James_Eh

Sure, here's the breakdown: - 376 parts, 2922 Mg on pad - 273 parts once all of the huge tanks had been staged off (in LKO). This was the vessel that made the trip to Eve. Nothing else was staged off until LEO. It started out at 488 Mg. - the return ship was 25 parts - the interplanetary drive was 72 parts in total, including the full fuel tanks left in orbit - the lander was 176 parts, 225 Mg - after the pontoons were blown off, 130 parts were left for the ascent Thanks for the challenge!

OK, this time I didn't have to cheat. I flew to, landed on, took off from, and returned from Eve's oceans, and left behind two full orange tanks worth of fuel in an easily accessible orbit for future missions. HOO-YA! Granted, the extra weight of the 5760 units of fuel and the associated oxidizer were neither planned for, nor required. Granted, the lifter could have been a bit smaller minus that weight. But still... Granted the whole lifter would have been a lot prettier without the two misshapen extra tanks tucked into the circle, but still... This was designed as my swan song on my current computer. I plan on taking a break in KSP until I get the new monster, then going full on in 0.90. I kept the part count reasonable. I tried again and again until I found a semi-decent design for a splash-down lander that didn't capsize the moment it came to rest. I can't believe that it took me until 0.25 (and 2000 or 3000 hrs of game play) to embrace the loveliness of the structural fuselage part. I took Laie's advice and went for a semi-powered landing using just enough 'chutes to keep me vertical and slowish. Splashdown was optimal. The most fun came when I accidentally decoupled the pontoons before lighting the jets to leave the ocean. What with all of the explosions going on, I was sure I would have to try again, but the pontoons (plus girders) popped back out of the sea just like an inflatable toy held deep underwater in the pool, and they all missed the ship, and the ship DIDN'T sink (completely). Off we went. I sincerely hope that I provided sufficient evidence of the ascent this time. Once I get the new machine, I want to try a less-vegetably designed vehicle... Anyway, sorry that this entry is a bit on the brute force side. But, hey - we took a deep sea sample! We wanted to swim to the shore for a beach sample also, but given that land was completely hidden by the horizon, that plan got ditched promptly. On that note, I should mention that the only time I had to resort to using F9 was, of all things, when I completely MISSED THE OCEAN during my descent - by, like, 100 km. I'll say it again. MISSED THE OCEAN BY A LOT. Lastly, I'll mention ladders. I agonized over the placement of the lander can vs the rest of the vessel. There were ladders pointing up and down from the can hatch, to ensure that Rongan could get back to the hatch. And what happened? The hatch was dead nuts on sea level. He stepped out and swam. That was a LOT of work for nothing... (EDIT: 1: Oops I guess I should say what level I am competing for? I'd say 3. Is there a 3.1? Because I suspect I started from minus 10 metres... Also WRT the whatnots - using 25.0, only mod KER, did it in sandbox because I didn't want to screw up the other saves under my name or my son's. 2: A buddy reports that he sees a white stripe on the left of the pix from about #60 onwards. That would be an Imgur creation if that is the case and I can happily supply the unwhite pix to those who want them. Sorry!) Javascript is disabled. View full album' alt='script>'>

Darnit. Trying to put the old computer through its paces for one last mission before the new computer gets here and can handle 1000 part ships. Hit the wrong key. Debris everywhere. Great fun. (?!?!?) Upside, I've aborted into Kerbin's oceans about 30 times. So I'm fairly sure I have a good feel for the floatability of my lander...

I'm slowly losing my mind. Something like test #9 (maybe 10) left me floating, with the upside of the ship pointing towards the correct hemisphere. (Dead level was a bit too much to ask for.) Followup tests duplicated the results. And now the exit from the capsule is, I dunno, 3m underwater? First I was too high. Way too high might I add. Now, I'm underwater. Off to bed. Overnight I'll think of a plan.

Well. It turns out it's a bit harder to build an Eve 200T pontoon lander than I had first figured. But on the upside, test #5 produced my first Kerbal survival and 80% of the ship still intact. (Tests number 1 thru 4 were fun too, watching the pontoons and girders bounce away into the distance...)

