Dave Kerbin

Golf 1 - 2 After failure I went back to an unmanned ship. Seeing some opportunity in Delta 3 I decided to try and copy the parachute design - until now I couldn't return a probe because there was nowhere obvious to place a parachute. But if I mounted extra radial engines I could put parachutes there. I decided to see if I could get some science from return a probefrom the upper atmosphere or maybe even space. The idea was for the 2 radial boosters to fire first, then the center one would take over when there was less solid fuel to lift. However I had my first encounter with deadly reentry when the parachutes decided to explode from overheating. It wasn't a complete loss though - the ship had enough inertia to reach over 90km before it came back down and crashed. An interesting observation is that as the solid boosters heated up from reentry the nozzles glowed rather then the whole booster. Echo 2 wouldn't try to fix the parachute problem, instead I fitted it with science instruments to take orbital readings and transmit them. I wasn't sure how much power the GravMax would need so I packed extra batteries. With the extra weight Echo 2 didn't fly as high - in fact it just barely touched the edge of space where I quickly stored all the readings and then began transmitting them as the ship fell back down. This lets me unlock Basic Flight Control and the control fins. I have 24 science left but everything now costs 45 science. With the technology I have I can probably put a short term satellite into orbit and take more gravity readings.

Foxtrot 1 Since I didn't get any substantial amount of science I tried out a varient of the last Echo ship (it could have been an echo series itself). It added solid boosters at an angle, on the idea that they would add some spin stabilization. Johngan Kerman is the pilot. It barely passes 200m. And then they go really not well when the mass of the fuel tank brings the capsule down at 16 m/s, killing Johngan. The Foxtrot series is abandoned.

Echo 1 - 3 With science for stability a priority I turned back to manned flight. Maybe if I could safely land a pilot there would be a science reward. Wilrod steps up to pilot Echo 1 which will attempt a flight using liquid fuel engines. The first problem of the flight is stability again. The rocket tips as it flies and I'm forced to cut engines as it turns beyond 90 degrees pointing down instead of up. The parachute is deployed but when it fully opens the forces applied rip the ship apart. I'd expected the fuel tank and engine might be taken off but it falls apart completely, leaving the pod to crash. Huddo Kerman is up next. He tries to burn as much fuel as possible, taking the engine right up to the red line but stopping on a complete overheat. It isn't enough. The explosion you see is the parachute, which has ripped off the pod on deployment, smashing into the rocket and leaving a fireball behind it as it falls. Hanemone Kerman is up for Echo 3. Piloting isn't going to fix things, so I go for more parachutes by adding 3 radial tanks, each with an engine and a parachute. The flight starts out really slow - with all those engines I run them at really low throttle, lifting off the pad slowly but stable in the hopes of using as much fuel as possible. The ship does start to turn as I climb. When it gets close to horizontal I turn the engines up to maximum, deliberately running them hot enough to blow up in the hopes of burning even more fuel and 'removing' the weight of the engines. The ship is actually flipped around a bit by the uneven loss of the engines (2 radials explode first, then the remaining one, then the center engine) The chutes open and the ship finally rights itself. When they fully deploy it holds together. Hanemone is the first kerbal to survive a flight, though the hatch is blocked and he can't get out. Unfortunately it's not worth very much, just 0.8 science.

Delta 1 - 2 I'm honestly not 100% sure what my goal with Delta was. BTSM is a very interesting change to science in KSP. If you've ever browsed the question and answer forum you'll find someone new to KSP asking where they can get science. To anyone experienced it's easy because there is plenty of it at the beginning, Kerbin is covered in small bits of science. BTSM puts experienced players in that same position. I have used the 2Hot and barometer in the upper and lower atmosphere, I can't fly a kerbal into the upper atmosphere without killing him and the GravMax can only be used in orbit. If I could figure out how to land safely I might be able to try a terrifying low atmosphere EVA. In short it doesn't seem like I have any experiments left, I actually thought a few times I might be running into a tech tree dead end. BTSM seems to do a nice job making you really work for the next bit of science - you have to be original. So anyway I think my 'goal' with Delta was to figure out what I could do with liquid rockets. Maybe I could get into orbit or something so I attached all my current instruments to a probe. Or maybe I just didn't want to kill another kerbal without advancing a bit so they would at least die in a new way. So I launch off and there are two problems. The first is that I don't get a perfectly straight up launch - the nozzile of the liquid booster just isn't as stable a launchpad as the solid booster - and that means I slowly tilt over. The second problem is that extra bit of smoke you see coming off a bit of an angle from my main exhaust. That's bits of the nozzle assembly melting. The T15 exploded a few seconds after that smoke started appearing. Without the engine the rocket did not fly. The second Delta added 2 large and 2 small boosters, with the large ones forming the launch platform. The hope was that I could stage them and maybe it would stay stable and have enough to reach orbit. Unfortunately it did not fly straight which told me my main problem now was making my rockets stable. I needed science so I could unlock useful parts and Delta wasn't going to provide it.

