FastMINI42

Today I launched my latest iteration of my contract probe. Up until now, I've been using the service bays exclusively and putting in all the science instruments, batteries, etc. for a nice smooth, sleek. look. This time I thought I'd go for as lumpy as possible. It's got a mix of .625 and 1.25m parts and little bits and pieces stuck all over. Not very sleek, but I kind of like it. Once up into orbit it has about 2800m/s of delta-v, plenty for any probe contracts around Kerbin, the Mun, and Minmus. It is also fully returnable to Kerbin, with parachutes, heat shield, and landing legs. I'm figuring if I throw enough probes at Kerbin, I'll eventually get the science in all the biomes. At the launch pad: Gravity Turn: In orbit and ready to go to the MUN to fulfill an orbit contract:

I flew some probes around, finished some contracts. Also got some Kerbals on the other side of Kerbin's SOI for the first time. It is the maiden voyage of the Space Bus II ... larger than the original, with a MPL and room for 9 Kerbals. Larger also meant adding more parachutes for the re-entry, and landing legs because ... why not? On the other side of the SOI: So far from home ...

After completing "put a probe in a polar orbit around Kerbin" contract, I brought it back to Kerbin and landed on the polar ice cap for the first time: Re-entry was a little steep: Sitting on the ice cap for 18 science:

I picked up KSP again after hearing about the new 1.0 updates after not playing for a long, long time. I started career mode a few weeks ago and have beenn enjoying the contracts, upgrading tech, experience. Currently I'm working on ramping up to a Duna mission. Tonight I landed on Minmus for the first time (never really got there way back in the day) with 8 Kerbals to get more science and XP. I also brought the SpaceBus home after Jeb took four tourists for an epic 41 day journey through the system. Janjorie demanded a Mun flyby, so the return from Minmus took a little longer. Apparently orbiting the Mun for 5 days wasn't good enough. Tourists ... sheesh. Minmus Landing: SpaceBus landing:

Today I designed and launched the Big Bertha Fuel Tug. Why use cylinders when you can use spheres? Here she is in orbit, big and round: I wanted to try IVA docking, which is why I built the odd looking structure on the capsule with the docking port on the end, which worked reasonably well: However the Kraken showed up and wouldn't let me turn the Big Bertha in any direction after I undocked. She wouldn't move until I got more than 2.2km away and came back after switching to another vessel. Then, when I came back, the Kraken had eaten the solar sails ... they were just gone. When I landed, KSP just closed (no crash report, no freezing, just *poof* closed!) after I tried to EVA Joevey. I thought the Kraken had eaten the saved game, but I was able to load it back up. I think I need to redesign the Big Bertha anyway. I was wanting to get her back to completely stock (except for the round fuel tanks) and forgot a couple things. She also needs a few more m/s to get into orbit a little more efficiently and a couple more parachutes on the capsule for re-entry.

I redesigned (again) the Icarus ship that will be going to Dres/Jool and finished the assembly in orbit. The Icarus V: Crew Capacity: 17 Docking Ports: 10 (8 for landing craft/probes, 1 in the rear drive section for refueling, and one on the front I forgot was there until now. Nobody knows why that's there.) Fuel Capacity: 85950/105050 Engines: 22 LV-N Atomic Part Count: 214

I designed the Hercules class construction tug: With 2250 units of mono propellent, 16k units of electricity, and a set of push/pull engines (2 PB-ION & 2 48-7S), and two kinds of docking ports (senior and regular), she'll push anything around and together as well as keeping station modules charged. The Mk2 design will replace the ion engines with two more 48-7S engines (I don't know why I put them on there, except they're shiny and glow blue), remove some mono propellant to add more liquid fuel, maybe give it enough range to do Mun/Minmus shuttle runs. Although I'm not sure what needs to be shuttled to and from the Mun or Minmus... the scientists at KSC will probably come up with something though.

lol ... yeah. I got frustrated and banished everyone at KSC to a remote sector of my hard drive and started a new game. Then got to missing everything I accomplished in the first save with flags planted at Duna and the Mun and several flights in progress, so I brought them back. I did find that, with enough patience and fuel, a retrograde burn eventually becomes a prograde burn and clockwise becomes counterclockwise. Oh, altitude. Need enough altitude too. So I think I'll be turning a few ships around tonight

I tend to just start playing without reading directions unless I get stuck ... last night I found out I spent the last couple months launching rockets the wrong direction (gravity turn going to 270 degrees). *facepalm* I tried turning to 0 last night and things are practically floating into space. Looks like I'll be redesigning a lot of launch vehicles to remove dv so that the final stages properly lithobreak into Kerbin. Dodging all the existing debris going the opposite direction is going to be ... interesting.

