JayKay

Other than the spectacular waste of fuel involved? Getting fuel into space is not a trivial cost to space programs; that's the point of using LV/Ns in the first place, to lower the launch cost by reducing the weight of fuel needed for the mission. To spend as much fuel again after you're done with the engines to get rid of them negates the point of using them in the first place. JK

Have you tried putting the ships into retrograde orbit around the Mun like NASA did? I have made a habit of doing that since I started going to the Mun. Usually it works out to a free return trajectory back to Kerbin if I wanted, though I always go into retrograde orbit instead. I'm not sure if there is any advantage going either way, but orbiting the Mun prograde feels wrong to me at this point. JK

Actually, version .23 came out and I decided to try a career mode save. I've made a lot of progress on the tech tree, but nothing as grand as the Jool beast has been built. I have found it's a different game altogether when you are concentrating on getting science out of specific spots rather than setting your own goals. I haven't tried importing the save into version .23 to see if there's any improvement in the lag situation. I did get the Joolian Endeavour to the moon and it's on a free return trajectory back to Kerbin. I intended to see how it would deal with Aerobraking once it got back to Kerbin. I may dust this save off yet and see how it goes. Thanks for the interest. JK

I built a 900 tonne plus ship in my previous sandbox save. I had five central ASAS units and nine more reaction wheels by the Nervas at the back. It could quickly and precisely maneuver to any orientation I wanted (well, other than the horrendous lag slowing things down.) So, it is certainly possible to make a big ship maneuver using ASAS units. It won't help you dock, though, since you need RCS to do linear movements. I used to regularly dock fuel ships to my space station at about 80 tonnes each. The best advice I can give is make sure your RCS units are positioned at the axes of the center of mass, and that you have four of them, symmetrically placed front and back and on both sides. This is more important than being at the corners of the ship. Sometimes it helps to move fuel back and forth between different tanks to help balance the ship. It's still important to have one or two heavy duty reaction wheels working to help keep the ship in line if it's slightly off balance. By switching back and forth between linear and rotation mode quickly you can also keep even badly balanced craft lined up, but it takes some practice. JK

Anything worth doing is worth overdoing... The way I look at it is that the ship is a complete success, it's my computer that's failing. JK

OK, so to make a long story short, after a couple weeks of experimentation, testing, failure and back to the drawing board, Project Jool is in the final test flight stage. I present to you, the Joolian Endeavour: Almost 1000 tonnes fully fueled, 915 parts, and a crippling nexus for lag beyond all reason. Five actual seconds pass for every in-game second logged. Surprisingly, however, the ship is very stable and maneuverable and MechJeb can lock the ship on course effortlessly. The ship uses 5 large ASAS units plus 9 more smaller units at the rear, which allows it to turn without using any RCS. There is no flex in the spaceframe at all while under acceleration, which had been a problem with earlier versions. I can't get a precise delta-V figure for the ship, but I think it's around 15,000. Docked to Sr. ports on either side of the command/hab section are two identical heavy landers, one each for Tylo and Laythe. Each lander also carries two rovers for surface operations. Besides the two heavy landers, the Endeavour also carries two one-man landers for smaller bodies, two MechJeb landing probes for scouting landing locations, and a pair of mini orbital probes. I have also developed a tug which will be docked to the front of the ship which will assist the heavy landers in reaching their descent orbits without using their on-board fuel, and then help recover the ascent stages when they return from the surface. I have 9 LV/N engines mounted at the rear of the fuel tanks, but only 8 want to fire. Fortunately, the one which is not working is the middle one, so there are no balance problems. I am flying it to the Mun and back as a test run. The burn was estimated at almost 20 minutes for 745 dV, and with the lag, that would take over an hour. I fired it up and went to watch a movie, expecting it to be done when I got back, but miscalculated in that I forgot to take into account that after 15 minutes it would be firing at 90 degrees to its orbit trying to stay on course. I shut it down after wasting a bunch of fuel and it's on its second approach to the node now. I will fire it up 10 minutes before the node and hope it can escape orbit this time. This means several orbits would be needed to get enough speed for Jool insertion, unless I mount more engines on the back. Just what my poor CPU needs, more parts on this beast. Well, I'm running out of time before my Jool window opens (less than 5 in-game days,) so I will have to figure out what I will do quickly. JK

