Dave Kerbin

The payload is about 618 tons into a 100km orbit with a little fuel left over (not enough for anything serious, maybe shave any rough edges off the orbit). Pad weight is just over 5000 tons, and it consumes just over 5000 L of liquid fuel and oxidizer per second when launched.

I think Eeloo is coming soon. This is a big ship so I actually did an unmanned test launch into orbit where staging, fuel lines and mass (for double checking delta-v figures) could be verified. The only thing I'm not happy about is the first stage booster which has gotten ugly. It's not a pancake yet but it's edging really close. Unfortunately I need a certain amount of thrust leading to a minimum number of engines (it's a lot). I don't want to spoil much so I've obscured the upper portion. The orbital jumble of rockets is from staging without actually burning any fuel, the rest of the ship is less then 50m away split into 4 pieces, staged as far as the Kerbin SOI reentry (from there the staging has already been well tested with Ham and Kiwi). One way to try and streamline it was to build it out and create a pair of super-boosters attached to the side though I'd really need to abuse the new joints to prevent it from tearing apart the ship on launch. However even the smallest viable super booster had too large a footprint because of the engine count requirement - even the single launch design has the edge of an engine peaking out over the front and back edges of the launch pad. The smaller super booster design (which isn't much of an improvement in terms of looks) has 3 engines right over the right edge (the model rigged up was not structurally sound for a launch, it was only for size checking). The proper sized super booster would have 9 more engines, pushing it well past the edges of the launchpad. My one defense over the huge cost of this test launch just to check mass in orbit (I don't use Kerbal Engineer or other information mods so sometimes figures need to be double checked the hard way) is that I am getting economy of scale - most of the ship is composed of the same Nosecone+X64+X32+Mainsail assembly.

Just a note, I am coming up on my goal of reaching Eeloo. Once that happens I'll be starting a fresh BTSM file to see how things go with the changes that have been made and how things pay out now that I know some information. I'm looking for input on two things. One is a theme or list of names for ships, ideally alphabetical so that they sort correctly. The other is a specific goal. I don't think I'll be going this far on my second run - I really want to see what I can do during the initial hard engineering section, before it becomes a matter of building mega ships like I have been. Some possible goals are: Land a probe on another planet. Pretty straight forward but maybe not hard enough. Maybe make it harder and more interesting, like landing a probe on Laythe on land. Complete all of tech level 7. Somewhat plain, and it doesn't really open up an creative solutions to reach for that goal. Send and return a manned expedition to a body outside of Kerbin's SOI. Could bring up some creative ways to mount such an expedition with the lowest tech possible. When I do start that career I'll also post up the list of kerbonaut's available for hire in that new file and make it a public poll to pick 3 of them as my prime crew (they will Jeb, Bob and Bill who I will delete as always). A side goal will be to not hire any other kerbonaut's unless I really need to, which means keeping them alive (rememeber that going to the Mun the first time all but needed 3 crew members to work)

Jam 2 The goal of this mission is to grab the next type of asteroid, a class B. I've assembled a new ship for this mission, one I hope I can reuse for most or all of the other asteroid capture missions. It's based on the Ham launcher so it's carrying a lot of fuel and power and I've configured the top in such a way that if one of them is not enough to finish the job of pulling an asteroid into low orbit it can detach most of itself and let another take over. I found during the first mission that monopropellent was in short supply so not only is this one of the few ships I've built that uses a large RCS tank, it's also designed so that the body of the ship can be discarded, leaving only the RCS tank and some RCS thrusters attached to the asteroid. This way if two ships are needed to capture an asteroid the first ship can at least continue contributing RCS. After launching the unmanned asteroid hunter into a parking orbit around Kerbin I went looking for a suitable asteroid. That search revealed some potential targets but also turned up something unexpected - a class C asteroid marked RJM-005 that would visit Kerbin in just over a month. Kerbin's astronomers have spotted a number of class C asteroids but this one was different from the others due to the course it was taking. With RJM projected to strike somewhere near the south pole action had to be taken. Jam 2's new primary mission is now to divert RJM from its collision course, with a secondary objective of capturing it safely. An outbound 937 m/s burn was calculated that would bring it within 100,000km of RJM in 21 days. I need to catch up quickly so I can't dip in and out of Kerbin's SOI lining up an approach. After the initial burn which used up the first 2 tanks several smaller burns where made over the next 15 hours of flight as it moved away from Kerbin toward deep space. These where designed to refine the approach, bringing it down to under 100 km. Exiting Kerbin's SOI doesn't alter that projection, however timewarping does seem to - 5 days from the asteroid I slow down and find my approach is now 3000 km off. A burn is made to bring it to within 900 km and at that point the probe begins to cancel out all but 25 m/s of the relative velocity. At this point a hard burn is made to flip around the relative velocity to 90 m/s but heading on a course that now brings it within 9 km in less then 20 minutes. There the velocity is canceled out again and another inward burn is made, to bring the probe along a course to within 100m of RJM. Approaching RJM I begin canceling out most of the remaining velocity. However I decide on a different approach then trying to line up a course toward it and juggle adding velocity to line up and braking to prevent to hard a collision. Instead I let the ship drift past the asteroid, in the below screenshot the ship is facing backwards, ready to break its remaining 3.6 m/s velocity relative to RJM. Doing it this way allows me to come to a halt just behind the asteroid, less then 100m away. This makes it much easier to make a slow and exact approach, since I am speeding up to catch it rather then trying to slow down while hitting it. This allows for a nice soft capture. I forgot to take mark of the mass before, but a rough estimate based on fuel puts the asteroids mass in the range of 130 tons. From here I need to line up the engines with the center of mass. By approach the asteroid like this I seem to have the target designators in a better way then before, making it easy to get it straight. I've got enough power to turn the asteroid and the thrust vectoring from 4 engines works well to keep it on course. Altering the asteroid's path so that it passes 200km from the surface is easy at this point. Arriving at Kerbin the drives are used again to bring RJM into a stable orbit around Kerbin. The fuel in the second set of tank is exhausted, which means 2 fewer engines and slightly less control. Since the asteroid is already in orbit I don't try to lower that orbit yet, I can wait until it passes around and plot an ideal burn. It will take almost 1000 m/s to put the asteroid into low orbit and I've already burned 400 of that. With 3 engines the second burn will take 3 minutes but is still easily possible with the available fuel. In stable low orbit the asteroid is captured for 1000 science which is beamed back. I can unlock the Science Jr again (completing the one tech 8 node I skipped). While 130 tons is obviously a growth over 8 tons I still think my improved Jam class ship will be enough to capture an E class, I just might need a second or maybe even third to help refine its orbit once captured so the science can be done.