I've been working on some large ships and starting to work on being more efficient with part counts. What I started getting concerned about was all the leftover anchor points when a payload is connected to the final stage. Do those count as parts? Or does the strut itself count as the part and when it vanishes, the anchor points don't matter? Or does just the first anchor point count? So I setup a simple experiment with a very simple 2 stage rocket and found that when final part counts are a concern, it's important to draw the strut from the lower stage to the upper stage as the part count originates from the first anchor point. The second anchor point just sits there, not counting as a part. Which makes sense, since the first anchor point is the piece that is grabbed from the part menu. Some screenshots: The final stage, only 7 parts: The complete rocket. 16 parts including 4 struts and 2 gantries: By drawing the struts from the de-coupler to the final stage, the part count for the final stage came to 0 struts and 7 parts: By drawing the struts from the final stage to the de-coupler, the part count for the final stage came to 4 struts and 11 parts: As aside note, after I got done, I got to wondering if the little thing could get up to a 70km orbit. Tried a couple times, didn't quite get there. Then I had MechJeb try and it was successful ... barely: (10km turn, 40% path, limit to terminal velocity on)

Something related I would like to see is the time warp value being displayed anytime you hit any key besides , or . There's been a few times where I've come to a maneuver node, tried to throttle up and nothing happens. Try again, nothing. Try a couple more times, nothing. Thinking that KSP has gone into some weird locked up state and visions of the Space Kraken eating my saved game usually panics me enough that I don't think about time warp for a few precious seconds. It's usually a good indicator that I've been playing too long and should quit for the night I keep hearing about KAC... I think I'm going to have to try it.

This is a mission report for a $42.9M test flight of an atmospheric probe that will later on be hurled at Jool. Jebediah volunteered to go down in a lander can and write down the measurements every few seconds, but there were concerns about getting him back. The consensus was also that Jebediah probably would not be able to fly AND write down measurements without crashing ... so the scientists settled on a Telemachus equiped unkerboled probe instead. It comes equipped with all the fancy sciency sensors, a radio dish and some antennas. (KSC scientists have also been picking up Elevator Muzak in their radio telescopes on Kerbin. Most scientists are convinced it's interference from elevators the VAB, but we went ahead and put the radio antennas on there anyway to see if the Muzak is coming from Jool). Plans are to take two on the grand tour to Jool & Dres, so that we can throw one at Laythe as well. Kerbin's atmosphere from 100km: Small floodlight, just it comes down in the dark: This test flight also gave me a chance to check my numbers in a MS Excel spreadsheet I cobbled together for calculating terminal velocity, specifically with parachute selection in mind (more specifically, for designing a Laythe Lander). Final velocity was 10.8m/s, which was pretty much right on. Final velocity before landing (if you can really land on a gas giant) for Jool should be 2.48 m/s:

Took a break today from planning my grand tour around Jool with a pit stop at Dres and launched a probe at Kerbol. Since it's going to the sun, I thought it'd be appropriate to make it solar powered with Ion engines. The Kerbol I:

Actually, if you hit Mod+L you will lock the stage and prevent bad things from happening by accidentally pressing the space-bar. When you hit Mod+L, you should see the green light on the lower left of the HUD turn a pink color. Key Bindings

Actually ... I just discovered when docking a small, very maneuverable docking tug that the yellow dot does show the speed in the X & Y planes relative to the center. I thought it a pointer or ... well, honestly, I didn't know what it was. Keeping that yellow dot centered between the green line and the gray line worked really well as that naturally decreased the velocity as I got closer to the docking axis and made for a neat, smooth docking maneuver. Much smoother when I was just going by raw numbers.

I found out that Mechjeb's docking auto pilot will keep running even if you switch to a different ship. So Mechjeb docked the little space tug to the big piece while I docked the big piece to the Icarus. It was all about team work until I started messing with the poor thing.... "look we're going faster!!!" *big puffs of RCS* "and now we're going slower!!" *big puffs of RCS* "and now we're going faster!!" *big puffs of RCS* but then MechJeb got it's revenge in the end when it docked first and things got horrible unbalanced only 5 meters away from docking ... should have thought of that.

