fun...zipping along so fast and low. I like it." Thompbles: "Keep your mind on the job. Sight-see later." Aldner: "No problem, Fearless Leader. We are...Ooo! Is that a squirrel?" Thompbles: "Stay on task." Aldner: "Nope...just a rock that looked like a squirrel. 4000 meters...deploying the chutes." Kurt: "Three thousand meters. Twenty-five hundred. Fifteen hundred..." Aldner: "Brace for the Big Yank, boys..." Kurt: "Unh. Six good chutes, fully open." Aldner: "Braking...hardly any throttle needed at all...annnd...touchdown. Engines safed. You may now move around the cabin, but remember that luggage in overhead bins may have shifted position during flight. We hope you choose to fly with Duna Air for all your future travel needs." Thompbles: "We're ready for the first EVA. Kelby...you've had experience with this...perhaps you'd like to show us how it's done." Kelby: "Thanks, Thompbles. Hatch open. I'm extending the ladder. Climbing down. I'll step onto the surface now. That's one small step for a kerbal...One heck of a 25-year-wait to return for me!" Thompbles: "Here...have a flag. I know they hadn't developed space-rated flag technology the last time you were here." Aldner: "Hey, wait for me before you plant it. I'm repacking the lander's parachutes." Kurt: "Wait for me, too...I've got the camera. Wow, it sure is red out here. Such magnificent...crimson..lation..ness." Kelby: "Yep. But this site is certainly not as flat as my first landing site...which isn't too far East of here." Below is a overview showing Duna Lander 1's landing spot relative to the three previous landers. Not bad, but I was trying to get it into the triangle formed by the other three ships. Kurt hoofed it the 290 meters over to the Fuel Fido to check out the rover. He deployed the ladders and activated the Claws. He repacked its chutes for the sake of neatness...not that they expected to ever hop this rover...but it could happen. The Fuel Fido has two oppositely-facing seats on top. Kurt: "Hey, Thompbles...Would you like a ride over to the Base?" Thompbles: "That would be great. Thanks." Aldner: "Wow...Taxi service already on Duna. All the modern conveniences." Kelby: "The neighborhood sure has improved in 25 years." Thompbles got on board the Base, went to the central shaft to take the ladder up to the command cabin on top, then retracted the landing legs. The Base settled onto its wheels with no problem. He then drove it slowly over near Lander 1. The Base isn't meant to be a long-distance exploration rover, but it seems to trundle around just fine on the relatively flat terrain of the landing site. Below: The view out of Thompbles's window: Thompbles: "Duna Base to Duna Station." Emilynn: "Go ahead Duna Base." Thompbles: "The real estate looks good. Bring down Blue Team." Emilynn: "Roger. We're on our way." Blue Team consisting of Adly (commander), Emilynn (piloting), Nelemy (pilot...who also took a few quickie engineering courses before launch), and Hellou (scientist) separated their Duna Lander 2 ship from the Station and followed the Gold Team down to the surface. The landing was without incident. It was getting later in the afternoon by the time Blue Team landed, setting down close to the Fuel Station. The picture below shows the view looking West with Lander 2 and Ike in the photo (Ike is fairly high overhead from this site). Emilynn deployed the high gain antenna after landing. With all eight of the crew safely down, there was still more hardware to deliver. Up in polar orbit, the remotely controlled BANT D6 separated its rack of four Small Science Landers and then flipped the around 180 degrees to redock those landers to the rear docking port. This freed up the stack of Fido rovers...the first of which separated in preparation for landing at the Duna Base site the next morning. A polar orbit gives you the ability to land anywhere on the planet...but it can involve waiting a while for the right time to deorbit. In the images below, you can see the orbital plane of the Fido rover (the smaller of the two polar orbits, being seen nearly edge on). The position of the Duna Base site is marked with an arrow on each image...and you can see that by the next orbit, the Base site will be under the Fido's orbital plane. Time to land! The Fido rover has a Junior docking port on top...and landing maneuvers are much easier if you choose to control from there. The retro burn took place over Duna's southern polar cap. The Map view below shows the Fido's incoming trajectory, slightly leading the Base site markers to account for the extra rotation motion Duna will make during the descent of the Fido. How much lead is required? If MechJeb's Landing Guidance is turned on, it will display a red marker at the target point you specify, and a blue marker where the ship will land (the position of the blue marker ACCOUNTS for rotation of the planet). So you just need to line up those markers. The Fido is equipped with RCS, so that can be used for fine tweaking of the targeting after retro burn. If the target is NOT going to be right under the ship's orbital plane when the lander gets to that point, the ship would need to do some normal or antinormal burn in its orbit 90 degrees away from landing site to shift the trajectory plane as needed. The Fido exploration rovers have two 48-7S engines and four parachutes to assist in landing. The targeting wasn't as precise on this landing, and the Fido touched down about 400 meters from Duna Lander 1 and Duna Base (which were visible because they are on top of a low ridge...the other ships were beyond the ridge). But a little distance doesn't matter for the Fido because it's a ROVER...so the control