Jam 1 (Extended Mission) To answer a few lingering questions about the asteroid capture experiment I'm extending Jam 1's mission just a tiny bit. Jam 1 can be seen here still attached to asteroid YSQ-213 with the discarded Kiwi grabber in the foreground and the Death Star in the background. The first step in this extended mission is to nudge YSQ back into high orbit. We don't need much, just >250 km to change the biome. Since I sort of figured out how to center the mass near the end of Jam 1's main mission I can fire the engines at low thrust and stay on target with only a small amount of input. There is enough fuel for everything I have planned (almost 200L) but RCS is low at 26 units and falling. RCS needs to be conserved so rotating the asteroid is done slowly, just a few puffs to get it moving and then let it rotate freely until it is pointing at my planned maneuver. Two burns bring the orbit up to ~260 km. I try to perform the capture experiment again but I'm told the capture experiment can't be done right now. That's usually the message I get when an experiment is not in a suitable biome but there is one other possiblity, it could be that a manned pod is needed for the experiment. To determine that I do one more burn to lower my PE into low orbit again and when I pass below 250 km I try the experiment again - this time it starts just fine, proceeding until I come back into high orbit and it cancels. So now I think I know the parameters of the experiment - it can be performed by any ship under control, it must be performed in low Kerbin orbit and it takes 60 minutes after which I can transmit the result (500Mbit). The only thing I don't know is if it can be repeated on a second class A asteroid. Since this would allow for infinite science without showing any progression I highly doubt FlowerChild would have allowed this. I think my time would be best spent looking at a class B asteroid to see if I get 500 science or if the science scales with size.

Kiwi 1 Kiwi is a manned mission piloted by Merdun Kerman to visit the asteroid I now have in orbit around Kerbin. It should be pretty straight forward though I have several objectives to I want to complete: See if a Kerbal can perform any science on the asteroid See if fuel or monopropellent passes through the asteroid Find out what the Capture command does Test the RTG equipped reentry system for future deep space missions Since this is only to orbit and then adjust 21 degrees the ship doesn't need to be big. The reentry portion is somewhat fixed, since I want it to be a copy of the design I used on Ham and intend to continue using for deep space missions. For this reason the recycler is still attached, though I've reduced the amount of life support to 200 to bring the launch weight into the correct range for the 30 ton standard lifter I am using (I haven't used one of these in a while). The RTGs are attached to the last seperator, so they will be retained until the heatshield is discarded which is done at about 10-16 km from the surface when landing, followed later by the parachutes opening. In place of the experiments (I no longer have the Science Jr unlocked) I've attached both the grabber and a minimal fuel pump experiment consisting of an isolated tank and a fuel pump. The first stage booster with 6 Skipper engines gets the ship most of the way into space and then the second stage booster, which is just a single tank and Skipper, take over for the orbital insertion with about 100L of fuel left. An 831 m/s burn is used to adjust orbit to match the asteroid, with 2 orbits needed before they are close enough for a final push for interception that probably burns another 150 m/s in total. The first close interception is just under 1km (look at upper right), but I'm not going to try and link up at that point, on the opposite side of that same orbit they will pass within 200m of each other. This time when I make contact at about 3.5 m/s it is like a crash, bumping into the asteroid and sending everything into a spin with obvious stress on both attached ships joints. This stress would appear any time I came out of timewarp. There doesn't seem to be any science I can do from inside the ship so Merdun gets out to explore the asteroid directly. He takes a sample but it doesn't seem to be worth anything. Reboarding the fuel pump test is done but it seems that fuel cannot be pumped through the asteroid into the other ship (the asteroid is not a 'crossfeed' part). I forget to try moving around monopropellent - I have a feeling I could move that and life support around. Finally I try the capture asteroid command. This starts an experiment like the habitation study, requiring 60 minutes and showing me that it is being done on a Class A asteroid in Low Space. This raises a number of questions I'll need to find the answers for later: could I have done the 'capture' experiment way out in deep space, is there a matching experiment (and result) for high space, and can it be done with a kerbal involved? After 60 minutes the experiment is complete and I get 500 science! The experiment seems to be 'stored' in the asteroid but I can right click and use the 'transfer' to move it to the command pod. It also looks like it can be transmitted. With the results I detach from the asteroid (testing if the 'release' function on the grabber does what I expect) and then the grabber and fuel pump equipment are discarded before a reentry burn is made and the capsule seperates from the service module. The capsule performs normally during reentry. I turned off SAS but kept ready to use RCS to see that it was naturally stable. When the heatshield is discarded I found out that the seperator seperates everything - even radially attached items are removed unlike the decoupler which only detaches from whatever is linked to the top node.