It was probably the lag that got you then. I've noticed MechJeb really struggles with lag at times. The automatic docking at my space station was useless, it just spun around and around, probably because it kept overshooting its mark with each frame and tried thrusting the other way, overshot again, etc. In your case it probably was impacting the ground before it knew it was that close. JK

Looks like you switched MechJeb off at the end. MechJeb deploys the gear in the last few seconds before touchdown. It always makes me nervous, wondering if it will deploy in time, so I usually do it manually a lot earlier. JK

Since our somewhat spacey Astronomy department discovered (noticed?) that a launch window for Jool was coming up before one for Duna, the Duna Explorer has been put on the back burner and Project Jool has been fast tracked. There have been lots of experiments with propulsion systems for the Jool Explorer (more on that some other time,) but the real concern has been with landers for Tylo and Laythe. I decided the ship would need one lander for each moon, and that they could probably also be used on the other moons as well before going to the bigger satellites. These landers would need to be pretty big to land two crewmen and a rover and take off from these challenging destinations. My first thought was to upgrade my Duna Lander. It is still untried on Duna, but I reasoned that it would need a lot more power to take off from Tylo or Laythe anyway, so I would see if I could get it to work on Kerbin--if it works on Kerbin, those moons ought to be no problem. Getting the design to work on both might be a problem, so I decided to concentrate on atmospheric landings and takeoffs. So, I had to get the thing into orbit on Kerbin first: OK, so this isn't such a good design. I needed something lighter. I designed a new ship from scratch with both Laythe and Tylo in mind. It would need over 3000 dV for both the landing and ascent stages for Tylo, and parachutes for Laythe. I reasoned that by using aerobraking to land on Laythe, I would have lots of fuel in the landing stage still, which could be used to assist the takeoff in Laythe's atmosphere. Here's what I came up with: That last successful landing seems to be a proof of concept, to me anyway. I had to move fuel back and forth between its various tanks to get it to stand upright, thanks to those mushy legs. Once it was vertical, I transfered fuel back into a balanced condition, raising and lowering individual legs to compensate for the shifting center of mass. I'm still quite concerned about the thing's ability to land on even a slight slope. We may have to use the F5-F9 compensator to correct problems in that area. I may add Infernal Robotics jacks to manually adjust the lean without using the legs. In any event, since Laythe has less gravity and atmosphere, and I accomplished the landing and takeoff with less than a full load of fuel, I think it's pretty certain the ship will work on Laythe. According to the dV numbers, it should also be capable of landing and taking off from Tylo. There's no way to know until I get there, though. Meanwhile, work continues on the Jool mothership. Once it gets closer to completion there will be an update. JK

Well, I have good days and I have bad days. This was a very bad day. I designed my Duna Explorer on the fly, making it up as I went, and I managed to get it assembled and it does seem to fly OK. I decided that a lot could be done better, so I when I went to built its follow-up ship, I determined to make some improvements. One of these was a better design for its triple fuel tanks. The originals were kind of flexxy, making the ship bend when maneuvering hard, so I made the ends of the new tank assembly rigidly attached to the end of the middle tank. Here's how that went: I went back to the original design, which still works fine. Sometimes your first idea is the best one. JK

My first concern is how many tonnes is your payload. If it's around 100 tonnes, even your 7 booster mega-rocket would likely have trouble with it. Adding some SRBs to give it some extra take-off thrust would probably help. It's also necessary to add quite a few struts to keep the side boosters in line until they separate. It looks like you may have too many side separators as well; you should know that only one can be used on each side booster, any other support has to be done with struts, which will release at the same time as the separator. JK