point was switched from the top port to the cockpit, and rover was remotely controlled the drive it over to the Base. Because of the lower traction available with the chosen wheels in Duna's low gravity, it's necessary to disable the SAS (if you drive with it normally on...which I do) to make tight turns. Holding down the "f" key during turns works fine. Also...it takes a fair distance to come to a stop, so that must be kept in mind. I used the older wheels since they worked well for me back when I did the circumnavigation of Duna with an unmanned Fido (back when rovber wheels first came out in KSP 0.19)...but the grippier wheels (or a mix) might be better here. Duna Fido 2 was similarly dropped into the Base area a Duna-day later in the morning. It would have been possible to land it half a day earlier when the Base site was passing under the other side of the orbit, but the lighting was a little better under the northward-moving side of the orbit. Playing with Planes Time to attempt flying a plane in Duna's atmosphere...Not a full fledged test, but just enough to get the DunaDog plane safely down to the Base area. With Aldner at the remote controls and Emilynn monitoring as backup, DunaDog 1 was separated from the SP Tug A in equatorial orbit. Emilynn: "Separation looks good, Buzz. I'm moving the Tug away." Aldner: "OK. Rocket engine 1 is activated. Ship is pointed retrograde. Give me a count to the retro fire point." Emilynn: "One minute. Thirty seconds. Five...four...three...two...one...mark." Aldner: "Retro burn. Positive function. Attitude holding. Annnnd cut." Emilynn: "You were a few tenths short on that burn." Aldner: "No matter...it's a plane...I have lots of leeway." ...Several minutes later... Aldner: "Eight thousand meters. Starting to get some bite." Emilynn: "Looks like it's going to overfly at about five klicks." Aldner: "OK. Pitching down more." Emilynn: "The plane is coming overhead at four point five klicks." Aldner: "OK. Banking it right. Hmmm. The response is sluggish...but getting at lot better as it drops. Twenty-eight hundred meters...I've got it in a level turn now. Good bite." Emilynn: "Speed is dropping. Two hundred. One seventy." Aldner: "Let's see how well these ion engines work. Rocket engine 1 is deactivated. Activating the ions." Emilynn: "Four ions are hot, reading green." Emilynn: "Two of the ions are flickering." Aldner: "OK...reducing throttle. The plane is pointed at the Base. Heading three five five. I'll buzz the tower at two hundred meters. Her she comes. Speed one hundred." Emilynn: "Looking hot, Buzz." Aldner: "As always. The plane's nice, too. OK...ions off. I'll plop her down north of Base." Emilynn: "DunaDog is clear of the base." Aldner: "Pulling up. Slowing down. Eighty. Seventy. Popping the chutes!" Emilynn: "Big pitch up, there." Aldner: "Pitching down. I've got her. Belly engine activated." Emilynn: "Descending at twelve. Four forward. Four forward." Aldner: "Belly engine on!" Emilynn: "Slowing. Eight down. Contact!" Aldner: "OK. Engine stop." Emilynn: "Fuel at 87 percent. Xenon over 97 percent. Good work, Buzz." Aldner: "Thanks, Hawk. All engine arm circuits are off. Let's drive on over and check her out." Emilynn gave Aldner a ride over to his DunaDog in the Fido. Aldner climbed into the cockpit...after repacking the chutes (you don't want to realize that you forgot to repack the chutes AFTER takeoff)... and after hauling the kerbal-sized bag of supplies out of the cockpit and over to the rover (never miss an opportunity to send down extra supplies in empty ships). The DunaDog, like its Laythe BirdDog inspiration, converts to surface-rover mode by raising the nose gear to drop the rover wheels to the surface. Aldner drove the DunaDog over to Lander 2 to visit the rest of Blue Team. (Ooops...I notice from the picture that I forgot to repack Lander 2's parachutes after landing -- that was a serious breech of protocol. Let me add that to my list of important things to do.) Just as was done with DunaDog 1, DunaDog 2 was separated from the SP Tug A and brought down to Duna, this time with Emilynn in remote control of the plane. The image below shows the landing trajectory -- the targeting on this is less critical than for normal landers, since the plane can fly around to get to its designated landing spot once it hits thicker air. Emilynn initially overflew the Base area at only 1500 meters. She was hoping to make a landing using less fuel than Aldner, but her DunaDog was getting too low and slow, so she needed to kick in the ions for the turn. Emilynn brought the DunaDog 2 around for a second flyover heading north at only 150 meters. Emilynn: "Ions off. Belly engine activated. Pitching up." Aldner: "Speed seventy-five. Seventy-three. Seventy-t..." Emilynn: "Chutes out. Whoa, settle down, girl! " Aldner: "Thirteen down..." Emilynn: "Throttling up!" Aldner: "Twelve down. Eleven...contact." Emilynn: "Hmm. That landing looked a bit hard. I was a might late with the belly thrust. I hope I didn't bend anything." Aldner: "We live and learn. A minimum of 200 meters may be best for popping the chutes. Telemetry reports all systems green. Want me to drive you over?" Emilynn: "Nah...I'll drive it over here remotely. Raising the front gear." The DunaDog 2 seemed no worse for the slightly hard landing. Emilynn brought it over near Lander 2, then went over and climbed on top of the plane to repack the parachutes. That's it for this episode. All the initial equipment is safely down at Duna Base. In fact, things are getting a bit laggy there -- it will be nice to get some of these vehicles sent out on testing and exploration missions...but that's for later.