Jam 1 I'm skipping over the letter i because I have several 'Ice' blueprints for an Eeloo mission, though they might not get used now. Jam 1 will attempt to fufill mission 1 of my asteroid goals. Since only basic equipment is required I fit it on the well used 60 ton launcher, most of the payload is fuel and I have about 6000 m/s once I reach orbit. The outer fuel tanks are on a single stage, I haven't used any fancy fuel lines since I think I already have enough delta-v. Since it can stay up indefinitely I simply launch the ship into a 100 km parking orbit and then go back to the observatory to find an asteroid. Something I've neglected to mention is how much debris is in Kerbin orbit beyond the visible stuff like all the discarded landers around the Mun. I've had several close calls where discarded boosters passed less then 8 km from a newly launched ship. Coming up to a 100 km gets me away from most of the debris which is between 70 and 80 km (most lower tech missions made their circulization and injection burns from a low ~74km orbit). I've combined two screenshots made in rapid succession (a few frames apart) to show what ships in standard orbit are dealing with. I'm looking for a suitable candiate to intercept. It needs to be class A (no point in measuring the mass of a larger asteroid yet, I'm trying to gather information on the smallest kind for a realistic first capture mission) and I want it to be in close orbit to Kerbin. There is an immediate class A candidate but it is about half way to Duna's orbit so I ignore it. Several weeks of watching produce a drought of class A asteroids (though I noted several as large as a class E, class F is either very rare or I was mistaken in the scale going that high) but after 45 days a new class A appears and it is an excellent candiate. Kerbal astronomers label the object YSQ-213 and it is following Kerbin closely, it will cross Kerbin's SOI in about 40 days. Last time I waited until the object was in Kerbin's SOI to try and intercept it. This time I will break free of Kerbin and go after it before it reachs Kerbin. I plot a minimal escape from Kerbin's SOI - I'm raising my orbit just slightly above Kerbin's. The initial course looks good, even without course correction I'll be coming close to YSQ. I can also see that OGD-061 (Ham 7) is still within my tracking range too though I expect contact will be lost at some point. I can also see that YSQ-213 is on a very close orbit, even closer then I had originally estimated. The short blueish line at upper left is my probe on its way to leave Kerbin for deep space, while the big sweeping turquoise line (visible now that I've selected the asteroid as my target) is where YSQ is going to swing past Kerbin in 5 weeks. If I can figure everything out in time it shouldn't take more then a nudge to capture it. My first correction burn actually brings me back into Kerbin's SOI by a few m/s which I correct with a second burn. However this new course will take 14 days before I leave Kerbin again. After an inclination burn to bring me within 4000 km of the target I settle in until I'm near the closest intercept point (about 4000 km) I burn to begin canceling out relative velocity until there is a difference of about 100 km. From there a series of small corrections gets my intercept down to 20 km - at the end of each burn I check to see if altering my speed, direction or angle or bring me closer. It's been 21 days since leaving Kerbin, which means I'll be intercepting the asteroid at about the half way point. From here I can handle it like a docking approach, canceling out velocity and coming in closer and just adjusting as I go. I get direct visual contact at about 500. YSQ-213 isn't much bigger then the probe. The claw is deployed and attaching seems to be as easy as flying straight into the asteroid. There doesn't seem to be any pull or strain. Attach it doesn't seem like any of my science instruments are useful -they all seem concerned with me being in high sun orbit rather then the asteroid. Right clicking the asteroid itself shows me it has some quantity of material - could this be for converting to fuel with the processor? I also see an option to claim the asteroid. I don't know what that does so I'm not going to try it until I've done everything else I can with it. Unfortunately I don't have a mass read out, at least not a direct one. Using the ship information on the map screen I can see my ship is now 32.51 tons - without doing a precise calculation of how much the ship weighs without the asteroid that would put YSQ-213 at around 8 tons, much lighter then I expected it to be. Based on the size of my ship, which is mostly fuel (the outer tanks are almost entirely empty), I'd make a ball park estimate that the density of the asteroid is about 1/4 that of rocket fuel. Since kerbal rocket fuel+oxydizer seems to have a density of 5 kg/L that means the asteroid is only about 25% denser then water if my eyeball measurements are correct (though they could be very wrong, I'm really just making a quick visual comparison and guess). That makes the composition of the asteroid something of a mystery - iron is something like 800% denser then water and silicon (dirt) is still 200% denser. Of course asteroids might be composed of other elements too (certainly things like oxygen and hydrogen are more abundent in the universe) and I went over to Wikipedia to see if there was any information. Apparently my guess for the density of the kerbal asteroid is not far off the density scientists have estimated for some (C type) real ones. I try clicking Target Center of Mass which I think did something - my target indicator moved a tiny bit though I'm still looking at the negative side. The claw has a free pivot option (this seems to let it flex instead of being rigid) though I have some trouble lining things up. I don't think that I quite understand this part yet. I experiment a bit with RCS - it seems I can get the whole thing turning though I'm not sure if navigation works. With lots of fuel and nothing else to do I sit in and wait for YSQ to reach Kerbin. Arriving at Kerbin navigation proves to be weird - I can set a node for capturing, but the blue target wants to move around wildly, it won't stay in one place. As I reach the PE I burn in a direction I hope is correct. Like I said it should only take a nudge to get into orbit and it seems to do it, though the asteroid is now in a spin. I'm now in orbit around Kerbin at least so I've got my second missions objective done. The safest place to try another burn is at the AP, since I don't risk breaking orbit. Rather then try a node I just burn using the prograde/retrograde markers which seem to be lined up correctly. I make a few more burns as the probe passes the PE/AP but they need to be short since it can't hold steady and thrust needs to be kept low. Once the PE is at 200 km I focus only on lowering the AP. Eventually I tried working on the pivot again and have some success in figuring out how to get it centered. I don't think I've got it perfect but it's closer enough that I can make more realistic burns without going too far off course. Once the orbit is nearly circular I start working on inclination which means keeping the orbit from going too far off in the process. Eventually I get down to a -21 degree inclination going in roughly the 'correct' direction (east to west). It should be possible for a ship to launch and meet with the asteroid without too much trouble. I've still got some fuel but monopropellent is running short so I'll conserve what I have. The next mission will be a manned visit to see if I can extract some science. After that I'll send up some equipment to start prodding my pet asteroid and see what it can do (things like fuel transfer through the asteroid, if the processor works and if so does it consume 'material' and at what rate).

