StrandedonEarth

Nuggets, you say?

The Curious Case of Leetrix Kerman A while ago, Leetrix Kerman was rescued from the surface of Minmus, with no explanation of how she got there. She worked her way up the pilot ranks to 4-star status. She mysteriously perished one day after landing an experimental spaceplane on the far side of Kerbin. It seemed somebody forgot to put a ladder on her cockpit to allow her to descend to the ground, and when she fell the short distance to the ground, she vanished in a puff of dust. After being listed as MIA for several weeks, she suddenly appeared in the Astronaut Complex, bereft of all her hard-earned skills. At the same time, a contract was tendered to splash a vessel in the oceans of Eve. Leetrix was immediately volunteered for the mission, and her Mk1 capsule (with her inside) just splashed down in the Explodium Sea. The destruct charges should detonate shortly.

Ya, until I got used to the 1.0.x systems I did a lot of cursing out those flippin' rockets!

"I dunno boss, I was just dozing in the capsule waiting for the launch window [i.e. in timewarp] and when I woke up the stack just fell apart under me!"

I posted this one a week or two ago: On the next trip down, I tried landing on the drills, which didn't go so well. Some excess lateral velocity didn't help But it still managed, with the help of Throttle Control Avionics, to make it back to the tug and back to Kerbin, for disposal by way of destructive reentry. And then my Duna base, launched well before that ill-fated Minmus miner, finally arrived at Duna. After some aerobraking passes, the landing gear was deployed, and I *facepalmed* again.

Yup, that's the way Bill would do it. But only 1 strap? That's asking for things to start kraken.

Most of them would have been eventually swept up by the Earth-moon system in the billions of years since.

Fine, I'll just make more work for you then: Low-tech impactor probe, with lower science return than the hi-tech penetrator probe. Once you get the bugs ironed out, of course.

And to think, if they had the right software onboard, they could have recovered not only the Dragon but possibly even the booster! No, really, the booster was still ok. Kill thrust, decouple the second stage, try to get clear, and look for the LZ. Of course, it's stupidly hard to plan for all contingencies. Does anyone ever expect a second-stage structural failure due to faulty materials, that leaves the rest of the vehicle more-or-less intact?

Just a comment on the tech-tree part. Historically, impactors were the first probes sent to the Moon, before soft landing was figured out. So perhaps this should be fairly early in the tech tree, maybe even before (or with) landing legs?

Either they didn't realize that Jeb's Junkyard & Spaceship Parts is not an approved parts vendor, or they need to stop using struts they found lying by the side of the road. Ya, the unexpected is the hardest thing to expect. I just can't imagine them plastering strain gauges over all the struts in that bird.

I noticed the drills trying to go on upside-down, but...

Definitely Pong

They use filters to take "black and white" pictures at different wavelengths, then combine them on the ground. Then they can assign whatever "false" colors they want to the data.

Whoops, must have missed it, sorry 'bout the repost. The probable reason why you're seeing it around today is because Elon Musk retweeted it today. I don't twitter but I keep checking his hoping for an update on the last launch.

NADA? Seriously? A word I associate with "nope" or "nothing?" No wonder I have trouble taking NK seriously. Q: "So how'd the launch go?" A: "Nada" Q: "Yeah, I know NADA launched it. But what happened?" A: "Nada, zilch, squat. It's still on the pad."

One way to make the part-test contracts more story driven is that the prototype tests need to be done before the part is unlocked. Sure, as long as you have the contract you can still use the part, but, well, does the "Dang-it!" mod tend to pick on those experimental parts?

A tediously accurate scale model of the Solar System I think I lasted about 5 minutes of scrolling....

9/10 Looks like dinner!

(Wolfsbane)

Sent a station with tourists to Dres. By the time I got a decent intercept burn completed, I found I was about 110m/s short for the capture burn, even after transferring reserve fuel from the CRV and the Mining ship. By jettisoning the CRV, I gained about 450m/s. Now I just hope my mining ship can manage a landing. I didn't even bring a Klaw for mining Dresteroids; I wonder if I can mine one without actually grabbing it I guess I should have tried to build a launcher for the MegaTug Edit: Looking at the dV map, I should be able to pull off a landing. Hopefully I'll be able to use the miner as a CRV; it has 'chutes but no heat shield aside from engines and ore tanks

Mass and cost; those scientific intruments are expensive and every kg counted. The Pluto mission was already basically cancelled (or not funded) twice, and was only finally approved after much fighting by the scientific community. New Horizons Wiki

I used to be able to solve a standard 3x3x3 back when they were new, but I had to buy a book to do it. Before I bought the book, I could solve the top face and 2 rows down the sides, but the bottom face would stymie me. Now my kids have them, and they couldn't be bothered. At least now I only had to look on the Web to solve it. I never messed with the other sizes, and the sphere is just a rounded cube.

I knew I could stack tanks, but I thought I had to connect them with fuel lines I thought it mattered which way I was facing during reentry. It didn't then, but it does now.