Thanks. My way of thinking of this was that putting wheels under everything would be pretty unrealistic and a big weight penalty, so a real space program would not go that route. It was a matter of finding something fairly efficient and logical, and a transporter to move the modules seemed like the way to go. I have mixed feelings about adding a lot of mods to the game, but in terms of Infernal Robotics, those parts are something I think is really missing in stock parts, so I don't feel too bad about using that add-on. By the way, that docking port on the transporter has a bit of a story behind it. I wanted to be able to raise the legs on single modules without needing to add power and control to each of them. At first I thought I would just add a port on an arm similar to the one on the pictured transporter. I moved under a module and then docked with it; I then had control of its legs, and thought, no problem, I just have to raise them. Unfortunately, the module proceeded to drop through the deck of the transporter like it wasn't there--it just was hanging on a terribly over-stressed docking arm which was bending at a 45 degree angle. When you dock with something, you can no longer collide with it, so the transporter became physically invisible to the module. So much for that idea. So plan B was to make a portable control unit sandwiched between two docking ports. Using it turned out to be disastrous, because in the moment when the transporter, the portable unit and the base modules are connected, some bizarre bugs are exposed. I found my moonbase catapulting itself off the surface of the Mun, whipping the hapless transporter around by the aforementioned docking arm. I figured it didn't like control modules mounted in different planes connected to the same object, and tried to bend them all into the same plane. Fortunately, I did a quicksave before doing the docking, or it would have been start-over for the base. Anyway, it turned out that the transporter could pick up the whole ship easily, so I just used the ship's control of the legs to raise them before it took off again. It's pretty much a routine task now. I'm thinking about stacking some of the modules 2 high to make things more interesting, and that's what the crane is mainly for. It just needs some redesign to make it less tippy, and there will be some 2-storey modules in my base. Some kind of communication gear on top of the tower would be a good addition, too, I think. Work continues... JK

Though I have been concerned with interplanetary exploits of late, I have taken some time to continue work on my Moonbase. Yeah, I know, everyone has a moon base. I wanted mine to be modular, so I came up with a way of being able to dock hab module together on the surface. Here's my base so far: You've no doubt noticed that thing on its end. It's a module transporter, Mark I version. It has had a hard life. It's amazing how easy it is to flip things over on the Mun. It was wrecked even before it was flipped in a bizarre refuel experiment gone wrong. Unfortunately, I don't have any photos, but it was very strange. I had used KAS hoses to connect two ships in an attempt to refuel one of them. I had a lot of trouble getting a connector to place on one, but once it had connected, I concentrated on trying to get fuel to flow between them. I happened to move my point of view to where the rover was, and I saw it was cartwheeling in extreme show motion over the surface of the Mun. The winches were mounted on the end of the lift platforms on some small girders and they were slowly being bent into pretzels while the winches twisted on the ends of the hoses. I was eventually able to disconnect the thing before anything worse happened, but the damage had been done. I built another transporter and sent it to the Mun. When this one accidentally flipped on its end, it was just left that way until I could find a way to remove it. Beside it is my crane, made with Infernal Robotics and KAS parts. I did try to right the transporter with the crane, but it's too heavy. The crane has its own problems. The next one I send will have a full fuel tank mounted on one side of the turntable as a counterweight. You would think at 1/6 gravity, weight wouldn't be a big concern, but the crane is also that much lighter, so it likes to tip over. This operation is so Kerbal. Perhaps some other time I'll relate what befell the first transporter to be delivered (which is now in several pieces beside a crater about 4 km north of the base) or the first exploration rover which is dead in the water several kilometers to the east. Let's just say that things have been going better lately. Anyway, here's a little album showing how I built my base. Maybe someone will benefit from my experience: The question throughout the exercise has always been: what are we going to use it for? I'm tempted to get the Kethane mod so that planetary bases would have a purpose. Perhaps resources will be added to the game sometime and then our bases of operation will have more of a function. JK

Well, I've been busy with various distractions from bringing this story up to where it now stands, but this will bring things up to date: There were a couple of developments since this. First, I installed Kerbal Alarm Clock. Very recommended if you want to juggle 10 balls (Kerballs?) at once. This is where I discovered that the Jool window will open before the Duna window. Hmm; decision time. I thought of re-purposing the Duna Explorer for Jool instead. I was concerned about having enough fuel for that, though. The ship is ridiculously big, and though the six tanks give her a lot of Delta V, it's not enough for a trip to Jool with any chance of returning, I think. So how much fuel would I need for such an enterprise? How many fuel tanks could I get up into space at once anyway? Well... Next time I'll show you how many tanks I can get up there at once JK