Sigh. Well at least I can't complain that you didn't give it serious consideration. (I should have gone for diamond cufflinks, not just a fancy dinner...) It never occurred to me that the lack of pix from the Eve ascent would be an issue, largely because KER was showing more than enough dV (although now that I consider it and you point out, since I and KER seem to not be on the same page, that's not the best excuse ever...). I'm not too sure why I didn't screen shot a couple of other points in the launch. One thing is for sure - I almost botched everything because I had gotten so used to the horrific lag while driving the big ship, I was very unprepared for the sudden speedup when I got far enough away from the entire gridwork structure on Eve's surface. I actually flew for a number of seconds with the first two orange tanks depleted before I blew them off because it was all suddenly happening at real time... I didn't even think of where the soil sample data would stay. That's a very good point. Regarding the 80+ part ladder, I could have done something far more austere, but it would have required rearranging the parachutes on the grid structure, and by then I was having big big problems with lag in the VAB. I am currently considering whether to resubmit. If I do, I will likely ditch the teleporters and knuckle down and get a smaller ladder built, maybe drop some struts to keep parts down, but the ascent vehicle will remain the same. Is it OK if I just start the pix from the surface of Eve for the report addendum? (PS - I don't have HyperEdit, KER is the only mod I have...) Ah, well, even if my possibly salvageable save file had not been overwritten, I would likely not have used it. I stopped using F5/9 a while ago, only reverted to hitting F5 here and there on this mission because I wasn't sure that I could handle the lagfest for a second time, and am proud that I never used F9 (mainly because the only time I wanted to it was broken...)

I have finally gotten around to posting a Mission Report of my trip to Eve. I will get this right out of the way now. I CHEATED. The mission went perfectly, and there was no need to cheat. However I got completely fooled by an odd glitch in KER (which I was using for the first time ever) and stupidly didn't question the dV report that it was giving me regarding how much oomph I had left in my return vessel. So instead of doing an aerobrake to lower its orbit, and instead of taking the rendezvous with the successfully returned lander as one vector (rather than what I did, which was to match planes, then rendezvous), I burned fuel like a madman thinking that I had enough to cruise half of the system on the way home, and then ran out of fuel on the return burn with 300 or so dV left. Only then did I go back and check the picture logs and realize what was going on. I actually HAD hit F5 early enough that I could have salvaged things (which is very out of character for me, I generally don't use them at all, but this whole trip made me nervous so I F5'd a few times)... But I did this in sandbox, which I share with my son, and he was testing a nifty SSTO design and ultimately used F5/9 at the wrong time, leaving the latest save at the point where I had to do the last burn to Kerbin with a 300 dV deficit. I would like to point out that I could easily have arranged the images in this post to gloss over this error, but I didn't. Instead I throw myself on the mercy of the court, and the challenge adjudicator (hey, Laie, bud, want to go for a fancy dinner?) because I want the fancy purple ribbon darnit, think I've earned it, but can't bring myself to claim it outright. I could have done the "Get Out and Push" routine as well I suppose, but in the name of "been there, done that" I decided to turn on infinite fuel for the burn to take me from solar orbit (near Eve) to the Kerbin intercept. With that out of the way: I have never used the Nasa parts for anything much. Nor have I ever tried to launch a 3000T ship. I didn't really want to do either of these things, but once I had settled on the basic lander design I found that it was lagging enough that I didn't want to endure the pain of trying to dock with it, so I completely changed my plans and decided to build one giant launcher to get the lander, return ship, and drive section up to orbit. This mission was supposed to be a test flight, but it kept succeeding so we just headed out. The worst part of the mission occurred when I got to Eve. I wanted to aerobrake very carefully, and 5 or 6 passes through the atmosphere at 70-something km left me in a good spot. I had detached the return ship after the first braking, all was good there. I wanted to try for one more gentle aerobrake to circularize as much as possible, but I misjudged and wound up scrubbing off too much orbital speed and was essentially committed to the landing. I used the remains of the drive section to accelerate the deorbit and miss the purple depths of the ocean. All else went perfectly. As expected, many many landing legs were broken during the touchdown, but they were not needed for anything else. The teleport system worked perfectly and the ascent also went flawlessly, despite my poor piloting which had me ascending at something like 2X terminal velocity. Oh, a note on the "teleport system" - we did have a version of this craft that had a pile of parts added to it (negligible weight) that allowed the intrepid Kerbonaught to clamber all the way to the surface. But at this point, lag was really getting to be an issue, so I installed the teleport pods and wiped off the 80+ parts that constituted the ladder assembly. I humbly beg for the purple ribbon.