Ham 7 This is a first attempt to explore an asteroid. I haven't done this in stock and haven't really payed much attention to how the asteroid missions work - so far the bits of information I know are that you can pick an unknown object to track, at which point it becomes persistant, that they are classified by letter with A being the smallest and E or F being the largest, I know that you can attach to an asteroid with the grabber sort of like a docking port and I know that once attached there is a 'gimble' option of some sorts so you can adjust the angle of the ship relative to the asteroid for the purpose of aligning thrust. I also know that asteroids supposedly act like a ship part you can right click for information and consumables can flow between 2 seperately attached items but I'm not sure how that works with relation to the more restricted fuel flow of BTSM or if the fuel processor works on asteroids. Without knowing the specifics of the mission I tried to wing it. I took a Ham class ship and removed the now obsolete solar panels, replacing them with 6 RTGs to power the pod. I then attached a small taxi/asteroid lander. It's just a lander can with a supply of monopropellent, batteries and a grabber along with a few science instruments. I've fitted a decoupler to the grabber since I'm not sure if you can release once you've grabbed on so I want to make sure my kerbal can get back to the mothership without resorting to a long EVA. The life support supply has been reduced to 60 days, giving me some time to linger without adding a lot of weight. I've identified and begun tracking a class A asteroid, OGD-061, which will soon pass through Kerbin's SOI. Ham 7 is launched into orbit to intercept it, hopefully while it is still within Kerbin's SOI to make a return straight forward (there is about a 36 hour window for this). One thing I only thought about after launching is that the RTGs could have been placed on the seperator between the heatshield and the recycler. This way the pod would have power right until the final landing sequence was begun after reentry. With a potential high velocity return from Eeloo I want the pod to be ready for a aerobrake return - it seperates but instead of landing it only slows down enough in the atmosphere to get into a degrading orbit. The pod carries plenty of life support supplies, it just needs power to last long enough for the orbit to degrade enough to bring it home (that strategy was used for some of my early probe return missions, making 3 passes through the atmosphere for a soft return). Given the way this mission turned out I regret not being able to test that system. The ship is aligned to match the asteroids path and then a basic intercept is plotted. I can't seem to get it below about 70km with the node but I assume that I can refine that. The two question marks in orbit are Grape 2 and 3, which took on those icons after being detached from Grape 1. I have no idea why and might try to change them. As I get closer I can't seem to get the intercept refined. I finally make the burn to align their orbits and I'm still at least 100 km out. I can't really figure out how to get them close enough without going on a longer deep space journey. Since I haven't planned this out enough and it's obviously not going right I decide to call off the mission and bring Lemger home. A hard burn brings him back into orbit around Kerbin and on and landing course. I'm a little slow on getting things setup for reentry. The lander is discarded long before hitting the atmosphere but the final pod setup isn't done until I'm already descending. The monopropellent valves need to be opened before seperation and pod consumables double checked along with some parachute tweaks. By the time the pod seperates it is already at 43 km and has to expand the heatshield and rapidly turn around. The pod is aligned in time but I cut it much too close for comfort. The rest of the reentry proceeds normally. The pod slows down and when it is safe the heatshield is discarded and SAS turned off. Below 6km the parachutes are deployed for a soft water landing. Much like some of my early missions in BTSM I think I need to treat these asteroids as something new (which they are). I need to approach them step by step so I can figure out how to work with them. I'm going to break this down into several smaller missions with specific goals. Mission 1 Send a small one way probe to grapple a class A asteroid. Since it's unmanned I won't have an time pressure on the intercept. It will carry some basic science instruments (not sure if these can be used in stock or BTSM) but the real goals of this mission will be to figure out the particulars of intercepting an asteroid, determine if an asteroid passing Kerbin can be intercepted in a reasonable amount of time (is a manned mission practical on a passing asteroid or does it need to be captured first) and finally I hope to find out the rough mass of a class A asteroid, which is important if I need to capture it. Mission 2 Assuming I need to capture an asteroid for a practical manned mission this will be a mission to travel out and capture one (maybe the same one I've already got a probe on). This will bring a class A asteroid into Kerbin orbit. Mission 3 A manned mission to the asteroid. This will attempt to determine what science (beyond whatever might be possible in mission 1) can be done on an asteroid and what the return value is, at least for a class A. Mission 4 An unmanned mission to the same captured asteroid, this time with a fuel processor that will be attached to the asteroid along with a tank and docking/pump setup. This will determine if it is possible to extract fuel from an asteroid.

Upgrading to 1.55 of BTSM changes the tech tree a bit. There are two new solid boosters at the beginning, I'm not going to look at the specs now so that it will be a surprise when I start a new career later. A few things are moved to different nodes in tier 5 and 6. There is a node called Negative Results in tier 6 that doesn't seem to do anything...this might be an artifact of me starting on a much earlier version. I guess I'll find out on a second play through. There is also a super heavy solid booster on tier 7, I think that is one of the NASA parts. I probably won't be using it at this stage. A few other parts are shifted around at tier 7, my favorite LV909 is here, I wonder how that will affect things. On tier 8 I see another NASA part (the silly combined liquid engine and fuel tank) but I also see a rather important change - I no longer have the Science Jr, it has been moved to that flight node I didn't unlock. I'll need to unlock it if I want to use the Science Jr again. The tier 9 node where I already unlocked the RTG now also has the fuel processor and monopropellent processor. I guess I can use them now if I want. The last major change I see, apart from one fewer tier 9 nodes, is that the habittation study seems to be moved to the lab module. Reading the text it is also only valid in low orbit when there is an atmosphere, so you need to land otherwise. It is still 5 years. Edit: for some reason there are entries for the Advanced Grabbing Unit in both Composites and Advanced Exploration.

