Surefoot

Whoohoo I'll test that first thing tomorrow morning, now i need some sleep.. Good news !

@KeithStone: thanks mate ! The sleek design is a direct consequence of playing with FAR and thus adhering to aerodynamic rules. They have to fly well in atmo, or face unplanned disassemblies or various backflips that are nicely acrobatic but not efficient @Taki117, Deathsoul097: As stated in first post, i use mostly B9 and Novapunch plus Talisar's Toroidal pack (these 3 make up most of the builds part wise), the Ion/Hybrid pack (which i'll demise from now on, it was not useful there actually), Procwings and fairings (obviously for the SSTO jet and all rocket fairings), Mechjeb and PreciseNode, some quantum struts (now KJR pretty much obsoletes them), MagicSmoke / Infernal robotics for the foldable rover wheels and shuttle bay articulated docks, and of course the most important mod being FAR. There's also my first use of Kethane (the probe deployed in last picture). Since then i have added KJR, the memory saving mod, Stretchytanks, and the TACFuelBalancer (and playing a bit with KW to see if it adds anything valuable for me). Also inserting multiple ships in Jool orbit in rapid succession was only doable thanks to KerbalClock, that mod should become stock really... For my current endeavours the procedural parts pretty much replace all wings, fairings and tanks from all other mods. I still have to use the Qstruts in one place: the foldable rover wheels, since otherwise the hinge is not strong enough and will collapse when the rover hits the ground. With that i'm doing now a complete Grand Tour, powered by Kethane, with one reusable lander (with the exception of Eve where i use an alternate lander for obvious reasons) - that includes Moho and Tylo. Also with the limitation of playing with FAR. I'll make a mission report on that shortly

With the stock turbojet, i max out way before that (i cant remember the limit but that's around mach 3 or 4), and B9 SABRE's bring me to just mach 5 (before i switch to rocket mode, that is). Interestingly enough your own afterburner jet maxes out at around mach 2.7 (since i cant fire the AB at high altitude..). Indeed mach 10 would be way too much for normal Kerbin scale. There with the ramjet mode i still find enough air to fire them at around 34km, though i'm at 10% thrust there and pretty much glide along. Maybe i can go a bit faster but the current version of FAR has got a small glitch that makes the plane veer off course at random times, which at that point leads to a stall (and subsequent rapid loss of velocity).

Your best chance would be standing on top of the elevator (on the roof) provided there is an access from inside the cabin, and that you can get up there quickly. Then try and use your clothes to grip the ascending cable (if it's still there) - NOT YOUR HANDS -. All that in the few fractions of seconds you'll have . On most elevators i have seen though there is no roof access from inside the cabin, and of course the ascending cable ends with the counterweight in many designs, that leaves very little time... Otherwise it's like Mythbusters demonstrated, whatever is in the cabin becomes goo.

Ahh this is useful.

That's how we do it in ISO format (ISO 8601). But that's mostly for computer programming, for human language it's much more natural starting from the day, mostly for natural language reasons. Like when reading an address, you start with the street, then zip and town, then state then country.

As a bonus, exploring the north pole of Laythe: It's totally black ! What kind of material could that be ? Also deploying a kethane probe around Jool moons: There we are, i learned a lot with that mission, took me a few weeks total to do it. Now my nuke haulers are radically improved, and my fuel tankers are reaching 1700t ! Thanks to everything i learned during that huge trip. Loved the views from Laythe, and loved the Jool aerobraking sessions.

The rover landed without any problem, the shell container and foldable wheel system was flawless: Transferring kerbals to the rover, to bring them to the HH module: And there, total success (apart from some missing panels that disappeared upon game reload...):

Now the SSTO jet going down from orbit then landing near the HH module:

Now landing the hitchhiker module: Went fot the 3-lake area, nice view with Jool just over the horizon: Landed and ready :

Jool base assembly time ! Aaand all done : (attached to one of the tanks is the landing module, more on that just after)

Arrival at Laythe (with another aerobraking session for some of them):

Aerobraking time ! With FAR, that means doing the whole thing at gut feeling, since no calculation can give you the result ahead of time. So to tune the result i make use of aerobrakes, and AoA adjustments. Then on map view i check the resulting apoapsis reduce and when satisfactory, i release the brakes and hope i didnt go too low... Required a few tries before success ! That one was braking in reverse (since there i adapted my nuke haulers design to account for this kind of behavior): Shuttle aerobraking: And the fuel cargo (braking such a monster required diving quite low in Jool atmosphere, also going off Aoa for more than 2° meant total destruction): Resulting elliptic orbits, give me breathe time for taking care of other incoming ships: As you see it was quite epic, some of them managed to encounter Laythe directly on first approach so they went there directly:

Now the big transfer, a lot of ships going off during the same launch window... First, crowded orbit: Departing.... Almost everyone gone Last one to go ! During the transfer... the distances seem small but that's huge empty void between each ship. Last corrections before insertion ! Aaand here we go:

And finally the SSTO jet. That one required a lot of flight testing, aerodynamics tuning, so it could fly reliably and perform re-entry with no issue: Test flight and landing at north pole of Kerbin: In orbit, departing from Kerbin:

