troyn123

Just FYI for you all: You can't successfully aerobrake on Kerbol. I tried. It was much more of a lithobrake to zero.

Coming in for a Mun landing, pretty routine for me at this point (I've played WAY too much)... But carelessness breeds mistakes! My approach to a big crater was a little too low and I clipped the rim of the crater, managing to destroy the bottom half of my ship. Pretty much only the capsule survived, no RCS. However... That impact + explosion boosted the capsule up. A quick look at the map, and I was on a very eccentric and sub-orbital trajectory. :-| I EVA'ed, grabbed the science from the pod and all the remaining sensors and watched the pod crash into the surface HARD as I used the EVA pack to boost Jeb's periaps high enough to avoid the ground. Just had him hang out in a low orbit around the Mun until I could mount a rescue operation. :-P

I've tried a couple times... Using the rotating parts in the Infernal Robotics package, I tried making a paddle-wheel... It topped out at around 2 m/s. :-| http://i.imgur.com/PY6a4xL.png My catamaran worked pretty well, once I added a tiltable hinge to change the pitch of the engine (to keep it from nose-diving). Still only tops out around 23 m/s, on land or in the water though: http://i.imgur.com/ztA8L5Y.png http://i.imgur.com/YqX2SF5.png My first attempt at a kethane mining submarine was a huge failure, it sank like a rock: http://i.imgur.com/5gYMEDh.png But the second attempt actually works! http://i.imgur.com/eUNhQrr.png I've seen a handful of designs that use backwards facing air intakes on the bottom, they have a high crash tolerance (80 m/s I think) and seem to be buoyant. That keeps it from blowing up as it slightly bounces in and out of the water...

Some of you guys are seriously ridiculous... I love it.

My biggest "ship" could technically be my Jebrock space station, when I dock an engine to it: If that doesn't count as a ship, then it would likely be my orbit-assembled base builder. Inside the fairing is a bunch of components for building a self-sustaining Kethane mining base. First is in transit, second one is after landing and deployment: Smallest ship, aside from just simple probes of course, would likely be my Ion Fighter: Or my small orbital bus SSTO. Works on Kerbin and Laythe:

During my first several attempts to land on and return from Laythe, I was so excited that I forgot a few things... Attempt 1) Beautiful transfer to Laythe, got lucky with the other moons providing some gravity assist... Ran out of battery, and ended up kind of getting pinball-machined around the moons until it was eventually flung out into space. I ALWAYS stick an RTG or solar panel somewhere, and forgot this time. Attempt 2) Add power, repeat mission... Nice gentle aerobrake at Laythe, coming down to land gently on a fairly flat beach, lower the landing gear... Landing gear? What landing gear? :-| Managed to either break the engine off every F5-F9 attempt, or just fall over and be unable to take off again. Attempt 3) Add landing gear, repeat mission... Beautiful landing!! EVA to plant a flag, and watch Jeb fall about 5 meters onto his head. Forgot a ladder... There's Jeb, standing right under his ship on Laythe, thoroughly stuck, literally just meters from his hatch! Attempt 4) Successfully got there, landed, planted flag, liftoff, rendezvous with the ride home... Parachutes snapped off on the descent. (This was prior to the joints being a little stronger) I have since then managed to build a very successful, reusable space program on Laythe (using Kethane tugged in from Bop)... But it was a long road getting there!

I found that by right-clicking on the parachutes, lowering the "minimum pressure" and "deployment altitude" as low as they can go (.01 and 50 meters), you get a lot more drogue-style slowing and simple atmospheric drag before they crack open. On top of that, by adding another set, and setting the deployment altitude the next step up from lowest (300m), you can greatly reduce the opening shock of all the 'chutes opening at once at higher altitudes and speeds. It's the only way I've managed to land of my more wonky structures, prior to the joint strength update in 23.5!

Thanks for all the responses... You are all quite wonderfully ridiculous. :-D

Wow... You guys are awesome. :-D

Patience, mostly. :-P I used the new grabber thing to basically put a really well-aligned large docking port on the asteroid, and then just kept swapping out fresh, large fuel tanks with LVN engines until it was where I wanted it. Initial capture around Kerbin was done with a pretty lucky atmosphere brake that left the apoapsis roughly at the level of the Mün, a lot more burnin' to get it to the right inclination... That was actually the slowest, hardest part. Then, relatively small amounts of delta-v to get it captured around the Mün. From there I inched the orbit down just a couple hundred meters at a time from around 8k, fast forward through an orbit to see if it hit anything, repeat. Even with fairly low torque, I was still able to get the asteroid turned around during a single Mün orbit for another burn in order keep the periapis and the apoapsis pretty even. I had to reload once or twice when I "found" that tall peak where I later ended up parked the viewing lights. ;-)

The Kerbal Attachment System add-on (KAS: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/0-18-2-kas-kerbal-attachment-system-v0-1/) includes fuel pipe ends that you can attach while on EVA to connect components that are reasonably close together. Not necessary to transfer fuel around the asteroid, but made it slightly more realistic for me. :-) (and it was fun!)

I think I just got a couple of gray hairs, just thinking about the immense burn-times.

