lajoswinkler

Sideways. The service module is 3.75 m wide (Taurus HCV) and has doors which reveal docking ports.

Roughly 303.9 km. Unlike Eve, data in the map view for Sarnus is identical to the actual experience. Check out my flagship mission at the banner link, there is actual flight data you'll find useful.

And that's, children, what memes are. Memes are not silly photos with words on them. Memes are viral ideas.

More data about aerobraking at Sarnus using FAR, check it out. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/104160-Kron-series?p=1782515&viewfull=1#post1782515

One more aerobraking without changing apoapsis at 280.5 km resulted in this orbit. As Slate was my primary target, this was very convenient. Series of burns circularized the orbit. From now on it was very easy to get captured into Slate's orbit. At the edge of its SOI, inclination was changed to 39.5° to cover the latitude where Kron 3D lander is. Again, after series of burns, the ship was parked in a circular 100 km high orbit. Now is the proper time for Kerbals to wake up. RTG units are a bit over 50% and large battery banks are 100% full. There's science to be done above and on Slate.

Of course, every new thing has its awful applications. This one is potentially incredibly dangerous.

Screw Inception.

They are the perfect mixture of angry mofos and cute.

Dumpy

Indeed, 7900 m/s is probably too much for DRE with any normal vessel configuration. You were lucky your entire ship content hasn't evaporated. I don't think fins would help in my case. This is outermost part of the atmosphere where lift forces are way too small. Also, the fins would have to be inside shield shadow, and with FAR this means that they probably wouldn't interact with the atmosphere well. I can't tell for sure.

Did it manually. OPM devs, this post contains some data you might find interesting. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/104160-Kron-series?p=1781127&viewfull=1#post1781127

After initial aerobraking, Kron 3 has been captured into highly eccentrical orbit. Success. I had to do it 4 times. Braking using periapsis of 302 km took away only 10 m/s. 295 km took away 50 m/s, 288 km 140 m/s, and finally, a bit over 280 km took over 310 m/s. Approaching the ring system. All instruments folded. Shield positioned prograde. Slate and Eeloo peeking behind the rings. Inclination set at 1.9° made it avoid direct ring contact. Impact at more than 5700 m/s instantly enveloped the shield into plasma. This almost turned into a disaster when the decceleration started exceeding 0.1 G. The ship can tolerate up to 0.06 G indefinitively, and 0.1 for a short amount of time before it starts bending. As you can see here, maximum load was 0.277 G which was enough to expose the fuel tanks. Luckily, the heat transfer was not enough to cause explosions, but it was very close. Procedural Parts' shield system doesn't work perfectly. Plenty of heat bleeds over to the connected parts. Nevertheless, without the shield, resistance would be much weaker and heat transmission would cause rapid and total destruction. Remember, this is FAR and DRE on hard mode. At least the ship has been captured. Several more aerobrakings will have to be done to lower the eccentricity of the orbit. Total eclipse of Kerbol by Sarnus. Kerty will soon wake up the crew.

Tommygun, that's a good design. Also, when the fuel is proper, there are way less problems.

You're still bugged about this? Do you or do you not want to play it? It's that simple.

I have, back when it came out. It didn't work well so I've abandoned it. Maybe I should give it another try...

Sure. Salyut was very interesting and Mir is something I watched glide across the sky.

Jool seems to be much more forgiving for aerobraking... Sarnus has more atmosphere and it's less stuffed close to the "surface", extending higher, so I guess Jool experiences don't help. I smell failure, but that's why we have F9.

Deep Freeze and yes, TAC. - - - Updated - - - Well this was probably the longest burn in real time. More than 4 hours at an average 0.5 m*s-2, which was thrusting at some 60%. At least I could do some other stuff, but every now and then I'd check if it was time for tank jettisoning. This is how the ship looks now. And this is the established trajectory. Corrections will obviously be necessary. Ship's systems are offline, engines are shut down and now this becomes a long voyage in dead silence of vacuum. 1 year and 219 days, Earth time, to arrival.