Grape 1 (part 2) So Nedvan Kerman on board Grape 1 is still doing his long term study in Kerbin orbit. Even with all the interplanetary missions it is only half way complete. One odd thing is that it doesn't look like much of any life support has been used up, I'm not sure why that is. There will ultimately be a lot of weirdness around this study and since I'm not running the latest version of BTSM (I will be once the study is done and returned) I'm not going to give much thought to any bugs I encounter. So I switch to the tracking station and begin advancing 2.4 years. This brings up another bug which I'm not sure is stock or BTSM - it starts getting noticibly slow and jerky advancing the years. This slowness continued right up until I finally exited the game and task manager showed it was likely because of a resource leak. After advancing about 2.4 years I came back and found that the study needed 14.9 hours to complete. So I went to 50x speed, the fastest I could in an 80km orbit and waited a bit. But even if I changed back to 1x speed the time to completion would still say 14.9 hours. So I finally had to switch to another object, advance a day and come back. Upon returning I immediately got the message that the study was complete. 5 years of work has resulted in a whole 300 science. With the study complete the two supply sections (Grape 2 and 3) are cut lose and the reentry engine is lit up. Once on a reentry course Nedvan moves into the reentry pod which has the biometric experiment attached and decouples from the station. Unfortunately reentry is on the night side of Kerbin so there isn't a lot to see. Reentry goes smoothly and the heatshield is discarded and parachutes opened for a water landing. Unfortunately a bug seems to have affected the experiment, since despite returning it as instructed I don't get the science. As I said before this is an older version of BTSM and this experiment has undergone changes and fixes since then.

The main thing that was holding back my upgrade was the habitation experiment (Grape 1). It was one of the things in a lot of flux between versions so I didn't want to upgrade and potentially mess it up. I fast forwarded time another 2.4 years to complete the study and I'll post the results of that soon. Once I do the upgrade I'll try out an asteroid mission. I haven't touched asteroids or the grabber in stock and haven't really read about them so it will be a real first time for everything. Without any clue about the fuel requirements I'll just be setting up a modified Ham class ship with something like 60 days of life support and a little asteroid intercept shuttle to taxi between the mothership and the asteroid (the Ham class turns like a pig, one of the reasons for not trying to make 2 of them dock with each other for refueling). The tech tree changes might also alter my big picture once I see them.

I'll look at upgrading, I'm still at 522c. Another thought I've had but haven't worked out (I've been having a lot going on lately so KSP hasn't got a lot of time regardless) is a Duna stop. I had calculated before that Duna was the best location for a fuel stop on the way to Eeloo (Dres is too far out of the way and Jool doesn't help much since it takes almost as much fuel to reach). I'm not sure of the exact setup because I haven't played with the numbers but I'm wondering how much benefit I could get from a probe controlled ship flown out to Duna. A shuttle would then be used to bring a kerbal to Duna. At that range the shuttle could bring enough to refuel the first ship (with Eeloo you burn a ton just bringing the fuel out there) and the kerbal would then abandon the shuttle (and it's 60-100 days of life support) and move into the fully fueled, fully loaded ship for a trip to Eeloo where there could potentially be a third ship with a lander and some more fuel. Or if I really wanted to I could just go with many ships - deploy a small fleet of simple ships carrying fuel and life support and send them out to Eeloo (they would be small enough that they could dock without lots of pain). Then send the main manned mothership as a followup where it would arrive at Eeloo low on fuel and life support, ready to be refilled.

Yeah, a Moho mission is very similar to Eeloo. I had written off getting the nuclear engines (another tier 9 tech) because it would require missions to both Dres and Moho, and if I was going to Moho I might as well go to Eeloo. Now that I think about it though I might as well at least run some quick calculations to see what kind of savings I'd get due to the reduced life support cost vs the fuel costs.

Still thinking a bit off and on about the Eeloo ship, looking for enough time to realistically tackle it. As a reference the Ham design is 300 tons into orbit around Kerbin (it was designed for 120 tons to reach Duna or Eve orbit) and a second napkin calculation I've done for the weight of a single ship (ignoring some staging) to do the mission by itself was just short of 600 tons which seemed to validate my initial thoughts that a pair of Ham class ships could do it together. The key design issues with the pair of ships are a reliable means of docking and transfering the fuel. If the target ship has any outboard tanks that need refueling then it either needs fuel lines leading to them or each has a seperate docking port. There is then the issue of ensuring I can reliably dock a pair of 100 ton ships one or more times. Even with a lot of RCS thrusters the Ham series wasn't exactly maneuverable and even a tiny amount of spin carries a massive amount of momentum - docking would need to be perfectly straight on because those magnets wouldn't have a prayer against those forces. Using multiple docking ports was one possibility but it raised some serious questions about whether it would mess up the operation of the fuel pump, plus it wouldn't work if the one port that didn't lock on (as often happens) was the one with the pump. On the idea of a single 600 ton ship I did throw that number into a spreadsheet and came up with a 3 stage lifter (all 3 stages are fully used and discarded in comparison to Ham's 2.5 stage design) that seems like it would be viable under the new .23.5 rules that make joints roughly equal to the strong nuclear force. It might kill the framerate but it could be worth a shot to simply put the entire ship up at once. Granted if budgets existed it would cost more then all previous launches combined - 84 mainsails and over 300,000 tons of liquid fuel, not counting oxidizer.