Charlie 1 - 2 Being the first manned mission I should take a moment here to explain that for my career files I make a modification before I start playing - I edit the save to turn off respawning (dead kerbals stay dead) and I remove the 3 orange suits (Bill, Bob and Jeb). This way all my kerbals are fresh and new, instead of having kerbals from my other careers mysteriously show up. My first kerbonaut is Gusmin Kerman. You can see he is very brave, and just dumb enough to get into a ship that's nothing more then a cockpit on top of a solid booster rocket. The launch goes well and he starts transmitting a crew report. The transmission is going really slow - even with 8 batteries there just won't be enough charge to send even half of it. At 10km up the ship is just about to run out of charge when another problem appears. Gusmin needs air to breath. 5 science is received for the data Gusmin transmitted before he passed out. The ship falls back and lands in the parking lot. Another brave pilot is found to take the ship up again. Since the problem started a little past 10km and the ship started falling back soon after it's just a matter of not going that high. On the way up it becomes apparent that there is no way to actually steer the spaceship. The crew report is stored, knowing that there isn't enough charge to transmit it. At the last minute the parachute is deployed in an attempt to slow down the ship but it's too late. Billy-Bob Dan is tragically killed though his ship is the first to land safely back on Kerbin carrying his last written words. The +15 science (with +5 from Gusmin) is enough to unlock General Rocketry. We get a different version of the GravMax (from the description it only works in low orbit), the T800 fuel tank and a unique LV-T15 series rocket, not to be confused with the T30.

Beta 1 With the knowledge I gained from the Alpha series I have some idea what I'm doing with Beta. I load up on batteries and add new new barometer to my ship which is now on top of the bigger solid booster. The need to balance weight differently (the science components not sharing the same weight) leads to some more interesting visual designs. The flight goes easy, reaching 30km. The barometer takes much longer to transmit then the 2Hot, though it also provides double the science (8). I unlock Survivability which gives me an unpressurized cockpit and the small parachute.

Alpha 1 - 4 BTSM starts off with a unique tech tree. As you can see there is no capsule, not even a liquid fuel rocket. Just a solid booster, probe, antenna and 2Hot. The first thing I noticed in the VAB was that the weights are different - a lot of things are heavier so you no longer have science instruments weighing a negligible amount. The Stayputnick is heavier but it now actually has 10 minutes of battery life like the description says. I also found out that you can't tweak the thrust on solid boosters, so after calculating that I wanted 25% thrust for optimum altitude I couldn't do it. There is only one speed and that will be fast. On the launchpad I found out that you no longer get science on the ground - in BTSM the kerbals seem to have already explored that far. My first launch gets off the pad and begins turning north, slowly tipping over. It becomes clear it will not last long and as it passes 90 degrees, now tilting down, I start transmitting some temperature data about the lower atmosphere. The transmission ends just 1.08 seconds before the probe hits the water 50m from the shore and is destroyed. 4 science isn't enough to unlock anything, so I try flying again but with SAS turned on. It turns out the probe doesn't have SAS or a reaction wheel and it crashes, without the ability to perform any new science. So for a third launch I try to get the antenna and 2Hot placed to balance each other. This doesn't work either. Then I remember that the weights are different - I need 2 antennas and 2 2Hots to balance. This time it works and the 4th Alpha launch manages to reach the upper atmosphere and get 4 more science. After it comes down I can unlock the next item in the tech tree, Basic Rocketry. This gives me the bigger solid booster rocket, a barometer and finally what looks like the Double-C but is actually a small (50em) battery.