I expect that the rover might see use again in the future (assuming my savegame survives conversion to version 1.0)... because we'll have to see how Eve Ascent can be done in the new version!

I am very sad. It wasn't unexpected...but he was my favorite author in recent years, and I will miss him.

Today I posted an UPDATE to my Exiting Eve thread. I finally decided to return Desdin Kerman from Eve after 24 years alone. Yesterday I posted Episode 44 in the Longterm Laythe series. This episode dealt with fixing comsats that were broken by the 0.90 Beta upgrade.

Exiting Eve 2 This mission is a continuation of the adventures of Desdin Kerman, who has been sitting on Eve since KSP version 0.18. He wasn't just left there to rot...there were multiple missions to keep him supplied and provide him with a fine rover and much larger living quarters (as seen in a side story in Longterm Laythe episode 20). Below: 1) Desdin's original landing craft on Eve. 2) Desdin's first Base upgrade. 3) Desdin's Blutonium Laboratory. 4) Desdin's second Base upgrade. There was even the Eve Return mission (the first post of this thread) which showed the development and testing of a ship that could be used to rescue Desdin. But, as you may recall, Desdin was quite happy on Eve, spending his time exploring via rover, experimenting with possible Blutonium extraction methods, observing Kerbol...but mostly just meditating in a resource-conserving trance state. Desdin LIKED being a space hermit. Eve itself changed quite a bit during Desdin's stay on the surface. The image below shows what Desdin's landing site looked like originally: a nice basin with lots of large lakes. You can see his lander's marker by one of the lakes. It looked the same at the time of the first Exiting Eve episode. But one day upon wakening from a long hibernation trance, Desdin found that the landscape had altered significantly (see image below). The lake alongside his landing site (1) had dried up almost completely. So when his second Base Upgrade was sent to him, it was landed by one of the lake remnants (2), and Desdin went there in his rover. Even worse for the future chances of rescuing Desdin, the large landing location used in the first Exiting Eve episode (3 on the map above), which had been at over 4,100 meters, had shifted down to 2,000-something meters...which would require a much larger ascent vehicle. A new landing site would be needed (4 on the map...but more about that later). And, just to add insult to injury, when Desdin woke up from hibernation after Beta Storm 0.90 had hit, he found his Base was awash in the lake (which had apparently shifted a little), and his rover was floating in the lake: This was a serious problem. The wheels of the Base were still touching botom, so it could be driven out of the lake (see below). But the rover was floating, with no purchase for its wheels to allow driving to shore. Desdin needed that rover if he ever wanted to get to an Eve Ascent Vehicle landing site. Luckily, the rover that had been sent to Desdin was a version of the Fido K that had been tested on Duna, Mün, and Minmus...so it was equipped with RCS. The RCS system was basically useless for driving around on Eve, so it's monopropellant had never been used. This allowed Desdin to remotely move the rover to shore using the RCS jets until its wheels could touch bottom to drive out the rest of the way. Huzzah! Even Desdin can take a hint. Eve apparently just didn't want him there, and was kindly suggesting that he leave. If he ignored the hint, would he one day find that his Base had been totally submerged...or dropped into a chasm? Besides...the whole Blutonium resource processing scheme had turned out to be a bust anyway. So Desdin contacted KSC about returning home to Kerbin. Eve Express The engineers at KSC hadn't been idle all the years since the first Eve Ascent mission. They had designed a new, lighter and more capable Eve ascent vehicle using the amazing Rockomax 48-7S engines instead of aerospike engines. This ship, dubbed the Eve Express, had been built and held in storage in case Desdin needed to be rescued. But recently, Rockomax warned the KSC staff that its 48-7S engines MIGHT be having a problem -- some of the alloys used were not aging well, and it might not be advisable to run them at full power beyond what they cryptically named "Date 1.0" ...so it also happened to be a question of "use it now or never" that aligned with Desdin wanting to return. Jebediah Kerman, senior kerbalnaut, seized the opportunity of the "need to rescue Desdin" to put together a mission plan (which Jeb, of course, would command). The problem was, the KSC launch pad had been booked up up for the next ten months with back to back launches for the Developing Duna project, so there wouldn't be time to fit in all the launches for Jeb's mission. Happily, before the infighting got out of hand, the Duna mission engineers came up with an alternate plan for Jeb's mission. For example, the Eve Express is designed to operate as a free-standing vehicle...so instead of using the main launch pad, the Eve Express could be serviced in the SPH and carted out to the runway for launch. Below, we see the liftoff of the Eve Express: Jeb piloted the Eve Express to Kerbin orbit himself. His single-kerbal lander cabin is located deep in the center of the ship, but it was deemed safe enough (for Jeb anyway) to fly it manned because it had a simple abort scheme: Just cut the engines and pop out the two dozen parachutes to land the ship. The Eve Express has 65 Rockomax 48-7S engines firing at liftoff. This required a little throttling back to keep the ship below terminal velocity during the first phase of the boost. The bottom view shows all 65 engines blazing as Jeb heads into the cloud layer. During the flight to Kerbin orbit, none of the stages of this massively asparagus ship were dropped, of course, since they would be needed at Eve later. But any