Edit the original post and click advanced. Then you'll have a drop down beside the title to set it to answered.

What screen resolution are you running the game at? If you are running a lower resolution you'll have fewer items visible at once because they can't all fit. 11 rows sounds like someone running at 1920x1080. I have 12 rows because I'm running at 1920x1200. You can see all the rows in a YouTube video because the screen is being shrunk down to fit in the YouTube players little space.

Are you playing in career mode? If you are then those parts won't appear until you unlock them in the tech tree by spending science. You earn science by performing observations and experiments in different locations and returning or transmitting the results back home. Many mods do add additional parts, but without more information about what parts you can see and what you see in the videos I can't tell you if you are seeing any mod parts.

I don't really like clipping and they'd have to be clipped a lot to fit under the drop tanks since those life support kegs are the size of regular T200 fuel tanks. In the end I just didn't need all the fuel (dropping the tanks was planned form the start so all the other burns where budgeted without that fuel). It's really a case of me building in more safety then I needed, so the ship had more fuel, especially in the injection tanks, then it would ever use. Part of that comes from the fact that I basically built the ship around the launch system rather then building the smallest ship to do the mission and then building a launch system for it. I'm starting to run some more detailed numbers for Eeloo and it's starting to come together as to how payloads should be split up if I want to build this on the existing launch platform instead of building some super launch platform (with the framerate drop I get I don't think I want to go bigger). One ship will be the manned ship. The center section will strongly resemble Ham but use a small RTG collection instead of a solar array. The 6 outer modules will likely be short and identical instead of the 2 very tall tanks seen on Ham. There will be roughly 1000 days of life support - 22 kegs attached to the center section and 22 kegs attached to the outer tanks. There will be enough fuel to reach Eeloo orbit where the empty tanks, along half a set of empty kegs, will be discarded leaving 500 days of life support (the return trip is faster then the outbound trip but has a larger margin of error to be accounted for - I'm carrying at least 25% more then required to cover it). A second ship, piloted by probe core and powered by RTG, will have departed Kerbin ahead of the manned ship. It will travel to Eeloo and enter orbit. Instead of 44 kegs of life support it will be carrying over 5000L of fuel (roughly equal weight) along with fuel pumps mounted to a pair of side docking points. On top will be a lander of similar size (slightly lighter) then the one that went to Duna. The first ship will dock to the side of this supply ship and be refueled. The pilot will then EVA over to the lander which will remain attached to the supply ship as it is undocked from the manned mothership and carried a short distance away before the lander seperates and goes down to Eeloo. Upon return from Eeloo the lander will dock with the mothership so the pilot can transfer over. The lander, except for the science components, will be discarded and the refueled and lightened mothership will return to Kerbin.