I've logged my career play here on the forums, playing .22 and discovering the tech tree and how science works for the first time, then playing .23 and trying to roleplay a budget (and finding it was a bit too easy once you knew the tech tree) and finally playing with only probes. I wanted a new engineering challenge, one that encouraged doing reasonable missions but on limited resources (like going to the Duna in under 22 tons), rather then massive goals like returning from Eve. I had a couple of ideas and I've already played out the first of them, the probe only career. My other options including doing another stock career but with special roleplay restrictions as I outlined here, doing an IVA only career, or doing some kind of mod career using TAC life support, deadly reentry and maybe some other realism mods. While asking about stock restrictions the user Death Engineering, who sometimes frequents my career file, suggested the mod Better Than Starting Manned. This mod looks really neat - a complete redo of the tech tree, some of the science mechanics and as I found out the parts are basically brand new too so all my old spreadsheet designs and assumptions have to be started over from scratch. It also has a form of life support and is designed to work with Deadly Reentry Continued. So this is what I'm going to be doing, I'll be playing a fresh career with the mod Better Than Starting Manned along with the prerequisite Deadly Reentry Continued (everything else is pure stock). This will be my first time playing with the mod. I have no foreknowledge of the tech tree, parts or mechanics beyond what is in the first post of the mods thread and deadly reentry's. This will be an entirely 'new player experience' (granted from a player well versed with stock KSP) complete with all the mistakes. There will be dead kerbals. I won't be playing with any imaginary restrictions (other then avoiding any exploits like infinite gliders or silly tricks like stacking solid boosters to create decouplers) so ships can be big if they need to be. My one goal which everything else will support is to reach Eeloo, plant a flag and return to Kerbin safely. Ask any questions you want, I'd be happy to answer or clarify anything. Comment or click the star if you like this thread. Update, second playthrough I've completed the original goal and have started a playthrough with the new version of BTSM, rebalanced and with new parts for KSP .23.5. You can skip straight to this new playthrough by clicking here, or just read through the original playthrough first and you'll continue into the second. Update, third playthrough With the second playthrough's goal completed there is now a third playthrough, utilizing the newest version of BTSM which introduces launchpad weight limits. My goal is to make a manned mission to the Mun using the absolute minimum of BTSM tech and the smallest launchpad weight limit.

I think I might have a rule to nicely handle Mun spam without making it strickly one landing per body: The we went here last year rule: You can't do 2 missions to the same body back to back (passing by a body doesn't count, so going to Ike after Duna is ok). Additionally Minmus is prettier then the Mun, so you can't do a mission to the Mun if the last mission visited Minmus. And finally Kerbin doesn't count as a vacation, so you can do as many missions as you want there but it won't count as a break between missions to another body (you can't do Mun, Kerbin, Mun because that would count as Mun, Mun). This way I don't paint myself into a corner with too little science and no reachable bodies left, but at the same time I can't send lots of missions to the Mun or swap between the Mun and Minmus.