Eve ascent vehicle that can make it into Eve orbit from a moderately low elevation should be able to easily make it into Kerbin orbit as an SSTO. 20-something seconds after liftoff, the first two sets of four engines went dark...and the throttle was advanced to full. The fuel in the two X200-8 tanks on top of the ship (the Eve retro tanks) and two of the FL-T800 tanks was expended by then. By 46 seconds after launch, with the ship over 5200 meters up, two more sets of four engines had gone dark. Pitch-over was started at 6000 meters, and by 13,800 meters (86 seconds into boost) eight of the side boosters were no longer getting fuel, with half of the side boosters still firing. The apoapsis passed 95 km while the ship was still below 66 km altitude with just nine engines still firing (two side boosters and the central engine), and the throttle was cut until the circularization burn. After reaching orbit, two of the FL-T800 tanks had 25% of their fuel remaining (and the small FL-200 central tank was full). The Eve Express needed to be refueled for its mission to Eve. This would require about 2.25 "Orange Tanks" worth of fuel. Normally I would do this with launches of my standard Reusable Rockets carrying Reusable Refueler craft...but the launch pad was booked, so an alternative was needed. Happily, there were stores of propellant in Kerbin orbit (untouched for many years), so those would be used in this pinch. One of the on-orbit fuel stores was at Space Station Alpha. Unfortunately, that station was constructed before the invention of Senior Docking Ports, so it was only equipped with Standard ports. An adapter was needed so that the Eve Express could dock with the Station. This job was handled by a Passenger Pigeon SSTO spaceplane. The adapter, consisting of a Senior port, a probe core, a Standard port, and a couple solar panels, was attached to the top of the spaceplane's fuselage. The Passenger Pigeon has two Turbojets and four 48-7S engines. Normally it would carry 8 passengers (in addition to pilots Bobgan and Ludger Kerman), but it would be carrying up supplies for Jeb's mission in place of kerbals on this flight. The spaceplane cruised along at about 33 kilometers to gain speed, then kicked in the rocket engines at 35,675 meters for the push to orbit. It made it to orbit this time with 439 m/s of delta-V remaining for orbital maneuvers and reentry...not my best showing for this spaceplane. The rendezvous and docking were routine. Gotta love the Lazor Docking Cam mod. After transferring the supplies to the custody of the Space Station crew (hopefully they won't eat all of Jeb's favorite snacks), Bobgan and Ludger separated from the Station, leaving the adapter behind, and returned to KSC. To push the Eve Express to Eve, one of my Double Standard Nuclear Tugs was called into service. There were several of these available in Kerbin orbit (having previously been used at least once to take payloads out to Laythe and back). This particular set of tugs was mostly empty, but still contained enough fuel to rendezvous with the Eve Express and move it to the Space Station. At the Space Station, the Tug backed up to dock with the newly attached Senior docking adapter. Then the propellants in those lovely orange tanks were used to refuel both the Eve Express and its Double Tug. That required a big percentage of the fuel stored in the Station, but that can be replaced next year after the Duna Mission launch frenzy ends. Jeb transferred over to the Space Station to hang out with its crew. One of the Space Station's crew members (Dilger Kerman) would be Jeb's second crewmate for the mission to Eve. Jeb and Dilger were going to need a ship to ride to Eve and back...but happily there was a lot of previously used hardware in orbit. The Grey Havens Express, which had recently returned the Laythe and Vall exploration crews to Kerbin, was sitting there. So the Laythe crew's habitat module, and the Vall crew's habitat/lander were separated from the Grey Havens Express under remote control, then docked together. This combined vehicle then rendezvoused and docked with yet another Double Tug that was available in Kerbin orbit (I've got a lot of Tugs from my Longterm Laythe mission). The hab ship then rendezvoused and docked with one of the oldest ships I have in Kerbin orbit: Tanker Station 1...a real museum piece. But it had two orange tanks full of fuel to be raided...more than the Interplanetary Transfer Habitat ship would need. The fully fueled interplanetary habitat ship then rendezvoused and docked with Space Station Alpha where it would pick up Jeb and Dilger for the journey to Eve. I did another Passenger Pigeon flight up to the Space Station to represent bringing even more supplies for Jeb's mission (and it brought an additional docking adapter for general Station improvement). The crew got to enjoy a total solar eclipse from the Station before the Passenger Pigeon returned to land at KSC. As the Eve transfer window approached, Jeb and Dilger transferred to their ship and separated from the Station. The unkerballed Eve Express was also separated and moved away from the station in preparation for the trans-Eve-Inerstion burns. The transfer trajectory to Eve for the Habitat ship required 1008.7 m/s of delta-V. The plot below is focussed on Eve to tweak the burn components to target an eventual aerocapture at Eve. For the Habitat ship, the 13.5 minute maneuver was done in one burn. For the heavier Eve Express ship ship, the maneuver was done in two parts for greater fuel efficiency. Burn 1 sent the ship out into an elliptical orbit...and burn 2 was made when the ship returned to periapsis to complete the transfer maneuver. A small fine-targeting burn was made once the ship left Kerbin's SOI. Eve was near the orbit node with respect to Kerbin, so a plane shift maneuver was not needed to get intercepts with Eve. At Eve, the arrival of the Habitat ship was surprisingly lacking in