Title says it all... What are you currently doing with asteroids? First I built a space station: Then I was screwing around and put a 1200 tonner into the lowest stable equatorial Mün orbit I dared, my Münraker, complete with ground spotlights to shine on it as it goes by!

Truly epic.. I love the little, very well thought-out (and likely tested to death) details of the crafts. The interlocking kethane mining modules, still balanced enough that the main craft flew straight. The 3-man rover, with the funny external seat. Even down to the 2-stage parachutes on the return capsule, dropping off the 3-man pod first, then rotating to open the 'chutes for the 3 1-man pods... LOVE IT!

Do you happen to have any plans for a continuous build, or even just pushing to github more often? Looks like the last commit was 9 months ago (https://github.com/sirkut/InfernalRobotics), but you're obviously doing stuff now. :-) Side note... Before the ARM patch, the KAS and Infernal Robotics mods are what kept me playing KSP!

I got around this by attaching several "torque modules" to my asteroid roughly 90 degrees apart on a couple axis. The longer the lever, the better it worked (provided you ramped up the torque slowly, OR used something like the KAS mod to attach struts from the tower to the asteroid):

Ahh, just saw this... Thank you!

I dragged a ~3100 ton class E into a 275x275 orbit (or was it 250?)... Yeah, I think it was something like 10 Kerbal years to get it there (real heavy plane change as well). I set up a large docking clamp with a grabber, as perfectly aligned with the CoM as I could get it, then via the KAS add-on, attached a bunch of struts between my docking port and the asteroid itself. That helped significantly with steering the thing! After that, I was just sending up one orange tank after another after another with a couple LVN's on there, burn burn burn. Took forever! One thing to note is that with the stronger joints in this .23.5 patch, you can get away with a little bit more time acceleration while burning. Not much, but enough to really help... And then I finally got my asteroid where I wanted it, started building it into a space station... And stuff kept just blowing up any time the asteroid came into a render range. BOOM. Jump to it from the Tracking Station? BOOM! Reload from a quicksave? BOOM! So painfully disappointing. Starting over with a much smaller asteroid now. http://i.imgur.com/mI6A8qZ.png

I've been trying to move the really large ones, so I've been using manned missions so they can EVA to attach extra struts (KAS add on: http://i.imgur.com/mI6A8qZ.png) to keep higher thrust engines from breaking the ship/clamp. I spent something like 5 game years getting a 3,000 ton class E into a near perfect 250x250 orbit to use as my new space station... Only to have the physics get wonky after I got partway through building and it somehow tore everything apart and ejected the pieces all over the system. :-| Couple pictures: http://i.imgur.com/XXkZmKD.png http://i.imgur.com/iDNtsmA.png

Woo! The submarine approach seems to be working. Hopefully it will still have enough ballast to go back to the surface after it's full of Kethane... We'll see! For anyone curious: http://imgur.com/a/9SsW1

Hmm, I'll have to give that one a try. Hopefully that'll do the trick... I actually already tried that one on accident, while dialing in the parachute sequence. It didn't work either. ;-)

Hey all! I've set up a reasonably reusable space program in the Jool system, with a Kethane mining operation on Bop, a nuclear powered tug to haul it to a space station in Laythe orbit, and small reusable VTOL-SSTO vehicles to ferry crew back and forth between the ground base and the orbital base, blah blah blah... But I wanted to take it a step further, and set up a fueling station on the ground on Laythe, but most of the deposits I see are under the water! No problem, build a floating mining rig, right? FAIL. It doesn't actually extract kethane unless the drills contact the ground. So I added a bunch of telescoping sections (via the MagicSmokeIndustries robotics package) and put the drills on the end of those. It looked promising at first, a bunch of sequential parachutes brought it down safely, but it seemed to be riding a bit high in the water... As I extended the drills down, instead of pushing them down into the water, it pushed the rig up into the air! http://imgur.com/a/jAz5F By far, the majority of the mass was above the drills, so this isn't exactly what I would have expected... Is there a hard limit to how deep something can go in KSP? Do I just need to make it heavier?

First, it was landing a stock parts craft on the Mun. For a while, I just could NOT keep the nose pointed in the right direction. Finally got the hang of it, and was really proud of my first successful landing! Then I managed to take my Mun lander, take off, return to the Kerbin, and land at the KSC. Took a freakin' boatload of trial and error to figure out how much aerobraking you get... So once I had a ship that had gone to the Mun, and showed up in the Tracking Center as "Landed as KSC", that was my proudest moment. That got blown away once I successfully docked the last component of my refueling/space station. That felt easy compared to linking up the final module on my manned base on Eve! The heavy gravity made landing without breaking anything a real pain. Designing a new Mun lander to meet up with my Mun base, and then managing to stick the landing on top of a medium-size docking clamp felt AWESOME! And then just yesterday, after more spectacular failures than I can recall, when my first successful SSTO finally docked at my 150km LKO station, that is now my proudest moment... Each new achievement sets the bar a little higher for myself! :-D

Yeah, playing this game very quickly reminded me of a quote from a Larry Niven sci-fi, Integral Trees: "Forward takes you out, out takes you back, back takes you in, and in takes you forward."

When you fire up the stage with the nuclear rockets, does it blow up? I've had problems with the 2 panels that house the enclosed LVN crashing into the other rockets whenever I try to do more than 2x side by side...