technion

Finally, here comes the rescue rocket. Its transfer stage uses an interstellar methane powered engine. Another somehow perfect transfer. That's one expensive capture though Sitting in orbit after working through a rendezvous. You can see we not only used the entire methane tank, but half of the command module, which I planned to return with. Somehow I didn't take any further screenshots, but after transferring our kerbal, the command module had roughly 2800dv, and transferred home in a single burn from Tylo.

This bug is highly annoying. I can't access the bottom of the window for the ISRU refinery. It takes a lot of circling around to get to the top one pixel of the tabs to start mining alumina. Here we refuel the top boosters. Obligatory shot. This jetpack from the Kerbalquest mod was supposed to be my ticket back to the rocket. I did a few seconds of testing on Kerbin and concluded it was hard but should be fine. After nearly two hours of trying to get back into the rocket, I've concluded instead that this mod is simply bugged to all hell and isn't a feasible alternative to ladders. If I stuffed up and didn't test a ladder, I would write it off as my fault and start again. Really though, if this mod allowed a Kerbal to fly straight up, as opposed to straight under the ground and bringing on blackscreen crashes, we'd be fine. So, I used hack gravity as a way out and don't feel bad about it. Finally, this is the return to orbit. Incredibly difficult to steer, overly heavy, the two boosters separate the lander can for reorbit. One kerbal stayed behind on a permanent space station.

Time to engage the fission reactor. We've configured it to use the higher powered, short lived ThF4 fuel. The transport can start the deorbit process. Here we use the efficient thermal rocket nozzle, with the inefficient aluminium booster to bring in a safe landing. Honestly with the weight of these things, tests demonstrated the rocket was a lot easier to land without them. But that didn't satisfy the reborbit objective. Touching down with literally no fuel left in the top stage. We separated one of these proves and sent it up north to run a seismic probe. And a second one went south. Finally, the third probe went up and straight down to generate an impact event. It creates plenty of science for both probes.

Here's the tug we used. It takes a lot of fuel and thrust to move this much of a rocket to Tylo. Just enough fuel to orbit. Trying to turn this thing is terrible. I should have added far more monoprop control rockets. Transfer to Jool couldn't be better. The transport docket with the lander ready to transfer. Took a lot of fiddling but we arranged a direct Tylo injection. Note, the major thing here is that we couldn't cheaply direct inject to Jool or Laythe due to DRE. Wow that's the cheapest capture I could ever imagine after a direct transfer from Kerbin. Alexmoon told me to expect to burn 1300+. Capture.

Hey guys, This mission involves landing a large spacestation on Tylo. The goal was to land with as little fuel as possible, then use a refinery to refuel an aluminium booster to re-establish orbit. As always, I host on an experimental server. Users may have an even more interesting time accessing my images because I've reduced AES support and configured preference for more secure ciphers - feedback welcome on the viewing experience. This mission is a great example of Interstellar providing gameplay options, which are significantly more difficult than stock. It sounds overpowered to perform a kethane-like refuel on a planet, however, the aluminium hybrid rocket has an ISP that's absolutely terrible (286 VAC) and has a dry weight of 3 tonne (17 full, where, attached to a lander can, a single one still didn't provide enough dv to return to orbit from Tylo). Then I had the weight of the refinery. In short, it would have been far easier to land a small tank and a 47-8S to achieve the same mission. Here's the rocket that left Kerbal. Note the absolutely terrible aerodynamics of the refinery. Trying to launch with FAR without flipping the rocket was an exercise in hilarity. Detaching the launch stage. We also needed to perform an EVA to shutdown the reactor.

Honestly the only solution here is to start in career mode. Despite all the complaints from seasoned players, the limited parts in career mode at tier 0 makes this process a lot easier to learn.

I'm playing with interstellar and the propulsion seems to go for forever.. you can just keep on clicking "next" looking for a part.

Regarding rovers, I found Eve to be my favourite place for them. I hated going over a hill on the Mun and taking off. I didn't put any significant thought into making it handle the terrain, but I don't use those small wheels.