Can someone be a lamb and tell me the best average height for aerobraking at Sarnus? I use FAR and DRE.

Pile of horse poo. Yes, it can do good things for us, but its total effect is very negative. Deserts will not turn into lush areas. Zero evidence or theoretical predictions for that. What we see is an increased amount of energy in the atmosphere and hydrosphere, leading to more temperature and wind extremes: friggid cold waves, insane heat waves, worse and worse storms. Few years ago Arctic was turned into a completely passable sea for the first time in the history of humanity. That is not normal. Species are migrating. Tropical marine species are migrating towards the north because of the elevated seawater temperatures. That is extremely dangerous for natural variety of life in one area and it is detrimental to the fishery industry. By marine species I don't mean only fishes which compete with domestic ones. I also mean zooplankton - jellyfish included. They wreck havoc on juvenile fishes, destroying the fish stock. Insects are migrating. Europe is bombarded by dangerous tiger mosquitos. Domestic mosquitos survive winter. Summertime weeds survive winters, some of them are allergenic. This and many more things are happening. It is difficult to accept for people who live in regions of USA where arctic airmasses blow. They are obviously more prone to think there is no global warming. But the rest of the world is having more and more problems. It's not going to be the end, but it will cause lots of death over a great period of time. Party is over. This is an extinction level event for many species already, but not a sudden one, so you can't make a superhero movie about it and people don't give a crap because their lives aren't endangered in a way like when an asteroid is about to cover their house with a kilometre of ocean or molten rock. Hybrids will not help. Electric cars will not help if we continue to produce energy from coal. Solar panels will not help.

"DART" - hilarious

You used one wrong premise and it lead to a faulty conclusion. "Normal is what is common" - true, that is the definition of normal. Normal does not mean "good", "optimal" or "moral". It just means common - something that is seen in most cases. "it's common to be abnormal/different" - this is in direct violation with the first premise. If something is abnormal, then it is not common. Therefore the conclusion that you're perfectly normal is not valid. You claim to have Asperger's syndrome, an autistic disorder. That is not normal. People with autism disorders are very uncommon. Their small number and the fact it lowers the expected quality of life itself, makes it not a variation (like what being a lefthanded person is), but a disorder. However that does not make you neccessarily bad person. Don't let people's faulty logic make you think that being abnormal in one aspect immediately makes you a douchebag. Maybe you are a douchebag, I really don't know, but that is not important here.

I don't like the idea of merging. OPM+ doesn't have the realism, vanilla flavor or actual quality of OPM. I'm not even sure why this mod exists. OPM is a work in progress. Forking WIPs is quite an annoying thing in my opinion... Indeed it is. One of the best mods for KSP ever.

Slingshot maneuver went fine. Bill talked to Kerty (onboard computer) to pass the time. After leaving Kerbin's sphere of influence, Bill had to make sure there was no damage to the ship. There was - two of the struts that hold the shield in place broke for some odd reason. Additional inspection showed no further structural damage. After checking everything and carefully avoiding ship's stern where hot fission reactors are, Bill climbed on the cryonics module and gave one last look at his home. Kron 3 is now a ship carrying bodies, commanded by Kerty the computer. Change of inclination to match Sarnus' orbit took some 346 m/s. One more set of tanks has been jettisoned. Still more than 9 km/s are left for this configuration. Next maneuver is raising solar apoapsis to touch Sarnus. Jool was available for a slingshot but it would be a useless move as the savings in raising apoapsis would definitively be ruined by the need to adjust the disrupted inclination, so the idea was abandoned.

The ship is on its way to be thrown out of the Kerbin system by Mun. Only one set of tanks was spent. During all these burns at the periapsis, I was trying to account for one full Kerbin month so that Mun will get in the same position as it was in when the burns started. The last burn took 54 m/s and placed the ship in this trajectory. So this is the closest Kron 3 will be to home in a very long time.