Silverchain

The latest iteration of my Euryale class makes LKO with roughly six orange tanks worth of fuel, so should be good for comparison. Euryale 23-Fc It's 1573 tons on the launch pad and a lot of parts; there are three detachable dockable fuel tanks (3/4 big orange size) and the rest is accessible through docking. 270 tons in orbit (for 5 3/4 tanks fuel.) Not a very efficient design, ugly, asparagus, lots of stages, but if you want to put fuel in space it works.

No. For a bare-bones enclosed cabin and a 48-7S and nothing else you're not going to be able to get more 2000 dV for that (if the 108 is total liq + ox units); for any practical big ship you're not going to get anything like. You might be able to do it with a slingshot from Dres, I dunno. I would send another ship out to rescue them - rendezvous in solar orbit is not much harder than rendezvous in planetary orbit, just takes a bit longer.

Spaceplane/rover Cadillac Bling aerobraking at Duna. Cadillac Bling landed safely and searching for whatever that anomaly is that's down on the southern polar cap. Bollocks. And it's cold down here. Smelly Shandy landed near the base and drove there. Okay, okay, that's it for Duna. On to Ike!

I mentioned earlier that I was wondering what to do with all those borrowed Funky Gibbon-class ships... ...they do look very cool when landed with all their solar panels deployed. In the foreground is the Jessica Rainbow; back left the Desmond Droideka, then a small orbit shuttle and the rover Felicity Vector, then the Daniel Elijah Pulsifer and finally Coyote Man on the right. Getting all this hardware to the same place was a wee bit complicated, especially the rover. I landed the rover about 55km away on that orbit shuttle but didn't want to risk making a suborbital hop with it attached. So I drove it... fortunately the base rover is pretty much indestructible, but it lose a lot of externally mounted bits and pieces on the way. And then I tried hopping the shuttle over and it worked just fine... Coyote Man has just enough fuel to make orbit, I think, but I don't want to risk it so I'll leave it here at the base. I'll launch Heineken Keg, rendezvous with the Merry Go Round and use that for Ike instead, though I still want to see some other sights of Duna.

In orbit above Duna, new arrival Heineken Keg brings a can full of fuel to the nearly empty Coyote Man. Heineken Keg descends under chutes towards the surface of Duna. Happy landings. Back on Kerbin, spaceplane Six-Pack (unimaginatively named for the extra wheels it's sporting) lifts off... ...and touches down. Back to the drawing board! My aim at the moment is to get spaceplane rovers safely touched down on the surface of Duna and rendezvoused with the lander. And I need to get one of the Blue Toga rovers out there too.

Another day, another accident. Royal Rainbow II, carrying an as-yet-unnamed lander, begins a burn out of LKO for Duna. Shortly afterwards and for no identifiable reason* all three main nuclear engines exploded simultaneously, leaving the ship stranded on an elliptical orbit around Kerbin. I was able to rendezvous an engine pod with the ship. Clamp-o-Tron Senior ports are wonderful things. Royal Rainbow II is ready once more. I do like to overcomplicate things. *ok, I'd alt-tabbed out of the game and back into it while leaving the engines on at x2 warp on a big ship carrying a slightly unstable and heavy load on its front docking port. Possibly that had something to do with it.

I've written something that'll automatically remove for example "all splashed down debris on Laythe" or "any orbital debris anywhere" from a save game, but it doesn't have a UI yet. I hope to upload something half-presentable at the weekend.

The first time I bought it, or the second?

No progress today as I've mainly been housekeeping, landing a whole bunch of ships that were in LKO and recovering landed ships from Kerbin. I launched a couple more Euryale-class ships, the Royal Rainbow II and the Shi.tsu Tonka*, and tested a new-model Orkney D(una) lander with 'chutes to assist in the descent. Royal Rainbow II passes behind a borrowed ship going by the designation Project Funky Gibbon. I was spamming the Gibbon-class to orbit trying to iron out the design flaws (there was a Gameplay Questions request), and now I don't know what I'm going to do with them all. *when the moon is a pie in the sky...

Thanks everyone. That's the sort of thing I'm thinking of, something that you'd point at the save file and say "get rid of any debris near KSP" or "get rid of all debris on Duna" or similar. Yeah, a utility rather than a mod. I've got some free time next week so I'll probably look at it then, should be easy. Debris is identified with type = debris, think root is the body and lat / lon are straightforward so should just be a case of hacking through the save file to excise those entries which fall within whatever bounds are set.

Mostly iterative. I constantly update three designs: a full interplanetary spaceship which can go to and return from most places despite my low navigational skill, a spaceplane/rover, and a simple lift rocket that takes 20 tons to LKO onto which I pile whatever random junk I want in orbit. After that, I throw together random spaceplanes quite often, and I sometimes borrow other people's designs from the Spacecraft Exchange to try out. I try to prettify things if I can do so without sacrificing performance (e.g. adding the little gold torus fuel tanks looks nice without doing any significant harm) but there's a utilitarian feel to my designs.

Few things I'm wondering; 1) Is there any significant drawback to having large numbers of ongoing flights? Does it make a difference if the flights are in orbit or landed? Does it make a local difference if the flights are in another location (e.g. if LKO is full of junk, does it make any difference to a ship landed on Dres?) Does debris count for as much as controlled flights? I have about 100 flights-in-progress and little junk, and it seems not to be having too much of a performance hit. I don't know how the on-rails simulations work, and clearly a modern computer can handle loads of objects like this if it's optimised, I just don't know how well optimised KSP is at doing it if I continue to start flights... ...also kinda curious how many ongoing flights people have. 2) Is there a selective automatic debris removal mod? I'd like to clear debris from around KSC (and perhaps the Island Runway) only, without removing stuff from other places on Kerbin, orbit, or other worlds. (If there's not I'll see if I can write one, I just don't want to duplicate effort if someone's already done it!)