Ham 6 As I said before I'm skipping around a bit with numbering. Technically this is the second Ham class ship to fly (I'm not sure how much the future trip to Eeloo will use of Ham, I will likely be using the same launch platform and the return capsule but the rest of the structure might be redone). Lemger Kerman will be flying to Duna on a slightly upgraded Ham platform. I've add 2 more supply pods to add a degree of safety (8 pods now, up from 6) and of course there is a Duna specific lander mounted on top since the Gilly lander wouldn't really work. The same process is used to perform an injection burn to Duna as was used to reach Eve. Once the burn is done the injection tanks and remaining fuel (460L x 2) where discarded like before so the solar array could be opened. Since this trip is to Duna monitoring solar performance is very important. The ship is reoriented several times during the journey to keep the panels from being blocked by each other or the rear engines. 2 small corrections are made mid-flight, one a few days from Kerbin at the AN and another a few days before reaching Duna to bring the approach to about 60 km from Duna's surface. Arriving at Duna the capture is with engines to setup a roughly 60km x 60km orbit (to allow 50x warping). I didn't get the approach perfectly straight so I'm inclined in my orbit. It's not enough that I'm going to worry about it. The probe Apple 2 can be seen on the surface though it's far from our potential landing zone. Crew reports and biometric readings are taken in low and high orbit and both goo containers on the mothership are used. The mothership goes for half a rotation around Duna (to get past the night side) while preparation are made for the landing. The lander's supplies are topped up and the batteries checked for charge. The mothership's probe core is activated and SAS+RCS is turned on to keep it stable. This time I remembered and retracted the solar array - the probe core has lots of battery power (it will last several times longer then the life support in the lander) and this avoids potential damage during docking. Finally Lemger takes a short space walk to reach the lander (the desired placement of a Science Jr prevents an internal tunnel) and detaches. After using RCS to move out of the mothership's path the engines are lit up and lightly begin thrusting to deorbit the lander. Once the deorbit burn is complete the heat shield can be inflated (it will block the engines). The heat shield turns out to be a bit useless. Descent speed never exceeds 800 m/s and by the time the air gets thicker circumstances have reduced it further. One goo container is used in the high atmosphere and crew related readings are taken there and when it reaches the lower atmosphere. At 18km the navball automatically switches to surface speed and I take that as a cue to ditch the heatshield and begin slowing down. I've said before that I consider Duna the most challenging planet to land on - everywhere else you can either use parachutes or just pack enough fuel but on Duna there are multiple chances for your ship to be violently destroyed. The engines are now burning to slow the ship down to an acceptable speed for parachute deployment. Without the heatshield I'm monitoring temperature - the bottom reaches a high temperature of 332 C but no more. At 9km the ship has slowed to just over 400 m/s and the parachutes are partially deployed to start providing me with some free drag. After a few seconds the engines are shutoff since speed is now at 350 m/s and dropping, slow enough I think that I should be safe when they fully deploy. The parachutes fully deploy at just under 6km, almost instantly snapping the ship from 330 m/s to 105m/s and pushing the G meter for a brief second. The ship stays in one piece and Lemger seems to pull through fine so the final landing sequence can be executed. With the parachutes open the ship is still falling at 20 m/s - I overshot the canyon I wanted to land on and instead I'm descending toward a 5.5km high mountain where the air is still thin. The lander was only designed for a parachute only landing up to 3.5km so some engine thrust is required to cut the last bit, reducing speed to about 7m/s. My biggest fear about using engine thrust is that it can tip the lander so I'm sure to cut it just before touching down. Even so you can see the lander wants to tip on the steep hill and the SAS kicks in with RCS to keep it planted. On the ground the second Goo container can be used along with crew and biometric reports. The Science Jr is easily access from the ladder and then surface experiments can be run. The lander still has 354 L of fuel (well above the safety margins I set for getting back into orbit - 320L ideal, 252L absolute minimum). Once everything is done Lemger returns to the lander for a nap while the mothership circles back into position overhead. With the mothership in position the lander heads back up into space. Because of the inclination a single orbit intercept is not possible. Inclination is adjusted on the first mutual orbit and on the second a burn is made to adjust course and bring the two together. Fortunately there is enough life support in the lander to safely perform these operations (it will dock with close to half it's life support remaining). I did switch between craft so that the mothership could perform some of the burns (specifically the inclination burn) since it had a much easier fuel situation and I want to ensure the lander had fuel to perform the close in burns that required quick attitude control. A consequence of this is that the batteries in the lander didn't drain in relation to the life support (batteries don't drain if the craft isn't focused). This wasn't a planned exploit and the lander had enough battery power regardless to match its life support reserves. Docking was in the dark and I had actually considered but never got around to installing lights on the mothership for this mission. The lander approached from behind, making a slight adjustment so that it would pass beside the mothership and then casually turns around for a braking burn before using RCS to travel the last 10m for docking. I considered making a GIF but it's dark anyway and it's about 4 seconds between each shot below, so it would have been really long. After docking Lemger doesn't immediately come back or open the solar array. It seems that with the docking the mothership is now going to dip a few hundred meters into the atmosphere (41,900m) in a few minutes so I'm going to wait that out. After passing safely the sun comes up and Lemger travels back to the mothership's control pod and tranfers all the science. Monopropellent and life support supplies are stripped from the lander. Once the lander has no more use it is ejected using the decoupler that linked it to the Science Jr and through that to the docking port. This leaves behind the Science Jr and Goo containers in the same configuration as the Gilly trip. The solar array can be deployed again and return burn (1750m/s) to Kerbin can be plotted. There is plenty of life support and fuel for the return journey. The extra engines are dropped after about 1100m/s since their fuel has run out. The center engine carries on to complete the burn. Returning to Kerbin I setup a burn to lower the PE by about 100km for reentry, but do it in a less then normally efficient manner, lower then the orbit of the Mun resulting in a cost of 1200 m/s. The reason is that I'll also be bleeding off 1200 m/s from my speed by braking into a lower PE like this. After burning I still have over 800L of fuel left and about 19 minutes before hitting the atmosphere. Speed is currently 3.9km/s but getting faster thanks to gravity. I begin burning all remaining fuel for braking, adjusting my angle to try and keep the PE roughly on target. With 11 minutes to go I've reduced speed to 3.1km/s and the PE is at 30km. I fill up the command pods life support reserve from 2 of the kegs and turn off the recycler. Like before I am going on the assumption that if I wind up in a degrading orbit instead of landing my survival will depend on electrical power rather then life support supplies. Descending over the south pole the rest of the mothership is discarded and the command pod inflates its heat shield for reentry. Entering the atmosphere at 4200 m/s the pod doesn't bleed off enough speed to keep descending, however the skip is only back up to 35km before it starts falling again. The heatshield gets warm during descent but holds. After a smooth 2nd descent the heatshield is discarded at 9km and then the parachutes are deployed at 6. The pod softly lands in the ocean. The mission brings in enough science to unlock the RTG.

I've run numbers on Duna many times and for a single kerbal mission (assuming no mods) there is only a small advantage to any kind of docking. Once you've landed on Duna the amount of delta-v you need to get into orbit and return to Kerbin can be fit into a relatively small craft. You definitely don't need nuclear engines for a mission to Duna. Just to illustrate that nuclear engines are not required, the ship below can make a round trip from the launchpad to the surface of Duna and back (bottom portion gets it into Kerbin orbit, the 2 fuel tanks strapped to the side get it to the surface of Duna and the middle tanks get it back to Kerbin). Now this isn't the kind of design you should be aiming for right now - you should be carrying more science stuff (you don't have the small Double-C or GravMax instruments so you'll want the Science Jr and Goo containers) and you can definitely carry more fuel to make the trip safer. Like I said, that's probably not the ship you should use. But there is a core concept to take from it which is that the portion that will return you from the surface of Duna back to Kerbin doesn't need to be big. A lander can, FL-400 tank, Rockomax 48-7S and some support equipment like solar panels and a parachute will do pretty well. You can remove the data from any experiment you run so there is no need to bring them back to Kerbin - just run them on the surface, collect the result and then abandon them when you take off. A more realistic but maybe a bit overdone Duna expedition can be seen here. I've gone to Duna and collected nearly every scrap of science (even sent a probe to collect data from Ike) at about the same tech level as you (though I've unlocked some more science instruments). You'll note that that return craft is very close to what I described and I attached my science and other support equipment to the sides so that it could be ejected when I was done with it.

The delta-v you will get for a given amount of fuel is the same regardless of how quickly you thrust (unless you do it inside the atmosphere of Laythe or Jool where the ISP will be lowered). However when you thrust will have a big impact on how far you'll actually go, which means there are strong advantages to thrusting as quickly as possible so that your delta-v is being used at the most optimum time. As a simple example if you want to expand your orbit then burning at the AP and PE will provide a lot more benefit then anywhere else. You should really figure out how to use maneuver nodes, you can use them to figure out when to burn if you want to line up an encounter with one of Jool's moons.