This is my entry for the Eve Rocks challenge. The write up is over there. It was supposed to be just a test run, but since all seemed to be working we went ahead and launched. And in my opinion succeeded, without any F5/9 usage - however a glitch in what KER was telling me led me to have to turn on infinite fuel for the return burn from Eve to Kerbin. I hang my head in shame for not noticing that my return ship was consuming 2 or 3X the dV that it should have been, and for squandering what seemed to be a plethora of dV on lazy flying when I had more than enough despite the KER oddity (at least I had more than enough until way too late.) Javascript is disabled. View full album' alt='script>'>

Couldn't agree more. That's why the runway is as long as it is. The runway length (and the dropoff immediately thereafter) are gifts from Squad. Use 'em. Just beware of those stupid wing- and wheel-wrecking thingys at the end of the runway. Hate those jerks.

OK, I am utterly mad. We came. We landed. We ASCENDED!!! We rendezvoused with the return ship. We transferred to it flawlessly. We headed for home. And I ran out of fuel during the burn from Eve to Kerbin. I stupidly didn't notice until very late in the burn that for whatever reason KER was reporting the dV available in my return vessel as far far too high. I don't think this is a stupid mistake on my part like my worries about fuel above. This seems to be some kind of crazy bug in KER which led it to report my available dV as something like 7000 when in fact it was half of that. The worst part is I designed the return ship with 3500 in mind, but then once it was free and KER started reporting 7000, I kind of spent some time flying less-than-optimally... What follows are two pix. One is of the lander safely on Eve. It ascended and I had almost 1000 dV left to boot. The second picture is of the simple return ship making a burn to match the orbiting Kerbal's inclination. Note how KER is reporting 6000+ dV. This ship, fully fuelled, only has about 3900. I have no idea where the KER display is coming from. I just tested the same vessel in Kerbin orbit and KER faithfully reported 3800 dV or so fully fuelled. AND I DIDN'T NOTICE IT UNTIL I RAN OUT OF FUEL !!!

No need for apology, we've all got lives... But I'm sure the issue has nothing to do with fuel flow, there were no fuel lines involved with those tanks whatsoever. They sat on the outside of the ship attached by radial decouplers. When I get my pix onto Imgur you'll see what I mean. It's a mystery to me. Once I manually pumped 4/6 of them full by draining the other two, and threw away the empties, the levels stayed rock solid. I still think it had something to do with weight distribution in my ship but it's a topic that likely belongs somewhere else, I plan to investigate. EDIT: Aha. It had nothing to do with neither fuel flow rules, nor weight distribution, and everything to do with the somewhat inexact process of transferring fuel INTO those tanks from the two leftovers from my booster that made it into orbit with me.

Laie, you magnificent beast. You forced me to finally conquer my Eve fears and send a Kerbal to the surface, with the implicit assumption that an ascent would be part of the plan. Anyway, the brave lander is back at 120x110 and awaiting the shenanigans of the crew in the luxurious hitchhiker as they match the 30 degree inclination difference and come to grab him. Pix to follow once I can Imgur them up into an album.