I'm currently working on the next big ship in orbit over Kerbin and have been trying to be a little more efficient with my launch windows so I don't have to wait as long for a rendezvous between the two ships. With my latest launch, I wound up going a little after sunset. I managed to grab the below screenshot (about 10km, i think) and, over the next few seconds as the light from the atmosphere faded, the stars gradually came out. I have no idea how you would program such a thing, but it's a really beautiful touch and it's the little things like this that make me like the game so much. And turning the camera around:

This is the report for a 318 day odyssey to Duna and back. A while back I saw a thread about large reusable ships and thought I try building one myself and sending it to Duna. After a tweaking the design part way through, I settled on a 12 Nuke engine, 10 jumbo tank design: Without including redesign, and including the CSM and LM with rover, from launch pad to Orbit the intrepid workers of KSC put a total of 2,530 components in orbit with a combined weight of 8,047.37 tons at a cost of $2.609 billion. There were some tweaks and testing along the way, such as trying out the lander on Kerbin: This had the unfortunate result of making Bob extremely excited to go. After a few days of Bob calling every hour and asking "Hey guys, me again. We ready to go yet?", ground control finally gave up waiting for an optimal launch window and just pushed the big red "go" button. Here's Icarus pulling out of the station heading for the Mun: We tried a slingshot past the Mun: Before finally making it to Duna: Jebediah took command of the CSM to take Bob and Bill to a lower orbit: Bob and Bill were soon on their way to the surface: Bob and Bill making History: Total flight time, from launch and construction, to Duna and back, was 318 days and 16 hours. All in all a lot of fun and challenging and I think I learned a lot. I used Mechjeb a lot in the beginning, but after watching I've been setting up the maneuvers myself and doing all the docking. I'm now starting construction on the Icarus III (yeah ... so much for multi-use ) for a combined Dres / Jool mission. She'll have twice the amount of tanks as the Icarus II, and I think I have a way to stack 6 rover/landing modules on the back. Launch Stats (Pad to Orbit): Weight: 8,047.37 tons Part Total: 2,530 Cost: $2.609.49 billion Pre-mission (completed ship in orbit, with CSM & LM) Weight: 535.45 tons Parts: 282 Liquid Fuel: 36,450L/36450L Oxidizer: 44,550L/44,550L Post-Mission (CSM returned to Kerbin, LM left at Duna) Weight: 244.75 tons Parts: 182 Liquid Fuel: 10,799L/34,200L Oxidizer: 13,198L/41,800L More (many more ... I tend to hit the F1 key a lot) pictures can be seen here:

I finally made it to Duna!! Landing at dawn: Touchdown! Rover detached, flag set, time to go exploring!

After leaving at not quite the ideal time and spending a lot of time orbiting Kerbol, the Icarus II finally made it to Duna. Tomorrow will involve using the Command/Snacks module down to ferry the Lander/Rover module down to low Duna orbit. After that we'll throw the LRM at Duna and see what happens.

I'm not familiar with the lazor cam mod, but the readouts I would like to see is the relative velocity to the target in the x, y, z planes in addition to the overall closure velocity. I usually have that displayed with MechJeb and it makes it a lot easier to line up with the docking axis without drifting off. Having that all in one window would be nice. Great mod, btw. It's really helped me with docking procedures.

I was able to get out of Kerbin's influence with about two burns that totaled about 880ish m/s (I have the exact numbers at home) after starting out in a 118km orbit ... the delta-v map I'm looking at shows 950m/s starting from an 80km orbit. Not a good comparison there, but I also looked at my orbital velocity right before entering Mun's influence and right after Mun escape and there was about a 225m/s increase ... I was assuming that I sped up by 225m/s. Am I interpreting that wrong? Or are you saying the slingshot is going to affect my orbit around Kerbol, which will then take more delta-v to intercept Duna? (my plan is to get out of Kerbin's influence before setting a node to intercept Duna). Incidentally, after passing behind the Mun, it looks like I'm not going to need any more delta-v to get out of Kerbin's orbit. I'm new at this, orbital mechanics are still somewhat mysterious to me, and I'm just curious why a Mun slingshot would expend more Delta-V than a direct route. Thanks!

I finally got my mission to Duna ready and out of orbit last night. I starting things off with a Mün slingshot, which just happened to be about 84km from my first Mün landing site. Melbald and Bob seem a little worried about the altitude while Jebediah looks rather excited: Kerbol, Kerbin, and the Mün lined up rather nicely afterwards. Looking at my velocity before Mün intercept and after Mün escape, I got about 225m/s for free:

With my first rover, I found you can't take a corner too quickly on the Mun either: *No Kerbonauts were harmed in the taking of this screenshot*

Try this mod: Actions on the fly . LeadMagnet, I do try and keep similar AG assignments across ships (8=toggle solar panels, 7=toggle sensors/antennas, 0=toggle gimbals, etc.) but I ran across a situation with a complex orbital tug where I ran out of AG items and needed to change my AG 0 to something else. Once in orbit, no more need to be toggling gimbals