Haste makes waste, as they say, and this project is proof of that. It's a good thing that launching more ships only costs us time in KSP. After all this, we're still not ready to go. It's a good thing I had a bunch of time before the departure window came up yet. JK

Thanks. I'm looking forward to busting out of the Kerbin gravity well properly once. I have to admit that I'm doing all this backwards, though. I had done a pretty good job of progressing from early test fights to first orbital satellite, to first Kerbal in orbit. Then I built a space station orbiting Kerbin, then one orbiting the Mun, then landing and finally a base there, too. Then I lost my mind. The Duna Explorer ought to be the last thing after sending flyby probes, then a lander, then maybe a small expedition to Duna; instead I build the big ship. Oh well. Maybe I'll do it "properly" when I restart the game again. I picked Duna because it seemed to be the easiest target and its launch window was coming up soon. I don't like quick-timing to where I want things to be--would rather let things unfold more naturally. I consider this ship the prototype for my Jool Explorer which I will build next. I have already defined a lot of things I would do differently on the next one. That launch window is coming up soon, too... JK

Most of my activity has centered around LKO or the Mun. The only craft I have launched out of Kerbin SOI was a probe I called Pioneer 1 and a spent fuel stage of a Mun transfer vehicle which somehow achieved escape velocity. Pioneer 1 is just on a lazy solar orbit outside of Kerbin's, with little fuel left to get anywhere. I built and launched another deep space probe vehicle, but it has been orbiting Kerbin ever since because there hasn't been a favorable launch window to anywhere so far. My Mun activities have suffered a few setbacks, so I backed away from them for a while. I was working on better boosters to get larger loads into Kerbin orbit instead. I hit on the idea of trying to get parts for a large interplanetary ship into space to give my bigger boosters something to do. Thus, with virtually no pre-planning at all, the Duna Explorer project sprang into being. I knew I was going to build it at my space station, and that it would be big. That meant it needed someplace to dock which would give it some standoff distance from the rest of the station. I built a docking port pylon designed to mount to the bottom port of the station, and sent it up attached to one of the refueling ships. Now I had a place to build. I reasoned I needed a lot of fuel for getting a big ship there and back. This wasn't going to be some wimpy little space probe. So I strapped three orange tanks together side by side, put Clamp-o-tron Srs on one end of them and a couple of regular docks top and bottom, and tied the other together with some trusswork which terminated in another docking port, attached to a space tug. This was perched on one of my Brutus II launch vehicles with a Skipper engine clamped temporarily to the middle port on one tank. After a couple of bad starts, I got this thing into space. It was docked to the bottom of the station. I had designed the first section so that an identical unit could dock with it and result in a six section fuel tank with docking ports at ether end. One end would connect to an engine section, and the other to the control section. A second triple tank ship was launched and docked with the first. Then 12 (yes, twelve) nuclear engines were put together in one assembly and launched on a specially designed ship with a couple Mainsails providing most of the power to get the thing aloft. Once it was high and fast enough, they were jettisoned and the nukes crawled their way into orbit, and likewise connected (slightly crooked) to one end of the fuel tank assembly. It occurred to me at this point that hiring a photographer would probably be prudent for documenting the process, if only to assist the enquiry later. Here is where the photos begin: I've been taking a lot of screenshots since then. I'm not sure if this is the best way to present them, or if individually posted photos would work better. In any case, I'm probably as interested as anyone else in seeing if this thing can actually get to Duna and get its mission completed. What could go wrong? JK

Among other things, I have been slowly working on increasing the lift capacity of my booster. This week the VAB completed final assembly of the first Brutus III boosters:

Thanks. That station has seen a lot of ships come and go. Until I developed the Brutus booster, I had trouble getting 40 tonnes into space, so everything going to the Mun had to stop there and refuel, and sometimes meet up with a fuel tender for the trip to the Mun. These days most flights to the Mun bypass the station. I'm thinking of replacing it with something made with fewer parts; the lag around the station is kinda nasty.

Actually, I found a way of stiffening the central stack by using struts and small box girders to make kingpost trusses between the upper and lower stages. There's almost no flex in my booster.

I've been playing KSP for 3 months or so now and started documenting some of my exploits, and thought it would fun to share one of my albums here. I hope this works; it's not showing up in preview.