Well this is interesting. Doing the main mission now and am coasting to Kerbin escape. I am using 6 tanks (2 LV-N's apiece) as the drive section to get to Eve. I didn't set them up in asparagus fashion, but figured I could transfer fuel and blow off 2 or 3 of them whenever convenient between burns. So I just checked the fuel levels on all 6. Starting from one at random, moving clockwise: 955 974 971 975 982 972 ????? This ship is very very laggy. Is there any chance of this being just related to calculations and calculation cycles? What I'm wondering the most is: Is there any possibility that the tank with the lowest level of remaining fuel was at the "bottom" (ie closest to Kerbin) of the ship during the escape burns and possibly used more fuel for steering? KSP doesn't work like that does it? EDIT: Even cooler. I chose a tank at random and transferred fuel to the tanks to the left and right of it until they were full. It left a teaspoon of fuel in the "from" tank. Then I did that again with the tank on the opposite side. And everything balanced! The two nearly empty tanks have exactly the same amount of fuel. This must have something to do with the fact that almost everything is 6-sym, but there are two fairly heavy bits at the bottom of the craft that are 2-sym. (?)

Nope. One of the fuel lines in the inner asparagus thingy is no longer attached to the tank to which it should be. You can see the little nub of the fuel line leading nowhere. I have run into this repeatedly, fuel lines and struts suddenly forgetting to where they ought to be attached. Sorry about the darkish picture but it seemed to me to be the best illustration of the issue. Shortly after I posted this, and shortly before the horrible end of the mission, I had a shot of the same issue front-lit by the sun which would have been a better post. Ah,well, it was, as they say, a (long) simulation and now I am getting ready for the main event.

Darn it darn it darn it. Honestly this was just a large-scale test flight that I suddenly realized could actually qualify me for this challenge, and I was so excited about the shiny purple ribbon that I kept the flight going despite thinking of about 20 design improvements during the very laggy adventure. I have never used KER before but felt I needed it for this challenge, and have been wondering about the way the dV calcs were playing out. Until I happened to aim the camera just right to catch the following shot of the ship shortly before the final deorbit burn to head down to land. Anybody see the glaring flaw? I'm still going to give it a go but I'll bet I have trouble in the last part of the ascent.

In the mid-80's my dad got Lotus something-or-other which included 1-2-3. I tried to type a high school essay on it, not realizing there was a word-processing application in there somewhere. Nearly soured me on computers forever. But this is veering off-topic...

I tried to show my son how to use a slide rule once. We lost track of the decimal points and got an answer off by a factor of 100. And that, my friends, is why I have been using Excel for 26 years (which is awesome when you think about it).

You know, I was thinking about the original premise of the post while I was stuck in snow-related traffic on the way home today (but not Buffalo thank goodness), and can't help but think that it's a pretty big messup to aim for Dres and hit Jool...

Heh, yah. Obviously I should have looped my doomed ship into the Jool system, I could have would up with a dV-free feather-soft landing at Eve.

No, no you can't. Nobody can go to Moho. Stupid planet... (One of these days I have to get off my duff and actually do a successful mission there.)

... the report of the demise of your poor brave Kerbal is found on the 4th page of the 13 page mission report. (Backstory here.)

So I just noticed that it was the last engine in the asparagus (of a pair) that blowed up. So since this is Kerbin, not Eve (on Eve this would be doom), I am going to just deactivate the opposite mainsail, and try a reascent to orbit. (Yeehaw!) Yah, nope. Missing mainsail left me too unbalanced.

OK, first that is an excellent forum handle. Second, yah that's why 3X sym is your friend... always point your ship to solar equator @ 0 or 180 degrees and even one lousy little single solar panel (per 120 degrees) will supply the oomph you need for those long interplanetary coasts.

Decided to deorbit the Eve lander from its successful "get-to-orbit" test and land back at KSP. Came down on the wrong side of the mountains. (Actually most of the lander survived the 12 m/s landing on the 23 degree slope, but one of the mainsails blowed up real good.)

Forgetting to move the launch clamps down to the first stage is my standard failure mode. That's a bit of a pet peeve of mine I must admit - it's a pain to have to hunt through the staging list to find where the game decided to drop them, I'd think a line or two of logic in the code would suffice to always default them TO THE FIRST STAGE!!! (I mean, they devoted time to defaulting the throttle to 50%...)