I kind of have a thing for early career mode play - I like working with restrictions rather then huge sandbox missions. My .23 career file and my probe only careers are examples of that. They tend to wear out once I've progressed beyond technical limitations and reach the sandbox stage. I've got a few ideas to challenge myself for a career and I'd like feedback - what you think would be challenging, what you might want to see documented/explored for your own reading enjoyment and what original ideas you might have. My first challenge rule I call slow scientists: When using science points you must always unlock the least expensive item on the tech tree. This means that once you pass the starter technologies you'll be restricted to choosing techs from the current tier only (45pt, 90pt, etc). There is still strategy in deciding what to unlock but you can't just beeline toward the GravMax anymore which means science point will come much slower. My second potential challenge rule is lazy engineers: All boosters must follow the same design - 2 fuel tanks and an engine in the center, and an optional set of identical radial boosters consisting of 1 fuel tank, 1 engine and 1 nose cone on radial decouplers using onion staging. The selection of engines and fuel tanks is open but the ship must not use any other propulsion until the boosters have all been released. By limiting the booster design it creates an upper limit on how much weight can be put into LKO at each stage in the tech tree. An alternative booster rule is skyscrapers only: Boosters cannot use any radial decouplers/fuel tanks/engines. It must be one tall stack (couplers are allowed, so you can have 3 tanks side by side fairly early). Like the lazy engineer rule it attempts to restrict the mass of the payload based on tech tree progress only more so. I'm thinking I could do a slow scientists building skyscrapers only run, what other restrictions could I place to make it interesting. Is there any good sounding or interesting rule I could use to avoid just landing on the Mun 20 times to collect the whole tech tree? As requested here is a list of the rules suggested for making stock more challenging. If you put your rule's name in bold it will make it easier for me to add it here. (Red Iron Crown) No massless objects: No fuel lines or struts. Staging is for wimps: No decouplers with engines above them. Decouplers only permitted for unpowered capsule recovery. Moons are overrated: Collect no science from the Mun or Minmus. Go West, young man: All launches must be in the westerly, retrograde direction, whether from Kerbin or another body. Speed limit strictly enforced: Limit thrust of all engines via tweakables to some arbitrary percentage, say 80%. Jeb, Bill and Bob forever: You may not recruit Kerbals and you may not revert flights. (JumpsterG, named by LordQ) One mission one discovery: Only 1 science unlock allowed following each dedicated science gathering or significant roleplay mission, regardless of the science points collected. (ScallopPotato) Selective inclination: All launches from Kerbin must go into polar orbits or an orbit of at least 45 degrees of inclination (choose one of the two) We went here last year: You can't do 2 missions to the same body back to back (passing by a body doesn't count, so going to Ike after Duna is ok). Additionally Minmus is prettier then the Mun, so you can't do a mission to the Mun if the last mission visited Minmus. And finally Kerbin doesn't count as a vacation, so you can do as many missions as you want there but it won't count as a break between missions to another body (you can't do Mun, Kerbin, Mun because that would count as Mun, Mun). (Pds314) Space program of one: Jeb must fly all manned missions and must not die. No reverts or quicksaves. (sdj64) Corporate rivalry: No using any Rockomax parts. Slow computer challenge: Keep all of your ships under a specific part count, say, 50 or 100.

I do it based on speed, I've calculated and tweaked my TWR such that I should be reaching altitudes at about the same speed each time. I turn about 22 degrees for every 250 m/s. So the first turn is just after 10km. Once I hit 1000 m/s going almost flat to the horizon I switch to map view and wait until I get to 72km AP (or whatever AP I want) and cut engines for the coasting phase. It's not the kind of exact science that others have been using but it has resulted in my boosters performing well enough - on my last light mission I'm pretty sure that no matter how I did the numbers for ISP my booster was well short of 4500 m/s, yet I reached orbit on each attempt with a few drops of fuel to spare.

I'd put an asterix beside this. When you say 'no margin for error' what you mean is that if you have to ask a question about landing on the Mun then there is no possible way you will do it and return to orbit on 1100 dV. Doing it with 1100 dV is crossing over from the realm of expert piloting into the realm of crazy party trick. You are basically doing this but 10 times harder because you don't have an atmosphere to hit terminal velocity in.

I would agree it's between 2 and 3 depending on how big a ship you can manage. Transmission spamming is gone, but in it's place Minmus has a bunch of biomes now. So the first mission uses thermal decoupler party tricks to visit Minmus and explore about 6 biomes (5 might be enough if you've picked up science on the way and can charge enough for some crew reports, might even stretch to 4 if you do a bunch of EVA's in orbit and maybe do a Mun gravity assist with EVA). That gives you 1300 science so that you can unlock a line straight down to the GravMax, plus enough left over to grab the 2HOT and radial decouplers. If you did more then the minimum science you can also grab fuel lines and the little rockomax engine. Now it's much more straight forward to build a ship that will grab science from the Mun and Minmus. Either one massive ship to get everything in one mission (yet another party trick ship), or 2 more reasonable ones (do Minmus with the first one, use that science to reach docking ports, then build a second one for the Mun) Edit: I also agree (somewhat) that it's much easier to do it if you avoid the tier-0 mission to Minmus though that pushes it to a minimum of 3 missions instead of 2. The only difference is I don't think need to limit yourself to just collecting stuff on the pad, you can get into orbit and do EVA's over a bunch of biomes without any tricks - Mk1 capsule, parachute and antenna then add 12x T200 fuel tanks and the LV-T30 engine. It turns like an oil tanker (just be gentle on the gravity turn) but it will get you into low orbit safely where you can do an EVA over all the biomes on the equator. You can also grab 2 'flying over' EVAs, one on the launchpad and one after landing.