Skurj-class Ramtut III Skurj-class Ra Ra Rasputin

Dangerous ain't the half of it. No great developments today (sotto voce) I crashed two planes at the Pyramids (/sotto voce), but testing of the new lander shows promise. A small SSTO crew shuttle ran out of fuel a while back, so it seemed like a good opportunity to try out the new and improved rescue seat. TOASTY! (in fairness, it isn't intended for Kerbin reentry, just vacuum and low pressure hitchhiking...) The craft landed successfully, and all was well. ...and then I sent one out to Duna, got a bad intercept with Ike, tried to be clever with an aerobrake-to-landing and crashed it. RIP Bartfrey Kerman, fourth casualty of the tour.

As capi says, I go with the atmospheric value and trust that the overall performance will have a level of reserve in practice. It's interesting to look at the corrected specific impulses at sea level at Duna and at Laythe, too.

I couldn't find them again when I last looked, but I think I've seen someone post a picture of them saying it was from .23 - will check again later. On topic - I would recommend visiting the big circular crater basin, especially with a plane, there's nice cliffs along the south edge. KSC2 is good to find, and it's nice to fly to the pole, though good luck finding (anything interesting) without precise coordinates. I have yet to visit the badlands, keep meaning to send a plane over to visit!

Skipping Ike for the moment, the Merry Go Round aerobraked to Duna orbit carrying Coyote Man. The lander made a good, fully powered descent. A long while ago, the aptly named spaceplane Dunan Bananaslip had crash-landed. Coyote Man had touched down about 20km away, so I broke the first rule of Duna club and hopped closer. (To just over that ridge there. Honest.) Charlie Kerman had been patiently awaiting rescue for a great many sols, and bravely clung to the lander's ladder for a lift to orbit. CHAAAARRRRLLIIIEEEEEEEEeeeeee..... It didn't work. RIP Charlie Kerman, third casualty of the tour. I don't do it deliberately, honest. How was I to know that holding onto a ladder is too much for a Kerbal when they're madly accelerating up through the atmosphere? Coyote Man made it back to orbit without further catastrophe. The lander design could do with some minor revisions based on practical experience, so I'll knock up a new model and ship it over next. The other ship is at Ike, and there's an old Brigantia-class in LDO, the Land of Sand, and a spaceplane touched down somewhere on Ike.

Creatively-acquired Damselfly-class Project Pilfered Herring shares LKO with Dearworthy-class Emily Haines Manual. Haven't tried landing it yet...

I launched another Science / Hab module full of excitable Kerbals. An engine block module took the Science / Hab module to the Mun, where it was attached to the Ladder Structure. Ladder Structure crossed the vasty deeps of space to the Red Planet and performed a reasonable aerobraking to a long elliptical orbit, ending up passing by Ike. I like Ike. The Science / Hab module phones home.

In Minmus orbit, the replacement Science / Hab module provides a perch for Skurj-class spaceplanes Enactor, Am I a Good Woman? and Cowface!* The unnamed module (I'm thinking of calling it the Butterfly Bush) is crewed by Kerbals from the Ladder Structure and has an engine block and that ship's remaining fuel tanks attached. The spaceplanes descended to the Great Flats to rendezvous with the Merry Go Round and Coyote Man. I'm not entirely convinced by that new Science Lab as I ended up making it unbalanced in order to fit Materials bays onto the sides. Flying it to the Mun was wobbly. It was a bit better behaved on the way from the Mun to Minmus (probably because of the extra mass and torque modules on the fuel tanks) but I might have to revise the design and send another. *don't knock it. It was good enough for Alexander the Great.

Nostalgia trip!

I've been mucking about with it out of curiosity - I've no use for it as a thing, but I'd hoped to rendezvous one with my tour craft for a photo opportunity. I've had little practical success - while it's very powerful when it works, channelling the power into a useful direction has proved much harder, just trying to get a Mun intercept is a pain in the backside... and it has a nasty tendency to break when switched on, or switched off, or when it feels like it, or when getting close to planetary bodies... ^^

That's... hefty. ^^ How well does it hold up under acceleration?

I swear I'm wasted here.

Coyote Man launched from the Mun and refueling from a Munar transfer vessel. (I'll spare you more pics of landers and rovers being tried out, there were a lot!) Merry Go Round made an uneventful launch, picked up Coyote Man, a modified Blue Toga-class rover and a fuel pod from the Ladder Structure and headed to Minmus. Merry Go Round landed first, opting for a nice and simple landing on the Greater Flats. Coyote Man followed carrying the rover. Driving it is difficult. So far so good - next step will be to bring a replacement Science and Hab module out to Minmus orbit, bring more fuel over from the Ladder Structure (with one fuel pod already detached it's unbalanced, so I have a dilemma; it has a lot of fuel in its central booster tank that I don't want to waste but which isn't accessible by a docking port if I drop it, so I must leave it attached but somehow carry the other two fuel pods. It's possible, but perhaps simpler to carry them over with yet another ship!) ...and then we're off to Duna. Gulp. That place claims my ships.