flames as it was aerocaptured into an high-apoapsis elliptical orbit. A burn of 172 m/s was needed to shift the ship's orbital plane to equatorial, and then a couple aerobraking passes were made (which showed small flames) before the 125 m/s burn to circularize at 210 km. The arrival of the Eve Express required a similar set of maneuvers (aerocapture; plane shift 225 m/s; multiple areobraking passes set up by small burns raising the periapsis; then a final 75 m/s burn to circularize at 130 km). The main tanks of the nuclear Tugs connected to the Eve Express were under 13% full (and the nacelle tanks were still full). This would be plenty of fuel to return those Tugs to Kerbin later. The main tanks of the Habitat ship's Tugs were over 55% full...but that ship still had more mission to perform. Now for the main event! It was time to land the Eve Express. Because the previous landing site used in the the first Exiting Eve mission had been nerfed to below 3,000 meters of elevation, a new site was needed. There were some high elevations north of Desdin's Base (the Base location is marked 2 on the map below), but most of those were small areas surrounded by slopes. The landing site chosen is marked on the map with an X. The site is very close to the equator and has a good-sized east-west extent with elevations above 3,200 meters. The target coordinates were 0°9'45" S, 160°47'0" E. The map is toggling between the Kerbal Maps 'satellite' and 'slope' views. The unkerballed Eve Express was separated from the Tugs and then performed a retro burn (landing point targeting courtesy of MechJeb). Yes, in case you are wondering, I DID remember to make an action group that toggled all those Rockomax 48-7S engines on and off so that I could easily disable them for the earlier maneuvers and easily activate them before retro burn (unlike the aerospikes during my original Eve ascent mission, which I had to activate manually). After the retro burn, I started the ship spinning so that when the retro tanks were separated, they would fly off to the side of the trajectory. The two X200-8 tanks had provided the fuel for the retro burn, and they also took the Senior docking port away with them. At this point, the ship was ready for Eve atmosphere entry, and it had a mass of 88.1 tons. The entry flames got to be VERY impressive (as entries at Eve tend to do) when this big asparagus brick of fuel tanks hit the atmosphere. Would it be possible for this ship to survive once entry heat damage is implemented? Or will a big heat shield be needed? And how to arrange for such a heat shield? The first two views below are looking toward the South as the EE descended under reefed chutes to show the indicator marking Desdin's Base location by the lake. Ah, the pretty purple vistas. Desdin has a theory that the purple particulates in the sky and purple chemicals staining the surface rocks are a waste product of microorganisms that live in Eve's high clouds. The ship is no doubt equipped to suck in air through a sequence of filters during the descent and ascent to see whether any such microorganisms can be captured. A brief engine burn was needed to drop the 7.4 m/s descent rate to a safer rate of less than 3 m/s, and the Eve Express landed safely. It has six heavy duty landing legs, but also has four stacks of cubic octagonal struts to prevent any of the legs from allowing too much sag to one side. The ship ended up tilted about 6° from vertical. Below is an overview of the landing site, looking toward the southeast. A nice little plateau. After the landing, the two FL-T200 tanks that held the fuel for the landing burn (and have all of the parachutes mounted onto them), were separated and pushed off to the side by sepatrons. The resulting explosions were impressive, but the remainder of the sip was unharmed. After the explosions of the obvious highly explosive parachutes subsided, there were two piles of debris on either side of the *BLAM!* *BLAM!* Ah...the explosions actually continued intermittently for quite a while as different pieces of debris finally realized they were sitting on the surface of Eve and decided this was a good place to explode. Below is an overview looking north showing the route Desdin planned to drive to get to the landing site from his base (2). The straight line distance from the Base to the landing site is 52 kilometers, but his drive will be longer because of the need to go around the intervening mountain. So Desdin left his Base for the final time and trundled over to his rover. Some might be daunted by a rover trip of 80 km or so, but I have a lot of experience with the Fido K rover design, and I was very confident that it could easily make the journey. The drive was quite scenic, in a purple sort of way. The rover handles well at 2X and 3X physical time warp on Eve, so it didn't take me too long. The most difficult part was the drive up onto the plateau, and that only required a couple switchbacks. When Desdin finally topped the ridge and approached the lander, it could see that it certainly was a beautiful site for *BLAM!