Is this with jet engines (regular, turbo, rapier) or without?

The chart numbers are for non-aerobraking transfers. Places where aerobraking is possible are labeled on the chart with a white arrow - in those cases you can either burn the delta-v or save some or all of it by aerobraking. You'll see the 860 on the path to the Mun there is a white arrow pointing to Kerbin and that means you can use aerobraking if you are going in that direction. If you wanted to return to a Kerbin 70km circular orbit without passing through the atmosphere it would use around the advertised 860 m/s, depending on how much of an assist you got coming out from the Mun.

To the right of the altitude readout there is a vertical speed indicator that you can use to determine if you are going up or down.

Kerbals can repack parachutes by right clicking them (they can also repair wheels and lander legs as long as they've been broken but not torn off or exploded). If your ladder is close enough to the parachute you can do it on the ground. If you have parachutes far away from any ladder then you can wait until you are back in space and do a space walk with the jetpack to reach them. Edit: In this case I took some help from my probe career and set the parachutes deployment pressure for Kerbin (0.3 will open the chute at around 6000m by which time you should have slowed down enough). That way I could activate the chute (right click and select deploy) while I was in space on approach to Kerbin's atmosphere and it would automatically be released.

I recently did a flight/challenge on reddit where I dug out the oldest craft I had and flew it. I decided to revist another old flight, this time from an engineering standpoint. Back in September of last year I started a thread where I asked if my attempt at a low mass Mun flight seemed reasonable and if the math was correct. This was the first ship I designed by making delta-v calculations ahead of time (my excel method), instead of just trial and error. My best design back then was this 34.5 ton ship. As part of the flight plan for this ship I tested and learned how to dock without RCS. Anyway I'm taking a fresh look at designing a low mass mission. The basic criteria are no exploits (infinite glider, intake spamming, etc) and I'd like it to look good. While I'll admit to doing it over in my probe thread I'm not a fan of 'pancake' shaped ships on the launchpad. Ultimately I came up with this. It weighs 21.99 tons on the launchpad (I used tweakables to drain a little unneeded fuel from the center booster) and looks reasonably like a rocket with a big center booster and 6 smaller boosters. The 2 fuel tanks on the side of the capsule are bending things a bit, they rely on the cubic strut trick to let me mount them radially like that. I did that mostly for looks, if you use a radial decoupler with the T100 tank it just looks terrible. Another alternative configuration that would have a slight effect on flight would be to place a single T200 tank on top, moving the parachutes to the sides. The weight can be brought back to 21.99t by removing the science gear which is just there for show (though you can actually get a lot of science using just those instruments plus kerbal stuff) After launch there is still 6L of fuel left in the booster but for this mission I'm just going to discard it before burning for the Mun. The side tanks provide just enough fuel for injection and capture. I push away from them as I slightly adjust the orbit and prepare for landing. So we land, plant a flag and come back. There is some fuel in the tank so I aerobrake and then setup a return to try and reach KSP. I managed to come down pretty close. So with half a year of experience I've managed to knock of 1/3 of the weight and make it look nicer. But that's not really enough to show for improvement, especially when there are pancake ships that do it for under 15 tons. I don't really want to make a pancake so is there something else I can do, somewhere else I can go. That is not how you get to Minmus. Arriving at Duna I have 3.06L of liquid fuel left in the side tanks. I'll use some of that to slightly adjust for aerocapture. I didn't actually get into orbit, instead coming into a long descent that brought me around to the day side of Duna (just barely). In the thin atmosphere I was still going over 400 m/s but the partially deployed chute slowly reduced until it fully deployed which instantly eliminated most of my horizontal velocity. There is still 1.18L left in the side tanks so they'll last all of 2 seconds for the ascent. I got a little lazy on the return and didn't correct my return PE until I entered Kerbin's SOI. I burned most of the remaining 9L of fuel (close to 200 m/s) to correct and put myself into return over the pole.

