Patupi

OK, I'm trying to save fuel as I come to the last moon, Bop, and was wondering. I've got science probes with their own RCS, and I think they might be able to land on their own (haven't checked that yet). Could I do that, then 'land' the crew individually on their EVA packs? It'd save on the fuel for the ship... but that would mean there is no 'designated driver' for that landing, even if the Kerbal who was designated went down. Would that be allowable in the rules? Note, I'm doing the Jedibiah, basic Jool-5 challenge. No parts mods (other than MechJeb's parts), and using MJ, Editor Extensions, AGM, Tac Fuel Balancer, Ship Manifest and Alarm Clock. I might be able to do a normal touchdown on Bop with my lander, but it'll eat heavily into the MS dV budget. After that I'd likely have to do a weird, multi-mun slingshot to get a return to Kerbin... or have to resort to yet another refuel mission which I'd really rather not do.

Yeah, my lander had that problem. The legs collapsed on Tylo, left it 'landed' on the engine bells, buried the legs in the ground, and one broke. But at least they can be repaired. On Laythe too the legs didn't hold it up off the ground much and the engine bells were on the ground again. Still, so far they're all still OK.

Well, I'm glad you're enjoying it. That's the important thing. I have to admit I was sorely taxed at Laythe. Weird that that was worse than Tylo, but then I designed the lander for Tylo first, and the others second. Now I just hope my fuel lasts out.

That's a nice looking ship SSSPutnik. I always did like the look of LLL's stuff, and it offers so many opportunities for creative construction! The problem I always had was memory when using LLL and other big mods at the same time. Now that texture compression is so good it's no longer an issue... and I don't think my comp can handle it any more. Well, I don't think texture is an issue with mine right now, it's just speed in total. I used to be able to fly 1000part ships with at least a passable frame rate. Now with 400 I get about five frames a sec How are you doing with that ship of yours? It looks intense.

OK, I had a bit of trouble... OK, a lot of trouble! My record of very little quickloading? Completely out the window! I've done Laythe a lot, but generally with specialized Laythe landers with built in parachutes and jet engines. Thus I never remembered what the dV for launching from Laythe's surface was. I looked it up, but just idly. I really didn't think much of this as I've done Laythe tons of times before. Big mistake! I allowed 3500 dV in the ship. Basically because I nearly ran out before I wanted to save as much fuel as possible. I thought it was 3000 dV to launch from Laythe's surface, and the landing wasn't as efficient as I'd hoped. I ended up with a little over 3200 dV on landing. Yeah, well, 200 dV spare? Yeah, that'll be fine. So I did my science, got things ready, then launched... and didn't get close. What was worse was I had quicksaved on the ground, just to be safe... and now I was stuck with too little fuel in my ship! When I rechecked fuel to reach Laythe orbit it was... yup, 3200. I had to make a PERFECT launch to reach orbit. Well, I didn't make it. I redid it and redid it, and eventually got a ballistic arc that was close enough for the MS to do yet another rescue, but with the added thrill of very little time to rendezvous outside the atmosphere. I got down to 40km, 15km inside the atmosphere, before I stabilized the orbit. Not fun! Well, just Vall and Bop left to go now. Hopefully no more nasty surprises, and I'm not going to be stingy on the fuel on them! I'm pretty sure I've got way enough fuel to do those landings and get back to Kerbin.

OK, I had a bit of trouble... OK, a lot of trouble! My record of very little quickloading? Completely out the window! I've done Laythe a lot, but generally with specialized Laythe landers with built in parachutes and jet engines. Thus I never remembered what the dV for launching from Laythe's surface was. I looked it up, but just idly. I really didn't think much of this as I've done Laythe tons of times before. Big mistake! I allowed 3500 dV in the ship. Basically because I nearly ran out before I wanted to save as much fuel as possible. I thought it was 3000 dV to launch from Laythe's surface, and the landing wasn't as efficient as I'd hoped. I ended up with a little over 3200 dV on landing. Yeah, well, 200 dV spare? Yeah, that'll be fine. So I did my science, got things ready, then launched... and didn't get close. What was worse was I had quicksaved on the ground, just to be safe... and now I was stuck with too little fuel in my ship! When I rechecked fuel to reach Laythe orbit it was... yup, 3200. I had to make a PERFECT launch to reach orbit. Well, I didn't make it. I redid it and redid it, and eventually got a ballistic arc that was close enough for the MS to do yet another rescue, but with the added thrill of very little time to rendezvous outside the atmosphere. I got down to 40km, 15km inside the atmosphere, before I stabilized the orbit. Not fun! Well, just Vall and Bop left to go now. Hopefully no more nasty surprises, and I'm not going to be stingy on the fuel on them! I'm pretty sure I've got way enough fuel to do those landings and get back to Kerbin.