* Ah...there were STILL debris explosions going on. So he approached it very slowly. Desdin decided it might be prudent to not approach the lander just yet...so he took a 1.8 km side trip to check out the other debris marker on the map display...which turned out to be a girder piece that had survived the impact of the retro tank assembly. When I finally got Desdin over by the lander and got him out of the rover, some Eve Weirdness occurred. When I tried to switch over to the lander, I switched to one of the pieces of parachute debris instead...at which point all the remaining parachute debris fell through the surface of Eve and I followed it down to its eventual impact at sea level. I've seen weirdness like this on Eve before. Eve is NOT a safe place to leave debris lying around. With all the debris safely out of the way (except for the OKTO2 probe core that had controlled the lander during descent...which seemed happy to sit on the surface of Eve in a non-explosive manner), Desdin was able to approach the lander without fear of explosions. The lander cabin is located fairly low so that a single ladder is needed to reach it (an big improvement over the long winding Ladder of Death that the my previous version needed). There is a gap between the tanks that allows the kerbal to easily reach the cabin ladder. In the cabin, Desdin checked out the systems, checked out the snacks, checked out the view from the window, checked out the...flag? Hey, a flag! They hadn't invented space-rated flag technology back in the day of Desdin's mission to Eve...nor had they been developed by the time Adly Kerman had done the first Eve return flight. So this was the first flag on Eve. Desdin got back out an planted it. He did not say any historic words; Desdin had gotten out of the habbit of talking much during his many years alone on Eve. Then Desdin got back into the Eve Express to complete the pre-launch checklist. Below is a top view of the lander (now that the retro tanks are no longer obscuring the view). Desdin: "Hey. Jeb." Jeb: "I read you Desdin. How's it going? We haven't heard much from you. Does the ship check out fine? We'll be heading over soon, so a launch window to intercept is coming up." Desdin: "Yes. Ready." Jeb: "OK, good buddy. We'll be waiting for you. The checklist says to remind you to open the sampling vents and activate the air sample filter system." Desdin: "Done. Launching." At liftoff, with all 65 engines firing, the Eve Express lumbered into the air. Desdin pointed the vehicle straight up and retracted the gear. At about 500 meters above the surface (the surface here is at 3286 meters elevation) the first set of tanks was expended and dropped, taking away the excess weight of two landing legs and the two Advanced Inline Stabilizer reaction wheels (which were included for extra torque to make sure the ship could be pointed quickly to vertical at launch). The next set of tanks was expended and jettisoned at an altitude of 1160 meters above the surface, taking away another set of landing legs. The third set of tanks was jettisoned a little over 2100 meters above the surface. The fourth set dropped at about 3420 AGL, taking away the final set of landing legs. The fifth set of tanks left the party at 5304 meters above the surface (8590 above sea level). The ship had gone through a distressingly large amount of fuel by this point, but you'll notice that the atmospheric pressure indicator is still pegged at the far right: The next set of tanks dropped at over 8.2 km AGL (11.5 km above sea level). The ship was down to just four side booster tanks, and the air pressure indicator finally began to creep off the Kerbin Sea Level mark, and the stages were beginning to last a reassuringly longer time each. The seventh set of tanks was dropped between 18 and 19 km above sea level. In the last pic of the set of three below, the view was rotated to look South in the direction of Desdin's Base area. Pitch-over began at 30 km above sea level. The final set of side boosters was expended and jettisoned between around 67 kilometers, and the Eve Express was down to its last stage, a single Rockomax 48-7S engine on an FL-T200 tank. When the ship's trajectory reached an apoapsis of 110 km, the engine was cut. A circularization burn of about 115 m/s was required at apoapsis...and Desdin was safely in orbit! In fact, the remnant of the Eve Express had over 1000 m/s of delta-V remaining. That being the case, Desdin handled the rendezvous maneuvers to meet up with the Jeb's ship. Jeb: "Yo, Des. That's a nice little ship you have there. It was a lot bigger the last time I saw it. Do you want me to handle the docking, since I have RCS and you don't?" Desdin: "No. Point at me." So with Jeb helping by simply keeping the nose of his ship pointed at the Eve Express, Desdin brought his ship in for docking. After 24 years, Desdin was back with friends. Success! And unlike my previous Eve Ascent Vehicle, which I couldn't fly to orbit without some help from MechJeb to keep the ship vertical during the initial boost, I was able to get the Eve Express into orbit unaided. Part of this was due to the fact that we now have the Z key for instant-full-thrust (the old ship could pick up a lot of deadly sideways motion during the gradual throttle-up of the old days). Also, the 48-7S motors have thrust vectoring that the aerospikes of the old version did not. Plus, with a couple proper torque wheels to help, and it was easy to get the ship going in the correct vertical direction without lots of wasted delta-V. When I checked back at the liftoff site, there were some debris explosions...but when those settled down the only remaining debris from the fallen boosters was a landing leg and a 48-7S engine. Desdin transferred over to the Interplanetary Habitat ship with his decades of samples and data, and the Eve Express was cast off to remain in Eve orbit. As long as Jeb, Dilger, and Desdin were going to have to wait around several hundred days for the next transfer window to return to Kerbin, they went to visit Gilly. This required a burn of 1111 m/s to push their apoapsis out to Gilly's orbit, a 55 m/s burn to match planes with Gilly's orbit, a 347 m/s burn to arrange an intercept by raising their periapsis the correct amount, and a 355 m/s burn to match orbital velocity of Gilly and get into a slow orbit around the tiny moon. They then separated the habitat modules (the bottom part of which was the old Vall lander) and took that part of the ship down to the surface of Gilly. Some of their vacation photos are shown below: That's where I'll leave our intrepid explorers for now, since I have a lot of things to do in my Developing Duna mission before the transfer window arrives for the return trip from Gilly to Kerbin. I'll post a little update here when they get home.