Radiation shielding could be interesting but I'm not sure how it could be done - most direct implimentations seem like they could be easily gamed. Rover science would be interesting - I'd love to see mechanics that would lead to more then one type of probe instead of a one size fits all packed with all the instruments. I also wish there where some mechanics to encourage/require more then one kerbal for interplanetary trips. Right now the one man cupola is the king of life support which is a bit unrealistic. I've suggested in the past that the cupola have its life support raised to match the Mk1-2 but power requirement lowered. Then add a hitchhiker type capsule with a 'garden'. It would require a minimal number of kerbals to operate but when in operation it would be like a recycler, significantly reducing the life support requirements. This would make it natural to take multiple kerbals on an interplanetary trip to get the advantage of the garden.

I'm actually refering to the .23 career in my sig, .23 Career (Science on a budget) . It's a stock career and was my second career save after the one I created for .22. I laid out a series of missions before hand though it turned out that science was much easier to get and I had to impose further 'budget' restrictions to try and keep things interesting. I lost interest in the last phase - the final 3 missions with the entire tech tree unlocked where basically big engineering missions (major Laythe mission, 2 man mission to Moho, manned mission to Eve) and I just don't get interested in those. That's why I'm looking to reach my goal of Eeloo in this save, then I can call it finished and start playing a fresh save with the updates you've made.

I probably wouldn't use a spacestation for it. If I had the energy to keep going with my .23 career and do the big engineering missions (where I would be limited to 4 LV-Ns with which to do them all I think) then I would have built a refuelable, reuseable nuclear tug that would park in Kerbin orbit where new drop tanks would be attached and 2 payloads would be attached - the mission payload and the return capsule. In this case there really isn't much of a need to reuse the ship. I can put it into space with a single launch and the drop tanks are much easier to work in when they use decouplers and struts instead of something that has to be locked on exclusively with docking ports and still fly stable. There is also the amount of reuse it would get - I only intend to fly one more mission with the Ham interplanetary ship before I unlock RTGs and the design is retired in favor of one with a 100% reliable and renewable power source. After Duna my destination will likely be Eeloo so I can wrap this up. I haven't worked out exactly how that mission will work. One idea I have is to launch 2 ships with a similar mass and engine configuration as Ham, the first one unmanned that would fly out to Eeloo and park there and a follow up manned ship. There are a few ways I could use two ships - the unmanned ship would almost certainly carry a lander and could include a fuel pump to refuel the second manned ship. An alternative design would see one ship used to reach Eeloo (with the higher delta-v requirements) where it would meet the lander and the ship that would be used to return home.

Ham 4 (Part 4) The ship is intended to return immediately to Kerbin - there is no point using up life support sitting in Eve orbit. My pre-planning showed a 60-odd day return from Eve but I couldn't seem to find it. I was able to find a 89 day transit instead that would take the ship outside of Kerbin's orbit. The Duna capable solar array will be needed for this portion of the trip. On the flip side the burn isn't very expensive at 1227 m/s though I have tons of fuel at this point (the center tank alone was designed to provide a final 3000 m/s for a safe return burn). The burn is on the other side of Eve's orbit so it will be a 2 day wait before it is executed. The side engines run out of fuel about a third of the way into the burn. There are no fuel lines so they are draining fuel at the same time as the center tank. They've provided about 400 m/s but now they are dropped and I sit in for a long burn on the center engine. The original time estimate with all 5 engines was 1:50, but with the thrust cut by 80% another 3 minutes is added. It's still under 5 minutes so the Ham ship is still quite speedy. In deep space a 180 m/s course correction is needed to fix up my approach (my initial burn wasn't accurate enough to actually get an encounter, just a close intercept) and to bring my estimate PE to less then 200km. The real challenge during the transit is keeping the solar array aligned during the large sweeping flight around the sun. With all the external tanks dropped the weight is far more balanced from end to end which means I actually have a lot more RCS thrust then I need. You can see that the tail end of the ship has massively overengineered RCS thrusters to counter the weight imbalance during the early stages of the mission. Place anywhere thrusters for pitch and yaw and 2 sets of regular thusters for rolling. Arriving back at Kerbin the final PE is lowered to 25 km. My experience at Jool showed me the inflatable heatshield can take a massive amount of punishment so I calculate the risk being greater if I don't aerobrake enough then if I aerobrake too much. I also transfer life support from 4 of the containers into the pod, refilling it nearly to capacity. The pods monopropellent tank valves are also opened and finally the recycler is turned off - with all the life support transfered to the pod it can last for days but once it is seperated from the mothership it will be on batteries so I want to reduce consumption in case the aerobraking captures but doesn't deorbit the pod (resulting in the pod potentially orbiting for several hours before a second dip in the atmosphere). At 400 km the pod decouples from the mothership. The heatshield is inflated and aligned for reentry. Orbital velocity is about 4000 m/s and rising as it approaches. A little bit of RCS is used to actively keep the ship aligned. It would probably align naturally by weight but I don't want any risk from it shifting to find that sweat spot. The heatshield easily protects the ship and enough velocity is lost to put it on a path to land. With speed at under 500 m/s the heatshield is discarded. At 6km the parachutes are deployed for final landing. Despite lacking a parachute the heatshield survives landing. The mission provides plenty of science, Duna will easily provide enough to unlock the RTG. Something I may take into consideration for Duna is adding an additional pair of life support containers. With the unexpected longer trip from Eve I may need to plan for a similar situation for Duna. Delta-v shouldn't be a problem though I need to be very careful with the solar system. Additional batteries for safety might also be advisable.