Commander Zoom

Some great flying on Bill's your part, there! (I just found this thread - which on the one hand is too bad, but on the other, I got to read all so far in one go. Very nice. And I'll give you three guesses what theme music I was listening to by the time I got to the Gilly landings...)

Very nice! My IPV (interplanetary vessel) was built along a very similar plan in the broad strokes (including the orbital assembly), but differs greatly into the details. In particular, I had a forehead-smacking moment when I see how you launched your four-NERVA engine stage... upside down, while I resorted to all sorts of complicated measures to get mine up "straight" (despite KSP really not wanting to do multiple attachment points).

Great mission, great post! Congratulations and welcome to the game/the forum!

They're working now. Ouch. Better luck next time...

Just found this thread, and I like it. Nice lander design, and I chuckled at Jeb's status report.

Allow me to endorse these also.

Love it. Absolutely love it. Any chance of getting a larger centrifuge some time? 2m hub, etc?

Chapter 35, 10 October 2013: You were right, Ned. You were right.

Personally, I prefer not to use dev builds unless the last public build just doesn't work (i.e., got broken by a KSP update). If it's good and stable enough to release, release it.

My ship is also bigger, but I'm quite impressed with how much you did with not much.

Great mod, great textures... just plain great.

Oooh, shiny. (Very nice! I'm using the black graphite/ceramic tile version myself - if anyone would like to have a go at improving that texture, I'd be grateful.)

Looking awesome! (heh, pun)

Brilliant! Something else for my Duna expedition to do.

Just FYI - though it can be a bit of a pain to actually do it, KAS does allow one to add struts in orbit. The end points can be placed, moved, etc by an EVA kerbal, and then linked. Dunno if that would actually serve your purpose - you'd still need to get caps with Senior ports up there to attach.

I spent a good hour or two yesterday crawling up the side of a mountain on Duna, then riding the brakes down into the crater on the other side, then realizing I'd overshot my target a bit and making my way back up the inner slope with more zig zags and switchbacks. The main challenges there were getting good traction/progress up slopes, and not overspeeding and breaking a wheel on the way down. In a previous save (before procedural craters), I drove a rover the length of the Mun's north-south canyon, which I nicknamed Skywalker's Run. At the time, I estimated the distance at roughly 100 km. Maybe I'll do it again someday.

After a long and arduous tedious drive, with a lot of doubling-back and crawling up slopes at an angle, one of my probe rovers finally reached a certain Duna anomaly. Which meant, of course, that my one guy in orbit had to climb into one of the one-kerb landers and go see it for himself. He managed to land within 1.5 km, a nice hike; the jetpack cut some distance off that (he rationed the fuel, half each way), but still a bit of a walk. (And once he got there, he still couldn't touch or take any samples of the thing; it was protected by some kind of invisible force field.) So he planted a flag, jetted and walked back to the lander, took off, got into orbit... and ran out of fuel while matching inclination. Oops. (Mission Control, who hadn't given him permission to land in the first place, were beside themselves at this point.) Still, he was in a stable orbit and thus no imminent danger; and, this was one reason (along with balance and symmetry) that the ship carried two landers (plus the big one, delivered on another rocket). The backup lander cast off under remote control and made rendezvous, and he flew the joined craft back to the ship. So now, not only is Harden Kerman the first (and so far only) kerbal on Ike, he's also landed on Duna (not part of the mission plan - that was for the rest of the expedition, he was supposed to stay in orbit) and been the first to see that anomaly with his own eyes. I think I've definitely found a kindred spirit for Jeb.

May I suggest that you reconsider the use of an ion engine for the upper stage? I had plenty of time (from entering Moho's SOI) to brake into a capture orbit, and thanks to the solar input that you observed, I could (and did) run the drive flat out the entire time. For a light probe engine with a total delta-V in the multiple thousands, it's really hard to beat ion. (Just don't plan on finishing your burns in single-digit minutes.)

That's an amazing odyssey for the Wayward 1. Kodspeed!

Officially, none at all. (More's the pity.) I'm playing in a sandbox game that I converted/imported into career mode, so that I could have the fun of actually doing science, getting reports, etc (even if everything is already bought).

As someone else who currently has an expedition on the surface, I agree!

Great thread! And your choice of caption font make me feel like I'm playing THE DIG again... (Commander Boston Kerman, anyone?) Oh, and which mod do those ballutes come from?

Whatever you like, really. As to your question: a lot of people have explored some of the unfortunate (but entirely, coldly, ruthlessly logical) implications of the Three Laws (Extended), and come to the conclusion that humanity would indeed be "safer" if deprived of freedom of choice, freedom of action, even freedom of will (up to and including keeping us all in pods, perpetually dreaming, ala the Matrix). But then you start getting into sticky/slippery philosophical matters like the definition of "harm", and whether that is ultimately more "harmful", to more people (and/or the whole species) than allowing us to continue as we are. Should we keep our children strapped to a bed, in an induced coma with an IV drip, for their entire life? To keep them safe, and/or others safe from them? Should we then strap ourselves into our own beds and go to sleep, leaving our machines to tend to us? I come down on the side of freedom, but I'm a flawed and imperfect being. I admit that I am probably not worthy or qualified to make that choice for others, and I'm glad of that - I don't want that responsibility. I'm much happier only being responsible for myself.

Mod (still) looks great, but until that SRB-exhaust bug is fixed, I won't be using it. Sorry.

Interesting functionality, great models.