I'm hoping I'll be able to set up exploitation of indigenous resources on Laythe (since that was part of the original mission plan) before I'm done.

Long-term Laythe - Part 44 Curing Comsats Recently I've been concentrating on my Developing Duna mission and a new Exiting Eve mission, so I've been assuming that the guys on Laythe have been keeping themselves busy. But Kerbal Alarm Clock reminded me that the ship for fixing the Laythe Comsats was approaching Jool and needed to be handled first...so I'll do a quickie report of that mission. As you may recall, all of the comsats in the Jool system were broken when the 0.90 MeV Beta Particle Storm hit, destroying the reaction wheel capabilities of the OKTO 2 probe cores. This mission is to refurbish the Laythe probes and deliver some replacement comsats that could potentially be moved to the other Joolian moons as needed. Below, the Standard Nuclear Tug carrying the comsat payload performs a plane shift burn, which happened to be very close to Jool's sphere of influence. Also built into that maneuver (planned shortly after the ship left Kerbin's SOI) were some small prograde and radial components to target the ship on a tangential intercept with Laythe that would result in aerocapture by Laythe. Note MechJeb's Landing Guidence display that shows the expected orbit after aerocapture (this was tweaked using RCS after the ship passed into Jool's SOI to give a Laythe apoapsis of 3,000 km). In the upcoming universe of KSP 1.0, which will include aerodynamic heating effects, the question of how to get captured at the Joolian system becomes very important. In the old days, I used to aerocapture in Jool's atmosphere (rather than in Laythe's). My thinking was that when using an atmosphere to come screeching into orbit, it would be less violent to slow down over a distance of thousands of kilometers in Jool's atmosphere rather than slow down over a much shorter distance of hundreds of kilometers in Laythe's atmosphere. But this turns out not to be the case, for reasons given below. First, you pick up more speed dropping down to Jool than just dropping down to Laythe's orbit. Second, Laythe is moving in its orbit, which increases the distance over which you are slowing down...and you only have to slow down to Laythe's orbital speed. Add to this the fact that you don't need to use additional fuel to intercept Laythe and brake into orbit (as I did after a Jool aerocapture), and aerocapture directly at Laythe becomes even more desirable. But, to ensure minimal aerocapture heating, you need to do a couple other things. One: You want to make sure your ship's intercept trajectory with Laythe is as close to tangential to Laythe's orbit as you can make it; this minimizes the relative velocities (by quite a bit in some cases). You can do this by tweaking the prograde and radial components of your distant targeting burn (while focused on the Jool system to see the results) so that your ship will arrive at Jool when Laythe is in the correct part of its orbit. Two: Adjust your aerocapture altitude as needed to put your ship into a highly eccentric orbit around Laythe; this also minimizes to aerodynamic heating by minimizing the aerocapture delta-V. You can then use multiple aerobrakings to lower the orbit. All of this depends on having a good aerobraking calculator. I use the one built into MechJeb's Landing Guidence feature, but I gather that there are aerobraking calculators online. Below: The Comsat Refurbishment ship drops in toward Laythe. I apparently hadn't handled my plane-matching burn outside of Jool's SOI too well, since the ship is coming in from below the plane of Laythe's orbit. I not sure how I messed this up...but I apparently hadn't done the burn to match Jool's orbital plane right at the node (I don't recall if I used Kerbal Alarm Clock's opinion of where the node was, or using the marker in Map view...I should have double-checked as that burn approached). The ship got as low as 26,160 km during the initial aerocapture, and the entry flames were unimpressive (as desired). Below: A burn of 279 m/s was needed to align the ship's initial post-aerocapture orbit with Laythe's equator. Unfortunately, the nodes were both close to Laythe, so the burn was relatively expensive. This could have been avoided had I done a better job out in deep space matching the orbital plane of Jool. Note: You might notice that the Map View above doesn't show all the orbital and surface assets that I have at Laythe. This is because, for reasons of lag reduction, I do my orbital assembles in Kerbin orbit and interplanetary transfers is a separate copy of my savegame file with fewer ships (the main savegame file has over 200 active ships, landers, bases, etc., which can bog down KSP). After the Comsat Refurbishment ship got into a stable orbit at Laythem I copied and pasted it into the main savegame file. At apoapsis, a small burn of 1.4 m/s was made to lift the periapsis a little for an aerobraking pass that would drop the apoapsis near 1,000 km where the stricken comsats are located. After the aerobraking pass, a burn of 293.2 m/s was needed at the new apoapsis to almost circularize the orbit. "Almost," because a slightly elliptical orbit was used to create an intercept with Laythe Comsat 1 upon the ship reaching its next apoapsis. Below, the ship rendezvous with Comsat 1 in a 1,000 km circular orbit above Laythe. For extra fun and excitement, the first thing I did to Comsat 1 was give it a bump to