Next installment. The Interplanetary Refueler got sent out to rendezvous with the mothership at Laythe orbit. Note it was leaving Kerbin orbit where the engines exploded due to over heating and I had to reload. Very odd. Most of the time I can run them at full thrust with no trouble, but a bit of wobble and they over heat. To play it safe I'm sticking with them at 99% from now on. On the mothership too. Four way adapters and nukes don't mix

Next installment. The Interplanetary Refueler got sent out to rendezvous with the mothership at Laythe orbit. Note it was leaving Kerbin orbit where the engines exploded due to over heating and I had to reload. Very odd. Most of the time I can run them at full thrust with no trouble, but a bit of wobble and they over heat. To play it safe I'm sticking with them at 99% from now on. On the mothership too.

I haven't had to save/reload much in this one so far. A couple of times from silly booster designs at Kerbin getting things off the ground and once at Tylo for a silly mistake. Wat no ScIenCe? Plus the whole 'Go back to the drawing board' thing I did at the start (EDIT: Spoke too soon. Apparently the way I've stacked nuke engines on 4x adapters they are too close together. Most of the time it's fine, though in the high red on temp. If they wobble just a bit however they get too close together, temp goes up.... BOOM. Lost engines. Reload time! *sigh* Need better engine allocation next time.)

If you can get 5000 dV you can probably land and take off without staging, and that ship looks about the same size as mine that did just that, though I goofed on the final orbital circularization it did get back up OK. However it does take some careful piloting on landing for that. I risked it because I've done a LOT of landing at weird angles and attitudes during my time on KSP, even if it wasn't on Tylo itself. Bare minimum seems around 2200 dV down, and something similar coming back up, though as those charts linked on the first page suggest, it depends on TWR local to that body and ISP. Still, a good minimum to start with. I was thinking of just a minimal probe body, one chair, a ladder, a solar panel or three, and the rest fuel and engines (maybe some landing gear would help ) but eventually decided to go for the whole 'Tylo SSTO' thing. I probably could do better still than I did. My first efforts I tried it with Poodle engines and got a smaller craft, but the best TWR I could get was 1.25 on landing and couldn't get the dV good enough overall with that set up. Hence I switched to Skippers. Play around with different engines, even ones you wouldn't think would work better. Sometimes the weird solutions come up with something truly interesting

Well, given the gravity (groan!) of the situation I wanted to meet up with the mothership quickly so timed the launch carefully, thus it was on hand nearby when I muffed the orbital insertion. Still, wasted a bit of fuel on racing towards, then matching velocity. I'm just glad I didn't crash on my first attempt on Tylo! I've been to Jool so many times before but never landed. I've skimmed by in orbit before but that's it. Oh, and in this mission I did one landing just before the one in the mission log... and realized when I was down on the surface I'd forgotten to bring a probe for science! *DOH!* Thus reload and try again. So I guess that was my second landing, not first really, but both worked out OK.

For those that don't want to click onto yet another page to see my full (so far) report here's the IMGUR album for the Tylo landing for my mission. The other sections are on the page I linked in my previous post.

OK, I decided to try for the Jool-5 Challenge, despite computer limitations, and so far am about half way through the mission. Here is the mission report I wanted to do a complete mission, no refueling, no staging, even on the landers! Well, so far with my heavy SSTO lander slowing the mothership down I've got part way through and am getting low on fuel so I DO need a refueling mission Ah well, This is my first attempt to land on Tylo and I did it with no staging, landing or take off! That's worth something! This mission is 'parts mod free', ie all I use are things like Alarm clock, Mechjeb and Editor extensions etc. No parts mods packs at all, and the only graphical mod I used was Hot Rockets. I want to do the texture replacer etc to get better pictures... but my machine isn't playing nice. It won't recognize my graphics card (or any graphics card it seems) and anything too intensive slow the computer to a crawl. I also decided to only use the new 23.5 advanced rockets to launch things from Kerbin (so I could minimize parts count) because they are a little overpowered otherwise. I did think of using the new, heavy singe engine bell 3.75m engine for the universal lander, but it just seemed too powerful. Skippers were good enough anyway. Mothership + Booster + Lander: This mission is to go to the Jebediah level, using science probes to collect science from all the moons and landing four Kerbals on each moon as well. Right now I've only landed on Tylo and Pol.

