magnemoe

Yet another rescue mission however on an kind of different scale. Finally doing aerobrake around Laythe after creating an kethane miner and docked it to the mothership(the four orange tanks to the left). Used the kethane miner as tug to get the mothership Jool express into Laythe orbit. Some complications, Jool express weight close to 2000 ton, its an orion nuclear pulse rocket with an cargo of 800 ton spare parts for orbital construction, 18 kerbals to put up an base on both Laythe and Pol. Some problems first two of the chemical engines fall off because of metal fatigue. Yes it uses mainsails for precision movement, then the orion engine failed after getting into orbit around Jool. So after going to Jool in 30 days, I used 4 to get an minimum power intercept with Laythe. The ting was horible to rotate and had ion engine like twr. Currently setting up infrastructure to mine on Pol to produce more infrastructure.

Sound plausible, ammonia would probably help life to. The volcanic activity probably produce lot of the heat on Laythe. So no life you could see, however an sample mission become an high priority.

I miss the between images so I just do some before and after ones. Underway http://imgur.com/WgXbEsI Minmus http://imgur.com/sENkhmo Mun http://imgur.com/aehCCl2 Low Gilly orbit http://imgur.com/aDWFr5e

Yes, so you can start the career with an bussard ramjet with an skylon first stage in the wab unless the mod has some metadata about career. Its also legal to use your head then it comes to mod. Some like the skylon, the bussard and the orion is designed to be totally overpowered.

True, however its fun On the other hand you should be able to salvage you mission even without the nervas unless your ship get way to side heavy, try to shift fuel, worst case drop one of the landers. Might even be posible to run the odd nerva together with the orion to balance. Even without the extra engines you just lose precision control.

Welcome to the world of programming

Guess you are right, I use balloons to get my Eve landers out of the atmosphere, however an mountain landing work well enough for this plant the flag mission.

It might be worse, I use some KW rocketry super strong trusses, six from orion to tank and two from tank to orion and it still broke. So unless the struts are weaker than they say they are we have other problems.

Will do some testing in orbit to see if its orbital construction. However first I will construct an huge kethane miner it should be usable as an tug and get the orion into Laythe orbit.

Easier now with the command seat you can get below 50 ton.

I did an run with kethane refueling. it include an Eve lander using balloons in front, an small lander mounted on the side, the main mothership and an huge kethane miner at the bottom. The miner was also the main lander, able to SSTO on Laythe and Tylo. One idea to do this stock might be to haul an huge fuel depot to low Eve orbit together with the Eve lander. Use this to refuel after going to Moho. You could even leave some of the stuff needed for Jool like the Laythe and Tylo lander in Eve orbit and only bring the medium lander. For landers I would probably use one lander for Laythe using jet first stage and a multi stage lander for Tylo. One other lander for other places or perhaps an very small one for low gravity moons.

Designed that lander to be able to land anywhere. Very wide with an low center of mass. But yes I did not realize how hilly it was or I would landed at the bottom.

One strange issue, My current ship orion engine has gone dead after loading the game. Restarting the game does not help, chemial engines work but the two remaining is on the same side. Only thing odd I did was spawning an service module with orbital construction close to the ship, this module spawned to far away to reach it with rcs, probably the long and non circular orbit created problems, next atempt did not leave launchpad because of some bug but this should not affect the other ship.

You have the exact same problem as I had, first I lost one engine during boost then an second during braking. The upper parts however holds up well, makes me wonder if its some issue with mounting stuff on the orion engine. Some chance of the nuclear blast hit things on it. One option might be to mount the engines higher up. one the magazines or higher. Downside of this is that mechjeb tend to get confused by this. The Minmus landing failed because of this. On switching to chemical for final decent it tried to rotate the ship, I switched to manual but was unable to kill all vertical speed.

That made sense, some fool designed an adapter to be able to make an mess of an foolproof design. Almost scary.

Stellar sized black holes stay around for an very long time so if the supernova created an black hole it would still be around. However sun circle the galaxy once every 200 million year so it could be pretty much everywhere today 25 orbits or more later.

As you use an docking port you can drive under the lander, retract the legs and dock to the rover again. Yes its dangerous as the lander can tip if it don't dock. I tend to use two sets of landing legs here, the upper set is to hold the lander if docking fails.

Remember landing where, lander worked fine but the kerbals was unable to walk up to it again.

I tired this but the kerbal fell off the seat then the parachute opened full at 500 meter. How do you avoid this? separator at bottom of seat and parachute on the back.

Strangest configuration I have seen. How will this work then you use up the fuel in the lower plane? My only guess is that you use cross-feed and both gimbal and lower trust on first stage until its empty and you separates.

Added a lot for three reasons, primary is actually that if you load up with magazines over the framework of the rack you get an very solid base to put stuff on. The two orange tanks contains 400 ton of spare parts, try to place it any other places. Bonus is that the ship get legs even then with all the cargo and extra stuff, still have enough bombs for another trip or another target. The key binding for the orion works nice, I assigned 1 for chemical, 2 for 1kt and 3 for 1.9kt. it disables the other engines. Works surprisingly well with mechjeb. Next version will have two changes, use small fuel tank for chemical engine and piping from tanks on top of the magazines. chemical engine set as an rotation helper.

Added benefit if you want distance because of radiation from the engines. This is main concern as most deep space engine ideas have low trust but might generate a lot of radiation.

If your rocket is to high you can cheat a bit, cut rocket in two, take the root node pod or probe and place top on top of it and bottom below, you can now push to top part past the roof. You can also push the bottom down in the floor.

You should be able to move minmus with an scaled up orion. Use megaton sized bombs and an trust plate of some hundred meter. You still probably had to trust for weeks. Mun would be another ballpark.