The Science Jr is fragile with a crash resistence of 6 m/s. You either need to use a kerbal to move the data from the Science Jr into a safer command pod, or add radial parachutes to slow it down to less then 6 m/s when it hits the water.

Checking my past flights if you flew to Eve at the ideal transfer point then unless you spent weeks orbiting Eve or Gilly you should be in position to make a passable transfer back to Kerbin. Here is a copy of my return flights (Dust 1 and LanfieldTwo). Neither are at the ideal transfer window but they are close enough (first one is 1169 m/s and then some minor correction after, second one is 1254 m/s with a 175 m/s correction after)

The most efficient would be to make a small nudge (it will literally take 1 or 2 m/s) to get yourself out of Gilly's orbit and into a 48,000 x 14,000 km orbit of Eve and then make the burn back to Kerbin from there. The Oberth effect will help if you started out below 1000 km but from Gilly's orbital height you'll actually spend less then what it would take from low Eve orbit, even without considering the cost of lowering your orbit. The real cost though will be the transfer window - I think it comes around every 130 days or so. You should be able to get back to Kerbin from Gilly for about 1400 m/s if you transfer at the right time, but miss it and the cost skyrockets. Since you aren't using the Oberth effect it's probably easiest to push yourself out of Eve's orbit entirely (into an orbit slightly higher then Eve), then use a maneuver node to find the optimum transfer time.

You should be able to attach the regular clamp-o-tron and the jr versions to the side of a fuel tank (the Sr. and shielded versions are an exception). Did you use the rotation keys to turn it in the correction direction first?

If you take a screenshot of your current tech tree I could offer some suggestions or designs. From your description it sounds like your first issue is really about the booster to get into orbit, it may be that you are trying to build too big a ship. One thing that will differ between a Mun mission and a Duna mission is that you will probably land mostly on parachutes. However Duna has a very thin atmosphere. You'll need more parachutes and you'll need to make sure everything is secure otherwise the sudden stop when they open will tear the ship apart.

You might draw some inspiration from a moon probe I built that was relatively successful at balancing a single goo container. Overall though you really need to think about where you are going. Most bodies don't have an atmosphere so the barometer and sensor nose cone are useless. On bodies that do have an atmosphere you are faced with a small issue - you need to collect the high atmosphere and low atmosphere readings within a short time span and without a safe period to exit the capsule to collect anything. For your planning I would make these suggestions: Determine if you are doing a manned or unmanned mission. If it's manned then apart from the Science Jr and Goo you only need one set of the vacuum instruments and 2 of the atmospheric ones. If it's manned consider how you might detach Science Jr and Goo containers after they have been used (and the data collected) to save weight One way probes can also benefit from discarding used up Science Jr and Goo containers. If you are having issues consider a pair stock science module - the standardized module contains all the experiments needed for 2 biomes. This makes it easier to balance. Consider seperate stock modules for atmosphere and vacuum.

So I've been thinking about rovers, and how they really aren't that useful at the moment. You can certainly make them just for the fun of driving around but there are no structured goals that rovers are really suited to. Without mods (and even with them) it just takes too long for a rover to travel far from the landing zone, meaning at best a rover might be able to visit one other biome if it landed really close by. Visiting other biomes just seems faster and easier using rocket power. My idea is to use the upcoming contract system to let the game provide incentives for short trips on a body you have already landed on. The game would periodically generate a contract for performing a specific experiment at a specific location (within 1m). In terms of wording it would be like "We'll give you this science/money/reputation reward if you take a closer look at that cool rock for us". The contract generator would make these "look at a rock" contracts very close to craft that have already landed, within a dozen km at most (in theory these contracts represent a request to followup on previous biome wide reading with a more detailed reading of a specific object detected). And there would be a short time limit so you couldn't just launch a brand new mission. While you could you rockets to make a hop to that location you'd need a very precise landing to be close enough to claim credit.