Jool-5 Cluster Helix Mission OK, despite various computer problems I decided to have a go at the Jool-5 Challenge. My first Attempt was with a traditional mothership + tons of landers. Basically smaller landers are more efficient on fuel for landing on small bodies. However my computer is rather low end for KSP now so as I was part way through doing it like that (Tylo lander + Mothership + Two orbital tugs + Laythe jet SSTO + 1 of 3 boosters) and it was already getting to be too big... I gave up and redesigned things. This is my first effort, the Snowflake Mothership, before I went back to the drawing board. So, I tried again and decided to do something special. A complete no staged effort! Great, land with ONE lander to cut down on parts that could do any moon of Jool with no staging. Even Tylo! Yeah, that's the ticket! Well, I got the ship designed, but the mothership had to be split into two launches as on the ground the part count with the launcher was just extreme! Still, two mothership parts and one lander still worked out pretty good at a hair under 500 parts which my machine just was able to handle without too much slow down (probably five frames a second at a guess) Half way through launching it I was a little worried about the dV of the mothership, so I boosted the fuel on the second part of the mothership, the booster section. Later on I found it was no where near enough. My lander was just so huge to carry four Kerbals and a science package down to Tylo and back that I ran out of fuel too early on! So, no 'Do mission without refueling' here unfortunately. Once up then it was the trek of sending the ship to Jool, and then into orbit of the first target: Tylo. I figured I'd get the worst fuel hog out of the way quickly, then Laythe, then Vall, and finally Bop and Pol. Once I got to Tylo orbit however and found fuel at low levels I re-arranged my schedule, deciding to go for Pol after Tylo, just to have a moon I could land on with minimal fuel before the refueling vessel arrived. Anyway, first a series of pics of the arrival at Tylo. Now a landing attempt. I'm using a generic Planesciprobe (Planetary Science Probe) that docks with the lander for each moon, then will be de-orbited back and Kerbin separately. So, dock the probe, burn for de-orbit and... well, it worked... though I had a teeny bit of trouble on getting back to orbit. I got it right, except for right at the end of the orbit when I didn't pull down closer to the horizon soon enough and my orbit got too high and too ballistic. The mothership had to pull off an intercept rescue! Did it though, and not too bad at that. Now, on to Pol! Yeah, once I'd decided to launch a refueling mission this seemed the best. I might even have managed to do Bop too before refueling, but decided against it. I'm going to head to Laythe after this so the refueler can aeobrake directly at Laythe to rendezvous with the mothership. The Pol landing went pretty much textbook. I allowed 500 dV on the lander, though technically I should have only needed about 300. I just wanted to make sure. For some reason the RCS ports on the ship failed on the way to orbit and wouldn't do anything, though those on the planesciprobe did. Weird. I kept on to orbit, and once safe went to the Space Center and back, and the ports worked again. Don't know what happened there. That's as far as I've got in the mission at the moment. I'll update as I get further. Next up the refueling mission, then on to a Laythe landing.

It'd be even more interesting to see the variations in expectations as they do the research on Laythe. From telescopes. From initial probes. From more advanced, atmospheric sampling probes. Then final Kerballed survey. Ups and downs of whether the scientists think people CAN live there at all. "There's Oxium there!" "Yay!" "The percentages are off, odd minor constituents... might not be feasible to process it to breathe even!" "Booo!" "Well, good news is there are places the contaminents are low enough to deal with...." "Yay!" "But it's bloody cold!" "Booo.... er, Snowmen? Yay?" "Hmm... *sniff sniff* Yeah, we can breath *cough* this... *Cough*" "JEB PUT THAT HELMET BACK ON!"

Yeah, I've heard conflicting things on what was planned for Laythe by Squad, and with the science data a little conflicting with the temp figures... well I just assume it's not quite habitable without some kind of filtration or something.

Maybe I got too used to my old comp. Before my HD fried I was routinely launching very high part number vessels with very low lag and using high textures for planets and skybox etc. Now I'm pretty much relagated to basic with some mods. I've actually got it to work with Interstellar, but it is slow. Technically high graphics cards aren't needed, but SOME graphics card is for any reasonable results! *sigh*

Mine's on hold too, unfortunately due to my computer not being adequate right now. For some reason I can't get the graphics card to work and am having issues with graphical glitches in the linux version *sigh* Honestly, I haven't been playing much of anything recently, which is pretty rare for me. Hope you get your AAR up and running again Designer 225. Good luck!

True, it's just assisting with grammar and some minor edits, and I've been assisting as well. No inside track definitely! Frankly I wouldn't want to spoil it! I'm glad he posted for others to assist. This is a big project and will take quite a few to handle this! (Um, just realized that sounds bad. I meant there is so much of the story, not that there is so much wrong! o~O )

Unfortunately I'm stuck on Linux on my current machine and for some reason this kind of plug in won't work for me. Had similar issues with What Pumpkin music samples. Any other places it is played? You Tube etc?

And this isn't the grasshopper test-bed system any more is it? This is actually a first stage with fixed legs, albeit set up more like a booster on the Falcon Heavy. This is definitely hot stuff!

Certainly picking up steam, but given they're thinking space program expansion... what specifically are people... er, kerbals, thinking of? Is the current theory that there are habitable planets in the Kerbol system? Similar to the thoughts here early on that Mars might be harsh, but habitable? Have they managed to get any spectral images of Laythe yet? Knowing there is oxygen (oxium?) in the atmosphere might spur them into attempting to go there, even if they do eventually find you can't just land and take your helmets off Brrrr!

I'd put myself down as a voice actor if anyone needs a British accent for anything, just not Rozer! There are too many movies where the Brit is the bad guy! *Humphs* (If he is a bad guy exactly?)

Dang, Jeb can't hit the broad side of a dictator! Well, nearly. I can't believe one of the Happy guides would dare to turn against his glorious imperrsi... Imperioussnes ness ... His.... greatness. *grins* Love this Xac, keep it up! (and my browser didn't update since yesterday... and I didn't realize this was really the end *sniffs, then bawls uncontrollably* <WARNING><FLOODWARNING> *Flood of tears drowns Xactar central and puts out rocket fire*)

Looks at Graffiti on the side of Proteus. KenBob5588 Wuz Here *shrugs* Huh, no matter how far you come they always show up.