I really don't think it's just about distance. For example...I'm looking at an intercept. I'm using precisenode so I can make perfect increments. Each +prograde brings the intercept closer. It started about a quarter of a orbit away, I keep clicking it until I've almost got it, then, +1 prograde and suddenly there's no intercept. Put in -1 normal, and there's that intercept. Another +1 prograde, and the pe is much better. Try bringing the pe down to <1 million meters, then remove that -1 normal. Suddenly there's no intercept markers at all, despite the orbit change barely being visible. It's very clearly a closer encounter than the quarter orbit that had a marker earlier.

Once a space station hits a certain size, the built in alignment indicators seem to bug out. It's a documented issue - but while people report it "rarely" occurring, I seem to have to deal with it on nearly everything I built, where you get up close and find pointing directly the pink target marker has you pointing right at an engine or something nowhere near the docking port. I don't like mods that try to make things easy, but to me, Navyfish is a workaround for a buggy system.

Hey guys, I a recent eeloo trip, I found I had a 6m/s burn that made the difference between an intercept, and not even showing the separation markers. The problem with this is that it's difficult as all heck to work out what direction you want to burn in and where from, when there's no markers to adjust. It's a problem that seems to occur regularly with meetups to inclined orbits. What's the usual solution to this? I feel like the game really should give you a better indication of how to make correcting burns from situations like this. I must have lost over two hours just making random nodes and moving them around to see what happens.

I have no idea how you managed to dock everything on the ground - but great job.

Well I managed to get a probe there and it isn't even picking up uranium or thorium. I guess Eeloo really isn't a great place to try this sort of mission

I'll say this - transfers to Eeloo, due to its elliptical orbit and inclination, often look about as inefficient as possible. I'm in the middle of one now, and the orbit goes out way, way past Eeloo and catches it on the way back, despite being setup with Precisenode to exactly match an Alexmoon recommendation. Meanwhile, if the transfer burn takes any more than 2-3 minutes (and it will if you use LV-N), the slight misaim will be enough to cost an encounter, so I always recommend budging for a significant correcting burn.

This works for me. I don't intend on returning the refinery - it would be a large ship going there, small rocket coming home. If refining some reactor fuel is workable I'll look into it.

I'm interested in pushing a large station to Eeloo, and I'm interested in what options may exist for refining myself a return trip. Currently I don't see a way of gathering this from the wiki, or from the game without just flying there first? Has anyone got a mission report on a similar mission?

I've said this before and I'll say it again - I have no idea at all how some people manage to make such grand plans with such small units. For either Eve of Tylo, I can't begin to imagine how those small landers will pull it off - best of luck!

I gave up ever trying to run a rover on Minmus, let alone Gilly, due to frustratingly low gravity.

There's no reason you have to hit all Kerbin's biomes. I don't enjoy it - I did one polar landing, and one grasslands, and had enough at that point to concentrate on the mun.

So my follow up question has to be, is there a reason I can't "take data" from the Double-C Seismic Accelerator? I've followed the process of gathering impact from a crash on Minmus. I can right click it and "review impact data". I've gathered data from the temperature probe right next to it, but I've spent about 15 minutes jumping up and down alongside it trying to grab this data and right click just gives me "no damage". This rocket can bring my crew back to Kerbin but the accelerometer is attached to a stage I need to jettison.

Haha yep, straight down won't go down well with DRE ! Heatshields work like decouplers, you can see where I came down on Eve with nine of them (I know I said six earlier), then had them staged to just drop off once I was running slow. The small ones were 0.4T each, the weight sure adds up when you try taking them to Jool. That said, I actually didn't have a heatshield on my return to Kerbin, that was most of the reason I had to approach it so gently. I believe it would have dealt with my "flipping over with FAR" problem also, due to the weight. But that weight is exactly the reason trying to push it from Eve to Kerbin under ion power was never going to happen.

Awesome. I'll give it a try.

Thanks for that. I'm not out for an easy option - I would have just used balloons if I was. I haven't unlocked all those parts yet, but I'm looking forward to putting that plan together.

I've just started playing with this mod. Because it's my "go to hard mission", is there anything in Interstellar that might make for a particularly interesting ground level Eve return trip? Do thermal turbojets work on Eve? The wiki suggests they just "heat up air", which implies it doesn't necessarily need to be oxygen?

5km/s isn't as unmanageable as it sounds with DRE. With a standard landing capsule, if you can shave it down to 4km/s it can safely aerobrake to capture, and after 1-2 orbits it'll be fine to come down. What's terrible is landing on Eve. You can't "just put a heatshield" on anything capable of the ascent.