Now the fuel cargo. That required a new design, with the engines pushing a huge payload. Using 6 NERVA engines there (made bigger ones since then, but that one did the mission): Here, refuelling in orbit to prepare for the big jump (orbiting that stuff required using its own fuel..) Ready to go: Going:

Coming now is the whole preparation for the parts transfer to Jool and Laythe, in Kerbin orbit. 6 ships, including 4 nuclear tugs and 2 "space shuttles" (cannot land, they are space bound only). I will talk about the fuel cargo and SSTO in separate posts. Shuttle cargo takeoff (it's technically a SSTO but once in space it stays there): Jool base core in orbit: and there, attached to its tug: Moving off to Jool: Other parts (fuel tanks, control modules): This is the articulated boom with the small dock port, for space planes mostly: Docking the hab module for the Jool base:

Hello all, this is a retrospective of the construction of my Jool base, and Laythe exploration mission that went on between v0.21 and v0.22. Goal was: - To build an permanent, orbital fuel base around Laythe, that is manned and has large docks for bigs ships, and an articulated boom with a small dock for small ships. Key is "refuel", so it has to have a big capacity... that will have a few consequences, the first being: - To build a fuel cargo able to refill the Jool base, and come back to Kerbin. That means pushing a payload around 700t and having enough fuel to get back. - To land a hitchhiker capsule on Laythe, and a rover next to it - To land a SSTO jet plane on Laythe (that took off from Kerbin) and use it to explore remote parts, also to bring crew to the hitchhiker module - To map Kethane resources around Jool to prepare for future resource mining missions One key point is i am using FAR. That means, aerodynamics apply, so no ridiculous asparagus designs, aerobraking becomes a death trap (and when successful, the result can be quite random at first, see later for more comments about that), and wide loads become next to impossible to put in orbit. AoA and ascent profiles become much more important now. This makes this mission a lot more interesting ! To help me in this mission, i am using a few mods, since designing aerodynamic stuff with the stock parts becomes very limited very quickly. B9, Novapunch, IonElec, Procedural wings & fairings are there to help. So stock-like part mods and procedural stuff. In hindsight, i used IonElec for the inline RTG's, but these are awfully heavy, i am now finding other solutions with the stock RTG and solar panels that are much lighter overall (still in this mission report, i used the inline generators). The bigger ion engines are nice for kethane probes though. I also use some quantum struts to prevent wobble on docking ports, that is now mostly unnecessary thanks to KJR (but that whole mission was pre-KJR). First, the foldable rover design, fits in a fairing shell that is shed after re-entry: Launch from Kerbin: In orbit: Arriving at Laythe with its nuclear tug: More about it later

Like 0 for water freezing and 100 for boiling ? O wait (snark snark) (sorry) I see what you mean but when you do serious scientific work, these imperial units stop making any sense. (re about Ariane official documentation: they protect their staff by obsucating the error as a "conversion error" not specifying the real cause, that would be politically incorrect and counter productive to fingerpoint a british national on such an international program).

I know, right, a colleague of mine was there during the launch (he was working on Ariane systems). When he came back and told us the story (at the time we only knew the launch was borked, but not why) we had a good laugh. True, that was actually due to a british engineer who programmed the ascent module (*) using imperial, while that module was fed with metric units. That made the rocket get too much AoA and veer off course brutally, at which point control room decided to auto destruct the launcher. (*) pretty much like Mechjeb's function of the same name, this module makes sure the rocket stays on a proper trajectory. Interesting. All the russian aircrafts i have seen were using exclusively metric, that includes helicopters and SU-27 derivatives (which is disturbing if you come from a western aerospace culture). 2011 is quite recent though, not sure there is still any hardware using imperial.. And that makes no sense intuitively, the international standard for measurements is metric (and imperial is used absolutely nowhere in Russia and China). Very weird decision. Do you have any source ?

The challenge would be more interesting with FAR (so no asparagus or very limited in that regard), and a requirement of landing one hitch hiker module and bringing it back to orbit (so more than just an external seat). And no silly balloon stuff, these are not rocket parts.

Then now do it with FAR Totally redefines the aerobraking experience...

My first successful FAR SSTO, able to fly to, and land on Laythe (that is now an old design): Test flight and landing at north pole of Kerbin: Going down from orbit at Laythe: Preparing to land in the 3-lakes area: Landed Also sent to Jool at the same time, my first fuel cargo design (able to go to Jool, empty its load, and return in one go): Nuke powered, 6 NERVAs, 1400t:

With a nuclear engine block attached to your lander for the planetary transfer, it's not so hard. You just need lots of fuel. I got a 10000+ deltaV engine block for that kind of purpose, 8 NERVA's pushing that beast. Can go anywhere and come back without refuelling. Actually what was hard for me was landing and taking off from .... Gilly ! That's basically just a small dustball, almost no gravity, every manoeuver takes forever since everything has to move so slowwww....

I'll add my voice for 3.75m and 5m engines. I want to push those 2000t+ cargoes with style (even the 2.5m NERVA looks and acts puny on these beasts)