get it slowly tumbling. Then I backed off and changed position and then tried to dock. First I gave a few little bumps to try to minimize the tumbling...then docked. The magnetic docking force is strong with this one, being rather small in mass. After docking, I saw that the RCS fuel was down to 79%...which seemed to indicate that I had used a lot more monopropellant than expected...though this does include monopropellant used during the interplanetary transfer targeting. But still...this seemed like a lot to have used. Maybe I forgot to top off the RCS tanks during the refurbishment of the Tug. Anyway... The central spire on the nose of the ship is a stack of: Jr. Docking Port - Small Reaction Wheel - Jr. Docking Port - Jr. Docking Port - Small Reaction Wheel - Jr. Docking Port...etc. The reaction wheels in that stack had been deactivated previously to keep the stack from wobbling around during maneuvers...so before the comsat was released, its new reation wheel had to be activated, and then the comsat was separated with its shiny new reaction wheel in place (and a docking port still on the end for future refurbishment, if needed). Then it was off to Comsat 2 by kicking the Comsat Refurb ship in a slightly higher orbit (just its apoapsis) to wait for the next comsat to move into position for a rendezvous. The remaining three comsats were still aligned Normal, and I didn't bother to bump them off kilter to force docking with a tumbling object (I'd already had enough of THAT fun). Below, the docking with Laythe Comsat 2, and the subsequent separation of the comsat with its spiffy new reaction wheel attached. Lather, rinse, repeat. Below, the releasing of Comsats 3 and 4, and a final picture of a comsat on station, 1000 km over Laythe's equator. You can see the central stack of docking ports/reaction wheel units shrinking after each refurbishment. After refurbishing the four equatorial comsats, the RCS was down to 55%. The liquid fuel and oxidizer levels in the main X200-32 tank was just below 13%...but the two FL-T400 tanks on the nuclear engine nacelles are full, which is enough fuel to return the Tug to Kerbin for re-use. The eight replacement comsats around the centra Comsat Bus core can be used later to replace the disabled comsats around Vall, Tylo, Bop, and/or Pol (as needed by future missions). The comsats orbiting those other moons were NOT equipped with docking ports, so they could not be refurbished like the Laythe comsats. Two of the replacement comsats were deployed for placement into polar orbits around Laythe (since Laythe is where most of the exploration traffic is located). The two comsats were separated and their high gain and omni antennas and solar panels were deployed. Shifting the orbital planes of these two comsats 90 degrees took most of the fuel they contained, but both ended up in polar orbits with their planes oriented about 90 degrees apart. The final Laythe Comsta constellation is shown below. Finally, the Tug was separated from the Comsat Bus. The Comsat Bus has a full X200-800 tank and four Rockomax 24-77 engines, which makes it capable of reaching any other Joolian moon (or multiple moons with careful planning). The Comsat Bus (which also functions as a comsat) will remain in Laythe orbit for now. So... Back to my Eve and Duna missions (write-ups coming Real Soon Now).

I've encountered this bug many times, usually when landing a spaceplane at KSC from the East. Wing parts will suddenly explode, and the damage report will claim I collided with the VAB or some other structure that doesn't happen to be hanging in the air east of the runway. This happens after the game has been running for some time. If I restart and try the landing again from a quicksave , I don't encounter the problem. How long the game has to be running before this bug rears its ugly head seems to be getting shorter over time (I run into this problem sooner in the newer versions). But mysteriously running into distant objects is not new to me. I first joined the KSP Forums to get help (back before the April 2013 Great Reset) when one of my spacecraft crashed into the Statue (at the desert pyrimid complex) while the spacecraft was orbiting Kerbin. The game had been running for over a day at that point, doing orbital mapping. No explanation for how this occurred was forthcoming.

Valley: Thanks for the rover autopilot explanations. Also... I am an American. It's possible to use proper English even if you live in the U.S.A.

Thoughts for today: Kerbals are much too active to be plants. The energy available to oxygen-breathing animals is much greater. If you are a plant, you'd make your whole spacesuit transparent...not just the faceplate in front of your eyes. Animals can hibernate.

The engines are on the Shuttle (so they can be recovered and re-used). The center of mass is below the shuttle's belly. If you aim the thrust vectors of the three engines along the long axis of the rocket, you CAN'T use the engines to cancel out the torques (they will all produce pitch-down torques).

I know that sandbox mode can be rewarding. The question in my mind is: "Do you think career mode could ever be rewarding?"

Nah...I don't need the extra lag.

Well, we are supposed to get sound enhancements in 1.0, right? Landing gear tire screech would be nice.

Sure. Put a mountain in the center of a prominent crater. Cover it with bright ice from cryovolcanic water freezing onto the surface, with mist as the ice evaporates. Dres ski resort!